Irish Lace

by Andrew M. Greeley

  “I’m afraid of her already.”

  “Madame is very nice, but you’d better practice or you’ll be in trouble.”

  “I will, Dermot,” she said grimly. “If I’m going to spend my money, wouldn’t I be a frigging eejit if I didn’t practice?”

  “Woman, you would.”

  I didn’t tell her—and I probably never would—that she’d be paying one-third of Madame’s fees and I’d be paying the rest with secret checks.

  “Can you get out of work an hour early tomorrow afternoon? I’d like to take you out to the site again and show you where things were, before you read my next report.”

  “Me boss thinks I’m a friggin’ genius. I’ll tell him I’m going to meet me new voice teacher that me young man has found for me.”

  This was the same woman who didn’t dare read my essay at work.

  “Am I your young man, Nuala?”

  “Damn frigging right you are.” She jabbed a finger at me. “And don’t you ever forget it. I don’t want to see you lollygagging around with anyone else.”

  Suddenly I was under suspicion of infidelity.

  “I wouldn’t risk my life doing that.”

  “Well, you’d better not … ah, sure, Dermot, I was only joking. I know you’re not the lollygagging type. Would you maybe be better off if you were?”

  “No.”

  “I don’t think so either.”

  “Back to your man with the arm. He and a couple of guys like him were hanging around the Tricolor all last week, talking big.”

  “Were they, now? Three of them, is it?”

  I wouldn’t be enthusiastic about facing down three of those guys, even if one of them had an arm in a cast. I hoped the cops who were watching me were good at their work.

  “They were hinting that they’re from the lads, from your man himself.”

  That would be Gerry Adams.

  “And what does he want?”

  “They’re saying that the Brits are going to break the truce and that Gerry needs the money to get ready to begin the campaign again.”

  “That’s implausible, Nuala. The Brits wouldn’t dare break the truce with Bill Clinton watching them.”

  “I don’t believe it either, but they’ve got the kids at the pub all stirred up. Some of them might do crazy things.”

  “The young women you live with?”

  “They’re excited, but, sure, they wouldn’t do a thing, and themselves all being illegal. They have too much to lose.”

  I didn’t like the sound of that, not at all, at all.

  “Be careful, Nuala. That’s dangerous talk.”

  “As I’ve told you before, Dermot Michael Coyne, I can take care of meself. Don’t worry about me.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “But I don’t know about going back to that place again. It scared me.”

  “It’s up to you.”

  She thought about it.

  “Maybe I better go.”

  We both declined dessert but drank a very small glass of Bailey’s, and I paid the check.

  We walked over to the Hancock Center parking lot.

  “Thank you, Dermot. It was a lovely dinner, even if they didn’t have the right wine … . Where are you taking me tomorrow night?”

  “Maybe to the Carlton Club at the Ritz-Carlton. If we get our work done, you can take another swim.”

  “You have to promise you’ll stop undressing me in your mind.”

  “I can no more do that than you can stop beating me at tennis.”

  “Fair play to you!” she said with a vast laugh. “Ah, aren’t you a tricky one with words, and yourself a Yank at that.”

  I drove her home and kissed her good night solidly, though by no means as passionately as the night before. She slipped quickly out of the car and bounded up the rickety stairs. Then near the top, she turned and bounded down again.

  Careful, young woman, you could fall down those things, break your leg, and be out of tennis for the season.

  “You let me forget me bags,” she said, her face a cross frown.

  “Did I now? Well I’ll carry them upstairs for you.”

  I opened the trunk, lifted out the two bags, and walked towards the stairs.

  “Careful with these stair things,” she warned me, taking my arm in hers. “You could fall down and break a leg.”

  “And be out of tennis for the season.”

  She tightened her arm around mine as she laughed.

  Actually, I slipped a couple of times on the stairs and was admonished in a fierce whisper to be careful and watch my step.

  “I’m entitled to another kiss for carrying these up the steps.”

  “I don’t know about that … .”

  I started out with another very chaste contact of lips. Nuala, however, collapsed into my arms and pressed herself against me.

  “I love you, Dermot Michael,” she said fiercely. “I’ll always love you.”

  “I love you too, Nuala,” I stammered as she slipped away from me and into the house.

  I turned to essay a walk down the stairs. They looked even more dangerous than they had on the way up. I eased my way down gingerly like a frigging old man.

  The door opened and herself emerged, already in a robe.

  “Don’t break your friggin’ skull on the stairs, Dermot Michael Coyne.”

  “It’s my leg I’m worried about.”

  She watched till I was safely in the car.

  I drove around the corner to get back on Webster. I saw a man lurking near a tree. It looked to me as if he had an arm in a sling. I picked up the phone to call her and then decided against it. I had told the security people to watch for a man with his arm in a sling. If I had seen him, surely they had too.

  I didn’t sleep well that night, either. I called Nuala at her office the first thing in the morning, allegedly to confirm when I could pick her up in front of her office.

  “Three-thirty,” she said. “I asked for three-thirty and got nary a word of protest.”

  Much later in the day, we were standing on the grounds of Prairie Shores again, poring over a map. Nuala this evening was wearing her dark blue work clothes, but at least she wasn’t sporting the fake glasses.

  It was a gray day with a chill in the wind off the lake, more like September than June.

  “They built the place out here on Cottage Grove because they thought it far enough away from the city to be safe—four miles out. There actually was a cottage and a little grove of trees around it, one of those tiny islands of trees that dotted the prairie. A man named Graves owned the cottage and refused to sell it to the government, so the camp walls went around it. Stephen A. Douglas was a U.S. senator who had beaten Lincoln in a senatorial race and lost to him in the 1860 presidential election. He owned the land and donated it to the Union Army for the camp. He also donated the land on the other side of Cottage Grove to the University of Chicago, which folded in 1886. The university land was across Cottage Grove along the lake, where the approaches to the Drive are now. Douglas died in June of 1861 at the age of forty-eight. They say he ate too much, drank too much, and worked too hard. He did not live to see the war become terrible or the cruel use that was made of his land.

  “Today Cottage stops at the entrance to Lake Meadows and feeds into Rhodes Avenue and then resumes south of Lake Meadows and goes out to the new university and beyond. Clear?”

  “Uh-huh.”

  “Any vibrations?”

  “Only a little. Left over from Sunday. I’m kind of anxious, though.”

  “The camp enclosed at least eighty acres and extended from 31st Street to 33d Street and from here to Martin Luther King Drive, four blocks in that direction; sometimes it might even have extended two blocks further. King Drive was called Kankakee Street in those days. It was surrounded by a wall of thick wooden planks twelve feet high. The main entrance was down in that direction at what would now be 32nd Street. The Illinois Central came by here and dropped off many of the p
risoners. Still OK?”

  “Go on.”

  “This parking lot here was the entrance to the Graves Cottage, the place that gave the street its name and whose people absolutely refused to leave during the war. White Oak Square, a horrible dungeon to punish prisoners, was on that grassy lawn in that direction. See it on the map?”

  She tilted the map, glanced at it and then glanced in the direction I was pointing.

  “The shopping center over there is where the smallpox hospital was. The dead were buried right behind the hospital until they were moved to Oakwood Cemetery. You can just see the children’s playground … . That’s where the university was.”

  “All gone now,” she sighed.

  “All gone by 1880. Not a trace on the ground and only a very few traces in the memory of Chicago—occasional scholarly articles, a book or two, some dissertations, maybe a commemoration on some Memorial Days. No one wants to remember it. It was, after all a disgrace to Chicago, and the men who died here were hardly heroes by Chicago standards. No one cares about them anymore. No one has cared for a hundred and twenty years, except some Confederate veterans and their families at the end of the last century; and they were concerned only about decent burial.”

  “How ugly.”

  “The war was over. The North was prosperous and wanted to forget the bloodshed of the war. The Union had been preserved. The slaves were free. What more was there to worry about? Besides, the Confederate prisons were worse, weren’t they?”

  “Was the war worth it?”

  “Was the Irish Civil War worth it? Does your generation much care about it?”

  “No.”

  “But the men that fought it thought it was worth it. So did the political leaders who led it.”

  “Eejits!”

  “Eejitcy is pervasive in the human condition, Nuala Anne.”

  She nodded.

  “You think it could have been settled without a war, that even the slaves would have been freed.”

  “I think so. I don’t know for sure … again are you OK?”

  “Just a little shaky. I’ll be all right. It’s not like last Sunday. I’m terrible sad, but I don’t feel the suffering … . You say six thousand men died where this lovely high rise development is?”

  “Yes … I’m sure you don’t want to drive out to Oakwood Cemetery.”

  “I do, though, Derm. How far is it?”

  “Ten, fifteen minutes at the most.”

  “Let’s go, then.”

  She had been a very happy young woman when we left our audience with Madame at the Fine Arts Building (once the Studebaker Building) on Michigan Avenue. Madame’s “studio” was on the fifth floor of the disheveled old rabbit warren of a building, looking out on Michigan Avenue and Grant Park. Her rooms—an office and a music room—were neat and elegant, with plants, oriental rugs, white walls lined with prints, and antique furniture. Madame, somewhere between sixty and seventy with rimless pince-nez and a large jeweled watch pinned on a flowing brown dress, had been a modest success as an opera singer and had invested wisely. She made it clear that she did not have to teach and would quickly dismiss a student who did not follow her instructions to the letter. Her long hair, pinned on the top of her head, had been dyed auburn, almost tastefully. She played with the watch constantly, gazing at the time during our “audition.”

  Nuala, as she had said later, “had gone all over shy.”

  “So, young woman, you want to be a singer?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” she had said, the Connemara accent thick.

  “Did you attend university?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Where?”

  “Trinity College, ma’am. The one in Dublin.”

  “You had a voice teacher there?”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Who?”

  “Mrs. Folly. She was professor of voice.”

  “Indeed! I believe I have heard of her. What did she say about your voice?”

  “That I ought to have more training.”

  “What makes you think you can become a singer?”

  “I don’t think that I can, ma’am. I’d like to find out if I can.”

  “Very well. Sing something for me.”

  She had reached for the piano to give Nuala a note. It was unnecessary. Nuala had begun singing without the note. Madame had pulled back her hand and rolled her eyes at me. Perfect pitch.

  “Molly Malone,” naturally. With never a look at me.

  I had heard herself sing that song many times. She had never sung it better. “All over shy” or not, she wasn’t going to flub this “audition.”

  Madam had said nothing for a moment at the end of song. Had herself pulled on this woman’s heartstrings as she always had on mine? Was there a tear in her eye, a memory of a young woman lost?

  “I believe, young woman, in telling my students the truth at the very beginning. You have a lovely voice; very lovely, if I may say so. You do not quite have the talent to be an opera singer as I was. Few do. I think you have no illusions about that. However, I believe that you can be very successful as a singer of a certain kind of popular music, folk songs and standards, and religious hymns especially. People will be willing to pay to hear you, my child. Pay a lot, as a matter of fact. There is no doubt in my mind about that. Moreover, you are able to put just the right amount of emotion into a song. Would you sing something else for me?”

  Nuala had tried her favorite lullaby.

  “Hmm,” Madame had mused. “Do you have a child of your own, my dear?”

  “No, ma’am. I don’t even have a husband.”

  “You acted at this university in Dublin?”

  “Yes, ma’am. A little.”

  The lead in The Playboy of the Western World, but I wasn’t going to say that.

  “It will not be necessary to train you in the emotional interpretation of a song. However, you have much work to do. First of all, child, you do not know how to breathe.”

  “Breathe, is it now?” Nuala had begun to smile.

  That had been a mistake.

  “You have terrible breathing habits. You must improve your breathing. It is all coming from the throat.”

  She had wrapped her long, thin hand around Nuala’s throat.

  “No, the air must not come from here. You must use the diaphragm and lungs God gave you. Breathe from down here.”

  Then she had shoved herself’s diaphragm.

  “You breathe from here, child, from here. Take a deep breath now.

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  “Now breathe from here and sing a couple of verses.”

  A fuller and richer voice emerged from Nuala. Its sound startled her.

  “’Tis not meself!”

  Madame had permitted herself a small smile. They had agreed on a schedule of instruction, once a week for an hour. Madam had given her a typed list of instructions for breathing practice.

  “If you don’t practice, my dear, I will dismiss you.”

  “I’ll practice, ma’am. I’d be a … an eejit if I didn’t.”

  Herself sailed out of the Fine Arts Building several feet off the ground.

  She had obviously suffered from the same doubts about her singing that I did (still) about my writing.

  Now, as we stood in the gray light on the parking lot where the smallpox hospital had been, she was quiet and grim.

  “We had our famine, didn’t we?”

  “And that killed more people than our civil war in a much smaller country.”

  “There weren’t humans torturing other humans.”

  “No. But there were government policies that starved people to death.”

  “Aye, isn’t that the truth?

  I remained silent.

  “And Auschwitz?”

  “Infinitely worse than Camp Douglas.”

  “Didn’t your man say he would not cry for the second child killed in a war, when the death of the first one was already an infinite tragedy?”

>   My “man” this time was George Orwell writing about the bombing of Guernica.

  “He did.”

  “’Tis a focking horrible world, Dermot Michael.”

  “’Tis.”

  “Well, let’s go out to that cemetery.”

  We drove down Cottage Grove to 65th Street and turned onto the old and tree-dense Oakwood Cemetery in which many famous Chicagoans had been buried. We found a custodian (African-American) in the cemetery office. He agreed (after I gave him twenty dollars) to show us the “Confederate” mound.

  “Not many folks come out to see it anymore,” he said. “I guess them folk are not fashionable. Not politically correct. I figure the Good Lord loved them just like he loved everyone else.”

  We stood in the semidarkness under the trees, staring at the single pillar with a roughly clad prisoner (presumably Confederate) on top and a cannon in front. Twelve tombstones in front of the pillar commemorated Federal soldiers buried here, too.

  “The Union bought several acres of very swampy land here for the graves of the smallpox victims. Then, when the City Cemetery was removed to make way for Lincoln Park, they moved as many as they could find up here and buried them in trenches. There are 4,234 names on those bronze tablets—the low estimate of how many men died at Camp Douglas. But no one knows how many were actually buried here.”

  “Not much respect for the dead, was there?”

  “The government tried. The land here was already below the level of the rest of the cemetery. The city and the cemetery filled in some of the cemetery land in the battle against the swamps. So all the drainage flowed into this plot. It sank even farther below the rest of the cemetery as the years went on. In 1902 Congress voted $3,850 to add more landfill and $250 per year for perpetual care. Oakwoods added six feet of fill above the plot. You can imagine how low it was.”

  “Do they still get the $250 a year?” she asked the custodian.

  “Sure do, ma’am. Doesn’t go far these days what with inflation.”

  “It is kind of peaceful, isn’t it now?” she said.

  “Yes, ma’am. God has given them peace and joy like he does to all of us eventually. Most folks who come to see this monument don’t know they’re walking over trenches filled with dead bodies.”

  Nuala shivered.

  “I suspect it doesn’t bother them much, since they’re in the bosom of Abraham, aren’t they?”