Irish Mist

by Andrew M. Greeley

  Perhaps her ingenious sexual allure was overwhelming to these dedicated young men, who had never met a woman quite like her. She overwhelmed O’Higgins, a stern and upright Catholic and a married man. He wrote to her the year before his death: “I am so unhappy and I want you, want you, and it is so miserable to have to pretend that I haven’t a wish in the world except to win the elections, which is absurd and suggests a convict clamoring for heavier balls of lead around his ankles.”

  Later, in January of the year he died and a few days after the birth of his second daughter, who is now a Carmelite nun, he wrote: “I am lost and broken. You are my life and my breath my sun and air and wind. Having absorbed everything, having become all life holds for me.”

  There can be no doubt, Nuala, that he wrote those letters. Nor can there be any doubt that she passed them around, practically guaranteeing that they would be discovered someday. It’s none of our business, nor is it our right to judge either of them, any of them, anyone.

  She died in 1935 in her early fifties. Her last fling was with Evelyn Waugh, who dedicated his first novel to her. Waugh was twenty-three years younger than her, yet he was one more victim of her powers of enchantment At the end, she murmured over and over again, “My house is built with straw. My house is built with sticks.”

  The Brompton Oratory, founded by Cardinal Newman, was the site of her funeral mass. Oh, yes, she was a Catholic, like everyone else in this strange story. May she rest in peace, like all the rest of them.

  Meanwhile the Civil War continued in Ireland. Beaten in the field, the Irregulars turned to terror, burning, ambushing, murdering. Their targets this time were members of the the Free State Government At first squeamish about killing men who had been their allies and friends, the Free State leaders concluded that violence must be met with violence. Their ruthless policy was successful because the Irish people, who had supported the rebellion against the English, were fed up with the Irregulars.

  Erskine Childers, an English-born leader in the War of Independence, was captured and shot because he carried a gun at the time of his capture. His son later became President of Ireland (and the son of Cosgrave, who had ordered his death served as his Prime Minister). In December of 1922, two members of the Dáil were shot as they were leaving their hotel. In reprisal the Free State Army demanded the execution of four captured leaders of the Irregulars, including O’Higgins’s old friend and wedding best man, Rory O’Connor. Reluctantly O’Higgins accepted the decision and defended it before the Dáil. Since then he has been known to many in Ireland as the man who ordered the execution of his best friend.

  After the execution of the four Irregular leaders, there was another election in which the killing was a major issue. O’Higgins’s party won in a landslide. The ordinary people of Ireland did not like the executions, but they liked even less the violence, which had now continued for eight years.

  The executions, which he had defended as a necessary deterrent, had their effect. Terrorism against the government ceased. By 1925, when De Valera ordered a cease-fire and the “caching” of weapons (which was bluster, because there were few weapons left to cache), the Irregular movement ceased to exist, save for a few die-hards. O’Higgins had successfully ended anarchy in Ireland. In a very short time Ireland would become a stable democratic society. It was an extraordinary accomplishment, one at which political scientists today marvel.

  He spent his remaining years establishing a working governmental structure at home, including the unarmed Garda Siochana, and representing Ireland as “Minister for External Affairs” abroad. He thought that a dual monarchy, in which the King of England would also be the King of Ireland (crowned in St. Patrick’s Cathedral after he was crowned at Westminster Abbey), would solve the Northern Ireland problem.

  It was probably too late for that. Ten years before, it might have done the trick.

  What kind of a man was he, Nuala love?

  To tell you the truth, I don’t know. He was stern, upright, just. Grimmer and tougher than his hero, the Big Fella. An utterly dedicated Catholic, as DeVere White describes him:

  A man who fasts for half a year before he marries, as a preparation for the ceremony, is not an ordinary man, according to the ideas of this age, in which ascetical practices are immediately suspect. There was a time when it would have seemed not an abnormal practice for a Christian on the eve of a sacrament. It fits the idealized conception of a dedicated knight. O’Higgins was not a psychopath; he was a Catholic who took his religion seriously, who lived in the light of his religion. It is impossible to interpret his character on any basis other than that of a man to whom religion was the inspiration of life. With his remorselessly clear and logical mind, he found it impossible to make the usual compromise between the claims of this world and the next. It would, however, be quite misleading to leave the impression that O’Higgins made any demonstration of unusual piety. Of his moral strength all were aware, hut, just as his family were surprised when he declared his intention of becoming a priest, so were his friends unaware of any unusual religious fervor. He had no pomp, nor did he smear his speech with the oil of sanctity.

  Yet there was always his infatuation with Lady Hazel Lavery. How does one reconcile that with the stern Catholicism that drove his public life?

  One doesn’t. Nor, since we are not media journalists, whose job it is to render judgment on men and women of the past, do we.

  We do know that if Collins is the “man who made Ireland,” Kevin O’Higgins is the man who made Ireland a peaceful democracy.

  I don’t know much help this, my report, in combination with the two stories from the Gardai, will be, Nuala love. It is not as clear or as clean as some of the other reports I have made in my Dr. Watson role. I don’t see how Kevin and Birdie O’Higgins and Hazel Lavery (from 415 Ninth Avenue) fit into our lives. Nor do I understand how they relate to what happened at Castle Garry, which also seems to fit into our lives.

  To tell you the truth, the whole business frightens me.

  —22—

  “LET ME read your report about Kevin O’Higgins again, Dermot love?”

  Arguing that she wanted to approach the data in the same order I had, Nuala had studied Gene Keenan’s two memos before she read my account of Ireland during its Civil War. Then she had returned to Keenan’s memos.

  I gave her my report about Kevin O’Higgins. She handed me back my notes about Garrytown and the photocopy of Augusta Downs’s book.

  We were sitting on a bench in Merrion Square, enjoying the delightful spring warmth that had won its most recent confrontation with the Irish mist. Fiona was curled up at our feet, panting contentedly. Nuala was wearing white jeans and a purple knit shirt. She was sufficiently lovely that everyone who passed us by had to have a second look. Man with a beautiful woman and a beautiful dog. Lucky guy.

  The beautiful woman was all business this morning, no time for lollygagging.

  Somewhere near cops were lurking, but I didn’t see any of them.

  “So much suffering,” Nuala said, giving me back the report, which I put in my briefcase with our other files.

  “There is certainly plenty of that.”

  “Look at all the marriages that were destroyed—Brigid O’Higgins, Augusta Downs, Eve Tudor, maybe even Hazel Lavery. If that ever were a marriage.”

  “He certainly loved her.”

  “That doesn’t make a marriage, Dermot Michael.”

  “ ’Tis true.”

  “Don’t think that’s going to happen to our marriage,” she warned. “I’m not about to let you get away.”

  “I wasn’t planning on it.”

  “You’d better not,” she said, patting my knee. “We’re not going to let him get away, are we, Fiona girl?”

  The wolfhound wagged her tail and slobbered.

  “Do you think Birdie O’Higgins knew about Hazel?” I asked.

  “Sure she did. … Did she write a letter to Hazel after Kevin’s death?”

  “I
think so,” I said, taking Sinead McGoole’s book out of my briefcase. “Yeah, here it is.”

  “ ‘I want to thank you and Sir John Lavery for your loving messages on the death of our dauntless hero, my beloved Kevin. You were his dear, dear friends—he loved you both and he will be with you in and by your sides when death comes. His own death was an inspiration—quiet—great, beautiful! ! ! ! ! ! Sometime I want to tell you about it! I’m sorry you were not here to say adieu to his noble spirit, for “Nothing in his life/Became him like the leaving it.” It was magnificent. He conquered death as he conquered life. He was serene. But oh! for those who are left … it is unthinkable—and yet with dying breath he charged us all “to be brave and to carry on” and “orders is orders.” ’ ”

  “She knew all right,” Nuala said. “And she is telling Hazel that he died as her husband. I bet Hazel didn’t like the letter at all.”

  “She showed it around to people and remarked on how strange it was. … Hazel had a lot of lovers in her life. Men who were captivated by her, wrote poetry about her, risked everything for her. Churchill, Ramsey MacDonald, who was the first Labour Prime Minister, Lord Londonderry, Lord Brinkenhead. None of them, however, gave up their wives and family for her.”

  “Poor woman,” Nuala said with a shake of her head. “She was a pet like Fiona here. Her life depended on men showing her attention. Unlike Fiona, she served no other useful function in life. She wasn’t a great watchdog, was she, adorable little girl.…” She bent over and petted the dog’s huge head. Fiona responded by slobbering.

  “She thought the cause of a free Ireland gave purpose to her life for a while.”

  “Did Sir John marry her so he would have a model to paint?”

  “Probably,” I replied. “He even painted her on her deathbed.”

  Nuala shivered. “It gives me the creeps, Dermot Michael. … No children, I suppose?”

  “Actually, she had a daughter and a stepdaughter. Her first husband, a New York society M.D., died six months after they were married of a pulmonary embolism—in her presence. Her daughter, Alice, was born six months later. Sir John had a daughter who was Hazel’s age. He was twenty-five years older than Hazel.”

  “You’re wrong, Dermot, to say she wasn’t attractive.” Nuala took the book away from me and glanced at the pictures. “Not the kind which would attract you, thanks be to God, but still enchanting.”

  “I guess she had to be to have had so many lovers.”

  Nuala handed the book back to me. “If she really did, poor woman. … Did Birdie O’Higgins remarry?”

  “She did.”

  Nuala nodded her approval. “If I die before you do, Dermot Michael, I want you to marry again.”

  “You’ll outlive me. According to Prester George, you have ten more years of life expectancy.”

  She snorted, dismissing that possibility. “Anyway, Lady Hazel,” she continued, “is probably only a distraction. She’s not part of our problem.”

  “And what is our problem?”

  She turned to face me. “Dermot love, I haven’t the foggiest. I don’t know why we should be interested in Kevin O’Higgins or Birdie O’Higgins or Arthur Downs or Gussie Downs or Sir Henry Hugh Tudor. I don’t know what connection they have with our lives. I don’t see how they can be connected with them focking eejits who tried to kidnap me or who make those crazy phone calls. All I know is that I felt Kevin’s death and I felt the fire.”

  “And knew that the girl didn’t start it. … What girl?”

  She shrugged. “They’re not video replays, Dermot Michael.”

  “I understand.”

  Two young men were walking towards us on our side of the park. They looked tough and dangerous, but that was the way even the most innocent of students from Trinity College was supposed to look these days.

  Fiona, however, did not approve of them. She stood up, then sat on her haunches and glared at them, her tail wagging dubiously. Me shillelagh cane rested next to me on the bench.

  “It seems to me that we usually encounter these phenomena when we become involved with something from the past that causes you to feel vibrations. Like visiting Pa and Ma’s and at Mount Carmel1 or living in Lettitia Walsh’s home.2 Do you think that making a reservation at Castlegarry is what started it this time?”

  The young men were coming closer. They were grim and unsmiling. Fiona uttered a low, ominous growl.

  “Maybe, Dermot,” Nuala said with a sigh. “It’s a reasonable idea, but this dark talent of mine—if it’s a talent at all—isn’t exactly reasonable.”

  The received wisdom, promulgated by George the Priest, is that Nuala’s psychic sensitivity to “vibrations” from the past is a trait inherited by a few of us modern humans from a proto-hominoid ancestor, Homo antecessor, or Homo habilis, or even Homo erectus—not from the Neanderthals, which, according to the priest, are not now thought to be our ancestors. At one time, before language evolved as fully as it has in us, this ability was useful for survival. Now it carries with it no evolutionary advantage.

  The little bishop had listened skeptically to that explanation. “Maybe,” was all he’d said.

  “Dermot Michael,” Nuala had said with a big smile, “is His Rivirince suggesting that I ought to be living in a tree?”

  “More likely a savannah in Kenya.”

  Then we had to explain to her Kenya and that a savannah was not merely a newly popular woman’s name or a city in Georgia.

  “Well,” she had said, “I’d never call a daughter of mine Savannah.”

  Later I had asked her what she’d thought of George the Priest’s analysis.

  “Och, isn’t His Rivirince a grand man, and himself being so smart. But then sometimes he’s really full of cow shite, isn’t he?”

  I tentatively subscribe to the priest’s theory, but mainly because I need some kind of explanation.

  There’s no doubt, however, about her “sensitivity”—if that’s the right name for it. She knew that my sister-in-law was pregnant with her first child before the young woman herself did. She also knew the sex of the child.

  There are, of course, purely rational explanations for these individual phenomena. As far as that goes, there’s surely a purely rational explanation for all of it. Only it’s still spooky.

  And scary.

  “Anyway,” she said, continuing our conversation in Merrion Square, “the answer to it all is out there in Limerick. So we have to go there after Galway.”

  “I’m not so sure. …”

  Fiona growled again, more loudly.

  “Shush, darlin’,” Nuala whispered. “They only want me to sing a song for them.”

  The two lads stopped a few feet away from us. Fiona apparently accepted Nuala’s reassurance. She remained on her haunches, however.

  “Good morning, ma’am,” one of them said shyly.

  Herself replied in Irish. I knew the sound well enough to know that she said, “Jesus and Mary and Patrick be with you all this day.”

  “ ’Tis a lovely dog you have there,” said the other.

  “ ’Tis me darlin’ Fiona.”

  I was out of the loop, apparently where I belonged.

  “Could we pet her?”

  “Fiona, these nice young men from TCD want to pet you.”

  The lads, who were surely no older than eighteen, didn’t seem to think it strange that she knew where they went to school.

  I, however, thought that it was strange beyond belief that my gorgeous woman knew these kids were harmless before the Guard’s wolfhound did.

  Where was that tree?

  They approached the good dog gingerly. Fiona put her paw out to greet them, a new trick. Both lads solemnly shook hands with her and then patted her massive head. She responded by slobbering all over them, much to their delight.

  “I went to Trinity meself.”

  “We know, ma’am.”

  “We saw you on the telly.”

  This is me husband, Dermot.”

&
nbsp; “You played American football, didn’t you, sir?” one of them said as we shook hands.

  “A little,” I said.

  I was not being modest. I had played only a little and had quit after my junior year because I disliked the brutality.

  “Would you ever sing a song for us, Ms. McGrail?”

  “Ms. McGrail is me ma. I’m Nuala Anne. … I bet you want to hear The Cloud’s Veil.’ ”

  They nodded their heads solemnly.

  She sang only the refrain, which was what they wanted to hear from The Cloud’s Veil.”

  They asked herself for an autograph in each of their notebooks, shook hands with the three of us, and departed.

  They didn’t ask for my autograph,” I said.

  “Washed up linebacker! … Anyway, as I was saying, Dermot Michael, we have to go out to Limerick; that’s all there is to it. I must sing those hymns with the monks!”

  “We don’t have to stay at Castlegarry.”

  “Yes, we do; that’s what the mystery is all about.”

  The place is haunted.”

  “All castles in Ireland are haunted, Dermot You know that. ’Tis only the cottages which can’t afford ghosts.”