Irish Tweed Read online

  IRISH

  TWEED

  ALSO BY ANDREW M. GREELEY

  FROM TOM DOHERTY ASSOCIATES

  NUALA ANNE MCGRAIL NOVELS

  Irish Gold Irish Stew!

  Irish Lace Irish Cream

  Irish Whiskey Irish Crystal

  Irish Mist Irish Linen

  Irish Eyes Irish Tiger

  Irish Love

  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 Lake

  The Archbishop in Andalusia

  THE O’MALLEYS IN THE TWENTIETH CENTURY

  A Midwinter’s Tale September Song

  Younger Than Springtime Second Spring

  A Christmas Wedding Golden Years

  All About Women

  Angel Fire

  Angel Light

  Contact with an Angel

  Faithful Attraction

  The Final Planet

  Furthermore!: Memories of a Parish Priest

  God Game

  Jesus: A Meditation on His Stories and His Relationships with Women

  Star Bright!

  Summer at the Lake

  White Smoke

  Sacred Visions (editor with Michael Cassutt)

  The Book of Love(editor with Mary G. Durkin)

  Emerald Magic (editor)

  IRISH

  TWEED

  A Nuala Anne

  McGrail Novel

  ANDREW M. GREELEY

  A TOM DOHERTY ASSOCIATES BOOK

  NEW YORK

  The author and publisher have provided this e-book to you without Digital Rights Management software (DRM) applied so that you can enjoy reading it on your personal devices. This e-book is for your personal use only. You may not print or post this e-book, or make this e-book publicly available in any way. You may not copy, reproduce or upload this e-book, other than to read it on one of your personal devices.

  Copyright infringement is against the law. If you believe the copy of this e-book you are reading infringes on the author’s copyright, please notify the publisher at: us.macmillanusa.com/piracy.

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  IRISH TWEED: A NUALA ANNE MCGRAIL NOVEL

  Copyright © 2009 by Andrew M. Greeley Enterprises, Ltd.

  All rights reserved.

  A Forge Book

  Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

  175 Fifth Avenue

  New York, NY 10010

  www.tor-forge.com

  Forge® is a registered trademark of Tom Doherty Associates, LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Greeley, Andrew M., 1928—

  Irish tweed : a Nuala Anne McGrail novel / Andrew M. Greeley.—1st ed.

  p. cm.

  “A Tom Doherty Associates book.”

  ISBN-13: 978-0-7653-2223-4

  ISBN-10: 0-7653-2223-4

  1. McGrail, Nuala Anne (Fictitious character)—Fiction. 2. Women detectives—Illinois—Chicago—Fiction. 3. Irish Americans—Fiction. 4. Chicago (Ill.)—Fiction. I. Title.

  PS3557.R358I839 2009

  813’.54—dc22

  2008038025

  First Edition: February 2009

  Printed in the United States of America

  0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Part of my story occurs in the era of the migration from Ireland that happened during the so-called little famine of the middle eighteen seventies when many men and women migrated from the West of Ireland to Chicago, which accounts for the preponderance of Mayo folks in our city. Among them were my two grandmothers, Annie Moran and Mary Laura Reynolds, good women who I, deprived of grandparents, had always wanted to meet. I dedicate this story to their honored memory and to the memory of all Irish immigrant women, whose sufferings we cannot even begin to imagine.

  AG, June 1, 2008

  Contents

  The First Battle

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Afterword

  Note

  These stories are fiction. The events and people are all products of my imagination. The only person drawn from reality is Bishop Peter Muldoon, auxiliary of Chicago and then first Bishop of Rockford. He was pastor of St. Charles Borromeo Church in Chicago when my mother was growing up in that neighborhood. His kindness and goodness left an indelible image in her memory that I am happy to repeat. He was destined to be Archbishop of Chicago but was betrayed by his fellow priests—something that fellow priests often do. Rush Medical College and St. Joe’s parish are real places, but their stories in this book are fictional. St. Joe’s is a wonderful parish with a wonderful school; its only flaw is that my friends the Coynes have moved in across the street from them and hence the parish often appears in my stories—always, however, fictionalized.

  There is verisimilitude, I believe, in my stories of late nineteenth-century medical education and practice in Chicago, but for history one could consult Medicine in Chicago, 1850–1950, by Thomas Neville Bonner. I have tried to give a hint of what the medical world was like when my parents were growing up—so very different from our own but, fortunately, very different from the previous quarter century. The inimitable Angela Agnes Tierney, MD, may not have been able to matriculate at Rush Medical College at the time I depict her entering the school, but a few years later she would have been able to do so. The struggle against plagues and disease in a large and very new city, I believe, was not unlike what I portray as the struggle between the followers of Pasteur and Lister, with their convictions about germs, and a slightly older generation who believed in miasmas and bloodletting. As for Irish women like Dr. Tierney, they are legion, then and now . . .

  The battles at St. Joe’s illustrate what can happen when errant clichés left over from Vatican Council II fall into the worldview of angry and unhappy humans, made bitter by the failure of the church leadership after the Council to implement the Council’s vision.

  There’s never enough time, is there,

  Dermot Michael? And when there is, isn’t it too late?

  Nuala Anne McGrail

  IRISH

  TWEED

  The First Battle

  THE WOLFHOUNDS were howling. That wasn’t right. When they were angry, normally they barked. Why were they making a fuss on this early September afternoon, dense with humidity? When they howled they were furious, ready to fight at the slightest notice. Where were they? I rolled over in my bed, trying to straighten out this puzzle. Normally the gentlest of God’s creatures, hounds are big, terrifying monsters when they are offended. In the school yard, they adored and were adored by the kids. What would make them angry . . . Why would they howl? Only if someone for whom they were responsible was under attack? Who could that be?

  Nuala Anne! My wife!

  I jumped out of my bed, ignoring my pained muscles (thirty-six holes at Lost Dunes) and rushed to the window. Across the street the school yard was in chaos. Kids were swirling around in b
attle with one another. Nuala was in the middle of the fight. The hounds were trying to drag her across the yard so they could make short work of the bad guys. My four children were fully engaged—Mary Anne, just turned thirteen, helped her mother to restrain the hounds, eleven-year-old Micheal (Me-Hall, AKA the Mick) had pinned a big kid on the ground, nine-year-old Socra Marie and seven-year-old Patjo were pounding on the Mick’s foe, and the new principal, her ascetic face twisted in rage, was screaming at my wife. Various other parents were engaged in battle to protect their own children from the Ostrogoths who were trying to beat them up.

  Pulling on my jeans and Marquette sweatshirt, I charged down the outdoor stairs of our pre– Civil War three storey, wondering what the hell I was supposed to do. On the way down I noted that a woman, shaped rather like a bowling ball, rolled across the yard and knocked my three youngest to the ground. Frank Sauer, the parish priest and a classmate of my brother George, was nowhere to be seen. The unengaged children were chanting “Fight! Fight! Fight!”

  Dr. Lorraine Fletcher, the principal, slapped Nuala Anne’s face. The doggies went ballistic, Mary Anne grabbed their leashes so that her mother, a newly minted black belt, could kick Dr. Fletcher in the stomach and send her reeling into the mud of the yard . . .

  “No! Doggies!” I shouted.

  “Stop!” My valiant daughter shouted.

  “Sit!” Her mother added the decisive word.

  They did, of course.

  Julie, our golden-haired nanny, pulled the human bowling ball off the Mick, who promptly slugged his assailant (as I presumed the lout on the ground must be), gathered his younger siblings, and redeployed to where his mother and father stood. I whistled a signal to my troops that we were to engage on a strategic retreat.

  “I’m a-callin’ the po-lice, over to the sixth precinct, and a-tellin’ them that the polecats have taken over at St. Joe’s. I saw Nuala kick that polecat bitch after she done slapped her. I’ll testify in court.”

  It was Cindasue Lou McCloud Murphy, Commander in the Yewnited States Coast Guard and some kind of gumshoe for the Secret Service. She had an arm around her son Peteyjack and the other arm around her daughter Katiesue.

  “I wanna kick that phony bitch just once more,” my wife, teeth clenched in determination, begged.

  “Maire Phinoula Ain,” I insisted, “You do not! . . . Julie, you and Mary Anne, get her mother back in the house before the cops come.”

  Somehow I now had responsibility for Maeve and Fiona. They had begun to howl again.

  “Shut up!” I shouted at them.

  Surprised, the two mutts fell into line with our retreating militia. I did not ordinarily presume to give them instructions. It may have been that my wife, who maintained some kind of creepy extrasensory communication links with them, had ordered them to chill out.

  Inside our castle, everyone wanted to talk at the same time.

  “Julie,” I said, “I think we all need a hot chocolate with whipped cream . . . Sorcie, will you help her, please?”

  Delighted to be given adult responsibility, our onetime-tiny neonate followed Julie to the kitchen.

  I sat down on our antique couch next to me wife, who was quivering with many different explosive emotions. Mary Anne was on the other side, both of us helping Nuala to chill out.

  The dogs arranged themselves at her feet, ready to resume the fight should the enemy return.

  “I’m a-goin’ out to talk to them thar cops, a-tellin’ them that the little kids are rebellin’ ’gainst the junior high school polecats who are a-takin’ their money.”

  “Bobby Finnerty, if you need a name, ma’am.”

  Mary Anne kissed her mother’s cheek.

  “Ma, you were wonderful. The Revered teacher will be proud of you.”

  Later on, as supper time approached, the tangled lines of the story began to emerge. There had been a parents’ meeting at the school. Father Sauer had introduced the new principal, a lean and hungry polecat, according to Cindasue, to whom everyone took an immediate dislike. She announced that henceforth St. Joe’s would be a Catholic school because it would exercise the “fundamental option for the poor,” which meant that no special favors would be granted to the children of the affluent or of celebrities or to children who were good athletes. Everyone would be equal and the only discrimination would be in favor of the poor. When asked about the bullying of little ones by “big kids” who were taking their money from them, she had replied that sometimes the poor may take revolutionary action to reestablish equality.

  “That polecat just plain crazy.”

  “It means she selects the basketball team,” Mary Anne explained, “not coach. And no seventh graders can play on the eighth-grade team.”

  “Guess who that means!” the Mick, still angry, shouted. “So this morning the bullies started pushing around the little kids like Sorci and Patjo.”

  “I pushed back,” Patjo said.

  “And so we organized our own revolution!” the Mick continued.

  “Who is this ‘we’?” I asked.

  “Me and Liz Boyle.”

  Ms. Boyle was the local hellion, a sweet little blond with an enchanting smile.

  “Good ally,” I conceded.

  “What kind of a Catholic place is this,” my wife protested, “that has revolutions and counterrevolutions . . . I’m so ashamed of myself!”

  “I’m not ashamed of you, Ma,” Mary Anne said. “She had it coming!”

  “Dermot Michael Coyne, you’ve raised a brood of bloody radicals!”

  “Apples don’t fall that far from their trees,” I replied.

  Fortunately the melee did not make the evening news.

  “Nuala Anne in mob fight with kids!” she said. “Wouldn’t that have been a great lead.”

  Wouldn’t it now?

  “I lost it altogether, Dermot Michael,” my good wife said. “I should never have kicked that bitch in the stomach.”

  “You were just defending your kids, Ma.” The Mick inched his way onto the now-crowded couch.

  The whole lot of them, I told myself, were wild uhns from the West of Ireland. In times of trouble when the wolves were howling, my genes became recessive.

  1

  MY BEAUTIFUL wife, Nuala Anne, is doing martial arts these days. Like everything she does, she’s an enthusiast about her program of “Self-Defense for Women.” One night every week, she dons her floppy white clothes, tightens her black belt, and goes over to the storefront on Clark Street to learn from “the Revered Teacher” how to fend off and incapacitate would-be assailants. Sometimes she brings along one of our snow-white wolfhounds, which, she insists, are very popular with the group.

  “ ’Tis not that I’m afraid of you, Dermot love,” she says anxiously as we wait in the parlor of our home on Southport Avenue for the advent of Julie’s date. “It’s not that kind of attack that I want to resist.”

  “We’ll see,” I say, not wanting to give up a talking point in our culture of banter.

  In some of our recent adventures me wife has battered, routed, and incapacitated troublesome males with considerable éclat. The only resistance I encounter is symbolic, part of the games we play in bed—or anywhere else when there is opportunity. However, I rarely challenge her when she has a new idea. My challenge would make her feel guilty, but it wouldn’t stop her. If me wife says she feels the need to learn taekwondo, I go along. Her instincts, I have learned in thirteen years of marriage, are usually dead on.

  Fiona, our senior wolfhound, ambled in the room and sat at me wife’s feet.

  “Doesn’t this one want to get a look at Julie’s date,” she said as she patted the compliant canine’s massive head. “Just like that one that just went upstairs.” “That one,” was our Mary Anne (in the past also known as Nellie or Nelliecoyne), an auburn-haired beauty on the cusp of adulthood. Nuala Anne’s conceit was that she had no control whatever over our eldest, and she was now my responsibility. This was pure fiction. The two of them had b
onded long ago and, both being part witch, they communicated silently with one another. Against me, as I claimed. Nuala bonded with every woman that came into our sprawling antebellum house. That was the only way she could properly take care of them. Julie alone of our nannies resisted the link—mostly out of shyness, I thought. Instead she bonded with Mary Anne, which perhaps gave my wife an indirect link, not one which assuaged her Connemara sense of maternal responsibility.

  “I’m sure her ma expects me to take care of her and herself all them thousands of miles away from Dublin at Loyola University, the poor little thing.”

  You must understand that the key words which began with th-emerged sounding like “dem,” “dousands,” and “ding”—the Irish language lacks a sound to correspond with our th. I had long since given up my battle to transform her dialect from Galwegan to Mercan. Yet when our oldest began to speak “the way they do back home,” me wife would comment, “Won’t dem kids at St. Ignatius College Prep laugh at you for being uncivilized.”

  “The ones from da Soudside won’t even notice.”

  “Dermot Michael Coyne! You must do something about your daughter.”

  “Isn’t it too late now, and yourself having spoiled her rotten?”

  Thus we bantered with one another—outside our bedroom anyway.

  Me wife is a beautiful woman, as I have said. In fact, she is many beautiful women, and an actress at that she was at TCD (Trinity College Dublin), as well as a singer. She slips from one persona into another with practiced ease—the shy and charming young singer from Carraoe in Connemara, the disciplined athlete who ran the marathon and played hoops with her daughter over in the school yard of St. Joe’s, the stiff, shrewd investment broker at Arthur Andersen (who got out long before the bailiff arrived), the grand duchess sashaying down Michigan Avenue in the Easter Parade, oblivious to the hungry stares of men and the resentful expressions of women, the modest virgin who might have become a nun and who could outpray most of the women in the world (especially when our tiny neonate was dying), the ingenious slut with whom I slept.