Irish Mist

by Andrew M. Greeley

  —34—

  “WOULD YOU ever mind doing it just one more time?”

  My wife, in faded jeans and her Marquette sweatshirt, was edgy. She did not like the demands that each motet be sung five or six times, “until it’s perfect, love.”

  She glared at the sound director.

  “All right,” she said tersely.

  Sexual frustration, I informed myself, not wanting to give the Adversary a chance to say the same thing. This afternoon when we are back at the castle I’m going to do it. I don’t know how or what, but I’m going to do it and be done with it. I can’t let this go on. The woman is not made of stone.

  She had recorded the four Gregorian antiphons and the Schubert “Ave Maria.” However, the polyphonic “Regina Coeli,” in which she sang against the strings of the Limerick Symphony, was a bit more difficult. As far as my tin ear could tell, she had done it perfectly the last time.

  I glanced at the abbot, who was watching me keenly.

  “It would be worth my life to intervene now,” I said, “but I thought it was perfect the last time.”

  “I’m admiring your patience, Dermot Michael,” he said with a smile.

  “I suppose these guys have a job to do.”

  “They don’t seem to realize that they’re teetering on the edge of a volcano.”

  “Ready, Nuala Anne?” the director asked.

  “Last time,” she said firmly.

  “Absolutely,” the director said, perhaps realizing that, good or bad, it was indeed the last time.

  “Someone just drew the line,” Father Abbot whispered.

  When she was singing the Gregorian antiphons, she kept her light and larklike soprano voice under strict restraints. But the polyphonic motet gave her a chance to play.

  She carried the whole orchestra, the monks who were listening, and all of us in the control room along with her. We were at the Resurrection celebrating with the mother of Jesus his return from the dead.

  The last notes died in the air. There was a long pause of awe and expectation, then cheers. Nuala blushed and bowed, and fell into my arms.

  Her body was tight with need. In our embrace there was challenge and demand. Maybe the embraces had been that way before and I had simply not noticed. Now, however, the fierceness of her hunger was too obvious to ignore. I’d better do something about it and soon.

  Mere lovemaking would not be enough. It had to be something spectacular.

  Could I be spectacular in bed?

  Well, apparently I never had been.

  I didn’t like to be under pressure to perform. That’s why I had given up competitive sports.

  On the other hand, when the chips were down …

  “You were focking brill, Nuala Anne,” I said, holding her close and responding to demand with demand of my own.

  “I can’t believe I sang like that,” she said. “Madam won’t believe it either.”

  The wife of the president of the university, who had been present for the recording, invited us to supper out at their home in Newport the next evening. The abbot would be there and Maureen and her husband and a few other people, including a bishop and the Archdeacon and his wife. Not, however, the Archbishop of Cashel (in whose domain the abbey was theoretically located). I gathered that he was not a whole ton of fun.

  If he had come and acted archepiscopal, Nuala would doubtless have spent much of the evening quoting her good friend “Cardinal Sean.” She might even do that for a plain old bishop, whom everyone called Willie.

  “Can we ever stay over another day, Dermot Michael?” she asked me, as though my vote mattered.

  “Even a couple of days,” I said. “We both need a rest. Grand Beach can wait.”

  Two days of intense and reckless lovemaking, I promised myself.

  WHO ARE YOU KIDDING?

  After drinks and a buffet to celebrate Nuala’s triumph, we toured the spanking new and impressive university, collected Fiona, and found our driver (one of Mike Casey’s men), whom we asked to take us to the parish house in Garry town. And we hoped to the solution to our last mystery.

  —35—

  I PUT the envelope on Father MacNamee’s desk.

  “A small contribution from your man up in the castle.”

  He looked up from the tea he was pouring and smiled.

  “Beat him, did you now?”

  “As everyone between Limerick and Killarney knows by now.”

  He made no attempt to open the envelope, doubtless because he already knew what was in it.

  “You met me colleague, Very Reverend Father Smith-Rider, have you now?

  “I have.”

  “Beautiful wife, isn’t she?”

  “A woman like that clutters up a vicarage, doesn’t she?” I replied.

  “She would that,” he said with a wink. “Still, few of us would object. And they may be closer to the old way than we are.”

  Nuala Anne must have felt that there had been enough clerical chitchat. She dropped her bomb.

  “You were present when Lady Augusta was finally buried up there thirty years ago, weren’t you, Father MacNamee?”

  If he was surprised, he didn’t show it. “Sure, wasn’t I the parish priest? Didn’t I have to be there?”

  “She had been in a convent, hadn’t she?”

  “Where else would she be if she wasn’t buried up there in 1921?”

  “Carmelite? The same one in which Kevin O’Higgins’s daughter is today?”

  “What other one would it be?”

  He was smiling genially through her litany of questions. Nonetheless, he seemed impressed.

  I sure was.

  “She saved the lives of those Kerry men, didn’t she? The Whelan boys whose execution O’Higgins later ordered?”

  “Not to say executed exactly,” he said. “There was a standing order in the Free State Army to shoot such people on sight.”

  “All except Tommy, and himself having a conversion experience?”

  “And his grandson a junior minister in the government today, Foreign Office I believe. … Isn’t it all strange, Dermot Michael?”

  “And kind of glorious, too,” I replied. “And very, very Irish.”

  “Och, it is that. … Well, now, Nuala Anne, there isn’t much more for me to say, and yourself knowing the whole story.”

  “The truth is in the details, Father, as me man always says.”

  I’d never said anything like that in all my life. I did not, however, disagree with the sentiment.

  “Well, let’s see where we can begin? I suppose it is with the old fella who was my predecessor here, Canon McGinn. He’d been here fifty years, first as the Catholic curate, then as the parish priest. That means he was here before the Great War. Became a great friend of Lord and Lady Downs. Played Irish football with him on the pitch. His predecessor, old Canon Muldoon, was also a great friend of theirs, a man way before his time, the old canon. Was friends with the Anglican Vicar, long before anyone approved of your ecumenical dialogue, if you take me meaning.”

  “He said the Mass here in the church when Lord Downs was killed?”

  “He did and nary a word of protest from our man in Limerick. He knew better than to take on the old canon. Well, me canon, Canon McGinn that is, always thought that Lord Downs had become a Catholic in the trenches. That’s probably true, you know.”

  “Of course,” Nuala said impatiently, as if she didn’t need to be told such self-evident things.

  “Anyway, me canon was dying when I came down here to be administrator. He told me all the stories about the McGarrys and what wonderful people they were and themselves being Protestant and that it was time we put aside all that Reformation nonsense and say we were one church. I was fresh out of Maynooth then, and I thought the canon was a heretic but a wonderful heretic.

  “So finally as he lay in that room there dying, doesn’t he call me in and says he has a secret to tell me. ‘Lady Downs didn’t die in the fire and isn’t buried up there next
to her husband. She’s still very much alive, he says. … Now, lad, don’t ask too many questions because the answers are none of your business. She had grand reasons for what she did. The old canon and I did it for her, and I’d do it all over again if I had to.’

  “Well, I’m brimming over with questions, but it’s none of my business, like he said. ‘I visit her a couple of times a year in the Discalced Carmelite convent, where they call her Mother Augusta.…’ That’s what he said. She was the Superior there, young woman, did you know that?”

  “I did not, Father. But it doesn’t surprise me.”

  “ ‘I want you to go up and see her a couple of times a year, just like I did,’ the canon says to me. ‘She likes to know what’s happening in Garrytown, poor woman. And in my desk are the instructions for her burial when she dies. They know about it in the cloister, and they are committed to honoring her wishes.’ ”

  “And you visited her regularly?”

  “I did that. She was a wonderful woman, the happiest woman I’ve ever met. I think that’s important to remember, Nuala and Dermot. She found happiness in the cloister, not the same kind of happiness as when her man was alive but happiness just the same. … When she knew she was dying didn’t she send for me to make sure the arrangements were still on. They were of course. It was no problem at all, at all, to bury her up there late one night, though how you knew it was stormy I can’t figure out.”

  Good guess, I thought. With my wife in one of these detective moods of hers it’s hard to tell how much she knows through her Homo antecessor (or whatever) genes and how much is quick guesswork—if there’s a difference between the two.

  “She told you why she disappeared?” Nuala persisted.

  “I didn’t ask. When you’re with a woman like that, you don’t ask. She gave occasional retreat conferences outside the cloister; her last one was for priests, if you can imagine. It was in the days immediately after the Council when we all had such great hopes … until the amadons in Rome ended them. She even went to Rome for a meeting of the order and had a lot of influence on it. Wasn’t she the most impressive woman I’ve ever met, saving yourself, Nuala Anne?”

  It was a sincere compliment. Nuala nodded politely. “We’ll see what I’m like in fifty years, Father Mike.”

  “But she did write a document for you, didn’t she?” I interjected.

  Nuala started in surprise, causing the snoozing Fiona to look up sharply. “Go back to sleep, darlin’; me man was brilliant again.”

  “Och,” said the smiling leprechaun priest, “aren’t I surrounded by dark ones?”

  “Did she know that General Tudor died in 1965, three years before she did?” I asked.

  “If she did, she didn’t say. I didn’t know it meself. She cared for him or at least felt sorry for him. She had ways of finding things out, and herself in the cloister.”

  “She probably found out where he was and wrote him, forgiving him,” Nuala said thoughtfully.

  “It would be very like her. … She was not a mournful person. She had absolute confidence that the castle would be restored. She carried grief over her husband’s death to the grave. But she had long since given up mourning. She prayed to him every day.”

  He paused and shook his head.

  “The last time I saw her before she died, she gave me the document I’m going to show you … give to you. ‘Father Mike,’ she says, ‘you know that I didn’t enter Carmel to expiate my sins, don’t you?’ And don’t I say, ‘Mother Augusta, I never thought you did.’ And she says that the old canon tells her that what happened between her and General Tudor that night was, under the circumstances, not a serious sin. … I told you that the old canon was way ahead of his time, didn’t I?”

  “He was that,” Nuala agreed, now patiently waiting out the old man’s story, since he had promised to give us—well, to give her—Mother Augusta’s final testament.

  “ ‘My whole story is in this, Father Mike,’ she says. This and the little book I did about me husband that you have in your rectory. Just as I am certain that Castle Garry will be restored someday, I am also certain that sometime people will come along who want to know my story. For a long time I felt, well, too bad for them. It’s none of their business. But I realize now that it’s wrong to think that way. My story is just a little bit of them terrible times, but it also shows how grace works. I’ll be with Arthur soon, and he’ll want to know why I didn’t put it all down, and himself loving history. Moreover, I think Himself will be a little upset with me, because it’s a story of His grace. So here it is. Give it to anyone who wants to know what really happened out here if you think you can trust them. You read it, too, because I want you to know the whole story when you sneak me into the grave where you’ll bury me forty decades too late.’

  “And then doesn’t she laugh? She was a great one for laughing, Mother Augusta was.”

  —36—

  I don’t know who you are, you who will read my story. I am uneasy about telling it to someone I’ve never met, someone who might not even be alive today. We Irish always want to see the expression on someone’s face when we tell a story, so we can win them over as we talk. Well, it can’t be helped. I hope you will be tolerant of my weakness and my failings and forgive me. Perhaps you would have behaved very differently if you were in my circumstances. Perhaps not. I ask you to be tolerant of the world in which I grew up, just as you would want those born after you to respect your time and your culture, even if it were not their own.

  I hope that my biography of my husband will tell the first part of my story. My heart was breaking when I wrote that little book. But I had to do it. I had to record what a wonderful man he was and how deeply I missed him. I was a very young woman then and perhaps too sentimental. I feel that I hardly know the author of the book, but I admire her restraint.

  While I was writing it, I was thinking seriously of what to do with the rest of my life. I did not want to become a recluse living in a gloomy old manor house in which everthing was frozen in the spring of 1918. I realized I could marry again. I was not sure I wanted to do that It would be difficult, I knew, in my social class to find another man like my Arthur. I would always be making comparisons. Moreover, while I enjoyed the pleasures of the marriage bed with Arthur, enjoyed them intensely, there had always lurked in the background a, what shall I call it, a hint of another love, another kind of love. It was like that with Arthur, only deeper and richer and more demanding. As long as we were together it was not an option. The lover who lurked, just around the corner, was content to leave me alone. He did not, definitely did not, want to take me away from my husband. He left me alone when Arthur was in the trenches, too. Nor did he intrude in my life when I was paralyzed with grief. But he did let me know he was waiting.

  I went to Canon Muldoon about it. “Can I become a contemplative nun?” I asked him. “Is that what God wants of me?”

  He was not surprised at all. Nothing surprised the canon. “What do you think, Gussie?” he says to me. I think he’s calling me, inviting me, very gently, very tenderly, but very persistently. “You don’t want to marry again,” says the canon. “I wouldn’t mind,” I says, “though it would be hard to get used to another man. But this other lover is very persistent. Is it God?” I asked.

  “Who else would it be?” he says, and that was the right answer, wasn’t it now?

  Then he says that it’s possible for someone to be involved with both a human lover and a divine lover. Men and women have done it. I told him that I was sure some had, but I didn’t think that was possible for me or what this persistent lover wanted of me.

  Then I asked him how I could enter Mount Carmel, and myself not even Catholic. The canon said that would be no problem at all, at all.

  Then it was 1921 and the “Troubles” came to Ireland. I was not afraid. We had always been close to our tenants, and Garrytown was hardly a revolutionary hamlet. But anarchy has no memory. One stormy night a band of the Irish Volunteers, most of them f
rom down below in Kerry, appeared in front of our house. They were badly drunk. They beat some of the servants and set fire to the outbuildings. They were removing furniture and paintings from the house. I went out to chase them away. They laughed at me and cursed me and then tied me to a tree and threw mud at me. I was soaking wet from the rain, which had started again and which was putting out the fires. I thought they would kill me. I was terrified, of course, but I was ready to die. I would join Arthur sooner rather than later.

  Then a British Army patrol showed up and surrounded them. A British officer cut me down from the tree. He said he was General Tudor from the Ninth Scottish Division and that Arthur had been his chief of staff.

  He carried me into the house, and we made love. I was frightened and lonely and hungry. I cannot say I was raped, but if I were in full command of myself, I would have said no to him. It might not have done any good.

  He was a wonderful lover. I think I could have fallen in love with him and married him, if I had not found out later that he had a wife and children in England.

  As we were lying in each other’s arms after love, I heard rifle shots outside. I paid no attention. When he left the next morning and I went outside to try to salvage what I could from the raid, the servants told me that the Brits were Black and Tans and had shot all the men whom they had captured.

  You can imagine my desperation. I believed that the English government had no business ruling Ireland. Our family had supported Home Rule for fifty years. We should not have been a target. Now I understood that every landlord in the west of Ireland was a fair target. Moreover, I had committed a sin, fornication surely and probably adultery, too. Our own Vicar had gone to Dublin with his family, for which I no longer blamed him. So I went to the canon, who assured me that under the circumstances it wasn’t a serious sin. The canon, as you say, Father Mike, was way ahead of his time. Maybe even a little bit ahead of the present time. I am sure now, however, that I was not fully responsible and have long since forgiven myself, as I’m sure God has forgiven me.