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PHOTO: “© NYU PHOTO BUREAU: DAN CREIGHTON
Maurice Harmon, Lavin said the move to Athenry decided her future career: “How great a shock it must have been to the eyes and ears of a child to leave that small town in Massachusetts and in a few days arrive in a small town in the west of Ireland. For all I know it was the shock to eye and ear that made me a writer. The kind of person who writes is born. I never wanted to be a writer, never, never, never.” In Athenry, thrust into her mother’s large and opinionated family, Lavin confronted many cultural changes as well: farm animals in the streets, a less rigorous curriculum at school, and no electricity. In the 1992 RTÉ film, An Arrow in Flight: A Tribute to Mary Lavin, Caroline described the experience as “being catapulted” into a place where her mother’s entire world was challenged. From the start Lavin was “picking it all up…seeing inequities…seeing poverty and…the pain of emigration.” Glucksman Ireland House NYU on April 27th 2012. Left to right: Greg Londe, Cormac Catholicism was different, too. In East O’Malley, James Ryan, James and Caroline’s daughter Alice, Mary Gordon, Colm Tóibín. Walpole, she had gone to Sunday school, a strictly Protestant practice in Ireland, and to Mass in a local cineNot only did Tom Lavin work for Bird, but Mary attended the ma. To her, the people in Athenry seemed unable to think for themBird Elementary School, and by 1920, Nora, Tom and Mary were selves, and were, she said, “very much at the mercy of what we living at the same street address as Bird and his family. How would now call superstition.” The eight months she spent in many of Bird’s progressive attitudes filtered into Tom’s converAthenry, and the shell shock of her transplantation, fueled her writsation at home? Did young Mary, growing up in an atmosphere ing throughout her career. where the outward principles of social justice were taken for In her story “Tom,” published in The New Yorker in 1973, Lavin granted, react to the poverty and class distinctions she found in describes an Irish-American family in which the mother’s version Ireland even more sharply? of Ireland, a place of serenity, order, and pretty (if delusional) While the young writer may have been shaken into being when memories, is pitted against the father’s “Ireland.” On a trip home she first arrived in Athenry, it was in the countryside of County to Roscommon the father, Tom, is shocked to find his former Meath, where she lived for many years when not in Dublin, that sweetheart is now a shriveled old woman, and the familiar cabins Lavin and her writing flourished. She loved the Midlands countryof his childhood, mounds of rubble. The fictional Tom says most side, but would never have set foot on Bective Bridge if it hadn’t of the people he knew had left for the United States long ago. been for the Bird family. “ ‘Ah, I knew you were an American, sir,’ an old man tells Tom. After Mary and her mother moved from Athenry to Dublin, Tom ‘Sure, Americans have plenty of money for traveling the world and reluctantly left Massachusetts to join them. When Bird’s son, going anywhere they like.’ ” Charlie, a horse racing and hunt enthusiast, decided to buy a counInstead of identifying himself to the woman he remembered so try estate not far from Dublin, he hired Tom, whom he knew from fondly, Tom allows her to believe that he is his own son, then East Walpole, to be his agent at Bective House. abruptly shifts his big car into reverse to drive away without an The arrangement was fortuitous. Tom and Nora were not happy explanation. “And the black mood that came down on him didn’t together, and now they could live apart without disgrace – he at lift till we’d crossed the Shannon.” Bective and she in Dublin, while on weekends Mary happily visitA curious but integral ingredient in Lavin’s transatlantic DNA is ed her father, who adored his only child. When Tom died, Mary Charles Sumner Bird, the owner of what was in 1920 a successful and her husband William Walsh took over as estate agents at building products mill in East Walpole. Founded by his grandfather Bective House, ultimately buying the nearby Abbey Farm for in 1795 as a paper mill, by 1812 it was producing the rag stock themselves. used for printing the U.S. dollar. Levenson says Tom’s salary from the Birds allowed Mary to The younger Bird, who ran unsuccessfully for governor of dress well, drive a sports car while a college student, and even travMassachusetts twice on the Progressive Party ticket, genuinely el to the States when her father went there on business for his cared about his employees, introducing 8-hour shifts, a minimum employer. wage, and a workers’ mutual benefit association. Paternalistic as he Mary became friends with Charlie’s wife, Julia, who introduced may appear now (he did not support unions), he nevertheless built her to their neighbor, Edward Plunkett, Lord Dunsany. An author recreation halls, reading rooms and parks for his employees and himself, he encouraged the young writer, introduced her to friends their families, and worked to give them access to good housing. in the publishing world, and wrote the preface to her first collecTheodore Roosevelt wrote to Bird in 1916, “You have been a tion, Tales from Bective Bridge. tower of strength to the men and women of this country who strive Lavin was widowed twice, in 1954 when her husband, lawyer for better things in our national life.” William Walsh, died, leaving her with three young daughters, 62 IRISH AMERICA JUNE / JULY 2013