Grandmother and the Priests (47 page)

“Certainly, Geoffrey,” said Father Shayne. “Your sister and brother may wait in the parlor.” He went to the door and opened it, Elsa came first, limping, her pretty mouth tremulous; Eric followed, all jerks and movement. Had the poor child suffered from St. Vitus Dance? Elsa curtseyed as she passed the priest; the little boy bowed. Dear children! For some reason the priest’s throat knotted tightly, as he followed the boy and girl with sad eyes. He closed the door then and returned to Geoffrey. The boy was leaning forward in his chair, his hands clasped tightly between his knees, and he studied the priest with a passionate intensity.

“It’s about my father, and my mother,” he began at once. “I tried to talk with Father McGinnis about them, but he immediately stopped me. He spoke of the Commandment to honor our parents. So, he never heard what I wanted to tell him. Father, do you think one should suppress the truth because of that Commandment? If you think so, then we won’t bother you any longer. We will leave immediately.” He moved forward on his chair, and his dark eyes were watchful and resolute.

“Will your truth be revealing the sins of others?” Father Shayne asked.

“Yes. But something is more important: my father’s soul and peace of mind, and his return to the Sacraments.” The boy’s voice was strong and uncompromising. “If you refuse to listen, then we must go. We,” and he hesitated, “have been approached very kindly by Vicar Martin, who believes that Father McGinnis behaved abominably to my father, as he did.”

Vicar Martin was the rector of the local Anglo-Catholic church. He was a splendid and erudite gentleman in his middle age, and Father Shayne had chatted with him often. If such a man had come mercifully to that family, while they had been rejected by their own, then Old Tom had indeed ‘behaved abominably’.

“Does Vicar Martin know what you wish to tell me, Geoffrey?”

“Yes. I told him, myself. Father Shayne, we don’t want to leave the Church; we’d never be happy again. But we’ve been driven out, or, rather, Papa has, and where Papa goes, we’ll go, too.”

Now here was a dismaying problem. It could not be defined in such sharp terms as good or evil. Father Shayne was agitated. After a little thought he said, “Tell me, Geoffrey. And I know you wish this to be confidential. I want to help you. Frankly, your family has worried me. If I think you are about to commit a sin — ” He stopped, for Geoffrey’s face had changed, become a little cold and distant. Then the boy smiled. “If I sin, I will confess, and will ask you for absolution, Father.”

There was an atmosphere about the boy as of despair, and this was piteous at his age. Abruptly, he lifted the thick hair from his forehead. Across the dark fine skin a long deep scar ran. Geoffrey let the priest look at it for a moment, then he dropped his curls over it. “My mother did that to me,” he said, without emotion. “When I was seven years old. You’ve noticed Elsa’s limp. My mother did that; she threw her down the stairs and broke her leg in several places. You’ve seen Eric; she beat his head against the floor until he was unconscious; he was two, then, and he almost died. He has a brain injury. My mother did that to us.”

He looked at the horrified priest, who had turned very pale. “Have I committed a sin against that Commandment, Father?” he asked, and his voice was the voice of a man.

Father Shayne paused. His heart was beating with outrage at these evidences of cruelty. Finally he could say, “Let me judge a little later, Geoffrey. Continue.” Who had done these things? The stepmother? Or the real mother? It could not possibly be the latter!

“Your father!” exclaimed the priest. “Surely he knows what your stepmother has done to his children! Why did he permit these horrible things? There are the police — ” Old Tom had been right, after all. The stepmother was evil; if she could do things like this to helpless children, then she could commit murder without the slightest compunction.

The boy studied the priest. Then his mouth twisted slowly, bitterly.

“I said, Father, my mother. Not my stepmother; we call her Mama Florence, and we love her, for she is good and kind to us, and loves us. You see, I’m the oldest. Papa thinks we were too young to remember, and so to help him I’ve pretended not to have known. Elsa and Eric don’t remember. At least, I don’t think so. We never talk about it.”

“Your mother,” said the priest. He was stupefied. Then he thought: The poor woman must have been insane.

“My mother could deceive anyone, except Papa and me,” said Geoffrey. “She even had our priest believing that she was saintly. She had the most cruel face, and it was mostly laughing. She hated Papa. She hated us.”

“Why, Geoffrey?” Father Shayne could hardly believe what he was hearing.

“I don’t really know, Father. But I’m not a child. I know there are wicked people in the world, who love to do cruel and malicious things, and lie and slander and libel for the very pleasure of it.”

It was dreadful knowledge for a youth to have, thought the priest.

“They aren’t mad,” said the youth. “They are just evil. Some of my teachers in school in London, good schoolmasters who never knew a wicked person when they saw one — they’re so wrapped up in their teaching and soccer and cricket, such simple people! — believe that bad people are either mad or the world has been so harsh to them that they are only retaliating. It isn’t true, Father. I’ve met some lads in my own forms who were evil just for evil’s sake. Doesn’t St. Paul speak of these people? You believe in absolute evil, don’t you, Father?”

The priest started. The old problem of evil. He fell back on his doctrinal training. “Certainly, Geoffrey, I know that a great many people in this world are purely evil, and love evil, and do evil, and prosper in their evil. The Holy Bible speaks of them often. They aren’t mad, or hurt. They are simply of the tribe of Satan.”

The boy sighed. “Thank you, Father. My mother wasn’t mad, and she had no grudge against the world. She thought Papa was a fool because he was kind and charitable and would not listen to her vicious lies against their friends, and her lies about her children. She used to accuse me of the vilest things, and Elsa, too, and we were then only eight and seven, and Eric was only two. Once I found some money under my pillow, quite a lot of it. I was seven years old then. I had just lost a tooth, and I wanted to put it under my pillow,” and he smiled shyly at that childish superstition. “And I found the money there and took it down to Papa, who had put it there anyway. And my mother screamed that I had stolen it, and that she had missed it only that afternoon! Papa brought me back to bed, and he said to me, ‘Your mother was only joking, of course, Geoffrey. Think nothing of it.’ But,” said Geoffrey, “I thought of it. It was only one of many such in our house.”

The priest was silent. The boy went on.

“My mother despised Papa. He was rich, but she wanted much more. When she was in the wrong he opposed her. And so she made us children suffer, for she knew how Papa loved us. I know a boy at school who has a mater just like her, and he won’t go home for the holidays. He visits relatives near Bournemouth. When Papa would do something for our church she would flare up and throw things about, such as Papa’s collection of Meissen china. She did so love to destroy his treasures! But he always gave to the Church in both their names and then the priests would come to thank them and Mama was so gracious and smiled so prettily. She was very pretty; she looked like Elsa, and people — how very stupid people can believed her because she was so pretty. She was very charming, too, to her friends and the clergy, and even to the servants. You see, she almost always managed to go on her rampages when the servants were off, or on holiday, and the family was alone. So no one knew, except us. Or, perhaps, old Bailiff, our butler in Belfast. He wasn’t a bailiff, of course, but he was so strict and straight that we called him that. I don’t think Mama ever deceived Bailiff. He hated her. But at the trial, for our sakes, he said nothing.”

The priest, the product of intensive training, had been listening and watching closely, and he knew, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that Geoffrey had been telling him the truth. His horror increased.

“You knew about the trial, Geoffrey? You see, I do know something about this, myself.”

The boy stood up and began to pace the room in extreme agitation. “Of course I knew! Everyone tried to keep it from us, but I knew. They hid the newspapers, and I found them. Papa wasn’t on holiday, as he had tried to tell me before the police took him; he was in gaol. Mama Florence — she was staying with us then — pretended that everything was so nice and serene, and I let her believe what she wanted us to believe. It was the least I could do for her.”

“And you were only eight years old.”

The boy gestured impatiently. “I don’t know why people think boys of eight are utter idiots! Or infants. We know a great deal more then than we’ll ever know again, about people.” He paused. “I don’t think Papa murdered my mother. But, if he did, I’m glad!” He clenched his fists, and his young face was distorted for a moment. “I’m glad! I’m glad she’s dead! She might have killed one of us, if she hadn’t died. No,” he added after another pause, “she’d always stop short of murder. She was very cunning; she did what she did to us all in private, and carefully, and she knew that Papa would never expose her. For our sake! That was foolish of Papa. He should have taken us away, before it all happened to us. That’s the thing I can’t forgive — that he didn’t leave my mother. But he explained to me, when I was a child, that even the worst of mothers are better than none. I don’t believe it, Father, I don’t believe it! And then after Eric was born, Papa said to me, You see, Geoffrey, that your mother wasn’t responsible. She is so ill, and must have been ill for a long time.’ I didn’t believe that, either. She would fly into such awful rages, and scream and shout, when we were all alone, and threaten, and I think all that wicked anger hurt her heart.”

“No one knew, the neighbors, the friends, the servants?”

“I don’t know. Perhaps some did. But, at the trial, they wanted to protect Papa. Everyone loved him. They didn’t want to tell about my mother, because then Papa would have seemed to have had a motive for killing her. He was acquitted for the reason that there was no motive for her — murder.”

The priest rose abruptly and went to the window of his study and stared out at the furious blossoming of his garden. Without turning, he said, “Do you think she was murdered, Geoffrey?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think Papa did it — I don’t know. If he did, then God understands. If Mama Florence did it, she did it for all of us. It isn’t murder, Father, if you kill to defend yourself, or the helpless. The Church knows that.”

The priest turned and went back to his chair, and studied the back of his hands. The problem of evil. He thought of these children, so terribly injured in body and soul. They would bear the marks of evil all their lives; they would suffer all their lives, even if the younger did not remember fully what had injured them, and who. In dark nightmares, in loneliness, in grief, in difficulty or in despondency, the evil shadow of half-forgotten or wholly forgotten pain and terror would loom over them, heightening their misery, increasing their burden. He, Father Shayne, had often knelt at the bedsides of old men and women, old far beyond the average, who in dying had cried pitifully, like infants, for their mothers, or had screamed out some torment or suffering they had endured as very small children, too young then even to understand, too young to have retained the nightmare in conscious memory. The body, the brain, forgot; the soul never forgot. And, too, he remembered how he had stood beside those stricken with grief or mortal illness, and how they would suddenly exclaim, “Oh, I had forgotten that! I never thought of it until just now! How can I bear it?” The memory, for moments at least, was even more dreadful than their present state, and must have haunted their dreams all their lives, unknown, unexorcised.

He said to Geoffrey, “Can you not forgive your mother, my son?”

The boy smiled at him bitterly again. “How can I forgive my mother, when the Church will not believe my father, or, if he did kill my mother, will not forgive him?”

“The Church requires true contrition, repentance and penance, Geoffrey.”

The boy thought deeply, his scarred brow wrinkled. Then he said wearily, “How can my father be sorry that he rescued us from our mother? Yes, I know you will say that murder is a most mortal sin. But, he did what he did — if he did it — to protect and save us. How can he be sorry?”

He waited, but the priest did not answer. Then the boy cried out, “The problem of evil! That is what you are thinking! I have been studying it, myself, and sometimes you can’t tell, can you, Father? You can’t tell!”

My poor child, thought the priest. There is something that perhaps you do not know, that perhaps your father killed your mother not only to rescue his children but to be able to marry another woman. Perhaps. Who knew?

“Geoffrey,” he said, “do you think there is the slightest possibility that your stepmother killed your mother?”

The boy was silent. He said at last, “I’ve thought of it. If she did, I’m grateful to her, too. She loves us; our mother hated us. We never knew why. I think she thought, in the beginning, that Papa was richer then than he was. I remember hearing her scream at him when I was a child. She hated Belfast; she wanted to live in London. She wanted to travel. She wanted to be free, she would shout at Papa. And then she would curse him because we had been born. We had imprisoned her, she said. If we had not been born she should have been able to do all the things, and go to all the places, which she had dreamed about when she was a girl in a poor family. She would curse us, in front of Papa, and slap and punch us.

“Mama Florence visited us on holidays and for a month in the winter. We’ve always known her; she went to school with our mother. We’ve always loved her, too. She was very rich, herself, and she would bring us beautiful presents. Mama envied her, I know, envied her because she wasn’t married and had no children. She envied her for being rich. The only thing, Mama would say when she was in a good mood, was that she was much prettier than Mama Florence, and then she would frown and say, ‘Much good it did me, after all! Imprisoned in this house with the children I never wanted, and the wife of a man who has no spirit and no imagination!’ ”

“And your mother was Catholic, Geoffrey, and had not wanted you?”

“She wanted no one but herself, Father. Do you think that just because she was Catholic she automatically loved children, even her own? Oh, she would make a splendid show when the priest visited us! She would have us dressed up handsomely, and she would hold Eric on her knee, and she would kiss us, and the priest would look sentimental. The moment he had left she would drive us off, undress and go back to bed and moan. She was always moaning. I don’t think she was so sick as the doctors said she was. She was very clever. She could deceive even them.”

Evil, thought the priest, does not always have a stupendousness about it, or even the dark grandeur described by Milton. It can be meanly venomous and meanly ugly, viciously small. It can have the face of an asp as well as the face of a great fallen angel.

“My father was wretched with my mother,” said Geoffrey, into the silence. “I can never remember him laughing before she died. Sometimes, at night, I’d look through my window and see him walking up and down in the garden, under the moon, and sometimes he’d do this with his hands,” and the boy wrung his own hands. “The only time he smiled was when he was playing with us, and when Mama Florence visited us. Then everything was happy for Papa and ourselves. It was as if someone opened windows in a musty house and let the sun and air in. You do understand?” said the boy, awkwardly.

“Yes, I think so.” The priest hesitated. “Did your mother ever resent your — the lady you call Mama Florence?”

The boy stared at him. Then his face colored quickly and brightly, and his mouth twitched with disgust. “I know what you mean! But it isn’t so! They tried to bring that out at the trial; I read it, myself. Papa and Mama Florence would take walks in the afternoon together, sometimes alone, sometimes with us, or they’d take us for a treat into the city in our carriage. That was after Eric was born, and my mother was almost always in bed. Before that, my parents and Mama Florence would go together.”

The priest fell into thought again, while the boy watched him with deepening impatience and despair.

“Geoffrey,” said the priest, “if your mother had been completely evil how could it have been possible for your stepmother to have cared for her and visited her?”