“All those not sailing must now go ashore, please.”
I had, I really had made it. This was it. I could see the first and second mates at their stations and the captain on the wing of his bridge. Along with the rejection, the nightmare of America, the angst, melancholia and hypochondria, were at last, thank God, all over. If I died now, it would be at least peacefully. Or indeed, I could live and begin a life again. Even in these last few seconds of leaving, I was still desperately anxious to go. And staring down at the now emptied pier, I thought of Gainor. Hunted and haunted. Somewhere desperately left in this city. Where he’d been so often caught in the spiderweb of the subway. A vagabond alone on the North American continent and so very far away from a Dublin and London he in many ways loved. The solution now to his suffering, the rope in his brown paper bag. For all the worry and even anger he had caused through all the wasted time of the past few weeks, one simply didn’t have it within one to put upon him blame. Only to wish him all blessings. And desperately hope for him that he would one day escape.
A white-coated waiter came out a door on deck and went in another toting a tray. It left a familiar warming smell on the cold air. Beef tea was being served in the ship’s lounge. Blue peter lowered from the main mast. From high up on the ship’s funnel, steam shot in the air as two blasts came of the ship’s horn. I was back in dignity, holding myself askance. I stood by the ship’s rails, not far from the gangplank. Always the imaginary admiral watching this last act of setting sail. Above the clattering noise, my ears could still hear ashore the sound of police sirens. Dockers now pushing and tugging to remove the gangway. The twenty-thousand-ton vessel making its first stirring in the dock. Next stop would be February 15 at Halifax, Nova Scotia. And from there, straight across the North Atlantic to Cork and Liverpool. Then suddenly, as the last rope of the gangway was cast aside, instead of joyous relief, tears welled in my eyes. A desperate inexplicable sorrow overtaking me. That I was leaving people, some of whom, like my father, I would never see again. And that poor old Gainor, who had endured through his own insufferable fault so bloody much, had not made it.
From portside, I was about to turn my attentions to the starboard to watch the tugboats at work, when on the pier there seemed to be a slight commotion. A voice shouting. A thump, thump, like feet running. The voice sounded like one I had previously known well and heard crying out in exasperation. And one had nearly expected to have such a daylight nightmare. That I would now take back with me to Europe. To forever afterward hear familiar words spoken to me by a ghost of a man I had never seen before. But was suddenly seeing now on the pier, as there and then came into sight from around the corner of the customs hut a hobbling figure struggling to make haste over the wooden planks. Moving forward almost as if one leg had to wait till the other crippled one had caught up. Scarf wound round his neck and tucked in under the lapels of his orangy brown tweed jacket. His blue Aran Islander’s cap on his head. Lugging in one hand a heavy suitcase and in the other a brown paper bag. And this man who was shouting out, was none other than the one and only intrepid and resolute Gainor Stephen Crist.
“Wait for me.”
The gangway was pulled back into place and held as Gainor climbed aboard. I watched as his suitcase was taken from him by a sailor. Gainor wincing, holding the rail as he stepped onto the ship’s deck. His breath heaving, his head nodding up and down. And without seeing me, he disappeared aboard as the tugs hooted and the Franconia blasted two blasts and the echoes came back over the Hudson from the Palisades. I went back to the stern. The vessel, pushed out into the current by tugs, was slowly turned and, bow facing east, the Franconia, its engines throbbing, was now under way down the North River. The tall buildings of Manhattan were gray and silver under the overcast sky and veiled by a strange red-tinted mist. And a hand came to rest on my shoulder. Standing there silently behind me and smiling was Gainor. His paper bag and suitcase parked with the purser, and with a Pan American Airways pouch underarm he had returned out on deck. And one might have known, he had a cabin for four all to himself.
“Ah, Dinnlay, you did think, didn’t you, that I would not make it. To sail back with you into those times of yore. And back to the nighttime sweet-scented smoke descending upon the city of Dublin. Softness of rain falling softly. The glow of turf fires, the only warmth. The sound of music on wirelesses, the only comfort. The evening-steamed windows of the crowded trams rattling past Trinity. We return to the smell of sheep’s head stew. The dark wine of the people going glug glug down the slaked throats in all the pubs. Rasp of meaningless voices becoming more meaningless as they become drunker and finally make sense. Those too, of the stone-cold hearts. The unkind, the ungenerous. The narrow minds becoming narrower. Who will go to join the others like them in the granite sepulcher of Dublin’s defeated souls. The evening’s loneliness as one hastens from pub to pub and the turf smoke presses down from the old gray sky. And we seek out the catacombs to raise a defiance against death. Where bad nights can always be relied upon to bring worse mornings. And yet, Dinnlay, that selfsame city we love. The noise of earth-colored beasts through the night in the cattle markets. The lash of blackbriar on their rumps. A brute voice driving them through the darkness and into the morning light of the harbor’s quays, where the boat awaits to take them to slaughter in England to become British roast beef. It is how we will always remember Dublin. And where’er we go, to it shall we always want to return. Living as it does within us. Incubus of eternal sorrow. Across which the purple winds of melancholy blow. Dinnlay, we go back now to embrace all its grimness, all its default and all its failure. And we willingly do so with wide-open and all-embracing arms.”
WHERE ALSO THE FIRST PRIORITY WILL BE
FOR US TO GET INTO A BAR
WHERE AS SOON AS POSSIBLE WITH DRINK WE CAN
BLOT OUT THE PAST AND DREAM AND TALK OF
A HOPEFUL FUTURE
WHILE AT THE SAME TIME WE TRY TO BORROW
AS MUCH MONEY AS POSSIBLE
FROM ANYONE WHO HAS ANY
WHICH IS USUALLY NOBODY
IN THE CITY WHOSE FLAWS
SO SPLENDIDLY PROVE
ITS PERFECTIONS
“Ah, Dinnlay, you may no longer speak with your mouth, but you have not lost your eloquence and astutely accurate observation by your pen.”
AND I AM, I FEAR, ALSO LIKE THOSE IN DUBLIN
WHERE THE WANDERING POET PLEADS
CELEBRATE ME NOW BEFORE I’M
DEAD
CELEBRATE ME NOW WHILE I’M POOR AND
UNREAD
CELEBRATE ME NOW WITH A DRINK
A MEAL AND A LIFETIME ANNUITY. PLEASE DON’T LET ME DIE
BEFORE I’M RICH AND FAMOUS
AND BECOME A VACUITY
“But, Dinnlay, you say pessimistically harsh words about where we would wish to return to.”
JUST AS THE IRISH CAN BE
BRILLIANT FLATTERERS
THEY CAN ALSO DISCLOSE
RUTHLESSLY TOLD
VERSIONS OF THE TRUTH
On the fantail stern we stood, the Franconia in the current gathering speed. Beneath us, the water eight fathoms deep. Watching the island of Manhattan silently receding in the gray mist. As if all life had ceased there. Across the sky, the sun cast a dim, blood red cold light. Passing to our starboard, Hoboken. Where there was a school which taught you how to build ships. On portside passed the fireboat station. And across town, beyond, in those streets was where April lived and St. Vincent’s Hospital and the wondrous nun. Gainor, as well as knowing the depth of water flowing beneath the hull, also seemed to know the details of all we passed port and starboard. Just as he had known throughout the war, the most secret and guarded telephone number of the bunker beneath London’s Mall, from which Winston Churchill conducted the Battle of Britain. And to which number Gainor phoned to make assignations with his first wife, Constance, who had refused to disclose same to him.
“And, Mike, we both know that Pier Ninety-two was the best
place to be stationed during the war. Unlike being at sea aboard ship, it was marvelous for liberty. Merely a walk of a few blocks to Forty-second Street and Broadway for girls and beer. Of course while briefly there, I frequented the better hotels, which others, less particular, ignored.”
As Battery Park went by, I knew that there stood a monument on which were listed all the names carved in marble of the dead in the war. And it seemed as if to acknowledge this, that both Gainor and I were involuntarily, silently standing at attention. And could it be, that all these braver dead, had they not died, could have made this place we left, less ruled by the bigoted, bullying, treacherous and their demagoguery. For it seemed that the silence we left behind was that of a city which had stopped chasing us. To drive us out and away. For we were gone.
It was as if one could hear signal bells ring up on the bridge. Faster now as the knots increased and the sea foamed up astern. Through the narrows. In nine fathoms. A ferry crossing our wake on its way to Staten Island. The clutch of tall buildings of Manhattan sinking and fading now out of sight. The wind blowing harder. Seagulls crying. Passing to port was Coney Island, Brighton Beach and Rockaway. We were at last at sea. Out upon the Atlantic deeps. Making our way through the heaving ocean swells.
Mike, my dear Dinnlay,
There it goes
And we shall without hoot,
Without holler,
Commemorate this moment
For the rest of our lives
29
EVEN WITH HIS BAD KNEES, Gainor was able to dance a departing jig on the deck. He had spent most of the three days prior to leaving riding from last stop to last stop and sleeping at night on the subway. Taking trains variously traveling back and forth from the Bronx to Coney Island more than twenty miles and fifty stops away. I had feared he’d never raise enough money for his ticket, but his loving and ever dependable Pamela provided once again. And of course he had nearly missed catching the Franconia by having fallen asleep and wakened in the environs of Canarsie. Then, near hysterical, he found himself back in Manhattan with a bare twenty minutes left to sailing.
“Mike, I had not even a last few dollars to spend on a taxi. But I can tell you, no one in the Olympics has ever covered running distances faster. All pain vanished from my knees as I skipped, hopped and tripped my way the last few blocks to the pier. The subway, which was my nemesis upon my arrival in this land, has alas also been upon my departure, my savior.”
When we had been passing the mouth of the East River, entering New York Bay, one could nearly see from the Franconia the house at 8 Willow Place in Brooklyn Heights where my parents had first set up to live a married life and where one was conceived. My father later, when we had moved from Brooklyn to Wakefield in the Bronx and thence to Woodlawn, was, as he tended dahlias in the garden, always bemused watching me go by in the sunshine with a tennis racket or golf clubs over a shoulder, when in the old country in the misty mist I would have been toting a shovel, pitchfork or a scythe.
My parents’ wedding picture.
The certainty of my going and leaving America confirmed one inevitable thing, that my birth and having been reared there did not make me eternally American. And it might even be thought that I had been born in the wrong country. Brought up by parents to whom it was still the promised land but who themselves must have spent many a secret moment remembering and wanting to return to where they were first reared and grew up. My mother’s eyes always filled with uncharacteristic tears whenever she alluded to suddenly being snatched away from her Galway home as a young girl to be brought to America and there to become thoroughly part of this mix of races, but where she always kept her Irish Catholic faith throughout her life. America physically fading now as we left its shores. But still remembering the more wished-to-be-forgotten unforgettable moments there. Where, like Gainor’s homosexualist motorist, I had also indulged my own vehicle escapades, as when at the age of sixteen, having just got a license, my father let me drive one of his new Dodge cars as I did one night, having a beer too many. And found myself racing along a sharply curving lane, which sent me up through and across a suburban dweller’s front lawn and over his flower garden of bright red and yellow tulips, mowing them down under my headlights. And Gainor had an explanation of such phenomenon.
“Mike, we were raising defiance against the claustrophobic status quo. And you can be absolutely certain of one thing, that such suburban people, over whose lawns such motorcars tend to go to maraud with crazy insanity at night, fly the stars and stripes on their front lawns by day. And it’s as well such bloody righteous, patriotically smug citizens are occasionally reminded of their vulnerability.”
This latter remark could have been thought extremely uncharacteristic talk from Gainor, who on the surface at least had always verbally extolled and upheld the honor and trust that dignified family values, especially those epitomized by photographic portraiture of mom, pop and offspring exhibiting Brahmin respectability, with such representation perched upon the shiny top of the grand piano. And it was only by dint of necessity and circumstance that a major degree of Bohemianism had insinuated itself into his life. Such now exemplified by his brown paper bag, sandals, Aran Islander’s cap and his trusty rope, which might be required when things got bad enough to end it all. However, aboard the Franconia he immediately adopted one of my suits, a silk shirt and Trinity cravat for shipboard wear. Returning him to his previous diplomatic splendor, which he had sported when receiving and taking leave of the important persons on behalf of Pan American Airways. Indeed, on our second day at sea, with his back to me, I hardly recognized him in the ship’s lounge already in the company of a group of girls who happened to be the Franconia’s most attractive passengers. And presto. Upon Gainor seeing me, I was no longer left to be the lonely, reclusive and silent North Atlantic traveler that I usually was. Gainor, heels clicking and bowing, instantly introduced me to whatever female shipboard fun, beauty and intelligence was available.
GAINOR HOW
PLEASE TELL ME
HOW
DO YOU DO IT
“Ah, Dinnlay, aside from allowing myself to enter my second childhood, and my having an honest and open demeanor about me, I abide by a simple motto. Bad persons vamoose, good persons come hither.”
YOU DON’T SAY
“Yes I do verily say, Dinnlay. And those who may be of a doubtful category I encourage to stick around to see if they might at least prove briefly amusing, as indeed most often they do.”
The ship on its way to Halifax was not very full and indeed at times seemed relatively deserted. But nowhere in the annals of human enthusiasm or among those crossing eastbound on the North Atlantic could ever be found recorded anything to exceed the amount of wholehearted animation that was shown by Gainor Stephen Crist upon this voyage. His name being the first to appear as a participant in every contest being advertised aboard the good ship Franconia. Nor did any passenger ever engaged in so many activities at the same time exhibit a so utterly unfussed and unfazed demeanor or move about as Gainor did with such verve and elegance. Almost overnight his knee joints, becoming more flexibly nimble by the minute, returned to nearly normal size.
GOOD GOD
GAINOR YOU’RE UP
AND DOWN THIS
SHIP’S LADDERS LIKE A
GYMNAST
“Ah, to be sure, Dinnlay, to be sure. One must avail of quickness to fulfill so many commitments. And indeed luckily so, as I have met the most delightfully appealing young lady who is returning to Europe, just like us and who was badly disillusioned with the United States. And we discuss and talk about it in my cabin.”
I assumed from Gainor’s pleased expression that he too had to keep his backbone flexibly nimble for his frequent bowing and possible other activities, for one now began to encounter a smilingly gladsome young lady who seemed very little disillusioned as she was to be seen coming and going from his cabin door. Even on this second day under way, Gainor, up bright and early, was the first to han
d in his slip to the guessing game, having estimated within four eggs how many had been eaten in the previous twenty-four hours. He had already won his first two matches with all comers in Ping-Pong. He also waged furious war at quoits, his eye even without his glasses devastatingly accurate. And when I lent him for the coming events a pair of black, diplomatically correct shoes to sport by day and diplomatically appropriate dancing pumps to wear by evening, his smiles were a mile wider, and his bows a fathom deeper.
“I am most grateful to you, my dear Mike, for this loan of shoes and shall refrain, I promise you, from teaching lessons to any future vending machines by kicking them to pieces.”
My failure to speak and being attired in my beaver-collared, camel’s hair greatcoat as I paced the deck with silver-knobbed walking stick and accompanied by a solicitous Crist, reading messages I handed him, gave rise to the stories now abounding about the ship that I was formerly of a middle European family dynasty who had ruled a province which was now a Russian satellite state and that Gainor, my chief of protocol and personal secretary, was shielding me from unwanted attention and that we were traveling incognito and tourist class to avoid being conspicuous. And of course more than a few women aboard were going out of their minds as to how to meet Gainor and if meeting him how to continue to stay close. And one was even able to witness the unprecedented phenomenon of first-class passengers longingly and enviously looking over the barrier into tourist class and to find some excuse to breach the division. Even to peeking through a boat deck porthole into the tourist-class smoke room, and then upon seeing Gainor there, to gate-crash into his company. And which did not seem to please Gainor much.
The History of the Ginger Man: An Autobiography Page 39
