Irish Lace

by Andrew M. Greeley

  “I see … . Dermot Michael, would you ever find out more about it for me? It’s important that I know. I don’t know why it’s important, but it is.”

  “Sure. I have time on my hands, and you don’t.”

  “I didn’t say that!”

  “I know you didn’t. I did.”

  “I feel like a frigging eejit asking you to …”

  “I’d be interested in learning more about it even if you weren’t. I’ll dig up what I can, put it into the form of notes towards a novel, and then report to you.”

  “Thank you, Dermot, I know it’s very important.”

  We kissed each other good night. It started out as an ordinary kiss and then, kind of by mutual consent, it turned passionate. Extremely passionate.

  When we finally parted, she sighed.

  “Oh, Dermot,” she gasped. “That was too much altogether.”

  “It was,” I agreed.

  “Not, mind you, that it wasn’t nice.”

  She turned and ran up the steps.

  Five years, I thought, is too long to wait.

  I walked over to Clark Street to catch a cab. I had a vague sense I was being followed, but I could see no one.

  Yeah, but you got to respect her freedom, let her mature into the woman she wants to be, not the one you want to possess.

  Not quite the last of the gentleman. Nor the last of the romantics.

  ONLY THE LAST OF THE IRISH CATHOLIC ROMANTIC GENTLEMEN, the Adversary sneered. PROPOSAL OR PROPOSITION, DERMOT. THAT’S THE ONLY CHOICE. YOU’RE GOING TO HAVE TO BED HER SOON, ONE WAY OR ANOTHER.

  “What if she says no?”

  THAT’S YOUR WHOLE PROBLEM, he said and slipped away again into the depths of my unconscious.

  Back in my apartment, I poured the remains of the eiswein into a goblet and finished it off.

  The Nuala whom I had escorted to her home was yet another version, honest about her homesickness, candid about her fear of becoming dependent on me, and passionate in my embrace. I liked this version, but then, I liked all the versions. Yet I wondered if a docile and passive Nuala would not become dull after a while.

  No, I decided, no danger of that. Not as long as she would kiss like that. Besides, this new version would change soon.

  I permitted myself some delicious fantasies about a naked Nuala Anne in bed with me. Well, despite the Adversary, I wouldn’t dare proposition her because she’d probably say no. And I wouldn’t dare propose to her just yet because she would probably say yes.

  Then, even though it was late, I looked up the number of the Reliable Security Agency—mostly off-duty cops—whom my sister Cindy had recommended when I was worried about Nuala after she had left our house and moved into an apartment of her own. I hadn’t used them, but I had talked to them.

  Even though it was eleven o’clock, I called and told the woman dispatcher what had happened and what I wanted. Sure, I knew the usual terms. I mentioned my sister’s name.

  “No problem, Mr. Coyne. No problem at all. Now you go to bed and get a good night’s sleep.”

  In other words, we’re on the case: forget your worries, your sense of impending doom lurking out there somewhere in that mass of lights which is Chicago.

  I went to bed, but I didn’t have a good night’s sleep.

  In the morning while I was struggling to get my act in order for a trip up to the Chicago Historical Society, my brother the priest called me.

  “I did some more checking about this Camp Douglas business, little bro.”

  “That was good of you.”

  “It was a big plot, according to my friend, who knows less about Chicago history than he thinks he does. Tens of thousands of men slipping into Chicago: Confederate agents working their way in from Canada; Butternuts—downstaters who sympathized with their southern neighbors across the Ohio and the Mississippi; local Copperheads—men and women on the side of the South; soldiers of fortune who expected to get rich off the loot. And get this: a lot of Chicago Irish Democrats who were fed up with the war in which their sons were dying.”

  “Our kind of people!”

  “They had no particular love for the ‘darkies,’ as they were called then, and even less love for dying in what they thought was a foolish war. Apparently, there was a whole mob of conspirators armed to the teeth and ready, each for different reasons, to turn ten thousand Confederate prisoners on the city. Then they were to go off to Rock Island and free the prisoners there and wage guerrilla war all over the North.”

  “Wow!”

  “It wasn’t clear to anyone that the war would be over in less than a year. It might not have been if the conspiracy were successful.”

  “But it wasn’t.”

  “Right! The local feds caught on to it, rounded up the leaders, tried them, and sentenced them to death. Otherwise maybe Bill Clinton would be President of the Confederate States of America and Mario Cuomo President of the United States.”

  “We wouldn’t let them into NAFTA, either.”

  “And Newt would be a hanger-on at a Georgia courthouse, and Phil Gramm a crooked sheriff in Texas.”

  It was the kind of fantasy word game which the priest and I loved to play.

  “Oh, yeah, one more thing.” He became serious. “I know your winsome witch from Galway is involved.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Right. There’s buried treasure.”

  “What kind of buried treasure?”

  “A lost letter from one A. Lincoln about the conspiracy. Probably worth millions to whomever finds it.”

  “One letter is buried treasure?”

  “He wrote it late in the day on Good Friday 1865, just before he and the wife went over to Ford’s Theater to see a play called Our American Cousin and keep a date with destiny in the person of John Wilkes Booth. They were the last words A. Lincoln ever wrote.”

  3

  Nuala, my love,

  Ever since the Ken Burns Civil War series on American television, I have thought of writing a novel about that horrific and probably unnecessary war. I would have made it a reflection on human folly and especially the folly of military leaders. Not that original an idea. I have not written it yet and probably never will because it exceeds my capabilities. I haven’t even started the research for fear that if I did the research I would have no excuse for not writing it.

  So now I’m doing the research. The Civil War is a fascinating and terrifying subject. I don’t like it, and I can’t leave it alone.

  Anyway, here is my first report.

  All my love,

  Dermot

  “All of it, is it now?” She looked up at me with a leprechaunish grin.

  “’Tis a convention,” I said, “A rhetorical turn of phrase, if you take me meaning.”

  “Oh, I take your meaning, Dermot Michael,” she continued to grin. “And I’ll take all your love too.”

  I had proposed lunch at the Chicago Club, our most elegant eating club, just off Michigan Avenue. She argued that she couldn’t take time off from work. I replied that she was entitled to a lunch hour. Reluctantly, she agreed to come.

  The Nuala whom I greeted in the foyer was a dowdy professional woman: shapeless beige summer suit, hair in a bun, no jewelry or makeup, shoulders slumped, eyes downcast—the stenographer who was afraid of losing her job if she took too long a lunch hour. She glanced around at the dark green, plush red, and opulent oak club and the men with $1,500 suits and the women with $2,000 dresses, not counting the jewelry, blinked once as if she had entered a cathedral she had never seen before, and adjusted her image. In a twinkling of the eye that had blinked and without any change in costume or hairstyle, she became a high-powered woman executive, vice-president of a brokerage firm perhaps.

  I was sure she made the change without any conscious reflection. She merely became the person that the scenery demanded.

  We passed two senior partners from Arthur’s in the grill-room lobby.

  “Good afternoon Nuala,” one of them said. />
  “Enjoy your lunch, Nuala,” the other added.

  “Good afternoon, gentlemen,” she said with a radiant smile.

  They both looked me over and decided that they approved, with reservations.

  Despite her efforts to vanish into the woodwork, everyone at the firm knew her.

  Part of the new image required that she flirt with me. I didn’t mind.

  “Well,” she continued her discussion of “all my love,” “I’m not the kind who rejects gifts, not even if anyone tries to take them back.”

  We ordered roast beef and a half-bottle of cabernet sauvignon.

  I changed the subject as gracefully as I could, which wasn’t very graceful.

  “This is my first report, Nuala Anne. I thought I had to do some Chicago background first.”

  “Good. I must learn more about my new city. Don’t interrupt me while I read it.”

  “It can wait.”

  “No, it can’t.”

  So she read my report, distracted not even by the roast beef she wolfed down as she read.

  I’m afraid I’ll have to impose some Chicago history as background to the Camp Douglas story. I’ll give you the background in this first report. Then, in the second, I’ll write about life at Camp Douglas. Then I’ll give you the information about the Conspiracy, which, it seems, is still a controversial mystery, and let you apply your skills to solving it.

  The city was incorporated in the 1830s, twenty years after the Fort Dearborn massacre. At the beginning of the civil War, thirty years later, it was already the busiest shipping port in the world and the railroad center of America! In the space of a couple of decades, its population had increased from 5,000 to 100,000 (and would double again before the war was over).

  It was a boomtown like the ones in the American westerns—raw, rough, disorderly, corrupt; but a boomtown with 100,000 people. It already had its red-light district at the south end of what we now call the Loop, its cheap hotels, its gambling dens, its brothels. Most of its buildings were of cheap wooden construction. Worst of all, Chicago was built on a swamp between two water systems: the Des Plaines, Fox, and Illinois rivers emptied eventually into the Mississippi and then the Gulf of Mexico, and the Chicago River emptied into Lake Michigan and eventually the Atlantic Ocean. A narrow portage, aided by a sometime body of water called Round Lake connected the two. Normally the Chicago River flowed into Lake Michigan; but, when the lake was high, the river reversed its course and flowed in the other direction.

  The land between the two drainage systems was soggy at the best of times and a sea of mud at the worst. Just before the Civil War and for many years thereafter, Chicagoans coped with the mud by raising buildings off the ground level, sometimes as much as six feet, and filling in the land. Then they’d raise the levels of the streets and pave them with gravel. Maybe they’d add planked sidewalks, too. This process of jacking up the city—pulling it up by its own boot-straps, so to speak—would go on for decades.

  The swamp and the mud made sanitation difficult, if not impossible. Sewer pipes had been laid before the war (and gas pipes for gaslights, too). The sewage drained either directly into the lake or into the river and thence into the lake—the same lake from which the city drew its water supply. Even more than most American cities at the time, Chicago was a cesspool (literally) of disease—typhoid, cholera, smallpox, measles, and scarlet fever. The worst of the cholera epidemics would come in later decades, until the city finally solved its sanitation problems by reversing the flow of the river permanently. But that’s another story.

  Another problem was the city’s weather—too hot in the summer and too cold in the winter. You haven’t lived through a Chicago winter yet, Nuala. I’m sure winter is worse in places like Moscow and Nome and Point Barrow. It’s bad enough, however, in Chicago, especially if you are living in a cheap, uninsulated frame house with poor heat, inadequate clothing, and sickness. Many immigrants didn’t make it through their first winter.

  The city (governed by a “common council” made up of aldermen) was a city only in name. The government and the police had minimal authority. The civic elite, such as it was, made a lot of noise about crime and corruption, but had little power to do anything about it. Chicago was essentially a mob of people and a disorderly array of shacks, farms, animals, and muddy streets. Some of the people were rich, some were very poor (most of them immigrants and most of the immigrants Irish) and many schemers, operators, confidence men, and crooks determined to get rich quick. Some of the last group, men like Philip Armour and Potter Palmer and Marshall Field, would later become our most distinguished citizens. In a novel, Upton Sinclair would later call a Chicago neighborhood The Jungle. In 1860 the whole city was a jungle. The Board of Trade, that unique Chicago institution to which I must take you someday soon, was already up and running. Even then some men made a lot of money either through skill or crookedness or, as in my case, pure luck. Many men lost a lot of money.

  To make matters worse for immigrants living in Chicago, the country was swept repeatedly by severe financial “panics”—a major one every twenty years or so, and minor ones more frequently. These were, in fact, severe economic depressions in which hundreds of thousands of men lost their jobs. In a boom city like Chicago, the impact of the “panics” was even worse. The one in 1857 just before the Civil War was particularly severe. It coincided, as panics usually did, with a bitter Chicago winter.

  You have to understand this background if you’re going to understand Camp Douglas—the swamp, the disease, the social disorder, the corruption, the winter weather, and the constant fear of fire.

  I’m not making excuses for Camp Douglas. It was a terrible place. But I am trying to put into context. Many people in the city lived only a little better than those in the camp. The best estimate in the literature I’m reading is that between 4,000 and 6,000 of the 30,000 prisoners interned in Camp Douglas died—between 12 and 20 percent. In some of the cholera epidemics later in the century, between 12 and 17 percent of Chicagoans died. Before Camp Douglas became a prison camp in 1862, it was a training camp for Union soldiers. In four months, 42 men of a regiment of 600 died. A recruit wrote to his wife: “The provisions they furnish us, Betty, is nothing special. I am so weak I can hardly hold my pencil.” Life was tough and death was cheap, save for those who died or lost people they loved.

  As she read, she passed the pages over to me. I stacked them in a neat pile.

  “’Tis hard to believe that this grand city is the same place. Sure, isn’t it good for me that I was born when I was and came to Chicago now, instead of then?”

  “Lucky for me too.”

  She actually blushed at the compliment.

  I found some terrible letters in the archives of the Chicago Historical Society, written by an Irish immigrant from Galway to his brother—the fact that he could write made him different from many immigrants.

  “October 14, 1858

  “My dear brother Dan,

  “America is not the place we thought it would be. I have not been able to find steady work. The cottage we live in is cold and drafty. Food is very dear. My dear Mary Anne is doing poorly, and the children are hungry all the time.

  “Every night we pray to God that He will deliver us from our misery.

  “Please write as soon as you can.

  “Your loving brother,

  Tim”

  “November 10, 1858

  “Dear Dan,

  “The cold is terrible and the winter hasn’t really come yet. We are all sick. I work one day a week for fifty cents a day. I’m so weak and so hungry, I can barely lift the shovel.

  “The priests at St. Mary’s help us a lot, but they have so many people to care for.

  “I wonder if all of us won’t soon be joining Ma and Pa in heaven.

  “Pray for us all,

  Tim”

  “December 13, 1858

  “Dear brother Dan,

  “We lost our little Nan last night. She had a terri
ble chill and shivered for a couple of hours in Mary Anne’s arms before she died. Only four years old. She knew she was going to die. Her last words were, “Good-bye, Ma, I love you.”

  “I can’t help but thinking she’s in a better place than we are. Only hell could be worse than Chicago.

  “The priest at St. Mary’s said a Mass for her and we buried her in a potter’s field. It was so cold out at the cemetery that we all shivered like poor Nan when she was dying.

  “Please pray for us all.

  “Your sorrowing brother,

  Tim”

  “December 25, 1859

  “Dear Danny,

  Mary Anne made it a nice Christmas with a tiny tree and some candles and a few bits of ribbon. We went to Mass at St. Mary’s this morning, struggling through a foot of snow. Mary Anne and I wept in each other’s arms after we put the children to bed. We know that we won’t last the winter. It breaks my heart. She is so young and so brave.

  “Tell everyone at home that we love them.

  “Your brother,

  Tim”

  “January 18, 1860

  “Dear brother Dan,

  “I buried Paddy and Mary Anne this morning in the potter’s field during a terrible snowstorm. The snow stung my face and the cold froze my tears. They both died of measles. The young priest cried with me. I don’t know why I should feel that my suffering is different from so many others. I wonder if any of the Irish in this city will survive, other than the wealthy ones out in the West Division of the city.

  “I don’t know what Annie, our oldest and just six, and I will do. If we are to die of the measles, I hope she dies first. If I die first who will take care of her?

  “It is so unbelievably cold that her soft skin is blue. Still she is very brave like her mother was and sings songs to me like her mother did.

  “Good-bye Dan, I don’t think I’ll be writing again.