Irish Crystal Read online

  That was a more complicated task than you might expect. The very mention of tea bags was solemnly interdicted in our house. Nor could you pour more boiling water over the loose tea already in the pot without removing some of what was there and replacing it. The art was to know just how much to replace. I was learning.

  I pushed the button on the electric teapot—which was not too modern because they used such pots back in Carraroe all the time.

  “You scalded the pot, did you now?” I ask often when she’s making the tea.

  “I may have lost me mind, Dermot Michael Coyne, but I haven’t lost me soul.”

  I poured the boiling water over the tea and sat at the table. She buttered an English muffin and covered it with raspberry jam for meself. I left it to her to decide when the tea was ready.

  There was no milk on the table because I had talked her out of the Irish custom of, as I said, polluting perfectly good tea.

  “You aren’t the worst lover in all the world, Dermot Michael.”

  You must understand that is a very high compliment from an Irishwoman.

  “And you have had so many others to compare me with?”

  She actually laughed as she poured our tea.

  “Did you ever think, Dermot Michael, that if you had it to do over again, you might just sneak out of O’Neill’s and not sit at the same table with me?”

  That was a fast pitch for which I was not ready. While I tried to cope, she broke off a piece of the English muffin and put it in my mouth, just like she was distributing the Eucharist.

  “Well, to tell the truth, woman, I have not.”

  “Why not?”

  A tough question. We were obviously in a mood for a general confession.

  “I figured then that you’d be a good ride and there’d never be a dull moment. Both expectations—admittedly of a young man whose blood was drenched with hormones—have been fulfilled.”

  “I’ve been nothing but trouble for you.”

  That wasn’t true at all and she knew it wasn’t true. Yet just then she was afraid that it might be. I had better tread carefully. So I said nothing.

  “I’m a neurotic twit, I get depressed, I almost lost my little girl, I fight with you all the time …”

  “And you’re no good in bed.”

  “That’s not true,” she said hotly, “and yourself knowing it.”

  My wife was fiercely competitive. She had learned to play tennis only in America and was not satisfied till she could beat me half the time. She was already good at golf and, granted her handicap, she also beat me half the time, though she claimed that she won more often than I did. A couple of years ago she had decided that she was not as sexually skillful as other women—she never specified who those other women were. So she began to read books on how to be a better lover.

  “You may not read those books, Dermot Michael Coyne,” she had ordered me. “Won’t they be giving you dirty thoughts?”

  “Any poor man who has to live in the same house with you and share the same bedroom with you, woman, will already have all the dirty thoughts he needs.”

  She had blushed, smiled, and lowered her head.

  “Isn’t that a sweet thing to say … But how do I give you dirty thoughts?”

  I read the books without undergoing a noticeable increment in my lust level, though they did provide some insights into woman psychology which I tried to introduce into my poetry. As far as I could tell, however, the books did not improve on my wife’s sexual skills, which, as I had told her, were considerable to begin with.

  She was furious with me. I should have kept my mouth shut.

  She was bantering now, shite kicking, looking for an argument.

  “Well, sometimes you take off your bra when you brush your hair before you go to bed.”

  Her face had turned as red as Cardinal Sean’s choir robes.

  “And you want me stop such misbehaving?”

  “If you do, I’ll divorce you.”

  She didn’t misbehave that way every night. Even when she did, I took the brush out of her hand and brushed her hair myself only sometimes. Happen the opportunity, as Cindasue would say, I’ll do it again tonight. In the meantime, as I ate my muffin and drank my tea, I calmed her down.

  “But all this fey stuff drives you out of your friggin’ mind,” she said sadly. “You’re about fed up with it, aren’t you now?”

  “It’s part of the package, Nuala Anne,” I said evenly. “If you are meant to solve mysteries and save people, then I’m meant to be your spear-carrier and research assistant … Besides they’re fun … A live video game for a superannuated adolescent even if the heroine doesn’t wear latex …”

  “There’s bad people around, Dermot love,” she said grimly. “I knew about them even before me dream. Really evil people. I knew about them even before Cindasue told us about them last night.”

  “Who are they spying on?” I asked, having put on my invisibility cloak.

  “On everybody, especially immigrants. We have to stop them.”

  IT’S JUST GOING TO MEAN MORE TROUBLE. Now’s THE TIME TO BREAK HER OF THIS CRAZY HABIT. TELL HER SHE CAN’T BE FEY ANYMORE.

  The Adversary had a point. Here I am, a young man with a beautiful wife, three great kids, a steady if not altogether earned income, three homes (one for each kid?) and a wife who on some nights will let me brush her hair. If I let her go on this new venture into feydom, I might lose it all.

  Who were the new enemies, spies who were everywhere and spying on everyone? The woman was out of her mind!

  So what did I say?

  I took charge of our family and said, “Nuala Anne McGrail, go take your shower and wake up. When you’re finished, we’ll talk about how we will defeat this new crowd of baddies.”

  “Will you really do that, Dermot?”

  She knew damn well that I would.

  “Get into the shower, woman!” I ordered, squeezing her thigh. “The game’s afoot and we haven’t a second to lose.”

  YOU’RE A FRIGGING AMADON.

  “You’re sure?”

  “Haven’t I told you so!”

  She hesitated.

  “This morning, I think it ought to be a private shower.”

  Astonishingly I hadn’t thought of that possibility.

  “Into the shower, woman!”

  She put her notes in a neat pile on the table and went upstairs to our room.

  I really am a friggin’ amadon.

  3

  The hot water feels so good … I should turn on the cold … Och, Nuala Anne, ’tis not like the old days when you and Ma used to go swimming in the ocean! You’d laugh at the cold water! But then you didn’t have so much heat to cool as you do now … And you weren’t hungover … A second jar of the creature, Cindasue’s stories, me terrible dreams, then Dermot … Well, I asked him to take me and he did … and I felt wonderful … And I wake up with this terrible hangover … Loving and the creature never did this to me before … It wasn’t the loving … it was the drink taken … . But the loving is still in me … It’s not right at all, at all for a man to have as much power over a woman as he has over me … I’ve let him know too much about me … I’ll never get away from him … The thing is that I don’t want to get away from him … He’s too good for me … I go crazy when I feel him inside of me … I want him there all the time … I don’t deserve a lover and a husband like him … So I try to fend him off with me quick tongue and me obsessions … My friggin’ lists … I think I’m nicer to him than I used to be, but I don’t know because the poor amadon never complains … Even the kids complain when I turn obsessive … They laugh at me … Dermot doesn’t laugh and doesn’t complain … I should have invited him to come up here with me … His hands are so wise when he’s bathing me … They mess around with me and drive me out of me friggin’ mind when I want that and they provide reassurance when that’s all I need … I was afraid to have him here with me … What am I to do about him … And now I’ve got him into
another evil mess … It is truly evil, worse than any of the others … Layer upon layer of evil … Spies everywhere … The evil is like a big heavy pall weighing me down … and it’s right here in the neighborhood too … We’ve escaped before … But this time it’s worse … twisted, complex malevolent … We’ll beat it of course … It’s going to be difficult … And what will it do to us as we destroy it? … I better stop dreaming about all my Dermot’s wonderful tricks, take a nice cold shower … and get back to work, still I wish he were here …

  4

  I hardly knew where to begin. I knew I could find a manuscript over in the basement of Immaculate Conception Church on North Park Avenue, part of the collection that Ned Fitzpatrick had picked up on his various trips to Ireland. There was always a manuscript over there that somehow fit the vibes that herself was feeling. Sometimes I thought it was the manuscripts that attracted the vibes. My brother George the Priest, always the busy pastor, went through the motions of being glad to see me.

  “Your gorgeous witch up to something new?” he asked as he gave me the key to Ned’s archives.

  “Witch,” when George applied it to Nuala Anne, was a positive word. She was after all one of the dark ones. Still, I didn’t like it.

  “If she’s a witch, she’s a good witch,” I insisted.

  “Never denied that, little bro. She’s worked miracles with you … The good witch of North Southport Avenue.”

  That was the family conventional wisdom about me. I was talented, lazy, indifferent, went to two colleges for four years and never graduated. Then Nuala Anne came along and made something out of me. The fact that I had made more money than all of them put together was the result of pure luck. I usually added, “and sound instincts,” but they ignored me. They also ignored the books I had published. The truth is, they would say, that without Nuala you’d be hanging around some library reading old books.

  Herself lost her temper when she heard their theory. I was not lazy, I was not indifferent, she had not made something out of me at all, at all. I was the one who had salvaged her from a boring life as an accountant and turned her into a concert singer “and a lot of other things besides.” I was the perfect husband and father. She was terrible lucky altogether to have found a man like me. The family, who adored Nuala, backed off, but didn’t change their minds.

  I hoped she was right, but I half thought (as she would have said) that she was wrong. Or half-wrong anyway.

  So I went down to the musty old storeroom beneath the side altar where my wife was convinced I should always look for material when she was in one of her dark moods. I told myself once again that we really ought to get an archivist in to arrange everything. Nuala had vetoed the idea.

  “I think Ned and Nora would want us to leave the stuff right where it is still,” she said. She was convinced that she was related to Nora and in some sort of communication with her—just as she was on the same wavelength as my grandmother (“Ma” as we called her) even though she had never met Ma. So when our first child had been born with bright red hair, we had to call her Mary Anne after Ma and that became Nellie just like Ma and then elided into Nelliecoyne, which Ma had been for most of her life.

  Superstition?

  How did I know? I was living on the edge of a very strange world, pretty deep into it, and I didn’t want to sink in any deeper by trying to explain it.

  I searched through the old papers, which Ned had organized into folders. None seemed interesting till I came to a folder which was labeled “1833.” The first paragraph, in firm and clear black writing, began:

  It was the spies that did in the United Irishmen. The spies were as thick as flies around a dead cow. At some of their meetings half the participants were spies for Dublin Castle, the English headquarters for all of Ireland. Lord Edward, Wolf Tone, and especially Robert Emmet—Bold Robert Emmet—were murdered by traitorous friends. The Castle did not have to establish an organization. Irishmen flocked to it, eager for the Castle’s pound in exchange for the blood of Irish patriots. Sometimes the spies even reported on one another. The whole crowd of patriots knew there were informers, but, naïve innocents that they were, were not afraid of them. They killed those whom they caught but remained careless. They would never have thought of spying back on the Castle.

  I put the manuscript in my briefcase, left a note in the archives saying that I had removed it on a certain day and planned to return it. All the Irish “risings” till 1916 were romantic, poorly planned follies. Spies sold out the rebels before they ever had a chance, not that there was ever much of a chance anyway. No one ever spied on the Castle. Not till Michael Collins arrived on the scene and infiltrated the center of English power with brave woman stenographers. The Big Fella was always one step ahead of the Brits whom he beat at their own game. The brave young women never earned a penny for their spying and wouldn’t have taken it if it were offered to them. The Castle people didn’t realize that kind of patriotism could exist among women, especially Irishwomen.

  Spies were very much part of English imperialism. They used spies against us when we were getting rid of them. They used them in India in what that poet of imperialism, Rudyard Kipling, called the Great Game. They used them everywhere because pay for a spy requires much less than the death of English soldiers. It was a dirty business dealing with traitors, but not as dirty as sending in English troops. It was not an accident that their counterspies at Bletchley Park helped to win World War II. The Brits knew all there was to know about spies.

  “Well,” said my wife, impatiently looking up from the book she was reading, when I returned to the house, “I don’t suppose you found anything.”

  “Woman, you’re wrong again!”

  I read her the first paragraph of the manuscript.

  She removed her reading glasses, leaned forward, her blue eyes hard and intense. “Wasn’t I after telling you that you’d find something over there?”

  “Woman, you were.”

  That’s the way it is in our cases. The spear-carrier never gets credit.

  She was freshly scrubbed and wearing neatly pressed black jeans and a matching black sweatshirt, both closely fitting, with a red ribbon holding her hair in place, shoes with high heels, and nylons. For whom had this costume been arranged, I wondered—for herself, for me, for the angels? If it was for me, her neatly displayed curves had their usual effect of causing me to gasp. Do I love Nuala or just lust after her? Both and in an intricate complexity that I try to express in my poems—with little success.

  She was surrounded by a pile of books about espionage.

  “Would you ever walk across the street and collect the small one,” she said, returning to her book. “You know what she’s like. If one of us is not there, she’ll just cross by herself.”

  I whistled for the hounds. They came running, doubtless figuring it was about time to collect Socra Marie. If we had delayed five more minutes, they would have complained. Spear-carriers do what they’re told.

  We arrived in the nick of time. Along with other toddlers she emerged from the door of the school and dashed towards the street, determined as she always was to navigate it herself. A patrol woman of sixth-grade age shouted at her, “Sarah Marie, you stop right now!”

  The child was growing up. A year ago she would have run into the street anyway. Now she’d stop with a sigh of protest and wait for the advent of the doggies.

  I scooped her up.

  “I always do what Angie says,” she informed me piously.

  It was like her to know the sixth grader’s name. A future precinct captain?

  The canine brigade paused to bark at their friends among the toddlers. The Team Coyne then looked in both directions and crossed the street.

  “Da looked both ways,” the child said, confirming my probity.

  “If Angie wasn’t there, what would you have done?”

  “Wait for Da and doggies,” she said piously.

  She was fibbing, but she at least knew the right fib.
r />   Her mother, a delectable sculpture in black, waited for her at the top of the stairs. The child squirmed out of my arms and ran up the stairs.

  “Ma! I stop for Angie …”

  Nuala enfolded the tiny bundle of energy in her arms. Unconditional love.

  “Didn’t I see you, dear? And wasn’t I terrible proud of you?”

  Unconditional love all the way.

  As her mother led us all to the breakfast nook, Socra Marie poured forth a largely incoherent tale of her triumphs during the morning.

  “Everyone love me!” she concluded brightly. “Except when I talk too much.”

  “You wouldn’t be your mother’s daughter, would you now, unless you had important things to say?” I observed, noting that I was increasingly talking in questions.

  Me wife glared at me, then grinned.

  She rewarded the dogs with treats and sent them to their room. She allowed no begging mutts at her table, even in the breakfast nook. Despite her obligation to research espionage, she had provided a healthy lunch, bowls of steaming soup and stacks of sandwiches with the crusts cut off, Irish style, a glass of milk for Socra Marie, and two glasses of iced tea for Socra Marie’s parents.

  The iced tea was a concession to Americanization, one which she never honored when we were “back home.”

  “Wouldn’t it shock me ma and da, something terrible!”

  Socra Marie entertained us through lunch with her stories of school. Nuala Anne listened with an indulgent, loving smile, though she had no more idea than I did what our child was saying. The teacher had told us that she was the most popular child in the class because she was so kind to all the others. “She’s a little verbal, of course, but no one really minds.”

  “Verbal, is it?”

  My wife is suspicious of any praise from teachers.

  “Runs in the family,” I had said, earning myself a glare that would wither half the shamrocks in Ireland.

  “The other children want to take her home to be their sister, she’s so entertaining.”