I was Zooming with someone the other night, an old college friend I’d lost contact with, and I wondered when was the last time we’d met.
He reminded me it was that time in Dublin, just before I moved to America, he and his partner were in town for a wedding, they stayed with me in my apartment and the following evening we met with other friends and went out to a restaurant, there were drinks, the usual, it sounded like a good night.
The fact that I’d no memory of any of this, other than a vague sense that he was correct, wasn’t even the disconcerting part, it was rather the feeling that forgetting every second of that weekend such that it left no imprint – like sunlight on stone – is the way of things, and that weekend in 2006 was no more or less memorable than any of the ones before or after it.
I tell people all the time I’ve a bad memory but I’m not sure that’s true. Sometimes it’s the best in the world, and people from the past are as clear as my old friend on Zoom. Clearer, their voices are inside your head. When I moved to New York I met my wife in the Art Students League on 57th Street. We still have the paintings we worked on that day, a male nude from two separate angles, mine unfortunately the full frontal. The paintings are in our basement like silent witnesses of that day, who we could dig up and interrogate if it ever came to it.
Naomi is Jewish and the family occasions she hauled me along to – there seemed to be one every couple of weeks – were my first encounter with that tradition. I was struck most of all by the strength of communal recall, that there seemed to be a collective memory at work. Maybe it was the Hebrew or the reliquary foods (gefilte fish, matzo) but the rituals seemed to strive for a literal historicism, not merely mythical, like the people who get dressed up to re-enact history’s more recent verifiable events, the battle of Gettysburg, or Lexington and Concord.
After my fellowship in New York ended we moved to Washington DC where we spent a decade, got married, brought two children through the early years (not done with that yet), worked hard at my day job (oncologist) and I published a book.
All along there was the nagging sense of home, questions of identity which truthfully never rose above the wistful. I had after all intended to go to America for two years and here I was, a decade on, getting into baseball, celebrating Thanksgiving, I became a citizen just in time to vote for Hillary.
It was around then I started on my second book, Ten Days. It emanated from an article I read in a magazine, years ago, a light, short piece by a journalist who took his daughter to New York. He had worked there in his twenties and knew his way around, and he noticed that she looked at him differently now, impressed by his Manhattan knowledge, as if she was realising for the first time that he was more than just a dad, or had been at one point.
The scenario seemed to have promise and in my novel a father and daughter similarly travel from London to Manhattan, we meet them early on in the airplane. The story emerged as answers to all the logical questions arising from this scene. Why are they going to New York? Who will they meet there? Where’s the mother or wife? What is their relationship? Fraught, why? What is the father trying to achieve and what’s the rush, can’t it wait? Are they in business class or coach? He must be wealthy then, or famous? How, what does he do? Is he still doing it and if not, what made him stop?
My experience as an emigrant primed me for questions about identity, its link to the past, and the novel went in that direction. The father is losing his identity as his daughter is exploring hers.
In 2017 we moved to Howth, a fishing village north of Dublin. Not many Jews in Howth. Naomi has found herself a long way from the Upper West Side, that’s for sure. She is now the emigrant. On Fridays we try to remember but mostly forget to light the Shabbat candles but most of the other holidays pass us by. When she remembers to, Naomi sings the prayers unaccompanied, though the kids and I try to mouth along. This year we got an enormous Christmas tree.
Given that neither of us are religious there was never any clash of cultures other than curiosity and its flipside, that wistfulness over whatever loss is entailed in the transformation. But there’s no hiding how far you might have gone from where you started out. The price of an interesting life would be my contention, but I can see and even appreciate the counterargument.
Moving away from where you began, whatever formed your identity in those early molten years, can seem like an amnesia, a relatively selective one, but just as silent and irrevocable.
The blurb on the back of my book says that the story is about grief, memory and time. Sounds about right. Thankfully the grief part isn’t autobiographical. But there’s no getting away from memory and time. Who hasn’t found them to be like unreliable friends, like me and my Zoom-buddy the other night, unbelievably up for it one day, then all but absent entirely.
Austin Duffy is the author of Ten Days, published by Granta
