Irish Cream

by Andrew M. Greeley

  We had added an exercise room in the attic, of which my wife and I made separate use. Nuala Anne in shorts and running bra, twisting and turning and running was too much of a distraction when I wanted serious exercise.

  I walked down to the playroom, where the three kids were playing, Nelliecoyne with her coloring book, the Mick with his Legos, and the Tiny Terrorist with her dolls. Who could ask for children who were more quiet, more dutiful, more intent on their play?

  “How’s herself?” I asked Nellie.

  “She had bad dreams that told her she had spilled the tea on Ma. I told her the dreams weren’t true. Ma spilled it on herself.”

  “Ma love Socra Marie, unconditionally.”

  “Yes, she does,” I agreed, lifting her up into the air and spinning her around. Many kids her age would have been frightened by such a spin. My younger daughter chortled gleefully.

  “Where are the doggies?”

  “Day took them for a run.”

  Better he than I, I thought.

  “Day color doggies,” Socra Marie informed me, when I restored her to terra firma. She held up a sheet of drawing paper. “Fabulous!”

  This time the word was appropriate. In crayon he had captured the two snow-white giants on green grass panting after furious exercise, possibly wrestling with one another. They huddled together in mute affection, empresses of all they surveyed and ready to rebuff any dog that threatened their domains. He’d even caught the differences in their personalities; Maeve more laid-back, Fiona more vigilant as befits a retired police dog.

  The composition, the color, the craftsmanship were superb. The kid had talent, some of it natural, some of it acquired by discipline and practice. Of that skill his father certainly would not be proud.

  “It certainly is fabulous, Socra Marie. Can I put it over here to show Ma?”

  “Ma spill tea,” she insisted.

  “Yes, she did,” I agreed.

  I would not report this exchange to her mother. Nuala would worry that she had created a major psychological problem for the child, which it might take years of therapy to resolve.

  I began to turn over in my mind a poem about three kids in the playroom—black, red, and blond hair, of their intensity at their games and myself wondering how I came to have such three rapidly growing rugrats.

  A chorus of barking dogs erupted in our backyard.

  “They’re back!” Socra Marie rushed into the dogs’ room and hugged the canine Moby Dicks as they entered.

  The foundation of our house had been laid before the Great Fire, which had missed it, though just barely. The ground level was near the ground until the city built up the streets in its never-ending battle with mud and eliminated the possibility of ground-floor entrance. However, the yard in back was some three feet lower than the street level. Hence there was a back door.

  “Hi, Dermot,” Damian said with a happy grin, not unlike his father’s except his geniality had not yet turned bitter. “Quiet, girls, you know how herself doesn’t like all that barking in the house.”

  Except when they’re barking at her in something like hyperdulia in the good old Catholic days.

  “My dad was here, wasn’t he, Dermot. It looked like his car in front.”

  “He was.”

  “And?”

  “Herself and the dogs scared him away.”

  “I’ve tried. I can’t please him, no matter what I do. I keep trying …”

  No one tells Nuala Anne McGrail whom she can hire.”

  “That should be obvious after a moment’s conversation!” He grinned happily. “Dad always undercuts me because he wants me to grow up and become a man. He used to bribe my teachers to give me poor marks because he told them good marks would go to my head. He bribed the man at the secretary of state’s office so I wouldn’t get a driver’s license. I got it on my own six months later.”

  “He didn’t undercut you with us,” I said firmly.

  At that point, my good wife appeared in running shorts and sweatshirt, virtuously sweating after an enthusiastic workout. My fantasies became dirty at once.

  “Don’t mess with me, guys,” she announced breathlessly. “Haven’t I been practicing me martial arts? And after supper, you know what, Socra Marie, I’m going to practice singing again! Your da made me do it!”

  He most certainly did not! But the cheers from the troops made it difficult to reject credit!

  “Ma unconditionally!” exclaimed our youngest, hugging her mother’s thigh.

  “You can’t come and listen till I improve!”

  “Ma!” the three of them shouted, the Mick looking up from his Legos.

  “You can too listen,” I insisted.

  “Well,” Nuala Anne said with a sigh. “Like I tell you, Da is the boss, isn’t he now?”

  “Yes, Ma,” they said dutifully, though they knew better.

  “Da, show Ma Day’s colors!”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  At the sound of Day’s name the hounds yelped and danced around him, expecting that they would have another run.

  “Girls!” Nuala ordered.

  They sat down obediently but continued to pant.

  I handed her Day’s crayon sketch of the hounds.

  Nuala glanced at the drawing. Then an expression of intense concentration flashed across her face. This was very serious business.

  “What do you think, Dermot Michael?”

  I am almost never consulted on artistic matters.

  “Reilly Gallery,” I said, “maybe some sort of contract They’ll exhibit him and broker deals for him to paint people’s dogs.”

  “You have the right of it as always, Dermot Michael.”

  She did not add the usual, “Wasn’t I thinking of the same thing meself.”

  “Do you know the Reilly Gallery, Damian?” she asked.

  He had suddenly been promoted to Damian. Wasn’t he, after all, a fellow artist?

  “Sure, I stop in there every once in a while to look at Superintendent Casey’s paintings. Mrs. Casey makes herbal tea for me and serves oatmeal raisin cookies.”

  “Naturally,” I said.

  “You do a lot of paintings of dogs, do you now, Damian?”

  “Dogs and people, kids especially.”

  The rest of us listened silently, knowing somehow that this was an important conversation. Even the doggies seem to understand that herself was up to serious business—the business of befriending a suppressed talent, one of my wife’s favorite indoor sports. It was, she told me often, an obligation that her own surprising career imposed upon her.

  “I don’t suppose you have a lot of work like this around your apartment.”

  Day, or Damian as I must now call him, seemed baffled. What was this catechism all about?

  “Tons of them, I’m afraid, Nuala. That’s about all I do when I’m not studying art books or working.”

  Nuala sighed, her most expressive West of Ireland sigh, a woman’s protest against the failure of reality to organize itself properly.

  “And you learned how to do this stuff, mostly by looking at books?”

  “Like I told Dermot, I didn’t want to do the kind of stuff that the students down at the Art Institute want to do. There’s nothing wrong with it. I just like to draw other stuff. I found a couple of books about painting dogs. That’s why I hang around the dog park. I like dogs. They tell us a lot about ourselves if we’d only listen.”

  He sat on one of the many stools in the playroom, one across from my wife—two artists at work. The hounds curled up on the floor between them.

  “Weren’t we after breeding them to reflect our own traits? Isn’t that true, Dermot Michael?”

  “’Tis,” I said, but without the appropriate sigh.

  Now I was being asked to confirm what she said. Something that happened rarely in my marriage. What the hell is going on?

  “When I was a little girl,” Nuala Anne began again, “I wanted to be an opera singer. I knew I wasn’t quite good enoug
h, so I decided to be an accountant and I came to this city to work for Andersen. And doesn’t this sweet boy I met at O’Neill’s pub in Dublin say to me, Nuala Anne, you can have a lot more fun singing popular and standards and folk songs than being an accountant? I thought he was crazy, but I did what he said, like I always do.”

  PURE BULLSHIT.

  For once I agree.

  “Uh-huh.”

  Damian O’Sullivan listened intently to this sweaty beautiful woman, dimly seeing a faerie big sister or maybe an angel who was pointing towards a glimmer of hope in his life.

  I sat in the old easy chair, which was my designated seat in the playroom, where I could be convenient when herself needed me to confirm what she was saying. The Mick returned to his Legos, but he was listening. Nelliecoyne pretended to be working on her herd of purple heifers that might change the Deity’s mind. Socra Marie crawled onto her ma’s lap and confirmed the thrust of the conversation.

  “Day color fabulous.”

  “I’m not saying they’ll hang your work in the Art Institute or that you’ll become as wealthy as your father, but I am saying you could have a lot of fun and earn a very good living.”

  “Painting dogs?”

  “And kids and grown-ups too maybe, isn’t that true, Dermot Michael?”

  “’Tis,” I said, managing to sigh this time.

  “I never thought of that … It would be fun. What do I have to do?”

  “What do you think, Dermot Michael?”

  This was getting to be too much.

  “I don’t suppose you could pick out maybe ten of your best works and bring them over tomorrow morning. Nuala would bring them down to Mrs. Casey to get her opinion.”

  “Day draw Socra Marie?”

  “I sure will! … My stuff at the Reilly Gallery … I can’t believe it.”

  “No promises, Damian,” I said. “But unless my wife’s taste is wrong—and I’ve never known it to be—you’ve got it.”

  “Gosh!”

  For just a moment, his eyes lit up. Then quickly they dimmed.

  “My dad will ruin it. He always does.”

  “If he tries,” Nuala said grimly, “he’ll find that he’s encountered a rather different set of adversaries, won’t he, Dermot love?”

  “He will indeed.”

  Learning martial arts, I hardly need remark, did not make Nuala Anne a fighter. It only helped.

  Mike Casey was the head of Reliable Security, for which many of the city’s best cops worked when off duty. Then there was the little bishop, who had more clout than anyone I ever met. If John Patrick O’Sullivan tried to interfere with Nuala’s plan, he would find he’d run into a buzz saw.

  It was patently (as the little bishop would say) her-plan, despite her attempt to make it all seem like my idea.

  WHAT THE HELL IS GOING ON?

  Don’t ask.

  So Damian went home, his eyes wet with tears and glowing with hope, and we ate our Sunday supper— sandwiches with the crusts cut off, Irish style, a sure way I thought to spoil children. Naturally I kept that opinion to myself.

  After supper we all trooped to the music room, where the materfamilias began to renew her singing career. The kids clapped and cheered, even Socra Marie, whose head was nodding and her dolly held at half-mast.

  However, while the bells still rang clearly over the peat bogs, Nuala Anne was rusty, very rusty. She could sing church hymns and lullabies without too much effort, but you quickly realized that her voice was ragged around the edges and her breathing was out of focus.

  “Don’t try to do it all at once, Nuala Anne,” I warned her. “There’s no rush, is there now?”

  She glared at me, took a deep breath, and murmured, “Don’t you have the right of it again, Dermot Michael … Would you ever call Madame for me and see if I might go down to the Fine Arts Building and get some help?”

  “No.”

  “But, Dermot love, won’t she be furious at me?” Close to tears.

  “She’ll go through her act, Nuala love, but you’re her most successful pupil and you know how much she adores you.”

  “I can’t do everything, Dermot Michael. It isn’t fair of God to want me to do everything.”

  “Ma no cry,” Socra Marie begged.

  “I think if you bring herself down with you, Madame will melt.”

  “Isn’t that a brilliant idea altogether!”

  It was all of that, especially since my wife had thought of it from the beginning of the conversation.

  “You have more minutes to sing, Ma,” the implacable Nelliecoyne reminded her mother. “Sing a couple of lullabies to put herself to sleep.”

  The Tiny Terrorist was deep in the land of Nod at the end of the first. The Mick was yawning. It was easy to get them all into bed.

  “I should practice at bedtime every night, shouldn’t I, Dermot Michael?”

  I didn’t answer, not till I figured out what the game was.

  Later, I lay in bed working on my poem while Nuala, in an unnecessarily chaste gown and robe, sat at the foot of the bed, reading the first installment of Father Richard Lonigan’s diary. She was wearing her reading glasses, which meant that it was very serious reading.

  “Very dark indeed, Dermot Michael Coyne!” she said, with one of her better sighs as she put the manila folder aside. “Bad things are going to happen!”

  We were both too worn from the previous night’s exertions to consider lovemaking.

  “They happened long ago, Nuala.”

  “We have to figure them out. But …”

  “Otherwise, Ned Fitzpatrick wouldn’t have left the diary for us.”

  “’Tis true,” she murmured sleepily. “And we have to figure out who framed poor Damian.”

  She hung up her robe and crawled into bed next to me.

  “Good night, Dermot Michael, I love you.”

  For all her worries, she went to sleep as easily as had her younger daughter.

  And left me to ponder as I tried to sleep the peculiar change in my wife. She had regressed to the greenhorn country girl from the Gaeltacht.

  Which, unless I was very much mistaken, she had never really been.

  6

  “LOVELY RING,” I said to the young public defender. “You got it on Easter, I bet.”

  She covered it up immediately, embarrassed that I had read the signs.

  “Is it that obvious?” she said, her fair face flushing.

  “Is he South Side Irish too?”

  “Are there any other kind?”

  “And he’s a lawyer too?”

  “Are there any other kind?”

  “He works for the state’s attorney?”

  “No, thank God! He works in the mayor’s office!”

  Mary Jane Healy was a lovely young woman with long blond hair, deep blue eyes, though not as deep as my wife’s eyes, and a willowy figure that must have been distracting to judges and juries. She had been skeptical of me when I first asked to see her.

  “I cannot talk about my previous clients,” she had insisted curtly.

  Then I recognized her radiance for what it was.

  THE OLD COYNE CHARM, the Adversary insisted.

  We were talking in her small, windowless office at the Cook County Courthouse at 26th and California.

  “I assume he understands who the boss is?”

  “All Irishmen know that!” She laughed. “He’s a good guy though. Very sensitive and kind.”

  “God bless you and grant you many happy years together.”

  “Thank you very much, Mr. Coyne,” she said, flushing again.

  “My dad’s Mr. Coyne,” I replied, borrowing one of Nuala’s lines. “I’m Dermot.”

  Actually he was R. Coyne, but that was not relevant to the situation.

  “Why do you want to know about Damian O’Sullivan?” she said, the tough litigator again, but not quite so tough.

  “My wife and I are convinced he was framed.”

  “He may well have be
en. All I know is that the state’s attorney had no case against him. There was no evidence. Sure, they found him drunk at the edge of the pool. But there is no evidence that he drove the car that banged into Rod Keefe. None. The police arrested him because his father and his brothers and sisters all said he had stolen the car and driven off with it. Except they didn’t find keys on him or in the car or anywhere else. Maybe he did kill Keefe. Probably he did. But he was innocent till they could prove him guilty and there was no way they could do that. I was asking for a bench trial and would have moved for a dismissal on grounds of lack of evidence. I might have won.”

  “No evidence?”

  “Not a bit … then this tight-assed little black Irish bitch comes to see me. She’s Maura O’Sullivan, like I’m supposed to be impressed. Associate at Minor, Grey she tells me, DePaul graduate, Law Review. They want a plea bargain. I tell her I was Law Review at The University and all she says is that everyone knew that our graduates were no good as litigators. I say good enough to know that there’s no persuasive evidence against your brother and that Judge Mikolitis will almost certainly grant a motion to dismiss. She waves that off. The family does not want a trial. Keefe was her father’s closest friend. They hurt enough as it is. They want a plea. Negligent homicide. I say he could get ten years. She tells me that he deserves it—his sister, his fucking sister, excuse me, Mr. er Dermot, Jerry doesn’t like me using that language and he’s right—his sister wants to send him to jail. So I remind her that I’m Damian’s lawyer and I will not seek a plea when I am convinced he’s innocent. She says then they will have to hire their own lawyer. The O’Sullivans don’t need a charity lawyer. Little bitch!”

  “And Damian agrees to the change?”

  “The poor kid doesn’t know whether he’s coming or going. They bring in a real heavy, senior partner in another firm who’s a tax specialist. The state’s attorney who is a real asshole offers them five years, which includes time off for good behavior. The gangs would make him a sex slave. He probably wouldn’t survive. They buy it.”

  “The judge gives him probation anyway? How did that happen?”

  “I meet him at a Bar Association golf outing. I’m in his foursome and am beating the shit out of him. So he asks me how come I’m out of the case and they’re pleading. Not exactly a proper question, but he’s the judge and smells something funny. So I tell him. He turns around and gives Damian five years of probation. The state’s attorney is furious. So are the little bitch and her father, who are in court. They want him to do time. I’m in court because I want to see how it plays out. I thought the father was going to beat up the judge.”