But Enough About You: Essays (12 page)

(Feb. 19–March 20)

Your friends are sick and tired of hearing you complain and are plotting to kill you. Don’t go to the police—they hate you, too, and are in league with your friends. Move to the Cape Verde Islands and take up whaling until they’ve forgotten you ever existed, then move back and act like it never happened. But no more whining about your problems!

ARIES

(March 21–April 19)

Avoid kitchen appliances and people named Jim, Nancy, or Blethersthwaite-Jones. Be wary of letters from shareholders whom you have bankrupted. If you encounter anyone with freckles, throw white wine on them and shout, “Fiend—you have no power here!” Tell the waiter the fish has “too much mercury” and send it back. Menace the people at the next table with the pepper grinder.

TAURUS

(April 20–May 20)

Postpone that trip to Spain, Mexico, or other Latin countries. Write Merrill Lynch and propose that they make you their new corporate logo. Do not have sex with cows until the bovine spongiform encephalitis epidemic is erased from the planet. If you find yourself in a china shop, violently smash everything in it. People expect that, and with Pisces rising, you don’t want to disappoint.

GEMINI

(May 21–June 21)

We told you—didn’t we?—not to tightrope-walk across Victoria Falls in Manolo Blahniks when Capricorn and Libra were in your eleventh house. But listening has never been a Gemini strong point. All you can do at this point is try to swim faster than those crocodiles and postpone making any long-term romantic commitments. If you make it to the mudbank, avoid Leos and Scorpios.

CANCER

(June 22–July 22)

Go easy on the hollandaise—your cardiologist has four kids in college and is just looking for an excuse to do a triple bypass. When taxiing for takeoff, do not stand up and shout, “Allahu akbar!” but do leave yourself open to the possibility of romance, especially with wildly attractive, scantily clad members of the opposite sex. An old
friend posing as a telemarketer for a long-distance phone company is searching desperately for you with amazing news. Take the call.

LEO

(July 23–Aug. 22)

Watch out for radioactive bags of potato chips, rivers of molten lava, and people who introduce themselves only as “Turk.” Keep your left arm straight and your chin down. Listen to Aries, but say you’ll have to get back to him. Avoid asparagus and manatees.

—
Forbes FYI
, September 2002

Had I been present at the Creation, I would have given some useful hints for the better ordering of the universe.

—ALFONSO THE LEARNED

“Oh, the poobs are hortin’ something terrible,” said the porter at the Merrion Hotel in Dublin.

There was a sly, diversionary agenda to his banter about the calamitous economic impact of the recent smoking ban on the pubs. My friend Maggie O’Moyne and I had been waiting for the rental car to arrive. This being Ireland, it was now going on two hours late. But this being Ireland, neither of us could muster more than bemused curiosity over the delay. By this point back home, we’d have been in a cold, litigious rage. Yet despite having imbibed nearly toxic amounts of caffeine in the Merrion’s cozy lobby, richly hung with gleaming, important paintings, we were all at peace.

“Don’t you adore Ireland?” Maggie mused rhetorically for the fifteenth time.

She has adored Ireland since she came here a quarter century ago after her disgrace with the Brazilian ambassador at the Knickerbocker Gold Cotillion. Ireland being Ireland, it took her in, no questions asked, and here for two years in her ancestral land she thrived, befriending everyone—poets, painters, players, pipers, politicians. Her memoir of that sojourn,
Rambles in Ireland
, is considered a classic.

In the fullness of time—the Good Lord be thanked—the car arrived and we could begin our sentimental journey. We would visit three notable haunts of Maggie’s youth: Luggala, Glin Castle, and St. Clerans. The first is home to Ireland’s last great dandy; the second, to the twenty-ninth and last Knight of Glin; the third was once the home of John Huston, the famous director. All three are open to the public, for sums ranging from impressive to quite manageable.

Though we were already running late, we had to stop at Joyce’s Martello tower in Sandycove, where the opening lines of
Ulysses
are set (“Stately, plump Buck Mulligan . . .”). Brave, pink-skinned swimmers plunged into the surging, snot-green, frigid waves of the Forty
Foot Pool. Emerging from the tower thinking Joycean thoughts, we were drenched by the day’s tenth or eleventh rainfall. Otherwise, it was a glorious day in May. Moistly, we drove to nearby Dalkey and warmed ourselves inside and out at Finnegan’s over pints of Guinness and baked Dalkey crab.

On the way to Roundwood in County Wicklow, Maggie told a convoluted story about one of her Irish friends, someone named Roderick.

“My God,” she said as we hove into Roundwood toward late afternoon, “there he is. Exactly where I left him two years ago.”

Roderick was standing unsteadily on the pavement outside a pub, smoking a cigarette. The recent smoking ban has driven half the country’s population onto the sidewalks. He grinned at Maggie’s approach, not in the least surprised at her sudden appearance after all these years. In a country where highway projects are rerouted by town planners because they might displace notable fairy homes such as the Tree of Latoon, serendipity is taken for granted here.

He was on his fourth Irish coffee, following we guessed about as many pints, and was all congeniality. At his stage of inebriation, bar patrons in most other countries start throwing punches or shouting obscenities at the widescreen TV.

“I’m inside with a very disreputable local personage,” Roderick informed us. “I warn you, he’s a
serious
alcoholic.”

We went inside and met his friend, who greeted us warmly, if wobbily. He turned out to be a distinguished musician who records with Van Morrison and the Chieftains and is brother to Ireland’s most famous woman singer.

“You know what she’s worth?” Roderick murmured as his friend staggered off toward the Gents. “A hundred and ten million euros. How much is that in pence?”

“Don’t you adore Ireland?” Maggie said in the car. We were now seriously late. A spectacular vista opened to our left. It seemed familiar, though I had not been to this part of Ireland. Then the next day we passed a sign indicating that Mel Gibson filmed part of
Braveheart
here.

As Maggie drove, she told me about our host tonight, her old
friend the Honorable Garech a Brún. Garech is the son of Oonagh, Lady Oranmore and Browne, one of three legendarily beautiful Guinness sisters. His brother Tara Browne was killed at age twenty-one in 1966 when he drove his Lotus Elan at lethal speed into the back of a parked van in London. Tara’s friend John Lennon memorialized the event in the song “A Day in the Life” (“I heard the news today, oh boy . . .”).

Garech founded Claddagh Records, which started the Irish music revival and preserved much of Ireland’s musical patrimony from oblivion. He’s lived at Luggala for many years and is married to an Indian princess. Really, there is nothing about him that is
not
exotic. At one point in our visit, Maggie came into accidental possession of a piece of paper containing Garech’s most frequently dialed phone numbers. Among them were Bono’s cell phone, a dozen maharajahs and maharanis, Chez L’Ami Louis restaurant in Paris, and the Taj Mahal.

“You’ve never met anyone like him,” Maggie said.

We drove through a gate and descended into a long, misty valley with a river-fed lake. The road leveled as we went through a mossy glade. It felt like going through a time warp. As we emerged, I saw what looked like a small Greek temple by the shore of the lake.

“That’s where the brother’s buried. Look, deer.”

We were in an open field planted with immense four-hundred-year-old specimen trees. And yes, there were deer.

The house loomed ahead, a low white Egyptian Gothic confection with crenellations. Luggala. It was built as a hunting lodge in the 1780s and has twice been given by a father to a daughter as a wedding present. It appears in the 2004 movie
King Arthur
. Everything here seems to have been a movie set.

Garech emerged blinking and watery-eyed from a nap to greet us. And now the illusion of being in Middle Earth was complete. Luggala’s master is diminutive but dominates a room by stepping into it. I couldn’t decide—man, leprechaun, hobbit . . . wizard? He carried a walking stick and had a bald pate, long gray wispy beard, hair tied in an unkempt ponytail, and was impeccably dressed in a baby-blue tweed three-piece suit. I wouldn’t have been at all
surprised if he’d reached into his pocket and produced either a flintlock pistol or a mandrake root. His eyes gleamed with intelligence and hospitality and a trace of sadness. Later he said to me, “I’m actually a very
shy
person.” Garech looks at you with a half smile, as though daring you to blurt out whatever thought you’re withholding. In my experience, aristocrats are usually cool to the touch. This one glowed like a peat fire.

His friend and Luggala’s curator, a natty, polymath architectural historian with the unimprovable name of Count Randal MacDonnell of the Glens, poured champagne. Garech plunked himself down on an important-looking sofa and held court until suppertime.

Count Randal gave us a tour of the house, which has been undergoing renovation for the last five years. He showed us a 270-year-old clock that once kept time in the Irish Parliament and which plays “God Save the Queen” on the quarter hour; a horizontal harpsichord (“very rare”); a French Revolutionary cap in a Lucite case in a bathroom (“You don’t see many of those, do you?”); a chair on a landing that had belonged to Napoleon; paintings by, among others, Jack Yeats, Francis Bacon, and Lucian Freud, who was a sort of godfather to Garech; and the new library, which will hold 28,000 volumes.

At dinner, as the clock repeatedly chimed “God Save the Queen,” Garech read from a memoir by a member of the Bloomsbury circle, about a dinner party in this same room in the 1930s. When I got home, I found another anecdote of a dinner at Luggala in a book about the director John Huston. This one took place in the 1950s, and featured a well-and-truly-drunk Brendan Behan. Behan kept interrupting the convivial conversation, shouting, “Up the rebels!” Then, “after dessert was served, he rose unsteadily to his feet and, swaying slightly, raised his glass in the direction of our hostess. ‘To her ladyship!’ he roared. ‘God bless her!’ and fell forward onto the table, which gave way under his weight with a tinkling of breaking glass and a jingle of antique sterling silver.

“Oona [sic] said, ‘Oh, dear,’ as if someone had spilled a teaspoonful of salt, rose from the debris in front of her, and suggested that it was ‘time for us to move back into the drawing room.’ Two of the sturdier gentlemen guests lifted the eminent playwright from where
he had fallen and carried him into the adjoining chamber, where they deposited him, breathing heavily, on an ancient sofa.”

After dinner, sitting on that same ancient sofa with Garech, I noticed a pair of bronzed hands in front of the fire screen.

“I thought you’d notice those,” he said. “They’re the death hands of a very great piper named Seamus Ennis. He would stay up all night, and then after you’d finally got to sleep, wake you at five o’clock in the morning to tell you that the story he had told you at four a.m. had a detail wrong, and would tell the entire story again, which you really didn’t want to hear.”

The next morning, I walked to the Greek temple to pay my respects to Tara. We ate a good Irish breakfast of eggs, bacon, and sausage and prepared to depart.

“You must sign the book,” Garech said. Luggala’s guest book starts in 1964, the year Garech’s mother gave him Luggala. It weighs as much as a Gutenberg bible and is full of drawings and photographs. Garech gave me a guided tour through it. It took almost two hours. I was in no hurry, but Maggie, who had signed the book many times over the years, was getting frantic about being late to Glin.

One early page had a photograph of a striking woman named Tessa Welborn, who designed Ursula Andress’s bikini in
Dr. No
. Here, too, was John Hurt, the actor. Ronnie Fraser, the actor, who got very drunk at the races and fell down face forward on the course. John Boorman, the director (
Deliverance
,
Hope and Glory
), a near neighbor. Also Mick Jagger, a regular at Luggala. Charlotte Rampling, the actress. (“One of the Chieftains became so infatuated with her that he had to be pried off.”) Tara Browne, Garech’s brother, and a yellowed newspaper clipping about his fatal wreck suggesting that he’d swerved at the last second to save his passenger. He was very handsome, Tara. Ronnie Wood of the Stones. Robert Graves the poet, whose eightieth birthday party was held here. John Berryman, the poet. Marianne Faithfull. A woman with a famous German surname, an old flame of Garech, looking fiercely at the camera like combination vampire and dominatrix. (“She was
really
crazy.”) Brendan Behan. Garech’s wife, Purna, beautiful in her royal Indian finery. And an Irish poet whose last name I missed but who effectively
ended his career by broadcasting from Berlin during the war. “His defense,” Garech said, “was that an artist ought always to be on the wrong side of any issue.” He continued leafing. What times this place has seen.

We said our good-byes and drove off toward the lake, past deer and stately trees on our way to Glin.

“We’re going to be seriously late,” Maggie said. “On the other hand, no one cares. It’s Ireland.”

Glin Castle sits on the Shannon River thirty-two miles west of Limerick. It was built in 1785 and is the seat of the Knight of Glin, a title that goes back seven hundred years. The current knight, Desmond FitzGerald, is the twenty-ninth and last as he and his wife produced no son, albeit three beautiful daughters.