Eugene had never met Frank Sinatra. He was a huge fan, but it just never happened. When I encountered Eugene he didn’t look well, but you don’t tell someone that. Especially a stranger in a hospital. I wouldn’t have said anything at all, but the nurse spoke to me, and when I responded he perked up a little.
He glanced at me and asked, “Are you from the old country?”
I have heard that question so often during my 25-year New York sojourn that I usually give a sarcastic yet good-humoured response: “I am, but it was a new country when I left,” or even, “Begorrah, which old country would that be?” And so on. Sure the craic never stops.
Not this time, though. Not with him. I couldn’t.
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We were in adjacent beds. At least, he was in a bed, where his crisp new bandages were just about stopping what was in from getting out. I was standing by mine, fully dressed, awaiting my paperwork and taxi home.
He, it seemed, was also preparing to leave, although under very different, heartbreaking circumstances.
Eugene was born Irish in America, to a courageous woman he still missed and adored. The irony didn’t escape me that had he been born in Ireland to a single mother at that time, he may have been sent off to be raised in the US anyway
A few days earlier I’d experienced minor chest pains. Not being 22 any more, I was mildly concerned. After one thing and another, I wound up in this New York emergency room. It turned out, after tests and questions and charts and analyses, that I’d merely strained something, most likely while clearing out our storage facility the day before. I’d been looking for old Roy of the Rovers comics, convincing myself they were for my kids’ benefit, not mine.
Eugene told me he was in this hospital because “I’m bleeding all over on the inside, and nobody can figure out why.” He is 85, unmarried, has no kids. He tells me he is an only child.
His beloved Irish-born mother, who had died four decades earlier, had arrived on United States soil in the 1930s. Shortly afterwards her husband, an Ulsterman, decided to “up sticks and split”, he told me, leaving that brave young woman to give birth and raise her child alone.
Eugene was born Irish in America, to a courageous woman he still missed and adored all these years later. The irony didn’t escape me that had he been born in Ireland to a single mother at that time, he may have been sent off to be raised in the US anyway.
Eugene had travelled the world all his life, rarely giving the father he never knew another thought.
I could tell that conversation and company were things he enjoyed yet didn’t often experience. He gracefully flitted from one topic to the next and was more eloquent and interesting than I could ever hope to be. If we had met in different circumstances we’d have been pals, I thought.
Eugene had bartended in the 1950s. He’d once even served Tony Bennett a Martini, although that was as close as he got to Sinatra’s world. He became a teacher, and for almost 40 years he had taught boys and girls all over the world, or at least all over Brooklyn. His world.
He had read James Joyce in Dublin, George Orwell in Barcelona and Albert Camus in Paris, then journeyed home to Brooklyn, to tell his high-school kids all about them.
I thought of another Brooklyn schoolteacher, Frank McCourt, the Angela’s Ashes author, whom Eugene told me he would also have liked to have encountered but never did.
Quoting Yeats, he put my own knowledge of that great poet’s work to shame. Eugene was far more than a stereotypical Yank seeking ancestors and leprechauns while mispronouncing place names and wearing green polyester trousers
Eugene had been to Ireland many times, often alone but also on sentimental trips with his mother, treating her when he was a younger man. He had delighted in the accents of Cork, Galway and Belfast. He had travelled by train, through Kildare, Westmeath and Longford, then up to Mayo and Donegal, where the scenery took his breath away — every time.
Quoting WB Yeats when mentioning his visit to Sligo back in the 1970s, he put my own knowledge of that great poet’s work to shame. Eugene was far more than a stereotypical Yank seeking ancestors and leprechauns while mispronouncing place names and wearing green polyester trousers. He was the real deal. But now he was real sick.
He would wince as he moved. The overworked nurses and their aides gently requested that Eugene try to stay still, but as he chatted he would wave his arms, to try to convey the beauty he had seen in Ireland.
In that hospital in Queens, on that bitterly cold December night, Eugene spoke of his fondness for “the old country” — that of Oscar Wilde, The Clancy Brothers and the craic. He talked of his immense love for his mother’s adopted hometown of Brooklyn and what it had produced: Rita Hayworth, Mickey Rooney and Jackie Robinson.
As he was wheeled to the operating room we bumped fists. I stood, as I had before, by an unused bed, waiting to be told that all was good, so I could go home to my family. Minutes later I did just that.
By the next afternoon my chest pain had gone. Weeks later, so had Eugene from Brooklyn, off to join Rita, Mickey and Jackie. Perhaps the two Franks too.
Michael Fitzpatrick is a playwright and journalist from Lucan, Co Dublin, who lives in New York with his wife, Mei, a nurse practitioner at a Manhattan hospital, and their three children, Liam, Emmett and Fiona
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