Irish Above All

by Mary Pat Kelly

  “I thought the Marines had left Derry,” I said to Duggan. “Didn’t all of you end up in the Pacific?”

  Not a good choice of words. Many of their comrades had died on those islands with odd names. Iwo Jima, Okinawa, and Tarawa. But Colonel Duggan didn’t seem to take offence.

  “Hard duty,” he said. “Though there was a great moment when one of the pipers from the band we started in Derry piped us ashore on Iwo Jima.”

  Cyril’s head turned at that. “Jesus Christ,” he said. “That must have been something. I hope he played a rebel song.”

  “I believe it was ‘Wearing of the Green,’” Duggan said.

  “Must have confused the Japanese,” I said.

  But now Father Abbot stood in the space in front of the altar and called for silence, but the rustle of talk continued until, holding the whistle in one hand, he started the sign of the cross with the other.

  “In the name of the Father, and of the Son, and of the Holy Ghost.” The congregation instantly quieted and answered, “Amen.”

  “Now,” Father Abbot said. “This is not a traditional religious concert but it’s very suited for this sacred space. Our choir director, Brother Stephen, says that music is the coagulate of Irish culture. When we as a people were bleeding to death, our songs somehow staunched the flow and let us hold on to ourselves. You know that well and many of you are singers in Gaeilge as well as in English but the woman we have with us tonight—from Mayo, God help her—did our music a great service by taking the old songs and performing them in concert halls and on the radio. When my mother heard Delia Murphy sing ‘The Spinning Wheel’ on the radio, she wept. Her party piece was being sent out to the whole country. A kind of affirmation. We had no extra money in our house, but that radio always had new batteries and my father bought a phonograph so my mother could play Delia’s records and tonight we have the woman herself with us. She and her husband represented Ireland at the Vatican and I’d like to imagine her leading a singsong with a gaggle of cardinals, and who knows, the pope himself.”

  Now I was getting impatient. I still resented Peter Keeley being cossetted while the world fought for survival. Singsongs at the Vatican while the Nazis strangled Europe? But Father Abbot had finally finished his introduction, and Delia was walking up from the back of the chapel. Father Abbot moved to the side of the altar, and Delia stepped right through the gate at the center of the Communion rail and onto the altar step.

  “Now really,” I heard from behind me. A man, I guessed, because he continued. “Women are not permitted into the sanctuary.”

  “Would you ever shut your gob, Reverend dear.”

  Cyril of course. Just behind us. Delia took off her fur coat and dropped it over the railings. “Mo mhuintir, mo chroí.”

  “My people, my heart,” Cyril translated for me, leaning forward, though he had little enough Irish himself. “The way she starts every concert in Ireland.”

  “My friends, I am so happy to be home in Ireland, and particularly glad to be in Donegal to spend time with a friend from Rome, Professor Peter Keeley.”

  I looked over at Peter. He smiled but kept his head down.

  “Now as you’ve probably heard me say before, I learned many of the songs I sing from the traveling people who camped at the edge of our farm in a road called the Featherbed because they’d often leave their old mattresses behind. I wish you could have been there with me sitting around the fire, the stars blazing out of a black sky, but perhaps you can imagine the scene. All their songs told a story. I suppose I should start with the one Father Abbot’s mother knew. It was my biggest hit.” She nodded to Father Abbot. “Listen carefully to the words. It’s not like so many Irish songs where the lovers are separated or die or the woman is deserted. No. Eileen knows her own mind so here goes.”

  Mellow the moonlight to shine is beginning,

  Close by the window young Eileen is spinning,

  Bent o’er the fire her blind grandmother sitting,

  Is crooning and moaning and drowsily knitting.

  Delia had a straightforward voice. Strong and dramatic. She created the scene, becoming Eileen spinning, then the crooning, moaning old grandmother and even the sound of the “autumn winds dying.”

  The audience was delighted. The scene she described could take place in their own kitchens. Then Delia became the wheel itself. “Merrily, merrily, noiselessly whirring,” they were with her, hearing the wheel spinning. Their own feet stirring. But I knew this song too. Granny Honora’s friend Mrs. McKenna sang it. I had liked the story because when Eileen’s true love appeared at the window and invited her to go roving in the moonlight she’d stood up, put one foot on the stool, and had been ready to climb out.

  As Delia sang I remembered that Eileen had hesitated, looking at her grandmother, and Delia managed to make us feel both the young girl’s ambivalence and her eagerness to leap into the arms of her lover. Back in Bridgeport I had been too young to understand why the song spoke to Granny and her friends. They had run, not from a cozy kitchen, but an Ireland where a million people—their own friends and relatives—had starved to death. But I had heard them speak too of “the before times” with spinning wheels and sweet voices singing. Though my aunt Máire had said to Granny that the song was really the gentry writing lies about old Ireland, the place they had destroyed. But Granny had said, “What harm and at least the lovers had some joy. But it was hard on the grandmother though maybe the girl only enjoyed a night of courting and didn’t desert her altogether.”

  And of course I’d been too young to think about what it meant that Granny and Aunt Máire had left their parents behind, as had all the women in that room.

  Delia’s audience sang along with her. The spinning wheel went slower and slower until it stopped entirely as the lovers ran away to the grove. I’d never heard a congregation hoot in a church, but this one did. Stomped its feet too.

  “Outrageous,” the voice behind me said.

  “Hold on there, Father,” Cyril said to him. “You’re not the parish priest tonight. You’re only a guest. Maybe she’ll sing ‘Ave Maria.’”

  No hymns in the concert. Delia Murphy was here to lift the spirits of the people. True, they had avoided the worst of the war—no bombs had fallen on Donegal—but many sons and husbands had enlisted in the British Army for the same reason Irishmen had always taken the king’s shilling: for the shilling. Although I’m sure standing up against the evils of the Nazis added to their motivation. Some of them had surely been killed or wounded.

  Delia started singing, “I’ve been a moonshiner for many a year.”

  Are we the only race that can make “It killed me old father and now it tries me” funny? “Bless all moonshiners, And bless all moonshine,” the congregation bellowed. No sound from behind me. The priest had probably fainted.

  As she continued her program, Delia changed moods. Sometimes she was plaintive. “If I were a blackbird,” she sang, her voice shivering, but even then this blackbird was not going to lose her true love no matter what. That did seem to be Delia’s theme. In her songs women asserted themselves, complaining sometimes as in “I Wish That I Never Was Wed,” a song I didn’t know but the audience did. Lots of female voices were raised in that chorus.

  And they were with Delia in every note of the “Three Lovely Lassies of Bannion,” and each woman asserting that she “was the best of them all.” Happy to be getting her shoes mended, her petticoat dyed green, to dress like a queen for a marriage that would surely be happy.

  Even when she sang her most political song, “Down By the Glenside,” it was a woman who told the story. We women are alive. We survived.

  “We wouldn’t die,” Granny Honora said, “and that annoyed them.”

  Brother Stephen was right. Music was the coagulant of Irish culture. We hadn’t bled out yet.

  “I have one final number I’d like to do for you,” Delia said. “The air has had quite a high-class life. Thomas Moore had a go at putting words to it, a
s did Ludwig van Beethoven himself but I prefer the original lyrics to ‘Nora Críonna.’”

  “Right you are,” someone shouted out.

  “But it’s a duet,” Delia said. “I need a man. Surely there’s one among you can help me.”

  And suddenly just like that the audience was taken with shyness. Feet shuffled. No one spoke. I was surprised but Delia wasn’t.

  “Not to worry,” she said. “That was a bit of a setup really. I came here tonight to see an old friend who shared some dark days in Rome with me. We sang this song together on Christmas Day 1944, only last year, but it seems another lifetime. We’d gathered in a residence for priests within the Vatican. Heard Mass in a little chapel and now were in one of the priest’s rooms talking about songs and this fellow asked me did I know ‘Nora Críonna.’ He said he knew a Nora who was wise and full of life like the woman in the song, and me being the forward body that I am, I said to him, it sounds like you were in love with her. Now he was a shy fellow and I expected him to duck his head and change the subject. But he said right back to me, ‘I was, and I am.’ And I thought, ‘Something interesting here.’ I had put him down as a man who, as the Mayo fellows would say, ‘didn’t bother with the women.’ Though I knew this man had plenty of nerve because…”

  Delia knew she was losing the audience. Get to the song, they were thinking.

  “Well, sorry for losing the run of myself, but he taught me not only the song but what each of the allusions meant. So that’s why I’m calling him up here tonight. Stand up and join me, Professor Peter Keeley,” she said.

  And he did. Left the pew and took a place next to Delia. So, I thought, Peter Keeley could sing. Never knew that before. And a song for Nora. He’d told Delia I was the woman he’d loved and yet he had never tried to get in touch with me. Even if he thought I had married, my husband could have died, or left me. Wait, I thought. I hadn’t a husband.

  Peter surely didn’t look like an entertainer. Was this song to be the one failure in a brilliant evening? Delia Murphy had stared at me as she talked about Nora. Now, Nonie, I said to myself, why not be glad you did matter to Peter? That your relationship wasn’t a total fantasy and be happy he’d had friends and a life instead of castigating him for being locked away in the Vatican?

  Delia said, “Do you want to introduce the song, Peter?” He leaned forward. I knew that expression on his face from our sessions in the library of the Irish College. A teacher ready to deliver a lesson. Nothing made him happier.

  “Now the heroine of this song is Nora Críonna, which means ‘Nora the Wise,’ though there are a lot of gradations of meaning in the word,” Peter said. “For example, it also means clever, inventive, canny.”

  Delia interrupted him. “We don’t have time for linguistics. Just give them the history.”

  “Because of the references,” he said, “we can date the song to Napoleon’s time, though the music of the jig is even older. Now the hedge schoolmasters at that time knew Latin and Greek and kept their students informed on current events, even though teaching Catholics was against the penal laws. All the references in this song are historically correct.”

  “That’s fine, Professor. We believe you,” Delia said.

  “The very first line refers to the empress de Janina, and there was such a person. The wife of Ali Pasha. Shilna was a Hindu goddess, and Tilburnia a character in one of Sheridan’s plays.”

  Delia put her hand on Peter’s sleeve. “But the most important person in the song is Nora Críonna so let’s introduce her.” Peter smiled and started singing.

  Who are you who walks this way

  Like the Empress de Janina

  Or is it true what people say

  That you’re the famous Shilna Greena,

  Or are you the great Ramsey,

  Our beloved queen the bold Tilburnia,

  Or are you Dido or Dr. McGee?

  How Peter enjoyed listing each of those names, and how well Delia acted Nora’s amused dissent.

  “Oh no,” Delia sang.

  I’m the girl that makes them stir from Cork to Skibbereenia,

  All day long we drink strong tea and whiskey with Nora Críonna.

  And then Delia threw out Nora’s own list of classical figures.

  Who are you that asks my name?

  Othello, Wat Tyler, or Julius Caesar?

  Or are you Venus of bright fame?

  Or that old fogey Nebuchadnezzar?

  She tossed a few more names at Peter before he answered.

  There, my lass, your eye is out for I’m Napoleon Bonaparte.

  That started the whole place laughing, and Delia rode the laugh before she sang the chorus one more time. She was the girl who made them stir. In the next verse Peter invited Nora to dinner and promised a guest list that included people who were celebrities in their time. Irish chieftains like McGillycuddy of the Reeks and O’Donoghue of the Glen as well as enemies such as the Duke of Gloucester and Oliver Cromwell. Delia sashayed across the space in front of the communion rail and then invited the audience to respond with her.

  “I’m the girl that makes them stir,” she sang. She finished the chorus and walked over to me and improvised a second chorus.

  You’re the girl that makes them stir from Maine to Chicagoeena,

  All the day we’ll drink strong tea and whiskey too, said Nora Críonna.

  “Now stand up, Nora and come up here with us. Here’s the woman,” she said to the audience, “inspired us to sing this song. The professor’s lost love. United at last.”

  What could I do? I stood up and moved next to Peter.

  The audience went wild. Cyril put his finger and thumb between his lips and whistled. I took Peter’s hand and I wasn’t about to let go.

  “Thank you, Delia,” the abbot said. “You’ve brought joy to all of us. None more than the woman sitting right there in the front row.”

  He pointed at an old lady holding her shawl around her. “Give Delia a wave, Mother,” he said.

  Dear God, I thought. I am in Tír na nÓg with a touch of “Going My Way.” Delia’s singing had created an out-of-time moment. Peter had taught me that the ancient Celts believed you could enter the other world through a lake, a river, a spring, or a sudden insight. Add singsong to the list. And if Peter and I could just stay in this moment I would be Nora Críonna. We’d live in that cottage next to the Grianán of Aileach and watch the sun rise each morning and set each evening. Peter hadn’t forgotten me.

  I squeezed his hand. He turned and smiled at me. So what if he’d been just a little bit of a coward. Why not stay out of the war? But then the two Marines, Colonel Duggan and Major Berndt, and the Army officer stood up and came walking toward us. And there it was. The war. Unassailable, unavoidable.

  Peter and Delia had performed their party piece, protected in the Vatican while men such as these risked everything … Easy, Nora. Weren’t you the one left France after the Great War a convinced pacifist? To shoot bullets into healthy bodies was obscene. Don’t blame Peter for what Hitler and the Nazis did. I had accepted Ireland’s neutrality. Even argued the case to Eleanor Roosevelt. Dev couldn’t risk invasion by Germany or Britain either. But Peter had been in Rome spending his days bent over old manuscripts with an occasional break for a singsong while Mussolini and Hitler took over Italy.

  Who was I to judge, but I knew I couldn’t join him in his hermitage. And isn’t it just as well he hasn’t asked you, a voice inside said to me. All this back and forth in my mind happened in the time it took for Colonel Duggan to begin speaking.

  “I’m Jim Duggan, US Marine Corps, and this is my aide, Major Martin Berndt, and our Army guest, Captain Jones. We have all enjoyed this performance tremendously. Evenings like this are what all Marines who have had the good fortune to serve in Derry will always remember. Many of them are bringing more than memories home. There are over fifty girls from Derry and Donegal who married Marines and are waiting right now to board the ship that will take them to the United
States. It’s called appropriately enough the Marine Haven and will sail within the next week if the North Atlantic cooperates. Marty here is organizing the logistics. Probably the most pleasant task anyone has had during this war.”

  Leave it to the Marines, I thought. When I was in London, I’d heard there were fifty thousand war brides stranded in England and the wives of the Corps were getting door-to-door service.

  “But now I’d like to introduce Captain Jones. He’s here tonight on a secret mission so I’m going to ask you all to keep what happens in the next few minutes under your hats. Captain Jones.”

  “Good evening,” the Army officer said. A deep voice coming from this rangy man. “I’m very glad to be back in Ireland again. I was one of the first GIs here, stationed up the coast near Castle Rock when an Army officer called Darby got the idea that the US should have a commando unit. He asked for volunteers from those of us who had come over with the first US expeditionary unit. He wanted three hundred volunteers but he got three thousand. He chose enough to create the US Rangers, the only US Army unit ever formed on foreign soil. He gathered us all in a town called Carrickfergus. He said he’d chosen the place because that’s where the first US Navy battle took place when John Paul Jones’s ship, the Ranger, captured the Drake.”

  “There were Marines in that battle,” Berndt interposed. Jones only shook his head.

  “We Rangers fought our way through North Africa, over to Sicily, and then up the boot of Italy, except the Nazis stopped us at Casino. They captured some of our fellows and made them walk in front of the German tanks. We would have had to shoot our brothers. Anyway the whole lot of us ended up as prisoners of war. The Nazis put us on a train going to Germany. This was early 1944. The Nazis knew they were losing but they were going to revenge themselves on us. The guards putting us on the train told us not to expect a nice POW camp. This was a death train. One of our guys was a football player from Minnesota. Bing, we called him, because he could croon a song as easily as lift three hundred pounds. Bing decided we had to escape. He used the buckle on his belt to start digging at the floor of the boxcar. We all helped. In the end we were scratching up pieces of wood with our fingernails. Then we had some luck. The train stopped for a few hours on a mountain pass in the north of Italy. We were able to pound out a hole in the floor of the boxcar. Five of us got out. The others were too tired and too sick to follow. We ran like hell down this mountain pass, sure the Nazis would be after us. We hid in a cave and the next day some villagers found us. Risky for them to help us but they did. Plenty of stories like mine. Italian peasants aiding POWs and downed pilots. We couldn’t stay in that area. Too many Nazis. We had to get to Rome. The priest in the village gave us a note to give to the pope. Imagine.”