ISOLATED IN soggy gloom that cut me off from the rest of the world, I reveled in self-pity. Sure, hadn’t I lost the last great Celtic goddess of the Western World?
It was still a game then—infatuation, flirtation, self-pity.
Then I realized, after enjoying my allusion to John M. Synge, that I could find out when and where they were performing The Playboy and track Nuala down that way—as she doubtless realized even before she slipped off, shy and embarrassed child, into the wet night.
Shy, embarrassed, and attracted to me.
She ought to know better.
How could she know better?
I had better protect her.
From what?
From myself.
Don’t be an eejit.
Forget about her. Don’t go back to O’Neill’s and don’t find out where they’re performing The Playboy.
Well, that’s just what I would do. Probably.
Not exactly a druid goddess, but a shy Catholic virgin. I suppose I couldn’t complain. They made much better wives than your druid goddesses.
I glanced around uneasily. I thought I heard faint footsteps behind me on Dawson Street. It was a half-hour walk back to my suite in Jury’s and not a cab in sight. If they wanted to attack me again, this would be the perfect night to do it. This time they’d send tougher thugs.
They had tried the night before, after my unpleasant conversation with the Special Branch cop. It was a lovely warm evening, the air fresh and soft, a three-quarter moon shining over Dublin Town and bathing the streets, still wet from the afternoon rain, a magic silver. On nights like that Dublin seems a faerie city, perhaps the set for a Walt Disney fairy-tale film. I drifted out of Jury’s, aimless as usual. I was still angry at Chief Superintendent Conlon’s clumsy attempt to bully me. I was a citizen of the United States of America, wasn’t I? Ireland was part of the free world, wasn’t it? And what the hell kind of professor was it that would report a couple of honest questions to the gnomes of the Special Branch?
I’d show them. I’d write the whole story, the true story about Bill and Nell Pat Ready, and publish it as an American best-seller.
Ah, not without ambition after all, you say? Dermot Coyne wants to be a writer, does he now? And a famous writer at that?
I didn’t want it so badly that I’d return to my suite after supper and work on it. If literary fame came as easily as commodity trading profits, well, maybe. But in a choice between a leisurely walk down Pembroke Road and Baggot Street to St. Stephen’s Green and research for a book, the former would win any time.
Auto traffic was heavy on the street, not unusual at that time of night, and there was a steady stream of pedestrians. I was hardly alone. There are streets in Dublin, particularly north of the Liffey, you avoid at half ten of an autumn evening, but not Pembroke Road.
I noticed the three punks when they walked by going in the oppose direction just after I had crossed the Grand Canal, a glittering black velvet band in the moonlight.
There was nothing particularly remarkable about them, kids in their late teens, jeans and black jackets, long hair, sneers painted on their faces. Over in the “Liberties” section behind Christ Church Cathedral or on the north side of the Liffey east of the Catholic pro-cathedral, they would be scary. Not, however, on Upper Baggot Street at this hour of the night.
It takes longer to describe my reaction to them than the reaction itself lasted.
When I felt someone grab my arms from behind, I knew who it was.
I must have looked like a pushover—I usually do. A big patsy maybe, but still a patsy. Definitely not a white Richard Dent, as Nuala Anne would suggest the next day. Anyway, the three of them piled on like they expected a pushover.
I let them drag me down the two flights of iron steps to a concrete areaway in front of the darkened windows of a basement tea shop. I thought about yelling but decided that they wouldn’t have jumped me if there was anyone nearby. They had waited for what seemed just the right moment.
“We’ll teach you a lesson, you focking bastard,” one of them sneered as he buried his fist in my stomach.
He must have felt pretty safe because his two pals were holding my arms. As I say, the focking Yank bastard was a pushover.
So he was not prepared for the impact of my foot in his groin.
He screamed and doubled up in agony, spitting out curses. Then I broke loose from the punk that had pinned my left arm and slammed him into the concrete foundation of the stairway up to the ground floor. Next I turned and slugged the punk who was trying to kick me. He fell back against the opposite wall, banged his head against the concrete, and stood there, momentarily stunned.
The other one came at me from behind. “I’m going to cut off your balls, bastard!” He had a switchblade in his hand, a very long switchblade.
He dove towards my groin.
This knife slit my trouser leg as I jumped away from him. He wheeled around for another try, this time aiming at my face.
I stepped aside, grabbed his arm, and twisted it behind his back. He roared with injured fury as the knife popped out of his hand.
Looking back on the fight, I should have broken his arm. I don’t have much taste, however, for alley fighting.
The other kid had his knife out and rushed at me wildly. I ducked his first swipe. He crashed into the wall of the tea shop, bounced off it, and rushed me again. I jumped up on a windowsill and tripped him.
He fell forward, crashed into a bench, leaped up quickly, and lunged once more.
One chop on his arm sent that switchblade flying too.
Bounding back in blasphemous outrage, the two of them jumped on me and pulled me down on the cold concrete. I noticed a pot of geraniums next to my head, a useful weapon if I needed it.
I bellowed like an injured bull, shook them off, and staggered to my feet. They jumped me again. I was hurting in a number of places and was now thoroughly angry at them.
So I shifted my shoulders abruptly and threw the two of them through the plate-glass window into the tea shop. The third punk, still moaning over the damage I had done to his reproductive organs, lurched towards me, drunkenly waving his switchblade.
I scooped up the pot of red flowers and bashed it against his head. He collapsed like he had been shot. I lifted him off the ground and tossed him after his friends into the wreckage of the tea shop. I hoped that the owners had insurance.
I dusted off my hands and, trying to ignore my aching ribs and sore shoulder, walked back up the steps to Baggot Street.
I looked around for Chief Superintendent Conlon with the thought that I might toss him through the plate glass too. He was nowhere to be seen.
Back in my room at Jury’s I noted that no visible damage had been done save to my jeans, though my ribs and shoulder were hurting. I took a couple of Advils, hung up my clothes, dirty and wet from the concrete, and slumped into my chair.
Then the reaction came. I realized what had happened and began to shake.
Should I call Conlon and tell him where he could find his thugs? Call the American embassy and protest? Call the local Garda station and report an assault?
I decided to do nothing at all.
So they called me.
I picked up the phone. “Good evening.”
It was not Conlon’s voice, at least I didn’t think so. “Tonight was a hint of what we can do if you don’t let the dead sleep in peace.”
“You haven’t seen your punks yet. What I did to them is a hint of what I’ll do to you, focker, if you don’t leave me alone.”
I hung up on him.
Big deal.
But why? What were they warning me about? Could it be worth so much trouble merely to stop me from poking around in my grandparents’ history? That didn’t seem to make any sense.
It took me a long time to unwind and sleep. The sound of the cleaning staff in the corridor woke me up in the morning. I ached all over.
And for the first time I was consciously scared.
Not so scared, however, that I was ready to give up my determination to trace the story of my grandparents during the Troubles.
Nevertheless, I stayed away from the Long Room of the library at Trinity where I had been poking around for a couple of days and did not visit again Professor Nolan who had probably blown the whistle on me.
Instead I called home.
“Why, Dermot darling, how nice of you to call. We were just wondering about you yesterday. Have you met any nice Irish girls?”
“There aren’t any, Mom. All the beautiful ones like you and Grandma Nell are in America.”
“Now, darling, you shouldn’t say that. I’m sure there’s some lovely girl there just waiting for an American like you.”
“Scores of them. . . . Mom, did Pa and Ma leave any papers or anything?”
“Well,” Mom replied, “your grandfather was not one for writing much down. But your grandmother kept all kinds of paper, she’d never throw anything out, you remember. There must be five or six crates down in the basement. I don’t know what we should do with them.”
So Mom, being Mom and believing that if you wait long enough, all problems, including a problem son, will solve themselves, had done nothing.
“Mom, could you ask George to wrap them up and ship them to me at Jury’s in Dublin, Federal Express? Today if he can. I’m trying to write a book about their early days here in Ireland.”
“Why, darling, what a wonderful idea. I’m sure Father George will be glad to help. . . . Will the book take long?”
George thought me a little less useless than the rest of my siblings did. He even professed to believe that I had some talent as a writer.
“Not too long. I’ll be home soon. Would you ask George to send the boxes Federal Express today?” I repeated my instructions, lest Mom forget them in her concern about me finding a nice little Irish girl. “I’ll mail him a check.”
“Of course, dear. And keep your eye open for some nice, sensible Irish girl.”
“There aren’t any, Mom. There isn’t a sensible woman in this whole island.”
“Your grandmother came from Ireland, dear.”
“That was a long time ago, Mom.”
And she wasn’t all that sensible.
Rather Nell Pat Malone Ready was passionate—she threw herself into things with a mix of determination and abandonment, Grace O’Malley storming down out of the mountains.
If I were like her, I would have then and there purchased two (first-class) tickets for Chicago, rounded up Nuala Anne McGrail, and brought her home to Mother.
No, Grandma Nell was not what you’d call sensible. Shrewd maybe, clever maybe, cute in the Irish meaning of that word, but sensible? No way.
Mom was as pretty as Grandma Nell and as sweet and loving but neither sensible nor shrewd. She didn’t have to be.
I half expected another attack that day, or another phone call. Nothing happened. Maybe they thought my absence from the library was a message. Maybe they were amateurs. So I wandered out into the fog and, my ribs still aching, into O’Neill’s, looking for a quick one—and maybe a sympathetic womanly shoulder.
And found Nuala. Not a druid maiden, as it turned out, but a virginal Catholic agnostic from the West of Ireland who sang and acted and did not object to my kissing her and rather liked snuggling close to me under my umbrella.
Later that night, dazzled by the young woman who had sped off in the fog, I walked up Dawson Street towards the green, listening for footsteps behind me and fantasizing about holding Nuala in my arms.
Respectfully, of course.
Not that I would have any choice in the matter, except to be respectful.
I was almost at the bottom of Dawson Street when I thought I heard footsteps behind me in the dark. I stopped. They seemed to stop too. Maybe I was hearing my own echo.
My mind still on the luminous—and numinous—Nuala Anne McGrail, I foolishly cut across the green instead of skirting it. I would walk up Lesson Street to the canal and then back to Pembroke Road. The mists and fog were now so thick that I could only see a couple of feet ahead. The green seemed deserted. The footsteps now were right behind me and coming faster.
I ducked off the pathway and hid behind a bush next to the pond. This time I’d get the jump on them.
Two people emerged from the darkness. I yelled like a banshee and jumped. I grabbed both of them in a mighty bear hug and prepared to throw them into the pond.
Then I heard my prisoners whimper in fright and looked at their faces. Two kids, a boy and a girl, younger even than Nuala. Young lovers walking arm and arm in the park.
I released them. “Don’t ever sneak up on a man in the fog,” I warned them, trying to sound gruff.
The girl screamed and rushed off in the fog, still screaming. The boy—he seemed half my size—paused as if he were pondering a thorough thrashing of his assailant. Then he turned and ran after his love. “Eileen! Eileen,” he shouted. “Wait for me!”
I hurried away before the Guards had a chance to sweep the green.
The next morning a headline in the Irish Independent announced, “Couple Assaulted in the Green by ‘Bigfoot’!”
According to the story, the couple had told the Guards that some “terrible monster creature” had grabbed them in his arms—a bear or a gorilla or maybe even Bigfoot—and shouted at them in a foreign language. “He was certain to kill us both,” Eileen McGovern had told the Independent. “And done horrible things to me before he chewed off my head, but sure didn’t Henry chase him off.”
Lucky Henry to be the recipient of such love.
The Guards had searched the green and found no trace of the assailant, except for large footprints near the pond. “They were very big prints,” said Garda Sergeant Tomas O’Cuiv. “No ordinary human could have made them.”
Size eleven, Sergeant? You must have too much of the drink taken.
The Guard sergeant also noted that the attack seemed to be similar to that of an unknown assailant who the previous night had thrown three young men through the plate-glass window of a tea shop on Lower Baggot Street.
“This Bigfoot person has been quite active this week,” the Garda had said.
The story concluded with the observation that no zoos or circuses reported any missing animals.
Doubtless there would be more sightings of Bigfoot around the city and the country. I had started a crime wave.
The last Bigfoot of the Western World.
What would Nuala think if I told her?
First I would have to find her.
And kiss her again. Naturally.
I waited a few days and went back to the Berkeley Library at Trinity College, my eyes searching the face of every woman with long black hair to see if she was Nuala, and hunted up newspapers from 1922. When I returned to Jury’s I found that the boxes had come from America, six large cartons stuffed with memorabilia. It occurred to me that the materials might be useful for an immigrant archive somewhere. I ought to put them in order or maybe hire someone to put them in order. I didn’t sort through them myself, because I didn’t know yet what I was looking for.
I was more certain than ever that Professor Nolan had turned me in. I half made up my mind, as the locals would say, to corner him in his office and offer to toss him through the first plate glass that was available.