ON THE anniversary of Kevin O’Higgins’s death, my wife and I entered the Catholic church in Booterstown. A plainclothes cop moved to stop us at the door and then backed off when he saw that we were accompanied by the Deputy Commissioner and his wife.
There were perhaps sixty people present for the Mass, only a sprinkling in the large church. They all seemed to be respectable members of the uppermiddle class, no one looking remotely like a revolutionary. They wore ordinary summer clothes, as we did, light dresses, summer suits. Like us they entered the church quietly, though hardly with a mournful air. An elderly Carmelite nun knelt in the front row, Kevin’s youngest daughter.
The priest who presided over the Eucharist wore white vestments. I accepted on the authoritative testimony of my parents the fact that at one time the Catholic funeral services had required black vestments and somber Latin. How could one have so completely missed the point of our faith?
The music was from Father Liam Lawton’s Mass for Celtic Saints. Nuala sang softly next to me. If anyone heard her or recognized her they gave no sign of it. Perhaps the rules were that you never recognized people at this memorial.
The middle-aged priest read the Gospel in which Jesus teaches the “Our Father.”
“The key phrase,” he said, setting the Gospel book aside, “in this prayer is ‘forgive us our sins as we forgive those who sin against us.’ This is the fundamental truth Jesus came to teach us. This is the core of our faith. This is the most important truth we Catholics have to offer the rest of the world today as always, even though we have often not lived it ourselves. Note carefully, my friends, that there is no question here of earning God’s pardon. We do not plead that He forgive us because we have forgiven others. You do not bargain with God, not even for forgiveness. Quite the contrary, God’s pardon is an implacable given. In this prayer we rather promise God that we will forgive because we have been forgiven—we will manifest His forgiveness in our forgiveness of others. This is what Catholicism means.
“We are here today because one man said, ‘The killing has to stop; I forgive you.’ These words had an astonishing redemptive power for his family, for those who killed him, and for their families, and, if I may say so, also for Ireland. Someone, who knows about this annual Eucharist, remarked to me recently that only in Ireland could something like this occur. I don’t know whether that is true. I do know that if Irish Catholicism means anything at all, something like this should most certainly happen in Ireland.
‘The killing has not yet stopped on this island, but there is much less of it than there used to be. We seem finally on the verge of the peace for which so many men died seventy-five years ago. We already have our freedom. We also seem to have prosperity. What Kevin dreamed about has come true, perhaps not quite the way he planned, but it still seems to have happened.
“If we wish to sustain this remarkable phenomenon that has been called modern Ireland, we must not forget the importance of forgiveness in our age-old tradition. If we do forget it, much of what we have achieved in the last three-quarters of a century could be lost again. So we pray today that forgiveness will complete and perfect the healing process that Ireland and the whole world need.”
Nuala leaned over and whispered in my ear, “That’s why we had to do all these things, Dermot love, to learn about forgiveness.”
I nodded.
You don’t argue with your mystics. Especially when she’s your wife.
Afterward there was a buffet in the parish hall. The people chatted amiably with one another, talking about their lives since the last Eucharist, a year ago. I finished off several sandwiches and pastries because Ma had always said it was a sin to waste food.
Gene Keenan introduced us to Tom Whelan, the Junior Minister in the Foreign Office, a bright-looking young man, accompanied by a bright-looking young wife, who, it turned out, was a lawyer.
“She wants to be president of Ireland someday,” he told us. “You have to be a woman and a lawyer to be elected these days.”
“Well, I’ll never name you prime minister,” she said in reply.
“Gene has been telling me of the astonishing detective work you two have been doing since you’ve been here in Ireland this time … and herself performing so brilliantly at the Point the other night.”
“We have been rewarded,” I said, “with the best wolfhound in all of Ireland.”
“So I understand. … Is she Irish-speaking?”
Nuala Anne said something in Irish.
“As her first language? Well, that’s all to the good. … Let me be honest with you: It’s time that the whole story be told. It was so long ago. So much tragedy and heartache. But so much generosity and faith.”
I thought briefly of Archdeacon Clyde’s comment that men and women who lived long ago become historical figures and cease to be human beings. They rather become icons, legends from whom we can learn, but not flesh-and-blood people like us who can suffer as we do and have. Was not all this goodwill just a little shallow?
Then I thought of the Carmelite nun with whom we had shaken hands, and herself, as my wife would have said—and probably would say—so radiantly lovely.
No, this scene of goodwill was not shallow at all.
“If you want to tell the story, Dermot, you certainly have my permission. Lady Augusta is surely the most astonishing character of them all.”
“What do you think about that other and very different astonishing woman, my fellow Chicagoan, Lady Hazel Lavery?”
He frowned pensively. “She was a remarkable woman, magical, one might say. Certainly lonely and haunted. She lost both her father and her first husband very early in life. Sir John Lavery perhaps replaced her father. The many lovers she claimed never adequately replaced Ned Trudeau, who died in her arms a few months after their marriage.”
“And herself pregnant.”
“Precisely. … She had a vivid imagination. Historians I’ve talked to tell me that she had many fewer lovers than she claimed. Her pretense to be virtually Michael Collins’s widow was certainly fantasy.”
“And Kevin?”
“You know, Dermot, I kind of doubt it. It doesn’t fit what we know of his stern, upright character. Doubtless he was enamored of her; most men that knew her were. He wrote her some silly letters. Sleep with her? It seems most unlikely. Moreover, she was skillful at editing the letters, cutting parts out, and showing different ones to different friends. I don’t doubt that she persuaded herself that they were lovers, just like she persuaded herself that Winston Churchill was her lover. I do doubt, however, that in either case she bedded them.”
“Maybe,” I said.
Later I asked Nuala Anne what she thought.
“We wouldn’t be all that far from wrong if we said that your man probably had the right of it.”
Before we left Ireland we receive a manila envelope with a Garda Siochana letterhead. Inside there was a photograph of an elderly nun. There was no mistaking the hint of mischief that glowed in her eyes or tugged at her mouth.
Later, soon after our return to America and before our first trip to Grand Beach, Nuala and I went to 415 Ninth Avenue, between Cleveland and Larrabee Streets, where Hazel was born. St. Michael’s Church loomed in the background. The building had long since been torn down and replaced by new town houses. Our next stop was the house on Astor Street where she grew up. There we prayed that this resdess, haunted, and beautiful woman had at last found peace.
One morning in late September, as our first wedding anniversary drew near, I was awakened from deep sleep in our home on Southport by someone persistently nudging my thigh.
“Nuala? …”
The nudging continued. It was followed by a bark.
“Fiona? … What’s the matter, girl?”
I was pushed out of bed.
Someone was being very sick in the bathroom.
Fiona barked insistently and nudged me towards the bathroom.
“All right, all right!”
Nuala, a robe around her shoulders, was kneeling on the floor and vomiting into the toilet.
“Nuala!”
Fiona barked again, a demand that I stop whatever was troubling her beloved mistress.
“What’s wrong!”
“It’s that focking bitch!”
“What focking bitch?”
“Your focking daughter!”
“My daughter?”
“That focking little Mary Anne.”
I knelt next to her and put my arm around her protectively. “You mean little Nell Dermot?”
“I’m going to have to fight with her for the rest of my life,” she wailed. “This is only the beginning!”
She retched again.
“Course, we’ll bond by fighting.”
“Bond against her father?”
“Who else?”
“Whom else.”
She fell into my arms, laughing and crying. The crying, however, was joyous. Fiona settled down, content with her early morning’s work.
“Oh, Dermot Michael! I’ve never been so happy!”
I did not even think of questioning whether our child would be a girl.