2

SHREWD WEST of Ireland peasant that she is, Nuala Anne likes to keep life under control. That’s why she was studying accounting at Trinity College when I first met her three years ago at O’Neill’s Pub across from St. Anne’s Church, a gorgeous nineteen-year-old in whose voice one heard the bells of music floating over the bogs of Connemara, a Celtic goddess in jeans and a sweatshirt.

The course of a pregnancy, however, was something she could not control. She was angry at herself for being sick almost all the time, for “spotting” intermittently, and for two near misses at miscarriages. She considered all of these natural inevitabilities to be signs of her own moral failure as both a wife and a potential mother.

Through a long and extremely difficult labor, she apologized to me and her mother—Annie McGrail, whom we had flown over for the event—for the inconvenience she was causing us. This is very Irish behavior and there was no point in trying to fight it. Did she mean it as literally true?

What do I know?

“Sure, doesn’t she half believe it all?” Annie had whispered to me.

I have never been able to comprehend what the word half on the lips of an Irish person means.

“Didn’t I half believe it meself?”

That settled nothing, save adding confirmation to the thesis that apples don’t fall very far from their trees.

However, just as Jesus had wisely observed, all these feelings of guilt and responsibility had temporarily disappeared when a worn but radiant Nuala Anne had held the intolerably tiny redhead in her arms.

“Isn’t she gorgeous, Dermot Michael?”

“She is,” I agreed honestly enough.

“Now,” she sighed, “won’t I have to work very hard to be a good mother to her?”

What happens to me in all of that, I asked myself.

I said, however, “Nuala Anne, for you being a good mother will be as natural as breathing.”

“Ah, no,” she sighed.

I did not try to convince her. Try as I might, I had never persuaded her that she was as wonderful a wife as a young man could possibly hope for.

“Doesn’t she look like your ma?”

“Ma” in our family meant my late grandmother, the indomitable Nell Pat Malone, with whom Nuala thought she had some weird psychic link.

“She does,” I admitted.

“What will we call her, Dermot love?”

Long before the child had been conceived, indeed before we were married, Nuala had informed me that our first child would be a girl and that we would name her Mary Anne, which was my grandmother’s real name.

“I thought we were going to call her Mary Anne.”

“That will be her name,” she said patiently, as though she had two infants on her hands, “but what will we call her?”

“Well,” I said, “we can’t call her Nell Pat.”

“OF COURSE we can’t call her that. Your name isn’t Patrick like Nell Pat’s father’s was.”

This was said in a tone that hinted it might well be my fault that I had not been named Patrick.

“’Tis true,” I said, half apologetically.

“We could call her Nell Derm?”

“Nuala, that sounds like some kind of body lotion.”

We both giggled, happy that the agony of labor was over and that we had a new life in the family, even if I had some reservations in the back basement of my brain about playing second fiddle to this tiny intruder.

“WELL, what do you think we should call her, if you know so much?”

“Well,” I said, feeling like I was already an old man, “I have this fantasy of our being at a Catholic League championship game in fifteen years or so and the announcer saying, ‘And for St. Ignatius College Prep at forward, five-ten and All-State, Nellie Coyne!’”

No woman in her right mind would permit a daughter to be called Nellie, just because her father wanted the child to be a basketball star.

“Five-ten, is it?”

“About her mother’s height. And naturally with her mother’s figure. And her red hair in a long ponytail. And a look of pure defiance on her face.”

“Sure, doesn’t it have a certain ring to it?”

And she began to sing Victor Herbert’s “My Nellie’s Blue Eyes.”

Was it the name she had wanted all along? Had she communicated this to me by some weird psychic transfer?

I didn’t want to think about that.

Oddly enough both families thought that Nellie was a perfect name for our little rug rat with the red hair and quickly adopted the elision Nelliecoyne. As my brother George the Priest, who knows nothing about such matters, commented, “It fits her perfectly.” His boss, the little Bishop, observed more realistically, “Nelliecoyne suggests what is patent. She will be a handful, but a delightful handful.”

So Nelliecoyne she was.

None of them, however, had predicted that she would be fey like her mother, that at the age of six months she would see a ghost ship, a ship that didn’t exist and perhaps never existed, floating off the shore of Grand Beach. Grand Beach, by the way, is the last place on the planet one would have expected a ghost ship to appear, especially without the permission of the neoauthoritarians in the Village Council and the Michigan Department of Natural Resources.

The child remained in my arms.

“What are you up to, small girl child?” I asked her.

She continued to sleep peacefully.

Nuala Anne was a good mother, tender, gentle, but firm. Just as she was a good wife, tender, gentle, but firm. She did not let her compulsions about being inadequate interfere with her performance in either role. They impeded (or perhaps half impeded) only her self-image.

Nonetheless and paradoxically, marriage, sexual self-possession (a long time in coming), and motherhood had in fact enhanced her self-confidence. The persona of Nuala Anne, the poised woman of the world, emerged more often, though the ur-Nuala, the shy, skittish child from the Irish Gaeltacht, still lurked.

That one, I add, without going into details, is the most challenging and the most rewarding of bedmates. When the Gaeltacht lass was gently introduced to abandon, the skies fell in on us.

She needed the resources of the poised woman of the world when Nick Farmer began his “investigation” of her. By his own definition he was part of the Chicago literary establishment, a combination of Nelson Algren, Saul Bellow, and Mike Royko, a man with impeccable taste who hung out at all the right bars, knew all the right people, and shared all the right opinions.

Worse luck for us, he and I, quite by chance, published “Chicago” novels at the same time. His was, according to his friends who wrote the reviews, a “gritty, gutsy expose of the phoniness of Chicago political life.” Mine was a “trashy potboiler.” Mine made the best-seller lists; his didn’t go into a second printing. Farmer told people that I was a rich suburban scumbag and he would get even with me. Naturally I heard about his threats.

Farmer was, in my prejudiced opinion, an overweight, untalented, mean-spirited slob. Not good enough to become the music critic of the major media outlets in Chicago, he worked for one of the city’s lesser alternative papers and a minor radio station and defined his role as “musical investigative reporter.” Our least important and most sensationalist TV station gave him a few moments of airtime once a week. In both roles, he presented himself as a serious musical heavyweight, sternly upholding the highest of musical standards with righteous and crusading rigor.

He got even with me by going after Nuala. She was not part of the Chicago popular music establishment, just as I was not part of the local literary scene. She had achieved success and even a platinum disc (Nuala Anne Goes to Church). She was hardly a celebrity yet, but she was big enough, I guess, for a very small man to make his target.

“He’s angry at her,” I told my family, “because she’s beautiful and Irish and a success.”

“Naturally,” George the Priest replied. “That’s why he denounces her wonderful Celtic spirituality on the disc as ‘Mystical Gobbledygook’ and says that her ‘pseudoleprechaunish dialect’ is a fake. The Irish are the only group in America that it is all right for his kind of person to hate.”

“That’s the way she talks,” I protested.

“And the way you’re beginning to talk.”

Nick’s attacks on my Nuala became feverish as her pregnancy continued. Her voice was untrained, not even pretty. Her “presence,” both on the disc and on the video, was phony. Her “superstitious piety” should have been left behind in Ireland. Her success was the result of unscrupulous marketing and shameless self-promotion. She would never be a great singer or even a very good one. Once he had found his theme—“cheap Irish-Catholic kitsch”—he pushed it unremittingly.

At our first family conference on the subject, Nuala being excused “because of her condition” (she was at “Madam’s” for one of her three times a week voice lessons), it was decided by our combination of lawyers, doctors, and public relations experts that the appropriate strategy was simply to ignore Nick Farmer.

The only dissenting voice was Mae Ellen (aka behind her back as Maybelline), my brother Jeff’s wife, who announced in her usual tones of absolute certainty, “He’s right, she should give up the brogue and talk like an American.” We ignored Maybelline as we had become accustomed to doing. I clenched my fist, however, in pent-up rage. Maybelline was on Nuala’s case all the time. As in such obiter dicta, “You have a cute figure, dear, but it’s the kind that a few pregnancies will wipe out. So enjoy it while you can.”

Nuala Anne hates but rarely, but when she does it is passionately. “At least I’ll never be as fat and sloppy as you are.”

That reply shocked the family, which likes to maintain peace among its disparate members. Only my dad suppressed a grin. To give him his due, George the Priest rolled his eyes appreciatively.

For the record, my wife’s mother, of whom Nuala is a clone, a woman in her early fifties, has a perfectly presentable womanly body.

Nick Farmer’s next ploy was to lament the “injustice” of the attention and success of an untrained and untalented Irish-Catholic singer while better and more deserving African-American singers were ignored. In other words he played the race card. None of us thought he would get away with it until The New York Times featured a “report from Chicago” (a city which it views as a mixture of Kinshasa and Beirut) that reported Farmer’s allegation as a serious matter and quoted a number of African-American singers as lamenting the “blatant racism” of Nuala’s success. Then some of the African-American radio stations took up the battle which enabled the Times to report their protest as “racial controversy grows in Chicago.”

(Ever notice how many times on a single page the Times reports something is either growing or declining, usually without any more evidence than selective interviews?)

As Jimmy Breslin remarked, it’s not that The New York Times newspaper is anti-Irish Catholic, it’s just the way things work out.

Nuala’s recording company got cold feet. Something had to be done about the “bad publicity.”

“They spelled her name right, didn’t they?” my sister-in-law Tracy, our “in-house” public relations expert, asked. “The people who will buy herself’s records don’t read The New York Times.”

Still, it was decided that I should write a letter to the Times in my role as Nuala’s “manager.” In fact, I wasn’t her manager. Nuala was her own manager. She had the good sense not to trust anything financial to me and I had the good sense not to want to manage anything.

So I drafted a letter which read, in part:

There was a time when The New York Times had yet to become a racist newspaper that it would check its facts, before printing falsehoods. The allegation that Ms. McGrail has had no vocal training is untrue, indeed it is repeated in reckless disregard of the truth. For several years she has studied under a woman who is universally regarded as one of the best voice teachers in the world. Moreover, apparently your reporter and editor have forgotten your popular music critic’s view that “Nuala Anne Goes to Church is a rare treat by a rare talent, a festival of Celtic spirituality, ancient and modern.” Finally it is absurd to suggest that Ms. McGrail is the only white singer who might be in competition with African-American singers or that she and she alone should end her vocal career to give more African Americans a chance for success. Indeed, even a cursory glance at the pop music charts would suggest that African-American women are doing very well indeed.

Mae Rosen, our “outside” media consultant, made me cut my final sentence: “Perhaps the editors of the Times are too obsessed with the President’s sex life to treat fairly an Irish-Catholic woman from Chicago who by definition already has three strikes against her.”

“Leave that to Cindy,” she advised.

Cindy is my sister, Cynthia Coyne Hurley, as tough a litigator who has ever walked down LaSalle Street. She made a couple of calls to the Times. Their lawyers patronized her only once. After they got over the tsunami which hit them, they agreed to print my letter and to lay off Nuala.

Nuala herself was so sick that she really didn’t much care. “Och, aren’t you the fierce controversialist, Dermot Michael!” was her only comment on my letter.

Then Nick Farmer celebrated Nelliecoyne’s birth by suggesting that it was a publicity trick timed to coincide with the recording of her third disc, Nuala Anne Sings Lullabies. Moreover, he accused her of intending to exploit our “poor little tot” by putting her on the cover of the record and “dragging her before the camera” for the Christmas special in which herself was supposed to sing a few of her lullabies.

The council of war decided that someone should reply.

“You do it, Dermot,” Mae Rosen said. “You’re so good with the media.”

I pretended that I didn’t want to do it.

At Grand Beach on that morning in October after I had laid out the materials for breakfast and created my very own special blueberry pancake batter (bought at the supermarket in the Karwick Plaza), I went upstairs to begin my work for the day. Then, as I sat in front of my computer and stared vacantly out at the serene blue Lake, I changed my reveries from the encounter with Nick Farmer to the subject of the five-masted schooner.

I’ll think of almost anything to put off work. I’m not lazy, well not in the ordinary sense of the word. I’d finish the novel about the Irish “Troubles” in County Limerick during the 1920s in time to meet the contract deadline and keep my publisher, Tim Donegan, and my editor, Henriette Murray, happy. But daydreams and distractions, reveries and reminiscences, are, I argue, necessary for a creative writer. Naturally, I must also spend some time recalling the delights of my romps (“rides” is what she calls them) with my wife.

I had set up my laptop in the room my father uses for his library at Grand Beach. His medical books are at the house in River Forest. At the Lake he stores fiction and his beloved collection of books on the Great Lakes and Great Lakes shipwrecks. Probably my fascination with airplane wrecks off the Chicago lakefront is somehow linked with his addiction to Great Lakes stories. I glanced at the books occasionally when I was growing up and listened to him talk about the Lakes, but, sonlike, had not permitted myself to succumb to the lure of shipping on the Lakes back in the days when Chicago was the busiest port in the world. I typed a few sentences of my novel (the only work I would do on it all day), rose from my makeshift desk, and began to browse through the “Old Fella’s” (as Nuala called him, respectfully, of course) books.

After I opened the first book, however, I wandered down the corridor to make sure my daughter was still breathing. Miraculously she still was sleeping the peace of a self-satisfied little angel.

I remembered George the Priest’s comment shortly before Nelliecoyne had entered the world, “It will be a much more difficult adjustment than marriage, Little Bro.”

I ignored George as I usually do. What did he know?

On that subject, it turned out he knew more than I thought he did.

Parent that I was, I could now put aside my adolescent rebellion against my father’s obsession with the Lakes. As I paged through his books, I realized how many wonderful stories of tragedy, stupidity, and courage filled his collection.

ABOUT TIME YOU GREW UP, the Adversary sneered.

“Shut up,” I told him. “I’m looking for a five-masted schooner.”

THERE IT IS RIGHT IN FRONT OF YOU.

“How perceptive of you!”

The boat, a ship really, was the Charles C. Campbell, the only five-mast ever to sail the Lakes. She was a beautiful craft, sleek, smooth, shapely. And just a little sinister. The note under the picture said that she really was a barkentine with fore and aft sails from her four rear masts and square-rigged sails from her foremast.

So the fore and aft rigging is what makes a schooner a schooner. Fair enough.

She was also one of the last schooners built on the Lakes. She was launched in 1885. By 1890, the windjammers were losing out to the steel-hulled steamers which carried iron and wheat and lumber more efficiently than the schooners. She had spent her final years, as had many other sailing craft, as a manned barge towed by a steam-powered ship. With her consort she disappeared in the famous Indian summer storm of 1901 on Lake Huron. No one ever found a trace of the wreckage.

I had never heard of the Indian summer storm. If I remembered Dad’s tales, November was the month of terrible storms.

Uneasily I glanced out at the Lake. Still smooth as glass.

“Despite her elegance,” said the last sentence of the note, “the Charles C. Campbell was always considered somewhat sinister after her tragic collision with the wooden paddle wheel passenger ship City of Benton Harbor off Michigan City on a foggy night in October of 1898.”

Oh, oh.

Before I could hunt for more information on the City of Benton Harbor, I saw my wife and my faithful hound dog racing madly down the beach. The goddess Maeve with the faithful wolfhound bitch Bran running ahead of her and then waiting for her to catch up and barking in protest that the goddess wasn’t as fast as she was.

Maeve was blond, as I remember, and never did her long hair in a ponytail, and probably never ran on a beach. My own Irish deity was surely taller than the Passionate (which is what Maeve means) and her black ponytail trailed behind her like the trail of a dark comet. Also, Bran was Finn MacCool’s dog and not Maeve’s. But you can’t expect a Yank to keep all his Irish mythology straight.

As I watched, they stopped at the foot of the dune in front of our house. Nuala Anne kicked off her shoes and socks and dove into the Lake, Fiona right behind her. They frolicked in the water and splashed each other. They were both, as Nuala would have said, out of their friggin’ minds. The water was no more than fifty-eight degrees, warm for October and warmer than the Gulf Stream off Galway, but still too cold altogether.

Fiona, white fur flat from the water, beat Nuala Anne to the beach and snatched up a piece of wood. She was doubtless playing some crazy wolfhound game.

I decided that I wanted to know as little as possible about the City of Benton Harbor. Maybe it would all go away. So I turned away from Dad’s books and paid a visit to the nursery before I went downstairs to prepare breakfast for the tribe of Danu. All the ghost ships in the Lake would please go away.

The tyke from outer space was still alive, lightly breathing in and out. She was sleeping peacefully, as well she might. She was dry and well fed and adored, so all was right with the world.

“You’re a sneaky little witch,” I whispered to her. “Isn’t it bad enough that you’ve taken my wife away from me? Now you turn out to be as fey as she is. I’m not sure why we let you in the house. You do nothing but eat and shit and sleep and wail when you know there’s a ghost ship around. What good are you? You’re nothing but trouble and you’ll always be trouble, even if you do end up as an All-State point guard.”

The witch slept on, utterly unperturbed by my denunciation.

BIG DEAL, said the Adversary.

“I’m just expressing my ambivalence.”

YEAH. NOW KISS HER FOREHEAD AND GO COOK BREAKFAST.

So I did kiss her tiny forehead, as I always do when I check on her to see if she is still breathing.