The Best of Frank O'Connor

by Frank O'Connor

  ‘ ’Tis a long walk,’ he said with embarrassment.

  ‘Why?’ she asked wearily. ‘Can’t I drive with you?’

  ‘You’d rather have McCarthy’s car, but ’tisn’t back from Cork yet.’

  ‘I would not. I’d rather drive with you.’

  ‘ ’Tis no conveyance,’ he said angrily, referring to the old cart. Nevertheless he was pleased. She mounted from behind and sat on her black trunk. He lifted himself in after her, and they jolted down the village with the bay on their left. Beyond the village the road climbed a steep hill. Through a hedge of trees the bay grew upon the sight with a wonderful brightness because of the dark canopy of leaves. On and up, now to right, now to left, till the trees ceased, the bay disappeared over the brow of a hill, and they drove along a sunlight upland road with sunken fences. Hills like mattresses rose to their right, a brilliant green except where they were broken by cultivated patches or clumps of golden furze; a bog, all brown with bright pools and tall grey reeds, flanked the road.

  ‘Ye were in about eight, I’d say,’ he commented, breaking the silence.

  ‘Oh yes. About that.’

  ‘I seen ye.’

  ‘You did?’

  ‘I was on the look out. When she rounded the head I ran in and told the wife “Your daughter-in-law’s coming.” She nearly had me life when she seen ’twas only the ould liner.’

  The girl smiled.

  ‘Ah, now,’ he added proudly, a moment later, ‘there’s a sight for you!’

  She half raised herself on the edge of the cart and looked in the direction his head indicated. The land dropped suddenly away from beneath their feet, and the open sea, speckled white with waves and seagulls’ wings, stretched out before them. The hills, their smooth flanks patterned with the varying colours of the fields, flowed down to it in great unbroken curves, and the rocks looked very dark between their wind-flawed brightness and the brightness of the water. In little hollows nestled houses and cottages, diminutive and quaint and mostly of a cold, startling whiteness that was keyed up here and there by the spring-like colour of fresh thatch. In the clear air the sea was spread out like a great hall with all its folding doors thrown wide; a dancing floor, room beyond room, each narrower and paler than the last, till on the farthest reaches steamers that were scarcely more than dots jerked to and fro as on a wire.

  Something in the fixity of the girl’s pose made Tom Shea shout the mare to a standstill.

  ‘ ’Tis the house beyond,’ he said, brandishing his stick. ‘The one with the slate roof on the hill.’

  With sudden tenderness he looked quizzically down at her from under his black hat. This strange girl with her American clothes and faintly American accent was his son’s wife and would some day be the mother of his grandchildren. Her hands were gripping the front of the cart. She was weeping. She made no effort to restrain herself or conceal her tears, nor did she turn her eyes from the sea. He remembered a far-away evening when he had returned like this, having seen off his son.

  ‘Yes,’ he said after a moment’s silence, ‘ ’tis so, ’tis so.’

  A woman with a stern and handsome face stood in the doorway. As everything in Tom seemed to revolve about a fixed point of softness; his huge frame, his comfortable paunch, his stride, his round face with the shrewd, brown twinkling eyes and the big grey moustache, so everything in her seemed to obey a central reserve. Hers was a nature refined to the point of hardness, and while her husband took colour from everything about him, circumstances or acquaintance would, you felt, leave no trace on her.

  One glance was enough to show her that he had already surrendered. She, her look said, would not give in so easily. But sooner than he she recognized the signals of fatigue.

  ‘You’re tired out, girl!’ she exclaimed.

  ‘I am,’ replied the younger woman, resting her forehead in her hands as though to counteract a sudden giddiness. In the kitchen she removed her hat and coat and sat at the head of the table where the westering light caught her. She wore a pale-blue frock with a darker collar. She was very dark, but the pallor of illness had bleached the dusk from her skin. Her cheek-bones were high so that they formed transparencies beneath her eyes. It was a very Irish face, long and spiritual, with an inherent melancholy that might dissolve into sudden anger or equally sudden gaiety.

  ‘You were a long time sick,’ said Maire Shea, tossing a handful of brosna on the fire.

  ‘I was.’

  ‘Maybe ’twas too soon for you to travel?’

  ‘If I didn’t, I’d have missed the summer at home.’

  ‘So Michael said, so Michael said.’

  ‘Ah,’ declared Tom with burning optimism, ‘you won’t be long pulling round now, with God’s help. There’s great air here, powerful air.’

  ‘You’ll be finding us rough, simple poor people,’ added his wife with dignity, taking from him a parcel that contained a cheap glass sugar-bowl to replace the flowered mug without a handle that had served them till now. ‘We’re not used to your ways nor you to ours but we have a great will to please you.’

  ‘We have,’ agreed Tom heartily. ‘We have indeed.’

  The young woman ate nothing, only sipped her tea that smelled of burned wood, and it was clear, as when she tried to pour milk from the large jug, that she was completely astray in her new surroundings. And that acute sense of her discomfort put a strain on the two old people, on Tom especially, whose desire to make a good impression was general and strong.

  After tea she went upstairs to rest. Maire came with her.

  ‘ ’Tis Michael’s room,’ she said. ‘And that’s Michael’s bed.’

  It was a bare, green-washed room with a low window looking on to the front of the house, an iron bed and an oleograph of the Holy Family. For a moment an old familiar feeling of wild jealousy stole over Maire Shea, but when the girl, in undressing, exposed the scar across her stomach, she felt guilty.

  ‘You’ll sleep now,’ she said softly.

  ‘I ought to.’

  Maire stole down the straight stair. Tom was standing in the doorway, his black hat over his eyes, his hands clasped behind his back.

  ‘Well?’ he asked in a whisper.

  ‘Whist!’ she replied irritably. ‘She shouldn’t be travelling at all. I don’t know what come over Michael, and to leave her and he knowing well we have no facility. The cut in her stomach – ’tis the length of your arm.’

  ‘Would I run up and tell Kate not to come? Herself and Joan will be in soon.’

  ‘’Twould be no use. All the neighbours will be in.’

  ‘So they will, so they will,’ he admitted in a depressed tone.

  He was very restless. After a while he stole upstairs and down again on tiptoe.

  ‘She’s asleep. But whisper, Moll, she must have been crying.’

  ‘ ’Tis weakness.’

  ‘Maybe she’d be lonely.’

  ‘ ’Tis weakness, ’tis weakness. She should never be travelling.’

  Later Kate and Joan arrived and after them three or four other women. Twilight fell within the long whitewashed kitchen; and still they talked in subdued voices. Suddenly the door on the stair opened and Michael’s wife appeared. She seemed to have grown calmer, though she still retained something of the air of a sleepwalker, and in the half-light with her jet-black eyes and hair, her long pale face had a curious ethereal beauty.

  The sense of strain was very noticeable. Tom fussed about her in a helpless fidgety way till the women, made nervous by it, began to mock and scold him. Even then a question put at random caused him to fret.

  ‘Can’t ye leave her alone, now can’t ye? Can’t ye see she’s tired? Go on with yeer ould talk, leave ye, and don’t be bothering her any more.’

  ‘No, no,’ she said. ‘I’m not so tired now.’ Her voice retained a memory of her native Donegal in a certain dry sweetness.

  ‘Have a sup of this,’ urged Tom. ‘A weeshy sup – ’twill do you no harm.’

  S
he refused the drink, but two of the other women took it, and Tom, having first toasted ‘her lovely black eyes,’ drank a glass without pausing for breath. He gave a deep sigh of content.

  ‘The curate was drunk and the midwife was tipsy

  And I was baptized in a basin of whiskey,’

  he hummed. He refilled his glass before sitting down beside the open door. The sky turned deep and deeper blue above the crown of a tree that looked in the low doorway and a star winked at the window-pane. Maire rose and lit the wall-lamp with its tin reflector. From far away in a lag between two headlands a voice was calling and calling on a falling cadence ‘Taaaamie! Taaaamie!’ and in the distance the call had a remote and penetrating sweetness. When it ceased there came to their ears the noise of the sea, and suddenly it was night. The young woman drew herself up. All were silent. One of the women sighed. The girl looked up, throwing back her head.

  ‘I’m sorry, neighbours,’ she said. ‘I was only a child when I left Ireland and it’s all strange to me now.’

  ‘ ’Tis surely,’ replied Kate heartily. ‘ ’Tis lonely for you. You’re every bit as strange as we’d be in the heart of New York.’

  ‘Just so, just so,’ exclaimed Tom with approval.

  ‘Never mind,’ continued Kate. ‘You have me to take your part.’

  ‘You be damned!’ retorted Tomin mock indignation. ‘No one is going to look after that girl but meself.’

  ‘A deal she have to expect from either of ye!’ added Maire coldly. ‘It wouldn’t occur to ye she should be in bed.’

  She dipped a candle in the fire and held it above her head. The girl followed her. The others sat on and talked; then all took their leave together. Maire, busy about the house and yard for a long time, heard voices and footsteps coming back to her on the light land wind.

  She was thinking in her dispassionate way of Michael’s wife. She had thought of her often before but now she found herself at sea. It wasn’t only that the girl was a stranger and a sick one at that, but – and this Maire had never allowed for – she was the child of a strange world, the atmosphere of which had come with her, disturbing judgement. Less clearly than Kate or Tom, yet clearly enough, she realized that the girl was as strange amongst them as they would be in New York. In the bright starlight a cluster of whitewashed cottages stood out against the hillside like a frame of snow about its orange window-squares. For the first time Maire looked at it, and with a strange feeling of alienation wondered what it was like to one unused to it.

  A heavy step startled her. She turned in to see that Tom had disappeared. Heated with drink and emotion he had tiptoed up the stairs and opened the girl’s door. He was surprised to find her sitting on the low window-ledge in her dressing-gown. From the darkness she was looking out with strange eyes on the same scene Maire had been watching with eyes grown too familiar, hills, whitewashed cottages and sea.

  ‘Are ’oo awake?’ he asked – a stupid question.

  ‘Wisha, for goodness’ sake will you come down and leave the girl sleep?’ came Maire’s voice in irritation from the foot of the stairs.

  ‘No, no, no,’ he whispered nervously.

  ‘What is it?’ asked the girl.

  ‘Are ’oo all right?’

  ‘Quite, thanks.’

  ‘We didn’t disturb ’oo?’

  ‘Not at all.’

  ‘Come down out of that, you ould fool!’ cried Maire in an exasperated tone.

  ‘I’m coming, I’m coming – Jasus, can’t you give us a chance?’ he added angrily. ‘Tell me,’ this in a whisper, ‘the ould operation, ’twont come again you?’

  He bent over her, hot and excited, his breath smelling of whiskey.

  ‘I don’t understand you.’

  ‘Ah,’ he said in the same low tone, ‘wouldn’t it be a terrible misfortune? A terrible misfortune entirely! ’Tis great life in a house, a child is.’

  ‘Oh, no,’ she answered hastily, nervously, as though she were growing afraid.

  ‘Are ’oo sure? What did the doctors say?’

  ‘It won’t, it won’t.’

  ‘Ah, glory be to the hand of God!’ he said, turning away, ‘ ’tis a great ease to my mind to know that. A great ease! A great ease! I’m destroyed thinking of it.’

  He stumbled downstairs to face his wife’s anger that continued long after he had shut up the house for the night. She had a bitter tongue when she chose to use it, and she chose now. For weeks they had been screwing themselves up, to make a good impression on Michael’s wife, and now it was spoiled by a drunken fool of a man.

  He turned and tossed, unable to sleep at the injustice of it. As though a man wouldn’t want to know a thing like that, as though he mightn’t ask his own daughter-in-law a civil question, without being told he was worse than a black, a heathen savage from Africa, without niceness or consideration except for his own dirty gut!

  He, Tom Shea, who tried to leave a good impression on every hog, dog and devil that came the road!

  II

  In the morning Michael’s wife was somewhat better. The sun appeared only at intervals, but for the greater part of the day she was able to sit by the gable where she had a view of the sea in shelter from the wind. A stream ran just beneath her, and a hedge of fuchsia beside it bordered a narrow stony laneway leading to the strand. The chickens raced about her with a noise like distant piping and from the back of the house came the complaining voice of a hen saying without pause, ‘Oh, God! God! God! God!’

  Occasionally Maire came and sat beside her on a low stool. Maire asked no questions – her pride again – and the conversation was strained, almost hostile, until the girl became aware of what ailed her: curiosity for the minute trifles of their life in America, hers and Michael’s; the details that had become so much part of her that she found it difficult to remember them. How much the maid was paid, how the milk was delivered, the apartment house with its central heating, the negro lift-hop, the street-cars and the rest of it. At last her mind seemed to embrace the old woman’s vivid and unlettered mind trying to construct a picture of the world in which her son lived, and she continued to talk for the sake of talking, as though the impersonality of it was a relief.

  It was different when at dinner-time Tom came in from the strand in a dirty old shirt and pants, his black hat well forward on his eyes.

  ‘Listen, girleen,’ he said in a gruff voice, very different from that of the previous night, as with legs crossed and hands joined behind his back he leaned against the wall. ‘Tell that husband of yours he should write oftener to his mother. Women are like that. If ’twas your own son now, you’d understand.’

  ‘I know, I know,’ she said hastily.

  ‘Of course you do. You’re a fine big-hearted girl, and don’t think we’re not thankful to you. The wife now, she’s a fine decent woman but she have queer ways. She wouldn’t thank God Almighty if she thought He was listening, and she’ll never say it to you but she said it to others, how good you are to us.’

  ‘Don’t blame Michael,’ she replied in a low voice. ‘It isn’t his fault.’

  ‘I know, sure, I know.’

  ‘He never has time.’

  ‘Mention it to him though, you! Mention it to him. The letter to say you were coming, ’twas the first we had from himself for months. Tell him ’tis his mother, not me at all.’

  ‘If only you knew how he wanted to come!’ she exclaimed with a troubled glance.

  ‘Yes, yes, yes; but ’twill be two years more before he can. Two years to one at his hour of life ’tis only like tomorrow, but for old people that never know the time or the place …! And that same, it may be the last he’ll see of one or the other of us. And we’ve no one but him, girleen, more’s the pity.’

  It was certainly different with Tom, who had but one approach to any situation.

  *

  In a few days she had regained something of her strength. Tom cut her a stout ashplant and she went for short walks, to the strand, to the little harb
our or to the post office which was kept by Tom’s sisters. Mostly she went alone. To his delight the weather turned showery, but it never completely broke.

  All day long the horizon was peopled by a million copper-coloured cloudlets, rounded and tiny and packed back to the very limits of the sky like cherubs in a picture of the Madonna. Then they began to swell, bubble on bubble, expanding, changing colour; one broke away from the mass and then another; it grew into a race; they gathered, sending out dark streamers that blackened the day and broke the patina of the water with dark-green stormy paths; lastly, a shrill whistle of wind and wild driving rain enveloped everything in mist. She took shelter under a rock or at the lee-side of a fence, and watched the shower dissolve in golden points of light that grew into a sunlit landscape beyond, as the clouds like children in frolic terror scampered back pell-mell to the horizon, the blue strip of sky they left broadening, the rain thinning, the fields and sea stripping off their scum of shadow till everything was sparkling and steaming again.

  What it meant to her they could only guess when she returned. Whenever she remained too long in the house the shadow came on her again. Kate bade them take no notice.

  She seemed to be very drawn towards Kate. Her walks often took her to the post office, and there she sat for hours with the two sisters, frequently sharing their meals, and listening to Kate’s tales of old times in the parish, about her parents and her brother Tom, but most frequently about Michael’s youth.

  Kate was tall and bony with a long nose, long protruding chin and wire spectacles. Her teeth, like her sister’s, were all rotten. She was the sort country people describe as having a great heart, a masterful woman, always busy, noisy and good-humoured. Tom, who was very proud of her, told how she had gone off for a major operation carrying a basket of eggs to sell so that she wouldn’t have her journey for nothing. Her sister Joan was a nun-like creature who had spent some time in an asylum. She had a wonderfully soft, round, gentle face with traces of a girlish complexion, a voice that seldom rose above a whisper and the most lovely eyes; but when the cloud came on her she was perverse and obstinate. On the wall of the living-room, cluttered thick with pictures, was a framed sampler in ungainly lettering, ‘Eleanor Joan Shea, March 1881’. She was nominally postmistress, but it was Kate who did the work.