Irish Whiskey

by Andrew M. Greeley

  Then we came to a large, neatly manicured lawn and, after one more turn, pulled up to a house that reminded me of Brideshead in the miniseries, an English manor house lifted from a film. All it lacked was a Rolls or a Bentley or maybe both parked on the gravel road in front of the door.

  Brendan opened the car door for us. We stepped out of the car into a zone of almost unnatural quiet, no birds, no traffic, no wind, no sound at all, at all.

  “Scary,” Nuala whispered to me, taking my arm.

  “You can hear the grass grow,” I replied.

  “If you ring the bell,” Brendan said, “Gorman will see to you. I will be waiting here to take you back to the city when you are finished.”

  “Thank you, Brendan,” Nuala said, now in her lady-of-the-manor guise.

  “Waugh,” I whispered to Nuala.

  “Or Wodehouse.”

  I rang the doorbell. Deep inside the house a gong responded. The door opened almost immediately.

  “Mr. Coyne and Ms. McGrail,” I said briskly to the young woman, a few years older than herself, in a maid’s uniform.

  “Come in,” she said. “I will tell Mrs. Mangan that you are here.”

  We were shown into a parlor just off the entrance corridor and invited to sit down. We remained standing.

  “That one’s a Cork woman,” Nuala says to me.

  “And our friend is now using the name of Mangan.”

  “Clarence Mangan was a grand Irish poet.”

  “I know THAT.”

  The maid, presumably Gorman, returned.

  “Mrs. Mangan will see you now. Will you follow me, please?”

  We were led through an immense parlor and a vast dining room towards the rear of the house. The place seemed dust-proof and stain-free. Yet I doubt that there had been any parties here in a long time.

  In the parlor a large and tasteful painting of a nude hung over the fireplace. She held a flimsy garment beneath her breasts and looked enchantingly vulnerable. The painter must have worked with both adoration and respect.

  Mrs. Mangan was waiting for us in a solarium at the rear of the house. Mums of many different colors filled the autumn garden outside.

  Mrs. Mangan was a tall woman with perfectly coifed white hair. Dressed in a simple gray dress, almost the same shade as Nuala’s, she awaited us standing up, cane in hand. Despite the network of wrinkles which covered her face she was handsome and apparently alert.

  Marie Kavanagh Sullivan, almost seventy years later?

  No doubt about it!

  “Miss McGrail and Mr. Coyne, ma’am,” German informed her.

  She inspected us closely for a moment, then fell back into the easy chair from which she had apparently risen.

  “Bill!” She gasped. “It can’t be! And Nell!”

  She began to weep.

  The quiet, pretty solarium quickly filled up with the uncanny. Or the Uncanny.

  Almost instantly Nuala was kneeling at her side holding her hand.

  “He’s Bill Ready’s grandson, Mrs. Mangan; I’m his fiancée and not half the woman she was. And I don’t have her red hair, worse luck for me. But I am from the same town.”

  Gorman stood at the other side of the stricken woman, anxious and worried.

  “Tis all right, ma’am, tis all right.”

  The Uncanny swirled around. I was surrounded by Druids. And ghosts.

  Perhaps a few angels, too, but they weren’t singing and dancing, not at all, at all.

  Marie Mangan recovered her composure with surprising speed.

  “Come closer, young man. So you’re Bill Ready’s grandson? Well, aren’t you the spitting image of himself?”

  “And isn’t he gorgeous?” Nuala demanded proudly.

  “Very much so, my dear. And you’re from Carraroe?”

  “I am, and didn’t the two of us meet in a pub in Dublin?”

  “Where else would you meet,” Marie said with a laugh. “Well you’re both most welcome. I’m very glad you’ve come. I wanted to tell someone our story. Bill and Nell’s grandson has a right to know it.”

  “Thank you, ma’am,” I replied.

  “You know, child,” Marie said to Gorman, “I think all four of us need a bit of a drink. Irish whiskey? Yes, I thought so.”

  “And you two are about to be married?” she continued.

  “We are, ma’am,” Nuala replied. “A week from tomorrow. At the Cathedral?”

  “Might I come?”

  “I hope you will.”

  “I’ll smile when Brendan parks in that lot where it all happened so long ago.”

  We drank a toast to one another in Bushmill’s Green.

  Then the old woman said, “Well, I’d better begin telling my story if you two are to return home before dark.”

  26

  MARIE’S STORY

  Jimmy killed the first time when he was ten. A kind woman had given him two shillings because he was so polite when he delivered a couple of loaves of freshly baked bread to her house. He told his friends about the gift. One of them, a couple of years older and much stronger, cornered him in an alley with a knife and tried to take the money away from him. Jimmy fought back of course, as he always would. Fighting back was the only way to survive. In the scuffle he turned the knife around. He had no idea what was happening. The knife plunged into the other lad’s heart. Jimmy never forgot how quickly the blood exploded from the poor boy’s body. He dreamed about the expression of terror and surprise on the boy’s face for the rest of his life. He’d wake up at night sobbing. I’d hold him in my arms like a little boy and sing songs to him till he went back to sleep. In many ways Jimmy was always a little boy. He never had a chance to grow up.

  “All the shillings in the world are not worth a single drop of human blood,” he used to say. “And I have shed blood, hundreds of gallons of it.”

  He didn’t know who his mother or father were. He had no memories before Sullivan’s bakery in Cork. He heard from some that he was the son of an English officer and an Irish serving maid and from others that his father was an illiterate countryman and his mother an Englishwoman from one of the “big houses.” He loved to tell stories; I think he could have been a novelist. He used to make up stories about his parents and tell them to me and ask if they seemed plausible. I’d say that all I needed to know about him was that he was Irish and that someone had loved him very much when he was a small child; otherwise, he would not be able to love as generously as he did.

  He was a bright, alert and hardworking little boy. One of the Sullivans’ daughters, a few years older than him, taught him the rudiments of reading and writing. That was the only school Jimmy ever had. Somehow he managed to educate himself, mostly at the front during the Great War as he used to call it. If you had met him without knowing his background, you would have said he was a witty, well-educated gentleman. That role fit him like a glove. It became Jimmy Sullivan by the time I knew him. Everything else in his life was walled up behind it. Even I had a hard time getting beneath it to the real Jimmy. He’d only talk about his past in bed and only when I’d press him to tell me more.

  There was so much agony, so much pain, so much grief locked up inside him. I never was able to do any more than touch the surface of it.

  Survival was all that mattered to him, to stay alive for a few more days, a few more weeks, maybe another year. He admitted to me that he was a thief in Cork. He organized a gang of thieves his age. “We didn’t steal much and only from the swells,” he used to say. “As gangs went in those days we were rather harmless. We never killed anyone, thank God.”

  He joined the English army to escape from Cork and move up in the world. He did not want to talk about the war, not ever. He’d just say, “Ah, sure, love, wasn’t it easier to be a company commander in Flanders than boss of a gang of street thieves in Cork?”

  He did say once that at Paschendale when the Royal Tank Corps broke through the German lines for eight miles the English could have won the war if Sir John French
and Douglas Haig, the British commanders, had the sense to exploit the breakthrough. He hated French especially, blamed him for the destruction of his company. I think that was the time he was recommended for the Victoria Cross. They gave him the Military Cross instead because he was Irish. He told me that he threw it into the River Lee when he returned to Cork. His men apparently held the line for an extra day during the German counterattack and saved tens of thousands of English soldiers—“only to have most of them butchered later on,” he said to me once.

  I read a lot of Irish history, trying to understand my man. I asked him once if Michael Collins had really ordered the killing of General Maitland, who was Chief of the Imperial General Staff, during the “troubles.”

  “It was an execution of a criminal,” he said coldly. “And please, love, I’ll talk about it someday, but not today.”

  He never talked about it despite his promise, but I think he was involved in the killing. He liked to tell me about his past, especially after we’d made love, but only in bits and pieces.

  “When I came back to Ireland after the war, with a few gold pieces in my pocket and nothing much else to show for five years of killing, it was either sign up with the Black and Tans who wanted me or join the Big Fella. So I did a little bit of both.”

  “You were a spy for Collins, Jimmy?”

  He’d wink and kiss me and say something like, “Well, love, I was certainly not spying for the Tans.”

  He later broke with Collins after the peace treaty was signed and then, after they killed Collins, he quit the irregulars and came to America.

  “I watched Emmett Dalton sweep those fools out of Cork that summer and knew we didn’t have a chance—and the Cork Regatta going on at the same time as if it were the most important thing in Ireland. I thought the Big Fella might end the fighting, but when they killed him I knew it would be a fight to the bloody end, and I wanted a couple of more years of life.”

  That was a long speech for him. Sometimes it was hard to know which side he was on.

  “On me own side,” he’d say when I asked him, “just trying to survive for a couple of more days.”

  He took to Bill Ready the way he did because Bill had lived through the same confusion and had to leave Ireland for similar reasons … Jimmy wasn’t twenty-five then and Bill, as you know, was barely twenty. That seems so young today …

  He believed that we lived in a jungle, and heaven knows there was nothing in his life that gave him any reason to question that conviction.

  “Maybe there was order under the Roman Empire,” he said to me once, “though I’m not even sure about that. But it’s the era of the barbarians now. Governments don’t work. They never have, unless you’re rich. They can’t make proper wars or proper peace either. The police are corrupt, always, everywhere. If you’re rich, maybe they can protect you. If you’re not, they won’t even try. Every man has to defend his own castle and his own people … whatever that involves.”

  There was nothing in the Chicago of the nineteen twenties to make him change his mind. Shortly after he opened his bakeshop with some of those gold coins from the war a couple of punks tried to make him pay protection money. He laughed at them. The next day the windows of his shop were broken. They came back again. He threw them out of the store. He went to the police who, he found out later, were getting a cut of the protection money. They told him to wise up. When the punks came back to set fire to the place he was waiting for them. No one ever saw either of them again.

  “It’s a war,” he’d say to me. “You defend your life and your property any way you can.”

  He had come to believe that killing was necessary to survive, but he never loved killing as they used to say back in those days. He brooded over every death.

  “The man was no good,” he’d say to me. “But once he was an adored little baby in his mother’s arms. Like I was.”

  Bootlegging was a perfect opportunity for him. He knew how to organize an operation from his days in the army and he was smarter than all the rest of them. He thought the law was silly, as everyone in Chicago seemed to. He defended his own territory like a row of trenches in France, though he thought that the gang leaders were stupid to bother fighting one another.

  “Al Brown is right,” he told me before we were married. “There’s more than enough for everyone.”

  He always called Capone “Al Brown” or “Mr. Brown” with a wink in his eye. Or sometimes even “Your friend over in Cicero,” with a nod of his head towards the West Side.

  Some of the people who wrote about us said that I was a flapper, a dizzy deb without a brain in my head. I was young and inexperienced, God knows. But I was not dumb. I knew that he was a criminal and a killer, but I wasn’t fascinated by that. I was fascinated by him. I did not think I would save him from his crimes. I wanted him. It was, if you will, a terrible schoolgirl crush, but it turned into a lot more than that and very quickly. He didn’t seduce me either.

  I knew nothing about where he came from or what he had done. I would learn something about that much later. It wouldn’t have made a bit of difference if I had heard about his past before we were married.

  He was the most wonderful man I had ever met, gentle and charming and respectful and funny and kind and generous. So he seemed then, and so he seems even today after all these years.

  Excuse my tears. I miss him so much.

  I realized that he adored me and that he would do anything for me, and eventually that he believed I was the best thing that had ever happened to him. “You’re the only good thing in my whole life,” he said to me, “the only grace God ever bothered to send me. I hope I can have you with me for a few more years.”

  He was a fantastic lover. I don’t know and don’t care how he learned about women. He knew me, knew what I needed and wanted before I knew myself. After the first time, I realized that I would belong to him forever. That part never changed.

  We both liked the Readys—Bill, the big, smart, simple man that he was and Nell, the passionate little fireball that she was. Maybe Jim saw in Bill the moral integrity he would have liked for himself. I saw in her the gritty loyalty I hoped I would learn in marriage. They came to Jim’s apartment to ask help against Klondike O’Donnell, who was trying to extort protection money from Bill’s business. They were in deeper trouble than they realized. Klondike was the kind of man who killed on a whim. Jimmy warned him off and that was that. We invited them to our wedding. They fit in wonderfully. I wanted to keep them as friends. But Jimmy said to me, “Love, they’re not our kind of people.”

  I said, “Are we too good for them?”

  And he replied, “No, they’re too good for us.”

  I knew what he meant and for the first time began to worry about our future.

  When I fell in love with Jimmy, did I think it would last? Did I realize that most bootleggers died young? I was eighteen. I didn’t ask such questions. Now is forever and tomorrow doesn’t matter. I didn’t care about the risks because I didn’t think of them much.

  But he did think of them, every day, especially after little Peggy was born. The system that Capone had imposed on the gangs and which Jimmy supported had worked at first. Then the thugs began to get greedy, the Genna brothers who were totally insane. Bugs Moran’s gang, Klondike O’Donnell. They begin to kill one another and then kill Capone’s men and Jimmy’s, too. He did what to him seemed the natural thing to do, he fought back.

  Then some people inside the Capone gang started to think that they could do a better job than Big Al. It was dangerous to think such thoughts as his two gunmen Anselmi and Scalise learned when Capone had them killed. The Genna brothers were behind the trouble, as they always were in the late nineteen twenties. They got themselves killed one by one but each one of them was tougher and meaner and dumber than the previous one. They were Sicilians, from Little Sicily or Taylor Street as we call it now. They resented the fact that a Neapolitan like Capone was running the mob. That was not the way it was done in
the old country.

  I found out about these conflicts only later. Jimmy didn’t tell me and I didn’t ask. I didn’t read the papers much because I didn’t believe anything they said. I did realize, however, after Peggy was born, that Jimmy came home each night more preoccupied and worried. “Nothing serious,” he told me.

  Then some of his men were killed by Capone people. Machine-gunned in a restaurant up on Fullerton Avenue. We went to their funerals of course. For the first time I was really scared. I was pregnant again and I realized that I could become a widowed mother of two children anytime.

  “Is it ever going to stop, Jimmy?” I asked him one night.

  “It’s going to have to stop,” he said. “One way or another.”

  The next event was the famous shoot-out in front of the Lexington Hotel, where Capone lived at the time. Jimmy’s men drove down the street in ten cars and cut those three killers into little pieces. In broad daylight.

  “I had to do it,” he told me. “They killed my men and they would have killed all of us if we’d left them alive.”

  Then he told me all about what had been happening. I was petrified but I tried to act like an adult.

  “What happens next?”

  “I fight Al Brown. It’s him or me at this point.”

  Then Frank Nitti, the one they called “The Enforcer,” came to see us under a kind of a flag of truce. Jimmy let me listen to the conversation. Almost seventy years later I still remember it like yesterday.

  “Our mutual friend says to tell you that he don’t owe you nothing,” Nitti begins.