Irish Tiger

by Andrew M. Greeley

  This is a story I first heard from a Cherokee princess. My Cherokee brogue isn’t very good, so I’ve changed it to a brogue and a setting I know a little better.

  Once upon a time, long, long ago, there was Earth Maker and First Man and First Woman. They lived in a whitewashed stone cottage on the edge of a green field with a silver lake and a road leaving over the hills and out beyond. First Man and First Woman were very much in love and very happy together. Earth Maker was pleased with himself because it appeared that his experiment of creating male and female had been a huge success. Oh, they argued a few times a week, but never anything serious.

  Then one day they had a terrible fight. They forgot what they were fighting about and fought about who had started it and then about what the fight was about.

  Finally First Woman was fed up. You’re nothing but a loudmouth braggart! she said and stormed out of the cottage and across the green field and by the silver lake and over the hill and out beyond.

  First Man sat back in his rocking chair, lit his pipe, and sighed happily. Well, at last we’ll have some peace and quiet around here. The woman has a terrible mouth on her.

  But as the sun set and turned the silver lake rose gold, he realized he was hungry. Woman, he shouted, I want my tea. But there was no woman to make the tea. Poor First Man could not even boil water. So he had to be content with half of a cold pratie (which is what the Irish call a potato). Then as a chill came over the cottage and First Man felt lonely altogether, he sighed again, let his pipe go out, and felt he needed a good night’s sleep. He didn’t light the fire because, truth to tell, he wasn’t very good at such things. First Woman did all the fire-lighting in their house because she could start fires in a second.

  The poor fella shivered something awful when he pulled the covers over himself. Well, he told himself, she did keep the bed warm at night. He didn’t sleep very well and when he woke there was a terrible hunger on him. Woman, he shouted, I want me tea! Then he realized that there was no woman and no tea. So he had to be satisfied with the other half of the cold pratie.

  Well, he was sitting in front of the cold fireplace, puffing on a cold pipe, wrapped in a thin blanket, when Earth Maker appeared.

  Let me see now, said Earth Maker. This is earth and I made ye male and female. And you’re the male. Where’s herself?

  She’s gone, Your Reverence.

  Gone?

  Gone!

  Why’s she gone?

  We had a fight!

  You never did!

  We did!

  And she left you?

  She did, Your Reverence.

  You’re a pair of eejits!

  Yes, Your Reverence.

  Do you still love her?

  Oh yes, Your Reverence, something terrible!

  Well then, man, off your rocking chair and after her!

  She’s long gone, Your Reverence. I’ll never catch up with her.

  No problem. I can move as fast as thought. I’ll go ahead of you and slow her down! Now get a move on!

  Poor First Man, his heart breaking, trundled out of his chair and down the path across the green field and by the silver lake and out beyond.

  Meanwhile Earth Maker caught up with First Woman. She was still furious at First Man. She walked down the road at top speed, muttering to herself as she went.

  The woman has a temper, Earth Maker reflected. But that fella would make anyone lose their temper.

  So to slow her down, said “ZAP!” and created a forest. Didn’t she cut through it like a warm knife cutting through butter?

  Then Earth Maker “ZAP!” created a big hill. Didn’t she charge over the hill like a mountain goat?

  So ZAP, Earth Maker created a big lake. That’ll stop her, he said to himself.

  It didn’t stop her at all, at all. She charged into the lake and swam across it, Australian Crawl.

  I don’t know where she learned the stroke because Australia didn’t exist way back then. But she knew it.

  Och, said Earth Maker, there are problems in creating women athletes, aren’t there now? Well, the poor thing is hungry, so she’ll slow down to eat. ZAP. There appeared along the road all kinds of fruit trees—peach trees, plum trees, grapefruit trees, apricot trees (no apple trees because that’s another story).

  What did First Woman do? Well she just picked the fruit as she was walking and didn’t slow down a bit.

  Sure, said Earth Maker, won’t I have to fall back on me ultimate weapon. I’ll have to create strawberries!

  ZAP!

  First Woman stopped cold. Ah, would you look at them pretty bushes with the white flowers.

  As she watched didn’t the flowers turn into rich red fruit?

  Ah now isn’t that gorgeous fruit and itself shaped just like the human heart?

  She felt the first strawberry. Sure, doesn’t it feel just like the human heart, soft and yet strong and firm. I wonder what it tastes like. Sure, doesn’t it have the sweetest taste in all the world, save for the taste of human love?

  Well, she sighed loudly, speaking of that subject, I suppose the eejit is chasing after me, poor dear man. I’d better wait for him.

  So didn’t she pick a whole apron full of strawberries and sit by the strawberry bush and wait for First Man.

  And finally, he came down the road, huffing and puffing and all worn out.

  This is called the strawberry bush, she said, pointing at the bush. And doesn’t the fruit taste wonderful? So she gave a piece of fruit to First Man, like the priest gives the Eucharist.

  Oh, says First Man, isn’t it the sweetest taste in all the world, save for the taste of human love. So they picked more strawberries and, arm in arm, walked home to their whitewashed cottage by the green field and the silver lake and the hill and out beyond. ’Tis said that they lived happily ever after, which meant only three or so fights a week.

  Now I want all of you here, especially Maria Angelica and John Patrick to remember every time from now on when you taste strawberries, that the only thing sweeter is the taste of human love. And remember too that love is about catching up and waiting and true lovers know how to catch up and wait.

  So that’s our story, Nuala Anne, I hope it didn’t bore you. . . . There’s people out there that wanted to stop our marriage and now want to ruin it and maybe kill us. I’m afraid that both of us are not as scared as we should be. . . . And as we saw a few minutes ago we have hired ourselves very classy angels. . . . I take your point, Dermot, seraphs.

  Dermot

  “WELL, DERMOT Michael Coyne, what would you be after thinking about the afternoon show?”

  “I thought the dogs were wonderful and weren’t you smashing altogether and yourself swinging your camogie stick like you were a fifteen-year-old again!”

  “Give over, Dermot Michael! That’s not what I meant!”

  Give over is Irish English that is more or less equivalent to get real, though it implies that the addressee is also a bit of an eejit.

  My lovely wife and I were engaging in a new ritual we had inserted in our lives. We were sitting on a couch in our master bedroom, wearing robes, and sipping a small splash (a splasheen) of Baileys, though on other nights it might be a swallow of Bushmills Green, and discussing the events of our day. It was an interlude of peace and recollection marking the end of the chaos of the day and anticipating the wonders of the night, sleep, and perhaps love. It was supposed to constrain us not to retire with any resentments against each other. It was herself’s idea of course and like all such, altogether brilliant, by her own admission. She argued that it had increased not only the frequency of our “messing around” but the quality. We ended the ritual with a decade of the rosary.

  “And your older kids swarming up the stairs with their softball bats and meself swinging the snow shovel, faith we could have repelled the whole Brit parachute regiment, couldn’t we? No one pulls up in front of the Coyne house and looks suspicious and the dogs howling like they were auditioning for The Hound of the
Baskervilles. We scared them shitehawks!

  “And me daughter thought to bring her camera and take a picture of their friggin’ car and get its license plate number.”

  One of the rhetorical rules of our happy union is that when one of the kids does something “brilliant altogether,” it’s her offspring and when one goofs up, the child becomes “mine.”

  “The whole business suggests that the plot against our new friends is clumsy.”

  “Reckless and possibly dangerous . . . And them poor folks just beginning a brilliant new marriage . . . And don’t think, Dermot Michael, that I didn’t notice all the attention you were paying to the woman.”

  “I was only imagining myself at that age and having such a gorgeous spouse.”

  “Och,” she said with a sigh, the typical West of Ireland sigh which sounds like a severe asthma attack. “Doesn’t she have pretty boobs? And herself experiencing full orgasm for the first time. . . .”

  “Ah,” I said, figuring that if my wife could predict pregnancies before they happen, she could also sense the quality of a woman’s orgasm after the fact.

  “Some of us never experience it at all, the trick of it, as you well know, is for the poor woman to yield to her body’s demand for total abandon of which she is afraid. Sometimes she even passes out for a moment. . . . But her pleasure then is much greater than that of the eejit with the pent-up hormones who’s riding her.”

  “So I have been told.”

  “Sure you don’t even remember when it happened to me for the first time, do you now?”

  “Woman, I do. It was in Limerick town . . . and you scared the living daylights out of me when you passed out.”

  I had the day marked in my calendar and gave her a present on the anniversary.

  “Sometimes you see a woman on an elevator and you can tell where she’s been the night before.”

  “And where’s that?”

  “In the antechamber of heaven, where else . . . And meself praying to God that her eejit lover will remember how it went . . . and that he shouldn’t expect it all the time . . . So we have to protect them both, poor dear people, from those who want to destroy their love, isn’t that true, Dermot Michael?”

  “Woman, ’tis.”

  “Those gobshites in the car weren’t the people behind it. Commander Culhane says that they are just thugs sent to harass them, like all the phone calls and the anonymous e-mail. But the evil people behind them are really dangerous. Sloppy maybe but that makes them only more dangerous, doesn’t it now?”

  “I think the real plotters—conceding for the moment that there’s a plot . . .”

  My contribution to the resolution of the mock attack on Sheffield Avenue was to call Mike Casey on my cell phone and tell him to tell Gaby Lopez to drive around the block before I had grabbed the snow shovel and belatedly joined our mob. They would have fled quickly enough anyway, the Devil himself would have run from the howls of our hounds.

  Afterward, terribly proud of what they had done, they returned calmly to the first floor to play with the kids.

  “Dermot Michael Coyne, there is a plot, haven’t I told you so?”

  “Woman, you have . . . They’re probably playing it all by ear, taking advantage of the opportunities that come up. . . . Empiricists . . . I can’t imagine what they’re up to. . . .”

  “They want to destroy Jack and Maria and we have to find out why.”

  “They both said that if their marriage becomes a media sensation, it could destroy their businesses. . . . Is that true, Dermot?”

  “His asset management funds depend on investors’ confidence in him. I can’t imagine Frodo or Samwise tanking but he might have to sell them, though he’d collect enough to live the rest of his life in total comfort. Her venture is new and promising, but fragile. It’s on the bubble. It could come under assault from suspicious customers and disappear into the night.”

  “So tomorrow morning, don’t you have to go out to Loyola Medical School and interview this Mary Fran person and find out where they heard all the misinformation about Maria Angelica and whether they passed on that fake letter to the gobshite at St. Freddy’s?”

  “Wasn’t I thinking the same thing meself?”

  “And we must say our decade of the rosary tonight that them gobshites and CTN (Consolidated Television Network) back down. Or that the judge gives us . . . What do they call it?”

  “An emergency order. Our guys made a strong case about catastrophic harm. The judge will grant the order. They’ll appeal and we’ll need the Seventh District to grant their own emergency. The CTN people are dumb enough to try the Supreme Court. That will be a waste of their time and money.”

  “I still don’t like it.”

  “What you don’t like, good wife, is staying out of the fight.”

  “Och, sure, Dermot Michael, don’t you have the right of it.”

  We said the rosary. It was her turn to lead. The tone of her voice suggested that the deity was receiving his instructions.

  Then we would make the rounds of the bedrooms. Both the boys and the girls were sleeping soundly, the former under the watchful eye of Fiona and the latter snoozing under the surveillance of Maeve. Both would slip into the master bedroom in the course of the night, nudging the door open with their big snoots.

  “Well,” I said rising from my knees, “I don’t suppose there’ll be any riding tonight.”

  “Go long with ya, Dermot love, after the sexuality oozing around our living room today, I won’t permit you to dream about that woman’s boobs all night long.”

  “Well then.” I pulled off her robe. “I’ll have to find an alternative subject for my lascivious dreams, won’t I now?”

  Dermot

  “EVIE CARRIES a lot of anger,” Mary Fran Donlan said in the calm tone appropriate for a Freudian therapist in her middle fifties or a newly ordained priest. “She is angry at our mother whom she adored for being an alcoholic and then for dying too early in life. She is angry at the O’Mearas for killing her and at Daddy for permitting them to kill her. She is angry at me because, as she thinks, Daddy named the boat after me, when it was really his mother’s name. She is also furious at me because she thinks I’m prettier than she is. She is angry at the Church because it is there, inviting anger. She’s angry at her husband because he is a creep with no confidence in himself and lets her browbeat him. . . . I’m sorry, Mr. Coyne, for lecturing. . . .”

  “Dermot,” I insisted. “Mr. Coyne is my father.”

  “Actually, he’s Dr. Coyne.” Her brief smile would have melted an ice cap. “He’s one of the nicest men in this place. And Dr. Coyne asks questions just the way you do, Mr. Coyne . . . Dermot.”

  We were sitting in a cubicle for students doing their clerkships at Loyola University Hospital and Medical Center in Maywood. There was room for a small metal desk on which there were two paper cups filled with coffee (black), two uncomfortable metal chairs, and us. In her shapeless green coat and without any makeup, she looked like a pretty, natural-blond teenager playing nurse and not the beautiful young woman that Maria Angelica had described.

  “A deeply troubled young woman,” I nodded in agreement.

  She smiled slightly in acknowledgment that I was giving a therapist’s response.

  “Yet her fury turns her into a dynamic leader for any cause that happens to come along. Back in the days when Daddy was young she’d have marched on the Pentagon alongside Norman Mailer. She has charisma and charm to spare, all driven by her rage at the O’Meara family and at the O’Meara inside herself. . . . Now look at me! Analyzing my sister like I’m a teaching analyst at the institute! And I’m really only a third-year med student.”

  The “institute” was the Chicago Institute for Psychoanalysis founded by one of Freud’s pupils, Franz Alexander, and not to be confused with the Art Institute or The University.

  “But you hope to be one some day.”

  “Maybe,” she shrugged. “I’m not sure I buy all that Fre
udian stuff. . . . Anyway she’s very angry at Maria because my stepmom, as she is now, is a perfect target—another O’Meara and yet a non-O’Meara.”

  “And too beautiful by half, as the Brits would say.”

  “And she has laid-back kids like Evie wishes we were. . . . Well, she doesn’t know the kids yet, but wait till she does.”

  Before I drove out to Maywood on the Congress Expressway (as we Democrats still call it), my wife and I took our three oldest children, accompanied by the two dogs, across the street to St. Josephat school. I wondered if they might some day become a viper’s tangle of conflicts that would be our fault. Nelliecoyne (aka Mary Anne) was four years short of her chronological teen years but had already become a certified, card-carrying preteen, especially in her ability to be acutely critical of her parents’ inconsistencies. She and her mother argued constantly, though with little anger.

  “You and Ma banter, Da, me and Ma argue. It’s the way we bond.”

  “Ma and I,” Nuala Anne corrected her.

  “Yes, Ma,” she said with a sigh almost as loud as her ma’s.

  She was also fey like her mother, “even more than I was at her age, the poor dear little thing.”

  So Nelliecoyne and her ma often communicated without the benefit of words, especially when I was the subject. That alliance against me would become stronger as the years went on.

  The Mick, named after me Michael Dirmuid, was all boy, soccer, baseball, Cub fan, Bear fan, Bull fan, Notre Dame fan, even Marquette fan. He loves to play with trucks. He also loves to paint. Just as his sister carries a camera all the time, he has a sketchbook in his pocket and would translate that sketch often to a computer graphic.

  Socra Marie, at the moment leading her two doggies into the little band of kindergarten children who screamed with joy every morning at the sight of the huge white beasts, was our miracle child. Impatient to get into the world, she left her mother’s womb after twenty-five weeks and was so tiny I could hold her in one of my hands. She entered the world with a determination to stay with us that was barely strong enough to ensure her survival. But she made it and finally came home with us, still tiny and still filled with vitality. By the time she was two her energy made her a tiny terrorist who, with great éclat, broke or spoiled everything she could get her hands on. She also wore “gwasses,” which hung askew on her little nose but never quite fell. She tried her best to be a “good little girl” but her ongoing celebration of life precluded such a transformation till she went to preschool. She charmed teachers and classmates alike and calmed down a bit because she perceived that was necessary to her charm. But the mania was still there just beneath the surface. “Teacher says I’m an adorable handful,” she had told us proudly.