The Best of Frank O'Connor

by Frank O'Connor

  The other death didn’t take long in coming. Charlie, in the way he had, got wind of it first, and, having sent his father to break the news to Min, he went off himself to tell his uncle. It was a fine spring morning. The shop was empty but for his uncle, standing with his back to the counter studying the shelves.

  ‘Good morning, Charliss,’ he crackled over his shoulder. ‘What’s the best news?’

  ‘Bad, I’m afraid, Uncle Tom,’ Charlie replied, leaning across the counter to him.

  ‘Something about Peter, I dare say?’ his uncle asked casually, but Charlie noticed how, caught unawares, he had failed to say ‘my son’, as he had taken to doing.

  ‘Just so.’

  ‘Dead, I suppose?’

  ‘Dead, Uncle Tom.’

  ‘I was expecting something of the sort,’ said his uncle. ‘May the Almighty God have mercy on his soul!… Con!’ he called at the back of the shop while he changed his coat. ‘You’d better close up the shop. You’ll find the crepe on the top shelf and the mourning-cards in my desk.’

  ‘Who is it, Mr Lucey?’ asked Con Quill. ‘’Tisn’t Peter?’

  ‘ ’Tis, Con, ’tis, I’m sorry to say,’ and Tom came out briskly with his umbrella over his arm. As they went down the street two people stopped them: the news was already round.

  Charlie, who had to see about the arrangements for the funeral, left his uncle outside the house and so had no chance of averting the scene that took place inside. Not that he would have had much chance of doing so. His father had found Min in a state of collapse. Ben was the last man in the world to look after a woman, but he did manage to get her a pillow, put her legs on a chair and cover her with a rug, which was more than Charlie would have given him credit for. Min smelt of brandy. Then Ben strode up and down the darkened room with his hands in his pockets and his cap over his eyes, talking about the horrors of aeroplane travel. He knew he was no fit company for a woman of sensibility like Min, and he almost welcomed Tom’s arrival.

  ‘That’s terrible news, Tom,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, God help us!’ cried Min. ‘They said he disgraced us but he didn’t disgrace us long.’

  ‘I’d sooner ’twas one of my own, Tom,’ Ben said excitedly. ‘As God is listening to me I would. I’d still have a couple left, but he was all ye had.’

  He held out his hand to Tom. Tom looked at it, then at him, and then deliberately put his own hands behind his back.

  ‘Aren’t you going to shake hands with me, Tom?’ Ben asked appealingly.

  ‘No, Ben,’ Tom said grimly. ‘I am not.’

  ‘Oh, Tom Lucey!’ moaned Min with her crucified smile. ‘Over your son’s dead body!’

  Ben looked at his brother in chagrin and dropped his hand. For a moment it looked as though he might strike him. He was a volatile, hot-tempered man.

  ‘That wasn’t what I expected from you, Tom,’ he said, making a mighty effort to control himself.

  ‘Ben,’ said his brother, squaring his frail little shoulders, ‘you disrespected my son while he was alive. Now that he’s dead I’d thank you to leave him alone.’

  ‘I disrespected him?’ Ben exclaimed indignantly. ‘I did nothing of the sort. I said things I shouldn’t have said. I was upset. You know the sort I am. You were upset yourself and I dare say you said things you regret.’

  ‘’Tisn’t alike, Ben,’ Tom said in a rasping, opinionated tone. ‘I said them because I loved the boy. You said them because you hated him.’

  ‘I hated him?’ Ben repeated incredulously. ‘Peter? Are you out of your mind?’

  ‘You said he changed his name because it wasn’t grand enough for him,’ Tom said, clutching the lapels of his coat and stepping from one foot to another. ‘Why did you say such a mean, mocking, cowardly thing about the boy when he was in trouble?’

  ‘All right, all right,’ snapped Ben. ‘I admit I was wrong to say it. There were a lot of things you said about my family, but I’m not throwing them back at you.’

  ‘You said you wouldn’t cross the road to help him,’ said Tom. Again he primmed up the corners of his mouth and lowered his head. ‘And why, Ben? I’ll tell you why. Because you were jealous of him.’

  ‘I was jealous of him?’ Ben repeated. It seemed to him that he was talking to a different man, discussing a different life, as though the whole of his nature was being turned inside out.

  ‘You were jealous of him, Ben. You were jealous because he had the upbringing and education your own sons lacked. And I’m not saying that to disparage your sons. Far from it. But you begrudged my son his advantages.’

  ‘Never!’ shouted Ben in a fury.

  ‘And I was harsh with him,’ Tom said, taking another nervous step forward while his neat waspish little voice grew harder. ‘I was harsh with him and you were jealous of him, and when his hour of trouble came he had no one to turn to. Now, Ben, the least you can do is to spare us your commiserations.’

  ‘Oh, wisha, don’t mind him, Ben,’ moaned Min. ‘Sure, everyone knows you never begrudged my poor child anything. The man isn’t in his right mind.’

  ‘I know that, Min,’ Ben said, trying hard to keep his temper. ‘I know he’s upset. Only for that he’d never say what he did say – or believe it.’

  ‘We’ll see, Ben, we’ll see,’ said Tom grimly.

  That was how the row between the Luceys began, and it continued like that for years. Charlie married and had children of his own. He always remained friendly with his uncle and visited him regularly; sat in the stuffy front room with him and listened with frowning gravity to Tom’s views, and no more than in his childhood understood what the old man was talking about. All he gathered was that none of the political parties had any principle and the country was in a bad way due to the inroads of the uneducated and ill-bred. Tom looked more and more like a rabbi. As is the way of men of character in provincial towns, he tended more and more to become a collection of mannerisms, a caricature of himself. His academic jokes on his simple customers became more elaborate; so elaborate, in fact, that in time he gave up trying to explain them and was content to be set down as merely queer. In a way it made things easier for Ben; he was able to treat the breach with Tom as another example of his brother’s cantankerousness, and spoke of it with amusement and good nature.

  Then he fell ill. Charlie’s cares were redoubled. Ben was the world’s worst patient. He was dying and didn’t know it, wouldn’t go to hospital, and broke the heart of his wife and daughter. He was awake at six, knocking peremptorily for his cup of tea; then waited impatiently for the paper and the post. ‘What the hell is keeping Mick Duggan? That fellow spends half his time gossiping along the road. Half past nine and no post!’ After that the day was a blank to him until evening when a couple of County Council chaps dropped in to keep him company and tell him what was afoot in the courthouse. There was nothing in the long low room, plastered with blue and green flowered wallpaper, but a bedside table, a press, and three or four holy pictures, and Ben’s mind was not on these but on the world outside – feet passing and repassing on errands which he would never be told about. It broke his heart. He couldn’t believe he was as bad as people tried to make out; sometimes it was the doctor he blamed, sometimes the chemist who wasn’t careful enough of the bottles and pills he made up – Ben could remember some shocking cases. He lay in bed doing involved calculations about his pension.

  Charlie came every evening to sit with him. Though his father didn’t say much about Tom, Charlie knew the row was always there in the back of his mind. It left Ben bewildered, a man without bitterness. And Charlie knew he came in for some of the blame. It was the illness all over again: someone must be slipping up somewhere; the right word hadn’t been dropped in the right quarter or a wrong one had been dropped instead. Charlie, being so thick with Tom, must somehow be to blame. Ben did not understand the inevitable. One night it came out.

  ‘You weren’t at your uncle’s?’ Ben asked.

  ‘I was,’ Charlie said with
a nod. ‘I dropped in on the way up.’

  ‘He wasn’t asking about me?’ Ben asked, looking at him out of the corner of his eye.

  ‘Oh, he was,’ Charlie said with a shocked air. ‘Give the man his due, he always does that. That’s one reason I try to drop in every day. He likes to know.’

  But he knew this was not the question his father wanted answered. That question was: ‘Did you say the right words? Did you make me out the feeble figure you should have made me out, or did you say the wrong thing, letting him know I was better?’ These things had to be managed. In Charlie’s place Ben would have managed it splendidly.

  ‘He didn’t say anything about dropping up?’ Ben asked with affected lightness.

  ‘No,’ Charlie said with assumed thoughtfulness. ‘I don’t remember.’

  ‘There’s blackness for you!’ his father said with sudden bitterness. It came as a shock to Charlie; it was the first time he had heard his father speak like that, from the heart, and he knew the end must be near.

  ‘God knows,’ Charlie said, tapping one heel nervously, ‘he’s a queer man. A queer bloody man!’

  ‘Tell me, Charlie,’ his father insisted, ‘wouldn’t you say it to him? ’Tisn’t right and you know ’tisn’t right.’

  ‘’Tisn’t,’ said Charlie, tearing at his hair, ‘but to tell you the God’s truth I’d sooner not talk to him.’

  ‘Yes,’ his father added in disappointment. ‘I see it mightn’t do for you.’

  Charlie realized that his father was thinking of the shop, which would now come to him. He got up and stood against the fireplace, a fat, handsome, moody man.

  ‘That has nothing to do with it,’ he said. ‘If he gave me cause I’d throw his bloody old shop in his face in the morning. I don’t want anything from him. ’Tis just that I don’t seem to be able to talk to him. I’ll send Paddy down tonight and let him ask him.’

  ‘Do, do,’ his father said with a knowing nod. ‘That’s the very thing you’ll do. And tell Julie to bring me up a drop of whiskey and a couple of glasses. You’ll have a drop yourself?’

  ‘I won’t.’

  ‘You will, you will. Julie will bring it up.’

  Charlie went to his brother’s house and asked him to call on Tom and tell him how near the end was. Paddy was a gentle, good-natured boy with something of Charlie’s benevolence and none of his guile.

  ‘I will to be sure,’ he said. ‘But why don’t you tell him? Sure, he thinks the world of you.’

  ‘I’ll tell you why, Paddy,’ Charlie whispered with his hand on his brother’s sleeve. ‘Because if he refused me I might do him some injury.’

  ‘But you don’t think he will?’ Paddy asked in bewilderment.

  ‘I don’t think at all, Paddy,’ Charlie said broodingly. ‘I know.’

  He knew all right. When he called on his way home the next afternoon his mother and sister were waiting for him, hysterical with excitement. Paddy had met with a cold refusal. Their hysteria was infectious. He understood now why he had caught people glancing at him curiously in the street. It was being argued out in every pub, what Charlie Lucey ought to do. People couldn’t mind their own bloody business. He rapped out an oath at the two women and took the stairs three at a time. His father was lying with his back to the window. The whiskey was still there as Charlie had seen it the previous evening. It tore at his heart more than the sight of his father’s despair.

  ‘You’re not feeling too good?’ he said gruffly.

  ‘I’m not, I’m not,’ Ben said, lifting the sheet from his face. ‘Paddy didn’t bring a reply to that message?’ he added questioningly.

  ‘Do you tell me so?’ Charlie replied, trying to sound shocked.

  ‘Paddy was always a bad man to send on a message,’ his father said despondently, turning himself painfully in the bed, but still not looking at Charlie. ‘Of course, he hasn’t the sense. Tell me, Charlie,’ he added in a feeble voice, ‘weren’t you there when I was talking about Peter?’

  ‘About Peter?’ Charlie exclaimed in surprise.

  ‘You were, you were,’ his father insisted, looking at the window. ‘Sure, ’twas from you I heard it. You wanted to go to Asragh to look at the books, and I told you if anything went wrong you’d get the blame. Isn’t that all I said?’

  Charlie had to readjust his mind before he realized that his father had been going over it all again in the long hours of loneliness and pain, trying to see where he had gone wrong. It seemed to make him even more remote. Charlie didn’t remember what his father had said; he doubted if his uncle remembered.

  ‘I might have passed some joke about it,’ his father said., ‘but sure I was always joking him and he was always joking me. What the hell more was there in it?’

  ‘Oh, a chance remark!’ agreed Charlie.

  ‘Now, the way I look at that,’ his father said, seeking his eyes for the first time, ‘someone was out to make mischief. This town is full of people like that. If you went and told him he’d believe you.’

  I will, I will,’ Charlie said, sick with disgust. ‘I’ll see him myself today.’

  He left the house, cursing his uncle for a brutal egotist. He felt the growing hysteria of the town concentrating on himself and knew that at last it had got inside him. His sisters and brothers, the people in the little shops along the street, expected him to bring his uncle to book, and failing that, to have done with him. This was the moment when people had to take their side once and for all. And he knew he was only too capable of taking sides.

  Min opened the door to him, her red-rimmed eyes dirty with tears and the smell of brandy on her breath. She was near hysterics, too.

  ‘What way is he, Charlie?’ she wailed.

  ‘Bad enough, Aunt Min,’ he said as he wiped his boots and went past her. ‘He won’t last the night.’

  At the sound of his voice his uncle had opened the sitting-room door and now he came out and drew Charlie in by the hand. Min followed. His uncle didn’t release his hand, and betrayed his nervousness only by the way his frail fingers played over Charlie’s hand, like a woman’s.

  ‘I’m sorry to hear it, Charliss,’ he said.

  ‘Sure, of course you are, Uncle Tom,’ said Charlie, and at the first words the feeling of hysteria within him dissolved and left only a feeling of immense understanding and pity. ‘You know what brought me?’

  His uncle dropped his hand.

  ‘I do, Charliss,’ he said and drew himself erect. They were neither of them men to beat about the bush.

  ‘You’ll come and see the last of him,’ Charlie said, not even marking the question.

  ‘Charliss,’ Tom said with that queer tightening at the corners of his mouth, ‘I was never one to hedge or procrastinate. I will not come.’

  He almost hissed the final words. Min broke into a loud wail.

  ‘Talk to him, Charlie, do! I’m sick and tired of it. We can never show our faces in the town again.’

  ‘And I need hardly say, Charliss,’ his uncle continued with an air of triumph that was almost evil, ‘that that doesn’t trouble me.’

  ‘I know,’ Charlie said earnestly, still keeping his eyes on the withered old face with the narrow-winged, almost transparent nose. ‘And you know that I never interfered between ye. Whatever disagreements ye had, I never took my father’s side against you. And ’twasn’t for what I might get out of you.’

  In his excitement his uncle grinned, a grin that wasn’t natural, and that combined in a strange way affection and arrogance, the arrogance of the idealist who doesn’t realize how easily he can be fooled.

  ‘I never thought it, boy,’ he said, raising his voice. ‘Not for an instant. Nor ’twasn’t in you.’

  ‘And you know too you did this once before and you regretted it.’

  ‘Bitterly! Bitterly!’

  ‘And you’re going to make the same mistake with your brother that you made with your son?’

  ‘I’m not forgetting that either, Charliss,’ said Tom. �
�It wasn’t today nor yesterday I thought of it.’

  ‘And it isn’t as if you didn’t care for him,’ Charlie went on remorselessly. ‘It isn’t as if you had no heart for him. You know he’s lying up there waiting for you. He sent for you last night and you never came. He had the bottle of whiskey and the two glasses by the bed. All he wants is for you to say you forgive him.… Jesus Christ, man,’ he shouted with all the violence in him roused, ‘never mind what you’re doing to him. Do you know what you’re doing to yourself?’

  ‘I know, Charliss,’ his uncle said in a cold, excited voice. ‘I know that too. And ’tisn’t as you say that I have no heart for him. God knows it isn’t that I don’t forgive him. I forgave him long years ago for what he said about – one that was very dear to me. But I swore that day, Charliss, that never the longest day I lived would I take your father’s hand in friendship, and if God was to strike me dead at this very moment for my presumption I’d say the same. You know me, Charliss,’ he added, gripping the lapels of his coat. ‘I never broke my word yet to God or man. I won’t do it now.’

  ‘Oh, how can you say it?’ cried Min. ‘Even the wild beasts have more nature.’

  ‘Some other time I’ll ask you to forgive me,’ added Tom, ignoring her.

  ‘You need never do that, Uncle Tom,’ Charlie said with great simplicity and humbleness. ‘ ’Tis yourself you’ll have to forgive.’

  At the door he stopped. He had a feeling that if he turned he would see Peter standing behind him. He knew his uncle’s barren pride was all he could now offer to the shadow of his son, and that it was his dead cousin who stood between them. For a moment he felt like turning and appealing to Peter. But he was never much given to the supernatural. The real world was trouble enough for him, and he went slowly homeward, praying that he might see the blinds drawn before him.