by Liz Nugent
A few years later, when I was in the seminary, I found a photograph of Oliver Ryan in the newspaper. He was a publishing “sensation.” I recalled that he was a Ryan cousin but he was now going by the name of Vincent Dax. I mentioned it to my father when he next visited and asked him to explain the relationship that he hadn’t been able to explain to a small boy. Dad was still clearly uncomfortable with the subject. He told me that Oliver’s mother had been a woman of “ill repute.” I questioned the Ryan connection; it must have been Oliver’s father who was related to us, surely? Dad looked away and said that Oliver’s father had died young of tuberculosis. I knew that he was lying to me. I suspected that if Oliver’s mother had been a prostitute, perhaps his father had died of syphilis or some other sexually transmitted disease, and that my father wanted to hide the details. Seeing his unease, I moved the conversation along and asserted that at least it was good to have a famous author in the family. Dad actually flinched and suggested that if I wanted a successful career in the church hierarchy, it would not do to associate myself with a family scandal. I could see his point.
Still, as Vincent Dax’s notoriety grew, I followed the media coverage of his success. I even bought one of his books. It was very good indeed. So I was quietly proud of my cousin but kept our relationship to myself.
On the day of my ordination, nobody was happier than my father. I was very glad to bring him such joy. We were always close, Dad and I. Like-minded in many ways, I suppose. He spent more on my ordination celebrations than he would have on a wedding, and insisted on paying for handmade robes. My mother, red eyed, put her objections aside and genuinely wished me well.
• • •
I still find it impossible to believe that my father lied for so long about something so fundamental. Even on his deathbed, he couldn’t tell me the truth. It’s nearly eleven years ago now since I discovered the facts, and even then . . . how can I know for sure? The only person who knew with certainty is gone.
My father was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer just six weeks before his death. His suffering was thankfully short-lived and he knew it was terminal. I was coincidentally the chaplain appointed to the hospital where he spent his last weeks. It meant that I was able to be with him, sit with him, and pray with him. Chemotherapy might have given him more time, but he declined it, choosing quality over quantity of life. His pain was managed well with medication, and he received visitors with grace and dignity. At the very end, when it was clear that it would be just a matter of days or hours, my mother and I kept vigil with him, both of us straining to maintain a tone of optimism though we knew it was hopeless. He was still conscious when I administered the last rites, or the anointing of the sick, as the sacrament is known.
For me, it is the most meaningful of all the sacraments. It is about giving the patient the strength, peace, and courage to endure pain and suffering, it is to find unity with the passion of Christ, it is spiritual preparation for the passing over to eternal life, and it is the forgiveness of sins. My father accepted my words and bowed his sunken head in prayer, but my mother, on the other side of the bed, took his arm and stroked it.
“Francis? Is there anything you would like to tell Philip?”
I was confused, and a little annoyed with my mother for disturbing such a peaceful moment. My father grew agitated. He shifted in his bed and I moved some pillows underneath his shoulder in order to make him more comfortable. He closed his eyes and exhaled. I looked at my mother quizzically.
“Francis,” she said again gently, smoothing his furrowed brow, “it is time to tell.”
My father turned his face into the pillow away from both of us, and I could tell from the shaking form under the blankets that he was crying. I was distressed at seeing my father in such misery and berated my mother. Whatever it was, now was certainly not the time. I called a nurse, who upped the morphine dose in his drip. He relaxed then and we were able to take his hands again until he slipped into unconsciousness. A few hours later, he passed over. It was almost dawn.
The day after my father’s funeral, my mother told me that Oliver Ryan was my half brother. She had desperately wanted my father to be the one to tell me, but right to the end he was deeply ashamed. Mum said he had got a woman pregnant while a priest back in the 1950s. She may have been a nurse, or even a nun. My mother doesn’t think she was a prostitute like my father told me, back when he was maintaining that Oliver was a cousin. My father never revealed the mother’s name. Mum says the woman abandoned her baby and disappeared, never to be seen again. My father told my mother about it in the early days of their relationship. He insisted on starting their marriage with a clean slate and had Oliver shipped off to St. Finian’s to be raised by the priests. Mum thought Dad was wrong to do that.
My mother was not the reason why Dad left the priesthood. They met some years later. She says that he was resistant to their relationship in the beginning; she thinks that they eventually bonded over their shared faith and that it was only when her uncle, Dad’s former bishop, gave his approval that Dad allowed himself to actually fall for her. He still kept extremely close links to the church and ultimately worked for them.
My mother insists she would have raised Oliver as her own son if Dad had let her. Mum says that it was the only thing that caused heartache in their marriage. It was simply a part of my father’s life that he refused to acknowledge or discuss. She says he passionately and irrationally hated the boy, and she never knew why.
I was stunned to hear this, of course. How could the father I knew have abandoned a child so cruelly when he had always treated me with such warmth and affection? How could he have denied me a brother? Regardless of what Oliver’s mother was like, how could he have hated an innocent child? My mother couldn’t give me answers and nor could the priests of my father’s acquaintance who might have been contemporaries. They either had no knowledge of the tale or had heard something of the story back in the day, but none could add further information. Shockingly, Oliver knew that we shared a father. How jealous must he have been of me? The staring and the spying in my school days finally made sense. Oliver Ryan was only watching his family. If the betrayal I now felt was so great, how must Oliver have felt his entire life? Earlier the previous day, I had accepted condolences from my brother on our father’s death. I knew that at some stage in the not-too-distant future, I would need to seek out this stranger. Perhaps it was not too late to welcome him to the family.
When I did seek him out some months later, our meeting did not go well.
16
* * *
OLIVER
I was intrigued by Father Daniel’s cryptic words at my father’s funeral. I wondered if my father had left me a bequest or a message of some kind, and I was conflicted about whether I wanted to receive it. But Father Daniel had always been good to me and I wanted to see him.
Father Daniel was a great age at this point, but his mind was still sharp and the years had not dulled his compassion. I know my current circumstances would be a great disappointment to him if he were still alive, but perhaps, of all people, he might have understood my desperation.
I was led into the priest’s parlor, familiar from the few occasions of my father’s visits in school days. It had not changed at all. I could see at once that Father Daniel was agitated, and he began by telling me that he wasn’t sure if he was doing the right thing.
“Your father was a . . . strange man,” he stated, and got no argument from me. “I wanted to . . . I’m not sure if . . .” There was his hesitancy and uncertainty again.
It seemed there was no bequest. I wasn’t upset about that. It wasn’t as if I needed money at that stage. Father Daniel explained that my father’s estate had been left entirely to Judith and Philip. I wasn’t mentioned in the will. Judith had subsequently given Father Daniel a box containing some gold holy medals that she asked him to pass on to me. I examined them in their box. They were engraved with crucifixes.
Father Daniel tried to apolog
ize on my father’s behalf. I brushed off the apology and accepted a small glass of Jameson to lessen the priest’s embarrassment.
“Did he ever mention to you . . . ? About your mother?” He looked nervous as he said it.
I sat up straight. “My . . . mother?” Even the words felt alien on my lips.
He shifted position in his chair. “I see, I thought not. It’s not easy . . . ,” he began. “We don’t have to . . . if you don’t want to.”
I asked for a minute and left the room and had the strongest urge to smoke as my hands began independently to reach for my cuff buttons. I paced the hall outside and was tempted just to walk away. Did I need this, did I really need to know? Of course I did. Every boy, regardless of age, needs a mother. If he can’t have her, he must at least know something about her. It is the natural order of things. Whether I needed to know was not the issue. I wanted to know. I paused before I reentered Father Daniel’s room, wondering if I would be a different man when I emerged. I asked Father Daniel to tell me everything.
“I’m sorry,” he said, “but I can only tell you what was said at the time. I have no proof of any of it, but I had friends out there at the time and they told me.”
“Out there?” I didn’t know what he meant.
“Northern Rhodesia, now Zambia,” he said. “There was an official report, but it was all hushed up. I tried to find it over the last month so that I would have something to give you, but it has disappeared. There are no records.”
These are the “facts,” as they were told to me:
My father was a young missionary priest who was sent out with three others to establish Catholic schools in rural villages along the Zambezi River in the early 1950s. In a particularly deprived and destitute village called Lakumu, where he was stationed for a year, he formed a friendship with a local native girl called Amadika.
Oh, no. My father was a pedophile priest? Oh, no. What has this to do with me?
Father Daniel was at pains to insist that Amadika was not a child. She was perhaps in her late teens or early twenties. They had a platonic relationship. She was apparently a very smart and diligent student, and it was known that my father favored her with school prizes and allowed her to cook and clean for him.
He used her as his slave? Is that it? What has this to do with me?
The school was heavily oversubscribed, and a rule was introduced that only the younger children could attend. Amadika’s mother begged my father to allow her to continue her studies, but my father refused. He couldn’t break the rules for anybody.
Apparently, Amadika was sent by her mother to sexually seduce my father in order to bargain for her right to stay in school. Father Daniel says that the natives had nothing else with which to bribe their educators, and the girl’s mother hoped that a good education might be the only thing to secure her future. It seems that my father was a particularly devout priest with ambitions, but that on this one occasion he yielded to natural urges and slept with the girl. He rejected her immediately afterward, banned her from the school, and ended their association.
Of course he slept with her. She offered herself. And then he was ashamed. What does this have to do with me?
Amadika’s pregnancy caused a scandal when she claimed that Father Francis Ryan was the child’s father. He strenuously denied it until the girl gave birth to a purely white baby—me.
No.
Impossible. No.
At this point in Father Daniel’s narrative, I reeled first with disbelief and later, shock. I had always assumed, because of what my father had said, that I was the result of an affair with a prostitute, and so had never wanted to explore the issue too deeply, especially after my birth certificate seemed to be a work of fiction, but this was just too fantastical to be credible, I thought. I was white. Father Daniel admitted that he too had found it difficult to come to terms with but swore this was the story he was told by the other priests. He insisted that Amadika was not a prostitute but rather a person forced by poverty, desperation, and circumstance to use the only thing she had at her disposal to make a better life for herself. Somehow, that rang a bell with me, but I simply couldn’t accept it.
“You have no proof!” I whispered. “You said there are no records!”
“There are none,” he admitted, “but I really can’t imagine why those who told me would lie about such a thing. I am the only person left alive who can tell you.”
I paced the room, processing what I had just been told, but it made no sense.
“Maybe I was wrong to tell you, but I thought you should know what was said. It was kept very quiet.”
I didn’t believe it and told him so in no uncertain terms. He apologized for causing any distress, and I could see that he was in anguish about having told me such a tale.
“You can just carry on as normal. It is only us who know.”
“What happened? To her?”
I tried to make sense of a tale that made no sense as Father Daniel continued his story. My story?
Amadika rejected her baby straightaway. Nobody in the village had ever seen a white baby before. She was terrified of it and shunned by her friends and her neighbors in the village, who thought that the baby’s pale sickliness had brought a curse upon the tribe. Apparently, she left the child at the door of my father’s hut and left the village with her mother. Nobody knows where she went. Nobody knew her last name.
My father had a mental breakdown. According to the other priests, he had been particularly devout. Father Daniel suggested that my father must have found it exceptionally difficult to have broken his vows. He was insistent that he had never initiated sexual contact. His lofty ecclesiastical ambitions were ruined. He was forced out of the priesthood and returned to Ireland with his unwanted son. However, because of strong connections to the Archbishop’s Palace, my father was hired as a special adviser and was warned to keep me as removed from him as possible, so as not to raise questions or provoke a scandal. They assumed, as the baby grew, as I grew, that I would develop physical signs of my black roots, that my hair might curl or my nose might flare, but I confounded their expectations by maintaining my Caucasian appearance. Most of those who knew of my existence were told I was an orphaned nephew, but my father subsequently met and married Judith within a few years and abandoned me to St. Finian’s.
If Father Daniel was right, if it was all true, I am a freak of nature. My eyes are dark brown and my pigmentation is a little more sallow than the average Irishman, but in every respect I am a white European. I chose not to believe it.
I told nobody, and when Father Daniel died a year later, I let the ridiculous story die with him. It made no difference to me now, and there was nothing I could do about the past. Who knows what went on in Africa? A little bit of private research revealed that my father had been in Northern Rhodesia at the time, and there was a village called Lakumu, but that was as far as I was prepared to go. It didn’t matter.
The truth is that I deserved a better father. I found one in France, but, alas, he wasn’t mine.
17
* * *
VÉRONIQUE
I cannot remember how it was that we ended up taking Irish students that year. I knew little of Ireland, apart from their whiskey and some of their music. A cousin of a friend organized it, I think. I recall being skeptical as to how college-educated people could adapt to heavy manual labor, but they tried their best, I will say that for them, with varying degrees of success. We also agreed at that time to take on some South Africans who were keen to learn about the Bordeaux wines of our region, and we were to train them in viticulture and pay a small fee in exchange for their labor. Naturally, not all of my white workers were happy about working alongside the black boys, but my father, who was still a hero to our community, led by example. Without having to say anything, we were subtly reminded by him of the dire consequences of racial intolerance.
I was later ashamed that I did not make more inquiries into exactly who was going to come and how
they would work. I had received a letter from a man in Stellenbosch who asked if he could send his son along with seven other laborers to learn about our grapes, so I was prepared for eight men to stay for two months. But then we got seven black boys, some very young, and one Afrikaner man named Joost, who was the only one who spoke French. It turned out that Joost was to inherit some land in the Western Cape and his father had decreed that he must plant it as a vineyard, but Joost did not want to do any actual work, so he brought these seven poor men to France to learn how to do the work for him. He refused to let them stay in the lodgings arranged for everybody else and had them billeted in a barn in the village. He also did not pay them the fee they had earned and instead paid them with wine that we dispensed freely. I did not work this out right away. It was the other laborers who told me what was going on. They were uncomfortable with it, and when I saw for myself the cuts and bruises on some of the men, I was finally convinced that the stories of Joost’s brutality were true and ordered him to leave. There was nothing I could do for those boys, who were little more than slaves. They had no education and no French, and we would not have work enough to keep them on beyond that summer. Papa and I sought them out the night before they left while Joost got drunk in the village. We gave them some money and food, and although they seemed terrified, one boy stepped forward to shake my hand and thank us. The other boys seemed stunned at his audacity.