by Edna O'Brien
“Creature.”
“How many years is it in all since she got crippled?”
“She was lucky to have Jack.”
“She’s gone straight to heaven.”
They all said the same things, agreed with each other about Maggie’s sainthood, and probably dimly thought of their own deaths. My mother said that she would make tea, and no doubt she was impelled to do it, so as to keep my father from anything alcoholic. In the parlor, where she and I went to get the cups, we found dog daisies in a jug on the sideboard with the water putrid and the daisies themselves shriveled up. She said what was a house without a woman, and as she carried the jug out, the women had to put their handkerchiefs or their gloved hands to their noses. As we walked home she told my father this and said it was a pity that Jack had never married and that perhaps he would now.
“Whoever marries Jack will have Maggie’s brooches,” I said.
“Maybe he’ll wait for you,” she said jokingly.
“She’ll marry a doctor,” said my father proudly, as he hoped that I would better their situation.
“She’ll marry Jack,” my mother said, and the thought was offensive. It happened to be a time when my girl friends and I secretly talked of nothing but marriage. We skipped to a rhyme that went:
Raspberry, strawberry, blackberry jam,
tell me the name of my young man
and we mused on the film stars who were our idols. So many girls plumped for Clark Gable that several were insanely jealous of each other, and if one said, “Clark,” another would say, “Excuse me, are you talking of my friend Clark Gable,” and enmity ensued. Daisies were plucked, novenas were said, and spells resorted to. There was one spell that surpassed all others for novelty. In the post came that particular little white box lined with silver paper that contained dark rich wedding cake, so dense with different fruits that it was as if it had no other ingredients but fruits, raisins, and candied peel. Then there was the deep yellow layer of almond icing and above that the white icing, with maybe a silver ball or the shred of an initial where it had been cut off on someone’s name or a greeting. The flavor was exotic, but that was secondary. One slept with it under one’s pillow in the hope that the initials of one’s own future spouse would be delivered up in a dream. If it did not happen that night, then some other night, in a year or two or three, when another piece of wedding cake hopefully would arrive in the post. I was vexed with my mother for suggesting him, even as a joke. I felt defiled.
When I went away to boarding school, Jack gave me a present wrapped in several sheets of damp newspaper. It was a blue propelling pencil whose lead was so weak that at first usage it broke. Later I gave it to a nun who was collecting for the black babies. Within a week he wrote to me, and since our letters were censored, the nun asked who this gentleman was.
“My uncle, Sister,” I said, and was surprised that I could lie with such facility. It was almost dark, but as it was not the appointed time to put on the lights, we were obliged to read our letters in the half-light. I went over to the window and pushed aside a castor-oil plant and read his effusion.
I hope you are well and attending diligently to your studies. I shall be curious to learn if geometry is your pet subject as it was mine; three cheers for Pythagoras! Your mam and dad are fine, we converse as usual on world affairs, and we miss your bright pertinent contributions.
My wine shop is flourishing; a gentleman traveled from the North of Ireland last week to sample, and later to purchase, a particular vintage of mine. It was my very own, concocted from the offerings of the ditches, rhubarb, elderberry, and parsnip mixed to give a subtle bouquet.
(I knew that if anyone made the wine it was the maternity nurse.)
I am still writing poems and brushing up on Swift and Goldsmith, indeed have dialogues with them when I peruse the highways and the byways. The name of Holland will one day be illustrious; if not for one thing, then for another. The weather is clement, though there was a downpour yesterday and I was obliged to take precautions.
(I could see him putting basins in the passage and dishcloths on the shop floor to catch some of the rain as it poured through the leaking roof.)
Here is a little surprise with which to supplement your budget. Do not allow the good nuns to twist your head in a fervent direction, and remember your promise to your friend Jack
He had enclosed a money order for five shillings; I could hardly believe it. Its white crinkled paper with the heavy black lettering assured me that he had indeed sent this amount, but I did not know why.
It was a clear starry night when I came home for my Christmas holidays as I got off the bus and walked up the field. It was a pleasure to feel the darkness again, to smell the wet grass and the rotting toadstools. The dogs jumped on me, licked my face, and were hysterical with welcome. Inside the door Mama stood waiting to embrace me, and beside her was Jack. He grinned foolishly at me and hurt the two fingers next to my ringed finger by giving me an iron handshake. My new friend, Lydia, had loaned me her signet ring, so that I would think of her constantly.
Mama had a table laid in the breakfast room, and there were sausage rolls, mince pies, and iced orange cake. The turf fire sent up rainbow-colored flames, and to smell it again after so many months made me realize how cold and unnatural was our life in the convent.
“Yours truly is a bit of an antiquarian now,” Jack said to me across the table.
“Oh” was all I could say in reply.
“Yes, when searching for mushrooms last harvest I found a brooch which proved to be unique. But keep this under your hat, because of course a lot of hooligans would endeavor to imitate me. It’s bronze. I’ve interested some authorities from Dublin and they are traveling to see it early in the new year.”
Mama winked at me. “Will you carry a candle upstairs, till we get a pillow that I want to air for you.”
We linked as we climbed the stairs, and for once she did not warn me about spilling grease on the old Turkey carpet. Anyhow, we would melt it next day onto a piece of brown paper, either with a hot iron or with a hot knife. I wanted to sit on the landing step and discuss everything, how my hair once got nits in it and the disgrace that the nun had made of me, then ask if Dada had been drinking, and if the harvest had been good and therefore would we be able to pay my fees. When I shone the candle on her face Mama was laughing.
“It’s Jack,” she said, “he imagines things now. He’s not all there. He digs in the Protestant graveyard every night and finds nothing, only old bottles and chamber pots and broken glass domes.”
“Has he any friends?” I asked.
“Only us …” she said.
Jack beamed at me when I came downstairs, and a little later when he was leaving it was inside the neck of my jumper and not Mama’s that he dropped two toffees. I was back in the convent only a month when Mama wrote to tell me that Jack was building a large two-story house three miles outside the village. She also said that there was a rumor he was getting married to a girl from Longford and that the maternity nurse got shingles when she heard it. He was then probably sixty. There was no telling how he made contact with this lady in Longford unless it was by post, but it was said that such a lady existed, and that her name was Cissy. Most afternoons he shut shop and went to build without any help at all, not even a handyman or a plasterer. As a consequence the house took three years, and my mother wrote to tell me what it was like. “Jack’s house is at last complete. Your father and I were brought to see it last Sunday. ‘Terrible’ is the only word I could use. The roof is not slated, the window frames very crooked, and the exterior a bilious yellow color which he called ocher. The road up to it is a swamp. Of course Jack thinks it is marvelous and he has called it Sweet Auburn, no less. He is dying to show it to you.”
When I came home on a summer holiday, having finished with the convent, I aspired toward Dublin and resented having to stay at home and listen to depressing conversations. I was sarcastic to my mother, shunned my father,
and spent most of the time upstairs fitting on clothes, my own clothes and my mother’s clothes. A youngster came from the village to say that Jack wanted to see me at three o’clock. My mother said that she felt it was propitious. I had done well in my examination and she believed that Jack was going to give me ten or twenty pounds. I hoped she was right, as I yearned for the money to buy style. He was waiting for me outside the shop, sitting on the windowsill with an oilskin thrown over one shoulder in jaunty toreador fashion. He looked happy and he waved to me from fifty yards away.
“What a picture,” he said as he stood up and with a nod indicated that we weren’t going to sit there in view of the village. The blind was down in his shop and I asked if it was the half day.
“No, but yours truly is his own boss,” he said, and took great strides up the hill and passed the chapel and the graveyard.
“Where are we going?” I asked.
“To my country abode,” he said.
It began to rain; the drops came singly at first and then with a great urgency, and he used this as an excuse for chivalry and placed the oilskin over my shoulders. We walked out that road and then up the track to the damp spectacle of a solitary house. He was impatient to get to it. There being no gate, he lifted a strand of the rusty barbed wire and helped me in, into the rectangular patch which enclosed the house and where the nettles flourished. The house looked haunted and the windows were dirty. A rat slunk deftly through a hole under the privet hedge; if Jack saw it he certainly made no reference to it. Birds flew wildly in and out of the eaves, and chattered as if they were angry with us, as if their occupancy of the place was challenged by our visit. In the field beyond the barbed wire was a very small old donkey whose hairs had come off in patches and who stared at us but did not bray. Jack muttered something about having flower beds made later on and added that he was also partial to an arch over which roses could tumble in June. It was June and all that blossomed was the ragwort and the masses of buttercups, both yellow, both bright.
As we stood there he was pointing to certain features of the house, the fanlight above the hall door, which he described as neo-Georgian, and the door itself, which was made of deal. For all his talk its features were very prosaic and very wanting. It was a square two-story house, its front pebble-dashed and painted over this dark muddy yellow. The curtainless windows were like long mourners looking out onto the neglected garden. Its only feature, if one can call it that, was that it was on an incline and there was a fine view of plowed land and meadow leading to the road. I went to look through one of the long windows, but he intercepted me. The tour had to be done properly and with him as guide. Impatience seized me and I looked anyhow and in the drawing room saw the bare boards spattered with paint and, in the middle of the floor, incongruously, a marble fireplace. Carrara marble, as he said. It was a sign of the grandeur that he aspired to. He conceded that the house needed a bit more work and then declared that what it surely needed was the woman’s touch, that seemly eye that would know where to hang a mirror, or where to put a little whatnot, and which portrait to place over the fireplace, so that visitors would sit there with a sense of enrichment. I listened to his ramblings, resenting the fact that the high wet grass was harming my new sandals and draining the beige dye out of them. Did we, I wondered, ever pay him back the money he had given the bailiff? He was probably paid in kind and hunks of cake and bacon, and even an embroidered tablecloth would have to suffice for much of the money. I did not care. Only one thing was uppermost in me and it was flight, and in my fancies I had no idea that no matter how distant the flight or how high I soared, those people were entrenched in me.
I had to say something, so I said, “It’s very secluded.”
“Not when there’s two of us …” he said.
He went around to the side to fetch the key, which was kept in a can. I felt chilled by the sight of it all—nettles, thistles, ragwort, and such an emanation of damp from the house itself that it seemed more dismal than any outhouse. Coming back twirling the big key, he winked at me slyly, and then it happened before I had time to repel him. Jack turned the key in the door; then lifted me up in his arms, and carried me over the threshold, triumphantly shouting, “Hallelujah … ours, ours, ours.” He said for long he had envisaged such a scene and only wished he had brought a ring. His mouth and nose were lowered toward my face, and I saw him as a great vampire about to demand a kiss. I struggled out of his arms and ran toward the barbed wire, accusing him of being a horrible man. Either he was too shocked or too ashamed to follow, but I need not have gone at such a helter-skelter down the dirt track, because as I looked back, I saw that he was standing as stationary and as forlorn as a poplar tree. He did not move or beckon.
Jack stopped visiting our house, crossed the road when he saw my mother, and avoided my father after Mass. It was then the maternity nurse became essential. Now that we were banished, she made him soda bread, and when she delivered it, she collected dirty socks from the table or from a chair where they were slung. She darned them and even began to talk of plans for the unused parlor; she fancied an oil stove to be put in there. Since the girl from Longford had not materialized, everyone thought he would marry the maternity nurse, and indeed, so did she. But after six months of washing and baking and even repairing the lace curtains on the upstairs landing, she asked the parish priest to have a word with Jack. The priest called one Sunday evening, and since the public house was shut, the front door was ceremoniously lifted back. It had swollen in the rain. Jack threw a newspaper over a kitchen chair and asked His Reverence to sit down and to please forgive the humility of the place, and to have a drop of sherry, or better still a glass of malt.
“Well now, Jack, there’s none of us getting younger, and time it passing, and you are keeping company with a very nice lady, and isn’t it time that you thought of settling down?”
Those were the very words the parish priest used, because he described the incident in detail to my mother the day she had Mass said in our house.
“Marriage, Father,” said Jack, “is out of the question. I was betrothed for a long number of years to a certain little lady in this parish, who jilted me. It has embittered my ideals about the opposite sex, it has cauterized me from ever entering on another alliance; indeed, it has ruined my life.”
Jack was soon without the ministerings of the maternity nurse, and in time he became more remote and did not even talk to his customers. He just served them the drink and watched while they drank and brooded. He lost interest in his two-story house, and one evening some children who were picking mushrooms saw flames in the front window and hurried to look inside, thinking it had caught fire. Inside, a group of tinkers squatted on the floor, eating and drinking; they had made a big fire in the grate. When told of this, Jack said he would get the sergeant to deal with it, but whenever the tinkers came, they did not sleep out in the fields as before but used the shelter of the house.
The following winter he got shingles and used to open his shop at odd hours, when it suited him. As I got older, I thought of him, of how embarrassed he must have been and how callous I must have seemed. I wanted to talk to him and somehow to make amends. My mother warned me that he was very peculiar and that if I went to the shop he would not let me past the door but would drive me out as he had done to her. I said that I would follow him from Mass. I sat through the coughing and the croaking, inhaling the damp smell of tweed coats, looking at all the faces that I had almost forgotten, faces worn and twisted like the trees. He was bald, stooped, and he prayed feverishly on his black horn rosary beads. His fingers could have been an old woman’s so small were they, so gnarled. The chapel itself seemed a smaller and humbler place, and I thought of the missionaries and the terror of their sermons. The parish priest was very slow and at times hesitated as if he had forgotten the words. At the Last Gospel, Jack jumped up and left. Forewarned about this, I too got up, genuflected, and left. He hurried out under the cypress trees and opened the church gate but did not
wait to close it. It clanged.
“Jack, Jack.” I could not shout lest it be disrespectful to the proceedings in the church. I closed the gate and walked quickly, all the while calling, but he pretended not to hear. He took great strides, and it was clear that he was avoiding me. I caught up with him as he reached his own shop door and was pushing it in.
“Jack, it’s lovely to see you.”
He heard but did not respond. He went in, pushed the door shut, and immediately drew a bolt. I stood there thinking that he would change his mind. The gray gauze blind that had once had the name VINTNER printed on it was like filament. Any minute it seemed as if it might disintegrate. I tapped and tapped, but he did not relent. Indeed, I did not know if he stood there, vacillating, or if he had gone on tiptoe into the kitchen and was brewing a cup of tea. As I walked down the road and saw the bright red bells of fuchsia and heard the sounds of motorists hooting happily, I thought how untoward his gloom was and how melancholy had cut him off from others. In him I saw a glimpse of my future exiled self.
When he died he left his premises to a cousin whom we had never seen and scarcely knew of. Realizing that he had not remembered us at all in his will, and reciting the motto about “blood being thicker than water,” my mother said that she was genuinely surprised that he hadn’t left her a decanter or a biscuit barrel. But I think her disappointment was not so much to do with graft as it was deference to hidden romance, which although she stoutly denounced it, in some part of her mysterious being she cherished it and all her life believed that it would come her way.
Savages
Mabel’s family lived in a cottage at the end of our avenue and we were forever going back and forth, helping, borrowing tea or sugar or the paper, or liniment, agog for each other’s news. We knew of Mabel’s homecoming for weeks, but what we did not know was whether she would come by bus or car, and whether she would arrive in daylight or dusk. She was coming from Australia, making most of the journey by ship, and then crossing on the sailboat to Dublin, and then by train to our station, which was indeed rustic and where a passenger seldom got off. She would be tired. She would be excited. She would be full of strange stories and strange impressions. How long would she stay? What would she look like? Would her hair be permed? What presents, or what knickknacks would she bring? Would she have an accent? Oh, what novelty. These and a thousand other questions assailed us, and as the time got nearer, her name and her arrival were on everyone’s lips. I was allowed to help her mother on the Saturday and in my eagerness I set out at cockcrow, having brought six fresh eggs and the loan of our egg beater. First task was to clear out the upstairs room. It smelled musty. Mice scrambled there, because her family kept their oats in it. It was an attic room with a skylight window and a slanting ceiling. In fact, it was only half a room, because of the way one kept bumping one’s head on the low, distempered ceiling. My job was to scoop oats with a trowel and pour it into a sack. So buoyed up was I with anticipation that now and then I became absentminded and the oats slid out of the sack once again. From time to time her mother would say, “I hope she hasn’t an accident,” or “I hope she hasn’t broke her pledge,” but these things were said to disguise or temper her joy. The thing is, Mabel’s coming had brought hope and renewal into her life.
