She looked as if she wanted to rip the stone out of the ground with her bare hands and break it over her knee but finally, breathing heavily, she stood up and moved on. I couldn’t help but wonder what might have happened to her if the priest had shown her compassion instead of cruelty, had he intervened with my grandfather and helped him realize that we all make mistakes. If the parish had rallied behind my mother instead of casting her out.
I wandered off and looked around the gravestones myself and stopped short when I saw one for Kenneth O’Ríafa. There was no particular reason that I should have noticed it except for the fact that beneath his name were the words: And his wife Jean. I checked the dates. He was born in 1919, which would have been exactly right. And dead in 1994, the same year I had sat by Charles’s bed as he passed away. Who, I wondered, had sat by Kenneth’s? Not Jean, for she had passed five years earlier in 1989.
“Well now,” said my mother, appearing before me and looking down at the inscription. “There he is. But do you see what they did?”
“What?” I asked.
“Auntie Jean died first,” she said. “She would have had her own gravestone. Jean O’Ríafa, it would have said. 1921–1989. But when he died they must have taken her stone away and made it all about him. Kenneth O’Ríafa. And his wife Jean. The afterthought. The men just get it all, don’t they? It must be great for them all the same.”
“No children on the headstone,” I said.
“I see that.”
“And that’s my father,” I added, more to myself than anyone else, the words low and quiet. I didn’t know how to feel. I didn’t know how I was supposed to feel. I had never known the man. But the way my mother told it, he wasn’t necessarily the villain of the piece. Maybe there were no villains in my mother’s story at all. Just men and women, trying to do their best by each other. And failing.
“All these people,” she said sorrowfully. “And all of that trouble. And look, they’re all dead now. So what did it all matter in the end?”
When I looked around, Catherine was gone. I turned my head toward the doors of the church and caught sight of her as she disappeared inside. I didn’t follow for a while but continued to wander around the graves, reading the names and the dates, thinking about the children who had passed away at such young ages and wondering what had happened to them. I found myself lost in thought for a long time and then finally I turned around and stared up at the mountains that surrounded me, at the village that I could see down the road. This was Goleen. This was where my mother and father were from. My grandparents. This was where I had been conceived and where, in a different world, I might have grown up.
“You’re praying,” I said a few minutes later as I entered the church to find my mother on her knees on the padded rest before one of the pews, her head bowed to the back of the seat in front of her.
“I’m not praying,” she said. “I’m remembering. Sometimes the two things look alike, that’s all. This was it, Cyril, you see. This was where I was sitting.”
“When?” I asked.
“The day I was sent away. We’d come to Mass together, all of us, and Father Monroe dragged me up onto the altar. I was sitting right here in this very seat. The rest of my family were lined up next to me. It’s so long ago and yet I can see them, Cyril. I can see them all as if it was yesterday. Still alive. Still sitting here. Still looking at me with humiliation and disgust in their eyes. Why did they abandon me? Why do we abandon each other? Why did I abandon you?”
A sound from the side of the altar startled us, and a young man of about thirty appeared from the sacristy door. A priest. He turned to us and smiled, leaving something on the altar itself before walking over.
“Hello,” he said.
“Hello, Father,” I said, as my mother stayed silent.
“Are you just visiting?” he asked. “It’s a beautiful day for it.”
“Visiting and returning,” said Catherine. “It’s a long time since I last set foot inside this church. Sixty-three years, if you can believe it. I wanted to see it one last time.”
“Are your people from here?” he asked.
“They are,” she said. “The Goggins. Do you know them?”
He frowned, thought about it and shook his head. “Goggin,” he said. “It rings a bell. I think I’ve heard some parishioners mention a Goggin family from back in the old days. But as far as I know now, there’s none left here. They scattered, I suppose. To the winds and to America.”
“Most likely,” said my mother. “I’m not looking for any of them anyway.”
“And will you be staying with us for long?” he asked.
“No,” I said. “We go back to Cork City tonight. And then the train back to Dublin in the morning.”
“Well, enjoy,” he said, smiling as he turned away. “We welcome everyone in the parish of Goleen. It’s a wonderful place.”
My mother snorted a little and shook her head. And as the priest returned to the altar, she stood up, turned her back on him and walked out of the church for the last time, her head held high.
EPILOGUE
2015 Beyond the Harbor on the High Seas
Dartmouth Square
I woke to the sound of Pugni’s La Esmerelda rising through the old bones of the house on Dartmouth Square and settling, somewhat muffled, in the top-floor bedroom where I had spent the night before. Looking through the skylight to the blue sky above me, I closed my eyes and tried to recall how it had felt to wake in this same bed, seven decades earlier, a lonely and attention-starved child. The memories, which had always been such a part of my being, had dimmed slightly over the last twelve months. It saddened me that no strong emotions came back to me now. I tried to recall the name of the housekeeper who had worked for Charles and Maude and been something of a friend to me throughout my youth, but everything about her was gone. I searched for the face of Max Woodbead, but it was a blur. And as for why I was even there? That took a moment too, but then it came back to me. A happy day, at last; a day that I thought would never come.
I hadn’t slept well: a combination of anxiety, the temozolomide tablets that I had been taking daily at bedtime for the last five weeks and the sporadic fits of insomnia that they in turn caused. My doctor had told me that they might also result in decreased urination but, quite the contrary, I had gone to the bathroom four times during the night. On the third occasion, I’d continued downstairs in search of a snack only to find my seventeen-year-old grandson, George, lying on the sofa in a T-shirt and boxer shorts, stuffing his face full of crisps while watching a superhero movie on the enormous television that dominated a wall of the living room.
“Shouldn’t you be in bed?” I asked, opening the fridge and looking inside in the vain hope that there might be a sandwich waiting in there for me.
“It’s only one o’clock,” said George, turning around and dragging the hair out of his eyes as he held the open crisp packet in my direction. I tried a few: awful.
“Is that a beer you’re drinking?” I asked.
“It might be,” he said.
“Should you be drinking that?”
“Probably not. You won’t tell anyone, will you?”