I ROLLED over in my bed and reached for Nuala.I ROLLED over in my bed and reached for Nuala.
She wasn’t there. Where was she?
As a matter of fact, where was I?
I groped for my memory. It was jet-lagged, too. Jet lag? Ah, yes, I was in Jury’s Hotel in Dublin. There was someone I had to phone. Who was it?
I remembered. George the Priest.
I dialed his number, got it wrong, told the young woman who answered that I didn’t want to buy anything from Merrill Lynch, thank you very much, and tried again.
“Father Coyne.”
“Yeah.”
“Little Bro … you sound like you have a hangover.”
“Jet lag … Who was the Irish politician who was shot on his way home from Mass?”
“When did this happen?”
“How should I know?” I said irritably.
“Ah, herself is seeing things again, is she now?”
“No comment.”
“Like I tell you, Little Bro, it’s part of the package. … Where in Ireland did this happen?”
“No information on that.”
“Hmm … are you sure it wasn’t going to Mass?”
“Maybe it was.”
‘Then it must have been Kevin O’Higgins.… He was the strongman who took over Ireland after Michael Collins was killed. Some folks say that if it were not for him, democracy would not have had a chance in Ireland because of anarchy out in the countryside. He was shot on the Booterstown road. Forgave his killers before he died. Daughter a Carmelite nun.”
Sure enough, herself was on to something again.
“O’Higgins? Is that a real Irish name?”
“As I remember, he was born Higgins and added the ‘O’ when he joined the Irish Volunteers.”
“Was he involved in a house catching fire?”
George the Priest paused. ‘There was a lot of killing and burning out in the country at that time, Little Bro. First the Black and Tans, the English mercenaries, then the Irregulars during the Irish Civil War. People settling local scores or just for the pure fun of it. O’Higgins put an end to it. He was pretty ruthless. Signed the death warrant for the good friend who had been the best man at his wedding.”
“Wow!”
“Yeah. And he got mixed up with Lady Lavery. That one was no better than she had to be. Born in Chicago.”
“The one who chased Michael Collins?”
“The very one. The Big Fella got away from her, but Kevin O’Higgins didn’t. The letters he wrote her were published only a couple of years ago.”
“Sounds interesting.”
And it also sounded like we shouldn’t get mixed up with it, not that there was much choice.
“Well, good hunting. Give my love to herself. She’ll be a big hit over there.”
“She gave a miniconcert at the airport.”
“‘O Sanctissima’ and ‘Holy God, We Praise Thy Name.’ ”
“Figures.”
I hung up the phone, sank back into my bed, and wondered what time it was. I rummaged around my nightstand and discovered my watch. Ten o’clock. At night? Then I noticed the alarm on the opposite nightstand. It said that it was 4:00. In the morning?
I struggled out of my bed and peered out the window. The swimming pool area was dense with thick Irish mist. Yet there was enough light to suggest that somewhere the sun was still operating. I closed the drapes and crawled back to bed.
Damn Nuala.
Why?
Well, you have to understand that my bride has certain very unattractive characteristics. Like endless energy and boundless enthusiasm and total immunity to the negative effects of airplane travel. Here I was in our hotel room suffering like a lost soul and she was out cavorting around Dublin. It was not fair.
In the taxi we had first settled the matter of my telling Father Placid that I would take care of my wife the way I wanted.
“I don’t need me husband to take care of me, Dermot Michael Coyne!”
“Well, I need my wife to take care of me,” I had replied.
She had pondered that and giggled. “Fair play to you, Dermot love.”
I then began to fade rapidly. She, on the other hand, picked up steam, just like it was really early morning—which it was. The Energizer wife. Since I was incapable of intelligent conversation, she turned to the taxi driver, who, like all of his ilk in Dublin, was gregarious and literate.
“The old city looks grand, doesn’t it now?” she began.
“It will till the mists come back,” I mumbled.
Neither of them paid any attention.
“Galway, is it now?”
“ ‘Tis,” she sighed.
“Here to sing at the Point?”
Did everyone in the focking city know her on sight?
“I am,” another sigh.
“We sold ninety thousand cars here in Dublin last year. Twice as many as four years ago. Pretty soon there’ll be so many cars in the streets that we won’t be able to drive them at all, at all.”
Not quite Irish bull. Maybe just a statement of fact.
A third sigh, the loudest yet,
I opened one eye and peered out the window. We were on an expressway, new cars on all sides. In the distance mists hovered over the Irish Sea. I closed my eye.
They discussed golf and the Yanks who came over for golfing vacations. So many Yanks that it was hard for the locals, like the driver, to get on their own courses. He and his twelve-year-old son had played two Yanks the other day. Beat them. They were grand men, they were, the both of them.
A taxi driver had his own country club? Ah, the country must be prosperous indeed.
Nuala Anne admitted to playing golf even though she wasn’t sure she’d ever be able to beat your man (me). Wasn’t his handicap one and himself not working at it as hard as he should?
Actually, my handicap hovers between two and three. One is what Nuala thinks it ought to be if I practiced more.
The driver turned to the subject of Ireland’s prosperity.
Wasn’t Ireland being called the Celtic Tiger now because its growth rate was 10 percent a year, like the Asian Tigers before they collapsed? That wasn’t going to happen here. And wasn’t the Irish standard of living higher than them fellas over beyond across (Brits)? “And just think of how well we’d be doing if they hadn’t kept us down for seven hundred years? Maybe better even than you Yanks.”
Sighs from both of them.
Maybe the United States should have been a colony of Ireland and would never have wanted to rebel, I thought, but had more sense than to get swept up in a conversation in which I wasn’t needed.
Lowest inflation rate in Europe, highest balance of payments, Dublin the best-educated city in Europe, Galway the fastest-growing city in Europe. Now we had to give money to the European Union instead of getting it from them. Still, fair was fair, wasn’t it now?
Yeah, yeah. I just wanted to get to Jury’s and collapse into bed.
I opened an eye again to consider Dublin. It looked good in the sunlight, as it always did—though the mists on the eastern horizon seemed thicker. Yet there was a sheen of prosperity in the city that had not been there when I first encountered herself in the pub outside Trinity College.
Why did it look more prosperous? I wondered, closing my eyes. In a few minutes I opened both of them to look out the window. The car was not moving. The driver’s quasi bull had already come true. We’d never get to Jury’s.
I observed that, as always, there were large crowds on the streets of downtown Dublin. The difference today was that they all seemed well dressed. Well, their standard of living had a long way to go to catch up with Yankland.
“We’re here, Dermot love,” she whispered to me as though I were a small child.
“Sheffield Avenue?” I said, knowing full well that it wasn’t. The melodious voices had not really put me to sleep. Not much.
‘Jury’s,” she said as she paid off the driver, with a ten-pound note as a tip.
I struggled to climb out of the car.
“Why are we in front and not at the Towers’ entrance? We don’t have to go through the lobby?”
“Don’t we have to say hello to all our old friends?”
So I stumbled into the lobby. Our “old friends,” from the general manager to the bellmen and the women from the gift shop, swarmed around us as soon as we came through the revolving door—as if they had been waiting for our arrival.
Another one of Nuala Anne’s objectionable traits is that she never forgets a name. She remembered everyone who had worked in the hotel when she was acting as my secretary, even in many cases the names of their children.
There was much hugging and kissing and congratulating. My task in the situation was simple. I merely had to smile my stupid smile and agree when I was told repeatedly that I was a very lucky fella to have such a wonderful wife.
I could hardly disagree, could I—even if I were in such a rotten mood?
It was also my responsibility to supply herself with CDs for her autograph.
Finally we made it to our room. Just as I was about to collapse on the bed, herself displayed her most obnoxious trait—being right.
“Would you think now, Dermot love,” she said hesitantly, “that it might not be a bad idea if we spent a little time in the pool to work the kinks out from the trip?”
“It’s a terrible idea altogether,” I said, doffing my jacket, “but as always, Nuala Anne, you’re right.”
“If you don’t want to …”
“I don’t want to at all, at all, but I think we should.”
So we donned swimsuits and Jury’s terry cloth robes and walked down to the swimming pool, an indoor-outdoor affair with the water temperature comfortably above eighty degrees Fahrenheit—a swimming pool for Yanks who, as Nuala had tardy observed when I was her employer rather than vice versa, had never swum in the Atlantic Ocean.
“I’ve seen that bikini before,” I observed.
“Have you now?”
“I have.”
“And where did you see it?”
The first time you went swimming in this place.
It was a modest dark blue ensemble, as if anything on Nuala Anne could be considered to be modest.
“I don’t remember. A woman tried to seduce me in it, but I don’t think she was successful.”
She slapped my arm affectionately. “You’re a desperate man altogether, Dermot Michael Coyne!”
“So I’ve been told.”
We cuddled in the whirlpool, a concession, it was implied, to my weakness. She had undressed in our room and was now lying compliantly in my arms as the waters bubbled around us. Both were pleasant aesthetic experiences, but my hormones were on a temporary hiatus due to circadian dysrhythmia. I promised myself I’d make up for it later.
You’re pretty young to be turning impotent, the Adversary informed me.
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
We then swam for a half hour. The exercise did not improve either my physical condition or my mental disposition.
“I’ll never make it to our room,” I complained.
“Poor Dermot love,” she said. “Your nap will be a lot healthier now.”
“I don’t want health; I want sleep.”
“Poor dear man.”
Just like I was her boy child—which might be what I was.
I collapsed into bed and watched her dress in light gray slacks, matching sweater, and a blue blazer.
“Where would you be going, Nuala Anne?” I asked.
“Out to look around Dublin’s fair city to see how it’s changed in a year and a half.” She bent over me and kissed me lovingly. “I’ll visit a lot of the places where we courted.”
“We didn’t court here.”
“You didn’t, but I did,” she said defiantly as she flounced out the door.
Then I had fallen into the deepest pit of sleep and woke much later in the day to call George the Priest and learn from him about Kevin O’Higgins.
Booterstown road, was it? Well, I wouldn’t tell her. Serve her right. We’d forget the whole subject.
I groped for the phone again and phoned Fred Hanna’s, my Dublin bookstore.
“Dermot Coyne here,” I said. “I have an account with you.”
“Just a minute, Mr. Coyne, while I look it up.”
Right. You gotta be sure I’m not lying.
“On Sheffield Avenue in Chicago, is it now?”
“ ‘Tis.”
“Welcome to Dublin, Mr. Coyne.… We’re all waiting eagerly to hear herself sing.”
Sure they knew who I was. Nuala Anne’s husband.
“You can see a preview on the telly this evening.… I wonder if you could help me with a couple of books.”
“I’d be delighted to, Mr. Coyne.”
“Would you have a biography of Kevin O’Higgins?”
“By DeVere White? I’m sure we do somewhere, perhaps only secondhand. Would that be all right?”
“It would.… Then there’s a book about that woman he might have been involved with?”
“Lady Hazel Lavery? Yes, I’m quite certain we have that in stock … That one was no better than she had to be, Mr. Coyne.”
“And herself from Chicago at that.… Would it be all right if I stopped by tomorrow morning to pick them up?”
“Certainly, Mr. Coyne. We’ll be looking forward to seeing you again. Perhaps you could sign some copies of your novel for us.”
“I did write a novel, didn’t I?”
“We could arrange a cup of tea for you.”
“And scones?”
“Of course.”
“Done.”
So I was a novelist after all. Nuala Anne’s husband, who happened to write novels.
I closed my eyes, merely to rest them. However, when herself bounced in the door I was sound asleep.
“Still sleeping, Dermot love? Ah, but don’t you look a lot better now, and meself feeling guilty that I was so wide awake.”
She didn’t mean a word of it.
“Did you visit all our old haunts?”
“Didn’t I go to O’Neill’s and Trinity and Bewley’s and Irishtown and meet a lot of me old friends. They were so glad to see me, not a touch of envy. It was brilliant, Dermot love, dead brilliant. They all wondered where yourself was.”
And her sweater.
I made no comment.
“And you told them?”
“That you were resting up from the plane flight and would be as fit as a fiddle tomorrow morning.… And didn’t I make a dinner reservation for us at the Commons at half seven. I’ll pay.”
The Commons was in the basement of Newman House on the south side of the green, the house where Newman had given the lectures that became The Idea of a University, where Gerard Manley Hopkins died, and where your man with the dirty mind went to college. When I took her there for the first time, she thought the menu was too dear altogether. Now she wanted to pay for dinner.
“I’m hungry now.”
“Well, can’t we ring for tea in a little while.”
“And how’s Dublin?”
“Och, Dermot, isn’t it scary how much money there is in this city? I’m afraid all the Irish are becoming materialists.”
“Better than living on the edge of starvation.”
“ ’Tis true … ,” she sighed. “I found a bunch of secondary school girls playing Camogie. They let me have a run or two on the pitch.”
Camogie is the woman’s version of hurling, a dangerous, if exciting, sport in which a couple of dozen Irish folk were equipped with clubs.
“In your good clothes!”
“I took off me shoes.”
“How did you do?”
“I’m afraid,” she said, making a motion of swinging her club, “that I astonished the poor children.… What did His Rivirince say?”
She sat down on the bed next to me.
“Your brother George, what other rivirince?”
She kicked off her shoes and slipped out of her slacks. George was always treated with great respect, a wise and holy man. I was still poor Dermot.
“Why would I be calling George the Priest?”
“About the man who was killed walking to Mass.”
Of course she knew that I would call George. Why would I think she wouldn’t know that?
“Oh, that.… Does the name Kevin O’Higgins mean anything to you?”
She frowned. “Wasn’t he one of the gobshites that killed Michael Collins?”
“No, he was on Collins’s side. Apparently he became the backbone of the new Free State Government. He cracked down on the violence in the country and made a lot of enemies. He was killed on the way to Mass down on the Booterstown road.”
She nodded.
“Apparently he became involved with my fellow Chicagoan, Lady Hazel Lavery.”
“THAT one!”
“Unlike the Big Fella, who seems to have evaded her, O’Higgins left a trail of letters that are in a new book.”
“Hm …”
“I called our bookstore over by the Railings, and I’ll pick up a biography of O’Higgins and the book about Lady Hazel.”
Hanna’s was across the street from the wrought-iron railings of Trinity College.
“Och, Dermot, aren’t you a grand husband to put up with my craziness.”
“Actively promote it.”
“You do indeed. … We’ve got to prove that the woman didn’t start the fire; don’t you see that?”
“If you say so.… What woman and which fire?”
“If I knew that, would I not have told you?”
“So we have to find out?”
“We have to find out.”
I’d been there before.
“Nuala Anne, WHAT are you doing?”
“Taking off your shorts.”
“Why?”
“Because you are so beautiful with all your clothes off.”
With one hand she caressed my chest and with the other unhooked her bra. Then she brushed her lips against mine.
“I love you, Dermot Michael; I love you something terrible.”
My hormones seemed to be working again.