Irish Mist

by Andrew M. Greeley

  The last letter she received from him, in the spring of 1918, revealed no premonitions about death but only a renewed hope:

  The other side seems to be getting ready for another big offensive, perhaps their last one. Russia is out of the war, but the United States, with its huge population and resources and its grim Protestant determination, is in it. For the Germans, it is a matter of winning now or giving up. There is nothing subtle about their plans. They intend to drive on Paris, just as they did in 1870 and 1914. They also intend to break our line, drive a wedge between us and the French, and then head for the sea to encircle us. If they lose, I think it will be their last offensive and they may pack it in. If they win their gamble, I think the French will pack it in. What we will do, I don’t know. British people—to say nothing of us Irish—can be very stubborn about surrendering. Every battle but the last sort of thing. I believe that we will hold them and then counterattack at the end of summer. No matter how stupid our generals, that should finally defeat the Germans. If that happens and with any luck I’ll be back with you in Garrytown by Christmas. And won’t we have a wonderful time celebrating!

  Arthur Downs was correct in his analysis. The last desperate German offensive failed, though it was, as the Iron Duke said of Waterloo, a damn close thing. The final Allied offensive sent the German Army reeling. A new German government sued for peace. Arthur Downs’s body was home for Christmas.

  Gussie contented herself with the printing from the citation for his Victoria Cross:

  Colonel The Lord Arthur Thomas John Michael Downs, In action at Cambrai on 15 April 1918 this officer, chief of staff of the Ninth Scottish Division, carried a message from his Officer Commanding to the Third Battalion of that division, with which communication had been lost Arriving at the position of this unit, he discovered that the enemy had overrun the battalion, that its senior officers were dead or wounded, and that German soliders were occupying its trenches. Realizing that the position had to be held if the flank of his division were not to be turned, Colonel The Lord Downs assumed temporary command of the battalion on his own initiative, rallied the troops, and drove the enemy from its trenches. Though wounded three times he continued to lead the counterattack until our position was completely restored. He died from his wounds at the very end of the action. However, his initiative and courage undoubtedly saved his entire division from destruction.

  Gussie added Hugh Tudor’s letter:

  I was fond of your husband, one of the finest men I have ever known. I miss him greatly. I can only begin to comprehend how much you miss him. His bravery was both exemplary and typical. He did save the day for us. Our line held that day and perhaps changed the course of this terrible war. Gerry was the man responsible. I do not know how much consolation it will bring you, but most of us would have been dead at the end of the day if he had not acted far above and beyond the call of duty. I shall never forget his smile, his laugh, his good spirits, his courage. Never.

  H. H. Tudor

  General Officer Commanding

  Ninth Scottish Division

  Typical of the kind of letter an officer had to write many times during war. Yet also unique and special.

  Gussie cited the sermons of both the Anglican vicar and Canon Muldoon. The latter, she tells us, broke into tears during his eulogy.

  Naturally he spoke the highest Irish praise: “We’ll not see his like again.”

  Her own final words were brief: “I have loved my husband since I first met him at Lord Mayo’s. I miss him. I will always love him. Often I feel him very close to me. I’m sure he is. I know I will be with him someday in a better world than this. Until then I must honor his memory by not feeling sorry for myself and not abandoning my responsibilities.”

  At the end there is a drawing of a simple tombstone on the grounds of Castle Garry and of his Victoria Cross.

  “Damn!” I muttered to myself.

  A librarian at Trinity College was happy to make me a photocopy of the little book.

  “Worth reading?” she asked.

  “Yes indeed.”

  “Victoria Cross? Brave man. English or Irish?”

  “Both, I think.”

  “Must have been hard in those days.”

  “Not for him.”

  Would I show the book to Nuala Anne?

  Maybe. But she’d probably figure it all out anyway.

  1 Irish Gold

  —16—

  NUALA’S PARENTS were peasants. They earned their living by raising a few head of cattle on poor land way out on the far end of the Connemara Peninsula. They also served tea and scones to tourists who roared up to their neatly painted (blue) little house in the charming town of Carraroe—strips of land between lake and ocean crossed by gravel roads and whitewashed stone fences. Some of the tourists were impressed by the austere beauty of Connemara, and others made no effort to hide their opinion that it was a savage place inhabited by savage people—Europe’s last Stone Age race, in the words of an English poet.

  The German tourists were the worst. When I had been permitted to help Nuala serve tea to a busload of them during our courtship (as she defined it) she warned me sternly not to get into any fights with them.

  “Their culture is different from ours,” she said primly.

  I held my temper under control, though just barely.

  “Our is better,” I said after their bus left.

  “Yank or Irish?” she said, her nose firmly pointed in the air.

  “Is there a difference? We deserve credit for being hospitable. You don’t because it is programmed into your genes.”

  She sniffed disdainfully.

  Annie and Gerry McGrail, however, did not look or act like peasants. A handsome couple in their middle fifties, they passed with ease as upper-middle-class professionals when they dressed up in their best clothes, which Nuala and I had discreetly purchased for them. At our wedding reception they had fit in perfectly with the doctors and lawyers and professors and clergy who filled the place. Nuala had come by her ability to fit into every situation naturally enough. They were also very intelligent people, readers of the Scripture and Shakespeare and the Bible and Irish poetry, though they had at the most six years of education.

  They also adored their youngest child, who revered them and treated them with the greatest respect, a difficult task for most adult children. She never argued with them, but then they never argued with her.

  As far as they were concerned, I was wonderful, indeed well nigh perfect. This conviction seemed to be based on the assumption that their Nuala Anne would never choose a man who was not well nigh perfect.

  It didn’t hurt that I put a telephone in their cottage so that Nuala Anne could call them when she went to America. “Just like she’s right around the corner,” Annie had said happily.

  “It is practically just around the corner,” I suggested.

  Now they had a computer and E-mail, toys in which they reveled.

  So they embraced me warmly when I greeted them as they got off the Galway train at Heuston station behind St. James Brewery on the banks of Anna Livia.

  You could not possibly tell that they had never been to Dublin in their lives. They took in everything but did not give the slightest hint that they were staring.

  “Well,” said himself, “’tis not attractive as Chicago.”

  “A lot more history.”

  “Aye,” he said skeptically.

  “How’s herself doing?” Annie demanded. “Worrying, I suppose?”

  “If you’re Irish you have to worry lest God punish you for not worrying!”

  “Doesn’t she save God a lot of time?” her father said as we entered the limo I had brought over from the station to take them to the Towers at Jury’s.

  “Ever since she was a little girl, hasn’t she been saving God a lot of time?”

  Their laughter at Nuala Anne was good-hearted. She could do no wrong in their eyes.

  “Wasn’t that quite a TV show you two put on the
other night?” Gerry observed.

  “They’ll think a long time before they try that again, won’t they?” Annie added.

  “I hope so,” I said fervently, not being sure who “they” were or why “they’d” done it. Or why “they’d” wanted it on television.

  And were they the same people who had sent a note in the name of the Real IRA and had made two phone threats already today? Or were there two separate groups, one exploiting the publicity gained by the other?

  “She’ll be just as good tonight as she was out at Dublin Airport,” Annie observed.

  “Even better,” I said confidently.

  I understood my wife well enough to know that she was now a nervous wreck and that anyone, especially her husband, who came near her would be in serious danger for limb and life. I also knew that when the show began she would be radiantly charming. I was not about to derail her with the information that “Ma” and “Da” were in Dublin. On the other hand, if I failed to show up a half hour before show time, I would be in the most serious trouble since I first met her on that foggy night a half a lifetime ago (actually less than a year and a half ago).

  As we inched away through the traffic jam on Steven’s Lane and towards Thomas Street, I noted a car pull out of the hospital parking lot on the right of the lane. Gene Keenan’s men, I presumed, though a little more obvious than usual.

  It was patent in the backseat of the car how much the couple loved each other. They held each other’s hands unobtrusively, as though they were on their second date. Annie McGrail was a striking woman, the model from which their daughter had been designed. It would be hard not to love her. Good sign for your future, Dermot Michael.

  EXCEPT THAT YOU’RE NOT HALF THE MAN HER FATHER IS, THE ADVERSARY ANNOUNCED.

  Finally, after inching our way forward slowly and painfully, we reached the stoplight on Thomas Street and turned left into it when the light became green.

  Suddenly the car from the hospital parking lot spun into the opposite lane, raced through the stoplight, and cut us off.

  “Focking gobshites!” our driver exploded as he slammed on his brakes and skidded into the sidewalk.

  Here we go again, I thought.

  The car, a big English Rover, stopped in front of us, the door opened, and two men emerged, big guys with the required ski masks.

  Not big enough, I told myself, fingering the cosh I was carrying in my leather Chicago Bulls jacket pocket.

  Then blue lights exploded in every direction as the Guards rode over the hills like the Seventh Cavalry. The men in the Rover hurried back into the car, slammed the doors, and in reverse rushed by us towards Basin Lane.

  Madman that I am, I jumped out of our Benz and chased them.

  In the course of this berserk pursuit I wondered what I’d do if I caught up with them.

  Then I did catch up with them, momentarily.

  I smashed the window on the passenger’s side and then smashed the thug. I had aimed for his head but succeeded only in hitting his collarbone as the car pulled away from me. I heard the passenger screaming in agony.

  Good enough for him.

  “You’re out of your focking mind,” said the Guard who had caught up to me.

  “You’re supposed to protect us from them gobshites!” I shouted, turning on him.

  He backed away from me. “We just did,” he said mildly.

  “You did that,” I said ruefully, returning my weapon to my Chicago Bulls jacket (on the back of which there was the magic number 31). “Thank you.”

  “You’re quite welcome,” he said with a smile. “Sure you almost stopped them for us. Never fear; we’ll get them this time.”

  Three squads careened down Basin Lane and around the corner into Rainsford Street.

  “I certainly hope so.… Incidentally, the one in the passenger seat probably has a broken collarbone.”

  “Fair play to you.”

  “Ask the Commissioner to ring me at Jury’s.”

  “Sure you can count on him doing that.”

  I returned to our car. “I was just saying to herself that it was not such a long time after all before they’d tried again.”

  “Our Nuala will never lack for protection,” Annie agreed, “will she now?” As calm and as philosophical as though I had left the car to chase a herd of recalcitrant sheep out of our right-of-way.

  “Are you all right?” I asked the driver.

  “Fine, sir. Weren’t your man and I thinking about the tire irons in the boot when the Gardai arrived?”

  “You work for Mike Casey?”

  “Isn’t he the best cop in the world?”

  As we picked our way through the crowded streets of Dublin, I pondered this latest folly.

  It was an act of sheer madness. How could they have hoped to get at us in broad daylight on the streets of Dublin with such crude tactics? Didn’t they know that the Dublin Guards would be hanging around? They were amateurs, minor leaguers, tough guys who were not wise guys, would-be gangsters with not quite enough brawn and very little brain. The “boys” out on the West Side of Chicago would laugh at them.

  Yet what was the point? Why were they trying to harass us? Could it be that it was all an act? Did they want to frighten us out of Ireland? Might they have dropped Nuala off a half an hour after they had lifted her?

  If it was a form of psychological warfare, it was a risky business.

  We checked the McGrails into the Towers. I showed them up to their room. They acted like they had stayed in hotels like this and, indeed, better ones all around the world. Anyone seeing them walking down the corridor from the elevator would have assumed that they belonged here.

  Which, in fact, they did.

  “ ’Tis a nice room,” Annie said judiciously.

  “It’ll do,” himself agreed.

  Then they both laughed, as though the three of us knew it was a grand joke.

  “Would you ever like a bite to eat?”

  “Well,” he said, “after the long train ride and the long night ahead of us, wouldn’t it be better if we had a bit of a nap first?”

  “And then a little dip in the pool that Nuala tells us about? Sure I can’t believe it is as warm as she says. Won’t we perish with the heat?”

  “ ’Tis a bit warmer than the Gulf Stream out in Carraroe,” I admitted. “Suppose I meet you in the lobby for a cup of tea and some scones and maybe a sandwich or two and a sip of sherry at half five? Then we can go over to the Point. The woman will want an annulment if I don’t stick my head in her dressing room a half hour or so before she starts.”

  They agreed.

  They’d do more than take a nap, I thought to myself and shut off the Adversary before he could make any obscene comments.

  I began to work on my report. I’d write up the story of Kevin O’Higgins first and then turn to the mystery of Castle Garry or Casdegarry, as it was now called. I had no way of knowing which order herself would like, though I was pretty sure that whatever I chose would be the wrong choice.

  The phone rang as I opened my Omnibook 800CS.

  “Dermot Coyne,” I announced.

  “Keenan, here.”

  “Indeed!”

  “I’m sorry about this afternoon.”

  “I should hope so.”

  “You weren’t in any danger, you know, not until you jumped out of the car. My people arrived in plenty of time.”

  “And you found the bad guys?”

  “Ah, no.”

  “Why not?”

  “They abandoned their car, stolen, as you might have expected, and, ah, disappeared.”

  “Almost like they’d planned it?”

  “Uh, just so.”

  “So they’re both stupid to try such an attack in daylight with half the Dublin police lurking around and yet smart to have an escape hatch?”

  “You might say that, Dermot.”

  “I did say it.”

  Silence.

  “You still carrying that cosh?”

/>   “I am.”

  “Is that altogether necessary?”

  “ ‘Tis.”

  Silence.

  “You might want to try a shillelagh.”

  “I don’t happen to have one.”

  “I’ll get you one.”

  “Grand. … Now what about tonight?”

  “We’ll be using metal detectors at every door. There’ll be hundreds of our people in the audience, most of whom are delighted to be able to attend. We will monitor every corner, every corridor, every possible place for the bad guys, as you call them, to hide. I believe it will be quite safe. … The only way to make it perfectly safe of course would be to cancel the concert. That is your decision.”

  “No, it isn’t, as you well know.”

  “I suppose not.”

  “The sun could cancel its rising tomorrow morning before herself cancels the concert.”

  “You could not talk some sense into her on the matter?”

  “You gotta be kidding!”

  “I suppose so.”

  We were both silent for a moment.

  “Do these attacks make any sense to you, Gene?” I asked, backing off from the hostility of my earlier remarks.

  “Candidly, Dermot, they do not.… Our friends have frightened you. But they have inflicted no physical harm on you. Quite the contrary, you have inflicted considerable physical harm on them.... I shudder to think what you might do to them with a cosh AND a shillelagh.”

  “Do you think they want to stop the concert?”

  “Possibly … but for what purpose? I can’t think of any. Can you?”

  “No. Only the poor will benefit from it.”

  “Actually,” he said, “our fraud people have taken a look at it, just to be sure. It seems perfectly legitimate.”

  “The Garrytown factor?”

  “I have considered that since you told me that you were going out there. The present proprietors, distant cousins and Catholics you may be interested to know, are decent folk who do a fine job. There’s no trace of anything questionable in their past or their present.”