It could be that Big Sis is a pervert too. She used to walk around the house wearing only a bra and knickers until Arnie Duncan, our 80-year-old across-the-road neighbour keeled over by his netted curtains with his hand on his mickey and the other on a pair of steamed-up binoculars. Horny Arnie, we called him. He’s in an old folk’s home for a year now, waiting to die. He has the same horn he had when the doctor found him. We found this out from Mrs Doran, who knows everything about everybody in the estate, and who is fond of saying that she’s never wrong about this or that. Da shut her up when he said, ‘Except for your Bollix dying that is.’
So then, we were in the middle of dinner like I’d mentioned, and out Big Sis comes with, ‘I’m pregnant!’ And the man who’s always saying he never panics, that he would have been the calmest person on the Titanic … Well, Da nearly swallowed his fork whole. Ma put a hand to her mouth, either to keep her dentures in or to check that the words didn’t come from her mouth.
Little Sis’s sniggering fell away when Big Sis hung out the culprit’s name to dry.
‘Curtis Maguire! Curtis! You knew I fancied him, you bitch!’
Da’s hands were by his plate, fingers curling up and uncurling, his cheeks red as cherries, lips white and shiny like the edge of a razor blade.
‘Shut it!’ he said, slapping the table with the flat of his hands. The calmest man on the Titanic had spoken. He snarled, ‘I suppose the fucking rat wants to marry you?’
Ma said, ‘He’s only 17, Red. No young one gets married nowadays just because they’re … they don’t want to go making two mistakes.’
Big Sis said, ‘He doesn’t know.’
He glanced at us in turn and said, ‘Is that why that litterture shite has been in the house?’
Mam said, ‘Red …’.
‘Well now, we’ll have to deal with this little problem,’ he said.
Mam said, ‘Hold on there … what do you mean?’
Ma’s a Catholic and Da is a Protestant. And that makes us Procats or Catprods, I suppose. They don’t go to Mass, so the truth is they’re pagans … but I think even pagans believe in something. So they’re not even pagans.
Da shook his head and said, looking at Ma side-on with something like fear coming to his eyes, ‘She’s too young; she can’t have it. Her life will be ruined.’ He turned his eyes to Big Sis and said, ‘You don’t want it, do you?’
‘I don’t know.’
Then she did the sister thing: she turned on the waterworks.
‘Did he … rape you?’ Da said, with hope in his tone. Like his daughter’s condition wasn’t her fault.
‘More like she raped him,’ Little Sis said.
Ma reached across the table and clipped Little Sis’s ear. ‘Go to your room!’
Little Sis opened her little mouth, but Da cut her off. ‘Now!’
She pushed back the chair, and ran from the kitchen, along the hall, pounded on the stairs and slammed her door shut. We all looked up at the ceiling, where, according to the pleading in Da’s eyes, is where all his answers lounge.
There was absolute silence for a few seconds, broken then by Big Sis’s snuffling and Da’s constant sighing. The dagger glances that Ma was sending Da had a noise, too.
‘No,’ Ma said, ‘it’s no possibility. Not a hope. The child will be born … even if it’s over my dead body.’
I said, ‘Nice image, Ma. Thanks for planting that in my head, you’re a pal.’
Da seemed to notice me then, and he hiked a thumb to the hall and said, ‘Go to your room.’ He said it quietly, like he was doing me a favour.
I went. No problem. My wardrobe is above the kitchen, and I often hear great bits of news whenever I put my ear in there. Like the neighbour Ma told Da couldn’t keep her legs together. I thought that a terrible disease and imagined myself walking splay-legged to school, drawing sympathy from my pals. But the next day I saw your woman coming toward me on the footpath, and her knees were close together. There isn’t much point, I thought, in having a disease that you can be easily cured of. Another bit of news I could have told the sisters was the fact that Ma and Da were thinking of having another baby. Funny how your plans can come alive through a third person.
I put my ear in my listening post.
‘Who-do-you-think-is-going-to-feed-and-look-after-this-baby?’ Da said, pausing between each word, ‘not-moi!’
‘Curtis Maguire,’ Ma said, distantly.
Curtis is creepy. Goes all weird in the eyes sometimes, like he was seeing stuff in you that a mirror wouldn’t tell.
Da said with measured patience, ‘F this.’ then he flared up thick, ‘I’m going to ring that … that … that FUCKER …’.
‘Da!’ Big Sis said.
‘Shush you!’
‘Ma!’ Big Sis said.
‘Shut it!’
Within a breath he was on to Curtis’s dad and told him all and then he was listening. After he was finished speaking with Bill he said, ‘Jesus!’
‘What?’ Ma said.
Da said, ‘He told me that was the fourth this week.’
‘Fourth!’ Big Sis shrieked.
‘Red?’ Ma said.
‘Four, aye … fucking four. Wan is expecting twins.’
‘Oh Jesus!’ Ma said.
Silence.
Big Sis said, ‘Does twins hurt more than one, Ma?’
‘I fucking hope so,’ Da said.
‘Red,’ Ma said.
He softened then, ‘And some long-time childless married woman has a bit of explaining to do to her husband.’
That’s typical Da: making himself feel better by thinking how others were worse off.
‘Twins,’ Ma whispered in alarm.
Well, Big Sis didn’t have twins. She’d a bouncing baby boy. She called him Red-Mond, which is the height of arse licking. Little Sis is cute, she says, by taking her smarties. There’s one for every day – Tuesday and Thursday tasted horrible. She was raging because she had to gobble Friday’s ahead of itself. I can’t figure out how the smarties stop a woman from getting pregnant, but I know how condoms are supposed to. Ma showed me using a parsnip. She said she didn’t want me getting young wans in trouble, even if they wanted to get themselves into that trouble. That’s progress, I suppose.
Da is always playing with Red Mond, which sickens my hole because he doesn’t bring me to the park to play soccer any more. But then he’s a lot on his plate, especially after Ma told him to prepare himself for more little trouble.
The Archbishop’s Daughter
Everything has a shadow of some kind. Maybe even a shadow has a shadow.
– Amos Oz
Dear Monsignor,
If I’ve strayed from protocol and addressed you incorrectly, forgive me; I meant no disrespect. Don’t you think that the words ‘Archbishop’ and ‘Daughter’ make for an interesting and somewhat arresting banner? It brings us straight to the heart of the matter.
What I have to tell you is of genuine significance. This isn’t yet another sad and lamentable tale of child sexual abuse that continues to drag the roots of the church screaming towards daylight. My secret, soon to be yours (though I suspect you already know some detail) is at once amazing, heartbreaking, romantic, and yet conversely it is none of these.
What I have to tell you concerns another type of abuse, of a nature that I haven’t quite managed to define. The secret I want to relate to you is a recently discovered one, and the pain and shock of it has not fully taken its leave of me. Nor is this a case of a man putting a foot forward in the hope that he will be given money to go away quietly, with the secret locked tightly in his heart, its trail to turn cold on his tongue. Money does not interest me; I mean this, though I am by no means a wealthy man. I can hear my own death knells in the offing. I am too
busy with the process of dying to worry about money.
Why do I write to you, Monsignor, and not an Irish Archbishop? Rome is where the power is – Rome is the Authority, the Dragon, the Ivory Tower of the Infallible One: Il Papa. And so I write to the sinless soul. I want him to know that I did not reach the end of my days in total ignorance. Il Papa has, through his silence, his covering up of truths and sins, sinned against me. May God forgive him, and your church.
Let’s begin.
My wife, Monsignor, is the daughter of Ireland’s most famous or infamous Archbishop, and her mother is a nun. His name is Laurence John Roche, and his friend and long-time lover is Sister Emma Pearse – their daughter’s real name is Eleanor.
I’ll let you digest that for some moments before bringing you further.
It is of course the reason why he never made Cardinal.
Irrespective of what I can see and now know (I feel none the wiser because of it), it’s important too that I tell someone of religious pedigree this story.
To refresh your memory.
Laurence John Roche was born in 1895. His father was a doctor, and his mother died when he was a year old – a fact that Laurence did not discover until he was 16 and at boarding school. He had always thought his stepmother, Deirdre, to be his real mother. The effect of this revelation on the boy, according to his biographer, was devastating. I’ve read the book, and isn’t it sad that, for all of its 675 pages, there is not a single clue to be found of what had been really going on in the late Archbishop’s life? The writer must have been bound by awe and respect for the Archbishop, and/or by the country’s libel laws. Fear, too. Then again, Monsignor, you are acquainted with how we Irish like to bury things. We are the Ostrich Nation.
In all his regal glory, the Archbishop is there between the covers in black-and-white photographs of his ordination, his meetings with Pope Pius and later with Pope Paul, with President de Valera, with whom he was great friends. All that information is contained within those 675 pages, and while the details and facts of it I presume are true and accurate, it is with what’s not written about him that we must concern ourselves. Let the public and academics pick over the bones of the man they think he was, the things he did and didn’t do – he is part of the long road that has led the Church to possible ruination and moral bankruptcy.
In his defence, he came from a society where truth was harboured like the last few good potatoes of a famine cottager. A man leaves his community and dons a white collar and black garb and becomes what? A moral compass for the community? A teacher? Perhaps. But he could never lose what was ingrained in him: to hide things, to move paedophile priests from parish to parish – and Archbishop Laurence John Roche did that sort of thing, because the importance of preserving secrets had been bred into him like good manners. To say that he should have known better is to try and escape from the fact that he did not. There was the secret of his dead mother – a secret kept from him by his stepmother and his father, his friends and neighbours in Cootehill. He had his own secrets about life in his first boarding school, saying only that terrible things had happened to him there. A didactic man, austere, saturnine. A great scholar and teacher, who by his very appointment to Archbishop had created enemies for himself within the religious community – he was the bog-man from the north of the country. What good ever came out of Nazareth and Cavan county?
His friendship with the poet Patrick Kavanagh? There are documented accounts of their meetings, and the song that evolved from Kavanagh’s poem, ‘On Raglan Road’ held perfect resonance for the Archbishop. He ‘tripped lightly along the way’, yes? ‘Her dark hair would weave a snare that he would one day rue’? ‘He loved too much and by such by such is happiness thrown away?’ ‘When the angel woos the clay …’.
Ah yes, for I believe that Eleanor’s mother had beautiful, long, dark hair, as does Eleanor, even now, still, though she is – I was about to write 50 years old – 46. I am finding it difficult to come to terms with her age in all of this. She was 14, and not 18, when I made love to her. What does that make me? A friend of the Church? An ally? A stealer of innocence? Yet, I was ignorant, kept in the dark – this is some mitigation, I expect.
A photocopy of a black-and-white photograph is attached by a Baloo the bear magnet to the fridge in Eleanor’s (our) kitchen. It shows a baby dressed in a cardigan with the cuffs rolled up. Behind her is a pristine pram, its flank shiny. She lies on a blanket spread on newspapers – one of the banner lines reads ‘TAKEN’, which, Monsignor, when you think on it, is both ironic and appropriate. For much was taken from Eleanor, and had to be, I suppose, when you consider that she is a princess of the Church, which is far removed from being a princess of royalty. It is a graceless thing, which is ironic when you consider grace to be a big word in the Church. Amazing Grace, the grace to enter the Kingdom of Heaven ….
On her wrist, circling the sleeve, is a silver bracelet with a capping that contains a fragment of bone from the remains of Saint Therese. This did not come back with her from Wales (where she had been fostered by an aunt too ill to make the fostering a permanent arrangement), but she has it now; after forty-three years. A long wait, isn’t it? A long wait, too, for her to be handed back her real identity. It sometimes crosses my mind that it might have been wiser to let her go to her grave thinking that she was the person she had been all her life. But this would probably have been the greatest betrayal of all.
In the end, a relative of the Archbishop stepped in to resolve the issue of the infant’s ‘no fixed abode’. Her relationship to the Archbishop is not clear to me. It appears that she was a doughty old woman with an iron will. She insisted that the child be given to her married daughter and son-in-law, a childhood friend/foster-brother of the Archbishop.
When Eleanor arrived at her new home, she was malnourished and underweight, and it took the O’Learys three weeks to settle her from constant crying. She was given the name Patricia, and her age changed to slot in with the other children in the family. Neighbours who inquired about the new addition to the family were told that the child belonged to a sister of Michael’s who had got herself into trouble with a married man. Not an uncommon occurrence back then.
Eleanor can recall being brought in from playing in the back garden to meet with a man in the sitting room. The Archbishop had called on four occasions to see his daughter, but she only remembers two of his visits, and only some of the things he’d said to her.
Eleanor told me of the excitement in the house prior to these visits – the polishing and cleaning that went on, the Wedgewood delft that was rarely used was taken from the locked kitchen cabinet. The sitting room was reserved for special guests and as an occasional treat for members of the family at Christmas time and on birthdays. There was a charge in the air – a humming and electrifying energy. These days she has items belonging to him in her possession: a prayer book, and between its pages old memorial cards and novenas to the saints he must have prayed to, a letter. As she entered the room, she remembered the fall into silence, the slow departure of others – leaving her alone with this man the others had called ‘Your Grace’. In that room, with its smell of new floral-patterned carpet, and photographs of dead people, and a bookcase rich with brown-covered Encyclopaedia Britannica, she felt a tiny bit afraid, a tiny bit special. She wondered why none of her brothers and sisters had been brought into see him. Why her? Had she done something bad? Had someone told him what she’d shouted at Dougie Molloy for putting a frog down her back? The names she’d called him? And his mother too, for that was the only way she could get him to stop laughing at her.
She stood a few feet away from him in her new blue dress, her hair in a ponytail, new black shoes mirror shiny after Dad had that morning spat on and polished them.
‘Come over here, child; don’t be staying over there.’
He sat to the edge of the new sofa and looked her over, his hands on her upper ar
ms, gently squeezing. Then he put his palms flat to her cheeks. He stared at her until he saw a mist come to her eyes; he feared she might begin to cry. Gently, he rubbed the top of her head and said, sighing, that she was a lovely looking girl. Eleanor is sure that she is able to remember this particular visit because of his sigh, for it was long and loud and filled with a pining sadness.
He asked her about school, and she said that she liked Mrs Doyle but not Mrs Kenny. She talked about the frog that was put down her back, but not about the things she had said afterwards. All the while she was talking, he was smiling, but it wasn’t a happy smile – she sensed that. Now she recognises it as the smile of the forlorn, of someone who for a split second sees how things could have been, and yet could never have been.
‘Are you happy, child?’
She nodded.
He said it again, after a timid knock on the door to remind him that he had an appointment to keep. ‘Are you happy?’
‘Yes, Father.’
He made the sign of the cross over her, and spoke in a strange language. At the door, he stopped and smiled at her. ‘Be a good girl for Michael …’.
She was 10 years old when he died. Imagine not knowing your own father was dead? Imagine her foster parents looking at the news on TV, and the front pages of the newspapers screaming at them in bold – listening and hearing and digesting all the good and bad said of the dead man, while under their roof lived the Archbishop’s daughter, and they could never tell a soul because they’d been sworn to secrecy. Very often it is the ordinary man and woman who are true to their promises, unlike others, who lean weight on an oath and then find they can’t keep it. There were many times when Michael and his wife hadn’t got a loaf to put on the table, and here was a story they could have sold for a holy/unholy sum. It’s a barb, Monsignor, and I apologise for it – occasionally I give way to anger over all that’s happened to Eleanor, and by association with her, me.
Deadly Confederacies Page 4