The Healing Place

by Clare Nonhebel

CHAPTER 26

  ‘I don’t know what to do.’

  Rachel was in the front hall with Franz, who was giving her a hug. Ella hung back, not wanting to intrude, then decided to risk it and moved forward to hug both of them. Rachel looked exhausted. She said again, ‘I don’t know what to do now.’

  ‘You go to bed,’ Franz said, ‘and tomorrow – or rather later today – either I will come over, or both of us will come, and collect you. We’ll find somewhere quiet to have lunch and we’ll talk over the past and think about the future. All right?’

  ‘I don’t want to be any trouble to you,’ she said, looking from Franz to Ella.

  ‘You’re not trouble,’ Ella told her. ‘You’re my future sister-in-law and auntie to the baby and I want to get to know you.’

  ‘See?’ Franz said. He gave her another hug. ‘Go and sleep now, if you can. I’ll be back here about midday. That suit you?’

  ‘Yes. Goodnight.’

  ‘Night.’

  It wasn’t night but morning, the sky growing visibly lighter as they drove back to the hotel. They let themselves in the back door and saw there was a light on in the kitchen.

  Mary appeared in the doorway as they walked past.

  ‘Any news?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You’ve come back for a rest, then. You have to, don’t you, in these circumstances? Do you want breakfast or do you need to sleep first?’

  ‘What time is it?’ Franz looked at his watch. ‘Ella, what do you want to do?’

  ‘I’m not hungry – how about you?’

  ‘No, I’m not.’

  ‘We’ll just make a cup of tea in the room,’ Ella told Mary.

  ‘Wait up a few moments; I’ll make you both some cocoa. It’ll help you to sleep.’

  'Thank you, that would be good,’said Franz.

  ‘You go on up. I’ll knock and leave it outside your door for you when it’s done.’

  They went up and kicked off their shoes then sat on the bed fully dressed. Ella pulled the duvet over them and took Franz’s hand. They sat in silence, Ella leaning her head against his shoulder.

  When the knock came at the door, Franz got up and brought in the tray and they sat sipping the cocoa and dunking the biscuits Mary had provided.

  ‘They’re kind people, Mary and Tom,’ Ella said. ‘You found a good place.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Are you okay?’

  He heaved a deep sigh. ‘I feel relieved. Does that sound callous?’

  ‘Do you feel callous?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Then it isn’t. Maybe it feels like something is complete?’

  ‘That’s what it is.’

  ‘You did well, this evening. A good son.’

  ‘I haven’t always been.’

  Ella wanted to say something comforting but felt that it wasn’t comfort he wanted. She waited to see if he wanted to talk any more or to sleep.

  ‘Do you want the last biscuit?’ he asked her.

  ‘You have it. Sister Briege fed me with tea and brack.’

  ‘Did she … tell you anything?’

  ‘Yes. She nursed your mother?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘When was the last time you came back here, since you left Ireland after your mother died?’

  There was silence apart from the crunch.

  ‘I haven’t been back,’ he said finally.

  ‘Since when?’

  ‘Since I left. When I was twenty-two.’

  If she was shocked, she tried not to show it. He hasn’t been back. Until now.

  ‘What does that make me?’ he asked, looking her in the eyes. ‘Not a good son, certainly.’

  ‘Hurt?’

  He shrugged. ‘Hurt, ashamed, guilty.’

  Ella felt he was now allowing her to ask questions but she didn’t know what to ask. There were still too many blanks.

  She said, ‘There isn’t anything you can’t tell me, if you want to. I will still love you, you know.’

  ‘There are things I can’t even tell myself,’ he said roughly.

  ‘Maybe it’s not the right time, then.’

  ‘When, then?’ he said, almost shouting. He slammed the cup down on the bedside table. ‘When I’m on my deathbed? Do I face up to things then? Call in some priest and ask him to give me absolution because I’m frightened to put the lights out in case I see myself?’

  Give me the words, Ella thought, though she wasn’t sure whom she was asking. Maybe Father Francis, if he could hear her now. Or God, if one existed.

  ‘If you feel that bad,’ she said carefully, ‘then the only way I can think of is to get it over with. Tell me now, and start with the worst.’

  ‘The worst is what I did to them,’ he said tonelessly. The anger had gone out of his voice. He sounded subdued, almost lifeless. His hand, held in Ella’s, felt limp.

  ‘To who?’

  ‘My father, Rachel, my mother indirectly.’

  ‘Okay. What did you do?’

  He was silent for so long that she thought he couldn't do this. Then he began to talk, in staccato bursts.

  ‘I knew Rachel wasn’t his,’ he said. ‘He told me. My mother didn’t know whether to believe him or not. I don’t think she did.’

  ‘You believed him?’ Ella prompted, when he fell silent again.

  ‘I did. He never lied to me.’ His shoulders shook. ‘Never lied to anybody. He never denied I was his.’

  ‘Sister Briege said he wasn’t a hypocrite.’

  ‘He wasn’t. He used to say he was worse than that – he was a failure as a Christian, a bad public witness.’

  ‘Did you think that’s what he was?’

  ‘I hated him. Sometimes I hated him.’

  ‘For what he did?’

  ‘For what he didn’t do, I guess. People talked about him – insulted him to his face. The other priests, some of them, treated him like dirt. They preached about forgiveness but I never saw them forgive him. They never forgot or let him forget. For a minute. And he took it.’

  ‘It didn’t break him,’ Ella suggested.

  ‘It nearly did. He nearly left. They moved him away at first, to another part of Mayo. My mother had told him to go, to get on with being a priest. He tried. It was what she wanted. Then he rang up one night, said he couldn’t hack it even if she could; he was leaving and he’d get some kind of a job and we’d live as a family.’

  ‘And your mother didn’t agree?’

  ‘She compromised. She said if he stayed where he was, we’d move. We’d live near him: not on his territory but in a parish not far away – and he could come and see me as often as he wanted. But there was to be no relationship between them and he was to stay as a priest.’

  ‘Was it really what she wanted?’

  ‘I think it was. She used to say he had too much love to give and it was never meant for just us.’

  ‘What did you want?’

  ‘I wanted to turn back the clock and not exist. I wanted them never to have met. There was no possible happy outcome to it.’

  ‘You didn’t want him to leave being a priest and come and live with you, be an ordinary husband and father?’

  ‘It would have been a disaster. He knew it and so did my mother. She needed security. She was someone who liked everything neat – needed it. Everything in its place, meals on time, shoelaces tied – that kind of thing. Obsessive about cleaning the house and arranging every item on its right shelf.’

  ‘And he?’

  ‘He had no concept of time, would stay up all night with somebody then arrive late to say Mass in the morning, unshaven. He never remembered to have his hair cut, hardly remembered to eat, would sleep when he fell down exhausted. He had no concept of money either. If he had it, he’d give it to the first person he met who hadn’t. He swapped his shoes with a tramp in the street and arrived to do hospital visits with the toes open and the heels flapping.’ He chuckled, reluctantly.

  ‘He sounds nice,’ Ella v
entured. ‘Human.’

  ‘He was too human to be a priest. He offended everyone. Everyone except those who thought the sun shone out of his every orifice.’

  ‘Were there many who thought the sun shone out of him?’

  ‘There were some who thought he was some kind of saint and wanted him canonized. The others wanted him crucified.’

  ‘Which one were you?’

  He sighed. ‘Both, at different times. Sometimes both at the same time.’

  ‘How painful for you.’

  ‘It wasn’t exactly a picnic for anyone.’

  He was silent again. Ella waited.

  ‘Did I tell you he knocked out a priest, in the sacristy?’

  ‘No, I don’t think you did.’

  You didn’t tell me anything! Hadn’t he realized, Ella pondered, how little he had told her about himself, over the year and a half she had known him? Wasn’t he conscious of how evasive he had been when she had asked him perfectly normal questions about his history?

  ‘I went to see him,’ Franz said. ‘I must have been eight or nine. No, nine. It was when Rachel’s mother came on the scene. I went to ask him … anyway. I never normally went to the church where he was. We always went to another church. I’d never been in the sacristy – that’s where the priests put on their vestments and prepare for Mass. Only the priests and the altar servers go in there.’

  ‘I don’t know what an altar server is?’

  ‘They’re hordes of little boys – now girls as well – who supposedly help the priest in saying Mass, hand him the wine and water, light candles, ring bells, that kind of thing, with one or two older ones to keep them in order and stop them from making too much of a nuisance of themselves.’

  ‘Were you one?’

  ‘No, I never was. Most of my schoolfriends were. They thought it was cool, when they were young, to dress up in the cassock and so on and go up on the altar and be like a miniature version of the priest.’

  ‘I can see why you wouldn’t want to do that.’

  ‘Exactly.’

  He went quiet again and Ella was afraid she’d said the wrong thing.

  ‘So you went to see him?’ she prompted.

  ‘Yes. I thought it was him saying Mass. It was meant to be. But he was late – again. So late that the other priest had taken over from him. Father George. Groping Georgie, the altar boys used to call him.’

  ‘Oh, shit!’

  ‘He was fairly harmless. Everyone knew about him and took good care not to be alone with him. He’d been warned off by the bishop but, more effective than that, he was laughed at by the kids. They made his life a misery.’

  ‘He deserved it.’

  ‘I suppose he did. Poor old wanker, he couldn’t help himself. He wore a wig.’

  ‘What’s that got to do with it?’

  ‘Nothing. Just, you know. You couldn’t take him too seriously. I certainly didn’t.’

  ‘Did he do anything?’

  ‘I think he might have done, if I’d let him. He didn’t know me. He was getting robed up to say Mass instead of my dad and when I came in he beckoned me over and asked me to lift up his scapular for him.’

  ‘His what?’

  Franz laughed. ‘It's a square of fabric on a cord, worn round the neck by some Catholics as some kind of emblem of devotion, I forget what exactly. He’d got it caught up in the stole – the strip of fabric that goes round the neck, part of the Mass vestments – and he couldn’t reach round to untangle it. So I sorted it out for him and asked him where I could find Father Francis, and he kind of smirked – so I thought he must know who I was. Everyone knew, even when they pretended they didn’t.’

  He stopped. Ella picked up his hand and kissed it. He felt stone cold. Cold as death, she thought. She wondered if Father Francis was yet with his longed-for God.

  ‘What happened then?’ she said gently.

  ‘He said Father Francis was late again and he must rush now because he had to say Mass instead of him. He was obviously in a hurry; people were sitting waiting in the church when I came in, and he’d got the vestments all twisted round and the alb caught up on the belt of his trousers, so he was standing there fumbling around with the alb – don’t ask – which was bunched up around his waist and he was grabbing at the front of his trousers. And my father walked in.’

  ‘Holy shit!’ said Ella, half tempted to laugh, half horrified. ‘What did he say?’

  ‘He said nothing. He thumped him. Knocked him out flat.’

  ‘You’re joking!’

  ‘I wish.’ The corners of his mouth were starting to twitch, though. Ella couldn’t help laughing openly now.

  ‘Then what happened?’

  ‘He said to me, “What did he do to you?” and I said, “Nothing. He was rushing too much and his alb got caught up,” and my father kind of groaned. Then he grabbed a bottle of holy water and chucked the whole contents in Father George’s face. That brought him round.’

  ‘I should think it would!’

  ‘As soon as he’d woken up, my father hauled him to his feet and shoved him into a chair. The man was gibbering, saying he’d done nothing. My father said, “I apologize for hitting you,” and he quietened down a bit. Then my father said, “And if you ever go near this boy again, or any other child, I’ll not only hit you, I’ll kill you with my bare hands.” So that made it worse again.’

  ‘Understandably.’ Ella was still laughing.

  ‘It didn’t seem funny at the time,’ Franz said but he smiled involuntarily.

  ‘So what happened then?’

  ‘Father George started roaring at him. The whole church must have been all ears – all the half dozen old people who attended early Mass every weekday morning.’

  ‘Not too bad, then.’

  ‘Don’t you believe it. It would have been round the whole neighbourhood like lightning, the moment they left the church. They operated their own kind of telegraph system.’

  ‘A gossip factory,’ Ella said, quoting Sister Briege’s words.

  ‘Absolutely. Father George shouted that he knew and the whole world knew that I was Francis’ son and how he had the nerve to call himself a priest, he’d never know, going out on that altar and desecrating every holy vessel he touched with his contaminated hands that had defiled a traveller woman and begotten a bastard child and now conceived another one into the bargain – by a black woman this time.’

  ‘Jesus wept!’

  ‘I’m sure he did,’ Franz said simply. ‘So did I.’

  ‘That’s just terrible, Franz. Poor little boy!’

  He shrugged. ‘It wasn’t untypical. I’d heard it all many times before – just the part about Rachel was recent.’

  ‘What happened then?’

  ‘My father said to him, very quietly, “Fathering children is a far cry from molesting them, and if the bishop won’t put a stop to your indecencies, I pray that God will.”

  ‘Then he frogmarched him out into the church – on to the altar – and said to the people there, “Neither one of us is in any fit state to say Mass this morning, as you will have gathered by now. I ask you all to go home quietly and pray for forgiveness for both of us, and may God deal with us as he sees fit.”’

  ‘Wow. And how did God deal with them – Father George and your father?’

  ‘The bishop reassigned Father George to work in the home for retired priests in the wilds of County Offaly, which was tantamount to being buried alive, and he sent my father to be dogsbody for one of the fiercest and most heavy-drinking priests in the diocese, a Father Eamonn, in a parish serving one of the most dangerous inner-city housing estates in the republic.’

  ‘And what happened to you in the church, after your father said all that from the altar? Did he talk to you?’

  ‘He tried to. I called him a hypocrite, said I didn’t believe him about that woman not being pregnant by him – he’d said 'fathering children' not 'a child.' I said I never wanted to see him again as long as
I lived.’

  ‘So the family didn’t go with him, when he went to live in the inner city parish?’

  ‘Not to start with. He said it wasn’t an area he wanted his son to grow up in. But in the end we did go and live there, yes.’

  ‘He changed his mind, or your mother insisted?’

  ‘I insisted.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘I missed him.’

  Ella lifted the edge of her long sleeve and wiped the tears that rolled out of his eyes.

  ‘I’m not surprised,’ she said tenderly.

  She turned out the bedside light. There was no need for it now. Daylight was streaming through the thin fabric of the closed curtains, banishing the last remains of the night.

  ‘Lie down,’ she whispered.

  Still clothed, they slid down the bed and lay hand in hand till at some point sleep put out the light.