Irish Tiger

by Andrew M. Greeley

  “Do you have any comment on the fact that Mr. Abercrombie will appear in all the papers tomorrow morning as the dog in the manger?”

  “I’m just happy that you Yanks are all familiar with Aesop’s fables.”

  The kids began to sing the Connemara lullaby.

  The camera turned on them. They sang more loudly.

  “Great!” Mary Alice gave the cut sign. “Now let’s rush this, guys, so we can get down to the studios in time to get it on both five and six o’clock.”

  The TV folks exited loudly. The eating and drinking and talking and singing went on. In Ireland, they would have called it a comeallye, though there would be liquor on the premises.

  “This wasn’t me idea,” Nuala assured me as she pecked at me, uh, my cheek. “It was your sister and her husband and their daughter and themselves, terrible people altogether!”

  “It was worth a celebration,” I said, returning the kiss.

  “Did you find out anything?”

  “We better talk about it later.”

  “Sure, don’t you have the right of it, Dermot Michael, like you always do.”

  My cell phone rang. I walked into our library and closed the door.

  “Dermot Coyne,” I said tersely.

  “Hey, Dermot, it’s Dom, what’s happening!”

  “We’re having a little celebration.”

  “I heard you won the case.”

  “They’re appealing.”

  “Them appellate judges are no good, Dermot. I hope you got a good one. . . . Say, I talked to my friends. Their friends tell them that none of our people were involved in that caper that went down yesterday. The guys who put out the contract were punks. They were told to get out of town and not come back. My friends said that their friends assured them that there wouldn’t be any more trouble and that I should tell you that they still have enormous respect for you and your wife.”

  All very neat.

  “Where were these guys from?”

  “Somewhere in Wisconsin. They’re back there now.”

  “And the guys who pulled up in the stolen car?”

  “Already gone, back to St. Louis.”

  “No one from Oakdale?”

  “Like I told you, my friends’ friends don’t like the Sabattini bunch at all but this is not the way they operate.”

  I found that reply unsettling. It probably meant that the wiseguys had no evidence and had not investigated that angle with any great care. Probably however, the wiseguys would keep an eye on them. As far as I was concerned Maria Angelica’s brothers were still on the suspect list.

  “I assume they’ll watch them.”

  “Dermot, the friends of my friends always watch guys like them that are crazy and are too close to Chicago. Someday they’ll go too far and then it’s zero for them.”

  “Thanks, Dom, thanks a million . . . You’ll let me know if you pick up anything more.”

  “I promise you that sincerely, like I tell you, you are a man my friends respect.”

  I never have been able to figure out why they respect me. The wiseguys have no reason to be afraid of me or of Nuala Anne. But they get nervous when they get near people that seem supernatural.

  I went back to the parlor. Nuala, as is her wont, was giving orders. I noted that Cindy and Tom were not looking happy.

  “All right, folks, it’s getting dark outside, and all the kids should be going home. We’ll continue this party on another day. Mick and Nelliecoyne, will you take the doggies downstairs so everyone has protection going home?”

  “Yes, Ma!”

  “Now, everyone goes right straight home, understand?”

  “Yes, Miz Coyne.”

  Only in the context of St. Josephat school is she Miz Coyne. If she’s not, how can she be Nelliecoyne’s mother? At other times Miz Coyne is my mother.

  “We had bad luck at the Seventh Circuit,” Tom Hurley reported as Nuala was ushering the kids down the stairs, lest anyone fall. “There is only one man on the circuit who might give us trouble, Rick Rowbottom. And that’s who we got. Anyone else would have thrown the dog back in the manger. Rick delayed a ruling till tomorrow morning so that he could study the case and that’s very bad news.”

  Cindy and her daughter were in the kitchen putting together a supper. They were getting along very well, much better than they would in their own kitchen. Nuala’s idea to hire her as babysitter had been, as usual, wise.

  Cindy stuck her head into the dining room where her husband and I were setting the table.

  “He defines narcissism. He imagines that he is the best lawyer on the circuit and that the pretentious and self-important opinions he writes are going to be cited for the ages. Now he has another chance to primp and preen and perform on a high-profile case about which there is no serious question of law at all. He’ll delay a decision until the matter is moot on the grounds that there are very serious—his favorite words—matters of law at issue. He is a pimp and a prick!”

  “Mother!” her daughter protested from the kitchen.

  That’s my sister Cindy, never one to be guilty of excessive moderation—five words beginning with a P leading up to prick, alliteration with a vengeance.

  “What will you and Gerry do, Tom?”

  “We’ll go into Rowbottom’s court tomorrow assuming that obviously he will sustain the injunction while he reviews the serious matters of contract law at issue. He will suspend the injunction until there is a full review of the issue. It’s a matter of national importance and a full review is essential, especially because media law is extremely complicated. We will be astonished and then outraged. It is a simple matter of contract law, that every second-year student in law school could answer. He will be offended, which is good because he says stupid things. He will set a date for argument sometime after Christmas. We will yell that the issue will be moot by then because the program is scheduled for the week before Christmas. He will reply that the majesty of the legal process cannot be subservient to the television schedule, especially when that is dependent on a religious feast. He will be very proud of himself for having introduced the church/state issue. We will announce that we are appealing to the full circuit and storm out in high dudgeon, just like Nuala Anne when she’s upset, to say nothing of my wife.”

  “Rick ought to be locked up,” Cindy cried from the kitchen.

  “Then we’ll go down to the chief justice’s office and scream bloody murder. This kind of grandstanding is what gives appellate courts a bad name. Can you see the headlines tomorrow—‘Judge keeps dog in the manger!’ You can imagine what that will do. He will try to calm us down. We will repeat the argument. He will say, ‘Religious feast, did that asshole really say that?’ and we will say it’s all on the record and he’ll say we should appear before him first thing in the morning and ask for emergency relief. He’ll set up a panel of justices that will have an emergency hearing and a decision by the end of the business day tomorrow.”

  “Are you sure that it will work out that way?”

  “Not certain. Probably.”

  “The chief justice hates Rick’s guts.” Cindy arrived with salad. “There’s enough problems in the circuit without his muddying the waters. . . . My daughter made this salad and it’s scrumptious. . . . Where’s Nuala?”

  “Out with the dogs,” I replied, “taking her choir kids home.”

  The front door opened and the white demons thundered into the house, followed by the “big kids,” followed by their mother. Then the “little kids” appeared from the playroom.

  Socra Marie, now always a self-designated spokesman for her little brother announced, “Patjo says he starving.”

  “Downstairs, doggies,” she ordered. “You were wonderful!”

  She had to hug both of them. “Nelliecoyne, Mick, feed them please.”

  “Yes, Ma.”

  “Thank you . . . Dermot Michael, I need a drink!”

  “Yes, Ma.”

  ______

  MUCH LATER, whe
n the Hurleys (save for their daughter) had gone home and the kitchen and dining room cleaned up and the kids put to bed, and Danuta had driven off in her Honda, and Ellie was studying sociology in her room—herself and meself had settled in with a “splash” of Baileys—we sat at the window overlooking Sheffield Avenue for our end-of-day conversation.

  “Dermot Michael, I may die before morning.”

  “Woman, you will not!”

  “I am too old for days like this. . . . Anyway, tell me what happened.”

  “I want to go on record as claiming that I am too old for days like this too and I’m a lot older than you.”

  “Five years.”

  “Five and a half.”

  We sipped our Baileys.

  “You first,” she said. “I have a wonderful story for you.” I recounted my conversation with Mary Fran.

  “Poor child. She’d find Maria a wonderful confidante.”

  “I’m sure she will eventually.”

  “Is that something of which you are sure or that you know?”

  She laughed my favorite Nuala Anne laugh, wicked, fey, impish—a leprechaun child.

  “Sure would I be saying it so confident like, unless I knew it?”

  “Here’s the copy she made of the letter that led to the big family fight.”

  Nuala Anne looked at it and frowned, turned it over to look at the other side, and then frowned even more deeply.

  “It’s a copy of a note scribbled on a lined page torn out of a notebook.”

  “Hmm.”

  “It ain’t what it pretends to be. It’s very evil.”

  Rarely does she slip anymore and say ain’t. It’s not accepted American usage anymore, though herself insists that it is a perfectly “daycent” word.

  “Oh,” I said.

  “It’s someone pretending to be a hysterical middle-class woman, pretending to be vulgar. But that’s not what it is at all, at all.”

  “What is it?”

  “Evil.”

  Then I told her about my first conversation with Dom.

  “I’ve never met the man, but I don’t like them.”

  “He’s not a Tony Soprano type.”

  “I hate that program,” she said firmly. “I won’t let me kids watch it. It’s evil.”

  “The outfit imposes some social control here that otherwise wouldn’t exist.”

  “So did the lads in Northern Ireland . . . Did he call back?”

  “He did.”

  I repeated his message, almost word for word.

  “Wisconsin, St. Louis. Your friends on the West Side are not telling us the whole truth, are they?”

  “They know more than they’re telling, that’s for sure. Their own guys are not involved. And they’ve warned off the outsiders. But that doesn’t help us much. Our friends are safe for the moment. We’ll tell Mike Casey to keep a close watch on them.”

  Then I told her about my visit to Jack Donlan’s office, about the nervousness of his funds and about his tennis friend Lou Garner. Then I gave her Mike Casey’s three-page report about Maria Sabattini Connors. She read the document carefully and grinned.

  “Chaste and modest matron, fersure!”

  “In my experience they are great craic in bed.”

  “And yourself with great experience of them kind! You’re supposed to mail this to Mary Fran? Good idea. They’ll all come home eventually. And before you ask, Dermot Michael Coyne, let me say that now I know that.”

  How does one not know something and then know it?

  Don’t ask me. Am I fey?

  Darn good thing for all of us!

  “Dermot, since we’re too tired to do anything but sleep, would you ever bring me another little splash of Baileys?”

  I had been thinking the same thing.

  “She came to see me this morning,” Nuala informed me when I returned with two brandy snifters, her eyes twinkling mischievously.

  “Who came to see you this morning?”

  “The chaste and modest matron.”

  “Why?”

  “To confess an act of adultery.”

  “She never did!”

  “That’s the way I talk.”

  “Did you give her absolution?”

  “Dermot Michael, I did not. Wasn’t there nothing to absolve?”

  “Why did she tell you?”

  “Because she thought we should know it.”

  “Are you going to tell me?”

  “I might just,” she grinned and yawned.

  The story of Sterling Stafford was wild.

  “So you see your chaste and modest matron is also a warrior queen, maybe descendant of Granne O’Malley.”

  “Jackie Donlan is an even more fortunate man than he realizes,” I observed.

  “We’ll have to charge your man extra for our fee. Doesn’t the woman think that I’m her confidante now?”

  We don’t take fees. If people ask how much they owe us, herself always says, “Give Whatever you want to the charity of your choice and don’t complicate me income tax returns.”

  I don’t know what that means, but one of the advantages of marrying a woman who is, as she says, a “chartered accountant” is that she does our tax returns, which, as she avers, “They’d never dare question.”

  “She’ll call me in the morning to tell me whether your man has thrown”—pronounced trun—“her out of their apartment. . . . Well, we’ve made enough on Samwise, so I suppose we can’t complain, can we?”

  “Does he know you’re a client?”

  “He didn’t say, but then he wouldn’t.”

  “That’s his high-risk fund! I didn’t know you were a high roller, Nuala Anne McGrail!”

  She yawned loudly.

  “Didn’t I marry you?”

  “’Tis true . . .”

  “Dermot love, I’m going to bed now. Tomorrow night we can say two decades of the rosary.”

  I tucked her in like she was a little girl. She was already asleep.

  Poor kid. One moment she was sitting in O’Neil’s pub off the College Green and the next moment, almost before she knew it, she had a lecherous husband, four kids, a big house, a couple of demanding careers, and a major court case.

  I was tired too, but, unlike me wife, I couldn’t wipe out the stimuli of the day. I walked the house for another hour trying to sort out the problems before I slipped into bed next to her. As I disappeared into the magic world of Nod, she took my hand.

  Thank you, I whispered to the deity.

  About time you said that.

  Nuala Anne

  I BEGAN the day peacefully enough. I brought the big kids over to school, along with the dogs. I then glanced at a picture on the front page of the Herald, depicting Triple A in a manger labeled “Christmas,” and reading his comment, “Judge Brown is typical of the subhuman hacks that suck graft out of the city for the Daley administration.” I settled down to practice my lullabies for my younger son who stopped playing with his trucks long enough to climb into my lap and grin his idiot grin, which is an imitation of his father’s grin. . . . Och, me Dermot isn’t an idiot and neither is Patjo.

  The first call was from Cindy Hurley.

  “There’s bad news and good news. The bad is that Judge Rowbottom lifted the injunction this morning and scheduled a hearing after the first of the year. He’s preening around the Dirksen building like he’s just been named to the supreme court. The good news is that Judge Brown has held Abercrombie in contempt of court and sentenced him to a week in the Federal lockup. The marshals arrested him when he came out of the Hilton this morning. His lawyers are going crazy. So are the media. Don’t miss the noonday news! Gerry and Tom are appealing this afternoon as planned. Funny thing is that George Bush the First appointed Ebenezer to the bench and he’s a Republican. I’ll keep you informed.”

  I’d spent too much time in the courtrooms of this litigious country to regret that I was not part of the scene. Cindy was a lawyer. She loved every second of it. If we lost
the case, the Christmas specials were dead. I could still sing me songs to me own kids and we’d get out a record anyway.

  Ellie came in about ten from her class at Loyola, all excited about how wonderful college was. She took me son from me arms. Faithless one that he is, he deserted me without protest.

  “Come on now, little punk, your ma has work to do.”

  “Didn’t you and your ma get along well enough in the kitchen last night?”

  She sighed, a bad habit that she had picked up from me.

  “My mom is okay, Aunt Nuala.”

  “Learned a lot, has she now, since you walked out on her? Sometimes parents grow up in a hurry, don’t they?”

  “Like you say, Aunt Nuala, mothers and daughters bond by fighting.”

  Aunt Nuala was becoming an authority to be quoted.

  The next interruption was a call from another one of those who had decided I was a trusted confidante.

  “You were right, Nuala, as you well know. Jack was wonderful. He told me that he always knew I could take care of myself, but now he was absolutely certain!”

  “Brilliant.”

  Me husband says that brilliant is the superlative of the Irish adjective grand and the comparative is super.

  “He laughed at my description of my ‘destruction’ as he calls it of Sterling and said he wasn’t sure he wanted a shotgun rack in our apartment. I felt like a fool for ever doubting his reaction. He also said to pass on the word to you and Dermot that Sterling is a bad ’un and that we should keep an eye on him.”

  “Me man has already passed that information on to Mike Casey.”

  “He made me promise not to throw a camera unless it was one of those small ones.”

  “And you replied . . .”

  “Oh, that there were always objects around the house that you can throw at an obstreperous husband. . . .”

  “And then you had a lot of fun?”

  “We did that, Nuala Anne . . . I still feel like a fool for being scared of him . . . I’m a very lucky woman.”

  “You’re not the only lucky person in the family, not even the luckiest.”