Father Joe: The Man Who Saved My Soul

Book by Hendra Tony

chapter one

How I met Father Joe:

I was fourteen and having an affair with a married woman.

At least she called it an affair; she also said we were lovers, and on several occasions, doomed lovers. An average teen, I was quite content with these exalted terms; in practice, however, I only got to second base with her. (I didn’t yet know it was second base, as I was growing up in England.)

It was only rather later too, when I saw The Graduate, that I realized my Mrs. Robinson may have been somewhat older than she admitted to—which was twenty-two. To my unpracticed eye she could certainly pass for that; I was still young enough that any woman with breasts and a waist and her own teeth was roughly the same age as any other—which is to say a grown-up—and the mysterious repository of unimaginable pleasures deserving . . .

. . . hideous, very specific torments. The fly in the ointment of this relationship was that we were both Catholics. At least in theory (theory to me, practice to her), there was a terrible bill being racked up somewhere, calibrating the relative sinfulness of everything we did, every gesture made, every word exchanged, let alone every kiss. Should death strike, should lightning fork from one of the huge trees outside into our concupiscent bodies, should one of the experimental jets being developed over the hill at DeHavilland’s disintegrate and plummet to earth (as they often threatened to do when trying to break the sound barrier), turning her trailer into a fireball, down, down we would plunge, into the bowels of Hell, unshriven, unforgiven, damned for all eternity to indescribable suffering.

A lot of what little conversation we had—much more the norm were interminable, agonized, what she called “existential” silences—concerned whether we should even be having a conversation, should even be together for that matter, doomed lovers in the throes of a hopeless and illicit liaison, wrestling with the irresistible temptation of being in the same neighborhood, town, county, country, planet, dimension. We were so bad for one another, she said, such a monumental occasion of sin for each other, it was playing with fire; oh, if only we’d never met and plunged ourselves into this cauldron of raging emotions from which there was no escape!

These sentiments were very new to me. My instinctive response was that they were pretty goofy, but what did I know? I dimly recognized that I was going through some kind of passage out of childhood and would from now on be required to learn, without being taught, how grown-ups acted and spoke. Best not to rock the boat, by suppressing a classroom splutter. I had a good thing going. Mrs. Bootle was no slouch in the looks department. Perhaps this was the way women always spoke in extremis. Books were my only guide and so far it all seemed pretty true to form—like being in The Thorn Birds if it had been written by Christina Rossetti.

But it had been a long time since the first hesitant kiss, and we’d done lots of kissing since. I was getting restless, anxious to find out what would be the next cauldron of raging emotions from which there was no escape.

Now on a bleak Saturday morning in the damp, dank early spring of green, green Hertfordshire, England, The World, The Solar System, The Universe, in the year of our Lord 1956, I was about to find out.

She stood at the kitchen end of the trailer, where the sink was, surrounded by dirty dishes, her back to the picture window through which a waterlogged plot ran down to the river, swollen and sullen in the rain, the depressed little green caps of her higgledy-piggledy vegetable garden poking through the mud. “Should we?” she said in an agonized half-sob. “I think we should,” I replied, having no idea what she was talking about. “But . . . but” (she never used just one “but”—always at least two) “it will be the end, the point of no return, all will be lost.” “Well, then,” said the voice of proto-adult reason, “perhaps we shouldn’t.” “No! no! yes! yes!, how can we help ourselves, I’m swept away, I tell you, let’s cast all caution to the winds! Turn round.”

I did as I was bid, averting my head and closing my eyes, mad excitement welling up through my body from my heels to my eyelids. This must be it, whatever it was. From behind me came surreptitious noises: rustling clothes, eyelets popping, zippers unzipping, hot little pants of effort.

“Turn round,” she whispered hoarsely. I did. “Open your eyes.” I did. Her eyes were now closed, her head inclined to one side, long hair draped over her white, slight, naked shoulders, framed by the rain-drenched window, the Madonna of the drizzle. My eyes ratcheted nervously down to her breasts. They were quite small, of slightly different sizes, and rather flat. Well, actually very flat. Making the nipples seem somewhat larger than I would have expected. The baby—to all appearances a sweet little scrap—must have been a voracious feeder.

These were my first live breasts. The only ones I’d seen to date had been in nudist magazines. Were they all like this? I’d just read The Four Quartets for the first time: the image of Tiresias popped into my head and wouldn’t budge.

Then she kissed me. Her lips and face were hotter than usual, like my little brother’s when he had a temperature. She came closer. I could feel the warmth of her skin through my shirt and then what must have been those nipples. I put my hand inside her rolled-down dress between her hip and her belly. “No! no!” she whispered, covering my hand with hers. But she pushed it down infinitesimally. As I followed her pressure, she resisted, pulling it up even more infinitesimally. “You mustn’t!” she sobbed. “Think of the sin, the mortal sin, the eternal flames!” Then the downward pressure again. A textbook case of no-but-yes—though I was too young to grasp such psycho-sexual antics. I followed her hand down for a few millimeters. It resisted. Up we went. But not so far—we were definitely making headway. Down . . . up, down, up, down . . . My whole hand was inside her dress now, inching inexorably earthward. Her skin was silky and her flesh deliciously soft. And it kept getting softer. Where were we? Way down there, surely? Waves of—some unknown emotion—shuddered through me. I was dizzy with excitement, Tiresias having definitely taken a powder . . .
ben and Lily Bootle had first appeared at the local Catholic church a year earlier. She was petite and slender, he was big and rangy, a head or more taller than his mate. Though she was very pregnant she wore a clingy, full-length shift-like dress, emphasizing her milky breasts and bulging belly. Open leather sandals advertised tiny, shapely feet. Her outfit had a distinct bohemian flair in a Sunday congregation made up for the most part of dowdy English widows and hungover Irish laborers with the occasional large unruly family and cigarette-ashen wife.

Ben looked as though he’d just emerged from a night of electroshock. His thick wiry hair stood up in uncombed clumps and spikes, his clothes were always rumpled with at least one element undone, and he wore battered tortoiseshell-rimmed glasses of impressive thickness.

They seemed to have no friends and kept very much to themselves; no one even knew where they lived, least of all our ancient and embottled parish priest, Father B. Leary (the “B.”—for Bartholomew—leading us altar boys to call him Father Bleary).

In due course a baby Bootle appeared, which Lily carried in a rather self-consciously peasanty manner on her hip. Its gender was unclear, since it wore no conventional baby garments, being wrapped regardless of season in what my mother acidly called “swaddling clothes.” But still no one had found out a whole lot about them, except that Ben was some kind of scientist doing hush-hush work on jets or rockets or something. Since the church was the only place they made contact with us earthlings, it had also been noted that Ben was quite devout. As well as Sunday Mass he would appear at non-obligatory services like Rosary evenings to pray for the Godless Soviets.

Though our paths hadn’t crossed, serving Mass was also one of my chores, which I loathed not only because of the tongue-twisting Latin responses but also because Father Bleary had last brushed his teeth to celebrate victory over the Kaiser and his breath would have stopped even the leper-hugging St. Francis dead in his tracks. One moment of the Mass in particular, the Lavabo, at which the server is required to ritually wash the priest’s fingers, putting the anointed face inches from yours, was like being gassed in the trenches at Verdun.

My level of devotion was at a fairly obligatory level. I was the product of what the Church called a “mixed marriage”—one between a Catholic and a non-Catholic, which in my father’s case meant nothing fun like a Muslim or a Satanist, but simply a desultory agnostic, a “nonbeliever in anything much, really.” Ironically, he was a stained-glass artist, so he spent far more time inside churches and knew far more about Catholic iconography than his nominally Catholic brood.

My mother was what the priests called a “good” Catholic. She attended Mass every Sunday and holiday of obligation, went to confession once a month, shelled out handfuls of silver when required, but otherwise, as far as I could tell, didn’t allow the precepts of the Gospels and their chief spokesman to interfere much with her daily round of gossip, bitching, kid-slapping, neighbor-bashing, petty vengeance, and other middle-class peccadilloes.

One aspect of my mother’s behavior did seem to me to be well up the scale of venial sin, if not all the way to mortal: she shared with local non-Catholics a broad prejudice against the Irish laborers who were appearing in our village in considerable numbers, as they were in many other parts of England, to work in the ongoing reconstruction of postwar Britain, particularly the new motorways. All of whom were Catholic.

The vast majority of these workers were fleeing chronic unemployment in the new Republic and brought with them habits of poverty that didn’t sit well with the upwardly mobile Protestant burghers of southeast England: the drinking and plangent midnight singing in the street—naturally—but also the taking a leak round any old corner, the possession of only one jacket and pair of trousers—worn to the construction site every morning, to the pub every night, to church on Sunday, and to sleep in anytime.

Mostly they were loathed just for being Irish. The depth of British odium for a people they robbed, murdered, enslaved, and starved for eight hundred years is hard to exaggerate; I often experienced it at second hand when gangs of local toughs would run me to cover as I walked home from school, screaming “dirty Catholic go home” and heaving stones at me. True, British anti-Catholic prejudice harked back to the seventeenth century and was institutionalized in many ways, but it’s unlikely these troglodytes had the excesses of James II on their tiny minds; for them, “Catholic” and “Irish” were interchangeable slurs.

I hadn’t made this connection yet; kids tend to take prejudice in their stride, a fixed peril you find a route around on your journey toward adulthood. For the moment its larger meaning was opaque and my dealings with it open to compromise if not outright collaboration.

Example: every November fifth in England, Guy Fawkes—a Catholic conspirator of the early seventeenth century who almost succeeded in blowing up the Houses of Parliament—is burned in effigy on thousands of bonfires across the land. While it’s fine that Guy Fawkes be remembered for what he was—an odious antidemocratic terrorist—this custom has for centuries also expressed and refueled anti-Catholic prejudice. So every Sunday before Guy Fawkes Day, Catholic priests would condemn it and order Catholics not to participate. For me—a serial pyromaniac—the prospect of no bonfire was bad enough, but it also meant missing the truly glorious part of Guy Fawkes Day: fireworks.

In a mixed marriage this sort of thing could be sheer poison. The arrangement my father worked out was as follows: (a) fireworks, naturally—kids have to have fireworks; (b) smallish bonfire (though I’d always creep out in the night and pile it higher, and if possible stick tires in it); (c) absolutely no guy (as the effigy of Mr. Fawkes is known). When my mother objected that we were still symbolically burning a Catholic, Dad would reply yes, but every time we let off a firework we were symbolically blowing up the Houses of Parliament.

So then we’d celebrate the same prejudice that got rocks thrown at my head on the way home from school. And the same prejudice that had the good villagers muttering about lazy drunks and refusing to rent rooms to the Irish or serve them in their shops. I found this obnoxious in them and, to the degree that she agreed, in my mother. I’d like to pretend that I was smart enough at fourteen to have worked all this out in total consistency, but in fact I had simply picked up from somewhere an aversion to discriminating against people because they had next to nothing and did work no one else wanted to do.

Unbeknownst to me there was more at work than mere altruism; a deeper bond made me take the Irish side.

If challenged, Mum would have said she was just being protective in putting as much distance as possible between us kids and the boyos down the pub. (She certainly did in church, where she would sit as far away as she could from her boozy coreligionists, moving up a row or two if they got too close.) Something much juicier, however, was going on beneath these maternal protestations.

She always insisted that her maiden name—McGovern—was Scottish, even though it began with “Mc” as all the finest Irish names do, not “Mac” like all the finest Scottish ones. She and the other four McGovern sisters had indeed been born in Glasgow, so she did have that on her side. But as one of her older sisters would say, less skit- tish than she about their true origins: if a cat has kittens in the oven, are they biscuits? Nonetheless Mum stuck to her guns; we were Scottish and proud of it, och awa’ the noo. Of course the British weren’t much fonder of the Scots than they were of the Irish, but on the spectrum of Anglo-Saxon anti-Celtic prejudice she evidently felt it was better to be ridiculed as Scottish than despised as Irish.

Once when I was about ten, Dad brought home a book of Scottish tartans—he was painstaking about the heraldic and chivalric symbols he used in his windows—and I got very excited over the rich old aristocratic patterns. Surely with our deep Scottish roots we must have a tartan? That in turn would mean we could wear a kilt, och awa’ the noo. This line of questioning threw Mum for the biggest loop so far. “Um—that one,” she said, pointing at the Campbell tartan. “But that’s the Campbell tartan,” I objected. “Well,” she fired back, “the McGoverns are part of the Campbell clan.”

Only later, when I moved to New York, where I met dozens of McGoverns, every one as Irish as a pint of stout, did all become clear; I realized that the closest my maternal ancestors had ever come to the Highlands and a Campbell kilt was the wilds of County Leitrim.

If I’d known at the time how Irish I was, I mightn’t have been so pleased about it. I wasn’t a whole lot keener about being a Catholic. This had less to do with being on the receiving end of prejudice than with the growing gap between what I heard in church and learned in school. Not that my mother hadn’t tried to prevent the gap from growing. The mixed-marriage contract the Church required the infidel half of the couple to sign said that all resulting offspring had to be brought up in the ...