Perhaps this is the moment to meet the Fays—Professor Cyril Fay and his sister, Miss Dora. Professor Fay was a historian who had a hunger for influence, and his sister a mathematician who loved words and language and stories. Acquainted with one of Mother’s sisters, they began to rent the cottage on our farm for weekends, and then for stretches of the year during the long university vacations.

Both played their parts in this story. But how differently they affected me—even though they were twins and did many things together, and often very similarly. In many ways, they defined the term “unidentical twins;” he small and with no neck, she gooselike, thin as a knitting needle, and a good deal taller (though that wouldn’t have been difficult). Only in one respect could a stranger tell that they were related—they walked identically. It was Mother who pointed it out—a fast pace, with a surge on every third step—one-two-three, one-two-three.

I can run my first memory of the Fays like a film. A Saturday afternoon in summer, I about eight years old; Mother and I walked down the fields to the river, and then along the riverbank path to the cottage; Mother carried a round Red Riding Hood wicker basket full of peas, gooseberries, new potatoes, and Lily Moloney’s fresh soda bread hot from the oven. As we reached the cottage, Mother told me that we were going to meet “very clever people. It will do you well to know them. Very clever.”

Miss Fay wore round tortoiseshell spectacles that gave her a surprised look. She sat close to the river on a chair that she’d taken from the cottage, reading so intently that her body bent to the chair’s curve.

In the distance a man—“the professor,” Mother whispered—walked away from us in a straight line. As I watched, he turned back and walked toward us just as briskly—and ignored us. Then he turned and walked again in the opposite direction at the same brisk pace, one-two-three, and then turned again and came back. I saw that as he approached us he was looking down and to his right—he had, we discovered, marked out with wooden pegs a distance of 110 yards.

“Sixteen of these makes a mile,” he later told us.

Mother coughed, and the lady looked up from her book and blinked at the sun. Her warmth to Mother still comforts me.

“I know exactly who you are and I’m Miss Dora Fay and that’s my brother over there; he’s a big walker.” When she shook hands with me she said, “If I have letters to post, or need milk, will you be my Mercury?”

I, because I had been raised quietly, nodded and said nothing, but Miss Fay asked, “Let me see your ankles.”

She bent a little and peered—I was wearing sandals and no socks—and she straightened up, smiled, and said, “Yes, I can definitely see wings sprouting there.”

She had prominent front teeth, Miss Dora Fay. She could, as they say, eat a banana through a tennis racket, and she was, I now think, my first true love. As first loves are capable of doing, she later inspired me, and gave me shelter and comfort.

When she died, an old lady, I was with her. I wept salt tears, and helped to carry her coffin to her grave. She bequeathed me all her books, and from time to time I find her lovely wide handwriting in the margin of something, always a thoughtful note, always inquiring, always seeking to expand knowledge, never judgmental.

I also have certain scientific instruments that she gave me; they saved my life; I keep them in a bank vault box, and I look at them every year.

She called her brother to meet us, but he waved her away and continued his walking. Miss Fay raised an eyebrow to Mother that said, “You and I understand these things.”

It was only when I put together the many similarities between Miss Dora Fay and Mother that I grasped the cultural mixed-ness of my parents’ marriage. The Fays came from an Anglo-Irish family, meaning not Catholics, and had roots in a society that originated in England, although their ancestors had been in Ireland for hundreds of years. They worshipped at the Church of Ireland, known elsewhere as Anglican or Episcopalian—what we have always in Ireland called “Protestants,” even though the term properly refers to the Reform churches.

My mother, of Welsh stock, had also been a “Protestant,” but converted to Catholicism in order to marry my father. His family can be traced back to the oldest of the Irish clans, and now I can survey where people might have seen certain differences between us and our farming neighbors.

We had that slight Protestant tinge—“English,” if you will—that to some people seemed to set us apart. And to be apart is, if not dangerous, at least exotic. To my eyes, though, my parents never seemed different from anybody else’s. I suppose if you’ve always been wrapped in wool, you don’t know it’s wool.

Mother had embraced Catholicism like a soldier takes orders—duty rather than passion, rote rather than inquiry. (My father once remarked to me, “She still has some of that Welsh Baptist wind in her pipes.”) She left my religious education to my teachers, and faith played no part in our conversation.

In fact, other than the duty of Mass every Sunday, the only contact we had with the Catholic Church arose if Father Hogan asked my father to come with him when buying a horse; and sometimes they went to the races together.

The next day Professor Fay and Miss Dora Fay came to our house for lunch. Such talk! And all about politics. Up to that moment I’d never heard anything like it. The four adults conversed in gales; the winds of their conversation blew up and down the long table and out into the sunny Sunday afternoon. My parents thrilled to Professor Fay, who had all the latest news from Dublin. Miss Fay, when she wanted to make a point, swept the table in front of her with one hand and then the other.

That was June of 1922, the first summer of our new nation—which was why I’d never heard such talk. Intoxicating. Intoxicating even now to look back upon it, and I believe that’s when my interest in politics first took hold.

A note here on Professor Fay: I didn’t like him from the first. Being a small boy, I didn’t quite know why I didn’t like him. He had eyes like a bad-tempered pig and it grieved me to think so, because I loved our pigs. But we’d once had a bad-tempered sow who had often tried to bite me. Her name was Rita, and Professor Fay’s little eyes reminded me of Rita’s—mean-spirited, glinty eyes, sulky with malice. As it turned out, I was so right not to like him.

He also had an irritating habit of straightening his bow tie unreasonably often, and wetting his lips with his tongue, a darting little pink slink.

I did, however, enjoy the respect that he paid my parents, and how he said repeatedly to my father, “I perfectly agree with you, Mr. MacCarthy, I perfectly agree with you.” But I adored Miss Fay, and I did indeed become her Mercury—letters to the postbox, the new milk from the cows every morning, butter when it was made, the hot soda bread, which she loved.

“You’re always bringing me gifts,” she said over and over. “So I must bring you gifts.”

Consequently, Miss Dora Fay showed me how to do crosswords. She taught me rock, paper, scissors. And she arrived one time from Dublin with a five-thousand-piece jigsaw puzzle of Moses Parts the Red Sea, which we built together all summer.

“Let’s do the sky first,” she said. “The sky is always difficult.”

She also gave me what is still my favorite possession—a red leather book named, in gold on the front cover, Shakespeare.

Almost more important, she said, “Don’t feel that you have to know how to use it now,” but she read passages to me and explained what was going on. She took Macbeth as the principal first lesson because, she said, “Boys like blood and gore and there’s a lot of it in here.”

Next summer she brought her own Shakespeare down from Dublin, the huge, new Yale edition, because her “happiest time,” she said, had been at Yale. She described the university with longing in her voice—“the ivy, the statues.” And she had me follow in my red leather book while she read Hamlet to me from her volume, and as we sat together she explained it as she went along. It remains my favorite play.

Those were the Fays, and throughout this story of the Kellys and my family, you’ll meet them now and again. And they were there at the resolution—he disgraceful, she supreme.