Collected Works
THE sky would always be this shade of blue. The towers had come down the day before. Third Avenue on the Upper East Side was a flutter of missing faces, the posters taped to the mailboxes, plastered on windows, flapping against the light poles: “Looking for Derek Sword”; “Have You Seen This Person?”; “Matt…
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A couple of years ago a 57-year-old in Hancock Michigan was searching through the attic of his family home, when he opened a box and a dusty copy of a book called “Prince of Egypt” fell out. He flicked to the back cover and discovered that it was a library book forty-seven years overdue. Over the years, the book had been misplaced and boxed and re-boxed and misplaced again.
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IT is difficult to tell a story about Frank McCourt since the probability is that there’s always someone else around who has a better story to tell — not least Frank himself who could, of course, shape a word better than anyone, and is in all likelihood, right now, making the audience laugh and cry in the vast upstairs.
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A LONDON nursing home. The shape of a figure beneath the sheets. My grandfather could just about whisper. He wanted a cigarette and a glass of whiskey. “Come up on the bed here, young fella,” he said, gruffly. It was 1975 and I was 10 years old and it would be the first — and probably last — time I’d ever see him. Gangrene was taking him away. He reached for the bottle and managed to light a cigarette. Spittle collected at the edge of his mouth. He began talking, but most of the details of his life had already begun slipping away.
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BOXING. You can press the language out of it. The sweathouse of the body. The moving machinery of ligaments. The intimate fray of rope. The men in their archaic stances like anatomy illustrations from an old-time encyclopedia. The moment in a fight when the punches slow down and the opponents watch each other like time-lapse photographs—the sweat frozen in midair, the blood still spinning, the maniacal grin like the teeth themselves have gone bare-knuckle.
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IT was long before baseball ever enchanted me, and long before I ever knew anything of the Yankees, and long before I learned that a pitch could swerve, yet it came back to me, years later, sitting in the bleachers at Yankee Stadium, a curveball from the past.
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Imagine this: It is August, 1950. He is Irish. He is in London. He is engaged to be married in Westminster Church to a pretty farm-girl from Northern Ireland. He tells her in love letters that her beauty paints the world well. Shortly before the wedding she gets cold feet. She cancels the service. In his grief and confusion he joins the British Air Force and gets sent to Egypt as an intelligence officer.
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In the early 1990s I was researching a novel, part of which entailed getting to know some of the homeless people in the tunnels of New York. At that stage—before physics was applied to the World Trade Center, and the Guiliani administration locked off most access to the underground—there were a couple thousand people living beneath the city.
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I have been gone from Ireland for almost thirty years, yet I can’t shake the word “home” from my idea of her. I try to maintain a good degree of skepticism about where I came from because it is, in so many ways, a spectacular ruin. Our sad love songs. Our happy wars. Our stunned submission to power. Our embrace of the robber barons. Our complicity of silence in the face of financial thuggery. Our willingness, especially in the beginning of the 21st century, to allow our heritage to be demolished. There were office buildings built over ancient Viking sites. There were roads allowed to go through holy shrines. Cranes swung like toy things over the skyline of Dublin. “Model” villages were built in the middle of nowhere, only to become ghosts of themselves.
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Every Christmas morning now is full of every Christmas morning then, and in the old unaccountable unfolding of memory I can’t rest on a single time when it all took shape, but this is the story of a suburban Christmas, a Dublin Christmas, a Christmas in the four-bedroom house where I spent my first twenty years and where, thirty years on, I still return no matter where I happen to be.
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