Country Girl: A Memoir (36 page)

He looked exhausted, his eyes dark and vulpine. His hero, as he said with passion, was Nelson Mandela, no doubt seeing the trajectory from the Armalite to the negotiating table. He was putting the finishing touches to a speech he would make that evening in Belfast, asking Prime Minister John Major for clarification of a document that Dublin and London were soon to issue and that was to be a framework for envisaged peace. But the obstacles were many. Major was insisting that the document “be free of the fingerprints of the IRA,” while his Irish counterpart, Albert Reynolds, was imploring him to persevere with it. Meanwhile, in the streets, the killings from both sides escalated. Loyalists, fearing betrayal, became more and more virulent, so as to goad the IRA even further, and James Molyneaux, leader of the Ulster Unionist Party, predicted that there was nothing in the document for Catholics, while the UDA published their own document outlining a necessary scenario,
which was the “ethnic cleansing of Ulster, an all-out war, using some Catholics as pawns and allowing for a nullification of others, to reduce demands on food supplies.” The entire thing would be finished in one or two weeks, they reckoned. Reverend Ian Paisley was letting it be known that his party were not in the business of getting anyone “to talk to Gerry Adams about anything.” Others proposed that he be put in quarantine, to be decontaminated. Despite all this, he was surprisingly optimistic, saying that the peace process was on an “irreversible thrust.” Since Dr. Paisley, in trying to wreck the possibility of any peace or any joint assembly, was firing his “vintage assaults on the South, the Catholic Church, the IRA, and perfidious Albion,” I asked Adams if, in the unlikely event of its coming about, would he shake hands with Paisley?

“Why not?” was the answer. It was not cynicism, it was not appeasement, it was the pragmatism of politics.

But peace, as Yeats said, “comes dropping slow,” and hopes that had burgeoned turned to despair.

On the Shankill Road on a Saturday in October 1993, when streets were filled with hundreds of shoppers, a bomb exploded. Two IRA men, wearing white coats to give the impression that they were delivery men, carried it hidden under a cover on a plastic tray into a fish shop, where they believed the command staff of the UDA were to meet in a room upstairs. The device detonated prematurely, killing the fishmonger and those inside the shop as the building collapsed, killing others who were passing in the street and were soon buried under it. Police, locals, and ambulance men all converged on the site, using axes, crowbars, and their bare hands to dig out the dead and survivors. As limbs were lifted out, rescuers listened for a groan or a breath, and a doctor, who later wrote about it in a British medical journal, described looking at a young woman whose eyes, when he opened them and shone a pen torch in, had dust on
the glistening corneas that had the vague opacity of death. “I do not know if this is human,” he wrote.

Reprisals were swift. The UDA leader whom they had hoped to kill let it be known that “John Hume, Gerry Adams, and the nationalist electorate will pay a heavy, heavy price for today’s atrocity.”

Loyalist gunmen went on a spree, killing six Catholics that week, and then in a lounge bar at Greysteel, where Catholics had gathered at Halloween for a country-and-western dance, catastrophe struck. “Trick or treat,” two gunmen called out as they went in, people at first believing it was a Halloween prank, until the gunshots rang out. It was a young boy, Raymond, who had previously driven me on my visits to the North, and who was in that pub but miraculously escaped, who described the scene of carnage, the screams, walls with blood and bloodied limbs, a picture of gore. The doctor who looked into the dying girl’s cornea on the Shankill Road and wondered if it was human would have to ask the same of this massacre.

It would be fourteen years later, in 2007, after numerous failed initiatives, avowals, and disavowals, that the two mavericks, putative men of cloth, the Reverend Ian Paisley and the Jesuitical Gerry Adams, came from their lairs of power to sit side by side at a diamond-shaped table and face the cameras to announce that they were ready to work together in a newly formed Irish assembly.

I was alone in my house in London and watched it with understandable emotion and incredulousness, watched, as David McKittrick put it, “the closest thing to a miracle that Belfast had ever seen.” I remembered that, when my interview with Adams had ended, he had conveyed me downstairs to the bookshop, to give me a gift of a book of Belfast sayings in Belfast
parlance. A lonely, iconoclastic figure, yet, despite everything, with that innate certainty which would eventually lead him to the grand staircase of power. I remembered, too, that by having written about him with an openness, for my “silly novelettish mentality,” I would be described in an English newspaper as “the Barbara Cartland of long-distance Republicanism.”

I was often invited by some or other American university to teach for a semester, and I welcomed it. It was a respite, a stimulus, and an escape from the doldrums. I taught several times at City College in New York, which is on the corner of 136th Street and Convent Avenue.

New York was always enlivening, it was as if the air itself had some strange elixir. I could barely contain myself in the customs queue, which was often at a standstill, officials behind desks bent over forms, and then, with a maddening sadism, wandering off, deciding to have us sweat it out and fuel the multiple fear and my own particular fear that my visa might not be in order.

Then the excitement of a taxi ride in from the airport, usually at dusk, passing the few remembered landmarks, the site of the World’s Fair, with a huge globe of the world perched in a ring of steel, then on past some clapboard houses, all identical, and towering blocks of flats, gray and huddled together, before coming to the bridge and into the purlieu of Manhattan itself. The flutters of impatience became more urgent as we got nearer to my destination, willing the face of the traffic signal to go green, “Go green!” Along Fifth Avenue was a low building in the park set far back, like a keeper’s cottage, that in its quiet and its quaintness seemed a relic of the old New York, the one my mother used to speak of and the one I saw in sepia advertisements for soaps and eau de cologne.

I used to stay at the Wyndham Hotel, where the welcome from Mrs. Mados was unfailing. Randy, the concierge, would
be standing at the desk to present me with a single red rose in a flute of glassy paper. Then a bellman (one of whom was later to become a famous Hollywood agent and whom, years later, by chance, I would see escorting Nicole Kidman in a restaurant in Los Angeles) would bring me up to Suite 1006; there, waiting, were more flowers and telephone messages on slips of pink paper, with a tick on the sign that read
YOU WERE CALLED.
The whole world, like the Statue of Liberty itself, opening its arms to me, and England was a nunnery by comparison.

When I recall the many people I met there, it still comes as an amazement. Several introductions were through Milton Goldman, a theatrical agent whose parties in Sutton Place were legendary, as was his habit of strenuously introducing everyone to everyone else, including Arnold Weisberger, his companion of many years, to Arnold’s own mother. It was with Milton that I met Stravinsky’s second wife, Vera de Bosset, in her nineties, sitting totally composed, while we queued to exchange a few clichéd words with her. At a swish party given by the designer Halston, to which Milton brought me, I met Martha Graham. She was tall and commanding, and seemed to me to be the reincarnation of a tribal ancestress. I remember our conversation and the coincidence of the fact that we each had a title for a work yet to be done and that title was “Blood Memory,” which she would use for her autobiography, in which she claimed life was dance and dance was life.

In the lobby of the Wyndham there were always celebrities, and once I was introduced to Coral Browne, who, with barbed glee, since she was going out to dinner with Mr. and Mrs. Mados, promised to bring me back a doggy bag. The rebuff was short-lived, because the next night, for a St. Patrick’s Day celebration along with Gregory Peck, I would recite Irish poetry from the pulpit of St. Patrick’s Cathedral to the accompaniment of Phil Coulter’s music. To the rather deserted dining
room, where the red color scheme owed a distinct debt to the Russian Tea Room on nearby Fifty-seventh Street, I invited people, Vincent, the operatic maître d’, treating us to some of his favorite arias. My children wondered when I was coming home, and Carlo reminded me that the washing machine was broken. Sasha, however, was jubilant to report that, along with Laurence Sterne, Gene O’Neill, Oscar Wilde, and Samuel Beckett, I had been featured in a song by Dexy’s Midnight Runners.

On an earlier visit, for the publication of
August Is a Wicked Month,
I had stayed at the Algonquin, and also by chance met a galaxy of people. There was a long session in the Blue Bar with Thornton Wilder, who next day was setting out on a Greyhound bus across America, admonishing me for my yearning heroines, enjoining me to follow the pluck and dauntless humor of Rosalind in
As You Like It.
I would receive a handwritten letter, which read,
Dear Edna O’Brien, Will you meet me in Blue Bar at seven o’clock this evening, and if we like each other after five minutes, we will go and eat big fish or other animal. Yours, Günter Grass. PS: This is my first letter in English.
When I came down the stairs a few minutes after seven, he was already on the house phone, presumably ringing my room. It was in those days that I was sometimes mistaken for Maureen O’Hara, and once in a taxi, irked with being asked yet again, I said, “Yes, yes, I am,” to which the driver replied, “You’re a goddamn liar, ’cos she was in this cab yesterday and you’re not her.”

So why had he asked me? Only because he thought I might be her sister or something.

Oh yes, there were other New Yorks, apart from these gilded haunts, the New York I had read of in many works of fiction. There was Saul Bellow’s
Seize the Day,
a New York for which the celluloid
dream,
through aggrandizement and delusion, though different from that of Gatsby’s, had also turned to a
“valley of ashes.” There was Isaac Bashevis Singer’s New York, immigrants who met in old-fashioned cafés, without a groschen, but with rich memories of rabbis and matchmakers, imbuing life with improbable tales of love and riches. There were the bohemians of Anatole Broyard’s down in Greenwich Village, and the junkies and hoodlums and hookers and transvestites in Hubert Selby’s
Last Exit to Brooklyn.

Brooklyn, just across the bridge, where my mother had lived for eight years and where I intended to go to research the novel I would write about her. For Brooklyn, New York, was the “vast Gomorrah across the water.” I had read that. I had read also that Walt Whitman recited Shakespeare from the top of a stagecoach, drew inspiration from its people, and drew water from the street well. There, too, Henry Miller would chart his spiritual initiations from his time in the flophouses, and it was also where Norman Mailer was known to have stabbed a wife.

From Brooklyn my mother had brought a cache of memories that she kept locked, and only once, as she was confiding in another woman, did I overhear her talk of the man she loved, ah, the man she should have married, and how, strangely, as he walked her home one night and they passed a house of ill repute, he had suggested that they might go in. She had worked first as a maid in a house and then graduated to becoming a cutter in the tailor room of a big department store. She had brought back glamorous clothes, for which she found little wear—a black gauze fan, appliquéd with splashes of white rock rose, a georgette dance dress, and silver shoes. What I have is not those fal-lals but the scissors from the cutting room, half the size of a shears, rusted now and kept in a drawer, a prized possession, as if between us there is still something waiting to be cut.

The first thing I would do when I arrived in Suite 1006 at the
Wyndham, half-believing that it was mine, was to look under the papers that lined the drawers of bureaus, to see if notes I had left were still there, and sometimes they were and sometimes they were not. I would go out onto the terrace, where there was a terracotta tub, to see if the packets of seeds that I had sprinkled had flowered, and occasionally a few limp petals of pansies had braved the city clay. My visits were usually in December, the zesty time, when real snow was no match for the artificial pageantry in the windows on Fifth Avenue. I was constantly surprised that from the volumes of books in the glass-fronted bookcase nobody had stolen Tom Wolfe’s
The Bonfire of the Vanities.

Up the street from the Wyndham and two doors away from Sixth Avenue was my favorite restaurant, Jean Lafitte. At that corner a maniac drove by regularly with the window down, shouting obscenities at well-dressed women, believing they were prostitutes, and in my long green coat I too was the butt of his rage. In that stretch of street by a luggage shop three shamrocks had been beveled into the tarmac, and nearby was a delicatessen, the specialty being chicken soup with dumplings, which they were famous for.