“We went to the movie theater on our own. Together. Last year.” Maura spoke defiantly, smiling through her tears.
“It was a true story, about a young unwed mother named Philomena. Her toddler son was adopted out to America, for money, from one of those merciless homes named after Saint Mary Magdalene. Not a newborn, a two-year-old! Can you imagine the lasting severed bond? Remembering each other, lies to both kept them apart for decades, never again meeting. At least Philomena finally learned her son’s fate. He’d died in the prime of life and had asked to be buried at the Magdalene institution graveyard, in case his mother ever came looking for him. So she did find him at last.”
Of course, Temple thought, they would go to see Philomena together alone, almost furtively, women who had lost sons at the same time from the same brutal event. Sisters who had carried on with guarded emotions and doubt and self-doubt and subtle estrangement.
Temple knew the movie’s plot and wasn’t watching the women. She was watching Max. He downed the remaining three fingers of whiskey in his glass in one heroic go. Set the expensive crystal down with a thump on the long table behind the couch, and came around it to kneel in front of the weeping women, covering their entwined hands with his large ones. Head bowed, voice raw, he whispered, “Bless me, Mothers, for I have sinned.”
During the long silence punctuated by the women’s sobs, everyone kept stone-still. Matt caught Temple’s glance returning to him, and pulled her closer.
“I know,” she whispered. “You’ve heard that beginning sentence in a lot of Confessions. ‘Bless me, Father, for I have sinned’. Would you have ever dreamed you’d hear it paraphrased by Max?”
Matt shook his head. “It will do him good. And it’s the perfect way to apologize to this crowd.”
“And sinned again.” Max went on, sitting back on his heels.
“What is this?” Kevin sounded uneasily gruff. “An Irish wake? More whisky and less tears. What’s done is done.” He eyed his son. “So what more are we to learn, Michael, that we have an unsuspected grandchild somewhere?”
Max was able to discharge his deep emotion in a shaky laugh. “Not that. No. Sorry.” He rose and sat on the huge square coffee table’s edge. “There’s still a lot more story to come, though. We Irish love telling and hearing stories.”
Temple retrieved his glass and went to Matt, already holding the Jamison’s bottle. He cocked his eyebrows as he refilled it and eyed the others.
“As a humble radio counselor, I’d advise a topping off,” he said as he made the rounds. “What is the famous line from that old movie you love?” he asked Temple.
“Bette Davis in superb sardonic form. ‘Fasten your seat belts. It’s going to be a bumpy ride.’”
Temple took her champagne glass, sat on the coffee table beside Max, and set the glass down on the nearest coaster. Matt settled into Eileen’s place on the sofa after offering her husband Patrick an inquiring look.
“There’ll be no more waterworks, I hope,” Patrick muttered.
Max sipped from his glass and gave Temple a wry smile before continuing. “You were all quite right after the bombing. I underwent paroxysms of guilt on all fronts. It took a while for the authorities to sort out the crime scene and separate the wounded from the dead, or pieces of them. I knew Sean had gone missing.” Max shut his eyes for a moment. “I had to provide his toothbrush for DNA testing, which was quite new then.
“No one was there to stop me. I became a vengeance machine. I told the IRA men that Sean and I had come over hoping to join the movement to free Northern Ireland from the British…yes, what we now call ‘young naive foreign fighters’ for ISIS. I’d always done magic tricks as a hobby and that makes you very observant, very able to be unobserved. I was a perfect spy, really, and I found the two men who’d planted the bomb and gave their names to the British. I never heard what happened to them, but a swift, secret killing was fine with me then. Many people were badly wounded, but Sean was the only one dead.
“Of course, in my guilt and fury I had no time for colleens whose eyes ‘shined like the diamonds’, as in the old song. I didn’t know that Kathleen’s savage early life had made her psychotic about being abandoned. She couldn’t understand that my bond with Sean made avenging him my only priority. And I didn’t know then she was an IRA agent, a champion fund-raiser well-known to the scattered Irish abroad.
“So,” Max said, “when I came home for the closed casket funeral, I saw that my lies to cover up why we were in Northern Ireland in that pub weren’t credible. And I saw that the pressure of one cousin back from a pub bombing without a scratch—or visible ones, anyway, and the other cousin identified from fragments—would gall good people, one family happy but guilty, the other reminded daily of their loss, and guilty. And me guiltiest of all.”
Matt shook his head. “Catholic guilt is built-in. We’re asked to examine our consciences from the age of seven, and that situation was a perfect trifecta.”
Maura just sat there, numb. “Our collective grief blinded us to the living. We thought of you still as a child. And here you’d been through war, through your own hell, and we didn’t know it.”
Max shook his head, to deny her need for guilt. “Then word came that the IRA realized I’d ‘betrayed’ them, probably alerted by Kathleen, and had a price on my head. In those days before the peace, IRA sympathizers were everywhere, especially in the U.S. I had to get as far away as possible or my family and friends could get caught in the cross-fire. By then, counterterrorist operations had heard of my exploits, so they both saved and recruited me and magic became my cover. It turned out I was quite a good magician, especially at disappearing acts.”
Temple turned to face Max. “So you were already adept at it when my turn came.”
“You?” Maura jerked her head toward the other couch where Matt was now sitting. “But you just married him.” She stared at Temple again.
Temple smiled. “Yes, Maura, your son swept me off my feet in Minneapolis and directly to Las Vegas, where he had a year’s engagement as The Mystifying Max. We planned on marrying soon. When he realized some shady characters had waylaid me to inquire about him, he left on the closing day of his act, without a word, the same night a dead man had been discovered on the hotel premises, which made him a suspect.”
“He left without a word?”
“I followed him from my home city and family and a good job.’ Temple linked arms with Max. “And, to ensure my safety, he left me here for the police and other less honest people to harass. Still…I love my freelance public relations work, and Vegas is the place to be for that. Then Matt moved into my apartment building. And Max did finally come back to face the music.”
The moment of astonishment hovered, a paused recorded Lifetime movie moment.
“And,” Matt announced from behind them all, from the door through which Max had entered. “So, finally did Sean and his wife Deirdre of County Tyrone, Northern Ireland, come back.”
30
In Sunshine or in Shadow
Everyone had automatically turned toward Matt’s voice, beside the open door Max had used, now framing Sean and Deirdre Kelly standing together arm-in-arm like a life-size couple on a wedding cake.
The Kinsellas and Kellys stood as one, shocked to their feet to face the unexpected couple.
Except Max. He bounded over the Kinsella couch and ushered them into the room, his enthusiasm masking how tense and shy and wary the newcomers were.
Cries of “Oh, dear God” and “Glory Be” and “My darling Sean”. “Our lost boyo, Sean.”
Max and the couple were mobbed in an incoherent group hug.
Alone and marooned behind, Temple told Matt through a teary voice, “This is the greatest wedding present ever.”