Irish Mist

by Andrew M. Greeley

  The Adversary left me alone, perhaps to indicate that he had given up on me.

  —31—

  FOCK THE focking dinner!

  Pardon me terrible language.

  We were almost there, though I’m not sure where or what there is.

  And I lost me nerve and mentioned dinner.

  And then he lost his nerve.

  And the fire inside me went out.

  And I guess the fire inside him went out, too.

  I’m frustrated. I want whatever it is that women are supposed to get out of sex, even if them as me ma calls the prim and proper don’t get it.

  The next time Til keep me focking mouth shut.

  I promise.

  He should be furious at me, but he’s not. Is that good or bad?

  Probably good.

  —32—

  PADDY MACGARRY watched my first drive with wide eyes. The first hole on his beautiful golf course was a 350-yard par 4, with a water trap that seemed as big as Galway Bay at 200 yards.

  “Most aim short,” he warned me as I teed up.

  “I imagine they do.”

  The course was also a local country club. Two members had joined us, a local lawyer and his son, a student at Limerick University. I assumed that the lawyer was to share in the fleecing of Dermot Michael Coyne.

  “You’ll beat the shite out of them all,” herself had said as she kissed me before she climbed into the car, along with Fiona. The latter seemed to be in some doubt as to whom she should accompany. I shoved her in after Nuala.

  “Woman, I will.”

  I felt cool, relaxed, and at the top of my game. I took no practice swings. I simply hit the ball a mighty thump.

  It was not one of my better drives. Instead of 300 yards it went only 260, 270. However, it cleared the lake with ease.

  “Holy shite,” said the kid from the university.

  “A little short, I said modestly.

  “Nice shot,” Paddy said, gasping for breath.

  He was so unnerved that he hit his first drive into the lake.

  I didn’t understand the betting protocol. There were all kinds of side bets and special matches. But it didn’t matter. I was going to win everything.

  Like I say, I’m not a very competitive fellow.

  “Would it be out of place, Dermot,” the lawyer asked me with a quick smile, “to ask what your handicap is?”

  “I usually play at Oak Park Country Club in my family’s neighborhood, though sometimes at Long Beach, where we spend part of the summer. The two places seem to agree that I merit about a three. I think that’s a little too low.”

  “Holy shite,” said the kid from the university.

  Despite my inadequate drive, I put my iron shot up on the green, twenty feet from the pin. I waited patiently for the rest of the foursome to catch up with me. Then, pushing my luck, I aimed my putt for the hole, just as herself would. It dropped in with a loud clunk.

  Birdie on the first hole.

  I’ll give Paddy MacGarry full credit. He was a good sport.

  “I’d say they were excessively generous with that handicap.”

  We had a grand time. I ended up one over par, which was not bad, considering that I had not played the course before. My wife would be pleased with me. However, she would add that if I had worked on my iron shots and my putts I would have done much better.

  And I would say that it would not be fair to be better at the short shots than she was.

  I also ended up eight-hundred pounds richer.

  “I’ll split this between Father Clyde and Father Mike,” I said.

  They hailed my generosity.

  “When a guest beats me,” Paddy said with good grace, “I tell him that I’ll get mine back next year. I hope you come back next year, maybe for our tournament, but I know I’ll never beat you.”

  “My irons were hot today,” I said with utterly fake modesty. “Nuala usually beats me in the short game.”

  “I don’t think I want to play her either.”

  “It might be risky. She’s a fearsome competitor.”

  I showered, changed into slacks and a knit sport shirt, and walked down to the vicarage. The Archdeacon’s wife, in a sleeveless summer dress, let me in with a shy smile. A sexy woman, I decided, who doesn’t know she’s sexy. I wonder if my wife knows she’s sexy. Probably not.

  “That’s a very pretty dress,” I said.

  “Thank you,” she said, blushing furiously.

  It would have helped if I could remember her name.

  “Dermot,” the Archdeacon said, rising from the chair in his study where he had been working over bookkeeping sheets, “you must think I’m the dumbest man in Ireland. I fear I didn’t catch your wife’s name. I heard the concert on the radio, driving up from Cork, but I did not see it. My wife said I was a terrible eejit.”

  “That’s what women say.”

  “She made a tape for me that now I’m going to have to listen to. I hope you’ll explain to Nuala Anne.”

  “I’ll tell her, but she’s not the kind that needs or wants celebrity treatment. … Incidentally, Father, here’s half the winnings from the golf course. The other half goes to Father Mike.”

  “A nice ecumenical split, Dermot,” he said, taking the bills. “We’ll put it in the cathedral repair fund … four-hundred pounds!”

  “I had a lucky day!”

  “What did you hit?”

  “One over par. My wife will criticize me for not working on my iron shots.”

  “Your wife is a breathtaking young woman, Dermot.”

  “So is yours, Father.”

  A strange phrase for an American Irish Catholic to speak, but, what the hell, according to George the Priest, St. Peter was married.

  ‘Thank you. I tell her that often. Sometimes she believes me, but not often.”

  “ ’Tis the way of it,” I agreed.

  “I have a peculiar perspective on Ireland,” the Archdeacon said thoughtfully. “Though we have been here for four generations, I am still something of an outsider, by ancestry, religion, and education. That gives a point of view which is somewhat interesting, if not altogether without biases of its own, if you take my meaning?”

  I nodded. I wasn’t quite sure that I did, but I was prepared to wait him out.

  “I watch football, of course, but I’m afraid that I don’t think that the fate of Ireland depends on the success or failure of our soccer team—or any of our athletic ventures, as far as that goes. I don’t think Ireland has to prove anything to anyone or ever did.”

  “We may not share the same perspectives, but I agree.”

  “So I am skeptical of our interludes of manic enthusiasm and disconsolate self-rejection.”

  His wife poked her head in the door. “Did your mem feed you lunch out on the links?”

  “Woman, he did not,” I admitted, admiring again her radiant sexuality. “When Dermot was through with him, Vicki, I don’t think poor Paddy could afford it.”

  “Good enough for him! … So, Dermot”—she smiled gently—“you could eat some sandwiches and pastries along with your tea and scones?”

  “I won’t resist the suggestion … if you’ll join us.”

  “Yes, Vicki, by all means. Dermot has not come for spiritual counseling. Sure, can’t he get that down below from Father Mike. … He has, my dear, just given us four-hundred Irish pounds of his gambling prize for the restoration of the cathedral. I would think that’s worth a sip of sherry in the garden, wouldn’t you?”

  He followed his wife out of the room and returned with a very old bottle of sherry. He opened it and then led the way out the doors into a shaded and lush garden, thick with humidity.

  “The woman, as you may imagine, Dermot, is a constant distraction,” he said, filling two of the three glasses he had brought out and placed on an old wooden table.

  Triumph on the links, an attractive woman who admired me, a sunny day in a humid garden, and sherry under a palm tree … och, D
ermot, be careful.

  “To finish me point, Dermot Coyne”—he raised the crystal sherry glass in a toast—“I think that ‘modern Ireland’ is, as you Americans would say, for real. I believe in the Celtic Tiger. I also believe that this is a golden age for Irish literature, music, and art. I finally believe that we may also be entering a golden age of Irish spirituality, despite the problems both our churches experience here. What is surging up from the theologians and the musicians and the ordinary people like your astonishing wife is grace, grace superabundant, grace overwhelming. It is an exciting time to be Irish.”

  “And to be a priest?”

  “Indeed.” He filled my glass again. “Did you think of being a priest, Dermot Coyne?”

  “Not for long. My older brother is the priest in the family. I’m the sennachie, I guess.”

  I had never claimed that title before. Shows what a glass of sherry and a humid day in Ireland will do to me.

  “An even older vocation. … Ah, my dear, it looks stunning.”

  He was referring to the array of sandwiches, scones, and cakes, but he meant his wife.

  I devoured the tea sandwiches (from which, as is customary in these islands, the crusts had been cut) like I thought I would not see food for several more days. Clyde filled Vicki’s glass, and she poured my tea, accepting with a puzzled frown my wave-off of the inevitable milk.

  “To conclude my little homily, which poor Vicki has heard far too many times, from the sixth to the ninth century the Western world looked to Ireland for spirituality. Allowing for all the proper qualifications and caveats, I think that we are entering into a similar era.”

  “I agree completely,” I said. “It’s an exciting time to be Irish and to be Irish-American.”

  “Your wife,” Vicki said simply, “is such a lovely young woman.”

  “Funny thing, I’ve noticed that, too.”

  We all laughed and continued to destroy the sherry bottle. Their children, I learned, were in school in England and would soon be coming home for the long vacation.

  “Now as to your man Mayor General Sir Henry Hugh Tudor, O.B.E., I talked to my friend who is the chaplain at Sandhurst, the Royal Military Academy, this morning. He called back in an hour or so. It seems that at certain of the upper levels of what’s left of the officer corps Tudor is still, if not a legend exactly, a story, a cautionary tale.”

  “Oh?

  “He was a brilliant field officer. He might well have ended up as Chief of the Imperial General Staff. He did not want to go to Ireland, but his friend Churchill persuaded him, a terrible mistake. He knew regular warfare; he knew nothing about guerrilla war. He made a mess of it, but anyone would have done that. His men killed 238 people, by British standards on this island not all that many. However, the English people were fed up with war and fed up with Ireland. They wanted it all to go away. He fired General Crozier, one of his subordinates, for not being tough enough. Crozier went home to England and labeled him ‘Bloody Tudor’ in the English press, with the damning allusion to Bloody Mary, if you take my meaning. The image stuck, even though he won a libel judgment. He served in Palestine; there was an attempt on his life, blamed improbably on the IRA. The army was fed up with him and suggested that he retire. He more or less disappeared from sight.”

  I had heard most of this story before. “How a cautionary tale?”

  Vicki filled our sherry glasses again.

  “His was a classic case of a field commander who should have stayed away from political battles,” the archdeacon continued, “especially in Ireland. He should have turned his friend Winston down cold. “Stay away from Ireland,’ they warn the young men at Sandhurst, ‘or you’ll go the way of poor old Hugh Tudor.’ ”

  “And his name is hardly known here.”

  “He kept it out of the Irish papers. Besides, there were many other English general officers to hate. Field Marshal Sir Henry Wilson for one … He was the Chief of the Imperial General Staff. He approved the killings of Catholics in the North. Collins ordered his assassination.”

  I had heard that story. “But not Tudor’s?”

  “No … and not General McCready, who was in charge of all military operations. Like Cornwallis he had the good sense to want to get the English out of this country. It was too late for anything else, but no one in the English government realized that. So they stayed in part of Ireland and made a bad situation worse.”

  “The Tudor story doesn’t make much sense, does it? Why go into exile for more than forty years because of libelous charges?”

  “There is a darker side to the story, one that makes me shiver.”

  “Indeed?”

  “You must understand that from the point of view of the young men at Sandhurst, and their instructors, too, as far as that goes, these events happened long ago. Tudor, Michael Collins, the lot of them, are no more real human beings then Wellington or Napoleon. They are stories of men who died long ago. …”

  “Tudor died in 1965.”

  “Really? He must have been quite old.”

  “Ninety-five.”

  He paused in his story.

  “What is the darker side of the story, Clyde dear?” his wife asked.

  “It’s all very obscure. Hints that he became involved in a love affair while he was here.”

  “He would not have been the first, would he?”

  “He apparently ordered her execution when she wouldn’t submit to him. Even if there was never any proof of that, the story would stick to him.”

  “Lady Augusta?” Vicki asked in horror.

  “My man at Sandhurst knew none of the details.”

  “Isn’t there a story in the village,” Vicki asked, “that she is not the one buried up there on the edge of the Shannon?”

  “I’ve heard it,” her husband agreed. “I’ve always dismissed it as nonsense. … It doesn’t fit with this story. … Have you heard that, Dermot?”

  “It’s completely new to me,” I said, thinking that my wife had a bad habit of becoming involved with empty graves.1 “I’ve heard her name linked with General Tudor’s, however.”

  “What will you do if you find out the truth, whatever that may be?”

  “In general I believe that one should let the dead bury their dead, like Jesus said—unless someone’s reputation needs to be rehabilitated. Or perhaps it means the same thing, some restless spirit needs peace.”

  My host and hostess nodded solemnly.

  “Your wife is fey, of course,” Vicki said.

  “A little bit.”

  “Just like you play a little golf.”

  We all laughed uneasily.

  “I’ve always felt that Father Mike knows more about the tragedy of Augusta Downs than he lets on. But Mike seems to know more about everything than he lets on. Could it be nothing more than a canny old parish priest playing a little game?”

  “Perhaps.”

  I ambled back up to the castle with a woozy head and unsteady legs. I knew from the way the vicarage couple extended their arms around each other as they waved good-bye to me that they would make love as soon as I was out of sight.

  Well, more power to them. That’s what humid, subtropical summer afternoons were for on the very edge of the Celtic fringe.

  I napped, showered, dressed in tan slacks and sport shirt (an ensemble, like all my clothes, selected for me by herself), collected my shillelagh, and wandered down to the door of the castle to await the return of my wife. What was taking so long?

  I waited fifteen minutes, a half hour, an hour. I went back into the hotel and dialed Glenstal. I hung up before anyone answered the phone because I remembered that the rehearsal today was at the University of Limerick.

  Finally, when I was almost ready to call the Guards, the Mercedes turned the corner from the lane of trees and pulled up to the door, the chase car following it faithfully.

  The door opened; Fiona popped out and ran up to me. She stood on her hind legs and licked my face, as if she had feared she
would never see me again.

  “Good doggy.” Nuala Anne eased her temporary rival aside. “Dermot Michael,” she whispered, “them eejits are in the Limerickman. I was afraid to tell Inspector Murphy because he would have thought me round the bend altogether.”

  Her uniform today was black jeans and a black blouse with a gold Celtic cross.

  “What eejits?” I said stupidly. “Who’s the Limerickman?”

  “The people from the bridge are in the pub. Tell Inspector Murphy, Dermot, before they get away again.”

  1 Irish Whiskey

  —33—

  “SOME INFORMATION received, Inspector Murphy. Our friends from the Grand Canal are having a pint over at the pub in Garrytown, the Limerickman, I think it’s called.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Nope. But it’s worth a look.”

  “That at least.…

  He ran over to the chase car. A young constable (male) dressed like a scruffy hippie came back with him. Nuala, Fiona, and I piled into the backseat.

  “I’m not sure you should be coming along,” the Inspector objected.

  “You’ll need some identification.”

  “Maybe.”

  He started the car and spoke into his transceiver as we sped down the lane and out to the main road.

  “My name is Stevie,” said the young cop in the front seat. “I look like I should be sitting all day in a pub.”

  “With only one pint, tough,” said my wife, winning a grin from Stevie.

  “A few drops every hour or so.”

  We parked a hundred yards away from the Limerickman.

  “We have backup coming down from Limerick,” the Inspector informed us. “If they’re still in there, I’d just as soon wait till we have everyone in place. Stevie, you go in and have a look.”

  Nuala whispered in my ear, “Maeve Doyle might well be in there, too. And her husband.”

  Stevie jumped out of the car, gave us a jaunty wave, then slouched down the narrow street like he had nothing to do and nary a care or worry in the world.

  “Good actor,” Nuala Anne said tersely.

  “Takes one to know one.”

  She giggled.