by Edna O'Brien
No sooner had they sat down to eat than John Ryan started sniffing. Every forkful was put to his nose before being consigned to his mouth. Hickey commented on this and on the fact that John Ryan wouldn’t eat a shop egg if you paid him.
“It doesn’t smell right,” John Ryan said.
“God’s sake, it’s the tastiest chicken I ever ate,” Hickey said.
“First class, first class,” Morgan said, though he didn’t fancy it that much. That blackguard had depressed him and hadn’t given him any sense of comradeship, but hoofed it soon as he got the hundred pounds. Had the others not been there, Morgan would have haggled, and he resolved in future to do business alone.
“Are you in, Morgan?” They heard Long John Salmon call from the shop, and sullenly Morgan got up and put his plate of dinner on top of the stove.
“Coming,” he said as he wiped his mouth.
Out in the shop he asked Long John if he had any other calls to do, because business had been so brisk he hadn’t got around to weighing the meal stuff.
“Nicest chicken I ever had,” he then said, humoring Long John.
“They’re a good table fowl, the Rhode Islands,” said Long John.
“They are,” said Morgan, “they’re the best.”
“If I’d known you were eating it so soon, I’d have got it all ready for you,” said Long John.
“It was ready, hadn’t a thing to do only put it in the pot with some onions and salt, and Bob’s your uncle.”
“ ’Twasn’t cleaned,” said Long John Salmon.
“What?” said Morgan, not fully understanding.
“Christ, that’s what it is,” said John Ryan, dropping his plate and making one leap out of the snug and through the shop, around to the back where he could be sick.
“He’s in a hurry,” said Long John as he saw Ryan go out with his hand clapped across his mouth.
“You mean it wasn’t drawn,” said Morgan, and he felt queasy. Then he remembered being in Long John’s farmyard and he writhed as he contemplated the muck of the place. Sorrows never come in single file. At that moment Guard Tighe came into the shop in uniform, looking agitated.
“Was there a bloke here about spraying hay sheds?” he asked.
“What business is it of yours,” Morgan said.
Morgan was thinking that Tighe was nosy and probably wanted the franchise for his wife’s people, who had a hardware shop up the street.
“Was he or wasn’t he?”
“He was here,” said Morgan, and he was on the point of boasting of his new enterprise when the guard forestalled him.
“He’s a bounder,” he said. “He’s going all over the country bamboozling people.”
“How do you know that?” Morgan said.
Hickey had come from inside the snug, wild with curiosity.
“I know it because the man who invented the damn stuff got in touch with us, warning us about this bounder, this pretender.”
“Jaysus,” said Morgan. “Why didn’t you tell me sooner.”
“We’re a guard short,” said Tighe, and at that instant Morgan hit the counter with his fist and kept hitting it so that billheads and paper bags flew about.
“You’re supposed to protect citizens,” he said.
“You didn’t give him any money?” said the guard.
“Only one hundred pounds,” said Morgan with vehemence, as if the guard were the cause of it all, instead of his own importunity. The guard then asked particulars of the car, the license plate, the man’s appearance, dismissing the man’s name as fictitious. When the guard asked if the man’s beard looked to be dyed, Morgan lost his temper completely and called upon his Maker to wreak vengeance on embezzlers, chancers, bounders, thieves, layabouts, liars, and the Garda Siotchana.
“Christ, I didn’t even give myself a Christmas box,” Morgan said, and Hickey, sensing that worse was to follow, picked up his cap and said it was heinous, heinous altogether. Outside, he found Ryan, white as a sheet, over near the wall where the mare and cart were tethered.
“Red Hugh of the North was a bounder,” he said.
“I don’t care what he was,” said Ryan, predicting his own demise.
“You’re very chicken,” said Hickey, thrilled at making such an apt joke.
“If you had stayed inside I was all right,” said Ryan, as he commenced to retch again. Hickey looked up and saw that Mrs. Gleeson was crouched behind the other side of the wall observing. In her black garb she looked like a witch. She’d tell the whole country.
“She’ll tell my mother,” said Ryan, and drew his coat collar up around him to try and disguise his appearance.
“Good, good Bess,” Hickey said to the mare as he unknotted the reins. Morgan had come out and like a lunatic was waving his arms in all directions and calling for action. Hickey was damned if he was going to stay for any postmortem. It was obvious that the whole thing was a swindle and the fellow was now in some smart hotel eating his fill or more likely heading for the boat to Holyhead. Exit the gangsters.
“Get rid of this bloody chicken,” Morgan called.
“Add peaches to it,” said Hickey.
“Come back,” said Morgan. “Come back, you hooligan.”
But Hickey had already set out and the mare was trotting at a merry pace, having been unaccountably idle for a couple of hours.
The Doll
Every Christmas there came a present of a doll from a lady I scarcely knew. She was a friend of my mother’s, and though they only met rarely, or accidentally at a funeral, she kept up the miraculous habit of sending me a doll. It would come on the evening bus shortly before Christmas, and it added to the hectic glow of those days when everything was charged with bustle and excitement. We made potato stuffing, we made mince pies, we made bowls of trifle, we decorated the windowsills with holly and with tinsel, and it was as if untoward happiness was about to befall us.
Each year’s doll seemed to be more beautiful, more bewitching, and more sumptuously dad than the previous year’s. They were of both sexes. There was a jockey in bright red and saffron, there was a Dutch drummer boy in maroon velvet, there was a sleeping doll in a crinoline, a creature of such fragile beauty that I used to fear for her when my sisters picked her up clumsily or tried to make her flutter her eyelashes. Her eyes were suggestive of beads and small blue flowers, having the haunting color of one and the smooth glaze of the other. She was named Rosalind.
My sisters, of course, were jealous and riled against the unfairness of my getting a doll, whereas they only got the usual dull flannel sock with tiny things in it, necessary things such as pencils, copybooks, plus some toffees and a licorice pipe. Each of my dolls was given a name, and a place of rest, in a corner or on a whatnot, or in an empty biscuit tin, and each had special conversations allotted to them, special endearments, and if necessary special chastisements. They had special times for fresh air—a doll would be brought out and splayed on a windowsill, or sunk down in the high grass and apparently abandoned. I had no favorites until the seventh doll came, and she was to me the living representation of a princess. She too was a sleeping doll, but a sizable one, and she was dressed in a pale-blue dress, with a gauze overdress, a pale-blue bonnet, and white kid button shoes. My sisters—who were older—were as smitten with her as I. She was uncanny. We all agreed that she was almost lifelike and that with coaxing she might speak. Her flaxen hair was like a feather to finger, her little wrists moved on a swivel, her eyelashes were black and sleek and the gaze in her eyes so fetching that we often thought she was not an inanimate creature, that she had a soul and a sense of us. Conversations with her were the most intense and the most incriminating of all.
It so happened that the teacher at school harbored a dislike for me and this for unfathomable reasons. I loved lessons, was first with my homework, always early for class, then always lit the school fire, raked the ashes, and had a basket full of turf and wood when she arrived. In fact, my very diligence was what annoyed her and she wou
ld taunt me about it and proclaim what a “goody-goody” I was. She made jokes about my cardigan or my shoelaces or the slide in my hair, and to make the other girls laugh, she referred to me as “It.” She would say, “It has a hole in its sock,” or “It hasn’t got a proper blazer,” or “It has a daub on its copybook.” I believe she hated me. If in an examination I came first—and I usually did—she would read out everyone’s marks, leave mine until last, and say, “We know who swotted the most,” as if I were in disgrace. If at cookery classes I made pancakes and offered her one, she would make a face as if I had offered her tripe or strychnine. She once got a big girl to give me fruit laxatives, pretending that they were sweets, and made great fun when I had to go in and out to the closets all day. It was a cruel cross to bear. When the inspector came and praised me, she said that I was brainy but that I lacked versatility. In direct contrast she was lovely to my sisters and would ask them occasionally how my mother was, and when was she going to send over a nice pot of homemade jam or a slab cake. I used to pray and make novenas that one day she would examine her conscience and think about how she wronged me and repent.
One day my prayers seemed on the point of being answered. It was November and already the girls were saving up for Christmas, and we knew that soon there would be the turkey market and soon after hams and candied peel in the grocery shop window. She said that since we’d all done so well in the catechism exam, she was going to get the infants to act in the school play and that we would build a crib and stack it with fresh hay and statues. Somebody said that my doll would make a most beautiful Virgin. Several girls had come home with me to see the doll and had been allowed to peep in at her in her box, which was lined with silver chaff. I brought her next day, and every head in the classroom craned as the teacher lifted the lid of the black lacquered box and looked in.
“She’s passable,” she said, and told one of the girls to put the doll in the cookery cupboard until such time as she was needed. I grieved at being parted from her, but I was proud of the fact that she would be in the school play and be the cynosure of all. I had made her a cloak, a flowing blue cloak with a sheath of net over it and a little diamante clasp. She was like a creature of moonlight, shimmering, even on dark wet days. The cookery cupboard was not a fit abode for her, but what could I do?
The play did not pass off without incident. The teacher’s cousin Milo was drunk, belligerent, and offensive. He called girls up to the fire to pretend to talk to them and then touched the calves of their legs and tickled the backs of their knees. He called me up and asked would I click. He was an auctioneer from the city and unmarried. The teacher’s two sons also came to look at the performance, but one of them left in the middle. He was strange and would laugh for no reason, and although over twenty he called the teacher “Mammy.” He had very bright-red hair and a peculiar stare in his eyes. For the most part, the infants forgot their lines, lost their heads, and the prompter was always late, so that the wrong girls picked up her cues. She was behind a curtain but could be heard out on the street. The whole thing was a fiasco. My doll was the star of the occasion and everyone raved about her.
Afterward there was tea and scones, and the teacher talked to those few mothers who had come. My mother had not come because at that time she was unable to confront crowds and even dreaded going to Mass on Sundays, but believed that God would preserve her from the dizziness and suffocations that she was suffering from. After they had all left and a few of us had done the washing up, I went to the teacher and to my delight she gave me a wide genial smile. She thanked me for the doll, said that there was no denying but that the doll saved the play, and then, as I reached out, she staved my hand with a ruler and laughed heartily.
“You don’t think I’m going to let you have her now, I’ve got quite fond of her … the little mite,” she said, and gave the china cheek a tap. At home I was berserk. My mother said the teacher was probably teasing and that she would return the doll in a day or two. My father said that if she didn’t she would have to answer to him, or else get a hammering. The days passed and the holidays came, and not only did she not give me my doll, but she took it to her own home and put it in the china cabinet along with cups and ornaments. Passing by their window, I would look in. I could not see her because the china cabinet was in a corner, but I knew where she was, as the maid Lizzie told me. I would press my forehead to the window and call to the doll and say that I was thinking of her and that rescue was being hatched.
Everyone agreed that it was monstrous, but no one talked to the teacher, no one tackled her. The truth is, they were afraid of her. She had a bitter tongue, and also, being superstitious, they felt that she could give us children brains or take them away, as a witch might. It was as if she could lift the brains out of us with a forceps and pickle them in brine. No one did anything, and in time I became reconciled to it. I asked once in a fit of bravura and the teacher said wasn’t I becoming impudent. No longer did I halt to look in the window of her house but rather crossed the road, and I did not talk to Lizzie in case she should tell me something upsetting.
Once, I was sent to the teacher’s house with a loin of pork and found her by the fire with her queer son, both of them with their stockings down, warming themselves. There were zigzags of heat on their shins. She asked if I wanted to go in and see the doll, but I declined. By then I was preparing to go away to boarding school and I knew that I would be free of her forever, that I would forget her, that I would forget the doll, forget most of what happened, or at least remember it without a quiver.
The years go by and everything and everyone gets replaced. Those we knew, though absent, are yet merged inextricably into new folk, so that each person is to us a sum of many others and the effect is of opening box after box in which the original is forever hidden.
The teacher dies a slow death, wastes to a thread through cancer, yet strives against it and says she is not ready. I hear the amount of money she left and her pitiable last words, but I feel nothing. I feel none of the rage and none of the despair. She does not matter to me anymore. I am on the run from them. I have fled. I live in a city. I am cosmopolitan. People come to my house, all sorts of people, and they do feats like dancing, or jesting, or singing, inventing a sort of private theater where we all play a part. I too play a part. My part is to receive them and disarm them, ply them with food and drink, and secretly be wary of them, be distanced from them. Like them I smile, and drift; like them I smoke or drink to induce a feverishness or a pleasant wandering hallucination. It was not something I cultivated. It developed of its own accord, like a spore that breathes in the darkness. So I am far from those I am with, and far from those I have left. At night I enjoy the farness. In the morning I touch a table or a teacup to make sure that it is a table or a teacup, and I talk to it, and I water the flowers and I talk to them, and I think how tender flowers are, and woods and woodsmoke and possibly how tender are my new friends, but that like me they are intent on concealment. None of us ever says where we come from or what haunts us. Perhaps we are bewildered or ashamed.
I go back. Duty hauls me back to see the remaining relatives, and I play the expected part. I had to call on the teacher’s son. He was the undertaker and was in charge of my aunt’s burial. I went to pay him, to “fix up,” as it is called. His wife, whom I knew to be a bit scattered, admitted me amid peals of laughter. She said she always thought I had jet-black hair, as she ran down the hall calling his name. His name is Denis. He shakes hands with me very formally, asks what kind of wreath I want and if it should be heart-shaped, circular, or in the form of a cross. I leave it all to him. There in the overstuffed china cabinet is my confiscated doll, and if dolls can age, it certainly had. Gray and moldy, the dress and cloak are as a shroud, and I thought, If I was to pick her up she would disintegrate.
“God, my mother was fond of her,” he said, as if he were trying to tell me that she had been fond of me, too. Had he said so, I might have challenged. I was older now and it was clea
r to me that she had kept the doll out of perversity, out of pique and jealousy. In some way she had divined that I would have a life far away from them and adventures such as she herself would never taste. Sensing my chill, he boasted that he had not let his own children play with the doll, thereby implying that she was a sacred object, a treasured souvenir. He hauled out a brandy bottle and winked, expecting me to say yes. I declined.
A sickness had come over me, a sort of nausea for having cared so much about the doll, for having let them maltreat me, and now for no longer caring at all. My abrupt departure puzzled him. He did something untoward. He tried to kiss me. He thought perhaps that in my world it was the expected thing. Except that the kiss was proffered as a sympathy kiss, a kiss of condolence over my aunt’s death. His face had the sour smell of a towel that he must have dried himself on, just before he came to welcome me. The kiss was clumsiness personified. I pitied him, but I could not stay, and I could not reminisce, and I could not pretend to be the fast kiss-easy woman he imagined me to be.
Walking down the street, where I walk in memory, morning noon and night, I could not tell what it was, precisely, that reduced me to such wretchedness. Indeed, it was not death but rather the gnawing conviction of not having yet lived. All I could tell was that the stars were as singular and as wondrous as I remembered them and that they still seemed like a link, an enticement to the great heavens, and that one day I would reach them and be absorbed into their glory, and pass from a world that, at that moment, I found to be rife with cruelty and stupidity, a world that had forgotten how to give.
Tomorrow … I thought Tomorrow I shall be gone, and realized that I had not lost the desire to escape or the strenuous habit of hoping.
The Bachelor
In the distance he was often mistaken for a priest, so solemn did he seem in his great long black overcoat and his black squashed hat. His face was grave, too, and very often he had a drip at the end of his pointed nose. It was unusual to see a grown man with tears in his eyes and this even when he told something lighthearted. The tears would start up in his eyes almost as soon as he began to talk, giving him a morose funereal look. He wore striped flannelette shirts and a tattered homespun jacket that he had once shared with his dead brother. When his brother was alive they had to attend Mass separately, as each wanted to be the proud wearer of the oatmeal jacket.
