The Secret Scripture

Dr. Grene is the psychiatrist who runs the Roscommon asylum, where Roseanne is his patient. Roseanne compares his appearance to that of St. Thomas because Dr. Grene has a “beard and balding crown” (3). He is a serious and intent man who expresses an urge both to analyze Roseanne and to befriend her. He’s been counseling Roseanne for 24 years. Dr. Grene is 65 years old at the time in which the story takes place.

Dr. Grene believes that he is of English origin, though he supposedly has paternal Irish connections. He was raised Catholic but is now agnostic. In actuality, he was adopted in 1945 by Mr. and Mrs. Grene of Padstow, Cornwall but was born in Sligo, Ireland. He learns that he is the son of Eneas and Roseanne—the child whom Roseanne believed had been lost to her. His adoptive mother committed suicide when he was young, which he believes inspired him to go to Durham University to study psychiatry. Dr. Grene had a younger brother named John, his parents’ biological child, who was devoted to his elder brother. The younger boy was hit by a school bus when he was 10, an accident that Dr. Grene witnessed and which led to their mother’s fatal grief.

Dr. Grene was married to a woman named Bet who suffered from health problems and eventually died. They had no children. At the beginning of their marriage, the Grenes moved to England so that Bet could be closer to her family. He went to Ireland after his colleague, Amurdat Singh, offered him “a junior post” (119). This came as a surprise, given that Dr. Grene didn’t have an impressive academic record. After he and Bet were married for some years, Dr. Grene had an affair with a colleague named Martha, which prompted Bet to move upstairs into the old maid’s quarters in their house, where she remained until her death.

Joe Clear was Roseanne’s beloved father and Cissy’s husband. He originally came from Collooney. Formerly the superintendent of a Catholic cemetery in Sligo and later a rat-catcher, Joe Clear was a Presbyterian who was rumored to have been in the Royal Irish Constabulary (RIC). Though he was a manual laborer who enjoyed riding a motor bike, Joe Clear was a cultured man who sang operettas and read poetry, particularly sermons. He carried a copy of Religio Medici, which Roseanne keeps in her possession. Roseanne enjoyed a much closer relationship to her father than she did to her mother. Joe Clear would frequently come home after an evening at the bar, sit on the edge of Roseanne’s bed, and tell her stories. Roseanne also accompanied her father to work, both at the graveyard and when he went rat-catching. Roseanne was with Joe Clear on the fateful night when a rat, dampened with flammable paraffin, caused a fire to spread throughout an orphanage.

Roseanne and Father Gaunt differ in their recollections of the circumstances around Joe’s death. Roseanne recalls finding out that her father had hung himself. She assumes that it was out of grief for losing his beloved job at the graveyard after the incident with the rebel John Lavelle, in which he helped to bury John’s murdered brother, Willie. However, Father Gaunt’s deposition reveals that rebels beat Joe Clear to death with hammers for having formerly been with the RIC, and Roseanne witnessed her father’s murder; one of the hammers that was used to kill him fell out of the tower and struck her, knocking her cold.

Cissy was Roseanne’s mother and Joe Clear’s wife. The narrative reveals little about her, aside from the fact that she was unhappy with the life that she made with Joe, and this unhappiness somehow led to a descent into madness. She is described as having dark hair and a “darkskinned Spanish sort of beauty, with green eyes like American emeralds” (8). Joe Clear met Cissy when she was working as a chambermaid in a boarding house where he stayed in Southampton, England when he was in the British Merchant Marine. Cissy’s true origins are unclear. In her testimony, Roseanne describes her mother as extraordinarily beautiful, “but like a lost shilling on a floor of mud, glistening in some despair” (8). Roseanne recognized her mother’s unhappiness, which was partly the result of the impoverished circumstances in which the Clear family lived. Cissy became “[s]everely deranged” and died in Sligo Mental Hospital in 1941 (272). 

Tom was Roseanne’s husband He played trumpet and clarinet in his band that carried his name. . He had a “beaming face” and “ruddy signs of health in his cheeks” (202). A cigarette usually dangled from his mouth—the same “Army Club Sandhurst” brand also favored by his brother Jack. Tom was confident, optimistic, and eager for what the world could offer him.

Tom wanted to believe that he was descended from some “sort of Catholic gentry” (147). As a result, he disliked Presbyterians, whom he regarded as “working class” (147). His marriage to Roseanne was annulled, thereby allowing Tom to remarry an upper-class woman with whom he had a child. 

Jack is Tom’s brother and closest friend. Jack completed two degrees at Galway in Engineering and Geology, convincing Tom that he was a sort of genius. Jack spent time in Africa, working with the Royal Engineers, where he picked up certain expressions and phrases particular to British colonists. Like Tom, Jack was very class-conscious and used language to separate himself from those whom he regarded as lower-class. He was also self-conscious and very concerned with how he appeared in public.

Aside from the upper-class members of the town, Jack owned the nicest car in Sligo. He had a girlfriend named Mai. It was important to Jack that Mai’s father was an insurance man and that the family lived in an impressive house; his interest in these details helps to establish his snobbish and materialistic character. 

Eneas was an outcast in his family, spoken of in whispers. When Roseanne first encountered him, it was at a time in her life in which she, too, had become an outcast because of the machinations of Father Gaunt and Mrs. McNulty. Eneas first appeared to Roseanne as a soldier covered in ash. He arrived back in Sligo from Belfast, which had just suffered a bombing from German bomber jets. Eneas and Roseanne comforted each other by making love. The result of that brief affair was a child whom the reader later learns is Dr. Grene. Eneas was last seen in the 1960s, living in a hotel on the Isle of Dogs in London, which burned down the day after Jack traced his brother there. It is unclear if Eneas burned down the hotel himself, out of fear that rebels were following him, or if some men had been looking to kill him, followed Jack to the hotel, and torched it.

Father Gaunt was a Catholic priest who later became an “auxiliary bishop of Dublin in the 1950s and 1960s” (135). He knew Roseanne during her childhood and employed her father, Joe Clear, as the superintendent of the Catholic graveyard. Father Gaunt dismissed Joe Clear from his position for involving the priest in the burial of the Protestant rebel, Willie Lavelle.

Father Gaunt took what seemed to be a paternal interest in Roseanne after her father died. He encouraged her to marry Joe Brady. However, Roseanne didn’t trust Father Gaunt, a misogynist who mistrusted women. He perceived Roseanne’s great beauty as both an asset, for he wanted to use her to get 50-year-old Joe Brady a wife, and as a threat, given his belief that women are sources of temptation. He was a man who “seemed to long for the banishment of women behind the closed doors of their homes, and the elevation of manhood into a condition of sublime chastity and sporting prowess” (135). Father Gaunt later disrupted Roseanne’s marriage to Tom. He isolated Tom from her, and then commanded Roseanne to remain alone at the hut that she once shared with Tom at Strandhill until Father Gaunt and Mrs. McNulty decided whether to dissolve the marriage. He did this out of resentment for Roseanne, who refused his request that she become a Catholic.

Father Gaunt wore “woolen clothes” (a soutane) that he ordered from “clerical outfitters [on] Marlborough Street in Dublin” (220). For a priest, his clothes are “oddly stylish” (220). Roseanne didn’t dislike Father Gaunt; she hardly understood him. He, on the other hand, knew a great deal about her life, which led her to believe that he was qualified to provide “an intimate history of [her] life” (221).

Mrs. McNulty is Roseanne’s cold and mysterious mother-in-law. She is Old Tom’s wife and the mother of Tom, Jack, and Sister Declan. Mrs. McNulty was a devout Catholic who sought Father Gaunt’s counsel. She disapproved of Tom’s marriage to Roseanne, because of the latter being Presbyterian. She later instigated to have them separated based on the false notion that Roseanne was a young woman of poor virtue. Mrs. McNulty wanted to become a nun but couldn’t as long as her husband was alive. Like Old Tom, she was employed at the Sligo Mental Hospital. She was an unsympathetic woman who expressed an aversion to Roseanne very soon after they met. It is later revealed that Mrs. McNulty was adopted by a Catholic. Mrs. McNulty had Jack when she was only 16. Tom, however, was fathered by another man, whose name Mrs. McNulty refused to reveal. Mrs. McNulty’s aversion to Roseanne is, thus, a projection of her own past shames.