Irish Crystal

by Andrew M. Greeley

  “Even if one is Scotch Irish,” I agreed.

  “I’ve had dealings with both,” he said with a laugh.

  Nuala Anne was not amused. However.

  “Dermot love.” She hugged me. “There are people out there that don’t like us.”

  A couple of nights later, after we had dinner with the Murphys, her dreams began.

  2

  The morning after her dream-induced hysteria. I turned off our alarm at 7:00 A.M., our normal school day beginning, and stole out of the bedroom to awaken the kids for breakfast.

  “Gwasses,” Socra Marie demanded as she did every morning. So far in her young life only her eyes showed any effect of her premature birth. Far from resisting the glasses when we put them on her, she reveled in them because they made the world “all pretty.”

  “MA!” she protested loudly. It was her mother’s duty to affix the lenses.

  “Ma is sleeping in,” I said.

  “She had a terrible dream,” Nelliecoyne explained.

  “Poor Ma,” the tiny one said as she permitted me to equip her with the spectacles.

  “So pretty!” she exclaimed.

  They sighed in unison, Irish matriarchs in training.

  “She just needs a little more sleep,” I said, leaving for the next room, where my namesake (ma-HALL DER-MUD) was wide-awake and scrawling lines which may have represented a soccer team on a page torn out of a spiral notebook.

  “Up and at ’em!”

  “Where’s MA?”

  “Sleeping in.”

  “Why?” He frowned at me.

  “Bad dreams!”

  He nodded sympathetically and bounded out of bed.

  “Poor Ma!”

  No sympathy for poor Da, who had to do all Ma’s chores and himself not good at them at all, at all.

  So I got them dressed and fed and escorted them over to our parish school, which was just across Southport Avenue, all the time admiring meself for my adaptability. Finally we collected the two mutts who were standing at the doorway, panting eagerly.

  Spring was pondering the wisdom of returning to Chicago in mid-April. In her wisdom she usually decided against it and withdrew to the south. April is the cruelest month of the year in Midwestern America for different reasons than in Mr. Eliot’s England. Nature was not going through the cruel experience of birth. Rather, despite the technical arrival of spring at the vernal equinox, nature was determined to wait at least another six weeks. Winter, it seemed, would never end. Easter snow was not unheard of. Yet the sun shone brightly on the Southport Avenue homes, some of which had survived the Great Chicago Fire and others that had sprung up right after the Fire. The grass was becoming green, an occasional daffodil had imprudently appeared, and tiny buds were emerging on the trees. An early spring? No, another dirty trick.

  The procession across the street to the school was part of our morning routine. The snow-white giants would accompany us to school and play with the children. Normally our babysitter Ethne or Damian, our protégé who runs the dogs and paints portraits of dogs and children, or my wife were responsible for this pilgrimage. But all our help had Monday off, so I was in charge. The canines like me—heck, they like everyone—but they did not respect me as they did the alpha person in the house. So I had to put them on expanding leashes.

  The rest of the children milling around in the school yard shouted their joy as the two “Santa Claus” dogs approached. The huge white canines offered paws, sat up, rolled over, solicited belly scratching, barked loud but harmless warnings at other dogs, and worked the kids up to a fever of excitement that the poor teachers would need a half hour to calm down.

  The bell rang, and just as in the old days in a Catholic school yard, solemn silence descended upon us, even on Maeve and Fiona. Then another bell rang, the children formed up ranks and marched quietly into the school.

  Many things may change in Catholicism, but that will never change. The dogs and I watched forlornly as our threesome disappeared through the main door of the school.

  Then they decided to pull me towards the church. If Nuala had been presiding, they would have entered the church for the Eucharist, much to the unease of the poor presiding priest—though the hounds were nothing if not reverent in the solemnity of the old church. Not having as much karma as my wife, I didn’t trust them in church. The pastor thought our whole family was just a little mad and not without some reason. I didn’t want to provide him with more data for this judgment.

  “Let’s run!”

  The wolfhounds promptly forgot about the wonders of the church and dragged me to the Lincoln Park dog run. The welcome from the pooches there was much like the welcome in front of the school. The white hounds were big and scary and fun to play with.

  As they scampered and frolicked, I replayed our dinner at the Kurdish restaurant on Clark Street the previous night with Peter Murphy and his wife, Cindasue McCloud, parents of Katiesue Murphy, and prospective parents of Johnpete, who would arrive very soon.

  Johnpete would be named after his great uncle, the little Archbishop over at the Cathedral, and his father. “Even if that thar bishop a papist priest, he all right,” Cindasue explained. “So we’re a fixin’ to name him after his great uncle and his father. Powerful name.”

  Cindasue, a small, sexy woman with large round eyes and a solemn face whose expression never changed, unlike my wife’s, which was in constant flux, was allegedly from Stinking Creek, West Virginia.

  “Happen I ever lose my mind and becoming one of you papists, need a powerful priest and myself a hard-shell Baptist from down to Stinkin’ Crick.”

  Cindasue was Protestant Irish. Her family moved out to Stinkin’ Crick fifty years before that thar “Dan’l Boone came through.” My wife was Irish Catholic from Carraroe, an Irish-speaking community at the end of Galway Bay, and was still struggling with Homeland Security about her citizenship papers. They had bonded instantly—two Irish matriarchs. She was a lieutenant commander in the Yewnited States Coast Guard and acted as their occasional spokesperson because she was cute in her uniform (“pretty little girl in a sea scout dress,” her mother-in-law, Dr. Mary Kathleen Ryan Murphy, had said when first meeting her) and could slip back and forth seamlessly from American Standard Bureaucratese and Appalachian Hill talk, both of which were admirably suited to confusing the media if that’s what you wanted to do. Her husband, Peter Murphy, was an associate professor at Loyola whose doctoral dissertation at The University had been on a little-known tribe called “commodities traders.” He had confided to us that his wife was some kind of gumshoe for the Treasury Department, who still worked for them, though the Coast Guard was now part of Homeland Security and not Treasury, where its origins as the Revenue Cutter Service had properly placed them.

  “Sure,” my own wife had said, “isn’t it a case of the Lord made them and the divil matched them?”

  I didn’t ask her what Irish saying might apply to our marriage.

  We had been talking about the owner of the restaurant, a Kurdish refugee and a superb cook, whom Homeland Security had incarcerated on the grounds that a few weeks in one of the Kurdist activist organization twenty years before made him a threat to the United States in the war on terrorism. He would be tried in administrative court, then shipped off to Turkey, where his life would be in serious danger.

  “Them polecats are interested only in collecting another scalp. Makes them feel right proper. Useless varmints. They give themselves points for every innocent person with dark skin they can throw out of the country.”

  “Bureau?” I asked as I sopped up the last remnants of my kavurma with a hunk of Turkish bread, meaning the notoriously incompetent but arrogant Federal Bureau of Investigation. (As in, “we don’t care whether Arabs are learning to fly airplanes out there in Minnesota.”)

  “Worse. One polecat comes into my office and says he want all my records. I tell him if he go sleep with a badger, I think about it. He say he send a memo to Mr. Ridge and I say won’t do a
ny good, ’cause Mr. Ridge is so dumb he can’t read or write. I tell him to work on his messed-up computer files. Now they leave me alone.”

  “Cindasue is correct in her analysis,” said her husband, beaming with pride. “You put together a bunch of small incompetent agencies and you get not an arithmetic but a geometric increase in incompetence. But leaders think they can solve everything by mergers. No competent social scientist would agree.”

  “Them fools not a listenin’ to competent anythin’.”

  It requires only a half tumbler of barleycorn of whatever variety for Cindasue to loosen up and go after her bosses.

  “Don’t I know that too!” my wife joined the conversation. “First off they take away my green card, then send me back to Ireland because I don’t have it. Then doesn’t your man clear it up and personally asks me to return and I came back and applied for citizenship papers? And aren’t they sitting on them for two years?”

  “Your man” in Irish can be any male member of the human race, depending on the context. In this case it meant a president of the United States.

  “They got some skunk from down to the holler a poring over them, then he takes and tries to get you thrown out of the country, like poor Ishamel down hyar to the restaurant.”

  “They wouldn’t dare do that to Nuala Anne,” Peter Murphy protested as he filled the wineglasses around the table.

  “They a tryin’ their damnest,” his wife warned. “They too dumb to know who she is. Happen they find out, they dig in with their phony evidence … Your lawyer woman, that thar Cindy Hurley shunuf she’ll break thar backs, but they be a tryin’.”

  Ms. Hurley is my sister. She is convinced that Nuala Anne is too good for me. Which is true, but she doesn’t have to be so obvious about it.

  “How do they find out about people like Ishmael?” my wife asked.

  “Rattlesnake spies tell ’em … Happen spies come up with good stuff, polecats pay ’em. ’Gainst the law but thar’s always money for scalps.”

  We all laughed uneasily. Yet we knew that the country was in the depths of a particularly vicious period of hatred for foreigners, all foreigners. The Patriot Act produced a lot of phony patriots—which it was supposed to do.

  “It is what they done to Mr. Ishmael. He too successful here on Clark Street. Competitors done reported him.”

  “A lot of people picked up in this neighborhood,” Peter Murphy said. “I suppose that because of the kind of place it is we’d have more than our share of targets.”

  “Best damn targets are people with dark skin,” his wife agreed. “Polecats and rattlesnakes like to break up families. Send Moma or Dada back home and leave the rest of the family hyar. Best thing is to break up Moslem families. Serves ’em right. Keep ’merica safe from terrorists.”

  “That’s terrible!” my wife protested, her face twisted in pain.

  “’Cept’n they don’t think them folks are real humans like we’uns. ’Taint wrong to ruin their lives.”

  My wife thinks Cindasue is very funny. She had told me that she “just loves” the cute way Cindasue talks. I almost told her that her way of talking was every bit as amusing to those of us who are stuck with Radio Standard English, ’merican style. She couldn’t believe that her beloved America would try to throw her out again.

  “Not right we a doing things like that hyar in the Yewnited States of ’merica. Mista Jeffereson, he warned about it.”

  “I am getting too old for it,” Nuala Anne said, “and a peace-loving woman. Yet I really do enjoy fighting the government, don’t I, Dermot dear?”

  “Woman, you do,” I recited my lines on cue.

  But in the corner of my head, not the one where the smart-assed Adversary lives, but the haunt of the little wisdom I’ve acquired, I felt a tremor of fear. One could never tell what the national security state might do next.

  Varmints, polecats, skunks, badgers, rattlesnakes.

  “Happen they show up early in the morning like them thar holler skunks do, don’t be saying a word till your lawyer be thar. ’Member what they were a doin’ to that poor Martha Stewart gal.”

  My wife was quite blase about the whole matter, even though the American government had taken both her green card and her Irish passport in preparation for her citizenship papers. She had loved the fight over her previous deportation. She would love another. As she had told me once, “Dermot love, ain’t I a shite-kicker?”

  I understood the general idea but I wondered how she would define it.

  “What’s a shite-kicker?”

  “Well isn’t it like this?” she said, her voice sinking to a conspiratorial whisper. “Don’t I come into a room and look around to see if I can find a pile of shite to kick and kinda spread it around the room?”

  “A high-powered troublemaker?”

  “Don’t you have the right of it, Dermot Michael Coyne? And a bitch on wheels too!”

  I didn’t doubt her for a moment. Last year a couple of eejits were trying to beat me up on the sidewalk in front of the house. My demure Irish wife, looking like Grainne O’Malley, charged down the stairs, canogi stick in hand, and began to pound on them, canogi being a kind of Irish hockey for women. Also the dogs and the kids joined in. And Cindasue, delicious in halter and shorts, appeared from down the street with a service revolver that was almost as big as she was. I had to pretend that I needed the help.

  So she would relish taking on the gobshites (her word) at Homeland Security.

  Nuala, like all the rest of us, has many different personalities which fit the various situations in which she finds herself. Unlike the rest of us, they are all colorful personalities and she moves among them with great speed. The ur-Nuala as I call her is the shy, fragile, and modest Irish speaker from Connemara. Then there is the sophisticated woman of the world who has been everywhere and done everything, and the accomplished entertainer and the devoted wife and mother (a bit on the compulsive side) and the wanton wench who loves to seduce me and the mystic who talks about the mountain behind the mountain and the fey detective who knows what’s going on in people’s souls—or dogs’ souls—and the furious shite-kicker and the worrywart who thinks teachers are exaggerating her children’s virtues and guilt-ridden old-fashioned Catholic who believes in her heart of hearts that she was personally responsible for her postpartum depression after Micheal and the premature birth of Socra Marie (pronounced, mind you, Sorra) and fishwife gossiping over the backyard fence and mother whose patience had been driven to its utmost limits by her husband and children, a role which is all too familiar these days. And many more besides.

  I have slept with all of them. Each has her own erotic appeal.

  THAT’S BECAUSE YOU’RE HYPER-SEXED.

  I am NOT.

  My favorite bedmate is the greenhorn from Connemara.

  My wife had not changed much physically since I had first encountered her in O’Neill’s pub on College Green in Dublin, the Danish town with the Dark Pool. She was still a graceful Irish goddess, not that I had ever encountered any exemplars of that group of women—slender, lithe, dangerously sensuous, with a voice in which you hear the sound of distant bells over the bog land, long black hair, flashing blue eyes, and a pale, ever-changing face which adjusted to the role she was playing at any given time. Her grimly determined will would not permit pregnancies to affect her bodily measurements and the faint smile and laugh lines on her face made it even more appealing. Marriage and motherhood had added to her beauty, even hazardously so. What does she look like with her clothes off? Well, that’s my business and I won’t be telling, will I now?

  Save for the metaphors in the unpublished poems I’ve written about her.

  Living in the same house, to say nothing of sleeping in the same bed with her, keeps me in a permanent state of semi-tumescence. I have no complaints about her in bed either.

  People see Nuala Anne and they need a second look, women and men alike—whether she’s walking into church on Sunday with her three well-dressed chi
ldren trailing behind her or swinging a lethal tennis racket in two-piece. tennis togs or entering a restaurant as if she owned all the world or strolling purposefully down Michigan Avenue in a business suit. In each of these scenes, no one notices the big, dumb blond guy trailing after her.

  So when I returned from walking the dogs I found her in the breakfast nook, bedraggled in Notre Dame shirt and terry-cloth robe, hair in disarray, sipping a cup of tea and shuffling through the day’s lists. The dogs had dragged me up the stairs because, as much as they like to run, they like even more to come home and find that Nuala is still around. She hugged them both and asked them to go downstairs to the doggie room. They needed water and rest after their run. I sighed mentally. We were in for a serious discussion.

  “Did you wake up the children?” she asked.

  “Woman, I did.”

  “Did you feed them their breakfast.”

  “Woman, I did.”

  “Did you take them across the street to school?”

  “Woman, I did.”

  “Did you take the dogs for their run?”

  “Woman, I did.”

  “Did you manage to clean up after breakfast?”

  “Woman, I did.”

  “Aren’t you the friggin’ perfect husband?”

  “Woman, I am!”

  She sighed loudly.

  “I can’t even work on me lists! How will I get through the day without me lists!”

  Tears poured down her cheeks.

  Nuala Anne coped with the demands of her lives by making lists each day of what had to be done—a list for everyone and for every project, cross-indexed for all I knew because they were written in Irish. I’m sure there is a Dermot list because she wouldn’t let me look at it.

  I had asked her once, “Does it say that I should fuck Dermot tonight?”

  “Och, Dermot Michael,” she had replied, “I don’t have to be reminded of that, do I now!”

  “Should I wet the tea?” I asked her that morning in the kitchen as she shuffled again through her scraps of notepaper.

  “It will do no harm,” she admitted with another sigh as she pushed the papers aside.