Кэрол Дуглас - Cat In An Alphabet Endgame

“To be seventeen having your first look at an another country, an island, among people who look exactly like you, speak with the same lilt, drink the same ale, laugh at the same jokes…to feel at home so far away from home. It was inebriating. We courted the colleens. The black Irish and the red-haired girls who seemed so exotic and yet familiar at the same time. Far more interesting than our American high school girls. Besides, we’d gone to all-boys’ high school with the Christian Brothers.

“We competed to drink ourselves under the table, we competed to spirit a girl away from the pub to…wherever. We met one stunner of a Black Irish rose. Older, early twenties, but so much the better. We wanted to win her to ourselves to sample whatever undescribed bliss that had been cruelly hidden from us.”

Max shrugged. “I won. A hollow victory. The pub bomb exploded while I was ‘off-campus’. But that was not the only bomb that day. The other bomb that exploded my life was one Kathleen O’Connor, as damaged a young woman as had lived through the hell of Magdalene laundries called “asylums”, where young pregnant girls were overworked and abused for being victims of institutionalized ignorance and family assault.”

“Oh,” Eileen breathed rather than said. “That Judi Dench movie Philomena. ” She rose and went to sit beside Maura on the Kinsella-occupied couch. They looked at each other for a long moment before Maura reached out for Eileen’s hands.

“Philomena?” Patrick asked. “I had a nun named that in eighth grade. We never saw any such movie, Eileen.” He glanced at the sisters’ twined hands. “And you two haven’t been so cozy since— He eyed Kevin with a question in his eyes.

“We went to the movie theater on our own. Together. Last year.” Maura spoke defiantly, smiling through her tears.

“It was a true story, about a young unwed mother named Philomena. Her toddler son was adopted out to America, for money, from one of those merciless homes named after Saint Mary Magdalene. Not a newborn, a two-year-old! Can you imagine the lasting severed bond? Remembering each other, lies to both kept them apart for decades, never again meeting. At least Philomena finally learned her son’s fate. He’d died in the prime of life and had asked to be buried at the Magdalene institution graveyard, in case his mother ever came looking for him. So she did find him at last.”

Of course, Temple thought, they would go to see Philomena together alone, almost furtively, women who had lost sons at the same time from the same brutal event. Sisters who had carried on with guarded emotions and doubt and self-doubt and subtle estrangement.

Temple knew the movie’s plot and wasn’t watching the women. She was watching Max. He downed the remaining three fingers of whiskey in his glass in one heroic go. Set the expensive crystal down with a thump on the long table behind the couch, and came around it to kneel in front of the weeping women, covering their entwined hands with his large ones. Head bowed, voice raw, he whispered, “Bless me, Mothers, for I have sinned.”

During the long silence punctuated by the women’s sobs, everyone kept stone-still. Matt caught Temple’s glance returning to him, and pulled her closer.

“I know,” she whispered. “You’ve heard that beginning sentence in a lot of Confessions. ‘Bless me, Father, for I have sinned’. Would you have ever dreamed you’d hear it paraphrased by Max?”

Matt shook his head. “It will do him good. And it’s the perfect way to apologize to this crowd.”

“And sinned again.” Max went on, sitting back on his heels.

“What is this?” Kevin sounded uneasily gruff. “An Irish wake? More whisky and less tears. What’s done is done.” He eyed his son. “So what more are we to learn, Michael, that we have an unsuspected grandchild somewhere?”

Max was able to discharge his deep emotion in a shaky laugh. “Not that. No. Sorry.” He rose and sat on the huge square coffee table’s edge. “There’s still a lot more story to come, though. We Irish love telling and hearing stories.”

Temple retrieved his glass and went to Matt, already holding the Jamison’s bottle. He cocked his eyebrows as he refilled it and eyed the others.

“As a humble radio counselor, I’d advise a topping off,” he said as he made the rounds. “What is the famous line from that old movie you love?” he asked Temple.

“Bette Davis in superb sardonic form. ‘Fasten your seat belts. It’s going to be a bumpy ride.’”

Temple took her champagne glass, sat on the coffee table beside Max, and set the glass down on the nearest coaster. Matt settled into Eileen’s place on the sofa after offering her husband Patrick an inquiring look.

“There’ll be no more waterworks, I hope,” Patrick muttered.

Max sipped from his glass and gave Temple a wry smile before continuing. “You were all quite right after the bombing. I underwent paroxysms of guilt on all fronts. It took a while for the authorities to sort out the crime scene and separate the wounded from the dead, or pieces of them. I knew Sean had gone missing.” Max shut his eyes for a moment. “I had to provide his toothbrush for DNA testing, which was quite new then.

“No one was there to stop me. I became a vengeance machine. I told the IRA men that Sean and I had come over hoping to join the movement to free Northern Ireland from the British…yes, what we now call ‘young naive foreign fighters’ for ISIS. I’d always done magic tricks as a hobby and that makes you very observant, very able to be unobserved. I was a perfect spy, really, and I found the two men who’d planted the bomb and gave their names to the British. I never heard what happened to them, but a swift, secret killing was fine with me then. Many people were badly wounded, but Sean was the only one dead.

“Of course, in my guilt and fury I had no time for colleens whose eyes ‘shined like the diamonds’, as in the old song. I didn’t know that Kathleen’s savage early life had made her psychotic about being abandoned. She couldn’t understand that my bond with Sean made avenging him my only priority. And I didn’t know then she was an IRA agent, a champion fund-raiser well-known to the scattered Irish abroad.

“So,” Max said, “when I came home for the closed casket funeral, I saw that my lies to cover up why we were in Northern Ireland in that pub weren’t credible. And I saw that the pressure of one cousin back from a pub bombing without a scratch—or visible ones, anyway, and the other cousin identified from fragments—would gall good people, one family happy but guilty, the other reminded daily of their loss, and guilty. And me guiltiest of all.”

Matt shook his head. “Catholic guilt is built-in. We’re asked to examine our consciences from the age of seven, and that situation was a perfect trifecta.”

Maura just sat there, numb. “Our collective grief blinded us to the living. We thought of you still as a child. And here you’d been through war, through your own hell, and we didn’t know it.”

Max shook his head, to deny her need for guilt. “Then word came that the IRA realized I’d ‘betrayed’ them, probably alerted by Kathleen, and had a price on my head. In those days before the peace, IRA sympathizers were everywhere, especially in the U.S. I had to get as far away as possible or my family and friends could get caught in the cross-fire. By then, counterterrorist operations had heard of my exploits, so they both saved and recruited me and magic became my cover. It turned out I was quite a good magician, especially at disappearing acts.”

Temple turned to face Max. “So you were already adept at it when my turn came.”

“You?” Maura jerked her head toward the other couch where Matt was now sitting. “But you just married him .” She stared at Temple again.