The Best of Frank O'Connor

by Frank O'Connor

  Then I talked myself, for a change, and she listened attentively while I told her about myself, my voyages, my books, and the time of the trains from all the city stations. As she seemed so interested I told her I would meet her after school and tell her some more.

  I was as good as my word. When I had eaten my lunch, instead of going on further voyages I went back to the Girls’ School and waited for her to come out. She seemed pleased to see me because she took my hand and brought me home with her. She lived up Gardiner’s Hill, a steep, demure suburban road with trees that overhung the walls at either side. She lived in a small house on top of the hill and was one of a family of three girls. Her little brother, John Joe, had been killed the previous year by a car. ‘Look at what I brought home with me!’ she said when we went into the kitchen, and her mother, a tall, thin woman, made a great fuss of me and wanted me to have my dinner with Una. That was the girl’s name. I didn’t take anything but while she ate I sat by the range and told her mother about myself. She seemed to like it as much as Una, and when dinner was over Una took me out in the fields behind the house for a walk.

  When I went home at teatime, Mother was delighted.

  ‘Ah,’ she said, ‘I knew you wouldn’t be long making nice friends at school. It’s about time for you, the dear knows.’

  I felt much the same about it, and every fine day at three I waited for Una outside the school. When it rained and Mother would not let me out I was miserable.

  One day while I was waiting for her there were two senior girls outside the gate.

  ‘Your girl isn’t out yet, Larry,’ said one with a giggle.

  ‘And do you mean to tell me Larry has a girl?’ the other asked with a shocked air.

  ‘Oh, yes,’ said the first. ‘Una Dwyer is Larry’s girl. He goes with Una, don’t you, Larry?’

  I replied politely that I did, but in fact I was seriously alarmed. I had not realized that Una would be considered my girl. It had never happened to me before, and I had not understood that my waiting for her would be regarded in such a grave light. Now, I think the girls were probably right anyhow, for that is always the way it has been with me. A woman has only to shut up and let me talk long enough for me to fall head and ears in love with her. But then I did not recognize the symptoms. All I knew was that going with somebody meant you intended to marry them. I had always planned on marrying Mother; now it seemed as if I was expected to marry someone else, and I wasn’t sure if I should like it or if, like football, it would prove to be one of those games that two people could not play without pushing.

  A couple of weeks later I went to a party at Una’s house. By this time it was almost as much mine as theirs. All the girls liked me and Mrs Dwyer talked to me by the hour. I saw nothing unusual about this except a proper appreciation of geniuses. Una had warned me that I should be expected to sing, so I was ready for the occasion. I sang the Gregorian Credo, and some of the little girls laughed but Mrs Dwyer only looked at me fondly.

  ‘I suppose you’ll be a priest when you grow up, Larry?’ she asked.

  ‘No, Mrs Dwyer,’ I replied firmly. ‘As a matter of fact, I intend to be a composer. Priests can’t marry, you see, and I want to get married.’

  That seemed to surprise her quite a bit. I was quite prepared to continue discussing my plans for the future, but all the children talked together. I was used to planning discussions so that they went on for a long time, but I found that whenever I began one in the Dwyers’, it was immediately interrupted so that I found it hard to concentrate. Besides, all the children shouted, and Mrs Dwyer, for all her gentleness, shouted with them and at them. At first, I was somewhat alarmed, but I soon saw that they meant no particular harm, and when the party ended I was jumping up and down on the sofa, shrieking louder than anyone, while Una, in hysterics of giggling, encouraged me. She seemed to think I was the funniest thing ever.

  It was a moonlit November night, and lights were burning in the little cottages along the road when Una brought me home. On the road outside she stopped uncertainly and said: ‘This is where little John Joe was killed.’

  There was nothing remarkable about the spot, and I saw no chance of acquiring any useful information.

  ‘Was it a Ford or a Morris?’ I asked, more out of politeness than anything else.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she replied with smouldering anger. ‘It was Donegan’s old car. They can never look where they’re going, the old shows!’

  ‘Our Lord probably wanted him,’ I said perfunctorily.

  ‘I dare say He did,’ Una replied, though she showed no particular conviction. ‘That old fool Donegan – I could kill him whenever I think of it.’

  ‘You should get your mother to make you another,’ I suggested helpfully.

  ‘Make me a what?’ Una exclaimed in consternation.

  ‘Make you another brother,’ I repeated earnestly. ‘It’s quite easy, really. She has an engine in her tummy, and all your daddy has to do is to start it with his starting-handle.’

  ‘Cripes!’ Una said and clapped her hand over her mouth in an explosion of giggles. ‘Imagine me telling her that!’

  ‘But it’s true, Una,’ I said obstinately. ‘It only takes nine months. She could make you another little brother by next summer.’

  ‘Oh, Jay!’ exclaimed Una in another fit of giggles. ‘Who told you all that?’

  ‘Mummy did. Didn’t your mother tell you?’

  ‘Oh, she says you buy them from Nurse Daly,’ said Una and began to giggle again.

  ‘I wouldn’t really believe that,’ I said with as much dignity as I could muster.

  But the truth was I felt I had made a fool of myself again. I realized now that I had never been convinced by Mother’s explanation. It was too simple. If there was anything that woman could get wrong she did so without fail. And it upset me, because for the first time I found myself wanting to make a really good impression. The Dwyers had managed to convince me that, whatever else I wanted to be, I did not want to be a priest. I didn’t even want to be an explorer, a career which would take me away for long periods from my wife and family. I was prepared to be a composer and nothing but a composer.

  That night in bed I sounded Mother on the subject of marriage. I tried to be tactful because it had always been agreed between us that I should marry her and I did not wish her to see that my feelings had changed.

  ‘Mummy,’ I asked, ‘if a gentleman asks a lady to marry him, what does he say?’

  ‘Oh,’ she replied shortly, ‘some of them say a lot. They say more than they mean.’

  She was so irritable that I guessed she had divined my secret and I felt really sorry for her.

  ‘If a gentleman said “Excuse me, will you marry me?” would that be all right?’ I persisted.

  ‘Ah, well, he’d have to tell her first that he was fond of her,’ said Mother, who, no matter what she felt, could never bring herself to deceive me on any major issue.

  But about the other matter I saw that it was hopeless to ask her any more. For days I made the most pertinacious inquiries at school and received some startling information. One boy had actually come floating down on a snowflake, wearing a bright blue dress, but, to his chagrin and mine, the dress had been given away to a poor child in the North Main Street. I grieved long and deeply over this wanton destruction of evidence. The balance of opinion favoured Mrs Dwyer’s solution, but of the theory of engines and starting-handles no one in the school had ever heard. That theory might have been all right when Mother was a girl but it was now definitely out of fashion.

  And because of it I had been exposed to ridicule before the family whose good opinion I valued most! It was hard enough to keep up my dignity with a girl who was doing algebra while I hadn’t got beyond long division without falling into childish errors that made her laugh. That is another thing I still cannot stand, being made fun of by women. Once they begin they never stop. Once when we were going up Gardiner’s Hill together after school she stopped to loo
k at a baby in a pram. The baby grinned at her and she gave him her finger to suck. He waved his fists and sucked like mad and she went off into giggles again.

  ‘I suppose that was another engine?’ she said.

  Four times at least she mentioned my silliness, twice in front of other girls, and each time, though I pretended to ignore it, I was pierced to the heart. It made me determined not to be exposed again. Once Mother asked Una and her younger sister, Joan, to tea and all the time I was in an agony of self-consciousness, dreading what she would say next. I felt that a woman who had said such things about babies was capable of anything. Then the talk turned on the death of little John Joe, and it all flowed back into my mind on a wave of mortification. I made two efforts to change the conversation, but Mother returned to it. She was full of pity for the Dwyers, full of sympathy for the little boy, and had almost reduced herself to tears. Finally, I got up and ordered Una and Joan to play with me. Then Mother got angry.

  ‘For goodness’ sake, Larry, let the children finish their tea!’ she snapped.

  ‘It’s all right, Mrs Delaney,’ Una said good-naturedly. ‘I’ll go with him.’

  ‘Nonsense, Una!’ Mother said sharply. ‘Finish your tea and go on with what you were saying. It’s a wonder to me your poor mother didn’t go out of her mind. How can they let people like that drive cars?’

  At this I set up a loud wail. At any moment now, I felt, she was going to get on to babies and advise Una about what her mother ought to do.

  ‘Will you behave yourself, Larry!’ Mother said in a quivering voice. ‘Or what’s come over you in the past few weeks? You used to have such nice manners, and now look at you! A little corner boy! I’m ashamed of you!’

  How could she know what had come over me? How could she realize that I was imagining the family circle in the Dwyers’ house and Una, between fits of laughter, describing my old-fashioned mother who still talked about babies coming out of people’s stomachs? It must have been real love, for I have never known true love in which I wasn’t ashamed of Mother.

  And she knew it and was hurt. I still enjoyed going home with Una in the afternoons and, while she ate her dinner, I sat at the piano and pretended to play my own compositions, but whenever she called at our house for me I grabbed her by the hand and tried to drag her away so that she and Mother shouldn’t start talking.

  ‘Ah, I’m disgusted with you,’ Mother said one day. ‘One would think you were ashamed of me in front of that little girl. I’ll engage she doesn’t treat her mother like that.’

  Then one day I was waiting for Una at the school gate as usual. Another boy was waiting there as well – one of the seniors. When he heard the screams of the school breaking up he strolled away and stationed himself at the foot of the hill by the crossroads. Then Una herself came rushing out in her wide-brimmed felt hat, swinging her satchel, and approached me with a conspiratorial air.

  ‘Oh, Larry, guess what’s happened!’ she whispered. ‘I can’t bring you home with me today. I’ll come down and see you during the week, though. Will that do?”

  ‘Yes, thank you,’ I said in a dead cold voice. Even at the most tragic moment of my life I could be nothing but polite. I watched her scamper down the hill to where the big boy was waiting. He looked over his shoulder with a grin, and then the two of them went off together.

  Instead of following them, I went back up the hill alone and stood leaning over the quarry wall, looking at the roadway and the valley of the city beneath me. I knew this was the end. I was too young to marry Una. I didn’t know where babies came from and I didn’t understand algebra. The fellow she had gone home with probably knew everything about both. I was full of gloom and revengeful thoughts. I, who had considered it sinful and dangerous to fight, was now regretting that I hadn’t gone after him to batter his teeth in and jump on his face. It wouldn’t even have mattered to me that I was too young and weak and that he would have done all the battering. I saw that love was a game that two people couldn’t play at without pushing, just like football.

  I went home and without saying a word took out the work I had been neglecting so long. That, too, seemed to have lost its appeal. Moodily, I ruled five lines and began to trace the difficult sign of the treble clef.

  ‘Didn’t you see Una, Larry?’ Mother asked in surprise, looking up from her sewing.

  ‘No, Mummy,’ I said, too full for speech.

  ‘Wisha, ’twasn’t a falling-out ye had?’ she asked in dismay, coming towards me. I put my head on my hands and sobbed. ‘Wisha, nevermind, childeen!’ she murmured, running her hand through my hair. ‘She was a bit old for you. You reminded her of her little brother that was killed, of course – that was why. You’ll soon make new friends, take my word for it.’

  But I did not believe her. That evening there was no comfort for me. My great work meant nothing to me and I knew it was all I would ever have. For all the difference it made, I might as well become a priest. I felt it was a poor, sad, lonesome thing being nothing but a genius.

  FIRST CONFESSION

  ALL THE trouble began when my grandfather died and my grandmother – my father’s mother – came to live with us. Relations in the one house are a strain at the best of times, but, to make matters worse, my grandmother was a real old country woman and quite unsuited to the life in town. She had a fat, wrinkled old face, and, to Mother’s great indignation, went round the house in bare feet – the boots had her crippled, she said. For dinner she had a jug of porter and a pot of potatoes with – sometimes – a bit of salt fish, and she poured out the potatoes on the table and ate them slowly, with great relish, using her fingers by way of a fork.

  Now, girls are supposed to be fastidious, but I was the one who suffered most from this. Nora, my sister, just sucked up to the old woman for the penny she got every Friday out of the old-age pension, a thing I could not do. I was too honest, that was my trouble; and when I was playing with Bill Connell, the sergeant-major’s son, and saw my grandmother steering up the path with the jug of porter sticking out from beneath her shawl I was mortified. I made excuses not to let him come into the house, because I could never be sure what she would be up to when we went in.

  When Mother was at work and my grandmother made the dinner I wouldn’t touch it. Nora once tried to make me, but I hid under the table from her and took the bread-knife with me for protection. Nora let on to be very indignant (she wasn’t, of course, but she knew Mother saw through her, so she sided with Gran) and came after me. I lashed out at her with the bread-knife, and after that she left me alone. I stayed there till Mother came in from work and made my dinner, but when Father came in later Nora said in a shocked voice: ‘Oh, Dadda, do you know what Jackie did at dinnertime?’ Then, of course, it all came out; Father gave me a flaking; Mother interfered, and for days after that he didn’t speak to me and Mother barely spoke to Nora. And all because of that old woman! God knows, I was heart-scalded.

  Then, to crown my misfortunes, I had to make my first Confession and Communion. It was an old woman called Ryan who prepared us for these. She was about the one age with Gran; she was well-to-do, lived in a big house on Montenotte, wore a black cloak and bonnet, and came every day to school at three o’clock when we should have been going home, and talked to us of Hell. She may have mentioned the other place as well, but that could only have been by accident, for Hell had the first place in her heart.

  She lit a candle, took out a new half-crown, and offered it to the first boy who would hold one finger – only one finger! – in the flame for five minutes by the school clock. Being always very ambitious I was tempted to volunteer, but I thought it might look greedy. Then she asked were we afraid of holding one finger –only one finger! – in a little candle flame for five minutes and not afraid of burning all over in roasting hot furnaces for all eternity. ‘All eternity! Just think of that! A whole lifetime goes by and it’s nothing, not even a drop in the ocean of your sufferings.’ The woman was really interesting about Hell, but my atten
tion was all fixed on the half-crown. At the end of the lesson she put it back in her purse. It was a great disappointment; a religious woman like that, you wouldn’t think she’d bother about a thing like a half-crown.

  Another day she said she knew a priest who woke one night to find a fellow he didn’t recognize leaning over the end of his bed. The priest was a bit frightened – naturally enough – but he asked the fellow what he wanted, and the fellow said in a deep, husky voice that he wanted to go to Confession. The priest said it was an awkward time and wouldn’t it do in the morning, but the fellow said that last time he went to Confession, there was one sin he kept back, being ashamed to mention it, and now it was always on his mind. Then the priest knew it was a bad case, because the fellow was after making a bad confession and committing a mortal sin. He got up to dress, and just then the cock crew in the yard outside, and – lo and behold! – when the priest looked round there was no sign of the fellow, only a smell of burning timber, and when the priest looked at his bed didn’t he see the print of two hands burned in it? That was because the fellow had made a bad confession. This story made a shocking impression on me.

  But the worst of all was when she showed us how to examine our conscience. Did we take the name of the Lord, our God, in vain? Did we honour our father and our mother? (I asked her did this include grandmothers and she said it did.) Did we love our neighbour as ourselves? Did we covet our neighbour’s goods? (I thought of the way I felt about the penny that Nora got every Friday.) I decided that, between one thing and another, I must have broken the whole ten commandments, all on account of that old woman, and so far as I could see, so long as she remained in the house I had no hope of ever doing anything else.

  I was scared to death of Confession. The day the whole class went I let on to have a toothache, hoping my absence wouldn’t be noticed; but at three o’clock, just as I was feeling safe, along comes a chap with a message from Mrs Ryan that I was to go to Confession myself on Saturday and be at the chapel for Communion with the rest. To make it worse, Mother couldn’t come with me and sent Nora instead.