Live Encounters Poetry & Writing April 2025
My other Aunt Mary, story by Neil Brosnan.
Dad was the youngest of four; the eldest was Mary, but I only ever heard her referred to as Mother Perpetua. I never met Mother Perpetua; she died when I was in my teens, having spent forty-eight years in the religious order she’d entered immediately on leaving school. The story goes that in all that time she’d never ventured beyond the convent walls, and her only contact with the outside world had been an annual visit from Dad – and sometimes Mam – usually in August. The only image I’ve seen of her is the old sepia photo of Dad’s First Communion day, with their parents and brother and sister. I was never well disposed towards Mother Perpetua; I’d thought our daily family rosary – complete with The Apostles’ Creed, the relevant mysteries of the day, and The Hail Holy Queen – long enough without having to face another litany for the holy intentions of Mother Perpetua.
To my memory, the first time we missed a rosary was a Thursday in May when I was nine. Uncle Willie, Mam’s brother, was in the kitchen when I came home from school, and Mam said that he had come to take her and Dad on a journey. They would be leaving once my sisters returned from secondary school, and Eileen, the elder of the girls, would be in charge. Eileen would check my homework; I was to be on my best behaviour, and go to bed at my usual time – or earlier, if told.
I wasn’t told, and nobody asked about my homework, and I don’t think my sisters did much homework either – unless it involved learning songs from some strange radio station called Luxembourg. Having the freedom to remain outside until dusk was a mixed blessing but despite the rain, I didn’t dare go indoors in case I’d have to say the rosary. My fears proved groundless: neither sister even noticed when I finally found the courage to sneak inside and creep upstairs to bed.
My room was directly above the kitchen, and I was awakened at some ungodly hour by the rumble of muffled voices from below. Why was Willie in our house in the middle of the night? Why had Willie taken Mam and Dad away in the first place? Why was Willie arguing with Dad, and why were Mam and Dad arguing with each other? I couldn’t glean much from the general kerfuffle, but the words Mary, convent, and funeral were being spouted by Mam and Willie, while Dad would intermittently interject with parents, blame and shame. Finally, I heard the name I’d been waiting for: Mother Perpetua; Mam screamed it three times in rapid succession, and then everybody went silent. The last thing I remember was the slamming of a door and somebody creaking up the stairs.
I was surprised to find Dad in my bed next morning. Only Mam had ever shared my bed – years before, when I was very small and had tonsillitis. If Mother Perpetua had gone to her eternal reward, would our rosary be reduced to more manageable proportions, or did nuns continue to have holy intentions even after death? I slipped out of bed and padded downstairs to the pong of cigarette smoke and a loud snoring from the parlour. A quick peek at the sofa revealed Willie’s arm protruding from beneath Dad’s heavy overcoat. I knew it was Willie’s arm because of the tattoo: only people who’d been to England – or to sea or prison – had tattoos. Willie had once lived in England – before I was born. Dad loved to joke that Willie had taken the first boat back home once he discovered that he’d actually have to work for a living in London. Willie had tattoos on both forearms: on the right was a red heart with the word Mary inside; on the left was a blue heart, pierced by a black arrow, with a single red droplet clinging to its tip.
A hand touched my shoulder. I whirled around to see Mam holding a raised index finger to her pursed lips. Smelling of frying bacon and Sunday perfume, she steered me into the kitchen and explained that she and Willie would be leaving once they’d had breakfast, but she would be back for keeps on the following evening. When I asked if Dad would be going, she said that he’d be staying home to look after us and to cook our meals. I thought it strange that Mam was going instead of him: after all, Mother Perpetua was Dad’s sister – and Mam was a much better cook. Although I desperately wanted to know what was happening, I was afraid to ask my parents in case they might start arguing again, and whenever I’d ask my sisters about anything they’d just laugh and call me a stupid child. Knowing that Willie wouldn’t be any help – he was a bachelor, and believed that children should be seen and not heard – I decided to keep my eyes and ears open, and my mouth shut.
Neither Dad nor my sisters came downstairs until after Willie’s car had left the yard. Strangely, although it was after eight o’clock, nobody mentioned school, and all three of us sat in silence as Dad set the kettle and a pot of eggs to boil on the new electric cooker. I was on my third slice of soda bread when Dad said he had things to do in town; he promised to call to our schools to explain our absences and assure our teachers that we were all studying hard at home. He seemed surprisingly cheery for somebody whose sister had just died, and he winked broadly at the bit about us studying hard at home. He brought us chips and burgers when he returned late in the evening, and then went straight to bed without any mention of study, or the rosary, or Mother Perpetua’s holy intentions. He did, however, lead the rosary on Saturday evening, but Mam was strangely silent during our prayers for Mother Perpetua’s holy intentions, and she remained kneeling long after Dad and my sisters had left the kitchen. Weeks and months went by with the daily rosary continuing unchanged, and neither Mam nor my sisters reacted when Dad made his customary August visit to Mother Perpetua. He would make seven or eight subsequent pilgrimages before Fr Keane arrived one dark November morning to inform us of Mother Perpetua’s death. Mam didn’t accompany Dad to the funeral; she led the rosary in his absence, and recited his decade as well as her own, but made no mention of Mother Perpetua or her holy intentions.
***
Aisling, our eldest, reminds me a lot of Mam. Theirs was a fraught relationship, which became ever more volatile as Aisling advanced through her teens and Mam entered her eighties. The last straw for Mam was when Aisling assumed the role of family archivist and began to quiz Mam about her family. Although she would never admit it to me, I’m sure Aisling hasn’t forgiven Mam for taking much of her clan’s history to the grave. Last May, Aisling went to New Jersey on a J1 Visa. As a bio-tech undergrad, she’d found a temporary position with the company she hopes to join when qualified. Prolonged periods of study haven’t dampened Aisling’s obsession with genealogy, and thanks to her knowledge of all things DNA, along with her mastery of the Internet, she has unearthed several hitherto unknown offshoots of our family tree.
Aisling was Stateside for scarcely a wet week when she found a slua of descendants of an uncle of Dad’s who had supposedly died as a teenager in the Boer War. Nuala, my better half, was less than overjoyed with that news: having already endured years of surprise visits from her own scattered cousins, the last thing she needed was a queue of my relatives on her doorstep. I had almost convinced her of the unlikelihood of such a scenario when our youngest – nine-year-old Jack – pointed to a young lady in the local supermarket and remarked on her likeness to Aisling. We looked, and then we stared: first at the girl, and then – seeing that she was staring right back – at each other. No! I mentally echoed Nuala’s silent scream. It’s a coincidence, I told myself; there will be a perfectly logical explanation. Over the following weeks, however, scarcely a day went by without somebody asking if Aisling had returned from the States. By then, we had reverted to our Covid-19 Lockdown practice of shopping only twice a week – and very early in the morning. It wasn’t too difficult to convince Jack that unconnected people can sometimes look alike, especially after I pointed out one of his classmate’s resemblance to an unrelated family in the locality. I could have bitten my tongue when Nuala reminded me of an old rumour concerning the boy’s mother’s parentage. I’m since trying to convince myself that, unlike me at that age, most nine-year-olds rarely dwell on any thought for very long.
Not so the fathers of nine-year-olds, especially when one overhears a work colleague comment that when he overheard our Aisling answer her phone on the previous evening, she’d sounded exactly like somebody in a Hollywood movie. That was something I decided to keep to myself, and neither Nuala nor I mentioned the doppelganger during our next webcam chat with Aisling. Just a week before her planned return home, Aisling announced that she’d been contacted by a girl who looked a lot like her and whose DNA suggested that she was a close relative. As the girl was holidaying in Ireland; would I mind meeting with her? Just me – not Nuala – what could I say? I couldn’t admit that we were already aware of such a girl, and she of us; that even Jack had noticed her similarity to Aisling. What was even more unsettling was my gut feeling that Aisling wasn’t being totally honest with me. She couldn’t possibly think that the girl might be her sister; could she?
Nuala wasn’t in the least offended by her exclusion from my face-to-face with the mysterious young lady, and she gleefully took Jack and his brother Ryan off to the beach for the day. By the appointed time, my sense of foreboding had morphed into acute anxiety, but I was absolutely terror stricken when I opened the door to find both Aisling and her lookalike on the threshold. They were virtually identical, and both uncannily similar to how my mother looked in her wedding photo. Despite my best attempts to delay the inevitable, the girls declined nibbles and refreshments in favour of getting straight to business. Aisling introduced the girl as Lucia D’Angelo, and described how Lucia had recently met with a woman in London to whom she was even more closely related than to us. Uncle Willie, I thought, and instantly blurted it out. Shaking her head, Aisling explained that something called mitochondrial DNA can only be inherited from one’s mother. That ruled Willie out – and me, I realised, and began to breathe more easily.
Lucia described how, following her DNA hit with Aisling, she had found us through Aisling’s Facebook page. She then explained that the woman in London was actually her biological aunt – my unknown first cousin: the daughter of Mam’s younger sister Mary – of whom I’d never heard. Apparently, teenage Mary had given birth to twin daughters in a now infamous mother-and-baby home. One girl’s birth had been registered to a childless Dublin couple who’d later settled in London, while her twin – Lucia’s mother – had been trafficked to a Catholic Irish/Italian family in Lower Manhattan. According to Lucia, my London cousin recently discovered that her birth mother – Mam’s disowned sister Mary – had spent her entire adult life as an unpaid labourer in the laundry of the convent which was then run by Reverend Mother Perpetua – my other Aunt Mary.
© Neil Brosnan
From Listowel, Ireland, Neil Brosnan’s stories appear in print and digital anthologies and magazines in Ireland, Britain, Europe, Australia, India, USA, Latin America, and Canada. A multiple Pushcart nominee, he has won The Bryan MacMahon, The Maurice Walsh, and Ireland’s Own short story awards, and has published two short story collections.
Great story . I laughed out loud about the
” manageable proportions ” of the Rosarie .