The Mangan Inheritance

by Brian Moore

  Feeley sighed and rose, wiping his mouth with the back of his hand. “Una, will you allow me one minute?” He turned to Mangan. “Father Burke does be in the presbytery all morning, barring an emergency. Why don’t you go up there now?”

  Mangan, realizing he was being dismissed, rose and said his thanks. “Not at all.” Feeley gave his dolphin grin. “And after you’ve finished with the priest, if you stop in here I could run you out to see Dinny Mangan.”

  “Dinny won’t be at home,” Mrs. Feeley snapped. “And you’re going nowhere, do you hear me, Seamus?”

  Her husband shrugged. Quickly, he ushered Mangan out of the kitchen and through the shop. “Sorry about that.” He winked his dolphin eye. “It’s her time of life. Hot flushes—the lot.” He unlocked the shop door. “Now, you go straight up the street, first right at the cross, and it’s the first house past the church. Good luck, Mr. Mangan.”

  The village was beginning to stir. As Mangan walked out, a small cart came up the street noisily hauling a rubber-wheeled milk cart loaded with empty clattering milk churns. The driver, a middle-aged man in a cap, tipped a wave to Mangan as he passed. A fat boy came out of an alley beside one of the pubs with a dolly on which he had stacked two yellow metal containers of propane gas. He lowered the dolly and nodded to Mangan. “Nice day.”

  “Nice day,” Mangan echoed. He started up his car and drove to the cross street, where, as instructed, he turned right. Ahead, the high spire of the church seemed to reel in the sky, so swiftly did the clouds scud past behind it. The church, like most others he had seen in Ireland, appeared unconscionably large for the village which surrounded it. Enclosed by a graveyard full of Celtic crosses, it was a grim gray fieldstone building with, beyond it, a house in the same stone, surrounded by a low stucco wall. A small iron gate led up a graveled walk to the gate of this presbytery. There was an old-fashioned bell, which he grasped and pulled. Within the house he heard it ring.

  Footsteps. An old woman in carpet slippers, gray work apron, and faded flowered dress opened the door.

  “Yes?”

  “Father Burke?”

  “Who is it calling?”

  “My name is Mangan.”

  “Come in, please.”

  The hall smelled institutional, an acrid stink of cleaning fluid and carbolic soap. The floor was shining wood, and as she moved ahead of him she shuffled her slippers as though by her action she gave an extra polish to its surface. “Nice day,” she said, opening a parlor door to the right of her hall. He went in and she closed the door behind him. The parlor was large, with a bay window which gave on the front garden and the street beyond it. The pictures on its walls were holy and palm leaves were twisted in cruciform shape over the door. On the mahogany dining table in the center of the room were copies of Catholic Truth Society pamphlets and African Missionary Society magazines. Six dining chairs were spaced around the table, in neat unuse, but in the bay-window alcove were two much-worn green leatherette armchairs and a small round table bearing an ashtray. Mangan went to the window and sat in one of the armchairs. At once, the door opened. He stood, as though caught in the commission of a theft. “Don’t get up,” a soft voice advised.

  The priest who entered the room was not at all what he had expected. He had envisaged an older man. But this priest was younger than he, a thin, pale-faced youth, his clerical suit one size too big for him, its stiff black serge trousers already shiny with wear in the knees and seat. His cheap celluloid Roman collar was attached to an ill-fitting black dickey. His hand, which he held out to Mangan, was rough as a farmer’s, its middle and index fingers painted brown by nicotine stains.

  “I’m Denis Burke,” he said. “And you must be Mr. Mangan.”

  “How do you do,” Mangan said. “I hope I’m not disturbing you.”

  “Not at all. Delighted to meet you,” the priest said, his smile revealing a mouthful of decaying teeth. “I hear you’ve come in search of your ancestors.”

  “How did you know that?”

  “There is nothing a person does not know in a place like this. That is the drawback of living here. You know too much about everybody, but it is not enough to keep your brain in rapid circulation. Sit down, won’t you?”

  Outside the window the stormy skies had muted to an obedient gray. A soft rain began to fall. The priest proffered cigarettes, then lit one himself. “Well, let’s see. You came to Drishane yesterday looking for a room in the Sceptre. Seamus Feeley fixed you up in the old Mangan house at Duntally.” The priest laughed. “That was a start, wasn’t it? And he tells me that you were born in Canada and you live in New York. Am I right so far?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, now. Tell me, what do you know of your family history?”

  So Mangan told him about the family Bible, which he had brought from Canada. He told about Drishane in the Bible’s record of births and deaths. He told about his grandfather sailing from Cork to Quebec, about his father’s abortive visit to Drishane many years ago, and, finally, that he was trying to find out if the family was related to James Clarence Mangan, the poet. He told of the Drinan biography with its theory that Mangan had not died celibate but had married a West Cork woman who left him and went back to Skibbereen. And that the son of that marriage had moved from Skibbereen in later years and settled in Drishane.

  “Mangan the poet?” Father Burke said. “Now, that’s interesting! Hundreds of lines of his I read when I was a boy in school. And his son lived here, did he?”

  “Yes. At least, according to one of his biographers. The other biographies contend that he never married at all. But it seems very odd that we in Canada would have books by and about him, and this tradition that we’re related to him, if it was just an invention of that one biographer, who, incidentally, was a priest. A Father Drinan.”

  “James Clarence Mangan,” Father Burke said. “I’m sure I have his poems someplace. When did he die?”

  “Eighteen forty-nine.” Mangan reached in his inside pocket and produced the daguerreotype. “This may be a photograph of him.”

  “But it’s a photograph of you!” the priest said. He turned the daguerreotype over. “J.M. 1847. Isn’t that interesting. I didn’t know they had photographs that far back.”

  “Those were among the first.”

  As the priest stared again at the photograph, a man pedaled up to the presbytery on a bicycle. He put the bicycle against the garden wall and opened the gate and hurried up the path. Now he rang the presbytery bell with several urgent peals. The priest rose, went to the bay window, knocked on it with his knuckles, and when he had secured the man’s attention, nodded to him. He then turned back to Mangan.

  “His wife must be sick again,” he said. “I will have to go with him. I’ll not be long. Look—would you like to come with me? We could talk in the car.”

  And so they went out into the soft rain. The heavily built man nodded to the priest. “It’s Molly,” he said. “Sorry now, Father.”

  “That’s all right, Kieran. Is she bad?”

  “She’s bad,” the man said. “The doctor is with her.”

  “I’ll be with you directly,” the priest said. He went down the hall and returned in a well-worn black raincoat and black hat. He carried a small bag. “My car is round the side,” he said. “Do you want to follow on the bike, Kieran?”

  “I’ll do that, Father. I’ll be there shortly,” the man said. He got on his bicycle and pedaled off. Mangan and the priest walked around to the rear of the house, where the priest’s battered little car was parked in an alley. “I may have to give her the last sacrament,” the priest said. “But it won’t take very long. Where did you come across that photograph? I’ve been thinking about that. Would there be any other photographs of Mangan around?”

  “Apparently not,” Mangan said. “Before I left New York I cabled the National Library in Dublin. They cabled back that there is no known photograph of him in existence. There are sketches and pen-and-pencil portraits, but all o
f them differ. And none of them is just like this daguerreo-type.”

  “So it could be a photograph of someone who wasn’t the poet?”

  “It could. But it’s certainly someone who’s related to me. And it looks a bit like the deathbed drawing of Mangan done in a Dublin hospital.”

  By now the little car was out of the village, and as it went along the small high-hedgerowed road, it slowed to a stop behind six swaying cows, which a small boy had let out of one field and was herding toward another field. The boy looked back, nodding respectfully to the priest. The cows were shunted to one side and the priest drove on and, farther up the road, turned into a narrow rough driveway, which led over rocky grazing foreland to a cottage under a spur of hill, sheltered from a sweep of strand and the rain-drenched, foaming sea. A child in a yellow slicker waited for them there, holding open an iron gate. The priest drove through the gateway, and the boy shut the gate behind them and ran on ahead into the cottage. There was another car in the farmyard. “That’s Dr. Murphy’s car,” the priest said. He took his small bag and got out, saying again that he would not be long, and went hurrying toward the door of the cottage, leaving Mangan alone in this unfamiliar landscape. The rain had turned to squall; the wind picked it up and lashed it in gusts across the yard, blurring the car’s windshield, blinding out the view. Rain, heavy as the rain on that day of her funeral, himself soaked and floundering on Madison Avenue on that last day of his life as her husband. It was as though on that funeral day they had ended together, she and he, and now, one week later, reborn but not renamed, searching a new identity, he had crossed the frontier of this land, carrying in his pocket like a passport a photograph of himself as a man long dead. To sit here in this priest’s car while the priest administered extreme unction to a dying Irish woman seemed a dream which like all true dreams moved at its own mysterious pace, without logic, toward a purpose he did not understand. To have spent his first night in Ireland, not in a hotel, but in that old farmhouse, in a room filled with holy pictures and a lamp in the shape of Christ’s heart—all of it seemed a dream which might lead him not toward the ancestor he hoped to find, the first poète maudit whose statue stood in parks, whose name was known to Irish history, but to humble relatives in this strange backward place, to people he might even be ashamed to claim as kin. Like the daguerreotype in his pocket, he was the bearer of a face to which no certain identity had yet been attached. Like the man in that photograph, he had once been someone, was now no one, and might here, in this small wild country on the edge of Europe, discover who and what he would become.

  The rain, beating and squalling, isolated him in the car so that he did not see the two figures leave the cottage. The car door opened. The priest looked in, smiling. “This is Dr. Murphy,” he said. “And this is Mr. Mangan from America,” moving aside to let the second man see Mangan. The doctor was a ruddy person with an inquisitive eye. “How do you do,” he said and peered again, closely. “Your name is Mangan? Are you by chance a relation of the Mangans hereabouts?”

  “Yes, I think so.”

  “You look like . . .” the doctor said, and stopped. He turned to the priest. “How long is it you’ve been here, Father?”

  “Three years.”

  “Ah, you wouldn’t remember the man I’m thinking of, then. Good day to you, Mr. Mangan. Goodbye, Father.”

  He moved off in the rain. The priest got into the car and banged the door, which shut improperly. “I wonder what man he’s talking about,” Mangan said.

  “I don’t know,” the priest said. “As I said, I’m not that long in Drishane.” He started the engine and drove to the gate. The child in the yellow slicker stood in the pelting rain holding it open. The priest waved to him as they passed.

  When they returned to the presbytery, Mangan went to his own car and brought the family Bible into the priest’s parlor. Father Burke sat down and read the flyleaf, then closed the Bible and asked: “Can you leave this with me?”

  “Of course.”

  “That way I can compare it with the parish records. But I’m afraid that will take a bit of time and I have to go out again. I have word of a death up by Dunmanway. I’ll have to leave you now.”

  “That’s all right. When will I get in touch with you?”

  “Come back in the morning,” the priest said. “Between ten and eleven. I’ll be here, please God.”

  The priest’s old housekeeper let him out. It was no longer raining, and in the rapid and dramatic changes which seemed normal here, the sky was now clear and cold, with high fleecy clouds. He drove down into the village and stopped outside Feeley’s store. At once Feeley’s head popped up behind the auctioneer’s sign in his window, and a moment later, smiling his strange dolphin grin, Feeley bounded out of the shop door and came to join him. “How did it go with Father Burke?”

  “Oh, fine.”

  “He’s a grand young man, isn’t he?” Feeley said. “And I have other news for you. Dinny Mangan will be around to see you at six this evening. He’ll come to your house himself.”

  “Thank you. And what about the other Mangan family? Con Mangan?”

  “Well, yes, there’s them, of course,” Feeley said. “But I have a feeling, just a notion mind you, that ’tis the Dinny Mangan connection that you’ll be closest to. He’s a grand chap, Dinny, a grand chap.”

  “But perhaps, as I won’t be seeing Dinny till this evening, I could go and see the other Mangans now.”

  Feeley put his head on one side as though to ponder. His white rubbery skin glistened as though it were wet. “You could,” he said, slowly. “Yes, you could. But you don’t know where they live, do you?”

  “I could follow directions.”

  “You could, you could. It’s up your way, so it is.”

  “Perhaps you could tell me the way?”

  “I would run you up, but I am desperate busy,” Feeley said.

  “No need. Where would it be in relation to where I’m living now?”

  “Where would it be?” Feeley wagged his head as though considering the merits of this question and, suddenly, seemed to come to a decision. “Why not?” he said, as though to himself. “Yes, it’s not hard to find, not hard at all. Look, the road you are on, the road that goes up to your house, you don’t turn down to your house, do you see, but you continue on up. The road becomes a boreen a bit further up the mountain.”

  “A boreen?”

  “A little road. Just a track, do you see. But the car will manage it. Oh, yes. You go right up to the top of the mountain. Go to the very top of the road. Over the top you’ll see the sea. But, before you get to the very top, you pass a house. It’s off behind some whin bushes. That’s Gorteen, the old Mangan house. That house is two hundred years old, so it is. But don’t go to the house. Continue on up the road and right at the top there’s a bit of a field on the left and there’s a caravan there. That’s where Con hangs out, when he’s home. Do you follow me, now?”

  “Yes, thanks. Just go up to the top of the mountain.”

  “That’s it. And remember that Dinny Mangan will come by to your place at six. And by the way, sir, I’d not mention to Con that you’re seeing Dinny. Or vice versa, as they say.” Feeley smiled and wagged his head. “Mind you, if anyone asks, I said nothing.”

  “Thanks again.”

  “Pop in and see me in the morning on your way back from the priest’s. Let me know how you get on.”

  “All right, I will,” Mangan said, but as he drove off he wondered how Feeley could have known he was going to see the priest tomorrow. Surely in the few minutes it took to drive from the presbytery to the store the priest had not phoned Feeley with the news? And as he turned up the road toward Duntally, it came to him that life in Drishane was the obverse of his life in New York. There, in the last weeks, he had discovered that nobody knew or cared whether he lived or died; no neighbors saw his comings and goings; there was no community. Here, even though he had arrived only twenty-four hours earlier, every one of h
is movements was known, every step he took was noted and commented on by one of the inhabitants. Irrationally, this pleased him. Here he was of interest for himself; his name had a familiar ring on these tongues. Here, for the first time in years, no one knew him as Beatrice Abbot’s husband.

  At the outskirts of the village he turned up the side road toward Duntally. There were few houses on this road, and by the time he reached the crossroad higher up, there was no house in sight in any direction. Turning at the crossroads, he drove along a bare narrow road which circled the mountainside, past grazing lands whose only inhabitants were black-faced sheep which cropped indolently on grassy knolls by the roadside, indifferent to the car’s passing. He passed the new bungalow surrounded by the rubble of its building and then, coming to the gateway to Duntally, drove on up the road, which began to climb more steeply, narrowing to two ruts where the wheels of cars and carts had passed before him. Purple patches of heather and large isolated rocks broke the gray-green monotony on either side. He was forced to shift down to second gear to ascend the last steep incline that led to the mountaintop. On his left he saw the whin bushes Feeley had spoken of, which even in their present wild state evidenced a man-made regularity at odds with the untouched wilderness here at the mountaintop. The house they sheltered was concealed from view, but as he passed it he saw the ridge of its buckled slate roof. At the very top of the incline the car almost stalled, then ground forward to rest on the ridge. Ahead was blue sky, and as he looked down he saw the little track of road fall precipitously down the other side, going toward a ribbon of intersecting road, far below, a road which ran among cultivated fields, around the sweep of a sea bay enclosed by wild headlands. This splendid panorama was marred by a dirty yellow-colored caravan trailer, up on wooden blocks in a field on his right. From the trailer on a clothesline which extended to a rock on the hillside, sheets and miscellaneous garments flapped like the flags of poverty. A quiff of smoke rose toward the sky from a dirty exhaust vent. Someone was at home.