Hours of Gladness

by Thomas Fleming

  “We oughter change their minds about that,” Billy said. “They oughter know we’d be left thrown potatoes at the fookin’ Saracens if it wasn’t for the Bolshies.”

  “You’re not gonna change their minds, so skip it,” McGinty said. “Take my advice, skip it entirely.”

  “Did you get that message, Commander?” O’Gorman said.

  “I got the message that you need watchin’,” Kilroy said. “You ain’t off the plane four hours and you’re chasin’ snatch.”

  Someone in Sofia or Belfast had fumigated Kilroy’s brain. He had acquired the trappings, if not the essentials, of intelligence. Even more incredible, the brain-washers had convinced him he was worthy of respect. It almost made a man believe in indoctrination.

  They exchanged telephone numbers with McGinty. He told them to rely on O’Toole, the police chief at Paradise Beach. He was tough and dependable. McBride was necessary because he owned the boat. He had been recruited in Dublin on his last visit to Ireland but was, as anyone could see, a timid fish. He would have to be handled with care.

  “Right, right,” O’Gorman said, jet lag gnawing at his nerves.

  They said good-bye to McGinty and crawled into McBride’s green Cadillac. He inched out of New York in the rush-hour traffic. It took them an hour to get through a tunnel under the Hudson River. On the other side they picked up speed and were soon zooming along an overpass surrounded by decrepit houses and random church steeples. It looked like a city that God had forgotten.

  McBride lectured them on the glorious political past of this decaying metropolis, called Jersey City. Here the Irish had ruled for decades. Now it was in the hands of the Italians and the Poles. It made no sense whatsoever to O’Gorman. He gazed longingly at the soaring skyscrapers of New York on the other side of the Hudson. Ellen O’Flaherty, what I wouldn’t give for a touch of your willing thighs.

  McBride talked on. The jet lag gnawed. O’Gorman was tired of being transported. He seemed to have spent his entire life being transported from airports, train terminals, bus stations, while some foreigner talked at him, presuming he understood why the Lebanese hated Gemayel or the Libyans adored Qaddafi or the Algerians yearned for the return of Ben Bella. It all came down to boredom and transportation. Some earlier ancestor, perhaps transported in chains to eighteenth-century Georgia or Australia, must have left an antipathy for the word in his genes.

  Soon they were hurtling down an immense highway called the New Jersey Turnpike. It had six lanes on either side, and the cars and trucks drove like the devil and all his angels were crawling up their exhaust pipes. The trucks were gigantic roaring monsters that looked as if they could thunder over a car without even noticing it. McBride drove blithely beside one whose wheels were so huge, they were spinning at the height of the car’s windows.

  “Holy Jesus,” Billy said in the backseat. He was shaking all over. It was the roar of the truck motors. It was taking him back to Belfast, to the sound the Saracens made in the streets. “Holy Jesus, can we stop somewheres and get a drink?” he cried, the sweat pouring down his scrawny cheeks.

  “There’s a bar back there,” McBride said, and told Billy how to liberate it from its hiding place inside the seatback. Billy downed a whole glass of something and passed a half up to O’Gorman. It was Scotch. Good stoof, as Billy would say. They hurtled on, past a landscape full of dark factories emitting the most god-awful stench O’Gorman had ever inhaled. He put his nose in his whiskey to escape it.

  “You’d swear they forgot to bury a fookin’ British regiment,” Billy said.

  They finally escaped the stench, and after another hour of boredom on a parkway mercifully free of trucks, they purred sedately down the broad streets of Paradise Beach. The place was not quite as deserted as O’Gorman had feared it would be. There were plenty of automobiles, many of them quite expensive looking. The houses were all well painted. Prosperity had apparently come around the corner some time ago. McBride eased to a stop in front of a large, green corner house with a substantial lawn around it. “Here’s where you’ll be staying,” he said.

  Inside, he introduced them to his father-in-law, Dan Monahan, a tall, shriveled old man on a cane, almost totally bald and not a little gaga. “Always glad to see a friend from Ireland,” he said. He repeated it three times as if they were deaf or stupid. “Barbara?” he called. “Meet my daughter Barbara O’Day.”

  Out of the kitchen, wearing tan slacks and a white blouse and an apron that said Three Cheers for the Cook came a smiling redhead with a sexy swinging walk and a figure to match it. She was no youngster but neither was he, O’Gorman reminded himself. She held her head high and smiled boldly into his eyes. “I’ve always wanted to meet a real Irishman,” she said.

  Paradise Beach might be well named, after all.

  LONG LIVE THE REVOLUTION

  Braking, double-clutching, changing lanes without even a blink of a taillight, Melody Faithorne thrust the red Ferrari through the swarming rush-hour traffic at the southern end of the New Jersey Turnpike with the insouciance of a Formula 1 champion. Beside her in the death seat, Leo McBride chomped a mouthful of Maalox to dull the twinges in his aching stomach. “Take it easy,” he said. “They’ll wait for us.”

  Melody ignored him. She shot around a sixteen-wheeler, hurtled past a Dodge van crammed with middle-aged commuters, and cut back two lanes to pass another sixteen-wheeler on the right. The trucker gave her a blast of his horn. Melody dangled her delicate wrist out the window and replied with an upturned middle finger.

  Leo McBride gazed ruefully at his wife. She was wearing one of her sixties specials, torn blue jeans and a faded denim workshirt. Her flower-petal face was devoid of makeup. Yet the glossy blond hair, the breasts pressing against the shirt, stirred desire in his groin.

  “Let’s get one thing straight,” Leo said. “No fooling around with this guy.”

  “Black Dick O’Gorman?”

  “Yeah. Didn’t you tell me he was famous for his sex appeal?”

  “I don’t remember saying any such thing.”

  “Maybe I read it in the CIA report on him.”

  “Now you’re getting me interested.”

  “Melody. I mean it. I won’t let you embarrass me in front of my parents, my relatives. It’s a capital no-no. I’m serious.”

  “Do I complain when you prowl?”

  “I haven’t prowled since Jennifer what’s her name in London—two years ago.”

  “Poor dear. I’m using you up? Is that your complaint?”

  “It’s a nice complaint,” Leo ruefully admitted.

  “There’s something else a lot more important to get straight: deniability. I want you to drill it into your clunk-headed relatives’ heads. They never heard a word from us about this gambit. In no way, shape, or form can it be linked to the senator.”

  “But it’s okay to ruin the congressman?” Leo snarled.

  “Of course not. He’s out of the loop too.”

  “Gee, thanks.”

  Melody worked for Senator Teddy Kennedy. At times Leo wondered if she did more than work for him. She was one of the girls who had been partying on Chappaquiddick Island the night the senator drove Mary Jo Kopechne off a bridge and himself into becoming a political pariah outside Massachusetts. Leo had tried more than once to get Melody to tell him what had really happened on that historic night. But her lips were sealed, even to her husband, even when she was sloshed or high.

  Melody’s status as a Chappy girl guaranteed her a job for life in the Kennedy apparatus. That suited her perfectly. Having graduated first in her class from Wellesley in 1969 and first again from Yale Law in 1972, she had absolute confidence in her destiny. She was born to raise hell, publicly and privately. The sixties zinged in her bloodstream and she was still determined to make the rest of America get the revolutionary message—or else.

  Leo McBride had met Melody at Yale Law, to which he had fled to escape sudden death in Vietnam. In the hyper-temperature of her acrobatic bed
and neo-Marxist head, his summa cum laude Georgetown diploma had turned into Silly Putty. For a while Leo was only one among a circle of lovers. But his persistence and a certain ability to cajole her into the wisdom of playing the political game in order to accomplish revolutionary goals had won Melody’s grudging attention.

  Melody was even more impressed when Leo landed a job in Congressman James Mullen’s office with his grandfather’s help and swiftly became Mullen’s chief of staff. Along with screen-star good looks, Leo had a natural ability to flatter and persuade. He was also a drudge—a combination that virtually guaranteed success on Capitol Hill.

  When Mullen rose to the chairmanship of the powerful House Appropriations Committee, Melody decided an entente should be sealed with a wedding ring. Henceforth, if Senator Kennedy or one of his friends wanted anything from Washington’s cornucopia of political pork, Leo saw that it got pushed through the committee, no matter how malodorous it was. The senator frequently used the connection to persuade other solons into voting his way on the liberals’ agenda. Mullen, a moderate Democratic, seldom objected.

  As his reward, Leo McBride got Melody every night—theoretically. But he had signed aboard an open marriage, and he soon discovered that Melody was more inclined to play the field than spend much bed time with her husband. At first he had retaliated with liaisons of his own, but his Irish-American psyche found little satisfaction in these one-and-two-night stands—and he was further wilted to discover that Melody did not give a damn.

  Only one thing mattered to Melody—the oncoming triumph of the world revolution against capitalism, which would usher in an era that guaranteed abundance, gender equality, and the pursuit of sexual freedom for everyone. She was undeterred and undiscouraged by the election of Ronald Reagan. She dismissed him as a dotard and an airhead and remained ferociously committed to supporting what she called “vanguard movements” everywhere. This was not difficult, working within the aura of the Kennedy name. If she managed to get the word liberal into Senator Ted’s head, he was ready to endorse almost anything.

  “You don’t have to worry about anyone from Paradise Beach shooting off their mouths,” Leo said. “They’re used to keeping their traps shut. It’s part of the code.”

  “Oh, I forgot. The wonderful code. The existence of honor among your ancestral thieves.”

  Pain gyrated in Leo’s stomach. At times he grew weary of Melody’s contempt for Irish-Americans and their politics. From her Mayflower-descended viewpoint, the Irish were nothing but a tribe of crooks. The quicker their remnants were expunged from the nation’s politics, the better. She carefully concealed this opinion from Senator Kennedy, of course. His Harvard diploma and his blind devotion to the tenets of liberalism gave him a temporary exemption from extinction. But she made no secret of her generic detestation when she was alone with her husband.

  More than once, Leo had tried to convince Melody that the old Democratic Party and its political machines were not all bad. Their ability to steal elections had put John F. Kennedy in the White House. Their solidarity had provided a haven, a sense of community, in the urban wilderness. Melody had dismissed his argument with a sneer. She had called him a sentimental recidivist, an atavist.

  “Now that we’re into rule making, here’s one for you,” Leo said. “No booze. You tend to shoot off your mouth too much after three drinks.”

  “Yes, dear.”

  One of the more unpleasant surprises of his marriage was Melody’s fondness for hard stuff. Her Boston-born mother and father were two of the worst drunks Leo had ever met. It explained why they barely had a nickel left in their trust funds. At the moment they were living aboard a cabin cruiser in Fort Lauderdale—the last piece of property they owned.

  “I mean it, Melody!”

  “I promise.”

  Encouraged by this concession, Leo could not resist renewing his criticism of this latest collaboration with the IRA: “I’m still not enthusiastic about giving these micks surface-to-air missiles.”

  Melody had put the deal together through her contacts with the IRA’s American front groups and clandestine Cuban agents operating out of their UN mission in New York. She had persuaded Leo to approach his father and arrange a meeting with an IRA spokesman during his annual pilgrimage to Ireland. Leo had reassured Desmond McBride that loaning one of his boats was a noble, even a patriotic, gesture of support for a good cause.

  Too late, Leo learned that the scale of the operation was far beyond the usual few hundred rifles and grenades and ammunition that IRA sympathizers bought from gun merchants—many of whom turned out to be FBI agents in disguise.

  “Why not?”

  “I’m afraid they’ll use them on civilian planes.”

  “As long as they’re British, who cares?”

  “Your lack of interest in history is one of your primary flaws, Ms. Faithorne. Did you ever hear of the Lusitania? When the Germans sank that ship in 1915, they killed a hundred and twenty-eight Americans—and turned the United States against them. The same thing could happen if there were Americans on any British plane the IRA shot down.”

  “The IRA will issue a warning to stay off British planes. Any Americans who choose to fly on them will be doing so at their own risk.”

  “The Germans issued a warning like that just before the Lusitania sailed.”

  “Oh, go fuck yourself and your historical research. Nobody gives a damn what happened seventy years ago.”

  Melody pressed the pedal to the metal and the Ferrari accelerated to a 110 in sixty seconds. She knew exactly how to unravel Leo. He chewed another Maalox and struggled for some usually unreachable level of calm.

  “I’ve been doing research on the history of the IRA. This habit of blowing people up is an Irish-American idea. They picked it up from German anarchists in Chicago in the 1880s. When they went to Ireland and proposed it to John O’Leary, founder of the Irish Republican Army, he said there were some things a man must not do for his country.”

  “Are you related to him?” Melody said. “That sounds like one of your noble-sounding wimpish ideas.”

  “The Irish-Americans ignored him and started blowing up London with nitroglycerin and dynamite. It was a public relations disaster. When they attacked the House of Commons, the U.S. Senate passed a resolution condemning them by a vote of sixty-one to one.”

  “So? Wimps obviously predominated in those days.”

  “They lost the support of most of the Irish-Americans too.”

  Melody zoomed past a half dozen sedans plodding along at the legal fifty-five. “The IRA doesn’t need mass support,” she said. “It’s a vanguard organization. All they need is the backing of a handful of wealthy or politically well-connected people to disrupt the British repression machine. Once that’s accomplished, they’ll devote their energies to leading the Irish people.”

  “Stuff,” Leo said. “Whenever they run a candidate in the south, he gets about two percent of the vote.”

  “That’s because the capitalist government of the south hasn’t been disrupted—yet. They’ll get to that as soon as they acquire power in the north.”

  “Bullshit. I’m beginning to think your revolutionary dreams are the political equivalent of smoking dope.”

  “You son of a bitch!”

  With the speedometer at 105, Melody slammed on the brakes. The Ferrari fishtailed all over the highway. The stench of burning rubber poured into the interior as the tires virtually disintegrated. Leo writhed in his seat as sudden death unmanned him.

  They wound up sideways in the breakdown lane. Through a haze of terror, Leo heard Melody screaming, “What I care about doesn’t matter, is that it? I’m just another hysterical woman, is that it? A stupid cunt who gets her way on her back, is that it? Your great male brain, packed with historical bullshit, should be our censor and guide, is that it?”

  “No—nothing of the sort,” Leo mumbled.

  Tears were streaming down Melody’s china-doll face. In some part of Leo’s br
ain beneath the level on which he had been trying to operate, he knew this was a performance, the ultimate resort by which Melody always got her way. But he was helpless to resist it. For the thousandth and first time, he surrendered.

  “You know I love you. You know—I’m just as committed,” he said. “But giving these things some thought—”

  “Thought. No one ever got anywhere on thought. Acts are what win wars. Acts are what change the course of history.”

  What about old Karl Marx? He never performed an act in his entire life. Unless you call taking another book off the shelf at the British Museum an act. The subterranean Leo was still there. But he was helpless, extinguished, if not quite extinct, by the combination of pity and pathos and sexual promise that was engulfing him.

  Leo got out and examined the Ferrari’s tires. They had lost some treads but their air was intact. They resumed their journey to Paradise Beach at a more subdued pace.

  “The next exit,” Leo said.

  Melody spun the Ferrari into the exit lane, passing a pickup truck on the right. Leo handed her the money for the toll and they roared down the long, straight road through the pines at a swift but not quite suicidal pace. In twenty minutes, the 240-horsepower motor purred to a stop in front of Sunny Dan’s faded-green mansion. Leo left their bags in the car—they were sleeping at his parents’ house—and followed Melody up the steps.

  Inside, they were greeted by a party in progress. Sunny Dan was in his BarcaLounger, a brown bourbon and water in his hand. In the corner sat Leo’s first cousin Mick, looking morose as usual. A nice combination of guilt and family solidarity had prompted Leo to offer his services to expunge Mick’s dishonorable discharge from his service record. He was a victim of the cover-your-ass psychology that had permeated the officer corps in Vietnam. They had let him take the rap for the brutal policy of repression and murder that characterized America’s so-called pacification program. But Mick had told Leo to get lost. Mick had transferred to the Marine Corps the stoic pride and sense of solidarity that had made the old Irish political organizations so potent.