The Mangan Inheritance

by Brian Moore

  “Yes, that’s her.”

  “And you were married to her. Are you not still?”

  “No.”

  “Is she your wife that died, then?”

  “Yes.”

  Ahead he could see the high slate roofs of Duntally, where he had slept last night, and as they came around the screen of hedge he saw the old derelict woman in the yard, scattering to the chickens scraps from a bucket. She looked up at the car, peering, too far away to see them.

  “Do you know that old woman back there?”

  “That’s my Aunt Eileen. Dinny’s mother.”

  “I’ll tell you the truth,” Mangan said. “There’s something about her that gives me the creeps.”

  Kathleen laughed. “It will be you that gives her the creeps.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Never mind. Turn left now, at the cross. It’s about twenty miles on to Skull. Are you hungry?”

  “A bit.”

  “They have grand toasted sandwiches in Cullen’s Lounge in Skull. We can get a drink there, too.” She put her hand on his thigh and mischievously slid her long, delicate, slightly dirty fingers into the crook of his crotch. “Do you like me, Jim?”

  “Like you?” he said. “You’ll never know how much.”

  She smiled at him. “Well, I like you. And that’s a miracle.”

  “Why, a miracle?”

  She laughed. “Ah, it’s a long story. I’ll tell you someday when I’m more inclined.”

  Inside the door of the lounge bar at Cullen’s Hotel in Skull, a circular wire rack of picture-postcard views, retired from its summer position as tourist bait in the hotel’s front lobby, sat by the wall, gathering dust. Mangan, in an adjacent booth, finishing his second gin-and-tonic and, eating a toasted ham sandwich, inspected these postcards as he waited for Kathleen to come back from the washroom. Skull Harbor, Roaring Water Bay, Dunmanus Bay, Mizen Head, and Crookhaven, summer views in bright sunlight which the tourists would buy and inscribe “Wish you were here,” small boasts of holiday privilege to those they had left behind in Belfast or Birmingham, Dublin or Dulwich.

  But now it was winter in Skull. Only locals moved in the town’s wet, narrow streets. Cullen’s Lounge Bar was empty. The boy who had served them drinks and toasted the sandwiches in an infrared oven stood behind the bar, pretending to listen to a football match on the radio, but in reality with his ears tuned to their conversation. There was, as Mangan had already divined, a special winter boredom in this place, the young gone to work in England, the old abandoned, living on their untilled farms, dependent on assistance and pension checks. The few young who remained seemed very young indeed, subteens pretending adolescence in jeans and T-shirts, their half-finished faces ill at ease in this fancy dress of a larger world. Among them, in these streets of shops which opened late and shut early, in this silence of empty roads and the certainty of rain, Kathleen’s beauty and wild high spirits were as odd as a clown’s costume. And later, as he walked through the streets of Skull with her, helping carry the myriad paper and plastic bags she heaped on him, he became aware that the men who remained eyed her with sad lust, while the women shopkeepers, though avid for the pounds she spent so liberally, greeted her with the painful condescension of those who have denied themselves all sinful pleasures for the sake of a higher good.

  One of their last shopping stops was the off-license. She had him bring the car up to the entrance. “We’ll get two dozen of stout,” she decided. “Con’s a great one for stout. And we’ll get a bottle of Cork gin. Will we make it two? You like gin better than whiskey, don’t you?”

  “I’m easy.”

  “And two bottles of Power’s whiskey, just for insurance. We’ll be needing minerals. Will that do us now?” She turned to him trustfully, as though she were a child and he the responsible adult.

  “I’d say it would.” He handed two twenty-pound notes to the thin man who had prepared their order. As the man made change, Mangan saw him look up from his till, staring into Kathleen’s cardigan. A fourteen-year-old boy appeared, eyed Kathleen, then awkwardly hefted the carton of bottles, following them out to the street.

  “The butcher’s now is our last stop,” she said. “And then we’re done. Tell us, Jim, would you fancy a bit of roast beef? It’s very dear, I know.”

  “Roast beef,” he said. “Best they’ve got. And a big one.”

  She put her arm into his and hugged him to her. “Oh, you suit me fine. You’re what I’ve been looking for. The men around here are mice compared with you.”

  The butcher’s shop was off the main street, a bare, brutal place, with worn wooden counters, carcasses hanging from steel hooks, and a window full of chops, liver, oxtail, and stewing meat. The butcher, a strong fellow in a bloodstained white apron, went into the back room to bring out his best roast. As they waited, an untidy elderly woman stopped in the street outside the shop window, peered at the cuts of meat, then came in at the front door. She looked first at Kathleen and gave a small, startled smile. “Hello, there,” she said. “Are you back, so?”

  Then, almost without interest, her eyes went to Mangan, the stranger, and on looking at his face she started, as in fright. She remained staring: her mouth open, her eyes glazed, as though she had suffered some sort of attack. Kathleen, who at once noticed, came forward, put her hand on the woman’s arm, and said, “It’s all right, May. He’s from America. He’s a relative of ours from America.”

  The butcher had returned and was holding up a large piece of meat. “This is a lovely one,” he said to Kathleen. “How many ribs would you be wanting?”

  “Would that one be all right, Jim?” Kathleen asked. “Will we get a big one?”

  “I have another here I can show you,” the butcher said, and while Kathleen busied herself with the roast, Mangan looked at the woman called May. She was small and gray-haired and wore an old purple cloth overcoat, short and out of style. Her legs were thick and knots of varicose veins stood out under her stockings. As the sound of the butcher’s hacksaw filled the shop, Kathleen returned and introduced them. “This is my cousin May who lives up by Ballymore. This is our cousin Jim Mangan from New York.”

  The woman stared, her mouth open. “God, I wouldn’t credit it,” she said under her breath, and looked significantly at Kathleen.

  “How’s John?” Kathleen asked.

  But the woman seemed not to hear. “You’re from America, you said?” she asked Mangan. “And a cousin of ours?”

  “Yes. My grandfather James Patrick Mangan emigrated to Canada from Cork back in the eighteen-nineties. I wonder, would you ever have heard of him?”

  “James Patrick is a family name, all right,” the woman said. “Isn’t it, Kathleen? But I don’t know. I’m not well up on the Mangans. I’m sorry, now.” She turned to Kathleen. “I have to be getting along. I’ve a lot of shopping to do and I’m getting a lift up home in half an hour.” She smiled weakly at Mangan. “Nice meeting you. Enjoy your holidays.”

  “That will be seven pounds and forty pence,” the butcher said to Mangan.

  They paid and went out, with more goodbyes.

  “She looked at me as if she’d seen a ghost,” Mangan said. “It’s this uncle of yours—Michael Mangan—that’s the one I look like. Right?”

  “Ah, you have look-alike on the brain,” Kathleen said. “Anyway, thanks be to God she was in a hurry. She’d wear you, that one. She’s married to a man who’s paralyzed from the waist down these fourteen years and cannot be left alone in the house. So she never gets out. That’s the first time I’ve run into her in two years.”

  “This person I look like, this Uncle Michael who died, Con said you didn’t like him. At least I think that’s what he meant. Is that true?”

  He was putting the roast into the trunk of the car when he asked this and at first he imagined she had not heard him. He looked up, thinking to repeat the question. “I said . . .” he began.

  “I heard you.” She turned away and got int
o the car. He got in beside her and started the engine.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Why are you so interested in who you look like?” she said crossly.

  He looked at her. He did not know why she was angry, but he feared her anger and, suddenly, decided to tell her what he had not told her or her brother until now. “Actually, it was a likeness that brought me to Ireland,” he said. “An old photograph I found among my father’s papers in Montreal. Actually, it looks just like me. It could be a photograph of me.”

  He was driving through the main street as he said this and for a while she did not answer him. Then: “Do you have the photo with you now?”

  “As a matter of fact, I do.”

  “Show it to me.”

  “Wait,” he said. He drove through the village and, when he reached a clear stretch of road, pulled the car off into the grass beside the ditch. He took the photograph from his breast pocket, unwrapped it from the handkerchief, and handed it to her, watching her as she stared at it, then stared at him, comparing him with the photograph. Without saying anything, she turned it over, looked at the inscription.

  “Who’s J.M.?”

  “I’m not sure. I think it’s James Mangan, the poet. He died in 1849. That would be two years after this photograph was taken. He’s the one whose poetry I’ve been reciting to you. If I’m right, he’s my great-great-grandfather.”

  “Are you sure this photo is that old?”

  “Yes. It’s a daguerreotype. They were the first photos ever taken and they can’t be reproduced. Each one is an original. So this must be at least a hundred years old. More, I’d say.”

  “Then it’s not him,” she said.

  “Not who?”

  “It’s not Uncle Michael. I thought it was.”

  “So I look exactly like him, do I?”

  “Yes. But you don’t have a missing tooth. The photo has a tooth missing just like he had. That’s why I thought it was him.”

  “A missing tooth?” he said, studying the photograph again. And saw what he had forgotten, the gap in the upper front teeth. “That’s fascinating.”

  “Is it? Are we going to sit in this ditch all day?”

  “Sorry.” He started the car and drove back along the road in the direction of Drishane. The rain had stopped and a strong wind buffeted against the side of the car. So he looked like her uncle Michael, the one Con said she hated. Was that why she had told him it was a miracle she’d gone to bed with him? He looked sideways at her. Now was the time to ask her again about this uncle. She had slipped down in the seat so that her head rested on the headrest and at the moment he looked at her she began to sing in a soft, haunting voice.

  “Oft in the stilly night,

  Ere slumber’s chain has bound me,

  Fond memory brings the light

  Of other days around me.”

  He was surprised at the beauty of her voice and by the simple unself-conscious way she sang. It was as though she had forgotten him and imagined herself to be alone in the car. The questions he had meant to ask her went from his mind. He drove on, listening as though in a trance.

  “I feel like one

  Who treads alone

  Some banquet hall deserted,

  Whose lights are fled,

  Whose garlands dead,

  And all but he departed.

  Oft in the stilly night,

  Ere slumber’s chain has bound me

  Fond memory brings the light

  Of other days around me.”

  Her voice, small and pure, the words of the song, nostalgic and sad, echoed in Mangan’s head as he stared ahead down the bare empty ribbon of road. On either side was a landscape which seemed to fit her song, for they were driving in a turf bog, a lonely deserted place with layers of earth spaded up like brown loaves and, at intervals, rectangular turf stacks like funerary monuments to some forgotten tribe. In this landscape he listened to her clear young voice and felt a strange emotion, close to elation, close to tears.

  “And other friends, long parted . . .”

  In his mind he saw her naked as she was this morning, in the high old bed of the mountaintop house, her red hair falling away from the nape of her white neck, her back bowed down as if in sacrifice to him. He remembered her laughter as he urged her to buy more sweets and cakes, saw her run ahead of him into the shops, heard her sing beside him now as they drove on through the bog, the light fading to darkness in the sky above them. And as he did, he experienced a happiness which differed from anything he had known in his former life. The person he had been no longer seemed to be present with him in this car as he drove through the wild, darkening Irish countryside. That person would have made guilty judgments on this girl, whose past was dubious, whose conversation was banal, who was no novice in the ways of love and perhaps pretended affection simply to get money from him, who now sang in her beautiful soprano voice, only to distract him from asking awkward questions about a dead uncle. The person he had been, the person who would make these judgments, had faded from his mind. It seemed to him that he could no longer clearly remember his own past, and were he now to speak of his boyhood in Montreal, his student years at McGill, his days as a young poet, newspaper reporter, husband of Beatrice Abbot, he would recite the facts only as he would a story he had memorized, a life told to him by someone else. Now he was a man who, improbably, was the lover of a very young girl, who felt excited and alive when he recited the poems of a poet long dead, a man who carried in his pocket an old photograph of a mysterious double, a man who knew nothing of his true past save that his ancestors were poets like himself. And so, as Kathleen ended her song and leaned close to him, he felt exultant and free and increased the car speed until they were flying along the lonely ribbon of road. He turned right at the sign before Drishane, going helter-skelter up the narrow mountain road, turning onto the even narrower track which led past Duntally. There, in the darkness, he saw the silhouette of the house in which he had slept for the past two nights. No lights shone, nor was there any light from the cottage hidden behind it where Dinny Mangan lived with his strange mother. Downshifting to second gear, he went up to the high ground, to the mountaintop, the lights of Drishane glimmering far beneath as they came around the curve and started the last steep ascent past the minatory façade of the house called Gorteen. As the car passed by the front yard, he heard the dog bark. He drove on up the last rise to the yellow caravan, where he parked on the ridge, turning his wheels in at right angles to the ditch.

  “What about your dog?”

  “I’ll get him later,” she said. “First we’ll light up inside.”

  She went up into the caravan and lit the kerosene lamp. He followed her in, making three trips to carry up the various parcels of food and drink. When all the things had been deposited on the counter by the stove, he heard the dog again.

  “I’ll go and get him,” he said.

  “Let him be, he’s all right.”

  “But he’s been tied up all day.”

  “All right, then,” she said. “Go, if you want. Will you be able to see your way?”

  “Sure. It’s not really dark yet.”

  “I’ll pour us a drink while you’re gone. Will you have gin or whiskey?”

  “Gin-and-tonic.”

  “And will a lamb chop with sausages and egg be all right for your supper?”

  “Great.”

  He went out, down the steps, and walked across the wet grass of the field. There was no moon but here, high on the mountaintop, the night sky was a light faded color as on a long summer’s night. All around was a stillness so total that there were no faraway sound waves of traffic or airplanes, or indeed of any noise at all. Even the dog was silent. He reached the road and went down its precipitous incline, his footsteps grating loud on the small stones of the roadbed, going toward the house, which presented to him its gray stone façade, its windows like dead eyes as always seeming to repel him. And now as he turne
d into the yard he heard a strange piteous cry as of some bird or small animal. He stopped. The cry seemed to come from the house. He listened, but it did not repeat itself.

  In the blackness of the coach house the dog rose up with a flurry of paws and a growl of alarm, then, recognizing him, came to greet him with a craven tail wagging and went down on its forelegs, fawning. He untied it and it skeltered past him, bounding across the crackling gravel of the yard. Now, as he grew more accustomed to the strange twilight, he could see the house almost as plainly as in daytime. Again, he heard that small piteous cry, somewhere up there under the roof. Light rain wet his face, increasing as he went out of the yard and back up the steep road to the caravan. By the time he reached its shelter, the rain was thick and drenching. He climbed the steps, his face and hair wet, blinded by the light from the propane lamp as he entered, not seeing her until she came from the small bedroom area, a different girl. For she had changed from her jeans and cardigan to a long white cotton dress like a nightdress, crumpled, almost translucent, and as she stood against the light of the lamp, the delicate erotic lines of her slender body came up like a photographic print in a developing tray. He stared, transfixed, and felt his penis stiffen in his trousers.

  “When will your brother be coming home?” he asked, and she laughed as though she understood the hidden intent of his question.

  “I was thinking about that. He told me he might stay over in Cork. But his nose might tell him there’s food and drink here. I’d say we’ll see him home before the night is out.”

  She came forward and handed him a very large gin-and-tonic. “Here,” she said. “That will stand to you, as they say. Drink it up.”

  But he put the glass aside on the rickety center table and caught her, kissing her, his hands sliding down her back. “Wait,” she said. “I’m cooking the supper, now. Don’t worry. Time enough for that.”

  “But when?”

  “Later on. When you go back to the house, I’ll come to you.”

  “Promise?”

  “I promise. Now let’s have a few drinks and maybe a few laughs.” She went to the radio and turned it on. Tinny Irish country music filled the caravan. She switched to another station and the loud crash of rock. He hated rock, hated radios, but he smiled at her and raised his glass in toast. This was his new life. He had better get used to it.