Father Neil's Monkeyshines Page 8

  She picked up one of the girls to wind her.

  “A few minutes ago, Father, we had a call from the adoption society, that’s all.”

  “They’re not taking the twins back, are they?”

  “Of course not.”

  “What’s the problem, then?”

  “The problem is, the superintendent says they’ve been handed twin boys.”

  “So?”

  “We can swap if we like.”

  “Swap the girls for boys?”

  She giggled. “That’s right.”

  Seeing Julie fondling Emma (or Donna) I collapsed into a chair, relieved. “What a ridiculous suggestion.”

  “Isn’t it?” Julie ran a big red hand in a circle over her baby’s back. “I’d sooner give up an arm and a leg than part with one of these little darlings.”

  Bob burst in, bringing my amusement to an abrupt end. It seemed that he and Julie did not see things in the same light.

  I was alarmed. I could be held responsible for breaking up a very happy partnership. It looked as if Julie wanted to keep the twins and Bob wanted to change them.

  “What do you reckon, Father?” Bob said.

  I tried not to side with either partner.

  “They’re lovely girls,” I said, weakly.

  “’Course they are,” Bob said, as if he would knock down anyone who disagreed with him. “It’s just … Well, I did so want to start off with boys.”

  I failed to see why. Unless he could already visualize strapping sons helping him out in his business.

  “Next time around,” I said, hoping to soothe him.

  “What I was wondering, Father, is perhaps they’ll keep ’em for us.”

  It was the silliest thing I’d ever heard.

  “No chance, Bob.”

  His shoulders slumped. “I suppose you’re right, Father.”

  We had a cup of tea. At the precise moment I was congratulating myself on resolving the issue, Bob put his cup down with a crash.

  “On Sunday, I’m going to look ’em over, anyway.”

  I swallowed the last of my tea too quickly. “You are?” I spluttered.

  “Might as well see what we’ve turned down, Father.”

  I went with Bob, Julie, and the girls to see the second set of twins. The visit, I thought, was a mistake. Bob would only make himself miserable. And for what?

  A sister showed us into the nursery. In adjoining beds were the two cutest, dark-haired, dark-eyed baby boys I’d ever come across.

  Watching Bob closely, I saw tears spring into his eyes. He so wanted them.

  Father Duddleswell was right all along. Odd as two left boots.

  “The superintendent,” the sister was explaining, “knows how keen you are on boys. He thought, if you are not too attached to the girls …”

  “But we are,” Julie cut in.

  “Yes, we are,” Bob said, fiercely, biting his cheek. “We can’t possibly give our girls up.”

  “That settles it, then,” the sister said. “I’m sorry you’ve had a wasted journey.”

  “But I want these, too.”

  The poor nurse looked at Bob as if she’d swallowed a pin.

  “Well, Mr. Tyson, I don’t … Um, that wasn’t what …”

  “It is simply not possible, Mr. Tyson.”

  The white-haired superintendent was a genial man but he was in a sensitive job where he had to be firm. Bob’s offer to take on two sets of twins, he implied, was preposterous.

  Julie took Bob’s hand and held it tight.

  “You see,” the superintendent explained, “there’s another childless couple wanting to adopt twins. Their preference is for girls. It was no doubt a mistake on my part to give you a choice at this stage but knowing your love of boys—”

  He ended with a guilty shrug.

  That, I felt sure, was that.

  Fate or, as my parish priest put it, the Man Above, decided otherwise.

  The superintendent rang the Tysons later that week, asking them to visit him the following Sunday. He gave no reason except to say it might be in their interest. I went along as before.

  “Thank you for coming,” he said.

  The couple hoping to adopt the second set of twins had been forced to withdraw their application. The husband had been in a car accident. He had broken an arm and a leg. In addition, he was being charged with drunk driving.

  “In the normal run,” the superintendent said, “twins are difficult to place. So, if you think you can cope with four babies, all around three months old, you are welcome to try.”

  Bob and Julie did not need to discuss it. They hugged each other delightedly and asked if they could take Tim and Peter home with the girls that same afternoon.

  The baby boom happened at a time when Father Duddleswell was going through a periodic crisis of his own. He was worrying about his “cursing and swearing.” I wasn’t keeping score, but his present tally seemed to me nothing exceptional. But, to help out, when he seemed about to lose control at meals, I offered him a glass of water, with “Rinse, please.”

  In this gloomy mood, he preached again one of his favorite sermons.

  A certain Father Buckley of Glenroe had in his parish a fellow named Charlie Coscoran who turned the air blue with his language. Father Buckley persuaded Charlie to pull a button off his clothes whenever he swore. It wasn’t long before Charlie had nothing but faith, hope, and charity to keep his pants up.

  When I got back from the children’s home and told Father D what the Tysons had done, his face buckled like a wheel hitting a wall. His resolution vanished and one “bloody” followed another in rapid succession.

  I bent down and pulled a few of the thirty or so buttons off the bottom of his cassock.

  “You are right, Father Neil,” he said contritely, tambourining his breast. “I should watch over me tongue better than I do. Mind you, that Bob Tyson is a ripe bloody eejit and no mistake.”

  “Ping!”

  I pulled off another button and laid it on his outstretched hand.

  “That is not dacent,” he protested. “I had no idea I even said it.”

  “You are a hardened case, all right.”

  “But why did you not try and dissuade the silly … er, blighter?”

  “It’s not for me to order people around,” I replied. “I’m only the curate.”

  “Ah,” he roared, disgustedly, “you are a …” He searched for a suitable epithet that wouldn’t open his cassock still wider to the four winds. “You are a miserable mugwump.”

  I had no idea what that was. But in the interests of parochial harmony, I beat my breast.

  “Guilty as charged, Father.”

  On rainy days, when Father Duddleswell and I dropped in on Julie, the washed nappies were stretched out like bunting across the kitchen, the dining room, the hall and up the stairs.

  “What a pong!” Father Duddleswell groaned in my ear. “Billy Buzzle’s pigs never smelled as loud as this.”

  “Next time,” I advised, “remember to bring your gas mask.”

  Feeding bottles, packed in a box, had been sterilized and filled with formula. Whoever chanced to be passing was expected to lend a hand. Even clerics had to take their turn.

  “Tell me honestly, now,” Father Duddleswell said, addressing Peter whom he was feeding, “what do you really think of your parish priest?”

  For reply, Peter, pop-eyed, gave a stupendous burp.

  Mrs. Pring, in the next room, heard. Putting her head around the door, she yelled, “Out of the mouths of babes and sucklings.”

  “Women!”

  That was Father Duddleswell’s longhand for Mrs. Pring.

  “Don’t know what you’d do without us, Father D.”

  “Women are like strawberries, I’d have you k
now. Nice enough but they have a very short season.”

  Mrs. Pring was keen to instruct him on how to put on nappies.

  “You fold them like this.” She demonstrated with his serviette. “This is the triangle method. For boys, folding it like a kite is probably safer.”

  He was up from his seat and out of the house before she got around to kites.

  The Tysons’ house resembled an assembly plant. The place buzzed with activity. In the middle of it, Julie never lost her cool. She dealt effortlessly with every emergency.

  Doc Daley paid regular visits. “Every time I go inside,” he complained, stroking his red-wired nose, “I’m seeing double with both my eyes.”

  He looked forward with misery to the day when all four kiddies had chicken pox or measles together.

  Mother Stephen made out a rota for her nuns to help, especially at nights when the babies had teething problems.

  As to Mrs. Pring, she was forever leaving her post in the presbytery to do her bit.

  Once, when he called on the Tysons, Father Duddleswell found her clucking over the babies when it was his turn.

  “Will you listen,” he said, “to the old hen that’s stopped laying.”

  “Look at the old rooster,” she returned, touching his bald head, “that’s lost its comb.”

  Back home, she spent her spare time knitting. Most evenings, I was conscripted to hold skeins of wool for her to roll into balls.

  Father Duddleswell, feeling a trifle neglected, ordered, “Take those woolly handcuffs off, lad, and get on with the job.”

  That apart, no complaints. Except on Sundays.

  He had consistently taught that young couples should heed Jesus’s words, “Suffer little children to come unto me.” Never too early to start children off on the right path by bringing them to mass.

  Now he was having second thoughts.

  Bob and Julie, with assistance from neighbors, brought all four to the same mass. When one cried, it set the others off.

  “The quartet were baying at me like wolves,” he said, “in the middle of me choicest sermon.”

  When I said he should be glad of four extra choristers, his rejoinder meant I had to pluck another button off his cassock. Before long, he lost so many, he took to wearing a black leather belt outside his soutane to stop it looking like an ancient bathrobe.

  In the whole astonishing Tyson saga, the news that shook me most was, with hindsight, the most predictable.

  At breakfast, Father Duddleswell held the sugar bowl hostage until I answered his question.

  “Is there something you should be telling me, lad?”

  “What about?”

  He must have thought I was pulling his leg again.

  “The Tysons, Father Neil.”

  “Ah,” I joked, “you’ve heard they want to adopt another set of twins. Not identical, this time.”

  “No?”

  “One Catholic and one Protestant, Father.”

  “You know what I am referring to.”

  I didn’t, in fact.

  “You have surely noticed, lad, that Julie is walking the streets with a belly on her like a Lambeg drum.”

  My mouth was wide open as if I was having a tooth pulled.

  “You don’t suppose—”

  “How in heaven’s name,” he asked, “did they find the time?”

  I went straight around to see Dr. Daley. He confirmed that Julie was adding her own small contribution to the human race.

  He held up a whiskey bottle and peered into it as though it were a fortune-teller’s glass ball.

  “Will she keep it or lose it like the others, Father Neil? I have no idea.”

  Bob told me the specialist was optimistic.

  “Is this good news or bad?” Bob said with a grin.

  “Depends on your bank balance,” I said.

  Within a year of being childless, Bob and Julie seemed destined to have a family of five.

  As the weeks went by, Father Duddleswell was concerned lest they were underestimating the harvest.

  “Would it not be an extraordinary thing,” he said, “if the Holy Ghost, in his infinite wisdom and foolish indiscretion, sends ’em twins?”

  The thought had occurred to me but, according to Bob and Julie, there were no records of twins in either family.

  Dr. Daley sent Julie back to the gynecologist for a further examination. When I heard the result, I begged the doctor and the Tysons to do me a favor and not breathe a word to Father Duddleswell. It was time the old feller learned that some of us did sometimes know more than he did.

  With everyone playing it close to their chests, my boss said to me casually, “Is there something you are wanting to tell me, Father Neil?”

  Mrs. Pring was right about him. That one, she said, never misses a thing. He can even see up his own nose.

  On this occasion, I showed him a pair of big clean eyes. “Like what, Father?”

  “Jaysus,” he roared, “I might as well be whistling jigs to a milestone.”

  Mrs. Pring came in as he stormed out.

  “What’s wrong with old prickly pear, Father Neil?”

  “Can’t think, Mrs. P. He must reckon I’ve been tapping God’s telephone.”

  Even when he invited Dr. Daley around and plied him with one whiskey after another, he got nowhere.

  “Professional etiquette, Charles. Who knows that better than your saintly self?”

  “I suppose so,” Father Duddleswell conceded grudgingly.

  “You won’t betray anything told in confession, Charles, would you? Even if you were thumb-screwed. So my own dry lips are sealed, except when as now, I drink to your good health.” And he drained the last of Father Duddleswell’s whiskey in a gulp.

  Dr. Daley phoned me, as arranged, giving me advance warning of the happy event. At my suggestion, Mrs. Pring went to the Tysons’ to help out while I spent a long, eventful morning and afternoon in the maternity ward of the Kenworthy General.

  At 6:00 p.m. I returned, exhausted, to St. Jude’s.

  I was met by Father D in what he took to be a towering rage.

  “Is nobody but meself working in this parish anymore?” he yelped.

  “Sorry, Father, urgent business,” I said, pleasantly. “You know how it is.”

  “Where, pray, have you been all day?”

  “Didn’t you hear?” I said.

  “Tell me.”

  “What could I possibly tell you that you don’t already know?”

  “Dear God, you are getting to be a Chinese puzzle of a curate.”

  “I had a very good teacher, Father.”

  “This is your last chance, lad.”

  “I was at the hospital, holding Julie’s hand.”

  He quietened down at once. “Julie Tyson? Has she been delivered ahead of time?”

  “You’re pulling my leg, Father. You were surely the first to hear.”

  I trotted upstairs to my study, as if curates had better things to do than answer questions from inquisitive parish priests.

  He came after me like wind in a tunnel.

  “Well, Father Neil?”

  “In the pink, thank you.”

  “Not you, boyo,” he exploded. “Julie.”

  I slowly said, “Very, very well.”

  He nodded gratefully. “Male or female?”

  “Bob will be pleased. Male.”

  He pursed his lips before venturing to say, “Twins. ’Twasn’t twins, by any chance?”

  I smiled at his anxiety before relenting. He wasn’t a bad old stick. Better to put him out of his misery.

  “No, Father, doctors did think it was twins at one point, but they were wrong.”

  He sighed with relief. “Thank God for that. Julie had me worried. She looked pregnant wi
th half the town.”

  “It was triplets,” I said.

  “Ping, ping, ping.”

  To prepare himself for an outburst without let or hindrance, he plucked the last three buttons off his cassock.

  5. The New Curate

  A visit to Bishop O’Reilly always cut Father Duddleswell down to size. At St. Jude’s, he was what Mrs. Pring called “the little giant of the parish.” In the presence of the bishop, he was like a small boy carpeted by a ferocious headmaster for kicking a ball through his window.

  We had received a joint summons to appear before His Lordship, an unusual occurrence. Mrs. Pring was afraid he might be assigning me to a different parish. The little giant saw it otherwise.

  “Tell me honestly, now, Father Neil, what have you been up to?”

  “Nothing,” I assured him, not sure what I feared more, his driving or the audience at the end of it. “What about you?”

  “Ditto repeato,” he said, “apart from saying me prayers backward. And how could Old Silk Socks have got wind of that?”

  “Maybe,” I said, “he wants to put me in charge of Saint Jude’s and make you curate.”

  He was not amused, chiefly because commuter traffic had delayed us and the bishop took little pleasure in anything and least of all in being kept waiting.

  Having arrived at the bishop’s house only five minutes late, there was nowhere to park.

  “Drop me off outside the door,” I said.

  “And leave me to face the music later on me own,” he thundered back. “You yeller-belly.”

  When we were ushered by a secretary into the presence twenty minutes overdue, the bishop was tapping his desk. His clergy agreed he would never make a bird-watcher.

  “I thought you did not know the day nor the hour,” His Lordship said, making it sound as if we had been surprised by the Day of Judgment.

  My brave and boisterous parish priest bowed his head and began to apologize. The bishop stopped him with a broad gesture and a fishy-looking smile.

  “Never you mind, gentlemen. Sit yourselves down. Comfortable? I have good news for you, Father Duddleswell.”

  Heavens, we both thought, something really bad is about to happen.

  “I have decided,” he went on, “that Saint Jude’s is in need of a new curate.”