1949 (18 page)

On Friday evening Ursula went to Confession.

One should always begin with the worst sin, she believed. Once that was out of the way the priest would find it easier to forgive the others. But which was the worst sin? Letting Finbar touch her body? Or letting Lewis put his tongue in her mouth?

Her flesh remembered. How vividly her flesh remembered!

 

Anonymous in the shadows of the confessional box, the priest listened through the grille as she struggled to describe her experiences. Even with her educated vocabulary the words did not come easily. Irish women simply did not say such things.

“You allowed a man to put his hands on you? At
Mass?
” The priest's outrage hissed through the grille.

“I did, Father.”
No point in lying about it. God sees everything. You can't lie to Him
.

Ursula waited with bowed head while the priest chastised her savagely. The blame was not ascribed to Finbar but to herself, the female, the weak vessel. “You have been an Occasion of Sin, young woman!” When the tongue-lashing was over the priest heaped her with penances.

How long will it take to say ten decades of the Rosary every day for a week? How many can I do before I go to work? I'll have to get up earlier
.

A waspish voice snatched her thoughts back. “I said, have you anything else to confess?”

“I…er…let a man kiss me, Father. And…and put his tongue in my mouth.” Ursula did not bother to add that she had enjoyed it.
Enjoyment
was a word one dare not use when speaking of sex.

“The same man, I assume?”

“A different man, Father.”

“You shameful and perverted creature! The devil has his mark on your soul, young woman. If you continue in this way you are in great danger of being excommunicated.”

 

When Ursula escaped the confessional box she did not kneel in a pew and pray. Instead she left the church and walked aimlessly through the streets of Dublin. She had much to think about. Henry Mooney always said the best way to think was to take a long walk.

What's so terrible about kissing? Married men and women do it all the time. Ned and Síle certainly did; I saw them
.

And touching…Finbar touched my breasts but it did me no harm. I'm still a virgin. That's the most important thing to the Church, isn't it? Virginity? Like Mary's?

A deep and stubborn anger was rising.
I refuse to believe we did anything wrong. It was just a moment's pleasure for both of us. Pleasure as simple and thoughtless as enjoying the sun. How can that be so evil that God might turn his face from me forever?

Is it God? Or the Church?

Walking with her head down, watching her feet on familiar cobbled pavement, Ursula let her thoughts follow untrodden paths. For the first time she questioned a theology that condemned the very pleasures which God had built into the human body. Was such condemnation not, in itself, a perversion?

And yet, and yet…

Her thoughts and her feet rambled on.

Catholic Ireland does have a very special magic. Luminous occasions of innocence and beauty. Benediction, May Altars, First Communion. The sacrament of the Eucharist. The exalted way one feels, partaking of the body of Christ
.

Ursula paused in her walk. She was standing in front of a church in one of the most impoverished areas of northside Dublin.
Catholic Ireland also has a God who must be bargained with; a condemnatory God who sells indulgences for money. Those who can afford it least give the most. Tenement women spend money that should buy shoes for their children in order to buy their parents out of purgatory. Meanwhile the bishops wear gold embroidery
.

Is this what Christ intended?

There was more than one version of Irish history. The one sanctioned by the Church described an unbroken continuum from Saint Patrick to present-day Catholicism. The Faith as it always had been and always would be. Unchanged and unchangeable. World without end amen.

But in dusty, forgotten tomes in secondhand bookshops Ursula had read a different story.

New forms of Catholic devotion had been introduced into Ireland in the nineteenth century. These displaced the earlier tradition, a tolerant and peculiarly Irish blend of Christian and pre-Christian, Celtic and Norman. The new version of Catholicism was solidly Roman. The clergy and the religious orders now owned the Church that originally had belonged to its people. The laity had become merely supplicants.

Although it stressed the importance of family values, the Church replaced the home as the center of life. Rituals traditionally performed by women, such as publicly mourning the dead, were taken over by a patriarchal priesthood. Through the Requiem Mass the priests had appropriated death, but they were biologically unable to appropriate birth. So they found another way to marginalize women. Irish women were given the cult of the Virgin to identify with—a pure, unquestioning, submissive woman whose innocence was not soiled by sexual intercourse.

Virgin Mary, Queen of Ireland.

Ursula longed for the serenity of absolute faith.
Why do the priests make it so hard?

 

She heard nothing from Finbar Cassidy for almost a week. Then one evening he was waiting for her when she left the broadcasting station. Standing on the pavement with his hat in his hands. “Have you forgiven me?” he asked.

She gave him an innocent stare. “Forgiven you? For what?”

“You know.”

“Do you mean for being so rude to Mr. Raines? I have not; it was quite unforgivable.”

“I'm talking about what happened in the Park.”

She tilted her head to one side as if trying to remember something of absolutely no consequence. “What happened in the Park, Finbar?”

“Please, Ursula! You know exactly. It's haunted me ever since. I have to know I'm forgiven.”

“If that's so important, I can't understand why you've waited until now to ask.”

“I wasn't sure you'd see me.”

“So you ambushed me?”

Prodded past endurance, Finbar lost his temper. “You're such a Republican I thought you would appreciate an ambush!”

Ursula gave a soft laugh and linked his arm with hers. “There's nothing to forgive.”

Finbar felt dazed.

 

“Dear Ursula,” Fliss wrote. “Perhaps I should have warned you that Lewis Baines was coming to Ireland, but I thought it would be fun to surprise you. Is he not a Greek God? We girls are all crazy about him. You must have made an impression, though. At a house party last weekend Lew said he's planning to visit Ireland again soon.”

I promise. I promise
.

Ursula hoped for a letter from Lewis but none arrived. Days turned into weeks, weeks became months. She wanted to write Fliss and ask about him but her pride would not allow it.

 

Finbar was now kissing her when he left her at her door. Kissing her softly on the lips with his mouth closed. She would allow him to embrace her, but she always stepped back as soon as the kiss ended.

He thought she was afraid. He was afraid himself, and dare not try to go any farther.

Ursula never alluded to the incident in the Park. If Finbar did, she changed the subject. Yet sometimes he caught her looking at him in a strangely speculative way. Her smoky blue-gray gaze drifted over his face. His body. Those eyes mesmerized him. They held him pinned like a moth skewered to a cork.

An evening with Ursula left Finbar shaken. He tried to rein in his imagination where she was concerned; sometimes he swore to forget her. Then he would find himself walking up to the weather-beaten blue door again and know he was doomed.

26 September 1932
EAMON DE VALERA GIVES INAUGURAL SPEECH

Irish Leader Becomes Chairman of the Assembly of the League of Nations

22 October 1932
PIONEERING FLIGHT FROM BALDONNEL TO BERLIN VIA LONDON
Businessmen Hope to Establish Regular Air Service

16 November 1932
PRINCE OF WALES OPENS STORMONT
New Home for the Northern Ireland Parliament

Ned Halloran propped his rifle against a tree and slumped down beside it. He tried to recall a time when he had not felt weary, weary to the marrow of his bones.

New Year's Day, 1933. Soon the Americans would swear in a new president, Franklin Roosevelt. But the same old problems endured in Ireland. Between Northern Ireland and the Free State was an unpoliceable border of some 320 miles, meandering through woodlands and farmlands, cutting right through houses in some cases, the major destabilizing force on the island. Men like Ned roamed both sides of the border fighting an undeclared war.

A few hours earlier there had been gunfire from the direction of Crossmaglen, a County Armagh border village. “Hold your position here, Halloran,” the O/C had ordered as the other men moved out in that direction, “in case we need you to cover our retreat.”

Ned resented being left behind though he understood the reason. Sometimes, as now, a headache would leave him half-blind with pain. His hands shook so badly he could not hold his weapon steady. “You ought to go home for a while, lad,” the O/C had advised just this morning.

That, thought Ned, was part of the problem. He was not a lad anymore. He no longer awoke clear-headed and full of energy. Waking had become a painful, incremental process. Sounds would gradually intrude into his dreams, letting reality flood in. When he could avoid it no longer he would pry open his eyelids and wait for his vision to clear. Then he must force his reluctant body to move.

After a night spent sleeping on damp ground under a hedge, the rats of arthritis gnawed at his joints. Old man, he called himself privately. Old man, though he was not quite forty.

He felt sixty.

But there was work to be done in the north and no one else to do it. Only the IRA. The
real
army. Simultaneously trying to protect the northern Catholics and find some way to win back the amputated Six Counties.

South of the border some of the IRA were running far too wild, getting their own back against the treatyites who had persecuted them. Former government officials were assaulted.
¹
Garda stations were attacked when the police tried to intervene. Law and order was breaking down. There was a rumor among the Volunteers—there were always rumors—that the military tribunals that de Valera had disbanded might be reestablished.

“If this is an army,” Ned muttered to himself, “we should act like one. That includes you, Halloran. On your feet. Stand at attention.” He hauled himself up and waited.

More gunfire. Closer. The imperative crack of sound that focuses the mind and freezes the heart.

Four men came running up. Four from a squad of five. “Where's Patsy?” Ned wanted to know.

The O/C shook his head. “He's facedown in a ditch back there. We ran into a whole company of B-Specials. They don't give a donkey's arse what happened to the village, but they were damned glad to get us in their sights. We'd best split up and make a run for it before they catch up with us.”

Ned reached for his rifle. “I'm not willing to leave Patsy! We can make a stand right here, fight them off and then go back for his body. We can—”

“We can't. It's a whole company of the bastards, I'm telling you, and they mean business. Use your head, Halloran. If you stay here and die you won't be any good to the cause except as another martyr, and Christ knows we've plenty of them already.”

When Ned still hesitated the exasperated officer reached for his rifle. “If you're determined to die, I'll take this. We're short enough of them as it is.”

Ned's fingers tightened on the weapon. He would not disobey orders, but he could not give up the gun.

 

On January thirtieth, at the age of forty-three, Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany's Weimar Republic—the youngest man ever to hold the office. He was appointed by the elderly president of the republic, Field Marshal Paul von Hindenburg. The new chancellor inherited an economy in which one out of every two workers was unemployed, but Hitler refused to be discouraged. He saw Germany's abject position on the world stage as his opportunity. “Everything I have done or will do,” Hitler announced, “has only one aim: to restore the nation to greatness.”

 

Propelled by young leaders with radical ideas, Europe was rebuilding itself in new patterns. Meanwhile Ireland was increasingly narrow and inward-looking. The departure of so many of their British colleagues had meant new opportunities for educated Irish Catholics. Doctors, lawyers, and senior civil servants were finding their way into the upper levels of society, joining those businessmen and large farmers who had survived the revolutionary years. Fearing the very winds of change that had once blown so gloriously through the souls of Ireland's revolutionaries, they resisted anything that might upset their new and fragile sense of self.

The result was a deepening of the national conservatism. Eamon de Valera, who claimed to know the heart of the Irish people, responded with increasingly conservative policies of his own.

 

“This country is going backward while the rest of the world is rushing forward,” Ursula complained in a letter to Henry Mooney. “It is a pity that Germany was prevented from helping us during the Rising. One has to admire the way the Germans are struggling to overcome their difficulties. We could benefit from their example now.”

Henry replied, “In 1916 the Germans did not care about helping Ireland. They simply wanted to encourage Irish rebellion in order to distract England from the war in Europe. Never make the mistake of thinking that a small, poor country like Ireland means anything to the great powers, Ursula—except as a pawn. Whatever Ireland accomplishes she will have to do for herself.”

In Munich, Heidi Neckermann received a letter from Ursula seeking information about Adolf Hitler. She replied,

Ursula tried to envision this new Germany and its new leader. To an Irish woman there was something sinister about huge military displays combined with fervent speeches about racial superiority.

“The only foreign newspapers in Dublin are English,” she wrote to Heidi. “Can you please send some German papers?” When she came home from work to find a thick package waiting, she hastily tore it open and spread the contents on her bed. What she read presented a disturbing picture.

Supported mainly by the middle class, the National Socialist Party was obsessed with images of order. Hitler hated the people the middle classes hated, Communists and Jews, and blamed them for Germany's troubles. When they were brought under control all would be well.

Some, though not all, of the German people agreed. The voices of those who disagreed were silenced.

Hitler spoke in grandiose visions. His underlings tried to translate his sweeping oratory into concrete plans, but the reality sometimes fell short of the dream. Beneath a veneer of strict discipline was the potential for chaos.

Under Hitler the Germans were regaining self-respect, however, and for this they adored him. In his public pronouncements Hitler frequently referred to the Holy Grail, invoking the aura of the Knights of the Round Table to ennoble his followers. Using great public spectacles, he introduced rituals that subsumed heroic Teutonic myth into modern Nazi symbols. He was restoring pride, pageantry, and mysticism to the lives of people exhausted by defeat and inflation.

After the Great War the Allies had demanded total German disarmament. France in particular had insisted that her enemy be humiliated. Now, in open defiance of the Versailles Treaty, Hitler was building a new army. Germany would never be humiliated again.