We need her to ask for assistance before we can take action, the woman said. Im very sorry. Dont give up. There are people you can talk to.
What are they saying? her mother asked, pulling the belt on her robe into a tight knot.
Eileen put her hand over the receiver and explained the situation.
Give me that goddamned phone, her mother said, stubbing out her cigarette and rising. I need help, she said into it. Did you hear the girl? Goddammit, I need help.
A pair of men came to the apartment the following evening to meet her mother. Eileen had never been more grateful not to find her father home. She sat with them as they explained that they were going to arrange for her mother to be admitted to Knickerbocker Hospital. They would return the next evening to take her in.
That night, as soon as the men had left, her mother took the bottle of whiskey down off the shelf and sat on the couch pouring a little of it at a time into a tumbler. She drank it deliberately, as if she were taking medicine. Theyd told her mother to pack enough clothing for two weeks, so Eileen filled a small duffel bag for her and slipped it under the bed. She would explain things to her father once her mother was in the hospital.
Eileen spent the school day worrying that, with so many hours left before the men returned, something would go awry. Her mother seemed okay, though, when Eileen got home. All in the apartment was still. The kettle sat shining on the small four-burner stove, the floor was swept, the blinds were pulled evenly across the windows. Eileen cooked some sausage and eggs for them to eat together. Her mother ate slowly. When the men arrived, shortly before six oclock, both wearing suits, her mother acquiesced without denying shed agreed to go. The strangely tender, sorrowful look she wore as she shuffled around the apartment gathering the last of the things she needed toothbrush, wallet, a book made Eileens chest ache.
Eileen rode with them to the hospital. At the end, the two men drove her back. When they reached the apartment building, the driver put the car in park and sat motionless while the man in the passenger seat came around to open her door. She stood outside the car, thinking she might like to say something to express her gratitude, but there wasnt a way to do it. The man took his hat off. A strange, knowing silence filtered into the air around them. She was glad these men werent the kind that said much. He handed her a piece of paper with a phone number on it.
Call if you need anything, he said. Any hour. Then they drove off.
Her mother stayed in for nine days. When she reemerged, she attended meetings and took a job cleaning grammar schools in Bayside. She complained about being beholden to the Long Island Rail Road schedule, but Eileen figured what actually bothered her was all the time she had to herself on the train to consider how she hadnt gotten very far in the years since shed made similar trips.
Eileen dreamed of taking a dramatic journey of her own. When she learned about Death Valley in geography class, how it was the hottest and driest spot in North America, she decided to visit it sometime, even though she wouldnt be able to leave her alabaster skin exposed there for long without suffering a terrible burn. A vast, desert expanse like that was the only place she could imagine not minding the absence of company.
4
In the fall of 1956, when Eileen was a sophomore, another round of relatives started coming over from Ireland. How she loved it! Sure, at times the apartment was like a sick ward, teeming with newly landed, sniffling relations who commandeered a bit of the floor or even her own bed, but still: with all those people crowded around, her father came alive, charming them like a circus animal keeping a ball aloft on the tip of its nose, and her mother worked alongside her to keep the peace in cramped quarters.
Over a dozen people passed through their little space: her mothers youngest sister Margie, who was only a few years older than Eileen and whom her mother had never met; her aunts Ronnie and Lily; her uncles Desi, Eddie, and Davy; her cousins Nora, Brendan, Mickey, Eamonn, Declan, Margaret, Trish, and Sean. Two or three or even four would stay with them at a time, until that group found an apartment in Rockaway or Woodlawn or Inwood and the next moved in. Nothing came close to the feeling Eileen got when they gathered at the table for meals, and when she awoke in the night and heard the gentle snoring and the shuffling sound of their rolling sleep, she was sure shed never felt happier.
Uncle Desi, her fathers youngest brother, was the first to arrive. He moved into the room with her father. The first time her father wasnt around, Eileen peppered Desi with questions. It wasnt hard to get him to talk. It was as if hed turned a faucet on and the words came pouring out.
Your father loved Kinvara, Uncle Desi said. He was the happiest fellow you could imagine. A smile from ear to ear all day long. Then we were made to move to Loughrea when the Land Reform laws came. We went to better farmland, but I believe he never got over the sting of leaving those fields and that house hed helped to build as a lad.
The apartment and neighbors and outside noises seemed to succumb to Desis charms. All went hush as he rubbed his bristled chin.
I was much younger than him, seven or so when we moved, so I had a grand time building the new house. We pulled it up out of the land. We boys and our father dug clay, dragged timbers from the bog, and harvested the thatch for the roof. I tell you, it was plumb and solid, still is. Everyone was satisfied but your father. He said that if they could take one house from you against your will, they could take another. He never settled into it. The sky was his ceiling, I suppose. One thing: he never had to be asked twice to work. Jesus, he never had to be asked once. He was always working. The stone walls he built you would have thought they were a mile around.
All he ever wanted was a little money to play cards. Thered be poker games that would last five days. That, and a chance to work in the fields. When I tell you he had strength enough to bend a hammer, I dont know if youll believe me. The only thing he wanted it for was to pull up stubborn vegetables. Then, in 1931your father must have been twenty-four my eldest brother Willie, he was a beat cop in Dublin, well, he developed a cataract. He went blind in that eye and had to come back to the farm. The plot wasnt big enough to support two men and my father, and there wasnt a job to be found on the entire godforsaken island, not even for a man like your father.
He raised one brow and clicked his tongue dramatically, as if to suggest that the failure to find room for his older brother spelled doom for the country he had left behind.
The best our father could do for him was buy him a ticket over. It was Willie whod wanted to emigrate, not your father, but that was out of the question. This country didnt admit the infirm.
Our father gave him three months. Your father spent the time plowing, harrowing, and sowing, barely stopping to eat or sleep. A man could be forgiven for wondering if he were trying to die in the fields. His friends threw the biggest good-bye party in memory; it lasted three days and nights. What a time! At the end, your father went directly from the revelry to the crops. People tried to get him to go in and sleep, but he wouldnt listen. He worked through the night. Our father went out in the morning, the ticket in his hand; I followed behind. He found him ripping out weeds. Ill never forget what he said.
Desi paused. He stood up to act out the scene.
Michael John, he said, handing it over. He stretched an imaginary ticket toward her. You have to go. And thats that. Then he turned back to the house. Desi faced away, took a couple of steps and looped back. I stood there for a while with your father in perfect silence. Our mother took him to the boat.
He sat back down and eyed his empty teacup. She got up to refill it for him.
I remember the first letter from your father, Desi said as he chewed some shortbread. He said the hardest part about leaving was knowing that Willie had no idea what to do with the crops hed planted, that hed let them linger in the earth too long. And thats exactly what happened. He wrote that the whole way over, he saw, in his mind, the crops moldering there, sugaring over, their rich nutrition going to waste. He said he was never planting another seed. My brother Paddy your cousin Pats father, God rest his soul was here already a couple of years. Paddy referred your father to Schaefer Beer. As soon as they got one look at him, they put him to work hauling barrels.
She knew how much pride her father took in being able to write, since not everyone he grew up with could, and she watched with interest whenever he slipped on his reading glasses to sign his name to checks and delivery slips, but the idea of him sitting down to write a letter especially one that revealed his thoughts and feelings simply baffled her. The closest he got to expressing a feeling was when the foolishness, idleness, or venality of certain men moved him to indignation.
Shed always understood that her father had been young once, but shed never really considered what that meant. Now she saw him as a young man crossing a sea to start life anew, a courageous man carrying a kernel of regret and heartache that he would feed with his silence. There was more in him than shed grasped. She wanted to find a man who was like him, but who hadnt formed as hard an exterior: someone fate had tested, but who had retained a little more innocence. Someone who could rise above the grievances life had put before him. If her father had a weakness, that was it. There were other ways to be strong. She wasnt blind to them.
She wanted a man whose trunk was thick but whose bark was thin, who flowered beautifully, even if only for her.
Maybe having all those relatives around had given her father a reason to settle in, or maybe it was the power of a management salary to keep a person in line. Whatever it was, when her father was promoted from driver to manager of drivers, something extraordinary happened: he stopped going out and began to do his drinking at home, where shed never seen him put a glass of alcohol to his lips. There was such a self-possession about the way he drank at home, such an air of leisure and forbearance, that rather than signal chaos as it had in her mothers case, it suggested urbanity, balance, a kind of evolution.