The Road to McCarthy (20 page)

Rather more plausible is the assertion that Irish monks may have visited America as early as the sixth or seventh century, a theory supported by a Celtic inscription carved in symbols ten feet high on a cliff face in West Virginia. At the winter solstice—or Christmas, as the early Christians named it, in the first recorded instance of corporate rebranding—the rising sun illuminates the inscription exactly as it does the burial mound of New Grange in County Meath. So perhaps the boys from County Meath were the first Europeans to cross the Atlantic and get their hands on a much coveted green card. Maybe that’s why it’s called a green card in the first place.

I enjoy dropping in for a couple of hours, browsing from subject to subject and noticing how certain stories and names keep recurring. Prominent among them are those of Thomas Francis Meagher and John Mitchel, two of the Young Irelanders who were transported, along with the politician Smith O’Brien, to Van Diemen’s Land in 1848 for inciting rebellion against the crown. This is the same John Mitchel who was brought to my attention by the Bishop Basher that afternoon in Cobh. After extraordinary adventures
in the wilderness of Tasmania, Mitchel was eventually released, while Meagher escaped. As if to prove that Irish politics is never as straightforward as you think it’s going to be, they both made their way to America, where they ended up on opposite sides in the Civil War.

The more you read about Irish America, the more you realize it’s a heavily loaded term. Forty-four million Americans can claim some kind of Irish ancestry. Those who identify themselves as Irish Americans are overwhelmingly from the green, nationalist, Catholic tradition, yet at least half, possibly more, of the Irish who emigrated to the United States and Canada were Protestant. Many came over before the great migration of the famine. A greater religious and political affinity with the English meant they were quickly assimilated into the property-owning classes of the colony, and consequently were less inclined to maintain, romanticize or sing about their allegiances to the old country. Theirs is a tradition that will be absent from Saturday’s parade, and you can’t help feeling it’s a big omission.

The library has rest rooms and phone booths, but no bar. This is a major historical oversight in libraries the world over. Who invented libraries anyway? The Greeks? The Romans? Irish monks? Whoever it was, I bet they had bars in them. It stands to reason. What could be more likely to illuminate your manuscript than a couple of drinks at the end of the day? Or in this instance, the middle. I decide to head outside for a breath of air. Better not leave my bag behind, though. Wouldn’t want the Argentinian and Bolivian chapters that follow on from Tangier to go missing.

Launderettes. They should have bars as well.

The library’s just a short walk from Grand Central Station, which is one of my favorite places in the city. I like to use it as a park or market or piazza, somewhere to walk and eat and watch the world go by. Once in a while I go down the ramp to the Oyster Bar and have half a dozen and a Guinness, but today I settle for a sandwich in the big undergound food court, then take a walk through the central concourse. This is one of the truly great public spaces, now restored to its full glory, with hazy light diffusing from high distant windows illuminating the stars and planets on the ceiling and the two palatial staircases at either end. It takes a moment or two for the true masterstroke to sink in; and then you see it. Or rather, you don’t. There are no
ads or retail outlets. They have all been put somewhere else. This is a Nike-and Burger King-free zone in the heart of the global advertising industry, where no brand or logo has been able to buy the right to clash with the surroundings. The huge detail-perfect period setting looks as if it were built yesterday. The only clues that it’s the twenty-first century are the tiny individuals in modern clothes who cross and recross at pleasing intervals, though even they look like extras directed by Alfred Hitchcock. And it’s so gleamingly clean that you could eat your dinner off the floor, unlike most stations, where it looks as though someone already has.

Twenty minutes later I’m back in my new hotel room.

The management of hotels doesn’t get anxious if you aren’t home till breakfast time, nor do they have innocent young children who may be scarred for life by their father’s hangovers and inappropriate late-night behavior, so for the sake of our continuing friendship I’ve moved out of Phil’s apartment and into a hotel for a few days. It’s a nice Italian-style place with marble floors, just a few blocks from where the parade begins. They’ve upgraded me to a minisuite, which is a first, and can only be a case of mistaken identity. It won’t be long before they cotton on and kick me out into a box-room near the food-slop dumpsters. There’s a phone in the lavatory, and a TV next to the sinks so you can view while you shave. There’s also a living room with a sofa, an enormous shrub and a small library compiled with the business traveler in mind, featuring books with titles such as
Retire Early with Rental Properties
and
How to Make a Fortune from Discounted Mortgages
. I search the shelves for copies of
Get Rich Quick by Embezzling Widows
or
Make Big Cash by Selling Orphans
, but they don’t have them. I’ll mention it when I fill in the questionnaire.

I finish unpacking, then put all the shower caps, sewing kits and shoe mitts in my empty case so they’ll have to leave some more tomorrow. If everything else falls apart, then one day I’ll open a market stall. It won’t just sell hotel tat either. There’ll be airplane socks and blindfolds as well. And after-dinner mints from Chinese restaurants. While I’m at it I decide I may as well get my money’s worth out of the room and stay in on my own for a couple of hours. Much as I’ve come to love the library, I do enjoy being free to talk out loud to myself. I think the effects of solitude probably get worse
as time goes by. Next time you hear someone has published their seventeenth or eighteenth novel, imagine how barmy they must be.

I’d planned to spend the evening shaving and watching TV, but I soon get fed up with the advertisements, and the cuts, so I go round to see Phil instead. The kids have just gone to bed, but the doorbell wakes them up. We have a drop of Jameson’s, then go out to a Tex-Mex bar to see a guitar player who used to be in Commander Cody and his Lost Planet Airmen, because that’s the kind of thing musos like to do. It’s a sedate, polite crowd, though someone does try to sell us crack in the gents’ after the show. It’s late when we head home. I hope they haven’t moved the art again. Phil could wander those corridors for days before the guy in the top hat finds him.

Like all right-minded people
, I am an instinctive ideological opponent of globalization. I had planned to support the cause by going to the last G12 summit, smashing up a few Mercedes and fire-bombing McDonald’s, but the Sheraton and the Hilton were fully booked, so there wasn’t anywhere to stay. But I can say, hand on heart, that I’ve never been inside a Starbucks.

Until now.

After one of those substantial yet confusing American breakfasts where you get sweet pancakes, meat and fried potatoes all on the same plate, I head down to Battery Park to get the ferry to Ellis Island. The next boat isn’t for half an hour, and it’s several degrees colder on the waterfront than it is in midtown. I think the buildings, as well as shielding you from the wind, must release delayed warmth, like giant storage heaters, a bizarre concept in home comfort that was peculiar to Britain. They looked like heaters, but when you took them apart there was nothing in there but bricks. They kept the place hot all day while you were out at work, but then it was freezing in the evening when you got home, so you had to go out to the pub and spend the money you were saving by not having proper heating. There’s nowhere else to wait in the warm for the ferry, so I’ve abandoned what’s left of my principles and come into Starbucks.

I can see the Statue of Liberty from here, a larger-than-life symbol of the
spirit of free enterprise represented by the famous coffee I’m drinking. I can’t see what all the fuss is about. It’s just ordinary black coffee, served for some reason in a massive cardboard cup you could grow a cheeseplant in.

I’m just wondering why drinks in America are now called
beverages
, which sounds like something a policeman giving evidence from his notebook would have consumed while proceeding in a northerly direction, when I notice a strange minidrama being acted out in front of me. A woman in a tartan skirt ‘n’ coat ensemble that makes her resemble a tour guide or air hostess, or Princess Anne opening a community center—she’s got quite a beak on her as well, which makes her look even more like the princess—comes in and sits at the table behind me, all the while speaking into her cell phone. Then she gets up and starts peering out through the tall plate-glass window, walking along it past the doorway to the far corner of the café, still gazing through the glass as if at some mirage or vision.

Meanwhile a man, also on a cell phone, has approached the café from outside. He peers in through the glass, yattering away, but sees only me. Then he walks to his left along the outside of the window as Princess Anne walks in the opposite direction along the inside. They pass at the doorway, the only place on the whole wall where they can’t see each other, and end up once again in opposite corners. I’m just about to hold up a placard saying, you represent non-communication in a world of never-ending talk, but before I can get the felt-tip and the flashcard out of my coat pocket, a waitress comes out from behind the counter, taps the princess on the shoulder and points to the man. The customers stop laughing and go back to their cardboard buckets of cappuccino, the guy comes inside, and the two of them purchase beverages and assume a sedentary position at a seating unit adjacent to my vicinity.

“Great awards ceremony last night,” he says.

“Yeah.” She laughs in what she believes to be a coquettish manner. “Yeah, I was pleased to win again. Hey, you know David? The head of….”

I can’t hear what David is head of because the milk frothing machine has just burst into life.

“…. back at the hotel and he came on to me, like, really strong? Again? But you know, he’s married and though it’s flattering and very, well, like,
tempting, hey! Do I really need those kinds of complications? I don’t think so. But it was very gratifying to win. Again.”

My ferry’s due and I get up to leave realizing that I will never know which award she won last night. Again. Maybe if she wins next year she’ll think what the hell, and give poor old David the kind of seeing-to that’ll bring tears to his eyes many years from now, possibly when his kids are making speeches at his diamond wedding.

The ferry goes to the Statue of Liberty first, which I don’t intend climbing, then on to Ellis Island. There’s a grumpy fifty-something guy who never intended to end up in a job like this serving more beverages, snacks and souvenirs behind a counter in the center of the boat. He seems pleased to be out of coffee, and can only offer tea or hot chocolate. The young couple on the wooden bench seat next to me are clutching their cardboard cups in heavily gloved hands, sipping tea through the little gob-gap in the plastic lid. The teabag’s label and string dangle down the side of the cup like a tampon. Americans just don’t get this whole tea thing.

Two thirteen-year-old boys go up to Grumpy’s Souvenir Emporium and say they want to buy Statue of Liberty lighters, big chunky things with a torch of freedom that bursts into flame and ignites your ciggie. He takes one down from the shelf, removes it from its presentation packaging and presses the lighter to test it. Once. Twice. Three times. No flame. With an air of profound resignation he takes a second one down and repeats the action. The same thing happens. He sighs, in silence, but with his whole body. You’d think the boys would realize this isn’t a top-of-the-range gift item, but their youthful enthusiasm remains undeterred. The third lighter works at the second attempt. He puts it back in the box then into a brown paper bag, like a fifth of bourbon. The boys leave happy and he turns to put the two duds back on the shelf.

“Useless pieces a shit.”

It’s always nice to see someone happy at his work.

The Registry Room on Ellis Island is a huge hall with a vaulted herringbone brick ceiling, three great chandeliers and massive arched windows that frame the Statue of Liberty on one side and the Empire State Building on the other. From its opening in 1892, every immigrant arriving in New
York was processed through this room, up to 5,000 each day during the first quarter of the twentieth century. This was journey’s end for all those who boarded in Cobh, and there’s a statue of the first person to pass through here, Annie Moore of Cork, which is replicated on the waterfront in Cobh. But though America features large in the Irish story, Ellis Island reminds us that Ireland was only one of dozens of strands in America’s narrative. There are photographs of people from Armenia, Hungary, Jamaica, Hiroshima, Scotland, Belorussia, Greece, Assyria, Romania and Lapland. A pair of women from Guadeloupe arriving in 1911 in spectacular frocks fix the camera with worldly-wise eyes staring out from beneath remarkable hats. The pictures help you see what happened here not as a process of mass immigration, which is the story the statistics tell, but as something experienced by individuals. It’s so recent, yet at the same time so remote: they came, they did it, they’ve gone. A couple of hours wandering around leaves you aware of what little time we have in life to make an impression.

The buildings were abandoned in 1954—around the same time that Cobh went into decline—and fell into disrepair until restoration began in 1982. Many damaged and decrepit artifacts are displayed in the condition in which they were found; a broken piano, a shattered children’s picture, mangled crutches, a weighing machine, bedpans, scales, bed racks and hospital cots sit covered in dust, their paint peeling, eloquently evoking the fractured lives they once serviced. In a country that’s never been backward about coming forward, there’s a restraint about the way this story is told that is unexpectedly affecting.