Читать книгу Singing My Him Song - Malachy McCourt - Страница 11

My friend Hugh Magill and his wife had arranged for a justice of the peace to marry Diana and me, on Monday, March 1, 1965. Louise Arnold, who had introduced us, now married to John Westergaard, a lovable, eccentric bear of a man, joined us for the mini-ceremony, as did Diana’s mother and father.

We have only one picture of the wedding, taken before we left for the house of the justice of the peace, a man who bore the unforgettable name of Euclid Shook. I think he and his missus must probably have had a martini or two that evening, as they were an unusually jolly couple, offering around the beverages, as we were in their home.

After the I dos, Diana, now McCourt, and self sped off to some old inn in Hartford, the Old Forge, I believe it was called. For two people who had both been married before, we were a shy couple that night. We turned on the television for comfort and diversion, and there was a movie playing which I fervently hoped would not portend our future. It was I’ll Cry Tomorrow, with Susan Hayward, as dreary a film as you’d ever see and hope to miss.

In the morning I managed to get the car stuck in a snow bank, from which we were rescued by a French Canadian couple. Another stop, just a little later, to get in the backseat and steam up the windows, and then back we went to reality and life in New York.

At that time there was no housing crunch in New York. Newly built apartments were plentiful on the East Side, and the older and bigger apartments were available quite reasonably on the West Side. We opted for one on the West Side, with the several bedrooms and, as they say, two and a half baths, and they were just as glad to get us as tenants then as they would be glad to get rid of us today, as we are still there, and they could double or triple the rent as soon as we left.

We were both moving from relatively small places, and this new habitation seemed huge and full of echoes. We thought we would never be able to afford to furnish it. But Diana had some furniture, and I had access to a knife and spoon and a few things like that, so we set up housekeeping with what we could.

Merv Griffin had started his syndicated television show, with Arthur Treacher sniffing superciliously at all the vulgar goings-on while offering the occasional witticism (he told me that, secretly, he was having a jolly good time). My friend Tom O’Malley, possibly the best talent booker in the business, was involved from the start, and so I had a reasonably good run as an irregular regular with the show.

There is the illusion that all these chat shows consist of spontaneous and impromptu conversations between celebrities who know each other very well. Not so, old sport! All guests, no matter how well known, are prepped, as they say, by a talent booker. Particularly young actors and actresses ill read and lacking in wit, which is more often the case than you’d want to know. Vaguely humorous anecdotes have to be drawn out of them and inflated into stories, and then polished by the show’s writers until they are actually funny, or else the whole interview is apt to reveal how boring the guests really are.

I, of course, was the ideal guest, replete with the story, the jest, the bon mot, or so it seemed to me. Griffin liked to come to Himself after the show, and there were nights there with Dom DeLuise, Jonathan Winters, Pat McCormick, and Jack Burns that can neither be remembered nor forgotten.

In the kitchen, the cook, the big-bodied, laughing Sudia Masoud, my favorite Black Muslim, eavesdropped all night and added her shrieks of merriment to the general uproar. She had been present when Malcolm X was shot down, and told me, “That was the cleanest assassination I ever did see.” I forbore asking her how many others she had witnessed.

Diana developed a vague suspicion that she was pregnant, and a visit to the physician made it a certainty. We were told that a new child would make its way into this world sometime around the middle of October 1965. I informed my mother, Angela, that she was about to become a grandma again, and she launched immediately into the keening mode.

Now, for those who don’t know, keening is an ancient Celtic expression of grief or sorrow, usually heard at a time of death. It is expressed by a high-pitched wailing sound with mourners beating breasts and giving vent to the odd shriek in the middle of the wail. While it was not quite the full frontal keen, the mother did a fairly good job moaning about what would happen to the other children, Siobhan and Malachy. If I couldn’t look after them, how was I going to look after the new one?

There is nothing more aggravating than someone giving voice to your own unspoken fears.

We weren’t doing well financially, and we were trying to cope with raising a handicapped child. Plus, I’d made a haimes of my role as father to Siobhan and Malachy, so I had my own doubts. I contributed what I could, but Linda took care of our children largely with money she got from her parents, who had quite a bit of it. Having settled in with Diana, I saw Siobhan and Malachy, now six and five, most weekends, but I was as apt to bring them home and then go out, leaving their care to Diana, as I was to stay and give them any of what they needed from their father. During their earliest years, I had been completely absent a good amount of the time, sometimes just too drunk to show up.

But the mother Angela was never comfortable with the women any of the sons married anyway, and announcements of pregnancies only served to deepen her gloom that liaisons were going to be on the permanent side. Yet when babies shouldered their way into the world, the mother became most maternal and loving, at least until the little ones reached the age of two or thereabouts. At that point, they got a bit of independence and she’d shift her attention onto the next infant.

On the evening of the thirteenth of October 1965, Diana announced that there were certain movements within her body that indicated a desire on the part of someone to take his leave of the womb. So it was off to the New York Hospital with us. We had taken some Lamaze classes with a lady named Elizabeth Bing, the natural childbirth guru, and for the first time, I had the sublime experience of watching the new life make its entry into our orbit. It was a boy, whom we named Conor Turlough. He was a long lithe fellow, and of course the most brilliant baby in the nursery.

Nina, my stepdaughter, wasn’t making much progress, and the experts were now saying she was very retarded. She sat for long periods of time, crinkling cellophane paper from cigarette packs and rocking back and forth. She was for some reason terrified of solid foods, so even when she was six we were still getting her jars of baby food and spooning it into her mouth. It occurred to me that as she had all her teeth and seemed otherwise in good physical health, perhaps some solid grub might be in order.

I apprised Diana of my intention and suggested she absent herself and Conor from the house, as I didn’t think it was going to be quiet or pleasant getting Nina to eat the hamburgers I’d prepared. (Were I doing it today, I’d probably select rice and beans or tofu, as I’m a vegetarian, on health grounds.) I sat Nina on a chair at the kitchen table, tied a large apron round her neck, and spread out some newspapers on the table and on the floor, and so began the battle.

I’d made about eight medium-size burgers, which I broke into bite-size pieces. I popped the first piece into Nina’s mouth, where she allowed it to rest for a brief moment. When she realized what I’d done, her eyes opened up wide with fury and rage at this big person who’d forced foreign matter into her mouth. She let go with a yowl and spat out the offending morsel, which landed on my shirtfront, leaving a stain before descending to the floor. She quieted down, and I tried again, putting another piece of hamburger in her mouth, all the time speaking as softly and as soothingly as I could. Same result: Out came the meaty projectile, which just dropped to the floor. We sat for a while, me doing all the talking, as Nina did not and does not have speech.

Nina made no attempt to get off her chair, nor did she keep her mouth shut tight to prevent me popping in the food. There were times during this hour-long battle that I was sure I was being bamboozled by this child, as she yowled without conviction, and her resistance was confined to spitting out the food. She’d sometimes have a look of disdain and amusement at this hulk of a man trying to feed her. Somewhere I had read that Annie Sullivan, who took on the task of teaching Helen Keller the rudiments of ordinary societal behavior, had had a similar siege and, heartened by that thought, I continued the routine. Pop, spit, talk. Pop, spit, talk. Pop, spit, talk. The kitchen floor and table were littered with hamburger. Splatter after splatter, it appeared soon enough as if it were raining hamburger meat in the kitchen.

I was about to admit defeat and sue for terms of surrender when my doughty and noble opponent decided to have mercy on me. She retained a chunk of burger behind closed lips and smiled her Mona Lisa smile at me, still not swallowing, but after a long, long interval I noticed little movements that indicated something was headed toward the stomach, and that’s how Nina ate solid food for the first time in her six years of life.

But this small step forward with Nina was just that and no more. With the new baby, Diana was overwhelmed, and there wasn’t anywhere we could turn for help. There were no day programs suitable or, indeed, willing to take Nina. When we tried to take her out, she would stage screaming sit-down strikes on the sidewalk. We began to think about permanent residential care.

It is not an easy or simple decision to admit that you cannot raise your own child, but in the end, that is what we did. We found a small home in New Jersey run by a very kindly, bright lady and, soliciting all the financial help we could from family, we arranged for Nina to live there.

It was a bright, sunny day driving out there, but it was hard to appreciate as Diana was teary-eyed and heart-sore at the prospect of parting with Nina. It was hard for me, too, as I’d become very attached to this sweet, trusting child. Nina played quietly in the backseat, not knowing she was heading for a totally new life. When we dropped her off, we saw that a couple of the other kids were similar to Nina in age, condition, and behavior, something we took a bit of comfort from, because we figured Nina would not be an unknown quantity. In a sense we were now free—free to be married, to travel about, to go out, to be parents to Conor—but the price was high. As we drove away, we stopped to look back and saw Nina with her new mentor, standing on a rise outside the house, the sun lighting up her face and turning her blond hair to a light, golden aura. We both wept, because no matter how often we visited her, we knew that child would never live in our home again.

Diana’s sister, Heidi, had married her high school love, Warren Washburn, a Marine, and they had become parents to Kelly, a brilliant little girl. Being married and a parent was no barrier to service in Vietnam, though. Warren, a charming, gregarious, devil-may-care sort of lad, assured Heidi and his family that there was nothing to worry about, a statement which can be depended upon to cause a lot of worry.

I don’t know why I felt so strongly about that war, particularly as I didn’t have to go there and slog it out myself, but I did. The French had treated the people abominably, with the usual colonial torture and murder, and then pulled out, leaving the U.S. to carry on the savagery. Of course, being steeped in Irish history and the brutal centuries-long occupation of Ireland had an influence on me. Colonial powers were always brutal, I knew, from what I’d seen and heard growing up, and what the French, and later the U.S., did to the Vietnamese seemed to me little different from what the English had done in Ireland. Indeed, I could never understand Irish people who supported that barbarous and diabolical attempt to bomb poor people into accepting an alien culture.