by Various
‘These are the prints of Jeremiah Fagan,’ the officer said at my interview, pushing a piece of paper across the counter. ‘Here’s his address and his details. They might be out of date – this was filed twenty-odd years ago.’
‘It’s a firearms application,’ I said, with disbelief, and I saw that the date on it was the year I was born.
‘And you can see it was approved. He had a license to carry a Class A firearm.’
‘My father carried a gun?’
‘This is your father?’
To identify myself I had shown him my driver’s license, where I was Lawrence Hope.
‘I think my father changed his name.’
‘No, he didn’t. That would have come up in the search. A name change would have invalidated the gun license.’
‘Why would he want to carry a gun?’
‘There’s his reason on the application,’ the sergeant said. ‘Line five. “Personal protection”. If you want a copy it’s two dollars.’
I sat in a coffee shop studying the application, trying to fit the new name to my father’s face, reflecting on the date of the document, which was so near to my birthday; and at last I examined my father’s home address, 600 Harrison Avenue.
Harrison Avenue is one of Boston’s major thoroughfares – long and lined with important buildings, running south from Chinatown almost to Malcolm X Boulevard, which suggests the racial diversity of its residents. But where my father’s house should have stood there was an imposing brick building that looked more like a school than an apartment house. Walking around it I saw, looming behind it, the granite steeples of the Cathedral of the Holy Cross.
The address I had was not a school at all, but the cathedral rectory. I knocked. A woman in an apron answered and said that the priests were either busy or away, and that if I wanted to talk to one I would need to make an appointment.
I said, ‘Tell me, who is the oldest priest here?’
‘That would be Monsignor Bracken.’
‘Is he about sixty-five or seventy?’
‘Could be.’
‘May I leave him a note?’
The woman agreed, and helped by offering me a piece of paper. I wrote that I hoped that I might meet Monsignor Bracken at his convenience the following Sunday, before he said Mass (as the schedule indicated) at one of the side altars of the Cathedral.
Although I wrote my name and telephone number on the note I did not receive a reply. After some days of speculation, I was eager to find out the truth. On the Sunday, I stopped at the rectory at nine and was met by a young priest. I said that I was there to see Monsignor Bracken.
‘Do you have an appointment?’
‘I left a message for him.’
‘Just a moment.’
He left me standing in the foyer, in the odor of candlewax and incense and starched linen and furniture polish. I heard what sounded like a complaint from a few rooms away, and then the young priest returned.
‘You can go through,’ he said. ‘Second door on your left.’
The old priest, Monsignor Bracken, was seated in an armchair and looking like a plump pink granny with tangled hair, a frilly blouse over his sloping stomach, and a shawl around his neck – vestments, of course, and his cassock like a gown.
He welcomed me – ‘Take a seat’ – but was so abrupt I felt I had intruded upon him. And perhaps I had. In his lap, there was a sheet of paper, obviously something he was studying, with words in large letters, the sort of typeface that aids a public speaker.
‘I’m sorry to bother you, monsignor.’
He looked troubled, as though I’d ambushed him and might have a serious problem to raise. But he cautioned me in a kindly way, ‘I don’t have a great deal of time. I’m saying Mass at ten. Might we meet afterwards in the sacristy?’
‘Just a simple question.’
‘What is it, my son?’
‘I am inquiring about a man named Jeremiah Fagan.’
He made a disgusted face and at the same time gripped the arms of his chair with his plump hands, his fingers growing pale with the pressure of his grip, and for a moment from the sour way he twisted his lips I thought he was going to spit.
‘What of him?’
‘Am I right in thinking he once lived here?’
‘Father Fagan was a disgrace, an immoral man, one of the priests that did violence to the reputation of the Church. I don’t want to hear about him. Now please leave me in peace.’
‘May I ask in what way immoral?’
Monsignor Bracken rose from his chair as a way of urging me to get up, and he directed me to the door using his big bumping belly, the skirts of his cassock whirling as he hurried forward, all this motion like an elaborate gesture of rejection.
‘Yes, he was a priest here, but he sinned – grievously. And he tainted others with his immorality. It was a great scandal. But he will have to explain that to Almighty God.’
‘He died recently.’
‘Then he is in hell,’ the monsignor said, and outstretched his arms to shoo me away, as you would a pestering hound. ‘That’s all you need to know. We will never forgive him for the damage he did. Now go.’
The young priest who had let me in must have heard some of this, because he looked fussed but said nothing, only snatched open the rectory door and shut it as soon as I stepped over the threshold, ejecting me.
Father Fagan: I wanted to know more. I lingered, trying to make connections, and to calm myself I walked around the corner to the Cathedral, and entered, glad for a place to sit. It was so easy to see my father as a priest – he had the temperament, the piety, the humility – but what was the scandal? I hated to think that he had trifled with small boys, as many of the priests in Boston had done. But Monsignor Bracken had been so angry, damning him as immoral, it was possible that he’d been one of those predatory priests.
The tinkle of bells from a side altar distracted me from these confused thoughts, and I saw emerging from an adjacent door Monsignor Bracken, in a little procession, two women by his side, their eyes downcast. I crept towards them and took a seat at the back, near a pillar, where I could not easily be seen – nor could I see the action at the altar. Though my father seldom went to church, he had always encouraged me to attend Mass, but I had not been good about it. I was so out of touch, I was surprised to see women serving the water and wine, helping with the communion hosts, where I had been used to seeing altar boys.
I heard the Mass being said, Monsignor Bracken speaking in his liturgical singsong, and the serving women’s responses, echoed by the muttering people in the pews.
And after a while the monsignor ascended the pulpit, he cleared his throat, and when he began to speak, at first slowly, glowing with confidence, as though inspired, I heard my father’s voice, my father’s wisdom, one of his sermons, with the dialogue he loved, Peter asking Jesus, ‘What if my brother sins against me seven times?’ and Jesus saying, ‘I do not say to you seven times, but seventy times seven.’ And Monsignor Bracken was emphatic in uttering the numbers, making it plain that there was no limit in forgiving someone.
It was as though my father was at that altar, in that pulpit, offering a message of compassion, speaking through that priest.
With his name I was able to find his story in the Boston newspapers, how Father Fagan had been surprised in a motel with a nun, a Sister of Charity, named Sister Constance; the investigation into their behavior, the violent threats against them, how they’d vanished together, and been denounced; how they had stayed in hiding, undetected, and ultimately their scandal was overtaken by the greater one of the pedophile priests.
But they had remained in the Boston area. I found their marriage certificate, on file in Boston City Hall, with their proper names on it – the marriage had taken place six months before I was born – and at last more papers, a house full of them, the sermons, the homilies, the gentle words of love and forgiveness my father had written under a pen name for the priests who had condemned him.
COLM TÓIBÍN
SILENCE
34 DVG, January 23d, 1894
Another incident – ‘subject’ – related to me by Lady G. was that of the eminent London clergyman who on the Dover-to-Calais steamer, starting on his wedding tour, picked up on the deck a letter addressed to his wife, while she was below, and finding it to be from an old lover, and very ardent (an engagement – a rupture, a relation, in short), of which he never had been told, took the line of sending her, from Paris, straight back to her parents – without having touched her – on the ground that he had been deceived. He ended, subsequently, by taking her back into his house to live, but never lived with her as his wife. There is a drama in the various things, for her, to which that situation – that night in Paris – might have led. Her immediate surrender to some one else, etc. etc. etc.
From The Notebooks of Henry James
SOMETIMES WHEN THE evening had almost ended, Lady Gregory would catch someone’s eye for a moment and that would be enough to make her remember. At those tables in the great city she knew not ever to talk about herself, or complain about anything such as the heat, or the dullness of the season, or the antics of an actress; she knew not to babble about banalities, or laugh at things that were not very funny. She focused instead with as much force and care as she could on the gentleman beside her and asked him questions and then listened with attention to the answers. Listening took more work than talking; she made sure that her companion knew, from the sympathy and sharp light in her eyes, how intelligent she was, and how quietly powerful and deep.
She would suffer only when she left the company. In the carriage on the way home she would stare into the dark, knowing that what had happened in those years would not come back, that memories were no use, that there was nothing ahead except darkness. And on the bad nights, after evenings when there had been too much gaiety and brightness, she often wondered if there was a difference between her life now and the years stretching to eternity that she would spend in the grave.
She would write out a list and the writing itself would make her smile. Things to live for. Her son Robert would always come first, and then some of her sisters. She often thought of erasing one or two of them, and maybe one brother, but no more than one. And then Coole Park, the house in Ireland her husband had left her, or at least left their son, and to which she could return when she wished. She thought of the trees she had planted at Coole, she often dreamed of going back there to study the slow progress of things as the winter gave way to spring, or autumn came. And there were books and paintings and how light came into a high room as she pulled the shutters back in the morning. She would add these also to the list.
Below the list each time was blank paper. It was easy to fill the blank spaces with another list. A list of grim facts led by a single inescapable thought – that love had eluded her, that love would not come back, that she was alone and she would have to make the best of being alone.
On this particular evening, she crumpled the piece of paper in her hand before she stood up and made her way to the bedroom and prepared for the night. She was glad, or almost glad, that there would be no more outings that week, that no London hostess had the need for a dowager from Ireland at her table for the moment. A woman known for her listening skills and her keen intelligence had her uses, she thought, but not every night of the week.
She had liked being married; she had enjoyed being noticed as the young wife of an old man, had known the effect her quiet gaze could have on friends of her husband’s who thought she might be dull because she was not pretty. She had let them know, carefully, tactfully, keeping her voice low, that she was someone on whom nothing was lost. She had read all the latest books and she chose her words slowly when she came to discuss them. She did not want to appear clever. She made sure that she was silent without seeming shy, polite and reserved without seeming intimidated. She had no natural grace and she made up for this by having no empty opinions. She took the view that it was a mistake for a woman with her looks ever to show her teeth. In any case, she disliked laughter and preferred to smile using her eyes.
She disliked her husband only when he came to her at night in those first months; his fumbling and panting, his eager hands and his sour breath, gave her a sense that daylight and many layers of clothing and servants and large furnished rooms and chatter about politics or paintings were ways to distract people from feeling a revulsion towards each other.
There were times when she saw him in the distance or had occasion to glance at his face in repose when she viewed him as someone who had merely on a whim or a sudden need rescued her or captured her. He was too old to know her, he had seen too much and lived too long to allow anything new, such as a wife thirty-five years his junior, to enter his orbit. In the night, in those early months, as she tried to move towards him to embrace him fully, to offer herself to his dried-up spirit, she found that he was happier obsessively fondling certain parts of her body in the dark as though he were trying to find something he had mislaid. And thus as she attempted to please him, she also tried to make sure that, when he was finished, she would be able gently to turn away from him and face the dark alone as he slept and snored. She longed to wake in the morning and not have to look at his face too closely, his half-opened mouth, his stubbled cheeks, his grey whiskers, his wrinkled skin.
All over London, she thought, in the hours after midnight in rooms with curtains drawn, silence was broken by grunts and groans and sighs. It was lucky, she knew, that it was all done in secret, lucky also that no matter how much they talked of love or faithfulness or the unity of man and wife, no one would ever realise how apart people were in these hours, how deeply and singly themselves, how thoughts came that could never be shared or whispered or made known in any way. This was marriage, she thought, and it was her job to be calm about it. There were times when the grim, dull truth of it made her smile.
Nonetheless, there was in the day almost an excitement about being the wife of Sir William Gregory, of having a role to play in the world. He had been lonely, that much was clear. He had married her because he had been lonely. He longed to travel and he enjoyed the idea now that she would arrange his clothes and listen to him talk. They could enter dining rooms together as others did, rooms in which an elderly man alone would have appeared out of place, too sad somehow.
And because he knew his way around the world – he had been governor of Ceylon, among other things – he had many old friends and associates, was oddly popular and dependable and cultured and well informed and almost amusing in company. Once they arrived in Cairo therefore, it was natural that they would stay in the same hotel as the young poet Wilfrid Scawen Blunt and his grand wife, that the two couples would dine together and find each other interesting as they discussed poetry lightly and then, as things began to change, argued politics with growing intensity and seriousness.
Wilfrid Scawen Blunt. As she lay in the bed with the light out, Lady Gregory smiled at the thought that she would not need ever to write his name down on any list. His name belonged elsewhere; it was a name she might breathe on glass or whisper to herself when things were harder than she had ever imagined that anything could become. It was a name that might have been etched on her heart if she believed in such things.
His fingers were long and beautiful; even his fingernails had a glow of health; his hair was shiny, his teeth white. And his eyes brightened as he spoke; thinking made him smile and when he smiled he exuded a sleek perfection. He was as far from her as a palace was from her house in Coole or as the heavens were from the earth. She liked looking at him as she liked looking at a Bronzino or a Titian and she was careful always to pretend that she also liked looking at his wife, Byron’s granddaughter, although she did not.
She thought of them like food, Lady Anne all watery vegetables, or sour, small potatoes, or salted fish, and the poet her husband like lamb cooked slowly for hours with garlic and thyme, or goose stuffed at Christmas. And she remembered in her
childhood the watchful eye of her mother, her mother making her eat each morsel of bad winter food, leave her plate clean. Thus she forced herself to pay attention to every word Lady Anne said; she gazed at her with soft and sympathetic interest, she spoke to her with warmth and the dull intimacy that one man’s wife might have with another, hoping that soon Lady Anne would be calmed and suitably assuaged by this so she would not notice when Lady Gregory turned to the poet and ate him up with her eyes.
Blunt was on fire with passion during these evenings, composing a letter to The Times at the very dining table in support of Arabi Bey, arguing in favour of loosening the control that France and England had over Egyptian affairs, cajoling Sir William, who was of course a friend of the editor of The Times, to put pressure on the paper to publish his letter and support the cause. Sir William was quiet, watchful, gruff. It was easy for Blunt to feel that he agreed with every point Blunt was making mainly because Blunt did not notice dissent. They arranged for Lady Gregory to visit Arabi Bey’s wife and family so that she could describe to the English how refined they were, how sweet and deserving of support.
The afternoon when she returned was unusually hot. Her husband, she found, was in a deep sleep so she did not disturb him. When she went in search of Blunt, she was told by the maid that Lady Anne had a severe headache brought on by the heat and would not be appearing for the rest of the day. Her husband the poet could be found in the garden or in the room he kept for work, where he often spent the afternoons. Lady Gregory found him in the garden; Blunt was excited to hear about her visit to Bey’s family and ready to show her a draft of a poem he had composed that morning on the matter of Egyptian freedom. She went to his study with him, not realizing until she was in the room and the door was closed that the study was in fact an extra bedroom the Blunts had taken, no different from the Gregorys’ own room except for a large desk and books and papers strewn on the floor and on the bed.