How can something still feel so painful after twenty-eight years? I asked myself. Is there no recovery from the traumas of our youth?
“Hello, Your Grace,” I said, kneeling down and allowing my lips briefly to make contact with the heavy gold ring he wore on the fourth finger of his right hand before he led me toward a pair of armchairs next to the fireplace.
“It’s good to see you, Odran,” he said, falling into his chair. Jim Cordington, two years ahead of me at Clonliffe College seminary and once the best midfielder the Dublin hurling team had ever lost to the priesthood, had grown fat from indulgence and lack of exercise. I could remember him sweeping up the fields at Holy Cross with the wind behind him, and not a one of us could have stopped him in his stride. What had happened to him in the years since then? I wondered. His once sharply defined features were now flabby and scarlet speckled, his nose thickly veined with bloodred capillaries. When he smiled and tucked his face downward in that curious manner he had, a series of chins made themselves visible, one atop the other like folds of whipped meringue.
“And you, Your Grace,” I replied.
“Ah, here,” he said, waving his hands in the air and dismissing this. “Would you stop now with the Your Grace, Odran. It’s Jim, you know that. There’s no one else in here. We can leave the formalities for another time. How are you, anyway? Are you keeping well?”
“I am,” I said. “Busy, as always.”
“I haven’t seen you this long time.”
“I think it was the conference in Maynooth last year,” I said.
“Yes, probably. But look, that’s a grand little school you’re in, isn’t it?” he asked, scratching his cheeks, his nails making a slight sweeping sound against his early-afternoon stubble. “Did you know that I went to Terenure myself?”
“I did, Your Grace,” I said. “Jim.”
“Different now than when I was a lad, I’d say.”
I nodded. Everything was different now, of course it was.
“Did you ever hear of a priest called Richard Camwell?” he asked me, leaning forward. “He was a terrible man altogether. Used to lift a lad out of his seat by the ear, and while he was holding him there, he’d give him an almighty clatter across the cheek and send him sprawling across the tables. Once, he held a boy by his ankles out the window of the sixth-floor corridor while the lads in the yard below called up ‘Father, Father, don’t drop him!’” He laughed and shook his head. “We were afraid of the priests in those days, of course. There were some right terrors among them.” He frowned then and looked directly at me. “But fierce holy men,” he added, pointing a finger. “Fierce holy men all the same.”
“If you tried something like that now, sure the boys would fight back,” I said. “And they’d be right too.”
“Well, I don’t know about that,” he said, sitting back again with a shrug.
“Don’t you?”
“Boys are terrible creatures. They need discipline. But who am I telling? Aren’t you there in their company five days a week during the school year? When I think of some of the beatings I took in that school, it’s a wonder I ever got out of the place alive. Happy days, though. Terrible happy days.”
I nodded, biting my lip. There were many things I wanted to say, but fear stopped me from saying them. There had been a teacher at Terenure only the year before, a layman, not a priest, who had cuffed a fourteen-year-old boy across the ear for a piece of backchat and hadn’t the lad only leaped up and punched him in the face, breaking the poor man’s nose. He was a strong wee pup, that boy, and arrogant with it. His father ran a branch of an international bank and the boy was forever talking about how many air miles he’d racked up. In my day, he would have been expelled, but now, of course, things were different. The teacher, a nice man but completely unsuited to the job, was fired and brought up on assault charges by the boy’s parents while the lad himself was given four thousand euros by the school in compensation for “emotional trauma.”
“My granny lived down the road from Terenure, you see,” continued the archbishop. “Near the Dodder Bridge. We were closer in toward Harold’s Cross, but sure didn’t I spend half my life at my granny’s? She could cook, that woman. She was never out of the kitchen. She had fourteen children over sixteen years, can you believe that? And never complained about it. Brought them up in a house with two bedrooms. You’d wonder now how that’s even possible. Fourteen children, a husband and wife in two rooms. Sardines, what?”
“You must have a fair run of cousins then,” I said.
“More than I can count. I have one cousin who works in the Formula One,” he said. “In the pit stops, you know? He changes the tires when the drivers pull in. He told me once that they have to get the car in and out again in forty seconds flat or they lose their jobs. Can you imagine? I’d still be looking for the monkey wrench. Not that I get to see my family very often. There’s so many demands in this job, you wouldn’t believe it. You should think yourself lucky, Odran, that you were never elevated.”
There was nothing I could say to this. At Clonliffe College, I had excelled in my exams and been selected for the Pontifical Irish College in Rome, where I had been offered an unexpected position during 1978 that was both a blessing and a curse. Had I completed the year successfully, I was all but assured of a quick rise through the ranks, but of course my job was taken off me before the year was up and a black mark put against my name that was impossible to wipe clean.
Other lads in the seminary were very ambitious about their careers, a word that never sat well with me, and perhaps I was too at first, but I don’t recall any great longing, even as a young man, for advancement. It seemed clear from the start who was destined for an archbishopric or, in one case with a fellow only a year ahead of us, the scarlet zucchetto of a cardinal. All I ever wanted was to be a good priest, to help people somehow. That seemed ambition enough for me.
“Are you happy out there anyway?” the archbishop asked me, and I nodded.
“I am,” I said. “They’re good boys for the most part. I’ve tried to do my best by them.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t doubt it, Odran, I wouldn’t doubt it. I hear nothing but good reports of you from everyone.” He glanced up at the clock. “Is it that time already? Will you have a wee dram with me?”
I shook my head. “I’m grand,” I said.
“Go on, you will. Sure I’m having a small one myself. You won’t see me a lonely drinker.”
“I have the car, Your Grace,” I said. “It wouldn’t do.”
“Ah,” he said, waving his hand to dismiss the concept of sober driving as some sort of new age fad. He dragged himself up and made his way over to a cabinet that supported a fine bronze statue of Archbishop John Charles McQuaid, whose funeral at the Pro-Cathedral I had attended along with all the other seminarians in 1973. He opened the cabinet—I’d seen less alcohol behind the bar of Slattery’s on the Rathmines Road—and extracted a bottle from the corner, pouring a healthy glass for himself, topping it up with some water, and then, rejoining me, crashing into his seat with another loud groan.