Honey

The academic gowns swish through the atrium. Mid-morning does not seem a likely time for wine, but this is a celebration and the glasses are refilled with gusto. The new graduates whose Commencements Ceremony this is swirl the bottles with the expertise born of the work which expanded their college grants.
      There are people here who can identify the collars. People who can interpret the ermine trim, the scarlet cowl, the dark blue ribands. The law graduates are shawled in white fur. More than half of them are women. What will happen to these young women now? What are they hoping for, or planning? Have they, like this daughter here, a hope of the Bench, an eye on the path towards Senior Counsel?
      The bright winter morning is a smoky gloom inside but the atmosphere is energetic with gratification. Everyone has tried to make the day memorable. The college with its dedicated speeches, the long articulated Latin phrases, the careful naming. Parents, guardians, partners and friends wear smart clothes, bear flowers, champagne, talk of bookings for lunch, flash their cameras.
      Enjoying the day for what it is I let others preserve it. Who knows, who can tell, what is memorable? My glittering girl may remember this Commencements Ceremony as her taking-off point but there is no guarantee of that. I may remember it as the period to a contract, the contract signed in the blood of her beginning. I look for nothing more than this hubbub of happy strangers, her glee, my relief.
      She comes back to me through the throng, gasping, she says, for a cigarette. The mortarboard is at a rakish slant, its tassel swinging like her earrings. Her collar has slipped to reveal a shoulder, a vulnerable pale bone. Her hands flaunt the rosy wine-glass.
      We make for a corner in the sun outside. As we move a man catches my elbow. Kindly he says:
      "There's no reason why you should remember me."
      Pretending a confusion of handbag, parchment scroll, wine-glass, I do not stretch out my hand. He is a stranger.
      He explains: "I once lived with you in Kerry."
      The wine lurches from my daughter's goblet. We both laugh, this is a mischievous introduction.
      "No!--I mean, we both shared the same guest house in Ballyferriter. One summer. Dun Ciomhain--do you remember Ballyferriter?"
      Thirty years ago. Ballyferriter. Baile na nGall.
      Smerwick Harbour, the Three Sisters. The broad white sweep of glittering beach and Dun an Oir, the townland of gold, of death.
      I don't remember him. He gives a name.
     

"You don't remember me. It's a long time ago. But you haven't changed much. I would have known you anywhere--you were there for three weeks. Always with your head in a book."
      Suddenly my daughter recognizes me in his memory. She looks at me with amused fondness. Whatever past this stranger was going to call up with his reminiscences is annulled into literature. I am the woman she has known. This is not a shadow of her father who has left our lives. This is safe, a visitor from beyond her world of absences.
      "Some things never change!" she laughs as she turns to greet her brother. They both smile kindly as that Kerry holiday is unrolled like a map to a country they will never visit. My past, not theirs. A place with no photographs to haunt them.
      This is a man from thirty years ago. We knew each other's name and no more. We may have danced together at the ceil¡dhe at Bru na Graige or walked home in separate but affiliated groups along the dimming summer roads, swishing at the fuchsia still glowing in the dark high damp hedgerows.
      We may have met as we shook rain from sweaters and plimsolls in the dank hallway. Departing on malodorous buses to different ends of the country--his accent has a Northern tinge--we may have wished each other well, and meant it. It is as though someone has touched my heart's flesh with a finger. Let me have been nice to him I pray as if the prayer could make me have been so.
      I gaze at him helpless with amazement. With awe. The space between us contains our imagined lives, what we have achieved or endured. What we have obtained without intention. What we have become.
      He must have been as tall as this even when he knew me.
      Now the hair is grey but not sparse. He is a little stooped, but looks well-dressed. Well-to-do, which appeases my heart. A boyish look, open as he awaits my recalcitrant memory.
      I have no recollection of him at all. Nothing in the flood of awareness his words undam brings him back to me as a youth.
      How can it be that his mind has me in it and mine excludes him? In his kindness he acknowledges this; there is no reason, none at all he says, why I should remember. Perhaps this is true.
      There is something I can offer: hadn't he been one of the lads who had spent so much time with Sean O Ciomhain?
      Yes! His smile is a beam. My guess is a good one. Yes. He had spent a lot of time with Sean. It was important to talk as often as possible with Sean whose Irish language was so pure despite the many years in Massachusetts.
      He speaks easily, glad to have found himself. Yes. He talks of Sean's life in America, in Springfield. A Gaeltacht in itself, an image of the landscape of language we had been trying to encounter in Kerry. Wasn't that amazing? We shared that wonderment of the Irish-speaking ghetto in Massachusetts.
     

Ah--isn't this amazing? My smile is no longer blank. Our eyes engage although there is nothing to read except the mystery of this meeting. His children, my children, our offspring, are somewhere on the periphery of our shared vision. Amazing, to speak again together of Sean O Ciomhain and Massachusetts. To breathe with the words that blowing mist off the headlands, its drift of turf-reek and salt.
      Our eyes graze the boundaries in between. Years knotted like grass in the ditches. We look at one another, a look which must last us now as long as we have already survived, undulating like the long walk across the cliffs to Slea Head and Ferriter's Castle.
      The profiles loom with the slant of the Three Sisters. With the long noiseless silver curve of Smerwick Harbour.
      Amazing! To be here. As old as we are. To have children as old as they are, as good, as acclaimed as they are. We are caught in the square shape of the sun in the atrium. A winter sun but something warms us.
      His family--an engineering graduate to congratulate--reclaims him. An attractive wife, her face bright. I am grateful for his air of well-being, of completion. He does not question my solitariness; who would, these days, if I do not? And yet, for a blank second, I almost wish for, almost desire, his curiosity. Life has made us too polite.
      His farewell is like a benediction. Long ago we must have wished each other well. I wish him well now. I hear his gentle blessing with gratitude as if it implies that our wishes, having once come almost true will come at least as true again. Our adventures were not shared, but we survived them.
      And what, demands my family--a lawyer to congratulate--was I doing in Kerry? They are almost proud of me that my past has outlasted thirty years.
      I am proud too. A past is one of the few things the old can have that the young might envy. I feel glad, without understanding why, that they have been reminded that I existed before they did, was known before they knew me. Before their father knew me.
      What was I doing in Kerry? The same as he, that known stranger. Learning the Irish language. It was something we all wanted to do, then.
      I had not succeeded. I allowed distractions: the sweep of rain across Mount Brandon and the black crevices of Brandon Creek. The grey reeking ruins of Dun an Oir, a townland transformed into a slaughterhouse as Spaniards sheltered hopelessly among its cabins. Walking the headlands I heard waves of music surge under the cliffs, the promontories.
      Lines of poetry--we were very young, after all--rolled along the boreens as the fuchsia buds snapped open under my fingers, spilling pollen from the anthers. We would have been sixteen, seventeen. No more. In love only with what we imagined of ourselves. In touch with the rim of our lives, conscious of a beginning.
      Those are my memories of Kerry, of Ballyferriter. Those, and my own conversations with Sean O Ciomhain, conversations in English about America. About the conflict between the life he had to live all summer long--host, professor, folklorist, story-teller--and the winter life of turf-hoarder and herdsman, or rheumatism and the Christmas letter from Springfield and of silence and of rain. A conflict he was not equipped to understand or to explain.
      There is too the memory of honey.
      Precise as a dream I see the cabbage leaf, its clean green dimples upturned to form a plate and the comb thick with juice. Being a city child I thought of the honey as raw. Sean had brought it from the hive and took pleasure in my ignorance, my amazed fear of the thriving bees.
      The hives were behind the house, in itself a featureless building common in Kerry, grey and spare and functional, imposed on the landscape rather than part of it. It was not the kind of house from which the emigrants had departed. It was the kind to which they returned, if they did return.
      Sean had softened his with hollyhocks, blackcurrants, rampant fuchsia hedging the garden against the fields where sand grew. The milk had a salt taste to it; the honey swelling on the quilted cabbage leaf had a tang of flowers. Its aftertaste was scarlet.
      I sat on the bank beside the house. I sat on clover and campion, butterwort, on scratchy sand spurrey. Warmth and damp invaded my skin. The sun was heating the drenched ditches. The honey steamed on the leaf. The light caught the veins twisted like briars on Sean's hand as he showed me how to scoop the honey with my fingers.
      He was an old man but there was a vigour in his hands, the energy of knowledge, the authority of custom. It was a delight to him to have such as I was--willing to listen, to respond to the continuing mystery of his life, where he had been, why he was here.
      I should have learned from him the names of the wildflowers of the ditch but I never did. Sea rocket is rocket still, sandwort only that, the hedge parsley parsley forever.
      I know the Irish word for honey: meala. From the Irish sweetness. I think of the word with my tongue as I rock on the cobbles on our way out of the college. There are other events to fill the day before our family dinner this evening, the ceremonial union of what we call, what has become, our family. The one-parent family. There is a sweetness in this day's success. It is not all mine, but as I make my way to a seminar on Women's Studies it is relishable, more real now than the remembered molten honey on its honeycomb of leaf.
      As women now we sit together, all our journeys joining us at the heart of a world we have made for ourselves. Yet we wait for transformation while a poet evokes her past. She offers us a memory of deliberately following in her father's footsteps to walk, as he had done, on forbidden grass.
      She parses the recollection into phrases. The rightness of it, its neatness as verse and as metaphor, its image of endorsed rebellion are all applauded. We are all, here, anxious for ourselves. We are all looking for the magic that will give us back the meaning of our lives.
      Observer more than alchemist for I have already found a mystery in my day I admire the transfiguration of footstep to poetry. The investment of imagination in the real, the actual, the remembered.
     

There is the touch at my elbow. The apology: "You won't remember me. You were only three years old . . ."
      This is not true. We have never met. This woman who must be much older than she looks does not remember me at all. Her memory is of two girls--the elder, the younger--and a baby brother.
      The components are of the family alive before I was. She had played, she says, in our garden. She thinks I must be the younger of the two girls. She speaks of the house I knew and of my parents. Her own mother had died, her father had remarried and she had been bitterly unhappy. A step-child in a country where such a relationship occurred only through death and was rare enough to make her, among her peers, remarkable.
      "Times change," she said; she would not be remarkable now.
      Some kind of shelter and of ease had been available in our garden.
      "Your mother was really lovely-looking, wasn't she?"
      I think I knew that she was, but I did not know her then.
      "She used to include me. She made those fancy-dress outfits out of crepe paper, and she made them for me as well."
      She did not make them for me at that time. I was not born.
      I am being introduced to my mother's life as my children were to mine. I try to explain but this woman doesn't want to hear me. It is as if I have to be the person she thinks I am. Something is happening for which she has waited a long time. I must substantiate her memory.
      A grief builds within me. If I had been that child I would have had more of my mother. The crepe paper dresses, the parties with singing and dancing in our small suburban garden with its apple-trees, its lavender and Japanese anenomes. I would have made different choices. I would have married differently.
      In the confusion of my wish to reassure this stranger at my elbow I think the baby brother she describes could have been the brother younger than myself. The brother now dead, a possibility unthinkable then and unbearable now. I want to say it to her. To confess that we were told to keep an eye on the pram but something happened, something terrible, not then but now when we saw it coming and could not evade it. Now, when we felt, still feel that we had taken our eye off the pram.
      Instead I insist on chronology. We shake out the different members of the family and select, like children at a sweet-counter, the siblings she names as alive before I was. My father walking to work. An uncle giving us backers on his bicycle. My grandmother accusing one of us of "shaping," showing off.
      "And your mother. She used to give us little picnics in the garden. Bread and jam. Biscuits she made herself. She was the first person ever to give me honey, she put it in little sandwiches, tiny triangles with all that sweetness in them."
      She stops. Her mouth trembles as if she were gathering herself for something else.
      "Once she said something to me. It went through me. I had a lovely little figure and your sister was very thin. We were in the kitchen. What can we have been talking about, or doing?"
      Her face is tense. This has been a long anguish. All through her life she has remembered a time when not only was I not the child she recalls, I wasn't even born. A time when she was thirteen. Fifty years ago.
      "I don't know. Maybe something happened to upset your sister. Maybe I said something or repeated something my stepmother had said.
      "I remember how your mother looked at me and said: Margaret is just as womanly as you. It went right through me at the time."
      Womanly. It goes right through me. My mother's vanished admonition. This stranger's enduring pain. Out of the sunlit garden had come this sadness in the kitchen where the little picnics were prepared.
      I think of the photographs in black and white with my sisters and a brother in them. An older girl who may have been this woman. The girls stand together in printed cotton frocks and cardigans. I remember the sharp sweet smell of the bolts of fabric my mother used to bring home, unrolling the glossy cotton on the dining-room table where she did her sewing, the spread of flowers flooding the surface before becoming skirts and shirred bodices and Sunday frocks.
      The little girls stand by the see-saw, the dresses tucked into the legs of their knickers. Who held the camera? Who preserved them in their play, their heads of curls tied with bows of white taffeta? The kind of ribbons, I remember, which shrieked when being tied.
      Her life, she tells me, has gone well. A good job, a good marriage, she is a grandmother. But she had to speak to me when she saw me at this meeting on Women's Studies, seeing a face, hearing a name remembered from all those years ago.
      It had not been me. My sisters, the elder, still-living brother. My mother. These had been real to her before I knew them. She remembered them from a time before my life began. There had been no me to remember.
      Nor had there been a me in Kerry. There had been someone, someone, for the kind and successful man to recall. If I do not remember meeting him there, neither do I remember myself.
      Incidents, yes. I remember the incidents. Memory is accurate enough on happenings.
      We can't rely on it, though. How could it be that in this one day I meet two people--one of whom I never knew, one of whom I don't remember--in whose lives I have somehow been held at anchor? Anchored by language, by my mother, and by a more retentive eye than mine.
      All I remember is the shared garden. The rain, the smell, the honey. As if these were all there could have been. The absence of my self strikes me like a stubbed toe in holiday sandals. Where have I been all my life? What was I doing, my head in a book, my hair tied in ribbons? Walking the headlands, dreaming of a future, sea-mist in my face, honey sandwiches among the blackcurrant bushes. From these I entered my life, leaving some traces of my passage.
      Other lives were touched by me, more deeply than I touched these revenants. I have left my mark. My impressed bruise has lingered on landscapes long deserted by what I must still call, can only call, my self. Going to meet again those whom I call my own, those in whom I will live only as long, and as accurately, as they remember me, I feel the swelling of regret. It hurts me now that I have never liked honey. It is too sweet. Too sticky, its traces lasting long beyond its taste.