“I’m saying”—the cop stared longingly at his empty mug—“that no good comes of stirring up old troubles.”
“I thought that was what historians did.”
“But, with all respect, Mr. Coyne, you’re not a historian, are you now?”
“An amateur one.”
“Aye,” he said, nodding his head significantly as if I had made an important admission. “Wouldn’t some things be better left to the professional historians, especially things that would upset a lot of important people?”
“And if I don’t care about a lot of important people?”
“Well”—he heaved himself out of his chair—“sure, isn’t it the job of the Guard to protect American tourists, especially if they are wealthy and from well-known families? And don’t we do our best? But aren’t there some things we can’t prevent, if some tourists take foolish risks?”
The Civic Guard (Garda Siochana in Irish) are an unarmed national police force that replaced the old Royal Irish Constabulary after the establishment of the Free State. Guard (or Garda) is both the singular and the collective and guards (Guardai) are the plural—as in “The publican called the Garda and didn’t five focking Gardia show up a half hour later? One Garda would have been enough if he had come right away.”
“I think I understand your message, Chief Superintendent Conlon.” I stood up with him. “Let me illustrate how much of an Irish American I am by giving you a direct answer to those that sent you: Tell them I said that they should go fuck themselves.”
Tough, huh? Really fierce, right?
The cop had hardly left Jury’s, shaking his head in astonishment at rudeness, when I realized what a fool I had been. Riding up to my suite in the new tower, I told myself I was crazy to let them—whoever they were—bully myself into a commitment that I did not want to make.
Nonetheless, I was stuck with my resolution: Come what may, I would learn why Liam O’Riada and Nell Pat Malone, God be good to their great, gentle souls, had fled their native land never to return.
–– 3 ––
DESPITE HER forceful objections to leaving the pub with me, Nuala McGrail and I were walking down College Green (a street, no longer a real green) huddled under my umbrella, she with her student’s bag over one shoulder and her battered guitar case over the other. She was tall, probably five foot eight, maybe six inches shorter than I, and there was a certain delightful intimacy between us already, two young people close together and isolated by the darkness and mists from the rest of the world.
“I can’t tell you my life story in this noisy pub,” I had insisted again.
“Well, I’ll not be walking out of here with you, Dermot Coyne. They’ll be thinking you’ve already seduced me.”
“I’m not trying to seduce you, Nuala Anne McGrail.”
“How did you know my middle name was Anne?” she demanded, frowning dangerously.
“Every Irish woman”—I tried to placate her—“claims the name of the mother of Jesus or his grandmother somewhere, if not as her first name at least as her middle name. My second guess would have been Moire.”
“I’m really Marie Fionnuala Anne”—she picked up her pint of Guinness—“pronounced Moiré and spelled Marie—and I don’t believe in Jesus or his mother or grandmother or God.”
The “ua” in her name, by the way, is pronounced as the “ou” in “Lou.”
“Why not? Too much evil in the world?”
“Just the opposite.” Her eyes flashed, a streak of lightning racing across the bog on a dark night. “What kind of a God would it be that would waste his time on the likes of us? God, if there is a God, shouldn’t give a good fock about us silly humans.”
“That’s an interesting position.”
“And your middle name is John?”
“No. I told you once.”
“You did not.”
“I did so.”
“Patrick?”
“Certainly not.”
“Michael?”
“Right!”
“Dermot Michael Coyne? Well, it scans nicely.”
“And, as I say, Dermot Michael Coyne does not have seduction on his mind, although I shall assert again that he won’t deny that it would be an interesting experience to take off your clothes. He just wants to be friends.”
“I’m not worried about seduction”—she shoved her glass aside—“or losing my clothes. I can take care of meself if it comes to that. I don’t want to be friends with any Yank. I don’t like Yanks, not at all, at all.”
She didn’t sound completely convinced, however.
“Then you’re not interested in my occupation?”
Ah, but, you see, she was curious.
And where had I heard that delightful melody in her accent before?
“I don’t give a fock what you do to earn all your money . . . and if I walk out of here with you, they’ll be thinking I’m headed for a bed in the Shelbourne.”
“Jury’s, actually, and I’m thinking from the way they react to you, there’s no doubt at all, at all about the virtue of the fair Fionnuala”
“They’re thinking I’m frigid,” she responded tersely, “and maybe I am.”
“I’ll not debate that point.” I said, “except to say that I find it inherently improbable. Let me suggest a ruse. I’ll walk out of here and wait outside in the Dublin fog. You finish your world econ notes and join me in five minutes, and I’ll walk you to wherever you’re going and relate the fascinating story of the lives and loves of Dermot Michael Coyne.”
She pondered the appeal of such a possibility and then laughed. “I don’t know why I care about my reputation anyway. Let them think I’m in bed with a—”
“Fockingrichyank?”
She laughed again. Dear God, she was beautiful when she laughed.
“Go along with you.” She dismissed me. “Maybe I’ll see you outside and maybe I won’t.”
Impulsively and foolishly I leaned across the table and touched her lips with mine. They tasted so good, despite the flavor of Guinness, that I did it again.
She closed her eyes and swallowed. No resistance, no protest.
For a moment I was weak and dizzy, tottering on the edge of making a complete fool out of myself. I beat a hasty retreat before I could discover whether she was balanced precariously on the same edge.
She’s only a kid, I thought as I picked my way through the clouds of cigarette smoke towards the door, and I took her by surprise. That wasn’t fair. I exploited her.
On the other hand, I told myself as I waited for her in front of St. Andrew’s (Church of Ireland or C. of I.—not ours) in the Dublin gloom that reminded me of a cemetery on a story night, she didn’t seem to dislike my kiss, even if I am a fockingrichyank.
Well, she’s perfectly free not to seek shelter under my umbrella when she comes out of that dingy, unhealthy place.
Dublin was in one of her ugly moods that night. It perhaps shows that state of my libido that I picture the city as a handsome matron in her early forties, cultivated, well preserved, charming; for some reason she delights in tricking you by pretending to be unattractive on many occasions—particularly when she arranges for bad weather.
“An umbrella, miss?” I extended it over her head precisely five minutes later.
Without comment she ducked under it. “All right, let’s hear your fascinating story.”
Not a word about the stolen kiss. If I had been in trouble, I was already forgiven. Maybe I should try to steal another one.
I noticed that her jacket cuffs were frayed, her jeans were worn, the jacket hood pulled down over her ears had a hole in it, and her unpolished shoes were cracked.
Nuala was poor. Not a good omen for her reaction to my story.
I have told the story many times, especially to young women. It provides a nice test for me to decide whether I should continue to fall in love with a young woman. Some are horrified by my story and think I’m feckless and irresponsible. Others think I was into
lerably lucky and will be unlucky for the rest of my life. The former want to remake me; the latter want nothing to do with me. I had yet to find someone who understood.
‘Well, to begin with, Nuala McGrail, I’m not much good at anything—”
“Except talking.”
“I suppose. . . . I’m the youngest child of seven, you see.”
“No crime in that. So am I.”
“If you keep interrupting me, I’ll never get to the good part.”
“No promises.”
The woman was an imp—a beautiful, innocent, impoverished imp with lovely breasts and sweet lips. What more could a lonely romantic ask for?
I decided to modify the authorized version of the story. “You see, Nuala McGrail, I don’t do anything at all.”
“Not at all, at all?” She turned to look up at me, skeptical, suspicious, perhaps a little scared.
“Not at all, at all.”
“A great big, overgrown amadon like yourself? And yourself not working at all, at all?”
Ah, I had exorcised the imp.
“That’s right.”
“And yourself living off your poor parents?”
“I didn’t say that, now did I?”
“It’s all right for us Irish to be indirect, but you Yanks must tell your stories straight-like.”
Nuala’s First Law.
“Well, I’m retired! I write a little bit on the odd occasion. Nothing more.”
We had walked past the front gate of Trinity and into Grafton Street at the top of which was the statue of Molly Malone that Dublin had acquired as part of its millennium celebration and promptly dubbed the “tart with the cart” because of her décolletage.
(And the statue of Anna Livia, James Joyce’s evocation of the Anna Liffey River, in front of the General Post Office—where it replaced Lord Nelson—was called “the floozy in the Jacuzzi” or the “whore in the sewer.”)
“Retired? At twenty-four? Go along with you now.”
Ah, she’d been guessing at my age. She is interested in me.
“Twenty-five actually. As I say, I’ve been pretty much a failure in my life. I’m the youngest child and the only one who hasn’t been a credit to his parents. Two of my brothers and one of my sisters are doctors. My sister Linda is a hotshot lawyer. Another brother is a priest. My sisters are both married and mothers. I guess I was spoiled and indulged as a kid because I’ve never been very ambitious.”
No comment from the fair Nuala.
“I’m supposed to be pretty bright. At least the IQ scores say that I am. And I’m supposed to be creative, but my grades in school were on the low side of average. And as you say, I’m a great big overgrown amadon who should have been a star athlete. I quit the football team in high school because I had a fight with the coach.”
“A fight with him, is it?”
She seemed impressed. Or was she hunching closer to me because the rain was coming down harder?
Grafton Street, a usually crowded pedestrian mall, was deserted because of the bad weather. We were walking toward St. Stephen’s Green, away from Trinity. Was Nuala prolonging the walk because she wanted to hear my story or because she liked clinging to my arm as much as I liked it?
“He was a bully. If we played the way he wanted, we could have hurt people. . . . Anyway, I went to Notre Dame—that’s the big Catholic university with the famous football team.”
She patted my arm. Really.
“I’m not a complete onchock, Dermot Michael Coyne. I have heard of the Fighting Irish, though most of them don’t look very Irish. Did you play football there?”
“I did not,” I said, unconsciously slipping into Irish idiom. “Though some people suggested that I should and my father would have been very proud of me if I had. To tell the truth, most of the fighting Irish are now fighting black Baptists, not that there’s any disgrace in that.”
“Not at all,” she agreed fervently. “Nothing wrong with being a Prod.”
“They probably shouldn’t have let me in because my grades were so poor. But my test scores were sky high and I studied a little in the first semester of my senior year—that’s the last year of secondary school—and my brothers and one of my sisters and my father had gone there and maybe they could change my mind about football and—”
“What position would you be playing now?”
“You’ve been watching Yank football on the telly and yourself hating Yanks?”
“Sure.” She actually patted my arm a second time. “Isn’t it a savage sport just right for the likes of them savage Yanks?”
“I was a defensive end.”
“Isn’t that the most savage of them all, like your man Richard Dent?”
A girl from the West of Ireland and herself a Chicago Bears fan.
“I wasn’t that good. I probably wouldn’t have made the Notre Dame team anyway. Not first string. I flunked out at the end of my sophomore year.”
“Ah, sure, wasn’t that terrible for your poor mother?”
I was sure of it now. Her accent was the same as Nell Pat Malone, Grandma Nell. Nuala Anne McGrail was from the Gaeltacht, an Irish speaker, the last of the druid maidens. One more point in her favor.
“Mom gave up worrying about her children after the fourth. If I did anything it was all right. As I say, I was spoiled rotten.”
“And what were you doing with your time? Drinking and drugs, was it now?”
I patted her arm, turnabout surely being fair play. “ ’Tis a wonderful prosecuting attorney you would be, Nuala Anne McGrail. I spent most of my time reading and walking around in a daze and dreaming and thinking. Such activities were a lot more fun than class. So I went off to Marquette for two years and didn’t fail anything, but I didn’t collect nearly enough credits to graduate so I gave college up as a bad job.”
“And there wasn’t any young woman in your life, was there not?”
A perfectly legitimate question, delivered in a completely neutral tone.
“Ah, weren’t there scads of them, all willing to straighten out me life and make me put me nose to the grindstone?”
“That’s no reason to marry anyone,” she said firmly. “Sure, if they’re not what you want before you marry them, they’re not likely to become that afterward.”
“And isn’t yourself wise beyond your years, Nuala Anne? Anyway, my family was faced with a problem. They had a perfectly healthy son who was not college material. They couldn’t make a doctor or a lawyer or a priest out of him, not even an accountant.” I patted her arm a second time. “What were they to do with him?”
“A terrible problem altogether.” She sighed.
I had found a woman who wanted to listen to me, even if I couldn’t tell her about my conversation with the chief superintendent yesterday or the thugs who assaulted me last night, in memory of whom my ribs ached as I held the umbrella over her head.
“So they did what any Chicago Irish family does if it has a little money and a son who is not good for anything at all, at all. They bought me a seat on the Mercantile Exchange and gave me some capital to play with—like sending the youngest son off to the army or the colonies a century or two ago. I traded in the Standard and Poors index—I don’t suppose you know anything about the commodities futures market, do you, Nuala Anne McGrail?”
She pounded my arm in protest this time. “Do you think that I’m such an awful eejit? I told you I was studying accounting, didn’t I now?”
“You know the difference between going long and selling short?”
“I’ll walk away by myself in all this terrible rain if you ask me another question like that.”
“Well, I did my best, honestly I did, but I’m afraid I wasn’t very good.”
“Sure, you shouldn’t have tried it, should you now?”
“I didn’t lose much money and I didn’t make much money either. Some of my father’s friends, doctors like himself, gave me a little bit of their business. I managed usually not to mess up their orders to
o badly. On my own deals I simply wasn’t quick enough. I had to stop and think while the other traders my age acted on instinct.”
“Poor dear man.” She sighed, just like Grandma Nell used to sigh.
“Anyway, the last time the stock market decided to take a plunge, there I was, standing in the S and P pit, bemused and confused. Some of my friends were making tons of money and some of them were losing tons of money and I wasn’t doing anything, because I had no idea what was happening. On Friday the market started to rally and everyone was buying like mad, hoping to ride up the index as it soared. One of my few clients called in a sell order—three hundred contracts—”
“He thought the rally wouldn’t last and himself selling short?”
“And he was right of course. But somehow I got confused and bought three hundred cars—”
“You never did!” she shouted, stopping in her tracks, hand at her mouth in horror. “Ah, you poor thing!”
“That’s what I thought on Saturday morning when I went down to the exchange to catch up on paperwork. I was down six hundred cars, the three hundred he wanted me to sell and the three hundred I had bought on my own. Millions of dollars that I didn’t have, Nuala Anne.”
I shivered at the recollection. It was a terrible weekend, saved only by the Bear victory that Sunday afternoon.
“So what happened?”
“So I went in on Monday morning, expecting the worst. I’d try to buy immediately before the market went up any more.”
“And it fell?” She started to walk again, beginning to understand my story.
“Like a rock. I watched it go down all day and bought just before the closing bell.”
“Glory be to God.” She gasped. “And the holy saints Brigid, Patrick, and Columcille too! You must have made a fortune!”
“Just a little over three million dollars, not that I deserved any of it. I had made a dumb mistake and was very lucky. I know you don’t believe in God or the holy saints you just invoked and probably not even in the holy guardian angels, for which God forgive you, says I. Anyway, I thought the last-named must have been working overtime for me. It was like winning a lottery, even though you hadn’t bought a ticket.”
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