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But I'd tried that before. The last time there'd been an upheaval in my life, I went to New York to stay with Nora, with the idea of maybe settling down near her. It lasted a week. And Ireland - well, I certainly wasn't going to live in Ireland. Though Ireland was on my mind, in a way it had never been before. Maybe going to the psychiatrist had stirred up the murk in my memory. Or maybe it was reading the Talbot Judgment again, though I hadn't realized at the time - so soon after Jimmy died - that I was taking it in.
Something had started moving inside me. I realized it standing in a private zoo near London, taking notes for a piece Alex wanted on animals as tourist attractions. It wasn't a zoo, exactly, as much as a species rescue place where they were running a breeding program to save the miniature lion tamarin monkey. The reddish-gold color of spaniels, the monkeys were, with ruffs like the MGM lion around each tiny, melancholy face. I leaned my forehead against the glass to watch them go about their business. I loved looking at them. They hung from branches by one arm, swinging slightly to and fro, pensive, or they crouched under the big fleshy leaves of the habitat, or they scratched their heads, completely indifferent to scrutiny. I followed the busy little doings of a lion-headed monkey about the size of my hand with an even smaller one clinging to its stomach. Mother and baby. Poignant little eyes, they had.
It struck me suddenly: I have never looked at my family the way I look at animals. I have never taken an unhurried look at the people by whom I was formed, wanting nothing but to see clearly, the way I look at animals or birds-appreciating them, without having any designs on them. My family has been the same size and shape in my head since I ran out of Ireland. Mother? Victim. Nora and me and Danny and poor little Sean? Neglected victims of her victimhood. Villain? Father. Old-style Irish Catholic patriarch; unkind to wife, unloving to children, harsh to young Kathleen when she tried to talk to him.
Then I lifted my head as if I could smell something odd.
What was I being bitter about, nearly thirty years after I'd seen my father last, and when he'd been dead five or six years? I couldn't not have changed. I could not be the same person now that I was when I left home. It just wasn't possible. Although I had lived for a long time, during the basement years, in a state of suspended animation, I had been alive. And everything that is alive changes all the time.
The mother and baby monkeys had disappeared. I think they'd gone in behind the big leaves of a tropical tree.
Where are you? I whispered. I tapped lightly on the glass.
The lines of a poem we learned at school came into my head and they pulled at me as I walked back to the car.
"Is there anybody there?" said the Traveller, knocking on the moonlit door-
There was a man knocking on the door of a deserted house deep in a forest. And there were ghosts inside on the stairs, weren't there? Listening to him.
"Tell them I came and no one answered - that I kept my word," he said....
I tried to remember it properly.
"Is there anybody there?" said the Traveller, knocking on the moonlit door, And his horse in the silence of the-something-champed the grasses of the forest's ferny floor, And a bird flew up out of a turret above the Traveller's head, And he smote upon the door again a second time. "Is there anybody there?" he said.
A picture formed at the back of my mind, of silent ghosts waiting and listening, and me, the Traveller, riding up and calling to them. Whether these were the ghosts of Marianne Talbot and William Mullan, watching each other on the lamplit stairs of Mount Talbot, or of my father and mother - his watch chain gleaming, her face a pale patch over his shoulder - I didn't bother to decide. It wasn't people I was thinking of. It was a shape, a blurred image - me outside somewhere, calling, and tragic ghosts listening to me and waiting for me to free them - that settled inside me.
Reprinted from My Dream of You by Nuala O'Faolain by permission of Riverhead Books, a member of Penguin Putnam Inc. Copyright (c) 2000 Nuala O'Faolain. All rights reserved. This excerpt, or any parts thereof, may not be reproduced in any form without permission.
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