Irish Eyes Page 3

  “You call a woman a dame?” he asked, befuddled. “Who is this Cleary person?”

  Oh, my, it should not be this easy.

  “Kiri Te Kanawa, Mr. Farmer. She’s an opera singer from New Zealand who performs here at the Lyric often. She’s a Dame of the British Empire, which is kind of like being a knight. To call her Dame Kiri is a sign of respect. She is, as I’m sure you know, half Maori, which is the native tribe in New Zealand.”

  “And the other half?” he snapped.

  “The kind of person you don’t like, Mr. Farmer. Irish Catholic.”

  “Your wife certainly doesn’t believe all that mystical mumbo jumbo about the mountain behind the mountain, does she?”

  “Certainly she does. It’s age-old Irish spirituality. The Irish are very sensitive to the ultimate reality which lurks behind ordinary daily reality.”

  “And her brogue, that’s fake too, isn’t it?”

  “Ms. McGrail speaks Irish as her first language. She prays in it and curses in it and sings in it. She speaks English just the way everyone from her part of Ireland speaks it, English enriched by a couple of thousand years of Gaelic poetry. On her records she is careful to keep the poetry under control.”

  There was one outright falsehood in that response. Nuala Anne does not curse in Irish, because the language lacks curse words. Poets that they all are, however, Irish speakers have skillfully adapted all those four-letter Anglo Saxon words to their language. They mean no harm by it.

  “Don’t you think that all the Irish stuff is very offensive to many Americans?”

  “Probably no more than hip-hop … . Anyway, they don’t have to listen to it.”

  “Why are you exploiting your baby to make money?”

  “I am told that you really can’t sing lullabies properly unless there is a baby around to hear them. Mary Anne loves to hear her mother sing lullabies. It won’t make any difference to her that there’s a television camera around. Besides, we’re putting all the money from the disc into a fund for her college education, except for the twenty percent that Ms. McGrail always contributes to charity.”

  Not that Nelliecoyne would need money for college, because she was going to be an All-American point guard, wasn’t she? Even if she was fey.

  “When did you get the idea of using your kid as a prop?”

  Sweat was pouring down Farmer’s face, messing his makeup. He had expected me to be a dumb Irish Catholic who would be both furious and tongue-tied in the face of his attack on my wife.

  Bingo!

  “Actually we hadn’t thought all that much about it until we heard that you were suggesting it. We thought it was kind of a good idea.”

  His face tightened in anger.

  “Your wife is docile and passive like most Irishwomen, isn’t she?”

  Wry laugh from D. M. Coyne.

  “You don’t know many Irishwomen if you think that, Mr. Farmer. Nor have you ever had to play tennis against that particular Irishwoman. You’d find it an enlightening experience.”

  The director, realizing that she had a fiasco on her hands, signaled us to wrap it up.

  “Many people think her singing is like your fiction—exploitive kitsch.”

  Aha!

  JUST BECAUSE HE’S ASKING FOR IT, YOU DON’T HAVE TO SAY IT.

  “The hell I don’t!”

  “I’d rather think it’s like my work which has been published in Poetry magazine.”

  ALL RIGHT, RUB IT IN!

  “There are a lot of unanswered questions,” Nick snarled, the journalist’s final cliché.

  “I’ll be happy to answer them anytime,” I said, with my most genial Dermot Michael Coyne smile. “We’ll be , listening to you for more suggestions.”

  That was not altogether true, but it was a nice ending.

  “I’m going to drive her off the charts,” he snarled at me as the floor director led me off the stage, fearful that I might demolish him physically.

  “As herself would say, that will be as may be.”

  The people in the control booth rolled their eyes.

  “You creamed him,” the director said as she led me out of the studio.

  “He’s a larger-than-life Chicago character,” I said, piously quoting a feature article on Farmer that had appeared in Chicago magazine.

  Nuala’s only comment that evening was, “The poor frigger never had a chance.”

  I was inordinately proud of myself.

  Great reverie. I played it over and over.

  Farmer’s latest ploy was to insist that someone was making threats on his life, probably, he said, Irish terrorists.

  I had just organized myself, as best as I ever can do that, in the kitchen when two M1A1 tanks roared into the house. The hound rushed upstairs to check on Nelliecoyne.

  “Breakfast is it?” Nuala asked, frowning darkly.

  “’Tis.”

  “You’ve made a mess of me kitchen.”

  “Our kitchen.”

  “I don’t suppose you’ve put the lass down?”

  “She isn’t here, where else would she be?”

  My wife leaned against the doorjamb. She was soaking wet, her green (naturally) running bra and shorts looking like they had been pasted on, her shoes over her shoulder, her bare feet red from the cold. I gulped as I usually do when I see my wife. She’s tall and lithe with a woman athlete’s subtle but obvious figure and the pale white skin and deep blue eyes of your standard-issue Irish goddess. Her face is that of a model you’d see on a cover of an Irish fashion magazine and her jaw has the round firmness which is required of your normal Irish matriarch. Naturally her waist measured exactly what it had on the day she had married me. She had been sternly determined that pregnancy would not affect her figure, if only to prove Maybelline wrong.

  She also bluntly refused to play tennis with me while she was nursing Nelliecoyne. Nursing mothers, she said, lacked athletic mobility. I learned that this assertion was a total falsehood. Moreover, she did battle with my sister Cindy a couple of times a week. The real reason is that she had not practiced during pregnancy and I had. She would be prepared to take me on again only when she knew she could beat me more than half the time.

  Unlike me, er, my wife, I am perhaps the least competitive person in the world.

  I absorbed her with a dangerous blend of desire, admiration, and love.

  “And you didn’t change her diaper, did you?”

  “Certainly I did and hadn’t, to quote you, she made a fine mess of shite for herself?”

  You’ll note that in this dialogue I had, perforce, adjusted to the Irish rules for such a conversation.

  “And you haven’t looked in on her at all, at all?”

  “Woman, I’ve looked in three times. And wasn’t she sleeping peacefully, as she should?”

  Sometimes I’ll have to interpret my Nuala Anne for you. Not only is it necessary for a man to hear what his wife means instead of what she says (wives should do the same thing, but the same rules don’t apply), in the case of an Irish spouse the problem is more difficult. They never say what they mean or mean what they say.

  Herself was begging me to reassure her that her beautiful little girl child had not died while she had neglected her to take a run on the beach.

  “You shouldn’t look at me that way, Dermot Michael Coyne.”

  A tinge of flush appeared on her cheeks.

  “What way?”

  “Like you’re more hungry for me than for your blueberry pancakes … .”

  She lowered her eyes.

  “Actually, I’ll take the pancakes first … . But I’d be in serious trouble if I didn’t look at you that way.”

  “You’ll never learn, will you, Dermot Michael?” she said with an impish grin.

  “What will I never learn?”

  “That men can’t win no matter what they do or say.”

  “I learned that long ago.”

  She leaned her body, now shivering a little from her unhealthy plunge in the Lake, against mine. I did not draw away from her, though she was cold and wet. I touched the firm flesh of her belly gently.

  “You’re a brilliant man altogether, Dermot Michael Coyne,” she whispered softly as her lips touched mine.

  “Brilliant” was not a comment on my intelligence. Rather it is the superlative of a generic Irish adjective indicating approval; “grand” was followed by the comparative “super” on its way to “brilliant.” If she had said that I was a “grand” man altogether, my feelings would have been hurt.

  On the other hand, the fire in her kiss would have canceled out the moderation of being merely “grand.”

  “A good run?” I asked as she drew away from me.

  “Wasn’t it brilliant?” she said. “And the Lake like a little child that wants to play when she touches your toes and the sky as pure as a Blue Nun’s veil and the beach all creamy soft and the trees watching like statues in a cathedral and the sun peeking up to see if it likes the day and God smiling down on all of us?”

  “Celtic mumbo jumbo?”

  “’Tis not at all,” she said with a laugh.

  “There’s a lake behind the Lake?”

  “Why wouldn’t there be? … Oh, and there is something wrong with your dog. Out on the beach she wouldn’t give me back a piece of wood that I had thrown into the Lake.”

  “Shame on her!”

  “You know how she wrestles with me for the stick? Well, this time she wouldn’t let me have it after I’d thrown it into the Lake twice. Didn’t she even come into the house with it in her teeth?”

  “’Tis strange.”

  I felt an uneasy twisting in my stomach. Did I have three fey females in the house with me? One human adult, one human infant, and one pushy pure-white Irish wolfhound?
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  “I’ll go upstairs and change. I’ll be right back down, save some of the breakfast for me. And only give herself one biscuit.”

  Nuala dashed up the stairs. She was so very beautiful and so very wonderful and the tension around her eyes scared the living daylights out of me. But what could I do? One of the reasons you marry is to have children. You agonize when you don’t have a child. Then the child comes and you adore her. But she also turns out to be a demanding monster, even if she is a good baby. And what does the mother do who has to be practically perfect at everything? She goes tense and anxious.

  My reverie was interrupted by a huge mass of wet white fur dashing into the kitchen. Sure enough, Fiona crunched a piece of driftwood in her teeth. Before noticing me, however, it was necessary for her to run around the kitchen sniffing all the corners and making sure that no objectionable smell had entered the kitchen since she had left the house. Then she approached me, tail wagging furiously, and dropped the driftwood in front of me.

  “Good dog, Fiona,” I said.

  Rearing up on her hind legs, she put her forepaws on my shoulders and nuzzled my face. I’m six feet three inches tall and when Fiona puts her forepaws on my shoulders she’s still an inch or so taller than I am. An enormous mass of wet white fur.

  “Good dog, Fiona,” I said.

  She continued to nuzzle me affectionately, as if to assure me that even though I was the third most important person in the house, she still adored me.

  “That won’t get you any more than one doggie biscuit,” I warned her.

  Whereupon she removed her forepaws from my shoulders, sank back to her normal position, and seriously shook the moisture out of her fur—in the process soaking me. This was standard procedure when Fiona came out of the water. She seemed to think that I liked the act.

  “You good for nothing bitch!” I informed her.

  She wagged her tail furiously, feeling that I’d paid her some kind of enormous compliment.

  “Come on now,” I said. “Don’t tell herself but I’m going to sneak you an extra doggie biscuit because you’re such a good doggie.”

  That comment was greeted with a bark of approval.

  Surreptitiously, as if Nuala might be able to tell what I was doing, I opened the kitchen cabinet, removed a large doggie biscuit—wolfhounds only do large things—and slipped it into Fiona’s open mouth. Delicately she removed the doggie biscuit from my hand and began to chomp on it.

  “You’d better finish it before herself comes down,” I warned her.

  While Fiona disposed of the doggie biscuit I picked up the ancient piece of driftwood. It was a carving from a molding, arguably from a house but also from perhaps the dining room on a ship—ornate and elaborate. Why it had washed up on the beach this morning was an interesting question. Or maybe I was just imagining things.

  I filled orange juice tumblers and poured the pancake batter on the frying pan. Nuala thundered down the stairs again and burst into the kitchen, a perfect picture of early morning vitality, in jean shorts and a dark red T-shirt which announced that she was a Galway Hooker. (A sailboat.)

  “I want me tea!”

  “Woman,” I said, “can’t you pour it yourself?”

  “You’re busy preparing the pancakes are you now?”

  “Woman, I am. It’s bad enough being the housewife around this cottage without having to make the pancakes and pour the tea at the same time—and while you’re pouring it would you ever pour me a small cup of tea too?”

  She poured the tea for the two of us, without polluting it with milk, a perverse Irish habit she had abandoned at my insistence.

  “Hurry along with them pancakes,” she ordered me. “Am I not perishing with the hunger? … You want a doggie biscuit, do you now, Fiona? Has himself given you one already?”

  The wolfhound barked, wagged her tail, and rested a paw on Nuala’s thigh. She knew what “doggie biscuit” meant and the appropriate behavior to obtain one from her mistress. Nuala did not ask me whether I had already rewarded the hound for her morning run. She knew that I had—Nuala tended to know everything I did or didn’t do. But if she had asked and I had admitted my responsibility, then she would have been deprived of the pleasure of feeding her humongous pet. She reached up into the nearby cabinet, removed the box of biscuits, and said, “Say please.”

  Fiona whined, and then with even more delicacy than when she was accepting her prize from me, removed the cookie from my wife’s fingers and retreated to the corner of the kitchen where, according to the rules, she was to remain while we ate our breakfast.

  Good baby, good dog, good husband … sometimes even a brilliant husband!

  I stacked up a half-dozen pancakes on Nuala’s plate. She soaked them in maple syrup—pure Michigan maple syrup, of course, bought at the farmer’s market in New Buffalo—and attacked them with vigor comparable to that of the wolfhound at suppertime. My wife displays perfect table manners in public situations when she puts on one of her public personae, of which she has many. In private, however, she consumes her food as if it might be going out of fashion.

  “I want me bacon,” she informed me with a mouth full of pancakes.

  I brought her a paper towel loaded with crisp bacon. She jammed two pieces into her mouth.

  “Aren’t you a super cook!” she exclaimed. “Now eat your own breakfast, lest you perish with the hunger!”

  Thereupon she poured maple syrup on her bacon. I winced—behind her back.

  My wife takes nutrition seriously. Therefore, perforce, we eat healthy food. However, good Irish Catholic that she is, she is perfectly willing to grant dispensations from the rules, so long as we “don’t do it too often.” An Indian summer week at Grand Beach, I had argued, when proposing pancakes and bacon, was a good reason. She promptly agreed, adding for the sake of her virtue, “We mustn’t do it too often.”

  “How’s herself?” I asked, knowing that she had inspected the sleeping Nelliecoyne before she had discarded her running clothes.

  “Brilliant!” she exclaimed. “Sleeping like the little angel that she is … . Och, Dermot, isn’t she a beautiful little girl!”

  “She is,” I agreed solemnly, “though she does shite a lot!”

  “That’s what babies do, Dermot Michael Coyne!”

  “So I have discovered.”

  “We must take very good care of her, so when she’s grown up we can give her back to God as a healthy, happy adult. God only lends children to us, like me ma says.”

  “Somehow, I figure, Nelliecoyne will be able to take care of herself.”

  “It won’t be me doing and meself a terrible mother altogether. Isn’t she lucky to have you as her father?”

  The tension around my wife’s eyes deepened. My mother had consoled me with the thought that Nuala would stop worrying about her skills as a mother as soon as we had our second child. I shivered at the thought.

  “Just as you’re lucky to have me as a husband, and such a good cook too … . Have some more bacon!”

  “Just one more piece … . Your overgrown bitch gave you that piece of wood, did she now?”

  “She did.” I picked the driftwood up off the floor. “It looks like a bit of fancy molding, maybe from a house or even a boat.”

  Nuala examined the molding carefully. If there were any psychic vibrations emanating from it, she didn’t seem to notice them.

  “From a boat?”

  “Maybe something that was washed off in a storm.”

  “Boats don’t sink out there, do they, Dermot Michael?”

  I’d better tell her the truth.

  “They do, Nuala Anne. The first ship ever built on the Great Lakes, La Salle’s ship Griffon, disappeared maybe on Lake Huron, maybe on Lake Michigan, without a trace on her first voyage. Since then over ten thousand ships have sunk on the Great Lakes. Lake Superior, way up north, is supposed to be the most dangerous. A steel ore boat was torn in two up there not too many years ago by a couple of thirty-foot waves. However, more boats have sunk on Lake Michigan. The waves and the winds sweep down three hundred miles from the Soo in the November storms. You’ll have to see one of them this year.”

  She glanced out of the window at the serene blue waters.

  “And it looks so peaceful now … .”

  “Those of us who have been around Michigan for all our lives know that you have to respect the Lake, Nuala. It’s a lot more dangerous than Galway Bay.”