“We are here today because one man said, ‘The killing has to stop; I forgive you.’ These words had an astonishing redemptive power for his family, for those who killed him, and for their families, and, if I may say so, also for Ireland. Someone, who knows about this annual Eucharist, remarked to me recently that only in Ireland could something like this occur. I don’t know whether that is true. I do know that if Irish Catholicism means anything at all, something like this should most certainly happen in Ireland.
‘The killing has not yet stopped on this island, but there is much less of it than there used to be. We seem finally on the verge of the peace for which so many men died seventy-five years ago. We already have our freedom. We also seem to have prosperity. What Kevin dreamed about has come true, perhaps not quite the way he planned, but it still seems to have happened.
“If we wish to sustain this remarkable phenomenon that has been called modern Ireland, we must not forget the importance of forgiveness in our age-old tradition. If we do forget it, much of what we have achieved in the last three-quarters of a century could be lost again. So we pray today that forgiveness will complete and perfect the healing process that Ireland and the whole world need.”
Nuala leaned over and whispered in my ear, “That’s why we had to do all these things, Dermot love, to learn about forgiveness.”
I nodded.
You don’t argue with your mystics. Especially when she’s your wife.
Afterward there was a buffet in the parish hall. The people chatted amiably with one another, talking about their lives since the last Eucharist, a year ago. I finished off several sandwiches and pastries because Ma had always said it was a sin to waste food.
Gene Keenan introduced us to Tom Whelan, the Junior Minister in the Foreign Office, a bright-looking young man, accompanied by a bright-looking young wife, who, it turned out, was a lawyer.
“She wants to be president of Ireland someday,” he told us. “You have to be a woman and a lawyer to be elected these days.”
“Well, I’ll never name you prime minister,” she said in reply.
“Gene has been telling me of the astonishing detective work you two have been doing since you’ve been here in Ireland this time … and herself performing so brilliantly at the Point the other night.”
“We have been rewarded,” I said, “with the best wolfhound in all of Ireland.”
“So I understand. … Is she Irish-speaking?”
Nuala Anne said something in Irish.
“As her first language? Well, that’s all to the good. … Let me be honest with you: It’s time that the whole story be told. It was so long ago. So much tragedy and heartache. But so much generosity and faith.”
I thought briefly of Archdeacon Clyde’s comment that men and women who lived long ago become historical figures and cease to be human beings. They rather become icons, legends from whom we can learn, but not flesh-and-blood people like us who can suffer as we do and have. Was not all this goodwill just a little shallow?
Then I thought of the Carmelite nun with whom we had shaken hands, and herself, as my wife would have said—and probably would say—so radiantly lovely.
No, this scene of goodwill was not shallow at all.
“If you want to tell the story, Dermot, you certainly have my permission. Lady Augusta is surely the most astonishing character of them all.”
“What do you think about that other and very different astonishing woman, my fellow Chicagoan, Lady Hazel Lavery?”
He frowned pensively. “She was a remarkable woman, magical, one might say. Certainly lonely and haunted. She lost both her father and her first husband very early in life. Sir John Lavery perhaps replaced her father. The many lovers she claimed never adequately replaced Ned Trudeau, who died in her arms a few months after their marriage.”
“And herself pregnant.”
“Precisely. … She had a vivid imagination. Historians I’ve talked to tell me that she had many fewer lovers than she claimed. Her pretense to be virtually Michael Collins’s widow was certainly fantasy.”
“And Kevin?”
“You know, Dermot, I kind of doubt it. It doesn’t fit what we know of his stern, upright character. Doubtless he was enamored of her; most men that knew her were. He wrote her some silly letters. Sleep with her? It seems most unlikely. Moreover, she was skillful at editing the letters, cutting parts out, and showing different ones to different friends. I don’t doubt that she persuaded herself that they were lovers, just like she persuaded herself that Winston Churchill was her lover. I do doubt, however, that in either case she bedded them.”
“Maybe,” I said.
Later I asked Nuala Anne what she thought.
“We wouldn’t be all that far from wrong if we said that your man probably had the right of it.”
Before we left Ireland we receive a manila envelope with a Garda Siochana letterhead. Inside there was a photograph of an elderly nun. There was no mistaking the hint of mischief that glowed in her eyes or tugged at her mouth.
Later, soon after our return to America and before our first trip to Grand Beach, Nuala and I went to 415 Ninth Avenue, between Cleveland and Larrabee Streets, where Hazel was born. St. Michael’s Church loomed in the background. The building had long since been torn down and replaced by new town houses. Our next stop was the house on Astor Street where she grew up. There we prayed that this resdess, haunted, and beautiful woman had at last found peace.
One morning in late September, as our first wedding anniversary drew near, I was awakened from deep sleep in our home on Southport by someone persistently nudging my thigh.
“Nuala? …”
The nudging continued. It was followed by a bark.
“Fiona? … What’s the matter, girl?”
I was pushed out of bed.
Someone was being very sick in the bathroom.
Fiona barked insistently and nudged me towards the bathroom.
“All right, all right!”
Nuala, a robe around her shoulders, was kneeling on the floor and vomiting into the toilet.
“Nuala!”
Fiona barked again, a demand that I stop whatever was troubling her beloved mistress.
“What’s wrong!”
“It’s that focking bitch!”
“What focking bitch?”
“Your focking daughter!”
“My daughter?”
“That focking little Mary Anne.”
I knelt next to her and put my arm around her protectively. “You mean little Nell Dermot?”
“I’m going to have to fight with her for the rest of my life,” she wailed. “This is only the beginning!”
She retched again.
“Course, we’ll bond by fighting.”
“Bond against her father?”
“Who else?”
“Whom else.”
She fell into my arms, laughing and crying. The crying, however, was joyous. Fiona settled down, content with her early morning’s work.
“Oh, Dermot Michael! I’ve never been so happy!”
I did not even think of questioning whether our child would be a girl.
—NOTE—
ONCE, WHEN I was in the land of my ancestors, I heard a story about the annual Mass for the family of Kevin O’Higgins and the families of his killers. I do not know whether the story is true, but it seemed very Irish to me and typical of the complex and fascinating culture of the country. This story is about how that Mass, should it exist, might have come to be.
There are, as I note in the book, different stories about who killed O’Higgins on his way to Sunday Mass in July of 1927. It would appear, however, that like the death of his hero Michael Collins, the assassination of O’Higgins was a chance event. It is astonishing that no one has written a scholarly biography of him. More than anyone else he created peace and stability in the emergent Irish State. My explanation of who killed him and why is fictional, but there is no doubt that he died because of his vigorou
s efforts to end the violence and the terrorism at the end of the Irish Civil War.
There is no Castlegarry or Garrytown on the bank of the Shannon Estuary. All the people and events that occur in that place are fictional. Major General Sir Henry Hugh Tudor, however, did command the Black and Tans during the Troubles. He did withdraw in disgrace to Newfoundland, where he lived in exile till 1965. I am grateful to Superintendent James J. Lynch, Ret., of the Canadian Railroad Police for telling me the story of Tudor’s forty years of exile in Newfoundland. My attempt to explain his disgrace is a work of my own imagination. He will, I suspect, forever be a mystery.
The material about Connemara is based on the wonderful book Atlas of the Irish Rural Landscape, by F. H. A. Aalen, Kevin Whelan, and Matthew Stout.
I am grateful to President and Mrs. Edward Walsh of the University of Limerick (which is a lovely city when it’s not raining) for inviting me many times to that wonderful part of Ireland and for introducing me to the CD Faith of Our Fathers, which gave me the idea for Nuala Anne Goes to Church.
I am, finally, grateful to the monks of Glenstal Abbey for their constant hospitality. Though Abbot Fabian and Brother Killian are creatures of my imagination, the abbey in reality is at least as wonderful as I describe it.
I’m not certain where Nuala Anne acquired all her insights into Irish mysticism. Maybe she was born with spiritual mists floating around in her lovely head. But patently, as her friend the little bishop would say, she also has read Father John O’Donohue’s wonderful spiritual essay Anam Cara: A Book of Celtic Wisdom.
AG
First Sunday in Advent, 1997
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