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him that with her medication she might, with legroom, be able to sleep the nine hours to Honolulu. The guy said he was sure she would.
    On entering the steerage section there seemed to be no more than thirty or forty passengers, which makes a Boeing 707 appear as sparsely filled as the Wrigley Field bleachers on an overcast April afternoon. Placing the old lady’s satchels beneath her seat, I clamped her seat belt, drew it tight, then took my seat across from her and clamped myself in. By now it was five minutes to nine or departure time, the engines were revving up vigorously. If d been a damn near perfect connection. At precisely nine the engines moderated to an odd calm, then the captain came on the intercom and said he was sorry but there would be a forty-minute delay to pick up some passengers from Toronto. He said he’d probably then go up to thirty-five thousand feet, and that if anyone were waiting for us in Honolulu we’d make up the lost time and doubtless be only a few minutes late, if we were late at all. Abruptly someone up front drew the curtain between first class and steerage sections, perhaps suggesting that whoever was delaying the flight didn’t want to be ogled by peons. Who the hell, I thought, had the power to delay a transpacific flight for forty minutes?
    An extremely attractive attendant in her mid-twenties was coming down the aisle toward me. Her uniform was perfectly interchangeable with those of the girls on the Syracuse-to-Chicago leg of the trip, save that the predominant hue of the skirt and jacket was now an American-flag red, the blouse a checkered white and blue. Her red skirt was very tight, outlining precisely her fine full thighs. She was confidently aware of herself and walked with an oddly delicate muscular sureness. She had a great amount of black sepia—rather tobacco-colored—hair tucked neatly into her red, white, and blue cap. Her nose was chiseled fine, her mouth full and lightly painted. What startled more than her thighs were her eyes. They were huge and pale, pale gray flecked at the top with spots of vivid green. Save for the green flecks they were the biggest and most vacuous eyes I’d ever seen, something almost albino and haunted about them, something out of a horror movie. Like a traffic cop I threw the palm of my right hand rigidly upward to stop her. The identification tag on her red lapel identified her as Robin.
    “Forty damn minutes to pick up a Toronto flight? This damn well better be Prime Minister Trudeau and his child bride.”
    Robin laughed and assured me it wasn’t.
    “Is Robin first or last name?”
    “First.”
    “Last?”
    “Glenn.”
    “Miss, Mrs., or Ms.?”
    “Miz”
    “Oh me, oh my.”
    Ms. Robin Glenn laughed again, with a shrill flightiness suggesting she might be as vacuous as her eyes, and in her muscularly delicate sure way proceeded to the rear of the cabin. I turned to study her bum moving away from me. I thought, “Oh, me, oh, my, for fact.” Looking across at the old lady to see if she wanted to talk, I saw her eyes were closed in calmness, she was relaxed now, she had taken God only knows how many Demerol, she was thankfully going down.

 

     
     

    5
     
    I have always and forever feared, been ashamed of, and somewhat loathed the Irish within me. From where I write at the moment (and I shall write from many places, for many places shall be home), the upper story of my sister’s A-frame on Washington Island off Clayton, New York, among the Thousand Islands, I can lift my head from this round card table, look out the vents of the jalousie windows, and, a short way downriver, see Big Round Island where, both before and after the turn of the century, my great-grandmother, Miss Fanny Maguire, worked as a cook and a domestic at the Frontenac Hotel, which no longer stands. In the 1850s the colleen Maguire had fled the potato famines of County Cork and settled in America—for that reason a “wild goose” to the Irish—and