Irish Cream

by Andrew M. Greeley

  I looked around and pondered the situation.

  When I was in college I would stroll down the beach and note with astonishment how many guys not much older than me were sitting under beach umbrellas with their wives watching a bunch of kids building castles, charging the waves, screaming with joy. The wife would be reading a magazine or a romance novel, the guy would be pondering papers he’d brought from work. Both would pretend that this was really living while in fact they were both prisoners to their offspring and bored out of their minds.

  I resolved firmly that I would never be entrapped in that prison.

  So here I was trapped.

  There were some differences. Nuala Anne was startlingly beautiful in her white bikini. She was reading some Russian, Turgenev I thought. I was working on a poem about Memorial Day. Most American poets seemed to be addicted to melancholy Labor Day poems. I would show them up by writing a hopeful Memorial Day poem.

  All right, I was not quite in the same trap as other men my age who were filtering down to the beach. No one had a wife who was quite the feast for the eyes as mine was. Yet I didn’t think that watching kids on the beach was part of the contract when we were married.

  Herself tossed aside the Russian.

  “Wouldn’t it be good for me to go soak my head in the water?”

  “Woman, it would,” I said because it was what I was supposed to say.

  She dashed up the stairs to our cottage. Nuala never walks, she thunders. She never closes doors, she slams them.

  She would have to exchange the bikini for a black tank suit, technically more modest, as though any garment that fit my wife’s body could possibly be modest.

  A few minutes later she thundered down the stairs, wrapped in a vast white terry-cloth robe. She threw the robe at me, pecked at my cheek, and dashed into the water, diving in the shallows to avoid the rocks. Then she swam out into the Lake with a powerful Australian crawl.

  The whole scenario woke up everyone on the beach who might have been dozing. Every eye swiveled in our direction. The crazy McGrail woman, the famous singer you know, was inaugurating summer. Yes, my dear, she has three little children.

  Holding her robe (which I must have ready for her return) I wandered down to the edge of the beach. Like my younger daughter I tested the temperature of the waters. Just a little above freezing. The man who had said on the radio that it was fifty-six had not told the truth.

  Me wife continued her assault on the melted glacier. I wished Cindasue Murphy was on the beach. She’d have a cell phone with which she could instantly summon the Coast Guard if …

  Socra Marie was standing next to me.

  “Ma swim,” she observed.

  “Ma crazy,” I said, slipping into baby talk again.

  “Me no swim.”

  “You’re not crazy.”

  “Ma come back?” she asked cautiously.

  “Sure Ma will come back,” I said with more confidence than I felt.

  To tell Nuala Anne that she couldn’t swim because the water was too cold was to invite mocking laughter. Had she not swum with her own ma every day in Galway Bay, which was colder than Lake Michigan in May?

  I doubted the daily part of the myth, but I had no doubt that winter would not have stopped the two of them from testing the Gulf Stream.

  My two older children, used to the act, kept right on working at their sand castle.

  Eventually, the swimmer turned around and attacked the Lake back towards the shore.

  Dear God, how did I ever find one like this?

  God did not see fit to answer. When she reached the sandbar, she stood up and hobbled over the stones—an Irish Venus without the half shell, her long black hair pasted to her arms and shoulders and the tight tank suit clinging to her body.

  Again I wondered if the Deity could explain how I ever found her.

  She hurled herself into the terry-cloth robe, which I had opened at just the right angle.

  “Och, Dermot Michael, wasn’t it grand altogether? And itself much warmer than Galway Bay?”

  She leaned against me once again, either to share my warmth or share her cold.

  “Ma crazy,” Socra Marie said definitively.

  “Am I now?” Nuala picked up la terrorista and swung her up in the air.

  “Ma cold.” the little girl chortled. “Me warm!”

  Nuala kissed Socra Marie and handed her over to me.

  “I have to get out of this swimsuit,” she informed me and thundered up the stairs.

  “Ma crazy,” our daughter observed solemnly.

  “I’ll bring the kids up to the pool,” I shouted.

  I spent much of the rest of the day in our lap pool playing with the kids while my wife sat under an umbrella at poolside reading that Russian. She would glance up occasionally and blow a kiss at me.

  Well, I had told her to cool it, hadn’t I?

  At first our youngest was reluctant to jump in the pool even if her da’s arms were outstretched to catch her. Finally she decided to risk it. Generally the operation involved two screeches in rapid succession, the first when she jumped and the second when she landed in the water.

  The older kids both swam like fish, having learned when they were infants. We had been afraid to risk it with our preemie. However, she flapped around the pool like her brother and sister, determined to catch up with them.

  I knew the game. Youngest that I was, I always played catch-up with older siblings. Never did catch up. Not till I brought Nuala home. Then I lapped the field.

  “Ma, why don’t you come play with us in the pool?”

  She frowned her displeasure, put aside her sunglasses, pulled off her sweatshirt and joined us. She was wearing, I noted, a different bikini, this one rose.

  She pecked at my cheek as she climbed in and rested her breasts briefly against my chest. She was playing with me. Well, we’d see about that in bed tonight

  “Come on, little one”—she grabbed Socra Marie—“let’s see if we can teach you to swim.”

  Socra Marie did not seem to have the slightest fear of the water, not as long as her ma was around. I found myself praying to God that Ma would be around for a long time to take care of all of us.

  We opened the summer traditionally with a big multi-generational buffet at my parents’ home. Nuala Anne had donned a lime minisundress, suspended from her shoulders by spaghetti straps. Traffic slowed as we strolled down Lakeview.

  The village was alive with the joys of summer just beginning, especially since the weather was so benign. Neighbors asked the silly question of when you had come up and the more serious question of how the winter had been.

  “It ended only last week,” I would reply, truthfully enough.

  Nuala would scoop up a grinning Socra Marie, also in lime (as was her big sister), and announce, “Wasn’t there never a dull moment with this little one?”

  Socra Marie would beam happily, convinced as are all small ones that the whole world loves them just like their ma and da.

  The Mick was wearing a Grand Beach sweatshirt and black shorts, just enough to make him feel independent of the rest of our crowd.

  My three lime-clad womenfolk introduced a moment of silence on my parents’ big deck overlooking the Lake. Once more the gang was astonished that Dermot could have carried this off. Then the conversation and the laughter resumed and everyone admired our “baby” as they called her.

  “She’s not a baby,” Nelliecoyne said fiercely. “She’s a little girl, aren’t you, Socra?”

  “Me big girl,” the child said, shaping the air with her hands. “Me TWO!”

  She held up two fingers to confirm this truth.

  “Me poop in toilet! Me wear big-girl pants!”

  Nuala gave her to my mother, a keen-eyed nurse. She snuggled into “Gra’s” protective arms.

  “Me big girl.”

  “She’s the picture of health, Nuala.”

  “Doesn’t she tire real easily?” my wife said, still worried abo
ut the child’s love of naps.

  “Or maybe she’s just lazy,” I said, “like I am alleged to have been at that age.”

  They all laughed.

  “Well,” my dad said, “you certainly weren’t a barrel of energy like this little dynamo.”

  I wasn’t because I didn’t have to be. That’s why I didn’t talk much till I was three.

  Family mythologies never die. Poor little Derm, by far the biggest and tallest member of the clan, was your classic underachiever, a phenomenon that often happens to the runt of the litter. Admittedly, I had made a lot of money at the Merc, but I had been lucky. I had indeed written a couple of successful novels and won a prize for a collection of my poetry; but I didn’t have a real job and thank heavens Nuala earned a good income with her songs. (They had no idea how good!) Still the myth was that I was a big, handsome, and lazy lout.

  I knew how Day O’Sullivan felt, though I didn’t mind the myth and had no doubts about family love. My wife, however, was furious every time someone said to her, usually in astonishment, that she “had certainly done a lot with Dermot.”

  “Isn’t he the one who’s done a lot with me?” she’d shoot back, her jaw tight and her eyes blazing.

  The family learned to keep that idea to themselves.

  They induced Nuala to sing for them, a routine at family parties, and one she didn’t mind. So her voice, with the bells ringing over the bogs, soared through the still spring air and over the serene Lake as an approving sun seemed to delay its departure just to hear her and to spread rose-and-gold lights over the Lake in approval.

  Heaven forgive me for it, but my desire for her became implacable as I watched and listened. She would not escape me tonight, not that I expected she’d try.

  Her ready-made chorus, uninvited, joined in for the refrains, lamenting as she did the lost Shenandoah. Socra Marie looked appropriately sad and sang vigorously, way off-key again.

  After the applause, my wife said nothing about her planned appearance on national TV in a month. It was bad luck to anticipate something till just before it happened.

  “I might come down with a terrible sore throat and meself a friggin’ eejit for bragging about what I was going to do.”

  Seven centuries of oppression have inured the Irish against counting unhatched chickens.

  “Herself grows more beautiful every year,” Cindy whispered into my ear.

  “Sure, I haven’t noticed it at all, at all,” I replied.

  “Then why did your mouth hang open when she was singing? … I have a suggestion on the Damian O’Sullivan case, by the way.”

  “Ah?”

  “I go to the state’s attorney with the evidence, including depositions from the public defender and the arresting police and ask him to agree to a motion for a new trial. Then we ask the judge to dismiss the case for lack of evidence.”

  “That’s two big assumptions.”

  “This state’s attorney believes in justice. One look at what happened and he’ll realize that it was unjust. Besides it didn’t happen on his watch. We’ll make sure that we get Rick Mikolitis, the same judge who wouldn’t send him to jail. He’ll dismiss the case.”

  “Damian has only four and a half months more probation. Could the judge send him to jail?”

  “Not if the state’s attorney agrees that there was no evidence. Damian gets a felony conviction stricken from the record. And he can sue his lawyer if he wants, not that I would imagine he’d want.”

  “Old man O’Sullivan will fight it.”

  “He’ll make a fool out of himself.”

  “He doesn’t realize, Cindy, that the playing field can be tilted against him.”

  Nuala consigned Socra Marie to the babysitter’s room, where a group of my teenage nieces were supervising their infant and toddler siblings and cousins.

  “She’s adorable, Aunt Nuala,” one of them said.

  “Sure, isn’t she a tricky one now? You’ll have to keep a close eye on her.”

  That caution was only for the record. The Tiny Terrorist would not be awake till morning.

  As I was putting away my third swissburger, I found my father and asked him if he knew anything about a Dr. Tom McBride. My old fella had in his head a file-cardlike memory for every doctor in Chicago, especially if he were Irish and Catholic.

  “Young psychiatrist from Boston? At Loyola. Teaches in the med school too. Little guy. Absolutely first-rate. Very creative and ingenious. Respected. Married to Katie O’Sullivan. Neonatology. Also first-rate. Daughter of Jackie O’Sullivan. Bad case of Notre Dame obsession. Not a nice man. I hear that Tom and Katie have rented a little place over in Michiana. I hear she’s expecting.”

  See what I mean?

  Dad himself had been a Domer, back in the days, as I tell him, when they had a football team.

  We left the party early, pleading our exhausted children. I carried the sleeping youngest, while Nuala held the hands of the bleary-eyed older kids. I summarized the conversations with Cindy and my father.

  “We’ll have to see what Damian wants,” I said.

  “After all these years he probably doesn’t much care one way or another … Poor kid, he still wants his family to love him.”

  “There’s always a chance that the judge would want to send him to jail.”

  “Och, Dermot, is there any lawyer in Chicago who knows more about tilting the soccer pitch than Cindy?”

  I agreed that there wasn’t.

  We put the unprotesting kids to bed.

  As we walked to our room, Nuala began, “Dermot, it’s been a long day and we’re both exhausted …”

  “It’s going to be a bit longer,” I said, flipping the spaghetti straps from her shoulders and letting the sundress fall to the floor.

  “Dermot Michael Coyne!” she protested, picking up the sundress.

  “And yourself teasing me all day long.”

  “’Tis true.” She sighed loudly as I closed the door. “Fair play to you!”

  I flicked away her minimal underwear and drew her to the bed.

  “You frighten me when you’re this way,” she murmured.

  “Do I now? … ’Tis a good thing altogether for a man to have a naked woman on his bed.”

  “And yourself not having that often at all, at all.”

  “We’re riding over the waterfall tonight, Nuala Anne McGrail.”

  “’Tis a brilliant idea, Dermot Michael Coyne.”

  And so we did.

  Beyond the waterfall we found a great silver lake of total peace and almost unbearable joy in which neither of us had ever swum before—endless ecstasy. This must, I thought, be the place where God is.

  The next morning I tiptoed out of the house and drove to the Village Bake Shop in New Buffalo, where I picked up “Dermot’s tray”—forty-eight raisin Danish made especially for the Coynes, which I would deliver before breakfast. This custom was naturally attributed to Nuala’s good influence on me. It was my own idea, but I didn’t dispute the allegation or pass it on to my wife.

  I found my family at the table in the kitchen, the kids slurping up cereal, my groggy wife sipping at her tea.

  “Wasn’t it wonderful of you, Dermot Michael, to collect them rolls for us all?”

  “Woman, it was … Didn’t you sleep well last night?”

  “Once I was asleep,” she said, an impish smile flitting across her face, “didn’t I sleep just fine?”

  “Me finish!” shouted Socra Marie, ready to throw herself into another exciting day.

  “Go into the parlor and play with your coloring books for a few minutes and I’ll take you to the beach. Aunt Cindy will be down there and Annie Hurley will babysit you till we get back. Aunt Cindasue and Uncle Peter will be there and so will Katiesue.”

  “Hokay!”

  New word.

  “You’re a desperate man, Dermot Michael Coyne,” she said as she filled my teacup.

  “Am I now?”

  “You are.” She looked at me ove
r the rim of her teacup and sighed. “All I want to do today is float around in the pool and daydream.”

  “You will, however, play golf, swim in the Lake, frolic in the pool with the kids, attend Mass at the elder Murphys’, and talk to Dr. O’Sullivan after Mass.”

  She sighed again.

  “You friggin’ Yanks and your Protestant ethic!”

  She smiled, a complacent, self-satisfied smile.

  “Where were we last night, Dermot?” she asked in a bemused voice.

  “Close to the Lake beyond the Lake?”

  “You mean God?” she asked.

  “Isn’t that what you mean when you engage in your Irish mysticism.”

  “’Tis.”

  Pause.

  “I love you so much, Dermot Michael Coyne.”

  She raised her teacup to me.

  “Not as much as I love you, Nuala Anne McGrail.”

  We clicked teacups.

  “Now let’s play golf!” I demanded.

  We were two very fortunate people.

  The Grand Beach golf course (real name: Michigan Shores) is a nine-hole remnant of a twenty-seven hole layout that did not survive the Great Depression. It’s short and not the most difficult course in the world. But it’s right there within walking distance, though most of our neighbors rode over in their golf carts.

  My wife firmly forbade such pampering.

  “You Yanks,” she informed me, “are obese because you’re self-indulgent. We don’t permit them things (dem dings) at Poolnarooma and you don’t need one at this miniature golf course. You can get one if you want but I’ll walk.”

  That settled that.

  It was the second glorious day, a violation of the Memorial Day rules.

  We were paired with two men in Notre Dame sweatshirts in their forties, serious golfers. They looked suspiciously at my wife in her white slacks and Galway sweatshirt. Gorgeous perhaps but an obvious duffer who would slow down the foursome.