The Divine Ryans, page 10
The dancers were a huge success. As they left the stage, tap-dancing one by one into the wings, there was a great ovation, the largest for Young Leonard, who was the last to leave, tap-dancing sideways while twirling his green Swiss hat above his head.
Then, after a short intermission during which many of the dancers changed into fresh uniforms, came Father Seymour’s choir. I, feeling every bit the fraud and pretender that I was, stood among them, dressed like them, looking just like a real member of the junior choir, even when Father Seymour tapped his baton and the singing began. I stood there, lip-synching ‘Greensleeves’, ‘Ave Maria’, ‘Barbara Allen’, ‘Sad are the Men of Nottingham’.
‘Which one is Father Seymour’s nephew?’ I imagined people in the crowd were asking one another. ‘Oh he’s the one whose mouth is wide open when the rest of them are closed.’ There was my mother, in the front row, beaming with pride. Looking at her, I was so ashamed that I forgot to move my mouth, but she didn’t seem to notice.
I suppose it wouldn’t have been so bad if there hadn’t been so much talk about my being in Father Seymour’s Number. ‘His own nephew?’ I imagined people saying.
‘Yes, Draper Doyle is his name. Six months ago, he couldn’t carry a note and now look at him.’
And there was my mother, to whom the supposed miracle had been meant as a gift, a special favour. Father Seymour takes widow’s little boy and makes a special case of him, teaches him to sing in record time. Widow is fairly lifted from her misery by the sight of her boy singing in the chorus of Father Seymour’s choir. How guilty I felt! There was my mother, husband-less, sick with worry about me and Mary. Why couldn’t I be the sort of boy who charmed his mother by singing ‘Ave Maria’? Why couldn’t that pride beaming on my mother’s face be justified? What on earth was wrong with me? I was feeling so sorry for myself, I had a sudden urge to burst out bawling, yes, even to confess, right there on the stage, own up to the whole world that I was faking it. Draper Doyle, impostor. I could see the headlines in tomorrow’s Daily Chronicle, my own family’s newspaper. PRIEST’S NEPHEW PRETENDS TO SING WHILE MOTHER BEAMS WITH PRIDE.
Instead of breaking down and confessing, I tried to comfort myself by lip-synching with all my might, belting out the words of ‘Ave Maria’ in my mind, giving what was perhaps the greatest bogus rendition ever given of that song. My mouth was wide open, my shoulders rose and fell with every word. Never had ‘Ave Maria’ been faked more sincerely, more convincingly. I put everything I had into it, straining, straining, sweat breaking out on my forehead, all the while trying desperately not to break down in a fit of shameful weeping on the stage.
It was then, through a glaze of tears, that I saw him. My father was sitting near the back of the hall, at the end of one of the rows. He was dressed as he might have dressed in life for this occasion, wearing his best suit, across the vest of which the gold chain of his watch was visible. He was sitting there, smiling like everyone else, looking not in the least out of place, except that once again he held a hockey puck in his hands. He was turning it over and over as if he was either admiring it or wondering what on earth it was. It might have been something that had fallen from the sky for the way that he was looking at it, now and then tapping it as if to see what it was made of. ‘Cryptic,’ his expression seemed to say; ‘inscrutable,’ as if the mystery of its origin was as dark and densely opaque as the puck itself.
I looked at the people beside him. Would he show the puck to one of them? He had never appeared this close to other people before. Surely they could see him. Surely, it seemed to me, everyone could see him. He had been as well known among this crowd as any of the Divine Ryans, so why was his presence not causing a commotion? Why was the person sitting next to him ignoring him as if he wasn’t there?
I was determined not to let him get away this time. I knew that with his tendency to disappear in an instant, I had better waste no time in getting to him. He seemed to know what I had in mind, for he looked up from the puck and a mischievous, almost encouraging smile came on his face. To reach the part of the hall in which my father was sitting, I would have to break ranks with the back row of the choir, run clear across the stage, right in front of Father Seymour, then pass within a few feet of Aunt Phil and the archbishop at the bottom of the stairs – after which I would still have to run the length of the hall. Looking once again at my father, whose mischievous expression had become more pronounced, I jumped down from the bleachers we were standing on and, so fast that I didn’t notice anyone’s reaction, ran across the stage. I was just descending the stairs, just about to reach the floor of the hall, when I glanced up to find that the chair in which my father had been sitting was now empty.
I should simply have kept on going, I suppose, down through the audience and out the door. It wouldn’t have been any more difficult to explain. Instead, I came to a skidding halt in front of the archbishop. It was quite a while before the audience realized that what was happening was unplanned. Everyone seemed to think that it was part of the act, some daring innovation of Father Seymour’s perhaps, having one of his choirboys run across the stage, descend the stairs and stop in front of the archbishop, there to burst into some spectacular solo for his benefit.
Even Aunt Phil seemed to be hoping desperately that this was the case, hoping the whole thing would suddenly resolve itself into a scene from Boys’ Town, hoping that somehow I, her nephew, whom she knew to be the newest, least practised member of Father Seymour’s Number, would suddenly burst into song, and what had seemed to be a catastrophe would turn out to be one of the great moments in the history of Father Seymour’s Number – perhaps it would be remembered as the time that Father Seymour’s nephew, on the ingenious instructions of Father Seymour, had fooled everyone into thinking that some horrible embarrassment was taking place, and then had burst into song, his mouth as roundly and as sweetly open as that of some Vienna choirboy, his head gesturing for emphasis, his whole body caught up in serenading the archbishop. For surely, surely, her face seemed to say, I had not simply taken it into my head to flee from the stage and come to a screeching halt in front of His Grace.
Not the least of those who must have been expecting some such face-saving performance was the archbishop himself who had been more or less woken up, not by me so much as by the sudden silence, to find that, inexplicably, one of Father Seymour’s choirboys was standing right in front of him, staring at him with an expression of simple horror on his face. The archbishop was the first to recover, the first to admit to himself that no serenade, no unprecedented solo would be forthcoming. Smiling at me, he extended his hand, not to shake mine, I was fairly certain, since he did so palm down, but for what reason I had no idea.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Sister Louise motioning frantically for me to do something. I saw her rubbing one of her fingers, and making a frantic downward motion with her hands. What this meant, I could not begin to guess. I stared at her in panic, wondering what on earth she wanted me to do.
I dearly wished I understood her, for her expression seemed to assure me that what she had in mind would not only save the moment, but was quite easy to do. When I shrugged, she knitted her forehead, and the motion of her hands became so ferociously concentrated, that her whole body began to shake as if with sheer spite. She was rubbing her finger so vigorously she appeared to be trying to erase her knuckle, all the while staring at me with ever increasing exasperation, as if she believed I was only pretending not to understand. What by this time was obvious to everyone but me was that Sister Louise and the archbishop wanted me to kiss his ring. When it became apparent that I would not, the archbishop lowered his hand, looked away from me, and went back to staring at the stage.
I could think of nothing else to do but turn around and go back onstage, which I began to do, every step of my black buckled shoes resounding throughout the hall. Suddenly, I was acutely aware of my outfit, my elf’s hat, my green suspenders, my short pants, the six inches or so of absurdly skinny leg that showed between the pants and my knee-high yellow socks. And finally, the shoes, the famous shoes of Father Seymour’s Number in which, one day, if Father Seymour changed his mind about my dancing potential, I might be tap-dancing, footing it about the stage with the same pointless expertise as Young Leonard.
Somehow, Father Seymour got the choir going again and the recital went on as planned, with the audience giving us a kind of bemused, sympathetic ovation at the end. My mother was backstage waiting for me when we went off. Perhaps she had meant to head off the chewing out that I was sure to get from Father Seymour. She needn’t have worried. Father Seymour was quite clearly enraged, but he was not about to say anything, for he knew that I might very well blurt out our secret, tell her that, on his instructions, I had only been pretending to sing.
The dressing room was silent as my mother led me out by the hand. When we got to the car, Aunt Phil and Sister Louise had already gone home, so disgusted had they been by my performance. I climbed into the back seat with Mary, and my mother got in front with Uncle Reginald who, saying it might be best if we gave Aunt Phil time to cool off, took us for a drive. For a while, no-one but Uncle Reginald spoke. He made the inevitable joke about how, with only three months’ training, I had stopped the show. Then my mother turned around.
‘I don’t suppose,’ she said, ‘that you would like to explain yourself.’ I considered telling the truth, but, remembering my promise to Mary, decided I better not.
‘I thought I had to use the bathroom,’ I said.
‘You thought you had to use the bathroom,’ my mother said. ‘And then, once you had interrupted everything and spoiled the concert, you discovered that you didn’t have to use the bathroom?’
Trying not to mimic her look of incredulity, I nodded.
Mary and my mother looked at one another, rolled their eyes, shook their heads. And then everyone, me included, burst out laughing.
9
Because of all the holiday confusion, the next Confession Wednesday was not until three weeks after the concert. In the days before, I tried to think of a way of getting out of it. I could feign sickness, but I would have to seem very sick to convince Aunt Phil to let me miss confession, especially since it was three weeks since we had gone. Mary, who had been genuinely ill, had once asked to be allowed to miss confession and Aunt Phil had assured her that however sick her body might be, her soul was much worse. It seemed there was no end to metaphors when it came to sin. The soul was black. The soul was sick. The soul had too much hair. My normally bald soul would have grown a brushcut’s worth of sin in three weeks, so what chance did I have of missing confession? And even if I did miss it, that would only delay the inevitable.
‘Bless me, Father, I have sinned. It’s been three weeks since my last confession.’ I repeated those words over and over in my mind, and when Wednesday came, I went to meet my fate, which turned out to be every bit as bad as I thought it would. After reciting some vague infractions of the junior ten commandments, I fell silent.
‘Anything else?’ said Father Seymour. I said nothing.
‘Anything else?’ he said, somewhat more forcefully than usual, and in the kind of familiar tone he had warned me against using. For a long time, there was silence. The penitent on the other side of Father Seymour, as if to signal his impatience, began to cough. I could faintly hear the shuffle of footsteps from outside, the world, despite my dilemma, going on as usual. I could dimly see Father Seymour, his hand resting on his chin in that reflective pose he always used. I suddenly felt dizzy and fell forward, banging my head against the screen.
‘Anything else?’ said Father Seymour, who seemed startled. I closed my eyes, remembering my mother’s remark that I had ‘spoiled’ the concert.
‘I spoiled the Christmas concert,’ I said.
Without asking for an explanation, he gave me penance.
The visitations continued, as did the Momary nightmares. My father appeared about once a week in the yard next door, dressed for winter as if even ghosts could feel the cold. Once I saw him in the middle of the afternoon, a rare daytime appearance. He stood there in the backyard, holding a puck up to the sunlight like some jeweller appraising a stone, staring at it with one eye closed as if he was trying to see through it, trying to see what it was made of. Later, when I was sleeping, Momary, that strange spectacle of nakedness, pursued me through dreams in which I too was naked. Her object was to get a look at my Methuselah, which I could keep hidden from her only by running as fast as I could, thereby showing her my backside, at the sight of which, in a voice all too like my mother’s, she shouted, ‘Look Mary, look, it’s Draper Doyle’s bum.’ She was trying to fool me into thinking that to let her see my bum was more humiliating than to let her see my Methuselah, but I wasn’t falling for it. I knew it was my Methuselah she was after, and no matter how gleefully she pointed at my bum, I didn’t turn around.
I took to sleeping on my back so that when the pee started, when my alarm cock went off, I wouldn’t stain the sheet. I was spending all my weekly allowance, as well as drawing from my once-substantial savings, to keep myself in underwear. I wondered if I should ask Uncle Reginald to forgo my oralysis fee, at least for a few weeks, then thought better of it, for he was certain to worm an explanation out of me.
I had visions of becoming like one of those boys we saw in the public health films at school. ‘Drug addicts will do anything for money,’ the narrator said, ‘anything to feed their daily habit.’ Mine was a weekly habit, one pair of drawers per week on average. My habit. My weekly fix. ‘The addict begins each day with the knowledge that he must somehow get enough money by nightfall to buy a pair of underwear.’
I knew that if I got to the point of spoiling one pair of drawers per day, I was finished. It had gotten so that I could not look at my mother or Mary without thinking of Momary, and therefore of all the underwear I had to buy, as much for their sake as for mine. When I saw Mary, all I could think of was that tuft of hair between her legs, that little goatee which in the dream was always there when I looked over my shoulder – above it was her belly button, her belly like some cyclops with one eye in the middle, coming after me.
I managed to get some revenge on Mary when it came to my attention that she and a boy named Harold Noonan were having what Uncle Reginald called a ‘fling’. A fling was putting it far too strongly since they had yet to speak to one another. All that had really happened was that Harold had taken to following Mary home from school, staring at her from a distance as if he was trying desperately to remember who she was. As for Mary, what strange satisfaction she derived from having a boy to whom she had yet to speak follow her home from school every day, I had no idea. She was always looking back at him, apparently encouraging whatever weird delusion he had formed about her.
Harold Noonan wore shirts with ruffled sleeves, as well as the most bizarrely coloured pants, sometimes red, with purple bell bottoms, sometimes striped. And his hair – combed completely to one side, it was almost as long as Mary’s, so long in fact that, to see, he had to walk about with his head turned sideways, sometimes holding his hair in place with one hand while his other hand was in his pocket. He seemed to think that this was a perfectly reasonable way to walk about, a relaxed, self-possessed pose. Sometimes, it looked not as if he was turning his head to keep the hair out of his eyes, but as if that great bunch of hair was pulling his head sideways, so weighing him down that his whole body was thrown off balance, making him lopsided, causing him to walk with one arm much lower than the other, and even with a kind of limp.
There he went, Harold Noonan, looking like someone with a permanent cold in the neck. Aunt Phil, who also noticed Harold Noonan’s strange behaviour, called him ‘that long-haired Lothario from up the street’. He was a sight to say the least, that Harold Noonan. I wondered what he would think of Momary. I wondered if, having once seen her, he would still follow Mary home from school.
One day, as Harold Noonan was stalking Mary, I walked along, halfway between them, on the opposite side of the street.
‘Go home, Draper Doyle,’ Mary said.
‘Mary, Mary, bum so hairy, how do you make it grow?’ I shouted. Mary screamed and began to run – not after me, I was glad to see, but away from me, as fast as possible, her hands over her ears. All Harold Noonan did was feign disinterest.
This episode touched off a renewal of the sex versus age controversy in which Mary and I had been engaging for as long as I could remember. It all hinged on the fact that, while she was three years older than me, I was a boy. She never doubted that those three years would always seem as crucial as they did when we were children, that forty would be as much of an improvement on thirty-seven as nine was on six. Nor did I doubt it, though for a while I did think my age was catching up with hers. It was my father who pointed out that while the difference in our ages would always be three years, the proportionate difference was forever getting smaller. I was faced with the mystery of how, when I was one, she was four times older than me, but when I was two, only two and a half times older. Surely, if my age was an ever-increasing fraction of hers, I told him, it would catch hers some day. My father assured me that this was not even theoretically possible.
My only comfort was that while she would always be older, I would always be a boy. Faced with the fact that most grownups of either sex agreed that boys were, as the saying went, ‘better’ than girls, Mary conceded inferiority in sex while trying to convince me that age was more important. She pointed out that she had gone to school before I did, made her first confession and communion before I did, was allowed to stay up later, and so on. I answered that these were things that I would do one day. The mere fact that she had done them first meant nothing. There were, however, things that boys could do that girls could not do at all. I believed that anything that boys could do that girls could not was a blessing, and that anything that girls could do that boys could not was, at the very least, not worth doing and in all probability a curse.
