Irish Cream

by Andrew M. Greeley

  It was a lovely Saturday in April, with green lace appearing at last on the stark trees and lawns green overnight, as though the mayor had sent out paint crews. Just like the day we brought the little terror back from the hospital.

  “Didn’t your daughter try to kill herself?” Nuala accused me, as though it were all my responsibility.

  “Me go for a walk, Da,” the child informed me cheerfully.

  “And she’s going for a long time-out.”

  “Ma!”

  Unsurprised by the scene, our two other children stood behind me.

  “She dropped her glasses,” our six-year-old Nelliecoyne observed. “I’ll get them.”

  Nuala Anne said something in Irish which I think meant that Nelliecoyne should not go out on the street.

  “Ma!” the perfect little daughter exclaimed.

  Four-year-old Mick sighed loudly, protesting the disruption to his Lego project.

  Socra Marie had reached the age of two, at which time, the doctors had told us, her developmental process would have caught up with that of other children her age. Her only apparent problem was weak eyesight. We were afraid she’d reject the glasses—which made her tiny face look even more elfin. She loved them, however, and would shout when she woke up in the morning, “Ma! Glasses!”

  “I think her eyes will improve as she gets older and she won’t need the glasses anymore,” the doctor had said soothingly.

  “She won’t go blind, will she now?” Nuala Anne had demanded anxiously.

  Though she knew better, my wife still feared in the depths of her superstitious Irish soul that she was somehow responsible for the premature birth of our third child.

  “Certainly not,” the doctor had replied soothingly. “There may be some later developmental problems, but I don’t think so. She’s fine, a very healthy and lively little girl.”

  The woman understood that she was treating Marie’s ma as well as the little girl.

  “Marie fine.” The child who had climbed into the doctor’s arms twisted about and grinned at us.

  Nuala was uneasy.

  “Isn’t all this energy a little suspicious, Doctor?”

  The pediatrician, a blonde maybe my age, smiled.

  “There aren’t many two-year-olds who are as curious and as energetic as our little friend here, but she’s certainly within the normal limits.”

  “Me normal!”

  I was sure she didn’t know quite what normal was. She’d figured it was good.

  “Neonates like Socra Marie,” the doctor continued, “expend a lot of energy just staying alive. She doesn’t need so much anymore, but she enjoys it, just like she enjoys bonding with you.”

  She handed the two-year-old back to her ma.

  “Me normal,” she said, cuddling in her ma’s arms.

  Then she would want to cuddle in my arms and with her big sister should Nelliecoyne be around and then with her big brother, who would put up with her, though with a considerable show of impatience.

  The wolfhounds would be next.

  “She has,” the pediatrician said, perhaps unnecessarily, “strong affiliative needs.”

  Not reassured, Nuala Anne murmured, “Somehow she doesn’t seem normal.”

  The doctor, Polish if one were to judge by her name, did not want to touch that bit of Irish superstition.

  “She’s a remarkable little girl, Nuala. God has blessed you with a wonderful child.

  My wife muttered something in Irish.

  One of our children was apparently normal—the Mick, who like his father was big, blond, laid-back, and maybe just a little lazy—though my wife became furious whenever that description was suggested of either of us. Mary Margaret, as her teachers at St. Josaphat properly called her, was, according to her mother, even more fey than Nuala herself had been at that age.

  “Dear sweet little Mary Margaret.” as the teachers called her, was the social leader of her class. “She always knows when someone is hurting. She’s so kind.”

  “Little manipulator,” her mother had murmured, wary of compliments of her children and even more wary of the lack of compliments.

  Fey perhaps our graceful little first grader was, but unlike her mother she was even-tempered, sunny, and predictable. Nelliecoyne had inherited the fey part of my wife. Socra Marie, her madcap, manic part.

  “She’s not fey, at all, at all,” Nuala explained to me. “Lucky little brat!”

  Back in the family room Socra Marie was banished to the chair in the corner, her face clouded by an injured pout—an innocent unjustly persecuted.

  “Time-out for a half hour!” Nuala ordered.

  “Ma!” She clasped her dolly to her chest.

  “Not a word from you, Ms. Coyne! And don’t you dare leave that chair!”

  The children became Coynes only when they engaged in bad behavior.

  “Ma,” Nelliecoyne asked as she worked on her coloring book, “what’s a heifer?”

  Nuala turned quickly. Her rules said that she had to give as much attention to our two older children as she gave to the little terrorist, lest they be “destroyed for life altogether!”

  There were no signs that this was happening. Nelliecoyne and Mick were at times exasperated by their little sister and more often amused. Neither seemed particularly cheated out of maternal love. But what did I know?

  My wife had not changed much physically since I had first encountered her in O’Neill’s pub on College Green in Dublin, the Danish town of the Dark Pool. Despite her jeans and her Chicago Bears sweatshirt (which matched the garb of our little terrorist), she was still an Irish goddess, not that I had ever encountered any exemplars of that group of women—slender, lithe, dangerously sensuous, with a voice in which you hear the sound of distant bells over the bog land, long black hair, flashing blue eyes, and a pale, ever-changing face that adjusted to the role she was playing at any given time. As I watched her she was playing the role of the mother whose patience had been driven to its outer limits, a role that was all too familiar these days.

  She had resolutely refused to permit three pregnancies to affect her figure. To look at her was still to desire her. However, the sudden appearance of three more personalities in our house—not counting the two wolfhounds—had taken its toll on her tranquility, never all that stable to begin with. She suffered from postpartum depression after the Mick and then had struggled with the task of keeping Socra Marie alive, as though God could not be fully trusted to do His part—an idea I had never dared to raise. She had abandoned her singing career and threw herself into responding to the challenges of motherhood, the standards for which would have been too much even for the Madonna. She had plenty of help—Ethne, our babysitter, Danuta, our housekeeper, and even Nelliecoyne, who loved to play the role of little mother. Indeed, as far as I could see (and I kept my mouth shut) the last-named was the principal agent in the toilet training of the Tiny Terrorist. I was available on demand, though my wife had little confidence in my abilities as a “minder.”

  However, Nuala reasoned that she was still responsible not only for the children, but also for her associate caregivers and, on rare occasion, me. Also, arguably as the little bishop says, the two snow-white wolfhounds before me.

  Only an insensitive brute would try to force himself on such a stressed-out woman. Her graceful breasts, however, still tormented me when I permitted myself to notice them.

  “A heifer, dear, is kind of a teenage girl cow.”

  “What color should she be?”

  “Any color you want.”

  “Are there purple heifers, Ma?”

  “I don’t think God has made any that color yet, but if you do a good job on her, God might think it’s an interesting idea.”

  She was good with the kids, I had to admit. Yet the lines appearing around her eyes were lines of worry.

  “I’m a focking, frazzled mess,” she had admitted to me tearfully one night “A nine-fingered gobshite of a mess.”

  “Beautiful
though.”

  “I’m old before me time, I won’t live to be thirty.”

  “Woman, you will.”

  “A lot you know.”

  SO YOU MARRY A BEAUTIFUL WOMAN, the Adversary whispered, AND YOU FIGURE YOU’RE GOING TO MAKE LOVE TO HER DAILY FOR THE REST OF YOUR LIFE AND THEN THESE THREE LITTLE HELLIONS INVADE YOUR HOUSE AND TAKE HER AWAY FROM YOU.

  The Adversary is a voice which lives in one of the dusty subbasements of my soul and periodically bothers me with its complaints. I am not responsible for any of his ideas.

  In another year or two they’ll all be in school. I’ll have her to myself then.

  SHE’LL STILL WORRY ABOUT THEM AND WILL BE RUNNING BACK AND FORTH TO SCHOOL ALL THE TIME. YOU’LL HAVE TO WAIT TILL THEY’RE IN COLLEGE, AND BY THEN YOU’LL NEED VIAGRA.

  It wasn’t that we didn’t make love. We did and we enjoyed it, more or less. But it was an interlude of brief escape from the chaos of our nursery school.

  THE GOOD DAYS ARE OVER, BOYO. IT SERVES YOU RIGHT FOR MARRYING A NEUROTIC TWIT.

  She is not!

  Up to a point, I feared, maybe she was. Or maybe it was just part of the life cycle if you were married to a sensitive woman. Sensitive Irishwoman.

  The phone rang. Before Nuala could turn to answer it and before I could lumber out of my comfortable chair, Socra Marie bounded out of her chair and grabbed it.

  She babbled into it, imitating as best she could her mother’s impatient tone. Then she shouted “Go away!” and hung up.

  “Me answer phone,” she said with a proud smile, clearly expecting applause.

  I lifted her up and returned her to the time-out chair.

  She began to sob.

  “Da make me cry!”

  “An hour on that chair,” Nuala ordered implacably. “Don’t ever, ever do that again, Socra Marie Coyne.”

  “’Twas her father’s genes again,” I said aloud.

  My wife actually giggled. She did that occasionally, even when we were not in bed.

  “Certainly not her mother’s. We didn’t even have a phone in Carraroe when I was a child.”

  “You learned how to use it quickly enough.”

  “Isn’t it a grand means for finding civilized talk when you’re surrounded by little monsters all the day long?”

  “Monster, Ma,” Nelliecoyne corrected her.

  The phone rang again. This time I got to it before the Tiny Terrorist, though the demonic expression on her face hinted that she was about to break out of the penalty box.

  “Dermot,” I said.

  “This is John Patrick O’Sullivan” a resonant baritone voice informed me, “Damian’s father. I just tried to get through to you.”

  His tone was pleasant and friendly enough. My demon (who is distinct from the Adversary) took over.

  “I’m sorry about the confusion. We’re teaching our two-year-old how to answer the phone. She’s making a lot of progress.”

  Nuala Anne, who had slumped to the floor in total exhaustion, looked up and grinned. Still the imp, still indeed the shite-kicker.

  “I’m happy to hear that,” John Patrick O’Sullivan replied easily. “Never can begin too young.”

  “Absolutely not.”

  “I wonder if I might stop by and see you tomorrow after Mass …”

  There was a hint of suspicion in his voice. We were probably the kind of young Catholics who didn’t go to Mass.

  “My wife sings at the eleven o’clock Mass at Old St. Patrick’s. Anytime after two-thirty would be fine.”

  “Good. I’ll be looking forward to meeting you … and that long-distance operator in training.”

  It was a funny comment, but I didn’t like it.

  “Damian’s father?”

  “Yeah,”

  How did she know? Don’t ask me. She just knows.

  “I don’t like him.”

  One doesn’t argue.

  “Whatever Damian’s problems might be, he’s part of them.”

  “He wants to see us tomorrow.”

  “I’ll be ready for him.”

  Thus spoke the implacable Irish goddess. Normally they come in threes. My Nuala Anne, however, could kick enough shite for three of them.

  Sure enough, in a few minutes, our younger daughter, still clutching Dolly, was sound asleep.

  “The poor little thing.” Nuala Anne sighed. “The point is that all of that was just too much for her.”

  The words sounded different when she spoke them because the Irish language has no “TH.” So what I heard was, “Da poor little ding, da pint is dat all of dat was just too much for her.”

  I am so adjusted to that language tic that I sometimes drop my “h” after “t,” for which Nelliecoyne corrects me.

  “You’re a Yank, Da. You can’t talk that way.”

  My wife picked up the “ding” and, humming da Connemara lullaby, carried her upstairs.

  “Don’t worry, Da,” Nelliecoyne reassured me, “eventually she’ll grow up. I did.”

  “You were never a Tiny Terrorist,” I replied.

  “I know the doctors say that she needs a lot of sleep because she expends so much energy,” Nuala complained when she rejoined us. “It still doesn’t seem natural.”

  “She’s a very healthy little girl, Nuala,” I said, echoing the doctors.

  “That’s what they say, but what do they know?”

  I didn’t try to answer that question.

  “Mothers always worry too much, Ma.” Nellie held up her purple heifer. “Weren’t you after telling me that yourself?”

  Nuala giggled again and rolled her eyes.

  “Well, I know one thing: don’t I already dislike that gobshite John Patrick O’Sullivan and meself not even knowing him yet.”

  “Don’t say gobshite, Ma. It’ll shock the Mick.”

  I decided at that moment that I would make fierce love with my wife that night.

  Nuala always knows when I begin to think this. Don’t ask me how she knows. She knows.

  She glanced at me, then glanced away quickly.

  YOU DON’T HAVE IT IN YOU.

  You just wait and see.

  3

  OUR LIFE on Southport Avenue is regulated by an elaborate scheme of rules. The only way my wife could sustain the weight of her responsibilities to three children, two dogs, two “helpers” (three now that Day was on board) and, oh yes, one husband, was to impose order on chaos by making rules. To a considerable extent, however, her passion for order was violated by the fact that for every rule there were exceptions, either ones that she had legislated on the spur of the moment or systematic. Thus the rule said that when the door to the master bedroom was closed, the room became an inner sanctum into which neither child nor dog was permitted to enter.

  Fair enough.

  But what if there were an emergency that we did not pick up on our four monitors, one in the Mick’s room and three in the girls’ room, two for Socra Marie? The systematic exception was therefore legislated that the door would be ever so slightly ajar so that a large canine snoot or a small human face might cautiously peek in. That this exception negated the whole purpose of parental privacy was not a position I was ready to debate.

  The other side of the coin was that Ma became very angry when someone took foolish advantage of the exception. So we were only occasionally bothered on our nuptial bed. The possibility of this happening, however, was an impediment to abandoned passion.

  So the night before John Patrick O’Sullivan was to visit, Fiona pushed her large muzzle into our Holy Place, very tentatively, and looked around.

  “Your police dog friend is here,” I murmured.

  “Hmm? … Oh, Fifi, it’s all right.” She sighed. “Weren’t your man and I just playing around?”

  The good Fiona did not understand the words, but she knew the tone of voice. Discreetly she withdrew and presumably returned to the “girls’ room,” which was her chosen overnight station. Better her inquiry than the Tiny Terrorist.r />
  “’Tis your fault,” Nuala Anne insisted, “and yourself making all that noise.”

  “I thought it was my wife who did the screaming.”

  “Only because you made me,” she whispered contentedly, as she snuggled closer to me. “You’re a desperate man altogether.”

  “Desperate” is a hard word to translate from Irish English to American English. It may be a fourth level in the comparison of the adjective “grand” as in “grand,” “super,” “brilliant,” and finally “desperate.” It was on a higher level than “dead focking brill,” the kind of expression Nuala Anne had given up out of respect for my American relatives and our children. In some places in Ireland “desperate” yielded position to “right focking whore,” which was very high praise indeed. Nuala disdained that expression on the grounds that it was “chauvinist.”

  “The room is a terrible mess,” she murmured as I caressed her gently.

  “Is it now?”

  “It smells like illicit sex.”

  “How would you know what illicit sex smells like?”

  She giggled, as she often did during our postcoital cuddling.

  “Ah, that would be telling, wouldn’t it”

  “It smells like perfectly legitimate marital sex.”

  “The sheets are soaking wet and crumpled up, our clothes are all over the floor, and it’s a terrible, terrible mess—like a room in a disorderly house. I’ll have to clean it up before Danuta comes in the morning.” She sighed loudly. “Sure, isn’t that the way of it?”

  Heaven forefend that Danuta would suspect that we had made moderately violent love. Indeed, the marital bed was always neatly made before she arrived in the morning, even if it were Sunday morning and she would not show up.

  Having stated her obligation, Nuala Anne did not move to get out of bed and begin to impose order on our disorderly room. Instead, she snuggled yet closer to me.

  “Hold me tight, Dermot,” she begged.

  “If you insist on that, you might just get assaulted again.”