Irish Linen Page 8

  “My parents made up their minds to send him to New Trier Township High School. You know, of course, Dermot, that it is perhaps the best high school in America. I had done very well up there. We all agreed that the rigorous academic discipline at New Trier would settle him down. Instead, he went over to the Jesuits at Loyola Academy, where he had a wonderful time, earned several athletic letters in sports like lacrosse, and was still an emotional ten-year-old.”

  “Con and I were dating at Princeton. Every time I encountered Des, I laughed myself sick. Until Con pointed out the terrible effect an audience had on Des.”

  “And how worried my parents were that Jennifer, our little sister, would follow after him.”

  “Has she?”

  “I don’t think so,” Con responded promptly.

  “I’m not so sure, dear.” Mattie permitted herself a dissent.

  “She’s still in college. She’s quiet, but she chose Notre Dame when she could have gone to Princeton.”

  Mortal sin!

  Well she could have chosen Marquette.

  “And,” Mattie continued, “she’s talking about Notre Dame law school.”

  God forbid.

  “I’m afraid that she might follow Des into the Peace Corps.” Conor sounded worried, but he still managed to yawn. “That’s when Des went into his ‘Mr. Kurtz’ phase. He became a god to those poor, ignorant natives. He came to believe that there was no crazy thing he could not do … He called me just before he left for Iraq. I begged him not to go. I warned him that it might kill our parents. He just said something foolish and hung up.”

  Tears actually appeared in Conor’s eyes.

  “I’m sorry, Dermot, in my world men don’t cry. Yet I loved the little punk. You couldn’t help loving him. I asked myself every night if there were anything else I might have done.”

  “You did all you could, dear.” Mattie touched his hand affectionately. The first hint of emotion that I had seen between them. “You did all you could, we all tried. Nothing seemed to work. He really thought he was Peter Pan.”

  “Mom says that your wife thinks he’s still alive. Do you agree, Dermot?”

  “Nuala Anne operates on a different wavelength than most of the rest of us. I make it a practice never to write off one of her insights.”

  I thought that was a pretty good dodge.

  I could hear herself say, “Give over, Dermot, you know I’m right.”

  “Was your family astonished that he chose to major in theology at Marquette?”

  “We were all dismayed. Theology is what priests do! He had no business in that program. What would it equip him to do? Besides, my parents did research and discovered that it was a hotbed of radical religious ideas. I suspect that it was in that climate that he decided that he could save the world all by himself.”

  I shook hands with them both as I left. Tears were now in both of their eyes. They thanked me for my interest and said that it had been good to talk to me. They meant it, poor dear people, as Nuala would have called them.

  I never thought that I could save the world by myself. I just wanted to be left alone. Did anyone in my family weep when I went off to tour Europe with my commodity exchange profits (earned, like I say, by mistake)? I didn’t think so.

  My wife insists that God sent me to Europe to find her and take care of her and protect her for her whole friggin’ life. She believes that as though the Archangel Michael had told her it were so in a personal conversation.

  What the hell do I know about how God works!

  Even financial services creeps love, I told myself as I began the walk back across Halsted Street. What could they have done to protect Des from the drummers to which he was marching?

  Maybe, just maybe, however, if they had valued his drummers a little more or had been more sympathetic to the mysterious workings of the Holy Spirit, his brief life story might have had a different ending.

  If I were to believe my wife, however, the final chapter of that biography was yet to come.

  The drizzle turned to rain as I walked down Webster Avenue. I jogged home and arrived at the top of the steps leading to our second-floor entrance wet and winded and sad. No, I would not tear down this house and build something on it to enhance the wealth of my rug rats.

  The front door was open. In the bowels of the house the kids were shouting, the dogs were barking, and me wife was singing some kind of Irish song. Bedlam was after all a place in Ireland. No it was Donnybrook. Saturday morning at the Coynes.

  The pooches, always alert to someone coming in the door, especially when he had been away for a time and in their perspective might not return, ignored my arrival.

  “Quiet, guys,” my wife said, “Da’s here and he is in a BA-AD mood.”

  She could smell me even more quickly than the pooches could. Small chance I had of sneaking up behind her and having my way with her—unless she wanted me to.

  The dogs charged up the stairs, eager to make up for their dereliction of duty and almost knocked me down. I stumbled into the playroom and the three mobile kids assaulted me and the nonmobile one on the floor screeched with delight. My wife in exercise shorts and a wet tee shirt embraced me. I held her a little longer than was strictly speaking proper in the context.

  “Da’s home,” I confirmed the announcement. “And he’s in a great mood … Ethne, can’t you control this mob of Galway miscreants?”

  “Haven’t I given that up long ago!”

  “Da isn’t in a bad mood,” Socra Marie assured the assembly. “He’s never mad when he hugs Ma!”

  “Dermot Michael Coyne! You’re soaking wet and you’re shivering with the cold! Won’t you be catching that virus that’s going around!”

  “Woman, I’ll not! I’ve come home to report on my work this morning.”

  “Well, upstairs with you anyhow!”

  “I’m on me way.”

  “Take off your wet clothes, Dermot!” she ordered me. “And into the shower with you.”

  “How can I report about the young Doolins when I’m in the shower?”

  “Won’t I be there with you?”

  That put things in an entirely different perspective.

  I’ll not tell you how I rehearsed my adventure in the shower with me wife. It’s none of your business.

  8

  “POOR DEAR people!” my Nuala Anne said predictably.

  “Poor dear creepy, misguided people,” I agreed.

  We were sitting in my office. My wife had made huge plates of fruit salad for both of us. She was wearing her official uniform of jeans and a sweatshirt, the latter celebrating the Chicago White Sox, though I had distinctly forbidden such memorabilia in my house. The two younger kids were sound asleep in the nursery, under the watchful eyes of the hounds. Ethne was down in the playroom, working on her dissertation, while the older kids worked on their artistic efforts.

  “Your man,” I said, “really is a little daft.”

  “And himself going off to Iraq without talking to his parents … I’m tired of this stuff, Dermot Michael Coyne. I don’t want to be a detective anymore.”

  “I’ll call over at the zoo and see if the other leopards are changing their spots.”

  “Why can’t I be just a wife and a mother and someone who sings in public occasionally? Why do people have to bother me about the messes they’ve made in their family lives? Why can’t they leave their blather to your man Jude?”

  “Maybe he has too much to do and himself under contract to your Claretian fathers anyway!”

  “Des Doolin really was immature and irresponsible. If our Patjo were ever to run away like that, wouldn’t it break me heart altogether?!”

  YOUR WIFE, DOLT, IS GOING THROUGH SOME KIND OF MIDLIFE CRISIS!

  She never is!

  YOU DON’T HAVE TO TALK THAT FUNNY IRISH WAY WHEN YOU’RE TALKING TO ME.

  “We’d never be so clueless about Patjo if he turns out to have the glint in his eye.”

  She pondered that.


  “And meself hinting to them poor folks that he’s still alive.”

  “I thought you said you knew that.”

  “There’s knowing and there’s knowing, Dermot love. I’m worn out from my friggin’ instincts. Are they any better than guesses?”

  Was Nuala losing faith in her own fey insights? Life around Sheffield Avenue would be a lot quieter. Also a little dull?

  “They work well enough so far.”

  “They seem to be fading away. Maybe a fourth pregnancy is too much for them. Maybe the hormone cocktail erodes them. Maybe it’s time I grow up and myself with four children to take care of them.”

  “Five counting meself!”

  She laughed at that.

  “Sure, you’re easy altogether … A little loving every once in a while is no work at all, at all … But seriously, Dermot, it’s not fun anymore. I’d leave as soon spend Saturday playing with me childer and romancing me man.”

  “You seem to have accomplished both of those tasks this morning.”

  “Only because I made you do the work.”

  THAT ANSWER IS IRRELEVANT.

  “You’re not sure that Des is still alive?

  “Desperate Des? … Well, part of me kind of knows that he is, but what good does that do? Here in Yank land, don’t we fairy folk turn pragmatic?”

  THAT WAS A GREAT LINE.

  I don’t need an eejit like you to tell me.

  “And how do I get him out of Iraq if he is still alive? Write a nice note to Mr. Rumsfeld? And I won’t be after sending yourself over there to find him! This one is beyond me, Dermot Michael Coyne!”

  “Isn’t the other man some help?”

  “Dermot, Lord Ridgeland is long since gone from this world … No, I’m wrong there. He’s still alive too, even if he is ninety-five or whatever, but we don’t know what crazy things he’s going to do and himself falling in love with that German hussy even before he meets her.”

  My wife was in a very bad mood.

  “I suppose we have to try to wrap this one up before we retire from the business,” I offered.

  “Och, ’tis true, Dermot love … Well what did we learn this morning?”

  “That our Des didn’t fit what his parents and his brother and sister-in-law thought was the paradigm for maturity and responsibility. Mattie compared him several times to Peter Pan.”

  “Yet didn’t your man spend two years in Ethiopia, didn’t he all but get himself a doctorate in Arabic, and didn’t he organize an interfaith group of students at the university down below?”

  “Your man” refers to almost anyone. A listener has to figure out who the speaker means. “Down below” is the way the Irish cope with geography. In this case it means University of Illinois at Chicago or UIC—almost always called the Pier by my parents’ generation when GIs back from the war went to Navy Pier for their first two years of higher education. “Down within” means downtown or sometimes the Loop or other times Michigan Avenue. Nuala’s point is that P. Pan didn’t do much constructive with his life. Des Doolin’s madcap life did not suggest an inability to set goals and achieve them.

  “’Tis true,” I said. “He wasn’t just playing games for the pure fun of it.”

  “Are we missing something altogether, Dermot Michael? What was he up to? What demons drove him? If he were just running away from his family, there would be better ways to do it, wouldn’t there now?”

  “You have the right of it, Nuala Anne.”

  THERE YOU GO AGAIN, TALKING FUNNY TO HER. How OFTEN DO I HAVE TO TELL YOU THAT YOU’RE NOT AN IRISH IMMIGRANT?

  West of Ireland immigrant.

  “You went to Marquette, didn’t you, Dermot love?”

  “Woman, I did and had a wonderful time and learned a lot, even if I didn’t put enough credits together to graduate.”

  “Why did you have such a brilliant time?”

  I thought about it.

  “Everyone has a brilliant time at Marquette,” I said.

  “Beautiful campus?”

  “Pure ugly.”

  “Lovely city?”

  “The joke is that it’s a nice place to live in but you wouldn’t want to visit there.”

  “Are those gobshite drinking laws you Yanks indulge in easier up there?”

  “They used to be but not anymore.”

  “You’re not making sense, Dermot love,” she said.

  “Wonderful community spirit,” I said, not altogether clear as to what that meant.

  “Well, that’s better. Now what about his studying theology? Do you think he wanted to be a priest?”

  “I took a lot of theology and I didn’t want to be a priest.”

  “Why?”

  “Because it was a fun department, great priests and great lay teachers. They made religion exciting.”

  “That broke all the rules, didn’t it? Any special priest?”

  “Father Bob O’Donovan S.J., a Jesuit who was run out of Ireland. He made God fun.”

  “Well, as you would say, Dermot Michael, maybe he had the right of it.”

  “Most popular teacher on campus.”

  “And himself still alive?”

  “Very much.”

  “Any particular part of Ireland?”

  “Come to think of it, the County Galway.”

  “Give your man a ring on Monday morning and tell him you’re driving up with your Galway wife to pay your respects and thank him for putting up with you.”

  “You think he will be able to explain what made your man tick?”

  “If he’s from me own county, he’ll be able to make up an explanation even if he doesn’t have one now.”

  “I wouldn’t doubt it for a minute.”

  “Dermot,” she ordered, “don’t wait till Monday. Call him now. Maybe we can have lunch with him on Monday.”

  “You don’t want to visit Milwaukee?”

  “I do. Maybe we can visit that great art museum they have up above.”

  I dialed the Marquette number and asked for the direct line to Father Robert O’Donovan. He was the kind of celibate faculty member who worked all day Saturday in his office before he went off to some dorm to say the Saturday Mass for the kids.

  “Bob O’Donovan,” he said briskly, answering on the first ring.

  “Hi, Father, I’m sure you don’t remember me but I’m Dermot Coyne.”

  “Dermot Michael Coyne, if I remember correctly. I always remember the troublemakers.”

  “I just liked to ask tough questions.”

  “Good questions generally, if my memory serves me right … What can I do for you, Dermot?”

  “Well, I’m married now, in fact to a Galway woman.”

  “I read the newspapers and watch television. I know whom you married.”

  “Do you now … Well we were talking about Galway this afternoon and I mentioned that a Galway man protected me from heresy and immediately she wanted to drive up on Monday and meet you because she was certain you were from Connemara.”

  “Clifden.”

  “’Tis strange altogether,” I said, “we have a place up in Rynville.”

  “I’d heard that too … Well, I’d certainly like to meet the fair Nuala Anne, find out what she saw in you.”

  “Doctrinal orthodoxy, I’m sure.”

  “Come into the Student Union, ask for the private dining rooms, and then for Fr. O’Donovan’s room. We’ll see you both then.”

  Me bride could scarcely control her giggles.

  Inside the entrance to the Schloss Stauffenberg, two aged male servants hugged Claus and carried our luggage upstairs. We walked through a big solid oak door and into a parlour that must have been the old Schloss which the new manor house had enclosed. The high walls were covered with armour and weapons and paintings of earlier Count Stauffenbergs, of some of which Claus was a photo-perfect image. The furniture and rugs and lamps which, however, were late Victorian, the latter with electric bulbs. The people in the room, mostly tall and graceful, rose
respectfully when we entered. Claus took over the introductions smoothly.

  “Family and friends,” he said in German with his most gentle charm, “I wish you to meet a new friend I have brought from Heidelberg. He is Irish and you will find him very amusing. He claims, accurately I think, that Irish monks converted our ancestors thirteen hundred years ago. I present,” he went into English, “the Right Honorable Viscount Timothy Ridgewood of Ridgeland. I believe that ‘Sir Timothy’ would be the appropriate mode of address.”

  “Call me Timmy,” I said and then continued in German. “It is a pleasure to visit this historic Schloss, which represents a great tradition of Catholic and German humanism and especially in the company of the son of the house, who is the finest Catholic gentleman I’ve ever met, un chevalier parfait, if you will excuse my using another language.”

  All right it was excessive. At least it would have been excessive back home. Here with these formal but not stiff people, it might just go down.

  It must have, because they applauded—knocking on tables and chairs and any wood available.

  Claus slipped a glass of sweet Rhine wine into my hand.

  “From the Jesuit Garden,” he said.

  I raised the glass, “Prost! And as they say in my native land, ‘God bless this house and all who live in it! And may Brigid, Patrick and Colmcille and Killian bless you when you have to leave it.’”

  The shite was getting so thick that they’d have to shovel it out when I was finished.

  Claus took me around the room and introduced me to his family. I had some blarney for each of them. I noted that, though he was the youngest of the three sons, he was treated with the respect due to the head of the family. Nina, blond, tall, and well proportioned, was not exactly pretty, much less beautiful. But she was striking and would become more so, I thought, with the passage of time—a perfect lady for the perfect knight.

  “Claus has spoken often of you,” I fibbed. “He did not exaggerate your presence and your grace.”

  “Danke, Herr Viscount,” she said lowering her eyes and blushing.

  Then we came to Annalise, the Gothic empress who had distracted my eyes from the moment I had entered the room—a perfect Blanchefleur for Parzifal. Long, pale blond hair, dancing blue eyes, tall, willowy with a flawless body. I wanted to take her into my arms and hold her forever.