On 20 November 1956 Marge and Doc took the kids to Loras’s consecration.
It was a six-hour drive from St Louis to Rockford, but for Doc and Marge it was like going home. They had both been born and raised in towns just over the Iowa border – Marge in Cascade and Doc in Worthington – and when they got to Rockford they looked at each other and wondered why ever they had left.
Mike was fascinated by Loras’s consecration ceremony. The smell of the incense worked on him like a hypnotic drug; the murmured rhythms of the Latin ritual, the incantations and chants, the slow processing up and down the aisles captivated his imagination. He loved the colour, the glamour of the vestments: Uncle Loras’s tall stiff mitre, his pale blue chasuble and the flowing robes with their yellow trim; Archbishop Binz’s great gold crozier and long white pallium, his ruby ring and his pectoral cross; the dark cassocks and pink birettas of the attendants; the white surplices of the altar boys; the mystery of the ‘Munire me digneris’ and the hint of a world beyond . . . The men gathered in solemn, hushed communion round the dimly lit altar seemed to the four-year-old Mike the most elegant, mysterious and romantic beings he had ever seen.
The bishop’s residence on North Court Street was easily big enough to accommodate the Hess clan and Loras insisted they all stay on for Thanksgiving, which fell two days after the inauguration. It was a busy time for the new bishop and he was grateful to have his sister there to help. Doc took his boys bowling while Marge stayed home with the little ones, helping Mrs Brannigan the housekeeper assemble the ingredients for the Thanksgiving dinner.
When Loras came in from his day’s work, he looked happier than Marge had seen him for a long time, full of enthusiasm for his new post and relishing the task that lay ahead. In an access of high spirits he picked Mike up under one arm and Mary under the other and twirled them round until they shrieked with excitement. When he came to an exhausted stop, both were shouting, ‘More, more, more!’ and Loras obliged with a final twirl before slumping in his armchair, where they immediately threw themselves on his knee.
Marge smiled to see how fond the kids were becoming of her brother. She was a perceptive woman – she knew Mike and Mary were troubled little things – and she was delighted to see a smile on their faces. Loras was tickling them and making them cry with laughter. It was, Marge thought, the first time she had seen them completely and unreservedly happy.
‘Can you remember your mammy, Mary?’
Mike returned to the question for the hundredth time. He was whispering – even though they were huddled under the bedclothes they could hear the adults talking downstairs over the remnants of the Thanksgiving meal.
Mary shook her head. ‘Can you remember yours, Mikey?’
Mike frowned as if concentrating on some elusive inner vision.
‘No,’ he said, ‘I don’t think so.’
When he thought of the old world now it came to him as a faded image of high windows, whispered talk and femininity; the old days, once sharp and individually delineated, were merging into a single generic memory.
‘But why did our mammies give us away, Mikey? Did they never ever love us at all?’
Mike pondered the vital, half-remembered riddle.
‘No, Mary, I think they never loved us. For if they did, they would not have given us away. I think they just had us and gave us to the sisters.’
Mary’s eyes filled with tears.
‘But Mikey, why did our mammies never love us? Did we do something very bad?’
‘Well, Mary, I would say we did not do anything bad before they gave us away. We were only babbies when they gave us away, so we hadn’t done nothing at all, even though we surely have been very bad since . . .’
Mary cast her eyes down guiltily as Mike continued.
‘So what I think is this: they gave us away because they saw we were very bad inside, and that’s why they never loved us. And now no one ever can love us because of what we are.’
Mary nodded and bit her lip. After a moment she said, ‘But Mikey, sure Mommy loves us. I mean this mommy. So why did she take us if we are so bad?’
It was something Mike had thought about and found the explanation for.
‘She took us because she didn’t know what we are like – because we managed to disguise our badness. So that’s why we must never argue or misbehave now. We must always do what they say – what Pop says and what the boys say – because if we don’t, they will send us away again, just like our own mammies did . . .’
In the darkness Mike sensed that Mary was crying. The thought of being sent away terrified her and she hated when Mike spoke about it. How could they ever cope if their new mother gave them up like the old ones did?
‘Mikey, don’t say that!’ she pleaded. ‘You know I can’t always be good like you. When I’m a bad girl, when I argue and cry, does that mean they will send us away? I can’t bear it if they do, Mikey!’
Mary was working herself into a state and Mike knew it was time to drop the subject. He put his arm round his sister’s shoulder and pulled her close to him.
‘It’s all right, Mary. I’ll be here for you. I’ll always look after you. I won’t let them send us away.’
Mary sniffed and snuggled up to her brother.
‘You love me, Mikey; you love me, don’t you?’
Mike nodded and squeezed his sister’s hand.
SIX
1957–60
The trip the Hess family had taken for Loras’s consecration had set the wheels of Doc’s mind in motion, but they needed plenty of oiling and Marge, having dreamt for years of living closer to her brother, worked on him tirelessly. She remarked more than once on the glaring absence of any professional urologist in the Rockford area . . . and suddenly one morning Doc made a triumphant, authoritative announcement: the Hesses would be moving to Rockford!
Loras was delighted and quickly found a suitable house for rent on North Church Street, just two blocks from his own residence. They moved in at the end of June 1957 but Doc Hess resented wasting money on rent, and almost as soon as they arrived began the search for a place to buy. He picked a plot in a new subdivision that was being carved out near the Rock River and engaged a construction company to build a large tri-level house at the head of a small cul-de-sac named Maplewood Drive.
Moving to a new city and a new home was good for Mike and Mary, and living so close to Uncle Loras allowed them to form close ties with an adult man for the first time in their lives, ties they never formed with the demanding and distant Doc. When the school year began, Loras took Mike and Mary to the kindergarten and introduced them to the teachers, setting up a vexed dynamic that followed them through their Rockford years: being niece and nephew of the bishop brought both respect and envy, both affection and resentment. Suddenly being special was a confusing, unfamiliar experience.
The final years of the 1950s blessed the American Midwest with a series of long, hot summers. Crop yields hit record highs and President Eisenhower was able to back up his doctrine of support for countries resisting communism with exports of tons of surplus grain.
On 9 October 1958 Pope Pius XII died and three months later his reforming successor John XXIII announced he was planning a great Vatican council, the first of its kind since 1871, which would modernize and liberalize the Catholic Church.
‘I want to throw open the windows of the Church,’ he told his advisers, ‘so that we can see out and the people can see in.’
As a liberal himself, Loras Lane was encouraged by the Pope’s promise and excited by the prospect of an impending trip to Rome.
The Hesses eventually moved into the new house on Maplewood Drive, and this meant a new school for Mike and Mary. Mike was seven now and growing tall and slim. His hair was gleaming black, his skin smooth and his blue eyes glowed with a limpid serenity. Doc insisted on Mike having a military-style buzz cut (he had tried and failed with Jim and Tom, who were now in their late teens and confirmed devotees of the Elvis quiff), and in spite of Mary
’s protestations – she said that with his high forehead it made his face look too long – Mike had, as ever, been happy to do what Doc wanted. Oftentimes Doc would make him wear bright, patterned bow ties that gave him the comical look of a preening cockatoo (Doc and Stevie wore them the whole time), but Mike never argued and had even learned how to tie them the way Doc liked best.
At school his eager compliance and sharp intelligence proved a winning combination. He loved reading; his appetite for learning was insatiable; the teachers adored him and he got the highest grades. He was sensitive to his sister’s needs and helped her with homework, but for a long time she felt very much in his shadow: he was such a hard act to follow that after a while Mary gave up trying.
Mike loved to please and hated the thought of letting people down. He quickly sensed he was not meeting Doc’s expectations and the thought tormented him. Doc boasted that he had turned his own boys into real men. Jim, Tom and Stevie played masculine sports – football, track, baseball – and Doc expected Mike to do the same. Mike was not cut out for sport but he forced himself to do what Doc wanted. He ran cross-country and went on treks that left his feet blistered and his legs bruised; but he forced himself to keep going because he did not want to disappoint his father. In bed afterwards he would lie awake with his feet throbbing and his body aching, berating himself for his weakness. I gotta do better, he said to himself as he drifted into uneasy sleep. I gotta do better.
Mary and Mike were constantly in church: Marge took them to parishes where Loras was celebrating Mass and they attended Church functions with their parents. The trappings of Catholicism were a part of their life and they accepted the Church’s teachings because they never knew anything different. They believed in heaven and hell, in the devil and eternal damnation, and they looked up to the priests and nuns who ran their school on weekdays and their church on Sundays.
When Mike made his First Communion in summer 1961 it was taken for granted that he would become a server at St James’ Pro Cathedral. He adored being an altar boy, and unlike some took his responsibilities seriously. When the others poked fun at the priest or sabotaged the serving of Communion, he kept out of it. He was the first to volunteer for early Mass, stayed on in the evening to tidy up the church and was never late for duty. His sweet singing voice made him a favourite of the priests and a star of the St James’ choir.
Mike loved the theatricality of the Mass, the vestments and the incense, the incantations and prayers, the feeling that he was assisting in a rite that opened the doors to another reality. The ceremonies conjured up another world beyond the dull facade of material life, a world he hoped might transcend the injustices and anxieties of his own existence. The more Mike served, the more he fell under the spell of the ritual. Numbers, repetition, formulae became the bulwarks of his faith; following the liturgical forms, murmuring the responses and penances. If he could just do everything with no mistakes, if he never deviated, never stumbled over the words, he might perhaps stave off the malevolent forces he felt buffeting his path through life.
Confession was an important part of the bargain, but he found the build-up to the mysterious encounter in the confessional fraught with dread. How to confess? How to quantify his sins? He knew he was bad – that he had done, spoken, thought bad things – and the obsessive compulsion within him demanded he formulate his badness in the proper way, the only way that would work the miracle of absolution. So where other children sought out young Father O’Leary, the gentle pastor who would reply mildly and reassuringly, merely enjoining the sinner to ‘go away and be kind’, Mike chose Father Sullivan. Stepping into the musty half-light of the confessional, his eyes fixed on the latticed window beyond which his hopes of redemption lay, he felt his anxiety increase.
‘In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Ghost. Amen.’
Mike knelt.
‘Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It has been a week since my last confession.’
There was a grunt from beyond the window as Mike began listing his shames, one by one in a stuttering rush. Father Sullivan was rigorous, stern and reproachful, demanding to know how many times the sin had been repeated, how many times the sinner had disobeyed his parents, how many times he had thought wicked thoughts. But without the severity Mike felt the ritual was inadequate, the magic not properly performed: the harsher the judgement and the bigger the penance, the greater were the chances of his salvation.
As always, the end of the confession brought sudden panic.
Have I missed something out? he thought desperately as Father Sullivan’s throaty mumble blessed and forgave him, gnarled hands silhouetted against the grille, making the familiar sign of the cross. Did I forget something? Did I withhold it on purpose? As he scrambled to his feet, helplessly stammering the Latin, Mike felt the magic of the confessional slip tormentingly beyond his grasp. He was seized with the thought that he had not earned forgiveness, that some tiny imperfection in his confession – he had forgotten something; he must have forgotten something – had rendered the absolution worthless. As he knelt down at a pew to commence his Hail Marys a void opened beneath him, sucking him down to the emptiness below.
SEVEN
1961–3
School was a torment for Mary. Full of youthful energy, she found the discipline hard to take, and her grades were average at best. She could not settle with a book and longed to be out climbing trees or playing in the fields around Maplewood Drive.
Exasperated by her behaviour, Mrs Hummers asked Doc and Marge to come in for a parent–teacher conference. She explained that Mary needed to learn respect and obedience; she needed to calm down and sit quietly at her table, listen to the teacher and concentrate on the lesson instead of fidgeting and looking out the window.
‘I can hardly believe she is young Michael’s sister,’ Mrs Hummers said. ‘He’s such a sweet, quiet young man, always diligent at his work and never any trouble. But she is more rambunctious than any boy!’
‘Those darn kids,’ Doc had growled in the car on the way home. ‘They’re the wrong way round.’ Marge had looked at him in puzzlement. ‘She should have turned out better behaved, like the boy, ’ he’d continued, eyes glaring fixedly on the road, ‘and he should have turned out more like her. He’s too damn girly by half!’
Mike hadn’t made many friends among the altar boys – they regarded him as stand-offish because he refused to take part in their pranks and they worried he would snitch on them to his uncle the bishop – but he had become close to one of them. Jake Horvath was the same age as Mike and shared some of his earnest thoughtfulness. Jake’s uncle was a monsignor in the Rockford diocese, and every morning as they wriggled into their white cassocks and lacy surplices they would exchange gossip they’d picked up from their priestly relatives. Mike loved these whispered, secret moments and, maybe even more than that, he loved the ritual of the dressing-up, the transformation they were going through – ‘just like Clark Kent’ – from ordinary Joe to purveyors of transcendent truth. For him, the swish of the soft white robes conjured fleeting images, never quite defined but redolent of the long-ago world he had once inhabited and lost. The ritual and the vestments gave him the chance to be someone else, to stop being the person he was, the rejected orphan he hated.
Loras Lane had been due to fly to Rome for the opening of the Vatican council in October 1962. He had renewed his passport, booked his plane ticket and made arrangements for diocesan affairs in his absence, but a week before he was due to depart he had collapsed in the parlour of his residence. Dr West, who had rushed out to examine him, concluded that all he needed was bed rest and a protein diet, but sent him for blood tests at Rockford Memorial Hospital all the same.
When the results came back, Dr West was less reassuring. ‘Your Excellency, ’ he said dubiously, ‘have you suffered any serious disease or sickness in your life that I am not aware of?’
Loras thought for a moment and mentioned the mysterious two months of pain he had bee
n through as a teenager. It had kept him away from school, he had shed pounds in weight and his urine had been tinged with blood.
Dr West frowned. ‘And did the medics never make a specific diagnosis? Because to me that sounds like a classic case of nephritis.’
Father Hiller was director of vocations for the Rockford diocese and had seen countless boys who thought they had a priestly calling. He could usually distinguish the serious candidates from the dreamers, but Michael Hess was an enigma. He said all the right things – and he was the nephew of the bishop – but there was something odd about his reasons for wanting to join the priesthood. Mike himself was unclear about his motivation: it was something to do with his compulsive obsession with the power of ritual, but he could put none of this into words. Hiller recommended Mike take part in a two-week retreat the diocese was organizing.
The vocation camp was at a diocesan centre south-west of Rockford in the woods by the Rock River. There were bonfires and singalongs, barbecues and prayers. Young priests came to share their experiences and answer questions from the boys about the demands of celibacy and the Church’s view of homosexuality, the communist threat and the real presence in the Eucharist – is the Communion bread really transformed into Christ’s flesh before we eat it? Some of the boys saw it as little more than a summer camp – there was horseplay and smuggled liquor – but Mike took it seriously. He respected the rules of silence and the periods of contemplation, ignoring the whispers, winks and grimaces that disrupted the retreat’s solemnity. Mike prayed constantly and fretted about the authenticity of his vocation. He prayed for a sign and maybe he got it.
At the end of the two weeks the boys were told to spend the afternoon in private meditation before the bus took them home. Mike found a secluded corner by the stream and knelt to pray.
O Lord, teach me what You want me to be; give me Your sign and I will follow; give me a vocation and I will see it through; make me good, O Lord. Please Lord, make me good . . .
The Lost Child of Philomena Lee (Original Edition) Page 11