Lark's Eggs Page 27

  Lucien was born in December 1932. That something terrible was happening to the Jews in Germany he was made aware of in gossipy gatherings of boys in school costumes at street corners around the archetypal corner, Kelly’s Corner, boys who were as equally concerned with removing navy chocolate wrappers as they were with the fate of the Jews in Germany. Dublin in those years was a city of solitarily squirting rain clouds and of navy chocolate papers. Then it became a city of girls in navy convent uniforms. These girls had been whipped up by demagogues of Reverend Mothers into applause for fascist leaders, the saviours of the church against the Bolsheviks. Such was the hatred of one of these leaders, for the Jews, that he sent a plane to destroy the Jews of Dublin in January 1941. On the night of 1 January 1941 Greenville Hall Synagogue, on the South Circular Road, was half destroyed by a German bomber and the house of the second reader of the Adelaide Road Synagogue, who lived opposite the Greenville Hall Synagogue, totally destroyed. But no Jews in Dublin were killed. Greenville Hall Synagogue was reopened in September 1941 and Lucien was present.

  Nights in London, his daughter making love in the house to a boyfriend, Lucien reconstructed another part of his family legend. This was the most extraordinary part and it was relevant to those war years, Dublin Jews with their own private war against a mass outbreak of anti-Semitism in Irish society. ‘They’re jealous of us,’ his father would always say, ‘jealous of our positiveness, our love of life.’ This part of the family history was verified by an excavating Hoagman. The son of Magiash Hoagman, who’d left Dublin shortly after the family arrival in Ireland in the middle of the nineteenth century, had relinquished his Jewishness and become a Hogan, descendants running a butchering business in County Westmeath and fervent Catholics too. Their Jewishness had been totally oblivionized way back. It was not uncommon in Ireland for people to forget their recent heritage seeing that so many of the Irish middle class were survivors of quite recent famine or people who’d managed to cope after evictions from land. Irish family memory in general could not afford to go back very far. So the Hogans in Westmeath were really Jews who’d come to Dublin in the late 1840s. The very blackness of the hair of the Hogan girls could have made you suspicious. They were members of the Blueshirts, the Irish fascist organization, in the 1930s, their throng dotting the shores of Lake Derravaragh—legendary home of the Children of Lir, royal Irish children haplessly turned into swans, for three hundred years—for picnics. In 1941 Mr Hogan at an open-air wedding table, his black-haired daughters also at the table, made a speech saying that Ireland should do as Germany did and drive the Jews, ‘those who’d crucified Our Lord’, out. The speech was just one extension of the crazed Catholic triumphalism which gripped Ireland in those times. An excavating Hoagman confronted his relatives, and then rushed back to his business as picture-house owner in Dublin, not having, as he said himself, ‘let the cat out of the bag’. But the Dublin Hoagmans could afford to be sly. They were rich, erudite and worldly people now, scoffing at the mores of the country around them and wearing laconic middle-class Dublin brogues. They were loved, despite the prevailing anti-Semitism in Dublin, for their laughter, their smiles and the way their eyes always seemed cocked in a joke. Uncle Adolphe, the picture-house owner, was the most loved one of all and he took on management of a theatre in which there was a pantomime each year until his death.

  It was the influence of that uncle that played such a large part in Lucien’s plans.

  After leaving St Columba’s College, Rathfarnham, in 1951, a Protestant secondary school founded so that landowners could address their tenants in Gaelic, Lucien entered Trinity College. There he befriended Ethel Bannion, a Catholic girl from Limerick, and spent two or three years going to plays with her and discussing the mainstreams of philosophy of the time with her. She was an eager, lonely girl, freckles like oatflakes on her face, eyes that startled out as from a statue of the Virgin Mary, auburn, even coppery curls in her hair. She followed him wherever he went; she was wafted by him. When he took lead parts in college plays she stared at him idolatrously. But when Libby Lazurus came along he fell carnally in love with her and made love for the first time. Libby, a Cork Jewess, came to Trinity in 1954. Hair black as Clanbrassil Street black puddings, eyes that were biblical, exotically alive. He made love to this girl, three years his junior, all over Dublin, in Killiney, Dalkey, in the wastes between Rock Road and the sea, on the top of the Dublin mountains, one day in a field in the Dublin mountains for Sunday picnickers to see. She was sexually carnivorous. She was unashamed. She was the most resplendent girl in Dublin. Then abruptly she threw in Trinity and left Dublin in the autumn of 1955 to go to an acting school. That threw him back on Ethel Bannion. He did not know how to make love to a girl after Libby Lazurus.

  Lucien began working as an actor in Dublin in 1956. The world of Uncle Adolphe had exerted its influence over him. But he still had the safety of a university degree. Ethel Bannion was working as a secretary in a law firm, having failed all her way through college since Lucien began having the affair with Libby Lazurus. But still she saw him now and attended the theatre with him and watched him in rehearsal for the plays in which he performed. But there was something more subdued about her. She’d left college without a degree, having given up on it. And occasionally beside Lucien in the theatre seats, during a rehearsal for a play he was in, she came out with a rancorous remark under her breath. But still he tolerated her. The days were greyer in Dublin. The time was greyer. And then one day, beside a travel poster showing Chartres Cathedral at the juncture of Westmoreland Street and D’Olier Street, he saw Libby Lazurus. She was back. He was now twenty-five. She was performing in a pantomime that Christmas in his uncle’s theatre. And he began having an affair with her again, as passionately and as mindlessly as before.

  It was 1958. He turned twenty-six that December. On the night of his birthday Libby allowed him to make love to her under a bush on the cold ground in St Stephen’s Green, the two of them, like winos, having skirted the railings. But there was a backlog of experience Lucien had not coped with. He’d tried to make love to other girls since Libby went and failed. Somehow the armoury of his body didn’t work with anyone else, such had been the intensity of what had happened between him and Libby. Word quickly gets around Dublin and it was this word that killed the revival of his relationship with Libby. Full of masculinity, at a New Year’s party, 1959, he was suddenly confronted by Ethel Bannion. Immediately he caught sight of her he knew there would be trouble. She approached him, an almost tangible smell of disuse off her. ‘You’re incapable. Incapable of physical relations with anyone except Libby Lazurus.’ He was wearing a white jersey. He stopped dead. ‘You’re a Jewish lesbian. You can’t get it up. You’re a sexual failure. A wimp. Come on, show us what a circumcised prick that doesn’t work looks like.’ Her face, drunk, was an aurora borealis of bitterness. The skin of her face like heaps and heaps of dead porridge. This was her moment. Her speech. Then she withdrew. He couldn’t believe it. This was the Third Reich, the Tsarist oppressions manifesting themselves at a Dublin theatrical party where, if the revellers were not actors, they were ex-Trinity students. There was silence. Ethel had made her impact.

  He could not make love to Libby after that. In Ethel Bannion’s words he could not ‘get it up’. She had destroyed something in him. Not just his sexuality, but his belief in the steadiness of human nature. He lost his innocence the night Ethel had attacked him. Shortly after that, his ignominy with Libby and her quick withdrawal from him, he left Ireland.

  Yes, he gave up his pretensions to the theatre about the same time. Was it a coincidence? Anyway he’d married the daughter of a failed, rural Tory parliamentary candidate a few years later. She’d brought him back to sexual life; she’d conquered, by her quietness, the deadness in him. He was working for an insurance company in the city by then and extravagantly successful at what he was doing. ‘The righteous shall flourish like the palm tree: he shall grow like a cedar in Lebanon.’

  I
n the late 1970s he had occasion to visit Beirut for business reasons. He stood on a street in this city with evening hitting a few high-rise buildings with a sun which was a perfect orange and thought: nothing in this city, for all its carnage, can be worse than what Ireland tried to do to me; it tried systematically to take the flesh from the bone; it tried to eliminate me. He stood, perilously still, a professional briefcase in his right hand.

  By then, of course, Ireland was just a memory. His father died in 1967. The burial was nostalgically Jewish. Clay from a black desert in the Wicklow mountains under his head, his head tentatively turned to the east—the verge of the Hill of Howth on the opposite side of the bay. Lucien recited the Hebrew prayers at Dolphin’s Barn Jewish Cemetery among a gaggle of half-embarrassed men in heavy, charcoal coats. His father had always lit two candles on Friday evenings in Dun Laoghaire so that often the candles were reflected on the image of the sea; his father had inserted the Scrolls of the Law back into the Ark of the Covenant in Adelaide Road Synagogue; his father had led the Jews of Dublin out of the old year often as the Bridegroom of the Torah and brought them back to Lebanon Lodge for festivities.

  Lucien watched the silver bells tinkle on the Scrolls of the Law the following Saturday in Adelaide Road Synagogue as he would have as a child. But more than years separated him from then. He was not really his father’s son. He was not an heir. He wanted to get away quickly from brothers who were forcing familial obligations on him. He didn’t want any of these arabesques. When his mother died the house was sold and the money portioned among the family. There was no house in Ireland now for him to bring his children back to. But still it haunted him, Lebanon Lodge, a house become more ghostly with the years. It was the house of the dead. Ironic that Ethel Bannion, now grown fat, had married a member of the ruling party in the Irish parliament, another parliamentary representative of the same party having purchased the house. But political parties come and go, especially in Ireland. Irish politics as everyone knows are quixotic. But the house in Lucien’s mind had a steadiness, a ghostly permanence. It lived in a world of night in Maida Vale. His relationship with his brothers was, as it had always been, negligible. They were Dublin businessmen, intent on keeping the idea of family up. He had an English accent now. The Irish connections had come to nothing. One of his brothers kept the factory going and another hovered around it. They were forever making overtures to him, those overtures having begun as soon as he had thrown in the theatre for business. But he suspected them. He had done with them. Yet something nagged him. About Ireland. About his youth there. He entered the front door of Lebanon Lodge in his dreams and the whole of a history of a Jewish family revealed itself to him, a history since their arrival in Ireland. They had married Jewish history with Irish history and made a covenant out of which he’d been born. He’d been the Jewish boy who’d vacantly written an essay entitled ‘A House Tells Its Story’ in a Christian Brothers’ school in Dun Laoghaire. He fidgeted with the pen again in his mind and put the last strokes on the essay. It was the 1980s and his children were grown. His daughter worked in the theatre. She brought theatrical friends to his party on Christmas night in Maida Vale each year. Girls with short dresses and striped woollen stockings. Striped marionettes in Southern Bohemia? By default they’d become a kind of aristocracy. The children of the rich came to the party. Fenella, the heiress, of the long legs in the brief dress and of the little mirthful fountain of a head. Even the daughter, herself Jewish, of a man who made long and boring speeches in the Houses of Parliament, a girl with salient, tangerine lips. But for some reason he had to admit that his children, for all their easy artistic pursuits, were somewhat boring to him. They were beyond a border of understanding. Try as hard as they could they’d never be able to go back on that border. They were somewhat soulless, like their friends. People complimented him at the party for being so young-looking, as young-looking as his sons, his dark hair still shining and his skin pristine, that skin that had been married to Libby Lazurus’s radiating skin once in a moment of total forgetfulness. But his lingering youthfulness made him oddly alone-looking there, standing among the hubbub of a Christmas night party in Maida Vale as he had stood on a street in Lebanon when the sun was going down and the high-rise buildings were aflame with meteors of colour, the tokens of the tired sun on them, and his mind had been shot through with an awareness of how close to extinction he’d come, whether extinction in Dublin during the War when the Germans were thinking of invading or extinction at a theatrical party in Dublin, not far from Kelly’s Corner, when a woman had breathed her own brand of genocide into his body.

  Barnacle Geese

  He would come early winter every year in his caravan to Kerry from a town in Tipperary where there is now a nude swim in the swimming pool the third Saturday of every month and swim on the different beaches, parking his caravan alongside them. He came when the barnacle geese arrived and he would explain to the boys on the beaches how barnacle geese got their names, that it had been believed they were born from ship barnacles.

  Features smooth as a sea-stone, hare-lip, glass-grey eyes, sienna brows, Prussian crew cut.

  He’d always stop at the Stella Café in Limerick on his way where the waitress had a steeple-beehive. Villages of flamingo-dolloped cakes under the casing on the formica counter. Toffee banana ice cream advertised. The speciality being Al Capone scoops.

  There was a photograph on the wall of Willie Bevill in bermuda-length gym shorts. He’d used chest weights and spring grips before anybody was using them and he’d jump off the bridge at Parteen to swim in winter and he’d break the ice at Corbally Baths to swim.

  On this stop he’d always have a cup of coffee and a slice of angel two-tone cake.

  He’d swim in carnation-red underpants rather than a swimming togs and he’d carry his towel in a carpet bag.

  In one village, after kicking up a peacock’s tail of spray against the sunset on a beach where there were greyhounds’ footprints like a little girl’s acorn earrings, he’d have pig’s head in a pub called Grunter’s.

  In the same village there was a sixteen-stone German man, brown as a picking berry, he’d join in a swim. The German came after the races every autumn and swam through the winter. People would come from all over to look at him.

  But his favourite beach was Chapeltown where the swans gather on the sea before making journeys and after making journeys, and he’d swim out on winter evenings among the swans.

  In his caravan were two photographs of a woman, one in a half-cup bra top, jersey trousers, shoes with high wedge heels, the other in a swimming suit with a key opening.

  A picture of Alan Ladd in a yellow check waistcoat.

  And a reproduction of Rubens’ Prometheus Bound torn out of a library book. An eagle tearing at Prometheus. He turned downwards. His pubic parts just covered. Despite the savagery of his situation the clothes on his left side luxuriant—silvery and a deep twilight blue. The eagle chiaroscuro—some of his features gilded. The sky a mourning one—mauve, yellowy white.

  When visiting boys would ask ‘Who painted that?’ and he’d say ‘Rubens’, they’d ask ‘Was he a queer?’

  In Killarney mental hospital there’s a jigsaw reproduction of a Veronese painting in the corridor—Christ philosophically blessing wine in a tapered Venetian glass at Emmaus, little girls with spun gold hair, in décolletage, salmon petals on their silver brocade, playing with dogs at His feet, a little boy with a patina of hair fondling his own dog, a blonde woman with strawberry cheeks holding an infant, inevitably the masonry of the Renaissance—and his story was like a jigsaw picture.

  ‘I lived with a woman. Then she took a heart attack. And I came to live in this caravan.’

  Before her there’d been a boy.

  ‘Slept out among the hop poles in Kent. Slept in a football field in Stepney Green. Used swim out to the coots’ nest on Highgate Ponds.

  ‘I met Bador. He was a good boy. But he liked the drink. What’s this sex? An old cud
dle and tickle. Sometimes he wouldn’t come to me. He’d be out drinking with other candidates. He was sick. A bit of mental illness.

  ‘Then we stopped seeing one another. He bent his head when he saw me.’

  Silence is a tall order, the abandonment of a certain desire. At a street window in a town in Tipperary, gold clouds over a church spire like a wedding canopy in a synagogue, he remembered a Turkish bath in the East End that had a black and white portrait of Edward VII and Queen Alexandra at the burnt umber entrance.

  He went to Dublin for a while and broke stones in Kilmainham for a living, and he’d swim from a shelter in South Dublin that had been built by British soldiers so they could get away from the wars, the turmoil, before they left Ireland.

  He told the boys who visited his caravan that there was a place in Dublin called the Boys’ Bathing Place. A ship called the Inverisk was shipwrecked just out from there in 1915 and boys used to swim out to it. There were rats on it so they’d bring dogs to protect themselves.

  Before the woman in the photograph there’d been a few years in the FCA Barracks in Clonmel. There was a humpbacked Protestant businessman in another town in Tipperary, whose premises was stoned during the War of Independence, who rode his Harley Davidson every year to a Twelfth of July parade in a town just this side of the border, a town of almost all platinum-haired Protestants, where, wearing a sash, he’d march with the Orangemen, and he’d sit in Hearn’s Hotel in Clonmel in the evenings with young soldiers in boat-necked jerseys.