Irish Whiskey

by Andrew M. Greeley

  “Oh, Dermot”—she had burst into tears—“I’m a terrible woman altogether, difficult and contentious and argumentative …”

  “I know that,” I had said. “I knew it from that first night in O’Neill’s.”

  She laughed through her tears.

  “You’ll need the patience of a saint to put up with me for the rest of your life … Besides, I don’t think I’ll be very good in bed. I know you want to make love to me something terrible. That’s what a man should feel. And I’ll be a terrible disappointment.”

  In her Dublin manifestation, she would have said “fuck.” America and Chicago were ruining her vocabulary.

  “And you don’t want to fuck with me, woman?”

  “Dermot Michael Coyne.” She slapped my arm in a more vigorous reprimand. “Such terrible language!”

  She giggled through her tears and then sobbed again.

  “Don’t you?” I demanded.

  “Sure I do.” She sniffled and began to dab at her eyes. “Don’t I want to more than anything else in the world? But I don’t know whether I’ll be any good at it, do I now?”

  So that was it. I could have said that adjusting to marital intimacy requires time and patience and sensitivity. Or I might have said that there was so much passion in her lovely body when she clung to me that I knew she’d explode with desire when we came together. Or I could have tried to reassure her with soothing words.

  Instead, wise man in the ways of womankind that I had become, I took her in my arms and held her fervently. The tears had stopped, she relaxed, and looked up at me sheepishly.

  “Am I not a terrible friggin’ amadon, Dermot Michael?”

  “Ah, woman, you are,” I had said as I began to kiss her.

  And so that tempest had passed—sweetly as far as I was concerned and with temporary reassurance as far as she was concerned. It would recur several times more in different forms.

  I should make it clear that we were sufficiently old-fashioned to wait till our wedding night for our lovemaking. Well, I was anyway. Since we never discussed other possibilities, I didn’t know what Nuala’s feelings were on the matter. But I respected her vulnerability—at the core of her enormous energy and strength—too much even to suggest otherwise to her.

  To be honest I was not without some unease as we approached our wedding day and night. I was not afraid of lovemaking, not even afraid that I lacked the tenderness and sensitivity I needed to be a good bridegroom. But I was afraid of hurting Nuala.

  WELL, ME BUCKO, the Adversary in my head observed, AREN’T YOU THE SELF-CONFIDENT COCKS-MAN?

  “I don’t like your fake brogue,” I told him. “And I don’t like your language.”

  He laughed loudly at that.

  AND WHAT IF YOU COME UP IMPOTENT ON YOUR WEDDING NIGHT? OR COME OFF IN A MINUTE OR TWO?

  “Not a chance. Now go away.”

  He went.

  Obviously the Adversary is part of me, so that thought must have been banging around, you should excuse the expression, in one of the subbasements of my soul.

  I was also afraid about the loss of my personal privacy. I had been an Irish bachelor, living in his own pad, for six years, counting those last two at Marquette after I flunked out of Notre Dame. I had become selfish and self-centered. How would I cope with a loud, mercurial, enthusiastic person of the opposite gender who usually bounded instead of walked, and who would surely want to remake me and my life, as Irish women always want to do?

  But I desired her so much that I figured I could put up with those minor inconveniences.

  At the graveside that day, she said, “I suppose you were hoping I’d never get one of these experiences again, weren’t you, Dermot Michael? And especially not before our wedding?”

  “You are who you are, Nuala. The results of your experiences have always been interesting.”

  The fact of the matter is that my true love is fey, psychically sensitive, whatever you want to call it. She knows things that others don’t know, which is why she is such a good detective and I am reduced to being her spear-carrier when we get involved in a mystery. Moreover, she picks up psychic vibrations of which almost everyone else is unaware, like the horrors of the Civil War prison camp at 31st and Cottage Grove in Chicago or of Bealneblah (The Vale of the Blossoms) where Michael Collins was killed.

  Nuala and I keep these traits—fascinating but a little scary—to ourselves, though my brother George the Priest has some inkling of them.

  “Shall we dig up the grave?” I asked her.

  “Certainly not!” she exclaimed. “Well, not yet, anyhow.”

  So. We were on the edge of another one.

  In my experience, young women (especially when they are not quite yet twenty-one) are overwhelmed by the excitement of wedding preparations, an effect reinforced by the high anxiety of their mothers. I assumed that Nuala would be no different from the rest of them.

  Wrong again.

  Her mother and father were coming over from Ireland a week before the wedding (their first trip to America) and it was most unlikely that her beautiful and serene mother ever suffered from high anxiety anyway. Nuala was content to let my mother (for whom yet another family wedding in which she was responsible for the bride was an unexpected opportunity) and my sister Cindy assume full responsibility.

  “That one is remarkable,” Mom had said to me. “We walk into the bridal salon, she looks at three dresses, points to the second one and says that’s it.”

  “And it was,” Cindy had agreed. “I never heard of such a brief decision-making process about a bridal gown.”

  “Was it a bad choice?”

  “Wonderfully tasteful,” Mom had admitted. “Perfect for her. You’ll love it.”

  “But she deprived us,” Cindy had said with a touch of sadness, “of a lot of high-quality worry time!”

  “She’s a strong woman, Dermot,” Mom had added, a touch of worry in her voice.

  “Tell me about it.”

  “You’d never know”—my father had shaken his head in amazement—“that the young woman will enter solemn wedlock in a couple of weeks. Totally cool.”

  “No way,” I had said.

  I had not, however, tried to explain.

  Nuala had kept up her usual routine. By day she went to Mass every morning, ran a couple of miles, worked at Arthur Andersen (which had graciously given her an extended leave for a honeymoon because they wanted her back) sang two nights a week at the Abbey Pub, was faithful to her two voice lessons a week with Madame in the Fine Arts Building on South Michigan Avenue, and even cut her first disc of Irish songs, a copy of which we planned to give to everyone who came to the wedding.

  “It’s commercial,” the agent I had found for her told us. “It will be really big.”

  “Fine,” said Nuala, monumentally unimpressed.

  After five minutes of reflection she decided that the Casino Club was too fancy for the reception and chose instead the Grand Ballroom of the Drake and selected the menu.

  She deferred to me on both decisions. At first I thought this was merely ceremonial. Then I realized that when she said, “Whatever you think best, Dermot,” she meant it.

  “Shall our honeymoon be in America or Europe, Nuala Anne? Los Angeles and San Francisco? Or Paris, Florence and Rome?”

  “Whatever you think best, Dermot.”

  “Or maybe do both?”

  “Whatever you think best, Dermot.”

  Whatever had happened to my contentious, argumentative Nuala Anne? The only time the old Nuala returned was when she announced to us, “Isn’t my pompous asshole brother Laurence flying in from Pacific Palisades to vet my intended and his family and himself bringing his fat bitch of a wife with him?”

  “Dear,” Mom said, “we’ll be happy to meet your relatives.”

  Mom adored Ma, but she wasn’t anything like that fierce Celtic warrior who brought her into the world. Ma’s language would have been worse than Nuala’s.

  “We won’
t pass muster,” I said happily. “Especially me.”

  “There’s nothing worse than a Galway man who’s made a little money,” Nuala continued, her jaw tense and her eyes flashing, “and thinks he has friggin’ veto rights on everything that someone else in the family does.”

  “Derm is probably right,” my brother George the Priest observed. “What responsible Irish male would want his youngest sister marrying someone like him? A writer, would you believe? No good will ever come of marrying a writer.”

  George was kidding, not very subtly.

  “I’ll scratch the friggin’ bitch’s eyes out,” Nuala warned us. “Me ma and me da like Dermot Michael and that’s enough for me. I’m not a docile little sister who does what the friggin’ amadon wants her to do.”

  “And probably never were either,” I added.

  She turned on me, ready to vent her anger on me. If she was angry at her brother, then loyalty demanded that I be, too.

  Instead she grinned. “Och, sure, Dermot, won’t you talk circles around him now?”

  “Or if not, might I not throw him through a plate-glass window?”

  I had done that once in Dublin when three toughs tried to teach me a thing or two.

  “Good enough for him,” Nuala said complacently.

  We were to meet the Laurence McGrails at my family’s home in River Forest after our retreat and take them to supper at the Oak Park Country Club.

  “They won’t be impressed by that grand place,” Nuala had admonished us. “And himself using an outdoor shit-house for the first twenty years of his life. Sure, if it’s not in Pacific Palisades, it isn’t any good at all, at all.”

  “What will he do after he decides that we’re not good enough for his little sister?”

  “Won’t he be calling all his brothers and sisters and telling them what a terrible thing it is and then me poor parents and try to worry them?”

  “Does he know,” brother George asked, his family loyalty aroused, “who put the phone in your parents’ house?”

  “And it wasn’t himself either. Or that tub of lard he’s married to and herself with all them expensive rings she wears? And won’t he be thinking that it was irresponsible altogether for you to spend money on a phone they didn’t need, the shithead that he is?”

  By Irish standards, Nuala’s language around my family was relatively free of obscenity and scatology. That she was on a run just now suggested an intense dislike which I had not heard before. Heaven forfend that I ever become the target of such rage. I would dry up and wither away.

  So I said, “Nuala Anne Marie McGrail, I’ll not be having you use such shocking language when your poor ma and da come to Chicago.”

  Again warning clouds of rage furrowed her graceful forehead and then were dissipated by her smile—which as always filled the room with radiance.

  She hugged me and murmured, “Aren’t you the lovely man, Dermot Michael? Grand altogether.”

  “Bring along a copy of your income tax return, Derm,” me, er, my brother the cleric suggested, “and offer it to them at the dinner table.”

  “The bastards will take it home to look at!” Nuala’s ire was returning.

  “I couldn’t do that.”

  “Ah, your reverence.” Nuala hugged George this time. “Still tis a grand idea, isn’t it? Do it, Dermot Michael! Please do it!”

  Reluctantly I agreed.

  “Can he make serious trouble, Nuala?” I asked her later when I dropped her off at her house on North Southport across from St. Josaphat’s Church.

  “You mean prevent me from marrying you, Dermot Michael? Och, don’t be daft. But he could ruin the wedding for everyone in my family and maybe some in your family.”

  “Not hardly,” I said.

  For some reason that escapes me people tend to think of me as a pushover, though I’m built like a linebacker (college not pro). Maybe it’s my innocent face, dimple, and longish blond hair. Cute, they seem to think, but hardly anything more than a cream puff, physically and emotionally. Maybe Nuala’s brother would have to learn the hard way.

  YOU AREN’T THINKING OF BATTERING HIM PHYSICALLY, ARE YOU? the Adversary demanded in pretended disapproval, as I conducted herself up the outside stairs to her apartment. ARE YOU JUST LOOKING FOR ANOTHER OPPORTUNITY TO PLAY THE MACHO HERO?

  “Only if necessary,” I replied. “Now leave me alone. I’m going to kiss my woman good night.”

  Which I did with considerable, but appropriate vigor, much to the woman’s delight. Mind you I was not invited into the apartment, which I’m sure was just as well.

  The apartment was on the second floor of a wooden A-frame house which had once been an elegant home. It was the only house in the neighborhood that had survived the Great Chicago Fire which in that area had spread as far as Fullerton Avenue two blocks north. Nuala had shared the apartment with a crew of greenhorns like herself, though none of them shared her passion for neatness. The first floor was vacant. When the greenhorns were shipped back to Ireland because they were illegal and Nuala was deported though she was legal, I had bought the house at a bargain price and remodeled the second floor temporarily because I was sure she’d be back. Then I had begun the process of restoring the whole place. It was across the street from a church and a parochial school; the neighborhood was a mix of ethnics (of every hue under heaven) and gentrifying yuppies and boasted a couple of corner groceries and bars. A strip mall over on Clybourn, the nearby Kennedy Expressway, fast public transportation into the Loop, and Lincoln Park and the Lake within walking distance—why not raise one’s children here in West Lincoln Park, or DePaul (after the neighborhood university) as real estate people had recently named it?

  Mind you, at the time I was making all these prudent choices, there were no children, no wife, no fiancée in the offing. I assumed that I would marry Nuala eventually, some unspecified years into the future. But about that I had no definite plans.

  None that I was willing to admit to myself anyway.

  So within the month I had bought a ring with which to surprise her on the Labor Day weekend along with a suggestion of a Christmas wedding—only to find that she had already chatted with her buddy, the little bishop.

  The groom is always the last to know.

  So the following week, I had advanced my notion of living after our marriage in the house on Southport.

  I had heard then for the first time, though not the last, “Sure, whatever you think best, Dermot.”

  “You get a vote.”

  “Well, I suppose that ’Titia will like the idea of another newly married couple living in her home.”

  ’Titia was Letitia Walsh Murray, Lace Maker, whose narrative had clarified the problem of the alleged Camp Douglas conspiracies and who had received a priceless letter from “A. Lincoln,” written on that fateful Good Friday, a couple of hours before he and his wife went over to Ford’s Theater to see Our American Cousin.

  During the course of our investigating the Camp Douglas matter, Nuala had imagined herself bonding with Ms. Murray, a fearsome woman much like herself. Whether this bonding was metaphorical or literal, I did not know. Nor did I ask because I was sure that the explanation would not be satisfactory.

  Some of the Irish, particularly if they are Irish speakers from the West, tend to live in a borderland between various worlds, all of them “real” in one way or another. When one asks them to distinguish among the degrees of real in these worlds, they are incapable of answering the question.

  I think.

  So, after the emotional exhaustion of the weekend retreat and mortality-reminding experience of praying at my grandparents’ grave, I was not eager to face our guests at my family’s home.

  “You should be ashamed of yourself, Dermot Michael Coyne,” Nuala admonished me with total lack of sincerity as we cuddled by the bootlegger’s grave. “And yourself molesting a woman in a cemetery.”

  “Irish comic tradition,” I said, alluding to Vivian Mercier’s book which argued tha
t for the Irish sex was a way of defying death, of asserting that life was stronger than death.

  My hand was now under her sweatshirt and had found its way—on its own initiative of course—to her lace-enclosed breast.

  “It would be easier, Nuala Anne, if you didn’t put any barriers in my way,” I said, as I slipped away the cup and felt the firm flesh and the hard nipple.

  “Sure, doesn’t it add to the pleasure of your exploration?”

  There were two aspects of my love’s complex personality that gave me great hope for our marriage. She had an almost infinite capacity to absorb affection, or to give it a more proper name, love. When I first knew her in Dublin’s fair city I thought that perhaps she needed such affection because she had been deprived of it as a child. Then, when I met her parents on their pathetic but happy little farm in Galway, I understood that she was a sponge for love because she had been so totally immersed in it for her whole life. She was an actress who slipped from role to role in life depending upon the requirements of a situation, but within the changing masks she wore and her natural shyness (which she shared with most of the Irish-speaking folk) there lurked a solid core of faith in her own worth. Her concern about whether she would be a good wife was a mask, a sincere enough one, but beneath the mask, she had damn well made up her mind that she was going to be a better wife than anyone else.

  Moreover, perhaps precisely because she did not doubt her value, Nuala never fended me off when I was kissing and caressing her. “Sure, Dermot me love, wouldn’t I be a terrible eejit altogether, if I chose a fella because I knew I could trust him and then didn’t trust him?”

  So it was left to me to draw the line during our time of, as she once called it at Grand Beach, “half keeping company,” and more recently of betrothal. I knew of no other relationship between young people in which that was the case.

  So I delicately replaced the lace and with a quick caress of her belly, removed my hand from underneath her sweatshirt.

  “You’re a grand man, Dermot,” she sighed. “Sure, tis meself that can hardly wait to take off all my clothes for you.”

  Being of my age and gender and with the hormones of my species, my fantasy had been steaming since I had first encountered her with deliciously obscene images of what I might and would and could do to Nuala when I finally got my hands on her. As our wedding night approached, this imagery often took possession of me so that I could think of nothing else. In my (relatively few) sane moments I realized that whatever would happen would be with her and not to her and would be utterly different from my exploitive fantasies. Well, partially different.