Someone in Father Seymour’s Number must have let slip that I had only been lip-synching at the Christmas concert, for Aunt Phil, saying that she didn’t want my mother to hear about it first ‘on the street’, told her everything. That is, she put the best face possible on the matter, at least where Father Seymour was concerned. The whole thing had been done for her sake, Aunt Phil told her, to spare her the disappointment and the embarrassment of finding out that not even Father Seymour could teach her little boy how to sing. The problem, her tone implied, was not that I had had no talent, but that I had been wilfully obtuse, resisting Father Seymour at every step.
‘Them that will not learn cannot be taught,’ said Sister Louise.
The only one of the Divine Ryans not present when my mother was informed of what Uncle Reginald called ‘The Christmas Concert Caper’ was its mastermind, Father Seymour. He even missed confession the following Wednesday, so that ten days passed before he and my mother spoke again, at which time not one word was said about the matter. In fact, the two of them went to great lengths to avoid looking at each other. It was obvious that despite Aunt Phil’s defence of his motives, she and Sister Louise were disappointed with him, a fact of which Father Seymour was only too aware. So nervous he could not sit still, he fell even further in their eyes by pacing back and forth in the living room, now and then peering through the drapes as if he might have to leave at any moment. Aunt Phil and Sister Louise watched him with such evident disapproval that it’s little wonder he blurted out what he did.
‘Will you be coming to see him box?’ said Father Seymour, his hands behind his back, looking first at me and then at my mother as if to say, ‘Has Draper Doyle mentioned the matter yet?’
‘Oh, I – of course,’ my mother said, ‘of course. Draper Doyle never said—’
‘We’re fighting United next week,’ said Father Seymour, smiling at me in a way which seemed to fondly recall many days spent together in the gym, preparing for United. He might just have mentioned some secret and soon-to-be-unveiled masterpiece for the way that Aunt Phil and Sister Louise lit up, beaming at him. ‘Here, finally, is Father Seymour,’ their expressions said.
The whole thing was so absurd, I had a kind of perverse and barely resistible urge to play along with it, to say something about how eagerly I was looking forward to the tournament. What I should have done was expose him for a fraud, then and there, but I didn’t. Everyone seemed so pleased with me, not to mention relieved that something was soon to happen that would make us all forget the Christmas concert.
What on earth Father Seymour was thinking of I did not find out until the next day in the gym, when he informed me that contrary to ‘our’ original plan, I would be taking part in the tournament.
‘But I haven’t got a chance,’ I said. ‘I can’t box.’
‘It doesn’t matter if you lose,’ said Father Seymour, and before I could tell him that on the contrary, it mattered a great deal to me, he added, ‘the important thing is that you take part, that’s all.’
‘Why?’ I said.
‘It just is, that’s all,’ he said.
He assured me that I had nothing to be afraid of, for I would fight a boy at my own ‘skill level’. I doubted very much that such a boy existed, and I said so, pointing out that my only boxing experience to date was a few sparring matches with Young Leonard, which had ended either with water running from my eyes or blood running from my nose.
‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘The boy you’ll fight won’t be as good as Young Leonard.’ This was not saying much, given that no-one was as good as Young Leonard.
That night, I kept mentioning my upcoming bout, hoping my mother might object to it, but she didn’t. As far as she knew, I had been practising for the past six months, and would no doubt fight a boy my age and size who had also been practising that long. The fact that I had been coming home from practice looking none the worse for wear must have further reassured her that Father Seymour had been taking proper care of me.
I wondered if I should swallow my pride and confess to everything, but I couldn’t do it. Having been caught in the Christmas concert hoax was bad enough. I remembered the look on her face when Aunt Phil told her that I was faking it. She was not, as Aunt Phil would have it, disappointed because I had failed, but because I had lied to her – so disappointed, in fact, that she could not bring herself to speak to me about it. Nor could I bring myself to tell her that even my membership on the boxing team was a hoax. And quite aside from how she would react, there was no telling what Father Seymour would have done.
‘Could you ask Father Seymour,’ I said, ‘to let Uncle Reginald be in my corner?’
She promised me she would, and the next day told me that Father Seymour had agreed, provided that Uncle Reginald ‘stayed out of the way’ and let him do the coaching. When I asked Uncle Reginald to be my corner man, he said he would be honoured, so it was settled.
There had always been someone like Young Leonard in Father Seymour’s Number. The little fireplug. The inspirational half-pint. The boy you suspected or at least hoped was secretly despised by everyone. Boys like Young Leonard were there to guarantee the moral victory. They were so small that just to step into the ring with them seemed an act of cowardice. By the way we booed Young Leonard’s opponent the night of the tournament, you’d have thought it was he who had arranged for Young Leonard to be there, and not us. For Father Seymour, a fight was not really ‘won’ unless a moral victory came with it. The point was not so much to win as to make the other fighter so resentful of your skill, of your ability to hit him in the face, that he would resort to unfair tactics.
The point in other words was to goad him into cheating, so that you not only won the fight but came away with a moral victory as well. When, from sheer spite, Young Leonard’s opponent started ‘cheating’, that is, clutching, pushing, throwing low blows, Father Seymour assumed a confident ‘virtue shall prevail’ expression; on the one occasion that Young Leonard took a punch, he assumed an ‘even if we lose we win’ expression. At no time did he complain about the tactics the other boy was using, nor did our team. We all just sat there, watching, waiting for our own fights to begin. Only the Catholics in the crowd complained. It was not enough that Young Leonard’s opponent was twice the size of Young Leonard, their booing seemed to say – no, he had to cheat as well. Being bigger was unfair, breaking the rules was unfair, but for some reason possessing ten times as much skill as your opponent was not unfair. Skill was a measure of virtue, it seemed.
Abandoning even the pretence of boxing, the other boy grabbed hold of one of Young Leonard’s legs and tried to wrestle him to the canvas; when that didn’t work, when Young Leonard somehow managed to keep his balance, the other boy tried, still holding the leg, to throw Young Leonard through the ropes. Young Leonard looked as if this leg-grabbing was the standard desperation move of his opponents, one he had encountered many times before; he hopped around with such apparent ease on one leg that, when the referee pulled him away, the other boy, on hands and knees on the canvas, was almost weeping with frustration. A great cheer went up. Young Leonard had done it again. The fight was called and Father Seymour, with a kind of ‘gloating is beneath me’ look about him, wordlessly escorted Young Leonard from the ring.
It went on like that, the boys of Father Seymour’s Number so embarrassing and irritating their opponents with their combination of skill and self-righteous good sportsmanship that most of United was disqualified for cheating, for flailing away with low blows that had such little effect on the boys of Father Seymour’s Number that the Protestant fans began making remarks about what was done with choirboys to make them better boxers. Once, one of our Number, Terry O’Shea, did go down after receiving a low blow; when the fight was called and Father Seymour led him from the ring, Terry was still doubled over, but so determined was he not to let the agony he was feeling register on his face, he had a kind of half-impassive, half-stricken look about him, like that of someone trying to set a world record for holding his breath; his wistfully unfocused eyes were blinking rapidly, but his unwavering dedication to the cause, his willingness to make the supreme sacrifice was evident in the way the muscles of his bloodless face were clenched. In this, he seemed to say as Father Seymour led him, doubled over, past his gleeful detractors, in this mastery of my facial muscles lies your defeat.
It was a stirring display of willpower, to say the least, one I was quite certain I could never duplicate, though I might well have the opportunity. In fact, my sympathies, as I climbed into the ring, were entirely with the other side. The moral scorecard read 9–0 by the time I set eyes on my opponent, a boy who, I was glad to see, looked to be every bit as puny and disinclined to punch and be punched as I was. Father Seymour had been as good as his word, it seemed, for here was a boy who was almost as much of a weakling as I was.
A great cheer went up when my name was announced. Most of the people there, half of whom were Catholics who had been following Father Seymour’s boxers for years, believed, presumed, that I could fight, that I was a bona fide member of Father Seymour’s Number and that the other boy was therefore the underdog. No-one believed it more than the other boy himself, who was quite clearly trying to hide the fact that he was terrified, looking at me with such transparently affected scorn that I felt sorry for him. I gave him what was intended to be a reassuring smile which so unnerved him that he turned around. ‘C’mon, Jeffie,’ shouted a man in the crowd, his voice so pleadingly sorrowful he could only have been Jeffie’s father. I was glad that, at the last minute, my mother and Mary had decided not to come.
As I stood in my corner, Father Seymour gave me no instructions whatsoever – not that this was unusual. He never gave any of his fighters instructions, only stood there behind them as if to say that to give fighters of their ability instructions would have been entirely superfluous, as if nothing could make them more ready than they already were. That, for different reasons, instructions would also have been superfluous in my case, no-one but me, my team-mates and Father Seymour knew. Even Uncle Reginald didn’t know, for I hadn’t had the nerve to tell him. It occurred to me, however, that Father Seymour’s silence must be conveying the wrong impression to the boxing fans assembled. I peered into the crowd, and sure enough, people were staring at me as if I was doubtless a boxer of sinister, if not immediately apparent, abilities. They seemed to find my puniness especially intriguing – was I, their expressions seemed to say, another Young Leonard, a brawling fury cunningly disguised as a weakling?
Uncle Reginald had bought me a terry-towel bathrobe, onto which he had sewn my name, ‘Draper Doyle Ryan’. (Mary’s ‘half-an-orphan’ joke had by this time gotten round the city. Why, some of the Protestants wanted to know, did half an orphan need two names?) This only made matters worse, for it was assumed that any boxer who had his own bathrobe must be terrific. ‘That robe won’t help ya when the fight starts,’ shouted the boys from the other school, who were obviously convinced that I would win in the first thirty seconds.
Then there was the imposing figure of Uncle Reginald, standing in my corner. Unlike Father Seymour, he was shouting instructions, chattering away as if he had memorized the words in some boxing manual without bothering to find out what they meant. He kept telling me to follow the left jab with the left uppercut which, as far as I could see, would have been impossible even for someone who knew how to box, let alone for someone who didn’t. On top of everything, there was the name of Ryan on my bathrobe, a name which the Catholics in the audience would expect me to do proud and which the Protestants despised – surely any nephew of Father Seymour, any Divine Ryan, was a young man to be reckoned with.
Had I not been wearing my mouthpiece and my headgear, I might have set about lowering their expectations, running around to all four corners of the ring, preparing the audience for disappointment, assuring everyone that I couldn’t box, disarming the hatred of the Protestants who were looking at me with a kind of begrudging admiration, as if it was inevitable that one of their boys fall victim to me and all they asked was that he land at least one punch. ‘I am Draper Doyle,’ I felt like telling them, ‘owner of the known universe’s least hairy, most wrinkled Methuselah. I do not know how to box.’
At last, the bell rang, and my opponent and I touched gloves. It occurred to me that this might be the last glove that I would lay on him. For a while, as Uncle Reginald said later, the element of surprise was on my side. The other boy was so surprised at how badly I was fighting that sometimes he forgot to hit me. He looked darkly puzzled, as if he suspected that letting him hit me was part of some sinister strategy of mine – perhaps I was one of those boxers who needed to be hit a dozen times before his anger was aroused.
Each time I got hit, Uncle Reginald shouted, ‘That’s it, Draper Doyle,’ which must have added to the boy’s confusion. It certainly added to mine. The other boy really wasn’t very good – any of our other boxers would have had him cheating by the second round. But he was good enough to block my pitiful attempts at punching and find a way around my pitiful attempts at blocking.
The first round was almost over before the crowd, the Protestant part of it especially, began to realize what was happening. When the bell rang, the Protestants sent forth a rousing cheer for Jeffie. The voice I had taken to be that of Jeffie’s father was loudest, shouting, ‘Good round, Jeffie, good round,’ as if he dared not to hope too much, as if there was still a chance that one round was a fluke and the awful beating would happen in the second. Others, who knew boxing better or whose judgement was not skewed by having a relative in the ring, were quite certain that I was already beaten. A lot of Protestants remarked on the appropriateness of my having an undertaker in my corner.
‘If yer dyin’, see Reg Ryan,’ said the Protestants.
‘C’mon choirboy,’ the Catholics said, which usually fired up the pride of any member of Father Seymour’s Number, for it was as good as asking him to fight for his religion and his people. ‘C’mon now, choirboy,’ they said. ‘Ya gotta take it to him in the second round.’
As I sat down in the corner, Uncle Reginald rubbed my shoulders and Father Seymour just stood there, still saying nothing but looking very worried.
‘What about it, Seymour?’ said Uncle Reginald. ‘What’s our strategy?’
‘No strategy,’ said Father Seymour, trying to look as if the whole thing had been planned or at least foreseen. ‘Neither of the boys can box,’ he said, ‘so there’s not much I can tell Draper Doyle.’
‘Keep your gloves up, Draper Doyle,’ said Uncle Reginald, tossing his head in disgust at Father Seymour as the bell rang to start the second round.
After taking about thirty seconds of an ever more furious beating, it occurred to me, quite irrationally I now realize, that I should try smiling at my opponent again. In fact, dizzy from the blows that I had received, giddy from the pain in my head and my stomach, I for some reason felt like smiling. It even occurred to me, without in the least seeming absurd, that smiling might somehow be the key to boxing. Hoping Jeffie wouldn’t be unnerved as he had been the last time, I smiled at him, and I believe that I can say with some confidence that he was not unnerved. What I thought I was doing was appealing to his sense of humour, disarming him by inviting him to take the whole thing about as seriously as I was taking it. What I was in fact doing was provoking him, for he came at me harder than ever.
I smiled throughout the whole second round, so incensing my opponent, his supporters, and even a few of my supporters, that, by the end, more than half the people in the hall were cheering for Jeffie, exhorting him to wipe what they persisted in calling the ‘smug’ smile off my face. Despite the fact that I obviously could not box, despite the fact that from the first bell to the last, I had done nothing but absorb punishment, they would not let go of the notion that at long last one of Father Seymour’s Number was being whipped.
For years, as Uncle Reginald said later, it would be talked of as an upset, the night that Little Jeffie White beat one of Father Seymour’s Number, one of the Divine Ryans, all over the ring. I was surprised that I hadn’t been knocked out by this time. Even that thought struck me as funny. As I felt myself smiling again I wondered if I should go down, pretend to be knocked out. I made up my mind to do it, in fact tried to do it, but nothing happened. I smiled again at the thought that, with my luck, the only part of my brain that was damaged was the part that told my body how to fall.
The referee seemed to take my smile as a sign that I was not hurt and wanted to keep going, for he kept crouching down as if to see if I was still smiling. The strange thing was that, when I saw him looking at me, I couldn’t help smiling at him even more. For one thing, I was sort of embarrassed by all the attention he was paying me, running around, looking at me – I had never been so closely scrutinized before, under any circumstances. I kept wondering what it was he was staring at, what it was I was doing wrong, and each time I caught his eye I smiled foolishly, not knowing what else to do. Also, however, he began to strike me as being very funny, that is, not him per se, but the whole idea of the referee struck me as being funny, the referee whose job was not to keep one nine-year-old from beating up another, but to make sure that he did it properly, according to the rules, as well as to make sure that I submitted to it properly, according to the rules. It tickled me that he watched approvingly when we stood apart, punching one another, but intervened when we stopped fighting, when I threw my arms around the other boy and tried to rest. ‘Break,’ he said angrily, as if I was taking advantage of the other boy, as if it was unreasonable of me to deprive him of the chance of hitting me again.
Finally, the bell rang to end the second round. Everything was spinning and I had no idea where my corner was. ‘If yer dyin’, see Reg Ryan,’ a voice said. Then I felt myself sitting down and the spinning stopped. ‘How do you feel, Draper Doyle?’ said Uncle Reginald. All I could do was shake my head.
‘Maybe we should stop the fight, Seymour,’ said Uncle Reginald. Father Seymour said nothing.
‘Well what about it?’ said Uncle Reginald.
‘The boy isn’t hurt,’ said Father Seymour, who obviously hoped that I would go the distance. I think Uncle Reginald would have stopped it, if it had been up to him, but it was not. As he said later, he could have thrown in a thousand towels and they would have been ignored.
In the third round, simply unable to take further punishment, I decided to try what the Protestant boy had tried with Young Leonard. When the bell rang, I came out of my corner with what to the audience must have seemed like more enthusiasm than was appropriate for a boxer who had been absorbing punishment for the last two rounds. We touched gloves and, as the other boy was about to back away, I got down on my hands and knees and grabbed him by the leg. It seemed to me that compared to him hitting me in the face, me grabbing him by the leg was no big deal, but the whole hall rang with booing. All he wanted to do was break my nose, and here was I, clinging unreasonably to his leg.
‘Booooo,’ the crowd roared.
‘Stand up, Draper Doyle,’ screamed Father Seymour, sounding as if his worst fears had been realized. ‘Stand up and fight!’
The referee grabbed hold of me, dragged me to my feet, and to my surprise declared that the fight was not yet over. Perhaps he had grown so tired of seeing Father Seymour’s boys beat up the Protestants, he didn’t want to miss even one second of our comeuppance.
‘Box,’ he said.
I was still looking at the referee when the other boy obeyed his command by throwing a roundhouse right that landed squarely on my jaw. Even as the ring was going round and the floor was coming up to meet me, it occurred to me that many more such encounters waited for me in the future. ‘If yer dyin’, see Reg Ryan,’ said a voice inside my head. During that long fall to the floor, I thought of Mary and my mother, and of my father, whose ghost, even after six months of oralysis, was still appearing to me. What did my father want? I wondered. What on earth did my father want? It might have been from the sheer effort of trying to answer this question, from sheer confusion that my head was spinning. Then I blacked out.
‘Draper Doyle,’ I heard a voice saying. ‘Draper Doyle.’ It was Uncle Reginald, kneeling over me. ‘Draper Doyle,’ he said, ‘are you all right?’
I smiled at him.
In the dressing room afterwards, Father Seymour maintained a kind of contemptuous silence on the subject of my behaviour. He had to, what with Uncle Reginald being there, looking at him as if he was daring him to say something. While Uncle Reginald attended to my cuts and bruises, Father Seymour went about tousling the hair of the other boys whose faces, almost without exception, were unmarked. The other boys were silent until Uncle Reginald said that instead of showering I should go straight home. As he led me out of the dressing room, a few of them said ‘so long’ in a way that seemed meant to be pointedly sympathetic. There was a party planned for all the boys, Father Seymour said, but Uncle Reginald, shouting over his shoulder, assured him that I was in no condition to attend it.
When we were in the car, I asked him what he thought of my performance. Actually, Uncle Reginald said, I hadn’t done too badly. The other boy had been swinging wildly throughout the fight, and it was only my unfailing ability to put my head exactly in the path of his fists that had made him look so good.
‘Such head speed,’ Uncle Reginald said, ‘such timing!’
Perhaps, he said, if I had worn my goalie equipment, especially my mask, I might have had a chance. He could have beaten me up all day if I had those on. I could just see it. In this corner, a goalie. At least I wouldn’t have black eyes.
‘I guess you didn’t win,’ Mary said, when we got home. Uncle Reginald had me in his arms. I was half knocked out. There was blood all over me. I guess you didn’t win.
‘Of course I won,’ I said. ‘All this happened on the way home.’
Laughing, Uncle Reginald said, ‘No, he did not win. There is still no known instance of a boxer making a comeback while lying unconscious on the canvas.’ That was a good one. Still, I had to get back at Mary. It may have had something to do with my semi-conscious state that the following couplet appeared fully formed in my head: ‘Mary’s tits are hard to find, they’re not as big as her behind.’ Aunt Phil was there, but it didn’t matter. You can get away with almost anything when you’re half knocked out.
‘Oh my God,’ my mother said when she saw me. She put her hand over her mouth and looked on the verge of tears until, as if she had suddenly realized that having your mother look at you in horror could, to say the least, be disconcerting, she managed a smile, then had Uncle Reginald carry me to bed, where in a few seconds I fell asleep.
The next day, my mother withheld comment, in fact ignored Father Seymour when he assured her that I was not hurt as badly as I appeared to be. It was obvious that although she knew that something had to be done about Father Seymour, she was not yet sure what that something was.
Within a couple of days, she was teasing me about my fight. She laughed when Mary called me Raccoon Face. The day after that, she called me Purple Puss. Every day, for about two weeks, my face changed colour, and every day Mary and my mother had a new name for me.
‘Is it a bird?’ Mary said. ‘Is it a plane? No, it’s Kaleido-head.’
‘I wonder what colour Draper Doyle will be tomorrow,’ my mother would say, each night at the dinner table. They looked at me, Mary and my mother, examined me, two experts in facial coloration, consulting, comparing notes. Prognosis? ‘Green,’ Mary might say, ‘with bluish tints around the eyes.’ My mother would concur.
It was very distressing, going to bed not knowing what colour you would be when you got up. They should make a movie, Mary said, a short sequence of time-lapse photography called The Changing Face of Draper Doyle.
My face was all but back to normal by the time Confession Wednesday came around. I spent the hours leading up to my confession rehearsing what I would say. I kept remembering Young Leonard’s face as Father Seymour led him from the ring. I had lost my fight, but Father Seymour could still have his moral victory if I confessed to cheating. I repeatedly imagined myself saying the words, ‘I cheated at the boxing tournament.’ I said them over and over in my mind, trying to convince myself that to say them out loud would be just as easy.
In the confessional that afternoon, I recited the standard sinventory, listing six infractions of the junior ten commandments.
‘Anything else?’ Father Seymour said.
‘No,’ I surprised myself by saying. ‘No, nothing else.’
‘Are you sure?’ he said, hanging on ‘sure’ as if he had been about to say my name.
I had a moment of panic, wondering what I would do if he withheld his forgiveness. I tried to remember if anyone else had been waiting for confession. If I was the last one, he could keep me in there until I told him what he wanted.
‘Are you sure that’s all?’ he said.
‘I’m sure,’ I said.
There might as well have been no screen between us, no darkness. All that was keeping us apart, all that was keeping the sacrament intact, was his unwillingness to say my name. Finally, I heard him sigh, and as his hand came up to give me absolution, I bowed my head.
‘Go in peace,’ my uncle said. ‘Your sins have been forgiven.’