This Is How It Ends (11 page)

B
RUNO HAD STARTED
working on his family tree.

When you looked at it on paper it was a winter tree. It was a naked-looking thing, all bare branches ending in blank spaces. There was no foliage and no color, no life in it yet. Only on the far left-hand side of the page was there any indication of growth. Starting with his grandfather, Bruno had constructed a system of straight lines and neat boxes dropping down through the generations. Inside the boxes, in tiny meticulous letters, he had inscribed the names of his father and mother, his sisters and their various husbands. All his nieces and nephews. Below their names he had printed the year of their birth and, where appropriate, the year of their death. In his father’s case he had also included the year he emigrated. His aunt Nora too, she had followed his father out two years later. Born 1926, he wrote below Nora’s name. Emigrated 1950. Died 1990.

It filled him with emotion, to see it written there on the page. “I come from pioneer stock!” he told Addie. “I’m very proud of that.”

“Oh God,” she said, a jaded tone to her voice as she leaned over his shoulder and surveyed his work. “It reminds me of those novels that have a family tree at the start. You have to keep flicking back to the beginning to check who’s who. I always find that a total bore. I always give up on it when it gets too complicated.”

Addie was proving less than helpful with the family tree. She didn’t even know the name of her paternal grandfather. “He was a ship’s doctor, I think. I’m not sure I ever met him.”

“But you must know his name?”

“He’d be Murphy, wouldn’t he? Something Murphy, I suppose.”

So Bruno wrote Murphy down, with a question mark beside it.

“We could ask your dad. He would surely know.”

Addie’s eyes narrowed at the thought of it.

“He’s not very keen on talking about the past. I’m not sure it would be safe to broach the subject with him.”

“All I need are some names,” said Bruno stubbornly. “Once I have the names, I can take it from there.”

“By all means,” said Addie. “I’ll ask him. But I wouldn’t hold out too much hope.”

ONLY NOW IS IT
dawning on Bruno that he has come unprepared.

He should have done some foundation work. Before he left New York, he should have questioned his sisters. He should have got them all round a table and purged their memories. But of course he didn’t, it never even occurred to him to do that. For some reason he had imagined that his search would start only when he got here.

“I always tell people to start with old family stories,” said the genealogist in the National Library. “It’s amazing what people remember once they start to think about it. If you trawl through your memory you’ll probably find you already have the bones of your family history.”

A tiny man in a perfectly ironed shirt, the genealogist had welcomed Bruno like an old friend. He had gestured for him to sit down at a large table in a room halfway up the sweeping stairs. The hush of the library was all around them but the genealogist didn’t lower his voice, moving through the silence as if he didn’t even notice it. He was like a doctor in a hospital ward, going about his business.

“Any little snippets you can think of,” he said. “They’re like gold dust. Things your father would have mentioned about his family. Maybe he talked about what an ancestor did for a living, maybe he said where they were from, that kind of thing. If you can piece them together, you’ll find that one clue leads to another.”

Bruno was writing all this down. He had brought a leather-bound notebook with him for this very purpose. This was the first time he’d used it.

“Once you have the bones of the story you can start going through the public records. The births, the marriages, the deaths. Of course if you have the dates it will make your task all the easier. When was it that your ancestor emigrated?”

“The late forties,” he said.

“Assuming they were Catholic you’ll be looking at church records. Civil registration didn’t come in here until 1864…”

Bruno interrupted him. “The
nineteen
forties. My father left in the nineteen forties.”

The genealogist looked surprised. “Sure that’s within living memory,” he said. “You should be able to make a good start on it from memory.”

Bruno was overtaken by a moment from the past. His recollection of it was so nebulous that he was afraid it would leave him again before he was finished with it, like a burst of song heard through the open window of a passing car.

In his memory, Bruno is painting someone’s porch. He’s dipping the paintbrush into the can, sweeping the brush against the inside rim to take off the excess, otherwise you would get drips. It wasn’t a good brush he was using. He kept having to stop to pick loose hairs out of the wet paintwork. When that happened you had to give the woodwork another sweep, to get it even again. He remembers how anxious he was to get it even. He knew his dad would be coming round later to check his work.

The next thing his sister was standing behind him. She was telling him he had to come home. Our grandmother died, she said. Dad says we have to go to the church to pray for her. What year would that have been? Nineteen seventy-two, Bruno was guessing, it would have been his first summer working for his dad. He wrote the date down in his notebook with a question mark after it.

The genealogist was still talking. Bruno snapped himself back into the present.

“Do you have any old family photographs with you? The photographs can be invaluable, especially if they’ve been dated. Often people used to inscribe the names on the back of them. That’s the kind of lucky break you’re looking for!”

Bruno took the photograph out of his notebook and passed it across the table.

His father was at the center of the picture, squinting at the camera. His sister Nora was standing beside him. There were three other women in the picture. Two of them were standing alongside Bruno’s father, the other one on the far side of Nora. They all had their arms around each other’s waists, perhaps they’d been told to do that so they would fit into the picture. The women were wearing summer dresses, their expressions solemn. You could see they weren’t used to having their photograph taken. There was a strong family resemblance between them. They all had the same pale eyes, the same honest round face. They all shared the same awkward stance, their shoulders hunched up in their shyness.

The genealogist didn’t even look at the photo. He flipped it over straightaway and studied the back.

Someone had written down the date on the reverse. It was inscribed carefully in watery blue ink, the color faded with time. Bruno wondered who it was that had written it. He wished they’d written the names down as well.

They were cousins of his father’s, that much Bruno knew. A family of girl cousins. One of them would have been Hugh’s mother, but Bruno wasn’t sure which one.

“Kitty was the looker.” That’s what Nora used to say. “She was the beauty of the family. She was the one all the lads were after.”

And that in turn reminded him of an old song his father used to sing.
She is handsome, she is pretty, she is the belle of Belfast city.
Bruno had always thought of Kitty as the girl in that song. But peering at the photograph now, he couldn’t figure out which one she might be. They were all good-looking women as far as he could see.

“What I suggest is that you write down everything you can remember,” the genealogist was saying. He handed back the photo. “Write everything down and then take it from there.”

BRUNO PASSED OUT
of the sanctity of the library into a barrage of noise.

There was a crowd outside, some kind of a protest. They were spread out in front of the parliament building, spilling off the pavement onto the street. As Bruno stood there looking around him someone came up and handed him a flyer. He glanced down to read it.

NO BANK BAILOUT!
A list of questions followed in smaller print.
Why should we pay for a decade of greed? Was it for this our forefathers died?

Bruno looked around him again.

Some of the protesters were carrying placards. They all bore a similar message. There was a surprisingly amiable atmosphere, the protesters clustered in little groups chatting companionably. Some of them were talking to the policemen on sentry duty at the gates. Passing motorists were honking their horns. A woman with a briefcase made her way through the crowd and they stood by to let her pass. She slipped in through a side gate.

Bruno became aware of himself again. He realized he was still standing there holding the flyer in his hand. The noise of the traffic and the thick air were swirling around him and he felt like he’d been drinking. He spotted a hotel across the street and made a dash for it. He pushed his way through the doors and collapsed into an armchair in the lounge area. Ordering himself a pot of coffee and a ham sandwich, he took his notebook out of his backpack and opened it on the table in front of him.

He had so many things coursing through his head, there was no order to them. He was afraid he’d lose them if he didn’t write them down. He couldn’t get his pen to write fast enough. His hand was racing to keep up.

Slices of conversation, disjointed phrases, Bruno was as sure as he could be that he was remembering them word for word. His father’s unique turn of phrase, Bruno would never have been able to replicate that for himself.

Get thee behind me, devil, and push, that’s what his father used to say every time he unscrewed the lid off the bottle of whiskey. Not that he did it that often, he was a careful drinker. But he took great pleasure in the drinking. He took pleasure in everything he did. The cackle of laughter he would let out of him, Bruno could still hear it. Get thee behind me and push.

The sigh of disapproval from his mother, it would only have encouraged him all the more. Would you relax, woman, he would say. Come here and sit on my knee, for God’s sake. ’Tis little enough attention I get in this house. And he would pull his wife onto his lap. She would wriggle to get free and the girls would all shriek with laughter.

He was larger than life, Bruno’s father. A big man, with a big presence in their house. He could be a rough man sometimes. He could be uncouth. On a summer evening, he would walk out into the backyard, unzip his fly, and piss into the flower beds. Oh Patrick, Bruno’s mother would sigh. She used to make this clicking sound with her tongue when she disapproved of something.

What’s the world coming to, his father would say, if a man can’t piss in his own garden. Sure it’s good for the roses. And he would swagger back into the kitchen, bowing his legs like a cowboy so he could yank his fly up. A mischievous glint in his eye, he always got a great kick out of winding her up.

Thirty years since his father had died and suddenly Bruno could hear his voice again, as if he were listening to a recording that had been dug out of an old radio archive. The rhythm of his father’s voice, the way the words bellowed out from deep within his chest.

He was some man for one man, that’s what his father used to say about his own father. A bear of a man. Bruno remembers stories from his father’s childhood, stories of swimming in a swollen river, stories of stolen oranges during the war. They descended on Bruno like a flood, these stories. An uncle who had the loan of a car, a trip to the beach at Bettystown. A baby cousin who fell into a slurry pit and died.

Bruno scribbled all these snippets down. He poured them out onto the page. He had the sense he was only just starting. All those stories his father had told them as children, if you’d asked him last week, Bruno would have said he’d forgotten them. He was amazed now to find that they were all still there.

Three decades his father had been gone and suddenly it was as if a door had been opened into the past. This man he thought he’d forgotten, he was all around him now.

Bruno would be walking along the street and up ahead of him he would see his father. Even from the back, he knows him, the thick neck rising out of the shirt collar, the tight haircut, the stocky set of the shoulders in the heavy overcoat. Merrion Square on a sunny afternoon and he’s chasing after a man who’s been dead for thirty years. He has to stop himself from shouting out.

Bruno is standing at the bar in the pub in Sandymount and the bartender is pouring his pint. The man looks over the taps at him. He looks at him with those watery blue eyes and the flushed cheeks and for a moment Bruno thinks he’s going to call him son.

This is where my dad was from, he has to tell himself. These are his people, of course they remind me of him.

It wasn’t something he had expected to find here, this connection with his father. But it’s as welcome as it is strange. All his life, Bruno has been told he’s Irish. Now, for the first time, he’s starting to understand what that means.

NEEDLESS TO SAY
Hugh wasn’t jumping over himself to help with the photograph.

“As I predicted,” said Addie, “he wasn’t hugely forthcoming.”

“Oh,” said Bruno, taking the photograph back from her and studying it again.

“I warned you, he’s not crazy about talking about the past.”

Bruno nodded. He was finding all of this difficult to understand.

“He did tell me which of them is which.”

“Oh,” said Bruno again, “well, that’s a help.”

Addie moved in behind him, leaning over his shoulder to point them out.

“On the right of your father, that’s Margaret. She was always known as May. Next to her, that’s Patricia.”

Addie burrowed her chin down into the cradle of his collarbone.

“And on the left, that’s the other sister. Hugh’s mother.”

“Your grandmother,” said Bruno.

“Yes,” said Addie in a detached voice. “My grandmother. Her name was Catherine but they all called her Kitty.”

She looked into the photograph. She searched her grandmother’s face, finding nothing in it. It was just a stranger looking back at her. For the first time Addie was flooded with curiosity. This was her grandmother. Surely she had the right to know something about her?