Country Girl: A Memoir

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  For my warrior sons,

  Carlo and Sasha Gébler

  It was when I got here I really realized—I’m here.

  —TYSON GAY, AMERICAN SPRINTER,

  ON THE EVE OF THE LONDON 2012 OLYMPICS

  Prologue

  I was in a National Health clinic in London, and an amiable girl with a mass of brown hair and a foreign accent had tested me for deafness. “You are quite well, but with regard to your hearing, you are broken piano.” She looked to see if this had any disquieting effect upon me and then reeled off the hazards of old age. Finally, she wrote down the day and the date on which I could come and collect my two hearing aids, which I dutifully did, though I have failed to befriend them. They slipped like little ball bearings into the cavity of my ears, and retrieving them was hazardous. In fact, they are back in the brown envelope in which they came.

  At home the garden was waiting, the second flowering of the roses, washed pink and blowsy but beautiful, and the massed leaves on the three fig trees were a ripple as birds darted in and out, chasing each other, half in courtship and half in combat.

  “Broken piano” in all its connotations kept saying itself to me, and yet I thought of life’s many bounties—to have known the extremities of joy and sorrow, love, crossed love and unrequited love, success and failure, fame and slaughter, to have read in the newspapers that as a writer I was past my sell-by date, and moreover a “bargain basement Molly Bloom,” yet, regardless, to go on writing and reading, to be lucky enough to be able to immerse myself in those two intensities that have buttressed my whole life.

  I got out a cookery book from Ballymaloe House in County Cork, where I’d stayed a couple of times and partook of delicacies such as nettle soup, carrageen moss soufflé, lemon posset with rose-scented geranium, and gooseberry frangipane with baby banoffees. It was where I had seen for the first time and been astonished by Jack Yeats’s paintings, thick palettes of curdled blues that spoke to me then as deeply of Ireland as any poem or fragment of prose could do. I looked up the recipe for soda bread and did something that I had not done in thirty-odd years. I made bread. Broken piano or not, I felt very alive, as the smell of the baking bread filled the air. It was an old smell, the begetter of many a memory, and so on that day in August, in my seventy-eighth year, I sat down to begin the memoir which I swore I would never write.

  PART ONE

  Ghosts

  The two dreams could not be more contrasting. In one I am walking up the avenue, toward Drewsboro, the house I was born in, and it is a veritable temple. The gold light on the windowpanes, rivering, the rooms flooded in a warm pink light for a feasting within, and along the paling wire, torches of flame, furling, unfurling. As I slide the hasp of the gate and walk toward the hall door, I see the line of men in livery, soldiers, the tips of their spears red-hot through and through, as if they have just been pulled out of fire. These are hard men that bar the way.

  In the second dream, I am in the house in the blue room where I was born. Doors and windows all locked, and even the space under the door, where motes of dust used to sidle, is sealed with some sort of wadding. The furniture is as it was—a double wardrobe of walnut with matching dressing table and washstand. There is the slop bucket in green, with a plaited basket button. I am there, alone, incarcerated. All the others have died. I am there to answer for my crimes. It makes no difference that my interrogators are all dead.

  It seems to me that I saw things before I actually saw them; they were always there, the way I believe that the words are always there, coursing through us. I think, for instance, that I recognized the blue walls of the blue room, walls weeping quietly away from endless damp and no fire, even though there was a fire grate, ridiculously small compared with the size of the room, in which the lid of a chocolate box had been laid as an ornament. And Our Lady? She was not the sallow creature in paintings that I would come to see on different walls, but a buxom Our Lady of Limerick, with a host of infants around her ankles, as though she had just given birth to them. Her accouchement was far happier than that of my mother, who would talk of it down the years: her labor, her long labor, the night in December and the black frost that was usual for that time of year, the midwife late and the hullabaloo, which turned out to be needless, on being told that I had club feet because I came into the world the wrong way. The child before me had died in infancy, but I always believed that she wasn’t dead, she was in one of the bedrooms, in a cupboard, or a nightdress case, and after I learned to walk, I would never go up there alone, not even in daylight.

  My father and his brother, Jack, were downstairs drinking, and on being told the good news they staggered up, bringing strips of goose which they had just cooked, it being the Christmas season. In my mother’s telling of it, the goose was half-cooked, pink and tough. Jack gave a rendering of “Red River Valley”:

  Come and sit by my side, if you love me

  Do not hasten to bid me adieu

  Just remember the Red River Valley

  And the cowboy who loved you so true.

  I was an ugly child, so ugly that when Ger McNamara, the son of the couple who lived in our gate lodge and a captain in the Irish army, came to congratulate her, my mother said I was too unsightly to be shown and therefore kept me hidden under the red herringbone quilt.

  Such is the ragbag of anecdote, hearsay, allegory, and consternation that filled the canvas of my early life, at once beautiful and frightening, tender and savage.

  My mother, Lena, Boston, 1920.

  Drewsboro was a large two-storey house, with bay windows, and could be approached by two avenues, an old and a new. The goldish sandstone of which it was built was from the burnt ruin of a “Big House” that had belonged to the English and that had been burnt in the Troubles, during the 1920s. My mother, as a young girl, would be invited to the annual garden party held each year for the local peasantry, where they were served iced buns and homemade lemonade with wasps swarming the buffet table.

  Drewsboro owed something to the stylish houses my mother had seen in America. There were ornamental piers on the gateway, bay windows, and a tiled porch that was called a vestibule opening into a tiled hallway. No other house around there had bay windows or a vestibule. The lawn had many trees, not planted in succession as in a demesne, but each tree in its own massive empire, leaves stirring and drowsing in summer and in winter, the boughs groaning and creaking, as if they were about to expire.

  By the time I was born we were no longer rich. True, we had the large house and the two avenues, but the thousand acres or more that my father had inherited had been sold off in bits, or given away in fits of generosity, or bartered to pay debts. My father had inherited a fortune from rich uncles who, when they were ordained as priests, emigrated to New England and served in the parish of Lowell, outside Boston. There, they combined spiritual and secular powers by patenting a medicine called Father John’s, which was reputed to be a cure for everything and sold by the gallon.

  Not far from our house was the ruin of the old house, also called Drewsboro, which like many big houses had been burned in order that the English militia, the Black and Tans, could not occupy them as a barracks. My fathe
r took part in that burning and would describe the high spirits with which he and other gallants doused rags in petrol, then went all around with the petrol cans, soaking walls and woodwork. Scores of matches were struck, and the subsequent bonfire, seen for miles around, was another notch of victory over the invader.

  Long before, Lord and Lady Drew had lived there, and the story went that the ghost of Lady Drew, in her shift, roamed our fields at night, wailing the loss of her acres, a woman dispossessed.

  My great-grandmother, who was widowed, acquired that house from the Drews, the money having come from the priests in Lowell. She was a haughty woman, who was driven in her pony and trap each Sunday to view her lands and her herds and then onward to glimpse the red deer as they rushed from their brakes into the heart of the wood, where oak, ash, and beech had grown into one another. By the time I was growing up, that wood had become the preserve of foxes, stoats, badgers, and pine martens who warred in the night as our dogs, too frightened to go in there, barked hysterically from the outskirts.

  Though she lived alone, she would dress each evening for dinner, always in black, with a white lace ruff, and she drank toddies from a silver-topped horn cup that bore the questionable motto of the O’Briens—“Might Before Right.” She was waited upon by a factotum named Dan Egan, and there was a verse about him, as indeed there were verses about many local people:

  Dan Egan’s in Drewsboro

  The Wattles at the Gate

  Manny Parker’s in the Avenue

  And the Nigger’s walking straight.

  The Nigger had a strawberry face that wasn’t black but dark puce, with berries hanging from it. He worked in a slate quarry. Manny Parker was a hermit who claimed to be a botanist, roamed our fields, and sometimes slept in a tent in our bog so that he could study the habits of birds and insects who, like himself, eschewed chimney corners and barn and church porches. The Wattles were so named because a daughter had gone to Australia and used the word frequently in her letters home. A postcard of hers that opened out concertina-wise, showing reefs and blue islands, was displayed on their front window.

  I preferred the outdoors, fields that ran into other fields, storm and sleet, showers and sun showers; then, as if by enchantment, primroses and cowslips sprang up next to the tall thistles and fresh cowpats that were elegantly called “pancakes.” Time flew out there, but indoors was different, being often fraught.

  My mother’s family was different from my father’s, poor people evicted from the wealthier environs of County Kildare who trudged across the central plain, met the mountains, and, in a godforsaken place, built a cabin on a bit of stone land. It was about five miles from Drewsboro, and I sometimes attribute my two conflicting selves to my contrasting grandparents, the one a lady, the other a peasant. Quite recently this was brought home to me when I was approached by an Irish newspaper to have my DNA tested, along with other people with historic family names. I balked at the procedure, but the journalist assured me that when I received the kit, he would tell me exactly what to do and what it entailed, which indeed he did. The swab was returned, and in due course I was told that, according to their findings, I share DNA with the last tsarina of Russia, Marie Antoinette, and Susan Sarandon. Asked what I felt about the royal lineage, I flinched at the unfortunate fate of the first two, and my efforts to reach Susan Sarandon proved futile.

  The ruins of the big house held a fascination for me. Along with the weasels, there were the signs of its former life: torn tongues of dark green wallpaper embossed with acorns hung in the reception room, and in the kitchen there was a set of gongs with thick crusts of verdigris, the green and silver brilliancies of bygone days. On a high mound of rubble was an elderberry tree that birds must have seeded, and my mother and I would pick the berries to make wine, which had to be hidden from my father, who might be tempted by it and after a mere sip go on the batter. It was reserved for visitors, who, apart from tinkers and Mad Mabel, were few and far between. The rungs of a staircase dangled down into what had once been a ballroom, feeding the various fantasies that I contrived, of balls, carriages along the back avenue, and footmen rushing out with lit sods of turf to help the visitors down. There would be pipers in the forecourt and tables with jugs of mulled wine, and feasting as in the sagas of old. My great-grandmother I pictured in black taffeta with an ermine coatee and a corsage, maybe violets or some other woodland flower. My mother, hearing these ravings, would smile, but then frown, desperate as she was to keep everything together and possibly sensing that the prodigal blood of the O’Briens reigned uppermost in me, rather than the blood of her own people, the Clearys, who clung steadfastly to their little mountain holding.

  Once, when I got home from school, a bailiff was sitting in our kitchen, drinking tea. He was an affable man, and before long he spoke to me, asked about school and what I had learned that day. Then he asked me to recite a poem. I recited “Fontenoy,” a heroic ballad of Irish earls and chieftains, banished and serving in foreign brigades all over Europe, missing their native soil. It was very rousing and patriotic as, even on the brink of battle, they thirsted, they starved, for their native County Clare.

  My mother called me into the pantry and put her finger to her upper lip to signify that I must tell no one of the disgrace we were in. My father had gone out, presumably to borrow money, and it was near dark when he returned and conferred with the bailiff, who then left. Disaster was postponed. Then ructions. Horses. Horses, the waste they were, strutting around the fields eating all before them, having to be sent to stud farm to be covered, eating up still more money and losing races, as my mother saw it, out of pure spite. There was one, Shannon Rose, which she singled out for particular odium, saying that the filly could come first, if she wanted to, but chose to come third, the difference between the two prize monies being exorbitant. It ended with my father going up to bed, which was far preferable to his going out, where he would be tempted, in anger and frustration, to drink.

  Horses always loomed in my mind as dangers, creatures that led to argument and pending destitution, their eyes so moist and shining in contrast to their movements, which were jerky and unpredictable as they whinnied their way from one field to the next. I would see them in the fields and then again in my mind’s eye—that great unleashing of energy, when they exploded as one into a mad gallop, their flying tails arched up, moving with such daring, such speed, showered in the dust they had raised and in their exhilaration seeming to float.

  Two summers ago a plaque was unveiled in my honor on one of the piers that led to the old avenue. Unlike the time when I was considered something of a Jezebel because of my books, now from the altar the priest spoke of the honor that it was to have me back and encouraged people to attend the ceremony. There was a small crowd, children cycling in and out, bursting with laughter, as I made a short speech on the influence Drewsboro had on my writing. “A font of inspiration” was the phrase I used, at which children laughed even more.

  It was a warm summer evening, and afterward my nephew Michael and I picked our steps over the high grass and crawled under loops of barbed wire to visit the house. It was going back to nature: trees and briars and bushes had moved in like an army to overtake it. Ivy and saplings climbed up to where the cut stone met the plaster, along with shoots and briars and ferns that wove their way, to get a grip, establishing their ownership of the place, as none of the living had succeeded in doing. Even the wild cats had gone. Some red, ribbony roses that my mother had planted threaded their way through the fallen hedging, and, picking a few as a keepsake for me, Michael cut himself, the red spurt of blood as vivid and alive as the stored memories. This the house my mother strove to keep together, this the house she swore she would never give to her thankless son, this the house with our unfinished stories and our unfinished quarrels with one another.

  My mother and father, Lena and Michael O’Brien, in Drewsboro, 1970s.

  My mother’s death was sudden. I had gone to see her in the Mater Hospital in Dublin, w
here she had been admitted with shingles. With a nun, Sister R., who had become her friend, she smeared a brown ointment over them; it was one she had got from a faith healer, and they both believed that it would cure her. She was due to be discharged in a week, but calling me over to the side of the bed, she said that we would have to go down home, just for the day. I was to fix it with the matron and the registrar, and hire a car to bring us there and back. It was like this. Long ago, when they were in danger of losing the place completely, my father, after one of his drinking sprees and in contrition, had signed the place over to her, as she would be a better manager of things. Two years before and after much insistence, my brother, John, had asked her to make a will, saying he and his wife would accompany her to the solicitors. She made the will, giving him Drewsboro, believing in her heart that at a later date she could make another. What she wanted now was to go down home in secret and make the second will, giving me the house and the surrounding lawn. I said there was no hurry, it could all be done in the fullness of time and openly, when she was recovered.

  To this day, no matter how I try to reconstruct it, I cannot arrive at the exact moment of my mother’s death, although I know the circumstances of it. It was in March 1977. I was in the airplane returning from New York, and, when I got home, the telephone was ringing; it was my sister, giving me the news. Later, from Sister R., I learned of the several comings and goings of that last flurried day. My mother was going home. A driver was coming to collect her. Since breakfast she had been ready, dressed for travel, sitting on her bed with a walking frame and a walking stick, which the nun had given her on the quiet, to take with her as a gift for her husband. In the days leading up to her going home she had been indiscreet, telling various nurses how proud she was of her intention of changing her will. One nurse, who boasted about being a friend of my brother’s, rang him urgently at his practice in Monasterevin to tell him of the crooked plan his mother was hatching. He arrived in an utter fury. Unluckily Sister R., signed up that day for a course at the university, was not present for the ugly confrontation, but as she told me in a letter, when she did return at lunchtime and popped in to say “Hello,” she found that between mother and son there was a ghastly tension.