by Thomas Lynch
“Oh God,” he half-sobbed through the shambles of his emotions, “to think of it, Tom, the truth and beauty of it.”
And I thought it a queer thing to say, but admirable that he should be so overtaken with the grief at the death of a distant cousin whom he’d only met on a couple of occasions over the past twenty years when she’d made her visits to America. What is more, I remarked to myself, given that the brother and I were both occupationally inclined to get through these solemnities while maintaining an undertakerly reserve, I thought his emotings rather strange. Might it be the distance or the jet lag or maybe the sea air? It was his first time in Ireland, after all. It might all have overwhelmed him.
Truth told I was a little worried that my own bereavement didn’t seem sufficiently keen compared to the way Pat had been leveled by his. All the same, I thought it my brotherly and accustomed duty to comfort the heart-sore with such condolence as I could bring to bear on such abject sadness.
“She’d a good life, a good death, and a great funeral, Pat. She’s at peace now and there is comfort in that. It really was very good of you and Mary to come. My Mary and I are forever grateful.”
He was still buckled, the thumbs twitching and the face of him fixed on the neighboring grave, and he was muttering something I made out to be about love and death because all he kept saying was, “In Love and in Death, together still.” He was making an effort to point the finger of his left hand at the stone that marked the grave next to Nora’s. I thought he might be quoting from the stone and examined the marker for “love” and “death.” It was clean white marble, lettered plain, the name of Callaghan chiseled on it and not much else that was legible.
And then it came to me—his wife Mary’s name is Callaghan.
“To think of it, Tom, here we are, four thousand miles from home, but home all the same at the grave of our great-great-grandparents; and the Lynches and Callaghans are buried together, right next to each other. In love and in death, they are together still. Who’d have ever imagined that?”
“Yes, yes, I see, of course. . . .”
“To think of it, Tom, all these years, all these miles. . . .”
“Yes, the years, the miles. . . .”
“Who’d have believed it, Tom?”
I helped him to his feet, brushed the mud from his trousers, and said nothing of substance for fear it might hobble the big man again. At the Long Dock he embraced his wife as a man does who has seen the ghosts.
PAT GOT SMITTEN at a funeral Mass one Saturday at Holy Name when Mary Callaghan, accompanied by her father on the organ, sang the “In Paradisum” as the sad entourage processed into church. First cross bearer and acolytes, then Fr. Harrington, then my father and Pat wheeling the casket in, the mourners rising to the entrance hymn. The brother stood at the foot of the altar holding the pall, transfixed by the voice of the angel come to earth in the comely figure of Mary Callaghan. When it came time to cover the casket with the pall as the priest read, “On the day of her baptism she put on Christ. In the day of Christ’s coming may she be clothed in glory,” Pat was elsewhere in his mind, imagining the paradise into which Miss Callaghan, what with her dark curls, blue eyes, and fetching attributes, might conduct him. My father thumped him ceremoniously on the shoulder to snap him back into the moment at hand. At the Offertory, she sang the “Ave Maria.” Pat swooned at the back of church at the Latin for Hail and Mary and the fruit of wombs. At communion, “Panis Angelicus”; and for the recessional she sang an Englished version of the “Ode to Joy.” It was all Pat could do to get the casket in the hearse, the family in the limousine, the cars flagged, and the procession on its way to Holy Sepulchre, so walloped was he by the music in her mouth and the beauty of her being.
When Fr. Harrington, riding shotgun in the hearse with Pat, wondered aloud, as he always did, had Pat met any fine young Catholic woman to settle down with yet—for a young man with a good job at the height of his sexual prowess untethered by the bonds of holy matrimony and indentured to nothing but his own pleasures is a peril second only to a young woman of similar station to any parish priest—Pat answered that he had indeed, and only within the hour. The priest looked puzzled.
When Pat explained further that he had only moments ago come to understand the trials of Job, the suffering of souls in purgatory, and meaning no blasphemy, the Passion itself—to behold such beauty and not to hold it, to have it, to take it home and wake to it, to be in earshot and eyeshot of such a rare specimen of womanly grace and gorgeousness and not be able to hold the hand of her, kiss the mouth of her, run a finger down the cheekbone of her—this was a suffering he had never had before. Fr. Harrington, blushing a little now, one supposes, had the brother exactly where he wanted him, on the brink of surrender to the will of God, ready to be delivered from the occasion of sin by the sacraments of the Church.
“Could you help me, Father?” Pat implored him.
“Leave it to me, boy. And say your prayers.”
So it was a priest who made Pat’s match with Mary Callaghan. Well, actually a bishop now. But back in that day it was Fr. Bernard Harrington, parish priest at Holy Name, who organized the courtship and consortium between the brother and the famous beauty.
Pat was twenty-three or twenty-four, recently finished with mortuary school, newly licensed and working funerals with our father and enjoying the life of the single man.
Mary was nineteen, an underclasswoman at Marygrove College studying theatre and voice under the tutelage of nuns. She was the fourteenth of the eighteen offspring of John F. Callaghan, a church organist, and Mary O’Brien Callaghan, whose once-promising operatic career was sacrificed to her marriage and motherhood duties. Of this prolific couple it was said that they had great music but never quite got rhythm.
It was the priest, later Bishop Harrington, who made discreet inquiries about the young woman’s plans and prospects; the priest who put it in the organist’s mind that a funeral director in the family would be no bad thing, the inevitabilities being, well, inevitable; and the priest who mentioned to the mother, “Queen” Mary, that a match between her namesake and heir to her vocal legacy and a tall and handsome Irish Catholic man, the son of famously honest people, would produce grandchildren of such moral, spiritual, intellectual, and physical pedigree as to ever be a credit to the tribe and race and species and, needless to say, to her own good self. It was the priest who advanced my brother’s cause with the girl in question, letting it slip, more or less in passing, that he owned, albeit subject to a modest mortgage, his own three-bedroom bungalow in a good neighborhood, stood to take over the family business, was possessed, it was said, of a grand if untrained tenor voice, and sang “Danny Boy” with such aplomb that many’s the young person and the old were set to weeping when he gave out with it.
It was the priest furthermore who blighted her other suitors, by novena or rosary or some other priestly medicine. One by one they all disappeared: the one in law school, the one with the family fortune, the one who later became a senator. Even Mary’s twin brother Joe’s best friend, a man of impeccable Irish-American stock who courted her with poems and roses and curried favor with the mother, even he was passed over. He went off to Ohio broken-hearted, married a Lithuanian woman, and was seldom heard from in these parts again. It was the priest who did it. And the priest who organized the first date, counseled them through the predictable quibbles, and after three years of courtship, pressed the brother to pop the question.
And standing before the dearly beloved and the church full of family assembled there—the Lynch and the Callaghan parents, like Celtic chieftains and their queens, the bride’s seventeen siblings with their spouses and children and significant others, the groom’s eight siblings with theirs as well, and the O’Brien and O’Hara cousins and uncles and aunts and host of friends all dressed to the nines for the nuptials—it was the priest who proclaimed it a great day for the Irish indeed.
INDEED, FOR THE IRISH and Irish Americans, the only spectacle m
ore likely to bring out a crowd than a blushing couple at the brink of their marriage bed is a fresh corpse at the edge of its grave. Mighty at weddings, we are mightier still at wakes and funerals, to which we are drawn like moths to flame, where the full nature of our characters and character flaws are allowed to play out in a theatre that has deep and maybe pagan roots.
As Hely Dutton, an agriculturalist in the service of the Dublin Society opined in 1808 in the final chapter of his Statistical Survey of the County of Clare:
Wakes, quite different from what are so called in England, still continue to be the disgrace of the country. As it would be thought a great mark of disrespect not to attend at the house where the corpse lies, every person makes it a point, especially women, to shew themselves; and when they first enter the house, they set up the most hideous but dry-eyed yell, called the Irish cry; this, however, lasts but a short time. The night is usually spent in singing, not mournful dirges, but merry songs, and in amusing themselves with different small plays, dancing, drinking, and often fighting, &c.
When Pat’s Mary’s mother “Queen” Mary died, late last year at age eighty-five, we dispatched a hearse and driver to Pittsburgh to pick up a bespoke, carved-top mahogany casket for her. She’d have hated the expense but approved the bother. Mary O’Brien Callaghan was, like all the Irish dead, one of a kind. The much-doted-over only child of “Big Paul” O’Brien—a short man who made a respectable fortune as a lumber merchant—she passed her girlhood in Oswego, New York, with piano lessons, voice recitals, and the lace-curtain privilege of moneyed Irish. In high school she met her leading man, Jack Callaghan, when they played the love interests in HMS Pinafore. While attending Syracuse University on a voice scholarship, she married him and over the next twenty-two years gave birth to eight daughters and ten sons. He played the organ at daily Masses, directed choirs, and taught music at a women’s college and a Christian Brothers school. They kept body and soul and household together. On the occasion of their fiftieth anniversary, an interviewer commented, “Mrs. Callaghan, you must really love children!” She replied, “Actually I just really love Mr. Callaghan.” That same love—selfless, faithful, fierce, and true—still shines in the eyes of her sixty grandchildren, forty-some great-grandchildren, and one great-great-grandchild.
She had seen the generations grow up around her.
It was her grandson Paddy who helped his father wheel her casket into church, her granddaughter Caitlin whose soprano met the mourners at the door. It was her daughters who covered her with the pall and her sons who walked beside the hearse the few blocks to Greenwood Cemetery, then bore her body to the grave where another grandson piped the sad, slow air.
“Some say this is supposed to be a celebration of Mary’s life,” the priest said, “and we’ll get to that, but not right now. Right now it hurts too much. We must first mourn her death.” There was weeping and sighing, the breath of them whitening in the chill November air. Folks held hands and embraced one another.
The brother’s thumbs were twitching.
THE THUMBS ARE safe for another season. Because we cannot go to Moveen this March, because Pat got himself elected president of the Funeral Directors’ Association, because I’m finishing a book about the Irish and Irish Americans, because we are bound by duty and detail to the life in southeastern Lower Michigan, we head downtown to celebrate the high holy day in the standard fashion. A local radio station has a St. Patrick’s Day party they broadcast from the lobby of the Fisher Theatre on West Grand Boulevard in Detroit. Then we make for Corktown and the annual Mass at Most Holy Trinity, where the blessed and elect, the great and small, will gather to give thanks for the day that’s in it.
There’s a crowd at the Fisher, and Paul W. Smith, the drive-time disc jockey, makes his way among the guests and celebrities and local business types who are keen for a little free air time to hawk their wares in their best put-on brogue.
Pat does “Danny Boy” and I recite a poem about a dream of going home, because here we are in a city of immigrants and their descendants from every parish on the globe and all of them wearing the green today, and hoisting Guinness and humming sweet ditties about the Irish. I see my mother’s cousin, Eddie Coyle, and Mayor Kwame Kilpatrick, the self-described “first six-foot, six-inch Irish African American.” We laugh and glad-hand and then get on our way for Corktown on the southwest side of the city.
Corktown is the oldest neighborhood in Detroit. It was settled in the 1830s by Irish who came west on the Erie Canal from the eastern slums and the West of Ireland. Most Holy Trinity was the first English-speaking parish in the city that was, in the middle of the nineteenth century, still mostly French. The factory and railway and civil-service jobs that grew with the city attracted plenty of the Famine Irish and after the Irish, the Maltese came, and after the Maltese, mostly Mexicans. In a city that has been blighted by white flight, segregation, and racism, Corktown remains a little broken jewel of stable integration and diversity. There are blacks and whites and Hispanics sharing the row houses, family businesses, churches, schools, and community halls. New townhouses, vetted by the historical society for architectural correctness, fill in the old lots cleared for parking when the Detroit Tigers played at the stadium at the corner of Michigan Avenue and Trumbell until 1999.
This morning it’s a mix of city people and suburbanites who fill Most Holy Trinity to celebrate the 170th anniversary of the church’s founding. Sister Marietta always saves a place for Big Pat down front with the politicos, heavy donors, and dignitaries. We are seated near the plaster statue of the saint Himself whose life and times in the fifth century still seems relevant for the new millennium. He was kidnapped in his teens by Irish marauders, taken to Antrim and kept as a slave, escaped to Gaul where he became a priest and returned to the country of his captors to convert them to Christianity. The snakes and shamrocks might have been added in by overly enthusiastic biographers.
The cardinal is here and his concelebrants, the governor and her smiling aides, the county executives and secretary of state, the president of the Ancient Order of Hibernians and the president of the “Ladies” AOH and a detail of knights from the Knights of Columbus. And the “Maid of Erin” and her pretty attendant court sponsored by the United Irish Societies, and all of them piped in by a corps of pipers and drummers in full regalia.
Everyone is wearing some paper shamrocks or a green carnation or a bright green scarf or tie or a badge that says something like, “Kiss Me I’m Irish” or “Erin Go Bragh.” And as the pipes and drums begin, we rise, all smiles, because it’s a great day for the Irish and Irish eyes are smiling and Oh Danny Boy things are good in Glocca Morra and God is in heaven and here, now, if only for a moment, all’s right with the world.
But of course it’s not. The litany of the world’s woes expands exponentially from the local to the regional to the global.
There’s famine in Africa, plagues in Asia; quiet little homicides and suicides and genocides go on around the globe while wars and rumors of war are everywhere, everywhere. The pitiful species remains its own worst enemy.
Fr. Russ Kohler, the pastor of Holy Trinity since 1991, steps to the lectern to welcome everyone. After the requisite niceties, he makes mention of the two young police officers from the neighborhood shot to death in the line of duty last month.
I personally knew 21-year-old Officer Matthew Bowens and instead of a marriage I officiated at his funeral. And I personally knew 26-year-old Officer Jennifer Fettig and officiated not at her wedding, but her funeral. Illegal drug distribution throughout Michigan renders our cities into virtual free fall. Inept political maneuvering demoralizes police departments. Using sworn officers for after-hours escorts to rave parties renders the whole city one big market for drug distribution and consumption.
The cardinal speaks about the War on Terror and the violence of euthanasia, abortion, the need for repentance, the hunger for justice, forgiveness, and peace in the world.
The governor is concerned ab
out the loss of manufacturing jobs from Michigan to Mexico, where workers are paid much less. There’s an influx of illegal immigrants taking low-wage jobs around the state. She has brought a proclamation to honor the parish for one hundred seventy years of service to the immigrant and homeless, the helpless and those in need, many of whom are from, well, Mexico. The parish runs a free legal clinic, a free medical clinic, an outreach to sailors through the Port of Detroit.
The third-graders from the school sing, “I believe that children are our future.” Their faces are black and brown and white and every shade in between. They are from everywhere. Watching their performance, the Maid of Erin weeps, the governor is beaming and singing along, the cardinal is enraptured or possibly dozing in a post-communion reverie.
The Taoiseach (prime minister of Ireland) is in Washington, D.C., to give the president a bowl of shamrocks.
In Chicago they dye the river green.
There’s music and marching in Melbourne and Moscow and Montreal.
AND OUT ACROSS the world the roseate Irish everywhere are proclaiming what a good thing it is to be them, possessed as they are of this full register of free-range humanity: the warp-spasms and shape-changing of their ancient heroes, their feats and paroxysms and flights of fancy, their treacheries and deceits, sure faith and abiding doubts—chumps and champions, egomanias and inferiority complexes, given to fits of pride and fits of guilt, able to wound with a word or mend with one, to bless or curse in impeccable verse, prone to ornamental speech, long silences, fierce tirades, and tender talk. Maybe this is why the couple hundred million Americans who do not claim an Irish connection identify with the forty-five million who do—for the license it gives them, just for today, for a good laugh, a good cry, a dirge or a dance, to say the things most in need of saying, to ignore the world’s heartbreaks, the Lenten disciplines, their own grievous mediocrities, the winter’s last gasping hold on the soul, and to summon up visions of a home-place where the home fires are kept burning, where the light at the window is familiar, the face at the door a neighbor’s or friend’s, the sea not far beyond the next field over, the ghosts that populate our dreams all dear and welcome, their voices sweet with assurances, the soft day’s rain but temperate, the household safe for the time being from the murderous world’s worst perils; home among people at one with all immigrants, all pilgrims, all of the hungry and vanquished and evicted strangers in a strange place, at odds with the culture of triumphalists and blue bloods.
