‘But I have tenure,’ Elaine pleaded. ‘I have full tuition remission for you here.’ Her lips were weak, her eyes very far away beneath their milk-bottle lenses.
‘It’s what I want,’ Dani said, and she looked at me. ‘Please, Daddy.’
While Elaine sulked, we hashed out a plan over double pepperoni and garlic knots. I’d cash in all the personal days I’d been hoarding for the past two years, have Georgette hold my caseload over for a week that summer, and Dani and I would jet off for my first trip back in fourteen years, her first trip ever, with a view to checking out some schools in Dublin and one in Galway, plus discover the heritage, plus spend some quality time together — just the two of us. My father had died when I was in my teens, and I hadn’t heard from his side of the family in years. On my mother’s side there were some cousins scattered through Cabra and Kimmage, but I could no longer picture their faces, never mind figure out how to get in touch with them, even if I’d wanted to.
We checked into a featureless hotel for nomadic men of business by the Grand Canal, in which Georgette and AmEx miles had secured for us a junior suite. There was a couch, a phone, an enormous TV, and two bedrooms separated by a locking door.
‘The name Dublin,’ Dani read from her iPad, ‘appears in the record as early as the writings of Ptolemy the First, around 140 AD. It derives from the Irish Dubh Linn, meaning Black Pool, which is to say, the area of dark water where the Rivers Poddle and Liffey meet. The city’s been a Viking garrison, a Norman stronghold, and was briefly the second city of the British Empire.’
‘Briefly,’ I said as I reached into her closet for the suite’s lone ironing board. I set it up at the foot of her bed and spread out a shirt.
Already, Dani had hung the outfits she’d spent the guts of the past week devising: a tweed blazer over a vintage T-shirt; a white blouse paired with ripped black jeans; a navy polo neck and a charcoal pencil skirt. Beneath each was arranged a pair of shoes: tan derbies, white Chuck Taylors, brown ballet pumps with a bow. And on the shelf above them were three dossiers culled from her binder, with many tongues of Post-its hanging from their edges.
The next morning, and for two mornings following, we toured libraries and lecture halls. Dani asked questions about borrowing limits and digital resources before heading off to meetings she’d scheduled with professors. Each time I stood for a moment to watch her walk away, her dossiers hugged to her chest, and each time I felt proud and vindicated for having raised a girl so capable. Never at her age would I have thought to arrange meetings like these, much less imagined how to go about it, or what to say if I had.
At university, it had felt as though my classmates and I belonged to separate worlds. They, it seemed, had been bred to feel comfortable eating in wood-panelled dining halls and drinking in cricket pavilions, whereas I had needed to work hard to fit in, and never did. I had earned the right exam points but not at the right secondary school, had honed the knack for argument but couldn’t shake off my accent. From day one, I suspected — and when I graduated with honours but no offers, while they strolled towards the King’s Inns with 2.2s, I knew — that I would never make it in the law in Ireland. I thought that America might be big enough to fit me in, applied to a dozen places and was rejected by all but one tiny school in Maryland. When I got there I found the same entitlement, the same unwelcome. And I found those things at the non-profit that gave me my first job, in the courtroom where I tried my first case, at the firm where I made my first million. Now Dani, I thought, had a chance to skip all that.
In the afternoons, while I read and wrote emails, she called Elaine and reported back to her about faculty ratios or alumni networks or internship opportunities. To me, she talked about the things that really mattered to her. Trinity, she said, was all city life and storied marble eminence (not to mention shoulderless boys with nicotine fingers and the poet’s stare): she loved it. DCU and UCD were suburban, corporate, anonymous (also full of engineers and farmers; also much, much cheaper): she didn’t love them.
But more importantly, to me anyway, she seemed really to love the city. We toured the Castle and the GPO, Christ Church and Kilmainham Gaol. I relived the mix of brief awe and enduring boredom that I once had felt on school trips, while Dani asked excited questions of the tour guide or, once, corrected him. After dinner, we people-watched from cafe tables and (Dani swore she wouldn’t tell her mother) swigged Guinness in beer gardens, in alleyways or on rooftops. I felt the urge to list for my daughter the ways in which the place had changed — but I stopped myself. What, really, would have been the point? And how much, when it came down to it, could you really trust your memories of any time or place, especially your youth or, most especially, your home?
But some things Dani insisted on seeing for herself. And so, after picking up the rental car the night before we left for Galway, we headed out for a quick visit to the house where I grew up. The road was dark and lit in yellow pools. Traffic was sparse. The sky was starless, the moon a sliver.
‘You know,’ I said, ‘this is only the second time I’ve driven in this country.’
‘Did you know that settlement at Coolock dates back over three thousand five hundred years? A Bronze Age burial site has been excavated and dated to around 1500 BC.’
‘Since you ask,’ I said, ‘I got my licence in the States so I could get your mother to the hospital in the event that you came early. I was twenty-eight, twenty-nine? Course, the first time, that is, my last time here, I was heading to the same —’
‘What did she look like,’ Dani said, ‘your mother?’
‘Your grandmother,’ I reminded her. ‘Do you not remember?’
‘I was, like, a baby when she came to visit?’
‘She looked … she modelled herself really, I think, after Maureen O’Hara. You’ve seen Kangaroo? Or The Quiet Man?’
‘No.’
‘My God. What do they teach you in that school?’
‘Algebra, Macro-economics, Japanese, Romantic Poetry …’
‘All right,’ I said.
‘… Enlightenment Dialectics, Daoist Philosophy, the Peloponnesian War —’
‘She looked,’ I said, as we turned on to the Malahide Road, ‘glamorous. Or she tried to, anyway. Always had her hair set and her clothes well cut and spotless. She had this one coat, I remember, with these toggle buckles and a Nehru collar. She must’ve worn it nearly every day for twenty-five years. White! But she was careful with every little stain, stooped at the sink with her bleach and her rubber gloves at night, got it dry-cleaned every year at Easter. And she looked … I don’t know what she looked like. She was a knock-out.’
I spun us on to the Tonlegee Road at the Cadbury’s factory and we wound through the dark estates. Outside, fronting an unlit sports pitch, the old grey-speckled three-over-two still stood. Its windows had been double-glazed, its porch closed in, its driveway cobbled and occupied now by a black Ford registered during the previous year. I pointed to the window above the driveway.