I'll Love You Tomorrow Read online

  In our own time, indeed, Europe has seemed less a unity than ever. The figurative Iron Curtain between communism and capitalism was apparently indestructible, and made one half of the continent feel permanently estranged from the other. To travel from Brussels to Bucharest at the height of the ideological Cold War was an almost medieval experience, enveloped as one was in the hostile bureaucracy, often spied upon, subjected to perpetual propaganda and sometimes very frightened. It was less of a cultural shock to go to Cairo or Tokyo.

  Now the curtain has dissolved, and the concept of being European has acquired a new validity. Like the proud cry from the Celtic fringe, the orphaned children most likely trace their roots to a European heritage giving testimony to a grand development: the emergence of a Europe that can dimly be discerned, by optimist at least, as a true community. Never since the legions left Caernarvon has a citizen of Ireland been able to proclaim himself a citizen of Europe too; never before has it been possible for the photographers to portray from the air the whole of this endemically divided and suspicious continent.

  Aspersions aside, America and its individual states have given lessons on unity and it holds among its population the citizens of Europe, who fought for the right of the congress of the United States of America to maintain the union of the states with or without their desire.

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  A little of that old Lincolnesque spirit is shared here. I am so taken by my European heritage and the considered dearth of knowledge by fellow Americans on the subject of Europe that I have chosen to use a few of these pages between chapters of the fictional novel to share a few of my own feelings on the variety that is Europe. It is my hope that the readers will not be entirely bored, and “pitch” the book…that you will embrace as I have embraced the continent from which so many of us have come.

  Seen from the sea, Dublin keeps you guessing up to the last moment. There is a lighthouse, a factory chimney, an office block and the squat cylinder of the city’s main gas-storage tank. The, rest until you are close, is a long, low line of shadow, like an unpromising mirage. To the left rise the green and purple mountains of County Wicklow; on the right stands the complacent hump of the northern promontory; Howth Head. You could not be expected to guess, if you did not already know, that between these two bosomy outgrowths of rock is spread Ireland’s capital city, 45 square miles of asphalt, stone and brick containing some 75,000 souls-nearly a third of the Republic’s population and a similar proportion of its man-made grandeur. None of this is evident from the sea-lanes. Judging from all the outward signs she displays, Dublin might not be at home today.

  But the question is, have you begun to feel that way…is there yet a bit of the Irish in Ye?

  She is at home, as you see, as you begin to disembark-at home, and trying on an outfit from her roomy wardrobe, matching her appearance to the season and the colour of the sky. There are days of bluster and cold drizzle, when the streets glower in a mantle of blue and gray. There are days of blue and gold, when the great public building of the 18thcentury luxuriate in their mellowed splendour, and miles of more modest houses warm to intimacy as their fabric breathes in the sunlight. And there are subtle grading’s of the atmosphere. Like many of her inhabitants, Celtic and mercurial, she is a bit of a chameleon.

  It is the variety of costume, and the many facets of her citizens, that make me nervous in approaching the subject. The printing process will in due course efface the tremolo of my handwriting, but it will not alter the apprehension I feel on trying to convert a capital city-a complex amalgam of past, present, people of passion, peace, war, pedantry and badinage- into a few thousand words of print. The problem applies to any city but to Dublin, I think, more than most. For one thing, the bars and garrets of Dublin are crowded with writers, each with a ready portrait of his native town, each primed to snap like a trap on literary trespassers. And there are other snares. Compared with London (which we will later experience), Paris or New York (each of which has a population at least ten times greater than Dublin), a small, compact, and nearly circumscribed: by sea to the east, mountains to the south, and pastures to the north and west. Smallness being easily taken for simplicity, Dublin invites dogmatic statement and generalization. It seems on first sight to be a nice, assimilliable, pocket-sized town that behaves, like a model railway, exactly as one thought it would. Any package theory about it can’t be supported by evidence on the ground. Any visitor will find his picture of the city fits neatly into the nutshell of reality, and he may well go away unaware that this particular nutshell happens to contain an infinite number of kernels.

  Of one thing there is no doubt: Dublin’s greatness is a palpable quality, not subject to the whims or bias of the observer. No one would deny that the city has been a nursery of great literature, nourishing some of the most distinguished and influential writers in the Western world: The poet William Butler Yeats, holding reality up to the myriad facets of his tirelessly analytical mind; the novelist James Joyce, subjecting Dublin-and through it mankind-to the cynical lens of his mental microscope; the playwrights Richard Brinsley Sheridan, John Millington Synge, Sean O’Casey, George Bernard Shaw, Oscar Wilde; the clerical satirist Jonathan Swift, author ofGulliver’s Travels;Brian Stoker, creator of Dracula; Brendan Behan, in his short life almost a walking definition of Irish blarney; and score more.

  The accomplishments of Dublin’s writers are rivaled by those of her architects, buildings are grand as any in Europe, break the skyline on either side of the River Liffey. In its eastward flow through the city, the river passes within half mile of almost all of them.How many cities do you know is dominated by a hospital?Four square and stately, Kilmainham Royal Hospital, dominates the western approaches of Dublin as it has since 1684. Closer to the center, on the north bank-guays, stands the massive 18thcentury four-courts building, Ireland’s judicial headquarters, with its four chambers radiating from the central lantern-dome.

  On the other side of the river, and on high ground, is Christ Church Cathedral, the oldest building in Dublin, dating from the 12thcentury and-thanks to 19th-Century restoration-a still sound gothic colossus flaunting its pinnacles and flying buttresses. A second cathedral, St. Patrick’s, rises a quarter of a mile south of Christ Church Cathedral, and presents a less florid, more endearing profile, though it was begun 20 years after its elevated sister. Down river, and again on the south side, is the baroque dome of City Hall, distinguished more for size than beauty; and behind it is the rambling courtyards of Dublin Castle, built by successive British viceroys in an assortment of styles, so that bold medieval stone towers abut on the mannered redbrick of the 18thcentury.

  Half a mile downstream, the broad artery of O’Connell Street leads north from the river, to end at the curved colonnade of the rotunda-18th-Century assembly rooms that now contain a theatre auditorium and a cinema. Opposite, on the river’s south side, but hidden from it by workaday buildings on the quays, are two of Dublin’s prime monuments. The Bank of Ireland, originally built to house Ireland’s parliament, presents a dramatic sweep of columns, bone-white from their first cleaning in 1977, and leads the eye to the local thoroughfare of College Green; opposite the long gray façade of Trinity College hides two spacious quadrangles and a treasury of architecture and sculpture. Then, before the river flows through nondescript docks and outskirts to the sea, there rises on the north the crowning glory of the Custom House, massively domed like the Four Courts, but in a lighter, more feminine form.

  Like many women of the Irish countryside, Dublin is a great beauty wrapped in a tattered shawl. Between the peaks of her grander buildings, alongside green parks and exquisitely proportioned rows of houses, are troughs of slum land. Most of the grandeur dates long before 1921, when the Irish won their independence after more than 700 years of British rule. The care in erecting buildings, in framing vistas, in conjuring settings that please the eye was the achievement of English settlers and their descendants, a foreign plant that is now dying as the iron o
f its hothouse rusts and the glass falls and breaks. A sad commentary on the historical heritage of Dubliners, perhaps justified only in the hatred of anything that is British.

  Over front doors, plaster saints or images of Pope John Paul XXIII and President Kennedy, look out from semi-elliptical fanlights whose designers would have deplored such visual clutter, let alone the religious sentiment. Old men in rain-coats snore on iron seats skillfully wrought by Victorian craftsmen. Beneath converted Victorian gas lamps, besides hugh cast-iron post-boxes still bearing the letters VR, initials of the queen under whose domination they were erected, above cobbles and antique granite paving’s-some of them chipped away, flake by flake, by masons to accommodate decorative Coal-Hole-Covers-Dublin passes unheeding.

  But there is a perverse and the unintended taste in the tastelessness of the place. Dublin’s lack of style is in itself a style. Certain sights and smells seem to be eternal, incontrovertible, essential to the cities character: the reek of stale beer emanating from pubs and of urine from under the bridges and decrepit gateways; the tetchy moodiness of the winds that rise suddenly from torpor and blow papers and bags and discarded cigarette packages across open spaces. The phrase, “dear, dirty Dublin”, has stuck.

  I have not written so far in much fear of contradiction. These sights, sounds and smells are sufficiently well accepted to satisfy Dickens’ Mr. Gradgrind, who believed in facts and statistics and nothing else. I have perhaps betrayed my affection for the city in the way I have presented them, and that is as well, for I have loved Dublin as long as I have known her. But my Dublin is not your Dublin, and yours is not your neighbor’s. Under the facades of the palpable Dublin we see and feel, are the many Dublin’s of illusion and imagination.

  At the airports, the quays and the railway stations, microcosmic Dublin’s arrive daily in the minds of visitors. The English fortify their notions of their own Anglo-Saxon stolidity by pointing out, with told-you-so nods, the more feckless aspects of the natives and the handsome, enduring monuments to what was principally an English regime in Dublin during the 18thCentury. The French see holiness writ large in the cathedrals and the proliferation of ecclesiastical collars, monks and nuns. Liberal Germans sign longingly at the apparent viability of a race of happy natural individualists so notably in contrast with the efficiency of the Teutonic homeland. Americans find the fun, wit, charm, generosity and blarney their guidebooks have predisposed them to believe.

  There are those of any nation who, brought up on literary fancies and tales of Liffey water-often falsely described as the secret in Ireland’s famous creamy dark stout-come prepared for a kind of Nordic lotusland on the banks of the River Guinness. They are here, in a sense, to see an allegory, a symbol of some innocently hedonistic corner of their minds. Others expect smiling eyes and loquacious good cheer, a better wit than lime house or Brooklyn fosters, pretty girls with green eyes and russet hair, and heart-stirring dirges wafting from bar doorways. They will find them. The seller of shoe laces will say, “That’ll be eight pence, if you have it.”-as if it doesn’t matter if you don’t-and the memory will eclipse all less favorable impressions. “Tea?” Says the grocer, who also sells tobacco, paperback thrillers, apples and Catholic literature. “Tea? And it’s getting cheaper by the hour. You’re on a winner there.” The Guinness will go to their heads, and they will unload the cargo of their minds to some bar-propper who will nod with the same rapt attention he would pay to the prophecies of john the Baptist. And in the afterglow-for them-all Dublin will be bathed in the light of that memory. Some will come looking for a kind of 18thCentury sanctuary, for stucco ornaments, fan lights, wing staircases, and everything to admire in a Palladian paradise, and if you choose to, you can blot shoddier products out of your mind. Still others will be hunting the Celt, the procrastinating, begorrah-ing, impish yarn-spinning Stage-Irishman; and he too, in spite of vehement denial by serious nationalist, is ubiquitous.

  I am reminded of that relaxed Irish aphorism, “Sure, the man who made time, made plenty of it”; and of the bus driver who recently arrived an hour late to take a group of us to some seminar in the country. He was balding, but such hair that was prepared to grow floated in waves to his shoulders. He dismounted and stooped before us in abject penitence. Then, with both arms, he made the most eloquent gesture like a book. It said: I am emptied, good people, drained of the energy to tell you of it all, of the trials and tribulations I’ve had to face getting here, the traffic-jams, accidents, road-work, hold-ups, hijacks, the hail and blizzards, the earthquake here and the tidal wave there. Accept my word, my contrition. Sure to God, nothing but His divine intervention would have got me here at all.

  The driver had not opened his mouth, and the June day was dull and uneventful. Yet, I swear we all felt, as we climbed into the bus, an ineffable pity for the man who, his gesture convinced us, had been to hell and back for our service. If such characters-and they abound-are-Stage-Irishmen, then Dublin is theatre.

  Underneath all the paradox and the contradiction lies the confusing fact that while London is and has always been an English town and Paris always French…Dublin was for most of its existence hardly Irish at all. It enters history more than a thousand years ago as a garrison town of the Scandinavian colonists, better known as Vikings or Norsemen, who in the 8thand 9thCenturies were established ports and spring-boards for inland plunder all-round the coasts of northern Europe. From that time onwards, Dublin continued to be a foreign stronghold, with just one brief interlude. In 1014, the Irish rallied under their warrior King Brian Boro, defeated the Norsemen at the village of Clontarf, close to Dublin, and drove them from Dublin, itself. But the Norse, re-established themselves, and when Dublin changed hands again, the victors were not the Irish but an invasion force of Anglo-Normans who landed in 1169 and began Ireland’s long subjection to her more powerful neighbor, England.

  This invasion can be seen, from a glance at the map, to be an almost inevitable result of geography. The west coast of Britain reaches out towards Ireland like the clasping talons of a hawk, and the journey across the Irish Sea is no more than 20 miles at the narrowest point. Sooner or later the English were bound to extend their grasp round this vulnerable prey. Once they did, the primary themes of all subsequent Irish history were established.

  Dublin was an obvious sight for the Anglo-Norman headquarters. It had been well developed as a naval base by the Norsemen, with strong fortresses, wooden houses and storerooms, and a thriving trade in wine and clothe. It afforded easy access by river and road into the interior. The Anglo-Normans colonized it, re-walled it and edified it with fine buildings. From that moment on, the history of Dublin and that of Ireland diverged. Dublin became a predominately English town, a center from which English settlers were disseminated to the rest of Ireland.

  Until the end of the 16th Century, direct English influence was restricted to a strip of land along the east coast, varying in extent but running roughly from the town of Dundalk, 50 miles away in the north, to a point little farther south than Dublin; the area was known as the English Pale, or “The Obedient Shires.” English policy, roughly stated, was to extend the boundaries of the Pale into the dark, barbarian country beyond. During the 17thand 18thCenturies increasing numbers of English Protestant settlers came and did just that. They became the landlords of Ireland, a group sufficiently diluted with Irish blood and Irish ways to have achieved an identity of their own as the Anglo-Irish, and yet sufficiently apart and so much more powerful than the catholic majority of Ireland to be known also as the Protestant Ascendancy. Eighteenth-Century Dublin, with its fine Palladian houses and grand public buildings, was their capital. To them, it was second only to London or Paris in fashion and social glitter.

  After 1921, when Dublin became the capital of the Irish Free State, the influence of the Anglo-Irish declined, but it was not extinguished. Dublin has become more Irish than any English town, yet remains more English than other towns in the independent Ireland. Above all, it still bears the sta
mp of the Anglo-Irish, and though I risk a literary martyrdom for saying so, their attitudes and personal presence are still evident in the city. Little can be understood about Dublin without some knowledge of this shriveled breed.

  Breed is not quite the right word. The Anglo-Irish are not a race. Indeed, there is no such thing as a pure race in Ireland, where conquest, immigration, elopement and bastardry have, as elsewhere in the world, inextricably mixed the genes of its inhabitants. Irish patriots look back to Brian Boro as an Irish hero and regard his followers as the true Irish. And yet even they were the descendants of the invaders. They were Gaelic's, Celts who had reached Ireland from the mainland of Europe only a century or so before Christ, displacing a small, dark race called Firbolg, who have the best claim to be called aboriginal inhabitants. And by the time of Brian Boro’s victory, Norsemen’s had been settling among the Celts for two or three hundred years and in sufficient numbers to blur the racial distinctions. Successes waves of settlers from England made racial differences impossible to spot. Even the diehard Irish patriot, to whom Englishness is anathema, is likely to have English, Welsh, Scottish, Norse, German or Spanish blood flowing in his veins.

  II

  BUDDY QUINN

  The next week, after his day at the Catholic Charities office on South Brook Street in Louisville, Father Hermann made the drive to the orphanage for the evening. Upon arrival at the orphanage, the good priest was met at the back door leading to the angelus tower by Sister Mary Como… as he would later relate to me.