THE NEXT day I ate lunch at the Bar Association with Bob Hurley and two denizens of the West Side real estate market, which now stretched out almost to Rockford. Both of them were in the non-shady crowd. Their firms had not been involved in the blockbusting thirty years ago. Roy Morningstar (English for Morgenstern) specialized in Oak Brook, the huge DuPage county residential and commercial area out beyond the Cook County line. Five feet eight at most with dark brown eyes that oozed sincerity, he was the grandson of a Holocaust survivor, active in Jewish community affairs, and a specialist in shopping malls. His favorite gesture was a slight shrug of the shoulders which said, in effect, “What can I tell you?”
“You want to buy a mall, Mr. Coyne? What can I tell you? I have a bunch of them for sale, not the big ones, of course, though there are a lot of properties inside the bag that are worthless now for all the interest they would stir up. A mansion with housing for your thoroughbreds? I could get it for you cheap, even below wholesale. Nothing is moving out here. I mean nothing. Maybe next year, if we are all alive?”
Johnny Bowler, an overweight Irish-American with a bald head and sad blue eyes who specialized on the close-in suburbs—Oak Park, River Forest, Elmwood Park, Forest Park, LaGrange—was equally pessimistic. “An upturn? Not next year. Maybe the year after. Worst I’ve seen, absolute worst. My dad says go back to the Great Depression to see it.”
“I didn’t vote for him,” I said, my standard response to those who complained about the economy.
Everyone talked about the Great Depression these days, but none of them had been there. I’d read the books. We were not in something like the Great Depression, even the housing bust. We weren’t throwing people out on the streets yet, not that we could exclude the possibility.
“What about this crowd that’s trying to redo West End Park?”
Johnny Bowler answered.
“The Irish firm . . . What do they call themselves, Restoration? They’re really part of the market. Hey, they build up that neighborhood again? It will be a big deal, but it’s long term at best. No help to us, no threat either . . . I don’t like the Irish butting into our business, though. Why should they be building that idiot spire down at the River? That’s rubbing it in. When things get better here, Americans ought not prop up their economy with tourism.”
“Better their money,” I said, “than Russian or Chinese.”
“You know anything about Ireland?”
“A little,” I said, waiving off Bob Hurley.
“Is that not the company whose young man was thrown in the Chicago River the other night?” Roy Morningstar asked.
“Yeah, I read about that. Probably just some gangbangers. They’re not big enough to be a problem. Allied Irish Bank? That’s another question.”
“The West Side Irish,” Bob observed, “have taken a real beating the last thirty years. They might resent foreigners intruding.”
“Hell,” Johnny Bowler insisted, “the Irish aren’t foreigners.”
“Any kind of Irish Republican resentments out here?” I asked innocently. “They have long memories.”
“The Greenhorns, maybe, but most Irish Americans don’t give a shit about the Irish Republicans. Probably think they are the conservative party over there.”
“There was once a man”—Roy Morningstar frowned as he struggled for a memory—“who owned a big gasoline station at Harlem and Lake. I don’t remember his name. He was active in some kind of group which was sending money to Northern Ireland for the fighting over there. A little obsessed with it, people say. An immigrant himself, judging by the way he talked. Northaid, I think he called it.”
“Noraid,” I said.
“Yes, Dermot, I think that was what he called it. He’s probably long since dead by now—Freistaters he called the people in charge of things. Really hated them.”
“Free Staters?”
“Yes, that’s it. They are the ones in charge of Northern Ireland?”
“No, that’s the English government . . . The Free Staters are the recognized government of Ireland, duly elected by their own people. They are called Free Staters by those who lost to them in the Irish Civil War.”
“So . . . But wasn’t that settled recently?”
“It was, Roy, but the extremists would regard that as another sellout to England and the Northern Protestants.”
“Stupid bastards, why fight over something that happened fifty years ago?”
“A hundred years ago, Johnny. Or maybe seven hundred, depending on how you count.”
“Why the fuck are they messing around in our business?”
“Because the administration believes in a weak dollar to help American business.”
We walked back to the law offices of Warner, Werner, Wanzer, Hurley, and Hurley. I wanted to greet my sister Cyndi and see what mischief she and my wife were spinning for the Archdiocese.
“It looks like the Archdiocese backed down,” she said as soon as I walked into her office.
She was clearly disappointed by this apparent retreat.
“I don’t think that the people in charge at St. Joe’s have backed down.”
“That idiot ex-nun doesn’t know what we can do to them. Is she sleeping with the priest?”
“I don’t think so. I suspect rather that she’s a substitute for a domineering mother.”
“Doesn’t matter! We could get an injunction against them tomorrow on the grounds that their grading system is doing grave harm to many of the students and violates the implicit contract the school makes to the parents. Extend the injunction to include the Church. I assume your friend Blackie knows what we did out in Joliet?”
“I’m sure he does. That’s why he issued the releases that were in the Trib this morning.”
“If the school doesn’t reply and the Church does not take action, then the Church is certainly liable. People spend a lot of money for that school so they can get their kids into a good high school like St. Ignatius or Fenwick.”
“Keep your powder dry,” I warned her.
“Tell the Cardinal that I love him even if I have to sue him.”
“I was the youngest,” I said, “and didn’t pay much attention to such things. Did Ma and Pa have anything to do with the Irish nationalists when they were still alive?”
She thought a moment.
“A bell kind of rings in the back of my head, Dermot. As you remember, they had to get out in the early nineteen twenties. I think that maybe some strange people came through the house when I was a kid.
“Ma and Pa were our maternal grandparents, deeply adored by all of us. Our own mother worshipped them too, but she wanted them to concentrate on being good Americans. And they weren’t much interested in the old country. They had left it behind with little regret. Too bad neither of them lived to know your wife. They would have totally adored her . . . Let me see, there was some local leader who represented the Irregulars. Owned a gas station somewhere . . . That was a long time ago, Dermot. I’ll ask Mom, she might remember.”