Irish Love

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  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  1

  2

  3

  4

  5

  6

  7

  Galway, August 14, 1882

  Galway, August 15, 1882

  August 18, 1882

  August 20, 1882

  8

  August 21, 1882

  9

  10

  August 23, 1882

  11

  12

  Galway Town, August 23, 1882

  13

  14

  15

  Letterfrack, County Galway, October 15, 1882

  Letterfrack, County Galway, October 16, 1882

  16

  Dublin, November 1, 1882

  Dublin, November 13, 1882

  17

  November 15, 1882

  Dublin, November 16, 1882

  Dublin, November 17, 1882

  Dublin, November 18, 1882

  Dublin, November 19, 1882

  18

  Dublin, November 20, 1882

  Dublin, November 21, 1882

  19

  20

  Galway, December 10, 1882

  Galway Town, December 14, 1882

  Galway Town, December 15, 1882

  Galway Town, December 16, 1882

  Galway Town, December 17, 1882

  London, February 3, 1883

  London, May 9, 1883

  21

  22

  23

  Letterfrack, County Galway, May 11, 1883

  Letterfrack, County Galway, May 12, 1883

  24

  25

  July 5, 1883

  26

  Galway Town, August 1, 1883

  Galway Town, August 2, 1883

  Galway Town, August 4, 1883

  27

  London, September 15, 1883

  28

  Galway, September 27, 1883

  Galway Town, September 28, 1883

  Kinsale, October 3, 1883

  29

  30

  BY ANDREW M. GREELEY FROM TOM DOHERTY ASSOCIATES

  PRAISE FOR ANDREW M. GREELEY

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  1

  Notes

  Copyright Page

  For the Lanes: Jack, Dani, and Jackie

  1

  “BLOOD!” MY wife announced. “There’s blood everywhere.”

  “This is a bad place, Da.” The pretty redhead dug her fingers into my arm. “I wanna go home!”

  Our beautiful Connemara day had suddenly turned somber. Dank fog had drifted in, Kilray Harbor and Galway Bay had disappeared; the ruined hovels my wife had been photographing had quickly changed from picturesque to desolate—and perhaps sinister. The ugly slabs of rock on which we were standing seemed somehow sinister, like the basement of a haunted house. With the fog had come a sudden blast of cold air. Despite my Aran Isle sweater, I shivered. We were in a horror film.

  In my arms the Mick, big, blond, and lazy—like his father it was often said—continued to sleep contentedly, his usual mode of facing life.

  I glanced around. The three females in our party were sniffing the air. I sniffed too. All I could smell was the acrid salt of seawater.

  Nuala Anne was wearing the young matron’s uniform: jeans, running shoes, and a sweatshirt, in this case a blue-and-gold sweatshirt from Marquette University.

  “It smells!” The little redhead, my three-year-old daughter, Nelliecoyne, wrinkled her pert little nose. “I wanna go home now.”

  She was dressed as her mother was, though neither had ever seen Marquette, where I spent my last years of college (and failed to graduate). Like her mother, she wore a blue-and-gold ribbon around her hair.

  There was patently not blood everywhere. However, my wife and daughter are fey. If they smelled blood, then there had been blood there once. Moreover, by the time we returned down the mountains to our bungalow in Renvyle it would be our family duty to find out why they smelled blood. I sighed, not as loudly or agonizingly as the locals sigh, but still vigorously for a friggin’ Yank. This we did not need.

  The third female in our party, Fiona, our snow white and presumably pregnant wolfhound, stuck her massive snout skyward and, falling back on her wolf ancestors, howled in protest.

  I had not thought that Fiona was fey.

  “I wonder who the last people who lived in this place were,” Nuala Anne had said before the dark and icy pall had descended upon us. “And where they went.”

  “Probably to America,” I said lightly, “where their descendants are now rich, complacent, overweight, and Republican.”

  I wondered how anyone could have possibly spent their whole life in a cave with a stone extension, or in a tiny hut not much bigger than a closet in our home on Southport Avenue across from St. Josaphat’s Church. Yet, at one time, the hut was home to three or four impoverished, illiterate families clinging to life on the hard rocks of County Galway. The roof and walls had collapsed, a few rotting timbers lay on the ground, a straggly blackthorn tree stood by, a dubious memorial. All that remained were a few piles of rubble. In another decade there would be nothing left. Yet, in Ma’s time—my grandmother Nell Pat Malone that was—people would have remembered who had lived in this little cemetery and her father, Paddy Tom Malone, might have known them.

  It was while I was pondering the melancholy scene—melancholy comes easy in the West of Ireland—that the pall of fog covered us. With the fog had come the stench. Had Nuala’s question about the inhabitants of this harsh little place called both the fog and the smell?

  It wouldn’t have been the first time something like that happened.

  My daughter deserted me and ran to cling to her mother’s jean-covered leg. I walked bravely toward the largest hut. Fiona trailed after me, growling softly. Yet, she didn’t try to stop me. Neither did my wife or daughter. As for my son, he continued to sleep, oblivious to the smell and to the wolfhound’s howl.

  Bravely, I walked into the shell of stone remnants. Fiona doggedly (you should excuse the expression) trailed behind me, growling at whatever was inside. I didn’t expect to find anything. Nevertheless, every contact of my wife with the uncanny tempted me to believe that she saw more deeply into reality than I could ever hope to.

  “There’s nothing here!” I announced bravely.

  Fiona barked happily and nudged me in approval.

  The sun, perhaps reassured, promptly returned. The fog dissipated. The temperature climbed back into the seventies—perishing with the heat in this rocky, rainy island.

  “Daddy made the bad smell go away,” Nelliecoyne announced proudly.

  “Isn’t Daddy a brilliant exorcist?” my wife agreed. “Brilliant altogether?”

  She was pale and tense, her Mavica camera hanging loosely on her arm.

  DERMOT MICHAEL AN EXORCIST! said the Adversary, a voice hidden in the back of my head that frequently comments on my follies.

  “Maybe we had better go home,” I said gently.

  “I think you have the right of it, Dermot Michael,” Nuala agreed. “Enough of me picture-taking for this morning.”

 
; We were on the lip of a valley created by the Twelve Bens mountain chain. On the north was the Atlantic Ocean, and on the south stretched the valley, a picturesque, if barren and rocky, slice of land carved out by the Traheen River rushing among the mountains in a frantic search for the sea. Like most of the land in Connemara, the valley was brown even in late spring, save for the dark gash of the river, its grasslands stripped by generations of grazing sheep. Connemara had once been almost as green as Wicklow, over near Dublin. But the fierce struggle of the local people for life had denuded it of its trees and then its grasslands.

  A few whitewashed stone houses dotted the sides of the valley, homes of the shepherds whose EU-funded sheep grazed the valley floor and hillsides, nibbling on the sparse meadows.

  “Diamond Hill” Nuala had called it as we reached the top of the mountain. “See that manor house down there on the hill? Hasn’t some fancy English lord restored it?”

  It was a Big House in the sense of the English Protestant Ascendancy of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, but it was not particularly large compared to some of the great manors—a relatively small manifestation of Georgian culture, planted precariously in the midst of another, much older and more opaque, culture.

  The latter might well have been called, up until the end of the last century, Neolithic.

  “I imagine the locals don’t like the fella very much?”

  Nuala had shrugged indifferently. “Don’t they say he’s a nice man and really Irish? He’s not oppressing anyone, is he?”

  Nuala had given up singing over a year ago and was now painting wild scenes from the Irish countryside. Since she didn’t want anyone to see her watercolors, she would explore the countryside, photograph the sites, then return to the privacy of our home and paint with frantic haste.

  Home was not our house on Southport Avenue in Chicago, right across the street from St. Josaphat’s Church. Nor was it our summer place in Grand Beach, Michigan. Rather it was a bungalow in Renvyle on the far coast of Connemara, a place the next parish to which is on Long Island, as the locals say. Renvyle, by the way, means “bare headland” in Irish, a grimly accurate description.

  “Grand,” I said, as I removed our son from my arms and put him in the sack around my wife’s neck. Then I picked up his sister.

  “Let me sit on your head, Daddy,” Nelliecoyne pleaded.

  “You’re too heavy,” I replied.

  “I am NOT!”

  We began to carefully pick our way down the mountain trail to the main road through Letterfrack National Park.

  We had covered the first half of our ten-minute walk back to our Ford before Nuala Anne said a word.

  “Wouldn’t you think this psychic stuff is getting tiresome, Dermot Michael?”

  “It’s not your fault,” I said, repeating what had become my favorite mantra for the last year and a half.

  “Still and all, I’m an educated, modern woman. I know that this psychic shite is all nonsense, isn’t it now?”

  I sighed as only someone from the West of Ireland—by adoption at least—can sigh.

  “I’m not one of your superstitious Irish peasants, am I?”

  My wife was indeed an educated, modern woman—Trinity College degree. She was also, if not exactly a superstitious peasant, a throwback to the Neolithic age.

  “I thought it would all go away after I had this little gosson. Didn’t me ma say that me Aunt Aggie, you know, the one in New Zealand, stopped seeing things after her second child was born?”

  “Ah?”

  I had never heard of Aunt Aggie before.

  “And wasn’t she the one who passed on the second sight to me? Isn’t it always from aunt to niece, like me ma says?”

  “That doesn’t explain why Nelliecoyne is even more fey than you are.”

  She sighed, as if showing me how it should be done.

  “’Tis true.”

  “Daddy made the bad smell go away,” that worthy little elf proclaimed from atop my head.

  “Sure, darlin’, there wasn’t any bad smell. Wasn’t it only the fog?”

  Our daughter did not deign to debate that point.

  Nuala began to hum the Connemara Cradle Song to her son, the first hint of music I had heard since his birth.

  On the wings of the wind, o’er the dark, rolling deep,

  Angels are coming to watch o’er your sleep.

  Angels are coming to watch over you.

  So list to the wind coming over the sea.

  Hear the wind blow, hear the wind blow,

  Lean your head over, hear the wind blow.

  “Still, it was women’s blood up there, wasn’t it, Fiona darlin’?”

  The wolfhound barked in approval as she always did when Nuala spoke her name.

  “Women’s blood?”

  “Grandmother, mother, and daughter, all were murdered up there.”

  “They were?”

  She nodded solemnly.

  “And didn’t the poor woman lose her husband over it?”

  “One of those who died?”

  “Och, Dermot Michael, don’t be an eejit! They were already dead. It was the other woman.”

  “Oh.”

  When we reached our van, my son (whose real name is Micheal Dermod, pronounced MI-hall DIR-mud) emitted a small complaining sound, which usually meant that he wanted his diaper changed. Nuala promptly took over the task while Fiona, accompanied by Nelliecoyne clinging to her collar, sniffed round the parking area just to make sure that no other canines had invaded this sanctuary while we were up on the mountain.

  When our daughter was in the diaper stage, I was frequently permitted to change her diaper. Nuala reserved changes for the Mick to herself.

  “Poor dear little thing,” she murmured, holding him close after she had reassembled his clothes.

  On the lips of an Irish woman the word “poor” in that context ordinarily did not indicate either spiritual or material poverty. Rather it represented the superlative of the following adjective as in “dearest little thing.” (Or “ting” since the Gaelic lacks an “h” sound.)

  My wife was convinced that during her bout of postpartum depression she had neglected the Mick, and she was now trying to make up for it.

  I was sure that behind my back she was calling me “poor dear Dermot and himself having to put up with a terrible wife like me.”

  “Your wife has always excelled, has she not, Mr. Coyne?” the psychiatrist, a handsome Jewish grandmother had said to me. “At everything?”

  “Sports, singing, acting, lovemaking,” I had agreed.

  “Often by sheer willpower?”

  “And raw talent.”

  “And she comes from a cultural background where there are no great demands for a woman to be good at everything all the time?”

  “It’s changing over there, but in her community that’s still true.”

  “And now she believes that she’s a bad wife and a bad mother and a worthless human being?”

  “She cries all the time and loses her temper and then cries some more. She complains that I don’t help her with the children and then shouts at me when I do help. She has to do it all herself because no one else knows how to do it right.”

  “But you did persuade her to see me?”

  “Her own mother did, at my instigation. ‘Me ma says I should see the doctor person.’”

  The psychiatrist smiled thinly.

  “She’s overwhelmed, Mr. Coyne, by her own internalized demands and by the demands of our culture. Let me read you a quote from Dr. Thurer. ‘The current standards for good mothering are so formidable, self-denying, elusive, changeable, and contradictory that they are unattainable. Our contemporary myth heaps upon the mother so many duties and expectations that to take it seriously would be hazardous to her mental health.’ Your wife takes the myth very seriously indeed. Her saving grace is that in her better moments she laughs at it.”

  “She’ll be all right?”

  “Yes,
of course, eventually. It may require several months, and she must take her medicine every day … . A woman’s body undergoes hormonal changes constantly. There are enormous changes after she gives birth. When this is combined with a strong sense of personal responsibility, such as your wife possesses …”

  “Is possessed by.”

  “Exactly … You understand the problem. Have her moods affected your son, do you think?”

  “The Mick? A seven-forty-seven could crash outside our house and he would hardly notice … . Nuala Anne says that he’s like his father.”

  “I doubt that she really means that,” the doctor had said with another thin smile. “However, you must accept for the present her insistence that she is giving up her career. Eventually she may change her mind, but she must change it for herself.”

  “Naturally.”

  “When I told her that this kind of problem happens after ten percent of births, she seemed relieved.”

  “Oh?”

  “Her exact words”—third thin smile—“were that she wasn’t the only friggin’ fruitcake in the world.”

  Later, as we were driving home from the “doctor woman’s office,” Nuala complained, “Dermot Michael, a woman is nothin’ but a friggin’ cesspool of friggin’ hormones.”

  Despite myself I started to laugh. For a moment she pretended to be upset with me, then she laughed too.

  There was another crisis over her medication. She didn’t want to poison her “poor little tyke” and she didn’t want to give up breast-feeding. Her mother, the good Annie McGrail, had persuaded her that it was more important for her son to have a happy mother than to drink her milk.

  However, she often felt that since she was “better now” that it would be a sign of weakness to take her medication every day.

  “Woman,” I had thundered at her, “the doctor woman said you had to take it every day until she said you could stop. So you swallow the thing in me presence or I’ll divorce you.”