Drown All the Dogs

by Thomas Adcock

  The driver laughed.

  I said, “God bless Eire.”

  Thirty minutes later I was seated in the Ould Plaid Shawl, rereading Gunston’s article, connecting things together in my notebook and having myself a big drink while I waited for my lunch date.

  Dermot Brennan was a fifty-year-old professor who looked like a giant Paddington bear. He had a round face, tightly curled brown hair with a frizzy beard to match and button-black eyes. He wore a navy blazer decorated with the ancient Trinity crest, a red-and-white checkered shirt and a yellow bowtie. He even had a Paddington briefcase, one of those attachés with triangular envelope flaps that tied instead of buckled. Professor Brennan’s dress and physical appearance was as cheerful as his academic love was morose.

  “Irish political history,” he explained, as if our pub table was an extension of his lecture hall, “is the dark story of a fatal divide, what the great American scholar Hannah Arendt called the abyss between men of brilliant, facile conceptions and the men of brutal deeds—which no intellectual explanation is able to bridge.”

  Brennan was nothing if not quick to the point.

  “Speaking of politics,” he said to me, with a nod toward Gunston, who was opening a spiral-bound reporter’s notebook, “our mutual newspaper friend tells me you’re Aidan Hockaday’s son.”

  “I’m beginning to think that’s not exactly to my advantage.”

  “Oh? What gave you that idea?”

  “Your Trinity librarian, O’Dowd, … Your chancellor …”

  “Peadar Cavanaugh?” Brennan’s frizzy eyebrows rose. He took a meerschaum from his breast pocket and emptied out burnt tobacco into an ashtray. “What did he tell you of your father?”

  “Nothing direct, except Cavanaugh seems to think I’m somehow an awful lot like my old man, whatever that means.”

  “Well, you do look powerful like him. I’d say that, all right.”

  “How would you know?”

  “Aidan Hockaday shows up in one of the photographs from my collection, my rogue’s gallery, as I call it.” Brennan found a tobacco pouch and was now filling the bowl of his meerschaum. Then he lit his pipe. “Of course, I’d be compensating for time. In the photo, your father is a good deal younger than you are now.”

  I looked at Gunston, who seemed as surprised as I was. “I checked the morgue for pictures, of course,” Gunston said. He made a circle with his thumb and forefinger. “Not a one.”

  “This picture you have, could I see it?” I asked Brennan. “I never knew my father.”

  “So Gunston also informs me.” Brennan opened his briefcase, pulled out a folder and handed it to me. “I’ve anticipated your interest in this.”

  The folder contained a black-and-white group photograph, with faces not much bigger than dimes. It was old and cracked, with printing at the right bottom corner. I took out my bifocals, and read, DUBLIN MEN’S SOCIETY OF LETTERS, MAY’36. There were maybe twenty men of college age in the shot, clustered around two middle-aged men, one of them clean-shaven and dressed in a trim-fitting suit and the other in a Victorian four-button coat and flowing beard.

  I picked out my father in the student lineup before Brennan could point to him. It could have been my own NYPD rookie mug shot, minus the blue cap with the silver shield and the patent leather brim.

  “The picture was made right here in this very pub where we’re sitting, gentlemen,” Brennan said. “The Ould Plaid Shawl was heavy with politics in the years of the terrible Great Depression … and the world war that came of it.”

  I handed the picture to Gunston, who looked it over appreciatively. “Well now, we’re computing,” he said. “Here we have none other than Peadar Cavanaugh in his younger version. And himself, William Butler Yeats, the poet-politician. Remember the clip, Hockaday?”

  “The notice about the Sunday night fête for Yeats,” I answered, “sponsored by my father’s campus organization, the one O’Dowd and Cavanaugh claimed never existed.”

  “We must think charitably on the likes of O’Dowd, and Cavanaugh, too,” Brennan said. “In trying to kill an old and inconvenient memory, they’re only following their instincts as the decent bureaucrats they’ve become. By today’s lights, you see, the Dublin Men’s Society of Letters is a bit of an embarrassment to the college.”

  Gunston, pen poised over his notebook, asked why.

  Brennan looked to him, then to me. He said, “Your dad and his own mentor, Professor Cavanaugh, started up the Society of Letters. There was little time lost in this becoming a radical political movement, as nearly any formal gathering did in those excitable days. The Society’s agenda, sorry to say, was the impossible one spoken of by Hannah Arendt.”

  “A union of college gents and yobbos?” Gunston suggested.

  “Something like that.”

  Brennan paused then, in the self-satisfied way a teacher pauses when he knows he has sparked the curiosity of his class. He puffed on his pipe, very pleased, waiting for either Gunston or me to eagerly pick up on the dialogue.

  Gunston handed back the photograph. I said to Brennan, “Professor, I’ve also got a photo of Aidan Hockaday. It’s an intriguing one, not for the picture of him in the uniform of the U.S. Army, but for what I found on the back only a few days ago.”

  Brennan was now the eager one. “What was that?”

  “A poem, about drowning dogs.”

  Brennan took the pipe from his mouth. “Ah, that would be from Yeats,” he said quietly. Then he recited, slowly and with what I took to be great reluctance: “‘Drown all the dogs,’ said the fierce young woman, ‘They killed my goose and a cat. Drown, drown in the water butt, drown all the dogs,’ said the fierce young woman.”

  Gunston wrote down the words.

  “That’s it,” I said when Brennan was through. “When I recited it myself to Cavanaugh, the old boy broke a few tears, and told me to go home. What do you make of it, Professor?”

  “Simply the dark heart of the matter, Detective Hockaday. If you’d like, I’ll explain that, as I myself am not a decent bureaucrat. But I warn you of two things. First, mucking about in the Irish past without pain is a lie. And second, what I have to tell you won’t be reflecting kindly on any noble image you might wish to maintain of a father you never knew.”

  The two of them, Gunston and Brennan, waited for me to consider carefully. And meanwhile, there were the barmaids to set out our luncheon of cold meats and pickles, leek soup, brown bread and butter and the house ale.

  I thought of my father’s army portrait, all I owned of him until I discovered the poem by William Butler Yeats penned to the back of it—for what agonized purpose I might soon know. I thought of his eloquent letter from faraway America to his brother, Liam, written in a hand that did not match the writing on the soldier photo. New York is a fabulous lady who gives incredible parties …

  I thought of the discomfort the photograph and the eerie verse from Yeats had brought to Father Tim and Davy Mogaill, and the strange effect of Aidan Hockaday’s mere name on Chief Eamonn Keegan. And then Liam’s words, From the day he was born, Aidan changed everything and everybody around him …

  “You’re now warned right and proper,” Gunston said, dipping a spoon into his soup. “So what’ll it be, Hockaday?”

  “The truth,” I said. The Truth! Was this on my say alone, or was the man who sat at the end of my bed putting words into my mouth again?

  “The truth’s buried somewhere in the tortured politics of Ireland, which is no simple thing as it is in America,” Brennan said, addressing me. He had finished half a sandwich and pushed his plate away. He now sipped ale as he spoke. “America enjoys the illusion of itself as politically complex, especially during your unending presidential elections. But America is merely a one-party state that has found it useful to have two parties.”

  “And what is Ireland?” I asked like a good student.

  “We’re an unending conversation in the shape of a country. The value of any good conversation is th
e conflict. Don’t you agree?”

  “I have the idea the arguments here are rich.”

  “Aye. In our more civilized moments, we organize the arguments into political parties. Many, many parties. The more to keep the conversation going, you see. Quite naturally, then, our most lively and memorable politicians are the writers. It’s why they’re the heroes on our Irish pound notes, as opposed to the dead lawyers and such the Americans use to decorate dollars.”

  “This is leading somewhere, like to gents and yobbos—and Yeats?”

  “Aye, but first understand a bit of the background, at least during this century. Ireland comes to its independence right as the world’s first going to war, and then afterward we’re in for all the bitterness and treachery and mob piggery that’s known to any country cut loose after its long oppression. Well, no sooner does the dust clear some but we’re right up against it again with the Great Depression. The most profound social chaos is what I’m describing to you in this horrible abbreviation, do you understand?”

  I did.

  “Everywhere in Europe, the greatest desire of all classes of people is some manner of order—strong, working order—to replace the disasters of war and depression. There’s peppery talk of this in the finest salons and in the grottiest sheepeens, all the same. And in every capital of Europe, including Ireland, there were thousands admiring the likes of Benito Mussolini.”

  “Yeats himself was a notable fan,” Gunston explained to me, setting down his pen. The historical preface was clearly for my American benefit. “At least for a time. He’d go on holiday to Rapallo, on the Italian Riviera, then come home to regale his political friends here in Dublin with the wizardry of II Duce.”

  “Aye, that’s fairly it,” said Brennan, smiling at Gunston as if he were his prize pupil. He turned to me, and said, “Now then, I trust you read Oliver’s fine article in this morning’s Guardian?”

  I said, “The Blue Shirts and the ‘Hearts of Steel’ club, at the time of the Battle of Britain …”

  Hearts of Steel. I reached into my pocket and took out the brass medallion Father Tim had given me. I looked it over again, then handed it to Brennan. “Speaking of the H.O.S.,” I said.

  Brennan noted the axe and the fasces, and nodded. Then he read off the verse on the back: “When nations are empty up there at the top, when order has weakened or faction is strong, time for us all to pick out a good tune, take to the roads and go marching along.”

  He passed the medallion to Gunston, who asked where I had got it. I told him of Father Kelly’s gift, just before his suicide. Gunston noted this, and returned the medallion to me.

  “Would that also be Yeats?” I asked Brennan.

  “It would,” Brennan said as he relit his pipe. “And written at the same time as the drowning dog bit. He was a great inspiration to the cause—so some people made it their business to say.”

  “Cause? What are you saying? William Butler Yeats was the father of the Blue Shirts? A Nazi? What—?”

  “I’m saying nothing so simple as that. Keep firm in your mind the troubles of the time then, and how it might be that an articulate man of Yeats’s ideals might be tripped up by his passions, his words misinterpreted—used. See my meaning?”

  “You’re leading now to the Dublin Men’s Society of Letters?”

  “Exactly. I’ll get to that footnote directly. But you should first know that what was hardly obscure—then or now—was the basic contempt Yeats held for the Irish government in which he himself served as a senator in the twenties. Oliver, you’ll recollect from my class what Yeats called the Cosgrave government?”

  So, Gunston was a prize student.

  Gunston thought for a moment, then answered, “He said the government was ‘something warm, damp and soiled, middle-class democracy at its worst.’”

  “Just so, Oliver. Very good. Now then, it was also no secret how Yeats and his crowd of intellectuals were beside themselves with dread of Communist rabble overrunning Leinster House. Anybody in political circles knew how in the early months of 1933 it was Yeats who was campaigning strenuously for government by a ruling class devoted to order, intellectual hierarchy, discipline and devotion to culture—what he wrote was to be ‘fascism modified by religion.’”

  “Please God, may Billy Yeats rest in peace,” Gunston said, “but don’t it show that you can be an educated man and yet still manage to be a fool?”

  Brennan patted Gunston’s shoulder, and told him, “Well put, son. The learned man knows his best lesson is remembrance of the severest shortcomings of his school. This causes me no small wonder as to how I’ve survived a lifetime in academe.”

  “Back to my father’s outfit, the Society of Letters,” I said to Brennan. “Whatever it might have been, it wasn’t the Communist threat.”

  “Lord no! It’s the IRA was said to have them bogeymen.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “With a great lot of thanks to the Catholic Church, the IRA was assumed far and wide to be a creature of the antichrist—Karl Marx. What do you know about Marxism, Detective Hockaday?”

  “I myself am a Groucho Marxist.”

  “Well said to you then, too. The Marxism that grew in this soil back then was always more Irish than Marxist. The same was true with the Irish fascism. You now see how embarrassments come about?”

  “I see that. What I don’t get are the conflicts. According to Oliver’s article, the Society was full of Blue Shirts, who you’re now telling me took their inspiration from Yeats and his gentlemanly fascism. Yet the government claims the Society was a front group for the leftist IRA?”

  “Left and right don’t matter when it comes to the one holy hatred that unites Irishmen of all persuasions,” Brennan said. “Surely, being the son of Aidan Hockaday, you know what that is.”

  “England.”

  “Precisely. Have you never heard the line—the enemy of my enemy is my friend?”

  “I heard that. I also heard about strange bedfellows.”

  “Aye, and it was a strange bed we were all lying in during the last war. We called ourselves neutral. But there were plenty here thrilled by the Battle of Britain, when it very nearly looked as if our friend Hitler might at long last destroy our mutual enemy. Follow?”

  “Yes.”

  “Now think how it’s possible that certain ones were none too innocent in the national thrill.”

  “Meaning my father?”

  “By the looks of it.”

  Chapter 36

  When Brennan was finished running his case, and all its Disgraceful meanings, I was convinced by the pain in my heart that I had been told a truth, if not yet The Truth. And that Mogaill was dead right, the truth does not necessarily set men free.

  Brennan returned to his lecture hall, after reminding me that I had asked for it, after all. He made me a gift of the photograph. Gunston quickly borrowed it and headed for the office of Chancellor Peadar Cavanaugh, saying it would probably go better for him if I was not along for the confrontation.

  Which was all right by me because I could do with a couple of drinks. A barmaid called Mave took care of that.

  While I drank, I tried mapping out some way of breaking it to Ruby about the strange bedfellows in my father’s story. Also to myself. How do you explain your father’s Nazi pals?

  The only thing that made sense was the whiskey. Which told me it was time to call it a day in Dublin.

  I called over Mave to settle up with her. She cracked a ten-pound note, returning not nearly enough to me.

  “You shortchanged me,” I said to her.

  “Please God, strike me dead for shortin’ a Yank!”

  “And what’s your problem with Americans, Mave?”

  “You’ve got no respect for the proper rules.”

  “Such as what?”

  “Them with money for fine trips to the olde sod, they’ve got the duty of gettin’ a little cheated in a pub now and again.”

  “You believe the myth abou
t all Americans being rich?”

  “Nobody believes myths about Americans more than Americans.”

  A better man than I would have had Ruby meet him at the Dublin airport for the next available flight to New York. But I, dutifully cheated, left the Ould Plaid Shawl with the bright idea of catching the train back to Dún Laoghaire, collecting Ruby, saying good-bye for a while to Uncle Liam, and making a midafternoon start to County Carlow.

  On the way to the central depot, I decided I should probably telephone Ruby. Knowing her, she would want to get a jump on packing up the bags. Snoody answered.

  “Let me talk to Ruby,” I said.

  “I deeply regret to tell you, sir, she’s not here.”

  “She went out again with Moira?”

  There was dead air on the line for a second, then Snoody said, “There’s been tragedy here this morning. Moira…! Terrible, terrible …”

  His voice trailed off, and for once Snoody sounded like a human being. Which was reason in itself for my blood pressure to start rising. There had been a tragedy, all right.

  “Take a breath, Patrick. Then give it to me straight and fast. Starting with where’s Ruby?”

  “She’s been pinched.”

  “What—?”

  “The policemen were here—Dublin Garda, not our local Civil Guard. And they were looking for you as well, sir. Four of them. I gather you just managed to escape?”

  Escape?

  “What’s the charge against Ruby?”

  “Sir, I surely don’t wish to think your Miss Ruby had anything to do with … with Moira!”

  “What’s with Moira?”

  “She’s … been hanged. She’s dead.”

  “When—?”

  “I don’t rightly know, sir. Things are still dreadfully confused.”

  “Where is Ruby now?”

  “I presume she’s being questioned, in the city …”

  “Where’s my uncle?”

  “He’s a late riser, you know. He’s sitting in the garden now, with his coffee. I’ve told him nothing.”

  “All right. But tell me.”

  “Well, the policemen came to the door, asking for the two of you. I tried to find you, sir, but I hadn’t known you’d left the house so early. By the way, did you take my hat?”