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speaking a language I didn’t understand, I felt a sharp pang.
    My parents left Ireland in hopes of a brighter future, all of us believing we were
     on our way to a land of plenty. As it happened, they failed in this new land, failed
     in just about every way possible. It may have been that they were weak people, ill
     suited for the rigors of emigration, its humiliations and compromises, its competing
     demands of self-discipline and adventurousness. But I wonder how things might have
     been different if my father was part of a family business that gave him structure
     and a steady paycheck instead of working in a bar, the worst place for a man like
     him—or if my mother had been surrounded by women, sisters and nieces, perhaps, who
     could have provided relief from destitution and loneliness, a refuge from strangers.
    In Kinvara, poor as we were, and unstable, we at least had family nearby, people who
     knew us. We shared traditions and a way of looking at the world. We didn’t know until
     we left how much we took those things for granted.

New York Central Train, 1929
    As the hours pass I get used to the motion of the train, the heavy wheels clacking in their grooves, the industrial hum under my seat. Dusk softens the sharp
     points of trees outside my window; the sky slowly darkens, then blackens around an
     orb of moon. Hours later, a faint blue tinge yields to the soft pastels of dawn, and
     soon enough sun is streaming in, the stop-start rhythm of the train making it all
     feel like still photography, thousands of images that taken together create a scene
     in motion.
    We pass the time looking out at the evolving landscape, talking, playing games. Mrs.
     Scatcherd has a checkers set and a bible, and I thumb through it, looking for Psalm
     121, Mam’s favorite: I will lift up mine eyes unto the hills, from whence cometh my help. My help cometh
     from the Lord, which made heaven and earth . . .
    I’m one of few children on the train who can read. Mam taught me all my letters years
     ago, in Ireland, then taught me how to spell. When we got to New York, she’d make
     me read to her, anything with words on it—crates and bottles I found in the street.
    “Donner brand car-bonated bev—”
    “Beverage.”
    “Beverage. LemonKist soda. Artifickle—”
    “Artificial. The ‘c’ sounds like ‘s.’”
    “Artificial color. Kitric—citric acid added.”
    “Good.”
    When I became more proficient, Mam went into the shabby trunk beside her bed and brought
     out a hardback book of poems, blue with gold trim. Francis Fahy was a Kinvara poet
     born into a family of seventeen children. At fifteen he became an assistant teacher
     at the local boys’ school before heading off to England (like every other Irish poet,
     Mam said), where he mingled with the likes of Yeats and Shaw. She would turn the pages
     carefully, running her finger over the black lines on flimsy paper, mouthing the words
     to herself, until she found the one she wanted.
    “‘Galway Bay,’” she would say. “My favorite. Read it to me.”
    And so I did:
              Had I youth’s blood and hopeful mood and heart of fire once more,
              For all the gold the world might hold I’d never quit your shore,
              I’d live content whate’er God sent with neighbours old and gray,
              And lay my bones ’neath churchyard stones, beside you, Galway Bay.
    Once I looked up from a halting and botched rendition to see two lines of tears rivuleting
     Mam’s cheeks. “Jesus Mary and Joseph,” she said. “We should never have left that place.”
    Sometimes, on the train, we sing. Mr. Curran taught us a song before we left that
     he stands to lead us in at least once a day:
    From the city’s gloom to the country’s bloom
    Where the fragrant breezes sigh
    From the city’s blight to the greenwood bright
    Like the birds of summer fly
    O Children, dear Children
    Young, happy, pure . . .
    We stop at a