She pushed me harder than my parents ever would. I was more afraid of her reaction to my B’s and C’s than I was afraid of Mom’s and Dad’s. Her fury when I quit the football team was worse than theirs.
“You’re stubborn and proud and lazy,” she told me bluntly, in the front seat of her Mustang convertible after a date the Friday night I had walked out of the locker room never to return.
“But you still love me.”
“Certainly I still love you.” She nuzzled close to me. “But I want to be proud of you too.”
“What about the A’s I’m getting?” I touched one of her pert young breasts.
She did not pull away from me. She seemed to like to be fondled even more than I liked to fondle her. Our love play was an endlessly interesting sport, one in which I often sensed nervously that I could have gone much farther than I did.
“You’d better keep on getting them.” She sighed contentedly. “I’d be awfully lonely at Notre Dame without you.”
I dutifully pulled up my average, made it to Notre Dame by the skin of my teeth, and discovered that her father had other plans for her—Yale.
We were an oddly matched pair: Kel was always exuberant, an enthusiastic master of the revels as well as academic and athletic leader. I was the big amadon (a word that was affectionate, more or less, when Ma used it) who tagged along behind her.
She led the songs in the bus on the high school club picnics, consoled the lonely and unhappy kids in our crowd, organized the double dates, planned the dances, took charge whenever someone was needed to take charge, and even when, strictly speaking, no take-charge person was required. I arranged the chairs and cleaned up afterward.
I did win a prize or two—poetry and story contests, but who needs a scribbler when they have a prom queen who is also a merit scholarship winner and a volleyball ace who did not quit in midseason?
A mild spasm of pride did run briefly through the parish and the school when my prizes were announced, but such awards didn’t get you into Notre Dame.
“Sure,” Ma announced to the family, “merit scholars are a dime a dozen, but poets are rare birds.”
“Rare birds indeed,” said Pa, whose strategy for dealing with his wife’s vigorous assertions was to echo her last two words and then add the decisive “indeed,” usually with a happy grin that said, in effect, “Sure, the woman is a terror, now isn’t she?”
Afterward I often wondered whether Kel and I would have become romantically involved if we had not been friends for so long before the hormones were dumped into our bloodstreams. We were locked into a relationship that we might not have chosen if we had been strangers at fourteen. As it was, adolescent passion trapped us before we had a chance to think, not that either of us minded in those days.
There was a dark side to Kel’s sunny, dynamic personality. She drank one or two more cans of beer than she should have and experimented with both marijuana and cocaine, much to my horror.
When I begged her to stop the drugs and cut down the beer, she did so promptly, apologized for causing me to worry, and begged me to forgive her.
“I don’t want to lose you, Derm,” she said, tears in her eyes. “I don’t know how I’d survive without you.”
I’d tell her she didn’t need me at all and she’d hug me and bury her head in my chest and say, “Yes I do, Derm. I really do.”
Not so much that when Yale accepted her and “Doctor”—as Tom Morrisey was always called in his family—commanded that she go there instead of Notre Dame she was able to refuse.
These are all afterthoughts. In those days I thought Kel was the perfect girl and I was the luckiest guy in the world.
Was I brokenhearted when she told me that she “had” to go to Yale?
To tell the truth, as I look back on it, I was not. I consoled her in her tears and argued that maybe absence really did make the heart grow fonder. Looking back on that conversation, I wonder if I was not experiencing somewhere deep down inside myself a bit of relief.
I wouldn’t admit it then, however. I was besotted with her, dazzled by her wit and energy, captivated by her beauty, astonished by her love for me, enraptured by her superb young body.
Yet she was not quite beautiful, not the way Nuala is beautiful. She was pretty and mildly voluptuous, a young man’s fantasy of a woman he’d like to see naked rather than a mature man’s image of ideal beauty.
I never did see her completely undressed, although I did have the opportunity.
Some of our friends were certain that we had slept together. We were too close to one another, they said, to have resisted the demands of our bodies. I won’t pretend that the idea had not occurred to me. Yet I would never have suggested it to her. How do you proposition your best friend? I wondered.
She offered herself to me the day before the senior prom.
“Do you want to make love with me after the prom, Derm?” she asked with her usual direct candor. “Maybe we ought to be lovers this summer so we will remember each other when we go away to college at the end of August.”
What kind of a young man would say no to such a request?
One that was frightened by the prospect, I suppose.
“I think we’re too young, Kel. I respect you too much to do that to you now. And I don’t need sex to remember you.”
She sighed—disappointed, I suppose. “You’re right, as always. But, just the same, I’m yours whenever you want me.”
“A breathtaking offer, Kel.” I wrapped my arms around her. “I won’t forget it.”
She hanged herself on Father’s Day. Wearing her prom dress. In front of a video camera. After she had shouted her hatred for her parents into the camera. Just before she kicked the chair she shouted, “I’m sorry, Derm. I love you!”
I found out about the tape later. Denise Reid, her “best friend,” called me hysterically about four o’clock on that softly pleasant late spring afternoon.
“Something terrible has happened at Kel’s house, Derm. They say . . . they say she’s killed herself.” The girl’s voice choked with horror.
I sprinted the two blocks that separated our homes. An ambulance and two police cars were parked in front, a silent crowd of perhaps fifty people waited outside. I pushed my way through them and up to the door. A cop stopped me.
“You can’t go in there, son. Sorry.”
“Let me talk to her mother or father,” I begged, panting for breath. “I’m Dermot Coyne.”
The cop glanced at me and guessed that I was the boyfriend.
“I’ll get one of them.” He nodded.
Doctor appeared at the door a moment later, smelling strongly of bourbon. “Arrest him, Officer,” he shouted. “He killed my little girl! He murdered my little doctor!”
The crowd behind me murmured uneasily.
“How did he do that, sir?” The cop seemed to understand that he was dealing with a man out of control.
“He knew she was going to do it and he didn’t tell us. He’s responsible!”
“I—I didn’t know, Dr. Morrisey,” I stammered. “Honestly I didn’t. . . . She isn’t dead, is she?”
“He wanted her to go to Notre Dame with him. She was too good for that school and for him. That’s why he killed her! He’s a goddamn killer!”
Out of the corner of my eye I saw a young woman writing rapidly in a notebook. A reporter—all this would be in the papers and on TV. I was too sick with grief to care. I did not want to believe that my friend Kel was dead. Yet I was beginning to realize that she was.
Life seemed very empty, an open tomb without a bottom.
“You’d better go back in the house, Doctor,” the officer said softly. “We’ll take care of it for you.” Then to me: “It would be a good idea, son, to go home. We’ll come over and talk to you later. Don’t worry.”
The walk home was a stroll to the end of the earth.
My face, twisted with grief, filled the screen on the ten o’clock news that night. “Parents blame boyfriend in
death of prom queen!” the Tribune said the next morning. Tom and his wife, Dot, became hysterical when I entered the wake on Monday evening, flanked by my parents, Ma and Pa, George (who had been ordained that year), and my sister Linda, a lawyer who warned one of the lawyers (male) in the Morrisey clan that, grief or not, his parents were asking for a defamation suit. Doctor started to shout obscenities at all of us. My father turned abruptly on his heel and walked towards the door. A hush fell on the crowd, as if someone else had just died. We all followed Dad out in the warm spring night, Ma and Pa acting as the Legion of the Rear Guard, just in case there was a fight Ma might miss.
As I left the funeral home with my grim-faced entourage all around me, I felt thankful at least that I didn’t have to look at her in the casket.
Her friends told me that she looked totally gorgeous. I refused to believe them.
“They need a scapegoat to blame,” George muttered through clenched teeth. “They can’t accept their own responsibility.”
“Hush, darling.” Ma cut him off. “Everyone knows that.”
“Knows that indeed,” her husband agreed.
I sat in the last pew of St. Mark’s Church for the Mass of the Resurrection and stood outside the chapel of Queen of Heaven Cemetery. Mom and Dad were with me, the rest of the family stayed away, even Ma and Pa, though the former wanted to come, just in case there was a fight.
Some of the elderly nuns at Trinity had told the girls who had rushed to them for consolation that, unless Kel had made a perfect act of contrition the instant before she died, she would have gone straight to hell. The pastor of St. Mark’s, who hated all teenagers, had avoided the issue completely in his homily, a tribute to her mother and father that barely mentioned Kel.
Later George, furious at both the nuns and the priest, demanded of me, “You loved her, Derm?”
“I sure did.”
“Do you think God loved her any less?”
“Certainly not.”
“Then we can trust Him to take care of her, poor little thing that she is, as Ma would say, can’t we?”
“I guess.”
George was right, but all I could do then was wonder why God would permit such great vitality to be snuffed out. I still wonder that when I think about Kel. Or when she appears to me in my dreams.
If I had agreed to make love with her that spring, might she still be alive?
George himself, not knowing about her suggestion, argued that Kel had been trapped in a momentary firestorm of despair. “If she had made it another week, she would have been all right. But at your age in life you think you’re going to have to exist in the lower depths forever.”
That was the night after her burial. They had played the videotape on the five o’clock news—with the phony excuse that it might help parents to cope with depressed children in the future. I had turned on the TV to learn the Cubs score and saw Kel in her prom dress shouting at me. I watched, my hand on the remote control, frozen in place.
“Nothing in my life is worth anything,” she cried, “except my love for Dermot. I’m no one. I am worthless. Everything I’ve ever done was to please my parents. I hate myself. I hate them. They’re drunken bastards. I hate all the prizes and trophies and awards. You can have them, Mom and Dad, but you can’t have me anymore. There’s no reason for me to go on living. None! I’m useless. At least now I’m doing something I want to do. Dermot, I love you! I’m sorry!”
Then an anchorwoman appeared and urged parents to listen to the feelings of their teenage children.
I vomited on our big-screen TV.
There was a nasty media controversy about how the station got the tape and the ethics of playing it. The controversy provided an excuse for playing the tape again and again. No one showed the actual hanging, though the Tribune did report that Kel’s last words were her plea to me for forgiveness.
“Her love for you will be enough to win her admission to heaven.” George jabbed a finger at me. “Totally unselfish love is a ticket to paradise.”
I hope so. Dot and Tom moved to California before the week was out, without a word to my parents, who, I think, were immensely relieved. We never heard from them again. I kept myself busy talking other young women in our crowd out of trying to follow Kel and reassuring the guys that they ought not to feel guilty.
I suppose I had some guilt feelings then, though I was too preoccupied to notice them. Mostly I was lonely. I missed her. There was a vacancy in my life that would never be filled.
“Why does God let these things happen?” I demanded of George.
“Maybe because He can’t stop them.” George shrugged. “One thing you can count on, however, is that God hurts for her as much as you do. More, in fact.”
“God hurts?”
“Forget the Greek philosophy, punk.” He jabbed his finger at me. “The God of Isaias and the God of Jesus is vulnerable, a shy and injured child like poor Denise to whom you’ve been so kind. We have to take care of God just as we do all the injured, fragile people we know.”
“Shy children?”
“Sure. Remember the Bergman film? Ingrid Thulin says that lovers must treat one another like shy children. Fair enough, so long as we realize that God is included in the list of lovers.”
“I have to take care of God like a vulnerable woman?”
“Now you got it!” He beamed. “And when you take care of vulnerable women, you take care of God. Denise is God and God is Denise.”
“Sounds like heresy.”
“Solid Catholic mysticism.”
Prester George is probably right. He usually is. Was God Kel? And Kel God? I guess I messed up with that vulnerable combination. Or maybe I didn’t. Maybe I did the best I could, which is all any lover can expect of you.
Isn’t it?
For a long time I kind of drifted along, carrying a burden of loss about which I could talk to no one. Why, I wondered, did she have to die? What had gone wrong? What had we all missed? Would I ever see her dancing eyes and her bubbling laughter again?
Dear God, how I missed her.
I probably would have flunked out of Notre Dame anyway.
No, that’s not true. If Kel had been around to goad me, I would have pulled down the A’s that I should have earned. And I would have played football for Lou Holtz—second string.
Maybe third string.
The emptiness is still there. My attempt after I left Marquette to fill it began and ended in folly.
Sometimes, even last autumn in Dublin, I would wake up in the morning, convinced that Kel was still alive and I would see her after breakfast.
I still looked for her face in the crowds on Dawson and Grafton streets. Sometimes I even imagined that I saw her, her light blue eyes eagerly searching the street looking for me.
–– 8 ––
I ENCOUNTERED Nuala Anne McGrail, noted West of Ireland agnostic, coming out of St. Teresa’s Church on Clarendon Street. It was three days after I had fled her, leaving my dozen roses behind. I had not been sleeping well, despite an hour every day in the pool at Jury’s. Ma’s archives had depressed me more than anything else in life except Kel’s death.
I discovered that I missed Ma too, almost as much as I missed Kel.
Moreover, my dreams were tormented agonies that refought the Troubles in the West of Ireland. I failed to protect Oughterard from the Black and Tans. I was the Irregular who fired the single rifle shot that killed Michael Collins. I riddled the body of Daniel O’Kelly. I killed Ma and Pa as they tried to escape Ireland.
I would wake up several times during the night in a hot sweat, although the window was open and the temperature was cool. You don’t sweat in Ireland during the autumn.
Each morning I would tell myself as I struggled out of bed that I ought to return to River Forest and watch the World Series. I didn’t belong in Dublin. The mysteries I had determined to solve were insoluble—and not worth solving.
I’d take my walk, often stopping in a church for part of Mass—o
r the Eucharist, as Prester George says I ought to call it these days—eat my breakfast, and decide that I would stay at least another day and hope something would occur.
Then I had the call from the cultural attaché at the American embassy—an invitation to a dinner at Lord Longwood-Jones’s home on Merrion Square. I told myself that I ought to stay in Dublin at least for that event, especially since I wondered why His Lordship would be interested in meeting me.
I knew who Lord Martin Longwood-Jones and his wife, Lady Elizabeth, were, of course. You read the Irish Times for a week and you knew who they were. He was the president of the Irish-British Friendship League and she a patron of classical gardens. They seemed to be involved in every upright and honorable civic and cultural program in the city.
Goo-goos, to use the Chicago term.
So Lord L.-J. had read all the English-language literary magazines and liked my two stories. So he had remarked on them to the cultural attaché. So a junior officer at the embassy told the cultural attaché that I was in Ireland.
It also sounded fishy to me. Was this to be another version of being warned off dangerous history, more cultivated, more elaborate, more delicate?
I neglected to mention that on my many walks through Dublin, I continued to stroll in the vicinity of Trinity College. My eyes searched the face of every young woman I passed in the street, hoping she might be Nuala. I no longer saw Kel’s short blond hair everywhere in the crowd: now I saw the long black hair of the girl from Carraroe.
In the grotesque calculus I had worked out for myself, it would be wrong to seek her out but acceptable to encounter her by chance.
God—or someone—took me at my word and, being a comedian, arranged for me to encounter her in the Carmelite church—quite possibly the ugliest church in the world. I saw her, in fact, coming back from Communion.
It was a clear brisk morning, one of those days during which you think it might not be so bad to live in Ireland after all. Dawn had broken up the remnants of night as I drifted into St. Teresa’s from Johnson Court, the little alley (with a shopping arcade) connecting Grafton Street to Clarendon Street. However, it was still dark in the church, illumined only by candles and lights in the sanctuary and a weird blue light from one of the windows that made the church look like a mausoleum.
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