‘We’d be Yanks now,’ Seamus and Eamonn used to shout in amusement. ‘Ballpark,’ they repeated like parrots. ‘Soda-pop, candy.’ They might have been talking about China or the moon. There had been slitty-eyed Chinks in Boston too. Running laundries. The Da pulled his eyes sideways to show how they looked. He swore he’d eaten sharks’ fins in a place called One Hung Low. Judith couldn’t see why that was funny.
America was a myth and the myth had a moral. Any man who worked there could get ahead. Any man smart enough. There was the place where the sheep got sorted quickly from the goats. You betja. Their mother’s uncle had gone out ahead of them and earned enough to buy a partnership in a grocery store. When he died she’d come into it and with what their father had earned himself the couple had been able to get married and come home to buy this pub.
‘That’s independence,’ he said pugnaciously. ‘Working. Making something of yourself by your own efforts.’
Joining up with a throng of corner boys and idlers to shoot policemen and burn down property ran counter to the code he’d learned in America. Or so he’d said that night after old Fleming’s departure. Other nights he spoke differently. He wasn’t consistent. He understood dreams too well not to half-sympathize with Eamonn. Half only though, for their dreams conflicted and, besides, he was coming to see dreams as a weakness, like drink. They could corrode a man. Hollow him out Especially political dreams. Look at that poor bugger Fleming how he was ending up. Though in Boston, mind, politics were something else. A different kettle of fish. No moonlight drilling for them, only hard bargaining, ganging together to wangle what could be wangled and get the best you could for your own people. It was hard-headed and businesslike and had nothing to do with moaning and ulagoaning about defeat. Jesus, but they hugged defeat to their bosoms here as if it were a sacrament, a sign of being too good for this world. Losers! Derisive, he parodied the old songs in a snivelling voice, chanting like a sexton with a cold in his nose:
‘Who fears to speak of ’98?
Who blushes at the name?’
Begob and they should blush, we all should if we had any sense!
‘When cowards mock the patriots’ fate
Who hangs his head for shame?’
His lips twirled in a fury of contempt.
‘The men that’s going now,’ Kathleen told him, ‘aren’t looking for defeat any more than you were. And they have the full and enthusiastic support of your friends, the Irish Americans. They’ve already achieved more than any other generation before …’
‘My generation …’ He took everything personally His generation had looked to constitutional reform, and he began talking of Gladstone’s promises of Home Rule. But soon he was back in America in Murphy’s Irish saloon singing comeal-lyes about going back to Erin. He closed his eyes to concentrate on the words and his voice throbbed with a nostalgia which showed him so sunk in memory that he was longing to return to where he bodily was. His spirit was lost back in Boston in the days when he was courting the young girl who wanted to be brought home across the ocean wide and wild and had died a few years after he had brought her back, while still young and red-cheeked with the glow of consumption, but otherwise looking, from the testimony of the photograph album, very like Judith.
Eamonn’s cork-blackened face appeared like a ghost’s at the window and Kathleen motioned to Judith to go on up to bed. She’d stay below herself to fulfil the peacemaker’s role which would allow each man to feel he had not backed down,
Judith lit her candle and carried it upstairs. Behind her, the syrupy song stopped and there was a crash of furniture, a shatter of glass, and her father’s shouting. Kathleen came backing up the stairs. Peacemaking wasn’t wanted. She hadn’t had time to get herself a candle.
She drew Judith into her room. ‘They’re having it out.’
‘What happened?’
‘The Da threw his glass at the wall. He’s drunk but Eamonn isn’t and Eamonn’s stronger. They’ll be all right.’ She looked sad though, perhaps at the discovery their father was going to make if he tried wrestling with Eamonn.
There was another crash.
‘Jesus, what’s he broken now?’
Kathleen worried for the clock and some Staffordshire figures. No question in their minds but that it was the man who put his pride in property who was throwing it about Eamonn would be trying to reason with his father, patiently and sensibly, having time and history on his side and probably entirely forgetful of his sinisterly blackened face.
Their father’s voice came raised in lamentation: ‘Riffraff!’
Something else fell, making a lesser, muted noise and Kathleen shook her head.
‘Maybe it’s only a saucepan?’ Judith hoped.
‘A good thing your mother didn’t live to see …’
Eamonn’s answer didn’t reach up the stairs.
‘And suppose you get killed?’
After that the talk became subdued and went on so long that Judith went to bed and left her candle to Kathleen. Some sort of peace was made that night, although their father was distant and drank heavily all the following week and Eamonn could not be pumped about the terms.
‘I’ll bet the pair of ye wept like babbies and threw yeer arms around each other!’ Judith threw the provocation out as bait but it wasn’t taken up.
Some months later Eamonn was killed and Seamus, his younger brother, was out training fellows to charge. He’d learned himself from a fellow who’d been with the British in India and he gave Judith lessons on afternoons when their father was busy in the pub. They rigged up a sort of scarecrow with a bed-bolster for a belly and had it in flitters after a few training sessions. Judith had insisted on using a hay-fork. She attacked the bolster with such vigour that Seamus said he’d let her have a try with a real bayonet as soon as he could get his hands on one. It was a pity women weren’t being armed, he said. It might calm them down to do a bit of real fighting. As it was, they had no outlet and were a sight more blood-thirsty than the lads.
*
She should not have come back. Jane had been right. Though how could you live your life in a Halfway House? After a glass of Michael’s whiskey, Grainne was on the point of deciding that there was no better metaphor for life.
She’d got home to find chaos. No Michael. Only a new maid some agency had palmed off on him who was fresh from the Aran Islands and as unhousebroken as a new kitten. She’d probably have nits and be confused by a flush lavatory. Then there was the aunt. Sweet Jesus! If even Doris, the char, had been there! But it wasn’t her day and there was just this new maid, Mary, and the incontinent aunt. Why had nobody told Grainne she was incontinent?
‘How long have you been here?’ Grainne asked Mary.
‘A week.’ Sullenly. The place was filthy. Shit on the floor. Maybe Doris would give notice?
‘If Sister Judith can’t get to the bathroom then other arrangements should be made. Didn’t my husband tell you?’
‘Nobody said nothin’.’
‘Has he been upstairs?’
‘She only come the other night.’
‘Has Doris been in?’
‘Not since she come.’
So that was all right. Grainne cleaned up the unfortunate aunt, got Mary to clean the mess in the corridor and unpacked her own suitcase. While she was busy, depression stayed at bay.
The old woman looked at her with shuffling eyes and mumbled about Owen and being found out. She was either non compos or unsure of her surroundings, which needn’t be the same thing. Grainne had a bath in some scented oil bought in London and got herself up prettily to seduce herself back to life. By then it was seven and Michael, if he had been coming back for dinner, should have been in. She had been planning a surprise but it had misfired. Quickly she fried up some food and took a tray up to her aunt.
‘God bless ye, girl! Listen here to me.’ The cunning, frightened eye fixed her and a hand grasped her skirt. ‘I want to go back. I never came here of my own accord. You be my
witness now. I never wanted to leave the convent. He said he’d commit me, have me committed if ever I left. That or gaoled.’
‘Who?’
‘Owen.’
‘Why gaoled?’
The old mouth closed like a zip. Chewing, it moved sideways, left, right, left, right, like a grazing animal’s. The fear in the face too was animal.
Grainne sat down. ‘Aunt Judith.’
The mouth stopped its motion. The eyes dodged.
‘Sister Judith,’ Grainne corrected herself. ‘Has Michael explained to you who we are? His grandmother was your sister, Kathleen. Remember? She died.’
‘Ha! They keep saying that. Died. Died. They even say Owen died. Maybe some day someone will be born?’ There was a charge of derision in the voice.
‘Don’t you believe me?’ Grainne wondered. ‘Owen is dead.’
‘Maybe so.’
And maybe that was what depressed her? The news – it appeared to be sudden – of her contemporaries’ deaths, mass deaths they must seem to her, could hardly be cheering. Michael seemed to have done a poor job of welcoming her.
‘We’re having a commode put in your room,’ Grainne told her, for want of anything more positive to say. ‘It will make things easier.’
No answer. The old lady popped food into her mouth. As though she had no back teeth, her mouth bulged over each morsel. Dressed in a poncho which might have been made from a punctured billiard-table cover, she had the air of a disaster-victim, one of the stunned women photographed after an earthquake in Turkey or Venezuela. The niff from her clothes was the one you got from unaired spaces affected by organic rot: a vegetable bin, or the inside of a well-worn shoe.
‘Listen,’ Grainne offered, ‘would you like me to take you shopping tomorrow? We could buy you some clothes.’
‘Clothes? What would I want with clothes? I’m going back to the convent.’
‘All right.’ There was a pause. ‘I see,’ Grainne noted, ‘that you’ve got the TV here. Do you watch it?’
The face relaxed.
‘What’s your favourite programme?’
‘It varies,’ said the nun with composure. ‘There was a series on India which I liked. Bayonetting. I think I must have witnessed a bayonet charge.’
‘Really?’
‘It came to me as I watched them. Ghurkas? Not clearly. I just had a feeling …’ She kneaded the air, closing her eyes in exasperation. ‘My old brain,’ she remonstrated with it.
‘A feeling of having been there before?’
‘That’s it.’
‘Did you ever see people killed? Ambushes?’
‘Me?’ Suspicion was back. The mouth twitched like a spider worriedly patrolling its web. ‘Ambushes? How would that be?’ Left, right, left rushed the mouth. ‘Who gave you that idea?’
‘You yourself, just now.’
‘You misunderstood.’
‘I see.’ Grainne stood up. ‘Perhaps you’re sleepy?’ she hoped. ‘Ready for bed?’
‘Now?’
‘Or you could watch television.’ Grainne was tense with the need to get out of the room. The sight of the old woman’s ruined flesh had given her a pressing desire to use her own, to refresh it in sex with Michael whom she was going to assault with a demand for conjugal rights the minute he got in the door. ‘Here,’ she told the aunt, ‘I’ve put on the box. I’ll be up later to get you to bed.’ A feature film came on. It would fill up the time until close-down. ‘There now, Aunt Judith, you’ll enjoy that.’
Grainne left the old lady watching and fled down the stairs. She closed the drawing-room door behind her on an attenuated rollicking of cowboy music. Rescue, rescue jounced the music as she poured herself a drink. The whiskey tasted tinny. The truth was she liked it only in company. Lone drinking had morose implications and the room looked down-at-heel.
She poked the fire, stirring up sparks which curled like wind-bent barley then drifted back down into the maw of turf. Look at this room! And she knew he wouldn’t have kept his dental appointments. Self-neglect was slow suicide and he’d commit it in the end if she didn’t keep after him. He shoved her into the role of the awful, manipulative wife. But if she didn’t manipulate he flopped like one of those life-size Japanese puppets which have to be held up by black-clothed puppeteers.
Grainne had a flashing image of herself cutting a hole in Michael’s chest and shoving a battery inside it to make him go. She thrust the poker through a turf sod and twisted it like the key in a doll’s back. Like that, Mikey, sod you!
‘You don’t give a hoot about Daddy,’ Cormac had yelled an hour ago. They’d been having a row because he wanted to go out.
‘You haven’t seen your father for months,’ she accused, ‘and you want to go out without even waiting for him to come home.’
‘And why haven’t I?’ Cormac threw back. ‘Whose fault is that? You don’t give two hoots for Daddy, and don’t think he doesn’t know it. Why do you think he drinks?’
His mother was astounded by the accusation.
‘You’re no wiser than I am,’ Cormac went on. ‘I’m going to see Granduncle Owen Roe. You can’t stop me.’
This was true.
‘Why can’t I see him?’ he asked.
‘He’s a bad influence. He could get you into trouble. And himself.’
Probably she, in her time, had been told the same thing about Michael. The phrases came automatically to her lips but she was unsure of them. For her own parents there had been right and wrong and no doubt about it. Cormac was the same. Michael and she, a peace-time generation, were like children before this assertive son of fourteen and a half. They turned words round in their heads until they grew porous and weightless. For Cormac words were as solid as bricks. This had become clear last summer when she discovered a gun in his sock drawer and demanded an explanation. It was not, it turned out, a lethal sort of gun, just the sort a boy could get without a licence. However, he had hidden it from her and had used it to do target practice with his great-uncle. She had roped in Michael and the two clamped down on Cormac. No more guns. Why? Because they disliked violence and one thing led to another. The boy had cut through this with contemptuous clarity. The government, he said, was violent itself. It was interning and torturing men who were the salt of the earth.
‘I suppose you’ll tell us next that the felon’s cap is the noblest crown an Irish head can wear!’
‘Just because you say it in a funny voice, Mummy, doesn’t make it less true. People of your generation make jokes because you never want to have to take sides on anything.’
Grainne had been stricken. ‘Is that your granduncle’s opinion?’ she had asked.
‘Oh I know you think I can’t work anything out for myself. But I can and I’ve got to be given the right.’
‘You don’t work things out,’ Michael told him. ‘You parrot slogans. Do you think you’ve said one original thing?’
‘Why should it be original if it’s true?’
Some of the lines Cormac got off were better than those which seemed to go with his parents’ roles. Style was on the side of subversion and could look like truth. So could anything put to ballad music. Great-uncle Owen Roe sponsored a youth club which had ballad-singing sessions. Ostensibly harmless, the place was a recruiting centre for activist Republicans.
‘Well, we can’t stop Cormac going to ballad-singing sessions.’
‘I suppose not.’
The dilemma had drawn Michael and her together. Briefly. Sadly. It was dispiriting to be found woolly and tentative when faced with bundles of energy like Owen Roe who was Michael’s uncle, Grainne’s cousin, and a political opportunist who had been forced out of his party some years before for intriguing with the IRA. Now he hoped to turn his downfall to advantage by appearing more Republican than the Republic. Knowing that the Northern conundrum would not solve itself overnight, he dallied in the wilderness, pleased to let the men in office compromise their reputations. Later, his chance might come to catapult hims
elf into power. His personal standing, enhanced by the almost mythic reputation of his dead father, would probably be increased several notches if younger members of the family – Cormac – were to get into trouble for Republican activities.
Mother’s paranoia? Maybe? Maybe not. Owen Roe was bad luck. After all, he had inherited the woollen mills which should by rights have come to Michael and that wasn’t all she had against him.
‘Cormac, I’m not going to argue with you about your great-uncle. Some matters are too complex …’
She saw his smile and knew what was behind it. Lovers of the status quo always said that things were complex. Be on your watch for that word: a Quisling’s word, a Pétainiste word, a word for the politically cowardly. She knew the argument, had heard Owen Roe produce it. Cormac was primed.
Bright indignant eyes judging her.
‘You are not to go out without your father’s permission.’
‘My father’s drinking his head off in some pub.’
‘I forbid you to talk about him that way.’
‘You? You don’t give two hoots about Daddy.’
And out he’d gone, either to Owen Roe’s or the Youth Club. She phoned there and got Patsy Flynn on the phone.
‘Oh, you’re back, Mrs O’Malley? Well that’s great news. Looking for young Cormac? Ah no, sure I didn’t even know yez were back, either of yez. Not a sign of him. What? Send him home if he shows up? I’ll do that. Yes. You can rely on me, Mrs O’Malley.’
She could just imagine the contortions of Patsy as he winked at Cormac, covered the receiver and played the conversation up for laughs. He was childish as a result of having been beaten round the head in a British gaol, where he had spent a number of years for planting bombs in Britain during the IRA campaign of the 1950s. He now worked for the Grateful Patriots’ Youth Club and was mindlessly devoted to Owen Roe.
‘I hear your grandaunt is out?’ he remarked. ‘The Captain’ – he called Owen Roe ‘the Captain’, giving him a title he had earned in a youth corps to which he had once belonged – ‘the Captain says she should be put away in the national interest.’ Patsy laughed his ricocheting, idiot’s laugh.
No Country for Young Men Page 9
