I am Mary Dunne

by Brian Moore

  ‘And that’s the whole story, Maria. I mean, the letter had something to do with this idea he had that you’d been in Montreal, come right to the flat, then decided not to see him. And that’s it, that’s all I know.’

  ‘As you say,’ Tee said, ‘that’s it.’ I saw him give Ernie a meaningful look and then he said, ‘Could I see you a moment?’ They both went out into the front hall and I heard them whisper male whispers about me. Then they came back, Ernie first, Ernie saying, ‘Well, gee, I really must be getting along now. Listen, and thanks for dinner and everything. And, ah, I’m sorry about the letter, golly, Maria, as I said there’s nothing I wouldn’t do to prevent, I mean I’d never want to see you hurt or anything. As Terence here says, and he’s right, all that is water under the bridge, no sense you worrying about it now.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Yes. Well, good night, Ernie.’

  ‘Good night. Sorry I got out of line.’

  ‘That’s all right, you didn’t.’

  Terence shook hands with Ernie and we all went back into the front hall. Ernie took my hand between his large damp palms and pressed it, staring at me with blind eyes. ‘Good night, dear,’ he said.

  I withdrew my hand. Terence handed him his cocoa straw hat, then held open the apartment door. Ernie put the hat on his head, shifted the angle to make sure it was secure, then, with a clumsy, half-humble bow to us both, turned and walked off towards the elevator. In my last sight of him, as Terence closed our door, he reached furtively in his side pocket for the glasses he had concealed, put them on, then moved forward more confidently, as though restored to sight.

  ‘I think you need a drink,’ Terence said, turning to me, holding me. I pressed my face against his coat and heard my heart beat, loud. I felt he must hear it too, but I said, ‘No, not a drink. I’m all right.’ I said I had better do the dishes and so Tee said he would help me and I remember carrying dishes in from the dining-room and putting detergent in the dishwasher while Terence said he thought Ernie wasn’t normal, there was something mad about him and I remember talking about Ernie for a bit, but in my mind was that picture of Hat, in Montreal, half-mad, standing in Ernie’s living-room, peering through the slats of the venetian blind at some girl he imagined was me come back to him at last. And then sitting in that chair, waiting, waiting, staring at the front door while it got dark, he sat there staring at that door all night as my father dead in the Park Plaza stared at the door, and I thought I saw Mama dead too, lying now on the kitchen floor in Butchersville, the wind from under the door jamb blowing her grey hair into her dead, staring eyes.

  ‘Mary, are you all right?’

  ‘Yes,’ I said.

  ‘Would you like to lie down? I’ll put these dishes through and make some coffee. Lie down for a few minutes and I’ll bring you a cup.’

  I said yes I would and got up and went into the bedroom. In the bedroom I put on all the lights and sat on the bed and thought about that long letter Hat had written. He wrote the letter to rebuke me, then killed himself to give point to his rebuke. Yet, the letter never reached me. Until today, I did not even know he was a suicide. Nor will I ever know, for sure. Yet in his bungling, didn’t he achieve the most subtle revenge of all? The letter was probably a re-hash of the reproaches he shouted at me in our last days together. But I cannot be sure: I do not know what it said. Not knowing is the worst, it is those other things I do not know, like the name and the face of the woman who was in bed with my father the afternoon he died, it is those things I will never know, they are what frighten me and it is because of them that I can no longer find my way back to the Mary Dunne I was in my schooldays, to that Mary Phelan who giggled and wept in the Blodgetts’ bed-sitter, or to that girl who laughed long ago in a winter street when Hat cried, ‘Mange la merde,’ when such things were funny, when I was Mary Bell. I will not even be able to go back to today when I am Mary Lavery, for today was a warning, a beginning, I mean forgetting my name, it was like forgetting my name that day, long ago, in Juarez, I will forget again, I will forget more often, it will happen to me every day and perhaps every hour, and as I sat on my bed and thought of that, the dooms came down, the Juarez dooms.

  Terence came in and saw me. ‘What is it?’ he asked, but I could not tell him. ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘I’m down, I feel down.’

  He came and lay beside me on the bed and held me, but it did not help. I felt the dooms, I felt as though I had been plugged in to some strange electric current and that current ran through me and made me tremble. It was the dooms, the Juarez dooms and this time I knew it would never go away, I would tremble and shake for the rest of my days. And now that it had come upon me, Terence would leave me, the doctors would advise it, they would lock me up, and so I began to weep and Tee kissed me and said, ‘Listen, darling, listen, the best thing to do about all that is to forget it. You know the way Hat drank, he wouldn’t know what he was doing and besides, even if it were suicide, it had nothing to do with you. Whatever was wrong with him was wrong, long before you met him.’

  ‘Angus said that too,’ I said. I felt like someone making conversation.

  ‘Angus who?’

  ‘McMurtry, the psychiatrist.’

  ‘What did he say?’

  ‘Oh, it was long ago, he told me whatever was wrong with Hat had something to do with his family – his parents.’

  ‘Well,’ said Tee. ‘You see. Now, try to forget it.’

  ‘It’s not that. It’s me,’ I said. ‘I’m afraid and I don’t know why. I think something’s happening to my mind.’

  ‘Nonsense,’ Tee said.

  And the phone rang. We lay and listened, ‘Don’t go,’ I told Tee. ‘It’s him again, it’s Ernie. Or Janice Sloane. Or somebody else I don’t want to speak to.’

  ‘No, it’s Bowen for me. I’ll be back in a moment.’ I lay and did not weep but my heart frightened me, the electric current ran in my body: it made me tremble; it would not go away; it was here to stay.

  ‘It’s for you, love,’ Tee called from the living-room. ‘Your mother.’

  My mother has cancer, a rectal lump, and when they do the operation, they will simply open her up, look at what is there, sew her up again, and send her home to die. In the Juarez dooms, all things are black. In the Juarez dooms, fear comes like vomit in my throat and the electric current runs in my body, making my heart thump and my hands shake and when I picked up the receiver and said ‘Hello’, my mother knew at once.

  ‘Mary, it’s me. How are you, are you all right?’

  ‘Sure. I’m fine,’ said some recording tape within me.

  ‘You don’t sound fine. Are you ill?’

  ‘I’m fine, Mama. I got your letter today.’

  Her voice, far away in Butchersville, ignoring what I’d said. ‘Listen, Mary, were you calling me?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Ah, I thought it was you. Mrs Daly at the phone office said it was New York, so it’s Mary, I said to myself, I hope she’s all right, why would she call? So, anyway, I thought I’d better call you back. What is it, dear, is there anything I can do for you?’

  ‘Is there anything I can do for you?’ I asked. ‘I mean about the hospital?’

  ‘The hospital?’

  ‘Your letter,’ I said. ‘About that lump of yours. How do you feel, are you worried about it?’

  ‘So that’s why you called. Of course, why didn’t I think of that? Oh Lord. I didn’t mean to scare you.’ And she laughed.

  ‘What are you laughing about?’

  ‘I forgot what a worrier you are, dear. Now, don’t you be upsetting yourself, sure it’s only a minor thing, it’s not much more than having a boil lanced.’

  ‘Still,’ I said. ‘There’ll be an anaesthetic. You might feel sick after it. Why don’t you let me come up and take care of you for a few days?’

  ‘Oh, Mary dear.’ And I heard my mother laugh again. ‘Ah, you’re sweet,’ she said. ‘And I always love to see you. But why waste a lot of money just for a
day or two? Why not come up and bring, ah, Terence. Come up and stay a while, when the weather’s a bit better?’

  ‘But I wasn’t talking about a holiday,’ I said.

  ‘I know, dear, I know. You’re worrying about it being cancer, aren’t you?’

  ‘Are you?’ I said.

  ‘Well, I am, a wee bit.’

  ‘Then maybe you’d like me to be there?’

  ‘And have you worrying for the two of us?’ my mother said. ‘Is that it?’

  ‘Oh, Mama, I’m not worried. It’ll be all right.’

  ‘Well, of course it will.’ Her voice, the voice of my childhood, that voice which said a kiss would make the hurt all better. ‘Yes, of course, it’ll be all right,’ my mother’s voice said. ‘Why, Dr McLarnon says this sort of lump is common as carrots in women of my age. Oh, of course, I know it could be serious, I’m not daft. But I’ll say my prayers and put myself in God’s hands. That’s all any of us can do.’

  God: I see Jesus, effeminate and sanctimonious; he wears a wispy brown beard and a white nightgown. He holds his hands up, palm outward, as though stopping traffic. He stops me. When his name comes up in our conversations, my mother and I become strangers in a darkness, far away from contact with each other; strangers on a long distance wire.

  ‘Yes,’ I said. ‘I suppose so.’

  ‘Tell you what, Mary. I’ll get Dick to phone you the minute he gets the results. All right?’

  ‘All right.’ I did not tell her I’d already spoken to Dick.

  ‘So, don’t worry,’ my mother said. And then, ‘How are you, yourself? You sound a bit down in the dumps.’

  ‘I am, a bit,’ I said. ‘But it will pass. I hope.’

  ‘Of course it will. And, Mary?’

  ‘Three minutes,’ an operator said.

  ‘All right, operator,’ my mother said. ‘We’re just finishing.’

  ‘Mama, what was it you were going to ask me?’

  ‘It doesn’t matter, it was nothing,’ my mother said in a rushed voice. All she could think of now was that the three minutes was up. ‘Good night, dear. We’ll keep in touch.’

  ‘Mama?’ I said. ‘Mama? I want to ask you something. Do you think I’ve changed much in these last years?’

  Again, she laughed. ‘You haven’t changed at all, you’re still talking over the time limit.’

  ‘No, seriously.’

  ‘Look,’ said my mother. ‘Good night, now. You haven’t changed for me. You’re my daughter, you’ll always be the same to me. Good night, darling.’

  And she hung up.

  ‘Anything wrong at home?’ Terence asked, coming in from the kitchen with two cups of coffee. I told him about the letter this morning and about my earlier phone call to Dick.

  ‘Poor you,’ Tee said. ‘What a day you’ve had. No wonder you’re feeling low.’

  I looked at him when he said that. Did he know? He sat facing me, smiling, sympathetic, sipping at his coffee. Did he know the Juarez dooms were on me, the electric current dooms which cut me off from everyone else, for in these dooms it is not the world which is at fault, it is me who is at fault, my fault, my fault, my most grievous fault, yet I do not know my fault, the Juarez dooms are not about real things, I do not think about Hat’s suicide, I do not know what is it I have done and so, not knowing, I cannot forgive myself. I know only that I have done wrong, that I am being punished, that I will never be happy again. The greatest happiness would be to be as I was a few hours ago before these dooms came upon me. But that will never be, I will get worse, I will end in a madhouse, a vegetable, smeared in my own excrement, unable even to clean myself and once I think of that I know Terence is the one who will be forced to commit me to the asylum and now I am afraid to be in the same room with him for he will see how mad I have become and I must be cunning and escape so I say to him, ‘Yes, you’re right, I have had a hard day. In fact, I think I should take a hot bath and go to bed, if you wouldn’t mind too much?’

  ‘Sure,’ he said. ‘Go ahead. I’m going to bed myself in a moment.’ He smiled at me.

  So I escaped him.

  But not the dooms. Naked in the bathroom, I stood and stared at myself in the full-length mirror. I had run a bath but just as I went to get into the tub I saw myself naked in this mirror. I looked at my face, a mask which looked back at me, at my body which hid what happens inside it, for this is hell and I am in it, the strange current runs in me, it will never turn off, I will get worse, I will lose not only my memory, but my mind and at the end I will be that vegetable squatting on the floor of the asylum’s disturbed ward, unable to say its name, any of its names, for it has forgotten, therefore it is not, it has no name, it cannot even clean itself. And death which frightened me all day, death which brought hints of these dooms, death did not frighten me now, death was quiet graves, Hat’s grave, my father’s grave, stone markers in the snow. I thought of snow as I put on my dressing gown and went out of the bathroom. I thought of the white, light, rubble-filled space, the one I see below, from the kitchen window. I went into the kitchen, but I was quiet, I did not want to disturb Terence. I heard him moving around in the bedroom as I shut the kitchen door. I went to the kitchen window and opened it. I climbed out of the window on to the fire escape. The iron steps of the fire escape were warm against my bare feet. The building next door to ours was torn down some months ago: they are going to put up a new apartment building in the empty space. I looked down at the narrow, dark area way, four storeys below the fire-escape railing, but I was not drawn down to that darkness, I was drawn beyond it, to those strange palisades made of old wooden doors which wreckers erect around these waste lots. The street light shone on the whitish, dusty, brick-rubbled rectangle where that building used to be. I would have to climb up and balance on the fire-escape railing, then jump far out, jumping the ditch of the narrow area way to fall where I wanted to fall, inside the wooden palisades, into that white, light, brick-rubbled rectangle.

  I put my hand on the railing. I looked down and, at once, felt giddy. I could not climb up on to the railing. I could not balance up there. I was afraid, very afraid to be out on the fire escape at all, so I ducked back through the kitchen window. I shut the window.

  I went into the bedroom. Terence was in bed, half asleep, a book lax in his hand. I got into bed, lying well away from him. The electric current ran within me. I listened as he let the book drop on the floor. He leaned over, his body touching mine. He kissed my cheek.

  ‘I love you,’ he said.

  ‘I love you,’ I said.

  He reached for the bedside switch. ‘Want the light on?’

  ‘No.’

  He switched off the light. I lay very still wondering why he did not hear my heartbeat. If I was afraid to jump off the fire-escape, then I am more afraid of physical pain than I am of these dooms. If Hat killed himself, it was a stupid, selfish thing to do. Hat was always the actor, always making dramas out of his fairly ordinary problems. And, at the end, so caught up in his self-dramatization that he overplayed his role. But if I make that harsh judgment on Hat, then what was I doing, playacting out there on the fire escape? And what are these dooms of mine but a frightening, unreal play going on inside my head, a play I must sit through and suffer, for if I do not fight them, the dooms will not leave me.

  And so, here in the dark, I closed my eyes and went back sixteen years. They were waiting: Mother Marie-Thérèse and the class. She wrote it on the blackboard. Cogito ergo sum. My hand went up. Memento ergo sum. And see, when I put my mind to it, I did manage to remember most of the thoughts, words, and deeds of today, and now I will not panic, these dooms may just be pre-menstrual, I will not over-dramatize my problems, I am not losing my memory, I know who I am, my mother said tonight that I am her daughter and while she lives I will be that, I will not change, I am the daughter of Daniel Malone Dunne and Eileen Martha Ring, I am Mary Patricia Dunne, I was christened that and there is nothing wrong with my heart or with my mind: in a few hours I will beg
in to bleed, and until then I will hold on, I will remember what Mama told me, I am her daughter, I have not changed, I remember who I am and I say it over and over and over, I am Mary Dunne, I am Mary Dunne, I am Mary Dunne.

  BRIAN MOORE was born in Belfast. He emigrated to Canada in 1948 and then moved to California. He twice won the Canadian Governor General’s Award for Fiction and has been given a special award from the United States Institute of Arts and Letters. He won the Author’s Club First Novel Award for The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne and the James Tait Black Memorial Prize for The Great Victorian Collection. The Doctor’s Wife, The Colour of Blood – winner of the Sunday Express 1988 Book of the Year – and Lies of Silence were all shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Six of his novels have been made into films – The Luck of Ginger Coffey, Catholics, The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne, Cold Heaven, The Statement and Black Robe. Brian Moore died in 1999.

  By the Same Author

  The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne

  The Feast of Lupercal

  The Luck of Ginger Coffey

  An Answer from Limbo

  The Emperor of Ice Cream

  Fergus

  Catholics

  The Great Victorian Collection

  The Doctor’s Wife

  The Mangan Inheritance

  The Temptation of Eileen Hughes

  Cold Heaven

  Black Robe

  The Colour of Blood

  Lies of Silence

  No Other Life

  The Statement

  The Magician’s Wife

  ALSO AVAILABLE BY BRIAN MOORE

  THE DOCTOR’S WIFE

  Sheila Redden, a quiet, thirty-seven-year-old doctor’s wife, has long been looking forward to returning with her husband to the town where they spent their honeymoon over twenty years ago. Little does she suspect that after a chance encounter in Paris she will end up spending her holiday with a man she has only just met, an American ten years her junior.

  Four weeks later, Sheila is nowhere to be found. Owen Deane, her brother, follows her steps to Paris in the hopes of shedding light on her disappearance, but soon begins to wonder if she will ever reappear. Interspersed with Sheila’s harrowing memories of her hometown of Ulster at the height of The Troubles, this is a compelling tale of love, escape and abandon. ‘It is uncanny: No other male writer, I swear (and precious few females), knows so much about women’