Country Girl: A Memoir (40 page)

The film was never made. I learned that the Hollywood moguls were livid when he showed them the script, and I felt
ashamed that I had let him down. Yet the last time we talked he was magnanimous. Even though he was ill, he was filled with excitement, preparing to shoot Joyce’s
The Dead,
for which his son Tony had written the script and which his daughter Anjelica would star in. No longer the White Hunter with the Black Heart, as Peter Viertel had called him, but a Prospero, who had chosen for his last work Joyce’s tender elegy on death.

It was December 2009 when my play
Haunted
opened at the 59th Street Theatre in New York. Critics in England had been enthusiastic about it, and I somehow looked forward to the same reception. It was not to be. I had wakened very early in my hotel, waiting for the good news. By eight o’clock and feeling jittery, I rang my friend Marilyn Lownes, who was giving me a birthday party that evening. Upon hearing the first few disappointing and damning adjectives, I asked her to go no further. The newspaper, as I well knew, had been delivered around six, and was on the outside doorknob in a plastic folder, but I felt disinclined to open it. Having heard the verdict, I picked it up, went down the corridor to the quarters where the staff worked, and found the double doors ajar. In there was the hum of various fridges, large vacuum cleaners, and trolleys piled with breakfasts half-eaten that had big white napkins folded over them, as might a corpse. It contrasted lamentably with the neatness of the corridors, the plush carpeting, the tall flowers that had to live in a sort of twilight zone, and the unoffending soulless pictures along the walls. A young man, whom I recognized as the surly one who constantly checked the mini-bar, showed slight offense at my having barged in there and was at a loss when I handed him the folded newspaper, saying, “Burn this.”

The street where Marilyn and Victor lived led from First Avenue toward Sutton Place and the East River, and still clung to its fond legends, Marilyn Monroe, Arthur Miller, Bobby Short, and Cy Coleman all having lived there. It was in fairy-tale mood, what with real snow and simulated snow, Christmas lights, Hanukkah candles, and doormen in tuxedos, running with a breezy alacrity to get taxis, their whistles shrill and rivalrous in the crisp cold air.

“It’s Fellini… it’s eclectic,” Marilyn said of the party, which was in full swing when she met me in the front hall. She was wearing a gold brocade dress and gold lace shoes, drawing me into a room that was alive with chatter and Frank Sinatra striking the witchcraft keynote:

Those fingers in my hair

That sly come-hither stare

That strips my conscience bare

It’s witchcraft

At a side table presents that I had been sent were stacked, and a bowl of chocolate roses, cream-colored, exactly resembled real roses, even down to a little brown sugared stamen in the center. Robert Downey was telling me that there was no God, no White Light, when one passed over. He could vouch for it, because after being given wrong prescriptions that were almost fatal due to his diabetes, he nearly passed away.

“You weren’t dead enough, honey,” his wife, Rosemary, said.

“No God and no White Light,” he repeated.

“You weren’t certified dead,” Rosemary said, and everybody laughed, and more people arrived, including the three actors from
Haunted:
Brenda Blethyn, a powerhouse as Mrs. Berry; Niall Buggy, her dreaming deceiver; and Beth Cooke, the waif who unwittingly brings trouble into their threadbare abode in Blackheath, London.

Philip Roth is already there. Known to be a hermit, he sometimes comes out and is invariably the magus in any gathering. Unyieldingly scrupulous about the written word, and with a knife-edged intelligence, he is also, when in jocular mood, the funniest person on earth. I have seen him spin a story to such a dizzying height that it is like witnessing a mind in excess of itself. At his encouragement, Jake LaMotta is reenacting the fights he had fought and survived, the good fights, the great fights, the crummy fights, the besmirched fights, the bites, the close-in, the speed, the crouch, the combinations, the failures, the comebacks, building this narrative to the massacre in Chicago, on St. Valentine’s Day, thirteen rounds with his nemesis Sugar Ray Robinson, when he was beaten to a pulp. To Philip, as he told me afterward, it was like a page out of fiction, to meet his boyhood hero, whose career he had assiduously followed by subscribing to
Ring
magazine. He said that, sitting opposite Jake in his twilight years, he could scarcely imagine the violence that body had taken and the violence it had inflicted.

“Thirteen rounds and he never got me down once,” Jake is saying, and everyone applauds because it is well known and was often written that LaMotta’s “courage in defeat had made the early Spartans seem cowardly.”

A speaker was being set up in the hall, and we were ushered out for the surprise event. As guest of honor I was seated on the one high chair, the throne, men ranged at the back, women in front, the flicker of expectation in their eyes—Patricia Harty, Brenda Blethyn, Beth Cooke, Kim Cattrall, Alexandra Schlesinger, Rosemary Downey, Mary Downe, and many more. Marilyn and her tango teacher were gliding under the light of the dimmed chandelier, like two dreamers miraculously caught up in the yearning of the tango music, close and yet strangely detached, all the while their feet, as it were, painting pictures on the floor, and now and then, as he turned her round and
round, the pictures were peeled off with a kick, then a second, higher, triumphant kick, as she separated from him, only to merge with him again. The young man who operated the lift was so spellbound that he kept coming up and down, drawing back the gates, just to look, to fill his eyes.

“Either it grabs you or it doesn’t,” Marilyn said, suddenly detaching herself from her teacher’s arms, and shy now as we filed back into the room, she saying there was no way in this world that she would make a speech. Women surrounded the tango teacher, all wanting lessons, wanting his secret, to which he replied with enigmatic courtesy, “The tango is a beautiful excuse for living.”

It was my turn to sit with Jake LaMotta. He was wearing a brown Stetson hat, identical to the one his young wife was wearing, which Victor had just presented her with. He watched his wife’s movements with a keen interest, calling across to say she was spending too much time with that barman. His face bore no mark of the bashings it had had, except for a small clod of flesh above the nose, and his hands were smooth and white and pampered.

“You have the hands of a concert pianist,” I heard myself idiotically say, to which he said, “When you break bones, they come back stronger.” We had nothing in common, so that a stony silence ensued. Marilyn came and knelt by us, telling him about
Haunted
and the injustice done, and he looked from her to me and back again and asked, “Is she able to hit the spot?”

“She’s able to hit the spot,” Marilyn said, and he gave me a look, a little grin of acknowledgment.

It was time for music, and it was mainly left to Niall Buggy to draw on his great repertoire of Irish songs, giving them such a heft of emotion that the mood in the room changed, the faces looked softer, and eyes welled up with tears. Soon it would be the parting glass. Already I had arrived at my hotel, and walking
down the long corridor and hearing the sound of the wind from the lift shaft, replicating the winds that blew in from the Atlantic, I thought of travelers who, when they hear those winds, far out at sea, know them to be a hearkening toward home.

It was to Donegal, in the most northwestern tip of Ireland, that in the 1990s I headed, in order to build a house. The very place-names so rough and musical, the country dotted with lakes and hemmed in by the mountains of Errigal, Muckish, Blue Stack, Doonish West, and Snaght.

Stephen Rea and his wife, Dolours, were the ones who led me there, Stephen in his wry Belfast way saying, “It’s the best of the north and the best of the south without the fuck-up of either.” In this he was gloriously mistaken.

The venture would have its excitements and its obstacles, dramas and melodramas, and the getting of a site at all necessitated a wiliness to interpret that no might possibly mean yes and that any yes was equivocal. Overnight a site that might have been promised would next day be withdrawn, because of a phone call to a son or a daughter or a brother or a sister, in England or America or Australia, who opposed it.

In my ongoing search my solicitor Paddy Sweeney and the contractor Phil Ward trudged with me, often sinking into mire and quagmire, only to arrive on a spit of land that might, just might, be for sale. In Bloody Foreland, the gales were such that we were literally flung together and torn apart, like flaps of old newspaper. On another occasion Sasha, as future architect, was directed from the airport to where we stood on another bit of isolated barony, the waves hammering the headland across the way and more waves rolling ponderously around our feet. He pointed out to me that it was not only the shifting sands that were an obstacle but the hidden channels of water under the
sands, so that, as in “Kublai Khan,” I would end up with a house that first floated and then literally was carried out to sea.

I had almost given up.

Then one morning, in London, my friend Manus Lunny telephoned me to say that as his plane took off from Carrickfinn, he noticed a
FOR SALE
sign on a post down below. It was in a quiet cove, which the locals called Point, and already I saw myself there, availing of the “peace that passeth understanding.”

That evening I boarded the selfsame plane, on its return journey up to Carrickfinn, and had my first spectacular view of the county. It was like a moonscape, rock and water, and the vast basin of sea scarcely stirring. The houses, all white, were like dovecotes, set so snugly down in this seemingly washy tender archipelago. I would see those houses more distinctly as Paddy, Phil, and I drove along the sea road, the small houses with hall doors varnished red and loads of washing on every clothesline. Postcard picturesqueness. The evening was balmy, and down on the shore, fawn cows ambled about, the scene, in its simplicity and timelessness, recalling the paintings of Constable. Admittedly the Church of Ireland, a stone building on a hilltop, did look forlorn, and the glass door of the public telephone, swinging open, was the last word in desolation.

There it was, at the end of the road, the
FOR SALE
sign, no gate, a small overgrown drive, willows clinging to each other, and the little ruin of a cottage facing the Atlantic. There were two dwellings nearby, a cottage and a larger house on a hill, with sloping front gardens. Mount Errigal towered above the sea, streaked with whitish marble, like veins of new snow. They called her “she.” They said, “She’s shimmering for you,” and she was, the crystallized lava from millions of years before there to greet us. It was a secret corner where families had lived for decades, with the ingrained memories of a suspicion of the stranger, which I was.

What did I envisage as I stood there? Nice neighbors, getting to know the many facets of the sea, the seabirds, and perhaps a last sustained love.

Across from us the lights of Gweedore came on in twinkling succession, linking to the lights of the long low hotel, so that the effect was of looking toward a metropolis. Remembering that Maud Gonne had ridden on horseback among the peasants of Gweedore, as their cabins were being razed to the ground, I thought I would name my future house after her, except that in the end and accidentally it came to be called the Pink House.

Since I had left London that morning, two other parties had put in a bid, so that, as Paddy informed me, the sale would proceed by auction. I was on tenterhooks all next day, as I lay on a single bed in the small hotel, awaiting calls, which came regularly, as the price escalated. Rain slid down the narrow window with such swiftness that I thought I was in a car, with the windscreen being endlessly washed, and I questioned the common sense of my adventure.

By four o’clock the site was mine, and that evening Paddy, Phil, and I drove up there. A rainbow looped from Errigal across the estuary, bending its last painted toe exactly above the ruin. All three of us saw it and smiled. It faded slowly, with such cadence, getting fainter and fainter, the orange tint being the last to fade, a rind of tangerine. The men undid the padlock, pushed the door in, and we were in a small kitchen with a steep stairs to an upper floor. Everything smelled of damp and mold, since the place had been vacant for almost twenty years, and in one corner, on the mortar wall, there was a fresco that seemed to be a likeness of Christ, the Good Shepherd, in red raiment, holding a wand. I made Phil swear that no matter what alterations we would make to the place, the Good Shepherd would stay.