Irish Tiger

by Andrew M. Greeley

  What would, in the circumstances, be a wise reply?

  “Well, I’ve been feeling tired a lot lately. I guess I need a vacation. . . .”

  Never argue with an Irish Tiger!

  Note

  The North Central section of Illinois in this story is mostly fictional. I think I have crossed the Fox River no more than half a dozen times in my life. Oakdale is entirely fictional. The Kishwaukee County and River, Rockford, DeKalb, and Northern Illinois University actually exist but my rendering is fictional. Do not search for Oakdale because, alas, you will find it only in my imagination. The tactics of the Chicago police presented in this story are also completely fictional as well as various police officers. Neither the Reliables nor Godzilla actually exist. Indeed everyone in this book is fictional. It does not follow, however, that they do not exist vividly in my imagination and haunt my dreams

  God is not fictional.

  Tucson

  Vernal Equinox,

  St. Patrick’s Week

  2007

  Turn the page for a preview of

  IRISH

  TWEED

  A Nuala Anne

  McGrail Novel

  ANDREW M.

  GREELEY

  Available February 2009

  A FORGE HARDCOVER

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7653-2223-4

  ISBN-10: 0-7653-2223-4

  Copyright © 2009 by Andrew M. Greeley Enterprises, Ltd.

  The First Battle

  THE WOLFHOUNDS were howling. That wasn’t right. When they were angry, normally they barked. Why were they making a fuss on this early September afternoon, dense with humidity? When they howled they were furious, ready to fight at the slightest notice. Where were they? I rolled over in my bed, trying to straighten out this puzzle. Normally the gentlest of God’s creatures, hounds are big, terrifying monsters when they are offended. In the school yard, they adored and were adored by the kids. What would make them angry . . . Why would they howl? Only if someone for whom they were responsible was under attack? Who could that be?

  Nuala Anne! My wife!

  I jumped out of my bed, ignoring my pained muscles (thirty-six holes at Lost Dunes) and rushed to the window. Across the street the school yard was in chaos. Kids were swirling around in battle with one another. Nuala was in the middle of the fight. The hounds were trying to drag her across the yard so they could make short work of the bad guys. My four children were fully engaged—Mary Anne, just turned thirteen, helped her mother to restrain the hounds, eleven-year-old Micheal (Me-Hall, AKA the Mick) had pinned a big kid on the ground, nine-year-old Socra Marie and seven-year-old Patjo were pounding on the Mick’s foe, and the new principal, her ascetic face twisted in rage, was screaming at my wife. Various other parents were engaged in battle to protect their own children from the Ostrogoths who were trying to beat them up.

  Pulling on my jeans and Marquette sweatshirt, I charged down the outdoor stairs of our pre–Civil War three storey, wondering what the hell I was supposed to do. On the way down I noted that a woman, shaped rather like a bowling ball, rolled across the yard and knocked my three youngest to the ground. Frank Sauer, the parish priest and a classmate of my brother George, was nowhere to be seen. The unengaged children were chanting “Fight! Fight! Fight!”

  Dr. Lorraine Fletcher, the principal, slapped Nuala Anne’s face. The doggies went ballistic, Mary Anne grabbed their leashes so that her mother, a newly minted black belt, could kick Dr. Fletcher in the stomach and send her reeling into the mud of the yard . . .

  “No! Doggies!” I shouted.

  “Stop!” My valiant daughter shouted.

  “Sit!” Her mother added the decisive word.

  They did, of course.

  Julie, our golden-haired nanny, pulled the human bowling ball off the Mick, who promptly slugged his assailant (as I presumed the lout on the ground must be), gathered his younger siblings, and redeployed to where his mother and father stood. I whistled a signal to my troops that we were to engage on a strategic retreat.

  “I’m a-callin’ the po-lice, over to the sixth precinct, and a-tellin’ them that the polecats have taken over at St. Joe’s. I saw Nuala kick that polecat bitch after she done slapped her. I’ll testify in court.”

  It was Cindasue Lou McCloud Murphy, Commander in the Yewnited States Coast Guard and some kind of gumshoe for the Secret Service. She had an arm around her son Peteyjack and the other arm around her daughter Katiesue.

  “I wanna kick that phony bitch just once more,” my wife, teeth clenched in determination, begged.

  “Maire Phinoula Ain,” I insisted, “You do not! . . . Julie, you and Mary Anne, get her mother back in the house before the cops come.”

  Somehow I now had responsibility for Maeve and Fiona. They had begun to howl again.

  “Shut up!” I shouted at them.

  Surprised, the two mutts fell into line with our retreating militia. I did not ordinarily presume to give them instructions. It may have been that my wife, who maintained some kind of creepy extrasensory communication links with them, had ordered them to chill out.

  Inside our castle, everyone wanted to talk at the same time.

  “Julie,” I said, “I think we all need a hot chocolate with whipped cream . . . Sorci, will you help her, please?”

  Delighted to be given adult responsibility, our onetime-tiny neonate followed Julie to the kitchen.

  I sat down on our antique couch next to me wife, who was quivering with many different explosive emotions. Mary Anne was on the other side, both of us helping Nuala to chill out.

  The dogs arranged themselves at her feet, ready to resume the fight should the enemy return.

  “I’m a-goin’ out to talk to them thar cops, a-tellin’ them that the little kids are rebellin’ ’gainst the junior high school polecats who are a-takin’ their money.”

  “Bobby Finnerty, if you need a name, ma’am.”

  Mary Anne kissed her mother’s cheek.

  “Ma, you were wonderful. The Revered Teacher will be proud of you.”

  Later on, as supper time approached, the tangled lines of the story began to emerge. There had been a parents’ meeting at the school. Father Sauer had introduced the new principal, a lean and hungry polecat, according to Cindasue, to whom everyone took an immediate dislike. She announced that henceforth St. Joe’s would be a Catholic school because it would exercise the “fundamental option for the poor,” which meant that no special favors would be granted to the children of the affluent or of celebrities or to children who were good athletes. Everyone would be equal and the only discrimination would be in favor of the poor. When asked about the bullying of little ones by “big kids” who were taking their money from them, she had replied that sometimes the poor may take revolutionary action to reestablish equality.

  “That polecat just plain crazy.”

  “It means she selects the basketball team,” Mary Anne explained, “not coach. And no seventh graders can play on the eighth-grade team.”

  “Guess who that means!” the Mick, still angry, shouted. “So this morning the bullies started pushing around the little kids like Sorci and Patjo.”

  “I pushed back,” Patjo said.

  “And so we organized our own revolution!” the Mick continued.

  “Who is this ‘we’?” I asked.

  “Me and Liz Boyle.”

  Ms. Boyle was the local hellion, a sweet little blond with an enchanting smile.

  “Good ally,” I conceded.

  “What kind of a Catholic place is this,” my wife protested, “that has revolutions and counterrevolutions . . . I’m so ashamed of myself!”

  “I’m not ashamed of you, Ma,” Mary Anne said. “She had it coming!”

  “Dermot Michael Coyne, you’ve raised a brood of bloody radicals!”

  “Apples don’t fall that far from their trees,” I replied.

  Fortunately the melee did not make the evening news.

  “Nuala Anne in mob fight with kids!�
� she said. “Wouldn’t that have been a great lead.”

  Wouldn’t it now?

  “I lost it altogether, Dermot Michael,” my good wife said. “I should never have kicked that bitch in the stomach.”

  “You were just defending your kids, Ma.” The Mick inched his way on to the now-crowded couch.

  The whole lot of them, I told myself, were wild uhns from the West of Ireland. In times of trouble when the wolves were howling, my genes became recessive.

  1

  MY BEAUTIFUL wife, Nuala Anne, is doing martial arts these days. Like everything she does, she’s an enthusiast about her program of “Self-Defense for Women.” One night every week, she dons her floppy white clothes, tightens her black belt, and goes over to the storefront on Clark Street to learn from “the Revered Teacher” how to fend off and incapacitate would-be assailants. Sometimes she brings along one of our snow-white wolfhounds, which, she insists, are very popular with the group.

  “’Tis not that I’m afraid of you, Dermot love,” she says anxiously as we wait in the parlor of our home on Southport Avenue for the advent of Julie’s date. “It’s not that kind of attack that I want to resist.”

  “We’ll see,” I say, not wanting to give up a talking point in our culture of banter.

  In some of our recent adventures me wife has battered, routed, and incapacitated troublesome males with considerable éclat. The only resistance I encounter is symbolic, part of the games we play in bed—or anywhere else when there is opportunity. However, I rarely challenge her when she has a new idea. My challenge would make her feel guilty, but it wouldn’t stop her. If me wife says she feels the need to learn taekwondo, I go along. Her instincts, I have learned in thirteen years of marriage, are usually dead on.

  Fiona, our senior wolfhound, ambled in the room and sat at me wife’s feet.

  “Doesn’t this one want to get a look at Julie’s date,” she said as she patted the compliant canine’s massive head. “Just like that one that just went upstairs.” “That one” was our Mary Anne (in the past also known as Nellie or Nelliecoyne), an auburn-haired beauty on the cusp of adulthood. Nuala Anne’s conceit was that she had no control whatever over our eldest, and she was now my responsibility. This was pure fiction. The two of them had bonded long ago and, both being part witch, they communicated silently with one another. Against me, as I claimed. Nuala bonded with every woman that came into our sprawling antebellum house. That was the only way she could properly take care of them. Julie alone of our nannies resisted the link—mostly out of shyness, I thought. Instead she bonded with Mary Anne, which perhaps gave my wife an indirect link, not one which assuaged her Connemara sense of maternal responsibility.

  “I’m sure her ma expects me to take care of her and herself all them thousands of miles away from Dublin at Loyola University, the poor little thing.”

  You must understand that the key words which began with th- emerged sounding like “dem,” “dousands,” and “ding”—the Irish language lacks a sound to correspond with our th. I had long since given up my battle to transform her dialect from Galwegan to Mercan. Yet when our oldest began to speak “the way they do back home,” me wife would comment, “Won’t dem kids at St. Ignatius College Prep laugh at you for being uncivilized.”

  “The ones from da Soudside won’t even notice.”

  “Dermot Michael Coyne! You must do something about your daughter.”

  “Isn’t it too late now, and yourself having spoiled her rotten?”

  Thus we bantered with one another—outside our bedroom anyway.

  Me wife is a beautiful woman, as I have said. In fact, she is many beautiful women, and an actress at that she was at TCD (Trinity College Dublin), as well as a singer. She slips from one persona into another with practiced ease—the shy and charming young singer from Carraoe in Connemara, the disciplined athlete who ran the marathon and played hoops with her daughter over in the school yard of St. Joe’s, the stiff, shrewd investment broker at Arthur Andersen (who got out long before the bailiff arrived), the grand duchess sashaying down Michigan Avenue in the Easter Parade, oblivious to the hungry stares of men and the resentful expressions of women, the modest virgin who might have become a nun and who could outpray most of the women in the world (especially when our tiny neonate was dying), the ingenious slut with whom I slept.

  I loved them all.

  She was five feet nine inches tall, and had pale blue eyes which suggested a rare sunny day on Galway Bay, long thick black hair, and buttermilk-smooth skin. Her voice evoked, for me anyway, the sound of church bells heard from a distance over the bogs. I fell in love with her the first night I encountered her with a world economics textbook in O’Neil’s Pub on the College Green (which hasn’t been green for centuries) and she repudiated my efforts to “chat her up” with a dismissive, “Focking rich Yank.” According to her, she knew then and there, as I gawked at her breasts while she was singing about Molly Malone—and weeping at poor Molly’s fate—that she would have to sleep with me sometime.

  She’d had a hard time at first in Yank Land—homesick, afraid of me and my family (all of whom adored her), hunted down by the feds as an illegal (which she wasn’t), terrified at the prospect of becoming a concert singer. Marriage did not make life any easier—four pregnancies, one of them causing a sustained trauma of postpartum depression and another a premature little girl child, Socra Marie, who was now our tiny terrorist. And she had to live in the same house with me, the four kids, the cook, the nannies, and the hounds. I was the most difficult of them all.

  “Me poor Dermot Michael, he doesn’t do much of anything useful. He started his life as a gambler (read ‘commodity trader’), then he retired and lived off his winnings and he just sits around daydreaming and writing poetry and stories.”

  “And I didn’t say that you devour me with your hungry eyes all day long, did I?”

  “You’re the one who is a poet, woman of the house. And you didn’t say either that I’m your spear-carrier, your Doctor Watson, your Captain Hastings, your Monsieur Flambeau.”

  “Actually you’re my Baker Street Irregular.”

  You see, my Nuala Anne solves puzzles. According to Commander Culhane of the Sixth Precinct Detectives and Superintendent Michael Casey of Reliable Security, she is the best “natural” detective they have ever met, save perhaps for her good friend Blackie Ryan, sometime Rector of the Cathedral and now, “by the inattention of the Holy Spirit and ineptitude of the Holy See, Cardinal Archbishop of Chicago.”

  The doorbell rang.

  “’Tis himself,” my wife said.

  That could have been a guess, a statement of probability, or a certainty. You see, my wife is fey. She even sees halos around people’s heads (mine is silver and blue, if you’re interested), a trait she shares with the good Mary Anne.

  “Answer the door, Dermot Michael, and remember his name is not Finnbar Michael but Finnbar Me-hall, just like yours is Dir-mud.”

  “With the emphasis on mud.”

  I struggled to my feet and glanced at her quickly. Her body was turned at such an angle that her torso outlined itself against the floppy gown. My thoughts of lust or love, hard to say which or what combination of both was at work, that had teased my imagination all day, took over. Ah, it would be a fun night.

  She knew of course about my fantasies almost before I did—and sometimes, maybe always, stirred them up. I learned how to read the glint in her eyes which was a signal that she wouldn’t half mind. There was, I told myself, the required glint. It didn’t follow that there would not be a show of resistance, hesitation, insistence that we both had a hard day tomorrow and should have a good night’s sleep. This was all, I had come to realize, nothing more than symbolic behavior which meant, “yes, why not?” She would beg off on occasion, with a signal in her eyes.

  One night after a particularly delightful romp, she said, “Isn’t it a good thing now, Dermot Michael, that we enjoy this so much. Otherwise it would be difficult to live to
gether, and meself an accountant and yourself a poet.”

  “’Tis true,” I said with the required sigh.

  “And yourself telling me all along that I’m a beautiful woman and meself not believing it at all, at all.”

  “That’s why God created us humans to be lovers.”

  “’Tis true,” she said.

  So, of course, when I had looked out the window there was a small decrepit Asian-looking car, probably “previously owned” and maybe “previously owned” twice. A young man emerged, barely of medium height, six inches shorter than me and an inch or two shorter than Nuala. More than big enough for the diminutive Julie. He glanced up at the house, noted the stairway to the second floor, shrugged his shoulders and began, somewhat gingerly like all first-time guests, to ascend the stairs. He was wearing a dark suit (vaguely navy blue, perhaps) purchased off a rack somewhere. He was also wearing an Irish tweed hat, which he removed and stuffed into his jacket pocket halfway up the stairs. His hair was blond with bushy curls and his face was already tainted red—and not from climbing the stairs. Not handsome, not a man of power, but surely cute and perhaps even adorable.

  He knocked on the door. I opened it promptly.

  His smile was easy and charming.

  “Good evening, Mr. McGrail. Finnbar Burke. With your permission I’d like to take Julie Crean to the motion pictures tonight.”

  Very formal but still with a grin that forced me to grin.

  I shook hands with him.

  “I’m Dermot, Finnbar. Mr. McGrail is my father-in-law over across in Connemara. The woman of the house is the gorgeous woman behind me, my wife Nuala Anne McGrail.”

  “Dressed for combat, I see.”

  He was inundated by a stream of Irish, Galway dialect I expected.

  He responded with his own stream.

  Both of them showing off.

  “Like all good Cork men,” Nuala Anne observed, “you still have that patada in your mouth.”