She paused, stopped petting Fiona who protested by raising her head. Maria renewed the affection. Someday, I thought, I’m going to be as grown up as she is and won’t I be about ninety?
“Anyway, one weekend five years ago, his office in D.C. called and suggested we have dinner on Saturday night at the country club. He had good news for me. I was suspicious. He was married and his wife, a smartly dressed woman about his age, had decided, unlike the current congressmen’s wives, to live in Chevy Chase. Sterling Stafford nonetheless flew back to his district a couple of times a month. Maybe that ought to have made me suspicious. He had enormous power in Congress, lots of lobbyist money, and was close to Newt Gingrich when he was Speaker and a leader in the impeachment of Clinton.”
“Nice man,” I said.
“The news was really good. He had made a deal which would bring some major grants to his district for historic preservation and development. I needed good news. My poor husband’s decline was accelerating. We were no longer making love, though we hugged and held hands. I didn’t think I was any more deprived sexually than many women my age who were in unsatisfactory marriages—which seemed to me most of the women I knew. Their favorite conversational topic was how inadequate their men were in every respect. My plans and projects and big ideas and little crusades seemed useless and boring. Only my kids kept me going. They were fun and they let me have fun with them.
“I drank too much wine that evening in the club. Sterling didn’t push his luck which was wise because I would have smote him with righteous anger as my evangelical friends say. His kiss good-night was too forceful but it stirred up emotions and sensations that I had not experienced in a long time and expected not to experience again. . . . That’s when my adultery began.”
“It began,” I said firmly, “when you went to bed with him.”
She was weeping now, a thin line of tears slipping down her cheeks. She hugged a delighted Fiona as though the wolfhound promised salvation.
“We drove up to Rockford in his wife’s Cadillac the next week for dinner at an expensive and elegant steakhouse—probably the only one in town. I drank too much and surrendered all thoughts of resistance. Sterling pawed me all the way back to his home on the Kishwaukee, one we had built for him. I knew what would happen and I no longer cared. He had said nothing about the appropriation bill for our grants and I didn’t care about that either. Nor did I care about the animal heads and the gun racks with which he had ruined our design for the parlor. No wonder, I thought, that his wife stays in D.C. He carried me upstairs to the master bedroom which was one of our standard models. He began to remove my clothes, none too gently, and to kiss me with increasing brutality. One of those kind, I thought, but it doesn’t matter.”
“Why did you get out?”
“How did you know that!” she exclaimed, startled.
“No way you were that drunk or lonely.”
“I heard the camera running.”
“Camera!”
“There was a vague sound of something whirling—even, mechanical, implacable. I was on a soundstage. Like I say, I knew the room and I looked at the corner where one might hide a camera. Sure enough! I pushed the bastard off me, dashed across the room, picked up the camera, pulled out the tape, and threw the camera at him. It hit the bastard in his head and stunned him for a moment. I grabbed my dress, ran down the stairs, and seized one of his shotguns.”
I applauded.
“I hope you shot him!”
“Och, Nuala Anne McGrail Coyne, aren’t you the violent one!
“He stumbled down the stairs, stark naked, and dazed. He called me a lot of names, the mildest one of which was ‘tease.’ I told him I would blow off his balls if he came a step nearer to me. I wouldn’t of course, but I would have hit him on the head with the butt of the gun. I could see the safety was on the gun. He was still woozy. The camera was a good weapon. I picked his car keys off the mantel where he had deposited them when we had come into the house.
“He collapsed into a chair and rubbed his head. ‘You hurt me, bitch.’ ‘Not as much as I will if you get out of that chair. Now I’ll tell you what you’re going to do. You’re going to take some aspirin and sleep this off. Then tomorrow morning at ten o’clock you drive into the parking lot behind our store in your Taurus. You will bring the rest of my clothes in some kind of suitcase, enter our front door, and deposit it inside the door. I will throw this key at you and you will get into your wife’s car where this gun will be on the backseat, minus the bullets, and drive home. You can have one of your guys pick up the Taurus. And that’s the end of it. I have the tape and I’ll write up an account of the evening. I will place the tape somewhere where you won’t ever find it. I won’t blackmail you and you don’t try to have me killed. And we’ll call it even. Clear?’ ”
“Quick thinking,” I said.
“Salespeople have to think quickly.”
“He called me some more names and then groaned and held his head. I was ready for him the next morning with one of my father-in-law’s guns, not loaded. ‘Just put the bag down and leave.’ ”
“He tried to make peace?” I said.
“ ‘Maria, it was all a terrible mistake. I beg you, please forgive me.’
“ ‘It certainly was a mistake. I won’t use this against you. Just get out of here and leave me alone.’ He begged some more and I raised the gun and he dashed out.
“He phoned the next day to apologize again and promised that he would tell no one.”
“Damn well better not,” I said.
“The money actually came through for our project. I publicly thanked him for his support. We chatted amiably on the rare occasions we were together in public. He looked like a whipped little puppy dog.”
At the word dog Fiona perked up her ears to see if she were under discussion. She rearranged herself and went back to sleep.
“And a frightened one at that!”
“Yes, he did seem scared.”
“’Tis yourself who needs a drop of the creature.”
I left the room and came back with two jars of the finest. She had suspended her weeping and repaired her makeup.
I glanced out the window. A reliable limo was waiting.
“Slainte!”
“Slainte!” she said in return, not pronouncing the word properly at all—most Yanks can’t.
We both sipped our drinks. She shuddered, but she needed something strong, didn’t she?
“So,” I said, “when did the adultery happen? Did you give him a second chance?”
I knew very well she hadn’t.
“I drove up to Rockford to go to confession. I couldn’t tell Father Matt. The priest said that I had intended to commit adultery and that was already a mortal sin of adultery. I had to say all fifteen decades of the rosary.”
“Bullshite! You never really intended to do it, else why would you be looking for a way out and hearing that friggin’ camera? He would have had to rape you and I suspect you would have beat him up while he was trying. . . . You never went to Catholic schools?”
“My parents said we couldn’t afford it.”
“Well, if you did, you’d know it was no sin at all, at all.” Nuala Anne McGrail, mother superior, confessor, and doctor of the Church.
“If you want to know what I think, you should forget it all together . . . though it’s a great story.”
“I have to tell my husband.”
“Why ever would you do that?”
“They say that Sterling Stafford is very bitter over his defeat and is talking about getting even with his enemies.”
“If you ask me, and I know you haven’t, he still regrets his lost opportunity. So you tell Jackie and won’t he laugh like I did!”
“You will tell Dermot, won’t you?”
“We’ll find out what your man is up to. I suspect he’s still terrified.”
“You’re a wonderful confidante, Nuala,” she said, her eyes shining.
And the woman a
good twenty years older than meself, even if she didn’t look it. Wait till I tell Dermot!
“I don’t understand why sex is so important to women my age. We’re not likely to produce more kids. There is no need for us to stay married so that our kids will receive an education. I thought I was through with it till I met my husband. Now I’m like a raging inferno.”
How fortunate for your man. “’Tis the discipline, isn’t it now?”
“Discipline!”
“’Tis! Sex is great craic, but only if we can learn the discipline of being sensitive to our lover. All the time. No complaining about him to our women friends. Same for him. We learn how to respect everyone by respecting our lover. And if we’re not generous to him, we won’t be generous to anyone else and we’ll be miserable human beings, won’t we? So sex at any age civilizes us, at least if we want to keep up the craic. Lots of times it isn’t easy because the other is often a friggin’ amadon. But that’s the way they are. Women can be eejits too, you know, friggin’ onchucks.”
“We have to learn how to preserve our lovers?”
“’Tis true and if we can do that we have learned how to be good in all our relationships.”
“The lover is paradigmatic?”
“Isn’t that what himself, the little archbishop says and doesn’t he know everything about it and himself an outsider.”
We drained our jars, she put on her Brit trench coat and walked down to the car, meself with her lest she fall. She hugged me again.
“I’d better go home and prepare myself to be generous to my lover, not that it is difficult these days. . . . I must learn to understand him better. . . .”
“Ah, no, that’s useful, but the trick of it is to understand yourself better.”
She nodded, as if she got it. Smart woman that she was, she surely got it.
“Come on, Fiona, we’ve done a good day’s work,” I said and we walked up the stairs together.
Dermot
“WHAT’S HAPPENING?” I asked as I ambled into Jack Donlan’s office.
He glanced up and smiled, a smile which me wife had said would break many a married woman’s heart if she were Irish. Not mine of course, she had added.
He stood up briskly and shook hands.
“A cup of tea?”
“A touch of it,” I said. “It’s been a dry morning.”
Waiting in the doorway, Elfrida said, “I’ll make it, Mr. Donlan. You don’t know how to do it for an Irishman.”
I thought of pleading that it was me wife that was Irish.
“To answer your question, the Dow, Nasdaq, S and P are all nervous. Frodo and Samwise are no more nervous than anyone else. The lightning is still up there, but so far so good.”
“You think that will continue?”
“Until the other shoe falls.”
“What’s the other shoe?”
“The next phase in the plot.”
“You think there is a plot?”
“Dermot, as a gambler, I have to deal with probabilities. If it looks like a duck and walks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it’s probably a duck—eighty-five percent probability. Maybe it’s a South American pigeon which is invading our shores. This affair looks like someone—singular or plural—is out to get either Maria or me. They are hasty and clumsy but so far they have proven themselves skillful at seizing opportunities.”
“You are remarkably calm about it, sir.”
He shrugged, a hint of Celtic fatalism.
The good Elfrida returned with tea and buttered scones and admonished us to let it steep for a while. I immediately captured one of the scones and swallowed it whole.
“One wins some and loses some. I won Maria, I might lose Frodo, but with enough cash to live luxuriously for the rest of our lives. As my father used to say, don’t fight the Holy Ghost. I might sail a boat round the world or do something else constructive.”
“Who are the plotters?”
“I don’t know. I’m trusting you and your wife and Mike Casey to figure that out. I think my family is involved, but only as unwitting tools. . . . Have you managed to find any evidence about that?”
He poured tea for both of us. Perfectly steeped, as I knew it would be. Like me wife he must have a stopwatch in his head for such matters.
“This is a copy of the letter they received,” I said, passing it across his desk. “The original was crudely scrawled on a lined page torn out of a notebook.”
He glanced at it and shrugged again.
“I would say probably an outburst from a hysterical middle-aged person, likely a woman. Just the sort of screed that would appeal to my family.”
He gave it back to me.
“They certainly made a lot out of it,” I suggested. “Would you suppose that she knew how they would react?”
I sipped the tea. Delicious.
“Milk?” he asked.
“As I tell the woman of the house, I never pollute perfectly good tea.”
“Or maybe the one who sent the letter had a shrewd guess about what they would think anyway of a new stepmother. . . . I never would have thought that adult women would so resent another woman in the master bedroom. . . . Shows how much I understand women, doesn’t it, Dermot?”
“Me wife, who knows about such primal things, tells me that the mystery of the parental bed is both fascinating and terrifying to kids as they grow up.”
“Mary Fran gave you the copy, I suppose? Where is she?”
“She understands that she must make a decision and knows that she will choose you and Maria but hesitates.”
“Spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak, eh?”
“A colleague of yours made roughly the same allegations, did he not?”
“Lou Garner, a classmate at Loyola University, real estate, loves to gossip, but is not vicious, means no harm by it . . .”
“A rival?”
“On the tennis court . . . Otherwise a friend. He came to the wedding and the reception and was very gracious in his congratulations. I don’t think he is capable of conspiracy, but then what do I know?”
“Either he made up the allegations or they are free-floating rumors up and down LaSalle Street.”
“I thought they were the latter, the sort of remark which is made about a woman who is beautiful and successful. I asked Mike Casey to investigate.”
He opened a drawer in his desk and with the unerring instinct of the man who knows where every document is, removed a file folder and handed it to me.
Three typed pages of notes, which I read quickly. “When is her feast day?” I asked, returning the file to his desk, still opened.
He chuckled.
“ ‘Chaste and modest matron’ summarizes it all, does it not? I’ll confess that I found the prospect of bedding such a one to be, how shall I say it, appealing. I hope that does not make me sound like a degenerate.”
“If it does, then much of the human race is degenerate.”
You think herself is a chaste and modest matron?
Among other things.
That’s why you fuck her in the kitchen?
Once in a while when no one else is around.
I shook off the murmurings of my everpresent Adversary and returned to the discussion with my client.
“You might mail this report to Mary Fran. It would confirm her inclination to admire your wife.”
He considered the folder and glanced up at me.
“Better you send it to her. It will then appear in a more neutral context.”
“Good idea . . . Now, would you give me permission to talk to Lou Garner?”
“Why not? I would have a hard time thinking of him as a suspect.”
A classmate and a foe on the tennis court who was not nearly so successful as you? Gimme a break.
I gathered together the remnants of our morning tea, but Elfrida intervened to prevent servile work by such an important man. As I left the office I observed that John Patrick Donlan had returned to the eternal flow of st
ock reports on his big computer screen and rejoiced that I had withdrawn from that casino.
I hurried home in the hope that I might find me wife in some domestic situation in which she could play the role of the chaste and modest matron.
I was out of luck. There were vehicles all along Sheffield Avenue, including a Channel 3 TV truck. Several small ones were thundering up the stairs. Nuala Anne was having a party. Celebrating our victory in court.
The parlor was swarming with people, rug-rat people and grown-up people, neighbors and their kids like Peter and Cindasue Murphy, kids from school who were in Nuala’s chorus, teachers from the school, the priest from the rectory, my sister Cindy and her husband Tom Hurley who was one of the lawyers for NBS and parents of Ellie, TV technicians, me wife pouring tea, me older daughter and son offering Coke or water, Ellie and Danuta serving scones, Socra Marie hugging anyone who looked like they needed a hug, and the hounds proudly sauntering around as if they were in fact the cause of all the celebration.
“All right, quiet please! . . . Are you ready, Nuala? . . . You can put the teapot down for a moment. . . .”
The ever-present Nelliecoyne removed the pot from her ma’s hand. In a red and gold Marquette sweatsuit me wife looked every bit the surprised yuppy matron.
I was proud of her, like I usually am.
“Nuala,” Mary Alice asked, “would you have any comment that you seemed to have won the case and your Christmas special will air again this year on NBS?”
“Winning is better than losing, as we Irish know because we’ve lost so often in our sad history. And isn’t it NBS who had the injunction lifted, so didn’t they win? And isn’t the decision on appeal and no one knows what this new bunch of lawyers will do? So it’s still early days, isn’t it now? But it’s time for a preliminary celebration anyway. . . .”
“Isn’t it true, Nuala, that Ireland is now the richest country in Europe?”
“Och, ’tis, but we don’t like to talk about it for fear of hurting the feelings of your poor Brits. All that proves is that the Irish win in the long run but they have to wait a thousand years. . . . And we only have a couple of more days?”
Irish Tiger Page 12
