The Last Cadillac (21 page)

But I'd already made up my mind.

He shook his head, gave Dad a hearty pat on the back, and waved in my direction, all the while opening the office door to escape. “Well, good luck!” He was out the door with the flip of a chart.

I wanted to make the trip as comfortable as possible. I did my research and found a driver who would pick us up at the airport and take us around, and we kept all of our prior reservations made through Lucy. The staff at the Shelbourne Hotel had a reputation for hospitality, like all the Irish. I called the agent at the hotel to discuss our situation. She cheered me on. “Oh, it will be brilliant,” she said in lilting Irish laughter. “You bring your dad and the wee one and come on now. It'll be foin.”

The flight was remarkably calm. We slept through most of it, except for Dad, who said he didn't sleep at all, even though he snored with his large, white head resting on the pillow and his legs tucked under a blue fleece blanket. Getting back and forth to the bathroom was a production, but we made it with relative ease—and limited liquid intake.

Our driver, John McCrory, met us in baggage claim at the airport in Dublin. He looked exactly like I thought he would: tall with silver hair and a strong jaw, and a twinkle in his eye. He held a tweed cap in one hand and wore a long black coat. He gave me a crisp nod and a big smile, and he and Dad shook hands, John bending slightly to Dad who presided in
a wheelchair like arriving royalty. They became fast friends on the spot. Little Sunshine danced amid the confusion, with the luggage and tourists and the blaring of announcements.

I relaxed, but we had a long way to go.

John rolled Dad along in the wheelchair to a large black Mercedes, put Dad in the front seat, and loaded the luggage in the trunk. With dispatch, he said, “So there,” and we were off to the Shelbourne. It wasn't a long ride, but it was a welcome breather to drink in the cozy rows of stucco houses that gave way to the big city of small whizzing cars driving with abandon. Dublin, on the outskirts, looked like London—or Chicago and New York—but then the city revealed its distinctive Georgian architecture of classic grey stone buildings with enormous, bright green, blue, or red doors and gleaming brass fittings. Frosted nineteenth-century street lamps festooned with seahorses and leaves. Black iron gates opening to spotless alleyways.

We pulled up to the hotel overlooking St. Stephen's Green, surrounded by Georgian townhouses with the doors of Dublin. On that February afternoon, midday walkers bundled in tweed ambled briskly around the pots of winter flowers, brilliant under a patch of silver sky shining through very tall trees. An old woman was feeding the birds.

John McGrory and Eddy, the doorman, lifted Dad out of the car and into the wheelchair. A minute later, two men arrived with an instant ramp so they could roll Dad into the hotel. Then, the helpers disappeared. I followed Little Sunshine up a few steps from the damp street into the lobby, where a fire crackled at the hearth. Little Sunshine landed on a heap of luggage piled neatly on the well-worn carpeting. More polished brass planters and vases full of flowers splashed the small lobby with deep purple, yellow, shades of
red, so lush I wanted to pinch them.

“Mom! Look!” said Little Sunshine. She rubbed her hands together in front of the fire and wiggled among the suitcases. Her eyes beamed at a silver tray of tiny sandwiches and fruit and almond petits fours on a marble table off the lobby. A small woman in a black dress with starchy white cuffs and collar poured hot chocolate into china cups for a young couple seated on a small divan.

Just in time for tea. I smiled and nodded at Little Sunshine, then turned to the receptionist who slid some paperwork toward me. “We are so happy to see you.” John was back and chatting with Dad, and it didn't look like I could pry them apart. But I finally got John's ear. We made tentative plans to meet some time later in the week to take a tour around Dublin.

So far so good. We've made it well into the first day.

“Oh, the gale was blowin' for days til just last night,” said Eddy. He busied himself with the luggage cart. “Until ye landed, it was frightful. But now it looks like it might clear up for ye a bit.”

Good weather often followed me. My luck changed through the years, due entirely to some quirk of nature, and prayer. It simply happened, and after growing up in gloomy stretches of cold, snowy weather, this could only mean a fortunate turn of events. Through the lobby doors, the sky over St. Stephen's shone with a streak of gold in the silver. It was a good omen.

“Yes, the weather,” I said. “The rain is soft in Ireland. I like it very much.”

“Ye do, do ye?” he said, as he finished loading the cart. “Still, we'll see if we can't order ye some proper weather for yeer holiday.” I tipped him, and he tipped his hat in return.

In Ireland, holiday and vacation are the same (that is, any time off), and the Irish are adept at helping visitors experience their holiday. They tell jokes and pour Guinness. They stop whatever they are doing to take the lost and confused to wherever they are headed, even if it means giving up some precious time. And inevitably, a brief encounter with any one of our Irish hosts gets down to the question of the day: “Have ye been to see the Great Mouse at the Disney?”

Our adjoining rooms overlooked St. Stephen's Green. I pulled back the heavy blue silk drapery and stared at a wide view of treetops, carriages, and traffic six stories below. Dad and Little Sunshine were already down for a nap, but I was wide awake, poking at the damask bedcovers, stacking underwear in the polished mahogany dresser. I drifted over to the window again and looked down at the busy street and into the park where splashes of primroses, fuchsia, and alyssum bloomed everywhere. It was late February, but the soft rains and temperate climate made all of Ireland a regular garden year-round. A horse carriage clip-clopped past the hotel, and taxis and walkers crisscrossed the paths among the hedges. In my head, hours of jet engines still droned away. I needed to sleep, but I couldn't lie down and let all that life down in Dublin swirl around without me. I left a note for Little Sunshine and went down the lift for a short walk.

It was not a holiday for most Dubliners. Rushing workers were swinging briefcases, weaving in and out of Grafton Street, faces set. It was time for many of them to be getting off the job. I bustled along like one of them and mingled with trench-coated girls with short, dark hair and fresh,
ruddy white faces. Clutching my long green gabardine coat around me, I wove through the crowd and reveled in the moist, temperate Irish air. They looked at me and I looked back at my kinsmen and women, knowing I was one of them, but not knowing any of them. I thought, how crazy it is to be here, and how I'd always be reminded of the brisk pace, the rough red face of an old man in the doorway, smoking and eyeing the crowd leisurely, the young man hurrying as fast as he could to the pub or home, the young mother wiping cracker crumbs tenderly from the pink face of a cherub in a stroller. The baby dropped the cracker and the mother picked it up, brushed it lightly and handed it back to the small, outstretched fingers. “Here ye be,” she said, and she caught me smiling.

At dinner, Dad drank and ate everything he could get his hands on, especially the Harp and soda bread slathered in sweet butter. Little Sunshine called it “non-stop chewing,” though she wasn't much different than her grandfather in that department, and neither was I. Over the course of several days, we ate in the dining room of the Shelbourne, at the Clarence Hotel tearoom (hoping to see Bono. We didn't), and at the King Sitric north of Dublin on the sea. In short order, we ate our way through heaps of bread and scones, sole and plaice, creamy vegetable soups, hot chips, baby greens, galia melons and pastry, with a river of tea, Harp, Cork gin, and hot chocolate.

One night, while Dad slept upstairs, my daughter ate chicken sandwiches and lemon cookies, and I drank an Irish coffee in the hotel lounge. Our favorite spot was a sofa near the fireplace. We listened to the piano player. We talked to the staff when it got very late and the crowd thinned out. We
stared at the Waterford crystal chandelier as big as Cinderella's coach, and we wondered out loud about all the people who had been reflected a million times over in its tiny prisms. We studied the symmetrical arrangement of paintings that hung on nearly forty feet of wall as we tried out different sofas and chairs. From the windows in the lounge, we took pictures of the horses and carriages clomping by beyond the flower boxes under the hotel windows. We watched well-dressed men and women, young and old, talking with their hands, and we made up stories about what they did all day. We wrote in our journals and brought our books down to the sitting areas we appropriated, hanging out at the Shel-bourne like it was the usual thing to do.

Then one evening, my daughter wore hot pink velvet overalls and a sweater to match. The young woman on the sofa across from us said, “How pink pink pink you are.”

Her boyfriend said, “Your piercing blue eyes are quite lovely tonight.”

Sunshine laughed and bounced onto the sofa. Mary was a shop girl who worked in a boutique on a chic Dublin alley, and she liked to rove around the city with her boyfriend, Declan.

“Alley? You work in the alley?” my daughter asked. Her eyes opened wide, imagining the beautiful Mary with white skin and short black hair toiling away in an alley.

Declan chuckled. “It's not one of your dark places, you know, where the garbage piles up for the rats and such. We call it an alley, or the mews. Years ago, the carriage drivers used these small side streets to park their horses inside the wide doors under living quarters,” he said. “Now, many of these alleys are places for fancy wankers in their fancy shops and row houses.”

Mary gave him a poke and laughed. “Ah, don't be callin' me a wanker.”

“Not you, me love.” He wrapped his arm around her and gave her a squeeze, then he kissed her on the cheek. He had the honed features and endearing, disheveled look of an artist. In fact, he was an artist, working part-time to support his habit of splashing paint on canvas in his tiny studio. I guessed they were both about twenty-five, if not younger.

“What's a wanker?” asked my daughter.

“Someone who is puttin' on airs—someone full up to here,” said Declan, putting a hand over one dark eyebrow. I took another large sip of my Paddy whiskey and hot coffee, and leaned over to choose a piece of pound cake, which I needed like another thigh. I offered the platter to Mary.

“Mom, I think we're wankers.”

“I hope not,” I said. We all burst into laughter.

“Aye, and you're not,” said Mary. “You're loooove-ly.”

They left soon after that. Having such a delightful time, I didn't notice that it got to be past midnight.

“It's like being in a story, isn't it, Mom?”

“What is?”

“Being here,” she said. “We're in this very exciting story, and the people are walking around and talking in it.”

“And we're turning the pages, aren't we?”

“I'd sure like to know how it turns out.”

I had no idea how things would turn out for us, but we had our imaginations. My daughter and I made up a fine destiny for Mary and Declan. She got out of the alley and wore a silver dress to her wedding at Waterford Castle where the green candles lit up a crystal stairway decked out in white roses, after which Declan sold his fabulous paintings to kings and museums, and the Silver Princess and the Artist
lived happily ever after with one boy and one girl, who bore a striking resemblance to Tick and Little Sunshine. The girl had freckles and danced a lot, and the boy played the guitar and was a true Viking. We needed some work on the end of it, and we finally agreed—very tired by then—how very far away the adventure of our story had carried us from Florida and all around Ireland and back to the lounge at the Shel-bourne under the crystal ball of a chandelier.

My biggest fear during our trip was that Dad would get sick, or fall down and break something, or worst of all, that he'd have another stroke. But he slept soundly. Actually, I had a heck of a time getting him out of bed, until I mentioned breakfast. He loved the Irish oatmeal, marmalade, and coffee, and he was already asking me if we could pack some in our suitcase. I also worried about the flu or food poisoning, for all of us. But when Dad didn't feel well, he never suffered quietly. He was an enormous baby about it, and ordinarily, I didn't mind babying him. I just didn't want to do it in Ireland.

Aside from all my worrying, he was weathering the trip quite well, and enjoying every minute of it. His favorite part of the day seemed to be his hour of holding court in the hotel lounge, reading the Dublin newspapers, sipping a Harp near the fire, and yapping away with Eddy, or Sarah, or Billy, or any ready, willing, and available member of the friendly staff at hand. They all loved to talk; it's an Irish gene.

Then, it happened. Someone had to get sick. After all, we were in the Land of Murphy.

On the third night, Little Sunshine started throwing up. One too many hot chocolates, I thought, but then it didn't stop. She developed a fever. I wiped her face for hours, and then I got scared. I was also very tired. Neither one of us slept for more than half an hour, with the changing of towels and wringing of hands. Dad woke up once, shuffled in on his walker, and stared at Little Sunshine for an unusually long time for him. He was satisfied that she was back to sleep, and then he went off the bathroom. “You'll handle it,” he said. “And she'll be fine.”

I prayed he was right, wondering if anyone up there heard me, and then I wandered out into the hallway. It was the dead of dawn and no one moved about. I tried to think about what to give her, or where to go for help. I had to do something. She was becoming dehydrated.

A cart mounded over with linen was parked at the elevators, ready for the morning rounds. A door clicked softly, and then a rustling, and a small girl in a black and white uniform rounded the corner. I had the feeling she'd been hovering close by, and now she scurried toward me, leaving her cart and clasping her hands together. Her fine black brows were knit together in concern. A tiny white cap perched on a halo of coal-black curls, she turned her head first one way, then the other, worry etching her sweet face.