Irish Crystal

by Andrew M. Greeley

  “Why do you say the other craft are boats and the Coast Guard boat a cutter?”

  “We the Yewnited States Coast Guard, the oldest armed service. A-starting out in 1793 as the Yewnited States Revenue Cutter Service. We right proud of that. All our vessels, happen even with an outboard motor, are cutters.”

  Commander McCloud’s solemn eyes sparkled with laughter.

  “One more question, Commander-Are you pregnant?”

  “I dono. This hyar little varmint inside me shunuff think so.”

  “And you’re still on active duty?”

  “Johnypete, he ain’t coming till Thursday afternoon. We uns always prepared. Semper Paratus.”

  We all cheered enthusiastically. Socra Marie held out her arms to me to be lifted off the chair.

  “What happened to the baby?” the Mick asked.

  “The raincoat covers him,” I explained.

  “Oh,” he said, filing the information away for future use.

  Damian appeared, to take the dogs for a run in the rain, which being Irish, they enjoyed even more than a run when it was not raining. Ethne led the brats to the playroom for rainy-day amusements, mostly on TV—though only after a quick exchange of affectionate glances with Damian.

  “If you don’t mind, Nuala,” he said, “I’ll come back and do some more sketches.”

  “Please do,” she said, glowing over the very slow-moving romance she was supervising.

  The phone rang.

  “Father Ryan, Dermot … I have three matters of interest to you. I hear on very good authority that your brother behaved with great courage and wisdom at the fire site, not that such intelligence will surprise you. Secondly, it would seem that the pastor of the local parish did not appear until this morning and seemed quite upset about the traffic problems the fire was causing for his parish. Thirdly, the Currans, including the admirable Father Rory, are skiing in the Italian alps, after having paid a visit to Rome in an endeavor to enroll him in Milord Cronin’s alma mater, the College of Noble Ecclesiastics.”

  “Indeed.”

  “My term … Despite his love of said loving mother, Milord Cronin is not a little upset at this presumption.”

  I relayed the information to Nuala Anne, who responded by pouring me some more tea and giving me a slice of soda bread with raspberry jam.

  “I saved some of it for you, Dermot love,” she said with her shy, peasant girl smile.

  “Thoughtful of you, my dear … Any special reason?”

  “Because I love you so much.”

  “Funny, I was about to say the same thing.”

  We finished our breakfast in contented silence.

  “Let’s go over and look at the mess … . We can stop and congratulate Commander McCloud on another public relations triumph.”

  Peter Murphy greeted us at the door. Like all the Ryans, save the little Archbishop, he was a tall black Irish type. IRA gunman, my wife suggested.

  The women in his house were both sleeping, hangovers doubtless. Peter Murphy told us that there was no chance they could keep Cindasue away from the camera and the mike. She was “right proud” of her performance. And she had Nuala Anne’s guarantee that the li’l varmint wouldn’t come till Thursday afternoon.

  “What if you were wrong?” I asked my wife as we turned west on Webster and walked towards the river.

  “Happen I’m wrong, I’ll apologize. But I’m never wrong, not when I know. I knew that the tiny one was a girl and that she would be tiny. I didn’t know how tiny.”

  What good is it to be one of the dark ones if the messages are often incomplete. But then, as herself says, she does not take it seriously when something important is at stake, like a stock market investment.

  THE BIRTH OF A BABY ISN’T SOMETHING IMPORTANT?

  Beats me.

  Clyborn Avenue is one of the slanted streets in Chicago that violate its stern cross-street grids, like Ogden and Milwaukee Avenues and Mr. Dooley’s fabled Archery Road. Unlike the other slanted streets Clyborn had been a minor street until the urban professionals invaded the neighborhood, lined with small stores, aging homes, and low-end factories. Now it has become an upper-middle shopping mall for said urban professionals (who include the McGrail-Coyne ménage). On the corner of Clyborn and Webster, however, there survives an old neighborhood tavern which prospers because of the patronage of the professionals who feel like they’re in a real neighborhood when they drink in a bar with members of other social classes, from west of the River. Nuala calls it our “local” because insofar as we go into any bar, it’s that one.

  When one crosses Clyborn and approaches the River, the ambience changes. The down-at-the-heel houses on either side of Webster have yet to be rehabbed. Then one arrives at a thin strip of small machine shops and tool stores, and finally the shipyards along the River, where Lake Michigan sailing craft are stored out of the water during the long winter months.

  Just short of the river is Dominick Street, at the end of which we beheld the ruins of a shipyard, then the ruins of the Curran house, and beyond that, a smoldering lumberyard. That segment of the bank of the Chicago River looked like it had been taken out by a flight of jet fighter bombers or perhaps had been the scene of a house-to-house battle like the one in Faluja in Iraq.

  The fireboats out on the river were still distributing gentle streams of water all along the bank, like irrigation systems in prairie states. Police cars, fire trucks, and a couple of ambulances were lined up in a disorderly row, safely out of the range of the falling water. A Fire Department helicopter hovered in lazy circles overhead. Upriver a Coast Guard chopper, with its trademark red bar, stood guard to warn summer sailors that this first Sunday in April was not, after all, a good time to try to begin the summer season. Though the rain had stopped, temporarily if one were to believe the morning forecasts, cops and firemen and various suit types stood around in slickers and jackets, huddled against the legendary Chicago winds. A lone TV truck rested next to an empty ambulance. The whole area was ringed by the usual police investigation tapes and two young persons in uniform to warn off unauthorized personnel. Like us. It was a comment on the weather—twenty degrees colder than the day before—that we were the only such breaking the Sunday morning peace.

  We walked back to Webster and stood on the bridge, where we had a full view of the wreckage on our right and the two police boats and the Coast Guard cutter on the left, the latter distinguishable only by its red stripe. Their temporary pumps were not operating, but the crews kept a careful eye on the darkened ruins on the west bank.

  Nothing remained of the Curran house but a few brick pillars and unidentifiable pieces of rubble. Even the water and heating pipes had melted.

  “Dear God, those poor people! All the things they prized so much don’t exist anymore.”

  Nuala Anne never takes God’s name in vain. When she uses it, she’s praying.

  “Yesterday you said it was all covered by insurance.”

  “Memories can’t be insured, Dermot Michael.”

  We ambled back across the bridge.

  “Do you have any vibes, Nuala?”

  “I know it’s all wrong, Dermot, all wrong.”

  “None of this happened?”

  “Not for the reasons everyone thinks.”

  “What are the reasons?”

  “Won’t we have to find out?”

  Well, that was clear enough as a mission statement.

  “Only authorized personnel can cross these tapes, ma’am,” the cop told me wife.

  “Is Commander John Culhane here?” she said.

  “The Chief of Detectives of Area Six,” I added.

  “Yes.” The cop was getting suspicious. We probably were media.

  “We’re not media,” I assured him.

  “Would you ever tell him that Dermot and Nuala Anne are out here if he has a minute or two.”

  “Same name as the singer?” asked the woman cop.

  “Yes.”

  “People ever
tell you that you look like her too?”

  “Once in a while. She’s a lot prettier.”

  “I wouldn’t say that … I’ll get Commander Culhane for you.”

  John Culhane, a big, trim man, with sandy hair and piercing brown eyes strode up to the tape with a vast grin on his Irish face:

  “I figured you two would show up. Something like this in your neighborhood. You’re kinda late … Congratulations on being a citizen, Nuala. I hear you had a grand time with those bastards.”

  “Well, we managed to hold them off, if you take me meaning.”

  “I can well imagine you did … Do you want to take a look around?”

  We agreed that it would be interesting, Nuala Anne thanked the cops with her most gracious smile, and we walked under the yellow tapes into a sea of mud.

  “I think they must have emptied half the river last night,” John said. “Do you know these folks?”

  “Didn’t we have dinner with them last week?”

  “Ah! And what did you think?”

  “Interesting people, very cultivated, a little shallow maybe but well-meaning, and not our kind of people.”

  We walked by the hulks of burned-out yachts, a mess that looked like Florida after a hurricane.

  “From what I hear about them that’s not a bad summary. They’ve been a major player in Chicago politics and law for over a hundred years, discreet, behind the scenes, capable, quietly affluent … The Germans built this place in the 1850s, all by itself on the side of the River, very pastoral … Built it to last, which it did until someone blew it up …”

  “Certainly arson?”

  “Not much doubt … See that crater? That was the garage. Someone parked a car in there loaded with high explosives. The house went up at once, the lumberyard and the yacht storage were enveloped. By the time the fire engines arrived there was a solid sheet of flame. If they hadn’t brought the fireboat up right away, it could have spread all the way to Clybom and across the River for a couple of blocks anyway. The plan was not merely to destroy the Curran house; but to create a neighborhood conflagration.”

  “Another Chicago Fire!”

  “Not that bad, but bad enough. Most of the homes around here are wood … The other buildings too … We could have lost a lot of people … Panic …”

  “Will you find who did it?” Nuala asked.

  Our house was wood. Her children had been threatened.

  “Our arson guys are the best. They’ll put the pieces together and analyze all the rubble and identify the explosives and the kind of car. But this is a superprofessional job. Not just some jerk throwing a milk container of gasoline through a window. So my job will be to find out who would want to do this to the Currans. It won’t be easy.”

  “Terrorists?”

  “My guess—and that’s all I have now—is that it’s too big for just ordinary arson and too small for the terrorists.”

  “Pretty spectacular way of collecting insurance, huh?”

  “I would think so, but we’ll have to look into that too. Kind of interesting that they’re over in Cortina. Doesn’t prove anything either way.”

  “It wouldn’t fit their image as multigeneration respectable professionals,” I said.

  “Irish professionals,” Nuala added, skeptically. “Gombeen men maybe.”

  “But not mad?”

  She sighed.

  “No, I don’t think so.”

  “Beautiful house, was it?”

  “Most elegant I’ve ever seen besides the Georgian places in Dublin.”

  She displayed no inclination to walk any farther into the swamp the fireboat had created.

  “Shame … Not much of a location anymore … You folks going to be working on it?”

  “Och, Commander Culhane, would we even think at all, at all of trying to compete with the Chicago Police Department?”

  “Yes you would and we both know you would. I learned a long time ago that it was better to cooperate with you two … Do we still have a deal?”

  “We do!” She raised her hand for a high five.

  Spear-carriers do not participate in such rituals.

  I guided her through the least swampy parts of the boatyard and back to Webster Avenue.

  She was silent till we crossed Clyborn.

  “Someone wanted to send a message, Dermot Michael, didn’t they?”

  “And they risked burning our little house down.”

  “It isn’t very little.”

  “I don’t like that they did that.”

  “Then they’re in trouble, aren’t they?”

  “’Tis true … and, Dermot love, it has something to do with them Currans, even if they didn’t do it themselves.”

  “I’ll call Mike the Cop as soon as we get back to the house.”

  The whole family, except the tiny one who was sleeping, were gathered together in the playroom watching Bambi. Ethne and Damian were sitting on chairs near one another but disclosing no hints of intimacy. Ethne had a notebook in front of her, half-studying for an exam. The pooches were snoozing quietly.

  “Anyone for brunch? We have Sunday brunch at this house!”

  The kids shouted gleefully.

  “I’ll help.” Ethne rose from her chair.

  “Ah, no, ’tis the job of the woman of the house. And haven’t I found a couple of loaves of me soda bread that somehow didn’t find their way over to the Murphy house!”

  The kids cheered again.

  “You make the best soda bread in the world,” Nelliecoyne said firmly.

  “Galways Soda Bread.”

  “West Galway.”

  “Connemara.”

  “Carraroe.”

  “I’ll help,” I volunteered.

  “’Tis good of you, man of the house. Don’t forget your phone call.”

  I went up to the study and punched in Mike Casey’s private number.

  “I figured herself would want to know more about them,” he said. “I’ve got a complete line on them … Got a pencil handy?”

  “Sure.”

  I didn’t of course. Fortunately for me when I worked with Nuala I had an excellent memory.

  “To begin at the top, John Curran, managing partner of Curran and Sons law firm. One of the ‘sons’ was his grandfather. Born 1946 a boomer, Loyola Academy 1962, Loyola University 1967, Loyola Law School 1970. Went into the family law firm immediately. Grandfather lived in the house on the River. His family born and raised in St. Jerome’s on the North Side.”

  “There are no North Side Irish,” I repeated a mantra from my West Side family.

  “I quite agree. The grandfather, Bart, was quite the boyo. Sanitary district, among other things. Would do jail time these days. The father, Tomas or Long Tom, was a straight arrow professionally, though a little dubious personally. Survivor of the Bataan Death March in World War II. People called him Long Tom because of his moods. John is as clean as they come. With the old man out of the way they turned the firm into a boutique operation—wills, trusts, taxes, discreet divorces for the money Irish up on the North Shore. The firm has made a lot of money because it has a deserved reputation for competence and discretion. The grandfather, Bartholomew, known as Black Bart, left the house to John, apparently because the father hated the place. When John married Estelle Keane in 1970, they moved in. She had a lot of money and they became involved in the restoration of the house, which has kept them busy for the last three decades or so. The firm has some clout which it uses with its usual discretion. Close to the Daleys, but not friendly, if you know what I mean.”

  “Indeed.”

  “Democrat in local politics, probably tends to vote Republican nationally, but doesn’t admit it to anyone in the ward. Moderate on most issues. If he’s pro life, he’s quiet about it. Supports civil unions for gays. Has a gay man working for the firm, which offends his wife and one of his daughters-in-law. Practicing Catholic pro-Jesuit as you might imagine. Does not, however, get along too well with your good friend Sea
n Cronin over the subsidizing of inner-city schools—Catholic schools should be for Catholics.”

  “Ah.”

  “Presumably doesn’t like our mutual friend down at the Cathedral either.”

  “Serious mistake.”

  “He learned early on that if they avoid long coffee breaks and longer lunch hours, lawyers don’t have all that much work to do, that their junior partners, sons, paralegals, and legal secretaries could do just as well for them or better. So the family owns a home in Dorr County, condos in Ocean Reef and Vail, and an apartment in Rome.”

  “Rome!”

  “They bought the apartment when their son, Father Rory—always called that by the way—began his studies at the North American College in Rome. They’d spend time over there every year to keep an eye on him and promote his career, just like old man Cronin did with the present Cardinal.”

  “Interesting.”

  “They don’t need money, Dermot. They’re not filthy rich and don’t want to be. Maybe they blew up the house on the river for insurance money, but there’s no obvious reason why they would need it. The Feds hassle them about taxes now and again, but never find anything. One has the impression that, for the Currans, corruption would be too much work.”

  An interesting characterization.

  Nelliecoyne appeared with a plate heaped with soda bread, bacon, an omelet, and a scone.

  “Ma says that we’ll all go back on our diets tomorrow. I’ll bring the tea.”

  “Estelle Keenan Curran, born in 1951 married John in 1970 after two years with Madames of the Sacred Heart at Barat. Great beauty from a new rich construction family. First child, Trevor, born fifteen months later. Stay-at-home mom, but managed to collect her degree, and now runs a successful catering firm. Good cook apparently. More straitlaced than her husband. Goes to Mass every day at the Loyola chapel. Takes Jesuit advice very seriously. Still quite attractive. Reads a lot, as they all do, but hardly an intellectual. Doesn’t like gay people.”

  And bossy, I thought to myself, remembering her dialogue with Nuala in which she disapproved of the existence of Socra Marie.

  Aloud I said, “Trevor!”

  “It is said he has aristocratic pretensions. Trevor is a lawyer with the family firm. Estates. He is said to be boring but very good at his work. His wife, Annette, is an Opus Dei enthusiast and supports Estelle’s objection to the young gay man in the firm. Their kids go to the Opus Academy up north. Trevor agrees with his father that the man is a good lawyer. On the other hand the dad is furious at the Cardinal for not forcing all gay men out of the priesthood.”