by Brian Moore
The sun was declining beneath the blue sea,
When I strayed with my love to the pure crystal
fountain—”
“That’s not the right one at all,” the little man snapped. “‘My Dark Rosaleen,’ I have heard that one. It’s a different one entirely.”
”That made me love Mary, the Rose of Tralee,” the girl sang, ignoring him.
“Ah, will you give over with that,” the little man shouted. “I told you, it’s the wrong one.”
“But you’ve heard of ‘My Dark Rosaleen,’” Mangan said to the little man.
“I think my uncle used to recite that one,” the little man said. “I remember now. Wait. Stay here, the pair of you. Don’t stir.” He turned and hurried out of the room again. The girl turned to Mangan, smiling the smile that transfixed him. “You could stay with us,” she said. “There’s beds upstairs. You’d be quite comfortable.” Smiling, she came toward him and daringly put out her hand, her delicate fingers cradling the bump of his genitals, gauging his stiffening. Gently, she felt for and squeezed his penis.
“But you don’t use the house yourselves,” he said, in a choked voice, trying to make conversation, unwilling that this unexpected pleasure should cease.
“I like the caravan,” she said. Her delicate fingers spread and with the palm of her hand she began rubbing up and down on his penis. Poteen fuming in his head, he stared at her as though hypnotized and at that moment heard the loud heel taps on the stone of the corridor outside, signaling the little man’s return. At once, she took her hand away. The little man came in, holding aloft yet a third Coca-Cola bottle of the colorless liquid. “One for the road, now,” he cried.
“For what road?” the girl said. “We’re not going anyplace, are we?”
“Jim is,” the little man said. “It’s five now and he has to be back in Duntally to meet his nabs, Dinny. He will blame myself if you come late.”
“Sure what do we care what he says?” the girl asked. “Why doesn’t Jim move up here and to hell with your man Dinny? What do we care?”
“We’ll not anger him, so,” the little man said. “Jim will meet him on time tonight. And you could tell him that you’re moving up here. How would that be, Jim?”
Mangan looked at the girl. Desire suffused him. “Yes, well, yes, that would be nice. If you’re sure it’s no trouble?”
“No trouble at all,” the girl said. “I’ll be expecting you first thing in the morning.”
And now the little man was pouring again, and he was saying no, no, telling him to go easy. But he did not mean it. He felt high. He felt happy.
”Sláinte and sláinte again,” the little man cried, raising his glass. “Here’s to us, the blood of the poet, as the saying goes.”
“Ah, give over with that,” Kathleen said. “Look at him, pretending he cares about poetry. He couldn’t recite you a poem to save his life.”
“Well, I don’t know Mangan’s verses,” the little man said. “But I know others.”
”I know them,” Mangan announced drunkenly. “It’s amazing, but I just read them once, some weeks ago, and it was as if I’d written them myself. Without even trying, I know them by heart.”
“You’re joking me,” the little man cried merrily. “Let’s have that one you said, then. ‘My Dark Rosaleen.’ Do you know that one?”
“Of course.”
“O my Dark Rosaleen,
Do not sigh, do not weep!
The priests are on the ocean green,
They march along the deep.
There’s wine from the royal Pope,
Upon the ocean green;
And Spanish ale shall give you hope,
My Dark Rosaleen!
My own Rosaleen!
Shall glad your heart, shall give you hope,
Shall give you health, and help, and hope.”
He paused, catching his breath, ready for the next stanza. They smiled at him, happy, hanging on his words. He smiled at their smiling faces, happy in his turn, at home as he had never been at home.
At ten minutes to six he drove his rented car into the yard at Duntally and got out, pleased that he was still early for his meeting with Dinny Mangan. Mist mingled with the dusk, swelling up in fat clouds from the valleys below. Far out on its solitary ocean rock the Fastnet light winked its bright minuscule warning. All else was still, gray-green, lonely. He could see no other light, no other house. For a moment he stood, taking deep breaths in an effort to clear his head from the muzzy, inebriated feeling produced by the poteen, and then went to the kitchen door, lifting the doormat under which he had hidden the door key. A strange voice moaned behind him and he turned to see five cows coming in off the road, their leader, a heifer, emitting a loud moo at sight of his car in its path. The cattle paused and then, lumbering, moved around the car with infinite slowness, coming on down the path, passing him with insolent bovine stares as they moved through the yard into the little rough lane which led to the house hidden below his. And at that moment, looking back toward the road, he saw the same stout old female he had seen that morning, her gray hair disheveled, wearing her man’s tweed jacket and male boots, carrying a long switch to herd the animals. She had not seen him, but now, as she did, her face changed and he saw a look of unease come over it. She lowered her head, as though afraid to look at him further, and blundered on past him.
“Good evening,” he called lamely, but no answer came. Ahead of her, the cows had stopped again. Urgently she raised her switch and struck the rear animal on its bony crupper. The cow lurched forward, almost colliding with another as the old woman called, “Hi! Hi!” striking out in haste at their rumps, hurrying them down the lane and out of sight.
Mangan unlocked the kitchen door and switched on the electric light. He realized that he had forgotten to buy any food for his evening meal. He lit the gas stove and made himself a cup of instant coffee. Outside, dusk began to obscure the yard and roadway. The house was so quiet he could hear the gas pilot in the kitchen stove and the ticking of the grandfather clock in the adjacent parlor. There was no need to stay on in this house, cooking solitary meals, sleeping above in that room beneath the red votive lamp. Up there in Gorteen he would be with Kathleen. And wasn’t it Kathleen and her brother who had led him to the point in his researches where it looked pretty certain that his father’s story was true? He and these Mangans in Drishane were indeed descendants of the poet. The priest, with his parish registers, would confirm it all tomorrow.
Suddenly, policeman-loud, startling him, someone pounded on the kitchen door. He went to open. A rush of mist met his face like damp smoke. Standing in this mist was a stout man of about his own age, wearing an ill-fitting gray pinstripe suit with waistcoat, a stiff white collar, and a cheap silk tie. He was shod in large black boots like an off-duty policeman. “Am I disturbing you?” he asked in a high, loud voice.
“No, no. Come in, please.”
The boots advanced with a parade-ground clump. Mangan shut the door. The newcomer wore round, old-fashioned spectacles, the right lens of which magnified the eye, giving it the look of an opened oyster. He stared at Mangan, coming up close to peer into his face a second time. “Mr. Mangan, am I right?” he asked in his high voice.
“Yes. And you’re Dinny Mangan, I assume.”
“That is correct.” The newcomer looked around the room, as though searching for something. “You have a window open?” he accused.
“No, I don’t think so.”
“There is a draft. There does be a very catching cold going around Drishane. Do you not have a fire?”
“I’m not good at setting fires.”
“Nothing to it. Let me do it for you.”
The newcomer got down on his knees after first placing a piece of newspaper on the floor to protect his trousers. He took turf from a wooden box on one side of the hearth and from the other some turf briquettes and cubes of a white sugarlike substance. All of these he arranged in a pyramid as he spoke. “Yes,
there is a very catching cold in Drishane and in Crookhaven, too. I was in Crookhaven this morning, there were four people down with it. And one woman, Mrs. Boyle, they are afraid she has pneumonia. And do you know what I’m going to tell you? Pneumonia is very catching, particularly for the visitor.”
He produced a kitchen match from his waistcoat pocket, struck it on the heel of his boot, which was cleated with steel sole protectors. He put the lit match to the white sugarlike substance, which he had inserted at the base of the pyramid of turf and turf briquettes. It blazed at once. “Paraffin,” said he. “That is what is in those little white fellows. Paraffin is your man for this job.”
He rose, dusting his kneecaps, and replaced the newspaper beside the hearth. “Thanks very much,” Mangan said. “Would you like a cup of coffee? I’m afraid I don’t have a drink to offer you.”
“Not to worry on my account.” The newcomer pointed to his lapel. There was a tiny pin in it, in the shape of a heart surrounded by a white border. “I am a Pioneer, you see.”
“A Pioneer,” Mangan said. “What is that, exactly.”
“You are joking me, surely?”
“No.”
“Do you mean to tell me that in America they have never heard of the Pioneer Total Abstinence Association, founded by Father Matthew and spread the length and breadth of Ireland! Sure and when you passed through Cork—you were in Cork City, weren’t you?”
“Yes. Yesterday.”
“When you passed down Royal Parade in Cork City, there was Father Matthew’s statue, facing the River Lee. Father Matthew. A Cork man born and bred.”
“I’m sorry. I missed it.”
“Well, and do you know what I’m going to tell you? I never miss it. The drink, I mean. I took the pledge five years ago. Stout, sherry, whiskey, the lot. I never miss it. So a cup of coffee would be most acceptable, thank you.”
As Mangan went to the stove to prepare the coffee, he became aware that his visitor kept staring at him. “So your name is Mangan, is it?” the visitor asked.
“It is. It’s on my passport.”
“And I hear tell you’ve come looking for relations, is that right?”
“Yes. I’m trying to find out if there’s any connection between my family and the poet James Clarence Mangan. Have you ever heard of a connection?”
“And why would you be interested in that?”
“Why not?” Mangan poured the coffee and handed it to his visitor, who took it and put it down on the table, untasted.
“I hear you are a journalist by trade,” he said.
“That’s right.”
“Are you quite sure it’s the poet James Clarence Mangan that you’re interested in?”
“What else would I be interested in? I’m sorry, I don’t quite understand.”
“Well, now, perhaps I was a bit hasty,” the visitor said. “Perhaps there has been a bit of a misunderstanding on my part. I will tell you straight that I was annoyed with Seamus Feeley for putting you in here without consulting me. I have no intention of letting this house to you. I have my own reasons for that. I cannot tell them to you, but they are good ones. No fault of yours, I hasten to add. I must say, though, that if your name is Mangan and you are trying to establish some connection with the poet James Clarence Mangan, there is nobody hereabouts who can help you. I have heard tell someplace that we might be some relation to that poet, but I don’t honestly think that there is anyone here who could tell you for sure one way or the other. And if you are digging around in our family history there are certain things that neither me nor my mammy want to discuss. I will be straight with you. I do not want you in this house. I do not want you asking questions. I bear you no ill will, but I would like to see the back of you. Did you pay Seamus Feeley a deposit on the rent?”
“No. He said he would speak to you about it.”
“All right, then,” the visitor said. “No money has changed hands. You can stay here tonight, but I will be obliged if you leave in the morning. I am sorry now, if that does not suit you.”
“Oh, it suits me fine,” Mangan said, “Your cousin Conor has invited me to stay with him.”
“Well, that is up to you, of course. I would not advise it, but that is another matter. I came up here tonight to tell you to leave and I have done that. I apologize to you for any inconvenience you may have been caused.”
“That’s all right,” Mangan said. Suddenly he had a vision of his visitor below in his little cottage, dressing up in his Sunday best to walk up the lane and evict him, the unwanted tenant. And at that moment he realized that he felt ashamed of his possible kinship to this maladroit, pompous fool. “By the way,” he said. “Let me pay you for the two nights here.”
“That will not be necessary, thank you very much,” the visitor said. He rose with a scraping of his heavy, cleated boots. “I will leave you now. Put the key under the door when you lock up in the morning. Good night to you.”
And shut the kitchen door with a dismissing slam. Mangan heard the ring of his boots on the cobbles outside and thought of him in his formal suit, marching down the lane to report to the old woman, that female tramp who herded the cows. He rose and took the visitor’s untasted coffee to the kitchen sink, remembering again that he had bought no food for his evening meal. Going to the cupboard, he found some bread and two slices of uncooked bacon left over from his breakfast. It would have to do. Again he became aware of the unearthly quiet of this place. He could hear the drip of raindrops on the windowpane and the faint sound of a tree branch creaking in the wind outside. He was on the end of a peninsula on the tip of this island country, alone in the Atlantic Ocean, cut off completely from the world he knew. Everything that was happening to him seemed as different and distant from the events of that other world as is a fairy tale from the evening news. And as he stood listening to the tiny sounds outside in the still Irish night, he seemed to hear a doorbell ring, a familiar ring, the sound of the doorbell in the apartment on East Fifty-first Street in New York. He turned around and saw Beatrice come in out of the mist, just as he had seen her the day before her death, booted and furred, her opulent new clothes like costly vestments donned in preparation for her funeral pyre.
It was not a hallucination. He knew that he was imagining her; that she was not really here. Yet he willed her to pirouette on her expensive cognac-colored boots and stare quizzically at the portraits of Pope Paul and the Virgin Mary on the wall. He willed her to sit down on the uncomfortable wooden armchair across the hearth, letting her beautiful dark mink coat fall away from her body, stretching out her legs as she had that day, like some youthful Regency buck.
“So this is how the world ends,” she said. “Not with a bang, but a whimper.”
“What do you mean?”
“Ambition should be made of sterner stuff.”
“Stop quoting lines,” he said. “Don’t you have any original thoughts?”
She seemed about to cry. “When I am dead, my dearest, sing no sad songs for me.”
“I’m sorry about that,” he said. “It wasn’t my choice, that poem. E.P. just picked it because you’d used it in that play.”
She shut her eyes as though memorizing:
“I shall not see the shadows,
I shall not feel the rain;
I shall not hear the nightingale
Sing on, as if in pain.”
“I know,” he said. “I’m sorry. But if you’d been with me, I wouldn’t have let you drive.”
She shook her head.
“The Moving Finger writes; and having writ,
Moves on: nor all your Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line,
Nor all your Tears wash out a Word of it.”
“Yes,” he said. “It’s too late. But I did try to look after you when we were together. I loved you. I used to blame you for my career, or lack of it. But maybe it wasn’t your fault.”
She smiled.
“How vainly men themselves amaze
To win the palm, the oak, or bays.”
“But you won them,” he said. “You were a victor. You worked harder than I did. I think my trouble was, and is, that I don’t have a real ambition. I wanted to be a poet, but I didn’t work at it. I didn’t work at anything.”
She stared at the fire.
“It must
Be the finding of a satisfaction, and may
Be of a man skating, a woman dancing, a woman
Combing. The poem of the act of the mind.”
“That’s it,” he said. “Oh, I’ve thought that many times. Perhaps I’m not capable of the act of the mind. Yet, you know, I had an odd thing happen today. I began to recite some verses of Mangan the poet to some Irish relatives of mine. And when I said those verses aloud, I felt the way I’ve never felt about any of my own poems. I was excited—exhilarated. It was as though I’d made up those verses myself. And my cousins were excited, too. It was an amazing sight. This little fellow, almost a midget, and his sister, applauding like crazy.”
She smiled.
“A sweet disorder in the dress
Kindles in clothes a wantonness.”
“Oh, come on,” he said. “The girl’s almost young enough to be my daughter. Besides, we’re probably close cousins. Did you see that other cousin of mine, by the way, that pompous ass who was just in here with his suit and his big boots?”
Again she smiled.
“One of the low on whom assurance sits
As a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire.”
“Exactly. But it’s funny I felt at home with the other two, the little fellow and his sister. At home as we never were at home.”
She turned her gaze on the fire and said in a low, bitter tone:
“And from my neck so free
The Albatross fell off, and sank
Like lead into the sea.”
“Okay, I’m sorry. I was wrong. That summer in Amagansett, we were happy, the time I built the deck and the walkway. And anyway, don’t misunderstand me. I’m worried about feeling at home here—they may be my relatives, but they’re very different from me. They’re dirty and wild, they prefer to live in a stinking trailer rather than in a house. They’re the sort of people if they inherited your money they’d never do a tap of work until they’d spent every penny of it. I said they’re different from me, but supposing they’re not? When I got your money I told myself this was my chance to try again, to really work at poetry, ‘to win the palm, the oak, or bays.’ And I came here because I found a photograph—this one—” He drew the photograph from his pocket and began to unwrap the handkerchief. “I mean, it looks as though I’m really descended from the Irish poet Mangan. Remember, I mentioned him to you a few times? But this photograph is of a man who lived one hundred and thirty years ago, a man who might be Mangan himself. And as you’ll see, it’s my face.” But as he spoke he looked at his face in the photograph and at once experienced the familiar giddy sensation, held by those glittering eyes which were his eyes. And when he looked up from the photograph he could no longer maintain the illusion that Beatrice was in the room with him. The chair by the fire was empty and he could not summon her image again in his mind’s eye. The room was cold.
