Exclusive Read online

  I asked Marsha to drop me off at Owenvarragh Park. If anyone could find a high-ranking American on his day off, it was Suzie McBreeze.

  Her house was unlocked. But nobody was there.

  Peter King, I remembered, was making an appearance at Milltown Cemetery.

  I plopped on the couch, glad to feel no lumps. The first time Mulvaney left me, I had said I hoped that he would rot in a foreign prison. But I didn't mean it. I didn't imagine him on a dirt floor surrounded by rats, or even transvestites. I hadn't wished interrogators or torturers on him. All I did was whisper that Mulvaney was the kind of guy who should be locked up. And now, here I was in a small house off the Andersonstown Road about to search the Belfast yellow pages for a human rights specialist.

  I got up and dialed Pier 92 instead. Easier to find an Irish lawyer in Rockaway. As a waiter answered, I heard Suzie on the front steps and held the door open for her. Without blinking, she clumped past me into the living room and turned on a Dynasty rerun, an attempt, I assumed, to assuage her political sorrows.

  “Yer woman Crystal . . . ach aye . . . her heart is true,” she said, dabbing her eyes with a Kleenex.

  I couldn't stand it.

  A bottle of tonic sat on a faded patch of carpet remnant. Next to it stood the white canvas bag Suzie had taken to Mother's Night at the Felons Club.

  I finished the call and sat down again, next to her, hoping a momentary lack of drama might help me think. Then I felt the couch go hard.

  Damn it. The guns were still there. Was that why they had arrested Mulvaney?

  She took two glasses from a small side table, poured tonic, dipped the glass into her white bag.

  “Single or double?” she asked.

  “Suzie! This is your house!” She nodded, handed me the glass, and I gulped. “Gin is one thing you don't have tohide.”

  “Ach aye.” She laughed. Without taking her eyes off John Forsythe, she lifted the liquor bottle from her bar bag and set it next to the tonic, a Belfast still life on that dreadful carpet. “Living with deception becomes habitual,” she said casually, still not looking me in the eye.

  “Suzie, why do you do it?”

  “Shh, it's the good part.”

  I threw my glass on the floor.

  Surprised, she looked at me.

  “Suzie, they arrested Mulvaney.”

  She stood and flipped the television off. “They lifted our Jim? Whatever fer?”

  I stood, too, and looked back at the couch. “You probably know better than I do.”

  A ray of light shot through the door.

  Suzie's daughters. “Mummy, we want our tea,” Bridget squeaked.

  Suzie put down her glass. “Our Jim's been lifted.”

  The girls stopped, turned, and went solemnly to their rooms. A drill they'd rehearsed. The floor banged. The noise was softer than soldiers throwing mattresses but just as purposeful. I heard a loud snap, the clasp of a hard suitcase.

  Suzie looked me up and down and straight in the eye. “I was not stupid,” she said, then marched toward her kitchen. “After the Brits came, I got rid of them.”

  She returned with a knife and slit the couch. “There aren't any there,” she said calmly.

  Like Armagh Prison and the Alleged Cousin, like Gerry Adams and Danny Morrison, like Xanti and Amalia, like Ian Paisley, I tried to tally up Suzie.

  Like Mulvaney, too.

  She was a gunrunner who accepted dole checks from the very people she plotted to overthrow. If she was not on the run herself, it was only because she hadn't been caught. Even her own comrades had to put up with her shenanigans. Suzie was a Provo who wouldn't even buy a shot of Provo gin.

  But she had taken in Mulvaney, not knowing if she'd get anything out of him. She knew he would write stories. But what kind of stories? She did not insist he take her side. Suzie believed it was more important to make sure the story was told than to direct it herself. And she'd recognized the tenuous connections between my mother's life and her own, not an easy leap across cultures and decades.

  Now she put the knife down, ran upstairs, checked her daughters, ran down again with four identical gift boxes, one piled atop another. She opened one and showed me the electric blanket inside.

  “Jimmy Mulvenna brought these to us when he moved in. But we couldna get used to 'em. Too many years cold.”

  She looked me in the eye again. “Fer sure someone wanted to teach yer Jim a lesson.”

  “Hundreds of people,” I agreed.

  “Mebbe thousands,” Suzie said, her own eyes dancing a jig. “But not me.”

  It was after six, very dark. Rain, the pouring rain that should have fallen in Northern Ireland all along, finally streamed down. In the kitchen the mahogany cabinet was askew. Past it, in Mulvaney's room, still a mess, the garbage heap lay intact under his bed. I heard the door slam shut; Suzie and the girls were gone. In the hallway the phone rang. I hadn't seen the doctor's bag. He was going to have a hard time being a doctor without it.

  I ran back out.

  “Unfortunately the princess phone in Mulvaney's cell does not take international calls.” Claire's voice prickled over the line. I could hear the Gloomroom's other telephones ringing off its desks. “The PR man in the Northern Ireland office was ever so helpful when he explained that they arrested Mulvaney after he helped his wife sneak into Armagh Prison.”

  Silence.

  “Can't you even go on an unauthorized vacation without getting into trouble? They searched his room. About that, though, they are not talking.”

  I looked at the front door and now saw that the lock had been broken. The Brits must have been here while Suzie was at the IRA funeral.

  “Leisure Suit says he'll never let a foreign correspondent out of Suffolk County again.”

  I hung up the phone and screamed.

  Is this the secret to Mulvaney's success?

  That people take one look at him and expect him to misbehave?

  Then, when he does, they congratulate themselves on their insight.

  What they really want to hear, though, is that he was the kid who got detention.

  When Mulvaney's parents moved from Queens to Garden City, they believed it would be the Real Long Island. Or what Long Island wanted to be anyway. White and Planned.

  Mulvaney, though, was White and Unplanned. It wasn't long before he convinced his numerous new friends to take the golf carts at the country club joyriding at three a.m. They ruined the greens.

  “Good practice for driver's ed,” he explained.

  The first time he went to college, he got kicked out.

  It was only Thomas Pynchon—as hard as this is to believe—that got him back in. But I have finally identified it as a true-true Mulvaney tale. Well, it's as true-true as a Mulvaney tale gets.

  “I told you you needed more about my childhood,” he says.

  As for me, I just let everyone think that I really did kill my kindergarten teacher.

  CHAPTER 35

  How Many People Does It Take to Free a Mulvaney?

  My mother walked off the plane at Aldergrove, waving an aging paperback copy of Leon Uris's Exodus. Her other hand was hooked through the elbow of a fellow traveler, a weary Protestant businessman.

  “The Brits did the same thing in Palestine,” my mother said, shaking the book in his face as she hunched her shoulders to keep her large psychedelic carry-on from slipping off.

  Carefully, as if she herself were a bomb set to detonate Belfast, the man extricated himself from her hold and scooted away. My mother shrugged and threw her arms around me. “You didn't think I was going to have you spring poor Jim Mulvaney all by yourself?”

  “How's Dad?”

  Suddenly her Peter Max bag leaped, as if by itself, off her shoulder.

  “Asta,” she explained. “As you remember, she loves Jim Mulvaney.”

  My mother had now smuggled a dog into Northern Ireland.

  “Why didn't you just declare her?” Why didn't she just leave her h
ome?

  “Too inconvenient,” my mother said. “In rabies-free Northern Ireland, all newcomer dogs must be quarantined for six months. She'll be fine. She's on Valium. Just needs another dose.”

  Peaceable mutts? Here? The bigger question was could we do a prisoner swap? Queen Asta for Mulvaney?

  “Maybe she'll sleep through the Europa,” I said, as my mother's bag yelped drowsily.

  “It was very comfortable last time,” my mother assured me. “Particularly for a hotel under siege.”

  While my mother unpacked her dog, I went to the hotel bar, where I found the Real Mulvaney drinking a martini and chatting up the cocktail waitress. He had flown into Dublin, driven north on what was for him the wrong side of the road, and now, in the thick of happy hour in Belfast, an oxymoron if ever there was one, he looked as if he had never left Pier 92.

  “Gin and tonic,” I said as I climbed onto the stool next to his.

  I spotted my mother on the staircase, Queen Opium Bow-Wow resting comfortably, and illegally, in her arms for all of Northern Ireland to see.

  As they made their way to the bar, the Real Mulvaney bent his head in deference to the royal couple, then took my mother's hand and kissed it.

  “My machetunim!” he declared. His Yiddish was as imprecise as his assumption. One female in-law: machetayneste. For machetunim, in Felshtin at least, you needed two or more. Dogs don't count.

  “She is no such thing!” I said to the Real Mulvaney, spilling gin on my Paris sweater.

  Mulvaney couldn't even get arrested without convening a family reunion. Mine—and his. Didn't most people become foreign correspondents to get away from their relatives?

  Queen Asta, suddenly aroused, yelped, jumped, and ran, dashing my hopes she'd remain drugged forever. My mother ran after her. I ran after my mother. Losing track of Ida Fischkin in Belfast was not, as I'd learned the last time, a good idea. The Real Mulvaney watched from the archway of the bar, looking as if he knew the truth. We could need counsel for the dog, too.

  At the registration desk, Queen Asta jumped between two men in American trench coats, one tall, the other short, and barked a chorus. Startled, one of the men turned, bent to pet the dog. As his coat fell open, I spotted a white carnation.

  “Gary Ackerman!” I said over the mutt's yelps. “You've come to free Mulvaney.”

  He twisted his face into a sardonic grin. “Actually, I was hoping to bring peace to Northern Ireland.”

  “Very funny,” said the taller man, Peter King. Ecstatic, Queen Asta jumped into his arms and licked his face. So the mutt was a Republican. It figured. As the dog slavered, the Real Mulvaney bounced out from the bar archway and into the arms of both politicians. All of them, including the dog, congratulated one another, as if the true heroes of the Irish Revolution had come home.

  “Your son was supposed to introduce me to Ian Paisley,” Gary Ackerman complained.

  The Real Mulvaney nodded. “Who says he won't?”

  “Paisley loves Mulvaney,” King agreed. “He says Mulvaney's the only American who has ever written fairly about the Prods.”

  This, I hoped, was not their entire defense. It wasn't even true. “This is between Mulvaney and the Brits,” I reminded them. “Who cares what Ian Paisley thinks?”

  “We might,” said Peter King, Long Island's most prominent Irish Republican.

  My husband is morose. This is worse than having him under arrest. “Where are you heading with this?” he asks. “The book needs closure.”

  Before I became a fiction writer, he never used words like “closure.” “We are working up to some core ideas,” I say. “Truth is the sum of many fragmented but necessary small truths—and small lies. How they all work together is an individual truth.”

  “Don't make this a self-help book.”

  “Mulvaney,” I say. “No one would ever accuse it of that. But the individual truth of this book is that no story is ever your own story. Every story you tell is someone else's story. True-true doesn't exist.”

  “The book is over, then,” he says.

  “The book is never over. This may be a book about a simple romance. But no romance is ever simple. They all begin like this. And none of them ever end.”

  I have, I realize, just committed to writing a sequel.

  CHAPTER 36

  Not Without Me

  Nobody was bombing the Europa. But I still couldn't sleep.

  “You should take a Valium,” my mother offered.

  We wouldn't be able to see Mulvaney until the following morning. I examined my roommates. My mother and her dog.

  “Hand them over,” I agreed.

  As she did, Queen Asta emitted a growl so filled with long-standing animosity that I popped two.

  “I don't know what to do with Mulvaney,” I said to myself.

  “You may see,” my mother commented, “that you have no choice except to marry him. It may regularize his situation.”

  “A steamroller might regularize his situation.”

  She pulled down the blanket on her side of the bed.

  “Mother, you always said it would kill you if I didn't marry someone Jewish.”

  “People become Jewish,” my mother said, not for the first time.

  She still did not comprehend the worldwide havoc that would ensue if Mulvaney, who already believed he was chosen by God, converted. Then he'd have five-thousand-plus years of history to back up his overblown opinion of himself.

  “He's perfect for you,” she said. “You are two equally contentious, difficult, and occasionally delightful human beings, although he is more often delightful than you are.” She tucked the yawning Queen Asta between us. I lifted the mutt and moved it closer to her.

  I yawned now, too. “I can't marry him when he's under arrest.”

  “You can do anything you set your mind to do, dear,” my mother said.

  I hadn't meant to oversleep on the morning we were going to free Mulvaney. The fire alarms woke me. Then the phone. My mother was nowhere to be seen.

  “Hiya, toots!”

  “Daddy?” I muttered through the clanging. “Where are you?”

  “Downstairs.”

  Was this a dream, or a nightmare?

  Or worse.

  Machetunim.

  “I'm having an Ulster Fry with Pete and Gary!”

  Eggs, bacon, sausage, and fried soda bread. A meal that should come with your own Christiaan Barnard.

  “Delicious!” my father reported.

  I sat up in bed.

  “Pete King tried to tell me it was kosher, but I know a charming liar when I see one.”

  I asked my father why he was in Belfast.

  “Barbara, I'm surprised you would ask. Who sprung me when I needed him?” My father said he would have come even sooner if it hadn't been “Take a Chance on Saturday Nite.” “Now get down here or you'll miss Long Kesh Prison.”

  Did he think he was on a European bus tour for Jewish senior citizens?

  I ran out the front door of the chaotic hotel just as my parents, Queen Asta, Gary Ackerman, Peter King, and the Real Mulvaney were getting into a taxi. Safe in the commodious back, I pulled down a stool, breathed in the comforting smell of my father's Phillies Panatelas, kissed him, and glared at my mother.

  “Nice try, Mom,” I said. “You should have used more Valium.”

  “It was for your own good, dear,” my mother replied. “Just don't mess anything up by talking.”

  “Mother, I happen to have a bit more experience than you do when it comes to Northern Irish prisons.”

  “And if you hadn't insisted on doing that story, Jim Mulvaney wouldn't be where he is right now. I don't know why you couldn't have been happy interviewing that perfectly nice carousel man.”

  How did she know about that?

  More important, how long could I keep up a romance with a man in prison? In Albany—when I'd run out of incarcerated senior citizens for my “After Sixty” column—I'd interviewed women who did that, the
ones who took buses to the Greene County State Penitentiary twice a month, comparing love letters along the way. Most of them were disenfranchised, woebegone individuals, wives and girlfriends of tinkers or the American equivalent, women who only fell for difficult men.

  But at least those difficult men wrote love letters.

  I couldn't imagine Mulvaney writing me a love letter from prison. More likely he'd write stories for Newsday about his experience in Long Kesh and expect me, or my mother, to read between the lines and surmise that he needed me.

  Gary Ackerman turned from his front seat. “How is the egg mayonnaise here?” he asked, changing the subject just in time.

  “The best thing you can say about Northern Ireland's egg mayonnaise,” I announced, “is that no one in Long Kesh Prison ever pined for it.”

  The car went silent. I put my hand over my mouth. Soon we might know if that was true.

  “But that's just my opinion,” I added hastily.

  My mother snorted. “My Barbara's opinions shift like the wind. It's because she doesn't have a stable relationship.”

  “We're not going to Long Kesh,” Ackerman said, as if he were surprised I hadn't figured this out. “They are holding him in Stormont Castle.”

  “Is that good?” I asked. I knew it was. Still, Mulvaney and turrets would not mix well.

  “At Stormont, this won't be a real day in court. It will look more like a political negotiation, an international insult, an affront to America and its citizens abroad. At Long Kesh, it would be a bail hearing.”

  Feeling every bump in the road, I held on tight to my fold-up stool. Across from me, the Real Mulvaney, in a fedora, jotted notes on a yellow legal pad. Finally I could envision the Real Mulvaney as a real attorney. I'd known he'd been a prosecutor and a defense lawyer. But I'd never actually seen him in a courtroom, or a law office. Only on a barstool.

  He put down his legal pad and looked me in the eye. His were brown. “Just let Pete and Gary do the talking. If there's anything you want to add, say you need to speak to your attorney outside.”