Mothers and Sons

by Colm Toibin

  ‘Father Greenwood said he was down,’ Frank said.

  ‘He was,’ she replied.

  ‘He says you’re a lesson to everyone of your age, out every night.’

  ‘Well, as you know, I keep myself busy.’

  ‘That’s good.’

  She realized that she had forgotten to put butter on the table. She went to the fridge to fetch some.

  ‘The girls are in and out to see you?’ he asked.

  ‘If I need them, I know where they are,’ she said.

  He watched her spreading the butter on the toast.

  ‘We thought you might go away for a bit of a holiday,’ he said.

  She reached over for the marmalade, which was already on the table, and said nothing.

  ‘Do you know, it would spare you,’ he added.

  ‘So the girls said.’

  She did not want the silence that began then to linger for too long, yet everything she thought of saying seemed unnecessary. She wished he would go.

  ‘I’m sorry I didn’t come in and tell you myself what was happening,’ he said.

  ‘Well, you’re here now, and it’s nice to see you,’ she replied.

  ‘I think it’s going to be …’ He didn’t finish, merely lowered his head. She did not drink the tea or eat the toast.

  ‘There might be a lot of detail in the papers,’ he said. ‘I just wanted to warn you myself about that.’

  ‘Don’t worry about me at all, Frank,’ she said.

  She tried to smile in case he looked up.

  ‘It’s been bad,’ he said and shook his head.

  She wondered if they would let him say Mass when he was in prison, or have his vestments and his prayer books.

  ‘We’ll do the best we can for you, Frank,’ she said.

  ‘What do you mean?’ he asked.

  When he lifted his head and took her in with a glance, he had the face of a small boy.

  ‘I mean, whatever we can do, we will do, and none of us will be going away. I’ll be here.’

  ‘Are you sure you don’t want to go away?’ he asked in a half-whisper.

  ‘I am certain, Frank.’

  He did not move. She put her hand on the cup; the tea was still hot. Frank smiled faintly and then stood up.

  ‘I wanted to come in anyway and see you,’ he said.

  ‘I’m glad you did,’ she said.

  She did not stand up from her chair until she heard him starting the car in the drive. She went to the window and watched him reversing and turning the car, careful as always not to drive on her lawn. She stood at the window as he drove away; she stayed there until the sound of his car had died down in the distance.

  A Journey

  ‘MAMMY, how do people die?’ he had asked, and Mary had explained how the soul left the body and then God … well, God … took your soul because he loves you.

  ‘Will everyone die?’

  ‘Yes, David.’

  ‘Every single person?’

  She was amused by his earnestness, but tried to treat him seriously and answer as well as she could. He must have been about four then, going through the stage, she remembered, of asking questions and wanting to know how everything worked and why.

  He was their only child, born after almost twenty years of marriage when Seamus and she had long given up hope of ever having children. At first she could hardly believe it and then was frightened; she asked herself why it had happened then and not years before but she could find no explanation. She felt that perhaps they would be too old and set in their ways to bring up a child. They were used to being free. Yet David did not really make the great change in their lives that she expected. Mrs Redmond, who lived in a nearby cottage and whose husband died just after David was born, came in every day to help her and babysat at night if they wanted to go out. Their house was just beside the small country national school where Seamus was principal. As David got bigger he began to spend more and more time with Mrs Redmond. Often, when Mary went down to the cottage to collect him, he did not want to come home. But then, once he was back in his own house, he would start to smile again and follow her around asking her questions or, when he was older, telling her what had happened to him at school.

  IT WAS LATE and she was not used to driving long distances in the dark. She found it difficult to concentrate, and even though she knew the road very well, she had to drive slowly. It was March and a thin frost was beginning to settle. The road had been widened for stretches, and the car lights beamed on wooden fences instead of the old ditches. The road was no more the hidden, almost guilty thing it had been, huddled away from the land around. There were fewer accidents now, she supposed. She remembered the old narrow road, and her mind began to slip back until she found that she was trying once again to pinpoint the day it had started, the day she first noticed that David had grown beyond their reach and become sullen and withdrawn. Were they to blame, she and Seamus, and in what way, for the fact that their twenty-year-old son whom she was driving home from hospital had spent the last seven months there suffering from silence, as she called it; the doctors called it depression. David had refused to sit in the front seat beside her and would not talk to her. He sat in the back of the car and lit one cigarette after another from the packet he had asked her to stop in Bray and buy for him. She wondered if he had made a decision not to speak to her, or if this was natural for him, if the silence made him comfortable, as it made her uneasy and weary. She decided that she would have to speak.

  ‘Your father’s not well, David,’ she said.

  There was no answer. As a car came towards her, she dimmed her own lights, but the oncoming beams were too strong and she had to fix her eyes on the margin to avoid them.

  ‘He had another stroke last week,’ she said, but it sounded false and untrue, as if she had invented it merely to shock him into speaking to her. But he did not speak; she could hear him drawing hard on his cigarette.

  The long main street of Arklow was deserted, and there was just Gorey, Camolin and Ferns and all the roads that stretched between them, and afterwards home. The car’s headlights illuminated a short distance and there seemed always to be absolutely nothing beyond them. There was very little traffic. Mary found the dense cigarette smoke in the car almost sickening. The moon came into view for the first time.

  She tried not to think, tried to keep her mind fixed on the road ahead, but random images of places in the past kept coming to her, and there was nothing she could do to stop them. The Mont Clare Hotel in Dublin where she had spent her honeymoon, she could picture the room they had and recall the strange street noises in the morning. She tried to conjure up the impression that the city, which she knew very slightly then, had made on her, but other scenes ran into that picture and made it blurred. The network of lanes around Cush where they used to go for the summer and the midges that used to circle at twilight and get into your hair. She saw the portrait of her mother hung after she died in the unused musty parlour over her father’s shop in Ferns.

  She pictured as well their first sighting of the old two-storey house beside the school that her father had bought for them when they got married. She remembered the atmosphere inside the house the day they went to look at it, all bare walls and the hollow sounds their feet made. Now Seamus was lying upstairs in that same house. The whole right side of his body was paralysed. That scene Mary could picture more sharply than anything. Even when she read the newspaper to him, Seamus did not seem interested.

  David lit another cigarette in the back of the car.

  ‘Would you like to sit in the front for a while?’ she asked. There was silence for a few moments and then a muffled sound.

  ‘No, thanks.’

  She stopped the car suddenly and pulled into the side. She could not see him properly when she turned around so she flicked on the dim light over her head. David opened the window to let the smoke out. He had inherited her thick blonde hair but nothing of her large-boned face. In the faint light he remind
ed her of Seamus when she had known him first, but David’s face was even thinner. His expression was strained. He made it clear in the way he turned that he did not wish to speak to her.

  ‘What are you going to do now? Do you have any idea?’ she asked, and for a quick second she caught his eye. He looked away.

  ‘I don’t know. Just don’t ask me anything, is that agreed? Just don’t ask me anything.’

  ‘You might stay at home for a while. Maybe you could get a job at home.’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  He threw his half-smoked cigarette out of the window.

  ‘I get very tired driving at night. I must be getting old.’ She laughed and he gave her an edgy smile.

  ‘Anyway, we’d better hurry up.’

  She reached to turn off the light and then she re-started the engine.

  ‘Your father will be expecting us.’

  He will be lying with his eyes open, she thought, and he’ll barely glance at me when I come in. She smiled at the idea that now she would have two of them for company. Nonetheless, she wanted David to stay at home, no matter how grim his silences, no matter how many days he spent in his bed with the curtains drawn. She dreamed now of going back to Cush with him, of a bright summer day and the light from the sea giving him back something long lost, an old vitality he seemed to have wilfully discarded. She thought if he could walk on the sand in his bare feet, it might lift his spirits, but she sighed as she realized that nothing would be as quick or simple. It was, she knew, an illness, but it did not seem like one. It seemed to her like something David would not give up, a special dark gift he had been offered. Something which comforted him and which he had accepted.

  ‘What was it like, David, the hospital? I never could get any sense of it when we visited. I could never tell how you were.’

  ‘No questions, Ma, I said no questions.’

  ‘Just tell me.’

  ‘It was lousy.’ He sighed, and she could hear him blowing out smoke. ‘All of it. It was lousy.’

  ‘But it was the best thing at the time, wasn’t it? I mean, there wasn’t anything else we could have done.’

  ‘Yeah.’

  She knew that he had his pills, but she did not know what they were meant to do. The doctor to whom she had spoken had referred to David throughout as ‘the patient’ and said that he might benefit from a later admission. He did not seem ready to answer any direct questions so Mary had asked none. No one would employ David, she thought, and he was qualified for nothing. She imagined that when she was an old woman she would have him in the room upstairs. She wanted to ask him something else, but she stopped herself, she did not want to irritate him. The silence in the back of the car had become more alert, more hostile. She could almost feel that it was directed at her as she drove faster. She was eager to arrive.

  The car headlights hit the modest square steeple of the Protestant cathedral in Ferns. Each Sunday before they had a car, Seamus and she used to ride on bicycles into the town and then get the train to Ferns where they used to spend the day with her father. In the months when he was dying; when he seemed so mild and good-humoured, Mary stayed on alone with him, and sat with him. It was, she thought, for both of them a happy time.

  As the car lights flashed against the glass of the squat, modern Catholic church at the T-junction, she remembered they had been married from the old one and wondered what it was used for now. She still had her father’s steel-rimmed glasses in a drawer somewhere. When he died, they had sold his shop and built an extension to their own house and bought a car. She dreamed for a second that they had not sold it and thought that working there every day might help David, and she would oversee him, make sure that it did not become too much for him. When she was a little girl she loved working in the shop.

  ‘Is he in bed all the time?’ David suddenly asked her.

  ‘Most of the time,’ she said. ‘He was meant to go into hospital but he wouldn’t go, so Mrs Redmond comes up every night. We have to lift him and he’s very heavy. Mrs Redmond’s getting very old. She’ll be staying the night tonight.’

  She pretended to herself, as she spoke, that she and David had been having a casual conversation for all of the journey.

  ‘Do you know what I’d love?’ she asked familiarly. ‘I’d love a cigarette, haven’t had one for ages. Your father hates me smoking. Would you ever light one and pass it into me?’

  She could hear David flicking a lighter in the back of the car. He handed her a cigarette.

  ‘Are you sure you wouldn’t like to sit in the front seat?’ she asked. ‘We’re nearly home.’

  ‘No. I’m all right.’

  They came into the town along the narrow road by the river that was overhung with trees. The moon appeared over the hill, and she could see the bare branches and the stars of frost on the road. She found that she could not finish the cigarette so she put it out in the ashtray. The street lights in the town were a dirty sinister yellow. As she drove past the post office and then towards the mill, David pulled the ashtray from its container in the back door of the car and emptied it out of the back window. She noticed the cold air coming into the car.

  ‘We’re just home now,’ she said.

  She turned off the road and up the tarmacadam drive to the house. There were lights on, and Mrs Redmond opened the front door to meet them. David took his bag from the back seat.

  ‘How has he been?’ Mary asked in a half whisper.

  ‘He slept for a while earlier, but he’s wide awake now. He’s been very low all day,’ Mrs Redmond said.

  When they went inside, Mrs Redmond insisted that David come into the kitchen with her. He followed her, but he held the bag firmly in his hand as though he were on his way somewhere else. Mary stood and watched them from the bottom of the stairs before she turned and went up to the bedroom.

  The curtains were drawn and there was a bowl of water beside the electric fire. The room was very warm.

  ‘Is he here?’ Seamus asked.

  She did not answer but walked over and sat on a stool in front of the dressing-table mirror from where she could see him. She noticed how strange her well-kept blonde hair looked beside the wrinkles around her eyes and mouth. Her crocks, David used to call them. It was time, she thought, to let the grey appear. Seamus was staring at her from the bed and when their eyes caught she was struck for a moment by a glimpse of a future in which she would need to muster every ounce of selfishness she had. She shut her eyes before she turned around to face him.

  ‘Is he back? Did you bring him?’ he asked her again.

  Three Friends

  ON THE MONDAY, when the others had gone to the hotel for lunch, Fergus stayed alone with his mother’s body in the funeral parlour. She would, he knew, have so far enjoyed her own funeral. The hush of conversation with old friends, the conjuring up of memories, the arrival of people she would not have seen for years, all of this would have put a gleam into her eyes. But she would not, he thought, have enjoyed being alone now in the shadowy candlelight with her son, all the life gone out of her. She was not enjoying herself now, he thought.

  He was tempted to whisper to her some words of comfort, to say that she would be all right, that she was at peace. He stood up and looked at her. Her dead face had none of her live face’s softness. He hoped some day he would be able to forget what she looked like as she lay inert in her coffin, with faint traces of an old distress behind the mask of stillness and peace and immobility. The undertakers or the nurses who had laid her out had made her chin seem firmer and more settled, almost pointed at the end with strange creases. If she spoke now, he knew, her old chin would come back, her old voice, her old smile. But that was all gone now; anyone seeing her for the first time would never know her. She was beyond knowing, he thought, and suddenly realized that he was going to cry.

  When he heard the noise of feet outside, a man’s heavy shoes against the concrete, he felt almost surprised that someone should come now to break his vigil with her
. He had been sitting there as though the door were closed and he could not be disturbed.

  The man who appeared was middle-aged and tall; he walked with a slight stoop. He had a mild, modest look; Fergus was sure that he had never seen him before. He paid no attention to Fergus as he moved towards the coffin with a stiff reverence, blessing himself, and then reaching down gently to touch the dead woman’s forehead. He had the look of someone from the town, not a neighbour, Fergus felt, but someone she must have known years earlier. Being on display like this, being touched by anyone who came, would, he knew, have horrified his mother, but she had only a few more hours of it before the coffin would be closed and taken to the cathedral.

  The man sat down beside him, still watching his mother’s face, gazing at it as though waiting for it to do something in the flickering candlelight. Fergus almost smiled to himself at the idea of telling the man that there was no point in looking at her so intensely, she was dead. The man turned to him as he blessed himself again and offered his large hand and his open-faced sympathy.

  ‘I’m very sorry for your trouble.’

  ‘Thank you,’ Fergus replied. ‘It was very good of you to come.’

  ‘She’s very peaceful,’ the man said.

  ‘She is,’ Fergus replied.

  ‘She was a great lady,’ the man said.

  Fergus nodded. He knew that the man would now have to wait for at least ten minutes before he could decently go. He wished that he would introduce himself or give some clue about his identity. They sat in silence looking at the coffin.

  As the time elapsed, it seemed odd to Fergus that no one else came. The others surely would have finished at the hotel; his mother’s friends had come all morning, and some relatives. It made no sense that all of them had left this gap for Fergus and a stranger to sit so uneasily beside each other for so long. This stretch of time appeared to Fergus to belong to a dark dream which took them out of all familiar elements into a place of dim, shimmering lights, uncomfortable silence, the unending, dull and neutral realm of the dead. As the man cleared his throat, Fergus glanced at him and saw in his dry skin and his pale face further evidence that these minutes did not belong to ordinary time, that they both had been dragged away by his mother’s spirit into a place of shadows.