“DID SOMETHING terrible happen up there in the mountains behind Letterfrack?” I asked Gerroid McGrail over dessert—Baileys Irish Cream soufflé (a concession to the Yanks who, even in prosperous Ireland, were still an important part of the trade at Ashford Castle).I had learned from Irish politicians in Chicago that one reserved serious matters for dessert.
Need I say that my wife created a sensation when she walked into the lounge of Ashford, a place of which it was said that it was the kind of castle God would have created if he had as much money as a Philadelphia millionaire. Every eye in the place turned in her direction. Most of them, of whichever gender, remained fixed on her in the lounge and the dining room. Though her only jewelry, in addition to her “sinfully large” engagement ring—which she had never tried to give back—were silver earrings and a silver pendant, she glittered as though she was awash in diamonds. “Isn’t it remarkable, Dermot Michael, what a Prozac pill and a good afternoon ride will do for a woman?” The glitter, however, was in her archduchess smile, which she could turn on with professional ease when she was of a mind to do so.
“Will herself agree to sit at the table with Galway peasants like ourselves, Dermot Coyne?” Annie McGrail asked me as she hugged me.
“Peasants like ourselves,” Gerroid agreed.
Technically, the elder McGrails were indeed peasants, as was their aristocratic daughter. When I first met them in what I thought were the preliminary stages of our courtship (and Nuala thought, correctly, were the definitive stages), they lived in a stone cottage only marginally better than the ruins we had visited that morning up in the mountain. Like their ancestors for a thousand years, they eked out a living from the harsh Connemara soil and had sent their children to the ends of the earth in search of a better life. Now, courtesy of the European Union and Ireland’s incredible prosperity, they lived in a new home and enjoyed a middle-class lifestyle. They fit with ease into the affluence of Ashford Castle.
“It’s the telly, isn’t it now, Dermot Coyne? We know how to act like we belong in this place from watching posh people like me daughter on the telly.”
“On the telly.”
“’Tis not, woman,” I replied. “Class has nothing to do with income.”
Nuala Anne was a clone of her mother, who was, at sixty or so, a lovely woman, though with a lot more wisdom and common sense than her daughter.
Nuala had begun a conversation with them in Irish as I ordered the drinks.
“Now, child,” her mother had said gently, “talk English or your poor husband will think we’re talking about him.”
Me wife turned crimson.
“Who else would we be talking about, and himself not civilized enough to learn the language?”
“Whom else,” I said, causing another surge of crimson.
“Good on you, Dermot Coyne!”
A couple of days every week, we would drive over to
Carraroe or the McGrails would join us at Renvyle, allegedly so that the grandparents could spend time with the Mick and Nelliecoyne, but even more to provide time for Nuala to spend with her mother. Later that evening Annie would whisper to me, “The poor thing is a lot better, Dermot. She just needs more time.”
This was an uncharacteristically direct statement for a West of Ireland woman. I relaxed. A little …
“Up on Diamond Hill,” Nuala clarified my request for information.
“Aye, on Diamond Hill …”
Both her parents were quiet for a moment. I knew what was coming, a typically indirect, elusive, and opaque conversation. It was the way the Galway Irish normally talk when asked about something even mildly unpleasant.
“You were up there, were you?”
“We were.”
“At the ruins, was it now?”
“It was.”
“Maamtrasna.”
“Is that what it was called?” Nuala asked.
No direct answers.
“Some say,” Gerroid spoke slowly, “that there were terrible murders up there during the Land League wars.”
“When the tenants weren’t paying the rent,” Annie added. “Back in the time of Michael Davitt and your man Parnell.”
“Some say that maybe it was a secret society thing,” her husband continued after a long pause. “Others think maybe it was about the stealing of sheep.”
“No one talks about it anymore,” Nuala said. “I’ve never heard a word.”
“Heard a word.”
Another long pause.
“They say the English hung the wrong man and sent some innocent men to jail.”
“Perhaps betrayed by their neighbors.”
More silence.
“’Tis said that there was a big fight about it in the English parliament.”
Yet more silence.
“It was all a long time ago.”
That was more information than I had expected.
After another pause, Annie sighed the perfect West of Ireland sigh. “Those things should be forgotten, shouldn’t they? Hasn’t the world changed a lot since then?
“Since then.”
I did not disagree. We all knew, however, that the Irish are not a people disposed to easy forgetfulness.
At the table next to us, a little man with silver hair and the angry face of an offended leprechaun was expostulating on the subject of Colm MacManus, member of the Dáil.
“It’s about time someone did something about him. He’s worse than a gombeen man. He’s a crook. There isn’t a shady deal in the Dail that he doesn’t have his fingers in. He runs Connemara like Daley runs Chicago. Too bad he wasn’t in the house. He has too much power altogether!”
A gombeen man was a crooked businessman.
My fists clenched at the comparison.
“Sean O’Cuiv,” Annie McGrail informed us, “is a bit of a gombeen man himself. He and your man have been fighting for years, and himself a land developer.”
“Land developer.”
“He ought not to be so public about it,” I said. “Not today anyway.”
“Won’t the Gardai suspect him anyway?”
“Anyway.”
Then a handsome young couple approached us shyly and asked Nuala something in Irish as the man handed her an Ashford Castle menu.
She enveloped them in her smile and extended her hand to me for a pen.
“Me ma says I have to speak English when I’m with this lug. Is it your honeymoon now?”
She signed the menu with a big flourish, much unlike her usual accountant’s script.
“’Tis,” they sighed, both of them blushing.
“Isn’t it a grand place for a honeymoon and meself spending my own here with me first husband.”
“And last,” I added.
We all laughed.
“We love your songs.”
“We hope you’ll sing again.”
“You never can tell. Right now I have two small ones to take care of.”
They thanked her and bashfully bowed away.
She must have signed a dozen more menus with equal grace.
“You were very nice to those people, Nuala love,” I said to her as she drove us back to Renvyle.
“They don’t bother me, Dermot Michael,” she sighed. “Besides, I didn’t want to humiliate me parents.”
“And themselves teaching you always to be polite to strangers.”
“Doesn’t the Lord himself come to us as a stranger?”
“And occasionally as a lover too?”
“Sure, doesn’t that happen once or twice?”
“Your parents told us more than I thought they would about that place … .”
“Maamtrasna.”
“I assume that they know even more.”
“They won’t tell us any more. Isn’t it one of those things that the local people don’t want to remember but will never forget? Sure, there’s probably a few descendants around still, though most of the little villages on the
mountains up there have disappeared. You’ll have to talk to the parish priest.”
I had thought of that myself. Now it was a command performance.
As we neared Renvyle, the touch of fog drifted off. On our left the Twelve Bens loomed over us and the ocean glowed placidly on our right, a nighttime postcard from the Country Galway.
“You can see him in the morning,” Nuala commented. “Remember we’re going water-skiing in the afternoon.”
“In that ocean?”
“There are some perfectly calm coves and won’t we be wearing wet suits?”
Later that night, after I had driven Ethne home and checked one last time on the two rugrats, both of whom were sleeping peacefully, I tiptoed into our bedroom.
“’Tis yourself?”
“’Tis.”
“Come to bed quickly, Dermot Michael. Don’t I want to sleep in your arms?”
So I took off my clothes and slipped into bed. We embraced each other happily—love tonight, deep love, no sex required.
“Falling asleep in one another’s arms,” I whispered, “is in its own way as sweet as making love.”
“If you’re over thirty,” my wife said as she drifted off to sleep.