Undisconcertable herself, she had slipped into an old and populous convent, as a guerrilla-fighter might slip into a city or a mite into cheese, and had managed, in the course of a few years, to hollow it out. This was to be the last time the nuns would assemble in this room. Tomorrow they would begin to disperse. The building would be sold. From now on, nuns were to live in small apartments in the poorer parts of the city.
‘We shall be going to the people,’ triumphed Sister Mary Quinn, ‘living in manageable units and acting as the shock troops of the Lord.’
Sister Gilchrist sighed. Stability had gone the way of the Latin mass. So had trust in the efficacy of prayer and with it the older nuns’ sense of their usefulness. They could hardly be shock troops or join Sister Quinn, who was planning to live and work with tinkers and alcoholics. Quinn set great store on scoring points in the here and now. Politics and social work attracted her. To Sister Gilchrist’s mind, if religion was the opium of the people, politics was the people’s benzedrine.
‘Future shock …’ Quinn was crying. ‘Inability to adapt … Old wood …’
Sister Gilchrist tried to find it in her heart to forgive her. Looking along her own pew, she counted five nuns in tears. She gave them a rallying smile. Beside her, Sister Judith Clancy was making a cat’s cradle with her rosary and seemed to have taken nothing in. She gave Sister Gilchrist a lunatic beam of non-recognition. One small, precise charge for which Sister Quinn would have to answer on the Last Day was that she had turned this gentle madwoman loose in an alien world after fifty-five years in the convent. Here Sister Judith had been looked after and who could say that her prayers had not been as valuable as anyone’s, rising clear of terrestrial folly to swell the ghostly bank of grace on which all must draw, even the most active, even Sister Mary Quinn? Sister Judith might not always recognize her sisters in religion but she did know Christ. Indeed, she worried that she personally had hurt and wounded him, and pushed this belief, not in itself unorthodox, to extremes which, though they might have been welcome in a twelfth-century religious community, were harder to accommodate today. They would fit even less well in the secular world. Sister Gilchrist had made this point to Reverend Mother but, since her defeat by the forces of Quinn, Reverend Mother – her new title was ‘the coordinator’ – was a bruised reed.
‘Arrangements are being made,’ she had told Sister Gilchrist, ‘for younger nuns to look after those who may be more of a hindrance than a help in the society to which we are returning. In Sister Clancy’s case, however …’
‘Yes?’
‘A special one, don’t you think?’ Reverend Mother tapped her forehead. ‘Now that we are going public, it would jeopardize the impact of our overall effort if …’
Sister Gilchrist recognized the Quinn vocabulary. She sighed.
Reverend Mother looked guilty. ‘We shall,’ she recited in a singsong, ‘be mingling with the people. There will be little or no supervision. Can you imagine Sister Judith Clancy who, as we all know, regrettably – well, she’s seventy-five and a bad seventy-five and there are things distressing to consider which must be considered nonetheless. She takes her clothes off, for goodness sake, Sister, in public, as you know right well. Besides, my predecessor warned me … You do know that her delusions are not all religious? Her mind – well.’ Reverend Mother raised her eyes to heaven. ‘I must ask you to trust me in this,’ she appealed, invoking a loyalty which she had done nothing to deserve. ‘There is a nephew,’ she remarked. ‘He is not best pleased at our sending her back to him but, after all, the convent has done the family a favour for fifty-five years. Perhaps, later, we might manage to have her in one of the new mini-communities. But in the first weeks there will be media coverage. Sister Quinn, you see …’
Sister Gilchrist saw. Reverend Mother, a latterday Pope Celestine, had thrown in the towel. Useless to expect anything from her and anyway Sister Judith’s was no cause on which to make a stand.
*
‘Isn’t it great news, Sister Judith, that you’ll be going home?’
‘Home?’ Judith thought of heaven – Christ clasping her to his bleeding bosom – and of her childhood. ‘What home?’
‘To your grandniece and -nephew’s place. They’re married to each other. Cousins. They must have got a dispensation for that, I’d say. It’ll mean you’ll be with all blood relatives. Isn’t that grand?’
‘I want to stay here,’ said Judith, ‘I don’t want to go where I’ll be a burden. Do I have to go?’ she asked the falsely smiling hussy in front of her. She didn’t know who the hussy was but knew a false simper when she saw one. She braced herself. ‘Do I?’
‘Yes,’ said the hussy, showing her true colours and switching off the smile. ‘This place is closing down and we’re all going back to live in the world.’
‘Oh law,’ said Judith, ‘did they have a revolution then? Like in France? Are they closing down the convents?’ she asked.
‘We’re closing them ourselves. We’re giving up our own spiritual comfort so as to put ourselves at the service of the people. To do corporal works of mercy. We feel the times are ripe for it. There’s no use making heavy weather of this, Sister Judith. The decision has been taken collectively by the community. You’ll just have to make the best of it.’
Sister Judith closed her eyes and told herself, ‘Live, horse, and you’ll get grass.’ When the powers-that-be took a decision all you could do was bow your head and live inside it.
2
The bus for the city terminal – An Lar – was cream-coloured and streamlined as a butter pat. While waiting for it to move off, James read the local paper. A headline ran: GARDAI URGE RETENTION OF DEATH PENALTY. The Gardai were the Irish police and the penalty aimed at members of the IRA who might be planning to kill them. Republican police v. Republican army might sound like a football game but James had done his homework and knew that the republics did not coincide. One was a place of the mind. He had received briefing on the matter from his employer, Larry O’Toole.
‘Language over there,’ Larry had warned, ‘is highly charged. Better avoid the word “republic” completely. Don’t say “free state” either. That’s obsolete. The best bet is to say “the twenty-six counties”. That shows your sympathies. The ideal republic, you see, would have thirty-two.’
Larry’s main directive was ‘don’t make waves’. Though the incident at Customs had surely been no more than a ripple, Larry would not have liked it. He was nervous about this film and about his irresponsible old father who was putting up the money for it and had to be kept sweet. The Irish authorities, as Larry had impressed on James, also had to be kept sweet.
James had run into Larry at a radio chat-show on the Irish situation. James had been standing in for a sick colleague.
‘You go,’ the colleague had begged James. ‘You have an Irish name; you’re articulate. That’s all they want: someone to hold the ring and keep the two sides from disembowelling each other.’
The radio station was in a kind of shack in North Hollywood run mainly by volunteers and James had been surprised to find Larry there. He’d known him years earlier, when they were both on the same college football team, and the two felt an exaggerated sense of kinship on recognizing each other in that bunch of amateurs who looked as though they’d never got anything quite right in their lives.
There was an Orangeman from Belfast in a pair of bright new cowboy boots, a local priest whose gold cuff-links were slightly bigger than quarters, and a fierce, butch-looking girl from Ireland who turned out to have a remarkable knack for scoring debating points and keeping physical control of the mike. She spoke with the fluency of a mimeographed flyer, and reminded James of the years when he’d been a student, and a confetti of mimeos were forever proclaiming the need to sit in or stand up, ban some product or put your body on the line. That game was no longer played on campuses where kids now were busy grooming themselves to snatch the jobs as yet uneroded by the West’s decline. On reflection, though, thi
s girl wasn’t like the Sixties radicals at all. She was tough, a tough cookie.
James felt a lurch of depression which he couldn’t place right away then attached to the word ‘job’. Of course: he’d lost his. He hadn’t liked it but now he’d lost it and his wife might have to go on keeping him indefinitely. Therese too was a tough cookie. She had been college-age in the Fifties, as this girl had in the Seventies, and both were tough compared to James, a child of the siren decade in between.
After the discussion, Larry invited the group back to his father’s house in the Hollywood Hills.
‘The old man will be wild to meet you,’ he told James. ‘He used to travel out to see all the games when I was at college. He still talks about you as the greatest quarterback ever.’
To James, having that sort of success behind you was like having been an infant prodigy: it made you a has-been for the rest of your life. He managed not to say this though, for he didn’t want to snub Larry’s old man, who turned out to be an amiably leonine figure. O’Toole had obviously once been a bigger man, and a contracting spine had left him with a top-heavy lope. His eyelids were moulting and the lashless eyes themselves had an air of startled excitement. It was impossible to dodge his eagerness and James found himself surrendering to the limpid memories and smile. It was true that O’Toole could talk endlessly about games in which he’d seen James score.
‘A quarterback’s got to have brains,’ said the old man. ‘That’s where you were ahead, son. You had the grey matter.’ Orthodontia and lashlessness had given O’Toole a saintly expression. When he made a point, he looked James deep in the eye as though eager to trade commitment. ‘I told Larry, “that boy’ll go far. He has what it takes here.”’ Tapping his own forehead. He laughed: ‘Fantastic his meeting you like this. They wouldn’t let me come on the show, you know!’ The big, winning smile. ‘I’m too excitable.’
On the other side of some potted jade plants, the Irish girl was arguing with the priest. Both supported the Irish Republican movement, but it was turning out that their conceptions of what this meant differed.
‘Democracy …’ the girl was saying.
‘There’s no such thing. People’s minds are manipulated,’ the priest told her. ‘Always have been. Always will be. What we’ve got to ensure is that they’re manipulated to a good end.’
‘I remember a field goal you scored in ’67,’ O’Toole reminisced, ‘in a game against Penn State, was it?’
‘But you’re an elitist!’ The girl sounded shocked.
‘It tipped the balance,’ said O’Toole. ‘Brought the team from behind. You’d covered three yards in three downs and time was running out. Then you decided to go for a field goal. The wind was against you but you managed it. Great judgement. Cool execution.’ The old fan’s eyes watered. His tones were religious. ‘I always told Larry: that kid’ll go far.’
James braced himself for the admission he was going to have to make sooner or later, which was that he hadn’t gone anywhere. Not even out of school. All he’d done was change campuses and take a job as assistant professor. Even that seemed inconclusive, as people around the campus were constantly taking him for a student. He looked that young and half the time thought he was – had thought so until a month ago when the sword fell and the Drama Department decided not to renew his contract. James couldn’t get used to it: failure. Expulsion from the garden of youth.
‘Can you believe,’ he asked the old man, ‘that I haven’t been out of school since I was four? My mother sent me to kindergarten early and I guess I got addicted. I’ve been in school in one way or another since.’
‘We’re all elitists,’ the priest was saying.
‘Not me,’ the Irish girl argued. ‘No, Mister. I represent the ordinary people,’ She was deliberately denying the priest his title. But she spoke indolently. They were off the air and she was saving her breath.
‘Exactly,’ said the priest. ‘You decide for them, speak for them. Unless,’ he spoke slyly, ‘you represent God? Leaders believed that once.’
‘I’m not a leader.’
‘What does Larry do these days?’ James asked.
‘He’s in films,’ said Larry’s father, ‘and real estate. Real and unreal, ha ha! Did you say you were in the Drama Department at UC?’
‘Was,’ said James with unnecessary truthfulness. ‘I’ve been let go.’
‘Being an elitist,’ the priest was saying, ‘is nothing to be ashamed of. Small groups have always taken the lead. Did you know that the Irish War of Independence was planned by a clandestine organization, the IRB? They moved in secrecy,’ cried the priest, ‘used men who never knew of the hidden hand manipulating them.’
‘You love that word,’ said the girl disgustedly.
‘Read your history,’ the priest told her. ‘The “people” as you call them,’ he hammered at her, ‘never decide anything. Neither do abstract forces.’
‘Who did the fighting then?’
‘Wrong question. Ask who paid for the gun. American greenbacks did. He who pays the piper …’
O’Toole was listening with amusement. ‘Father Casey,’ he whispered to James, ‘has a theory that the Irish back in Ireland have less claim to Irishness than men like himself. Something to do with accidents, essences, and being born in a stable not necessarily making you a horse. A man with your training would grasp it at once.’
‘Socialism,’ Father Casey was telling the tired or indifferent girl, ‘eliminated God then man. For you history is like a weather report: ridges of pressure move; confrontations occur. Can’t you see that that’s not how things happen. Somewhere,’ said the priest passionately, ‘an individual has to make a decision, exert will-power …’
O’Toole nudged James. ‘Every game needs a quarterback, eh? Listen.’ Gleaming and grinning, he contemplated James. ‘I’ve got a dilly of an idea. Come and talk to Larry – no.’ Slyness seeped up the expanse of old face. O’Toole tapped James on the shoulder. ‘I’m retired,’ he confessed. ‘Larry likes to make his own decisions. Father Casey says I have to learn to work like Lucifer: be the power behind the throne.’ Again that swell of zest. The old man, James saw, milked every eventuality. Obstacles were challenges, boredom a time for plotting. ‘Don’t go.’ O’Toole gave James another squeeze. ‘Got to plant an impulse. Wait for me.’ Another theatrical wink and James was alone.
Amused, he got himself a drink and ate some of the cold food scattered around. The house was standard Los Angeles upper-crust taste: full of natural materials and a pretence at casualness. A tree grew through a hallway and appeared to hold up the roof. The old man, he remembered, had made a killing in real estate. Now Larry ran the firm, having eased his father out of it and into what the two described jocosely as the ‘unreal estate’ of propaganda for the Irish cause. O’Toole and his side-kick, Father Casey, were the mainstays of the West Coast Chapter of the Honourable Heirs of Hibernia and their fund-raising organization, Banned Aid.
‘It keeps him busy,’ Larry had confided to James on the drive over. ‘For a while there I thought I’d never get him out of the business. You know how old guys get? He’d lost touch and in five years he’d have destroyed it.’
Now it looked as if the old man wanted Larry to offer James a job. Excited, James poured himself some more whiskey and, coming back from the bar, tripped over a girl lying on a rug. People were sprawled around the place like shepherds in a frieze. Surprised, he heard himself confide to her about the humiliations of having a wife in the same profession as oneself but more successful. The responses he elicited struck him as only slightly more articulate than those he might have got if he’d pressed the stomach of a teddybear. ‘Not more successful,’ he corrected himself, ‘successful, period. She made if. I didn’t. She has tenure.’ But he cared less than he had supposed. The tenured were tethered and he wanted to roam. Leaving the girl, he found a couch where he stretched out to wait for his hosts. Were the other unconvivial loungers lying about like knights of the Round Table
also waiting for tasks and assignments?
*
‘The old man,’ said Larry, ‘has been dropping hints of the delicacy of sledgehammers. He wants me to ask you to work on a propaganda film we’re making: Four Green Fields. It’s to raise funds for the Irish Republican cause. Before you say a thing,’ Larry lifted his palm, ‘let me say that I can’t think of anyone I’d rather work with. Point number one. Number two – I’d better spit it out right from the start – is that this is my film and not my father’s. The Honourable Heirs – and for practical purposes that means my father and Father Casey – are backing it but I’m the director. I say this because the old man’s like a kid: crafty, tries to have things his way. He’ll go behind my back to you. I know. It’s ridiculous but I’ve got to say it. We couldn’t work together if I thought your loyalty wasn’t with me.’
‘I’m interested,’ said James. ‘I’m also embarrassed.’
‘You’ll have to live with that.’
Larry had probably toned down and created himself in opposition to his exuberant, charming, over-ripe old Dad. He explained that the film would be made in Ireland and that therefore James and he would have to work with the Irish authorities. No point antagonizing them, right? The old man, he explained, was unable to see this. He had a hundred mad ideas a day which James must promise to ignore.
James grinned: ‘OΚ. You’re the quarterback. You call the plays.’
*
In the autumn of 1921 Judith went back to Mucklea for a final term. She was going on to be a teacher and, since experience never comes amiss, helped now with classes like map-drawing. Juniors learned from a coloured globe.
‘England’s cruel red,’ said the geography nun, and spun it to show the colour visible at every turn. She came from a Sinn Féin family. ‘They’ll have to make new maps,’ said she. ‘Ireland, the first land conquered, will be the first to go.’
No Country for Young Men Page 3
