I ENCOUNTERED Nuala Anne McGrail, noted West of Ireland agnostic, coming out of St. Teresa’s Church on Clarendon Street. It was three days after I had fled her, leaving my dozen roses behind. I had not been sleeping well, despite an hour every day in the pool at Jury’s. Ma’s archives had depressed me more than anything else in life except Kel’s death.
I discovered that I missed Ma too, almost as much as I missed Kel.
Moreover, my dreams were tormented agonies that refought the Troubles in the West of Ireland. I failed to protect Oughterard from the Black and Tans. I was the Irregular who fired the single rifle shot that killed Michael Collins. I riddled the body of Daniel O’Kelly. I killed Ma and Pa as they tried to escape Ireland.
I would wake up several times during the night in a hot sweat, although the window was open and the temperature was cool. You don’t sweat in Ireland during the autumn.
Each morning I would tell myself as I struggled out of bed that I ought to return to River Forest and watch the World Series. I didn’t belong in Dublin. The mysteries I had determined to solve were insoluble—and not worth solving.
I’d take my walk, often stopping in a church for part of Mass—or the Eucharist, as Prester George says I ought to call it these days—eat my breakfast, and decide that I would stay at least another day and hope something would occur.
Then I had the call from the cultural attaché at the American embassy—an invitation to a dinner at Lord Longwood-Jones’s home on Merrion Square. I told myself that I ought to stay in Dublin at least for that event, especially since I wondered why His Lordship would be interested in meeting me.
I knew who Lord Martin Longwood-Jones and his wife, Lady Elizabeth, were, of course. You read the Irish Times for a week and you knew who they were. He was the president of the Irish-British Friendship League and she a patron of classical gardens. They seemed to be involved in every upright and honorable civic and cultural program in the city.
Goo-goos, to use the Chicago term.
So Lord L.-J. had read all the English-language literary magazines and liked my two stories. So he had remarked on them to the cultural attaché. So a junior officer at the embassy told the cultural attaché that I was in Ireland.
It also sounded fishy to me. Was this to be another version of being warned off dangerous history, more cultivated, more elaborate, more delicate?
I neglected to mention that on my many walks through Dublin, I continued to stroll in the vicinity of Trinity College. My eyes searched the face of every young woman I passed in the street, hoping she might be Nuala. I no longer saw Kel’s short blond hair everywhere in the crowd: now I saw the long black hair of the girl from Carraroe.
In the grotesque calculus I had worked out for myself, it would be wrong to seek her out but acceptable to encounter her by chance.
God—or someone—took me at my word and, being a comedian, arranged for me to encounter her in the Carmelite church—quite possibly the ugliest church in the world. I saw her, in fact, coming back from Communion.
It was a clear brisk morning, one of those days during which you think it might not be so bad to live in Ireland after all. Dawn had broken up the remnants of night as I drifted into St. Teresa’s from Johnson Court, the little alley (with a shopping arcade) connecting Grafton Street to Clarendon Street. However, it was still dark in the church, illumined only by candles and lights in the sanctuary and a weird blue light from one of the windows that made the church look like a mausoleum.
The young priest who presided over the seven-thirty Eucharist was of the same age and style as Prester George. He preached an incisive and academic homily, to which I did not much listen since, to tell the truth, I was looking around the darkened church for a young woman who might be Nuala—even if I had her word for it that she didn’t believe in God.
I saw long black hair on a blue jacket ahead of me and to the left, a combination that appeared thousands of times a day in Dublin. I told myself that I was falling in love with a girl I hardly knew and acting like a lovesick teenager.
An accurate diagnosis, as far as that goes. Unfortunately for me, it was much later that I came to realize that the diagnosis didn’t go far enough.
On the way back from Communion, however, I managed to sneak a quick look at the white face above the jacket. The young woman’s eyes were devoutly averted, but if it wasn’t Nuala Anne McGrail, it was someone sufficiently like her that I wanted to meet the strange woman anyway.
I should have been praying after receiving the Sacrament. However, my mind was more on Nuala than on God. She was taller than I had thought. Five eight and a half or five nine. Statuesque. She did not slump, however, to hide her height. Rather she carried herself with elegant, almost regal, grace as she walked back from the altar, a countess in jeans and cloth jacket.
A countess in jeans with a lithe, willowy body, long black hair, pale white skin, and a smooth jaw that ended in a pert and determined chin.
I fear that my imagination went farther in its entertainments. As George had said when I asked him about ogling young women in church, “It’s the way the species has been designed, punk. Their beauty reflects God’s beauty so I imagine She doesn’t mind.”
If God was as attractive as Nuala, I thought to myself, trying to break away from my desires, She must be wonderfully alluring.
I waited outside the church, the early morning sun making Dublin town seem like a set for a musical, while the putative Nuala remained in intense prayer. At the Johnson Court entrance I saw a log encased in glass. It was not, however, as I first suspected, a relic of the True Cross but only evidence of rotting timbers to encourage contributions to the fund to repair the church.
“Sure, if it isn’t Pegeen Mike herself,” I observed as she walked out in the bright sunlight, her book bag slung over her back.
Squinting for a moment to adjust her eyes, she recognized me and began to babble.
“Ah, sure, weren’t you an eejit for wasting time on our terrible play? And an amadon for spending your money on those roses? And didn’t I make a terrible mess of it that night?”
I put my hand over her mouth to stifle the babble. “Listen to me, Nuala Anne McGrail from Carraroe in the County Galway. You were sensational. Wasn’t the Irish Times itself saying you were a very talented young woman? I’ll have no more of your Irish self-deprecation, which as you know yourself is only half serious. Is that clear?”
She didn’t struggle to escape the grip of my hand. Rather, eyes wide, she nodded her head.
“If I said you were terrible and that the play was awful, I’d be lucky if I escaped with my life, now wouldn’t I?”
I felt her mouth move in a grin. Her eyes danced in amusement. She nodded vigorously.
“Now, the first thing you’re going to do when I let you talk is thank me for the roses. Understand?”
She nodded again.
“All right.”
“Thank you very much for the beautiful roses, Dermot Michael Coyne,” she said dutifully. “If I wasn’t such an eejit, I would have thanked you for them first. Everyone said that me fockingrichyank”—she grinned mischievously—“must be sweet.”
“And you said?”
“I just stuck my nose up in the air and said that, sure, he wasn’t the worst of them.”
“Very proper.” I took her arm. “Now let me buy you breakfast.”
She yanked it away from me. “I’ll buy me own breakfast, if you don’t mind.”
The imp had instantly become a fury. I wasn’t going to fight it. “Well, then, will you join me for breakfast?”
She pondered that invitation suspiciously. “Where?”
“You name it.”
“Bewley’s?” She gestured at the café a few steps across Johnson Court.
“Why not? Do you have your bike?”
She gestured at the sign in the small front yard of St. Teresa’s forbidding bicycles. “Don’t the priests forbid us to leave them here?”
“You sound like an anticlerical.”
“I am not,” she insisted. “I just don’t like priests.”
I recaptured her arm and walked into the café. Bewley’s is a wonderful tea shop where you can buy some of the best scones and drink some of the best tea and coffee in Ireland. It’s not a place where you can buy nutritious meals like we Americans pursue, but the Irish are not much into nutrition, probably because they cannot afford to be. It’s also a great place to watch parents and kids play. Ireland is the greatest country in the world to be a kid, because it’s a culture steeped in play and the presence of kids gives adults a chance to act like kids again.
“And yourself telling me that you don’t believe in God?”
“I never said I believed in Him, did I?” She frowned grimly.
“But you go to Mass every day, don’t you now?”
“What if I do?”
“If you don’t believe in God, why go to Mass every day?”
“Haven’t me mother and I been going to Mass every day since as far back as I can remember?”
“Your mother isn’t around to check up on you now, fair Nuala.”
“God is.” She bowed her head stubbornly, not willing to give me an inch.
“But didn’t you tell me that you don’t believe in God?”
“What if I’m wrong?”
“Huh?”
She stopped and turned towards me, her face assuming an expression of feral shrewdness that I would see many more times in the weeks that were to come, the face of an impoverished housewife bargaining over the price of a pound of bacon or a half pound of butter.
“If there is no God, sure, it doesn’t do any harm at all to go to Mass, does it now? And doesn’t it get me out of me bed every morning? And if there is a God, well, He knows that I’m at least maintaining diplomatic relations with Him, doesn’t He?”
“Her.”
“Huh?”
“My brother George, who is a priest, says that God is as much womanly as manly.”
“More. I mean if She exists, if you take my meaning.”
“Why don’t you go to Mass in the college chapel?”
I was sure I knew the answer. Nuala was hiding her piety from her friends, just as she tried to hide it from me by her anticlerical outburst.
“Why would I be wanting to pray in a Prod church?” she snapped, eyes glowing triumphantly as she fended off my question.
“I give up, Nuala! Let’s go in and have breakfast.”
“Mind you.” She would not yield me the last word. “There’s nothing really wrong with being a Prod if that’s what you are.”
It was hot in Bewley’s, and dense with cigarette smoke as always. The lights behind the yellow stained-glass windows, however, made the place seem cheerful. We both took off jackets, mine the blue and gold of Marquette U. Nuala was wearing with her jeans a dark blue sweater that had seen better days at least a decade ago—a hand-me-down from an older sister. It did considerably more justice to her wonderful breasts than the Dublin Millennium sweatshirt had.
We purchased our tea and scones and my orange juice from the buffet and paid a sad-faced young Asian woman in native dress over her Bewley’s uniform. I watched Nuala dole out her coins with the care of a poor person who doesn’t have enough coins to risk making a mistake.
“Good morning, Shirley,” Nuala said to the Asian. “ ’Tis a wonderful morning, isn’t it now?”
“Ah, it is, Nuala.” The woman smiled brightly. “You have a good day now.”
“As best I can with this big amadon in tow.” She nodded in my direction. The Asian girl giggled.
“Do you know everyone in this part of Dublin?”
“She’s in one of my classes, poor thing.”
We found ourselves a table in an alcove in the front corner of the basement floor, protected on three sides by walls with rose-colored covering.
“You should drink orange juice in the morning, young woman,” I told her firmly. “It’s good for you.”
“ ’Tis, especially since you have better teeth than any Irish person I’ve ever met. You should take care of them.”
“Should I now?”
“You should.”
She looked like she was about to sail off into another argument and then thought better of it. “Maybe I will.”
“Can I get you some now?”
“Didn’t I say I’d buy me own breakfast?”
“A glass of orange juice isn’t breakfast.”
She pondered that and then laughed. “Ah, sure, what a terrible witch I’m being. Make it a large glass, if you don’t mind.”
I smiled happily as I went back to the buffet. I also bought another large pot of tea and a plateful of scones.
“What are you doing with the extra scones?” she demanded suspiciously.
“I like them, woman, if you don’t mind. And if you try to take a single one of them away from me, won’t I be chopping off your hand?”
She laughed again. And impudently grabbed for one of my scones.
I grabbed the hand and kissed it.
I told you I was a romantic.
She blushed furiously. “You’re a desperate man, Dermot Michael Coyne. A desperate man altogether. Now if you don’t mind, I’ll eat me pilfered scone.”
“You might want to run the risk of pilfering another. But drink your orange juice.”
“Yes, sir.”
While she gulped down the juice with considerable enthusiasm, I studied her carefully. Nuala’s clothes were not much above the poverty level, but her face, once more devoid of makeup, was freshly scrubbed, and her sweater and jeans were clean. Moreover, there was a slight aroma of inexpensive scent about her. Nuala’s mother had brought her up right.
“I’m glad you have not acquired the terrible Irish habit of smoking all the time, Nuala.”
“Och, isn’t it a terrible habit altogether and so much better things to do with your money? Still, you can’t blame them.” She glanced around the room. “There’s little enough in most of their lives.”
“Tell me about your life, Nuala.”
“What’s there to tell?” She put down the empty juice glass and deftly pulled the entire plate of scones to her side of the small table. “And if you want more scones, won’t you have to be going back to the buffet and buying some for yourself?”
I filled her teacup. The kid was hungry. Dear God, how poor she must really be.
“Tell me about your family and Carraroe.”
“Not much to tell. We have a couple of acres of poor farmland, a few cows, and a small tea shop at which some of the tour buses stop. There were seven of us, all married but me, and I’m never going to marry, not at all, at all. A brother and a sister live in London, and a brother in San Francisco and another in Boston, a brother in Montreal and a sister in Christ Church, that’s in New Zealand.”
“And where are you going to live when you graduate from university?”
“In Carraroe,” she said stubbornly. “I won’t leave me poor parents alone. I’m sure I can get a job in Galway city.”
How many jobs were there for accountants anywhere in Ireland? I wondered.
“Your brothers and sisters come back often, don’t they?”
“Too often altogether, if you ask me.” She layered clotted cream and raspberry jam on yet another scone. “And themselves showing off their rich Yank ways and staying at the fancy hotels in Salt Hill with their spoiled brats.”
She seemed on the verge of tears.
“I love them all something terrible.”
“Do you now?”
“Haven’t I said so? That’s why I’m never going to marry. You have children and you break your heart and sometimes your back too raising them and educating them and then they go away and leave you alone.”
She was frowning again, a bitter and angry frown.
“Are your parents angry at your brothers and sisters for leaving?”
“They are not!” she exclaimed. “Aren’t they terrible proud that all of the eejits are doing so well? And don’t they miss them just the same? All the West of Ireland exports is people and sweaters.”
“Handsome and gifted people.”
“Isn’t that the truth now?”
“Some of them looking quite lovely in sweaters.”
She blushed again and turned away her eyes. “Go ’long with you.”
“You’re really planning not to emigrate?”
“Ah.” She grinned wickedly. “I was saying that, wasn’t I? But can you really believe me? Weren’t you saying yourself that I’m a pretty good actress? Might I not be pretending? How do you know that I’m not looking for some fockingrichyank to seduce so I can escape this soggy and impoverished island?”
She leaned back in her chair, still grinning. How would I handle that scenario?
“I think, Nuala Anne McGrail,” I said, slowly and cautiously, “that if you set out to seduce someone, you’d probably accomplish it pretty effectively.”
Her grin faded. “You think so, do you?”
“I do, woman.”
Her grin returned, a little less cocksure this time. “We’ll just have to wait and see, won’t we now?”
“I’d be delighted to.”
“Of course, you’ve been engaged once already, haven’t you?”
I gulped down a large swallow of tea. “How did you know that?”
“Was she the one who died, or was it someone else?”
“It was someone else . . . and how do you know about either of them?”
“I just know, Dermot. I don’t know how I know.” She shook her head sadly. “I’m by way of being a wee bit of a witch.”
That’s why she would turn out to be a first-rate detective. She “just knew” things. I don’t know whether it was the shrewdness of Europe’s last Stone Age people by which they put together as quickly as a computer isolated facts that others noticed but did not really see or whether she was really one of the faerie folk. Or some combination.
“Are you now?”
“Haven’t I said that I am? . . . Does it scare you?”
I thought about it. “Just makes you more fascinating.”
“Do you want to tell me about your engagement?”
That was direct enough, astonishingly direct for an Irish person.
Yes, I did want to talk about it. Womanly sympathy, you can’t beat it, Pa always used to say.
“It’s a crazy story, Nul. Probably a comedy. I met this girl, Christina, in a bar on Rush Street—that’s our big singles’ bar district—the summer after I gave up on college. She was Irish on her father’s side and Italian on her mother’s side. There’s nothing wrong with that in Chicago anymore. One of my brothers and one of my sisters are married to Italians. It seems to be a good combination. Anyway, we hit it off well and began to date regularly. I hadn’t dated much since . . . since I graduated from high school.”
I wasn’t about to tell my West of Ireland witch that Tina took me home to her apartment the night we met and that we made love, she with considerably more skill and experience than I.
“She was two years older than me and had an excellent job in the finance department of the First Chicago, that’s a bank—”
“Shouldn’t a man be careful of them accountant women?”
We both laughed. I felt like I was on a psychiatrist’s couch.
We didn’t move in with one another, but we sustained a torrid sexual relationship. The best part of it was that I forgot about Kel. Or thought I did.
“Her family liked me and my family liked her, except Ma and George the priest, both of whom had some doubts that she’d value my, uh, dreamy side.”
“If she didn’t, wasn’t she a terrible fool?”
Dear God, this lovely child is already defending me.
Tina was small and slender, not exactly voluptuous but, to put it mildly, extremely sexy. We were both infatuated; we talked about sports and business and of course about sex, but not about much else.
“The following Christmas we were engaged with the wedding set for June. Her mother and her Italian grandmother took over the arrangements, which was fine with my family since we’d pretty much had it with weddings.”
I was, if the truth be told, swept along on a tide of loneliness and lust, not convinced that George was wrong but unwilling to admit the possibility that the issue was worth considering.
“I finally met her Italian grandfather, the padrino, the head of the clan. They have no monopoly on such people, we Micks have them too. But this guy, a frail, apparently kindly old man, who had built up the family electronics industry from scratch, had more power than most of our patriarchs have.”
“Not more than our matriarchs,” she said quietly.
I didn’t like the bastard but I didn’t see that he made much difference. Not till he asked what I did for a living.
“He found out that I worked at the Merc and hit the ceiling. I was nothing more than a gambler. An Irish gambler. He would not have a granddaughter of his marrying an Irish gambler, and probably a crooked and drunken one.”
The explosion took Tina and her family by surprise, but they didn’t disagree. “He really has your best interests at heart,” she said to me mildly after that first eruption of the padrino’s volcano.
“It didn’t seem credible that in the 1980s a grandfather could veto a marriage. A couple days later her father, who was the executive vice-president of the family firm and the man who really ran it because her uncle, the padrino’s son, was a lovely guy but with no sense for business, called me to offer me a job at the company. Vice-president at $80,000 a year with no particular responsibilities described.”
“Brigid, Patrick, and Columcille!”
“I declined.”
“You certainly should have declined.” Her face was crimson again, not with embarrassment but with anger.
“My family, George again excepted, thought it was a very generous offer. They would not have to worry about me any more. Ever again. Tina was overjoyed. How could I possibly not accept such largesse? I still said no.”
“Tough focker.”
“Me or the padrino?”
“Both of you, but you especially.”
“I didn’t think it was serious. I really couldn’t believe that the job was a sine qua non; no one acts that way any more. Well, I was pretty dumb. As I would find out later, I wasn’t the only one who encountered such a stone wall. Most of the guys that were offered jobs as a condition of marriage, all of them that I talked to in fact, accepted the condition enthusiastically. They couldn’t understand why I turned down such a grand opportunity.”
“ ’Cause you had the balls.” She reached for the scone plate. It was empty.
“More likely just a stubborn streak. I’ll get some more scones.”
“And maybe some of them cute croissant things, if you don’t mind?”
“I don’t mind.”
“And . . .” She smiled shyly. “Would you ever think of bringing some more of that orange juice?”
“Ah, sure, woman, ’tis yourself that has a grand appetite, isn’t it?”
“A terrible appetite altogether when someone is telling me a love story.”
“I’m not sure it’s a love story.”
Tina and I had furious arguments. I was selfish and ungrateful. Besides, Grandpa was right. Most traders faded from the floor. There was nothing in my record as a trader that suggested I would ever be very successful. Why didn’t I want the job? I guess because I didn’t want to be under anyone’s thumb that way, not ever.
“To continue,” I said when I returned, this time with a tray. “I never quite caught on to the fact that Tina and her family were deadly serious. I knew she was unhappy about my stubborn refusal to take the job, but I couldn’t imagine that she might call the marriage off because of it.”
“Did she ever say she would call if off?” The fair Nuala was wolfing down a croissant, also lathered with cream and raspberry preserves.
“Two weeks before the wedding. We had a monumental row. She told me that she wasn’t sure she wanted to marry me if I was such an ungrateful and irresponsible person. Everything was prepared, the church, the country club; we had made our pre-Cana conference, filled out all the forms; her family had mailed the invitations, over a thousand of them; our pictures were in the papers. I felt confident that it was too late for her to turn back. I was wrong.”
The fight took place after a particularly spectacular session in her bed, designed, I later decided, to overwhelm my reluctance to become part of her family.
“My father is not under anyone’s thumb, is he?” she demanded hotly. “How would you be different?”
“I’m not sure he really is his own man,” I replied. “Anyway, he likes his job and I wouldn’t like it.”
Those ill-chosen words launched our brawl. She hit me and I left her apartment.
“So then what happened?” Nuala’s interest did not interfere with her draining the orange juice glass.
“I didn’t talk to her for a few days. Let the dust settle, I thought, and then we can have a reconciliation. The day I was going to call her, the cancellation announcements started showing up in the mail.”
“Blackmail?” She stopped eating.
“I think so. As she said to me when we got together a couple of days later to try to see if we could work it out, it was the only way she had to make me understand that she was serious. It wasn’t Grandfather, she said, not really. She had always worried about my financial future; Grandfather merely made it explicit for her.”
“Oh.” Nuala continued to stare at me.
“She was willing to send out another set of invitations now that I understood the situation. I told her I’d think about it. That was the next-to-last time we spoke to one another.”
“Poor dear man.” Her eyes filled up with tears.
“That was in June. The following October I made my three million. Tina called to congratulate me. So did her father. So too did the padrino. I was very gracious in my expression of thanks for their kind words. So it was kind of a comedy.”
“I don’t think so.” She found a tissue in her book bag and dabbed at her eyes. “Course, you were still missing the poor girl that died, weren’t you now? And so you weren’t being very careful in your choice of substitutes, were you?”
That’s what you call a gotcha. And how could I be angry at her, with tears slipping down her cheeks?
“You couldn’t be more accurate, Nul. That’s precisely what I was doing. George said so after the breakup. I wasn’t willing to accept it then.”
She nodded. “Do you want to tell me about the girl that died?”
“Later, if I may. This is more self-revelation than I’ve ever experienced before. You are indeed a bit of a witch, Nul, but a very kindly and lovely witch.”
“Go ’long with you. . . .”
I thought of a question I wanted to ask her. “Do you know the town of Oughterard, Nuala?”
“And isn’t it right up the road from Carraroe?”
“Through Maam Cross?”
“Haven’t you been looking at the map?”
“You’ve been there then?”
“Hundreds of times, I suppose. Didn’t my brother marry a girl from there and herself with a nose stuck so high in the air she couldn’t see the horse shite on the road?”
“You know the statue at the crossroads?”
She frowned, trying to remember.
“Daniel O’Kelly?”
“Who was he?”
“Commandant of the Galway Brigade of the IRA back in the Troubles.”
She dismissed him and all his kind with a brisk wave of her hand. “Focking eejits.”
“Perhaps. Yet there was a band of Auxiliaries, Black and Tans, tearing up the town back in 1919, beating up the men, molesting the women, destroying property. O’Kelly and his crowd saved the place.”
“Killed all the Brits?”
“Yes.”
“Savages. . . . I remember the statue now. Ugly focking thing.”
“If you were a young woman in the town then, you might have welcomed Daniel O’Kelly and his bunch.”
She thought about that. “Maybe I would. Those were different times. Still, wouldn’t the Brits have given us home rule anyway after the war? What was the point in all the shite of the Rising and the Troubles?”
Thus is the patriotic past written off with one devastating swipe. They must teach revisionist history at TCD.
“Surely you’ve heard the name of Michael Collins?”
“Wasn’t he one of those eejits who opposed the treaty and was gunned down by his best friends?”
“You’re probably thinking of Cathal Brugha. Michael Collins was chairman of the Provisional Government, the commanding officer of the Free State army. He was shot probably by a sniper in Cork, his home county.”
She shrugged indifferently. “They were all eejits.”
“Collins died at thirty-one. He was the man who finally drove the English out of Ireland.”
“Weren’t they leaving anyway?”
“He was one of the great geniuses of the twentieth century, Nul. His death was a terrible loss to Ireland and the world.”
“Worse luck for him then, and himself dying in a foolish fight.”
“My grandfather—Liam O’Riada he was called, Bill Ready to us, Pa or Grandpa Bill to me—was part of the Galway Brigade. I don’t know what happened but he and Ma—Grandma Nell—left right after O’Kelly was killed and never came back to Ireland. She told me once that if they came back they’d both be shot.”
“Poor things. Maybe I would have been on their side in those days.” She shook her head as if trying to understand human folly.
“They were sweet, gentle people, Nul. Daily churchgoers like yourself.”
“Well”—she tilted her jaw at me—“you can believe that I’m not tied up with them eejits in the IRA today. Maybe they were necessary then, but not anymore. And meself a daily Mass person too.”
She was uninterested in Irish nationalism, past and present, and had apparently never heard of Daniel O’Kelly, William Ready, or the Galway Brigade. My suspicions that she might be on the other side—whatever the other side might be—were foolish.
Or were they? The Connemara district has always been a hotbed of nationalism and republicanism. The people from the Gaeltacht were not likely to be revolutionaries, but they were not opposed to them either. What about Nuala’s grandparents? Where were they and what were they doing during the Troubles?
Questions to be asked later. She didn’t seem so much to resent my interest in the past as to dismiss it as irrelevant.
“Eucharist.”
“Huh?”
“Prester George says we should call it Eucharist.”
“The focking Mass”—she chuckled—“is the focking Mass no matter what you call it. And tell that to George the priest for me.”
“I sure will. He’ll love it.”
“Will he now? Doesn’t he sound like an interesting priest? . . . Glory be to God, will you look at the time! I’ll be missing me Ancient Irish literature class and I’ll never learn whether Diramuid gets Granne.” She stood up hastily. “And let me tell you that one was no better than she had to be, not at all, at all.”
“I’ll walk you over to class.”
“You will not.” She struggled into her jacket. I assisted her.
“I will so.”
She slung the book bag over her back. “Well, ’tis a free country and a man can walk down any street he wants, can’t he now?”
“And thank you very much”—she seemed suddenly very vulnerable—“for the supplement to me breakfast.”
“We’ll do it again?”
“Sure.” She pulled the stocking cap down on her head. “Don’t I have to learn more of your story, especially”—she hesitated—“about the poor girl who died?”
Suddenly I had an idea, as ideas go, a pretty good one.
“Nuala,” I said as we emerged in the sunshine, “I need a favor.”
“Do you now?”
“Wasn’t I just saying so? I need a date. For a dinner. At Lord Longwood-Jones’s house in Merrion Square. The cultural attaché at the American embassy set it up. They want me to bring a date.”
The last sentence was a bold lie.
“In Merrion Square? Dinner jacket and all that shite?”
“They do that every night. White tie.”
“Holy saints preserve us! And you’d be taking the chit of a lass from the West of Ireland whose only dinner jacket occasion was her sister’s wedding? You’re daft, man, totally daft!”
“You’ll never be out of place anywhere, Nuala.”
“Go ’long with you. I know my place.”
“Your place is anywhere you want to go.”
“No! I won’t hear any more about it.”
Yet I was sure she would, that in fact she wanted to go, for reasons of curiosity if nothing else. I had to reassure her and persuade her. My first attempt was a failure.
“You’re a beautiful young woman, Nuala. They’ll love you.”
She stopped walking and turned away from me, as if she were about to walk the other way down Grafton
Street towards the green. “I’m not beautiful. I won’t listen to such horse shite.”
I grabbed her arm. “You are too.”
“I am not. And—”
I put my hand over her mouth again. She didn’t struggle.
“I thought I told you I’d not tolerate your self-deprecation. I meant it, woman, do you understand?”
A couple of old fellas smiled at us as they walked by. Lovers’ quarrel, they probably figured.
I must have been a little rougher than I intended. Nuala’s eyes showed fear. Mild fear. Well, good enough for her.
“I said, do you understand me?”
She nodded quickly.
“That’s better.” I removed my hand from her mouth, hooked her arm around mine, and began to walk north on Grafton towards Trinity College.
“Fockingbrute.” she murmured, but she was laughing at me. “Enjoys pushing defenseless women around.”
“I’ll put up with none of your shite, woman.”
She nudged my ribs. “I’m terrified, and yourself finally talking like an Irishman.”
“We’re agreed that you’re beautiful?”
“Ah, sure, won’t I get myself battered and right here on Grafton Street if I dare disagree?”
“I’ll accept that as a characteristic Irish affirmation of assent.”
She laughed again. “Ah, but aren’t you the dominating male now?”
“Not with one of your Irish matriarchs.”
“Anyway”—she turned grim again—“what good is beauty? It just fades away.”
“It changes as we get older.” I was quoting George the priest. “But we direct its change by who and what we are. My grandmother Nell was a beautiful woman at eighty. You’ll always be beautiful, Nuala.”
“I will not.” She said it gently, as if afraid of my assault.
“How old is your mother?”
“Sixty. I was the last of the brood.”
“And she’s not beautiful?”
“I never said that at all, at all, did I?” she shouted at me. “She’s the most beautiful woman I know.”
“And you don’t look like her? Isn’t everyone saying that Nuala is the spitting image of her ma?”
“How would you know that?”
“Maybe I’m a bit of a witch too, Nuala Anne McGrail.”
She leaned against me, laughing again. “I’m no match for you this morning, Dermot Michael Coyne, and that’s the truth, no match at all.”
I could have put my arm around her. I could have patted her gorgeous rump, a gesture I had been contemplating all morning. I lost my nerve. Instead I turned the corner to Nassau Street.
“So it’s all settled, woman. You’ll join me for dinner at Lord Longwood-Jones’s house.”
“Won’t I be disgracing you?” She nodded to a group of students that we passed. “Good morning to you.”
“Good morning, Nuala.”
The kids took a careful look at me: fockingrichyank. “That should be up to me to judge, shouldn’t it?” I pursued my argument.
“I’m thinking that you don’t know them folks well enough or me well enough to be able to judge.”
“And I’m thinking that I’m old enough to make me own decisions.”
Nuala sighed, that wonderful West of Ireland sigh that suggests the onslaught of a serious attack of asthma. “Well, I don’t have anything to wear.”
I don’t pretend to understand much about women, but I do know enough to recognize agreement when I hear it. “I bet you can find something.”
“Good morning, Nuala.”
“And the best of the day to yourselves.”
“Are you running for office?”
“They all know me because I sing in the pub.”
“A likely story. . . . I take it that you’ll be my date.”
“You don’t give a woman a chance to decide. Sure, if I say no, won’t you be coming after me with brute force, you big amadon?”
She was enjoying the game again.
“I would if I knew where you lived.”
“And I’ll not tell you that, will I?”
“Then I’ll steal you away from church in the morning.”
We were now opposite the entrance to Trinity College.”
“When is this white tie dinner?”
“Friday night at half eight.”
“Glory be to God, man, that’s only two days away.”
“I guess.”
“Why didn’t you give me more warning?”
“How did I know I was going to meet you at church this morning?”
“You’re a focking eejit!” Nonetheless she was amused by me.
“His Lordship said he would send a car to pick me, uh, us, up. What time should we come by your place?”
“You shouldn’t. Won’t I be meeting you at Jury’s at a quarter past eight?”
“Will you now?”
“Haven’t I just said I would?”
I took possession of a long strand of jet-black hair and caressed it like it was fine fabric. “It’s a date.”
She stared at the sidewalk. “I’m sure I’ll be disgracing you, Dermot Michael Coyne.”
“Bet on it?”
“I’m not a gambling woman.” Faint grin.
I tilted her chin upward and kissed her forehead. “I’m not a gambling man either.”
“And yourself a commodity trader.”
“Former commodity trader. . . . A quarter past eight, Nuala. And you be there, Nuala Anne McGrail.”
“Haven’t I said I would?”