Children in the Morning (42 page)

“When was this?”

“At gym class time.”

“When’s gym again, dolly, remind me?”

“Just before lunch.”

“So the two of them left the school together at that time?”

“Yes!”

“Well, I’ll check on Father Burke and make sure he’s all right. I’ll let you go now. Don’t worry. It’s probably not as bad as it looked.”

“Okay, okay, Daddy, get going!” Slam.

I made a call to Brennan’s direct number at the rectory. No answer. That didn’t mean anything one way or the other. I would go and see if someone knew where he was. Two minutes later I was in the car and on my way to St. Bernadette’s. When I squealed to a stop in the parking lot and got out of the car, I met Michael O’Flaherty emerging from the rectory. I made an effort not to look rattled.

“Afternoon, Monsignor. How’s it going?”

“Ah. Monty. Just grand, and yourself?”

“Can’t complain. I just popped over to see your curate. I tried to reach him on the phone.”

“No, you wouldn’t be able to get him on his line.”

“Is everything all right?”

“Oh yes, you’ll find him in my room, watching a movie on my tv.”

Relief coursed through me. All I said to Michael was: “Now there’s something you don’t see every day: Burke in front of a television.

What movie is it,
The Bells of Saint Mary’s
?”

“No, it’s something a little closer to home. The Hollywood movie about Beau Delaney.
Righteous Defender.
Brennan rented the video.

He said they had several copies at Video Difference.”

“Is that right?”

“Yes, and I suffered through the viewing.”

“You didn’t like it?”

“Oh, it wasn’t that. It’s a fascinating story about a fascinating man.

But watching it with Brennan was aggravating beyond words. He kept pressing the rewind button over and over.”

“Oh?”

“He must be intrigued by the new technologies. We’ll bring him into the 1990s yet.”

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“I never think of him as a techie sort of guy. But he has surprised me on occasion.”

“True enough. Anyway, on this particular occasion, he kept replaying certain parts of the movie.”

“Which parts did he like?”

“I didn’t keep track of the interruptions, Monty. I just know that’s not the way I prefer to watch a show. He’s on to the news documentary about Delaney now. He got it from the tv station. I didn’t stick around for that.”

“I’ll go up and watch it with him.”

“Sure thing. Go right up, Monty. I’ll see you later.”

“See you, Mike.”

Never mind that I had already seen both shows. I had new reasons for wanting to view them now, or rather, I had reason to be curious about what parts Brennan found so important. Add that to my curiosity over the scene Normie had witnessed earlier in the day.

I went into the rectory and headed up the stairs to the room I knew belonged to Monsignor O’Flaherty. The door was ajar, and I saw the back of Brennan’s head. The vcr was on pause, and I peered in to see what he was looking at. But I couldn’t make it out. Then he resumed playing the video. There was Peggy, talking about the murder of Beau’s client, allegedly done in by a member of the Hells Angels. Peggy said: “That was the longest night of my life.” Brennan pressed rewind and watched it again. Then he sensed my presence and turned around. He gave a little start when he saw it was me. But he did not look as if he had been in any kind of scuffle with Beau Delaney. He nodded, turned back to the vcr, and switched it off.

“What?” I said, entering O’Flaherty’s room. “I’m not going to see the show?”

“You’ve seen it.”

“So have you. Why are you watching it again?”

“I don’t have
The Exorcist
so I’m watching this.”

“You kind of remind me of the younger priest in that, come to think of it. The kind of dark, brooding, haunted . . . but I guess he was Greek.”

“The character was Greek. The actor was an American Irishman, Jason Miller.”

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“Well! Who knew you’d be such a fount of movie trivia?”

“There’s nothing trivial, Collins, about the battle for supremacy between the forces of good and evil.”

“I stand corrected, Father.”

“It’s about time. So, what’s up?”

I didn’t want to spring Normie’s story on him right away, so I came up with something more benign.

“Dinner and drinks at O’Carroll’s? I was going to give MacNeil a call about it.”

“Sounds good.”

I thought of something else that I had been meaning to do, and reached for my chequebook. I grabbed a pen from O’Flaherty’s desk and wrote out a cheque.

“This is for Patrick, to reimburse him for his mercy flight to Halifax on Normie’s behalf. Make sure he gets it.”

“He doesn’t want it.”

“Make him want it. Do whatever you have to do.”

“My brother and I had a grand time together. He was due for a visit.”

So I took the cheque, scratched out the name Patrick Burke, wrote in St. Bernadette’s Church, initialled it, and slapped it down on the desk.

“Ready?”

“I will be in five minutes. I’ll get cleaned up.”

When had the fastidious priest ever been dirty? But I followed him to his own room, gave Maura a call about dinner, then sat at Brennan’s table by the window and waited while he performed his ablutions in the bathroom. When he emerged, we headed out together.

“How are things?” I asked him.

“Good.”

“Anything new?”

“Nothing.”

I would try another tack.

“What were you looking for in that documentary?”

“Nothing in particular.”

“Well, then, why were you rewinding and playing parts of it again?”

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“The sound wasn’t very good. I couldn’t hear it.”

This was a man who could hear when a note sung by one section of a four-part choir was off by a quarter of a tone. Well, I could hear too. And what I was hearing was that it was none of my business what he had been looking for. I knew that something about the program had struck a false note for me when I watched it, too, but I would figure it out later.

Brennan and I arrived at O’Carroll’s and made ourselves at home at the bar. I ordered a pint of Guinness and he got a double Jameson.

He had downed it by the time I’d had two sips of my pint. It didn’t make him garrulous, by any means. He ordered a second drink and stared into it, as if he had forgotten there was anyone else around.

“Is everything all right with you, Brennan?”

“Sure, yes, I’m grand.”

He made an obvious effort to rally. If there was something on his mind, he put it aside, and told me a long, funny story about the Gaelic football team he played on as a young boy in Ireland, and the mishaps they endured on their trip to play a team in Mayo-God-Help-Us. Maura joined us half an hour later.

“You look as if you were born and raised, schooled and ordained, right there on that bar stool, Burke,” said Maura. “You, too, Collins.”

“Ah, just like the oul country itself, so it is,” Burke replied in a stagy brogue.

“Well, if you can detach yourself from it without doing internal damage, I’d prefer to have dinner at a table.”

“No worries, no damage.”

So we got ourselves settled at a table, ordered drinks, and pro-cured menus. Conversation resumed.

“Speaking of the old country, now, Mr.
Collins
.” Brennan raised his glass to his lips, and his left eyebrow to me. “Your father’s people were from Cork, you’ve told me, and came over here around the turn of the century.” He took a sip of his whiskey. “Your mother’s family, on the other hand, was long established in Halifax by that time.”

“Right. They’d been here almost since the city was founded in 1749. Originally from England. Catholics, though, Brennan, as you know.”

“Bless them and save them,” he said with mock piety.

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“The Earls of Halifax were Montagues, you know, back in the day,” Maura put in, affecting a snooty British accent. She pointed at me. “He’s schizo, Brennan. Lord Halifax by day, Irish rabble-rouser by night.”

“An Irish rabble-rouser is exactly what he should be if my speculations are correct. His crowd was still in County Cork when
Michael
Collins was toddling around in his nappies. No doubt if he made even the most elementary inquiries, he’d uncover a connection with that illustrious branch of the family.
Have
you made any efforts in that regard, Montague Michael Collins?”

“Well, no, I haven’t.”

“No sense of history. Did your father never tell you tales of your Irish ancestors when you were a boy?”

“Oh, he did, but you know what kids are like. They don’t listen.

Then they grow up and want to know, and they find out they’ve left it too late. I hear there’s going to be an Irish history lecture at Saint Bernadette’s Choir School, Brennan.”

“There is, and you’ll be expected to attend. A command performance, let us say.”

“I wouldn’t miss it, Father.”

“There’s hope for you yet, then.”

“Monty’s father helped
make
history, Brennan,” Maura said. “Did you know that? He did very secret intelligence work, code-breaking, during the war.”

“Right. Didn’t someone tell me he was at Bletchley Park in England?”

“Yep,” I said, “my dad had left Halifax to do his Ph.D. in math at Cambridge University. Bletchley Park recruited him from Cambridge and got him working on the codes. They couldn’t have broken the German ciphers without him, I’m convinced. My mother boarded a ship here and sailed over to be with him. Brave soul, to sail the Atlantic during the war years.”

“Montague didn’t make his appearance till they moved back here, though, a couple of years later,” Maura said.

“Hey, I could wait! Putting Hitler away was more important than getting me started.”

“I’ve never heard you so humble, Collins,” she said. “But what 276

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about you, Brennan? You were a wartime baby. What year did you come into the world,” Maura asked him, “bringing joy and laughter to those around you?”

“The people walked in darkness until 1940. Then they saw a great light.”

“Yeah, it was called the Blitz.”

“No blitzkrieg where I came from, in Dublin.”

“That’s right. You guys were neutral during the war.”

“During
the emergency
. That’s what we called it in Ireland.”

“Do you remember anything from those times?” she asked him.

“Did young boys play at fighting Hitler, or did you sit around being quiet and doing nothing and pretending you were Swiss?”

“I know you’re takin’ the piss out of me, MacNeil, but I won’t reply in kind. I do recall listening to news on the wireless about the war. It was a long time ago so I couldn’t tell you exactly what the broadcasts said, but . . .”

I tuned them out. I went through the motions as we ate our meal and gabbed, but I was distracted all the while. Because I had just caught on to something that was so obvious I had simply overlooked it before.

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Chapter 19

(Monty)

“Michael,” I said into the phone when I got home from O’Carroll’s and dialled the number of the rectory. “I apologize for the very short notice here. But you’ll recall our conversation about the orphanage in Saint John.”

“Of course I do.”

“It’s important that I go there and speak to the people in charge.”

“Really! The sisters, you mean.”

“Yes. And you mentioned a trip home if ever I went. But, under the circumstances, I don’t want to wait. I’m sorry about the rush.”

“No worries. When are you leaving?”

“I’d like to go first thing in the morning. I don’t know what Saturdays are like for you. But I can’t go during the week.”

“I’ll palm my Saturday Mass off on Brennan — God forgive me for putting it like that; I’m only joking — and I’ll be ready whenever you are.”

“Great, Mike. See you at eight?”

“Eight it is.”

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So we took off for Saint John, New Brunswick, first thing in the morning. Michael kept me entertained during the four-and-a-half-hour drive with stories of his childhood in the old port city, where the orange and the green played out their ancient roles over and over again in the New World. We stopped for a quick bite to eat when we arrived, then headed along Waterloo Street past the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception and around the corner to Cliff Street.

St. Vincent’s Convent, as it was now called, was a three-storey red-brick building, with dormers giving it a partial fourth storey. Crosses topped two of the dormers, and the building had rows of Gothic windows. A stone set high up in the facade displayed the words:

“Saint Vincent’s Orphan Asylum, A.D. 1865.”

Michael accompanied me inside and introduced me to Sister Theodora. She looked to be in her early seventies, with short steel-grey hair and glasses. She was dressed in a dark navy skirt and white blouse, with a large silver crucifix on a chain around her neck. I explained the purpose of our visit.

“I am eighty years old,” she said, “and I will never forget my first sight of Burton Delaney. Burton McGrath, he was then. We always called him Beau. One of our sisters — Soeur Marie-France — said

‘Qu’il est beau!
’ when she first saw him. And it stuck. It would have been when? Forty-five years ago? No, more than that. We were called to see about an abandoned child in a flat on Paddock Street. The boy’s father was a bitter and ferocious man. He had been given a dishonourable discharge from the army early in the war, and never got over it. He and his cronies used to sit around the house and get drunk and rant about the war, and berate little Beau, and humiliate him and beat him. At other times, the child was neglected completely. The mother was cowed into submission. Oh, it was a dreadful situation.