“JESUS,” SAID the little bishop after the fundamentalist minister had left, “was a very difficult man.”
The sun had risen, so it was morning. We were back in the neonatology ward. The most that could be said about Socra Marie was that she was breathing somewhat more easily and her temperature was down to 102-from 106. The antibiotics, we had been assured, would take effect soon and rout her pneumonia. She was screaming only some of the time, but continued to fight the various tubes which protruded from her tiny body.
My wife and I were beyond exhaustion, too worn to wonder how our child could come down with pneumonia so quickly or to worry about the chaos at home. Nuala had remembered that her ma and her da were in town and had called them as the sun appeared in the sky to plead for help.
Then the minister had entered the ward, Bible in hand, and offered to pray over our daughter. We figured that we should welcome prayers from anyone and everyone and readily agreed. He had prayed and read the Bible over Socra Marie and then over us. Not content with these rituals he asked us if we had yet been converted to the Lord Jesus.
Hell, we were both Catholics. Wasn’t that enough?
Apparently it was not. We would not be saved unless we were converted. Perhaps our little girl’s pneumonia was a warning from Jesus. Perhaps we should convert now to save her life.
At this point the little bishop had appeared, in his usual windbreaker (White Sox this summer) and clerical shirt with the Roman collar missing. As usual he was practically invisible. The preacher certainly did not notice him. He listened silently to what was being said. Somehow his presence prevented us from assaulting the poor preacher.
“I will pray to the Lord Jesus for you,” he said, as he left, “that you may find him and salvation.”
The little bishop may have muttered something about praying to his mother too because she had a lot of experience finding him.
Or maybe I had only imagined that.
“Jesus,” he continued to us, “had a very bad habit of refusing to fit into anyone’s paradigms. He learned a lot from the Pharisees, but He wasn’t one of them. He may have hung out with the Essenes, but He was not a compulsive hand-washer. He was surely a Jew, steeped in the Torah, but He put a very different spin on it. He was charming and even witty and told wonderful stories but He refused to be a celebrity. He dealt politely with those in authority, but did not sign on with them. Half the time He reassured people and the other half of the time He scared them. He told all the old stories but with new and disconcerting endings. He was patently a troublemaker. Which is why they had to get rid of Him.”
Nuala and I listened;
“It’s been that way every since. Everyone claims Him for their own. He’s on our side. He’s doing things our way. He confirms what we say. Then when we think we’ve sewed Him up, He’s not there anymore: When we have domesticated Jesus, we may have a very interesting person on our hands, even a superstar maybe. Alas, it is not the real Jesus. He’s gone somewhere else, preaching His contradictions about His Father’s kingdom and stirring up His kind of trouble. A Jesus who does not disconcert and shake us up is not Jesus at all.”
“What does He say about our little wisp of humanity?” I asked.
“Well, He might say that you’re lucky to have her and she’s His child more than she’s yours and if He wants to call her home early that’s His privilege. And He might say that He loves her more than you do and that as a good parent He suffers with her, even more than you do. When she cries, He might insist, He weeps. He might say that He agrees with the doctors that the antibiotics and the oxygen will bring her around and you’ll take her home in a day or two and that you’d better take care of her. He might say that she’s always a gift and you should never be possessive. But then He might not say anything at all. He might just smile and touch her hot little forehead and slip away.”
“ ’Tis true.” Nuala sighed. “ ’Tis true altogether.”
“But then”—the little bishop sighed, almost as loudly as my wife—“what do I know?”
He blessed Socra Marie and us and promised he would stay in touch.
We didn’t ask how he knew we were back in the hospital and why he had added us to his morning hospital calls.
Nuala put her Rosary aside, having fingered it all the night, and picked up Ned’s diary.
“I’m letting Jesus worry about her for the moment,” she informed me.
Before she could tackle that scene on old Dearborn Street in the moonlight, there was a knock at the window of the nursery—Annie McGrail and her red-haired granddaughter.
Nellie, grimly serious, stared at Socra Marie through the glass, once again as if she were communicating with her little sister.
I walked outside and hugged my mother-in-law and my elder daughter.
“The poor little thing doesn’t look very happy,” Annie said tentatively.
“A lot better than last night. Her fever’s down, she’s breathing better, and she’s a little less restless.”
“She doesn’t like those tubes,” Nellie informed me. “Not at all, at all.”
“They keep her alive, Nellie.”
“I know THAT, Da.”
I changed places with Nuala.
When she returned to the bassinet, she said, “Me ma says that everything’s fine at home. The lad is playing with his trucks, the dogs are chasing one another, and Nellie went to school this morning and asked everyone to pray for her little sister.”
“Your ma has a way with kids.”
“And meself knowing that.”
She sat down in her chair and listlessly picked up Ned’s manuscript. She glanced at Socra Marie.
“Dermot, isn’t herself resting a little more easily?”
Nervously I glanced at the monitor over the little bed. Her temperature was down to just under a hundred. All the other vital signs looked OK.
“She is indeed!”
“You know what the other one told me out there?”
“Nothing would surprise me.”
“That she was going to tell Fiona and Maeveen that Socra Marie was getting better.”
“Sometimes the kid scares me, Nuala,” I admitted.
“And herself scaring me all the time!”
Then Jane Foley appeared and smiled happily.
“The little girl is much better, isn’t she?”
“Och, weren’t we hoping it wasn’t just our imagination?”
“No, there’s been a steady decline in temperature and improvement in breathing. As I told you before, she’s a fighter. She wants to live. She also probably wants to go home.”
“Ah, no,” Nuala relaxed. “Don’t her da and her ma just love the hospital?”
“Nuala Anne?” I asked when the resident had left the room.
“Dermot love?”
“Did you talk to babies and animals when you were a little girl?”
“Dermot Michael Coyne! I did not!”
I had learned to tell when me wife, ah, my wife, was fibbing.
“Not ever?”
“Well not exactly talk to babies, animals maybe a little if you take me meaning …”
“Did they talk back?”
“Not to say talked back exactly, because they can’t talk. But I knew they heard me.”
Scarier and scarier.
“You don’t do that anymore, do you?”
Silence.
“Nuala Anne!
“Sure sometimes when the dogs are making too much mess and noise, don’t I kind of think, ‘Cool it, girls.’”
“And they do?”
“Naturally.”
Yeah, naturally.
Later the resident said Nuala could nurse her daughter if she wished. She wished of course. The young ‘un’s appetite returned with a vengeance.
When Nuala had accomplished this maternal task, she went out into the corridor to call home.
“Me ma has everything under control. Nellie’s out jumping rope with the other little girls. The Mick is watching Tarzan again. The girls are wrestling with each other in the yard… And wasn’t it a wonderful idea for finding someone for Fiona to play with?”
“It was,” I agreed.
Actually, I didn’t have the opportunity to vote on whether our home should be converted into a kennel.
“Nuala Anne?”
“Dermot?”
“You don’t get inside of people’s heads, do you?”
“I’d be afraid to,” she said seriously. “Besides, people have free will, don’t they now?”
“They do.”
“Well…”
“Well?”
“Well, this one time wasn’t I sitting in O’Neill’s and meself studying for an exam and didn’t this gorgeous boy with the kindest blue eyes come in and wasn’t I afraid to look at him, but didn’t I kind of suggest that maybe he’d look at me?”
“Did he?”
“I don’t know and himself sitting down at the same table I was and ogling me boobs when I sang me song.”
She didn’t look up at me when she told this part of the story. It was probably true. She had always claimed she fell for me that first foggy night in Dublin. Besides I would have to have been deaf and blind not to notice her.
Still…
“I didn’t have much of a choice at all, at all, did I now?”
“God’s truth, Dermot Michael Coyne!”
“You don’t do that to me anymore, do you?”
“I never do it!”
“Except once in a while.”
“Well, now and again when you’re after not really listening to me… Now stop all these silly questions. I have to read what Ned is up to.”
She read through the episode I had copied, hurriedly at first like she always does.
Then she looked up at me, her eyes wide.
“Dermot Michael, these people are around the bend altogether!”
We, on the other hand, were perfectly normal. Just like everyone else. We dialogued with animals and sent unconscious messages to potential lovers.
I shivered, not that it would do me any good.