Irish Tweed

by Andrew M. Greeley

  “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.”

  11

  “WE ARE certainly grateful,” Finnbar Burke Sr. told us, “for your good care of our son. He was much impressed that the Cardinal himself came to visit him. And comes back.”

  “The Cardinal,” Lilianna Burke agreed, “is a charming man, so much like a parish priest.”

  “He is a parish priest,” me good wife insisted. “That’s why he’s such a good Cardinal.”

  “ ’Tis the twinkle in his eyes,” Finnbar Sr. said. “You can tell he’s four steps ahead of you.”

  We were having supper at the Everest, one of the best of Chicago restaurants, with a view of the West Side at night as far out as Glen Ellyn and beyond. Finnbar Sr. was the opposite of his brother. It was easy to believe that this big, grinning man raced motorboats, sailboats, horses, and automobiles, and was the father of our Julie’s young man.

  His mother was a trim woman in her middle forties with shrewd green eyes and hair the same color as Julie’s.

  “And we’re especially grateful for Julie,” she said, adjusting one of her many rings. “She’s the answer to our prayers. And smart as a whip too.”

  “And quite good with children, as you tell us, Ms. McGrail.”

  “That’s me ma over across in Connemara. I’m Nuala Anne.”

  “In our family,” Finnbar Sr. said, “we worry about heirs—foolishly, I tell me wife, because God provides. Our young man is very much interested in golf and in business. It’s reassuring to see that he’s interested in women, and a beautiful woman at that.”

  “Sure didn’t your son make her beautiful?”

  “And how exactly did he do that, uh, Nuala Anne?”

  “He looked at her with desire in his eyes. Nothing like that to make a young woman feel that she is attractive after all.”

  “True enough,” Finnbar Sr. said, “true enough . . . I don’t want to ask inappropriate questions, but would you say they have an agreement?”

  “Absolutely,” me wife responded before I could say something more cautious. “My daughter agrees with me, and she’s Julie’s confidant.”

  “And how old is this wise young woman?”

  “Several hundred years sometimes and going on thirteen other times,” I replied. “In matters of the heart, like her mother, she is never wrong.”

  “She also is a potential all-state power forward at basketball,” Nuala asserted.

  “Capital,” Finnbar Sr. said. “Well, Lord knows we won’t oppose the match, not that it would do us much good if we wanted to.”

  “You’re making progess,” Lilianna asked nervously.

  “We’re getting there,” I said, which did not answer her question but did not stretch the truth. “Tell me, has anything like this happened in the past, with the family or the firm perhaps? Your brother had no recollection of such an event. We wonder if it might be some kind of symbolic revenge.”

  Our new friends were both silent.

  “There was something a long time ago. Finnbar would not necessarily have known about it . . . You have some clues?”

  “It seems that there was a cell of Irregulars out in the Western Suburbs several decades ago. I use ‘Irregulars’ advisedly because they saw themselves as opposed to the Free State. I suppose they would have been more Official IRA as opposed to Provincial.”

  Finnbar Sr. lost his verve and enthusiasm. He looked at his wife. She lifted her shoulders in imitation of Roy Morningstar’s favorite gesture.

  “I can’t believe it, Dermot, Nuala. It’s been almost ninety years. Blood feuds don’t last that long.”

  “In Ireland that’s only a short time,” my wife observed.

  “ ’Tis true . . . I’ll try to tell you about it. I wasn’t there. It was my great-grandfather that was responsible, another Finnbar Burke. He was not a young man in 1921, but he was powerful, a big fella, overweight, drank too much, smoked too much, whored too much, lived too long probably. You know the story of the Cork Regatta of 1922? Most people don’t . . . The Free State troops were trained, equipped and directed by English officers. Or so it was said. Maybe it wasn’t true. They decided to land in Cork Harbor in the middle of the Regatta, which was the big social and sports event in our city at the time—still is for that matter—Every other year. Well, the Free State transport ship steers right into the harbor in the midst of all the different races. They begin to off-load their soldiers, dressed in dark green uniforms, into lighters to go ashore.

  “The Cork IRA had made a lot of noise and probably was responsible for the start of the Civil War even though Michael Collins, Cork’s greatest hero, after whom my father, my son, and myself are named, was the leader of the Free State. They probably knew that the Free Staters were coming because they marched down the Parade earlier in the day and then went home for tea and a sip of the creature. When the Free Staters were coming ashore, a squad of the Irregulars marched down to the harbor and commandeered our yacht, the St. Finbar. My great grandfather, himself a Finnbar, Michael Finnbar, refused to cooperate, so a sixteen-year-old kid put a revolver to his head and ordered him to bring the yacht up the harbor to where the Free Staters were landing. The Irregulars now had a navy for the first and last time, only they didn’t know what to do with it. Then on a beautiful summer day under a clear blue sky, the Battle of Cork Harbor took place. The Irregulars started to fire their weapons at the soldiers. They didn’t hit anyone. Most of their weapons didn’t work. The Free Staters were hardly professional soldiers yet, but they knew how to fire weapons. The Irregulars were a bunch of kids with guns they had never operated. They fell off the edge of the yacht into the bay, the first and only casualties of the capture of Cork by the Irish Free State. The three that were still alive threw away their weapons and raised their hands in surrender. My great-grandfather went into the bridge of the yacht and came out with his Lee-Enfield and shot all three of them in the back. He ordered his crew to throw the bodies into the harbor. Then he sailed out into the lower harbor for the race of the large yachts, which he won.”

  His wife shivered. A thick raincloud rolled down the Congress Expressway (only Republicans and traffic reporters call it the Eisenhower) towards our building and enveloped it.

  Nuala glared at the rain as though it were evil.

  “We’re supposed to have been cursed ever since. One member of each generation drowned. Killed in the war serving with the Royal Navy. Shot down over Korea. Boating accidents. Caught in undertows. When this story gets to Cork the Examiner will carry it and ask whether the curse continues.”

  My wife spoke in her solemn Irish-witch tone. “Can’t you tell them that it does not because two brave young women lifeguards who were his classmates kept him alive and the Chicago Fire Department rescued him? And isn’t the curs
e broken now? And here on the shore of Lake Michigan?”

  “I’ll write a letter to the Examiner saying that. It would help if we knew who the attackers were.”

  “Did any of the Irregulars actually speak the curse?” I asked.

  “It is said that the last one, Joey McGowan, who was only sixteen, turned and screamed the curse at great-grandfather, who then shot his face away.”

  “We don’t know for sure if any of this really happened,” Lilianna said. “Yet when we heard that young Finnbar had been thrown into the river, we were terrifed . . .”

  “Understandably,” I said.

  On our way back to Southport Avenue Nuala Anne said, “I don’t believe in the curse, Dermot Michael, but I do believe there’s something evil out there that is trying to bring back its memory.”

  “Why?”

  “Maybe just for the fun of it. Can’t Mr. Casey find out about that cell of former Irregulars out on your West Side?”

  I called him on my mobile phone, since we were in her Lincoln Navigator and she was driving.

  “Dermot, that was thirty years ago!”

  “There must be someone who remembers the activist who owned the gasoline station.”

  “I’ll see what I can find out. Does herself think it’s a curse really dooming someone after almost a century?”

  “She thinks someone is trying to pretend that, for purposes of their own.”

  “Well we can begin with a list of names of men who owned that gasoline station on Harlem Avenue and Lake Street. Maybe we’ll come up with a name that means something.”

  “Try McGowan for starters.”

  Back home we found Julie in tears again. Finnbar’s parents were stuck up and didn’t like her at all. What was she to do about it?

  “Didn’t herself say you were the answer to all the family’s prayers for Finnbar and yourself an eejit for not believing they could possibly like a nerd like you?”

  “And,” I jumped in, “didn’t they say that you were beautiful and thoughtful and that they couldn’t understand how their son could possibly appeal to such a lovely and intelligent young woman!”

  “They never said those things!”

  “And ourselves lying to you too!”

  The conversation was now between Julie and Nuala.

  “You’ll be having dinner with them tomorrow night?”

  “They want to vet me?”

  “They want to know you better.”

  “They are biased against me.”

  “Woman, they are not. Isn’t their bias in the other direction?”

  “Why?”

  “Because, onchuck, they love you!”

  An onchuck is a female amadon, got it?

  “And yourself knowing that I resist being loved?”

  “Tell me about it!”

  A rare use of her daughter’s slang.

  “But I do give over . . . Eventually . . .”

  The poor child was frightened. Me wife, however, did not back off.

  “Eventually, in this context, is tomorrow night.”

  “What do I have to do?”

  “You have to walk into that restaurant like you owned the whole city of Cork and everyone in the city wanting you for their daughter-in-law!”

  “Like you walk into the pub down below,” I said, “and Finnbar on your arm!”

  Sometimes in that house dominated by Irish syntax, I talk like them. And being a poet in my spare time, when I’m not a spearcarrier, I occasionally manage to carry it off.

  Anyway, both the women had to weep over the image of the couple entering the pub and the conversation was over. Sometimes, very rarely, it’s useful to have a poet around.

  But a poet was no use at all when Mary Anne informed us after school that Hannibal Lecter had ordered the faculty to ignore the letters from the Vicar for Education. He was a young punk with no authority. Only the superintendent of schools could issue such an order. Someone, the kids had learned, said that he had a valid doctorate from Notre Dame. Hannibal Lecter had replied with a tirade against “your alma mater, Da” on the grounds that it was a phony university.

  “My half-alma mater, dear,” I replied. “A cheer and a half for Old Notre Dame.”

  “The kids say she’s losing her cool more often as the Church closes in. One of my classmates who hates her even more than I do says that she should be burned at the stake with a silver bullet in her heart.”

  “Mary Anne!” Her mother insisted, “We shouldn’t hate anyone. We should forgive them with an abundance of love, just like God forgives us.”

  “Yes, Ma . . . I really don’t want to see her burned at the stake.”

  “I do,” Patjo said. “She is mean to little kids.”

  I left it to Nuala and Julie to argue for God’s love, which of course, one must do.

  I sneaked off to my TV monitor system and noted down the names of the bullies who had extorted money from the little ones that day or beat up on the nerds. Same ones every day.

  Then I called Finnbar Burke Jr. at the rehab institute.

  “How you doing?”

  “Getting there, Dermot . . . Looking forward to the first tee at Ridgemoor sometime in April.”

  “Already have several days booked.”

  “I tried to get angry at the guys who attacked me. Just can’t do it. Never much into the revenge thing.”

  “That’s so first-century Christian, Finnbar!”

  “I suppose so . . . My pa and ma really like Julie! I think if they had a choice they’d take her instead of me.”

  “My family are the same way about Nuala.”

  “She’s kind of shy until she starts being funny. She lives off people’s laughter.”

  “A rare grace . . . The guys who beat up on you . . . Who were they?”

  “No one I knew.”

  “Did the cops ask you about their racial background?”

  “They just seemed to assume that they were gangbangers, which means they were African-American, I guess.”

  “Were they?”

  “They were Irish, Dermot, just like me.”

  “You could tell?”

  “Irish curses—who else uses the word gobshite?”

  “And with a bit of the drink taken?”

  “The smell of Guinness all over them. Right out of a pub.”

  “You didn’t tell the cops?”

  “They didn’t ask.”

  Friggin’ eejits!

  I called Mike Casey.

  “That changes everything, Dermot.”

  “Tell me about it.”

  “The agents that are guarding him should be on the lookout for drunken Irishmen.”

  “There can’t be too many of them in town.”

  “And most of them illegals. I’ll see what I can find out.”

  I had a gnawing feeling that there was something very important that I had missed.

  12

  ANGELA KNEW after her first year of “normal” school that she would not be a schoolteacher, as much as she loved being in a classroom with little children. She took all the biology courses that she could and began to read Papa Paddy’s anatomy books.

  “I think I know what’s on your mind, small one.”

  “You don’t think I should try to become a doctor?”

  “I would be very proud of you. It won’t be easy. I can protect you to some extent and so can your brother and Seamus. But most doctors don’t want women to break their monopoly on the profession. Your professors and your fellow students will haze you every inch of the way. You are tough enough and certainly smart enough to beat them, but it will be unpleasant. We’ve had a few women graduates from Rush, one or two of them do all right in the profession. They weren’t as attractive as you . . . I see by the look on your face that you’re thinking you can take care of yourself. They’ll find that out and try even harder to break you . . . If you need any help let me know.”

  “I’m sure I’ll need help and I will let you know.”

&n
bsp; “Rosina and Seamus will, I suspect, marry one another after their graduations.”

  “They will be very happy together,” Angela said.

  “You have no such plans, I presume?”

  “Not at the moment. I have other things I want to do first.”

  She knew this was a delicate area. Both Papa Paddy and Mama Mae had paired her with Timothy in their minds, especially since their mutual attraction was obvious enough. Yet Timmy was sensitive to her decision making about medical school and did not raise the issue of marriage.

  Seamus and Rosina did marry in June, just after their graduations. Angela was the maid of honor and Timmy the best man. They danced together at the wedding dinner at the new Palmer House. All eyes were on them, expecting and hoping that they would be the next happily married couple. Angela found herself drawn in that direction, not strongly enough to change her mind (which she did not often do) but strongly enough to feel the pain.

  “Do you remember what I said when I kissed you up at the lake, Angela?”

  “Did you kiss me at the lake, Timothy? I don’t remember. Was it last year?”

  “Year before.”

  “Oh, that . . . Yes, I vaguely remember. I believe I said something about your being reasonably skillful . . .”

  “And I said that I had always loved you and always would.”

  Her heart jumped. Twice.

  “Yes, I do recall that, Timmy.”

  “I renew it now.”

  He drew her very close, pressing his body against hers. She felt dizzy.

  “Thank you, Timothy. I respect that pledge. I will not hold you to it, however.”

  And that was it. She almost surrendered to him then and there. Later that night, alone for the first time in the bedroom which had once belonged to her and Rosina, she felt woefully alone. Even Sir Charles had climbed into Rosina’s bed.

  “Well,” her ma said, from the doorway, “you know what you’re doing. You may have other chances with that young man. But eventually there won’t be any more.”

  “I know that, Ma. Am I making a mistake?”