“Hmm …”
“We’ll be watching closely, Dermot. You can count on that. You may find some consolation in the fact that we were there this afternoon.”
“You’re not really going to give me that Celtic club, are you?”
“If you leave your cosh behind.”
“All right.”
I had not, however, quite made up my mind to that.
“Good! I might add that we have added a very Celtic secret weapon that you will encounter when you go over to the Point. It is very effective.”
“I can hardly wait.”
Celtic secret weapon indeed! I was in the land of the fairies and the leprechauns and the pookas.
And the dark ones.
I was not yet ready to take the cosh out of my jacket pocket.
—17—
SHILLELAGH IN hand, I approached herself’s dressing room with considerable caution. I had better not be either too early or too late. It was in one of the back corridors of the Point Theater on the banks of Anna Livia, a vast and not totally unattractive barn. I had anticipated some problem with the security people, even though at the moment I was only slightly less well-known on this misty island than was my wife.
In fact, there had not been any mist all day.
I had settled my in-laws in our seats, halfway back so as not to distract Nuala Anne. I noted when I left them that in one hand herself was holding her husband’s big paw—he would have been quite good with the tire irons—and in the other her rosary.
Yep, it was still Ireland.
I had, incidentally, left my cosh behind, though with considerable misgivings.
The security precautions were almost a security blanket. At every step of the way, grim-eyed Celtic warriors checked my passport, my driver’s license, and the ID card that the Reliable, Dublin, driver (a certain Paddy) had passed on to me from Commissioner Keenan. At certain key points I was carefully examined to make sure I wasn’t carrying any concealed weapons. With the utmost reluctance—and without a trace of Celtic wit and laugher—they let me through.
There were four of these unsmiling Fenians at the door to my wife’s dressing room.
“I’m her husband,” I said, displaying my assorted credentials.
Each mark of my identity as Dermot Michael Coyne was carefully considered seriatim by the quartet.
They nodded slightly as if they were just barely willing to admit that I might be telling the truth.
“Might I knock on the door?”
They considered the question carefully and glanced at one another.
“All right,” said the woman who seemed to be in charge, “but, mind, not too loudly!”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“And you’d better let me have that cane of yours. You’ll scare the poor woman half to death with it.”
“Yes, ma’am,” I said, though I doubted that it would scare Nuala much.
I knocked very gently, more in fear of herself than of the four Fenians.
“Come in,” said a very unhappy voice that might have belonged to my Nuala Anne.
I opened the door and was greeted by a very large and very suspicious Irish wolfhound, no doubt a product of pre-Christian antiquity.
“Dermot Michael Coyne, where the fock have you been! You’re late!”
“No, ma’am,” I said meekly. “I am precisely on time. However, I’m afraid I can’t come in unless you call off this fearsome creature who seems ready to chew off my head.”
“Och, Dermot, that’s only Fiona. She knows that you love me, don’t you, Fiona girl?”
The Celtic secret weapon responded with what sounded like a low growl, then licked my hand with approval and offered her oversize head for affection.
“Nice, Fiona,” I said tentatively as I petted her.
“Isn’t she a darlin’ girl!”
“She sure is!”
To show her approval, the darlin’ stood on her hind paws and slobbered on my face.
“See; I told you she’d like you. … Down, Fiona. Me fella is a touch fastidious.”
The pre-Christian creature did as she was told.
The dressing room was fit for an Academy Award winner. But the only person in it was the shy lass from Carraroe, indeed a shy and woebegone lass from Carraroe, wearing an elegant dressing gown (apparently provided by the house) and holding a brush in her hand.
“Dermot, me love,” she said, collapsing into my arms. “I’m sorry I shouted at you. … I shouldn’t be doing this.... I’m the most terrible eejit in all the world. … I’m a disgrace. … I’ll humiliate you and me ma and me da and everyone I know.…”
“You’ll probably humiliate Fiona, too.”
That canine, who had curled up at our feet, heard her name, lifted an ear, and then decided that the two humans in each other’s arms did not need her attention.
“I will not, Dermot Michael; won’t she stay out there on the stage with me, no matter how bad I am?”
“Arguably, as the little bishop would say.”
We both giggled.
So the secret weapon of the fairies would be onstage. Nice touch. I wouldn’t need my cosh.
Not at all, at all.
“I suppose the final run-through was terrible,” I said, taking the hairbrush out of her hand.
“No, it was perfect,” she said in despair. “That’s why I know the performance will be awful altogether … and meself letting down all the wonderful people here …”
To say nothing of myself and your ma and your da!”
She giggled again but clung to me for dear life. “Who do I think I am, carrying on like an amadon and meself not even two years out of TCD.”
“Only just a year.”
“Och, Dermot,” she wailed.
“You will, of course, love every minute,” I said, “just like you did that day I saw you lament that you’d lost the last playboy of the Western world.”1
Laughter this time.
“I found the last playboy of the Western world, didn’t I? … Dermot Michael, did you bring roses for me tonight like you did that time?”2
“Woman, I did not!”
In fact, I had left them with the stage manager.
“You did, too! I know you did!”
We held each other in silence for a moment.
“Well”—she sighed the loudest west of Ireland sigh I had ever heard—“I suppose I must do my makeup again, and yourself making me cry.”
Which meant, Dermot Michael, get the hell out of here.
I left, content that I had done my duty. Good-dog Fiona barked her approval.
“All we need now is your boss,” I said to the Fenians as I emerged from the dressing room.
“Boss?” one of them said softly.
“The REALLY big guy with the REALLY big club.”
“Finn himself, is it?”
“Who else?”
I walked away from them satisfied that I was one up.
Father Placid was lurking backstage, looking even more dyspeptic than he had at Dublin Airport.
“Cheer up, Father,” I urged him. “You’ll make a bundle tonight.”
“These things are expensive,” he said in his usual dismal baritone. “A lot of money is wasted.”
Right.
“She’s a terrible wreck, isn’t she now?” Annie McGrail asked as I sat down next to her.
“Totally out of control. … I wouldn’t let go of that rosary, if I were you.”
All three of us laughed.
“Didn’t she always love the limelight?” her da observed.
“Didn’t she ever?” her ma agreed.
The lights went down in the house and up on the stage. The background hinted at stained glass and round towers and beehive huts and old Irish monasteries. The audience waited expectantly.
However, before herself could appear, didn’t Father Placid show up?
The lights went up.
“I want to say a word,” he informed us in the tone of a
man who had many words to say. “You’ve all come here tonight to be entertained by listening to songs you used to sing in church. I wonder how many of you went to church last Sunday. Ireland is a post-Catholic country now. We have to bring you to a theater to persuade you to give money to the poor and starving of the world. You all have nice jobs and nice homes and nice clothes and nice motorcars and nice food. You forget what it was like not so long ago in this country to be hungry and cold. You don’t bother to thank God for your money and your success. You don’t realize how transient such things are. You don’t realize how transient your selfish, consumerist lives are. They are even worse than the lives of the stupid Americans because you ought to know better. Soon you’ll stand before God’s judgment seat and have to render an account for your silly, shallow, materialist lives. God have mercy on all of you. Keep those truths in mind while you listen to the music tonight. If the songs don’t make you feel guilty, then you’ll probably spend all eternity listening not to the angelic hymns but the tormented screams of the damned.”
The audience was silent, resentful perhaps, but also troubled. Father Placid might easily have ruined the evening. He certainly had tried to do so.
“Let’s hear it for the stupid Americans,” I whispered to the McGrails.
They both chuckled.
“Shush, Dermot,” my mother-in-law murmured in the tone of voice that meant “fair play to you.”
The lights went down again.
Suddenly my wife, radiant in her white suit and green scarf, harp in hand, appeared, accompanied by the faithful Fiona, who curled up at the foot of the harp.
Thunderous applause trailed off into silence as, seated at her harp, she waited to begin.
Then suddenly:
“ ‘Hail, Holy Queen, enthroned above, O Maria!
Hail, Queen of mercy, Queen of love, O Maria!
“ ‘Triumph all, ye Cherubin!
Sing with us, ye Seraphim!
Heaven and earth resound the hymn,
Salve, Salve Regina!
“ ‘Our life, our sweetness here below, O Maria!
Our hope in sorrow and in woe, O Maria!’ ”
The audience cheered and then joined in on the chorus.
There is probably not a Catholic in the English-speaking world who hasn’t sung that hymn, usually at the top of her voice. But no one ever heard it sung with the delicacy, the reverence, and the ethereal joy with which my Nuala sang it.
“Softly now,” she said, as we went into the second refrain, “so we won’t wake up the sleeping Christ child!”
“ ‘Triumph all, ye Cherubin!
Sing with us, ye Seraphim!
Heaven and earth resound the hymn,
Salve, Salve Regina!’ ”
Suddenly, we were in church and Sister Superior was warning us not to forget that God was present.
Next to me Annie McGrail was crying happily.
“Well, now,” me wife said, standing up and revealing her long, slender figure and her modest knee-length skirt, “isn’t that a lovely song when we sing it right. We’re not in church, of course, so there won’t be a collection or a sermon …”
Laughter.
She was wearing her Dublin persona. Hence her accent was strictly West Brit.
“But still we’re singing prayer songs, so we should remember that we’re praying. … Most of the hymns I’ll sing tonight are songs we grew up with. Some of them are quite lovely, and others, well, they’re still part of our heritage and we have to respect them. Even if we’re glad we don’t sing them anymore!”
More laughter.
“I’ll sing a song or two in Irish, because that’s me real language. And I’ll sing a couple of new songs, too, because in Ireland and in Catholicism there is room for the present as well as the past.”
She strummed the harp a couple of times.
“I want to dedicate this night to Mary the mother of Jesus, who gave me the courage to come out here tonight even though I felt like a total eejit... and to me ma and me da, who are watching out in Carraroe. They told me all the wonderful Catholic stories when I was a very little one and have lived those stories as an example to me every day since. …”
She switched to Irish for a sentence or two. Her ma grabbed in her purse for a new tissue.
Sure, the Irish will cry at almost anything, won’t they now?
“Now,” herself went on, “I’m going to sing the ‘Lourdes Hymn,’ which I think is just wonderful. Sure, isn’t it written for a pilgrimage, but isn’t our life a pilgrimage? I’ll sing it in French first. You French people here will have to excuse me terrible French accent Then I’ll sing it in Irish and you Dubliners will have to excuse me terrible Galway accent. Finally I’ll sing it in English, and I’ll make no apology at all at all for my west of Ireland brogue.”
The folks with the pipes and the bodhran drums slipped onto the stage and provided soft marching music. We were on our way to Lourdes and a rendezvous with wonder. Many of the congregation, as I was now thinking of them, seemed to know the hymn in all three languages. The brief stanzas rolled on. Yank that I was, I could remember only a couple of them—the first two and the last!
“ ‘Immaculate Mary, your praises we sing.
You reign now in splendor with Jesus our King.
Ave, Ave, Ave Maria! Ave, Ave Maria!
“ ‘In heaven the blessed your glory proclaim,
On earth we your children invoke your sweet name.
Ave, Ave, Ave Maria! Ave, Ave Maria!
“ ‘We pray for the Church, our true Mother on
earth,
And beg you to watch o’er the land of our birth.
Ave, Ave, Ave Maria! Ave, Ave Maria!’ ”
“Well now,” my friend went on, “’tis time we come back from Lourdes to Ireland, isn’t it? Next I’m going to sing a more modern hymn. The melody is from ‘Simple Gifts,’ a Shaker hymn, poor dear folks. And I’m going to sing their version first. Then I’ll sing it as ‘Lord of the Dance,’ a poem Sidney Carter wrote. I first heard it sung on a record by Mary O’Hara. It was a dark, dark night out in the Gaeltach [her accent now was pure Connemara]—and it gets pretty dark out there. I was sitting by the fire. As I heard Mary sing it, I imagined a lot of little Irish feet dancing around the room in front of the fire. So I danced meself with me big Irish feet. I see the small ones dancing whenever I hear it. So I thought we’d have them dance with us and for God tonight.”
A group of little Irish dancers flounced out on the stage—the oldest girl child was certainly no more than eight. As Nuala sang they danced. The fairie folk had returned, only now to dance with Jesus.
And didn’t herself join the small lasses in the final whirl of their dance, herself a small one again?
Through all of this, good-dog Fiona, curled up near the harp, didn’t move. Indeed, she almost seemed to be sound asleep. Her ears twitched a little at the dance music. However, her eyes, alert and intelligent, watched the audience intently. She glanced quickly at the dancing colleens, as if she would like to join them. However, she stuck to her job.
“Now,” Fiona’s charge announced, “I’m going to do a couple of hymns that will give your fiddle players and your choir a chance to join us for the evening. Youse know them well, but I want to sing them a little different tonight, so you’ll kind of hear them for the first time.”
Dutifully the strings and the choristers appeared behind her.
“Panis Angelicas” on Nuala’s lips was not a doleful signal that a wedding mass was winding down but a light, mystical hymn of celebration in which the soaring voice of the soprano was less important than the joy of the lyrics. Herself was relying on her own Irishlanguage spirituality in which God was not merely and not even mainly in His Heaven but lurked in the lanes and the hedges and the little lakes and the stone fences, always close and always eager to have a quiet word with us.
“That’s the way we’d sing it in Connemara,” she informed us. “Now I want to read a paragraph f
rom a book by a man from Connemara who writes about the spiritual life in the Celtic world. Since I really can’t preach a homily in the church—well, not yet anyway—I thought a quote from John O’Donohue would be just right. It’s for all of us who are afraid of something tonight, including especially meself.”
“ ‘No one but you can sense the eternity and depth concealed in your solitude. This is one of the lonely things about individuality. You arrive at a sense of the eternal in you only through confronting and outpacing your fears. The truly lonely element in loneliness is fear. No one else has access to the world you carry around within yourself—you are its custodian and entrance. No one else can see the world the way you see it. No one else can feel your life the way you feel it. Thus it is impossible to ever compare two people because each stands on such different ground. When you compare yourself to others, you are inviting envy into your consciousness; it can be a dangerous and destructive guest. This is always one of the great tensions in an awakened or spiritual life, namely, to find the rhythm of its unique language, perception, and belonging. To remain faithful to your life requires commitment and vision that must be constantly renewed.’ ”
Then we did Schubert’s “Ave Maria” in the Galwegian mode. It began to dawn on me that Nuala Anne had reached not only into her own creative imagination for her approach to the concert but also and perhaps not altogether consciously into the spiritual memories of Irish Catholic antiquity. She had done such a fine job of it that the minutes of the concert slipped away like snowflakes melting on the ground.
I noticed a young man, neatly dressed in sweater and jeans, sitting at the far end of a row two ahead of ours. He was moderately good-looking, too well-groomed to be a student. Perhaps a young man from the countryside come to Dublin to work as a clerk at an accounting firm. He squirmed nervously in his seat, twisting and turning like a golfer eager to escape from church. There was something just a little unnerving about him. I resolved to keep my eye on him.
“You know what?” she asked us. “I think I’ve forgotten about the Holy Spirit altogether, haven’t I now? Sure, I don’t want to hurt Her feelings at all, at all, and Herself taking such good care of me all me life. So let’s sing a song to Her. It’s not the greatest hymn ever written, but youse all know the words, and we’ll sing them quiet like they’re going to float away on a gentle spring breeze and catch up with God’s gentle spring breeze, which Jesus told us blows wither She will.”
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