“Not us,” Nuala said, that far away, communing-with-the-powers look in her searing blue eyes.
“They might want to kill Julie Crean.”
“Who is she?”
“The one with the long golden hair like a ripe wheat field in the rising sun.”
21
IN THE week before her marriage, Angela was kissed, caressed, embraced, cosseted, and her sexual feelings en-flamed. A week of foreplay, she complained to herself. And she had to see to the arrangements for the wedding when her need for love was intolerably active and her fiancé’s fingers were so demanding and delightful. She kept lists of things to do, but often could not decipher what an item on her list meant.
Would her marriage be like that? Would she become the official family planner for the Gaughan clan?
Probably not. They were now giddy, drunk on the heady wine of the Holy Spirit, as Bishop Muldoon explained. They’re enveloped in the exuberance of sacraments.
Their wedding would be on Saturday and Father Vinny’s First Mass would be on Sunday. A great family weekend, Vinny exulted—little sister becomes big sister-in-law.
“Still little sister,” she insisted.
Her mom and dad were ecstatically happy, dreams coming true all around them—one long expected and the other now an improbable surprise. So she did not mind organizing both events. If only her future husband was not so persistent in his affection. She was worried too, as any virgin bride might be about the possibly painful adventure of the first night. Her Timmy would be the most gentle of men, but how would it feel when he took possession of her?
The joy began when Tim had carried her into the family parlor, holding her in his strong arms.
“You know, I’ve been searching for a bride,” he announced. “You know that I absolutely insist on long golden hair. I was wandering about the park and didn’t I find such a woman and didn’t I steal her from her guards and bring her here for your approval.”
They both were being silly, giddy, laughing half the time and giggling the other half. I must settle down, Angela told herself. Someone has to be sensible. Then she realized that love is not sensible and that the romance between her and Tim would always be just a little madcap—and that would keep it alive through the years.
Father Vinny presided at the marriage and Bishop Muldoon said the mass. Shay and her beloved Rosina were the witnesses. Everyone giggled and laughed. She and Timmy had to repeat the wedding vows several times because they both could not contain their laughter. Even Bishop Muldoon, normally serious and sober during ceremonies, laughed often.
“Though we never doubted that this couple would marry, we laugh because their match is so comic. Please God that it will always be.”
The dinner at the Palmer House, the dances, the wedding cake, the toasts, were all unintentionally funny.
Ma was there, of course, radiantly happy and laughing.
I didn’t know that the Blessed in Heaven laughed.
“We see a lot more of the comedy in life. Anyway, God laughs all the time.”
Timmy’s toast was wonderful.
“I once said to you up at the lake that I had always loved you, Angela, and that I always would. Today I merely made that promise solemn.”
And she replied, “I said the same thing to you, Timothy. Only you were in Prague, so I had to shout it.”
More laughter.
“And I heard it.”
We even laughed on our way to the bridal suite.
“Madam, may I assist you in removing your clothes?”
“If you don’t, Timmy love, I don’t know how I’ll get rid of all this stuff . . . Just a moment.”
She removed a blanket from one of the dresser doors. It was the old, faithful Irish tweed.
“You can always wrap me in this when you’re finished with me.”
“I’ll never be finished with you, Angie. Never.”
He did, however, wrap her in her own Irish tweed after their first love.
“You’ll keep the bed warm on cold winter nights, Timothy. I can give up my nightly brandy.”
And they laughed again till they slept.
NOTE
Their marriage was indeed filled with laughter. Together they helped to reform medicine in Chicago and made the city a much healthier place in which to live. They had three children—Mae, Patrick, and Vincent. Patrick died in the 1918 influenza epidemic. His parents suffered greatly because of his death, but recovered their laughter. They traveled often in Europe. Angela kept her promise to visit her friend Eileen in Connemara. They received the Nobel Prize in 1935 and met Alexander Fleming, whose discovery of penicillin confirmed Angela’s conviction that there were substances in nature which could defeat many more once-fatal diseases. She may have written another volume of memoirs, but it has yet to be discovered. They died within a month of one another just before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.
22
“RUSTY LITZ, yes of course. I know him from the Board of Trade. He owns a tavern on North Avenue just east of Narragansett . . . I know the place . . . And he lives in Oak Brook . . . and the other fellow was Jerry Maginn. Yeah . . . I was so embarassed when I tried to introduce him to my friend from Cork . . . He’s good, all right. Almost beat me.”
“It’s your man Litz,” Nuala told us. “And his tavern is the same one that your man Martin McGurn owned. I bet there’s always a group of Irish half-drunks lolling around there all the time and they were the ones who wanted to kill Finnbar Burke and set fire to our house so they could kill Julie Crean, who never did anything to anyone except smile at poor Finnbar.”
“Astonishing,” John Culhane said, as he often had when Nuala solved a problem.
I wasn’t astonished. There was nothing uncanny about her solution. All she had to know was that the same people who wanted to kill Finnbar Burke would also want to kill Julie Crean. They had seen our battle with Gena Finnerty and her bunch on TV, spotted Julie’s golden hair in the ruckus, and found a way to get rid of her without getting involved themselves. Junior high school kids are not the most reliable conspirators. They didn’t dump their plastic Molotov cocktails, wash their hands, and throw their clothes in the laundry.
They were perfectly willing to wipe out a family to get Julie so they could punish the Burkes for something that had happened almost ninety years ago. That was weird, crazy, mad—but you didn’t have to be a psychic to realize there were a lot of crazy people in the world.
They would also take the risk of ruining permanently the lives of the three young women they had sent to do the work. But what did they matter?
Nuala Anne certainly had psychic instincts. I would be the last to deny that, and meself with a silver-blue aura. However, she also had a gift of making quick connections and seeing the implications of these connections. Hence she was a first-rate detective. I told her so in bed that night.
“Sure,” she said dismissing my insight, “and yourself knowing that all along.”
Knowing from day one that there was evil haunting Finnbar Burke and Julie—that was not something that could be so easily dismissed. I didn’t want to think about it.
So two days later a couple of very tough plainclothes dicks and I, dressed like an Irish oil drill rigger, dropped in to the Last Chance, which was, as we had learned, the descendant of Martin McGurn’s Irish Saloon of years ago. We sat there, slowly and silently sipping our pints of Guinness, as is appropriate in such places. A sullen and suspicious woman bartender stared at us with a hostile glare.
We had a pretty good idea of the looks of the perpetrators for whom we were searching. John Culhane had pried loose from Immigration some pictures of suspicious Irishmen in town. He showed them to Gena Finnerty and company, all of whom were under charge of arson and attempted murder. They had been terrified by the cops’ descriptions of what reformatories for women were like. They had no trouble identifying two of them.
Soon these two punks swaggered into the Last Chance with two others and arran
ged themselves around the table in the front corner of the bar.
“Four of the best, Amy, doubles.”
“Coming up!”
One of them sneered at me. “You have a problem?”
“I don’t think so,” I said, “except you guys burned my house down.”
The four punks were punks, undersized hoods who thought attitude could substitute for intelligence and strength. Two of them threw over the table and came after me with knives. I knocked both of them down and kicked them in their private parts. A half dozen plainclothes cops surged into the tavern and cuffed the four of them quickly. No windows broken, no more resistance.
“I’m sure that was necessary, Dermot,” the sergeant in charge said to me.
“Get the knives out in the open at the beginning,” I said airily. Perhaps that was a rationalization. I don’t know.
“You’re right . . . OK, you bunch of losers. We’re arresting you on charges of arson and attempted murder . . . Anything you say . . .”
I had seen the ritual on television and did not need to hear it. My heart was pounding loudly from the tussle with the knife wielders. I’d better not tell me wife.
“Tell Rusty the cops will be coming after him next,” I said to the bartender.
She was crying, her face now tender.
“It’s his grandmother. She raised him after his mother had left them and his father remarried. She’s dying of cancer over at West Suburban . . . All her life she was obsessed by the Cork Regatta. I warned him. Everyone did. His poor wife and kids . . . But he tried to kill you and your family too, didn’t he? He never got over the story. His grandmother is a McGowan, you see.”
“Yeah, I see. It was ninety years ago. His grandmother wasn’t even born.”
“The kid was her uncle. The whole family was consumed with hate. Martin McGurn kept after them about the need for revenge. I think poor Rusty may get over it now.”
“Too late,” I said.
I told Nuala the whole story.
“I shouldna let you you go.”
“Probably not.”
“Well, you might have saved some lives by disarming those with the knives.”
And as we were getting ready for bed that night, she said, “I think it’s a frigging shame that we are not taking advantage of this honeymoon suite.”
“Men go crazy during the honeymoon.”
“You didn’t.”
“ ’Tis true.”
Naturally we took advantage of the opportunity. Great craic.
The next morning Conor O’Connor came to visit us and talk to the kids . . . Nuala insisted on being present.
“Smart man,” my wife said that night. “I imagine that the school will be open next week.”
“New leaders and expelled bullies should be enough.”
“And strong oversight from His Riverence and Father Neal.”
“They just took a lot of notes,” Mary Anne reported to me. “They wanted the names of all the bullies. Will they expel them, Da?”
“Some of them.”
“Not all of them?” Mick asked.
“You think there should be exceptions?”
“Some were just dumb.”
“Give your da,” Nuala suggested, “a list of the just-dumb ones. They’ll probably expel all of them and then review the cases.”
“Were they really trying to kill me, Dermot?” Julie asked as she was leaving to return to the neighborhood with her fella.
“They were, the frigging eejits . . . Don’t worry, they’ll be in jail for a long time, and the poor woman who paid them is dying.”
“It’s so dumb . . .”
“Very dumb.”
She paused at the door.
“Oh, there’s a rumor I may get a ring at Christmas . . . Just a rumor. I already told Nuala.”
Not that she needed to be told.
“Congratulations in order?”
“Only when I’m after getting the ring. You know what Irish men are like!”
Did I now?
Rusty Litz called me that evening.
“My grandma is dead, Dermot.”
“I’m sorry to hear that, Rusty.”
“I’m sorry about what we did to your house.”
“And almost did to my family.”
“She gave the orders. I learned only the next morning.”
“I hope she’s at peace now.”
“So do I . . . She was always obsessed . . . But as her condition worsened, she became totally obsessed. It’s all over now. I’m turning myself in to the Chicago cops.”
“Did you know about the attempt on Finnbar Burke?”
“No. I told her that I had met him at the Club. She said that he needed to die. I was horrified . . . and that poor little child with the golden hair who is your nanny.”
“To say nothing of my own children.”
“I went to church this morning to give thanks they are all still alive . . . That kid with the three-point shot is really good . . . You remember, Dermot, I went to St. Ignatius.”
I said that I did, but I didn’t remember.
“Well, I have to pay the price. My wife is sticking with me, though she shouldn’t.”
“I don’t imagine,” I said with unintended irony, “that the Burkes will want revenge.”
“They’re entitled to it, Dermot.”
“Only God is.”
“Poor dear man,” Nuala observed as she hung up the phone. “And such a fool. We don’t want revenge, do we, Dermot Michael?”
“Only against the insurance company.”
“Och, Dermot, when your sister is finished with them, they’ll pay quick and proper.”
“ ’Tis true.”
We had one more penitent that night—Hugh Finnerty.
“I’m so sorry, Nuala, so sorry. I didn’t like what was going on at the school and I was concerned about my wife’s explosions . . . That’s not the way she really is or used to be anyway . . . ever since she had the hysterectomy she stopped taking her meds and has been increasingly crazy . . . She grew up in a family which believed in clout . . . All that mattered was who you know . . . Anything can be fixed . . . I told her that wasn’t true . . . you couldn’t be a good basketball player and be overweight . . . She was furious at me . . . If your daughter had weighed as much she wouldn’t play either . . . She attacked me physically for saying that . . . We’re going to ask that she be institutionalized . . . She was so happy when she heard the fire sirens . . . I’m not sure she will ever recover . . . She has to take her meds . . . Anyway, we will move to another city . . . also they will give the children time in a training school which will be much better than boarding school.”
“We won’t stand in the way of any of those decisions, will we, Dermot?”
“No,” I agreed. “It would be wise if you get a job in some other place . . .”
“I’m thinking of California.”
“Good idea.”
“Poor devil,” I said when he had left.
“Three obsessed women,” Nuala replied. “Maureen, Dr. Fletcher, and Grandma McGovern . . . What sad, wasted lives.”
“I hope they can turn themselves around.”
“All we can really do,” my wife said, “is forgive them and have Mr. Casey keep an eye on both of them—and say the occasional prayer for them.”
“It’s a good time to teach the kids about forgiveness.”
On Monday the Cardinal released the Conor and O’Connor report. It blamed the situation on the Superintendent of Schools, the Pastor, and the Principal and detailed how discipline and order slowly collapsed at St. Joe’s, and then suddenly crashed. The Pastor was placed on sick leave, which he accepted, we were told, with considerable complaint. Ms. Fletcher was removed as principal but received her pay for the rest of the year. A new principal from the Notre Dame program was hired and a new Pastor was appointed, both as it turned out, people of great charm and prudence. St. Josephat won the girls’ basketball championship in
Catholic North. Cardinal Ryan presided at the confirmation rites in the parish . . . Julie did collect her huge diamond at Christmas. The wolfhounds were spoiled rotten by all the attention at the Belden Stratford. Herself and meself both enjoyed the honeymoon suite. We all flew to Ireland for Christmas, and I managed, by a miracle of great power, to avoid my usual Ireland cold.
Long before we left for Ireland we gathered in the parlor of the honeymoon suite for another kind of ceremony, which Mary Anne had convened. It was a big deal and a very solemn one.
“I want to ask everyone’s permission to change my name back from Mary Anne to Nelliecoyne which is my real name. I can be Mary Anne officially on my driver’s license if I have to, but I’m really a Nellie and I’m proud to have the real name of my great-grandmother. If any of you object then I’ll change my name back.”
The vote was unanimous.
Her mother began to sing the appropriate song, “My Nellie’s Blue Eyes” by W. J. Scanlan:
My dear Nellie’s eyes are blue
Hair of red and golden hue
Like her heart, her eyes are true
My Nellie my own
My Nellie’s blue eyes
My Nellie’s blue eyes
Brighter than the Stars that shine at night
My Nellie’s blue eyes
Never was culled from nature’s bower
Half so rare or sweet a flower
My Nellie, my own my own
My Nellie’s blue eyes
My Nellie’s blue eyes
Brighter than the Stars that shine at night
My Nellie’s blue eyes
It was promptly decided by unanimous vote that would be the theme of our Christmas program.
“ ’Tis not me eyes,” Nuala insisted. “They’re your great-grandmother’s eyes. A lot more complicated than mine.”
And so they were.
Afterword?
TIM AND Angela took their three children to Europe in 1905. On their way, they stopped at both Castle Garden and Ellis Island. Angela had not wished to burden their imaginations too early in life with the details of her life story.
Irish Tweed Page 22
