For years I’ve been trying to understand my feminine side. I don’t just mean being more empathetic and compassionate, or trying to understand my anima, though that may be part of it. I mean how I am threaded into the world around me.
It wasn’t until I left America for an art history fellowship in Scotland that my initiation began. For one, being in Scotland allowed me to see Aunt Fi again. When I first arrived, I hadn’t seen Aunt Fifi for twelve years, even though she was always my favorite aunt. She used to babysit me when I was a child, when my parents would go out on dates. We’d stay up late dancing and eating pizza. Then Aunt Fi got pregnant and moved to Ireland and she and my mom had a falling out; why I wasn’t even sure. But I knew that I had come to Scotland because it was close to Ireland, and this way I could bring Aunt Fi and my mom together again, to bridge their two-decade-long estrangement.
Aunt Fi probably knew it too. She was thrilled to see me again. She said we have an unbreakable bond—always did—and that I’m like one of her children.
Aunt Fi is a Catholic with mystical tendencies, which I have too, though Aunt Fi says I have to work harder to cultivate them because I’m less receptive, since I’m not a woman. Every time I saw her, I felt like I did. Cultivate them, that is. I visited six times that year. Hopped on a fifty-dollar flight to Dublin, took the bus down the road and “mucked in.”
That first day after breakfast, I noticed a small plate hanging in the hall. It depicted an icon of the Virgin with the Christ Child. I mistook it as a replica of the icon painted by the Russian painter Andrei Rublev, but in fact he copied this one. That is, the reproduced image on this plate was of the original Theotokos of Vladimir, painted by an artist long forgotten by the steppe; the plate itself manufactured by a corporation in China, just as anonymous as the original painter. The image of the Theotokos of Vladimir shows Baby Christ snuggling up to his mother. It is the first icon to depict Mother and Child this way, in the Eleusa, or “tenderness” style.
“You like it?” Aunt Fi asked me.
I nodded.
“Take it.” She pressed it into my hands. Aunt Fi’s hands are bigger than mine, with long fingers and broad palms—Muldoon hands, working hands, she said. Mine I’ve inherited from my father; thick, with short nimble fingers.
The plate bearing the image of the Theotokos of Vladimir is the centerpiece of my altar.
Howth is Aunt Fi’s favorite place, but not so much the magical green hills that overlook the sea as the lighthouse at the edge of the pier where she once celebrated a New Year’s with an ex-boyfriend; The Bloody Stream, the bar where over the past two decades she’d celebrated various evenings with Jamie, the man who almost became her husband, and their friend Matthew. The Bloody Stream is a pub converted from the former Howth railway station. The January sun shone faintly through a damp mist. We both had wool blankets around our shoulders. Aunt Fi blew on her Irish coffee. “Tell me, Ian, I’ve done okay, haven’t I?”
She waited for my reply before she took a sip.
She was talking about being a single mom. When she found out she was pregnant, Niamh’s dad didn’t want to be involved. Aunt Fi moved to Ireland so she wouldn’t have to face her family’s judgment. Grandpa Doon offered her the ancestral house. She met Jamie, Damian’s dad, and soon she was pregnant again. They agreed to marry, but he left her at the altar. Jamie’s since asked Aunt Fi to marry him again, but she’s always said no.
Still, he comes over Sunday nights with dinner and rubs her feet.
Aunt Fi doesn’t work anymore, what with her hip and her arthritis. Her pension gives her enough to live on.
If anything in the house needed repairs, she’d have to take out a loan, or ask Jamie for help. The house isn’t big—two bedrooms—but it’s conveniently located ten minutes from Dublin City. When Grandpa Doon bought it sixty years ago the surroundings were potato fields; today they’re prime real estate.
“When I was pregnant with Niamh, all my neighbors came to see me in the hospital. Three of them cried when they saw me pushing her in her buggy up and down the street. And I saw that that’s life. I’ve learned so much from being here in Europe. So if Claire gets pregnant you better have that baby because once you see it, you’ll know it doesn’t matter if you have a million dollars or a sausage.”
At home, Aunt Fi changed into her magenta fleece robe. It was pocked with holes from burning cigarette ash. She lit a cigarette on the stove and swiveled toward me. “Now I gave you the key so if you’re having a meltdown and you say I need to get out of here, you don’t have to text Niamh or me, and if I’m not here, you can just muck in and do your thing, and I’ll be in the garden, having a cigarette and a glass of wine. It’s so nice that you can come here and hang out with me. Now that the excitement’s settling down into contentment you’re such a comfort to me, Ian. You know who’s like that? Damian.”
On cue, Damian comes in, shoulders hunched, six feet tall, mumbling in his thick Irish accent, goes to the refrigerator.
We moved into the garden, wrapped ourselves in blankets, and sat across from each other with our feet up on the same chair. I wanted to ask Aunt Fifi why she was estranged from my mother. Aunt Fi said, “She spread lies about me, that I stole from her. But I never did.”
I said, “Maybe she told people you did because she was jealous of you. Jealous that you had the house. Jealous that Grandpa visited you all the time.”
Cigarette in one hand, glass of sauvignon blanc in the other, Aunt Fi became serious. “You know what she did? One night after Ma died, she called me up and said, Jack and I have rights to that house. I got off the phone and was scared because she could be ruthless. I told Daddy, and he said, Oh don’t mind them.” Aunt Fi lit another cig from the burning embers of her last one and she leaned for her wine. “Oo,” she winced.
“My body’s giving up on me. I need a new hip, but I don’t wanna do it. It’s the arthritis. Look.” She held up a curled pinkie finger. “I can’t straighten it any more. But that’s what happens when you reach my age. You know,” she grinned coyly, “I was something before central heating.”
Exuberance seemed to be Aunt Fi’s dominant characteristic. The energy she exuded was so strong that I wondered if it was possible for that abundance to destroy her. In the same way, my mother’s compassion became vengeance when she imagined she’d been wronged. Isn’t that how most of us decline and fall, by allowing our strengths to grow unchecked?
“So what happened with Anne and your dad?”
I told about how when I was fourteen and Mom suspected Dad of cheating on her. He told her he wanted a divorce. They agreed to separate, but one night they were fighting and it got so bad Dad had to call the cops to get Mom to stop coming after him. The cops took her to jail.
Aunt Fi erupted in laughter, “I’m sorry,” she said. “But I can just see her.” She wiped an eye with the back of her index finger.
“It was very traumatic for me,” I said. “I had to testify to an officer.”
“I know, I’m sorry, I’m sure it was. So what happened after that?”
“Well, Mom spent the night in jail. My friend’s parents picked her up and she stayed with them for a week or
so. But she never forgave Dad. She still hates him, even though Dad always asks after her. She won’t even say his name.”
“Aww. She always did that, though. If you crossed her once, that was it.”
We sat thinking. I knew I had to bring Aunt Fi and my mom together again, to bridge their two-decade-long estrangement. A squeaking came from the back of the garden. “That’s the Fairy Tree,” Aunt Fi said. “Its branches are rubbing together. You know about hawthorn trees? You’re not supposed to touch them. When I moved here twenty-one years ago it was in bloom—I plucked a flower from its branch. Three hours later I fell off a bike and broke my arm.” She grinned her strong white teeth, cigarette between her fingers, and cocked her head. “You’ve never heard the rhyme, Every shepherd tells his tale under the hawthorn in the dale?”
*
“Now if you need to use the toilet, you go up there and do your business and flush once before you wipe, then you wait a few minutes for the toilet to fill up again and if it’s not working put your bits and pieces in to the basket and bring it down. No one gives a shit. It’s the coffee. And all the food here is so fresh. Don’t be surprised if you’re walking down the street and you think you need to fart, and you have to run into the closest Mackers to use the toilet…”
The kitchen was silent when I came down from my shower, save for the slush of the dishwasher. Aunt Fi was moving through the garden, back to me as I sat before the window, warming myself in front of the radiator. My toes were numb from her leaving the back door open to release “the toxins”—what toxins?—the toxins. Thirty-six degrees outside with eighty-nine percent humidity and a thin rain falling: arthritic, bone-damp cold—god knew what toxins. The tops of the beech trees blew in the gray sky, Aunt Fi dragged a folded lawn chair across the grass in her magenta robe and pink Crocs. She lifted it above the pot and brushed against the dormant rose bush, which sprung back like a jack-in-the-box. Down the concrete path, wrists bent, long fingers splayed, careful not to slip, she’s fallen in the muck before, thought weighs on her brow, what is she thinking, she looks up and sees me typing through the window in front of the radiator and her face alights, she opens the door and says, “So just come back when you want, you might have a morning in Edinburgh where you’re having a meltdown—and if I’m gone you make something to eat, what’s wrong with that? I used to do that with Anne all the time, but she was hurting. I think when you’re hurting you’re angry at the whole world, and I’ve—but what I’m saying is, just come over, you have the key, and you’ll be fine. I’ll go, Oh hi Ian you want a smoke and a glass of wine? Okay, I’m gonna take a shower and then we’re gonna go shopping.”
I began to daydream. I looked up the Andrei Rublev version of the Theotokos of Vladimir. I clicked to a link about the Andrei Tarkovsky film based on the fourteenth-century icon painter. I’ve always been fascinated by the medieval era and its savagery: in the film, a horse falls down a flight of stone steps during a Mongol invasion set in Vladimir; gold from a melted crucifix is poured down a bishop’s throat before he is tied to a horse set to run; a young bell-maker confesses in tears that his father never told him the secret of bell-making before he died, only his instincts led him to create the bell that rang, which prevented him from being beheaded by the Grand Prince. When I first saw Andrei Rublev, the severity and arbitrariness of life and death in that cold land in an era so remote struck me as so real and distant from my own world that I entered deep into Wikipedia k-holes about medieval Russia, as if by learning more about that time I could approximate it in my own experience, in something realer than my banal office job and routine. I imagined I could remember experiences from a past life I might have lived during the medieval Rus era, that by researching more about it, I could summon experiences from then, experiences so remote that they would have a different texture or color, and would appear hazily, or in the black and white Tarkovsky used to film his early masterpiece.
From upstairs the shower stopped running and a moment later the bathroom door clicked. Aunt Fi called, “Be down in a minute Ian! Your aunt is going to look beautiful!”
An hour later we were in Penney’s and Aunt Fi was forcing me to try on a pair of green combat boots with a white sole. I didn’t really like them, but it’s her will can be adamantine. “Do you like them? Aren’t they kewl?”
She says ‘cool’ like Niamh, but her daughter grew up here, has the accent, and Fi still sounds like she’s from the Bronx.
“Walk around. How do they feel? Here, you need some new socks. You like these? Take those off and put these on. Now try the bigger size. The women like it when you wear big shoes, it makes it look you have a big cock—”
“I dunno, Aunt Fi. I don’t really need ‘em.”
“You sure?”
“Yeah. I have a pair of boots.”
Aunt Fi pursed her big lips and stared at me from under her raspberry beret with her big hazel eyes.
“I mean, I’d rather get something I need. Like those handkerchiefs.”
“Fine,” she said. “Then get the handkerchiefs.”
I was planning to go into town with Niamh, who had the day off from the makeup counter at Brown Thomas. Before I left, Aunt FiFi came back from the corner store and pulled a wad of bills from her pocket onto the kitchen table. Her fingers moved to her forehead, “I just had this feeling, I was thinking of Daddy and it was like he was telling me to give you and Niamh money so you can have a fun day out.”
I refused once, knew it would do no good.
When I saw Niamh in her oversized denim jacket in front of Christ Church, I told her the day was on Grandpa Doon.
We went to the International Photography Center to see Krass Clement’s Drum, extended for another week due to popular demand: the photo story of an old County Monaghan drunk on a night in the pub. Clement’s other 1991 portraits of Dublin are equally psychological: kids running around in projects barefoot, beautiful little U2 children with hope and poverty running their lives, old ladies pushing groceries in converted prams, the indigence that used to exist in Ireland—even thirty years ago—you don’t realize how much changed after the Celtic Tiger.
Niamh and I went to a bar called Drury with a heated back porch where we ordered hot toddys. We talked a bit about her mom, who she was very worried about—her drinking, her meds, her health. “Every night I call her to check on her and tell her I love her.”
“That’s nice,” I replied. “But maybe you shouldn’t.”
This was the first inkling I had that Niamh was more a mother to Aunt Fi than Aunt Fi was to her. It was probably also the first inkling she had that I was an asshole.
She changed the subject. “Have you ever seen a ghost?”
“I don’t think so. Have you?”
“When I was a little girl I remember I’d sometimes be falling asleep and I’d see this white outline of a face on
my door. It wasn’t bad or scary, and it didn’t show up every night. But eventually I told Mom, I asked if she ever saw it, and she took the holy water she keeps downstairs and sprinkled it over the door and blessed it. After that I never saw it again. Then, when I was a teenager I was fighting with her, and I was downstairs in the room where you’re sleeping, I was watching a scary movie, and I felt this rush of air and the door slammed and I just felt this evil presence, and I ran upstairs and held mom and cried for like, hours, until finally I fell asleep in her bed.”
“I think there are a lot of spirits here because there’s been so much suffering over the centuries. I’m not sure how much went on in the house or on that land, but I think it’s good your mom’s there to counter it.” I sipped my hot toddy. “You have the psychic power like her.”
“Mom says she sometimes sees fairies in the garden.”
“Have you ever seen any?”
Niamh shook her head.
I thought of Aunt Fi missing me then, I felt her wondering when I’d be home.
Niamh’s phone rang. “It’s Mom.”
Aunt Fi had made spaghetti bolognese for dinner. Niamh told her I’d be back in an hour or two at the latest.
We went to The Ink Factory to see Niamh’s girlfriend, Sally, who was the tattoo/barber shop photographer. All the people who worked there had cool haircuts and wore black and had piercings. I looked through the books on the shelf in the waiting area. “You can take one,” Niamh said.
A man with tattoos on his face and his left palm tattooed black came over to us and started talking to Niamh. Soon I was listening to their conversation and every time he made eye contact with me I noticed another one of his tattoos, almost like he was—or the tattoos were— revealing themselves one at a time: a word across his right jaw in Old English font, which I could not make out, tears under his right eye, the unalome over his third eye, Pharaoh’s horses on the crown of his head, a symbol of power and wealth, he said, which he got a couple of years ago, when he was thirty-four. In the center of his right palm an om and a sutra. He showed us videos on his phone, a funny instance of a rat on the New York subway, and then the scarification thought leaders he followed.
Then he started talking about the stud in his lower lip and he removed it: A quarter-sized hole showed his lower teeth. It took years to stretch from a tiny stud; this was yet another reason it was so hard for him to get a house, why he sent his friend to inquire at the bank for mortgage approval, why the loan officer was so surprised when he saw this man with black stripes from the corners of his mouth to his chin show up to sign papers.
He lubricated the hole with his index finger, and as he stuck it through his lip a spool of saliva dripped onto the floor. It was the first time I saw him lose self-assurance; he blushed and our gazes met. He stood to ask for a paper towel from behind the coffee bar, and I stood too, offering him one of the handkerchiefs Aunt Fi bought me, which I now kept in my back pocket. I’d always heard that when you offer a handkerchief, you should expect never it back. I wanted to give him this one. But he looked at it, considered, refused, I insisted, he refused again and there was a long moment before he accepted the four paper towels the barista handed him, wiped the floor and sat back down.
Before we left, Sally emerged. She had a mop of salt-and-pepper curls and seemed very nice, in a chill way. She took a photo of me and Niamh with my arm around her. She bristled, and in the photo there is a space between our heads, her face the portrait of a young woman, mine the portrait of a clown. I wished I could be Niamh’s favorite cousin, a male figure she could confide in, rely on, despite my eventual return to the U.S.
As I rode the bus home I could feel Aunt Fi expecting me. I knew when she called Niamh at Drury’s that she was missing me, that she wanted me to bond with my cousin but she also missed hanging out with me in the garden with a little glass of wine. It was amazing how even now I reverted to being the way I was as a child with Aunt Fi, I thought, how the habit of our relationship could last twenty-five years. I remembered how, when I was four, she took me to see the animated Aladdin film. After, she taught me to search for leftover quarters in payphones. We found one and bought a candy bar. We were a duo then and now—even if our roles in the world had shifted—we still shared the same amount of love. I was conscious of how my coming here was a direct exercise of my privilege—my fellowship allowed me enough time off to cross the Irish Sea weekly if I chose—but I hoped that by eventually reuniting Aunt Fi and my mother, I could further justify the money my father gave me to live abroad, since the pittance from the Scottish Art Foundation was barely enough to live on. But that was a long-term justification. In the meanwhile, I worried that Aunt Fi felt as if she had to dote on me, and that by coming from an environment in which most of the people in my program disliked me, and the very definition of being a student correlated to relative poverty, I allowed and thereby encouraged Aunt Fi to treat me like a spoiled child. Just that afternoon she walked me to the bus and asked: “Are you wearing underwear? Socks? Are you warm enough? You’ve got to zip up your coat,” zipping it for me and then waiting with me and walking me onto the bus. “This is my nephew, he’s going to Henry Street, will you please make sure he gets there,” the bus driver, “Hey how you doing,” either unfazed or affecting normalcy so as not to offend me, a possibly debilitated thirty-year-old man being put onto the bus by his auntie. I wasn’t sure if Aunt Fifi was performing, if she got a kick out of pretending I was still a four-year-old, or if that was her way of spoiling, of loving me.
Aunt Fi was waiting to bring out the bolognese when I arrived. She had changed into a light blue fleece robe with equally as many cigarette-burn holes as her magenta one, and her peroxide blonde hair was pulled back in a short ponytail. “I went to the butcher’s for the beef,” she said. She set an enormous plate before me and I protested as she ground salt over my pasta, which I never do, but when I tried it, it was perfect—same with the cheese and sweet chili sauce she had added to other meals she cooked for me—she knew just how much to add to be delicious. Less delicious was how as I ate she went on about worms that wind up in your food because it’s so fresh, “Little mites,” she repeated, transmitted from one person to the other, “you know how?” She made me hold out my hand and gently slapped it. She went on and it became evident that my absence had not prevented her from enjoying a glass or three of wine in the yard: “Once when I was a caregiver in the hospital, I saw one. It was as thin as a needle and white, and it stuck its head out—” her eyes crossed as she watched her pointed index finger, “So if your asshole is itchy you gotta get Vermex. You can get it at the corner for three eighty-nine, you take it for a week, they’re gone. But if you don’t, you’re gonna be itching away every night at eleven o’clock. You know how you get ‘em?”
As she spoke I saw that I was as powerless against her as when she walked me onto the bus; I kept falling into the role of the four-year-old she knew when she was twenty-six. Only when I laughed at myself could I break the spell.
“What?” she laughed.
“I’ve been listening to you repeat yourself for the past ten minutes.”
She stood, laughing. “You want some chocolate? A cup of tea? I need a ciggie.”
“Sure,” I said, becoming a four-year-old again.
Damian came down. I told him how his mother put me on the bus, how absurd it was for her to put me, a thirty-year-old man on the bus as if I were debilitated, and I wasn’t sure if we were laughing at her, at me or at everything, but we had the craic. I finished my tea, opened a beer per her suggestion and we moved into the damp corner of the garden against the house.
Aunt Fi brought up Mom, said she wished she could see her again. She looked up at me girlishly and asked, “Does she ever steal things?”
I saw in a flash my mother holding a locket, a thin gold chain, pretending it was hers, and me as a child looking on, vaguely conscious that she was doing wrong, but still childlike, having nothing to say, no authority to judge, wanting to ask, but knowing that as a child I was not entitled to the truth. This vision was impossible to verify; it could have been a memory, or conjured by imagination, by Aunt Fi’s desire to hear me say yes. “Yes,” I said.
“Like what?”
“I don’t know. I just imagine her kind of taking things and pretending they were hers.”
“Yeah.” Aunt Fifi grinned. “She always used to do that. Kind of klepto.”
“Why do you think she does that?” It was strange that Mom had had a similar opinion of Aunt Fi, the little sister who took things and never gave them back, or stole them if she wasn’t allowed to borrow.
“Maybe it was growing up in your big family, where you had to fight to stay alive. She’ll be getting off work soon, I’ll text her to call us when she’s done. I hope one day she’ll visit you. It would be nice if you could rekindle your relationship.”
Then Mom called.
Aunt Fi was surprisingly open and sincere in apologizing—for what? inheriting the house, letting so much time pass without talking?—whereas Mom kept it light, she was moving, and about to view an apartment in a blue house, blue being the color associated with the throat chakra, which for Aunt FiFi was most out of order: I’d recognized this when she told me she had an underactive thyroid, as well as by her babbling not just about worms, but about her long-held resentment for the rest of her family, which she’d described to me that morning as those “—who come here and they’re gone in three hours, I love them, they’re always welcome here, but Ian, I don’t know them.” Brothers and sisters and nieces and nephews, who, Aunt Fi had said repeatedly over the past few days, were boring, or cruel or interested in how much money you’re making or what you’re doing. “I have no interest in being around that shower of cunts,” she said that morning with a bundle of laundry in her arms. I was surprised, but when she laughed and told me the derivation of that phrase, how her neighbor had come to her twenty years before and said that after a recent spate of suffering she had no interest in her family or friends at all, and leveled that blow against them, and here Aunt Fi repeated it with a smile and said, “Isn’t that great?” I agreed it was, and reminded myself of the arbitrariness of language, how in this culture words such as that—and insults in general (Joyce was referred to as “that prick with the stick”)—could take on a near-poetic, almost laudatory quality. Almost.
Now, as Mom reverted to her role of protective older sister, Aunt Fi told her she had to come visit, she was unwell. “What’s wrong,” Mom said, suddenly serious, “do you have cancer?”
“No, but I’m unwell.”
“All right.” Mom sighed. I wondered if Aunt Fi was—or always had been?—a hypochondriac. Maybe just a drama queen. It was impossible to tell which of them to believe, to take seriously.
“You’ll have to visit,” I added. “To care for your baby sister.”
“Yeah. I don’t know when I can. I just started this new job nursing. Oh, here's the guy to show me the house. Harry I’ll be right there,” she called. Dropping her voice she whispered, “Who’s Harry?—I don’t even know if that’s his name!” And the sisters laughed as they used to and wished each other love before they signed off.
“Aww,” said Aunt Fi. “She looks good.”
“Yeah, I don’t think she likes it much in her new city.”
“I want to do something for her.”
“It would be nice if she could come here and you sisters could be together again, like old times.”
The next afternoon I had to return to Edinburgh. In the kitchen that morning, Aunt Fi pouted and hugged me. “I woke up sad this morning. I’ve got to be alone again, I’ll have no one to dote on, no one to talk to.” It was true. When Damian returned from work he went straight to his bedroom and Niamh spent almost every night at Sally’s. To Aunt Fi’s children she was unwell, slightly manic. Her anxiety and pain medications made her loopy, she herself confessed.
After breakfast, she went upstairs to lie down, she said she was sad. I felt bad but when I asked if I could do anything and she said no, she’d be fine, I figured maybe she just wanted to be alone. I retreated to the front room, a blanket over my legs, researching the Eleusa type of icon, the tenderness type. It developed in Constantinople during what is known as the Komnenian period—an era of prolonged contact between Byzantine and Latin cultures during the twelfth century Crusades. The Theotokos icon was probably brought to Kiev as a gift to the Grand Duke, who then brought it east to Vladimir, his favorite city. After this, Kiev entered a period of decline and ceased to be the capital of the Rus. Because it no longer had the icon? The icon moved to Moscow in the late fourteenth century, during Tamerlane’s invasion. When Grand Prince Vasili saw it for the first time he spent a night crying over its beauty. That same day Tamerlane’s armies retreated. Later, the icon was moved to the Cathedral of the Dormition in the Moscow Kremlin. Today it’s in the Tretayakov Gallery. I glanced at the plate bearing its image, resting on top of my bag. Somehow, the power of the original icon was embodied in the image on the plate, even though it was a reproduction.
On the wall hung a contemporary rendition of the icon. Aunt FiFi appeared in the doorway. “Where’d you get that one?” I asked.
“I saw it in a Russian shop downtown and had to have it. Three hundred euro. I asked the lady if I could pay for it in installments. Every month when I got my pension check I’d take out fifty euros and ride the bus downtown. And after six months I brought it home. Isn’t it great?”
I nodded. Then Aunt Fi said, “You know I was just thinking…” And this became her daily sermon. It was a great monologue, and it occurred to me while she was speaking to record her, even though I only caught the second half. I’m not sure if she knew; when she was done, she said end of dictation, but that could have been coincidence.
I began recording as she segued into talking about Mom: “I just wanted to reassure her, she was the matriarch, she looked after us, and that’s what she wanted to hear last night and she’s right. But let it go. Let the pain go. We were in dark places. And maybe we were distant from you. And then unfortunately, Johnny went off, Charlie went off, I went off and she was left with the fucking likes of Maureen, Jack, and Tessa who are so like, what are you doing, you have to have a career, you have to have this, and that affected her—whereas she had fun with us. And I think there’s a bit of jealousy there, I think there’s a bit of jealousy between her and Maureen and Tessa and there always was. Whereas I’m not a jealous person, I could give a fuck, and they always knew I was like that. But they always took their problems out on me and when Daddy doted on me they were like, How come we didn’t have that? And that’s sad. So without me doing anything and being nasty, they hate me, because I had Daddy’s love and then every Christmas, I’m going to Ireland, Daddy had a brill—you know how you’re hangin’ out?—Daddy had a brilliant time, he would stay six or seven weeks during the summer, and he would come back for Christmas another six or seven—and sometimes I’d wake up and come downstairs and he’d be sitting there, you know, in the same chair you like, and I’d be like Oh hi Daddy. He wouldn’t even tell me when he was coming. But that was the way we were and that was the way Daddy was. And that’s how I am with you. But when Anne moved with you guys out west, he sort of lost her? But he loved her and he doted on her, but what I think, now that I’m older, he saw that I was weak and on my own, but he didn’t realize I would’ve managed, I would’ve lived in a tent, he knew, right, Anne has a house and is secure, I need to look after Fiona, I know Anne will look after Fiona, but the reality is, to me Ian, this is bricks and mortar to me. What I’m saying is I’d like to do something for Anne, if Anne is having a meltdown, and she can’t stay in the States, come over here, I’ll look after her, and she can stay here until she’s old. And she wouldn’t have to worry about a penny. She doesn’t need a pension, I’ll look after her, she doesn’t need insurance, I’ll look after her. We have a roof over our heads. And as you said last night, I said, Ian what am I going to do, I’d like to do something for Anne, and then you said the nicest thing: she could come here and you sisters could be together again. She can stay here till she dies and we can be buried together. And if that makes…I want her to know she has a home here. And I want her to feel like, you see Anne is very soft, and shit happens, I know I laughed, I know I took the piss out of her going to jail because I know Anne? Okay it was serious at the time. But what did Anne say, I can’t believe he did that to me, Anne’s a softie. She just wants to be LOVED. And that’s all it is. End of dictation. Anyway, enjoy. You want a coffee?”
“I’m good.”
“Okay, I’m going out in the garden.”
But she was seized by a coughing fit, a whooping wheeze; she waved at her neck as if trying to cool herself down, made the international gesture for water, set the cup of water I gave her on the kitchen counter, indicated for me to pull her sweater off and hand her paper towels to cough into. Then she crouched onto all fours in her tank top and pajama bottoms, coughing and spitting into a trash bag. But she was not coughing up any phlegm. I wondered if she was acting, if she was a hypochondriac or just a drama queen. When she recovered enough to say, “Gimme the water,” I handed her the glass and began to laugh. “You fuckin’ prick,” she coughed again, “I’m over here dyin’ and you’re laughin’.”
“Sorry.” I helped her up. “Aunt Fifi, you gotta stop smoking. You’re on, what, two packs a day?”
“One and a half.” She drank half the glass of water, gulping loudly, streams running down either side of her chin, and set it down. She wiped her mouth with the back of her hand and belched loudly. “It’s my one vice, though.” She pouted like a little girl. “I need a little ciggie. Where are they anyway?” And she looked at me and laughed, grabbed the pack from the counter and opening the back door said, “Just promise me that when I die, you’ll stick needles in me to make sure I’m dead. They used to do that you know, they’d bury people alive at Glasnevin.”
“I will,” I said.
While Aunt Fi was outside Niamh came through the door. We hugged and she said she was stressed, trying to get a place of her own soon so she didn’t have to spend so much time at Sally’s. “My anxiety is like this ball in my stomach. Do you ever have that?”
“Sometimes,” I said. “But I sleep with crystals under my pillow, and if I’m really stressed, I meditate and listen to binaural beats on the internet to balance the kundalini energy in my body.” Niamh looked at me like I was crazy, which is to say, she looked at me the way most people do, though her head was cocked a few degrees farther to the right, as if what I was saying might contain some sense. “Do you know about this?” I asked her. She shook her head. “The kundalini energy, the serpent energy, exists at the base of your spine and charges your body’s chakras, the seven energy points throughout your body. Each chakra is associated with a color, so if you meditate on that color, it can with blockages at the point. The root chakra grounds you, the sex chakra relates to emotions, the navel chakra is tied to ego, the heart chakra is about love, the throat chakra—”
“Niamh!” Aunt FiFi said, re-entering the kitchen with her arms open. I kicked the door shut so the drizzle and damp wouldn’t ooze into the warm kitchen. “You want some tea?”
Aunt Fi filled the kettle. I whispered to Niamh, “Your mother told me she has an underactive thyroid, a symptom associated with the throat chakra, the color blue. Aunt FiFi,” I called over the rush of water in the sink, “do you like the color blue?”
“No.” She turned the water off. “I hate that color.”
“Why?”
“Because it’s sad. I wrote a poem about it when I was a girl, Blue is the color of sadness, blue is the color that comes between me and you. I got a good grade on it, but it was sad.”
“Yes, blue can be sad, but from sadness also comes joy. Like blues music. Do you ever sing in the shower?”
“I don’t like being asked questions, Ian, it makes me think of my family, like I have something to explain and I don’t.”
Aunt FiFi said she was going to lie down. “It’s too sad to say goodbye,” she said.
In the hallway I slid fifty euro into the teapot that Aunt Fi keeps her change in and when I emerged from my room with my bag, Aunt Fi was standing at the top of the stairs. I walked up to hug her goodbye. She pouted as I turned away. “Don’t worry Aunt FiFi. I’ll be back soon.” She only pouted harder, as if mocking herself. As I turned, my bag knocked against the miniature Ghirlandaio Virgin triptych on the windowsill. I moved to right it but she held up a hand. “Don’t. It was meant to be.”
I believed her, though I’m not sure why. I left it fallen and wondered how long it would remain like that.
Aunt Fi followed me downstairs to the door where we hugged. As I walked out, she stood pouting and I remembered that cold Brooklyn day when I was seven with snow banked on the sidewalk, Aunt Fi smiling sadly before she got into a cab, exhaust trailing from its tailpipe in the orange winter light, how she was going to live in Ireland with her newborn Niamh swaddled in her arms, Niamh who I was jealous of for taking Aunt Fi’s attention from me; how that day ushered me into late childhood, when I first acknowledged a difference between my own internal world, which I had shared with Aunt Fifi, and the external world of endings and divisions and cruelties which destroyed wonder. I blinked all this back and told myself to occupy a more traditional masculine role, to stop being a sentimental baby, to comfort Aunt Fi the way she’d comforted me the past five days. I turned and waved and told her mentally, Don’t worry Aunt FiFi, I’ll be back in six weeks. And she heard me and believed me and felt better.
Niamh hugged me goodbye in front of the bus, she squeezed me tight as I said, “I’ll see you soon.” She tightened her hug again and let me go. She slipped some change into my pocket. I protested that her mom had already given me change for the bus. “For next time,” she said.
Even now, when I feel lonely or weak I admire the plate with the image of the Russian Virgin with Christ Child, the Theotokos of Vladimir. I think of that lost world of my youth, the wonder I used to know, as well as other lost histories. I mentioned that the Theotokos of Vladimir hangs in the Tretyakov Gallery today. I visited there ten years ago. I was totally ignorant of icons then, though I remember the quiet holiness of those life-sized, cracked wooden panels of faded crimson and gold and azure. I was impressed and overwhelmed by them, most of which hung behind bulletproof glass. Sadly, I have no concrete memory of the Theotokos of Vladimir. I’m tempted to imagine a memory, to imagine that I paused before it, attracted to its radiance, though it’s more likely that overwhelmed as I was, I could not distinguish it from the others in that room, being totally ignorant of icons as I was. Maybe this lacuna will bring me back to the Tretyakov Gallery one day, the way my love for Aunt Fi brought me back to her, back to the family home in Dublin which I visited for the first time with my grandfather and my mother when I was nine months old, where I took my first steps, well before Aunt Fi lived there, which I visited for the second time more than twenty-eight years later.
I sometimes wish I had a film of my life to which I could return so as to appreciate certain moments I may have overlooked, or to more deeply engrain them into my memory. But perhaps not having such a record is a good thing; it allows me to fill in any gaps with my imagination.
Daniel Adler was born in Brooklyn, NY. He has studied at NYU, Edinburgh University and is finishing his MFA at University of South Carolina. His writing has appeared in Entropy, Queen Mob's Tea House, The Opiate and elsewhere.
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