Father Neil's Monkeyshines Read online

“He said, ‘Say after me, Dear God … c’mon, Chick, after me, you hear? Trust me, y’hear. Dear God, I am heartily sorry for not being sorry.’

  “I said, ‘I can say that,’ and I did.”

  I shook my head to clear it. “That must be the oddest confession God has ever heard—from a couple of priests, too.”

  “He must still be trying to puzzle it out.”

  “It explains,” I said, “why so many parishioners go to him for confession.”

  Chick laughed. “True. Now I just accept it as a great mystery and leave it to God to explain it to me some day if ever we meet.”

  As an afterthought, he said, “Today is my son’s birthday. I sent him a card, of course.”

  I was wondering why he chose that day to confide in me.

  Though frail, Father Dawson delighted in June and roses and the prospect of the children’s First Communion.

  Sad to say, on the Sunday after Corpus Christi, he wasn’t up to it. I had to step in and take his place.

  In the middle of the ceremony, Rufus appeared, bearing a letter in his teeth. I read it to the packed congregation. Father Dawson wanted to see all the new communicants in his room after mass. Everyone clapped, a rare thing in those days.

  After mass, I led the boys and girls into his room in pairs. From his bed, he blessed them and gave them each a medal of the Sacred Heart.

  It tired him and he was dozing when music filled the room. The children had gathered in the garden to sing him a few communion hymns.

  He came to with a start. “What’s this, Neil? Am I in heaven already? I never thought I’d skip Purgatory altogether.”

  Chick’s golden jubilee as a priest was approaching. Bishop O’Reilly wrote to say he would preside at the celebration mass. But he had decided it was time for the old warhorse to retire. He had already appointed a successor.

  Father Duddleswell said, “The sturdiest bucket gets broken in the end.”

  Chick took the news well, but he was obviously upset, especially as he had lost his dog only a few weeks before.

  Rufus received an interment in keeping with his status. I dug his grave and buried him in the garden in sight of Chick’s bedroom. More than a hundred parishioners attended the obsequies with their children who carried lighted candles and covered the grave with flowers. At Chick’s request, I put on top of the flowers his old biretta.

  “It’s time for me to retire,” Chick said. “My parishioners deserve someone younger and fitter to look after them.”

  I said to Father Duddleswell that this could be the end of Chick. He didn’t agree.

  “Dr. Daley maintains, Father Neil, provided a man does not get bored he can go on living almost as long as he likes.”

  He went on to tell me the story of one of Father Dawson’s congregation. George Rowan, whom I’d met, had lost his wife and was for throwing in the towel. He sent for Chick to come and anoint him.

  “Chick came, of course. But would he anoint him? He would not. Instead, he took out a newspaper and started teaching him to read.”

  George had left school at thirteen, illiterate. For more than fifty years, he wanted to read and write. When Chick offered to teach him, George took on a new lease of life. He wasn’t going to peg out, he said, until he mastered “this reading and writing lark.” He was still going strong five years later.

  I appreciated the story but, I said, “That’s just the point. Now that Chick is separated from his people, he has nothing to live for anymore.”

  “Is that so, lad?” he said in a tone that suggested he was up to something.

  The jubilee mass was joyful but inevitably tinged with sadness.

  After seeing the bishop to his car, I went to Chick’s room to settle him in for the night. I was utterly exhausted, ready to drop.

  I was concerned to find that a man and three lads were gathered around the bed. Didn’t they realize the poor old fellow had had enough for the day?

  I began to usher them out, saying, “Father Dawson’s very tired.”

  Chick, his face shining, said, “My son and grandsons have come to take me home.”

  For several Christmases after that, I received a card from Grasse. “I am so happy,” Chick wrote, “the danger is I might never die at all.”

  It is all so long ago. I can’t tell you how many times in the meanwhile I’ve said to my penitents, “Tell God, my dear, how sorry you are for not being sorry,” and to myself, too, I have said it.

  Ah, if only devout Catholics knew the frailty of those they depend on and hold in high regard.

  I am as old now as Chick and Rufus were then, no, I’m older. I have known trials and tribulations and had my ecstatic moments, too.

  In all those years, I felt it was a special privilege to have known a man who, in the truest sense, lived happily ever after. May his great soul rest everlastingly in the peace he finally and deservedly found.

  2. The Foundling

  For months, I kept a photo on my mantelpiece. Whenever friends, especially priests, visited me, it was a subject of such amusement I had to hide it in a drawer. The story behind it began on a Saturday evening in midsummer.

  It was my week for locking up the church. Father Duddleswell’s instructions were precise. I was to investigate and, if need be, flush out any intruder who might be hiding behind the altar or in the confessional, hoping to burgle the church after closing hours.

  I never found anyone, though I confess, on cold winter’s nights, I edged the confessional open with almost as much trepidation as if it were a coffin.

  On this occasion, with the sun streaming through the stained-glass windows, there was nothing more daunting in my confessional than a cardboard box. I hardly bothered to check it. It surely had nothing more in it than some of the gear used by the cleaning ladies.

  I was closing the confessional door when I heard a strange sound from within. There was something in that box. Correction, someone.

  It was every priest’s nightmare.

  He or she was at a guess a few days old, with carrot-colored hair, small ears neat as pinecones, and a high, sheep-like bridge to his or her nose. He or she was sound asleep.

  A kid abandoned like Moses, I told myself as I carried the box into the presbytery where I hurried to ask Mrs. Pring’s advice.

  “Ah, isn’t he a darling,” she purred.

  How did she know it was a boy?

  “Whose is he, Father Neil?”

  “Mine,” I said.

  Father Duddleswell, sensing trouble, was snapping at my heels. “Take it back where you found it, Father Neil.”

  Mrs. Pring took the baby from me. In the bottom of the box were a few nappies, a feeding bottle, a couple of safety pins, and a note scribbled in pencil: Sorry I can’t cope. Please have him cristened.

  “Poor little chap,” Mrs. Pring said, rocking him.

  Poor mother, I thought, to be so desperate.

  “Did you look around you, lad?”

  I shuddered under Father D’s accusing glare. “I didn’t think.”

  “It did not occur to you, like, that the mother might be hanging around waiting to see if the kiddy was being cared for?”

  I realized I should have been more circumspect.

  Dr. Daley was summoned to cast a professional eye over the foundling. He declared him a fine bonny lad, healthy and well fed, and worthy to be toasted.

  That night, Mother Stephen, superior of the convent, took the baby into her care. Sister Mercy was put in charge of him and she named him Mark.

  I wasn’t too keen on Sister Mercy. She was a dour Lancashire lass in her mid-twenties. She was a trained nurse, but she hadn’t a spark of gaiety in her. When you addressed her, she looked just below your eyes. It was like talking to a statue.

  With the baby safely housed for the night, Father Duddleswell wanted to know
why I’d been chosen as the baby-minder.

  I’d asked myself the same question. The Sunday before, I’d preached on Jesus’s words, “Suffer little children to come unto me,” but I hadn’t bargained on this.

  Father Duddleswell thought this might give us a clue. The mother belonged to our parish. Maybe she had brought him to mass the Sunday before.

  An appeal in the local paper brought no response. Hardly surprising. The black-and-white picture of him they printed looked like any baby. It didn’t bring out the shape of his nose or the redness of his hair.

  At Sunday masses, we asked for anyone with information to come forward.

  Father Duddleswell told me to watch the young women closely when I stepped in the pulpit in case one showed by her reaction that the baby was hers.

  A girl in the third row, accompanied by an older woman, could not stifle her sobs. After mass, I found them lighting candles in front of Our Lady’s altar.

  When they stood up, I asked them hesitantly, if I might be of assistance.

  The elder woman whispered back, “Our Gretel here has just got herself … you know, Father.”

  I was tempted to say, When the time comes don’t leave him in my confessional.

  I baptized the foundling Mark Gerard. He was entered in the parish register as of unknown parentage.

  What consoled me on my frequent visits to the convent was to see the change that had come over Sister Mercy. She had lost her inhibitions and become lively and outgoing.

  The convent only catered for children of six and upward for whom there was no hope of adoption. Baby Mark was being treated as an exception.

  He brought great happiness to the community. At recreation, the word was that Mother Stephen sometimes settled Mark on her knee, even if she did give the impression she was teaching him his catechism.

  A month passed and we got nowhere in the search for the parents. I was getting worried for the little chap. Though the nuns loved him dearly, an orphanage was not the place for him. I had found him. I felt a special responsibility toward him.

  I preached on the subject again. Someone somewhere must know something, I said. In case the mother was present, I crossed my fingers and described how beautiful the child was and how easy to deal with. I promised the mother I would help in any way I could.

  It seemed to work. I felt vibrations from someone in the congregation. After mass, a fair-haired woman took me aside and said simply, “It’s me, Father.”

  Mary Lavery had popping eyes and lines around her thin mouth. She was about thirty.

  “Congratulations, Mary.” I said it warmly enough, but my heart wasn’t in it. This woman had abandoned her baby, after all.

  That was before I visited her in her digs and heard her story.

  She was living in one dingy room in a prewar boardinghouse that had seen better days. Her floor had no running water, and she had to walk up three flights of stairs to the bathroom. It was no place to bring up a baby.

  She told me in a brogue that she hailed from County Kildare. She had been company-keeping with a lad five years younger than herself. He got her into trouble and did a bunk.

  Mary was terrified to tell her family, the disgrace of it. Her father, she said, would roast her if he knew and throw her out of the house. Before the baby showed, she took the boat to England. In London, she’d found these digs and a job in a department store that just about paid for food and lodging. She had no friends.

  Genuinely sympathetic now, I asked her who had helped her at the birth.

  It wrung my heart to hear that she, a lonely girl in a bedsit in a foreign land, had no one to help her deliver her child in a room without even running water.

  “You haven’t contacted the father, I suppose, Mary?”

  “I have no idea where he is, Father. Besides, he never loved me, so what’s the point?”

  I said I presumed she would want to have the baby adopted.

  “I thought so, Father, until I heard you speak about my little boy. Now I’ve changed my mind. Whatever happens, I want to keep him.”

  I was not too pleased to hear that.

  “You promised to help, didn’t you, Father?”

  Now it came to it, I hadn’t the faintest idea what to do.

  “I most certainly will,” I assured her.

  Keen to test her good faith, I said, “Would you like to see him?”

  She closed her eyes and still the tears got through.

  “Oh yes, Father.” A fierce maternal light shone out of her. “What you said from the altar made me long to hold him again. I scarcely had more than a few hours with him.”

  When we reached the convent, Sister Mercy was feeding Mark, then seven weeks old.

  “Sister,” I said, “Mark’s mother is here to see him.”

  Far from being pleased, Sister Mercy glowered at Mary as if she were a bitter rival. Fortunately, Mary was so absorbed in her baby she didn’t notice the hostility.

  I suggested to Sister Mercy that we leave for a few minutes so mother and child could get reacquainted.

  In the parlor, Sister Mercy said, “You made a big mistake, Father, bringing that woman here.”

  “Sister,” I said, “you mustn’t judge her too harshly. Mary will be the first to show you gratitude for what you’ve done. I’m sure she will let you see Mark from time to time if it’s possible.”

  Sister Mercy hissed at me, “She is not Mark’s mother.”

  My temper was becoming frayed. “How do you know?”

  “Intuition.”

  “A mother’s intuition, eh?”

  The unforgiveable irony slipped out. Before I could apologize, Sister Mercy burst into tears and ran from the room.

  I told Mary that Mark would have to stay with the sisters until all the formalities were dealt with. She had a final session with her son before returning to her digs.

  Back at St. Jude’s, I was pleased to inform Father Duddleswell that I had solved the mystery of the baby.

  He gave me a withering look. “Proof, please.”

  “Proof?” I was taken off guard.

  “Intuition is it, lad?”

  Ah, the biter bit.

  “The girl said, Father, she had an illegitimate baby and dumped him in my confessional. Who on earth would admit to that if she were not the real mother?”

  He covered his eyes with his hands and went from wall to wall as if he were looking for someone with sense to talk to.

  “Father,” I said, “you can’t feign sincerity like that.”

  “You can’t,” he said in a derogatory tone. “I do it all the time.”

  As he marched me around to Mary’s, I felt ashamed. I had publicly promised that if the mother identified herself she would be treated with kindness and in strictest confidence. Father Duddleswell seemed intent on publicly disgracing her.

  As soon as we entered the building, Father Duddleswell said, “At least it’s clear of cockroaches. They wouldn’t dare enter a place like this.”

  As I went ahead to brief Mary on what was to come, Father Duddleswell was looking for whoever was in charge of the place.

  When he finally joined us, I was relieved to hear him thank Mary for coming forward so bravely. He needed, he said, her written permission to put the baby’s mother’s name in the baptismal register.

  While she was writing it, he said, “When you left the baby in the church, why didn’t you put a feeding bottle in the box?”

  “Didn’t I?” she said. “Oh, I remember, I couldn’t afford one, Father.”

  Meanwhile I examined what she had written. It shocked me to see that the word christen was spelt correctly.

  Father Duddleswell told Mary that Dr. Daley was waiting to see her in his surgery. He must have arranged this by phone before we left St. Jude’s.

  On our way home, F
ather Duddleswell told me that, according to the landlady, Mary had been living there for two years. To ease my mind, he said he’d see to it the poor deluded woman had a better flat than the one she was presently living in.

  An hour later, Dr. Daley called me. He’d examined the lass. “To put it modestly, Father Neil,” he said, “Mary, if that is her name, has never had a child.”

  At this point, it came as no surprise but I was very annoyed with Mary Lavery for making me look a fool.

  “Why did she do it, Doctor?”

  “She saw you were fond of the kiddy, Father Neil. And at a guess, I shouldn’t wonder, she was fond of you. She wanted to look after the baby on your behalf.”

  I went straight back to Mary’s place. On the way, it occurred to me that Mary, aged thirty, unmarried, probably without a boyfriend, was not an evil person. Simply a kindhearted lonely woman, unbalanced by adversity, living in fantasyland.

  I didn’t get to speak with her. According to the landlady, she had gathered up her few belongings, paid her bill, and left.

  The weeks of summer passed, and there was still no sign of Mark’s mother. The boy was flourishing.

  One day, I found Sister Mercy so upset I was afraid that Mark was ill.

  “I’m being moved,” she sobbed.

  “To another job up north?”

  She shook her head.

  “Where, then?”

  “Manila in the Philippines.” She pressed the baby to her. “I’m not sure I can bear to leave him.”

  I did not sympathize too much for fear of making her situation harder to bear.

  “He’s like my own son, Father. He loves me. He needs me.”

  “You mean,” I said gently, “you need him.”

  “Both,” she said. “That’s what love is, isn’t it?”

  Mark was gazing up at her with round eyes and wide-open mouth, gurgling, wriggling, talking to her with every limb.

  For the first time since finding him, I was really angry. I sensed Mother Stephen was behind this. She was a fanatic for obedience. She was moving Sister Mercy to test her vocation, as if living with her was not Purgatory enough. Doubtless she felt Sister Mercy was too attached to the child, as if it were some sort of sin. Maybe she was plain jealous.