Jaywalking with the Irish (3 page)

Meanwhile, Jamie, restless after ten years of full-time motherhood, wanted to see if the fabled explosion of Celtic Tiger wealth might bless her with a colorful new career. Ireland’s economy had supposedly become one of the fastest growing in the world; the place felt like it might offer new business ventures to be explored, for us both. So what did we have to lose? Pack the nets and the dreams, and there was no telling what one might catch in that summer of 2000.

Goodbye lunches, farewell dinners, and “when will you ever get out of here” parties were followed by tears and protestations of love as we said goodbye to our friends and families, wondering which one of the older generation would die in our absence. On the plane, there was much hand-holding, in the upraised fashion of prayer, or of roller-coaster riders hanging on for dear life.

We soon discovered that Cork’s airport has some unusual features, including typhoon gusts from the North Atlantic that toss arriving planes around like confetti, and tractors that are kept on call to plough lakes of torrential rain off its runways. Calming tablets should be dispensed as arrivals thump down in the gales and suddenly confront the confusion of a country straddling two eras, with cows munching serenely in the fields to one side and cranes hefting together an antiseptic concrete and glass business park on the other.

With thirteen suitcases and five human beings crammed into two taxis, our new lives commenced. We parked before the Victorian house we had rented sight unseen on the north side of Cork City. The place was located in Bellevue Park, a cul-de-sac with a row of ivy-clad stone terrace houses to the right, and two lanes breaking left, the first a narrow passage mottled with shade.

Down that lane our future waited beyond a green gate. The house, a brooding relic of red brick and gray pebbledash, boasted
pretty stained-glass windows on either side of its front door. Inside, a pair of sofa-ridden high-ceilinged sitting rooms gave way to an airy modern kitchen, which opened onto a slate patio. Beyond, tall hedges and small trees wreathed a tennis-court-sized rectangle of lawn.

Upstairs, on what’s called a “first floor” (as opposed to the “floor zero” below), waited three bedrooms and a study, bifurcated by more steps and landings leading to a top floor. From there, downtown Cork could be seen tucked in between the twin branches of the River Lee, with squat freighters docked at grain silos almost close enough to be hit with a flung stone. Cathedral steeples soared like exclamation points over the warrens of the small metropolis, and sent the eye searching over the byways that fanned out around them. The beginnings of Cork’s great bay gleamed silver to our left, while an amphitheater of green hills rolled lazily into the shadows of peaks leaning off toward the Kerry border. So far, so very good.

I led Jamie out onto a flat square of roof, and waved at the panoramic visions under the floating clouds.

“It’s fantastic,” she squeezed my hand, breathing in the enormity of our changed lives. “The town is so compact, and yet everything stretches out into the imagination. It all looks so interesting and new. Plus, this house is superb. I love it. That you found it the way you did is incredible. The kitchen is so big and bright, and the garden so perfect and private for the kids. Can you imagine the parties we could have here? This is exactly what we needed!” With that, Jamie, high on a roof at the absolute top perch over our new town, closed her arms around me.

Well, now, ahem. A guy could get used to this kind of thing. And Jamie, with Cork’s bay gleaming behind her, looked as gorgeous as the day we met: her blue eyes radiant, her high cheekbones freckled and her blond hair glistening in the wonderfully beneficent light. I felt there was only rightness between us now, and that our marriage would be stronger for this journey.

I stepped back and pointed toward things discovered on my reconnaissance trip a few months earlier, when I had found us a real-estate agent and told him exactly what kind of house we
dreamed of. Past a leafy park to a glassy edifice to the west lay what is known as “the tallest building in Ireland,” and this was flanked just across the river by “the longest building in Ireland,” a granite former lunatic asylum that has been transformed into luxury apartments for the beneficiaries of the country’s new wealth. Between these points lay what is known as “the straightest road in Ireland,” and this in due course leads into Irish-speaking regions where locals congregate on a nearby mountaintop at what is known as “the highest pub in Ireland.” A mean little bar down the road, I’d heard, is sometimes disparaged as “the lowest pub in Ireland.” Taking all this in, with my wife appreciatively at my side, I was, for a moment, the happiest man in Ireland.

Not for long. A horrible screeching erupted from somewhere in our perfect house, and we hurriedly climbed back through the top bedroom’s window.

“It’s not yours, Harris!” That was redheaded Laura with a shrillness in her voice that flooded the labyrinths of our new abode’s stairs and inflicted agony on all eardrums within its reach.

“I’m not sleeping in a pink room! I’ve never had my own room. You’ve always had your own room!” screamed Harris. Then Owen flaunted his impressive lung power. Friends sitting at a tranquil candlelit dinner party on the deck outside our house in the States once heard a similar outbreak of hideous screaming and alternating demented laughter from our miniature threesome inside, and remarked that it sounded like a mad chamber from the Marquis de Sade. Racing down the stairs, I could picture our little darlings’ nearly pure Irish blood flushing their freckled cheeks as scarlet as the hue sometimes glimpsed in those of their deceased grandfathers, Bill Donnelly and Jake Monagan – the latter surname being a bastardization of a flinty line of dirt-poor Monaghans who emigrated to Lowell, Massachusetts, to card wool at the beginnings of the Famine’s ravages in the mid-1840s. Deasy and McDermott, Butler and McKeon – even the grandmothers’ sides of the family were ridden with Irish blood.

Poor Harris was our biggest worry. Only yesterday he had been living in the woods, prowling for his beloved snakes, salamanders, and frogs. He knew there were no snakes and few frogs in Ireland,
and that his world had been turned upside down. Laura, the ready adventurer, had embraced the scheme more easily – until now.

“I’m not sleeping in the same room as Laura!” Egging on the fray was moppy, blond Owen, who would follow Harris off the edge of a cliff, would do anything to be at his brother’s side. Owen is a boy who refers to the early summer months as Julune. A perfect name for an Irish summer, that.

So it was the children who began searching for their new senses of identity – with all-out warfare, and shrieks to the neighbors announcing that the Yanks had arrived.

In an effort to find peace we decided to walk into town. The vertiginous Military Hill, with its Ambassador Hotel formerly known as “the hospital for the incurables,” and its St. Patrick’s Hospital and Chapel of the Holy Ghost, led us to the shady descent of Wellington Road, and then the San Francisco-steep St. Patrick’s Hill spilling down to the balustraded St. Patrick’s Bridge over the Lee to greet St. Patrick’s Street and its many Pats, Patricks, Paddies, and Padraigs waiting on the other side.

Wishful thinkers like to dub Cork “the Venice of the North” because the downtown is but an anvil-shaped island between two branches of the Lee. A few hundred years ago half the lanes in the place oozed water and several avenues hosted boats, before being drained and filled in to make streets. Were Cork hot enough to breed mosquitoes, great numbers of its 220,000 residents might contract malaria, which would help explain the behavior of certain of its more peculiar citizens. The original name, Corcaigh, means marshy place, and engineers say that the town’s tallest buildings have no right to stand upon their foundations in the enduring subterranean mud.

Today, the main branch of the Lee runs so deep that oceangoing ships dock at the city’s southern end. A bustle of modern commerce is everywhere visible from that point, with shop-crowded quays sweeping toward stately Georgian and Italianate facades and the Romanesque colonnaded St. Mary’s of the Dominicans spliced between a boxy mishmash of modern theaters, department stores, and car “parks.”

Above this tableau, on Shandon Street, the 150-year-old St. Anne’s Cathedral’s “liar’s tower” thrusts its four clock faces, each of which was once said to tell a different time, before tapering into a spire crowned by an incongruous salmon. Although two thousand or more of that wild species somehow make it through the alluvium below to cleaner waters upstream, the lower reaches of the Lee are more commonly inhabited by gangs of mullet, which lounge beside effluent pipes discharging the city’s wastes. These scavengers recently attracted a hungry pod of killer whales whose five-foot dorsal fins struck wonder into drinkers attempting to separate themselves from certain quayside Cork taverns at closing time.

Elated and curious, we crossed St. Patrick’s Bridge toward the outstretched arm of a soot-black bronze monument – dubbed De Statue – of Father Theobald Mathew, a charismatic nineteenth-century advocate of temperance, now spending eternity urging ever more indifferent sojourners onward toward deliverance. Today, de poor fella’s right arm held some prankster’s recently emptied can of Guinness. “De smell off Patrick’s Bridge is wicked. How do Father Mathew stick it?” goes one local ballad.

Great clots of people thronged the main thoroughfare, yakking with a blithe animation. An amazing percentage, some only ten or eleven years old, simultaneously chatted on mobile phones, a device the nonstop talking Irish have adopted with a unique mania, as evidenced by the presence of shops selling phones on nearly every block. The ambience was festive, sauntering and laughing with summer ease, and also chaotic with young and old cutting across traffic whenever and wherever they felt like crossing the street. The way everyone ambled before onrushing vehicles, like matadors fighting the modern age, was impressive. Young mothers shoved prams before buses, school girls giggled between accelerating cars – yet drivers never blasted a horn. The anarchy seemed to be governed by secret rules.

At the next corner a hunched-over Jimmy Durante look-alike was tap dancing on brass-studded shoes to jigs and reels creaking out of his tinny boom box. A teddy bear sat inexplicably beside him, pensively eyeing hordes of skimpily dressed teenage girls in
platform shoes and push-up bras with earrings stuck into their exposed belly buttons: Britney Spears appeared to be a shoo-in for Irish sainthood. All her young devotees seemed to be smoking, puffing heedlessly without so much as a disapproving glance tossed their way. For years, I had told my wife what a moral and protective place Catholic Ireland would be for raising our children. Doubts were already creeping in.

Farther along, a wan individual sat on a stool, working a bent saw with a violin bow. The thing released ethereal, mesmerizing versions of “Moon River” and “When You Wish Upon a Star;” one wondered what the man could do with a hammer and nails. On the next block, four gaudily shirted Romanian Gypsies played trumpet harmonies from Herb Alpert’s 1960s’ Tijuana Brass.

“The place feels like an audition studio for dreamers,” said Jamie, and I suddenly felt Owen squeezing my hand with excitement. Harris, his eyes roving in wonderment, was holding my wife’s, and suddenly even Laura, just turned twelve and growing standoffish, was leaning tenderly against my shoulder.

A friend had predicted that the best thing about our adventure wouldn’t be the sights savored but how permanently the experience would pull our family together. This was wisdom, I thought, as a redheaded midget in a plaid jacket and blue tie tottered forward, steadying himself from one parked car to the next. He turned out to be called Small Denis, and was famous all over town for the way he scaled certain bar stools and, after a mere pint, disintegrated into bouts of uncontrollable laughter over jokes only he heard. But then raucous laughter is never rare in Cork.

We found our way to a side street that housed the irresistibly named Cronin’s Gentlemen’s Outfitters, Jamie being overcome with a desire to ask about school uniforms that might be needed in, oh, another four weeks. The proprietor poured on his loquaciousness the instant he understood her quest. “Your sons are attending Christian Brothers? Why that’s a fine choice for a school. Very strong.”

“My husband was impressed,” replied Jamie, referring to the whirlwind trip I had undertaken earlier to arrange our affairs. “And we’re both thrilled with the idea of the boys wearing blazers and
ties after the baggy pants and ripped T-shirts you see in American schools. Every day you get a new clothing fight back there.”

“I can imagine. But you should understand that Christian’s uniform has some particularities that give it a special class. Look carefully here,” the proprietor said, pulling a black blazer off a rack. “You see the piping on the sleeve, the gold braid? The stuff is not come by like snuff at a wedding, that I can tell you. Why, there are only two manufacturers who still make it, and they might as well own Fort Knox. A shoebox of that material costs £900. Madness! Why, you couldn’t even be leaving it overnight with a tailor if you wanted to see it again!”