The Whipping Club Read Online Free PDF

something vague and untouchable, and she stared out into the garden without really seeing. Everybody has problems. She wasn’t the only one. Hidden inside the red and brick homes, behind the perfectly painted doors, there were problems. She looked at the weighty rose climbers drooping over the gates of a brownstone across the way. She noticed the thorns. The vegetables were lovely, too, but underneath the soil there were grubs mixed in with the roots. 
              Ben had asked her last night to redouble her efforts toward Johanna. “God, what?” she’d said. Johanna asks too many questions. She talks too much. She didn’t remember talking as much at ten years old. She was exhausted from her daughter. Was she alone in this, too? Her own ma came to mind. As a child, Marian believed her ma would have preferred a more ladylike daughter, someone quieter. She stamped out the butt and threw it in the garden trash bin before reentering the house. Maybe she and Johanna were more similar than she realized. Letting out another sigh, she weaved back into the foyer, touched the blue violas she’d pinned to a white beret and slanted it over her yellow-gold curls, courtesy of Miss Clairol, shimmer blonde #33. She loved these blonde colors much better than her natural Orphan Annie look.
              You can’t keep the McKeever in you down, Da would have told her. Sure, you’re a regular Marian McKeever, better looking than any Marilyn Monroe, he might have said.
              She slipped on her cotton gloves as she started down the four steps of their Georgian townhouse. She noticed a threesome of young mothers from the neighborhood talking codswallop by the news-agent on the corner. Their necks craned when they saw her like the unfashionable ostriches they were. Ostriches without any pretty feathers. They had gray woolen coats and identical black nursemaid shoes. All holy Joes, they feigned busyness as she drew nearer, ending their blather abruptly, casually crossing the street. They’d probably been talking shite about her and Ben, and she knew the lawdy-daws would all be relieved to see them both leave town. She would be happier, too. But the more she felt the sting of their rejection, the angrier she became and the more she resolved to stay put. She was happy and happily married for over ten years, and a mother as well. She was just like the women she chatted with in Dolan’s greengrocers, the ones who seemed so casually confident about everything.
              She had her father, God rest him, to thank for her inner strength. He’d be proud of her today. From the beginning, he made sure she went to the best schools. Somehow he talked her way into Loreto College, with the big back garden and grass courts and the respect the nuns offered middle-class graduates of the institution. The National School right next door would not do for his girl. And whenever the nuns complained about “Marian’s boldness,” he’d not flog her. Rather, he whipped the nuns with his tongue, and took her by the hand, out for a day at Sheridan’s pub, where he drank Guinness and she ate gobstoppers all afternoon. They laughed and told his mates about the grievous expression on a nun’s face when he praised his clever Marian. She had a right to question and receive a decent answer from a teacher. She wasn’t bold, she was brilliant, he told the nuns; he reminded them who was paying their salary. He took her in his arms, told her that the hard times would pass away. He held her there in the pub, the rest of the world be damned. He struggled, she knew, driving that taxi, not drinking as much as he would have liked, to give her the new dress and the new books to keep up with the middle-class kids on her street.
              When they called Marian to come down to the bar and identify her da, she was twenty, just two years from graduating from University College. Why did he