The Whipping Club (40 page)

             
Marian shook her head in disbelief. “A bit too late for any of that now. This time, tell the truth. You rang the guards?”

             
“I did no thing. I thought it was a burglar, yes, but I rang nobody,” she said, her English deteriorating under the duress. “The guards were here. They came, yes. Somebody else must have rang them. Not me.”

             
Marian grappled with the sequence of events, and for the first time she considered what Mrs. O’Rourke was saying as if it might well be true; the guards had said so themselves. They’d said that Adrian, for reasons unbeknownst to anyone at the time, had gone to Ringsend. A barman rung Surtane, and Brother Ryder rung the guards.

             
“Why do you hate me, Mrs. O’Rourke? I don’t understand.”

             
“I don’t understand. It’s me that don’t understand.”

             
Mrs. O’Rourke started to walk away. Marian took a moment to consider the possible reasons why the two of them had never liked one another. The most she could muster was a painful disconnect that disguised something similar in each of them. Perhaps Mrs. O’Rourke would have wanted to be invited for tea. Perhaps there was something essential missing from Mrs. O’Rourke’s life, something that Marian couldn’t have known. Marian had not taken on the mothering of a relative’s kids, and she had no idea what a loveless marriage was like.

             
“Please don’t go,” Marian said quietly.

             
Mrs. O’Rourke turned, and they looked at each other. Marian began whistling on the stoop and looked at the ground, but it was clear when she looked back at Mrs. O’Rourke that their shared expression was one of relief.

             
“I never rang the guards. I always liked Adrian. He knows.”

             
Marian shrugged as Mrs. O’Rourke walked back toward her, clutching the cake.

             
“Can I make tea? Let me explain myself, please. Johanna told me about this union card. Come. To my house, please. I tell you something, you’ll see.”

             
As Marian walked with Mrs. O’Rourke into the O’Rourke living room, she noticed a homemade picture frame. Mrs. O’Rourke smiled as Marian reached for the frame. This was the first time she saw Mrs. O’Rourke smile, and she looked with her at the photo. It was a picture of the four of them: Anna, Adrian, Jo, and Rona holding hands in swim caps, the O’Rourke’s sprinkler in the background.

             
Marian let out a sad smile and put the picture down. For the rest of the evening, she sat at her neighbor’s oak kitchen table. It had been before seven o’clock on Saturday night that Mrs. O’Rourke saw a figure climbing up their drainpipe, but she did not call the guards, she explained to Marian once again.

             
“The one thing that would kill me is not being able to protect my kids,” Marian said to Mrs. O’Rourke.

             
They shared a smile this time, though neither of them felt any happiness. It was then that Mrs. O’Rourke told her own story, how she married her sister’s husband to take care of her sister’s kids, how this act had not been completely voluntary, that there had been family pressures as well.

             
Late that Sunday evening, Mrs. O’Rourke asked Marian to call her Barbara. She explained as best she could that she had two brothers, and a father before them, who worked the coalmines and that eventually, until World War II, the family managed to own Koliknova Coal Company. Now under the same company name the brothers held permanent positions in the largest state-run coal company in Poland.

             
Mr. O’Rourke briefly joined in the discussion. “Your boy seems

he’s got no other way,” he said, “but that she make a call back home. They’ll look after him for a while anyway,” he advised. They agreed it was worth pursuing.

On Monday morning, Ben again refused his breakfast and the pen to sign the bail bond for his release.

             
Adhering to the law, Officer Conrad had no choice but to bring him into Dublin to the Four C
ourts Building for sentencing.
Marian alerted Robert Thompson of this development, who told every newsman he knew. As the police car pulled up to the famous architectural landmark with its large green dome and stately entrance along the Liffey, a great crowd of reporters and pedestrians were gathered, pushing to get inside the building.

             
Ben sat in High Court for hours until he was brought before a judge. He, Father Brennan, and Officer Conrad spoke as Thompson and others jotted notes. Father Brennan came forward with some of what he knew about the Surtane School from giving Masses there: the unsanitary conditions of the heinous place, the nonexistent visits by the Health Board, the children’s
hunger. Officer Conrad talked
of the charge of breaking and entering brought against Adrian by a bartender in Ringsend, who made the false accusation after a bribe from Brother Ryder. And then there was alleged abuse described by an unnamed source, including the inexplicable death of a young orphan named Peter.

             
The Ellis story spread quickly because of impressive media coverage, not to mention the growing public outcry.

             
With emotions running high, the judge ordered Ben to sign the bail bond for his release. Ben again declined, stating that he had principles and the law had to make provisions for cases like his.

He was not the only one, he stated with force. There were thousands of cases yet to be heard, thousands of Adrians, he shouted. The judge warned him that if he did not sign, he would be held in contempt; if he did not sign, he would be sent to Mountjoy Prison indefinitely.

             
Still, Ben refused.

             
So it was in front of an increasing number of spectators that Ben was handcuffed and brought to the infamous Dublin jail.

Father Brennan sat in his easy chair,
a glass of brandy in one hand,
a prayer book in his lap, deliberating about how much he should disclose, whether he should help secure an illegal union card for Adrian. What he’d been asked to do was unlawful and, if discovered, he would be excommunicated or worse. No pressure if he couldn’t get Adrian the card, Marian had indicated as they left the Four Courts Building Monday afternoon. “I’ll get him out myself—

no way that I won’t. Just let me know by the morning,” she said.

             
There came a shameful time in Father Brennan’s life seven years ago when he experienced a spiritual crisis and sought help from his mentor, Father Flanagan. Father Flanagan tried to reassure him that no one knows the condition of another’s heart, as he listened kindly and without judgment to Father Brennan’s confession. The more Father Brennan focused and prayed, and willed God’s peace to enrich his homilies, the more incompetent and alone he felt and the more frustrated he became with God. 

             
It had been years since he had felt the joy of simply being in the presence of God, and he missed the peace it brought. Instead he was filled with an intense self-loathing brought on by what he perceived as his lack of depth, and this torment drove him further from the truth he’d once known. Over the years, the time he spent with Ben had been thought-provoking and fruitful. Although Ben’s God was an intellectual one, these philosophical discussions somehow brought Father Brennan closer to his faith. But now this.

             
He felt yanked out of his ambiguous state to take some action to help Adrian. He was once again besieged by the terror of the unanswered question of whether he was a Pharisee or a Christian. The drama of the situation and particularly Ben’s reaction to the predicament with Adrian, the pureness of his devotion, provoked new doubt within Father Brennan. Perhaps he didn’t have enough compassion or desire or passion to be a priest.

Early Tuesday morning, during a confidential visit at the Mountjoy Prison, Father Brennan told Ben and Marian it would take twenty-four hours to process the union card. Men everywhere were clamoring for union pins; they’d get no work anywhere without one, and procuring one had become more than a dangerous business. Marian shared with Ben and Father Brennan her discussion with Barbara Koliknova O’Rourke. Trembling, Marian said that even if it meant sending Adrian far away, perhaps forever, she felt they must, for his own well-being. It was time to take matters into their own hands, she added. Everyone agreed.

             
Marian whispered the details as she huddled next to Ben. Barbara had notified her brother Jakub that Adrian would be on the Koliknova steamer from Dublin before dawn this Wednesday. Jakub would be there when Adrian got off the boat and would make arrangements for work: To load coal boats in Poland or be sent to the mountains to work in the coalmines.

             
Jakub Koliknova might impound his union pin, Father Brennan warned. Once Adrian reached Gdansk Port, he’d be at the man’s mercy, and Father Brennan prayed aloud that he wouldn’t be bringing him to Upper Silesia to work underground for free. He knew from the talk, too, how dangerous the coalmines were in Poland; diseases of the lungs befell many a Dubliner who was lucky enough to get work. Emphysema was a killer among the dockers. The living were losing their eyesight in droves. He kept to himself the stories he heard firsthand from priests administering last rites down the back alleys.

             
“I have other news,” Father Brennan said, hoping to lighten their load. “The barman at the Jolly Roger Inn has dropped the charges. Officer Conrad rang me this morning. After all the press, there is hope,” he added. “Inside of a year, you’ll likely receive custody of Adrian.”

             
“An Officer Dolan, Nurse’s friend, paid me a visit as well,” Ben whispered to him, but looked at Marian.

             
She rang Nurse last night, Marian explained, offering her congratulations on her reunion with Beth and asking for Dolan’s help in their emergency.

             
Father Brennan brought Tuesday’s
Irish Times
and showed them Ben’s statement printed boldly on the second page of the newspaper. “Justice has her back turned on the people of Ireland,” Ben quoted words written on a famous Dublin monument. Marian said the words brought her back to the beginning of their life together when the two of them were standing in Ben’s mother’s kitchen as Beva walked in like a general with leg wounds. The nervous woman had grabbed Ben’s arm, touched the gold band on her son’s hand. She stared at him, her eyes burning, but he didn’t budge. He looked calmly back at his mother and firmly took Marian’s hand in his, willing to take a risk on love.

Brother Mack placed a damp hand towel on Adrian’s forehead as he lay in the infirmary recuperating fr
om his Saturday night beating.
He suffered serious wounds to his jaw and more than likely broken ribs. Three days ago when the Garda pulled up to the playing fields of Surtane, Adrian’s mouth still taped shut, Brother Ryder took his usual stance in front of the eager, waiting crowd: dignified, his hands behind his back, he watched as the officers uncuffed the boy and the car pulled away. Crooning, jumping up and down, singing “A Nation Once Again,” the boys cheered for the return of one of their own, his attempted escape an indictment of their odd brotherhood. Then, en masse, the lads pinned Adrian’s kicking arms and legs as one of them punched him in his right eye. O’Connor and a few others hogtied his feet to his wrists and Brother Ryder raised his golf club in the air and slammed it down hard on Adrian’s exposed feet. Another whack of the club against his back, and he fell into a stupor. Brother Mack appeared out of nowhere and stopped the attack.

             
Brother Ryder had laughed at Brother Mack’s plea to put an end to the torture, his insistence that Adrian would not run again. “He won’t walk again when I get through with him,” Brother Ryder said. “Called us pigs. Thinks we’re the ones need the Devil lifted out of us. I’ll teach him to call me a pig.” Ryder commanded the boys to strip him.

             
“You should never have gone to Ringsend,” Brother Mack said now. “You should have come to me.”

             
“I was trying to help a friend,” Adrian said.

             
Brother Mack frowned.

             
“Isn’t that what we’re supposed to do, Brother Mack?”

             
“If we can.”

             
“They’ll make a murderer out of me yet,” Adrian muttered, thinking about the knives in the bakery.

             
“What did you say?”

             
“I’ll end up in Mountjoy.”

             
“And to what end, Adrian? To who’s good? Certainly not yours.”