MYSTERIES OF MY FATHER: An Irish-American Memoir

We were always a confessional people, we Irish, but only as long as the listener was a priest in the box or a pal nodding after a night of knocking back pints. We didn't tell every Tom, Dick or Mick our troubles. It wasn't done.

Historians and scholars may pull me up short on this, but it seems to me that until recently, perhaps the last 30 years or so, there was a great paucity of memoir in the Irish and Irish-American world. Keep your troubles behind the lace curtain, darling, or the neighbors will be talking. There was Eugene O'Neill, of course, but he was an aberration.

It's changing. The Irish-Americans are looking back and getting it down on paper. They're a different breed, the Irish-Americans, not to be confused with the Irish Back Home.

You'll discover those differences in Thomas Fleming's majestic new book, Mysteries of My Father , a book in which there are enough plots and themes for a dozen novels. There is the marriage of Fleming's father, Teddy, to his mother, Kitty. They are a classic, almost stereotypical, pair: he the ill-educated tough ward politician aware of his shortcomings, she the gentle, well-educated beauty with social aspirations.

You may not have much patience with Kitty. She despises Teddy's political world, especially the man at the top in Jersey City, Frank Hague. She simply doesn't understand that, for many Irish in those days, that was the way you had to go. You helped your own, you found them jobs, you made sure they voted and you rewarded them. You made your way with your fists.

No, Kitty didn't understand. She looked along other avenues and saw "the quality" secure in their snobbery. That was the family tragedy, though the tragedy was mostly Teddy's.

What an extraordinary man—tough enough, brave enough, smart enough to earn a battlefield commission. Personable enough to make an impression on Frank Hague.

The ingredients of this memoir are particularly Irish-American. The setting is Jersey City, then an Irish (American) political powerhouse ruled by Hague. You may think "Ah, yes, the usual Irish political machine," but Fleming dismisses the notion of something well-oiled and running smoothly. What he saw around Frank Hague was essentially a ragtag army of hangers-on and opportunists.

Teddy gives lip service to the church, but his faith goes fist deep. He will bow to monsignors and bishops but it's all political. In families like the Flemings, as in most Irish-American families, it is the women who keep the faith alive.

Irishness is an ingredient of the book, but not as the Irish Back Home would understand it. There is a reference to the Dolan family (Kitty was a Dolan) and their relationship with the Old Country. "Seldom if ever was Ireland mentioned in the Dolan household as a source of anger and sorrow. To Tom Dolan, the mother country was not even a memory.... Instead, the Dolans felt a subtle discomfort about their Irish Catholic name in mostly Protestant uptown Jersey City."

This book is mainly a chronicle of love—repressed, frustrated, lost, finally exploding, as Thomas Fleming leads us skillfully from the first breathless moments between Teddy and Kitty through the deterioration of their marriage to a later time when the son begins to understand his father's volcanic love.

Andrew Greeley once wrote of a scholar going to Washington looking for funds to introduce courses on the Irish-American experience. The Washington official said, "No. The Irish don't count anymore."

Not on the political scene, perhaps, but watch out for an Irish-American literature that digs deep, a literature with Thomas Fleming as standard bearer. This, for the historian, novelist and playwright, is still, I think, virgin territory. There's gold here.

McCourt's Teacher Man, a memoir of this 30 years of teaching in New York City schools, will be published by Scriber in the fall.