How Ireland Saved My Life

“Ireland, once you live there, you’re seduced by it.” –Frank McCourt

“I’m not going to Ireland.” 

My mother turned around. She had been cutting steaks from a side of beef. “Don’t be dramatic,” she said. 

“My best friend just died; my boyfriend doesn’t love me anymore.”

She could not minimize the loss of Cynthia but the boy, the boy who made plaster casts of his feet and fucked her daughter senseless. “He did this to you! You are going to Ireland.”

“I can’t. I’m an alcoholic and I want to die.”

It was a lot. I was a lot. But then again, there was a clear indication from the time I was fifteen that alcohol was not my friend. Now, I was twenty, and I could feel myself in the cold clasp of something deadly, something that blanked out how I felt, and how I felt was so terrible I needed that darkness. I had never said this to anyone besides my best friend Cindy, who had offered to help me stop drinking, offered me sanctuary, and then promptly was killed in a car crash. I had just returned from her funeral in Ohio, a trip that had included the end of my first love, followed by Cindy’s death, followed by a clear desire to end things. But I had seen her parents, her mother’s kind face aged by grief, trying to explain to me how much Cindy had loved me, a person who was beyond the pale, who had lied and degraded herself, who could not see her own reflection without silently intoning, “I hate you.” 

photo by Magdalena Smolnicka

And her father, who asked me to visit the grave the day after she was buried and broke down, this All-American, crew cut, Republican who we had secretly made fun of, fell on his knees in front of me and said, “Something’s wrong. Go home and tell your parents. I would die for her.” And then he wept. I had never seen a grown man cry except in the movies.

But there was my mother, waving her favorite knife around, telling me I was perfect, I was fine, it was all that terrible boy’s fault, and I should go upstairs and stop being sad because, well, because I had to. I left the house and hitchhiked into Princeton, where I found a phone booth. I called a family friend, who was a massive fan of psychiatrists, and told her what had happened. I went to therapy. I went to therapy and worked at the Princeton Shopping Center at a store called Baileys that sold ballet supplies and support garments. The few customers were either anorexic bunhead ballerinas or very fat women. The fat women frequently called me into the dressing room to help them fasten the clasp on their enormous bras. The rest of the time, I pushed clothing back and forth on the racks, staring into a gray-tinged future. 

I found a house-sitting gig that had me living in the pool house, feeding a sad dog and smoking pot while I floated around on an air mattress watching the trees spin overhead, feeling like a character from an Updike story, surrounded by greenery and wealth, drunk and depressed. Some nights, I passed out on a plastic chaise lounge; I crawled on hands and knees into the pool house to call my ex-boyfriend, sobbing that I still loved him and I was sorry. I didn’t love him, and I wasn’t sorry. I was grieving, numb, bored and angry. I told my therapist about my impressive parents and how I sometimes went barefoot to school during the winter. I don’t remember any helpful advice and when I finally whispered that I drank too much, she changed the subject. One day I woke up to find what resembled part of a tree stuck in the bumper of my Volkswagen Beetle. I drove around town and noticed tire tracks across the lawns of several houses. In bits and pieces, I recalled drinking at a local bar and then getting in my car. 

In late August, I left for Dublin with a vague plan to commit suicide. For some reason, I thought the blow might be cushioned by killing myself in a foreign country. The Trinity fall term started later than schools in America so I would have time to find a place to live. I landed in Dublin and was in a cab headed to Emily Murphy’s flat on Wilton Place before I felt anything but a mild sort of shock that I had actually managed to leave the country.

“Are you visiting a relative?” the cab driver asked.

“I’m going to Trinity for a year.”

He glanced in his rear-view mirror. “Ah, Protestant then?”

“What? Oh, no. I’m a lapsed catholic. Well, not even lapsed, never started. My grandmother was from the North. She grew up in a convent.”

This need for self-identification was always in play in Ireland. Unlike race in America, Irish people looked alike and needed a guide to hate each other. It was almost impossible to remain mysterious about your belief system or to deny religion when choosing a side was necessary.

“Why not UCD, then?” He was still looking at me, teasing but not.

“I’m an American. We kill each other over race, sex, and money. Religion isn’t our thing. We have more important fish to fry.”

He laughed. “So, what will you study at Trinity, Miss America?”

“History and English.”

“You’ll want to stay away from the history. It’s nothing but killings and treaties and bombings and murders on both sides. Forgive me the familiarity, but you have a sad expression, and I can’t imagine someone with youth and beauty and the brains to get a place at Trinity can look so tragic.”

I giggled. “I look tragic?” It seemed funny that I had become one of those unhappy, angry people I secretly envied growing up. It didn’t feel that good.

“You might wake up tomorrow and discover life is sweet even if it’s seemed bitter lately.”

I considered that idea. After all, I wasn’t a Jew living in the Ghetto during WWII or a slave or handicapped. “Why are you happy?” I asked, leaning forward. He looked to be in his mid-forties. His name, according to his medallion, was Martin Mulligan.

“Low expectations have always worked for me. Expect nothing, and you won’t be disappointed. Anything good is great. Anything bad is expected. And I smoke excellent hash. But that’s just to keep me from murdering other drivers.” He winked at me. “It’s a fine life after all, Ms. Trinity.”

I sat back and watched the streets pass, the Georgian houses, the row houses, the streets lit by lamps. It felt like a new beginning with a sense of wonder I hadn’t experienced in a long time. I considered the possibility of not killing myself. Patricia, Emily’s mother, was in the final stages of drinking herself to death. She no longer got out of bed, and Emily was reluctant to have me stay with them because of the situation. I felt terrible for her. Despite Patricia’s crazy temper and how poorly she functioned as a mother, she adored Emily. 

The arrangement had been to stay there until I located a place to live, but since the Trinity term had not yet started, Emily suggested I use the room of a friend who was traveling around Spain with his girlfriend.

“He’s a lovely guy but he has hideous taste in women. Itamonica is this crazy, jealous bitch! He’s from Rhodesia.”

The only thing I knew about Rhodesia was it practiced apartheid. “He’s white?”

“Yes. His parents have a tobacco farm. If he didn’t leave he’d be conscripted. He’s very tall and gorgeous. Look, I’m sorry about this.”

“It’s fine. I’m so sorry about your mum.”

Emily shrugged. We’d known each other since we were six with bad haircuts and a mutual understanding of gifted, selfish parents. Her situation with her mother was much worse than mine but she knew enough about my parents, whom she adored, to appreciate the dark side. We pulled up outside a dilapidated Georgian mansion with a large bay window in front. I could see someone’s shadow, the shadow of what appeared to be an old lady with a huge bird on her shoulder.

“That’s Flem,” Emily said. “You’ll love her.”

Loving Flem would be like loving Miss Havisham, a risky proposition. But she was fascinating, an eccentric with one room where she slept, watched her television programs, cooked and entertained guests, and minded the parrot, at least I think it was a parrot. It swore all the time and honestly it frightened me with its enormous beak and penetrating eyes. Flem rented out all the other rooms in her house to various students, some at Trinity, some at UCD or College of Surgeons. She liked having young people around herself, especially good-looking young people. 

The door to my borrowed room sported an impressive padlock. People shared the kitchen and a bathroom, but everyone had separate digs. The room was large with a gas fire fed on shillings, an enormous wooden bed that looked homemade, some bookshelves and a chair pulled up to the fire with a reading light above it. It was a bit dark being the basement, but it wasn’t depressing. The tenant had lovely things, a piece of bleached driftwood, a collection of elephants carved from ivory and some vivid African patterned pieces of cloth tacked to the wall. Despite being in Rathmines, the room seemed exotic smelling of sandalwood and ginger and other faraway spices. 

“Why is the bed so huge?”

“Christopher’s six-seven barefoot.”

“Did he make it himself?” I looked around at the bookshelves and saw how everything seemed handmade.

Emily shrugged. “Probably. He grew up on a farm. I think he knows how to do nearly everything, beekeeping and winemaking and bed building.”

Emily’s mother, Patricia, died that night. Apparently, she drank Benedictine and Cointreau while taking Nembutal. I had only been in Dublin a week. I didn’t know Patricia very well. I knew she had been the poet Philip Larkin’s lover. My mother had told me Patricia was stopped in her writing career by other men, authors and editors who would not accept a woman’s voice as equal to their own. Being accepted by male writers in the 1950s was difficult enough to hasten suicides by writers like Anne Sexton and Sylvia Plath. I was a fan of Shirley Jackson, another 1950s female writer who didn’t kill herself but was a heavy drinker and consumer of prescribed medications popular with angry housewives. Trying to have a coherent domestic life had plagued my architect mother so much she sometimes, usually after being interrupted repeatedly during her work day by her daughters needing various things, got in the car and drove away leaving my father to take us for Chinese food and bowling. 

When I read Tilly Olson’s short story, I Stand Here Ironing, recommended by my father who championed Tilly Olson’s book Tell Me a Riddle it introduced me to the circumstances of a woman who longed to write while having four children and little money. 

I admired my mother enormously but never articulated this feeling to her, possibly because my father’s influence was so strong. We interrupted her while she was meeting with clients to ask what was for dinner or request something that made it clear that she was solely responsible for the domestic life of the family. She created stunning architectural models from balsa wood, using an exacto knife, adding dried weeds from the fields to represent trees. The magic of those miniatures was never celebrated the way my father’s publishing accomplishments were lauded. As in her original family we treated her talent with little respect. Until I found myself marginalized and insulted because of my gender. I had no understanding of what my mother experienced as a female architect in the 1950s, 60s and 70s.

The first morning I woke up in Christopher’s room I lay in bed trying to remember where I was. Nothing was familiar even the smell and sounds outside. There was the muffled screech of Flem’s parrot and the roar of Dublin traffic but even the horns sounded foreign. I had borrowed one of Christopher’s thermal shirts to sleep in as it was surprisingly cold and I was limited to my small suitcase, which was supposed to last me until my trunk would clear customs. Two weeks into my stay in Christopher’s room I had worn most of his sweaters and borrowed a coat, which was very warm albeit huge. Two weeks away from America I was in a strange state, not lonely, angry, sad, scared or anything bad. As I grew accustomed to my surroundings, I became aware of an emotion I hadn’t felt for years, a sense of hope. Morning didn’t bring joy exactly, but it brought a sense of anticipation and of looking forward to the day ahead. I hadn’t felt like this for so long. It reminded me of when I was a child, before everything became complicated, before anything really bad had happened.

Everything felt new. Just boiling an egg and eating it with the bread I bought at the Jewish bakery, toasting and buttering that bread, talking to some of the other tenants in Flem’s house, felt exotic. Food tasted different, better. I was hungry again.

I lay in Christopher’s huge handmade bed and imagined him. His clothes were lovely, soft cottons and wools, big hand knitted socks that someone who loved him must have made. I borrowed his soap and his shampoo. His bath stuff smelled like almonds and lemons. I fell in love with his room, his clothes and his stuff. I imagined conversations we would have lying in his bed at night, the lights from the street soft on the opposite wall. I didn’t know it then, but I had forgotten how to live. I never listened to music anymore or even went outside. I barely ate or slept and stayed mostly alone. I woke up with a terrible sense of foreboding and anxiety that wrung the strength from my body. I cried for hours alone in the dark, sobs that hurt, so many tears the pillow would be soaked. Grief over Cynthia and losing my boyfriend had clouded my senses. I felt dread, rage and grief so painful that drinking until blackout was the only way to stop feeling.

During those weeks before the fall term at Trinity started, I walked all over Dublin. I went to Bewley’s on Grafton Street to drink coffee and choose buns from the plate they left on each table. The smell of the coffee was strong and reminded me of my parents who made coffee from beans they ground and poured through a Melitta filter, a rare thing in America where instant was the preferred brew. I ate brown bread and smoked salmon with Irish butter, keeping a promise to my mother who missed that feast since we’d left Ireland. I walked down to the sea and thought about Cynthia, my precious friend who had loved me so fiercely. I felt the beginning of healing, a sense of peace and a lessening of the guilt that I’d survived. I believed I could stay alive which came as a shock.

My funds were very low because my father had written me a personal check for $500.00 American dollars while I only had a hundred dollar traveler’s check left. I planned to cash his check at the Bank of Ireland, which was based in the first two-party parliament house in Europe. It served as Ireland’s Parliament until the Act of Union in 1801, which imposed direct rule on Ireland from London. I read these facts on a plaque attached to the wall. The bank looked like a palace or a museum or maybe a very fancy prison. It was located on College Green directly across from the gates of Trinity College and it was where the porter told me to open an account. The porters at the gates of Trinity knew almost everything. They were like the concierges of Dublin. 

I entered the bank lobby and went up to a teller’s window. The nameplate said “Mahoney.”

“Hello? I have a personal check.”

“Have you now? And may I know your name, young lady?”

“Molly Moynahan. It’s from my father. I need to open a checking account. I’m a one-year student at Trinity.”

“Well, isn’t that grand? You’ll be with us for a year. And what are you studying, might I inquire, Miss Moynahan?”

I was getting used to how the Irish turned nearly every sentence no matter how declarative into an inquiry. Possibly this was the secret to their ability to carry on a conversation with anyone be it a baby who might respond by throwing Something or a very old person. Previously I had believed my parents’ gift for gab was a family trait but in Dublin I recognized it was a national characteristic. Bus drivers, taxi drivers, bank tellers, porters and waiters that could quote Jonathan Swift and Seamus Heaney as easily as an American cabbie might identify a famous landmark.

“History and literature.”

I handed over the check, which Mr. Mahoney took with great ceremony despite its unprepossessing appearance having been squished inside my passport.

He smiled at me. “Now, I assume you have other funds?”

“No. Is Something wrong?”

“Not at all. But this is a personal check from Princeton, New Jersey.” He looked at me. “Is that where the great University is located?”

I nodded.

“It will take about a month to clear. In the meantime, do you have a local address, Miss Moynahan?”

“I’m staying in a boarding house temporarily. I’m looking for a real apartment.”

He nodded. “So, this is what we’ll do then. I’ll get your check on its way to clear and meanwhile, we’ll lend you whatever you need. Does that sound like a plan?”

“Should I call my father? Maybe he can wire money.”

Mr. Mahoney shook his head. “Not at all. This will be grand. I’ll just write down what I’ve given you on this piece of paper and then we’ll deduct it after the check clears, and we open you an account. Now, would you be needing some cash immediately?”

Thus, I acquired my own personal banker and new friend, Mr. Mahoney. After I appeared in a play at Trinity he laminated the review and hung it in his window and after I was photographed attempting to levitate during a man-powered flight contest, I was wearing a silly looking turban and a shirt that needed a bra (I wasn’t wearing one), a picture that was published on the front page of the Irish Times, Mr. Mahoney laminated the page with my picture and displayed it in his teller window. Without any security or looking at my passport, Mr. Mahoney lent me nearly two hundred pounds until my father’s check finally cleared. This was my Ireland. A place that trusted me because I seemed like someone who wouldn’t do something bad on purpose. For some reason, this was very comforting.

During the second week at Flem’s place, I nearly joined a yoga cult. At that point, I had spent nearly all my time alone and I was longing for school to begin. While I hadn’t consciously decided not to kill myself, as the days passed it seemed much less certain. The days were growing shorter as October approached. I spent my time taking long walks around Dublin, peering into other people’s windows, reading Christopher’s books and wishing I had someone to talk to. The yoga class was advertised all over Dublin, the flyers stapled to telephone poles and bulletin boards in the health food store. It said the class was free and there would be tea and discussion afterwards. The address brought me to a tall house on the northside of Dublin. When I knocked on the door a woman wearing white with a turban answered. “Namaste,” she said. She put her palms together and bowed. I bowed back. 

She brought me into a small, windowless room painted white with cushions on the floor. Sitting on one of the cushions was another man who looked happy to see me.

After she left us alone, he leaned over and whispered, “Name’s Fred.” He had an English accent.

“Molly.”

“Do a lot of yoga, do you?”

“Not really. Do you?”

“Never touch the stuff.”

A man dressed in white, his robes covered in fancy embroidery, wearing the same sort of turban came in, bowed to us, sat down in a cross-legged position and then stared into space. I looked at my socks which were actually Chris’ socks and Fred cleared his throat so many times I nearly offered to get him some water.

“Welcome my children.” The man had an accent I couldn’t locate. 

We did some simple yoga, mostly stretches, nothing too difficult. Fred lost his balance in tree pose and actually fell over sideways, very slowly, next to me. The teacher ignored him, but I got the giggles, which lasted for the rest of the class, right into savasana when we stretched out on the floor to relax. Aside from the giggles it was very cold, and I could also smell Something spicy, cooking. After savasana, we drank tea, and the first woman came back into the room.

“I feel your pain,” the yoga man said, staring deeply into my eyes.

“Really?” I could hear Fred next to me gulping for air to keep from giggling.

“The loneliness that guided you here is part of your destiny. Someone you cared about deeply has left you. “I nodded. He had really nice eyes. “And you,” he focused on Fred. “You are far from home and wondering how to forget your past.”

Fred nodded.

And then we were in another larger room eating bowls of the spicy stuff and drinking more tea while the two of us told these complete strangers an abbreviated version of our life stories. Fred had left London after the failure of his business and the end of an engagement. The yoga man asked us about our current living circumstances and when we would be able to move into the house and practice yoga twelve hours a day and devote our lives to the Guru whose name I couldn’t understand at all. It was now dark. Fred and I had been in the yoga house for over six hours. I was sitting at the feet of the yoga man and Fred was having his shoulders massaged by the woman. I felt completely content, at peace and slightly drugged. 

“Go home and get your things,” the yoga man instructed us as we stood in the doorway. And then we walked back outside. The air was cold and crisp with a huge moon. The moment we left the house, the spell was broken. We were walking back towards City Centre and Fred said he might go see a movie.

“Are you moving in?” he asked me.

“Fuck, no! Who wants to do yoga twelve hours a day?”

Fred went off towards Grafton Street to see an American film butchered by the Irish censors and I walked back to Christopher’s room slightly shocked by what I had nearly done. My lovely cousin Mary was a follower of a famous Indian guru and lived in an ashram in India, sweeping the steps of rose petals and meditating and doing whatever they did in an ashram. Her Manhattan childhood and Harvard education made it seem unlikely she would end up in a place like that but now I understood. A year later, traveling on a Eurail Pass, I picked up an old Time magazine that described a yoga cult accused of murdering its followers. The murders had happened in Germany, but I recognized the intense eyes of the yoga man. There had been a moment during that long afternoon when I felt so happy, I believed I could become an acolyte of the yoga man and there would be no more choices, no more disappointments and no more conflict. I would sit at his feet; maybe wear a cool outfit like Jeannie on I Dream of Jeannie. I would never have sex or drink or do drugs again. 

But now I was back in Christopher’s room, eating chocolate, drinking wine and reading one of his books, The Grass is Singing by Doris Lessing. I started a list, 1. Find a place to live. 2. Locate my trunk. 3. Write to my parents. I might have added 4. Cancel suicide. There was too much to see and do, people to meet, classes to take, books to read, and I could die anytime. The next morning, I went to the bulletin board outside the Buttery, the student pub, and found a notice requesting a fourth room mate in a house in Blackrock, a suburb of Dublin about four miles from Trinity. 

Tina, Trine and Kathinka were Norwegian girls from Oslo who were studying to become doctors at the College of Surgeons. It was far cheaper to attend medical school in Ireland than Norway. They had met that summer and decided to rent a house together, but they felt as if they were too alike and they needed a fourth to break up the monotony of Norwegian good health, medical studies, and a passion for baking cakes, knitting sweaters and eating goat cheese. I would provide a respite from their Scandinavian rigidity with my crazy Irish friends, my refusal to build a platform bed despite encouragement and my various boyfriends who were warmly welcomed and plied with open-faced sandwiches by all three girls. Trine was a bit bossy and violently agitated by my constantly using the tea towels to dry the dishes. Kathinka and Tina were incredibly sweet and very, very pretty in a way that suggested fjords and wooden shoes. On our moving-in day there was an intense flurry of activity around the fitting together of wooden beds that each of them had built and managed to install in their respective rooms. I put down a futon, which basically took care of the floor space, as my room was tiny, but had a nice window overlooking the garden and a door. Paradise.

Our landlady lived next door with her two “bachelor” sons. They were Irish bachelors which means you get married and don’t like it and move back in with your mother and never get divorced because then you’ll go straight to hell. The sons could not believe their luck when we moved in since Tina, Trine and Kathinka did their anatomy homework in our backyard with their shirts off checking one another’s spines as they studied. One day the younger son leaned so far out the upstairs window he tumbled onto the roof of the tool shed. The older one was constantly ringing our doorbell asking if we needed anything fixed or adjusted. The Norwegian girls would have invited him in and given him cake but I told him to keep his tools to himself and if we needed anything we’d tell his mother.

Finally, the fall term started. I purchased a used bicycle with my loan from Mr. Mahoney and discovered that the ride to the back gate of Trinity was exactly 4.4 miles and if I really pushed it, I could be there in less than a half-hour. I went to an audition at Players, the Trinity College Drama Society, for a play about Sylvia Plath written by the female members of the Royal Shakespeare Company. I was cast as one of the three female leads along with two other girls. 

Gabrielle Reidy was cast as the oldest Sylvia, I played the adolescent and Miriam Hayes was the child. Gabrielle was an extraordinary actress, who had been Antigone at the Abbey Theater and had a television series starting that fall on RTE called The Spike in which she played the sexy daughter of a math teacher who was frequently found with her skirt over her head. 

Miriam was an incredibly pretty, tiny English girl with a plummy accent and a deep affection for The Royal Family. She had no acting experience, but the director was a chubby, American control freak that channeled Orson Welles and had a huge crush on her and an even huger crush on me.During our first rehearsal, he repeatedly  changed the scene’s blocking so I was stepping into a spotlight and shaking down my hair that was in a sort of turban. Trying to put my hair back into the turban was distracting and took forever. After rehearsal ended, I saw Gabrielle and Miriam exchange a look and then they vaguely alluded to a plan to go get a drink. I needed to make friends and let them know I thought the director was an ass.

“What a bloody Yank wanker,” Gabrielle said, dumping her bag on the table of our snug, biting into an apple that rolled out.

“He’s completely bloody incompetent,” Miriam said, looking at her reflection in the mirror and then taking out lipstick to touch up her makeup.

“I’m not taking my hair down,” I said. “This is an ensemble. Let’s tell him he needs to treat us exactly the same, okay?”

They both nodded.

“All right, Molly.” Gabrielle offered me a bite of her apple. “But are you a self-absorbed illiterate like most Americans?”

“Totally.” I took a huge bite. “America is the greatest country in the world.”

Miriam and Gabrielle looked at each other and then at me and we started to giggle. We drank vast amounts and stumbled out of the pub so Gabrielle could catch her bus and Miriam could get into her rooms at Trinity before the porter locked the gate. Searching for Gabrielle’s bus pass buried deep in her enormous bag became the usual coda to our nights together. She carried an enormous bag full of scripts, books, apples, and cheese sandwiches on whole grain bread and somewhere near the bottom a change purse containing her bus pass. We dropped Miriam off at her door, collected my bicycle and then continued to Gabrielle’s bus stop.

“You must come to tea in Malahide someday.”

“I’d love to. And you come and meet the Norwegians.”

I had made a friend, a wonderful, talented, exasperating, nutty Irish friend. Gabrielle was just seventeen, reading French at Trinity, already a consummate actress. I have never again shared a stage with anyone that talented. Her mere act of breathing or staring into space was captivating. When she blew her lines or screwed up the blocking no one thought she had made a mistake because her concentration was so absolute. There was a second, short play added to our bill to make the evening longer, a Tennessee Williams’ one-act called Something Unspoken. The two of us played faded Southern spinsters with my character secretly in love with the other one. The second play was barely rehearsed, and Gabrielle never learned her lines completely. She would wander offstage to check the script whenever she was unsure and I could see her in the wings, looking at her lines, taking a drag off the stage manager’s cigarette. After figuring out where we were in the play she would glide back and say something poignant. Meanwhile, the audience watched me frozen, waiting for her, and decided I had blown my cue. A few weeks into rehearsal her television series was abruptly cancelled. The head of the Irish League of Decency had complained about the sex in the script and was jeered at by the public until he died of a heart attack reportedly brought on by a particularly graphic scene. Gabrielle’s big break evaporated. 

My classes were amazing. One of my history professors, T.W. Moody, wrote the definitive history of modern Ireland. In addition to Moody, I was fortunate to have Aiden Clarke as my tutor. Studying at Trinity was different from Rutgers. Students tended to slack off until the exams and then study like mad. But I wasn’t taking those exams, so I wrote papers and was always prepared for the tutorials. I loved the lectures and the small meetings with our professors. I had the extraordinary David Norris, a renowned Joyce scholar who was also out as a gay man in 1977 despite the dangers to his professional and personal life. I started reading Ulysses and recognized my route into Trinity from Blackrock was the route that Leopold Bloom took in the novel. Reading Joyce was no longer a struggle; the language, the allusions, and the dialect were local. I heard men in the pub having the same discussions about Parnell, the famine, and the tangled mess that was Irish politics. My childhood spent in Sandy Cove across from the Joyce Tower, the decades of listening to my parents go on about Ireland, the British, literature and music suddenly became concrete. I understood my parents and grandparents in a way I never imagined. My grandmother who spoke with such vicious intensity about non-Catholics and who swooned and tittered when paid attention to by a priest was no longer mysterious. I saw her doppelgangers all over Dublin, elderly ladies wearing veils and clutching rosaries, attending mass each and every day. 

At the same time, Ireland was changing. They offered condoms at the Trinity Health Services and people were raising children without marrying since divorce was still illegal. In October, the punk band The Clash played their music at Trinity College and the amount of spittle that attached itself to the portraits of the universities’ founders made it unlikely they’d be invited back. I was too much of a hippie, too non-punk to attend that concert but Dublin was full of teenagers wearing rusty black, safety pins stuck through all available skin, drinking, cursing and spitting. 

Beneath all of the studying, drinking, acting, biking and consumption of Scandinavian dairy products was the constant thought of Christopher the Rhodesian. He had returned from Spain where he had, according to Emily, many scenes with his Irish girlfriend. They had split up over her jealousy, which apparently verged on the psychotic. This was before movies like Fatal Attraction, and I found it fascinating that anyone would show violent emotion about being unloved or not desired. When my boyfriend stopped loving me, I could not articulate my pain except when I was drunk and then I made no sense. Pride kept me from holding on too tight. 

One morning in November I was rushing across the front square of Trinity, pushing my bike across the cobblestones, late, red-faced and sweaty from riding too fast from Blackrock. I had a tutorial and I hated being late.

“Hello?”

Someone was hanging onto my rear wheel. I turned around ready to be irritable and dismissive and there he stood in the flesh, gorgeous, smiling, wearing my jumper, his jumper but it seemed like mine.

“Molly?” He was very, very tall, 6’7 at least. His head was covered in brown curls, a tan face and huge blue eyes. I recognized him from his photograph.

“How are you? I slept in your bed.”

This was an idiotic thing to say.

“Yes,” he looked down and laughed. “Was it comfortable?”

I nodded. No one had ever made me feel so small and girlish. I thought about his room, my sanctuary, reading T.S. Eliot, deeply peaceful and oddly happy.

“Rose of memory, rose of forgetfulness.” I quoted Ash Wednesday. “I also read your books.” I tried to stop staring. 

“Did they help? Eliot can be grim.”

“I came to Dublin ready to die and your room changed everything. And your jumpers.” I added stupidly.

He looked concerned. “Are you ill?”

I shook my head. “No, no. Just American, dramatic and depressed.” I told myself to shut up. “You have the bluest eyes I’ve ever seen in my life.”

He smiled again and I nearly swooned.

I mounted my bicycle and crashed across the cobblestones. There was a red flush spreading across my face. From then on, I tracked him. I’d be drinking tea in the Buttery, and I’d feel his presence, spot his head bent over a book in the library or some lucky girl. I’d watch him from the corner of my eye, follow from a distance as he headed home, occasionally disappearing into the shadows of a building or a doorway when it seemed he might see me. 

Once or twice, we attended the same party as he was friendly with Emily’s crowd and she was loyal enough to invite me to her parties. Like all schools, Trinity had cliques. There were the drama people who hung out at Players, the athletes who drank at the pub out on the playing fields, the one-year students who tended to clump together and talk about all the ways Ireland differed from the United States, and there was Emily’s gang, a mixture of Euro-trash and rich kids, people who’d attended private British boarding schools or who simply had an air of entitlement. When Patricia died, Emily inherited the flat on Wilton Place. Her friends tended to be druggies and not very nice. Most of my Irish friends smoked hash crumbled into cigarette tobacco, but Emily’s crowd was into drugs like heroin and opium. They spent school breaks in places like Morocco and Afghanistan, where drugs were plentiful, boasting about smuggling them into Ireland concealed in parts of their bodies. Midnight Express with its harrowing scenes of torture in a Turkish jail wasn’t released until 1978. 

On the other hand, the Norwegians were almost suburban in their obsessions, which included baking flag cakes, whipping cream, knitting reindeer sweaters, and gardening. They were well-behaved, ate balanced meals, breakfast, and dinner together nearly every evening, and packed a healthy lunch in their beautifully designed lunch boxes. I was always welcome to eat with them, but my schedule was affected by rehearsals and nights spent at the pub or at a party. Kathinka went orienteering in Wicklow almost every Saturday and sweetly invited me to come. However, the idea of running through the Wicklow Mountains trying to read a compass and locate various clues was unappealing. Tina had a steady boyfriend, and Trine was invariably cross about something, by using the wrong sponge or drying towel or drinking her special juice. Living with them was like living with a feminine ideal. They were nurturing, sweet, domestic and constantly baking.

The Norwegians went home for the holidays and my parents visited just before Christmas. I had everything planned. A friend of mine from high school who knew them was also visiting and my parents would stay at Emily Murphy’s flat since she had an extra room, and it would give them better access to downtown Dublin. Of course, I got the date wrong for their arrival, so the night before a chap called Sean stayed. I met him in a pub and brought him home for the weekend. We were a couple but not in love. He was nice, funny, smart and raised in the Dublin Liberties, the equivalent of our worst slums.

His mother had twelve children and enjoyed the hospital visits for each baby as her only holiday. At Trinity on scholarship, he wore cowboy boots and his blonde hair to his shoulders. I liked him, but I was secretly, madly, and stupidly in love with Christopher. The night before my parents came, Sean and I had drunk Poteen, an Irish version of grain alcohol, and I got up the next morning to attend a dance class, so hungover I could barely see. I rode my bicycle, and after several hours of class, I returned to our house to see my mother’s head pop up in the kitchen window. It was like a horror movie. She was wearing Trine’s cleaning gloves. I had left the house in a shambles, expecting to clean that afternoon. I had also left Sean fast asleep in my bed. As I opened the door, I glimpsed my father and Sean reading the newspaper in the dining room, and my mother burst out of the kitchen, the smell of bleach strong in her wake.

“Honey,” she said, “we’re here!”

My friend came down the stairs looking petrified and later told me about opening the door to my parents, who were wearing matching suede coats, trying to explain where I was but being steamrolled by my mother, who immediately started to clean, picking up glasses and empty bottles, opening drawers and checking closets. Sean was so charming that my mother had invited him to breakfast; the rest was history. It was nice to have them visit, especially since they stayed with Emily, and I had some privacy. My mother took me to tea one afternoon and asked a single question. “Are you all right now?”

I nodded. I knew it was a temporary lull in the battlefield of my life, but I wanted her to feel better.

When Emily threw a large party in February I decided to go and bring Sean. When we got to the party there was tons of liquor, food and drugs. I noticed Christopher appeared to be alone. Sean went upstairs to smoke hash and Christopher asked me to dance. I had met his latest girlfriend, an upper-class English person who seemed nice.

‘Where’s Marion?” I asked him.

“I haven’t a clue.” He smiled down at me.

“Isn’t she your girlfriend?”

“I haven’t got a girlfriend for the moment.”

And that was that. I spent the next hour pushing tequila on Sean, which, combined with the hashish, made him legless. Pouring him into a cab, I said it would be rude to leave Emily’s party so soon and that he should go home without me. I spent a few minutes brushing my hair, and then I found Christopher.

“Take me home.”

“What about your man?”

“Gone home sick. Also, we’re just friends.”

I had studied Joyce’s exquisite short story, The Dead in high school but that was before Cindy had died, and I hadn’t understood how someone could grieve over the loss of innocence and hope. Previously, I equated innocence with weakness. Now, it represented grace and a belief in true love. There was a rare snowfall that night. The streets were already dusted white when we came downstairs. Christopher unlocked his bicycle, and I perched on the front bar, his arms around me, the familiar scent of him, his coat, and his shampoo reminding me of why I loved him so. I leaned back against his chest and felt perfectly happy. The air was cold but not cruel; the snow made everything and every person seem softer, prettier, and kinder. When we reached Flem’s, he ran us a bath and I lay in his arms, the water hiding and then revealing our bodies, both of us slightly breathless with the beauty of it all. Afterwards, we sat on pillows in front of his fire, eating buttered toast and drinking tea, talking, and then, finally, we made love in his huge bed.

I didn’t leave his room for several days. Each morning, there was more snow, a longer time spent in his bed cuddling, discussing our childhoods, his in Rhodesia, mine in New Jersey, Bruce Springsteen, apartheid, writing, racism, and bread baking; we were so different, and yet each of us understood loneliness and the solace of nature. I was completely besotted. His room seemed like the safest, warmest, softest place in the world. I borrowed his jumpers and forgot about the rest of the world. 

If the relationship had ended after those days we spent together, we might have looked back and only recalled perfection. Snowed in, alone, unthinking about the past, careless of the future, trusting one another, talking, reading, eating, smoking hash, and making love. It should have ended with the snow, but I had waited for too long and wanted him too much to be content with something so brief.  

And what did he want? Not me. I tried to force him to fall in love with me. We traveled to Emily’s cottage in Cleggan during spring break, and I was sick with a fever. He took care of me, reading aloud, wiping my forehead, and keeping the turf burning while I alternated between sweating and being so cold my teeth chattered. I hallucinated people, Cynthia, and my parents. Somehow, after the fever broke, I knew when I looked at him sitting in Emily’s rocker reading a book I should let him go. 

“You don’t love me, do you?”

He put his book down and came to sit at the edge of the bed. He pulled me into his arms and whispered, “Flower gatherer, my girl that smells of flowers.” I looked into his beautiful eyes and saw pity and sorrow but not love. 

—Molly Moynahan, author and writing coach