Irish Gold

by Andrew M. Greeley

  “Your friends can’t find you anything?”

  “I’m too focking proud to ask. There are no jobs in Dublin. They’d want to loan me money. The posh folk. ‘Won’t you come down to my home in South County Dublin for holiday, Nuala?’ ” She imitated a posh type from Dublin 4. “I won’t take charity from anyone, do you hear that, Dermot Michael Coyne?”

  “I hear it.”

  “Good enough for you.” Her face was as hard as stone, pure Protestant ethic, or maybe Gaeltach integrity.

  As my brother George always says, you should never fight the Holy Spirit.

  I reached into my Marquette jacket, pulled out a small manila envelope, and removed the first book of Ma’s diary. “Look at this, Nul.”

  She opened the yellowed book carefully. “Sure, it’s the old script, the way me gram use to write.”

  “You can read it?”

  “I can indeed. . . . ’Tis your gram?”

  “ ’Tis.”

  “May 1919.” She examined the document carefully. “How old was she then?”

  “Fourteen, going on fifteen.”

  “She has a crush on a boy. Liam Ready, is that your grandpa?”

  “Yes.”

  “How old was he?”

  “Seventeen.”

  “Glory be to God, he’s a member of the IRA! On the run! He’s hiding in her house! She’s adored him for years! Now she thinks he’s beginning to notice her! She’s ecstatic, the poor dear thing!”

  “It’s not hard to translate, then?”

  “I told you I was a museum piece, didn’t I? No, it’s plain old modern Irish Gaelic—though the script is hard enough to read. A few turns of the phrase are different than the way we speak it now, but just like how me own gram spoke.”

  “Could you translate it all for me, Nul?”

  “Translate it, is it now? Well, I don’t see why not. It would take some time, but it’s not a very big book, is it?”

  “There are about thirty of them.”

  “Glory be to God, her whole life story, is it?”

  “ ’Tis.”

  Nuala examined the tattered notebook. “She’s an interesting young woman, I’ll say that for her. . . . Her whole life?”

  “Till a couple of weeks before she died.”

  “It might be worth publishing, and herself a fascinating woman even on the first page. But, sure, don’t you need a better translator that I would be?”

  “Eventually maybe, but you could at least get it started and tell me whether it’s worth doing all of it.”

  “You’d trust me to take all these notebooks back to Galway?”

  “Not at all. I’ll hire you to translate it right here in Dublin . . . and before you shout at me about charity, I want to point out that I brought this notebook along before I knew you needed a job. How many hours of work can you put in a day?”

  “Three at least, some days four.” She was trying to think of an excuse to turn me down and none was coming.

  “Can you do word processing?”

  “I’m not a bloody eejit, am I?”

  “You are not.”

  “I don’t have a computer, except in my class, and I can use that only for schoolwork.”

  “You can use the one in my suite at Jury’s.”

  Nuala was tempted, oh, how she was tempted. Manna was falling from heaven. Her eyes faded back and forth from hesitation to eagerness.

  “They’ll think I’m your whore.”

  “They will not. I’ll tell the manager of the hotel exactly what you are. Being Irish, he’ll have the housekeeping staff snoop a little to make sure.”

  “Will you now?”

  “I will. It’s an honest offer, Nul. Purely a business arrangement.”

  “I know that.”

  She considered me shrewdly, weighing the costs and the benefits like any good accountant should. “It’s a business relationship, is it now?”

  “Only that. How much did they pay you at Brown’s?”

  “Twenty punts a week.”

  Twenty-five dollars! Was that the difference between starvation and survival for a young woman college student in Dublin?

  “I’ll make inquiries as to what the rates are for beginning translators—I bet they’re more than twice that—and I won’t pay you one focking penny more! Understand?”

  She continued to weigh the risks and the payoffs, a shrewd, shrewd trader. She was the one who belonged in the Standard and Poor’s pit at the Merc. “Only business in the suite?”

  “Nuala! You don’t know me very well, if you think I’d make a pass at you there. I won’t promise what might happen elsewhere, but not while you’re working for me.”

  “I won’t make any passes either.” She did not smile at that remark. I assumed that she was touching a feminist base.

  “Glory be to God, I hope not!”

  She smiled thinly.

  She was merely making a feminist point, wasn’t she? I hoped so.

  “You can eat your evening meal in the room while you’re working. I’m not even likely to be there much. I’ll be doing my exercise. I’ll tell you one thing, woman: I’ll not distract someone who’s costing me so much money.”

  “I think you probably will distract me, Dermot Michael Coyne.” She had made up her mind. “But I can take care of meself if I have to—and if I want to.”

  “You’ll do it?”

  “Haven’t I said I will?” Then her smile broke through, a Dublin sun at last driving off a storm. “Oh, Dermot! How wonderful!”

  She hugged me, very briefly.

  It might be quite distracting indeed. The distractions would be complicated because our relationship, only a couple of weeks old, was already pretty complicated.

  The distractions, however, I told myself, would not be unpleasant ones.

  Not at all, at all. But it would still be strictly a business arrangement. I was not ready yet to fall into the kind of love that would lead me to the altar.

  So has every cowardly Irish bachelor defended himself down through the ages.

  Looking back at my relationship with Marie Fionnuala Anne McGrail, I think that incident was the turning point. I had subtly changed my role. I was no longer a potential suitor looking for a mate permanent or temporary. I was now a protector. I had to take care of her, respect her, provide for her.

  –– 19 ––

  “YOUR BROTHER called.” Nuala did not look up from the PC monitor.

  “George?” I flopped in a chair on the other side of the parlor, exhausted from an hour-and-a-half swim in the darkness of a Dublin autumn afternoon.

  “Father George,” she reproved me.

  “Did he say I should call back?”

  “He did.” She continued to type, slowly and carefully. “He said that you should use an outside line because it was personal and he didn’t want me to listen in.”

  “He didn’t!”

  “He did too. He’s a very nice priest. Like the young priest at home. Very nice. He didn’t even mind that terrible story you told him about me.”

  “What awful story?”

  “That I said the focking Mass was the focking Mass. I never use language like that.

  “Nuala!”

  “Well.” She turned around and looked at me over her glasses. “Not in my present mask.”

  “You not only said those very words”—I sighed as loudly as she would—“You told me that I should tell him you said it.”

  “I didn’t mean you should tell him.”

  “I thought you didn’t like priests.”

  “Isn’t he your brother and himself a nice young priest?”

  Even in her responsible professional woman mask, Nuala Anne McGrail was exasperating, all the more so because she enjoyed exasperating me.

  She had showed up for work that afternoon looking every inch the mature businesswoman—dark blue suit, white blouse, low-heeled shoes, dark stockings, hair severely tied in a bun, and glasses. She carried a large, businesslike should
er purse, a new Irish-English dictionary, and an artificial leather notebook.

  “Glasses, Nuala?”

  “Magnifying glasses so I can read your gram’s small print.”

  “And so you can look like a dowdy secretary.”

  “It’s me new mask. Do you like it?”

  “Very professional. Focking professional, I’d say.”

  “I don’t use that language when I’m being a professional. I wish you wouldn’t either.”

  Her lips turned up in her imp grin. That wasn’t excluded apparently by the new persona.

  She had not wanted to take two weeks’ advance pay. I insisted that it was appropriate for someone who was a professional translator. She argued a little but not convincingly.

  I didn’t want her to starve to death.

  Of course she wouldn’t starve to death. But you see, I had become her protector. I could still have lewd thoughts about her. Yet now I was responsible for her.

  I also decided that now I’d have to stay in Dublin. I wouldn’t be able to return to Chicago to watch Notre Dame try for an unbeaten season—not that I had ever seriously considered such a plan.

  Couldn’t I have left her in Dublin with my computer and the diaries?

  Sure.

  By then I was so bemused and befuddled by my lovely protégée that I was not thinking straight. She would keep me in that condition, not without some intent I think, till I finally flew home.

  I wondered how much money she had spent on clothes to create her new image. Probably not too much. The clothes were inexpensive and became stylish because of the person who wore them and the way she wore them.

  Maybe she still had a discount at Brown’s.

  I introduced her to the manager, the concierge, the director of the towers, and the housekeeper on my floor. Nuala was servile in her respect for these dignitaries. They couldn’t possibly doubt that she was exactly what I said she was, a translator of some old documents. She confirmed this by murmuring a few bashful words in her first language to the manager, who responded in kind, with a broad smile of approval.

  “No doubt that the young woman is an Irish speaker, Mr. Coyne. She’s flawless.”

  “I’m glad to hear that.”

  Nonetheless, they would check on her and me to make sure that I was telling the truth, not they would do anything about it if I wasn’t.

  Nuala inspected my suite with a critical eye, noting carefully the artificial plants, the two TV sets, and the two impressionistic paintings, one of a vase of flowers and the other of sailboats on Dublin Bay.

  “It’s a bit posh,” I admitted, embarrassed as I always was by my affluence.

  “I’m a materialist, Dermot Michael.” She sighed loudly. “Not too much of a one, mind you. I don’t want to be wealthy. Me ma and da are poor and they’re the happiest people in the world. All I want is to be a little less poor.”

  “Maybe you should find yourself a fockingrichyank.”

  “Maybe I should.” She tilted her head defiantly. “One that doesn’t think these rooms are something to be ashamed of.”

  “Ouch.”

  “Wasn’t I only joking?” She touched my hand. “Don’t put on your angry look.”

  ‘I promise.” I laughed.

  “Now show me how your computer works.”

  “Yes, ma’am.”

  I showed her how to turn on my Compaq, argued with her about the relative merits of Microsoft Word and WordPerfect (the only religious war in the Western World outside of the Six Counties and Bosnia) and instructed her in the use of MS Word.

  “Ready to go?”

  “You can fire me anytime you want if I’m no good,” she said dubiously.

  “Break your neck, possibly; fire you, no way. Now I’m going swimming.”

  “To Sandymount on a day like this?”

  “No indeed. In Jury’s heated pool. Right down there.”

  She joined me at the window overlooking the pool, glasses in hand. “Glory be to God, a pool! Did you say it was heated?”

  “For Americans, about eighty-two or eighty-three Fahrenheit, I think. We like our pools warm.”

  “Me ma and I used to swim in the ocean every day. Sure, it was refreshing.”

  “In winter?”

  “Faith, it’s cold all the time, fifty degrees Fahrenheit.”

  “You can use this pool if you want, Nuala. I’m sure the manager wouldn’t object.”

  “I’d never do that.” She scurried back to her workstation and began to pour over Ma’s diary.

  “It’s up to you . . . oh, yes. Ring room service for your tea. I’ll want some too when I come back. Tea is not the meal you’re entitled to when you work here, by the way.”

  “I’m thinking you want to make me fat.”

  “Not a chance, Nul, not a chance.”

  I went into the bedroom, closed the door, and put on my swim trunks and terry robe for my daily trip to the pool.

  Nuala was hard at work when I emerged.

  “Don’t try to do too much the first day.”

  “Room service, you said?” She peered at me over her glasses, a look to which I perceived that I would have to become accustomed.

  “Yes. You pick up the phone, push the buttons, and tell them that you’d like to have tea and whatever else you want. I’ll have scones and sandwiches, but no sherry, lest someone be counting.”

  “And the Pope not a Mormon yet.”

  “Now get to work.”

  “Yes, sir.” She turned back to the screen, then looked again in my direction. “Just ring room service and tell them what I want?”

  “Just like in the films, Nuala.”

  “Just like in the films.” Her face lighted up in a smile of admiration and gratitude that almost broke my heart.

  “I’m going swimming,” I said lamely.

  “Don’t catch cold,” she called after me, words that Ma and Mom called after me almost every day when I left the house from September 15 to June 15.

  The poor kid, you’re’the rich Yank savior who treats her with respect, what else would she do? She’s a shy child. You’ll have to protect her from herself. If she was a little bit more experienced, she’d know better than to fall in love with you.

  Fortunately, your own heart is armor plated and you are not falling in love with her.

  Suppose she translates a couple of weeks and then you go home, leaving her copies of the diaries and your computer to finish the work. Then what? Will she get over you?

  Probably. No, certainly.

  Will you get over her?

  Most likely. Do you want to get over her?

  Maybe and maybe not.

  Nuala as a companion for a half century? You could do a lot worse. I don’t want a domineering woman running my life.

  My mile-long swim completed, I went back to my suite and learned of George’s phone call.

  “The tea’s just come,” she informed me. “Help yourself.”

  “Room service was cooperative?”

  I did help myself. Obviously the professional Nuala didn’t pour tea.

  “It wasn’t like the films at all, at all. Wasn’t the young woman who brought it up from the County Galway? We had a nice little talk. . . . I’ll pour the tea.”

  “You don’t have to.”

  “Me ma raised me proper.” She hurried over to the table. “And you should get out of those wet clothes or you’ll catch a cold. Cream or sugar?

  “A cold is a viral infection, Nul. It is not caused by wet clothes on a chilly evening.”

  “A lot you know about it.” She sniffed.

  Exactly what Ma would have said, God be good to her.

  “How is the translation coming?”

  “All right. When you’re dressed proper, I’ll show you the screen.”

  “I’m not sure who’s the boss in this company.”

  She ignored that crack. “You should finish the story, Dermot Michael. It’s good.”

  “Glory be to God, woman!” I e
xclaimed. “Are you reading all my documents?”

  “Only the ones that have my name as a file label. I see Nuala.doc in your short story subdirectory, how can I not be reading it?”

  That seemed a not unreasonable argument. “You liked it?”

  “Haven’t I said that I did?” She nibbled cautiously at a scone, joining the ranks of the women of the world who worry about their weight. “Sure, would I not like to be that Celtic goddess you describe and yourself with such lascivious thoughts about her?”

  “Am I blushing, Nuala Anne McGrail?”

  She poured more tea for me. “ ’Tis not for me to say,” she said primly. “But ’tis a good story. You should finish it. Sure.” She glanced up from her tea pouring for a quick glance at me. “Sure, if the story was about me, I suppose I’d be terrible flattered that a man like your narrator found me that interesting, but since it’s not about me at all, at all, ’tis not for me to say.”

  “Right.”

  “You take your tea and go put some warm clothes on and I’ll show you what I’ve done.”

  “Do I have a choice?”

  “Not at all, at all.”

  The water is getting deeper, I thought to myself as I dressed in a jogging suit. It’s pleasantly warm water, however.

  I went back to see the first segment of Ma’s diary with a rapidly beating heart.

  For any number of reasons.

  –– 20 ––

  May 14, 1919

  Liam Tomas came home yesterday. For the first time he noticed me as someone distinct from the chickens and the sheep. I was so thrilled by what he said to me that I’m thinking to meself now is the time to start writing that diary you’ve been thinking about for so long. ’Tis the proper time to start the story of your love affair with Liam Tomas O’Riada, even if it never does become a love affair.

  I hope it does become a love story. I love him so much. He is so sweet and so kind and so good and so handsome. I want to spend all my life with him. Deal, my cousin, says that I’m too young to know anything about love. You’re only fourteen, she says. Liam Tomas O’Riada doesn’t even know you exist.

  Liam Tomas is a great big bull of a man with a gentle heart and a sweet voice and long blond hair and red face and doesn’t he looking like a Viking pirate or an ancient Celtic king or maybe holy Saint Columcille himself?