Irish Gold

by Andrew M. Greeley

  I don’t like being Watson to anyone.

  It was raining again in Dublin’s fair city, a slow, gentle rain, “soft,” the locals would call it. I thought that I might just as well be in Gary, Indiana.

  Feeling infinitely sorry for myself, a great Irish pastime, especially when it’s raining, I wandered down Grafton Street to St. Stephen’s Green, listening out of one ear for footballs behind me and thinking of the possibility of another Bigfoot caper.

  I was glad to get back to my suite in Jury’s. Out of my bedroom window, when it wasn’t raining, the Dublin Mountains loomed in the distance. From the windows of my parlor I could see Christ Church and the Liberties. The suite wasn’t home, but it was as close to home as I had been in a long time.

  I had chosen Jury’s because it had both a pool and an exercise room and the suite because if I took it for a month there was a big discount and, I argued to soothe my conscience, I needed a room in which to work on my computer. My suite with its light floral wall covering and green furniture was comfortable and reassuring, if a bit lonely, and I could cook my own snacks in it. The hotel, glass atriums and fountains, throbbed with life—American tourists, Irish businessmen, and young men and women awkward in formal attire for dinners at night. Life pulsed through Jury’s and managed to miss me, which was the way I wanted it.

  Till I met my Pegeen Mike.

  After a very small taste of Bushmill’s Single Malt, I sighed almost as heavily as if I were a native and began the melancholy task of systematically searching through my grandmother’s memorabilia. She was a convinced paper saver—newspaper clippings about her husband, marriage announcements of her children and grandchildren, baptismal photos of her great-grandchildren, crayon drawings by the children and the grandchildren—half of which, I fear, were manic fantasies by her favorite (“because he’s the spitting image of himself”), a certain Dermot, or as she preferred, Diramuid Coyne.

  “Ma, you’ll spoil him rotten,” my own mother used to protest with notable lack of sincerity.

  “Ah, he’s such a winsome one, poor little thing,” Ma—as I called her too—would respond, “wouldn’t anyone just adore him?”

  They all adored me, all right, my parents, my siblings, my aunts and uncles, my cousins. Maybe they did spoil me. Or maybe the ambition genes had run thin by the time I came along. Or maybe my parents, while greeting me as a happy surprise, didn’t have the energy left to inculcate the work ethic in me.

  I could do no wrong, not even when I did things wrong, like flunk out of Notre Dame or quit the Fenwick football team. They’d line up, led by “Ma,” to provide excuses.

  And they had a week of parties to celebrate my success at the Merc—it was a “grand achievement, altogether grand,” Ma said, as if pure dumb luck was any achievement at all.

  Six months later “Pa” was dead and herself another four months after her husband.

  My eyes filled with tears as I sorted through her archives. I told myself that there was no reason to weep. Ma had led a full, happy, and passionate life, struggling from dire poverty to comfortable affluence, raising seven children, and living to see her great-grandchildren: “Ah, sure, Derm, me boy, ’tis no great feat at all, at all. You only have to marry young and live long.”

  Why was I crying for Ma?

  Because I missed her. And because I missed her at the end, when, they told me, she kept asking for me—and characteristically she made excuses for my not being there.

  At the bottom of the second box I found a stack of tiny paper-covered notebooks, neatly piled and wrapped in rubber bands, maybe thirty of them. I opened the first one. It was written in Irish and in a tiny script whose letters I could not decipher. I could, however, make out numbers on the first page: 14, 05, 19. I glanced through the other pages. Dates on all of them. A diary! Ma’s diary. In May of 1919, she would have been fourteen years old!

  Ma had not made entries every day. She had apparently written things down when she thought she had something worth recording.

  Ma kept a diary! She never told me! She probably never told anyone, except “himself,” and a secret told him was as safe as one told to a lion in front of the Art Institute.

  I considered the little booklets and permitted the first hint of an idea to form in the back of my head. Might there not be in these old books, the early ones discolored with age, an explanation for why they never went back, the reason why—I could hear her voice whispering in my ear when I was maybe eight—“Sure, if we went back, my poor little gosson, would they not shoot the both of us?”

  I shivered again, in memory of an eight-year-old gosson’s shivering.

  Moreover, might there not be in these books a publishable memoir, or at least a rich document for the Chicago Historical Society?

  It occurred to me then that I probably ought to call home. Mom and Dad would be watching the Chicago Bears in the family room, probably with George the Priest present to second-guess Mike Ditka, since the Bears were playing at Green Bay. Why not call them?

  (Did I keep track of the Bears’ schedule even though I had been wandering the world? Of course I did! What kind of a fan wouldn’t?)

  Fortunately for me it was half time and the Bears were ahead—or the conversation would have been short and my temporary antidote for homesickness denied me.

  “Mom, did you know that Ma kept a diary?”

  “I’m sure she didn’t, darling. She didn’t keep secrets from us.”

  “She did, Mom. From the fourteenth of May 1919 to”—I flipped open the final book—“to three weeks before she died.”

  “Well, what did she say?” Mom was mildly interested, but unperturbed—Mom was rarely if ever perturbed, a serene child of a wild and passionate woman.

  “I don’t know. It’s all in Irish.”

  “Really? I didn’t know she remembered the language! Ah, Dermot, she was a grand lady!”

  “I know.”

  “Maybe it’s just as well we can’t read it. She wouldn’t want us prying in her secrets.”

  “Then she would have destroyed them, wouldn’t she?”

  “I suppose so. . . . Have you met that special Irish girl yet?”

  For some crazy reason I told her I had—perhaps because of the hint of longing in my mother’s voice: She believed firmly that if her last child would only meet a “nice young woman,” he would settle down, come home, and use his many talents wisely and well, all most unlikely eventualities.

  “What’s her name?” Mom demanded happily.

  “Nuala Anne McGrail—the first name is short for Fionnuala. She’s a student at TCD, Trinity College, that is, studying to be an accountant but she acts and sings.”

  Why was I letting all this spill out? There was as little chance of my ever bringing Nuala home to Mom as there was of Boris Yeltsin joining the Young Republicans.

  “Is she pretty?”

  “Outstanding!”

  God forgive me for what I was doing.

  Then Dad came on and analyzed for me the Bears’ mistakes during the first half. He was followed by Prester George, as I called him.

  “A girl?” he demanded incredulously.

  “It’s not serious, George. Never will be.”

  “She look like Ma?”

  George, you will perceive, is a very clever young cleric.

  “Not at all.”

  Ma was short and compact with flashing green eyes (which I inherit from her along with Pa’s blond hair and height) and red hair in her youth. “My wee Gypsy lass,” Pa used to needle her, a description that always caused her to pretend she was furious with him.

  In fact, I can’t remember her ever really being angry at her husband.

  “Yeah?” Prester George said skeptically.

  “Tall, black-haired, blue-eyed, willowy, foulmouthed.”

  “Sounds like just your type.”

  If I had told George that she was from the Carraroe Gaeltacht, he would have been overjoyed—“the model fits the data,” he would crow.
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  I’m fond of George, admire him and respect him as a matter of fact. But I don’t like to be the subject of his pop psychological hypotheses.

  “It’s not important, George. I’ve only spoken to her once.”

  “Sometimes that’s all that’s required,” he said carefully. George was acutely aware of my troubles with women and careful not to tread on too many raw memories.

  “She called me a pissant Yank gobshite.”

  “Sounds very perceptive.” He laughed.

  I changed the subject to Notre Dame’s team, for which I still root as a matter of right, even if they did bounce me out.

  When I had said good-bye to them, I returned to feeling sorry for myself. It was delightful.

  What, you might well ask, is the trouble with Dermot Coyne? Is he short on hormones? Here’s a gifted, intelligent, and gorgeous young woman, contentious enough to be interesting, vulnerable enough to be appealing, and interested enough in him (she didn’t protest the kiss, did she?) to perhaps be open to pursuit.

  So why doesn’t said Dermot Coyne begin the preliminaries of pursuit? Is he not of such an age that a woman like the fair Nuala Anne should produce all kinds of physical reactions in him? To say nothing of obscene (though respectful) fantasies?

  Hasn’t he admitted the reactions and the fantasies already, poor dear man?

  Why didn’t the eejit go backstage with his dozen red roses and present them to the aforementioned young woman, perhaps the first flowers anyone has given her in her young life?

  Surely that would earn him the right to another kiss, would it not? Perhaps a brief hug of gratitude?

  You’ve got to understand that while I’ve been lucky in the S and P pit at the Merc, I have had an unlucky history in love. I’d already been seriously in love twice in my life, I mean really seriously. One of those relationships ended in tragedy, the other in catastrophe, though perhaps the catastrophe was comedic.

  No, in retrospect, it was surely a comedy, even if the laugh was on me.

  I stacked Ma’s diaries and returned them to the crate in which they had come, making sure that they were as neatly arranged as she had left them. Ma was not, as I’ve said before, obsessive-compulsive. But she did keep things neat.

  The phone rang. Who the hell was disturbing my peace here in Jury’s on a cold foggy Dublin night?

  “Dermot Coyne,” I said.

  Silence.

  “Well?” I said impatiently, though my heart beat rapidly and my mouth suddenly dried up.

  “You enjoyed the play tonight, did you now?” The voice was hoarse, deliberately disguised, not the same disguise as the last time.

  “And if I did?”

  “Nothing wrong with that at all, is there? So long as you continue to be a good boy and don’t ask any more questions you shouldn’t be asking, if you take my meaning?”

  “Fuck you,” I shouted, and slammed down the phone.

  Instantly I regretted that I had not added a crack about Bigfoot.

  Like “never fock around with Bigfoot, you fockers!” As I have said before, when they tried to bully me, they turned on all my jets.

  So what if they had followed me to the play.

  Big focking deal!

  –– 7 ––

  SHE WAS born Kelly Anne Morrisey.

  In her early teens that became Kellianne. Later it was simply Keli. To me she had always been Kel.

  She was my first love.

  I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know her. Or didn’t love her.

  Her father and mine had been classmates in medical school. Her mother and my mother had graduated from Trinity High School in River Forest the same year. She was born a month before me, the last of seven and a surprise, a mistake perhaps that became an adored child.

  I had sensed from the beginning—one so far back that I can’t remember when the feeling came—that I had lucked out on parents compared to her. Mom and Dad are unfailingly refined and gentle folk. I cannot remember either of them ever being drunk. Her father is a loud-mouth braggart even if he is a highly successful urologist. Her mother is a tasteless and overweight bitch, three words that no one could imagine predicating of my mother.

  However, Dr. and Mrs. Morrisey were part of the environment into which I was born and in which I was raised. They were as much an element of my personal scenery as St. Mark’s parish, Oak Park Country Club, Lake Geneva, and my brother who wanted to be a priest. Only when I was a teen did I realize not only that I didn’t like them but that I had never liked them. Later I would discover that my parents didn’t like them either.

  “If we ever need proof,” George said, his quick, wry grin indicating that he was about to be perceptive and harsh, “that our parents are both saints, we only have to consider that they put up with those two drunks for thirty-five years.”

  George doesn’t look or act much like my brother. He’s five eight, black-haired instead of blond, with a sharply etched face, thick eyebrows, and an animated grin. He is quick, intense, forceful. Epigrams and quotes spin off from his lips like bullets from an automatic weapon. When he is talking or thinking or both (which is almost all the time), he strides up and down like a bantamweight boxer before a fight.

  “Drunks?”

  “You miss things, don’t you, Derm? They’re both alcoholics. Of course.”

  “I never thought of it that way.”

  “You wouldn’t,” he said partly in exasperation, partly in admiration.

  He was right about the elder Morriseys: They were indeed both alcoholics. Their heavy drinking had been as much part of the world in which I grew up as their daughter’s pale blond hair, light blue eyes, and pretty, pretty face. Just as I had assumed that “Kel” would be pretty, so I had always taken for granted that her parents’ drank a lot and acted kind of silly.

  I cannot remember a time when Kel and I were not inseparable friends. Nor can I remember the time when we first kissed, though she probably kissed me. She certainly initiated the kisses in the early years of grammar school and resumed them again in seventh grade when we boys were no longer ashamed of kissing girls but began to brag about our conquests—I never bragged about kissing her, however.

  Kel and I were always together. We made sand castles on the beach at Lake Geneva and splashed each other with water, we walked the side roads and picked wild raspberries, we watched television together, we did our homework together, we threw snowballs at one another sometimes but usually at others, pretending that they had thrown the first snowballs at us.

  Every morning in St. Mark’s schoolyard my eyes, pretending to be uninterested, would seek her out—and meet hers looking for me. We’d both giggle and turn away, not wanting to admit to anyone else how much we meant to one another.

  At parties and dances in high school, I was never at ease till I had spotted Kel—an easy enough task because her effervescent laughter usually told me where to look.

  More skillfully perhaps, she kept an eye out for me.

  “You came at ten after nine,” she said accusingly after one such party. “Late.”

  “Keeping tabs on me?”

  “You bet.” She hugged me. “Where would I be without you?”

  Did she love me more than I loved her? Or was it easier for a young woman to display her love?

  I don’t know. Maybe both.

  In our teen years the kisses turned passionate, and that was my doing, though she did not protest. Our parents had mixed emotions about the two of us. Our affection for one another was “cute,” and they thought we’d make an “adorable” marriage. But they worried about whether we were becoming “too involved,” by which they meant that they were afraid that adolescent passion might interfere with our careers.

  As I’ve already suggested, my family was not terribly worried about my career—a little concerned maybe at least for the record. Kel’s family, however, was always apprehensive about her future.

  All my brothers and sisters had become “successful,” so I was
kind of a wild card, gifted surely but not necessary to prove the family’s worth.

  Tom Morrisey, however, was a disappointed man because none of his children had become M.D.’s like himself.

  “It’s the highest profession a man can have,” he said once to my father.

  “Only if he likes it,” my dad replied—one of his cautious little bits of wisdom that Tom never heard.

  The problem was not that the Morrisey kids didn’t try to be doctors. Alas, they either failed to get into medical school or flunked out, a disgrace far worse than my failure at the Golden Dome.

  “They’re not cut out for it,” my father would say. “They inherited their father’s looks and their mother’s brains.”

  “Jim, that’s terrible,” Mom would remonstrate with him in the tone of pious insincerity which she used to demonstrate that she was in complete agreement with one of my father’s more outrageous comments.

  Kel, the last and most golden child, was different. She was number one in everything from kindergarten on—highest marks in the class, class officer, valedictorian, student council president, merit scholar semifinalist, prom queen, captain of the volleyball team. . . . You name an honor, she won it.

  She had all the natural talent I had and more. Moreover, she worked at success.

  “The difference between you and little Kelly Anne,” my mother said once, “is that she uses her talents and you don’t.”

  “She’s a girl,” I protested with notable lack of logic.

  “Ah, you noticed that, did you now?” Ma grinned impishly. “Sure, you’ve always acted like she’s one of the guys.”

  “She’s that too,” I said stubbornly. “She’s not stuck up like the other girls.”

  “The poor child is a nervous wreck,” Ma continued, shaking her head sadly. “And her parents pushing her all the time.”

  I hadn’t noticed that. Quite the contrary, it seemed to me that Kel wanted to succeed even more than they longed for her achievements and that she worked hard at everything—harder than was required, given her natural abilities—because she liked working hard.