The weeks leading up to Christmas seemed to be an endless succession of corny movies, most of them, as luck would have it, featuring priests and nuns and orphans. We were forced to sit through Boys’ Town, Going My Way and The Bells of St Mary’s, all of which moved Aunt Phil to tears and even made Sister Louise and Father Seymour look a little wistful. Uncle Reginald observed that Father Seymour was a cross between Spencer Tracy and Bing Crosby, which pleased Aunt Phil until he pointed out that what he meant was that Father Seymour sang like Spencer Tracy and acted like Bing Crosby.
We spent half our time lampooning Aunt Phil’s favourites. ‘He ain’t heavy, Fadder, he’s my brudder,’ Mary kept saying, as, with eyes bulging and face beet red, she strained to lift me from the chesterfield. The day after we watched yet another version of A Christmas Carol, Uncle Reginald devoted a full session of oralysis to it. He invented something called the Tiny Timometer, an instrument which measured cuteness, and said that we should take readings from it throughout Christmas, especially when corny movies were playing. Every night after that, as we sat watching the likes of Hayley Mills and Julie Andrews succumbing to the call of the convent while angels sang and light came breaking through the clouds, Uncle Reginald would consult the Tiny Timometer, take readings and announce them to the living room.
The lowest reading on the Tiny Timometer, ‘the least nauseating’, as Uncle Reginald put it, was ‘God bless us, everyone’, which he would have me say in the most puny, pathetic voice whenever some corny movie was about to start. Next nauseating on the Tiny Timometer, warranted by any scene in which Bing Crosby broke into song, was ‘Oh Mother, will there be no plum pudding this year?’ The highest reading, that of supremely nauseating, came from the mouth of, as Uncle Reginald called him, ‘That Bobsequious Cratchett’, who, shortly after being fired by Ebenezer Scrooge, said, ‘He’s not such a bad man, Mother.’ ‘He’s not such a bad man, Mother,’ Uncle Reginald would say, whenever our heroes forgave their enemies some heinous crime.
I often played Tiny Tim to Uncle Reginald’s Scrooge, or Uncle Scrooginald, as he called himself. ‘Please Mr Scrooge,’ I’d say, ‘something to eat for my little sister.’
‘I will give you,’ Uncle Scrooginald would say, ‘in exchange for your wheelchair and your sister’s crutch, and all the clothes that you and your sister have on your backs, one cup of lukewarm water.’
‘Oh God bless you, Mr Scrooge,’ I’d say, ‘God bless you, you’re a saint.’
Other times, I played Scrooge’s nephew, blurting out, ‘I say, Uncle, make merry,’ whenever Uncle Reginald was looking glum. Uncle Reginald would respond, ‘I say, nephew, if you persist in this nauseating cheerfulness, I shall make pudding of your plums.’
The relevance of A Christmas Carol to the visitations I was having was not lost on Uncle Reginald. Perhaps, he said, I should do like Scrooge, and the next time my father appeared, dismiss him as a bit of undigested beef.
‘You wouldn’t think,’ Aunt Phil said, ‘that a man would make jokes about a brother not six months in the grave.’
In the days leading up to Christmas Day, Mary kept giving me looks that told me that her annual solemn declaration of love was in the offing. Every year, Mary for some reason felt the need and somehow worked up the nerve to say she loved me. This year, she did it in a Christmas card. ‘Merry Christmas, Draper Doyle,’ the card said, ‘I love you,’ the word love underlined three times.
Nor was this year any different for what happened afterwards. As always, Mary regretted telling me she loved me the minute she did it. ‘Oh my God,’ she said, ‘I can’t believe I said “I love you” on that card.’ Mortified to the point of speechlessness by the card, I now had to reassure her that it had seemed entirely appropriate. ‘No, no,’ I said, in a tone that begged her not to pursue the matter any further. ‘It was nice.’
‘NICE?’ Mary said. ‘NICE? Nice if we were married maybe. Nice if we had about fifty kids. My God, why do I do these things, why?’
Father Seymour gave my mother a necklace, a gesture seen by most of the adults as being both charming and proper from a priest to a sister-in-law who had recently been widowed, who, for the first time in years, had no husband to give her gifts at Christmas. Aunt Phil seemed to think that the necklace would cinch my mother’s membership in Father Seymour’s Other Number. As it turned out, it had just the opposite effect. There was an awkward moment, or more like an awkward ten minutes when, on Aunt Phil’s insistence, Father Seymour tried to put the necklace around my mother’s neck. He was tall enough, but unfortunately tried to put it on from the front and stood for an embarrassing amount of time more or less face to face with my mother’s bosom, more or less embracing her, while she tried to smile and he struggled to join the clasp of a necklace for perhaps the first time in his life. No-one wanted to acknowledge the awkwardness of what was happening by telling him to put it on from behind.
There they were, my mother and Father Seymour in the middle of the room, my mother leaning as far forward in her high heels as she dared, her arms limp at her sides, as if she was terrified of somehow, inadvertently, throwing them around him, Father Seymour standing on tiptoe, trying both to get closer to the necklace and further from my mother, his whole body showing the strain of this impossibility. How precariously balanced each of them was. It looked as if, at any moment, one of them might topple forwards, straight into the arms of the other, as if this great show they were making of not touching one another would end with them falling to the floor in a kind of mad, we’ll-both-be-damned embrace right in the middle of Aunt Phil’s living room.
So we all sat there watching them, Sister Louise and Aunt Phil trying hard to seem charmed by their predicament, smiling at them. Aunt Phil kept glancing towards the front door as if she was worried that someone who might misunderstand the situation would suddenly barge in. It seemed it would never end, this strange embrace. There were shouts of what was meant to sound like mock encouragement, as if we were all so relaxed with what was happening that we really didn’t care how long it took. ‘Come on, Father,’ said Aunt Phil, using her best not-in-the-least-distressed tone of voice. ‘You can tell he hasn’t had much experience,’ Sister Louise said, which brought a great roar of laughter that trailed off badly and made everyone feel even worse. Finally, his face bursting red, Father Seymour somehow managed it, then raised his arms slowly from our mother’s shoulders as if, at the slightest touch, the necklace might come undone. ‘Ta-dah,’ someone said, and everyone applauded.
Once each year, at Christmas, after some drinks and much encouragement, Father Seymour agreed to dance, and this year was no different. He took off his jacket, removed his collar and went out into the hall, where the floor was hardwood and where he could be seen from all parts of the living room. I was relieved to see that he did not wear that eager-to-please expression which he coached the boys in his Number to wear. Instead, he stared at his feet most of the time, only now and then looking up with what might have been an expression of humility on his face, as if he was saying either that what he was doing was no big deal, or that he himself could not, perhaps absolutely would not, take any personal credit for it. How seriously they watched him, the grownups, their expressions betraying only the faintest trace of irony.
It was tap-dancing at its best that we were seeing, their faces seemed to say, a master practitioner of an ancient, now declining art. What I felt, more than anything, was sheer astonishment. It was somehow off-putting to know that the man who forgave your sins was fond of tap-dancing. Here was Father Seymour, his white socks and black shoes a blur as he went through his routine, Father Seymour without his collar, his shirt two buttons open, his chest hair showing.
There was much applause when he was finished, by which time he was sweating quite a bit, mopping his brow with his handkerchief, smiling quite boyishly, as if he was some child who each year was coaxed into dancing for his relatives. For how many years before I came along had he been doing it? I wondered. How old was this command performance?
For a moment, I could see the boy he must have been on that first occasion, grinning sheepishly when praised, looking about the room to see the effect that he was having. Now, it was as though there was a kind of sacrifice in it, a sacrifice on his part, as though, for some reason that none of them could quite have put their fingers on, it was important that once a year he indulge in this display that even to them seemed faintly absurd. How they gathered about him afterwards, shaking his hand, slapping him on the shoulder, again with only the faintest trace of irony in their smiles, as if he had suffered some humiliation on their behalf, as if they were congratulating him, not so much on his performance as on the fact that it was over for another year, on his having endured it, somehow for their sake. The Divine Ryans. Uncle Reginald said they had first been called that almost two hundred years ago.
The Christmas recital came just after Christmas, early in the new year. Father Seymour, still unwilling to own up to my mother and Aunt Phil about his failure, or rather his refusal, to make me part of the chorus, told me that I would appear on stage with the choir, not singing, of course, but pretending to sing, ‘lip-synching’, he said. ‘Just move your mouth like you’re singing the words,’ he said. When I looked doubtful, he put his hands on my shoulders. ‘Now, you’ll do it, Draper Doyle,’ he said. ‘And it will be our secret, won’t it? You don’t want to disappoint your mother, do you?’ I shook my head.
In the days leading up to the recital, my mother kept asking me to sing my part.
‘C’mon, Draper Doyle,’ she said. ‘Let’s hear it.’
‘I’m in the chorus,’ I said, trying to sound casually dismissive, ‘I can’t sing by myself.’
I was at least relieved that I would not be among the dancers, there being no known way to fake tap-dancing – tap-synching, perhaps? Moving to the sound of someone else’s feet?
The day before the concert, Aunt Phil took me to Parker’s barbershop where, for some reason, there were pictures on the wall of boys my age with various hairstyles. I say ‘for some reason’ because the only haircut Mr Parker knew was the brush-cut, which he promptly gave me. (‘Men have hair there, too,’ my mother had said. Imagine if, like the hair on your head, it just kept growing. I could see myself choosing, from pictures on Mr Parker’s wall, what style I wanted.)
I spent most of that night in front of the mirror, begging my hair to grow, pulling on it, one hair at a time. I might have used my mother’s eyebrow tweezers except I was worried that instead of making the hairs longer, I might just pull them out altogether, leaving my head completely bald, not to mention covered with red dots. I got my mother’s mirror and had a mock consultation with Methuselah.
‘Oh Great Hairless One,’ I said, ‘oh Great Wrinkled One, oh Oracle of Oracles, oh Prune of Prunes, oh Wisest of the Wise, tell me all.’
‘What is your question?’ said Methuselah.
‘Will my mother notice that I’m not singing?’ I said. That sage of sages, that centre of the world’s wisdom, just sat there, looking back at me.
The only full-length mirror in the house was in the hall, and, while they were getting ready for the recital, Aunt Phil and my mother took turns using it, going back and forth without speaking to each other. Once, they shared it, Aunt Phil standing just behind my mother. For a moment their eyes met in the mirror. My mother seemed surprised, but Aunt Phil, as if she believed she was still looking at herself, stood as my mother was standing and, in perfect imitation of her, touched her throat softly with her fingers. Then, my mother smiled and, as if to conform to what she still thought was her own reflection, Aunt Phil smiled back. Finally, something broke the spell. Aunt Phil, addressing what she now realized was my mother’s image in the mirror, said, ‘Don’t you smile at me.’ When my mother, her face protesting her innocence, gestured to the mirror, as if to accuse it of having played a trick on both of them, Aunt Phil turned away.
My mother belonged to a family even older than the Ryans, a once-great family whose fortune was long since spent, and whose members had begun to scatter even before some of them came across from Ireland in the nineteenth century. Her parents had died before I was born and her two sisters, her only close relatives, were living on the mainland. Delaney, my mother’s maiden name, was a good name according to Aunt Phil, who spoke not of good and bad families but of good and bad names. All Protestant names were bad, of course, but so were most Catholic names as far as she was concerned. A family had a bad name if it had a bad history or, even worse, no history at all. Delaney was still a good name when our mother joined the family. ‘No money but good blood’ was how Aunt Phil put it, and since the Ryans’ own fortune was declining, it must have seemed there were no real grounds for complaint. Besides all this, there was our mother herself, who, within the circle of church families in the city, was thought to have been something of a catch. People had talked about how Donald Ryan was soon to marry ‘that tall Delaney girl’. Do you, Donald Ryan, take that tall Delaney girl to be your wife? was how I had often imagined their wedding.
We walked into St Martin’s Hall together, all the Divine Ryans, made the kind of entrance we knew people were expecting, first Father Seymour pushing Sister Louise, then Aunt Phil leading me by the hand, then my mother walking side by side with Mary, and finally Uncle Reginald, not dressed in his uniform, of course, but looking impressive nonetheless, walking with that mournful grace he had, and looking about as if he really was head of the family, as if the train in front of him was his creation. Everyone turned to look at us, and a wave of whispering went down the hall. How many of them, I wondered, could have imagined my mother and Aunt Phil working at Reg Ryan’s, vacuuming beneath the caskets, polishing the brass and silver handles?
For there was Aunt Phil, the famous Philomena, and there was our mother, a fixture at her side, ‘the Young Widow’, as she was called: ‘The Young Widow,’ people whispered, as if this was her official title, bestowed upon her by the Ryans, as if she was the latest in a long and distinguished line of Young Widows. It was mostly at our mother people stared, mostly about her they whispered. ‘She’s lovely,’ people said, nodding their heads, as if that was exactly the right word. Opinion was unanimous that she was ‘lovely’, not ‘beautiful’ or ‘pretty’, but ‘lovely’, implying, it now seems to me, a kind of untouched, even untouchable attractiveness.
They stared because we were still the Divine Ryans, because it was only our fortune that was declining, and not, as people put it, ‘the family itself’. It was as if people believed that our privilege, our status, had nothing to do with money. It was as if they believed that these things were God-given, as if we were simply blessed with them the way that other people were blessed with good looks or intelligence. You could think of the Ryan house, Uncle Reginald had once said, as a kind of giant headstone for which all the Catholics of the city had chipped in, a monument to all the people who had ever read the Chronicle or been waked at Reg Ryan’s. An audience of customers is what they were, happy customers I hoped, given that Father Seymour’s Number was about to perform for them.
As the others took their seats in front, Father Seymour and I went backstage. He began to see to the dancers, who would go on first, while I put on my choir uniform. Before the recital got underway, I peeked out through the curtain. Most of the Catholic dignitaries of the city were in the front row. My mother and Uncle Reginald were sitting together, Mary beside Uncle Reginald, nodding solemnly as he whispered God knows what sort of nonsense to her. Aunt Phil and Sister Louise sat on either side of the archbishop, who would nod his head on the rare occasions when they spoke to him, but did not speak so much as one word in return, only continued to stare with apparent fascination at the empty stage. It was clearly the umpteenth such event that he had attended, and I suspected that he had mastered the art of seeming to watch and listen when in fact he neither had, nor wanted to have, the faintest idea of what was going on. I had seen him sit in just this fashion at every other performance of Father Seymour’s Number, staring straight ahead of him. Everyone acted as if the point was not to impress the archbishop, but to refrain from doing anything which would startle him into an awareness of his surroundings.
I watched from the wings as the dance recital got underway. Out came the dancers, all wearing the same look of ingenuous enthusiasm, all smiling at the archbishop as if to watch a group of orphans tap-dancing was known to be the highlight of his year, his favourite pastime. He sat there, still staring straight ahead, wearing that same look of intense concentration, as if he did not want to miss a single click of their shoes. One row came forward as the other went backward, and it went like that as the tempo gradually increased, the dancers tapping faster and faster, the rows interchanging more and more rapidly, coming closer and closer together until, the clicking of their shoes at its height, the dancers formed one row and came to the very edge of the stage, all of them smiling with wide-eyed enthusiasm at his grace, whose head was still at the same angle, so that he now appeared to be staring at their feet, or more accurately at the feet of Young Leonard, who was in the middle. There they were, Father Seymour’s dancers, at the very edge of the stage, doing their much-loved running-on-the-spot dance, in which they appeared to be fighting for balance, waving their arms, trying desperately, it seemed, not to fall forwards, though still smiling. Somehow, they moved even closer to the edge, leaned even further forward, smiling more broadly as oohs and aahs came from the audience, smiling as if to say, ‘We’re terribly close to falling, aren’t we, we’re terribly close to falling.’ (How many boys had been lost, Uncle Reginald asked me later, in practising this manoeuvre?)
The dancers were a huge success. As they left the stage, tap-dancing one by one into the wings, there was a great ovation, the largest for Young Leonard, who was the last to leave, tap-dancing sideways while twirling his green Swiss hat above his head.
Then, after a short intermission during which many of the dancers changed into fresh uniforms, came Father Seymour’s choir. I, feeling every bit the fraud and pretender that I was, stood among them, dressed like them, looking just like a real member of the junior choir, even when Father Seymour tapped his baton and the singing began. I stood there, lip-synching ‘Greensleeves’, ‘Ave Maria’, ‘Barbara Allen’, ‘Sad are the Men of Nottingham’.
‘Which one is Father Seymour’s nephew?’ I imagined people in the crowd were asking one another. ‘Oh he’s the one whose mouth is wide open when the rest of them are closed.’ There was my mother, in the front row, beaming with pride. Looking at her, I was so ashamed that I forgot to move my mouth, but she didn’t seem to notice.
I suppose it wouldn’t have been so bad if there hadn’t been so much talk about my being in Father Seymour’s Number. ‘His own nephew?’ I imagined people saying.
‘Yes, Draper Doyle is his name. Six months ago, he couldn’t carry a note and now look at him.’
And there was my mother, to whom the supposed miracle had been meant as a gift, a special favour. Father Seymour takes widow’s little boy and makes a special case of him, teaches him to sing in record time. Widow is fairly lifted from her misery by the sight of her boy singing in the chorus of Father Seymour’s choir. How guilty I felt! There was my mother, husband-less, sick with worry about me and Mary. Why couldn’t I be the sort of boy who charmed his mother by singing ‘Ave Maria’? Why couldn’t that pride beaming on my mother’s face be justified? What on earth was wrong with me? I was feeling so sorry for myself, I had a sudden urge to burst out bawling, yes, even to confess, right there on the stage, own up to the whole world that I was faking it. Draper Doyle, impostor. I could see the headlines in tomorrow’s Daily Chronicle, my own family’s newspaper. PRIEST’S NEPHEW PRETENDS TO SING WHILE MOTHER BEAMS WITH PRIDE.
Instead of breaking down and confessing, I tried to comfort myself by lip-synching with all my might, belting out the words of ‘Ave Maria’ in my mind, giving what was perhaps the greatest bogus rendition ever given of that song. My mouth was wide open, my shoulders rose and fell with every word. Never had ‘Ave Maria’ been faked more sincerely, more convincingly. I put everything I had into it, straining, straining, sweat breaking out on my forehead, all the while trying desperately not to break down in a fit of shameful weeping on the stage.
It was then, through a glaze of tears, that I saw him. My father was sitting near the back of the hall, at the end of one of the rows. He was dressed as he might have dressed in life for this occasion, wearing his best suit, across the vest of which the gold chain of his watch was visible. He was sitting there, smiling like everyone else, looking not in the least out of place, except that once again he held a hockey puck in his hands. He was turning it over and over as if he was either admiring it or wondering what on earth it was. It might have been something that had fallen from the sky for the way that he was looking at it, now and then tapping it as if to see what it was made of. ‘Cryptic,’ his expression seemed to say; ‘inscrutable,’ as if the mystery of its origin was as dark and densely opaque as the puck itself.
I looked at the people beside him. Would he show the puck to one of them? He had never appeared this close to other people before. Surely they could see him. Surely, it seemed to me, everyone could see him. He had been as well known among this crowd as any of the Divine Ryans, so why was his presence not causing a commotion? Why was the person sitting next to him ignoring him as if he wasn’t there?
I was determined not to let him get away this time. I knew that with his tendency to disappear in an instant, I had better waste no time in getting to him. He seemed to know what I had in mind, for he looked up from the puck and a mischievous, almost encouraging smile came on his face. To reach the part of the hall in which my father was sitting, I would have to break ranks with the back row of the choir, run clear across the stage, right in front of Father Seymour, then pass within a few feet of Aunt Phil and the archbishop at the bottom of the stairs – after which I would still have to run the length of the hall. Looking once again at my father, whose mischievous expression had become more pronounced, I jumped down from the bleachers we were standing on and, so fast that I didn’t notice anyone’s reaction, ran across the stage. I was just descending the stairs, just about to reach the floor of the hall, when I glanced up to find that the chair in which my father had been sitting was now empty.
I should simply have kept on going, I suppose, down through the audience and out the door. It wouldn’t have been any more difficult to explain. Instead, I came to a skidding halt in front of the archbishop. It was quite a while before the audience realized that what was happening was unplanned. Everyone seemed to think that it was part of the act, some daring innovation of Father Seymour’s perhaps, having one of his choirboys run across the stage, descend the stairs and stop in front of the archbishop, there to burst into some spectacular solo for his benefit.
Even Aunt Phil seemed to be hoping desperately that this was the case, hoping the whole thing would suddenly resolve itself into a scene from Boys’ Town, hoping that somehow I, her nephew, whom she knew to be the newest, least practised member of Father Seymour’s Number, would suddenly burst into song, and what had seemed to be a catastrophe would turn out to be one of the great moments in the history of Father Seymour’s Number – perhaps it would be remembered as the time that Father Seymour’s nephew, on the ingenious instructions of Father Seymour, had fooled everyone into thinking that some horrible embarrassment was taking place, and then had burst into song, his mouth as roundly and as sweetly open as that of some Vienna choirboy, his head gesturing for emphasis, his whole body caught up in serenading the archbishop. For surely, surely, her face seemed to say, I had not simply taken it into my head to flee from the stage and come to a screeching halt in front of His Grace.
Not the least of those who must have been expecting some such face-saving performance was the archbishop himself who had been more or less woken up, not by me so much as by the sudden silence, to find that, inexplicably, one of Father Seymour’s choirboys was standing right in front of him, staring at him with an expression of simple horror on his face. The archbishop was the first to recover, the first to admit to himself that no serenade, no unprecedented solo would be forthcoming. Smiling at me, he extended his hand, not to shake mine, I was fairly certain, since he did so palm down, but for what reason I had no idea.
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Sister Louise motioning frantically for me to do something. I saw her rubbing one of her fingers, and making a frantic downward motion with her hands. What this meant, I could not begin to guess. I stared at her in panic, wondering what on earth she wanted me to do.
I dearly wished I understood her, for her expression seemed to assure me that what she had in mind would not only save the moment, but was quite easy to do. When I shrugged, she knitted her forehead, and the motion of her hands became so ferociously concentrated, that her whole body began to shake as if with sheer spite. She was rubbing her finger so vigorously she appeared to be trying to erase her knuckle, all the while staring at me with ever increasing exasperation, as if she believed I was only pretending not to understand. What by this time was obvious to everyone but me was that Sister Louise and the archbishop wanted me to kiss his ring. When it became apparent that I would not, the archbishop lowered his hand, looked away from me, and went back to staring at the stage.
I could think of nothing else to do but turn around and go back onstage, which I began to do, every step of my black buckled shoes resounding throughout the hall. Suddenly, I was acutely aware of my outfit, my elf’s hat, my green suspenders, my short pants, the six inches or so of absurdly skinny leg that showed between the pants and my knee-high yellow socks. And finally, the shoes, the famous shoes of Father Seymour’s Number in which, one day, if Father Seymour changed his mind about my dancing potential, I might be tap-dancing, footing it about the stage with the same pointless expertise as Young Leonard.
Somehow, Father Seymour got the choir going again and the recital went on as planned, with the audience giving us a kind of bemused, sympathetic ovation at the end. My mother was backstage waiting for me when we went off. Perhaps she had meant to head off the chewing out that I was sure to get from Father Seymour. She needn’t have worried. Father Seymour was quite clearly enraged, but he was not about to say anything, for he knew that I might very well blurt out our secret, tell her that, on his instructions, I had only been pretending to sing.
The dressing room was silent as my mother led me out by the hand. When we got to the car, Aunt Phil and Sister Louise had already gone home, so disgusted had they been by my performance. I climbed into the back seat with Mary, and my mother got in front with Uncle Reginald who, saying it might be best if we gave Aunt Phil time to cool off, took us for a drive. For a while, no-one but Uncle Reginald spoke. He made the inevitable joke about how, with only three months’ training, I had stopped the show. Then my mother turned around.
‘I don’t suppose,’ she said, ‘that you would like to explain yourself.’ I considered telling the truth, but, remembering my promise to Mary, decided I better not.
‘I thought I had to use the bathroom,’ I said.
‘You thought you had to use the bathroom,’ my mother said. ‘And then, once you had interrupted everything and spoiled the concert, you discovered that you didn’t have to use the bathroom?’
Trying not to mimic her look of incredulity, I nodded.
Mary and my mother looked at one another, rolled their eyes, shook their heads. And then everyone, me included, burst out laughing.