The Importance of Being Irish

THE OVERLOOK

By Tom Clavin

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Recently, I was informed that early next year there would be a new addition to the family. And that made me flash back to a previous generation of my family, and especially Uncle Jimmy, who had fit perfectly the stereotype of beefy Irish New York cop on the beat. He had imparted to me a sense of superiority about being of Irish descent during what remains one of the most indelible scenes in my memory. His intentions were good, but I later realized that is how people can look down on those of other races and ethnicities.

That scene with Uncle Jimmy took place when I was around five. He was the oldest of the five Clavin siblings, old enough to enlist in the Navy and see action in the Pacific Theater during the war. His destroyer had been hit by a kamikaze yet he returned home unharmed and joined the New York Police Department. In the play A Moon for the Misbegotten, Eugene O’Neill wrote about Josie: “The map of Ireland is stamped on her face.” That was Jimmy Clavin.

One summer evening he left his beat in the Grand Concourse section of the Bronx to find which bar on Bainbridge Avenue my father had gone to after work. Uncle Jimmy brought him home, he and my mother tossed him into bed, and before leaving he suggested we enjoy a cool breeze on the roof. We lived on the top floor of a walk-up, so reaching the sky, so to speak, was only one flight up.

A few minutes later, only my uncle and I were standing on the tar-paper roof that was still warm from that afternoon’s sunlight. I wondered if he had something important to say. He was a man of few words, especially with children; he married late, to a woman a decade older, and never had any. If he didn’t talk, it was still nice to be cooling off with him on the roof, with its 360-degree panorama of the Bronx, the light of millions of stars above and the glow of thousands of lights below.

But suddenly, Uncle Jimmy began speaking, his right arm outstretched and moving slowly in a circle, index finger pointing. I’ll clean up some of the language:

“See there, Tommy, that’s the neighborhood where the Puerto Ricans and other Spanish live. Over there, you got the Chinese and whatever, Japanese too, though I gotta tell ya, I ain’t too fond of them still. There, that’s what the blacks call home. Over on that side are the Italians, though I hear most of the top Mafia guys are moving to Long Island. And here, where we are, is the Irish. That’s us. Everybody is where they belong, in their own neighborhoods, and here we are like in the middle of the world. Joe DiMaggio once thanked God for making him a Yankee. I thank God for making me Irish.”

He paused. I waited. But he apparently had nothing more to say. After a few more minutes, we went downstairs, his billy club and handcuffs rattling against the stairway railing.

My grandfathers were pointed to with great pride for being Irish, though not for much else. My father’s father was a ruddy-faced man nicknamed “Red” because of his hair and there was a hint of a brogue in his cigarette-scarred voice. I was reminded repeatedly that there was nothing the Irish weren’t good at, including having defeated Hitler and Hirohito. James Clavin Sr. continued to overlook that he himself had not succeeded. Heart problems and alcohol robbed him of the ability to work much. My grandmother – whose name was Elizabeth but was called Nancy by her male friends (don’t ask) – had exiled him to a small apartment above a candy store off the Grand Concourse.

On major holidays, with some reluctance, one of his kids would fetch him for the dinner my grandmother prepared at her house. He gave me my first wallet and glass of beer, both for my seventh birthday. The last time I saw him was a couple of years later, not long before his final heart attack, when my father took me to visit him on a bright summer day. His apartment was dark and smelled sour with old sweat and beer. We sat at a rickety card table and he showed me how to scissor shamrocks out of pages of the Daily News.

My mother and her sister and brother were known as “Obie’s kids.” They were the children of Walter O’Brien and not to be trifled with because he was as quick with his fists as he was to bray out “Danny Boy.” He was champion of the saloons, and that was partly how he made a living.

After serving in the Army in World War I – he always claimed it was in the “Fighting 69^th,” but the closest to it he ever got to that regiment was watching the James Cagney movie – Walter O’Brien got married and found work as a chauffeur. But he made better money in saloons and speakeasies in the 1920s as a singing waiter. He had a fine tenor voice, and for an extra buck or two he’d break into a version of “Danny Boy” that would have patrons smelling the peat in the bogs of County Cork.

He and my grandmother raised their three children on Bainbridge Avenue, which in its heyday had no fewer than 14 Irish bars lining it. I helped my father and his brothers count and often frequent each one. Walter O’Brien had blazed a trail there years earlier, and in the process spent most of what he earned. He took to taking off for long periods of time, returning to the neighborhood when he was flat broke. He sang and drove his way back into the good graces of most in the all-Irish Catholic neighborhood, then disappeared again. My mother, the oldest, was very conflicted about him, recognizing him as both an irresponsible father and a charming Irish scamp. (Watch the old classic A Tree Grows in Brooklyn and those are the O’Briens portrayed in it.)

Somehow, ol’ Walter talked his way back into the Army in 1942 and spent the rest of the war in it. Years later, his kids married or moved away, and his wife was mostly a recluse, only going to and from her job at the New York Telephone Company. He drifted off, wandering and checking himself into VA hospitals for free room and board. The last time I saw him was at one of those hospitals on Long Island. My mother brought me but it was no warm family reunion. We made stilted small talk for a few minutes, he asked me about school (I was in seventh grade), and he gave me a dollar.

My grandfather lived to be 86, dying and being buried somewhere in upstate New York. I remember being shocked and confused and a bit contemptuous at how dramatically my mother cried when she received the call.

My family’s move from the Perry Avenue building where there was an Irish name next to every buzzer in the lobby to a three-bedroom ranch on Long Island was more of an eye-opener. I went to school with kids of Italian, Polish, German, and other descents, Jewish kids, and there was one black kid in the school, the son of the school’s janitor. There was no Catholic school yet, so every kid went to the public school. In retrospect, I’m very glad to have had this experience, but it was a bit scary to be out of the Irish Catholic cocoon.

As I grew older, as family dynamics changed, as I became angry about the senseless violence in Northern Ireland during the “Troubles” and the drunken spectacles of some St. Patrick’s Day parades, I drifted away from Irish pride. Some remained, such as having a special affinity for the writings of Joyce and Yeats and O’Casey and the music of Van Morrison, Chieftains, Pogues, and then U2. There was no coincidence my son was named Brendan and my daughter, with streaks of red hair like Grandfather James, is Katy. But there was no longer pride for pride’s sake.

A decade ago, there was a bit of a shock. As my sister’s health deteriorated, she passed on to me various documents. One was my mother’s burial instructions. She wanted to be interred in the family plot . . . Velthaus. Her mother, Gertrude O’Brien, was German and it was kept hidden, presumably because Walter insisted and that’s how you kept friends on Bainbridge Avenue in the Bronx.

Oh well, I’ve adjusted: It’s a fine thing to be mostly Irish.

Tom Clavin is the bestselling author/co-author of 25 books, including Bandit Heaven, published by St. Martin’s Press, and Promise, a memoir. To purchase a copy, please go to your local bookstore or to Bookshop.org, Amazon.com, BN.com, or tomclavin.com.