Irish Love

by Andrew M. Greeley

  By this time, Socra Marie was living in the isolete as they call an incubator these days and, wrapped in several layers of blankets, breathing on her own. She also looked pretty much like a human baby with a lovely face and her mother’s fair white skin.

  “She’s cute, Ma, but isn’t she terrible small altogether?”

  “You were small once too, me darlin’ girl.”

  “Not that small, was I?”

  “Well, not quite.”

  “We’ll have to take real good care of her, so she’ll grow up big and strong, won’t we?”

  Nellie was echoing her mother.

  “We will …”

  Nellie and Nuala sighed in unison.

  Her little sister opened her eyes then and, as she usually did, surveyed her immediate environment with intense curiosity. She seemed satisfied with Nuala and myself. Then her eyes widened as she took in Nellie’s bright red hair. She paused, and then closed her eyes.

  “She likes my hair,” Nellie informed us. “I think we can keep her!”

  Socra Marie opened her eyes again and pondered her parents and then, satisfied, closed them and went back to sleep. We touched her and caressed her for a while and spoke softly to her.

  “She likes me too,” Nellie whispered. “We’re going to be great friends.”

  “I’m sure she does,” Nuala Anne assured her firstborn.

  “Can I touch her?” Nellie asked the nurse who was hovering over us—sensing immediately who the authority figure in the group was.

  “Very gently, my dear,” said the nurse, somewhat dubiously.

  So our elder daughter touched her little sister’s neck and murmured softly, “I love you, Socra Marie. Please come home and live with us soon. I’ll take good care of you.”

  Everyone in the room was suddenly in tears.

  With most big sisters that would have meant that Nellie would be the boss. With this sweet, loving, and very strange little kid with the haunting Irish eyes, that was by no means certain.

  Our two snow-white Irish wolfhounds, Fiona and her daughter Maeveen, who did not like extra disorder in their domain, of which they assumed they were the absolute rulers, were also upset by the frantic life of our family during those long months.

  Two?

  Yes, two. My wife had read somewhere that dogs need other dogs to play with. Wolfhounds’ notion of playing is wrestling and pretending to fight with one another and rolling around on the floor with human kids. Though they are gentle and intelligent dogs, they are also very big. Their games occupy a lot of space.

  Our child could both see and hear, but we were warned that there were other possible developmental risks, though the odds were better than nine out of ten that she would survive. Cerebral palsy, for example, was always a possibility, as were recurrent lung problems. Moreover, it would take perhaps two years before her development would catch up with that of term babies, though there was a wide variation in that projection. Preemies progressed at different rates, sometimes similar and sometimes different, from those of term children.

  Yet those weeks in the hospital, in which days and nights blurred into a continuous stream and the times when we weren’t there seemed unreal, when the blue lights and the spanking clean walls and corridors of the hospital were like another planet, in which we belonged and the rest of the world was only a fantasy, were like a long retreat in which wonder and surprise and above all life swirled around us like a choir of softly singing angels.

  One night, I woke up from the chair in which I had been snoozing to see Nuala, her face alight with a supernatural glow, bending over Socra Marie, touching her lightly and gently moving her fingers back and forth over her little arm. For a moment, just a moment, the whole universe stood still and the love from that touch leaped out of the crib scene and enveloped me. The whole world stood still. I saw how everything fit together and how the three of us, the little holy family in the neonate room, were all part of it and that all things would be well, all manner of things would be well. As I slowly eased down from the mountain I had climbed, I told myself that this was the kind of moment of grace out of which poetry was born, indeed out of which poetry ought to be born.

  “You are awake are you now, Dermot Michael, and yourself should be home getting a good night’s sleep and walking the dogs and getting a good run in the morning.”

  “I am,” I admitted. “ … Nuala, do you think God loves us the way you love Socra Marie at this moment? Does he touch us the way you touch her?”

  “Och, that’s a strange question, Dermot Michael, and yourself knowing that there’s no point in being God unless you can do them kind of things and himself sending Jesus to tell us that, poor dear man.”

  Lofty praise for Jesus. Rarely was I referred to as a “poor dear man,” the highest praise an Irishwoman can bestow on a member of the inferior gender.

  In the confusion after Socra Marie’s birth and Nuala’s inability to understand why her baby was taken away from her so quickly, we forgot about Baptism. Later, she stirred out of a drugged sleep and murmured something to me about “our daughter.”

  “She’s alive, Nuala dear. They’re giving her oxygen to help her breathe. She’ll be fine.”

  She nodded. “I know that, Dermot. Still we should baptize her just to be sure.”

  Neither of us believed in Limbo. We both figured that God wanted to save everyone and would find a way to do so, no matter what happened.

  However, we also believed in “just to be sure.”

  I dashed down to the neonate room. A nurse stood guard over our little girl, who was struggling against the tubes in her mouth and nose.

  “Baptism …” I stammered.

  “No problem,” the nurse said. “I poured water on her head and said the words as soon as she came in, not that God didn’t love her anyway … Isn’t she beautiful, Mr. McGrail?”

  “She sure is!”

  It was a story I resolved that I would tell many times to my second daughter as she grew up. Like her mother she would doubtless agree that I was Mr. McGrail.

  “You shouldn’t worry,” a senior doctor later told us, “if she doesn’t walk till she’s two and doesn’t talk much till she’s three.”

  Nuala raised her eyes skeptically.

  “When she does begin to talk, won’t she talk up a storm just like her poor mother?”

  “She might also have a hard time learning how to sit up and to crawl. You’ll have to be patient with her, you know.”

  “Sure, won’t she have to be patient with us!”

  “You understand then, that you’re taking a risk with this child?”

  “Didn’t we take a risk in bringing her into the world? And don’t we all take risks in being born?”

  “I understand and I admire your decisions. I merely want to make it clear that you may have to walk long miles with her.”

  “Aren’t we Irish great walkers, Doctor?”

  He sighed and looked at his pen.

  “It wasn’t all that many years ago that we made no effort to save children your little girl’s size. We lacked the tools, the medication, the understanding. Some older men in the profession were very dubious about the progress we had made in neonatology. They said we saved children at tremendous cost only to cause many of them to live in pain and suffering for themselves and their family or to prolong hope when there were no grounds. Sometimes that is true even today, most of the time it is not. You’re too young to remember the case of Patrick Kennedy, the President’s third child. He died of a lung syndrome of the sort which your daughter faced. Now we have a medication that deals with the problem effectively in most cases, as it did in hers. The whole point”—he smiled self-consciously—“is to tell you that you are taking a gamble, a not unreasonable gamble, but a gamble nevertheless.”

  “Och, aren’t we Irish the greatest gamblers in all the world, Doctor?”

  We all laughed.

  I favored the gamble at least as much as my wife did.

 
“Hasn’t God been very good to us, Dermot Michael?” she said later as she rearranged the pink knitted blanket over Socra Marie and tilted the matching cap to a flattering angle.

  (The knitted garments were given to the hospital by a group of elderly Jewish women who knitted them for the neonates. Nuala of course insisted on visiting them.)

  “He has,” I agreed.

  “Hasn’t he blessed us with three fine, healthy children and made the doctors smart enough to invent medicine to keep the third one alive and wouldn’t poor Caroline Kennedy have a brother alive today if they had the same medicines forty years ago?”

  “He has,” I agreed again, wondering if the family death instinct would have extended to Patrick Kennedy if he had lived to maturity.

  “So we should thank God for giving us a little challenge as well as a little girl?”

  “We should … Nuala, my love, when you said you knew that Socra Marie would live, was that fey knowledge or mother knowledge?”

  “Sure, Dermot, isn’t that an eejit question? How can there be any difference?”

  Anyway, despite two occasions when we were told that Socra Marie would not last the night, we were finally bringing her home in triumph.

  “’Tis a brilliant day altogether, isn’t it, Dermot Michael, and ourselves with this wonderful little girl child right here on Southport Avenue?”

  “It is a lovely day,” I agreed as I helped herself up the stairs to the entrance of our home, on the second floor like all houses built in the good old days before Chicago had modestly hidden its swampy self under many tons of earth.

  “Didn’t I mean the day behind the day?”

  I glanced at her radiantly happy face. I was never quite sure about her excursions into Irish mysticism, in which she claimed (pretended? actually experienced?) some immediate contact with the ultimate reality—the mountain behind the mountain, the lake behind the lake, the Dermot behind the Dermot. In the last case, I was informed, that the “Dermot behind Dermot” was someone “you might call God, if you were of such a mind.”

  I was not sure God would be flattered and said so. She laughed, and said, “sure, he wouldn’t mind at all, at all.”

  Did she really emerge from Plato’s cave and walk in the world of the really real? Or was she speaking in metaphors, something that the Irish are genetically programmed to do?

  When I asked her once she had sighed loudly (the West of Ireland sigh, which at first sounded like an acute asthma attack) and informed me that, sure, she didn’t see the difference.

  “Was that thunder, Dermot Michael?” she asked me as we reached the door of the house.

  “I don’t think so … Maybe some angelic Bodhran drum to celebrate the homecoming of Socra Marie!”

  “Hush, Dermot love. Isn’t it bad luck to be blaspheming when you’re bringing a newborn into the house?”

  The Irish, I am convinced, make up their superstitions about bad luck to fit the circumstances.

  The door swung open before I could unlock it. There were cheers and shouts and music playing on the stereo—Nuala Anne singing the Connemara Cradle Song.

  In addition to Ethne and Danuta, my mother and father (a nurse/doctor combination who understandably wanted to form a discreet diagnosis of their new granddaughter) Cindasue McCloud Murphy, a Coast Guard officer and wife of Peter Murphy, and her ten-month-old daughter Katiesue were there to proclaim the tiny heroine. The neonate of the hour ignored the noise and continued to sleep, even when the two massive white canines tentatively pushed their way into the crowd of admirers, tails wagging, to sniff this new human puppy. Obviously they approved: they curled up on the floor in front of Nuala Anne on the couch as a kind of protective honor guard.

  The only one who was less than ecstatic about this triumphant homecoming was our blond middle child, who continued to play with his Tonka trucks, his diaper hanging askew over his rear end as it usually did.

  “No one more narcissistic,” I murmured to my wife next to me on the couch, “then a two-year-old boy.”

  “Lest it be a thirty-two-year-old boy!”

  Nuala Anne made my life difficult by pointing out whenever possible that I was “way over thirty” while, at twenty-seven, she was “nowhere near thirty.”

  It was the generally held opinion (even by me) that the Mick was much like his father—big, good-looking, and generally useless. The comparison caused the thunderclouds to gather on Nuala’s face and her lips to tighten.

  “I’ll not have anyone at all, at all saying things like that about my poor husband,” she’d snap. Everyone would retreat from the comparison, afraid to ask how exactly I was different from my firstborn son.

  Danuta produced a big cake, my mom offered a huge plate of cookies, and my dad began pouring the champagne. Socra Marie for her part slept on.

  Her big sister stared at her intently.

  “As the grandfather of this little miracle,” my father began as he lifted a champagne flute, “I propose the first toast to Socra Marie Coyne, the small girl with indomitable will.”

  We all toasted the baby, who responded by continuing to sleep.

  “I’ll talk to her other grandparents over in Carraroe tonight,” Dad went on, “and tell them they’ll have to come over soon so they can be as proud of her as her American grandmother and I are.”

  “And her great-grandmother too,” Nuala whispered in my ear.

  Nuala claimed a special relationship with Nell Pat Malone, even though my grandmother had died before I had met Nuala.

  “Wasn’t she the one who brought us together?”

  I wouldn’t have put it—or anything else—past Ma, as I had always called Nell Pat.

  “Bernie and Jackie are coming,” Nellie announced confidently, and strode toward the door to admit these favorites, French musicians who played Celtic music, into the house.

  “I didn’t hear the bell just now,” Cindasue said to me with a puzzled frown. “Does that thar’ chile have hearing like to a mountain polecat?”

  “Heard them on the steps, I suppose.”

  We had become so accustomed Nellie’s anticipations that we hardly noticed them.

  “Dear little Mary Anne,” her preschool teacher, a woman of no more than twenty-three summers, had said. “is so sensitive and thoughtful. If one of the children, is unhappy she notices it and immediately consoles the child. She leads by sensitivity and sympathy, normally pretty rare in a four-year-old.”

  “Maybe she’s manipulating them, isn’t she?” Nuala said grimly, unwilling, like so many of our kind, to believe praise of our children (and equally willing to be irate in the absence of praise).

  “Oh, no, Mrs. Coyne,” The teacher, unaware of the game, replied, “Mary Anne is simply adorable.”

  “Hmf,” she muttered proudly to me as we walked across Southport, “the little brat has fooled them altogether.”

  “At least they haven’t noticed she’s fey.”

  “Aren’t they afraid to?”

  “What does Nellie think of it?”

  “Why should she be any different, poor little thing, than I was at that age? She thinks everyone is that way.”

  Marie-Bernadette and Jacques-Yves joined the admiring throng at our house the day we brought Socra Marie home.

  “Chérie,” my wife asked, “did you notice any thunder when you were coming over?”

  “Mais non, was not the day très belle?”

  “Don’t worry, Ma,” Nellie piped up. “It was only some men setting off a bomb down at the Haymarket.”

  No one else seemed to notice this outrageous claim. I slipped away into our library and took down a book of Chicago history. It was as I feared. The Haymarket riot was a hundred and fourteen years ago. To the day.

  My wife had heard the noise. Her daughter knew all about it.

  I shivered.

  Back in the parlor, Socra Marie had opened her eyes, reducing the room to silence. She did not cry out in protest against the crowd and the noise they made. Rather she ca
refully and thoughtfully (or so it seemed to me) surveyed the room. First of all she found her mother, who was holding her in her arms, then her eyes discovered Nellie’s red hair, of which she seemed to approve, then she detected the Daddy shape, though she didn’t know the word. I rated a quick glance. Then, she saw the two huge dogs. She closed her eyes as if she couldn’t believe that this new world in which she had been plunged without prior consultation could possibly contain such creatures. Then she opened them again, as if reconsidering Fiona and Maeveen. Then, satisfied, she closed her eyes and went back to sleep.

  “Well, she didn’t reject us anyway,” my wife said, kissing her daughter’s forehead. “She knows she’s home.”

  “Can I hold her, Mommy, just for a minute? I won’t drop her.”

  “It’s good crack, Nellie. Just keep the blankets around her. She likes being warm.”

  “I know.”

  Nellie held her little sister with enraptured awe, as though she were something sacred. Everyone in the room, except her mother and father, held their breath. Then carefully she gave the baby back to her mother.

  “Brilliant altogether,” she informed us.

  (“Good crack,” by the way, is an Irish phrase which has nothing to do with narcotics but means something like “great fun.”)

  Later on that day, after everyone had gone home and all the children were in bed, Socra Marie in a bassinet right next to our bed, I had occasion to shiver again.

  “Didn’t Ethne tell me that someone took a shot at that gobshite Seamus Costelloe last night.”

  “Just as you predicted?”

  “’Tis true”—she sighed—“Dermot love. ’Tis true. The mark of death is on him.”

  “Did they kill him?”

  “They did not. Not this time. He’s in hospital …”

  That’s when I shivered again. Without warning we were swept up in two mysteries. If my wife were to have her way we would have to solve them both. Naturally, she would have her way.

  And ourselves with an adorable and fragile little girl in the house, a beautiful gamble.

  As if to reassure me, both Fiona and Maeveen ambled into our room and snuggled up next to the bassinet.