Hours of Gladness

by Thomas Fleming

  When Hague’s hegemony collapsed in the early 1950s, Sunny Dan had accumulated an astonishing number of these bonds. He took them south to Paradise Beach, where they enabled him to remain the chieftain and assured his daughters and sons-in-law that their future was rosy and that even their somewhat constricted present was capable of being gladdened by sudden infusions of cash.

  Still, for Dan and his daughters and their spouses, a canker never ceased to gnaw in their well-fed bellies. Puny Paradise Beach could never be Eden for them. Nevermore could they roll up the killer majorities that had brought presidents and senators slavering to their doorsteps. But for their children—or some of their children—Paradise came close to living up to its extravagant name.

  I am thinking now of Mick in the glorious summers of his prime. He would come floating into the Golden Shamrock around midnight and tell me about his latest conquest. It was the sixties, 1967 to be exact, and all the girlies were eager to discover the Experience in those BHA (Before Herpes & AIDS) days. I had played some part in freeing Mick from his compulsive Catholicism, enabling him to accept their eager offers.

  My God, what a beautiful creature he was in those days. He sat on that elongated green lifeguard’s chair at Havens Beach, the blond hair cascading to his shoulders, muscles rippling on his golden brown torso. He emitted sexual attraction with the intensity of an atom smasher spitting particles into a centrifuge. Nobody knew they were responding to something elemental, a piece of history emerging from the void with the same inconsistency atoms display to our baffled physicists.

  Mick was a warrior, spawned by His Incomprehensibility in our supposedly modern world for reasons we cannot begin to understand. Maybe by the time I finish this story we will understand a few of them. But I doubt it.

  One night in 1970 just before Mick went into the Marines, I hypnotized him in the Golden Shamrock when we were all drunk. I regressed him through several irrelevant lives, which included at least two deaths by starvation in Irish famines, back back into the Celtic mists where the Firbolg and the Tuatha da Danaan wandered and chanted and fought. He wailed a song in a language that no one in New Jersey had ever heard before. He crouched by a nonexistent peat fire to warm his hands and backside.

  Then he stripped off his clothes and wound the bartender’s rag around his neck in a remarkable approximation of a Celtic torc. The light of ancient battle fury danced across his face. Both hands gripped the hilt of an invisible sword, and he hacked and thrust and whirled it around his head exactly as his ancestors had wielded the weapon at Arretium in 285 B.C. where they annihilated a Roman legion.

  Think about that while I relapse into the third person and get back into the story.

  HOME THOUGHTS FROM ABROAD

  As usual, the Aer Lingus 747 took the better part of forever to get its hulking immensity into the air. Dick O’Gorman felt sweat gluing his Taiwan-made undershirt to his Oxford Street shirt as he gazed down on Ireland through the inevitable gray drizzle. A line from William Butler Yeats caromed through his brain: What shall I do for pretty girls, now that my old bawd is dead? O’Gorman took a quart of Jameson from his flight bag, filled a paper cup to the brim with the brown whiskey of his native land, and drank it down in one swift swallow.

  O’Gorman filled another cup and handed it to a scrawny, red-haired man in the seat next to him. He had an ugly set of bare patches in his hair, like mange on a cat. Billy Kilroy imitated the older man’s dispatch of the Jameson and held out the cup for another round. O’Gorman filled it reluctantly. But he filled it. “We’re on duty, you know,” he said.

  “Fook dooty,” Billy said in the nasal whine of the Belfast proletariat. In the dangerous alleys of the Bogside, Billy was known as the Eye, for his ability to put a bullet through the slit of a Saracen tank with an ArmaLite rifle or in a man’s head with a Zastava pistol.

  It was going to be a desolate two weeks with this sod on his hands, O’Gorman thought gloomily. The IRA’s chief of staff was still at it, making his life miserable.

  The pilot began droning his message of phony reassurance to the passengers, telling them that they were trapped in his infernal machine for the next five and a half hours, during which they would hurtle over the wintry Atlantic at forty thousand feet with a tailwind pushing their ground speed to 620 miles per hour. Kilroy held out his cup again. O’Gorman filled it. The quicker the little back-talker shut his fabulous eyes, the better, as far as O’Gorman was concerned. But the liquor only seemed to make Billy garrulous.

  “Why the fook we gawn to the States?”

  “That’s where the money is,” O’Gorman said.

  “I’d rather go to Sofia.”

  “Sofia is no longer an ally. The Russians have sold out them—and us—to extract their tits from the Afghanistan wringer.”

  This enormous fact did not even register on Billy’s small brain. The staggering changes in the globe’s political landscape since Russia’s disastrous plunge into Afghanistan and the election of Ronald Reagan to the American presidency meant nothing to him. The world barely existed beyond the borders of Belfast, and even there he saw things through the telescopic sight of an ArmaLite. Compared to Billy and his kind, men with tunnel vision were broad-minded.

  “Last time I was in Sofia, they gimmy this Bulgarian bitch. Christ, she had an ass as wide as a Saracen, but she made up for it with her mouth. Anything like that in America?”

  “In American you have to persuade them.”

  “Fook that.” Billy held out his cup again.

  O’Gorman poured himself another drink too and pressed the oversize button that released his seatback. He sipped his whiskey reflectively, out of Billy’s line of conversational fire.

  Dick O’Gorman was good at persuading women—Irish, English, American, French, Italian. Even an Arab or two when he’d jetted to Beirut to promote an alliance between the Palestine Liberation Front and the Irish Republican Army. But he was not good at persuading the people who knew him best, the members of the IRA’s ruling council. They went right on bombing and maiming and assassinating enemies real and imaginary. After thirty-six years he was thoroughly sick of the whole business.

  More and more O’Gorman relived those months in 1972 when he and William Whitemore, the British secretary of state for Northern Ireland, had met almost every day to negotiate a settlement that would have made the IRA a powerful force in Irish politics, north and south. But the stony-eyed men around the chief of staff had found the mere idea of talking to a British politician treasonous. O’Gorman and Whitemore had been within days of an agreement when the orders to break the truce went up to Belfast and the bombs began exploding, the snipers’ bullets whining again.

  Now it was too late to negotiate. The world had made one of its incomprehensible turns. The governments that had pledged their allegiance to socialism, to the classless society of O’Gorman’s youthful dreams, were floundering, while the resurgent capitalists gloated in London and New York, Bonn and Tokyo.

  He should have quit in 1972 and gone to England with Moira and told the whole disgusting story to the newspapers. It would have put the IRA out of business in a month. Instead he let Moira go alone and sing her pathetic solo to the Brits. Sweet little Moira with her burning idealist’s eyes and overheated thighs. The chief of staff himself had made a pass at her, the horny puritanical bastard, but she had belonged to him. To Black Dick O’Gorman with the belt of scars across his belly where a burst from a Sten gun had hit him during the first battle of Belfast in 1956.

  He could still remember the pain that had raged in his body until whiskey and hypodermic needles quenched it. But it was not as acute as the pain that had coruscated through his mind in 1972 when his chance to become a political leader of international stature had vanished because his fellow revolutionaries had no ideas in their thick skulls beyond the one enunciated by the glorious, brainless Easter martyrs of 1916, the gun and the gun’s best friend, death.

  What should a man with a belly full of Sten-gun sc
ars do about this discovery? Moira knew the answer. Walk. Tell the truth and stop the killing. But Moira did not understand Deirdre. His dear Deirdre of the Sorrows. It was she and her heroic lineage of IRA heroes who had seduced Richard O’Gorman, son of an English mother and a neutralist father, into the patriot game.

  Since 1972, he had persisted in returning to Deirdre again and again for expiation and forgiveness. She was the only fragment of meaning he had left, his only link with mythical, mystical Ireland, the Kathleen Mavourneen of his student days. Perhaps he confessed his infidelities to her to avoid thinking about the other things on his conscience. The shopgirls blinded by the bombs on Drumlin Road. The informers kneecapped with Black & Decker drills.

  O’Gorman remembered the chief of staff weeping, almost hysterical, in 1969, when he was told that they had shot two rural policeman, the first of hundreds. “What will happen to their wives and children?” he’d cried. That was the moment when Black Dick O’Gorman had decided the Englishman (as they secretly called him) was not tough enough to be chief of staff of the Provisional IRA. After all, what had he done besides spend eight years in a British jug for getting caught stealing guns from a military school? He had changed his name to the Gaelic spelling and learned their mother tongue to pass the time behind bars. But he still spoke Gaelic with an English accent.

  At the next meeting of the council, Black Dick had made his move (after killing a bottle of Jameson to steady his nerves). He had proposed Joe Cahill, a man who had actually seen some fighting in Belfast, as chief of staff. But the vote had gone humiliatingly against him. The Englishman swiftly concluded he must never show emotion again—above all to “the Politician”—the nickname he had instantly fastened on Dick O’Gorman, his enemy unto death.

  “Hey, come on, where’s the stoof?” muttered Billy Kilroy, his cup empty once more.

  O’Gorman refilled it again, resenting the way this little Bogside twit talked to him.

  They told him at headquarters to treat Billy like a wired can of sodium chlorate, the marvelously potent explosive the Russians had once shipped them from Prague. “Tip him the wrong way and he could go off in your face,” Joe Cahill had warned his old friend.

  Bad nerves were one thing. Billy’s obnoxious assumption of superiority was another matter. Had they sent him along to mind the Politician the way the Russians used to send keepers when anyone about whom they had the slightest doubt went abroad? That would be a hell of a thing. Black Dick O’Gorman, fifty-four-year-old veteran of the first Belfast offensive, former member of the Irish Revolutionary Army Council (he was ousted by the chief of staff the day after the 1972 truce blew up). A man of his distinction guarded by a violent child like Billy Kilroy? Could the chief stoop that low in his determination to destroy him?

  It was hardly the same war in Belfast these days. So many of the old faces were gone, caught by Protestant death squads in their houses or cars or walking home from a pub. The Prods had learned to imitate the IRA’s tactics with incredible skill and savagery. Not really surprising. They were Irish too.

  “How we gawn to get the money?” Billy muttered.

  “Cocaine,” O’Gorman said. “But we won’t have to touch it. The Americans are going to handle it for us. The Cubans have got it all lined up. All we’ve got to do is stand around and look heroic for the sods.”

  “Didn’t know they snorted mooch in Booston,” Kilroy said. For him, like many Irish his age, the United States and Boston were synonymous.

  “We’re not going anywhere near Boston,” O’Gorman snapped. “Don’t you remember what you did in Boston?”

  They had made the mistake of sending Billy to Boston four years ago, alone. He had gotten drunk and tried to rape the forty-five-year-old maiden daughter of the president of the Ancient Order of Hibernians. The Americans had poured him on a plane singing the “Internationale.”

  “I dawn’t remember a bloody thing about that trip,” Billy said defiantly.

  “We’re going to New Jersey. Down on the seashore. The Irish-Americans are still thick down there.”

  Billy’s head drooped. In five minutes he was snoring. A small recompense for wasting a half bottle of whiskey on him. O’Gorman contemplated the mange patches on Billy’s head. Joe Cahill said Billy got them from scratching his head too much. It looked as if the sod had clawed the hair out by the roots.

  Suddenly Billy’s legs shot straight out. His feet rammed into the seat in front of him, practically sending the occupant flying headlong into the cockpit. Billy was rigid. The sweat was pouring off him like a waterfall. O’Gorman could hear Billy’s teeth grinding. His eyes were bulging under his squeezed lids. “Ah, naw,” he was whimpering. “Naw. Naw. Naw.”

  Above the rear of the rammed seat rose the large gray head of an outraged Irish-American tourist. “What the hell is going on?” he rumbled.

  “I’m so sorry,” O’Gorman said. “My son here is having a spell. We’re taking him to the States to see the doctors.”

  THERE WILL ALWAYS BE AN ENGLAND

  Through a fine mist, Captain Arthur Littlejohn of Her Majesty’s Royal Yorkshire Rifles swung his red Triumph onto the ancient bridge over the river Ouse. Ahead of him were the sloping roofs of York, capital of his native province. In the center loomed the immense bulk of York Minster, the great cathedral, visible witness to God’s transcendence.

  For five centuries, Littlejohns had walked these twisting streets, worshiped in York Minster before it was lost to the Protestants, drunk toasts to the cleverness and wit of themselves and fellow Yorkshiremen beneath the splendid timberwork of the Merchant Adventurers Hall. Captain Littlejohn never missed an opportunity to visit York.

  In a few minutes he was parking his car on the quiet side street a few steps from the regiment’s Officers’ House. New recruits were being drilled by a sharp-tongued sergeant on the smooth bricks of the parade ground formed by the House and the barracks. Upstairs in the anteroom, old friends were sipping port before the huge fireplace. A surge of nostalgia swept over Captain Littlejohn. For a moment he felt as if he had died and were returning to the scenes of his former life.

  “Littlejohn, what a nice surprise,” said Colonel Richard Hadley, holding out a slim, manicured hand. Simultaneously his cool gray eyes were studying the captain for signs of strain. No one spent a year in Northern Ireland without some strain.

  “I’ve got a bit of leave. Thought I’d drop in on the family,” Littlejohn said. “Just driving by so …”

  “Of course, of course. How was it over there in Belfast?”

  “Rum. But very enjoyable in the end. I found intelligence a fascinating business.”

  “That’s more than I ever found it. But I was always on the receiving end. Always telling me there were twenty thousand bloody wogs out there in the jungle when it turned out to be twenty.”

  The colonel had helped suppress the communist insurrection in Malaya.

  “We’ve gotten much better at it,” Littlejohn said. “It’s really the leading edge of the army these days.”

  “Oh? You sound like you’ve all but defected to them, old chap.”

  “They want me to stay on. At least for another assignment. I hope you won’t object.”

  “Excitement. If I was your age, I’d probably feel the same way. Where will you be going?”

  “America.”

  “Really? I don’t imagine you can exercise certain privileges over there, can you?”

  Colonel Hadley was recalling in fairly precise detail the request he had received from army headquarters. They wanted him to recommend one of his officers for detached duty in Northern Ireland. The brisk ADC at headquarters had added that the assignment would include an M-5 classification, a license to kill the enemy in ways that would at best be unorthodox and at worst might be illegal. The colonel had chosen Littlejohn because he was a Catholic and presumably had at least a glimmer of what was going on in an Irishman’s head. He was also the best marksman in the regiment.

  “The For
eign Office is working on a clearance,” Littlejohn said.

  Colonel Hadley felt a flicker of alarm. Something was wrong with the expression on Littlejohn’s face. Was he starting to like shooting Irishmen in the middle of the night? That was not good for the service—or for Captain Littlejohn. But what could the colonel do about it? The icing was already on the cake. He was being given a taste in this visit—and all he was supposed to do was smack his lips and murmur, “Delicious.”

  An hour later, warmed by a Scotch and soda and some easygoing banter with old friends in the anteroom, Captain Littlejohn eased his Triumph to a stop in front of Hazelewood Hall. His mother was saying good-bye to a clump of Americans who had just completed their tour. There were about twenty of them, all middle-aged or older. Littlejohn saw nothing in their lumpy faces but vulgarity and self-satisfaction. Every time he thought of his mother shepherding these gawkers through rooms where he had eaten and slept and dreamt of a future dedicated to God’s glory, Littlejohn had to suppress a terrific rage.

  With impeccable grace, his mother kissed him on the cheek and introduced him to the tourists. She was looking older, but her face remained rich in the plangent beauty that had inspired his youth. Her tawny hair was still streaked with reddish gold, her lovely neck was as unlined as a girl’s. In another time, she would have sat for Gainsborough or Sargent. But the barbarians who controlled the art world today were not interested in beauty.

  “Arthur’s been on duty in Northern Ireland,” she said.