Irish Tiger

by Andrew M. Greeley

  “And like all Connemara mystics you talk in plainchant.”

  More laughter. The young man was not devoid of wit.

  “And here’s your lovely date . . . Trailing after her are three witches who ought not to be here—Fiona, who is Julie’s canine guardian, and two of my children, Mary Anne and Socra Marie. Shake hands with Mr. Burke, girls.”

  “Mary Anne” was pronounced “MA-ree-ahn.”

  The white hound claimed precedence and offered her paw respectfully. Finnbar Burke bent down, took the paw, and said some words in Irish. The huge dog stood up on her hind legs and kissed him. He hugged her and continued praising her in Irish.

  “Fiona,” Julie said, blushing furiously, “you’ll be the ruination of us all!”

  “And my daughters, Mary Anne and Socra Marie, who are now going to shake hands with you and return to their rooms to finish their homework.”

  They both shook hands with Julie’s date and greeted him in Irish. Mary Anne wore her martial arts garments.

  “Och, isn’t it two fearsome women altogether? And a gorgeous wolfhound? Sure, Mr. Coyne, wouldn’t you be havin’ no security problems at all, at all?”

  “Dermot! Isn’t Mr. Coyne my uncle, the lawyer?”

  “Galway lasses, I note,” he said, “Good night, girls, study hard.”

  “Yes, Mr. Burke.”

  Julie, dressed at last in something more than jeans and sweatshirt, was gorgeous in a knit beige dress which clung nicely to her delightful body. She radiated joy, confidence, pleasure. She had a fella, and a nice fella, with a great smile and a quick wit. His admiration enveloped her. She lowered her eyes, embarrassed but pleased. It was perhaps the first time in her life that she had experienced male desire, respectful desire indeed, but still desire.

  “We’ll just go over to the Century to see the filum there about Cork during the Troubles and then stop for a pint at the Irish pub down the street.”

  The Wind in the Barley Fields was not, I thought, the ideal “filum” for a first date.

  “We won’t stay out too late,” Julie assured us.

  “Don’t come home too early either,” Nuala added.

  She pecked at my cheek and then Nuala’s, the first for both of us. Finnbar Burke took her hand and led her down the steps. He watched her on every step, his eyes drinking her in, like a man perishing with the thirst.

  When I closed the door, Fiona curled up in front of it. She would stand guard till her charge returned.

  “Upstairs, girls,” the woman of the house repeated her orders . . . “No, not you, Fiona. You can wait till she comes home.”

  The hound raised her huge head as if to protest and then curled up in a complacent knot and promptly went to sleep.

  “I think he’s adorable,” Mary Anne observed as she obeyed with no undue haste.

  On the couch next to me, an antique from the Civil War subbasement and appropriately rehabbed, me spouse was weeping softly. I put my arm around her.

  “They’re both so young.” She sighed her loudest West of Ireland sigh, which her friend Cardinal Blackie described as sounding like the beginning of a heavy asthma attack.

  “Reminds you of O’Neil’s Pub a long time ago, does it now?”

  “’Tis true.”

  “In fact, she is three years older than you were that evening, and he’s probably about the same age as I was.”

  “And he looks at her with the same glow in his eyes that you looked at me.”

  “And she blushes in response even as you did.”

  We both sighed again.

  “We didn’t know what we were doing, did we Dermot Michael?”

  “Woman, we did not!”

  “Won’t you have to take him out to Butterfield and see how good he is?”

  “He plays golf?”

  “Isn’t that tweed cap he shoved in his pocket the symbol of the Old Head Links in Kinsale? Don’t they say the wind there comes either from the North Pole or from Hell?”

  “You’ll have to come along and play with us.”

  “Only when you report how good he is.”

  Me spouse is a grand golfer altogether. Won the women’s tournament at Portumna when she was seventeen. She claims she’s too busy to play anymore, but in truth she’s afraid that I’ll beat her, which I do on very rare occasions. She hits her drives as long as I hit mine, which is not appropriate behavior for a wife, is it now?

  “Well,” she sighed again. “Don’t we have one more responsibility and ourselves not having enough responsibilities as it is.”

  “What responsibility?”

  “We have to take care of Julie and her fella. They don’t have anyone else to take care of them.”

  “Two more children in our family?”

  “If God didn’t want us to take care of them, why would he have sent them here?”

  “Give over, Nuala Anne. No one took care of us.”

  “Except our parents who taught us marital love by example and your family which took care of me as soon as I showed up. And themselves wondering if I wouldn’t make something out of you.”

  “Which you didn’t like at all, at all, if I remember right.”

  “They wanted me to remake you and meself liking you the way you were. And now they think I did remake you and themselves being wrong altogether. But they were there to help and still are. Your pa and ma take care of the kids, and His Riverance digs up all those manuscripts, and Cyndi keeps the feds off our backs.”

  My brother the priest is always accorded such respect. The Cardinal, one would expect, would deserve much more. However, he was simply Blackie.

  “’Tis true,” I admitted. “Don’t Julie and Finnbar have families of their own?”

  “Dermot they do not, and yourself knowing that. They came here to escape their families. God wants us to be their families while they’re keeping company and courting.”

  I never quite understood the distinction.

  “Orphans of the storm who rolled up on our beach?”

  “You have the right of it now. God wants us to help them.”

  Well, that settled that.

  “You have the right of it, woman of the house.”

  She sniffed as though that were self-evident.

  “What do we know about them?”

  “She doesn’t confide in me, but your daughter keeps me informed.

  “That one?”

  “She tells me that she went to CUD, City University of Dublin, and himself to CUC, City University Cork—the bottom of the ladder, so to speak—and themselves both very clever, herself in a doctoral program at DePaul and her man down at your business school below on Illinois Street and doing very well indeed, if you please.”

  It wasn’t my business school. It belonged to the University of Chicago. Or simply The University.

  My wife was proud of her knowledge of the street maps of Chicago. If Finnbar Burke was doing well there, he was also a bright young man and probably a dangerous golfer.

  My tranquility disappeared before my very eyes.

  “And where does he work?”

  “On Washington Street down below and isn’t it for some Irish company that’s buying a lot of American property and that cheap these days.”

  “Sounds un-American to me.”

  “We bought property in Ireland when it was cheap, why shouldn’t they buy it in America when it’s cheap?”

  We both sighed again. This time I was faking it.

  “Well,” she said, “since you intend to have your way with me once again tonight, we’d better go upstairs and put the small ones to bed.”

  She spoke as one resigned to one more male assault, but her glowing eyes suggested that she could hardly wait. It ought not be that easy for a man to seduce his wife. But it is what it is.

  I loosened the black belt and probed her sports bra. She sighed again and leaned on my shoulder.

  “There’s never enough time, is there, Dermot Michael? And when there is, isn’t it too late?”r />
  I think that was Irish bull.

  “How is that one doing in her taekwondo?”

  “Och, isn’t the little witch catching up with me? She’s not as strong yet, but isn’t she pure grace? Lightning feet?”

  “She’d never permit herself to beat you.”

  “She’d better not . . . Give over, Dermot Michael Coyne. We’re not up in the bedroom yet.”

  I paused in my explorations.

  Now don’t youse be thinking I’m gonna tell you what me spouse looks like with her clothes off. Or what she’s like when she is gasping for orgasm, fuhgeddaboudit. That’s none of your business, is it?

  “Did you go over to the parish while I was up above perfecting the womanly art?”

  “Woman, I did.”

  “And?”

  “The principal—Dr. Fletcher—didn’t have time to talk with me. So I asked her when I could have an appointment, and didn’t she say, she never had time to talk to the children of the rich and famous. ‘The school,’ she informed me, ‘is exercising the fundamental option for the poor.’”

  “Bitch! . . . What did that eejit priest have to say?”

  She had leapt off the couch and the gi of her martial arts garb fell open. I gulped at the sight of her wondrous breasts behind the discipline of the bra. My fingers twitched a little.

  “Sit down, what would the kids think!”

  That was her favorite line about our occasional affection when they might see us.

  She drew the gi together and sat on the couch next to me, her body tense with fury.

  Dr. Lorraine Fletcher was a thin, not to say skinny, former nun with a Ph.D. in education from Chicago Circle and Technicolor hair which changed its hue frequently. She was an intense feminist who did not suffer fools lightly. By definition all men were fools. I wondered why, with a Ph.D., she was a principal in a Catholic grammar school.

  “The priest said that he supported any decisions that the principal made and would not discuss them with me. He supported lay authority in the schools.”

  “‘But,’ I says to him, ‘aren’t the parents laity too?’”

  “And he says?”

  “He says that he’s not afraid of the Cardinal or my brother or the school office or anyone else because the laity supports him completely. He added that it is natural and healthy that the ordinary kids resent those who get good marks or are good athletes. A little bit of bully action is good for everyone.”

  Our priest supported the principal’s theory that some of those who are not good athletes should be on the varsity teams even if that meant the stars should have to sit on the bench. There was open warfare between the coach and the principal, with the laity of course supporting the coach, save for the parents of those who weren’t good athletes. The school was, as Mr. Dooley would have said, in a state of chaos.

  “So you said?” Me wife was growing angry at me for not “putting that friggin’ amadon in his place.”

  “I said that if the bullies continued to mistreat my children, we would withdraw from the school and I would ask my sister to seek an injunction against the school.”

  “And that scared him?”

  “He said he was not afraid of Cyndi Hurley either.”

  “Then he’s a real eejit altogether!”

  “’Tis true.”

  My sister lives in the Joliet diocese west of Chicago and had scared the living daylights out of their Chancery on the subject of bullying. She had forced them to hire security guards to end violence in the yard of one of their schools.

  Julie and Fiona would take the four kids to school every morning and bring them home at noon and in the evening. Maeve had joined them recently. The kids ordered their ma to stay out of the fight. The tense days were Julie’s days off, when Nuala or I would escort the entourage. Wolfhounds love kids and like to play with them. They also can sniff hostility a mile away. So they would snarl when someone hassled one of our kids. The principal ordered us to keep the wolfhounds out of the yard. We responded by keeping them on the sidewalk. We also hired Reliable Security to keep an eye on the school. Mike Casey, former superintendent of police, managed to have someone around every day, someone so discreet that no one would suspect that he or she was an off-duty cop. I would sit at the top of the stairs in front of our house—a sky-high stoop I called it—with a powerful TV camera monitoring the school yard during recess time, the dangerous hour of the day for our ring of bullies.

  Me wife would instantly recognize the cop, of course. Fights in the school yard and nastiness to the talented committed by bullies were part of growing up. We had them in the school yard at River Forest in my day. They left me alone, because even then I was kind of big. Clumsy, but massive. I was the one to go into fights and break them up because even then I was a romantic. I also shut bullies up, unless they were girls. I refused to admit that girls could be bullies.

  In the school across the street from us, however, the bullies and begrudgers had set the tone. Some parents, especially mothers, were urging their children to stand up for their rights. That meant they should fight the favoritism teachers displayed to smart kids, “good” kids, and athletes. Ms. O’Haloran made this “resistance” a cause of social justice. Our four were smart, good, and athletes. Worse still, their parents were celebrities, and were probably rich too. They also fought back, since each of them had quick tongues and could match insult for insult. Micheal Dermot, our older son, had a reputation for being tough, so he was generally left alone. Patjo, our youngest child, was big for first grade and could (and did) take on all comers.

  “Only when they try to beat up on him,” Socra Marie, his next oldest sibling, rushed to his defense. “Don’t believe that Dr. Fletcher . . . She’s a friggin’ bitch.”

  “Socra Marie, you should never talk that way!”

  “It’s true, Ma.” Her big sister intruded in the conversation. “She makes fun of Socrie because she says it’s a pagan name.”

  “And what do you say, Socra Marie?”

  “I say that it’s an Irish name and it can’t be pagan.”

  Well, that settled that.

  “There’s a rumor among the kids that the grades in our next report cards will be distributed randomly . . . What does that mean, Da?”

  “It means that grades will not be related to performance in school.”

  “Dumb kids get As and smart kids flunk?” the Mick protested. “That’s not fair is it, Da?”

  “It’s as fair as replacing the good players on the teams with those who aren’t so good.”

  “Friggin’ bitch,” Patjo said with a happy smile. If his sister said it, he could say it too.

  “Hush, dear,” his mother said. “Nice boys and girls don’t use words like that.”

  “I’m not a nice boy, Ma. Dr. Fletcher said nice boys don’t fight back.”

  “There’s going to be a lot of trouble at the next parents’ conferences,” Nuala Anne said thoughtfully. “Grades are precious stones to parents. They’ll be furious.”

  “It will end up on the Cardinal’s desk,” I predicted. “It will be interesting to see how he handles it.”

  “Stay out of it, Ma,” Mary Anne urged. “We can take care of ourselves. Ms. Murphy says that most parents are already angry at them two polecats.”

  Ms. Murphy was Cindasue Lou McCloud Murphy from Stinkin’ Crik, West Virginia, a commander in the Yewnited States Coast Guard who lived down the street from us. She was related to Cardinal Blackie by marriage and claimed that she was a “Hard-shell Baptist Catholic.” She was some kind of spook for the Yewnited States Secret Service. Her two kids, Katiesue and Petryjack were the ages of our two youngest, and the four were inseparable friends.

  So, as we cuddled on the antique couch in the parlor, I felt that everything was under control, and I said so as I embraced my wife with some determination. She was quite content with this affection. Indeed, she was fading into one of her moods where the whole world was running out of control and poor Nuala Anne
had to reorient it.

  “Cindasue is on the case,” I said tentatively.

  “It’s bad, Dermot Michael,” she replied. “Really bad. There’s evil over across in the school. Deep, mean twisted evil. Naturally, we’ll have to fight it.”

  This was hardly the time or the place to argue with her. Just because there was evil around didn’t mean it was any of our business. Except that it was not an argument which had ever worked with her before.

  “Well,” she said with the loudest sigh of the evening, “since you’re determined to have your way with me tonight, we’d better tuck the kids into bed now or they’ll know what we’re doing.” I held her closely as we climbed the stairs. She surrendered herself into my embrace. It would be one of our solemn high lovemaking nights.

  At the head of the stairs we encountered Maeve who was patrolling the corridor to protect the small ones, an obligation that the two white giants had assumed for themselves on arrival. The hound would push her way into any room whose door was not closed. She led us first to the girls’ room. Both daughters were sleeping peacefully.

  We kissed them good night. They stirred slightly and went back to sleep. If we didn’t pay our routine visit, we would hear about it from all four in the morning.

  “Aren’t they sweet little ones, Dermot Michael? Innocents!”

  “Who can take care of themselves, thank you very much.”

  Then we turned to the boys’ room where both our sons were also sound asleep, Patjo with his baseball glove on the pillow next to him—just in case there was a pop fly he had to chase.

  Then we petted the “doggie,” who had sniffed each of the children and licked both of our faces and returned to the girls’ room. We went to our own.

  “Close the door, Dermot.”

  With great ceremony I removed her clothes.

  “I should take a shower,” she argued with little conviction. “I smell of sweat.”

  “I’ve told you that it’s an aphrodisiac.”

  “Och, Dermot, you’re a desperate man altogether and yourself setting me on fire.”

  Despite fourteen years of marriage and four pregnancies and concerts every year and mysteries resolved, me wife was more sexually attractive than when we married. She was filled with what she called a holy determination to preserve her figure. I thought at first that it was for my benefit, then I decided it was for her own self-respect, then I knew it was a combination of both in an intricate pattern, and that I would never figure out and indeed shouldn’t bother. She had also become more confident of her sexual attractiveness and of her lovemaking skills. She could drive me out of my mind just as she claimed I did her. As she removed my clothes and my temples pounded, I realized again that this she-demon from the bogs and the fog and the howling winds and the pounding sea of Connemara was quite beyond my analytic powers.