Midlife Irish (2 page)

It is, of course, impossible to totally break one’s “language ties.” I remember a dialect specialist in college who told me
exactly where I was born, where I grew up, and where my parents came from. It was as if I had a sign on my forehead to the
dialect specialist, but to the general public I was “disguised.”

My dad actually tried to get rid of his brogue, but saw it was hopeless and abandoned the project. My mom never tried. Her
speaking voice was as west Irish as the rocks on the coast of Mayo. I can close my eyes and listen to her funny/sad Irish
voice any time I want to.

I do have one ability I seem to have inherited. I can tell if an actor is accurate in his Irish accent. If the actor is a
little off on his feigned Irishness, I can tell. Brad Pitt had the most egregiously wrong “Irish accent” in the quickly forgotten
The Devil’s Own
(“I’m not goin’ bahk!”) as an IRA guy in America with a hidden past. I react to his voice in that film
like I react to the sound of a balloon being rubbed with wet hands.

A few actors do an Irish accent, to my ear, very accurately. I guess Liam Neeson doesn’t count, but Julia Roberts, to me,
can sound as if she just got off the boat. Johnny Depp (
Chocolate
) and Robin Wright (
The Playboys
) also receive high grades for Irish verisimilitude. Tom Cruise (
Far and Away
): accent B minus, performance D.

My dad had a dilemma that he had to deal with every day. He didn’t want to be identified as Irish, yet every time he spoke,
he gave himself away. Therefore, he didn’t talk unless he couldn’t get out of it. Talk only as a last resort.

My dad was a pretty mysterious guy. When I was little, I thought maybe he was Batman. He tended to conceal certain details,
when the details weren’t to his liking. One lifelong, very weird thing my dad did was lie about his birthday. He didn’t lie
about the year, which would have been understandable. He lied about the date he was born.

Dad’s birthday, he always told us, was August 25. I discovered that he was lying, after he died. He was really born on December
21. My nephew’s birthday is on that date, so you would think it would slip. But no, he was born in August, and that was it.
He kept up this minor lie his whole life.

When he died, and I saw “December 21, 1908” on his birth certificate, I was startled. Why, I thought, would he lie about such
a ridiculous thing? He wanted to be another astrological sign? After my dad’s funeral, I asked my dad’s brother, John Gannon,
who was as gregarious as my dad was quiet, why my dad misrepresented his birthday.

“He didn’t want to be younger than his wife,” he said quickly, as if that explained things. For the Gannon brothers.

My dad spoke about his life back in Ireland as little as possible. The only subject he spoke less about was sex—or perhaps
“sex” and “life back in Ireland” were tied for last. My mom, who talked all the time about almost everything, rarely mentioned
her childhood. My mom was the easiest person in
the world to talk to. She would chat about
everything
. Things that you didn’t think
had
great detail, she would discuss in great detail, but about life back in the Old Country, she was almost as silent as my dad.

If I did ask them about Ireland, which I did often when I was in college, my mom would steer the subject away from Ireland,
while my dad would do his imitation of a rock. Because my mom kept talking, I felt I had a chance of getting something about
the Old Sod, but no dice. If you talked to her for twenty minutes, you would have taken a huge conversational walk. You might
talk about baseball and God and whatever, but I very rarely got her to talk about her childhood.

The Indian who answers, “How” to every question was a blabbermouth compared to my dad. Once, riding in the car, I tried the
direct approach. “What was it like when you were in school?”

“Different,” he said, and that was it.

Growing up, I knew that I was Irish in much the same way I knew that I had asthma. I knew I had it but I didn’t know anything
about it. Unlike asthma, however, I would never grow out of being Irish. What little I did know about my parents’ early life
I had to piece together from tiny overheard pieces of conversations and a few inferences. I was a kid, and I wasn’t a great
inferer, but I did gather a few facts:

• Although my parents are almost exactly the same age and Ireland is a very small country, they did not know each other until
  they were in America.
  
• My dad arrived in America first, but my mom became a citizen before he did. They were both in their twenties when they became
  official Americans. (They were, of course, also official citizens of Ireland until the day they died.)
  
• Mom and Dad knew that they were leaving Ireland permanently. In this they were like most Irish people. For
  Irish immigrants coming to America, Ireland is the country of the past. Irish people are the least likely immigrants to return
  to their native country. Depression-era Philadelphia, for my parents, was still better than what they left behind. Frank McCourt’s
  mom and dad, who returned to Ireland, are an exceptional case. (With Ireland’s bright economy, this is probably going to change
  soon.)
  
• My parents had a very long courtship. They met; they dated; they got engaged. My dad, who was desperate for a job, decided
  to enlist in the army. He hated it. When his hitch was almost up, World War II started. He wound up spending ten years in
  the army. He got out, they got married. They were both almost forty.
  
• Mom and Dad didn’t say what their time in Ireland was like, but they did train me to suspect anything that was pseudo-Irish.
  I am happy they never lived to see
  Leprechaun in the Hood.
  

My parents’ one and only trip to Ireland was something that my dad strongly resisted. He needed a lot of coaxing. I remember
long conversations featuring my mom on the “Pro-Ireland” side and my dad on the “Con-Irish.” These started without warning.
Sometimes something came on television that suggested Ireland, and crossfire would begin. Sometimes it was something overtly
Irish. More often it was something subtle. In the right mood, merely the sight of the color green was enough to set it off.

Look at that on television.

Yeah.

Those hills look like round stone.

They don’t.

Yes they do. Exactly.

It’s just television. It’s nothing.

Let’s go.

I can’t.

Why?

I can’t leave the place.

Frank and Jack can handle it. Look at him. He’s all grown up.

I can’t do it. And that’s it.

Come on.

My dad would turn to me with a desperate look. Then he’d take off his glasses and rub his eyes. Then he would say, “She won’t
stop.”

There were many hours of this but they finally went. The hardest thing for my dad was leaving the bar, which he never called
anything except “The Place.” He worried about his bar all the time. He was sure that no one could run it the right way.

But he finally agreed, and they went back to Ireland for a couple of weeks. After he said he would go if she would just stop
talking about it, my mom whispered something in my ear.

“He just needed coaxing.” Five thousand hours of coaxing.

I also needed coaxing.

A lot of Americans saw the miserable, poverty-stricken youth of Frank McCourt as representative of the typical first-generation
Irish experience. I got public sympathy that I hadn’t earned in social situations. I was introduced to a woman in her twenties
at a party of some sort. I said hello. Then my friend, by way of introduction, said, “His parents were born in Ireland.” My
friend could have said many other things. She might have said, “He needs the plot explained to him after he sees Agatha Christie
movies.” She might have said, “The poor bastard voted for Ralph Nader.” But she picked the Irish thing. The person I was introduced
to suddenly looked sympathetic.

“I’m so sorry,” she said.

I will take whatever sympathy is offered, but there is nothing in my childhood that would normally evoke pity. In this I’m
like most first-generation Irish-Americans. The over-whelming majority had experiences like mine. Their parents
were generally very poor, but America was a new start. In America they worked hard, stayed married, and tried hard to raise
their kids. There were no drunken beatings and no starvation. Christmas was always nice. The only drunk people I saw weren’t
related to me. The Gannon kids grew up to be more American than Irish. They had a little neurosis here and there, but nothing
a little Prozac wouldn’t fix.

So it wasn’t really that surprising that my parents left the past in the past. However, no one ever successfully cuts himself
off from his own past, and, as J. M. Barrie said, “Nothing much matters after you’re six years old.”

I came in near the end of my parents’ lives. I completely missed the beginning, so I’m going back to the theater.

Of my two parents, my dad was by far the more mysterious. Except for her Irish past, I was very close to my mom, but I really
didn’t even know much about my dad’s
post
-Ireland life. My dad was over forty when I was born, so by the time I started to get curious about his past, he was already
around sixty. We didn’t talk very much. When he died, at sixty-five, I was still waiting to have a good talk.

I would spend about two hours alone with my dad every week, so it seems remarkable that we had very little communication.
However, my dad talked in a very distinctive, non-revelatory way. I can say, after “talking” with him for several hundred
hours, I still didn’t know any more about him. He wanted it that way. Let me explain.

Every Sunday we would ride to the bar to clean up. My dad liked to thoroughly clean the place on Sunday, the only day of the
week he closed. It was against the law in New Jersey to sell take-out liquor, beer, or wine then, so it probably wouldn’t
have been a big profit day, but my dad said that Sunday was a special day, set aside for church and family, and closing was
the right thing to do. My dad closed the bar on Sundays, Good Friday, New Year’s Day, and Christmas. The Good Friday closing
used to seriously puzzle winos. They
would knock on the door, peer through the glass, and scratch their heads in wonderment. It can’t be Sunday already, thought
the winos. Why is this bar closed today?

I know this because my dad and I drove past the bar on Good Fridays, and I could see the winos lost in wonderment outside.
There was another, open bar three blocks away, but this was
their
bar, and they were genuinely perplexed.

“They’re heathens,” my dad said.

There was no work on Good Friday, but every Sunday morning it was clean-up time. We’d get up around 6:00
A.M.
, go to mass, get some breakfast, and head over to the bar. My dad liked to get a fanatical right-wing preacher on the radio
and listen to him while he worked. His favorite right-wing preacher was named Carl McIntire, who would just spout off. He
hated Catholics and Irish people, but he really hated Irish Catholic people. My dad would listen to McIntire say something
horrible about Irish Catholics, and it did something very few other things could do: It made him laugh.

I would have preferred that we turn on some rock ’n’ roll. Even some Robert Goulet would be better than McIntire.

“This is my place,” he said. “When you get your own place you don’t have to listen to McIntire. You can listen to your own
crap.” That was the end of that.

My father’s conversation during our work resembled
Bartlett’s Familiar Quotations
. He never said (I think), “Beauty is Truth; Truth Beauty.” But he tended to develop certain responses, and once he had a
response that pleased him, he stayed with it.

These were his observations. I recorded them for posterity.

Sometimes something would have happened in my life, and I was perplexed by it. This would cause me all kinds of heartache
because I was a teenager beset by life’s difficulties. When I expressed this to my dad, he always eloquently said the same
thing:

What could have happened happened.

—
Bernard Gannon

Sometimes while laboring over a mop or one of the inadequate tools that had to do for this epic undertaking, I might be overcome
with lethargy. I would take a big gulp of air and let it out, shaking my head and showing great weariness at my impossible
task. Surely, he would not ask an animal to work like this. Where is the humanity? At these times my dad would say:

Hard work isn’t easy, isn’t it?

—
Bernard Gannon

My dad would retain his Bartlett’s quality even after we finished work and drove home. It was just a mood he got into on Sundays.
I remember this scene. My dad is in the living room watching TV. I am in the backyard playing one-on-one basketball with one
of my friends. I was very tough to beat on my home court because I knew all the cracks in the pavement in our driveway. After
playing, and inevitably triumphing, I, along with my vanquished friend, would be very thirsty. When I was about seventeen,
my dad let me steal a beer or two on Sundays, if I asked. You had to ask permission. I would say something like, “Is it okay
if _____ and I get a couple of beers?” His reply was:

What are we, Chinamen?

—
Bernard Gannon

Thirty years later, I still do not fully understand this question, but I remember it, as if it were the Pledge of Allegiance
to the Flag.

When I went to Ireland I knew it would not be easy, but I was going to find out at least something about this man.

TWO

Irish DNA