Mrs Eckdorf in O'Neill's Hotel

by William Trevor

  And yet she knew a time was near when men no longer would pause beside her. No man passed her by now as men passed Mrs Dargan and even Beulah Flynn, and Mrs Kite had long since learned to live with that. Compensation could be thieved away by time: would she age in night-time doorways, would she die as she’d been born?

  In the shop on the Quays she had bought the china cup that she’d mentioned to Morrissey. Tomorrow she would bring it to the hotel. She would hand it to the old woman whose silent sympathy had helped her a little in her life. Now she needed help that couldn’t come from comfort, but from within herself: she must do what she had to do, as she had done in another way before, and for that she had courage to find.

  Mrs Sinnott awoke. She turned her head, seeing her visitor, acknowledging her again in her economic way, not smiling.

  Leave me money when you die, Agnes might write, explaining that she could buy a sweet-shop with money left to her, that money left to her could mean the turning of a new leaf. She had often thought of writing that, of making it apparent to Mrs Sinnott that with enough money to help her along she could be a happy person for the remainder of her life. She had never written it because she knew that Mrs Sinnott would take no notice. In matters of money, Mrs Sinnott had a sense of family: what she had would pass to Eugene and Eugene would spend it on sherry and cigarettes and the placing of bets. Over ten years he would probably spend in that way the asking price of a small sweet-shop.

  Tomorrow she would hand her the cup and she would pick up an exercise-book and write in it, wishing her a happy birthday and saying only that she was moving away from the area and would not be back in Thaddeus Street ever again. It seemed easy when she considered it like that, giving a present, writing down two ordinary sentences. She had at one time saved the money she earned, willing it to accumulate quickly so that when the moment came, when men began to pass her by, she would look and see that she had enough for a small business. Beulah Flynn had done the same, and she hadn’t succeeded either. Sweets and chocolate would be different from the nails she’d sold in the hardware shop; sweets and chocolate, and cigarettes, maybe, in their gay packets, and Easter eggs and fruit. She had planned it on wakeful nights. She had seen herself dressing a small window, building a castle with Black Magic. She knew it would never be.

  Mrs Sinnott looked down on Thaddeus Street. She remembered Agnes as a child standing in the convent, not pretty then. Why could she not stretch out a hand and touch the hand of this one who was unhappy and need not be? She was useless in her old age. They came and wrote her messages, they cheered her up with company. All she could do was to give them nods, and smiles when she felt she could smile, which wasn’t all that often these days. It was good of Agnes Quin to come and sit with her, and of Morrissey to try and please her in his own particular way. Often she wondered what it meant, the information he wrote down, but who could know what everything meant, or indeed who would want to?

  Agnes Quin stood up, and Mrs Sinnott nodded her gratitude. She watched the street again and in a moment saw her visitor walking away from the hotel. She wondered what the end of her would be. She was an immoral woman: repeatedly she committed mortal sin and yet she had stood that day with innocence in her face, a child who wished for another kind of life and had not been granted that.

  Her mind became blank while Agnes Quin walked in Thaddeus Street. She tried to go on thinking about her but could not, and then, abruptly, her father’s handwriting emerged from the blackness, black ink on yellow paper. He was shot, a message said.

  In Venice she’d seen a funeral, gondolas blackly ribboned. The coffin floating away had made her shiver for some reason. She’d seen it exactly as it was, she’d thought: for those who watched it was as it was for her, silent on the water.

  In the hotel, after their wedding, she had felt the noise around her. His friends had lifted up their glasses: she hated his friends when he was dead. She hated their saddened faces at his funeral. They had carried his coffin in a ceremonial way: he had died for their cause; if they had all not come together he would not have died at all.

  Of all her visitors, she’d pray the most for Agnes Quin. Of all the orphan children she’d known, Agnes had taken her orphan state to heart the most. And yet she probably wasn’t an orphan at all: were dead parents easier to live with than two people somewhere, still walking around? She gave them nothing, she thought again: her visitors came, they loved her because they were sorry for her. They wrote about themselves, they confided troubles because they knew she liked to feel a privileged person. It was their love for her that comforted them. She was useless in her old age; she didn’t deserve the attention they gave her, she couldn’t even smile when she didn’t feel like it any more. Was it because of her affliction that she had known the warmth of love, from both her parents and from her husband too? Everyone, always, had been gentle with her, as all her visitors were today, and O’Shea and Eugene. Who was that woman, she wondered, who had come that morning?

  Her father had been born in a year more famous for death than for birth, in 1846. The house was prosperous then, an ordinary house in Thaddeus Street, not far from the canal. Then there had been no wastelands, no smaller houses all around, no shops. There were fields and gardens, a mill that took in local people. Her father, selling land and losing money, had turned his house into a small hotel, urged towards that by his Venetian wife. Hoteliers, he had written. They are all hoteliers, Italians.

  It was her mother who had made the hotel a place of grandeur, as Italians always do, or so her father said. How had he met a Venetian? She had often pondered, and had never known.

  She wondered if she’d live to see her birthday through: a month ago she’d sensed the worrying of a doctor. She thought again about Agnes Quin, and then about all her visitors. Their faces appeared in her mind: her son, her daughter, her grandson, her son-in-law, Philomena, O’Shea, Morrissey, Agnes Quin. Father Hennessey, who was another kind of visitor, smiled at her too; her husband smiled; in Venice she walked with both her parents. She would sleep, she thought: it was nice to doze in the sunshine, by her window.

  Father Hennessey left his house and walked slowly down Thaddeus Street. Ahead of him two children stalked a cat. ‘Leave it alone,’ he said.

  At that moment in the Home and Personal Effects Department Timothy John put his arms around the naked body of Daisy Tulip. We’ve had no luck here this year, a letter in front of him stated. First a death and now the hearthrug gone up like a cinder. His mother made that rug for us, God help the woman. His hands traversed the plump body of Daisy Tulip, her voice murmured at him with an eagerness in it. He touched her two blue eyes with his lips, he put his cheek against her hair, which was what he had so urgently wanted to do the first time he saw her, that morning in Lipton’s. ‘Stay with me always,’ whispered Daisy Tulip, and he felt as she spoke a sudden sharp pain in his tooth. I never failed to pay the premiums, stated the sloping handwriting of the letter. Trusting to hear from you. The tooth ached again, and he thought of his mother, waiting for him in the bungalow, with his tea ready to be cooked and she herself ready to hear from him all that had happened during his day. ‘Stay with me always,’ whispered Daisy Tulip.

  The children in Thaddeus Street, having obeyed their priest, watched the cat they’d been interested in. It sloped off, its body close to the houses, blinking sleepily. ‘You could skin a cat,’ one child remarked to the other, and the other said that first you’d have to kill a cat, which might, he suggested, be neither easy nor pleasant.

  Eugene Sinnott, alone in the Excelsior Bar, glanced through its window and observed the moving cat and the children standing. Cats were animals he feared, and he recalled uncomfortably his mother’s cats and remembered too the tomcat that had jumped on to his son’s pram on a day as sunny as this one, in the backyard of the hotel. He turned away from the window, thinking that a week later, quite suddenly one morning, Philomena had left the hotel, being advised to do so by his mother.

  In Terenur
e, while Eugene remembered that, the doorbell of the Gregans’ house rang and Mrs Gregan answered it. That, said Mrs Eckdorf to herself, is the daughter who ran away.

  ‘I’m Ivy Eckdorf,’ said Mrs Eckdorf. ‘Mrs Gregan, how do you do?’

  She held out her right hand and Mrs Gregan accepted it.

  ‘May I perhaps come in?’ suggested Mrs Eckdorf. ‘I’m staying in your mother’s hotel, Mrs Gregan. I thought I’d come and see you.’

  ‘In O’Neill’s?’ said Mrs Gregan, amazed.

  Mrs Eckdorf nodded. She stepped into the hall. She glanced around her, thinking that she did not at all care for the decor. It was odd this thing of people having no taste. She said:

  ‘I’d like to take up two minutes of your time, Mrs Gregan. I’m interested in buying O’Neill’s Hotel. ‘Come in,’ said Mrs Gregan, leading the way to a small sitting-room. She gestured towards an armchair with a chintz cover on it. Mrs Eckdorf sat down.

  The conversation that developed between the two women did not greatly please Mrs Eckdorf, although she attempted repeatedly to lead it in a profitable direction. It was interesting, Mrs Gregan said, the notion that someone wanted to buy the hotel: it would clearly be an excellent thing if the hotel passed out of the family at this stage, since no one much stayed there any more. She had often thought it absurd that the big old house should stand there in decay, but she added that her mother was attached to it for family reasons and would probably not for a minute consider its sale.

  ‘You lived there, of course?’ Mrs Eckdorf said, and Mrs Gregan agreed that she had lived in the hotel as a child and as a girl. More than that, in spite of pressure, Mrs Gregan didn’t seem interested in saying, and talked instead of recipes. She insisted on making tea for Mrs Eckdorf and giving her macaroons. ‘Delicious,’ said Mrs Eckdorf and was at once obliged to eat another one, although in fact she didn’t at all care for the taste. She spoke in what she hoped was a natural manner about O’Neill’s Hotel in the past, making the point that in a city that increasingly attracted tourists there was no reason why it should not again enjoy prosperity.

  ‘I’m sure,’ replied Mrs Gregan. ‘Now look, I’m just going to write this out for you.’ It was nice having a visitor unexpectedly. She scribbled down a recipe for moussaka, which Mrs Eckdorf accepted, thinking how odd it was that this woman should imagine she’d ever go to all the trouble of buying minced raw meat and cheese and onions and tomatoes and blend them together in a dish. She sat on the chintz-covered chair, listening to Mrs Gregan’s voice telling her about other food and offering her instructions for its making. Her husband, Mrs Gregan said, enjoyed some dishes and did not enjoy others, being conservative about food. Coffee cake he liked, she said, and told Mrs Eckdorf how best to make a coffee cake. No hint or disturbance in the woman’s demeanour suggested that any mystery surrounded O’Neill’s Hotel.

  ‘It’s odd to see it quite so poorly,’ Mrs Eckdorf remarked with a laugh.

  A shame, Mrs Gregan agreed, which was why it would be a good thing if someone bought it up. There would be no objections from the members of the family, she was sure, but she reminded Mrs Eckdorf that her mother had never known another home and didn’t much notice the increasing decrepitude of the hotel, since she so rarely descended from her room. She would tomorrow, of course, on her birthday.

  It was when she mentioned her husband in terms of the food he cared for or did not care for that Mrs Gregan displayed traces of emotion. Her existence with Gregan, Mrs Eckdorf deduced, was proving something of a disappointment. ‘It’s that time in my life,’ Mrs Gregan said apropos of absolutely nothing, holding out the plate of macaroons.

  Mrs Eckdorf rose, shaking her head at the offered sustenance. Her figure would protest, she said, and anyway she must be off.

  She asked Mrs Gregan for the address of her sister-in-law, Philomena, and for the address of the insurance firm where her husband and her nephew worked: she wouldn’t bother her husband, she promised, but she’d like to have a courteous word with Eugene Sinnott’s son in order to put him in the picture. She didn’t want any member of the family to think that she was going behind the family’s back: the elderly were often irresponsible and she was giving the family the chance to offer a full programme of advice to Mrs Sinnott before Mrs Sinnott made up her mind.

  ‘You fry the mince and the onions first,’ reminded Mrs Gregan before her visitor left.

  She might have been talking to a stone wall, Mrs Eckdorf thought, as the taxi-cab moved her away. She sympathized with the square-faced woman in the matter of her marriage, but she hadn’t trekked all that way just to hear what some anonymous husband ate and did not eat. She tore up the recipe for moussaka and threw the pieces out of the taxi window.

  As she was carried along, she felt uneasy, as though something, somewhere, was wrong. She frowned, feeling the beginning of a bewilderment, and then she shook her head, conscious again of the leaping of her intuitions.

  The taxi brought her to a bungalow that was set among other bungalows in a short road that was a cul-de-sac. The driver got out and stepped around the car to open the car door for her. He returned to his seat and opened a newspaper that already he had thoroughly read.

  ‘How d’you do?’ Mrs Eckdorf said, standing on the doorstep of the bungalow, regarding with interest the small face of Eugene Sinnott’s small wife, ‘I’m Mrs Eckdorf. I’ve been sent round by Mrs Gregan. Your sister-in-law,’ she added, ‘in Terenure.’

  ‘Enid?’

  ‘I’m thinking of buying O’Neill’s Hotel.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Mrs Eckdorf, smiling and crossing the threshold. She closed the door behind her. ‘How awfully nice,’ she said. Why couldn’t they just paint their places out if they weren’t able to select suitable wallpapers? The ceiling of the hall pressed uncomfortably down: that could quite easily be corrected by the use of a light shade of paint instead of the heavily patterned paper that someone had seen fit to stick on it. She longed to tell the woman, but felt that a conversation about decoration would hamper progress as gravely as the conversation about Mrs Gregan’s culinary pursuits had.

  She was led to another small sitting-room. ‘So very nice,’ she said.

  ‘It really has nothing to do with me, Mrs Eckdorf –’

  ‘Your son will one day inherit O’Neill’s. I’m saying I wish to purchase it. In which case it would not be there for anyone to inherit.’

  ‘You must talk to Timothy John –’

  ‘I would like to talk to you first, my dear.’

  ‘I know nothing –’

  ‘You are Eugene Sinnott’s wife, am I right in that?’

  ‘Mrs Eckdorf –’

  ‘Mr Sinnott said that while everyone else might agree, you might not. The old hotel, he said, has memories for you, as it has for him. You might wish to see it one day in the hands of your son.’

  The flesh of the little woman’s face, Mrs Eckdorf noticed, seemed suddenly to have whitened. That was the colour they should have done the hall ceiling. She longed to photograph this whiteness but she felt she had better not: it would hardly be the thing for a woman who said she wanted to buy an hotel to pick up a camera and suddenly to take photographs in a bungalow.

  ‘You do not mind,’ she said, ‘my reference to your husband?’

  ‘No, no.’

  ‘I ask because of the estrangement. Sometimes there is a difficulty. Men are terrible, I always say. I’ve been married myself.’

  She watched the face closely and wondered if she saw a trembling of the lips.

  ‘I found your husband a charmer,’ she said.

  ‘I can’t imagine my husband saying a thing like that. I think you may have misheard, Mrs Eckdorf.’

  Mrs Eckdorf smiled. She had been on the point of saying that of course she had misheard and that it was stupid of her, of adding that she was always mishearing things. She had been on the point, but at the very last moment she had drawn the words back from her lips, although they were a
ctually shaped to issue them. Something was happening in the room, and what was happening, said Mrs Eckdorf to herself, was that a journey was being made down memory lane. She felt excited. She nodded to encourage Philomena.

  ‘It has memories for me, yes,’ said Philomena. She began to say something else and did not say it. She picked up a framed photograph and handed it to Mrs Eckdorf. ‘That is Timothy John,’ she said. ‘My son.’

  What happened next was that, to Mrs Eckdorfs irritation, Philomena talked about her son. Just as Mrs Gregan had chosen her husband and his eating habits as a conversational topic so this smaller woman saw fit to choose a narrow-headed youth, whose age was twenty-eight but who might be taken, from his mother’s way of speaking, to be a person still in childhood.

  ‘He was born in the hotel,’ Philomena said, and did not mention the hotel again until Mrs Eckdorf brought the subject up. She went through the early years, the years at school, the fondness of her son for mathematics, his distaste for French.

  ‘He’s nervous, of course,’ said Philomena. She added that his uncle had been kind to him. He had felt at one time that he was not cut out for the department of the insurance company in which he currently worked; he had thought about the Motor Department but had been dissuaded. He was settling down now, finding his feet quite well.

  Mrs Eckdorf remembered the red exercise-books in which all these people had written and continued to write. Was this the kind of stuff? Chatter about a son finding his feet? Recipes for moussaka? Wandering down memory lane for this little thing clearly meant a walk hand in hand with a golden boy. Could it truly be that the first thing the woman thought of when O’Neill’s Hotel was mentioned was that the birth of her narrow-headed son had taken place there? Philomena talked about an ailment he had had when he was nine.

  ‘It’s a shame to see it,’ said Mrs Eckdorf. ‘It could be a nice enough hotel.’