But Enough About You: Essays (13 page)

When your family goes back seven hundred years, there are bound to be some interesting moments. Such as this, from the family history:

. . . Thomas FitzGerald, heir of the then Knight, was hanged, drawn and quartered by the English forces in Limerick in 1567. His mother, legend has it, seized his severed head, drank his blood, and walked, surrounded by a vast keening concourse, carrying his dismembered body to be buried at Lislaughtin Abbey.

Or this, as the original castle was besieged by the forces of Queen Elizabeth I in 1600:

. . . Sir George Carew, the Lord President of Munster, captured the Knight’s six-year-old son and, tying the child to the mouth of a cannon, threatened to blow him to bits if the Knight did not surrender. The reply, in Irish, was blunt: ‘the Knight was virile and his wife was strong and it would be easy to produce another son.’

So there you have the Glin parental gamut, from Mother of the Year to Dad from Hell. FitzGerald DNA runs strong.

Desmond’s grandfather FitzJohn was paralyzed by a stroke and lived in the castle during the struggle against British rule. When Sinn Fein arrived one day in 1923 to torch the place, he refused to budge. He told them, “Well, you’ll have to burn me in it, boys.” The boys repaired to a pub and never got around to burning the castle to the ground.

Desmond is a Harvard M.A. in art history and for a decade was deputy curator of furniture at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London. He and his striking wife, Olda, have painstakingly restored Glin to a glory it never had in the first place. To pay for it all, they decided to accept guests. There are fifteen guest rooms. It’s like spending the night in a museum. Every detail is flawless.

Over dinner that night, Desmond said, “Many Americans will say, ‘I love Ireland,’ but their entire experience of it has been staying at Ashford or Dromoland Castle and playing a few rounds of golf.” A visit to Glin steeps you in Ireland like a tea bag. Glin’s manager, Bob Duff, an able and amusing New Zealander, told us about a fellow from Chicago who took over the entire place for five days. He wanted a medieval feast and jousting tournament laid on. “I told him we’re an eighteenth-century house, and not really organized for suckling pig and jousting.”

Glin has a historic link with America: The first transatlantic flying boats landed a few miles up the Shannon, at Foynes. Desmond’s mother, whose family nickname was “The Knightmare,” sold fresh produce from her garden to the flying boats during the hard times of the 1930s and ’40s. Veronica FitzGerald was by all accounts a demanding personality. “Battleship Britannia under full sail,” Bob Duff said as he showed us her masterpiece, the gardens. That the castle survived, indeed flourished, is due to her and her son, Desmond. But with him will end seven hundred years of family history. See it while you can. Maggie and I set off the next morning in a driving rain. Late as we were, she said we had to stop at Moran’s Oyster Cottage in Kilcolgan. They’ve been serving oysters here since 1797. On a wall is a framed poem by Seamus Heaney, one of Ireland’s numerous Nobel laureates.

Our shells clacked on the plates.

My tongue was a filling estuary,

My palate hung with starlight:

As I tasted the salty Pleiades

Orion dipped his foot into the water.

It was signed “To Willie Moran, in the cool and thatch of crockery.” Maggie and I sat by the fire and drank creamy Guinness and ate briny oysters and then drove to our third and last stop, St. Clerans.

There was a certain circularity to our trip. John Huston first came to Ireland in 1951 at the invitation of Garech’s mother, Oonagh. One day while hunting on horseback, he saw St. Clerans looming across the fields, fell in love with it, and, in the impulsive manner of Americans, bought the place. He lived here with his fourth wife, Ricki, and their son, Anthony, and daughter, Angelica. The upkeep finally forced him to sell eighteen years later, but he always said that his happiest years were the ones spent here. His great passion was foxhunting. He became Joint Master of the Galway Blazers.

On our first night, as Maggie and I tucked into black tiger prawn tempura and Cajun roasted monkfish—typical Irish fare—I pointed to the portrait of Huston and asked our young waiter, Barry, if he was familiar with Huston films.

“I’ve been racking my brains,” he said.

I named a few:
The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
,
The Maltese Falcon
,
Moby-Dick
,
The African Queen
,
The Man Who Would Be King
,
The Dead
.

Barry nodded. “Ah, yes. Really? Well, around here, you see, he’s known for his horses. They don’t know him for the other.”

Famous people came to visit. One was Jean-Paul Sartre, who had rather oddly agreed to collaborate on a screenplay for Huston about Sigmund Freud. He arrived by taxi from Dublin. Huston greeted him on horseback at the gate. A description of the moment is in Peter Viertel’s memoir,
Dangerous Friends
, along with the account of Brendan Behan passing out at Luggala:

It was a strange way to welcome the originator of existentialism, a man who frowned upon all personal possessions, especially those of the upper classes. Booted and spurred,
Huston greeted the small, homely intellectual . . . Sartre was not impressed. To show his distaste for all the splendor . . . Sartre entered the house and made no comment whatsoever about the architecture, the art on the walls, the lavish comfort of his host’s residence.

There are twelve bedrooms, all beautifully redone. The “Griffin” suite, named for St. Clerans’s current owner, Merv Griffin, was Huston’s bedroom. As you walk in, on either side are glass-encased alcoves in the walls. These were where he kept his Oscar statuettes. The view from Huston’s old bedroom sweeps across a field where a half-dozen horses, one of them ghost white, frisk at all hours.

On the last night of our trip, Maggie and I walked out to the fountain after dinner. The house was quiet now but tomorrow would be all astir, for Griffin was helicoptering in from Shannon Airport for a visit. He would be accompanied by his pet shar-pei dog, Charlie Chan. St. Clerans’s manager had been busily putting a thousand details right for the incoming lord of the manor.

I smoked my cigar, sipped my brandy, and looked at the house under the stars and thought of all that Luggala, Glin Castle, and St. Clerans had been through since the 1780s, when they were all built, within three years of one another.

Suddenly we heard a thunderous rumble coming at us and turned. It was the horses. The white one flashed as they galloped away in the night.

“Don’t you adore Ireland?” Maggie said. And the answer was yes.

—
Forbes FYI
, October 2005

A Brief History of Directions

3297 B.C.—A Bronze Age hunter-gatherer, tired of woolly mammoth jerky and shivering, sets out from his village in what is now the Tyrolean Alps for what is now Italy, where, he has heard, the food is better and there aren’t as many sabre-toothed tigers. The village shaman tells him to head due north. His body is found by hikers in 1991, clutching directions drawn on lambskin.

1275–1235 B.C.—Moses and his brother, Aaron, spend forty years leading his people from Egypt to the Dead Sea, a distance of 250 miles (San Francisco–Lake Tahoe). Moses is righteous and brave, but clueless when it comes to following directions. He misses an important exit on the Thebes–Red Sea Beltway, finding himself and his people waist-deep in water.

Moses’s people eventually chafe at making only .027 miles progress per day and begin worshipping the Golden Calf (a Babylonian god of direction-giving) and practicing unsafe sex. Moses climbs Mount Sinai in what scholars consider the first recorded attempt by a male to ask directions of a higher power. The Ten Directions, later “Commandments,” lead the way to the Land of Milk and Honey and usher in the start of the Three Thousand Years’ Middle East Peace Process.

1184–1174 B.C.—Odysseus, king of Ithaca and master mariner, takes ten years to return home from Troy, a distance of approximately 650 miles (New York–Cincinnati). Fearing that his wife, Penelope, will hurl priceless amphorae at him upon his arrival, he commissions a
sight-challenged, out-of-work poet to concoct an epic cover story based on having been given faulty directions by a vengeful sea god. Penelope, meanwhile, hoping to divert his attention from the 108 young bachelors who have been hanging around the house for a decade, draining the amphorae of his best retsina, pretends to believe her husband’s so-called Odyssey, though she makes him clean up the house.

4 B.C.—Three westward-leading, still proceeding Oriental kings on their way to the annual meeting of the KOTA (Kings of Orient Trade Association) in Damascus become disoriented by a light in the sky and end up in a crowded stable in Bethlehem during the annual Christmas outbreak of violence there.

A.D. 1306—The Florentine poet Dante becomes lost in a dark wood (
selva oscura
) while trying to find an Amoco (Latin: “I love oil companies”) station and accepts directions from the ghost of the Roman poet Virgil. Virgil leads him straight to Hell.

1336—The Italian poet Petrarch climbs Mount Ventoux, not, as scholars have suggested, to usher in the Renaissance, but to find the way to Milan, where he is eager to attend the first recorded runway fashion show. Pope Livid VI, disapproving of the “shameless display of ankles and wrists by the
fashionisti Milanese
,” has ordered Milan to be erased from maps so that no one can find it. Petrarch’s bold initiative represents the attempt by man to wrest direction-giving power away from the Church. In retaliation, Livid orders Manolo Blahnik, a cobbler, burned at the stake.

1492—The Genoese navigator Christopher Columbus buys a map ostensibly showing a “short route to the Indies” from a man he meets in a bar in Seville. After two months, Columbus’s men tire of eating
barnacles and licking dew off the deck. To divert them, Columbus discovers the Bahamas instead and encourages the crew to infect the local population with the many wonderful diseases they have brought with them from the Old World.

1847—The Donner Party takes a left instead of a right and spends a long winter eating bark, among other things, in what is now California. Governor Gray Davis blames the crisis on Republicans.

1964—In
A Hard Day’s Night
, John Lennon tells reporters who ask how the Beatles found America, “Turn left at Greenland.”

More British rock bands follow John’s directions, though upon reaching Greenland, the Rolling Stone Keith Richards attempts to snort it and comes down with a severe head cold.

—
Forbes FYI
, March 2003

Machu Picchu had long been on my “Things to See Before I Die” list, so when my friend, boon companion, and personal physician Dr. Peaches Melocotón announced that she had reserved a suite at the Sanctuary Lodge for the full moon, I replied,
“¡Vámanos!”

That is more or less what Pizarro’s conquistadors said upon hearing that the Incan cities here were paved with gold, along with: “What an excellent time we shall have kidnapping, torturing, and
burning the Incas alive, to say nothing of raping their women, looting the country, and destroying the last of a seven-thousand-year-old line of civilizations—all in the name of the One True Faith!”

This is my own gloss, admittedly, but it will be recognizable to anyone who has read William Prescott’s masterpiece,
History of the Conquest of Peru
. The book was published in 1847, at a time when the United States was engaging in its own conquistadorial episode, storming the heights of Chapultepec in Mexico City and annexing California, Utah, Arizona, great swaths of Colorado and Wyoming, and just for good measure another heaping helping of Texas. Just to show what good sports we were, we named one purloined chunk of this windfall “New Mexico.”

Prescott’s history of Peru’s tragedy is remarkable not only for its contemporaneous anti-imperialist flavor. A century and a half later, it is still authoritative, and its protein-rich nineteenth-century prose is writing to raise the hairs on your arms. (“
Thus by the death of a vile malefactor perished the last of the Incas!
”) Then there’s this detail: it was written by a blind man. Prescott lost vision in one eye during a food fight in a Harvard dining hall; the other the following year, due to a congenital condition. He went on to write the definitive histories of the conquests of Mexico and Peru. My dog-eared copy was the first thing I put in my overnight bag. Dr. Melocotón was in charge of altitude sickness meds.

Lima’s virtues do not immediately reveal themselves to the first-time visitor. The ride from the airport to Miraflores—the city’s answer to Baghdad’s Green Zone—put me in mind of those movies where the arriving gringo’s motorcade is suddenly blocked by a truck as men in ski masks scamper across the flanking rooftops, firing rocket-propelled grenade launchers.

It’s a sprawling city of more than eight million on which less than ten millimeters of rain fall per year. The cold Humboldt Current produces a sort of dirty gray mist called
la garúa
that envelopes the city for months at a time. Miraflores’s nicest residential neighborhood is a more or less continuous strand of concertina wire and spiked gates. Private security guards wear flak jackets.

Lima grew during the late 1980s and early ’90s, heyday of Sendero
Luminoso terrorism. Then, President Alberto Fujimori, son of Japanese immigrants, finally succeeded in capturing Shining Path’s leader, Abimael Guzmán, a nasty combination of Mao Tse-Tung and Charles Manson. He and hundreds of his followers were imprisoned for life. During his ten-year reign, Fujimori also built schools, hospitals, and roads, improved services, eliminated hyperinflation, and generally brought the country back from the abyss. But this being Latin America, there was an arrest warrant out for him on charges of corruption and human rights violations. Fujimori was apprehended in Chile not long after we were there and is now awaiting extradition to the country he saved. In the meantime, Peru reelected Alan García, whose accomplishments as president in the ’80s included an inflation rate of more than 7,000 percent.