Bird on a Wire

Like a bird, on the wire

Like a drunk in a midnight choir

I have tried, in my way, to be free.

--Leonard Cohen

*

Let me tell you a nanny story. About four years ago, at the height of the craziness over Clinton appointee Zoe Baird and her Peruvian help, I happened to become caught in a baby-sitter squeeze myself. My wife was out of the country on assignment and for reasons now forgotten the regular child care arrangement had fallen apart.

Fortunately my brother-in-law, a fellow we called Uncle Paul, was able to come down from Northern California for a while and bail me out. He was a perfect baby-sitter. He played well with the kids, kept a tidy house, helped cook dinner--and didn’t complain about too much baseball on television.

Later, after his arrest, it would take awhile before we could find the humor in Paul’s brief hitch as nanny: At a time when the entire nation was fixated on illicit baby-sitters, I had experienced perhaps the greatest Zoe Baird problem of them all.

Our beloved Uncle Paul, government authorities would allege, was in fact one Terence Kirby, was in fact a member of the IRA, was in fact on the lam, a participant 13 years ago in a historic mass escape from the Maze Prison in Northern Ireland. They would say many bad things about my brother-in-law. I will say this: He was a terrific baby-sitter. He also was, and is, family.

*

Now, marrying into a big Irish Catholic family can present challenges. For all I know, so can marrying into a small WASP family. Families are like a running movie, with their own narrative, characters, subplots. Coming in late, as in-laws inevitably do, it can be difficult to track all the dialogue, to sort through the interplay of family politics. And so in-laws bond in their own special way.

On family occasions, Paul and I would huddle together in the garage, swatting pingpong balls, sipping beers. Paul was a Coors man. He also was an Oakland A’s fan. We shared an enthusiasm for Leonard Cohen music, in particular his classic song “Bird on the Wire.” I understand better now why he might have found the lyrics so moving.

Paul was quiet, shy, but not excessively so. He didn’t talk much Irish politics, which was exceptional. That he was in love with my wife’s sister seemed obvious. We all got married about the same time, camped together, hung out by the pool at the little house in Concord that Paul and his wife lived in. It was at this house, one cold morning two years ago, that federal agents swarmed out of the trees and up the driveway.

With his arrest, my brother-in-law joined three other Maze fugitives fighting extradition; the H-Block Four, they came to be called. It was a time of jail visits and bail hearings and circling the family wagons. I remember holding up a hospital telephone so Terry, as we now call him, could hear, from jail, the first cries of his newborn daughter.

*

And now to last Thursday: A lawyer stands in federal court for a final summation. The government wants his client returned to Northern Ireland and prison--an outcome that conceivably could be tantamount to a death sentence. He tries, this lawyer, to re-create the Belfast that reared his client, shaped him. This is the Belfast of the early 1970s, of the so-called “troubles.”

He tells how things went for Catholic boys back then--taunts and threats, street beatings and roundups, all at the hands of the “authorities.” His client was 11 when first knocked around by a soldier. At 17 he was swept up and deposited, uncharged, in prison for three years. Upon his release, he was rearrested and “interrogated” for days. These were inquiries that produced split lips, swollen cheeks and, eventually, confessions to all sorts of crimes: anything they wanted.

During the presentation, the defendant appears glum, weary. He keeps his head down, fiddles with a foam cup. Later, he would say only that the lawyer had returned him to places and pains he wanted to forget. In the audience sits the defendant’s brother-in-law. They are the same age and much alike. They have young children, suburban houses, shared pastimes. One just happened to be born in Belfast, the other in suburban California.

At age 11, the Californian was playing Little League baseball, not dodging soldiers. He spent his 17th summer, not locked away, but on a lark, free from high school, anticipating college, free. The same Sunday his future brother-in-law was escaping the Maze and its years of horrors and humiliations, this other one would have been on a couch in Newport Beach, watching football. And they speak of the luck of the Irish.