“None . . .”
“You won’t let them kill me doggies, will you, Dermot Michael?”
“Woman, I will not!”
It turned out to be a very interesting late afternoon frolic.
That was excessive.
She’s me wife.
All the worse.
I carried her upstairs and tucked her into bed.
“I think I’ll need a nap before the brats come home. Sure, haven’t I earned it!”
I had to take a nap too. It had been a long, hard day.
That evening after supper, we argued in my office about how to deal with the parish. My wife wanted to defy them and walk over to the school yard with the hounds every day. I argued that we should hold our cards close to our vests. The solution would have to come from elsewhere—the police or the Archdiocese. However, I suggested, we ought to pull our kids out of the school even if they wanted to stay. We didn’t want to be part of the fight which was certainly in the wind. Enroll them in Chicago Latin for the rest of the year.
“They won’t like it, Dermot Michael, they’re their parents’ children and they don’t like the idea of running away.”
“It’s a fight they can’t win. Not unless more families are willing to abandon the school.”
Our eldest, flushed and sweaty from basketball at the little park around the corner—Mr. Flynn wouldn’t let anyone play in the school yard—bounced upstairs, finger in place in her homework notebook.
“Da, Father Sourpuss is downstairs and wants to talk to you. He said explicitly it was you he wanted.”
“How were the hoops?”
“Beat all the boys at twenty-one.”
“Naturally.”
Nuala and I went downstairs to see him. The hounds had both tried to shake hands with him and had been rebuffed.
Frank Sauer was a classmate of my brother George, hence in his late thirties. He was a thin, nervous man with rapidly blinking eyes and the dubious smile of a pre-owned car salesman at a Hyundai dealership. His thinning brown hair was arranged so as to protect as many bald spots as possible.
“Frank,” I said, extending my hand. “Good to see you.”
“Would you please dismiss your beasts. They make me nervous.”
Nuala sent the signal. With some reluctance Maeve and Fiona trundled down the stairs, tails between their legs. They didn’t like being rebuffed three times in one day.
“Sit down, Father,” Nuala offered, the picture of pious Irish Catholic respect.
He ignored her.
“Dermot, I want to talk to you about those dogs. I don’t want to argue with you. I want to ask you as a personal favor to keep them out of the school yard, indeed, off the street between your house and the yard.”
Even though it was a warm September evening, he was shivering. His smile came and went as we talked, independently of what he said. What a shame that the Archdiocese didn’t have stronger men to appoint as pastors in these tumultuous days when we were desperately short of vocations.
“Nuala?”
“Dermot, please. I’ve come here this evening to talk to you, man to man, as head of the family, and ask you to go along with this request before something unfortunate occurs.”
“We won’t get anywhere, Frank, if you insist on that context. I am not head of the family. We have a consensual democracy in this house. The actual head varies from issue to issue. On matters of the parish school I think the head is the young woman who opened the door for you, fresh from basketball down the street at the park because your Mr. Flynn won’t let them play in the school yard. By the way, I’m sure you know that he’s not a legitimate hire for a Catholic school.”
He began to breathe heavily, perhaps to control his temper.
“Always a little unstable at the seminary,” George had told me. “Probably shouldn’t have ordained him.”
“Dermot, please. We are trying to build a parish here that is socially aware. Arnie Flynn is indeed an ex-convict. Dr. Fletcher taught him in grammar school and believes he is totally reformed. His past mistakes should not be held against him. I will not discuss the matter further. We think you of all people should be on the side of the poor and the oppressed and not the oppressive laws that victimize them.”
“You might start losing a lot of students, Frank.”
“We want only those students who come from families that are willing to embrace the Catholic social principle of the preferential option for the poor.”
“I guess, Frank, that I am committed to Mr. Joyce’s social principle that Catholicism means ‘here comes everyone.’ ”
Father Sauer turned on his heel and stormed out of the house. He was held together by shoelaces and rubber bands.
“OK,” Nuala said, “Ms. Nosey Posey can come down the stairs.”
“They’re both ’round the bend,” Mary Anne said glumly. “They’ll ruin everything.”
“You guys could go to Parker or Latin,” I said.
Our eldest turned up her nose.
“We want a Catholic school.”
“St. Clement’s, FXW?” Nuala offered.
“We’d be on the waiting list.”
“We have some clout . . .”
Mary Anne turned the idea over in her head.
“I’d like to think about it, Da. Maybe Cardinal Blackie or someone will work a miracle . . . I gotta do my homework, even if homework is capitalist oppression.”
“Are they still stealing money from the little kids?” Nuala asked.
“Gena Finnerty still picks on second-graders. Dr. Lecher says it’s all right.”
“Lecher?” I said.
“As in Hannibal Lecher. The little kids believe that she was fired at her last school for eating first-graders alive.”
She flounced upstairs with her homework notebook.
“I believe the man’s name was Hannibal Lecter,” I murmured.
“Little kids always get things wrong,” Mary Anne shouted from the top of the stairs.
“Well?” asked my wife. “What does the head of the house think?”
“How would I know!”
The hounds appeared again, looking very dubious. We embraced both of them and assured them that we were about to take them down to the pub.
“I think just what you think, Dermot Michael—we keep the doggies out of trouble. We let our kids stay there as long as they want. We talk to our friends at FXW. And we wait and see. With all the trouble in this sad old world of ours, it seems a shame to be so upset about a brawl in our parish school.”
“And yourself reading my mind. I suppose Blackie needs more to intervene.”
“More, I should think, Dermot love, but not much more.”
We assembled the dogs, left Julie in charge of the kids and walked hand in hand down the street to the pub where we had planned to sing.
“Me Finnbar tells me that you won today but you cheated!” Julie had said. “You had an eagle on the last hole.”
“Dermot always does that, Julie.”
“Actually he had a grand time altogether.”
“So did I.” And then I added sotto voce to me wife, “Especially after the golf.”
“Shame on you, Dermot Michael Coyne, and yourself knowing that we behaved liked two animals.”
“I thought we were animals.”
She giggled.
“ ’Tis your fault altogether for being such a good lover.”
Well, with a compliment like that, wasn’t I willing to take on the whole parish, most of whom, it seemed, were at the pub. We sang the old-time songs and the hounds made friends with everyone and howled on signal. Everyone wanted to talk about the parish crisis. Both the newcomers and the old-timers thought that the leadership was crazy, that the bullying had to stop, and that Mr. Flynn had to go. Also the Finnerty family, which was new in the parish and strongly supported the Principal. Their kids were the prime bullies. They dismissed the support for Sourpuss and Dr. Lecher as a crazy minority. They were especially
concerned that the teachers had lost the right to assign grades. They were to submit tentative grades to the Principal, who would then correct them from a “religious” point of view. Most of the teachers would leave at the end of the year.
“They never consult the school board,” Josie Ostrowski, a VP in a data-gathering company, complained to me. “The parish council never meets. Fletcher has abolished the athletic committee and closed the gym. There’s no one to complain to.”
“The Archdiocese,” I said, as though I were an expert, “is inundated by complaints from parishes, most of them ideological. They get concerned when they hear an enormous amount of static, which they should hear from our neighborhood. If the static gets loud enough and madcap enough, then they take action. Under the present administration, that is likely to be sooner rather than later.”
“Letters?” Josie asked.
“Letters, petitions, delegations, ads in the papers.”
“We have better things to do in our lives,” Marty Lyons protested, “than fight downtown. We don’t want to look like malcontents.”
“You all sound like malcontents,” me wife said. She had been strumming on her guitar while the discussion continued.
“The athletic committee,” said Larry Conor, a graduate of the dome, who was athletic director and coach of about everything, “has decided to ignore her. We use the park as our home-court gym and play with the players we have chosen instead of the geeks she assigns. The Finnertys raise hell because we won’t play their Gena, whom the Principal has named captain of the team. We won’t let her on the court because she wants to fight. It’s a cuckoo’s nest, not a Catholic school.”
The talk continued. But no action came from it. They weren’t offended enough to give up their passive attitudes towards the parish and devote some of their time to fighting back. Everyone had some experience with a crazy pastor or a tyrannical nun when they were growing up—which they described in great detail to much laughter. The Catholic church hadn’t changed that much at all.
After Nuala had sung her final piece—always “Molly Malone”—we held hands as we walked home together.
“You’re going to call His Riverence when we get home?”
She always referred to my brother with great respect, long before he became Blackie’s Blackie.
“Woman, I will.”
“Can I listen in?”
“Have I ever tried to stop you?”
“No, but don’t you know it wouldn’t do any good?”
George, the priest, listened carefully to our account of the evening at the pub.
“It isn’t a battle between newcomers and old-timers?”
“Maybe a little, but the leaders of the bullies are all newcomers.”
He was quiet for a moment.
“What should we do, Bro?”
“What you will have to do eventually would be better done now. Have someone do an impartial audit of the parish and suspend Pastor and Principal till it’s over.”
“They’re doing some publicity about them in some Catholic journals—liberation theology in Chicago’s gold coast. Trying to brand the boss as a conservative. One of the religion writers at a Chicago paper’s about to do a partisan piece.”
“You have to stop these people, Father George.” Nuala was in her doomsday mentality. “They’re evil. Terrible things will happen. People will get hurt. Maybe killed.”
Silence.
“I know better than to argue with your instincts. We’ll do what we can. The superintendent of schools is blocking everything. She’s a classmate of Dr. Fletcher.”
“And the new Vicar for Education?”
“Rick is fresh out of graduate school and greatly in awe of the superintendent . . .”
“You might want to look into Dr. Fletcher’s degree,” I pointed out. “And ask sister superintendents about it.”
Silence.
“I’ll do that, Dermot.”
My turn for silence.
“George, you can pass this on to Himself and file it in your own memory. These clowns are going to go too far. Count on it. It’s in their nature to do so. When they do, you and Blackie and everyone else must clamp down. Hard. Otherwise. I endorse my wife’s analysis. All hell will break out.”
Another silence between two brothers who always found it difficult to talk seriously with one another.
“Gotcha, Bro. We’ll lay out our plans now.”
Me wife nodded her approval.
“You did good, Dermot, you have the right of it.”
On Friday afternoon we were invited to attend the basketball game between our parish and St. Clement’s at the local park. Our firstborn admitted that she might play “a little bit” and that it was all right if we came and watched. We could even cheer for her. If we wanted to bring the Mick and the little kids that would be all right too. She was expecting to do well and wouldn’t mind an audience.
We accepted the invitation, though Nuala and I admitted to one another that we were nervous.
“You’d better call your man.”
This time I knew she meant Mike Casey. He would send Monica and Shareen, the two off-duty cops who did security protection for Nuala Anne on some public occasions—and for the family.
St. Joe’s sports teams were for some reason called the Cardinals, and wore bright crimson uniforms. The young women came to the park in uniforms and sweat suits of cardinalatial red. Our own heroine looked smashing during the warm-up. She was having the time of her life, even to the extent of acknowledging our presence with a casual wave of her hand.
“She’s really good, Dad,” the Mick assured me. “Even the boys in seventh and eighth grade say so. Coach won’t start her because she’s only in seventh grade. Watch the game change when she gets in.”
The stands at the park were pretty well filled.
“There are more people here than at the boy’s football team outside. A lot of them will sneak in to watch Mary Anne.”
“Those three young women over in the corner.”
“Gross City—Kitty McGinnis, Sue Wozniak, and Gena Finnerty—biggest bullies in the school. Everyone who comes out for the team is entitled to uniforms and to sit on the bench. Coach ignores them because the Lecher mandated that he start them. He won’t even put them in at the end of the game, because they would mess everything else up. All they can do is foul.”
“Poor young women,” Nuala sighed.
“Ba-aad,” the Mick muttered.
Our firstborn was tall, lithe, and lovely. Her mother at thirteen, except more self-confident. She seemed to make most of her shots during the warm-up. Then she put on her crimson jacket and walked briskly to the bench.
The Cardinals did not play very well in the first quarter. They seemed listless and awkward. They missed shots and threw passes away. The Chicago Bulls on a (typical) bad night.
At the end of the quarter the coach sent our onetime baby into the game. Me wife gripped me hand. Our little one was all over the court, snatching rebounds, intercepting passes, feeding shooters. The team was lively, but it was still down six points.
The coach raised three fingers. Our point guard nodded and the game changed. Mary Anne drifted to the corner. The point guard whipped the ball to her. She rose with a jump shot that scarcely disturbed the net. The St. Joe crowd went wild. Their hero was at work.
She took five more shots before the half ended. Four of them were scores and the fifth earned her three free throws which made her total eighteen points. She laughed, spun around in pleasure and beat everyone down the court.
“She’s not any taller than anyone else out there,” her admiring brother informed me, “only she’s got springs in her legs.”
During the warm-up at the beginning of the second half, Gena Finnerty, without much effort at deception, charged into her and knocked her over. The crowd cried in protest. Mary Anne rose slowly to her feet, glared at her foe, and walked over to the bench. The coach whispered in her ear. Mary Anne nodded solemnly.
She didn’t play in the third quarter, but rather sat contentedly on the bench and watched her teammates struggle to maintain their lead. With five minutes left in the game, the coach sent her back in. The ovation this time was indeed thunderous.
“I’m so nervous,” me wife admtted.
“Get used to it,” her older son advised. “It’s always going to be this way.”
She only hit four for six this time, plus four free throws. The coach pulled her with thirty seconds left in the game. More cheers. She waved at us and slipped into her crimson jacket and modestly accepted the congratulations of the losing team. She had won with such class that even those whom she had beaten loved her.
She joined us in the stands and hugged each of us, her mother last of all.
“Were you seeing yourself out there, Ma!”
“What I would like to have been?”
Of course they both cried, so did little Socra Marie who was dreaming her own dreams.
Then, as we were saying good-bye to the Coach, a bowling ball rolled across the floor and hit me—Maureen Finnerty in one of her famous attacks. Face purple, eyes wild, fingernails extended, she hit me with full force, screaming curses which I could not understand.
“She shouldn’t be playing. My child is in eighth grade. She should have been out there. Why do you rich people take everything away from the poor kids? Your daughter is a selfish, stuck-up bitch! She’ll pay for it, you just wait and see.”
Her punches landed on my chest. I pushed her away. She came back at me again, filth pouring from her mouth. Monica emerged from the crowd and held her. Mrs. Finnerty tossed her away. Then Shareen appeared on the other side.
“Take your hands off me, you dirty nigger whore!”
“We’re police officers, ma’am, and you’re engaging in disorderly conduct.”
I wondered where my wife was. Why hadn’t she joined in the melee? I glanced around. Our young basketball star was firmly restraining her.
“Mo-ther, you’ll only make it worse.”
“Maybe I want to make it worse!”
Then the two top women in my life collapsed into each other’s arms and the both of them laughing hysterically.
The Mick had been struggling to keep his two younger siblings from fighting to defend their poor da from the woman who Socra Marie dubbed “bitch-monster.”
Irish Tweed Page 8
