Irish Crystal

by Andrew M. Greeley

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “Irresistible.”

  —Booklist on Irish Cream

  “No contemporary writer is better than Greeley at depicting the genius, humor, logic, personal skills, and cultural idiosyncrasies of the Irish, whether in American cities like Chicago or across the big pond in Ireland. This author is the master of modern Irish ethnic genius! … A delight to read … This book is bound to give you a few hours of great reading pleasure!”

  —Shelby-Utica News (Warren, Michigan) on Irish Cream

  “Immensely entertaining.”

  —Publishers Weekly on Irish Cream

  “Solid, modest Dermot and fiery, unpredictable Nuala Anne enjoy an ideal marriage: sexy and humorous and unabashedly loving.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  “’Tis a charmin’ tale that Andrew Greeley tells … . It’s a lively novel filled with Irish wit, interesting situations, and likable people.”

  —The Chattanooga Times on Irish Whiskey

  “The prolific cleric plops his psychic singer heroine and her family into a delightful stew of trouble in his latest crowd pleaser … . The double plot is rich with detail, while the couple’s earnestness and food intentions are never in question.”

  —Publishers Weekly on Irish Stew!

  “A love story as much as a mystery, with Greeley portraying Chicago’s middle-class Irish-American ethnics with flair, dignity, and affection for their lilting speech.”

  —Chicago Sun-Times on Irish Lace

  “The comical banter between Dermot and Nuala cleverly gives the reader insight into their Irish heritage as well as their Catholic faith.”

  —Romantic Times BookReviews on Irish Stew!

  Afterword

  The description of the Risings of ’98 and ’03 in the narrative of the nameless priesteen, as Nuala calls him, are historically accurate with some details elided (but none changed) for narrative pace. The priesteen is a fictional observer, hence he has no name. Since he didn’t exist, he never fell in love with Sarah Curran.

  Readers wishing more details might consult Citizen Lord by Stella Tillyard, Cornwallis by Franklin and Mary Wickwire, Wolf Tone by Marianne Elliot, Robert Emmet and the Rebellion of 1798 and Robert Emmet and the Rising of 1803 both by Ruan O’Donnell, and Robert Emmet by Marianne Elliot. The toast from Charles Cornwallis to George Washington is taken from Washington’s Crossing by David Hackett Fischer, page 362.

  The O’Donnell books are rich in detail, indeed too rich by half, and hence very difficult reading. Ms. Elliot’s two books are a study in contrasts. The former is straight historiography, though she does in her introduction identify Wolf Tone with the Provisional IRA of which he was surely not a member. In her book on Emmet, she engages in a debunking exercise. She aims at the “Emmet” myth, which she claims has produced subsequent republican violence from Young Ireland of 1848 to the Provos of the present.

  I make no case for the IRA, but I wish writers like Ms. Elliot would also denounce wars of liberation in other countries. If Gerry Adams is a terrorist, then so is Nelson Mandela. Other peoples in the world have the right to turn to violence to defeat colonialism. The Irish somehow do not. Ms. Elliot reveals that she is part of the Ascendancy school of Irish historiography in a passing comment that Lord Cornwallis was too lenient in his repression of the remnants of ’98. One must assume that she meant that he should have hung more Irish. In this perspective the Irish are always to blame for the problems in the country and the English never.

  It would appear that the most effective strategy for ridding Ireland from colonial rule was, as Nuala Anne says, fight, then negotiate like Michael Collins did.

  The many deaths of infants, children, and young adults (including Nuala’s friend Mollie Malone) in the Irish segment of my story was not unusual for the time and place or indeed for any time in human history up until the middle of the nineteenth century, when sanitation measures and water purification in much of Western Europe improved.

  No one has written Robert Emmet’s epitaph yet. Ruan O’Donnell suggests that now is the time. Marianne Elliot says that he has become such a patron saint of the IRA that it should never be written, a curious form of historical argument if there ever was one. The Irish government is not eager to erect a monument because of the situation in the North.

  Ireland has indeed taken its place in the family of nations. Yet should anyone write the epitaph while a quarter of Ireland is still an English colony?

  The most fundamental question is why England had the right to conquer Ireland, then colonize it. Ms. Elliot clearly assumes that it did. Others will want to disagree.

  I agree, however, with Nuala Anne (heaven help me if I do not) that if England had not suspended its 1912 promise of Home Rule to Ireland at the start of the Great War, then there never would have been the Easter Rising and the subsequent Anglo-Irish war and probably not the endless succession of “troubles” over the North. They should have waited, it will be said. England would have honored its promise in the 1920s. England always honors its promises.

  Yeah?

  Tucson

  Palm Sunday 2005

  Turn the page for a preview of

  IRISH LINEN

  (0-765-31586-6)

  A Nuala Anne

  McGrail Novel

  ANDREW M.

  GREELEY

  1

  AFTER A certain number of books, even folly-driven mass horror becomes boring. All right, I had to read them for my wife’s current case, a search for a nice young man from our neighborhood who had disappeared in the Middle East, maybe in Iraq. There was, I thought, not a chance in the world of Nuala solving this one without one or the other of us flying to Kuwait or Dubai or some such place. That we would not do. Since she would have to stay home to take care of the kids, I would have to fly to Kuwait and she wouldn’t let me do that.

  I pushed aside the stack of books about the world from 1914 to 1945 and began a dialogue with my six-month-old son Pòraig Jòsefa (Patrick Joseph) Coyne aka “Patjo.”

  “We have a lot in common, young man,” I informed him. “We are both large, good-looking, gentle blonds who are also lazy, mostly undependable sensualists. One might even use the adjective ‘useless.’ We make our way through life not by hard work but because we have a happy smile, an appealing laugh, and lots of barely resistible Irish charm. We both have breast fixations, indeed about the same pair of lovely breasts, if for somewhat different but related reasons.”

  He smiled enthusiastically.

  “You must never tell your mother I told you these truths, because she becomes furious when people assert them about me and she’ll go ballistic if she should learn that I’m saying that about you.”

  He laughed.

  “Herself, mind you, is a brilliant woman altogether, to use the Irish superlative and, if you don’t mind my using male talk, a wonderful lay. She has a friggin’ ton of talents and she feels obligated to be perfect at all of them—singer, accountant, actress, detective, wife, mother, lover. She’s the alpha person in this house and the sooner you learn it the better off we’ll all be. You four young ’uns, the two wolfhounds, the nanny, and the housekeeper work for her. As does your poor father. The only reason you’re here is that she had to prove she could have a normal, easy pregnancy. The red-haired woman in the house, your big sister Nelliecoyne, required a lot of effort to bring into the world, your big brother Micky plunged her into a terrible fit of PPD as they call it these days. Then the little imp who presides over you like she’s your mother showed up awfully early and barely made it. Your mom thinks these events were somehow or the other her fault. Well, she knows better, but deep down in her bronze-age Irish soul, she’s still convinced she did something wrong. We conceived you in a memorable night of orgy so that she’d finally get it right and we’d also have a neatly balanced family, two boys and two girls, which appeals to her accountant’s love of order. I shouldn’t mention it to you but I will. She knew your gender and that it wo
uld be an untroubled pregnancy at least a month before your conception. I don’t know how she does that and I don’t want to know.”

  He frowned. Hungry again. I offered him one of the bottles of milk that I had stockpiled for him. As his mother would have said, he destroyed it altogether and discarded the bottle like a fifteen-year-old male would discard a beer can. He then closed his eyes like he was thinking seriously about sleep.

  I glanced out the window and considered Sheffield Avenue, which on this mild, wet, and dark April morning looked like a set for a horror film. Everything—trees, lawns, homes, the church and school—was dank and barren, fog hovered just above the church steeple, it seemed, and drizzle was touching the ground with its faint hint of corruption. I imagined I could even smell corruption, the corruption of an old graveyard.

  “Don’t misunderstand me, young man, your mother is an astonishing woman. My lust for her varies from intense most of the time, to mild and that only after she’s exhausted me in bed. If your man Freud is right, you feel the same way about her. Well, she’s mine, do you hear!”

  In fact, he didn’t hear because he was sleeping soundly.

  “With any luck, your mother and Socra Marie will return soon from her weekly voice lesson with Madame down at the Fine Arts Building. The little terrorist needs an afternoon nap to replenish her energies. The two of you would thus be asleep and your mother and I would have the house to ourselves until the older kids return from St. Josephat’s school across Sheffield Avenue. I could take advantage of that situation to fuck her right and proper as they say in her native land … and as she herself has said on occasion.”

  These salacious words did not upset the woman’s son in the slightest. So I began to sing the Connemara lullaby:

  On the wings of the wind, o’er the dark, rolling deep

  Angels are coming to watch o’er your sleep

  Angels are coming to watch over you

  So list to the wind coming over the sea

  Hear the wind blow, hear the wind blow

  Lean your head over, hear the wind blow.

  I shouldn’t have been singing it. The lullaby was my wife’s. Indeed it had been the lead song on her platinum disk Hear the Wind Blow: Nuala Anne Sings Lullabies. Nevertheless, even in my whiskey tenor voice (not created by drinking whiskey, which I rarely do and only when me spouse wants the two of us to have a splasheen before we progress to other matters), it puts Patjo to sleep for a long time.

  “Och, don’t I have a rival in me own house!” said a voice which always reminds me of church bells ringing across the bogs.

  ’Twas herself in a tightly fitting blue summer suit, her pale face and deep blue eyes in a leprechaun mood. I tend to gasp and blink every time I see her, a mix of desire and adoration which has been with me ever since I first saw her in O’Neill’s pub just off College green in Dublin.

  “Ma, doesn’t Da sing real good?” our sleepy-eyed toddler asked.

  “Da does lots of things real good,” her mother responded. “I’ll put this one down in the nursery, Dermot love,” she said. “Why don’t you put himself in the bedroom, where our conversation won’t wake him up?”

  “Conversation be damned, woman! I have other plans!”

  “Do you now?” My wife, always a modest woman, blushed.

  Fiona, our elder wolfhound, rose up from her own afternoon nap and padded down to the nursery while Maeve ambled into the master bedroom where Patjo still ruled. I never understood how the two dogs divided their child protection responsibilities.

  In a very few minutes Nuala Anne returned to my office, several buttons on the front of her suit open and a robe draped over her arm. Very gently I claimed her in my arms. She leaned against me and sighed loudly, “Well, if you want to fuck me, I suppose, I have to let you do it.”

  Nuala is very careful with her language under most circumstances, having learned, much to her dismay, that “your Yanks are not relaxed about words, are they now?” She is also careful about such matters when there are little ears around. However, privately she reverts to the West of Ireland traditions when we’re alone.

  “Sure, Dermot Michael,” she added, “isn’t it yourself that owns me altogether? You look at me that way and don’t I want to take off all me clothes?”

  That’s not the way it really works. Most of the undressing is left to me. I had learned early in our marriage that there was no upper limit to the amount of foreplay my wife could absorb.

  “We’ll talk about the war afterwards, won’t we, Dermot love?” She sighed as my lips sank to her breasts to taste a bit of her milk.

  “Woman, we will, but only after I’ve reestablished my reputation as a Viking ravager of Irish matrons.”

  She laughed.

  “If you were really one of them dumb Vikings, I’d already have me knife in your heart … Och, Dermot leave some for poor Patjo …”

  I will not describe what me wife looks like with all her clothes off, save to say that she is lithe rather than voluptuous and that she looks like a naked Irish goddess, not one of your buxom Greco-Roman though, mind you, I’ve never slept with a naked Irish goddess, nor even set eyes on one. My Nuala was not one of your hefty, slow-moving classical goddesses like Juno. Rather she was a slender, quick-flowing powerful goddess like the River Shannon. She was also determined that four pregnancies would not change her figure, a goal which both genes and rigorous exercise sustained.

  Nor will I give you any of the details of our little afternoon romp, except that we were improving through the years at the signs and the signals, the constantly changing art of the rhythms and the negotiations and the strategies a husband and a wife, if they’re sensitive to one another, slowly acquire.

  “You’re getting better at ravishing the matron.”. She sighed, a great West of Ireland sigh, like the advent of a major asthma attack, when I had finished with her. Or she with me.

  “’Tis yourself,” I said, struggling to regain my breath, “that leads me down the path to terrible sin.”

  “Just like I thought when I first saw you at O’Neill’s, that’s the kind of man, I want to undress me and fuck me for the rest of me life. I’m old enough now to know better, but I haven’t changed me mind.”

  Nostalgia as postcoital reinforcement. The subject would soon change to my readings. Och, didn’t you have to pay a price for everything?

  Yet she gave me five more minutes of gentle caresses before it was time to get down to business. Then she bounded off the couch on which I had taken her and threw on her pale green robe. She folded her suit and her lingerie in a neat little pile on my desk.

  “They’ll be after coming back in forty-five minutes,” she said, nodding in the direction of the parish school across the street. “I’d like to continue this for the rest of the day, but …”

  “But,” I said, getting off the couch but not exactly bounding, “we can continue these amusements tonight.”

  She blushed again.

  “Ever since I brought that clone of yours into the world, I’ve been a pushover for you, Dermot Michael Coyne.”

  “’Tis the other way around, woman.”

  “Tell me what you learned this afternoon.” She turned into her schoolmarm persona.

  Me wife has a couple of dozen different personae, from one to the other of which she moves with the speed of light—this time from the sexual playmate to the serious scholar. I couldn’t move that fast, even among my far more limited repertory of masks. So I had to look away from her green robe and disarrayed hair and concentrate on me … my notes.

  “It was only one war,” I began. “It started in 1914 and ended in 1945, with a twenty-year intermission. Germany against England and France—and Russia. Germany started it and then restarted it. The Austrians used the assassination of Franz Ferdinand and his wife as an excuse to slap Serbia down. The Germans thought it provided an excellent excuse to try out their plan for mobilization of their armed forces, a plan which predicted that on M Day plus thirty they would
be in Paris. Such was their contempt for the military ability of the French that they saw no reason to take them into account. Get your troops on the trains, send them to the front, push across Belgium, and that was that. They had beaten up the French forty-four years before and figured that there was no reason why they couldn’t do it again. Both they and the Austrians were convinced that the war would be over in two months, regardless of what the Russians did. To put frosting on their cake, an outnumbered German army in East Prussia wiped out the Russian forces.”

  “It wasn’t a short war, was it?”

  “Not at all. They almost made it to Paris but were stopped by the French at the Marne River on M+30. The Germans pulled back, both sides dug trenches and the war settled into bloody attrition for the next three and a half years. In January of 1915, the German chief of staff, one Erich von Falkenhayn went to the Chancellor, a certain Bethmannz Hollweg, and told him that the war had settled into a stalemate and that Germany should seek some kind of peace deal to prevent the slaughter of its young men. At that point, Nuala Anne, you see what had happened. They hadn’t won their quick victory, the military knew it, and wanted to end the slaughter. The Chancellor said that such a deal would embarrass the Kaiser and the war must go on. Thus sealing a death warrant on a whole generation of French, German, and English soldiers.”

  “Wars being easier to start than to end?”

  “That’s the overriding lesson of this Thirty-One-Years war. To the point of our investigation, there were many attempts to end it, but finally the one that worked was the destruction of Germany in the spring of 1945.”

  “But these other attempts might have worked?”