Driving along empty roads, I arrived quickly, parked the car, and entered through the open gates. The moon was out that night, bright and speckled, lending some illumination to the grounds, but as I turned the corner, I was surprised to hear a keening of sorts, a kind of terrible, anguished moaning emerging from the direction of the grotto. I hesitated, trying to decipher the sound. If there were young people over there getting up to all sorts, I didn’t want to see it, didn’t want to know about it, would rather just get back into my car and go home, but after a moment I realized that these were not cries of passion, but the deep-plundered howls of uncontrollable weeping.
I stepped forward carefully, and as my eyes focused, I saw what appeared to be a body lying facedown, its arms and legs outstretched, a human crucifix prostrate on the gravel, and my first thought was that a crime had been committed, a murder. Someone had come and killed a man in front of the grotto at Inchicore church. But then the body moved, it lifted itself up into a kneeling position, and I saw that this was not an injured man at all, but a praying man. A priest, in fact, for he wore the long-sleeved black cassock of the ordained, the garment blowing in the breeze just above his ankles. As he knelt, he raised his hands to the heavens before twisting them into fists, which he used to beat himself rapidly about his head, a pounding of such ferocity and wildness that I prepared myself to intervene even if there was a risk that he might turn on me in his grief or madness and do me an injury. He turned slightly and I saw his face silhouetted in the moonlight. A young man, younger than I was anyway by a decade or more, perhaps in his early thirties. A mess of dark hair and a prominent nose with a wide bridge at its summit. He let out a cry and collapsed back into the position in which I had originally found him, but although he quieted now, the moaning continued, this interminable sobbing, and I felt a stab of fear when I looked to his left and noticed that he was not alone.
For seated in the corner of the grotto, almost hidden out of sight, was a much older woman, in her late sixties, and she was rocking back and forth, tears streaming down her face, suffering distorting her features. As her face caught the moonlight, I saw that she shared something in common with the young priest, that aquiline nose, and I knew immediately that he had inherited it from her, his mother.
And so there they were, the young man lying flat, beseeching the world to bring his torment to an end, the mother shaking in pain and looking for all the world as if she would like the heavens to open and God to call her home without another wasted moment.
It was a terrifying sight. It unsettled me enormously. And although another in my place might have gone over to the pair and offered whatever comfort he could, I walked away quickly and nervously, for there was something there, some horror looming over us all, with which I felt ill-equipped to cope.
And I look back at that night, more than a decade ago, and I remember those two incidents as if they took place only earlier this week. George W. Bush has been and gone. But I recall Hannah sitting in her armchair telling me that her dead husband was suffering from awful headaches, and I recall this mother and son weeping and wailing at the grotto in Inchicore. And as I drove back through the streets toward the comfort of my lonely bed, I knew without question that the world as I had always known it and the faith that I had put in it were about to come to an end, and who knew what would take its place?
TWO
2006
It was just over five years later that I was taken away from Terenure College, the school where I had been living and working for twenty-seven years. I had long ago accepted that I was at my happiest when hidden away behind the high walls and closed gates of this private and erudite enclave, and the change came as a shock.
I had never intended to stay at Terenure for so long. Returning from Rome to Dublin in the middle of 1979, finally ordained after seven years of study but with a slight whiff of scandal still attached to my name, I was assigned to the school chaplaincy with a view to moving me to a parish soon after. But somehow this relocation never took place. Instead, I passed the exams for my Higher Diploma and ended up teaching English, with a little bit of history thrown in. Outside of teaching hours, I ran the library and celebrated mass every morning at half past six for the same small group of elderly men and women, retirees all, who had never developed the ability to sleep in or were worried that they might not wake up if they did. I was to be a spiritual counselor to the boys, a job whose demands decreased dramatically as the 1980s gave way to the nineties and these in turn yielded to the twenty-first century, for the life of the spirit was one that seemed less important to the students as the years went on.
Our school was a rugby school, one of those elite establishments on Dublin’s Southside, populated by boys with wealthy fathers—property developers, bankers, businessmen who thought their good times would never come to a halt—and although I knew next to nothing about the sport, I did my best to develop an interest, for there was no way to survive at Terenure if you did not. In general I got on well with the boys, for I neither bullied them nor tried to be their friend—the twin mistakes that many of my colleagues made—and somehow this stood me in good stead, and I found myself as popular as it was possible to be among the quicksand of arriving and graduating students. They were often an arrogant lot and could be hateful and wicked in their attitude toward those who had not been born into similar privilege, but I did my best to humanize them.
The phone call from Archbishop Cordington’s secretary came on a Saturday afternoon, and if it made me anxious, it was only because I misunderstood the reason for the summons.
“Is it just me?” I asked Father Lomas, his secretary, on the other end of the line. “Or is there a gang of us being called over?”
“It’s just you,” he replied in the driest tone you could imagine. Some of those lads at the archbishop’s residence could be fierce full of themselves.
“Will it keep, do you think?” I asked.
“His Grace will receive you at two o’clock on Tuesday,” he replied, which I supposed meant no, before hanging up the phone. And so I drove out to Drumcondra that day with a heavy heart. What would I say, I wondered, if he asked me whether I had ever had any suspicions about Miles Donlan and, if so, why I had never reported them to him. How could I answer him when I had asked myself this very question time and again and been met with only silence?
“Father Yates,” said the archbishop, looking up and smiling as I entered his private office, trying my best not to betray in my expression how uncomfortable the luxury of his surroundings made me. There were paintings on the walls that wouldn’t have been out of place in the National Gallery. Indeed, they had probably been selected from the National Gallery; it was one of the perks of the job, after all. The carpet beneath my feet was so thick that I thought I could have lain down on it and got a good night’s sleep. Everything about the place screamed prosperity and profligacy, concepts that stood in stark contrast to the vows we had both taken. The opulence of the Episcopal Palace reminded me a little of the Vatican, albeit on a far smaller scale, and my mind turned as it so often did to 1978, when I had served three masters over the course of a single year, filling my mornings and nights with servitude, my days with study, and my evenings with standing beneath an open window on the Vicolo della Campana, racked with longing and confused desire.