The Penance Room

by Carol Coffey

  “That evening in Susan’s apartment, we fought. We pleaded. She said, ‘Mum, the war is over,’ and I said, ‘Yes, it is, but not in my heart,’ and that’s when I said to myself, ‘Why is it not over in my heart and when will this be so?’ The following morning, Robert’s parents brought Jin and me around the city and, although it was a difficult day, we tried hard to cope. They were very nice ordinary people, people like us who had lost a lot. We had things in common: people being racist because of the colour of our skin, pride at having a child who is now a doctor, being a minority in the country you call home, lots of things that should bring us together. On our last day there, Robert’s mother said to me, ‘Isn’t it amazing that such beautiful people should find each other on the other side of the world?’ and I had to agree. It was amazing. The whole world is amazing and you have to see the good in difficult situations.”

  Li looks at Mina and stands. She opens a small silver locket around her neck and moves around the room, showing everybody the photos inside.

  “My twin granddaughters,” she says proudly. “Hua and Hana. Their names mean ‘flower’ in Chinese and Japanese. Susan and Robert spent weeks looking through books before deciding on what to call them. And you know what? During their search they found another meaning for Kai, something I didn’t know before I named my son. In Japanese, Kai is a girl’s name and it means ‘forgiveness’.”

  Li moves towards the door. We can all see that she is overcome with emotion, with sadness and joy for telling her story, a story of loss and of forgiveness. As she passes Mina, the old woman puts her hand forward and touches Li’s arm. Li stops and acknowledges her. She stands for a moment and there is a silent exchange between the women, an exchange that says that Mina also needs to forgive and forget.

  “You coming to work?” Li asks.

  Mina smiles, stands up and slowly moves her walking frame toward the door. She looks back into the room where everybody remains silent.

  “Come on, Kai. We have work to do.”

  Chapter 23

  The following morning, Steve arrives early but fails to talk Wilfred into telling his story. My mother decides it is best not to press it and I am disappointed that I will not get to hear about the sad life Wilfred has had. It is his birthday today and Steve is due to leave tomorrow after his party. Wilfred seems to be in bad humour and even Greta gets annoyed with him when he shouts at Iren to stop calling for Aron.

  Jimmy is sitting in the corner of the room in a wheelchair and Martin is looking at him in an odd way. Kora is here and telling everyone that Jeff will be home from the hospital soon. She is smiling broadly which is not like Kora and I think there is something different about her that I cannot describe.

  The door of the room is open and outside I see my mother hand Aishling a letter. My heart races. “Please let it be from her family!” I pray but I can see her peer at the postmark and she does not look surprised so I know it is not from her family. I move out to the hall and, as my mother and Aishling read the letter together, I peer over their shoulders. Aishling puts one hand over her mouth but I can see the huge smile that has erupted beneath her red-painted fingernails.

  Dear Aishling

  Oh, it was so nice to hear from you and to hear that Aiden is alive and well. Well, you know from my niece that Aiden and I were childhood sweethearts. We had promised to get married but of course you know all of that. I am getting on myself but I am still able to live in my house. My daughter lives with me and I go to a lot of Irish get-togethers here in Brooklyn. I never went back to Ireland. I couldn’t bear to visit home after Aiden went into the priesthood. The last time I was there in my home town was when my brother met me off the train to tell me that Aiden was gone. I came to America immediately after my training finished and I’ve been here since. My brothers have visited which was nice but I just didn’t ever want to go back.

  Even though I had a happy marriage, I thought of Aiden often. I hated to think that he was alone in this world. Even now, after all these years, I can feel myself welling up thinking about him. I know they say that everything happens for a reason but I still feel bitter about losing Aiden to the Church. I hope he was happy but I doubt it. It is amazing that now after all these years I found where Aiden is, especially as I have a son in Australia. He lives in Sydney which he tells me is a long way away from where Aiden is but I am coming to visit him and his wife in a couple of months. I have a new grandson that I have not yet met. We should have asked Aiden to do the baptism. Now wouldn’t that be something?

  My daughter is flying with me. She isn’t married. She’s not interested in men, if you know what I mean. Never heard of it in my day. I walk with a stick now so I need her to help me but, although she thinks this is foolishness at my age, she has agreed to accompany me to Broken Hill and says we could easily get a train from Sydney and stay in a hotel in town for a couple of days, so if it is all right with you, that’s what we’ll do.

  I’ve put my phone number on top of the letter and also my son’s contact details in Sydney. Oh, I can’t believe that I am going to see Aiden! I can’t believe that we’ll get a chance to see each other again, even if we are both old and grey now. Please tell him that I am looking forward to seeing him again and thank you so much for your kindness in reuniting us. I look forward to meeting you.

  Yours sincerely

  Deirdre Mahon (Née McGonigle)

  My mother and Aishling look teary and are smiling at the same time. If my father was here he would raise his eyes up to heaven and say “Women!” and I am never sure what this means. Aishling goes straight into the lounge room to tell Father Francis and I watch him smile and clasp his hands tightly together as she tells him. When she leaves, his smile fades and is replaced with tears which he tries to hide. I feel a lump in my throat as he puts his bony hand into his jacket pocket and takes out his rosary beads to pray.

  “I hope this Deirdre is not expecting him to be the man she knew,” my mother says to Steve who is busy setting up his tape recorder for the day.

  Martin is sitting beside Father Francis and raises his hand as if he is in school.

  “Yes, Martin?” Steve says.

  “I’ll tell ya. I’ll talk into the machine if ya like?”

  Steve raises an eyebrow. “You sure? You didn’t seem keen before.”

  Martin points at Jimmy who is dozing off. “If he can do it, I can. Fair’s fair.”

  Steve smiles and nods and Martin moves forward to take the chair near the recording machine. Martin clears his throat and begins.

  “I’ve heard you all say that no matter what happened to you, you don’t hold a grudge and you are thankful for whatever you’ve got. Well, I’m not bloody thankful and I’ve a few things to say about how my people were treated when they came to this country.”

  “Your people?” Steve asks.

  “Yeah!” Martin barks back. “My father arrived here from Ireland in 1892. He was only about twenty or a little more and he came with his wife, my mother. She was about two years younger than him. They were free settlers, mind. No convicts on my side. Well, I had a grand-uncle sent out here long before that for stealing but the poor old sod did nothing more than try steal a sheep to feed his kids. It was shortly before the famine. My daughter looked into it and found out that he died in prison out here. His family never heard from him again. They were never even told he was dead. But that’s the pommies for ya, greed and evil through and through. Wanting everything except what they are entitled to.”

  Steve interrupts him. “Martin, are you going to tell us your story?”

  “I’m getting to it!”

  I know he is shouting as he breaks into one of his coughing-fits caused by smoking and years of inhaling dust in the mine.

  “One generation affects the next,” he says when he recovers, more to himself than to his audience. “When they came here, my parents had nothing. Their own parents had been thrown off their small farms by English landlords and left to wander the road with small o
nes in tow. My mother told me that her mother had eleven siblings and only three of them survived the famine. Whole families wiped out by starvation.”

  Martin gives Penelope and Victoria an evil look but they don’t notice and, even if they did, they would not understand its meaning. Oddly he doesn’t direct this at Jimmy Young as he would have done before. Perhaps it is because he now knows that Jimmy’s own ancestors were transported to Australia as convicts and were not from the English ruling classes that kept Martin’s people down.

  “When they got here though, they found that they were not going to get the fresh start they had hoped for. In many towns, there were signs saying ‘No Irish Need Apply’ or ‘No Dogs, No Irish’. The kind of immigrants they wanted were Protestant, not Irish Catholics. If it wasn’t for the Church help they got when they arrived here, they’d have starved. Might have been better to starve on Irish soil than come all this way and die anyway.”

  “But they didn’t die?” Steve asks.

  Martin raises an eye at Steve. The two men don’t seem to like each other and I have never noticed this before. I wonder briefly what it is about.

  “My father wasn’t the type of man who’d let others beat him. He came here for a new life and by Christ he was going to get it. My mother, she was even tougher than him. God, she worked hard, all hours, washing clothes by hand, scrubbing other people’s houses. When I think back, this land must have seemed so foreign to them with the heat, the dust. They were determined to give their kids a better life. They did all they could for us.”

  Martin’s chin begins to quiver. Steve notices it.

  “Did you do all you could for them?”

  I can see the anger rising in Martin’s face. He leans forward as if he is about to jump at Steve but suddenly thinks the better of it and leans back, as if in defeat. I gloat a little to myself that I know more about Martin’s story than Steve but there is still work to do. He has a long way to go yet.

  “My father eventually got into the mines and he straightened himself out. No drinking. Double shifts whenever he could get them. He wanted to buy a small patch of land. Just enough for some livestock for ourselves and to grow vegetables. He always said you were nothing if you didn’t own a piece of this earth. He had this thing for the Aboriginals. Great respect for them. He said they were the nearest thing to brothers that the Irish had here. That they had endured the same history – eviction, starvation, murder. He had this one friend, can’t remember his name, he lived on a small settlement around here. He was nice. We didn’t get along, the father and me. I used to say to him ‘Well, if you love the natives so much what are you doing buying their land from the whites that took it from them?’ He never had an answer to that but to hit me. I used to get such beatings. I was the eldest, me and my twin, Tom. He was sickly and, well, that’s another story. What I’m trying to say is that while our parents had most of the trouble, it leaves a bad taste in your mouth. It affects ya. Makes you angry from the start, before you even have a chance to see how lucky you are to be here. So that’s it. That’s my story. That’s what I mean.”

  Martin stops talking and looks around the room. No one quite knows what to say as his story is so unlike anyone else’s that it doesn’t really seem like a story at all. Martin only seems comfortable telling us about the beginning but skims over the middle and leaves out the ending. Steve is thinking the same thing.

  “What happened in your life, Martin?” he asks.

  “Can’t you see that’s what I’m bloody trying to tell you? There is no life. It poisons ya, hatred and injustice. Before you get a chance to breathe, your lungs are so black with the world’s worries there’s no way for you to see things clearly. Everybody is against ya. You can’t trust no one. I fought against the Japs for this country but ya think back then they saw me as one of their own? Ya don’t belong anywhere. Fresh starts in a new country, my arse!”

  Martin starts to cough. Kora makes her way across the room to him.

  “Ya all right, mate?”

  Martin puts out his hand and nods. “Bloody lungs.”

  Steve is not going to let him away lightly. “So, you blame everything that happened to you on your parents and on discrimination?”

  “Not on my parents, well, a bit – but you’re young, you don’t know anything about it.”

  “Well, enlighten me,” Steve says.

  I don’t like the way he is treating Martin. I know he is an angry man but I feel there is hope for him and annoying him will get Steve nowhere.

  “Tell me how it was for you,” says Steve. “Tell me what happened to you.”

  Martin cracks his jaw sideways and glares at Steve but he quietens and looks suddenly sad.

  “I tried to make them proud but it was as if there was no room for me. As if I was invisible from the start. My brother, they had to take more care of him. He needed medicine and rest. I worked harder and got nothing for it. I was just looking for someone to notice me.”

  “And how did you eventually get noticed?” Steve asks.

  Martin ignores him and jumps forward about ten years.

  “When I married it was the same. My wife ignored me. Didn’t appreciate me. Took me a while but I figured out she needed a firm hand. Lazy she was and stupid. I’d come home some days and find her staring into the stove. Not a thing done around the place.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I did what any man should do. Showed her who the boss was.”

  “How would you do that?”

  Martin knows Steve is baiting him but it is too late. He is trapped.

  “I’d smack her and she’d smarten up. For a while anyway.”

  “Didn’t you just say that you hated when your father beat you?”

  “Yes, but this was different. She was useless.”

  “Martin, did your mother tell you that you were useless?”

  Martin’s chin starts to tremble. His hand shakes and he places it on his bony knee to steady himself. “How’d ya know that? Yeah . . . she said that a lot.”

  “Did you tell your children that they were useless?”

  Martin raises his red face closer to Steve. “Only when they bloody well were useless!” he shouts. He flings his arm forward, pointing angrily at Steve, and knocks a glass of water onto the floor.

  “You took your revenge on those least able to defend themselves,” says Steve. “You carried on your father’s behaviour with your own family. Maybe your children are doing the same as we speak.”

  Martin looks to his right and I know that he is thinking of the frightened Ellen, the somewhat aggressive Una and his two other daughters, Nora and Bridget, who visit once a week and sit quietly as they stare at the clock and wait for the punishing hour to pass.

  “But he . . . he hated me . . . I was never good enough!”

  “Then you should have proved him wrong,” Steve says slowly. “You should have shown him the man you could have been.”

  No one knows what to say and there is a silence in the room that even I am aware of. When Li calls everyone to lunch, the relief in the room is palpable. Martin stands and, as he makes his way towards the door, Jimmy gestures for him to come over to him. Amazingly, Martin obeys. As he gets closer, Jimmy tries to speak but I don’t know what he is trying to say. He moves his stiff arm forward and rolls out three middle fingers, as if he is trying to shake Martin’s hand. Martin understands the gesture but looks confused. He takes the fingers and shakes them.

  “My fad – my – fad . . .”

  Martin nods. “Your father was the same. I know, Jimmy,” he says and as he walks away I can see his eyes moisten. It is the first time he has ever called Jimmy by his first name. He walks past the dining room and climbs the stairs slowly to his room. I know now that he will never tell Steve his full story, the real story of why his life turned out the way it did. I think about following him but I know that right now he would prefer to be alone. I enter the dining room and, as people are getting seated, Greta is standing at
my mother’s piano and tinkling on the keys. I stand and watch as she runs her fingers back and forth on the ivory. She is watching Penelope in the corner of her eye and I know she is planning something.

  “Stop it!” Penelope shouts, disturbing the others from their lunch. “You can’t play!”

  “I know,” Greta says, smiling. “Wish I could but I’ll keep trying here. Maybe you could teach me. Always wanted to learn.”

  Penelope’s expression changes and I think she is aware that Greta is playing her. She decides to ignore her and starts chopping her meat up into tiny pieces. Victoria stands up and takes her plate to another table. She senses a storm brewing and is running for cover. Greta starts running her fingers back and forth over the keys. Some of the residents place their fingers in their ears so I know the sound must be awful. Iren has stopped shouting for Aron and is saying what looks like “No, no, no!” over and over, though I know she is not speaking English – I guess it is “no” in French.

  “Okay!” Penelope screams with a red face and throat. “Okay, I’ll play. Just stop – please stop that awful racket!”

  Greta apologises and thanks Penelope. She hands her some music and Penelope sits down to play. Greta relaxes but Penelope stands again abruptly without having played a single note.