Page Two
Two new carpenters have arrived on the job. They seem to be about my age, in their early twenties. They are wearing brand new off-white bib overalls, not yet stained. They sit down near me in the shade and eat their nice, neat sandwiches. In spite of the heat, they are drinking hot milky tea from new metal-clad Thermoses. They are speaking a language I do not understand, and yet it sounds somehow familiar. I ask, and they laugh. They say they are Irish, that they have just arrived in the US. We talk. They teach me to say “kiss my ass” in Irish. It sounds like “poga ma hone.” I try to say it. They laugh again. We are friends. Irish blood is thicker than beer.
One of my favorite objects as a child was an antique Crown Devon porcelain beer mug with a picture of an Irish jaunting car and Lake Killarney in the background on one side and the lyrics of the old Irish song, “Killarney,” on the other. It had a music box set into the base that played a tinkly version of the melody when you lifted the mug to drink. I learned that song by heart by the time I was six, along with a lot of other Irish songs that I found in songbooks stored inside our piano bench. I loved that little mug until one day I accidentally broke it to pieces. Last week, while I was on eBay, I happened to find the very same mug being auctioned by a dealer, and today I discovered that I had won the mug with my four dollar bid! I can’t wait for it to arrive.
Ever since I was a small child, I have been fascinated by Ireland and all things Irish. I must have lived there in a previous life, because I still think of it as a kind of spiritual home. In many different ways my life has been infused and enriched by my various Irish connections. Our family name is very Irish. Who hasn’t heard of sweet Molly Malone, who “wheeled her wheelbarrow through the streets broad and narrow”? Actually the name is a slightly Anglicized version of the Irish Gaelic name Maoileoin, which signifies “the grandson of a disciple of John the Evangelist.” My first Malone ancestor was a member of an ancient sept related to a Celtic Christian monk in the monastic community of Clonmacnois, which was founded in the sixth century by St. Ciaran on the bank of the River Shannon in County Offaly. Those first Malones were a branch of the O’ Connors of Connaught, and the earliest known Malone graves in Ireland, dating from the eighth century, are found in the churchyard on the north side of Temple Connor in the precinct of the monastery.
My Malone grandmother, born Matilda Moses in 1876, was the only real, native-born Irish member of our family. Thanks to her, I was able to apply for Irish citizenship ten years ago and receive a beautiful, dark red, Irish European Union passport, still one of my most prized possessions. (Yes, I really am an Irish citizen.) Grandmother Malone would never allow a word of Irish to escape her lips, though I think she probably understood it a little from her childhood on her father’s small farm in Ulster. She was a dour, unsmiling woman, a staunch Church of Ireland Protestant from the village of Seskinore in County Tyrone, known today as the only village in Ireland with three churches, a post office but not a single pub! My father, smitten with Ireland like me, named our family home “Seskinore” in honor of his mother’s Irish birthplace.
I am sure that when my Grandmother Malone was a girl, she had looked down her long straight nose with those pale blue accusing eyes of hers at the Irish-speakers in her village. They were mainly landless itinerant laborers in those days, “spalpeens” in Irish slang, and almost invariably Catholic, or as my Protestant grandmother would have said, “Papists.”
My father’s Malone ancestors arrived in America in 1842 from County Cavan, the southernmost of the nine counties of Ulster. They were not Protestant farmers, but rather impoverished, illiterate, landless, Catholic, Irish-speaking laborers. They were the same sort of Irish people of whom Oliver Cromwell infamously said, in proclaiming his own ethnic cleansing program in Ireland in 1652, “They can go to Hell or to Connaught !” (Connaught, in the west, is Ireland ’s poorest province, where one of Cromwell’s generals said there was “not enough water to drown a man, not enough trees to hang a man, and not enough soil to bury a man.”) In 1873, my Catholic great-grandfather Tom Malone, the first of my Malone ancestors born here in America, married a non-Irish Baptist girl from Ohio and was immediately excommunicated by the Catholic Church and disowned by his parents, beginning a line of Protestant Malones that includes my grandfather, my father and me.
I love it that I am almost half Irish by blood, 13/32 or 40.625%, to be exact. I have one great-grandparent on my father’s side who was only a quarter Irish, while absolutely none of my mother’s ancestors were Irish, thank you very much! But another Irish lady was a great influence on my early life, an even greater influence than my own patrician, utterly un-Irish mother.
Miss Mary McGinty, “Missy,” was my Irish nanny. She came to work for my parents when I was only six months old and stayed with us until my younger sister, Carolyn, went off to boarding school. During those formative years of my life, I saw much more of Missy than I did of my own mother, who spent most of her waking hours pecking at a green Smith-Corona portable typewriter behind her closed bedroom door, trying desperately to conquer depression and write the Great American Novel.
Missy was born in Glasgow, Scotland, in 1881, the daughter of Irish parents from Letterkenny, the largest town in County Donegal. She returned to Ireland with her parents as a student and taught piano and organ, eventually becoming the organist at the Catholic Cathedral in Letterkenny, where her father owned a pub. For reasons which never became clear to us, she never married her one true love, but instead found herself caring for her alcoholic father in his illness and old age.
After he died, she emigrated to America and lived with relatives in Carnegie Borough, near Pittsburgh, where she entered service as a nanny, first caring for the child of friends of my parents and then caring for me and my sister. She lived six days of every week in her room over the garage in our house in Coraopolis Heights, with a crucifix above her bed and a picture of the Sacred Heart of Jesus on the wall by her dresser, just a few steps away from our bedrooms so she could hear us if we cried. When I was at school or occasionally being looked after by my mother, she would sit there in her freshly-ironed white uniform saying her Rosary. Her beads were always with her, tucked into a pocket of her uniform. When she prayed, she would whisper the words softly, but always loud enough that we children could still hear them. When I was six, I asked my Protestant parents if I could have a crucifix to hang on the wall above my bed, announcing to them that I wanted to be a “Christian like Missy.”
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