Irish Whiskey Read online

  Since I’m a writer, I must try to understand the sexual fantasies of women. They hide them pretty well. My editor thinks I do a good job at it. For a man.

  So I was intrigued by Nuala’s telling me that she could hardly wait to undress for me. There is no law against doing research while you’re courting and seducing a woman—and being courted and seduced—is there?

  “Do you really imagine such things, Nuala?” I asked cautiously.

  “Well, why wouldn’t I? Sure, won’t it be grand to see the light go on in your eyes?”

  “Sounds like you’re a bit of an exhibitionist,” I said cautiously.

  “Sure, aren’t all of us that way? Didn’t Herself design us to delight men? And so why shouldn’t we enjoy it when we do? Even if they’d better enjoy us respectfully?”

  “And how long have you delighted in the prospect of delighting me?”

  “And yourself doing research for your stories … Sure, don’t I sometimes think you’re marrying me as a research project … And don’t you already know the answer to that question? Didn’t I go back to me room on that rainy night and ask meself if I’d like to undress for you?”

  “And you decided?”

  “That it would be brilliant fun altogether and that I’d claw the clothes off of you, too, and that you’d probably be more prudish than I am.”

  “Some women are very prudish,” I suggested.

  “That’s because they’re humans and not because they’re women.”

  “So what then is modesty?”

  “Modesty means that you insist that men delight in you at the right time and in the right place and in the right way and we dictate what that means … Sure, Dermot, you don’t have to worry at all at all. You do it right instinctively. Most of the time, anyway. And for the next fifty years or so, I’ll edjicate you on the subject.”

  That was as far as I wanted to go.

  “An interesting prospect,” I said, patting her rear end lightly. “Maybe we should go back to my mom’s.”

  “Aye,” she said. “Still, Dermot, I don’t like that grave.”

  “What do you think is in it?”

  “I didn’t say that I thought anything is in it. I said that something was wrong with it.”

  “Indeed you did say just that. What do you think is wrong with it?”

  As hard as it is for a man to do so, I must learn the trick of listening carefully to exactly what this woman said.

  “I don’t know yet, darling boy, but I don’t like it. Eventually I’ll figure out what is wrong with it and I’ll tell you before I tell anyone else.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “Now then,” she said briskly, “let’s go back to your ma’s and face my asshole brother and his fat bitch of a wife.”

  2

  “THAT ISN’T a Negro family next door, is it now?” Laurence McGrail asked my father in shocked disbelief as he looked down his nose at the scene outside on Lathrop Street.

  “They’re both colleagues of mine, at the Loyola Medical Center,” Dad replied, embarrassed by the gaucherie of the question. “She’s a neurologist and he’s a neurological surgeon. They belong to our parish here, of course.”

  “I suppose the poor people feel better with one of their own treating them.”

  Nuala, now dressed in a lavender autumn suit and looking like a sophisticated woman of the world instead of a casual teen, spat out a string of angry words in the Irish language, which is hard to do because it is a very polite language. Her brother ignored her.

  “Do you have many Negroes in your community?” Melissa McGrail demanded. “We don’t have any in Pacific Palisades.”

  “I don’t know about Pacific Palisades,” I cut in. “But here in Chicago we call them African-Americans or blacks.”

  (Subsequent research revealed that there were several African-American families in the Palisades).

  Nuala beamed proudly at my pugnacious remark.

  YOU ARE GOING TO HIT HIM BEFORE THE NIGHT IS OVER, the Adversary complained. YOU’RE WORKING UP A HEAD OF STEAM ALREADY.

  “African-Americans, is it?” Laurence asked in a tone of voice which indicated contemptuous skepticism, a comment and a tone we would hear often in the next several hours.

  Nuala’s brother looked very much like her father, but like her father might have looked if he were going to seed, same height, same distinguished face, same silver-gray hair, same dark blue eyes. But Laurence McGrail displayed a potbelly, slumped shoulders, and a ravaged face. His dark Armani three-piece suit did not successfully hide his physical deterioration. He was not exactly fat, as my bride-to-be had claimed, but he could afford to lose twenty pounds. He had paid a heavy price for his financial success.

  His American-born wife, on the other hand, was on the knife edge which separates overweight from obese. A short woman with a face that must have been sweetly attractive before she had become bloated, she was clad in a dress of autumnal mauve which was perhaps two sizes too small.

  As soon as they were seated in our living room (as Ma had insisted it be called), they both reached for their cigarettes.

  “I’m sorry,” I said, “this is a nonsmoking house.”

  It was indeed, but these guests were relatives. Mom, Dad, my sister Cindy and her husband Joe were prepared to grant a temporary dispensation. They were shocked by my ukase. Nuala Anne and my brother George the Priest beamed happily, however.

  “Nonsmoking, is it?” Laurence said. With a face appropriate for his patron roasting on the gridiron, he returned the cigarettes to his jacket pocket.

  They were offered drinks. They both wanted whiskey, straight up. Irish or Scotch or Bourbon or Canadian? I asked. They preferred single malt. We could offer them Bushmill’s Single Malt. Laurence assured me that you couldn’t buy it in America. You can in Chicago. So I brought the bottle with the green label into the parlor, as well as a bottle of Glenlivet. They wanted the Glenlivet, darkly hinting that the green label could not be authentic. Ostentatiously I poured Bushmill’s into Waterford tumblers for Nuala, George the Priest, and myself and two meager glasses of sherry for my parents.

  “Thank you, Dermot Michael,” herself said as I handed her the tumbler of Irish whiskey. “And would you ever give Melissa a refill?”

  To my astonishment Laurence’s wife had already drained her glass of Scotch. I made her wait for a refill, which pleased my true love even more than calling attention to her sister-in-law’s compulsive drinking.

  Ah, the Irish are great haters when they turn their minds to it, are they not?

  “What kind of architecture is this house, Nuala Anne?” Laurence asked her, ignoring my parents whose house, after all, it was.

  “Dutch Colonial,” I replied promptly. “All of us were raised here.”

  “Dutch Colonial, is it?”

  “How many bedrooms does it have?” Melissa demanded.

  “Five,” Mom replied, “counting the one on this floor that we use for an office.”

  “Five, is it?” Laurence said suspiciously.

  “We have six in our house in Pacific Palisades,” Melissa crowed in triumph.

  “Mom isn’t counting the coach-house apartment in back, which has two more bedrooms. My grandparents lived there until their deaths. Since I was their favorite grandson, they wanted to be near me.”

  Nuala was giggling. So was the priest. And even Cindy, who had caught on to the game.

  The Irish Americans can be pretty good haters too, when they turn angry. And I was angry now. I would not permit these creeps to mar the wedding for my Nuala and her family.

  “Nuala’s parents will be staying there when they arrive. I’m sure they’ll love it.”

  Laurence continued to address his questions to herself and to ignore the rest of us.

  “Now, Nuala Anne, where exactly is this wedding supposed to take place? At the local church, I presume?”

  The word “wedding” on his lips was heavily layered with disapproval and doubt.

 
; “Actually,” I replied, “it will be at the Cathedral. I live in the parish, and my priestly brother is on the staff. He will preside over the Eucharist and officiate at the marriage ceremony. Nuala Anne’s good friend, the little bishop, will preach his famous strawberry story. My uncle, the retired bishop of Alton, will give the final blessing. It’s only a short walk to the Drake from there.”

  “The Cathedral, is it? I don’t imagine that’s a very desirable neighborhood, Nuala, is it now?”

  “Highest median income of any parish in the city,” I replied triumphantly.

  That answer might not have been quite the factual truth. I wasn’t sure. Certainly it was among the top ten, which was as near the truth as we needed to get under the circumstances.

  “And isn’t your man going to preside from his throne?” Nuala said innocently, pure divilment sparkling in her eyes.

  “The big fella?” George said in surprise.

  “Your man in crimson,” Nuala smiled sweetly. “Isn’t that nice of him?”

  “The bishop didn’t get around to telling me that this morning.”

  “Sure, didn’t he call me just before me relatives stepped into the house? And wasn’t himself busy conspiring with his sister, so I didn’t have a chance to tell him?”

  “The Cardinal, is it?” Laurence said incredulously.

  “The very same. Didn’t I sing Irish songs for him one night at the Cathedral? And didn’t he say that they were brilliant?”

  The Cardinal’s word in fact was “dazzling.” One must understand that in Ireland the list of comparative adjectives starts at “grand,” progresses through “super,” and culminates at “brilliant.”

  “We are close personal friends of the Monsignor in Pacific Palisades,” Melissa said, her voice already slurring from the second “jar” drained. “He is a very important Monsignor, as you might imagine. He worked for our Cardinal for many years.”

  “Judge in the matrimonial tribunal,” I observed.

  That should have been a warning to them that I had done some research. They missed it completely.

  I raised an eyebrow for my love, asking silently whether I should refill Melissa’s jar. She shook her head in a slight but decisive negative motion.

  So it went. Laurence would make a supercilious remark to his sister. Someone from our family—they had all caught on by now—would trump his ace and then his tipsy wife would offer an inane remark about the Palisades.

  THEY’RE PATHETIC PEOPLE, the Adversary said, feigning disapproval. YOU OUGHT TO BE ASHAMED OF YOURSELF. DUCKS IN A SHOOTING GALLERY.

  “Pathetic,” I agreed, “but impenetrable. Nothing gets through to them. They are still determined to ruin Nuala’s wedding. I don’t intend to permit that.”

  Despite the fun of bantering with Nuala’s brother and sister-in-law, I was preoccupied by the “conspiracy,” as Nuala Anne who misses nothing had called the conversation between myself and Cindy, while we were awaiting the Laurence McGrails.

  3

  “YOU BEEN over to the Exchange lately, Derm?” asked Cindy.

  “I stay away from that place. I’m no good at their game. Why?”

  “I bumped into your old friend Jarry Kennedy on LaSalle Street the other day.”

  “Friend” in the context of Chicago political conversation does not have its usual meaning.

  “How’s Jarry doing?” I had asked guardedly.

  “Same old Jarry. Still your classic borderline personality.”

  Cindy (short for Cynthia), my oldest sibling, just barely forty, as she would say, is a pert, pretty, intense blond mother of three kids. She looks and acts like a suburban homemaker, which she is. She is also a lawyer and like her husband Joe, a giant (bigger even than I am) with flaming red hair—a fearsomely effective litigator. They are both senior partners in the same prestigious Loop law factory, though currently Cindy telecommutes and works on tax law so she can be with her children. A teenager when I appeared on the scene, Cindy took over as my little mother and had played the role ever since. She had been suspicious about the “girl” I’d met in Ireland, until she met Nuala. Then the two of them made common cause against me, which is what women do.

  “Yeah,” I said curtly, realizing how much I hate Jarry Kennedy—and fear him.

  “He said something about you better not show your face over there. You know the way he talks, like he has the inside dope on everything.”

  “He still blames me for Kel’s death. Always will.”

  “He met Nuala at the beach this summer?”

  “Yeah. We bumped into him on one of our walks. I had to introduce her.”

  “He made some comment about her being fat. Tasteless jerk.”

  “He said she’d better watch out or she might go the way Kel did.”

  “The word on the street is that he’s wearing a wire for the Bureau. Looks like they’re trying to go after a few more traders. They never learn. They blew the last effort sky-high.”

  “I’m not a trader anymore. I never go near the place. And I don’t talk to Jared Alphonsus Kennedy. But I take your point.”

  Her point had been that I should avoid him even more completely than I had in the past.

  IF HE APPROACHES YOU, the Adversary had warned me, YOU’D BETTER PULL THE WIRE OFF HIM.

  “Exactly what I’ll do.”

  Jared Alphonsus Liguori Kennedy was my bête noire, my implacable enemy, the person who was always lurking in the shadows, plotting ways to get me. He hated me with a fury so pure, so undeviating, so profound that he had become a symbol of evil in my life. I usually dismissed him as a sick and twisted mental case. Yet in the subbasement of my psyche he lurked. Coyote as the Native American saying puts it, is always waiting and he is always hungry.

  He hated me more than anyone else because we had always been compared when we were growing up together, most people feeling that he was destined for success and fame and I for failure and mediocrity. It had turned out the other way around and he had persuaded himself that I had stolen his success from him and made it my own.

  He also believed that I was responsible for the tragic death of a young woman he loved (though she did not return that love). So I stole his success and killed his woman. There were no rational reasons for either of these convictions. Her parents blamed me for her death, but no one else thought that. However, these obsessions in a mind that was already twisted became a driving force in his life.

  Jarry and I had once been friends, close friends. All through the years at St. Luke Grammar School and Fenwick High School we had been inseparable companions. That means we were friends, doesn’t it? Or maybe we had never been friends. Maybe we were only rivals, even in early childhood keeping a wary eye on each other.

  The Kennedys lived just down Lathrop Street from us, his father a successful real estate broker who had just managed to make it into Oak Park Country Club on the third try, his mother active in every woman’s organization that would have her. They were, as Ma said once, just a little bit too vulgar.

  Jarry and I walked to school together almost every day during the eight years of grammar school. If there were any competition between us in those days, I was the loser. Jarry was smarter, better-looking, and a better athlete. The girls adored his smile and his dimple and his curly red hair; the priests and the nuns and the lay teachers admired his quickness and wit; the coaches thought that he had the makings of an All-American quarterback even when he was in seventh grade.

  I knew that he had one terrible weakness: he was a cheater. He copied his homework from compliant girls, he stole answers in tests from those sitting around him, he lied about why he missed acolyte assignments, he skipped football practices, he was an ever-undiscovered truant.

  “Why do you cheat, Jarry?” I had asked him once. “You don’t have to.”

  His face had expanded in his usual infectious grin.

  “It’s fun, Dermy Boy. There are two ways of doing things—the hard way, which means work, and the easy way, whic
h means being smarter than everyone else. You do it the first way, I do it the second. I have more fun.”

  As my brother George the Priest would say later, “Jarry Kennedy cheats not because it is in his interest to cheat but because it is in his nature to cheat.”

  Everyone liked Jarry. I was an oversize, shy oaf. No one seemed to like me. I took the unfavorable comparisons for granted. I was not surprised when I heard a girl say to him, “Why do you hang around with that dweeb?”

  “Dermy Boy needs me,” he said with a laugh. “Without me, he’s nothing.”

  When we were in eighth grade, I was not sure that I liked him anymore or that I had ever liked him. He was my friend, but he was, as I had told Ma once, kind of twisted.

  “Och,” she had said, “he’ll come to no good, that one.”

  At Fenwick the balance of power had shifted. I had become a solid hunk of linebacker poise and my shyness through some miracle changed to extroverted wit. I possessed, it turned out much to my surprise, a quick mind and an even quicker tongue.

  “Coyne, you talk in paragraphs,” a Dominican priest had said to me, making it sound like he was accusing me of a crime.

  “Yes, Father,” I had replied. “Was that a paragraph?”

  Even he had laughed.

  At Fenwick some of the glow had worn off Jarry. In the freshman year, he had been caught cheating and was expelled. His father managed to persuade the Dominicans to take him back. He was drunk most of the time on weekends. In seventh and eighth grade he had become adept at getting as much beer as he wanted and consuming it with his buddies, I not among them, in back of the Convent. At Fenwick he turned to the hard stuff. He was thrown off the football team for goofing around, but somehow managed to persuade the coach to take him back. He led the team to the quarterfinals in our senior year (after I had quit the team because I didn’t like the coach) but had blown the game because of a hangover, of which, like all his hangovers, he was immensely proud. We still purported to be friends and I guess I had kind of enjoyed basking in the reflections of his glory, even when the glory was becoming tarnished.