My Father Left Me Ireland Read online

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  Copyright © 2019 by Michael Brendan Dougherty

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  Ebook ISBN: 9780525538677

  LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

  Names: Dougherty, Michael Brendan, author.

  Title: My father left me Ireland: an American son’s search for home / Michael Brendan Dougherty.

  Description: New York, New York: Sentinel, an imprint of Penguin Random House LLC, [2019]

  Identifiers: LCCN 2018060865 | ISBN 9780525538653 (hardcover)

  Subjects: LCSH: Dougherty, Michael Brendan. | Irish Americans--Biography. | Irish Americans--Ethnic identity. | Children of single parents--United States--Biography. | Father and child. | Irish Americans--Social life and customs. | Irish language--Study and teaching--Anecdotes. | Acculturation. | Nationalism--Ireland. | Ireland--Civilization.

  Classification: LCC E184.I6 D635 2019 | DDC 305.8916/2073--dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018060865

  Penguin is committed to publishing works of quality and integrity. In that spirit, we are proud to offer this book to our readers; however, the story, the experiences, and the words are the author’s alone.

  Version_1

  For my mother, Maryellen

  Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  INTRODUCTION

  I

  ONLY CHILD, SINGLE MOTHER

  II

  PUTTING CHILDISH THINGS AWAY

  III

  WHO MADE ME

  IV

  MAROONED BY HISTORY

  V

  REBEL SONGS AS LULLABIES

  VI

  FATHER TONGUE

  VII

  RECONCILIATION

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  A man who is a mere author is nothing. If there is anything good in anything I have written, it is the potentiality of adventure in me.

  —THOMAS MACDONAGH

  INTRODUCTION

  I’ve been told all my life that I didn’t need my father. He had left my American mother to bring me up by herself in New Jersey while he raised a family of his own back in Ireland. I was encouraged to believe that I was better off without him, that my broken home was just another modern family, no worse than any other.

  But when my wife became pregnant with our first child, I suddenly realized that I was a vital link between my unborn daughter and her heritage. And I realized that my own father was that link for me, whether I liked it or not.

  In my father’s absence, my mother tried to give me some sense of my Irishness. She would sing about the heroic sacrifices made for Irish freedom. She gave me the sense that out there, beyond our broken home, there was a homeland, a heritage, a patrimony.

  At one point in my life, I had believed what the world told me—that the idea of a homeland saved at a great price was just a harmful myth. A prominent Irish leader reiterated that view not so long ago: “Sacrifice breeds intransigence,” he said, “The dead exert an unhealthy power over the living, persuading the living to hold out for the impossible, so that the sacrifice of the dead is not perceived to have been in vain.”

  But when I heard those words a few months before my daughter was born, I knew in my bones that he was wrong.

  I don’t think I’m alone. We live in an age of disinheritance, with longings that we’re discouraged from acknowledging. This book of letters is my attempt at rekindling a relationship between father and son, at recovering something in danger of being lost. I wrote these to help my children have a proper home, and to know the refuge and comfort of a homeland beyond it.

  I

  Only Child, Single Mother

  Come away, O human child!

  To the waters and the wild with a faery, hand in hand,

  For the world’s more full of weeping than you can understand.

  —W. B. Yeats, “The Stolen Child”

  Dear Father,

  Do you remember when you put the hurl into my hand? I was six, I think. It was a gray day in Clare, a kind of gray I never saw at home in America. I remember the shabby carpet of the shop’s floor and a mumbled instruction to put my hands at my side. A number of these hurls—these wooden axes used in a sport I did not know—were held up to my body for sizing. I couldn’t understand much of what the men in the shop were saying. Their thick Irish accents, so different from yours, meant that in the whole world as I perceived it, I only understood you and my mother. On a day like this, it meant that the world beyond the three of us faded into the background, a little lilt on the air, a charming mumble.

  All my boyhood memories of you are like this. A brief, suggestive interruption of a life I lived without you. We would meet. You would delight in your son. I would feel spoiled rotten, trying to soak up each moment together in all its detail. Then we would part. In the moments after, I would wail for want of you, before becoming quiet for days. My mother would worry for me as she navigated her own seas of love and hatred of you. Then the whole topic of “my father” would begin to fade from consciousness, sometimes for years. Most days, I lived as if you did not exist. It is only recently that I tried to think about what you were thinking then. Or what you felt that day.

  I remember other little flashes of things about that trip to Ireland. I remember my mother, her mother, and I taking a ferry to one of the Aran Islands. We walked a five-mile stretch, and I tried to take seriously the charge a local man gave me to uncover the faeries there. He probably laughed at the predictable gullibility of Americans. But as my grandmother gingerly made her way over and through this green-and-gray labyrinth, the one that my mother assured her was the true repository of our nationality, I saw the faeries squelching in the mud near every low rock wall. I inhaled the briny Atlantic air, proud that unlike my classmates who called themselves Italian, I had put my Velcroed foot onto something solid on the opposite side of the Jersey shore. I remember later when a cab driver made the sign of the cross as we passed by the parish church. And my grandmother imitated him, having only just discovered this sign of devotion.

  I remember being waist high to you and my mother in a crowded, dark pub somewhere, and the slightly renegade thrill of being in a place made for adults. I remember the way you ended your sentences with a suggestive “you know.” To this boy’s ears, it was an invitation to be with you in every story. “I was working in the black market, you know. When you were born, I went straight, you know. Not very much money, you know.” My impertinent counting of the drinks each of you had was appraised as the work of America’s antidrinking propaganda on the young. I remember the sound of Irish music enveloping us, that propulsive and occasionally annoying clatter of banjos, fiddles, and tin whistles. Beneath the harsh stage lights, and amidst the smell of cigarette smoke, watery stout, and mold somewhere in the building, there were men singing. And in my memory, the men singing and playing are transformed into the Irish folksingers my mother inflicted on me with her cassettes: Every baritone is Christy Moore. Every tenor, Paul Brady.

&
nbsp; I had this dim sense of the two of you enjoying each other, and enjoying me. I moved about this world in which every object was charged with meaning. I remember Mom’s blue eye shadow and the gold-plated bangles and your thick Irish wool jumper. I remember that my mother’s Virginia Slims suddenly had this new Irish name, “fags,” which I was not allowed to repeat. I remember the smoke drifting up from her glass held at the height of my head, and seeming to curl around your arm like a lasso. And I was praying it would pull you two closer to each other.

  But my prayers were not answered. And my memory turns back to America.

  * * *

  —

  My mother had let her life be turned upside down by my birth. She lost her job at Toshiba, since an unwed mother was not acceptable to Japanese corporations at that time. She got another one at IBM. Things were just tight enough that we still lived at her parents’ home, where she slept on a sofa bed at night. Things were just flush enough that she could send me to Catholic school. She would come home late at night, in her smart work clothes, and I would lie on her arm, watching the light from the television glint off the edge of her little yellow-gold Cartier watch, before falling asleep with the smell of her Chanel No. 5 perfume in my nose.

  My mother’s side of the family left Ireland with the Great Famine still a fresh memory. But over a century later, in my boyhood home, my mother’s parents had let the Irish and the hyphen gradually recede from their Irish-American identity. My grandparents had a few records of American crooners who put out albums of Irish tunes. My grandmother sang “Too-Ra-Loo-Ra-Loo-Ral,” an “Irish lullaby” composed in Detroit. My grandfather had some glassware with our Anglicized last name, Dougherty, printed on it with a family crest.

  It wasn’t homesickness that burdened my mother with the idea of Ireland. It was her unrequited love for a real Irishman, yourself. Traveling Europe in the 1970s, she used her claim to Irishness to make friends, and to make love. Her best friend, an Irish Londoner, introduced you to her. You left her with a baby and then you continued on in the life you had before us.

  She informed you of my birth by letter. Your brother, traveling through to Philadelphia, was the first of your family to even see me. You reconnected with an old girlfriend and made a family in Malahide. And in your absence—in her heartsickness—my own nursery was injected with a peculiar kind of Irish nationalism. My mother wanted me to know myself as Irish, and made her efforts.

  She took me to the Irish culture festivals—feiseanna—throughout New Jersey, where she collected little awards for singing old ballads and for her increasing proficiency in the Irish language. She wore a claddagh ring. She wore a green-and-gold bracelet for the release of political prisoners in Northern Ireland. She brought me to bars in Boston and put spare money into those woolen Irish flat caps when collections went out for the “widows and orphans” of West Belfast. She was smart enough to know what the money really was for.

  Her love of Ireland was refreshed by waves of Irish men and women landing on the eastern seaboard in the 1980s. I can only barely remember some of the first names: Bobby. Trasa. Donal. We’d meet them in Queens, and with them she would curse the name of Margaret Thatcher. In my first years, she read me children’s books in Irish. Nearly every night she put me to bed saying good night in Irish: “Oíche mhaith.” She took me away to what we called “Gaeltacht weekends” in sprawling and half-abandoned religious retreat houses. They had a rule: Try to speak only Irish. And there we would gather with other Irish people who were proving to themselves, at least, that there was still life in a dying language.

  By the time I was a young adult I would know the history of Ireland well enough to debate it with friends and teachers. The story as I knew it was straightforward and heroic: a people coming out of captivity. There was colonization and misrule on one side, fitful Irish resistance on the other. Irish people launched periodic rebellions over the centuries: against Protestant usurpers; against misrule from Westminster; against wicked landlords; against the power of the old English monarchy; against British imperialism; against those who had attempted to rob them of their culture, their language, their land. It was as if rebellion itself made you Irish. The misrule culminated in the Great Famine and the waves of migration that sent one side of my ancestors to America and that nearly extinguished the nationhood of Ireland. The rebellions culminated and were fulfilled in the Easter Rising, the resurrection of the Irish nation.

  The absurdly theatrical rebellion took Dublin as its stage on Easter Monday 1916 and began when a schoolteacher, Patrick Pearse, wearing a green military uniform in front of the General Post Office in Dublin, proclaimed an Irish Republic to passersby. The moment had been years in the making. When World War I had started, the Brits had suspended implementation of a Home Rule parliament in Ireland, then set about recruiting Irishmen to fight in the trenches so that the small nations of Europe might be free. Believing that “England’s difficulty is Ireland’s opportunity,” a core of Irish nationalists decided instead to fight for the freedom of their own nation. The paramilitary Irish Volunteers, originally formed to defend Home Rule, would be deployed for a more ambitious purpose.

  Pearse, and some of the Irish Volunteers with him, some of them only just informed they were part of a revolution, seized a handful of buildings and positions throughout Dublin. Less than a week later, after bloody street fighting with British troops rushed across the Irish Sea, and constant shelling from a gunship anchored in the River Liffey, the Rising ended in a humiliating military failure. Pearse handed his sword to British officers, and the rebels surrendered. The Republic lasted six days.

  As its leaders were marched into prisons by British forces, they were cursed by the common people of Dublin as traitors and murderers. The Rising had wrecked the United Kingdom’s second city, inspired looters, and resulted in the deaths of hundreds of Irish bystanders, some of them children. It temporarily stopped wives from getting the checks for their husbands’ military service. It would soon result in mass arrests and even tighter wartime censorship. Not even two thousand Irish men and women had participated in the Rising, while over a hundred times that number of Irish men were fighting in British uniforms on the western front in the Great War. Pearse predicted in a letter to his mother from Kilmainham jail, “People will say hard things of us now, but we shall be remembered by posterity and blessed by unborn generations.”

  He was right. In those following days Ireland came to know the identity of the rebels—the schoolteacher Pearse, the journalist Seán Mac Diarmada, the language activist Éamonn Ceannt—and saw them as noble men. The British began executing them, one by one. They propped up the injured labor agitator James Connolly in a chair to shoot him. The poet Joseph Mary Plunkett, who drew up the war plans, married his sweetheart there in Kilmainham just before he was shot.

  Dublin had been, for centuries, the seat of foreign rule. But now, christened by the blood of Irish patriots, it was redeemed. The martyrs became the heroes of a people’s ballads, and the rebel cause won a posthumous mandate, inflaming the nation and setting twenty-six counties of Ireland on a course to full separation from Britain. Such was the power in this romantic, doomed yet successful, self-sacrifice.

  Its power reached over the ocean and forward through time. Pearse and his friends shaped part of my childhood. What they had done informed my mother’s commitment to the Irish language and her support for the IRA in Northern Ireland. Later in life, in sepia tones, they would be there as I drank watery stout at my local Irish pub.

  But in my childhood, their stories, along with so many others that dissolved into legends, gave me a sense of Ireland being just barely over the horizon. As a child, when we took vacations to the Jersey shore, I would point out over the water, squint, and tell my mother I could see it.

  * * *

  —

  A year or so after you gave me that hurl in Clare, you were visiting me. Another of these eruptions into my life
. I showed you what a Nintendo was. I remember us walking around the cozy streets of Halcyon Park, with its one-way lanes and 1,200-square-foot American dreams crowding each other. You ordered steak well done at the restaurant, and then I did too. (I would order my steak this way for the next ten years. Damn you for that.) My mother told us about her adventures in her 1970s MGB. You told me all about my older cousin Darragh, whom I should meet someday. And then we all had a snowball fight.

  Then came the day you were supposed to leave. Already, the pattern of these partings was established. You leave; I cry. Then my mother tries to pick up the pieces. For that much, I suppose we were all steeling ourselves. But this time you had news to deliver before you left for Newark Airport, and before I was supposed to go to school that morning. And it was this moment that my mother cited again and again in years to come as revealing the full measure of your stupidity, your selfish shortsightedness, and the price it extracted from me and from her.

  I sat in my grandmother’s rocking chair, dressed in the uniform of my Catholic school, gray slacks, a white dress shirt, and a maroon tartan tie. I stared down at my black shoes and across an expanse of blue carpet, to you in the seat across from me. And you told me news. Your wife was pregnant. (Your wife! I had let myself forget.) And so you were having a child soon. I was going to be a brother. Technically, half of one.

  How was I a brother to someone who was not my mother’s child? What did it mean to be a big brother to someone three thousand miles away? Was I going to be to them what Darragh was to me? A name placed on a relative I’d never see? Being a child, I could not even ask these questions. The one skill I had to deploy when talking to adults was intuiting the exact response they wanted to solicit from me, and giving it fully. But the strategy was failing in that moment. What did you want from me? What did my mother want? I was falling silent. I was crying. You had to get into the car and go. Neither of us got to see how hard this was on the other. In a few minutes, I would run out of the house, venturing halfway up Farrandale Avenue under the delusion that I would make it to school before neighbors returned me to where any seven-year-old child sobbing that way belongs: his home. But in that moment, you gave me a good-bye hug and a reassurance that you were still my father. And that nothing would change between us.