For months, I kept a photo on my mantelpiece. Whenever friends, especially priests, visited me, it was a subject of such amusement I had to hide it in a drawer. The story behind it began on a Saturday evening in midsummer.
It was my week for locking up the church. Father Duddleswell’s instructions were precise. I was to investigate and, if need be, flush out any intruder who might be hiding behind the altar or in the confessional, hoping to burgle the church after closing hours.
I never found anyone, though I confess, on cold winter’s nights, I edged the confessional open with almost as much trepidation as if it were a coffin.
On this occasion, with the sun streaming through the stained-glass windows, there was nothing more daunting in my confessional than a cardboard box. I hardly bothered to check it. It surely had nothing more in it than some of the gear used by the cleaning ladies.
I was closing the confessional door when I heard a strange sound from within. There was something in that box. Correction, someone.
It was every priest’s nightmare.
He or she was at a guess a few days old, with carrot-colored hair, small ears neat as pinecones, and a high, sheep-like bridge to his or her nose. He or she was sound asleep.
A kid abandoned like Moses, I told myself as I carried the box into the presbytery where I hurried to ask Mrs. Pring’s advice.
“Ah, isn’t he a darling,” she purred.
How did she know it was a boy?
“Whose is he, Father Neil?”
“Mine,” I said.
Father Duddleswell, sensing trouble, was snapping at my heels. “Take it back where you found it, Father Neil.”
Mrs. Pring took the baby from me. In the bottom of the box were a few nappies, a feeding bottle, a couple of safety pins, and a note scribbled in pencil: Sorry I can’t cope. Please have him cristened.
“Poor little chap,” Mrs. Pring said, rocking him.
Poor mother, I thought, to be so desperate.
“Did you look around you, lad?”
I shuddered under Father D’s accusing glare. “I didn’t think.”
“It did not occur to you, like, that the mother might be hanging around waiting to see if the kiddy was being cared for?”
I realized I should have been more circumspect.
Dr. Daley was summoned to cast a professional eye over the foundling. He declared him a fine bonny lad, healthy and well fed, and worthy to be toasted.
That night, Mother Stephen, superior of the convent, took the baby into her care. Sister Mercy was put in charge of him and she named him Mark.
I wasn’t too keen on Sister Mercy. She was a dour Lancashire lass in her mid-twenties. She was a trained nurse, but she hadn’t a spark of gaiety in her. When you addressed her, she looked just below your eyes. It was like talking to a statue.
With the baby safely housed for the night, Father Duddleswell wanted to know why I’d been chosen as the baby-minder.
I’d asked myself the same question. The Sunday before, I’d preached on Jesus’s words, “Suffer little children to come unto me,” but I hadn’t bargained on this.
Father Duddleswell thought this might give us a clue. The mother belonged to our parish. Maybe she had brought him to mass the Sunday before.
An appeal in the local paper brought no response. Hardly surprising. The black-and-white picture of him they printed looked like any baby. It didn’t bring out the shape of his nose or the redness of his hair.
At Sunday masses, we asked for anyone with information to come forward.
Father Duddleswell told me to watch the young women closely when I stepped in the pulpit in case one showed by her reaction that the baby was hers.
A girl in the third row, accompanied by an older woman, could not stifle her sobs. After mass, I found them lighting candles in front of Our Lady’s altar.
When they stood up, I asked them hesitantly, if I might be of assistance.
The elder woman whispered back, “Our Gretel here has just got herself … you know, Father.”
I was tempted to say, When the time comes don’t leave him in my confessional.
I baptized the foundling Mark Gerard. He was entered in the parish register as of unknown parentage.
What consoled me on my frequent visits to the convent was to see the change that had come over Sister Mercy. She had lost her inhibitions and become lively and outgoing.
The convent only catered for children of six and upward for whom there was no hope of adoption. Baby Mark was being treated as an exception.
He brought great happiness to the community. At recreation, the word was that Mother Stephen sometimes settled Mark on her knee, even if she did give the impression she was teaching him his catechism.
A month passed and we got nowhere in the search for the parents. I was getting worried for the little chap. Though the nuns loved him dearly, an orphanage was not the place for him. I had found him. I felt a special responsibility toward him.
I preached on the subject again. Someone somewhere must know something, I said. In case the mother was present, I crossed my fingers and described how beautiful the child was and how easy to deal with. I promised the mother I would help in any way I could.
It seemed to work. I felt vibrations from someone in the congregation. After mass, a fair-haired woman took me aside and said simply, “It’s me, Father.”
Mary Lavery had popping eyes and lines around her thin mouth. She was about thirty.
“Congratulations, Mary.” I said it warmly enough, but my heart wasn’t in it. This woman had abandoned her baby, after all.
That was before I visited her in her digs and heard her story.
She was living in one dingy room in a prewar boardinghouse that had seen better days. Her floor had no running water, and she had to walk up three flights of stairs to the bathroom. It was no place to bring up a baby.
She told me in a brogue that she hailed from County Kildare. She had been company-keeping with a lad five years younger than herself. He got her into trouble and did a bunk.
Mary was terrified to tell her family, the disgrace of it. Her father, she said, would roast her if he knew and throw her out of the house. Before the baby showed, she took the boat to England. In London, she’d found these digs and a job in a department store that just about paid for food and lodging. She had no friends.
Genuinely sympathetic now, I asked her who had helped her at the birth.
It wrung my heart to hear that she, a lonely girl in a bedsit in a foreign land, had no one to help her deliver her child in a room without even running water.
“You haven’t contacted the father, I suppose, Mary?”
“I have no idea where he is, Father. Besides, he never loved me, so what’s the point?”
I said I presumed she would want to have the baby adopted.
“I thought so, Father, until I heard you speak about my little boy. Now I’ve changed my mind. Whatever happens, I want to keep him.”
I was not too pleased to hear that.
“You promised to help, didn’t you, Father?”
Now it came to it, I hadn’t the faintest idea what to do.
“I most certainly will,” I assured her.
Keen to test her good faith, I said, “Would you like to see him?”
She closed her eyes and still the tears got through.
“Oh yes, Father.” A fierce maternal light shone out of her. “What you said from the altar made me long to hold him again. I scarcely had more than a few hours with him.”
When we reached the convent, Sister Mercy was feeding Mark, then seven weeks old.
“Sister,” I said, “Mark’s mother is here to see him.”
Far from being pleased, Sister Mercy glowered at Mary as if she were a bitter rival. Fortunately, Mary was so absorbed in her baby she didn’t notice the hostility.
I suggested to Sister Mercy that we leave for a few minutes so mother and child could get reacquainted.
In the parlor, Sister Mercy said, “You made a big mistake, Father, bringing that woman here.”
“Sister,” I said, “you mustn’t judge her too harshly. Mary will be the first to show you gratitude for what you’ve done. I’m sure she will let you see Mark from time to time if it’s possible.”
Sister Mercy hissed at me, “She is not Mark’s mother.”
My temper was becoming frayed. “How do you know?”
“Intuition.”
“A mother’s intuition, eh?”
The unforgiveable irony slipped out. Before I could apologize, Sister Mercy burst into tears and ran from the room.
I told Mary that Mark would have to stay with the sisters until all the formalities were dealt with. She had a final session with her son before returning to her digs.
Back at St. Jude’s, I was pleased to inform Father Duddleswell that I had solved the mystery of the baby.
He gave me a withering look. “Proof, please.”
“Proof?” I was taken off guard.
“Intuition is it, lad?”
Ah, the biter bit.
“The girl said, Father, she had an illegitimate baby and dumped him in my confessional. Who on earth would admit to that if she were not the real mother?”
He covered his eyes with his hands and went from wall to wall as if he were looking for someone with sense to talk to.
“Father,” I said, “you can’t feign sincerity like that.”
“You can’t,” he said in a derogatory tone. “I do it all the time.”
As he marched me around to Mary’s, I felt ashamed. I had publicly promised that if the mother identified herself she would be treated with kindness and in strictest confidence. Father Duddleswell seemed intent on publicly disgracing her.
As soon as we entered the building, Father Duddleswell said, “At least it’s clear of cockroaches. They wouldn’t dare enter a place like this.”
As I went ahead to brief Mary on what was to come, Father Duddleswell was looking for whoever was in charge of the place.
When he finally joined us, I was relieved to hear him thank Mary for coming forward so bravely. He needed, he said, her written permission to put the baby’s mother’s name in the baptismal register.
While she was writing it, he said, “When you left the baby in the church, why didn’t you put a feeding bottle in the box?”
“Didn’t I?” she said. “Oh, I remember, I couldn’t afford one, Father.”
Meanwhile I examined what she had written. It shocked me to see that the word christen was spelt correctly.
Father Duddleswell told Mary that Dr. Daley was waiting to see her in his surgery. He must have arranged this by phone before we left St. Jude’s.
On our way home, Father Duddleswell told me that, according to the landlady, Mary had been living there for two years. To ease my mind, he said he’d see to it the poor deluded woman had a better flat than the one she was presently living in.
An hour later, Dr. Daley called me. He’d examined the lass. “To put it modestly, Father Neil,” he said, “Mary, if that is her name, has never had a child.”
At this point, it came as no surprise but I was very annoyed with Mary Lavery for making me look a fool.
“Why did she do it, Doctor?”
“She saw you were fond of the kiddy, Father Neil. And at a guess, I shouldn’t wonder, she was fond of you. She wanted to look after the baby on your behalf.”
I went straight back to Mary’s place. On the way, it occurred to me that Mary, aged thirty, unmarried, probably without a boyfriend, was not an evil person. Simply a kindhearted lonely woman, unbalanced by adversity, living in fantasyland.
I didn’t get to speak with her. According to the landlady, she had gathered up her few belongings, paid her bill, and left.
The weeks of summer passed, and there was still no sign of Mark’s mother. The boy was flourishing.
One day, I found Sister Mercy so upset I was afraid that Mark was ill.
“I’m being moved,” she sobbed.
“To another job up north?”
She shook her head.
“Where, then?”
“Manila in the Philippines.” She pressed the baby to her. “I’m not sure I can bear to leave him.”
I did not sympathize too much for fear of making her situation harder to bear.
“He’s like my own son, Father. He loves me. He needs me.”
“You mean,” I said gently, “you need him.”
“Both,” she said. “That’s what love is, isn’t it?”
Mark was gazing up at her with round eyes and wide-open mouth, gurgling, wriggling, talking to her with every limb.
For the first time since finding him, I was really angry. I sensed Mother Stephen was behind this. She was a fanatic for obedience. She was moving Sister Mercy to test her vocation, as if living with her was not Purgatory enough. Doubtless she felt Sister Mercy was too attached to the child, as if it were some sort of sin. Maybe she was plain jealous.
Without any qualms, I barged into her office. I didn’t bother to knock. That’ll show the bitch.
I roundly accused her of inhumanity. Didn’t she realize the baby needed someone special to take care of him? Was it right that at this critical stage of his development Mark should be twice orphaned for the sake of some religious scruple that Jesus would not have approved of?
All the while she sat behind her desk, looking at me like an icicle forming. Then, when I ran out of steam and was beginning to think I’d made a right fool of myself:
“You misjudge me, Father Boyd.”
Two months earlier, she explained, the Mother General in Rome had asked for Sister Mercy to be put in charge of a new orphanage in Manila.
“I begged for a postponement, Father, and it was granted.”
She held up a letter.
“This came last week. I am told that Sister Mercy is vital to the success of our new venture. I telephoned our Mother General. She tried for a replacement but failed.”
I was totally becalmed. Not a puff of wind in my sails.
She took out a photograph. It showed a ward crowded with brown-skinned babies, all undernourished.
“Sister Mercy was trained for this, Father. Our Blessed Lord is calling her to this. I wanted to delay things for Mark’s sake. But”—she gestured sadly—“God’s will.”
I apologized, but she told me not to worry. Her vocation had fully prepared her for ignorant insults like this.
I asked if I could borrow the photo and she agreed.
Outside the office, I ran into Father Duddleswell. He had obviously been kept in touch.
“Poor Sister Mercy,” I said. “It would have been better for her if she’d never seen that baby.”
He sat me down next to him on a bench so highly polished your backside skated all over it.
“Listen to me,” he said briskly. “Never say or suggest anything of the sort to Sister Mercy.”
I didn’t care much for his tutorial tone. “As if I would,” I said.
“Pain is the proof of love, is that not so? What do you want for her, a painless love? Impossible even for the Almighty. Tell her to be glad of the pain, cherish it, keep it always fresh in her. Tell her she is blessed to have a heart of flesh and not of stone. Tell her if she felt nothing, it would mean she had no love for Mark, nor for anyone else.”
I went to the sisters’ chapel to pray. What irony, I told the Lord. Sister Mercy, true to her vocation, had guarded herself against falling in love with a man, only to lose her heart to a child?
She had got the child to sleep when I returned. She was sitting beside the cot with her hands joined, her eyes closed. She knew who it was, but she made no attempt to look at me when I entered the room.
“Sister, I have a photograph.”
“I’ve seen it,” she said in a level voice. “I do understand that I must go from here. Only, Mark seems so much more real to me than anything I’ve ever known. He’s part of me. When I feel his little hand in mine …” Tears trickled down her cheek. “I never felt weak before. This will break me, I’ll never be the same.”
“You won’t be the same, Sister, I agree. But not broken.”
She shook her head as if to say, Yes, I will.
“You won’t believe this, Sister, but Mark has changed you a lot already. Because that little boy loves you, you are not weaker but stronger than before. Think of him when you are looking after those hundreds of orphan children in Manila.”
She promised to try.
Father Duddleswell once said to me that some people spend their entire lives doing heroic deeds. Yet they persist in thinking, “If only I could do one really worthwhile thing before I die.” In that quiet curtained room, I repeated this to Sister Mercy.
“You love Mark and he loves you.”
She nodded.
“You have made his earliest days very happy, Sister, and his gift to you is to make you a new person. If you died tomorrow, this sacrifice of yours is your one worthwhile thing.”
She smiled a weak smile but, when I left, her eyes were still tightly closed.
When Sister Mercy sailed for the Philippines, Mark was put in charge of Sister Elizabeth, a middle-aged, down-to-earth Londoner. She was efficient but not nearly as warm as Mercy had become.
Mother Stephen warned us that if Mark’s mother was not found by the New Year, he would have to be transferred to a home with better facilities.
I redoubled my efforts, asking questions on my parochial visits, preaching again at every Sunday mass. “It would be a tragedy,” I said, “if this little boy is put in an institution for life.”
No one came forward.
I had given up hope when, one evening, a plain, squarely built girl, rang the doorbell and asked for me.
“It’s about that baby, Father.”
I did not want to be bitten twice.
“Which baby are you talking about?”
“The redhead I put in your confessional. He’s mine.”
“You are Mark’s mother?” I said dubiously.
“I wanted him called Sydney.”
Father Duddleswell’s skepticism had got through to me and it showed.
“Why didn’t you say so, miss …”
“I’m Judy, Judy Phelps. I didn’t say so because I didn’t think I had the right.”
“Would you mind writing something down for me? Good.”
I told her the word and she wrote cristened.
I shot up in my chair. “Did you deliver him yourself?”
“To the church, yes. In an apple box.”
“I meant deliver him when he was born.”
She bit her lip at such a silly suggestion. “No, my friend, Sal, she did the necessary. We share a flat in Elmwood Road.”
I went to see Sal, a big myopic girl who kept her legs tucked under her on the settee while she worked her way through a box of chocolates. She didn’t offer me one. Obviously not a Catholic.
Sal confirmed that she had acted as midwife when the red-haired little fellow came into the world. I asked her confidentially, if she knew who the father was.
“Dunno. Judy’s a close ’un. She didn’t say and I didn’t ask. That way you hear no lies, do you?”
“Can’t you at least tell me where she used to work?”
Father Duddleswell thought it more likely that this time the true mother had been found. He advised me to try and worm out of Judy the father’s name.
“I can’t tell you,” she said firmly.
“Can’t or won’t?”
“Daren’t, Father. He can’t do nothing. He’s got what you might call family ties.”
“He’s married, you mean.”
She made a face but didn’t answer point-blank.
Before the baby was born, she had been in service. She admitted that she’d worked for a former naval officer and his wife in a fashionable district.
“The husband wasn’t the culprit, Judy?” I was only forthright because of my concern for Mark.
She bowed her head and turned crimson.
“Didn’t he offer to pay maintenance?”
“Ten bob a week, Father. But when I gave the baby up, I didn’t bother.”
“Ten shillings,” I said. “You swear to that?”
“The dad,” she said, crossing her heart, “offered me ten bob a week.”
I was disgusted that Mark’s father, unquestionably a prosperous man, had been so niggardly.
“Captain Donaldson?”
A couple of quid had restored Sal’s memory. She told me the name and address of Judy’s last employer.
A stylish, neat, plausible-looking man opened the door of his Georgian home in an up-market street.
“Yes?” He looked a trifle apprehensive, but it may only have been my clerical collar.
“It’s about Judy.”
He didn’t even need to ask, Judy who?
“I see.” He put his finger to his lips and invited me in. “My youngest daughter is upstairs. She naturally knows nothing about this.”
He led me into an expensively decorated lounge. I was beginning to hate the guy. It was maybe due to my working-class background.
“Sherry?”
I was not in a drinking mood. “No, thank you.”
I just had time to notice a happy family photograph on the mantelpiece. What hypocrisy that was.
“Judy’s had it, then? You have come about that, I take it?”
I didn’t like the sound of “it” and “that” as a way of referring to an innocent baby.
The captain heaved a sigh as he poured himself a large whiskey.
“I was very sorry about it, believe me. I warned her to be careful, I really did. But she didn’t take any precautions.”
“Didn’t she?” My hostile tone cannot have escaped him.
“No point in apportioning blame, is there?” and he had the temerity to wink at me and sip some more whiskey. “You’re a man of the world, Padre, you know how these things come about.”
His cavalier attitude got my back up. I expected something better from a so-called gentleman.
“I don’t, as a matter of fact,” I said.
He shrugged. “Censoriousness helps no one.” He drained his glass in almost a single gulp. “We can only do our best in the circumstances.”
“Like turning her out?”
“Look, my dear chap, I could hardly have her stay on here, could I? Think of my position.”
I gazed pointedly at his well-stocked drinks cabinet.
“You might have offered her more than ten shillings a week?”
“What? Did she say that?”
He was on the run. He realized I knew more than he thought.
“She swears that was all you offered her. You mean you offered her more?”
“She’s fibbing, Padre.”
“How much, then?”
“A hundred pounds cash.”
“A hundred?”
That was a lot. I was thinking, Why wasn’t Judy straight with me?
“I also assured her, Padre, if she needed more till she sorted herself out, she had only to come to me. Provided, of course, she didn’t upset my wife and daughters.”
I was taken off guard. I’d expected him to be more in denial than he was.
“Judy said you haven’t even bothered to come and see the baby.”
“Why should I? That butcher’s lad she was walking out with—”
He came to a deathly halt before slowly stabbing himself with his finger.
“You don’t think that I—?”
Like a true gentleman, without another word, he handed me my hat and escorted me to the door.
Outside, I was shaking with a mixture of fury and embarrassment. First, I’d got the wrong mum; now, I’d accused the wrong dad. The boy’s father was not a naval captain but a butcher boy.
I also cursed myself. One look at the captain should have convinced me he couldn’t possibly have been Mark’s dad. My only excuse was I was so angry these days, I was seeing red everywhere.
Moments later, a curious thing happened. In the next street from where the captain lived, I found myself looking into a shop window. It was hung with carcasses.
It was a butcher’s shop. Could it be the butcher’s shop?
I peered in and what did I see but a larger version of Mark. A brawny young man with carrot-colored hair, small ears, and a sheep-like nose. The resemblance was uncanny. I’d have picked him out of an identity parade of thousands.
The lad was finishing serving an elderly woman. He must have noticed me gawping at him. He can’t have liked the look of my collar, either.
He dropped his chopper with a clang, whipped his apron off, and scuttled out the back door. I raced after him, only to see a pair of heels disappear over an eight-foot wall. In the dark, I skidded on the greasy tiles, fell over, and badly twisted my knee.
When I returned to the shop, the owner said, “Where did you come from?”
“Saint Jude’s,” I said, wincing.
“You seen our Jim, Reverend?”
“He had to go out for a bit,” I said.
“Where?”
“He didn’t say. Is Jim married?”
“Not to my knowledge.” The boss was puzzled. “Can I help you?”
“A leg of lamb, please.” I have no idea why I said it. Maybe because of Jim’s nose.
“A whole leg?”
“Yes, please.”
“Got your ration card? You don’t mind me asking.”
I pretended to search my pockets. Mrs. Pring kept the ration books.
“I seem to have forgotten it. Maybe you could let me have a few scraps for the dog?”
“For the dog?”
“Well, to be precise, the next-door neighbor’s dog.”
He put a few smelly bones into a brown paper bag. I dumped them in the nearest dustbin and limped home. For the next week, I used a stick I borrowed from Doc Daley. He only had one and it was white. Father Duddleswell’s comment on it was not original.
I kept quiet about my encounter with Captain Donaldson but I did tell Judy I’d run into her boyfriend, “Jim—”
“Gallagher.” She completed the name for me, with evident relief.
“Jim’s the one who offered you ten shillings a week?”
She nodded. “And the odd pound of sausages.”
“And he won’t admit to being the dad?”
She nodded again.
“Look,” I said, not wanting to be made a fool of a second or was it a third time? I was losing count. “You are one hundred percent sure that Jim is the dad?”
“Who else could it be?”
I almost said it could be Jim’s boss for all I knew.
“I have no idea, Judy. You tell me.”
“What funny ideas you priests get into your heads,” she said.
I could feel myself blushing.
“What are these family ties Jim’s got?”
“His dad. His missus walked out on him when Jim was a baby and he don’t want Jim making the same mistake he did.”
Late one afternoon, I called on Jim’s dad with some trepidation. He lived in a narrow, terraced house in a blind street. The front door opened directly onto the pavement and the pavement onto a busy road. The downstairs window had been smashed and repaired with a piece of cardboard.
I had prepared an elaborate speech that I promptly forgot as soon as the door opened. Mr. Gallagher Senior was baby Mark miraculously transformed into middle age.
The family resemblance in succeeding generations was a case study in itself. As if there is a conveyor belt in heaven turning out sandy-haired males with tiny ears and sheep’s noses.
“I was having my nap, wasn’t I?” spoken in a rancid voice. “I don’t want no raffle tickets.”
I instantly recognized him. He usually wore a cap and an overall with a badge on the pocket. He was our milkman. He rose at four every morning in all kinds of weather, hence the need for a siesta.
What distinguished him from Mark was the ruddy face, the chilblained fingers, and the cold gray eyes like old sixpences.
“No raffle tickets,” I said, holding my hands up, “honest.”
He led me into the grubbiest kitchen I’d ever seen. Nothing had been washed in days, including a dozen empty milk bottles.
“I know what you’re here for,” he grumbled, “and I don’t want to hear a word.”
He sat me down next to a cage where a cream-colored ferret was glaring at me through the bars with pink eyes. Instinctively, I fingered my collar.
“It’s all one big lie,” Mr. Gallagher said, as if he were commenting on the state of world.
He started to roll a cigarette. He economized on tobacco, as Father Duddleswell would’ve done if he had smoked, and bit the ends off like jagged fingernails.
“Your son got a girl into trouble, Mr. Gallagher.”
“That’s her story and she’ll stick to it like paint, I daresay. You can’t trust women, none of them. I don’t want my Jim made a fool of like I was. Have you thought someone else might be the dad?”
I almost said several. In view of the baby’s looks, apart from Jim, the only other possible culprit was him.
Leaning back too close to the cage, I felt sharp claws rip my sleeve open from shoulder to cuff.
“I don’t know who this Jezebel is, mister, but she can’t have my Jim, see. I raised that lad and fed him and learned him. There’s him and me and that’s all I care about. Another thing.”
“Yes?” I said apprehensively, trying to pull the slit sides of my sleeve together.
“I’ve got rotten toothache.”
“I know when I’m not wanted,” I said.
He thumbed toward the door. “Saves me telling you.”
I wasn’t usually saucy with my elders but I pointed to the cage. “That ferret. You and him should change places.”
On my way to Judy’s place, I was thinking that Gallagher Senior was a classic case of a deserted husband nursing a grievance half as old as himself. His son was all he had in the world and all he wanted. There was precious little chance of Jim accepting Mark as his own in the circumstances.
I was chatting to Judy when who came in but Jim. I nearly hit him with my stick.
When he got over the shock of seeing me again, he admitted he was scared stiff of his dad.
“I like Judy a lot, I really do, but I ain’t got nothing saved up.”
If they married, they’d have nowhere to live. His dad had allowed no woman in the house since his mum left.
“Jim,” I said, “wouldn’t you at least like to see your son?”
“I didn’t bargain on no baby, did I, mister? Never did like ’em much. I prefer me mates.”
I went home depressed. There was no future for Mark with that couple. Besides, I wanted something better for him than a father who preferred his mates and took orders from a grandfather who lived in a squalid little house in a sunless street.
Back at St. Jude’s, I found Dr. Daley cadging a drink from my parish priest. I told them both the bad news, ending with, “That’s why I’m suggesting they put the baby up for adoption.”
Doc Daley knew Mr. Gallagher. “Not a bad old stick, Father Neil. Whenever Jimmy was ill, he used to bring him to me like a shot.”
“Better a poor father than none,” Father Duddleswell said. “And a poor grandfather, too, come to that.”
“But that couple has nothing,” I said.
“Nothing?” he echoed mischievously. “What more do they need?”
I help up my hands in surrender.
“Donal here and meself, we are followers of King Solomon. For us, there is nothing new under the sun.”
“Especially his jokes,” said Dr. Daley.
“For youngsters like Judy and Jim, now, the world is but a pup. They will look back on these days and drool over them as the best in their lives. Why? Not because they are different from all the rest but because they hold the best thing there is, their shining youth.”
“Me, now,” Dr. Daley whistled, holding out his glass for a refill, “I’m still waiting for the good old days to arrive.” He pointed to the bottle. “C’mon, Charles, help the good old days come my way before it’s too late.”
“It’s all very well,” I said, “but Jim’s dad won’t have them in the house and I’ve tried everything.”
“You hear that, Donal? Me wizard of a curate has tried ev-e-ry-thing.”
Again that infuriating smile, suggesting that as a priest I was still at the five-finger exercise stage.
“You’ve so far relied on jaw, jaw, jaw, lad. Did not Sister Mercy teach you anything?”
Out of my depth, I held my tongue.
“Leave it to me,” he said, leading me into even deeper water, “assisted by me dear old friend.”
“Surely not me?” said an alarmed Dr. Daley.
“I was referring,” he said, “to Mother Stephen.”
New Year’s Eve fell on a Saturday. Father D and I were hiding in a room off the convent parlor, waiting for the milkman. It was almost 7:00 p.m.
Gallagher Senior collected his week’s money on Saturday evenings. Jim helped him after he finished work at the butcher’s.
We could hear Mother Stephen at the door, offering Mr. Gallagher a New Year’s present.
Father Duddleswell shivered. “It has cost me a pretty penny already, Father Neil.”
We listened to Mother Stephen inviting the milkman in for a drink.
“Thank you kindly, ma’am,” he said. “I can only stay a minute or two.”
He was probably glad of a warm in front of the fire and a drink to cheer him up on that dark cold end-of-the-year evening.
Mother Superior led him into the parlor where there was a big fire in the hearth. Sister Elizabeth was caring for Mark, now seven months old. He’d been fed and was in a good humor.
“Sister,” Mother Stephen said, “kindly fetch this gentleman a drink. I take it, Mr. Gallagher, you won’t object to a glass of Jameson’s whiskey?”
“No,” he said, his eyes brightening up. He was maybe afraid it might be orange juice.
Mother Stephen withdrew and Sister Elizabeth said to Mr. Gallagher, “Would you be so good as to hold this little one for me, sir?”
“Well, I dunno about—”
Mark was deposited in his arms while he was still making his mind up.
Through the slightly open door, I saw the milkman rocking the baby nervously. Eventually, he glanced at him and there followed the most fantastic double-take. He couldn’t believe his eyes. The baby was the spitting image of his Jim.
He started to get agitated, puffing and blowing.
Was this confusion or white anger? If anger, I was prepared to rush in before he threw Mark in the fire. Father Duddleswell restrained me.
Mr. Gallagher’s face was a melting pot of emotions. He could not take his eyes off this child. If a bomb had gone off outside, he would not have heard it.
Collapsing in a chair, he stroked the baby’s cheek.
“’Ello, little feller,” he said with a squeak, “who are you, then?”
Father Duddleswell nudged me. In his view, it was a great beginning. I was not so sure.
Sister Elizabeth returned with a bottle of whiskey and a glass.
“Mind me asking, ma’am. Who this might be?”
“I’m so sorry to have kept you,” Sister Elizabeth said, not answering. “I’ll take him from you.”
“No, leave ’im a bit. He’s a nice little ’un.”
“He’s very nice.”
“Where’d he come from, m’um?”
“He’s local. Home-grown, you might say.”
“I know a butcher’s lad,” he said. “’E wouldn’t be a relation, I suppose?”
“I couldn’t possibly say,” said Sister Elizabeth.
Mr. Gallagher confirmed my worst suspicions. He suddenly turned nasty.
“Hold this, m’um.” He placed the baby in Sister Elizabeth’s arms. “I want to get someone from outside.”
“Does he want a drink, too?”
“’E’ll get more than that when I lay me hands on ’im.”
He rushed out with a spiteful look on his face.
“This is a disaster,” I whispered to Father Duddleswell and he did not disagree.
Within a minute, the milkman was back, dragging Jim by the ear.
Sister asked Mr. Gallagher to hold the baby while she went to fetch another glass.
“Look at this ’ere baby,” Mr. Gallagher said hoarsely. “Go on, look at ’im. You gormless lying so-and-so.”
Jim looked and what he saw knocked his head back.
“Your double. A coincidence, is it?”
“Well, I—”
“And you swore black’s blue.”
“I couldn’t be sure, Dad,” Jim broke in with a kind of stutter.
“Why didn’t you own up, you great-crested twit?”
Jim said, “I knew you’d be furious, that’s why.”
“’Course I’m bloody furious.” The milkman smiled crookedly. “Fancy letting my flesh and blood stay in a place like this, with penguins.”
Father Duddleswell winked at me in triumph. The milkman’s face was aglow with the realization that his son was not all he had in the world. Jim was not his only future. He had a future after his future. He was a grandfather.
“They’re friendly enough, the penguins are,” Jim said in his defense.
“They’re like women, ain’t they, Jim? Y’ think I want my … grandson growing up like a sissy.”
Father and grandfather were cooing in chorus when the chief penguin brought an extra glass.
Mr. Gallaher said, “This kid’s ours. You can tell. This one”—a poke at Jim—“he’s the guilty party.”
“But,” Mother Stephen said haughtily, “he has never been to see him.”
“I didn’t come,” Jim said, “’cause I didn’t know.”
Mother Stephen sharply took the baby, saying he had to be bathed and put to bed.
Jim and his dad left without touching their drink. The milkman was asking, “Are you going steady with the mum?” And Jim said, “We’re talking.”
Jim and Judy shyly informed me the next day that the talking was over. Jim’s dad insisted they live with him after the wedding.
According to Sister Elizabeth, for the next couple of weeks, Mr. Gallagher was sprinting on his rounds, ending up at the convent for a ten-minute session with the baby. Two extra pints of milk were delivered daily free of charge.
I married the young couple. Judy was in white, “pretty as a bottle of milk,” as Mr. Gallagher noted with approval.
I don’t suppose they were ideal parents for my little foundling but, like everyone else, Mark had to be satisfied with what he was given.
Grandpa tidied himself up for the occasion and looked ridiculously happy as though his youth had been restored to him, which, in a sense, it had.
The wedding was embarrassing to me because Judy had felt obliged to invite her previous employers. Outside the church, while the photographs were being taken, Captain Donaldson approached me and shook my hand.
I began to apologize, but he stopped me. Speaking out of the corner of his mouth, he whispered, “To be honest, Padre, when you dropped in on my place, my first thought was, So this is the guilty father.”
He smiled and returned to his wife who was waiting for him in their Rolls.
As to that photograph, I soon rescued it from my drawer and put it back on my mantelpiece where it belonged.
It showed a radiant bride and groom holding a nine-month-old baby boy who could not possibly have been anyone else’s.