Irish Love

by Andrew M. Greeley

  “Well, isn’t the poor thing pregnant?”

  Nelliecoyne tugged at my leg, demanding her turn for a skyride.

  “Fiona is going to have three white puppies, two girl puppies and one boy puppy.”

  “Is she now?” I said, gently replacing her brother on the floor and lifting her up.

  “Yes, she is, Daddy.”

  So that was that. What did I know?

  “Dermot, would you ever take your shower and dress now? I’d like to have the room to meself to make me preparations.”

  “Doesn’t Nuala have a super dress, Mr. Coyne? Sure, you’ll be loving it?”

  “Bought at a sale!” my wife assured me, as though I complained about her buying habits—which I never had. Nuala was a stylish dresser because she was lovely and had good taste. Since money couldn’t buy either, she bought off-the-rack dresses that had been marked down and transformed them with her own personal elegance.

  “Like every good Irish male, I do what I’m told.”

  The three women giggled. Because they knew it was true.

  You will note that, to Ethne, my wife was Nuala Anne and I was Mr. Coyne. That’s what comes of being over thirty.

  In the master bedroom, I went immediately to the corner where herself played with her watercolors. I recoiled at the bloody horror on her easel—a charnel house with six torn and broken human bodies, three women, two boys, and an adult man, the remnants of their faces twisted in agony, their limbs broken, their skulls bashed in. They had died slow, agonizing, tortured deaths, at the end almost pleading that their suffering be ended.

  I rushed into the bathroom and vomited.

  Then I carefully cleaned up the mess and opened the window so that the Atlantic breezes would exorcise the smell of my sickness.

  Was that what Nuala had seen up on the mountain? And Nelliecoyne too?

  I sat on the edge of the bed trembling. Nuala’s paintings were usually dramatic but peaceful. Yet the imagery of this one must be deeply buried in her soul.

  Small wonder that she needed Prozac.

  What was I supposed to do now?

  Probably tomorrow morning I should pay a visit to Jack Lane, as everyone called the local priest, and ask some questions about the hovels on the mountain.

  I was sweating, a cold, sinister sweat, as though a demon had temporarily invaded my soul. We should go home tomorrow and find a psychiatrist for my wife. The gynecologist had said that she didn’t need therapy, that she was basically a healthy woman. No healthy woman could carry such a hell in her brain.

  GET A HOLD OF YOURSELF, YOU FOCKING AMADON. YOU SAW HER DOWNSTAIRS WITH YOUR BRATS. DID SHE SEEM CRAZY?

  She had not. She seemed fine, the Nuala of O’Neill’s pub in the shadow of Trinity College. My chill faded. If she wanted to talk about it, I would. Otherwise … She must have realized that I would see the painting and didn’t seem worried about it.

  I should take a nice warm shower and get dressed for dinner.

  “Well, you’ve spent enough time in there, haven’t you?” my wife greeted me when I emerged from the shower. “Would you be thinking we have all night?”

  “Sorry,” I murmured.

  “I need the room to meself, so I can look healthy and happy for me ma and da.”

  “I’ll be out of here in a couple of minutes.”

  “Did you like me painting?”

  “It’s very powerful.”

  “That’s what happened up there, Dermot Michael.”

  She tossed her robe at me, entered the shower, and closed the door.

  I turned on the telly to see pictures of our bungalow, which the RTE was informing the world was right next to the destroyed home of T.D. Colm MacManus. Then MacManus himself appeared, a round, nervous man with darting eyes.

  “I call upon the Garda to find the criminals immediately,” he said in a voice quivering with not altogether convincing outrage. This is not Belfast. We cannot tolerate such violence in Ireland. Our invaluable tourist trade is bound to suffer in the wake of this wanton destruction.”

  Somehow his sputtering, self-righteous anger reminded me of the redneck Republicans in the American Congress.

  Still, he had reason to be angry, didn’t he?

  Later, having assisted Ethne in putting the exhausted small ones to bed and telling her to study hard for her big test the next day, I sat in the parlor and sipped a small jar (as they call it in Ireland) of Jameson’s as I waited for Nuala to emerge for our trip over to Ashford. She’d insist on driving, so the “jar” wouldn’t hurt.

  As my nerves and my queasy stomach settled down, my worries increased. What the hell was I supposed to do with my wife?

  MAYBE JUST LEAVE HER ALONE.

  “Maybe.”

  Then the Adversary said nothing, most unusual for him. Or her. Sometimes these days the Adversary sounds like my wife.

  Too much talent … Those hints of crow’s-feet around her eyes … We’re both getting older … Meself over thirty.

  Maybe I should let her recover at her own pace … As long as she continues to take the pills … She’s fine with the kids … Maybe she should be a painter instead of a singer … But the horror in that painting!

  “Well,” she said, appearing in the room, “and yourself sipping on a jar! Trying to recover from me painting, which shocks you more than it does me, are you now?”

  “Bracing for the shock of you in that super dress. Would I need a couple of jars for that?”

  She blushed, delighted as a kid on her first date that she had pleased her man.

  “Will I be able to fool me ma and me pa that I’m a healthy young woman again?”

  Her dress was red with a gold belt. It fell to just above her knees and in that respect was modest by present standards. However a slit reached at least to midthigh and the thin straps holding the dress in place presided over a touch of cleavage that was tasteful indeed, but left no question about the splendor of her breasts.

  Gulp!

  Hands on hips, she said, “You haven’t answered me question.”

  “Well, Annie and Gerry will marvel at how beautiful you are, though they won’t be surprised. As for fooling the good Annie, you haven’t been able to do that since the day you were born.”

  I kissed her forehead and put my arm around her.

  “’Tis true enough,” she sighed. “The problem is that I don’t know whether I’m healthy again.”

  “Healthy enough to be a spectacular bedmate.”

  “Oh, THAT! Dermot Michael, I’d have to be dead and buried for ten years not to fock with you every time I get a chance. Don’t you know all me secrets? … Come along, now, we don’t want to be late.”

  In the car as she drove, I continued the discussion.

  “I don’t know any of your secrets, Nuala Anne. You’re pure mystery to me. Wonderful, but always a surprise.”

  “Go along with you, Dermot Michael Coyne! When I’m with you, don’t I feel naked even if I’m wearing all me clothes and me not knowing at all, at all, what’s going on in that big, thick skull of yours?”

  “Oh.”

  “Except that you love me something terrible, a lot more than I deserve.”

  “A lot less …”

  “Och, give over, Dermot Michael!”

  To change the subject I told her about the interview with the young man from RTE radio.

  “Blatherskite!”

  “Shy young man. I suspect that our Ethne knows him.”

  “Well, if she approves of him, that’s different. Anyway, didn’t you give all the right answers!”

  “I’m glad to hear it … And how does our daughter know that the lads set the bomb down the road.”

  “She doesn’t even know who the lads are, Dermot love. Doesn’t she pick it up from me?”

  “Pick it up?”

  “Sure, when that terrible explosion happened, didn’t I think that it might be the lads and didn’t she hear what I thought?”

  “She heard what you though
t?”

  “Just like me and me Aunt Aggie when I was a small one … Isn’t that how she knows about Fiona’s puppies?”

  “You know how many pups and then tell her?”

  “Dermot Michael Coyne! You simply don’t understand! I don’t tell her anything. Sometimes she hears my thoughts. ’Tis nothing to worry about.”

  The hell it isn’t.

  THIS SCARES ME TOO, BOYO.

  “So we really don’t, about the pups?”

  She sighed in protest.

  “Of course we do! Three white ones, two of them bitches. I know that and I always know those things. The poor sweet child hears it from me.”

  “When will the pups arrive?”

  “Give over Dermot Michael! Did I know when me own small ones were to be born? Do I choose stocks by this shite? It’s mostly useless when it isn’t scary like up there in the Twelve Bens this morning.”

  “Oh … Still, you’d bet me about herself’s offspring.”

  “I would … Dana, Deirdre, and Dano!”

  “Do you still read Aunt Aggie’s thoughts and herself far away in New Zealand?”

  “On the odd day, mostly when she wants me ma to call her.”

  I had a horrible thought.

  “Does she know what we were doing in bed this afternoon?”

  “You’re a friggin’ amadon, Dermot Michael Coyne. She’s only a little girl. She knows her ma and her da love one another and isn’t that enough?”

  I decided to shut up and watch the setting sun paint the Innishboffin and the other offshore islands rose and gold and silver and then ermine.

  I touched my wife’s thigh. She sighed complacently.

  IF YOU WEREN’T SUCH A WORRIER, YOU’D BE CONTENT WITH THE PLEASURES OF THE DAY, WHICH ARE MORE THAN YOU DESERVE ALTOGETHER.

  4

  “DID SOMETHING terrible happen up there in the mountains behind Letterfrack?” I asked Gerroid McGrail over dessert—Baileys Irish Cream soufflé (a concession to the Yanks who, even in prosperous Ireland, were still an important part of the trade at Ashford Castle).

  I had learned from Irish politicians in Chicago that one reserved serious matters for dessert.

  Need I say that my wife created a sensation when she walked into the lounge of Ashford, a place of which it was said that it was the kind of castle God would have created if he had as much money as a Philadelphia millionaire. Every eye in the place turned in her direction. Most of them, of whichever gender, remained fixed on her in the lounge and the dining room. Though her only jewelry, in addition to her “sinfully large” engagement ring—which she had never tried to give back—were silver earrings and a silver pendant, she glittered as though she was awash in diamonds. “Isn’t it remarkable, Dermot Michael, what a Prozac pill and a good afternoon ride will do for a woman?” The glitter, however, was in her archduchess smile, which she could turn on with professional ease when she was of a mind to do so.

  “Will herself agree to sit at the table with Galway peasants like ourselves, Dermot Coyne?” Annie McGrail asked me as she hugged me.

  “Peasants like ourselves,” Gerroid agreed.

  Technically, the elder McGrails were indeed peasants, as was their aristocratic daughter. When I first met them in what I thought were the preliminary stages of our courtship (and Nuala thought, correctly, were the definitive stages), they lived in a stone cottage only marginally better than the ruins we had visited that morning up in the mountain. Like their ancestors for a thousand years, they eked out a living from the harsh Connemara soil and had sent their children to the ends of the earth in search of a better life. Now, courtesy of the European Union and Ireland’s incredible prosperity, they lived in a new home and enjoyed a middle-class lifestyle. They fit with ease into the affluence of Ashford Castle.

  “It’s the telly, isn’t it now, Dermot Coyne? We know how to act like we belong in this place from watching posh people like me daughter on the telly.”

  “On the telly.”

  “’Tis not, woman,” I replied. “Class has nothing to do with income.”

  Nuala Anne was a clone of her mother, who was, at sixty or so, a lovely woman, though with a lot more wisdom and common sense than her daughter.

  Nuala had begun a conversation with them in Irish as I ordered the drinks.

  “Now, child,” her mother had said gently, “talk English or your poor husband will think we’re talking about him.”

  Me wife turned crimson.

  “Who else would we be talking about, and himself not civilized enough to learn the language?”

  “Whom else,” I said, causing another surge of crimson.

  “Good on you, Dermot Coyne!”

  A couple of days every week, we would drive over to Carraroe or the McGrails would join us at Renvyle, allegedly so that the grandparents could spend time with the Mick and Nelliecoyne, but even more to provide time for Nuala to spend with her mother. Later that evening Annie would whisper to me, “The poor thing is a lot better, Dermot. She just needs more time.”

  This was an uncharacteristically direct statement for a West of Ireland woman. I relaxed. A little …

  “Up on Diamond Hill,” Nuala clarified my request for information.

  “Aye, on Diamond Hill …”

  Both her parents were quiet for a moment. I knew what was coming, a typically indirect, elusive, and opaque conversation. It was the way the Galway Irish normally talk when asked about something even mildly unpleasant.

  “You were up there, were you?”

  “We were.”

  “At the ruins, was it now?”

  “It was.”

  “Maamtrasna.”

  “Is that what it was called?” Nuala asked.

  No direct answers.

  “Some say,” Gerroid spoke slowly, “that there were terrible murders up there during the Land League wars.”

  “When the tenants weren’t paying the rent,” Annie added. “Back in the time of Michael Davitt and your man Parnell.”

  “Some say that maybe it was a secret society thing,” her husband continued after a long pause. “Others think maybe it was about the stealing of sheep.”

  “No one talks about it anymore,” Nuala said. “I’ve never heard a word.”

  “Heard a word.”

  Another long pause.

  “They say the English hung the wrong man and sent some innocent men to jail.”

  “Perhaps betrayed by their neighbors.”

  More silence.

  “’Tis said that there was a big fight about it in the English parliament.”

  Yet more silence.

  “It was all a long time ago.”

  That was more information than I had expected.

  After another pause, Annie sighed the perfect West of Ireland sigh. “Those things should be forgotten, shouldn’t they? Hasn’t the world changed a lot since then?

  “Since then.”

  I did not disagree. We all knew, however, that the Irish are not a people disposed to easy forgetfulness.

  At the table next to us, a little man with silver hair and the angry face of an offended leprechaun was expostulating on the subject of Colm MacManus, member of the Dáil.

  “It’s about time someone did something about him. He’s worse than a gombeen man. He’s a crook. There isn’t a shady deal in the Dail that he doesn’t have his fingers in. He runs Connemara like Daley runs Chicago. Too bad he wasn’t in the house. He has too much power altogether!”

  A gombeen man was a crooked businessman.

  My fists clenched at the comparison.

  “Sean O’Cuiv,” Annie McGrail informed us, “is a bit of a gombeen man himself. He and your man have been fighting for years, and himself a land developer.”

  “Land developer.”

  “He ought not to be so public about it,” I said. “Not today anyway.”

  “Won’t the Gardai suspect him anyway?”

  “Anyway.”

  Then a handsome young couple approac
hed us shyly and asked Nuala something in Irish as the man handed her an Ashford Castle menu.

  She enveloped them in her smile and extended her hand to me for a pen.

  “Me ma says I have to speak English when I’m with this lug. Is it your honeymoon now?”

  She signed the menu with a big flourish, much unlike her usual accountant’s script.

  “’Tis,” they sighed, both of them blushing.

  “Isn’t it a grand place for a honeymoon and meself spending my own here with me first husband.”

  “And last,” I added.

  We all laughed.

  “We love your songs.”

  “We hope you’ll sing again.”

  “You never can tell. Right now I have two small ones to take care of.”

  They thanked her and bashfully bowed away.

  She must have signed a dozen more menus with equal grace.

  “You were very nice to those people, Nuala love,” I said to her as she drove us back to Renvyle.

  “They don’t bother me, Dermot Michael,” she sighed. “Besides, I didn’t want to humiliate me parents.”

  “And themselves teaching you always to be polite to strangers.”

  “Doesn’t the Lord himself come to us as a stranger?”

  “And occasionally as a lover too?”

  “Sure, doesn’t that happen once or twice?”

  “Your parents told us more than I thought they would about that place … .”

  “Maamtrasna.”

  “I assume that they know even more.”

  “They won’t tell us any more. Isn’t it one of those things that the local people don’t want to remember but will never forget? Sure, there’s probably a few descendants around still, though most of the little villages on the mountains up there have disappeared. You’ll have to talk to the parish priest.”

  I had thought of that myself. Now it was a command performance.

  As we neared Renvyle, the touch of fog drifted off. On our left the Twelve Bens loomed over us and the ocean glowed placidly on our right, a nighttime postcard from the Country Galway.

  “You can see him in the morning,” Nuala commented. “Remember we’re going water-skiing in the afternoon.”

  “In that ocean?”

  “There are some perfectly calm coves and won’t we be wearing wet suits?”