The Whipping Club (31 page)

Easter came, and the boys were thrilled. They shined their shoes in the outfitting room. The whole place was alive. The boys had only to complete morning chores with the proviso to appear content and clean and well fed.

             
Brother Ryder, as much as anyone, looked forward to this event. All year, in fact, he thought about this festive picnic, the only all-school social gathering. Careful not to mess his gelled hair, he lowered a thick wooden crucifix around his neck, then belted his black missal with an embroidered gold rope his mother had given him. With his parents both gone and his sister married in Pittsburgh there were no family visits, no one to fawn over him, but there would be others there that afternoon who would revere him. Many fine women among them.

             
Manipulated as a boy into becoming a Christian Brother, he winced now at the memory of the Monkstown Seminary beside Dun Laoghaire Harbor. He always wanted to be married and have a family, so felt utter confusion when his mother sent him to seminary along with their neighbor Christopher Mack.
You’ll keep each other company,
she said, and his father agreed that Christopher was a good example for their boy. They said their goodbyes at the side of the road. Unaware of the hardships to come, he placed his bag on a pony trap and walked with the other newcomers the nine miles to their new school. Countrymen lined the roads, and waved Irish flags at them, handing them jam sandwiches for the journey, as if they were heroes on parade. His mother hadn’t told him that he’d remain there, without any visits at all, for four years. He was a different person by the time he came back home. He became awkward around the girls, and Mary, the girl of his dreams, had married a Jack Ryan, a farmer from Kildare. Barely eighteen, his brains, his achievement, and his closeness to the Lord’s work, positioned Eddie Ryder with Christopher Mack for Surtane before he could have any say in the matter. 

             
Brother Mack, unlike himself, was mercifully unaware that something was lacking in his life and took his lot the way an old maid might. Once, when he’d asked Christopher why he was so content at Surtane, Mack told him that his eyes and thoughts fell on the beauty in life, and in any life there was beauty: the scent of lingering ash from a woodbine enjoyed in the garden, the rain bathing the ivy leaves on the gate lodge, honeysuckle smells in spring. Ryder guffawed.

             
Now that their parents were gone, he thought about calling his sister in Pittsburgh, but he hadn’t yet worked up the nerve to ask her husband to pay his way. Although he kept his claustrophobic room immaculate except for a dirty rag draped over an open jar of boot polish by the trash bin, he felt like an animal in a cage. There was barely space to walk around his cot. Smells of brylcreem and smoke and Old Spice choked the space. He took out a stylo and his worn leather journal from the nightstand drawer, marked the date of this special Easter event. There was a flask on the old dresser, a couple of black belts and crosses hanging from a nail on the wall, a magazine article taped to the mirror: “England ties US in the Ryder Cup match after five consecutive defeats,” the caption read. He whistled at the thought of leaving the country, slapped some Aramis aftershave on his cheeks as shouts exploded from down the hall. He eyed his wooden golf club, erect against the bedside table, ran his fingers over the MacGregor insignia, and then along the lettering in black ink scrawled unsteadily along the shaft.

             
Ryder marched toward the noise. He was, he believed, a role model for the real boys. He wasn’t for the faggots and maggots, he said. Cream rises to the top, he told them, and in this world it is the survival of the fittest. He himself kept trim and fit all these years, working the timber, lifting logs with the best of the lot in here, his monitors.

             
He detected noise was coming straight from Dormo Three. As his boots trailed close, the noise vanished.

             
“All right, everybody downstairs. On your best behavior or there’ll be consequences.”

             
He noticed from the dorm window the morning sky was a steely turquoise. Several people were already mulling about the playing fields. Ellis and Pansy were greeting Ellis’s mother, father, and sister, a pretty thing, budding slightly, a cardigan swinging off her shoulders. She fawned over her brother and perhaps even Pansy. It was their time, he supposed, for girls in kitten heels and boyhood crushes.

             
Brother Ryder felt an insinuating lust come over him whenever he would see Brother Mack making his way to speak with Adrian. He’d never have taken Adrian to be the type, although he was sure Brother Mack had more on his brain than conversation. He looked at Brother Mack for a moment and couldn’t help recalling him as a pudgy, unpopular schoolboy, not one for sports like him, not one the girls took a shine to. He was in every way then as he was now different, a bit of a molly. And it was no wonder he wanted to become a Brother. He didn’t seem to like doing much except sitting quietly in his room reading. Some relief was there inside Brother Ryder at times like this, a bit of his guilt removed for the abuse he caused some of the boys over the years. At least he wasn’t outwardly having relationships with them, setting up house as it were, he thought. He had peered at the two of them last week as they sat in the chapel “reading the Bible and talking.”

             
“Talking, is it,” he said, lingering for a moment. “About what?”

             
“We just thought we’d ask if Peter might join Adrian as a Kitchener. They work well together. Brother Tyrone could use another set of hands as well.”

             
Ryder immediately thought the transfer might incite others to start requesting favors and fights would break out. Also, Ellis and Pansy, they would be distracte
d from their work. And Brother
Tyrone, along with the outside baker, Mr. Donnelly, would have to pick up the slack, to boot. He remembered Peter hurt himself cutting logs. “No,” he muttered and meandered over to the infirmary.

             
He hadn’t given it another thought until this moment, when he knew it would be wrong, and left for the party, couldn’t wait to be part of all the fun.

             
The Ellis family spread their red-checked cloth in the far corner of the refectory. He watched Adrian for a moment, his muscles growing strong with the extra work he’d been assigned—mopping the chapel floors and cleaning the windows in lieu of confirmation classes, which Ryder felt he didn’t need. He looked at Mr. Ellis and wondered about the man. He felt the familiar urge come over him when he saw Peter and knew he would have to continue keeping him company when he was alone in the infirmary.

             
The queer Nurse finally arrived, on her ow
n: the request from
Father Brennan made to the Reverend Mother of Castleboro, for Adrian’s sake, had been granted.

“I received your letter. Are you not all right?” Ma inquired upon seeing Nurse. She told her to sit with them on the picnic spread, between the lemon tart and the egg salad. Nurse appeared more agitated than usual.

             
“Just wanted to see our Adrian here. Did you enjoy the eggs I sent?” she asked him.

             
He looked around, shook his head yes, but his eyes lowered with the lies he was forced into. I never saw one, he wanted to say.

Hadn’t she grown up in an orphanage herself?
Doesn’t she know what is going on here? Tell someone, tell my ma, you blasted eejit.
Distressed by the casual tone of her comment, he wanted to scream, but he knew she was not well, and never had been. She reminded him of a donkey, dumb and lost.

             
“How is Sister Paulinas?” Ma asked Nurse.

             
“Reverend Mother chose Sister Theresa to replace her. She’s retiring, too old now. The job’s getting harder for Sister Paulinas—she’s getting on, too. And the new girls s
eem to get younger and bolder.
A different girl these days.”

             
“Harder for you, too, no doubt.”

             
“’Tis,” she said.

             
“What’s he staring at,” Ma whispered, looking worriedly at Brother Ryder, his hands clasped behind his back. A second phone call she’d made requesting special visitation
rights before Easter the right
bastard had denied. Adrian, his back turned away from the man, grimaced at her, wild with fear that his mother might be heard.

             
“Ah, the beginning of the adolescent years,” Da said, trying to underplay the anxiety on his face.

             
Johanna peeled an orange and handed it to him.

             
“Adrian, do you remember Rosemary? She’s asked after you,” Nurse blurted.

             
“What?” 

             
“Sister Adela told me. She’s been released for good behavior and is working at the Jolly Roger Inn near Ringsend, she wanted you to know.”

             
“Ringsend,” he murmured. “That’s grand.”

             
“He used to call her Betty Boop,” Johanna said, giggling, eyeing Peter.

             
“Sure, go on,” Ma said, laughing too loudly. “Although I call Johanna Annette Funicello.”

             
Johanna turned coy, looked away from Peter. Peter also looked away, embarrassed, probably not knowing who Annette Funicello is.

             
“We’re thrilled you’re all here. Aren’t we, Peter?” Adrian said.

             
“Yes, sir. Thrilled to bits,” Peter said, recovering from Johanna’s

attentions.

             
“I have something for you, Adrian.” Nurse pulled out a bracelet from her black handbag.

             
“Why would a bracelet be for me? No gifts allowed, Nurse,” he said.

             
“I’m off to London, maybe, and I w
anted you to have this to
remember me by,” she said.

             
“London?” Ma exclaimed.

             
Nurse had heard the girls whispering that there were some investigations going on into past Irish adoptions. She overheard the location, near South Kensington, of a private tracing agency and she was determined now to look for her Beth.

             
“Have you told Sister Paulinas?”

             
“I wouldn’t dare,” Nurse said, reddening. “It’s the girls’ talking all the time about London. It just popped into my mind, but I said maybe, if I have the nerve.”

             
“Sure, I think you would have the nerve,” Ma said, squeezing her arm. Adrian noticed Nurse did not repel the touch.

             
“Pawn the bracelet,” Adrian said. “Keep the money for London.”

             
If Nurse could be thinking of escape, if she could get up the nerve, Adrian thought that he, too, could hatch an escape plan, and if she had the courage to escape Sister Paulinas, surely he and Peter could flee Brother Ryder. Figuring out an escape route would keep him sane while he was in there as well.

             
“Listen to you, telling her to sell it.
It might not be hers to sell,”
Ma said.

             
“Ma, sometimes you can be a maggot,” Adrian said, studying his ma’s glamorous face, all made up for the picnic and wearing a blue dress with brass buttons. He couldn’t help but notice Johanna’s pretty dress, too, and Da in his smart brown tweed suit.

             
“Never mind, you. A maggot out of your mouth,” Ma said. “I don’t like the language you’re picking up. That looks as if it could have been an important confirmation gift.”

             
“And we all know how much your confirmation meant to you,” Johanna said, giving Ma a wry smile. “Gran told me all you cared about was the dress.”

             
“That’s not true, young lady. I l
oved church for a while there.
I used to sing the melody of the ‘Ave Maria’ in my room, practicing my walk toward Father Riordan, my white puffy veil growing out of my head like a calla lily. Sure I remember loving that communion.”

             
“It was the dress you loved. That’s all you talked about, Gran said.”

             
Ma protested. “Everything had turned white in my mind on my communion morning. I felt no longer of this world, as if I was floating among angels.” She hesitated, and then she said softly, “I’ve never told anybody, not even my da, about this inexplicable feeling. Kept it a secret all these years, never enjoying it again. But I loved church for awhile,” she said.

             
“Indeed. Love thy neighbor, that sort of thing,” Ben added.