Irish Lace

by Andrew M. Greeley

  Don’t argue with her, Dermot. She’s terribly wrong. But you’ll never talk her out of it. Not now. She’ll get over it.

  I hope.

  “Nuala,” I said very carefully, “I’ve always told you since you came to the United States that you have to be free to be your own self, live your own life, chase your own dreams, seek out your own stars. How can you think I wouldn’t approve your decision? We’ll miss you at Grand Beach. But your job and your life are too important for you not to chart your own path.”

  “I knew you’d understand, Dermot.” She hugged me. “You’re such a sweet and wonderful man!”

  No, YOU’RE NOT, said the Adversary. YOU’RE A JERK.

  “You will still take me out once a week?” she asked anxiously. “I really don’t want to break up with you.”

  “I’ll call you over the weekend and see what night next week you might be free.”

  “That’s such a long time, Dermot.”

  “Next week?”

  “I can’t complain. I made the rules, and there it is.”

  Later I realized that she meant I could phone her before the weekend, even if I couldn’t see her. I had overinterpreted the rule.

  Well, too bad for her. She had made a decision in favor of loneliness, and that was that. If she wanted, she could always call me. Right?

  “Maybe we could have dinner and see that film The Brothers McMullen?”

  “Wouldn’t that be grand? Don’t they say that it is a wonderful fillum!”

  Which is the way the Irish pronounce that word.

  We arrived at the old wooden building. She embraced me and kissed me good night.

  “I’ll walk up the steps meself. Won’t I be moving out of here in a week or so? I’ll sublease this place and get meself a nice quiet studio where I can be by myself and do me own work.”

  What about your friends who can’t afford a place to live?

  However, I said, “That sounds like a good idea.”

  Which I have been pushing for a couple of weeks.

  She climbed up the stairs with much less than her usual enthusiasm. Probably crying. She made a great sacrifice for her career, and it hurt. Doubtless she was brokenhearted, but proud of her courage.

  Bullshite, Nuala Anne, it’s all pure bullshite.

  You’ll have to find that out for yourself.

  At the top of the stairs, she turned and waved. I waved back and turned for the melancholy walk over to Clark Street and a cab.

  I was hoping the three hard men would show up. I would take great pleasure in stomping them all into the ground.

  “Well,” I told myself, “it’s not all bad. She’ll still go out with me. This will take some of the pressure off both of us. Maybe there’s even a story in this quasi-breakup.”

  YOU’RE A DAMN FOOL! The Adversary abandoned his phony brogue. HOW LONG DO YOU THINK IT WILL BE BEFORE YOU BECOME ONE MORE PRESSURE ON HER TIME? SHE’S JUST LETTING YOU DOWN GENTLY.

  “You might be right,” I admitted.

  FROM A SHY CHILD TO A DULL ACCOUNTANT, THAT’S A PRETTY QUICK TRIP.

  “Overnight. Less than that.”

  YOUR FEY GALWAY LASS HAS TURNED INTO A DULL YANK.

  “You could put it that way.”

  AND IT’S ALL YOUR FAULT. IF YOU HADN’T BEEN SUCH A WISE GUY WITH HER BOSS AT THE EAST BANK CLUB NONE OF THIS WOULD HAVE HAPPENED. YOU MADE HER A SUCCESSFUL, ACCOUNTANT, SO SHE DOESN’T WANT TO BE A MINSTREL GIRL ANYMORE.

  “Minstrel woman.”

  REGARDLESS. YOU SAW TO IT THAT THEY THREW A BUCKET OF COLD WATER IN HER FACE. THEY REMINDED HER THAT SHE HAD NOT COME HERE TO BE A SINGER BUT TO MAKE MONEY AND EARN HER WAY THROUGH LIFE. BRILLIANT!

  “She has the right to that opportunity. She has the right to a career of her own.”

  AS A SINGER.

  “If she wants to sing. Now leave me alone.”

  IF YOU’D HAD THE SENSE TO PROPOSE TO HER ON SUNDAY, NONE OF THIS WOULD HAVE HAPPENED.

  “You’re crazy.”

  No, I’M NOT. WONDERING ABOUT YOU AND TRYING TO FIGURE YOU OUT WOULD BE A STRAIN ON ANY WOMAN, ESPECIALLY A GREENHORN WHO DOESN’T KNOW WHICH WAY HER LIFE IS GOING. IF SHE KNEW SHE WOULD MARRY YOU IN A YEAR OR SO, SHE WOULD BE LESS WORRIED ABOUT HER FUTURE, LESS LIKELY TO FEEL ALL ALONE IN THE WORLD, AS SHE DOES NOW.

  “I don’t like that.”

  I caught a cab on Clark Street. The Adversary, usually a free rider, left me.

  Did Nuala really feel that way about me? Was my strict insistence on her freedom, which, after all she had merely taken seriously in her revised life plan, leaving me out in the cold, so to speak?

  ALL WOMEN WANT TO GET MARRIED! the Adversary shouted at me as he flitted by the open cab window.

  “No, they don’t!” I shouted after him.

  “Sir?” the cabbie asked.

  “Nothing, I was just mumbling.”

  Most women, like most men, did want to marry. Given Nuala’s background, surely she wanted a husband and kids. But so young? Was she that insecure, fragile, vulnerable? That much a shy child?

  Was there any reason why she could not be her own woman with a husband and a family? Sure, there’d be some constraints, but might not they actually be a help to her?

  That was a possibility of which I had never thought.

  And, as I told myself after draining a glass of whiskey (Scotch, not Irish), one I didn’t want to think about now or ever.

  7

  THE MORNING after my quasi-breakup with Nuala Anne, I woke up groggy and with a bad headache. It was the second Scotch that had done me in. I looked at the clock. Short hitter. Already nine-thirty. What had happened yesterday to make me so unhappy?

  Then I remembered: I had lost my Nuala Anne.

  Well, maybe not completely.

  The Adversary must have recognized my pitiable condition because he did not renew his previous night’s attack.

  I swung my legs out of the bed and tried to persuade the city of Chicago to stop twirling out beyond the windows of the John Hancock building

  What else was I supposed to remember? Oh, yes. I had turned off the phone before I went to bed. I wanted no heartbreaking conversations with her at two o’clock in the morning.

  I turned on the phone and sank into the easy chair next to it. It promptly jangled, torturing every nerve in my body.

  “Dermot Coyne,” I growled.

  “Where the hell have you been?”

  My sister Cynthia, aka Cindy. In her lawyer mode. With her children and her husband and the rest of the Coyne clan, she was one of the sweetest and gentlest women you have ever met. When she turns litigation lawyer, Cynthia Coyne Hurley, Esq. becomes hell on wheels. Lately she has turned to tax law because she can do that and telecommute. Today she was obviously being the litigator.

  “Sleeping.”

  “Did you see the morning TV?”

  The call was coming from her car, a massive and ungainly Toyota van—without which you cannot be a properly certified suburban wife.

  “No.”

  If only my mouth did not taste like I’d swallowed garlic.

  “They’ve taken Nuala.”

  “Who?”

  I was now very wide awake and, if the truth be told, spoiling for a fight.

  “My idiot ex-employer, Zack O’Hara, the duly elected State’s Attorney for the County of Cook. He has charged that she was involved in the robbery of the Armacost Gallery on Saturday night and conspired at a meeting on Thursday night to commit a felony.”

  “She can’t have been! She was with us at the wiener roast on the beach.”

  “I am aware of that, little brother. I saw O’Hara’s thugs dragging them into Area Six on the tube this morning, a bedraggled and confused crowd of Irish kids, all of them, according to O’Hara’s office, illegal aliens. To my horror, there was our Nuala among them.”

  Our Nuala was it?

  “She’s not illegal, she has a Morrison visa.”

  “I suspect that my former employer ha
s not the foggiest notion of who Morrison is or what a Morrison visa is.”

  “Probably not … . Did she call you?”

  “No. I’m sure that the cops read her rights rapidfire, so that neither she nor any of the others understood. I am going down to Area Six to represent her. Do you want to join me?”

  “I sure do … . Area Six is where?”

  “Diversey and Western. Under the bridge. I’m fighting traffic out here on the Ike. Whoever gets there first, wait for the other.”

  I ran an electric razor over my face, brewed a cup of instant coffee to take with me, washed my mouth with Scope, sprayed myself with cologne, gobbled a couple of Advil tablets, and dressed in jeans and T-shirt. I grabbed the coffee and a raisin roll and hurried towards the elevators.

  It is an absolute given that whenever I am in a rush to get to my car, the three elevators I must traverse slow down so as to make the trip as long as possible. Also, there will be repairs on the spiral ramp so there is a long wait before you get a chance to go down the one available ramp, always facing the possibility that the incompetents who are supposed to manage the traffic flow will foul up and halfway down you will meet a car coming in the opposite direction. Then you will have to take the long way around so that you get stuck in the jams in front of the Drake Hotel and, you should excuse the expression, the Playboy Tower caused by taxis pulling in and out of the Drake.

  That particular hot summer morning, the Fates decreed heavy traffic on Michigan, a jam getting off it, and a monumental tie-up on Diversey.

  I was so foolishly impatient with the delays that it was only as I inched across Damen that I remembered to call Reliable Security.

  “Yes Mr. Coyne. We tried to call you at your home early this morning and repeatedly thereafter. It’s all quite awful. We can’t believe that Mr. O’Hara is doing this thing.”

  “As your record may show,” I said, “Ms. McGrail was at Grand Beach all weekend.”

  “Yes sir, and she did not attend any meeting on Thursday. After you dropped her off at her house, she did not leave till she departed for work on Friday morning.”

  “So.”

  I had not thought of that angle.

  “Should we continue to guard her, Mr. Coyne?”

  “Yes, indeed. We expect to have her out by the end of the day … . By the way, do your people testify about these sorts of things?”

  “Certainly, sir. That’s in the contract we sent you.”

  “Fine!”

  I was beginning to feel better, but I should have taken more Advil. My head was still pounding, as if I’d been thrown on the mat by a wrestler twice my size. I arrived at the modern police station at 10:30, just as Cindy’s van pulled in. We found a place in the parking lot, and Cindy, leading the way like Grace O‘Malley storming a fortress of the O’Flahertys, charged into the police station.

  A melancholy captain was leaning against the wall.

  “Can’t help it, Cindy. It’s all your friend’s show. We didn’t pick them up. He’s holding them here until he can get an evening news shot transferring them to 26th and California.”

  That’s the County Courthouse and Jail.

  We barged into the lobby of the station to encounter a Zack O’Hara press briefing. He obviously was playing it for both the noon and the five o’clock news.

  Zack has been running for governor since the day he was elected state’s attorney. He cultivates the image of a good-looking square, a bright, plainspoken, straight-dealing prosecutor, tough and honest, with great respect for the law. The faster he talks, the more honest he seems. In fact, he is not very bright but is as devious as they come. He has also has one of the hardest heads that the South Side of Chicago, notorious for its hardheaded Irish, has ever produced.

  This morning he was obviously playing two cards: the solution to the Art Heist gang card and the xenophobia card. The latter was sweeping the country as candidate Bob Dole suggested making English the only “official language” of the United States and Pete Wilson, having been elected governor of California by running against Mexican-Americans, was now running for the presidency on the same platform.

  “I received a tip yesterday that there had been considerable discussion at a certain pub called the Tricolor, where known supporters of the Irish Republican Army gather, about yet another offense by the so-called Art Heist gang. There was a meeting at the aforementioned pub on Thursday night to plan the robbery. Our informant was present and gathered the names. Unfortunately he was unable to get in touch with us in time to stop the theft of the priceless Monet painting. However, acting on this information last night, we arrested every name on his list. All of them—each and every one of them—are illegal aliens in this country. We are continuing our investigations and expect to arraign them tomorrow. I am delighted that we have been able to break this case. I assure the public that I will not tolerate illegal aliens of any nationality in this jurisdiction.”

  Vigorous, concise, blunt. That’s our Zack O’Hara.

  Questions erupted from the reporters.

  “Have you recovered the paintings yet?”

  “Not yet, but I have every reason to expect that we will in the very near future.”

  “Are you convinced that these young illegals are responsible for all the art heists?”

  “We are in the process of establishing that at the present time. We expect that we will be able to do so.”

  “Will there be any more arrests?”

  “If more evidence emerges, we certainly will make more arrests.”

  Cindy whispered in my ear, “He doesn’t have a thing, Dermot. One tip-off from an informant. Unless the kids snitch on each other, he won’t even be able to get an indictment. He’s going to have to find out where the paintings are.”

  “Then why all the fuss?”

  “If he’s lucky, he may find some evidence. If not, he can ship them all back to Ireland and get publicity on that. People will sigh with relief that the country has been freed of dangerous illegals and forget that Zack didn’t recover any of the paintings.”

  “And if there are more thefts while Nuala’s friends are in jail or after they’re deported?”

  “Then he’ll have lost his gamble; the media will climb all over him.”

  “Sounds like a risky gamble.”

  “You don’t know how much Zack likes to see himself on TV. He’s really an Irish cement head.”

  “Republican.”

  “Zack,” a reporter asked him, “does it bother you that there’s a possibility that you’ll be deporting people from your own ethnic background?”

  “Planted question,” Cindy said, this time in a stage whisper.

  “Absolutely not. My grandparents were immigrants and they came legally. All immigrants should come legally. Those who come any other way have no right to be here, Irish or any other group.”

  “You’d think,” Cindy said aloud, “that he’s the State Department and the Immigration and Naturalization Service. He can’t deport anyone.”

  A couple of reporters turned to her and smiled.

  “Hi, Cindy,” one of them said. “Good to see you. How are the kids?”

  They exchanged information about their respective children, ignoring Zack’s continuing pontifications.

  “He’s finishing,” Cindy told me. “Let’s bait the jackass in his stable.”

  She strode up to the temporary podium, elbowed her way through the crowd of flunkies around O’Hara, and said, “Zack, this is my brother Dermot. He writes. I’m here to represent Nuala McGrail.”

  He nodded to me, as if I were a trivial flyspeck, and glanced at his notes.

  “She’s one of the perpetrators, part of the conspiracy,” he said proudly.

  “You mean alleged perpetrators, don’t you Zack?”

  “She’s an illegal alien like the rest of them.”

  “So I heard you say. Your statements are defamatory and in reckless disregard of the truth. Since those statements went out on WGN and henc
e across the nation, I intend to file a suit against you in Federal Court this afternoon.”

  “She’s an illegal alien,” he repeated. “And engaged in an illegal conspiracy.”

  I felt my fists clench. It wouldn’t help matters at all if I assaulted this man. But it sure would make me feel good.

  “Still the asshole, huh, Zack? She’s not illegal. She has a Morrison visa.”

  The state’s attorney frowned, as if he didn’t know what such a visa was.

  “Have one of your flunkies look it up, Zack,” Cindy continued.

  She had been a top prosecutor under his predecessors, Rich Daley and Cecil Partee. When Zack took over the office, he purged all the senior personnel of what was supposed to be a nonpolitical staff.

  “We lifted that visa,” he said triumphantly after peering at his list.

  “It may surprise you, asshole, but you have no authority to lift anyone’s visa. Only the State Department can do that. Moreover, it’s a permanent visa, and even they can’t lift it unless the person has been convicted of a crime. Give it back to her now, or when I go over to the Dirksen Building this afternoon, I’ll ask for a court order mandating you to return it.”

  “She has already committed a crime … and keep a civil tongue in your mouth, Cindy.”

  “You’re a fine one to talk about civility, Zack. Would it surprise you to know that Ms. McGrail was at Grand Beach, Michigan, over the weekend, in plain sight of twelve people? On the night in question, she attended a wiener roast on the beach.”

  “Who are these people?”

  “My family.”

  “I don’t care. She still attended the meeting where the conspiracy was hatched.”

  “No, she didn’t,” I said.

  Cindy looked startled.

  “You can’t prove that,” Zack said, growling at me.

  “Yes, I can.”

  “How?”

  “At my instigation, she was being protected by Reliable Security Agency. They will testify that she returned to her apartment on Thursday night after singing at the Tricolor—and by the way, Mr. State’s Attorney, it’s pronounced Trickcolor—and did not leave till the next morning.”

  Cindy stared at me with her bright brown eyes wide open in amazement.