All during that year Francis talked to her about his forthcoming visit to the Holy Land, endeavouring to make her understand that for a fortnight next spring he would be away from the house and the shop. He’d been away before for odd days, but that was when she’d been younger. He used to visit an aunt in Tralee, but three years ago the aunt had died and he hadn’t left the town since.
Francis and his mother had always been close. Before his birth two daughters had died in infancy, and his very survival had often struck Mrs Conary as a gift. He had always been her favourite, the one among her children whom she often considered least able to stand on his own two feet. It was just like Paul to have gone blustering off to San Francisco instead of remaining in Co. Tipperary. It was just like Kitty to have married a useless man. ‘There’s not a girl in the town who’d touch him,’ she’d said to her daughter at the time, but Kitty had been headstrong and adamant, and there was My les now, doing nothing whatsoever except cleaning other people’s windows for a pittance and placing bets in Donovan’s the turf accountant’s. It was the shop and the arrangement Kitty had with Francis and her mother that kept her and the children going, three of whom had already left the town, which in Mrs Conary’s opinion they mightn’t have done if they’d had a better type of father. Mrs Conary often wondered what her own two babies who’d died might have grown up into, and imagined they might have been like Francis, about whom she’d never had a moment’s worry. Not in a million years would he give you the feeling that he was too big for his boots, like Paul sometimes did with his lavishness and his big talk of America. He wasn’t silly like Kitty, or so sinful you couldn’t forgive him, the way you couldn’t forgive Edna, even though she was dead and buried in Toronto.
Francis understood how his mother felt about the family. She’d had a hard life, left a widow early on, trying to do the best she could for everyone. In turn he did his best to compensate for the struggles and disappointments she’d suffered, cheering her in the evenings while Kitty and Myles and the youngest of their children watched the television in the kitchen. His mother had ignored the existence of Myles for ten years, ever since the day he’d taken money out of the till to pick up the odds on Gusty Spirit at Phoenix Park. And although Francis got on well enough with Myles he quite understood that there should be a long aftermath to that day. There’d been a terrible row in the kitchen, Kitty screaming at Myles and Myles telling lies and Francis trying to keep them calm, saying they’d give the old woman a heart attack.
She didn’t like upsets of any kind, so all during the year before he was to visit the Holy Land Francis read the New Testament to her in order to prepare her. He talked to her about Bethlehem and Nazareth and the miracle of the loaves and fishes and all the other miracles. She kept nodding, but he often wondered if she didn’t assume he was just casually referring to episodes in the Bible. As a child he had listened to such talk himself, with awe and fascination, imagining the walking on the water and the temptation in the wilderness. He had imagined the cross carried to Calvary, and the rock rolled back from the tomb, and the rising from the dead on the third day. That he was now to walk in such places seemed extraordinary to him, and he wished his mother was younger so that she could appreciate his good fortune and share it with him when she received the postcards he intended, every day, to send her. But her eyes seemed always to tell him that he was making a mistake, that somehow he was making a fool of himself by doing such a showy thing as going to the Holy Land. I have the entire itinerary mapped out, his brother wrote from San Francisco. There’s nothing we’ll miss.
It was the first time Francis had been in an aeroplane. He flew by Aer Lingus from Dublin to London and then changed to an El Al flight to Tel Aviv. He was nervous and he found it exhausting. All the time he seemed to be eating, and it was strange being among so many people he didn’t know. ‘You will taste honey such as never before,’ an Israeli businessman in the seat next to his assured him. ‘And Galilean figs. Make certain to taste Galilean figs.’ Make certain too, the businessman went on, to experience Jerusalem by night and in the early dawn. He urged Francis to see places he had never heard of, Yad Va-Shem, the treasures of the Shrine of the Book. He urged him to honour the martyrs of Masada and to learn a few words of Hebrew as a token of respect. He told him of a shop where he could buy mementoes and warned him against Arab street traders.
‘The hard man, how are you?’ Father Paul said at Tel Aviv airport, having flown in from San Francisco the day before. Father Paul had had a drink or two and he suggested another when they arrived at the Plaza Hotel in Jerusalem. It was half past nine in the evening. ‘A quick little nightcap,’ Father Paul insisted, ‘and then hop into bed with you, Francis.’ They sat in an enormous open lounge with low, round tables and square modern armchairs. Father Paul said it was the bar.
They had said what had to be said in the car from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. Father Paul had asked about their mother, and Kitty and Myles. He’d asked about other people in the town, old Canon Mahon and Sergeant Murray. He and Father Steigmuller had had a great year of it, he reported: as well as everything else, the boys’ home had turned out two tip-top footballers. ‘We’ll start on a tour at half-nine in the morning,’ he said. ‘I’ll be sitting having breakfast at eight.’
Francis went to bed and Father Paul ordered another whisky, with ice. To his great disappointment there was no Irish whiskey in the hotel so he’d had to content himself with Haig. He fell into conversation with an American couple, making them promise that if they were ever in Ireland they wouldn’t miss out Co. Tipperary. At eleven o’clock the barman said he was wanted at the reception desk and when Father Paul went there and announced himself he was given a message in an envelope. It was a telegram that had come, the girl said in poor English. Then she shook her head, saying it was a telex. He opened the envelope and learnt that Mrs Conary had died.
Francis fell asleep immediately and dreamed that he was a boy again, out fishing with a friend whom he couldn’t now identify.
On the telephone Father Paul ordered whisky and ice to be brought to his room. Before drinking it he took his jacket off and knelt by his bed to pray for his mother’s salvation. When he’d completed the prayers he walked slowly up and down the length of the room, occasionally sipping at his whisky. He argued with himself and finally arrived at a decision.
For breakfast they had scrambled eggs that looked like yellow ice-cream, and orange juice that was delicious. Francis wondered about bacon, but Father Paul explained that bacon was not readily available in Israel.
‘Did you sleep all right?’ Father Paul inquired. ‘Did you have the jet-lag?’
‘Jet-lag?’
‘A tiredness you get after jet flights. It’d knock you out for days.’
‘Ah, I slept great, Paul.’
‘Good man.’
They lingered over breakfast. Father Paul reported a little more of what had happened in his parish during the year, in particular about the two young footballers from the boys’ home. Francis told about the decline in the cooking at Mrs Shea’s boarding-house, as related to him by the three Christian Brothers. ‘I have a car laid on,’ Father Paul said, and twenty minutes later they walked out into the Jerusalem sunshine.
The hired car stopped on the way to the walls of the Old City. It drew into a lay-by at Father Paul’s request and the two men got out and looked across a wide valley dotted with houses and olive trees. A road curled along the distant slope opposite. ‘The Mount of Olives,’ Father Paul said. ‘And that’s the road to Jericho.’ He pointed more particularly. ‘You see that group of eight big olives? Just off the road, where the church is?’
Francis thought he did, but was not sure. There were so many olive trees, and more than one church. He glanced at his brother’s pointing finger and followed its direction with his glance.
‘The Garden of Gethsemane,’ Father Paul said.
Francis did not say anything. He continued to gaze at the distant church, with the clump of o
live trees beside it. Wild flowers were profuse on the slopes of the valley, smears of orange and blue on land that looked poor. Two Arab women herded goats.
‘Could we see it closer?’ he asked, and his brother said that definitely they would. They returned to the waiting car and Father Paul ordered it to the Gate of St Stephen.
Tourists heavy with cameras thronged the Via Dolorosa. Brown, barefoot children asked for alms. Stall-keepers pressed their different wares: cotton dresses, metal-ware, mementoes, sacred goods. ‘Get out of the way,’ Father Paul kept saying to them, genially laughing to show he wasn’t being abrupt. Francis wanted to stand still and close his eyes, to visualize for a moment the carrying of the Cross. But the ceremony of the Stations, familiar to him for as long as he could remember, was unreal. Try as he would, Christ’s journey refused to enter his imagination, and his own plain church seemed closer to the heart of the matter than the noisy lane he was now being jostled on. ‘God damn it, of course it’s genuine,’ an angry American voice proclaimed, in reply to a shriller voice which insisted that cheating had taken place. The voices argued about a piece of wood, neat beneath plastic in a little box, a sample or not of the Cross that had been carried.
They arrived at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, and at the Chapel of the Nailing to the Cross, where they prayed. They passed through the Chapel of the Angel, to the tomb of Christ. Nobody spoke in the marble cell, but when they left the church Francis overheard a quiet man with spectacles saying it was unlikely that a body would have been buried within the walls of the city. They walked to Hezekiah’s Pool and out of the Old City at the Jaffa Gate, where their hired car was waiting for them. ‘Are you peckish?’ Father Paul asked, and although Francis said he wasn’t they returned to the hotel.
Delay funeral till Monday was the telegram Father Paul had sent. There was an early flight on Sunday, in time for an afternoon one from London to Dublin. With luck there’d be a late train on Sunday evening and if there wasn’t they’d have to fix a car. Today was Tuesday. It would give them four and a half days. Funeral eleven Monday the telegram at the reception desk now confirmed. ‘Ah, isn’t that great?’ he said to himself, bundling the telegram up.
‘Will we have a small one?’ he suggested in the open area that was the bar. ‘Or better still a big one.’ He laughed. He was in good spirits in spite of the death that had taken place. He gestured at the barman, wagging his head and smiling jovially.
His face had reddened in the morning sun; there were specks of sweat on his forehead and his nose. ‘Bethlehem this afternoon,’ he laid down. ‘Unless the jet-lag…?’
‘I haven’t got the jet-lag.’
In the Nativity Boutique Francis bought for his mother a small metal plate with a fish on it. He had stood for a moment, scarcely able to believe it, on the spot where the manger had been, in the Church of the Nativity. As in the Via Dolorosa it had been difficult to clear his mind of the surroundings that now were present: the exotic Greek Orthodox trappings, the foreign-looking priests, the oriental smell. Gold, frankincense and myrrh, he’d kept thinking, for somehow the church seemed more the church of the kings than of Joseph and Mary and their child. Afterwards they returned to Jerusalem, to the Tomb of the Virgin and the Garden of Gethsemane. ‘It could have been anywhere,’ he heard the quiet, bespectacled sceptic remarking in Gethsemane. ‘They’re only guessing.’
Father Paul rested in the late afternoon, lying down on his bed with his jacket off. He slept from half past five until a quarter past seven and awoke refreshed. He picked up the telephone and asked for whisky and ice to be brought up and when it arrived he undressed and had a bath, relaxing in the warm water with the drink on a ledge in the tiled wall beside him. There would be time to take in Nazareth and Galilee. He was particularly keen that his brother should see Galilee because Galilee had atmosphere and was beautiful. There wasn’t, in his own opinion, very much to Nazareth but it would be a pity to miss it all the same. It was at the Sea of Galilee that he intended to tell his brother of their mother’s death.
We’ve had a great day, Francis wrote on a postcard that showed an aerial view of Jerusalem. The Church of the Holy Sepulchre, where Our Lord’s tomb is, and Gethsemane and Bethlehem. Paul’s in great form. He addressed it to his mother, and then wrote other cards, to Kitty and Myles and to the three Christian Brothers in Mrs Shea’s, and to Canon Mahon. He gave thanks that he was privileged to be in Jerusalem. He read St Mark and some of St Matthew. He said his rosary.
‘Will we chance the wine?’ Father Paul said at dinner, not that wine was something he went in for, but a waiter had come up and put a large padded wine-list into his hand.
‘Ah, no, no,’ Francis protested, but already Father Paul was running his eye down the listed bottles.
‘Have you local wine?’ he inquired of the waiter. ‘A nice red one?’
The waiter nodded and hurried away, and Francis hoped he wouldn’t get drunk, the red wine on top of the whisky he’d had in the bar before the meal. He’d only had the one whisky, not being much used to it, making it last through his brother’s three.
‘I heard some gurriers in the bar,’ Father Paul said, ‘making a great song and dance about the local red wine.’
Wine made Francis think of the Holy Communion, but he didn’t say so. He said the soup was delicious and he drew his brother’s attention to the custom there was in the hotel of a porter ringing a bell and walking about with a person’s name chalked on a little blackboard on the end of a rod.
‘It’s a way of paging you,’ Father Paul explained, ‘Isn’t it nicer than bellowing out some fellow’s name?’ He smiled his easy smile, his eyes beginning to water as a result of the few drinks he’d had. He was beginning to feel the strain: he kept thinking of their mother lying there, of what she’d say if she knew what he’d done, how she’d savagely upbraid him for keeping the fact from Francis. Out of duty and humanity he had returned each year to see her because, after all, you only had the one mother. But he had never cared for her.
Francis went for à walk after dinner. There were young soldiers with what seemed to be toy guns on the streets, but he knew the guns were real. In the shop windows there were television sets for sale, and furniture and clothes, just like anywhere else. There were advertisements for some film or other, two writhing women without a stitch on them, the kind of thing you wouldn’t see in Co. Tipperary. ‘You want something, sir?’ a girl said, smiling at him with broken front teeth. The siren of a police car or an ambulance shrilled urgently near by. He shook his head at the girl. ‘No, I don’t want anything,’ he said, and then realized what she had meant. She was small and very dark, no more than a child. He hurried on, praying for her.
When he returned to the hotel he found his brother in the lounge with other people, two men and two women. Father Paul was ordering a round of drinks and called out to the barman to bring another whisky. ‘Ah, no, no,’ Francis protested, anxious to go to his room and to think about the day, to read the New Testament and perhaps to write a few more postcards. Music was playing, coming from speakers that could not be seen.
‘My brother Francis,’ Father Paul said to the people he was with, and the people all gave their names, adding that they came from New York. ‘I was telling them about Tipp,’ Father Paul said to his brother, offering his packet of cigarettes around.
‘You like Jerusalem, Francis?’ one of the American women asked him, and he replied that he hadn’t been able to take it in yet. Then, feeling that didn’t sound enthusiastic enough, he added that being there was the experience of a lifetime.
Father Paul went on talking about Co. Tipperary and then spoke of his parish in San Francisco, the boys’ home and the two promising footballers, the plans for the new church. The Americans listened and in a moment the conversation drifted on to the subject of their travels in England, their visit to Istanbul and Athens, an argument they’d had with the Customs at Tel Aviv. ‘Well, I think I’ll hit the hay,’ one of the men announced eventual
ly, standing up.
The others stood up too and so did Francis. Father Paul remained where he was, gesturing again in the direction of the barman. ‘Sit down for a nightcap,’ he urged his brother.
‘Ah, no, no –’ Francis began.
‘Bring us two more of those,’ the priest ordered with a sudden abruptness, and the barman hurried away. ‘Listen,’ said Father Paul. ‘I’ve something to tell you.’
After dinner, while Francis had been out on his walk, before he’d dropped into conversation with the Americans, Father Paul had said to himself that he couldn’t stand the strain. It was the old woman stretched out above the hardware shop, as stiff as a board already, with the little lights burning in her room: he kept seeing all that, as if she wanted him to, as if she was trying to haunt him. Nice as the idea was, he didn’t think he could continue with what he’d planned, with waiting until they got up to Galilee.
The Collected Stories Page 84