by Anne Emery
“We’ll get you out from under this, Brennan. I promise you.”
If I wanted to reach him in the next few days, he informed me, I would have to stop by the church. No, he wasn’t embarking on a prayer marathon; he was going to paint the interior. The patch of mismatched colour over the graffiti was a blessing in disguise, Mike O’Flaherty averred. He had been putting off a badly needed paint job because of the cost. Brennan, having tuned him out until now, tuned back in and volunteered to do it himself. Convict labour, he called it. They had commandeered one of the church ladies with a good eye for colour, and the paint had been selected and lugged to the site.
“It will give me something useful to do as I wait out this painful episode in my life,” Burke said. “But if one person says ‘it will be good therapy for you, Brennan,’ I shall fall upon that person from a great height.”
“When do you start?”
“I’m heading there now. But I’ll have to take a break for a while from, say, four to six, because little Lexie Robinson is coming over for some more assistance with her choral music. And by the way, I could use an extra hand with a brush.”
“I know just the lad for you.”
“Thought you might.”
III
Tommy Douglas cleared his Friday after-school schedule, showered, and donned his painting apparel, a sharply creased pair of khaki pants and a handsome Shetland wool sweater. “You can’t wear that for painting, Tommy! It will be ruined in the first five minutes. Get back in there and put on an old pair of jeans and a T-shirt.”
“But that’s what I had on when we met. She’ll think I’m always a slob.”
“She’ll think you’re an idiot if you wear good clothes for a paint job.”
“Really?” I nodded. “Okay.” So he dressed down and we walked over to the job site.
Lexie was already there when we arrived. She and the choirmaster were hard at work in the loft.
“Do you want me to start where you left off, Father?” Tom called loudly.
“Oh, good, Mr. Douglas, you’re here. Why don’t you pop up and we’ll figure out the best way to go about it.” Tom bounded up the stairs, and was greeted — enthusiastically, I thought — by Lexie, who was clad in jeans and a T-shirt. Her glorious hair was tied in a ponytail.
I looked around. Burke had a huge job in front of him. If he had begun painting when we finished our call at noon hour, he was making slow progress. He had done one segment of the south wall in the new creamy paint, several shades lighter than what had been on it for decades, and it was clear it would brighten up the church immeasurably. But the pillars had not been touched yet. And there was all the remaining wall space, as well as the ceiling. Scaffolding was in place for that daunting task.
“Brennan, how many hours did you put in here?”
“Four hours, I suppose it was. Looks grand, doesn’t it?”
“Ever hear of a roller?”
“There’s a roller there someplace. I ended up using a brush because of all that close work around the window and the stations of the cross.”
“You’ll be too old to run for Pope by the time you finish, at the rate you’re going.”
“Well, what are you going to do about it?”
“Yeah, yeah, I’ll come over and help you. But why not get a whole crew in? Tomorrow’s Saturday. Make a little party out of it. Pizza, treats. Bribe some of the church crowd. Can’t you see Marguerite over here in a pair of overalls and a cap?”
“Why don’t you run over and see if Mike’s there. He’d love to organize them all.”
Did Burke, in the predicament he was in, feel he could not call upon his colleagues to help him fix up their church? “Sure. I’ll check.”
I crossed to the rectory, where O’Flaherty greeted me with a big smile. He walked with me to the church. The idea was put to the gregarious priest and he took it up with enthusiasm. “I’ll get on the blower right away,” he promised.
“And I’ll be the pizza man,” I offered. “Just let me know how many will be here, Mike, and I’ll order them. Some sweets and drinks as well. I can run out and get some more rollers and brushes this evening.”
When we entered the church, Burke was at the wall making small, painstaking brush strokes, wiping the excess off with his hand, and painting again. I jerked my head in his direction. “See what I mean, Mike?”
He got it. “You could use some help, Brennan, my lad. And keep in mind that I bought the paint for the church, not for you to bathe in. You’re a sight.”
Above us, the two young people were playing a duet on the pipe organ. “This goes down much better with music, I have to say,” Brennan told us. “I’ll move my stereo in here for the duration.”
O’Flaherty went off to make his calls and Brennan stood looking after him.
“The oul’ divil! Do you know what he’s been doing?”
“What?”
“He’s been chatting up my sister.”
“The one in Ireland?”
“Right. Maire. And the old sneak never told me about it.”
“Well, they’re both over the age of consent! And he can hardly be compromising her virtue. Or she, his. She’s over three thousand miles away. Seriously, though, how do you know this?”
“I walked into his room when they were having a row. He was on the phone, speaking quite heatedly. ‘No, Maire, please don’t do it! Well, I’m telling you you’ll live to regret it!’ He caught sight of me then, said he had to go, and hung up. He was a bit flustered. Then he came up with a cover story: ‘Maire McLanahan, the poor soul. Don’t even ask,’ he said.”
“How do you know it wasn’t this McLanahan?”
“Because way back he made a remark about not knowing any other Irish women named after the Blessed Mother, and wasn’t that a shame.”
“Well, you set them up yourself, Brennan, that night she called during the poker game.”
“No, it was before that.”
“Oh. I had the impression that was the first time they spoke.”
“So did I, but then I remembered Mrs. Kelly tormenting me about phone bills to Ireland shortly after I moved here. Maire must have called when I was out; maybe she ended up with O’Flaherty, he liked the sound of her and called her again. Who knows?”
“Call Maire and ask her.”
“No, I’m not going to do that! I’ve given out to her enough times when she tried to ask me those questions.”
The organ stopped and Lexie said she had to go. I heard my son clear his throat and invite her for some of his mother’s lasagna, which she had been in the process of making when he left. I extended the invitation to Brennan but he was keen on his work, so we left him to paint his walls, his clothing, and every exposed inch of his flesh.
We were met at the door by Normie, who demanded to know why she had not been asked to paint. Then she fell silent and stared at Lexie. For once, she appeared to be shy.
“Maura!” I called out.
“What?”
“We have company.”
“Oh? Who?” She came out to see, looking for all the world like a contented homemaker. She removed an apron (an apron!) as she came towards us. A new era of domesticity?
Tommy said: “Mum, this is Lexie. My mother, Maura MacNeil.”
“Nice to meet you, Mrs. MacNeil.” My wife looked from our son to the lovely young girl. Then she broke into a big, warm smile and said she was delighted to meet Lexie. Her delight grew as the evening wore on, because the young musician showed signs of a sly sense of humour MacNeil could appreciate. Maura was on her best behaviour during the meal. We all were. After the meal, Normie produced a pair of eyeglasses she had sworn were los
t, and put them on. They looked remarkably like Lexie’s. Everyone, it seemed, had fallen in love.
The next morning, when I arrived at St. Bernadette’s with a supply of brushes and rollers, the worker bees were getting their orders from the queen. Sister Marguerite Dunne was not quite in overalls, but she was wearing something other than a business suit, covered by a smock. I recognized Erin Christie and Tyler MacDonald from the youth centre, with another guy and girl of college age. Brennan was at it again with his brush. Marguerite relieved me of one of my rollers and pointedly presented it to Burke; he accepted it without rancour. The nun directed her charges to various spots in the church and oversaw their first strokes. Father O’Flaherty burst in, beaming with pleasure at all the activity. He didn’t look to me like a man fretting over a lover’s tiff. Maybe long distance had a calming effect. My son had promised to join us in the afternoon, as had my wife. Normie would be spending the afternoon with a pal. Lexie was hoping to come over after a preliminary practice with her new choir. A stereo system had been set up and the space was filled with exquisite Renaissance polyphony.
I looked around at what was, in effect, much of the cast of Brennan’s murder trial. If there had been any awkwardness when they all got together, I had missed it. They appeared to be quite happy in their labours. Marguerite marched over to me.
“You’re providing the pizzas as usual, Mr. Collins?”
“I know my place, Sister, and the pizzas will be here in time for lunch, with enough left over for supper. I’ll go get the soft drinks. I have them in a cooler.” She nodded, as if this were the natural order of things, then took up a roller and set upon her segment of the church wall.
Everyone painted and gabbed till the pizzas were delivered. Tyler was bold enough to switch the soundtrack from the Renaissance to something closer to rock and roll. We fell upon the pizzas and sat around on the canvas drop sheets as if it were party time. Brennan was in a light-hearted mood and told an amusing tale about himself, his father, and his brothers deciding to surprise his mother by painting the interior walls of their house when Mrs. Burke had taken his sisters up to Boston for a girls’ weekend out of town. Not surprisingly, the plan went off the rails: hideous colours, horrendous paint job, great blobs of oil paint all over the place, squabbles, tears, desperate measures to repair the damage before the missus got home. He did a perfect impersonation of his Irish father in high dudgeon as the crisis deepened. Everyone was laughing in sympathy, even Marguerite.
The church door opened; the sun blazed in and was immediately blotted out by the form of Eileen Darragh. Like Marguerite, she was dressed in a smock. I assumed Burke had not seen Eileen since I told him what everyone else already knew: her feelings for him were such that they could only be aired in somebody else’s confession box. Someone the age of O’Flaherty perhaps. Or maybe not. Eileen smiled at everyone, but did not let her eyes rest on Father Burke. And one would never have known from his demeanour that he had heard anything embarrassing or unwelcome about her.
He rose from where he had been sitting on the floor. “Hello, Eileen.”
“Hello, Father. Hi everybody. I was hoping you’d have it all done and I could walk in, congratulate you all, and get right down to the pizza and pop.”
“Your timing was pretty cagey. Help yourself,” Marguerite declared. “But don’t regard it as anything but fuel for the afternoon’s work.”
We ate, then resumed painting. An hour or so later, Marguerite gave a sharp, nun-like clap of her hands and everyone turned in her direction. She called the workers together at the back of the church. Some people had painted as high as they could, standing on pews and anything else that would hold them. It was time to divide up responsibility, to get at the upper areas of the walls and pillars.
We heard someone coming in and everybody turned to the door. It was Maura, dressed in a blue sweatshirt that depicted the Sistine Chapel as a paint-by-number. Brennan gave her a big smile, reached over and did something with a paintbrush, then grabbed her and held her close. Eileen glowered at my wife as she struggled playfully to escape the arms that held her like a vise. Burke pushed her away and was gratified to see that he had left a number of paint smudges on the front of her shirt. Then she turned slightly and I saw two nearly perfect cream-coloured handprints on the back.
Mike O’Flaherty said: “And him telling us he can’t paint at all. Like many a great artist before him, all he needed was the inspiration of a beautiful woman.”
“You’d better not be thinking Rubens there, Father,” Maura admonished O’Flaherty.
“All right. You.” Marguerite pointed a commanding finger at Maura. “Over there with Eileen. She needs somebody to help her around those windows. I want two people up on ladders for the tops of the walls. I’ll give you the key, Tyler; bring the ladders over from the centre. Everyone else, back to work. And you, Michelangelo,” she said to Burke, “you’re going up there.” She pointed to the scaffolding “Where you’re going to be looking at God, and nobody else. I don’t want to see any more grubby handprints on the women in this sacred place.”
“Yes, Sister,” Burke answered, in perfect obedience.
“Before he gets up on that,” I interjected, “who put the scaffolding together? You didn’t assemble it yourself, did you, Brennan?”
“No, it was done by the fellows who delivered it. Why? You don’t think I could lay a few boards on a rack?”
“I rest my case. All right. Go ahead.”
“Ever the lawyer,” my wife remarked.
I whispered to her. “Did he tell me he had once planned on becoming an architect?”
“So? He’d have made the blueprints for magnificent buildings. You’ve heard it said that architecture is frozen music. You just wouldn’t let him near the nuts and bolts, or the paint.”
Eileen and Maura moved to the front of the church, Eileen staring dolefully at the hands of her beloved, imprinted for all time on the garment of my wife. She did not suffer in silence, as I learned from Maura later in the afternoon, when Eileen went to the basement of the church to use the washroom. Maura came over to me. “I thought Eileen regarded Burke as the nearest thing to God Almighty.”
I put down my roller and wiped my hands on my pants. “What happened? Did she say something less than worshipful?”
“She cast a scornful eye at the paint he put on my shirt and said: ‘Well, at least he only went at you with his paintbrush. Not his crucifix.’ Then she kind of blushed and looked ashamed, but went bravely on: ‘Or those mysterious initials.’ Surely she doesn’t think he’s guilty!”
“She knows he’s guilty of one thing, putting his arms around you. You’ve seen what she’s like around him.”
“Oh, yeah. Could hardly miss it.”
“He missed it. Whatever you do, don’t mention it to him.”
“Not bloody likely.”
“So, you can figure out what gave rise to her rare descent into bitchiness. But no, I can’t imagine that she really thinks he’s guilty. I suspect in moments of frustration or jealousy she finds it gratifying to be less than charitable about him.”
The work went on for a while longer, then I noticed that everyone was laying down tools. Michael O’Flaherty called to the man on the scaffold: “Aren’t you forgetting something, Father Burke?”
“No.”
“Ever hear of the four o’clock Saturday Mass?”
“Ah.” He climbed down from the ceiling, more paint-splotched than ever. O’Flaherty bustled away to clean himself up, and we moved tarpaulins and debris out of the way as people began to turn up for Mass. We painters stayed on our drop sheets, so as not to smear paint on the pews. Most of the faithful complimented us on our work, though a couple of people coughed ostentatiously, presumably at the smell of the paint.
O’Flaherty entered the church in his vestments, and the Mass began. We participated from our quarantined area at the back. The priest in our midst gave the responses quietly, unlike an older man at the front of the church who shouted each response a beat ahead of everyone else. I remembered from my altar boy days that there was always one like that. Tom and Lexie arrived midway through, and sat together in one of the back pews. Lexie knew all the words and gestures by heart; I could see Tom making an effort to look as if he participated in the Eucharist every week. When the celebration was over, and the congregation had been cheered on its way by O’Flaherty, we brought out our pizzas and pop and ate our supper.
Maura whispered: “Even though he was stuck at the back of the church on a drop sheet, and everyone in the building knew why, you could see a change in him during the Mass. It was like peace descending on him. I hope it lasts.” But it didn’t: Maura herself unintentionally raised his hackles. Leaning over to Brennan, she asked him whether he had said his Latin Mass that morning before the work began.
“I’m in the long grass these days, MacNeil,” came the curt reply. “So no, I haven’t been saying Mass publicly in my new role as convicted murderer. I thought it might be unseemly. I say it by myself.” Maura closed her eyes and shook her head, mortified at herself.