Father Neil's Monkeyshines Page 9

Schooled in obedience, Father D responded in a shaky voice, “I am sad to hear that, me Lord.” There was a tremor in his voice. “When will Father Boyd be leaving?”

  “Who said anything about young Neil here leaving? I have heard nothing but good reports of him.”

  I smiled with relief. I also appreciated being called by my Christian name. Being in the bishop’s good books was marginally better than being in his bad books. On the bad side, it now seemed likely that I was going to lose my sparring partner to another, maybe more upmarket parish.

  I blurted out, “When will Father Duddleswell be leaving?”

  “Who said anything about him leaving and where would I send him?”

  He was clearly mindful of his last visit to us when Billy Buzzle’s big black dog stole up to the altar and literally laid paws on him.

  “You both seem mightily looking forward to getting rid of each other,” he said.

  Father Duddleswell and I exchanged a brief glance of relief. The relief was not long-lasting.

  “I heard,” the bishop went on, “from my vicar general that you requested a second curate when poor Neil here had them terrible bouts of flu. Are you over them, now, Neil?”

  I hadn’t had flu for years. I said, “I am, my lord, but thank you for asking.”

  “I think of me priests’ good health every minute of every day, don’t you know?”

  We both foolishly nodded our heads at such a preposterous idea.

  Looking to his own good health, he took a sip of tonic wine for his stomach’s sake, as St. Paul advised, before turning to me with a worrying concern.

  “And how are you these days, Neil?”

  “Very well, my lord. I am so grateful for your prayers.”

  “Ah, more things are wrought by prayer than this world dreams of, as Saint Paul said, or was it Alfred, Lord Tennyson?”

  Father Duddleswell leaned over and stroked my arm in a concerned way.

  “The brave lad means, me lord, he is improving slowly but he is still thin as a rasher.”

  “I can see that,” the bishop said, being inspired for some reason to notice something that had eluded me. “But are you sure you have room for an extra curate?”

  “Ample, me lord.”

  It was hardly a fair description of our tiny guest room.

  “That’s settled it then.” He was keen to draw the interview to a close. “The new man will be with you by the weekend.”

  Before the bishop could rise, Father Duddleswell put in, “Would he be newly ordained, me lord?”

  He had a horror of being landed with an elderly or cranky curate who had done the rounds and quarreled with everyone.

  “Indeed, he is.” The bishop seemed a bit sly about something. “The holy oil of ordination is still wet upon him. Ordained by His Holiness in Rome only a couple of weeks ago. I am relying on you to lick him into shape for me.”

  As my parish priest, a seasoned campaigner, rose from kissing the bishop’s ring, he said, “There is nothing, um, peculiar about—?”

  “In the name of God, do you think the pope would ordain someone peculiar or I would send the same someone peculiar to Saint Jude’s? Isn’t one peculiar enough?”

  My parish priest and I looked at each other, wondering which of us he was referring to.

  As I knelt in my turn, Father Duddleswell said over my bowed head, “It wouldn’t be one of them recent converts, me lord?”

  I was on the point of kissing the bishop’s ring. At the word converts, he so jerked his hand that I nearly lost a tooth.

  The bishop howled as I bit into him and made him purpler than he was before. Literally, a case of biting the hand that fed me.

  Pain made him lose all pretense of affability.

  “He is a convert,” he said with a tremor, as if he hated no word more. “Trained at Saint George’s.”

  The George, as it was fondly called, was a Roman college that specialized in training older, mostly professional men for the priesthood. Eccentricity was the norm there. One time, the George put on a Gilbert and Sullivan opera starring a real-life rear admiral and a recently retired major general.

  “A late vocation,” Father Duddleswell muttered. “How late, if I might ask?”

  The bishop, holding his hand as if he had just been mauled by a lion, growled, “Too late, if you ask me. I’d never have accepted an ex-Anglican clergyman if the cardinal”—he involuntarily twisted his arm—“hadn’t requested me to do so.” Turning his back on us: “God bless you both.”

  Back in the car, with a parking ticket attached, Father Duddleswell became once more his hard-knuckled self. He kept wishing he had belted the bishop with his own crozier. His one solace was my fancy dental work on the bishop’s hand.

  “When,” he said, “he last came to Saint Jude’s, even Billy Buzzle’s Pontius didn’t have the wit or bottle to bite him. Our only hope now, Father Neil, is that you are suffering unbeknownst to quick-acting rabies.”

  Father Jonathan Barr-Jones came to us from his country home in the cab of a removal van. The men were in a nearby pub having a pint before unloading.

  Mrs. Pring had told me Father D needed me for moral support. It did not seem necessary. The new curate was so obviously friendly even he would warm to him.

  Jonathan, at fifty-five, was one of the handsomest men I ever met, with white wavy hair and jet-black eyebrows. His forehead was high and broad and his nose was straight. He reminded me of Father Francis Chisholm, played by Gregory Peck, when a makeup artist aged him for the final scenes of the film The Keys of the Kingdom.

  I said to Mrs. Pring, “A woman’s man.”

  She whispered back, “Not really. Too handsome by far. Women feel more at ease with craggy men.”

  Neatly dressed in regulation black, Jonathan spoke in an attractive, husky voice and his courtesy then, as always, was unfailing.

  We had no sooner finished tea than the removal van drew up. Trouble, at which the bishop had not hinted, immediately surfaced.

  “What is that?” asked Father Duddleswell, peering through the window. The first thing to be unloaded was a double bed.

  “I’ve slept in it for thirty years,” Jonathan said. “All through my marriage.”

  Father Duddleswell nodded in a shell-shocked way. “Not nearly enough room for that,” he stammered.

  “I am so sorry,” said Jonathan. “The bishop assured me you had plentiful accommodation.”

  The rest of his things were unloaded: an easy chair, a desk and typewriter, filing cabinet, a few pictures, and five tea chests full of books.

  Meanwhile, the double bed was blocking the pavement. I had to go out and stop two youngsters jumping up and down on it as if it were a trampoline.

  “Jesus, Mary, and Joseph,” Father Duddleswell muttered in my ear. “The good people will be thinking double beds are standard equipment for us priests.”

  Jonathan apologized for his thoughtlessness and instructed the removal men to take it back to his home in Oxfordshire.

  Around Catholic presbyteries, news travels faster than light. For hours, the phone never ceased ringing. Father D’s cronies wanted to know if there was any truth in the rumor that the bishop had sent him a thrice-married, blind, deaf, and dumb curate.

  The next day, he received two letters. One was addressed to Father Charles Duddleswell-Smythe and the other to the Irreverend Father Duddles-Wellington. Often after that, he addressed me as “me unhyphenated curate.”

  Jonathan was assigned the downstairs parlor as his reception room. He said the accommodation was more than adequate.

  He and I hit it off. The thirty years between us were no barrier. He had the special gift of relaxed people: He made you feel you had known him all your life.

  Father D introduced his new curate very warmly to his parishioners on Sunday, after which Jonathan preached h
is first sermon.

  Next to me on the sanctuary, Father Duddleswell, hearing his precise, almost precious English tone, whispered, “Dear God, the feller has a lot to learn. He sounds like a speech therapist.”

  Jonathan did sound quaint, and he was certainly scholarly, being the author of five tomes on church history. But we all learned to appreciate his common touch. The congregation listened to him with rapt attention.

  His examples were based on his experience as a family man. He spoke of parents listening at the door at night to make sure their baby is still breathing. Staying beside a sick child’s bed all night in case they’re needed. Feeling soft baby fingers on their cheeks and knowing it for the miracle and foretaste of heaven that it is.

  He preached knowledgeably and with sympathy of the problems facing courting couples as they try to relate to one another and build a home together.

  It was a refreshing change from Father Duddleswell’s whimsical advice: “If you are keeping company, be like the beads on the holy rosary, close as you like without actually touching.”

  Jonathan also shone a new light on death. I had often quoted Newman’s lines, “Every man dies alone.” Jonathan said, when someone close to you dies—your wife, say, or child—it alters your attitude to death entirely. Death has taken from you what you treasure most in this world. From that moment, death is no longer a solitary nightmare, since for you to die now is to go the way of your beloved. “It is the road,” he said, “the golden road to reunion.”

  Jonathan had one special gift, rarer than he imagined: He did not feel threatened or embarrassed by children. He was the father of three girls. Maybe this is why he didn’t mind children questioning him or relying on him. He was never afraid of being alone with them or people thinking he was becoming too fond of them.

  There was, for instance, a girl in our junior school, Josie Baxter, aged nine. Josie’s mother, a lifelong Catholic, had married a divorcé and so was forbidden to go to Communion. For years, she was deeply upset about this. Her second cross was learning that Josie, who had been born with a heart complaint, was not allowed to play games with other children.

  Every day, Jonathan bolted his lunch to be with Josie. He held her hand and, for ten minutes, walked her around the edge of the bustling playground so she would not feel cut off from other people.

  No wonder Jonathan’s confessional was crowded, in contrast to Father Duddleswell’s and mine.

  Mrs. Pring’s explanation was to the point: “He speaks with authority, not like the scribes and Pharisees.”

  “Really?” I said, none too pleased at the waning of my popularity in the parish.

  “Oh yes, Father Neil. He’s been married, you see, with kiddies of his own, so he knows. The hottest thing Father D’s ever had on his lap is a boiled potato I dropped there one lunchtime.”

  At this stage, it was not Jonathan’s lack of orthodoxy that grated on Father Duddleswell but his peculiar “habits.”

  He used to dress in the evenings in a purple smoking jacket. To Father D, this was a terrible affectation. A parishioner might call and be so shocked he’d never return.

  Then there was the evening when Jonathan returned from his day off at eleven thirty, after the curfew hour. He had no key to let himself in because Father D had been slow to get a new one cut.

  He had locked up in his usual thorough manner. Mrs. Pring used to say if ever God came for his soul at night he’d have to rip the roof off.

  From my bed, I heard him unlock the front door and ask Jonathan what he was doing in a collar and tie.

  “I was off-duty,” came the reply.

  “A priest is not a policeman, Father. He is never off-duty.”

  Jonathan explained that he did not like going to the theater in a clerical collar.

  “You have been where, Father?”

  “To the West End, to the theater.”

  Father Duddleswell told him that priests could attend a symphony concert but were forbidden to go to the theater or the opera, wherever there was “a spectacle” on the stage. The penalty was automatic suspension from priestly office. He couldn’t even say mass until the matter was cleared up.

  “But,” Jonathan protested, “I only went to see Hamlet.”

  “So?”

  “A man can hardly be suspended when he’s done nothing wrong.”

  “Oh, you can, Father. ’Tis wrong to be disobedient.”

  “If it pleases you,” Jonathan replied evenly, “I won’t do it again.”

  “’Tis not a question of pleasing me but of keeping rules made for the benefit of all.”

  I sided with Jonathan in this. A line of clerics in the front row of Hamlet would be more edifying that dozens of them in the stands at the racetrack. There was even a joke among priests present at one meeting. When a jockey was thrown and broke his back, a hundred clerical hands were raised in absolution.

  I could hardly be unaware of the contrast in styles between my two colleagues. The clash was no less real for being mostly silent and charitable.

  Jonathan was a man of immense culture, whereas Father D was sharp in a narrower field. The one was tall and elegant in speech and manner; the other was stocky and dressed as if his clothes had been pitchforked onto him. The one understated everything, whereas Father D not only gilded the lily, he used three coats of paint.

  An evening came when Father Duddleswell had his closest pals in for poker. Doc was there, with Canon Mahoney and Father Nelson Twomey, a former naval chaplain.

  During a brief break, I played the part of waiter. I enjoyed the conversation of these old men, empty of malice but full of mischief.

  I offered the canon a whiskey: “Anything with it, Canon?”

  “Indeed, laddie,” he said, “more whiskey.”

  It made a change from “No milk and sugar, thank ye.”

  Father Duddleswell was telling them how much he liked his curate as a man, which sounded ominous.

  “Is that so, Charles?” Canon Mahoney asked. “Why, then, have you a face on you like a horse with sore hooves.”

  “Write down what you really think,” said Father Nelson, “and hand it to the judge.”

  Dr. Daley moved like a penguin toward the sideboard to help himself to refreshment, which he took neat as the grace of God.

  He said, “This new curate of yours, Charles, was married, was he not? Not a bad idea. He has more experience of marriage than the rest of you priests worldwide put together. You must be green with envy.”

  Father Nelson wondered if this was not the sort of knowledge that clouded judgment.

  The canon, a big kindly man with a head bald as a lightbulb, took the opposite line.

  “Why, now, Nelson, would Bishop O’Reilly be the impossible feller he is if he got Ballyhooly from a little woman on the pillow at night? I reckon the Vatican should impose marriage on a feller like our bishop to put a splinter of sense in him.”

  Father Nelson brushed that unlikely idea aside. “Is he orthodox, Charles, or do you see the devil and his hooves?”

  Father D replied that he had reservations about the new man on that score. But any theological problems he would refer to the expert there opposite him.

  “Do not bother me with them silly things, Charlie,” Canon Mahoney said with a wide practically toothless grin. “Theological problems, begod! When I was younger, Neil’s age, for instance, I was red hot against Cranmer, Luther, and Calvin, as you can all testify. But,” he sighed, “these days I know who my real foes are.”

  “Yes?” I said.

  The canon winked at me. “Rheumatics, laddie, getting to the bathroom in time to avoid calamity and sometimes heretical-sounding bellyaches.”

  I laughed so much I jogged Dr. Daley’s arm. He looked at me, astonished.

  “Could you not have waited till I emptied my glass before spilling the blessed lot
?”

  Father Duddleswell proceeded to tell them about Jonathan going to the theater and his having to warn him this was a suspension offense. He was shocked to hear that Canon Mahoney thought he had acted over the top.

  “But surely, Seamus,” Father D protested, “the law has not been repealed?”

  “True for you, Charlie, but there is all the difference in the world between a rule not being repealed and still being in force. Times change, y’see, and new customs come along with the force of law. Banning the theater was only a local law brought in a century ago when things were different. Few people take any notice of it nowadays.”

  “Would you ever think of going to the theater, Seamus?”

  “I would, Charlie. Indeed, I do. Once a month at least.”

  Father D pondered this a while before saying, “Then I must offer me new curate a profound apology.” And the next day, he did.

  I was the one to benefit most from Jonathan’s company. We went for walks and he coached me in music. He was a fellow of the Royal College of Music and played the organ superbly.

  That’s why I was puzzled when, during a service, the playing was far from his usual standard. I crept up to the organ loft to find a girl of ten at the organ. Sheila came from a broken home and Jonathan was teaching her to play. She couldn’t reach the pedals so he pulled out the stops and was on his knees, working the pedals with his hands.

  Jonathan often spoke to me about art. Once he invited me into his study to look at his collection of Chinese watercolors. He outlined for my benefit the best periods and the numerous dynasties. I forgot most of the details but not the lesson itself.

  He picked out a picture by a Shanghai artist. Sailing boats were shrouded in the mists. There was a half-sun at the top of the canvas.

  I was not impressed. The lines were so crude a child could have drawn them. The mist hid most of the details of rocks, sea, and sails.

  He waited for my comment, typically not wanting to influence my judgment.

  “It looks,” I said, “as if it took five minutes.”

  He smiled. “The artist probably took days agonizing about what to leave out.”

  I said it seemed unfinished to me.