Dancing in Limbo

‘You know you can never go back?’

‘I know that. Am I safe here?’

‘You have my word on it!’

She would have his word indeed! A cast iron guarantee! For no one in Ireland had followed the story of Chastity McCoy more closely than Schnozzle. He knew every detail of her strange upbringing, a childhood steeped in the bigotry that was her father’s hallmark. It had all started with the arrival of Ramirez, the apostate priest and his blasphemous circus, who travelled the roads at McCoy’s bidding to shame and outrage the Catholic people. He remembered all too well her late mother, a one-time nun seduced away from the convent to join in this provocative charade. He could say with pride that he himself was the only man brave enough to confront them, to stalk them fearlessly from townland to townland, risking the wrath of Magee and his bully boys. Schnozzle foretold that it would end badly and when he heard that Ramirez had been murdered he knew he had been proved right. God was not mocked! But what was he to make of the corollary to this tale of shame? The Señora moving into the Shambles with McCoy, heavy with his child? For years it had troubled him, this enigma of the half-caste girl playing in the gutters on the Protestant side of the square. If God had a plan in all this, Schnozzle couldn’t see it. He reluctantly accepted that the ways of the Almighty might not be ours. He prayed that the blood in her veins would one day prove unsuited to the cold Presbyterian ways of Armagh. And in time his patience was rewarded.

The rumours at first were will-o’-the-wisps, ephemeral whisperings, fading away to nothing when he tried to pin them down. Ireland had always been full of rumours, of visitations and apparitions and miracles, all promising deliverance from the horrors we had brought on ourselves. At first he dismissed them, but they persisted. There was something unsettling about them, something that marked them out from the ordinary run of superstition, these whispers from Donegal of a broken chapel at the end of the Yellow Meal Road, in a place they mockingly called Ballychondom. Whispers of a dancing Madonna, a mysterious icon, a statue of unrivalled potency. He began to hear of powerful cures for the sick and wonderful promises of the nation united under the leadership of the One True Church. Briefly Schnozzle dared to hope.

But the tale, so full of expectation, had ended suddenly in shame and humiliation. The rumours that reached the palace now spoke of dark and treacherous deeds. He heard how McCoy and the girl had ventured to the very end of the Yellow Meal Road and stolen the Dancing Madonna on the eve of Her Epiphany. Stolen it for an exhibit in a peepshow, to mock him and his people once more. Terror and bloodshed still ruled the land, tolerance remained as elusive as ever. Protestant and Catholic still slaughtered each other with ritual regularity.

Few now remembered, or cared to remember, the Madonna of Ballychondom. She had been consigned to the scrapheap of collective memory, along with a thousand other lost hopes and false dawns. But Schnozzle hadn’t forgotten her. He still clung to a wisp of hope. For one rumour, stranger than all the others, had reached his ears. A sting in the tail so implausible that it could only be true. The Little Sisters had reported to him that on her trip to Donegal with her father the Madonna had danced for Chastity McCoy.

When the door was safely bolted he sat her down at the kitchen table and gave her the third degree for a bit, to allay any residual suspicions, but her answers measured up. What had given her confidence to cross the Shambles and turn her back on her father and his heresy? Shyly she hinted at the presence of Patrick Pearse McGuffin round the place, and Schnozzle, though his eyes never left her, offered up a pious ejaculation to the Sacred Heart for His mysterious ways. To be on the safe side, though, he’d have Immaculata give her a full gynaecological examination in a while to check if she was a virgin or not. Immaculata was a veteran among veterans of the never-ending abortion struggle; the foetus had yet to be conceived that could escape her stringent searches. Was McGuffin her boyfriend, Schnozzle asked, all smiles now? Maybe he was and maybe he wasn’t was all she would concede. He pressed her further. Was she expecting? She blushed, denied it vehemently, began to cry and got up to leave. He put his hand firmly on her shoulder and let her cry; these were things he had a right to ask. If, with the help of God, she joined the Church, she would have to answer questions like these every week in the confessional.

He was on the point of questioning her about the Missing Madonna, but he bit his tongue. An inner voice counselled caution. This was something that could wait. He had gleaned enough already to know that these were deep waters. He knew that the three of them had seen Her dance and heard Her message. An unlikely trio they were too! Frank Feely, a simpleton from the hills above the town. Noreen Moran, gauche and unschooled, the child of a spoiled priest forced to share her father’s wretched exile. And Chastity McCoy, least likely of the threesome! A ragged half-breed from across the Shambles. He had the boy in service below stairs where he could keep an eye on him in person. Noreen was in the convent in Caherciveen out of harm’s way. He had a monthly report from the Reverend Mother on her spiritual progress. And here was the third of them, landing on his doorstep without benefit of preliminaries. Subtlety and patience had never been virtues that Schnozzle admired, but for once he knew better than to go probing too deeply the will of the Almighty. All would be revealed in time. In the meantime there were a thousand practical details to attend to.

Already his mind was racing with the responsibility of the project. How much time had he got? How long would it be before McCoy sobered up and spotted that the bird had flown? Was there some way he could throw him off the scent till the job was done? Normally it would take a year’s instruction to turn a Protestant, but given the girl’s pedigree could the job be expedited? He had a month, two if he was lucky. It would have to be done by Easter. She would receive instruction under conditions of the greatest secrecy, and her conversion would only be announced when it was complete.

But then what was to become of her?

Anywhere in Ireland would be out of the question. She would have to be returned to Mexico. It was the only place she would be safe. Was there anyone he could rely on there? Mentally he ran through a list of those with experience in Latin America. Father Alphonsus was the man he needed! Father Alphonsus had connections in Tijuana, he remembered. When the time came, Chastity would return to the land of her forefathers, and the great sin of her mother would be expiated. He looked up in gratitude at the portrait that hung over the Adam fireplace. A hint of a smile was playing round the lips of old Cardinal Mac. Schnozzle dropped to his knees on the Persian rug, gave the girl his rosary beads, and showed her how to count them as he offered up the five decades of the joyful mysteries. Our Blessed Lady had answered his prayers! Saint Jude had intervened on his behalf! The old Cardinal’s dream, of one, just one lost sheep returning to the true fold, had come spectacularly true! He had the genuine article on his hands at last.

On the mantelpiece beneath Big Mac’s portrait, propping up the Peter’s Pence inventory, stood three fading photographs in silver frames. He picked up the middle one and stroked his nose. Then with the air of a man making a momentous decision, he ripped the backing from the frame and removed the picture of King George.

The young Schnozzle O’Shea had grown up believing that the late king of England was the father he had never known. It was a strange fantasy for a boy from the slums of the Shambles. A dangerous fantasy too, for such an idea might be construed as a denial of the men of 1916 and could get you kneecapped, or worse. But Schnozzle’s childish loyalty to the House of Windsor was based on the evidence before him. Throughout his youth, the face of the old King had stared down on him with bovine resignation from the dresser. His Majesty formed the central panel of a royal triptych, his picture flanked by sepia lithographs featuring the youthful princesses, his dumpy queen and his haughty mother. No other house on the Shambles would dare display the portrait of the British monarch, tempting as it did summary court martial at the hands of the forces of the Republic. But old Mrs O’Shea was acknowledged by one and all to be several coppers short of the full shilling. There were few visitors to her house, and fewer still who needed to be ushered into the parlour where these strange icons held pride of place.

The pictures were a memento, the only memento, of his real father, who had taken the mailboat to England the day before he was born and had never returned. They had arrived together in the post the morning of his birth, a concertina of perforated postcards, bearing no forwarding address. Where other children grew up believing in Santa Claus, Schnozzle O’Shea grew up believing that the man in the beard would one day arrive on the doorstep and claim him. He would have done better with Santa. Even round the Shambles, Santa was good for a Bramley apple, a tangerine, and a Roy Rogers sixshooter in the stocking. When George the Sixth died, shunning the Shambles to the end, Schnozzle’s hopes died too. When he had grown old enough to stand on tiptoe and see himself in the mirror he realized that not even the Battenbergs could have bequeathed him a nose like the one he saw reflected there. He set aside his dream and turned to the cultivation of his vocation, knowing now that he was on his own.

But our childhood dreams never fade completely. A resonance lingers. His mother died before he was ordained. When he cleared the house the only souvenirs he took back to Maynooth were the faded postcards from the dresser. And now it looked as if the hand of God had intervened, and that the old monarch had a purpose after all.

‘Let’s send your daddy a postcard,’ he told the girl. ‘To stop him worrying.’

‘Mister Magee too,’ she said. ‘He’s worse than my da!’

‘You can set his mind at rest while you’re at it. What could be more appropriate than one of His Majesty? The Christian Brothers will see that it’s delivered first thing on Boxing Day.’

Then he rang for Immaculata McGillicuddy.

Frank Feely had been on his way home when he found the kitchen door bolted against him. He rattled it a few times, knowing it for a door that stuck easily in the damp weather. But when Sister Immaculata appeared at the noise, took him firmly by the ear and led him without another word back inside, he realized that something was up and knew better than to start asking questions. All day and all evening he sat in the scullery, listening to the muffled sounds of the house, the frantic scurrying of feet and the far-off ringing of the telephone. As it grew dark Major-domo MacBride appeared, looking flustered and ill at ease.

‘My mother will be worried if I don’t get home,’ Frank told him.

‘There’s nothing to be done about it! She’ll just have to fret like the rest of them.’

‘Any idea what’s up?’

Mister MacBride looked at him. ‘Nobody tells the likes of us anything. But there’s a three line whip out. No one in and no one out till his nibs gives the order. If you take my advice you’ll lie low till whatever it is blows over.’

It was as well he got on with the major-domo for Snotters was a petulant wee man, inflated by notions of his own importance, who could have made his life a misery. He had served the old Cardinal and his humble needs for forty years, supervising the kitchen and the cellar, checking the linen when it returned from the convent laundry, cuffing the young servants into line. He liked the title ‘Major-domo’ and the quasi-clerical soutane that went with the job. The permanent candlestick of red eczema hanging from his nose and the hint of a hare lip had earned him the nickname Snotters round the Shambles, but they never used it to his face, for the major-domo was touchy to a fault. Frank always gave him his title, even in the Patriot’s of an evening when he called to collect his bike and answer Eugene’s gentle interrogation.

The major-domo had belted him round the ear often enough in the first months, when Frank was still cack-handed and awkward with the clumsy kitchen implements, cutting himself as he peeled the sprouts or scalding himself as he teemed the potatoes. But he learned fast, and in the slack periods after breakfast, the major-domo would sit him down and make him learn his declensions, over and over till he was word perfect. ‘Do you want to be a skivvy all your life?’ he would shout, if Frank hesitated over the dative or the ablative. ‘Book learning is the only way a lad like you will ever make anything of yourself. Your father, God rest him, would have wanted more from you.’

He had begun to grow during his time in the kitchen. The food that came daily from the college farm was nothing but the best, floury red King Edwards, a churn of buttermilk for the soda farls, yellow butter and long root vegetables. They killed their pigs in the autumn and salted the carcases for the rest of the year. There were chickens and boiling fowl for holy days of obligation, salmon from the Blackwater and Warrenpoint herrings for Friday abstinence. But Schnozzle was a picky eater. He would turn up his nose at everything, pushing away his plate half-eaten, to the despair of the major-domo. ‘You’re a growing boy,’ Mr MacBride said as yet another plate of bacon and cabbage returned untouched from the master’s study. ‘Waste not, want not,’ he said, beckoning the boy to the kitchen table. Frank rarely needed a second invitation.

Not all his time was spent in the scullery. Sometimes, if Schnozzle rang for a sherry late at night, the major-domo would send him to the drawing-room with the fresh decanter, spitting on his hair and smoothing it down before he let him out of his sight, and reminding him every step of the way to mind his manners, not to speak till he was spoken to, and not for the love of the suffering Jesus to drop anything. In the corner of the study the machines kept up their endless chatter, ticker tape and telex and telephone, monitoring the moral pulse of the nation. From every parish in the land the information poured in round the clock. The Archbishop sat humped over the computer screen, a silent spider at the centre of a web of information. Frank would slip unobtrusively into the room, set the sherry down on the occasional table and try to slip out again. But Schnozzle would call to him to stop, order him to stand against the light, scrutinizing his profile for the features of his father Joe. He knew the details of Frank’s upbringing. How as a boy he had been dragged through every parish in the land as Joe searched for a cure for his affliction. He knew too that his speech and his understanding had been miraculously restored by the intervention of the Silent Madonna herself. And though the boy was still gauche and ill at ease, Schnozzle could recognize in him a certain quality that made him both excited and uneasy.

‘How old are you now, boy?’

‘Fifteen, Your Grace.’

‘Have you cultivated a special devotion to Our Blessed Lady?’

‘Yes, Your Grace.’

‘Do you practise the virtue of Holy Purity?’

‘Yes, Your Grace.’

‘You’re attentive in your spiritual duties?’

‘Yes, Your Grace.’

‘Do you pray for the repose of the soul of your poor father, God rest him?’

‘Every day, Your Grace.’

‘You’re not neglectful of your studies?’

‘No, Your Grace.’

‘And Mister MacBride looks after you well enough?’

‘He does, Your Grace.’

But there were no further conversations after the mystery guest appeared. No further visits to the drawing-room. All areas were out of bounds. Frank found himself banned from everywhere but the kitchen, ordered to sleep in the scullery and wash at the cold tap. The Sisters were suddenly everywhere, at his elbow when he bent over the jawbox to scrub the carrots and among the pots and pans when he tried to cook them, checking and rechecking his every movement, censoring all idle speculation. Every door had its turnkey. A tense silence had fallen over the house. No phones rang. He knew better than to speak to the major-domo, or even to catch his eye.

But alone among the cockroaches, night after night, Frank could hear the faint faraway sound of a young girl weeping. It haunted his dreams. He knew that the crying came from the deserted attic at the top of the house. It was the crying of a tortured soul, a cry that echoed the accumulated terrors of his native land.

The path that leads to Truth is never an easy one. And for someone raised in bigotry it can prove particularly stony. Schnozzle knew that if he relaxed his vigilance she would be gone, running down the long steps that led to the Shambles, scurrying across the wide square to the Protestant quarter where her father would be waiting for her, belt in hand, to welcome her back into heresy. But with God’s help, he told himself, that would never happen. Long days and longer nights followed, the Archbishop and the girl closeted together, going over and over again the mysteries of the true faith. She learned by rote the catechism and the creed; she recited the unfamiliar prayers till she had them word perfect; she practised her responses till they were automatic. He coached her in how to lead the rosary and how to comport herself during Mass. He explained patiently the true meaning of the miracles at Lourdes, Fatima and Knock. She was a keen pupil, with a ready grasp of the intricacies of the faith as he unfolded them to her. With the help of God, he told himself, she would make a lovely convert. By the beginning of Lent the girl knew enough about the Trinity and the mystery of Transubstantiation to pass muster and it was time to get down to what really mattered, what would make a real Catholic of her.

Sex!

As he prepared her for her first confession, he explained to her how she should examine her conscience. He probed her soul for sins. He winkled out her impure thoughts. Her innermost fantasies were exposed and analysed. He told her about hell and purgatory and the terrors that lie ahead for the unclean in spirit. He questioned her again and again about Patrick Pearse McGuffin, the gorge rising in his throat every time he pronounced the name. Had he interfered with her? Had he kissed her? Had he put his hands on her breasts? Up her skirt? How far? How often? Had she enjoyed it? What had she done in return? Chastity was as pure a virgin as any convent school girl, but she learned to answer these and other questions without tears and without embarrassment, in a spirit of thoughtful remorse.

They discussed sex in marriage, they discussed sex outside marriage. Every aspect of carnality was dissected and analysed. Like every member of his celibate profession, Schnozzle was an authority on sex. He knew with unerring certainty the Church’s position on every aspect of the marriage bed. No man in Ireland could hold a candle to Schnozzle O’Shea when it came to knowing about women and their sexuality. From the confessional he had learned of their little ways and wiles. There was not an orifice of the female body that he had not explored and dissected with the aid of the Church Fathers. He knew the precise viscosity of the mucus on the vaginal walls at the time of ovulation, and the mean temperature of the urine in the week before ovulation. To within an hour, maybe less, he could instruct the women of Ireland on the exact time for coition to fall within the morally acceptable safe period. He could advise on the best moment for conception to occur, and the best position for it. He knew every pore of their bodies, their changing smells as the cycle of fertility waxed and waned with the passing month, their swelling bellies when they were pregnant, their emissions and discharges, shows and flushes, menstrual, pre-menstrual and postnatal. He hovered vicariously at the elbow of the gynaecologists in the Mater Hospital, advising them of their moral responsibilities, giving them permission to break the waters or forbidding them from inducing labour. In all matters of reproduction he stood above contradiction. He could tell to a centimetre, to a millimetre, how far penile penetration must go for it to be within the natural law. He could calculate the degree of guilt attached to each party when anal penetration had been attempted or even considered. He could spell out, for those contemplating matrimony, the four requirements of canon law, erictio, introducio, penetratio, et ejaculatio, and how they must take their appointed order before he could be certain that a pious consummation had taken place. He knew the difference between praecox voluntare and involuntare and the respective degrees of divine wrath attaching to each. Any attempt to frustrate the fullness of the sexual act he was wise to.

Chastity took notes and learned them thoroughly before each confrontation. They devoted a month to contraception alone, leaving no stone unturned till he was sure she fully grasped the difference between mortal and venial digressions. But it all seemed to come naturally to her. When she told him on Palm Sunday that she had awakened to find the picture of the Madonna smiling at her, the crude features in Sharkey’s painting rearranged into a smile of beatific acknowledgement, he knew that her doubts and fears were behind her.