The Best of Frank O'Connor

by Frank O'Connor

  ‘I’d better get him settled down,’ Margaret said nervously with a quick, bright smile.

  ‘Yes,’ Sylvia said. ‘Margaret and I will take him up. Will you pour her a drink first, Jack?’

  ‘Certainly,’ said Jack, beginning to beam. ‘Nothing I like so much. Whiskey, Mrs Harding?’

  ‘Oh, whiskey – Mr Courtenay,’ she replied with her sudden, brilliant laugh.

  ‘Won’t you call me Jack,’ he asked with a mock-languishing air. I think he was almost enjoying the mystification, which had something in common with his own practical jokes.

  While the girls went upstairs with the baby, Mrs Courtenay sat before the fire, her hands joined in her lap. Her eyes had a faraway look.

  ‘God help us!’ she sighed. ‘Isn’t she young to be a widow?’

  At ten Mrs Courtenay drew the shawl about her shoulders, said as usual ‘I’ll go to my old doss,’ and went upstairs. Some time later we were interrupted by a sickly little whine. Margaret jumped up with an apologetic smile.

  ‘That’s Teddy,’ she said. ‘I shan’t be a minute.’

  ‘I shouldn’t trouble, dear,’ Sylvia said in her bland, insolent way, and we heard a door open softly. ‘I rather thought Granny would come to the rescue,’ she explained.

  ‘He’ll be afraid of a stranger,’ Margaret said tensely, and we all listened again. We heard the old woman’s voice, soft and almost continuous, and the crying ceased abruptly. Apparently Teddy didn’t consider Mrs Courtenay a stranger. I noticed as if for the first time the billows of wind break over the house.

  Next morning, when Teddy had been settled in the garden in his pram, Mrs Courtenay said: ‘I think I’ll take him for a little walk. They get very tired of the one place.’ She apparently knew things about babies that weren’t in any textbook, and uttered them in a tone of quiet authority which made textbooks an impertinence. She didn’t appear again until lunch-time, having taken him to the park – ‘they’re very fond of trees.’ His father’s death in an air-crash in the Middle East had proved a safe introduction to the other women, and Mrs Courtenay, who usually complained of the standoffishness of the English, returned in high good humour, full of gossip – the untold numbers blinded, drowned, and burned to death, and the wrecked lives of young women who became too intimate with foreigners. The Poles, in particular, were a great disappointment to her – such a grand Catholic nation, but so unreliable.

  That evening, when we heard the shriek from the bedroom, there was no question about who was to deal with it. ‘Don’t upset yourselves,’ Mrs Courtenay said modestly, pulled the shawl firmly about her, and went upstairs. Margaret, a very modern young woman, had Teddy’s day worked out to a time-table, stipulating when he should be fed, lifted, and loved, but it had taken that baby no time to discover that Mrs Courtenay read nothing but holy books and believed that babies should be fed, lifted, and loved when it suited themselves. Margaret frowned and shook herself in her frock.

  ‘I’m sure it’s bad for him, Sylvia,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, dreadful,’ Sylvia sighed with her heartless air as she threw one long leg over the arm of the chair. ‘But Granny is thriving on it. Haven’t you noticed?’

  A curious situation was developing in the house, which I watched with fascination. Sylvia, who had very little use for sentiment, was quite attracted by Margaret. ‘She really is charming, Phil,’ she told me in her bland way. ‘Really, Jack has remarkably good taste.’ Margaret, a much more dependent type, after hesitating for a week, developed quite a crush on Sylvia. It was Jack who was odd man out. Their friendship was a puzzle to him, and what they said and thought about him when they were together was more than he could imagine, but judging by the frown that frequently drew down one side of his face, he felt it couldn’t be very nice.

  Sylvia was older, shrewder, more practical, and Margaret’s guilelessness took her breath away. Margaret’s experience of love had been very limited; she had fluttered round with some highly inappropriate characters, and from them drew vast generalizations, mostly derogatory, which included all races and men. Jack had been the first real man in her life, and she had grabbed at the chance of having his child. Now she envisaged nothing but a future dedicated to the memory of a couple of weekends with him and to the upbringing of his child. Sylvia in her cool way tried to make her see things more realistically.

  ‘Really, Phil,’ she told me, ‘she is the sweetest girl, but, oh, dear, she’s such an impossible romantic. What she really needs is a husband to knock some of the romance out of her.’

  I had a shrewd idea that she regarded me as a likely candidate for the honours of knocking the romance out of Margaret, but I felt the situation was already complicated enough. At the same time, it struck me as ironic that the world should be full of men who would be glad of a decent wife, while a girl like Margaret, whom any man could be proud of, made a fool of herself over a married man.

  IV

  One Saturday afternoon I went up early, just after lunch, for my walk with Jack. He wasn’t ready, so I sat in the front room with Sylvia, Margaret, and Mrs Courtenay. I had the impression that there were feelings, at least on the old lady’s part, and I was right. It had taken Teddy a week to discover that she had a bedroom of her own, and when he did, he took full advantage of it. She had now become his devoted slave, and when we met, I had to be careful that she didn’t suspect me of treating him with insufficient respect. Two old women on the road had made a mortal enemy of her because of that. And it wasn’t only strangers. Margaret too came in for criticism.

  The criticism this afternoon had been provoked first by Margaret’s inhuman refusal to feed him half an hour before his feeding time, and secondly by the pointed way the two younger women went on with their talk instead of joining her in keeping him company. In Margaret this was only assumed. She was inclined to resent the total occupation of her baby by Mrs Courtenay, but this was qualified by Teddy’s antics and quite suddenly she would smile and then a quick frown would follow the smile. Sylvia was quite genuinely uninterested. She had the capacity for surrounding herself in her own good manners.

  The old woman could, of course, have monopolized me, but it gave her more satisfaction to throw me to the girls and make their monstrous inhumanity obvious even to themselves.

  ‘Wisha, go on, Phil,’ she said with her sweet, distraught smile. ‘You’ll want to be talking. He’ll be getting his dinner soon anyway. The poor child is famished.’

  Most of this went over my head, and I joined the girls gladly enough, while Mrs Courtenay, playing quietly with Teddy, suffered in silence. Just then the door opened quietly behind her and Jack came in. She started and looked up.

  ‘Ah, here’s Daddy now!’ she said triumphantly. ‘Daddy will play with us.’

  ‘Daddy will do nothing of the sort,’ retorted Jack with remarkable presence of mind. ‘Daddy wants somebody to play with him. Ready, Phil?’

  But even this didn’t relax the tension in the room. Margaret looked dumbfoundered. She looked at Jack and grinned; then frowned and looked at me. Sylvia raised her shoulders. Meanwhile her mother-in-law, apparently quite unaware of the effect she had created, was making Teddy sit up and show off his tricks. Sylvia followed us to the door.

  ‘Does she suspect anything?’ she asked anxiously with one hand on the jamb.

  ‘Oh, not at all,’ Jack said with a shocked expression that almost caused one side of his face to fold up. ‘That’s only her way of speaking.’

  ‘Hm,’ grunted Sylvia. ‘Curious way of speaking.’

  ‘Not really, Sylvia,’ I said. ‘If she suspected anything, that’s the last thing in the world she’d have said.’

  ‘Like leaning against a ship?’ Sylvia said. ‘I dare say you’re right.’

  But she wasn’t sure. Jack walked down the avenue without speaking, and I knew he was shaken too.

  ‘Awkward situation,’ he said between his teeth.

  Since Margaret’s arrival he had become what for him was almost for
thcoming. It was mainly the need for someone to confide in. He couldn’t any longer confide in Margaret or Sylvia because of their friendship.

  ‘I don’t think it meant what Sylvia imagined,’ I said as we set off briskly up the hill. We both liked the hilly country behind the town, the strong thrust of the landscape that made walking like a bird’s flight on a stormy day.

  ‘I dare say not, but still, it’s awkward – two women in a house!’

  ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘You know what I mean?’

  I thought I did, and I liked his delicacy. Being a chap who never cared to hurt people’s feelings, he probably left both girls very much alone. Having had so much to do with them both, and being the sort who is accustomed to having a lot to do with women, he probably found this a strain. They must have found it so likewise, because their behaviour had grown decidedly obstreperous. One evening I had watched them, with their arms about one another’s waists, guying him, and realized that behind it there was an element of hysteria. The situation was becoming impossible.

  We had come out on the common, with the little red houses to one side, and the uplands sweeping away from them.

  ‘Last night Sylvia woke me when the alert went, to keep Margaret company,’ he went on in a tone in which pain, bewilderment, and amusement were about equally blended. It was as though he were fastidiously holding up something small, frail, and not quite clean for your inspection. ‘She said she’d go if I didn’t. I’d have preferred her to go, but then she got quite cross. She said: “Margaret won’t like it, and you’ve shown her little enough consideration since she came.” ’

  ‘Rather tactless of Sylvia,’ I said.

  ‘I know,’ he added with a bewildered air. ‘And it’s so unlike her. She said I didn’t understand women.’

  ‘And did you go?’

  ‘I had to.’

  I could fill in the gaps in his narrative and appreciate his embarrassment. Obviously, before he went to Margaret’s room, he had to go to his mother’s to explain Sylvia’s anxiety for her old school friend, and having done everything a man could do to spare the feelings of three women, had probably returned to bed with the feeling that they were all laughing at him. And though he told it lightly, I had the feeling that it was loneliness which made him tell it at all, and that he would never again be quite comfortable with either Sylvia or Margaret. ‘Now your days of philandering are over,’ was running through my head. I wasn’t sure that he would be quite such a pleasant friend.

  Margaret remained for some months until the baby was quite well and she had both got a job and found a home where Teddy would be looked after. She was full of gaiety and courage, but I had the feeling that her way was not an easy one either. Even without the aid of a husband, the romance had been knocked out of her. It was marked by the transference of her allegiance from Jack to Sylvia. And Sylvia was lonesome too. She kept pressing me to come to the house when Jack was away. She corresponded with Margaret and went to stay with her when she was in town. They were linked by something which excluded Jack. To each of them her moment of sacrifice had come, and each had risen to it, but nobody can live on that plane forever, and now there stretched before them the commonplace of life with no prospect that ever again would it call on them in the same way. Never again would Sylvia and Jack be able to joke about his philandering, and the house seemed the gloomier for it, as though it had lost a safety valve.

  Mrs Courtenay too was lonely after Teddy, though with her usual stoicism she made light of it. ‘Wisha, you get very used to them, Phil,’ she said to me as she pulled her shawl about her. Now she felt that she had no proper introduction when she went to the park, was jealous of the mothers and grandmothers who met there, and decided that the English were as queer and standoffish as she had always supposed them to be. For weeks she slept badly and talked with resignation of ‘being in the way’ and ‘going to her long home’. She never asked about Teddy, always about his mother, and when Margaret, who seemed suddenly to have got over her dislike of the old woman, sent her a photo of the child, she put it away in a drawer and did not refer to it again.

  One evening, while Sylvia was in the kitchen, she startled me by a sudden question.

  ‘You never hear about Mrs Harding?’ she asked.

  ‘I believe she’s all right,’ I said. ‘Sylvia could tell you. She hears from her regularly.’

  ‘They don’t tell me,’ she said resignedly, folding her arms and looking broodingly into the fire – it was one of her fictions that no one ever told her anything. ‘Wisha, Phil,’ she added with a smile, ‘you don’t think she noticed me calling Jack his daddy?’

  She turned a searching look on me. It was one of those occasions when whatever you say is bound to be wrong.

  ‘Who’s that, Mrs Courtenay?’

  ‘Sylvia. She didn’t notice?’

  ‘I wouldn’t say so. Why?’

  ‘It worries me,’ she replied, looking into the fire again. ‘It could make mischief.’

  ‘I doubt it,’ I said. ‘I don’t think Sylvia noticed anything.’

  ‘I hope not. I made a novena that she wouldn’t. She’s a nice, simple poor girl.’

  ‘She’s one in a thousand,’ I said.

  ‘Why then, indeed, Phil, there aren’t many like her,’ she agreed humbly. ‘I could have bitten my tongue out when I said it. But, of course, I knew from the first minute I saw him in the hall. Didn’t you?’

  ‘Know what?’ I stammered, wondering if I looked as red as I felt.

  ‘That Jack was his daddy,’ she said in a low voice. ‘Sure you must.’

  ‘Oh, yes,’ I said. ‘He mentioned it.’

  ‘He didn’t say anything to me,’ she said, but without reproach. You could see she knew that Jack would have good reason for not telling her. ‘I suppose he thought I’d tell Sylvia, but of course I wouldn’t dream of making mischief. And the two of them such great friends too – wisha, isn’t life queer, Phil?’

  In the kitchen Sylvia suddenly began to sing ‘Lili Marlene’. It was then the real poignancy of the situation struck me. I had seen it only as the tragedy of Jack and Sylvia and Margaret, but what was their loneliness to that of the old woman, to whom tragedy presented itself as in a foreign tongue? Now I realized why she did not care to look at the photograph of Margaret’s son.

  ‘It might be God’s will her poor husband was killed,’ Mrs Courtenay said. ‘God help us, I can never get the poor boy out of my head. I pray for him night and morning. ’Twould be such a shock to him if he ever found out. And the baby so lovely and all – oh, the dead image of Jack at his age!’

  Sylvia accompanied me to the door as usual. Now when we kissed good-night it wasn’t such an act on her part; not because she cared any more for me but because she was already seeking for support in the world outside. The bubble in which she lived was broken. I was tempted to tell her about her mother-in-law, but something held me back. Women like their own mystifications, which give them a feeling of power; they dislike other people’s, which they always describe as slyness. Besides, it would have seemed like a betrayal. I had shifted my allegiance.

  5 IRELAND

  PREFACE

  IN 1958 O’CONNOR was interviewed by the Paris Review in his Brooklyn apartment, which had a view across the river to lower Manhattan and the New York Harbor. On the writer’s table, the interviewer noted ‘a typewriter, a small litter of papers, and a pair of binoculars’. O’Connor explained that the binoculars were for watching liners ‘on the way to Ireland’. He added that he returned there once a year, and that if he didn’t, he would die.

  O’Connor was profoundly attached to the land of his birth: to its traditions and history, its landscape, archaeology and culture, its lunacies, its smells and sounds, and above all, to its people. He loathed sentimental Irishry, and as his second wife Harriet Sheehy recalled, ‘He nearly threw up when an American hotel operator said, “Top of the morning to you, Mr O’Connor”.’ But he was fascinated by, and cared
deeply about, the rural and small-town folk he turned into characters in such stories as ‘The Majesty of the Law’, ‘Uprooted’, or ‘In the Train’. Many of his stories were first published in the New Yorker, then perhaps the world’s most sophisticated magazine; but he was writing them ‘for the man and woman down the country who reads them and says, “Yes. That is how it is. That is life as I know it.” ’

  O’Connor had many harsh things to say about Ireland, about the moral stagnation and intellectual repression of both Church and State. He wrote a weekly newspaper column in which he frequently attacked the government for neglecting the high crosses and the ruins of romanesque churches, for allowing Georgian houses to be knocked down, and for its censorship policy. He suffered from this himself: much of his work was banned for its ‘general indecent tendency’. In theory, Ireland was the perfect place for a writer to work; and yet – even leaving aside the matter of censorship – the country’s bureaucracy made it near-impossible. ‘A writer must fight and think and waste his time in useless efforts to create an atmosphere in which he can exist and work.’

  But such professional exasperation only emphasized the attachment O’Connor felt to all that was non-official Ireland. He wrote three topographical books about the country – though category is a fairly fluid concept with O’Connor; there are times, reading his Leinster, Munster and Connaught, when you feel you might have wandered into the beginning of a short story (and sometimes, of course, you have). He tried to make sense of Ireland’s fractured history, and the literature it produced, in The Backward Look; and he sought to preserve and convey the literary past in his translations of Irish poetry, of which he published five volumes. The collection Kings, Lords & Commons, includes two of the great long Irish poems, ‘The Midnight Court’ and ‘The Lament for Art O’Leary’; also verse high and low from 600 AD to the nineteenth century. The notes at the head of the poems that follow are the translator’s own. ‘Kilcash’ was read by Brendan Kennelly at O’Connor’s burial on 12th March 1966 at Dean’s Grange cemetery, Co. Dublin.