Irish Mist
Praise for Andrew M. Greeley
“In this deft addition to his shelf of novels, Greeley once again shows his knack for combining solid char- acterizations, folksy prose, a bantamweight sense of history, and understated Catholic morality to make highly entertaining fiction.”
—Publishers Weekly on A Midwinter’s Tale
“Sentimentality and nostalgia for bygone days underlie this coming-of-age story from Greeley.… Fans will love it.”
—Library Journal on A Midwinter’s Tale
“Fans of Greeley’s trademarked light touch will enjoy yet another tale of the trials and turmoils of Chicago’s own.”
—The Irish American Post on A Midwinter’s Tale
“A witty and delightful inside-out Faust with angelic choirs, a variety of loving, and an ending with a special twist. Greeley has fashioned a novel about learning to love and doing it well.”
—San Antonio Express-News on Contract with an Angel
“Sit back and enjoy novel-writing Catholic priest Andrew M. Greeley’s little fantasy about a wealthy and powerful businessman who turns his life around—none too soon—after a visit from a Seraph.”
—Dallas Morning News on Contract with an Angel
“Greeley’s descriptions of each encounter are touching and, at times, poignant.… Greeley injects a bit of humor into the book [as well].… Like a good homily, the priest’s message comes across quietly.”
—St. Paul Pioneer Press on Contract with an Angel
“ ’Tis a charmin’ tale that Andrew Greeley tells in his latest mystery novel, Irish Whiskey.… It’s a lovely novel filled with Irish wit, interesting situations, and likable people.”
—The Chattanooga Times
Also by Andrew M. Greeley
from Tom Doherty Associates
All About Women
Angel Fire
Angel Light
Contract with an Angel
Faithful Attraction
The Final Planet
Furthermore! Memories of a Parish Priest
God Game
Irish Eyes
Irish Gold
Irish Lace
Irish Whiskey
A Midwinter’s Tale
Star Bright!
Summer at the Lake
White Smoke
Younger than Springtime
Sacred Visions (editor with Michael Cassutt)
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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 MIST
Copyright © 1999 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-13: 978-0-812-59023-4
ISBN-10: 0-812-59023-6
First edition: March 1999
First mass market edition: March 2000
Printed in the United States of America
0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3
eISBN 9781429912181
All the characters in this story are creatures of my imagination. They exist only in my world and have no counterparts in God’s world. In particular, none of the lawyers or judges or law-enforcement officers are based on real people.
For my Irish priest friends Conor Ward,
Eammon Casey, Christopher Dillon, Paddy Dowling,
Liam Lawton, Dermod MacCarthy,
Enda MacDonagh, Michael MacGriel,
John O’Donohue, and Liam Ryan.
I am the wind which breathes upon the sea,
I am the wave of the ocean,
I am the murmur of the billows,
I am the ox of the seven combats,
I am the vulture upon the rocks,
I am a beam of the sun,
I am the fairest of plants,
I am the wild boar in valour,
I am a salmon in the water,
I am a lake in the plain,
I am a word of knowledge,
I am the point of the lance of battle,
I am the God who created the fire in the head
—Amergin circa 500 B.C.E.
Our God is the God of all men, the God of heaven and earth, of sea and river, of sun and moon and stars, of the lofty mountains and the lowly valley, the God above heaven, the God in heaven, the God under heaven. He has his dwelling around heaven and earth and sea and all that in them is. He inspires all, he quickens all, he dominates all, he sustains all. He lights the light of the sun; he furnishes the light of light; he has put springs in the dry land and has set stars to minister to the greater lights.
—St. Patrick circa A.D. 450
Perhaps the only real definition of a Celt, now as in the past, is that a Celt is a person who believes him- or herself to be Celtic.
—Barry Cunliffe,The Ancient Celts (1997)
He, giver of the gifts we bring,
He who needs nothing
Has need of us, and
if you or I should cease to be
He would die of sadness.
—Paul Murray, O.P.
Contents
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
Chapter 23
Chapter 24
Chapter 25
Chapter 26
Chapter 27
Chapter 28
Chapter 29
Chapter 30
Chapter 31
Chapter 32
Chapter 33
Chapter 34
Chapter 35
Chapter 36
Chapter 37
Chapter 38
Epilogue
Note
—1—
“WERE YOU the fella with whom I slept last night?”
The woman opened her eyes and peered at me.
“I was.”
She closed her eyes again.
“How was I?”
“Memorable.”
She snorted derisively, another hint that something was wrong in our relationship.
“ ’Tis all a mistake,” she sighed, curling up against me.
“Our sleeping together?”
“No … ourselves going to I
reland.”
It was the first hint that she didn’t think our trip was a frigging brilliant idea—to use her slightly cleaned up words.
“Why?”
“Bad things are happening,” she said, cuddling even closer—as much as a first-class seat on an Aer Lingus Airbus 300 permitted.
“To us?”
“Won’t we be involved?”
“The Irish media?”
“Them gobshites!”
My hand, always with a mind of its own where she was concerned, found its way under her loose Marquette University sweatshirt and took possession of a wondrous bare breast. Bras, she had insisted, were not acceptable on long overnight plane flights, a declaration I did not dispute.
She sighed contentedly.
“Anyway,” she continued, “the woman didn’t do it now, did she?”
“Didn’t do what?”
“Didn’t light the fire.”
“Which woman didn’t light what fire?”
“Och, Dermot Michael,” she said somewhat impatiently as, under her blanket, she pushed my hand harder against her breast, “if I were knowing that, wouldn’t I be telling you?”
Here we go again, I told myself.
We were at that stage of a transatlantic flight that is much like the old Catholic notion of Purgatory—the minutes seem like hours and the hours like days. The human organism revolts against all the indignities imposed on it in the last seven hours—dry mouth, wet sinuses, aching teeth, the guy across the aisle with a cough like a broaching whale. It will end eventually but only on the day of the final judgment.
My Nuala Anne is, among other things, fey, psychic, a dark one—call it whatever you want. She possesses, though only intermittently, an ability to see and hear things that happened decades ago or are happening now but at some great distance or haven’t happened yet but will. Maybe. My brother George the Priest, the only other one in our family to know of my bride’s “interludes,” claims that her ability is a throwback to an earlier age of the evolutionary process when our hominoid ancestors, not possessing thoraxes suitable for our kind of speech, communicated mentally.
“There’re a few genes like that around, Little Bro,” he informed me, “but don’t invest in any grain futures because of what she thinks she sees.”
I had stopped investing in the commodities market several years ago, mostly because I wasn’t very good at it.
“It’s weird, George,” I had argued.
“Part of the package,” he said with a shrug.
Easy enough for him to say. He didn’t have to live with her. Nor was he awakened in the middle of the night when she had one of her dreams.
She sat up straight in her seat, dislodging my predatory hand.
“They’re going to shoot the poor man, Dermot Michael,” she whispered, “and himself going to Mass!”
Fortunately, the man across the aisle hacked again, so violently that I thought the plane swayed. His explosion drowned Nuala’s protest.
“Can we do anything?” I asked ineptly.
“Course not,” she replied impatiently. “And ourselves up here in this friggin’ airplane!”
We were getting into trouble again. Whenever my wife had one of her intense spells, it was a sign that we were stumbling towards another strange adventure. Like the time at Mount Carmel Cemetery when she saw that the grave next to my grandparents’ plot was empty1 or the incident on Lake Shore Drive when she heard Confederate prisoners crying out in pain in Camp Douglas at 31st and Cottage Grove—in 1864!
Won’t the woman be the death of ya? the Adversary whispered in my brain.
“Go ‘way,” I told him. “That’s part of the package. Besides, your brogue is phony.”
Nuala Anne is quite a package. She’s the kind of woman even women turn around to look at when she walks down the street. She looks like a mythological Irish goddess, though I’ve never seen one of those worthies. They travel in threes, I’m told. Nuala is all three of them.
Drawings of the Celtic women deities, however, hint that they have solemn, frozen, slightly dyspeptic faces, as if they are so displeased with mortals that they will not deign to notice our existence. Nuala’s lovely face with its fine bones and deep blue eyes is in constant movement as emotions chase one another across it like greyhounds headed for the finish line—amusement, mischief, anger, sorrow, hauteur, devilment, fragility, sorrow. Each emotion represents one of the many different women in her complex personality: Nuala the detective, Nuala the woman leprechaun, Nuala the accountant, Nuala the athlete, Nuala the actress, Nuala the singer, Nuala the seducer, Nuala the vulnerable child.
I’m usually one step behind the most recent greyhound as I struggle to keep up with the rapid succession of personae. Her deep blue eyes can shift from tundra to Lake Michigan on the hottest day of the summer in the flick of a lash. And back. Heaven help me if I miss the flick.
She is tall and slender, with long and muscular legs and elegant breasts. Hers is a model’s body, a model for athletic wear. She looks great in an evening gown with spaghetti straps but even more striking in tennis shirt and shorts. What she looks like with her clothes off is my business and no one else’s—save that her beauty breaks my heart.
There is an ur-Nuala, I think. Her mask is that of the shy, quiet Irish-speaking country girl from Carraroe (An Cheathru Rua in her native Irish) in the Connemara district of the County Galway. I love all the Nualas, but I love that one the most.
However, I also love her hopelessly when she’s busy making trouble. Like the day when she showed for the little bishop’s Mass on the dunes at Grand Beach with a red T-shirt that proclaimed in large black letters: “Galway Hooker!”
The litttle bishop, George the Priest’s boss, was unfazed.
“Have you ever crewed in one of the boat races, Nuala Anne?” he asked. “Am I not correct that the word is based on the Dutch houkah, which means ‘boat with a long prow?”
I had not seen that mischievous troublemaker for a long time. Nuala Anne was upset that she was not pregnant. Moreover, for reasons that I could not fathom, she was convinced that she was not a good wife. Unshakably convinced.
The pilot announced that we were an hour from Dublin Airport.
“I suppose I should put on me bra,” she sighed, stirring next to me.
“If you want to.”
“If I don’t, it will just give them friggin’ bitches in the friggin’ media something to bitch about, won’t it now.”
Nuala’s first CD, Nuala Anne, had been a huge success, not bad for a young woman not yet twenty-one. She has a lovely voice, trained first by her mother in their tiny cottage in Galway, then by a teacher at Trinity College, where Nuala had studied accounting, and finally by “Madam,” a legendary voice coach in Chicago. The last named had told us that Nuala was a firstrate talent for the pop world, though she would never be an operatic singer. That was fine with both of us.
“Meself a friggin’ diva!” she had exclaimed, as though it were a huge joke.
Her beauty, her charm, her acting ability, and her skill with an Irish harp contributed to her success. She had made the leap from Chicago pubs quickly, too quickly for the media in her native land. One Irish woman writer commented, “Don’t we have too many pretty young Irish singers as it is without an American one trying to join the lot?”
This bit of envy ignored the fact that Nuala had lived in the United States for only a year when the first disk appeared.
The second disk was not supposed to be a hit. She insisted that she wanted to record hymns. The recording company grudgingly gave in. Nuala Anne Goes to Church was a combination of pre-Vatican Council hymns (like the May-crowning hymn “Bring Flowers of the Rarest”), spirituals such as “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” a few Protestant hymns like “Simple Gifts” and “Amazing Grace,” and some Irish-language religious music. There was nothing very new or very original on it, save for her voice and her devotion. The result was that the disk was a bigger hit than its predecessor,
in both Ireland and the United States. The Irish critics were furious. How dare someone just out of Trinity become a celebrity so soon and so easily! Their envy, however, did not prevent Irish International Aid, an Irish social action agency, from inviting her to perform at a benefit concert at the Point Theater on the banks of the River Liffey (where Riverdance first appeared).
Naturally, Nuala did not hesitate. Nor did she show the slightest signs of backing off when the Irish papers attacked the concert as soon as it was announced. My Nuala never saw a fight she didn’t like.
I thought the whole idea was crazy, but being a wise husband (in some matters anyway), I kept my mouth shut.
I looked around the first-class cabin (my idea) as she walked towards the washroom. The two other people in first class were sound asleep, as were the cabin attendants. So I followed her.
“What would you be wanting?” she demanded, her face turned away demurely as I pushed in after her.
“To hook your bra, like I always do.”
“All right,” she sighed as she pulled the Marquette sweatshirt over her head.
I caught my breath, as I always did when I saw her naked to the waist. Making the process as long and leisurely as I could, I assisted her with her black lace bra. She sighed contentedly.
“Are you going to put your sweatshirt back on?” I asked when I had the last hook in place.
“Would it be fun if I walked into the cabin without it?”
“Be my guest!”
She snorted, tied her hair up, and donned again the maroon and gold of Marquette.
I had attended Marquette for two years after I was expelled—for academic reasons—from Notre Dame. However, I had not graduated from Marquette, or anywhere else.
“I thought you might try to fuck me in there, Dermot love,” she said as we slipped back through the aisle to our seats.
“Would you have liked that?”