Midlife Irish (32 page)

My mom knew more about baseball than my friends. She also knew more than I did. That’s because she listened to the Phillies
games with rapt, focused attention.

When I got older, I wondered about this. Since she was, after all, from Ireland, where baseball was not played, and none of
her friends (or her husband) were at all interested in baseball, I found her interest puzzling.

She told me about her introduction to the game, her first impressions. At her first game she was astounded, like so many other
people, upon entering the stadium and seeing the vast green in the middle of the dingy gray city of Philadelphia, in the dingy
gray area of Twenty-first and Lehigh Avenue. Almost every baseball fan I know, however, has that same impression imprinted
on his or her brain. What else?

She told me that she was astounded at the fact that a long towering fly ball to center field was just an out, while a tiny,
off-the-end-of-the-bat Texas Leaguer could be a big deal if it happened at the right time. Then she was amazed at how the
distance from home to first was such that a fast runner who hit a ground ball to the shortstop would be just
barely
out if the ball was fielded cleanly and thrown well. She was also surprised at how a fly ball had to be just
so
deep if the runner was to tag and make it home. My mom was into baseball.

My mom and I went to many Phillies games, less than a hundred, more than fifty. She was a great person to watch a game with
because she was totally into the game and never needed anything, although she would get me whatever crap (hot dogs, caramel
corn) I wanted. She didn’t talk that much at the games, but when she noticed something, she mentioned it. It was always something
interesting.

At home she listened to the games on the radio. She didn’t like to watch them on television, but she would watch the tube
if she had to. She hated it when they showed the view from behind the pitcher.

“That ruins it,” she’d say.

I asked her why and she pointed out that you couldn’t see the fielders’ little moves, you couldn’t see the base runners, and
you couldn’t see the pitcher’s face.

But she listened to every Phillies game on the radio. I think she liked to picture the game in her mind.

Somewhere inside her, I knew there were pictures of Ireland. But my mom, like my dad, almost never talked to me about it.
The only story she ever shared with me about her childhood in Ballyhaunis was the story of her First Holy Communion. And it
was the only story she ever told me that made her visibly sad. It always made me feel that way also. It still does.

First Holy Communion is a huge day in an Irish Catholic kid’s life. It’s like ten birthdays rolled into one. In actuality,
my mom’s First Holy Communion was probably a happy day. For a kid in County Mayo, it had to be a highlight. At the beginning
of the story I could see that the mere memory of the day was exciting to her. My mom’s voice didn’t go up and down. It was
a steady, unending stream. But I could tell from the details that that was a big day.

When she told me about that big day in Ireland, I had already experienced my own First Holy Communion in New Jersey. It was
not a jump-up-and-down day for me. It was nothing like Christmas. The best thing about it, I remembered, was that it took
place at the end of May, and school was almost finished for a year. But I could tell that it had been a big, big deal to her.
She remembered all of the details.

Half of the stuff she told me, I didn’t understand. There was a lot of Irish stuff and church stuff that went right over my
head. With my mom everything went by very fast. I didn’t ask for clarification. There was, however, one detail that, to her,
was horrible. It caused her, even fifty years later, enormous emotional pain.
The black shoes.

When she got to the shoes, she paused, and she never paused. She swallowed or something. Then she went on. The
river flowed on, just like usual. But then she repeated the thing. The detail. The shoes. The words stopped.

I was amazed. My mom was crying. Very quietly.

She recovered almost immediately and went on. But my attention was focused on the thing that made her stop instead of the
rest of the story. It seemed to me a very small thing that made my mom cry, almost nothing at all really. The shoes? The sort
of thing you forget quickly. She didn’t forget quickly. Her parents, she told me, refused to buy her white shoes for the big
day. The white shoes cost too much money, and First Holy Communion, while a big thing and a sacred day in Ireland, is only
one day. They decided against the white shoes. That’s a lot to spend for one day, Anne, they told her. Think of how much food
you can buy with a pound, Annie. Think of that. So we can’t get the shoes, Anne. Sorry, Anne. No white shoes.

“So we can’t get the shoes, Anne. You’ll get over it.” That’s what they told her, and that sentence burned its way into my
heart. When she told me the story of the First Holy Communion and the black shoes in our kitchen in New Jersey, I could still
feel how much those words had hurt her.

“So we can’t get the shoes, Anne.”

She said it again and looked out the window. Her face was set, accepting the way things go. But I could see that she was thinking
back to the day she had heard the words. And her eyes showed that she had never really forgotten how much that hurt, how much
it crushed her.

She looked out the window for a minute. Then she dabbed her eyes with a dishtowel, and she went back to whatever else there
was.

I try to picture that scene. My mom had to receive her first communion with the “wrong shoes.” First Holy Communion was held
in the village church, the most important place in town, and Mom was there, wearing the same white dress her mother had worn,
but she had to be in a long line of little
girls in white dresses, the only one without white shoes. The only one with big ugly black shoes.

“I had to wear big ugly black shoes with laces.” She put it that way, “Big ugly black shoes with laces.” That was the part
of the story that crushed her. She told me this story only once or twice. She couldn’t get through it without crying at the
memory of that distant humiliation.

I really don’t believe she told anybody except my brother and sister and me the story. To be honest, I find that I cannot
tell it now without feeling empty and bleak and very, very sad.

That was the one single major image I had of my mom’s childhood—the black, ugly shoes and First Holy Communion, so I had,
in my mind’s eye, always imagined Ballyhaunis as a place of desperate poverty, a place where saving a pound was worth hurting
a little girl. But when we drove into the little town of Ballyhaunis, I was quite stunned by what I saw on the way in. Ballyhaunis
was doing very well. There were handsome homes and BMWs and handsomer, half-built homes and Mercedes Benzes and Jaguars and
manicured lawns. Automatic sprinklers and cell phones and winding drives and high-school kids in convertible Beemers and smiling
well-dressed people with really good haircuts.

No one seemed to be having difficulty coming up with the dough for the white shoes around there, the suburbs around the town.

The town itself looked exactly like every other little Irish town. Two banks, two pharmacies, an off-track betting place,
three or four B&Bs, and a few pubs. Every place, of course, had a freshly painted sign.

Ballyhaunis was the first town I saw in Ireland with the names from my family tree on signs. Forde and Turley owned a lot
of stuff here. Forde and Turley were doing well. We decided to stay at a B&B right in the town. The first one we saw was called
The Avondale. It was a beautiful old place run by a very nice lady named Bridie Levins. I talked with her for
a few moments and discovered that she not only knew my mom’s family, she was actually related to me. Her uncle was my mom’s
cousin. I was going to say, “That means that you are my…” but I stopped myself because I knew that I could never finish the
sentence until I drew one of those little family-tree charts and stared at it for about an hour and a half. Then I would be
able to say, “You are my second cousin, once-removed,” or something.

Bridie Levins told us that there was a pub named the Hazel, which was run by a Margaret Hopkins. Margaret Hopkins was Jimmy
Hopkins’s daughter, and Jimmy Hopkins, I had learned, was very close to the Forde girls. I had thought that this would be
a major mystery, but once I got to Ballyhaunis, it wasn’t.

Bridie said that my mom and her sisters liked to laugh a lot when they were young. That was not a big surprise. They liked
dances. I remembered seeing an old yellow picture of my mom all dressed up in what looked like one of the
Untouchables
speakeasy scenes. In the picture she’s laughing and her arm is around some guy who looks like the young Victor Mature. My
mom must have had a few laughs hanging around with the young Victor Mature.

That night we went to the Hazel, which is a very nice pub: polished brass and dark wood and beautiful old pictures on the
wallpapered walls. We found seats and asked for Margaret Hopkins. She came over right away. Margaret Hopkins was a very attractive
woman in her forties. She was extremely open and gracious and talking to her was as easy as breathing.

She told us that yes, indeed, she knew my mom’s sisters very well because they actually were, for a time, her babysitters.
I tried to picture that. She didn’t remember my mom much, but she had vivid memories of my mom’s two sisters, Delia and Mary.

“Mary had that Yank accent,” she said.

Margaret Hopkins told us about the sisters, who never married, living out there in the little house. They farmed a little.
They didn’t go out much, but when they did, they really liked to get dressed up. She also told us something totally surprising:
My mother had a sister I had never heard of. She was never mentioned in any kind of family thing, and I had never heard a
single word spoken about her.

She had been born with severe birth defects. My mom’s sister could never walk. She had to be cared for all her life, and she
died young, and she was not afterward discussed.

It amazed me, for a moment, that no one had ever mentioned my mom’s sister. How could a detail that large go unmentioned for
all those years? Wouldn’t my mom, a woman of a thousand words, have referred to this sister at least once? (I asked my brother
and my sister. To the best of their knowledge, my mom never said a single word about this sister.) I was amazed again at how
some Irish people avoid talking about something they aren’t comfortable with. They avoid it for lifetimes. My mom, who had
said probably a million words in my presence, had never
mentioned
this sister.

The horror of life, the shared tragedy that all Irish people in some way share, this is a
given
. The nightmare is not a surprise; the absence of the nightmare is. If you are lucky enough to avoid the nightmares, above
all, do not talk about them. Talking about them, even
mentioning
them, only encourages them. So any crippling, horrible malady is not to be talked about. Do you want it to approach?

In talking with the people in Ireland, I always knew, after a while, which subjects were
verboten
. There was always a look that told me. Sometimes a silence would fall and someone would say, in a low voice, “There’s no
luck in that.”

Or just, “Not that.”

I had been told this, sometimes in code, many times when I was in Ireland. “If you talk about bad things,” I was told by a
little man in a pub near Spanish Point, “the bad things hear their name, and they come because they’ve been called. Like a
dog. So you never mention anything really horrible. If you get drunk or something and just mention them, they come.
They hear their name and they come. And you don’t want that,” he added emphatically.

The man from Spanish Point who said that was not smiling. He was very drunk, but I believe that he thought that he was speaking
nothing but the truth, and I think, in a way, he was. In American baseball you do not mention it when somebody is pitching
a no-hitter. In Ireland, you do not talk about the “bad things.”

So my mom’s sister, my aunt, my crippled aunt, was never mentioned.

We made an arrangement to talk with Jimmy Hopkins at eight the next night. Jimmy knew the sisters Forde very well. After all
those years, I was going to go back to where everything began for my mother.

That night I tried to picture it as I fell asleep. I was now going to see the place that had always seemed like a place in
a strange old fairy tale. The little house out in the woods. The house where they didn’t buy the little girl the white shoes.
The place where they broke the little girl’s heart, a place like Hansel and Gretel’s house. I was going to visit a place that
had occupied a little place in my mind since I was a kid. But now it would have walls and a door and floors and windows. And
real ghosts: little girls who fall asleep sobbing as they gaze through the dim light at the ugly black shoes on the floor
next to the bed.

We arrived at the house at the appointed time. A little girl, maybe Jimmy’s daughter, went with us as a sort of guide. It
was very windy, but as clear as it gets in Ireland. It felt a little spooky walking out to find the house. I don’t know why,
but I felt extremely nervous and tight. My mouth was very dry.

My mom’s house was about as big as our garage in our old house back in New Jersey. It was a tiny house, but much larger and
nicer than my dad’s place outside Athlone. It was
white and yellow and the door was brown. It wasn’t hard to see that, at one time, this had been a very nice little house.
The little girl opened the door and I walked inside. I thought of Anne Forde as a little girl.

No one had been in the house for a long time. There were piles of cardboard and dirt and little metal parts that used to hold
shelves and half-collapsed tables and strange wild plants growing up through the holes in the floor. There was so much of
this overgrowth that it was difficult to walk. I shuffled along through the refuse, trying as well as I could to move from
room to room. There seemed to be four rooms in the house, but it was hard to tell where one room ended and another began because
there was so much stuff on the floor. I couldn’t see the actual floor for the weeds and the junk.