My Oedipus Complex

by Frank O'Connor

  ‘Then what the blazes do you want Dan Regan for?’ he snarled in exasperation.

  ‘What matter to you what I want him for?’ she retorted with senile suspicion. ‘I have a journey to go, never you mind where.’

  ‘Ach, you old oinseach, your mind is wandering,’ he cried. ‘There’s a devil of a wind blowing up the river. The whole house is shaking. That’s what you heard. Make your mind easy now and go back to bed.’

  ‘My mind is not wandering,’ she shouted. ‘Thanks be to the Almighty God I have my senses as good as you. My plans are made. I’m going back now where I came from. Back to Ummera.’

  ‘Back to where?’ Johnny asked in stupefaction.

  ‘Back to Ummera.’

  ‘You’re madder than I thought. And do you think or imagine Dan Regan will drive you?’

  ‘He will drive me then,’ she said, shrugging herself as she held an old petticoat to the light. ‘He’s booked for it any hour of the day or night.’

  ‘Then Dan Regan is madder still.’

  ‘Leave me alone now,’ she muttered stubbornly, blinking and shrugging. ‘I’m going back to Ummera and that was why my old comrade came for me. All night and every night I have my beads wore out, praying the Almighty God and his Blessed Mother not to leave me die among strangers. And now I’ll leave my old bones on a high hilltop in Ummera.’

  Johnny was easily persuaded. It promised to be a fine day’s outing and a story that would delight a pub, so he made tea for her and after that went down to Dan Regan’s little cottage, and before smoke showed from any chimney on the road they were away. Johnny was hopping about the car in his excitement, leaning out, shouting through the window of the car to Dan and identifying big estates that he hadn’t seen for years. When they were well outside the town, himself and Dan went in for a drink, and while they were inside the old woman dozed. Dan Regan roused her to ask if she wouldn’t take a drop of something and at first she didn’t know who he was and then she asked where they were and peered out at the public-house and the old dog sprawled asleep in the sunlight before the door. But when next they halted she had fallen asleep again, her mouth hanging open and her breath coming in noisy gusts. Dan’s face grew gloomier. He looked hard at her and spat. Then he took a few turns about the road, lit his pipe and put on the lid.

  ‘I don’t like her looks at all, Johnny,’ he said gravely. ‘I done wrong. I see that now. I done wrong.’

  After that, he halted every couple of miles to see how she was and Johnny, threatened with the loss of his treat, shook her and shouted at her. Each time Dan’s face grew graver. He walked gloomily about the road, clearing his nose and spitting in the ditch. ‘God direct me!’ he said solemnly. ‘ ’Twon’t be wishing to me. Her son is a powerful man. He’ll break me yet. A man should never interfere between families. Blood is thicker than water. The Regans were always unlucky.’

  When they reached the first town he drove straight to the police barrack and told them the story in his own peculiar way.

  ‘Ye can tell the judge I gave ye every assistance,’ he said in a reasonable broken-hearted tone. ‘I was always a friend of the law. I’ll keep nothing back – a pound was the price agreed. I suppose if she dies ’twill be manslaughter. I never had hand act or part in politics. Sergeant Daly at the Cross knows me well.’

  When Abby came to herself she was in a bed in the hospital. She began to fumble for her belongings and her shrieks brought a crowd of unfortunate old women about her.

  ‘Whisht, whisht, whisht!’ they said. ‘They’re all in safe-keeping. You’ll get them back.’

  ‘I want them now,’ she shouted, struggling to get out of bed while they held her down. ‘Leave me go, ye robbers of hell! Ye night-walking rogues, leave me go. Oh, murder, murder! Ye’re killing me.’

  At last an old Irish-speaking priest came and comforted her. He left her quietly saying her beads, secure in the promise to see that she was buried in Ummera no matter what anyone said. As darkness fell, the beads dropped from her swollen hands and she began to mutter to herself in Irish. Sitting about the fire, the ragged old women whispered and groaned in sympathy. The Angelus rang out from a near-by church. Suddenly Abby’s voice rose to a shout and she tried to lift herself on her elbow.

  ‘Ah, Michael Driscoll, my friend, my kind comrade, you didn’t forget me after all the long years. I’m a long time away from you but I’m coming at last. They tried to keep me away, to make me stop among foreigners in the town, but where would I be at all without you and all the old friends? Stay for me, my treasure! Stop and show me the way.… Neighbours,’ she shouted, pointing into the shadows, ‘that man there is my own husband, Michael Driscoll. Let ye see he won’t leave me to find my way alone. Gather round me with yeer lanterns, neighbours, till I see who I have. I know ye all. ’Tis only the sight that’s weak on me. Be easy now, my brightness, my own kind loving comrade. I’m coming. After all the long years I’m on the road to you at last.…’

  It was a spring day full of wandering sunlight when they brought her the long road to Ummera, the way she had come from it forty years before. The lake was like a dazzle of midges; the shafts of the sun revolving like a great millwheel poured their cascades of milky sunlight over the hills and the little whitewashed cottages and the little black mountain-cattle among the scarecrow fields. The hearse stopped at the foot of the lane that led to the roofless cabin just as she had pictured it to herself in the long nights, and Pat, looking more melancholy than ever, turned to the waiting neighbours and said:

  ‘Neighbours, this is Abby, Batty Heige’s daughter, that kept her promise to ye at the end of all.’

  The Wreath

  When Father Fogarty read of the death of his friend, Father Devine, in a Dublin nursing home, he was stunned. He was a man who did not understand the irremediable. He took out an old seminary group, put it on the mantelpiece and spent the evening looking at it. Devine’s clever, pale, shrunken face stood out from the rest, not very different from what it had been in his later years except for the absence of pinc-nez. He and Fogarty had been boys together in a provincial town where Devine’s father had been a schoolmaster and Fogarty’s mother had kept a shop. Even then, everybody had known that Devine was marked out by nature for the priesthood. He was clever, docile and beautifully mannered. Fogarty’s vocation had come later and proved a surprise, to himself as well as to others.

  They had been friends over the years, affectionate when together, critical and sarcastic when apart. They had not seen one another for close on a year. Devine had been unlucky. As long as the old Bishop, Gallogly, lived, he had been fairly well sheltered, but Lanigan, the new one, disliked him. It was partly Devine’s own fault. He could not keep his mouth shut. He was witty and waspish and said whatever came into his head about colleagues who had nothing like his gifts. Fogarty remembered the things Devine had said about himself. Devine had affected to believe that Fogarty was a man of many personalities, and asked with mock humility which he was now dealing with – Nero, Napoleon or St Francis of Assisi.

  It all came back: the occasional jaunts together, the plans for holidays abroad that never took place; and now the warm and genuine love for Devine which was so natural to Fogarty welled up in him, and, realizing that never again in this world would he be able to express it, he began to weep. He was as simple as a child in his emotions. When he was in high spirits he devised practical jokes of the utmost crudity; when he was depressed he brooded for days on imaginary injuries: he forgot lightly, remembered suddenly and with exaggerated intensity, and blamed himself cruelly and unjustly for his own short-comings. He would have been astonished to learn that, for all the intrusions of Nero and Napoleon, his understanding had continued to develop when that of cleverer men had dried up, and that he was a better and wiser man at forty than he had been twenty years before.

  But he did not understand the irremediable. He had to have someone to talk to, and for want of a better, rang up Jackson, a curate who had been Devine’s other fr
iend. He did not really like Jackson, who was worldly, cynical and something of a careerist, and he usually called him by the worst name in his vocabulary – a Jesuit. Several times he had asked Devine what he saw in Jackson but Devine’s replies had not enlightened him much. ‘I wouldn’t trust myself too far with the young Loyola if I were you,’ Fogarty had told Devine with his worldly swagger. Now, he had no swagger left.

  ‘That’s terrible news about Devine, Jim, isn’t it?’ he said.

  ‘Yes,’ Jackson drawled in his usual cautious, cagey way, as though he were afraid to commit himself even about that. ‘I suppose it’s a happy release for the poor devil.’

  That was the sort of tone that maddened Fogarty. It sounded as though Jackson were talking of an old family pet who had been sent to the vet’s.

  ‘I hope he appreciates it,’ he said gruffly. ‘I was thinking of going to town and coming back with the funeral. You wouldn’t come, I suppose?’

  ‘I don’t very well see how I could, Jerry,’ Jackson replied in a tone of mild alarm. ‘It’s only a week since I was up last.’

  ‘Ah, well, I’ll go myself,’ said Fogarty. ‘You don’t know what happened him, do you?’

  ‘Ah, well, he was always anaemic,’ Jackson said lightly. ‘He should have looked after himself, but he didn’t get much chance with old O’Leary.’

  ‘He wasn’t intended to,’ Fogarty said darkly, indiscreet as usual.

  ‘What?’ Jackson asked in surprise. ‘Oh no,’ he added, resuming his worldly tone. ‘It wasn’t a sinecure, of course. He was fainting all over the shop. Last time was in the middle of Mass. By then, of course, it was too late. When I saw him last week I knew he was dying.’

  ‘You saw him last week?’ Fogarty repeated.

  ‘Oh, just for a few minutes. He couldn’t talk much.’

  And again, the feeling of his own inadequacy descended on Fogarty. He realized that Jackson, who seemed to have as much feeling as a mowing machine, had kept in touch with Devine, and gone out of his way to see him at the end, while he, the devoted, warm-hearted friend, had let him slip from sight into eternity and was now wallowing in the sense of his own loss.

  ‘I’ll never forgive myself, Jim,’ he said humbly. ‘I never even knew he was sick.’

  ‘I’d like to go to the funeral myself if I could,’ said Jackson. ‘I’ll ring you up later if I can manage it.’

  He did manage it, and that evening they set off in Fogarty’s car for the city. They stayed in an old hotel in a side-street where porters and waiters all knew them. Jackson brought Fogarty to a very pleasant restaurant for dinner. The very sight of Jackson had been enough to renew Fogarty’s doubts. He was a tall, thin man with a prim, watchful, clerical air, and he knew his way around. He spent at least ten minutes over the menu and the wine list, and the head waiter danced attendance on him as head waiters do only when they are either hopeful or intimidated.

  ‘You needn’t bother about me,’ Fogarty said to cut short the rigmarole. ‘I’m having steak.’

  ‘Father Fogarty is having steak, Paddy,’ Jackson said suavely, looking at the head waiter over his spectacles with what Fogarty called his ‘Jesuit’ air. ‘Make it rare. And stout, I fancy. It’s a favourite beverage of the natives.’

  ‘I’ll spare you the stout,’ Fogarty said, enjoying the banter. ‘Red wine will do me fine.’

  ‘Mind, Paddy,’ Jackson said in the same tone, ‘Father Fogarty said red wine. You’re in Ireland now, remember.’

  Next morning they went to the parish church where the coffin was resting on trestles before the altar. Beside it, to Fogarty’s surprise, was a large wreath of roses. When they got up from their knees, Devine’s uncle, Ned, had arrived with his son. Ned was a broad-faced, dark-haired, nervous man, with the anaemic complexion of the family.

  ‘I’m sorry for your trouble, Ned,’ said Fogarty.

  ‘I know that, father,’ said Ned.

  ‘I don’t know if you know Father Jackson. He was a great friend of Father Willie’s.’

  ‘I heard him speak of him,’ said Ned. ‘He talked a lot about the pair of ye. Ye were his great friends. Poor Father Willie!’ he added with a sigh. ‘He had few enough.’

  Just then the parish priest came in and spoke to Ned Devine. His name was Martin. He was a tall man with a stern, unlined, wooden face and candid blue eyes like a baby’s. He stood for a few minutes by the coffin, then studied the breastplate and wreath, looking closely at the tag. It was only then that he beckoned the two younger priests towards the door.

  ‘Tell me, what are we going to do about that thing?’ he asked with a professional air.

  ‘What thing?’ Fogarty asked in surprise.

  ‘That wreath,’ Martin replied with a nod over his shoulder.

  ‘What’s wrong with it?’

  ‘ ’Tis against the rubrics,’ replied the parish priest in the complacent tone of a policeman who has looked up the law on the subject.

  ‘For heaven’s sake, what have the rubrics to do with it?’ Fogarty asked impatiently.

  ‘The rubrics have a whole lot to do with it,’ Martin replied with a stern glance. ‘And, apart from that, ’tis a bad custom.’

  ‘You mean Masses bring in more money?’ Fogarty asked with amused insolence.

  ‘I do not mean Masses bring in more money,’ replied Martin who tended to answer every remark verbatim, like a solicitor’s letter. It added to the impression of woodenness he gave. ‘I mean that flowers are a Pagan survival.’ He looked at the two young priests with the same anxious, innocent, wooden air. ‘And here am I, week in, week out, preaching against flowers, and a blooming big wreath of them in my own church. And on a priest’s coffin, what’s more! What am I to say about that?’

  ‘Who asked you to say anything?’ Fogarty asked angrily. ‘The man wasn’t from your diocese.’

  ‘Now, that’s all very well,’ said Martin. ‘That’s bad enough by itself, but it isn’t the whole story.’

  ‘You mean because it’s from a woman?’ Jackson broke in lightly in a tone that would have punctured any pose less substantial than Martin’s.

  ‘I mean, because it’s from a woman, exactly.’

  ‘A woman!’ said Fogarty in astonishment. ‘Does it say so?’

  ‘It does not say so.’

  ‘Then how do you know?’

  ‘Because it’s red roses.’

  ‘And does that mean it’s from a woman?’

  ‘What else could it mean?’

  ‘I suppose it could mean it’s from somebody who didn’t study the language of flowers the way you seem to have done,’ Fogarty snapped.

  He could feel Jackson’s disapproval of him weighing on the air, but when Jackson spoke it was at the parish priest that his coldness and nonchalance were directed.

  ‘Oh, well,’ he said with a shrug. ‘I’m afraid we know nothing about it, father. You’ll have to make up your own mind.’

  ‘I don’t like doing anything when I wasn’t acquainted with the man,’ Martin grumbled, but he made no further attempt to interfere, and one of the undertaker’s men took the wreath and put it on the hearse. Fogarty controlled himself with difficulty. As he banged open the door of his car and started the engine his face was flushed. He drove with his head bowed and his brows jutting down like rocks over his eyes. It was what Devine had called his Nero look. As they cleared the main streets he burst out.

  ‘That’s the sort of thing that makes me ashamed of myself, Jim. Flowers are a Pagan survival! And they take it from him, what’s worse. They take it from him. They listen to that sort of stuff instead of telling him to shut his big ignorant gob.’

  ‘Oh, well,’ Jackson said tolerantly, taking out his pipe, ‘we’re hardly being fair to him. After all, he didn’t know Devine.’

  ‘But that only makes it worse,’ Fogarty said hotly. ‘Only for our being there he’d have thrown out that wreath. And for what? His own dirty, mean, suspicious mind!’

  ‘Ah, I wouldn’t go as far a
s that,’ Jackson said, frowning. ‘I think in his position I’d have asked somebody to take it away.’

  ‘You would?’

  ‘Wouldn’t you?’

  ‘But why, in God’s name?’

  ‘Oh, I suppose I’d be afraid of the scandal – I’m not a very courageous type.’

  ‘Scandal?’

  ‘Whatever you like to call it. After all, some woman sent it.’

  ‘Yes. One of Devine’s old maids.’

  ‘Have you ever heard of an old maid sending a wreath of red roses to a funeral?’ Jackson asked, raising his brows, his head cocked.

  ‘To tell you the God’s truth, I might have done it myself,’ Fogarty confessed with boyish candour. ‘It would never have struck me that there was anything wrong with it.’

  ‘It would have struck the old maid all right, though.’

  Fogarty turned his eyes for a moment to stare at Jackson. Jackson was staring back. Then he missed a turning and reversed with a muttered curse. To the left of them the Wicklow mountains stretched away southwards, and between the grey walls the fields were a ragged brilliant green under the tattered sky.

  ‘You’re not serious, Jim?’ he said after a few minutes.

  ‘Oh, I’m not suggesting that there was anything wrong,’ Jackson said, gesturing widely with his pipe. ‘Women get ideas. We all know that.’

  ‘These things can happen in very innocent ways,’ Fogarty said with ingenuous solemnity. Then he scowled again and a blush spread over his handsome craggy face. Like all those who live mainly in their imaginations, he was always astonished and shocked at the suggestions that reached him from the outside world: he could live with his fantasies only by assuming that they were nothing more. Jackson, whose own imagination was curbed and even timid, who never went at things like a thoroughbred at a gate, watched him with amusement and a certain envy. Just occasionally he felt that he himself would have liked to welcome a new idea with that boyish wonder and panic.

  ‘I can’t believe it,’ Fogarty said angrily, tossing his head.