The Misremembered Man

by Christina McKenna

  When he reemerged, his audience voiced their approval, but Jamie frowned, pulled back the flaps of the jacket and looked down at his fly.

  “That was a stiff boy to get up, so it was.”

  “Yes, indeed,” said Mr. Harvey, resisting the urge to laugh out loud. “Those zippers are a bit stiff when new, but just give it a good tug to get her going and you’re away.”

  Jamie nodded, then went through a series of gymnastic movements, to test the suit’s flexibility and the strength of its seams at armpit and crotch. He stretched out one leg in front of him, then the other.

  “Yes, she’s a good length in the legs, so she is,” he declared.

  He squatted down suddenly then shot up again.

  “Aye, and she’s a roomy boy as well.”

  Finally he threw his arms high up above his head, then flung them back down again, then up again, like an orangutan performing some kind of bizarre mating ritual.

  “Well y’know,” he announced from between his raised arms, “she just ketches me a wee bit in the armpits, so she does.”

  Mr. Harvey was expecting this. He had witnessed virtually every farmer he sold a suit to go through this monkey routine before handing over their money. He was therefore ready with a pithy riposte.

  “Yes, James, and if you were planning to hurl a discus or throw a spear in that suit, I’d see your point. But since you are only going to wear it to Mass, where an aptitude for rigorous sport is not a requirement, then there’s not much chance of that, now is there?”

  He laughed and clapped his hands, hoping that his observation would clinch the deal.

  “Yes, I s’ppose you’re right,” came the slow concession.

  There was another hung silence while Jamie buttoned and unbuttoned the jacket, by turns advancing to the mirror then retreating from it in a puddle of indecision.

  “I think it looks good and grand now, Jamie,” Paddy observed from his chair. “That suit would take you anywhere—Mass or a waddin’ or a funeral or whatever.”

  Mr. Harvey had his eye on the clock. The first innings of the cricket were getting dangerously near. He went to a shelf of boxed shirts, pulled one out and took off the lid with a flourish.

  “Sunshine yellow, James! Polyester cotton, crease resistant, perfect. Five pounds, but to you: three. Couldn’t do better than that.”

  Jamie examined the shirt. “Not a bit bright, is it?”

  “Nonsense! Bright colors are the whole go in America these days. Brown and yellow go together, like bread and butter, salt and pepper, me and the missus.” He laughed and rubbed his palms together, impatient with the realization that he’d have to dangle another carrot pretty swiftly if he were to get rid of the farmers.

  “Tell you what, James,” he said, proffering another box, “I’ll let you have a pair of the latest brown slip-ons to go with the suit for half price.”

  Jamie mulled over the proposal. He knew that he could not be wearing the mustard yellow pair again because they attracted too much notice. The embarrassing memory of them finally decided him to go for the whole lot. Mr. Harvey sighed with relief and the deal was done.

  Jamie, for his part, left Mr. Harvey’s store completely satisfied. There was no doubt that in ten days’ time, a Miss Lydeea Devine would be meeting Mr. James Kevin Barry Michael McCloone looking “like royallity,” as Rose had predicted.

  Chapter twenty-six

  Lydia, like most people, hated hospitals, yet never had cause to be admitted to one. She rarely had a need to visit one either, and felt now that this run of good fortune was being wrested back from her, as though she were receiving some sort of overdue comeuppance.

  Her father had died in his sleep, thus ensuring that at a rather late stage in her life she had experienced bereavement, though not the terrible preamble that often accompanies the final decline of the elderly.

  Her world for the past four days had become the polished floors and sanitized wards of the County General, with its nurses in starched uniforms and its serious-faced doctors. It was a world of hopeful and anguished beings, held for a time in that most intimidating place, to be either released back to their lives, or expelled to the unimaginable beyond.

  She walked the neon-lit corridors where death waited, as cold and harsh as a winter sun, and tried not to dwell on the reality of what she saw and heard: the rapid footfalls on the vinyl flooring; curtains jerked swiftly about a bed, wailing cries at a damage done; the many lives altered forever by the extinguishing of one.

  Four days following the stroke, her mother was out of danger. She was removed from Intensive Care and given a small private room in the geriatric wing.

  Lydia hardly recognized the woman in the bed: an inert, mute woman with eyes that looked but did not see. She would sit there for long periods, just holding her mother’s hand and hoping for a response, but none was forthcoming. The stroke had paralyzed her right side. She had lost the ability to swallow, and was being fed intravenously. The disconnected world in which Lydia had found Elizabeth that fateful morning was still in attendance; the only difference now was that her mother’s eyes were open and she had somehow gained the strength to keep on living.

  So Lydia’s days became a series of vigils which rarely varied in their routine: three hours of afternoon duty followed by three hours in the evening. Every so often during her visits, a nurse would enter and substitute an infusion bottle of medicaments on the drip stand, check the rhythmic graph on the ecg monitor, take the patient’s pulse. The daughter would look with hope to the nurse after each ritual, willing her to indicate improvement of some kind, but there never was; there was only a smile from the medical staff and the assurance that the patient was “stable.”

  After a week, she went in search of the matron. Sister Milligan was a substantial lady in her fifties, whose manner was as clinical and starchy as the uniform she stood in. Her succinct analysis left Lydia in little doubt about the future.

  “Your mother is seventy-six, Miss Devine. A full recovery from such a severe stroke at her age is unlikely.” There was no give in Sister Milligan. Her businesslike smile said it all.

  “The most we can do is keep her comfortable. And pray.”

  “She’s stable, Daphne. That seems to be the best we can hope for.”

  Lydia stood in the hallway of the silent house, the telephone receiver in hand, trying to come to terms with the loneliness of this unthinkable situation.

  Her words reached her friend down the telephone line, and Daphne could hear the fear and resignation in her voice.

  “Oh, she’ll pull through,” Daphne said. “I know she will. Your mother’s as strong as an ox.”

  “No, it’s not going to be like that.” She could feel her stoicism crumble as her words wobbled out of control.

  It was the first time Daphne had heard her friend cry as an adult. “Look, I’ll come over and we’ll go out,” she said. “It’ll lift your mind. Give me ten minutes.”

  Before Lydia had time to protest, she had hung up.

  “Now I know you don’t drink,” Daphne said, holding up a bottle, “but I insist you have a glass of sherry. It’ll help calm you, I promise—medicine of the gods.”

  She smiled widely for her friend’s benefit, trying to keep the atmosphere light. “Now, why don’t you fetch us a couple of glasses?”

  They sat in the chintz sitting room, the room that was so much Elizabeth’s room. Her creative hands spoke from the embroidered peacock fire screen, the crocheted antimacassars, the lace doilies under the glass coffee table. Lydia’s eyes filled up when she looked on all those things that recalled a happier, fruitful time of keen-eyed attention and nimble-fingered mastery. An art that her mother had perfected over decades had been snatched away so cruelly in one night.

  Lydia had the sherry and listened to Daphne’s accounts of acquaintances of her mother’s who were around the same age, and had suffered similar strokes. Each had made a full recovery, and this news cheered her. The dire predictions of the
matron were forgotten for the present.

  “Oh, I meant to ask you,” Daphne said. “Any word back from Mr. McCloone?”

  “Oh dear! I’d totally forgotten about him.”

  “Well, naturally. That’s understandable. You unfortunately had more important things to think about.”

  Lydia got up. “His letter’s in the kitchen somewhere. I’ll get it.”

  She was already scanning it as she returned.

  “My heavens, it’s the day after tomorrow!” She handed the letter to Daphne. “What am I going to do?”

  “Well, go of course.”

  “But I can’t. It wouldn’t be right with my mother the way she is.”

  She sank back on the sofa, remembering how carefree she’d been when she met—or rather refused to meet—Mr. Frank Xavier McPrunty, and how so suddenly everything had changed as quickly and dramatically as a pantomime stage set.

  Daphne, seeming to read her thoughts, poured her friend another glass of sherry. Lydia protested.

  “Go on. It’s got no alcohol to speak of.” She turned her attention to Mr. McCloone’s letter.

  The Farmhouse

  Duntybutt

  Tailorstown

  Dear Miss Devine,

  I am happy to say that I am very happy to meet you at the Royal Neptune Hotel on Thursday the 14th August at half past three.

  I suppose I would need to tell you what I look like because it would be a terrible thing if we missed each other after all this time.

  I stand about five foot and seven inches high and I am of slim build and I suppose I look my age because I wouldn’t lie about a thing like that because the lie would show on the face I have on me, so what would be the point of it.

  I will be wearing a peat brown suit. If I arrive there before you I will sit down at a table and wait for you with a shandy in front of me, but if for some reason I am late I will carry a rolled up copy of the Mid Ulster Vindicator under my right arm as a sign like.

  I am looking forward very much to meeting you Miss Devine and will be counting the days till it happens, because I think we have a lot in common and will get on powerful well together.

  Yours most sincerely

  James Kevin Barry Michael McCloone.

  “Oh dear,” Daphne said, “you have to meet him. It would be terrible to let him down.” She reached for her sherry glass.

  “Daphne, how’s it going to look if I’m seen running round the county after a man and my mother the way she is?”

  “Now, Lydia, your mother is stable. The meeting will not take more than half an hour and you can visit the hospital afterwards. And believe me, no one could ever accuse you of running round the county after men; that’s just a bizarre way to look at things.” Daphne swallowed the last of her sherry and set the glass down with an air of finality.

  “But I—”

  “No, hear me out. The poor man says he’s been counting the days, so the least you can do is meet him and tell him about your mother and how things have changed. Tell him that you simply wanted someone to accompany you to a friend’s wedding and now you can’t go because of your mother’s illness.”

  “But—”

  “No ‘buts.’ You owe Mr. McCloone an explanation at least, which is more than you gave poor old Frank Xavier McPrunty.” Daphne pulled a face of mock censure which made Lydia smile in spite of herself.

  “Yes, I suppose you’re right, when you put it like that.”

  Daphne grinned. “Course I am. Now, get your coat. I’m taking you out for a nice meal.” She raised her hand. “And I won’t hear a word of objection.”

  “I can’t eat, Daphne.”

  “Now, now, of course you can eat, and if you really don’t wish to, you can watch me.”

  There seemed to be no getting out of that one.

  Chapter twenty-seven

  Eighty-Six lay in the cart, drifting in and out of consciousness, as it rumbled through the darkness. He could see the stars and smell the unpleasant reek of the straw, feel the raw, shooting pains in his body as the wheels bounced and shuddered over the gullied ground.

  He wished he could pass out again, because then the torment would leave him, and his mind would not keep pulling itself back to the awful source of the “crime” he had committed, and the penalty he had paid.

  He remembered the past hours as a patchwork of terrible fragments; the plate he’d been holding smashing on the floor of the Fairley kitchen, the woman lifting the poker from the brass frame, his feet splashing through the mud as he ran from the first blow. He could still hear her demented yells as he fled through the fields. Farmer Fairley was away; Arnold was in school. It was just him and the woman and the screaming gap between them as he made his escape.

  With the house well out of sight, he’d found a drain in a far field and clambered down into it, sinking heavily to the knee. There he’d stayed, exiled in the waterlogged land, where the trees and hedges argued fiercely in the lashing of the wind, and he shivered and wept and prayed that nightfall would not come; that they would not come. But when the vast unwelcome grayness of the winter sky turned black, they did come, as he sensed they would; the flashlights shining in his face, the savage hands reaching down to drag him from the drain.

  He shut his eyes tight against the memory as the cart horse plunged on through the darkness and the moon dashed on behind the clouds.

  They had dumped him face down in the yard while father, mother and son took turns with the punishment. The farmer used his belt, the mistress used the poker and Arnold used a stick. The son kept his foot on the boy’s head throughout, to stifle his screams. He had gagged on the gravel and mud and could still feel it in his nose and mouth. It was all he could remember, but it was enough; that was until he felt the burning pain below his right eye and reached up to feel the crusted, gaping wound on his cheek.

  He saw again the leering face of Arnold. When his parents had left the victim to lick his wounds, the son had turned him over, taken a shard of the shattered plate and cut a deep, steady path down his cheek, laughing maniacally all the while.

  Abruptly, the horse slowed. Eighty-Six opened his eyes. He could see the shapes of buildings open up on either side, sharpened into focus by the moonlight. He tried to sit up, but the pain of his injuries drove him back down again. Then he saw the rusted gates and knew with relief that he was back “home” again. The horse slowed more and the cart juddered to a halt. He shut his eyes as he was lifted from it and placed on the ground. He lay there, his heart beating fast, his injuries throbbing anew. He gritted his teeth and feigned sleep. He was finished with the awful Fairleys. He was free.

  But hands were lifting him and a familiar voice sliced through the darkness.

  “Take him to my room.”

  At that moment, his newfound hopes began to shake and tumble in on him as his whole world darkly swayed.

  The voice belonged to Master Keaney.

  Outside, snowflakes swerved at the high windows of the laundry room, dying at once on the hot glass. Inside, boiling water spluttered and gushed from the spigots. The water vapor was so dense that each of the thirty or so boys could see no farther than his work partner. Eighty-Six and Eighty-Four stood side by side, pounding and sloshing at the entwined sheets and clothes they had immersed in the vast tub. Down there swirled the habits, soutanes and vestments of the religious; all in congressional twists, in intimacies so frowned upon by the people whose garments they were—the coiling blacks, the snaking greens, the golds. Every stain and mark retreating under the fiercely scrubbing hands of the orphans of sin.

  To the left of the tub stood a creel, piled high with soiled linen, and to the right a wooden crate to receive the laundered garments. Each pair of boys worked as a unit. They were so used to the task and so afraid of Sister Mary’s stick across their backs that they did not dare slip out of rhythm, not even for one second.

  The nun proceeded up and down each row, holding the ashplant weapon behind her back, by turns emerging and disa
ppearing into the mist like a black phantom. She was a lean woman with a grim, angular face, who wore her habit pulled tight around her and secured with the knotted cord of her order.

  She rarely spoke; the stick was her voice. If she observed something she disapproved of, she would point to it first and the boys would have to guess what was wrong.

  Bitter experience had taught them to decipher the code of the cane. If she indicated the soiled linen in the creel, it meant they were not working fast enough. If she pointed to the contents of the tub, it meant they were not scrubbing hard enough. A frightful whack on the finished washing in the crate meant that they hadn’t rinsed the laundry properly and the process would have to be repeated.

  Eighty-Six could not risk another beating. He was three days back in the orphanage and his wounds were beginning to heal. Bending over the wash tub was punishment enough. At night in his bed he would lie on his stomach and cry into the night, hoping and praying that his mother would come soon and rescue him. He would picture her in a floral dress, her long hair streaming in the breeze as she ran toward him over a daisy-strewn field.

  The longer he waited for her, the more he colored in and added to the picture, filling in the crayon-red mouth, the sweeping brows above her smiling, blue eyes. He could smell her soap-rich scent as she lifted him up, and feel the crisp crackle of the dress as she embraced him. He had never been hugged by anyone, but sometimes from the rattling bus window he had seen women carry children in their arms, and thought that it must be a fine thing to experience: hands that caressed and did not punish.