Gospel, page 18
(If O’Hanrahan hadn’t had three Guinnesses down at the Crown, he might have remembered that Pope Leo XIII approved the number 6666 blows directly to the Body, with 150 knocks to the Head, 108 kicks on the shoulder, 24 hair-pullings, 23 beard-pullings, and an array of thorn wounds—there were 72 thorns in the crown of thorns, piercing our Savior lightly 110 times with 3 mortal wounds on the forehead, 1008 separate mockings. Direct spittings in the Face were put at 180 and the pièce de résistance was Leo’s drops-of-blood calculation: 28,430. These important calculations were worked out April 5th, 1890.)
“What’s the Sacred Letter?” asked David, looking over the rabbi’s shoulder at the next page.
Lucy watched the professor revive, his expertise appealed to.
“It was thought that Jesus may have committed something to paper in his final hours. When the Holy Sepulcher was discovered, supposedly in the crypt area was a letter written in Christ’s own hand, in a silver box. It gave directions for how many Glorias, Paters, and Aves to say, for how much indulgence and time off in Purgatory. St. Gregorious adored the Letter and proclaimed anyone who carried a copy would come to no harm.”
Enlivened by his two pints of beer, David blurted, “I can’t see how Catholics can be so damn stupid!”
Lucy felt defensive. Worse, Lucy knew she was appearing to be prim and she didn’t want David to think she was bound for the rosary brigade at the nearest Our Lady of Prompt Succor.
“But more interesting,” O’Hanrahan continued, “is the continual Nestorian and Armenian claim that Jesus did actually write things in his lifetime and engage in celebrated correspondences.”
O’Hanrahan told of Jesus’ letter to Abargus the Toparch, which congratulated Abargus for converting his kingdom to Christianity, and promised to heal the king as well. When the king recovered, he adopted Christianity at his court in Edessa, from which the Armenian Church sprang. Jesus as an added bonus miraculously put his face into a handkerchief and divinely imprinted it and sent that to Abargus as well.
“All this is forgotten now,” O’Hanrahan concluded, “but centuries passed and thousands died in battle over the possession of the Blessed Original Text and the Holy Handkerchief.”
“Sort of like Tom Jones,” suggested David. “And Elvis. You know how they had these towels they’d sweat upon in concert and then they’d throw ’em out to the screaming crowd. And women’d throw their panties and underclothes up to the stage, and Elvis’d wipe his sweaty brow on ’em and throw ’em back.”
Rabbi Hersch: “Maybe something happened like that during the entry into Jerusalem.”
O’Hanrahan nodded sagely. “There may be a Blessed Pair of Panties somewhere with Jesus’ Face imprinted on it—”
Mrs. McCall: “All right, now I’ve heard enough from all of ye! If our house is struck by lightning tonight, we’ll know why!” She was remonstrating against a room full of unrepentant schoolboys, with Lucy sitting to the side forcing a smile. “Oh, laugh at me? I may not serve ye supper, Patrick—you won’t be afinding that so funny, will ye? It’ll be ready in five minutes, and I ‘spect not to hear another worda this talk.”
But there was no going back now. David took his turn thumbing through the prayerbook. “Patrick, what’s this stuff about the Sacred Shoulder Wound of Christ?”
O’Hanrahan gleefully explained. “St. Bernard, that old criminal, in a mystical conversation with Jesus asked him what his greatest unrecorded suffering was.” O’Hanrahan read from the prayerbook: “I had on My Shoulder while I bore My Cross on the Way of Sorrows a grievous Wound which was more painful than the others, and which is not recorded by men. Honor this Wound with thy devotion.…”
“I wonder,” Rabbi Hersch contemplated, “if Jesus stubbed his toe during His Passion. Paddy, there still might be time to make your mark.”
“Yes, I could write the Oration to the Sacred Stubbed Toe of Christ. We could have a decade of rosaries, for each of the Ten Sacred Toes—”
Mrs. McCall cleared her throat unmistakably from the kitchen.
The rabbi answered back, “Paddy can’t help himself, Mary. He’s a Jesuit! Disobedience is in his blood.”
O’Hanrahan: “Former Jesuit!”
This was news to Lucy. She sat up straight.
“No such thing, really, as a lapsed Jesuit,” amended the rabbi. “A Jesuit’s a Jesuit. It’s almost like being a Jew. Doesn’t matter if you’re a good Jesuit or a bad Jesuit, you’re still a Jesuit. Why I never met a decent Jesuit who wasn’t a lapsed Jesuit.”
Lucy was sorting out her thoughts from this revelation. O’Hanrahan took vows? Submitted to orders? A Jesuit, servant to His Holiness the Pope, Vicar of Christ on Earth, Scion of St. Peter?
(That’s right.)
Well, pondered Lucy, it made sense, in a way. His personality, his skepticism. Priests in American theological schools, radical Dominicans, and most Jesuits she had met did a better number on Roman Catholicism these days than Martin Luther and Reverend Ian Paisley combined … And a man of O’Hanrahan’s generation, and his intellectual skills, yes, he would have been a natural choice for Jesuit seminary.
Lucy couldn’t imagine the young O’Hanrahan pledging eternal fealty to The One True Church, the long hours of prayer and discipline … Somewhere in his past he must have been, well, like me, thought Lucy. An earnest, practicing Catholic, maybe with a mother who wanted a priest for a son. A warm thought came to her: Dr. O’Hanrahan’s so hard on me because I remind him of how he used to be, a Patrick O’Hanrahan who knelt and kissed the ring, a Patrick he’d like to forget!
Dinner was served. Everyone crowded hungrily around the kitchen table in the variety of folding chairs Mrs. McCall had brought in from the garage. Mr. McCall emerged from the back of the house, freshly shaven, hair combed down, and not smelling of the cannery. He plopped down the pub’s secondhand newspaper beside his wife, who was ladling a helping onto O’Hanrahan’s plate.
“Got the paper for you,” Mr. McCall reminded his wife. “Still want to wrap me in’t, do ye?”
Mrs. McCall tsk-tsked as she spied the Belfast headline, a feature about mothers who had lost more than one son to sectarian violence. Poor Mrs. Graham and her three boys shot out of pure malice by the IRA, for sport. “It’s as bad as that poor Mrs. O’Malley in Derry,” she said putting the paper aside roughly, as if to disapprove of it. “She’s lost four sons to the Troubles.”
David helped his own plate. “Aww Mum, they should have some kind of pool for us to bet, ye know? Which of the old girls is gonna lose another one next.”
Mr. McCall cackled from high in his chest. Lucy was stunned at the dark humor, but she noticed even Mrs. McCall hid a smile behind her hand. “David,” his mother reprimanded feebly.
“It could be like the lottery it could,” their son went on. “I mean, you could put a fiver down that Old Lady O’Malley was going to lose another boy by Christmas, that kind of thing.”
“And if he merely gets knee-capped, it pays off half,” encouraged his father.
Mary McCall: “Both of you two!”
“It’s their own bleedin’ fault,” David said, taking his seat, and tearing at a soda-bread loaf. “And when they catch the boys who murdered the O’Malley boys they oughta try ’em twice, once for murder, and once for making us look at the same bloody television film of these old women wailing aboot their little gun-running, bomb-making angels!”
The rabbi, causing trouble: “What if a woman loses two sons, David?”
“Oh, pays off double, of course.”
It occurred to Lucy that with Belfast and Derry in their vicinity the cynical streak of the Irish would turn unremittingly dark. Savage weather, savage history, savage humor.
After dinner and a great show of the men wanting to wash dishes but not actually doing it, the evening reconvened back down at the Crown. David and Lucy again walked down the hill unaccompanied by the others, who trotted thirstily on ahead.
“You see,” he was saying, “I really do prefer it up here than to Dublin, old Begorrahsburg itself.”
“You don’t like Dublin?”
“It’s great in its way, but if they could elect a leprechaun mayor they’d do it for the friggin’ tourists, I think.” Lucy smiled broadly as he ranted. “The town’s like a Third World country for working phones, working plumbing—makes the British look good. I was walking down O’Connell and there was this leftover moth-eaten old hippie who had a sign around his neck, said for a pound he’d recite you a bloody poem.” David made a cry of exasperation. “I asked him, taking the piss, what he could recite, and he started up a U2 lyric for God’s sake. I mean, that’s bloody Dublin right there. No, if there was a future in Belfast, I’d much prefer it, but there’s not, so for now it’s the Republic for me.”
With all the bloody Catholics, thought Lucy.
She considered all the Catholic demerits: the IRA, the ignorant priests dictating local small-town policy in the Republic, the Visions of the Lamb at Knock, the dancing statues at Ballinspittal, the Republic outlawing divorce in the late 20th Century, preventing teenage rape and incest victims from securing an abortion, the Virgin Mary as Queen of Ireland, the electorate doing this particularly backward pope’s bidding … and Lucy felt momentarily in the enemy camp. God, her name was somewhere on a NORAID contribution so technically she was. Now truly, she had never doubted that Protestants for five hundred years had treated the Catholics abominably on what had once been their land. But how did a credulous peasant rabble with their eleven kids per family and medieval papal triumphalism expect to be treated by modern, rational people from the 19th Century’s most powerful nation? She coolly felt a lack of sympathy for Catholics, these weeping, ever-suffering professional victims, whining for recompense over something Henry VIII did.
Lucy also saw the complexity of cutting out an acceptable image for herself if she moved to Ireland. It was one thing to be an intellectual and practicing Catholic in the United States—a certain attractiveness, the consolation of an elite minority, a knowing quaintness attended the choice. It could be worn like an outfit for shock value or for temporary solidarity with fellow Catholics. But here in Ireland it merely demonstrated you weren’t above the age-old superstition of the island, or worse, that you took sides in the hopeless Protestant-Catholic squabble. Living here would kill any religious feeling I ever had, she decided.
(No, but it might wreak havoc on your sectarian loyalty.)
Hours later Lucy arrived back in Fiona’s room, once again escorted from the Crown on David’s arm, and she found herself oddly awake and giddy, happier than she’d been in years. She combed out her hair and looked down at photos of David on Fiona’s dresser, when he was younger, in faded, childhood birthday-party shots. Fiona’s own picture was on the wall and she looked a bit plain, but Lucy saw in her expression that the McCall wit and irreverence had perpetuated itself.
Lucy crawled into bed and wiggled down underneath the many covers.
Old Northern Ireland wasn’t going to let her alone, apparently. Not ten minutes could transpire without Lucy having to examine her own Roman Catholicism, her own near-miss as a nun. Lucy then thought of her buddy from St. Eulalia’s Catholic Chamber of Horrors and High School, Faith Kopinski. I bet she’s a nun by now.
(It hurt Faith that you dropped her as a friend after high school, Lucy. Your motives weren’t exactly pure.)
Lucy felt a tinge of guilt even to think of Faith. Could that weepy, oversensitive girl have been her best school friend? Lucy smiled. Usually when you name a girl Faith or Chastity or Hope, she ends up, as any Catholic School graduate can tell you, a bona fide whore by high school, the school slut, selling drugs in the hallway. But the name paid off for Faith, who was as demure and sweetly pious as any girl at St. Eulalia’s.
Faith was far from popular, but then neither was Lucy nor her inevitable partner, Gabriel, hounded mercilessly for his wimpishness and unathleticism by the guys, and Lucy instinctively congregated with fellow sufferers on the backside of school fame. Once in gym she glanced over to see Faith changing and was struck with how naked Faith looked when undressing, how white and thin and fragile she looked and how red her face was, blushing with a pure, intense shame for herself.
So Lucy stopped avoiding her sometime in ninth grade and sat beside her in the lunchroom. Faith wouldn’t talk about boys except in the abstract and always as something other girls were better cut out for; she never saw movies, never went out, had no one but cousins that represented her social life, didn’t know what records or TV shows were cool, and didn’t seem to know she was missing anything, and in that Lucy and Faith were fundamentally different, because Lucy always had a precise knowledge of what she was missing.
Once Christian Hall sat near them at lunch period.
Christian ran true to form regarding the name rule, and Lucy was infatuated with his utter paganness. He was the jock of the school, the hero of the basketball team, broad shoulders and muscular, smooth upper arms and a St. Eulalia T-shirt that was tight enough to draw endless discourse from Lucy’s slut sister Mary, the cheerleader. No, Lucy never had a chance with someone like Christian, and the only reason he alighted at their table that day in the lunchroom was because Lucy and Faith weren’t considered to matter in the popularity game—they were lower than unpopular, they were invisible, they were nonpeople and if he sat near them it was because he looked right through them.
And Lucy felt, for Faith’s benefit, that she had to speak to Christian because Lucy was always the more adventurous one and she relished her role of the more daring friend. So Lucy, in a choked, forced light way, said hi to Christian and congratulated him on his 22 points against Marie Curie.
“Uh, yeah,” he said, mildly noticing Lucy and looking around to see if anyone else was observing them. Then after a minute: “You’re Mary’s sister, right?”
Yeah, said Lucy, and that was it for the longed-for conversation.
Lucy swore to herself she would kill her little sister if Mary was lucky enough to go out with Christian—well, Mary never “went out with” she just “made out with” and God-knows-what-else with by the age of sixteen. Anyway. Lucy would stare at Christian unobserved and adore his long arms and legs and try to imagine what it was to be his girlfriend and what it would be like to kiss him or hold him and she would contemplate the canyon between her life and his and how easy it was for him to be him and how difficult it was for her to be her, the cold consolation of a shared baloney sandwich with Faith.
When the dreaded Sister Miriam droned on about the sins of the Magdalene, it was always Christian who put on a mock-innocent expression and raised his hand.
“Hey, Sister?” he’d ask. “What exactly were the sins of the Magdalene?”
And others would titter and Sister Miriam would say that Christian knew full well what they were—
“No, honestly … I haven’t read that part.”
And Sister Miriam could believe any ignorance of Christian, whom she detested for his careless limbs that were an offense to her, his swagger in the halls, his violations of dress codes, and his loud laughing with the older boys. She glared at him with undisguised hatred for the sneering sixteen-year-old potency that mocked her. “She was a fallen woman,” she breathed at last.
“Fallen? You mean she fell down?”
More titters. And Sister Miriam seethed as he pressed her for the exact details of Mary Magdalene’s sin, capping it off with the unanswerable: “Where is it written in the Bible?”
For of course, it’s not. There’s not a word about Mary Magdalene being a whore. So Christian’s final wise-ass victory was to be in his own way smarter than Sister Miriam. And Lucy envied more than his handsomeness, more than his popularity, more than his self-love, his untroubled soul, his sinless, guiltless world. Oh to be transported there in arms such as his.
But, conversely, what chance did Lucy have of becoming a Bride of Christ in this environment? The damage wrought by St. Eulalia’s was terminal: Sister Belinda, so slow of mind and fat—the butt of a hundred jokes a day. The old addled sisters, the young Sister Hilda who was called Sister Hitler because of her disposition and it didn’t hurt that she had a mustache. The only fun nun was the tippling women’s basketball coach, Sister Victoria, always known as Sister Vickie, and her friend Father Kennedy, another lively boozer with a wild Irish love of practical jokes and malicious remarks about the nuns he was forced to work with … God, how did those two ever find their way into St. Eulalia’s? But it was the wretched, sour old Sister Miriam who was a walking advertisement for Protestantism, Exhibit A for Reverend Paisley—maybe even for Paganism.
Sister Miriam, the woman who counted Kotexes in the girls’ room dispenser, rounded up the girls and demanded to know who took one without clearing it with her first.
“I want you to know,” she lectured seriously, “that whoever took that period-napkin, that this is a terrible, terrible thing you’ve done…”
Lucy wasn’t sure whether she meant having a period or taking a Kotex, or both. Sister Miriam, the woman who got permission from the principal to go into the girls’ lockers, who read their diaries late one night and then cornered the girls with their confessions, their filthy, sex-obsessed, perverse disgusting words, read back to them, held up to the scrutiny of Father Doogan, who would look at the girls with pity for their damnable actions.
God, what a war criminal she was.
Father Kennedy, full of life and intelligence, close pal of the pariah Sister Vickie, was Sister Miriam’s mortal enemy. Sister Miriam would sniff the merest hint of whiskey-breath on the man and either commence a moral lecture, announce that she was to report him to the archbishop—one assumed it was never a real threat—or attempt one of her more useless tactics, break into his history class, sit in the back and glare at him righteously.
Father Kennedy in good form was incomparable, a natural Dominican, always ready to be carried away with his own storytelling, not having read the source materials in centuries, trusting his own mind and what he remembered or thought he remembered but had rewritten and improved. He would be especially red-faced and florid after lunch, hitting the wine with Sister Vickie, and Lucy and Faith and the class watched him bellow about what a big fat pig Aquinas was, the man who preached everything in moderation! When the funeral came, how it took twelve brothers and a box six by ten to fit the obese doctor into. Fatter, claimed Father Kennedy, than some of the sisters at St. Eulalia’s! The class laughed and Father Kennedy, encouraged, continued to describe the fatness of Aquinas, doing a small imitation of Aquinas/Sister Belinda waddling about the halls.
