Irish Whiskey

by Andrew M. Greeley

  He spent much of his time figuring out “angles” and working on “deals.”

  “He’s a charming and gifted kid,” I had heard a young Dominican whisper to another. “Too bad he’s a sociopath.”

  He still had virtually everything that a young man might want. But I had one thing he did not have—Kel Morrisey. It should have been clear to me in those days that he wanted her and that he was jealous of me. I guess I was still an innocent and did not understand that his drumbeat of obscenities about her hid his resentment that she hated him.

  “He is a faker, a jerk, a dweeb, a nut,” she would insist to me. “You should get rid of him.”

  She had been baptized Kelly Anne Morrisey. In her early teens that became Kellianne. Later it was simply Keli. To me she had always been Kel. She was my first love. I can’t remember a time when I didn’t know her. Or didn’t love her.

  Her father and mine had been classmates in medical school. Her mother and my mother had graduated from Trinity High School in River Forest the same year. She was born a month before me, the last of seven and a surprise, a mistake perhaps that became an adored child. I had sensed from the beginning—so far back that I can’t remember when the feeling came—that I had lucked out on parents compared to her. Mom and Dad are unfailingly refined and gentle folk. I cannot remember either of them ever being drunk. Her father was a loudmouth braggart even if he is a highly successful urologist. Her mother is a tasteless and overweight bitch, three words that no one could imagine predicating of my mother.

  However, Doctor and Mrs. Morrisey were part of the environment into which I was born and in which I was raised. They were as much an element of my personal scenery as St. Mark’s Parish, Oak Park Country Club, Lake Geneva and my brother who wanted to be a priest. Only when I was a teen did I realize not only that I didn’t like them but that I had never liked them. Later I would discover that my parents didn’t like them either.

  “If we ever need proof,” George said, his quick, wry grin indicating that he was about to be perceptive and harsh, “that our parents are both saints we only have to consider that they put up with those two drunks for thirty-five years.”

  George doesn’t look or act much like my brother. He’s five-eight, black-haired instead of blond, with a sharply etched face, thick eyebrows and an animated grin. He is quick, intense, forceful. Epigrams and quotes spin off his lips like bullets from an automatic weapon. When he is talking or thinking or both (which is almost all the time) he strides up and down like a bantamweight boxer before a fight.

  “Drunks?”

  “You miss things, don’t you, Derm? They’re both alcoholics. Of course.”

  He was right about the elder Morriseys. Their heavy drinking had been as much part of the world in which I grew up as their daughter’s pale blond hair, light blue eyes, and pretty, pretty face. Just as I had assumed that “Kel”—as she always was to me—would be pretty, so I had always taken for granted that her parents drank a lot and acted kind of silly.

  I cannot remember a time when Kel and I were not inseparable friends. Nor can I remember the time when we first kissed, though she probably kissed me. She certainly initiated the kisses in the early years of grammar school and resumed them again in seventh grade, when we boys were no longer ashamed of kissing girls but began to brag about our conquests—I never bragged about kissing her, however.

  Kel and I were always together. We made sand castles on the beach at Lake Geneva and splashed each other with water; we walked the side roads and picked wild raspberries; we watched television together, we did our homework together, we threw snowballs at each other sometimes but usually at others, pretending that they had thrown the first snowballs at us.

  Every morning in St. Mark’s schoolyard my eyes, pretending to be uninterested, would seek her out—and meet hers looking for me. We’d both giggle and turn away, not wanting to admit to anyone else how much we meant to each other.

  At parties and dances in high school, I was never at ease till I had spotted Kel—an easy enough task because her effervescent laughter usually told me where to look.

  More skillfully perhaps, she kept an eye out for me.

  Jarry always trailed along with me, whispering in my ear that everyone knew she “put out” and was a bit of a whore. Amazingly, it never occurred to me to punch him in the mouth for these comments.

  “You came at ten after nine,” she said accusingly after one such party. “Late.”

  “Keeping tabs on me?”

  “You bet.” She hugged me. “Where would I be without you?”

  Did she love me more than I loved her? Or was it easier for a young woman to display her love?

  I don’t know. Maybe both.

  In our teen years the kisses turned passionate, and that was my doing, though she did not protest. Our parents had mixed emotions about the two of us. Our affection for each other was “cute” and they thought we’d make an “adorable” marriage. But they worried about whether we were becoming “too involved,” by which they meant that they were afraid that adolescent passion might interfere with our careers. My parents never worried very much about me, in part because Ma was always lurking in the background, telling them what a “grand lad” I was. Tom Morrisey, however, was a disappointed man because none of his children had become M.D.s like himself.

  “It’s the highest profession a man can have,” he said once to my father.

  “Only if he likes it,” my dad replied—one of his cautious little bits of wisdom that Tom never heard.

  The problem was not that the Morrisey kids didn’t try to be doctors. Alas, they either failed to get into medical school or flunked out, a disgrace far worse than my failure at the Golden Dome. Kel, the last and most golden child, was different. She was number one in everything from kindergarten on—highest marks in the class, class officer, valedictorian, student-council president, Merit scholar semifinalist, prom queen, captain of the volleyball team … . You name an honor, she won it. Moreover, unlike Jarry, she worked at success.

  “The difference between you and little Kelly Anne,” my mother said once, “is that she uses her talents and you don’t.”

  “She’s a girl,” I protested with notable lack of logic.

  “Ah, you noticed that, did you now?” Ma grinned impishly. “Sure, you’ve always acted like she’s one of the guys.”

  “She’s that, too,” I said stubbornly. “She’s not stuck-up like the other girls.”

  “The poor child is a nervous wreck,” Ma continued, shaking her head sadly, “and her parents pushing her all the time.”

  She pushed me harder than my parents ever would. I was more afraid of her reaction to my Bs and Cs than I was afraid of Mom’s and Dad’s. Her fury when I quit the football team was worse than theirs.

  “You’re stubborn and proud and lazy,” she told me bluntly, in the front seat of her Mustang convertible after a date on the Friday night I had walked out of the locker room never to return.

  “But you still love me.”

  “Certainly I still love you.” She nuzzled close to me. “But I want to be proud of you, too.”

  “What about the As I’m getting?” I touched one of her pert young breasts.

  She did not pull away from me. She seemed to like to be fondled even more than I liked to fondle her. Our love play was an endlessly interesting sport, one in which I often sensed nervously that I could have gone much farther than I did.

  “You’d better keep on getting them.” She sighed contentedly. “I’d be awfully lonely at Notre Dame without you.”

  I dutifully pulled up my average, made it to Notre Dame by the skin of my teeth, and discovered that her father had other plans for her—Yale.

  We were an oddly matched pair: Kel was always exuberant, an enthusiastic master of the revels as well as academic and athletic leader. I was the big amadon (a word which was affectionate, more or less, when Ma used it) who tagged along behind her.

  She led the songs in the bus
on the high-school club picnics, consoled the lonely and unhappy kids in our crowd, organized the double dates, planned the dances, took charge whenever someone was needed to take charge, and even when, strictly speaking, no take-charge person was required. I arranged the chairs and cleaned up afterwards.

  How did I balance Kel and Jarry? Even today I’m not sure. In those days it didn’t seem to be a problem. We weren’t exactly the Three Musketeers, but when we were together, Jarry kept his obscene thoughts to himself and Kel masked her delight. Towards the end of the high-school years, we saw less of Jarry because he spent a lot of his time in bars and at poker games, which he claimed he always won.

  I did win a prize or two, poetry and story contests, but who needs a scribbler when they have a prom queen who is also a Merit scholarship winner and a volleyball ace who did not quit in mid-season?

  A mild spasm of pride did run briefly through the parish and the school when my prizes were announced, but such awards didn’t get you into Notre Dame.

  “Sure,” Ma announced to the family. “Merit scholars are a dime a dozen, but poets are rare birds.”

  “Rare birds indeed,” said Pa, whose strategy for dealing with his wife’s vigorous assertions was to echo her last two words and then add the decisive “indeed,” usually with a happy grin which said in effect, “Sure, the woman is a terror, now isn’t she?”

  Afterwards I often wondered whether Kel and I would have become romantically involved if we had not been friends for so long before the hormones were dumped into our bloodstreams. We were locked into a relationship which we might not have chosen if we had been strangers at fourteen. As it was, adolescent passion trapped us before we had a chance to think, not that either of us minded in those days.

  There was a dark side to Kel’s sunny, dynamic personality. She drank one or two more cans of beer than she should have and experimented with both marijuana and cocaine, much to my horror.

  When I begged her to stop the drugs and cut down the beer, she did so promptly, apologized for causing me to worry, and begged me to forgive her.

  “I don’t want to lose you, Derm,” she said, tears in her eyes. “I don’t know how I’d survive without you.”

  I’d tell her she didn’t need me at all and she’d hug me and bury her head in my chest, and say, “Yes I do, Derm. I really do.”

  When Yale accepted her and “Doctor”—as Tom Morrisey was always called in his family, commanded that she go there instead of Notre Dame, she was unable to refuse. Doctor had beaten me as I always knew he would.

  These are all afterthoughts. In those days I thought Kel was the perfect girl and I was the luckiest guy in the world.

  Was I brokenhearted when she told me that she “had” to go to Yale?

  To tell the truth, as I look back on it, I was not. I consoled her in her tears and argued that maybe absence really did make the heart grow fonder. Looking back on that conversation I wonder if I was not experiencing somewhere deep down inside myself a bit of relief.

  As Ma said, “Isn’t she the grand young woman now? But, sure, Dermot Michael, isn’t she just a little too intense?”

  Well, as it turned out I had found an even more intense young woman (according to said young woman at Ma’s instigation) but one in whom the gift of laughter had never been and never would be suppressed.

  I wouldn’t admit then, however, that I felt liberated by Kel’s decision to go to Yale. I was besotted with her, dazzled by her wit and energy, captivated by her beauty, astonished by her love for me, enraptured by her superb young body.

  Yet she was not quite beautiful, not the way Nuala is beautiful. She was pretty and mildly voluptuous, a young man’s fantasy of a woman he’d like to see naked rather than a mature man’s image of ideal beauty.

  I never did see her completely undressed, although I did have the opportunity.

  Some of our friends were certain that we had slept together. We were too close to each other, they said, to have resisted the demands of our bodies. I won’t pretend that the idea had not occurred to me. Yet I would never have suggested it to her. How do you proposition your best friend, I wondered.

  She offered herself to me the day before her senior prom.

  “Do you want to make love with me after the prom, Derm?” she asked with her usual direct candor. “Maybe we ought to be lovers this summer so we will remember each other when we go away to college at the end of August?”

  What kind of a young man would say no to such a request?

  One that was frightened by the prospect, I suppose.

  “I think we’re too young, Kel. I respect you too much to do that to you now. And I don’t need sex to remember you.”

  She sighed, disappointed I suppose. “You’re right, as always. But, just the same, I’m yours whenever you want me.”

  “A breathtaking offer, Kel.” I wrapped my arms around her. “I won’t forget it.”

  She hanged herself on Father’s Day. Wearing her prom dress. In front of a video camera. After she had shouted her hatred for her parents into the camera and damned them to hell for all eternity. Just before she had kicked the chair, she shouted, “I’m sorry, Derm. I love you!”

  Her parents blamed me because they had to blame someone. Everyone else blamed them, especially after a TV station managed to get its grimy paws on the tape. My mother, who is a psychiatric nurse—indeed a vice president at her hospital—tried to ease my feelings of guilt.

  “There was nothing you or anyone could do, Dermot. Your father and I begged her parents to see that she received counseling. They wouldn’t hear of it. It was bound to happen, I’m afraid.”

  That helped a bit.

  “Why did she need help?”

  “She’s been showing signs of the alternative mood syndrome for the past couple of years. Manic depressive, to use the popular term. She was treatable, I’m sure.”

  Some of the people in the parish who didn’t like the Morriseys complained to the Chancery Office that Kel should not receive Christian burial because it would encourage other young people to commit suicide. But their complaints were overruled.

  I had to live with my grief and my guilt and my pain for a long time. I still grieve for the tragic end of her life and still dream that she is alive.

  Her parents moved away and did not even send us Christmas cards. In their view I was a killer, perhaps even a murderer. Jarry agreed with them. He spread rumors that I had got her pregnant and had refused to help her have an abortion. Those who knew me laughed it off, sometimes with the cynical comment that I wouldn’t know how to impregnate a woman. But still his story had a life of its own.

  “Why are you lying about me and Kel?” I had demanded of him one day in the shadow of the golden dome of Notre Dame.

  “You killed her,” he had sneered at me, “and I’m going to get you if it’s the last thing I ever do.”

  “I didn’t kill her,” I replied. “She wasn’t pregnant and you know that.”

  “Yeah?” he sneered. “It’s still your fault. You should have saved her from her asshole parents.”

  “How?”

  “That’s not my problem … Don’t ever feel safe, Dermy Boy. When you least expect it, I’m going to get you.”

  I told no one of his threats, no one except Nuala. Preternaturally perceptive as she often was, she had understood in those early weeks in Dublin that I was grieving for a lost love.

  “He’s a bad ’un, Dermot Michael,” she had said gravely when I was finished with the story.

  “He’s washed up, a has-been.”

  And so he was. He was thrown off the football team at Notre Dame during his freshman year and out of the school at the beginning of the next year for an attempted sexual assault on a woman student. He was drunk and high on amphetamines when he tried it. Florida State, which seems to have no concerns about such matters, recruited him, but he was bounced from there in a couple of months. He had grown fat and flabby but still talked about all the deals and prospects he had
lined up.

  I was bounced from Notre Dame at the end of my second year, because of “academic inadequacies.” Without Kel around to drive me, I didn’t find classwork very interesting. I went off to Marquette, where I had a wonderful time for two years, reading what I wanted to read and writing what I wanted to write. I didn’t fail anything, but at the end of my two years there I was only marginally closer to graduation than I had been at the end of my first year at N.D.

  Jarry’s parents bought him a seat on the Mercantile Exchange, where he made a lot of money in a hurry. Then lost most of it in an equal hurry. My own parents, facing, with characteristic gentleness, the prospect that their last—and possibly their most gifted—child was not about to be a “success” like his siblings, bought me a seat, too. I arrived just in time to learn that Jarry had been suspended for five years for a violation of professional ethics, the exact nature of which was not altogether clear, though it seemed to have involved trading in his own name with clients’ money.

  “Professional ethics at the world’s biggest gambling den?” George the Priest had murmured. “That’s an oxymoron if there ever was one.”

  I was a failure at the Exchange, too. Except by a dumb mistake I made three million dollars one Friday afternoon. “The angels made you do it, child,” Ma told me.

  It must have been a good angel who made me sell my seat, give the money and my capital back to Mom and Dad, and invest the rest in municipals and in a trading account that I turned over to the best trader on the floor. Thereupon the same angel persuaded me to retire, to go on the “grand tour” of Europe, and to wander into O’Neill’s pub in Dublin, just down the street from T.C.D.—Trinity College Dublin.

  Then the angel, having thrust Marie Phinoulah Annagh McGrail into my life, departed, doubtless complacent about her work. Ma didn’t live to meet her, alas, but she would have surely said, “Tis about time, young man, that you brought home the proper young woman.”