The Education of an Idealist. Samantha Power
the tulip-shaped pint glass at a 45-degree angle, filling it halfway, pausing so the stout could settle, and then—and only then—pouring the rest. “Pulling a pint” properly, my dad insisted, should take at least two minutes. “Good things come to those who wait,” he would say, mimicking the satisfied customers in the Guinness television ads. Once the pour was complete, my dad—usually an impatient man—waited with unencumbered anticipation for the barman to smooth the creamy head with a butter knife. He relished the first taste of every pint, pausing before clearing his upper lip of Guinness’s signature foamy residue.
By the time my brother Stephen was born in 1974, the cracks in our parents’ relationship were widening. The pub would become at once a sanctuary for my dad and an accelerator of his faltering marriage.
BOTH MUM AND DAD included me—and, when he was older, Stephen—in what they were doing, carving out time to be alone with each of us. I would often spend large parts of my afternoons and weekends accompanying Mum to the squash court, watching her smack the tiny black ball with a wooden Slazenger racket. She was unfailingly gracious on the court, but also fiercely competitive. Sitting in the wooden bleachers and watching her seemingly endless rallies, I would cheer as she wore down her opponents with her trademark grit.
Swimming together in the Irish Sea at the Blackrock beach, we would laugh as we both turned purple, teeth chattering in the frigid water. She often brought me on road trips to her hometown of Cork to visit with her parents and my many aunts, uncles, and cousins. Driving in her tiny Mini on Ireland’s bendy roads, we blissfully belted out songs of my choosing—“It’s a Long Way to Tipperary,” “Molly Malone,” and “She’ll Be Coming ’Round the Mountain.” On occasions when we hopped the train in Dublin and settled in for the three-hour ride, she would unfurl tinfoil-wrapped cheddar cheese and butter wedged between two Jacob’s Cream Crackers, followed by a Cadbury Flake chocolate bar or Kimberley biscuits. I loved the feeling of curling up next to her as she devoured her medical journals, and from around the age of six, I too would sink into a book.
Mum gave people she met a quality of attention that I would come to associate with the most gifted politicians. When making a new acquaintance, she would cock her head to the side and peer earnestly at the other person, digging for details and drawing connections across time and space. She laughed with her whole body, or—if someone’s tale was a sad one—sagged with the weight of the other person’s anguish. I never knew my mother to have an ulterior motive as she listened; she was simply curious and intensely empathetic. She had no airs and eschewed sentimentality, conveying her love not through expressive words—which to her would have sounded maudlin—but through intense, affectionate focus.
Early on, I saw that my mother had a gift for cramming as much life as possible into a day. She arose before dawn, often completing her six-mile morning run before I began groggily pouring my cereal. The only time I saw her sitting still was when she watched professional tennis. When the Wimbledon coverage began, she would park herself in front of our television for hours, contentedly taking in the juniors, the bottom seeds, the doubles, and her favorite, Björn Borg.
Mum was a terrible sleeper. She worried about her patients, with whom she formed deep attachments. But above all, she fretted about my younger brother, who spent the first six weeks of his life in the hospital. When he was born, Stephen suffered a collapsed lung and then quickly contracted meningitis. When he was unable to hold down food, the doctors realized he had a severe intestinal blockage that required surgery. He recovered from the operation, but didn’t talk for his first two years. While my dad thought he would speak when he felt like it, Mum thought the meningitis might have caused him to go deaf.
Dad proved correct. Stephen became an adorably loquacious troublemaker who got great laughs out of laying intricate traps throughout the house for his unsuspecting parents and older sister. At school, though, he struggled, rarely showing interest. My mother spent many nights awake, wondering if he would ever apply himself.
My father always seemed carefree. His dental practice was desultory; he appeared to only work when he felt like it. We would play tennis in the cul-de-sac outside our home, or I would tag along as he pounded golf balls on the driving range. He was close with his parents, whom we often visited two hours away in the town of Athlone. His mother was a force of nature—as a young woman in England, she had built a school from scratch and later made a comfortable living playing the stock market. His dad, whom I and all the grandkids called “Bam Bam,” was a former Irish soldier with a sunny outlook on life, often proclaiming, “Never trouble trouble unless trouble troubles you.” Having retired from the military years before, Bam Bam seemed to have no higher priority than kicking around a soccer ball with Stephen and me or taking us for ice cream.
Thursdays were especially precious to me, as they were reserved for my weekly “day out” in Dublin with my dad. He would pick me up from Mount Anville, the Catholic school I attended, take me for a hamburger, and then help me stock up on candy before we landed at Hartigan’s. Our arrival at the pub was usually a welcome escape from the lashing rain or, on short winter afternoons, the damp darkness. As soon as my father was spotted, he was greeted with cheers of “Jimbo!,” “Jimmy!,” or “If it isn’t the fine doctor himself!” My dad was such a regular patron that he had a designated chair—known as the “Seat of Power”—at the bar.
From around the time I was five years old, I viewed Hartigan’s as a kind of oasis. Without a fuss, I would make my way down a half-flight of stairs from the main pub room and take a seat at a seldom-used bar that mirrored the busy one upstairs. My dad would bring me a bottle of 7 Up—if Stephen was with me, he would get a Coke—and I would contentedly dig into whatever mystery I was reading. I never went far without an Enid Blyton (“The Famous Five” or “The Secret Seven” series), Nancy Drew, or Hardy Boys book under my arm.
Over the course of the many hours I spent in Hartigan’s basement, I disappeared on far-off adventures with intrepid child detectives, combating thieves and kidnappers. On the weekend, when I finished a book I had brought to the pub, I would march upstairs, and my dad would dash to the car to retrieve my coloring books and markers for the next phase of the afternoon. When my dad’s friends brought their children, we would play board games or make up our own entertainment while our fathers laid down sports predictions in the room above.
When I was on my own, I made small talk with the pub guests who ventured downstairs to put change in the cigarette machine or to use the bathroom. Sometimes, I would stand outside the “Gents” toilet, singing songs. I told Stephen that I offered these performances so that my musical talents (which I had yet to realize were lacking) would be “discovered,” but I was probably just pining for attention. For a while, the pub maintained a slot machine downstairs, which I enjoyed because it drew occasional pub patrons. On slow days, I often stood next to the machine’s display screen for the extra reading light.
Hartigan’s was not clean; the downstairs, where I read, played, and sang, had a smell that mingled urine, chlorine disinfectant, and the swirl of barley, malt, and hops. I couldn’t have liked these smells, or playing near a pub’s toilets, but I never complained. Years later, when I mentioned to an Irish diplomat that Hartigan’s had been a big part of my childhood, he claimed that once, while drinking there, he had approached the bathroom door and spotted what he thought was a sack lying across the threshold. “I went to step inside,” he told me, “and then suddenly, to my horror, the sack moved. It was a person!”
I froze, thinking for a second—absurdly—that it might have been me, before he revealed that it was, in fact, a small man who had passed out. I have my doubts that this story is true, but it speaks to the way many who visited Hartigan’s thought about the place I called my second home as a young girl.
Although I must have occasionally experienced boredom or loneliness down in the basement, when I think of that time, I only remember my father, the first man I loved, loving me back. While many Hartigan’s regulars seemed to leave thoughts of their families behind when they entered the cocoon of the pub, my father brought me with him. I was his sidekick. I could find him any time I needed him, with a long row of drained pint glasses beside him. Instead of shaking me off when I bounded up the stairs, he often picked me up and sat me down beside him. I grew preternaturally comfortable chatting