Lark's Eggs Page 26

  ‘My ma discovered I was gay. She was informed by a neighbour I was gay. She wasn’t sure what that meant but contacted the mother of a boy who was known to be gay. That woman declared “Mrs Finuacane, don’t fret. There were always gay men and women in Blarney but they didn’t have the word for it then.”’

  I was speaking to a youth in one of the bars, interviewing him really. His hand was on a pint of Guinness. These rests in pubs interspersed with Denny’s intense and self-engrossed mouthings.

  In the same pub as I spoke to the boy I enquired about Denny’s mother. She had stepped from a red brick suburban house into a big red brick hilltop mental hospital. Denny’s mother had begun to eat her own fur coats. She was totally mad, Denny said. Totally mad.

  residence

  What had really caused an eddy in my gait had been the way Denny had referred to his mother. It was as if there was plain reason to be dismissory about her. She had sunk for him. Legend and myth had walked out of his life but I had cherished it. She had grown for me. She had marched across nights for me. In fact the first film I made at film school I had thought of her. The blonde, ice-maiden-faced Polish lady. The lights had centred on her. When Denny had made his farewells I headed on into the night. There was a lot of way to go.

  ‘See you now. Good luck with the films. I might see you tomorrow.’ The phrases rang in my ears. I shovelled my hands into my jacket. Denny was an arabesque of remarks. But I had sauntered away from the Airedale a long time ago in this predestined black jacket. There were already films in my face and Denny had already changed in slinking away. There were worlds and corrosive thoughts to stride through tonight.

  ‘Goodnight. See you.’ There’d been a room in her mind. A chamber of torture. It had not necessarily been a concentration camp, the proximity to a concentration camp, but the experience and anguish of war. The worst anguish of surviving it. Storks and domed palaces had perished in this war. But she had survived.

  The scintillating blonde-haired lady in the garden imperiously called to her husband. ‘Bring me some lemonade.’ A white rabbit stuck its ears up at her. I watched from behind an oak tree, my right hand clinging to the hoary bark.

  The lights focused in on a girl’s face. She had the features of Mrs Bannerton. Why do I remember this face? What had this face to say for me?

  The city at night wound on. I unravelled the streets. There had been a point on which I had coincided with this lady. You go past pain. You come to meaning. I jotted little sentences in my mind. The city by the river, its slim outlying houses, was Italianate.

  The first time I made love to a woman I thought of her. Her buttocks had asserted themselves through summer dresses, the disdaining quiver at the side of her buttocks. That quiver had said a lot. ‘I’m not happy here. I’m not happy here.’

  In the first few years after they went I used jumble words on blue squared paper at school: ‘loss’, ‘severity’. Gulls had looked in on me, perching by an inedible crumb. I wanted to write to them, to all of them, but letters seemed inadequate to contain my feelings and anyway envelopes too frail to contain such corrosive letters as they might be. So I allowed myself to suffer. The Airedale had died. John F. Kennedy had died. My mother bought me a white sleeveless jersey one Christmas. At that point the Bannertons’ house had been turned into classrooms by the nuns.

  I’d wanted to write to her as well as to Denny. A letter to her had composed itself over my adolescence. There was place of pain we shared with one another. Not having any brothers I got on with I invented brothers in others, in boys who filtered through school—off to England after a short spate of studying at the priest-run boys’ secondary school. There was chestnut hair, there were certain chest muscles behind white jerseys I envied in other boys. Boys from the ‘Terrace’. Dionne Warwick sang me into a night of suicide. I woke up in Poland.

  ‘Dear Mrs Bannerton …’ Always there was a beginning of a letter to her. But after my exercise in suicide attempts whatever they did to me in the mental hospital part of my brain slumbered. They had cajoled me into their universe. Maynooth College, its black bricks, was a logical upshoot from that universe.

  On a night vaguely ingrained with rain in a hilly city in the very south of Ireland I finally scrambled off that letter to Mrs Bannerton. She was in a mental hospital in the vicinity, a house I thought I detected, shining with a light or two on a hill.

  The times I was on the verge of doing something truly disastrous—being ordained a priest—when there was the immediate imminence of some irreparable lunacy she stopped me. She took strides with me when I was in my black soutane. It was that room that carried me from Ireland to England. The room where her blonde hair had looked red. Where toy trains spun around. Where trains stopped in towns you crept out into and had cold eggs showered in paprika in small cafés, the autumn sunshine shining through white wine and a leaf sweeper singing like a minstrel outside.

  As a child I’d run up that street and peer in. There had been many ways of approaching a sight of the inside of that home. In the grey convent yard, a proudly decked member of the convent band, in claret dickie bow (which alternated occasionally with a miniature scarlet tie), white shirt, white long trousers, clashing a triangle, tripping in my clashing of it, one blue eye on the Bannertons’ garden. What were Mrs Bannerton’s limbs up to? Through the oblong window that stretched itself with narrowness on the street level you saw the brown wooden room and the journeys that the trains encompassed. Your mind gyrated with Europe’s railways. Sometimes she stood in the middle of that room returning over these journeys, trembling in a leafy tight summer dress in the room. There was a person or a budgie she spoke to often. If it was a budgie it was to be seen, a cheeky lemon and lime thing. If a human being he was invisible. There were also ways you spied into that house in your dreams, through the chimney, on that roof that sent slates flying down in March. One night I travelled in the sky over their house on a broomstick and in my magician’s capacity observed her dreams, trains snuggling into stations packed with marigolds and girls. But even being inside the house was always just an attempt. There were barriers. I was not one of them. The Airedale disdained me with one eye.

  ‘How are you?’

  A middle-aged man in a Charlie Chaplin-type bowler hat cascaded into me in the night. ‘You’re the young man who makes the films.’ As a celebrity in my own right I sat beside him on a high stool in a late night café on a hill, Elvis Presley in maroon and pink on the wall, looking as if he’d been blasted on to it, as we discussed my films and my intentions with new films. As a cappuccino lever was pulled down—the café was Italian—a voice in my head in a County Galway accent said, ‘Now you are their world.’

  A woman in a room crossed her own barrier to be again in the boulevards and the parks of childhood. The edges of her hair had been red in remembrance. They had stood out, flames. Mrs Bannerton had had red hair as a child. She’d coveted a wooden sleigh with emerald tattoos on it. I too had a barrier to cross to remember. In the night my relatives webbed in me, no longer the demons I’d always presented to myself, but innocent. My mother, her frail sisters beside her, on station platforms in June during their youths. Many of my mother’s sisters had died. Of purple lilac. Of tuberculosis. Purple lilac had flagged on russet, peeling railway bridges. Further back there was a room in history. A concentration camp. A war. A famine. There had been an operating theatre where innocence and joy had been removed. I had to make my way through ancestral minds to the joy in myself. The task in a black jacket seemed easy.

  ‘Dear Mrs Bannerton …’

  It was not to her I ended up giving most of my thoughts but to the young man I’d spent the evening with, her son. Whether we knew it or not those times we enacted pageants in the thick shrubbery outside the men’s club—a black canvas-covered hut—we were seeking to return to a corner of history; Ireland before subjugation. In white bed sheets we had been the kings of an undefiled Munster and undefiled hobgoblin world. The garden had pointed the way
to an innocence. That oak had shaded the wounds of history; the memory of war. It had covered a part of a human being quaking because the sores distributed on her body were not apparent.

  There was a bus; there was a journey. I’m not sure anymore what I left behind. I just remember a little boy in white trousers holding the white handbag of a woman. He was holding it up for the world to see. As if to ask why he was holding it. Why wasn’t it with its owner who was probably dead or mutilated?’

  The film scripts were beginning again. I could not stop them. A woman’s voice reached me from the twinkle of a mental hospital light.

  In a church at dawn under a cinder-blackened Christ I prayed for her and for her son who had disappeared into his grey jacket, into his spectacles and into the manifold expostulations of his cause. I tried to restate a part of myself I’d tried to forget. Pain too, the crossed mangled legs were necessary. They were a connecting point with the dots of our ancestors on the atlas. The world inside me now was created from childhood; from the gruesome logic of art. An attempt at art. But attempts at art could only lead back. To a room. In an ornately lettered mirror in a bar the edges of my hair were ghostly henna.

  ‘We try to build; we try to grow. But we always build backwards. May God help me both to forget and to remember.’ There were swans on the river. Graffiti flung itself against a urinal. There were turkey feet of aeroplane tracks through the clear sky. A path led out of here now. I had a ticket to depart. To leave a place where Mrs Bannerton was incarcerated, where Denny Bannerton fought among the profusion of media attention, where a garden had been cemented over and an oak tree slashed down. The blood from the oak tree landed on the pavement of this city. I wanted to say over again, ‘Thanks. Thanks for giving me birth.’ But a chill had entered the air. It fingered the exposed headlines of newspapers. This was no country. It was no place. It no longer existed for me. All I was aware of were the aeroplane tracks in the sky. But there was a country in me now. There was a demesne. Sometime in the middle of the night I had gone back and picked up a child who’d been waiting on a street in Poland for a long time. There was a country where my child could be born or failing that where I could give birth to the latent little boy in myself. The terms of reference had changed; the language had changed. The chill in the air here no longer tortured me. The fate of the Airedale no longer bothered me. Soon Mrs Bannerton and Denny Bannerton would be forgotten. But walking back to the hotel I heard what I had not permitted myself to hear for many years.

  The sound of Polish.

  Lebanon Lodge

  The house became the property of a member of the ruling party in the Irish parliament in the mid-1970s. With its name definitively written on one of the gateposts it was clear that that name, thought of in innocence—‘The trees of the Lord are full of sap: the cedars of Lebanon which he hath planted’—had become a kind of public chalking-up area, in the minds of those who lived in the vicinty of Dun Laoghaire, County Dublin, for the emotional reverberations of events in one of the world’s worst trouble-spots; that name placed on the gatepost was a parallel to a stretch of the front page of a newspaper which seared even the minds of these complacent suburban citizens. A lethargic middle-aged woman in a summer dress, her shopping beside her, often paused vacuously beside it. What did it make her think of? Miles away and years away in London, Lucien often fancied he was mentally writing its story as he would the story of a house in the Catholic primary school he attended in Dun Laoghaire for a while—this was a favourite task given by Christian Brothers to nubile, teetering boys, ‘A House Tells Its Story’, the irony of these Christian Brothers telling Lucien what to do being of course that he was Jewish. What did a house remember in inchoate nights in Maida Vale, London? What secrets did its night-time bougainvillaea and arbutus protect? In a sentence the history of an Irish Jewish family and particularly the history of a young man who had escaped from that family and from the country that family had adopted. ‘Alas, poor Erin! thou are thyself an eternal badge of sufferance, the blood of my people rests not on thy head.’ Lucien often awoke in the night and imagined he was the receptacle for a history that was greater than him and yet had defined his own personality. Words, sentences, phrases of folklore came back; it was all built on legend of course, this history, but as he grew older Lucien, insurance broker, decided that he needed legend more and more, not just to escape but to sort out the bits of himself that Ireland had mangled and thrown into confusion—right up to an outwardly successful middle age.

  The country his family had come to had been a strange one for Jews; they had come and gone since the beginning of the sixteenth century; Jews had been good spies for Cromwell; Jews had been jesters, Travellers on the roads of Ireland—no one knew if they were spies for the English or the French around the time of the planned French invasions at the end of the eighteenth century—Jews had shifted in and out of Jewish identity, not just on the roads of Ireland. There was a time when a whole spate of people, who had presented themselves as pious Catholics when it was difficult and even dangerous to be a pious Catholic, declared themselves to be Jewish on their deaths and asked for interment in the Jewish cemetery in Ballybough. Ballybough, a place by the sea, before it was a Jewish cemetery had been a burial place for suicides. Earth from Israel was imported into Dublin in the eighteenth century for Jewish burials, a handful of it thrown in after the corpse. Wine made from raisins was drunk on feast days and searches were made for tombstones, always disappearing and ending up as hearthstones on sale in market places, albeit hearthstones with Hebrew lettering—this story a comedy among Dublin working-class raconteurs. To this country came the Hoagmans, but not until after the synagogue at Mary’s Abbey had been opened and a small bit of stability attained for Irish Jews, a symbol of stability in the new synagogue.

  Where the Hoagmans began from was a mystery but there was no doubt where parlour legend allocated their beginnings—a fiercely black-haired woman left Hungary in Napoleonic times and met a man called Hoagman in Southern Bohemia, who had to flee his community—adhesive for false teeth which failed to adhere the teeth to the gum, brightly striped marionettes whose legs and arms quickly fell off, little, charred black Christs that quickly fell off their crosses—a marriage ceremony taking place before she fled with him to London. There they had two children, two boys, and it was the Famine of the 1840s which sent them to Ireland, all those Aid for Ireland events where Mrs Hoagman often got jobs serving soup or mopping marquee floors or attending the lavatorial areas, events so lavish and inspiring that they made you want to go to the land of reputed Famine, so loved did it seem by queens—who came in their carriages; by opera singers—who sang in cherry-coloured dresses on small improvised stages; by marchionesses—who baked huge, escalating cakes which were always threatening to fall, snowy, discreet Alpine peaks on those cakes; and by painters—who slapped people’s portraits on in a few minutes.

  It was not just this of course which made them go to Ireland—the glamour suggested by Ireland by way of people’s eagerness to show their concern for it—but the fact that an Irishman was Jewry’s greatest champion, Daniel O’Connell, and that Ireland’s great leaders had always seemed to put a word in for the Jews as well as the Catholic Irish. It was a pull to a land promised by Famine aid events and by benevolent, languorous speeches from Irish leaders.

  The city they arrived in was reeling under the Famine but still time was taken off to elaborately describe ladies’ dresses at Castle balls in the newspapers. That was Mrs Hoagman’s first impression of Ireland. A description of a young woman’s dress, the woman dying a week after the dress description appeared when her coach fell into the canal near Portobello Barracks. In the early os, when the Hoagmans found their feet, marionettes representing people with Jewish features were sold by women at College Green, and Dublin was held in the thrall of the legend of Pencil Cohen, a Jewish millionaire who’d started a halfpenny pencil industry and yet who slept under newspaper pages, visited and marvelled at by the ladies o
f Jewish relief organizations, an abundantly rich man who insisted on being a Rathmines Job. Magiash Hoagman, who’d started a small spice-box industry, soon had his own legend among the children of Chancery Street:

  Magpie, Magpie sitting on the sty

  Who, oh who has the dirty, greedy eye?

  Ireland’s tolerance for the Jews was even more considerably in doubt when a Passionist father ranted from his pulpit that the Dublin Jews had the crimson mark of deicide on their foreheads. One of Mr Hoagman’s sons stayed in Dublin and one disappeared into the country and was never heard of by him again.

  At this point Lucien, in London, would pause. So many unanswered questions, so many bits that didn’t hang together. But that had been the legend. And Pencil Cohen had indeed lived. Another Dublin Jewish industrialist with the name Cohen was called Fresser Cohen to distinguish him from his counterpart but he couldn’t live down the connection after Pencil Cohen’s death, people eager for the continuance of the legend, and he eventually left Dublin. But Mr Hoagman was thriving then and there was no question of the Hoagmans, those that remained in Dublin, leaving this city. They’d found an unexpected base under low, mellifluous, rainy mountains.

  Every event concerning themselves was a legend among the Jews of Dublin when Lucien was growing up—the night the new synagogue on Adelaide Road was opened in 1892, ‘a night of snow’, the night of the Day of Atonement, 1918, when the electricity failed and the ceremony was held by candlelight, ‘the guns of the War of Independence going off outside’, the day the newly extended Adelaide Road Synagogue was reconsecrated in June 1925 and a celebration held in a marquee by the canal afterwards, ‘all the dignitaries among the Jews there, justices in the new Irish state, businessmen; famous actresses and authoresses all in their finery on the gorgeous sunny day’. Lucien was born an exile. In Dun Laoghaire. His family had exiled themselves from the Jews around South Circular Road, the focus of Jewish population in Dublin, where the family had lived since the 1880s. There was a crockery factory under the Wicklow mountains, not far from Dun Laoghaire, and the family moved nearer to it. But there was also the wish to associate themselves with the most middle-class and secular environment in Ireland. But links were forcibly kept up and Lucien was eventually sent to the Zion Schools near Kelly’s Corner, a marathon bus journey to be undertaken each morning and each afternoon. When he tired of that or his family tired of the effort of pushing him on his journey each morning they settled for a local primary school for him. That was the beginning of a more irrevocable exile for him.