The Music Lesson (5 page)

The way I miss my mother, the idea of my mother, will probably be with me for the rest of my life. But it’s entirely Pete I’ve been thinking about since I got to Ireland. I feel very much that it’s Pete Dolan’s daughter tramping the road into the village, here at last in the land of her forebears. Not that Pete’s ever been here. For all the talk, he has never set foot on this island. We never traveled any farther than Maine or Cape Cod for a couple
of weeks every summer. I grew up, yet another lonely only Dolan child, went through the public schools, and spent my first twenty years entirely in the Mission Hill neighborhood of Boston, just across Huntington Avenue from Brookline, Massachusetts, birthplace of Saint John Fitzgerald Kennedy.

But right now, as connected as I feel to every rock and furze bush in West Cork, it is deeply frustrating to me that I can’t tell a soul in Ballyroe that I have O’Driscoll blood. I have managed to produce a vague, uninterested smile when more than one person has mentioned to me that I have the look of a Dolan all right, that there are Dolans in Skibbereen, Dolans in Timoleague, Dolans down in Red Strand, Dolans in Clonakilty, not five miles from here. I’m sure there are, and I’m sure that more than a few of them are my cousins.

So is Mickey. (His great-great-grandfather James O’Driscoll was my great-grandmother Maureen O’Driscoll Dolan’s brother; they were Skibbereen O’Driscolls.) How can it be that I’ve known him just weeks, since the middle of November?

But I’ve always known him. Mickey is the light of my life, the fire of my loins. Michael Patrick O’Driscoll. He is only twenty-five years old and I am forty-one—not quite Humbert Humbert, but this is a little shocking and I am a little shocked—and I am greedy for him.

Thinking about him changes the way I am breathing right now. I am blushing, alone in this room, in this cottage at the edge of nowhere. Have I lost my mind? Is he just some atavistic fantasy of my own devising? Have I dreamed up this halcyon Irish interlude?

I’ve certainly thrown over my traces. I am alive again, reinvented. I exist in the world in new ways because of Mickey. This was meant to be, if anything was ever meant to be. That sounds melodramatic. What would be better words for this? Mickey O’Driscoll has asked me to come here and I have done it.

Sometimes people do the right thing for the wrong reasons.

In my heart of hearts, I cannot say that I am as committed to the cause of uncompromised and everlasting freedom from the Brits as I am in love with Mickey. Would I be here if anyone else had approached me two months ago and appealed to me on purely ideological grounds? Truthfully, probably not. But maybe. I’ll never know.

I do know that I believe with all my heart that the British government has no right in Ireland, never had any right in Ireland, and never can have any right in Ireland. The presence of the British government in Ireland is a usurpation and a crime.

Those are more or less the words of James Connolly, who commanded the Dublin Division at the General Post Office attack that began the Easter Rising in 1916. Because he was wounded in the fighting, he was propped up and tied to a chair for his execution by British soldiers. Paddy gave me five dollars for memorizing Connolly’s words when I was ten, and he used to delight in trotting me out for a recitation when the precinct’s floating poker game landed at our house.

If my performance came late enough in the proceedings—that is, after the beer and Irish had been flowing for a while—it would usually elicit tears and shouts and lots of maudlin singing.

I am, either way, as deeply certain of the rightness of our plan as I think Pete would be, if he knew about it.

“I think I’d like yer old man. A tree is known, after all, by its fruit,” Mickey said when I quoted to him over our soup on that first afternoon the basic Pete Dolan rant on the subject of Charles Edward Trevelyan and the obscenity of the so-called Relief Commission, which presided over the genocide we call “the potato famine.”

Of course, much depends on the treeness of the tree, I told him, and he laughed.

There is a love for the real, an affection for the true, in all of Dutch art. A church interior with its stillness. A hand with its gesture. A landscape with its distances. A
cloud with its motion. People being people. Dogs being dogs. Cheese being cheese. Sky, always, the sky, conferring proportion and context on everything. But there is always intimacy, the intimacy of experience without pretension.

There is a profound link, for me, between Irish passion and Dutch restraint, here on the edge of the sea, in this cottage alone with her, in all her radiant serenity.

I
FIRST VISITED
the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum on a class trip in the sixth grade. I was stunned, shocked by the existence of this place. We were led around by a harassed-looking fortyish woman who was called a “docent”; because I had never heard the word before, she seemed exotic to me, decent and docile and intelligent. I was thrilled that this woman seemed to exist to provide me with information about the paintings. And I didn’t just love the paintings; I loved the idea that the paintings were so important that a magnificent villa had been erected to house them all.

The docent had us on a high-speed elementary school schedule, and we traipsed from one end of the building to the other, stopping only when she had something
to say about certain paintings that someone had decided would interest schoolchildren. My classmates jostled one another, shuffled their feet, fidgeted, whispered, and were clearly bored, but I was mesmerized, transfixed, enthralled.

“Sometimes you can learn all sorts of things about people when you look carefully at a painting, children,” the docent implored above our murmurings. “Can anyone tell me something about the people in this painting?” She indicated the picture in front of us, which was Vermeer’s
The Concert
. I had never seen anything like it. What art there was in my household was not very interesting—the most appealing item that I can remember on the walls was a free calendar from the bank that reproduced twelve Currier and Ives prints.

Here was a new world. I drank in the complications of light and dark on the carpet on the table. The wall glowed with reflected sunlight. I had an overwhelming desire to be in that room with those three people. There was a landscape painting visible inside the raised lid of the harpsichord and another on the wall. What possibilities! I could hardly take in the life that was indicated by this painting, the promise of life. The love of the real. I felt effaced by it, absorbed.

I was suddenly impatient that the figure of the man sitting on a chair in the middle of the group, in the middle of the canvas, blocked my view of the hands of the
woman seated at the harpsichord. I wanted to see her hands. Someone made a rude sound behind me, and there was muffled giggling. I heard the word
fart
whispered.

“Anybody?” the docent chirped desperately. She caught my eye and nodded at me. I felt my face go hot. The docent nodded again. I felt the other kids looking at me. I looked at
The Concert
, desperately trying to find words.

“There are three people in the painting on the wall, just like the three people in the room,” I began, hesitant. She nodded, encouraging me. “The man sitting with his back to us”—I realized now he was playing a lute, and was part of the concert, not just an audience—“his hair is dark, like the man’s hat in the painting inside the painting. It’s like when a word rhymes with another word—it’s like a rhyme, kind of, the way the different things in the painting go together,” I finished lamely. The docent smiled at me. The other kids began to laugh. Tears sprang into my eyes.

I wasn’t crying from embarrassment, I was crying because I found the painting so moving. I decided I wanted to be a docent when I grew up. I think it is reasonable to identify this moment as my very first act of art history scholarship.

After that, I spent so much time at the Gardner that most of the guards came to know me by name. Pete gave me a big book of paintings by the Dutch masters for my
twelfth birthday. I liked the landscapes and the still lifes, but I studied the paintings of interiors with a deep certainty that those still rooms held something for me—a marvelous sense of serenity and comfort and completion. I felt so loved by those paintings.

Somebody’s at the door. Nora O’Driscoll.

To be continued—

T
HE
C
OTTAGE ON THE
R
OCK
, some locals call it. It belonged to old Denis O’Driscoll, who died two years ago at eighty-nine, the last of three bachelor brothers who lived their entire lives there—the two other brothers and a sister married and moved away—and it has been rented out to the occasional extremely intrepid tourist only a few times since his death, while his various nieces and nephews (one of them Mickey’s uncle) squabble over who owns what percentage of it and how to get the most money out of the place. It will go to auction once the dust settles, Mickey says, but that could take years, even with the assistance of somebody who knows someone in the Land Registry.

These five small rooms must have been cleaned up a
fair bit since Denis O’Driscoll died—I noticed evidence of a recent bonfire out in the field; there is something touching about the twisted remains of rusted bedsprings in the middle of the ashy heap. The cottage is austere but reasonably comfortable. There are two “electric fires”—that is, electric heaters—and the fireplace throws heat well, now that I have finally mastered the science of getting a turf fire going with nasty-smelling fire starters. My second morning here, Nora was appalled that I had started a fire with bits of twisted willow branches I brought in from a walk. She says it’s bad luck.

The upstairs three rooms have been painted white, and though furnishings are sparse, the bed is new, as are some of the rough sheets and towels. There are some ancient sheets that are soft as velvet, but they have uncomfortable, lumpy Frankenstein’s monster stitches where they’ve been patched and mended. The downstairs floors are rough concrete, poured, Mickey told me, over dirt floors only a few years ago. There’s a rumor that the O’Driscolls were in the habit of burying gold coins in various corners of their cottage and that there is a hidden fortune buried here still.

There is absolutely nothing on the walls, which makes me notice the scraped creamy pudding of the walls themselves, immensely thick rough plaster. The only upstairs windows are at the gable ends of the cottage, and each has a sill almost two feet deep. The middle, windowless,
room is really more of a closet, with built-in cupboards on both sides. I keep my clothing on one side. The gray Samsonite suitcase, when it arrived, fit perfectly on the cupboard shelf on the other side.

Electricity is a relatively recent thing, run into the village in 1964, according to Mickey. The O’Driscoll brothers pumped water from their well by hand into the cistern in the attic, and they relied on bottled gas for their hot water and their cooking.