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Authors: Thomas Fleming

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BOOK: Hours of Gladness
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W
earing his best black suit, a red rosary entwined around his bony old hands, Sunny Dan Monahan lay in the parlor of Corrigan's Funeral Home in a steel-lined mahogany casket that was worth $6,000. The undertaker had rearranged his face to remove the terrified expression he was wearing when he died. He looked contented, as if he were thinking back over his long life and finding little to complain about.
The old and the middle-aged Irish-Americans of Paradise Beach and a few of the young turned out to pay their respects to the fallen chieftain. Dick O'Gorman sat beside Barbara O'Day and listened to endless anecdotes about local and national elections that meant nothing to him. The stories were mostly about stealing votes in clever ways, by bribing or intimidating election officials.
This was apparently a form of heroism among the American Irish. The more votes they stole, the greater the feat. It was amazing how they had carried intact to
America the corrupt habits they had acquired from English landlords in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Another set of stories was less surprising to O'Gorman. These were tales of largesse, of money loaned and favors done, a son placed in a government job, a brother-in-law rescued from a jail sentence, an aged mother admitted to the city hospital free of charge. They might have derived, with the details changed of course, from the Ireland of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when the heads of great Irish families presided over miniature kingdoms, with hundreds of relations, followers, poets, musicians, in their retinues.
Sunny Dan had no poets, but the people who sang his praises in the nasal accents of North Jersey were sincere. It made O'Gorman wistful that he had been born too late to witness and perhaps enjoy this chapter of Ireland's diaspora. While he listened and smiled, he kept seeing and hearing Tommy Giordano's loathsome face. To O'Gorman it was the face of capitalism in all its naked venality. The Irish-American political machines had been a feudal interlude that the ruthless who-gets-what of capitalism had swept away.
What would Barbara O'Day think of him if she discovered he had sacrificed her father to this Sicilian Moloch? She must never find out, as least as long as Dick O'Gorman was in America. And in Barbara, of course. She had fled to him for solace last night, when they were alone in the big house. Solace and something deeper, something unspoken that he was uneasily waiting to hear tonight.
“I don't think much of this fookin' wake,” Billy Kilroy said. “You can barely find a drink.”
By Irish standards, Billy was right. Corrigan's Funeral Home had no facilities for serving liquor, and it was considered unseemly to drink in the same room with the corpse, a prohibition that astonished Billy. But a steady supply of liquor was supplied to all comers in Corrigan's office, where Wilbur Gargan, gigantic proprietor of the Golden Shamrock, had set up a temporary bar.
At 9 P.M. Father McAvoy arrived to say the rosary. His pants were a size too large for him and so was his coat. He was a makeshift priest if there ever was one, with his wan, humble face, his routine pieties. Father Hart was still a sick man. He sent his apologies. Father McAvoy would say the funeral mass tomorrow.
At ten, after the last of the mourners had departed, Barbara and her sisters said a final prayer before Dan's bier and then went home. Once more, Billy and Mick continued their drinking at the Golden Shamrock or elsewhere, and O'Gorman had Barbara Kathleen to himself. She was as wild as a teenager until he subdued her. For a few minutes she lay contentedly in his arms. Then came the unspoken thing he had sensed, between the wildness and the final surrender.
“I have enough money now. Enough for both of us. This house is worth two hundred thousand dollars. He's leaving most of it to me. My sisters don't need it. We can go away. You can get a divorce in Nevada for almost nothing.”
A cold wind blew in O'Gorman's mind. What would this woman say and do when she found out that Dan had mortgaged the house to Tommy Giordano? She would kill him and he would not blame her. She would order her behemoth ex-marine son to kill him. Strenuous efforts had to be made to prevent her from finding out this appalling truth until O'Gorman had left America with the weapons, the wonderful weapons that would shoot down British helicopters and, if this failed to produce a troop withdrawal, British commercial planes.
“How I'd love to go with you tomorrow,” he whispered. “But there's something I must do first. I think I'd better tell you who I really am. I'm a colonel in the Irish Republican Army. Billy and I are here to buy guns that will be smuggled ashore here in a few days. A week's time at most.”
“You lied to me?” she cried, sitting up in bed, her fists clenched. He had never seen such ferocity in a woman. “That stuff about your wife was a lie?”
“No,” he said, drawing her down against him again, confident of his mastery of the female. “That was true and now I'll tell you another truth. I'll go with you. Wherever you say. I'm sick of the killing. I'm ready to quit the business. But I have to fulfill this last contract. Otherwise they'd come after me. They'd track me down and kill us both.”
“You're not lying?” she said, almost hysterical. “I couldn't stand it if you lied to me too.”
Thirty years apart, the two loves, one American, one Irish, were still fused in her mind. The female of the species was far more incomprehensible than the male.
“I'm not lying,” he said, and almost believed it. O'Gorman had told so many lies to so many women, he no longer thought of them as untruths. They were gifts, lovely illusory pearls of hope with which he draped their willing bodies for a while. Only much later would they perceive their beauty.
Oh. Oh. Oh, spoke Deirdre in the eternal silence. You faithless bastard.
Hearts were made to be broken, O'Gorman replied. Your IRA heroes have broken my heart and I am breaking yours. It is a triumph of justice, not revenge. Yes, when you considered the size of O'Gorman's heart, its desire to embrace not merely Ireland but the whole battered, bleeding world of the poor, the hungry, the oppressed in its thwarted embrace, a thousand broken female hearts were justified. None of their little hearts or minds nor all of them together, including yours, my sowish wife, can approach the power and the glory of the revolution Dick O'Gorman dreamt and lost.
Yes, lost. He faced in the silence the other thing he had seen when he'd confronted Tommy Giordano. The knowledge that the IRA were turning into thugs just like this man, extorting money from businessmen, taxi drivers, even the working poor, and spending it as they pleased. They were a long way from living in Giordano's Italianate splendor, but he saw in communist Ireland's
future the same corruptions that had made the revolution a bitter joke in Russia, China, Cuba. Limousines and vacation houses and seven-course dinners for party members, hovels and gruel and ten-hour days for the rest.
Maybe, incredible thought, he was telling Barbara Kathleen the truth. Maybe he was truly sick of it all. Maybe he was ready to go with her to Bermuda or Miami or Los Angeles and spend the Mafia's million and a half dollars. Maybe Deirdre and the IRA deserved this ultimate act of unfaith.
He grew hard again at the very thought of it. He placed Barbara's hand on his pulsing member and whispered one more O'Gorman truth. “There's your promise. Your promise and your fulfillment, my darling.” With exquisite care, he slipped it into her depths, into the inner world of pleasure and pride that obliterated for a little while the outer world of humiliation and frustration.
As he stroked her, another meaning grew in O'Gorman's mind. He was fucking them all in this supremely symbolic act, not merely Barbara Kathleen's innocence, which deserved to be fucked because it was innocence, but the Irish-Americans who had fled the challenge of agonized Ireland to make money in America; fucking America too because these fugitives and their progeny were no longer Irish—the immense quantities of money and meat and milk and sweets they had consumed in a century had turned them into Americans, quantifiers of greed in the name of more greed and power and pleasure.
In his Irish soul O'Gorman fucked all these things, invented by England and reinvented, polished, emblazoned, perfected, by their American capitalist descendants. He fucked this daughter of Moloch on behalf of the wretched of the earth, but ultimately out of an ancient Irish refusal to accept the world as created because in his soul he envisioned an immensely better one, a world of exquisite purity and perfection inhabited by saints.
Ahhhhhh. His semen gushed into her body, the second
coming, the best, the most prophetic kind. There you are Kathleen, there's O'Gorman's promise.
 
 
The next day, Billy Kilroy groaned and whimpered about his hangover. Mick glowered at O'Gorman, making him regret he had not taken the precaution of retreating to his own room last night. The limousines ferried them to Corrigan's for one last look at Sunny Dan. Barbara and her sisters wept and the coffin lid came down. They drove to the packed church and stood, sat, knelt, as Father McAvoy droned through the mass.
He continued to confirm the impression O'Gorman already had: the fellow was a hopeless clod. He had trouble finding some of the prayers in the big, gold-trimmed altar missal. He knocked over the chalice and spilled some of the wine on the altar linens. But his sermon was touching; he pictured Dan before the bar of heaven, telling God that he had done his best to practice the theological virtues, faith, hope, and charity, especially charity.
The interment was in a cemetery in the city, where the Monahan family had a plot. O'Gorman and Kilroy rode with Barbara, Mick, and the priest, McAvoy. No one had much to say until they wound through the city's black ghetto again. Barbara said the littered streets and wrecked houses made her glad they had fled to Paradise Beach. Mick said nothing.
The cemetery itself was a dismal sight. Many of the tombstones had been knocked over or defaced. Especially shocking was the desecration of the mausoleum of the city's erstwhile leader, Frank Hague, who had built the political organization that had once ruled the state. The stained-glass window had been smashed, the sides spray-painted with incomprehensible slogans such as 77X-YANI. O'Gorman asked Mick what they meant and he just shrugged.
At the grave, a thin, balding, sour-mouthed man in unpressed corduroys and a dirty sweater approached Barbara. “Sorry for your trouble,” he said.
She stepped back as if she was afraid he might touch her. “Thank you,” she said.
“You too, Mick,” he said.
Mick looked at him as if he were an insect he might squash. “Thanks,” he said.
Afterward, rolling back to the shore, O'Gorman asked Barbara who he was. “My husband,” she said.
“He's Mick's father?” O'Gorman said, pretending he knew nothing about the true story.
“Yes,” Barbara said in a small voice, almost a whisper.
“He must have inherited all his muscles from your side of the family.”
“I guess he did.”
Trying to restore or create some cheer, O'Gorman asked Mick what he had done in the marines. Getting nothing but surly monosyllables, O'Gorman soon gave up. That left no one but Father McAvoy. He began talking to him about Maynooth Seminary and the church in Ireland.
“I almost went there myself,” O'Gorman said. “My best friend at Clongowes was going and almost succeeded in talking me into it.”
“Really,” Father McAvoy said.
“Yes. He's now the bishop of Galway.”
“Oh, yes. Monsignor Finnegan. A wonderful man.”
“He is indeed. But not terribly bright, Father. It makes me wonder if I shouldn't have gone to Maynooth. I think I could have beaten him out for a job like that. It must be a pleasant life, with hot and cold running cooks and butlers and your car and chauffeur.”
Father McAvoy nodded and smiled feebly, granting him the jape. It was all perfectly jolly, but behind the smiles Dick O'Gorman's cold brain was at work. The correct name of the bishop of Galway was Flanagan, not Finnegan. Wasn't it a bit odd that a priest would forget the
name of the bishop who had probably paid his tuition at Maynooth?
Joey Zaccaro had been killed and his money stolen by someone who had recently arrived in Paradise Beach. Father McAvoy had been there exactly ten days.
Maybe Billy Kilroy would have some use for his Zastava after all.
“I
f you weren't in Paradise Beach in the fourth week in March, I'd swear you had malaria,” Dr. Vincent Butler said to Father Hart.
“It isn't just the flu?” Father Hart said, wiping the sweat from his streaming neck.
“It must be the flu. It can't be malaria. But the way you've been sweating, the way it goes away for about eight hours and then returns … .”
Butler had been a doctor on Guadalcanal during World War II and had seen a lot of malaria. He was a big, gruff man, married to a Monahan cousin. Something of a hypochondriac, Father Hart had gone to him four or five times over the previous ten years, convinced he was dying of illnesses as various and fatal as nephritis, cancer of the bladder, and a tumor on the brain. Dr. Butler had briskly dismissed Hart's symptoms and told him he was the healthiest priest in the diocese. Nevertheless they got along fairly well as fellow professionals who shared a common task with the local sick.
Butler had surprised Hart by approving his attempt to launch a healing ministry at St. Augustine's. But only a handful of people showed up at the Wednesday-afternoon service, and they soon dwindled to eighty-six-year-old Emma Murtagh, who wanted God to heal her arthritis of the spine to prove Dr. Butler did not know what he was doing. Father Hart had prayed fervently for her, but by the time Emma died she was bent almost U-shaped.
Dr. Butler left Father Hart to the gentle ministrations of his nurse, Father McAvoy. For dinner he served Hart a delicious clam broth and well-fried scallops. Hart dutifully consumed the food, even though his appetite was nil. “Can you believe it?” Father Hart said. “Dr. Butler says I've got malaria. We need a decent doctor down here.”
“Maybe you can get one from Ireland. They have a surplus there, along with priests. It's the sweepstakes money. They put so much of it into medicine, there's a saying, if someone in Connaught sneezes, they build a hospital around him.”
A violent hand seemed to be crushing both sides of Father Hart's skull. Never in his life had he had such headaches. He found himself wondering if he really wanted to go to the tropics and actually get malaria, if this flu was an imitation of the real thing.
He turned on the television to listen to the McNeil-Lehrer report. At least he would try to keep up with the state of the world. Downstairs, he heard a thump and a strange cry. Heavy feet pounded up the stairs and along the hall to Father McAvoy's room. Hart heard angry masculine voices. Clutching a blanket around him, he opened the door of his room and found himself face-to-face with the lecturer on Irish culture, Richard O'Gorman. He had a gun in his hand and an enraged expression on his face.
Father Hart recoiled. “What's going on?”
“Your friend Father McAvoy is a fraud, Father. He's a British agent. You haven't got the flu. You've got malaria—and he gave it to you.”
“I don't believe you.”
“Come take a look.” 0'German half dragged Hart down the hall to McAvoy's room. The man was sitting on the bed, blood streaming from a gash beneath his eye. Kilroy, the little Belfast freedom fighter, was holding a snub-nosed gun to McAvoy's head. Police Chief William O'Toole was going through McAvoy's suitcase. Mick O'Day stood by the window, watching the street. He too had a gun in his hand.
“He doesn't believe me. Show him,” O'Gorman said.
O'Toole picked up a small bottle of clear fluid. On the label was written in precise script
Falciparum Malaria.
On several other bottles more grisly words were written:
Doexpin, Resorcinol, Nitroprusside.
“There's enough germs in these bottles to wipe out the state of New Jersey,” O'Toole said.
“I still don't believe it,” Father Hart said. “Can you explain these bottles, Father?”
McAvoy just looked at him. It reminded Hart of the contemptuous stare he had received when he had tried to defend his antiwar sermons and marches to the archbishop. “Is your name Dennis McAvoy?” Hart asked.
“I'm Captain Arthur Littlejohn of the Yorkshire Rifles, Father, on detached duty with the Secret Intelligence Service. Your Irish friends here aren't using their real identities either. You've been talking to Black Dick O'Gorman, one of the leaders of the Provisional IRA. His little friend Billy Kilroy is wanted for at least a dozen murders in Belfast.”
“Is that true?” Father Hart asked.
“Pay no attention to him,” O'Gorman snarled.
“If you want to obey the law, you will go to the telephone and call the state police to report a conspiracy to smuggle drugs and guns into this country,” McAvoy/Littlejohn said. “You might also report a soon-to-be-committed murder.”
O'Gorman smashed Littlejohn in the face with the back of his left hand. He hit him on the other cheek with
his right hand. Littlejohn made no attempt to evade the blows. “Not murder, you limey son of a bitch. An execution. You will be tried and executed, according to the international code of military justice, which stipulates death for spies and traitors.”
“Are you going to let him stand there and mouth such nonsense, Father?” Littlejohn said. “He has no claim to being a soldier. His army is a vile fiction, a collection of Marxist thugs.”
Billy Kilroy smashed Littlejohn in the face with his pistol. “That's for me pal Brian Slattery you killed with his gun in his hand last month. Show me a fookin' limey who died better than him.”
Littlejohn fell back on the bed semiconscious. O'Toole grabbed Kilroy by the back of the neck and threw him across the room. “I told you not to do that! You can't find out where the money is from a dead man.”
“He's a long way from being dead. But he'll soon wish he was,” O'Gorman said.
He turned to Hart. “Who's side are you on, Father? We can't stop you from calling the state police. If you call them, Billy and I will simply disappear. Chief O'Toole can do what he pleases with this limey scum. The men he's assassinated in Ireland—I have personal knowledge of at least three—will go unavenged. The weapons we came here to smuggle to Belfast will be dumped into the sea.”
Father Hart's head pounded with pain; sweat soaked his pajamas; his fever was rising again. He stared down at McAvoy/Littlejohn on the bed. This was another imperialist killer, the same loathsome tribe he had risked his career in the Church to attack in 1969. This killer had given him a possibly fatal dose of malaria and simultaneously tricked him into humiliating gullibility.
Suddenly all the hours Father Hart had spent reading liberation theology, dreaming of himself as a leader of the poor, committing terrible but necessary acts of violence against the rich, all his theorizing about personal and collective
guilt, converged in this small room full of angry men with guns in their hands.
“You can do whatever you want with him,” Father Hart said. “What you have to do.”
“Can we work on him here?”
“Of course you can.”
Father Hart stumbled back to his bed and shivered and shook through the long night. From the room down the hall came unearthly cries of agony as O'Gorman and Kilroy attempted to persuade Littlejohn to tell them what he had done with the money. At first they did not believe him when he told them that he had mailed it to London. Then O'Gorman wanted the address in Dublin where the money was being laundered. Father Hart heard only fragments of this contest between a man who was prepared to suffer the worst torture and men who were ready to inflict ingenious pain on his flesh.
More than once as Hart sweated and trembled with alternating bouts of fever and chills, he imagined himself rushing into the room to gather McAvoy/Littlejohn into his arms like a lost tormented sheep. Was that what Jesus would have done? Or was the real Jesus the infuriated guerrilla leader who drove the money changers from the temple?
Shouts of anger now; the torturers were arguing among themselves. “I've had enough of this shit!” Mick O'Day roared. He stormed out of the house; his uncle Bill O'Toole pursued him to the stairs snarling curses at him.
Then it was almost dawn and Bill O'Toole was snarling at the Irishmen, “Look. He ain't gonna tell you. The money's gone. I don't give a goddamn where he mailed it. Let's kill him and get him the hell out of here.”
“Father Hart!” Littlejohn cried. “I want to see Father Hart.”
Hart stumbled out of bed again and down the hall to the room where Dennis McAvoy, the wan, humble Irishman who had somehow given Father Hart renewed confidence in his priesthood, once lived. Richard O'Gorman met him
in the doorway. “Stay out of here, Father. You're not ready for this.”
The room smelled of burnt flesh. Over O'Gorman's shoulder Hart could see McAvoy-Littlejohn tied to a chair. Blood was all over his face. “Father,” he gasped. “I'm a Catholic. I would like to confess my sins before I die.”
“Go back to bed, Father,” O'Gorman snarled.
Billy Kilroy had another gun in his hand, with a strange bulge in the bottom of the barrel. He was looking at it with something close to joy on his wizened face.
Yes, Hart thought. Yes. Go back to bed before you look at the awful meaning of the word
necessary.
Go back to bed before you disappear into the depths of McAvoy/Littlejohn's mournful eyes, which were unchanged. The sorrow you saw in them belonged to both men, the priest and the secret agent. What did that mean?
O'Gorman pointed to the gun in Kilroy's hand. “He doesn't deserve absolution. You see that? It's the gun he used to kill God knows how many innocent Irishmen. Now we're going to use it on him. That's all he deserves.”
Wasn't that decisive? Wouldn't that persuade Jesus, the guerrilla leader? The fever burned in Father Hart's body, the pain slammed in his head. Yes. It would convince Him. It would convince anyone.
As he stumbled away, Littlejohn cried out, “Father!”
Hart looked over his shoulder, seeing nothing but O'Gorman's saturnine face in the doorway, surmounted by Bill O'Toole's heavy cheeks, sagging his mouth into a caricature of a tragic mask from Aeschylus.
“Into thy hands I commend my spirit,” Littlejohn said.
Father Hart fell into his bed and drew the covers up to his chin. He lay on his side, curled into a trembling fetal ball, waiting for the blast of the pistol. It never came. Instead, a new kind of cold seemed to gather in his body, a cold deeper than the chill of malaria. It seemed to be in his body and in the room too, an intense, pervasive heatlessness that extinguished his fever like a hand snuffing a candle.
“We're just going, Father,” O'Gorman said at the door. “Going to bury him in the Pines. I'll speak to you later in the day.”
“He's dead?” Hart cried, sitting up. Why didn't O'Gorman notice the cold in the room?
“He's dead—without telling us what we wanted to know. Billy's cleaning up the mess in the room.”
Hart lay there listening to the footsteps on the stairs. O'Gorman said something about Mick O'Day. “I'll calm him down, don't worry,” O'Toole said.
The priest heard Billy Kilroy cursing to himself as he went down the hall to the bathroom. He returned, still cursing, and a scrub brush soon slithered back and forth on the floor of the room where Father McAvoy had slept in supposed celibate sanctity. The cold gathered beside Father Hart's bed like a hooded presence, a being with zeros for eyes, an empty triangle for a nose, a larger zero for a mouth. Was this Jesus the guerrilla leader?
Have mercy on us,
Father Hart prayed.
A waste of spiritual energy, that prayer. Mercy was not in this god's vocabulary.
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