in English. “As in what you do as a child determines how you turn out as an adult. What’s wrong with that?”
Her accent sounded slightly English to Blume’s ear.
“I don’t mind that idea,” said Blume. “Or maybe I do. I haven’t thought about it. It’s that bit about Wordsworth remarking it that annoys me. He didn’t remark it, he wrote it.”
“You know the poem?” asked Caterina. “I studied it once.”
“Of course I don’t know the poem,” said Blume in an exasperated tone. “I just know Wordsworth was a poet. So he wrote that line. He didn’t just once remark it in conversation with Treacy in a bar.”
Caterina sat down on the far side of the table, brushed some Weetabix crumbs onto the floor, pushed her straight brown hair back over her ear, took up a pen, and opened a notebook that she had taken from her son’s room with a blue robo-something on the cover.
“If you’re going to critique each line, Commissioner, this is going to take some time.”
“Well, can you read the handwriting?” asked Blume.
Caterina peered at it, shrugged. “It doesn’t look too…”
“Because I think it’s probably easier for me than for you to guess the English words. So if I read a bit and you follow in your copy, you’ll get used to the lettering quickly, then you can go on alone.”
“That seems like a good idea,” said Caterina.
“Great. So we start off like this, then I’ll leave the photocopy here, you read it, I’ll go home and read it. Then we compare notes sometime next week… We’ll play it by ear, basically.”
“Let’s try it, then,” said Caterina.
“Good. I appreciate this,” said Blume. He opened the first notebook and began to read, struggling over some of the first sentences, but then finding his flow as he familiarized himself with the handwriting.
“As William Wordsworth once remarked, the child is the father of the man. When I look back down the years, I see a strange nine-year-old boy whom I barely recognize. Yet it was he who decided how my life would be, and all because of his crush on an eight-year-old girl.
“The eight-year-old was called Monica, which was a very exotic name for Ireland in the fifties. I first became aware of my love when I was in ‘high babies’ (which, for the uninitiated, is one year above ‘low babies’). She wore an orange dress with a round lace patterned white collar.
“One day, Miss Woods, our art teacher, set us the task of drawing our favorite objects, as many of them as we saw fit. We had three lessons in which to complete our drawings. If deemed worthy, they would be pinned to the walls for sports day when parents would be allowed to come into the school to watch the children do long jumps that can’t have been all that long, and run egg-and-spoon races.
“Miss Woods allowed us only dark colors to begin with, though we were free to use crayons or pencils. She told us we could do the coloring-in during the next two lessons. I observed Monica carefully, noting the objects she chose to draw; I watched the yellow pencil in her beautiful fingers as she glided her hand over the page leaving careful gray outlines. Most of the other children were still using their fists as they sought to keep their waxy red and blue crayons under control.
“During the second lesson, when it seemed Monica had finished outlining her objects and was preparing for the coloring-in phase, I neatly divided my page into four columns and five rows: 20 boxes in all. In the first box, I drew an exact replica of Monica’s entire page, in miniature, without missing out a single object. In the second box, I did the same, only this time I colored in the objects in the way I thought she was likely to choose. In the third box I chose a different color scheme and so on until I had exhausted almost every permutation. When Monica did finish, her picture and colors corresponded exactly to my miniature in box 17. It is still my lucky number.
“Monica’s favorite objects were: a comb (I had kept it brown or black until version 12, when I thought it might be silver), a golden-brown teddy bear with a green bow, a pair of black dancing shoes, a red-haired Raggedy Ann doll, a giraffe, and a blue windmill with white sails.
“Miss Woods loved my work. Mrs. Walsh, the headmistress, did not, dismissing it in front of the whole class as being rather too ‘…’. I did not understand the big word she used that day, and I can’t remember it now.
“But it was clear the bitch did not like it.
“As for Monica, when she realized what I had done, she took her picture down from the wall, ruined it by adding a large and poorly-drawn cat and a purple cabbage tree in the foreground, whereupon she hung it up again.
“I learned three things from that. First, I could draw in another person’s style like it was my own; second, women could be unpredictable and vindictive; third, never imitate a living artist. If I had forgotten the first lesson and remembered the other two, I would have made my own life easier.
“My mother never came to school events and so she never saw the picture. Apart from not having any interest in how I was doing, I think she felt uncomfortable with the ethos of the school. It was Protestant. Church of Ireland, to be precise. My mother was born a Catholic, but no longer practicing. She had not lapsed; rather she had been cast out and thrown over when she became pregnant with me by a man whose name she never revealed to anyone, not even me. After failing to reconcile with her own family and most of her neighbors, she adopted a Bohemian guise, and affected not to care. After a while, assisted by some serious afternoon drinking and several rejection letters from publishers not at all interested in her imagist poetry, she really did not care.
“At the age of eleven, I acquired a reluctant stepfather called Manfred Manning. I call him my stepfather but at the time of his appearance he was married to another woman whom he could not divorce, this being Ireland and then being then. He finally chose to leave his first wife when she was diagnosed with cancer of the pancreas. She lasted almost three years, which may be some sort of record, perhaps hanging on to spite them, perhaps hoping he would come home at least for the final part. When she died, Mother and Manfred were holidaying in Edinburgh, a city I have yet to find a reason for visiting.
“After a Protestant primary education, my mother sent me, aged 12, as a boarder to Clongowes Wood College. It seems strange the Jesuits should take in the child of such an immoral woman shacked up with a bigamous Prod, but the reason is simple enough. Manning made a large contribution toward the building of a new wing and my mother lied about everything. She told them she was married, and though admitting her husband was a Protestant, insisted she was bringing me up Catholic. She might even have produced some false paperwork to prove it.
“The summer before I went, she gave me a crash-course in Catholicism, bringing me to mass, and shuffling me up the aisle to communion. Tongue out, eyes downcast, no chewing, it is supposed to be the flesh of Christ. Yes, Henry, it is a revolting concept, but it helps you not to chew. She explained confession to me, too, and warned me to hold back on some issues, notably religious doubt and my paternity. It was expected, she said.
“She told me in some detail about the first communion party I never had, and the gifts of money I never received from relatives I had never met. After a while, I began to remember all these events that had not happened, and I realized how easy it was to paint a fictional past.
“The most surprising thing I learned during my conversion to temporary Catholicism was that God was a soft blue woman. Cabinteely Catholic Church, to which my headscarfed and unrecognizably pious-looking mother took me to learn the ropes, had a tondo image of Jesus set into the pier to the right of the altar. A red sanctuary lamp hung over the altar and a second tondo image, this one of a gentle-looking person in blue, was set into the left pier. Now, as the Protestants had given me enough instruction about God’s three-in-one-person trick but remained tight- lipped about Mary, Mother of God, my interpretation was: Jesus on the right, the Holy Ghost in the middle, and God was the blue-shrouded woman on the left.
“I was soon disabused of the notion, but images are stronger than words. God was then and is sometimes even now an azure Bellini-esque woman…”
Blume turned over the page and looked in dismay at a web of crossings-out and insertion marks.
“I can’t make this out, but I think I’m going to skip ahead. This is no good to us. You’ve hardly taken any notes, I see. Are you following?”
Caterina looked down at what she had written.
Blume flicked forward a few pages. “This section seems to come to an end here.”
“You may as well read it through.”
“The Jesuits may have designed the myth of the Immaculate Conception, but the Irish chapter of the order
