Midlife Irish (29 page)

Paulette didn’t want to go inside. She felt we should keep walking. I thought that I had to try Gannon’s. Actually, I was
looking for a little “meditation time.” I went in alone.

It was empty except for a young man behind the counter. I looked him over. He was about twenty-five. He was an inch or so
shorter than I was, about my weight. He was a round-faced, clean-shaven, red-haired, friendly sort of guy. He looked really
Irish. Duh.

“Can I help you?” he said.

“Yes.” I started on my stumbling introduction. I was from America. My name was Frank Gannon. I knew that my father had grown
up around Athlone. His name was Bernard Gannon. He was born in 1908. He lived near Athlone until he was about twenty. Then
he went to America. That’s about it. Could he help me?

I can’t remember the man’s first name, but his last name was Gannon, which was comforting. He didn’t know whether he could
help me. He called into the back room. An older man came out. He looked like a man who had just woken. I told him my story.
He shook hands with me. He paused and looked puzzled.

One of the Gannons said, finally, “I have some people for you to meet.”

He motioned for me to follow him.

I followed him down a narrow hallway. There was a sort of living room back there. There were chairs and a rug and a refrigerator
and a television. It looked like the set for a sitcom. There were several people sitting around drinking and watching television.
Mr. Gannon introduced me to a young woman and an older woman and a heavy man in his sixties and a tall skinny man in his thirties.
They gave me a drink. I tasted it. It was whiskey. It tasted very good.

I got introduced to everybody. He said the name of the person, and then he said, “This is Frank Gannon.” He said it as if
it meant something. And the person who was named
“Gannon” acted as if he or she was very pleased to be meeting Frank Gannon.

“Frank Gannon,” they’d say. They smiled warmly and shook my hand.

I drank the whiskey and talked. Everybody was very friendly. We laughed and talked about this and that. It soon became clear,
however, that I wasn’t related, even faintly, to anyone in the room. I wasn’t even possibly anybody’s third cousin twice removed.

I was just some guy who wandered in off the street.

But we still had a nice talk. I finished my drink. They offered me another, or maybe some tea. I said I had to be going. How
about a scone? No, I can’t. Are you sure? They’re very good. Nice and hot. Fresh-baked. No, no, I can’t, sorry. We have a
busy day planned.

I said my goodbyes, walked to the front of the store, opened the door, and walked into the sunny day.

Paulette was standing there. Her arms were folded in front of her. She was not happy. I had been in there almost twenty minutes.
We started walking.

“Well,” she said, “what happened?”

“Nothing,” I said.

We walked along and, for the next twenty minutes, neither of us uttered a single syllable. But I felt a little better.

We wandered around for a while. Then we went where all confused people in Ireland have traditionally gone: to the Catholic
church.

There are two huge Catholic churches in Athlone: Saint Peter’s and Saint Mary’s. Saint Peter’s was the first church we came
across. I opened the door and we walked inside.

Saint Peter’s was quite a place. It was a beautiful, huge, elaborate church with amazing stained-glass windows and polished
marble and beautifully carved wood everywhere and soaring ceilings and startling, elaborate gold tabernacles. It was completely
empty except for one little guy who was
kneeling in a back pew all alone. He turned around and noted our presence, then turned back to his praying.

Paulette and I tentatively made our way up to the altar. We went in different aisles because we were still in the midst of
the aforementioned American-Alienation-Athlone experience. Our steps echoed in the huge space as we made our desultory way
up our separate aisles. I looked over and saw that she was a little in front of me, so I started to walk faster. She saw me
inching ahead and increased her speed. Although she was in better aerobic shape than I, I am bigger. My stride is longer.
I tried to get to the altar first, and I barely made it, beating her by about two lengths. I looked at her smugly. I could
see she was “less than thrilled.”

I was very happy to notice that there was a woman in back of the altar. She had been invisible from the rear of the cavernous
church when we entered. She stopped what she was doing and turned. Our eyes met.

“Excuse me,” I said. I began my pathetically lame, stumbling spiel. It was slightly more fluid because of the whiskey back
in Gannon’s. I started to think, wistfully, of Gannon’s. Maybe I should go back there. I was liked and respected there. I
was an “insider.”

The woman turned around. I had been using the time-tested stare-at-the-back-of-the-person’s-head-until-they-turn-around method.

“I don’t know if you can help me, but I’m from America and I’m over here looking into my father’s past because he was born
here in Ireland but he later moved to America, where I was born, and I just wondered whether you could help me find out anything
about his life over here in Ireland before I was born…”

I paused and noticed that my words were having absolutely no effect. Was it possible that she was not an English-speaking
person? In the middle of Ireland, it seemed very unlikely that she could be a non-English-understanding
person. Maybe it was just my American accent. Or maybe (which seemed like the best bet) I was just being really lame.

I paused again. The silence in the big church was very heavy. It made me a little nervous. When I get nervous, I have a tendency
to babble, so I started to babble again.

“So they always say, in America, that if you are really confused about something and you are in Ireland, the best place to
go is a church…” I looked at the lady. She didn’t think my “church” comment was amusing. As a matter of fact, she looked as
if she found me both unamusing and stupid. I looked over at Paulette. She looked just like the lady. They could be bookends.

The lady spoke. Her voice was very flat and emotionless, like someone announcing train schedules.

“Sir,” she said, “I’m the florist.”

She went back to her flowers. I thought
Well, the fact that you’re the florist doesn’t mean you can’t be helpful.

At that point, Paulette walked away. Great move, babe. Then I realized that she had seen someone, another lady, in the little
room behind the altar. This lady looked like someone who knew what was going on. I followed Paulette, who didn’t acknowledge
that act in any perceptible way.

When I walked into the room, the lady was looking through a shelf of books. These were major-league books. They were bound
in red leather and they looked big enough to contain all known Irish knowledge. Each one of the books was thicker than a Manhattan
white pages. The lady removed one of the books from the shelf. She brought it over and plopped it on a table. This was a strong
woman. The thing must have weighed thirty-five pounds.

The big red book turned out to be a computer-generated list of everyone who had ever had anything to do with Saint Peter’s
of Athlone: their birth, baptism, First Holy Communion, wedding, divorces (a decidedly un-Catholic-Irish bit of information),
all of their addresses, their death, and, in bold computer print, their yearly contributions to Saint Peter’s,
before and after death. I was wondering how they could give money
after
they were dead. Did someone give it in their name? What’s the point there? Does the dead guy want a tax deduction? A big
computer-generated page always makes me start thinking like that.

The big red book consisted, I noticed with quiet amazement, of just the letters “G,” “H,” and “I.” A thirty-five-pound book.
They kept good records here at Athlone. I had thought it was a sleepy little hamlet, but it was really data headquarters,
Ireland central.

But there was absolutely nothing in the big red book about Bernard Gannon. There were a few Bernard Gannons, but not
the
Bernard Gannon. Not the Bernard Gannon with enormous hands. Not the Bernard Gannon who had left Athlone and sailed to America
and married Anne Forde and had several children, one of whom was a remarkable literary figure who was really good sexually
and a credit to his race.

When we walked out of the church the little guy with the bulbous nose was still there praying. He looked at me. He looked
as if he felt sorry for me.

After that, the afternoon turned fouler and fouler and testier and testier, as did the general mood. We started walking a
few steps apart. It was slowly becoming one of those afternoons that are best erased from the memory bank. I had experienced
a thousand afternoons like that, but this was the first in Ireland.

Finally I stopped, excused myself, and went and got an ice cream cone. That, oddly, was the last straw. When I returned to
Paulette, slurping my cone (very good butter pecan in a sugar cone, by the way), things got ugly.

“You
had
to get that, didn’t you?”

“No,” I said, reaching back for my reserve sarcasm, “I didn’t
have
to do that. I
chose
to do that.” I knew I was fanning the flames, but I was far beyond caring.

Now we walked along in sullen silence. Blocks of Ireland
were passed without comment. I thought, randomly, that it reminded me, somehow, of the Newark airport.

Finally, after a sullen eternity, we got to our tiny automobile, our wretched Punta. Paulette got in what would be, in America,
the passenger door, a sign that she desired to drive. I was in no mood to say otherwise. We drove out of Athlone. “I got the
music in me,” was playing on the radio.

The traffic, as you would figure, was terrible. It started to rain. I looked at the guy in the car next to us. He looked as
if he belonged on the New Jersey Turnpike. People were honking their horns and passing on the impossibly narrow streets. Paulette
got a little too close to the curb and severely mangled a hubcap.

Somehow, as it was interpreted, the mangling was all my fault. I welcomed the responsibility. Mangle the other one, woman.
I’ll take the blame for that one too. When someone blamed my mother for something that wasn’t her fault, she always said,
Go ahead, put it on me. I’ve got broad shoulders.

I didn’t say that to Paulette but I was thinking it.

Now things got ugly. The horrible weather (it started, on cue, to pour, the first hard rain we had seen in Ireland). The terrible,
aggressive Athlone drivers. The sullen florist. The bitter ice cream cone purchase. The mangled hubcap.

Silence fell.

Ireland sucks
, I thought.

We drove like statues in the front seat of our tiny red car to an Irish Heritage Center, the sort of remote outpost that desperate,
suicidal tourists seeking their ancestral roots go in times of desperate need.

The Irish Heritage Center was an ugly, squat, white brick building set in an unpromising empty lot. It had a sign that advertised
lessons in traditional “Riverdance” stepping. Sure, stop here. This is the right place for our foul, nihilistic mood. No place
could be better. Let’s all riverdance. I can be lord of the motherless dance. I’m a Mick. Bite me.

Soon, I thought, there may be gunplay. In a final confrontation
between Paulette and me, I felt that I would emerge triumphant. I was much larger and I felt confident that, if it came to
it, I would prove to be the better man.

The last act of
La Boheme
is cheerier than the mood we brought with us to the Irish Heritage Center. But it was there that things, blissfully and surprisingly,
started to look up. The lady at the Heritage Center listened to our story about looking for my dad’s roots. Her eyes said
that she had heard this story many, many times, and the last time was ten minutes ago. She gave us a form, told us where to
send it, told us what it would cost in American dollars to do a computer check on all the Gannons in the area, yadda, yadda,
and was about to bid us goodbye. I was thinking about the desultory road back to Athlone. I asked myself, “What would Samuel
Beckett do?”

Then the heritage lady furrowed her brow. She raised her chin slightly.

“So the name is Gannon?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said, “and Turley.” Turley was my grandmother’s maiden name, a fact I picked up from a trip to the Mormon website.

“You know, there’s an old gent a few miles from here, Noel Turley. And I believe there’s some Gannon in him. Let me give you
directions.”

It was hard to believe. Something not completely bad.

We drove down a little road: a left turn from the road to Moate, a village about ten miles from Athlone. The houses were few
and far between, but they were pretty nice houses. It looked as if some of them were larger, renovated versions of the
Quiet Man
house, with the thatched roof replaced with slate.

We drove past an old man in a suit. We stopped.

“Excuse me, sir,” I asked. “Do you know Noel Turley?”

“Noel Turley?” he said. He said it as if shocked that I would ask him such an obvious question.

“He’s about five kilometers away. There’s an old caved-in-house, and a railroad, and a new house. Turley’s in the new house.”

Now we were cooking. We drove along happily, the misery of Athlone happily beginning to crumble. It stopped raining. The sun,
a rare thing in Ireland, started to peep through the gray clouds. Our bleak Samuel Beckett afternoon mood was slowly beginning
to dissipate.

We passed a caved-in house. I didn’t notice a railroad. There was an old gent with a friendly looking red face. He was stumbling
in his yard. There was something mysteriously familiar about him. We stopped the car.

“Excuse me, do you know Noel Turley?” I asked.

“Speaking,” he said.

Noel Turley invited us in and we walked into his house. He acted as if we lived next door and had last visited the house yesterday.
He introduced us to his wife, who was very gracious and friendly. Noel directed us to our seats. We sat down in his living
room. Yes, he had holy water fonts.