The Empty Family (v5)

by Colm Toibin

  There was a time, indeed, when I had loved him, but that was something that had not bothered me for years. I knew he now worked in administration in one of the main Dublin hospitals. I had heard him once or twice on the radio sounding rational and competent and in full possession of a large set of complex facts. His voice, I remember noting, had not changed. Nor indeed had hers. She made me agree to see them in the Tea Room at eight o’clock the following Wednesday.

  ‘Are you still in daily touch with the Virgin Mary?’ I asked before we rang off.

  ‘I am,’ she said, ‘and she is taking a very dim view of you.’

  I laughed. She had a lovely way of making herself sound as though she meant everything she said. Even when she tried to be ironic or sarcastic or funny, she sounded earnest. I could imagine Donnacha liking that too, finding it even more amusing and refreshing than I did.

  I almost looked forward to seeing them until the time came close. But as I walked slowly towards the Clarence Hotel I actually dreaded the prospect of meeting them and I wished I had not answered the phone to her that day. There was something dull about Gráinne and her urgent needs and her strong and half-baked opinions. And there was something about Donnacha that I had never been able to fathom, some deep laziness or contentment, an ease in the world, a way of letting nothing bother him too much, a way of never allowing anything to happen to him that would require close analysis on his part. This beautiful nonchalance of his had made me want him at a certain time in my life more than I have ever wanted anyone, and it had made him tolerate me and enjoy things while they lasted until something more normal and simple moved into his ambit.

  Such as a woman who did all of the talking.

  Most of us are gay or straight; Donnacha simply made no effort, he took whatever came his way. In the past I had found that exciting, but I had not thought about him seriously for a long time. As I walked into the Tea Room, however, and saw that they were waiting for me, I was surprised that I still felt jealous. Of Donnacha’s self-containment, of his ability to make people want him, or trust him, or like him. And maybe jealous too of the idea that he and Gráinne had now been together for almost twenty-five years, that she had him all the time, every night. I hoped to get away from them as soon as I could.

  ‘We thought you’d be late,’ she said.

  ‘Yes, I planned to be late, but it didn’t work out.’

  Donnacha was wearing a suit and a tie. I wondered if he had come straight from work. He stood up and shook my hand as though he did not know me well.

  ‘You’re still married to her?’ I asked.

  He smiled almost shyly and looked at Gráinne.

  ‘What God hath put together,’ she said.

  ‘Well,’ I said. ‘I don’t often meet a divinely inspired couple.’

  I wondered if my question had been unfortunate, if they were in fact meeting to let me be the first to know that they were separating, but I did not think so.

  Gráinne seemed to have arranged the table so that there were two places set opposite her, one for Donnacha and one for me. I had imagined that they would sit beside each other opposite me. She obviously wanted us both to look at her, or wanted to make sure that we were both listening to her when she spoke.

  She handed me the wine list.

  ‘We’ve ordered gin and tonics,’ she said, ‘but that might be too strong for you.’

  ‘It’s nice to see country people back in the Clarence,’ I replied. ‘I’m sure the band are delighted.’

  ‘Bono was in the lobby when we came in,’ Donnacha said.

  ‘Give me Larry any day,’ I replied.

  ‘Order the wine,’ Gráinne said.

  Donnacha had not changed. His hair was grey now, but the grey did not make much difference. His face had thickened but not very much. His teeth were still perfect. He was as slim as ever. But none of his physical attributes added up to much – he was not beautiful, or physically striking – and it was something else that made me glad I was not sitting opposite him and would not have to look at him all evening. His aura had not been affected by the years. He was lazily there, easygoing, comfortable, as their drinks came and we ordered our food and our wine.

  ‘I see you are still keeping the old age pensioners on trolleys in the hospital corridors,’ I said.

  He smiled almost impatiently and slowly began to explain how things in his hospital were improving, mentioning in passing several meetings he had had with the Minister and what she had said, and one meeting with the Taoiseach. I had forgotten how much he loved an argument and how rational he was and unwilling to deal with insult and half-thought-out invective. Nonetheless, it was not hard to tell him that the problem began and ended with the doctors and their greed and their arrogance, and that nothing would change until their salaries were halved and they had to clock in like everyone else.

  ‘It’s not as simple as that.’

  I almost said that it was precisely as simple as that when my mother was dying in a public ward over long months in one of the Dublin hospitals, but I did not want to talk about anything personal. I knew that Donnacha’s parents had died, as had Gráinne’s mother. I had not gone to the funerals, nor had they come to my mother’s.

  I noticed that Gráinne, who was facing the main door into the restaurant, paid absolutely no attention to this discussion, instead looked around her like a petulant child. She was behaving like herself, only more so. It comes with age, I thought. Donnacha was thus becoming all reason, all good sense. I was becoming all bored, or maybe all regret. I wished I could tell Donnacha that I had no interest in hospitals or health systems or Ministers or meetings with the Taoiseach, that I was interested in his face and his voice, in the darkness of his eyes, in the growing intensity in his tone as he made his argument.

  In St Aidan’s we had been distantly friendly for the first three years, although Donnacha was always in a different dormitory and was not involved in hurling, as I was then. Thus I never spoke to him much or grew close to him. He had friends from home and he spent time with them. I remember him as part of a group on semi-permanent watch for opportunities to cadge cigarettes, asking for a pull of yours, or a drag, or the butt. I remember that he could be trusted not to horse a cigarette if you gave him a drag, and, if he had borrowed a cigarette, he could be depended on to return it the next day.

  In our fourth year we became friends because we both worked to get on the school debating team. Donnacha started out as a useless speaker but over time the logical, calm way he made points began to have an effect, especially if he was part of a team with other boys who had greater skills at delivery and drama or humour. I could do dramatic openings and endings as long as I could keep my stammer under control. Sean Kelly could do imitations and make jokes and barbed comments about the opposition. We left Donnacha to do the quiet summing up. By the end of January we had won the internal competition in the school, and this meant we could now represent the school in debates all over the county, mainly against girls’ schools. Sometimes we got the topic a week in advance and were allowed time together to prepare, but there were some debates in which the subject was not released until an hour or two before and these were the hardest and the most exciting.

  This was how we met Gráinne Roche, who at sixteen was the most fiery debater in the county, with a skill at insulting her opponents that thrilled the audience. Donnacha never rose to her bait. Nothing she said or did made the slightest difference to his style, and he could take a sentence of hers, or a point she had made, and dissect it coldly to make her seem like a fool.

  Later, everybody who took part in those debates must have read the evidence against Father O’Neill, the science teacher who organized them within the school, and presumed that we, who travelled with him so many times, must have known about him or even suffered because of him. I suppose we knew that he took an interest in us that was more intense than normal, and that he was often very nosy. And of course he liked Donnacha and loved quizzing him about the smallest
details of his life, almost blushing with pleasure the more diffident and remote Donnacha grew. I watched this and it meant that I knew about Father O’Neill. According to the evidence given, it was only after our time at St Aidan’s that he brought boys to his room and fucked them. But maybe there was other evidence that would have implicated him much earlier, and maybe it all happened in front of our noses. The idea of a priest wanting to get naked with one of the boys at St Aidan’s and stuff his penis up the boy’s bottom was so unimaginable that it might have happened while I was in the next room and I might have mistaken the grunts and yelps they made for a sound coming from the television. Or I might have mistaken the silence they maintained for real silence.

  On a night driving back to the school from Bunclody, where Donnacha’s incisive and quiet arguments had seemed oddly powerless and flat, Sean Kelly sat in the front passenger seat while Father O’Neill drove and Donnacha and I sat in the back. I don’t remember how we began to move closer to each other than we needed to be. It might have been because one of us wanted to be heard and thus sat over towards the middle to be within earshot of Father O’Neill and Sean Kelly. We did nothing obvious. But we moved close to each other so that our legs were touching and maybe, in the heat of the car, we had our jackets off and our shoulders were touching too and our arms. I eased off, I remember, in case this was a mistake, but it soon became obvious that Donnacha was deliberately moving towards me and that a few times, as though by accident, he touched my thigh with his hand. We continued talking as normal but by the time we arrived back to the school Donnacha and I were on fire. It was a question of what we could do now. It was late and all the dormitory lights were off. No one would miss us, as everyone knew that we were in Bunclody at the debate.

  Donnacha and I were on fire, but as I was to learn, there was a great deal of difference between us. If I did not make a plan, or insist in some way, Donnacha’s fire would happily go out. It would not cost him a thought to go to his bed on his own on a night like this. But if I said nothing, merely led him to a place that was not too risky, then he would follow, and in the dark especially and with no words being spoken or whispered between us he would be passionate in a way that I could never manage. It would be clear that he wanted this all along, planned it maybe, but always with the proviso that he could, if he were not openly encouraged, walk away.

  Years later, when we lay in beds together, I learned more about him. But here in the dark, in this old school, with many nooks and shadowy spaces and unused rooms, I learned first how slowly I would have to move, how, for example, he would not let me touch him or kiss him until he had abandoned all modesty. This would take time. At first he would touch the light stubble on my face, or the hair on my chest. He would do this as though it were leading nowhere. I could touch his back and open his pants and pull him in against me, and slowly I could put my hands where I liked but only when I sensed from his breathing that he was ready for this.

  That night we went silently to a place off the rehearsal room that was once used for storing musical instruments. It had two doors – one connecting it to the rehearsal room, the other giving on to a dark corridor, both of which could be locked. There was no light inside. At first, as we stood facing each other, I moved too fast and Donnacha almost pushed me away. I thought then that he just wanted to play a bit before going to bed. I did not know that he was building up to something and that soon he would be ready for anything.

  I wondered that night, as I sneaked across the school to my dormitory and then lay in bed, what Donnacha would do in the morning. I wondered if he would avoid me, if he would pretend that nothing had happened between us, if he would pretend that he had not left marks on my back with his fingernails and made muffled sounds that went on and on as he came all over my chest and stomach, if he would try to make me forget that I had fed his sweet, thick, pungent, lemony sperm into my mouth with my fingers as if it were jam, desperately trying to make sure that none was wasted.

  As soon as I caught his eye at breakfast the next morning, however, he smiled at me, the smile cheeky and warm and affectionate. He told me later that I had glanced up at him in wonder, almost in fear, and immediately looked away. As soon as breakfast was over he made his way across and stood behind my chair, waiting for me to finish my cup of tea. He had never done this before. We walked out of the refectory as best friends.

  It seems ludicrous now, and it is certainly embarrassing, but it was more or less at the time I began to have sex with Donnacha that I became deeply religious. I still believe that it had nothing to do with him. I believe that I became interested in religion because of a number of poems on the school course that I read and reread with considerable intensity. These were the sonnets of Hopkins and two poems by T. S. Eliot, ‘A Song for Simeon’ and ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’. If I ever happen to read ‘Prufrock’ now, it is as a comic poem, but then, at the age of sixteen, I took seriously the idea of the ‘overwhelming question’ that Prufrock wished to ask. I believed that there was such a question and that it was up to us, students of the poem, to formulate it. I believed that the question was existential, almost religious, and it concerned how we should live in the world, and how we should relate to God and to each other, and I grew so solemn and earnest on the subject that Mr Mulhern, the English teacher, suggested I go and see a priest who had come back from America and who worked only with the seminarians. He was a theologian. His name was Patrick Moorehouse.

  The first day I knocked on his door he was busy, but I was struck by how polite he was. When I told him why I had come to see him, he nodded and said that Mr Mulhern had mentioned me to him, and that he too was an admirer of Hopkins and Eliot. He suggested that I come back another time. I remember that I went up to his room every evening after tea for some weeks but he was never there. One day I saw him on the corridor but he did not notice me.

  And then one Sunday, when I had presumed that I was travelling to New Ross for a hurling match, I was told that I had been dropped from the subs bench and the bus would be full. I knew it was my own fault for not togging out on the appointed afternoons, for disappearing into the library when I should have been on the playing field, but I was not alone in believing that I had been singled out by not being allowed to travel on the bus as a supporter. Even Donnacha had managed to get on the bus and he had never held a hurley in his life. This meant that I had a whole afternoon empty, from one o’clock, when the bus left, to five, when those still in the school would be expected to turn up for Rosary.

  When I went up to Father Moorehouse’s room that afternoon I did so merely as a way of passing ten minutes; I did not expect him to be there. He opened the door brusquely. He seemed preoccupied but once he remembered who I was and how long ago he had promised to see me he invited me into the room. I had been in other priests’ quarters, but these were different from the rest. The main room was smaller. It was full of books and papers and LPs piled on desks. I could see no television but there was a record player and there were two speakers resting against the wall. Father Moorehouse had been working at a desk. He moved some books and pamphlets from the short sofa and made space for me to sit and then he began to talk. I had no idea what I had expected him to say, or why, in fact, I had been sent to see him, but I need not have worried. His voice was soft; he smiled when he stopped to think, looking for the right phrase, and a few times he would take a note of something he had said so that he would not forget it. I wish I had taken notes too, but I remember clearly some of the things he said that day because I wrote them down as soon as I left his presence. He said: ‘We must turn our bewilderment in the world into a gift from God.’ He said: ‘We must merge the language of our prayer with the terms of our predicament.’ He said: ‘We must humbly understand that consciousness belongs to each of us alone, it is part of us as much as it is part of God.’

  He asked me about prayer and when I said nothing interesting he found me books and warned that some of them were not Catholic books but they might
help me understand Hopkins and Eliot. He asked me if I had read John Donne and I said that I had not. He told me I must and he quoted some lines. By the time I left his room, I had books by Lancelot Andrewes, Jonathan Edwards, Simone Weil and Fulton Sheen. He suggested that I come back even before I had read these books because he would like to talk to me more about faith and about prayer. I thanked him and I left.

  I suppose it must be said that my interest in Patrick Moorehouse’s mind, and my fascination at the points he made and the terms he used and the writers he quoted from, were entirely sexual. But maybe it should be said only once, and perhaps whispered or put into parentheses, or consigned to the realm of the obvious. At that time, no one knew that a sixteen-year-old boy and a priest twice his age could or would have sex, and so it never awoke as a thought in my conscious mind. Now, I have to say, even now, the idea of it – of Father Moorehouse naked, for example, or Father Moorehouse with an erection, or Father Moorehouse’s tongue – is exciting. I regret that I did not put more thought into it then.

  Instead, I tried to read the books he gave me. They were difficult, and I was glad that he had given me permission to go back to his room before I had finished any of them. I had found some essays by Eliot in the library and a book about his religious belief and his poetry and thought that this might be an excuse to go to Father Moorehouse’s room again, maybe with passages marked that had puzzled me, to see what he thought.

  The next time I found him in his room I was surprised to see Gráinne Roche and a friend of hers. They were both sitting on the sofa. Father Moorehouse got a chair for me from what I supposed must be the bedroom. I knew Gráinne, of course, from the debates. Now Father Moorehouse informed me that she was asking the same questions as I was and he was glad both of us had met in his room to discuss matters of faith rather than in the false world of the debating chamber. Gráinne was very quiet and appeared almost embarrassed. Father Moorehouse completely ignored her friend, who seemed not to notice, or not to mind. When he stood up, he made it clear that he had to go. All three of us left before him, the girls to walk back downtown, me to return to the study hall.