I held a letter in my hand that was written in India by a nun, who had heard the news of her engagement in June 1950. Maureen, a childhood friend, had joined the Loreto convent and was sent to Calcutta from where she wrote to Mother wishing her ‘every joy and happiness in your new life’.
The letter goes on:
I’m longing to hear everything about yourself and your future husband. I wish I knew the date of your wedding so that I could be united with you in prayer on that morning.
The nun was teaching in a school, beginning her classes at 7 a.m., and sleeping on the roof of the building with the other sisters at night because of the heat. And now she was writing in blue ink, and underlining words for emphasis. I held the letter in my hands, wishing my mother had shown it to me at some stage, even in old age, and said, ‘Look at this!’, and we could have laughed and cried at the brevity of a human life. Instead, she had folded it neatly away and placed it with three photographs of the nun at the back of a drawer in her dressing table, where it rested for over fifty years until I held it in my hands on the day of her burial.
I noticed an electric razor in the bathroom that my father had used when he was old. It was on a shelf under the sink. Something intimate about him still remained on the teeth of the little Ronson machine, and it occurred to me that he might have been the cause of her sorrow. Perhaps, in private, he had been a monster to her. He might not have enjoyed sex. The union might have been arranged. Her expectations might have been based on too many romantic films seen with her friends in Cork. Or perhaps, at thirty-four, she had discovered too late that a forty-eight-year-old man could be a cold authoritarian fish in the starchy world of the Irish middle classes in 1950.
I was desperate to know what had wounded this beautiful woman. I was speculating wildly until I found other pictures of the young couple together that proved me wrong. It was as if the house was talking back to me, telling me that there was a different story for me to uncover. I found heaps more photographs in her purses, in drawers, in wardrobes and under her bed and in a shoe box and out in the coal shed in a Jacob’s biscuit tin. I found albums of her wedding and maps of County Kerry from her honeymoon, and postcards I had sent to her from Italy in 1985, and postcards she had sent from Donegal on that same honeymoon in 1950, and pictures of her children in the 1960s, and letters from friends on the birth of her boys and pictures of her with himself in different parts of Ireland and pictures of her as an old woman in Belgium and Finland and Saudi Arabia when she went off with groups of other old people on adventures that I had long forgotten about. I found her laughing with my brother in Newfoundland and on her own at the end of a pier in Sweden. I found pictures of myself and of her one single grandchild everywhere. And I found cookbooks and recipes and stacks of magazines with knitting patterns. And letters.
The house was singing to me. It was giving up its secrets. It was happy. It was saying, ‘Look here and there and here again, you’ll find evidence of her love that you had forgotten about.’ I found a letter I had written to her when I was ten. It fell out of a high-heeled shoe under the stairs. It was from Donegal saying how much I missed home and how I hoped she was feeding the cat.
‘Look in the attic too,’ some voice whispered in my head. ‘For there are old suitcases up there and they are stuffed with hats and further treasures.’
She looked happy standing outside the church on her wedding morning or kneeling at the altar rails with the white veil still around her flowery hat. Leaning on her mother at the hotel door later on, and among her sisters around the breakfast table. Lined up with her brothers on the street. She looked happy two months later at the County Council Annual Dinner Dance in the town hall. On that occasion, she wore a white evening gown, immaculately folded around her waist and falling to her ankles. She wore her wedding and engagement rings and a gold watch on her wrist that he had bought her the previous year. And she wore a locket, with pictures of him and her inside. I know they are inside because I was holding the locket in my hand as I looked at the photograph. I held the rings and the watch and I scrutinised her smile and her white evening dress in the photograph. It had a high collar and a huge rose clipped on the right lapel. He sat beside her, intense as a young scholar, wearing a dinner jacket. The shirt, waistcoat and dickie-bow were white. On his lapel there was a round badge that said ‘Committee’. And I held the faded badge too in my hand, as I gazed at that photograph.
All these things she had kept hidden. All these moments she had kept secret. Cherished or buried, I don’t know. She never showed them to us. She never had them framed. They just gathered dust. And then she died. And then, only then, could I hold them.
She was eighty in 1996, but she spent over another decade refusing to answer the phone and scribbling useless things on tiny pages and casting notes into drawers, or behind the television set, or tossing them under the bed or lodging them at the back of wardrobes. I found evidence of every argument she had ever had with the ESB or the social welfare office or the county council about her pension or a car dealer with whom she had an altercation about repairs to her Ford Escort – all recorded in small pages torn from notebooks and tidied away into envelopes in the back of a drawer where she had kept her chequebooks. I found four one-line cuttings from the Anglo-Celt. One was her marriage notice. Two were notices of the births of her children. And the final one was her husband’s death notice. Each one was terse and to the point and they were pasted into the inside sleeve of her prayer book.
I found her diary for 1995, as small as a cigarette box with one line available for every day of the year.
After writing a few terse notes about Christmas that year, which she had spent with us in Leitrim, the entries in the diary continue in the same melancholic despair through the new year.
No water in the house.
Went to doctor today.
Waiting for hours.
Lunch in hotel. No respect.
Raining. Fed up.
Can’t find camera.
Terrible day.
Terrible lonely.
No one called.
On the story goes, all through January as she endured the snow and frost, confined to the house, afraid to walk the steps up to the cathedral for fear of slipping, and marking in her diary only pain and the price of food. The pittance she spent on her weekly groceries – six rashers, the local newspaper, a pint of milk, sticks for the fire, a bail of turf briquettes, a tin of soup. And at the end of the month, she recorded an important date: 27 January. ‘Celebrated birthday today,’ she writes. ‘Bought three buns.’
It was her eightieth year. Another year measured out in her diary by the random litany of needs – teabags, bones for soup, barley mix, firelighters, sliced pans, tapioca, celery, cheese, lemons and pyjamas and yoghurt and slices of Brady’s ham. And she had plenty of time to measure and record – on all those long endless Sundays that she spent alone in bed, when she wouldn’t answer the phone – her difficulties in the toilet, her stomach bugs, her little bowl for porridge waiting idle in the microwave that she was too sick to reach. Her slippers. The clips for her hair that she had used fifty years earlier when she’d been going out to that first County Council Annual Dinner Dance. And the diaries. Those terse notes, like enigmatic clues to her heart. And the envelopes with groceries listed on the back. The delicate fabric of her reduced circumstance, all the fragments that made up a spatial memorial to an entire life held there like dust in the shafts of sunlight. It was like walking into a museum of her unconscious mind.
I touched her things but I could not touch her. I touched the armchairs her husband had bought for their first home, two rented rooms on the first floor of the Commercial Hotel, and the bookcase where he had stored his books and where she had stored all the memories of his life when he died. I held in my hands a delph chamber pot that I remember my father using in his later years. When I was a child, I would see him running along the corridor in the mornings on white spindly legs, in his pyjama top.
I held Mother’s beautiful clothes gathered over six decades. I touched the mohair cardigans, the tweed suits and jackets, the woollen slacks and silk blouses. Everything neatly folded, I opened, hugged and replaced. I examined the skirts and then hung them back again in the wardrobes where she had arranged them as if she might use them tomorrow. As if the last time she had put anything away, she had put it away with the hope of taking it out later to dance again. The small hats, the berets in green, brown, black, cream and rusty orange, stacked neatly on the corner of a shelf. The five flowery umbrellas under the hall table. The volumes of Woman’s Way piled under the stairs with knitting patterns ‘for lace dresses you can wear on the beach’ and recipes written in her own hand for how to cook a trout.
Switch on the oven. Put on potatoes. Grease three tins. Melt the margarine. Prepare the stuffing for fish and tomatoes. Remove rind from rashers. Wipe fish, remove bone, put on greased tin, stuff, place rashers on top and cook for thirty minutes. Stuff tomatoes. Wash up. Set table. Put serving dishes in to heat. Cream the potatoes. Add eggs. Look at fish. Sieve sauce, put to heat gently. Prepare garnish. Take out fish and keep hot. Take out tomatoes and tidy up. Serve up. Wash up. The instructions for an invisible life serving others. And it did sum up her life. A public display of serving others with no hint of her own self in the picture, because she was tireless in her efforts to attend to her husband’s needs and her children’s needs.
‘You do your best,’ she’d say, ‘but you get no thanks.’
There was a cooking competition and she won first prize. I remember helping her bring pots and pans and cutlery into the schoolhouse where the competition was held on the day of the finals. I was six years old and stood among the frocked haunches of other women squeezing me out of sight as they leaned in for the judge’s decisions, and I desperately wished for my mother to win. And she did. And my pride in her was beyond control that she could beat all those other enormous perfumed ladies. I remember seeing her smile and holding the prize, a little silver cup. And I held a photograph of that too, as I foraged under the stairs.
I found a letter from the President of Ireland, Paddy Hillery, sympathising with her on the death of her brother Oliver, and a letter from the head gardener at Áras an Uachtaráin. And with them, another photograph of Oliver and her, arm in arm outside the front door of his house, and the entire list of mourners at his funeral. That museum of her unconscious mind held me transfixed.
Sometimes as a child, I used to go upstairs and cry alone in the bathroom while I was looking in the mirror. Don’t ask me why. I was drawn to mirrors. I spent hours in front of every mirror in the house. And there were a lot of them. On the dressing table of every bedroom and inside the doors of every wardrobe. And I was never caught. I was far too careful because adults didn’t approve of children looking in mirrors for too long. They said if you looked long enough in the mirror you might see the devil. Although the one I was terrified of was Dracula. I always feared that he might suddenly stare out at me with his fangs and lips of blood and point at me and say, ‘It’s time for your check-up.’
It was at the mirror that I first began talking to myself. I’d chastise myself as if I was the schoolteacher and the fellow in the mirror was someone else. Mother would hear me and call me down.
‘What were you doing in my room?’ she would ask, and I would make something up, because lies come fast to the unconscious mind.
‘I was looking for matches,’ I might say, since the fire might need to be lit and there was usually a box of matches sitting on the shelf between the statue of the Virgin Mary and the nightlight that she lit when she was going to bed.
The wonderful thing about life now is that there is no shame at all in being paralysed by narcissism. Teenagers on the streets are constantly looking sideways as they walk, admiring their own faces in the passing shop windows. But I suppose they’re only doing in public what I did in secret before the mirror. And I love the way they look out at me sometimes with gleeful faces from their Facebook pages. They smile as if nothing in the world was bothering them. As if they were not terrified of ever being alone, or not desiring madly to be held.
In my mother’s day, young people looked into cameras with a similar exuberance. At least that’s how she looks in old photographs from Cork. But maybe she too mooched about the rooms of her new home in Cavan after she was married and looked in the same mirrors and talked quietly to herself about how her new married life was getting along. At least all the mirrors were still intact, when I was examining the place like a forensic detective after she died. At one point I looked intently into the long oblong mirror in the bathroom just over the wash-hand basin, and I could still see the remnant of the child I once was staring back at me.
I still stare at mirrors. In the washrooms of five-star hotels or on the corridors of leisure centres or just in the gleaming glass of shop windows where I do what teenagers do.
I remember taking my mother to the Brandon Hotel in Tralee for a holiday just after my father’s death. She was reluctant, and still heavy with grief when we set out from Cavan, but as we moved down through the lush woodlands of Offaly and Limerick, the white hawthorn and the flag irises cheered her up and by the time we got through Adare with its thatched cottages and arrived in Kerry, it was me who was falling into depression and she who was growing more delighted.
And I was the one absorbed by my own image in the lift mirror after we had checked in. She just kept her eye on the lift door, like a child waiting for it to open and release her onto the corridor of the third floor where we had been assigned our bedrooms.
Even in old age, she still had an insatiable desire to connect with other people, as if she had no inner self. As if no conscious part of her mind was watching. She lived completely in the acting out of her engagement with the world, like those cheerful little girls on Facebook. The next person to turn up at her door was always a more exciting prospect than sitting with her own anxieties – which is why it was all so devastating for her in the end. And why the silent doorbell and the phone that never rang broke her heart in old age, and why, when depression came, it came with a vengeance. At ninety, no one called. And she grew bitter. And she never shared with me the regrets that afflicted her in that uneasy solitude.
AS I HEADED up the stairs of her house on Farnham Road, I was still looking for her, still wanting her presence to rise from some accidental artefact. My destination was the upstairs bedroom. So on I went, slowly, treading the dull brown carpet on the stairs, stained from various accidents over the years. I passed the icon of the Virgin Mary at the turn in the stairs. An icon which I had bought at a stall outside Christ Church Cathedral when Brother Roger of Taizé was in Dublin in 1983, and which, whenever I looked at it, made me sad.
I had driven a bus full of young people from troubled backgrounds in Fermanagh to see the holy monk and, at one stage, he passed close to us as we stood in the porch with hundreds of others. The frail white-haired man was being escorted out of the cathedral after he had delivered his sermon. Someone in the crowd said we were from Northern Ireland and he came over and hugged all the young people individually and each one cried, and then he looked at me, standing at a remove, and he said, ‘You are a priest.’ I didn’t know if he was asking me a question or declaring some truth, and I’m not quite sure what I said in reply but I too was embraced and I too cried.
Less than a year later, I had left the ministry but I didn’t have the heart to throw out the icon, so I gave it to my mother and it hung on the wall in Cavan between downstairs and the upstairs landing, and often in the years after I had abandoned the priesthood, when I was visiting her and might have occasion to go to the toilet, I would see it on the wall and be caught by a sudden sense of remorse.
The bed in the dining room had been a temporary solution and had only been in operation for two years. It was a public place where the nurses and the care workers came and went during her last years in the house. But upstairs was different. It was private.
I opened her bedroom door and was immediately held by her presence more powerfully than in any other room. This was the room where my father had slept with her. Where I was conceived. Where he grew old, lying on the bed, listening to BBC Radio 4 and gazing out at the evening sun, and saying to me that heaven might be a state of bliss, a nowhere land where everything beautiful we had in this world might be experienced again, and even then more intensely.
Upstairs is where she dreamed, the room where she made love and then grew old. And it is the room where I was born. I felt shame as I poked about in the drawers and rummaged in her wardrobe and stood staring at her bed and dressing table and all the idle brushes and combs and silver mirrors. She spent over twenty years in that room with her husband. And for thirty more years, she slept in the same bed alone as a widow.
In my childhood, mother wore frocks and dresses and light-blue mohair cardigans around her shoulders, and strings of pearls down along her bodice. I remember her wearing dainty hats with feathers sticking up, and black patent shoes. And I’ll never forget the night I saw her in a black strapless evening gown swishing in circles at the mirror, in anticipation of a night’s dancing and drinking and the whizz of posh gossip.
I remember going to a film in the Magnet Cinema in Cavan when I was very young and seeing a slim woman on the screen, in a long raincoat belted at the waist and a scarf hiding her hair; she was standing in a doorway in some black-and-white thriller. In the next scene, the door opened and she went inside and took off the wet coat and the scarf and a strange man with a moustache threw a cardigan around her shoulders and she sat down and leaned her elbow on a dining table, and I trembled with astonishment. I thought it was her. I thought it was Mammy. My own film star mammy in one of her perfect frocks. And I knew where frocks came from because I remember going regularly to a dressmaker’s house on Church Street with her. We would go upstairs to the fitting room. The dressmaker, Miss Brady, was old by then, and had been making and altering clothes for Mother since Mother was a child. There too, with just the three of us in the room, I can recall sitting on the floor watching her swish around at the mirror, so lovely to behold.
Hanging with the Elephant Page 10
