Mothers and Sons (16 page)

‘Your whole life’s a prayer, Molly,’ Father Greenwood said and smiled warmly.

She shook her head in disbelief.

‘Years ago the old women spent their lives praying. Now, we get our hair done and play bridge and go to Dublin on the free travel, and we say what we like. But I’ve to be careful what I say in front of Frank, he’s very holy. He got that from his father. It’s nice having a son a priest who’s very holy. He’s one of the old school. But I can say what I like to you.’

‘There are many ways of being holy,’ Father Greenwood said.

‘In my time there was only one,’ she replied.

W
HEN HE HAD
gone she got the
RTE Guide
and opened it for the evening’s television listings; she began to set the video to record
Glenroe
. She worked slowly, concentrating. In the morning, when the
Irish Times
had been read, she would put her feet up and watch this latest episode. Now in the hour she had to spare before she went out to play bridge, she sat at the dining-room table and flicked through the newspaper, examining headlines and photographs, but reading nothing, and not even thinking, letting the time pass easily.

It was only when she went to fetch her coat in the small room off the kitchen that she noticed Father Greenwood’s car still in front of the house; as she peered out, she could see him sitting in the driver’s seat.

Her first thought was that he was blocking her car and she would have to ask him to move. Later, that first thought would stay with her as a strange and innocent way of keeping all other thoughts at a distance; it was something which almost made her smile when she remembered it.

He opened the car door as soon as she appeared with her coat held distractedly over her arm.

‘Is there something wrong? Is it one of the girls?’ she asked.

‘No,’ he said, ‘no, there’s not.’

He moved towards her, preparing to make his way back into the house. She wished in the second they locked eyes that she could escape now to an evening of cards and company, get by him quickly and walk to the bridge club at the hotel, if she had to. Anything, she thought, to stop him saying whatever it was he had come to say.

‘Oh, it’s not the boys! Oh, don’t say it’s the boys have had an accident and you’re afraid to tell me!’ she said.

He shook his head with certainty.

‘No, Molly, not at all, no accident.’

As he reached her he caught her hand as though she would need his support nonetheless.

‘I know you have to go and play bridge,’ he said.

She believed then that it could not be anything urgent or important. If she could still play bridge then clearly no one was dead or injured.

‘I have a few minutes,’ she said.

‘Maybe I can come back another time. We can talk more,’ he said.

‘Are you in any trouble?’ she asked.

He looked at her as though the question puzzled him.

‘No,’ he said.

She put her coat down on a chair in the hallway.

‘No,’ he said again, his voice quieter.

‘Then we’ll leave it for another time,’ she said calmly and smiled as best she could. She watched him hesitate, and
she became even more determined that she would go immediately. She picked up her coat and made sure the keys were in the pocket.

‘If it can wait, then it can wait,’ she said.

He turned away from her, walking out of the hallway towards his car.

‘Right you be,’ he said. ‘Enjoy your night. I hope I didn’t alarm you.’

She was already moving away from him, her car keys in her hand, having closed the front door firmly behind her.

T
HE NEXT DAY
, when she had finished her lunch, she took her umbrella and her raincoat and walked to the library on the Back Road. It would be quiet, she knew, and Miriam the new girl would have time for her, she hoped. There was already a [email protected], Miriam had told her on her last visit to learn how to use the library computer, so for her first email address she would need to add something to the word ‘Molly’ to make it original, like a number maybe, hers alone.

‘Can I be Molly80?’ she had asked.

‘Are you eighty, Mrs O’Neill?’

‘Not yet, but it won’t be long.’

‘Well, you don’t look it.’

Her fingers had stiffened with age, but her typing was as accurate and fast as when she was twenty.

‘If I could just type, I’d be fine,’ she said now as Miriam moved an office chair close to the computer and sat beside her, ‘but that mouse will be the end of me. It doesn’t do what I want it to do at all. My grandsons can make it do
whatever they want. I hate having to click. It was much simpler in my day. Just typing. No clicking.’

‘Oh, when you’re sending emails and getting them, you’ll see the value of it,’ Miriam said.

‘Yes, I told them I was going to send them an email as soon as I could. I’ll have to think of what to put into it.’

She turned her head when she heard voices and saw two women from the town returning books to the library. They were studying her with immense curiosity.

‘Look at you, Molly. You’ve gone all modern,’ one of them said.

‘You have to keep up with what’s going on,’ she said.

‘You never liked missing anything, Molly. You’ll get all the news from that now.’

She faced the computer and began to practise opening her Hotmail account, as Miriam went to attend to the women, and she did not turn again when she heard them browsing among the stacks of books, speaking to one another in hushed voices.

Later, when she felt she had used enough of Miriam’s patience, she walked towards the cathedral and down Main Street into Irish Street. She greeted people she met on the street by name, people she had known all of her life, the children of her contemporaries, many of them grown middle-aged themselves, and even their children, all familiar to her. There was no need to stop and talk to them. She knew all about them, she thought, and they about her. When news spread widely that she was learning how to use the computer in the library, one or two of them would ask her how it was going, but for the moment she would be allowed pass with a kind, brisk greeting.

Her sister-in-law sat in the front room of her house where the fire was lighting. Molly tapped on the window and then waited while Jane fumbled with the automatic system.

‘Push now!’ She could hear her voice through the intercom.

She pushed the door, which was stiff, and, having closed it behind her, let herself into Jane’s sitting room.

‘I look forward to Monday,’ Jane said, ‘when you come down. It’s lovely to see you.’

‘It’s cold outside, Jane,’ she said, ‘but it’s nice and warm in here, thank God.’

It would be easier, more relaxing somehow, she thought, if one of them made tea, but Jane was too frail to move very much and too proud to want her sister-in-law in her kitchen. They sat opposite each other as Jane tended the fire almost absent-mindedly. There was, she thought, nothing to say, and yet there would never be a moment’s silence between them.

‘How was the bridge?’ Jane asked.

‘I’m getting worse at it,’ Molly replied, ‘but I’m not as bad as some of them.’

‘Oh, you were always a great card player,’ Jane said.

‘But for bridge you have to remember all the rules and the right bids and I’m too old, but I enjoy it, and then I enjoy when it’s over.’

‘It’s a wonder the girls don’t play,’ Jane said.

‘When you have young children, you’ve enough to think about. They never have a minute.’

Jane nodded distantly and looked into the fire.

‘They’re very good, the girls,’ she said. ‘I love it when they come down to see me.’

‘You know, Jane,’ Molly replied, ‘I like seeing them and all that, but I wouldn’t care if they didn’t visit from one end of the week to the next. I’m one of those mothers who prefers her grandchildren to her children.’

‘Oh, now,’ Jane replied.

‘It’s true, Jane. I’d go mad if a week went by and my lovely grandsons didn’t come down on a Wednesday for their tea, and I’m always raging when their mothers come to collect them. I always want to keep the boys.’

‘They’re nice when they’re at that age,’ Jane said. ‘And it’s so handy that they live so close together and they get on so well.’

‘Has Frank been here?’ Molly asked.

Jane glanced up at her, almost alarmed. For a moment a look of pain came on her face.

‘Oh Lord no,’ she said.

‘I haven’t seen him much since Christmas either,’ Molly said, ‘but you usually know more about him. You read the parish newsletter. He gave up sending it to me.’

Jane bowed her head, as though searching for something on the floor.

‘I must tell him to call in to you,’ Molly said. ‘I don’t mind him neglecting his mother, but neglecting his aunt, and she the holiest one in the family …’

‘Oh, don’t now!’ Jane said.

‘I will, Jane, I’ll write him a note. There’s no point in ringing him. You only get the machine. I hate talking into those machines.’

She studied Jane across the room, aware now that all the time her sister-in-law spent alone in this house was changing her face, making her responses slower, her jaw set. Her eyes had lost their kind glow.

‘I keep telling you,’ she said, as she stood up to go, ‘that you should get a video machine. It would be great company. I could bring you down videos.’

She noticed Jane taking a rosary beads from a small purse and wondered if this were being done deliberately as a way of showing that she had more important things to consider.

‘Think about it anyway,’ she said.

‘I will, Molly, I’ll think about that,’ Jane replied.

D
ARKNESS WAS
falling as she approached her bungalow, but she could clearly make out Father Greenwood’s car parked again in front of her car. She realized that he would have seen her in one of the mirrors just as soon as she saw him, so there would be no point in turning back. If I were not a widow, she thought, he would not do this to me. He would telephone first, minding his manners.

Father Greenwood got out of the car as she came close.

‘Now, Father Greenwood, come in,’ she said. ‘I have the key here in my hand.’ She brandished the key as though it were a foreign object.

She had put the heating system on a timer so the radiators were already warm. She touched the radiator in the hallway for a moment and thought of taking him into the sitting room, but felt then that the kitchen would be easier. She could stand up and make herself busy if she did not want to
sit listening to him. In the sitting room, she would be trapped with him.

‘Molly, you must think it strange my coming back like this,’ Father Greenwood said. He sat down at the kitchen table.

She did not answer. She sat down opposite him and unbuttoned her coat. It struck her for a moment that it might be the anniversary of Maurice’s death and that he had come to be with her in case she needed his support and sympathy, but she then remembered just as quickly that Maurice had died in the summer and that he had been dead for years and no one paid any attention to his anniversary. She could think of nothing else as she stood up and took her coat off and draped it over the armchair in the corner. Father Greenwood, she noticed, had his hands joined in front of him at the table as though ready for prayer. Whatever this was, she thought, she would make sure that he never came to her house unannounced again.

‘Molly, Frank asked me—’

‘Is there something wrong with Frank?’ she interrupted.

Father Greenwood smiled at her weakly.

‘He’s in trouble,’ he said.

Immediately she knew what that meant, and then thought no, her first reaction to everything else had been wrong, so maybe this too, maybe, she thought, maybe it was not what had automatically come into her mind.

‘Is it …?’

‘There’s going to be a court case, Molly.’

‘Abuse?’ She said the word which was daily in the newspapers and on the television, as pictures appeared of
priests with their anoraks over their heads, so that no one would recognize them, being led from court-houses in handcuffs.

‘Abuse?’ she asked again.

Father Greenwood’s hands were shaking. He nodded.

‘It’s bad, Molly.’

‘In the parish?’ she asked.

‘No,’ he said, ‘in the school. It was a good while ago. It was when he was teaching.’

Their eyes were locked in a sudden fierce hostility.

‘Does anyone else know this?’ she asked.

‘I came down to tell you yesterday but I didn’t have the heart.’

She held her breath for a moment and then decided she should stand up, push her chair back without caring whether it fell over, not moving her eyes from her visitor’s face for one second.

‘Does anyone else know this? Can you answer a straight question?’

‘It’s known about all right, Molly,’ Father Greenwood said gently.

‘Do the girls know?’

‘They do, Molly.’

‘Does Jane know?’

‘The girls told her last week.’

‘Does the whole town know?’

‘It’s being talked about all right,’ Father Greenwood said. His tone was resigned, almost forgiving. ‘Would you like me to make you a cup of tea?’ he added.

‘I would not, thank you.’

He sighed.

‘There will be a court hearing before the end of the month. They tried to have it postponed, but it looks as if it will be Thursday week.’

‘And where is Frank?’

‘He’s still in his parish, but he’s not going out much, as you can imagine.’

‘He abused young boys?’ she asked.

‘Teenagers,’ he replied.

‘And they’re now grown up? Is that correct?’ she asked.

‘He’ll need all—’

‘Don’t tell me what he’ll need,’ she interrupted.

‘It’s going to be very hard for you,’ he said, ‘and that’s killing him.’

She held the side of the table with her hands.

‘The whole town knows? Is that right? The only person who hasn’t known is the old woman? You’ve all made a fool out of me!’

‘It was not easy to tell you, Molly. The girls tried a while ago and I tried yesterday.’

‘And them all whispering about me!’ she said. ‘And Jane with her rosary beads!’