The Healing Place

by Clare Nonhebel

CHAPTER 28

  ‘Rachel’s mother’s name was Yolande,’ Franz said, addressing himself to Ella.

  Rachel gave him a suspicious sideways look. He raised his eyebrows at her for permission to go on and she nodded grudgingly, as if willing to confirm this fact at least.

  ‘Yolande was living in the parish where Father Francis was at the time. She’d been to the church once or twice, not to Mass but to sit in the church when it was quiet. She lived with a man who was violent. Every time Father Francis saw her, she had a black eye or bruises or had been crying.’

  Rachel was studying her hands in her lap.

  ‘She wouldn’t talk about it to anyone,' Franz continued. 'But Father Francis told her if ever she was in need of help, day or night, she could contact him. She turned up at the presbytery late one night. The parish priest had gone to bed. She was almost unconscious, covered in blood, crying hysterically. She refused to go to the hospital; Father Francis couldn’t persuade her.’

  Ella noticed that when Franz had talked to her, he had said 'my father.' Now, in front of Rachel, he was calling him Father Francis.

  ‘So he let her stay the night,’ Franz said, ‘on cushions on the floor in the downstairs reception room, with the electric fire on. In the morning when he came down, she was gone. The parish priest was known to be somewhat brusque, so he couldn’t blame her for not waiting to come face to face with him.

  ‘He didn’t see her again for a couple of days. Then she came back a few nights later, at about the same time, in about the same state. She said she hadn’t been back to the man she lived with but he had come looking for her at the café where she worked, waited till she came out after the late shift and beat her up in an alleyway.’

  ‘Three soups!’

  ‘Over here,’ said Franz, looking up. ‘Thanks very much.’

  ‘Hope you enjoy your meal,’ said the waitress cheerily. ‘Are yez visiting?’

  ‘Kind of,’ said Franz. ‘Thank you. This looks delicious.’

  She walked away, looking back at him and smiling.

  His charm was instinctive, Ella thought. Even now, grieving and trying to make things right with his sister, he could make a middle-aged waitress smile and look twice at him, and he wasn’t even aware of the effect he had. It was this unconscious appeal to people, as much as his hard work, that had drawn seekers and guides to The Healing Place, which seemed a million miles away now.

  ‘The third time it happened,’ Franz continued, ‘he insisted that she must go to the hospital. He said if she wouldn’t go with him, he was calling an ambulance there and then. He wanted her to tell the police as well. She agreed but when he went off to phone, she ran away.’

  ‘It’s so different from what she told me,’ Rachel whispered.

  Franz looked at her with compassion. ‘I know. Do you want to tell it your way – the way she told you?’

  Tears sprang into her eyes again. ‘No. She was lying to me. I know that now.’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he said.

  ‘Get on with telling it,’ she said angrily.

  ‘Okay. Stop me if you want to. He didn’t see her again until she came into the church one day. She said she was pregnant and her partner would kill her if he found out. She asked him for money. He wanted to know why she needed it. She said ….’

  ‘She said,’ Rachel supplied, when he hesitated, ‘that she wanted to go to England to have an abortion, so nobody would find out. She said if he didn’t give her the money she would tell everybody the baby was his.’

  Franz waited.

  ‘Go on,’ Rachel said.

  ‘He said no,’ Franz continued. ‘He said if she wanted to leave her partner he would help her as much as he could, to find a place to live, and he would ask the parish priest if she could do some work for the church, helping out in the office and so on, so she’d have a safe place to work, where the man wouldn’t come and pester her. She agreed to it.

  ‘She worked at the church, on and off, all the time she was pregnant. One day she didn’t turn up. Father Francis went round to the room he’d arranged for her to rent from a widow parishioner, and the woman said she’d never seen her from the first day she was meant to move in.

  ‘He challenged Yolande, when she came in for work, and asked her where she was living. She admitted she had been living with her partner all along and the baby was his. He was still beating her up but taking care not to hit her in the face. She showed Father Francis the bruises all over arms, legs and torso. Father Francis said she must leave her partner before he killed either her or the baby, or both.

  ‘He asked her if she had any family or friends who would support her if she did leave, and she said only in Jamaica. He said if they would agree to have her, he would arrange the airfare. She asked for the money on the spot and he said no: he would meet her at the airport, give her the ticket and see her on to the plane; otherwise there was no deal.

  ‘She flew into a rage, called him all the names under the sun, and said she was going to tell everyone the baby was his. She smashed up the office around him and then walked out. She went to see the parish priest, then the bishop, then spoke to everyone in and around the church.

  ‘It was at this time that the rumours were worst, when I went to see Father Francis at the church and ran into Father George instead and there was that incident, after which Father Francis was moved to work for Father Eamonn in the inner-city parish.

  ‘But before that happened, his present parish priest, surprisingly, had backed my … backed Father Francis up. He said he didn’t believe Yolande’s baby was anything to do with him. But public pressure was on him as well. The media was full of scandals of every kind about Catholic priests, and people were suspicious of all of them.

  ‘People had put priests on a pedestal in the past, turned a blind eye to all kinds of evils and weaknesses, put up with a lot of self-righteous clericalism, and now the reaction set in. They were out to crucify any priest over the slightest rumour of anything. And the rumours were rife. People said he’d done it before, so why not again?

  ‘Then Yolande disappeared. It turned out afterwards that she’d had a scare and thought she’d gone into premature labour and had been taken to hospital. There were complications and she was kept in for a while. Nobody knew that at the time, so when she went quiet people began to assume that maybe the stories weren’t true after all – though somebody suggested that Father Francis had had her murdered by a contract killer.’

  Rachel snorted.

  Franz waited to see if she wanted to speak, then continued. ‘In the meantime, Father Francis had been moved to Father Eamonn’s parish, because of the row with Father George. Yolande must have found out where he had gone.

  ‘Weeks after his arriving there, Father Eamonn opened the front door of the presbytery one morning and found a baby on the doorstep. It was a little girl. He’d heard all the rumours, of course. By her colouring, he knew the child must be Yolande’s – the child of Yolande and a white man.’

  Rachel was very still, hardly breathing. Ella couldn’t bear to look at her, to feel even a little of what she was suffering.

  ‘No one had ever seen Yolande’s partner,’ said Franz, ‘except Father Francis, who had gone round to their flat once to try to reason with him. Everyone had assumed he was, like Yolande, from the Caribbean. Perhaps they didn’t like to think that an Irishman could be so violent. Or perhaps it just never occurred to them that her partner was a white man. Anyway, nobody asked the question, either at the time or afterwards. The child’s colouring was seen as a clear sign of Father Francis’ guilt.’

  ‘Did Father Eamonn believe that?’ Ella asked. ‘Didn’t Father Francis tell him about the Irishman?’

  ‘Father Eamonn didn’t discuss it with him,’ Franz said. ‘He did an extraordinary thing. He bundled the child up and took her straight round to my mother’s. I opened the door to him. It was early in the morning; I was getting ready for school. My mother wasn’t well; she was in bed.
She was sick quite often, at the time.

  ‘Father Eamonn asked to see my mother, so I told her and she got up, not knowing what was happening. Father Eamonn had never spoken to her before and we didn’t go to his church. He showed her the baby and said it had been left on their doorstep and “in the circumstances” would she take care of it?’

  ‘Did he say what “the circumstances” were?’ Ella asked.

  ‘No. The baby was crying and obviously hungry and needing to be changed, so my mother took her from him to try and soothe her, and he turned on his heel and left. Never to speak to any of us again.’

  ‘What did your mother do?’

  ‘She sent me round to a neighbour’s for baby milk and a nappy, and got on with looking after Rachel. She was a lovely baby,’ Franz said softly. ‘She brought my mother joy. And to me. We were more of a family, with her.’

  He reached out to Rachel and she allowed him to take her hand, though she wouldn’t look at him.

  ‘Father Francis came round later in the day. Father Eamonn hadn’t said a thing to him but he’d heard about the baby on the doorstep – the news got around like wildfire, and he guessed that it must be Yolande’s. He had no idea, until he arrived at the house, that my mother had been asked to take care of the baby. He had only come to tell my mother that if she heard rumours about him having an affair, she mustn’t be hurt because none of it was true. He had told me that at the start.’

  ‘When?’ Rachel asked.

  ‘He phoned up one day and asked me to meet him after school; he said he wanted to speak to me. When I met him, he said there were rumours going round about a woman who had stayed a night or two at the presbytery. He said the woman was troubled and not to blame but she might start spreading stories that she was having a baby by him.

  ‘He said I was too young to be told about these things but he was afraid if I didn’t hear it from him I would hear it from other people who wouldn’t know the truth. He hoped my mother might be spared hearing it, because at the time she was sick and didn’t go out much or know many people, but I might hear things at school or outside it.

  ‘I asked him why he didn’t tell everyone it wasn’t true and he said he had suspicions that the woman was still with a man who had treated her in a way that no man should treat a woman, and that she was ashamed of going back to him but couldn’t help herself. He said he didn’t want her shamed in public, so let her say what she wanted and I wasn’t to say anything about her, but he wanted me to know the truth.’

  ‘Did you believe him, straight away?’ Rachel asked him.

  ‘I did, but then later on when everyone was saying it, I went to the church to ask him again. I wanted to hear it again from him. But that was when Father George was in the sacristy instead of him and he knocked him out. You knew about that?’

  ‘I heard about it when I was thirteen,’ Rachel said. ‘I think it was a friend of yours who told me. Pat Quinn?’

  ‘Pat Quinn!’ Franz had forgotten about Pat Quinn - the phone call at The Healing Place. He fell silent. Ella watched him, seeing his mind struggle with something.

  ‘I was so jealous about that,’ Rachel said suddenly, looking up at him.

  ‘Jealous!’

  ‘Yes. About him standing up for you like that - for his son. It was the reason I asked for – you know, the test thing.’ She ducked her head again, avoiding looking at Ella.

  ‘Oh. I didn’t know that,’ said Franz wonderingly. ‘You never told me what prompted that.’

  ‘I was ashamed of it.’

  ‘You want to tell Ella about that?’ Franz asked, enclosing her hand in both of his.

  ‘No. You tell it.’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Yes. Tell her everything,’ Rachel said. She raised her head and looked Ella in the eyes. ‘Everything,’ she said again.

  ‘We moved again, after Rachel came to live with us,’ Franz continued. ‘The bishop couldn’t find a worse parish for Father Francis than Father Eamonn’s that we were already in, so the next place was slightly better. Among the other improvements that Rachel made to our lives, she got us out of the inner city place that Father Francis had never wanted us to live in.’

  He grinned at Rachel, who managed to return a faint smile.

  ‘Again, we didn’t go to live in the same parish but we were only half a mile down the road and his parish priest was nicer and actually made us welcome.

  ‘We were allowed to go and visit Father Francis, which had never happened in any other church he was in, and the parish priest, Father Seb, who was from India, would let us play in the garden. He used to tell Rachel, “We coffee-coloured people must stick together.” D’you remember him, Rach?’

  ‘Yes. He was nice.’ Again, the faintest glimmer of a smile. Ella noticed that she kept her hand very still, in Franz’s hand, as if afraid he might take his away if she made any movement. He was her hero big brother, Ella realized, and he still is, if he hasn’t blown it. He still hasn’t told what he did.

  ‘Oh now, we can’t have this!’ The waitress sailed across the lounge to them. ‘What’s wrong with the soups?’

  Franz looked up, surprised. ‘The soup? Oh.’ The bowls lay untouched in front of them.

  ‘Nothing’s wrong,’ Ella said quickly. ‘We were just talking too much, and let them go cold.’

  The waitress ignored her, looking at Franz.

  ‘Huh?’ he said, suddenly aware she was waiting for him to say something. He took his hand away from Rachel, who looked unhappy. ‘Oh yes, that’s right. Talking too much.’

  ‘Are you sure?’ She smiled at him winsomely. ‘We don’t want you being unhappy with our fare. Can I get you something else instead? On the house?’

  You, not yez, Ella noticed. The singular form, not the plural. It’s only Franz she’s offering something extra to, on the house. Normally it would have amused her, seeing women of a certain age flirting with him while he didn't notice, but now she felt intensely irritated. Pregnancy hormones, she told herself.

  ‘Excuse me,’ she said, smiling at the waitress.

  ‘Yes?’ The woman turned to face her, reluctantly.

  ‘We’re having a discussion that’s private,’ Ella said charmingly, baring her teeth. ‘We don’t want anything else to eat. Thank you.’

  ‘Oh, well if that’s the way you want it …’ She turned away and walked off, every inch of her body expressing offence. Flounced, Ella thought; no other word for it. But she did it well, made an art form of the flounce.

  Rachel gave Ella a look of undisguised admiration. Franz, who hadn’t picked up the undertones, resumed to his narrative as though it hadn’t been interrupted.

  ‘Things got better for us, as a family,’ Franz said. ‘Then, when Rachel was about nine or ten, we got moved again.’

  ‘We didn’t want to go,’ Rachel said. ‘And Father Seb didn’t want us to, either. But some priest had had a heart attack and there was no one to stand in for him at short notice, so the bishop sent Father Francis.’

  ‘The parish with the church building fund,’ said Ella, with recognition. Franz and Rachel stared at her.

  ‘How did you know about that?’

  ‘Sister Briege, last night.’

  ‘He gave the money away,’ Rachel said, ‘to poor families who were going to be made homeless. He bought houses instead of building the new church.’

  Ella nodded.

  ‘People said terrible things about him,’ Rachel said, her voice just above a whisper. ‘You just wouldn’t believe the things they said. And did. They left a dead dog on the driving seat of his car – all covered with maggots. He used to leave his car unlocked at night for a homeless man who used to come by sometimes, so he could sleep in it.

  ‘They posted dogshit through our letterbox. They sent letters to my mother. Mothers of children in my class at school came up to me and asked me if I was that thief-priest’s bastard.’

  Franz, Ella saw with relief, had taken Rachel’s hand
again and was stroking it.

  ‘Rachel hadn’t come across this before,’ he said quietly. ‘I had. It wasn’t such a shock to me. But for her it stirred up all the other bad things that had receded into the past by then – the question of her colour, the rumours about who her father was, the rejection of being left on a doorstep. It was a very difficult time for her indeed.’

  ‘I turned into an early teenager,’ Rachel said, grimacing. ‘I went from a sunny-tempered child to a tantrum-throwing monster!’

  Franz smiled at her. ‘You weren’t quite that bad!’

  ‘I was.’

  ‘Well, I wasn’t much better,’ said Franz. ‘And I should have known better – I was in my late teens and should have grown out of going round threatening everyone who said a word about my dad!’

  ‘Did you?’ asked Ella.

  ‘Until he stopped me. He took me into the sacristy one day and showed me the crucifix on the wall, the figure of Jesus on the cross. He said, “Do you see those wounds? Hands, feet, head, side, and every inch in between? Do you know the skin was ripped off his back with whips with metal ends? Do you know he was made to carry his own implement of death up a rocky mountain, bleeding and barefoot, while people he had helped spat at him? What is this, that we’re going through, compared to what Christ did for us?”’

  ‘Strong stuff,’ Ella said. ‘Did it convince you?’

  ‘It shut me up. Temporarily. Until we moved again.’

  ‘That was soon, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Five or six weeks, he lasted in that place. I never made my mind up, quite, about what he did. I mean, he did take those people’s money and use it for something they hadn’t given it for. The fact that he saw it as building the people-church didn’t mean the people in the church saw it like that. They wanted their new building to have their services in.’

  ‘They got it,’ Rachel said. ‘He paid back the money.’

  ‘And the foundations turned out to be faulty, anyway,’ Ella contributed, ‘so it was just as well they had to wait. But Sister Briege said the money came from an anonymous donor. How could it have been Father Francis? He didn't have any money, did he?’

  ‘Grandfather’s money,’ said Franz. ‘His father, who disowned him and never spoke to him after he became a priest, left all his money to his wife if he predeceased her, which he was fairly sure to do, being fifteen years older than her. He must have known she would leave it to her son when she died, but it salvaged his pride, I suppose. He didn’t have to go back on his word after all he’d said about cutting Francis out of his will and out of his life.’

  Ella started to laugh. ‘His father left him his fortune and he used it to repay the church fund he’d burgled to house homeless families?’

  ‘Some of it. It was a lot.’

  ‘It must have been! How much?’

  ‘Several million.’

  ‘What did he do with the rest of it?’ Ella asked.

  ‘What he always did,’ said Rachel. ‘Gave it away. He put some in trust for me, for when I turned twenty-five. I don’t know why that age; he just said twenty-one was traditional but it was too young. And that turned out right, because I think my mother would have taken it if she’d known I had money. And he did the same for Michael, didn’t he?’

  Franz nodded. ‘This time he didn’t give it to the poor, or not all of it. He gave the rest to me.’

  ‘What did you do with yours?’ asked Rachel curiously.

  Franz was silent. Ella looked at him, awareness dawning.

  ‘The Healing Place,’ she said.