Kitabı oku: «The Education of an Idealist»

1
IRELAND

What right has this woman to be so educated?”

My mother, Vera Delaney, had not broken any laws, yet she seemed to be on trial. As she made the case for why she should be allowed to take my brother and me to America, her fate appeared contingent upon the whims of the Irish judge who posed this question.

I was eight; my brother, Stephen, was four. Neither of us was present that day in the Dublin courtroom. But the story of what transpired there is so emblazoned in my psyche that I can see the judge’s face, shaped like the map of Ireland, his skin blotted with what looked like my granny’s blush. I can visualize the mahogany wood paneling behind the bench where he presided. I can smell the boiled ham that wafted off of his black robes. I can even make out the intricate white threads of his juridical wig.

I’ve often wondered how my mother channeled her anger: Did she start to respond to the judge’s provocation, only to get a knee under the table from her lawyer? Did she feel her cheeks burn—as mine are prone to do—despite the chill of the courtroom? I imagined the voice inside her head: “Keep it together, Vera. He wants you to react. Don’t give him an excuse to deny you custody.”

It was far from inevitable that my mother, the person I have always admired most in this world, would end up “so educated.” She came of age at a time when less than 10 percent of married women in Ireland were part of the workforce. Her father, a policeman in Cork City, was an incurable, high-stakes gambler who bet his paychecks on horse and dog racing. My mother, her four sisters, and her younger brother grew up under the constant threat of foreclosure. While none of her three older siblings went to college, my mother decided early on that she would be the first of the Delaney children to do so—indeed, she would become a doctor.

Because the Catholic girls’ school my mother attended did not offer science courses, she had a problem. When she tried to apply to the University College Cork’s medical program, the registrar told her she lacked the background to manage the curriculum. Undeterred, my mother registered anyway. When she got home, one of her sisters lit into her because of the lengthy program’s cost. My mother responded by dumping her plate of bacon, cabbage, and mashed potatoes on her sister’s lap. But she marched back to the college and, livid but shamed, changed her registration to the shorter Bachelor of Science program. After earning that degree, she went on to pursue a PhD in biochemistry in London. But caring for patients was what my mother had always wanted and would never stop wanting; while writing her dissertation, she finally decided to apply to medical school. Thirteen years after first attempting to enroll, she achieved her lifelong dream of becoming a medical doctor.

Yet in that courtroom years later, my mother was forced to answer for her career—for being “so educated”—because she was trying to move with her children to the United States, a country she had never visited, in order to get advanced training in her area of specialization, kidney transplantation.

She was also hoping to run away with the man she loved—a man who wasn’t my father.

MY DAD, JIM POWER, was an epic figure—brilliant, dashing, and charismatic, yet intimidating and witheringly sharp-tongued. At six foot five he towered over his Irish contemporaries. Even as a child, I could tell he was the man in the room that people most wanted to please.

My parents met in London, where my mother was studying medicine and my dad was working as a dentist. Mum first spotted him leading a sing-along for a group of Irish exiles in the Bunch of Grapes pub in Knightsbridge. After long fending off girlfriends, my dad pursued her avidly.

Mum was a slender, stylish young woman with a lively sense of play, who could place a tennis serve or hit a squash forehand better than almost all her male peers. She liked my father’s constant teasing, which kept her off balance. She was amazed by his talent for the piano and his ability to launch into whatever songs the bar patrons requested.

My father initially encouraged and helped subsidize Mum’s medical school pursuits. A scratch golfer, he applauded how quickly she picked up his sport, and cheered her on as she ascended the ranks of British athletics in squash. As a teenager and college student, she had played competitive tennis and field hockey—first for her home province of Munster and later for Ireland. At squash, she was relentless: speedy to the front of the court and agile from side to side. When Mum was off in the library or on the squash court, Dad was at the pub, boasting to his friends about her latest feats. After an impassioned courtship, they wed in September of 1968.

“This is the third of my children getting married this year,” her father told his mother, “and I would not put my money on this one.” For a man who bet on anything and everything, this was saying something.

While my grandfather adored his daughter, his traditional views on gender roles made him worry that Mum would prioritize her career above her marriage. My grandfather accurately saw his new son-in-law as a man who needed to be taken care of. My dad had been idolized and sheltered by his own mother, but despite this coddled upbringing, he was deeply drawn to women with opinions and ambitions of their own.

While the accomplished duo initially charged forth, their interests soon began to diverge. My mother studied constantly, partly to make up for all she felt she didn’t know. And having grown up fearing that any knock on the door might be a lender seizing the family home to pay her father’s gambling debts, Mum was determined to take control of her own path. In contrast, my dad’s achievements had always come effortlessly. His photographic memory allowed him to look at a blank wall and visualize words as he had previously read them on the page. Because my father never felt the passion for his career that Mum had for hers, he lacked focus. Despite being an established dentist, at the age of thirty-five he decided to take the unusual step of returning to school to get a medical degree of his own.

I was born in September of 1970, while Mum was still studying to become a doctor in London. When my dad began the six-year course at University College Dublin shortly thereafter, we moved back to Dublin, where Mum would finish medical school. Although my dad breezed through his program, when he finally became Dr. Jim Power, MD, he showed no interest in practicing medicine—an attitude Mum couldn’t fathom. His older sister came to refer to him as “the eternal student.”

My father had always been a drinker, but after Mum threw herself deeper into her medical career, his drinking became something of a vocation. His second home was Hartigan’s, a pub ten minutes away from where we lived. Known for its highbrow political debates, no-frills decorum, and the taste and pour of its pints, Hartigan’s felt like a village pub in the middle of Ireland’s bustling capital. My father was one of the regulars.

Guinness—the dark brown, silky stout with the thick, pillowy head—was not just his drink; it was his craft. Known as “mother’s milk,” Guinness had adopted the tagline “GUINNESS IS GOOD FOR YOU” in the 1920s, and most of us believed it. For decades, Irish mothers had been served Guinness after giving birth because of its iron content and perceived health benefits.

Like many of his contemporaries, my father hailed the delicacy of the drinking experience, stressing the proper “two-pour” approach: tilting the tulip-shaped pint glass at a 45-degree angle, filling it halfway, pausing so the stout could settle, and then—and only then—pouring the rest. “Pulling a pint” properly, my dad insisted, should take at least two minutes. “Good things come to those who wait,” he would say, mimicking the satisfied customers in the Guinness television ads. Once the pour was complete, my dad—usually an impatient man—waited with unencumbered anticipation for the barman to smooth the creamy head with a butter knife. He relished the first taste of every pint, pausing before clearing his upper lip of Guinness’s signature foamy residue.

By the time my brother Stephen was born in 1974, the cracks in our parents’ relationship were widening. The pub would become at once a sanctuary for my dad and an accelerator of his faltering marriage.

BOTH MUM AND DAD included me—and, when he was older, Stephen—in what they were doing, carving out time to be alone with each of us. I would often spend large parts of my afternoons and weekends accompanying Mum to the squash court, watching her smack the tiny black ball with a wooden Slazenger racket. She was unfailingly gracious on the court, but also fiercely competitive. Sitting in the wooden bleachers and watching her seemingly endless rallies, I would cheer as she wore down her opponents with her trademark grit.

Swimming together in the Irish Sea at the Blackrock beach, we would laugh as we both turned purple, teeth chattering in the frigid water. She often brought me on road trips to her hometown of Cork to visit with her parents and my many aunts, uncles, and cousins. Driving in her tiny Mini on Ireland’s bendy roads, we blissfully belted out songs of my choosing—“It’s a Long Way to Tipperary,” “Molly Malone,” and “She’ll Be Coming ’Round the Mountain.” On occasions when we hopped the train in Dublin and settled in for the three-hour ride, she would unfurl tinfoil-wrapped cheddar cheese and butter wedged between two Jacob’s Cream Crackers, followed by a Cadbury Flake chocolate bar or Kimberley biscuits. I loved the feeling of curling up next to her as she devoured her medical journals, and from around the age of six, I too would sink into a book.

Mum gave people she met a quality of attention that I would come to associate with the most gifted politicians. When making a new acquaintance, she would cock her head to the side and peer earnestly at the other person, digging for details and drawing connections across time and space. She laughed with her whole body, or—if someone’s tale was a sad one—sagged with the weight of the other person’s anguish. I never knew my mother to have an ulterior motive as she listened; she was simply curious and intensely empathetic. She had no airs and eschewed sentimentality, conveying her love not through expressive words—which to her would have sounded maudlin—but through intense, affectionate focus.

Early on, I saw that my mother had a gift for cramming as much life as possible into a day. She arose before dawn, often completing her six-mile morning run before I began groggily pouring my cereal. The only time I saw her sitting still was when she watched professional tennis. When the Wimbledon coverage began, she would park herself in front of our television for hours, contentedly taking in the juniors, the bottom seeds, the doubles, and her favorite, Björn Borg.

Mum was a terrible sleeper. She worried about her patients, with whom she formed deep attachments. But above all, she fretted about my younger brother, who spent the first six weeks of his life in the hospital. When he was born, Stephen suffered a collapsed lung and then quickly contracted meningitis. When he was unable to hold down food, the doctors realized he had a severe intestinal blockage that required surgery. He recovered from the operation, but didn’t talk for his first two years. While my dad thought he would speak when he felt like it, Mum thought the meningitis might have caused him to go deaf.

Dad proved correct. Stephen became an adorably loquacious troublemaker who got great laughs out of laying intricate traps throughout the house for his unsuspecting parents and older sister. At school, though, he struggled, rarely showing interest. My mother spent many nights awake, wondering if he would ever apply himself.

My father always seemed carefree. His dental practice was desultory; he appeared to only work when he felt like it. We would play tennis in the cul-de-sac outside our home, or I would tag along as he pounded golf balls on the driving range. He was close with his parents, whom we often visited two hours away in the town of Athlone. His mother was a force of nature—as a young woman in England, she had built a school from scratch and later made a comfortable living playing the stock market. His dad, whom I and all the grandkids called “Bam Bam,” was a former Irish soldier with a sunny outlook on life, often proclaiming, “Never trouble trouble unless trouble troubles you.” Having retired from the military years before, Bam Bam seemed to have no higher priority than kicking around a soccer ball with Stephen and me or taking us for ice cream.

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.