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could use Dad’s frequent-flyer miles.
    Eventually we met up with the others in a two-story thatched cottage in County Wexford. Mom and Dad had made an agreement: He would not take a drink for the five days of the family reunion, but when we returned, he would drink his fill.
    As I remember it, we had a stiff but pleasant time. Nana seemed especially tuned in to the Irish mystical stuff—fairies and spirits and the like. She talked to me about those things during the trip, probably because no one else would listen. I remember Grandfather Mehan making comments to her in his thin, sarcastic voice, comments about “seeing little leprechauns.”
    The grand plan was that we would do one major thing each day. We went to some old churches. We visited Mehans, who didn’t really know us but treated us as family. Everywhere we went, though, those Irish people offered my dad drinks. And every time they did, he refused.
    However, after we flew back to the United States, and after we got off the train at Princeton Junction, he fulfilled the other side of his agreement with Mom. He never even went home with us. He walked straight to Pete’s Tavern, a bar between the train station and our house. He drank so much that he was not able to walk home. He slipped down, dead drunk, and he lay there with his legs on the curb and his head in the roadway. The next car driving past would have crushed his head.
    Fortunately, a policeman saw him first, turned on his lights, and blocked traffic while an ambulance came to the rescue. Mom got a call at four a.m. to pick him up at the hospital emergency room. This was not an unusual occurrence at our house. The police, and the ambulance drivers, and more eyewitnesses than I would care to name—all knew about Jack Conway’s problem.
    Anyway, we finally arrived at Back Bay Station in Boston, stepped off the train, and waited for Dad to do the same. After a tense minute, Mom dispatched me to the lounge car to find him. I started off at a brisk walk, but I stopped still when I spotted him ahead of me. He was swaying slightly on the platform and smiling a silly, wide smile. He called out, too loudly, “Hey, Martin, my boy! There you are! Where’s Mom and Margaret?”
    Mom and Margaret brushed past me on the left and continued onward, not even looking at him. He winked at me and intoned “Hello, ladies” to them. Then he and I fell in step behind. Some college kids near us on the platform started to laugh—at his silly grin, I suppose.
    I didn’t.
    I don’t know why anyone ever laughs at drunks. Especially public ones, with their families cringing nearby.
    They’re just not funny.

THE HOLY SHRINE
    To my surprise, Mom took a seat next to Dad when we boarded the Green Line to Brookline. She muttered at least a few words to him. I couldn’t hear them, but I’m sure they were about behaving in front of Aunt Elizabeth and other relatives we might encounter. Dad nodded at her very seriously. It was another agreement.
    We rolled our luggage a block and a half from the trolley stop to my grandparents’ house, a two-story colonial on a tree-lined street not far from where John F. Kennedy was born. My grandparents had lived in it for over sixty years. The downstairs contained a living room, a formal parlor, a dining room, a kitchen, and my grandparents’ bedroom. The upstairs had “the girls’ bedrooms,” where Mom once slept and Aunt Elizabeth still did, and my grandfather’s study.
    Aunt Elizabeth greeted us at the door with “Mary and Margaret, you’ll be in Mary’s old room; Jack and Martin, I’ve put you in Father’s study.” Then she added, “Did you all have a good trip?”
    Aunt Elizabeth stepped back to give us room to enter. She is a tall, bony woman, similar to younger pictures of Grandfather Mehan. We all congregated in the living room, where we made small talk, mostly about the schedule of events for the funeral. Nana’s wake was to be the next evening, from five to seven. Her