Irish Crystal

by Andrew M. Greeley

  None of my business.

  Because I’m a poet of human relationships, I am inclined to watch carefully the tiny signs in such relationships, especially the occasional quick glances, the slight brushing of bodies, the quick touch of hands, the brief smiles which pass between intense lovers. Remote foreplay—or after play. The sexual tension between the senior Currans was tinder that could burst into flames. Not that anyone else around the table, except the romantic poet, was consciously aware of it.

  Estelle leaned over me to pour some exotic sauce on some unrecognizable food. Her elegant breast, firmly controlled by a clearly outlined bra, was dangerously close to my face, her scent paralyzing.

  I gulped and glanced quickly at Nuala. She hadn’t noticed.

  OGLE YOUR OWN WIFE, FREAK.

  Not a bad idea.

  Irish Crystal tonight for Nuala Anne meant black and silver—a clinging black gown which fell from neck to feet, with thick silver trim at the neck and sleeveless edges of the gown and silver jewelry, including a silver comb in her piled-up hair. It was all very chaste, if anything that clings to her can be said to be chaste. No one in the room could keep their eyes off her, including, truth be told, her husband. Her silence, except for an occasional thank-you to the servants, was hardly typical. One might suspect (though not this one) that she was silent to enhance her radiant allure. In fact, she was characteristically sizing up the party before she took it over.

  “And didn’t I write the music for his anthems and isn’t it going to be a platinum record this summer?”

  Her blue eyes were dancing with mischief, which made her even more radiant.

  “Yes, of course. I thought you were a singer. But, ah, Dermot said you were an accountant.”

  “Didn’t I come over on a green card to work for Arthur Andersen and me husband rescued me from them just in the nick of time, poor dear people?”

  “Where did you live in Ireland before you came to America?” Estelle Curran smiled graciously at the charming little peasant goddess.

  “Och, so far out in Connemara that the next parish is on Long Island, a place called Carraroe.”

  Actually it wasn’t quite at the end.

  “When you’re flying back from the Aran Islands you can see Carraroe on the left-hand side of the plane,” I corrected her. “It’s a little Galway Venice, with a village on roads running between the lakes and the bay.”

  “And then I went to Trinity College in Dublin,” she continued, in effect dismissing my comment as irrelevant to the issue of her autobiography “and I learned accounting and now have charge of all the family finances, including paying the taxes.”

  That wasn’t altogether true either, but me wife was having too much fun putting these folk on that I didn’t bother correcting her.

  “And I have three children, the oldest makes her First Communion this year. The youngest came a little early and is three.”

  Nuala Anne always says this about Socra Marie because she is so proud of her.

  “How early?” Estelle said with a frown.

  “She came at twenty-five weeks.”

  “You will have developmental problems with her.”

  “She’s tiny and wears glasses,” I said, “but exhausts us all with her energy and wit.”

  “Don’t the doctors say that all her measures are well within the curves and that her eyes will get better too?”

  “Doctors are not doing anyone a favor when they keep those poor little babies alive.”

  “She’s the light of our lives,” Nuala said softly. “A great blessing from God.”

  “You must sing one of those anthems tonight, dear,” John Curran interrupted, gaining control of the conversation again. “And maybe some folk songs.”

  A flicker of unease slipped across my wife’s wonderful face—a sure sign that her dark side was acting up.

  “And maybe some of the rebel songs,” Deirdre Donovan, the older of their two blond daughters asked, a woman in her middle thirties, whose husband seemed to be a lawyer.

  “I don’t sing them songs,” Nuala said firmly. “The men who shout them out in the pubs would have run at the first sight of a British bayonet.”

  We were in deep water now, Nuala’s water.

  “I take it then, Ms. McGrail,” Father Reide mused, “that you favor peaceful means in the solution of Irish problems.”

  “Didn’t the Big Fella have the right of it, Father. You fight till they have to negotiate with you, then you negotiate. And look what they did to him, poor dear fella.”

  The Big Fella was Michael Collins.

  “Do you think that if the Irish Republican Brotherhood had waited in 1916, they would have won home rule without a fight?”

  “I don’t know, Father. And neither does anyone else. The Brits postponed it once too often, a mistake they often make when dealing with us poor savages. If they had granted Redmond home rule before the war, the Easter Rising wouldn’t have happened. Neither would the War of Independence and the Civil War. And there wouldn’t be the Troubles up in the North now.”

  She presented the theory as though she had worked it out after long years of careful reading of Irish history. In fact, she had formed it earlier in the day when she learned about such matters for the first time.

  “An interesting theory,” Jack Curran, a younger version of his father, and also a lawyer commented. “What about the earlier risings?”

  “Well, now,” Galway subtly segued into Trinity College, west Brit. “The truth of the matter is that the Irish never did accept the theory that their country rightly belonged to England. They rose every time they got a chance. There was in fact going to be violence until the English and their colonials went home, just as there has been recently and probably will be again. Most of us think it’s foolish now. Still, there’ll always be an IRA.”

  “You approve of them?” asked Father Rory Curran, the other son a young man, the oils of ordination still not dry on his hands.

  “I do not, not at all. They’re a pack of eejits, like the men of 1848, and 1867, and 1916. Losers all of them. With the exception of the Big Fella, they didn’t know how to organize or fight. Eloquent rhetoric, grand songs, brave deaths, and not a chance to win anything. That’s why I won’t sing their songs.”

  Again this firm opinion had been formed only a few hours earlier.

  “And the men of ’98?” asked Gerry Donovan, Deirdre’s husband.

  I realized as I studied his face that there is a tendency for all Irish lawyers to look alike. Every male face around the table had the faintly skeptical, reserved expression of the trained litigator waiting to pounce. I was willing to bet that young Rory was destined for Rome and canon law.

  “They were Protestant eejits and brave men too. So I won’t criticize them at all, at all.”

  The woman of the house and the two servingwomen now distributed dessert, some of kind of exotic ice-cream thing. I ate a bite or two, but my wife devoured the whole thing.

  The woman of the house and her two daughters were blond. One of the daughters-in-law had red hair and seemed to be a pert South Side Irishwoman, out of her element but defiant. The remaining one was a pretty, petite woman with a perpetual sulk. The conversation bored her and she didn’t seem to like the rest of the family. Her name was Annette, it turned out, and she was the wife of Trevor, the oldest of the three sons. He was tall, his hairline receded somewhat, and he wore thick, horn-rimmed glasses which, along with his solemn, legal demeanor, made him look a little like a Celtic Abraham Lincoln.

  OK, I counted mentally. The parents are John and Estelle. Trevor is the oldest—about forty—and his wife is Annette. Deirdre is the next, and her husband is Gerry Donovan, who is a lawyer at the Firm. Early thirties. Then there is Jack and his red-haired wife, Martha. He’s also at the Firm, late twenties. Father Rory middle twenties and Marie Therese, just out of college and as yet unmarried.

  The two daughters were clones of their mother, tall, shapely blondes, Marie Therese
the tallest of them—a lot of sexual appeal even for a married man like myself.

  “By the way, sir,” I intervened in the conversation with me wife, “are you by any chance related to the John Philpot Curran of the ’98?”

  He responded again with his gentle, urbane lawyer’s smile.

  “It’s not impossible, surely. There are a lot of Currans, however.”

  “Poor Sarah,” Nuala Anne commented, licking her lips to capture the last bit of ice cream. “She deserved better.”

  “Indeed she did.”

  The table was quiet for a moment. Most of the guests didn’t know about the tragedy of Sarah and Bob and were not about to ask.

  The conversation turned to the Church. John Curran announced that he thought Sean Cronin should have resigned as Archbishop at his seventy-fifth birthday instead of staying on.

  “I admit that he is in excellent health, but we’ve had him around for a long time. Chicago needs some new blood.”

  “Better the devil you know than the devil you don’t know,” Father Reide murmured.

  “That poor little coadjutor Archbishop,” Estelle agreed, “he’s such a pathetic, innocuous little man.”

  Me wife stiffened next to me. She and Blackie Ryan were colleagues in the solution of mysteries. Indeed, she owned a sweatshirt which proclaimed her to be a member of his North Wabash Avenue Irregulars.

  “Don’t underestimate Blackie,” Father Rory said. “That carefully cultivated aura of befuddlement only makes him more dangerous.”

  “Like Chesterton’s Father Brown,” Gerry Donovan added.

  “Well,” the host pursued his point, “Cronin has to do something about the homosexual problem. I cannot object to civil unions for them, but I don’t think they should be admitted to the priesthood. If the Cardinal doesn’t clamp down on them, then the Vatican should. We’ve had too many sexual abuse problems already.”

  “Most gays are not sexual predators, Dad,” his older daughter insisted. “That’s not fair.”

  “But, Deirdre, how is one to know which ones are and which ones aren’t? The only safe strategy is to exclude them altogether.”

  “How is the Cardinal going to know?” Father Rory asked.

  I had the impression that in the family he was always called Father Rory. Our family priest was never called Father George. He would have laughed at it. Except by Nuala, who did it to torment him.

  “I’m sure it’s obvious enough to those who are skilled in such matters.”

  “At the seminary it was obvious with some of them. They’d hang around with one another and you could pick them out easily. Others … No way of being sure.”

  “I feel sorry for them,” Estelle Curran said as she was supervising the distribution of tea, coffee, and liquors. Me wife and I had tea, black, and Bailey’s—which raised a few eyebrows. But what else could you expect of a young woman from the bogs who thought cognac was poison.

  “They don’t have any choice in the matter,” she continued. “It’s just the way they are. They must find celibacy more difficult than other men, just like it is impossible for them to be faithful to their partners.”

  “I say,” her husband insisted, “that they should have their civil unions if they want, even with ceremonies that they can consider marriage. But keep them out of the priesthood. I’ve had too many cases with such men to have any illusions. I think it should be a diriment impediment. Don’t you agree, Father Reide?”

  We were involved in sophisticated gay bashing. I decided to stay out of the conversation because the undertones were ugly. Indeed, the dinner table conversation was thick with undertones I didn’t understand and didn’t like.

  “I agree that it’s a serious problem, John. However, I think we’ve had gay priests since the beginning even if we didn’t have the word. Homosexual priests, bishops, popes, and even saints. It is possible that they bring to the ministry certain important characteristics that straight men do not possess so frequently … I have noted—and I may be wrong—that they see the world quite differently from the rest of us … That may be disturbing, but it may also be useful.”

  “Let them be artists and designers and poets and whatever,” John Curran said firmly, “but keep them out of the priesthood!”

  “I think,” Estelle said firmly, “we ought to adjourn to the parlor. Nuala Anne has been good enough to promise us a song or two …”

  “Or even three,” herself said with the vast, joyous smile that always warmed a room and drew all eyes back to her.

  She began with my Halloween anthem about trick-or-treaters, a slyly subversive poem about kids exploiting their parents who didn’t really mind. Nuala Anne had inserted mischievous little melodies of tiny dancing feet. I saw Socra Marie dancing in her angel garb. Our audience didn’t quite get it, but they applauded politely. Then she sang “The Kerry Dance,” the way “the Count” sang it—sad, sad music, with the burst of defiance at the end.

  Then she settled down for her masterpiece.

  “Sure, won’t I be keeping you here all night now? Well, I must sing one more song, which is for me anyway a kind of theme song, though it’s not about a Galway woman at all, at all, but about a tragic young woman in Dublin’s fair city who will be remembered whenever any Irish person sings about her.”

  So naturally she sang about Mollie Malone, who still pushes her wheelbarrow through streets broad and narrow.

  Weren’t the tears flowing like the River Liffey when she finished.

  “Sure,” she went on, “isn’t that special to me because I sang it on the night I fell in love with a man? And isn’t the ending a sad one too. For him. Didn’t he marry me!”

  So she sang it again with all her heart. For me, just the way she had done that first foggy night in O’Neill’s pub down the street from Trinity College. And didn’t my eyes fill up with tears like they always do when she sings the song, very Irish tears for meself and herself and for Mollie and for all the Irish and for all humans who have to die.

  The Curran clan—stiff, refined people that they were—cried too.

  “Just one more, please, Nuala Anne,” Deirdre begged.

  “Well, maybe I should sing the Connemara lullaby.”

  And the winds blew gently down the dark Chicago River, just outside the window and enveloped all of us.

  We walked home because as herself insisted, “’Tis only around the corner to our house and if anyone tries to rob us you can beat the shite out of them, can’t you, Dermot love?”

  Not out of a couple of guys with knives, but in fact our neighborhood was one of the safest in the city.

  “Well,” I asked, “what did you think of them?”

  “The three blond women are gorgeous, beautiful boobs. They have to be careful with their weight and all of them are.”

  “Well so are you, Nuala Anne.”

  “I’m not … I don’t have to be careful—like Ethne does. Me ma never puts on weight. I do it because I’m obsessive.”

  “It would be a lucky man who would see the three of them naked,” I commented, just making trouble.

  She sighed, her middle-range sigh, and ignored my attempt to make trouble.

  “Well, I suppose some lucky women have and wouldn’t it be a good lesson for all of them about beauty?”

  I thought that I would let that comment go—till I tried to write a sonnet about the three Curran women.

  “Sure,” Nuala continued, “aren’t they a strange crowd altogether and themselves nice people, and so uptight-like?”

  “That about says it. They were exploiting you. They can talk to all their uptight lace-curtain friends about what a sweet and intelligent young woman you are.”

  “I don’t mind singing for people, Dermot Michael. You know that. I’m not stuck-up. I didn’t have to bring me harp, did I now?”

  “No, you’re not stuck-up.”

  I extended my arm around her shoulders. She leaned against me. We turned away from the River, which we native Chicagoans don’t a
ppreciate nearly enough, especially now that it doesn’t smell anymore.

  “You were the most beautiful woman in the room.”

  “Go long with your blarney. It’s just a dress I picked up at a sale.”

  Nuala Anne does her personal shopping at mark-down sales and in wholesale shops and is inordinately proud of how much money she saves. If you have good taste and a body like hers, you can get away with it.

  “I think me hair will need a lot of combing tonight, to get the kinks out, don’t you know?”

  “With or without your bra?”

  “Och, Dermot Michael Coyne, you’ve never been reluctant about that before, have you now?”

  My loins tightened, my head grew light. The woman was seducing me.

  “Sounds ded friggin’ bril,” I managed to say.

  “Now you’re imitating me again! ’Tis not good for the children to hear you talking like a Claddagh fishwife.”

  “Will we see them again?” I asked, trying to lower the sexual tension a bit.

  “Well, I don’t think we’ll invite the lot of them back to our little cottage, will we, poor dear people? Maybe herself and himself. Invite the Murphys. Different kind of show, if you take me meaning.”

  “What’s wrong there, Nuala Anne?”

  “Dermot Michael Coyne! Can’t you wait till we get into the house to squeeze me boobs?”

  “Woman, I cannot!”

  “Ah, well, that’s the way of it … sure, won’t you drive me out of me mind altogether!”

  “That’s what marriage is for!”

  She sighed, as if in absolute despair.

  “You’d fuck me all the time if you could!”

  “Woman, I would!”

  The whole seduction was surely part of her plan to become pregnant, not that she didn’t love me and didn’t enjoy marital play.

  “I don’t know what’s the matter with them,” she returned to the Currans. “There’s something wrong, something just a little out of kilter, if you take me meaning. I suppose they’ve been rich for several generations?”

  “Affluent,” I said, “not rich. Professional money, like our clan—doctors, lawyers, accountants, you should excuse the expression.”