The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne (8 page)

But he did not pray. He thought: I wonder would she tell it in confession? When May said she ran offto early Mass this morning, maybe it was to tell the priest on both of us, he could ‘phone back to the house and raise hell, a child, May said, christ, some child, I should aave left her alone, none of my business. Pulled the blanket off her, he said. Ah, the priest couldn’t do a thing like that, secrets of the confessional. And she’s a scared kid, little roundheels, couldn’t have much religion, just ran out because she was scared to face me at breakfast. Ah, don’t worry, you’re okay, here in church with Miss Hearne, a free woman, a lady, a pleasure to talk to her it

is. But if she knew about me, Miss Hearne, if she knew about last night-ahh, I’m no good, drinking like that, pulling at that kid, but she was old enough though, what a build. Christ - I mean, Blessed Jesus Christ - why did I think that right in the church, an impure and filthy thought right in God’s house. O my God i am heartily sorry that I have offended Thee and because Thou are so good, I will not sin again. Not a mortal sin, no, I never, only tried to break it up, teach her a lesson, didn’t do a thing. Act of contrition, that’s absolution, couldn’t go to confession today anyway. Sunday, no confessions heard, if I die tonight, be in the state of grace. Say a rosary now, show my good intentions. Forget all that dirty thoughts stuff.

This was religion. Religion was begging God’s pardon on a morning like this one when the drink had made your mouth dry and the thing that happened last night with the serving girl was painful to think about. It was making your Easter duty once a year, going to Mass on Sunday morning. Peligion was insurance. It meant you got security afterwards. It meant you could always turn over a new leaf. just as long as you got an act of perfect contrition said before your last end, you’d be all set. Mr Madden rarely thought of Purgatory, of penance. Confession and resultant absolution were the pillars of his faith. He found it comforting to start out as often as possible with a clean slate, a new and promising future.

Miss Hearne, seeing him begin to pray, took out her Missal and set a little marker at the Gospel of the day. She was not, she sometimes chided herself, a particularly religious person. She had never been able to take much interest in the Children of Mary, the Foreign Missions, the decoration of altars or any of the other good causes in which married and single ladies devote themselves to God and His Blessed Mother. No, she had followed her Aunt D’Arcy’s lead in that. Church affairs, her aunt once said, tend to put one in contact with all sorts of people whom one would prefer not to know socially. Prayer and a rigorous attention to one’s religious duties will contribute far more towards one’s personal salvation than the bickering that goes on about church bazaars. Miss Hearne had her lifelong devotion to the Sacred Heart. He was her guide and

comforter. And her terrible judge. She halt a special saint, to whom she addressed her novenas: Anne, mother of Mary. She used to have a special confessor, old Father Farrelly, Rest in Peace. She had never missed Sunday Mass in her life, except from real illness. She had made the Nine Fridays every year for as long as she could remember. She went to evening devotions regularly and never a day since her First Communion had she missed saying her prayers.

Religion was there: it was not something you thought about, and if, occasionally, you had a small doubt about something in the way church affairs were carried on, or something that seemed wrong or silly, well, that was the Devil at work and God’s ways were not our ways. You could pray for guidance. She had always prayed for guidance, for help, for her good intentions. Her prayers would be answered. God is good.

As she knelt there, beginning her prayers, the organ ground out a faltering start and the choir started up discordantly in the gallery. Then the voices caught up with the music, lifted above it and the priest appeared, shuffling across in front of the altar, peering over the covered chalice so that he would not trip on the carpet. Two small altar boys scuttled after him, settling themselves on the altar steps with the ease and nonchalance of little boot-blacks on the steps of some great temple.

The Mass began. The choir sat down noisily in the gallery as the priest mumbled the opening prayers. Miss Hearne looked at him, the celebrant of the Mass, Father Quigley, he must be. She kept her eyes on him tintil he turned, a tall mart with the hollow cheeks and white face of an inquisitor. His hair was still strong and black but it had’made its own tonsure, leaving a little saucer of white baldness at the back. His hands, she noticed, were long, with long spatulate fingers, gesturing spiritual hands.

Then the organ groaned again and the choir stood up and sang. The crowd of worshippers immediately set off a tictac burst of coughing which rose in one part of the church, moved on, died, then started up afresh in an entirely different place.

The latecomers jostled, whispered and shuffled at the back of the church, and the singing of the choir was all but drowned in the resultant noise and confusion.

But Miss Hearne knelt upright, her heart singing a Te Deum, a full chant which admitted no distraction. For here she was in church, after all these years, with a good man kneeling beside her, not the youngest or the handsomest surely, but a man who had not forgotten her in the moment of meeting, a man who had kept his faith and said his beads and had not been turned away from God’s love by bitterness or evil or any sinful temptation.

She gave thanks then to the Sacred Heart that He had sent her the trials and tribulations of her last lodgings that she might move to Camden Street and meet Mr Madden and walk with him to Mass, and from him hear the secret things of his life. And she went up unto the altar of her Lord, her Lord who rejoiced in her youth. She sang His praises and she asked her soul why it was sad and why did it trouble her. I believe in God, said the Missal, and she believed and praised Him again for He was her salvation and her light.

‘Confiteor Deo Omnipotenti!’ cried the priest and she confessed to Almighty God, to the Blessed Mary, ever Virgin, Blessed Michael the Archangel, Blessed John the Baptist, the Blessed Apostles Peter and Paul and to all the saints and to you father, that she had grievously sinned in thought, word and deed. It was her fault, her fault, her most grievous fault. Thus, the Kyrie and Gloria passed in alternate praise and blame as the priest moved towards tlie first Gospel. The congregation groaned and shuffled to its feet and the Gospel was read. Then in the noise of the people kneeling again, the priest rushed ahead to the OfFertory and turned around to become not the living speech of the Missal but Father Francis Xavier Quigley, tall, ascetic, hollow white, pointing an accusing finger at his parishioners.

‘Quiet!’ he shouted. ‘And let me tell those people who just came in at the back of the Church that they’re late for Mass, that they’ve not fulfilled their obligation and that they should be ashamed of themselves. They’d better leave now because

they’ll have to come back to twelve o’clock Mass to fulfil their duty.’

Then whirled, with a swinging lurch of vestments, back to the altar. The congregation practised silence. But Mr Madden turned his head towards Miss Hearne and winked. No laughing matter, Miss Hearne thought. Father Quigley seemed like a terribly stern man.

The priest offered the chalice and she read her Missal, thinking of Father Quigley and of this tall man from across the water who knelt beside her. Both big men, both stern men, both men who were not afraid of anything. She shut her Missal and offered up a special prayer to the Sacred Heart, asking Him if this could be the answer to all her novenas and good intentions: if this man who knelt beside her might not be the one the Sacred Heart had chosen Himself to help her in her moments of pain and suffering, to uphold her and help her uphold the right, to comfort her and act as a good influence in her struggle with her special weakness. And at the sacred moment of the Consecration, she touched her breast three times and asked the Sacred Heart for a sign, a sign that would reveal to her whether He in His infinite patience and mercy had answered her prayers.

Before the last Gospel the congregation sat up on the seats and Father Quigley picked up the book of announcements and made his way across in front of the altar. A tiny altar boy ran ahead to open the gate and the parish priest went slowly across the aisle to the pulpit, leafing through the lists of the dead. As he mounted the pulpit steps, he was hidden from the congregation and the whispering started again. But then he emerged at the top like a watchman and the heads lifted, the sounds died to silence. A the back of the church, the ushers, moving quietly from long practice, passed the brass collection plates among their number.

Father Quigley laid the announcement book on the edge of the pulpit and sighted the clock underneath the organ loft. It began to rain outside and the stained glass windows grew dark, darkening the whole church as though it were evening and the sun had sunk out of sight. In this gloom, this sombre

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preliminary lighting, the priest’s white arid gold vestments shone brightly out of the murk above his congregation. He lifted his long white hand and made the Sign of the Cross. Then he began:

‘I had in mind to say a few words about the Gospel of today, which you have all read, or at least the good people have read, the ones that bring their Missals and prayer-books to Mass of a Sunday morning and try to follow the Holy Sacrifice. But I’m not going to talk about the Gospel, because this Gospel doesn’t deal with the subject which has to be settled in this Church today, before this kind of hooliganism goes any further.’

He paused, stared hollow-cheeked at the crowded gallery. Then pointed a long spatulate finger at the people sitting above.

‘You know what I mean, you people up there,’ he shouted in hard flat Ulster tones. ‘You that’s jiggling your feet and rubbing the backs of your heads along the fresh paint that was put on the walls. I mean the disrespect to the Holy Tabernacle and the Blessed Body of Our Lord here in it. I mean coming in late for Holy Mass. I mean inattention, young boys giggling with young girls, I mean running out at the Last Gospel before the Mass is over, I mean dirtying up the seats with big bloothers of boots, I mean the shocking attitude of people in this parish that won’t give half an hour to God of a Sunday morning but that can give the whole week to the devil without the slightest discomfort. I mean the young people, and a few of the older ones too, some of them that should know better but don’t because ignorance and cheekiness is sometlfing that they pride in and the House of God is just a place daey want to get in and out of as fast as possible and without any more respect for it than if it was a picture house, aye, not half as much, for you can see those same people of a Saturday night, or any night they have a couple of shillings in their pockets, you can see them lining up two deep outside a picture house. But I’ll ask you one thing now, and. I want you to examine your consdence and tell me if it isn’t true. Have you ever seen tile young men of this parish queuing up to get into a sodality meeting?

Or have you ever seen the girls and women of this parish lining up to get into the Children of Mary devotions? You have not, and I’ll tell any man he’s a liar if he says he has. Because I haven’t and I’m not at cinemas or dog tracks or dance halls during the week, I’m here, that’s where I am, here in the Church, with a few good souls listening to me and the benches empty, the sodalities, .just a few good men stuck in the front benches and the House of God empty, aye, empty.

‘But the dog tracks aren’t empty, are they now? Celtic Park or Dunmore Park on the nights the dogs run, they’re not empty. Oh-ho no! No, no, the trams are full of young men and old men, and the buses too, and those that don’t have the p rice of the tram after the races are over are thick as flies on e pavement. And the taxis are kept running full blast too.

Aye, there are dogs in those taxis, dogs sitting up like human beings while human beings walk. And there are men in those taxis too. Men with bags of money on their knees and bookmakers’ boards stuck on top of the taxis on the luggage racks. Aye, dogs ride home in taxis while Irishmen of this parish walk home without a penny piece in their pockets after giving it all away without a murmur. But let me ask for the money tomorrow for a new coat of paint for those walls that the young people of this parish seem to take a delight in dirtying up, and see the story I get. O Father, times has been very hard. Ah, yes, very hard. But not too hard to give that week’s wages to the dogs. No, never that hard. And not too hard for the young bits of girls nowadays to have plenty of money for powder and paint and silk stockings and chewing gum and cigarettes and all kinds of clothes which you wouldn’t see on a certain kind of woman in the old days. And not too hard to slap down a couple of shillings any night in the week to go into the cinema and look at a lot of people who’ve a moral disgrace to the whole wide world gallivanting half naked in glorious technicolour. No, no, there’s always plenty of money for that.’

He paused, breathing heavily. Looking up at him, Miss Hearne saw his nostrils flare like a horse that has run a race. Such a powerful speaker, she thought, so very direct. Not the

old style of priest at all, doesn’t mince words, does he? the young people, well, I think he’s right, goodness knows= those young girls I saw at…

‘Plenty of money!’ Father Quigley roared. ‘Plenty of money i Plenty of time! Plenty of time! Yes, the people of this parisk have both of those things. Time and money. But they don’t have it for their church! They don’t even have an hour of a Sunday to get down on their bended knees before Our Blessed Lord and ask for forgiveness for the rotten things they did during the week. They’ve got time for sin, time for naked dancing girls in the cinema, time to get drunk, time to ftll the publicans’ pockets and drink the pubs dry, time to run halfway across the town and stand in the rain watching a bunch of dogs race around a track, time to go to see the football matches, time to spend hours making up their football pools, time to spend in beauty parlours, time to go to foreign dances instead of ceilidhes, time to dance the tango and the foxtrot and the .jitterbugging, time to read trashy books and indecent magazines, time to do any blessed thing you could care to mention. Except one.