Irish Tiger

by Andrew M. Greeley

  “And the vice president? Didn’t he have his own group of intellectuals?”

  “I never liked the man. . . . I couldn’t stand him, to tell the truth. Never give an angry man like him a little power. . . . He also has offended a lot of good Christians out here in my district . . . well, what used to be my district”—he laughed lightly—“by publicly supporting his lesbo daughter. Privately I don’t mind. But doesn’t the Bible say that the sin is an abomination in his sight?”

  “I’m a Catholic, Ster, I don’t know much about the Bible.”

  I had studied the scriptures for two years at Marquette and knew a lot about what God said and didn’t say. Once I had the idea of becoming a Jesuit and going off to the Biblical Institute in Rome.

  “You’d flunk out there too, Dermot,” my brother Prester George had said bluntly. “You’re not cut out for schoolwork.”

  He was probably right. However, I believe that I know a lot and did a good job as an autodidact even before I met me wife—and that was a whole education in itself.

  “I finally came to the conclusion as I was trying to put the rest of my life together that the president isn’t a very bright man. We all kidded ourselves on that. And he’s as stubborn as a German farmer out here in Sunshine County.”

  I was silent for a moment. No point in jotting that down.

  “In other words, Mike, we had a great opportunity after we got rid of that notorious sinner. And we blew it. And I’m partly responsible. . . .”

  He reclined back in his chair and sipped his coffee. He was himself a notorious sinner. Yet his reverie seemed to disclose a man who, within his own limitations, was trying to be honest with himself. Or perhaps a man who was trying to persuade himself that he was trying to be honest.

  “I made a lot of mistakes locally too. . . . You just came out from Chicago. You saw how the prairie which once separated us from the city becomes smaller every year. I came back here often and hardly noticed it, even though I was heavily engaged in the local modernization effort. We rehabilitated this town, so it was true to its past and yet a place to escape from the hubbub of urban life—especially the drugs and the crime . . . and the sex. . . .”

  The kids at the local high school almost certainly had similar problems as did kids in Chicago high schools.

  “And a good place for someone to catch a breath of fresh air between flights at O’Hare or maybe to schedule a small private professional conference in a restful environment. Maybe play a couple of rounds of golf between sessions. I am proud of the course at Oakdale Country Club. I put a lot of work into its development. We believe it is the best golf course west of Lake Michigan and we are hoping to get a major professional tourney here in the next couple of years.”

  “That’s quite an achievement.”

  “I’m facing an obvious decision now. I’ve been offered a senior position in an important firm. . . .”

  “On K Street?”

  He frowned, not appreciating my insight.

  “As a matter of fact, no. . . But right around the corner. I would like it. I’d still be playing in the big game. As much as I hated life in the district, I also loved the excitement, the drama, the challenge. . . . Something like hunting. . . Well I gave up hunting and I lost the big game in the district. Viv, my wife, would be happy to stay. She’s winding things down in our condo now. She’ll be home for Christmas and we’ll make a decision then. Man and wife should not be separated for long.”

  Two days away from me own high-maintenance wife and I became your prototypical melancholy Irish male wondering where he’ll find his next drink.

  “Well, come on, let’s go over and have lunch. Your driver can follow after us, can’t he? Tell him I’ll wind a bit through the town so he can see what we’ve done with it.”

  As he conducted his booster’s tour of Oakdale, I tried to put together my thoughts about this not very bright but not uncomplicated man. He loved the town as much as Maria did. Or did he? Was this whole story an attempt to clear himself of suspicion? Or was it on the level? In his own way, twisted surely, did he also love her and hence want to add her beauty and talent to his collection? A strange kind of love.

  I’d have to see what me wife could make of it.

  The clubhouse was magnificent, reminiscent of Augusta, but somehow more decent and matter-of-fact. One could admire it and not suffer the temptation to dismiss it as reaching too far.

  The course itself was not the best between the Great Lakes and the Pacific Coast, as he claimed while we walked a couple of holes. But it was damned good. He carried a seven iron and a bag of balls as we walked. (My Reliable followed at a distance, watching very carefully. He would make a good lawyer.) We came to the tee for the eighth. It was a par three with a narrow fairway which was mostly rough and woods between the tee and the green save for a ring of sand traps and a tiny pond in front of the green. He teed up a ball and slammed it. It went into the water. The second burrowed deep into a sand trap and the third lost itself in rough.

  “Have a shot, Mike?”

  All my deep macho competitive genes surged within me. The hormones coursed through my veins. I’d show the son of a bitch. A good investigator would have botched all the shots. But under those circumstances I was not a good investigator. I put my first shot three feet from the cup.

  Ster chuckled softly. I glanced back at him. Amusement was already replacing rage on his face. Not in time.

  “Great shot, Mike, you do play a little golf now and then, don’t you! Can I interest you in a complimentary membership in the club. You’d be eligible for a shot at the championship tourney at the end of the summer. We’d make a great two-ball team.”

  I accepted the gift, but made no promises about the tourney.

  “My work piles up then. . . so many of the older men are on vacation.”

  “Let’s go in and have a drink on it.”

  “Only one . . . I have to take notes.”

  “One is my limit at lunch and only when I’m entertaining. One at supper too. Any more than that and I become dangerous.”

  Again I wonder whether this was true or part of an act.

  At the lunch table I ordered bourbon on the rocks—Scotch is forbidden in our house and Nuala would want to know what I had to eat and drink for lunch, especially if she thought I might do some of the driving. He ordered a Caesar salad for lunch and assured me it was first-rate. It was, though I like my Caesar best when it was soaking in garlic dressing.

  A symbol of the reformed Sterling Stafford? I didn’t know.

  “Another thing I missed out here was the importance of Northern. I remembered it as a kind of teachers’ college and I didn’t want to be a teacher. I got them a lot of grants and in return they gave me an honorary degree. I got them more grants and they asked me to give a graduation address that one of my staff wrote for me. Then somehow—I’ll be damned if I know when—it became a great university, about where Champaign was when I was thinking about college. That was something I should have been proud of. And afraid of too. Great university means high-quality faculty. The way things are these days that means a lot of liberals. And that means a lot of Democrats. And a lot of Jews. They not only vote all the time, they campaign like Chicago precinct captains. You put them together with Oakdale and add the soccer moms and the Hispanics and you have the beginnings of a winning coalition. I was not unaware of them because they picketed my office every time I voted against something they liked—this damned global warming stuff, for instance. You add Iraq to the mix and I’m in serious trouble. There were a lot of other Republican team players in the House in the same fix. We murmured about it in private, but we still believed that the country was in a conservative mood and in favor of punishing the Islamofascists. We kept our mouths shut, confident that the president and his boy Karl Rove would pull the rabbit out of the hat again.”

  “They let you down?”

  “Hell, yes! They didn’t care much if a lot of us lost, but they thought their majori
ty was safe. Turned out it wasn’t and somehow that was our fault.”

  “The buck doesn’t stop in the Oval Office?”

  “Not for a long time.”

  He toyed with his salad but ate only some of it.

  “So here I am, back in my district, hurting from defeat and wondering whether I should go back to the Beltway and play the game for the fun of it and not because I need the money or stay here with my farm and my country club and my national landmark little town—and it was the little town that beat me.”

  “Oakdale?”

  He sighed again, not like the way my Nuala Anne sighs, but a sadness of real agony mixed with grief for the passing of the years.

  “Not merely the voters here, they were never on my side, though this time they really turned out in force. But, you see, Mike, the president of the Oakdale Democrats was the woman behind the Oakdale plan. . . . What should I call her. . .? The organizer and the creative genius. . . We were allies, not exactly friends, but I thought we respected each other. . . . That’s the way it is in politics, I guess. . . . You won’t put anything about her in the story, please?”

  “Okay,” I said, closing my notebook.

  “We were never lovers, you see, though I often thought that would not be a bad idea, especially since Viv never came home on weekends. And my friend had a marriage problem of her own. Nothing ever came of it and I’m glad now of that. But it still hurts.”

  A quick flash of anger appeared in his dark eyes and then disappeared.

  “I understand.”

  “Well, her marriage problem cleared up and she married a man in Chicago. She comes back often, but I don’t see her. . . . Sometimes I wonder . . . But this defeat has brought me and Viv closer together than we’ve been in a long time. . . . So I suppose it’s all for the best.”

  An expurgated version of what happened but a usable rationalization for a fractured ego.

  “Maybe Junior did me a great favor when he didn’t fire Rummy. Maybe I’m out of there in the knick of time. Maybe I should be proud of my achievements and let it go at that. Let the liberals run the country for a while and see how they mess it up.”

  At the door of the clubhouse, I introduced him to my man Colm, a student in law school.

  “I always thought I might like the law,” Sterling Stafford mused. “One thing led to another and I never did. I’ve concluded that I made a mistake. Lawyers have an edge on everyone in society.”

  “Only,” my man Colm said, “because they make the rules where the edge is.”

  We all laughed.

  “I’d know your friend was Irish,” Ster said, “even if I didn’t know his name.”

  I waited till we were out on I-80 before calling Nuala Anne.

  “Nuala Anne,” she said crisply, her artistic impresario face totally in place.

  “Her husband.”

  “Och, Dermot Michael Coyne, aren’t you a wonderful husband altogether to be calling and myself in a disaster area?”

  “A frigging disaster, is it now?”

  She pondered for a moment.

  “I wouldn’t go that far, not yet? But in all me life as a director, I’ve never seen a worse dress rehearsal or final run-through or whatever you want to call it.”

  “Did you cuss them out?”

  “I’m an amadon as you know, Dermot love, but not that much of an eejit. I had a swarm of little girls, including poor Socra Marie and Katiesue. Didn’t I tell them how great they were and how wonderful they’d be tomorrow night at the taping? And weren’t some of the mothers angry at me for not going after them?”

  “That’s not your style, Nuala, except when you’re straightening me out.”

  “Go long with you, Dermot Michael Coyne, I never give you a hard time save when it’s for your own good and don’t you know that?”

  “What will it be like at the taping?”

  “Won’t they be friggin’ brilliant? And if I made them cry, any more than they did, after tomorrow I’d have to be on the first plane to Shannon.”

  “Do you know this?”

  “Would I be saying it if I didn’t know? The small ones are winners! Now what did you learn about our gobshite friend out beyond?”

  “Not what I expected at all, at all.”

  “’Tis interesting. . . We’ll have to talk about it tonight.”

  “You’ll be too worn and frazzled.”

  “Don’t be an eejit. . . . How long have you been married to me?”

  “A couple of eternities. . . All right we’ll talk about it tonight. . . . How are the Donlans doing?”

  “Doesn’t poor Jackie feel like he’s died and gone to heaven and his wife and his daughters and his stepdaughters treating him like he’s best thing since the invention of stock markets. The dentists and the plastic people have done him so that by Christmas he’ll look better than new.”

  “And his company?”

  “Still the value of the company is falling but not too badly, considering. Frodo and Samwise are standing firm. So’s the ELG thing. If we can unknot this puzzle by Christmas, they’ll bounce back.”

  “Will we? Can we?”

  “Don’t ever doubt an Irish Tiger. . . . See you at supper. Tell Colm to drive carefully.”

  Which I did of course. With a wife from the same ethnic background he assumed such a warning and would have been disappointed if it were not delivered.

  At supper it emerged that the doggies were in, you should excuse the expression, the dog house. They had misbehaved terrible altogether at the run-through, fighting with each other, and interrupting the songs with their infernal howling and chasing imaginary rats. That was unlike them. They had been banished to the Navigator where they howled all the more.

  Me wife who looked thin enough and haggard enough to be hauled off to the emergency room herself was upset with the hounds.

  “The kids,” she said “don’t know any better, but the puppies know they’re supposed to behave.”

  The children were helped with their homework and put to bed as they sang songs to one another.

  “You’ll be brilliant tomorrow,” she informed them. “Now just one more time through the Connemara lullaby and then off to the land of Nod.”

  Patjo and Socra Marie were most of the way there.

  The hounds wandered into the songfest looking sheepish, if such a description can be applied to wolfhounds. Fiona, by reason of seniority, nudged me wife by way of apology. She embraced them both and produced a treat for both of them. The reconciliation was thereby sealed.

  In our bedroom, after our showers, I recounted for herself my verbatim discussion with Sterling Silver Stafford aided by my notebook.

  “Now isn’t that the strangest thing!” she said, pondering my report. “What were you after thinking, Dermot Michael?”

  “Wasn’t I kind of thinking that he wasn’t quite clever enough to make up the whole story.”

  “It’s a story he’s told himself many times and yet he can’t quite believe it all. . . . He’d be happier if he filled in the blanks with the truth. . . .”

  The hounds entered the room together, a rare enough event. Something was brewing.

  “It’s all right, puppies, I’m not angry at you anymore.”

  They cuddled up around her legs, and she patted them both. They were still restless.

  My good wife began to shiver. She looked at me, her eyes wide with fear.

  “Dermot! Someone’s going to blow up my Navigator in the parking lot tomorrow night, just when people are coming out of the auditorium! Hundreds are going to die, including maybe us. We have to stop them!”

  Dermot

  WE BOTH froze. Nuala Anne has such intense warning experiences only rarely. They terrify her and frighten me as if someone is holding a gun to my skull. Something very bad was about to go down out there and we had to stop it. But we had only the faintest idea what it was and how to stop it. The warnings were vague and erractic and sometimes wrong. There was no way to be sure. Who w
ould want to blow up her car and kill the people that would come to the taping, including, if John Culhane were to be believed, the mayor and the senator? Was it part of the Donlan puzzle which seemed to escalate every day? It had started out as a harmless item in a gossip column and now it threatened mass murder.

  “Are you sure?” I asked, wrapping her trembling body in my arms.

  “I’m sure the explosion is out there. . . . But sometimes it’s wrong, never when it’s this strong. . . . Och, Dermot love, don’t I wish that I was never fey? Isn’t it terrible altogether.”

  “Are you sure it’s your Lincoln?”

  “It looks like it. . . . Sure, I hope that we all of us die together, even the puppies.”

  “None of us are gong to die, Nuala Anne. We’ve beaten the bad guys before and we’ll do it again.”

  “Ma! Ma!” Nelliecoyne rushed into the room in her Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs pajamas.

  She threw her arms around her ma and sobbed.

  “What’s wrong, cara, what’s wrong? Are them terrible Snow White dreams bothering you again?”

  She had discovered an old Snow White tape and shown it to the younger kids, who loved it. Somehow it had scared her—though she was immune to nocturnal troubles after Harry Potter and the Ring books.

  “The wicked dwarf is setting off a huge explosion, like a meteorite hitting our neighborhood! It blinded me for a few moments! . . . Oh, Ma, wasn’t it terrible altogether! I knew I was dying! We were all dying!”

  The two hounds rose on their hind legs as if to protect mother and child from impending doom. Poor Da could fend for himself.