“Your poor daddy can’t help you now,” said the priest, following the direction of her gaze. “Sure he wants nothing more to do with you. He told me so himself last night when he came to the presbytery to report the shameful news. And let no one here blame Bosco Goggin for any of this, for he brought up his children right, he brought them up with Catholic values, and how can he be held to account for one rotten apple in a barrel of good ones? Give me the pup’s name right now, Catherine Goggin, give me his name so we can cast you out and not have to look at your filthy face anymore. Or do you not know his name, is that it? Were there too many of them for you to be certain?”
A low murmur of discontent could be heard around the pews. Even in the midst of gossip, the congregation felt this might be going a step too far, for it implicated all of their sons in the immorality. Father Monroe, who had given hundreds of sermons in that church over the course of two decades and who knew well how to read a room, pulled back a little.
“No,” he said. “No, I can tell that there’s still a shred of decency inside you and there was only one lad. But you’ll give me his name right now, Catherine Goggin, or I’ll know the reason why.”
“I won’t say,” said my mother, shaking her head.
“What’s that?”
“I won’t say,” she repeated.
“You won’t say? The time for timidity is long since past; do you not realize that, no? The name, little girl, or I swear before the cross that I will whip you from this house of God in shame.”
She looked up now and glanced around the church. It was like a film, she would later tell me, with everyone holding their breath as they wondered to whom she might point the finger of blame, each mother praying that it would not be her son. Or worse, her husband.
She opened her mouth and seemed to be on the verge of an answer but changed her mind and shook her head.
“I won’t say,” she repeated quietly.
“Get on with you so,” said Father Monroe, stepping behind her and giving her an almighty kick in the back with his boot that sent her stumbling down the altar steps, her hands outstretched before her, for even at that early stage of my development she was ready to protect me at all costs. “Get on out of here, you floozy, and out of Goleen, and take your infamy to another place. There’s houses in London that have been built for the likes of you and beds there where you can throw yourself on your back and spread your legs for all and sundry to satisfy your wanton ways.”
The congregation gasped in horrified delight at his words, the teenage boys thrilled by such notions, and as she picked herself up off the ground the priest stepped forward again and dragged her by the arm through the nave of the church, spittle dribbling down his mouth and chin, his face red with indignation, and perhaps his excitement was even visible to those who knew where to look for it. My grandmother looked around but my grandfather gave her a puck on the arm and she turned back. My Uncle Eddie, the youngest of the six and the closest in age to my mother, stood up and shouted, “Ah come on, that’s enough now,” and at those words my grandfather stood too and laid his son out with one punch to the jaw. My mother saw no more after that, as Father Monroe discarded her into the graveyard beyond and told her that she was to leave the village within the hour and from that day forward the name of Catherine Goggin would no more be heard or spoken of in the parish of Goleen.
She lay on the ground, she told me, for a few minutes, knowing that the Mass had a good half hour to run yet, before slowly picking herself up and turning in the direction of home, where, she guessed, a packed bag would be waiting for her by the front door.
“Kitty.”
A voice from behind made her turn around and she was surprised to see my father walking toward her nervously. She’d noticed him in the back row, of course, as the priest dragged her toward the doors, and to his credit he’d had a look of shame upon his face.
“Haven’t you done enough?” she asked, putting a hand to her mouth and drawing it away to examine the blood that had seeped into her untrimmed nails.
“This wasn’t what I wanted at all,” he told her. “I’m sorry for your trouble, truly I am.”
“For my trouble?” she asked. “In a different world, this would be our trouble.”
“Ah come on now, Kitty,” he said, using the name he’d called her by from the time she was a child. “Don’t be like that. Here’s a couple of pounds,” he added, handing her two green Irish punts. “This should help you get started somewhere else.”
She looked at them for a few moments before holding them up in the air and slowly tearing them down the center.
“Ah, Kitty, there’s no need for—”
“No matter what that man in there says, I’m no whore,” she told him, crumpling the pieces up into a ball and throwing them at him. “Take your money. A bit of sticking tape will put them back together and you can buy my Auntie Jean a nice dress for her birthday instead.”
“Jesus, Kitty, will you keep your voice down, for God’s sake?”
“You’ll not hear it again,” she told him, turning away and heading for home and then the late-afternoon bus to Dublin. “Good luck to you now.”
And with that she took her leave of Goleen, the place of her birth, which she would not see again for more than sixty years, when she would stand in that same graveyard with me and search among the gravestones for the remains of the family that had cast her out.
A One-Way Ticket
She had her savings, of course: a few pounds that she’d squirreled away in a sock in her dresser drawer over the last few years. An elderly aunt, three years dead by the time of my mother’s disgrace, had given her the occasional few pennies when she ran errands for her and these had accumulated over time. And there was still something left over from her Communion money and a little more from her Confirmation. She’d never been a spender. There wasn’t much that she needed and the things that she might have liked, she didn’t know existed in the first place.
As expected, the bag was waiting for her when she got home, neatly packed and propped up next to the front door, her coat and hat thrown on top of it. She discarded these over the arm of the sofa, for they were hand-me-downs and she guessed that the Sunday clothes on her back would be more valuable to her in Dublin. Opening it now, she checked for the sock-purse and there it was, its secret as carefully concealed as her own had been until the previous evening when her mother had walked into her bedroom without knocking and discovered her standing before the mirror with her blouse undone, one hand stroking her convex belly with a mixture of fear and fascination.
The old dog looked up at her from his place in front of the fire and offered a lengthy yawn but didn’t trot over with his tail wagging like he usually did, hoping for a pat or a compliment.
She went to her bedroom and took one last look around for anything she might want to take with her. There were books, of course, but she had read them all and there would be books at the other end of her journey too. A small porcelain statue of St. Bernadette stood on her bedside table and for no sensible reason that she could think of, other than causing irritation to her parents, she turned its face to the wall. There was a small music box too, her mother’s originally, where she stored her keepsakes and treasures, and she began to sort through it as the ballerina turned and the melody sounded a tune from Pugni’s La Esmeralda before deciding that these things belonged to a different life and she closed it firmly, the dancer bending forward at the waist before disappearing from sight altogether.