Downtown (2 page)

Most of the time now I no longer loved my father, but here, closed in this warm car with the jeweled dark of my new city all around me, I could remember how I had.

“There’s nothing for you to worry about,” I said. “Aren’t I Liam O’Donnell’s daughter, then?”

The convent school where I had spent twelve millennial years back in Savannah, Saint Zita’s—named after the patron saint of servants and those who must cross bridges; apt for my contentious lower-class neighborhood—was ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS / 6

big on epiphanies. It was a favored mode of deliverance among the nuns in my day, perhaps because no one stuck in Corkie could conceive of any other means of escape. I had a speaking acquaintance with every significant epiphany suffered by every child of the Church from Adam on. But I had never been personally seized by one. It seemed somehow déclassé, bumbling and rural; my best friend Meg Conlon and I used to snicker whenever Sister Mary Gregory trotted out another for our edification.

“Zap! Another epic has epiphed!” we would whisper to each other.

I had one then.

I sat in the warm darkness of my father’s automobile, for the moment totally without contact with the world outside and newly without context of any sort, and saw that indeed I was Liam O’Donnell’s daughter, wholly that, just that.

Maureen Aisling O’Donnell, known as Smoky, partly for the sooty smudges of my eyelashes and brows and my ash-brown hair; smoke amid the pure red flame on the heads of my brothers. Twenty-six years on earth and all of them within the fourteen city blocks near the Savannah wharves that was Corkie, for County Cork, whence most of us who lived there had our provenance. Daughter of Maureen, sister of John, James, Patrick, Sean, and Terry. But unquestionably, particle and cell and blood and tenet, daughter of Liam O’Donnell.

It stopped my breath and paralyzed me with terror, and in the stillness my father laughed and pummeled my thigh, pleased and mollified, and said, “You are and no mistaking.

See you remember it.”

And we inched on up Peachtree Street toward midtown Atlanta, where the Our Lady’s Home for Catholic Girls waited to receive me in its red Medusa’s arms.

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I know that he was handsome once. There are yellowed, saw tooth-edged snapshots stuck in old albums and curling in drawers at home to attest to that. Never tall, of course, but powerful through the chest and arms from his years of wrestling reams and bales of Monarch paper products on and off the freighters that wallowed at the Savannah municipal docks. He was dark, too, from the malignant kiss of that coastal sun, even though his hair was as thick and red as molten copper. Even in the old photographs it looked red, like lava. His eyes were bright blue, though in the photos they were always narrowed with laughter; he laughed constantly when he was young, it seems. Laughed and sang and cursed and flirted; I have heard the stories of his legendary charm ever since I was old enough to understand them, and some of it I remember. He was still a force to be reckoned with when I was a child.

I remember running down to meet him at the edge of the docks when his shift was over. I was not allowed to go any farther into that den of iniquitous cursing and brawling and innuendo than that, but I would stand with one or more of my brothers, waiting for him, and I heard the laughter and the admiring jeers about his sexual prowess from the small crowd of men that always surrounded him. The talk would stop when the men reached my brothers and me, and change to the mindless, crooning endearments that Irishmen always have for girl children, and the sly, freighted teasing that they keep for boys. But I knew the sense of it. All of us kids in Corkie knew, early on. You could not live in the warren of small row houses and tenements that bordered the docks, off Gallien Street, and not know about sex. You would have to have been deaf and blind. The great, smothering mantle of Saint John the Baptist may have effectively stifled our actions, but it could do nothing

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about our minds and our groins. I never knew of more people in one time and place who thought more about sex and did less about it than the children of Corkie, in Savannah, Georgia, in the last two decades before the pill.

So I always understood that my father was two people: Liam O’Donnell who was my father and the head of our cramped, noisome household, whose savage hand lay heavy on all of us and whose sentimental, conventional Irish tongue glibly celebrated the joys and values of Family; and Liam O’Donnell the laughing, quick-handed rogue male, who, not unlike Browning’s last duchess, liked whate’er in skirts he looked on, and whose looks went everywhere. For a long time I loved the one and was awed by and proud of the other, even as I pretended to know nothing of him. Not knowing has been the way of the women of Corkie since time out of mind.

Of my mother I have always had less of a sense. She was when I first remember her as she was, to me, all of her life: gray of hair and face, deft and constant as a robot in her kitchen, silent and smileless, heavy-footed, and red-handed from daily washing of the family’s clothes and dishes. She wept when my father bought her a washer and dryer, when I was about ten, and not from joy, either. She wept because she said that the Blessed Virgin never had such, and nowhere in the scriptures did it say that a virtuous woman should, and she might be only plain little Maureen Downy O’Donnell from Pritkin Street, but there was no woman in the parish that kept a better house or did more for her family. Even Father Terry said that. She kept the washer and dryer, but she made sure that we all knew she made an act of contrition.

That’s what I remember most of her: her great, limitless, blind, joyless faith. For a very long time it maddened and embarrassed me. By the time that I saw that it was what she had in place of love or laughter or joy or 9 / DOWNTOWN

even contentment, she was gone. Of all the things I never did, telling her that I understood that is the bitterest to me.

I wish I could have seen it, or, failing that, I wish I had had the wit to lie and say I did. But in those days I had little of understanding and less of the sort of wit that breeds kindness.

When James and John, my oldest brothers, used to speak of the slender, curly-haired young woman who laughed in the hot evenings on the stoop as the children of Corkie played around the marble doorsteps, or who sang in the mornings while breakfast cooked, I could only look at them. They might have been talking of someone they saw on the screen at the Bijou on Saturday afternoons.

I look like her though, or as she once looked. I have the old photos, and they do not lie. I am, as she was, pale of skin, with her soot-fringed, water-clear gray eyes and her coarse, unruly dark curls; deep-breasted and small-waisted, with round hips that I used to try, vainly, to subdue with fearsome junior girdles. I have not bothered with these in many years. One day, perhaps, like her, I will be as soft as a pudding, but so far I am not. I have her deceptively sweet face; I will always look younger than I am, a fact that I hated for many years and have come, now, to appreciate. Sometimes, I am told, I can look almost sanctimonious, with a cloying, missal-saint’s rapt stare; this, usually, when I am lost in thought or tired to mindlessness. Those who tell me this do not mean it as a compliment, and I do not take it as such. I am very far from saintly. I have from my father, in addition to his smallness of stature, his pigheadedness and swift, hot temper and his sentimental penchant for lost causes, although the nuns and my mother taught me early and well to put a cap on all of them. From the time I was four or five I could hold my own in a fight with my brothers, and learned soon after that I could devastate ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS / 10

them with my tongue. But from almost as early an age, I was wracked with guilt when I did either one. I think if I had not gotten out of Corkie I would eventually simply have exploded from the force of all those warring, tightly repressed factions roiling within me. Many Corkie women did explode, or, like my mother, simply and gratefully turn to stone.

During the last terrible, irreparable argument I had with my brother John he told me that she changed when I was born, but I know that he was only trying to hurt me with that. In his eyes I had brought scalding shame on the family, and he fought me with what weapons he had. I knew that what he said was not true. My mother changed very gradually, and if I had been older I could have seen it happening.

She began to change, I think, when my father started with the women and drinking, and she changed for good and all when he did, when the laughing and the kissing and the spontaneous snatching-up and dancing around the kitchen stopped, and that was when he and many other Corkie men were fired from Monarch for trying to unionize.

Before that my father had been a fierce partisan of all things American, loudly scornful of those who clung to the ways of the old sod. It was, by his lights, a good life Monarch had given him and his family; to him, “made in America”

was more than a public relations slogan. It was one of the tenets that he lived by.

But Ireland will not, finally, let her sons go, and the dark need to argue and shout and rage in the name of injustice, real or imagined, came crawling out of the core of Liam O’Donnell like a tapeworm. When the first black men—spades and spooks and nigglers always to my father and the men of Corkie, even though they had long bossed black gangs on the docks and laughed and eaten with them—began to aspire to and get minor supervisory 11 / DOWNTOWN

posts, better pay, brighter prospects at Monarch, Liam O’Donnell and the Monarch men of his age began to lobby for organization and unionization. Georgia was a right-to-work state, and companies like Monarch were not about to let that change. Anyone not blinded and maddened with prejudice could have seen that it was a lost cause. But despite that—or perhaps, being the man that he was, because of it—my father took his rage to the pubs and street corners, and gathered a sizable army of red-faced, furious, bellowing Irishmen around him before Monarch bothered to fire them.

It was a terrible shock to him. I truly don’t think he ever re-covered from it.

I was around nine when it happened, in that last somnolent year of the decade, and I remember almost to the day when the man I had known came home from work for the last time and sat down in front of the large new Dumont television set he had bought and turned into someone I no longer knew. This man laughed no longer, made no more insulting, infectious jokes, took us no more for ice cream or to bingo, went only on high holy days to Mass, and carried me never again on his shoulders on a hot, still summer night.

He stared silently at the flickering black and white screen in the living room while the life of the house stumbled awkwardly around him, waiting only for five o’clock, when he could escape to Perkins’s Pub on the wharf, under the great shadow of the river bluff, where he and his mates had always stopped off after work three or four times a week. Now they met there and drank, steadily, watching the shifts change and the crowds, increasingly dotted with black faces, surge back and forth across the docks like the tide, while they muttered together in their spleen and sadness. And what they talked of in those twilights now was Ireland.

It was during those days, when he would come stumbling home, often on the arms of his cronies or one of ANNE RIVERS SIDDONS / 12

my brothers, sent to fetch him, that I began to hear the old stories of Ireland. Stories of soldiers and poets and kings and virtuous maidens, stories of heroes and battles and glory and blood. Stories and songs that we had not known he knew.

Perhaps he had not known, either. In those days, and the days that followed, my laughing, devilish, handsome father became one of those ludicrous and heartbreaking professional Irishmen who could be found drinking and weeping in pubs up and down the East Coast from Boston to Savannah; a straggling, frayed rosary of beads that had yearned to be gold but could not, in the end, transmute themselves. Ireland, they intoned endlessly, Ireland. If it was not Irish, it was not worth the gunpowder to blow it to hell.

It was then that he began to call me Smoky. Before that he had called me, as everyone else did, Reenie, after my mother, or, if he was angry with me, the more formal Maureen. I had almost forgotten that I had a Gaelic middle name; the old grandmother who had insisted on it, my father’s nonna, had died when I was not yet two. It is spelled Aisling, and it means, literally, “beautiful dream.” I remember being told that back during the Troubles, when their English oppressors had forbidden that poetry about Ireland be written, Irish poets used the word
aisling
in place of
Ireland
. My father remembered it suddenly one evening when John and James had brought him home much the worse for wear, and seized upon it as if it had been the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.

“Beautiful dream,” he crooned, over and over, his voice thick with Jameson and tears. “Beautiful dream. Ah, and ’tis Aisling you are from now on, darlin’, and I’ll not be hearing anything else under this roof.”

He often sounded like Barry Fitzgerald after a session at Perkins’s.

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When pronounced, the name sounds like “ashling,” and it was only a matter of time until one of my brothers, torment-ing me, stumbled upon “ashy,” and then Smoky. I hated it, and ran sniffling to my father, sure that he would reestablish by fiat the slightly less objectionable Aisling. But something in the cheeky, common little nickname pleased him, or else his perversity demon was sitting on his shoulder that day, because he laughed uproariously, and repeated it several times, and the boys all laughed, and even my mother smiled, and Smoky I have stayed until this day. As I grew older I tried, without success, to reintroduce Aisling or Maureen or Reenie among my schoolmates, but without success. Something in the combination of syllables, some essential foolishness, obviously had great charm. It is a nickname without dignity or substance; a man I once loved told me that it sounds like a stripper’s name or a professional lady roller skater’s—Smoky O’Donnell, queen of the steel wheels. It might as well be graven on my forehead. If I should ever win a Pulitzer Prize, it will be presented, not to Maureen Aisling, but to Smoky O’Donnell. It has outlived by far its perpetrator, and bids fair to outlive its owner. It is not the least of the reasons, that first night in Atlanta with my father, that “Liam O’Donnell’s daughter” struck me to stone.