Irish Cream

by Andrew M. Greeley

  “You went to the Dome, didn’t you?”

  I inclined my head slightly.

  “Play football?”

  “Not really.”

  That was true enough. I had quit the team at Fenwick and turned to wrestling because I detested the coach. I’d walked on at Notre Dame for a few days and decided that it was too much work.

  “You would have made a great linebacker.”

  “That’s what they told me.”

  “My position. I played it back in the sixties. Huarte and Snow.”

  “Number one till the last game,” I said, showing off my knowledge of Dome arcana.

  “We should have beat the Trojans that last game,” he insisted.

  In fact they should have. But they didn’t.

  When two big guys meet each other, they automatically size each other up, trying to figure who can take whom. Despite the fact that professional trainers had kept John Patrick O’Sullivan in good condition, I knew I could take him. I could have taken him when he was playing for the Dome. I was quicker and smarter and pretty good at wrestling. Also vain, a fault my wife contended that I shared with all males of the species.

  “A lot of things have changed since those days,” he said. “Not really a Catholic university anymore. Nor a Catholic football team.”

  It was my own fault I had flunked out at Notre Dame.

  “Kind of a Catholic theme park,” I said, a contradiction to what he’d said that was too subtle for him.

  “Now they’ve got this new coach. I don’t think it’s going to work out. Maybe he can civilize some of the savages they recruit these days.

  I liked to think that if this new coach, lifted from the Stanford Cardinals, had been coaching at the Dome when I was there I would have stayed and become all-American and maybe played a year or two with the pros. However, I would never have met Nuala Anne. She disagrees vehemently. “Didn’t God mean me to find you?”

  I introduced him to Nuala Anne.

  “Jesus and Mary be with all who come to this house,” she said in her thickest Galway accent. “Dermot Michael, would you see what Mr. O’Sullivan will have to drink?”

  Nuala never asks that question of a visitor.

  “Scotch and water on the rocks,” he said automatically, “even though it’s a little early in the day.”

  Incurably South Side Irish. Has bought enough good taste so that he thinks he’s urbane and polished but doesn’t know what the words mean.

  “Won’t I have a splasheen of Green Bush, Dermot love? Straight up.”

  Me wife does not ordinarily drink whiskey.

  As I fixed the drinks I heard the rustle of canines behind me. As discreet as they try to be, the two hounds make a lot of noise because there is a lot of them. I had not heard herself summon them, so they must have responded to a telepathic signal, which happens occasionally. Maeve lifted herself to the couch on which Nuala was sitting, causing it to sink perceptibly. Fiona curled up on the floor at her feet and watched John Patrick O’Sullivan intently. Cleopatra with her pet leopards.

  I poured her substantially more than a splasheen and a tiny drop for meself.

  “’Tis yourself that has the heavy hand.” She sighed, taking the Waterford glass with a perfectly straight face, which warned me not to spoil her act.

  “Those are big dogs, Mrs. McGrail,” our guest said nervously as I gave him his scotch and water on the rocks, light on the water.

  “Mrs. McGrail is me ma. I’m Mrs. Coyne or Ms. McGrail … Aren’t they dear ones? Maeve here is the largest wolfhound bitch in the world. Fiona is a retired police dog. They’re both as gentle as newborn kittens. They’d only chew your throat out if I told them to.”

  Maeve laid her huge snoot on my wife’s lap and made her noise not unlike a purring kitten. We would have to remove every hair from the parlor before Danuta showed up on the morrow.

  “What part of Ireland are you from, Mrs. McGrail? I get over there every year with a group of friends for a golf tour.”

  “Connemara,” she said softly.

  My wife does not normally answer the question that way. Rather she tells you the name of her hometown, assuming that anyone with intelligence knows where Carraroe is.

  “Yeah, I know the place. There’s a great golf course there, right above a town called Salt Head.”

  “Salt Hill. Me husband has a three-stroke handicap at Poolnarooma because he doesn’t practice very much.”

  Not the total truth. I don’t practice enough, but I haven’t played there often enough to build up an official handicap. Three is about right, however.

  “Me wife,” I added, “won the women’s championship there a couple of times.”

  Total truth.

  Said wife smiled modestly. “Wasn’t that ages ago?”

  “We play a different course every day,” O’Sullivan went on. “Ballybunion, Adare, Postmarnock … Great way to see Ireland, good friends, good food, good golf.”

  “Sure, doesn’t it sound like a brilliant cultural experience?”

  Her irony was lost on him.

  We got down to business. John Patrick O’Sullivan spoke to me. Nuala answered him. I remained silent. I noted that hard eyes were a much better indication of his temperament than the lighthearted, happy Irish smile that seemed frozen on his face.

  “This is a picture of my four oldest kids, Dermot. First-rate young men and women. All went to Notre Dame. Damian spoiled our perfect record. These kids are real Irish cream. Kathleen is a pediatric surgeon, Sean is a lawyer, so is Maura, Pat works with me at our company. I’m proud of them. Five grandchildren already, another in the oven. All married Irish spouses.”

  All four kids were clones of the old man, tall, athletic-looking, black Irish, who would have been handsome if not for their grim expressions. They could just as well have been an IRA cell. I passed the photo over to me, er, my wife.

  She glanced at it and nodded imperceptibly. “Handsome.”

  “I’m very proud of them. Like I say, they’re the cream of the crop.”

  “Damian isn’t in the picture.”

  “He would have ruined the picture.” He bowed his head and shook it. “Damian has the habit of ruining things.”

  “He seems like a very nice boy,” Nuala said, scratching Maeve’s huge head.

  “Boy is the right word! The doctor says he might have a Peter Pan personality. Refuses to grow up. Damian is almost twenty-five. By the time I was that age, I had two kids and owned my own company. He takes care of puppies, draws pictures, and babysits. He refuses to assume adult responsibility.”

  “Psychiatrist?” Nuala asked innocently

  “Of course not! No son of mine needs a shrink! … He refused to apply himself in school. Graduated from Faith, Hope grammar school only because we made a contribution. Flunked out of Loyola Academy. Was accepted at Notre Dame because of my clout and wouldn’t go. Ruined our perfect record. Absolutely refuses to apply himself.”

  “Maybe he needs testing,” Nuala Anne murmured.

  “No kid of mine needs testing,” John Patrick O’Sullivan said grimly, his fallacious smile fading for a moment. “He’s just lazy.”

  The man’s pain is real enough though he’s patently an asshole.

  I took his empty Waterford tumbler.

  “Just a short one. I have to drive up to the club.”

  He continued to speak to me, though Nuala Anne played our role in the conversation.

  “My daughter Maura, she’s the youngest, thinks he’s gay. I won’t believe that a son of mine could be gay. He’s just immature.”

  “Doesn’t Ethne, our cute little babysitter, tell us that he gets along fine with the girls here in the neighborhood and themselves liking him?”

  Nuala Anne never calls Ethne a “cute little babysitter” and does not refer to young women as “girls.” But she was in the role now and playing it to the fullest.

  “I tried to get him a seat at the Board of Trade …”

  “I hear th
ey’re cheap these days,” I said brightly.

  “Expensive enough … He worked there for a couple of days and quit. Would rather draw his crazy little pictures … There’s no money or respectability in that.”

  “I know a young man,” Nuala said, “who flunked out of Notre Dame; didn’t graduate from any college, and failed at the Exchange. He tries to write poetry. As you know there’s no money in that. His family thinks he’s lazy. Didn’t he seduce a poor innocent little Irish lass?”

  Witch. She didn’t add that I made a couple of million on a Friday afternoon, admittedly by mistake, and promptly retired and had since written a couple of successful novels. Even published a few poems here and there. About her and her children. Won the occasional prize.

  “That’s Damian’s problem. He’s lazy … I have to warn you that he might be dangerous. He got drunk out at the club and drove our car over a good friend of mine. A little twit of a public defender wanted to go to trial. We would have looked real bad in the media … I had to hire a topflight lawyer and use all my clout to get him off with five years’ probation.”

  “Bad enough family disgrace as it was …”

  “I don’t like the way he hangs around kids either. Doesn’t look right. What kind of a twenty-five-year-old male hangs around kids, tell me that?”

  “A priest, maybe?”

  He missed her irony.

  “They’d never take him in the seminary …” He put his empty glass on a coaster. “I had to warn one family here in Lincoln Park, which had hired him as a babysitter … Can you imagine that? A twenty-five-year-old man acting as a babysitter.”

  “They discharged him, did they now?”

  “Sure they did. Couldn’t take the chance. I didn’t want a suit on our hands. Or another court case.”

  His red face had turned purple. Anger at his youngest son had become a demon that possessed his soul.

  Damian the Leper.

  “Sure, doesn’t the poor lad have a lot of troubles?”

  “We’re the ones who have the troubles, Mrs. McGrail,” he said, as his genial smile and voice returned. “He’s going to destroy us … What’s the matter with that dog?”

  “Hush, Fiona. ’Tis all right. The poor man doesn’t realize he was shouting at me.”

  Fiona suspended her low growl. Temporarily.

  “I’m sorry if I shouted. The kid is driving me crazy. I beg you to get rid of him before he ruins your family too … How many kids do you have?”

  Nuala didn’t answer. It was up to me.

  “Three,” I said. “Two little girls and a little boy.”

  “For the love of God, get rid of Damian! He’s dangerous to them.”

  “Not while our two friends here are around.”

  “He charms dogs too.”

  “We appreciate your warning, ah,” Nuala glanced at the card, “Mr. O’Sullivan, and we understand your pain. Nonetheless, we think you are doing a terrible injustice to Damian and probably have done so for a long time. We’ll not discharge him!”

  Not a single question in the whole paragraph.

  “You must!” he sobbed.

  “Dermot Michael, will you show Mr. O’Sullivan to the door.”

  I did.

  “You gotta think about the risks,” he told me at the door. “The kid is a misfit. Totally unreliable!”

  “We will think about what you’ve said,” I replied in the interest of civility.

  I watched him walk down the steps to the street, his shoulders slumped, his head bowed. Poor bastard.

  As I closed the door, I realized that the two hounds were behind me wagging their tails dubiously. Then they took turns standing on their hind legs and licking my face.

  “Irresistible, Dermot Michael,” my wife observed, “aren’t you now?”

  “To dogs and little children!”

  I sat next to her on the couch. Both pooches curled up on the floor.

  “Just like poor Day.”

  “Except he didn’t seduce a poor lass from Ireland.”

  She giggled.

  “I admit that I went too far … Still, we got a lot out of him didn’t we … You know my methods, Dermot. What did you observe about your man?”

  “I caught the Sherlockismus, love. What I noticed most of all was that he seems to have produced five children, four of them pure Irish cream, without the necessity of a wife.”

  “You noticed that, did you now?”

  “I did.”

  “Mr. O’Sullivan is a friggin’ gobshite,” Nelliecoyne informed us.

  “Nelliecoyne!” we both exploded.

  “It’s all right to use the words,” she argued. “We’re all three Irish, and we know that we mean no harm by those words.”

  “The little children!” Nuala protested.

  “I don’t talk that way around them. Anyway, they’ll learn it soon enough … Poor Day probably has a learning disability.”

  I don’t know whether the Irish vulgarity or the American psychological cliché on the lips of our gorgeous little redhaired six-year-old was more of a surprise.

  “How many times have I told you not to eavesdrop on adults when they’re talking!”

  “A lot, Ma.”

  “And you still do it!”

  “Don’t I have to find out what’s happening in this house?”

  She hugged Maeve, who had sidled up to her. Fiona, unwilling to pass up affection, nudged her for a hug. Nelliecoyne obliged.

  “Go back to the little kids,” Nuala said sternly. “I’ll deal with you later.”

  “Yes, Ma.”

  “What about Socra Marie?”

  “She was grumpy when she woke up. Bad dreams about who spilled the tea. Now she and I are working on her coloring book.”

  “Whatever are we going to do with that one, Dermot Michael Coyne? She’s worse than her sister.”

  “I suspect that you will have a nice serious talk with her and explain why it isn’t fair to adults to listen to what they say and that you’ll explain to her everything she needs to know. That may work for a while.”

  She sighed loudly.

  “They’ll be the death of me altogether … By the way, I’m glad you liked the show.”

  “The one here with John Patrick Sullivan?”

  “Of course not. That was just a way of finding out a lot about him … No, the one in the bedroom. You’re very sweet, Dermot love. When you look at me in that adoring little-boy way, don’t I tremble all over and want to collapse?”

  “You mean you like being whipped cream?”

  “When you make me whipped cream, isn’t it dead friggin’ brill?”

  These days she rarely returned to the expressive Dublin street argot she had learned at Trinity College. She could use it about me, however, anytime she wanted.

  “I’ll keep that in mind.”

  “Now, about your man.” She changed the subject quickly. “Not only doesn’t he have a wife, he doesn’t think much of women. The twit who thought she could get Day off in a trial was obviously a young woman. He was unimpressed with our quotes from Ethne. He’s a locker room male, at ease only with men, especially on their golf trips to Ireland, from which women are banned … Don’t you ever dare to think of doing that, Dermot Michael Coyne!”

  “Wouldn’t I be out of my mind if I did!”

  “Did you notice anything else?”

  “Well, he talked to me and you answered him, an interesting conversational style.”

  “And?”

  “Let’s see, oh yes, he’s enthused about Ireland but doesn’t seem to be aware that you are a well-known singer of Irish music, which means he really doesn’t give a damn about Irish culture beyond that which he encountered at the Golden Dome four decades ago and on Irish golf courses more recently.”

  “And?”

  “Day is an obsession with him. He’s had this perfect life and perfect family, then one rotten apple comes along and spoils it all.”

  “Serious obsession … And the
other kids?”

  “They look grim and ruthless. Like a cell of IRA killers.”

  “You’ve got the right of it, Dermot Michael. He’s afraid of women, even his daughters, though they’re probably tough enough in their style to please him. Day is the only child who doesn’t look like him. Probably the image of his wife. He’s afraid Day’s queer.

  “His mother is likely a sweet little woman, who the others in the family ignore because Daddy does. Sweet and very strong, Dermot Michael. I’m not sure if the sweetness is real. We’ll have to talk to her if we can …”

  “Talk to her!”

  “Sure, don’t we have to find out what happened that night at the country club when someone killed someone?”

  “Where do we start?”

  “With that twit of a public defender. Where else?”

  “Good on you, Nuala Anne.”

  I was Dr. Watson again, the spear-carrier. For a woman like my wife I would gladly carry spears forever.

  “What’s that story like?” She gestured at my dossier.

  “Dark, very dark. I can’t quite figure out why. There’s lots of passionate people in it.”

  “Would you ever let me read it now? I need to go back to the nineteenth century. I’ll read it while I’m on the treadmill.”

  “I’ll go down and play with the kids.”

  We have three floors in our house—the ground floor with the laundry, the furnace, some storerooms, the playroom, and the dogs’ room. Beneath the ground floor was a dark gloomy basement. “For the ghosts,” me wife said.

  Some one of these days, we’d have to finish the basement and use it as game rooms and study rooms.

  On the second floor, where the entrance is, there’s the parlor, the dining room, the kitchen, the breakfast nook, and the music room where Nuala practices—when she practices at all. At all.

  On the third floor we have four bedrooms and two offices, both of which can be converted into temporary bedrooms. We also have five bathrooms scattered around the house, which Nuala thinks are “excessive altogether.” She also thought that the master bathroom was “excessive,” but she didn’t object to its various facilities.