Someone in Ireland told me, “Wherever you go in life, if you have three stories, two jokes, and a song, you’ll be fine.” Una seemed like she could do all three at once, and juggle a pint of Guinness, a curling iron and the neighbor’s dog while watercoloring the Cliffs of Kerry with her eyes closed. Hair poked out of her head in every direction. “Artist’s hair,” she winked.
She led us up a stairwell in a derelict schoolhouse in Limerick and pointed at a pig’s head with floppy ears on a dining table. “Just like in the book!” Against the will of locals (we learned in frequent conspiratorial asides that sent her eyebrows into the clouds), she had converted Frank McCourt’s school into a museum dedicated to his memoir Angela’s Ashes. “Worse than the ordinary miserable childhood,” he begins, “is the miserable Irish childhood, and worse yet is the miserable Irish Catholic childhood. Above all—we were wet.” Not everyone appreciated his depiction.
His outlandish storytelling seemed to have rubbed off on her, and I was as fascinated by her fascination with him as my own. After glossing over that she had once saved her husband’s life on their honeymoon, pulling him out of the sea on an island in Greece and performing brisk CPR that sent a lungful of brine choking up out of him at the last possible second, she said her best story might have been in Amsterdam. As a maid abroad in her twenties just looking for an escape from Ireland, she had been called to deliver room service at the hotel where she worked. “I opened the door and stumbled directly onto the set of a blue film!” Una threw her head back laughing. Naked actors sprawled all over the room, on the bed, on the furniture, amid a tangle of cameras and lighting gear. Another conclusive wink left it to us to decide whether she was saying she had joined in.
