by Maeve Binchy
He was never a holy kind of boy, and none of his schoolmates thought that there was anything remotely pious in his vocation. They were slightly envious in fact to think that Sean would go off to all these exotic places. It was never firmly decided whether it would be Africa, or India or China. The Brother who taught geography was quite grateful to young Sean, as the boy was always sending off to Missionary Orders asking for details of their work; and in return for magazines and pamphlets Sean organized the silver-paper collection for them too.
He had even managed to get a missionary priest to come and give a talk at their school when he was around thirteen. The priest told him to slave hard at his books and maybe he would be taken into a seminary; but for everything in this life it was essential to be good at the books.
Sean was three years older than Angela but he found her a willing ally. She borrowed books for him from the convent; she shared the task of going round to look for their father each evening and finding a neighbor willing to help carry him home. It was she who insisted that a corner of their kitchen be made into a sort of study for them, and had the oil lamp fixed firmly to a shelf so that it couldn’t be taken away from them. Their two sisters, Geraldine and Maire, were already planning to leave the nest. Geraldine had been in touch with a hospital in Wales where she could train as a nurse, and Maire had a friend who worked in a very nice store in London which was so smart that it wasn’t like being a shop girl at all. Fifteen and sixteen, and their futures were certain. Within months they were gone. Holidays at home very rarely, letters from time to time, pictures of grandchildren never seen, never known, growing up with English accents and a promise to come home some day.
Geraldine and Maire had come home for their father’s funeral. Grown-up, distant, wearing black coats and hats, startled that everyone else wore raincoats and headscarves. They had borrowed the black outfits specially. They had looked around with restless eyes at the wet cold churchyard, and at the entire population of Castlebay standing with bent heads against the wind. It was so unfamiliar to them after thirteen years in another country. They had looked pityingly at the small house that had been their home for over half their lives and shaken their heads sadly. Angela had been enraged. They didn’t know how hard she had worked during her father’s last illness to try to make the place look respectable, so that her mother would have some dignity at the end. So that she could give the neighbors tea and cake and whiskey without feeling ashamed of their home.
But of course the best consolation at the funeral had been Father Sean. He had been due back later in the spring but when Angela wrote to him and to the Superior of the Order—a measured letter explaining that her father would not be alive in spring, the liver damage was irreversible—the Order had acted swiftly and humanely. Of course young Father O’Hara could be spared from the misson fields a little earlier.
And home he came, stepping from the bus to a buzz of excitement; children ran ahead up to O’Hara’s cottage to give the news that he had arrived. The long skirts of his habits he raised slightly to avoid the mud of Castlebay, the way they were used to avoiding the swamps of the Far East. Father O’Hara, home to give his father Extreme Unction and to say his Funeral Mass.
Father Sean had a word for everyone in Castlebay. His eyes didn’t cloud with pity for the people, he didn’t look sadly at his old home, his bent mother, nor did he close his ears from the life his father had lived. “He was an unhappy man in this world, let us pray he finds that happiness he was always seeking in the next.” It was generous and forgiving and loving, people said. He had been away for most of his father’s spectacular unhappiness, away in the seminary in the novitiate and eventually in the mission fields. But still, the principle was the same, and if he was able to forgive his father for all that neglect and trouble, people thought it was big-hearted of him in the extreme.
Angela’s mother’s bones ached less when Father Sean was around, and on the very last morning, before he went away again for five years, he said a little Mass at a side altar in the church just for the two of them. They didn’t even have an altar boy; Angela answered the responses in Latin from her missal. Geraldine and Maire had gone back to their families in England with promises to return regularly.
When the Mass was over, Mrs. O’Hara pressed eighty pounds into her son’s hands for the missions; she had been saving it and hiding it for years waiting for his visit.
He had gone that day. The tears of goodbye were in the house, and the brave faces were at the bus stop opposite Conway’s post office; there was a waving of handkerchiefs, and the pride of the widow that everyone in the town should see how her fine tall son had turned out.
And the letters never failed: thanks for the cuttings from the local paper, or for the news that their stamp collection had been the biggest in the county; sympathy to the Dillons when old Mr. Dillon died, a holy picture to be given to the family with a few words of blessing written by Father O’Hara himself; less and less about what he did himself and more and more in response to their own tittle-tattle in the fortnightly letter which Angela now wrote for her mother since the arthritis had reached the old woman’s hands.
Not long ago, Angela had written on her own behalf a little request: “Sean, you’re so good to be interested in all our petty goings-on here, but tell us more about you. In the beginning you used to tell us about the House and the various fathers who lived there, and the schools you all started. And I remember the day a bishop came to confirm everyone and there was a monsoon and they all ran off into their huts and no one got confirmed that year. It’s interesting to us to know what it’s like for you every day, and what you do all the time. If you were a priest here with Father O’Dwyer we’d know, but it’s so different out there we find it hard to visualize . . .”
Why had she written that? If she had said nothing maybe she would never have had the letter that burned a hole through her handbag; the letter that told of the end of the vocation for Father Sean but would spell the end of any kind of life at all for his mother.
Sean had written that he couldn’t bear the deception anymore, he said that Shuya and he found the letters from home unbearable now; they referred to a life long past. And when money arrived for Masses, it was spent on rent and food. Sean taught English in Tokyo. There had never been a religious house of his order there at all; the address on letters from Castlebay was in fact the house of Shuya’s brother. Sean collected any mail from him.
The family spoke English, and were puzzled to know why he was still addressed as “Father” on the envelope, and why their house was described as a religious foundation.
The other fellows had been terrific about it all, even his Superior. They had tried to change his mind at first and said that, even though Shuya was pregnant, surely Sean could come back to the House, and a provision be made for the child. They didn’t understand that he loved her and wanted to have a family with her, and that long before he had met her, the conversion of the Far East had lost all sense for him. He could only see that they were fine with their own beliefs and he didn’t think the Lord wanted them changed at all.
Eventually, when everything got more settled, he was going to send his plea to Rome to be laicized and released from his priestly vows. It happened much more than people thought. Then he would be free to remarry Shuya in a Catholic church, and their children could be baptized. Shuya said she had no objection to the children being Catholics.
There was a finality about it that was chilling. The letter left no hope that Shuya was a dalliance, a shameful thing which you often heard whispered about when priests went abroad—something like that or two bottles of the local liquor a day. This woman was in his mind his wife. His fellow priests knew about her, they had been kind and supportive. His Superior knew. And Sean found the letters from home “unbearable.” He couldn’t “bear” to read them now because they referred to a life that no longer existed. To hell with him, she thought in fury. He can bloody bear to read them for as long as we send them. I
shall never tell that woman about the Japanese Shuya, I shall never tell her about the half-Jap grandson, called Denis after his grandfather. How could poor Mammy take it in and cope with it, if even Angela who was young and meant to be modern and intelligent couldn’t take it in herself? And then there were other moods: poor, poor Sean, how desperate, with only one life to lead, and finding it empty. Led on and seduced by this Japanese woman with no religion and no morals. To her, a priest was the same as anyone else; she would have no idea what a sin it was, and what a terrible decision Sean had to make. At other times still she had moments of calm: it’s not so bad, we’ll say nothing, Mammy doesn’t read my letters, I’ll write him ordinary letters referring to his new life, and ask him to write the old-style letters referring to his old life. That way nobody will be hurt.
But in the night, when she had been asleep for about an hour and would wake with that start which she knew meant no more sleep for the rest of the dark hours, Angela knew that she was fooling herself. A lot of people had been hurt already. And in her moments of real self-pity she got up and lit a cigarette and looked out of the window: she had been hurt most of all. Struggling all that time, scrimping to send him money, even during her teacher-training when she was penniless from start to finish and wore away her legs walking because she had neither bicycle nor bus fares. She had come back for a one-year appointment to the convent here, the year her father was dying. She had decided that she owed her mother that support and that the woman should have at least one of her children around for the bad months that lay ahead. She had been loath to leave the big, cheerful school in Dublin; but the Reverend Mother there had said she would certainly keep her job open for a year—Miss O’Hara was too good a prize to lose. She had walked the cliffs with her brother Sean when he was back for the death and the funeral. They had talked as naturally as they always had, the bond hadn’t been shaken in the slightest. They had stopped at stiles and leaned on grassy banks looking out to sea where the gulls swooped and cried; and Sean had talked gently about ties, and duty, and doing what you felt you had to do. And she knew then that she wasn’t going back to her job in Dublin, she was going to stay and look after her mother. She felt no resentment, then or later. She didn’t hate Geraldine for not shipping her English husband and children over to Castlebay, nor Maire. How could they do anything of the sort? Sean was a missionary priest who had already given up his life to good, and anyway what use would a boy be around the house, even suppose he had been able to come home?
But somehow, now, in the dark sleepless hours where her heart was caught with a permanent sense of alarm and dread, she felt little love for him. How dare he talk to her about duty? How dare he? Where was his duty? she might ask. The first temptation and he leaves his priesthood, he closes his ears to what he had known since he was old enough to learn his catechism: that once a priest always a priest. He had slept with a Japanese woman, over and over, she was about to have his second child. Angela had never slept with anybody, and she was more entitled to try it than was a priest of God.
In his letter he said that he had told Shuya all about Angela, and Shuya had said it sounded as if she were strong enough to sort out the whole thing. Thank you very much Shuya, Angela thought in the night. Nice, helpful, Japanese sister, thank you. Shovel it all onto Angela, as usual. Oh, you’re becoming an O’Hara all right, Shuya, don’t doubt it.
Clare received a letter from the nun in the secondary school enclosing the syllabus for the 1950 open scholarship. It arrived with the usual crop of bills, receipts and advertisements from suppliers which made up the O’Brien family post.
Agnes was sitting near the range so that she could supervise the lifting over of the big teapot and the spooning out of the porridge. The older boys and Chrissie sat on one side of the big kitchen table with its torn oilcloth; Clare and the two younger boys had their backs to the door. In winter, breakfast was one meal where they were unlikely to be disturbed. The ping of the shop bell never went before the family was off to school.
The kitchen was warm and not really uncomfortable, but it was so cluttered that it was almost impossible to move once any of them stood up from the table. There were clothes and schoolbooks scattered around on the dilapidated couch, there were bags that hadn’t yet been sorted for the shop heaped up against the wall. The washing hung perilously from the ceiling and the dresser bulged with so many things that had been “just put there for the moment” that it was impossible to see the plates and dishes.
Tom O’Brien groaned and sighed as usual over the brown envelopes, the ones with windows in them and the ones without. Then he gave a start. “Well now, Clare, there’s a letter here for you!”
Clare had never had a letter before, so it created a lot of interest in the O’Brien household.
“I suppose she’s got some awful, ugly, scabby lover,” Chrissie said.
“Don’t talk like that. Don’t be such a loudmouth always,” said Agnes O’Brien crossly to her troublesome daughter.
“Well who is it from? Why don’t you ask her? You always ask me everything, where I was, who I talked to. Why can’t Saint Clare be asked anything?”
“Don’t speak to your mother like that,” said Tom O’Brien, who was already in a bad humor. “Come on, Clare. Tell us who the letter is from and stop all this mystery.”
“It’s a list of books for exams,” Clare said simply, producing the roneoed sheet of paper that the nun had sent. She left the letter in the envelope.
“What do you want that for?” Chrissie scoffed.
“So there won’t be any mistakes in what I have to study.”
Chrissie looked at the list. “We did all those last year,” she said.
“Good.” Clare was calm. “Then maybe you’d have the books for me to use later.” She knew that Chrissie’s books were long torn up, or scribbled on, or lost. It was not a subject her sister would discuss for much longer.
Agnes O’Brien had more on her mind than book lists. She was preparing to send her two firstborn sons to England, where they were going to live in a strange woman’s house and go out to work with grown men of every nationality each day. It was a terrible worry. But what was there for them here in Castlebay? If they only had a few fields of land it would have been different, but a small shop like this one, there was hardly a living in it at all.
Clare decided to show the letter to Miss O’Hara after school, but she was careful not to be seen hobnobbing with the teacher in case anyone should suspect that she was favored, getting extra help and advice all the way. She would go to the O’Hara cottage instead. Miss O’Hara never seemed to mind her dropping in, and surely she would be interested in the letter.
Mrs. O’Hara answered the door slowly and painfully. Clare had been tempted to run off again when she heard the scraping of the chair that meant the old woman was beginning her long, aching journey to the door, but that would be worse.
“I’m sorry for getting you up.”
“That’s nothing,” the old woman said. “I may have to be getting up to answer the door myself in a short time—that’s the way things look.”
“Are you getting better?” Clare was pleased.
“No. But I may be on my own, that’s the way the wind is blowing.”
“Miss O’Hara going to move out of the house?” It was incredible.
“And out of Castlebay, by the looks of things.”
“She can’t!” Clare was stung with the unfairness of it. Miss O’Hara had to stay, until she got her scholarship. She couldn’t leave now.
“Is she getting married or something?” she asked, full of hostility to the whole notion of it.
“Married? Who’d have that big long string of misery? Of course she’s not getting married. Restless, that’s what she’s getting, restless. Her own words. She’s up pacing the house all night long. You couldn’t get a wink of sleep with her. What’s wrong? you ask her. Restless, she says. Ah well, nobody has any time for you when you’re old. Remember that, Clare.”
Miss O’Hara returned just then. She looked very tired. She had been short-tempered at school too for some time, though not with Clare. So Clare didn’t expect sharp words.
“God Almighty, am I to get no peace, at school, on the street and now at home?”
Clare was shocked.
“You give people an inch and they take a bloody mile. What is it tonight, Clare? Is it the long division or is it the Long Catechism? Tell me quickly and let’s be done with it.”
Clare stood up and placed the letter from the distant convent on the O’Hara kitchen table. “I thought you’d like to see the reply they sent me, since you helped me write the letter.” She was at the door now, her face red and furious. “Good night, Mrs. O’Hara,” she called, and was gone.
She marched down the long golf-course road, where more and more people were doing bed and breakfast in the season. Down toward the top of Church Street and straight into the town. She didn’t even see Chrissie and Kath sitting on a wall swinging their legs and talking to Gerry Doyle and two of his friends. She didn’t notice all the excitement in Dwyers’ the butchers, when the mad dog belonging to Dr. Power had run off down the street with a leg of mutton.
At home two suitcases were being packed even though the boys wouldn’t leave for a few days yet. It was a rare thing to go on a journey; the packing was always taken very seriously.
Clare’s father had found a good leather strap that would hold one case together—the locks had long rusted and wouldn’t catch anymore. They would probably use several layers of thick cord to hold the other.