Irish Crystal Read online

  “Only with your honesty and courage.”

  “Well, he did come calling the first night John wasn’t there. You must understand, Nuala, that I was half-drunk, frustrated, angry, disappointed. I don’t say that I didn’t know what I was doing, because I did and I liked it, but it seemed then and it seems now that I enjoyed it.”

  “He raped you!”

  “Every night while John was away, six nights in a row. Is it rape when the victim enjoys it and looks forward to it again? The first night I was lying in bed in my panties, drinking Scotch, too much of it, trying to read a book, feeling sorry for myself. He opened the door and looked at me and laughed. I knew what would happen. I knew I should resist him, but I was quite incapable of that. I pushed him away. He merely laughed at me. He laughed most of the time he was making love. We never said a thing to each other.”

  “Poor Stelle.”

  “Poor Stelle indeed! I still have nightmares, terror dreams, and wake up in a cold sweat. Even now the dreams are awful, but not without pleasure. Those five nights were the best sex I had—until then. I was a victim of my father-in-law, but the pleasure of victimhood was unbearably sweet. Long Tom knew how to love a woman, how to push all the right buttons, how to wake up desire … He was a master of the game.”

  She continued to weep, caught between humiliation and pleasure in her memories.

  “I suppose I could have called John and told him that his father was half raping me. I thought of that several times, even picked up the phone to dial the number, but I was afraid … Afraid of everything, afraid that he would visit me again that night. And to be honest that he would not visit me.”

  “A jumble of fear and guilt.”

  “A lot of fear, the guilt came only later. Then John came back and his father left me alone. His little smile, just for me, said I’ve had you, whore, and I know what you’re like. It was hateful. I hated him for a long time. Now I feel sorry for him. Poor, wretched, fouled-up man.”

  “I shouldn’t wonder.”

  “Two years ago, when we went down there at Easter, he whispered in my ear, ‘I’m sorry. Please forgive me.”’

  “And you said?”

  “I told him that of course I forgave him. He’s an old man with lots of regrets … When he was raping me, he called me ‘Liz’ several times. He confused me with his wife.”

  She paused for a moment. I tried to figure out what to say. My customary glib Irish mouth couldn’t form a word.

  “I should tell you, Nuala Anne, that when I was in eighth grade, my father groped me several times. I told him to stop or I would kill him the next time he tried. He knew that I meant it because I had a knife in my hand.”

  “God preserve us,” was all I could say. “You’re a desperate woman … that means a good and brave one.”

  “I don’t feel that way just now … Yet it is good that I talk to someone whom I like and trust.”

  “I’ll only tell me Dermot …”

  “I understand that, it’s the whole point isn’t it?’

  “So after we returned to Chicago, in a blizzard of course, I turned up pregnant. I hated the pregnancy. I hated the bastard inside me. I hated the thought of another child in my already child-crowded life. I asked God to take the child from me. I made an appointment with an abortion counselor. I couldn’t do it. But then as I could feel him kicking inside me, I changed my mind, as mothers do. I wanted him. I loved him, no matter who his father was.”

  “Your husband might just as well have been the father …”

  “But then why would God punish me by taking Brendan away from me?”

  She’s breaking down completely. I have to do something.

  “That’s not my God, Estelle Curran, and it’s not your God either and you know it.”

  Her sobs turned to laughs.

  “Of course, it’s not. I know better now. I’ll never know this side of heaven who was Brendan’s father and there it won’t be important, will it? … We loved the tiny mite so much. John and I came together to try to keep him alive. The doctors said that it was at best a fifty-fifty chance and that he would have substantial life problems. You, of all people, know what we went through. I baptized him. We told the doctors to do everything they could to save him. They shook their heads but said they would. I believed them. They asked about the ‘DNR’ instruction—how did you handle that?”

  “We agreed to that. Father George—Dermot’s brother the priest—said that was the correct decision. It never quite came to that, thanks be to God.”

  “We were there in the Neonatal Intensive Care Unit and we could see him dying. He just couldn’t breathe. The resident, who was very sympathetic to us, said there was nothing more we could do. So we said a decade of the rosary. At the third Hail Mary, our poor little Brendan went home.”

  “And is up there watching you today and himself very proud of you.”

  “I believe that,” she said with a sigh. “I don’t always feel it but I always believe it … Don’t worry, Nuala Anne, I’m through crying. Thank you for helping me to relive the worst time in my life.”

  “Did it get worse after Brendan died?”

  “Oddly enough, it didn’t. I was determined for his sake to remake my life. I already had a good priest, I got myself a good psychiatrist, a good sex therapist, a good nutritionist, and tried to put myself back together again. I went back to school full-time, I lost thirty-five pounds—the last five are the hardest and I still struggle with them—I founded my catering business and I fell in love with my husband again and he with me. Maybe I should say we fell in love with one another for the first time. It’s lasted, gets more intense rather than less.”

  “’Tis obvious to anyone who sees you together. He looks at you the way me Dermot looks at me.”

  “It took two years to re-create me, or to create me for the first time. It still seems tenuous. I see my psychiatrist every week and my priest once a month. And I pray that I can hang on. So far I have.”

  “And your man supports you?”

  “Oh, he does. He doesn’t understand but that doesn’t matter because he loves me. We drink only a glass of wine at dinner, we stay in condition, we read the same books, play the same sports. We try not to worry about the past. He certainly doesn’t fool around anymore, if he ever did, and that doesn’t matter now.”

  “He’d better not.”

  “That’s what he says. Recently a friend of ours acquired a trophy mistress. John said to me, ‘I don’t know how he does it. One passionate woman is almost too much for me.’”

  “Sure, isn’t he the darling now!”

  That nine-fingered shite hawk Dermot Michael Coyne has never said that to me. He’d better say it soon.

  “Now you want to ask me whether I know anyone or any reason for blowing up our house. After what I’ve said you wonder whether it might be something that Long Tom Curran might do. He stands to make a little money from the mortgage he still holds. But it’s trivial to what he has. He has, I think, always resented my John who he sees as more successful and more respected and has a wife who is still alive. Looking back on our interlude, I think he was punishing me and punishing John even more. Perhaps he counted on my telling John. I don’t know what would have happened, which is one of the many reasons I’ve kept quiet about it and always will.”

  “Hating you, hating your husband, and in his twisted mind still loving his wife.”

  “And in his own twisted way even loving me … It took me a long time to think about that, but it may be true. That doesn’t matter anymore either.”

  “It might matter,” I said with more wisdom than I thought I possessed, “someday when you’re standing at his deathbed, by yourself for a few moments, and himself unable to talk.”

  “I might even say that the whole thing forced me to turn my life around and become an adult.”

  “Indeed, it might.”

  “I think we ought to have a glass of sherry before you go.” It was very good sherry.


  “So might Long Tom have ordered the destruction of the house in which he lived with Elizabeth for many years and without her for many more years? You must remember that he went through great agonies out there in the islands when he was just a boy. He never recovered from that anger. No telling where it might go and on whom it might fasten. At this stage of his life he’s mellowed enough that the anger seems gone. Honestly, it wouldn’t make sense, but Long Tom never made sense. I just don’t know.”

  Neither did I.

  So I walked across the street to the Hancock Center, joked with the doorman, and rode up to our little love nest, took off my clothes, and put on one of my more modest bikinis—me Dermot likes to shock the uptight and deadly serious people who use the pool. Speaking of that gobshite, he should have been in the apartment waiting for me. I hadn’t suggested that he join me, but it was certainly implicit in what I said about me plans for the day.

  So I said to hell with him—well, it was a little stronger—and put on a robe and clogs and went down to the pool. I had it all to meself, so there was no one to grade my dive as I went in.

  I was angry at all men. Long Tom Curran was a vicious bastard for raping his defenseless daughter-in-law, no matter what he had suffered in the war, no matter how complex and mixed his motives, and no matter how it was somehow all ink for God’s drawing with crooked lines.

  I was also furious at Dermot Michael Coyne for not being there when I needed to talk to him. Frigging gobshite.

  Then suddenly a huge creature dove into the pool next to me.

  “Dermot Michael Coyne,” I shouted, hugging him, “where have you been and meself needing you.”

  20

  Marie Therese Curran filled the office with her height (five-eleven, I guessed), her beauty, and her obvious intelligence—Estelle’s daughter with a lightning mind. It was a small but very plush office in a large and very plush venture capital firm in the 333 South Wacker Building.

  As I tell me wife, I’m not threatened by tall women or intelligent ones or I never would have married her. Yet I could not imagine Marie Therese strolling down the Magnificent Mile against the spring winds in Nuala Anne’s floral print dress.

  She shook hands with me and apologized for her office.

  “Someone that’s only twenty-three doesn’t merit this office. However, I have persuaded my bosses that I’m a mathematical whiz. It was fairly easy because they are illiterate when it comes to numbers.”

  “Venture capitalists don’t know numbers?”

  “What they do is mostly instinct, like commodities traders. My numbers are a reality check on them. Sometimes.”

  “I was a trader once, but gave it up.”

  “Too many mistakes?”

  I love to answer that question.

  “One big mistake that earned me a million. Then I quit.”

  “We should be that lucky around here.” She laughed, a big hearty laugh.

  Then her facial expression turned serious. Time for getting down to business.

  “When you talk to Marti and Jack she may give you the wrong impression. She will suggest that after I finish law school the two of us will take over the firm and call it Curran and Daughters. She is an imp. Mind you the idea is not unattractive. We would surely be successful. But there are enough conflicts in the family past without adding more. It’s true I’m going to law school, but I don’t expect to practice law. As the cliche puts it, there are already too many lawyers. Neither of us have any serious intention of joining the firm, much less trying to take it over. I wanted to assure you of that.”

  “However, such a putsch would certainly be successful.”

  “Neither of us have any doubt of that.” She grinned. “But we couldn’t do that to our siblings. They’re interviewing young women now, even Dad says they have to integrate. About time.”

  Her height and her brisk manner did not diminish her attractiveness in the slightest. Despite Nuala Anne’s warnings, my eyes began to do their subtle work. I forbade them from continuing.

  “You speak of conflicts in the firm?”

  “Mostly in the past, Grandfather and Dad worked together with considerable success, but they did not get along personally. Grandfather, as you may know, left the family to join the army and became a prisoner of war in the Philippines. When he came home he drove Great-grandfather out of the firm. The strains now are not as serious, but they are there.”

  “Ah?”

  “There are differences of personality, mostly involving Trevor, who finds the others in the firm, how should I say it, flighty. He is also ill at ease with the new associate who is gay, though that may be the result of his wife’s endless complaints about the associate. She is a religious fanatic and somehow believes that his presence will corrupt her children, though they have no contact with the firm. In Annette’s world virtually everything is a threat to the purity of her children, or her ‘kiddies’ as she often calls them.”

  She didn’t like Annette very much. However, the image of Annette’s causing a crisis in the firm through her husband seemed far-fetched. Trevor, it had seemed to me, was skillful at fending off his wife.

  “Do you think she will create major crises in the firm?”

  Marie Therese hesitated.

  “Tensions, yes indeed. Crises, as in earlier years, probably not.

  “Now,” she continued, “as to the matter at hand, I am convinced that we have to look back into the past of our family. None of us would want to harm any of the others. For siblings we get along very well. We adore our parents. We even like our in-laws, well, except poor Annette. Grandpa has seen too much and suffered too much, but he’s an old man now, practically dying. He could not have created this fairly elaborate conspiracy, could he? So we must look outside.”

  “That’s not an unreasonable position.”

  “So I decided to do some research, since researching is my business. Using a number of databases that are not, ah, readily available, I have come up with three instances where the firm could be seen as harming someone. The claim would be unfair, but it still could be made.”

  “The cops wouldn’t have access to these databases?”

  “Some of them, of course, but not enough to create the profiles I have put together. There are three individuals in this city, not entirely of sound mind, who might harbor deadly thoughts towards us.”

  She passed three folders over to me.

  “The first one is a certain Ms. Germaine Livermore, a woman in her middle forties, with considerable experience in such ventures as artistic dancing and exercising on the streets. She was known by the professional name of Sunny—with the U—Christian, a very inappropriate name. She persuaded one of her clients, a Mr. Samuel Connors, to make an honest woman out of her. I have no doubt that she was sincere in this persuasion, though he was twenty years older than she was. They married and lived together for ten years, apparently with some contentment. Mr. Connors had three children and a wife who had deserted him. These persons were named in his will, which was prepared by the firm, as his heirs. He made no attempt to change this will or to make any provision for his second wife. Unfortunately he died in his late fifties of a massive heart attack. Ms. Livermore or Ms. Connors as she was then, challenged the will on the grounds that he had made promises to her in the presence of witnesses. Naturally Dad did not take the case. However, he did testify that the firm had done Samuel’s tax and inheritance work for many years and that he had never even mentioned the fact that he had a second wife. Naturally, Ms. Connors did not have a case. However, the lawyers for the first family advised them to make a moderately generous settlement on Ms. Connors. They stubbornly refused until it was pointed out to them how much they would stand to lose in prolonged litigation. They grudgingly agreed to a settlement. Negotiations were acrimonious. While the settlement was more than enough to maintain Ms. Connors for the rest of her life, she felt that she had been cheated and demeaned and made some unfortunate comments about revenge. She is now in a relationsh
ip with a certain Gilberto Juarez—or so he calls himself—who is a very important personage in one of the Hispanic drug gangs. Finally, her fury has driven her several times to seek psychiatric help. I don’t think that the firm could have assembled such a dossier, do you, Dermot?”

  “What did you find out on me?”

  “Only the very best, Dermot,” she said smoothly. ‘And Nuala Anne’s charitable generosity confirms that she is the wonderful human that she seems to be.”

  I don’t even know how much Nuala Anne gives to charity!

  “I would like to stress that while some of this information is not on the public record, I obtained it all legally.”

  “Naturally,” I said, somewhat shaken.

  “You can share the information with the police and of course with your wife, but don’t give the police the dossiers or tell them how you obtained it.”

  “My lips are sealed.”

  Who needed spies these days?

  “The second file is a certain Herbert McNeill, a very angry African-American gentleman who unfortunately had to do time at the Joliet institution for income tax evasion. He owned—and still does-a string of clothing stores in the African-American neighborhoods. He made quite a bit of money and concluded that he needed good tax advice. He consulted my brother Trevor, who carefully prepared his returns for three years. Unfortunately for Mr. McNeill, he did not share with poor Trevor-strike the word ‘poor,’ that’s the way we talk about him for obvious reasons—information about all his sources of income, some of which seems to have been from laundry work—of money, not garments. He did not disguise this income very carefully and lived a lifestyle much more luxurious than the tax return suggested was feasible. So he was indicted, convicted, and sentenced—and also fined. Irrationally he blames Trevor for failure to prepare an adequate return and cannot understand that such a return requires accurate listing of sources of income. Since Trevor has no source of information in the African-American community, he has no knowledge of this rage. It is not clear to me that Mr. McNeill is smart enough to organize such an elaborate conspiracy like blowing up River House but he has friends who are.”