Father Neil's Monkeyshines Read online

  I was unable to say a word to help him. I hadn’t expected anything like this.

  When he spoke again, he said, “It was the happiest and the unhappiest time in my life. You would understand that.”

  I nodded.

  Chick was working in a bakery. He worked all night and took on any extra jobs he could find by day to make ends meet.

  “Then, one morning, Neil, it was about nine o’clock, I’d finished my stint in the bakery and was taking a breath of fresh air. The street was in a panic. A big draft horse pulling a cart ran amok. Something had driven it crazy, I don’t know what. I was reared on a farm and was always good with horses. I jumped up on the cart and gradually brought it under control, but the poor horse had to be destroyed later. I felt it was my fault.”

  I let that pass. It was as if he were speaking a foreign language to me.

  “As I handed over the reins, the driver said, ‘Thanks, mate. Pity about the girl, she didn’t stand a chance.’”

  “‘Any idea who it was?’ I said. “My boss grabbed me by the shoulder and said, ‘Don’t you know, Chick?’ ‘Know what?’ ‘It’s your missus.’

  “I wrenched his hands off me and I wanted to knock him down and stamp all over him. Those around had to stop me doing it.

  “Everything went silent as I began searching … She was lying on the pavement, the pram next to her. An elderly woman, I don’t know who, whispered, ‘The kid’s okay, mister.’ Philip, a few weeks old, smiled when I looked down on him. I picked him up and held him tight, and he gurgled in my ear. ‘Thank you,’ I said to the woman. ‘Look after him, please.’ I put him back in his pram and turned to Emma. She was still conscious. I wanted to pick her up, but they wouldn’t let me, not till a doctor came. So I knelt beside her. I remember how flour from my apron fell like snow on her face. The cart, laden with kegs from the brewery, had gone right over her. ‘Don’t die, Emma,’ I said, ‘please don’t die,’ and, in spite of the pain, she smiled up at me. ‘Silly boy,’ she said.”

  The old priest paused as a mallard duck and its mate landed in our pond and swam around before taking off. I had to prod him to go on with his story.

  “Inside, she was all … inside, she … Someone offered to take care of Philip while I went in the ambulance to the hospital. I had seen many people die but, oddly, I didn’t recognize death on Emma’s face. You just can’t believe your love can die.”

  Rufus lifted his head and gently whined so a flicker of a smile passed over Chick’s face.

  “Doctors told me there was no hope, but I still refused to believe them. Emma was still smiling and it made her look, well, immortal. After a few days, I finally saw what everyone else saw from the beginning. I’d brought Philip with me the day I said to her …”

  He paused for a long while as if he had forgotten I was there or he was somewhere else, far away.

  He suddenly jerked to as if he had become aware of my presence again.

  “Emma, I said, I want you to do something for me, and she said she knew what it was but I won’t, I can’t. Emma, I said, you have to, for me, for Philip, too. She beckoned me to lower Philip so she could kiss him. Not even for our little baby, she said.”

  He took out a handkerchief to wipe his eyes.

  “Emma, I said, please, I want you to confess your sins so you can go straight to heaven and pray for us both. She kissed my hand and said, I’m already in heaven, silly. Please, Emma, please, you must. I can’t, Chick, I can’t speak to anyone about us, only to you. All right, I said, confess to me. I’m still a priest, a bad one, but still a priest. This is an emergency, confess.”

  I waited a while before asking, “Did she?”

  “Yes, but she didn’t mention marrying me. You must say it, Emma. She said, I will if you like, but I won’t mean it. I can’t be sorry for the best thing I did in my life. Look at Philip. Are you wanting me to say sorry for him, too?”

  For a while, the agony of that moment came back to Father Dawson in all its vigor.

  “She was as innocent as a lamb, you see. I was the guilty one. But I could never have lived with myself if I had absolved her from a sin that was, for her, no sin at all. I told God to blame me, only me.”

  “You didn’t give her absolution?”

  He shook his head. “I held up my hand and prayed in Latin over her but no absolution.”

  I mumbled something to the effect that I understood.

  “I prayed, Lord, let Emma live and I’ll go back to being a priest. I wasn’t being honest, Neil, not really. If she lived, I wouldn’t go back; only if she died, I might.”

  “Then?”

  “The next day, I brought Philip to see her and, five minutes later, she was holding his hand when she went to God.”

  There was stillness in the garden, not a breath of wind, not a leaf stirred.

  After a while, he was composed enough to continue.

  “I’ve always believed Emma didn’t die. She simply transferred her life into our son for his safekeeping until we all meet again.”

  I said I liked that idea very much.

  “When she was buried, I wrote to her mother. She and Emma’s sister came to see us. Jane picked Philip up and held him to her breast. I had to admit to myself, grudgingly, he looked very comfortable there. She said she had no children of her own and she and her husband would like to adopt Philip. She would bring him up in Roquebrune in the south of France where she lived. I didn’t like her all that much but she was the best person for the job, or so I persuaded myself. My son would grow up seeing with his own eyes what his mother looked like, you understand?”

  “Yes.”

  “Jane was a strict Catholic and didn’t approve of me but that was in her favor, don’t you think?”

  I made no comment.

  “She knew right from wrong, anyhow. I thought if she takes Philip, the only thing he’ll lack is me and that’s no loss. Without my wife and never wanting another, I knew I couldn’t cope. Especially as I was feeling the pull back to the old life. And guess why?”

  “Tell me.”

  “So I could offer mass for Emma’s soul.”

  “You confided in Father Duddleswell?”

  “Ah, my precious Charles. Newly ordained he was, your age, but the soul of kindness. Not one word of reproach. He promised to stand by me whatever I decided and help me come home if I chose that. He was the only priest I could trust.”

  “And the baby?”

  “I told Jane she could take Philip with her. ‘On one condition,’ she said, knowing she had won.”

  “Which was?”

  “That I promised never to try and see him or contact him in any way. She said let him remain in ignorance of you. She made me swear on the Bible. I said I’d swear on my wife’s grave, but she preferred the Bible. ‘Only one thing I ask, Jane,’ I said. ‘Will you tell my son I loved his mother with all my heart.’ ‘Yes, of course,’ she said.’”

  “It must have been hard giving him up—”

  “I was getting fonder and fonder of him. At the last moment, it hurt so much I nearly changed my mind, but Charles was with me, steady as a rock. ‘It’s best for the boy,’ he said. My last words to Jane were, ‘Will you tell me if he gets seriously ill?’ She nodded. It was foolish of me. Day after day for many years, I expected a letter in the post, telling me my son was dying or dead.”

  “You never contacted him?”

  “No.”

  “That was very brave of you.”

  He shook his head vigorously. “To be honest, I did make one crazy attempt to look for him. I went on my own to the South of France for a vacation. I hadn’t realized there are two Roquebrunes, one part by the sea, the other in the hills. Which was his Roquebrune?”

  “And?”

  “I wandered everywhere in both of them, not knowing what my son looked like. I’d never s
een his picture, you understand. When I had him, I never thought to take his picture or snip a lock of his hair, not that he had any. I had nothing left of him, nothing. But I thought he might resemble Emma.”

  “Or you.”

  “I wished not for that. I waited outside schools and churches. Maybe I saw him, but if I did, I never knew. I came back to London more unhappy than ever.”

  “When did you return to the priesthood, Father?”

  “Father.” He repeated the word as if had a magical ring to it. “A father twice over? Ah, I returned eighteen months to the day after leaving. Only Charles and my bishop knew, and the bishop, God rest him, is long since dead.”

  “You must have been deeply depressed.”

  “For years, I was an abysmal priest. I cold-shouldered the world. I wasn’t happy, and self-pity is a terrible affliction. I didn’t love God or anyone else. Least of all myself. I felt my soul was gangrenous. I prayed Our Father, and what sort of an image of God was I? A father who had given up his son.” He sighed deeply. “Suffering sometimes make you sympathetic, sometimes the opposite. Guilt is the wickedest thing. I felt I’d caused Emma’s death.”

  When I tried to object, he briskly silenced me.

  “You know the story of David and Bathsheba, how they sinned and the baby born of them died. David said it was because of his sin. It was like that with me. Only, I lost my wife, she was the innocent one. I didn’t lose my son, I gave him away. That’s why I resented the people I was supposed to serve. In particular, the children—can you believe that? If I saw a young mother wheeling a pram, I’d cross the road so as not to meet her. In the end, my parishioners sensed my loathing and didn’t even ask me to baptize their children anymore, they took them to another church. God took my wife and I could bear that. I had nothing but fond memories of her. But my son I had deserted, and for that I felt only guilt and misery. I found myself thinking, Philip is nine months old now, one year, two years old. And I don’t even know his face and he doesn’t know mine. I was forbidden to send him a card at Christmas or his birthday.”

  He lapsed into a long silence. I broke it by saying, “Your illness changed all that?”

  “Not my illness, no.” He smiled at the thought of that. “Something else. First, let me tell you I tried to kill myself. Not in any conventional way. I had a heart condition, so I started cycling madly all over the place. Imagine, suicide by riding a bike!”

  It was such a ridiculous idea, I couldn’t help laughing.

  “It nearly worked, too. Once, I fell off my bike, nearly under a bus.”

  “I’m glad you didn’t, Father.”

  He took my hand in his. “So am I, lad.” After more reflection: “I was dying. Everybody said that. Charles, who was now in charge of Saint Jude’s, was sent for and he anointed me. I didn’t want to live on merely to increase the misery of the world. I’d lived too long already. I’d given up my little boy for a ministry that bore no fruit.”

  “I heard the opposite.”

  “As I was dying in hospital, Charles visited me. He said he’d received out of the blue a letter from France. A lawyer was on his way with news about my son. All Charles had been told was that it was not bad news.

  “Within the hour, a young man came to see me, a tall fair-haired stranger with a thin pencil mustache. ‘Tell me about Philip.’ These were the first words I addressed to him.”

  “And?”

  “He said, in broken English, ‘I am he.’”

  “Ah.”

  “I hadn’t been able to imagine him as a grown-up, still less a lawyer. He was still a little boy to me. My mind, I suppose, was in a kind of time warp.”

  “I can understand that.”

  “For years, sometimes for hours on end, I’d wanted to kiss his hand. It was, you see, the last thing Emma had kissed. His hand was little then and so much bigger and stronger than mine now, I felt it represented all the years we’d been apart. He let me, let me put my lips to his hand, and a thrill went through me and my whole life came together in one precious moment.”

  “I’m glad,” I said.

  “I managed to convey to him that once, when he was a boy, I went to Roquebrune and my eyes got threadbare looking for him. To show he understood, he bent over me and kissed both my eyelids, the way, though he did not know this, the way his mother kissed them before we went to sleep at night. It was as if he knew.”

  “Tell me, did he look like your wife? I’m glad. You must’ve had a lot to say to one another.”

  “I was like a starving thing. I wanted to know everything that had happened in the lost years, my lost years, everything. We spoke, he in bad English, I in bad French. It was best like that. It meant we had to work hard to understand, to reach out to the other.”

  “And?”

  “We succeeded, we were the same flesh and blood, after all. He who was once my little boy was strong enough to repair all the gaping holes in the long road of my life.”

  “Who else could have done that?”

  He shook his head.

  “He brought me pictures of his wife and two little boys.”

  “How did he learn about you?”

  “Charles had contacted him. Maybe he made recent inquiries. More likely, he knew from Jane all along where they were living and didn’t tell me. Never so much as hinted, even in my darkest days.”

  “Did he bring you a letter from Jane?”

  “Better than that.”

  “Better?”

  “Philip handed me an old, faded letter. My wife had written it to her sister just before she died. Without me knowing, a nurse had taken down the words and she had signed it, Emma Dawson. In it, she begged Jane, for her sake, to adopt the boy so I could return to my first love, the priesthood. She wrote, ‘Tell Philip when he is old enough to understand, that his father gave up everything he ever loved for me and he is the finest of men.’”

  The old man lifted his bewildered eyes to mine. “You see what terrible things love does to one’s judgment, Neil?”

  “Tell me about Philip,” I said.

  “Just like his mother, no bitterness toward me at all. Times had changed, I suppose. Anyway, the young don’t blame the old the way the old blame the young. They have better things to do. He told me I had done the honorable thing and thanked me for providing him with such a wonderful second mother.” Chick wiped his eyes. “I walked out on him when he was a few months old and even so he said that.”

  To ease the tension, I said, “He helped you get well?”

  “Oh yes. Mind you, I had to get well, didn’t I? I wasn’t going to die, not even to please God and his holy angels. I persuaded the Almighty to postpone my death.”

  I said I was pleased God was so flexible.

  “Me, too,” he chuckled. “What a lot I had to live for. My parishioners whom I’d neglected prayed for me and sent me flowers. My son liked me and might one day learn to love me. It was a second life. I was born again. Resurrection. An Easter of my own.”

  “Have you seen Philip since?”

  He smiled broadly. “The whole family. My daughter-in-law, my grandchildren, all of them French, though I don’t hold that against them. And Jane, beautiful Jane, looking just as Emma would have looked.”

  “But not quite as beautiful.”

  He accepted my correction gratefully.

  “Jane had borne six children, but she confided in me that Philip has always been the apple of her eye. She was convinced that if Philip hadn’t been given her she would never have had children of her own. For years, poor girl, she was terrified I would suddenly appear and take him home. They were living in Grasse, not Roquebrune. I didn’t stay long the first time—it was that hot summer just before the war—in case my heart should break completely with the joy of it all. But I went back there when the war was over, twice. I have three grandsons now.” He broke of
abruptly. “That’s all there is to it, really.”

  I said it was quite a story.

  “I’m an old man now,” he said softly, “but every morning I wake up thanking God for the gift of my wife and son. Isn’t that a strange thing for a priest to do?”

  I couldn’t deny it. I didn’t know whether to pity or envy him.

  “I have to admit to you, too, lad, if I had a hundred lives I’d marry Emma in every one of them. If she’d have me. Not that I’d ever be a priest again. I haven’t the right, you see.”

  I tucked his blanket in to give myself something useful to do.

  “Emma is the one perfect thing in my life. I am always sad when I come across a man, woman, or child who hasn’t one perfect thing, someone to love and rely on.”

  He withdrew into himself for a while before adding, “I suppose, Neil, you could say I’m the unrepentant thief. I have never been truly sorry for loving and marrying Emma.”

  “How could you?” I replied instantly.

  He eyes me curiously. “That’s exactly what Charles said to me. I used to worry that I couldn’t be sorry for what I did when I went to him for confession.” He paused. “I’m allowed to break the seal of my own confession, aren’t I?”

  “I suppose so.”

  “Charles said, ‘Chick, I want you to say sorry to God.’”

  “I said, ‘I can’t.’”

  Chick caught me smiling at that. He had been through all this with Emma years before and we knew how she responded.

  “Charles said, ‘You can and you must. Say after me: Dear God, I’m sorry.’”

  “I said, ‘I’ve tried a thousand times and I still can’t.’”

  “Then Charles pounded his breast enough to break a couple of ribs, and admitted, ‘If I were you, Chick, I couldn’t say it, either.’”

  “That doesn’t surprise me,” I said.

  “So I said to Charles, ‘What do I do now, then?’