Our Lady Of Greenwich Village

by Dermot McEvoy

  Her sleep was deep, but troubled. All she thought of was O’Rourke. She could see him in the distance, but she couldn’t get to him. Oh, how she missed him. They hadn’t spoken in weeks. She knew him; he was probably brooding, wondering what he had done wrong. Probably drinking again. It wasn’t his fault at all. And it really wasn’t McGuire’s fault either. It was just the collision of two human beings who loved each other, but who lived in confusion and the strange hopelessness that always seemed to find the Irish in a state of love.

  She awoke in the middle of the night in a sweat. The sheets were wet and her breast was still dripping like an old faucet. She would have to get to the doctor in the morning. “Oh, Christ,” she said, realizing that she had to get up and take a pee. As she pulled herself in a daze up to the side of the bed she thought she saw something outside her window. A pink hand coming out of a blue dress, making the sign of the cross over her St. Brigid’s Cross.

  47.

  Up early Sunday morning, O’Rourke left Clarence Black to sleep in and walked down from the Shelbourne Hotel via Kildare, Nassau, and Grafton Streets to catch the number nineteen bus at College Green. He was on his way to Glasnevin Cemetery. For a man who hated wakes and funerals intensely, he had a strange affinity for cemeteries.

  Dublin was always a slow-starting town, especially on Sundays. There was simply no comparison to New York. New Yorkers took pride in their hustle. Dubliners were more gentle with time. What did O’Rourke’s father like to say? “When God made time, he made plenty of it.” And after a few days in Ireland O’Rourke noticed that he had a hard time pulling himself out of bed, even by 9 a.m. Sometimes he just had to finish that old Ironsides rerun on RTE. The old man, thought O’Rourke, was proven right again.

  O’Rourke went to the top of the bus, which was empty, and sat in the front seat. He gazed at the empty streets as the bus swept through O’Connell Street and swung up Parnell Square West. To his right was the Garden of Remembrance, the place where the GPO rebels had been rounded up and camped before the British figured out who they were going to shoot. Looking out to his left, O’Rourke smiled as he spun by #29, Vaughan’s Hotel back in the early 1920s, unofficial HQ to Michael Collins and his squad. The bus passed the Black Church on the way north. The Black Church was the most sinister and inhospitable looking church in the world. Legend declared that if you ran around it three times the devil would appear. O’Rourke smiled at the thought that the British could find the devil, Collins himself, at #29, sans the exercise.

  O’Rourke was daydreaming when the bus came to a stop with a jolt in front of the old Broadstone railroad station. There she was, just below him, as if she had been waiting for him. Only in Ireland could the Blessed Virgin Mary be propped up almost at double-decker eye-level like a traffic cop and no one thought it odd. She had been there for years, O’Rourke remembered, even going back to the 1970s when O’Rourke was “on the run” living down on the South Circular Road, still stewing about Vietnam and its personal carnage. He had been told by his cousin, Monsignor Vincent Bartley, that she was erected in the Holy Year of 1950—the year the O’Rourkes had left for New York. Vince, then a choir boy, sang at the installation. She was called Our Lady Queen of Peace. After a half century of rain and damp she still looked serene, although pollution had rendered her a permanent dirty Dublin gray. O’Rourke could see that she had averted her eyes, strangely annoying him.

  She was being coy this time, thought O’Rourke. Not like in the dream when she covered her face up and only showed him her eyes, which were the eyes of his dead mother. O’Rourke was beginning to feel resentful toward this piece of plaster. “What do you want of me?” he asked out loud. There was no response from the statue. “What’s the game here?” Whatever the game, it was her game and O’Rourke was playing it, but he did not know the rules. He didn’t know what she wanted, but she wanted something. He was biting his lip in frustration when the light changed and the bus went up the road toward Phibsborough.

  O’Rourke got off the bus in Glasnevin and walked up to the main gate, where he bought two roses. Inside he walked to the right, past the office, to the grave of General Michael Collins. Although Collins was buried in 1922, he didn’t get his headstone until 1939. A sort of delayed grant, after many negotiations with Collins’s brother Johnny, from the Taoiseach, Eamon DeValera. DeValera, petty to the last, decreed that the back of the headstone, the first thing one sees, be written in Irish, clearly to vex those not up on their Erse.

  O’Rourke went to the front of the grave and was surprised to see that, for once, it was covered in flowers. Usually the barrenness annoyed O’Rourke, but this time the grave abounded in color. He left the rose in a vase and said a prayer for one of his two heroes, Bobby Kennedy being the other one. Two Irish revolutionaries with different methods who came to the same ending. O’Rourke shook his head at the waste and said a prayer for all the young Irish soldiers, mostly killed in the Congo while on UN patrol, who surrounded Ireland’s premier general.

  O’Rourke walked past the appropriately named Republican Plot, home to John Devoy, Jeremiah O’Donovan Rossa, Harry Boland, Cathal Brugha, and all the other ancient Fenians. At Parnell’s grave boulder, he took the first right and started the walk towards St. Brigid’s, where his mother and her parents were buried. There were many Blessed Virgins along the way. Some pristine above the grave, others with an arm or a shoulder missing after all the years in the rain. He stopped to look at one whose features had been eroded. She looked at him fully, but with really no face. No eyes, just a bump for a nose, two lumps for ears. O’Rourke stood in the early morning quiet and felt serene. The irritation that the polluted Broadstone Virgin had caused him was now gone. This Virgin wasn’t giving him any clues either, but at least she stood before him without intimidating him. Maybe they could work this out. Then O’Rourke jumped as a rat—no, it was only a squirrel—ran across his path. O’Rourke realized that there would be no détente between himself and his celestial mother.

  He saw the wall and resurrectionist tower near his mother’s grave and was forced to smile. His mother had been cremated, and when O’Rourke had returned with her ashes to bury them, the gravedigger had said, “This is a grand spot to be buried in.” O’Rourke, frustrated and depressed by the whole ordeal, had turned on your man curtly: “And why might that be?”

  “Do ya see that wall there?” O’Rourke nodded. “Well, beyond it is the Botanical Gardens.” O’Rourke was forced to smile at the Dublinin-the-rare-ould-times moment and he was sure that his mother would have been delighted too. He gave your man an extra ten punts for his digging and his philosophizing.

  It only took O’Rourke a moment to find the stone. It had been replaced by his altar-building Uncle Dick in 1961. Since he was the last Kavanagh, he owned the plot that contained what was left of his mother’s family. There was young Charlie who was planted here in 1914. Grandmother Rosanna was next in 1915. Grandfather Joseph followed in 1924, followed by young Joe in 1961. O’Rourke’s mother was the last—until O’Rourke was ready—in 1989. The only two missing were Dick and Frank, who both died in America and were buried in the Bronx.

  Here was a family that O’Rourke was clueless about. He had only the fractured stories of his mother. The grandfather was a hairdresser, a barber, who had a shop in Aungier Street. He was a former alcoholic, a turf accountant, and a revolutionary in his time. He knew little of the grandmother who died just before his mother’s eighth birthday, landing her in an orphanage in Sandymount. Yes, there was one other thing about Rosanna. She was the original owner of the statue of the Blessed Virgin that O’Rourke now possessed. Charlie was the mystery boy, who choked on a fishbone on a Friday. Joe was the first child in 1901, Frank the second in, maybe, 1902, both bitten by the revolution bug. Just children, like so many of Michael Collins’s “men.” Charlie’s birth year looked like 1904 (he died in 1914 and the stone said “ten years of age”). He knew his mother was 1907 and he assumed Dick was just after her.

  Wor
thless numbers, all of them. A dead family that no one cared about anymore. He dropped the rose on the grave and said a prayer. O’Rourke always believed that if you thought of the dead it was like a prayer. Who knows? Maybe someone still needed help getting out of purgatory. It was beginning to rain and O’Rourke pulled his New York Mets baseball cap out of his jacket pocket for cover. He was saying the Act of Contrition in Irish, as he mother had thought him.

  A Dhia, tabhair cúnamh dom

  chun faoistin mhaith a dhéanamh.

  A Dhia, cabhraigh liom

  mo pheacaí a aithint,

  fíordhólás a bheith orm fúthu,

  iad a admháil gan ceilt san fhaoistin,

  agus rún daingean a bheith agam

  gan peaca a dhéanamh arís.

  As he finished the prayer, he looked out over all the gray graves and the barren soil—he wondered when was the last time a single blade of grass had actually grown here—and in the distance he could see her—a brand new Virgin Mary, probably on top of a fresh grave. She was in vivid color, with blues and whites and that ruddy Irish complexion. She was way up there, over in the next plot from where his mother was. In the starkness of the cemetery on a rainy Sunday morning, she seemed alive and animated. She was a good distance from O’Rourke, but she looked like she was smiling at him.

  O’Rourke looked at the mother’s gravestone again, then took out his notebook and jotted all the information on the stone down, about the grandparents and the two uncles he never knew. He didn’t know what he was going to do with them, but he knew he had to write it down.

  The rain was getting harder and the pages of his notebook were turning limp when he closed it and put it in his pocket. “I won’t forget you. I promise,” he said to the slab of marble in front of him. Then amid all the dead, he saw life. A snail was making its slow way up his mother’s gravestone. “Selide,” O’Rourke addressed the snail in its Irish name. He reached down and plucked it off the stone and the selide immediately sucked its head and horns and legs into its little shell, giving O’Rourke a smile. O’Rourke gently placed the snail back on the headstone. “Welcome to the family.”

  It was time to get out of the rain. He looked up to say goodbye to the brilliant Virgin in the next plot and realized with a jolt that she did not exist.

  48.

  O’Rourke did not sleep well, and he woke up agitated. He had been pestered by two of them this time. They had double-teamed him.

  He was first confronted by the Broadstone Virgin, the one stuck up in the air like a traffic cop. This time she had turned her back on him, as if showing him her rump, not in a provocative way, but more as a way to scorn.

  In the dream he was alone again in the top of the double-decker. Although there was no one about, he could hear the chorus all around him:

  Hail Mary, full of grace

  The Lord is with you

  Blessed art thou amongst women

  And blessed is the fruit of they womb, Jesus.

  “And how is the fruit of your womb, Jude?” the Virgin asked O’Rourke.

  She called him by his Christian name, which no one knew. O’Rourke had been called Tone since the day of his birth.

  “I don’t have a womb,” snapped O’Rourke. “I’m a man!”

  “You do have a womb, Jude,” she replied.

  “What womb?”

  “You know what womb I’m talking about.”

  O’Rourke thought of Sam. “Is it going to be alright?”

  “That’s up to you,” said the Virgin as she began to slowly turn toward him. He couldn’t catch her face because the bus pulled away, past the Broadstone Station, on its way to Glasnevin.

  Next he found himself in Glasnevin standing before the Virgin with no features. Lumps for nose and ears and a couple of sinkholes for eyes. No mouth at all.

  “Your womb,” she said to O’Rourke, as if continuing the conversation of the Broadstone Virgin.

  “Womb?”

  “You know what I mean,” she replied.

  “Sam’s womb?”

  “It bears fruit,” said the Virgin.

  “My child.”

  “Yes, your child,” reaffirmed the Virgin. “She is lonely for you.”

  “She,” repeated O’Rourke softly, and for the first time he knew he had a daughter. “I think of her all the time.”

  “The child knows that.”

  “She does?” said O’Rourke with surprise.

  “I reassure her,” said the Virgin, “of the love of her parents, but she does not believe me.”

  “Well,” said O’Rourke, “I love her like I loved my mother.”

  “I know,” replied the amorphous Virgin.

  There was silence and suddenly it began to rain heavily and Glasnevin Cemetery became even more gloomy than it naturally was. Through the rain, he thought he could see a fine line forming for a mouth on the Virgin’s statue above him. It was the long-lined mouth of the Conways, his grandmother’s people. And then eyes filled the two sinkholes and he swore they were the eyes of his mother. He excitedly wondered what would happen next to unlock this mystery, but then the dream failed and he awoke drained and disappointed.

  O’Rourke rose naked and walked to the window of his Shelbourne Hotel suite. Below him, St. Stephen’s Green was splendid in its summer dress, so green and full that it was impossible to really see anything in the park except for the pond. But the luxury of the Shelbourne suite and the park did not raise O’Rourke’s spirit. This morning he had grim work to do and it was time to get moving.

  O’Rourke came out of the Shelbourne, turned left, and headed down Merrion Row on his way to Merrion Square. O’Rourke loved walking around Dublin because he was always touched by its history. At Merrion Square, across from Clare Street, he surveyed the colorful reincarnation of Oscar Wilde. This statue was joyful, coy yet cheeky as he flirted, provocative in repose—well befitting its Dublin sobriquet, The Quare in the Square.

  Dublin was a city of history that jumped out at you. Just over there, on Merrion Square South, were the houses of Yeats and George Russell and right in front of him was Oscar Wilde’s father’s townhouse. O’Rourke looked down Merrion Square towards Hollis Street Maternity Hospital where he was born in 1946 in near poverty. America and its filthy politics had been good to O’Rourke—he could buy one of these beautiful buildings on Merrion Square if he so desired. Maybe that would impress Sam. Maybe not.

  He swung around Fenian Street and passed into Westland Row. He walked passed St. Andrew’s Church, where he was baptized, toward the Westland Row railroad station. He crossed Pearse Street to Lombard Street and went into Joyce House, the Registrar’s Office. He was directed to the second-floor research department in his quest to find out about his dead relatives. He got there early enough so that the place was not yet packed with vacationing Americans trying to find clues to their exiled existences.

  His task was grim and he was depressed at what he might find. Yet he was nervous in anticipation, kind of like the nervousness one would get on a first date. He had his notes from the gravestone up in Glasnevin and he was going to find out as much as he could about this lost family of his mother’s that, for some reason, had been dogging him now for months. His list was small:

  Joseph Kavanagh, grandfather

  Rosanna (née Conway) Kavanagh, grandmother

  Joseph, Francis (Frank), Charles (Charlie), Mary, Richard (Dick), the children.

  Uncle Charlie was first. O’Rourke went to the front desk and was given the index book for deaths in 1914. There Charlie was in the book in the first quarter of the year. It was easy work. O’Rourke filled out the form and gave it to the clerk. Within ten minutes some of the answers were horribly revealed.

  Dáta agus Ionad Báis/Date and Place of Death: 1914, 10 March. 1 Piles Buildings. The first surprise: 1 Piles Buildings. What where they? O’Rourke thought the family home was on Aungier Street. Also, a mention of Arthur’s Lane. And what and where was Arthur’s Lane?

  Aoi
s an lá breithe is déanai/ Age last Birthday: 10 years. Bachelor, the paper said. O’Rourke had to smile at the obvious.

  Cúis Báis Dheimhnithe agus fad an tinnis/Certified Cause of Death and Duration of Illness: Paralysis of heart following diphtheria. Sudden cardiac failure per medical attendant on way to Adelaide Hospital.

  Diphtheria. Who in God’s name dies of diphtheria anymore? But this was 1914, just before the beginning of the Great War and there were no tetanus shots. So Charlie died on his way to the Adelaide Hospital. Did Charlie feel the bump of the cobblestones as the horses panted and pulled to save his little life? It said his father was with him at the time of death. Where was his mammy? Back with the other kids? Did he cry out for his mammy at the end? And did Rosanna know that this was the beginning of her own end? Was the grief of Charlie’s death going to be responsible for her own death only eleven months later?

  O’Rourke had a special affinity for his Uncle Charlie. Maybe because he was next to his mother in age and maybe because he had never seen a picture of him. He had photos of Rosanna and the grandfather. He knew his Uncles Dick and Frank in New York and he had seen photos of Joe Jr., taken on the windy plains of Portrane, the lunatic asylum ten miles north of Dublin. So Charlie was the mystery. The ten-year-old ghost who must have been terribly sick and terribly frightened by it all. How does one get diphtheria? From lousy sanitation? The poor always have lousy sanitation. They always get to die in their own shit. Did Charlie know he was the harbinger of destruction for the Kavanagh family? Did he know he was lucky to be the first one to die because it saved him from becoming an orphan?