I loved them all.
She was five feet nine inches tall, and had pale blue eyes which suggested a rare sunny day on Galway Bay, long thick black hair, and buttermilk-smooth skin. Her voice evoked, for me anyway, the sound of church bells heard from a distance over the bogs. I fell in love with her the first night I encountered her with a world economics textbook in O’Neil’s Pub on the College Green (which hasn’t been green for centuries) and she repudiated my efforts to “chat her up” with a dismissive, “Focking rich Yank.” According to her, she knew then and there, as I gawked at her breasts while she was singing about Molly Malone—and weeping at poor Molly’s fate—that she would have to sleep with me sometime.
She’d had a hard time at first in Yank Land—homesick, afraid of me and my family (all of whom adored her), hunted down by the feds as an illegal (which she wasn’t), terrified at the prospect of becoming a concert singer. Marriage did not make life any easier—four pregnancies, one of them causing a sustained trauma of postpartum depression and another a premature little girl child, Socra Marie, who was now our tiny terrorist. And she had to live in the same house with me, the four kids, the cook, the nannies, and the hounds. I was the most difficult of them all.
“Me poor Dermot Michael, he doesn’t do much of anything useful. He started his life as a gambler (read ‘commodity trader’), then he retired and lived off his winnings and he just sits around daydreaming and writing poetry and stories.”
“And I didn’t say that you devour me with your hungry eyes all day long, did I?”
“You’re the one who is a poet, woman of the house. And you didn’t say either that I’m your spear-carrier, your Doctor Watson, your Captain Hastings, your Monsieur Flambeau.”
“Actually you’re my Baker Street Irregular.”
You see, my Nuala Anne solves puzzles. According to Commander Culhane of the Sixth Precinct Detectives and Superintendent Michael Casey of Reliable Security, she is the best “natural” detective they have ever met, save perhaps for her good friend Blackie Ryan, sometime Rector of the Cathedral and now, “by the inattention of the Holy Spirit and ineptitude of the Holy See, Cardinal Archbishop of Chicago.”
The doorbell rang.
“ ’Tis himself,” my wife said.
That could have been a guess, a statement of probability, or a certainty. You see, my wife is fey. She even sees halos around people’s heads (mine is silver and blue, if you’re interested), a trait she shares with the good Mary Anne.
“Answer the door, Dermot Michael, and remember his name is not Finnbar Michael but Finnbar Me-hall, just like yours is Dir-mud.”
“With the emphasis on mud.”
I struggled to my feet and glanced at her quickly. Her body was turned at such an angle that her torso outlined itself against the floppy gown. My thoughts of lust or love, hard to say which or what combination of both was at work, that had teased my imagination all day, took over. Ah, it would be a fun night.
She knew of course about my fantasies almost before I did—and sometimes, maybe always, stirred them up. I learned how to read the glint in her eyes which was a signal that she wouldn’t half mind. There was, I told myself, the required glint. It didn’t follow that there would not be a show of resistance, hesitation, insistence that we both had a hard day tomorrow and should have a good night’s sleep. This was all, I had come to realize, nothing more than symbolic behavior which meant, “yes, why not?” She would beg off on occasion, with a signal in her eyes.
One night after a particularly delightful romp, she said, “Isn’t it a good thing now, Dermot Michael, that we enjoy this so much. Otherwise it would be difficult to live together, and meself an accountant and yourself a poet.”
“ ’Tis true,” I said with the required sigh.
“And yourself telling me all along that I’m a beautiful woman and meself not believing it at all, at all.”
“That’s why God created us humans to be lovers.”
“ ’Tis true,” she said.
So, of course, when I had looked out the window there was a small decrepit Asian-looking car, probably “previously owned” and maybe “previously owned” twice. A young man emerged, barely of medium height, six inches shorter than me and an inch or two shorter than Nuala. More than big enough for the diminutive Julie. He glanced up at the house, noted the stairway to the second floor, shrugged his shoulders and began, somewhat gingerly like all first-time guests, to ascend the stairs. He was wearing a dark suit (vaguely navy blue, perhaps) purchased off a rack somewhere. He was also wearing an Irish tweed hat, which he removed and stuffed into his jacket pocket halfway up the stairs. His hair was blond with bushy curls and his face was already tainted red—and not from climbing the stairs. Not handsome, not a man of power, but surely cute and perhaps even adorable.
He knocked on the door. I opened it promptly.
His smile was easy and charming.
“Good evening Mr. McGrail, Finnbar Burke. With your permission I’d like to take Julie Crean to the motion pictures tonight.”
Very formal but still with a grin that forced me to grin.
I shook hands with him.
“I’m Dermot, Finnbar. Mr. McGrail is my father-in-law over across in Connemara. The woman of the house is the gorgeous woman behind me, my wife Nuala Anne McGrail.”
“Dressed for combat, I see.”
He was inundated by a stream of Irish, Galway dialect I expected.
He responded with his own stream.
Both of them showing off.
“Like all good Cork men,” Nuala Anne observed, “you still have that patada in your mouth.”
“And like all Connemara mystics you talk in plainchant.”
More laughter. The young man was not devoid of wit.
“And here’s your lovely date . . . Trailing after her are three witches who ought not to be here—Fiona, who is Julie’s canine guardian, and two of my children, Mary Anne and Socra Marie. Shake hands with Mr. Burke, girls.”
“Mary Anne” was pronounced “MA-ree-ahn.”
The white hound claimed precedence and offered her paw respectfully. Finnbar Burke bent down, took the paw, and said some words in Irish. The huge dog stood up on her hind legs and kissed him. He hugged her and continued praising her in Irish.
“Fiona,” Julie said, blushing furiously, “you’ll be the ruination of us all!”
“And my daughters, Mary Anne and Socra Marie, who are now going to shake hands with you and return to their rooms to finish their homework.”
They both shook hands with Julie’s date and greeted him in Irish. Mary Anne wore her martial arts garments.
“Och, isn’t it two fearsome women altogether? And a gorgeous wolfhound? Sure, Mr. Coyne, wouldn’t you be havin’ no security problems at all, at all?”
“Dermot! Isn’t Mr. Coyne my uncle, the lawyer?”
“Galway lasses, I note,” he said. “Good night, girls, study hard.”
“Yes, Mr. Burke.”
Julie, dressed at last in something more than jeans and sweatshirt, was gorgeous in a knit beige dress which clung nicely to her delightful body. She radiated joy, confidence, pleasure. She had a fella, and a nice fella, with a great smile and a quick wit. His admiration enveloped her. She lowered her eyes, embarrassed but pleased. It was perhaps the first time in her life that she had experienced male desire, respectful desire indeed, but still desire.
“We’ll just go over to the Century to see the filum there about Cork during the Troubles and then stop for a pint at the Irish pub down the street.”
The Wind in the Barley Fields was not, I thought, the ideal “filum” for a first date.
“We won’t stay out too late,” Julie assured us.
“Don’t come home too early either,” Nuala added.
She pecked at my cheek and then Nuala’s, the first for both of us. Finnbar Burke took her hand and led her down the steps. He watched her on every step, his eyes drinking her in, like a man perishing with the thir
st.
When I closed the door, Fiona curled up in front of it. She would stand guard till her charge returned.
“Upstairs, girls,” the woman of the house repeated her orders . . . “No, not you, Fiona. You can wait till she comes home.”
The hound raised her huge head as if to protest and then curled up in a complacent knot and promptly went to sleep.
“I think he’s adorable,” Mary Anne observed as she obeyed with no undue haste.
On the couch next to me, an antique from the Civil War sub-basement and appropriately rehabbed, me spouse was weeping softly. I put my arm around her.
“They’re both so young.” She sighed her loudest West of Ireland sigh, which her friend Cardinal Blackie described as sounding like the beginning of a heavy asthma attack.
“Reminds you of O’Neil’s Pub a long time ago, does it now?”
“ ’Tis true.”
“In fact, she is three years older than you were that evening, and he’s probably about the same age as I was.”
“And he looks at her with the same glow in his eyes that you looked at me.”
“And she blushes in response even as you did.”
We both sighed again.
“We didn’t know what we were doing, did we, Dermot Michael?”
“Woman, we did not!”
“Won’t you have to take him out to Butterfield and see how good he is?”
“He plays golf?”
“Isn’t that tweed cap he shoved in his pocket the symbol of the Old Head Links in Kinsale? Don’t they say the wind there comes either from the North Pole or from Hell?”
“You’ll have to come along and play with us.”
“Only when you report how good he is.”
Me spouse is a grand golfer altogether. Won the women’s tournament at Portumna when she was seventeen. She claims she’s too busy to play anymore, but in truth she’s afraid that I’ll beat her, which I do on very rare occasions. She hits her drives as long as I hit mine, which is not appropriate behavior for a wife, is it now?
“Well,” she sighed again. “Don’t we have one more responsibility and ourselves not having enough responsibilities as it is.”
“What responsibility?”
“We have to take care of Julie and her fella. They don’t have anyone else to take care of them.”
“Two more children in our family?”
“If God didn’t want us to take care of them, why would he have sent them here?”
“Give over, Nuala Anne. No one took care of us.”
“Except our parents who taught us marital love by example and your family which took care of me as soon as I showed up. And themselves wondering if I wouldn’t make something out of you.”
“Which you didn’t like at all, at all, if I remember right.”
“They wanted me to remake you and meself liking you the way you were. And now they think I did remake you and themselves being wrong altogether. But they were there to help and still are. Your pa and ma take care of the kids, and His Riverance digs up all those manuscripts, and Cyndi keeps the feds off our backs.”
My brother the priest is always accorded such respect. The Cardinal, one would expect, would deserve much more. However, he was simply Blackie.
“ ’Tis true,” I admitted. “Don’t Julie and Finnbar have families of their own?”
“Dermot they do not, and yourself knowing that. They came here to escape their families. God wants us to be their families while they’re keeping company and courting.”
I never quite understood the distinction.
“Orphans of the storm who rolled up on our beach?”
“You have the right of it now. God wants us to help them.”
Well, that settled that.
“You have the right of it, woman of the house.”
She sniffed as though that were self-evident.
“What do we know about them?”
“She doesn’t confide in me, but your daughter keeps me informed.
“That one?”
“She tells me that she went to CUD, City University of Dublin, and himself to CUC, City University Cork—the bottom of the ladder, so to speak—and themselves both very clever, herself in a doctoral program at DePaul and her man down at your business school below on Illinois Street and doing very well indeed, if you please.”
It wasn’t my business school. It belonged to the University of Chicago. Or simply The University.
My wife was proud of her knowledge of the street maps of Chicago. If Finnbar Burke was doing well there, he was also a bright young man and probably a dangerous golfer.
My tranquility disappeared before my very eyes.
“And where does he work?”
“On Washington Street down below and isn’t it for some Irish company that’s buying a lot of American property and that cheap these days.”
“Sounds un-American to me.”
“We bought property in Ireland when it was cheap, why shouldn’t they buy it in America when it’s cheap?”
We both sighed again. This time I was faking it.
“Well,” she said, “since you intend to have your way with me once again tonight, we’d better go upstairs and put the small ones to bed.”
She spoke as one resigned to one more male assault, but her glowing eyes suggested that she could hardly wait. It ought not be that easy for a man to seduce his wife. But it is what it is.
I loosened the black belt and probed her sports bra. She sighed again and leaned on my shoulder.
“There’s never enough time, is there, Dermot Michael? And when there is, isn’t it too late?”
I think that was Irish bull.
“How is that one doing in her taekwondo?”
“Och, isn’t the little witch catching up with me? She’s not as strong yet, but isn’t she pure grace? Lightning feet?”
“She’d never permit herself to beat you.”
“She’d better not . . . Give over, Dermot Michael Coyne. We’re not up in the bedroom yet.”
I paused in my explorations.
Now don’t youse be thinking I’m gonna tell you what me spouse looks like with her clothes off. Or what she’s like when she is gasping for orgasm, fuhgeddaboudit. That’s none of your business, is it?
“Did you go over to the parish while I was up above perfecting the womanly art?”
“Woman, I did.”
“And?”
“The principal—Dr. Fletcher—didn’t have time to talk with me. So I asked her when I could have an appointment, and didn’t she say, she never had time to talk to the children of the rich and famous. ‘The school,’ she informed me, ‘is exercising the fundamental option for the poor.’ ”
“Bitch! . . . What did that eejit priest have to say?”
She had leapt off the couch and the gi of her martial arts garb fell open. I gulped at the sight of her wondrous breasts behind the discipline of the bra. My fingers twitched a little.
“Sit down, what would the kids think!”
That was her favorite line about our occasional affection when they might see us.
She drew the gi together and sat on the couch next to me, her body tense with fury.
Dr. Lorraine Fletcher was a thin, not to say skinny, former nun with a Ph.D. in education from Chicago Circle and Technicolor hair which changed its hue frequently. She was an intense feminist who did not suffer fools lightly. By definition all men were fools. I wondered why, with a Ph.D., she was a principal in a Catholic grammar school.
“The priest said that he supported any decisions that the principal made and would not discuss them with me. He supported lay authority in the schools.”
“ ‘But,’ I says to him, ‘aren’t the parents laity too?’ ”
“And he says?”
“He says that he’s not afraid of the Cardinal or my brother or the school office or anyone else because the laity supports him completely. He added that it is natural and healthy that the ordinary kids resent
those who get good marks or are good athletes. A little bit of bully action is good for everyone.”
Our priest supported the principal’s theory that some of those who are not good athletes should be on the varsity teams even if that meant the stars should have to sit on the bench. There was open warfare between the coach and the principal, with the laity of course supporting the coach, save for the parents of those who weren’t good athletes. The school was, as Mr. Dooley would have said, in a state of chaos.
“So you said?” Me wife was growing angry at me for not “putting that friggin’ amadon in his place.”
“I said that if the bullies continued to mistreat my children, we would withdraw from the school and I would ask my sister to seek an injunction against the school.”
“And that scared him?”
“He said he was not afraid of Cyndi Hurley either.”
“Then he’s a real eejit altogether!”
“ ’Tis true.”
My sister lives in the Joliet diocese west of Chicago and had scared the living daylights out of their Chancery on the subject of bullying. She had forced them to hire security guards to end violence in the yard of one of their schools.
Julie and Fiona would take the four kids to school every morning and bring them home at noon and in the evening. Maeve had joined them recently. The kids ordered their ma to stay out of the fight. The tense days were Julie’s days off, when Nuala or I would escort the entourage. Wolfhounds love kids and like to play with them. They also can sniff hostility a mile away. So they would snarl when someone hassled one of our kids. The principal ordered us to keep the wolfhounds out of the yard. We responded by keeping them on the sidewalk. We also hired Reliable Security to keep an eye on the school. Mike Casey, former superintendent of police, managed to have someone around every day, someone so discreet that no one would suspect that he or she was an off-duty cop. I would sit at the top of the stairs in front of our house—a sky-high stoop I called it—with a powerful TV camera monitoring the school yard during recess time, the dangerous hour of the day for our ring of bullies.
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