Irish Linen

by Andrew M. Greeley

  “I was surprised that you encouraged them to believe their son is still alive.”

  “Were you now? I wouldn’t be sure that he wasn’t still alive, Dermot love … And whatever are you doing now!”

  “I think I’m feeling up your thigh.”

  “And the childer still playing downstairs and Ethne and Brendan playing with them!”

  Ethne was our nanny and Brendan, a rich young artist with whom she was keeping company.

  “I wasn’t planning an immediate assault on your matronly virtue.”

  “I’m glad to hear that,” she said with considerable insincerity.

  “You think he’s alive?”

  “Wouldn’t it be just like one of them kind to be alive and well?”

  “One of your fellas with a glint in his eye?”

  “Just so … it’s hard on his family, but I couldn’t help thinking that they’ll be so happy when he comes back they won’t mind … and that’s true enough though they’ll never understand why he did whatever he did in the first place, will they?”

  She rested her hand on my knee.

  AH THERE’LL BE SCREWING TONIGHT. THE WOMAN IS GETTING WORSE.

  She’s not. She’s just more confident in herself.

  Laughter.

  In truth, however, herself was acting more confident and aggressive in every aspect of her complicated life. Perhaps even pushy. She would never before have suggested to anyone that their missing child might be alive and well and stirring up trouble somewhere in the Middle East Now I was the one who had to return to the subject we were supposed to be talking about.

  AND YOURSELF STARTING THE GAME!

  “We have to find out where he is first,” I said.

  “Ah, no, Dermot Michael. First off we must find out why he went there.”

  There was a roar and the thunder of footsteps from downstairs—the “childer” coming up, either to demand adjudication of a conflict or to present something of which we must be proud.

  We drew discreetly apart.

  Fortunately it was the latter.

  Nelliecoyne took command of the situation, as she usually did.

  “We’ve learned to sing ‘Lord of the Dance,’” she announced. “And we call ourselves the Coyne Chorale—that’s alliteration!”

  She produced a pitch pipe, set the key, and they began to sing. Herself and Micky were in perfect tone. Socra Marie made up for her inability to harmonize with her vigorous enthusiasm. Nelliecoyne swayed the grinning babe in tune with the music. The dogs sat on their haunches and listened attentively. Brendan and Ethne beamed proudly. There would be a lot more family theatricals in the years ahead.

  We applauded enthusiastically. The pooches barked. Nuala hugged and kissed everyone.

  The noise did not prevent Patjo from falling sound asleep.

  “Should I put himself to bed, Ma?” Nelliecoyne asked.

  “That would be lovely, dear. You could even sing a couple of lullabies for him. Doesn’t he like them something terrible?”

  “Cool!”

  “Don’t I see a little girl and herself looking pretty sleepy too,” me wife observed.

  “No!”

  “I’ll tell you a story,” Ethne promised.

  “Cool!”

  “And I’ll sing a lullaby for you,” the Mick added.

  “Isn’t himself becoming domestic?” Nuala demanded when the horde had disappeared, save for the two dogs, who had decided to curl up and keep us company.

  We talked for another hour about Desmond Doolin.

  “I wonder if he kept a journal?” I asked.

  “Of course he did, but we’ll never find it unless the young woman knows where it is.”

  “Shovie?”

  “In this house,” me wife insisted primly, “we don’t use nicknames. We’ll call her Siobhan.”

  “As I remember our resident music director is called Nellie.”

  “Sure, if we called her Mary Anne outside of school, she wouldn’t know who that was.”

  That settled that. No points for you, Dermot Coyne.

  “Do you remember, Dermot, that journal we found over at His Riverence’s church by the Irish diplomat that disappeared during the war?”

  “Vaguely.”

  George the Priest, my brother, was always His Riverence. The Cardinal of Chicago was simply Cardinal Sean. The coadjutor Archbishop was simply Blackie. But my brother, so far devoid of either purple or crimson, was treated with more respect than either of them.

  “I’d wager that he had the glint in his eye too.”

  “Even in that unpredictable land of your origins, my love, they don’t make people with the glint into diplomats.”

  “’Tis true, but he was some kind of English lord, wasn’t he?”

  “Lord Ridgeland, as I remember.”

  “That might overcome the glint … Would you ever go over to them archives of his tomorrow morning and see if we can have a look at it. Maybe it will give us some insight into that kind of person.”

  For some reason that I never fully divined I was always given that assignment.

  3

  “THE WITCH stirring up another one of her pots?” Prester George asked as we walked down to the basement of his little old church on North Park Avenue.

  “We’re interested these days in the psychology of men with the glint in their eyes.”

  “The Holy Madman?”

  “Something like that.”

  “Francis and Philip Neri and that bunch?”

  “Arguably.”

  “You sound like our Most Reverend coadjutor Archbishop … Does he have the glint?”

  “Herself has never suggested that.”

  He opened the door to a small, dusty, dimly lit room in which piles of manuscripts were neatly stacked.

  “I’ll have to get these all archived at the historical society someday. At least we have them indexed.”

  “Because herself insisted.”

  “And paid for it, God bless her … I can’t figure out how they help her in her searches, but what do I know … Here is the one by Lord Ridgeland. As far as I can tell, no one has ever told his story.”

  Unlike the other manuscripts we had rescued from this center, this one was neatly typed, though by an old-fashioned typewriter. The label on the black, loose-leaf cover announced “Some reminiscences of Timothy Patrick Clarke, Lord Ridgeland, of the Second World War.”

  Timothy Patrick Clarke, an odd name for a laird, but there were Catholic lords in both England and Ireland. “Ridgeland” suggested Northern Ireland. A Catholic remnant of the old Ascendancy? Not completely impossible.

  I opened the binder. Before the first page someone had included two pictures of Milord Ridgeland, one where he was wearing what had to be the Oxford Blues, the other of the same young man, a year or two younger perhaps, with a hurling stick, in a green-and-white outfit. He played both Irish and English sports, did he now?

  In both pictures his face was solemn and serious, game faces as we’d call them today. I would not want to face the hook of his hurling stick. The eyes? Ah, the eyes!

  In both his English and Irish manifestations, they glowed with mischief or perhaps with divine madness. Otherwise, he reminded me of Desmond Doolin, slender, medium-sized, dark, curly hair—an utterly harmless young man despite his dangerous stick. And his dangerous eyes.

  “Is he your man?” Prester George asked.

  “Looks like it,” I replied. “Herself will have to judge … By the way, what can you tell me about religion in Eritrea?”

  “I’ve never been there, as you well know. It was part of the great Abyssinian Empire back in the old days. It was founded by Semitic peoples who migrated across the Red Sea and united all the local tribes under one rule, long before the Romans were building an empire. The Egyptians came down the Blue Nile and were consistently beaten back. Their great emperor was a certain Aksum, who had a daughter named Sheba, who may have been the Queen of Sheba who visited King David and may
have been his mistress. With the coming of Christianity, Ethiopia became Christian, part of the Church of the South, and then inclined in the direction of the Monophysite heresy which more or less denied the humanity of Jesus while the Church of the East inclined to the Nestorian heresy which denied his divinity. Both churches were intensely missionary, the Nestorians spread out from Antioch through Persia and Afghanistan, in the wake of Alexander’s kingdoms and into China while the Monophysites went south into Ethiopia and what we now call the Sudan. In both cases they were out of touch with what was happening among the barbarian tribes who had inherited the remnants of the Roman Empire. Nor did they pay any attention to Byzantium, which they figured was the Church of the West. It is unlikely they even knew there was a Pope.”

  “Ah,” I said. “Nuala said I should ask you.”

  Once you asked my brother something you’d better be ready to listen to the lecture, one of the few traits we have in common.

  “Then along came the Arabs and Islam. They were driven back from the borders of Abyssinia about the same time that your man Karl the Hammer stopped them at Tours. Various less dangerous tribes drifted in from Africa and Arabia and the Indian Ocean, including the Eritreans who never much liked the Ethiopian emperors but more than they liked the Arabs who just kept on coming. A young emperor named John reasserted the control of the empire and drove away the Arabs once again. It is said that he was also a priest. Rumors reached Europe in the twelfth century about this Prester John, as they called him, and his rich and deeply cultured empire. It was said that he would come with great armies and join the Crusaders in driving the Arabs out of the Holy Land.”

  “He never arrived, I guess.”

  “He was not entirely a legend Art and religion did flourish in Ethiopia in the Middle Ages. Scores of monasteries all over the highlands, with precious manuscripts from ancient times, including the Bible, many of which have yet to be recovered. What we have of their art is lively and creative. Eventually the culture waned, but religion—their version of Christianity—survives even to this day. The Jesuits came in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and tried the same game that they played in India and Japan, enculturating themselves into Ethiopian culture just as Ricci did in China and deNobili did in India. It didn’t take there, and the Dominicans, who had more clout in the Vatican than the Jebs, eventually snuffed it out.”

  “Too bad!”

  “Indeed, yes … Then came the colonizers in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Ethiopia lucked out and got the Italians, who were, as in other matters, the least efficient of all. They annexed the Eritrean north, whose people were only too happy to be rid of the Ethiopians. Then they took over Somalia, which was the southern part of the country and mostly Muslim. Finally, in the nineteen thirties, they took over the whole country and proclaimed the king of Italy as emperor of Abyssinia, which in retrospect was high comedy. The Brits drove them out during World War II and restored the emperor. The local Socialists drove him out and established their own version of the Soviet Union. Eritrea seceded again and established its own Marxist regime. They fought a bitter war which left Eritrea free and Cuban troops, of all people, in place in Addis Abba. More recently they both have typical African governments, relatively democratic, incompetent, corrupt, and unable to deal with the periodic famines. Sad end to three thousand years or so of history. Yet Christianity in its variant competing forms still survives. When you hear Third World poverty, think not of Nigeria wasting all its oil income but of Eritrea and Ethiopia, without any income to waste and still willing to go back to war about their border disputes … Can you remember all of that, Dermot? I wouldn’t want you to provide any inaccurate information to herself.”

  “I’ll take notes in the car, before I drive home.”

  I wasn’t about to tell him that I had a photographic memory and could rehearse his lecture verbatim to my good wife.

  “I don’t know”—he sighed—“how Prester John and Lord Ridgeland fit together.”

  “They both had the glint in their eyes,” I said.

  Meanwhile back at the ranch, that is the headquarters of Nuala Anne McGrail, Inc., on Sheffield Avenue, I found that worthy woman, dressed in dark brown slacks and light brown blouse (and gold jewelry), sitting at the desk in her workroom (as distinguished from my office) poring over computer output. She was wearing her glasses, which meant this was very serious business.

  I kissed the back of her neck.

  “’Tis yourself,” she noted. “I’m trying to think … How is His Riverence keeping?”

  “He’s in grand form.”

  “Putting on weight.”

  “Woman, he is not!”

  “And himself without a wife to keep an eye on his diet.”

  “Are we going somewhere?”

  “We are. Your man over at UIC is too busy saving the souls of the young to come to our house, so we have to see him at two this afternoon … Danuta is bringing up some Irish tea and bean soup and Polish salad for our lunch.”

  Polish salad!

  “No ice cream?”

  “It’s Wednesday.”

  That settled that. She didn’t look up from her papers.

  “Does he know who you are?”

  “I spoke with his associate, a woman, a former mother superior I should think.”

  “She was rude to you?” I demanded with unfeigned outrage.

  “She said I would have to wait three weeks for an appointment so I called Cardinal Sean. Chicago is a city that understands clout, isn’t it, Dermot love? Just like you always say?”

  She looked up from her papers and winked at me.

  YOU’VE CREATED A MONSTER, DOCTOR FRANKENSTEIN!

  “Did the good young priest tell you much about this mess in Ethiopia?”

  “A bit.”

  “Well, sit down and tell me about it! You don’t have to stand up just because I have clout with Cardinal Sean, do you now?”

  I sat down and recited almost verbatim my brother’s lecture about Prester John and the monasteries with priceless manuscripts and these handsome dark folk who had fought off the Egyptians and the Arabs and the Turks and the Eyetalians and the Jesuits and now were almost starving to death all the time.

  “’Tis the same thing with your Chaldees or Assyrians or whatever you want to call them, only now they’re getting gassed by your man and blown up by suicide bombers but have made peace with the Pope after fifteen hundred years, give or take. Just the kind of place that a daft idealist would have a grand time altogether!”

  “We’re getting to know him better?”

  “Better than his parents anyway … Did you remember to pick up the manuscript of Lord Ledgermain or whatever he was called?”

  “Woman, I did.”

  “Lemme see it!”

  I passed over the loose-leaf binder. She flipped open the cover.

  “Brigid, Patrick, and Colmcille and all the Holy saints of Ireland!” she exclaimed in wonderment. “Would you ever look at him, Dermot Michael Coyne!”

  “I have already. Even I recognized the glint.”

  Why there always were connections between her games and the manuscripts in the archives at old Immaculate Conception Church (on North Park, as you had to say in Chicago because there are so many parishes with the same name) remained a mystery to me, one which I did not want to explore. Danuta arrived with our Polish lunch—bean soup, Polish potato salad, and iced Irish Breakfast Tea.

  “Ethnic lunch,” she said. “Eat!”

  “Good stuff,” I said. “But ice cream would have fewer calories.”

  “Och, haven’t you been getting enough exercise lately that it shouldn’t be any problem at all, at all! Eat letcha!”

  “Letcha” is not a food, but another one of them, er, those tricky Irish subjunctives, I suppose one of polite command. It stands for “let you eat” and does not suppose that you are not eating.

  She destroyed her lunch despite my warning that she would give a bad example to
the childer if she kept on eating that fast.

  “Well, you’re not eating for two and a half, are you now?”

  She went off to feed the other one and a half and put him to bed. Socra Marie was already deep in her energy-renewing nap. For my part, I turned to the memoirs of Timothy Patrick Clarke, Lord Ridgeland.

  When I say that I am a marginal man, I am not complaining. I’ve been on the fringes for my whole life and have learned that you accomplish a lot more if you’re not tied down by the ordinary boundaries and restraints. The uncertainties increase, of course, but so do the opportunities—and little time is often available to consider the various opportunities in the detail that one would wish.

  This pompous observation is an attempt to explain to whoever might read these notes that I am not totally mad. If you happen to be an Irish Catholic lord in County Down, the most Protestant part of Ireland, it is assumed that you act a little mad and even enjoy the shock your actions create. To put a finer edge on the matter, oftentimes you don’t really give a damn what people say or think and on the contrary rather enjoy the dismay you have created.

  That’s how I became the Irish ambassador to Germany during the war and in fact a spy for the English government and how I was involved with the efforts of the German resistance to kill Hitler and end the war.

  In any event I was born in 1910. My father was the thirteenth Lord Ridgeland and, I believe, the fourth Roman Catholic to hold the seat. He took it, if the legends are true, by main force from his Protestant brother whose behaviour towards our tenants shocked even the most ruthless of the local gentry. Perhaps because our historic seat was on the border of a solidly Catholic county in what would later become the Republic of Ireland, the gentry were not greatly concerned with the man on the fringes.

  If the boundary commission’s definition of “Northern Ireland” had been less a farce and the resulting rump state had been at least half-Catholic, my father would have been a great man in Irish history. He had the will and the wit, the brains and the brawn, the intelligence and the industry to have created a tiny state that was not owned by the Orange Order and then combined the two segments of Ireland into a strong—and much more tolerant and even liberal—new nation. As it was, there was no opportunity to play that game. He washed his hands of the Protestant leadership after warning them that they would eventually lose to the gunmen from the south who, he said, “Are as hard as you are and much more creative.”