My Buried Life (19 page)

We both laugh. ‘No, you won’t.’

‘Course I will! Long, scented letters.’

We laugh again. It’s nice, this easy farewell. I trace my fingers over his Yeats tattoos. He squirms.

‘What?’

‘These stupid things. First thing I do when I make a bit of money is get them lasered. That’s it for me and ink.’

I follow the loops the words make. ‘I think they’re nice.’ And I mean it.

As he leaves, Sean kisses me. ‘Be good. And go back to New York. There’s nothing happening here for any of us.’

I watch till Sean turns the corner, and that’s when I see him. The other man. The one in the navy coat. He’s leaving Maude’s garden flat, the coat buttoned to the neck, a tweed cap pulled down on his head. He spies me, salutes, then climbs the steps towards me. Fear rumbles in some distant region of my insides. Something – intuition? – has instructed me to be wary of strangers who lurk in the wings, then present themselves as this man is doing now, with broad smiles and an outstretched hand.

Whatever it is he has to say to me, I don’t think I want to hear it.

‘Eva,’ he says, those hands reaching for mine. ‘My name is Peter Mahoney.’ The accent is unmistakable New York, the pronunciation of his last name American, with the stress on the middle syllable. ‘I’m sorry for just arriving like this, but I’d like to talk to you.’

CHAPTER 29

A
nonymity is what appeals to me most about hotels. Isaac and I used to meet in them at the beginning. No one cares who you are or what you do. The huge lobbies, the potted plants and revolving doors all conspire to create a place where identities are shed like onion skins and new circumstances can be invented at will.

Peter and I have arranged to meet here, in this city centre hotel. I walked through Stephen’s Green on my way, relishing the sudden change in temperatures. The colours of the green are deceptive, allowing me to think I’m in another, bigger city, where grey does not predominate, and real buildings dwarf the landscape.

The low buildings in Dublin annoy me. Everything here is irritating me at present, from the ridiculous ways of dressing – bare feet stuffed into ill-fitting shoes, even in the depths of winter, fake tan smeared on every conceivable body part – to the shops that are but disappointing imitations of proper stores in proper cities. Everything seems to be a copy of something bigger and better somewhere else. It’s as though Ireland has sold all semblance of its own self for a shabby imported version that cannot but disappoint.

I’m exhausted lately.

Peter has something he wishes to talk to me about. After introducing himself on the doorstep, he declined an invitation to step inside. He is staying here for a week. It suits me better this way. Something niggles at me, some vague conviction that all is not right with this man in his tailored coat, who loitered for a day or two before asking Maude where I was.

My guess is that Peter has been sent by Isaac, instructed to run me to ground and drag me back to New York, to my job, to him. Has he shadowed me, uncovered clues to my existence here, biding his time before approaching me?

It is nearly eleven o’clock, our appointed hour. I sit by a window and order an espresso. The place is buzzing. So much for the recession that is crippling Ireland. No evidence is on display here, among the suited professionals and the expertly overdressed. It was almost impossible to get a table.

Peter sits down in the chair opposite me that I’ve kept my coat on. He shakes my hand.

‘This must be strange for you,’ he says. ‘I’m sorry for the mystery, but I thought meeting you in a neutral spot would be the best.’ His skin is smooth, his teeth expertly cared for. It’s his accent that gets me the most, that vowel-broadened East Coast drawl. It sounds like home.

‘Is Isaac okay?’

Confusion films his face. ‘Isaac?’

Disappointment dampens the buzz the espresso has given me. Of course Isaac isn’t looking for me. Why would he bother?

Peter orders black coffee in a cafetière. When it arrives he busies himself with pouring it, dropping sugar in, stirring. Again I think that my father would be Peter Mahoney’s age now, somewhere in his late sixties. Would he still have all his hair? Would it be white, like Peter’s? If he could see me, what would he think of me? After we left him I spent most of my time missing him, pondering what he was doing, what music he was listening to. I sought out my face in shiny surfaces, peering at my green eyes, my dark hair. My mother slapped my hands, retribution for my vanity, but it wasn’t my own face I pursued. It was my father’s.

‘Where are you from?’

‘Bay Ridge.’ His accent is unmistakably Brooklyn. ‘But I live in midtown. Have done for years.’ He coughs, pauses. ‘Eva, I knew your father.’

Impossible. My father barely left the flat midlands. ‘How?’

‘I lived here when I was younger. Well, not here, not Dublin, but Ireland. Shanrath.’

My confusion must be visible, for he talks rapidly again.

‘My parents were immigrants. You know the story, they left in the forties, spent the rest of their lives longing for the place, then all their dreams came true when I decided to come back for a while, try it out, find a place to fit in.’

There is nothing in his story I haven’t heard before from the scores of Irish Americans I’ve encountered in my years in New York. What I’ve never understood is this yearning they have for the homeland, the old country. Now, all I can think about is getting out again. It’s all illusion, of course, all romance about a place that doesn’t exist.

‘I met Tom shortly after I arrived. His family farmed the neighbouring land.’

To hear my father’s name mentioned so casually, as though he were someone I was used to discussing, is shocking. My mother, when she mentioned him, something she rarely did, only ever referred to him as
your father. Your father.
Her lip curled palpably around the words, as though the taste were too disgusting to bear.

‘Did you know my mother?’

‘Yes.’

‘She died last September.’ Has it already been that long? Six months. Something has happened to time since my arrival in Dublin, an undetected slipping away of all those weeks and months. Six months.

‘I’m sorry.’

‘Don’t be.’

Music tinkles from a piano in the corner of the room, a welcome spill of sound. I recognise Liszt, the soft notes of a piano concerto. ‘But why are you here now?’

Sunlight suddenly dazzles the table between us. I look out the window. ‘Crazy climate, right?’ Peter laughs. ‘Four seasons in one day.’

I’m tired of it, tired of it all. It’s time for me to go, leave Dublin, and probably never come back. I crave consistency, knowing where I am, what kind of day it’s going to be.

I live in New York, I tell Peter. His shock is disproportionate to such a small piece of information.

‘What?’

I explain about the house, but don’t give any details of my sabbatical. I’m going back, I say. This is temporary.

He runs a hand over his face. ‘If we’d known,’ he says. ‘If we’d only known.’

I shift in my seat. Something is off here. There’s something unsaid that I can’t put my finger on, a whole part of this that is hovering beyond my comprehension. Something, a shadow maybe, lingers, obscuring the finer details. There is a sense of the conversation being waterlogged. I’m missing a component but I have no idea what it is.

The waitress lingers behind us. Peter points to my empty cup, which is wordlessly refilled. He points to pastries on the plates of the people at the next table, and within a moment croissants appear, small white pots of butter, others of jam. This is a man used to ordering. How like Isaac he is in his confident ability to ask for exactly what he wants, barely pausing his conversation.

Peter mentions a new exhibit at the Whitney, construction that’s causing huge traffic problems in midtown, a concert hall scheduled for opening next week in Brooklyn, just over the bridge. The New York Phil will inaugurate the new building. Isaac and I went a few times to see the Phil at Avery Fisher Hall. An hour in a cab in the crush of rush hour, the day’s work left behind us downtown. Once, the traffic was so bad we jumped out half way and took the subway to 66th Street. Isaac didn’t like the subway, and it took quite some convincing to get him underground. But Isaac has no place here, not in my head and not in my life. He belongs firmly in the past.

I lean forward. ‘Peter.’

He pauses, sips from his cup. The people at the next table leave and are replaced seamlessly by a couple with a sleeping baby.

‘Why are you here?’

He coughs. ‘I knew your father.’

A flash of irritation crackles inside me, flushing my cheeks. ‘I know. You said. But he’s been dead since I was a small child. Why are you telling me this now?’

The baby next to us wakes with a bawl. Her father shushes her, jiggling her on his lap and kissing her. She responds by arching her back and screaming even louder.

Peter shifts in his seat. He looks at his hands. They are good hands, the nails square, the skin smooth.

‘Eva.’

A vein throbs in my temple. A drink would be nice, because I realise I don’t want to hear whatever it is this man has travelled to Ireland to tell me. I’m in a hotel, for God’s sake. There is booze all around me, oceans of it, enough to drown me several times over. Glasses play their tinkling music everywhere, despite the early hour. Ice chinks, soda fizzes, even a champagne cork pops. In this precise moment I think I could murder the man in front of me for a drink.

In the end, after all the pauses, the procrastinating, Peter rushes the words out. ‘Your father didn’t die when you were a child. There was no heart attack or tumour or whatever your mother told you.’ He inhales, a shuddering breath. ‘He only died six weeks ago.’

The rest of what he says is a blur. Some words surface through the garbled, bloated mass. My father didn’t die when I was a child. He died recently. In New York City. A few miles from where I live.

I sit on my hands. They are shaking.

My father and this man were friends. My mother disapproved. No surprises there. Peter recounts walks in the evenings, pints in the nearest pub, three miles away. Then the marriage, and Esther’s cold eye of censure cast over her new husband’s friend.

‘I don’t know what way to say all this to you.’

‘Just say it. You and my father rendezvoused in the evenings. What was it, pints of stout and talk of milk quotas?’ My bitterness sounds childish. I’m jealous, I suppose. Someone knew my father and I never did.

‘We were friends, yes. Good friends. We were both isolated, I suppose, cut off from everything. And I was miserable, missing New York.’

‘You could’ve joined the football club.’ Wasn’t that what country boys did back then? Played sports, turned up at the local dance blitzed on cheap whiskey and tried to grope the other farmers’ daughters. All loud talk, no action guaranteed.

‘Do I look like a football player?’ He smiles. ‘Believe me, I couldn’t be further from it.’

I understand my father’s loneliness, his need for a friend. His elderly parents were dead by the time he met my mother. No siblings. My mother had to have been the one who moved in on him, because my father was the quietest person I’d known.

I remember his humble collection of jazz records. I remember his hands, rough from labour, dirt filling in the grooves. But mostly I remember the way he treated me, like I was some sort of rare bird. His opaque delightfulness.

My nose prickles, and I wonder if I’m going to cry. I haven’t wept in a very long time. There’s simply too much to cry over, and I’m not sure I’d even know where to start.After the abortion I thought about stabbing needles in my flesh, stubbing cigarettes out on my thighs, or sticking my hands in fire. I tried to focus on physical pain because the other pain was simply unendurable. There were no tears to cry. That well of release had long since run dry, evaporated by a grief too enormous to conquer.

Something is wrong with Peter’s story. Something doesn’t gel, doesn’t make real sense. My mother had been many things, but one way I couldn’t see her was in the role of monopoliser, demanding all of my father’s attention for herself. She was too self-sufficient for that, too severed from warmth.

Peter sighed, a huge intake of breath. He rubs his palms on his knees. ‘Esther took you and Andrew away. She told Tom that if he went near either of you, or tried to stay in touch with you, that she’d go to the police.’ He rubs both of his eyes. ‘It was Ireland in the seventies. It was easier to believe such threats, to take them seriously.’

‘So, what, he pretended to be dead?’ Why am I listening to this man, wasting my morning when I could be outside, running by the canal, reading a book with only fictional people and events unfolding in front of me? I could be preparing a short bio for the new textbook of poems that will include five of mine for the next school year. Anything but listen to this.

‘He didn’t pretend anything. It was Esther’s idea.’

‘And he just went along with it.’

‘He didn’t feel he had any choice,’ Peter says, sadly.

‘What happened?’

‘He came to New York with me. Esther said he’d died, told everyone he was dead, including you and Andrew. We went to New York. He sent her money for the two of you every month, and she never told anyone the truth. I think eventually she’d even convinced herself he was dead.’

Suddenly the hotel erupts into sound. Phones ring at the reception desk, glasses clink in the bar, the piano music crashes in thunderous waves of drama, people’s voices scream in high-octane conversation. In my head I sweep the cups and coffee pot to the floor in an arc of liquid and shattered china. In reality, I do no such thing.

My father, alive and in New York. All those years. And me, living nearby. Walking the streets, hailing cabs, sitting at patios, hiding in jazz clubs. Lying in Sheep’s Meadow, the buildings a horseshoe around the park. How many times had I come close to him, overlooked him on the street, wandered near where he was?

Did he pass me on the subway as the trains screamed and rattled their way along their endless circling track? Were we seated at the same moment on the edge of the Bethesda fountain, watching children throw balls around? Maybe we both gave money to the homeless man in the Knicks cap who waited, paper coffee cup in hand, outside the deli on Prince Street, day after day. Had we been to the same movies at Film Forum at the same time? Or walked by each other in Washington Square Park, stood watching the same street artists perform or chess games unfold?

‘I’m sorry, Eva. I am. It wasn’t Tom’s wish.’

So why do it then? Why pretend to be dead? Who would do such a thing? Of course, even I could answer that. My mother.

‘What does my mother have to do with all this?’

‘Everything.’

My mother had been in love with Peter. She wanted him out of her sight because she couldn’t have him. She forbade him to call to the little farmhouse, denied him hospitality because she wanted him for herself. Her upbringing, her religion, her own repressed nature would have conspired against her desires, so she put him away from her. It was easier to send my father packing, to spirit her children away under cover of summer darkness, than to have the man she wanted two miles away, single and for the taking, and utterly, utterly forbidden.

‘She was in love with you.’

Peter’s hands are joined on his lap. He shuts his eyes.