Irish Lace

by Andrew M. Greeley

  “So I’m not a witch?”

  “If you are, you’re the prettiest witch in the world.”

  “Go ’long with you,” she said, hitting my arm with her fist, very gently.

  I don’t work because I’m not very good at anything and because I made a lot of money one day on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange because of a mistake (mine). I did the sensible thing and retired. I asked investors more skilled than I am or ever would be to take care of my money. So I really don’t do anything at all except work out and swim at the East Bank Club, a place which, like everything else in Chicago, fascinates my Nuala.

  I write, too. That’s what I like to do and have always wanted to do. I’ve had some things published. Nuala is very proud of that fact and will brag about it when she thinks I’m not around to hear her.

  As she had said to her newfound friend at Grand Beach, “Sure, isn’t he a great writer?”

  The other person must have asked if I would ever become famous because Nuala replied, “Isn’t he famous already?”

  Well, only in a very limited circle.

  I had written what I thought was a lascivious, albeit comic, story in Dublin about the fantasies of a young man when he first met a young woman not unlike Nuala. The editor who published it told me that it was a fine example of lyrical and romantic eroticism. Nuala had found it on my hard disk while she was working for me and had been pleased by it (“Dead frigging bril”), though I had thought she would be deeply offended.

  “Ah, if young men didn’t think like that about young women, wouldn’t our kind have died out long ago? Sure, wouldn’t I be terrible flattered if some young man had those nice thoughts about me?”

  “Would you now?”

  “Can I show it to me ma?”

  “She’ll think I’m a dirty-minded man.”

  “No, she won’t.”

  I should have realized that, given charge of my computer and my hard disk, Nuala Anne would explore every file on it.

  “When did it happen?” I asked her as we approached the remodeled Navy Pier.

  “You mean my vision, though I really didn’t see anything? I don’t know. It was like all in the present. That’s the way I felt it anyway. But nothing was happening there. So it was sometime in the past … . And when, Dermot Michael Coyne, are you going to take me for the ride you promised on that frigging Ferris-wheel thing that your man put up on the pier?”

  I had made many excuses. The truth was that I was frightened of heights.

  “And the carousel, too?”

  I become dizzy on merry-go-rounds.

  “Wednesday night.”

  “I sing on Wednesday night, as you well know.”

  “So you do. Thursday?”

  I’d have to do it eventually. Maybe I would earn myself some tender loving sympathy if I got sick on one or both.

  “Grand!”

  See what I mean? She was still a youthful hoyden and she had no business at all, at all, in permitting herself to be tied down by a lecherous old man of twenty-five.

  I turned off at North Avenue so I could work my way through Lincoln Park on Stockton Drive (by the zoo) up to Webster.

  Beside me, Nuala stiffened again.

  “Dermot Michael, there’s bodies all over the place,” she murmured. “Look at them!”

  I glanced around as we went into the underpass beneath the Drive.

  “Nuala, that’s North Avenue beach.”

  “I mean dead bodies. Look at them all floating on the water!”

  The lake was still much too cold for anyone but greenhorns from County Galway. She was having another one of her experiences.

  I turned into Lincoln Park and stopped short of Stockton, a drive that winds ingeniously through the park and by the zoo.

  “Are you all right, Nuala?”

  She was trembling, as though caught in a blast of cold winter air.

  “Bodies coming out of their graves, washed out by the lake, on the beach and into the lake. A terrible storm claiming the dead.”

  It sounded scary—so scary that I almost imagined I saw what she was seeing.

  A cop came by and pounded on the side of the car. “What the hell is a matter with you, buster?”

  Cops have a habit of permitting themselves to be annoyed by a young punk like me (as they see it) driving a Mercedes. Who knows, maybe I’m pushing drugs. The Notre Dame and Marquette emblems which deface the back window help sometimes but not always. When they ask what I do for a living, I’m in a quandary. If I say “nothing,” they’ll be certain that I’m a pusher. If I tell them a “writer,” they’ll think maybe I’m gay and, alas, cops still bash gays. If I fudge a little and say I work at the Merc, these days, they still suspect I’m a pusher.

  “The young woman has a chill, officer.”

  “Does she now?” he asked, glancing at Nuala and becoming instantly solicitous.

  I had learned another thing about cops—a quite important one: You don’t get tickets when you have Nuala in the car with you.

  “Are you all right, young lady? Should we take you to the hospital? Northwestern is just down the street.”

  Nuala looked like hospital material, pale, drawn, and trembling.

  “I’ll be fine in a moment, officer. I get these spells every once in a while. They’re not serious.”

  “From Galway, is it?” he asked.

  Especially you don’t get tickets when a cop hears her West of Ireland accent, may she never lose it.

  “Cararoe.”

  He then said some words in Irish to her and she responded promptly in kind. They both laughed.

  The frigging Yank (D. M. Coyne) was out of the loop.

  “I’m much better now, officer,” she said, forcing a smile. “Tell me, was there ever a cemetery here?”

  The cop raised his eyebrows. “So that’s the way of it? You’re one of them dark ones, are you?”

  “Not my choice.”

  “Ah it never is, is it? … Well you’re right about one thing. There was a cemetery here. Chicago City Cemetery, they called it. When they built the park, they moved the bodies somewhere else. All of them, the city brass said. Only some of them, others say. So if that’s what you’re feeling, there’s some reason for it.”

  “There always is, officer,” I said.

  “That’s the way of it … . Well, now, sir, take good care of this young woman. She’s a special one.”

  “I know that, officer.”

  Nuala seemed to have calmed down. She was still ashen, however. I started the car and eased our way up Stockton.

  “How are you doing, Nuala Anne?”

  “Better, Dermot Michael, better. But you see I’m not daft altogether. There once were graves here.”

  “If you said so, Nuala, I never doubted it.”

  She sighed.

  “Why do people have to die, Dermot dear?”

  “There are two answers, Nuala dear. The first is that we die because we’re creatures, and all creatures die. The second is that death does not end our lives.”

  “Do you really believe that?”

  Nuala has an odd relationship with the Deity and the Church. She goes to Mass every morning at St. Josephat’s which is right across Southport from where she lives, its twin green towers dominating the neighborhood like benign hawks. (On Sundays she attends Mass with me at Old St. Patrick’s over on Adams and Des Plaines.) Yet she’s not absolutely sure that there is a God or more specifically whether “God gives a good frig about the likes of us, and ourselves being such little gobshites.”

  She goes to church, she says, just in case God actually does care for us, which may not after all be such a bad argument.

  “I suppose you’re right,” she said that Sunday afternoon. “’Tis the only answer that makes sense.”

  “Were they the same people who were dying down at Lake Meadows?”

  “Who?”

  “The bodies coming out of the graves.”

  I glanced at her. She
was frowning, as if she were trying to puzzle something out.

  “I think so,” she said. “I’m not sure.”

  To tell you the truth, I was not happy about her apartment, either. She was living with four other greenhorns (all women, thank God) in a two-bedroom place that was at least as crowded as her apartment in Dublin when she was going to Trinity College (T.C.D., to the initiate). I knew they were paying her enough at Arthur Andersen to entitle her to something better. I suspected that she was paying most of the rent and had taken the others in, as she might once have taken in stray kittens.

  Nor did I especially like her roommates, who were part of the crowd at the Tricolor. They were rough, noisy young women from Dublin, not at all like my shy child from the Galway Gaeltacht (Irish-speaking region). They were nannies or maids and were almost certainly in one degree of illegality or another. She put up with them, but I didn’t think she enjoyed them all that much.

  Again, it was none of my business. And maybe I was just being a snob. Either way, I kept my mouth shut.

  We arrived at the wooden house on Southport which had yet to be blessed with the gentrification that was seeping through the neighborhood.

  Nuala hugged me and then clung to me.

  “I don’t know why you put up with me, Dermot Michael, and meself dragging you away from your long weekend with your family at that wonderful place and then acting like a real gobshite on the drive in.”

  As I kissed her, I found the smooth flesh of her belly and the hard muscles that kept it in place. She sighed happily.

  “I like being with you, Nuala,” I said in lieu of more passionate words, at once more appropriate and more dangerous.

  “Hmm,” she said. “Well, you don’t have to come and hear my singing tonight. Haven’t you got better things to do than hang out in that shabby pub?”

  “Nothing better to do if you’re singing in it.”

  She eased out of my arms—reluctantly, I liked to think.

  “I’m glad when you come, but you don’t have to come.”

  “I know that.”

  “So maybe I’ll see you then?”

  “I’ll call Prester George and see if he knows what happened where Lake Meadows is now.”

  “That would be grand,” she said as she bounced out of the car and up the steps to her apartment, the second floor of a white frame house (with peeling paint) that had somehow escaped the Chicago fire of 1871. Like many buildings of that time, the entrance was on the second floor, up an outside wooden stairway, because the ground floor had once been awash in a sea of mud. The two floors had been split into two tiny apartments. The entrance of the ground floor, now six feet above the old ground level behind the house, was no longer threatened by the Chicago swamp. The stairway to her apartment might have been rebuilt once in the last century or so, but I would not have bet on it.

  I drove back towards the Loop and to my apartment at the John Hancock Center with a feeling of unease. I felt again that somehow I was missing a grand opportunity. Moreover I was worried about the two phenomena on the Drive. And about Nuala’s singing and her pub and her roommates.

  It might, I reasoned, be a very difficult summer.

  That would turn out to be an understatement.

  2

  AS THE shadows of evening slipped in from the lake and over the city, I called our house at Grand Beach and found Prester George on phone duty.

  “So you took herself home, did you?”

  “You’re beginning to talk like her, George.”

  “All I have to say to you on that subject, little brother, is that you better snatch her up before someone else does.”

  Should anyone else make such a pitch at my Nuala I would have become insanely jealous.

  “I’m not so sure, George. She’s a real shit-kicker, you know.”

  “And what do you mean by that?”

  “Well, she knew that all of us played tennis, so she took up the sport before she came over so she could take us on despite the fact that we had more or less broken up in Dublin. Now she beats everyone, including you. She was spoiling for a fight.”

  “You don’t like competitive women?”

  “Well, there’s a limit.”

  Secretly I was enormously proud of Nuala’s athletic ability. I was sure the next step would be golf.

  “She sure does attract notice on the tennis court.”

  “And that business with the T-shirt.”

  “The Galway Hooker one? I thought that was hilarious. So did the boss.”

  Well, it was, in a way. Nuala was flaunting it at the Grand Beach pious who had come to the Mass that the little bishop (for whom George works at the cathedral) says on the dune in front of his sister’s house. There were a few raised eyebrows, to put it mildly. I had introduced her to the bishop, anyway. She had lost her nerve at the last minute and decided she didn’t want to meet the bishop after all. I didn’t let her escape from her folly.

  “Did you crew on one of those craft, Nuala Anne?” he had asked her.

  To be fair to her, there were some lines on the shirt which could have hinted at a sail.

  “I did, milord,” she had said shyly. “Last summer.”

  “And you won the race?”

  “We did, milord,” she had said more confidently, “though, as the Duke of Wellington said, it was a near thing.”

  “And the name comes from the Dutch word hookuh, which means fishing boat or something of the sort?”

  “So they say, milord.”

  The bishop and Nuala had decided that they liked one another.

  “Those that don’t know the meaning would find perhaps some grounds for consternation in the word.”

  “They might, milord,” she was now grinning broadly, “As my mother would say, however, to the pure all things are pure. Besides, isn’t there a drawing of a boat on the shirt?”

  “People might not notice that,” I had said.

  I did not add that what they might notice was the shape of the person beneath the shirt.

  At the presentation of the gifts, the bishop asked herself and me to bring up the water and wine and bread. Herself beamed proudly.

  “Yeah, George, but how many bishops would have known what a Galway Hooker is? She was just flaunting it to stir up trouble. That’s the kind she is.”

  “You know that’s not true, little brother. She’s a shy child, and she was protecting her shyness with her outrageous wit.”

  George was absolutely right. Nuala arranges her layers of masks to protect her fundamental nature as a fragile bog flower. She also enjoys doing it.

  “Funny kind of shyness,” I said.

  “Face it, little brother. She has your number.”

  “Maybe.”

  My family had fallen in love with Nuala at first sight. She had played the sweet, vulnerable West of Ireland child with a touch of whimsy, and they were charmed instantly. Not that the mask isn’t revealing and transparent, but it doesn’t tell the whole story. All the masks are transparent, which is why they are so ingenious.

  As became apparent when she walked out on the tennis court and routed the whole lot of them. And along with myself, did the same thing at doubles. She had no compunction about beating me, either. Indeed she did it with considerable relish and much to the enjoyment of my parents and my various siblings.

  It was assumed by everyone that I would marry her. Even such a stolid, dull bump on a log as me would not let Nuala Anne slip through my fingers. Well, I didn’t intend to lose her. However, I did not like the whole family making common cause with her against me.

  “Anyway,” I got to the point of my phone call, “What was once where Lake Meadows is now?”

  “Lake Meadows? Let me see, that’s 31st and Cottage isn’t it? The old Douglas Park, you know, after the Douglas in the Lincoln-Douglas debates.”

  “I thought Douglas Park was on the west side.”

  “That’s another one. This one is older. The old University of Chicago was there be
fore it folded and was reborn courtesy of the Rockefellers and the Northern Baptists. Somewhere on the campus they have a stone from the old place. There were also a lot of elegant old homes along there, not quite Prairie Avenue, but still pretty splendid. They turned into slums before the land was cleared.”

  None of that fit with Nuala’s experience.

  “Anything else?”

  “Yeah, something jogs my memory … . Now I’ve got it. That’s where Camp Douglas was.”

  “What was that?”

  “It was a Union depot during the Civil War. Troops trained there. Most famous as the site of a prison camp for Confederate soldiers.”

  “People die there?”

  “Yeah, it was no Andersonville or anything like that, but a lot of them died there during the war, mostly of disease and exposure. More men died of disease during the war than from enemy action.”

  “How many?”

  “Thousands, as I remember.”

  “Yeah, OK.”

  “Why the interest?”

  “I’ll tell you some other time.”

  “Hey, one more thing, little bro. There was some kind of conspiracy there in the summer of either 1863 or 1864. A plot to free the prisoners, thousands of them, and burn Chicago to the ground, like we did to ourselves a few years later.”

  “Interesting … I’ll let you know when I can let you know.”

  “Yeah … . Something else, little bro—can’t quite remember what it was. Something kind of spooky … . Is your gorgeous little witch involved in this interest of yours?”

  “Maybe,” I said cautiously.

  “Maybe that’s what I’m thinking about. Some kind of buried treasure involved with Camp Douglas. She has an affinity for buried treasure, doesn’t she?”

  “Once in a lifetime,” I said.

  After George let me go, I prayed fervently that we were not mixed up in another treasure hunt and that treasure hunting was not another one of herself’s psychic specialties.

  Nuala’s fey instincts are highly specialized. She seems especially sensitive to incidents from the past about which the truth has yet to be told. Then she becomes a detective and solves the past mystery—and the present one too—like the detective in Josephine Tey’s The Daughter of Time.