Over Our Heads

The Navigator

When we dropped below the cloud, Dani’s hand fell on my wrist. I leaned across her and looked out the window at a slab of iron sea, corrugated with waves and scratched with the small white V’s of dissipating ship wakes.

‘Did you know,’ she said, ‘that the Gaelic peoples descend from the Scythian Goídel Glas and an Egyptian Pharaoh’s daughter?’

‘Is that a fact?’ I said.

‘And did you know that an Irish monk, St Brendan, discovered America centuries before Columbus?’

‘The Navigator,’ I said. ‘Yes. That one, I knew.’

The wing dipped. Squares of green land gleamed and vanished northward into haze. I felt my breath catch. Dani squeezed my thumb and smiled.

‘Are you okay?’ she said.

When Dani was born, I’d made noises to Elaine, with all the well-meaning arrogance available to the immigrant father, that we must do everything we could to provide our daughter with a transatlantic childhood: Fourth of July fireworks and the Paddy’s Day parade, a month each summer at camp in the Adirondacks and two weeks in the Gaeltacht. But after Mam died, and I’d sold the house in Coolock, it was easy to put things off, to make excuses. Easy too to stay away from the Queensboro Irish Center, where a circle of blotchy-armed women, name of Colleen or Shannon or Erin, compared genealogies over mugs of milky tea. But one evening as we crossed the bridge on our way home from late study hall, Dani announced:

‘I think, Daddy, I’d like to be a better Irishwoman.’

I let the ‘woman’ slide, though she was just shy of her fifteenth birthday, and downloaded The Táin to her iPad as soon as we got home. Before long, she was dragging me on school nights to uillean pipe recitals up in Yonkers and through the rain on Sunday mornings to Seán O’Casey matinees at the Irish Rep. Friday nights, while her classmates went in pairs to movies, she borrowed her mother’s credentials and went alone to lectures on Roger Casement or Ernie O’Malley at Ireland House on Washington Square. And finally, one night as we waited for pizza, she brought out a binder stuffed with admissions information from Ireland’s various universities, which she must have been assembling for months, and made her pitch.

‘But I have tenure,’ Elaine pleaded. ‘I have full tuition remission for you here.’ Her lips were weak, her eyes very far away beneath their milk-bottle lenses.

‘It’s what I want,’ Dani said, and she looked at me. ‘Please, Daddy.’

While Elaine sulked, we hashed out a plan over double pepperoni and garlic knots. I’d cash in all the personal days I’d been hoarding for the past two years, have Georgette hold my caseload over for a week that summer, and Dani and I would jet off for my first trip back in fourteen years, her first trip ever, with a view to checking out some schools in Dublin and one in Galway, plus discover the heritage, plus spend some quality time together — just the two of us. My father had died when I was in my teens, and I hadn’t heard from his side of the family in years. On my mother’s side there were some cousins scattered through Cabra and Kimmage, but I could no longer picture their faces, never mind figure out how to get in touch with them, even if I’d wanted to.

We checked into a featureless hotel for nomadic men of business by the Grand Canal, in which Georgette and AmEx miles had secured for us a junior suite. There was a couch, a phone, an enormous TV, and two bedrooms separated by a locking door.

‘The name Dublin,’ Dani read from her iPad, ‘appears in the record as early as the writings of Ptolemy the First, around 140 AD. It derives from the Irish Dubh Linn, meaning Black Pool, which is to say, the area of dark water where the Rivers Poddle and Liffey meet. The city’s been a Viking garrison, a Norman stronghold, and was briefly the second city of the British Empire.’

‘Briefly,’ I said as I reached into her closet for the suite’s lone ironing board. I set it up at the foot of her bed and spread out a shirt.

Already, Dani had hung the outfits she’d spent the guts of the past week devising: a tweed blazer over a vintage T-shirt; a white blouse paired with ripped black jeans; a navy polo neck and a charcoal pencil skirt. Beneath each was arranged a pair of shoes: tan derbies, white Chuck Taylors, brown ballet pumps with a bow. And on the shelf above them were three dossiers culled from her binder, with many tongues of Post-its hanging from their edges.

The next morning, and for two mornings following, we toured libraries and lecture halls. Dani asked questions about borrowing limits and digital resources before heading off to meetings she’d scheduled with professors. Each time I stood for a moment to watch her walk away, her dossiers hugged to her chest, and each time I felt proud and vindicated for having raised a girl so capable. Never at her age would I have thought to arrange meetings like these, much less imagined how to go about it, or what to say if I had.

At university, it had felt as though my classmates and I belonged to separate worlds. They, it seemed, had been bred to feel comfortable eating in wood-panelled dining halls and drinking in cricket pavilions, whereas I had needed to work hard to fit in, and never did. I had earned the right exam points but not at the right secondary school, had honed the knack for argument but couldn’t shake off my accent. From day one, I suspected — and when I graduated with honours but no offers, while they strolled towards the King’s Inns with 2.2s, I knew — that I would never make it in the law in Ireland. I thought that America might be big enough to fit me in, applied to a dozen places and was rejected by all but one tiny school in Maryland. When I got there I found the same entitlement, the same unwelcome. And I found those things at the non-profit that gave me my first job, in the courtroom where I tried my first case, at the firm where I made my first million. Now Dani, I thought, had a chance to skip all that.

In the afternoons, while I read and wrote emails, she called Elaine and reported back to her about faculty ratios or alumni networks or internship opportunities. To me, she talked about the things that really mattered to her. Trinity, she said, was all city life and storied marble eminence (not to mention shoulderless boys with nicotine fingers and the poet’s stare): she loved it. DCU and UCD were suburban, corporate, anonymous (also full of engineers and farmers; also much, much cheaper): she didn’t love them.

But more importantly, to me anyway, she seemed really to love the city. We toured the Castle and the GPO, Christ Church and Kilmainham Gaol. I relived the mix of brief awe and enduring boredom that I once had felt on school trips, while Dani asked excited questions of the tour guide or, once, corrected him. After dinner, we people-watched from cafe tables and (Dani swore she wouldn’t tell her mother) swigged Guinness in beer gardens, in alleyways or on rooftops. I felt the urge to list for my daughter the ways in which the place had changed — but I stopped myself. What, really, would have been the point? And how much, when it came down to it, could you really trust your memories of any time or place, especially your youth or, most especially, your home?

But some things Dani insisted on seeing for herself. And so, after picking up the rental car the night before we left for Galway, we headed out for a quick visit to the house where I grew up. The road was dark and lit in yellow pools. Traffic was sparse. The sky was starless, the moon a sliver.

‘You know,’ I said, ‘this is only the second time I’ve driven in this country.’

‘Did you know that settlement at Coolock dates back over three thousand five hundred years? A Bronze Age burial site has been excavated and dated to around 1500 BC.’

‘Since you ask,’ I said, ‘I got my licence in the States so I could get your mother to the hospital in the event that you came early. I was twenty-eight, twenty-nine? Course, the first time, that is, my last time here, I was heading to the same —’

‘What did she look like,’ Dani said, ‘your mother?’

‘Your grandmother,’ I reminded her. ‘Do you not remember?’

‘I was, like, a baby when she came to visit?’

‘She looked … she modelled herself really, I think, after Maureen O’Hara. You’ve seen Kangaroo? Or The Quiet Man?’

‘No.’

‘My God. What do they teach you in that school?’

‘Algebra, Macro-economics, Japanese, Romantic Poetry …’

‘All right,’ I said.

‘… Enlightenment Dialectics, Daoist Philosophy, the Peloponnesian War —’

‘She looked,’ I said, as we turned on to the Malahide Road, ‘glamorous. Or she tried to, anyway. Always had her hair set and her clothes well cut and spotless. She had this one coat, I remember, with these toggle buckles and a Nehru collar. She must’ve worn it nearly every day for twenty-five years. White! But she was careful with every little stain, stooped at the sink with her bleach and her rubber gloves at night, got it dry-cleaned every year at Easter. And she looked … I don’t know what she looked like. She was a knock-out.’

I spun us on to the Tonlegee Road at the Cadbury’s factory and we wound through the dark estates. Outside, fronting an unlit sports pitch, the old grey-speckled three-over-two still stood. Its windows had been double-glazed, its porch closed in, its driveway cobbled and occupied now by a black Ford registered during the previous year. I pointed to the window above the driveway.

‘I slept in there,’ I told Dani. ‘And Mam and Dad,’ I pointed to the window next to it, ‘were there.’

I remembered the fall-apart wardrobes that the old man had built himself, the yeasty smell of the little kitchen downstairs. I remembered my last Christmas home, when my cousins had laughed at my wingtips and I’d told my mother I’d met someone. She was bent at the sink, her shoulders hunched for a painful moment, and when she turned her lip was bitten but thrust towards me in challenge. ‘Just be careful,’ she’d said and returned to scrubbing her coat.

And suddenly I felt an urge to go and knock on the door and ask if we could come in. I remembered the man to whom I’d sold the house those years before, recalled his jeans and his stubbled cheeks and his running shoes. I imagined his vague recollection of me, his suspicion of my return and the charm I would use to conquer it. I saw through his eyes the wholesome picture my daughter and I would present, and knew that he would be powerless to resist us. Already, I felt the eerie, dreamlike state into which I would enter in the hallway, the thrill of recognizing things that hadn’t changed and the poignancy of finding things that had. The whole experience, I imagined, would be satisfying in the same way that pressing on a bruise is satisfying. But more than that, I felt a sense of opportunity, a chance to create a strong memory in Dani’s mind, something she would return to when she was in this country by herself, or alone in the world once I was gone. I told her my plan.

She watched me with patience, her eyes glazing, clearing. When I was done, she resettled her glasses on the bridge of her nose.

‘No,’ she said. ‘I don’t think that’s a good idea.’ She knitted her hands in her lap, her break-it-to-him-gently pose. ‘Look, if you don’t go in, then in your mind it could always be like it was. But if you do, it either will be or it won’t be, and you’ll know for certain — and isn’t that so much worse?’

She breathed slowly and with some effort. I looked up at the house. Its windows were still. I started the engine and pointed us back towards the city.

That night, after the light clicked off from the cracks around Dani’s door, I lay awake, my body clock suspended somewhere in the mid-Atlantic. The sheets were crisp, but the window seals were poor, the room airy and damp in a way that seemed thoroughly Irish. I checked my watch and calculated that, just then, Elaine would be finishing up and hurrying home from the 42nd Street Library, where she was spending the summer on an archivist’s residency. In the Main Concourse of Grand Central, she would stop for a moment to look at the stars constellated in gold against the vaulted ceiling’s blue, and she would think, I hoped, of her daughter and of me.

I reached for my phone and dialled her number, and as the phone rang I thought of the one time she had truly enjoyed a visit to Ireland, a post-engagement whistle-stop jaunt around the Burren of which, judiciously, we hadn’t informed my mother. For four gloriously, improbably sunny days, we had stamped our feet in sawdust shebeens to fiddle-and-drum combos, borne the slap of the Atlantic breeze at the lip of primordial cliffs and stood rooted to the rocky spot as two white horses raced inches from our elbows in love-chase. I had felt surer about things than I would be for a long time afterwards.

The phone rang five, six, seven times, and when Elaine answered I heard Miles Davis. But then lightly, distractedly:

‘Have you made it to Galway yet?’

My wife pronounced the word, and deliberately so, I thought, Gel-whay, the first vowel flattened and the second syllable stretched, as though the language from which it grew were too frail to withstand her tongue.

‘We’re leaving in the morning,’ I said. ‘Where are you? I thought you’d be —’

‘I told you this.’ Elaine paused. I tried to imagine what room of our apartment she might be in, but the stereo gave no clue.

She sighed. ‘I finished early. Calvin’s taking me to dinner.’

Calvin Barnes was a professor of something who sat on an admissions committee with Elaine. I’d met him once at a cocktail party at some dean’s apartment in Gramercy, and hated him on sight. He wore a grey corduroy three-piece with maroon felt brothel creepers, spoke in full paragraphs and, as soon as he got drunk (which was quickly), gazed deeply into my wife’s eyes, unashamedly at her legs.

‘Where’s his wife?’ I said. She was a big noise, apparently, in magazine publishing.

‘Somewhere,’ Elaine said. ‘Tell Dani love.’

‘Don’t drink too much,’ I said.

After I’d hung up, I thought about going out to walk the canal bank or the perimeter of the Green, as I had done sometimes in my student days. I fancied an adventure, or a drunken binge the like of which I never had permitted myself back then. But I didn’t go. I stayed, watching the weak moonlight angle on to the nightstand and listening to the night dogs yelp, while in the other room, my daughter slept.

I woke the next morning feeling sluggish, as though I’d been stepped on. But once I groped my way to the shower and the peeling blast of good water pressure, I allowed my mind to range over the long westerly drive that lay ahead, and began to brighten. I made coffee in the room, listened to the radio as I dressed, and was raring to go, relishing already the thinness of sole of my driving shoes, as I knocked on Dani’s door and waited for her emergence — but emerge she did not. I knocked again, heard a rustling. She opened the door a crack and held it on the chain.

‘Morning!’ I said. ‘All set to —’

‘Just give me fifteen.’ My daughter’s hair was madness, her eyes dark and fat.

‘What happened to you?’ I said and heard my voice find what Elaine called its Young Lady Range. ‘Did you go out last —’

‘Please,’ Dani said. ‘Fifteen.’

The door clicked shut. I wheeled my case to the lobby and, sitting beneath a plastic palm tree by the revolving door, scrolled through the Google docs Georgette had shared. An antitrust defence was in danger of falling apart a little less than a month before going to arbitration. I sent a stern but polite reminder to the client, some gentle reassurances to the partners, cc-ing Georgette on each and feeling negligent, detached.

When Dani finally materialized she looked transformed. She had gone with contacts for a change and her eyes seemed brighter than ever. Her skin was pale, her hair dark from the shower.

‘Ready?’ she said.

I followed her to the car and loaded our cases into the trunk.

‘So,’ I said as I programmed the GPS, ‘where did you get to, then, on this wild night out of yours?’

‘If you must know, I had three cocktails at the hotel bar. That’s the whole story.’

‘Did you talk to anyone?’

‘No.’

‘Did anyone talk to you?’

‘Some dude in a suit tried to —’

‘Jesus, Dani.’

‘But I pretended I didn’t speak English.’

I laughed: I couldn’t help it. We crossed the Liffey at Kilmainham.

‘Look,’ I said, ‘no harm done, I suppose. And probably best if we just say no more about it, yeah? But maybe, don’t tell your mother? I wouldn’t want her to worry. To be honest, I don’t know which of us she’d be maddest —’

‘That obelisk,’ Dani pointed out the window at a marble monument looming over the Phoenix Park, ‘commemorates the victories of Arthur Wellesley, first Duke of Wellington, in the Napoleonic Wars. Elsewhere in the park there’s a monument to Pope John Paul II, who drew a quarter of the country’s population to a special Mass in the year of his visit.’

‘1979,’ I said. ‘I made my confirmation.’

On the far side of Maynooth, the cloud cover broke and rain pounded the car. Dani called her mother to describe the dreary territory through which we were passing. I pulled in at a Topaz somewhere before Athlone, took the phone and sent Dani out to fill the tank. The forecourt was empty save for a canary-yellow Volkswagen with tinted windows and outsize silver wheels. Its driver, a young guy, was filling up as well. He wore boot-cut jeans and an untucked stripy shirt. His hair was shaved close at the sides and gelled in a quiff on top.

Elaine was eating cereal and struggling with the cable box.

‘How was Calvin?’ I said.

‘Oh, I don’t think I’ll be seeing him again for quite some time.’

Dani tapped on the window. I opened it and passed out my wallet. I watched her walk to the shop to pay, and the Volkswagen boy did too.

‘What happened?’

Elaine groaned, embarrassed. ‘You told me so.’

‘He made a pass at you?’

‘He’s very depressed. And lost. And drunk too, of course. He really hates his wife. He touched my knee.’

‘Jesus,’ I said.

‘And so I picked up his hand. And I gave it back to him. And I said: Calvin, hate her or don’t hate her, you’re going home to her right now.’

Dani stepped from the door of the shop as the Volkswagen boy stepped towards it. He said something to her, his hands in his pockets. She folded her arms and smiled.

‘And did he?’ I said.

‘He passed out in the bathroom first,’ Elaine said. ‘But eventually, yes.’

The boy pointed towards his car. Dani laughed and pointed towards me.

‘When are you coming home?’ Elaine said, though well she knew.

The boy met my eye. Nothing passed between us.

‘I love —’ Elaine said, but then, ‘Oh, the cable’s back!’

I hung up. Dani walked the rest of the way to the car, her head bowed. She climbed in and I gunned the engine.

‘What the hell was that?’ I said.

She smiled. ‘What was what?’

Galway appeared to us late afternoon in a mess of crowd-control barriers and bunting. Banners strung across the road cried the second-to-last day of a street theatre festival and signs in the windows of pubs summoned musicians for seisiún. Road-weary, we headed straight for the hotel, a self-styled ‘inn’ near the Spanish Arch that I’d allowed Dani to choose, with a heavy stone facade, faded carpets in the lobby and a stag’s head and cutlasses and oil paintings on the walls. In the bar, a sweaty guy in a woollen jumper was playing an accordion.

‘Isn’t this great?’ Dani said.

‘It’s something, all right,’ I said.

Our room — a twin; the place was without suites — had exposed rafters, a floor that sagged in the middle, a TV bolted into a cabinet and greying doilies laid beneath the glasses on the bedside table. Through the window I could see the low roofs of the Claddagh hunched together, before them boats beached on sand and shale as their like had been for centuries, and beyond them the roiling darkness of the ocean stretching, stretching.

Dani seemed uninterested in exploring Galway, so I went out for dry burgers and oily onion rings and brought them back to the room. We ate watching a restaurant-transformation show as the holler and yelp of the bar downstairs rose to rattle our window. Dani studied her materials while I drank two scotches from the minibar. Later on, we changed into our pyjamas one by one in the bathroom and brushed our teeth side by side at the mirror. I turned off the light and lay in the dark listening to the crowds outside whittle down to a lone drunk singing a monotonous chorus. Eventually he sang himself out and the murmur of the river seemed to rise to fill the silence. Dani whispered:

‘Dad, there isn’t much of your stuff at home, is there?’

‘What do you mean?’ I said.

‘Well, Mom has pictures and stuffed animals and stuff like that from when she was a kid. And that goofy Chat Noir poster from her dorm. And her guitar. I mean — mementoes. I mean your things. But you don’t have any things, you know? I was thinking about this outside your mother’s — my grandmother’s — house. It’s sad.’

I levered myself on to an elbow and squinted to see Dani’s face. She was lying on her back staring at the ceiling, the horizon of her nose and chin aglow in the street light.

‘Why, really,’ I said, ‘do you want to come to school here?’

‘Did you know,’ she said, ‘that Brooke got into Harvard? With a full ride?’

Elaine’s niece was a year older than Dani and a science whiz, who had spoken at nine and a half months but wet the bed until middle school.

‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘I think I heard that.’

‘And did you know that Stacey D’Albertino’s older sister is on a Fulbright doing fresco restorations in Siena?’

‘Did your mother tell you this?’

Dani shuffled on to her side and tucked her hands beneath a cheek. I wanted to tell her that she shouldn’t compare herself to other people, to reassure her that she had all the time in the world — but three years was a long time to be away from home, and those years would lead to others that eventually would amount to a life. Dani would renounce parts of herself, and seldom notice when other parts changed. Who would she be, I wondered, when she was done here?

I tossed and turned all night on the hard mattress and gave up at first light. I showered quietly, dressed in the bathroom and went out, leaving Dani undisturbed. In the lanes off Abbeygate, soapsuds ran in gutters and people slept on kerbs. Men unloaded kegs or pallets of bread from the backs of trucks. I wound around by the quays and ordered coffee from a kiosk. The barista was a studenty type with auburn dreadlocks and a heavy gaberdine toggled against the morning chill.

‘In town for the festival, is it?’ she said.

‘No,’ I said. ‘My daughter’s looking at colleges.’

‘I see,’ she said as she passed me my cup. ‘And what part of the States is it you’re from? I’ve a brother over in Philadelphia. Are you anywhere near there?’

‘Sometimes,’ I said. ‘We’re not too far away.’

I brought my coffee to a bench by the waterside and sat to watch the boats. Tacking rang against masts in the wind and seagulls ran surveillance. I took out my phone and mapped the route to the university, mapped on a whim the distance back to Elaine. Then I followed the quays back to the hotel, where I shared an elevator with a trio of golfers in bucket hats and windbreakers. One read from a guidebook with a Midwestern twang. He dwelled on words like ‘authentic’ and phrases like ‘time immemorial’. I wondered what my daughter’s take on that vocabulary would be, what any of those words might mean if she heard or spoke them.

The room smelled of sleep, coffee and burned toast. I found Dani sitting cross-legged on her bed tapping her iPad and eating an apple.

‘I was hungry,’ she said and fixed the glasses on her nose. ‘I didn’t know where you were, but I got you some things anyway.’

On a cart by the TV, two trays held a baker’s basket, a dish of preserves, a picked-over fruit salad and a plate with a plastic lid. I took the plate to the desk and uncovered a stack of fried meats and a halved tomato shining in a slick of fat.

‘Do you know,’ Dani said, ‘how they make black pudding? It’s really an interesting process. First —’

‘If it’s all the same to you,’ I said, ‘I’d rather remain in the dark. What are you writing there?’

‘Thoughts.’

‘Care to share them?’

‘Nope.’

She pushed the iPad aside and laced her fingers between her toes. Her toenail polish had chipped. I cut and speared a sausage.

‘Then let me ask you this,’ I said. ‘Just now, in the elevator —’

‘Listen,’ Dani said, ‘about today. And don’t be mad.’

‘Mad?’

‘I was thinking, maybe, of not going.’ Her mouth opened, closed. ‘It’s just — I feel like I have all the information I need already, is all.’

I wiped my lips and pushed my plate away.

‘But you haven’t even —’ I said. ‘And after we’ve driven all this way?’

‘I know.’

‘Is there something you want to tell me?’

Outside, hoarsely, someone started up a verse. A guitar rasped into life a half a beat behind it.

‘Oh, for God’s sake,’ Dani said. ‘I’ve had it up to here with all these fucking sad songs.’

I crossed the room and sat on the edge of her bed. She stared into her lap, hair covering her glasses. I brought my ear down close to the mattress and looked up into her face. She laughed but her eyes were dull.

‘Are you mad at me?’ I said.

‘Mad at you? Why would I be?’

My daughter drew her knees up to her chin and stared out the window. I followed her gaze over rooftops, past chimneypots, along the pier and westward, out over the sea.