Irish Gold

by Andrew M. Greeley

Yet I almost stopped ogling when she began to sing—in Irish. It was surely a love song and just as surely, being Irish, a sad love song. Nuala’s voice was sweet and precise, yet powerful. She filled the pub with her song and reduced the noise of her fellow students to a whisper—though the steady traffic back and forth to the bar was not terminated. Just the same, they walked softly.

  As I say, I did not suspend my astonishment at her wondrous breasts. Presumably no male in the pub did. The gentle, melancholy song made my astonishment all the more pleasant and poignant and frightening.

  She glanced at me a couple of times while she was singing, nervously I thought.

  Ah, if I brought this one home to Mother, there would be universal rejoicing in the family.

  The rest of the kids in the pub cheered enthusiastically. I was so dazzled that I forgot to applaud. She noted my failure and favored me with a dirty look.

  Ah, you don’t mess with this one, not at all, at all.

  They demanded another song. Feigning reluctance, which was calculated to fool no one, she sang a lullaby that made me want to be a baby again. I noticed that her mug of Guinness, like mine, was nearly empty and tiptoed over to the bar to refill them both. I felt two scorching blue eyes burn holes in my back.

  Uh-oh. I think I made a mistake.

  I made it back to the table just as the lullaby ended. Her eyes avoided mine. I was afraid she wouldn’t come back to our table.

  “Good luck with the play, Nuala,” someone shouted.

  “You’ll be great,” someone else chimed in.

  She stood at the table, towering, it seemed, above me.

  “Play?” I said cautiously.

  “TCD Players.” She scowled at me, ready to pick up her economics notes and storm out of the pub. “Playboy—and that’s not a magazine with naked women either.”

  “And you’ll be playing herself?”

  “Herself?”

  “Pegeen Mike. Who else?”

  “I am.”

  “ ‘Ah,’ ” I began, “ ‘six yards of stuff for to make a yellow gown. A pair of lace boots with lengthy heels on them and brassy eyelets. A hat is suited for a wedding day. A fine-tooth comb. To be sent with three barrels of porter in Jimmy Farrell’s creel cart on the evening of the coming fair to Mr. Michael James Flaherty. Best compliments of this season. Margaret Flaherty.’ ”

  Nuala listened carefully to my recitation of the opening lines of The Playboy. “You do it better than I do,” she admitted as she put her guitar back beneath the table with the same delightful passage of her torso by my face. “Sure, a male Pegeen in drag, that would create a scandal, wouldn’t it now? Something that Nial Jordan would think up.”

  “Beautiful songs, Nuala.”

  “Och, the first one is an eejit. Lamenting an amadon that walked out on her.”

  The word “eejit” would normally be translated as “idiot” in American English, but something of the affectionate nature of the reproach is lost. I also note that for reasons of delicacy, I tend to omit in this story further use of the colorful language with which Nuala began our relationship, though I am firmly convinced that, word-drunk people that they are, the Irish are more skillful at obscenity and scatology than anyone else in the world. Again, if you want the full details, consult Roddy Doyle. Nuala was much more restrained than the citizens of “Barrytown” as portrayed in The Commitments or The Snapper, for example.

  “There are,” I said, cautiously moving the replenished pint in her direction, “three themes in Irish song—lament for a lost love, farewell to Ireland, and poor old Ireland.”

  “I don’t want your focking jar.” She pushed it away angrily.

  “Nuala . . . short for Fionnuala, right? . . . I’m not trying to seduce you. Not that it wouldn’t be a most interesting and rewarding exercise, but it’s not, as we richyanks would say, where I’m at now. I’d like to be friends, if you don’t mind.”

  She reached tentatively for the jar. “Would you be gay now?”

  “Woman, if you knew the thoughts that were dancing in my head while you were singing, you wouldn’t be asking that.”

  “Nothing wrong with being gay.” She flushed a light pink and turned her eyes away from mine.

  I noted another difference between her face and that of a model on a magazine cover. The model’s face is impassive, content with its own immobile beauty. Nuala’s face was in constant motion, disclosing a rushing torrent of emotions—anger, interest, shyness, amusement. Either she was too unsophisticated to hide her emotions or she didn’t give a damn about hiding them. Later, much later, I would understand that, like the good actress she was, Nuala could manufacture emotions at will—and then convince herself that she really felt them.

  “Nuala, it is then?”

  “ ’Tis.” She did not look from her Guinness, which she moved back and forth uneasily on the pockmarked table.

  “And the name that goes with it?”

  She hesitated, not sure she wanted to cross that boundary. “McGrail,” she finally admitted, not at all sure she wasn’t making a big mistake.

  “That’s better. Now that we’re friends you can drink that jar, can’t you?”

  She looked up at me and grinned. “Sure, wasn’t I perishing from the thirst after singing?”

  I tried to place her accent. It wasn’t like any of those I had learned to identify since I’d been in Ireland, yet somehow it was familiar, soft, light, sweet, and ever so faintly ironic.

  “So you’re studying music and drama, Fionnuala McGrail?”

  “I am not,” she said hotly. “Would I want to starve to death, and there being enough unemployed in this country as it is? Wouldn’t I be a terrible eejit altogether if I wasn’t doing accounting?”

  I wasn’t sure that her voice was good enough to be commercial. Probably not. Everyone in Ireland could sing ballads.

  “Your voice is as lovely as you are, Nuala.”

  “Hasn’t the man swallowed the blarney stone instead of kissing it?”

  “I didn’t mean to make you angry.”

  “Sure, Dermot Coyne, aren’t you the terrible eejit not to realize that I like your flattery and that it scares me, and yourself”—she flushed again—“a big amadon of a fockingrichyank.”

  So, basically I attracted her and I scared her. Progress, too much progress altogether. For all her beauty and talent, she was only a teenager from . . . from where?

  “And so how would you be earning the money to pay for your expensive London clothes?”

  My heart sank. My answer to that question persuaded most young women that I was a total flake.

  “I didn’t know this was a student pub, or I wouldn’t have come in with this suit,” I said. “I didn’t want to look like a fockingrichyank.”

  “Would I mind how you’re dressed?”

  Probably not, Nuala McGrail. But you’ll probably mind how I get my money.

  Moreover, even if you don’t mind, I can’t burden you with my story about the Irish secret police. You’re too young and too innocent and I may just love you too much.

  –– 2 ––

  THE MAN was a cop and a bully. So I made up my mind that I would pay no attention to what he said, except maybe to do just the opposite.

  “Would you mind having a word or two with me, Mr. Coyne?” The words, spoken the day before I encountered Nuala McGrail, were polite enough; the manner was designed to intimidate, a linebacker pretending to prepare for a blitz.

  “I would mind, yes,” I replied, shaking his paw off my arm.

  “I’m Chief Superintendent Conlon,” he said, recapturing my arm. “I’d really like a word or two with you. Special Branch.”

  “If I’m supposed to be impressed, I’m sorry. Somehow I can’t work up that reaction.”

  He was a big man, not as tall as I am and not as solid either, but a hell of a lot more bulky. Moreover, he was skilled at using his bulk to intimidate, to create the illusion that in his black bowler with his black raincoat and his b
lack umbrella and his thick black mustache, he was a powerful and determined man whom it would be foolish to resist. In short, he was a bully.

  Now, in my own defense (and I have a lot to defend in this story), I must say that ordinarily I am a peaceful and nonviolent person. I quit the football team at Fenwick because I was disgusted by the physical and personal violence of one of the assistant coaches—who was also a bully. I stayed on the wrestling team because one-on-one combat did not require undue violence and because the bullies always lost.

  Only those who were weaklings had to be bullies, I thought. I refused to play football at Notre Dame, though I might have made the team. I would have flunked out of school anyway, probably a little sooner. I messed around with martial arts and learned a lot about self-control and resistance to pain from the Japanese master who taught me until I discovered that martial arts also attracted bullies who wanted to intimidate others despite their weakness.

  I don’t know where I get this aversion to bullies. Neither my father nor my older brothers ever bullied me. I was too amusing and too exasperating when I was a kid for them to want to, even if it was in their character.

  I guess there must have been incidents in the schoolyard when I was a tiny punk that I have repressed. Anyway, the point is that chief Superintendent Conlon, with his broad shoulders and his big belly and his heavy sigh, had chosen the wrong technique to deal with me.

  People do. They figure I’m a big, happy-go-lucky goof with no steel in his spine. Usually, I have to admit, they’re right. A suggestion that something, anything, might not be worth the argument is likely to win my lackadaisical assent. But try to intimidate me and something starts rumbling in the dark basement storerooms of my soul.

  So sometimes I get myself into a whole of a lot of trouble needlessly. This was one of those times.

  “You have a badge or card or something?” I asked the cop.

  “I have.” He sighed and produced a laminated card.

  “Doesn’t look very impressive to me.”

  “Just a word or two.” He pushed his bulky self in my direction, nudging me in the direction of the Dubliner, a pub off the lobby of Jury’s Hotel, where he had cornered me when I came in out of the Dublin rain.

  When such a man nudges you with his bulk, you’re supposed to agree to drift in the direction he wants you to go. If you do that, he has you.

  I resisted. So he continued to shove. Mexican standoff.

  “Special Branch of the Guards, is it?” I adopted the Irish ploy of communicating through questions. “That’s kind of the secret police, isn’t it? Like an Irish Gestapo?”

  I admit that I don’t sound very attractive in this scene. After all, he was making a civil enough request, wasn’t he? The point is that he was trying to push me around. I don’t want you admire me at this point, just understand that’s how I react.

  “We’d like to think of ourselves as the Irish FBI.” He stopped pushing, baffled apparently by the failure of his usual sure-fire intimidation technique.

  “That’s what I mean, Fascists.”

  His big, flat face turned an ugly purple. He was about to lose his temper. I wouldn’t have wanted to be in an interrogation room with him when he lost his temper.

  “I wanted to talk to you about your grandfather, Liam O’Riada.”

  Why hadn’t the stupid bastard said so in the first place?

  “Bill Ready to us.”

  “Aye.” He sighed.

  “All right.” I led him over to the Dubliner, the hotel bar, pretty effectively disguised as a typical Dublin pub (but cleaner), signaled for the waiter, and ordered a pint for him and a Ballygowan water for me. If he had learned his lesson from our preliminary exchange, there might not be a story to tell.

  “My grandfather died a year ago,” I said.

  “Aye.” The cop’s big belly moved up and down against the table. “God be good to him.”

  I waited. It was up to him to take the next step.

  “He never came back to Ireland, did he?” Conlon’s big black eyes flashed as if he knew some terrible secret.

  “I guess not.” I tried to dismiss the subject. “Personally I never noticed.”

  “Left during the Troubles, didn’t he, and never came back?”

  “The Troubles” is the polite name for the era after the end of the Great War—1916 to 1923. It includes the Easter Rising of 1916 (“A terrible beauty is born”), the Anglo-Irish War of 1919–1921 (the War of Independence, it is called in Ireland), and then the Irish Civil War, between 1921 and 1923, which occurred after the Brits left Ireland, and was fought between those who accepted the treaty setting up the Irish Free State and those who rejected it. For a couple of years, in other words, the Irish set about the task of killing friends and relatives and those who had been the best men at their weddings.

  The rebels of 1916 were poets and dreamers. If the British had imprisoned them after they shelled their handful of outposts into submission, it would have been the end of the matter, since most of the Irish thought the rebels were a crowd of eejits. Typically the Brits overreacted, shot the lot of them, and made them heroes. Typically too they missed the dangerous men—the crafty politician Eamon DeValera and the brilliant guerrilla leader Michael Collins. In 1919, after the end of the Great War, Collins changed the strategy of previous Irish insurgencies. Instead of pitched battles, the Irish Volunteers (renamed the Irish Republican Army) fought a series of hit-and-run attacks that slowly destroyed British power in Ireland.

  Britain, preoccupied with other postwar troubles, proposed a truce and then peace. Collins, though the leader of gunmen, realized, as many of the young hotheads did not, that there was no ammunition left to continue the fight and little support from the people for continued killing. Reluctantly he accepted the treaty the British proposed, arguing that, while it was not the republic which the IRA wanted, it was the best that could be had and the beginning of a republic. Despite the fact that Collins’s faction won the election, the young radicals rejected the treaty and rebelled against the so-called Irish Free State government. Collins, the only man who might have been able to make peace, was killed near his home in Cork, and the bloody civil war continued until most of the leaders were killed and most of the ammunition consumed.

  “I suppose so. I’m sure he had unpleasant memories of all the foolish killing.”

  “Aye.” The superintendent rested his jug of Guinness on his belly.

  My grandmother, Mary Anne, alias Nell Pat, had told me once that she and Bill did not dare go back because if they did they would be shot. She wouldn’t tell me why and now she, great and good woman, was dead too.

  I wasn’t going to admit any of this to a Special Branch cop.

  “And himself a hero of the Rising too, wasn’t he?”

  “He didn’t talk much about it. He became an American.”

  “And was very successful at it too, wasn’t he now?”

  “Moderately.”

  “Not as successful as you, was he? Not so young anyway?” Conlon’s black eyes flashed again as if he had dug out some great, dirty secret from my past.

  “Depends on your standards.”

  “There are them that say you’re asking questions about him. That wouldn’t be true now, would it?”

  Fair point to you, Chief Superintendent. I’d been digging up old newspapers and reading through histories of those dismal years of revolution started by poets and ended by gunmen. I’d met with a fat little professor at UCD (University College Dublin) named Seamus Nolan who had written a cautious book some twenty years ago about the Troubles. Nolan’s responses were as suspiciously evasive as his book. So he had squealed to the Special Branch? Why bother? It had happened sixty-five years before, when Bill Ready was eighteen and Nell, the only love of his life, was a mere sixteen. All the principal characters of the story were dead, weren’t they?

  “So what if it is true? Is there a law in Ireland against reading newspapers and history books and talking to profes
sors?”

  “Not a law, in a manner of speaking.” Conlon drained his jug. “A man could still get in trouble for asking questions that are perfectly legal to ask.”

  “I thought this was a civilized, democratic country.”

  “We don’t kill our presidents, now, do we?”

  Another fair point, I guess, but his making it increased my ire. “Let’s stop this silly Irish game of indirection, Chief Superintendent Conlon. You’re warning me off my casual inquiries about my grandfather and the Troubles.”

  He winced, as the Irish always do when you address them directly and spoil their elaborate circumlocutions. “I didn’t say that, now did I?”

  “What are you saying then?”

  I must note here that my interest in my grandfather’s story was casual. I had always adored the man and he seemed to like me, the youngest, more than any of the other grandchildren. Surely Grandma Nell, poor woman, doted on me. She had told me many stories about the Rising and the Troubles. She hadn’t told the stories to my mother or her brothers and sisters.

  I’d ask about what Pa (as I called him, imitating my mother) had done during the violence.

  “That was long ago,” she would tell me, with a distant glow in her eye. “Pa has left it behind.”

  I was out of the country when he died. I didn’t learn about his death till after the funeral. My mother’s disappointment in me at that blunder forced me to call home more often. So I arrived in time for Grandma Nell’s funeral.

  I hadn’t said good-bye to either of them, though I had loved them very much, almost as much as my own parents. Perhaps I was expiating by playing with the notion of writing a book about them and their early lives—I am kind of a dilettante writer, you see.

  It was not, however, a serious project. Very few things in my life have been serious projects. If they hadn’t tried to bully me out of it, I would have probably, irony of ironies, given this one up.

  What difference did it make, two-thirds of a century later, why my grandfather and grandmother left Ireland fugitives, why they never went back, why they never communicated with any of their relatives left behind? They had been happy and successful in America and lived rewarding lives. If there was some kind of blot on his reputation in Ireland, so what? Wasn’t he a respected and admired real estate developer in Chicago? Wasn’t he a man whose reputation for integrity was impeccable? Who cared what octogenarian Micks and a couple of fusty historians thought about him?