OUR TROUBLES had started eleven months earlier in a place called Portofino on the so-called Italian Riviera. We were staying for two nights at an elegant hotel called the Cenobio dei Dogi to rest up after Nuala Anne’s triumph at the Celtic music festival in Milano, a city which is heavy into festivals but had only recently taken seriously the truth that its heritage was more Celtic than Lombard.
“Dermot Michael,” Nuala Anne whispered in my ear, “you’re not asleep, are you?”
“Woman, I am not!”
Only about 95 percent asleep after a bout of very satisfactory lovemaking. My wife, playing the role of the poor, shy Irish countrywoman, was clinging to me as though she had to absorb my protection after the outrageous behavior in which she had enthusiastically engaged.
“Wouldn’t they be not so far from wrong who said that it would be a mistake for us to have another child just now?”
That’s the way the Irish talk. Three or four negatives wrapped together in the same convoluted sentence.
I was instantly alert. We were about to have a serious discussion.
“I’ve always thought meself, uh, myself, that the person who should make that decision is the one who will bear the child and nurse him.”
“Her,” she said firmly.
Ah, the gender of the yet unconceived child had already been determined.
“Sure,” she continued, “isn’t it the truth that the father should have an equal vote?”
“No,” I said firmly. “Fathers never get an equal vote.”
“But we have to pretend they do, don’t we now?”
“So long as everyone knows we’re pretending.”
There were a number of reasons why we were not quite ready for a third child. Nuala’s first two pregnancies and deliveries had been extraordinarily difficult. The second had plunged her into deep, if, as it turned out, temporary depression. Even though we could, thank the good Lord, afford help (through my luck and her talent), my wife was a responsible parent to the point of obsession. While she had learned to be a little more laid-back in her assumption of total responsibility, she still could be very hard on herself if, for example, one of the kids came down with a cold.
Moreover, she had become, as her triumph in Milano had shown, an international celebrity. Although at first she had dismissed the invitation to the Festival di musico Irelandese e Celtico, as a serious temptation to grave sin, she had finally succumbed to my mom’s insistence that she and Dad would enjoy hosting the kids and the hounds for a week or so. It would be good for us and for the kids if we got away.
Thus Mom, who knew all about compulsive Irish matriarchs, had trumped one moral responsibility with another.
“Besides,” she added, “it would be good for those Italians to know that Ireland was a civilized country long before they were.”
The claim was dubious historically, but any appeal to Irish national pride in these days of the Celtic Tiger, struck a responsive chord in my wife’s heart. The Irish were no longer a poor people and no one, save some of the Brits, thought they were uneducated or uncivilized. So we had to drive the truth about Ireland home to everyone, didn’t we now?
A minor problem was that Nuala Anne was Irish and a singer, but she was not exactly an Irish singer. Quite the contrary, she sang anything and everything—Protestant Gospel hymns, blues, American folk songs, English language and Latin hymns from the “old church.” She probably knew more Irish-language music than anyone of her generation, but she did not consider herself a specialist. Hence we had to suffer through a lot of practice to make sure that we’d do it just right.
I’ve often said that I sleep with many different women and my wife is all of them. Though she had majored in accounting, Nuala Anne had hung around the theater group at TCD where she had found justification for moving from role to role to role in her complex personality. She could board an airplane as a sophisticated woman of the world who had been everywhere and seen everything and was impressed by almost nothing and certainly no one.
Or she could be the shy Galway peasant, frightened to be out of the familiar context of Carraroe. Sometimes, when we traveled, she insisted on talking to me in Irish, a language of which I knew hardly more than a dozen words
“Och sure, Dermot love, don’t you know what I’m saying from the tone of me voice and the expression on me face?”
I didn’t argue.
The Irish peasant lass appeared frequently on our quick trip to northern Italy as me wife decided she did not want to be an international celebrity—as if that were possible after her Christmas programs, which were now broadcast all over the world. People would think they recognized her, but the young woman seemed so shy and spoke neither English nor Italian and babbled in some strange, if musical language, so it couldn’t be her.
Her voice was sweet and beautiful and now, thanks to my insistence, well trained. It is the kind of voice that if you listen to it closely, you can hear the sound of church bells ringing over the bogs on a day when the mists and the sunshine alternate with one another. She had wonderful stage presence and could get inside any song she tried. She would not be much of a threat, however, to the divas at the Teatro a la Scala. They, however, had not become part of Christmas around the world, a role which my wife would vehemently deny whenever it was suggested to her.
Nuala Anne is tall with the firmly disciplined body of a woman athlete, long and lustrous black hair, and a slender and expressive face that would remind one of an Irish goddess, not that I have ever met another Irish goddess. She’s the kind of young woman they put on the cover of the Irish travel magazines, save that those young women, gorgeous as they might be, cannot reveal a face whose expressions change by the second and half the time is filled with the light of pure mischief.
“Nuala Anne,” I said to her shortly after we were married, “you are a shit-kicker.”
“Am I now?” she said, grinning at the prospect of another argument.
“Woman, you are.”
“Well, now wherever in the world do I kick shite?”
“Wherever you find it.”
“Do I now?”
“You do. You come into a situation where you notice a pile of shit in the corner. You walk over to it to test it delicately with your foot to make sure that it’s high quality. Then you kick it around until the whole place is covered with it, all the time pretending that you’re not at all responsible for starting the argument.”
She threw back her head and laughed joyously.
“Dermot Michael Coyne,” she said, pretending to outrage, “I’d never do anything like that… and isn’t it yourself, poet that you are, who has a fine sense of metaphor.”
Then she hugged me fiercely.
Her denial didn’t indicate she was about to give up the habit. On our quick trip through northern Italy her premise was that she could find nothing there, at all, at all, which did not compare unfavorably with the County Galway.
The Duomo in Milan: “Sure isn’t St. Nicholas Collegiate Church a better example of late Gothic?”
The Piazza di Duomo: (With a sniff) “It can’t compare for elegance with Eyre Square in Galway Town.”
The Riviera “beach” at Portofino with its black gravel: “Don’t we have a dozen beaches on Galway Bay that are nicer?”
To which I replied, “I admit that Inch is incomparably better.”
She replied with an angry frown: “That’s a beach in Kerry. Kerrymen are sheep thieves.”
Venice (we’re standing on an elevated platform waiting single file to enter San Marco as a foot of Adriatic water covers most of the Piazza): “This place is a friggin’ sewer. They say Galway Town is the Venice of Ireland. Sure, doesn’t our County Council have grounds to sue?”
She doesn’t mean any of this shite, you should excuse the expression. It’s all part of the game. Does the game ever grow dull?
She keeps people laughing with it even when they’re not hopelessly in love with her like I am.
There was an incident in Venice that showed another side of my wife.
We had wandered out of the Danieli after having a Bailey’s Irish Cream nightcap and were strolling along the bank of the Grand Canal, to which the Adriatic had receded when the tide went down. We heard a soprano voice singing Schubert’s “Ave Maria” and Gonoud’s “Panis Angelicus,” for which liturgical chestnuts elderly Irish and American tourists are suckers. There’s always music around the Piazza, string groups playing melodies from my parents’ era like “Fascination” and “Always,” and “Dancing in the Dark.” Nuala knew the lyrics and sang the tunes softly.
She hummed along with the “Panis Angelicus” soprano and grabbed my arm. “Dermot Michael, that child has a beautiful voice.”
“How do you know she’s a child?”
“She’s better than I am.”
A crowd had gathered around the Palazzo di Dogi (under repair) to listen. Nuala was right, the pretty young woman, who sang with hands behind her back, was indeed a child, as was the man who was accompanying her on a guitar. She paused and bowed her head politely to the applause. The crowd added lire to the small box in front of her mike. A group of Italian naval cadets were especially generous.
The singer then turned to Mozart, chestnuts which were not quite so well known to the tourists. Next to me, my sentimental wife was weeping. I knew what would happen next and was already proud of her.
After a couple of Mozart pieces, they paused again. Nuala slipped up to them, put a 500,000 lire note in the box (two hundred dollars) and then purchased one of their CDs. She chatted with them for a few moments, wrote down their address on a used Vapo ticket, and gave them her business card.
(A plain white card which said simply nuala5@-aol.com.)
They would almost certainly be on her next Christmas show. Or the one after.
“ ’Tis not fair,” she said to me as we resumed our stroll, tears streaming down her cheeks.
“What’s not fair?”
“That they have to be street musicians to stay alive and meself pretending to be a great Celtic singer over in that town with the awful cathedral.”
“I bet they earn a very good living,” I replied. “There’s a new crowd of tourists walking the Grand Canal every night of the year.”
She sighed, her saddest West Galway sigh. “Still it’s not fair at all, at all.”
She had already adopted, with some help from the little bishop, Marie-Bernadette and Jacques-Yves. My Nuala Anne had a heart as big as all outside.
SOMEDAY YOU’LL GET TIRED OF HER, the Adversary whispered in my ear. ISN’T SHE TOO MUCH ALTOGETHER.
“Don’t pretend to talk Irish.”
YOU DO IT ALL THE TIME.
“Regardless.”
SOMEDAY YOU’LL GET TIRED OF OGLING HER BREASTS AND REALIZE YOU MADE A MISTAKE. ISN’T SHE ROUND THE BEND ALTOGETHER?
The Adversary is a voice from the subbasement of my soul who often complains about me. I am no more responsible for what he says than I am for what my wife says.
Nor would I ever grow weary of her breasts no matter how old we might be. Elegant, graceful, inviting, they challenged me, even when they were completely clothed.
Which brings me back to the scene in the bedroom in Portofino. I chose my words very carefully because I knew they would be stored up and used against me if the occasion warranted.
“Well,” I said as if I were discussing an interesting if abstract philosophical principle, “I suppose that the only thing the father might have a right to say is that he would have no objection to a new rugrat around the house, so long as the child’s mother would try hard not to be so obsessive about being a perfect mother.”
Dead silence. I had touched a sensitive point.
“Well, now”—she had adopted her philosophy debating voice—“sure, after a woman’s had a couple of small ones, shouldn’t she know enough not to be obsessive anymore?”
“She should,” I agreed.
Another long silence.
“And I suppose,” she said cautiously, “I suppose the father would be the one that would decide whether she was being obsessive or not?”
“Who better?”
She sighed loudly, a sigh that indicated that the conversation was over and I had, for the moment, won the point.
You won’t have the guts to stick to it.
I ignored him. I knew that I had better or I would not be a very good husband.
Then, as I was falling into the sleep of the just man who had won part of an argument with his wife and had a very pleasant time loving her, she whispered, “Won’t we call her Socra Marie?”
That settled that.
I thought we’d probably conceive Socra Marie before we had returned to Southport Avenue. However, that would happen only on or about the Labor Day weekend at Grand Beach.
How do you keep a mother from obsessing about a little girl, of whom a senior neonate consultant had said, “I don’t think we should make any special efforts to save her, Mrs. McGrail(sic!)” he had said. “She is likely to grow up with some severe damage to her system. It would be better to let her go and try again sometime in the future. I don’t think there would be much quality of life for her.”
I held my breath, expecting an explosion.
All she said was, “There’s nothing wrong with the poor little thing. She will live and be fine, no matter what you say.”
That was that. Dr. Foley, careful not to disagree explicitly with the great man, just nodded. God knows a lot of special efforts were necessary, especially with membranes in her lungs. Yet, at least as stubborn as her mother, “poor little Socra Marie” survived.
A pediatrician confided to us, “There’s nothing wrong with her. She just has to catch up. When she does, she’ll be as healthy as her brother and sister.”
“Didn’t I know that all along?” Nuala beamed radiantly.
Then to me she whispered, “I knew it, Dermot Michael, yet I really didn’t know it, if you take me meaning?”
I did indeed take her meaning. When you have someone as precious as a tiny girl child, you don’t completely trust your fey insights.
Anyway, the day after I was told the name of our third child, we met the Costelloe family at the swimming pool at the Cenobio dei Dogi, our hotel in the town of Camogli on the Portofino Peninsula.
“Not much of a view, Dermot Michael, is it?” she complained, as we walked out to the pool, at the top of a sheer ledge above the Ligurian Sea. “Nothing like Galway Bay?”
“Not quite up to the Cliffs of Maher,” I agreed.
“That’s in Clare,” she protested. “Wasn’t I thinking of the Aran Islands?”
“Ah,” I said… “Nuala Anne, the water is freezing! This pool isn’t heated!”
She dipped her fingers into it.
“Isn’t it grand, Dermot love, just like Galway Bay this time of the year!”
She tossed aside her robe, paused briefly (in her skintight maillot) and then dove into the pool.
Nuala, I should note, resolutely rejects the notion that pregnancy should interfere with the shape of her body. Diet, exercise, and grim determination seem to work for her. “I’m not doing it for you, Dermot Michael Coyne, I’m doing it for me own self-respect.”
“Not even a little bit for me?”
“Maybe a tiny bit,” she admitted grudgingly.
“What percent?”
“Well,” she considered the question, “no more than 90 percent.”
I love her, as you have probably gathered. Each day more than ever.
A family group at the side of the pool watched her dive. They looked like folks who might have stepped out of an Addams’ family film—better-looking than that crowd but not exactly the kind of folks you’d want to mess with. The father was a big man with a large bald head on top of a large body, more solid muscle than fat, and a frown on his square face that suggested a major grudge against the world. Since it was northern Italy, I thought, giving full rein to my ethnic prejudices, he was probably a crooked industrialist instead of a mafioso.
My wife’s dive was graceful, as was everything she did. She splashed a little water several feet from this crook and his family.
“Jesus Christ, you little bitch,” he shouted, his face turning crimson, “watch where you’re splashing the goddamn water!”
Are you going to let him get away with that?
“No way!”
The man had recoiled as though some of the water had actually fallen on his well-oiled body, which it hadn’t.
The woman who was presumably his wife, a skinny artificial blond with a frown that matched his, glared contemptuously at my wife and muttered something that had to be obscene. The four younger people, children and children-in-law probably, all of whom looked like skimpily dressed, hardened criminals, shifted on their lounges and began to reapply their oil.
I wandered over casually. I played linebacker at Notre Dame before I flunked out despite the fact that some people claimed that I would have been an all American. I haven’t put on any weight since then, mostly because of Nuala’s good example. Unfortunately, my blue eyes and blond hair and dimpled chin made me look harmless, which in truth I usually am, a pleasant, good-natured lout.
“My wife,” I informed this crowd, “is an innocent peasant girl with a delicate sensibility. I’d ask you to watch your language when you’re talking to her.”
Prig. Liar too.
“I am not. She doesn’t like to hear the Lord’s name taken in vain.”
The big guy looked up at me.
“Fuck off!”
He talked like Chicago. Flat A. Personal injury lawyer, I decided. I noted that the son and the son-in-law, as it seemed, were also big guys, but going toward flab. Not a problem.
Nuala Anne, who had heard his shout, ignored it and swam to the other end of the pool, returned—perfect Australian crawl of course—thunderheads marring her lovely face.
“Leave the focking eejit alone, Dermot Michael,” she screamed at me.
“Jesus Christ, twat,” the man yelled at her, “you have a goddamn filthy tongue in your mouth.”
He looked up at me and grinned. He was pleased with himself. He had made his point.
Someone else took over inside me and it wasn’t the usual adversary either.
I lifted him out of his chair and tossed him into the pool, knowing full well I’d catch hell from my wife for doing it. He kind of bounced when he hit the water and yelled with pain. He was not used to swimming in Galway Bay.
Then things began to get weird. I mean really weird. I was more or less prepared to throw the two young males in the pool when they came after me. Instead everyone in his entourage convulsed in laughter.
“Serves you right, asshole!” The good wife led the laughter.
“Got what you deserved,” a young woman who was just bitchy enough to be his daughter chortled.
In the pool, the big guy was laughing himself.
“Didn’t you play linebacker for Notre Dame?” he demanded, trying to pull himself out of the pool.
“Gave it up as a bad business,” I said, extending a hand to help him. “Not mean enough.”
“Couldn’t prove it by me,” he said lunging onto the deck.
“You looked like a beached whale,” the wife said without much imagination, but with some accuracy.
“Dad,” said a kid whose square face, like his father’s, had been hacked out of stone with an axe, “you’ll never learn to keep your mouth shut.”
“Gimme a towel.”
His wife negligently tossed him one.
“A dry towel, goddamn it!”
I gave him mine.
“Yeah, thanks. When did you play at the dome?”
“Twelve years ago.”
“Bad time to be on the team, asshole for a coach.”
“Last good one was Ara.”
“Goddamn right! I played for him.”
“Excuse me,” I said, “I have to run after my wife. She thinks I disgraced the family.”
The only remaining question was whether this loudmouth braggart who was a lawyer in tort practice had also been a Marine. At least he wasn’t from Texas.
When I cautiously entered our neat, airy room over-looking the Ligurian Sea, I might have encountered Nuala Anne crying. Then I would have had a chance. Instead she had turned into a banshee, her lovely face twisted into an enraged grimace, her gorgeous body tense with rage.
“Dermot Michael Coyne,” she said softly, “how many times do I have to tell you that I don’t need you to protect me? I can take care of myself.”
Old fight.
“You’ve made the point before,” I temporized.
“You still think you’re my big tough, testosterone hero who has to fight other males for me.”
The Galway brogue had vanished. This was good, old-fashioned plain American talk.
“You usually make the point,” I observed, “that we don’t have to fight off the Vikings anymore and even if we did you could dispose of a half dozen of them poor fellas.”
“Don’t try to laugh me out of it. You had no right to throw that poor man into the pool and himself with the mark of death on him.”
He had insulted my wife and maybe I did have some right to throw him into the unheated waters of the Ligurian Sea. However, mark of death…
“I didn’t see any mark on him…”
“Of course you didn’t. I did. That’s why I told you not to fight with him.”
“I missed that nuance.”
“You weren’t listening.”
“That’s an unreasonable remark, Nuala Anne. I’m not fey.”
“I know THAT!”
The phone rang.
“Mr. McGrail? I’m Seamus Costelloe, the lug you threw into the pool. I wonder if you and your wife would have supper with us tonight. There’s a nice place down the beach. We could make peace. Domers have to stick together. We’ll watch our language.”
I was not a Domer. I had flunked out of Notre Dame because it was interfering with my education.
“I’ll check with my wife.”
“ ’Tis the poor gobshite and himself wanting to make peace and himself thinking it was a big joke and meself not having to be fey to figure that out. Tell him that we Irish always believe in peace.”
She wasn’t smiling yet, but the worst of the thunderstorm had passed.
“After a good fight.”
“ ’Tis true.”
“Fine,” I told Seamus Costelloe. “I’ll try to keep her language under wraps too.”
She grinned faintly.
“Maybe you’ll go back and swim?”
She looked out the window.
“Only when they’re gone. I’d die of shame…”
“Does he have some kind of sickness… Heart, cancer?”
“No, of course not,” she said impatiently. “There are people who want to kill him.”
“Will they?”
“How do I know!”
She sighed loudly.
“And Dermot Michael, I’m sorry I acted like such a terrible witch. I didn’t want you to be the one who would kill him.”
I shivered, as I usually do when I encounter whatever powers intermittently take possession of my wife.
“I’d say banshee.”
She grinned crookedly.
“Maybe that’s what I am. A spirit howling at the time of death.”
I shivered again.
She stood up, put her arms around me, and rested her head on my shoulder.
“And now,” she whispered, “don’t I need a lot of protection altogether?”
It’s always a surprise to me to discover that this beautiful, talented, and brilliant woman loves me. She claims that she fell in love with me the first night we met at O’Neill’s pub down the street from College green in Dublin.
“Sure,” she says, “wasn’t it the great pools of kindness in your pretty blue eyes?”
Male of the species, I’m a sucker for that kind of line even if I only half believe it.
“Did you now?”
“And wasn’t that the night I gave up smoking because I said to meself, you friggin’ eejit your fella isn’t going to tolerate smoking and yourself ruining your voice?”
In the Irish ethical system there is always room for a bit of exaggeration to make a point.
“I didn’t know you smoked, Nuala.”
“Och, did I ever! Not when I lived out in Carraroe of course. Wouldn’t me ma and me da be terrible disappointed in me? But when I came to Dublin everyone else was smoking and I reckoned I was never going to be a singer anyway.”
“Was it hard to quit?” I said, full of the virtue of a man who had smoked but one cigarette in his whole life.
“Not when I was doing it”—she grinned shyly—“so that my fella would love me!”
I had tried to run away from her in Dublin, small chance of getting away with that. Then or ever.
We had eaten supper with the Costelloes that night in Camogli at a lovely little place called Ditte Ristoránte on the street above the beach. A man played the accordion. Nuala led the house in singing “Santa Lucia.” Vacation in Italy kind of movie.
Seamus was loud and often vulgar, but, oddly, good-hearted and very funny. As my mother, a tolerant woman usually, would remark of the South Side Irish, “They’re all right once you get used to the noise they make.”
Sometimes she would add, “They could do with a little refinement.”
Seamus told wonderful if improbable stories about the practice of tort law. He lectured on apparitions of the Blessed Mother—Lourdes was the only one he believed in “because of that little girl. Her answers to the bishop reminded me of Jeanne d’Arc.” He talked about his favorite charities in Chicago, Angel Guardian Orphanage and Maryville Academy, which he pronounced far better run than the Archdiocese. Nuala Anne sang without being asked, which proved she was in an excellent mood, even if she was convinced that her children did not miss her at all, at all. I would not say that the rest of the Costelloes were fun dinner companions. They were not obnoxious, only kind of dull, collections of South Side Irish clichés. Diane Costelloe and her daughter Lourdes talked about the fashions in Milano. Andy Costelloe made sweeping predictions about the American stock market which seemed to me, lucky failure at the commodity exchanges that I was, to be so much nonsense.
Lourdes’s husband, Patrick Loftus, was a quiet sort of dolt, who joined the conversation only when the subject was football or golf. He repeated frequently that Tiger Woods was a passing phenomenon and would not survive the tournaments next year. Andy’s “finance” Sonia’s high cheekbones and long blond hair, tied in a determined knot, suggested Eastern Europe as did her slightly hesitant speech. Not Poland. Maybe Lithuania. She was the only one in the family who appeared to be as tough as her future father-in-law. She also seemed bored.
I consumed two helpings of pasta with Genovese pesto sauce and two glasses of Barolo wine and generally kept my mouth shut (which I can do quite easily, especially when distracted by good food and drink and my wife’s smile.)
She was determined to win all the Costelloes to her side, turning on all of her West of Ireland charm mixed with an overpowering “woman of the world” sophistication. It is a very dangerous combination as I had come to realize early on in our relationship—and from which I tried to run away when I dumped her at the Dublin Airport.
Under the influence of such womanly charm, Seamus Costelloe became a seanachie. He told stories about his dealings with Cardinal Cody as a young lawyer (“Nuttier than a fruitcake and a poisoned fruitcake at that”), about Notre Dame football legends, about multimillion-dollar P.I. settlements which he had earned with brilliant courtroom tactics, about criminals for whom he had won acquittals, mostly because of the stupidity of government attorneys.
The stories lost nothing in the telling. Moreover, lest he offend Nuala Anne’s pious ears, his stories were free of scatological and obscene and blasphemous language.
One of the more interesting was about the trial of a Mafia hit man who had shot scores of people and whom the police had trapped in a setup after he had gunned down an important Calumet City crime boss.
“The State thought it had a good case against him. The media treated him like he was a goon, a psychopathic killer, who belonged in the electric chair—which he probably did. However, the State’s witnesses were even dumber than Testa—my man. I tied them in knots. I told the jury that Ernie Testa was a bad man, but that even bad men had the right to be presumed innocent until they were proven guilty, that his freedom was their freedom, all that ACLU bu, uh, baloney. They bought it. The guy walked out of the courtroom, all dressed up in expensive Armani suits with his jewelry rattling, like he was the King of Sicily. My last words to him were, ‘Ernie, be careful and get out of town, there are some people who want you dead.’ Well, before the editorials could attack me the following morning he was dead. Gunned down in a Rush Street bar. The cops knew who put out the contract, but they didn’t have any proof and the hit man, a lot smarter than Ernie Testa, disappeared. C’est la guerre.”
“You knew they’d get him?” I asked.
“Sure. He was too dumb to live in that world.”
“And he didn’t live to pay you?”
“He wouldn’t have been able to pay me even if they hadn’t put him down.”
“Then why bother?”
He shrugged indifferently. “Because it was fun, because they didn’t have a good case against him, because that’s what lawyers are for, because next case I take there’s a big fee up front, because I gotta do something.”
“Is not it wrong for a guilty man to go free?” Sonia asked suddenly.
“Only if his guilt has been proved beyond a reasonable doubt. That’s the way we do things in this country, Sonia Babe. Better that ten guilty men go free than one innocent man be convicted and maybe die in the electric chair. We presume that a man like Ernie Testa is innocent until the State proves him guilty. They didn’t. Next time maybe they’ll be more careful about collecting evidence.”
Sonia shrugged as though Americans were a very strange people.
Not Lithuanian, I thought. Russian.
“Besides,” Diane drawled, “you didn’t like the State’s Attorney very much.”
Seamus chuckled and filled my wineglass, “This Barolo stuff is good, Dermot. Glad you told us about it.”
That’s when the accordionist began “Santa Lucia” and Nuala Anne led the restaurant in singing it.
“Your man is complicated,” Nuala said later as we were undressing—a process which for her sometimes was long and languid.
“Is he now?” I said, admiring her disrobing sequence.
“He is. I had a few words with his wife. She really loves the poor amadon. Says he’s very gentle and kind and that he has a loud bark, but no bite at all.”
“Does he now?”
“Dermot Michael, stop staring at me like you’re a hungry wolfhound!”
“Woman, I will not!”
“I wonder who wants to kill him.”
We had turned off the lights in the room, because the moon, hanging over the Ligurian Sea, provided more than enough light to see my wife’s black hair as it fell over her pale white shoulders.
“Woman, you’re deliberately tormenting me!”
“Good enough for you, Dermot Michael, and yourself filled with lascivious thoughts!”
“I don’t want to talk about Seamus anymore,” I said as I captured her in my arms.
“The woman adores him,” she said, slipping out of my arms and walking to the window to stare out at the black sea. “He can’t be all bad, maybe just a little daft.”
I recaptured her, this time pressing her breasts against her ribs.
“Is it yourself that wants to make love? Sure, I never would have guessed.”
I wanted to forget about the Costelloes when we returned to Chicago. Herself wouldn’t hear of it.
“Maybe we’re supposed to save the poor man.”
Right!
So there we were on May 4, a fragile little girl in our house, a loud and sometimes obnoxious lawyer whose life we were supposed to save, and the Haymarket bomb alive in our midst.