Apologize, Apologize!

CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE

I RELAND IS A FUNNY PLACE TO VISIT IF YOU’RE LOOKING FOR peace and quiet or a reason to go on living. It’s a pretty argumentative culture; I got the impression my limits were being tested constantly and I was usually found wanting, which meant that I felt right at home from the moment I stepped off the plane and onto the tarmac at Shannon.
The countryside was spectacular, wild and remote, at least in north Clare, where Pop and Uncle Tom were from. We were staying with Aunt Brigid in the house where they grew up, a weathered old cottage, white plaster walls peeling under a thatched roof with a sky blue door, located on a windy bluff above the ocean overlooking the Burren, with shrouded views of the Cliffs of Moher and the Aran Islands.
We were minutes away from a couple of small villages populated mostly by old bachelors and incomprehensible farmers who were either backward in a toothless-grin sort of way or weirdly refined, almost statesmenlike in their rubber-booted gentility.
There were a handful of cottages nearby, but I rarely saw any of the people who lived in them—at least not their faces, anyway. For me, Ireland will always be a country of shifting curtains, neighbors taking up their positions in the shadows, lurking behind window frames, peering around lace and muslin, stealing furtive peeks as I went for long solitary walks every morning. Being surrounded by all that active misanthropy was like a tonic—I didn’t need to worry about making friends or being sociable, chatting up strangers.
The locals viewed me with a combination of distrust and distaste. The Falcon’s aggressive Protestantism was well-known, the IRA once threatening to bomb his London office. Meanwhile, it took Pop two hours to travel a hundred yards.
“I swear your father would talk the ear off a cob of corn,” Aunt Brigid said, watching as he waved his hands animatedly in the air, gesturing to make his point, arguing with people he’d known since childhood, taking up right where he’d left off decades earlier.
“It’s too bad Uncle Tom didn’t come with us. He said he wasn’t interested in seeing Ireland again. I don’t get it,” I said one day to Aunt Brigid as I sat on the back steps and watched her hang clothes on the line.
“Oh, well, that’s easily explained,” Aunt Brigid said, talking as she worked. “He made himself very unpopular here after what happened to Ellen O’Connor. She lived down the road. She was a bit of a neighborhood sensation, for having survived more than twenty suicide attempts. . . . Oh . . .” Aunt Brigid’s face turned bright red, and she clapped her hand to her mouth.
“It’s okay, Aunt Brigid, go on,” I reassured her. “It was a long time ago. I think I’m cured of that problem.”
“Well, in her case it was hard to take it seriously. We began to think of it as something she did as a matter of routine, a behavior, like getting a perm or washing your car,” Aunt Brigid told me. “She didn’t want to die. She liked a fuss made over her.”
According to Aunt Brigid, she timed her pill swallowing to coincide with her husband’s return from work. “It was a religion with that man to be on time. Every day for thirty years he’d walk in the door at exactly five-twenty on the dot. So she’d dress herself nicely, fix her hair, and she’d take her bottle of pills, one by one, comfortable knowing he’d be in time to rush her to hospital.”
On this particular evening, he crossed Uncle Tom’s path at five-fifteen and was kept talking in the shared driveway for a full two hours.
“Rigor mortis had set in by the time he found her in the bedroom.”
“She died! What was Uncle Tom’s reaction?” I asked.
“Oh well, he always hated her.”
“Why?”
“Well, you know your uncle Tom. She was a big woman. He used to tell her that she should be ashamed of herself. He became quite preoccupied with the sight of her trying to fit behind the wheel of her tiny car. He used to go out every morning just to watch. He’d sip his coffee and stare and shout out rude remarks. She drove a Mini Minor, and he’d make a point of telling her it was the height of vanity, like a woman with a size ten foot trying to squeeze into a size four shoe. She hollered back that she was only eating salad, and he said, ‘Well, then you’re eating it the way a cow eats hay.’”
“I see.” Sometimes I used to think I’d die during one of Pop’s or Uncle Tom’s diatribes and neither one of them would notice but just carry on talking.
“Oh, I know it’s terrible. But he used to say she hurt his eyes to look at her, and there must have been some truth to it. I never knew him to have headaches, but his head was always hurting that summer, so with that in mind, you can’t hold him entirely to blame.”
“Collie, come over here!”
I looked up. Pop was next door at the neighbor’s house. He was calling for me, wanting me to join in, but I just smiled and waved and got up from the stoop to go walking. It’s all I did, walk, and all I wanted to do, go for long walks, not thinking about what I was constantly thinking about.
The velveteen cows were beautiful and the only friends I made in Ireland, and even they barely tolerated my presence—watching as I walked, monitoring every step, less with interest than suspicion, every bit as Irish as the people. Sometimes I imagined them whispering to one another as I passed by: “There he goes like clockwork, the moody stranger.”
I once walked for seven hours, walked until even my cane was tired, my gimpy leg throbbing with pain, navigating the rocky disposition of the desolate Burren in my knee-high rubber boots, hobbling along, never saw another soul, though Aunt Brigid complained that the place had become a zoo what with all the American tourists.
Gray and green, the Burren was vacant as an empty planet, so vast and monochromatic that it was hard to judge distance, faraway destinations seeming within arm’s reach. The air was cool and fresh and full of moisture, and it rained almost every day, a light rain, almost a mist, like a spray, so gentle that you’d barely feel it, but it had this way of soaking you to the bone so I always was a little chilled.
I liked forcing myself out into the cold and wet, walking for hours in the pouring rain and feeling chilled for hours afterward, trying to warm up in front of the fireplace. It was good to feel cold and damp—it gave me a banal concern on which to focus, and for that I was grateful.
But I wasn’t entirely alone. The dogs followed me. Ownerless dogs ran free in the Irish countryside— gaunt and carefree in a wiry sort of way. A little mutt I called Jack joined me almost every day. One day he sprang out of a field carrying a cat’s skeleton, its mouth open and fixed in a snarl.
I was an anomaly in the nearest village, with my long curly hair and my white shirt, getting stared down by the street-corner wolf packs, growling over at me, graphically unhinged, with their shaved heads and stinking overalls, missing their teeth and smoking their cigarettes, hostility dangling from their lower lips. They’d skin me alive with their sharp glares, smashing empty beer cans on their foreheads, saying “feck” this and “feck” that, snarling like the cat corpse and as wiry as the stray dogs.
Sometimes I wished they’d just pounce and get it over with, I was that low.
Aunt Brigid, unable to conceal her concern about my mental state—she was too polite to mention Ma and Bing or the mess in El Salvador and the tragedy of Gary—devised her own remedy, setting me up with a girl called Mary Margaret Fanore, whose main claim to fame was that she had won the local beauty contest.
“Oh, not just beautiful, Collie—this one has talent pouring out of her like she was a spigot,” she said. “She came first in the talent competition.”
“What was her talent?” I asked, the two of us alone in the large open kitchen, me sitting across from her as she ironed, dipping her fingers in a container of water, which she sprinkled on the fabric. Clean laundry was like a religion to her.
“Well . . .” She paused, holding her finger to her lips. “I believe she’s double-jointed,” she replied, continuing to iron her tablecloth, steam rising.
Again she paused, deep in thought, but wanting to tell me something. I sat waiting patiently, averting my eyes. “Isn’t it funny, Collie, how it’s not the sorrow that consumes a person, nor even the pain of loss? I’ll tell you what it is—it’s the trauma. Your grandmother was in her eighties when she passed away from throat cancer. I found her in the bathroom, dead on the floor. She’d bled out. Well, it was quite a sight, as you might imagine.”
She started quietly to cry. “It’s the pictures that haunt you, Collie, the snapshots you carry around in your head that never fade.” Quickly recovering, she pushed her hair off her forehead with the palm of her hand, smoothing it into place at the temple. “So, here’s my advice to you, for whatever it’s worth.” She leaned forward, her hand outstretched, almost touching my knee. “Pack away all those pictures, lock them up, and whatever you do, resist the temptation to look.”
I couldn’t think of how to get out of meeting Mary Margaret without offending Aunt Brigid, so I agreed to accompany her on a ferry ride to the Aran Islands, where her mother lived. Aunt Brigid had arranged for her to give me a tour.
The first thing I realized on meeting Mary Margaret by the ferry in Doolin was that Aunt Brigid and I did not share the same definition of beautiful. In fact, I’d go so far as to say that when Aunt Brigid used the term beautiful, she was referring quite specifically to someone who compensated in forehead for what was missing in chin.
I introduced myself, but she seemed barely to notice. Her lips were chapped, and she kept chewing them nervously. Her face was raw and peeling, as if it had been washed once too often in harsh detergents. Her hands were twisting frantically as she fingered a small wrapped package in a cloth sack.
“It’s my mam’s birthday,” she explained.
“Oh, that’s nice,” I said, offering to carry her bag.
“Um, yes, I guess. Will you excuse me while I use the telephone for a moment?” she asked, pointing to the booth next to us.
“Go ahead,” I said as she took her place inside the open booth and started loudly dialing.
“Mam, it’s me. . . . Yes, Mam, we’re running a bit late. . . . Running a bit late. About thirty minutes.”
There was silence, then she resumed, her voice growing more emotional and tense, soaring skyward until its sustained pitch circled overhead like the flocks of marine birds.
“Mam, please try to understand, it’s a question of petrol. The boat’s refueling and we can’t get aboard just yet. . . .” She started sniffling as she was apparently listening, suddenly interrupting with a wail, “Mam, do I have your faith? Do I, Mam? If I don’t have your faith, I have nothing, Mam.”
She hung up the phone and, weeping, came and stood next to me, dabbing at her eyes, tears streaming down her cheeks.
“Are you all right?” I asked dumbly, feeling at a total loss. Everyone around us was ignoring her obvious distress. The Irish have a high tolerance for hysteria.
“I’m fine. Will you please excuse me again?” Her manner was awkwardly formal.
She went back to the phone and redialed her mother.
“Mam, I have your birthday gift, and I will bring it to the back door and then leave.” She was shaking her head vigorously. “No, I won’t come in. I will bring your gift and your papers to the back door, and I will lay them down gently, then I will turn around and leave.”
Now she really started crying, and loud. “Mam, if you had any idea what I’ve been through . . .”
I was standing with my arm around her as she cried, waiting as the drizzle became a torrential downpour and a rusty fishing boat called the Old Fart docked not far from us. I looked on astonished as people began to board.
“This can’t be the ferry?” I said as Mary Margaret, clutching her bag, nodded and wailed anew.
I walked along the solitary beach at Inisheer, leaving Mary Margaret at her sister’s house—my last sight of her, the two of them were sobbing in each other’s arms in the front yard—and all the while I was asking myself, Whose faith do I have?
When I got back to the cottage, Aunt Brigid was waiting with dinner. Pop never showed up. “Oh, don’t give it a second thought, Collie,” she said later that night, taking a knowing sip of tea, sitting in her rocking chair in front of the fireplace, overweight calico cat called Dorothy purring in her lap. “He’s no doubt gone into Dublin to seek the company of a hotel. You know how your father loves a good hotel. He learned it from my father, who used to run away to the Gresham Hotel whenever he got upset. When your aunt Rosalie announced her engagement, he took an ax to the shed, smashed it to the ground, and then vanished for a week, eventually coming home loaded down with monogrammed towels. Why, we’re still using them today.”
She had an experienced laugh, and it made me feel reassured—both of us choosing to believe that “hotel” in this case was an actual location and not a synonym for Guinness.
The next day, there was a note from Aunt Brigid taped to the door when I got back late that night from my day trip to Galway. Pop had called and wanted me to join him in Dublin. He was staying at the Gresham and “enjoying it very much by the sound of it,” Aunt Brigid wrote in expansive script punctuated with multiple exclamation points, followed by a cartoonish ellipsis—three oversize circles. My heart palpitated, tapping out its own Morse code, each beat signifying growing alarm.
When it came to Pop, even punctuation had the power to terrify.
Navigating rural Ireland’s narrow roads wasn’t my idea of fun, so I hopped the bus in Lisdoonvarna and settled in for the six-hour journey to Dublin, with stops along the way at Ennis, Shannon, and Limerick. The bus filled with a mix of locals and a bunch of buoyant American tourists who immediately engaged the bus driver, who was doing his best impersonation of Pat O’Brien: “Good morning, girls.” He tipped his cap to the visibly middle-aged women, who giggled delightedly, instantly charmed.
He was chatting away, brogue so preposterous that it would make a leprechaun blush, answering questions, volunteering quaint folklore, pointing out the local fairy bush, and they loved every moment of it. By the time we got to Ennis, which is about twenty miles from the cottage, his voice betrayed a bit of strain, as if the burden of his Irish charm were rubbing up against the sandpaper of his truer nature. The tourists seemed clueless, ignoring the deepening of his sighs, but I sat up and took interest as his attention was diverted by a group of drunken teens who noisily clambered aboard in Shannon.
Ten miles later, the kids were fighting with him because he wouldn’t let them off to pee. Within moments it had turned into a full-out rumble, the bus driver shouting out profanities, the kids laughing and goading him on—the tourists exchanging worried glances, stunned into silence by the sudden turn of events. One of the boys hit the bus driver in the back of the head with an empty beer can, and the bus screeched to a sudden jolting halt; some people were thrown into the aisle, and my backpack tumbled from the overhead carriage and landed in my lap.
“Get out, the lot of you! Get out! Now, before I throw you off!” The bus driver was standing up and shouting at us, his hands doubled into fists, his mouth twisted into a cudgel.
“You can’t be serious!” One of the American men stood up to try to negotiate with him as the locals unemotionally gathered up their stuff and prepared to disembark. “Be reasonable. We’re in the middle of nowhere.”
“Oh, say, don’t waste your breath on that one. He’s a right bastard, and doesn’t he do this whenever the mood strikes? Pay him no mind,” one of the Irish ladies said to the Americans. “There’ll be another bus coming along soon enough.”
Those of us who weren’t natives watched in disbelief from the side of the isolated country road as the bus driver, flipping us the bird, drove off, wheels spinning, gravel churning. After about an hour or so, another bus finally lumbered along and we climbed aboard.
This driver, who stank of stale body odor, which I’d come to think of as Irish country cologne, made no pretense of charm. When I asked him how many more stops before we reached Dublin, he waved me off angrily. “Go on,” he snarled. I sat next to an Irish woman, who rolled her eyes and shook her head and immediately started in on the bus driver. She was being helpful in the Irish way—she wanted to start shit.
“Oh, that one’s a menace. And doesn’t he beat up his poor wife on a regular basis and the children, too, if the truth were known. You shouldn’t put up with that treatment for one second. And you a paying customer and a visitor to this country!” She pursed her lips, and her head wobbled on her thin, wrinkled neck. “It’s a bloody shame, and he should be reported. If more people were to take action against such tyrants, well, then the world would be a better place. You’re not going to just sit and take it, are you? But then maybe people are different in America. It’s none of my business, after all.”
She carried on like that for the rest of the trip—the bus broke down midway, and what should have been a six-hour journey turned into a ten-hour ordeal, the bus driver, Cerberus in an Ike jacket, refusing to give up any information. I was pretty worked up with miles yet to go by the time the bus rolled into Limerick. Sensing victory, my companion encouraged me to go and speak to the inspector.
There was a twenty-minute wait in Limerick, so I got off the bus and immediately encountered the inspector. I approached him in friendly fashion, polite, not looking to complain; I’d decided to take a cab the rest of the way to Dublin. At that point, I would have gladly bought a car and driven to Dublin myself.
“Excuse me,” I said, and he looked at me, clearly annoyed, and waved his hand.
“I don’t need to hear it. Just tell me where you are going.”
“Dublin,” I replied, feeling a flash of anger. “Just wondering, when you get a moment, will you please order me a taxi?”
“Go over there and wait,” he said, flushed with irritation, pointing to a stand of chairs. Livid, I marched into the office to complain about him and the two bus drivers. The people inside were just as surly and reacted with considerable alarm, not at me being mistreated, but that I had the nerve to dare complain. They obviously thought I was a touchy-feely North American looking for deferential treatment, which engendered in them an instant hatred for me.
“Yes, well, we’ll take your complaints under advisement,” said the woman in charge, sniffing the air, not looking up from her paperwork. I turned to leave and heard her mumble something about the “arrogant Diaspora.” I headed back out to the seating area, and a few moments later the inspector came out of the office like an angry hornet—obviously they couldn’t wait to tattle—flying over at me, wagging his finger, and in a high-pitched nasal whine hollering at me to apologize.
“What are you talking about? Are you asking me to apologize to you?” I asked him incredulously, throwing my hands in the air.
“I certainly am,” he declared, folding his arms and waiting.
“That’s ridiculous. I asked you a simple question and you totally dismissed me. I have every right to complain about your attitude.”
“Oh, well, excuse me for not dropping everything to take care of Your Majesty. I was busy taking care of people who really needed my help, but obviously I’m guilty of not paying proper heed to someone as important as you appear to be.” He twisted around and poked me in the chest.
“Apologize, apologize!” he was railing, flipping right out.
Disbelieving what I was hearing, I was focused on his bushy eyebrows and his shoulders like ledges designed to catch falling dandruff. He was shorter than me and leaned into me. He gazed upward, staring at me; his eyes, yellow where they should have been white, were inches from my own.
“Apologize, apologize!” His voice lowered to a hiss.
Jesus, I couldn’t believe I was actually entertaining the idea, thinking about apologizing just to put an end to the madness, a part of me wanting to scream a thousand pardons to the universe, another part of me wanting to knock him into the next life. Instead, deceptively calm, I interrupted to say that I was not going to apologize so he might as well forget it.
“Well,” he said, drawing himself up, making grand sweeping gestures with his arms, glancing around at the crowd that had gathered in appreciation of his performance, “I will order you a cab this one time and this one time only, but I will never order another cab for you again in my lifetime.”
Applause greeted his announcement—an older man in a cap stepped forward and said, “No man should consider himself above saying he’s sorry. Do you think your expensive luggage grants you some sort of special entitlement from those of us in steerage?” He pointed to my leather backpack.
“Apologize? Apologize?” I said, refusing to be sidetracked, speaking to the group of onlookers, who surrounded the inspector protectively and looked back at me, their lips compressed in judgment and expectation. “Why? What did I do? Tell me what I did?” I persisted.
“Well,” said one middle-aged woman, wearing a transparent plastic raincoat and a kerchief on her head that was tied under her chin, “why involve all of us? What have we to do with it? Say you’re sorry and be done with it. I’m sure you know what you did.”