Irish Linen Read online

  With your stunted and stultified senses.

  In place of the arduous and rare I invoke

  The Facile; from compost I make things like gold,

  And perfumes, and nectars, and spices.

  And what the great prophet renounced I extol:

  An art without ploughing or sowing or toil

  Which yet drains the soil of its essence.

  The high Prince of Vermin extends his domains;

  No pleasure eludes him, no treasure or gain.

  And down with the dregs of rebellion!

  You cheer, mesmerised by demoniac sheen,

  Exhaust what remains of the honey of dawn,

  And only then sense the debacle.

  You then stretch your tongues to the now arid trough,

  Mill witless as kine through a pasture aflame,

  While fearfully brazens the trumpet.

  “Book of Revelation turned around,” I murmured.

  “Precisely,” he said grimly. “Now you see why I must kill him.”

  “You personally?” I said, hardly able to believe what he was saying.

  “Not immediately, of course. Eventually we of the Secret Germany must assume our destiny. Each of us must be ready to do his duty when it becomes necessary.”

  We were riding through the Schwartzwald, picturesque hills and forests and fields just coming into spring’s first rebirth, neat small towns, freshly painted homes, occasional working men and women tilling the soil.

  “Is this land the Secret Germany?” I asked.

  “If one needs to give it a geography,” he said softly, “Swabia is as good a place as any. We have protected the Church and the Reich here for over a thousand years. We will continue to do so, no matter what the cost nor how vile the enemy … I am being too serious, am I not, Timmy? We are on holiday, no?”

  “You feel you have to carry the burden of a millennium on your own shoulders?”

  “What is the responsibility of a lord in Ireland?” he replied.

  “Make money on the land, stay alive, see that the people are safe and well fed, though most of the Protestant lords are really English and care very little about the people whom they consider an inferior race.”

  “Your Old Fella too?”

  “Ah, no. He wants a free and just and peaceful Ireland. Periodically he lectures the House of Lords on the subject. They don’t listen.”

  “We feel, some of us more strongly than others, that by tradition and training and faith we are destined to lead. In war if necessary, but reluctantly. We are not Prussian Junkers who are war leaders and little else. We are leaders of religion and vision. So sometimes we must be ready to die to save our people. Does that seem arrogant?”

  “Not when you say it.”

  “Thank you, Timmy.”

  “But this permission to kill a local Antichrist whenever he comes along?”

  “An obligation … You have read Aquin on tyrannicide? Sometimes the beast must be slain. Our Protestant brothers have learned from Martin Luther that they have great respect and tolerance for our leaders. We Catholics are prepared to say ‘no’ a lot earlier than they are.”

  Ten years later, in July of 1944, I would remember every detail of that conversation on the train from Heidelberg to Stuttgart. Even today I’m not sure I fully understand them. Or fully understand Claus.

  Then we arrived at the Hauptbanhoff in Stuttgart, the old capital of the kingdom of Wittenberg, where Claus lived till 1918. Then the kingdom became a republic and his father, no longer the senior marshal to the king, had to move back to the family Schloss in Jettingen between Munich and Stuttgart. We had time between trains to visit the Altesschloss, a forbidding pile of bricks.

  “You liked living in that place?”

  “It was all I knew When we arrived in jettingen, I thought I had found a place like heaven.”

  We boarded the train to Ulm and Munich, having made it just in time. I sensed that Claus had calculated the time of our walk to his childhood home so that we would return to the Hauptbanhoff with not a moment wasted. A mystic who bore the responsibility of a thousand years of history and still kept a close eye on his wristwatch. Herr Hitler didn’t know what kind of an adversary he would have to face.

  “Do people swim in this lake of yours?”

  “Naturally, it is a small and shallow lake. It will become quite warm in another month. Some may want to swim this weekend.”

  “So perhaps this legendary woman will swim?”

  “Have you fallen in love with her merely because of my description? Shame on you, Timmy!”

  “I think you want me to fall in love with her, Claus, so you yourself won’t.”

  For a moment, an expression of sadness flickered across his face.

  “That would not be proper. She is too young and I am virtually engaged to her cousin. If there is a war, I may be killed. I would want to leave some children behind … But to answer your unspoken question, she is most attractive in a bathing costume. She is also quite progressive in her choices, much to the dismay of my mother and some of the townsfolk. I myself find no fault in her in this matter, however. Nor, I believe, would you.”

  “She rejects their complaints?”

  “You don’t understand Annalise, Tim. All love Annalise too much to complain.”

  “So,” I said.

  My interest, I told myself, was ridiculous. I had resisted the charms of Englishwomen at Oxford and German women in Heidelberg. Why should I fall in love with a woman out of a medieval Germanic myth. I should return to Ireland soon and find myself a proper Celtic spouse. As the Galway woman herself would have said, I should not be swept up by a springtime daydream in this fairyland where the Emperor Otto might still be lurking in preparation for a battle with the Antichrist and his Teutonic knights.

  We were the only ones to leave the train in Jettingen, a small and pretty little town, little more than a village, in a valley surrounded by high and somewhat forbidding hills, behind which the sun was already creating statues. There were no servants there to meet us.

  “Our Schloss is right down the street, Tim,” mein host informed me. “It is that buff-coloured home next to the church.”

  In the land of my ancestors the Schloss would have been considered a medium-sized manor house, too big for the town, too small for the countryside. Sedate and comfortable, but hardly as monumental as my own Big House in Ulster. Petty nobility at best—with a magic princess whom the count wanted to peddle to me as an investment in the future, Parzifal indeed!

  The old stationmaster embraced my friend.

  “Ja, ja! Claus!”

  “Ja, ja, Freddy!”

  Then as we walked towards the alleged Schloss, a swarm of kinder saw Claus.

  “Unser Claus!” they screamed, and ran down the street towards us.

  Claus beamed happily at this mob, shook hands with all of them, and called each by name.

  “We live very close to the families of the village, you see.”

  “All very seventeenth century—if the Thirty Years’ War wasn’t going on.”

  “If we go to war again with France and England and Russia, there will be more devastation in Germany than there was at the time of the Peace of Westphalia.”

  Nothing like a grim cloud of warning on this warm and mystical spring day.

  7

  ME WIFE was sobbing when I entered my office. The two hounds were pawing at her in vain efforts at consolation. Timmy Pat’s first segment lay on my desk. It was Saturday afternoon and I had spent much of the morning over in Lincoln Park interviewing Conor.

  “Och, Dermot, isn’t this the saddest story you’ve ever read? Those poor young men and the women they loved! All killed in that terrible war! And everything so beautiful that spring! Just like August of 1914!”

  August 1914 was alleged to have been the most beautiful summer in a hundred years. How did my Nuala know that!

  “Well,” I said, playing to my designed role as the sensible and insensi
tive male, “Timmy Pat lived to write this memoir, so he wasn’t killed in the war.”

  “I wonder if he’s still alive … He should have brought that young woman back to Ireland with him, still.”

  “Maybe he did!”

  “And I’m the one who is obsessed with happy endings!”

  “How old would he be now?”

  “In his nineties.”

  “Timmy never mentions his mother’s name, does he now?”

  “I thought it was Galway woman, and don’t you have a monopoly on that name?”

  “Silly! She must be a relative of your children, through Nell Pat your grandma! Isn’t that wonderful. We must find out her name and her home town in Galway. I just know that it’s Carraroe!”

  Carraroe was the hometown of Ma, as we called our grandmother, and of Nuala Anne herself. Me wife was convinced there were all sorts of mystical connections among the lot of us. I never debated the point.

  “There were many red-haired women in Galway in those days, even today.”

  “Give over, Dermot Michael, with your pedestrian Yank imagination. I know that we’re supposed to be involved with this story.”

  “I thought it was the story of poor Des Doolin.”

  “Go ’long with you Dermot, you’re having me on.”

  I sat down on my couch and reflected that according to the implicit bylaws of the house my wife could enter my office whenever she wanted to, but I couldn’t enter her workroom when she wasn’t there.

  Maeve, our younger hound, curled up at my feet, as if to console me for this injustice.

  “You are telling me, are you now, woman of the house, that Tim Clark’s story and Des Doolin’s cross lines somewhere. I’m sure they never met one another.”

  “Never be sure of anything, Dermot Michael Coyne, until you have the facts!”

  “Just like you!”

  “Just like me,” she replied calmly. She had, however, the good sense to giggle. “Now tell me about poor Des’s big brother … what’s his name?”

  “Conor … He’s about as unlike Des as anyone could be.”

  Their home was over in Lincoln Park, to the east of us near Clark Street. We were in DePaul or West Lincoln Park, which is a notch or a notch and a half down on the status ladder. It was a major center for Chicago yuppies with expensive tastes and the money to support such tastes. I was dispatched to walk to their home on Saturday morning and, among other things, study their interaction with their kids, of which they had three about the ages of our top three. That was impossible because their kids were nowhere to be seen. Their house, just a block south of Fullerton, had been rehabilitated, stood out from a street of gracious old brick homes. It still looked old, but grace had decamped, presumably in disgust.

  I commented that they had obviously done a lot of work on their home.

  “You have to maintain the property in this neighborhood,” Conor drawled with a slight yawn. “This property is the best investment in the city because of its locale near the Lake and L and the intrinsic value of the housing. A lot of our neighbors don’t seem to understand that location is not enough to maintain property value. You have to keep the housing up-to-date, especially with electric and electronic and plumbing resources that the next generation of investors will demand. The current investor will lose some of his wealth if he does not constantly renew the resources.”

  He yawned again.

  Values, resources, investors, wealth—all words applied to a house. Not once did he call it a house, much less a home. The jargon of big-time finance applied to a family dwelling sounded almost subversive.

  Conor Doolin was about my age, tending towards too much weight which with his hair loss and absence of vigor made him look ten years older.

  “A property like this place must be viewed as an important dimension of the owner’s wealth and money invested in it conceived of as a wealth enhancements endeavor.”

  “You have an investment over on Sheffield, don’t you, Dermot?” his wife, Mattie, asked. “A wooden place, I believe?”

  She was her husband’s age, I figured, but sufficiently out of condition to look much older.

  “Pre-Fire,” I said.

  “There is certainly,” Conor said solemnly, “some wealth inherent in such a building, but the age of a property is a fairly fixed value. It does not advance the wealth at a reasonable upward curve. I tried to explain to my neighbors that we saw the necessity of remodeling here purely as a matter of enhancing our future wealth beyond the future value of the building as it was. In the case of your own, the proper question is how much the land is enhanced by the presence of the building and how much its wealth potential is separate from the presence of the building. Separate the building factor and you would not lose much wealth but then you would have the possibility of immense enhancement by putting a new and more attractive building on it.”

  “You went to the University of Chicago Business School?” I asked.

  “Of course.” He yawned again.

  “We believe that one must do everything possible,” Mattie insisted, “to enhance the wealth of our children. Sentimental attachment to a given building does not contribute much to enhancement.”

  “It’s worth something surely,” I suggested, making trouble, “that one’s children need merely walk across the street to their school.”

  “I didn’t know there was a good school over on Sheffield,” Mattie said, her face easing in a puzzled frown that seemed habitual.

  “St. Josephat,” I said, ratcheting up the trouble bar.

  “A Catholic school?” Conor asked, more puzzled than shocked. “I admit that they do good work in poor neighborhoods, but certainly not in this neighborhood.”

  “We believe that we owe our children the very best in educational resources,” Mattie added. “Schools like Chicago Latin or Frances Parker are the kind of schools to which our youngsters are entitled, until we move back to Hyde Park and are able to send them to the Lab School at The University.”

  Mattie seemed to believe in an awful lot.

  I had found out about all I needed to know about the Conor Doolins. Nuala would love my stories. However, I’d add one more bit of evidence and then get on to the Dangerous Des.

  “I noticed that the children are not around today,” I said tentatively, fearing that I might be wading into deep water.

  “Mattie is a stay-at-home mom, and we think that this investment is a prudent one. But we also believe that it is sensible to provide a day when the children and the mother can be free of one another.”

  “We believe that too much togetherness,” his wife said, adding yet another belief to their dogma system, “negatively impacts on family well-being.”

  Their dogmas were a caricature of the Business School faith, but obviously it had worked for them so far in life, if the expensive modern furniture, heavy drapes, and faintly grotesque art were to be believed. That it was a tasteless mélange that might cause acute nausea in a sensitive guest did not matter.

  “Those are very interesting theories on which I will have to reflect,” I said, “but I’m here, as you know, to ask for details about your brother Desmond.”

  “Desmond’s life has been a tragic waste.” Conor suppressed a yawn and began to recite his carefully prepared script. “He was a young man of enormous talents, the most delightful child I have ever encountered. He entertained us when he was a kid every night at the supper table. He sang, he danced, he told stories—most of them, I might remark, not altogether true. He made us all laugh. I warned him when he began to attend school that his teachers would expect him to be more serious, that he would have to apply himself to the serious business of learning. He just laughed. Since then he laughed himself from one madcap escapade to another, without, if I may say so, ever acquiring good judgment or maturity.”

  “The poor kid,” Mattie took up the cause, “was a Peter Pan. He did not want to grow up, he refused to grow up, he bragged to us that he would never grow up. He was
smart enough and clever enough that for a long time he got away with not growing up. You could call his tragedy, ‘Peter Pan goes to Iraq.’”

  Nice line. Not Mattie’s I was sure, but nice just the same.

  “In a way,” Conor said, this time not suppressing his yawn, “I have to blame my parents. They encouraged his craziness as a child and then, by the time they began to see its serious effects, it was very difficult to turn him around.”

  “A lot of boys,” Mattie added, “go through a phase of sowing wild oats. The best cure for it is a serious young woman who makes them settle down. We did our best to find such a woman for Des. He turned on all his charm for them and then danced away. I said to Conor, ‘that’s the last girl I will try to persuade him to date.’ He was not mature enough for a serious relationship.”

  I wondered how often such conversations had occurred in the Coyne family about me. Then I came home with Nuala Anne and they were astonished. Since then they try to protect the poor kid from me, a game which herself enjoys enormously till they begin to criticize me. Then Katie bar the door.

  “I had gathered,” I said, “that he had good grades all through his education.”

  “Without any effort.” Conor shook his head. “That was infuriating. Other children had to work for their grades. He led his class with native intelligence, quick wit, and charm. He thought that life would be like a classroom at Faith, Hope. He never grasped that life was a serious business and that success would come only to a mature and responsible person.”

  “Faith, Hope,” is the name of a parish on the North Shore—actually a shortened form of SS Faith, Hope, and Charity. It is often called “Faith, Hope, and Cadillac,” though that is hardly fair because the Lexus has become the auto of choice up there, just as the parish, albeit the wealthiest in the Archdiocese, has taken up voting Democratic. “A miracle of divine humor,” the little Archbishop claims.

  “He never said ‘no’ to his mother and father,” Mattie said, “not once. He just listened politely and then went and did whatever he wanted to.”