The Best of Frank O'Connor

by Frank O'Connor

  ‘The very girl!’ Father would cry in astonishment. ‘How did I forget her name? A beautiful girl! ’Pon my word, a most remarkable girl! And still is, I hear.’

  ‘She should be,’ Mother would say in disgust. ‘With six of them!’

  ‘Oh, now, she’d be the one that could look after them! A fine head that girl had.’

  ‘She had. I suppose she ties them to a lamp-post while she goes in to drink and gossip.’

  That was one of the peculiar things about history. Father and Mother both loved to talk about it but in different ways. She would only talk about it when we were together somewhere, in the Park or down the Glen, and even then it was very hard to make her stick to the facts, because her whole face would light up and she would begin to talk about donkey-carriages or concerts in the kitchen, or oil-lamps, and though nowadays I would probably value it for atmosphere, in those days it sometimes drove me mad with impatience. Father, on the other hand, never minded talking about it in front of her, and it made her angry – particularly when he mentioned May Cadogan. He knew this perfectly well and he would wink at me and make me laugh outright, though I had no idea of why I laughed, and, anyway, my sympathy was all with her.

  ‘But, Daddy,’ I would say, presuming on his high spirits, ‘if you liked Miss Cadogan so much why didn’t you marry her?’

  At this, to my great delight, he would let on to be filled with doubt and distress. He would put his hands in his trouser pockets and stride to the door leading into the hallway.

  ‘That was a delicate matter,’ he would say, without looking at me. ‘You see, I had your poor mother to think of.’

  ‘I was a great trouble to you,’ Mother would say, in a blaze.

  ‘Poor May said it to me herself,’ he would go on as though he had not heard her, ‘and the tears pouring down her cheeks. “Mick,” she said, “that girl with the brown hair will bring me to an untimely grave.” ’

  ‘She could talk of hair!’ Mother would hiss. ‘With her carroty mop!’

  ‘Never did I suffer the way I suffered then, between the two of them,’ Father would say with deep emotion as he returned to his chair by the window.

  ‘Oh, ’tis a pity about ye!’ Mother would cry in an exasperated tone and suddenly get up and go into the front room with her book to escape his teasing. Every word that man said she took literally. Father would give a great guffaw of delight, his hands on his knees and his eyes on the ceiling, and wink at me again. I would laugh with him, of course, and then grow wretched because I hated Mother’s sitting alone in the front room. I would go in and find her in her wicker chair by the window in the dusk, the book open on her knee, looking out at the Square. She would always have regained her composure when she spoke to me, but I would have an uncanny feeling of unrest in her and stroke her and talk to her soothingly as if we had changed places and I were the adult and she the child.

  But if I was excited by what history meant to them, I was even more excited by what it meant to me. My potentialities were double theirs. Through Mother I might have been a French boy called Laurence Armady or a rich boy from Sunday’s Well called Laurence Riordan. Through Father I might, while still remaining a Delaney, have been one of the six children of the mysterious and beautiful Miss Cadogan. I was fascinated by the problem of who I would have been if I hadn’t been me, and, even more, by the problem of whether or not I would have known that there was anything wrong with the arrangement. Naturally, I tended to regard Laurence Delaney as the person I was intended to be, and so I could not help wondering whether as Laurence Riordan I would not have been aware of Laurence Delaney as a real gap in my make-up.

  I remember that one afternoon after school I walked by myself all the way up to Sunday’s Well, which I now regarded as something like a second house. I stood for a while at the garden gate of the house where Mother had been working when she was proposed to by Mr Riordan, and then went and studied the shop itself. It had clearly seen better days, and the cartons and advertisements in the window were dusty and sagging. It wasn’t like one of the big stores in Patrick Street, but at the same time, in size and fittings, it was well above the level of a village shop. I regretted that Mr Riordan was dead because I would have liked to see him for myself instead of relying on Mother’s impressions, which seemed to me to be biased. Since he had, more or less, died of grief on Mother’s account, I conceived of him as a really nice man; lent him the countenance and manner of an old gentleman who always spoke to me when he met me on the road; and felt I could have become really attached to him as a father. I could imagine it all: Mother reading in the parlour while she waited for me to come home up Sunday’s Well in a school cap and blazer, like the boys from the Grammar School, and with an expensive leather satchel instead of the old cloth schoolbag I carried over my shoulder. I could see myself walking slowly and with a certain distinction, lingering at gateways and looking down at the river; and later I would go out to tea in one of the big houses with long gardens sloping to the water, and maybe row a boat on the river along with a girl in a pink frock. I wondered only whether I would have any awareness of the National School boy with the cloth schoolbag who jammed his head between the bars of a gate and thought of me. It was a queer, lonesome feeling that all but reduced me to tears.

  But the place that had the greatest attraction of all for me was the Douglas Road, where Father’s friend Miss Cadogan lived, only now she wasn’t Miss Cadogan but Mrs O’Brien. Naturally, nobody called Mrs O’Brien could be as attractive to the imagination as a French chef or an elderly shopkeeper with eleven thousand pounds, but she had a physical reality that the other pair lacked. As I went regularly to the library at Parnell Bridge, I frequently found myself wandering up the road in the direction of Douglas and always stopped in front of the long row of houses where she lived. There were high steps up to them, and in the evening the sunlight fell brightly on the house-fronts till they looked like a screen. One evening as I watched a gang of boys playing ball in the street outside, curiosity overcame me. I spoke to one of them. Having been always a child of solemn and unnatural politeness, I probably scared the wits out of him.

  ‘I wonder if you could tell me which house Mrs O’Brien lives in, please?’ I asked.

  ‘Hi, Gussie!’ he yelled to another boy. ‘This fellow wants to know where your old one lives.’

  This was more than I had bargained for. Then a thin, good-looking boy of about my own age detached himself from the group and came up to me with his fists clenched. I was feeling distinctly panicky, but all the same I studied him closely. After all, he was the boy I might have been.

  ‘What do you want to know for?’ he asked suspiciously.

  Again, this was something I had not anticipated.

  ‘My father was a great friend of your mother,’ I explained carefully, but, so far as he was concerned, I might as well have been talking a foreign language. It was clear that Gussie O’Brien had no sense of history.

  ‘What’s that?’ he asked incredulously.

  At this point we were interrupted by a woman I had noticed earlier, talking to another over the railing between the two steep gardens. She was small and untidy-looking and occasionally rocked the pram in an absent-minded way as though she only remembered it at intervals.

  ‘What is it, Gussie?’ she cried, raising herself on tiptoe to see us better.

  ‘I don’t really want to disturb your mother, thank you,’ I said, in something like hysterics, but Gussie anticipated me, actually pointing me out to her in a manner I had been brought up to regard as rude.

  ‘This fellow wants you,’ he bawled.

  ‘I don’t really,’ I murmured, feeling that now I was in for it. She skipped down the high flight of steps to the gate with a laughing, puzzled air, her eyes in slits and her right hand arranging her hair at the back. It was not carroty as Mother described it, though it had red lights when the sun caught it.

  ‘What is it, little boy?’ she asked coaxingly, bending forward.

&nbs
p; ‘I didn’t really want anything, thank you,’ I said in terror. ‘It was just that my daddy said you lived up here, and, as I was changing my book at the library, I thought I’d come up and inquire. You can see,’ I added, showing her the book as proof, ‘that I’ve only just been to the library.’

  ‘But who is your daddy, little boy?’ she asked, her grey eyes still in long, laughing slits. ‘What’s your name?’

  ‘My name is Delaney,’ I said. ‘Larry Delaney.’

  ‘Not Mike Delaney’s boy?’ she exclaimed wonderingly. ‘Well, for God’s sake! Sure, I should have known it from that big head of yours.’ She passed her hand down the back of my head and laughed. ‘If you’d only get your hair cut I wouldn’t be long recognizing you. You wouldn’t think I’d know the feel of your old fellow’s head, would you?’ she added roguishly.

  ‘No, Mrs O’Brien,’ I replied meekly.

  ‘Why, then indeed I do, and more along with it,’ she added in the same saucy tone, though the meaning of what she said was not clear to me. ‘Ah, come in and give us a good look at you! That’s my eldest, Gussie, you were talking to,’ she added, taking my hand. Gussie trailed behind us for a purpose I only recognized later.

  ‘Ma-a-a-a, who’s dat fella with you?’ yelled a fat little girl who had been playing hopscotch on the pavement.

  ‘That’s Larry Delaney,’ her mother sang over her shoulder. I don’t know what it was about that woman but there was something about her high spirits that made her more like a regiment than a woman. You felt that everyone should fall into step behind her. ‘Mick Delaney’s son from Barrackton. I nearly married his old fellow once. Did he ever tell you that, Larry?’ she added slyly. She made sudden swift transitions from brilliance to intimacy that I found attractive.

  ‘Yes, Mrs O’Brien, he did,’ I replied, trying to sound as roguish as she, and she went off into a delighted laugh, tossing her red head.

  ‘Ah, look at that now! How well the old divil didn’t forget me! You can tell him I didn’t forget him either. And if I married him, I’d be your mother now. Wouldn’t that be a queer old three and fourpence? How would you like me for a mother, Larry?’

  ‘Very much, thank you,’ I said complacently.

  ‘Ah, go on with you, you would not,’ she exclaimed, but she was pleased all the same. She struck me as the sort of woman it would be easy enough to please. ‘Your old fellow always said it: your mother was a most superior woman, and you’re a most superior child. Ah, and I’m not too bad myself either,’ she added with a laugh and a shrug, wrinkling up her merry little face.

  In the kitchen she cut me a slice of bread, smothered it with jam, and gave me a big mug of milk. ‘Will you have some, Gussie?’ she asked in a sharp voice as if she knew only too well what the answer would be. ‘Aideen,’ she said to the horrible little girl who had followed us in, ‘aren’t you fat and ugly enough without making a pig of yourself? Murder the Loaf we call her,’ she added smilingly to me. ‘You’re a polite little boy, Larry, but damn the politeness you’d have if you had to deal with them. Is the book for your mother?’

  ‘Oh, no, Mrs O’Brien,’ I replied. ‘It’s my own.’

  ‘You mean you can read a big book like that?’ she asked incredulously, taking it from my hands and measuring the length of it with a puzzled air.

  ‘Oh, yes, I can.’

  ‘I don’t believe you,’ she said mockingly. ‘Go on and prove it!’

  There was nothing I asked better than to prove it. I felt that as a performer I had never got my due, so I stood in the middle of the kitchen, cleared my throat, and began with great feeling to enunciate one of those horribly involved opening paragraphs you found in children’s books of the time. ‘On a fine evening in Spring, as the setting sun was beginning to gild the blue peaks with its lambent rays, a rider, recognizable as a student by certain niceties of attire, was slowly, and perhaps regretfully making his way …’ It was the sort of opening sentence I loved.

  ‘I declare to God!’ Mrs O’Brien interrupted in astonishment. ‘And that fellow there is one age with you, and he can’t spell house. How well you wouldn’t be down at the library, you caubogue, you!… That’s enough now, Larry,’ she added hastily as I made ready to entertain them further.

  ‘Who wants to read that blooming old stuff?’ Gussie said contemptuously.

  Later, he took me upstairs to show me his air rifle and model aeroplanes. Every detail of the room is still clear to me: the view into the back garden with its jungle of wild plants where Gussie had pitched his tent (a bad site for a tent as I patiently explained to him, owing to the danger from wild beasts); the three cots still unmade; the scribbles on the walls; and Mrs O’Brien’s voice from the kitchen telling Aideen to see what was wrong with the baby, who was screaming his head off from the pram outside the front door. Gussie, in particular, fascinated me. He was spoiled, clever, casual; good-looking, with his mother’s small clean features; gay and calculating. I saw that when I left and his mother gave me a sixpence. Naturally I refused it politely, but she thrust it into my trouser pocket, and Gussie dragged at her skirt, noisily demanding something for himself.

  ‘If you give him a tanner you ought to give me a tanner,’ he yelled.

  ‘I’ll tan you,’ she said laughingly.

  ‘Well, give up a lop anyway,’ he begged, and she did give him a penny to take his face off her, as she said herself, and after that he followed me down the street and suggested we should go to the shop and buy sweets. I was simple-minded, but I wasn’t an out-and-out fool, and I knew that if I went to a sweet-shop with Gussie I should end up with no sixpence and very few sweets. So I told him I could not buy sweets without Mother’s permission, at which he gave me up altogether as a sissy or worse.

  It had been an exhausting afternoon but a very instructive one. In the twilight I went back slowly over the bridges, a little regretful for that fast-moving, colourful household, but with a new appreciation for my own home. When I went in the lamp was lit over the fireplace and Father was at his tea.

  ‘What kept you, child?’ Mother asked with an anxious air, and suddenly I felt slightly guilty, and I played it as I usually did whenever I was at fault – in a loud, demonstrative, grown-up way. I stood in the middle of the kitchen with my cap in my hand and pointed it first at one, then at the other.

  ‘You wouldn’t believe who I met!’ I said dramatically.

  ‘Wisha, who, child?’ Mother asked.

  ‘Miss Cadogan,’ I said, placing my cap squarely on a chair, and turning on them both again. ‘Miss May Cadogan. Mrs O’Brien as she is now.’

  ‘Mrs O’Brien?’ Father exclaimed, putting down his cup. ‘But where did you meet Mrs O’Brien?’

  ‘I said you wouldn’t believe it. It was near the library. I was talking to some fellows, and what do you think but one of them was Gussie O’Brien, Mrs O’Brien’s son. And he took me home with him, and his mother gave me bread and jam, and she gave me this.’ I produced the sixpence with a real flourish.

  ‘Well, I’m blowed!’ Father gasped, and first he looked at me, and then he looked at Mother and burst into a loud guffaw.

  ‘And she said to tell you she remembers you too, and that she sent her love.’

  ‘Oh, by the jumping bell of Athlone!’ Father crowed and clapped his hands on his knees. I could see he believed the story I had told and was delighted with it, and I could see, too, that Mother did not believe it and that she was not in the least delighted. That, of course, was the trouble with Mother. Though she would do anything to help me with an intellectual problem, she never seemed to understand the need for experiment. She never opened her mouth while Father cross-questioned me, shaking his head in wonder and storing it up to tell the men in the factory. What pleased him most was Mrs O’Brien’s remembering the shape of his head, and later, while Mother was out of the kitchen, I caught him looking in the mirror and stroking the back of his head.

  But I knew too that for the first time I had managed to produce in M
other the unrest that Father could produce, and I felt wretched and guilty and didn’t know why. This was an aspect of history I only studied later.

  That night I was really able to indulge my passion. At last I had the material to work with. I was myself as Gussie O’Brien, standing in the bedroom, looking down at my tent in the garden, and Aideen as my sister, and Mrs O’Brien as my mother, and, like Pascal, I re-created history. I remembered Mrs O’Brien’s laughter, her scolding, and the way she stroked my head. I knew she was kind – casually kind – and hot-tempered, and recognized that in dealing with her I must somehow be a different sort of person. Being good at reading would never satisfy her. She would almost compel you to be as Gussie was: flattering, impertinent, and exacting. Though I couldn’t have expressed it in those terms, she was the sort of woman who would compel you to flirt with her.

  Then, when I had had enough, I deliberately soothed myself as I did whenever I had scared myself by pretending that there was a burglar in the house or a wild animal trying to get in the attic window. I just crossed my hands on my chest, looked up at the window, and said to myself: ‘It is not like that. I am not Gussie O’Brien. I am Larry Delaney, and my mother is Mary Delaney, and we live in Number Eight, Wellington Square. Tomorrow I’ll go to school at the Cross, and first there will be prayers, and then arithmetic, and after that composition.’

  For the first time the charm did not work. I had ceased to be Gussie, all right, but somehow I had not become myself again, not any self that I knew. It was as though my own identity was a sort of sack I had to live in, and I had deliberately worked my way out of it, and now I couldn’t get back again because I had grown too big for it. I practised every trick I knew to reassure myself. I tried to play a counting game; then I prayed, but even the prayer seemed different, as though it didn’t belong to me at all. I was away in the middle of empty space, divorced from mother and home and everything permanent and familiar. Suddenly I found myself sobbing. The door opened and Mother came in in her nightdress, shivering, her hair over her face.