Angel Fire

by Andrew M. Greeley

  “The Shelbourne will be fine.”

  The car finally started and she eased it carefully out of its place and toward the gate.

  “It was generous of you to forgive those police officers.”

  “We all make mistakes, don’t we now?”

  “You’re mocking me, Professor Desmond!” She shoved the gears sharply into second, almost stripping them.

  “I am not, Professor Flanagan,” he blazed back as angry as she

  was.

  “You most certainly are!” She gunned the car into the highway, skidding across a lane in the process.

  “Glory be to God, woman, you’ll be the death of us all!”

  “There, goddamn you, you’ve done it again.”

  Ah, passion indeed.

  “I guess I have,” he said sheepishly, “and you must forgive me. It was neither intentional nor disrespectful. On the contrary, it was unconscious admiration for the loveliness of the Dublin Irish ac-

  cent, which I agree with the experts is the most beautiful sound of English in all the world.”

  Not bad, not bad at all, at all.

  “Oh.” She seemed a little mollified. But not much.

  No passive-aggressive personality here. Everything up front. In technicolor and four-channel Dolby sound.

  Just like Gaby. Like Gaby and not like her.

  Of course, stupid, she’s not an angel. You can sleep with her and not burn up in a volcano.

  “The trouble is, I’m afraid I’m a natural and unconscious mimic. My daughters too, even worse than I am, I fear. They pick up different accents and patterns in a half hour. I become fascinated by the variety of sounds and, without realizing what I’m doing, talk the way the others are talking. It’s never got me in all that much trouble before. I promise I’ll stop.”

  “No,” she sounded close to tears, “please don’t do that. You are rather good at it actually. I’d almost think you were from Fingal, the Danish area north of here where I was born ... but if you don’t mind a suggestion, Professor Desmond?”

  “Certainly not, Professor Flanagan.”

  “Before the lecture tomorrow you might say exactly what you said to me. People won’t think you’re making fun of us.”

  “Will they think I’m guilty of blarney?”

  She actually laughed. “Arguably. But we Irish never mind that.... You have daughters, do you now?”

  “Two, fourteen and fifteen. Very American names.”

  “Which are?”

  “Fionna and Deirdre, Fee and Dee to their intimates.”

  She laughed again. “And my two, about the same ages, actually, are Elizabeth and Anne. With an e.”

  “Naturally.”

  That attempt to break the ice of awkwardness in which they had been mired died aborning. Nora Flanagan peered anxiously through her windshield, the wipers of which should have been replaced long ago and were barely clearing away the sheets of rain.

  “Were your parents born here, Professor Desmond?”

  “Great-grandparents, actually.”

  “Oh? Where, if I may ask?”

  “The County Kerry, a place named Dingle, I think.”

  “Oh, that’s the most beautiful part of the whole country. We used to go there on holiday when I was young. Dennis and I went there on our honeymoon.”

  “I’ll have to visit it sometime. What does your husband do, Professor Flanagan?”

  “He was a soldier, Professor Desmond, a commandant— major, that is. He was in the Irish peace-keeping force in Lebanon. He was killed last year.”

  “I’m very sorry, Professor Flanagan, very sorry indeed.”

  “Thank you, Professor Desmond.”

  So they had arranged a widow woman for him, had they now? Wasn’t that nice? A woman still grieving, though if I interpret the tone right, the marriage left a lot to be desired.

  If I had a wife like her, I sure as hell would get out of the army.

  Of course, you don’t anticipate you’ll be sent to Lebanon.

  “Do you know the Kerryman jokes, Professor Desmond?”

  “I can’t say that I do.”

  They were in the city now. In the rain, it looked like one massive, gloomy slum.

  “How do you recognize the Kerryman on the oil rig?”

  “I don’t know, Professor Flanagan, how do you recognize the Kerryman on the oil rig?”

  “He’s the one shooting the bird gun at the helicopter.”

  It was not unfunny, but he didn’t want to laugh. If they laughed together, Gaby would have carried the day.

  “Indeed.”

  She tried again, unable to quit when she was behind. “What’s the definition of a Kerry farmer?”

  “You tell me.”

  “A man outstanding in his field.”

  Perversely Sean stifled his laughter.

  “We have parallel jokes in Chicago,” he said stuffily, “about Poles mostly. These jokes ‘contage’ around the world. I often wonder whether they start in Chicago. In England, I regret to say, they are Irish jokes; in France, Belgian jokes; in Germany, Friesland jokes; in Poland, Russian jokes.”

  How about that for academic pomposity!

  “You find them offensive?”

  “Not always.”

  Another awkward pause. Well, I showed you guys, didn’t I?

  “Only a few more minutes, Professor Desmond.” Her voice was unsteady. “Would you like to drive down O’Connell Street? By the GPO, the General Post Office? It’s where the rising began on Easter Monday 1916?”

  “But it was called Sackville Street then, wasn’t it, when Yeats’s ‘Terrible Beauty’ was born.”

  “That’s right.”

  That put you in your place, didn’t it? Kerryman jokes, indeed!

  Ah, but I may be going too far altogether. I don’t like being sandbagged by Gaby and her bunch, but I do want this woman, more than I have ever wanted anyone in all my life.

  Now isn’t that an interesting discovery!

  “You’re a physicist, are you now?” His turn to be ice breaker.

  “Theoretical physics, as a matter of fact. I suspect that’s why I was asked to chair your presentation tomorrow.”

  “I met Hawkings at Cambridge.”

  “I was with him there, a few years behind, naturally. But I knew him and his wife. Lovely people, poor dears.”

  “You studied at Cambridge?”

  “After I was married. While I was expecting the girls. Dennis was in Cyprus.”

  Impressive.

  “I met a woman physicist there last week. Arden Devoy.”

  “She was after me. Poor woman, she’s had a hard time of it lately.”

  “So I gathered from Hastings.”

  “He was one of my teachers. Nice man, a bit of an eye for the nicely turned ankle now, hasn’t he? But harmless really.”

  So the woman was a good physicist. So what?

  We are both frightened—attracted, yet frightened. The electricity began leaping back and forth as soon as we met.

  They drove into O’Connell Street and found themselves caught in a traffic jam.

  “Sorry, Professor Desmond.”

  “A few more minutes won’t matter.”

  She pointed out the flower bed that marked the spot from which Lord Nelson’s statue had been blown.

  He sang the first few lines of the Clancy Brothers’ song “Up Went Nelson!” then lost his nerve.

  “You have a nice voice, Professor Desmond.”

  “Whiskey tenor.”

  “Not really ... we don’t actually think of the Clancy Brothers

  as Irish.”

  “Don’t you now?” he snapped at her. “Well, will the Chieftains

  do? Or Mary O’Hara?”

  “And herself, poor woman, a widow for all those years.” She sighed, like she was about to be struck by an attack of asthma. “But aren’t you terribly interested in Ireland for a Yank? You’ve been here before, have you now?”

  “I have
not,” he said firmly.

  That sounded pretty Irish, didn’t it?

  “So you receive a typical warm Irish reception when you get off the plane, almost as bad as your farewell from England.”

  “Everyone says the Irish”—he sighed back at her—“are the most hospitable people in the world, don’t they now?”

  She glanced at him quickly, saw that he was grinning at her, and laughed tentatively.

  He laughed back, with equal caution. “Forget it, Nora Anne Flanagan.”

  “I will not.” Her turn to grin. “What’s the point in being Irish if you can’t enjoy feeling guilty? ... Actually”—(she pronounced it “akshully”) deep, deep breath—“we may be colleagues next term.”

  “Really?” What devilment—or angelment—was going on now?

  “I’ve been invited to teach at the University of Cook County during the winter and spring term. Sight unseen. I suspect they need someone to meet undergraduate classes.”

  “I’m not surprised. The typical professor at the university under normal circumstances isn’t at the university.”

  It was too much altogether. A crude, devious plot. Gaby and her bunch were boxing him in. Well, they wouldn’t get away with it.

  “If I accept—and the decision isn’t final—it has been suggested that I place my daughters in a Jesuit school there. I didn’t know the Jesuits taught girls, but...” They crossed a river, doubtless the Liffey, the dark waters from which Dublin received its name, on a crowded bridge.

  “In Chicago they do. St. Ignatius. My daughters go there. Only

  very bright girls are admitted. I’m sure your children will have no trouble.”

  Gabriella Light, you have no shame at all, at all.

  I’ll have no part of it.

  “Just one more turn and we’ll be on the Green and then down the street to the Shelbourne. St. Stephen’s Green. You may remember the passage in Joyce.”

  “ ‘Crossing Stephen’s, that is, my green.’”

  “Yes.”

  Another direct hit.

  Then he thought of the woman curled up next to him in his bed on a cold winter morning in January, the four kids off to school, and decided that the nonsense must stop.

  How to stop it?

  Well, lust finds a way. Even maybe love.

  “They hired you sight unseen, did they now?”

  “They did. Afterward, one of them flew over from London to vet me, I suppose.”

  She mentioned the name of a habitue of the round table.

  “And what were you after thinking of your man, Professor Nora Anne Flanagan?”

  They had stopped in front of a wedding cake building that was surely the Shelbourne.

  She looked up at him, defenseless, frightened, devastating.

  “I was thinking”—she hesitated—“that he was a bit of a bore and a bit of a lecher.”

  “A terrible thing to say, terrible altogether”—he shifted into half fun and full earnest—“and inaccurate altogether. You should be ashamed of yourself for such a mistaken judgment.”

  “In what way am I mistaken?” she demanded hotly.

  “In three little words: ‘a,’ ‘bit,’ and ‘of “

  A minisecond while she figured it out, and drey laughed together again, precisely what Gaby had planned that they do.

  “You know about Eric the Red?” Sean considered her face. It was really very pretty—much like Gaby’s, not as perfect perhaps, but warm and lively and appealing. He resisted a powerful impulse to reach out and touch it with gentle admiration.

  “The Viking?”

  “Icelander.” His eyes dropped to her bust, distinctive and de-

  licious even in the darkened car, and he felt a spasm of desire. “And himself at least half Irish on his mother’s side. Well, in one of his sagas, he goes beyond Iceland and beyond Greenland and even beyond Vineland and comes to a place where there’s a big monastery of Irish monks having a procession like they were wont to do.” His voice took on the tone and the accent of the stage-Irish storyteller that The New York Times had hinted he was some of the time. “He called it Great Ireland. I figure that’s the U.S.A. and rightly enough because there are ten million of us—twenty if you count the Prots—and only five million of you. You’re the Mere Irish and we’re the Great Irish.”

  Risky, but let’s see how she takes it.

  Pretty good thighs too, come to think of it, even if I have to imagine them in this car.

  She laughed, easily and confidently, just as Gaby would.

  “Sure,” she said, her face lighting in an impish smile that was irresistible, “haven’t I always said that you Yanks, ‘scuse me, you Great Irish will be Irish long after we are indistinguishable from the frigging Belgians!”

  They laughed together, establishing a tentative and still uneasy companionship.

  I want you, woman, I really do. Which is what that damn seraph has had in mind all along.

  This was the critical moment. The force and energies that had conspired to create repulsion between them were changing their direction. They were a man and a woman sitting in a decrepit old Renault, now quite conscious of the drives that were drawing them toward one another. What, both of them were wondering, should I do next?

  “I want to say two things, Nora Anne Flanagan.” He put his arm around the front seat, not around her but with a hint that such an act was not totally out of the question. “Before I enter that historic hotel and my suite from which I can see the Wicklow Hills if it ever stops raining ...”

  “Yes?” Her eyes shifted anxiously.

  “The first is that my name is Sean—long ago, Johnny; more recently to my students from whom I get no respect, Seano. Understand?”

  “Yes, Professor ... Seano.”

  “And the second is that I feel I’ve betrayed the honor of the

  County Kerry tonight and acted myself like a Kerryman joke I’ve turned down an invitation to dinner from an intelligent, beautiful, and fascinating woman. I think, as an honored guest of Trinity College and University College, I deserve a chance to reconsider my folly.”

  “Tonight, is it?” There was a warmth beneath her shyness and a mystery inside of her kindness. “Sure, I think we might be able to arrange that. It might not be any trouble at all, at all.”

  Sean Seamus Desmond, Distinguished Professor of Biology and Nobel laureate, was hopelessly in love. Not only did he desire with furiously demanding lust to bed his woman, he adored her. Already.

  She certainly seemed interested in him too.

  She was no longer either drab or dowdy. Her hair was neatly combed, her makeup was skillfully applied, her shoulders were erect and confident, her stylish beige cotton-knit dress left no doubt about the allurements of her figure.

  Definitely a clone of Gaby in that respect.

  Her wit was delicate and subtle, her laughter warm and inviting, her conversation light and charming. And her soft brown eyes were filled with admiration for him, an expression he had seen only at the end in Gaby’s eyes.

  The restaurant was cozy, the food was superb, and the wine smooth and reassuring. Nora Flanagan blossomed under the influence of his smile and respect.

  They engaged in the dance, ancient and new, ritualized and never the same, by which a man and a woman seek to know one another as a prelude to a decision about love. They probed and

  feinted, disclosed and hid, unveiled and obscured, laughed and almost cried.

  The dance was in fast tempo; they both knew they had so little time to finish their mixture of waltz and reel, polka and fox-trot, before the music stopped and he was on a plane to Chicago.

  Mature, intelligent, self-possessed academics that they were, with adolescence and its powerful hormonal demands far behind them, they fell in love with each other.

  Hopelessly and permanently, he thought.

  He knew that he not only lusted after the woman, but loved her, mysterious, fragile, efficient, shy, intelligent, comic woman/ child that she was.


  And the glow of worship in her eyes left no doubt that the combination of lust and love had taken possession of her too.

  Her most effective step in their pas de deux was candor. When she said “candidly,” she meant it. She told more about herself than you would expect her to tell, more than you would want her to tell, more even perhaps than she should tell—and just enough to devastate you with her honesty.

  “Sure, I’m a terrible compulsive eejit about neatness.” She brushed some bread crumbs into her hand and placed them in a saucer. “If you take me meaning. Aren’t the wee lasses, poor things, always complaining about my obsession with neating the house up?”

  “Terrible,” he agreed, “altogether.”

  “And my office a bloody mess!”

  “Hope for redemption.”

  She was most attractive when her slow smile—upturned lips, crinkly nose, little flecks of gold in her brown eyes—turned into a light, self-deprecating laugh in which the rain and the sun of Irish picture books seemed to merge into a rainbow sky.

  Most unlike the inestimable Gabriella, as Blackie would have called her if he knew about that troublesome seraph’s existence.

  Yet not too different from Gabriella either. And human, thank God.

  Well, thank Gaby too. A little.

  “And, faith, what a sensualist I’ve become.” She considered the color of the red wine. “Food and drink will be the end of me altogether.”

  “And sex?”

  “Ah, sure, that’s not been a problem in Ireland for the last hundred and twenty-five years!”

  “So I’m told, but to be honest I don’t altogether believe it.”

  “If I had my way”—she sipped the wine slowly, lovingly—“I’d probably have a couple of jars when I came home every afternoon and be fluthered at the end of the day.”

  “Why don’t you?”

  “Well”—she frowned in mock seriousness—“for a number of

  reasons.”

  “And they are?”

  “Would I be wanting to scandalize the girls—pardon, I must keep up my part of the illusion—the wee lasses?”

  “You would not.”

  “Would I be able to afford it?” She drained the glass and held it out to him to refill. “And meself with such expensive tastes?”

  “You would not.”