Irish Love

by Andrew M. Greeley

  (The Gaelic lacks the possessive pronoun. Often, and despite heroic efforts, I slip into her idiom.)

  “Och, sure, Dermot love, don’t you have the right of it?” she had said, collapsing into my arms in tears. “I promise.”

  YOU’D NEVER DIVORCE HER.

  So now she has indeed swallowed the medicine in my presence daily with a great show of phony obedience.

  “She knows I’d never divorce her.”

  We arranged our offspring in their car seats. Fiona jumped into the rear seat of the van, rocking it with her hundred-and-forty-pound mass, and curled up for her nap. Nelliecoyne started telling stories to her gurgling and cooing little brother in Irish. Nuala began to drive down the narrow road that circles the Letterfrack National Park in the Ballynahinch mountains.

  AT LEAST SHE’S SINGING AGAIN.

  “Humming.” I replied to the Adversary. Besides, she’s fey again too.

  NOTHING I CAN DO ABOUT THAT. YOU KNEW WHAT YOU WERE GETTING INTO WHEN YOU MARRIED HER. ISN’T SHE ONE OF THE DARK ONES?

  “I’d be glad to have her fey, if it means that she’s singing again.”

  Did me wife, oops, my wife really believe that the difficulties of her two pregnancies (on the flat of her back for the last three months before the Mick arrived) and two very arduous deliveries and then the depression were her fault? Were they proof that she was indeed a poor wife and mother?

  You can live with a woman for five years, pleasurably enough, and realize that you know less about her than you did on your wedding day. My guess is that, in the opaque Irish idiom, she “half believed it.” As best as I can understand the idiom, it does not mean half and half, but rather, totally some of the time and not at all, at all the rest of the time. Sometimes she thought she was a total failure, and other times she thought, correctly, that despite the depression she was a total success as a wife and mother.

  The latter, of course, was the truth.

  Letterfrack was swarming with Yank tourists shopping at the “Irish Crafts” store, which the Protestants had founded long ago in their totally unsuccessful efforts to win the locals away from their popish superstitions. At the edge of the town we heard a distant explosion and saw a puff of black smoke, a dirty hand that hung as if suspended against the pure blue sky.

  “Is it a bomb now, Dermot Michael?” Nuala gasped.

  “It looks like it is.”

  “In Renvyle, do you think?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Och … I hope it’s not our house!”

  “There’s no one in it, and it’s insured.”

  Which was a characteristically stupid male response.

  “Didn’t the lads set off a bomb?” Nelliecoyne commented and then went back to her Irish babble.

  “The lads” was an Irish euphemism—they are a people who love euphemisms—for the Irish Republican Army. After the Northern Ireland peace agreement, most of the lads had turned to more peaceful tasks.

  “She did say that, didn’t she?” I asked in a whisper, suppressing a shiver.

  “It’s probably something she heard us say when there was a loud noise,” Nuala replied with little conviction.

  When we reached the coast road, where the sapphire Atlantic brushed easily against the shoreline, leaving a thick white lace of foam, the cloud had faded to a smirch, a telltale hint of evil on the azure sky.

  We were about a mile (Galwegians don’t hold with kilometers) from our cottage in the shadow of Renvyle House Hotel, when a smartly dressed young Garda flagged us down.

  “Papers, please,” she said briskly. You didn’t ask this brisk young woman about a bomb until you had identified yourself.

  “Dermot?”

  I searched my pockets as if I thought I really had them.

  “Must have left the passports at home.”

  “Driver’s license?” The constable frowned disapprovingly. I was patently a typically stupid Yank.

  Nuala produced her license and spoke in Irish doubtless telling the pretty blond constable that her husband was an eejit altogether. I always assumed that when she went into her first language she was talking about me—and not paying me any compliments.

  THE NAME OF THAT, BOYO, IS PARANOIA.

  “You have the Irish,” the Garda said, “but this is a Yank driver’s license … . Oh my, who are you?”

  A massive white snout had appeared between our two children and then a vast mouth with a wide grin.

  “Isn’t it Fiona?” I said. “And herself a retired member of the Gardai. Whenever she encounters a colleague she wants to make friends!”

  I got out of the van and opened the door. Delighted, Fiona bounded out, circled the van in an enthusiastic rush, and placed her two massive paws on the young woman’s shoulders and licked her face. She was at least a foot taller than the constable.

  “Oh, aren’t you a great beauty now!” The officer hugged her newfound friend. “Sure, you’ll smother me completely!”

  She said a word in Irish. Our wolfhound sat down, her tail wagging furiously.

  “Haven’t we bred her with Sir Roy Harcourt de Bourk the fourth?” Nuala explained. “And don’t we think she’s pregnant?”

  “I bet she gave him a hard time!”

  Even when the female is in heat, wolfhounds would rather chase each other around and play than engage in sexual intercourse. Finally, the breeders had to constrain them to do so by a method that I will not describe.

  “Isn’t she an Irish female?” I said.

  “Dermot Michael!” my wife shouted in protest.

  “She’s going to have three puppies,” my daughter informed the Garda.

  “Is she now? And what’s your name?”

  “Moire Ain Coyne,” the redhead announced proudly.

  “The problem, Ms. Coyne,” the Garda said as she patted the head of the ecstatic Fiona, “is that there was an explosion down the road.”

  “Didn’t the lads set off a bomb?” Moire Ain Coyne informed her.

  The Garda was startled.

  “Actually we don’t know … .”

  “She heard us say it,” I tried to explain. “You know what mimics kids are at that age.”

  “I hope it wasn’t our house,” Nuala Anne interjected.

  “No, it was Mr. MacManus’s home. You know, the T.D.”

  T.D. is a member of the Dail, the Irish parliament. God forbid that the Irish should call one of their parliamentarians an M.P.

  “The next house down the road from us!” Nuala exclaimed, making an elaborately large sign of the cross.

  “It was a big explosion … fortunately no one was home … . And your house was not damaged.”

  MacManus was off in Dublin at the Dáil session.

  “Thanks be to God,” Nuala said.

  “Indeed, I’m sure you can go through to your house. However, there’ll be a lot of us around for a day or two.

  “Thanks be to God,” I agreed.

  “Fiona,” the Garda said, “back into the van.”

  Reluctantly the wolfhound obeyed.

  “Aren’t you Nuala Anne?” The constable glanced at my wife’s license before returning it.

  “’Tis me name,” she said, bowing her head modestly.

  “Aren’t we all terrible proud of you here at home, Ms. McGrail? Not all our exported celebrities have your dignity and grace.”

  Me wife turned deep red.

  “Thank you,” she said quietly.

  “Haven’t I been telling her that all along?” I said as I closed the rear door on our faithless hound and retook my seat.

  “Enjoy your time at home.” The young woman saluted.

  “Isn’t she sweet, the poor dear thing?”

  “Nice ass too,” I added, just to make trouble.

  “Dermot Michael Coyne! What a terrible thing to say!”

  “Just an observation,” I said. “Teats are cute too!”

  “You’re obsessed with sex,” she said, trying to sound as though she disapproved.
<
br />   “Not as cute as yours!”

  “Will you be quiet now, and the small ones in the car with us!”

  “I will … .”

  “The woman is not from Galway,” Nuala Anne observed.

  “Ah?”

  “She doesn’t speak Irish like we do, not quite. There may be a touch of Kerry in her … .”

  “God forbid …”

  “Dermot Michael, give over! Isn’t it important to you Yanks to know whether someone is from Texas?”

  “If he is, he’s probably carrying some kind of concealed weapon.”

  “Maybe East Mayo …” Nuala continued, ignoring me.

  Our daughter was babbling again in Irish at her little brother, who continued to gurgle and smile.

  The breeding of Fiona and Sir Roy, an attempt to combine presumably long-lived genes of the species, was the alleged reason for our trip to Ireland—that and the opportunity to see our new Irish bungalow and to expose Nelliecoyne to Irish culture. The real reason was to restore my fragile Irish lass to her Connemara milieu and to the common sense of her mother, Annie McGrail. (“The poor dear child has to learn to cope with all her talents, Dermot Michael. Don’t worry about it; she will in time.” But I was worried about it.) We were to have supper with Annie and her husband, Gerroid, that night at Ashford Castle.

  We passed a blackened hole in the ground, which had been Colm MacManus’s house. Guards swarmed around it. Two of their vans were already parked next to the rubble. They had come up quickly from their barracks at Clifden. One of them waved us through.

  “The lads set off a bomb,” Nelliecoyne repeated.

  Nuala sighed loudly.

  “Whatever are we to do with that one, Dermot Michael Coyne?”

  I was saved from the need to respond by Nelliecoyne herself.

  “Ma, sometimes this little brat drives me out of me friggin’ mind. He’s so dumb!”

  “Shush, darlin’, he’s only a little boy and you’re a big girl. You should be nice to him.”

  “Yes, Ma.”

  Two vans with satellite dishes rushed by us as we turned into our driveway.

  “It’s them friggin’ media vultures,” my wife protested. “They’ll find out I’m here, Dermot. I don’t want to talk to them!”

  “I’ll keep them at bay,” I said bravely.

  “They’ll want to know why I’m not singing. ‘Tis none of their business! The friggin’ gobshites!”

  “’Tis not.”

  Why should anyone be interested in the fact that a young woman who had just earned a platinum disk for Nuala Anne Sings American announces that she’s finished with her vocal career at twenty-five?

  Why, indeed?

  No reason given other than she was tired of singing—and on the flat of her back trying to save a baby.

  “You can tell them I’ve taken up painting!”

  “I can indeed.”

  We stopped in the bungalow’s carport and stared down the road at the ugly black scar on the turf, a blot on the postcard-perfect azure sky, sapphire sea, and green vegetation. All right, our house had not been hit by the explosion. What if, however, we had happened to be driving by, or if Nellie—violating all our rules, had been too close to the house next door. I shuddered at the image of her thin little body limp and lifeless on the road. Nuala Anne was probably seeing a similar image. She snatched her son out of the car seat and carried him protectively to the door of the house.

  “And tell them I won’t have any exhibitions for twenty-five years!”

  “Woman, I will.”

  2

  “THAT ONE will do just fine, Dermot Michael,” my wife said as she shrugged out of her sweatshirt.

  After each of our photo-taking ventures, she would pick one shot off the screen of my Dell and require that I print out a color copy. As I feared, this time it was a picture of the hovel up in the hills where she had smelled the blood of the three women. It was the last picture she’d taken before the fog had closed in on us. Already the light looked sinister.

  “Isn’t it a brilliant picture altogether!” She removed the ribbon from her long black hair, letting it fall over her shoulders. “Print it out.”

  My pulse rate shot up. More love in the afternoon. Even if I had now passed my thirtieth birthday, I was not likely to refuse.

  We had returned to our bungalow—given its size and comforts, “villa” would have been a better label. Ethne, our tiny and ebullient mother’s helper (and herself a student at UCG—University College Galway), was waiting for us. She had poured out rumors about the destruction of “that gombeen man’s house.”

  “Didn’t it scare the shite out of me? And didn’t I grab for my rosary? … Aren’t the Gardai saying it was a professional job and if he was inside there’d be nothing but bits and pieces left and it could have been the lads or the Prots from up above and that there’s no reason to waste good explosives on such a worthless gobshite …”

  “Maybe it was the Russian Mafia,” I suggested, a comment that stopped the loquacious young woman in her tracks.

  Nelliecoyne, who had bonded with Ethne, rushed to embrace her leg. The two of them and me wife jabbered in Irish—about me I was sure. My son, placed on the floor, managed to pull himself in a crawl towards his adored minder.

  Nelliecoyne had been walking at his age.

  Overachiever.

  Ethne swept him into her arms.

  “How’s me favorite little boy in all the world today!”

  “Dermot Michael,” Nuala asked, “would you ever unload me camera for me while we feed these hungry little demons?”

  “I would, so long as you feed me too!”

  More laughter and Irish chatter.

  So after I had removed the diskette from her camera and loaded it into our Dell and flipped through her shots, Nelliecoyne arrived in the master bedroom, cautiously carrying a plate on which there was a salmon sandwich with the crusts cut off. She offered it to me as though it were a chalice with the consecrated wine.

  “Ma says that you like peanut butter and jelly.”

  “If Ma says so, it must be true.”

  If my daughter should become a priest—which surely ought to be possible when she comes of age—they would have to ordain her a bishop.

  “Ma says that if you eat every last bit of it maybe you can have some ice cream.”

  “I had better eat every last bit of it, huh?”

  I often had the impression that I was the third kid in the house.

  Nuala’s shots were excellent. Naturally. She was good at everything she did. When I joined the rest of the ménage in the kitchen I found that there were roast beef, egg salad, and ham and cheese sandwiches, all on croissants, waiting for me.

  Our cottage was often called a bungalow. However, it had nothing in common with the snug, sturdy brick houses by the same name on the west side of Chicago. Rather it was modeled on the style of British India, only far more elegant—four bedrooms, three baths, a family room with a large TV, a kitchen, a dining room, and a parlor, which was usually left vacant for the “gentry”—the little people—should they happen by. Nuala Anne did not exactly believe in the fairie, but she did believe, as she explained to me, in traditions.

  It was hardly your stone-and-thatch Connemara cottage of not so long ago. Rather it had been designed for rich Yanks and, now that Ireland was bursting with prosperity, for rich Micks.

  After I had more or less cleaned the sandwich plate, Ethne and the children withdrew to the nursery for the children’s afternoon nap, accompanied by Fiona, who had forsaken the master bedroom entirely since we had come to Ireland. Nuala and I wandered down to the master bedroom. Fortunately, given my wife’s proclivity for afternoon “naps,” the nursery and the master bedroom were at opposite ends of the house.

  After she had chosen the shot she wanted me to print, she folded her sweatshirt neatly. Her bra was the same navy blue as the sweatshirt. In Nuala’s world, it was proper that undergarments match outer garments be
cause, as she said, “You never can tell when someone might want to undress you.”

  “Aren’t you going to print out me picture, Dermot Michael?” she said as she deftly loosened the front hook of her bra.

  “Momentarily distracted,” I murmured as I clicked on the print icon.

  “Are you now?”

  She folded the bra neatly—in Nuala Anne’s world everything was neat.

  She peaked out of the drapes.

  “Them gobshites are everywhere!”

  “Media?”

  “Gardaí.” She closed the drape. “I’m taking me pill now, Dermot Michael,” she said, popping a tablet into her mouth. “Just so you won’t call a divorce lawyer this afternoon.”

  “One day at a time!”

  She sniggered and tugged off her jeans.

  “Doesn’t your daughter hound me about it every day … . Ma, have you taken your pill yet?”

  It had become difficult for me to sustain the banter. After five years of marriage the sight of my wife’s breasts still intoxicated me.

  Nuala Anne was conniving again, not that she ever stopped conniving. She knew what the afternoon seductions did to my body and my mind. She was scheming some convoluted and intricate Irish womanly plot. I didn’t mind the conniving. In fact, I sort of enjoyed it. Hadn’t Ma, my beloved Connemara-born grandmother, with whom my wife identified because they were both from Carraroe, been a conniver too?

  “I may modify the threat from divorce to spanking you every day you don’t take it.”

  “Now isn’t that an interesting erotic possibility,” she said as she folded her jeans.

  Heaven help me if I ever tried it.

  Was she perhaps trying to bind me closer to her against the fear that I might become impatient with her recent problems? Or was she attempting to make up for the long hiatus in our sexual games when she was pregnant and recovering? Or was she seeking to win my support for her decision to abandon her vocal career? Or was she consoling me because I was now past thirty?

  All these obvious schemes were improbable and unnecessary, as I thought she well knew. The scheme had to be more complicated and devious.