Unraveling Oliver

by Liz Nugent

  “I suspect that my parents have asked you to come here because I think I’m a homosexual,” I said, and, feeling brazen, added, “In fact, I don’t just think it.”

  There was a pause while he coughed unnecessarily and readjusted himself on the leather armchair. It squeaked absurdly as if he had farted, and he quickly and deliberately moved again, causing another squeak, to make it clear that it was the chair and not him. I have eschewed leather furniture ever since.

  “It’s a sin, you know.”

  “I know, Father.”

  “Will you swear never to do it again?”

  “But, Father, you don’t seem to understand. It’s not just a matter of it, of sexual intercourse, it’s a fundamental part of who I am.”

  “But it’s a sin!”

  “I know, Father.”

  We went around in circles for a while. I declared that even if I never did it again, I wouldn’t be able to stop myself from thinking about it or indeed the man who might perform it with me. He reddened and declared that thinking about it was a sin too and suggested that I could think about flowers or trees instead. I asked him why it was a sin if I wasn’t hurting anyone, and he appeared confused.

  “What about getting married? Having children?”

  “I don’t want children.”

  “What if you change your mind?”

  “About having children or about being gay?”

  “The first one.”

  “What if you change your mind about having children?”

  Silence. He wasn’t programmed for that answer.

  With another priest, my question to him could have been seen as the height of insolence, but he had a soft way about him and a style that was not intimidating in the least. I felt emboldened.

  “I won’t,” he said eventually.

  “Neither will I.”

  “What about the other thing?”

  “Being gay? Changing my mind isn’t an option! It’s not a decision I have made. I have only decided not to hide it anymore. Not to hide who I am. I have never been interested in women, as much as I have tried. Don’t you think it’s unlikely that I might start now?”

  “Me neither,” he said.

  I thought he had lost the train of our conversation. I wasn’t sure what exactly he was agreeing with me about, and then suddenly he buried his head in his hands and broke down, grabbing a handkerchief and stifling his sobs.

  I was stunned at this turn of events and found myself consoling him.

  “What is it? Look, if I’ve upset you, I apologize, I never meant . . .”

  When he looked up at me imploringly, his long eyelashes glistening wetly, I understood immediately.

  “You’re not . . . ?” I said. It seemed like it would be blasphemous to even suggest it.

  He nodded miserably.

  Dermot (his given name) had joined the priesthood in a desperate attempt to escape the reality of his sexuality, as if by ignoring it, he could pretend it wasn’t there. The seminary, he later told me, was full of young gay men, most of whom found solace in each other, but he, raised in a more severely Catholic home than my own, was determined not to yield to his inclinations. My confession to him seemed to open the floodgates, and I listened as he recounted his years of utter loneliness, repression, and frustration. We talked for three hours. Mum was delighted when we eventually emerged.

  The afternoon concluded with me agreeing to meet him for a drink in a small hotel in Bray the following Sunday after mass. It was clear that Dermot was struggling with the priesthood and with his faith as much as with his sexuality. The church condemned us, and yet there were other things going on that the church was ignoring, the full extent of which we have only recently learned. Dermot was aware of some incidents and had reported them and seen the perpetrators moved or promoted and the “misdemeanor” covered up. He felt that if he expressed his sexuality, it would make him as bad as the abusers, and it took some time for me to convince him that there was a world of difference between two consenting adults engaging in a physical relationship and an older man in a position of power using that power to interfere with a child in some cases not old enough to understand what was being done to them. Dermot went to confession over and over again and spoke to his bishop, tried to be honest with them. They more or less told him to shut up about everything or face a transfer to some godforsaken spot on the globe. After six months of soul-searching, he quit the priesthood altogether and reverted to his given name, Dermot. We had become close friends and confidants by then, and not long afterward we became lovers. Before Dermot, I had never thought of settling down with one man. I assumed that, as a gay man, my relationships would probably be fleeting sexual encounters, but I found to my surprise that I loved him deeply and wanted him as a permanent fixture in my life. Thankfully, Dermot felt the same way, although it took him a bloody long time to admit it.

  But I am skipping ahead. Once I had come out to my parents in the autumn of 1973, I am not sure why I felt the need to, but I wrote to Oliver to tell him officially that I was gay. I think I wanted to explain myself to someone who had known me before and also to excuse the jealousy I felt toward him and Laura that summer. I wanted him to know that he couldn’t “dislike queers” because I was one, and I considered him a friend. I think I probably should have been sober when I wrote the letter. I cringe now when I think of it. I received a reply within the week. I don’t know exactly what I had wanted or expected, but he admitted that my declaration in the summer was no surprise to him, apologized for trying to set me up with Madame Véronique, wished me well in my life, and hoped that I would meet a good man. It seemed clear to me that he was drawing a line under our friendship.

  I must have caused quite a degree of stress for my parents around that time. There were more trials and tribulations when I declared my intention to drop out of college and open a restaurant. This time though, Mum was on my side and eventually convinced my father to lend me the capital required. I had practically moved into the kitchen in the months after my return from France, and Mum was delighted at all my discoveries. Some ingredients I had brought home with me, and some I imported from my deflorist Thierry. Dad was impressed by the food but thought I should be spending more time with my books, although when I single-handedly did the catering for a dinner party they were hosting for twelve of their most sophisticated friends, who swooned over each course, my father was persuaded to concede that I had a gift worth investing in.

  All these negotiations served to distract us from the fact that Laura had stated that she wasn’t coming home for Christmas. Her irregular letters home told of the building project undertaken to restore the east wing as a result of donations from all over the province. Though somewhat mystified, we were proud of Laura’s charitable actions and dispatched a large basket of food accompanied by an equally large bank draft courtesy of my father.

  My restaurant, L’Étoile Bleue, opened at the end of March 1974 in a laneway off a Georgian square in the city center. In the space of a year, my life had turned upside down in spectacular style. The restaurant did good business from the start, and within a few months I could see that if trade continued at the current rate, I would be able to repay my father’s investment within maybe five or six years, so all was fabulous. Then, in August, Laura came home.

  My parents were, of course, relieved, and I wanted to hear all about what was happening in Clochamps, how the building project was going in Château d’Aigse, how Madame Véronique was, whether she had seen Thierry, and so on. Laura answered my questions but seemed distant and uninterested. She looked pretty dreadful too: she had dark circles under her eyes and she was very thin. She just picked at her food at mealtimes. We didn’t recognize her odd behavior for the nervous breakdown she was having. My mother brought her to a doctor who recommended a foul-smelling tonic that had no effect whatsoever. When I suggested getting in touch with Oliver, she barely reacted at all. I didn’t understand what was going on with Laura, but I was worried. I offered he
r a few weeks’ work in the restaurant. She had deferred college for a year and still had more than a month before she started again. She would be okay for a few days and then she wouldn’t show up at all, leaving us frustrated and short staffed. She said she was tired. “Of what?” I said. “You don’t bloody do anything!”

  Reluctantly I approached Oliver to ask if he would call to the house to see her. He obliged by offering to take her out for a meal in my restaurant or anywhere she wanted, but Laura refused to go. Oliver even wrote her a letter, but Laura didn’t want to see him. I wondered if perhaps there was more to Oliver and Laura’s breakup than I knew. To all outward appearances, he had been a gentleman throughout their entire relationship—there was no question that he had cheated on her or anything like that—but it was clear that Laura wasn’t going to forgive him for rejecting her. Usually it was Laura who did the rejecting. She clearly couldn’t handle being on the receiving end. I didn’t think that Oliver could be held responsible for her depression. Not then.

  9

  * * *

  STANLEY

  I find it difficult to believe what is being said and written about Oliver. It is true that I haven’t seen him in decades, but the person they are describing in the headlines is not the boy I knew.

  When Oliver became so hugely successful as Vincent Dax, I was really glad that his life had worked out so well, because as far as I remember he had a fairly miserable childhood, even by Irish standards. I know because I was there for part of it. They say that children always accept their own reality as normality, so I suspect that Oliver wasn’t that aware of how neglected he was, but it was certainly whispered about at the time.

  My father had died the year before I arrived in St. Finian’s in south Dublin. I was fourteen and had three sisters. I think Mammy just wanted me to have a more stable education and to have some masculine influences on my life. We lived in rural south Kilkenny, and I ended up working the farm quite a bit, but Mammy was determined that I wouldn’t follow my father into an early grave, which, she insisted, was a result of working his fingers to the bone from dawn till dusk. The other more pressing reason, though I didn’t appreciate it at the time, was my chronic shyness. I have a disfiguring port-wine stain across my left eye and for most of my life have been self-conscious about it. My mother felt that if she didn’t find a way to get me off the farm at a young age, I would probably never leave home. She was right.

  St. Finian’s wasn’t a bad school by the standards of the day. I don’t ever remember there being reports of sexual abuse or anything like that. The priests were, by and large, quite kind. There was the token sadist, naturally enough, but I reckon having only one on staff in an entire school in the 1960s was a pretty good ratio.

  When I arrived in Oliver’s class, he had already been in St. Finian’s for eight years. It seems really shocking now; the thought of sending my own little fella away when he was only six sends shivers down my spine, but it really wasn’t that unusual at the time. Oliver was pretty quiet, most notable for the fact that his clothes were almost threadbare. Because of this and because of his dark complexion, he was an obvious target for general abuse. Academically, he was pretty average, better at French than anything else, though still not outstanding. For the first year, before I really got to know him, I assumed he was a scholarship child because he seemed so, well . . . poor. We knew he had no mother and assumed that she was dead. It was rumored that Oliver’s dad hadn’t been married to Oliver’s mother or that she might have died in childbirth. He never spoke of her and it was just one of those things that was understood; it would be inappropriate to ask, like the fact that we all knew Simon Wallace was adopted but no one ever mentioned it.

  Oliver spoke of his father though, often, and with reverence and pride. I can’t remember exactly what it was he did, something to do with the church, senior adviser to the archbishop of Dublin, something like that. It was surprising to me that Oliver’s dad would be someone of importance, because his general neglect of, and lack of interest in, his own son was staggering. What shocked me even more was the fact that Oliver had a sibling, a pale-eyed blond-haired half brother, Philip, about seven years younger than him, who lived at home and went to the primary school attached to our school. I never saw them speak to each other in intimate terms. It was as if they were completely unrelated. But the most awful thing was that Oliver’s home was less than a mile from the school and he seemed to be forbidden from entering it. At Christmastime and during school breaks, Oliver stayed with the priests. From the window of the hallway beside the science laboratory on the top floor of the school, you could see Oliver’s house. Many, many times, I found him perched on the windowsill, often with my pair of binoculars, watching his family come and go. Somehow, it seems much more tragic now. In the macho world of an all-boys’ boarding school, there was no room for sentimentality or sympathy. If we were wounded, we learned to hide it well.

  Oliver and I became friends in my second year at the school in a passive kind of way. We didn’t exactly choose each other. It was just because everyone else had friends and we were the two oddities with whom no one else wanted to hang out. My disfigurement and Oliver’s manifest neglect marked us as outsiders. He named us “The Weirdos.” We didn’t belong in the hip crowd and we didn’t belong in what we called the “namby-pamby” crowd, and as we weren’t part of any particular gang, we buffeted along between all the various groups, falling out of favor with one and moving on to the next. We trusted each other. Oliver dominated the friendship, which really suited me fine. I pretty much went along with anything he said, but he wasn’t much of a rule breaker or risk taker, so I was never led into jeopardy. He never mentioned my eye and I never mentioned his mother. That was the basis of a firm friendship in those days.

  He was curious about my family, constantly asking me to retell stories and anecdotes from my breaks at home. Not having a mother, he wanted to know about mine.

  Oliver’s father visited maybe once every year or eighteen months. Oliver would be in a knot of anxiety for weeks leading up to a visit, trying his best to raise his grades and keep out of any hint of trouble. He looked forward to it and dreaded it in equal measure, I think. When my mother or other parents visited, they always brought gifts for their children, usually a care package of some sort or, if you had particularly cool parents, a set of darts, water pistols, or other weapons of minor destruction.

  A boy would always be very popular in the wake of a parental visit, as he would be expected to share the swag. Some suggested that Oliver was keeping it for himself and simply refused to share, but I know that wasn’t the case. His father never brought him anything, except a book of psalms once.

  Approaching summer holidays toward the end of my second year there, my mother suggested that I invite Oliver to join us on the farm for a few weeks. I wasn’t sure about this plan, if I’m honest. It was one thing to be hanging out in school, whittling slingshots out of branches and spying on the school nurse and her boyfriend, Father James, but school and home were very different environments. My home was a particularly feminine one, with a widowed mother and three girls, while Oliver was growing up in a school surrounded almost exclusively by men, except for the aforementioned nurse and a few of the cleaners. I remember being worried by his reaction to my family and vice versa, but I needn’t have. All the women in my family fell in love with him. My mother would have adopted him if she could, and it was the most painful embarrassment to watch all my sisters going through the various stages of romantic attraction to him. Una, the youngest, was nine and spent as much time as possible climbing onto him for piggybacks or asking him to read to her. Michelle, thirteen, feigned a sudden curiosity in anything that Oliver had an interest in and spent her time baking new delicacies with which to charm him. Aoife, at sixteen, one year older than us, tried a different tack, pretending that she didn’t notice him, but always seemed to be in some state of undress when we walked in from the barn and developed a way of draping herself over ou
r furniture that could only be described as louche.

  Oliver took it in his stride. I’m sure he was somewhat discomfited, but he must have been flattered all the same. That was probably the first time he’d been around women of his own age. At first he was shy and overly polite, but he gradually relaxed until he almost became accepted as one of the clan. The plan was that he would stay three weeks. His father had apparently stipulated that Oliver must earn his keep and be put to work on the farm, but we were all used to working our summers on the farm anyway, so Oliver blended in quite well. Oliver proudly sent his first postcard to his father, telling him how much he was enjoying his time and assuring him that he was working hard nonetheless. Two days later, my mother received a phone call from Mr. Ryan instructing her to return Oliver to the school immediately. He should have had another eight days with us, but Oliver’s father would brook no argument and offered no reason for the change of plan. My mother was very upset, I recall, and bought Oliver a whole new set of clothing before we put him on the train back to Dublin. Oliver bade us farewell stoically. He didn’t question his father’s decision or express resentment. He didn’t seem angry about it, but I clearly remember the shine of tears in his eyes as we waved him good-bye from the station platform, my three sisters blowing him kisses, my mother as heartbroken as they were.

  We never got a valid reason for Oliver’s sudden departure. As far as I know, he just went back to the school and spent the rest of the summer with the priests. My mother always maintained that his father acted out of spite, that the postcard alerted him to the fact that Oliver might actually be enjoying himself, and so he felt compelled to put a stop to it. There wasn’t really any other explanation, I’m afraid. It is hard to credit that anyone could be so cruel to their own flesh and blood. I guess we will never know the reasons why, unless Oliver writes his autobiography. But I’m not sure if he would be allowed to do that now.