Born with Teeth: A Memoir (20 page)

“Tim?” I asked, whereupon he rose from his seat and extended his hand. When I walked toward him, he would tell me later, he had said to himself, Ah, there really is a God.

After a brief volley of complaints about the bar not being open, we decided to have tea. I poured. When I passed him his cup, sweetened with sugar and softened with milk, just as I took mine, he chuckled and made a disparaging remark about the size of his hands. “Cement mixer’s hands,” he said, but they didn’t seem so to me. A cement mixer would not have taken such care. His hands were large and strong, the nails trimmed and neat. He wore khaki trousers, a crisp white shirt, and a navy jacket. It was difficult to look at him for sustained periods of time, because whenever our eyes met, we burst into laughter. His face, were I to draw a face from some primitive memory, was exactly right. Feature by feature, it was irregular, a Cubist painting, but in composition it was almost perfect. For my taste, the face was perfect. And in that moment, over that absurd tea tray, my taste was all that mattered. The brown eyes, dancing, the broad high cheekbones, the smashed but noble nose, the crooked mouth, the warmth of the skin, where the sun had settled the day he was born, all of this evoked a response in me that I had never known before, and somehow understood I would never know again.

We spoke at the same time, laughing at the collision of words. Our thoughts rolled one over the other as we lobbied to express ideas, experiences. We both wanted to talk about my mother.

“You say you love my mother. Why?” I demanded, over the cooling tea in the increasingly busy lobby.

“One day we were on a plane to Taiwan, where we were visiting Jean,” Tim explained, “and we were having an animated discussion about Bertrand Russell, whom we were both reading
at the time. Suddenly, out of nowhere, we got caught in a terrible storm, and the plane began to buck and plummet, glasses flying, women screaming, it was very dramatic, and I looked over at your mother, who looked back at me, shrugged, and said, ‘More drinks. Now, what do you know about Russell’s private life?’ ”

I knew this was true, not because I’d heard it from my mother, but because it was so typical of her behavior.

The tea was cold, the boys would soon be expecting me, and so I said, “Speaking of drinks.”

He agreed. “Yes, let’s get the hell out of here and find a pub.”

“I have a car,” I said, “but don’t you need to get to Dublin? I’m going west, to Dingle.”

He was helping me on with my coat, and I couldn’t find the sleeve; again and again I missed, we started to laugh, and he said, “Let’s head toward Dingle, stop at the first pub. One drink.”

At the first pub, we sat outside and drank Jameson and Harp. Tim told me to prove to him that I was an experienced and accomplished actress.

“Okay,” I responded. “You know the
Godfather
trilogy?”

“Of course. Who doesn’t?”

“And the Corleone family?”

“Yes, yes, of course!”

“But”—I stopped him, index finger in the air—“what you
don’t
know is that the Corleone family loves Ireland and, in fact, is vacationing in the west country as we speak.”

For the next hour, I improvised scenes between Don Corleone and his sons, Michael and Sonny, then switched and sat still and grave with my whiskey glass in my hand, eyes lowered, until Tim shouted, “The consigliere, Tom Hagan!” Bees began to swarm around us, drawn to the heat, the whiskey, and the animation. We jumped up, swatting and cursing, and when a bee alighted on my sleeve, I smashed it with my purse and watched as it fell to its death on the picnic table beneath us.

“You could have been somebody,” I said to the dead bee, “instead of a bum, which is what you are.”

We were high on the whiskey, the sudden sunshine, the bees, the honey, and the tears of laughter running down our cheeks, when I heard Tim say, “I’ll keep you company to Dingle.”

“What about the ambassador? You don’t want to piss her off,” I warned, playing coy.

“I won’t be missed,” Tim replied, but he seemed unsure.

“That’s right, you won’t be missed—you’ll be whacked!”

“Then we better get the hell out of here!” he shouted, the two of us running to the car.

We stopped at a lake on the narrow, winding road to Dingle and got out of the car to investigate. Neither barbed-wire fences nor black-eyed bulls deterred us in our determination to reach that exquisite body of water. A deep blue pool, dancing in the sun, nestled like a sapphire in the cradle of a small valley. I approached the edge, Tim behind me, and decided to show off by nimbly hopscotching over a small lane of smooth-faced rocks until, suddenly, there were no more stones, and I slipped, knee-deep in the icy water. Tim, laughing, extended his hand to help me, but when he pulled me to him, everything stopped. It was an instant, nothing more, and I almost spoke, almost snipped it clean with a sharp scissors, but something stopped me. A tightening in my throat, a tension.

Then Hagan said, “You’re intrepid on the rocks.” The mirth again, bubbling up between us.

“A born rock hopper, a natural stone skipper, and a slippery little devil, that’s me,” I retorted.

The boys glowered at us when Tim and I at last came through the door of the pub and immediately began complaining about their day. They didn’t see the dolphin, they didn’t catch any fish, Owen was a drag, they were hungry, they were thirsty, I
was late, I was always late, I was not a good mother. I should not have left them alone for so long. They were right, of course, and so I did what I always did when I felt particularly guilty. I bought them fish and chips, I bought them ice cream, I bought them books and games and fishing caps and took them to pub after pub, listening to music, listening to craic, stealing moments with Hagan in dark corners while my sons amused themselves for five minutes at a time. I wanted them to be well amused because I was drawn to that dark corner, again and again, a corner where tales were being spun and information doled out in small, sweet cups.

“I have two children myself,” Hagan offered. “Daughters. I understand the need here. I get it.”

Even when Ian ran up to the table and demanded another drink, another minute, my eyes on him, my attention full and focused, even then Hagan looked at me and smiled crookedly, teasingly, the father who knew that behind these demands there was only one need, and that was to be loved.

The boys were exhausted by eleven; it was time to take them home, and to bed. As we walked down the cobblestone street to the flat, with the mist rising from the earth, spun like silver mesh from the clouds above, enveloping us, we could hear the sounds of the boys shouting and arguing ahead of us, but they were invisible to us, and it was then that Hagan stopped, took my chin in his hand, and lifted my face to his. It was the briefest of kisses, his lips barely brushed mine, but it was enough, and I knew it was enough because he said, “I’d like to meet the man who marries you.” He turned and walked away from me, then, disappearing into the fog.

The next day, we took the boys with us, and there was much merriment in the car. Ian was inordinately fond of Jim Carrey during this period and compulsively shouted, “All righty then!” in response to everything, which was followed by gales of hysterical
laughter. Jim Carrey accompanied us to Slea Head, where we fished in a deep and mysterious mountain lake, and to Inch, where we ran on the strand and where Alec and Hagan ate ham sandwiches hunched over a picnic table like two old cronies, and to the ocean, where on a bet the boys and I rented wet suits and jumped into the glacial Atlantic, screaming, the cold and the crash of the waves and the pink faces of my brave boys as they howled with delight at the thrill of it, and the beauty of it, and the secret, profound knowledge that no one else in their world had ever done this before.

We drove back as night fell, the boys fast asleep in the backseat.

Hagan helped me carry them up the stairs to the flat, remove their clothes, and put them into bed. I covered them with extra duvets, kissed their hot, sun-kissed cheeks, smoothed the salty hair from their foreheads, and closed the bedroom door behind me. Then I turned to Hagan and asked him if he’d like to stay for a drink. In the darkness, I felt him smile. I poured two glasses of whiskey, and we drew close together on the windowsill, in the far corner of the living room, where the window opened onto a courtyard, and where the muted moon irradiated the sky. Hagan pulled a pack of cigarettes from his coat pocket, which provoked a small symphony of moans from both of us, now regretting that we had simultaneously reached for cigarettes a girl had been passing on a silver tray in the pub the night before, lit them and inhaled, whereupon I’d hung my head in shame and told him I hadn’t had a cigarette in over a year. “A year?!” Hagan scoffed. “I haven’t had a cigarette in
ten
years, and guess what? It tastes pretty. Damn. Good.”

We talked all night long. We drank, and smoked, and we talked, and there was not enough time, that was all I knew. Not nearly enough time for the telling of all that needed to be told. He grew up in Youngstown, Ohio, the son of an Italian
mother named Ada and an Irish father who fancied himself a comedian, although neither the circuit he played nor the copy he created brought home enough money to provide the family with financial security. Tim went to work when he was very young, as did most of his thirteen brothers and sisters, and when they gathered around the table for meals the conversation was lively: political and provocative. Liberal Democrats, the lot of them, with an outspoken, civic-minded, egotistical father and a diminutive, dark-eyed, darling mother with a quick wit and a posse of children, all of whom felt their mother loved each of them in a unique, special way. That was her great gift, said Hagan. When he moved to Cleveland, he pursued political office with focus and ambition, winning the seat of Cayahoga County commissioner at the tender age of thirty. This office had remained his, uncontested, for sixteen years. He had married a woman of considerable standing in the community, but the match had proved volatile and unhappy.

“There’s no one. With the exception of my girls, of course,” Tim said, “who mean everything to me.”

“And you to them, I’m sure,” I replied, sensing the seriousness in his tone.

“No doubt about that. They need me and I will see to it that they are brought to independence.”

I half smiled. “With love?”

“Of course, with love. The love will bring them to independence.” This Tim declared definitively, almost with an edge, as if it was a well-practiced and long-exercised mantra.

I reached for another cigarette and said, “I have a child who I will never bring to independence. Or to school or to parties or to anything else, for that matter. I gave her up for adoption.”

There was a gentle silence. Tim asked me to tell him what had happened, and when I was finished, he looked at me and
said, very softly, “You were very brave. That must have been agony for you.”

How odd, to hear these words from the mouth of a near stranger and to know that they sprang from something deeply authentic. Neither my father nor any of my brothers nor, certainly, any man before or since had responded with such simplicity, such goodness. Hagan did not shift in his seat, his silence was not awkward, he was not shaken or unsettled, but I felt his empathy as keenly and surely as I felt the absence of my daughter, and this alone was enough to fill me with a solace I hadn’t felt since the very hour she was born. Hagan reached for me, and I went into his arms as naturally as if it had been written. Oh, but it had, I thought to myself as I lifted my face to his, it had been written on the wall of some primitive cave in the savanna, millions of years ago. It had just taken a little time to find its way. Then Tim Hagan tossed his cigarette out the window and pulled me to him, putting every kiss I’d ever known to shame.

In the morning, I woke to a soft rain and Alec at my elbow, begging me for breakfast.

“Let your brother sleep,” I cautioned him, “and we’ll go over to the hotel and have breakfast with Tim. How’s that?” A thumbs-up from Number Two, always gladdened by the prospect of an adventure.

“Have you considered changing your clothes in this lifetime?” I asked him as we skipped down the stairs.

“Nope! Gotta fly!” he called to me, running ahead, perfectly content to be the dirty, cheeky little devil he was.

At Benner’s Hotel on Main Street, Alec and I waited in the lobby until we saw Hagan coming smartly down the stairs, fresh from a shower, carelessly tucking in his crisp white shirt. He beamed when he saw Alec, and Alec smiled mischievously,
as if to suggest that it wasn’t Tim’s company he hankered for so much as a good breakfast and an adventure that didn’t include his brother. We trooped into the hotel dining room and were seated at a bright, white table already laden with teacups, cream, and sugar. No sooner had we ordered our breakfast than a man entered the restaurant carrying an armful of wildflowers wrapped in cellophane and tied with a purple ribbon. Tim gestured to him, and when the man approached our table, he rose and pulled out his wallet.

The deliveryman, middle aged and absolutely delighted to have been sent on such a mission, placed the flowers in my arms with the same tenderness he would have used had he been handing me a newborn.

“Madam,” he said with a beautiful formality, “your flowers.”

I looked at Tim, looked at Alec, looked at the flowers, and then, of course, I knew. Hagan was leaving.

“The ambassador is at the end of her patience,” he explained. “I’ve been gone a bit too long.”

“When do you leave?” I asked.

I whispered it, couldn’t find my voice.

“My flight leaves from the Kerry Airport in three hours. Could you give me a lift?”

I nodded, said, “Of course, but I need to see about someone to look after the boys.”

“No!”
shouted Alec. “I’m coming with you! I am coming with you and I’ll be with you driving back! Get someone to babysit Ian—he
likes
Owen!”

Hagan and I looked at each other over our cups, and our glance spoke volumes. Our chaperone had spoken.