The Death of an Irish Lass

by Bartholomew Gill

  Well, I’ve searched my soul. What they say may be true. But that approach is not for me. For too many years now I’ve been studying and learning and putting off my involvement with those whom my training should be helping. I’ll leave the research and new methods to other minds and hands.

  Quirk: But I’m told nobody’s mind or hands are quite like yours.

  Fleming: That’s flattery, but far from the truth. This country has dozens of doctors who can replace me. Right here at Columbia and Roosevelt Hospital I know three. One is a woman.

  Quirk: But why Clare? Couldn’t you satisfy this other desire to have a general practice by taking on a small number of patients from a private office here in New York?

  Fleming: No. First, I couldn’t do justice to both posts. Each is a full-time commitment. Too many doctors have large practices. That’s unfair to the patients.

  Second, New York is a dead end. The economic system it represents is at its last gasp. All over the world people are realizing this—in Portugal, Spain, Italy, England. It’s dying. One reason has to be because it’s wasteful. On one hand you have unlimited personal expectations, which are expressed in material goods, and on the other hand rapidly diminishing resources. Future generations will judge the twentieth century as a potlatch of the earth’s irreplaceable natural wealth.

  There was that word again, thought McGarr. He wondered how close Fleming and O’Connor really were. After all, it had been Fleming who had told O’Connor where Schwerr was camping on Black Head.

  Fleming had continued.

  How many people who own electric pencil sharpeners, plug-in waffle irons, or power toothbrushes really need them? This isn’t just another depression we’re in. We have inflation and unemployment, rising prices along with economic stagnation. I don’t doubt for a moment that this country won’t stage an economic recovery, but the handwriting is on the wall. The capitalist way of doing things, which I define as having each person out to get absolutely as much of everything that he can, is no longer practicable, if indeed it ever might have been. There simply has to be a new order. I think the seeds of a new order are not to be found here in this moribund giant of a metropolis but in a place like County Clare. Each of us should make an adjustment to accommodate himself to a more human, familiar, cooperative way of doing things. My adjustment is to return to Clare.

  Quirk: But why Clare? The emigration statistics for that barren land are still shocking. The young no longer even return for Christmas or the summer to get the hay in. The place has fewer people than it did in the fifteenth century when Europe’s population was less than 10 percent what it is today, and most of them are old men and women.

  Fleming: It’s curious that you should mention the fifteenth century. It’s precisely because the Renaissance never touched Ireland that piques my interest right now. Up until—let’s see—say, the middle of this century it was possible to talk to old men and women who had had few dealings with a money economy in their lives. My belief is that the kind of sharing and mutual support that obtained in those old Celtic communities might still be there in a residual way. Perhaps some of us can revive those ideals.

  Quirk: You sound like a dreamer, not a doctor. And one who wishes to return to the land of the saints and scholars, which never really existed. It would seem to me that you’re trying to deny the actuality of having been born a twentieth-century man and having found your place in this city.

  Fleming: You could be right. But the actuality of 125,000 heroin addicts, more persons than that treated yearly for serious mental illness, the deathly grinding pace of this town and society in which few if any human needs are cherished—that’s a twentieth-century actuality that can’t be denied either.

  You ask if I am a doctor. Yes indeed, I am a doctor, but I am also a human being who cares enough about the continuance of the human race in a form which is bearable that I’m choosing to try to make an area that might hold some hope for us habitable again. County Clare needs a doctor with my training. I don’t wish to stay here and become one of the wealthy who will preside over the demise of a civilization and the deaths-in-life of tens of millions of people. The way I see it, I’m opting for life.

  Quirk: You mean you think New York is already dead.

  Fleming: Dying. From a terminal condition. Greed.

  Quirk: And you’re fleeing the ship.

  Fleming: Rats are survivors. There’s another sail in sight.

  Thus the article ended.

  But McGarr got a surprise. There was a second article on Dr. John Fleming. This one had been filed only two weeks before and was a follow-up to the first.

  In it, May Quirk asked Fleming if he had found the seeds of his new economic order in Clare. He said she had mistaken him. His intent in coming back was to contribute his skills as a doctor and thereby make the place more desirable. He wasn’t a social architect or historian. His tone was sharp.

  “But perhaps you’re a politician,” she said. “You’re involved with the Provisional wing of the I.R.A., are you not?”

  “Only insofar as every Irishman should identify with the cause of a United Ireland. If Attila the Hun showed up on my doorstep with a hole in his belly, I’d help him out.”

  May then asked Fleming if he had expected to have to pinch-hit for the local veterinarian. “They tell me you delivered a litter of piglets last week. The farmer claims you’re miles more talented than your competitor. He says he wouldn’t have anybody else for man or beast.”

  “I’m flattered. Out here that’s a compliment. I only hope your reporting this won’t drive the vet from the country. Who knows, he may have to stand in for me.”

  “What’s the most common malady that you treat in Clare?” she asked.

  “Depression.”

  “Of what sort?”

  “Mental depression.”

  “What causes it?”

  “Most of it comes from the breakdown of the nuclear family. When nearly all of the children get to be about eighteen or twenty, they leave. They don’t want a family life for themselves. There’s little cash in it and still less glamor.”

  “Then capitalism is alive and well in Clare?”

  “If you define capitalism as the pursuit of cash and glamor. That’ll change.”

  “When? When the gunmen whom you support take over?”

  Fleming sidestepped that slash. “When the real truth is known about city life. When the glamor fades and other values are chosen.”

  “For instance.”

  “Cooperation, self-sufficiency. Perhaps the implementation of some of the tenets of living put forth by your countryman Henry Thoreau. Had he come to this country before Walden, he would never have needed to write the book.”

  “But Thoreau was a nineteenth-century philosopher espousing ideals which were current in the twelfth century. My countrymen, as you call them, considered him an interesting crank.”

  “Look around you here or in New York. Surely twentieth-century ideals aren’t achieving very much in human terms, are they?”

  The article closed with a description of Fleming standing on a barren rock overlooking a leaden sea. May Quirk assumed that he was looking off over the Atlantic and perhaps thinking about his former possibilities and the choice he had made.

  McGarr skimmed the other material in the Fleming file. It seemed that Fleming’s hobby was literature and that he was a Joyce aficionado, having contributed several scholarly articles on facets of Finnegans Wake. He also had a private collection of Joyce memorabilia: a signed copy of The Mime of Mick, Nick and the Maggies, and many of Joyce’s daughter’s prints and paintings.

  In all, McGarr decided, a rather complex young man.

  A loud knock came to the front door just as Nora Cleary was setting a tray with a decanter of amber whiskey and two glasses on the desk in front of McGarr.

  She rushed to answer it.

  McGarr poured himself a drink, wondering what the folders on O’Connor and Fleming had really told him: that, as he
had supposed, the relationship of the three Clare emigrees had become complicated once they had arrived here in this Babylon; that both men had had a sort of falling out with May Quirk; that she had then pursued each of them while ostensibly practicing her journalistic profession but had failed in her obvious purpose of portraying them as in some way inadequate to the challenges that the city had offered them; that there was an essential contradiction in her wanting O’Connor to reject the lure of the metropolis for art and wanting Fleming to accept the challenge in the name of science and fame.

  McGarr heard Nora Cleary shout, “Villain! Blackguard! You dirty, shameless heathen!”

  McGarr rushed into the living room.

  Simonds, the New York detective, had one of Nora Cleary’s arms pinned behind her. His other hand was on her wrist. She was holding the Mauser. Simonds shook the wrist. The gun fell onto the carpet. In back of Simonds were two other men. At one glance McGarr could tell they were cops. Paddy Sugrue was standing farther down the hall.

  Simonds said, “You’re not licensed to carry this gun. You pointed it at a policeman. That’s a felony. Consider yourself under arrest. You have the right to consult a lawyer, the right to remain silent. Anything you say may be taken down and held against you.”

  “Low-life!” she shouted. “Scum!”

  He clapped the handcuffs over each of her wrists.

  “You broke and entered here earlier. Take that down if you dare. They’ll have you in a blue coat and arch-support shoes before I’m done with you.”

  The other policemen took her away.

  Simonds explained to McGarr, “We can’t have people running around with toys like this in their hands.” He was hefting the Mauser. “But she’s got a point. She wasn’t exactly running around with it, was she.”

  Said McGarr, “No, but it was unlicensed. And it was a question of pride, was it not?”

  Simonds reddened a bit. “You’re damn right it was. Being in, you know,” he waved the gun, “public relations, I don’t get much chance to—”

  “Muscle up old ladies,” said Sugrue.

  “—to serve the public in my usual capacity.” He was chewing his cigar butt now, trying to justify the arrest. “And you get soft, out of shape. You tend to think making arrests is somebody else’s job. You begin to wink at crimes, let criminals go. But—”

  “What are you going to do with that thing?” McGarr meant the Mauser. He imagined that Simonds was well suited to his public relations job.

  “Evidence. We’ve got to impound it.”

  “Could you run a ballistics test on the thing and send me a copy of the report?”

  “Sure.” Simonds looked down at the gun. “Why? You don’t think that old babe—”

  “And I wonder if we could learn if she’s left this country recently.”

  Simonds thought for a moment. “We can check the status of her passport with the federal government. Maybe she’d surrender it voluntarily. If not, we could—” Simonds cast his flat black eyes around the apartment, “—subpoena it, if we believed she had committed a felony and could convince a judge of her probable guilt. And then Paddy and me could take another of our celebrated long walks down a short hall. I’ll be in the stairwell, having a confab with the cockroaches.” He sauntered out the door, which McGarr closed.

  After a long search McGarr found Nora Cleary’s passport in a battered black handbag at the back of a closet in the bedroom the old lady used.

  She was an American citizen now. The slim blue booklet had a Shannon entry date inscribed “12th August” and a Kennedy Airport return stamped “8/13.”

  McGarr then went into the kitchen, where at a small desk he had seen a collection of bills and correspondence in a hand different from that of May Quirk. He sat and leafed through the pile until he got the copy of the past month’s telephone bill. It listed calls to three numbers in Ireland, all of them outside the Dublin area. Alongside these McGarr wrote the numbers he’d seen over Paddy Sugrue’s shoulder. Two matched.

  On the pad of his pocket secretary, McGarr made note of all the numbers. He then picked up the phone, dialed customer service, and claimed that he was about to leave the country and wanted to pay his bill beforehand. If she could go through his current bill telling him his long-distance calls, the dates and amounts, he would pay them. But the woman told him all charges for the current month were in the computer and he’d just have to wait. She thanked McGarr for his concern but allowed as how the New York Telephone Company would doubtless survive the interval without his payment.

  McGarr put down the phone, wondering why everybody in New York had to have a smart last word.

  That was when Simonds appeared in the kitchen door. He said, “I’ve got nine fifteen, shamus. That’s a howling hour of a Sunday night.” The brogue he was putting on was thick but accurate. “I’ve told a bunch of the lads up in Queens about you, and they’re dying to get the message from the olde sod. Big beery police types and not a one of them that don’t get misty when hearing Dennis Day do ‘Danny Boy.’ Kate Smith works them over pretty good, too. I’ve told them you’re a real Irish cop, not the inflated pink hippo variety from Jamaica Plain.”

  The situation was even worse than Simonds had intimated. The beer joint had no windows. From the outside it looked like a squat fortress of yellow brick with a heavy cast-iron grate over the door.

  Inside, only a dim lamp by the cash register, some bulbs under the bar, and the blue glow from the jukebox and television set, which were battling each other for auditory dominance, lit the interior. The place stank of cigarettes, the sweet reek of cheap blended whiskey, lager beer, and a chemical cleanser that came from the open door to the latrine.

  Simonds was welcomed volubly, and before they could reach the clusters of men who were squeezed into the bar the proprietor had poured them shots of Jameson and glasses of stout from small amber bottles.

  All eyes were on McGarr, the smallest man there. The bar conversation had died. McGarr judged he was expected to knock back his drink. He removed his Panama hat and placed it on the bar, then raised the shot glass. Most of the men, he had noted, were uniformed New York policemen. They wore blue trousers and white short-sleeved shirts. Some had on windbreakers to cover their badges and name tags, but from the hips of most bristled the walnut and cold blue butts of Smith & Wesson service revolvers. McGarr had the feeling of having stepped onto the set of a special sort of American western movie, one staged in the East at a saloon filled with pistol-packing good guys who could not afford to be as lenient with desperadoes as had the heroes of the old horse operas. McGarr also realized why they had insisted that Simonds bring him there: they needed reinforcement, needed to see the genuine version of what they purported to be—the Irish cop who was at once tough on criminals but gentle with friends, capable of utter ruthlessness in situations requiring action, yet supportive and helpful at other times, interpreting the law on terms that were somehow fairer than the cold print on the pages of the law books.

  McGarr imagined it must be extremely difficult to be anything but a hardened professional here in this megalopolis. For instance, most of the buildings McGarr had seen in the neighborhood outside the bar looked as though they’d been ravaged. Many had been razed and were now just piles of brick or gullied lots with pools of fetid water, trash, and—McGarr had assumed from the stench that a torrid wind had wafted to him as he had stepped from the large police car—garbage. The structures that remained were dilapidated, the wooden porches of the apartment blocks faded and sagging, the bricks city-worn, the small houses shabby behind chain-link fences and plastic overhangs on the front doors. It seemed as though the denizens of the area, few of whom were on the street, had abandoned the idea of community for a perverse sort of isolation. It wasn’t only behind the gates of a plumbing wholesaler that McGarr had seen a large Alsatian guard dog but in the backyards of several houses as well. Bright red alarm bells and warnings to would-be thieves were numerous.

  Thus McGarr told
them what they wanted to hear. “To Irish cops,” he said in a loud voice. “The world over. And especially to Irish cops who started with two shoes, two fists, a hard head, and a big heart. The shoes may have been worn to a frazzle, the fists to scars, even the head taken on a shine,” he touched his own bald pate. “But the heart, gentlemen—in spite of all the bastards we’ve had to run in—that’s where we’re special. We’ve got heart.” McGarr drank off the shot.

  The others followed suit, and before any of them could speak, McGarr added in a rush, “I say this with authority, having consulted my cardiologist before coming over here. He said no fatty foods, no smoking, and most of all, no booze. Bartender,” McGarr tossed a blue ten-pound Irish bank note on the bar, “pour a round of drinks on the Garda Soichana.”

  A huge policeman almost wrenched McGarr’s arm stuffing the note back in his hand. The others pushed their own separate piles of American money toward the barman.

  McGarr guessed he was in for a wet night. He could hear somebody asking Simonds, who was standing as close as he could to McGarr, “What’s his job back in the old country?”

  Simonds said, “He runs the place, at least the investigative aspects. The chief himself will be here in a couple of minutes.”

  “He’s sure got a lot of malarky. That son of a bitch almost made me cry.”

  Other policemen were now squeezing through the door.

  After the second drink in less than as many minutes, McGarr decided he had better ease off, and thus at the public phone, which was a pay station hung on the wall near the jukebox, he placed a call to his office in Dublin.

  Simonds had been right. A melodramatic tenor voice from the jukebox began lilting through “Danny Boy.” A wiry policeman with a flame red face was punching the buttons. He selected “The Soldier’s Song,” “The Brave Colonial Boy,” and “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling.” The operator told McGarr it would be a few minutes before she could check on his credit-card number, put through the call, and get back to him.