As the afternoon waned, the conversations increased in intensity. From where Irene sat, she could see the open sky above Central Park. There were hundreds of clouds in the sky, as though the south wind had broken the winter into pieces and were blowing it north, and on her radio she could hear the arrival of cocktail guests and the return of children and businessmen from their schools and offices. “I found a good-sized diamond on the bathroom floor this morning,” a woman said. “It must have fallen out of that bracelet Mrs. Dunston was wearing last night.” “We’ll sell it,” a man said. “Take it down to the jeweller on Madison Avenue and sell it. Mrs. Dunston won’t know the difference, and we could use a couple of hundred bucks …” “ ‘Oranges and lemons, say the bells of St. Clement’s,’ ” the Sweeneys’ nurse sang. “ ‘Half-pence and farthings, say the bells of St. Martin’s. When will you pay me? say the bells at old Bailey …’ ” “It’s not a hat,” a woman cried, and at her back roared a cocktail party. “It’s not a hat, it’s a love affair. That’s what Walter Florell said. He said it’s not a hat, it’s a love affair,” and then, in a lower voice, the same woman added, “Talk to somebody, for Christ’s sake, honey, talk to somebody. If she catches you standing here not talking to anybody, she’ll take us off her invitation list, and I love these parties.”
The Westcotts were going out for dinner that night, and when Jim came home, Irene was dressing. She seemed sad and vague, and he brought her a drink. They were dining with friends in the neighborhood, and they walked to where they were going. The sky was broad and filled with light. It was one of those splendid spring evenings that excite memory and desire, and the air that touched their hands and faces felt very soft. A Salvation Army band was on the corner playing “Jesus Is Sweeter.” Irene drew on her husband’s arm and held him there for a minute, to hear the music. “They’re really such nice people, aren’t they?” she said. “They have such nice faces. Actually, they’re so much nicer than a lot of the people we know.” She took a bill from her purse and walked over and dropped it into the tambourine. There was in her face, when she returned to her husband, a look of radiant melancholy that he was not familiar with. And her conduct at the dinner party that night seemed strange to him, too. She interrupted her hostess rudely and stared at the people across the table from her with an intensity for which she would have punished her children.
It was still mild when they walked home from the party, and Irene looked up at the spring stars. “ ‘How far that little candle throws its beams,’ ” she exclaimed. “ ‘So shines a good deed in a naughty world.’ ” She waited that night until Jim had fallen asleep, and then went into the living room and turned on the radio.
· · ·
Jim came home at about six the next night. Emma, the maid, let him in, and he had taken off his hat and was taking off his coat when Irene ran into the hall. Her face was shining with tears and her hair was disordered. “Go up to 16-C, Jim!” she screamed. “Don’t take off your coat. Go up to 16-C. Mr. Osborn’s beating his wife. They’ve been quarrelling since four o’clock, and now he’s hitting her. Go up there and stop him.”
From the radio in the living room, Jim heard screams, obscenities, and thuds. “You know you don’t have to listen to this sort of thing,” he said. He strode into the living room and turned the switch. “It’s indecent,” he said. “It’s like looking in windows. You know you don’t have to listen to this sort of thing. You can turn it off.”
“Oh, it’s so horrible, it’s so dreadful,” Irene was sobbing. “I’ve been listening all day, and it’s so depressing.”
“Well, if it’s so depressing, why do you listen to it? I bought this damned radio to give you some pleasure,” he said. “I paid a great deal of money for it. I thought it might make you happy. I wanted to make you happy.”
“Don’t, don’t, don’t, don’t quarrel with me,” she moaned, and laid her head on his shoulder. “All the others have been quarrelling all day. Everybody’s been quarrelling. They’re all worried about money. Mrs. Hutchinson’s mother is dying of cancer in Florida and they don’t have enough money to send her to the Mayo Clinic. At least, Mr. Hutchinson says they don’t have enough money. And some woman in this building is having an affair with the superintendent—with that hideous superintendent. It’s too disgusting. And Mrs. Melville has heart trouble and Mr. Hendricks is going to lose his job in April and Mrs. Hendricks is horrid about the whole thing and that girl who plays the ‘Missouri Waltz’ is a whore, a common whore, and the elevator man has tuberculosis and Mr. Osborn has been beating Mrs. Osborn.” She wailed, she trembled with grief and checked the stream of tears down her face with the heel of her palm.
“Well, why do you have to listen?” Jim asked again. “Why do you have to listen to this stuff if it makes you so miserable?”
“Oh, don’t, don’t, don’t,” she cried. “Life is too terrible, too sordid and awful. But we’ve never been like that, have we, darling? Have we? I mean we’ve always been good and decent and loving to one another, haven’t we? And we have two children, two beautiful children. Our lives aren’t sordid, are they, darling? Are they?” She flung her arms around his neck and drew his face down to hers. “We’re happy, aren’t we, darling? We are happy, aren’t we?”
“Of course we’re happy,” he said tiredly. He began to surrender his resentment. “Of course we’re happy. I’ll have that damned radio fixed or taken away tomorrow.” He stroked her soft hair. “My poor girl,” he said.
“You love me, don’t you?” she asked. “And we’re not hypercritical or worried about money or dishonest, are we?”
“No, darling,” he said.
· · ·
A man came in the morning and fixed the radio. Irene turned it on cautiously and was happy to hear a California-wine commercial and a recording of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, including Schiller’s “Ode to Joy.” She kept the radio on all day and nothing untoward came from the speaker.
A Spanish suite was being played when Jim came home. “Is everything all right?” he asked. His face was pale, she thought. They had some cocktails and went in to dinner to the “Anvil Chorus” from “Il Trovatore.” This was followed by Debussy’s “La Mer.”
“I paid the bill for the radio today,” Jim said. “It cost four hundred dollars. I hope you’ll get some enjoyment out of it.”
“Oh, I’m sure I will,” Irene said.
“Four hundred dollars is a good deal more than I can afford,” he went on. “I wanted to get something that you’d enjoy. It’s the last extravagance we’ll be able to indulge in this year. I see that you haven’t paid your clothing bills yet. I saw them on your dressing table.” He looked directly at her. “Why did you tell me you’d paid them? Why did you lie to me?”
“I just didn’t want you to worry, Jim,” she said. She drank some water. “I’ll be able to pay my bills out of this month’s allowance. There were the slipcovers last month, and that party.”
“You’ve got to learn to handle the money I give you a little more intelligently, Irene,” he said. “You’ve got to understand that we won’t have as much money this year as we had last. I had a very sobering talk with Mitchell today. No one is buying anything. We’re spending all our time promoting new issues, and you know how long that takes. I’m not getting any younger, you know. I’m thirty-seven. My hair will be gray next year. I haven’t done as well as I’d hoped to do. And I don’t suppose things will get any better.”
“Yes, dear,” she said.
“We’ve got to start cutting down,” Jim said. “We’ve got to think of the children. To be perfectly frank with you, I worry about money a great deal. I’m not at all sure of the future. No one is. If anything should happen to me, there’s the insurance, but that wouldn’t go very far today. I’ve worked awfully hard to give you and the children a comfortable life,” he said bitterly. “I don’t like to see all of my energies, all of my youth, wasted in fur coats and radios and slipcovers and—”
“Please, Jim,”
she said. “Please. They’ll hear us.”
“Who’ll hear us? Emma can’t hear us.”
“The radio.”
“Oh, I’m sick!” he shouted. “I’m sick to death of your apprehensiveness. The radio can’t hear us. Nobody can hear us. And what if they can hear us? Who cares?”
Irene got up from the table and went into the living room. Jim went to the door and shouted at her from there. “Why are you so Christly all of a sudden? What’s turned you overnight into a convent girl? You stole your mother’s jewelry before they probated her will. You never gave your sister a cent of that money that was intended for her—not even when she needed it. You made Grace Howland’s life miserable, and where was all your piety and your virtue when you went to that abortionist? I’ll never forget how cool you were. You packed your bag and went off to have that child murdered as if you were going to Nassau. If you’d had any reasons, if you’d had any good reasons—”
Irene stood for a minute before the hideous cabinet, disgraced and sickened, but she held her hand on the switch before she extinguished the music and the voices, hoping that the instrument might speak to her kindly, that she might hear the Sweeneys’ nurse. Jim continued to shout at her from the door. The voice on the radio was suave and noncommittal. “An early-morning railroad disaster in Tokyo,” the loudspeaker said, “killed twenty-nine people. A fire in a Catholic hospital near Buffalo for the care of blind children was extinguished early this morning by nuns. The temperature is forty-seven. The humidity is eighty-nine.”
May 17, 1947
Frank O’Connor
Stevie Leary is a boy I remember with extraordinary vividness, so I suppose that even from the first there must have been something outstanding in him. The Learys lived next door to us, and Stevie’s mother was a great friend of my mother’s. Mrs. Leary was a big, buxom woman with a rich, husky voice, and she made her living as a charwoman. In her younger days she had left Ireland and spent a couple of years in America.
“It was love sent me there, Ma’am,” she would say to my mother, in a rich, wheezy, humorous voice. “Love was always the ruination of me. If I might have stuck on there, I could have chummed up with some old, sickly geezer of seventy that would think the world of me and leave me his money when he’d die. I was a fine-looking girl in those days. Frankie Leary used to say I was like the picture of the Colleen Bawn.”
I often studied the picture of the Colleen Bawn in her kitchen to see could I detect some resemblance between herself and Mrs. Leary, but I failed. The Colleen Bawn was a glorious-looking creature, plump and modest and all aglow, as if she had a lamp inside her.
“Why then indeed,” my mother would say loyally, “you’re a fine woman to this day, Mrs. Leary.”
“Ah, I’m not, Ma’am, I’m not,” Mrs. Leary would say with resignation. “I had great feeling, and nothing ages a woman like the feelings. But I was mad in love with Frankie Leary, and lovers can never agree. I had great pride. If he so much as lay a hand on me, I’d fight in a bag tied up.”
“Ah, ’tis a wonder you’d put up with it from him,” my mother would say. She had strong ideas about the dignity of womanhood.
“Ah, wisha, you would, Ma’am, you would,” Mrs. Leary would say with a sigh for my mother’s lack of experience. “A man would never love you properly till he’d give you a clout. I could die for that man when he beat me.”
Then, with a tear in her eye, she’d take out the snuffbox she kept in her enormous bosom and tell again the sad story of herself and Frankie. Frankie, it seemed, had even greater pride than herself. He had always been too big for his boots. America, he had said, was the only country for a man of spirit. Now, Mrs. Leary had a weakness for the little drop, and several times Frankie had warned her that if she didn’t give it up he’d leave her and go to America. One night when she was on a bat, she came home and found that he had been as good as his word. But she had a spirit as great as his own. Leaving Stevie, still a baby, with her mother-in-law, she had followed her husband to America. True, she had never succeeded in finding him. America was a big place, and Frankie Leary wasn’t the sort to leave traces. All the same, she’d had the experience, and she never let you forget it. Even Mrs. Delury, whom she mostly worked for, didn’t succeed in keeping her in her place. Mrs. Delury owned a shop and had a son in Maynooth going for the priesthood, but Mrs. Leary dismissed both of these sources of pride with a sarcastic “We have a priest in the family and a pump in the yard.” As Mrs. Delury said, you couldn’t expect better of anyone who had spent years in that horrible country.
Stevie was twelve, the same age I was, with a big, round, almost idiotic face and a rosy complexion, a slovenly, hasty stride that was almost a scamper, and a shrill, scolding, old woman’s voice. He was always in a hurry, and when someone called to him and he stopped, it was just as if some invisible hand had tightened the reins on him; he slithered and skidded to a halt with his beaming face over his shoulder. He was never a kid like the rest of us. He took life too seriously. His mother had told him the story of an American millionaire who had made his way up from rags to riches, and Stevie hoped to do the same thing. He collected swill for the Mahoneys, carried messages for the Delurys, and for a penny would do anything for you, from minding the baby to buying the dinner. He had a frightfully crabbed air, and would talk in that high-pitched voice of his about what was the cheapest sort of meat to make soup of. “You should try Reilly’s, Ma’am,” he would tell my mother. “Reilly’s keeps grand stewing beef.” My mother thought he wasn’t quite right in the head. “Ah, he’s a good poor slob,” she would say doubtfully when politeness required her to praise him to his mother. Mrs. Leary would sigh and take a pinch of snuff and say, “Ah, he’ll never be the man his father was, Ma’am.” I more or less knew Stevie’s father as the man Stevie would never be.
Occasionally, Mrs. Leary’s feelings would get too much for her. We’d be playing some boys’ game and Stevie would be sitting on the wall outside their little cottage, looking at us with a smile that was half superciliousness and half envy. A kid coming up the road would say, “Stevie, I seen your old one on a bat again.” “Oh, japers!” Stevie would groan. “That woman will be the death of me. Where is she now, Jerry?” “I seen her down by the Cross.” “Clancy’s or Mooney’s?” Stevie would ask, and away he would go. Sometimes I would go along after him and watch him darting into each pub as he passed, the very image of an up-to-date businessman, and shouting to the barmaid, “You didn’t see my ma today, Miss O.?…You didn’t? I’ll try Riordan’s.” Eventually he would discover her in some snug with a couple of cronies. Mrs. Leary was the warm sort of drunkard who attracts hangers-on.
“Ah, come on home now, Ma,” Stevie would cry coaxingly.
“Jasus help us!” the cronies would say in pretended admiration. “Isn’t he a lovely little boy, God bless him!”
“Ah, he’ll never be the man his father was, Ma’am,” Mrs. Leary would say, beaming at him regretfully. “There was a man for you, Ma’am! A fine, educated, independent man!”
It might be nightfall before Stevie got her home—a mountain of a woman, who would have stunned him if she’d collapsed on him. He would make her a cup of tea, undress her, and put her to bed. If my mother were by, she would lend a hand and, furious at any woman’s making such an exhibition of herself and before a child, she would rate Mrs. Leary soundly.
Sometimes, late at night, we’d hear Stevie crying, “Ah, stay here, Ma, and I’ll get it for you!” and his mother roaring, “Gimme the money!” Stevie would groan and steal away to whatever hiding hole he was then keeping his savings in. “That’s all I have now,” he would say hopefully. “Will tuppence do you?” With the cunning of all drunkards, Mrs. Leary seemed to know to a farthing how much he had. Night after night she shuffled down to Miss O.’s with nothing showing through the hood of the shawl but one sinister, bloodshot eye, and tuppence by tuppence Stevie’s capital vanished, till he started life again with all the bounce gone out of him, as
poor as any of us who had never heard the life story of an American millionaire.
Then one night Frankie Leary came back from the States. My mother was at Mrs. Leary’s when Frankie strolled up the road one summer evening, without even a bag, and stood in the doorway with an impassive air. “Hallo,” he said lightly. Mrs. Leary rose from her stool by the fire, gaping at him; then she tottered, and finally she ran and enveloped him in her arms. “Oh, Frankie!” she sobbed. “After all the years!” This apparently wasn’t at all the sort of conduct that the independent Frankie approved of. “Here, here,” he said roughly. “There’s time enough for that later. Now I want something to eat.” He pushed her away and looked at Stevie, who was staring at him, enraptured by the touching scene. “Is this the boy?” he asked, and then all at once he smiled pleasantly and held out his hand. “How’re ye, Son?” he asked heartily. “Oh, grand, Father,” said Stevie, who was equal to any occasion. “Did you have a nice journey?”
Frankie didn’t even reply to that. Maybe he hadn’t had a nice journey. Unlike the American Stevie had been told of, Frankie came home as poor as he left, and next day he had to go to work on the railway. It seemed America wasn’t all it was cracked up to be.
· · ·
For a week or two, Stevie was in a state of real hysteria over his father’s arrival. For the first time he had, like the rest of us, a da of his own, and as our das generally flaked hell out of us, Stevie felt it was up to him to go in fear and trembling of what “my da” might do to him. Of course, it was all showing off, for his da did nothing whatever to him. On the contrary, Frankie was painfully and anxiously correct with him, as though he were trying to make up for any slight he might have inflicted on the boy by his eleven-year absence. He found that Stevie was interested in America, and talked to him patiently for hours on end about it while Stevie, in an appalling imitation of some old man he had seen in a pub, sat back in his chair with his hands in his trousers pockets.
The 40s: The Story of a Decade Page 77
