Chapter 1
The day that changed so many lives said hello with a crooked red shamrock. I never thought I’d say that. But I never thought I’d meet the Irish Pirate Queen Grace O’Malley either. As my wife Sara says, life gets weird.
I looked forward to Saturday mornings in the law office. There was no need to pretend you were working hard, especially on a stinking hot summer day. It was already bumping ninety degrees in Boston and the sun had barely dragged itself over the horizon. Even Trumpkin climate change deniers were getting a little worried. Could be a record heat wave, gloated the television weather ghouls. Bostonians do love their records, even ones they boil in. I had driven in before dawn to watch the hazy fireball rise from the Harbor. I wasn’t planning on being in Massachusetts for the end of days. This might be like watching a free preview.
There would be plenty of time today for family history research. Everyone who could escape the city had already left. This was my Saturday ritual now, obsession Sara jokingly called it. Maybe she wasn’t joking any more. But there was a special vibe to doing research in the office. I could look across the water to the dock where my Tiernan ancestors landed in 1883. They probably walked down the street in front of my office, heading to the train that would take them to new lives as railroad and mill workers. Names started to morph into shadowy figures. I could almost see them in the haze. I could hear them. Were they talking to me? Could they have dreamed I’d be looking out my window at them?
It always began the same way -- fire up the desktop wayback machine and light the candle. I hated the candle. But an elderly Irish client, Mrs. Boyle, told me you had to light a candle if you wanted your ancestral spirits to reveal themselves. It showed respect. Did ye’ not learn a feckin’ thing in school? She said it with such conviction that it almost seemed to make sense. But she would also tell me her checks were in the mail and she probably believed that too. People were starting to think I lit the candle to cover up something I didn’t want them to smell. I told Mrs. Boyle that the candle wasn’t working. I wasn’t getting a lot of messages. Maybe I’d offer the spirits a snort of Jameson Green Spot instead. Mrs. Boyle’s husband suggested that. How could the spirits not like the good stuff? Save the candles for power failures, he said. And drink the Jameson yourself if the spirits were indisposed that day.
But Mrs. Boyle wouldn’t give an inch. How did I know it wasn’t working? Spirits aren’t trained seals, you know. If they felt disrespected, they might invite me over the divide to discuss it face-to-face. You’re not ready to take that trip yet, are you? Like everything else in Mrs. Boyle’s world, it was clear. If I wanted to keep my spirit communications long-distance, humor them and keep lighting the candle. I told her I set my wastebasket on fire last week. Good, she said. The spirits responded by turning on your sprinklers. They gave you a sign. But that just didn’t seem to me like something a spirit would do.
So Mrs. Boyle played her ace. If I started a spirit custom and abandoned it, a terrible curse surely would be visited upon me and my family. What kind of curse? She couldn’t say, because nobody had ever dared discontinue a spirit tradition. But it would probably involve eyeballs being plucked out. That was a common spirit curse. They weren’t known for their sense of humor. They were Irish. Seldom forgive, never forget. And spirit traditions are like antibiotics. Once you start taking them, you have to finish the whole bottle. So I kept lighting the candle. Smart lad, she said. A little cheap insurance never hurts. Hedge your bets. It was her own Boyle’s Law.
Her checks never arrived (“damnable postal office”), but Mrs. Boyle taught me how the Irish manage risk. Every blessing is a curse if you look at it from a different angle. It’s usually safe to blame the post office. And have a reliable saint on speed-dial to save your ass if you guess wrong. Even better, an archangel if you can find one accepting new clients. Mrs. Boyle was partial to Gabriel. He could blow his horn and make a problem go away, like Mrs. Boyle said she could make her family go away by playing trumpet as a young girl.
I meant to ask Mrs. Boyle what would happen if you never began observing the spirit custom. Would the curse even know about you? But I never got the chance. She was killed by a falling icicle while sneaking out of Sunday Mass early. Gabriel must have been booked at another gig that morning. There were rows of lighted candles at her wake, an Irish wake. The mourners smoked the traditional clay pipes dipped in poitin. Mr. Boyle laughed, sang and broke into a sprightly jig or two around the table where Mrs. Boyle was laid out. The whiskey flowed as freely as the tears. Good tobacco, better whiskey and the best music. I was pretty sure Mrs. Boyle felt respected.
I’d often stare into the lighted spirit candle. After thirty-four years of legal trench warfare, my own flame was burned out. I’d rather spend time now with dead ancestors than most living people. And I was escaping into the distant past for hours every day now. What was I running away from? It wasn’t always like this. I had great clients along the way, people who did more for me than I could ever do for them. There was the always-smiling Auschwitz survivor who joked that she got her tattoo free before they became fashionable. And the always-scowling Nobel laureate who grew up with nothing, scaled a scientific Everest, and now spent his retirement teaching inner-city kids about math and life. You’d never find people like that humble-bragging on Facebook or polishing their personal brands. They had no time for bullshit. And there were the Mrs. Boyles, for the sheer entertainment. But there were never enough of those people and most of them were gone now. I had been moved to Table One, maybe soon to be called up to the afterlife buffet.
Okay, I wasn’t pulling rotten potatoes out of the ground, like my ancestors did. They didn’t get to spend time trying to find their happy place. A good day was when they had enough to eat. In a lot of years, there weren’t many good days. But their seething determination made my soft life possible. I just didn’t want to become that pathetic old guy who hangs on too long and still thinks he’s still a player. The one everyone laughs at when he’s not around. The one they’re probably laughing at right now.
My law partner Glenn Bradley thought I was crazy. When I lit the candle, he’d chant “Ommmm…,” usually followed by, “Dude, can you spare some weed?” I wasn’t sure why Glenn associated a Hindu mantra with marijuana. It was probably a Republican thing. And Glenn wouldn’t know what to do with a joint if you stuck it in his mouth, lit it for him, and handed him a copy of the Stoner Manual. But Glenn could identify fifty different brands of Scotch, blindfolded and by smell alone. We live in a world of legal specialists.
Glenn and I had been friends for thirty-two years. We met when we were both cannon-fodder associates at big law firms. We were always on opposite sides of a case, but we liked each other from the start. I once joked to Glenn that we’d make better law partners than sparring partners. He looked up and said let’s do it. It was one of the few impulsive things I had ever seen Glenn do. He could spend an hour deciding on a coffee mug. But it sure worked out well for us.
Glenn came from a wealthy, socially prominent Boston family. Not the A-list, but solid A-minus. He had reddish hair, brownish eyes, bluish blood and the athletic build of the star high school football player he once was. Glenn probably always looked like he stepped off the cover of a preppie clothing catalog. But now he was the distinguished patriarch in the back, not the sullen punk fondling the tennis racket in the front. Glenn walked with a slight limp. I could tell it hurt. He said it was an old football injury. They don’t play much football in Vietnam, where he got the limp. You don’t ask a Vietnam vet for details, but sometimes they have chatty clients. Glenn enlisted right out of high school, three days after he turned eighteen, and a few months before the war ended. On his second patrol, he left a safe position to drag an injured boy to safety. The kid panicked and stabbed him in the knee. Glenn pulled him to safety anyway.
Glenn dated attractive women, but never married. I didn’t ask about that either. I knew he gave away big chunks of his inherited money to charities, always anonymously. Guys like Glenn almost give old money a good name. Almost.
That’s not to say Glenn was perfect. He had been a precinct captain for Ronald Reagan. But then, we Catholics once had a Pope in Hitler Youth. You have to forgive mistakes that result from coercion or the developing adolescent brain. And it looked like Glenn was on the road to recovery. He listened to Dylan now and remembered the lyrics. Even Dylan didn’t remember the lyrics. Okay, Glenn still kept an autographed picture of Reagan on his office wall. I figured that was like a recovering alcoholic keeping an empty liquor bottle in view, to remind himself how far he’s come.
I tried to interest Glenn in genealogy and he tried to interest me in Scotch. We each had limited success. I preferred Irish whiskey. It just tastes better. And Glenn’s roots went back to the Mayflower, but he hadn’t done the digging himself. He bought a certificate of ancestry for roughly what it cost to build and outfit the Mayflower. Where’s the fun in that? I told Glenn I thought the Mayflower was a prison ship taking grifters to a penal colony off Long Island. It was blown off course, and the grifters became Boston Brahmins. They married their siblings or pets and started to talk funny. Glenn just looked at me and started chanting “Ommmm…” So I guess we agreed to disagree.
I often wondered if America would have been better off if my people got here first and shot Glenn’s ancestors and their friends as they got off the boat. The Irish wouldn’t have been as trusting as the Native Americans. But I never dwelt long on those thoughts. They took me back to the fifth grade. Sister Mary Catherine, Sister Diabla when she was out of hearing range, said thoughts like that were mortal sins. I had some doubts. No bodies were ever produced.
And as my Irish Grandpa Tom told me on my twelfth birthday, if you’re going to burn in hell anyway, commit the sin and enjoy it, then have yourself a smoke and a drink. Why be a human torch for all eternity for a desire you never even acted on? It seemed to me that there should be some extra penalty for committing the sin after you’ve already sinned rehearsing it. But I didn’t want to discuss that with Sister Diabla. The parochial school Penal Code was etched in stone, and she’d want to know why I was asking.
So I decided to go with Grandpa Tom on that one. He had given me other advice that impressed me as sound, or at least fun. Leave unfulfilled desires to the Methodists.
By 9:30, I had worked through a pile of correspondence. I tried to make some telephone calls, but nobody was answering. Maybe all the phones had melted. My 9:30 appointment called and asked if we could meet by Skype instead. Her car was so hot she thought it might explode if she turned the key in the ignition. So we watched each other sweat for twenty minutes. I did a quick check of my email. Nothing interesting, except one I didn’t understand: “Anxiously awaiting your response, Aedan Burns.” I didn’t know an Aedan Burns. It was probably a Nigerian banking scam. There was a knock on the door and Glenn stuck his head in.
“Good soggy morning to you, Michael. Here’s your mail. And a strange manila envelope that just came for you by courier. What century are you in today? Ommmm…”
“Thanks, Glenn, I didn’t know you were in. And would you please cut the chanting crap? Isn’t there a Spawn of Mayflower meeting you can go to?”
“No, we don’t meet in the summer. Too many of us are in the Hamptons.”
“But not you? Maybe your family were Mayflower stowaways? No, waitstaff.”
“Ah, the always amusing class envy of the downwardly mobile Irish-American.”
“Bet your ass I’m downwardly mobile. I wound up being your law partner, didn’t I? Look, how much do I have to give you to get out of here? Name your price.”
“Nothing. It’s too damn hot. My butt is sticking to my new leather couch. I’m heading up to Montreal to cool off. See you next Friday. You’ve got my cell phone number. Try not to use it. Is there anything else you need to know?”
“Two things. First, that’s a really nice couch. Did the office pay for it?”
“No, it was a gift. A client was having a problem with a business permit violation. I called a
friend at the Enforcement Division and the misunderstanding went away. I think the file did too.
Next thing I know, there’s a leather couch with a smiley face note being delivered to my office.”
“ Glenn, the IRS wouldn’t consider that a gift.”
“That’s because satisfied customers don’t have leather couches delivered to their offices. Hey, I never asked the guy in Enforcement to do anything. He took pity on a hard-working business owner. But it’s too hot to chat about tax law. What was the other thing you wanted to know?”
“It’s a bigger question. How much longer are we going to keep doing this?”
“Doing what? Comparing office furnishings?”
“No, practicing law. We’ve been partners for what, thirty years? And I wouldn’t have wanted to do this with anyone else. But we’ll both be getting Medicare cards in about five years. We’ve changed, Glenn. I’m fried, and I don’t want to drag you down with me. Should we be thinking about an exit plan?”
“Actually, we’ve been together thirty years, three months and thirteen days as of yesterday. I’ve been thinking about it too. We might have to get that plan in place pretty soon.”
“I don’t like the big red flag I just saw. What’s wrong?”
“ I may have an inoperable tumor. They’re still running tests, but it doesn’t look good.”
“ Christ, Glenn, I don’t know what to say. I’m so sorry.”
“Thanks. You don’t have to say anything. Let’s not worry too much until I know for sure. Some heavy hitters are working on my case. But if anything happens to me, keep the couch and don’t tell the IRS how it got here. I have to go now. Montreal beckons.”
He smiled, but it wasn’t really a smile. And he closed the door much too softly on the way out.
Damn it to hell. I switched off the computer and stared into the lighted candle. Let’s play a long shot.
“Okay, Mrs. Boyle, there has to be someone over there you can talk to about this. I swallowed a lot of your blarney and at least a tuition-year of your bills. It’s time to put up or shut up.”
Actually, Michael, she had shut up two years ago. She was dead, remember? You’ve got to keep things like that straight.
Glenn stuck his head back in.
“You know I didn’t mean some of that, right? Unfortunately, the tumor part is real. I’m talking about the other shit.”
“The Irish class envy and downward mobility, that shit?”
“That’s all true. My family saw a lot of it in the servants. It was sad, really. No, it was the part about the Sons of Mayflower vacationing in the Hamptons. We’re Bostonians, Michael. Yankees suck and all that. Nantucket is our summer turf. Give me lobster and a nice white wine, or give me death. Au revoir and stay cool.”
His smile looked a little better, almost genuine.
But I still hurt. I decided to flip through my mail and call it a day. I could use some of that Jameson Green Spot Mr. Boyle swore by. You’re sitting there minding your business, just wallowing in a little self-pity, then life sneaks up behind you and kicks you in the ass. Just tell me what you need, you fucking spirits.
