Hours of Gladness

by Thomas Fleming

It was so terrible to see the knotted tangle of hate and profit on Hughie’s face, to see the countless times that Ireland had been betrayed by these twin motives recapitulated before her eyes. “How could you do this without consulting me?” she cried.

  “Consult you?” he shouted. “Is that all you’ve got to say? Not a word of shame, of pleading for forgiveness?”

  “It happened before you came near me,” she cried. “When I was in need of comfort and the lying bastard knew just how to offer it. Why didn’t you put it out of your mind? It had nothing to do with you.”

  “Is that so? A man finds out his wife’s a whore and it has nothing to do with him?”

  “I don’t deserve that name and I won’t let you use it. And I won’t let you do this thing tomorrow. Oh, Shewy, Shewy, can’t you see what you’re doing? You’re killing us all. If I don’t die from the grief of it, I’ll die and so will you and the children in a year or two or ten. It doesn’t matter where we go. They’ll find us, and all the time while we wait, there’ll be the terror shriveling our hearts. For God’s sake don’t do it, Hughie.”

  “They’ll never find us. The FBI has a program. They change your name and give you a whole new identity.”

  “Dear God, you’ll risk your wife and children and your own life on the strength of those kinds of promises? Look at the South Vietnamese. Where are they, trusting to American promises? They’re using you, Hughie, using you as truly as if you were taking British gold.”

  “I’ll not only risk all that, I’ll win the game and so will you and like it. That’s the price you can pay if you want my forgiveness for O’Gorman.”

  “I won’t. I won’t ask your forgiveness for that. I’ll leave you. I’ll take the children and leave you! Tonight!”

  “You try that and I’ll arrange for you to spend some time in jail along with O’Gorman. I’ll take the children and you’ll never find me or them.”

  “Oh, you bastard. You bastard.”

  She picked up a Waterford glass vase he had given her for Christmas and threw it at him. It smashed against the wall near his head. He rushed at her swinging his fists. She crashed to the ground, her mouth bloody, and fled sobbing to the bedroom. Raging, he pounded on the door and demanded her surrender, but she refused to unlock it.

  The children came home and he fed them. She heard him explaining that Mother was sick. At nine o’clock he put them to bed and knocked on the door. This time she opened it. “I’m going,” he said. “I’ve got to dress.”

  He put on rough clothes, corduroy pants and a checked shirt. To her relief, he did not try to kiss and make up. “You’ll see I’m right when you think it over,” he said. “We couldn’t have gone on with the thing eating away at me. This will end it.”

  It was hopeless. He could not see the way his greed and fear of failure in America had twisted his mind. All he knew was the satisfaction of his revenge. She lay on the bed, her head turned away, saying nothing until his car drove down the block. Then Nora began to think about life after the bomb.

  There was only one way to protect herself and the children. She had to turn him in. She had to betray Hughie. Otherwise she would be considered as guilty as he was. Even if they gave her the benefit of the doubt, there was always the chance that the men who came to kill Hughie would be careless. The car bomb might blow up her and the children instead of Hughie. The bullets sprayed in the dining room window might kill all of them.

  There was only one way to save her children’s lives. In the back of her dresser drawer, behind the sexy black underwear Hughie liked her to wear to parties so he could take it off when they got home, she found the telephone number the IRA Council had given her before she left Belfast. “Call this if you ever need help,” the colonel who had brought it to her said.

  They were telling her that they had no great opinion of Hughie. They were telling her that she was a daughter of the IRA, one of their own, and they would do everything in their power to assist her and her children if she asked them. All by itself, the telephone number made it impossible to let Hughie betray Dick O’Gorman, no matter how much he deserved it.

  She dialed the number, which was in New York. A woman said, “The judge isn’t home.”

  “My name is Nora McGinty. I have a message for him. I may not be able to call him again. Can you give it to him?”

  “Yes.”

  “My husband, Hugh McGinty, is working for the FBI.”

  She hung up and sat there. Without the bomb it was so quiet it seemed as if the whole world had stopped breathing. Nora turned on the television and stared at it for the rest of the night, seeing nothing.

  COME ALL YE

  On April 1, Patrolman Mick O’Day stood in the center of the intersection of Ocean and Atlantic Avenues, directing traffic. It was a beautiful spring day but he was not enjoying it. He was not enjoying much of anything these days.

  “Great!” he yelled when a Toyota Celica liftback driven by some bald-headed jerk from the suburbs stalled in the middle of the intersection. A glance in the window revealed that the hotshot had bought the five-speed manual gearbox instead of the three-speed automatic, and he was unable to cope with the notches in the first-second and second-third shifts.

  “Get an automatic, you asshole,” Mick bellowed into the closed window, causing the hotshot to slam the accelerator and send the motor roaring to its 2410 rpm cruising speed. He lurched out of the intersection and Mick blew his whistle and tried to get some movement into a line of cars stretching back to the causeway. Each had fluttering green flags on the fenders to celebrate the Sons of the Shamrock’s annual feis. Not until July 4 would they have this many cars in Paradise Beach again. By that time, Mick hoped to be far far away from his hometown.

  When he went off duty at four, he was going to take off his uniform for the last time. At midnight he would make a final installment on the debt he owed Bill O’Toole. He was going to help smuggle dope and guns into the country. It was a beautiful way to end his policeman’s career. It fit the ugly pattern that had taken shape in Vietnam. Someone or something must have put a curse on him a long time ago.

  Mick had become a cop because Uncle Bill O’Toole and others told him that if he kept his nose clean for five years, he would be able to join the FBI or maybe get back in the marines. That turned out to be malarkey. But he had told himself he would go on being a good cop and maybe make sergeant and eventually forget Nam. In spite of his back talk to his mother, he was not opposed on principle to finding a wife and settling down to a nice boring life by the sea.

  Then Trai and Phac had arrived and Nam became impossible to forget. It kept unreeling, night after night. Now it was mixed up with Joey Zaccaro and Tommy Giordano’s We’re runnin’ this fuckin’ state now and the British SIS man. Tyrone Power and the pint-size killer he had brought from Belfast no longer trusted Mick because he had refused to stay there and watch them torture the Englishman. He could not explain that it had triggered memories of watching Phac work on captured VC.

  In Nam he had never seen much point in torturing people because most of the time they died before the information they gave you could be checked out. Only with Trai’s father had it really worked. He had told them exactly where to find and riddle the famous Le Quan Chien, but Phac hanged the old man anyway.

  “Move it, move it, assholes,” Mick shouted to the cars as they turned right onto Ocean Avenue and headed for the feis on the football field beside the high school. On top of everything was Jackie Chasen’s death in Father Hart’s bedroom. The coroner said it was accidental, but why were Jackie’s hands and feet tied to the bed? It looked like murder to Mick. But no one was interested in his ideas. Everyone, including Chief O’Toole, was a lot happier with them dead.

  The priest did not bother Mick, although there was a certain amount of shock in the idea of someone murdering a man who was, theoretically at least, close to God. Father Hart’s obnoxious ignorance about Vietnam more or less canceled that emotion. But Jackie was another matter. He h
ad almost loved her. She was like him, messed up at an early age. She had paid her bitter dues and was trying to make a fresh start. You had to grieve for a woman you had held in your arms, especially when she died an agonizing death.

  Only a scumbag like Tommy Giordano would kill a woman that way. It could not have been Tyrone Power or Kilroy. No one with Irish blood could do that to a woman and a priest. Maybe he would buy himself some weaponry with his final paycheck and wait in the woods on the Top’s estate until his limousine came down that curving drive to the main road. It would be simple to shoot out the tires and hit the gas tank with a grenade launcher. Tommy would find out how it felt to die at a thousand degrees Fahrenheit.

  By 10 A.M. the traffic had dissolved and there were only random arrivals, who could make the turn with the light on automatic. Mick drove down Ocean Avenue to the feis, as ordered by Chief O’Toole. The entire Paradise Beach police force was supposed to spend the day there. Beer would flow like Niagara, and with a lot of first-generation Irish from different counties, that often meant trouble. It was amazing how much guys from County Mayo disliked guys from County Cork and vice versa. No wonder the British had been able to divide and conquer them for the last four hundred years.

  Who should come staggering at him the minute he stepped onto the football field but Kilroy. He was drunk and looking for an argument. “They tell me you played fookin’ football here marine,” he said. “Scored more fookin’ points than God. How come y’dawn’t have the guts to make that fookin’ SIS man squeal?”

  Mick ignored him. That only made Kilroy madder. “I dunno what’s it with the marines. Maybe the fookin’ VC cut off your fookin’ balls. Is that how they run you out of Vietnam? We’re gonna run the fookin’ British out of Ireland the same way. We don’t give a fook if the Rooshians and the Bulgarries and everyone else in the world turns quitter, we’ll do it alone!”

  Mick kept walking. Who should he meet, a few yards away in the crowd, but the Professor. “I guess I didn’t do you any favor, making that little IRA man your enemy,” Oxenford said.

  “I can handle him,” Mick said, stifling an impulse to tell the Professor the real reason why Billy was on his back—and why Mick was finally going to take the Professor’s advice and get out of Paradise Beach. Maybe Pops Oxenford would explain it to his son eventually.

  “I’m surprised you haven’t had a visit from the FBI about him,” the Professor said. “He and his smoothie friend sure as hell aren’t hanging around here to promote Irish culture.”

  “Maybe the big chief’s heard something. He didn’t mention it to me,” Mick said.

  Strolling past was Mick’s mother and her sister Marie O’Toole. His mother was wearing a new green dress; her red hair was all fluffy and shining. She was looking around, an eager smile on her face, as if the feis was a world’s fair.

  “I wish I could figure out your mother’s secret,” Oxenford said. “She’s as beautiful as she was when you were a kid.”

  “She’s in love with the Irishman O’Gorman,” Mick said. “It’s put her in a great mood. She’s stopped bugging me about getting married.”

  “Has her husband—your father—died?”

  “Nope. He was at Grandpa’s funeral.”

  “What’s going on? I thought the Catholic Church didn’t let her do that.”

  “I guess she’s decided to tell the Church to get lost. She’s talking about going to California with him.”

  “I’ll be damned,” Oxenford said. “I would have been at your house with a bouquet every night if I’d known …”

  “I thought Oxenfords never got married.”

  “The smart ones didn’t. But I’m one of the dumb ones. I’ve always … been very fond of your mother.”

  Mick was amazed. He seldom heard the Professor talk so personally about anything. “You’ve missed the boat. Look.”

  O’Gorman had emerged from the crowd. Marie O’Toole did a vanishing act. The Irishman was holding Mick’s mother’s hand, smiling, whispering something in her ear. She laughed and pretended to slap him.

  “I guess I have,” Oxenford said, turning away as if the sight was too painful for him to look at. He blundered through the crowd and headed down Ocean Avenue toward the Golden Shamrock. Mick could only shake his head in amazement.

  Ten minutes later, Mick found O’Gorman talking to Bill O’Toole, resplendent in his gold-braided trousers and coat with the shoulder boards of stars on it. “You better do something about Kilroy,” Mick said. “He’s mouthing off to the whole goddamn feis about the SIS guy.”

  O’Gorman muttered a curse and dove into the crowd in search of his wonder boy.

  “Be at the dock at eleven-thirty tonight,” Bill O’Toole said. “You pick up Phac.”

  “Yeah.”

  “I know it’s a mess. But we gotta go through with it. Don’t you fink out on me like Desmond.”

  “What’s wrong with him?”

  “He’s havin’ dizzy spells. We gotta line up another captain for the Enterprise, fast. Got any ideas? He’s gotta know the bay and the Mullica River inside out in the dark. And he’s gotta have a little larceny in his heart.”

  “Only guy around who adds up that way is the Professor. He learned the river from his old man. When it comes to breaking the law, he’s still a Piney.”

  “I’ll talk to him.”

  Mick strolled toward the main tent, from which the music of fiddlers and fifers was squealing. He stood in the entrance, watching a bunch of kids step-dancing on the stage. They wore Irish-peasant costumes, the girls in white aprons and long green skirts, the boys in green velvet pants that buttoned over their shoulders like overalls. Pretty dumb dancing, Mick decided. They had tried to get him onto the stage at the first feis and he had refused. But it was lively music. He found his feet shifting to the beat.

  “Oh, Mick, isn’t this nice?”

  He turned to find himself staring down at Trai and Suong. She was wearing an ao dai, white silk pants, and a long silk skirt. He had seen women wearing this outfit in Saigon, but he had never seen one in Binh Nghai. Trai had put a little makeup on her face. Her long black hair gleamed in the sun. She looked incredibly beautiful.

  “Do you like my outfit?” she said in Vietnamese. “Suong gave it to me for my birthday. He spent his own money that he won for a prize in an essay contest at school.”

  “You look great,” Mick said.

  “I want to thank you for helping me with Father Hart. He sent his friend Father McAvoy. He was so understanding. Is he here today?”

  “No. He … went back to Ireland.”

  “Oh. It’s so terrible about Father Hart. I can’t believe it.”

  “Yeah.”

  “There was something strange about Father McAvoy. He was very kind. But I thought he was troubled. Perhaps he knew about Father Hart and the woman.”

  “Maybe,” Mick said.

  “Mother says this reminds her of market day in Quang Tri City when she was a girl,” Suong said. “Except there aren’t any fire walkers or sword swallowers.”

  “They’ll be here next year,” Mick said.

  He had to get away from Trai. In some ways it was worse seeing her happy than it was seeing her sad. The happiness started everything unreeling again.

  “Gotta get to work,” he said with a forced grin. “Gotta keep these Irish lugs from slugging each other. Tell Phac I’ll pick him up for that special job tonight around eleven o’clock.

  Mick strolled down the midway, where the usual pitchmen were selling games of chance. Wherever possible, they gave their scams an Irish flavor. People were invited to throw baseballs at little stuffed leprechauns, for instance. The pitchmen didn’t look very Irish, but Mick bought a round and knocked three leprechauns off the top shelf. He won a stuffed dinosaur and gave it to a little blond girl in the crowd.

  At the southern end of the football field, on a stage where the goal posts usually stood, a pipe band started playing “The Kerry Dancers.” Mick could hear Sunny
Dan’s husky baritone.

  Oh the days of the Kerry dancers!

  Oh the ring of the piper’s tune!

  Oh for one of those hours of gladness

  Gone! alas, like our youth, too soon.

  Suddenly Mick was back in Binh Nghai kidding with Trai and her girlfriend Missy Thinh. He was giving candy to the village kids, letting them crawl all over him, as he sat in front of Trai’s house. He was in the fort selecting the night’s patrols, solving quarrels, calming fears. He was gliding along the village lanes and across the rice paddies with death out there in the dark, but that did not matter, that did not change what he felt inside: gladness. He was the protector, guarding these defenseless people in their fragile huts from midnight assassins.

  Gladness. Those were his hours of gladness. Gone like his youth too soon. Gone into a beer belly that would eventually bulge like Bill O’Toole’s if he stayed around here. Gone into endless midnight hours in search of imaginary prowlers, into arresting drunks on the boardwalk, into beery arguments about the Giants and the Jets in the Golden Shamrock, into this ugly deal to turn smuggler to rescue Bill O’Toole from his gambling debts.

  Jesus. Was this part of his punishment, part of the dishonorable discharge for those deaths in the fort? The dishonor, the humiliation, went on and on? Wasn’t there someplace, sometime, when God said enough? You’ve paid it off, you can try feeling glad again somewhere, somehow?

  A hand on his shoulder. It was Bill O’Toole with Nick Perella, the consigliere of the Giordano family. “He’s here with the money,” O’Toole said. “I asked him about the Chasen thing. He says they had nothin’ to do with it. He swears on his mother’s grave.”

  Mick stared at the crafty Sicilian face, the glittering eyes. “So who did?”

  “I think it went just like the coroner said it did. They were drunk and playin’ sex games and passed out with a cigarette burnin’. Set themselves on fire,” O’Toole said.

  Uncle Bill was lying. He was shaken by what had happened in St. Augustine’s rectory. He had covered it up with some help from the county coroner, another Monahan relative. Someone had murdered Jackie and Father Hart. Mick was still inclined to bet it was Tommy the Top evening the score for Joey Zaccaro. The priest gave them a beautiful cover story.