Irish Linen Page 5

  “No one here has heard anything from him?”

  “Not to my knowledge,” he said with some hesitation.

  He paused as though to consider another revelation.

  “To complete the story, I suppose I should tell you that government officials—I do not know from which agency—have visited me several times to ask about him. Different officials each time. Obviously they had some fear that he might have gone over to the other side in Iraq. I tried to reassure them that in my judgment his Catholic commitment was too strong for that. He might well try to have a friendly conversation with a suicide bomber and be blown up for his troubles, but that was as far as I could see the matter going.”

  “Did they think he was still alive?” Nuala demanded, ignoring the obligation of a West of Ireland person to be indirect.

  “I don’t know”—he shrugged—“they were most circumspect … I had the impression that they were perhaps collecting information about him in case he might emerge as a terrorist. I tried to explain to them that I did not find such an eventuality likely. I am convinced that he disappeared into the desert and we will never hear from him again. He was, in the final analysis, a lightweight.”

  Nuala Anne nodded solemnly.

  “So,” he continued, “I can only conclude that your quest to learn more about him is doomed to failure. I hope that you don’t raise any futile hopes with his parents. They are, I believe, contemplating a donation of a badly needed new chapel for this center to honor his memory.”

  “I hope they do,” my wife said, rising from her chair. “I’m sure he’ll be here for the dedication.”

  He stood up too.

  “That’s most unlikely, Ms. McGrail.”

  “Are you a betting man, Father O’Halloran?”

  “On occasion.”

  “I’ll bet you a hundred dollars that he is still alive. If he doesn’t return to Chicago within two years, I’ll owe you that money.”

  His laughter, I thought, was unpleasant. But then I didn’t like him.

  “You have a bet, Ms. McGrail, though I would be happy to lose it.”

  “I’ve known me wife for over a decade, Father,” I said.

  “I’ve never won a bet from her.”

  He showed us to the door of the center.

  Three young women, hardly more than eighteen, pushed their way in.

  “Good afternoon, Father. We’re here for Mass … Good afternoon ma’am … You’re NUALA ANNE … Are you really?”

  “’Tis meself,” she admitted with a modest blush.

  “Sing something for us … Sing the Connemara lullaby! …

  “PLEASE.”

  “Wouldn’t it be easier now if I had brought the little gossoon with me, but sure, I’ll pretend he’s here! Dermot love, would you ever hum along with me.”

  Spear carrier and accompanist!

  On the wings of the wind, o‘er the dark, rolling deep

  Angels are coming to watch o’er your sleep

  Angels are coming to watch over you

  So list to the wind coming over the sea

  Hear the wind blow, hear the wind blow

  Lean your head over, hear the wind blow.

  The youngsters joined in the repetition of the chorus.

  “Will you be doing your Christmas special this year?”

  “Haven’t I after been agreeing to it already?”

  “Can we have your autograph, PLEASE!”

  She withdrew from her huge purse three CDs of her lullabies and autographed them for the delighted kids.

  “Good-bye, Father,” she said, as we walked down the steps. “Remember we have a bet!”

  “You knew those three little groupies would be waiting!” I said, as we got into the car, herself in the driver’s seat. Where she belonged.

  “I did NOT, Dermot love. But wasn’t I glad that they did and wasn’t he a dreadfully stuffy and self-important priest altogether?”

  “Scared by the kids and especially by your bet … Why did you make the bet?”

  “Give over, Dermot Michael! I only bet when I know I’m going to win. Poor Desmond is still alive. Otherwise, why would your friends in the suits be asking questions about him? He’s up to some divilment over there and they want to figure out what it is.”

  “So we stop worrying about him?”

  “Och, Dermot Michael, don’t be an amadon! Doesn’t the poor lad need our help in getting out of there when he’s ready to come home!”

  “And how are we going to get him out?”

  “We’ll figure that out! I’ll not be letting you go over there by yourself, do you hear me!”

  “I hadn’t volunteered.”

  “One gobshite of a hero is more than enough.”

  “Woman, I understand!”

  5

  Heidelberg was a grim place in the early nineteen thirties. So was Belfast, so was Dublin, so was London. The economies of both victors and vanquished had been throttled by the war and peace and victory. The Neckar River was still lovely. The great old ruined castle on the hill and the quaint old fifteenth-century university were down at the heels. The people were shabby and often freezing in bad weather. Wounded war veterans on crutches begged in the streets. The students in their uniforms were grim and discouraged. They still drank in the pubs and sang their songs, which reminded me of the Irish rebel songs. I guess they fought their duels, but I didn’t see anyone with saber scars. The young women were worn and lonely, so many had lost their husbands and lovers in the war and looked forward to grim and unhappy lives. It was not, I reflected, all that much different from London, though Labour leader Ramsey McDonald was hardly what my Old Fella would have called a Bolshie threat. The Germans also suffered from the reparations demands imposed by the Versailles treaty, though more from the threat of the demands than the actual payments. The Yanks, who had won the war and bungled the peace treaty, went home and forgot about Europe.

  Heidelberg in the thirties, as I’ve told my children, wasn’t much like The Student Prince. It was not a good decade to be young. Yet hope and love persist among the young, no matter how foolish their hopes are and how blighted their loves will be. Conditions in Germany would improve and then become much worse, and then in the long haul when most men I knew in Heidelberg were dead, they would get much better. Why? I tell anyone who will listen to me that the reason is this time the Yanks did not go home.

  So I looked out of my one room in a building overlooking the Neckar every morning and wondered about my own future. I would eventually return to the Free State, which hardly needed a diplomat who could speak fluent German and had learned a little bit about German culture. Well, I could always go back and direct the family linen business. I studied German with a private instructor, attended concerts, inspected the museums—Germans have an obsession with museums—admired the music at Sunday Mass in the old churches, listened to lectures I did not understand, and sang with the students in the pubs, as I called them. I laughed and joked with them, even though I didn’t quite understand all the jokes, smiled at the barmaids and pretended I was still young. I still possessed my crazy Irish charm and once I had established that I hated the English as much as they did, I was tolerated as a strange but interesting manifestation of the lost Celtic civilization.

  Heidelberg, I told myself, was like Oxford but with a language barrier.

  Then one afternoon in spring I was sitting outside a Bierstube, drinking a pint (as I would call it) of their terrible German beer, wishing for a taste of Guinness, and feeling sorry for myself—as we Celts are entitled to do most of the time. A tall, handsome man with jet-black hair sat at the table, stuck out his hand, and said, “Stauffenberg, Claus.”

  He would turn out to be the most remarkable man I would ever meet.

  “Ridgewood, Timothy Patrick,” I replied, not ready for such vitality in this dying city.

  It was, as I would later understand, also the most important moment in my life.

  “English?” he asked in English
with not a trace of resentment.

  “Irlandese,” I replied. “And I would wager (I added in my best German) that it is Claus Graf von Stauffenberg.”

  He laughed happily.

  “Actually Claus Philipp Maria Graf Schenk von Stauffenberg.”

  “Naturally.”

  “You Irish,” he said, “are a fey people. How did you know that I was nobility?”

  “I’m a viscount,” I said, “son of Lord Ridgeland. I understand such things, though sometimes I don’t like them.”

  He smiled and his whole face came alive.

  “You are Catholic nevertheless. I see you in church when I attend on Sunday.”

  “There are some Catholic lords in Ireland. Strange breed.”

  “So I see you at the museums and the lectures and the concerts and in the taverns and in church. Yet you are not quite part of the environment. What brings you to Heidelberg in these terrible times?”

  “I may want to enter the Irish foreign service which is just beginning. I wrote a paper at Oxford about the old alliances between England and the German states. My father said I ought to learn more about Germany. He said the war would continue.”

  Claus nodded solemnly.

  “Please God it will not. It will only mean more dead. Our General Staff were fools to get involved and you were equal fools to come to the aid of the French.”

  “The English did, we didn’t. We were in the process of breaking away from England, though some of us did fight. My father commanded a regiment in Flanders. They were destroyed of course. So he resigned. I would never fight in another war. What are you studying?” I asked, changing the subject.

  “Architecture, music,” he waved his hand dismissively. “We have a military tradition in our family. I fear that I may have to join the army to prevent another war with England or France. Someone must resist the Junkers on the General Staff.”

  “And to fight off the Bolshies?”

  “They would never attack us unless our own madmen should attempt to repeat Napoleon’s mistake.”

  “Is that likely?”

  “We went to war with the French merely to test our mobilization plans, we could do anything.”

  “And it is your vocation to become a soldier to prevent the madmen from making similar mistakes?”

  “One must follow the directions of the Holy Spirit,” he said with a shrug … . “However, you need some German friends … . Would it embarrass you greatly if I invited you to visit my family at Easter?”

  “It is difficult to embarrass an Irishman, Claus. I’d be delighted to meet your family.”

  This was interesting stuff, but why was I reading it? What did it have to do with the long-lost Desmond Doolin? Foolish question. Me wife insisted in her fey modality that there were parallels in events from the past and what was happening in the present.

  “Sure, Dermot Michael,” she said on more than one occasion, “isn’t every thing present with God?”

  That irrelevancy settled the matter as far as she was concerned.

  “Does the name Claus von Stauffenberg mean anything to you, Nuala?”

  “A German.”

  “He was the man who almost killed Hitler in 1944. The German resistance to Hitler—they called themselves the Widerstand—was not very large and not very effective but it was very brave and mostly very Catholic. He was shot the same day.”

  “So your man was getting mixed up with German Catholic assassins.”

  “Tyrannicides they called themselves. Your good friend Thomas Aquinas said that sometimes it was all right to kill tyrants. In this case a couple of million lives might have been saved if they had succeeded.”

  “And your man says it was the important event in his life. Was he part of the plot? And what was he doing in Germany in 1944?”

  “Spying, no doubt.”

  “For whom?”

  “For Ireland, who else?”

  She sniffed. Ireland did not spy on other countries, except England.

  “A little crazy, still … Maybe like your man over in Iraq … Good crazy.”

  “Catholic crazy.”

  “Sure, there’s nothing wrong with that, is there now?”

  “Among the Irish, nothing at all, at all.”

  She went back to her notes.

  “The kind of man who picks up a foul-mouthed bitch in a pub and marries her against all common sense, is it?”

  “Wasn’t he seduced by her?”

  “He was NOT,” she said firmly.

  “He was just minding his own business when she sang this song and he never recovered.”

  “He was too busy ogling her boobs to hear her songs.

  “Well thanks be to all the holy saints of Ireland he doesn’t do that anymore.”

  “Now he wants to go beyond ogling and play with them all day and all night.”

  This banter between us was endless. I could never win.

  “Now if you stop lollygagging, isn’t it time to go down to the local and meet your man Ryan Dorsey.”

  “Plenty of time to lollygag tonight,” I murmured, as I struggled to my feet to begin the walk down to Webster and Sheffield, where there was a tavern named Sean’s which Nuala considered our local pub. It was also a useful meeting point for some of our interviews, especially when the subject was the kind of man who might frighten our children.

  I kissed her cheek and cupped a breast in my hand.

  “It’s not night yet, Dermot Michael Coyne.” She sighed. “You’ll have to wait.”

  But she didn’t brush my hand away. Rather she sighed with a hint of complacency in her tone.

  “Sean” was Polish and his tavern was hardly an Irish pub. But as Irish yuppies began to take it over it was drifting in that direction. One could for example purchase a “jar” of Middleton’s Single Malt just as one could in Dublin.

  I ordered one such and began to sip on it as I meditated that even under the protection of a Chicago Cubs sweatshirt and a bra, her breast was pure delight—and after ten years of marriage. Moreover she enjoyed my “fooling around” as much as I did, something that was not at all true of many of the matrons of her age.

  Ryan Dorsey, who had played the drums in Des Doolin’s Irish band, was indeed the kind of person who would scare the living daylights out of our kids. He was a big guy, some of it fat, but some of it hard muscle, with uncut hair and a wild black beard and permanently red face. Move back a couple of centuries and he’d do fine as an example of a Viking berserker or in the present age a defensive lineman on the Minnesota Vikings … His clothes had never seen a laundry or a dry-cleaning establishment and he smelled of woodsmoke. Under his arm he carried a Bodleian drum which he fiddled with through our conversation.

  “Ryan Dorsey?” I stood up to shake his hand.

  “Dermot Michael Coyne.” He tried to squeeze my hand like he was a linebacker. However, my grip was at least as strong as his. So he gave up and sat down.

  “A sip of Middleton’s?” I asked.

  “That’s good stuff,” he agreed. “I’m surprised they have it here. Just one swallow. I have a gig tonight at a real Irish bar. One that doesn’t have Middleton’s.”

  His laughter seemed to shake the bottles behind the bar.

  We toasted each other with our jars and he began the conversation.

  “You want to talk about Desi D?” he asked. “Mind if I ask why?”

  “His parents want to know whether he’s dead or alive?” I said cautiously.

  “Well, if he is alive, it’s not their fault.” He sneered as tears formed in his eyes. “They’ve been ruining his life since he was born. He went off to Iraq to get away from them. At least they couldn’t go over there to make fun of his work like they did when he was in Africa … Dermot, he was one of God’s great creatures, filled with charm and intelligence and talent and they wanted to remake him into a dull stockbroker. They just never got it, never, never, never.”

  He pounded the pockmarked table at which we were sitting a
nd “Sean” looked up from behind the bar and frowned. Noting Ryan Dorsey’s size, he decided not to make an issue of it.

  “As much as we loved him at Marquette, he should have gone somewhere on the other side of the continent or even the ocean. They were up there every other week, checking him out. They complained about the mess in our room, they looked for booze—never did find any—talked to his professors, even went to see the president because they were worried that he would flunk out. And him with a four-point average. They sat in on his theology classes and criticized the professors because they weren’t orthodox enough. Even went to the Archbishop …”

  “He majored in theology?”

  “Yeah, he said that he wanted to know the big answers to the big questions. He drove the professors crazy with his questions, but they loved him because he kept the other students awake. He won a departmental prize for one of his essays. The dean wanted him to go on to graduate school at the University of Chicago Divinity School. His parents scotched that idea and made him go to work at the Board of Trade … You put a frigging genius in that nuthouse, can you imagine anything that crazy?”

  “Des was a genius?”

  “He told stories, he danced, he played every musical instrument, and he sang like an angel. We put together an Irish band and performed at one of the bars in Milwaukee, a German bar at that. His parents caught us there one night and called the police. Can you blame him for running off to Africa? They even tried to persuade their contacts in D.C. to wash him out of the Peace Corps.”

  “Sounds a little daft.”

  “And all the time they’re comparing him to his ‘big brother,’ a bald, lazy drone with an MBA. Why can’t you grow up and be a man like Conor! Conor’s an idiot too. Always lecturing Des about how great it was to be a settled married man, married to a good stable wife!”

  “Ah?”

  “I met the woman once. Castrating bitch. But they insisted that Des take such women out on blind dates. He was perfectly polite to them but never called them back. I told him that if he did, I’d disown him.”

  “He fought with his parents?”