by Anne Emery
Brennan reached out, took Sandra’s hand and gave her a chaste kiss on the cheek. “’Tis indeed grand to see you,” he said lightly. “It’s too bad you didn’t have time for dinner beforehand. Perhaps after.”
“Perhaps so.”
She offered him a fleeting smile and came over to embrace me. In spite of the fact that our friendship had been formed in the stressful months before Brennan’s trial, Sandra and I had shared some laughs, and I had heard tales from her past with Brennan, before his thunderbolt call to the priesthood. I had even scribbled a little twelve-bar blues on the subject.
Sandra turned to Maura, whom she had met briefly in Halifax, and the two women greeted each other warmly.
I essayed a bit of conversation. “Who will you be betting on tonight, Brennan? The Celts or the Romans? After all you have a foot in both camps.”
“I’ll go for whichever side acquits itself best in the vocal department. It will be hard to beat the first Norma I heard, though. Thirty-five years ago. Maria Callas in 1956. At the old Met, downtown. It got off to a slow start; I don’t know if it was the heat or Callas’s nerves. But by Act II it was magical. Sixteen curtain calls.”
“You were a little young though, Brennan, to appreciate the story of a Celtic priestess who breaks her holy oath and gives way to her passion for a Roman proconsul,” Sandra put in.
If it was a dig, he didn’t let on but said evenly: “At sixteen I understood the passion, if not the priestliness.”
“And now?”
“Now it’s time to face the music.” Maura headed in first, followed by Brennan and Sandra. I got the aisle seat. We were in Row A near the back of the auditorium. Five levels of balconies rose above us. We sat, eyes front, until the chandeliers were raised, the massive gold curtain rose and the great drama began. The soprano, a young woman of Greek nationality, had been inevitably and unfairly compared to Callas. But once I got used to the cooler vocal tone and less dramatic persona, I found myself immersed in 50 BC Gaul. The magnificent aria “Casta Diva” comes in Act I, scene i, when the Druid high priestess invokes the moon and prays for peace. Let some of it descend on us:
Casta Diva, che inargenti
queste sacre antiche piante
a noi volgi il bel sembiante
senza nube e senza vel . . .
O chaste Goddess, who silver
these sacred ancient plants,
turn thy beautiful semblance on us
unclouded and unveiled . . .
At intermission, conversation was muted. Brennan did not look like a man whose homecoming had lived up to his expectations. He was determined to speak of other things. Apparently his first Norma, with his parents and sister Molly, was memorable in more ways than one.
New York City, 1956
Here we are in the lobby of the Metropolitan Opera House. The four of us: Da and Mam, Molly and me. I took a bit of slagging from the lads about coming out for the opera. Feck ’em! There’s more to music than the tin whistle. What’s this now? Who’s this woman who’s launched herself at Da, roaring and screeching at him? The brogue on her — she sounds like something right off the boat from Cobh. The woman looks even older than Mam; what did he do, get her up the pole? She doesn’t look it. I’ve seen more meat on Good Friday than I’m seeing on her.
“I knew I could find you here, Declan Burke! I heard about you gettin’ the tickets. All fine and good for those that can carry on and go to the opera. You won’t see my family here — the family you destroyed! How can you sleep at night, Mr. Burke? How can you show your face at Mass on Sunday?” Ah, here come the ushers to take her away. What’s that she’s giving to Mam? A big envelope of sorts. “Let her read what you’ve done. And may you roast for all eternity in the fires of hell!” Jazes! There, they’ve got her out of here. What was she on about?
Mam is standing there, all speech forsaken. Da’s going for the envelope. Mam won’t let go of it. Oh, the look she’s giving him. His face doesn’t have a drop of colour left in it. Is he going to be sick right here in the lobby of the Met? Mam has the envelope in her bag. Oul Dec will be lucky if she doesn’t stuff it down his throat. Time to go and hear Maria; she’ll have to hit some high Cs to top this.
“Well?” Maura asked. “Who was she? What was going on?”
“I have no idea. Neither of them would ever speak of it. Next day I rooted around trying to find the envelope. Couldn’t lay my hands on it. Neither could Molly.”
“I didn’t know you had a sister named Molly,” Maura said.
“My older sister, Maire. Nickname Molly.”
“Well, I hope she tells the story better than you do. So you never found out who the mystery woman was — that shouldn’t get in the way of a hair-raising ending to the tale. Make it up if you have to. I’ll never bring you home to Cape Breton if you can’t do better than that!”
“Maybe the point is: men by the name of Burke don’t seem to make much of a hit with the ladies at the Metropolitan Opera.” He directed a quizzical glance at Sandra.
“This evening wasn’t my idea, Brennan.”
Brennan looked suddenly weary. “I know it wasn’t, Sandy. I know it wasn’t.”
He turned away and started towards the auditorium. Maura caught up with him and put a hand on his arm. Whatever she said to him provoked a quick, impatient shake of the head and he continued on to his seat. I put an arm around Sandra. “What’s the matter, Sandy? You’ve hardly spoken a word.”
“Monty, I just don’t know what to say to him. I don’t understand the life he’s chosen. He hasn’t asked about my life either: about my children, about my late husband, about any of our old acquaintances. It’s as if neither of us wants to acknowledge the last quarter of a century.”
“Try not to be too rough on him. He’s coming off a very bad year.”
“I know, Monty, but he’s not facing reality. Let’s go inside.”
We sat down again. Brennan trained his dark eyes on Sandra for a long, searching look, but said nothing. The curtain went up, the performance resumed, and we found ourselves once again in a world of passion and treachery, prayer and sacrifice.
After the opera we walked up Columbus Avenue to a restaurant called Da Gimignano. We were seated in a large dining room with wall frescoes that depicted the medieval towers of San Gimignano, and other scenes from Tuscany. A waiter appeared immediately to take our orders for drinks. When they arrived, Brennan downed his whiskey and raised his glass for a refill. We all ordered dinner. Maura and I chatted quite companionably about our plans for the next few days. The other two gradually warmed to the conversation and suggested things we should do, or not do, in New York. By the time our orders arrived, the atmosphere had lightened up.
“So, Sandra, what was it like growing up with this guy?”
“Do you mean before he dedicated himself to a life of celibacy? The rationale for which is what again Brennan? Did you ever explain it?”
He raised his glass to his lips, lowered it, opened his mouth as if to speak, shut it. I could almost see the two opposing impulses warring within his soul. The Catholic apologist wanted to give a learned dissertation on the reasons for the Church’s insistence on a celibate priestly caste; the regular guy wanted to get the subject off the table, in order to salvage what little chance he still might have of getting lucky at the end of the evening.
“Let’s not get into that again,” was his reply.
“Again? I didn’t realize I was becoming tedious on the subject. After all, this is the first time I’ve mentioned it in twenty-five years. It’s only the second time I’ve laid eyes on you in all that time.” She sipped her wine, then turned to Maura. “But if I go way, way back I seem to remember there was something endearing about him. Everyone certainly noted his arrival at Mrs. Liebenthal’s Music School, which is where we met. On the Upper West Side. He had this lovely, lilting brogue — well, you can still hear a rather brusque version of it in his voice now. Black hair, black eyes, a darling smile. He sang like
an angel. And I remember our first kiss. It wasn’t a success. We were around twelve at the time.”
“That’s right. She was leaving our house in a taxi and I had worked up the nerve to kiss her goodbye. But I had a fat lip from fighting with my brothers. And the whole crowd of them were lined up in the window staring at us, their eyes out on sticks.”
“He tried to kiss me but his lip was bleeding and I said: ‘Eeeuuwww, stay away from me!’” She sighed. “If only it had ended then and there.”
“You don’t mean that, now,” he prompted.
“Well?” The edge was back in her voice.
“All the good times we had. You can’t regret that.” He leaned close and fixed her with his eyes. “Intensely good times.”
“Which made the bad times all the more intense for us both, wouldn’t you say?” She reached down for her handbag. “Excuse me a moment, would you?”
We turned our attention to the remains of our meal as she walked to the back of the restaurant. Brennan signalled for another whiskey; I decided the wiser course would be coffee; Maura opted for tea.
“And how is your trip to New York, Mr. and Mrs. Collins?”
“This is only your first night, Brennan. She . . . she just has to get used to you,” Maura tried.
“Stuff it, MacNeil. I don’t want to hear it.” Brennan lit up a cigarette and fanned the smoke away from us. We heard an ostentatious cough behind his shoulder. He had fanned the smoke into the face of the returning Sandra. “Shit,” he said. “I’m sorry.”
“So many bad habits, Brennan, so little time and space in which to indulge them.”
Maura sought to redirect the conversation: “What did you make of Brennan’s father, Sandra? Brennan seems to think there’s a death threat against Declan!”
Sandra stared at Burke. “Really!”
Brennan was silent, so Maura filled the gap. “A death threat disguised as the obituary of someone named Murphy, or so Collins tells me. Do you have it with you, Brennan? I haven’t seen it, though the whole thing sounds a little, well, over the top.”
“Let’s leave that aside for tonight,” Brennan replied.
“Well, he was unpopular with somebody,” Sandra told us. “Remember that shoving match?” When Burke gave her a blank look, she continued: “Don’t you remember a rather bulky man coming to the house and your father nearly slamming the door on your mother’s nose, trying to head the guy off? It’s funny, I haven’t thought of that in decades. It was when we were older, so you may have been passed out drunk at the time.” He started to protest but she cut him off. “I was in the living room.”
“Go on.”
“There was a man at the door, heavyset, taller than your father, and he spoke with a thick accent.”
“What kind of an accent? Like my father’s, you mean?”
“No, not an Irishman. Just New York, outer boroughs.”
“What did they say?”
“I couldn’t make it all out, or maybe I’ve forgotten. But I do remember your father telling him to get the fuck off his property. I had never heard my own father swear, ever, so I was absolutely agog at the scene. The man made a reply to your father about the house. Declan said something like: ‘I paid cash for it.’ Or I think it was: ‘I gave the gougers a great stack of bills for it.’ I was picturing a man in a top hat and moustache walking away with a tottering pile of money. So Declan said it was his house and he didn’t want this other guy in it.
“There was more arguing, then the guy accused your father of stealing, said he’d seen Declan stuff an envelope into his pocket. Declan told him to F-off or whatever, and gave him a shove. The guy shoved back. They stared at each other and the man walked away.”
Sandra sipped her wine, then went on. “Declan could be intimidating, no question. But he had standards. He didn’t approve, for instance, of some of Brennan’s shenanigans. The company he kept, the carousing, the bimbos, including the one he was with when the rest of us were sitting around the Burkes’ dinner table waiting for him — Declan took him by the scruff of the neck when he came in, and delivered some choice words in his direction.”
Brennan sat back with his arms across his chest, glowering across the table.
“Let’s give him a break, now, Sandra. Monty is no stranger to bimbos, either. One at least, as I witnessed when I walked in unannounced last year and —”
“Tales about you would round things out nicely here, Maura. So keep that in mind before you start in on me.”
“Are you suggesting —” my wife whirled on me as if she had only just realized old Monty had been sitting there all night without an unkind word being directed his way “— that I ever dragged home some bit of scruff and —”
“All right, everybody, cool off here,” I demanded. “If, on occasion, there’s an unsavoury story about us, Sandra, we all come by it honestly. He’s a Burke, I’m a Collins, she’s a MacNeil. In the Ulysses obscenity trial in 1933, here in New York, the judge took judicial notice of our nature when he ruled the book was not obscene. As for sex being a recurring theme in the minds of the characters, the judge said: ‘— it must always be remembered that his location was Celtic and his season spring.’” Burke and MacNeil joined me in some cathartic laughter; Sandra rolled her eyes and shook her head.
“Sorry I’m late!” We all turned to see a man in his thirties, tie askew, greeting a group of people at the table next to ours. The man was nearly out of breath. “I stopped in at the house to get the music she wants for the funeral. Look at it! A bunch of little squares, and no hint of what note it starts on. How am I supposed to sing that?”
Brennan twisted around in his chair. “Let me see that.” The man looked at him for a moment, then handed over a sheet of paper. “Those are called neumes. Chant notation,” Brennan explained.
“I’ve been singing at Mass for years, including Gregorian chant, but I’ve never seen this stuff before. It was something my aunt pulled out of a trunk. I have no idea how to read it, and I have to know it by eleven tomorrow! Jesus.”
Brennan got up and dragged his chair over to the other table. He laid the papers out before him. “All right. This little square is called a punctum, a single note, and this we call podatus, one note above the other with the bottom note sung first. This mark shows where doh is, so this Kyrie starts on F.” Brennan sang it and I recognized the beautiful melody from his work with the choir at Saint Bernadette’s.
Sandra leaned over. Her voice was barely above a whisper: “You cannot imagine what a far cry that is from what I used to hear out of him at this time of night.”
“Hey, I know that one!” the man exclaimed.
“It’s the Missa de Angelis. I’m singing it myself, at a wedding later this week.”
“So, you sing in church too.”
“Yeah. I do.”
“I’m Roger Stanton.” He held out his hand.
“Father Burke. Brennan Burke.” The man eyed his dinner jacket and black tie. “I’m out of costume tonight.”
“Or in costume,” Sandra muttered.
“Thanks, Father,” Stanton said. “You’ve saved my ass here.”
Brennan turned back to us and caught Sandra staring at him. He cleared his throat. “Another drink, anyone? A sweet?” The women decided on dessert. Burke brought out a fat cigar and fired it up. He gazed at Sandra through the curls of smoke.
“Where were we?” Maura asked.
“Excuse me,” came a timid voice from the mourners’ table beside us. “Father?” Brennan turned around. “No, I shouldn’t bother you on your night off —” The woman was well dressed but plain of face; her eyes bore evidence of earlier weeping. She was probably in her late thirties.
A man at the table spoke up. “Go ahead, Fiona, ask him. If it’s upsetting you this much, get it off your chest before the funeral.”
The woman took a deep, steadying breath and went on: “Father, could I speak with you for two minutes, somewhere . . .” Her eyes darted around the room.
>
“Sure. Let’s sit over there.” He gestured to an unoccupied table near the entrance. He got up, took the woman gently by the elbow and walked to the table. He pulled the chairs around so they were sitting nearly side by side. Sandra and I could see what was going on. The woman spoke urgently and Burke nodded from time to time. At one point he turned to her, smiled kindly, and wiped tears from her eyes with his thumbs. The confession continued and he listened intently. Then he made a discreet sign of the cross over her and began to speak.
A voice in my ear said: “Don’t leave town without calling me. Bring Maura over for dinner.” Sandra rose from her chair and mouthed the word “later” to Maura. I tried to restrain her, but she walked out. When she passed by Brennan, he looked at her, without expression and did not miss a beat in his conversation with the penitent.
He returned to our table a few minutes later and tossed back the remainder of his whiskey.
“She was tired,” Maura began.
“She was rude to walk out. Teacups would be rattling chez Worthington.” He shrugged as if to say: “What can you do?” We stayed on for dessert and avoided the subject uppermost in our minds.
†
The three of us walked to our hotel overlooking Carnegie Hall in midtown Manhattan. Brennan’s parents had opened their home to out-of-town guests for the days before and after their granddaughter’s wedding on Friday. By the time Brennan had made arrangements to visit, his old room had been spoken for. But no doubt the idea of living it up in a New York hotel appealed to him. I offered him the extra bedroom in our suite for the two nights Maura and the kids would be in Philadelphia; he reserved his own room for the nights he wasn’t sharing with me. When Maura and I got to our suite, we saw that Tom and Normie had each claimed a room. I joined my son, and Maura slipped in with our little girl.
†
The next morning, I saw the family off at Penn Station. Normie was as excited about this, her first-ever train journey, as she was about the trip to New York. She kept waving and blowing kisses until the train was out of my sight. I spent the rest of the morning walking around midtown Manhattan, then had a leisurely lunch and took in a movie, enjoying the luxury of having no demands on my time. Late in the afternoon, I took the subway to the Burke residence in the Irish enclave of Sunnyside, Queens. They had half of a large brick house in the leafy area around Skillman Avenue, north of Queens Boulevard. Their corner lot was enclosed by a hedge. It looked as though the white trim on the windows had been recently painted. When I got to the door I could see Brennan inside the doorway with another man.