“I’m buttering her up,” said Julian. “I’m giving her the old Woodbead charm.”
“She’ll be getting the old Behan charm if you’re not careful. And what about you, young fella?” he asked, turning to me. “You look like you’d rather be anywhere else but here right now.”
“Not at all,” I said, not wanting to let Julian down. “I’m having a great time.”
“You are not.”
“I am.”
“I am what?”
“I am, Mr. Behan?” I said, uncertain what he meant.
“I can see right through you,” he said, leaning forward and looking me directly in the eyes. “You’re like a wall of glass. I can see right into the depths of your soul and it is a dark cave filled with indecent thoughts and immoral fantasies. Good man yourself.”
A long silence followed, during which everyone at the table, with the exception of Behan himself, felt awkward.
“Bridget,” said Mary-Margaret finally, breaking the silence but slurring her words. “I think it’s time I went home. I don’t want to stay here any longer.”
“Have another Snowball,” said Bridget, who was getting as drunk as any of us, and she waved her finger over the table without even looking around and, to my astonishment, within about two minutes, a fresh round arrived.
“Was everything you said in your book true?” asked Julian. “In Borstal Boy, I mean.”
“Christ, I hope not,” said Behan, shaking his head as he lifted his next pint. “A book would be terrible boring if everything in it was true, don’t you think? Especially an autobiography. I can’t remember half of it anyway, so I presume I’ve slandered a few people along the way. Was that why your daddy wanted to have it banned?”
“He doesn’t approve of your past.”
“Do you have a sensational past, Mr. Behan?” asked Bridget.
“I have a few of them. Which part is it that he didn’t like?”
“When you tried to blow up the Liverpool docks,” said Julian. “The bit that landed you in Borstal in the first place.”
“Your daddy isn’t a sympathizer then?”
“He wants the Brits to come back in and take control,” said Julian. “He’s born and bred in Dublin but he’s ashamed of the fact.”
“Well, sure it takes all sorts to make a world. And what about you, young fella?” he asked, turning his attention to me.
“I don’t care,” I said. “I have no interest in politics.”
“Tell him who your mother is,” said Julian, nudging me in the arm.
“I don’t know who my mother is,” I replied.
“How can you not know who your mother is?” asked Behan.
“He’s adopted,” said Julian.
“And you don’t know who your mother is?” he asked.
“No,” I said.
“Then why did he—”
“Tell him who your adoptive mother is,” said Julian, and I looked down at the table, focusing on a stain that I was trying to scrub clean with my thumb.
“Maude Avery,” I said quietly.
“Maude Avery?” asked Behan, putting his pint down and staring at me with a mixture of disbelief and humor. “Like to the Lark Maude Avery?”
“That’s the one,” I said.
“One of the best writers Ireland has ever produced,” he said, slapping his hand down on the table a few times. “Do you know, I think I remember you now. You were at the funeral. I was there myself.”
“Of course I was at the funeral,” I said. “She was my adoptive mother.”
“She’ll find her peace with the Lord,” said Mary-Margaret in an evangelical tone that made me turn to her with a contemptuous expression on my face.
“I can see you still in the front row in a little dark suit,” said Behan. “Sitting right there next to your father.”
“His adoptive father,” said Julian.
“Shut up, Julian,” I said, a rare moment of displeasure from me to him.
“You gave one of the readings.”
“I did,” I said.
“And sang a song.”
“No, that wasn’t me.”
“It was a beautiful tune. You had us all in tears.”
“Again, not me. I can’t sing.”
“Yeats said it was like listening to a choir of angels. O’Casey said it was the first time he’d cried in his entire life.”
“I didn’t sing anything,” I insisted.
“Are you aware of the esteem in which we all held your mother?”
“I didn’t know her very well,” I said, wishing that Julian hadn’t brought this topic up.
“How could you not know her well?” asked Behan. “If she was your mother?”
“My adoptive mother,” I insisted for the umpteenth time.
“When did she adopt you?”
“When I was three days old.”
“Three years old?”
“Three days old.”
“Three days old? Sure then she was your real mother, for all intents and purposes.”
“We weren’t close,” I said.
“Have you read her books?”
“No,” I said.
“None of them?”
“None of them.”
“I’ve told him,” said Julian, perhaps feeling a little excluded from the conversation.
“Not even Like to the Lark?”
“Why do people keep telling me to read that? No, not even Like to the Lark.”
“Right so,” said Behan. “Well, you should if you have even a small interest in Irish literature.”
“That’s exactly what I have,” I said.
“Christ,” he said, looking from Julian to me and back again. “Your father is Max Woodbead, your mother is Maude Avery. What about you girls? Who are your parents? The Pope? Alma Cogan? Doris Day?”
“I’m going downstairs to the jacks,” I said, standing up and looking around the table. “I need a piss.”
“We don’t need to know,” said Mary-Margaret.
“Fuck you,” I said, before giggling uncontrollably.
“Do you know something,” said Behan, smiling at her sweetly, “if you want to loosen yourself up a little, maybe you should go down there with him. I bet he’d find a way to sort you out. You’ve got to lose it sometime, Missy, and so does he. This pair on the other hand,” he added, nodding toward Julian and Bridget. “They’re well into it already, I’d say. Sure he’s only short of dragging her under the table and sticking it to her right here.”
I stepped over the back of the chairs before I could hear her response and stumbled downstairs, urinating long and furiously against the back wall and wishing that we had never come to the Palace Bar to begin with. How long was Behan going to sit with us? And why hadn’t Julian told me that he had planned a foursome for the evening? Was he afraid that, had I known, I would never have come? The fact was, I would have anyway. It was easier to sit in front of him, watching him get up to all sorts, than it was to be left alone in our room at Belvedere College, imagining it.
When I came back upstairs, Behan was back on his barstool and Bridget was rubbing Mary-Magdalen’s arm while she dabbed at her eyes with a handkerchief.
“It’s just such a vulgar question,” she was saying. “What kind of a woman would do such a thing?”
“Don’t upset yourself, Mary-Margaret,” said Bridget. “It’s an American thing, that’s all. He probably heard about it over there.”
“Cyril, your round I think,” said Julian, nodding in the direction of the girls and rolling his eyes.