IT WAS the kind of typical Irish dinner Ma used to make—roast beef (well done), carrots, beans, mashed potatoes with pot liquor on them, and a big dish of chocolate ice cream.IT WAS the kind of typical Irish dinner Ma used to make—roast beef (well done), carrots, beans, mashed potatoes with pot liquor on them, and a big dish of chocolate ice cream.
No wine. Ma didn’t believe in it, and the elder McGrails were not yet into the French and American affectation of wine with dinner. However, we all had a small sip of Connemara, the local whiskey, which would burn the throat out of anyone who wasn’t Irish.
We praised their new house. They blushed and smiled.
“I don’t miss the old place one minute,” Annie assured us.
“It’s difficult altogether,” her husband agreed, “to grasp the change, if you take me meaning. It’s almost like we’re living in a television program—a warm, dry, comfortable house. Annie and me wanted this life for our children. We never expected it for ourselves.”
“Aren’t we afraid every morning when we wake up that it will all have been taken away from us overnight?”
“Shush, now, Ma,” Nuala insisted. “No one’s going to take it away from us.”
Her parents were skeptical, just as so many Americans had been skeptical after the Second World War, expecting as they did that the Great Depression would come back. It never did, not yet anyway.
There was not even a slight smell of turf in the house, though a stack of it stood near the fireplace. The electric heating apparently was enough. It was strange to be in a house in rural Ireland that was not permeated by your authentic west of Ireland smell—turf blended with cattle manure.
Nuala, now wearing a simple gray dress, had brought dinner plates out to the drivers, two of them this time, waiting on the road, and a large bone to the famished Fiona.
“Will those poor men be out there all night?” Annie wondered.
“Ah, no,” her daughter reassured her. “There’ll be another team.”
No further questions were asked. They knew as well as we did that the men were Gardai.
After dinner we adjourned to the garden, where a bottle of Baileys was produced along with water tumblers to drink it—no cordial glasses in this part of the world. No ice either.
Fiona, who had been having a great time with her bone, rushed over to join us, delighted that we had the good sense to come outdoors where she was. A full moon shone over our heads, though it was still dusk in Ireland even late in the evening. The moon was not shining over the Claddagh or, from our perspective, over Galway Bay. However it was shining on the small lake behind the McGrails’ house. Nuala and her mother had thrown sweaters over their shoulders. I reflected again on how similar they were in face and figure, if not in contentiousness.
‘Them eejits again?” Nuala had asked me when I had come out of the shower earlier.
She didn’t miss much, did she?
“And one of them with a broken arm.”
“They were coming after you?”
“One had a knife and the other a cosh. They’re amateur thugs. They saw Fiona and my shillelagh and decided against a fight.”
She removed the towel from my hands and completely the drying process, much to my delight.
“Sure you’re a gorgeous man, Dermot Michael,” she had said admiringly.
Under those circumstances I had almost told her how frantically the wolfhound and I had rushed back to protect her and her parents. Then I had realized that my panic was foolish. They would have been quite capable of taking care of themselves. Nuala with a garbage can (dust bin here) cover in her hand was as dangerous as I was with an Irish war club.
So I had kept my mouth shut.
“The Gardai will stay around?” she had asked.
“They will.”
“What do they want, Dermot?”
“It’s hard to tell. They’re not very good at being thugs, and they’re taking terrible chances.”
“Someone is paying them a lot of money.”
Out in the garden after supper, she hummed “Galway Bay” again and we all joined in softly, so as not to wake the Baby Jesus I presumed. I kept my mouth shut also about the feet that from where we were we could not see Galway Bay. Instead I sipped from my tumbler of Baileys.
Fiona curled up at my feet and went to sleep.
“It’s easy to see whose dog she is,” Annie McGrail said with a laugh.
This, I realized, would soon become the conventional wisdom.
We sat in companionable silence for many moments. In Ireland love is often communicated by total silence.
“You’re going down beyond below to Limerick,” said Gerry McGrail. It sounded like a simple observation, but it was in this part of the world a question intended to begin a conversation.
I never have figured out why the Irish combine three prepositions as adverbs when they’re talking direction.
“Aren’t we now?” I said, an Irish response that caused by wife to giggle.
“And you’ll be staying at that castle over across beyond the Shannon?”
“We will,” Nuala replied, cutting off my embarrassing effort to sound like a native.
Silence. Someone sighed.
I waited.
“It’s an interesting place altogether, isn’t it now?”
“A bit of history there,” I said, either now in the groove or at least not embarrassing my wife.
“Aye, there is that. … Mind you, it’s a fine hotel, they say.”
More silence.
“Back in Catholic hands, I hear.”
“ ’Tis not right for us to judge what happened so long ago,” Annie warned. “Still it’s nice when the wheel turns, isn’t it now?”
We all sighed.
“They were a brave young couple, weren’t they?” Gerry continued. “Himself with your Victoria Cross and herself fighting off both the Irregulars and the Tans.”
“All so long ago,” Nuala said, very softly.
Her father sighed. “No story in Ireland ever loses anything through repetition, but don’t they say that she was hiding some of the lads when the Tans came back.”
“Came back?”
Silence.
“The Kerry men had come before and tried to burn the Big House down, and an English officer living there. The Tans drove them off. Then the Tans came back again later.”
It could not have been much later, because the Tans (who killed 238 people during their time in Ireland) had run amok for only a year.
More silence. If Gerry smoked he would have been puffing on his pipe. I filled Nuala’s tumbler with more Baileys.
“Some strange things happened that night. Me own da who fought in the Free State Army because he didn’t much like your Cork men who were running the Irregulars told me once that there were a lot of tales told about that night.”
“Were there?”
“Aye, there were. The woman was killed somehow and the house burned down. Most of the Kerry men escaped and served with the Irregulars. Me da said that most of them were shot by the Free Staters when they captured them. He wasn’t there when it happened, but he says that the orders came down from higher up. They were killing a lot of folks in those days.”
“Is the castle haunted?” I asked.
Annie replied in the very words her daughter had used on our ride out, “Och, isn’t every castle in Ireland haunted.”
‘The owners don’t advertise that, do they now?” Gerry said. “ ’Tis all about their golf course.”
“Where I’m going to beat your man,” Nuala insisted. I ignored her.
“Anything about the officer who commanded the Tans?”
Yet more silence.
“Me da never said anything about him. Funny thing, there’s never been any talk about him.”
It was in England that Henry Hugh Tudor was a bad name, not in Ireland. Odd.
“Those things happened so long ago,” Nuala said, speaking even more softly this time. “Seventy years and more.”
“In Ireland, child, that’s only yesterday.”
Yet more silence.
“Did your father ever encounter any trouble for serving in the Free State Army?” I asked.
“Don’t we in the Gaeltacht look on such things a little differently?”
“We remember as long as anyone else, maybe longer,” Annie added. “But aren’t we easy on forgiveness?”
“Your children, too?” I asked.
Everyone laughed.
I poured myself a little bit more Baileys.
Gerry brought to an end our conversation about Casde Garry.
“Didn’t they all say that she was a very brave woman? Maybe she wanted to die to be with her husband again? Me da told me once that they said Mass for her in the Catholic church, just as they did for himself when he was killed.”
Gerry rose from his chair and took a book off an end table. He opened to a page in which there was a bookmark and with considerable flourish sat back in his chair.
“May I read you a bit about Carraroe, Dermot Michael?”
“Sure,” Annie McGrail said with a Nuala-like snort, “is there much chance of him saying no and yourself already to begin?”
“When your man was young and was writing that play about the islands, he toured the west of Ireland and wrote down what life was like in them days.”
“Synge,” Nuala Anne said, fearing that the allusion was too obscure for me.
“Didn’t I know a young woman once who told an audience that she’d lost the only playboy of the Western world?”
“And didn’t she get a dozen roses for the first time in her life?”
And didn’t tears of happiness flood her eyes at the memory.
“And didn’t she forget to say thank you?”
“And wasn’t she scared altogether?”1
Gerry waited patiently till we had finished our pas de deux and then began his story.
“He called it Between the Bays of Carraroe. It was the world in which our grandparents courted.
“ ‘In rural Ireland very few parishes only are increasing in population, and those that are doing so are usually in districts of the greatest poverty. One of the most curious instances of this tendency is to be found in the parish of Carraroe, which is said to be, on the whole, the poorest parish in the country, although many worse cases of individual destitution can be found elsewhere. The most characteristic part of this district lies on a long promontory between Cashla Bay and Greatman’s Bay. On both coastlines one sees a good many small quays, with, perhaps, two hookers moored to them, and on the roads one passes an occasional flat space covered with small green fields of oats—with whole families on their knees weeding among them—or patches of potatoes; but for the rest one sees little but an endless series of low stony hills, with veins of grass. Here and there, however, one comes in sight of a fresh-water lake, with an island or two, covered with seagulls, and many cottages round the shore; some of them standing almost on the brink of the water, others a little higher up, fitted in among the rocks, and one or two standing out on the top of a ridge against the blue of the sky or of the Twelve Bens of Connaught.
“ ‘At the edge of one of these lakes, near a school of lace or knitting—one of those that have been established by the Congested Districts Board—we met a man driving a mare and foal that had scrambled out of their enclosure, although the mare had her two offlegs chained together. As soon as he had got them back into one of the fields and built up the wall with loose stones, he came over to a stone beside us and began to talk about horses and the dying out of the ponies of Connemara. “You will hardly get any real Connemara ponies now at all,” he said, “and the kind of horses they send down to us to improve the breed are no use, for the horses we breed from them will not thrive or get their health on the little patches where we have to put them. This last while most of the people in this parish are giving up horses altogether. Those that have them sell their foals when they are about six months old for four pounds, or five maybe; but the better part of the people are working with an ass only, that can carry a few things on a straddle over her back.”
“ ‘ “If you’ve no horses,” I said, “how do you get to Galway if you want to go to a fair or to market?”
“ ‘ “We go by the sea,” he said, “in one of the hookers you’ve likely seen at the little quays while walking down by the road. You can sail to Galway if the wind is fair in four hours or less maybe; and the people here are all used to the sea, for no one can live in this place but by cutting turf in the mountains and sailing out to sell it in Clare or Aran, for you see yourselves there’s no good in the land, that has little in it but bare rocks and stones. Two years ago there came a wet summer, and the people were worse okay then than they are now maybe, with their bad potatoes and all; for they couldn’t cut or dry a load of turf to sell across the bay, and there was many a woman hadn’t a dry sod itself to put under her pot, and she shivering with cold and hunger.”
“ ‘ “You’re getting an old man,” I said, “and do you remember if the place was as bad as it is now when you were a young man growing up?”
“ ‘ “It wasn’t as bad, or a half as bad,” he said, “for there were fewer people in it and more land to each, and the land itself was better at the time, for now it is drying up or something, and not giving its fruits and increase as it did.”
“ ‘I asked him if they bought manures.
“ ‘ “We get a hundredweight for eight shillings now and again, but I think there’s little good in it, for it’s only a poor kind they send out to the like of us. Then there was another thing they had in the old times,” he continued, “and that was the making of poteen [illicit whiskey], for it was a great trade at that time, and you’d see the Gardai down on their knees blowing the fire with their own breath to make a drink for themselves, and then going off with the butt of an old barrel, and that was one seizure, and an old bag with a handful of malt, and that was another seizure, and would satisfy the law; but now they must have the worm and the still and a prisoner, and there is little of it made in the country. At that time a man would get ten shillings for a gallon, and it was a good trade for poor people.”
“ ‘As we were talking a woman passed driving two young pigs, and we began to speak of them.
“ ‘ “We buy the young pigs and rear them up,” he said, “but this year they are scarce and dear. And indeed what good are they in bad years, for how can we go feeding a pig when we haven’t enough, maybe, for ourselves? In good years, when you have potatoes and plenty, you can rear up two or three pigs and make a good bit on them; but other times, maybe, a poor man will give a pound for a young pig that won’t thrive after, and then his pound will be gone, and he’ll have no money for his rent.”
“ ‘The old man himself was cheerful and seemingly fairly well-to-do; but in the end he seemed to be getting dejected as he spoke of one difficulty after another, so I asked him, to change the subject, if there was much dancing in the country. “No,” he said, “this while back you’ll never see a piper coming this way at all, though in the old times it’s many a piper would be moving around through those houses for a whole quarter together, playing his pipes and drinking poteen and the people dancing round him; but now there is no dancing or singing in this place at all, and most of the young people is growing up and going to America.”
“ ‘I pointed to the lace school near us, and asked him how the girls got on with the lace, and if they earned much money. “I’ve heard tell,” he said, “that in the four schools round about this place there is near six hundred pounds paid out in wages every year, and that is a good sum; but there isn’t a young girl going to them that isn’t saving up, and saving up till she’ll have enough gathered to take her to America, and then away she will go, and why wouldn’t she?”
“ ‘Often the worst moments in the lives of these people are caused by the still frequent outbreaks of typhus fever, and before we parted I asked him if there was much fever in the particular district where we were.
“ ‘ “Just here,” he said, “there isn’t much of it at all, but there are places round about where you’ll sometimes hear of a score and more stretched out waiting for their death; but I suppose it is the will of God. Then there is a sickness they call consumption that some will die of; but I suppose there is no place where people aren’t getting their death one way or other, and the most in this place are enjoying good health, glory be to God! For it is a healthy place and there is a clean air blowing.”
“ ‘Then, with a few of the usual blessings, he got up and left us, and we walked on through more of similar or still poorer country. It is remarkable that from Spiddal onward—that is, in the whole of the most povertystricken district in Ireland—no one begs, even in a roundabout way. It is the fashion, with many of the officials who are connected with relief works and such things, to compare the people of this district rather unfavorably with the people of the poor districts of Donegal; but in this respect at least Donegal is not the more admirable.’ ”
Gerry closed the book solemnly.
He sighed loudly. So did the rest of us. We waited in silence. He cleared his throat. “It was only a little better when herself and I were growing up. Not so much hunger and a lot less consumption, but until 1960 it was still pretty grim. It seems like only yesterday and yet centuries ago. We wouldn’t be Irish if we didn’t think we might lose it tomorrow.”
“You won’t,” I said firmly.
They all sighed again.
Later in our bedroom, with the lights out and the moon peeking beneath the drapes, Nuala took my hand.
“I’m sorry, Dermot Michael.”
We had kind of implicitly agreed that it would be awkward making love in her parents’ house, especially since the walls were not all that thick. I wondered if her parents were equally shy.
How often did people their age who were still attractive physically and patently in love do sex?
Often enough, I decided, whatever that may mean.
So we were lying in bed, Nuala in a long T-shirt and I in my shorts.
“You should be, woman,” I said, “and meself the soul of patience … but would you ever mind telling me what you’re sorry for?”
“For excluding you from our conversation back in Ballinasloe. I was so excited to be near the Gaeltacht again that I forgot meself.”
I had forgotten completely, but I knew enough not to say that.
“Didn’t I enjoy watching you have so much fun?”
“You really are sounding like any Irishman, Dermot Michael Coyne. We have to get you back to Yankland soon or you’ll go native. You’ll say something every five minutes like ‘me da.’ ”
“Mr. Coyne, he dead.”
She snickered. “I’m also terrible sorry for acting the way I did at Jury’s.”
Aha. Which time at Jury’s? Better not to ask. She probably had been so bad that she would be insulted if I didn’t remember.
It isn’t easy being married.
So I didn’t say anything.
At all, at all.
“You did the right thing by reading your man from Glentrasna.”
John O’Donohue.
“Well, Nuala, you were all worn out.”
“And you made fun of me, too, and wasn’t that wonderful?”
Just so long as you don’t do it too often.
“You were pretty funny,” I said, crawling out on a very long and tenuous limb.
She laughed. “Wasn’t I a terrible onchuck!”
An onchuck is kind of a woman amadon. Kind of.
“I’ll never do that again, Dermot Michael. Never.”
“Never is a hell of a long time,” I said, quoting Harry Truman.
“Well, not till next month anyway!”
“Good!”
“I don’t know why Herself wants me to do all these things, but what a terrible disgrace of an Irish woman I would be if I didn’t do them because I was afraid.”
“Fear will never stop you, Nuala Anne McGrail,” I said, drawing her close.
“Not as long as you are around, Dermot Michael Coyne.”
You SHOULD FUCK HER NOW. The Adversary suddenly appeared in bed with us. NONE OF THIS SHITE ABOUT BEING SHY IN HER PARENTS’ HOUSE.
“A lot you know about women,” I told him.
He went away then and left us alone. We both slept calmly and peacefully in the knowledge that our love, however imperfect and inexperienced it was, would be as durable as the love between her parents.
The next morning we went to Mass at the local parish church. The liturgy and the sermon were both in Irish. Me wife … damn it, MY wife … sang some Latin hymns, which they all seemed to know. As a concession to the Yank in the church—and perhaps to the Guards—the final blessing was in English.
“Well, now,” said the elderly but lively priest, “don’t we have another blessing from your man up beyond above in Glentrasna, which is good for all of us to hear. Doesn’t he call it ‘A Blessing of Solitude’:
“ ‘May you recognize in your life the presence, power, and light of your soul.
“ ‘May you realize that you are never alone, that your soul in its brightness and belonging connects you intimately with the rhythm of the universe.
“ ‘May you have respect for your own individuality and difference.
“ ‘May you realize that the shape of your soul is unique, that you have a special destiny here, that behind the facade of your life there is something beautiful, good, and eternal happening.
“ ‘May you learn to see yourself with the same delight, pride, and expectation with which God sees you in every moment.
“ ‘In the name of the Father, and the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Amen.’ ”
“See,” said my wife, nudging me in the ribs before I could do the same to her.
Later on the golf course, she was not a happy camper.
“ ’Tis not fair at all, at all,” she said grimly, after I had driven a three-hundred-yard green.
“I’m stronger,” I said mildly, spoiling, however, for a fight.
‘That’s not fair either, but, sure, you never practice and you still hit the ball that far.”
“Doesn’t my father say that if I practiced more I’d win the championship at Oak Park every year?”
I had already won it once, but I don’t particularly like competition, unlike my wife, who lives off it.
“At Long Beach, too,” she added, still grim as she teed up her golf ball. “I can beat you with me irons and me putter.”
“Woman, you can, not a doubt about it, at least the short irons. However, golf is not just about irons. It’s about woods.”
“That’s what’s not fair.”
Her drive was perfectly presentable for a woman, 175 yards and straight as an arrow.
“Nice shot,” I remarked.
“Gobshite,” she sneered.
Strength and some skill got me on the green; luck put me close enough to the pin so I sank the putt for an eagle. A glowering Nuala Anne had to be content with a par.
“What did you think of your man’s story last night?” she said as we went to the next tee, not even congratulating me on me eagle. My eagle.
My man, in this instance, was her father.
“Well,” I said, teeing up my ball, “he certainly confirmed that there is a mystery down there at Castlegarry.”
“Aye,” she said. “It was so long ago. What has it to do with us?”
“Isn’t that my question most of the time?”
I swung my seven iron. The hole was a tricky par 3 with a good-sized Galway lake at its edge. My shot arched high in the air and dropped on the green, an easy two-putt away from a par.
“We have to go down there,” she agreed as she prepared for her five-iron blast. “Only, I wish I could go home tomorrow.”
“Home?”
“Southport Avenue. Where else?”
Her shot landed about ten feet from the cup, closer than mine, but just a little too long.
“What do you think happened at Castle Garry in 1922?”
“They killed her, only I don’t know who they are or what she wants us to clear up. Maybe they didn’t kill her. Maybe she wanted to die.”
Right.
As we walked on to the green, I heard her sob.
“Nuala! What’s wrong?”
“I’m such a terrible little gobshite of a wife!”
I put my arm around her. She was trembling with sobs.
“You’d better putt,” she said through her tears. “We don’t want to hold up them focking amadons behind us.”
Not being very competitive, I was ready to settle for a par even though there was a good chance she’d sink her ten footer. So I inched my golf ball up to about a foot and a half away.
“Och, Dermot,” she said through her tears, “you should have gone for it.”
She went for it of course. And missed by an inch.
“Two pars,” I said meekly.
She was still weeping when we arrived at the next tee.
I embraced her again.
“Woman, you’re not a little gobshite of a wife.”
That set off another round of sobbing.
“What makes you think you are?” I persisted, though I was wary that my question might be too direct for the woman and the time and the place.
“I didn’t congratulate you on your eagle! And it such a focking brilliant shot!”
“Just a little strength and a little luck.”
“Strength,” she murmured, “to get it there, skill to put it so close to the cup.”
“Pure luck.”
And it was.
“And meself such a focking competitive woman, always wanting to win.”
“I like competitive women,” I said, truthfully enough. ‘Then I don’t have to be competitive. I just have to glide along on my brute strength and my luck.”
She stopped weeping and began to laugh. “You’re such a dear, sweet, wonderful man, Dermot Michael Coyne!”
“ ’Tis true,” I said with a mock sigh.
She was so badly shaken by her sobbing jag that she had to dab at her eyes with a tissue all the way to the clubhouse. However, she competed as fiercely on the three remaining holes as she had before her burst of guilt. Nonetheless, she did compliment me on my drives.
“Focking brilliant!”
“Thank you.”
“I even half mean it!”
We swam in the pool, though the mists, this time thick and grim, had drifted back from the bay and covered the countryside. The fog had chased away the other swimmers. The pool was chilly, not as chilly as Galway Bay, as transferred to me by the ineffable Fiona.
“ ’Tis too cold for you Yanks and too warm for you Irish people,” my wife informed me.
“It notably warmed up when you dived in,” I said through chattering teeth.
She was wearing a blue bikini that was modest by the standards she usually adhered to at Grand Beach.
“Gobshite,” she said, splashing me.
“When do you show me the place where you and your mother skinny-dip?”
Though she had often insisted that there was such a place, I wasn’t sure that it really existed.
“Never!” she said, trying to shove me under the water. “ ’Tis a private place altogether. Besides, you’d never swim in Galway Bay, not at all, at all.”
“ ’Tis true,” I said, wrestling with her.
We both dragged each other under the water. She was one tough and strong woman.
“Not quite strong enough,” I taunted her—and swam away as fast as I could.
We climbed out of the pool, shivering and gasping for breath.
“ ’Twas great fun,” she announced.
“Frigid.”
While I waited for her in the lobby of the clubhouse, I picked up the Sunday Tribune—Dublin, not Chicago.
We seemed to have made the news again.
Father Placid Clarke had told their arts correspondent that the concert had just barely broken even. ‘The expenses of bringing over an America singer are enormous,” he complained. “They’re not very generous people you know. I feel badly let down by their selfishness.”
However, a certain Michael Patrick Dennis Dunn, the well-known Dublin barrister and spokesman for Nuala Anne McGrail had replied, “Father Placid is singularly ungracious. My client and her husband have paid all their traveling and living expenses themselves, including their taxi ride in from the airport. They have not accepted a single shilling from Irish International Aid. His statement is close to defamatory. If it is true that the concert earned very little money, despite the huge crowd which filled the Point Theater, a formal investigation by the fraud section of the Gardai of the I.I.A. finances might be appropriate. The least Father Placid Clarke could do is present the public with a detailed accounting.”
Father Placid Clarke had bluntly refused to do that. It remained to be seen what further action Mr. Dunn would take.
Though I didn’t know that we had a spokesman in Dublin, I saw the workings of the fine Irish hand of my big sister, Cynthia Marie Elizabeth Anne Hurley, Counselor at Law. Poor Father Placid, he had run into a very large freight train.
The other news about us, though only indirectly, was a profile on Maeve Doyle, “the greatest Irish folk singer of our time.” Maeve Bounces Back!
The theme of the article following this headline was that Ms. Doyle was recovering from a sharp decline in her popularity.
“Of course,” the singer observed, “if a person insists on the highest professional standards, there will come a time when those who are moved by the shallow fashions of the moment will lose interest One expects that to happen. My husband and I were candidly surprised that such an interlude was so long in coming. We are now satisfied that it has passed and that the real Irish people, those who know their own musical heritage and value fine music are rallying to our support.”
Her husband, who was also her manager, was a large, slightly dazed looking fellow with thick black hair, according to the picture which accompanied the article. He was described only as a “prominent musicologist who specializes in traditional Irish music.”
Ms. Boyle went on at some length about her academic and vocal training, her daily exercises to keep in practice, and the “absolute necessity” of maintaining the highest standards when singing folk music.
The reporter, who perhaps had a bit of mischief in her, observed that the folk who had originally sung the music might not have understood that necessity.
“We owe it to their memory,” Ms. Boyle replied, “to keep alive their songs in the most perfect way possible. It is unfortunate that some of the younger and more inexperienced singers do not appreciate that they could easily destroy a fragile tradition.”
She had sweetly passive-aggressive words to say about several singers of whom I had never heard and of the woman who had invited us to Glenstal. She also dismissed Sinead O’Connor and Dolores O’Riordan (of the Cranberries) as barbarians. Her only comment on my wife was that “she ought better to stay in America where she belongs.”
Probably nothing defamatory in that, though it ignored Nuala Anne’s Gaeltacht roots. The reporter noted dryly that Irish was not Ms. Doyle’s first language, though she sang it very well, according to many Irish-speaking music critics.
Aha.
We had made some wonderful friends in Dublin.
“A phone call for you, Mr. McGrail,” a polite young man with flaming red hair said to me.
Mr. McGrail was it now?
“Yeah?”
Silence.
“Who’s calling?”
More silence.
“We want our money!” a hoarse voice shouted into my ear. “We want it soon, you focking gobshite, or we’ll cut off her tits and your balls.”
The phone clicked off.
I hung up calmly and walked out to the car.
“Inspector Murphy,” I said to the copper (having learned his name and rank from my wife), “I just had another call from your friends in the ‘Real’ IRA. They threatened dire harm to my wife and myself.”
“Focking bastards,” he said. “Excuse me, sir. … I’ll call the Commissioner.”
“You do that.”
We drove back to Carraroe, picked up Gerry and Annie, and drove back for dinner at a restaurant on the bay side of the road. It specialized in extraordinary Norman cooking, the man of the house being a Gaeltacht native and his wife a cook from Normandy. We complimented them on their cuisine. They asked Nuala to sing “Galway Bay” for them, though the mists were so thick that one could not even see the bay, which was only a few yards away.
1 Irish Gold