A lifetime of searches for buried treasure I did not need.
I was not about to let the family know about Nuala Anne’s fey dimension. I don’t know why. They adored her so much, they would simply add “that wonderful talent” to their litany of praise.
I just wanted to keep it to myself.
Since I would take a taxi up to the Tricolor—you don’t try to park a Mercedes in that neighborhood—I poured myself a glass of cold Niersteiner eiswein and thought more about Nuala. She was easy to think about.
She could act and sing, the latter with a guitar or an Irish harp. I had given her one of the latter, a small, portable one, as a gift on her arrival in Amerca. She had received a little voice training at T.C.D. and would have improved greatly if she would get more in this country. But she was an accountant, and that was that.
“Sure, aren’t there more than enough friggin’ Irish sopranos?”
“Not like you.”
“Go ’long with ya!”
She would not seek more training. She would not even allow me to help her to cut a CD. I asked a friend of mine in the music business to come to the Tricolor to listen to her.
“She’s commercial already. The country is ready for a sweet soprano with the lilt in her voice.”
I introduced him to Nuala; she listened to his praise, thanked him politely, and did absolutely nothing about it.
“I’m an accountant who sings a couple of nights a week at a grungy pub because she likes to sing,” she said to me.
That was that.
I couldn’t even persuade her to sing at Mass or at weddings at Old St. Pat’s.
“I have no business at all, at all, singing pious hymns.”
When Nuala made up her mind, there was no arguing with her. Mind you, she was capable of changing her mind, but always on her own terms. Indeed, she would use my arguments to justify a decision of hers as though she had thought up the arguments herself and was trying to persuade me.
I had yet to figure out whether she knew what she was doing in such shifts of position. She might. She was, after all, and by her own admission, “a terrible, frigging conniver altogether.” It was this propensity of hers to connive which led to my breaking up with her in Dublin, one of the dumbest things I’ve ever done.
“Ah, well, weren’t you terrible sick with pneumonia when you said those eejit things.”
Surely my adored grandmother was also a conniver, a point which Nuala had made to me when she got the last word in at the Dublin airport.
Still, her habit of scheming annoyed me.
“Damn it all, Nuala Anne, you don’t have to scheme with me.”
“I do, Dermot Michael, I do. You’re such a mystery, I can never be sure how you will react.”
I would insist that she was the mystery. She would laugh and say that she was no mystery at all, at all. “Only a girl from the bogs of Connemara.”
Both of us couldn’t be right, could we?
The fight in Dublin was mostly my fault. No, that’s not true. It was entirely my fault. We had been trying to discover whether my grandparents were responsible for the death of Michael Collins, the great Irish revolutionary hero. As it turned out, they weren’t. I thought I was the detective who would solve the various mysteries we encountered and that Nuala was my able assistant. I was Holmes and she was Watson, right? Only as it turned out Nuala was Holmes and I was her spear carrier. That hurt my male ego considerably. I was also infuriated because she had schemed to hide her Holmesian role so as to protect my male ego.
“I didn’t want you to know because you would become angry,” she said not unreasonably. “And now you know, and you are angry.”
That’s when I told her that I never wanted to see her again. She defends me on the grounds that I was coming down with pneumonia at the time. That was true enough. Yet I think I would have behaved the same way if my temperature had been right on the 98.6 mark.
When I got out of the hospital in Chicago, I realized what a friggin eejit I had been. Nuala was worth it even if my male ego had to make adjustments. Why not be her spear carrier?
She has not taken on any mysteries in Chicago yet, but when she does I’ll gladly collect my spears.
Some of my friends, men my age and a little older, say I’m a wimp because I haven’t dragged Nuala off to bed. “Fuck the girl and get her out of your system,” these chauvinists say.
I had indulged in a turbulent and foolish love affair with a young woman I thought I was going to marry, so I wasn’t a stranger to the world of premarital sex. In that particular relationship, however, I guess I was the seduced rather than the seducer. It all ended when I refused to go to work for her father.
I don’t want to get Nuala out of my system. Moreover I don’t know whether she would sleep with me if I asked her, and I don’t want to know. My argument against marrying her now applies to trying to bed her now and a fortiori. I respect the child and her right to her freedom and her opportunity to mature.
“Someone else will take her first,” my guys say.
“That’s up to them and up to her. It’ll not be on my conscience.”
Do I mean that?
Well, partially, maybe.
I went back to my fridge and poured another glass of eiswein.
I have rehearsed this argument with Prester George. He says, “What makes you think you are the only gentleman left in the world? Even the only romantic gentleman?”
Fair play to him, as Nuala would say, but I never concede anything to George or another member of my family on the subject of Nuala. Or anything else.
“You love the girl, so you reverence her? What’s wrong with that?”
“Nothing,” I say.
“You should not listen to your immature friends, little bro.”
“So you agree that I should give her five more years or so?”
“Not many men could do that, but I suppose you could,” he replies, staring at me thoughtfully. “If she wants five years, which I doubt.”
“That doesn’t answer my question, George.”
“There are no answers to those kind of questions, little bro. There’s no paradigm for courtship.”
“We’re not courting!”
“Well, whatever you’re doing … I might be able to come close to an answer, if I were sure you’re not afraid.”
“Afraid of what?”
“Of commitment, of marriage, and of that young woman.”
“I’m not afraid of her!” I protest loudly. “Not at all, at all.”
The vehemence of my protest gave me away.
YES, YOU ARE, said the Adversary inside my head who harassed me frequently on such subjects. YOU’RE AFRAID TO PROPOSITION HER AND EVEN MORE AFRAID TO PROPOSE TO HER.
So I was afraid of Nuala Anne.
“There’s nothing wrong with being afraid of her,” Prester George, a frequent ally of the Adversary, persists. “Any man in his right mind would be afraid of that one. You might just as well hitch yourself to a shooting star, or maybe a comet.”
I’m a writer. I should be able to sort these things out in my work. But so far my attempts to develop the relationship I had described between my fictional narrator and the fictional young woman in Dublin had ended in worse confusion.
I stared out the window at the lights of Chicago as they came on, nicely organized by the checkerboard of orange lights on the main streets.
It was time to go up to the Tricolor. The implicit rules of the game were that I should enter the place only after she had started to sing.
This night I didn’t want to go.
Just the same, I’d be ill-advised not to.
So I put on chino slacks, a white shirt, and a brown sport coat. No tie, not on the Sunday night of the Memorial Day weekend. I can be as grungy as the best of them (and for most of them it is a pose and a sick one at that), but at the Tricolor I stubbornly did not want to be identified as one of the thugs. Not that I look much like a thug even when I want to.
I found a cab on Chestnut Street and rode up to Webster and Clybourn. The driver’s radio reported more details of the robbery of the Thalberg Gallery. Thieves had stolen more than a $100,000 worth of precious objects. They had somehow disarmed the security mechanisms of the gallery and cut through a window late at night. Art dealers were talking about buying their own police cars to patrol River North at night. The Chicago Police Department insisted that they were watching River North closely. The thieves, they said, were both very clever and very quick.
Odd, I thought to myself. I presumed that the cops or the insurance companies were taking a close look at the finances of the galleries that had been robbed.
In recent years, gentrification had transformed Clybourn, not so long ago a diagonal street of small warehouses and factories with occasional strips of very old homes. The Clybourn glitz and glamour had yet to transform the stretch of Webster between Clybourn and the Chicago River. A few blocks east, Webster was a main street of the fashionable and expensive Lincoln Park area. As it approached the river, Webster turned dank and dark and dingy.
The dark, smelly grunginess of the Tricolor overwhelmed me as soon as I had entered it—booze, cigarette smoke, vomit, human bodies, urine, and few other mysterious aromas I could not identify.
I imagined the owners going around the place before it opened with spray cans of these odors on which their livelihood depended. Grunginess was fashionable. You have to have it. I even designed in my fantasy art for the spray cans and ads for the spray on television—ads featuring lovely young woman semidressed in grungy clothes.
O’Neill’s pub in Dublin, where I had first encountered her, was a much more attractive place. The Tricolor was a valiant, though not quite successful, effort to imitate a working-class pub on the north side of Dublin.
I edged my way through the darkness and found an empty table. I told the slovenly boy who came to take my order that I wanted a “pint of the best.”
“Whadayamean?” he asked with a scandalous lack of knowledge of the proper rhetoric.
“A jar of Guinness.”
“It comes in glasses, not in jars.”
“Fine.”
The “glass” of Guinness was soon delivered. Stout on top of Niersteiner eiswein was hardly proper, but in Dublin I had learned how to nurse a “jar” all night long.
Someone turned on a single spotlight, just to the left of the bar. It revealed Nuala Anne in a white lace spring dress, suspended from her shoulders by thin white straps.
Irish lace over a white lining. The dress would come off very easily if there were a lover to take it off.
It was an inexpensive dress, off the rack from somewhere. Nuala Anne was hardly a consumerist. She had been raised frugally and lived frugally, even though she earned a good salary (especially by Irish standards). However, the frugality was always tasteful.
As I drank her in from head to toe—and everything in between—I told myself again that she was indeed the most beautiful woman in the world. Worse luck for me, as she would say.
“Nuala,” some of the others cried out. “Give us a song!”
“Well, I might just do that, now that I’m up here,” she responded.
They all laughed. She was a favorite, all right.
She began to sing a sad, Irish lullaby. Most Irish lullabies are sad. Nuala’s sweet pure voice caressed the words as if she had the child in her arms instead of the small Irish harp I had commissioned for her. She filled the pub with her love for this nonexistent child. The obstreperous conversations around me diminished to hushed whispers. Even the thugs and their consorts.
“Will you look at them tits!” an unshaven youth near me enthused.
“Would I like to get my hands inside that dress!” his equally unshaven companion agreed.
By their accent, they were both Yanks. Underage Yanks who had no right to be inside the Tricolor at all, at all. Or, to use the proper terms, friggin’ underage friggin’ Yanks.
My fist tightened around my Guinness. I had a strong impulse to plunge it down their throats, first one, then the other.
I warned myself that this was nothing more than immature boy talk, of the sort I had once engaged in myself and that the sentiments the talk expressed were understandable enough and that in, I hope a more reverential context, I shared them. Moreover, I added to my warning, they did whisper and, like all the other thugs and thugesses, they were respectfully quiet now.
I began to get an idea for a story in which a slightly snobbish admirer of Nuala’s came to a place like this and made a fool out of himself.
Comedy, that’s what I needed.
The crowd exploded in cheers when she finished the song. Some of the thugesses were crying openly.
You snobbish jerk, I told myself, most of these kids are homesick. She recalls the cottages, and the stone fences, and the bogs and the green fields they all miss.
The waiters hustled around the room to distribute more booze. I shook my head as my waiter glanced at me.
“Give us ‘Molly,’ Nuala,” someone shouted.
“‘Molly, Molly, Molly,’” they chanted.
“Well, if you’d shut up and give me a chance, I might just do that.”
They shut up.
“As I always say, I sing this for a special young man who loves the song.”
It was too dark for her to see, but maybe she sensed I was there. More likely that was merely her standard introduction to the song.
I took a sip of Guinness before she started.
It’s a sad, sad song, but on Nuala’s lips, it also took on an air of joy. Molly still lives. Somewhere.
In Dublin’s fair city,
Where the girls are so pretty
I first set my eyes
On sweet Molly Malone.
She wheeled her wheelbarrow
Through streets broad and narrow,
Crying, “Cockles and mussels,
Alive, alive, oh!”
Alive, alive, oh!
Alive, alive, oh!
Crying “Cockles and mussels,
Alive, alive, oh!”
She was a fishmonger,
But sure ’twas no wonder,
For so was her father and mother before
And they both wheeled their barrow
Through streets broad and narrow
Crying, “Cockles and mussels,
Alive, alive, oh!”
Alive, alive, oh!
Alive, alive, oh!
Crying, “Cockles and mussels,
Alive, alive, oh!”
She died of a fever
And no one could relieve her,
And that was the end of sweet Molly Malone,
But her ghost wheels her barrow
Through streets broad and narrow,
Crying, “Cockles and mussels,
Alive, alive, oh!”
Alive, alive, oh!
Alive, alive, oh!
Crying “Cockles and mussels,
Alive, alive, oh!”
There were more tears when she was finished, even a bit of salt in my own eyes.
Sensing that someone was standing over me, I glanced up.
The man was not a young thug, but a thirty-year-old. He could have been more than a thug, possibly a gunman. He was encased in tight-fitting jeans, an equally tight-fitting sweatshirt, and a battered black windbreaker. His hair was cut short and his face was stony and cold, his blue eyes, just barely visible in the half-light, innocent of emotion. He was wiry and his muscles looked taut and solid. He smelled of human sweat—real men don’t use deodorant. He was nursing a stub of a cigarette as if it were the last one he possessed.
He’s either a hard man, or wants to create the impression that he is, I thought. Maybe just a touch of the sociopath in him. He could be one of the IRA men one sees on television; though, to be fair, some of the gunmen look like angels. What is he doing here? There’s a cease-fire, the lads wouldn’t send one of their executioners to this city now, would they?
Uninvited, he sat down across from me and set his own jar of Guinness close to mine.
He stared at me, sizing me up. He didn’t like what he saw—which is to say, he thought I would be a pushover.
“That your bird?” he demanded in a thin almostreedlike voice.
North Side Dublin accent.
“I beg pardon?”
“Is that bird your bird?”
“I find the word offensive.”
“Do you, now?” His narrow lips parted in what might have been a smile, though a cruel smile. “What I mean is, are you fucking that bird with the nice tits?”
“The whole question—indeed, this whole conversation—is offensive.”
“I think she is your bird, and I’m going to take her away from you and fuck her myself. How do you like them apples?”
He had sized me up as a snob, a weakling, and a coward. I might have been the first, I was not the second, and I’d be the third only if I let him push me too far. I sized him up as an alley fighter, neither a boxer nor a wrestler. He probably carried a knife or a razor.
“I’ll fuck her whether she wants to be fucked or not,” he continued. “Most women enjoy a little rape when I’m the rapist.”
“Really?”
“Are you going to stop me?”
He shoved me with his clenched fist.
“Would you mind leaving my table?” I said softly.
He pushed me with both hands.
“You want to come outside and settle this between ourselves?”
“Not in the least.”
I deserve no points for restraint. Rather, I was playing the role he assigned me.
“Then I’ll beat the shite out of you inside. Your bird can see the blood all over you.”
He rose from his chair, grabbed me by the shirt, and pulled me up with him.
I sighed loudly, pretending as I had through the whole conversation that the testosterone was not surging through my blood. This is my cave, you frigging bastard.
“Very well, have it your way. But do let us go out into that good night, lest we disturb the singing.”
He will try something dirty as soon as we get out the door, I warned myself. Some kind of sucker punch.
Irish Lace Page 3