Fish On Friday

I am, if I may be allowed to stress one of my qualities, a good companion for an old person. My early life, up to my eleventh year, was spent in constant association with an aged grandfather. In those years of our childhood (his second and my first), my grandfather and I took a sympathetic interest in each other’s joys and miseries. He preferred me to any of his old cronies, and I him to any of my playmates. We were kindred spirits and loved each other dearly.

It was my business, when his memory became unreliable, to solve my grandfather’s bewilderments concerning the time of day, the hour of dinner, and the whereabouts of his spectacles. I had not only exclusive access to his thoughts, but also extraordinary privileges about his person. I was allowed to tie his bootlaces, dust his hat, wind his watch, and light his pipe. And my youthful ear had a monopoly on his stories.

His stories were invariably about Ireland, and rigidly Irish in flavor; but there was universal stuff in them: ghosts, fairies, christenings, wakes, weddings, famines, battles. The battles were my favorites, fought, it seems, from the beginning of the world, against an army of ruffians called “low Briddish.” The “low Briddish” kept coming across the sea in order to persecute our people, the “high Bernians.” We were a peaceful and gentle race. They were unkind and cruel. They killed our orators. They poisoned our potatoes. Many a summer’s afternoon my grandfather and I sat on the front doorstep with our chins in our hands, shaking our heads and hating the “low Briddish,” wishing them bad luck, and calling them the names they deserved.

From my grandfather I acquired many of my personal characteristics: the habit, for instance, of licking back my hair with my hand when I am annoyed, or of putting my thumbs behind my suspenders when I am amused. From him, too, I derived my sole musical talent, the art of humming Irish tunes. My grandfather took pains to teach me these ancestral arias with great thoroughness; and though I never tried to put words to them (nor did he), I learned to manage them in melody behind a closed mouth with unmistakable authenticity and sweetness. Even to this day native-born Irishmen will testify that I am a splendid Celtic hummer, with an extraordinary nasal range, and a most interesting repertory of hums.

Every child in the course of his development makes at least one precocious remark. Some children, provided they be unusually bright or abnormally stupid, make many. But no child fails to make at least one. I made one, I am quite sure only one, but I think it was a very good one.

My grandfather and I were sitting — need I say? — on the front doorstep one drowsy afternoon in July. It was getting late. The sun was ready to go down. Our voices were weary and our emotions tired. Finn McCool, a large-jowled Irish chieftain, had just executed some fine stunts for us in the movies of our imaginations. At intervals we had cleared our soft palates and strummed a little music, keeping it in time with a metronome accompaniment of heel and toe. My grandfather had made a few meditative remarks on his favorite holy topic, the Blessed Mother of God, at the mention of whose name he invariably raised his hat, even though it occurred twice in a sentence. I, being hatless, was in the habit of paying my devoir to any spoken syllables indicating Our Lady’s reality by making her a reverential flick of my hair. But, as I said, at last we grew tired, tired of talk and romantics. And we lapsed into one of those long silences we often had together when the conversation lagged.

My grandfather sighed. It was a long, deep sigh, indicating not the fatigue of a day but the fatigue of a whole life. He was growing very feeble at the time, only six months before his death. He sighed again, and looked at me for ten intense minutes that were full of flashes issuing from the core of his soul to the kernel of mine. “I am all through!” he said without speaking, “you must carry on. You must keep alive the thoughts, and the dreams, the stories we once shared together.”

I sighed back at my grandfather to show him that I understood his message, and was assuming my burden with pride and regret. And in some dim way I promised him with my eyes that if ever I had a grandson, I would see to it that our stories were kept alive and that our tradition did not die. I did not know at that time that it was God’s holy design to make me the last of my line.

When this sacred trust had been executed and I had in silence received it, my grandfather shriveled, and for some moments after seemed to lose his individuality. His hands grew cold, his face expressionless, and his head dropped dismally on his breast. For a little while he stopped being anybody’s grandfather, even mine, and became just an old hulk of a body with a spirit floating somewhere inside it, a soul unrelated to material dimensions and movements, without a function or any human purpose. I pulled his head down, and putting my mouth close to his ear, whispered, “Is it lonely in there, grandfather?” . . . I hope I am allowed to consider this a remarkable question, very precocious, and, indeed, deeply mystical.

My grandfather saw to a nicety the point of my strange query. He wiped his bad eye with the back of his hand — he had one bad eye which, for the last ten years of his life, was constantly inflamed, and which my mother had to bathe three times a day with boric acid and warm water — and answered, “It is, asthore!”

There is, in Irish, no expression of endearment so delicate in its nuance, or so extravagant in its meaning, as the term asthore. It is very probably the loveliest word in that language. It is elusive in its emotional significance and impossible to translate straightforwardly into English, much like the word doux in French. I once heard Hilaire Belloc struggling to render in good Anglo-Saxon the expression le doux air d’Anjou. “The sweet air of Anjou” he said would never do. Nor would “the gentle air of Anjou.” But possibly Chesterton’s phrase, “the quiet kindness of the Angevin air” would indicate the spirit of the word. “Asthore” is even more difficult.

The best way to convey the meaning of “asthore” is to state the relationship which must exist in persons between whom its employment is warranted. “Asthore” supposes in general what I may call “an affectionate, protective superiority” on the part of the one using it toward the one to whom it is used. A young person never calls another young person “asthore”; nor would a child use it to an elder, nor elder people among themselves. There are three situations in which the word achieves its power and its point, which usages I may designate as (1) The Lover-Beloved, (2) The Parent-Child, and (3) The Grandparent-Grandchild.

(1) The L-B use of “asthore” is always dead serious. It is, in this case, never a mere pet word, nor one to be employed in any light flirtation. For instance, an Irish lad would never think of saying to a pretty girl at a crossroads dance, “You have nice eyes, asthore,” or “What are you doing next Tuesday evening, asthore?” This would be an utter profanation of the word. It would be in impossible bad taste, much as though a young American “fresh guy” should say to an indefinite blonde waitress in a cafe, “Hello, bright eyes! I can see right on the spot that God meant you from all eternity to be my comfort, my joy, and my delight. Would you mind telling me your name and letting me take you to the movies?”

No. When a young man calls his sweetheart “asthore,” it is required (a) that she be not merely his sweetheart, but his “sweet soul”; and (b) that they be realizing for the moment some phase of the spiritual quality of love, its sacrificial character, its burden, its rapture, and its mystery. “And will you love me when I am a weeshy, scrawny, wither-may-jingle old woman?” says she. If she has asked it smilingly, he will answer: “Yes, acushla [or mavourneen or machree,” meaning, “Yes, my darling, or my honey, or my sweet one.” But if she asked this Question with tears in her eyes, his answer is, “I will, asthore!” That’s the way the word goes among lovers.

(2) The Parent-Child use of “asthore” is playful. It is the term of affection by which fathers and mothers (or their equivalents: aunts or uncles or very close neighbors) indicate to youngsters what adorable annoyances they are, what agreeable nuisances. When a father calls his little son “asthore” he means: “I love you because you are my little son. I love you because you are at once such a joy to me, and such a bother. I wouldn’t swap you for ten million pounds. And I wouldn’t give tuppence for ten more like you!” This is the second meaning of “asthore.”

(3) The Grandparent-Grandchild use of “asthore” is the most sacred of all. It is a word of ritual, the love cry of a tribe, the call of the blood overleaping a generation. It is the means by which an aged human heart asks its own posterity, not for affection but for existence, not for companionship but for continuation. It makes vocable an act, not of love alone, but of love and faith fused into one virtue, which we call “hope,” and which we rightly set highest of all the operations of the human spirit in its present condition of probation and exile. If King David had written his psalms in Irish, he would have called his Royal Grandchild “asthore.”

The night my grandfather died, just before the death rattle began in his throat, he raised a blessed candle and waved good-bye to all his neighbors and kindred, to the whole world and all its countries and peoples. And then with the last bit of strength left in him, he whispered, “Good-bye, asthore,” to me. Shortly afterward, the undertaker arrived, to dress his lifeless body in its coffin clothes, surround it with candles, and give it a parlor respectability. I have never had a grandfather since that time . . .

Freudians, psychoanalysts, and chemical philosophers, who are anxious to dissect and desecrate all forms of honorable human affection, will be interested in this personal confession. It may give rise to a whole new department in the field of behavioristic studies hitherto left untouched: “the little-boy-old-man neurosis”; or maybe, “the atavistic perversion”; or more likely, “the Abraham complex.” And if their textbooks can prove that the implications of my psychic irregularity are sufficiently degenerate and gloomy to arouse popular interest, science will hand over a fresh inspiration to literature. A new form of melancholy will develop among our novelists. America’s leading dramatist will put me in a play.