“Do I ever!”
I would not report that part of the conversation to me wife.
Better not.
“You gotta have a wife that understands you and stands by you, regardless. Sex holds people together just so long. Then you gotta have shared values and commitments, like my wife and I have, and good kids too. Poor Jackie married the first time essentially because he wanted to get laid. It didn’t work. I think he’d be more careful this time, know what I mean? I’m sure he’s getting a lot of action and I say good for him. More power to him, but, like I say that wears off. The kids won’t come to the wedding. There’s that nightmare over at St. Freddy’s and all the publicity. Hell of a way to start a marriage. I met her the first time at the dinner at the Four Seasons. She knew who I was and understood what I was doing, more than poor Faith ever did. Anyway Maria was charming and gracious and I thought, well, maybe it will work out. But I notice she has a tongue on her, know what I mean. Funny, real funny, always has a final comment that makes you laugh. I tell myself that Jackie who is a very serious guy will get tired of that after a while. Then she might be just a little too much. Like I say, sex is the most important thing a couple of months before the marriage and the least important thing a couple of months after. Know what I mean?”
“Do I ever!” I lied again.
Liar.
Shut up.
You think he’s abnormal. Ever think you might be?
No.
Yes you do.
“You know who the people were who warned you on LaSalle Street?”
“You know what it’s like with those things, someone says something in passing and you hear it and kind of remember it, but you can’t call back the face. I do remember the guy saying that one of the victims was the Congressman out in that district, what’s his name . . .?”
“Sterling Stafford?”
“Yeah, that guy . . . Well the word is that she let him screw her into the next county and then dropped him and he’s never been the same since.”
Threw a camcorder at him, actually.
“He’s married, isn’t he?”
“Yeah I saw him concede on television. She was lurking near him. Not bad for their age, but I don’t know.”
Bingo!
“Come on, let’s have lunch, there’s a great steakhouse up on Sheridan Road. I made a reservation.”
I resolved firmly that I would have fish.
He couldn’t let the topic go. After I had ordered my Alaskan salmon, so called, he returned to it.
“I sure hope she’s nice to him, long run I mean. Poor Jackie is a fragile guy and he’s been hurt enough, know what I mean. She could destroy him, eat him alive like they say she did to Stafford. That’s what a lot of women do. Can’t blame them. They have to get as much as they can, before it’s too late.”
“Does she seem like she’s the kind to do that?”
“No, but Jackie was probably the biggest catch she ever encountered, that’s the way those kind of women are.”
As I drove down Clark Street toward Fullerton, I decided I didn’t like Louis Garner, one bit. His elegance was an expensive veneer of class for a man who was quite incapable of being anything but vulgar. He would have been suspicious of Nuala reading her world economics book that night at O’Neil’s on College Green and her dismissal of me as a “focking rich Yank” when all the time she was thinking that she might have to fall in love with me. She’s still embarrassed when I remind her of it.
“And yourself taking off me clothes in that dirty imagination of yours!”
Those issues were irrelevant, however, to the present case.
When I pulled up to our prefire (Chicago Fire) house on Sheffield, the same crowd of cars were lined up, plus a network van from CTN. So we’d won the case? Well good on us.
You let that gombeen man interfere with your normal good disposition. Don’t rain on their parade.
Your metaphors are worse than ever.
As I walked up the two flights of stairs—Chicago houses in those days immediately after the Civil War had their entrance on the second floor because the first floor was a sea of mud—I heard singing, not lullabies, but drinking songs and also the happy howling of wolfhounds.
My daughter Nelliecoyne emerged and waited for me on the little porch at the top of the steps. She gave me the thumbs-up sign and then shouted ecstatically when she hugged me, “We won, Da! Poor Ma is so happy and herself pretending that it was no big deal!”
In the parlor, me good wife, tears flooding her face, which in turn glowed with light, was talking to the camera.
“Well, the Grinch didn’t steal Christmas, did he now, and himself, poor dear man, furious at his colleagues . . . The fight is a shame altogether. I don’t like fighting at all, we Irish women are a peaceful and forgiving people. We have to be because our men require so much forgiveness. . . . Christmas should be a peaceful time. I’m sorry we had to protect our Christmas songs and themselves again from all over the world. I hope they do a little bit to bring people closer together. The children for whom lullabies are sung deserve a world where people are closer together. So we’ll all pray that the people who hear the songs will feel more peaceful. . . . I’m going to ask the kids to sing our Arab lullaby.”
While they sang the marvelous little number, mostly wordless exclamations of joy, Tom Hurley and I drifted into the library.
“The panel restored the ban on the injunction?”
“They did indeed do that and with withering sarcasm for the attempt to moot the issue with gobbledygook incantations—the chief justice’s very words—about church and state.”
“That’s the end of it, I hope?”
“Not at all, Derm, not at all! After the hearing in January, we’ll go back to the district court for relief from the damages done to the show by Mr. Abercrombie’s defamatory comments about it and for his gross violation of NBS’s contract. If herself wants to quit after next year, that’s fine. I don’t think they’re fun for her anymore, but we can’t let a raving maniac ruin it and leave a bitter taste in everyone’s mouth.”
“They’ll settle, I suppose?”
“Yeah, they’ll settle and they’ll put a lid on Triple A. . . . And your sister and I will be able to buy Christmas presents for our kids. . . .”
There was another dinner, for which Nuala had laid in supplies of hamburgers and hot dogs and much toasting. My heart was not in it at all. I was worried about the Donlans and the forces of evil I saw swilling around them. If I could sense converging threats, what might Nuala see. How did you prepare a Christmas concert and protect good people from crazies?
We said last night’s decade of the rosary before our conversation. Nuala poured a “jar” of whiskey for each one of us. Solemn high conversation.
“So tell me about the gombeen man who made you come in with such a long face?”
The woman doesn’t miss a thing.
You just noticed that?
So I told her about Lou Garner, Jack Donlan’s great friend.
“Wouldn’t he love to destroy him! All his success and fame and now Maria!”
“That about summarizes it.”
“And the gobshite thinks he fooled me husband too?”
“The curly haired yuppie in the blazer!”
“And Sterling Stafford apparently is talking about Maria?”
“Maybe he was talking about her before she whupped him and then lied to cover up what really happened.”
“Do you think so, Nuala Anne?”
“What do you think?”
“He sounds like the kind of man who broods about his failures in the seduction contest, especially when the woman makes a fool out of him. Then he gets drubbed in an election and he broods some more. Then he reads about a wedding and he explodes, but he’s not too smooth anymore and does some clumsy things.”
“He’s giving a talk down at the Union League Club tonight. The subject is the ‘Republican Revival.’ . . . Nine-fingered shitehawks! The
y’re properly beaten and already planning a way to sneak back in.”
My wife had never paid much attention to Irish politics, save for denouncing the leadership as amadons. However, she had been strongly influenced by my mother’s intense loyalty to the Democrats.
“If our man Barak wins the election,” I mused, “they’ll need a new senator from Illinois two years from now. Sterling is a little long in the tooth, but that would be a spectacular comeback.”
“And Maria is out there with the film of his trying to rape her. She’d never use it. . . . She hasn’t looked at it herself. . . . But she’s still got it, in case she should ever need it.”
Film is pronounced the Irish way as though there were a u between the l and the m.
We were both silent, nursing our jars cautiously because we knew they’d weaken our thinking.
“The problem is, Dermot Michael, that none of these things hang together yet. There’s a pattern out there, but all they tell us is that someone has a grudge against Jack and Maria, but they’re inept. . . . Maybe someone whom she once hit in the head with a camera. . . . I’ll ask Mike Casey to go down to the Union League and listen to your man.”
“Good idea . . . You’ve got a TV special to jump-start. . . .”
“That’s what you Yanks call a slice of cake.”
“Piece of cake.”
“Isn’t that because you eat it with your fingers! . . . When do you think they’ll reinstate that gobshite Tony Cuneen?”
“Huh?”
“Och! Dermot! And meself only a tad over thirty and losing me mind altogether . . . I forgot to tell you!”
She told me about the call from Mary Fran and her conversation with Jackie and “that sweet little Elfrida kid.”
“I think you should probably see a doctor or take a long rest. Yourself with four brat kids, a gobshite of a husband, and a court battle with some bad people, and you forget that you save a young man’s career and marriage by a single phone call.”
She was blushing and, having to decide between laughter and tears, opted for laughter.
“Would you ever fill up me jar again?”
“Woman, I would not!”
“Then you’ll have to make love with me or I won’t sleep at all, at all.”
“Well, it’s been a long, hard day, but I guess I might manage it.”
I snaked my hand up her thigh. She groaned in response.
I took her in my arms and warned her, “I’ll probably have to kiss you everywhere tonight.”
“Isn’t it what you would do to a poor woman who is losing her mind! . . . Do you think they have reinstated Tony yet?”
You weren’t even thinking about screwing her tonight and now you’re acting crazy.
There’s a lot of sex in this case and it’s festering in my head.
“Dermot Michael Coyne,” she gasped. “You’ve taken off all me clothes and we’re not in the bedroom yet. . . .”
“Who needs a bedroom!”
“Och . . . DERMOT!”
Nuala Anne
ME POOR husband is a heavy sleeper and after a small jar and a bit of serious loving, he sleeps like the room has fallen on his head.
I love him so much. I’m glad I decided when I came to Yank land that I wanted to spend the rest of my life in the same bed as he.
However, I have to keep one ear open at night in case there’s any noise in the kids’ rooms. The dogs are watching, but what’s the point in having a mother unless she is listening for your sounds at night?
Me husband doesn’t know all me secrets yet, but the ones he doesn’t know, don’t matter much. I hope he never becomes bored with me. Well, I can probably come up with some more secrets if I put what’s left of my mind to it.
I was only half asleep when the phone rang. Isn’t the phone ringing at night the most terrible sound altogether? You’re after wondering if someone is dead. . . . Dermot was next to me in bed, the kids were in their rooms . . . me ma or dad . . .
“Nuala Anne,” I said, as crisp as if I was wide awake.
“Blackie . . .”
Real trouble.
“What’s wrong?”
“Our friend John Donlan is in the emergency room at St. Joseph’s Hospital. He has been beaten brutally. . . .”
“Brigid, Patrick, and Colmcille! He isn’t dead, is he?”
“No life-threatening injuries, concussion, maybe some internal injuries. They’re doing X-rays and scans. A little concern about the concussion . . .”
“Maria is there?”
“Oh yes, she drove off the perpetrators with a golf club. . . . She is, however, somewhat stressed, as they say.”
“I’ll be right over.”
“That would be a good work. The situation here is somewhat problematic.”
I jumped out of bed, put on black jeans, a black sweatshirt, my black leather jacket, and my black boots. Granne O’Malley goes to war at night.
Well, you have to look the part, don’t you?
I grabbed a sheet of computer paper and a Magic Marker.
Dermot Michael. Jack injured. Off to St. Joseph’s. Call me on my cell.
The woman you slept with last night.
Maeve followed me downstairs. “You coming with me, girl? Okay, but you have to act right, understand?”
I jumped into me Lincoln Navigator, the hound right behind me. The thing about me car is that in a crisis situation it provides a certain gravity.
I know St. Joseph’s better than I’d like to. For four months we were there night and day, taking care of our little neonate, whose survival will always seem to me to be a miracle. “You sang her into life,” the resident told me. Socra Marie and I still go over there a couple of times a year “to sing for the babies” as she says.
Now she even sings on key sometimes.
I pulled up to the emergency room driveway—cop cars, Reliable cars, ambulance, Blackie’s cute little Smart Car, thank God no TV vans. I jumped out of my SUV—the license which announced “Nuala”—and walked in the door, my hound tagging along with me. Two young Latino attendants and a pretty African-American nurse waited at the door.
“The archbishop said you should go right in, Nuala. . . . And who is this lovely lady?”
“This is Maeve.”
Mavie politely offered her hand.
“Maeve, you stay here with this nice woman. If we need help, we’ll yell.”
“Archbishop Ryan said that you would come in a big red SUV with a big white dog, he didn’t say how pretty you are, darlin’.”
The hounds love adoration and when the two attendants Juan and Rodrigo cautiously joined the group, she was ready to settle in for the night.
The corridor outside the emergency room was crowded with people—Mike Casey, John Culhane, the commander of Area Six detectives, two detectives, both women, two cops, both men, several people in hospital gowns looking serious and a screaming Evie Cuneen and her befuddled husband Tony. Neither Blackie nor Maria were present.
Naturally I walked up to the two senior police officials. In me old country I’d avoid the Guards like they were Brits and we were still under occupation.
“Mike, how is he?”
“Nuala! I didn’t hear you come in! He’s still unconscious, likely concussion and possible internal injuries. They are a little worried about the concussion.”
I don’t like hospitals at all at all. I spent too much time in this one with my darling little tiny terrorist. At night they are especially gloomy. St. Joseph’s, being a Catholic hospital, was so clean that you could eat off the floor. Still these were places where life and death met under bright lights with the whole world dark outside and the smell of antiseptic dense in the air. Purgatory must be something like this—purgatory where you know for sure that things would somehow improve.
“Two thugs managed to sneak into his building and trapped him between the elevator and the door to his apartment,” John Culhane said. “Gangbangers probably. It’s not clear that they wanted
to kill him. Amateurs, probably, though as the superintendent points out, getting into that building would have been very difficult.”
Mike Casey hadn’t been superintendent of police for a long time, but it’s like a governor or an ambassador here in Yank land—the title is lifelong.
“His wife heard the ruckus outside, grabbed a five iron, rushed out into the corridor, and assaulted the perpetrators. They fled for their lives. She may well have saved her husband from far worse injuries. They were unsheathing knives when Maria entered the fray. Jack was covered with blood when they brought him in here, only it wasn’t his blood.”
“Mulier fortis,” I remarked.
“We picked up a couple of individuals on Clark Street, one of them bleeding,” Commander Culhane said. “They may be the perps. Both high on crack.”
“Amateurs of a sort,” Mike Casey added. “Someone else must have provided them with the means of access to the building.”
“Is that hysterical woman his daughter?” Culhane asked. “She’s making reckless charges against Ms. Donlan. And her kid is wailing. No one needs that here. . . .”
“It will be a pleasure to shut her up,” I said.
I strode over to Evie and shook her.
“Shut up, you crazy little bitch. You almost ruined your husband’s career the other day on the telly. Your poor dad bailed him out. If you don’t calm down, he’ll be chasing ambulances for the rest of your life.”
She glared at me, hate darting from her eyes. “That isn’t true, is it, Tony?”
“Yes, it is, Evie. They told me this afternoon I’d have another year of probation. If I appeared in public with you again, I’d have fifteen minutes to leave the offices.”
His face was dark with despair. His little son continued to wail.
“Why didn’t you tell me?” she asked, her body caving in on itself as though she had been hit in the stomach.
“I’ve been trying to tell you all afternoon. I couldn’t get by your hatred for your father’s wife.”
Irish Tiger Page 15