Irish Crystal

by Andrew M. Greeley

  Nuala had not liked that at all.

  “Well, don’t let her disturb the class.”

  The teacher was seven or eight years younger than my wife.

  “Oh, she never does that!”

  Nuala wasn’t convinced.

  “Little show-off,” she had complained to me as we walked home.

  The Energizer Bunny ran down suddenly at lunch that day.

  “Ma!” She took off her glasses and rubbed sleepy eyes. “Nap!”

  Nuala picked her up and headed upstairs to the “girls’ room.”

  Our other kids resisted naps at that age. Socra demanded them. We both worried about it, but the doctor said that the child burned up a lot of energy with her enthusiasm and enjoying the life she almost didn’t have.

  Nuala returned, shaking her head. I was in our study, working on the document from the rectory.

  “The poor little tyke was asleep before I put her to bed … I wonder if there’s something wrong with her.”

  “Some kids need naps at her age more than others,” I said, echoing the doctor. “She’s still a tiny one. Besides, she’ll be the Energizer Bunny again in an hour and a half.”

  “What do doctors know?”

  She sat in her reading chair and opened the book on the top of the stack—all of them doubtless sent from Borders on a rush basis.

  “More than we do.”

  “That’s not much … And Dermot, why are you looking at me lustfully all day long? And yourself unable to wait till nighttime for that kind of shite!”

  AHA, YOU’RE IN TROUBLE NOW!

  “Well, Nuala Anne McGrail, isn’t yourself the only woman that’s in the house and my wife at that?”

  “And why do you have to talk in questions all the time? That’s all right for me, because I’m Irish, but aren’t you a friggin’Yank!”

  “Haven’t I become acculturated?”

  She relaxed and smiled, laughed, then collapsed into tears.

  “I’m the worst friggin’ bitch in all the world and a nine-fingered gobshite too.”

  I have no idea altogether what a nine-fingered gob of shite is. Neither does she. But it is a marvelous expletive.

  I rose from the couch, which is mine by right in our study overlooking Southport Avenue, walked over to her reclining easy chair, and took her hand.

  “Well, you’re not the worst of them. And if I should stop wanting you, then you’d better take me to the doctor for an eye test or a hormone test. And if you don’t want me to want you, you must not dress in sexy clothes.”

  I drew her over to the couch and sat her down. She stared at the floor, her book on her lap with a finger still in it.

  “We can sit here and do our reading together,” I offered.

  She nodded.

  “You know, Dermot Michael Coyne, that you can fuck me anytime you want.”

  “I know that, Nuala.”

  “I love you so much … I apologize … and I should have asked you to bathe me in the shower this morning … I would have loved it.”

  I put my arms around her shoulder.

  YOU’RE GOING TO EXPLOIT HER AGAIN.

  I’m not, you eejit. It’ll be much better tonight.

  “Why didn’t you ask me?”

  “I was afraid to … Och, Dermot Michael, my emotions are still a mess …”

  She rested her head on my chest.

  “The dreams still?”

  She sighed.

  “And the evil out there!”

  We were silent for a few moments.

  “All right!” She was all business again. “We both have work to do.”

  She straightened up and opened her book. But she made no move to leave the couch. Later on in the afternoon, she took my hand and held it.

  5

  I knew them all, you see. Bob Emmet, Lord Edward, Wolf Tone. Bold Robert Emmet as they call him now. I was in Bobby’s class at Trinity in 1794 and I was there the day they threw him out. I managed to sneak into his trial and listen to his speech from the dock. And ready-made legend it was. I stood there in front of St. Catherine’s Church when they hung him, cut off his head, and held it for the silent crowd to see. I saw Wolf Tone dragged out of a coach into Kilmainhum Jail, where the poor idiot cut his throat. I was in the crowd when Lord Edward Fitzgerald was shot in the house where he’d been hiding, betrayed by the spy Magan in whose house he had slept a couple of nights before.

  “He won’t swing,” said a man in the crowd.

  “Why not?” someone else asked.

  “The bastards will let him die from an infected wound. No public trouble that way.”

  I was too young to understand that anyone, even Lord Clare, would do something that evil.

  Well, it’s 1832, thirty years since then. They’re all great Irish patriots. And they’re all dead. Bobby would be fifty-five, just my age. He and Sarah would be living in Dublin with a flock of kids around them. Maybe not. All ten of the other Emmets are dead, except Tom, and himself a big political success in New York. Bobby was the fourth Robert in the family, the previous having died as infants. Most of them from tuberculosis. Bold Robert was, even at fifteen when I met him in Trinity College, a sick, wasted little man whose energy and drive did not match his poor body. Sarah died five years after he did, also from the white death, having lost her only child.

  God be good to them both … I stop writing and weep when I think of Sarah … I loved her too … Enough of this sentimentality.

  What would they think of this “emancipation” which Danny O’Connell has won for us? I personally don’t trust Danny. After the 1803 rising Danny went around searching for rebels. He didn’t find any because there were not many to begin with and they had returned to the hills. He doesn’t believe in violence, he says. The political way is the only way. Well, he won our rights and that thirty years and more after Lord Edward and Tone and poor Bobby failed. Now Irish Catholics will sit in the parliament in London and won’t have to pay tithes to the Protestant Church over here. So that’s good, I suppose. God knows that’s the way the Catholic bishops want it and themselves in the pocket of Dublin Castle from Archbishop Troy back in 1798 on down. We poor priests of the land out in the bogs don’t have a right to say anything.

  The next step, Danny tells us, is home rule. I don’t think the English will give us that without a fight. Why should they? They took this island away from us by violence. They beat us every time—Strongbow and Henry and Elizabeth and Cromwell. They believe we’re an inferior people that should be killed off like the red Indians in America. They hate us because we persist in our Catholic superstition. If they could kill every one of us, they’d do it and replace us with the lowland Scots that they want to get out of their own island anyway. So they take our land from us and force us to live in poverty and misery and starve us.

  Yet poor stupid fools, we fight back. There have been risings ever since Strongbow arrived—fifteen at least since King Billy planted his orange flag. The ’98 was only the biggest so far. There will be others, despite their lordships the bishops. We Irish are not only stupid but stubborn. We want our country back. Someday we’ll be taking it back.

  Still I don’t know, maybe Danny O’Connell is right. Maybe we should win our freedom by our political skills. The parliament in Westminster won’t know what hit it when forty so of our own come riding into town—fast-talking, clever men with long memories and a gift for making trouble. I’d like to be there and watch it all.

  It’s true that there are people in England who are on our side. The Act of Union did destroy the Ascendancy and the corrupt Irish parliament in which a couple of score of crooked Protestant politicians ran the country for their own purposes. Some of the English thought that would improve the lot of the Irish. It might have if Lord Cornwallis and Lord Castlereagh, who bribed the Irish parliament to vote itself out of existence, had been able to push through a Catholic emancipation act with the Act of Union. That crazy bastard George III vetoed their plan and their lordship
s, to give them due credit, resigned. Castlereagh was a bit on the crazy side, but Cornwallis was a gentleman in the best meaning of that word. Many more of the survivors of the ’98 would have died if he had not believed in compassion. He probably would have pardoned Wolf Tone too, if that idiot hadn’t cut his throat.

  Tone and Lord Edward and Bob were Protestants too. They were also Irish and hated English tyranny more than many of us did.

  Most of the priests of the land, no better than their people both the English and our bishops will tell you, have always been on the side of the “lads.” I’m not so sure who has the right of it. We Christians shouldn’t be killing people. When we kill the English—and their women and sometimes their children—we are no better than they are. The bishops don’t so much object to murder as they do to fears of the French Revolution—which shows how little they know of their own people.

  There are Whiteboys in my parish down here in Wexford—half bandits, half terrorists. Some of their fathers were in Dublin with Bobby, and my men would return to Dublin at a single word from someone who seemed to be in charge, even if it were a sickly twenty-five-year-old in a silly green uniform. Bobby is a hero to them. “Let no man write my epitaph”—For a Protestant Bobby could outblarney any Irishman I know. The Whiteboys know that I was a friend of his, so they treat me with great respect. I keep my own counsel. I let them know that I don’t approve of their violence against the local English but I don’t work for Dublin Castle either.

  Bobby knew he would become a legend. He designed his own trial and execution to accomplish just that—and to protect poor Sarah, who might have been in the dock too if Chief Secretary Wickham, and he had not agreed on compromise. Bobby would admit his guilt and Wickham would keep Sarah out of the trial. So it gave the poor woman five more years of mostly unhappy life before she joined him in heaven. Bob couldn’t have known that her tragedy would enhance his legend. He loved her too much even to think that way.

  I was in love with her too. I was in the parlor of Casino, the Emmet house down in Milltown, when she and Bob were introduced. Her father, John Philpot Curran, a really nasty bastard if you ask me, and Dr. Emmet were friends. He never did like Bob very much, but he could hardly keep him out of the house. He was too arrogant to notice the fire that leaped back and forth between his daughter and “young Emmet.” Maybe I was the only one who noticed it.

  I know what Bob saw in her. She was nineteen years old then, in the full and beautiful bloom of youth. It was, as I learned in those days, easy to fall in love with such a glorious woman. It is even now difficult to forget her, so I’ve ceased to try. I think that God understands. I don’t know what she saw in Bob, a pale, weak little fellow It must have been his mellifluous voice which had hypnotized all of us in the History Club at Trinity and which later would persuade many to accompany him on the folly of the Rising of ’03. Or maybe she recognized his inherent nobility which has already become part of our national mythology. It doesn’t matter anymore. Her lovely body and his ugly body are long since moldering in their graves.

  I was with her when she waved to Bob as he was being dragged to the gallows. I was with her when she visited the graveyard at St. Michan Church, where perhaps his body is buried. Her eyes were dry, her body erect, her head held high. Bob wasn’t the only one who could lay claim to a noble character. With a few hundred more men, some more muskets, and some help from the French they could have been the first rulers of a free and republican Ireland—much more impressive than George III and his equally mad brothers. Many people back in those days said that Bob Emmet was a crazy young romantic and his rebellion an aftereffect of the ’98. In fact, Dublin Castle was taken by surprise. Bob’s men fought well against the soldiers and the Yeomen. With some good fortune—more than we Irish ever seem to find—they might have taken control of the city. Then the whole country would have risen. All the disappointed veterans of ’98 would have swarmed in from the country. It would have been Paris in 1789—just as Archbishop Troy had feared …

  “It was all my fault, you know,” she said to me. “Before we went to France, he wanted me to go to America with him. I was afraid of my father. If I had agreed, we would have left this terrible island behind forever and he’d still be alive.”

  “You must not blame yourself, Sarah,” I said. “He was an incurable Irish rebel. He would have come back.”

  “I don’t believe that he would.”

  Even now I don’t know what to think about that. Maybe she was right. I thought to myself that, if she didn’t choke off such terrible thoughts, she’d soon be in a cemetery herself.

  Well, that’s all over with. Now we’re emancipated—thirty years after Lord Cornwallis promised it to us.

  I am ahead of myself. This was supposed to be a memoir for my nieces and nephews of the terrible times in which I grew up. I want to tell them all the truth about Bob Emmet—and Sarah Curran, a truth which is different from the legend. My problem is that, like the rest of Ireland, I find it hard to distinguish between the truth and the legend.

  6

  “Well, Dermot,” said John Curran, the host of the dinner party, “we’ve been neglecting you. What is it that you do exactly?”

  He was a slender man, in his late fifties according to what I had been told, but looking much younger, with wavy brown hair, edged with touches of gray and parted in the middle. His eyes danced, he smiled often, he exuded Irish charm.

  “I’m a retired commodities trader,” I said.

  “A little young to be retired, aren’t you?”

  “Oh I’ve been retired for ten years … I made a lot of money once, mostly by mistake, and retired. As Damon Runyan put it, all horseplayers die broke.”

  “And you invested your money wisely?”

  “My wife is an accountant. She does the family investments.”

  My dark Irish Crystal goddess raised an eyebrow, but uttered not a word.

  “I’m told you write some interesting poetry,” he said easily. “I’m afraid I haven’t heard the names of your books.”

  “The most recent one was Anthems for America: Songs for American Feasts.”

  “Sounds very patriotic.”

  Nuala deigned to come down from Cro-Patrick and join the conversation in pure West Galway brogue.

  “Wasn’t it short-listed both for the Pulitzer and National Book Award? Won’t we be back next year?”

  The night after we had begun our exploration of spies in Ireland, our eyes bleary from poring over books on the various Irish “Risings” and the manuscript from the Ned Fizpatrick’s collection, Nuala Anne and I went to a dinner party. We did not particularly enjoy ourselves because the hosts and the other guests—charming, literate, and erudite—were not our kind of people. It was a literary salon in a big, old mansion on the east bank of the Chicago River, appropriately called River House. Me wife, and meself, oops my wife and I, are not literary salon types, though I had published two novels and four books of poetry and she had set some of my verses to music. We produce literature, of a sort, they talk about it. We were the guests about whose presence they might later brag. In fact, however, through most of the meal they talked to one another while we listened. They showed off for us instead of permitting us to show off for them. It seemed likely that Nuala Anne had brought her small harp in vain.

  I didn’t want to attend the party. The Currans sounded a little too precious to me with their big old house down by the river among all the yards where the yachts off Lake Michigan are stored during the winter. Nuala insisted. These people lived “just around the corner” and were neighbors and it would be rude to turn them down. I almost said something about her Irish attitude towards aristocrats and thought better of it.

  They weren’t really aristocrats, but, it seemed to my jaundiced West Side prejudices that they were trying to act like they were—candles in holders on the oak-paneled wall and in an Irish crystal chandelier reflected on the row of Irish crystal goblets in front of each plate and the Irish linen
tablecloth. All very high-class Dublin Protestant that you’d never see in Dublin.

  Most of the women were beautiful, which would be some compensation, I told myself, for an otherwise wasted evening.

  Their conversation was about Catholic writers, some of whom I had even read, others of whom I had heard about, and still others of whose existence I had been unaware. Who the hell was Hans Urs von Baltassar? Also there was much discussion of papabili, Cardinals who might become the next Pope. They agreed that it would not be an American. These were Catholics on the inside, not merely regular churchgoers and contributors, but men and women who understood—or thought they did—the inside power structure and the theological heritage. I observed with interest that they did not mention David Tracy of whom my brother the priest had said, “He’s the best of them, little bro, best in the world. The Germans and the French don’t take him seriously because he’s an American.”

  The group around the table did not seem all that interested in Americans.

  They were all tall, handsome, well-groomed, and well-maintained people. The dinner was “semiformal,” which in our day means women wear long gowns and the men suits and ties. John was a lawyer of course. His statuesque blond wife, Estelle, was a caterer. She cooked the sumptuous meal herself, and served with the help of two maids. The fish and the meat were covered with sauces that made them unrecognizable. Me wife, suspicious of all “funny food,” nonetheless raised an eyebrow in appreciation. The wines were in decanters so, unless you were an expert, you’d have to guess the label. Father Reide a middle-aged Jesuit historian from Loyola (in enemy territory in a neighborhood called DePaul), smiled contentedly after his first sip of the red wine, “wonderful claret, Stelle.”

  Me wife raised both eyebrows.

  Estelle Curran’s figure was elegant and comfortable, well-shaped middle-aged sex appeal, full breasts carefully emphasized beneath her gown so that you hardly noticed. Her husband watched her every movement with what might be called clinical appreciation (though not if I were evaluating my own wife). There was still sex in their marriage, maybe a lot of it.