The Beginning (Revised)
An Irish-American Origin Story
Note to my wonderful readers: I am in the process of taking a memoir boot camp class that has caused me to reexamine my story and find ways to refine the focus and approach to telling the history. Some parts need to be condensed or cut, while others need to be expanded. There are many threads: alcoholism, grief, my father's story, and the loss of my sister and best friend. My survival, motherhood, marriage. I am so grateful for the comments and followers of my work, but if the process does not interest you, I completely understand. I will be revising and posting some material that will be familiar. Part of this change results from understanding that a chronological presentation of this journey is not necessarily the best choice. Part of me is thinking, Please don't leave me!
My family believed in Dickens, root vegetables, ignoring difficult truths, and Louis Kahn. They believed in making fun of the fat, the unintelligent, the poorly read, the conservative, and God. We believed in Ireland and scorned the Brits but loved England and adored the Beatles and hated The Monkees. I had no idea what was morally correct as a child, except you should suffer for everyone and not show off. You should tell a good story, and when your parents drank, go to bed, and hold your breath and hope morning comes fast. You should swim in the ocean as frequently as possible, not expect praise for mediocre effort, and remain aware that mediocrity would be determined by two incredibly talented and impressive people who both graduated from Harvard. You were fucked.
photo by Vivek Kumar
I went to first grade in Ireland when my father taught at UCD and learned that Tinkers will scream "Ya fuckin bitch” at you if you fail to give them any money. We had a wild-haired babysitter who beat us if we did anything she didn't like, so my oldest sister made a deal with her not to tell my parents if the babysitter supplied her with chocolate bars. Halloween in the Irish countryside was darker than black velvet, and when you said, "trick or treat," a trick was demanded, which made you long to go back to America where they knew how to hand out candy, and no one talked funny.
Scorning religion but mad pagans that we were, holidays were celebrated with style; presents and food prepared by a killer cook, my mom. Thanksgiving was a freshly killed turkey, seasonal vegetables, chestnut stuffing, homemade bread, and pies. Catherine, my oldest sister, was responsible for scoring, boiling, and extracting the balky chestnuts. I, youngest child, ironed cloth napkins and snapped green beans, Brigid, in the middle, was often caught staring into space instead of completing her assigned task. Christmas was once a goose, pronounced interesting, but ultimately rejected. Presents left unwrapped because of some previous trauma my mom had with wrapping paper, my father haunted by memories of sad past Christmases invariably drunk and raging, the Christmas tree knocked over, hearts broken temporarily, anger and remorse in our stockings.
My family was also intolerant of fat people. My grandmother oversaw setting the standard, but the standard remained mysterious. You shouldn't be fat or skinny or lazy or needy. My grandmother had been bombed in the Dardanelles, which I briefly interpreted to mean she had been drunk in France, but actually, she had literally been bombed and mustard gassed, or at least she had attended to those who had been mustard gassed when she was a nurse in WWI and went into the trenches with a French doctor converting dying young men to Catholicism with a French priest she shanghaied with her eagle eye for spotting Catholics. Though heathens, we were christened, and my oldest sister went to catechism but quit after her holy communion, according to my mother, because she wore the veil to breakfast. My mother, who hadn't taken her to church but allowed her to ride her bike there with a bible stuck in her belt had told her, "No, you're only a bride of Christ once, and then it's over." So, she quit. This ex-nurse Catholic grandmother told me I was the only one in our family not guilty of mortal sin since I was the youngest, which was odd because I can't believe Brigid had done anything venal, although Catherine probably had, and my parents were definitely doomed. She told me to pray for the family, and maybe they wouldn't go straight to hell.
For an entire year, I lined all my stuffed animals on my bed and in the unheated attic where our hair froze to the pillow, I prayed and prayed, not believing God had any interest in an eight-year-old's desperate pleas for mercy, especially an eight-year-old who had watched dirty movies while on an ocean liner bound for Europe, movies with bare butts and breasts and actors speaking Italian. When my grandmother came to see us again, she demanded to witness my prayers, and when I showed her how I kneeled by my bed, she said it didn't count because my bare knees needed to be on the cold floor instead of cushioned by my nightie. When she was in the convent in Ireland, they prayed on a frozen stone floor.
"This is New Jersey. We don't believe in God." I said.
So, I stopped praying.
One magical Christmas Eve in Paris, the year we lived in London, we borrowed a friend's flat and went to midnight Mass at Notre Dame and had a feast of oysters in a Paris café. My mother told me the skinny woman gobbling oysters was a prostitute. This was the mystery of being an adult. You knew things. At eleven years old I saw beauty in every fairy light, all of us together. A family friend, Bill Ward, the president of Amherst College and my father's Harvard classmate, told me as he held my hand that I was excellent company.
Seventeen years later, my mother called to say he had committed suicide, wrists slashed at the Harvard Club.
"Remember Christmas Eve in Paris? He was wonderful to me. He seemed so happy."
"Oh, those perfect oysters! Bill was very depressed. No one knew."
Paris, the smell of roasting chestnuts and sugared almonds, such light and love that ended in despair, I think of the misery of adult men, my father, and boys I knew from college. Something or someone had wounded them and I believed it was my duty to heal this hurt. That night in Paris, I felt special, safe, his hand warm in my own, our breath frosty in the cold air. He said he spoke French, and I told him how I had won a breaststroke race at my school in London.
"That's a tough stroke," he smiled down at me.
"Not as tough as the butterfly."
"Oh, the butterfly is very tough."
In a tribute written by an Amherst colleague it is said:
"I cannot speak to the despair which overcame him, nor testify to all his best moments and acts for I knew him far too short a time and less than many others. He moved among us for a season and left his register in the consciousnesses of many students and colleagues through the gestures and remarks and insights which make a life and which become so starkly final with death. We are left only with these memories to stand against what time inescapably blurs. John William Ward, born 1922, died 1985. Teacher, man of the public world, a pioneer in this field we profess, a citizen in search of the commonweal, a proud servant of democracy-fare ye well."
While my father was not a member of a profession that in itself was considered dangerous, I had the idea early that brilliance and accomplishments inspired melancholy, anger, and possible suicide. I feared for my father, I feared for the absolute genius of my oldest sister Catherine. I feared I would lose them both before I could discover how to protect them from the darkness they embraced and the mystery of why it could not be banished.
New Year's Eve was for drinking, the day after for recovery, St. Patrick's Day, corn beef and cabbage. Easter was a feast of spring lamb and candy, jellybean hunts, and the celebration of Christ's resurrection. "The Easter Bunny has risen," Daddy would announce.
Spring in rural New Jersey, asparagus, and poison ivy. Our garden and lawn bursting with flowers, the meadows and woods beyond lush and full of rustling noises, newborn bunnies, fox cubs, and fawns, the air smelled of hope, honeysuckle, and my mother's basil. On birthdays in May and June, Brigid and I were born three years apart, so we shared a party. Invitations were handed out in class because you invited everyone except the boys. My father offered Vesper rides; my mother baked cakes shaped like Irish cottages, lambs, or flowers. Catherine invented games, happiness, and presents. Daddy's birthday was New Jersey strawberries, my mother's shortcake, and fresh whipped cream. You understood how happy families felt. How joy tasted. You forgot about the bad times.
My role models were Honey West, the Bond girls, Jane Eyre, Helen Keller, Virginia Woolf, and television depictions of spunky career gals played by actresses like Marlo Thomas and Mary Tyler Moore, tortured co-dependent heroines like Anna Karenina or Meryl Streep in The French Lieutenant's Woman, or the women in various depressing foreign films who muttered about their sadness or rock star girls like Marianne Faithful or Janis Joplin, shooting heroin and singing the blues. And then there was my mother.
When I was little, really little, she wore a black bathing suit that soaked up the heat. After hours in the sun, I would fling myself on top of her and feel my mother as all comfort and warmth. Once, the girl who lived behind our house with her divorced mother told me my mother was dead, struck by lightning, and I ran home to see her sitting in the kitchen's picture window, legs crossed, reading the paper. She smiled and waved, and I fell to my knees and promised God never to lie again if he'd not let her die. I dreamed she was lying in her coffin, and people made me look at her and say goodbye.
I had watched my father menace her in a drunken rage, hit her, and draw blood, and I swore to kill him even though I loved him just as much. If only they knew how we cared. They were gorgeous and smart and funny and yet so angry. I wanted to turn on the lights and tell them to stop talking about the past. Read me a story. Turn off the lights. Stop talking about Ireland and dead writers. "Look at me!" I wanted to scream. "Listen to me."
When our handyman shot himself, I was eight, and I intended to understand the adult world well enough to stay away. The summer had been endlessly hot and boring. Catherine's scoliosis dominated as it had since the beginning of the year. In the downstairs living room converted to a sick room, Catherine had an air conditioner, a television set, and a French tutor named Madame Bop, who arrived each day at noon with her Pekingese under her arm, sometimes accompanied by her older sister, Madame Bop II, who demanded I accompany her on long walks around the property. We would stroll down the rutted, graveled driveway to the barns behind our house and Bop II would tell me fascinating things in rapid French, a language I did not understand.
Abe had not yet put a bullet in his brain, and so I would bring the old French woman to where he sat in the shade drinking what I found out later was Kool-Aid generously laced with vodka.
"Howdy," Abe bowed to Bop II, winking at me.
“Bonjour, Comment allez vous?”
"Tres bien." His Jersey accent made it sound like "tray ben"
I don't know how I found out that Abe had committed suicide. If I think about it I can see my mother on the wall-mounted, black kitchen phone, the sharp intake of breath, like the way she reacted when they called to tell her my grandmother's car had flipped on her way to visit us, driving alone from Florida, that sharp intake of breath that tells the listener that something very bad has happened. That night, the dead grandmother night, my mother gave us the dinner we had when there was nothing else to do but have dinner, hamburgernoodlesgreenpeas. I commented about "poor daddy," and Catherine, who would soon spend a year in plaster, hit me.
"Shut up," she said.
"Your father's an orphan now," my mother said, covering daddy's dinner with a pot lid. "He has no parents."
This seemed both tragic and sort of silly. Grown people weren't orphans. Jane Eyre was an orphan, the Little Princess, and Oliver Twist, but my father was forty and had a house and a wife and me.
"Honey," my mother called through the screen door as my father walked from his car, "your mother's dead."
This is what I remember. He was alone in the driveway, holding his books and papers, and he sort of flinched and winced. We couldn't hug him and kiss him and tell him that, yes, his mother had flipped her convertible on her way to see us, but she had died happy and independent and driving, which she had always enjoyed. Later that week, when a postcard arrived from her with a picture of something, a giant spoon or a teapot, some freaky American thing, and a note in her spidery writing, I ran up the stairs to my father's study where he sat hunched over James Joyce or Yeats or maybe his next novel, breathing the way he breathed when he was thinking hard and I said, "Daddy, she isn't dead. See, she isn't dead."
He took the postcard, read the note, and sighed. "No, Molser, she's dead."
My dad called me Molser, the Bison, and sometimes Swipsie.
He put his book down and told me a story about how Grandma was once knocked over by a car in Cambridge, and she had sat up as she was being loaded into an ambulance and said, "The pedestrian has the right of way."
"Why did your father leave?"
My dad looked out the window. It was hunting season, and deep in the woods, you could hear gunfire.
"It was his way. He didn't like to stay for long. He was a great dancer."
My father's father was a complete mystery, like his sister, who didn't speak to us. I knew he drank and supposedly died in an alleyway, a gutter, or a doorway. Sometimes I lay awake thinking about my lost, restless grandfather. Other kids had normal grandparents, but we had Grandmother Reilly, I was named after her, who told us we were sinners. Grandfather Reilly was bald and deadly dull. Grandmother Moynahan was dead now, and the mysterious Joseph Moynahan vanished without a trace, with no pictures and few memories. What sort of dancing, I wondered. My mother adored Gene Kelly.
But he was there in my father's novel, there as a tragic and lost character who happened to be my father's father.
"As his father came nearer Tom could feel his heart beating hard against his ribs, and he couldn't stop himself from clenching his hands together and grinding the heel of one hand against the other.. To control the turmoil of his feelings he thought slowly, 'There's my father. My awful father. I love my father.' At the same time, he felt shame for his father which made his stomach knot up, and an anger which blazed in and through the love without quite burning the love away."
After I read his novel I understood that love can exist next to hate without being diminished. The man who broke my mother's nose by throwing a phone in her face, who said terrible, unforgivable things to us, also saved my life. He was the funniest person I had ever known. I longed for him to tell me he loved me. I loved him so much it was hard to breathe. When he drove away after one of their fights I was terrified he would never come home again. The aftermath was a time I could go with him to choose a present to give to my mother, a peace offering which she accepted but acted as if the gesture was empty. We had carefully chosen something for her yet her face was closed to him. Then, I hated her for freezing him out, for forgetting he was once a child left behind in an orphanage even though his parents were alive.
Usually, I didn't get to sit in his study like this. The "back house" was behind our house. My mother called it the "ivory tower". When the farm had been a real farm, this is where the migrant workers had lived during apple picking season, dozens of families crammed into a small house. There had been another building back there, a pump house full of ancient machinery we had removed. I remember coming home from school to discover a massive mud pile in the backyard, putting on my Wellington boots, and climbing into the mud. After a minute, I started to sink like someone in one of those Tarzan movies with snakes and quicksand and angry natives. I sank up to my waist until my father appeared and dragged me free. I lost a Wellington with a gigantic suck, and I imagined that boot somewhere near the center of the earth discovered by another civilization, its rubber indestructible, and my foot the last thing it contained.
"She almost died." My Macbeth reciting sister Brigid announced over dinner.
"Not at all." My mother murmured. "Not at all."
—Molly Moynahan