Irish Mist: A Nuala Anne McGrail Novel - Hardcover

Greeley, Andrew M.

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0312865694 ISBN 13: 9780312865696

Publisher: Forge, 1999

Synopsis

Asked to sing at an international charity event in Dublin, Nuala Anne McGrail stumbles upon some dark secrets surrounding the assassination of O'Higgins, the man who succeeded Michael Collins, and sets out to bring the truth to light, much to the dismay of her husband, Dermot Michael Coyne. 100,000 first printing.

About this title

About the Author

Andrew M. Greeley, divides his time between teaching at the University of Chicago and the University of Arizona at Tucson.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

1
 
 
“WERE YOU” the fella with whom I slept last night?”
The women opened her eyes and peered at me.
“I was.”
She closed her eyes again.
“How was I?”
“Memorable.”
She snorted derisively, another hint that something was wrong in our relationship.
“’Tis all a mistake,” she sighted, cruling up against me.
“Our sleeping together?”
“No...ourselves going to Ireland.”
It was the first hint that she didn’t think our trip was a frigging brilliant idea—to use her slightly cleaned up words.
“Why?”
“Bad things are happening,” she said, cuddling even closer—as much as a first-class set on an Aer Lingus Airbus 300 permitted.
“To us?”
“Won’t we be involved?”
“The Irish media?”
“Them gobshites!”
My hand, always with a mind of its own where she was concerned, found its way under her loose Marquette University sweatshirt and took possession of a wondrous bare breast. Bars, she had insisted, were not acceptable on long overnight plane flights, a declaration I did not dispute.
She sighed contentedly.
“Anyway,” she continued, “the woman didn’t do it now, did she?”
“Didn’t do what?”
“Didn’t light the fire.”
“Which woman didn’t light what fire?”
“Och, Dermot Michael,” she said somewhat impatiently as, under her blanket, she pushed my hand harder against her breast, “if I were knowing that, wouldn’t I be telling you?”
Here we go again, I told myself.
We were at that stage of transatlantic flight that is much like the old Catholic notion of Purgatory—the minutes seem like hours and the hours like days. The human organism revolts against all the indignities imposed on it in the last seven hours—dry mouth, wet sinuses, aching teeth, the guy across the aisle with a cough like a broaching whale. It will end eventually but only on the day of the final judgment.
My Nuala Anne is, among other things, fey, psychic, a dark one—call it whatever you want. She possesses, though only intermittently, an ability to see and hear things that happened decades ago or are happening now but at some great distance or haven’t happened yet but will. Maybe. My brother George the priest, the only other one in our family to know of my bride’s “interludes,” claims that her ability is a throwback to an earlier age of the evolutionary process when our hominoid ancestors, nor possessing thoraxes suitable for our kind of speech, communicated mentally.
“There’re a few genes likes that around, Little Bro,” he informed me, “but don’t invest in any grain futures because of what she thinks she sees.”
I had stopped investing in the commodities market several years ago, mostly because I wasn’t very good at it.
“It’s weird, George,” I had argued.
“Part of the package,” he said with a shrug.
Easy enough for him to say. He didn’t have to live with her. Nor was he awakened in the middle of the night when she had one of her dreams.
She sat up straight in her seat, dislodging my predatory hand.
“They’re going to shoot the poor man, Dermot Michael,” she whispered, “and himself going to Mass!”
Fortunately, the man across the aisle hacked again, so violently that I thought the plane swayed. His explosion drowned Nuala’s protest.
“Can we do anything?” I asked ineptly.
“Course not,” she replied impatiently. “And ourselves up here in this friggin’ airplane!”
We were getting into trouble again. Whenever my wife had one of her intense spells, it was a sign that we were stumbling towards another strange adventure. Like the time at Mount Carmel Cemetery when she saw that the grave next to my grandparents’ plot was empty1 or the incident on Lake Shore Drive when she heard Confederate prisoners crying out in pain in pain in Camp Douglas at 31st and Cottage Grove—in 1864!
Won’t the woman be the death of ya? the Adversary whispered in my brain.
“Go ’way.” I told him. “That’s part of the package. Besides, your brogue is phony.”
Nuala Anne is quite a package. She’s the kind of woman even women turn around to look at when she walks down the street. She looks like a mythological Irish goddess, though I’ve never seen one of those worthies. They travel in threes, I’m told. Nuala is all three of them.
Drawings of the Celtic women deities, however, hint that they have solemn, frozen, slightly dyspeptic faces, as if they are so displeased with mortals that they will not deign to notice our existence. Nuala’s lovely face with its fine bones and deep blue eyes is in constant movement as emotions chase one another across it like greyhounds headed for the finish line—amusement, mischief, anger, sorrow, hauteur, devilment, fragility, sorrow. Each emotion represents one of the many different women in her complex personality: Nuala the detective, Nuala the woman leprechaun, Nuala the accountant, Nuala the athlete, Nuala the actress, Nuala the singer, Nuala the seducer, Nuala the vulnerable child.
I’m usually one step behind the most recent greyhound as I struggle to keep up with the rapid succession of personae. Her deep blue eyes can shift from tundra to Lake Michigan on the hottest day of the summer in the flick of a lash. And back. Heaven help me if I miss the flick.
She is tall and slender, with long and muscular legs and elegant breasts. Here is a model’s body, a model for athletic wear. She looks great in an evening gown with spaghetti straps but even more striking in tennis shirt and shorts. What she looks like with her clothes off is my business and no one else’s—save that her beauty breaks my heart.
There is an ur-Nuala, I think. Her mask is that of the shy, quiet Irish-speaking country girl from Carraroe (An Cheathru Rua in her native Irish) in the Connemara district of the Country Galway. I love all the Nualas, but I love that one the most.
However, I also love her hopelessly when she’s busy making trouble . Like the day when she showed for the little bishop’s Mass on the dunes at Grand Beach with a red T-shirt that proclaimed in large black letters: “Galway Hooker!”
The little bishop, George the Priest’s boss, was unfazed.
“Have you ever crewed in one of the boat races, Nuala Anne?” he asked. “Am I not correct that the word is based on the Duch houkah, which means ’boat with a long prow’?”
I had not seen that mischievous troublemaker for a long time. Nuala Anne was upset that she was not pregnant. Moreover, for reasons that I could not fathom, she was convinced that she was not a good wife. Unshakably convinced.
The pilot announced that we were an hour from Dublin Airport.
“I suppose I should put on me bra,” she sighed, stirring next to me.
“If you want to.”
“If I don’t, it will just give them friggin’ bitches in the friggin’ media something to bitch about, won’t it now.”
Nuala’s first CD, Nuala Anne, had been a huge success, not bad for a young woman not yet twenty-one. She has a lovely voice, trained first by her mother in their tiny cottage in Galway, then by a teacher at Trinity College, where Nuala had studied accounting , and finally by “Madam,” a legendary voice coach in Chicago. The last named had told us that Nuala was a first rate talent for the pop world, though she would never be an operatic singer. That was fine with both of us.
“Meself a friggin’ diva!” she had exclaimed, as though it were a huge joke.
Her beauty, her charm, her acting ability, and her skill with an Irish harp contributed to her success. She had made the leap from Chicago pubs quickly, too quickly for the media in her native land. One Irish woman writer commented, “Don’t we have too many pretty young Irish singers as it is without an American one trying to join the lot?”
This bit of envy ignored the fact that Nuala had lived in the United States for only a year wheb the first disk appeared.
The second disk was not supposed to be a hit. She insisted that she wanted to record hymns. The recording company grudgingly gave in.Nuala Anne Goes to Church was a combination of pre-Vatican Council hymns(like the May-crowning hymn “Bring Flowers of the Rarest”), spirituals such as “Swing Low, Sweet Chariot,” a few Protestant hymns like “Simple Gifts” and “Amazing Grace,” and some Irish-language religious music. There was nothing very new or very original on it, save for her voice and her devotion. The result was that the disk was a bigger hit that its predecessor, in both Ireland and the United Stated. The Irish critics were furious. How dare someone just out of Trinity become a celebrity so soon and so easily! Their envy, however, did not prevent Irish International Aid, an Irish social action agency, from inviting her to perform at a benefit concert at the Point Theater on the banks of the River Liffey (where Riverdance first appeared).
Naturally, Nuala did not hesitate. Nor did she show the slightest signs of backing off when the Irish papers attacked the concert as soon as it was announced. My Nuala never saw a fight she didn’t like.
I thought the whole idea was crazy, but being a wise husband (in some matters anyway), I kept my mouth shut.
I looked around the first-class cabin (my idea)as she walked towards the washroom. The two other people in first class were sound asleep, as were the cabin attendants. So I followed her.
“What would you be wanting?” she demanded, her face turned away demurely as I pushed in after her.
“To hook your bra, like I always do.”
“All right,” she sighed as she pulled the Marquette sweatshirt over her head.
 I caught my breath, as I always did when I saw her naked to the waist. Making the process as long and leisurely as I could, I assisted her with her black lace bra. She sighed contentedly.
“Are you going to put your sweatshirt back on?” I asked when I had the last hook in place.
“Would it be fun if I walked into the cabin without it?”
“Be my guest!”
She snorted, tied her hair up, and donned again the maroon and gold of Marquette.
I had attended Marquette for two years after I was expelled—for academic reasons—from Notre Dame. However, I had not graduated from Marquette, or anywhere else.
“I thought you might try to fuck me in there, Dermot love,” she said as we slipped back through the aisle to our seats.
“Would you have liked that?”
“Wouldn’t it have been an interesting experience now?”
Blew it again, the Adversary crowed.
Suddenly Nuala stiffened in front of me and then collapsed into my arms.
“It’s so hot, Dermot Michael. Call the fire battalion before we all perish with the heat.”
Gently I guided her to our seats.
“Terrible, terrible hot. We’re all burning up. Our lungs are filled with smoke.”
Then she began to sob softly.
“Is your wife all right, Mr. Coyne?” a cabin attendant asked.
“Bad dream,”
“It’s not a dream,” Nuala insisted when the young woman had returned to the small kitchen where she was preparing breakfast. “It’s really happening.”
|“It’s all right, Nuala Anne,” I insisted. “It’s all right.”
Gradually her sobs subsided.
Shot on the way to Mass. Something like that had really happened in Irish history. Who was it? And when? Lord Edward FitzGerald?
I’d call George from Dublin. He knew everything.
“Haven’t you married a crazy women, Dermot?” she said with a sniffle.
“No,” I said. “I married the finest wife in all the world.”
She snorted again, as if to say. Thanks for the compliment, but you and I know better.”
Actually, I didn’t know better. She was indeed a wonderful wife, fun to be with, glories in bed, undemanding, eager to please me. Too eager. When I complained that she slammed doors and pounded through the apartment like a herd of horses and slammed doors like a security guard, she apologized and walked on tiptoes—making me feel like a heel. I had also protested when she turned her compulsive neatness loose on my desk. “I can’t find a thing,” I growled. Tears sprang to her eyes as she apologized.
It wasn’t that big a deal.
Something was wrong, badly wrong, but I didn’t know what it was.
You’re a lousy husband and a worse lover, the Adversary sneered.
I didn’t answered because I was afraid he might be right.
Yet she certainly seemed satisfied with our lovemaking. She praised my skills in bed. I was the greatest lover in all the world, she insisted—which I knew I wasn’t.
I tried to talk about what our problem might be, and she dismissed me brusquely: “How could anyone have a problem with such a wonderful lover as you, Dermot Micheal?”
Yeah.
They served us our continental breakfast.
“Haven’t I become so much a Yank,” she said, “that I want a much bigger breakfast?”
“Are you a Yank or Mick when the media ask you?”
“Wont I have a good answer for them now?”
“Which meant that she wanted to surprise me, too. Nuala played very few situations by ear. She doubtless had all the answers ready for the catechism that would greet her as soon as we walked out of customs.
“We are now crossing the coast of Ireland just above Galway,” the pilot announced. “You can see Galway Bay through the clouds.”
Her fey interlude forgotten, she climbed over me to look out the window.
“Och, sure, Dermont Michael, isn’t it the most beautiful place in all the world? Isn’t the green brilliant altogether?”
She arranged herself on my lap, a posture I was not about to protest.
“It comes from all the rain.”
“Shush, Dermot love. It’s me home, even if it is a mite
damp...OH! Isn’t that Carraroe down there?”
We had not visited Ireland on our honeymoon. “Haven’t I seen everything there is to see?” she had said, waving her hand in a dismissive gesture that meant only an eejit would suggest such an absurd nation.
“’Tis,“ I said even though I couldn’t see.
“Isn’t it the first time I’ve seen it from the air...Oh, Dermot Michael, isn’t it lovely?”
She wept again, this time at the joy of a brief glimpse of her little village from the air, the village that had been her world before she had left for Trinity College only a couple of years before.
“We should have come back here long ago!” she added.
Being, like I said, a sometimes-wise husband, I did not observe that I had proposed it as a honeymoon stop.
“I can hardly wait to see me ma and me da...Och, Dermot, there’s a great sadness on me!”
More tears. I put my arm around her, eased her back into her seat, and held her close.
“Well,” she murmured, “at least I’m glad you’re along to take care of me on this focking trip to this focking country.”
A change of mind? Not at all, not among a people for whom the principle of contradiction does not apply.
“Haven’t you been taking care of me,” I replied, having learned the proper responses in seven months of marriage, “since we were married?”
“Go ’long wid ya!” she said, patting my arm in approval.
Mostly she had taken care of me. At least she organized everything, though she was always wary for the slightest sign that I might disapprove of her plans for anything from a movie to the furniture for our home across the street from St. Josaphat on Southern Avenue. She also decided that we’d be wise to keep our apartment at the John Hancock Center because it would always be a solid investment. Besides, she liked the swimming pool there better than the one at the East Bank Club.
“More privacy. if you take me meaning, Dermont Micheal.”
I did not disagree.
Her meaning was that we could return to the apartment and make love with less delay ...

About this edition

• Publisher: Forge
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0312865694
• ISBN 13: 9780312865696
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 319