Irish Whiskey

by Andrew M. Greeley

  Actually my handicap is down to five. Golf is my kind of game. It does not require much physical effort, only steady or, even better, lethargic nerves. My brothers and brothers-in-law insist that I win the family tournament every year because I don’t give a damn whether I win or not.

  Too true.

  At the dinner table, fortified by more drinks, Laurence McGrail settled down to the main issue at hand—money.

  “What exactly does your young man do, Nuala Anne?” he asked in a somber tone, like a prosecuting attorney beginning to question a witness.

  “I don’t do anything exactly at all,” I answered for her. “I’m retired.”

  “Retired, is it?” he said with a heavy frown.

  “Right! I made a lot of money in the grain markets and live off my earnings. It’s a great life. That’s why my handicap is almost down to two.”

  “Dermot writes,” Nuala said, rising to my defense.

  “Writes, does he now?”

  “Isn’t he having a novel published just before our wedding?”

  “There can’t be much money in that,” he said, shaking his head in disapproval.

  George the Priest took over my defense.

  “That depends on a lot of factors, Larry. They gave the kid a two-hundred-thousand-dollar advance on his novel and are printing a hundred thousand copies. Then there’s all the subsidiary rights …”

  “Tis true?” Nuala whispered in my ear.

  “Would the holy priest lie?”

  Nuala’s brother winced at “Larry.” So from then on he was “Larry” to all of us. The Coynes can be pretty nasty people themselves when they make up their minds to be. It’s a wonder that they didn’t put the sign from the North Avenue bar on the club.

  “But he can’t expect that kind of income every year from writing, can he now Nuala Anne?”

  “Whatever it is, Larry,” Cindy joined in, “it’s a nice supplement to the regular income from his investments.”

  As we worked our way through dinner, Larry continued to talk to Nuala and we continued to answer his questions. Melissa was out of the loop because she was now thoroughly looped out.

  “He really doesn’t have steady work, though, does he? He doesn’t go to his office every day?”

  “Dermot doesn’t have an office,” Mom said proudly, though she had been frightened more than anyone by my haphazard career. “He telecommutes from his apartment in the John Hancock Center.”

  That was her standard answer to matrons of her generation who pretended to worry about “where is Dermot working now?”

  “Doesn’t sound like a very stable life to me.”

  “Maybe not,” I agreed. “But it sure is a lot of fun. Anyway, Nuala will bring stability to the marriage. She has a grand job at Arthur Andersen and makes her pin money by singing at the Abbey Pub. The one here, that is, and recording.”

  That remark caused everyone at the table, except our guests, to struggle against laughter.

  “Singing in a pub?” Larry said in horror. “And recording?”

  “Och, Larry, won’t we have a copy of me first disc as a present for everyone who’s coming to the wedding? And won’t I sing the ’Ave’ meself at the Eucharist and won’t I sing a few songs at the reception?”

  This was all news to me.

  “Sing at your own wedding!” Larry said, as he wiped his lips with his napkin and then placed the napkin on the table in a sweeping gesture of disapproval and dismay.

  “Why not?” I said, pretending to be privy to these plans. “She’s better than anyone we could hire. And she comes free.”

  Nuala did dissolve in laughter at that one.

  “Tis not the original cost, me love, tis the long-term maintenance, if you take me meaning. Your singing brides don’t come cheap.”

  General laughter, except from Larry and the sloshed Melissa.

  “Isn’t commodity trading a very unstable business?”

  Larry never gave up, absolutely never.

  “There’s some that think real estate is even more unstable,” I observed grandly. “I’m told that in your part of the world, many people are forfeiting their mortgages because it’s cheaper than selling the property.”

  This was, or at least should have been, hitting pretty close to home, Larry’s home that is. I knew from certain private research that he had engaged in some risky investments in the last couple of years. While his back wasn’t against the whitewashed wall yet, he was pretty close to getting his carefully tailored suit marked by the whitewash.

  He went on as though he had not heard me. He really was thick and hence more dangerous. We were having fun with him, but we weren’t getting anywhere.

  “I’m told that most commodity brokers eventually lose all their money.”

  “That’s not altogether true.” My dad, Jim Coyne, the sound, sober, self-disciplined family practice physician, was not about to let the game pass him by. “All horseplayers may die broke, but not all traders, by any means. I have a lot of them as patients, so I ought to know. If they die younger, the reason is that the Exchange closes at 1:00 every day and they play all afternoon. Too much of the drink is taken, if you don’t mind my saying so. Our Dermot, of course, doesn’t trade anymore because he doesn’t like the lifestyle. He’d rather not work the whole day, instead of just the afternoon. He hardly drinks anything.”

  Well, I do have this weakness for good wine, like the Rothschild I had ordered for supper.

  As we turned to dessert—ice cream cake for me, nothing for my bride-to-be, who had understandably lost her appetite—I realized that Larry had beaten us. Nothing had penetrated his thick skull.

  As we waited for our cars in the fading September light, the chill of autumn and the smell of rain in the air, Larry took his sister aside, dragging his stumbling wife along with him.

  “I really must advise against this match, Nuala Anne,” he said to her, loudly enough for me to hear. “Your young man is unstable and irresponsible. His family is obviously in serious financial disarray and in any event seems quite disorganized, if you take my meaning. I can only regret that I was not consulted before you went so far as to accept a ring and set a date for the marriage. You will simply have to cancel it, that’s all there is to it.”

  He spoke as one who had the authority to make such a decision and the power to enforce it.

  Nuala replied in Irish, in the same frigid tones she had used with Jarry Kennedy. Like Jarry, her brother recoiled in surprise.

  “If you don’t mind, Larry, I’d like a word with you.” I dragged him to the end of the walk. He abandoned his wife, who would have collapsed if Cindy had not caught her. Nuala tagged along. Not much of a chance of keeping her out of the conversation.

  “Larry,” I said softly, “I have here in my coat pocket a number of documents you may find interesting. Basically, they are my tax returns for the last three years and estimates of my net worth. You might want to consider them very carefully before you bother Nuala’s parents—on a line I pay for incidentally, not you—with charges that I am not financially responsible.”

  “That’s not the point,” he tried to cut me off.

  “Tis the point. If you make such charges, they are, I would remind you, defamatory. Should I hear that you are making them, I will mail these documents to all the members of your family.”

  I pushed the papers into his trembling hand.

  “That doesn’t make any difference,” he said, trying to tug away from me.

  “Ah, but it does, Larry. I also have here an estimate of your net worth. Never mind how I got it. I think you will find it pretty accurate, though it may underestimate the financial troubles you are having just now. Should I feel constrained to mail around my other documents, I might just send this along, too. Is that clear?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said nervously as he glanced at my estimate of his net worth.

  “Yes, you do.”

  He tried to force the papers back in
to my hand. I stuffed them into his jacket pocket.

  Nuala was watching the exchange, silent and wide-eyed.

  “Now take your fat and drunken wife and both of you get the hell off the grounds of my country club.”

  The cab we had called to take them back to their hotel at the airport had pulled up. I ushered him firmly to the car. Cindy helped his wife in beside him.

  “Is he really in trouble?” Nuala asked me softly. “Poor man.”

  “Nothing he shouldn’t be able to get out of if he uses what little intelligence he has left. But right now the ice under him is kind of thin.”

  She took my arm in hers. “You’re a desperate man, Dermot Michael Coyne. Desperate altogether.”

  That’s a compliment in Irish English.

  “Maybe we were made for each other, Nuala Anne McGrail.”

  She grinned, recovering some of her good spirits.

  “That will be as may be.”

  “The Lord made us and the divil matched us.”

  “Didn’t he ever.”

  But on our way back to the house on Southport, we both grew silent. It had begun to rain, the kind of patented Chicago drizzle which hangs on for weeks. I turned on the windshield wipers.

  “What did you say to him, Nuala Anne?”

  “I won’t tell you.”

  “Fair play to you.”

  “I have to tell you, don’t I?”

  “No.”

  “I do too. I can’t hide anything from my husband.”

  “Yes you can. And I’m not your husband yet, worse luck for me on this rainy Sunday night in September.”

  “I cursed him.”

  “You never did!”

  “I did so. I had my fingers crossed. And anyway God doesn’t listen to curses, though I don’t suppose She likes them very much either.”

  “What did you say?”

  She took a deep breath. “I said, ‘May the devil damn you to the stone of dirges and to the well of ashes seven miles below hell; and may the devil break all your bones. May calamity and harm and misfortune for a whole year be upon you. And after you’re dead may you roast in hellfire for all eternity.’”

  “A powerful curse, Nuala Anne.”

  “Aren’t we Irish the great ones for cursing? I didn’t mean it. Not exactly. But he made me so mad with his friggin’ presumption and himself embarrassing me in front of your family.”

  “We didn’t do any good, did we?”

  “You mean did we knock him off his friggin’ high horse? I don’t think so, Dermot. In a few days he’ll forget about my curse and about the papers you had and start making the calls.”

  “So I shouldn’t send my dossier around?”

  “Only the papers about you. It won’t stop him, but it will reassure the rest of the family that he’s wrong again. No one will say that, though, because we can’t admit that our oldest is not the success he pretends to be but a damn fool!”

  “So the fight will go on even at the wedding. That is if we invite him.”

  “We have to invite him, Dermot. He’s my brother.”

  I was not about to challenge family loyalty.

  “Anyway, I’m not Nessa, and no one is going to make me cry on my wedding day. I’ll just ignore him.”

  “That won’t be easy.”

  “And I won’t curse him again; well at least I won’t damn him to hellfire for all eternity … But we’re a fair pair of gobshites when we’re crossed, aren’t we, Dermot Michael?”

  “We are that.”

  I turned the wiper knob up.

  “I’ll never curse you.”

  “I hope not.”

  “Except maybe with my fingers crossed.”

  If Nuala wanted to invite her crazy brother and his drunken wife to our wedding, that was her right. And it was my right to cook up schemes to keep him away. Little did I realize on that September Sunday that there would be a good chance I wouldn’t make it to the wedding.

  I turned off the Kennedy Expressway at Fullerton and then down Southport.

  “I know what was wrong with that grave, Dermot,” she said, breaking the gloomy silence.

  I shivered, as I usually do when I have to face Nuala’s second sight … Or whatever it should be called.

  “What was wrong with it?”

  “He isn’t in it. Your man Sweet Rolls Sullivan isn’t buried in his own tomb.”

  “Then who is?”

  “No one. The coffin is empty. Some stones in it make it seem heavy.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “I see it, Dermot.”

  “As I remember he was gunned down by Capone’s men in the bakery on a Friday afternoon. Before the eyes of his customers. The police ambulance took his body away to the morgue. If he isn’t in the tomb, then where is he?”

  “I don’t know, Dermot. I don’t know.”

  “He must be buried somewhere else.”

  “If he was ever buried. He was born in 1898, that would mean he would be …”

  “Ninety-eight years old now. You don’t think he’s still alive, do you?”

  I thought about turning on the heater. But it wouldn’t make my chill go away.

  “I don’t think he was dead when they buried him.”

  “You want me to try to get the casket dug up?”

  “No need for that, Dermot. We know he’s not there, don’t we now?”

  “We do indeed.”

  “Would you ever see if you could find out more about him? For some reason I think we are meant to get to know him better.”

  “I’ll see what I can dig up at the Historical Society. They panic when I appear there. They are afraid that ghosts are going to crawl out of their files.”

  “You don’t have to do it right away.”

  Which meant I’d better do it the first thing in the morning.

  “I don’t have much else to do tomorrow. But then I never have much to do on Monday morning. Or any other morning, for that matter.”

  She chuckled and leaned her head against my shoulder.

  “I’m the only one who isn’t worried that you don’t have a steady job. Well, I don’t think it bothers the holy priest much, but he keeps quiet on the subject.”

  “Maybe if I rented a big office in the Loop and put my name on the directory as Dermot Michael Coyne, Writer, it would satisfy my family and yours.”

  “Don’t you dare waste the money!”

  I stopped in front of her house, our house really, ducked around in the rain, opened the trunk, and pulled out an umbrella.

  “Don’t slip on the stairs,” I warned her as I escorted her up to the second-floor entrance of the old wooden place.

  “I’ll try not to …”

  At the landing, I hugged her as passionately as I could with an umbrella in my hand. She leaned against me in contented surrender.

  “I’m crazy in love with you, Dermot Michael.”

  “And I with you, Nuala Anne.”

  “Just a few more weeks.”

  “Right. Two weeks from Friday.”

  I opened the door for her.

  Just before she closed it, she said, “Och, Dermot, you won’t have to worry about getting into me on our wedding night. Didn’t I injure meself at hurling with the lads when I was a kid?”

  She disappeared before I could reply.

  Well, that was useful information.

  Foolishly I expected pleasant dreams after my weekend retreat. Instead, as I was trying to bed my wife on our wedding night, three men tried to take her away from me—her brother, Jarry Kennedy, and a red-haired guy in a double-breasted suit who seemed to be Sweet Rolls Sullivan.

  5

  “YOUR MAN had an interesting life,” I informed herself. “If anyone could climb out of the grave and go on living after they buried him, he was the one who could do it.”

  “I didn’t say he climbed out. I don’t think he was ever there to begin with.”

  We were having a nightcap at a neighborhood bar at the corner of
Webster and Southport—two Bailey’s on ice, an order which did not surprise the comely young woman with Slavic features who was tending bar. Doubtless she had learned how to distinguish the yuppies from the natives.

  Her name was Sonia and she was already on a first-name basis with my date.

  The aforementioned date, clad in jeans and one of those of knit tops which are designed to reveal several inches of midriff, was weary and a bit somber. It had been a hard day, she told me listlessly, at Arthur Andersen, Madame was upset with her because she had not practiced her breathing over the weekend, and the crowd at the Abbey was less responsive than usual.

  September, I told her, is a hard month.

  “Tis.” She sighed.

  “You need a vacation, a long vacation.”

  “If it is a honeymoon you mean, sure, I won’t say no to it at all, at all.”

  She placed her hand gently over my hand.

  “You won’t have to worry about your job or about Madame or the Abbey. Only about me.”

  “Ah, you’re no bother, Dermot Michael.”

  “Your brother hasn’t been calling yet, has he?”

  “Didn’t he wake up me ma and me da in the middle of the night to complain about you?”

  The miserable bastard!

  “Not responsible? Not stable? No class?”

  “And no visible employment … Sure, didn’t I know the amadon would? So I called them first thing this morning.”

  “I hope he didn’t call them collect?”

  She grinned faintly. “No, but I bet he thought about it.”

  “And what did your parents say?”

  “You know what we Irish speakers are like, Dermot Michael. We don’t like to argue or fight. So they just listened and said what a sweet young man you were.”

  “Older Irish speakers.”

  She squeezed my hand.

  “Some of us younger ones revert to type after we’re married.”

  “Did they seem worried?”

  “About you? No, but about Laurence and what else he might do.”

  I didn’t ask for a replay of the conversation, because I knew it would involve intricate Celtic circumlocutions and indirections.

  “Enough to upset them?”

  “And make them troubled, the friggin’ eejit. But let’s not talk about him anymore. Let’s talk about your man the baker. I can see by the look in your eyes, you have another one of your professorial lectures all prepared.”