The Best of Frank O'Connor

by Frank O'Connor

  Father stopped dead and looked at me over his shoulder.

  ‘What’s that you said?’ he asked sternly.

  ‘I was only talking to myself,’ I replied, trying to conceal my panic. ‘It’s private.’

  He turned and went in without a word. Mind you, I intended it as a solemn warning, but its effect was quite different. Father started being quite nice to me. I could understand that, of course. Mother was quite sickening about Sonny. Even at mealtimes she’d get up and gawk at him in the cradle with an idiotic smile, and tell Father to do the same. He was always polite about it, but he looked so puzzled you could see he didn’t know what she was talking about. He complained of the way Sonny cried at night, but she only got cross and said that Sonny never cried except when there was something up with him – which was a flaming lie, because Sonny never had anything up with him, and only cried for attention. It was really painful to see how simple-minded she was. Father wasn’t attractive, but he had a fine intelligence. He saw through Sonny, and now he knew that I saw through him as well.

  One night I woke with a start. There was someone beside me in the bed. For one wild moment I felt sure it must be Mother, having come to her senses and left Father for good, but then I heard Sonny in convulsions in the next room, and Mother saying: ‘There! There! There!’ and I knew it wasn’t she. It was Father. He was lying beside me, wide awake, breathing hard and apparently as mad as hell.

  After a while it came to me what he was mad about. It was his turn now. After turning me out of the big bed, he had been turned out himself. Mother had no consideration now for anyone but that poisonous pup, Sonny. I couldn’t help feeling sorry for Father. I had been through it all myself, and even at that age I was magnanimous. I began to stroke him down and say: ‘There! There!’ He wasn’t exactly responsive.

  ‘Aren’t you asleep either?’ he snarled.

  ‘Ah, come on and put your arm around us, can’t you?’ I said, and he did, in a sort of way. Gingerly, I suppose, is how you’d describe it. He was very bony but better than nothing.

  At Christmas he went out of his way to buy me a really nice model railway.

  From AN ONLY CHILD – MOTHER

  WHENEVER I read about juvenile delinquents, I find myself thinking of Mother, because she was whatever the opposite of a juvenile delinquent is, and this was not due to her upbringing in a Catholic orphanage, since whatever it was in her that was the opposite of a juvenile delinquent was too strong to have been due to the effect of any environment, and, indeed, resisted a number of environments to which no reasonable person would subject a child; the gutter where life had thrown her was deep and dirty. One way of describing this quality is to call it gaiety; another is to say that she was a woman who passionately believed in the world of appearances. If something appeared to be so, or if she had been told it was so, then she believed it to be so. This, as every psychologist knows, leads to disillusionments, and when a juvenile delinquent is disillusioned we describe it as a traumatic experience. So far as I could see, up to her death practically all Mother’s experiences were traumatic, including, I am afraid, her experience with me. And some small portion of her simple-mindedess she did pass on to me.

  She was small and dainty, with long dark hair that she was very proud of. She had only two faults that I ever knew of – she was vain and she was obstinate – and the fact that these qualities were masked by humility and gentleness prevented my recognizing them till I was a grown man. Father, who was as grey as a badger at thirty-five, and in danger of growing bald, in spite of his clippers, was very jealous of her beautiful dark hair, and whenever he wanted to make her mad he would affect to discover white strands in it. Being an orphan, she had no notion of her own age, and had never known a birthday, but Father had discussed it with my Uncle Tim and satisfied himself that she was several years older than himself. When he believed she was seventy, he got really angry because he was sure she was going to let her vanity deprive her of a perfectly good pension. Mother shrugged this off as another example of his jealousy. To tell the truth, that was what I thought myself. She looked, at the time, like a well-preserved fifty-five. However, to put his mind at rest, I had the date of her birth looked up in the Customs House in Dublin, and discovered that she was only a few months short of seventy. Father was triumphant, but I felt guilty because I feared that the knowledge of her real age would make her become old. I needn’t have worried. I think she probably decided finally that though the Registrar of Births and Deaths was a well-intentioned man, he was not particularly bright.

  She had a lordly way with any sort of record she could get her hands on that conflicted with her own view of herself – she merely tore it up. Once, the poet George Russell did a charming pencil drawing of her, which I had framed. The next time I came home on holiday, I found the frame filled with snapshots of me, and my heart sank, because I knew what must have happened. ‘What did you do with that drawing?’ I asked, hoping she might at least have preserved it, and she replied firmly: ‘Now, I’m just as fond of A.E. as you are, but I could not have that picture round the house. He made me look like a poisoner.’ When she was eighty-five, and we were leaving to live in England, I discovered that she had done the same thing with the photograph in her passport. She was entirely unaffected by my anger. ‘The sergeant of the police at Saint Luke’s said it,’ she proclaimed firmly. ‘The man who took that picture should be tried for his life.’ I think she was glad to have official authority for her personal view that I had been very remiss in not bringing proceedings against the photographer. When my wife and I separated, the only indication I had of Mother’s feelings was when I looked at my photograph album one day and saw that every single photograph of my wife had been destroyed. Where she had been photographed with me or the children her picture had been cut away. It was not all malice, any more than the destruction of her own pictures was all vanity. I am certain it went back to some childish technique of endurance by obliterating impressions she had found too terrible to entertain, as though, believing as she did in the world of appearances, she found it necessary to alter the world of appearances to make it seem right, but in time it came to affect almost everything she did. It even worked in reverse, for one Christmas an old friend, Stan Stewart, sent her a book, but because it came straight from his bookseller, it did not contain an inscription, as books that were sent to me did. After her death, I found the book with a charming inscription from Stan, written in by herself. Her affection for him made her give herself away, for she wrote ‘From dear Stan’.

  THE GENIUS

  I

  SOME KIDS are sissies by nature but I was a sissy by conviction. Mother had told me about geniuses; I wanted to be one, and I could see for myself that fighting, as well as being sinful, was dangerous. The kids round the Barrack where I lived were always fighting. Mother said they were savages, that I needed proper friends, and that once I was old enough to go to school I would meet them.

  My way, when someone wanted to fight and I could not get away, was to climb on the nearest wall and argue like hell in a shrill voice about Our Blessed Lord and good manners. This was a way of attracting attention, and it usually worked because the enemy, having stared incredulously at me for several minutes, wondering if he would have time to hammer my head on the pavement before someone came out to him, yelled something like ‘blooming sissy’ and went away in disgust. I didn’t like being called a sissy but I preferred it to fighting. I felt very like one of those poor mongrels who slunk through our neighbourhood and took to their heels when anyone came near them, and I always tried to make friends with them.

  I toyed with games, and enjoyed kicking a ball gently before me along the pavement till I discovered that any boy who joined me grew violent and started to shoulder me out of the way. I preferred little girls because they didn’t fight so much, but otherwise I found them insipid and lacking in any solid basis of information. The only women I cared for were grown-ups, and my most intimate friend was an old washerwo
man called Miss Cooney who had been in the lunatic asylum and was very religious. It was she who had told me all about dogs. She would run a mile after anyone she saw hurting an animal and even went to the police about them, but the police knew she was mad and paid no attention.

  She was a sad-looking woman with grey hair, high cheekbones, and toothless gums. While she ironed, I would sit for hours in the steaming, damp kitchen, turning over the pages of her religious books. She was fond of me, too, and told me she was sure I would be a priest. I agreed that I might be a Bishop, but she didn’t seem to think so highly of Bishops. I told her there were so many other things I might be that I couldn’t make up my mind but she only smiled at this. Miss Cooney thought there was only one thing a genius could be and that was a priest.

  On the whole, I thought an explorer was what I would be. Our house was in a square between two roads, one terraced above the other, and I could leave home, follow the upper road for a mile past the Barrack, turn left on any of the intervening roads and lanes, and return almost without leaving the pavement. It was astonishing what valuable information you could pick up on a trip like that. When I came home I wrote down my adventures in a book called The Voyages of Johnson Martin, with Many Maps and Illustrations, Irishtown University Press, 3s.6d. nett. I was also compiling The Irishtown University Song Book for Use in Schools and Institutions, by Johnson Martin, which had the words and music of my favourite songs. I could not read music yet but I copied it from anything that came handy, preferring staff to solfa because it looked better on the page. But I still wasn’t sure what I would be. All I knew was that I intended to be famous and have a statue put up to me near that of Father Matthew in Patrick Street. Father Matthew was called the Apostle of Temperance, but I didn’t think much of temperance. So far our town hadn’t a proper genius and I intended to supply the deficiency.

  But my work continued to bring home to me the great gaps in my knowledge. Mother understood my difficulty and worried herself endlessly finding answers to my questions, but neither she nor Miss Cooney had a great store of the sort of information I needed, and Father was more a hindrance than a help. He was talkative enough about subjects that interested himself but they did not greatly interest me. ‘Ballybeg,’ he would say brightly. ‘Market Town. Population 648. Nearest station, Rathkeale.’ He was also forthcoming enough about other things, but later Mother would take me aside and explain that he was only joking again. This made me mad because I never knew when he was joking and when he wasn’t.

  I can see now, of course, that he didn’t really like me. It was not the poor man’s fault. He had never expected to be the father of a genius and it filled him with forebodings. He looked round him at all his contemporaries who had normal, bloodthirsty, illiterate children, and shuddered at the thought that I would never be good for anything but being a genius. To give him his due, it wasn’t himself he worried about, but there had never been anything like it in the family before and he dreaded the shame of it. He would come in from the front door with his cap over his eyes and his hands in his trousers pockets and stare moodily at me while I sat at the kitchen table, surrounded by papers, producing fresh maps and illustrations for my book of voyages or copying the music of ‘The Minstrel Boy’.

  ‘Why can’t you go out and play with the Horgans?’ he would ask wheedlingly, trying to make it sound attractive.

  ‘I don’t like the Horgans, Daddy,’ I would reply politely.

  ‘But what’s wrong with them?’ he would ask testily. ‘They’re fine, manly young fellows.’

  ‘They’re always fighting, Daddy.’

  ‘And what harm is fighting? Can’t you fight them back?’

  ‘I don’t like fighting, Daddy, thank you,’ I would say, still with perfect politeness.

  ‘The dear knows, the child is right,’ Mother would say, coming to my defence. ‘I don’t know what sort those children are.’

  ‘Ah, you have him as bad as yourself,’ Father would snort and stalk to the front door again, to scald his heart with thoughts of the nice natural son he might have had if only he hadn’t married the wrong woman. Granny had always said Mother was the wrong woman for him and now she was being proved right.

  She was being proved so right that the poor man couldn’t keep his eyes off me, waiting for the insanity to break out. One of the things he didn’t like was my Opera House. The Opera House was a cardboard box I had mounted on two chairs in the dark hallway. It had a proscenium cut in it, and I had painted some backdrops of mountain and sea with wings that represented trees and rocks. The characters were pictures cut out, mounted and coloured and moved on bits of stick. It was lit with candles for which I had made coloured screens, greased so that they were transparent, and I made up operas from story-books and bits of songs. I was singing a passionate duet for two of the characters while twiddling the screens to produce the effect of moonlight when one of the screens caught fire and everything went up in a mass of flames. I screamed and Father came to stamp out the blaze, and he cursed me till even Mother lost her temper with him and told him he was worse than six children, after which he wouldn’t speak to her for a week.

  Another time I was so impressed with a lame teacher I knew that I decided to have a lame leg myself, and there was hell in the home for days because Mother had no difficulty at all in seeing that my foot was already out of shape while Father only looked at it and sniffed contemptuously. I was furious with him, and Mother decided he wasn’t much better than a monster. They quarrelled for days over that until it became quite an embarrassment to me because, though I was bored stiff with limping, I felt I should be letting her down by getting better. When I went down the Square, lurching from side to side, Father stood at the gate, looking after me with a malicious knowing smile, and when I had discarded my limp, the way he mocked Mother was positively disgusting.

  II

  As I say, they squabbled endlessly about what I should be told. Father was for telling me nothing.

  ‘But, Mick,’ Mother would say earnestly, ‘the child must learn.’

  ‘He’ll learn soon enough when he goes to school,’ he snarled. ‘Why do you be always at him, putting ideas into his head? Isn’t he bad enough? I’d sooner the boy would grow up a bit natural.’

  But either Mother didn’t like children to be natural or she thought I was natural enough as I was. Women, of course, don’t object to geniuses half as much as men do. I suppose they find them a relief.

  Now, one of the things I wanted badly to know was where babies came from but this was something that no one seemed to be able to explain to me. When I asked Mother she got upset and talked about birds and flowers, and I decided that if she had ever known she must have forgotten it and was ashamed to say so. Miss Cooney when I asked her only smiled wistfully and said: ‘You’ll know all about it soon enough, child.’

  ‘But, Miss Cooney,’ I said with great dignity, ‘I have to know now. It’s for my work, you see.’

  ‘Keep your innocence while you can, child,’ she said in the same tone. ‘Soon enough the world will rob you of it, and once ’tis gone ’tis gone forever.’

  But whatever the world wanted to rob me of, it was welcome to it from my point of view, if only I could get a few facts to work on. I appealed to Father and he told me that babies were dropped out of aeroplanes and if you caught one you could keep it. ‘By parachute?’ I asked, but he only looked pained and said: ‘Oh, no, you don’t want to begin by spoiling them.’ Afterwards, Mother took me aside again and explained that he was only joking. I went quite dotty with rage and told her that one of these days he would go too far with his jokes.

  All the same, it was a great worry to Mother. It wasn’t every mother who had a genius for a son, and she dreaded that she might be wronging me. She suggested timidly to Father that he should tell me something about it, and he danced with rage. I heard them because I was supposed to be playing with the Opera House upstairs at the time. He said she was going out of her mind, and that she was driving
me out of my mind as well. She was very upset because she had considerable respect for his judgement.

  At the same time when it was a matter of duty she could be very, very obstinate. It was a heavy responsibility, and she disliked it intensely – a deeply pious woman who never mentioned the subject at all to anybody if she could avoid it – but it had to be done. She took an awful long time over it – it was a summer day, and we were sitting on the bank of a stream in the Glen – but at last I managed to detach the fact that mummies had an engine in their tummies and daddies had a starting-handle that made it work, and once it started it went on until it made a baby. That certainly explained an awful lot I had not understood up to this – for instance, why fathers were necessary and why Mother had buffers on her chest while Father had none. It made her almost as interesting as a locomotive, and for days I went round deploring my own rotten luck that I wasn’t a girl and couldn’t have an engine and buffers instead of a measly old starting-handle like Father.

  Soon afterwards I went to school and disliked it intensely. I was too small to be moved up to the big boys, and the other ‘infants’ were still at the stage of spelling ‘cat’ and ‘dog’. I tried to tell the old teacher about my work, but she only smiled and said: ‘Hush, Larry!’ I hated being told to hush. Father was always saying it to me.

  One day I was standing at the playground gate, feeling very lonely and dissatisfied, when a tall girl from the Senior Girls’ School spoke to me. She had a plump, dark face and black pigtails.

  ‘What’s your name, little boy?’ she asked.

  I told her.

  ‘Is this your first time at school?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And do you like it?’

  ‘No, I hate it,’ I replied gravely. ‘The children can’t spell and the old woman talks too much.’