Irish Tiger

by Andrew M. Greeley

  “That cute Ms. Connors is here, Ma. She said you had tickets for her.”

  “Thanks, cara. Did you get a good picture of her?”

  “Wouldn’t it be impossible, Ma, not to get a good picture of her!”

  “She won’t stay long, Dermot love, and then I’ll be off to the land of Nod.”

  “And not a minute too soon.”

  Maria Angelica was sitting in the parlor, in slacks and NIU sweatshirt, drinking a cup of tea and eating some of our remaining soda bread.

  “That little imp of yours is a wonder,” she said. “I have too many daughters of my own these days, but I’d be willing to trade any two of them for one of her. She did a wonderful portrait of me without my even noticing it.”

  “Better than the one in that real estate magazine?”

  “No cleavage but sexier. I ordered a half dozen copies at five dollars each—a real bargain!”

  “No trade! Won’t she be supporting me in me old age. . . How’s the old fella keeping?”

  “He’s fine, though the companies are slipping. Not too much yet . . . We can make love again which is nice. I lived thirty years or so without much sex and was none the worse for it. Now in sunset years I find a man I love and I can’t get enough of him.”

  “Which he enjoys?”

  “He’s astonished. Can’t understand why he’s a sex object. I wonder if it will last.”

  “Why shouldn’t it?”

  “I’ve not been lucky with men.”

  “That’s your old story. Now you have a new one. As long as you’re good to him, you’ll have a very happy marriage, even if he’s occasionally an eejit.”

  “Such a sweet eejit,” she said with a weak sigh.

  Why should I laugh to myself at that? I had whispered the same words to meself about my poor, dear Dermot.

  “And the daughters?”

  “A lot of strong emotions trying to focus. It’s working out, but like I tell them, I’m not a referee or an appellate judge, only a dorm mother.”

  “So you’ll be needing seven tickets for tonight?”

  “I will, if you have them.”

  “Sure, why wouldn’t I have them? It’s my show isn’t it now? And won’t I be glad when it’s over!”

  “It will be brilliant altogether, to use your terms.”

  “There will be a small party afterward backstage. Nothing stronger than a splash of Baileys. . . All you need is the tickets. Not long because we must get the small ones home.”

  “One more thing. My son tells me that my brothers are acting strange . . . laughing at the incident in front of St. Joseph’s. They say that I’m finally getting what I deserve.”

  A light flashed in the back of my head. There was no time to investigate it, but it would stay there and I’d return to it tomorrow.

  “Sweethearts, aren’t they? Nothing will happen to you, Maria Angelica, as long as you have one of the Reliables around. It will all be over soon anyway.”

  I said that with more confidence than I should have. I knew, however, that it would be over by Christmas.

  “Why do your brothers hate you so much?”

  “Gina and I were pop u lar in school, they weren’t. I had good grades, they didn’t. They’re clumsy, I’m an athlete of sorts. I made it in the town’s elite, they never had a chance. They’re ugly and I’m not. My mother hated me and she loved the boys, she turned them against me. I was a traitor to the family. They were always loyal. It went on and on and on. They could do nothing wrong. I did nothing right. She spoiled them rotten. They’ve always been little boys who never had to grow up. When someone or something frustrates them, they react with rage. The mob in Chicago almost killed them.”

  “Not nice people?”

  “I’m sorry, Nuala, you touched a sensitive spot in my memory. I try not to be angry at them. . . . I try to forgive them. I think I have and then someone asks about them and my fury comes back. . . . I don’t think they’re killers. Don’t have the courage for that.”

  Somehow that information calmed me. I would have a good nap this afternoon.

  I stopped at the door of Nelliecoyne’s darkroom. The red light was off, so I knocked.

  “Come in, Ma!”

  “Ms. Connors said you took a real sexy picture of her and sold her a half dozen copies.”

  “Should I have? She insisted.”

  “Congratulations. . . We’ll have to start charging you room and board.”

  “You’d never let Da do that,” she said with one of her big grins. She showed me her first print. It was indeed very sexy. No way it wouldn’t be at this time in Maria’s life.

  “Very sexy.”

  “She has beautiful boobs, Ma. Just like you.”

  “Are the other kids napping?”

  “Not the Mick. He’s drawing pictures. Aren’t the young ’uns dead to the world, as I will be in a few moments.”

  “It will be wonderful tonight, cara.”

  “Of course it will, Ma.”

  So I went up to the master bedroom where me poor dear Dermot was waiting for me. I thought he might want to make love, but he took off my clothes and put me to bed with a promise.

  “I’ll wake you up in two hours, woman. We can’t have you groggy tonight. Then we’ll have our showers and engage in a little light focking.”

  “With you, Dermot Michael Coyne, there is no such thing as light focking.”

  Then before I knew it I was sound asleep.

  Dermot

  AFTER PUTTING herself to bed, I went back to the Situation Room and turned on the TV monitor of the CPD, which we weren’t supposed to have, but we managed to obtain nonetheless. It picks up the same feed which goes into the superintendent’s office. We didn’t watch it much because the fare was usually pretty dull. I had no doubt that the top cop would be watching with great interest. Terry Glen’s career was at stake. If he carried this caper off, then he’d be the next man. From what cops told me that would please the present boss and most of the force.

  The monitor showed a quiet street in a very old neighborhood on the near West Side, some abandoned buildings, some vacant lots, some ancient brick two-flats, once superior housing for the emergent middle class, maybe a century and a quarter ago, back when the Cubs were winning championships a mile or so away at the old Playing Fields.

  We were a half mile away in an unmarked van, probably an unprepossessing near wreck. Cars went by, looming large for a moment and then disappearing off camera.

  My mobile rang.

  “Dermot.”

  “Dominic. . . I hear from my friends in the neighborhood that they’re pulling back out of sight. They’ll see what happens and let me know. I’ll be in touch with you.”

  “Stay out of there, Dom.”

  He laughed.

  “Derm, you’re the crazy one, not me.”

  As we talked a large, grey buslike thing lumbered down the street toward the camera. It stopped in front of what had to be the house where the commandos had established their command center. Instead of windows it had gun ports out of which automatic weapons protruded. No one fired from inside the house or from the armored bus. In case there was any doubt the blue letters on the side of the bus spelled out “Chicago Police Department—Tactical Unit 1.”

  Then a second and similar vehicle pulled into the alley behind the two-flat and clumped behind it. The gun ports opened and more automatic weapons appeared.

  At the far end of the street, out of the line of fire, scores of police cars and other vehicles appeared and cops set up street barricades. Only a few cops left their cars. This was perhaps the combat infantry who would clean up the remnants after the battle was over. I had heard that the department had purchased some vehicles (pronounced always as vee HIK ils), but I was not prepared for the next grotesque monster—a broad, squat thing which looked like a heavily armored tank, with a squat pillar on top, a large artillery piece jutting from its front and two lighter weapons, looking like the Gatling guns from the Civil
War or the Philippine Insurrection, poking out of recesses in the front. At the end of the pillar a radarlike device with a red light spun nervously. I was a couple of miles away, but the scene scared me.

  The tank featured on its front a mammoth shovel which looked like a huge front loader. It wheeled around in front of the house and paused. The spinner on the tank spun furiously.

  Then a man appeared in an open window on the second floor of the flat with one of those grenade launchers that we see on TV in the hands of Middle Eastern “militants.” A puff of smoke appeared in the window and the grenade leaped out of its launcher. Suddenly the tank threw up what looked like a large steel hand, deflected the grenade, and hurled it back at the two-flat.

  An incomplete forward pass. An agile cornerback like Mike Brown of the Bears.

  Then a barrage of small-weapons fire erupted from the house, pinging noisily like hail on a tin roof against the sides of the armored bus.

  “We’re taking fire, sir,” said a voice presumably from the bus.

  “Well,” said Terry Glen, “return the fire.”

  The Gatling guns on the tank rose from their recesses and began to eat into the bricks of the house. Then the automatic weapons in the gun ports on the buses opened up. The windows disappeared, some of the walls disintegrated, the front door vanished. Smoke poured from the house.

  “Try the tear gas!”

  A long arm appeared at the top of the tank, leaned over toward the disintegrating structure and, casually almost negligently, distributed several tear gas canisters through the available openings.

  A white sheet appeared from one of the windows. Surrender.

  “We know there are four of you in there. Come out of the house without your weapons and your hands in the air. If there are any missteps you will all die.”

  Then the command was repeated in a Slavic language. Russian. Best we could do.

  “Ten seconds and we will begin firing again.”

  Four battered men, two of them wounded, staggered out of the remnants of the two-flat, hands over their heads.

  “Get them in the bus and get out of there. The residence is filled with explosives.”

  A door opened in the side of the bus and a set of stairs unfolded. Four men in grey armor appeared and helped the prisoners into the bus and the stairs folded. The bus inched away from the wrecked two-flat and trudged down the street toward the camera. Suddenly there was a loud whuf as the building turned into a red and black fireball. The camera shook, the bus heaved to the side, and the strange tank thing rocked back and forth in alarm, its antenna quivering in the blast. Then a nozzle appeared from the top of the machine, spun toward the flaming two-flat, and emitted a thick stream of heavy liquid which turned into foam as it encountered the flames. The tank was prepared for absolutely any eventuality. A brilliant contraption altogether.

  The fire was quickly snuffed out. No noisy Chicago Fire Department required. Then, as if offended by the temerity of the two-flat, the tank lowered its front-loader shovel and attacked the smoking ruins, reducing them in short order to a mass of rubble. Finally, it swept the remains into a neat pile, doused it again with foam, and then harrumphed back on Erie Street and, as if wiping off its hands in satisfaction lumbered toward the camera and then out of sight.

  My mobile phone rang again.

  “In case you’re wondering, Dermot,” Mike Casey said, “that monster, appropriately named Godzilla, operates completely on remote control. Tactical has been waiting eagerly for a chance to try it.”

  “And no media there to observe and record.”

  “Precisely. . . The only problem is that there were just a few terrorists. We don’t know for sure what would happen if we had forty or so holed up in that building and they were real terrorists instead of out-of-work commandos.”

  “Either they would have surrendered or that monster—”

  “We call it Godzilla.”

  “—would have stacked them up in neat little piles. . . I suppose your good friend Terry Glen will have a press conference on Monday and let the media take pictures of Godzilla from a safe distance, lest it inundate them with foam.”

  “It does have a mind of its own. See you tonight. The boys in the blue uniforms will swarm on the ruins and dig out whatever they can. We’ll have a thick cordon of them all around the soundstage tonight. Enjoy!”

  I turned off the monitor just as a swarm of “civilians” tried to push against the police barriers to inspect the modestly withdrawing Godzilla. I checked my recording to make sure I could show it to Nuala before I destroyed it.

  The word modestly reminded me of another Saturday afternoon responsibility I had.

  Outside in the playroom, the kids, up from their naps and still in their pj’s, were playing with their various amusements, the TV was playing My Fair Lady, and Ellie was teaching Patjo to read, an exercise he seemed to enjoy.

  “Hi, Uncle Derm! Did you have a horror movie playing in there?”

  “Godzilla!”

  “I just love Godzilla,” Socra Marie announced.

  Nelliecoyne was working on a scrapbook of her pictures.

  “Will Mr. Donlan and Ms. Connors be at the show tonight, Da?”

  “They wouldn’t miss it for the world.”

  “Good! I’ll give her the copies of my picture. Ma says she looks real sexy.”

  “Ma would know.”

  Upstairs in our master bedroom, Ma was sleeping peacefully, looking like an innocent teen. Once again I found it difficult to believe that this beautiful woman was my wife and indeed the mother of my four rug rats. My desire for her surged as though she were a new conquest. Yet I felt sorry for the enormous burdens that had intruded into her life, mostly because of me. She shouldn’t have to assume all the Christmas responsibilities that would weary her next week and then fly “home” on the day after Christmas. But then she wouldn’t be Nuala Anne, the Irish Tiger.

  She opened her eyes and saw me standing above her. Her face eased into a smile of adoration, which broke my heart every time I saw it. I didn’t deserve that kind of love. However, since it was there, I might just as well take advantage of it.

  “You’re late for our tryst, Dermot Michael Coyne.”

  “Only two minutes.”

  “Sure, wasn’t there a time when you’d be five minutes early.”

  “I didn’t want to cheat you out of an extra minute of sleep.”

  “Well, make yourself useful and turn on the shower to just the right temperature and yourself knowing how much I hate a shower that’s too cold or too hot.”

  Dermot

  NUALA ANNE was radiant and relaxed as we drove in the Reliable Lexus from Sheffield Avenue over to West Ohio Street. She glanced at me occasionally and winked, sharing the joy of our marital love. She led the gossons and the colleens in singing some of their favorite lullabies which they would sing later in the evening. First the “Castle of Dromore”:

  The October winds lament

  Around the castle of Dromore

  Yet peace lies in her lofty halls

  My loving treasure store

  Though autumn leaves may droop and die

  A bud of spring are you

  Lullaby, lullaby,

  Sweet little baby,

  Don’t you cry

  I’d rock my own little child to rest

  In a cradle of gold on the bough of a willow

  To the shoheen ho of the wind of the west And the lulla low of the soft see billow

  Sleep baby dear

  Sleep without fear

  Mother is here beside your pillow.

  Then they turned to their absolute favorite, the Connemara lullaby which all the mothers of Carraroe had sung to their daughters for generations and which according to family legend had kept Socra Marie alive in the hospital when she was too small to come home.

  The childish voices were a pleasant background to my delicious memories of the amusements of our tryst in the shower and afterward. It had been a dan
gerous gamble on God’s part to permit such pleasure to humans. It did bind husband and wife together but the bond was a two-edge sword which could so easily tear itself apart. Well, there was no point in being philosophical at the present moment, sometime in the next couple of days I must start the poem that had been hiding in my head, not quite ready to emerge fully blown like the mythical Venus on the seashell.

  The car, even with its Reliable sticker, was searched thoroughly by apologetic but competent cops. Then we had to go through a door frame like the kind they keep at the Federal building and the county court house.

  The rest of my family would go backstage. I hugged each one of them and told them that they were wonderful. Me wife hugged me and whispered, “Well, Dermot Michael Coyne, won’t you do as a lover until someone better comes along?”

  “See you later,” I said.

  “She didn’t seem nervous at all,” Maria Donlan murmured to me as I found my seat in the row in front of theirs.

  “She’s chilled out,” I explained. “She refuses to worry on the day of a performance. ’Tis a waste of energy altogether.”

  I was nonetheless uneasy. We had done lullabies before and that special had been enormously pop u lar. Now we were stretching for politically correct Arab lullabies, Sea Island lullabies, Russian lullabies, Chinese lullabies, African-American lullabies as well as Irish lullabies and the ones that everyone knew and loved. This did not mean that Nuala sang less but that she sang translations (that she had made) after the native singer and then the two joined together in a final chorus. It would be a tour de force if it worked. Moreover the kids and the Old St. Patrick’s choir would background almost all the numbers. The choir was flawless of course. The kids were problematic. Not problematic, however, was Nuala. When she put on her Christmas special persona, she became the smooth, sleek, Irish Tiger whose rare mistakes carried on the performance. Her daimon at the Christmas special was flawless and carried the performers, the technicians, and the audience.

  She left behind the barefoot lass from Galway and talked Trinity College Irish, patently Irish to the uninitiated, but all the wonderful diction of the West and its slang, not to say its vulgarity, left far behind.