Irish Tweed Read online

  Me wife would instantly recognize the cop, of course. Fights in the school yard and nastiness to the talented committed by bullies were part of growing up. We had them in the school yard at River Forest in my day. They left me alone, because even then I was kind of big. Clumsy, but massive. I was the one to go into fights and break them up because even then I was a romantic. I also shut bullies up, unless they were girls. I refused to admit that girls could be bullies.

  In the school across the street from us, however, the bullies and begrudgers had set the tone. Some parents, especially mothers, were urging their children to stand up for their rights. That meant they should fight the favoritism teachers displayed to smart kids, “good” kids, and athletes. Ms. O’Haloran made this “resistance” a cause of social justice. Our four were smart, good, and athletes. Worse still, their parents were celebrities, and were probably rich too. They also fought back, since each of them had quick tongues and could match insult for insult. Micheal Dermot, our older son, had a reputation for being tough, so he was generally left alone. Patjo, our youngest child, was big for first grade and could (and did) take on all comers.

  “Only when they try to beat up on him,” Socra Marie, his next oldest sibling, rushed to his defense. “Don’t believe that Dr. Fletcher . . . She’s a friggin’ bitch.”

  “Socra Marie, you should never talk that way!”

  “It’s true, Ma.” Her big sister intruded in the conversation. “She makes fun of Sorcie because she says it’s a pagan name.”

  “And what do you say, Socra Marie?”

  “I say that it’s an Irish name and it can’t be pagan.”

  Well, that settled that.

  “There’s a rumor among the kids that the grades in our next report cards will be distributed randomly . . . What does that mean, Da?”

  “It means that grades will not be related to per for mance in school.”

  “Dumb kids get As and smart kids flunk?” the Mick protested. “That’s not fair is it, Da?”

  “It’s as fair as replacing the good players on the teams with those who aren’t so good.”

  “Friggin’ bitch,” Patjo said with a happy smile. If his sister said it, he could say it too.

  “Hush, dear,” his mother said. “Nice boys and girls don’t use words like that.”

  “I’m not a nice boy, Ma. Dr. Fletcher said nice boys don’t fight back.”

  “There’s going to be a lot of trouble at the next parents’ conferences,” Nuala Anne said thoughtfully. “Grades are precious stones to parents. They’ll be furious.”

  “It will end up on the Cardinal’s desk,” I predicted. “It will be interesting to see how he handles it.”

  “Stay out of it, Ma,” Mary Anne urged. “We can take care of ourselves. Ms. Murphy says that most parents are already angry at them two polecats.”

  Ms. Murphy was Cindasue Lou McCloud Murphy from Stinkin’ Crik, West Virginia, a commander in the Yewnited States Coast Guard who lived down the street from us. She was related to Cardinal Blackie by marriage and claimed that she was a “Hard-shell Baptist Catholic.” She was some kind of spook for the Yewnited States Secret Service. Her two kids, Katiesue and Peteyjack were the ages of our two youngest, and the four were inseparable friends.

  So, as we cuddled on the antique couch in the parlor, I felt that everything was under control, and I said so as I embraced my wife with some determination. She was quite content with this affection. Indeed, she was fading into one of her moods where the whole world was running out of control and poor Nuala Anne had to reorient it.

  “Cindasue is on the case,” I said tentatively.

  “It’s bad, Dermot Michael,” she replied. “Really bad. There’s evil over across in the school. Deep, mean twisted evil. Naturally, we’ll have to fight it.”

  This was hardly the time or the place to argue with her. Just because there was evil around didn’t mean it was any of our business. Except that it was not an argument which had ever worked with her before.

  “Well,” she said with the loudest sigh of the evening, “since you’re determined to have your way with me tonight, we’d better tuck the kids into bed now or they’ll know what we’re doing.” I held her closely as we climbed the stairs. She surrendered herself into my embrace. It would be one of our solemn high lovemaking nights.

  At the head of the stairs we encountered Maeve who was patrolling the corridor to protect the small ones, an obligation that the two white giants had assumed for themselves on arrival. The hound would push her way into any room whose door was not closed. She led us first to the girls’ room. Both daughters were sleeping peacefully.

  We kissed them good night. They stirred slightly and went back to sleep. If we didn’t pay our routine visit, we would hear about it from all four in the morning.

  “Aren’t they sweet little ones, Dermot Michael? Innocents!”

  “Who can take care of themselves, thank you very much.”

  Then we turned to the boys’ room where both our sons were also sound asleep, Patjo with his baseball glove on the pillow next to him—just in case there was a pop fly he had to chase.

  Then we petted the “doggie,” who had sniffed each of the children and licked both of our faces and returned to the girls’ room. We went to our own.

  “Close the door, Dermot.”

  With great ceremony I removed her clothes.

  “I should take a shower,” she argued with little conviction. “I smell of sweat.”

  “I’ve told you that it’s an aphrodisiac.”

  “Och, Dermot, you’re a desperate man altogether and yourself setting me on fire.”

  Despite fourteen years of marriage and four pregnancies and concerts every year and mysteries resolved, me wife was more sexually attractive than when we married. She was filled with what she called a holy determination to preserve her figure. I thought at first that it was for my benefit, then I decided it was for her own self-respect, then I knew it was a combination of both in an intricate pattern, and that I would never figure out and indeed shouldn’t bother. She had also become more confident of her sexual attractiveness and of her lovemaking skills. She could drive me out of my mind just as she claimed I did her. As she removed my clothes and my temples pounded, I realized again that this she-demon from the bogs and the fog and the howling winds and the pounding sea of Connemara was quite beyond my analytic powers.

  Lovemaking with Nuala Anne was always a joy, sometimes just a simple, satisfying joy, but on other occasions an explosive burst into another world where we floated together on the sea of eternity. A wild, fantastical spirit, she would sometimes even drag me along on our trip, even if it seemed, faint heart that I was, hesitant. We were dancing in the courtyard of God.

  Then we would float back to earth again, more confident of ourselves and our family and our life. Joy superabundant.

  “That was nice, Dermot love,” she said, patting my chest. “You’re improving.”

  2

  A WOMAN shouldn’t do those kinds of things, especially with her husband. As some women say to me, after five or six years, it’s time to curtail sex. They want it all the time, of course. But you have to make them earn it. I pay no attention to that advice. Nor do I join in conversations about how difficult my man is, because I think that’s dirty. Me Dermot is not a difficult man at all, at all. Doesn’t he have the patience of a saint and meself sometimes a frigging witch altogether. He is a distraction, ogling me all the time and embarrassing me. How can a woman keep a proper house with four kids, two dogs, two nannies usually, a cook, and her man devouring her with his eyes all the time. And meself having to exercise, and go downtown for my voice lessons with Madam, and now attend sessions with the Revered Teacher. ’Tis not fitting to be gobbled up like he gobbles me. I have work to do, you ravening creature, give over.

  I never say it, of course. It would break his heart, poor dear man. Besides, if he didn’t look at me that way, wouldn’t I be afraid that he had found someone e
lse to devour with his soft blue eyes? And doesn’t it feel good when someone who by now should be bored with you still wants you, even if it’s all the time. What would have happened to me if he hadn’t tried to chat me up in O’Neil’s that cold autumn night? I’d be a lonely, frustrated, nasty woman—which I might be anyway, but at least one who is loved and knows how to love in return—just as the Holy Father, poor dear man, said in that letter of his. That’s where God is.

  Speaking of Yourself, thank You for me Dermot and me kids and me friends, and protect us from the evil that lurks all around, especially over across the street.

  3

  AFTER THE choir Mass at Old St. Patick’s at which Nuala sings, we drove out en famille to River Forest to have dinner with my parents. They were careful to see that all the children and grandchildren in the clan were given equal opportunity to return to the castle, but they were especially eager to see us, in part because, as they insisted, ours were the best-behaved kids. In truth they also especially delighted them, because she talked so much like “Ma”—the original Mary Anne (and Nellie). Needless to say, me wife perceived that she had an audience and performed up to her highest standards of the beautiful but mildly crazy Irish immigrant woman.

  My brother George the Priest was there, happy because he could see his favorite nieces and nephews. George was the Pastor of the Cathedral and was considered by his fellow priests to be Blackie’s Blackie, a difficult act to follow.

  “How’s the situation at the parish?” he asked innocently.

  George shares the family conventional wisdom that I am practically useless and managed to remember to pay my income tax only because my wife reminds me (in fact, she does all our taxes). They agree that whatever diminution of my uselessness might be, it all results from me wife’s benign influence on me.

  “ ’Tis bull shite, Dermot Michael,” she explodes.

  “ ’Tis true,” I said, “but we all need our simple explanations.”

  George, however, has decided that I am a credible observer of the follies of the human condition.

  “You been hearing complaints?” I said, following my wife’s custom of answering a question with another question.

  “Some.”

  “Well, Blackie will have to do something about it soon. It’s a viper’s tangle.”

  “So I gathered, though your literary allusion is the first I’ve heard.”

  “The place is worse than anything you might have heard. It could explode any time. Your very favorite niece is taking taekwondo lessons along with her mother, so she can fight off bullies in the school yard.”

  “Why do they go after her?” he asked, his face tightening.

  “Because she is the best basketball player in the school and that’s a form of repression that is not Christian.”

  “I can tell the boss this?”

  “Be my guest.”

  “You can tell me more that I can tell him.”

  So I rehearsed the whole story.

  “Is Frank sleeping with Dr. Fletcher?”

  “Our friend Cindasue, who lives down the street, says in her own colorful lingo that you get two polecats together in the same holler, they go a-ruttin’. However, I don’t think so. Not yet anyway.”

  “He wasn’t a half bad pastor before this?”

  “Old-fashioned but harmless. Midlife crisis maybe.”

  “You’ll keep us posted?”

  “Our kids say they can take care of themselves, but sure, so long as I am an anonymous source.”

  “You have Mike Casey keeping an eye on it?”

  “Sure I do. But that’s the deepest of deep background.”

  “Good idea . . . It’s all the Vatican Council, Bro. All the old structures fell apart. That means more craziness, some left-wing, some right-wing, and some Katie-Bar-The-Door-Wing. There’s no one around to say to people, ‘That’s the worst crock of bullshit I’ve ever heard.’ ”

  He then went off to collect his favorite niece for a game of twenty-one on the old basketball court in the driveway.

  “We call it twenty-four now, Uncle George. If you make the free throw and the layup, you get a shot from downtown.”

  “Sounds like fun.”

  Beware brother, you’re in trouble.

  My wife and my parents came out to watch.

  Nuala clung to my arm to protect herself from the October chill.

  “She won’t beat him, will she?”

  “Is the Pope still Catholic?”

  George had some skills at the hoops in his days at Fenwick, and, while no Barack Obama, he had a pretty good eye.

  Me child skunked him.

  While the annihilation was transpiring, I whispered to me wife the gist of my conversation with George.

  “Then everything will be all right,” she said with a sigh of relief. “He knows about it, doesn’t he?”

  “Blackie? Sure he does. George wasn’t surprised. He was very angry when I told him who was the prime target.”

  “Blackie will work it all out,” she said confidently.

  I wasn’t so certain. Blackie was the cardinal, but his powers were limited. He couldn’t close down the school and surround it with police, could he?

  The Hurleys joined us for dessert after dinner. Their oldest, Josephina, or Josie, would attend St. Ignatius College Prep next year. She and Nellie—oops—Mary Anne had been friendly rivals for a long time. Against a new and scary high school, however, they would surely make common cause. They’d have a lock on it before their first week was over.

  Dad cornered me as we were leaving and handed me a thick manila folder.

  “You still interested in old manuscripts, Derm?”

  I had presided over the publication of several old memoirs that my wife and I had rescued during the course of our problem solving. So my dad finally realized that I was not a complete waste—but it was still all because of Nuala’s influence.

  Give over! It’s time you stop feeling sorry for yourself. Doesn’t the whole family give you credit for bringing home such a wonderful bride.

  My adversary had returned to torment me with his truisms.

  “We found this in the old archives we brought out to the new campus from the old place down on Harrison Street. Someone decided that it was time to clean the place up. This looks like a pretty interesting story. Remarkable woman. One of the first women doctors we had in this town. Still something of a legend. She seems to have been a little fey, just like your Nuala.”

  I winced but to myself. Two fey women would not find a century of time any barrier to communication, not at all, at all.

  “They’re not a great deal of trouble,” I said with phony confidence. “Not when you get to understand them.”

  I noted that the folder had somehow morphed into my hand.

  “The Old Fella gave you a memoir, did he now?” Nuala said suspiciously. “I suppose it will be another dull story. Besides, Dermot love, we have more than enough on our platter, don’t we now?”

  “ ’Tis true,” I said. “I won’t pass it on unless I think it’s something which you would want to read.”

  “Give me every single page! We owe a lot to the Old Fella and himself so nice to our kids.”

  My parents insisted that when we were going away somewhere, we were to leave our kids at their house. They would spoil the brats rotten, of course. But it was, as me wife proclaimed, good craic for both sides. Now that they were growing up and Mary Anne was the special agent in charge of the group as well as the acting precinct captain, the kids were generally well behaved. Nuala figured we owed my parents for their babysitting. I figured that they reveled in spoiling the kids

  She has the right of it, like always.

  Be quiet!

  “What’s her name?”

  “Who?

  “The woman who wrote the memoir?”

  I opened the manuscript.

  Nuala drives the car in our family when we have the whole clan. She insists that she is the better driver,
“and yourself teaching me how to drive.”

  Moreover she argues that our fire-engine-red Lincoln Navigator is her car.

  “Angela Tierney.”

  “Who was she?”

  “Someone famous, though I’ve never heard of her.”

  “All the same,” Nuala said, “she’s someone we know very well. Isn’t she from Carraoe?”

  I shivered. We’d have this dead woman walking around our house for weeks.

  We arrived at our house on Southport Street to find the night lights on—my wife had them in almost every room in the house—and the puppies sound asleep and upset when we had disturbed them. A note from Julie was pinned on the bulletin board.

  “Nuala, would you ever let me Finnbar buy you a pint down below in the pub?”

  “She’s getting familiar with you, isn’t she?”

  “Haven’t we had some talks about herself and her fella? Didn’t she ask me about men?”

  “A subject on which you are an expert?”

  “Didn’t I tell her that the secret was that we have to teach them, poor, clumsy, testosterone-driven boy children that they are, how to love us, and then they have to teach us how to love them . . . Isn’t it all as simple as that?”

  “No, it is not!”

  Our elder daughter appeared with a note from Julie, asking her to take over for a half hour.

  “Pa, I think you ought to go down to the pub and have a pint with them . . . I’ll get all the kids in bed on time, well, not the Mick because he doesn’t take orders from me anymore, and he shouldn’t really. I’ll ask him to. You call me on the cell phone every fifteen minutes, and I’ll report.”

  Mary Anne knew which parent to address questions to in the circumstances. So we put on our dark leather jackets and, harp in my hand, we walked down to the corner pub. Flannery’s by name, but with a Polish owner.