All the Irish in Me by Christopher Mahon copyright 2004 Christopher Mahon All Rights Reserved

"What do you know about your grandparents?" I used to ask my parents.

"When did we come over from Ireland?"

Mom never said much; Dad said a little.

Nobody knew.

I’m going to guess our family fled the Great Irish Potato Famine of 1845-1850. I haven’t traced the history through any genealogical records. It’s something I feel in my own body, in the genealogy that runs through my blood.

And if we didn’t flee the factual famine, we must have fled a figurative one.

I recently saw Jim Sheridan, the filmmaker, on the Charlie Rose Show. He was talking about his film In America, his own tale of Irish immigration.

He said something like this to Mr. Rose: "All immigrants flee from death or starvation."

It’s true. Something or someone has died, somewhere.

You’re starving. You need nourishment.

You have to leave.

Somewhere, sometime, probably in the mid-nineteenth century, the great-grandparents of my parents left Ireland and came to America.

My mother’s family — the Heffernans and the Buckleys — arrived in the small villages dotting the Pocono mountains outside of Scranton, in the villages built amidst the coal country, or not far from coal country, and my father’s family — the Mahons and the Cuffs — moved to the city itself, to Scranton, although many of the Cuffs — my Dad’s maternal grandparents, in fact — left Scranton for New York City.

Dad’s maternal grandfather, reputedly, was a construction foreman on the project that built LaGuardia airport. He had an uncle who was a New York City cop, whose beat was Yankee stadium, and that uncle once gave to my Dad, when he was a boy, a traveling Yankee uniform. Another uncle worked for the IRT (the inter-burough transit line) in New York City. He fell off the platform one day and his leg was crushed. He received a generous settlement, bought a green Deuseldorf automobile and went through the rest of the settlement in a year. And yet another uncle, Jim, owned a pub, but the workers stole money from him and he closed the pub down.

According to my father, he later became general manager for Pepsi-Cola distributorship in New York City.

But that is not true.

Recently, I received an e-mail from my long-lost second cousin, Mary Ellen, the granddaughter of my father’s Uncle James. She now lives in Texas. She’s got an interest in genealogy, had gotten my own e-mail address from my brother Mike, who’d been in touch with my father’s sister, finally, and Mary Ellen wanted to send me an update on the family history.

I responded to her initial e-mail and asked her some questions.

She replied with a message indicating there had been no Pepsi-Cola distributorship but there had been time spent in a federal prison for forgery. And she alluded to some other, darker rumors—albeit unsubstantiated—hovering about the family tree.

In my middle age now, I sometimes wonder why I have so much compassion for the down and out in the world, for the desperate, for those whose ways have been lost or blighted: the drunks, the thieves, and the prisoners. Why have I handed out so many dollar bills to homeless on the streets of San Francisco and Los Angeles; why can I not condemn in my own heart those who are reviled and ostracized in the newspapers and the high-wire televisions shows, no matter how far they have fallen or no matter what they have done?

Maybe it’s because they are all part of my family.

*****

Mom’s people were different from Dad’s.

Nana’s religion was pure and heartfelt, unquestioned. ("Nana" was what we called my maternal grandmother.) She sat at the window in the dining room for hours and looked over the church next door, the small church built out of large grey stones, and she took care of the altar and the priest’s vestments as the honorary sacristan. Once during a ferocious lightning and thunderstorm she promised God that she would give up eating meat on Wednesdays if God allowed her to survive the storm.

God allowed it.

I never knew my grandmother to take a bite of meat on a Wednesday.

Mom’s people were quiet. And bookish. Or, I might say, literate.

At last, the men.

When my maternal grandfather arrived home from work, in those cold winter days, when the snow in the Pocono Mountains drifted up against the walls of the church and fell on the bare forests that surrounded the town, and over the lake just down the road, caking the ice with snow and more snow; when he arrived home from the railroad station in Scranton in the summer, when the trees were blooming green all across the roads and lit up the sky in their leaves and light, and the windows on the front porch had been taken down, so that only the screens remained, and the summer wind blew in to the porch and cooled the front of the house, and my grandfather’s boots, and hat, and scarves and gloves had placed in the closet until the next day — whatever the season, Poppy, as we called him, would come home after work and sit in his favorite chair in the living room, and read.

(This was, of course, after dinner, after Nana, my grandmother, had prepared the roast beef or the chicken and the mashed potatoes in the pantry in the back of the house and then brought the food out to the kitchen or, on Sundays, to the dining room with the heavy wooden table and the china cabinets and the heavy wooden chairs.)

He was, for the most part, a quiet man who rarely spoke at home and never, in fact, spoke in the car, when he drove twenty-five miles each morning on his commute to work with his brother. Mom drove with him because he was taking her to school. And he never uttered a word during those journeys, she later reported. My grandfather did not spend money foolishly. In fact, he rarely spent money at all, but when he did, he bought things of high quality, things that would last a lifetime, whether they be a pair of shoes, a man’s suit, or a piece of furniture.

Poppy worked seven days a week back then, as a telegrapher for the railroad, back in the twenties, thirties, and forties, lucky to have a job during those depression years (my grandparents’ house, which was built next to the church, was often mistaken for a rectory by homeless men who knocked at the back door, looking for food, and Nana always gave them something), but his life, it seemed to me, from the stories I heard, revolved around work, reading, and the occasional visit to one of the local pubs, where this most quiet of quiet men was transformed into a gregarious and likable neighbor.

I’m not sure what he read in those quiet evenings, whether it was newspapers or classics or adventure stories, but I’m told he always performed brilliantly at home when he listened to the radio quiz shows. And he passed on, by practice or by genetic design, his love of reading to his only son, my uncle Leo. Leo was a great athlete in his youth, especially as a baseball player, and was courted by the Los Angeles Dodgers to try out for their farm team. Trophies from the Pocono Mountain League stood on tables in the parlor in the front of the house. Giant, three-feet trophies. Leo "Petey" Heffernan had been named Most Valuable Player in the league at least twice, was both a batting champion and a pitcher, had his name written up in the local newspapers countless times. He elected not to travel to California to try his fate as a professional baseball player because he thought, simply, that he was too small for the major leagues. He was five foot eight and weighed 145 pounds. But I would love to cross through the membrane of time into a summer day in 1948 to watch Leo hurl a fastball or hit a home run on the baseball fields out near the Fairgrounds towards Newfoundland. And I would love to have seen my mother as a twenty-four year old on that afternoon when a fastball crashed into and broke my uncle’s collar bone, when he fell to the dirt, and my mother leaped from the stands and ran to be with him on the field, all the while screaming at the opposing pitcher.

Leo had a small heart murmur, was rejected by the military, to the eternal disgrace of my grandfather, Poppy, (who had been in a military unit during World War I), and spent a year after college — he was graduated from the University of Scranton, along with my dad’s brother Bobby — stepping outside of the mainstream and into the forests and streams of the surrounding countryside. He wanted to hunt and fish. That was all. Baseball wasn’t an option, not really. He had been rejected by the military. He had difficulty with calculus in college and couldn’t become the engineer he might have wanted to become. He wasn’t sure what he wanted to do. So, like so many American men of his age, who were searching for an identity, he went on his own silent, misunderstood quest — into the forest, throughout the land, walking the trails with his rifle and his beagle and some friends from around the county, shooting deer, trapping beaver, catching trout. He did this for a year — "I just wanted to hunt and fish," he explained to me many years later — and when he came out of the forest he joined a construction crew in the Pennsylvania State Highway Department. He eventually became a construction engineer and was also, in later years, elected a county supervisor.

This was in the Eisenhower era now, when the Interstate was being built across the country.

Leo worked on I-80, told stories of the Indians who could climb to the top of bridges as they were being built; of how the men would be gone away from home for weeks at a time as they built the highway across the state sleeping in roadhouses along the way (Leo learned surveying, and would set up his surveying equipment in his room with a friend at night, to perfect by practice the mechanical art of surveying); of the brawls that involved the Irish, the Italians, and the Germans, and, in particular, one brawl so intense that the whole front wall of the tavern in which it took place had been demolished. Even years later, as he would drive me from pub to pub on our circuits around the county, he once mentioned a fight that had taken place in a tavern. This was the 1970s now. He spoke of some young toughs in the area who were getting a reputation as brawlers, troublemakers. Even then, as he approached fifty, he wanted to indicate that he was still not entirely outside of the world. "But you know, Chrissy," he told me, "I can take care of myself."

He read, too.

As a young man, he would spread out the Sunday New York Times on the living room carpet, and lie down on the floor with it, and read. He was particularly interested in the Sunday Book Section and would spend nights at a pub — at Chick’s Rimrock Inn, or Emery’s, or another one of the taverns at a county crossroad — discussing books with his best friend and fellow construction worker, Johnny Prestosh. Johnny Prestosh listened to the New York Metropolitan Opera on Thursday nights and Leo and he talked of John O’Hara, Hemingway, and Fitzgerald. When Johnny Prestosh laid dying in a hospital bed, some years later, and Leo came to visit him, Johnny quoted a line from one of their favorite authors, "I’m not going to make it over the hedge, Petey," John told my uncle. And after he died his family, by John’s request, passed on to Leo a favorite book of John’s, in memorium: The Trees of Pennsylvania.

Reading for Leo was not an academic enterprise. It was a part of life. He bought a set of the Harvard Classics — a five foot shelf of books which included works by some of the greatest authors of literature during the last 3,000 years: Benjamin Franklin, Francis Bacon, Emerson, Milton, Robert Burns, St. Augustine, Sophocles, Euripides, Aeschylus, Cervantes, Plutarch, Darwin, Dryden, Dante Alghieri, Calderon de la Barca, Homer. The set included the Bhagavad-Gita and works by Confucius. And he kept the Classics in a special wooden bookcase with wooden doors.

Leo was just as comfortable discussing Socrates as he was singing along to a new country western song on the radio. He had a fondness for C.W. McCall during the days I used to visit him in Gouldsboro. He’d nickname me "Earl" as he’d sing the lyrics of one of McCall’s songs, "Wolf Creek Pass." And Leo also loved to read aloud from the poems of Robert Service, like "The Law of the Yukon" and "The Shooting of Dan McGrew."

*****

On my mother’s side of the family, there is another ancestral story that I can also claim for my bloodline: apparently, in Ireland, there was a seminarian who fell in love with a dark-haired girl and scandalized the family. He had to choose God or the Woman and he chose the woman, but once he did he could no longer live in Ireland. So, the romantic couple, the former priest-to-be, and his dark-haired lover fled Ireland for America, traveling to the eastern part of Pennsylvania, forsaking the collar for love.

And so, the story of my father’s family joined the story of my mother’s family and became one. It was a story that contained drunks, thieves, prisoners, saints, and lovers.

Into this story I was born, claiming the invisible heritage as my own.

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