The Whipping Club (3 page)

             
“No canopy? No breaking of a glass? I’m sorry, it’s not a real wedding without the
chuppa
,” Beva said.
             
“How about I’ll break a glass here, right now?” Ben said.
             
“Don’t be smart.”
             
“When would you do this, Marian?” Sam asked.
             
“Very soon.”
             
“I was thinking in May,” Ben agreed.
             
“May?” Marian said.
             
“I’ve found this house. I think I’ll be able to put a down payment on it by mid-April. I have a raise now. That’s my surprise.”
             
He looked worried as if he could sense her disappointment.
             
“That okay?” he asked into her ear.
             
“We can talk about that later, Ben.” Marian turned to Beva. “Please try to accept it. I know it’s hard.”
             
“She knows it’s hard,” Beva said. “I wanted our son, our only child, to marry a Jewish girl. Is that hard to understand?”
             
“You know mixed marriages are difficult,” Sam said, looking from her to Ben.
             
“Well, of course, they are,” Beva said.
             
“No doubt you’ll come across some hard times,” Sam said to them.
             
“And where will you live?” Beva said. “You can’t stay in this district. You’ll be stared at.”
             
“I was thinking of Donnybrook,” Ben said, giving Marian’s hand a squeeze.
             
“Full of
goyim
,” Sam said.
             
“It’s a mixed neighborhood, Tatte.”
             
“And what about the k
inder
? Did you think of them? Your children will suffer. Neither Jew nor Christian. They won’t belong. You have a lot of
chutzpah
, Marian,” Beva said.
             
“Excuse me?” Marian said.
             
“A lot of nerve.”
             
“And your son, Mrs. Ellis. What has he got?”
             
“He’s the big savior. Had to do his part to raise educational standards for the Zion School children. And boom, there you are, like out of a Doris Day movie.” The woman threw her arms in the air as she walked into the living room, stared out the bay window.
             
“Mammy, let me ask you this” Ben said. “Did you marry Tatte for love?”
             
“Of course,” Beva said.
             
“Remember how you felt, being in love?”
             
“Not often,” Beva said.
             
“Can’t you try to understand?” Ben said.
             
“I’m sorry. It’s very different.”
             
“You know, Mammy. I dream every night of receiving yours and Tatte’s blessing. You’re robbing me of that.”
             
“And I’m being robbed of a good son. And Jewish grandchildren.”
             
“It’s a new world, Beva,” Sam said, rising slowly. “They’re freer in their thinking than we were.”
             
“Hogwash,” Beva said. “I’m calling Sylvie Rosenblatt tomorrow. Her daughter’s in love with him, she told me. They’d make a good
shiddach
. They’d be a great match. Talk to him, Sam, before it’s too late. Tell him that a
shiksa
colleen–”
             
“
Schweig
!” Sam followed after her into the foyer.
             
“Mammy!” Ben raised his voice, holding tight to Marian’s hand.
             
Beva turned. “Let me just ask the two of you. Do you think Marian’s mother wants–”
             
“I’m going,” Marian decided, reaching for her handbag.
             
“If she goes, I go,” Ben said. “Mammy, apologize. Look what you’ve done.”
             
“What I’ve done? What have I done? You’re the one who brought her here!”
             
“Shut it!” Tatte shouted, holding the sides of his head. He gripped the staircase, then leaned on Ben’s shoulder.
             
“Sam!” Mrs. Ellis leaned over her husband; his eyelids were opening and shutting, and she began slapping his flabby cheeks. “Benjamin, call Dr. Eisen.”
             
“No doctors. Marian, get me a glass of water, would you,” Sam said.
             
Marian turned back to the dining room, grabbed a glass of wine from the table, and hurried to the foyer washroom to dump it and return with water.
             
“Listen, you’re a smart girl. I’m trying to save you both from a lot of pain. The two of you, it’ll never work.”
             
Marian looked past Beva, watched Mr. Ellis.
             
I don’t have to listen to this a second longer
, Marian decided, and fumbled the glass onto the foyer table. “Ben, take care of your da,” she said. “And ring me later.”
             
“Wait. I’ll be right with you,” Ben said, as he helped his father shuffle to the living room couch.
             
She left the house and came out onto the street. The cold air from the canal washed over her, a relief from the heat in that house. What had she been thinking, waltzing over there, hoping for their approval? Had she really deluded herself into thinking that teaching at the Jewish Day School would be enough for his parents to accept her? And what about Ben assuring her that they would love her? In the bay window Ben tried to comfort his parents. Marian wanted to protect him from the pain they were causing him. There was something about the exhausted look in his eyes, something she couldn’t pinpoint, something simple and complex; she loved this essence of him. But a complex relationship is one thing. Complications are another, Father Brennan would say.
             
Ben rushed outside.
             
“I wish you had warned me about her, Ben.”
             
“I had no idea this would happen. Tatte told me he’d handle everything. Marian, I’m sorry.”
             
“I’m sorry, too,” she said. “Your da’s splendid.”
             
He was perspiring, and she reached out and wiped his forehead. She felt dizzy and confused, but one thing was certain. Ben loved her, and she loved him. She could see the excruciating love he had for her; it was right there on his troubled face.
             
“I’m going home,” she said.
             
He looked across the narrow street and wiped the back of his neck. Neighbors peered at them from doorways; small children in upstairs windows made funny faces at them.
             
“I can walk home alone tonight,” Marian said. “You help your da now.”
             
Through the bay window she watched his mother give Tatte a sip of water.
             
“I’m going with you,” Ben said.
             
“I know you are, but not now, Ben. Go and straighten out your parents. Please.”
             
Marian looked down at her swollen ankles. “Not so perfect now, huh?” she said.
             
“I’ve loved you from the start, Marian. Don’t worry about them,” he said. His parents were going at it still, just audible from where they stood. “My mother’s all talk, but she’ll come around.”
             
“You promise me you’ll marry me, and you’ll love me and no one else, so help you God?” Marian said.
             
He grinned at her in that shy way of his. “I promise.”
             
“I’ve been wanting to tell you something, Ben.”
             
“Yeah?”
             
She put her hands in his pockets, and he drew her close.
             
“I’m going away with my uncle, Father Brennan. You’ve heard me talk about him.”
             
“Sure. The priest.”
             
“Right.” The fabric of his shirt felt soft against her skin and she leaned into him.
             
“What do you mean by it, Marian?” Ben asked.
             
Marian bit her lip. “Ring me later. We can talk about it then.”
             
“But where are you going?”
             
“It’s a rest I’m going for. A lovely rest.”
             
She laid her head on his shoulder. She would do the right thing, she thought. She’d not force him into it; she’d not rush him. They weren’t ready to take on anymore than what they had. They’d all be better off, even him; she had decided now that it was a him. In her mind, she placed their baby somewhere far away from here, far from this street corner, far from the winding streets of Little Jerusalem, from Dublin, from the western mountains, far away from Ireland all together. She imagined him somewhere full of light and warmth where he would have a better life. This would be her gift. Someday he’d thank her for it. She slipped out of Ben’s arms and walked toward home.

Yarmulke caps rested with the Easter eggs in a cut crystal bowl, fabric swatches beside painted curios. Ma
rian rearranged the assortment
and then dusted the photograph on the mantelpiece of Johanna as a toddler, petite and smooth-skinned, a bow in her silky hair, a golliwog doll in her arms. In the phone cradled to Marian’s ear the school principal admonished the girl. Marian agreed to Mr. Hinckley’s request for an afternoon conference and hung up the phone with an audible sigh. She brushed the image of her daughter’s face. This was only her daughter’s third year and already she had been called in twice on account of her antics. Why was Jo acting out? Marian listened to the
tap, tap, rap
of her pumps against their oak floor as she shouldered the swinging door into the kitchen. Through the bay window, the wisteria cascaded over the iron railings enclosing their backyard. She took a moment to admire the effect; she had interlaced the waif-like vines back in the first week at their new home. So much had changed since marrying Ben Ellis in 1957. For the better—though she wondered if anything would ever shake the graying veil over Dublin.  
             
“
Póg mo thóin,
”
she spoke aloud. “Kiss my ass.” She slapped her butt at an imagined Principal Hinckley and folded her dust rag into a perfect square.
Nothing will be perfect. Not for me. Not for anyone. Not ever.
             
Marian swiped the Loreto Church of Christ Mass cards her ma had taped to the fridge and put them in the junk drawer. She took a cigarette from Ben’s Players pack and went to smoke it underneath the white trellis in the garden. She stared at the frozen spot where an extravaganza of zucchini and tomato plants, scallions and parsley, might grow later in the year. For a few moments, she felt something dead inside her, something vague and untouchable, and she stared out into the garden without really seeing. Everybody has problems. She wasn’t the only one. Hidden inside the red and brick homes, behind the perfectly painted doors, there were problems. She looked at the weighty rose climbers drooping over the gates of a brownstone across the way. She noticed the thorns. The vegetables were lovely, too, but underneath the soil there were grubs mixed in with the roots. 
             
Ben had asked her last night to redouble her efforts toward Johanna. “God, what?” she’d said.
Johanna asks too many questions. She talks too much.
She didn’t remember talking as much at ten years old. She was exhausted from her daughter. Was she alone in this, too? Her own ma came to mind. As a child, Marian believed her ma would have preferred a more ladylike daughter, someone quieter. She stamped out the butt and threw it in the garden trash bin before reentering the house. Maybe she and Johanna were more similar than she realized. Letting out another sigh, she weaved back into the foyer, touched the blue violas she’d pinned to a white beret and slanted it over her yellow-gold curls, courtesy of Miss Clairol, shimmer blonde #33. She loved these blonde colors much better than her natural Orphan Annie look.
             
You can’t keep the McKeever in you down,
Da would have told her.
Sure, you’re a regular Marian McKeever, better looking than any Marilyn Monroe,
he might have said.
             
She slipped on her cotton gloves as she started down the four steps of their Georgian townhouse. She noticed a threesome of young mothers from the neighborhood talking codswallop by the news-agent on the corner. Their necks craned when they saw her like the unfashionable ostriches they were. Ostriches without any pretty feathers. They had gray woolen coats and identical black nursemaid shoes. All holy Joes, they feigned busyness as she drew nearer, ending their blather abruptly, casually crossing the street. They’d probably been talking shite about her and Ben, and she knew the lawdy-daws would all be relieved to see them both leave town. She would be happier, too. But the more she felt the sting of their rejection, the angrier she became and the more she resolved to stay put. She was happy and happily married for over ten years, and a mother as well. She was just like the women she chatted with in Dolan’s greengrocers, the ones who seemed so casually confident about everything.
             
She had her father, God rest him, to thank for her inner strength. He’d be proud of her today. From the beginning, he made sure she went to the best schools. Somehow he talked her way into Loreto College, with the big back garden and grass courts and the respect the nuns offered middle-class graduates of the institution. The National School right next door would not do for his girl. And whenever the nuns complained about “Marian’s boldness,” he’d not flog her. Rather, he whipped the nuns with his tongue, and took her by the hand, out for a day at Sheridan’s pub, where he drank Guinness and she ate gobstoppers all afternoon. They laughed and told his mates about the grievous expression on a nun’s face when he praised his clever Marian. She had a right to question and receive a decent answer from a teacher. She wasn’t bold, she was brilliant, he told the nuns; he reminded them who was paying their salary. He took her in his arms, told her that the hard times would pass away. He held her there in the pub, the rest of the world be damned. He struggled, she knew, driving that taxi, not drinking as much as he would have liked, to give her the new dress and the new books to keep up with the middle-class kids on her street.
             
When they called Marian to come down to the bar and identify her da, she was twenty, just two years from graduating from University College. Why did he have to go and die before seeing her graduate from college, she wanted to know. She’d always have the picture in her head of Da lying outside of Murray’s bar, in the alley across from the busy intersection of Parnell and O’Connell Streets, there on the North Side. Thrown out of his taxi into the alley by hooligans, a typically brutal brawl, the guards had said. Hard to control bar fights from getting out of hand, they said, and dismissed the case. He owed some money, his mates whispered to her. The hooligans bullied him, beat him with sticks to his skull. She felt the dried blood, sticky in his hair, and she lay there beside him, rubbing his head, helping him into a calm sleep.
             
Down the block, Marian admired Mrs. Parker’s home, her toddlers playing hide-and-seek in their yard. There was nothing more enjoyable than a cigarette and a saunter in this neighborhood. The only thing missing in this pristine setting was perhaps a bit more camaraderie. She had some friends, mothers of Johanna’s school chums. Though if she were honest, they were little more than acquaintances. Nothing went deeper than ordinary talk about their children’s lives. The only one who ever dropped in on her unannounced was her own mother. But this was not a drop-in-on-someone neighborhood, like she was used to. She pretended not to peer into Mrs. Parker’s back garden, fighting an urge to tiptoe across the lawn and sneak a peek into the flower beds hidden behind the wall. No time to look now, anyway. Ben promised he would meet her at the school for the appointment with Principal Hinckley, and Marian didn’t want Ben, who would no doubt be swayed by the principal, to arrive before she did.
             
Marian passed through the gothic-style railings around the grounds perimeter of the Muckross Park House School, centuries-old weeping willows wearing their vines like Victorian gowns. A large statue of Saint Michael stared down at her from an archway. She climbed the intimidating front stairs and braced herself.
             
Stepping into Mr. Hinckley’s office, she was again amazed that such a dramatic space—the highest of ceilings, crown moldings of naked cherubs, floor to ceiling windows that cried out for dark velvet, a never-used mosaic fireplace—remained a cold, drab setting. Everybody had problems beneath the surface but this man seemed
to create problems for himself.
Getting his gander up over the antics of a couple of kids in the schoolyard. She’d like to tell him off.
             
She moved closer to Hinckley’s desk and received only a cough from the geezer. Some things never changed. Not even the Beatles would be able to shake the dust off this place. There was always some crotchety grouch behind a desk. A nun, a priest, an ordinary man, it didn’t matter where you went to school in dreary Dublin. She was tired of all the dirty whites on the school walls, wanted to paint his office a delicious cranberry and watch the light play off the high ceiling.
             
“Received a call from Miss Harpin saying Johanna is stuck in the principal’s office.” Marian raised her eyebrows at Mr. Hinckley. “What seems the trouble this time?”
             
“Have a seat, Mrs. Ellis.”
             
“I’m fine standing.”
             
Johanna slouched in a leather chair, her shins streaked with dirt, her brown knit knee socks round her ankles. The bow that sat prettily in her mahogany hair this morning now dangling from the pocket of her jumper. She sat up, but kept her head down, dark lashes fanning sea-green eyes. Full of dance and trouble, she hid nothing with those eyes. The sullen maroon skirt and striped tie of her uniform did not suit her. A handful of teachers had already remarked that she was “extremely playful,” as if that was a bad thing. Johanna’s exuberance, what Marian would call charisma, had been a challenge early on. She couldn’t walk, couldn’t even crawl into a room quietly. She would never go unnoticed.
             
“It seems there’s been an incident,” Hinckley began, his fingers entwined, his beefy thumbs tapping together as if to music.
             
What’d she do, put a frog down your pants or something?
             
“The suspense is killing me,” Marian said and turned toward Ben, who just then hurried into the room, his hair a mop-top. Bulging from his suit pocket was a journalist’s handkerchief, what Marian called his crumpled white pad of paper.
             
“Mr. Ellis.” Hinckley nodded and continued, “It seems Johanna has been caught calling a couple of the other boys and girls in third class very bad names.”
             
“What!” Marian exclaimed. She put her hands to her mouth in mock horror.
             
Ben squeezed Marian’s arm. “Johanna?”
             
“Only after I’d been called names, Da.”
             
“Let me see your palms, Jo, dear,” Marian said.
             
Johanna stared at her hands as Marian turned them over. Short red streaks engraved her palms.
             
“I was a first year teacher myself, and I don’t believe in hitting.”
             
“Now there was no harm done, Mrs. Ellis. You can see that plainly,” Hinckley said. “A tap to the palm is all any of them receive here.” The principal coughed.
             
“If she called them names, you can be sure there’s a reason. Tell us what happened, Jo?”
             
“Jimmy Barker called me a slimy Jew lover, and then some kids told me and Anne-Marie that Catholics were gik.”
             
“Who did?” Hinckley clenched his chubby hands.
             
“Jimmy Barker did, sir,” Jo repeated. “And Libby Higgins started them yelling gik at me.”
             
Marian looked to Ben now. “We were told Muckross avoided this nastiness.”
             
She took Johanna out of the chair and fixed her bow back into her shoulder-length hair.
             
“Sure, there are at least two versions to every story,” Ben began, making light of the situation, even trying to assist Mr. Hinckley now. “And what did you call them, Johanna?” Ben pressed his daughter. Marian widened her eyes, and Ben swallowed and turned away from her incredulous look.
             
“Proddies,” Jo said, her eyes peeking at Hinckley’s reaction,