Irish Linen Read online

  No, I was once more upholding the honour of the Irish race.

  In accord with the goal, when I had returned to the pier I did my best not to shiver.

  “Much warmer than Galway Bay,” I assured my friends, as they huddled inside their robes.

  “You are mad, Timmy!” Claus insisted as he helped me on with my robe.

  “Only Irish, Claus.”

  “We must go back to the Schloss,” he insisted, “put on warm clothes, and drink a glass of schnapps. It is very good for frostbite.”

  As we walked across the lawn, Claus whispered to me, “I must apologize, Claus, for Annalise. She is most forward. Too aggressive for a woman. Her bathing costume was outrageous.”

  “Did you really think so, Claus? I thought it was lovely!”

  “Of course! Very lovely indeed, but …”

  “If she is protected from too much more tragedy in her life, she will always be very lovely—and as innocent as she is now.”

  “Please, God, Timmy, that you are right.”

  “And as for the bathing costume, Claus Philipp Maria Graf Schenk von Stauffenberg. Don’t pretend to be Protestant. It doesn’t work.”

  He laughed, loud and long.

  Even today, many long years later, memories of that laugh as well as the swimsuit that occasioned it, haunt me.

  In the walls of the old fort, Claus served the schnapps—as clear as if it were alpine water—in shot glasses like he was administering a sacrament.

  “Ja, ja, this is very good for one’s health! It cures most serious physical diseases and all mental diseases. It is said that it even heals a broken heart!”

  “It looks like poteen,” I said as I sipped from the glass. “Sure it is the poteen, with a touch of cherry flavour in it.”

  I thereupon swallowed the whole glass. I felt that I might have swallowed a glass of liquid fire. I smacked my lips.

  “’Tis very like the poteen,” I agreed, “not quite so strong. I’m sure, Claus, that it cures everything but a broken heart.”

  “You are a fraud, Herr Ridgewood,” the dethroned tennis queen said, with a smile that might have been affectionate. “You were just as cold in the water as we were and the schnapps burned to the bottom of your soul—if you have one.”

  She was wearing the same white sweater that she had worn in the morning, but with a gray skirt.

  “The sight of your glorious bathing costume has dulled my sensitivity to heat and cold.”

  Everyone laughed, even Annalise.

  “Match point,” she said again, as her face turned red.

  “And I would add that we Irish are very tolerant of such matters. I found it very modest and appropriate in the circumstances and, if I may make bold to say it, quite innocently delightful.”

  I was fibbing again.

  “You are still a fraud, Herr Ridgewood, but a very nice one.” She enveloped me in a radiant smile that was even warmer than the poteen. I figured that I had been a fine credit to the Irish race.

  “We should all perhaps take a nap now so we will be awake at dinner and not miss the ongoing battle between Annalise and Viscount Ridgewood.”

  “Will I not be granted a respite because I say nice things about her?”

  They all laughed because it was obviously a silly question. I poured myself another glass of schnapps and downed it, against the chance of filthy dreams during my well-deserved nap.

  As the angels would have it, I encountered Annalise in the corridor.

  “Why did you not push my head under the water, Herr Ridgewood?” she asked. “You had the right to do so.”

  “In my country, Annalise, women have the right in such games to force a man’s head under the water as a matter of principle because he deserves it. But men have no right to retaliate in kind.”

  “You were being a gentleman?”

  “Well something like that … But I must apologize for not taking more appropriate action. In truth I didn’t want to shock the good Count Claus, who as we both know has a touch of the prude in him.”

  It was the demon rum speaking in my voice. I never should have issued such a challenge. It would only get me in trouble.

  “And what would that more appropriate action have been?”

  I put my arms around her and drew her close.

  “It is wrong in my country if a man holds a woman in his arms like I did and he does not kiss her.”

  I kissed her several times, forcefully. After the first one, she responded in kind. It was the poteen that was making me do it. She did not struggle as I thought she would. Rather, she rested her head against my chest and sighed.

  Oh, oh. I was in trouble now.

  “Those are very nice kisses, Herr Ridgewood,” she whispered. “You are no longer a fraud.”

  Gently she disengaged from my arms.

  “’Twas the poteen that made me do it,” I exclaimed.

  “I’m sure that it was.”

  She turned and walked slowly down the corridor, like a cloud was wafting her away.

  I staggered into my room, told myself that it was indeed the poteen which had carried off my sanity and that I shouldn’t worry about it. I fell asleep too quickly to experience guilt. When I woke up t told myself piously that it had never happened. However, Annalise’s shy smile at dinner told me that it had.

  The meal consisted of a wide variety of cold cuts, meat, cheeses, sausages, and Bavarian beers. I wasn’t sure that my stomach, disarranged by the drink taken and the taste of Annalise’s lips, would tolerate any food.

  “We hear, Sir Timothy, that you were not shocked by my cousin’s bathing costume.”

  Oh, oh. Trouble!

  “Claus did not express shock,” I said, pretending to be puzzled, “nor did Berthold or Alexander. I saw no reason why I should protest. We Irish, puritans in so many ways, are quite tolerant in such matters.”

  That was, of course, an absolute and total lie.

  Annalise’s face was crimson, her head bowed. So this was the sort of stuff with which she had to put up. Perhaps I had better, after all, take her away.

  Gräfin Karoline frowned. “That is kind of you, Sir Timothy, but you understand that we must apologize to you.”

  “I thought it was quite appropriate in the circumstances, Lady Karoline, and perfectly innocent. After all it was a domestic swim at a private lake. Moreover, and despite my pretense that the water was quite warm, there was no danger of anyone’s passions being aroused. In fact, if I may say so …” I paused as I had found a way out … “I personally found Lady Annalise’s great beauty, I’m sure a durable gift from God, more appealing as she scampered around the tennis court this morning, even when she was swinging that wicked racket of hers at me.”

  This was not an altogether false statement.

  The men around the table applauded, even Graf Albert.

  “So long as you were not offended, Sir Timothy …”

  “I assured you, ma’am, far from being offended I was delighted as I always am by Lady Annalise’s youthful charm and vigor.”

  “Game, set, match, and tournament to you, Herr Ridgewood,” Annalise murmured.

  “Well done, Timmy,” Claus said to me later after we had listened to his mother and Annalise play for us on the harp and piano. “I believe you have created a minor revolution here. I’m sure that my almost intended will join it before the week is over.”

  “Those negotiations go well?”

  “Smoothly enough. The decisions will be made sometime tomorrow. In the morning, however, you and I and Annalise will ride around our lands, if you wish. I may have to return early to finish the negotiations. Perhaps you could take her for a ride across the lake.”

  “Perhaps I could.”

  I did not sleep immediately that night. It had been an exciting day. I had problems to consider, decisions to be made, futures to ponder. All right, she was still very young, but she was intelligent, determined, witty, and, ah, so beautiful. And her lips burned like fire and smoothed li
ke silk.

  9

  THE FIELDS of Wisconsin were brown and boring under a dismal gray sky as we rushed up the interstate to Milwaukee on Monday morning in Nuala’s Lincoln Navigator SUV, a car as graceful as an M1-A3 tank.

  “In another month, everything will be turning green,” I explained to her.

  “And then it will look like the County Meath, the most boring place in the whole of Ireland, with the people to match.”

  “If you say so.”

  “And what did you think of himself?”

  “Patjo? Was he misbehaving again?”

  “No, your man the viscount?”

  “I thought he handled those krauts very well.”

  “Smooth-talking gombeen man,” she said.

  “Oh, all of that. Yet what he told them was the truth and, it would seem what they wanted to hear.”

  “And that terrible stupid war just down the road.”

  “Do you think he ought to have taken her home with him to Ireland?”

  “On the basis of a romance during Holy Week in 1934?”

  “Would you have done it?”

  “I didn’t take you home from Ireland, Nuala Anne.”

  “’Tis true and meself having to come after you.”

  “She was too young to flee to Ireland.”

  “Two or three years younger than I was.”

  YOU WOULD HAVE LEFT HER THERE IN GERMANY TO DIE IN THE WAR.

  I thought about it for a few silent minutes as we hurtled towards Milwaukee.

  “If I knew what would happen in the war, I might have taken the chance. Otherwise, I’d probably persuade myself that she wouldn’t go anywhere and I could return in five years or so and see if she were still interested in me. I would have been a fool and never forgiven myself.”

  “Irishmen,” my wife said, “are notoriously reluctant suitors.”

  “His father wasn’t.”

  “’Tis true.”

  “What do you think he should have done, Nuala Anne?”

  “The problem is that none of us know exactly what the future will be like.”

  That was all my wife, stern critic of male behavior that she was, would judge. Timmy Pat would have to live with his decision and regret it for the rest of his life, even though it was certainly sensible and reasonable.

  “Well, maybe he’ll get another chance,” I suggested.

  “Timmy Pat is a good and thoughtful fella,” she said, “even if he is a bit of a gombeen man. He didn’t take advantage of her, like many would have done. Maybe God will give him credit for that.”

  Nuala had set her global locator for the address of Marquette and navigated into the University with her accustomed skill. She even found a parking spot near the Student Union that was big enough for her beast of a car. Naturally she knew exactly where it was before she pulled into the campus.

  She had put on the mask of the successful, though sexy, professional woman—black suit, black hose, high heels, hair piled up, black leather jacket, large black briefcase with copies of all her CDs, “for the poor exile priest from me home county.” I could count on it, the brogue would get thicker and thicker before the day was over. I compromised and wore a sport coat and a tie with the Marquette colors—red and gold of course.

  I felt irrationally proud when I walked into the Student Union and the young women and the young men turned for a second look at my wife. Some of them frowned a little—they thought they remembered the face, but they weren’t quite sure about the name that went with it.

  “Father O’Donovan.” I shook hands with my teacher.

  “Dermot Michael Coyne,” he replied.

  “Father O’Donovan, this is me wife, Nuala Anne McGrail.”

  “I figured as much,” he said with a big grin.

  Thereupon the Irish language flowed like butter melting at a picnic on a hot summer day. The two Galway people ignored the poor, semiliterate Yank. Nuala Anne did not stop talking even while she was hanging up her black leather jacket.

  As far as I could tell the only change in my Jesuit mentor was that his tight curly black hair, parted in the center, had turned silver. If he had put on any weight, the shapeless Jebby cassock with its floppy sash covered it up. The light of mischief on his face was as bright as ever.

  “Does Dermot have the tongue?” He turned to English as we sat at a table in which the dishes and the silver had been laid out with the neatness we used to expect from nuns.

  “He does not, poor dear man.” She rested a sympathetic hand on my arm. “When we’re back home, the childer translate for him.”

  Out of the black bag there appeared an eight-by-ten picture (in a frame) of the childer and the dogs.

  “The lads favor Dermot as you can see, and Nellie, the oldest, looks just like his grandmother. The little girl, our tiny terrorist, favors me.”

  “Dermot,” said the priest, “you’ve done well for yourself, a lovely celebrity wife, four grand-looking kids, and all the time yourself continuing the image of the lazy lad to whom all these wonders just happened.”

  “You have the right of it, Father Bob,” Nuala agreed. “That’s the image. Isn’t the reality of it very different?”

  “’Tis,” he replied.

  Thereupon me wife opened her black bag, removed the six platinum CDs and autographed the sleeves with words in green ink—Irish words of course. Then she pulled my four books out of the bag and gave me the pen with the green ink. I signed them with the greeting “Father Bob.” Nuala made a face of displeasure. I should have been more elaborate.

  A waitress began serving our soup. She leaned over the table and whispered in the priest’s ear and then departed with a giggle.

  Did I know what was coming? Certainly I did! I’d been there before.

  “Nuala Anne,” he said, “we have a very polite request for you to sing, just one song before you go back to Chicago. Would you ever be able …”

  “I would, Father, and be happy to do it, so long as they can find a harp or a guitar.”

  Truth to tell, she would have been brokenhearted if they hadn’t asked.

  Father Bob wanted to know whether Archbishop Ryan was really running Chicago now that he was coadjutor with right to succession.

  “Isn’t there a lot of talk about it?” Nuala replied. “He claims that nothing has changed. Cardinal Sean says that he himself is on a permanent vacation. I don’t believe either one of them, at all, at all.”

  “I agree with me wife, though I would express it differently. I believe both of them.”

  “’Tis the same thing,” Nuala admitted.

  “Chicago continues to luck out,” he said. “You two know both of them well, I take it?”

  “Nuala is a full-fledged member of the North Wabash Avenue Irregulars, the crowd of people that help Blackie to solve mysteries. They both claim that the other is better at the puzzles. Again I believe both of them.”

  “Well, Father,” she segued to the work at hand, “on the odd occasion don’t me husband and I wrestle some small puzzles …”

  “I’m the spear-carrier, and she’s the thinker. She’s just a tiny bit fey …”

  “No one’s just at tiny bit fey, Dermot,” the priest said grimly.

  “The little Archbishop says that it’s a neo-Neanderthal vestige and I’m not really a witch.”

  “If Blackie says it,” the Jeb said, “it has to be true.”

  “Anywho, we’ve been asked to see if we can find young Des Doolin and aren’t we a bit confused about him? Some folk say he was immature and irresponsible and others that he knew what he was doing and his family didn’t support him.”

  Father Bob sighed, not as spectacularly as me wife could, but still it was an impressive protest against the folly of the human condition.

  “He baffled me too, Nuala Anne, almost as much as this fella you picked up in Dublin. Dermot was always thinking and dreaming up questions. Des … well, Des was running around all the time doing things …”

  “No
one ever accused me of doing that …”

  “Hush, Dermot love, we’re being serious now.”

  WELL, I GUESS SHE PUT YOU IN YOUR PLACE.

  ’Tis the way of the world.

  “I’d say that, like your fella, Des was solidly and unshakably Catholic. We get a lot of kids like that these days—absolutely dedicated to the tradition, shaped by the Vatican Council reforms, turned off by the leadership, but deeply committed to being Catholic. For Des that meant going to Mass, singing in the choir, acting as a lector or a Mass server, volunteering to work with the poor, saying the Rosary, nudging his friends back into the Church—any Catholic activity he could find, old, new or perennial. Like I say we get more and more such kids. They couldn’t be anything but Catholic and they want to be more Catholic. After all the scandals and the horses’ asses in the saddle they are a breath of fresh air, maybe a hurricane of fresh air.”

  “The leaders don’t know about them, do they?” Me wife beat me to that question.

  “Well, from what I hear about Chicago, Cardinal Cronin and Blackie know about them, but they’re not typical … Mind you, Des was not a fanatic, not a fundamentalist, not a pusher, he was much more sophisticated than that. Most of his nudging was his contagious enthusiasm. He got his class work done, earned his 3.95 average—a bit higher than yours, Dermot—didn’t drink too much. I know his parents thought he was immature … They complained to me and denounced me to the Archbishop … But he was far more mature and more responsible than they were.”

  “Were you after telling them that?”

  “Not in so many words, Nuala. We Jebs are a bit more subtle than that. I told them that their son was a fine young man and they should be proud of him. His mother said that they knew he was a fine young man, they only wished he’d settle down. I suggested that the young might need some time to test their wings and she said something about their mistake was letting him go to Loyola Academy …”

  “Blame the Jesuits,” I intruded. “Why not? Where was he headed, Father Bob?”

  “I don’t know and I think he didn’t know either. Peace Corps for sure and Africa for sure. Beyond that? No plans. Play it by ear. Go with the flow. He had a great time over in Eritrea. Loved the people. He came up here to see me when he returned. Asked my advice about learning Arabic. I told him it was a great idea.”