Irish Linen Read online

  That was my father. They didn’t understand what he was talking about of course. He turned his attention to modernizing our linen mills, providing wages which the emerging Labour Party would not have believed possible, and playing the role of a slightly daft but brilliant lord of the manor. During the Great War he had commanded the Royal Irish Fusiliers with ingenuity and courage. Then when Dougie Haig, as he always called him, sent most of that distinguished regiment to the world to come, he handed in his resignation papers to the War Office and returned to Ireland. What do you do to a nobleman and a brilliant leader who quits because he says his commanding officer is a butcher?

  You don’t do anything to him.

  As Winston Churchill said in my presence, probably in 1923, “James, if we had made you viceroy here—as I strongly argued we should—none of the troubles would have happened and we would have had a nice little dual monarchy here on this glorious island.”

  “Winston,” James Joseph Clarke, Lord Ridgeland—tall, strong and with flaming red hair—said with a sigh he had learned from his Black Irish Galway wife, “you’re often mistaken about this glorious island as you call it and not without some reason. On that matter, however, you are absolutely right, but not because I’m not an idiot, but because the men you and that damnable Welsh bastard sent over here are worse idiots than I am.”

  That’s how we would speak in the House of Lords on the few occasions when he deigned to enter that “coven of fools, fags, and fakirs.”

  He got away with such outrageous comments because such were almost expected from the Irish lairds, especially if they happened to be Catholic. I was taking it all in, of course, not consciously learning, but absorbing.

  My mother, a black-haired beautiful Galway woman, was certainly fey, and probably a witch of some sort. But she was a warm, passionate person of whom the neighbours said that she laughed far too much ever to be considered a Lady. However, my mother, the good Lady Ridgeland, was smarter than all of them put together, smarter even than His Lordship as the latter was eager to admit.

  I need not say that I had a happy childhood in such an environment. My four younger siblings were not from the same bolt of Irish linen. As the oldest I was the most responsible and the most cautious. I would warn the reader that I caught up with them after I turned thirty.

  I was sent off to Congreves in Dublin to study with the Jesuits, and was there on Easter Monday 1916, having just returned from the Easter Holiday. The people of Dublin were furious at the eejits who had tied up the streets and made it unsafe to walk around the center of the city for several days. They also resented the cannonading of the English gunboats in the Liffey. Destroyin’ the Easter peace, they complained. The Jesuits were unanimous in their disdain for “dreamers and gombeen men” with guns.

  So the English tried these silly fools for treason and decided to execute them, a typical mistake the English always make here. My father argued mightily that this would enflame the country. Lloyd George said that we could not tolerate treason (a tune he would change later). So they were all shot. James Connolly propped up on chair because his legs had been broken in the battle. At Westminster, Lord Ridgeland thundered that they had turned a minor incident into a war that would never end.

  When I left Congreves the war in Europe was over and me Old Fella thought not so much that I needed Oxford as he said but that Oxford needed me. I was the first in our clan to go there instead of Trinity. Again I was the odd man out, nobility of course, but Irish and Catholic and curiously quiet about the “troubles” in the South. Because I was the son of my mother and father and hence what the former calls a “shite-kicker” I would introduce myself as Viscount Ridgewood, sometimes adding “of Ridgeland” as if to distinguish myself from other Viscounts Ridgewood that might be around somewhere. My friends were content with “Timothy” or even “Timmy Pat.”

  I liked Oxford. No one made you study. You worked with your tutors, went to a few lectures, and studied occasionally for exams. It did not take me long to figure out how to charm everyone I needed to charm. I “read” European history which was a pleasure and drank very little. I was polite to the young women who were about, but wasn’t ready to be involved, an Irish bachelor in the making. I answered foolish questions about my life plans by murmuring “foreign office” or “diplomatic service” or even “MI5.”

  “Which diplomatic service?” someone asked, a recruiter it later developed.

  “Why not both?” I said. “The Free State grants citizenship to everyone on the island.”

  “Even to a British laird?”

  “The question does not arise.”

  On that issue I had, however, made up my mind. I might be a British Lord but I was also Irish. I was not Free Stater exactly, but neither was I on the side of the “Irregulars” who were foolishly trying to destroy the Free State. However, I would certainly embrace the role of a citizen of the “nation once again.”

  I read Modern European History—which meant after 1700—and wrote my paper on the cooperation between England and German states after 1750. I had the vague notion that despite the folly of the Great War the two “Anglo-Saxon” nations were natural allies and that the English and the French were natural enemies. I don’t remember as I write these notes what I meant by “natural.” I do know, however, that an alliance with France meant that we would have to pick up the pieces whenever the French Humpty Dumpty fell off the wall. I managed to gather a “first” despite the indifferent quality of my efforts. My father expressed some disapproval of that achievement. “Sure aren’t you disgracing the family by doing so well.”

  Ireland was a political mess then. The boundary commission had created a rump state which it called Northern Ireland whose boundaries were drawn in such a way that it would be dominated by the Protestants and their Orange Order. It accomplished this miracle by excluding three of the nine counties of historic Ulster and thus imposed on the island a conflict that goes on even as I write these words. In the Free State the bitterness created by the civil war continued, though in 1927 de Valera had taken the oath to the king and entered the Dail as we called our new parliament.

  “That man will be Ireland to the world for the next thirty years,” my Old Fella insisted. “And himself looking like a fucking bishop … If only they hadn’t killed Mick Collins, we would have become one of the most important countries in Europe.”

  My mother sighed loudly, as she often did at the folly of men and especially when they were politicians.

  When he had read my thesis, the Old Fella was impressed.

  “Damn good stuff. Where would England be without the Prussians or the Hessians? What would Jack Churchill have done without the Austrians or Art Wellesley without the fucking Prussians?”

  The Dukes of Marlborough and Wellington were always discussed as if they were still alive and our neighbours.

  One was not expected to answer such questions.

  “You gotta understand,” he went on, “that not all Germans are real Germans.”

  “Ah,” I said.

  “They only put the country together fifty years ago. The Prussians have been running it ever since. Their General Staff, which almost won the Great War, are not your typical Germans. You go to a place like Bonn or Cologne or into the Black Forest and you’ll find a much different kind of man.”

  “How so?”

  “Converted by Irish Catholic monks! I spent some time at Heidelberg before I fell in with this Galway woman. You learn the language, observe how they’re recovering from defeat, keep an eye on the politics, you’ll come back with a much broader understanding of our former enemies.”

  “To what purpose?”

  “They’ll be back. They don’t believe they really lost the war. They’ll want revenge. The Bolshies will try to take over the country, like they almost did in 1918. And so will people like Mussolini. That madman in the brown shirt who staged a make-believe Putsch in Munich last year is insane but brilliant in his own way. There’ll be another w
ar, or maybe only a continuation of the last one.”

  “The Irish will sit it out this time.”

  “I hope to God they will,” my mother agreed. “And I don’t want you to be in it, you hear, Timmy Pat.”

  I promised that I would not. I didn’t stay out of it, but I played a very strange role.

  Anyway, Heidelberg sounded like fun. Why not. I was in no rush to “settle down,” whatever that means. So off I went. And changed my life irrevocably.

  4

  “ISN’T THERE a parking place in the next block below?” my wife suggested.

  You must understand that, while my wife uses more interrogative sentences than declarative, she is often not asking questions but giving instructions. Also that her “th” sounds are spoken as though they are “T” or perhaps “D.” As in “Isn’t dere a parking place in da next block below.” Finally, on matters like parking places she is never in either doubt or error.

  Nor is that, as far as I can tell, a result of her devotion to St. Anthony. The good patron of lost causes is not involved in her “intuitions”—for lack of a better word. She simply knew where the empty space was. “Why would I ever bother the poor man when I already know where the parking place is?”

  We had driven around several blocks in the area near the University of Illinois at Chicago—an aggressively ugly modern campus—and even found the Newman Center, which looked much like a modern Catholic rectory, grim and tasteless. We were driving in my car, an ancient but resilient Benz (herself’s car is a massive Lincoln Navigator SUV). I was at the wheel which was an unusual event. No matter which car we might be in, Nuala Anne was almost always at the wheel, because as she asserted, “I’m a much better driver than you, Dermot Michael Coyne, and yourself teaching me how to be a safe driver.”

  My wife was still fuming about her initial conversation with Father O’Halloran, the director of the Newman Club. At first, through his assistant, he had refused to meet with her at all, at all. He was too busy with his responsibilities, the woman had told him. So Nuala had called the Cardinal. Shortly thereafter the assistant had phoned her.

  “And wasn’t she the snippy one? And didn’t she say that we should let the dead bury their dead? Fine Catholics they are!”

  The door to the Newman Center was locked and we had to push the doorbell. After the kind of long wait that one normally endures at a Catholic rectory, a dour woman in her late twenties opened the door and regarded us suspiciously.

  “Ms. McGrail to see Father O’Halloran,” my wife said tersely.

  “The Cardinal only mentioned one visitor.”

  “Me husband drove me over.”

  “Can’t he wait in the car?”

  “No!”

  We were ushered into a barren office with a desk and three chairs. Outside the single (dirty) window the cloudy sky seemed to threaten snow, though it was April and too warm for snow. Indian summer was years ago. We waited a half hour after our assigned two o’clock appointment.

  “Isn’t the place swarmin’ with unruly galoots?” Nuala demanded. “And themselves taking up all your man’s time?”

  “Most kids are probably in class now.”

  “Or riding home on your CART,” she sniffed.

  The Dublin rapid transit is called the DART, Dublin Area Rapid Transit, so the Chicago system should be called the CART, right?

  Finally, we were shown into Father’s office with the courtesy deserved by someone with an infectious disease. I could tell that Nuala was working up a head of steam.

  The director was a tall, broad-shouldered man in his middle forties, with an egg-bald head that he patted often in the course of our conversation. He wore a cassock with a sash and a biretta rested on his big oak desk. His large, square face radiated the good health which marks a man for whom exercise is close to an addiction. A flat screen television was mounted on the wall. He stood up when we entered the room, sending a whiff of something like Old Spice cologne across the room.

  “Ms. McGrail,” he said, not offering to shake hands, “do come in. We’re very busy around here. In fact we have more Catholic students than any Catholic college in the state. So we’re very busy protecting them from the secularist faculty.”

  He sank back into his plush CEO’s chair.

  “A grave responsibility,” my wife replied, arraying herself in one of the folding chairs.

  “Dermot Coyne,” I said, forcing him to shake hands.

  “Father Coyne’s brother?” he replied in a tone suggesting that if I had any sense, I would not claim that relationship.

  “George is my brother,” I replied, taking my place in the other folding chair.

  I noted that the bookshelves, the carpet, the drapes, the refrigerator were appropriate for a corporate executive though one innocent of good taste. Somewhere there was a cabinet with expensive Scotch.

  “Actually,” he began what seem to be well-rehearsed remarks, “there are so many young people around here and most of them commuter students from parishes which do not exercise any pastoral care for them, that we often find it difficult to remember them. However, God rest him, Des was the kind of young man that is hard to forget. Frantic energy, great charm, intensely religious, perhaps in some ways a little too intense. He certainly ran us ragged around here, but it was impossible to say no to him. At some point we had to draw the line, especially when we received complaints from parents of our students. You must understand, Ms. McGrail, that most of our students are ethnics of one sort or another and first-generation college students. Their parents are deeply concerned about the secular influence on their lives here at a pagan university. So I must be sensitive to their complaints.”

  “I attended Trinity College,” my wife said, “and I’m aware of such circumstances.”

  “In Washington, D.C.?” he asked.

  “Ah, no. In Dublin and meself an innocent child from the rocks of Connemara. Didn’t I manage to hold on to my faith, but only by receiving the Eucharist every day?”

  This was a highly edited version of herself’s student days.

  “Des went to Mass here every day too. He appointed himself sacristan, mass server, lector and leader of song. He made himself indispensable and indeed brought many students to church with him. I feared that he might be neglecting his studies, but I gathered that he was doing very well in his field. The lecture series he established after barely giving me a hint about it was very well attended, I must say. Too well attended, as it turned out, I fear.”

  He did not look at either of us as he talked; rather, his face was tilted to the right and his eyes elevated towards the ceiling as though the teleprompter for his remarks was up there somewhere. He was being careful because he suspected that his every word might be repeated to the Cardinal and perhaps to Father Coyne, who was a known friend of the little coadjutor Archbishop.

  “Was it now?”

  “The idea was to bring in non-Catholic students from other religious traditions, permit them to talk about their faiths, and then call upon our students to ask questions. I became uneasy about these dialogues, though to give him due credit Des presided over them with great skill. Even I was fascinated by the Muslim and Buddhist and Sikh and Hindu young people and indeed by the ability of our own young people to hold their own in these discussions. Some of them, unwisely I should think, reported these discussions to their parents, and I began to receive letters. It was the fire-eaters that were the final straw.”

  “Fire-eaters!” me wife exclaimed with some dismay.

  “Zoroastrians?” I asked.

  “Persians, I think they call themselves.” He looked at me as though I were a disagreeable rodent who had been allowed into his domain.

  “Parsee, more likely,” I said, showing off my knowledge of such things. “They use fire in their sacraments, but they don’t eat it.”

  “Perhaps that is true, but I was inundated with parental complaints. Some people even wrote to the Pope. I had no choice but to terminate the series.”
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br />   “Ahura Mazda,” I went on, “is the good God of that tradition, God of light, warmth, and wisdom. He is so beyond humans that we cannot even imagine him. Fire is only a hint of what he is like. He is engaged in an almost but not quite eternal battle with Angra Mainyu, the God of evil. Mazda wins in the long term, though it is very long. They don’t take converts so they were no threat to your ethnics. Much of their thinking was later appropriated by our heritage.”

  “Really? And I thought that a Mazda was a lightbulb or a Japanese car!”

  “Ah, see how much you learned, didn’t you now?”

  I realized as the conversation went on that Father O’Halloran did not know who my wife was. At one point in our marriage I was astonished by how often she was recognized—and flattered. Now when people didn’t recognize her, I was furious.

  “I suppose so.” He suppressed a yawn. “But I am responsible for the thousands of Catholic students on this campus and I must take a conservative stand on many matters to preserve their faith.”

  “So you stopped the series?”

  “As I have said, I had no choice … Des went along with it and continued his religious ministry around here … I hardly know what else to call it. I suppose this zeal was the result of his Peace Corps experience. I have reason to believe that he continued these dialogue sessions in his own apartment over on Taylor Street. Indeed I warned him that I could hardly approve of such conversations. However, he was evasive. I was seriously considering my duty to issue a cautious warning in our bulletin. Then he disappeared on this strange venture to bring peace to Iraq. I’m told his dissertation was virtually finished. This was quite typical of poor Des, I’m afraid. A lot of talent and charm and even zeal, but regrettably poor impulse control.”