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ON THE EDGE

March 14

The waning of the green

BY J.P. DEVINE

In 1889, John Francis (Honey Fitz) Fitzgerald married the lovely Mary Josephine Hannon. Honey Fitz's daughter, Rose Elizabeth, married Joseph P. Kennedy. Another Kennedy, Patrick, married Bridget Murphy.

Irish wed Irish. It's the way it always was, the way God decreed it, and to go against it was as big a sin as chewing the sacred host at communion.

To marry outside the faith or the blood was unheard of. It would provoke the parish priest to whisper in the confessional, "You'll break your sainted mother's heart ... and risk the fires of hell." Who can argue with that?

In America, in the amber shadows of the past, a sweet once upon a time when the air was cleaner and the beer-filled barrels were stacked behind saloons in the alleys of Boston, Mathias Devine married Bridget McCann, a girl he met on the boat coming to America. Catherine Devine married Big Jim Egan. Veronica Conlon, daughter of Jim "The Dude" Conlon, married the son of Mathias Devine and her sister Winnie married John Brady.

It was the Irish way. The blood flowed pure, clean and untainted.

And then the royal strain, blood of the kings (and farmers and sheep herders), smelling of peat smoke and rotting potatoes, got on wagons in County Cavan, Kerry, Donegal and Wexford, boarded the boats at Cobh, left the Emerald Isle and sailed into Boston and Ellis Island.

On this new soil their children and grandchildren were married to the blood in parishes where the priests were Father McIntire, Keating, O'Halloran and Foy.

It's as God intended. Their sons and daughters became cops and firemen, politicians, priests, ballet dancers and saloon keepers, comics and actors and talk show hosts.

MSNBC's Chris Matthews married Kathleen Cunningham. The late, greatest Speaker of The House, Tip O'Neill, wed Mildred Miller. Powerful Chicago mayor Richard Daley went to the altar with Eleanor "Sis" Guilfoyle. And Maine writer Gerard Emmet Boyle shared rings with Portland's Mary Foley as God intended.

Cracks in the grand old tradition began to appear when Jack Kennedy married Jackie Bouvier and Bobby Kennedy married a Skakel.

We all knew the end of that line had come. It wasn't long before the cracks became crevices.

My sister Eileen married Charlie Klein, sister Rita married Arthur Reichenbacher, baby sister Dawn married Leo Pisciotta. One brother married an English Smith, another married Theresa Arsenaul, yet another married Ruth Mueller and the youngest boy, the handsomest and most rebellious Irish of them all, went to the altar (twice) with Katherine Joly, obviously of French Canadian blood.

Our daughters have yet to wed and the chance that they will meet and fall in love with an O'Brien, a Kelly or a Kelleher is slim. But it doesn't matter now. The great Irish feast day, a holy day in Ireland, has faded here to a pale lime charade where drunken revelers outfitted in plastic green hats and "Kiss me" buttons inflate their Irish credentials.

The once pure, magical, insane and lyrical bloodline that gave us Eugene O'Neill and Frank McCourt, is a pale stream that has been forever tainted.

It's no wonder that Daniel Patrick Moynihan sighed, "To be Irish is to know that in the end the world will break your heart."

Beannachtai na feile Padraig (Happy St. Patrick's Day).

J.P. Devine is a Waterville writer.