The Education of an Idealist

Eddie made Mum laugh—and laughing always seemed the most important part of their life together. During my childhood, I saw my mother’s face shine in two predictable circumstances: watching my father play the piano and Eddie winding up for a joke or story. She loved them both at different times, and they both drove her mad.

Eddie had been raised in a strict, staunchly nationalistic household, and had attended an Irish school where even calculus was taught in “the medium”—the Gaelic language. The Irish nationalism around him was so intense that, if a boy in his school mistakenly used his head on the Gaelic football field (as one does in the “English” sport of soccer), the match would be suspended, and the ball confiscated. Rugby and soccer were seen as sports for Protestants and Anglophiles. Despite his cerebral day job, Eddie could get choked up singing Irish rebel songs or reciting Irish insurgent Robert Emmet’s last words before he was hanged by the British in 1803.

Years later, I would hear Irish novelist Colm Tóibín speak about how, growing up in Ireland, there was simply nothing worse than “being boring.” “You could be smelly, you could be ugly, you could be fierce dumb,” he said, happily, “but you could not be boring.” This had been the sensibility in our home in Ireland, and so it came to be in America as well. Eddie was as far from boring as Pittsburgh was from Dublin.

When we passed through customs, I gave Eddie a huge hug—what he called a “Squasheroni”—and shouted hello in my pidgin Arabic, “Ahlan wa Sahlan!” “Ahlan bik, Alhamdulillah!” he answered, welcoming me.

Like many intellectuals, Eddie frequently had difficulty focusing on real-world tasks. But having lived in Pittsburgh for nearly a year before our arrival, he had made impressive preparations, drawing on the help of his close Irish friends in the area. He had found a two-story house for us to move into together, and purchased a yellow Renault Le Car for Mum—to complement the charcoal Le Car that he drove.

In Ireland I’d had little exposure to America. The three channels on our Dublin television had played mainly Irish and British programs, so the little I knew about the United States came mostly from American exports like The Incredible Hulk and Charlie’s Angels. The few Americans I had actually encountered were tourists in Ireland on their golf holidays, most of whom seemed to be tanned men with straight teeth and loud opinions.

I didn’t arrive in the US until after the local public elementary school year had already started. When Mum walked me inside and introduced me to my new teacher, I was wearing the outfit I had worn to my Catholic school in Ireland—a navy and green skirt, knee-high lace socks, black leather dress shoes, and a white golf shirt. Immediately, I felt out of place next to my classmates in their blue jeans and docksiders. Within a couple weeks, Mum took me shopping at Kaufman’s Department Store, and I chose what I saw around me: a Pittsburgh Pirates T-shirt, a #12 Terry Bradshaw Steelers’ jersey, a Steelers’ sweatshirt, a green Izod golf shirt, green Izod pants, and a pair of light tan corduroys. This selection would tide me over until our next shopping outing many months later—although I quickly learned from my classmates that if I wore my all-green Izod outfit on Thursdays, it obviously indicated that I was “horny.” While I had no idea what this meant, I did know melting into my surroundings necessitated avoiding green on Thursdays.

Relatively self-assured in Dublin, I now felt self-conscious in Pittsburgh. I had a thick Dublin accent, long red hair in a ponytail, and pale skin. My freckles suddenly seemed to stand out against the backdrop of a complexion that had seen more rain than sun. Unable to do much about my wardrobe or my Irish looks, I dedicated myself to changing my accent, rehearsing a new American way of speaking in the mirror.

I also acquired a new vocabulary. My Sunday “brekkie” of rashers, black and white pudding, and burnt sausages became an American “breakfast” of bacon and eggs. My “wellies” gave way to “snow boots.” The older kids weren’t smoking “fags” behind school, they were merely sneaking “cigarettes.” And if we needed medicine, we no longer got it from the local “chemist,” but from the “pharmacy.”

Quickly seeking to master the preferred profanity of the locals, I noted that a combative classmate was no longer a “right pain in the arse,” but a “royal pain in the ass.” I made a particular point of brandishing words and phrases that I was told were unique to the Pittsburgh dialect, like “yinz” (for “you all”), “pop” (for “soda”), and “jagoff” (for “jerk”).

Of course, other differences abounded. After years of bland cornflakes, I had infinite cereal choices, though I usually landed on Cocoa Krispies or Lucky Charms. The bus I took to school was no longer Irish green but mustard yellow. In Ireland, when I misbehaved (hiding out in the girl’s bathroom, for example, to avoid ballet class, which I detested), I had been asked to produce my hand and was given a lashing with a belt or ruler. In the United States, however, I soon saw that punishment merely consisted of sitting in a corner removed from one’s classmates.

Young boys lived in almost all of the houses on my street. For a tomboy like me who loved sports, the neighborhood was a dream. In Ireland, Mum had taught me to play tennis, soccer, and a bit of field hockey. But the boys on Hidden Pond Drive played—and talked about nothing but—baseball. The game seemed slow, as it does initially to foreigners. But once I mastered the rules and key statistics (batting averages, RBIs, and ERAs), every pitch thrown during every at-bat seemed like a vital part of my day.

Mum adapted to her new life, showing no discernible nostalgia for the country she left behind. Despite her deep empathy for others, she focused far less on exploring her own feelings. When I pointed out this inconsistency when I got older, she either changed the subject or just ended the conversation with a dismissive “Arragh sure, I can’t be bothered.”

Despite completing her medical residency back in Dublin, Mum was required to redo her training in the United States, a three-year ordeal. Yet during the same period, she somehow managed to master the new American sport of racquetball (quickly winning the local club championship). She also regularly took Steve and me to Three Rivers Stadium for the baseball games of our new hometown team, the Pittsburgh Pirates. Unlike most of my new friends’ parents, she never even considered leaving before the last out. And remarkably, she attended most of my school and sporting events.

But there was no mistaking the Irishness of our family. While our neighbors ate pizza and grilled hot dogs, we rarely went a night without “spuds,” and corned beef and cabbage were a staple. Eddie’s version of a date with Mum was a night spent at The Blarney Stone, a local pub owned by an Irish footballer from County Kerry. When they could, they sat among fellow immigrants, ate Irish stew or bangers and mash, and joined the traditional music sing-alongs, enjoying the “craic.”

THE MAIN CONSTANT between Ireland and the United States was God. In Dublin, though some of the nuns at school terrified me, being a Catholic was a source of comfort, and, I suppose, an affirmation of my Irishness. Given the unpredictability of my home life, I was soothed by the familiarity of the prayers and hymns. When Irish television and radio paused three times a day (at six a.m., noon, and six p.m.) to broadcast the slow and steady chimes of the Angelus bell, I had felt calm—not unlike the effect of the call to prayer I had heard five times a day in Kuwait. The United States was the first place I had been that didn’t seem to want its people to pause and reflect during the day.

Mum stuck with her promise to the judge, driving my brother and me to Catholic Sunday school and Mass. But my main religious practice was (and still remains) private prayer, appeals to God to look after the people who mattered to me, and—even without the reminder of the Angelus bells—prayers of gratitude. I prayed when I was tying my shoes, having a bowl of soup, or riding the bus to school. I ran through long lists of all the people and occurrences I was thankful for. I prayed that “my daddy and all my aunts and uncles and grannies and granddads and cousins are happy.” And I devoted inordinate prayer time to the fortunes of my new hometown baseball team.

My interest in the Pittsburgh Pirates quickly became fanatical. During the team’s magical 1979 playoff run, which began soon after our arrival in the United States, Mum, Eddie, and I would sit on the new couch in our den and watch Captain Willie “Pops” Stargell light up the field with his smile and reliable bat. I was distraught when, during the World Series, the Pirates lost three of their first four games to the Baltimore Orioles. As my new team faced elimination in each of their next three games, I ducked into the bathroom during tense moments, got down on my knees, and prayed for a change of fortune.

I remember telling God that I knew from television that the Pirates’ players did all kinds of work in the community for vulnerable people. I tried to bargain with Him, pledging to treat my five-year-old brother better in exchange for a late-inning double off the wall, each time rounding out my prayers by softly singing the Irish National Anthem. Why I viewed this song as relevant to the Pirates is unclear to me now, but when they ultimately won the Series four games to three, I was convinced that my well-leveraged negotiations and patriotic chorus were factors in convincing God to turn the contest around.

I began spending my weekly pocket money—now “allowance”—on Topps baseball cards. I was a skilled trader, doing complex multiparty deals with my neighbors, such that I ended up with the entire 1980 collection, minus two elusive cards. As a medical resident, Mum was earning little money, and because Eddie had bought the house and the cars, she was hesitant to impose her children’s expenses on him as well. Thus, when I nagged her to buy me baseball cards so that I might luck into one of the two players I was missing—for me the equivalent of Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’s “golden tickets”—she usually turned me down.

Whenever I had saved up my allowance, I would ride my bike up the steep hill on Hidden Pond Drive and down a busy road to the convenience store a mile away. I would buy as many packs as I could afford, tearing open the waxy paper right there at the cash register, inhaling the smell of the pink gum, and checking to see whether I had landed a winner.

In my mind, Ireland was still my home. But this new place felt a bit like a wonderland. And while I was looking forward to my first trip back to Dublin, which I would take in December of 1979, I was going to gobble up all things American for as long as I could.

3

(#ulink_7f316f5a-cb56-56f9-b70e-285825ac816c)

LOSS (#ulink_7f316f5a-cb56-56f9-b70e-285825ac816c)

Few memories are more seared into my psyche than the moment my father told me he would not allow my mother to take Stephen and me back to America.

Returning to Dublin for the first time since we had moved away in September, Stephen and I were spending the Christmas holiday of 1979 in our old home. Mum had traveled with us and was staying nearby with her close friend Geraldine. I was lying in my pajamas next to my dad on the king-sized bed he had once shared with my mother. He was teasing me for “sounding like a Yank” and for adopting a boy’s haircut, which I had done to look as much like my Pittsburgh friends as possible. Stephen was asleep in the next room.

I was sucking on a peppermint I had raided from a stash in his nightstand when he informed me—as matter-of-factly as if offering up his golf tee time—that he planned to keep Stephen and me in Dublin.

He wanted us around, he explained, and thought it was a grave injustice that the courts had allowed Mum to take us so far away. He waited a few minutes and then telephoned my mother to inform her of his decision. In this short period of calm before I heard Mum’s reaction, I felt affirmed to my core by my dad’s willingness to defy the judge’s ruling. All children covet signs of their parents’ love, and I liked knowing that Stephen and I were worth a fight.

Once he had reached Mum, he handed me the phone so I could say hello first. Almost immediately, I blurted out the news. “Daddy’s keeping us!” I exclaimed, my heart beating madly as I found myself at the epicenter of a high drama.

“What?” Mum asked. When I repeated myself, she said she would be coming to collect us immediately and told me to pass the phone to Dad. Her fury was barely contained.

“Mum’s coming,” I announced, handing the phone over to him.

“No she’s not, pet,” my dad said.

In the ensuing minutes, I could hear Mum’s voice rising sharply through the receiver. Still, I figured they would have another argument—maybe even the fiercest of all their arguments—and then would sort things out.

When Mum didn’t show up that day or the next, I happily settled back into my father’s Hartigan’s routine, with my brother by my side. I loved being back home. For all the novelty that America offered, I had missed even the rain of Ireland.

On Christmas Eve, Stephen and I watched The Sound of Music on a small black-and-white television in the living room where my father and Susan had decorated a Christmas tree and hung our stockings (in Ireland we used our actual socks rather than the enormous red and white American stockings that were the size of Santa’s boots). My father had rented a keg from Hartigan’s and his pub friends were in a jovial mood.

Stephen and I ignored the revelry, happily tugging on Irish Christmas “crackers” until they snapped in two and revealed the small plastic toy. My dad cooked us steaks in a frying pan—his specialty—and took his place at the piano, playing Hoagy Carmichael numbers and our favorite Christmas carols.

At around ten p.m., the doorbell rang. Following my dad to the door and peering around him, I saw Mum and her friend Geraldine standing there. She would not allow Steve and me to stay in a den of booze, she told my father. She had come to take us.

I stood on the threshold, snuggled against my father’s leg. My brother and I watched the two people we loved most speak to each other in subdued tones, but their rage was unmaskable.

“Look at this,” my mother said, gesturing to the scene inside. “Do you really think this is an environment for children?”

When Mum insisted that we were leaving, I walked a few steps toward her. My dad told me to come back, and I froze. Stephen, who had followed me to the door, shuffled forward into Mum’s embrace. But I stood between my parents, paralyzed by the impossible choice.

My mother’s voice grew sterner as she told me to get into her nearby car, its engine running. I did as I was told. And before I had fully processed what was happening, we were driving away.

I turned to look out the back window—a scene I later saw reprised in Hollywood movies—and in the doorway I saw my dad, deflated, watching our car depart. He grew smaller and smaller until we turned the corner and he vanished from sight.

That night, we drove from Dublin to Mum’s hometown of Cork, where we stayed with her sister, Anne. Over the next few days, my father and a friend from Hartigan’s, a member of the Irish parliament, began calling my mother, threatening to secure an injunction to prevent us from leaving the country. As their warnings grew more convincing, Mum began to worry that another legal battle would delay our return to the United States, where she was expected the following week to resume work. In a panic, she asked my uncle Gary, her brother-in-law and the high-spirited family fixer, to drive us to Shannon Airport.

The nighttime drive was harrowing. Uncle Gary ran red lights and drove so far over the speed limit that I felt we were in a car chase. Mum’s constant checking of the passenger-side mirror was a telling sign that the grown-ups were worried. Only now—forty years later—do I realize the meaning of that frenzied drive: although she was in the right, my mother must have had no faith that the Irish courts would see the situation similarly. If my dad had appeared before a judge sober while we were still in the country, she could have lost us.

When we arrived at the airport, as the clock ticked slowly toward the hour of our departure, Uncle Gary bought Stephen and me heaping Irish breakfasts. But my mother neither ate nor took a proper breath until our flight was in the air.

Once we were back in our suburban Pittsburgh home, Mum telephoned Dad to tell him that he couldn’t be trusted to put our welfare first. Not only was he drinking too much, she said, but he had effectively threatened to kidnap us. She couldn’t take time away from work to chaperone our time together, she informed him, so if he wanted to see us, he would need to fly to America.

DURING THE YEARS THAT FOLLOWED, I threw myself into my new American life and began to thrive in school. My baseball skills improved, and I started learning the basics of basketball. No longer the awkward new girl with the Dublin accent and the pleated skirts, I developed a fresh set of friends. Their families brought me to barbecues in the summer and skiing and ice-skating in the winter. Although Mum was working long hours as a doctor, she would get home most summer nights in time to grill us corn on the cob as Pirates games played on the radio. Gradually, as she was able to take vacations, she and Eddie took us white-water rafting and to American historical sites like Gettysburg.

Although she said my dad had forfeited the custody agreement, my mother fulfilled the rest of its terms by taking me to Mass and continuing to teach me Irish. Nothing was worse than being summoned on a sunny day to improve my Gaelic. “Mum,” I would declare, “this makes no sense. Even if I lived in Ireland, I wouldn’t speak this language. And in America it is even more useless.” This logic did not move her. She forced me to review flash cards and write out sentences as if I would soon be back at Mount Anville, taking an exam.

Although my dad and I exchanged letters, and I sent him my unimpressive color-by-numbers artwork, he did not visit. When Susan nudged him, he had a ready response: “I just need to get sorted.” But he was never able to admit he needed help to overcome his drinking, and he never did get sorted.