The Visitors (8 page)

—I’m not sure yet, I said.

—Not sure. It’s not like you’re going down the road a bit.

—I’ll get a job. I’ll go to school.

—Will you now. Go to school. So you will.

—That’s what I’m thinking.

—And what does my plucky fellow intend to learn in school? From what I remember, you learned nothing there in all the years you went.

—I might study English, I said.

—Don’t you know that already?

—Something else, then, I said.

—But why are you going out there in the first place? he asked. —Your mother, God rest her, would want you to stay where you are, in that fine job I got for you. She’d like you to be here for your brothers and sisters. I’m not going to be around for too long more. Did you go and visit Tess? You took the train down to Cork to see her—

—I rang her. She didn’t want me going down there—

—You were very happy to not have to put yourself out—

—She didn’t want me going down there. She said it’d make her lonesome—

—That’s the best excuse I’ve heard in a long time. Since when did she know what she is thinking! That might be the one thing you know as good as I do!

—Tess’s fine. She likes the nursing, I said.

—You didn’t even bother to go down and see her, and you getting onto a plane for yourself—

—I told you she didn’t want me to!

—Keep the voice down. Do you hear me. The ears are sound as a bell. More sounder than your own. But what difference anyway that you are going. We never see much of you. You might as well be gone. When I think of it, you were always gone. My plucky fella cares greatly for us—

—I’m not so sure about that, I said.

—Now the truth of what I know since day one comes out—

—Whatever you think yourself, I said.

—Don’t disrespect your father, he said, grinding the back teeth, wagging the bent finger, and shuffling the feet.

—Sorry, I said.

—There’s little sorrow in you, he said.

The blackbird started to sing. He cocked his head. That smile appeared and he turned to look at a holy picture on the wall above their bed.

A few minutes later, he said, —You remember them John Garfield films, you do?

—I do, I said.

—You were young, but you were so fond of them. There’s risk for you, he said.

—Eddie told me you were into the acting, the first day I arrived in Dublin, I said.

—What are you bringing up now—

—Your second cousin. Eddie in the union.

—Like I have been saying to you my entire life, you talk and think about things that are of no use, and Eddie never had a clue what he was going on about. The only one Eddie is faithful to is John Powers. He keeps that family in high spirits. Eddie’s trouble is that he never got used to not being at home. He’d come down from Dublin for a few weeks in summer before he found the unfortunate old wife who could never give him a child, and we’d go for a few—

—He told me that day he was sad he had no children—

—There you are again, bringing up things that are of no concern to you—

—I’m only saying what he told—

—I don’t want to hear another word about that, he said.

—Fine with me, I said.

—Well, if you want to know, after the few pints you couldn’t stop Eddie from wailing that he would be a happier man if he’d stayed, and God forgive me now for saying this, but Eddie never told one word of the truth for one day in his life, not a word, lies for no rhyme or reason, that’s the kind Eddie is, and sure what could you expect, because that’s the way Eddie’s father was, who was likewise faithful to John Powers. When Eddie’s father died they found the empty bottles in every nook and cranny. They opened the wardrobe and the empty whiskey bottles poured out like the sands of time, and paper bags filled with whiskey bottles, hidden in the weeds, at the bottom of the haggard, empty bottles shoved into the rafters of the cow house and the henhouse. Of course,
the father was on his own and Eddie was away in Dublin, starting his union for himself, and Eddie’s mother dead since Eddie was a youngster.

He coughed loudly then took his hand from his mouth. He looked right at me.

—Born and raised in Brooklyn, John Garfield was, but you being the plucky young fella that you are, you’d know that.

—Of course, I know that, I said.

But I didn’t.

—Brooklyn’s not so close to Boston. Boston is a ways north of there, he said.

•   •   •

At the kitchen sink I gulped down two cups of water and stared out. No mountains and no fields. Only my dark reflection on that windowpane. Hannah’s dark reflection appeared to the right of mine. She was a few steps behind me.

—It went all right, Jimmy, she said.

—Like you’d expect, Hannah.

—He still misses Mam so much. He talks about her all the time. He worries about us. He worries about you going. He doesn’t want you to go. He is so sad over your going.

—He doesn’t have an ounce of sadness.

—That’s a very mean thing to say, Jimmy.

—If I call him the small, bitter, perishing patriarch, would that be mean, too, Hannah?

—You’re trying to be smart now, Jimmy.

—What if I am, Hannah?

—I’d give anything to see Mam again, Jimmy.

I turned from our reflections. Hannah stared at the floor.

—It will be easier when you marry and have your children, I said.

And I said it in such a cold way. Said it the way he’d say it.

•   •   •

Less than a week later, Brendan and I were staying in a motel room not far from Logan Airport. During the day we rode the T and got off at
stations along the way and wandered the streets. At night we lay on the motel beds and studied maps of the city, read the Boston-Irish newspapers, watched television, and drank duty-free rum from plastic cups. When the rum bottles were empty we rented space in a flat off Highland Avenue in Somerville through an ad in one of those newspapers.

The Davis Square T stop was a fifteen-minute walk from the flat, which was on the middle floor of a narrow three-story. The house next door looked the same. The houses had decks. And a deck was magic to us. The apartment was a one-bedroom. A carpenter from Cork lived there. He was illegal, and had been living out here a few years. Brendan and I rolled out our sleeping bags on the paint-splattered wooden floor in the sitting room. We bought a clock alarm and pillows. With regard to finding jobs, the Corkman told us to visit this bar on Central Square. Sure to find a lead there. And he kept telling us how lucky we were to have papers.

We visited that bar on Central Square. That was a place we’d come to love. We met people there from home. We met Americans, Europeans, Mexicans, and South Americans, and one Saturday night, I ran into a man from Dublin. Eamon was his name. He wore a sleeveless leather jacket with a skull and crossbones on its back. He and I chatted while pissing, and while I was drying my hands, he offered me a job painting houses in Concord. Six or seven big houses, inside and out. And he had a few more jobs lined up after that. The hourly wage was sound and under the table. I told Eamon I had no experience painting. Not to worry. A monkey can paint. I’d paint the outside. Pick you up at the Dunkin Donuts on Porter Square at half-six on Monday morning. Brendan met someone in the bar who offered him a job as a printer. We were set.

The accident happened on a Friday morning. This was around the end of July, about four months after I’d started. Eamon, myself, and the other painter, whose name I don’t remember, ate doughnuts and drank coffee on the front porch of the house we were painting. We sat on wicker chairs and made jokes about the thick cushions. The
Mexican gardener was mowing the lawn on the left side of the driveway. The mail carrier was walking up that long and wide driveway. We had never seen a female postman before, not to mention she was black. Her name was Tina, I remember that, and we chatted with her every morning for a few minutes. She liked our accents. We liked hers. The jokes went over and back. After Tina had left, Eamon said his team was playing hurling in Dorchester the next day. The other painter and I said we’d go. I had no interest in hurling, but seeing a match in Boston might be cool. Eamon said that afterward we’d head to this new Irish place in Brighton. A girl he knew from home bartended there. She’d set us up with free beers. The gardener was watering the flower beds along the driveway. He taught me vulgar words in Spanish. I taught him some in English. The house was a white three-story colonial. It had elegant bay windows and those lovely old shutters. Or that’s the way I recall it. Like it was Howard’s End. In the shaded backyard was a red brick patio and a small fountain fed by a constant stream from a fat stone boy’s penis. I don’t remember ever seeing the couple that lived in the house.

Eamon and I got on ladders at the shaded gable end. Three or four tall maples grew there. Our ladders were ten feet apart. He was painting the shingles. I was scraping old paint from them. The other painter was painting one of the two downstairs bathrooms. Eamon and I talked about the heat, like we did every day. He went on for a while about how he’d lost his hole in a poker game two nights ago, before he told me that every summer, when he was a child, he visited his aunt, uncle, and cousins in County Dublin. The aunt used to take Eamon and her children for picnics in the foothills of the Dublin Mountains. The day Eamon’s youngest cousin turned eighteen, his aunt left letters for her husband and children. She put a few things in a bag and took the boat to Liverpool. She never again came home. For years the aunt had visited her sister in Liverpool. The aunt had met a woman there very early on. This woman and Eamon’s aunt fell in love and began to correspond in secret. They were in love for twenty years before the
aunt left the family. She waited to raise the children first. Eamon said he never once blamed his aunt for leaving on account of his uncle being a complete bollocks.

I told Eamon about Aunt Tess. That she never married. That she was a matron in a Dublin hospital, and every summer she visited my family for a week, and my father brought me with him to pick her up at Limerick Junction. Me because I was her godson. And I told him that my aunt’s hair was the color of copper, she had fine manners, wore bright red lipstick, dresses with exotic patterns, and that my father and she spoke little on the drive home from the Junction. Only my aunt inquiring how their sister was faring out in the City Home. Fine. Grand. And I told him that my aunt Tess smiled when she turned around in the front seat to ask me how I was doing in school. What subjects did I like? What was I going to be when I grew up?

And I told him Aunt Tess flung herself under a city bus across the street from the Garden of Remembrance, that my aunt Hannah told me this before I left for Dublin, and Aunt Hannah passed away a few months later. And I told him that when I first arrived in Dublin I’d sit in the Garden of Remembrance on my days off work and gaze into the dirty pool and then look up at the Children of Lir changing into swans, and when I sat there I tried very hard not to think about Aunt Tess flinging herself under one of those red city buses lined up across the way. No. I saw her standing in the July sunlight at Limerick Junction. She was waiting for my father to pick her up. He was forever late for everything. She wore her beautiful clothes. At her feet were two suitcases and the bag I later brought to Dublin. That a so-called friend later stole. The medal still pinned inside the bag. I wish that fucking thief luck.

And I told him Coleman Daly stood beside my aunt and she and Coleman chatted and smoked and their smoke made its lazy way across the tracks and vanished into the bushes and the meadows. Coleman’s navy blue uniform coat was open. His hat lay upside down on the
bench behind him, his right hand deep in his pocket, shoulders back, the noble belly stuck out. Coleman addressed my aunt as Miss.

But I never got the chance to tell Eamon I’d visited Aunt Tess’s grave in Glasnevin, that Aunt Hannah had only told half of it, which didn’t surprise me, but I don’t know if Aunt Hannah even knew, and now I’ll never know if any of them at home ever knew, but about a month before I left for Boston, I visited the hospital where my aunt once worked, and was put in touch with a woman who was best friends with my aunt.

Mary was retired. We met on a park bench in Drumcondra. The bench was against the tall stone wall of Saint Patrick’s College. Mary brought her dog—bronze hair, the height, head, and folded ears of a terrier, and the thick, long body of some other breed. The dog’s name was Daisy. I shook hands with Mary and looked down and rubbed Daisy’s back. Maybe I turned to Daisy because I felt guilty. Or maybe I was afraid of what Mary was going to tell me.

Mary said my aunt Tess was the solitary sort. She gave her life to her patients. She loved the hospital. Never once missed a day’s work. And next Mary said my aunt became involved with a married Dublin man she tended to in the hospital. And it was then I stopped rubbing Daisy’s back and looked up at Mary.

—Tess fell in the big way, Jim, Mary said. —And not long after, he stopped talking to her. Would have nothing to do with her anymore. It broke Tess’s heart.

This man was mending after a motorcycle accident. And my aunt gave their child up for adoption. The boy was born a month after the man and Tess stopped talking. This boy was now a man, and Mary opened her purse and shoved into my hand a slip of paper with his phone number on it. I shook hands with Mary and said I was heading off to the States. Mary squeezed my hands, wished me luck, said that no one was as brave as Tess, and the only good thing about the young people leaving again was that you had the chance to tell things. Tell because what did any of it matter to those who were going away.

And I never got the chance to tell Eamon that two days before I left for Boston I took a bus to Clontarf to see my aunt’s son. His house was at the end of a tree-lined street. He was somewhere in his thirties, a mathematics professor at UCD. Mary had told me that. And he had red wavy hair. I saw it for myself. The same color hair as my father’s. Or I imagined that’s what my father’s hair looked like when he was this man’s age. A lighter shade than my sister Tess’s hair.