This Is Happiness Read online

  ‘May God go with you.’

  I lived in a profound loneliness at the time. I am not sure why or how it happens that a person finds themselves on the margin of life, but there I was. I was the opposite of surefooted. I couldn’t get any purchase on the ground and was unable to see how to belong anywhere.

  I came home from the seminary to Dublin, all rawness and intensity. My father, in deliberate revolt against his Crowe blood, was very careful in everything. He had few words, short dense eyebrows like dashes of Morse that lent him a look indecipherable. Your father is a mystery it takes your whole life to unravel. After my mother died, he had taken the required three days off, performed the public business of grief, and then gone back into his preferred purgatory of the Department where a legion of men in grey suits were busy inventing the State in their own likeness. It was a common stupidity then to think of your father as unreachable. I did not try to reach him until twenty years later, the year he was dying, and the first time I ever called him by his name. I’m older now than he was when he died and appreciate something of what it must have taken for him to stay living. It’s a thing you can’t quite grasp, I think, until you wake up an old man or woman and have to negotiate the way. At that time, we never embraced our fathers enough. I don’t know about now. I embrace him and say his name, Jack, now that he’s dead, which is the kind of foolishness old men allow. I’m not sure it does him any good. It helps me a bit sometimes.

  For a few weeks then I had stayed at home, and he went to work. But there’s something undoing about the dying light of mid-afternoon. In that empty old house on Marlborough Road all that had stitched me into this life came undone and I couldn’t escape the feeling that folded against my back were wings that had failed to open.

  I sometimes think the worst thing a young person can feel is when you can find no answer to the question of what you are supposed to do with this life you’ve been given. At moments you’re aware of it balanced on your tongue, but not what comes next. Something like that. I can now say that another version of that happens in old age, when it occurs to you that since you’ve lived this long you must have learned something, so you open your eyes before dawn and think: What is it that I’ve learned, what is it I want to say?

  Unable to stay at home any longer, with no money and nowhere else to go, I had come down to Clare that April, to my grandparents’, to their long low farmhouse, that had originally been three rooms, then four, and four-and-a-half, and then five-ish, as seed overtook sagacity and the twelve Crowe brothers burst forth, my tearaway uncles whose first propulsion into the world did not stop when they had sacked Faha of all cups, medals, plaques and trophies, but continued until all but my careful father had rampaged into what Ganga said were the twelve corners of the world. There they would be roughshod plasterers, happy-go-lucky layers of pipe, throwers-up of blocks, splintery off-square carpenters, speeding bus drivers, and in one unlikely case a Chicago policeman, but never be together again until back in Faha the famous day of Ganga’s funeral, when it was discovered he had so many friends.

  From that funeral, this memory: Ganga had a dog he loved called Joe, and, with that facility innate in dogs to recognise human goodness, Joe loved Ganga in equal measure. Joe was a small-sized crossbred black-and-white sheepdog of about a hundred in dog years, but it’s fair to say he knew the lineaments of Ganga’s spirit better than any living. On the day of the funeral, Joe was left inside the house, lying on the crocheted cushion he had long since learned to pull down from Ganga’s chair, and which Doady had long since given up complaining about. The black cloud of uncles, cousins, near and distant, neighbours, and the two of the Conefreys who had been sworn in as staff of Carty’s Undertakers, had finally floated out into the yard. The last, Uncle Peter, told Joe to mind the house, then he locked the door with the dog inside, and lifted his chin to follow his father to the church.

  At the end of the Mass the brothers bore the coffin by turns out of St Cecelia’s and down the hapless slope of Church Street. The entirety of west Clare was there. And, as the cortège reached the turn by Mangan’s, there was Joe sitting waiting for it. ‘There’s Joe Crowe,’ Mary Breen said, and without by-your-leave or beckon the dog rose from where he was sitting and joined the funeral procession and followed on to the graveside, from which he did not move the rest of that day. True as God.

  Although it is a fact that each time I came to Faha I found it smaller and poorer than my boyhood had made it, the sense of it as a place of escape endured.

  Doady and Ganga’s house was built on a slope a field back from the river. The house was built in haste, Ganga said, because his ancestors had stolen the stones from the walls of the agent, Blackall, when he was above in Leinster.

  Built in a puddle, Doady said, because his ancestors were frogs.

  A short and almost perfectly round man with eyes always near to laughter and tufted hair that sat like a small wig on a football, Ganga had the large ears that God puts on old men as evidence of the humour necessary for creation. Perhaps following the prompting of his physiognomy, he had the philosophy that life was a comedy. Like one of those rubber figures that cannot be toppled, in him this philosophy was irrefutable, and despite the weighty evidence of life he insisted on a blithe insouciance which, for the most part, kept the acid of disillusionment at bay. (This may not have come entirely naturally; in time I discovered the ditches around the house were a graveyard for blue bottles of Milk of Magnesia.)

  Doady, who was once a girl called Aine O Siochru, had come across river and mountain from the Iveragh peninsula in Kerry. Why, I can never understand.

  ‘Ganga’ I understood was what my infant tongue made of Grandfather, and he loved it and for his entire life I called him nothing else, but Doady, which came I think from Doodie, the name of my soother, sat less easily on her. Though she was the mother of twelve, succour was not apparent in her nature. But women are deeper than men, so it’s unfair to say. What is true is that to survive she had pared away any surface softness, was as practical as her husband impractical, appeared to have small tolerance for the whimsy, dreaming, and grand designs of men in general, and Ganga in particular.

  Doady had a narrow whiskered chin and a brownish complexion – her mother was a pipe-smoker in Kerry and had puffed out seven umber babies no bigger than smoke rings. She had a fierce attachment to fresh air. Fresh air was the cure for most things. She walked. Her shoes were shoes out of old times, square-heeled hooked-and-eyed with black laces running neatly crossways. The shoes of all grandparents are inestimable mysteries, hold them in your hand and they are strange and tender somehow, and hers were particularly so, polished and worn, mucked and puddled and polished again with that kind of human resolve that to me is inexplicably moving. She’d walk those shoes until the roads came through them and two dark welts would appear on her soles, then the shoes would go to Jack the cobbler below the village and for three days she’d wear a pair of Ganga’s stompy boots and head out evenings to walk by the river all the same.

  There was a world of saints then and people knew the Saints’ Days and whose feast fell when, and from the full gallery they chose favourites. Doady’s missal bulged with all the regulars, Anthony, Jude, Joseph and Francis, but also some of the lesser known, Saint Rita, Saint Dymphna and Saint Peregrine, as well as a personal selection of Saints of Last Resort. And I’ll admit that some vestige of that remains, not taken by the tide, inside me. Saint Anthony has often found my glasses, wallet and keys. Why he keeps taking them in the first place, harder to say.

  Doady gathered saints as insurances but backed them up with more ancient advocates including the moon and stars. She had an iron cauldron of remedies and pishogues inside her: a cough could be cured by a frog, a headache by a chew of hawthorn bark; the rowan tree brings luck; a leek in the kitchen saves a house from burning.

  Secretly, she fretted about her vanished children, lost to unknown stories in what was then a very distant elsewhere. She also had the sorrow all Kerry p
eople have when they’re not in Kerry, but this she countered with copious letter-writing. Letters took several days to write, the lost art of composition then a tenet of civility, and sheets of blotting paper with traceries of script indicative of the hand-pressed, my-hand-to-your-hand nature of the thing. She’d write those letters until the day she died, her forefinger inked and with a permanent pen-welt. She had many correspondents. One was Aunt Nollaig, who went to America, and defeated the physics of space by writing ever smaller on the single page of the aerogramme, her character apparent the moment Doady ran the knife carefully along the dotted line and held to the light the script that with Ganga’s loupe would take days to fully decipher. Doady’s own missives went across the river and over the mountains and brought replies that were read over several times, then folded back into their envelopes and stored inside a foil-lined tea chest stamped CEYLON, where in ink, paper and penmanship a kind of inner Kerry endured, and could be visited easier than the real thing.

  In recent times, in a gesture, partly of love, because he knew she was lonely for the voices of her home place, and partly of self-interest, because he himself could not resist the newfangled, Ganga had sold a cow and secretly ordered the installation of a telephone. It was the first telephone that was not in the village, had the number FAHA 4, and was delivered and installed by two big-booted line engineers from Miltown Malbay who made the first call, to Mrs Prendergast on the switch in the village, one of them giving the thumbs-up to Ganga once she answered and shouting down the line the kind of wooden conversation they may one day use on Mars. The telephone had a winder on the side and, like the cartoon bombs in comics, a large battery on the floor with wires coming out of it.

  Ganga’s plan misfired. Doady hated it. First, she asked, how were they to pay for it. To which Ganga gave his common response to all uncertainty: ‘We’ll figure it,’ which infuriated her more than Cork people. Second, she hated how the receiver sat silently on the wall, as if it were a black ear listening; in response she covered it with a doily and for the first weeks whispered when next to it. The telephone, it was decreed, would only be used for absolute necessities, which in her language meant funerals. Father Tom came on his rounds and before he left was asked to bless it. Unwilling to concede that science had answers where religion had mysteries, he improvised a blessing that was a prayer to Gabriel the Archangel, the patron saint of messengers, who was now, he said, in charge of telephones. Doady sent the number in a letter to Kerry and when the phone rang with a throttled pulse for the first time she knew before she lifted the doily that her ailing Auntie Ei had passed. The ring of the telephone retained that sinister aspect until word circulated around the hinterland, after which neighbours and people out the country gradually started to arrive at the door to make a call. The house became a kind of unofficial outer post office without opening or closing hours, and it was not unusual to have someone sitting on the stool inside the front window shouting the news of a death, or a sick cow, down the line while a game of cards or draughts was going on the pine table alongside. The first few times, it was Muireann Morrissey or Noirin Furey maybe, they offered the few pence for the call, Ganga shrugged off the offer and said how could you pay for talk. But by the second week Doady had placed a large jamjar on the sill with a few of her own threepenny bits inside it, and callers took the hint and the bill when it came was paid.

  What I can say about my grandmother is that she was testament to the opacity of human beings. She was small but wiry, had iron-grey hair that I never saw out of a bun until it was combed out and gave her back thirty years the day she finally lost her heroic battle with gravity. She was laid out in the parlour with a faint but noticeable smile, perhaps because, sitting alongside the casket in one of Bourke’s mourning suits, shoes shining and silver hair near enough to combed, Ganga looked like Spencer Tracy, and she realised that after forty years of marriage she almost had him trained. She had large but nimble hands, thin legs amplified by thick tights. She wore a wrap-around sleeveless apron, the blue one or the red one, and round glasses that made huge her eyes and at times lent her a look of fairy tale. As a shield against despair she had decided early on to live with the expectation of doom, an inspired tactic, because, by expecting it, it never fully arrived. She was equal parts Christian and pagan, never said the Good Lord without just a hint of irony, made no distinction between giving me my first set of scapulars and telling me that if I didn’t wear them the púca would get me.

  In her speech were bits of Irish and words that were halfway between two languages, accommodated into the mixture but strange as sloe berries, so that not only did she speak of a gabháil of turf or a beart of hay, a sky that was somehow more than just cloudy when it was called scamallach, but she had a whole range of descriptive words so onomatopoeic and exact that though I did not know their translation I somehow understood that Hanley the bodachán was a horrible small man, the brocky face of Gerry Colgan was pocked, shadowed like a badger’s, that big slow Liam O Leary was a right liúdramán, Marian Boylan a snooty smuilceachán, and that Sheila Sullivan had a little wet prislín of a son who couldn’t stop dribbling.

  My grandparents’ marriage was less than idyllic, for many reasons, one of which was Ganga had an incomplete understanding of money. That is, he did not believe in its existence, because, as he told me, his life thus far had provided no solid proof otherwise.

  ‘Another man would be ashamed to say that,’ Doady said, ‘but not your grandfather. Your grandfather has no principles.’

  ‘O Jeez, I do, Noe,’ he smiled a pained smile, the round face of him turned to me and his hands holding on to his braces. ‘But my principles have a small p. That way I can keep on loving my fellow man.’ He winked at me; Doady blew out in exasperation and with the venerable duster of a goose’s wing went at the dresser.

  They lived by dispute, and as there were often several running concurrently you had to be alert to keep up, to understand that when Doady shouted ‘Water!’ it meant Ganga had let his hands drip instead of turning them in the cloth, that ‘Boots!’ meant he hadn’t used the mat, ‘Press!’ that he had forgotten to close a cupboard door – ‘Should nothing have a door on it? Is that what you’re telling me? Open the doors, come dirt, come dust, come mice, and Welcome. That man won’t be happy till our clothes are crawling with sciatháns.’

  But in all Ganga maintained the equilibrium of the just and could not be risen or riled. And in this was the theatre of their marriage, which in Faha was also a spectator sport, and many evenings Bat or Martin or Jimmy might lift the latch and come calling, sitting hunkered over impenetrably strong mugs of tea to watch it play, flicking their ash in the general direction of the fire when the intermission was called.

  Ganga, being a complete world unto himself, had no politics. With a silver loupe, at a seat by the window, pages tilted down to catch the daylight, he read one book a year, Old Moore’s Almanac, and in that found all the explanation the universe required.

  He was, Doady would say, an impossible man. And although I believe she meant it, although often she would tell him to get out from under her feet before she took the broom to him, and other times say he had broken the heart of her, I’m not sure I ever saw a more married man and woman. As image of their marriage: first thing every morning Ganga riddled out the fire from the embers and reset some sods on the grate of the big hearth. Half an hour later, once he had gone outside to see to the animals, Doady took the tongs and repositioned all the sods, the way they should be. She said nothing about it, he said nothing about it. The fire survived it all.

  Of course, I didn’t understand the economies of their life then, realise that four cows was not an income, that a vegetable garden and hens were not just country pastimes, or that there was a reason why Ganga had made and hung all the crooked doors and windows himself. Why everything was repaired after a fashion neither textbook nor expedient, why, although all of Ganga’s solutions gave birth to unforeseen problems, he continued to pursue them. Why the
now lost art of darning was in their world essential, as if life was all the time undoing and holing their enterprise, and so Doady with glasses off, then on, then off again worked by paraffin lamplight with wools and threads of unmatched and often garish colours at elbows, knees, seats and cuffs, every angle of him that needed to be thatched back in against the exuberance of his leaking out.

  The fact is, I did not appreciate until much later in my own life what subterfuge and sacrifice it took to be independent and undefeated by the pressures of reality.

  4

  It is true for Doady that the house may have suited frogs. Except for an apron around the open fire much of it was permanently damp. Pale mushrooms could rise at the base of the dresser, the sills of windows wept, and after midnight when the fire in the big open hearth went low, when the spun cotton of cobwebs began to enshroud the upper rafters, there was a sense that all five-ish rooms were longing for the river just a field away.

  I had come down frequently in early childhood, first, accompanied by my parents, when what I remember are long chaotic dinners in the middle of the afternoon, a goose and a ham, a great bowl of rough-looking floury potatoes that sat in split jackets – in Dublin potatoes had no skins – milk that came not in bottles but thick and off-white and foaming at the edges of what Doady called a can but was an enamel jug kept cold inside the amateur refrigerator of a tiled but never-lit fireplace in the parlour. The carrots, the parsnips – there were no parsnips in Marlborough Road – the butter that bore no resemblance to what we called butter, a kind of all-out feast packed on to every inch of the table and along the dresser, and Doady running back and forth for things Ganga had forgotten and never seeming to sit down herself. The meal was made savoury by the addition of the indomitable mint that grew like an old man’s beard between the broken flagstones out the back, or the class of perpetual onion that, by mercy or message, God had made flourish in Faha. But perhaps because she tried too hard, because her own mother had passed on no skill, or because life enjoys confounding effort, Doady was a terrible cook, a fact that Ganga not only never mentioned, but flouted by praising as just beautiful the cremated pork chops, stringy bacon and desiccated chicken.