“The opportunities for that sort of behavior don’t come very often, do they?”
I’d have to be very careful in that cave on Saturday morning.
“Your gram is . . . was a wild woman, wasn’t she? I admire her, but I’m not all that much like her, as she keeps telling me.”
“Does she now?”
“She does.” Nuala nodded seriously. “She likes me and thinks I’m a nice wee lass, but she says I’m a quiet one compared to her and that’s all right too.”
“Ah.”
“She doesn’t have any regrets. Not at all, at all. She still doesn’t think it was wrong to seduce her man or to take the gold.”
“She wouldn’t. We always wondered where they got the capital to buy a string of two flats their first year in America.”
“You think I’m daft, don’t you, Dermot Michael?”
“I think you’re a very sensitive woman and a good actress and you have identified with the author of the diary so well that you can imagine her thoughts and actions.”
“That’s it, I suppose,” she agreed. “Ah, here’s your tea.”
“Our tea.”
“Wasn’t I saying that?”
I put the manuscript into the Federal Express envelope. I had, at Nuala’s suggestion, printed out all the previous translations and sent them to George, who knows some people in the publishing industry. Now we were sending each day’s copy to him.
“ ’Tis insurance,” she said, “against losing the original or a hard disk accident.”
“Or against our friends who won’t be able to suppress the story, once George has it?”
“I hadn’t thought of that.”
Naturally she had thought of it. Jane Bond. A know-it-all, just like Ma.
“Will she be ashamed of her love life being spread out in the open like that?” I asked herself.
She looked at me as if I were the worst eejit in all the world. “Is the Pope Buddhist?”
“Incredible!” George exploded on the phone after he’d read the early translations. “What a woman!”
Would no one be scandalized by this fierce redhead with the green eyes and a mind of her own?
“You’re not planning to show them to Mom or the bishop?”
“Why not?” Nell Pat was their mother, wasn’t she? Hell, Punk, they won’t be surprised. They knew what she was like better than we did.”
“But the bishop?”
“Uncle Willy is likely to be pleased at the thought he was conceived in a passionate union out of wedlock. He’s no prude.”
I apparently was surrounded by people who were not prudes. Worse luck for me, I guess.
“Here’s a wee sip of sherry.” She poured half a tumbler of it for me. “Dry sherry at that Sure, you need to recover from the shock of your gram’s wanton behavior.”
“Where did you get that, woman?”
“I bought it with the change from the flopping disks you were wanting. I figured we might need it.”
“On a rainy day.”
“Which is almost any day in Ireland, isn’t it?”
“They call them floppy disks, Nuala.”
“And they don’t flop at all, do they now?”
You never won.
A storm from the northeast was battering Dublin like a drunken pooka. A deluge of rain was pelting our windows, and the windows themselves were rattling in the wind. It was dark enough to be the day of the end of the world.
Dear God, I wanted to go home.
Nuala poured a “wee sip” for herself and buttered a scone for me.
“It has shaken you, Dermot Michael, hasn’t it?” She touched my hand. “Did you really think she wasn’t a plotter and a schemer?”
“No. . . . I’m sorry I didn’t know her better. I’m shaken by what a fierce wonderful woman she was—whom I never did appreciate.”
“But who knew her better or who appreciated her more than you, except himself? You’re the only one who still carries her pictures, aren’t you now?”
“I am.”
“I understand, Dermot Michael.” She pointed an accusing finger at me triumphantly. “You’re thinking you’ll never see Nell Pat again to tell her how much you love her and yourself believing in life after death and myself not being sure and yet knowing that she’s still alive and taking care of the two of us, so that everything will work out well.”
I did not want to pursue the last words. Would Nell Pat want me to bring Nuala home with me, if not on the plane a few days from now at least after she graduated from TCD?
Are the Jesuits a Catholic order?
“We may well need her help in the West this weekend.”
“Go ’long with you.” She handed me another scone, drenched in an outrageous layer of raspberry jam over clotted cream. “It’ll be easy.”
I doubted that. Quite the contrary, I dreaded our journey to Cork and Galway. Terrible things would surely happen.
–– 49 ––
September 8, 1922
Mrs. Liam Tomas O’Riada now, if you please.
The young schoolteacher man took a picture of us at the wedding and we already have some prints. I’ll be after packing the plate in our bags when we leave from Cork.
We both look terrible young.
I don’t care. I’ll never have any regrets. Never.
We’re living in the room in my own house that used to be mine. It’s crowded and there’s no privacy for us at all. Me ma and da are wonderful, but we need a house of our own—which most people in Ireland don’t have for many long years after they’re married.
I wonder if the gold is spoiling me. I wonder if Liam will be furious at me when I tell him about the gold. He’s a good man and a hard worker and a smart man too. But he’s a tad unpredictable, perhaps because I haven’t had much of a chance to study him yet up close. He doesn’t seem to mind a woman who is plotting and scheming all the time. He says I am twice as smart as any man he knows.
I don’t want to have any secrets from him. I want to be able to tell him everything. But I don’t how to do it yet.
Well, if he’s angry at me, I’ll tell him the truth—that I didn’t know how to tell him all the truth.
That’s the only problem which keeps me from being the happiest woman in the world.
Well, that and migrating to America. One moment I can hardly wait and the next moment I’m terrified to leave.
I know it will be all right when we do it, but I’ll miss poor old Carraroe something terrible.
Later.
I’m terrified. The schoolteacher man, the one with the big bloody camera, came over to the house a few minutes ago to say there was a phone call at the post office from the garage in Galway City. The black closed touring car is back and is staying there for the night. The driver told the garage man that they’re driving out to Connemara tomorrow.
Liam’s plan is to get to the pub early and seize the colonel, as he still calls him, when he comes in. Then at gunpoint he’ll force him to meet with the man in the car. The photographer man will take a picture of him handing over the money to the colonel. Then Liam will arrest both of them and turn them over to the Free Staters.
“It’s a grand plan,” says I, me knees shaking with fear, “but I’m not sure about arresting the man in the car.”
“And why not?”
“I don’t think the Free Staters would want him. They wouldn’t know what to do with him. They certainly couldn’t put him on trial.”
“Aye,” says me man, “true enough.”
“The picture might be more use to them than the man himself.”
Liam looks at me narrowly. “You’re a deep one, Nell Pat Malone.”
“I hope you’re not angry at me, Liam Tomas,” I says, and myself being close to tears.
He wraps me up in his arms. “Woman, I don’t know what I’d do without you. I never would have thought it, but I’m thinking now that I find deep women terrible attractive.”
So I blush and feel real
good about myself.
Liam is making all his arrangements for tomorrow. Then he’ll come back and I can tell by the look in his eye that he’ll want me.
Well, he’ll get no fight from me on that account, because I’m wanting him too.
Then when we’re finished with our loving, I’ll tell him that I intend to be with him tomorrow out on the end of Galway.
He may argue that it’s not safe and that it’s no place for a woman.
I’ll say wasn’t it a woman who found out about this traitor?
He’ll agree to that and then he’ll ask why I want to be there and I’ll say that I want to make sure you amadons don’t do some stupid thing like killing the man in the car.
But the truth will be that I’ll be going out to that meeting to make sure that Daniel O’Kelly doesn’t try to kill me husband like he killed me brother before him.
I’ll kill the traitor myself before I let him harm my Liam Tomas.
I don’t want revenge. I’ll leave that to God. I just want to protect my Liam Tomas. I pray right now to the Sacred Heart of Jesus and to Our Lady of Knock to help me protect me man.
I can hear him coming in the house and myself alone here and me blood as hot as a peat fire.
–– 50 ––
“ARE YOU afraid of a third strike, Dermot Michael?”
“Where did you hear that phrase, from baseball?”
We were sitting in the restaurant in the Imperial Hotel in Cork City, on South Mall, just above the Lee River. It was here that Major General Emmet Dalton had set up his headquarters after he had outmaneuvered the Irregulars and captured Cork. Here too Michael Collins had spent his last night of life. I didn’t want to know in which room he had slept. I continued to wonder whether he would approve of our quest.
We were behind schedule but content after a glorious day of touring the southeast of Ireland. In the old-fashioned brass and dark red atmosphere of the dining room, it was easy to imagine that time had rolled back and we were part of the Edwardian era, the optimistic time before the Great War. Perhaps we were an Anglo-Irish aristocrat and her wealthy American lover eating a large if rather unimaginative dinner and consuming enough drinks to make them forget tomorrow before they retired for a night of stolen love.
The light in the restaurant was soft and dim, we were both pleasantly tired, we had both a couple of jars of wine taken and a fine roast beef dinner eaten. There were only a few people in the room, and the woman who was playing the Irish harp sang with a gentle and restful voice. (“She’s quite grand indeed,” Nuala had commented. “Brilliant!”)
A perfect setting for romantic fantasies, although there wouldn’t be any stolen love tonight, that was for sure.
“Your brother said something about a third strike and he explained it to me.”
“About me?”
“No. But I applied it to you.” She was watching me intently, doubtless trying to figure me out the same way Ma tried to figure out her own man seventy years ago.
Except I was not Nuala’s man.
“And what does it mean?”
“It means”—she put down her claret glass—“are you afraid that, having made a mistake with two women before me, that I’ll be your third strike?”
That was precisely what I was afraid she meant. “What makes you think that, Nul?”
“You fancy me a lot, I can tell that.”
“My story would make that clear even if my actions didn’t.”
“From the first moment you saw me in O’Neill’s?”
“Just about.”
“Yet you don’t want me?” She seemed baffled rather than annoyed.
I shifted uneasily in my chair. “Nul, you’re the most remarkable woman I’ve ever met . . . attractive in every way that a woman can be attractive. Spending the rest of one’s life with you would be delight.”
“But?”
“But you’re too young.”
“I’m twenty at Christmastime.”
I knew that I should have begun this conversation with her before we left Dublin. My reluctance to talk to her about our relationship was irresponsible and cowardly—just as had been my postponement of an explanation about the puzzle of the gold and the death of Michael Collins.
Now I must face a quarrel at the tag end of what had been a perfect day.
We had left Dublin early in the morning, in the bright red Mercedes that the rental agency had brought over.
“Would you look at it now!” Nuala had pointed at the car in delighted astonishment. “Isn’t it a mistress car?”
“Just a Benz 250. Do you mean a car for a mistress or a car that substitutes for a mistress?”
“Isn’t it both?”
She was dressed in her jeans again with the new blue jacket I had purchased for her, my Marquette sweatshirt, and the Aran Isle scarf and cap I had given her the day after the attack in Irishtown. She looked very much like a college girl on a football weekend—at Notre Dame since, alas, Marquette doesn’t have a team anymore. In fact, she looked like any one of a couple score of young women from the neighborhood, though taller than most of them and more beautiful than any of them.
“Put your bag in the trunk, woman, and don’t give me a hard time.”
“Here we call it the boot, and if I can’t give you a hard time, sure, what’s the point in the trip?”
“Into the car with you, woman.” I had shoved her rump gently. “You’d try the patience of a saint.”
“And yourself being the saint, is it now?”
She had put her suitcase—spanking new—into the boot and jumped into the car.
“Take me to Carraroe, please, Arthur. By way of Cork if you don’t mind.”
“Yes, miss.” I had bowed politely.
Despite her pledge to give me a hard time, a pledge that she honored, Nuala was a fine traveling companion. She didn’t complain or grumble or ask how much longer the trip was. On the contrary, the trip was a fun experience for her. “And myself never traveling anywhere except back and forth to Dublin on the train.”
“Not even to Cork?”
“Not even to Kilarney.”
The weather was perfect again, blue sky and rapidly moving ice-cream clouds, a brisk, sunny football weekend to match my brisk, sunny football weekend companion.
The southeast region of Ireland—Wicklow, Waterford, Wexford, East Cork—is soft and serene, a vast green checkerboard blanket in which, a person might imagine, it would be pleasant to relax with one’s love for a night (or a day) of rest and love.
My plan had been to drive through Cork City and then on to Clonakilty and the vale where Michael Collins had died. However, it had become evident early on that we’d not be able to go beyond Cork. Nuala insisted on stopping often and scampering, once more the playful filly, over the hills and fields and strands of counties Wicklow and Wexford.
“Bring your camera, Dermot,” she would shout. “I’ll take the pictures of you and you can take pictures of me.”
Scenery without people in it, you see, she had pronounced dull and therefore unacceptable.
I would have not one picture of her to send to George, but several rolls—an Irish model with a knit beret and scarf, perfectly acceptable if not for Vogue or Bazaar then surely for Ireland of the Welcomes.
Any man would come to Ireland to see such radiant, happy young beauty.
“I think I’ll make a grand world traveler someday, Dermot,” she cried after lunch in Rosslare (off the main road to Cork but a place “ ’twould be a sin to miss.”): “Sure, isn’t it a beautiful and exciting world and yourself a writer that knows that without me shooting off me big mouth.”
We’d been watching the waves break at the harbor wall, great giants, glittering white foam in the sunlight with dark purple bases hurling the foam over the wall.
I kissed her then, quite chastely. She responded with equal chastity.
Wandering to the ends of the earth with this frolic-some young woman would indeed be a joy.
> At the dinner table over our cake and tea when she confronted me about our relationship, I wondered if the exuberance of our ride from Dublin to Cork was a part of a carefully orchestrated plan of action to prepare for this dialogue.
Are the Jesuits an all-male order?
My only distraction from a pleasant and exhausting day was an occasional brief attempt to capture and hold the image of the face that I was sure would break open the puzzle that was bringing us to Cork and Galway. The face would float across my imagination, hazy and undeveloped save in its outline, torment me for a fraction of a section, and then lazily float away.
Who was it? The mystery man for whom Ma and Pa had lain in wait at Lettermullen? Someone I knew from modern Ireland or modern America? Maybe Martin Longwood-Jones or Brendan Keane?
I couldn’t quite place it, yet I was more than ever convinced that if my preconscious would let me look at that face a little longer, I would solve the mystery.
At the end of dinner, she had looked up from her port somewhat shyly. “You know what this weekend is, Dermot?”
It was a question Ma had asked me often. I tried to think. Someone’s birthday? No. A feast in the church year?
“All Saints?”
“And All Hallows Eve.”
“Trick-or-treat time in the States.”
“And everywhere else; we invented it here in Ireland. ’Tis said that the dead walk at Sahmain.”
She had pronounced the word as if it were spelled Saurain.
“An old Celtic festival not quite Christianized yet, but certainly made harmless.”
“I’m thinking it’s a scary time of the year even if you are a Christian. The world turns dark and dangerous, doesn’t it now?”
“Do you believe the dead walk at Sahmaintide, Nuala?”
“Sure, in Dublin I don’t. In Carraroe I half did.”
“No self-respecting ghost would walk in Dublin anyway.”
“We’re different folk out here. The world is a mysterious and sometimes threatening place. Good and evil lurk where you’d least expect them.”
I had not wanted to argue with her West of Ireland mystical visions.
Irish Gold Page 35
