A limousine from Downing Street met us on the runway.
“By your leave, Sir Timothy, we’ll be taking you to Number 10. We assume you won’t leave for Ireland till tomorrow, so we have made a reservation for you at the Connaught.”
“Formerly called the Coburg,” I noted, “when England was proud of its relationships with Germany.”
“What’s in a name, eh, sir … Perhaps Lady Anne would want to rest there until you are finished talking to the PM. We will take care of the reservation formalities.”
“Fine, except we will pay … Annie, this is just in case you should need some money.”
I gave her a hundred-pound note.
No charity from the British Empire for me.
“Well, Timmy, that was a splendid minute you sent about the OSS,” Winston began. “Needless to say, I was also impressed by your story of the failure of Graf von Stauffenberg. Tragic loss of brave men that Germany would have needed in the years to come.”
“I quite agree, Winston.”
“Can you tell me the story in greater detail … lest your throat become dry.”
He pushed a glass of Middleton’s at me.
I recounted the story carefully. Winston would remember every word of it, perhaps write it down.
“Sad, sad … So many great men lost … Like your father’s friend Michael Collins for example … I’m told you brought a beautiful woman with you, Timothy. German? Enemy civilian?”
“Lady Anne is my lawfully wedded wife and hence an Irish citizen and by your own rules English too, though you won’t let her vote in this country … More to the point she is also Lord Ridgeland’s daughter-in-law.”
“He knows about her?”
“Yes, though he has yet to meet her. She is also the only survivor of the Bendlerstrasse bloodbath.”
“A match for you then?”
“I’m afraid so, Winston!”
“Congratulations to the two of you. I will look forward to meeting her someday.”
I was a little more uncertain about the reaction of my minister the next day.
“I hope you don’t think those last two minutes will interfere with your appointment to Washington, Timmy.”
“I hadn’t considered them in those terms, sir.”
“Good. Our current man there said that he showed the material on the OSS to the Undersecretary of State, who said he would take appropriate action. I doubt that they will discipline the colonel. He may well be an enemy when you do arrive in Washington.”
“That would be unwise of him, sir.”
“The only other item is when do I meet this fabulous wife of yours.”
“Whenever you wish to, sir.”
“We’ll arrange that as soon as you get back from your vacation … and we will take care of any possibility of questions which might arise later about the validity of her presence in Ireland.”
“She is an Irish citizen by marriage to me, a valid marriage in a Catholic church, she is also a survivor of the Stauffenberg Rising. This is a copy of our marriage certificate.”
“You think of everything, don’t you, Timothy?”
“I try, sir, but I often fail.”
I returned to the Royal Hiberneian to find my wife awake and recovered from the sea sickness she had acquired during a particularly rough crossing from Holyhead.
She did not seem happy.
“I do not want to meet your parents, Timmy Pat. I won’t do it. Call them and tell them that I am sick and they should stay away.”
“No.”
“Why not?”
“Because if I do you, you’ll change your mind in five minutes.”
“You’re right … Will you make love with me, so I’ll look radiant for them?”
“You will look radiant anyway, but I will never reject such an offer.”
“Ma, Pa,” I said to my startled parents in the Lafayette dining room, “this is me wife, Anne Elizabeth … Anne, these are me ma and pa.”
My lovely Gothic countess took a deep breath and smiled. The words cascaded out of her mouth.
“I have heard so much from Timmy Pat about the Old Fella and the Galway woman that only with difficulty have I waited to meet you. I talk stilted now because I am a little nervous. My dress, Lord Ridgeland, is I believe from your mills. It was my wedding dress … You may call me Annie. I hope you do.”
The eyes of the Galway woman and the Swabian woman linked and, as often happens in such contacts, they bonded instantly and permanently. Against me of course.
“Annie,” the Galway woman said, embracing her daughter-in-law, “welcome home to Ireland!”
SOME ADDITIONAL NOTES
The war ended nine months later. More humans died, more women were raped than in the previous five years of the war. Germany was destroyed, but quickly rose again, too quickly for those who believed in collective guilt.
Herman Goering committed suicide the day he was to be executed. Joachim von Ribbentrop was thus the first Nazi war criminal to be executed, first at last. Heinrich Himmler was captured by English troops after the German surrender as he desperately tried to find someone to talk to. He is alleged to have committed suicide, but it is always suspected that his captors shot him on the spot.
Admiral Canaris, Julius Leber, Pastor Bonhoeffer, and many others lived into 1945 and were executed only when American guns were heard near the prison.
There was, however, no blood vengeance against Claus’s family or anyone else.
We were in Washington and I persuaded friends at the Pentagon to order that the American military take good care of Nina and her children. When we returned to Germany later, we visited Schloss Stauffenberg with our children. It was still a happy place, with many memories. Once again I defeated my wife at tennis. The match was much closer, however. We also went to Berlin to place flowers at the monument to Claus. On the same trip we also placed flowers on the grave of Field Marshal General Paul von Richthofen in the small cemetery at the now closed Biggin Hill fighter station. Annie and I wept both times.
We would return many times to Germany. The Federal Republic presented me with a medal for my “Great service to the New Germany” the year I was President of the General Assembly of the United Nations. My wife and I continue to love one another. She still holds on to my hand, calls me “Timmy Pat,” and on every possible occasion avers that I am sweet. The mystery has never gone out of our love.
She never did show me the letters from Claus ordering her to permit me to lead her to freedom. But then I never asked to see them.
Ridgeland.
25
SO THE rest of the story is anticlimax. The two limos and the two security cars arrived twenty minutes early. Nelliecoyne, who happened to be in the parlor, opened the door. The rest of the kids swarmed into the parlor. And the doggies instantly bonded with Des, himself wearing one of those funny stovepipe hats that the Greek priests wear, a flowing robe, a dangerous black beard, and a cross around his neck. Blackie picked up Socra Marie. Des swung the Mick in the air. Nuala and I arrived, herself with the baby in her arms. He loved the noise and the excitement, assured as all tiny ones are that it was for him. Nelliecoyne snapped pictures right and left. I shook hands with “Steffan,” who had been a contemporary at the Dome. Des hugged Nuala and they both wept. The rest of the evening was like that. Laughter, tears, stories, songs.
“So how did you know that Des wanted to be a priest all along, and a parish priest here in Chicago?” I asked my wife as we lay in bed, exhausted after our party, the biggest we’d ever had in the house and one that escaped completely from our control, especially when Cindasue and her mob arrived, followed almost immediately by Mary and Joseph and their little newer—last minute ideas of Nuala Anne’s about which she hadn’t warned me.
“I didn’t have to be fey to recognize that, Dermot Michael.” She sighed patiently, as with Patjo when he had shit in perfectly clean diapers she had just put on him. “When you think about Des’s life, he was always rushi
ng around helping people and getting involved in religion. His mother may be right that your Jesuits corrupted him with religion when he was in high school. After that he had a mission. He took theology courses at Marquette and took them seriously. Who else does that unless it’s someone who wants to be a priest?”
“Maybe he just wanted to teach at some university?”
“Give over, Dermot love! If he wanted to be an academic, why did he run off to the Peace Corps?”
“Maybe he was just an idealist.”
“But he spent a lot of time healing wounds and bringing people together, just like good parish priests do, His Riverence, for example?”
“’Tis true,” I admitted, though her frequent praise of my self-proclaimed big brother always offended me.
GIVING THE DIVIL HIS DUE?
I never said he wasn’t a good priest.
“But, Nuala Anne, then he returned to Chicago and went to graduate school in Arabic.”
“And appointed himself de facto chaplain there. That should have been the decisive clue. He liked being a parish priest. Why else cool things off with the perfectly presentable Shovie, who would have been a fine wife for your Catholic intellectual.”
“Then off to Iraq! Why not the seminary then and there?”
“Because he wanted to see what monastery life was like and pick up a couple more languages. Praying at that strange place while people were shooting one another convinced him that this was not his vocation. Then he made up his mind that he belonged here on the shores of your Lake Michigan. You’ll remember how quickly he agreed when I said his vocation was to be a parish priest in Chicago. Then we made him an offer he couldn’t refuse. ’Tis a good thing, Dermot Michael, that we know Cardinal Sean and Blackie, isn’t it?”
“’Tis … So you knew that Tim Ridgewood would be faithful to his love because Des was faithful to his love?”
“Och, Dermot, don’t be a complete eejit altogether. Wasn’t it the other way around? Your two men with the glint in their eyes were lovers, I realized that the glint showed that they would be faithful and implacable lovers. Timmy told us a lot more about himself than we know about Des. He made up his mind that Holy Week in Jettingen that someday he would carry that woman off to Ireland and display her as a prize to his wonderful parents. The poor thing never had a chance, especially because she loved him too. He just never gave up. Then I says to meself, self, who is the lover that Des is chasing. It was perfectly clear as soon as I thought about it that way. Like I say, I didn’t have to be fey to figure all that out.”
“As the Cardinal says to Blackie, I’m glad that you’re on my side.”
“And as Blackie says to the Cardinal, arguably.”
I was on the edge of sleep, but our conversation wasn’t over yet.
“That woman is still alive, Dermot. She’s only ninety or so. Her husband has gone home, but she’s alive and still loves him. We’ll have to pay our respects to her when we’re in Galway this summer. It’s a brilliant love story and it should be told, shouldn’t it? Why else was it sitting there waiting for us in His Riverence’s church basement?”
“I can’t argue with any of that, Nuala Anne. I’d like to meet her too. She was quite a woman.”
“Is … But don’t you understand why I’m an expert on men with the glint in their eyes?”
“No …”
YOU REALLY ARE AN EEJIT.
“Didn’t I meet a man with the glint in his eyes one night in O’Neill’s pub just off College Green and didn’t he devour me altogether, body and soul, and didn’t I know I’d never escape from him.”
As Blessed Juliana predicted, all things were well, all manner of things were well.
Afterword
Claus Graf von Stauffenberg was one of the heroes of the twentieth century. He alone had the courage, the energy, and the intelligence to put together a vigorous plot against the Third Reich. The Gestapo analyst who created the dossier against his memory did not hesitate to praise his nobility of character. The Russians and the East Germans built a shrine to him in the courtyard where he was executed and changed the name of the Bendlerstrasse to the Stauffenbergstrasse. The English historian Trevor-Roper sang his praises. Yet the charges of the fictional OSS agent in my story represent the image of him created in the American press, which somehow has stained his reputation in the United States. He was not a Nazi count, he was not a fascist, he was not an ambitious power seeker, he was not a rebellious renegade. He was politically a Social Democrat and religiously a committed, if not always devout, Catholic, a man of enormous personal charm, intellectual brilliance, and dedicated bravery. If his carefully planned plot had worked, history might have been very different.
However, an ideology emerged in the United States after the war that insisted on the collective guilt of the whole German nation. There could not have been a Widerstand against Hitler of any importance. There could not have been many Germans who resisted, nor many plots against him, nor this one last desperate and almost successful plot, nor one shining hero without an arm and without an eye and with only three fingers who almost carried it off. Theories of collective guilt or an evil culture do not help us to understand any society. As Hannah Arendt once remarked, “If everyone is guilty, no one is guilty.”
Was it perhaps necessary that the war destroy Germany in order that the Federal Republic finally become a working democracy (albeit imperfect like all democracies), as Claus suggests in my story? Is the Federal Republic, particularly in its Bonn-based Western version, a manifestation of Claus’s “Secret Germany”? At least one can say that it is more influenced by that ideal than any other social form since Germany became a nation in 1870. If the July 20 plot had succeeded, might a new Germany have developed not unlike the Federal Republic and much earlier?
At least one can say that some six hundred thousand German civilians would not have died in RAF raids and two million German women would not have been raped by the Red Army. The idea that Germans brought this suffering on themselves and therefore it was just punishment is morally repugnant. Who is entitled to make such a judgment?
(In the long and bloody history of the British Empire, six hundred thousand deaths is something of a record.)
I was astonished by the Stauffenberg who emerged from the literature I read. I’ve tried to create a picture of him based on firsthand descriptions of him in the books. I know he would have delighted in a real-life Timmy Pat. I believe with Annalise that he was the last knight of Europe, “the last and lingering troubadour to whom the bird had sung that once went singing southward when all the world was young.”
I have pushed up the date of the American invasion of southern France by a couple of weeks in this story.
Books about von Stauffenberg and Berlin during the war:
Hitler’s Spy Chief: The Wilhelm Canaris Mystery by Richard Bassett
Battlefield Berlin by Peter M. Slowe and Richard Woods
Stauffenberg: The Architect of the Famous July 20th Conspiracy to Assassinate Hitler by Joachim Kramarz
Secret Germany: Claus von Stauffenberg and the Mystical Crusade Against Hitler by Michael Baigent and Richard Leigh
The Internet encyclopedia Wikipedia also provides many useful and interesting articles on these subjects.
Author’s Note
All the Chicago characters, lay and clerical, in the Chicago story exist not in God’s world but only in the world of my imagination. All the characters in the German story, except Annalise, Paul, and the Ridgeland family, existed in God’s world.
The Irish Free State (Eire) immediately established full diplomatic relations with most European countries because that was assumed to be part of being “A Nation Once Again.” The Irish Embassy in Berlin remained open until the arrival of the Red Army in the spring of 1945. It was not, however, a one-man operation, as is my Irish embassy in the story. Nor was the embassy necessarily on the Friedrichstrasse. Nor was its ambassador, as far as I know, engaged in activities like those of Tim Ridg
eland. The posture of Ireland in the war, absolutely and totally neutral but pro-England, was much like that in the book.
ALSO BY ANDREW M. GREELEY FROM TOM DOHERTY ASSOCIATES
Nuala Anne McGrail Novels
Irish Gold Irish Love
Irish Lace Irish Stew!
Irish Whiskey Irish Cream
Irish Mist Irish Crystal
Irish Eyes Irish Linen
Irish Tiger
All About Women Furthermore!: Memories of a Parish Priest
Angel Fire God Game
Angel Light Star Bright!
Contract with an Angel Summer at the Lake
Faithful Attraction The Priestly Sins
The Final Planet White Smoke
Sacred Visions (editor with Michael Cassutt)
The Book of Love: A Treasury Inspired by the Greatest of Virtues
(editor with Mary Durkin)
Emerald Magic: Great Tales of Irish Fantasy (editor)
Bishop Blackie Ryan Mysteries
The Bishop and the Missing L Train
The Bishop and the Beggar Girl of St. Germain
The Bishop in the West Wing
The Bishop Goes to The University
The Bishop in the Old Neighborhood
The O’Malleys in the Twentieth Century
A Midwinter’s Tale
Younger Than Springtime
A Christmas Wedding
September Song
Second Spring
Golden Years
Washington, D.C.
Irish Linen Page 34