Strumpet City (55 page)

His face was red and the telltale vein in his temple was purple. He had been drinking heavily again. Father O’Connor struggled with his anger. It turned to contempt. He fought that too. The man was sick. In a reasonable tone he said:

‘If we learned that proselytisers were distributing food and preaching in the parish we would take action. The socialists are doing the same thing.’

‘No, it is not the same thing,’ Father Giffley said. ‘They do not pretend to show the road to heaven.’

‘Their principles are a danger.’

‘To whom—to Kingstown?’

Father O’Connor mastered himself.

‘To souls,’ he said quietly, after a brief pause.

‘There is a more real danger to souls and to religion than any socialist,’ Father Giffley said, rising. He walked over and stood above Father O’Connor. ‘And it is my present duty to tell you what it is.’

Father O’Connor dropped his eyes.

‘A heavy-handed pastor,’ he finished and strode away.

Father O’Connor kept his eyes on the fire, anticipating the violent slam of the door. He waited, confident. But there was nothing further until he felt a hand on his shoulder. It was Father O’Sullivan.

‘Has he gone?’ he asked, looking up. Without waiting for the answer he looked around at the door. It was wide open. Beyond it he could see the hallway, which was empty. He looked back to Father O’Sullivan and said:

‘Was I in any way unreasonable?’

‘No, no indeed,’ Father O’Sullivan said, ‘not at all unreasonable.’

‘Then why am I treated like this?’

‘He is unwell. Please don’t let it upset you.’

‘I can endure the insults—they don’t matter. But what of our duty. If every parish and every Catholic publication is warning against Larkinism, surely it is our duty to give guidance to our own parishioners. Is that being a heavy-handed pastor—as he calls it?’ He appealed directly to Father O’Sullivan.

‘Are you yourself satisfied to remain entirely silent?’

‘His mind is better than mine,’ Father O’Sullivan answered simply. ‘I am content to leave it to his judgment.’

‘Judgment,’ Father O’Connor repeated. He looked up. ‘Is it judgment—or John Barleycorn? The man is half crazy. And you know it.’

Father O’Sullivan made a quick signal, cutting him off. The parish priest stood in the doorway. He had a hammer and a sheet of cardboard in his hands.

‘Am I?’ he said to Father O’Connor. He strode into the room.

‘John—a chair, if you please. Over here.’

Father O’Sullivan fetched the chair and placed it against the wall.

‘Now—your hand.’ He helped Father Giffley, who climbed on to it and swayed unsteadily for a moment.

‘This will serve to remind others, John, of my instructions.’

He placed the cardboard to the right of the picture of the Crucifixion and began to nail it to the wall. His shoulders hid it from their view. He grunted as he drove each nail home. Then he turned and said:

‘John—your hand.’

But while Father O’Sullivan was moving to his assistance he swayed and fell from the chair. The impact of his fall made the floor shake. They both rushed to him. There was a small cut above his eye, which bled a little. His face had gone pale. Then he opened his eyes and said:

‘I fell, John.’

‘Are you all right?’ Father O’Sullivan asked, distressed.

‘Perfectly.’ He summoned his will, levered himself on his elbows and smiled.

‘The just man of the Scriptures never touched a drop, John, yet we are told he fell seven times a day.’ They helped him to his feet. He would not allow them to see him to his room. To Father O’Connor he said:

‘If I am crazy, then I am crazy in good company.’

He held out his hand to Father O’Sullivan for the hammer, took it and left them. His gait was unsteady. Father O’Connor looked at the cardboard on the wall. Father Giffley had written on it in large letters with the red marking ink they used for parish notices.

Notice

The Great St. Gregory has Said:

It Is Not Enough

To Have Learning. These Also

Are My Sheep.

They both looked at each other. Father O’Sullivan said:

‘I’ll open a window, if you don’t mind.’

‘Please do. The air is stifling.’

The frame screeched and bumped. When Father O’Sullivan returned to the table neither could find anything to say, until Father O’Connor, as though repeating an earlier question, said:

‘What are we to do?’

‘I don’t know,’ Father O’Sullivan said.

It was the first time he had ever admitted there was a question to answer. He tried clumsily to change the subject.

‘The fire is my fault,’ he apologised, smiling. ‘I should never have complained about rheumatism. Whenever he finds me working in here he immediately orders the fire to be lit. There were times throughout the summer, I can tell you, when I was almost stifled to death.’ He continued to smile, inviting Father O’Connor’s participation.

‘That is what I mean,’ Father O’Connor, unsmiling, said. ‘He is not . . .
compos mentis.
’

Father O’Sullivan gave up pretending to smile.

‘I think I should go to his room and see how he is now,’ he suggested.

Father O’Connor nodded. ‘Of course,’ he said.

The weather soon made the fires in the heavily furnished room welcome. The queues at the food kitchens became less talkative. The jokes, worn thin by repetition, fell out of currency. No one found new ones. It was work enough to keep alive.

She stuck her head around the door of the little room to see that all was in order; on the small table at the bedside two candles, as yet unlit, a basin with a clean towel, a delicate glass bowl lent by Mary and now containing Holy Water and a sprig of Blessed Palm which would act as a sprinkler, a white cloth also loaned by Mary, a crucifix. Was he sleeping? She called quietly:

‘Bernie.’

‘What is it?’

‘You won’t forget that Father O’Sullivan is coming?’

‘Huh.’

The room smelled of stale tobacco, but there was nothing she could do about that. Father O’Sullivan was not one to notice.

In the afternoon gloom of St. Brigid’s the candles on either side of the tabernacle wavered into life as the clerk tipped each with the taper. One—a pause and it lit. Two. Both now. He genuflected. He knelt on the bottom step, the felt hammer now in his hand, the brass gong within reach. Father O’Sullivan kissed the stole and lifted it over his head and about his shoulders all in one movement, inserted the key in the door of the tabernacle, removed a communion particle from the ciborium and genuflected. The clerk struck the gong once, a warning that Jesus Christ, Body and Blood, Soul and Divinity, really present under the appearance of Bread, was exposed on the altar. Father O’Sullivan placed the wafer from the ciborium in a pyx and put the pyx in his inside pocket. He locked the tabernacle. His boots, which were new, creaked as he genuflected again and removed the stole. In the vestry the clerk handed him his street coat, black, faded by age, and his hat, a shapeless one. All this was in silence. There would be no unnecessary speech or gesture while Father O’Sullivan carried on his person the Living Presence.

The streets were sunlit and had a lazy air. Trams and commercial vehicles passed him, guarded by policemen who were bored or by soldiers who were embarrassed. It would take about fifteen minutes to reach Chandlers Court. In a fixed mood of recollection, his mind bent to the custody of eyes and ears, he passed the cab rank near the station, a public house, a series of garbage bins at the rear of an hotel. The smells were successively horsepiss, stale beer, decaying vegetable matter. The new boots squeaked at each step. They hurt him. The pain he could ignore. But the squeak, unseemly, incongruous, persistent, dragged his attention time and again away from his inward dialogue of veneration and love. In the end, being a simple man, he mentioned the matter apologetically. It became a joke. No longer embarrassed or distracted Father O’Sullivan for a while made fun of squeaking boots as he and Jesus Christ went together through the back lanes of the city. He never once mentioned the pain.

Patterns of October sunlight shimmered on the ceiling, holding his gaze for long stretches of unremembered time, trembling when a curtain stirred in a faint airy current or when a door somewhere down the afternoon house opened and slammed; delicate they were and voiceless, embodiments of drowsy things, of long past insubstantial summers. His mind in contemplation forgetting for long stretches his body without feet, forgetting pain forgetting the sentence of perpetual immobility, roamed among remote memories. In warm sunlight he stopped his horse and cart and jumped to the ground at a public house in a country lane where hedges brought the wild roses almost to the white-washed wall and insects were busy about them everywhere. He kept goal for Liffey Wanderers between white uprights in a sunny field and stretched and touched his toes to pass the time because for several minutes the play had stayed away down at the other end. He picked blackberries on a warm Sunday and when a butterfly settled on his boot, beautifully white against the polished black leather, he kept very still and let it remain there. He came out of the sea at Williamstown and walking to his clothes the deep footprints in the soft oozing sand behind were summer too, summer of childhood of youth of manhood. With a swift movement of his hand he knocked the wasp from Ellen’s neck and that was at the Scalp. It was the Liffey Wanderers’ outing when the coloured streamers flowed out in the breeze or sometimes drooped down and tangled themselves and broke in the wooden spoked wheels. How many drags were there? Nine. Who was present that he could now recall? Mick Reynolds, George Brierley, Jack O’Connor, Cap Callaghan, Alex Carr, Joe Kinsella. Others forgotten. Paddy Kelly the secretary he now remembered who had arranged the lemonade for the women, the sweets, buns, sandwiches, not forgetting the main thing which was the firkins of porter for the men. Winners of both the League and the Metropolitan Cup that year. Ellen yelled and the yellow-hooped body spun to the ground. He crushed it under his foot. Hard. Like that!

A dog barked in the basement. Father O’Sullivan went up the steps to the open halldoor, limped now through the hall, climbed the stairs, one landing, two landings, the third. The smells successively were woodrot from the basement, a privy odour in the hall, a conglomerate malodorousness of living as he climbed, individual stale airs, carbolic evidence of recent scrubbing. Limping still he came to a halt, rested briefly and knocked.

‘This way, Father,’ Mrs. Mulhall said in a whisper, reticent of speech and gesture, a lighted candle in her hand because of Christ Bodily Present. She led them without delay but also without haste across the scrupulously scrubbed and tidied room, knocked on the inner door to warn her husband, opened it, lit the candle on the table from her own and left her own on the table to companion the now lit candle on the table. Then without delay but also without haste because His present business was not with her she made her genuflection and withdrew, closing the door. She made a quick survey of the larger room for any impropriety of detail which might reflect on the throughness of her preparations. All seemed in order. She took out her rosary and knelt to pray. It was in no way remarkable to her that Jesus Christ Son of God the Father Creator of Heaven and Earth and of All Things should be one of the three people in the adjoining room or that He should come in person to the two pair back Three Chandlers Court. She had known Him a lifetime now and He was not by all accounts greatly taken with the Rich and He had been born in a humble house Himself. She was only sorry that He could not have seen her two china dogs. They were no longer on the mantelpiece. She had had to pawn them.

Having received Christ, Mulhall made his devotions quietly. After an appropriate interval of prayer and meditation Father O’Sullivan crossed himself, waited unobtrusively until Mulhall had done likewise, and snuffed the candles. Hearing sounds again in the room Mrs. Mulhall busied herself and brought in on a tray (also borrowed from Mary) two cups of tea and some biscuits.

‘This is trouble . . .’ Father O’Sullivan began.

‘What trouble, Father,’ she answered and left them alone again.

He drank. He was glad of the tea but the biscuits distressed him. They were a delicacy rare in his parish and meant sacrifice.

‘Ah—the women,’ he said to Mulhall, and elaborately selected a biscuit.

Mulhall selected a biscuit himself and he was at once amused and tender.

‘Biscuits, no less,’ he remarked, ‘she’d die or have style.’

‘Isn’t it a strange thing,’ Father O’Sullivan said, ‘I haven’t had a biscuit this long time—and they’re an item I’m very fond of. I must tell the housekeeper.’

‘What you lack is a wife, Father.’

‘It’s a great lack indeed,’ Father O’Sullivan acknowledged, ‘but then again—suppose I got a cranky one?’

They both laughed at that and Father O’Sullivan took another biscuit. Then he became grave and said:

‘Tell me, Bernie, are you at peace now with God?’

Mulhall hesitated and considered.

‘With God—yes, Father.’

‘I understand,’ Father O’Sullivan said. ‘Times are bad.’

‘Times is very bad.’

Father O’Sullivan nodded his agreement.

‘And I’d dearly love to be abroad—doing my bit.’

‘To strike a blow,’ Father O’Sullivan said, to show he understood.

‘Do you condemn us, Father?’

‘I go here and I go there,’ Father O’Sullivan said, ‘and the things I see would melt a heart of stone.’

‘Yet some of the priests is never done condemning us.’

‘And some don’t,’ Father O’Sullivan reminded him, ‘but at the same time you’d be the last to want them marching in procession with you.’

‘I want them all to keep out of it—that’s what I want,’ Mulhall said vehemently. Then he added: ‘That’s what I meant, Father. I’m at peace with God, but when I hear reports of what some of them say, I’m far from at peace with certain of his clergy. Is that sinful?’

‘Do you think you know better than they do?’ Father O’Sullivan asked, but not offensively.