The Education of an Idealist

Thursdays were especially precious to me, as they were reserved for my weekly “day out” in Dublin with my dad. He would pick me up from Mount Anville, the Catholic school I attended, take me for a hamburger, and then help me stock up on candy before we landed at Hartigan’s. Our arrival at the pub was usually a welcome escape from the lashing rain or, on short winter afternoons, the damp darkness. As soon as my father was spotted, he was greeted with cheers of “Jimbo!,” “Jimmy!,” or “If it isn’t the fine doctor himself!” My dad was such a regular patron that he had a designated chair—known as the “Seat of Power”—at the bar.

From around the time I was five years old, I viewed Hartigan’s as a kind of oasis. Without a fuss, I would make my way down a half-flight of stairs from the main pub room and take a seat at a seldom-used bar that mirrored the busy one upstairs. My dad would bring me a bottle of 7 Up—if Stephen was with me, he would get a Coke—and I would contentedly dig into whatever mystery I was reading. I never went far without an Enid Blyton (“The Famous Five” or “The Secret Seven” series), Nancy Drew, or Hardy Boys book under my arm.

Over the course of the many hours I spent in Hartigan’s basement, I disappeared on far-off adventures with intrepid child detectives, combating thieves and kidnappers. On the weekend, when I finished a book I had brought to the pub, I would march upstairs, and my dad would dash to the car to retrieve my coloring books and markers for the next phase of the afternoon. When my dad’s friends brought their children, we would play board games or make up our own entertainment while our fathers laid down sports predictions in the room above.

When I was on my own, I made small talk with the pub guests who ventured downstairs to put change in the cigarette machine or to use the bathroom. Sometimes, I would stand outside the “Gents” toilet, singing songs. I told Stephen that I offered these performances so that my musical talents (which I had yet to realize were lacking) would be “discovered,” but I was probably just pining for attention. For a while, the pub maintained a slot machine downstairs, which I enjoyed because it drew occasional pub patrons. On slow days, I often stood next to the machine’s display screen for the extra reading light.

Hartigan’s was not clean; the downstairs, where I read, played, and sang, had a smell that mingled urine, chlorine disinfectant, and the swirl of barley, malt, and hops. I couldn’t have liked these smells, or playing near a pub’s toilets, but I never complained. Years later, when I mentioned to an Irish diplomat that Hartigan’s had been a big part of my childhood, he claimed that once, while drinking there, he had approached the bathroom door and spotted what he thought was a sack lying across the threshold. “I went to step inside,” he told me, “and then suddenly, to my horror, the sack moved. It was a person!”

I froze, thinking for a second—absurdly—that it might have been me, before he revealed that it was, in fact, a small man who had passed out. I have my doubts that this story is true, but it speaks to the way many who visited Hartigan’s thought about the place I called my second home as a young girl.

Although I must have occasionally experienced boredom or loneliness down in the basement, when I think of that time, I only remember my father, the first man I loved, loving me back. While many Hartigan’s regulars seemed to leave thoughts of their families behind when they entered the cocoon of the pub, my father brought me with him. I was his sidekick. I could find him any time I needed him, with a long row of drained pint glasses beside him. Instead of shaking me off when I bounded up the stairs, he often picked me up and sat me down beside him. I grew preternaturally comfortable chatting with adults and people of different backgrounds, particularly about sports.

While my dad must have been well above the legal limit when he drove us home, he seemed in complete command of our little universe. On school nights when he came home late from the pub, even if it was after midnight, he would come to my room and wake me up. Often, he just wanted to chat about my day, but sometimes he would take Stephen and me for a drive around the neighborhood in his white Mazda—the backseat of which was covered with sheaves of discolored piano sheet music, broken golf tees, loose change, greasy wrappers from the local fish and chips shop, and months-old newspapers.

Hartigan’s was such a vital part of our family routine that when my aunt bought me an elegant blue raincoat and observed, “This will look lovely on you when you go to Mass on Sunday,” I responded, “No—it will look lovely on me when I go to the pub with Dad on Sunday.”

MY PARENTS LOVED LIFE and learning, they loved sports, and they loved me. They just found loving each other a struggle.

I craved harmony between them. On one family vacation, I interrupted lunch to present them with a fifty-pence piece I had been saving. “Whichever of you doesn’t argue with the other will get this,” I declared. “I will be watching, keeping careful track.” But my early efforts at diplomacy did not succeed. Although my mother had fallen for my dad watching him play piano in the pubs of London, she didn’t hide her disapproval of his drinking or his embrace of leisure time. But when she complained that Hartigan’s was no place for kids, my father countered that if she was so committed to our well-being, she should find a way to work less and be home more.

He started to nag and even taunt her. “Where have you been?” he would say when she came home late, physically poking her with his index finger.

“None of your business,” she would answer, before shutting herself in a room where he couldn’t disturb her studies.

One evening, when he found her at the kitchen table reviewing for an exam, he swept her medical notes and books into his arms, and, though it was pouring rain, marched into the back garden and threw them into a walled-up boiler pit where she would be unable to retrieve them.

Sober, perhaps, my dad might have pulled back from a confrontation, but having packed away a dozen pints, he would raise his voice at her, and she would give as good as she got. Lying in my twin bed above the living room, I would listen as the arguments grew nastier and as plates from the kitchen were hurled. When I got out of bed to spy from the landing atop the stairs, I would alternate between straining to decide who was at fault and blocking my ears with my hands so I could make out nothing but the sound of my heart pounding—a sound so deafening I was sure my parents could hear it below.

Sometimes, I would get down on my knees beside my bed, make a hasty sign of the cross, and then try to drown out the noise by saying as many Hail Marys and Our Fathers as it took for the din to subside.

WHEN I WAS SEVEN, Mum left Ireland for a year to help set up the first kidney transplant and dialysis unit in Kuwait, leaving Stephen and me in the care of our dad and wonderful housekeeper and live-in nanny, Eilish Hartnett. While a year was a long time to be separated, during the summer, Mum brought my brother and me to Kuwait for a six-week visit.

There, Stephen and I experienced heat of a kind that was literally unimaginable for two Dublin kids. We wore miniature dishdashas, which kept us as cool as possible, and lathered ourselves in sunscreen before spending long hours on the beach, swimming alongside Bedouin and Kuwaiti boys—but no local girls. I was fascinated by the minarets that dotted the horizon and the mixed dress of women—some in Western clothes, others in abayas or hijabs. Alcohol was illegal, but the Irish expatriates circumvented the rules at their parties. Although my mother was never a big drinker, she liked to join in, and even contributed beer that she home-brewed in a green plastic barrel using a kit she had brought from Dublin.

The deepest impression of our stay was made less by the sights and sounds of Kuwait than by the man with whom Mum had become romantically involved: an Irishman with a wide mustache and thick, prematurely graying hair. Dr. Edmund Bourke, or “Eddie,” was a pioneer in the science and practice of nephrology (the branch of medicine that deals with kidneys), and had been Mum’s supervisor at the Meath Hospital in Dublin during her medical residency. Although Eddie had a wife and four children of his own back in Dublin, he and my mother were now living together in a high-rise apartment, acting as if they were married.

Before Mum brought Stephen and me back to Ireland, she asked us not to tell our dad about Eddie. If we needed to mention that there was an “Eddie” in Kuwait, we were told to identify him as “Eddie McGrath,” an Irish doctor who apparently also worked in Kuwait City.

To a seven-year-old, this seemed like high-stakes mischief. I was invigorated to have been let into an exclusive club with grown-ups who now trusted me with a secret. I could tell that whatever was happening between Mum and Eddie was making her happier than I could remember seeing her with my dad.

Unfortunately, not long after we returned to Ireland, my father asked me point-blank whether my mother had been with Eddie Bourke in Kuwait. I answered truthfully that she had, presuming that Mum would not want me to lie in response to a direct question. She reassured me later that I had done the right thing. But when she moved back to Dublin from Kuwait, although she returned to live at home with us, she slept in the guest bedroom. She and my father began leading separate lives.

My dad, then thirty-six, had himself become involved with Susan Doody, a twenty-five-year-old teacher at a Dublin primary school, another welcome new presence in my and my brother’s lives. While Susan showed more tolerance for pub life than my mother, she still preferred luring Dad away from Hartigan’s to the latest Bergman or Fassbinder film, rugby match, or golf tournament. “He could spend hours watching any ball move on any surface,” she marveled.

In Catholic Ireland, Susan kept quiet about her relationship with my dad, believing that the nuns who ran the school where she taught would come under pressure to let her go if they found out that she was dating a married man. Still, in the coming years, she would play a leading role in prodding my dad to change his lifestyle, appealing to him to find a job that was more fulfilling than his part-time dental practice. “Let’s have a drink and talk about it,” he would say heartily, changing the subject.

Even when Eddie emerged on the scene and my father and Susan became more heavily involved, it never occurred to me that my parents’ marriage could end. To be fair, I had the facts on my side: marriages in Ireland weren’t allowed to end. The Catholic Church was extremely influential, and the priests made sure that Irish law prohibited not only contraception and abortion, but also divorce. And if marriages were to start ending because of “the drink”—known across the land as “the good man’s fault”—it seemed to me that few families would remain intact.

Despite the turbulence around me, I thought life was good. My father projected a sense that he lacked for nothing. He drank too much and clearly didn’t do much work, but he had infinite time for me—a child’s only true measure of a parent. My mother worked feverishly, but when we were together, she managed to make me feel as though time were standing still.

However, not long after she returned from Kuwait, Mum told Stephen and me she was hoping to move with us to the United States. Before she did so, she told my father about this possibility, stressing that she would not make the move if he would get help for his drinking problem. He refused.

My father battled Mum in an Irish court, trying to gain sole custody of us. Each depicted the other as unfit to raise kids: my father because he drank too much; my mother because she worked too much and was having an affair. My father didn’t help his cause when he appeared in court once after “a liquid lunch,” giving my mother more ammunition for her claim that he was incapable of taking care of two children.

When my father lost in the lower court, he appealed the case, which made its way to the Supreme Court. Once again, the court ruled in her favor. My dad didn’t prepare properly, and his itinerant career left him unable to demonstrate that he had the means to financially support his family. Despite the judge’s condescension to Mum about her education, in 1979 the court granted her permission to leave Ireland with my brother and me.

Given Irish tradition and the stigma associated with separating from one’s spouse, it is remarkable that she was awarded custody. But the state attached three conditions if Mum wanted to take us to the United States. First, my brother and I were to be raised Catholic. We were to continue attending Mass and studying religion so that we would receive the sacraments (communion and confirmation for my younger brother, confirmation for me, and regular confession for us both). Second, my mother would home-school us in the Irish language. And finally, we were to return to Ireland to stay with my dad during the summers and over holidays like Christmas and Easter.

I did not experience the news of moving to America as a bombshell announcement. Mum must have casually introduced the idea, herself not then expecting that the move would be permanent.

We boarded a plane bound for the United States in September of 1979. I was just nine years old, but I had a clear sense that Mum would do important medical work and then bring us back to Dublin, our home.

It would be years before I understood that we had immigrated to the United States.

2

AMERICA

When Mum, Stephen, and I landed in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, I was dressed for the occasion in a Stars and Stripes T-shirt. Mum, then just thirty-six years old, was wearing brown corduroys and a form-fitting turtleneck. All these years later, I remember her face at the airport as we awaited our luggage: she was exhausted. Yet somehow, she was going to start her American medical career the next day.

What must she have felt when we landed? Relief that she had somehow pulled off the move? Trepidation at a new life? I imagine that she was probably just thinking: “Where in God’s name are the bags? Sam and Steve need sleep.”

For my part, I knew that my mother had left my father behind in Ireland. But that she had left him for good—that they would never again even argue over dinner together—had not entered my nine-year-old consciousness. It wouldn’t for a very long time.

I scoured the conveyor belt for our suitcases, crammed with everything we could fit from our lives in Ireland: the components of my Irish school uniform; “runners” that would become “sneakers”; a stash of mystery novels; and “Teddy,” my long-suffering teddy bear. Mum had shipped several Dunlop tennis rackets, her squash racket, her most important medical reference books, and my maroon Raleigh bicycle. She would go to great lengths to reassemble the bike—only for me to quickly disown it as out of fashion in a neighborhood where dirt bikes were all the rage.

As we exited the baggage area, I recognized the middle-aged, medium-built man with a large crop of silver-gray hair who greeted us; it was Eddie Bourke, with whom Mum had told us we would be living. By then, she had been seeing Eddie for five years and he had separated from his wife.

During our time in Kuwait, Eddie had been a playful companion, taking Stephen and me to the beach and teaching me the basics of chess, as well as a few Arabic phrases. But what stood out most was his ability to lighten our days with ridiculous rhymes. He would recite:

There was an old lady from Clyde

Who once ate an apple and died.

Inside the lamented,

The apple fermented,

To cider inside her inside.

Or he would teasingly urge us to join in:

Way up on the mountain,

Green grows the grass,

Down came the elephant,

Tumbling on his …

Just as I was about to scream out the risqué swearword “ass,” Eddie would plow ahead with great animation:

Don’t misunderstand me.

Don’t you be misled.

Down came the elephant,

Tumbling on his head.

While my dad was quick with a cutting barb and flaunted encyclopedic recall, Eddie had a warmer, more inclusive kind of wit and an intelligence that extended well beyond the field of medicine. He would sit for hours with a pencil, marking up dense history books covering everything from Qing dynasty China to the origins of the universe. Eddie was also a once-in-a-generation storyteller. As the drinks flowed among friends, he played the role of the old Irish seanchaí, who offered jokes and tall tales. He would gesticulate dramatically, acting out each of the characters in his stories, his entranced audience holding their sides with laughter well before the punch line. The humor was in the telling, and Eddie delighted in other people’s delight. I sometimes had the sense that, as he went about his day, he was thinking less about what was happening around him than about how he would later stage his comic reenactments.

Eddie made Mum laugh—and laughing always seemed the most important part of their life together. During my childhood, I saw my mother’s face shine in two predictable circumstances: watching my father play the piano and Eddie winding up for a joke or story. She loved them both at different times, and they both drove her mad.

Eddie had been raised in a strict, staunchly nationalistic household, and had attended an Irish school where even calculus was taught in “the medium”—the Gaelic language. The Irish nationalism around him was so intense that, if a boy in his school mistakenly used his head on the Gaelic football field (as one does in the “English” sport of soccer), the match would be suspended, and the ball confiscated. Rugby and soccer were seen as sports for Protestants and Anglophiles. Despite his cerebral day job, Eddie could get choked up singing Irish rebel songs or reciting Irish insurgent Robert Emmet’s last words before he was hanged by the British in 1803.

Years later, I would hear Irish novelist Colm Tóibín speak about how, growing up in Ireland, there was simply nothing worse than “being boring.” “You could be smelly, you could be ugly, you could be fierce dumb,” he said, happily, “but you could not be boring.” This had been the sensibility in our home in Ireland, and so it came to be in America as well. Eddie was as far from boring as Pittsburgh was from Dublin.

When we passed through customs, I gave Eddie a huge hug—what he called a “Squasheroni”—and shouted hello in my pidgin Arabic, “Ahlan wa Sahlan!” “Ahlan bik, Alhamdulillah!” he answered, welcoming me.

Like many intellectuals, Eddie frequently had difficulty focusing on real-world tasks. But having lived in Pittsburgh for nearly a year before our arrival, he had made impressive preparations, drawing on the help of his close Irish friends in the area. He had found a two-story house for us to move into together, and purchased a yellow Renault Le Car for Mum—to complement the charcoal Le Car that he drove.

In Ireland I’d had little exposure to America. The three channels on our Dublin television had played mainly Irish and British programs, so the little I knew about the United States came mostly from American exports like The Incredible Hulk and Charlie’s Angels. The few Americans I had actually encountered were tourists in Ireland on their golf holidays, most of whom seemed to be tanned men with straight teeth and loud opinions.

I didn’t arrive in the US until after the local public elementary school year had already started. When Mum walked me inside and introduced me to my new teacher, I was wearing the outfit I had worn to my Catholic school in Ireland—a navy and green skirt, knee-high lace socks, black leather dress shoes, and a white golf shirt. Immediately, I felt out of place next to my classmates in their blue jeans and docksiders. Within a couple weeks, Mum took me shopping at Kaufman’s Department Store, and I chose what I saw around me: a Pittsburgh Pirates T-shirt, a #12 Terry Bradshaw Steelers’ jersey, a Steelers’ sweatshirt, a green Izod golf shirt, green Izod pants, and a pair of light tan corduroys. This selection would tide me over until our next shopping outing many months later—although I quickly learned from my classmates that if I wore my all-green Izod outfit on Thursdays, it obviously indicated that I was “horny.” While I had no idea what this meant, I did know melting into my surroundings necessitated avoiding green on Thursdays.

Relatively self-assured in Dublin, I now felt self-conscious in Pittsburgh. I had a thick Dublin accent, long red hair in a ponytail, and pale skin. My freckles suddenly seemed to stand out against the backdrop of a complexion that had seen more rain than sun. Unable to do much about my wardrobe or my Irish looks, I dedicated myself to changing my accent, rehearsing a new American way of speaking in the mirror.

I also acquired a new vocabulary. My Sunday “brekkie” of rashers, black and white pudding, and burnt sausages became an American “breakfast” of bacon and eggs. My “wellies” gave way to “snow boots.” The older kids weren’t smoking “fags” behind school, they were merely sneaking “cigarettes.” And if we needed medicine, we no longer got it from the local “chemist,” but from the “pharmacy.”

Quickly seeking to master the preferred profanity of the locals, I noted that a combative classmate was no longer a “right pain in the arse,” but a “royal pain in the ass.” I made a particular point of brandishing words and phrases that I was told were unique to the Pittsburgh dialect, like “yinz” (for “you all”), “pop” (for “soda”), and “jagoff” (for “jerk”).

Of course, other differences abounded. After years of bland cornflakes, I had infinite cereal choices, though I usually landed on Cocoa Krispies or Lucky Charms. The bus I took to school was no longer Irish green but mustard yellow. In Ireland, when I misbehaved (hiding out in the girl’s bathroom, for example, to avoid ballet class, which I detested), I had been asked to produce my hand and was given a lashing with a belt or ruler. In the United States, however, I soon saw that punishment merely consisted of sitting in a corner removed from one’s classmates.

Young boys lived in almost all of the houses on my street. For a tomboy like me who loved sports, the neighborhood was a dream. In Ireland, Mum had taught me to play tennis, soccer, and a bit of field hockey. But the boys on Hidden Pond Drive played—and talked about nothing but—baseball. The game seemed slow, as it does initially to foreigners. But once I mastered the rules and key statistics (batting averages, RBIs, and ERAs), every pitch thrown during every at-bat seemed like a vital part of my day.

Mum adapted to her new life, showing no discernible nostalgia for the country she left behind. Despite her deep empathy for others, she focused far less on exploring her own feelings. When I pointed out this inconsistency when I got older, she either changed the subject or just ended the conversation with a dismissive “Arragh sure, I can’t be bothered.”

Despite completing her medical residency back in Dublin, Mum was required to redo her training in the United States, a three-year ordeal. Yet during the same period, she somehow managed to master the new American sport of racquetball (quickly winning the local club championship). She also regularly took Steve and me to Three Rivers Stadium for the baseball games of our new hometown team, the Pittsburgh Pirates. Unlike most of my new friends’ parents, she never even considered leaving before the last out. And remarkably, she attended most of my school and sporting events.

But there was no mistaking the Irishness of our family. While our neighbors ate pizza and grilled hot dogs, we rarely went a night without “spuds,” and corned beef and cabbage were a staple. Eddie’s version of a date with Mum was a night spent at The Blarney Stone, a local pub owned by an Irish footballer from County Kerry. When they could, they sat among fellow immigrants, ate Irish stew or bangers and mash, and joined the traditional music sing-alongs, enjoying the “craic.”