Death of an Irish Tradition by Bartholomew Gill

Author:Bartholomew Gill [Gill, Bartholomew]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Mystery
ISBN: 9780060522612
Publisher: Avon
Published: 1979-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

When had it started? Menahan asked himself, pausing before the door of the Monsignor’s bedroom, the discontent with his…calling. With the transfer to Ballsbridge? Perhaps, but he couldn’t be sure and he’d actually gone back to check in his diary.

It was all there, page after page of resentment—at the Jansenist implication, pervasive throughout Ireland, that God had made an aesthetic mistake when conceiving of the reproductive functions of the human body, at the guilt one was made to feel at becoming cognizant of any “attachment,” however vague, to the flawed and repulsive body.

And he hadn’t hesitated when he received the phone call from Jimmy-Joe. “You know, some chemist in your parish. Somebody with a…Fenian bent. He’ll understand.” It was a wound and was becoming infected.

The body again, Menahan had thought. Festering. And of course he could help Mairead’s uncle, almost his own cousin, his former neighbor whose family had shared with his nearly—how many?—two hundred years of known history and probably more as well. Did that matter? Months ago he would have thought not—only God’s law, as proscribed in vivid “Thou shalt not’s,” would have guided his actions. But all that had changed for Menahan.

“Be happy to. Do you need anything else?”

A pause. “I could do with a bit of money. I’ve got a good amount in the bank, but that’s not something I could put my hands on. Now.”

“How much do you need?”

“A couple hundred quid, if you could manage it, Father.”

“I think it could be arranged.”

Keegan had been surprised. “You’re a…prince. I hope you don’t mind me sayin’ that, Johnny.”

Not at all, not in the least.

Menahan now girded himself with his new mantle of worldliness and rapped on the Monsignor’s door. The knock was louder than he intended, but maybe it was better like that.

“Yes?” The voice was thick with sleep.

That was good too. He had caught Kelly napping. “Father Menahan here. May I speak to you?”

“About what?” He was awake now and angry. There was an edge on his words.

“A private matter.” Menahan glanced down the hallway, noting the other doors, each the quarters of another priest. He heard a floorboard squeak. Gossips, he thought, worse than old women. “I’d prefer not to speak through a door.”

“You would, would you now,” he heard the old man mutter as he moved to the door and tugged it open. “What is it?”

Menahan surveyed Kelly—the full shock of white, bushy hair; the florid complexion; the thick glasses that made his eyes seem bulged and pugnacious, like headlamps on a machine—and he thought of the bit of Joyce doggerel, the lines that spoke of the militancy of the Catholic Church in Ireland. How did it go?

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