—14—

“THE THING is,” my wife informed me, that you gotta see the bridge behind the bridge, the real bridge that’s not hidden by your Irish mists.”

“Ah,” I replied. She pronounced thing as though it had no h, as was the local custom.

In fact, the mists had disappeared. It was another pleasant spring evening, with the delicate touch of a breeze, a faint sniff of sea air mixed with my woman’s alluring perfume, and soft sounds of night in the distance, a romantic evening for young lovers, if that is what we were—I personally felt very old.

We were eating supper at an outdoor table in front of the Dropping Well restaurant beneath the Miltown Bridge over the Dodder River. Other couples nodded and smiled as they passed our table but did not harass us. Many of the Irish are delicate about respecting privacy. They would even leave Michael Jordan alone if he were eating supper on a warm evening in Dublin.

The Dodder wanders aimlessly through the south and east sides of Dublin before finding the Liffey at Ring’s End, shortly before Anna Livia, following your man’s injunction to “river run,” plunges into the Irish Sea. It is the first of the seven rivers that your man (same man, different book) crosses during these twenty-four hours in 1902.

The bridge was illumined by floodlights and somehow represented much of Dublin history, a lovely relic to a troubled past. Both the Bellefield campus of University College Dublin (or the National University of Ireland, Dublin, as it now must be called) and the National College of Industrial Relations (Jesuit in origin, but, as Prester George says, there’s nothing necessarily wrong with that) were but a few hundred yards away. However, the restaurant was an old building that had been a morgue during the famine times.

“Didn’t the bodies float down the river?” my wife had informed me.‘They pulled them out and gave them a decent burial. Nothing more they could do, was there?”

This was my fey bride, one of the dark ones who could sense a psychic vibration a mile away, calmly and with considerable gusto, devouring a large helping of Scallops Mornay and a bottle of white Rhone, as she talked about the famine years in the country just outside Dublin. I, on the other hand, did not feel much like eating.

“No memories lingering here, Nuala Anne?”

She had frowned as through that were a ridiculous question. “Why should there be, Dermot Michael? Aren’t all those poor folks safe in Heaven?”

So too were the Confederate soldiers whose bodies had once been buried in Lincoln Park in Chicago, some of whom had been washed out into Lake Michigan. But Nuala had been aware of them.¹

I thought it best not to raise the issue.

We had paused at the slender, elegant memorial on the bank of the river to the Choctaw Indians who had sent food to Ireland during the famine.

“We Irish never forget our friends,” she had said. “Didn’t them poor Indians do more for us than the bloody Brits?”

“Or your enemies?”

“Och, sure, aren’t we nice to all the English people who come here to visit us?”

“You are indeed.”

“And ourselves now living better than they do!” she had said with a superior grin. “Though not as good as us Yanks.”

The net of security that both the Guards and Mike Casey had spun around us was invisible. However, I thought I saw at the far side of the little outdoor plaza in front of the restaurant the tall, elegant figure of Gene Keenan. He seemed to be with a blond woman who at a distance was equally tall and elegant.

My wife then had explained to me that England didn’t cause the potato famine directly. The Brits were not responsible for the blight that had destroyed the potato crops. However, they were indirectly responsible because they had reduced Ireland to such poverty through hundreds of years of oppression that millions of people were dependent for their survival on marginal subsistence farming.

Nuala Anne the Economist.

I would have to learn about this extraordinary woman.

Then we began to discuss bridges.

“You see, Dermot Michael,” she said, “the bridge up there is real enough. We Celts are not your Platonists.”

“I’m glad to hear that.”

“The bridge is really up there. In fact, it’s really there even when Irish mists hide it, isn’t it now?”

“I take your word for it.”

“No!” She pounded (gently) on the table. “You know ’tis there because you’ve seen it.”

She was, by the way, wearing the slip dress she had threatened to wear, with only the minimum beneath it as she had threatened. Maybe a little less than the minimum.

“Right.”

“So it is with the bridge behind the bridge. Just because it’s hidden in mists now doesn’t mean that it’s not there—if you take me meaning.”

“Uh-huh … but what is the bridge?”

“Sure, haven’t I been after telling you! ’Tis the bridge between Heaven and earth!”

She hadn’t just told me that at all.

“Which is?”

She waved her hand as if to dismiss my pathetic ignorance.

“The rainbow of Noah, the baby in Bethlehem, the Cross of Jesus. Doesn’t everyone know that?”

“Is there a lover behind the lover?”

“Why wouldn’t there be? When you love me passionately, doesn’t that stand for God loving me?”

SEE, ASSHOLE, said the Adversary.

When I had held her naked and scared in my arms earlier in the day was that a hint of what God was like? I wasn’t sure that I liked that kind of God, a voraciously hungry deity turned on by His creatures.

“I see,” I said to her.

Still maybe that was a pretty cool God, one head over heels with desire. Maybe I wanted Him on my side.

“Both of you put up with me, even though I’m not a very good wife.”

“Woman,” I said irritably. “I want to hear no more of that shite; do you understand?”

“Yes, Dermot,” she said meekly.

“Is there a person behind the person?” I asked.

“Ah, sure there is; doesn’t there have to be? This is the person we really are beneath all other persons we pretend to be. The trick of it, if you take me meaning, is to figure out who you really are. Then being the other people you are but not really is no problem at all, at all.”

“Ah.”

“So you’re wondering if I know who I really am behind all the different people I’m pretending to be most of the time?”

“The thought did occur to me, Nuala Anne.”

She considered the issue. “Well, I kind of halfknow … I’m not sure I like her.”

“Who is she?”

“Och, don’t you know that without me telling you?”

“I want to hear it anyhow.”

“Well,” she said, pouring more wine into my glass, “isn’t she the shy slip of a girl from the Gaeltacht in Connemara who is afraid of her own shadow and probably shouldn’t have gone any farther than Galway City? She is also very good at pretending to be someone else, but isn’t she afraid to be found out?”

She finished her scallops, wiping the plate clean, like all we Irish (and Irish Americans) are taught to do when we’re kids.

“Of course she is found out,” I picked up the theme, “because she wants to be, just to make sure that people don’t hate her.”

“Well, I still don’t really like her, Dermot love.”

“Everyone else does, myself included. She’s the woman I married.”

She waved that topic away.

“I suppose, Dermot Michael Coyne, that you think you’re transparent and that there are no mysteries about you at all, at all.”

The best defense is a good offense, huh?

“Well …”

“Aren’t you the most mysterious fella I’ve ever met.

You pretend to be the sweet, even-tempered kid who wouldn’t play football and couldn’t succeed at the Board of Trade. But you love competition and enjoy a good fight, especially a verbal one, and like to fend off the media and put nerds like me older brother in their place.² And you write passionate stories and erotic love poetry. Ah, no, you’re impenetrable altogether.”

“I’m not,” I said bluntly.

“You are, too.” She touched my hand with her fingers. “Mind you, I like me men that way.”

“Are you suggesting, young woman, that I change my personas as quickly as you change yours?”

“Not at all, at all!” Her fingers drummed on my hand. “I’m an actress and I can be someone else in a couple of seconds, but, sure, you change so slowly that I almost don’t realize that there’s another man who wants a ride with me.”

“Another man altogether?”

“Just about, but doesn’t that make it interesting?”

SEE, AMADON! SHE’S ALLUDING DISCREETLY TO YOUR LOST OPPORTUNITY.

She then ordered our dessert—apple crunch with heavy cream and a “small” sip of Baileys.

“You won’t be needing any Bushmill’s tonight,” she explained to me.

“Are you afraid of some of the people I become?” I asked, realizing I was skating out on thin ice.

“Terrified altogether, but isn’t it a nice kind of terror?”

An invitation to explore more deeply our sexual responses, about which neither of us knew very much?

“Where are we staying in the west?” I asked, deliberately changing the subject.

“Let’s see, in Galway we’ll be with me ma and me da at their new bungalow, of course, and then we’ll go down to Limerick. We’ll visit the monks at Glenstal and do the recording at the University of Limerick. We’ll be staying for a couple of nights out on the Shannon at a place called Castlegarry, one of them great country houses which have been turned into hotels. They have a fine golf course, and we’ll play a few rounds to make up for all the time you’ve missed at Long Beach Country Club. Then we’ll go home to Chicago.”

She squeezed my hand. Chicago was home now. And forever.

“What’s this Castlegarry place like?” I asked slyly. I wanted to see what she knew about it. Had she perhaps deliberately signed us up at a place where we would find out about arson and death?

“Sure, I haven’t been there. But wasn’t I after saying that it had a golf course? Do we need to know anything else about it?”

“Is it haunted?”

“Most places in Ireland are not haunted, Dermot Michael Coyne. ’Tis only you Yanks that want haunts everywhere.”

If I conceded that Nuala’s fey interludes were authentic—and on the basis of the evidence how could I deny their authenticity?—then the question was whether these instincts had been activated by her decision we would stay in Casdegarry or the instincts had dictated our choice of hotels in the west of Ireland. Practically, it didn’t matter much. If I told her the truth, which I had better do, there was no way we would find another hotel, much less fly home after our stop in Galway.

Over the apple crunch, which was too large by half, and tea, we discussed the plans for the morrow. Herself would go over to the theater at half ten, rehearse a bit more, and then make sure everything was the way it should be, especially with RTE.

You must understand that the R is pronounced as though it were oar.

This arrangement was fine with me. I could pick up her parents at the Heuston Street station and smuggle them into the hotel. Their appearance at the concert would be a total surprise.

“You figure that if you aren’t at the Point worrying, something will surely go wrong?”

“If you’re Irish,” she said, in her Yank accent, “you know that God will punish you if you don’t worry enough.”

“What God?”

“Not the one I’ll be singing to. Isn’t He a real sweetheart?”

“Well, since I won’t be seeing you tomorrow, I suppose I should be giving you this preconcert present now.”

“What have you done now, Dermot Michael?” she said suspiciously as she considered the small box I had placed on the table.

“Open it, woman, and find out.”

Gingerly she untied the ribbon and peeled away the tissue and peeked into the box.

“Och! Dermot!” she cried out as she flipped it open. “Aren’t they the most beautiful diamond studs in all the world! Sure, they must have cost too much altogether! Dermot Michael, you shouldn’t have done it!”

“Woman! You’re breaking all the rules!”

Her shoulders slumped. “I am now. I’m such a terrible woman.”

“Another rule down the drain!”

“Right!”

She gathered herself together, struggling to remember the rules.

“Dermot love, they’re wonderful presents! I’m very grateful,” she recited the prescribed response from memory. “It’s very generous of you to give them to me. I’ll always remember the night I received them … fair play?” She grinned like a street hoyden.

“Fair play indeed.”

She leaned across the table and kissed me. Then, very carefully, she took off the earrings she was wearing and put on the new ones. They glittered like dancing moonbeams in the soft light.

“They’ll fit perfectly with me white suit tomorrow night, won’t they now?”

“That was the general idea.”

Actually, studs of that size were hardly what an upper-middle-class Dublin matron would wear to Mass on Sunday, but that really didn’t matter.

“Aren’t they beautiful, Dermot Michael?”

Her smile was far more radiant than the diamonds. I was overwhelmed with love for her.

SURE, DON’T YOU WANT TO REACH ACROSS THE TABLE AND TOUCH HER BREASTS AND THEN PULL OFF THAT SILLY DRESS AND MAKE FRANTIC LOVE WITH HER?

“Not here,” I told the Adversary.

SOON.

I knew that I wouldn’t. Not tonight. After all, didn’t she have a concert tomorrow?

The Commissioner and his wife strolled over to our table. She was indeed a tall, blond, Viking princess type with a solemn face and pale, mischievous blue eyes.

Nuala Anne constrained them to sit down and enjoy a glass of Baileys with us. They both complimented her on her new studs and her new dress.

“Didn’t me man think it was a nightgown?”

“But nightgowns are not lined, are they!” Orla Keenan protested, dismayed by my seeming ignorance in the matter.

“A good thing,” her husband added with a chuckle.

They both wished herself every success at the event the next night, for which they had tickets.

I took the Commissioner aside as we drifted towards our cars.

“Any leads on the kidnapers?”

They seem to have vanished from the face of the earth. The survivor says he didn’t know them, thought they were Brits …”

He hesitated.

“There has been another development, I’m afraid.… We are screening your incoming messages and phone calls, just to make sure, I hope you don’t mind.…”

“Not in the least.”

“There was a crude note this afternoon from a group calling itself the Real IRA.”

“Oh?”

“They want fifty thousand dollars or they will kidnap your wife and this time kill you if you try to stop them. It seems that as a rich American you are bound in conscience to make restitution to the republic, one and indivisible.”

“Only fifty thousand?” I said, as my throat turned dry.

“It did seem a bit modest.... We don’t think that the men who are negotiating up beyond above would settle for such a trivial sum. Nor would they tolerate such threats in such a sensitive phase of the negotiations. These lads are either a disgruntled offshoot or not real IRA at all, at all.”

“Amateur night?”

“In a manner of speaking.”

“Which doesn’t make them any less dangerous.”

“We’ll get them, Dermot; never fear.”

“I’ll take your word for it,” I said with more confidence than I felt. “I have something to tell you, Gene. Something that makes me shiver even to think about it. Before we left America, didn’t herself make reservations for three nights at a hotel on the Shannon Estuary called Castlegarry?”

He closed his eyes and rubbed his chin. “What the hell...!”

“My very thought.”

“Why would she choose it?”

“Mostly, I think, because it has a golf course. She is determined to beat me at golf, which I don’t think she’ll ever do.”

“Strange indeed … but then someone might know that you’re going out there.”

“Lots of people. The travel agents and the hotel staff for starters.”

He nodded thoughtfully.

“Of course. … We will keep our network around you until you return to America.”

“I’d appreciate that.”

“She really is a dark one, isn’t she?”

‘Tell me about it.”

¹ Irish Lace

² Irish Whiskey