Father Neil's Monkeyshines Page 18

  Johnny was seven. He used his pants as a towel and his sleeve as handkerchief.

  Tommy, aged six, suffered from asthma. He graded everything. “Are you,” he asked me, “older than Father Duddleswat? Is ’e your granddad? Do you spend more on shirts and pants than him? If you had a fight with him, would you knock him out? In what round?”

  Rick, aged four, couldn’t get to sleep at night because there were butterflies in his bed. I prayed that the butterflies would go away and they did for all of three minutes.

  Billy, aged ten, had an old powder compact. It served as a flycatcher. He held it open till a fly settled on the mirror and he snapped it shut.

  “How do you do that?” I asked him.

  “It’s easy, Father. The fly sees ’isself in the mirror. ’E thinks it’s ’is pal, see, so ’e comes and says, ’Ello. That’s when I get ’im.”

  I was there the day a new lodger arrived: a monkey. It was bequeathed to the Mavins by Luigi, an Italian organ grinder.

  Whenever Luigi had turned out a tune down their road, Meg had given him a copper or two. He seemed to know when Meg was about to deliver. She always gave birth at home so as to be with the family.

  Without fail, Luigi pushed his barrel organ under the lamppost nearest to Meg’s window and played on cue, “Pack up your troubles in your old kit bag and smile, smile, smile.”

  Mario the monkey was a sad, ragged-looking little thing, missing his master, no doubt. He didn’t take to me. Meg said, “It’s only your black clothes that bother him, Father, nothing personal.”

  He showed his dislike by pelting me with everything he laid his hands on. Once it was a blancmange.

  Bert built him a trapeze suspended from the ceiling. I never could be sure from which direction Mario would attack me.

  Occasionally, Meg would mention the last time she and Bert went to the flicks together.

  I said to her, “If you want to go see a movie, I’ll mind the kids for you.”

  “I couldn’t do that,” she said, giggling.

  I persuaded Bert that an evening off would do Meg a world of good. They discussed it and got back to me. They’d like to risk it.

  When the time arrived, I told Father D he would be eating supper on his own. When I explained why, he looked at me with pity.

  “Ah, me poor little lad, me weeshy gossoon, you haven’t a titter of sense in you.”

  “Meg liked the idea,” I said.

  “Her lips said one thing but what said the corner of her eye?”

  “An act of kindness, Father.”

  “An act of lunacy, more like.”

  There was an air of excitement at the Mavins’ house when I arrived. Bert looked smart in what was probably his wedding suit. He wore a dotted tie with the knot under his left ear. His scrubbed face had the varnished look of a new piano and he smelled of mothballs.

  He pointed to Meg. “Ain’t she giddy, Father?”

  Assuming this was a compliment, I agreed with him.

  A crisp flowery frock had replaced the shapeless one she usually wore. Her stockings no longer spiraled up her leg. She wore pink ribbon in her hair and a string of paste pearls around her neck. She was in her way quite beautiful.

  She issued last-minute instructions, most of which I failed to take in. In the kitchen she showed me a cherry pie, big as a tabletop, in case I got peckish.

  You would have thought we were seeing off the Queen Mary, what with the waving and earsplitting good-byes. They’d never seen their mum and dad go out together on their own. In the end, Bert had to shoo Meg out of the house like a flock of geese.

  Only when the door closed behind them, did I get cold feet. The place was no different: it smelled as hot and fertile as a greenhouse. But without Meg there, it seemed somehow menacing. Yes, my boss was right, as usual. I was out of my mind.

  I was supervising three children doing their homework when there was a commotion. Siamese twins were coming down the stairs. A boy and a girl had climbed into their dad’s working pants.

  Next, Paul was being pursued on the landing when he slipped and banged his head.

  I ran up and tried to console him as Meg would have done. “It’s all right, sonny,” I said, wiping his tears away. “You’ve got a hard head,” which made him squeal all the louder.

  Minutes later, I was chasing snakes out of Tommy’s bedroom. I gave him a piece of chocolate to settle him.

  “How long’s my mum been away?”

  “Not long, Tommy.”

  “Three hours? Six hours?”

  “About fifteen minutes.”

  “When will she be back? Two hours? Six hours?”

  “Yes,” I said firmly.

  I was about to turn the light out when Tommy blathered, “I don’t feel well.”

  “Nonsense,” I said crossly.

  To my astonishment, his face had turned blotchy and started to swell like a balloon. Never was I so scared. Was the kid dying? His eyes had almost disappeared and he was breathing with great difficulty.

  I phoned Dr. Daley, taking care not to alarm the other children. What would Meg think if she came home from seeing Greer Garson in Mrs. Miniver to find her Tommy dead.

  I put a cold flannel on the boy’s forehead and prayed hard he survived until Doc came.

  Dr. Daley hummed to himself as he fumbled in his waistcoat like a best man searching for the ring. The waistcoat was speckled from a thousand breakfasts. “But not a single stain of liquor on it,” he used to say, proud of his steady hand on the really important occasions.

  Eventually, he tracked down his thermometer and took Tommy’s temperature. All I wanted to know was would he live.

  “Why ever not?” he said, puzzled. “There’s nothing much the matter with him.”

  Slowly, he wrote a prescription for the morning in his usual hieroglyphics.

  “What do you mean, Doctor? Look at him.”

  “He’s been eating peanuts, that’s all, and he has a slight intolerance to ground nuts.”

  I turned to Tommy. His face was already going down. “Have you eaten peanuts?”

  He nodded.

  “Who gave them to you?”

  “You did, Father.”

  It was true. The piece of chocolate had tiny bits of nut in it. If I hadn’t panicked and asked the kids, they would have told me.

  In the middle of this crisis, Mario the monkey had done something he shouldn’t. Without thinking, I grabbed him by the collar and dropped him outside the front door as if he were a cat.

  There was a commotion outside and when I checked, a stray dog had pounced on Mario. He had escaped by climbing up the drainpipe.

  Soon everyone but the baby was on the pavement pointing at the roof.

  No amount of pleading persuaded him to come down. Dr. Daley parked his rump on the curb and took out his hip flask hoping for spiritual inspiration.

  It came in the person of Father D who strode into view with his I’ve-been-through-two-world-wars-but-this-takes-the-biscuit face.

  Seeing the children, many of them in their pajamas, cramming the pavement, he said, “Ah, me Rin-Tin-Tin of a curate. Did I not say you are as thick as two small planks?”

  I pretended I took little problems like this in my stride.

  “I reckon,” he said, “that monkey must’ve evolved out of the likes of you.”

  “Call the fire brigade, Charles,” Dr. Daley counseled with a burp. “They get kittens out of trees, do they not?”

  Father D waved aside the curbside advice. “Fetch me a ladder and I will sort this out meself in no time at all.”

  A neighbor brought a ladder, extended it, and angled it against the front wall of the house.

  “You are so brave, Father,” I said, really impressed.

  “No one knows that better than meself, lad, but I a
m not crazy. If I climbed up there, I’d fall flat as a plate.”

  His faithful drinking partner sided with him. “Indeed, Charles, as your long-term physician I can testify that you have a wobbly in your knobbly.”

  Muggins began the ascent in the best Harold Lloyd manner, clasping an orange. In those postwar days, you couldn’t get a banana for love nor money.

  Mario, who never liked me, thrust a paw in the guttering and pulled out mud pellets to throw at me.

  Below, a crowd had gathered. The local bobby on the beat was writing in his notebook. The kids were shouting advice. Doc had resumed his seat on the curb, blowing smoke rings like a Red Indian. Father D was holding on to the ladder like grim death, mine, and calling on me to get on with it before he injured himself.

  I lobbed the orange for Mario to catch. He didn’t. Instead, it dislodged a loose tile that fell off the roof just missing the copper. That incident too found its way into his notebook.

  Mario was just about to throw another lump of mud at me, when someone called out, “Drop it, Mario.”

  It was Meg. She had so missed her family that after half an hour she asked Bert to walk her home.

  At the sound of her voice, Mario dropped his lump of mud.

  “Good boy, Mario, now come down here this minute.”

  The monkey climbed past me, down the underside of the ladder, nipping my behind, and settled on Meg’s arm.

  When I was back on terra firma, she said, “You only had to call him nicely, Father.”

  “’Tis nothing to widen your eyes about,” Father D said when I told him that Meg’s number twelve was on the way.

  Doc had joined us for lunch and I was relying on his support.

  “You are about as sharp as a spoon,” Father Duddleswell said, seeing I had reservations about Meg being pregnant again. “Do you not agree that God gives the necessary grace to a woman if he sends her a child?”

  Doc said, “Women are different, Charles. Perhaps you never noticed.”

  “How different, Donal?”

  “Two kiddies can be too much for one and a dozen too few for another.”

  “That’s as may be, but Meg Mavin was surely anointed by God for motherhood.”

  “Doesn’t there come a point,” I said, “when a couple simply cannot give the children the attention they deserve?”

  “Are you saying, Father Neil, a new child would prefer not to be born if it means having a little less attention from his parents?”

  He proceeded to tell us what Meg had told him long ago. The first babe is a cinch, the second ten times as bad, the third is impossible. From then on, it gets easier all the time. The older ones help the younger and become little mothers and fathers themselves.

  I wasn’t convinced; besides, a mother is entitled to a life of her own, too. Meg told me she’d been taking swimming lessons, a lifelong ambition, when she found she was with child again and had to stop.

  “The likes of Meg are different,” said Father D. “They’re special. Once she recited a verse for me that summed up all she felt about motherhood. Let me see if I remember it. Yes, ’tis coming to me.

  You are the trip I did not take

  You are the pearls I cannot buy

  You are my blue Italian lake

  You are my piece of foreign sky.

  To Meg’s delight, the gynecologist diagnosed non-identical twins. However, one was lost quite late in the pregnancy. Meg was upset and afraid of losing the other.

  “Take things easy,” the specialist said with unconscious irony.

  He promised to monitor her progress and take her into maternity well in advance of the birth.

  That was what Meg was dreading.

  Doc Daley said the baby would be born around Christmas time.

  “On Christmas Day itself?” Meg wanted to know.

  Doc said, “It’s been known before. And wasn’t Our Blessed Lord considerate to see he was born on one bank holiday and die on another?”

  She said, “I always wanted one of mine to be born on Jesus’s birthday.”

  Father D promised to get a manger ready just in case, with his curate playing the part of the ass.

  Privately, Dr. Daley thought they might have to intervene at some point to do a cesarean. But as the weeks passed, Meg’s luck held.

  A fortnight before Christmas, she was taken into hospital for observation.

  I asked the doctor in charge of the maternity unit how she was progressing.

  He looked at me above his half-moon spectacles.

  “She’s given birth before, I believe. More than once. She’s a perfectly healthy woman, why should anything go wrong?”

  Late on Christmas Eve, having finished hearing confessions, I went to have a chat with Bert. The whole family was up. The strange thing was the house that was usually as noisy as an indoor swimming pool was completely silent.

  Jessica had stopped moving in circles, Tess’s yo-yo was still, and Billy was no longer using the powder compact to trap flies. Even the monkey looked under the weather.

  Tommy said, “What if our mum has a dog this time?” and Teddy said he didn’t want his mum to die and become a statue.

  At eleven thirty, Bert called the hospital and learned Meg had just gone into labor.

  “Congratulations,” I said, trying to cheer them up. “The baby’s sure to be born on Christmas Day. I bet the rest of you are jealous.”

  There was no response from any of them.

  Father Duddleswell celebrated Midnight Mass. He was at his funniest and most affectionate. I went to bed in a contented frame of mind.

  At 5:00 a.m., my phone rang. Bert said the baby was still not born. Something was wrong. After the first, Meg never had a problem. “Like shelling peas,” he said.

  I promised to go to the hospital to check on it. I took my case with me in case of an emergency.

  At maternity, I ran into the doctor with the half-moon specs. He snapped at me like a watchdog, wanting to know what the fuss was all about and, incidentally, “Happy Christmas, Padre.”

  “Happy Christmas,” I whispered back, relieved by his business as usual approach.

  I was permitted a brief word with Meg. “It’s to be a Christmas baby after all,” I said.

  “I’m so hot, Father. If only I could take my skin off.” She did look uncomfortable. “They’re making me lie on my back, Father. I always sit up when I have my babies. This way gives me terrible backache.”

  To cheer her up, I said I’d seen the family the night before and they were in great form.

  Her face dropped. “You mean they were still up?”

  “Bert and the two eldest,” I said, crossing my fingers. But she knew.

  “I can’t relax,” she said. “I’ve never given birth in a place like this.”

  I blessed her and the unborn in her and apologized for having to rush back to St. Jude’s to say mass. I assured her the hospital doctor was pleased with her progress and I’d be back straight after my mass.

  All the Mavins were in church. I gave the shortest of sermons, ending by asking the congregation to pray for all mothers having babies today.

  At the church door, I paused for a word with Bert, intending to go back to the hospital without delay.

  Bert said, “We’re coming, too.”

  “You can’t, Bert. No visitors are allowed in this time of day.”

  “What about you?”

  “I’m a chaplain. Authorized.”

  “So are we authorized,” he said stubbornly. “I’m the hubby and these are our kids.”

  “Believe me,” I said, talking like a hospital spokesman who doesn’t know what’s going on. “Meg’s doing really well.”

  Bert showed his mettle. “Look, Father, Meg’s not used to having babies without us lot around. I should never have let her
go to hospital in the first place.”

  We were wasting time. If they wanted to tag along, I wasn’t stopping them. The porter would do that. It did cross my mind, though, that the Mavins had the advantage of numbers.

  On this fine, almost spring-like morning, we walked in convoy, with Bert holding the youngest in his arms.

  On the way, we passed their house. Paul let himself in for what I took to be the obvious reason. It wasn’t. When he caught us up, he was carrying Mario.

  It was beginning to look like a circus. I was thinking they might let Bert in but not the kids and certainly not a monkey.

  The main hospital door was always locked overnight. I strode into Casualty, trying to act normally and disassociating myself from the Mavins.

  Casualty was not its normal disciplined self. There were decorations up and a Christmas tree was winking on and off. Nurses were chatting to a background of piped carols.

  Bert touched my arm. “Where’s the problem, Father?”

  A young nurse asked which one of us was in need of attention. Seeing Mario, she tickled his chin. “Isn’t he a sweet little thing?” she said.

  “See,” Bert whispered, “they even like monkeys.”

  It’s anybody’s guess what would have happened had not an ambulance driven up with its siren blaring. The medical staff lost interest in us and raced toward the exit.

  We had cleared the first hurdle.

  I marched ahead of the Mavins into the interior of the hospital. I had not gone far when I ran smack into Sister Crighton, a nurse of the old school, the hospital’s equivalent of Mother Stephen.

  “Happy Christmas,” she said and, indicating the crowd, “would you be so good as to explain?”

  The situation was saved by the appearance of Dr. Daley, who after celebrating at Billy Buzzle’s nightclub had come to offer Christmas greetings to his patients on his way home. He summed up the situation in the time it took him to drain a glass.

  “Thanks a million, Father Boyd,” he called out from the other end of the corridor. “Good of you to bring the choir along.”