“WILL I be driving now?” me wife asked me, extending her hand.The gesture was more important than the interrogative form of her remark. The Irish language loves the courtesy of the question. The Irish mother, however, loves to be in charge. So what Nuala meant was, “I’ll be driving, so give me the friggin’ key.”
We were to join her parents, Gerroid and Annie, at Ashford Castle for supper. My wife didn’t trust me on the narrow Connemara roads at night. Moreover, since she couldn’t mix the “creature” with her medication, she alleged that her driving freed me up to drink “all that I wanted”—never more than a glass or two of wine and a sip of Baileys.
I had awakened, groggy and complacent, late in the afternoon. The springtime Irish sun was still high in the sky. In her terry cloth robe, Nuala Anne was huddled over her easel. I had noted from my comfortable spot in our bed that there was a lot of red on the watercolor.
“Dermot Michael,” she had said, continuing to concentrate on her work, “why don’t you take herself on her second run now and check on the kids?”
How did she know I was awake?
Don’t ask.
So I had dressed in my jogging clothes, tied on my Nikes, and kissed her neck.
“Och, aren’t you the brilliant lover, Dermot Michael Coyne?” she had observed, still concentrating on the painting, in which I thought I saw five bloody bodies.
“Brilliant” is the superlative degree of an adjective of which “super” is the comparative.
“Am I now?”
She had nodded her head slightly, in confirmation.
“Isn’t the greatest pleasure for a woman in that moment when she gives herself totally to her man?”
“You’d know that better than I would.”
I had kissed her neck again.
“’Tis.” She had sighed.
“When she’s done that she knows she’s captured her man completely,” I had suggested.
She had paused, her brush poised over the painting.
“Sure, if she hasn’t captured him completely, she has no business being in bed with him, has she now?”
I retreated with as much grace as I could muster under the circumstances.
Outside our bungalow, the tireless Ethne was frolicking with Nelliecoyne and a gaggle of three-year-old girls while the Mick relaxed in his car seat and watched the games with approval—and no apparent desire to join them.
He was indeed a big lug, just like his old man.
Fiona, who had also been watching the games, bounded up immediately, doubtless smelling my running clothes. In Ireland, unlike in Chicago, she was free from a leash when we ran.
We started down the road to the Renvyle House Hotel. Our bungalow was on the lee side of the bare headland, so the Atlantic Ocean was more tranquil. Connemara is a string of barren mountains on the north side and barren
lowlands on the south side, both little more than a network of lace held together among inlets, harbors, coves, and loughs. It is dramatically beautiful for the first two sunny days, and then, as far as I was concerned, harsh and depressing after that. On the rainy days it was, again in my fallible judgment, an antechamber of purgatory.
No wonder, I thought to myself as we jogged along the narrow road, that my wife had some gloomy strains in her personality. No wonder she had thrown over her career as a singer.
“I won’t do it anymore, Dermot Michael,” she had said one night in our room on Southport Avenue, as she lay in bed protecting the “poor little lad inside me.”
It was a given, a foregone conclusion that our second child would be a boy.
Fiona, inseparable from her mistress during these difficult weeks, stirred uneasily at the side of her bed.
“Everything’s on hold till himself comes,” I had replied.
“I don’t want anything on hold,” she had insisted. “I want everything canceled. No more recordings, no more concerts, no more Christmas specials, no more lessons with Madam. No more nothing, at all, at all.”
“Oh.”
“And it’s not me hormones talking either, Dermot Michael Coyne. I’ve been thinking about this for a long time. I’m sick of singing.”
“It’s your call,” had been all I could say.
“I hate it. I hate it altogether. I don’t want to do it anymore.”
We didn’t need the money. I had been a total failure as a commodity broker, except for one very lucky day. I had given most of the gains from that luck to a brilliant stockbroker, who had turned each dollar into five during the great market run-up. Nuala had put her money into the market too—making her own investment decisions,
naturally. My novels, which I worked on occasionally, brought in enough money to live more than comfortably. Our lifestyle was more or less frugal, save for buying a bungalow in Ireland, which could be rented to tourists when we weren’t using it.
At twenty-five my wife had become a successful vocalist far beyond her wildest dreams. Her lovely, if limited, voice and her charm had won over both the United States and Ireland. Her most recent record, Nuala Anne Sings American had won her a platinum disk. She had worked hard at it, very hard, but seemed to revel in the work. Now she was quitting.
“I can’t be a mother and a wife,” she had continued, “and continue this singing. Tell everyone I’m retiring.”
So I had done just that. No one had believed me. Hormones, they had said. However, they had not seen the cut of my wife’s jaw when she made her decision.
In the back of my head, down in the deep subbasements of my brain, there lurked a faint hunch that she might change her mind. However, I would not have gone long, as the traders say, on that possibility.
As I had jogged along the road, yielding to the majesty of the ocean and the sky and the Twelve Bens mountains, I wondered whether I might be responsible for the problem. She had seemed so ambitious about singing before our marriage (despite her job at Arthur Andersen), that I had encouraged it and even arranged for voice lessons and her first recording. Perhaps I should have left well enough alone. Maybe it would have been better if she had limited herself to an occasional gig at the Abbey Pub in Chicago.
She had loved to sing. Music was in her bones, in her body, in her soul. Now she wouldn’t even sing lullabies to our children.
Still, she had hummed the Connemara Cradle Song today, had she not?
A blue Garda car, coming up behind me, ended these
ruminations. Our young friend from the morning got out of the car, much to Fiona’s delight. A short, slender man in tweeds, looking like an English tourist, climbed out the other side.
“Mr. McGrail, uh, Mr. Coyne,” said the young woman, who was busy responding to Fiona’s enthusiasm, “this is Chief Superintendent McGinn from Galway City.”
Fiona turned her attention to the detective.
“Good girl,” he said as she embraced him. “Sure, you’re still a Galway lass, aren’t you?”
He said a couple of words in Irish. The wolfhound, her tail still wagging, settled back on her haunches.
“’Tis a pleasure to meet you, sir,” he said respectfully to me as we shook hands. “Deputy Commissioner Keenan from Dublin asked me to give you his warmest greetings.”
“Give my equally warmest greetings back to him and to herself also.”
“I believe you met Garda Sayers this morning.”
“First name Peg?”
The young woman blushed and grinned.
“With an ‘I,’ sir.”
“’The famous woman from the Blaskets is an ancestor. Her Irish has a touch of the Blaskets in it.”
“My wife noticed it.”
“We’re wondering, Mr. Coyne, if we might stop by tomorrow morning and have a chat with you about this little problem we seem to have.”
“Dermot.”
“Declan.”
He had shrewd brown eyes, shrewd but warm.
So our friend Gene Keenan told the Galway Gardai that me wife has certain skills as a detective. She had never said explicitly that she was giving that up too.
“My wife will be more help than I am, but I don’t think either of us has noticed anything. However, we’ll be happy to talk to you tomorrow.”
“A Galway woman, is she?”
“Carraroe. Her parents still live there.”
“One of the dark ones, is she now?”
“Sometimes,” I conceded cautiously.
“Peig will excuse me for saying it, but there’s a lot of that around Galway. Sure, the Iron Age has never quite ended here.”
“And a good thing too,” Peig said vigorously.
They returned to their car. Fiona hesitated briefly, torn between two loyalties, and decided on me.
Renvyle House was built by the Blakes, a Protestant family, in 1680. During the Land League wars two centuries later, the Blake widow who owned the house turned it into a hotel. Poet and author Oliver St. John Gogarty (“plump, stately Buck Mulligan” in Ulysses) bought the hotel. Yeats and Synge hung around there. The “lads” wrecked it in the early twenties. The Irish government compensated for its destruction. It is a hotel again today and a nice place to hang your hat, especially if you’re a fisherman and it’s fishing season, which it was, or someone looking for a bit of peace and quiet, and itself having horses and a heated swimming pool and a great restaurant and a nine-hole golf course nearby.
Peace and quiet, in my judgment, did not include exploding homes and hovels that smelled of blood.
“Fishermen are friggin’ eejits, chasing dumb fish when they don’t need them to stay alive,” me wife had told me once.
In front of the Renvyle House Hotel, we were stopped again, this time by a young man, probably just out of UCG, with a tape recorder and a mike. RTE radio.
“Mr. McGrail, is it now?” he had asked shyly.
Fiona had sniffed suspiciously and then approved him on a temporary basis.
“Coyne,” I said curtly.
He blushed with embarrassment.
“Of course, Mr. Coyne. Sorry.”
“No problem,” I relented. “Everyone makes that mistake.”
“And yourself a fine novelist too!”
The kid was all right!
“Could I ever ask you a question about Ms. McGrail?”
“Sure, but don’t expect a straight answer. This is the West of Ireland after all.”
He laughed and turned on his recorder.
“Will she ever sing again?”
“She has retired for family reasons. She considers the decision definitive.”
“Do you think she will ever sing again?”
“What do I know?”
“Is it true that she’s painting instead.”
“’Tis.”
“Is her work good?”
“Very good indeed. However, I’m her husband.”
“Will there be a gallery exhibition?”
“She said there will be … in twenty-five years.”
He thanked me profusely and went into the hotel, doubtless to phone his interview to the station in Dublin.
“Come on, girl,” I said to the dog, “back to Nuala.”
She barked enthusiastically in agreement.
We turned around and raced back to herself—against the wind, which was stiffening, as they say around this part of Galway, a place where zephyrs don’t exist. Fiona refused to run the last fifty yards, which was fine with me.
We entered the house and heard the noise of womanly voices in the kitchen—where else would Irish women be? In the kitchen and talking!
The weary wolfhound and I ambled out into the kitchen. My wife and my daughter and our mother’s helper, cleaning up after supper, were jabbering in Irish with such enthusiasm that they did not notice our arrival.
My son, his mouth covered with baby food, however, grinned happily at me and crawled over to hug my leg.
“Well, at least someone in the house welcomes me home!”
The chatter stopped instantly, proof, as I thought, that they had been chattering about me. I picked up the Mick and swung him over my head, an activity in which he reveled.
“Did you have a grand run, Dermot Michael?” my wife, still in the terry cloth robe, asked, trying to pretend that she was not flustered.
“Didn’t your dog run out of steam?”
“Well, isn’t the poor thing pregnant?”
Nelliecoyne tugged at my leg, demanding her turn for a skyride.
“Fiona is going to have three white puppies, two girl puppies and one boy puppy.”
“Is she now?” I said, gently replacing her brother on the floor and lifting her up.
“Yes, she is, Daddy.”
So that was that. What did I know?
“Dermot, would you ever take your shower and dress now? I’d like to have the room to meself to make me preparations.”
“Doesn’t Nuala have a super dress, Mr. Coyne? Sure, you’ll be loving it?”
“Bought at a sale!” my wife assured me, as though I complained about her buying habits—which I never had. Nuala was a stylish dresser because she was lovely and had good taste. Since money couldn’t buy either, she bought off-the-rack dresses that had been marked down and transformed them with her own personal elegance.
“Like every good Irish male, I do what I’m told.”
The three women giggled. Because they knew it was true.
You will note that, to Ethne, my wife was Nuala Anne
and I was Mr. Coyne. That’s what comes of being over thirty.
In the master bedroom, I went immediately to the corner where herself played with her watercolors. I recoiled at the bloody horror on her easel—a charnel house with six torn and broken human bodies, three women, two boys, and an adult man, the remnants of their faces twisted in agony, their limbs broken, their skulls bashed in. They had died slow, agonizing, tortured deaths, at the end almost pleading that their suffering be ended.
I rushed into the bathroom and vomited.
Then I carefully cleaned up the mess and opened the window so that the Atlantic breezes would exorcise the smell of my sickness.
Was that what Nuala had seen up on the mountain? And Nelliecoyne too?
I sat on the edge of the bed trembling. Nuala’s paintings were usually dramatic but peaceful. Yet the imagery of this one must be deeply buried in her soul.
Small wonder that she needed Prozac.
What was I supposed to do now?
Probably tomorrow morning I should pay a visit to Jack Lane, as everyone called the local priest, and ask some questions about the hovels on the mountain.
I was sweating, a cold, sinister sweat, as though a demon had temporarily invaded my soul. We should go home tomorrow and find a psychiatrist for my wife. The gynecologist had said that she didn’t need therapy, that she was basically a healthy woman. No healthy woman could carry such a hell in her brain.
GET A HOLD OF YOURSELF, YOU FOCKING AMADON. YOU SAW HER DOWNSTAIRS WITH YOUR BRATS. DID SHE SEEM CRAZY?
She had not. She seemed fine, the Nuala of O’Neill’s pub in the shadow of Trinity College. My chill faded. If she wanted to talk about it, I would. Otherwise … She
must have realized that I would see the painting and didn’t seem worried about it.
I should take a nice warm shower and get dressed for dinner.
“Well, you’ve spent enough time in there, haven’t you?” my wife greeted me when I emerged from the shower. “Would you be thinking we have all night?”
“Sorry,” I murmured.
“I need the room to meself, so I can look healthy and happy for me ma and da.”
“I’ll be out of here in a couple of minutes.”
“Did you like me painting?”
“It’s very powerful.”
“That’s what happened up there, Dermot Michael.”
She tossed her robe at me, entered the shower, and closed the door.
I turned on the telly to see pictures of our bungalow, which the RTE was informing the world was right next to the destroyed home of T.D. Colm MacManus. Then MacManus himself appeared, a round, nervous man with darting eyes.
“I call upon the Garda to find the criminals immediately,” he said in a voice quivering with not altogether convincing outrage. This is not Belfast. We cannot tolerate such violence in Ireland. Our invaluable tourist trade is bound to suffer in the wake of this wanton destruction.”
Somehow his sputtering, self-righteous anger reminded me of the redneck Republicans in the American Congress.
Still, he had reason to be angry, didn’t he?
Later, having assisted Ethne in putting the exhausted small ones to bed and telling her to study hard for her big test the next day, I sat in the parlor and sipped a small jar (as they call it in Ireland) of Jameson’s as I waited for Nuala to emerge for our trip over to Ashford. She’d insist on driving, so the “jar” wouldn’t hurt.
As my nerves and my queasy stomach settled down,
my worries increased. What the hell was I supposed to do with my wife?
MAYBE JUST LEAVE HER ALONE.
“Maybe.”
Then the Adversary said nothing, most unusual for him. Or her. Sometimes these days the Adversary sounds like my wife.
Too much talent … Those hints of crow’s-feet around her eyes … We’re both getting older … Meself over thirty.
Maybe I should let her recover at her own pace … As long as she continues to take the pills … She’s fine with the kids … Maybe she should be a painter instead of a singer … But the horror in that painting!
“Well,” she said, appearing in the room, “and yourself sipping on a jar! Trying to recover from me painting, which shocks you more than it does me, are you now?”
“Bracing for the shock of you in that super dress. Would I need a couple of jars for that?”
She blushed, delighted as a kid on her first date that she had pleased her man.
“Will I be able to fool me ma and me pa that I’m a healthy young woman again?”
Her dress was red with a gold belt. It fell to just above her knees and in that respect was modest by present standards. However a slit reached at least to midthigh and the thin straps holding the dress in place presided over a touch of cleavage that was tasteful indeed, but left no question about the splendor of her breasts.
Gulp!
Hands on hips, she said, “You haven’t answered me question.”
“Well, Annie and Gerry will marvel at how beautiful you are, though they won’t be surprised. As for fooling the good Annie, you haven’t been able to do that since the day you were born.”
I kissed her forehead and put my arm around her.
“’Tis true enough,” she sighed. “The problem is that I don’t know whether I’m healthy again.”
“Healthy enough to be a spectacular bedmate.”
“Oh, THAT! Dermot Michael, I’d have to be dead and buried for ten years not to fock with you every time I get a chance. Don’t you know all me secrets? … Come along, now, we don’t want to be late.”
In the car as she drove, I continued the discussion.
“I don’t know any of your secrets, Nuala Anne. You’re pure mystery to me. Wonderful, but always a surprise.”
“Go along with you, Dermot Michael Coyne! When I’m with you, don’t I feel naked even if I’m wearing all me clothes and me not knowing at all, at all, what’s going on in that big, thick skull of yours?”
“Oh.”
“Except that you love me something terrible, a lot more than I deserve.”
“A lot less …”
“Och, give over, Dermot Michael!”
To change the subject I told her about the interview with the young man from RTE radio.
“Blatherskite!”
“Shy young man. I suspect that our Ethne knows him.”
“Well, if she approves of him, that’s different. Anyway, didn’t you give all the right answers!”
“I’m glad to hear it … And how does our daughter know that the lads set the bomb down the road.”
“She doesn’t even know who the lads are, Dermot love. Doesn’t she pick it up from me?”
“Pick it up?”
“Sure, when that terrible explosion happened, didn’t I think that it might be the lads and didn’t she hear what I thought?”
“She heard what you thought?”
“Just like me and me Aunt Aggie when I was a small one … Isn’t that how she knows about Fiona’s puppies?”
“You know how many pups and then tell her?”
“Dermot Michael Coyne! You simply don’t understand! I don’t tell her anything. Sometimes she hears my thoughts. ’Tis nothing to worry about.”
The hell it isn’t.
THIS SCARES ME TOO, BOYO.
“So we really don’t, about the pups?”
She sighed in protest.
“Of course we do! Three white ones, two of them bitches. I know that and I always know those things. The poor sweet child hears it from me.”
“When will the pups arrive?”
“Give over Dermot Michael! Did I know when me own small ones were to be born? Do I choose stocks by this shite? It’s mostly useless when it isn’t scary like up there in the Twelve Bens this morning.”
“Oh … Still, you’d bet me about herself’s offspring.”
“I would … Dana, Deirdre, and Dano!”
“Do you still read Aunt Aggie’s thoughts and herself far away in New Zealand?”
“On the odd day, mostly when she wants me ma to call her.”
I had a horrible thought.
“Does she know what we were doing in bed this afternoon?”
“You’re a friggin’ amadon, Dermot Michael Coyne. She’s only a little girl. She knows her ma and her da love one another and isn’t that enough?”
I decided to shut up and watch the setting sun paint the Innishboffin and the other offshore islands rose and gold and silver and then ermine.
I touched my wife’s thigh. She sighed complacently.
IF YOU WEREN’T SUCH A WORRIER, YOU’D BE CONTENT WITH THE PLEASURES OF THE DAY, WHICH ARE MORE THAN YOU DESERVE ALTOGETHER.