The Mangan Inheritance

by Brian Moore

  His grandfather had died in his community. His death was a part of his life. But here, in a room which she had never seen, a room filled with flowers and greenery, with music whose tone was joyful and light, an actor had read a poem which had no significance for the dead woman it was supposed to commemorate. Here, there was no body. No hearse waited outside to bring the mourners to a cemetery, to spaded earth at the rim of a grave. Here an audience waited for a Broadway producer to eulogize an actress and praise her gift for aping people she was not. It was the actress who was commemorated here today, not the woman. For who among this audience really knew the woman who had walked out on her marriage, who had died drunk, roasted with her lover in a wall of flame.

  That was her funeral pyre. That was the time for weeping, for rending of garments, for gnashing of teeth. But who among this audience was capable of such grief? Certainly not he. For, of all here present, wasn’t his attendance the most ludicrous, he who, far from mourning her, had sat in Montreal filled with hatred for her on the very night she died, who sat here now unweeping, the unworthy inheritor of all her wealth.

  Leo Davoren, portly and assured, rose from his seat, nodding and smiling greetings to the film stars in the front row as he made his way toward the lectern. Now he would take out a speech, written for him by some writer he had hired two days ago and ordered to produce something suitable, sentimental, and sincere. Davoren! Davoren, who knew her only as an element in the successful deals he had put together, who saw her socially only at business lunches and dinners, who had fought with her many times, haggling over dollars and perquisites. Davoren! The waiter from Sardi’s should come forward and deliver the eulogy. He knew her just as well.

  But why not Davoren? He was the sort of person Beatrice might have chosen herself. He was a Caesar in her world. For her, that was what mattered.

  Davoren put his notes on the lectern, then fitted a pair of half spectacles over his ears. Watching him do this, Mangan foresaw Davoren coming up to him after the service, wrapping an arm around his shoulder, telling him of his sorrow. Foresaw others, many others, who would come to him and perform the same empty rite. A charade, another performance, a disgusting fraud! Why should he go through with it? What did it matter to anyone whether he was here or not? By next week, none of these people would care whether he lived or died. He thought of the Christmas cards and rose in sudden panic, trying not to make a noise, but clumsily scraping the floor with the legs of his chair as he pushed it back and stepped into the aisle. Those in front of him raised their heads, acknowledging the interruption, but no one looked directly at the leaver. Turning his back on the room, Mangan made his way in heavy tiptoe toward the exit doors, opening them as Davoren spoke his first words: “One day, about ten years ago, my secretary informed me that I had an appointment with a young actress. I had not made the appointment myself. I was not pleased.”

  He shut the doors on that voice. The ushers waiting in the outer hall turned and looked at him inquiringly. “Are you all right, sir?” one asked. He nodded and went past them, buttoning his soaking overcoat. As he reached the doorway, three young men loitering just inside looked up. They held cameras and strobes and were familiar to him from the past; paparazzi, freelances who earned a living by picking up shots of the famous at social events. Their eyes found his face and dismissed it; a tabula rasa. They went back to their conversation.

  The rain had stopped. The chauffeurs standing in a knot by one of the parked limousines looked at him, wondering if the service was already over. Avoiding their gaze, he turned into Eighty-first Street, passing by a side entrance to the funeral chapel, a place where coffins would be taken in and out. At once, he had the sensation of being followed. He was sure that someone had seen him leave and was coming around the corner to ask him to go back. Head down, he quickened his pace, pretending a brisk walk to a firm destination, but he panicked, the walk became a half run, his trouser legs wrapping themselves wetly around his calves as he shambled down the block. He did not risk a look behind him until he came to Fifth Avenue, but when he did there was no one on the street. Of course not. None of those people gave a damn if he attended the service or not. Most of them wouldn’t care if they never saw him again. Most of them never would see him again. His life as Beatrice Abbot’s husband was over.

  He looked across Fifth Avenue. Facing him was the Metropolitan Museum, huge, gray, and monumental, like some Soviet Palace of the People. Over the main entrance an outsize red-and-white banner advertised an exhibition of Russian paintings. Three weeks ago, under that same banner, he had seen Beatrice kiss her lover, then run down those steps with him, going off to her new life. Ignoring the traffic, he stepped out blindly, crossing Fifth Avenue. On the far pavement he turned toward the museum’s main entrance, drawn on as though the building were a terminal from which he would depart on a journey. He climbed the monumental steps. Already, daylight was fading over New York and myriad lights began to be switched on as though in tabulation of the millions of lives in this city. He went into the huge entrance hall: the guards, seeing that he carried nothing, waved him on. In front of him people swarmed to and fro, going to the information desk, queueing at the entrances to exhibits, clustering around the gift shops. After a moment’s indecision he went and sat on one of the octagonal banquettes in the middle of the hall. He shut his eyes. The voices of the crowd echoed in the high vaulted ceilings above him like the cry of birds in some great cave.

  She was dead. The anger he had felt against her, the self-doubt he had tormented himself with in the past weeks, all that was over. She was dead. All that was left of her now was her money, money she might not have given him had she been able to prevent it. The great, the noble thing to do now would be to renounce that inheritance. But he knew he had no intention of doing the noble thing.

  The museum was closing. People came down the great staircase and emptied out of the ground-floor galleries. Time to go. Back on Madison Avenue, the funeral service would be over. Some of those who attended it would speculate on his absence and assume he had stayed away from a cuckold’s spite. But it no longer mattered what those people thought. He was no longer Beatrice Abbot’s husband, an involuntary hanger-on in her world. Nor was he James Mangan, the nineteen-year-old student whose poem had been published in The New Yorker. In the years between, he had been like Scott Fitzgerald, an indifferent caretaker of his talent, but, unlike Fitzgerald, at thirty-six he had been given a second chance.

  A museum guard passed by. “Closing,” the guard warned. “We’re closing.”

  All about him voices, footsteps, the sounds of leaving. As he rose to go, he felt, heavy in his side pocket, the daguerreotype in its brass frame. He touched it through the cloth of his jacket. I will go to Ireland.

  Part Two

  As he drove into the town of Bantry, he passed a high stone wall which ran for more than a mile enclosing a huge estate, once the seat of English earls, now a museum to a vanished way of life. Ahead, as he came around the elbow of Bantry Bay, small fishing boats were moored at stone quays, and behind them the edge of the town spilled down to the water in a cluster of gray, severe buildings: convent, warehouse, church. He drove into the main square, which opened on the quays. A fair was in progress. All around were neighing mares, colts, bellowing calves separated from their mothers, dull heifers lifting their tails to drop gobbets of hot turd on the concrete. Wild-looking, poorly dressed people walked about, raw boys and girls, women in mourning black, red-faced farmers in cloth caps. He parked his little red rented Ford in front of a row of plain public houses, whose dark rooms were loud with talk and heavy with the stench of urine and yeast. Buyers and sellers of animals spilled from pub to pavement and back again in the course of constant barter.

  Farther up the town, Mangan saw a maze of streets and shops. He walked three blocks before he came to what he sought, a kiosk marked with the word Telefōn in the Irish manner. The phone system was old-fashioned. He put in coins as instructed and asked the operator to get
him the Sceptre Hotel in Drishane.

  He had arrived in Ireland that morning, flying from New York to land at Shannon at 8:00 a.m. local time. For Mangan, still on New York time, it was the middle of the night. A heavy-looking man in a worn tweed suit waited for him outside the airport customs area.

  “Mr. Mangan? I’m from Collins and O’Brien. I have your car for you, that you booked in New York.”

  They went to a car-rental counter, where Mangan signed some papers. Afterward, the heavy man, pushing an airport cart filled with Mangan’s baggage, preceded him out into the cold morning light. “Is this your first visit, then?”

  “Yes.”

  “You will get rain, I’d say. It is not the best time of year for a holiday. Here is your car, so.”

  His car was alone in the parking lot. The heavy man took out a road map and spread it across the car roof. “Drishane, was it? Well, you’ll take the road here to Limerick, then on to Cork City, do you see? And then to Brandon and so to Bantry. It’s a good road all the way. When you get to Bantry, you turn down in the direction of Mizen Head. That’s the very end of the country, down there. The very end of the land, as you might say.”

  “How long should it take me?”

  “I’d say six hours would see you nicely.”

  And so he had set off, driving somewhat uncertainly on the left-hand side of the road. At noon he reached Cork, the city in which his great-grandfather had lived in British Army married quarters after service in India. From Cork, his seventeen-year-old grandfather had sailed to Canada to seek his fortune. He stopped the car and walked along what seemed to be a main thoroughfare, a wide, winding street with statues in it, filled with a clamor of pedestrians hurrying in and out of old-fashioned department stores and cheap-looking cafés. In one of these cafés he had a sandwich and a pot of tea, then drove on to a town called Brandon. Now, six and a half hours after leaving Shannon, he was in Bantry, and still not at his destination.

  In New York, in the Irish Tourist Office on Fifth Avenue, he had asked if there was a hotel in Drishane. The girl consulted a book. “There’s a little place called the Sceptre,” she said. “Small, you know. But you should have no trouble getting a room at this time of year. Give them a ring when you’re on the road, just to be sure they’re open.”

  In the telephone kiosk in Bantry, the phone rang and rang, but there was no answer from Drishane. After a time the operator came on the line. “No answer, sir,” she said.

  “Could the number be out of order?”

  “I wouldn’t say so.”

  “Well, would the hotel be closed?”

  “I don’t know, sir. You could try later.”

  He came out of the kiosk. It was beginning to rain. By the map, Drishane couldn’t be more than half an hour’s drive. He went back to his car. He had not slept on the plane and now had trouble with drowsiness as he drove out of Bantry and came to a sign which said: to mizen head. He turned in at the sign onto a road narrower than any he had traveled, a dangerous winding road with hedgerows like blindfolds. That sense of a familiar unfamiliar which he had felt earlier now deserted him. Here his readings of Joyce and Yeats and O’Casey were no help. He felt he did not know Ireland at all. The very end of the country, the heavy man had said. The very end of the land, down here.

  After driving for about fifteen minutes, having passed through a village called Durrus, he again saw the sea; this time a great lough, a long, wild inland reach of ocean, far below on his right. On the perimeter of this lough were small patchwork-quilt fields, poorer than any he had passed to date. Cottages built lonely in the lee of hillocks overlooked these fields, their windows facing away from the cold sea winds. In the next ten minutes of driving he saw no other car or no living thing, except for some gulls circling a bog. Again the road forked inland and he drove alongside the rim of a deserted stone quarry. On a hill above him were the ruins of three old roofless cottages, abandoned perhaps a hundred years ago. He passed a crossroads, with a tiny grocery shop and placards out front advertising The Irish Times and The Irish Press. At the crossroads, a sign: DRISHANE 5.

  His eyes felt heavy. As soon as he reached the hotel he must get a few hours’ sleep. The sea came up again on the horizon and he saw what seemed a rock far, far out, with a lighthouse on it. The car went over a hump of road. In the distance, a huddle of slate rooftops, and thrusting above them the gray spire of a church. He came to a road sign: DRISHANE and drove into the village street, which intersected with a small cross street, which led up to the church, the presbytery, and the school. In the main street were five small shops, three public houses, a bank, a garage, a post office in a tobacconist’s shop, and a two-story building painted a surprising mauve, with a sign over the door: THE SCEPTRE HOTEL. He parked at the hotel doorway and got out.

  There were two people on the street, a woman coming out of a food store and a man sitting idle on a small tractor. Both were looking at him, without seeming to do so. The front door of the hotel was shut. There was a brass bell socket, with a bell, which he pressed. He heard it ring inside. The woman went back into the food store and a moment later reappeared with another woman, both looking at him. The man on the tractor lit his pipe. Mangan rang again. After what seemed a long moment, he heard slouching footsteps. A bolt was drawn behind the door. It opened to reveal an old woman in black cardigan and gray woolen dress, who seemed to be having trouble with her lower set of false teeth.

  “I’m looking for a room,” Mangan said.

  “I’m sorry. We’re shut.”

  “Shut?”

  “Mr. and Mrs. Fallon that owns the hotel have gone on their holidays to Majorca. They’ll be away till next week. I’m sorry, now.”

  “Is there another hotel somewhere in this area?”

  “There’s a hotel at Crookhaven, but it’s shut as well.”

  Behind the old woman, a plain girl came up the corridor, wiping her hands on a dish towel. ”Wachair, tell them to ask at Feeley’s. Go and ask at Feeley’s, sir, it’s just across the street. Seamus Feeley would know if there’s any place open. You might find a bed-and-breakfast place.”

  The old woman nodded in agreement, her dim eyes not seeming to focus on him. “Yes, sir, just across the street there,” she said, pointing past him. “D’you see the sign?”

  “Thank you,” he said. The girl nodded. The old woman gave him a wandering smile and a bob of her head as she shut the heavy door. He turned back to the street. A cold wind blew up. Black clouds slid overhead, casting a running shadow on the pavements. He went across the street, watched by the man on the tractor and the woman at the doorway of the food store.

  The door to S. Feeley’s office was shut. In the glazed window was a legend: S. P. FEELEY, AUCTIONEER & REAL ESTATE. Under it a cardboard notice: CLOSED. But next door in the same building was a small general store which also bore the sign: S. FEELEY. He went into the store, which was like the front room of a cottage, jammed with tiny aisles, lined with grocery items, a cold-meats section, hardware, sweets, fishing tackle, Irish sweaters, rubber boots, and a bakery counter. The shop seemed empty. As he went up to the cash register, a voice from the rear called “Shop!” and a fat, fair woman came in from what seemed to be a kitchen in the back of the premises, holding a large black cat in her arms. She let the cat down and looked up, seeming startled. Then, swiftly, she masked her startled look with a shopkeeper’s half smile. “Afternoon, sir. You’d be wanting?”

  “I was told to ask for Mr. Feeley. It’s about a room. The hotel is shut and they sent me over here.”

  “It would be a room for yourself, then? Bed and breakfast?”

  “Well, yes. Or just a room?”

  “Just a minute, please.”

  With a conciliatory smile the fat woman turned away and went to the rear of the premises. After a moment she came back, beckoning. “If you’ll just step this way, sir, please.”

  The shop was in the front part of the Feeley home. Behind it was a big modern kitchen, and there was
a passageway with a new figured carpet which led under a colored oleograph of the Sacred Heart to a parlor with a suite of matched furniture. Passing through the parlor, they entered a room which from the reversed sign in the glazed window was the office to which he had been directed in the first place. It was a small crowded place with a turf fire burning in the grate. On the mantelpiece above the fire was a colored plaster statue of the Virgin Mary, a bottle of Paddy whiskey, two glasses, and a recumbent gray cat. There were two old stuffed armchairs before the fire and all around the room a jumbled profusion of steel filing cabinets and tables spilling over with loose folders. At a wall desk under a large-scale Ordnance Survey map sat a small, stout man of about Mangan’s age, dressed in a tweed jacket, an Aran turtleneck sweater, corduroy trousers, and battered suede boots. He was totally bald, and when he turned toward them, his thick rubbery lips curving in a smile, his bulbous eyes set back in the sides of his head like the eyes of an animal, he reminded Mangan at once of that intelligent, amiable mammal, the dolphin.

  “This is my husband,” the fair woman said. “Seamus, this is the gentleman.” She nodded to Mangan and withdrew.

  “It was about a room, was it?” the stout man asked.

  “Yes. The hotel sent me over. They said you might know of some place.”