AFTER THE choir Mass at Old St. Patick’s at which Nuala sings, we drove out en famille to River Forest to have dinner with my parents. They were careful to see that all the children and grandchildren in the clan were given equal opportunity to return to the castle, but they were especially eager to see us, in part because, as they insisted, ours were the best-behaved kids. In truth they also especially delighted them, because she talked so much like “Ma”—the original Mary Anne (and Nellie). Needless to say, me wife perceived that she had an audience and performed up to her highest standards of the beautiful but mildly crazy Irish immigrant woman.
My brother George the Priest was there, happy because he could see his favorite nieces and nephews. George was the Pastor of the Cathedral and was considered by his fellow priests to be Blackie’s Blackie, a difficult act to follow.
“How’s the situation at the parish?” he asked innocently.
George shares the family conventional wisdom that I am practically useless and managed to remember to pay my income tax only because my wife reminds me (in fact, she does all our taxes). They agree that whatever diminution of my uselessness might be, it all results from me wife’s benign influence on me.
“ ’Tis bull shite, Dermot Michael,” she explodes.
“ ’Tis true,” I said, “but we all need our simple explanations.”
George, however, has decided that I am a credible observer of the follies of the human condition.
“You been hearing complaints?” I said, following my wife’s custom of answering a question with another question.
“Some.”
“Well, Blackie will have to do something about it soon. It’s a viper’s tangle.”
“So I gathered, though your literary allusion is the first I’ve heard.”
“The place is worse than anything you might have heard. It could explode any time. Your very favorite niece is taking taekwondo lessons along with her mother, so she can fight off bullies in the school yard.”
“Why do they go after her?” he asked, his face tightening.
“Because she is the best basketball player in the school and that’s a form of repression that is not Christian.”
“I can tell the boss this?”
“Be my guest.”
“You can tell me more that I can tell him.”
So I rehearsed the whole story.
“Is Frank sleeping with Dr. Fletcher?”
“Our friend Cindasue, who lives down the street, says in her own colorful lingo that you get two polecats together in the same holler, they go a-ruttin’. However, I don’t think so. Not yet anyway.”
“He wasn’t a half bad pastor before this?”
“Old-fashioned but harmless. Midlife crisis maybe.”
“You’ll keep us posted?”
“Our kids say they can take care of themselves, but sure, so long as I am an anonymous source.”
“You have Mike Casey keeping an eye on it?”
“Sure I do. But that’s the deepest of deep background.”
“Good idea . . . It’s all the Vatican Council, Bro. All the old structures fell apart. That means more craziness, some left-wing, some right-wing, and some Katie-Bar-The-Door-Wing. There’s no one around to say to people, ‘That’s the worst crock of bullshit I’ve ever heard.’ ”
He then went off to collect his favorite niece for a game of twenty-one on the old basketball court in the driveway.
“We call it twenty-four now, Uncle George. If you make the free throw and the layup, you get a shot from downtown.”
“Sounds like fun.”
Beware brother, you’re in trouble.
My wife and my parents came out to watch.
Nuala clung to my arm to protect herself from the October chill.
“She won’t beat him, will she?”
“Is the Pope still Catholic?”
George had some skills at the hoops in his days at Fenwick, and, while no Barack Obama, he had a pretty good eye.
Me child skunked him.
While the annihilation was transpiring, I whispered to me wife the gist of my conversation with George.
“Then everything will be all right,” she said with a sigh of relief. “He knows about it, doesn’t he?”
“Blackie? Sure he does. George wasn’t surprised. He was very angry when I told him who was the prime target.”
“Blackie will work it all out,” she said confidently.
I wasn’t so certain. Blackie was the cardinal, but his powers were limited. He couldn’t close down the school and surround it with police, could he?
The Hurleys joined us for dessert after dinner. Their oldest, Josephina, or Josie, would attend St. Ignatius College Prep next year. She and Nellie—oops—Mary Anne had been friendly rivals for a long time. Against a new and scary high school, however, they would surely make common cause. They’d have a lock on it before their first week was over.
Dad cornered me as we were leaving and handed me a thick manila folder.
“You still interested in old manuscripts, Derm?”
I had presided over the publication of several old memoirs that my wife and I had rescued during the course of our problem solving. So my dad finally realized that I was not a complete waste—but it was still all because of Nuala’s influence.
Give over! It’s time you stop feeling sorry for yourself. Doesn’t the whole family give you credit for bringing home such a wonderful bride.
My adversary had returned to torment me with his truisms.
“We found this in the old archives we brought out to the new campus from the old place down on Harrison Street. Someone decided that it was time to clean the place up. This looks like a pretty interesting story. Remarkable woman. One of the first women doctors we had in this town. Still something of a legend. She seems to have been a little fey, just like your Nuala.”
I winced but to myself. Two fey women would not find a century of time any barrier to communication, not at all, at all.
“They’re not a great deal of trouble,” I said with phony confidence. “Not when you get to understand them.”
I noted that the folder had somehow morphed into my hand.
“The Old Fella gave you a memoir, did he now?” Nuala said suspiciously. “I suppose it will be another dull story. Besides, Dermot love, we have more than enough on our platter, don’t we now?”
“ ’Tis true,” I said. “I won’t pass it on unless I think it’s something which you would want to read.”
“Give me every single page! We owe a lot to the Old Fella and himself so nice to our kids.”
My parents insisted that when we were going away somewhere, we were to leave our kids at their house. They would spoil the brats rotten, of course. But it was, as me wife proclaimed, good craic for both sides. Now that they were growing up and Mary Anne was the special agent in charge of the group as well as the acting precinct captain, the kids were generally well behaved. Nuala figured we owed my parents for their babysitting. I figured that they reveled in spoiling the kids
She has the right of it, like always.
Be quiet!
“What’s her name?”
“Who?
“The woman who wrote the memoir?”
I opened the manuscript.
Nuala drives the car in our family when we have the whole clan. She insists that she is the better driver, “and yourself teaching me how to drive.”
Moreover she argues that our fire-engine-red Lincoln Navigator is her car.
“Angela Tierney.”
“Who was she?”
“Someone famous, though I’ve never heard of her.”
“All the same,” Nuala said, “she’s someone we know very well. Isn’t she from Carraoe?”
I shivered. We’d have this dead woman walking around our house for weeks.
We arrived at our house on Southport Street to find the night lights on—my wife had them in almost every room in the house—and the puppies sound asleep and upset when we had disturbed them. A note from Julie was pinned on the bulletin board.
“Nuala, would you ever let me Finnbar buy you a pint down below in the pub?”
“She’s getting familiar with you, isn’t she?”
“Haven’t we had some talks about herself and her fella? Didn’t she ask me about men?”
“A subject on which you are an expert?”
“Didn’t I tell her that the secret was that we have to teach them, poor, clumsy, testosterone-driven boy children that they are, how to love us, and then they have to teach us how to love them . . . Isn’t it all as simple as that?”
“No, it is not!”
Our elder daughter appeared with a note from Julie, asking her to take over for a half hour.
“Pa, I think you ought to go down to the pub and have a pint with them . . . I’ll get all the kids in bed on time, well, not the Mick because he doesn’t take orders from me anymore, and he shouldn’t really. I’ll ask him to. You call me on the cell phone every fifteen minutes, and I’ll report.”
Mary Anne knew which parent to address questions to in the circumstances. So we put on our dark leather jackets and, harp in my hand, we walked down to the corner pub. Flannery’s by name, but with a Polish owner.
“Go on, say it, Dermot Michael Coyne.”
“That the poor child is her mother’s daughter and herself taking responsibility for the whole world? Why would I be surprised?”
She sighed loudly.
“So long as she doesn’t take responsibility for the wrong people?”
“I only did it once,” she said, squeezing my arm.
Everyone was happy to see us, especially the Yuppies, who were taking over West Lincoln Park. Me wife, to tell the truth and despite her national reputation as a concert singer, was in fact at her best when she was singing in a pub. She became the ur-Nuala, a peasant matron from the bogs of Connemara. Mary Anne was faithful to her promise.
“Mick is doing his arithmetic and the little kids are in bed and I’m reading a book by Graham Greene. He’s a strange man, isn’t he, Pa?”
Haunted by God, I think.
“Yeah . . .”
I had time to talk with Finnbar Burke, who was wearing his tattered “Old Head” cap, jeans and a tattered windbreaker over a T-shirt which proclaimed CORK CITY.
“You play much golf here?” I asked.
“Busy with work and school, but I wouldn’t mind having a go at it.”
“What’s your handicap at Old Head?”
“Three on a day when I’m feeling good.”
“That’s impressive.”
“It would be lower if I was better with a driver . . . Where do you play, Dermot, if it’s not improper to ask?”
“I try to stay a moving target. When we’re over across in the summer, it’s Polerama, where they give me four and herself a three. She won the women’s championship there when she was seventeen.”
“She never did!” This was a cry of wonder, not disbelief.
“I don’t play against her when we’re home, as she calls it. She out-drives most of the men in the club.”
“A wife who is wicked with the driver.”
He had the strange Irish habit of echoing your last comment, though in different words. Me wife rarely did that, because it takes too much time.
“In the summer we play at a place near our home on the other side of the lake called Lost Dunes, where they give me a three because they like her.”
“They have the sense to like a beautiful woman who hits a wicked driver . . . But I’m not sure I can afford to lose the golf balls that they tell me the place eats up.”
“My home course is Ridgemoor out in my old neighborhood . . . Would you ever be able to shoot a round with me? I’ll give you a five handicap, seeing that it’s a new course for you.”
“I’d rather play you even,” he said firmly.
“It’s a deal . . . When can you be free?”
“It’s an Irish firm I work for, so we’re relaxed about days off. My boss thinks I work too hard and meself going to school every night. How about Wednesday?”
“Wonderful! I’ll pick you up . . . Where do you live?”
“You know the Adlon Hotel?”
“On Huron street?”
“It’s one of our properties, and I have a small room down there. An easy walk from school . . . which is really hard, Dermot. They expect you to think. The golf game might clear me addled brain a bit.”
“I am fairly warned.”
We both laughed uneasily.
This cherubic little guy could prove dangerous.
The songfest ended with Nuala Anne singing the sad tale of Molly Malone.
As always, there were tears in everyone’s eyes. Poor little Julie sobbed.
“Gotta get home to the brats!” Nuala exclaimed.
“Come back more often!” Flannery (née Osmanski) begged.
“We will, Seano!”
A local Yuppie, named Reilly I think, took me aside as we were going through the rituals of saying good-bye (which in Nuala’s case dragged on like an old-style Solemn High Mass).
“What’s going on across the street at the school? It sounds to me like they’re deliberately trying to ruin it. The monkeys are running the zoo? Does Ryan know about it?”
“I don’t see how he couldn’t know about it. I’m sure he’s being deluged with complaints.”
“Do they pick on your kids?”
“Yeah, but mine want us to stay out of it . . . Why don’t you write to the Cardinal yourself?”
“He won’t hold it against us. Some of those guys do, you know.”
“My brother’s a priest, and he says that one should never, never mess with Blackie Ryan.”
“Sounds good . . . He looks like such a diffident little guy.”
“That’s what makes him so dangerous.”
Back at our house, Mary Anne and the dogs, all three of them yawning, went quietly to bed. Me wife departed to her exercise room and I went to the office to begin the story of Angela Tierney.