Irish Gold

by Andrew M. Greeley

  “Brigid, Patrick, and Columcille!”

  “I declined.”

  “You certainly should have declined.” Her face was crimson again, not with embarrassment but with anger.

  “My family, George again excepted, thought it was a very generous offer. They would not have to worry about me any more. Ever again. Tina was overjoyed. How could I possibly not accept such largesse? I still said no.”

  “Tough focker.”

  “Me or the padrino?”

  “Both of you, but you especially.”

  “I didn’t think it was serious. I really couldn’t believe that the job was a sine qua non; no one acts that way any more. Well, I was pretty dumb. As I would find out later, I wasn’t the only one who encountered such a stone wall. Most of the guys that were offered jobs as a condition of marriage, all of them that I talked to in fact, accepted the condition enthusiastically. They couldn’t understand why I turned down such a grand opportunity.”

  “ ’Cause you had the balls.” She reached for the scone plate. It was empty.

  “More likely just a stubborn streak. I’ll get some more scones.”

  “And maybe some of them cute croissant things, if you don’t mind?”

  “I don’t mind.”

  “And . . .” She smiled shyly. “Would you ever think of bringing some more of that orange juice?”

  “Ah, sure, woman, ’tis yourself that has a grand appetite, isn’t it?”

  “A terrible appetite altogether when someone is telling me a love story.”

  “I’m not sure it’s a love story.”

  Tina and I had furious arguments. I was selfish and ungrateful. Besides, Grandpa was right. Most traders faded from the floor. There was nothing in my record as a trader that suggested I would ever be very successful. Why didn’t I want the job? I guess because I didn’t want to be under anyone’s thumb that way, not ever.

  “To continue,” I said when I returned, this time with a tray. “I never quite caught on to the fact that Tina and her family were deadly serious. I knew she was unhappy about my stubborn refusal to take the job, but I couldn’t imagine that she might call the marriage off because of it.”

  “Did she ever say she would call if off?” The fair Nuala was wolfing down a croissant, also lathered with cream and raspberry preserves.

  “Two weeks before the wedding. We had a monumental row. She told me that she wasn’t sure she wanted to marry me if I was such an ungrateful and irresponsible person. Everything was prepared, the church, the country club; we had made our pre-Cana conference, filled out all the forms; her family had mailed the invitations, over a thousand of them; our pictures were in the papers. I felt confident that it was too late for her to turn back. I was wrong.”

  The fight took place after a particularly spectacular session in her bed, designed, I later decided, to overwhelm my reluctance to become part of her family.

  “My father is not under anyone’s thumb, is he?” she demanded hotly. “How would you be different?”

  “I’m not sure he really is his own man,” I replied. “Anyway, he likes his job and I wouldn’t like it.”

  Those ill-chosen words launched our brawl. She hit me and I left her apartment.

  “So then what happened?” Nuala’s interest did not interfere with her draining the orange juice glass.

  “I didn’t talk to her for a few days. Let the dust settle, I thought, and then we can have a reconciliation. The day I was going to call her, the cancellation announcements started showing up in the mail.”

  “Blackmail?” She stopped eating.

  “I think so. As she said to me when we got together a couple of days later to try to see if we could work it out, it was the only way she had to make me understand that she was serious. It wasn’t Grandfather, she said, not really. She had always worried about my financial future; Grandfather merely made it explicit for her.”

  “Oh.” Nuala continued to stare at me.

  “She was willing to send out another set of invitations now that I understood the situation. I told her I’d think about it. That was the next-to-last time we spoke to one another.”

  “Poor dear man.” Her eyes filled up with tears.

  “That was in June. The following October I made my three million. Tina called to congratulate me. So did her father. So too did the padrino. I was very gracious in my expression of thanks for their kind words. So it was kind of a comedy.”

  “I don’t think so.” She found a tissue in her book bag and dabbed at her eyes. “Course, you were still missing the poor girl that died, weren’t you now? And so you weren’t being very careful in your choice of substitutes, were you?”

  That’s what you call a gotcha. And how could I be angry at her, with tears slipping down her cheeks?

  “You couldn’t be more accurate, Nul. That’s precisely what I was doing. George said so after the breakup. I wasn’t willing to accept it then.”

  She nodded. “Do you want to tell me about the girl that died?”

  “Later, if I may. This is more self-revelation than I’ve ever experienced before. You are indeed a bit of a witch, Nul, but a very kindly and lovely witch.”

  “Go ’long with you. . . .”

  I thought of a question I wanted to ask her. “Do you know the town of Oughterard, Nuala?”

  “And isn’t it right up the road from Carraroe?”

  “Through Maam Cross?”

  “Haven’t you been looking at the map?”

  “You’ve been there then?”

  “Hundreds of times, I suppose. Didn’t my brother marry a girl from there and herself with a nose stuck so high in the air she couldn’t see the horse shite on the road?”

  “You know the statue at the crossroads?”

  She frowned, trying to remember.

  “Daniel O’Kelly?”

  “Who was he?”

  “Commandant of the Galway Brigade of the IRA back in the Troubles.”

  She dismissed him and all his kind with a brisk wave of her hand. “Focking eejits.”

  “Perhaps. Yet there was a band of Auxiliaries, Black and Tans, tearing up the town back in 1919, beating up the men, molesting the women, destroying property. O’Kelly and his crowd saved the place.”

  “Killed all the Brits?”

  “Yes.”

  “Savages. . . . I remember the statue now. Ugly focking thing.”

  “If you were a young woman in the town then, you might have welcomed Daniel O’Kelly and his bunch.”

  She thought about that. “Maybe I would. Those were different times. Still, wouldn’t the Brits have given us home rule anyway after the war? What was the point in all the shite of the Rising and the Troubles?”

  Thus is the patriotic past written off with one devastating swipe. They must teach revisionist history at TCD.

  “Surely you’ve heard the name of Michael Collins?”

  “Wasn’t he one of those eejits who opposed the treaty and was gunned down by his best friends?”

  “You’re probably thinking of Cathal Brugha. Michael Collins was chairman of the Provisional Government, the commanding officer of the Free State army. He was shot probably by a sniper in Cork, his home county.”

  She shrugged indifferently. “They were all eejits.”

  “Collins died at thirty-one. He was the man who finally drove the English out of Ireland.”

  “Weren’t they leaving anyway?”

  “He was one of the great geniuses of the twentieth century, Nul. His death was a terrible loss to Ireland and the world.”

  “Worse luck for him then, and himself dying in a foolish fight.”

  “My grandfather—Liam O’Riada he was called, Bill Ready to us, Pa or Grandpa Bill to me—was part of the Galway Brigade. I don’t know what happened but he and Ma—Grandma Nell—left right after O’Kelly was killed and never came back to Ireland. She told me once that if they came back they’d both be shot.”

  “Poor things. Maybe I would have been o
n their side in those days.” She shook her head as if trying to understand human folly.

  “They were sweet, gentle people, Nul. Daily churchgoers like yourself.”

  “Well”—she tilted her jaw at me—“you can believe that I’m not tied up with them eejits in the IRA today. Maybe they were necessary then, but not anymore. And meself a daily Mass person too.”

  She was uninterested in Irish nationalism, past and present, and had apparently never heard of Daniel O’Kelly, William Ready, or the Galway Brigade. My suspicions that she might be on the other side—whatever the other side might be—were foolish.

  Or were they? The Connemara district has always been a hotbed of nationalism and republicanism. The people from the Gaeltacht were not likely to be revolutionaries, but they were not opposed to them either. What about Nuala’s grandparents? Where were they and what were they doing during the Troubles?

  Questions to be asked later. She didn’t seem so much to resent my interest in the past as to dismiss it as irrelevant.

  “Eucharist.”

  “Huh?”

  “Prester George says we should call it Eucharist.”

  “The focking Mass”—she chuckled—“is the focking Mass no matter what you call it. And tell that to George the priest for me.”

  “I sure will. He’ll love it.”

  “Will he now? Doesn’t he sound like an interesting priest? . . . Glory be to God, will you look at the time! I’ll be missing me Ancient Irish literature class and I’ll never learn whether Diramuid gets Granne.” She stood up hastily. “And let me tell you that one was no better than she had to be, not at all, at all.”

  “I’ll walk you over to class.”

  “You will not.” She struggled into her jacket. I assisted her.

  “I will so.”

  She slung the book bag over her back. “Well, ’tis a free country and a man can walk down any street he wants, can’t he now?”

  “He sure can.”

  “And thank you very much”—she seemed suddenly very vulnerable—“for the supplement to me breakfast.”

  “We’ll do it again?”

  “Sure.” She pulled the stocking cap down on her head. “Don’t I have to learn more of your story, especially”—she hesitated—“about the poor girl who died?”

  Suddenly I had an idea, as ideas go, a pretty good one.

  “Nuala,” I said as we emerged in the sunshine, “I need a favor.”

  “Do you now?”

  “Wasn’t I just saying so? I need a date. For a dinner. At Lord Longwood-Jones’s house in Merrion Square. The cultural attaché at the American embassy set it up. They want me to bring a date.”

  The last sentence was a bold lie.

  “In Merrion Square? Dinner jacket and all that shite?”

  “They do that every night. White tie.”

  “Holy saints preserve us! And you’d be taking the chit of a lass from the West of Ireland whose only dinner jacket occasion was her sister’s wedding? You’re daft, man, totally daft!”

  “You’ll never be out of place anywhere, Nuala.”

  “Go ’long with you. I know my place.”

  “Your place is anywhere you want to go.”

  “No! I won’t hear any more about it.”

  Yet I was sure she would, that in fact she wanted to go, for reasons of curiosity if nothing else. I had to reassure her and persuade her. My first attempt was a failure.

  “You’re a beautiful young woman, Nuala. They’ll love you.”

  She stopped walking and turned away from me, as if she were about to walk the other way down Grafton

  Street towards the green. “I’m not beautiful. I won’t listen to such horse shite.”

  I grabbed her arm. “You are too.”

  “I am not. And—”

  I put my hand over her mouth again. She didn’t struggle.

  “I thought I told you I’d not tolerate your self-deprecation. I meant it, woman, do you understand?”

  A couple of old fellas smiled at us as they walked by. Lovers’ quarrel, they probably figured.

  I must have been a little rougher than I intended. Nuala’s eyes showed fear. Mild fear. Well, good enough for her.

  “I said, do you understand me?”

  She nodded quickly.

  “That’s better.” I removed my hand from her mouth, hooked her arm around mine, and began to walk north on Grafton towards Trinity College.

  “Fockingbrute.” she murmured, but she was laughing at me. “Enjoys pushing defenseless women around.”

  “I’ll put up with none of your shite, woman.”

  She nudged my ribs. “I’m terrified, and yourself finally talking like an Irishman.”

  “We’re agreed that you’re beautiful?”

  “Ah, sure, won’t I get myself battered and right here on Grafton Street if I dare disagree?”

  “I’ll accept that as a characteristic Irish affirmation of assent.”

  She laughed again. “Ah, but aren’t you the dominating male now?”

  “Not with one of your Irish matriarchs.”

  “Anyway”—she turned grim again—“what good is beauty? It just fades away.”

  “It changes as we get older.” I was quoting George the priest. “But we direct its change by who and what we are. My grandmother Nell was a beautiful woman at eighty. You’ll always be beautiful, Nuala.”

  “I will not.” She said it gently, as if afraid of my assault.

  “How old is your mother?”

  “Sixty. I was the last of the brood.”

  “And she’s not beautiful?”

  “I never said that at all, at all, did I?” she shouted at me. “She’s the most beautiful woman I know.”

  “And you don’t look like her? Isn’t everyone saying that Nuala is the spitting image of her ma?”

  “How would you know that?”

  “Maybe I’m a bit of a witch too, Nuala Anne McGrail.”

  She leaned against me, laughing again. “I’m no match for you this morning, Dermot Michael Coyne, and that’s the truth, no match at all.”

  I could have put my arm around her. I could have patted her gorgeous rump, a gesture I had been contemplating all morning. I lost my nerve. Instead I turned the corner to Nassau Street.

  “So it’s all settled, woman. You’ll join me for dinner at Lord Longwood-Jones’s house.”

  “Won’t I be disgracing you?” She nodded to a group of students that we passed. “Good morning to you.”

  “Good morning, Nuala.”

  The kids took a careful look at me: fockingrichyank. “That should be up to me to judge, shouldn’t it?” I pursued my argument.

  “I’m thinking that you don’t know them folks well enough or me well enough to be able to judge.”

  “And I’m thinking that I’m old enough to make me own decisions.”

  Nuala sighed, that wonderful West of Ireland sigh that suggests the onslaught of a serious attack of asthma. “Well, I don’t have anything to wear.”

  I don’t pretend to understand much about women, but I do know enough to recognize agreement when I hear it. “I bet you can find something.”

  “Good morning, Nuala.”

  “And the best of the day to yourselves.”

  “Are you running for office?”

  “They all know me because I sing in the pub.”

  “A likely story. . . . I take it that you’ll be my date.”

  “You don’t give a woman a chance to decide. Sure, if I say no, won’t you be coming after me with brute force, you big amadon?”

  She was enjoying the game again.

  “I would if I knew where you lived.”

  “And I’ll not tell you that, will I?”

  “Then I’ll steal you away from church in the morning.”

  We were now opposite the entrance to Trinity College.”

  “When is this white tie dinner?”

  “Friday night at half eight.”

  “Gl
ory be to God, man, that’s only two days away.”

  “I guess.”

  “Why didn’t you give me more warning?”

  “How did I know I was going to meet you at church this morning?”

  “You’re a focking eejit!” Nonetheless she was amused by me.

  “His Lordship said he would send a car to pick me, uh, us, up. What time should we come by your place?”

  “You shouldn’t. Won’t I be meeting you at Jury’s at a quarter past eight?”

  “Will you now?”

  “Haven’t I just said I would?”

  I took possession of a long strand of jet-black hair and caressed it like it was fine fabric. “It’s a date.”

  She stared at the sidewalk. “I’m sure I’ll be disgracing you, Dermot Michael Coyne.”

  “Bet on it?”

  “I’m not a gambling woman.” Faint grin.

  I tilted her chin upward and kissed her forehead. “I’m not a gambling man either.”

  “And yourself a commodity trader.”

  “Former commodity trader. . . . A quarter past eight, Nuala. And you be there, Nuala Anne McGrail.”

  “Haven’t I said I would?”

  –– 9 ––

  I FLOATED back to Jury’s in a happy daze, so happy that I didn’t notice the subtle change in my suite.

  Humming a tune to myself—the lullaby that Nuala had sung at the pub, to tell the truth—I put on my swimming trunks and terry robe and rode down to the heated pool.

  I was inordinately proud of myself. Hadn’t I won this gorgeous young woman over to my side? Wasn’t it true that she liked me? Didn’t she enjoy my company? Wasn’t she going on a date with me, one that scared her? Didn’t she enjoy the quasi-embrace right there in the middle of Grafton Street? Hadn’t she been proud of me when we passed the Nuala-worshipers on the walk to Trinity? Hadn’t I been sensational in reassuring this shy child, this vulnerable image of what George insisted was a vulnerable God?

  It took a quarter hour for me to swim off my euphoria and realize that if there were any ministering to a shy child at our breakfast, Mary Nuala Anne McGrail had been the minister and I the child. I had been so proud of my behavior at the beginning and the end of our encounter that I had forgotten the middle of it. Looking back on our adventures with the perspective of time, I realize that the morning would be a paradigm of our whole relationship.