Irish Love

by Andrew M. Greeley

  Sacred Visions (editor with Michael Cassutt)

  Star Bright!

  Summer at the Lake

  White Smoke

  Younger Than Springtime

  PRAISE FOR ANDREW M. GREELEY

  “Father Greeley’s deep and obvious love for the history and culture of Ireland shines through in his latest contemporary mystery … . Greeley skillfully depicts an Ireland flushed with economic success but still carrying the scars of historic poverty.”

  —Publishers Weekly on Irish Love

  “Greeley has a remarkable way of tying all the loose ends together to create a memorable story. Along the way, he throws in commentary on racism, intolerance, and a short lesson on the Bill of Rights. Irish Eyes is an appealing installment in the ongoing story of Nuala Anne … . Once you get to know these two engaging people, you’ll find yourself wanting more. Call it the charm of the Irish.”

  —BookPage

  “The return of Nuala Anne McGrail is more than just good luck for readers. The audience knows they are in for a weird, but wonderful tale about fascinating characters. Nuala and Dermot retain their charm especially when they dote on an infant with psychic powers … . Irish Eyes will surely shine down on Mr. Greeley for another triumphant tale.”

  —BookBrowser.com

  “‘Tis a charmin’ tale that Andrew Greeley tells in his latest mystery novel, Irish Whiskey … . It’s a lively novel filled with Irish wit, interesting situations and likable people.”

  —The Chattanooga Times

  “Like the delicate handwork that its title evokes, Greeley’s Irish Lace is finely crafted, laced with compelling characters and criss-crossed with strong story lines.”

  —Savannah Morning News

  “A tale of young love and faith as modern as U2, with a cast of characters, Irish and American, that very well may open Greeley’s work to a generation of new … readers. Yet those who have followed his works in the past will find the same story-telling mastery and the same understanding of the heart.”

  —Chicago Tribune on Irish Gold

  “May be Andrew M. Greeley’s best effort yet. It has more of everything—more plot, denser character development, fresh dialogue and a more solid now story line than his previous novels … . Gives a different dimension and personal look at Irish history and its heroes and villains … A firstrate adventure story with the love interest intertwined in the mystery.”

  —Baltimore Sun on Irish Gold

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  The story of the Maamtrasna murders is a fictionalized account of actual events. Both “fictionalized” and “actual” are important words. The events in the story actually happened in the West of Ireland in 1882. A family of five were brutally murdered and a sixth member barely survived. Informers, for their own purposes, lied about who the killers were. Five of the ten men arrested were not involved in the crime in any way. Nonetheless, in as corrupt a violation of justice as one can imagine, one of these men died and four served long jail sentences. Dublin Castle, the seat of English misrule in Ireland, covered up its mistakes. An attempt by Irish Nationalist Members of Parliament to reopen the case failed, as it was doomed to. The innocent man who was executed, Myles Joyce, is one of the great Irish folk heroes of the nineteenth century. One reflects, as does the narrator of my story, that the trial was not unlike that of blacks in the South at that time or Native Americans in the West. Nor are such travesties of justice, especially the immunizing of witnesses, absent from the tactics of American prosecutors today. Father Jarlath Waldron’s wonderful book about the incident (Maamtrasna: The Murders and the Mystery. 1992. Dublin : Edmund Burke) provides a detailed historical account of the Maamtrasna story. When I picked up a copy of the book in Kenny’s Bookstore in Galway, I realized that the story would make a wonderful novel.

  History and historical fiction are necessarily not the same thing. The purpose of history is to narrate events as accurately as one can. The purpose of historical fiction is to enable a reader through the perspective of the characters in the story to feel that she or he is present at the events. Such a goal obviously requires some modification of the events. Thus the fictional characters in this novel are Edward H. Fitzpatrick, Nora Joyce, Thomas Finnucane, Martin Dempsey, and Josephine “Josie” Philbin. Moreover because of the constraints2 of the Nuala Anne series, I have moved the story from the region west of Lough Mask in the current County Mayo (though it was in Galway at the time) to the County Galway of the present and from the Archdiocese of Tuam to the Diocese of Galway. Because of this change I have had to reconstruct somewhat the geography of the story. Bishop John Kane is also fictional. The exchange between him and the Earl Spencer was in fact between Archbishop MacEvilly of Tuam and Spencer (an ancestor of the late Princess Diana). For narrative purposes I have compressed the time of events in the years after the execution.

  I have also tried to simplify the problem of the names of the people involved. The area in the region is quite properly called Joyce Country. Many families share the same name. The victims, the informers, and some of the killers were all Joyces.

  Thus the reader of this novel can believe that the main historical events actually happened. The reader must also realize that many of the historical details have been changed to fit the needs of novel writing. For precision of detail the reader must turn to Father Waldron’s book.

  I share Father Waldron’s fury at this story of corruption and injustice. However, out of respect for his work, I have taken only one sentence from his book. On page 108 he writes, “The next man called into the dock was destined to become a folk hero whose name would never die.”

  Amen to that.

  I’m also grateful to my colleague and friend Micheal McGreil S. J. (whom Nuala Anne claims as a cousin!) for his input on Maamtrasna and for the story of the 1982 cross that he attempted to place at the Joyce house.

  In the story I follow Father Waldron’s custom of using the English version of the names. However John Joyce and John Casey were surely know as Sean Joyce and Sean Casey in their own times and Myles Joyce’s Irish name was surely Molua.

  Grand Beach, Chicago,

  Autumn 1999

  1

  WE STARTED having trouble again with our oldest child, Nelliecoyne, the day we brought her little sister home from the hospital. The difficulty, however, was not sibling rivalry with poor little Socra Marie. The problem was that Nellie heard an explosion that had occurred a hundred and fourteen years ago.

  It was a lovely May day, the fourth day of May to be exact. Spring had decided that she would come to Chicago after all, against her better judgment. She had festooned our old (but rehabbed) block on Southport Avenue with delicate green lace, bright emerald lawns, and flower beds that much to their own surprise had burst into bloom.

  “Isn’t it a party for herself?” my wife said as I parked our ancient Benz in front of the house. “God timed spring this year just for our Socra Marie.”

  I knew better than to argue.

  This ditsy celebration of new life (doubtless under the patronage of St. Brigid whose cross stood watch above the door of our home) matched the exuberance that the little girl’s mother, Nuala Anne McGrail, and I felt. Against all odds we had brought this tiny girl child home where she belonged after one week short of three months in an NICU—Neonatal Intensive Care Unit.

  Do you know how it feels to hold a six-hundred-gram neonate in your arms? Try a pound of butter that’s breathing and is totally beautiful, even if she looked at the beginning like a rare species of monkey.

  “She’s a tough one,” Jane Foley the young resident in neonatology, whispered to me, as Nuala viewed her for the first time. “Some of them are pretty passive. This one is determined to live.”

  “The toughness is all on her mother’s side.”

  “Little girls,” the young woman said primly, “have a better survival rate than little boys.”

  “That’s cause they’re stronger and better,” Nuala replied promptly, “jus
t like their mothers.”

  Before they took Nuala down to the NICU, the resident had told us about our daughter’s prospects. My wife was hurting from the agonies of birth and woozy from drugs.

  “The baby is still alive, Mrs. Coyne …”

  “Mrs. Coyne is my mother-in-law. I’m Nuala.”

  “Very well, Nuala …” the young woman said a bit primly, eager to go through her routine.

  “And she’s not ‘the baby.’ She’s Socra Marie.”

  “Of course … It is very fortunate that she came at the twenty-fifth week. Her chances are so much better than if it had been the twenty-third week …”

  “What did I do wrong?”

  I started to worry. Nuala had endured a bad case of postpartum depression after our second child.

  “You didn’t do anything wrong, Mrs … ah, Nuala. Premature births usually just happen.”

  “I must have done something wrong.”

  “Stop being Irish, Nuala,” I cut in. “Dr. Foley says it wasn’t your fault. That should settle that.”

  My wife smiled faintly.

  “You’re right, Dermot Michael, as always.”

  “We’re giving her increased oxygen now to help her breathing. That’s why we had to take her away from you right after she was born.”

  Nuala nodded, though I knew she didn’t understand.

  “Not so long ago, we would have abandoned her as a miscarriage. Now there’s a ninety percent chance you’ll be able to take her home.”

  Nuala nodded dully.

  “However, we have to be candid with you. A little more than half of our premature babies have some problems in later life, sight, hearing, speech, brain disorders like cerebral palsy. Some of these problems can be easily corrected. Others are serious, lifelong problems. She seems healthy now. We can make no guarantees.”

  Nuala nodded again.

  “We are forbidden by law to take her off life support. However, if you wish we will put a DNR on her chart; that means ‘Do not resuscitate.’ You would have to sign some papers for that.”

  Dr. Foley was about the same age as Nuala, probably had a kid or two of her own.

  “Why would we want to do that?”

  “I’m a Catholic like you are, Nuala. There is no obligation to extraordinary means. What we’re doing now is certainly extraordinary. The Church is more tolerant than the government. It would permit you to request that we stop trying to keep her alive. The government won’t let us do that. But it will let us follow your orders not to resuscitate her if, say, she stops breathing. Then she would be with God.”

  My wife frowned, puzzled by the prospect that Dr. Foley was offering her. “Why in the world would we ever do that?” Nuala asked.

  “There is a chance that she won’t have much of a life.”

  Nuala cocked her eye at me. I nodded.

  “Och, sure, if God doesn’t mind, won’t we be after keeping her?”

  Dr. Foley lowered her head, to hide tears no doubt.

  “Why doesn’t that choice surprise me!”

  So we went to the NICU. Nuala immediately went to the isolete where our daughter lay, tubes poking into her body, her eyes covered to protect her from the intense light that provided warmth, her ears covered with tiny earmuffs to protect them from the noise of the NICU. Clad only in a miniature diaper she was kicking her little feet and waving her little hands to protest the tubes

  “Och, sure, Dermot Michael, isn’t the little hellion here to stay? Can’t you tell it by the way she looks at me and herself with fire in her eyes already?”

  Socra Marie opened her eyes rarely in those very early days. However, we were assured by the nurses that she knew her mother’s smell from the time in the womb. Probably knew mine too because I hung around so much.

  “Can I talk to her?”

  “Please do,” Dr. Foley said. “The more she hears your voice, the better.”

  So my wife bent over the small one and spoke to her in tender and loving Irish.

  “I don’t suppose I could sing to her?”

  “If you do it very softly, so as not to disturb the other children.”

  Socra Marie heard for the first time in her life—though surely not the last—the melody of the Connemara lullaby. She calmed down and stopped fidgeting. So did the children on either side of her. A kind of mystical grace permeated the NICU, for a moment moving us into an alternative world.

  “You can sing louder, Nuala,” Dr. Foley whispered. “All the children like it.”

  So we had a daily concert.

  Nuala Anne was aware that it would be eight weeks at least before the tiny one saw much of anything. However, having predicted her gender and her early arrival, my wife was not likely to be wrong. She almost never is.

  She accurately predicts the gender of children, not only before they were born, but before they were conceived. Nuala Anne, you see, is fey. As is our first born, Nellie. The little bishop, who knows everything, “speculates” that it is a holdover from our Neanderthal ancestors who, since they could not talk very well, needed to communicate psychically. “A neo-Neanderthal vestige,” he informs us.

  “Is Socra Marie fey?” I asked.

  “Isn’t that a terrible thing to say about this poor little tyke? She’s not fey at all, at all, dear little thing that she is, but she’s full of life and will lead all of us a merry chase, won’t you, dear little one?”

  She wept as she did often these days.

  Then she sang very softly some more snatches of the Connemara Cradle Song—in her native Irish, naturally.

  “Socra,” by the way, is pronounced Sorra. You won’t have the right of it, however, unless you speak it like your sinuses are packed tight with Galway fog. My wife’s name is pronounced Noolah, with same thick Galway mist oozing through the vowels and consonants.

  The “dear little one” led us a merry chase through the first six weeks of her life, just barely surviving crisis after crisis, laser surgery on her eyes, several resuscitations, a couple of infections. However, survive she did with grim determination.

  The first time Nuala nursed her, she devoured her mother’s milk like she expected there to be a shortage, as if perhaps to say, “Well, it’s about time!”

  We spent much of our time at the hospital, “immersing” ourselves in the care of our new daughter at the suggestion of the staff in the NICU. At first that meant simply being there with her, so she could smell us and hear us.

  “Isn’t she beautiful, Dermot Michael?” Nuala said to me the day after the little girl was born, with very little warning.

  Actually fifteen weeks early and weighing almost a pound, Socra Marie didn’t look like much of anything, under the intense light which kept her warm and the Saran Wrap which kept her moist on an open bed with the blinkers over her eyes and the earmuffs over her ears and feeding and breathing tubes in her mouth and nose. Her dark brown and paper-thin skin was covered with cream (which, we were told, you could buy at the corner drugstore). She struggled violently against the tubes.

  “The poor little thing,” Nuala said, tears streaming down her cheeks. “There she was taking her ease inside of me and all of a sudden she’s dumped in this strange place with all them aggravating things sticking inside her.”

  When Nuala is in her Irish country-girl mood a “thing” is always pronounced a “ding.” She was very much in that modality after her little daughter was born. An African-American nurse asked if she were an immigrant. I told the truth and said that she was.

  “Is all this too much for her, do you think?”

  It was a perfectly legitimate question, so I withheld my amusement.

  “Nuala Anne can cope,” I replied. “She studied at Trinity College in Dublin.”

  “They have a fine medical school there,” the nurse said, putting me in my place.

  Eventually the staff figured out that the nice girl who sang to the babies and acted as a morale officer and chaplain for all the other mothers was the singer.
/>   “Sure I do sing now and then,” my wife admitted.

  “Isn’t her name Nuala Anne?” Dr. Foley asked me.

  “Sometimes.”

  When other babies went home, Nuala Anne led the cheers. When some died, she led the weeping. Despite all the strain, she was remarkably patient with me.

  “Wife,” I said, “haven’t I hinted now and again that you’d try the patience of a saint?”

  “’Tis true, I would.”

  “’Tis not true. What is true is that you have the patience of a saint.”

  “Och, Dermot Michael,” she said, resting her head on my shoulder, “’tis not true, but ’tis dead focking brill of you to say it.”

  So we were there every day all day, with only a few time-outs to return to our home to make sure that the troops were not too restless. They were, but what could we do?

  ’Tis essential for bonding, Dermot Michael, don’t you see now?

  What did I know? Nothing, except that if you were a child of Nuala Anne’s you bonded, whether you liked the idea or not.

  There was more than a little chaos at our house for those eight weeks. We had both a nanny and a housekeeper (Ethne and Danuta respectively) but my wife is the kind of Irishwoman who has to make sure the children are properly dressed and the house properly cleaned before either of these personages appears.

  The kids were restless in the midst of the confusion, though the Mick was monumentally uninterested in his baby sister once we had assured him that she would not want to play with his Tonka trucks. Red-haired Nellie (nee Mary Anne) on the other hand was fiercely impatient with the delay in the arrival at home of her little sister. “Is she EVER going to come home?” she would demand several times each day.

  Finally, after the first month, when we had progressed from touching her lightly to holding her in our arms, we brought Nellie, solemn and serious, to St. Joe’s for her first inspection.