Irish Stew! Read online

  Praise for the Nuala Anne McGrail novels by Andrew M. Greeley

  Irish Stew!

  “The prolific cleric plops his psychic singer heroine and her family into a delicious stew of trouble in his latest crowd pleaser.… The double plot is rich with detail, while the couple’s earnestness and good intentions are never in question.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “The parallels found between the Coynes and the 1880s Fitzpatricks add a unique dimension and the comical banter between Dermot and Nuala Anne cleverly gives the reader insight into their Irish heritage as well as their Catholic faith.… [A] pleasing read.”

  —Romantic Times

  “Greeley fans will be pleased.”

  —Arizona Daily Star

  “Once again, Father Greeley, with his enormous storytelling skill, his knowledge of Chicago, and his mastery of the mystery genre, combines two separate tales in two different eras to give us readers one tantalizing and endearing experience.”

  —Sullivan County Democrat

  “Dermot and Nuala Anne are a charming couple, deeply in love and devoted to their family. Female readers should love Dermot; he knows wives and mothers were made to be cherished and obeyed…. Male readers should take a lesson.”

  —Romance Reviews Today

  Irish Love

  “Father Greeley’s deep and obvious love for the history and culture of Ireland shines through in his latest contemporary mystery…. Greeley skillfully depicts an Ireland flushed with economic success but still carrying the scars of historic poverty.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  Irish Eyes

  “Greeley has a remarkable way of tying all the loose ends together to create a memorable story. Along the way, he throws in a commentary on racism, intolerance, and a short lesson on the Bill of Rights. Irish Eyes is an appealing installment in the ongoing story of Nuala Anne…. Once you get to know these two engaging people, you’ll find yourself wanting more. Call it the charm of the Irish.”

  —Bookpage

  “The return of Nuala Anne McGrail is more than just good luck for readers. The audience knows they are in for a weird, but wonderful tale about fascinating characters. Nuala and Dermot retain their charm especially when they dote on an infant with psychic powers…. Irish Eyes will surely shine down on Mr. Greeley for another triumphant tale.”

  —BookBrowser.com

  Irish Mist

  “Solid, modest Dermot and fiery, unpredictable Nuala Anne enjoy an ideal marriage: sexy and humorous and unabashedly loving.”

  —Los Angeles Times

  Irish Whiskey

  “ ’Tis a charmin’ tale that Andrew Greeley tells in his latest mystery novel, Irish Whiskey…. It’s a lively novel filled with Irish wit, interesting situations and likable people.”

  —The Chattanooga Times

  Irish Lace

  “Like the delicate handwork its title evokes, Greeley’s Irish Lace is finely crafted, laced with compelling characters and criss-crossed with strong storylines.”

  —Savannah Morning News

  Irish Gold

  “A tale of young love and faith as modern as U2, with a cast of characters, Irish and American, that very well may open Greeley’s work to a generation of new … readers. Yet those who have followed his works in the past will find the same storytelling mastery and the same understanding of the heart.”

  —Chicago Tribune

  “May be Andrew M. Greeley’s best effort yet. It has more of everything—more plot, denser character development, fresh dialogue and a more solid now storyline than his previous novels…. Gives a different dimension and personal look at Irish history and its heroes and villains…. A first-rate adventure story with the love interest intertwined in the mystery.”

  —Baltimore Sun

  ALSO BY ANDREW M. GREELEY FROM TOM DOHERTY ASSOCIATES

  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

  Nuala Anne McGrail Novels

  Irish Gold

  Irish Lace

  Irish Whiskey

  Irish Mist

  Irish Eyes

  Irish Love

  Irish Stew!

  The O’Malleys in the Twentieth Century

  A Midwinter’s Tale

  Younger Than Springtime

  A Christmas Wedding

  September Song

  Second Spring*

  All About Women

  Angel Fire

  Angel Light

  The Book of Love (with Mary Durkin)*

  Contract with an Angel

  Faithful Attraction

  The Final Planet

  Furthermore!: Memories of a Parish Priest

  God Game

  Sacred Visions (editor with Michael Cassutt)

  Star Bright!

  Summer at the Lake

  White Smoke

  *forthcoming

  IRISH STEW!

  A Nuala Anne McGrail Novel

  ANDREW M. GREELEY

  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.

  For the Lanes, Jack and Dani

  NOTE: If you purchased this book without a cover you should be aware that this book is stolen property. It was reported as “unsold and destroyed” to the publisher, and neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this “stripped book.”

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

  IRISH STEW!: A NUALA ANNE MCGRAIL NOVEL

  Copyright © 2002 by Andrew M. Greeley Enterprises, Ltd.

  All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book, or portions thereof, in any form.

  A Forge Book

  Published by Tom Doherty Associates, LLC

  175 Fifth Avenue

  New York, NY 10010

  www.tor.com

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

  ISBN: 0-812-57607-1

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 200105480-5

  First edition: March 2002

  First mass market edition: March 2003

  Printed in the United States of America

  0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  1

  WE STARTED having trouble again with our oldest child, Nelliecoyne, the day we brought her little sister home from the hospital. The difficulty, however, was not sibling rivalry with poor little Socra Marie. The problem was that Nellie heard an explosion that had occurred a hundred and fourteen years ago.

  It was a lovely May day, the fourth day of May to be exact. Spring had decided that she would come to Chicago after all, against her better judgment. She had festooned our old (but rehabbed) block on Southport Avenue with delicate green lace, bright emerald lawns, and flower beds that much to their own surprise had burst into bloom.

  “Isn’t it a party for herself?” my wife said as I parked our ancient Benz in front of the house. “God timed spring this year just for our Socra Marie.”

  I knew better than to argue.

  This ditsy celebration of new life (doubtless under the p
atronage of St. Brigid whose cross stood watch above the door of our home) matched the exuberance that the little girl’s mother, Nuala Anne McGrail, and I felt. Against all odds we had brought this tiny girl child home where she belonged after one week short of three months in an NICU—Neonatal Intensive Care Unit.

  Do you know how it feels to hold a six-hundred-gram neonate in your arms? Try a pound of butter that’s breathing and is totally beautiful, even if she looked at the beginning like a rare species of monkey.

  “She’s a tough one,” Jane Foley, the young resident in neonatology, whispered to me, as Nuala viewed her for the first time. “Some of them are pretty passive. This one is determined to live.”

  “The toughness is all on her mother’s side.”

  “Little girls,” the young woman said primly, “have a better survival rate than little boys.”

  “That’s cause they’re stronger and better,” Nuala replied promptly, “just like their mothers.”

  Before they took Nuala down to the NICU, the resident had told us about our daughter’s prospects. My wife was hurting from the agonies of birth and woozy from drugs.

  “The baby is still alive, Mrs. Coyne…”

  “Mrs. Coyne is my mother-in-law. I’m Nuala.”

  “Very well, Nuala …” the young woman said a bit primly, eager to go through her routine.

  “And she’s not ‘the baby.’ She’s Socra Marie.”

  “Of course … It is very fortunate that she came at the twenty-fifth week. Her chances are so much better than if it had been the twenty-third week…”

  “What did I do wrong?”

  I started to worry. Nuala had endured a bad case of postpartum depression after our second child.

  “You didn’t do anything wrong, Mrs … ah, Nuala. Premature births usually just happen.”

  “I must have done something wrong.”

  “Stop being Irish, Nuala,” I cut in. “Dr. Foley says it wasn’t your fault. That should settle that.”

  My wife smiled faintly.

  “You’re right, Dermot Michael, as always.”

  “We’re giving her increased oxygen now to help her breathing. That’s why we had to take her away from you right after she was born.”

  Nuala nodded, though I knew she didn’t understand.

  “Not so long ago, we would have abandoned her as a miscarriage. Now there’s a ninety percent chance you’ll be able to take her home.”

  Nuala nodded duly.

  “However, we have to be candid with you. A little more than half of our premature babies have some problems in later life, sight, hearing, speech, brain disorders like cerebral palsy. Some of these problems can be easily corrected. Others are serious, lifelong problems. She seems healthy now. We can make no guarantees.”

  Nuala nodded again.

  “We are forbidden by law to take her off life support. However, if you wish we will put a DNR on her chart; that means ‘Do not resuscitate.’ You would have to sign some papers for that.”

  Dr. Foley was about the same age as Nuala, probably had a kid or two of her own.

  “Why would we want to do that?”

  “I’m a Catholic like you are, Nuala. There is no obligation to extraordinary means. What we’re doing now is certainly extraordinary. The Church is more tolerant than the government. It would permit you to request that we stop trying to keep her alive. The government won’t let us do that. But it will let us follow your orders not to resuscitate her if, say, she stops breathing. Then she would be with God.”

  My wife frowned, puzzled by the prospect that Dr. Foley was offering her. “Why in the world would we ever do that?” Nuala asked.

  “There is a chance that she won’t have much of a life.”

  Nuala cocked her eye at me. I nodded.

  “Och, sure, if God doesn’t mind, won’t we be after keeping her?”

  Dr. Foley lowered her head, to hide tears no doubt.

  “Why doesn’t that choice surprise me!”

  So we went to the NICU. Nuala immediately went to the isolete where our daughter lay, tubes poking into her body, her eyes covered to protect her from the intense light that provided warmth, her ears covered with tiny earmuffs to protect them from the noise of the NICU. Clad only in a miniature diaper she was kicking her little feet and waving her little hands to protest the tubes

  “Och, sure, Dermot Michael, isn’t the little hellion here to stay? Can’t you tell it by the way she looks at me and herself with fire in her eyes already?”

  Socra Marie opened her eyes rarely in those very early days. However, we were assured by the nurses that she knew her mother’s smell from the time in the womb. Probably knew mine too because I hung around so much.

  “Can I talk to her?”

  “Please do,” Dr. Foley said. “The more she hears your voice, the better.”

  So my wife bent over the small one and spoke to her in tender and loving Irish.

  “I don’t suppose I could sing to her?”

  “If you do it very softly, so as not to disturb the other children.”

  Socra Marie heard for the first time in her life—though surely not the last—the melody of the Connemara lullaby. She calmed down and stopped fidgeting. So did the children on either side of her. A kind of mystical grace permeated the NICU, for a moment moving us into an alternative world.

  “You can sing louder, Nuala,” Dr. Foley whispered. “All the children like it.”

  So we had a daily concert.

  Nuala Anne was aware that it would be eight weeks at least before the tiny one saw much of anything. However, having predicted her gender and her early arrival, my wife was not likely to be wrong. She almost never is.

  She accurately predicts the gender of children, not only before they were born, but before they were conceived. Nuala Anne, you see, is fey. As is our first born, Nellie. The little bishop, who knows everything, “speculates” that it is a holdover from our Neanderthal ancestors who, since they could not talk very well, needed to communicate psychically. “A neo-Neanderthal vestige,” he informs us.

  “Is Socra Marie fey?” I asked.

  “Isn’t that a terrible thing to say about this poor little tyke? She’s not fey at all, at all, dear little thing that she is, but she’s full of life and will lead all of us a merry chase, won’t you, dear little one?”

  She wept as she did often these days.

  Then she sang very softly some more snatches of the Connemara Cradle Song—in her native Irish, naturally.

  “Socra,” by the way, is pronounced Sorra. You won’t have the right of it, however, unless you speak it like your sinuses are packed tight with Galway fog. My wife’s name is pronounced Noolah, with the same thick Galway mist oozing through the vowels and consonants.

  The “dear little one” led us a merry chase through the first six weeks of her life, just barely surviving crisis after crisis, laser surgery on her eyes, several resuscitations, a couple of infections. However, survive she did with grim determination.

  The first time Nuala nursed her, she devoured her mother’s milk like she expected there to be a shortage, as if perhaps to say, “Well, it’s about time!”

  We spent much of our time at the hospital, “immersing” ourselves in the care of our new daughter at the suggestion of the staff in the NICU. At first that meant simply being there with her, so she could smell us and hear us.

  “Isn’t she beautiful, Dermot Michael?” Nuala said to me the day after the little girl was born, with very little warning.

  Actually fifteen weeks early and weighing almost a pound, Socra Marie didn’t look like much of anything, under the intense light which kept her warm and the Saran Wrap which kept her moist on an open bed with the blinkers over her eyes and the earmuffs over her ears and feeding and breathing tubes in her mouth and nose. Her dark brown and paper-thin skin was covered with cream (which, we were told, you could buy at the corner drugstore). She struggled violently against the tubes.

  “The p
oor little thing,” Nuala said, tears streaming down her cheeks. “There she was taking her ease inside of me and all of a sudden she’s dumped in this strange place with all them aggravating things sticking inside her.”

  When Nuala is in her Irish country-girl mood a “thing” is always pronounced a “ding.” She was very much in that modality after her little daughter was born. An African-American nurse asked if she were an immigrant. I told the truth and said that she was.

  “Is all this too much for her, do you think?”

  It was a perfectly legitimate question, so I withheld my amusement.

  “Nuala Anne can cope,” I replied. “She studied at Trinity College in Dublin.”

  “They have a fine medical school there,” the nurse said, putting me in my place.

  Eventually the staff figured out that the nice girl who sang to the babies and acted as a morale officer and chaplain for all the other mothers was the singer.

  “Sure I do sing now and then,” my wife admitted.

  “Isn’t her name Nuala Anne?” Dr. Foley asked me.

  “Sometimes.”

  When other babies went home, Nuala Anne led the cheers. When some died, she led the weeping. Despite all the strain, she was remarkably patient with me.

  “Wife,” I said, “haven’t I hinted now and again that you’d try the patience of a saint?”

  “ ’Tis true, I would.”

  “ ’Tis not true. What is true is that you have the patience of a saint.”

  “Och, Dermot Michael,” she said, resting her head on my shoulder, “ ’tis not true, but ’tis dead focking brill of you to say it.”

  So we were there every day all day, with only a few time-outs to return to our home to make sure that the troops were not too restless. They were, but what could we do?

  “ ’Tis essential for bonding, Dermot Michael, don’t you see now?”

  What did I know? Nothing, except that if you were a child of Nuala Anne’s you bonded, whether you liked the idea or not.

  There was more than a little chaos at our house for those eight weeks. We had both a nanny and a housekeeper (Ethne and Danuta respectively) but my wife is the kind of Irishwoman who has to make sure the children are properly dressed and the house properly cleaned before either of these personages appears.