His last two years at Killgarson had been among the best of Billy’s life. His kick-boxing prowess launched him to legendary standing in school and, indeed, in the wider Kilkenny community. He continued his discipline with Tommy Dixon, growing bigger and stronger as puberty hit. With each passing month and with every fight won in under-14 competition, so grew the respect and deference of the Killgarson community.
Lady luck smiled more than once on Billy’s 6th grade year. McKenzie was transferred in October, and given a parish upland, in north Kildare, a small village called Rathmore. Killgarson school had a going away party for McKenzie; Billy was chosen by Mr. Duggan to present a book of Yeats’s poetry and to do a reading of Billy’s choice.
He selected “The Song of Wandering Aengus” and read with full-voiced confidence:
I went out to the hazel wood,
Because a fire was in my head,
And cut and peeled a hazel wand,
And hooked a berry to a thread…
And when white moths were on the wing,
And moth-like stars were flickering out,
I He dropped the berry in a stream
And caught a little silver trout…
As Billy finished the three-stanza poem, McKenzie listened with his usual icy detachment, cold gray eyes staring straight ahead, impassive. Seeing those amphibian eyes again up close brought the assault in the vestry rushing up, threatening to engulf him. Billy bolted for the toilet and stayed there until Mr. Duggan knocked, asking, “Is everything alright in there Billy? Father McKenzie has to leave. Can you please come out to say tooraloo?”
“Sorry, Mr. Duggan,” Billy had blurted. “Tell him I’m really sick. Throwin’ up. Say bye for me.” Mr. Duggan had let it go. “Alright, Billy. I’ll make your apologies. Great job on Aengus there. We were all very moved. I especially love those last two lines….’ silver apples of the moon; golden apples of the sun.’ Pure genius, that Yeats!”
***
Billy never saw McKenzie again, but never forgot him either. Not after he graduated from St. Aidan’s in Kilkenny, with A levels across the board; not after he graduated from University College, Dublin (UCD), with first class honors in social science; and not after his Guggenheim Fellowship and Ph.D. thesis at Columbia on “Cognition and Meaning in Cross-Cultural Context.”
After earning his doctorate at Columbia, Donovan accepted a teaching post at McIntosh University, a small liberal arts college in Northhampton, Massachusetts. Four years later, with the university’s sponsorship, he’d applied for a green card and became a naturalized U.S. citizen.
Three well-received books, a coveted tenure track position, and a litany of honors and awards studded a distinguished academic career. Donovan was a competent, though never popular, teacher—terms like “aloof” and “never gives an A,” were typical of student feedback. Yet, he was a provocative keynote speaker at national symposia and college commencements. In his sixth year, he was granted tenure and promoted to Associate Professor of Anthropology—the mark of a man on the move. Two years later, he was promoted to Full Professor and awarded the Noah R. Remsky endowed Chair of Linguistics.
His marriages were another story. After careening through three in eight years, he gave up. Luckily, he reflected, none of the marriages produced offspring. The dreary, dysfunctional pattern was now well established; all the therapy in the world was not going to change it. After whirlwind courtships—the longest lasting a mere three weeks—there would be a plunge into marriage, a clean slate, all things possible, again.
Except intimacy. That was the hidden iceberg, always discovered too late, on which all three marriages floundered. Each woman knew the story. He’d made it his policy to lay the whole sordid McKenzie episode on the table up front—by the second date, if not the first. He’d been in therapy since grad school, when he couldn’t consummate his relationship with Gwen Norgren, a gorgeous classmate and the first girl he’d ever managed to seduce. Sort of.
They worked through the trauma of that, only to discover the problem went much deeper than sex. On matters large and small, it turned out, try as he might, Donovan was closed to sharing anything beyond the most banal. Asked about his feelings, he didn’t just shut down, he fled to an altered state, his emotional bunker, with familiar harbingers: knotted stomach, nausea, clammy palms—then full-blown panic. The only palliative was an immediate escape to fresh air in the great outdoors—field, forest, beach, mountain—unburdened by buildings or people.
With the passing of time and decades of practice, he’d managed an early detection system, but never made progress on the intimacy front. After over a dozen years and four different therapists, he’d finally stopped trying.
Now, at 36, already at the top of his profession, he believed that had been a good decision for him. He hadn’t seen a therapist or slept with a woman since his last divorce, in February, 2000, five years ago this month. A good thing he hadn’t been in Ireland all this time, he reflected, or he’d still be stuck in his first marriage. Mother Church still frowned on divorce and that was the law—no separation of church and state in the Irish Republic. Even contraception was banned here, even for married couples, though over 90% of Catholic women admitted to ignoring the sanction. Donovan smiled grimly at the double standard: an institution that nurtures pedophiles while sternly rejecting responsible family planning.
Donovan’s three divorces had been amicable, no-fault affairs. No alimony. His former wives had all remarried affluent professionals; two were still in touch and had introduced their new husbands and announced the birth of their children to him. Donovan had reconciled himself to being single and celibate, limiting his social life to platonic dating. No point in revisiting a watering hole that was a mere mirage, he mused, after a trip across the Mojave desert. One of his colleagues in Political Science joked that Donovan had adopted a personal “Monroe Doctrine” of “no entangling alliances.”
All this presented Donovan with a maddening paradox. On the one hand, as a man who valued self-awareness, he accepted the fact that he was fatally flawed as a romantic prospect for any woman. On the other hand, he liked the company of women, still lusted after their beauty, missed the excitement of courtship, and hungered for intimacy.
Until he found it.
Though he was temped each time he saw an attractive woman and had to remind himself of his firm conclusion: there would be no backtracking anymore, no last-ditch effort. Sex was a closed chapter in his life, like a sacred room that must be locked and abandoned for good, out of respect. It was not his to inhabit any more.
But the Archbishop’s repentance had challenged that vow, rekindling the prospect that the room might be revisited. Maybe, just maybe, a new subfloor might to be unearthed. If the idea he was hatching could come to fruition, he might be able to go back, throw open those shuttered rooms, perhaps inhabit the whole house again—this time as a vulnerable, receptive mortal, not as a robotic academic with emotions encased behind a firewall of panic and self-loathing.
He passed through Roscrea, Tipperary—the fertile midlands—at noon, marveling that the drive had taken him two hours from Shannon. It the old days, it would have taken a full day to navigate the single-lane boreens, market towns full of livestock, cattle and sheep drives on every mile of road and, of course, the county council workmen leaning on their shovels, chatting to kill the time, blocking traffic as often as possible. Happily, those days seemed in the past. Another major change, one he was deeply grateful for.
Closing in on his destination, Donovan stopped for petrol in Clonmel, bought a ham sandwich and lemonade at a local shop and decided to treat himself to a picnic. He had a special place in mind and was delighted to find it still unspoiled. Hogan’s Gap—they called it—a famous roadside vista overlooking Killgarson, his former village. He remembered vividly the spectacular quilt of verdant fields, silver trout streams, and perfumed, purple heather wafting off the majestic Blackstairs Range.
The rain stopped as Donovan parked the Vauxhall and stepped out, just in time to catch the rainbow as it unfurled across the valley, like a grand, welcoming banner. Sitting on a rock in Hogan’s Gap, eating his sandwich, he could hear the farmers whistling to their border collies in the distance—the ewes noisily guarding their lambs against the intrusion—and a new, yet vaguely familiar, feeling possessed him.
This was the home he’d erased from memory. Tears came, again, soaking his shirt, as he saw, as if for the first time, the aching beauty of this precious valley he’d been forced to abandon.
In that moment, all his noble intentions—to take the high ground, to forgive, to show compassion for his molester—were swept away in a tsunami of rage; of lust for revenge. Yes, revenge. He shouted it across the valley: “REVENGE!” He choked it down till it felt… right. Just. Revenge for his stolen childhood; revenge for the misery of three divorces; revenge for the lost beauty of this place; and revenge for all the fresh-faced boyd who, like him, stumbled mutely into the diaspora, broken and ashamed.
Now, the only question was: How?
(to be continued next Friday)