Irish Whiskey

by Andrew M. Greeley

  “Wait till your brother gets wind of this mess.”

  “Och, doesn’t the friggin’ eejit know about it already? Wasn’t he on the phone just before I went over to the Abbey telling me that I would be a family disgrace if I married a convicted criminal.”

  “And you said?”

  “Sure, Dermot, wouldn’t you have been proud of me? Didn’t I say, real quiet and controlled like, that you hadn’t even been indicted and that if you were you wouldn’t be convicted and that I didn’t care whether the family thought I was a disgrace or not?”

  “Is that what you said?”

  “I answer with the questions,” she said with her best leprechaun grin. “You don’t!”

  “And then what did your man do?”

  “Didn’t he huff and puff and didn’t I tell him that I had to go over to the Abbey and sing and hang up on him very gentle like?”

  “Fair play to you Nuala Anne … will your record, after Nuala Anne Goes to Church, be Nuala Anne Sings Lullabies?”

  “Wouldn’t that depend now on whether your singer has a little Nell Pat in her arms to sing to?”

  “Will it be a girl?”

  “Sure it will … And we will name her Mary Anne after your grandma, won’t we Dermot?” Her hand touched mine pleadingly. “Won’t we?”

  “Och, woman, would we have any choice?”

  She had predicted the gender of my sister-in-law’s child (yet to be born) before the child’s mother knew she was pregnant. Why not the gender of a child yet to be conceived?

  “Did you hear anything from anyone about Jimmy Sullivan today?” she asked, still holding my hand.

  “I had a call from my friend Sean—who by the way has found a date to bring to the wedding, a colleague of yours who called him about going to the wedding together.”

  “Sure, wait till your man gets a look at her. She’s totally gorgeous. If he’s a nice fella like you say, she’ll go after him, because she wants to get married the worst way.”

  “You’re behind this?”

  “Who else? Now what did he say about our puzzle?”

  “He said that there was another disagreement between Sweet Rolls and Scarface that hadn’t made most of the articles. Capone approved plans for his thugs to take control of unions. Sullivan resisted. He protected workingmen, especially if they were Irish, from crooked leaders and mob infiltration.”

  “Just like he protected your grand da.”

  “The interesting point is that long after Sullivan had died or vanished or whatever, the Outfit left those unions alone.”

  Nuala frowned, as if her psyche was on overload.

  “It makes sense, Dermot Michael, but it doesn’t make sense at all, at all. There’s a big piece of the story missing.”

  “There is indeed … So what do we do?”

  “We wait.”

  “No hints, no voices, no hunches?”

  “None at all, at all … We should enjoy the weekend and ignore the odd way people look at us.”

  There would be plenty of that. Tomorrow night (Friday) there would be a farewell party for herself at Arthur’s at which she would distribute the first copies of her CD. Technically she would be going on a leave, but her bosses were pretty sure that they were losing a high-quality accountant. So much did they like her that they didn’t want to cut the tie completely.

  The next day we would venture to South Bend, Indiana, to witness the defense of the Catholic faith by the Fighting Black Baptists of Notre Dame against the perfidious Longhorns of Texas. On Sunday Nuala would be treated to her first American bridal shower.

  (I had rejected all plans for a bachelor party. I considered such events to be vulgar and disgusting, as did my brothers … with the possible exception of Prester George, who defended their male-bonding function mostly to make trouble.)

  Folks would indeed stare at us through these celebrations and perhaps give us their sympathy much as they would at a wake. We would dismiss the investigation as absurd and repeat constantly the mantra that Cindy had endorsed:

  “I never participated in such a conversation.”

  We’d show them!

  We’d show Dale Quade that she was destined for the same trash can as her friend Joe Dever.

  Nuala and I held hands and sipped our drinks silently, confident now of our own strength.

  Well, I was confident of her own quiet strength. Nuala had put on the persona of the “strong woman” of the Book of Wisdom in the Bible and found that it fit.

  “How did you know that something was going down at my apartment last night?” I asked her.

  She shrugged as if that were an irrelevant question. “Why wouldn’t I know?”

  “At the risk of sounding like a rigid American empiricist, Nuala Anne, you weren’t there and I hadn’t called you, though I would have if you’d given me a chance.”

  “Sure, Dermot, I just knew. That’s all.”

  “You woke up knowing that something was wrong with me.”

  “Not to say wrong exactly.” She chose her words carefully. “I knew you were all right but that something was happening.”

  “You were worried?”

  “Not to say worried exactly,” she repeated herself. “When you wake up in the middle of the night with one of them things, it takes you a while to sort them out. So I didn’t bother to sort it out. I just called you on the phone.”

  “I’ll probably never figure it out, not that I have.”

  “I can’t figure it out either, me darlin’ man. Mind you, I’ve never tried. These things have happened to me all me life and they seem perfectly normal. Didn’t I know that something special was going to happen to me when I woke up in the morning the day you walked into O’Neill’s pub?”

  “I almost didn’t go in that night.”

  “Ah, but Dermot Michael, the point is that you did!”

  Point was pronounced “pint,” a custom which might have caused some confusion if she had said, for example, “The point is that I want another pint of Guinness.”

  “You see, Dermot,” she continued, “in Ireland, especially in the West, we see halos around every bird and flower.”

  “Really!”

  “Not literally, except sometimes a little bit. I mean I see faint halos occasionally. Me ma sees them more often but they’re nothing big.”

  You see auras around people and it’s nothing big. Right? Right!

  “What color is mine?”

  “Oh, Dermot, it’s the most lovely color of blue … But that’s not what I meant.”

  “What did you mean?”

  “One of our poets says that she sees the mountain behind the mountain … That’s no help at all, at all, is it now?”

  “I’m listening.”

  “Well”—she leaned forward as if she were imparting a big secret—“we see the sky and the ocean and the mountains and the birds and the rivers and the flowers and we also see something behind them that is like them only different …”

  “Platonic cave?”

  “Shite, Dermot Michael, Platonists are the last thing we Irish speakers are. When I say that we see the mountain behind the mountain, don’t I mean that we see a reality behind the reality, a beauty behind the beauty, but what we see is every bit as concrete and solid as the mountain itself.”

  “Irish mysticism is nature mysticism?”

  “Och, Dermot Michael, isn’t that what the textbooks say? And they’re not wrong, exactly but they’re not right either. Didn’t we know that the world was sacred long before your Christian missionaries showed up? Sure, didn’t we let them in only because they seemed to understand that, too?”

  Uh-huh.

  “So God is in all the creatures of nature?” I said, trying my best to understand.

  “I’m no mystic, Derm, I’m just one of the remnants of the old Irish-speaking world. We knew the Holy was everywhere, only we didn’t call it the ‘Holy’ like your man did and we didn’t call it God either, though that’s not a bad name.”
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  “I see.”

  Which was total untruth.

  Tears formed in her eyes as she tried desperately to explain to me.

  “When I was growing up, I loved the flowers and the animals and the sea and the mountains. When I would look at them, I’d see the tiny edge of light at the end of them and know that’s where the angels were. Sometimes I’d slip into the light and see things the way they saw them, if you take my meaning, Dermot Michael?”

  “Light,” I said solemnly.

  “Now you have it,” she said enthusiastically. “Isn’t it wonderful altogether?”

  “Tis indeed.”

  I didn’t really have it, of course. But, as she would have said herself, under other circumstances, I half had it.

  “The light faded away when I went to Dublin, mostly because I didn’t want to see it. Somehow it didn’t seem right to see it if one was a university girl. Though your man saw it, didn’t he?”

  “Me man?”

  “Him with the wife,” she said with a laugh.

  James Joyce.

  “And your man with the prize, doesn’t he see it, out of the corner of his eye, like?”

  Seamus Heaney.

  “You don’t see the light in Chicago?”

  “Och, Dermot Michael, how can you miss the point of what I’ve been trying to say? Isn’t the light everywhere in this city? In the lake and the skyline and the River and Southport Avenue and”—she squeezed my hand—“wherever you are!”

  Aha.

  “I do understand, Nuala Anne,” I said slowly.

  “Sure, isn’t the whole problem your friggin’ principle of contradiction!”

  “Tis,” I said with a sigh.

  “So naturally I know when you’re in trouble. I kind of peek into the light and see you, in a manner of speaking. Not all the time, but sometimes, if you take my meaning.”

  “I do, Nuala, kind of. I hope that’s enough.”

  She beamed happily.

  “Isn’t that more than enough … Sonia, I’ll be needing another small jar, because I’m so nervous about sleeping with this eejit for the rest of me life. I suppose he can have another drop of Bailey’s for him, but, mind you, only a drop.”

  Later I walked with her to her house, oops, our house, on the sacred way called Southport Avenue. We kissed tenderly and affectionately. I walked back to my car and pondered the whole conversation.

  YOU DIDN’T UNDERSTAND ONE WORD, the Adversary told me. THE WOMAN IS AROUND THE BEND ALTOGETHER, OFF THE WALL, OVER THE TOP.

  “She’s an accountant and a singer and a very bright young woman. It’s not her fault she’s from the Gaeltacht.”

  TOTALLY CRAZY … THE LIGHT AT THE END OF THINGS WHERE THE ANGELS ARE. ON SOUTHPORT? YOU GOTTA BE KIDDING!

  “Maybe it’s here, but I don’t see it.”

  SOUTHPORT BEHIND SOUTHPORT BEHIND SOUTHPORT, he sneered. Too MUCH CELTIC TWILIGHT. Now YOU’RE STUCK WITH HER.

  “It was your idea,” I told him. “And I’m lucky.”

  THE FRIGGIN’ PRINCIPLE OF CONTRADICTION! he crowed.

  I told him to go away and turned on the ignition.

  I had read all this stuff before I met Nuala. It sounded fine, but I never believed that anyone that I was likely to meet was a throwback to Celtic antiquity. There were, I realized, no beautiful women walking out of the twilight to weave their spells and enchant me.

  Now it turned out that I was about to marry one such. One who had weaved a spell around me and had enchanted me.

  One who, in the finest traditions of down-to-earth Irish mysticism, had fabulous taste in clothes, a quick, practical mind, and loved my kisses and caresses and delighted in sharing herself with me.

  Could she, as Cindy wondered, also whip up some minor curses to rout our enemies?

  17

  ON FRIDAY, while I was wrapping the CDs we intended to give away at the wedding dinner, a fierce rain beat against the windows and the Hancock Center creaked and groaned in the wind, Cindy phoned me.

  “Good news, Dermot.”

  “I need some of that.”

  “She’s issued a subpoena for you to appear before the grand jury on next Monday.”

  “Monday!”

  “Right! … Isn’t that wonderful!”

  “Explain to me why it’s wonderful, sis.”

  “It means that they didn’t have time to go through your papers. She hopes to do that after she gets her indictment. All she has is Jarry’s tape.”

  “So?”

  “Don’t you see? She’s panicked. The little show at your apartment the other night, the removal of her buddy Joe Dever, her stupid leaking of the interview and my reaction with the suits against all the media—they’ve scared the hell out of her. She’s trying to regain her balance. Our job is to keep her off-balance.”

  “So what do we do next?”

  “You knock the grand jury dead. She’ll have to push to get an indictment. That won’t look good when a judge asks to see the record of the grand jury proceedings. And she’ll know it. She’s living on the wire. Maybe we can make her fall off it.”

  “I see.”

  I understood Cindy’s tactics about as well as I understood Nuala’s description of light and angels and the mountain behind the mountain.

  “We’ve already got the media lawyers terrified. Two of them called to ask, very nervously, whether this was a real suit or merely a media counterploy.”

  “And you said?”

  “I told them that they should find out how due was the diligence with which their editors and reporters checked the authenticity of the tape. That petrified them. It will also plant some doubts in the minds of the businessmen who own the papers and the TV stations. They’ll start pushing for documentation. Dale will find out and really go over the top.”

  “Great,” I said with as much enthusiasm as I could muster.

  I was caught in the crossfire between two Irish women warriors. One of whom was on the edge and the other of whom was eager to push her over.

  Great, indeed.

  I continued my mindless task of slipping the discs into their jewel boxes and then into the white wrappings which had been prepared for them. Good work for the groom as the wedding closed in. While I worked, I thought about Nuala. Naturally.

  However, I was not indulging in erotic fantasies. Well, only some of the time. Mostly, I was thinking about our conversation the night before. The light where the angels are! The mountain behind the mountain!

  Yeah.

  The Adversary did not try to argue with me. I think he was as confused as I was.

  How often did she see a halo around me? When did I find my way into the edge of light where the angels are? Would there be angels in our bedroom on the wedding night?

  That might not be a bad idea. I might need their help.

  Men angels or women angels?

  Dumb question.

  Women angels, of course.

  I knew she was different when I fell in love with her. I was certainly not about to fall out of love with her now. Not that I could have even if I wanted to. I had not realized how different she really was.

  I didn’t realize that troops of the little folk followed her around every day.

  Well, she hadn’t said that they did. but I was willing to bet on it.

  I hardly noticed the phone when it rang and picked it up automatically, as I peered into the rain to see if the little folk were lurking outside my window. I was Irish, too, wasn’t I? Couldn’t I see the rainstorm beyond the rain?

  “Hello,” I said glumly.

  “Tis yourself?”

  “Tis.”

  “It doesn’t sound like you, does it now?”

  “Maybe it isn’t me.”

  “Go long wid ya.”

  “I think the little folk are outside my window. They’re hiding in the rain and spying on me.”

  She laughed joyously.

  “Och, Dermot me darlin’, aren’t you the funny man?”

 
“I am.”

  “The shee didn’t come to Chicago. Poor little things, isn’t life hard enough for them in Ireland?”

  Shee was another name for the Irish fairie, the little people, the gentry, or often simply “they.”

  “Couldn’t they survive here?”

  “They barely survive in Ireland,” she said briskly. “How are you keeping today?”

  “I’m in great form,” I replied with the proper answer to that question.

  “Are you sure now?”

  “I am.”

  “I hope I didn’t confuse you too much with all me West of Ireland blather?”

  “It was fascinating, Nuala Anne. I can’t claim that I completely understood it all.”

  “Ah, well, won’t that take time? At least you didn’t have me arrested as a flaming eejit.”

  “I don’t think you’re an eejit, Nuala me, ah, my love.”

  “Wasn’t herself grand on the telly?”

  “Herself?”

  “Your sis. When she filed her complaints against all them bad fellas in the media.”

  “I’m afraid I didn’t watch it today.”

  “She was brilliant. They try to make fun of her but she has them on the run … You remember what you’re supposed to say?”

  “Yes, ma’am. I am supposed to say that I never participated in such a conversation.”

  “And what will you say when them bitches corner you at the door of your building and ask you what you’re going to do with the twenty-five million that Cindy wants from them?”

  “Uh …”

  I was still lingering in the Celtic twilight and not thinking about unimportant things.

  “You’d better have an answer, Dermot Michael.”

  “I’m going to build myself a castle in the West of Ireland.”

  “You’ll say no such thing!”

  “They’ll settle for a lot less than twenty-five million.”

  “That’s not a good answer.”

  My intellect, which had become a vestigial organ lately because of my fascination with my bride-to-be, kicked in.

  “I’ll give it all to the schools I attended—St. Luke, Fenwick, Notre Dame, and Marquette?”

  “Super!”

  I was glad I had passed the test.

  “You won’t forget about the party down here, will you now?”