Irish Linen Page 6

  “Not once. He’d listen, smile politely, nod and then do what he wanted to do.”

  “Solid Irish male response!”

  “We moved into an apartment up in Lakeview when we graduated and I started my band. He played with us at night and we really had a lot of good gigs. They called the police on us a couple of times. Cops left us alone. Then he ups and joins the Peace Corps. He thought he’d get away from them that way …”

  “Did he ever say that?”

  “Not once. He was always telling me that they meant well … No, thanks, Dermot, I’ve had my drink for the evening. Just a Diet Pepsi if you don’t mind.”

  I treated myself to a second jar of Middleton’s, aware that if I came home fluthered, I’d be banished from our marriage bed. Well, that had never happened, because it takes at least three jars to fluther me. But I had been warned often enough.

  “He didn’t expect them to follow him to Eritrea, did he?”

  “He sure did. I’m like they won’t visit you over there? He laughs and he goes, ‘I’m sure they will and they won’t approve and they’ll write to the senators and congressmen and to the president that the Peace Corps endangers the health and morals of American young people.’ Then he laughs and laughs and laughs. That’s the kind of guy he was. We all miss him so much …”

  More tears on that rough, bearded face which I began to realize was a mask.

  “And I suppose that they didn’t approve of his young woman, Siobhan, wasn’t it?”

  “He kept them away from her. She’s like totally gorgeous and sweet too, not like these bitches who try to prove they’re tougher than any guy. I don’t know what went on between them because he wouldn’t talk much about her. She went off to Creighton to do her doctorate. They kept in touch, maybe went out a couple of times when she was back in Chicago. He might have written her, I don’t know. Never saw any letters in our mailbox from her. Maybe he wrote to her from that African place …”

  “Eritrea?”

  “Yeah, asshole end of the world from what I hear. He came home from his two years, bought a condo over near UIC and signed up for a program in Arabic, if you can believe that. Along about then his parents finally gave up when he refused to date some creep they had discovered for him. They didn’t want him around the family for fear he’d give bad habits to his little sister, who had attended New Trier and was going to Notre Dame.”

  “Kind of washed their hands of him?”

  “Well they poked around UIC a bit, but yeah, they wrote him off.”

  “So he really didn’t have to go to Iraq, did he?”

  Ryan paused to ponder that.

  “I guess not. But you have to understand Des, if something wild and crazy and exciting came along and he thought he could help and he had some talents, like maybe knowing the language, he’d be off on the first plane. I guess”—he strummed his drum—“he was a bright candle who had to burn and burn out if necessary.”

  An insightful observation from our itinerant Irish drummer, not quite the latter-day hippy whose mask he was presently wearing.

  “Doomed by his talents and charm as much as by his parents?”

  “Even without his parents,” he admitted, “he probably would have gone to the Peace Corps—and to Iraq too. One of the girls in our group up at Marquette said she thought he was doomed to a short and glorious life.”

  “You think that’s what happened?”

  He thought for a moment.

  “Yeah, Dermot, I think he’s dead. Some kind of hero probably, but we’ll never know how he became a hero.”

  He glanced at his watch and rose from the table.

  “Thanks for the drink, Dermot. Good stuff. I gotta get on with my gig. I hope you find out what happened. He deserves to be remembered.”

  “Yes, Ryan Dorsey. He does indeed deserve to be remembered.”

  I walked back to our house, shivering from the cold which was creeping back into Chicago from Canada and from the cruel fate which had afflicted Desmond Doolin. What might he have become if his parents were not such eejits?

  “Dermot Michael Coyne! Have you been drinking too much!”

  “Woman of the house, when did I ever drink too much?”

  “Well there’s always a first time!”

  “Two jars of Middleton’s!”

  “Why did you climb up the stairs so slowly?”

  The witch never missed a thing.

  “Because I felt sad.”

  “Why don’t you sit down on me bed and tell me about it?”

  She flipped the switch on the bed table lamp and patted the bed. She had the sheets drawn up around her neck which meant she had dispensed with a nightgown. It was my fault I had started the foreplay earlier in the evening.

  “Ryan Dorsey is a nice young man who in his current mask is pretending to be a gross Irish Bodleian drummer. He had only one jar of Middleton’s because he had a gig at some Irish pub later on.”

  “And?”

  “And he thinks that Des Doolin was a brilliant candle doomed to burn himself out.”

  Me wife shivered.

  “How very Irish.”

  I went through our conversation in all its sad detail. She shivered again.

  “’Tis terrible altogether.” She sighed. “His parents are awful eejits.”

  “Ryan Dorsey thinks he would have burned out no matter what his parents and his brother might have done.”

  “Poor dear boy.”

  “Indeed.”

  “Dermot Michael … I’m sorry I was mean to you when you were climbing up the steps. I was worried about you and yourself almost never coming home late.”

  “And yourself all ready for lovemaking and meself never late for that.”

  “There was good reason to be sad.”

  I caressed her bare shoulder.

  “So much goes wrong in this world, Nuala Anne, no matter how hard people try.”

  She sighed quite loudly.

  “And don’t I worry about ourselves making such mistakes about our kids and not even knowing it?”

  “’Tis true.”

  “’Tis true,” she agreed. “Of course we know that Des is still alive, don’t we?”

  “Woman, we do! Now all we have to do is save him.”

  “Or help him save himself.”

  “’Tis true.”

  “So,” I said, folding back the sheet to uncover her delectable torso, “we should celebrate the power of life over death.”

  “Aren’t you the brilliant man, Dermot Michael Coyne.”

  “’Tis true.”

  I admired her loveliness for a long time. In a world where there is such beauty, there must yet be hope.

  6

  “So you have a Schloss on a hill outside of Ulm?” I asked Claus, as we drank our traditional afternoon glass of their execrable Deutsch beer. “Look like a place in the fairy tale?”

  It was a lovely early-spring day with warmth creeping back into the earth and back into our bloodstreams.

  “Well, a German fairy tale anyway,” he said with a chuckle.

  “It’s quite attractive up there on the hill. Tourists love to take pictures of it. Some parts of it may date to the ninth century. It’s in ruins now of course. We live in a manor house down in the valley, lovely picturesque place. Nineteenth-century construction around a twelfth-century core. We call it a Schloss though it really isn’t … . And your castle?”

  “The Vikings and the Brits knocked down our towers and castles. Our term for a Schloss is The Big House, nineteenth-century manor house, probably not unlike yours, big, drafty and cold with plumbing that doesn’t always work.”

  “In Germany we would not tolerate that,” he said with his broad grin. “Everything is always in order here. Ja, Ja. Well, in Prussia anyway … Here in Swabia we are a little more relaxed. We are part of the Secret Germany.”

  “Secret! You sing as loud as anyone in your pubs!”

  “Not that kind of silence. We Swabians have been soldie
rs in this part of the Old Empire, the First Reich if you will, for a long time and fervent Catholics for all that time too. We are very serious about our faith, though we feel free to criticize Church leadership.”

  “No bishops in the family?”

  “If there were, we keep it a secret,” he said with his contagious grin. “We feel that we are better Catholics than most bishops and indeed better Catholics than the Pope.”

  “Funny that’s the way we Irish feel too.”

  “My father, Alfred Schenk Graf von Stauffenberg, was the last Oberhofmarschal of the kingdom of Wittenberg, which disappeared in 1918. Naturally he fought in the war and was wounded twice in Flanders. He walks with a cane, and at first will seem very stiff and aloof. In fact, he is, as you will discover, a delightfully humorous man. He hates war and sometimes says that Swabia should leave Germany rather than fight in another Prussian war.”

  “You folks have a different military tradition than the Prussians?”

  “We would like to think so, Timmy Pat. We are the Secret Germany in part because we are also the real Germany. The Prussians,” he said with another grin, “are merely recently converted Teutonic Knights, semibarbarians from the shores of the Baltic. Yet we have intermarried with the Prussians, though not recently. August von Gneisenau who designed the strategy for the battle of Waterloo is some kind of ancestor of mine. He was not exactly a Prussian since he was born in Saxony, but he was a general in the Prussian army. Now we tend to marry other Swabian nobility, though that has its own risks. Our family does not marry cousins because we are so Catholic.”

  “Our aristocracy doesn’t go back that far,” I said, “and is much less distinguished. Mostly land grabbers. You’ll explain to your family that I am really little more than an uncouth lord of a hill fort.”

  He chuckled again, as he often did.

  “They’ll love you, Timmy Pat. We are serious, very serious people. Serious about our faith, serious about our tradition of service, but not really serious about ourselves.”

  “’Tis said that in England the situation is always serious but never desperate, while in Ireland it is always desperate but never serious.”

  He laughed again.

  “Our Schloss is never desperate … We will have some other guests for Holy Week, I hope you do not mind, some of them will be women.”

  “I’ve never been known to object to women,” I admitted.

  “Yet you seem to avoid beautiful women in the pubs, as you call them.”

  The comment was very gentle. He was always gracious even when he was offering a blunt insight. The man was, I told myself, too good to be true.

  “I become dizzy at the sight of a beautiful woman, Claus. I’m afraid that I’ll fall in love too soon.”

  “What, Timmy, is too soon?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Both women who will be with us during Easter Week are beautiful … Baroness Nina von Lerchenfeld is from Bamberg. Our families have been friends for generations. Both families are convinced that we should marry, my mother especially since my two older brothers already have spouses. She is quite attractive, very calm, very brave …”

  “And you are in love with her?”

  “I think so … You are not to fall in love with her.”

  “Holy Week is not a time for falling in love, Claus.”

  “Yet when the Christ rose from the dead, did he not seal his love with us forever?”

  This mystical side of Claus was very attractive because it was utterly sincere and unself-conscious. He belonged to a “circle” of young German students and aristocrats who had gathered around a poet named Stefan Georg, a group which the couple of times I was with them were entirely too otherworldly for the tastes of this Ulster farmer and linen maker. Now I realize that he was a German equivalent of Willie Yeats, only much stronger.

  “And does she love you?”

  He shrugged and blushed.

  “She gives some signs of it, I think. We must make some progress this week. I have made up my mind to join the army. There are many among the officers and even the General Staff who are part of the secret Germany. We will resist this madman who wants to destroy the Germany that we love.”

  “The Secret Germany?”

  “Of course.”

  As best as I could figure out, then and much later, this was the noble ideal of German culture contained in its religion, music, literature, and art. It had nothing to do with Prussia or Frederick the Great, or the Kaiser or the paganism which, as the Georg circle believed, lurked in the eastern regions of the country.

  “We don’t have a secret Ireland,” I said.

  “I’m sure you do … the other woman is Annalise von Sternberg who is Nina’s cousin. Her father and three brothers were killed at Verdun. Her mother later died of the flu. Nina’s family have taken her in. She is perhaps sixteen …”

  “Too young for the likes of me, Graf von Stauffenberg.”

  “She is blossoming into a woman. She has now returned from school in England. She is brilliant and has very strong opinions. She loves to argue and says many outrageously humorous things. She is a fine athlete too.”

  “Not my cup of tea,” I said.

  “She is also unbearably beautiful, but, as my mother, Gräfin Karoline says, she lacks mature sense. She needs to grow up for a few more years.”

  “That sounds like a perfect match for me,” I said ironically.

  “You may fall in love with her. Even worse she may fall in love with you. Now would not be the proper time.”

  “I’ll take your word for it, Claus.”

  I promised myself that I would avoid this delectable young woman. She sounded like someone I did not need, not in a Germany with the power of Adolf Hitler growing. Anyway, I was not the kind of person who fell in love with a kid.

  I wondered what the Galway woman, who married my father at eighteen and herself sixteen would have to say about all of this. I resolved not to consult with her.

  “Our Easter customs are traditional,” Claus pointed out to me. “We begin with a Palm Sunday celebration and enjoy recreation and exercise till Wednesday That evening we do Tenebrae and enter the Holy Week Triduum on Thursday. We try to devote Thursday and Friday to prayer and to eat no food at all, at least on Friday. Our chaplain, a wonderful old priest, will preach each day. With the Gloria of Saturday, Lent is over, the purple hoods come off the statues and the bells ring again. We have a big feast on Easter—a really big German feast and then leave the Schloss perhaps on Tuesday morning.”

  “Sounds pleasant,” I said, lying just a (little. I don’t mind fasting but we Irish don’t like such rigid schedules.

  “Good,” he said, happy that he had imposed Teutonic order on my disorderly, as he saw it, Irish life.

  “ja, ja!” I said.

  He laughed at my making fun of his German need that everything be in order.

  “You do exercise, don’t you, Timmy?”

  “Rugby, soccer, Irish football, rowing, and a little of a violent game called hurling.”

  This answer was greeted with another one of his contagious laughs.

  “We do have a lake in which you could row, even a boat with oars,” he said with a teasing wink. “Perhaps you could ride in it with Annalise.”

  “No,” I said firmly. “We Irish males tend to be celibates anyway.”

  “You will be a priest?”

  “in Ireland you don’t have to be a priest to be celibate. All you need is to be afraid of women.”

  “But the young servingwomen in the taverns dote on you!”

  “That’s why I’m afraid of them … what other recreation do you have besides pulling the oars for this young Brunhilde.”

  “Tennis, horses.”

  “I can do those too,” I said confidently. “I hope I don’t have to play tennis with this Teutonic goddess.”

  “It would be rude not to, Timmy.”

  “I thought you didn’t want me to fall in love with her.”
>
  “Oh, no, I did not say that. I said that she is too young now, too inexperienced, too grief-stricken over the death of her family. Someday it would perhaps be advisable. It should not be hard for an Irish celibate to wait a few years.”

  His grin this time was a little sly, which for Claus was not very sly. “You and she would be well matched in five years.”

  “I warn you that my Old Fella, the current Lord Ridgeland, married the Galway woman when she was sixteen and he was eighteen. When we Irish celibates fall in love we do it dramatically.”

  “You are making fun, Timmy,” he said cautiously. “Yes, of course you are! It is the Irish in you!”

  It was indeed. I did not bother to tell him that curiosity was a special weakness of us Irish males. I would fantasize about this Bavarian paragon till I met her—and then be sadly disappointed.

  “What does your family think of Herr Hitler?”

  “He is the Antichrist. You read about the so-called Night of the Long Knives last week? He ordered the elimination of those in the party who disagreed with him. He denounces the Jews on every occasion. He is vulgar, disgusting and mad. We in the Secret Germany must resist him, to death if necessary.”

  It was quite a change from teasing me about the yet unseen Annalise to threatening revolution.

  “Is it that bad?”

  “May I recite Stefan George’s poem about the Antichrist? You must remember he wrote it in 1907. Stefan was all too aware of the infection that lurks in the German soul.”

  How can an infection lurk in a soul? I wondered. Damn German mysticism!

  “Sure,” I said.

  He comes from the mountains, he stands mid the pines!

  We saw it ourselves! He transforms into wine

  Clear water, and trafficks with dead men!’

  Oh could you but hear how I laugh in the night!

  My hour is now struck, my snares are all sprung

  And fish fill my nets, thickly swarming.

  Wise men and dullards, the mob, frenzied, reels,

  Tramples the comfields, tears up the trees.

  Make way for the flock of the Risen!

  No wonder of heaven but I can’t perform.

  A hair’s-breadth impure, but you’ll not note the fraud