The Mangan Inheritance

by Brian Moore

  But there were no voices. The room was still. The portraits of these unknowns who might be his forebears looked down at him in dead indifference and in the photographs the subjects seemed fixed in a moment of play-acting, their poses designed to hide, not reveal, the truth of their lives. And then again he heard the tiny cry, and this time it seemed to come from the valance of the curtains above the window. He put the lamp down on a nearby table and reached in his pocket for his flashlight, thinking to turn its beam on the crannies up there. As he did, he strained forward, listening for the tiny cry. But the cry was not repeated, and as he stood waiting to flash his light, he had the conviction that whatever had cried was no longer in the room. Cautiously, he stepped into the alcove of the bay window, then looked at a face which moved to the left of him. He stared in terror at the face: a narrow old mirror framed in a gold-scrolled leaf and in it, glaring at him, ghostly pale, eyes glittering with the steely hysteria of an insane person, the features frighteningly bruised, lip swollen, missing front tooth: himself. And in that moment he knew why this house resisted him. I am the ghost that haunts it. I am come back to these rooms where whatever bloody deed that frightened Kathleen once took place. He stared at his ghostly mirror face, an image which, seen now in the gold-scrolled frame, rang in his mind like the bell around the neck of some lost animal high on a mountainside drifting toward its death. And then he put his hand in his pocket and for the first time in days drew out that other face in a frame, that face which confronted him now, eyes glittering with the steely hysteria of the insane. As he looked, he saw what he had forgotten. The photograph also had a gap in the upper right front teeth. From framed photograph to framed mirror he consulted these identical images, and as he did, the elation which had filled him in the past when he looked at his unknown Doppelgänger changed to fear. It was as though the daguerreotype was now a document sentencing him to some future doom. And at that moment Kathleen cried down to him. “Jim, where are you? Are you coming up? What’s keeping you down there?”

  He took the lamp and went out, shutting the door tight as he left the room. He went up the flight of stairs, calling out to reassure her. “It’s me, Kathleen.” When he went into the bedroom he found her, naked except for an old blue coverlet which she had wrapped around her, sitting cross-legged on the bed, drinking gin and eating a slice of yellow pound cake with chocolate icing. “Where were you?” she asked, with her mouth full. “You were long enough.”

  “Did you hear somebody crying?”

  “That’s just mice,” she said. “Shut that door. That’s another reason we’d be better off in the caravan. It’s freezing in this house.”

  He shut the door and, standing close to the heater, stripped himself to his underpants and socks. His rib cage was bound around with a pink bandage.

  “God, you’re a sketch,” she said. “Do you want a drink?”

  He shook his head and removed his socks before getting under the covers. “Get in with me,” he commanded her. “The bed’s cold.” At once obedient, she let slip the coverlet and, naked, slipped in beside him. She reached out to retrieve the gin bottle and her glass. She took a drink, then lay down. Her hand under the sheets took hold of his penis, which jerked to semistiffness.

  “How big a place is Pittsburgh?” she asked. “Bigger than Dublin?”

  “About the same size.”

  “The winters are desperate in America. I saw them on the telly.”

  “If you come to America with me, I’ll take you south for the winters. You can lie in the sun.”

  But she did not seem to hear him. She began to pull on his penis, a shade dutifully, he thought, and this surmise was confirmed when she reached out her other hand for her glass and took a pull on her gin. “Can I make this man stand and deliver?” she whispered, and with practiced assiduity plunged her head under the bedclothes, and her warm moist lips found the head of his prick. Then, while he lay staring in troubled ecstasy at the high shadows of the ceiling, she skillfully worked her passage to America, bringing him to the point of climax with her mouth and then throwing back the bedclothes to reveal herself as a prize for the taking: young, pointed, quivering breasts, small rounded belly, long limber legs, assuming again like an accomplished actress her role as his trembling, compliant victim.

  And so, weary though he was and aching from his recent beating, he rose over her, led blindly back to lust by his youthful governess. There, in the one bright room in that dark house, he again came to climax, rearing over her tender buttocks. And at the precise moment when he began to come inside her, loud footsteps sounded on the stairs outside. In panic, his orgasm spending in a dead rush, he crouched over her body as though to protect her. He felt her stiffen below him in silent terror. The footsteps approached the door. Someone knocked. “Kathleen?” a woman’s voice cried out.

  Kathleen squirmed below him, staring at the door, which slowly opened inward. “Maeve, no!” she screamed, and flung herself out from under Mangan, scrambling off the bed, crouching down on the far side of it. At that, the woman outside the door seemed to start and then came forward boldly into the room, the derelict old woman wearing a man’s tweed jacket, Dinny’s mother.

  “It’s not Maeve, Kathy,” she said in a gentling voice, a voice one might use to quiet a frightened child. “It’s only me, only Aunt Eileen.” But Kathleen cowered away, going on her hands and knees to a corner of the room, hunkering there, her long naked legs drawn up to her shoulders, her face averted from the visitor, her glorious hair spilling down over her back, uttering a senseless keening, which erupted suddenly into a high nightmare shriek as the old woman stretched out a hand as though to touch her. “Kathleen, Kathy, listen now, it’s Aunt Eileen, it’s only me, Kathy love, it’s your Aunt Eileen, everything’s all right. Maeve is not here now, she’s far away.”

  Ignored by the two women as though he were not in the room, Mangan got off the bed and shamefacedly pulled on his clothes. The old woman knelt on one knee in front of Kathleen and touched her on the forehead with her fingers. Kathleen shrieked, then subsided into a dull trance as the old woman began to stroke her brow.

  Mangan approached them. “Kathleen,” he said, but the old woman held up her hand, cautioning him to silence. “She’d not know you just now. Just let her be.” She resumed her caresses. Kathleen began to tremble and stare about the room as though searching for something dangerous. “There is nobody,” the old woman said softly. “It was only me. I’m sorry, now, that I disturbed you, Kathy.” She inched herself closer until she knelt beside the girl, and gradually, very gently, took her in her arms, rocking her as she would a small child. “It’s all right now, it’s all right, Kathleen. It’s only me. Only Aunt Eileen.”

  Gradually the strange tension left the girl. She turned and looked up at the old woman who held her in her arms. “What are you doing here?” she asked in a nearly normal voice.

  “I woke up this morning feeling poorly. I went out, thinking a walk would do me good. But I couldn’t tell you where I’ve been.” The old woman smiled distractedly. “I was wandering out there on the boreen. I thought I was on the road for Skull, but I couldn’t for the life of me tell you why I was wanting to go there. And then it was dark and I saw the light in this house and knew where I was. I felt better then. So I came in, thinking to ask you how is Con getting on? Poor Con, I hear the Guards are after lifting him in Cork.”

  “Him and Packy Deane,” Kathleen said. She looked over at Mangan. “Jim, will you pass my clothes?”

  He went to the foot of the bed, where her clothes lay. “Excuse me a minute, Aunt Eileen,” she said and, disengaging herself, got up and went to dress, modestly turning her back on her aunt. But as she put on her dress a change came over her again. “They say he’ll get five years,” she said, as though to herself. “Five years. I’ll be all alone.” She began to rock to and fro where she stood. The old woman, watching, got up and signaled Mangan to follow her out of the room. As he went toward the door, he looked back at Kat
hleen. The rocking had stopped. She stood completely still, her eyes dead as a statue’s. She did not see them go.

  On the dark landing the old woman moved close to him. He could smell milking cattle and peat fires on her old tweed jacket. He was expecting a shocked lecture on his behavior, but there was no rebuke. Her voice was light and gentle. “It’s this house that’s the cause,” she said. “It has a bad memory for her, do you see. She should not be here. She needs taking care of, but I cannot stay up at the caravan when I’m needed down at home. So I’d suggest, sir, that you let me take her home with me tonight.”

  “But she may come out of it. She did, this morning.”

  “Well, I don’t know about this morning,” the old woman said, and for the first time he detected a note of reproach in her voice. “My guess would be that she didn’t rightly come out of it. Anyway, she should not be here in this house with you. Not in the state she’s in.”

  “Does she get these attacks often?”

  “Now and then. Do you have your car outside?”

  “It’s up at the caravan.”

  “Maybe you’d go and bring it down here. I’ll meet you at the front door with Kathleen. Will that be all right?”

  “Yes. But will she come with you?”

  “She will. She’ll be glad to get out of this house. Do you have a torch?”

  “It’s all right,” he said. “I can find my way.”

  “We’ll meet you downstairs, then.” The old woman turned and went back into the bedroom. He went down the back stairs into the hallway, past the closed door of the parlor, and out into the moonlit yard. Somewhere in the field above, Kathleen’s dog began to yelp, and from far off a second dog answered, then a third, like inept buglers attempting to sound his retreat. He reached the road. A soft rain met his face, thickening as he hurried stiffly, painfully, uphill toward the car. Once inside the car with the engine roaring to life, he had an impulse to drive on down past the house and, traveling through the night, reach Shannon at dawn, hurrying out to the great planes which waited like remote-control toys to lift off for America. But then remembered her crouching in a corner of the bedroom, her long naked legs hunkered up, and felt again that curious mixture of tenderness and lust which had held him since the first day he followed her up the steps into her caravan.

  He released the hand brake and drove down in a rush toward the old house. As his headlights blazed on the road ahead, he saw the light in the upper window go out. He swerved into the yard. Ahead of him a flashlight pointed to the cobblestones by the door, and as he parked, it circled back and he heard the heavy front door slam. They were waiting for him, the shabby old woman holding an umbrella over the girl, bedraggled and dazed in her long white dress, clutching to her breast as if it were a baby the white plastic shopping bag containing the gin bottles. He opened both front and back doors and the women got in together into the back of the car. “There now, darling, there now,” the old woman kept murmuring as she helped Kathleen to seat herself. And then, in the car, having managed to separate Kathleen from the gin, she leaned forward and placed the plastic bag on the front seat beside Mangan. “It will be all right here, Kathy darling. If you’re wanting it, I will get it for you.”

  Down they went, the rain heavy, blinding the windshield despite his busy wipers, down the narrow track of the boreen until they reached the slightly broader road below. And now, ahead, far out, he could see the deceitful winking eye of the Fastnet lighthouse and, soon on his left, the slate roof of Duntally. He drove into the farmyard, his headlights blazing on the house’s faded pink walls, the abandoned outhouses, their thatched roofs sagging. “Slow now, sir,” said the old woman, leaning forward and pointing. “Just down here, down in the back.”

  As he entered the narrow lane between untended hedges, it came to him that both the house he had left and Duntally were empty, their owners, or former owners, living in smaller, more primitive dwellings behind them. One of those dwellings was now in range of his lights, the old cottage half hidden under the lee of the hill. A cat ran across the yard and he heard a clucking of wakened chickens in the henhouse. The cottage was dark. The old woman got out, murmuring, “We’re home, Kathy, we’re safe home.” She put up the umbrella against the rain and led the girl across the yard toward the cottage door. “Will you be all right yourself, sir?” she called back. “Hurry on in, now. The rain’s not too bad.”

  He followed them into the cottage. In the big open hearth the remains of a turf fire cast reddish shadows on the low-roofed interior. He was surprised when the old woman switched on the light and he saw an electric light bulb under the shade which hung over the kitchen table. Lit, the room was a sort of kitchen-sitting room with low wooden and rush-matting chairs grouped around the big open hearth, on which, in the red remains of burning turf, the old woman placed an ancient iron kettle full of water, which she drew from a sink in the adjacent scullery.

  There was a plaited rush crucifix hanging over the fireplace, and in a corner the inevitable tiny perpetual lamp burned under a picture of the Sacred Heart. Now, as Dinny’s mother settled Kathleen in an armchair under this votive lamp, Dinny entered, scraping his muddy boots on the stone step before he crossed the threshold. His old felt hat was soaked and tiny rivulets of water dripped from the hem of his heavy overcoat. “So you brought Mammy back,” he said. “I’m much obliged.”

  “No, it was your mother who brought us here,” Mangan said.

  “Mammy?” Dinny advanced to peer at his mother, who was efficiently setting out teacups and saucers from a large mahogany cabinet ranged against the wall.

  “I’m all right, son,” the old woman said as, drawing him aside, she whispered with him in a corner. Are they talking about finding Kathleen in bed with me? Mangan wondered.

  “What are you whispering about?” Kathleen cried suddenly. “Are you talking about me?”

  “Nothing, love, nothing,” the old woman said. “I was just asking Dinny to get milk.”

  “You want milk,” Dinny said. “Right, then.” He turned to Mangan and for the first time in their meetings smiled at him in welcome. “Sit down, Mr. Mangan,” he said. “Take that chair, it’s better than the other one. You’ll have a cup of tea with us? Of course you will.”

  Mangan sat in the rush-bottomed chair which had been set aside for him. The room had a pleasant smell of burning turf and also a smell of freshly baked bread. As he looked about, he noticed that this cottage, small and crowded with furniture which was a little too large for the room, was nevertheless clean and swept and scrubbed, in direct contrast to the caravan inhabited by the other branch of the Mangan family. There was a glassed-in bookcase with leather-bound books on its shelves, the Waverley novels of Sir Walter Scott, two books on accountancy, the stories of Maupassant, sets of Dickens and Shakespeare, and a Latin grammar. And now, as she set out the tea things, Dinny’s mother put sugar in a sugar bowl and laid teaspoons and a small pitcher of milk carefully by her good teacups on the kitchen table. He noticed for the first time that, despite her disheveled appearance and her strange habit of wearing a man’s jacket and boots, she was very clean in her person— again, in direct contrast to Kathleen, who sat staring at the fire in her soiled white dress, her fingernails dirty, smelling of gin and body sweat. And as he watched the old woman meticulously rinse out the teapot with hot water, preparing their tea, he sensed the nature of the difference between Dinny and Con Mangan and their respective dwelling places. Dinny had come down in the world and was desperately trying to maintain his dignity. Con, on the other hand, though he had also come down in his fortunes from that gray two-story house to his present squalid caravan lodging, embraced his new status and gloried in it.

  “Give us a gin,” Kathleen said suddenly, turning to Mangan.

  Dinny, coming in from the scullery with a shining tin pail of fresh milk, stopped and said, “It is partly the drink that has you in this bad way. We’re going to have a cup of tea, now.”

  But she ignored him. She
pointed to Mangan. “Get the gin out of the car.”

  “Now, wait, love,” Dinny’s mother said, coming forward and putting her arm around Kathleen, leaning forward to whisper, “What if I give you one of my pills? That’ll do you better than gin.”

  “Give it to me, then.”

  The old woman put the teapot on the hob, went into the bedroom, and returned, holding out a red-and-white capsule.

  “Are they the same lads you gave me last time?” Kathleen asked.

  “The same. You’ll be sound asleep before you know it.”

  Kathleen took the pill and popped it into her mouth. “Did you know that I’m going to America?” she said.

  Both Dinny and his mother looked at Mangan, as if for confirmation. “Not with him,” Kathleen said. “I’m going to stay with my aunt Bridget in Pittsburgh. He’s just lending me the fare.”

  “And what do you hear about Con?” Dinny asked her. “How is he getting on in this trouble of his?”