Exit Unicorns (Exit Unicorns Series) (33 page)

Still the Irish, spirits indomitable, managed to survive, occasionally to flourish. The famines, however, took a final and wretched care of that. As one million died, another million and a half fled and by 1914 that number would swell as another four million emigrated and spread over the face of the earth.

In the wake of the famines, the Catholic Church rose from the ashes and took firm hold of what was left of the Irish people. The Church was always involved in national events, backing the Protestant lawyer, Charles Stewart Parnell in his campaign for Home Rule and destroying him just as ably when it was revealed he was having an affair with a married woman.

After the failure of the 1916 Rising, Ireland was divided, north and south, Ulster and Free State. Because the Free State was so overwhelmingly Catholic, the newly formed government decided to build much of its policy around Catholic teaching. As a result, in 1925, divorce was outlawed and in 1930 a censorship board was established. Eamon de Valera, the newly crowned head of state, drafted a new constitution that relied heavily on Catholic moral and social teaching. It was tyranny of a subtle sort, ensuring the continued exile of the twentieth century’s greatest writer, James Joyce and forcing an unnatural piety on the Irish people. And yet the nation, decimated with war and famine, crippled by the loss of so many of her children, would manage to give the world, in the twentieth century, the eternal lights of William Butler Yeats, George Bernard Shaw, Samuel Beckett, John Millington Synge, Sean O’Casey and Brendan Behan, the angry young man with a pub-installed typewriter under one hand and a drink in the other. Words, not religion, would be the savior of the Irish people.

The Irish survived and so, clinging with the slenderest of threads at times, did the Catholic Church, until it came to seem at times that the one term was interchangeable with the other. Irish and Catholic, Christ and Caesar hand in glove, presiding over a nation too small to bear the weight of Rome comfortably, too firelit to linger long in its shadow.

Jamie had been born into a Catholic family who adored the Church in theory and abandoned it in principle. Rites of passage were held to, however, and he had known the perfume of chrism upon his forehead as a baby and as a young boy. He had been mesmerized by the scent and smoke of the thurible, sweetly numbed by the call and response of the antiphonal songs. Caught in the webbing of memorized, rhythmic prayers. Made safe by a burning candle under the benign gaze of a blue-robed Mary at night. Secure in the arms of such an ancient mother, who knew her children in a way no young offshoot ever could.

The Kirkpatrick household of his childhood had been one of long silences broken by bouts of parties, social evenings, great throngs of artists, writers, actors and activists sprawled about on beds, couches, carpets, smoking, eating, drinking, laughing and singing into the wee hours. A quiet child, Jamie had watched through banisters and from around corners, smelling the perfumes of tobacco, whiskey and more exotic, less definable substances. Had seen his mother whirl at the center of it all like some bright, burning avian-hearted creature, who would singe if you touched her. She had been all motion, forever going out the door or coming in with a horde of bohemians, a rabble of dispossessed who alternately spoiled and ignored the small son of the woman they adored. Caught up in causes, the more hopeless the better it seemed, in the life of the mind, in the extension of the soul into artistry, Jamie’s mother had been unable to stop running. She seemed afraid that if she were ever to stop some horrible, unnamed thing would catch and consume her alive. Perhaps she’d been right, though, for when she was thirty-two and Jamie only ten, the unnamed thing became a known quantity, cancer. The quietness had descended audibly then, memories clustering and becoming more real than the woman who’d clung to life still in the bed down the hall.

He could smell the sickness in her and it had, at his tender age, frightened him. It was the smell of decay and fear, of some monstrous thing completely out of control and Jamie had been terrified of catching it, of awakening one morning and feeling that horrible, growing, leeching thing sliding and slipping through him, surviving on his oxygen, destroying his life and its own through greed. So he, in some ways his mother’s son, had run. And found Colleen MacGregor and been given unstintingly her family and a safe place to hide.

The MacGregors were stalwart Catholics and Jamie, mercilessly scrubbed and polished with Colleen’s two brothers, was taken to church each and every Sunday. It was a refuge, a place of comforting mystery. Where someone could lay their hands upon your head and give you the gift of the secrets of the universe. He went into it fully, without hesitation, giving himself over with the passion his childhood had not allowed otherwise. Felt the strange rapture of the Eucharist when the bread was placed in his mouth, heard the whisper ‘this is my body’ and accompanying the wine, ‘this is my blood’ with a shiver rooted in his spine. Had confessed his sins in the misery of certainty that he was stained forever black and been physically relieved to know the Church always took her children back to her bosom, forgave, if not necessarily, forgot. Found comfort in the jet beads of the rosary clicking over, an unending cycle of man’s plaintive cry to heaven.

He’d watched as his mother was given Last Rites, had held her hand and prayed silently along with the priest’s audible words. Had felt life pull slowly away, like the tide going out from the shore and finally retreating altogether.

In the years that followed he’d lost himself in the Church, been tutored by Jesuits ablaze with their faith. He’d even considered Holy Orders himself, had wanted to burn alive in the crucible of ecstasy and agony that love of God seemed to promise. Had found himself one night, in a fit of adolescent passion, clinging to the gates of a monastery, certain he’d found his destiny and aware on a level he couldn’t acknowledge that he did not possess the key nor the character to open those gates. Still, in the ignorance of youth, he’d pursued the star. His mentor, a gentle man named Father Lawrence Loyola O’Donnell, had told him to pray carefully, to fast and to receive an honest answer from God, even if it wasn’t the one he wanted.

He had done that, prayed from early morning until shadows of evening had crept across the chapel he knelt in and the flames of the candles seemed to stretch into a grotesque thinness. Had waited in the silence for God to answer, had searched the faces of the gaudy saints, John of God with his mad eyes, Christopher, figment of religious myth, Mother Mary with her blank face and Christ with the omnipresent streams of blood coating his pale body. Nausea, thick and cloying rose in him, bile tasting like hot, salted blood tinged the back of his throat and tongue, he’d run from the church, desperate for fresh air and anything to escape the pain that had risen and clenched like a vise around the breadth of his head. He’d thrown up outside, retching in the grass until the muscles in his throat and around his ribs felt torn and burning.

Father Lawrence had found him there and brought him cool water to drink and a cloth to wipe his face with. And told him gently, kindly that whatever destiny awaited him, it was not to be found within the walls of the Church. The Church was not, Father Lawrence had said, a place to hide from whatever it was about the world that scared you.

He had truly listened in the chapel, had stilled his heart and mind and cells and synapses to a whisper and had listened with every straining, yearning bit of humanity that was in him. Yes, he had prayed as well, carefully at first, softly, so as not to alarm God nor himself and then finally into a silence so terrifying it had made him dizzy with ardor. As the silence lengthened with the shadows, ardor became panic.

‘Why this yearning, why? How did molecules come to this, be they stardust or not? Be more,’ he had prayed, ‘be more than what I am, what earthly gods I serve, be more than the sum of my memories, hopes and fears. Be more than the sum of all that is. Remain the infinite mystery if you must, but BE MORE than the equation of simple human yearning. Sweet Jesus BE MORE.

Where, where was the mercy in loving that which was mortal, that which broke, for without the more there was no mercy, no sense, neither rhyme nor reason.

And yet where was the mercy in not loving that which was mortal? For a flame could burn in its moment even if seconds later there was only smoke to know it by.

‘What Lord,’ he’d cried silently, ‘what of pain and terror and loneliness?’ But if MORE than it would also be the more of difficult things, the unsightly, the unseemly, the lowly of heart and mind.

He wondered after if he had asked too much, or if to not ask these things was faith. There had been no still, small voice in the darkness, no gentle finger skimming his face. Was it so very much to want that whisper at the gate, to hear the leaves rustle and know the sound of God’s music in their dance? To want that simple voice in the night that Julian of Norwich had once heard, the one that gave no absolutes but neither took them away.

‘This I am. I am what you love. I am what you enjoy. I am what you serve. I am what you long for. I am what you desire. I am what you intend. I am all that is.’

He had learned that day in the chapel that to search for God was to break your heart again and again and again. To accept that healing would not come in this life.

He’d gone to ground after that, a fox searching for the hole that would make him safe. Tried for comfort in words, as he’d always done and found even the masters of pen and wit had no answers, only plaintive cries, swallowed on the universal wind as surely as his own.

Now years later, after the loss of children, wife, father, he no longer searched, for he was afraid that someday he might actually find an answer and would be unable to bear it. Rilke had been right, the pain had not outworn the garden, because the garden was built not to care, to encompass infinity and as much pain as man was capable of.

And now this girl, holding out hope in her hand, believing he’d the courage to take it. All angels are terrible, but this one was not fruit, she was flower, easily bruised, felled and blighted by winter’s frost. He could not partake of the blossom without destroying it. As much as it appalled him, he would have to open the cup of his hands and let the wind take her where it would. Even if it was to the heart of the fire.

He supposed, in the end that he was, indeed, still a good Catholic boy.

In the morning, they played a comedy of manners, all politeness, walking in measured circles around each other. There were a number of things that had to be done in order to make the place ready for another long absence. Pamela disappeared down to the village for the better part of the afternoon, coming back and finding him in the garden, shearing the heads off of the roses, knowing he’d not be back in the fall to do it.

She was, despite the heat of the day, pale and shaking with cold. He paused in his beheading, a chill radiating from the tip of his spine through the sweat his labors had produced.

“What is it?” he asked, knowing somehow that it had nothing to do with the events of the previous day.

She shook her head, mutely handing him a rolled up paper from underneath her arm. He took it and knew with every fiber of his being that he didn’t want to see what it said, that somehow the smoke he’d been smelling all summer was about to burst into a conflagration he wouldn’t be able to direct or control. He opened it.

Before him was a sight he’d become all too used to over the preceding months. A picture of the beatific Reverend Lucien Broughton, managing to gleam even from the grain of newsprint. It was, unusually though, a small picture, a posed headshot. It was the photo opposite that stilled his heart for a beat and when it resumed beating, it was in a jagged and painful rhythm. There stood his father, in one of the last photos taken, face turned away from the camera though not far enough to disguise the terrible melancholy that resided there. A picture he’d taken himself on the last Christmas they’d had together, two sad and lonely men trying to pretend holidays meant a thing to them anymore. He didn’t need to read the headlines, he already had a very good idea what they said, but of course he did.