It's Hard To Be Holy

EP. 18: Chapter V

Whatever can be said about Colin and Mary Malone, it should be stated that their marriage, like most marriages of their time, survived. Unlike their peers, however, their contentions with each other were more for show than symptoms of problematic acrimony. They were more of a 'team' than most understood, a routine designed for an audience. They were entertainers. They loved a story, a laugh, an act. There was always a punchline. It's how they managed through life.
Neither came from blissful backgrounds. Colin's family were repressive and stern, while Mary's—she was the middle child of 16—was inattentive at best. It is no wonder they sought liberation, and found it in each other. It is a curious thing to realize that if they'd been younger, of a more modern generation, neither would have married the other, or perhaps married at all. That's not to say that they didn't love each other, they did, and deeply, but it's more a commentary on the nature of their love. They were friends first. Friends always. Sex was a bonus, and family...an afterthought. In their younger years, they shared a dream of being performers, of taking an actual stage, but to do all this, perform that is, make love, be friends, they signed the only accepted contract of their time. A marital one.

As Ireland crumbled under the weight of revolution, civil war, and then de Valerian austerity, off the married friends went, Colin with his fiddle, Mary on the piano. She was an exceptional pianist, though Bud never did hear her play. By the time he arrived on the scene, his grandmother's hands were gnarled with arthritis.

If only they'd been ten years younger. If only they'd been born in a different country, different climate. Their act could have been famous in the land of opportunity. 

Imagine it! 

Two wedded musicians, playing the favorites of the time, carrying out staged, bickering sessions for the audience's delight. They should have been loved! They should have been trailblazers! But fame proved too elusive, Irish audiences too conservative, the couple...too honest. Then there was the problem of sex, which, as it so often does, with friendships, got in the way.

Their oldest son, James, (named for the great socialist James Connolly of the Uprising), was born in 1922, three months after their wedding. Their second son, Pádraig, (named for Pádraig Pearse, the conscious of the Uprising), arrived two years later. But neither of these boys were the problem. No, the act could, and did, survive for sometime. What's cuter than a family of comedic musicians? No, the act would have been fine if they could have just stopped there—

1929. The Year of the Oops!

'Oops, there goes the stock market.'

'Oops! Here comes a Niamh.'

The money, the jobs, the audience and entertainment, already thin and worn, dried up overnight. The friendship fractured under the reality of finances. The alcohol and 'black moods' of both spouses set in.

'It wasn't violent!' Niamh tried to explain when her son was older. 'Just...quiet...'

It didn't take long for the family to disintegrate. As soon as they were old enough, the sons abandoned their parents. James went to America, while Pádraig rebelled more openly and went off to London to join the millions of Irishmen queuing up to tar English roads. It nearly killed his father, but Pádraig was Colin through and through, and did as he pleased. 

The father never spoke of, nor to, his youngest son again. 

Niamh, out of the shadow of her brothers for the first time in her life, turned out to be the biggest problem the family had ever encountered. By the standards of her time, she was a demon. Short hems and a boy a minute weren't the aspirations of a respectable, Irish daughter. Pithy scandal after pithy scandal mounted in County Cork, a yoke around Niamh's neck, constant ignominy for her parents.

Then Europe, plagued by a famine of discontent and hunger and centuries of festering hatred, lost its collective mind. Sins of the past came home to roost, and strong men went to march, and try as all might, the dead could not be ignored.

Pádraig, his wife, and their infant daughter were crushed to death when their apartment was demolished by the Luftwaffe in 1941. 

Two years later, James Malone, a proud volunteer for his adopted country, fell to German sniper in the hills of Sicily.

There can be no more sinful and savage and enduring pain than the loss of a child, let alone two in their prime. What remains of your life will always be inadequate. The splendor of the world shall grow impossibly faint. What could have been said, what should have been remedied, those chances gone, and only the iniquity of abject failure will be left for comfort. Part of a parent clamors then for death, for only death can be a relief from such sorrow, while another knows you must go on. Unwilling and loath to do so, treading into this new and bleak existence, adrift forever, but alive.

It was all too much for Colin and Mary. They needed a new beginning, a fresh start for their marriage and their daughter, who internalized her brothers' deaths with shields of cold resentment and deliberate consternation for the conservatism around her.

What purpose is there to a life, became her reasoning, but to live it to its fullest potential? There is only death at the end of the road, and at that final moment, what is the purpose of regret? She determined then to reject any austerity that society, or parental instruction, put upon her. She would live her life on her own terms.

But Mary and Colin knew better than most what consequences would come of this, and they made the only decision that was left to them. To America, that beastly kingdom of fresh starts, now in the prime of its power, they came.

America. 

It is so many things to so many different people, but it has never been what so many new arrivals dream it to be. It is not better times and riches. It is hungry. It is self-absorbed. It is merciless. Like so many off the boat, the Malones arrived with no money and no real prospects, but far from the saving grace it was meant to be, the New World proved more miserable than anything they'd left behind. They came to St. Gregory's in 1946, for that was where James had landed, and soon, the intake of alcohol and the 'black moods', the regrets and grudges ate at them again. No money was saved. No hope was found. Their daughter's attitudes only worsened. Mary begged to go home.

'I don't wanna die here,' she told her husband. 'I don't wanna die here. Promise me ya won't let me die here.'

And Colin would hold her close and promise her. Someday, he'd tell her, life and fortune would smile on them again, and then they could return. He didn't believe it as he said it, and she didn't believe it when she heard it, but like all immigrants, what else did they have to hold onto? 

The curse of the alien in America. To dream of a home you know you'll never get back to. How many have clamored ashore for a future, intent on improvement, resolute not to be melted down, only to watch their culture, their histories, their very essences and reason steadily be sanded away, molded into the stew of the New World. For it is new and ever changing, not truly beholden to any past, but incrementally evolving. What can be more terribly beautiful than that for a country? What can be as devastating for its people?

Colin and Mary Malone were too old to make anything of themselves. They'd come too late. For them, America was an epitaph.

But for Niamh...