I tell Letty about Denis and show her the letter he wrote to me.
She reads it over twice. “He sounds incredibly sweet, Regina,” she says. “But I don’t know. I just wouldn’t put that much hope in him.”
“Why not?” I ask.
“He’s reaching out but he’s also pulling away. ‘If I ever get to Dublin . . .’”
“I know,” I say, wincing at the words. “But maybe there’s a chance, Letty. Maybe he’ll come to Dublin. If you only knew how much I want to be with him again.”
She gives my forearm a sympathetic squeeze.
Why is it, I ask her, Ireland being so small across, that people speak as if getting to the other side is such a monumental endeavor, like trying to leave one world for another?
•
Letty and I stay up late and talk about ghosts. I tell her about the enchantments, how sometimes the ghosts have shadows, or I can smell them. She tells me about a time two years before when she moved into a tiny flat with her ex-boyfriend, Tony. The previous tenant had committed suicide. She awakened one night and there at her bedside was a figure of a man from the waist up, looking at her with the saddest expression she had ever seen. She did not feel afraid and reached out and touched the man’s stomach and her hand went through it. The man recoiled as if he could feel her hand, and looked even sadder.
I’m amazed that she wasn’t afraid and keep asking her why, but she says she doesn’t know why. She just wasn’t afraid.
•
I’m visiting Tracy and Sheila in Albuquerque when, on impulse, we take a drive out on the old dirt highway to the ghost town Madrid.
There’s not a sign of another living soul in this town. The houses are dull brown stone and gray wood and rusted, corrugated tin. All are missing doors and windows. We park, get out, and wander, each in her own direction. The sky gathers, rumbling softly until it breaks. Rain falls inside the houses and tall dry grass grows through cracks in the floors.
Behind a rotted wood frame that was once a window I watch my sisters exploring. They go into the empty shell of a house across the dirt road, and I hear what sounds like a board falling.
“Be careful!” I cry out, and am surprised by how loudly and clearly my voice echoes.
They look over at me through an empty doorframe.
“Okay!” Sheila calls. Tracy waves.
•
We have our hot milk and honey but before we say good night I ask Letty if I can borrow her wireless radio. The talk about ghosts has me agitated.
I lie in my room in the dark with enough light coming through the window from Baggot Street below to illuminate the edges of things. I listen to broadcasts of news and music out of London and Edinburgh, sometimes breaking transmissions of Italian or Teutonic voices crackling with distance, the insomniac night world of Europe, fading in and out, dissolving awhile into static before returning, as if on tides.
•
I bolt upright in the dark. A slender ghost waits at the foot of my bed, a milky, shuddering illumination. For the split second that I remain silent, her bright face contorts in waves like a reflection in moving water.
“No!” I shout. “No!” And she rushes through the wall.
I’m in my room on Baggot Street, Letty’s wireless still playing with poor, crackling reception, vague fanciful music with flutes. Where the figure was, nothing remains but a smear of light.
The doctor at the psychiatric ward asked me if the ghost at the foot of my bed in my uncle’s house might have been my mother. The question had unnerved me. How could it have been, with a face so unrecognizable?
But I feel her now in that smear of light, and in the familiar burning smell left on the cold air of the room, like a dozen candles have been blown out at once.
My mother had my father’s face put back together, but no one had my mother’s face put back together.
The flutes on the radio are almost drowned out by a sudden hiss of white noise. My heart still races.
A day or two after my mother died, Uncle Jack came back from the funeral home, where he had tried to arrange for an open-casket wake. I heard him speaking quietly to Aunt Pat, telling her that it wasn’t possible, that there was no face to put back together. It had shattered. It had been all over the room.
•
My mother moves through the room making sure my sisters are covered. She stands at the foot of my bed.
I close my eyes.
•
Spring arrives but it is still damp and frigid. Joan, a friend from the Focus, invites me along to a lively bar where we hear the Wolfe Tones singing pro-IRA songs, about the unrelenting hatred for England and the monster Oliver Cromwell. Joan knows a few people in a big group at one table and we join them.
Something about the middle-aged man sitting next to me reminds me of my father. He is of the same large build and has a similar forehead and nose. He seems very interested in the fact that I am American.
“Very few here really move forward from where they begin. I can say that to you and you’ll understand because you’re a Yank and you know what it means to move forward.”
“I think you idealize Yanks,” I say. “The Irish are a very energetic people . . .”
He shakes his head and talks about how quickly a life might pass and end in failure. “Don’t let all of this fool you,” he says, waving his hand to indicate the room filled with exuberance and irrepressible chatter. “Turn any corner in Dublin on a breezy day and you’ll smell decay. Too many of us here are living under a curse.”
The band starts up another fast-paced pro-IRA rant against “the bastards” and the man moves his head in time to the music. When the song is finished, he says, “The Irish were chieftains. We were once royalty, every one of us.” His tone is nostalgic and sad.
He lives here, an Irishman in Ireland, yet he too is plagued with nostalgia, some fundamental sense of loss, and a penchant for the dramatic. Maybe that sadness is in the blood itself, born of history, centuries of tribal memory: lost battles and wars, torture, starvation, murder. Is that it, I ask him, the fall from the age of chieftains? Is that the thing that is forever lost and so longed for?
“Yes, we’ve lost that world,” he says. “We fell from a golden age, what Yeats called ‘romantic Ireland.’”
The mention of Yeats both agitates and excites me. I feel terrible guilt for having let go of my dream of Yeats country. I tell him that I intended to go there in honor of my father, who is dead, and how things keep happening to prevent it, or else I procrastinate and lose the chance. I’ve had a few glasses of Harp, and this man’s resemblance to my father makes me speak to him in a tone too familiar for our brief acquaintance. As if I am reassuring my father, I say, “I can still try to get there. I will get there.”
The man studies me. “It’s a lovely place to visit, but what do you expect to find there?”
“I’ve imagined that it’s a more elevated place. I don’t know, a mystical place.”
“Well, I understand why it is you believe that. Just look at the poetry. Yeats was a dreamer. He strained after the mystical. Don’t get me wrong, I’m a great admirer of the old man, his poems about Irish history and mythology especially. But I’m among the camp that believes that Yeats’s preoccupation with visions and shadow worlds was all gobbledygoop. It’s a gorgeous place on the planet, but it’s as real as Dublin or Brooklyn or Timbuktu.”
I feel myself deflating, but still I cling to the small hope that this man, who looks like my father, will illuminate me somehow, absolve me of my negligence. “I feel I’ve let my father down,” I say.
He asks me how my father died, and the answer comes, almost too easily, out of my mouth. “He shot himself.”
He is silent for a few moments and then asks, “You’re worried that you let your father down? After the unforgivable thing he did to you?”
My heart riots. “I know that Catholics think that suicide . . .”
“I’m not talking about a sin against God. I�
�ve no interest in that. Do you have siblings?”
“Yes.”
He rolls his eyes. “I’m talking about a sin against his own children.”
•
“The right thing to do is always to come clean,” my father says. “You go to your teachers and tell them that you messed up.”
He sits forward on the couch with his hands laced together. There’s no anger in him that I’ve cut so many of my high school classes, just encouragement and a note of persuasion.
“It simplifies everything. You just tell the truth. Plus, it’s the right thing to do.”
I feel as if he relates to my predicament. He is giving me the right answer. There is relief in not lying or trying to hide something, relief in admitting to a mistake.
My father is a generous man, full of forgiveness.
•
I sit up in the darkness in my room in Dublin and cry because I miss my mother. I cry because my mother died without a face.
•
I walk aimlessly and find myself on O’Connell Street. I get onto a bus to Lough Bray, thirty minutes outside Dublin. Another waitress told me about it, a beautiful mountain lake with surrounding cliffs. If you are lucky, she said, while walking on the well-worn track around the water, you might see deer. She told me how easy it is to get there, and that it costs virtually nothing to go.
Walking along the trail around Lough Bray, looking for deer, I see two swans come together out of the water and walk on marshy land. The smaller one, which I assume is the female, has something red on one of her wings. At first I think it is blood, but then realize it is an area where feathers are missing and the flesh beneath is exposed.
The larger swan spreads and beats his wings; a powerful dry sound like harsh fabric brushing at harsh fabric, and the heavy creature lifts onto the air. The smaller swan watches his ascension uneasily. She moves back and forth, circles a few times and looks panicked. She seems confused as though there’s been no signal between them, as if there is something wrong with his departure. The sky is so vast, it is strange when he becomes no longer visible. Worry grips me.
As a middle-aged couple holding hands strolls by, I stop them and ask, “Isn’t it right that swans are monogamous and mate for life?”
They say yes, and I explain what I saw.
“Oh, he’ll be back,” the man says. “They don’t leave each other.”
And then, as if a spell has overtaken her, the female swan stretches tall, and spreads her wings. The three of us watch her. I know then that the wing with missing feathers is injured. It does not completely flex like the other. Still, she beats them both until she lifts on the air, straining her body, struggling to go in the direction he disappeared. But soon, with a great awkward flapping of the good wing, she comes down again to the ground.
“Ah, she’s injured, the poor thing,” the woman says.
“He’ll come back, though,” the man says and the two of them wander off.
I remain where I am, looking back and forth between the place in the sky where I last saw a trace of him, and the female on the ground. I want to believe he will come back, but I don’t. When I look at the female walking in uneasy circles, then bellowing up at the sky, I imagine the fast, light heartbeat going within her, and then I feel it in my own stomach and chest and throat.
•
I get off the bus near O’Connell Bridge in the late afternoon, and am heading back to Baggot Street, when it begins to rain, making the dark fall early. I step into a shop on Kildare Street and purchase a box of Silk Cut cigarettes. The rain intensifies and I wait it out in the shop. There’s been a lot of rain and the place retains an odor that I decide is a mixture of mildew and the slaughterhouse. It is a smell I have gotten used to, living for a year in Ireland. Pale gray sausages and raw rashers of bacon sit on a plate near the cash register and can be purchased singly. Cuts of mutton lie discoloring in a glass display case, also unrefrigerated. I light a cigarette and stand at the window, watching the gutters rush dark with rain. The past months, I’ve often spotted in the distance, walking on a road or standing waiting for a light to change, a man or woman of certain proportions or physical details. I wait for the man or woman to turn and look at me, expecting to see my father or my mother, peaceful, released from their earlier difficult selves, as if some compassionate deity has brought them home. After crucifixion, I have been taught since I was tiny, comes resurrection.
It amazes me that even now in my deflated state, angry and disappointed, I am doing it. A man passing on the other side of the street holding a newspaper over his head against the rain could so easily have my father’s face.
It goes through my mind that maybe the ghosts that come and stand, waiting for me to face them, to look at them in their ugliness, are embodiments of the horror of my parents’ deaths, which I resist accepting with every ounce of my energy.
Letty said to me that she thought that if I looked at them without flinching, they would not drive me mad. “Maybe they don’t really have all the power you think they have,” she said. I dismissed her words. Now the thought that this might be right shimmers within me. But that lasts only a moment. It will be years before I will be able to consider facing them.
Everything in me hurts as I walk back to Baggot Street, a hurt that leaks into my bones and viscera and skin.
I tell myself that my parents are dead, that I have to stop looking for them here, that I have to stop thinking there is some entrance in Ireland to an Otherworld. My parents’ bodies are buried side by side in soldiers’ graves on the green hill overlooking Rosario Boulevard in Santa Fe.
Today, the scorched grains from the Guinness Brewery on the wind, the exhaust of buses, the deep-fried smells from the chip and curry shops, all of which I’ve grown used to, feel suddenly alien to me.
•
It is within days after the trip to Lough Bray that the photographs arrive.
I tear the envelope open. Inside are three smaller envelopes. In the first one are various family pictures.
Many are blurred. My mother’s camera has not captured the New Mexico light, but has filtered and drained it of its intensity.
There is one of each of our First Communions, and a few old black-and-whites in front of the house, Tracy and me posing with Nanny, and a few of Jerry, Tracy, and me with Nanny on the plaza in downtown Santa Fe.
In the second envelope there are five of just the house surrounded by the poplars, taken from across the street, the willow visible on the front lawn. It is a house the color of sunflowers, or very ripe corn, though it appears in the pictures a less vibrant shade.
From the third envelope I extract the two glossy black-and-whites of my parents, a little creased, taken in Yonkers or Manhattan right before they married.
Here is my father in his late twenties, a solid figure standing in the garden of what must be a church, wearing a brimmed felt hat, a gray coat, collar and tie visible at his neck. He smiles, his focus off to the side, and I can tell from his alert expression, both mischievous and intelligent, that he is about to say something that will make my mother laugh.
Here is my mother, taken in the same garden, probably on the same overcast day, but at closer range. She wears a dark coat, her wavy, windblown hair parted at the side, a playful flash of sarcasm in her warm smile. She is sitting on a low wall, one hand resting on her lap, a cigarette poised between two gloved fingers.
Both pictures are fragile, almost weightless. The longer I look at my parents’ faces, the less I can see them, and soon it is as though I am not looking at anything.
I put the pictures back in the envelope. Leaving it on the bed, I go out and walk to the city center, where I wander in and out of the shops on Grafton Street, then stop for coffee in Bewley’s Oriental Café, popular and overcrowded, a massive, daylit room under a cloud of cigarette smoke. I sit at one of the carved dark polished wood booths along the wall, sipping hot coffee and finding refuge in the high bedlam of chatter, hissing tea urns, forks and kn
ives clattering on porcelain.
I keep thinking of the pictures, wishing I had placed the large envelope that held them under some books or weighted it down with something. Why do I wish this, I wonder, and laugh a little over it. Do I think I’ll come back and find all the photos floating in the air near the ceiling?
•
I sit with the envelope of pictures on my lap. I cannot bring myself to take out the black-and-whites of my youthful parents. Instead, I extract the ones my mother took of the house. Three of the pictures are older. They have no dates written on them, but the trees are not as tall and the car on the driveway is one from when I was younger. The other two pictures are dated September 1974, the month my mother died. In one, the trees have grown so high, they cannot be seen all the way to the top. The willow, too, is enormous.
The other picture, an incomplete close-up of the house, is taken from the front lawn, not across the street like the others. When I first looked at it earlier in the day, I did not see what I see now: my mother’s shadow. For a few moments, I have the feeling that it’s going to disappear, but the longer I look, the more certain it becomes.
She must have been standing on the lawn with the willow and the poplars behind her. I know from the red cast to the light that it is dusk. Her shadow is aslant on the wall of the house, arms high, elbows akimbo as she holds the camera, her legs elongated on the grass before her and on the porch. The shadows of the poplars, less distinct, lean at the same angle behind her.
How could I not have seen her shadow earlier? It seems so apparent to me now. And then, almost impossibly, I see something else, barely discernible in the grainy dark of the kitchen window: my sisters peering out.
My father is five months dead, my brother off with his friends. And me, where am I? My absence in this picture chills me, it is so palpable. And now again, here I am, on another continent, a world away from my sisters and my brother. I miss them with an awful urgency, a yawning ache in my chest and stomach. It is time, now, to go back.
I look at the other picture from the month my mother died, taken from a distance, the poplars so unnaturally tall. I think of my mother watering them for hours on weekends, and in the evenings after work. I hear the rushing sound they made in the wind, awkward giants, bending and gesturing, never easy in the desert air.
Ghost Songs Page 19
