Green Beans

The last summer of my grandmother’s life, she spent her afternoons on the back porch of the saltbox-style house she owned on Long Island’s East End, cutting vegetables for the family dinner. Her expertise was fresh picked green beans. A devout Catholic, she would work and pray at the same time, her lips moving in rhythm with the paring knife in her hands, the beans serving as substitute Rosary Beads, reciting oaths she learned in Ireland, growing up in the southern village of Ballylongford, on the tidal banks of the River Shannon and close to the turbulent North Atlantic.

I always wondered if my grandmother thought of Ireland while she cut beans; her house was less than a mile from the ocean, and from the porch one heard even the mildest of swells. Perhaps the sound was a comfort to her, a familiarity that made it easier to adapt to a new country, why she never felt the need or desire to return to Ireland. “I like to remember it the way it was,” she told me once when I asked on the subject. “When I was young.”

It’s still hard for me to visualize my grandmother as a girl. I only knew her as an older lady, with matronly gray hair and deep wrinkles that hid kind but probing blue eyes. But there was no bitterness in the folds, even though she had cause to embrace the feeling. Like many Irish immigrants in the 1920’s, my grandmother came to America seeking relief from famine, not fortune. There was also “The Troubles” to contend with – the escalating violence that spilled down from Northern Ireland, where Protestant communities loyal to British rule squared off in bloody battle against Roman Catholic nationalists. During this time, the school in my grandmother’s village was burned to the ground by British forces, and Catholics in the area were forbidden to congregate or attend church services. Yet I never heard her say a bad word about the English, never heard her complain about a childhood interrupted, an education limited, a family forced apart. My grandmother seemed to have come to peace with the past and had left whatever trauma she experienced in Ireland in Ireland.

This was not the case with my grandfather. He was from the Northeast of Ireland, a town called Enniskillen less than a 100 miles from Belfast, and grew up in the proverbial “eye of the storm.” He died long before I was born, but it was rumored that he was active in the struggle for Irish independence, was involved with illegal guns and needed to get out of the country as fast as possible. His passport and citizenship papers give credence to the idea that his passage was hurried, harried and suspect. For one thing, he was listed as standing five feet eleven inches tall, slight of build and having brown eyes. In reality, he was a tall, immense man, broad-shouldered and well over six feet, with a ruddy, handsome face, strong jaw-line, thick mop of curly dark hair and eyes as blue as the ocean in summer.

Which is when and where he met my grandmother, a Sunday evening at the beach, when the Irish domestics in the area gathered for a weekly picnic dinner. They were working at the time for different households, she as a linen maid and he as a gardener, but after marrying they came together to serve one family. It was a good life – along with wages they were given a home to live, and during the depression they always had full stomachs and coal in the boiler. And in time, two sons were born and raised, the youngest being my father.

I know my grandmother was grateful for what was given her and was fiercely devoted to America. By all accounts, my grandfather was equally thankful, but perhaps revenge and resentment clouded his patriotism. My father tells of the worry he endured as a child seeing his father, in the early years of World War II, when the Germans bombed London, listening in the family’s kitchen to a transistor radio, to reports of the shelling, rooting for England’s destruction, no matter what it might mean to America and its other allies.

That last summer, I also felt under attack, but not from any outside source, but an internal battle led by deep insecurities. Newly graduated from college, I was lost in that aimless way that leaves the mind unmoored while the body stays anchored. Mostly I drank, spending nights in bars and mornings at the beach, trying to wash away hangovers in the bracing sea. In between I spent time with my grandmother on the porch. What she really liked was for me to read aloud the horoscopes from the day’s newspaper – not just her own (she was a Sagittarius), but every sign in the chart, pausing to listen to the foretelling of riches and love, danger and safety, challenges to embrace, opportunities to avoid, decisions to make.

With the summer coming to an end, I knew I had to make a decision; knew I had to break the spell of my inertia and find a job, start a career, grow up. Unable to sleep one night, I took a solitary walk around the house. I stopped in the porch and sat in my grandmother’s chair. Light from a full moon pierced through the window and bounced off the tabletop. On the side of the table lay the paper. It was open to the horoscopes. Scraps of beans covered Capricorn, my sign. I considered moving them aside and reading my future, but instead leaned back in the chair and closed my eyes, drifting away to the sound of cresting waves, content, at least for the moment, to be part of an ending journey, not a new one.