Journey through the land of the gaels

 

By Herbert Hadad

I was small and wretched, all the more so for being attached to the strong left hand of my noble mother as she rapped at the curtained glass door of our Dorchester neighbor. A tall, sullen man opened up. "Your son is twice the size of mine," said my mother. "Why did he and his hoodlums want to beat up my boy?" The man turned angry but remained silent. My mother pinched me hard on the arm. "Look. Doesn't it hurt? Don't you think we cry? Don't you think we bleed? Be our friend or leave us alone," she said. As she spun us off the porch and back down the street, my mother whispered, "You have my permission. Next time his lug of a son bothers you, grab a board, a stone, anything, and let him have it." Thus was my introduction to Jewish-Irish relations in the city of Boston in the peace-loving years following World War II.

But this experience did nothing to explain what I recognized, even as a small boy, was the love between my mother and Mrs. Courtney, the older Irish lady who lived in the house set behind our triple-decker. They both seemed to glow when they met, embracing, talking animatedly, offering to shop for each other, cook, and bake. On her parlor wall, Mrs. Courtney hung framed slogans, embroidered in English and Gaelic, on the sanctity of the Irish and the family. One of her bachelor sons taught me to say "Kiss my butt" in Gaelic, but I could think of no one to say it to without the direst of consequences and soon forgot how. One time I arrived home with a dollar bill tucked into the breast pocket of my High Holy Days jacket. "Mrs. Courtney said, 'Happy New Year, Little Darling,' " I told my mother, who burst into tears.

Nor was the toughness of the streets in accord with the adoration that I sensed flowed between the couple next door I knew as Tom and Mary. I could not forget the smiles and caresses of the hands and stolen pecks on the cheek that Tom and Mary bestowed on each other. They seemed to have boundless gentleness and desire for each other, and they became even then the romantic ideal to which I would aspire decades later.

But neither Tom and Mary nor Mrs. Courtney and her houseful of sons, all of whom seemed to work for the city, could make the streets safe. We were one of a handful of Jewish families in an overwhelmingly Irish neighborhood. It made no difference that my name was Arab. It wasn't Irish, I didn't look Irish, and I never showed up at St. Matthew's Church. When my pious father enrolled me in a Hebrew school about a mile away, my mother had a new worry. "Don't wear your yarmulke on the street," she warned. "They'll kill you."

And indeed the local gang, a group of Irish kids led by the slight but cruel-tongued Jerry O'Hara, waited at the corner of Woodrow Avenue and Wollaston Terrace for my arrival one afternoon shortly after I began religious studies. The barbarians moved in for some sport, but suddenly stopped as if stricken and pointed to the top of my head. "Take that thing off and fight fair!" yelled O'Hara. They were afraid to strike a holy man, or at least a holy boy. I got very used to wearing my yarmulke.

I had a gentile friend, Roberto Francesco Grande, now a Boston artist, who lived near Franklin Park and did not look Irish. An Irish gang chased him down Seaver Street, screaming anti-Semitic epithets into his Mediterranean ears, trapped him in the park, and tied him to a tree. Another time, they waited in ambush, preparing to pelt him with trolley-track stones. "I ran too fast, the stones never touched me," Grande said. I was not so fortunate. Early one evening, as I was walking on Oakhurst Street, a stone flew into my left cheek. The doctor opened his office on Norfolk Street and sewed up my face. The worst part was looking at the scar every day until it faded away twenty years later.

When I was a teenager, my mother delivered a new lecture one afternoon in our kitchen. "Don't get mixed up with an Irish girl. They're cute as a button. They'll bill and coo. But the first time you have a fight," she said, becoming agitated, "the Irish girl will scream, 'You Dirty Jew!' " How could my mother know this? True, she suffered the immigrant's plight of seeming to need another group to knock, but she was given to abundant kindness as well. Irish girls were definitely cute. I loved watching them at City Point beach in South Boston, their lips purple and fair skin covered with goose bumps as they emerged from the cold water. They didn't seem to have boyfriends, only large numbers of tall brothers, skinny like them.

Northeastern University changed everything. It was not exactly the Dublin of the New World, but the campus offered an array of people I had scarcely known existed-Poles, Swedes, hardscrabble Wasps, French-Canadians, Italians, and Sicilians. And many Irish men and women. Did it occur to us then that we were almost all the same-bright, ambitious, wanting to start to feel grown-up and have a little forbidden fun, most of all hoping to lift ourselves solidly into the middle class? I don't think so. I carried my disastrous and comical self-consciousness toward all women with me at all times, feigning comfort only in large noisy groups at lunch or in the quadrangle. But another kind of miracle occurred. I began to develop friendships with Irish men. They wanted to talk, share jokes, discuss why a professor was unduly severe, whether I liked best the brunette from Swampscott, the blonde from Wrentham, or the Chinese girl from the South End. In the classrooms, I began to see the Irish beyond the pug-nosed tormentors and their untouchable sisters. I learned of the devastating famine of the nineteenth century, The Troubles in the fight for independence, the abuse suffered by Irish immigrants to Boston and other parts of America. I began to appreciate the superb Irish literary legacy of Joyce and Yeats.

This discovery of the possibilities and richness of Irish people took another great leap shortly after my arrival at the Boston Globe to begin my co-op chores as a copyboy. Most of the senior editors were Yankee Protestants, but the majority of the reporters were Irishmen. I found them determined, sentimental, funny, boisterous, kind, and honorable. After a couple of weeks on the job, I wanted nothing so much in the world as to become a reporter just like them. Late one Saturday, when the deadlines were past, three of the middle-aged reporters told me we were going out. We walked to a bar where they were known, near North Station, and as soon as we settled on our stools the bartender placed a shot of rye and a glass of beer-the perilous boilermaker-in front of each of us. I watched them throw down the whiskey and guzzle the beer, and I did the same. We did this three times, a different reporter pushing cash across the bar each time. I also sensed they were watching to see if I'd slide off my stool. But I reached into my pocket and ordered a fourth round, and after we all drank they smiled at one another and laughed and slapped me on the back. It was a strange ritual that left me reeling, but shortly afterward the three reporters and almost every other person in the City Room began to teach me how to be a reporter.

One other student and copyboy, particularly, offered his friendship and opened my eyes to the intricate and colorful world of the Boston Irish. His name was Robert J. Anglin. Anglin, a complex man, could be as sweet as Jerry O'Hara, the street-corner thug, had been feral. Where O'Hara practiced animosity, Anglin took me home to meet his family, invited me to rented summer houses on Cape Cod, introduced me to his friends in taverns and restaurants across Dorchester and South Boston. He charmed bartenders, established tabs, argued Greek philosophy or Roman history, and fairly often threw punches. "Bob," I would say nervously as we approached one of our hangouts, "remember you're a lover, not a fighter." He fixed me up with an Irish girl. I pulled up to her house in Southie, vaguely expecting that in the next few moments I might be dragged from the car and left bloodied in the gutter. Instead a glorious-looking girl, reminiscent of a teenage Lauren Bacall, leaned out her window and waved and said she'd be right down. Bob's only counsel had been not to try anything too sexually exotic on the first date. I was delighted that he perceived me as, well, so romantically dangerous, but the truth was I'd had little experience of any kind. The Irish girl and I went through the motions of dinner and conversation, but the evening never came alive. I drove her home and dreamed about her for a long time.

Bob stayed at the Globe while I established a writing career in New York. Early one evening several years later, I stopped for a beer at the Kettle of Fish on Macdougal Street in Greenwich Village, and as my eyes grew accustomed to the dimness I could not believe them. Sitting across the oak oval bar was Jerry O'Hara. I guess we humans are imbued with affection for old times, even unpleasant old times, because I waved to O'Hara, suggesting he join me and tell me why he was in town. By then I had completed the warrior phase of my life, having survived a series of professional prizefights, but even as Jerry ambled over, I felt an old and anxious chill. Seconds later, it was replaced by a rising fury, because as he pulled up the stool, Jerry was wearing his malicious smirk, like he used to on Woodrow Avenue. "Jerry," I said, "the way I see it, you have two choices here. One, you can buy me a beer and we can have a conversation. Two, we can go outside and I can beat the hell out of you." Who knows what might have happened? He bought, we had an uneventful chat, and parted.

Evelyn, actually Mary Evelyn Rose, descended from the Gallaghers and Mulhearns, daughter of Counties Mayo and Roscommon, was beautiful, smart, and effervescent, and I was captivated by her. She worked for the president of a Manhattan public relations firm where I'd been taken on. One day when she was dropping off papers in my office, I reached for the kind of glibness that masked my inhibition and asked her to sit in my lap. We all know that commissions and courts can be convened, careers destroyed by such ideas. But much to my fascination, she planted herself exactly as I had proposed, smiled, and then jumped up. It led to nothing else. She refused to go out on a date, declaring that such liaisons gone bad might make office life unbearable.

The president of the firm liked to have his troops leap when he appeared or tremble in his presence. Knowing that, I stubbornly refused. I was doing good work and, besides, I had only recently outfoxed Jerry O'Hara. The president's chief aide arrived at my door one day after a few weeks. "I know it's crazy," he said, "but the boss says you're fired." I can't make-believe I wasn't stunned. I'd never been fired, but the hurt was soon relieved. I found Evelyn. "I just got fired," I told her cheerfully. "I don't work here anymore. Now can we go out?" "Yes," she said.

Several months later, already knowing she was the Mary of my Tom, Evelyn and I drove to Boston. She had met some of my friends-Bob Anglin weighed in by saying she was too good for me-but I wanted her to meet my parents. I was certain that they would find her a young woman of rare and desirable qualities. I introduced her in the living room of my parents' apartment in Hyde Park and then slipped with my mother into the kitchen for coffees and cakes. "Well, Mom, how do you like her?" I asked. "She's lovely," said my mother. "Never bring her here again." It became a pivotal moment of my life. "Mom," I said, keeping calm, "you got that out of your system. I hope to never hear you speak about Evelyn that way again." She didn't reply.

The ambivalence toward Evelyn in Hyde Park was matched if not surpassed by that for me in her household on Staten Island. Although her sisters spoke to me and seemed enthusiastic, I had by this time developed a built-in blarney-meter, and the dial was bouncing all over the place. Her mother expressed her unhappiness by remaining aloof and, when I was not present, desperately trying to convince her daughter she might be making the mistake of her life. Evelyn's father had died only months before we had become acquainted, and the mantle of patriarch had gone to her older brother, a well-educated, socially cautious man who let it be known he was not pleased by our relationship, leading me to believe he opposed us on religious grounds.

My mother meddled again. We were out for a Sunday ride during another visit to Boston, my dad at my side, Evelyn and my mom in the back seat. I suddenly noticed in the rearview mirror that my mother was fidgeting with her fingers. A few minutes later, the woman who had unwittingly invoked Shakespeare to protect her little boy in Dorchester completed another of her dramatic gestures and asked Evelyn to show us her left hand. I hadn't proposed, or even contemplated the place and circumstances. It was too late. "Your girlfriend's wearing a diamond ring," said my mother, as Evelyn smiled demurely. "It looks like you two are engaged. Your father and I wish you a long and happy life."

Which, thanks to God, it has been, due in no small measure to our children, Edward, Charles, and Sara. But more than twenty years passed with scarcely a phone call between my house and that of Evelyn's brother John. While we had raised three children, he and his wife, Yvonne, had raised four. I pictured them as an eccentric and bitter family, draped in their sanctimony. I also had no way of measuring my wife's tribal loyalty to them. One night on vacation in Rockport, Massachusetts, we stayed too late and drank too much with good friends, the Jeremiah V. Murphy family, Murphy being a former Globe man, Pulitzer Prize­winner, and onetime colleague. In my condition, the warmth and hospitality of the Murphys suddenly summoned memories of the opposite-painful old feelings of rejection by my Irish kin. Returning on foot to the nearby inn where our children slept, I began to itemize, even codify, the manifold inadequacies of Evelyn's small-minded family. She protested for a few blocks, then took further strategic action. It became known as The Night Evelyn Slugged Me on Granite Street.

Yet there was an increasingly powerful desire to see them that I could not quite understand. And it was Evelyn who ultimately had the courage to call and insist that they jump into their van and drive the 150 miles to our home for a reunion. Arriving late for my own party with last-minute groceries, I entered the living room and everyone stopped talking. Their first-born, Heather, crossed the room and threw her arms around me and we held each other for what seemed a long time. Her sister, Tara, offered a hug. Andrew and Brian, teenage boys, shook my hand. One of them called me "Uncle Herb." Uncle Herb. That sounded good. These children could not have been told that I was some disagreeable philistine. I approached Yvonne, prepared to plant a light kiss on her cheek, and was amazed when she turned her head so that our lips met. John stood and smiled and we shook hands vigorously. "Thanks for coming," I said. "Thanks for asking us," he replied. After a long and exuberant supper, they piled back into their van, tossing over their shoulders promises of another reunion soon at their house.

"How could we have been so wrong about each other?" I asked my wife afterward. Had some Irish curse been lifted? Had the passage of time contrived to make us forget our laments? Had we discovered our folly and sought each other's forgiveness? My wife's reply was more analytical.

"We weren't wrong. But they were probably never as bad as we imagined. We've raised good and decent children, and so have they. We grew over the years, and so did they," she said.

"Evelyn," I told her, "I'm almost ashamed by this, but I have to make an admission. I love your brother's family. I love every single one of them."

"I believe it's mutual," she said. That day and the meetings that continued to follow remain one of the great mysteries and joys of my life.

Herbert Hadad, a Northeastern graduate and New York­based free-lance writer, wrote about Edmund Muskie's 1972 presidential campaign in the November 1996 issue.

Related Links: