Gospel (21 page)

“Ah, I told him it was strong,” said Father Keegan.

Lucy and David examined the chalice and David stuck a little finger into the pinkish brew and tasted it. He made a noise like a horse exhaling. “Good God,” David exclaimed.

“Give wine to those in bitter distress,”
quoted the father,
“let them drink and forget their poverty and remember their misery no more!
That, my boy, is the word of the Lord from…”

Lucy helped him. “Proverbs, Father.” She remembered it being printed on an undergraduate Theology Department cocktail party invitation.

Father Keegan was tipsy and extravagant now, mussing David's hair. “Ah David, m'lad, you're a fine Christian boy, you are! Before the war they'd have paid you to be a priest, I tellya. Given you the whole see.”

“I was raised Protestant, Father.”

Lucy felt something inside her sink, her hoped-for union threatened.

“Ah, if ye're Irish ye're an honorary Roman Catholic,” the priest persevered.

Between David and Father Keegan, they managed to get O'Hanrahan, babbling incoherently, to his feet. Lucy opened doors and blew out candles as the men dragged O'Hanrahan to the backseat of Father Keegan's car.

“O'Feagh's B & B, you say?” asked the priest, now winded and swaying unsurely.

“Why don't ye let me drive, Father?” volunteered David. Lucy sat in the back with O'Hanrahan, now snoring again. The father sat in the passenger seat and soon was insensate; David fished the keys out of his frockcoat and started the car.

“Oh, well,” said David, “I'll have to come back to fetch me car tomorrow.” He laughed. “I'll let Patrick pay for a taxi, otherwise he'll never get up to Ballymacross.”

Lucy asked if it was merely a social call, O'Hanrahan going up to Northern Ireland to see David's folks.

“No, Patrick and the old Jew are up to something, but I don't know what. I think Father Keegan knows. He was talking about some sort of deal earlier tonight, but I'm afraid none of this talk meant a thing to me.” As they turned the corner, which revealed the Irish Sea again, David added, “You're a brave girl.”

“How's that?”

“Being so smart,” he said. “Working with Patrick.”

“I'm not working with him yet. But that would be nice one day. He's such a bear, though.”

David waved this aside. “Nah, ye just have to know how to handle him.”

I doubt I'll get the chance, thought Lucy, strangely sad about it.

J
UNE
27
TH

O'Hanrahan met the morning, his water-stained ceiling wavering into focus. Hm, he thought, I'm at Mrs. O'Feagh's Bed & Breakfast. Wonder how I got here? Without moving his head he reached to see if he was wearing his tie … He was. The rabbi, most likely. No, we lost him after Mulligan's. Father Keegan. Could be. Wait. No, Lord, please not the humiliation of
Lucy,
the inescapable St. Lucy, Virgin Martyr, her blessed and all-watchful eyes,
lux eterna!
But yet he had this unrelenting sense that she was somehow there at the chapel …

(Yes, let you remember: drunk again, making a fool of yourself, wasting what brain cells you have left.)

A knock on the door.

O'Hanrahan raised his arm to see what time it was. Couldn't be the maid quite yet. In raising his head to look at the door, he emitted a pained groan.

“Seeya downstairs for breakfast, Dr. O'Hanrahan,” said Lucy through the door.

O'Hanrahan turned his head, right then left, stiffly.
Could
be worse. A hangover around five on the one-to-ten scale. The five cigars back-to-back were simply not called for, he thought judiciously, tasting his breath. Where's that mirror? O'Hanrahan had perfected grooming his white hair to a look of minimum baldness; he could wash, shave, brush his teeth without actually looking directly, irrevocably into the mirror. But today he did look. I see the skull beneath my face, he thought. Don't remind me, don't remind me …

(But you need reminding.)

O'Hanrahan stayed in Mrs. O'Feagh's Bed & Breakfast for the breakfast alone—God knows, like in most of Dublin's hostelries, there was never hot water or a comfortable bed or sufficient heating for the nighttime chill. But Mrs. O'Feagh laid it on the next morning, distinguishing her establishment. He made his way to a table in the breakfast room, like all Irish breakfast rooms, a museum of kitschy knickknacks and 3-D John Kennedy and Pope John Paul cards. He surveyed the other guests: an elderly couple, two loud-talking American guys with backpacks against the wall who were probably doing all of Europe in a month, and some old Irish crone in the corner.

(She's younger than you are, Patrick.)

“Here y'are, sir,” said Mrs. O'Feagh's blemished granddaughter, who slid a plate in front of him and put down a pot of black coffee.

Oh look at it! Two eggs. An extra egg than usual, the way Americans liked it. Two links of proper Irish pork sausage—not that stuffed bread and paper-product roll of sawdust they called a sausage back in Her Majesty's United Kingdom—a slab of thick, cured bacon with the rind still on it, and two disks of black pudding, and a stack of toast and jams and marmalades in a diaspora before him—

“Good morning, Dr. O'Hanrahan.”

With pain, he raised his eyes to meet her.

“Did you have a good sleep?” Lucy asked cheerfully, standing hesitantly before his table.

“What's it to you?”

“Well, I mean that stuff looked so strong you were drinking and you had…”

“So much of it?” O'Hanrahan began rearranging the table before him, pulling the jams and marmalades and even salt and pepper over to his half. “I am well past the point, Miss Dantan, of having to pay for my hangovers the next morning. I have a long-term account. When you're my age they hit you in the afternoon or maybe early evening, by which time…” He poured the rich coffee in a satisfying black arc into his cup. “… one is certainly drinking again. So I never pay for them, if you're wondering.” His Paddy the Priest routine followed: “I'm a runnin' me tab which I'll be a payin' forrrr when the Great Almighty, saints presairve us, calls me to me heavenly home.”

(Might be sooner than you think, Patrick.)

Lucy slipped into the chair across from him, waiting for his objection but he didn't have the energy to make one.

Mrs. O'Feagh's granddaughter returned: “Coffee or tea, miss?”

“Uh, tea, thank you.” And as the granddaughter returned to the kitchen, Lucy asked O'Hanrahan, “How much is the breakfast you have?”

O'Hanrahan: “This is a bed-and-breakfast, Miss Dantan, you've already paid for it.”

Lucy motioned for the young girl, and for once O'Hanrahan inspected Lucy. Same baggy sweater, bug-eye glasses, limp dark red hair hanging in her face in bangs. The granddaughter returned with Lucy's pot of tea and O'Hanrahan took a look at her, too: pale, plump, pimply, the baggy sweater, dark stockings. The Decline of the Irish Maiden.

“Do you have any cereal or bran flakes?” Lucy asked.

“I believe we have Corn Flakes. And we got some porridge, I'm sure. Do you not want the cooked breakfast, miss?”

Lucy whispered, “Well, actually, my stomach's been upset for a while and I think porridge might settle it better.”

The granddaughter went in search of porridge.

“You're surely not,” said O'Hanrahan, his voice an octave lower, ravaged by cigars, “going to eat
gruel
in front of me, are you? Disgusting, chalky Irish porridge?”

“Want me to move to a table over there, sir?”

“I want you to move to a table somewhere in Chicago.”

“When it comes, I'll move.” Lucy then picked up her giant brown handbag from the floor and started rummaging through it. “Now, about that letter from your sister—”

“I said destroy it!”

“Not even curious?” Lucy put it away and asked innocuously, “What's on Rathlin Island, sir?”

He looked lightly stunned, then his face relaxed. “So you've been talking to young McCall, have you?”

Lucy's porridge was set down before her.

“Well?” asked O'Hanrahan.

“Well what?”

“Aren't you going to move thy countenance from mine eyes?”

Lucy gathered up her things. “You're going to see me later anyway.”

If O'Hanrahan had been in possession of a working brain at that hour he would have made his objections to her continued presence, but it was not until David pulled up before the bed-and-breakfast and the waiting O'Hanrahan and Rabbi Hersch, bags at the curbside, that it sank in that Lucy was accompanying them to County Antrim.

“I made up my mind, Patrick,” said David, all smiles. “You can stop your bluster and get in the car.”

After David's further threats to drive off and abandon them, there was a surcease of hostilities as David put everyone's bags in the trunk.

“Shaughnesy will pay for his meddling,” swore O'Hanrahan.

The rabbi pointed a finger at Lucy.
“You,”
he barked, “are in the way more than you know.”

David laughed unconcernedly, but Lucy saw they were genuinely upset. “But can ye blame me?” asked David, giving Lucy a wink. “She's gonna put me up on her sofa for six months back in Chicago, so she might as well see the splendors of Ballymacross.”

Rabbi Hersch and O'Hanrahan grimly shared the back of the sedan and Lucy and David shared the front. The litany of complaints from the backseat gave way to road-punchiness and appreciation of the hilly, rain-soaked countryside around them. After an hour into the trip, a road sign offered a turnoff to Tara in a few miles.

“That's the real Tara?” Lucy wondered.

“As God is my witness,” O'Hanrahan announced in a hokey Southern accent, “I will nevuh sit in the backseat again!”

“Yes,” said David, confirming it was the Druids' famed capital, “the Dark Ages' St. Peter's.”

“Or more properly, Jerusalem,” said the rabbi. “You do know the persistent legend that Jeremiah fled here with the treasures of the Temple, including King David's harp, which is the source of the harp obsession in Irish lore.”

“So I should think of the Covenant,” asked O'Hanrahan intently, “each time I enjoy a Guinness with its harp logo?”

They passed the turnoff to Tara.

“Oooooh saints presairve us…” It was Paddy the Priest again. “To think we pass the very soil trod upon by his blessed feet, St. Padraig of Ireland, me patron and namesake!”

“Tell me a story, Paddy,” said the rabbi.

“Okay. Back in the 400s St. Patrick was brought to Tara to vie for Christianity against the Druids. The king had two houses built and a Druid disciple went into one and Patrick's Christian disciple went to the other, but the Druids cheated a bit because their house was out of green wood, which wouldn't burn easily. Then the king set both houses afire and only the Druid disciple burned to death. So the king was converted.”

“A true Christian m.o. there,” said the rabbi. “They were big on converting Jews before toasting them, too.”

The road passed pleasantly enough, Irish towns to the left and right amid the rolling hills, gray slate villages with steeples and bell towers presenting themselves in the drizzle. Near a roadside there was a lifesize crucifixion scene, a plaster Christ on a one-story cross with the lurid wounds and drops of blood freshly painted in vibrant scarlet.

“Jesus-on-a-stick,” commented O'Hanrahan.

A passing pub sparked another O'Hanrahan monologue. “It's comforting,” he continued, “how among so many of the legends of the Celtic saints booze makes its appearance. St. Brigit discovered one day that there was too little booze in the house when St. Patrick himself came to visit, so that morning she rose from the bath and served Patrick and his attendant churchmen her bathwater, which was so pure and delicious that they thought it truly was the finest beer they ever had tasted.”

“Yum,” said Lucy. “I went to St. Bridget's in Chicago's Bridgeport, by the way.”

“You grew up there?” asked O'Hanrahan. “That explains a lot.”

Past the town of Dundalk, their car met a line with scores of cars.

They had come to the border with Northern Ireland.

“The queues are murder on weekends,” said David as they inched forward to the checkpoint, a mile of cars visible in front of them. Lucy unhappily looked at the pillboxes and teenage soldiers with machine guns, the cement barriers in the road ahead. What was the IRA's newest thing? They'd hijack a car and its passengers, then threaten to kill the driver's family if he or she didn't drive dynamite into the checkpoint, making a human bomb out of some poor innocent.

A van ahead of them was being emptied, and she saw a fat, poorly dressed woman removed from the front seat, a trail of five sickly children streaming out behind her. Catholics. The man was being frisked.