“What did you ask me?”
“Do you live near the Jews in Cabra?”
“Are you tryin’ to tell me I’m Jewish?”
“No, I’m not. I don’t know what the fuck you are.”
“I go to Mass so how can I be Jewish?”
“You live in Cabra and you don’t know who you live near?”
“I live near the person in the house next to me.”
“Are the people you live next to Jewish?”
“What people?”
“You have neighbours, don’t ya?”
“Of course.”
“Are they Jewish?”
“I don’t think so.”
“What makes you say that?”
“Two of the girls are nuns.”
“How do you know?”
“They were walkin’ around with them black clothes on them. I know what a nun looks like. I go to Mass, don’t I?”
“You talk like you know everythin’. If you know so much why are you only a waiter down on his heels?”
“I’m not down on me heels.”
“You are so! You ought to go over and ask Mr. Briscoe to give you a helpin’ hand. He’s good for that, you know. That’s why I asked you if you lived near any Jews up there in Cabra. If you did you’d probably have a better shirt to wear when you come to work. You need help. There’s a charitable Jewish organisation up near where you live and you ought to ask for a bit of assistance.”
“Go piss off with yourself!”
I was standing by, listening like an anxious schoolboy. I looked over at Mr. Briscoe, the man Guiney said was the Lord Mayor of Dublin. He looked very serious. I was afraid he had heard the chat that was going on behind him. Normally when he came into the lounge for his afternoon tea he’d bid hello or tip his hat but today he didn’t. Had I known earlier the things Guiney said about him I would have paid more attention to him.
Guiney tapped me on the shoulder. “Walsh, go make sure Mr. Briscoe has enough hot water.”
I went over to the table. “Is everything all right, sir?”
Mr. Briscoe took his eyes away from the newspaper and stared at me. I was expecting him to answer right away but he didn’t. He continued to look at me and I began to regret my intrusion.
“Would you like another pot of hot water, sir?”
All of a sudden he looked happy. “I would, thanks. Kind of you to ask.”
I rushed back into the kitchen and filled a silver teapot with boiling water and ran back out to Mr. Briscoe’s table. I put the pot in front of him.
“Here you are, sir.”
“Are you new here?” he asked me.
“I’m here a short while.”
“Sit down,” he said.
“Me?”
“Yes, you. Who else would I be talking to?”
“I’m workin’, sir. If I sit down I’ll be sacked.”
Mr. Briscoe raised his voice a little bit. “Sit down!”
I sat down.
He looked across the room at the other waiters as if to taunt or defy them in some way. The waiters were somewhat mystified by the sight of me sitting. Mr. Briscoe folded his paper and placed his hat on top of it. He looked as if he was about to get up and leave but he didn’t. I made a feeble gesture to stand up but just as I did Mr. Briscoe raised his voice.
“Them fellas standing against the wall look like a row of penguins. They pay more attention to the customers than they do to their work. Don’t think I haven’t been able to hear what they were mumbling about. I’ll tell you something. There used to be a lot more Jews up on the South Circular Road than there are nowadays. Half of them are gone. I bet you don’t know why?”
I didn’t even know who lived where or what the difference was.
“Jewish girls in Dublin have to leave here and go to Scotland or England to meet fellas of their own kind. It’s a pity but it’s true. Lookin’ at that crew standing against the wall there is reason enough for them to go. If you want you can tell them that.”
I glanced over at the waiters who were now still and silent. They looked as if they were waiting for something else to happen.
“What’s your name?” Mr. Briscoe asked me.
“Gabriel.”
“Gabriel?” He laughed. “An odd name for an Irish fella!” His smile seemed to indicate he was enjoying holding me prisoner at the table. “Gabriel’s a Hebrew name, you know. It means . . .” He stopped.
I waited for him to continue but he just poured the hot water into the teapot and quickly poured himself another cup of tea. As he retreated to his paper I quietly got up, turned away and walked back to my workmates who were standing against the wall looking and acting like nervous penguins.
Quinn turned to me. “What did he want?”
“After I gave him the hot water he said you fellas frighten Jewish girls and they have to go to Scotland when they want to get married.”
Harry Guiney slapped me with his serving towel and left the room.
A few minutes later Mr. Briscoe got up from his chair and left also.
* * *
Mary the fifth-floor maid was resting and leaning against the corridor wall. A bundle of clean pressed linen was between her feet. She looked tired and exhausted. The sound of a guitar was coming from one of the nearby rooms.
“D’ya hear that? D’ya? He’s been at it all bloody night,” Mary said to me. “The guests next door have been complainin’ about that fella in there.”
“What fella?” I asked Mary.
“Yar man with the music thing!”
I stopped and listened. “It’s nice.”
“Nice?” Mary blabbered back with her eyes almost bursting through her reading glasses.
“Yeah. I like it. It’s very good.”
Mary leaned down and picked up the bed linen that was between her feet. As she walked away from me she called out: “What in the name of God would you know? You’re just a Dublin jackeen!”
“And what are you? A country mug without a handle?”
“No bloody manners at all if you ask me.” Mary liked calling Dubliners ‘jackeens’.
The breakfast I was in the process of delivering was for the man who was making the music. When I arrived at the door I knocked. After a moment I inserted the passkey and entered the room. A man was sitting up on the bed playing a guitar. He had whitish hair and was wearing a white shirt that was probably his nightgown. His fingers kept plucking away at the guitar strings. I walked to the small table next to the bed and placed the breakfast tray on it. The man didn’t appear to notice me. He just kept staring at his moving fingers. I stepped away and walked back towards the door but as I got to the door the music stopped.
I turned around and the man called to me. “I’ve been up all night trying to do that. It’s there. It’s between the cords. The quivering string is frightened. It must be made secure. Love it. Love it and it will speak its sound. Feel! Feel it.”
I wasn’t sure if he was talking to me or not but he seemed happy.
“Is it tea or coffee?” he asked as he lifted the top of the pot.
I wasn’t sure what was in the silver pot. I had rushed out of the pantry in such a hurry I forgot to check it.
He put his nose to the pot and smelled the aroma of coffee. “Coffee! Ah, yes! Thank you.”
When I got back to the service pantry the breakfast rush had subsided. And Fifth Floor Mary was vacuuming the corridor. John Kilady, another boy on duty that morning, was sitting at the small table drinking tea and reading the newspaper. John was so intense he never opened his mouth except when he was listening to you. The more you talked to him the wider his mouth got. It was as if he was ready to swallow your head. He lived in Killeen, a posh part of Dublin and was more of a “trainee” than a regular service waiter. Everybody who worked with him knew he didn’t have to work for a living. John had whiter shirt collars than any other waiter in the hotel. He also had new shoes. His ambition was to be a hotel manager or own his own hotel o
ne day. One of his uncles owned a hotel in Kerry and John spent his holidays there.
“What’s your uncle’s hotel like?” I asked him one morning when both of us had a break in the room service.
“Very good. We have a beautiful view of the bay down there. I love it. I want to manage me uncle’s place some day. I’ll tell you that.”
Being well off, John had many opportunities to travel abroad as well and he didn’t hesitate to talk about it. He bragged about his visits to London and Paris and about the big hotels there.
“If you saw the size of the Savoy in London you’d spit out your Adam’s apple. It’s so big you could hide this hotel in its basement.” Or: “If you want to know first-class silver service you have to know how they do it in Paris.”
Even though I knew how he got his money to travel abroad I still enjoyed asking him questions. “How’d you go to them places?”
“Me father.”
“Your father took you?”
“Don’t you go places with your father?”
“No. My father was in World War I and he hardly talks except to himself sometimes.”
“Is he shell-shocked?”
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Does he get up in the middle of the night and think he’s being attacked by the Germans?”
“No. He likes the Germans,” I answered.
“I do too,” John said.
“Me father thinks he’s being attacked by my mother,” I volunteered.
“He should take her to Paris. Me parents used to bark at each other all the time until me father took me mother to Paris. When they came back they couldn’t wipe the smiles off their faces. Have you ever been to Paris, Walsh?”
“No.”
“Go there sometime.”
“How can I do that?”
“Maybe I’ll loan you the money someday.”
“You’re jokin’,” I said.
“I know I am,” he answered.
My mind went to wondering how Paris could have stopped his parents from barking at each other. I thought of asking him for a loan to send Paddy and Molly there but I knew he wouldn’t offer a penny.
After a minute or two I noticed a picture of a man on the back page of the paper John was reading. I leaned forward to get a closer look. John then pulled the paper away.
“What are you lookin’ at?”
“The picture.”
“What friggin’ picture?”
I pointed to the picture of the man in the paper. The man was holding a guitar.
“That man! I just took him his breakfast.”
John turned the paper around to get a better look at the photograph. “This fella?”
“Yes. I was just talkin’ to him.”
“This fella?”
“Yis. Who d’ya think I’m talkin’ about?”
“What’s his name?” John put the paper down on the table so we could both look at it.
We then said out loud: “Andrés Segovia!”
After work while cycling home to Inchicore I couldn’t get the guitar music out of my ears and some of the people I had met out of my mind. The world of the hotel was a universe I had fallen into almost by accident and I was as happy as hell about it. All the waiters wore clean shirts and talked all day long about the people they served. Most of what they had to say about the customers and the hotel guests wouldn’t have been allowed in a pub on a Friday night. What they had to say about the management would have condemned them to hell for a thousand years or more. I felt I was working in a carnival where the merry-go-round never stopped and where everything said and done by the waiting staff was a commentary on Irish and world political leaders. Somehow the maids who made the beds and cleaned the rooms and the waiters who served everybody and anybody had an answer to every political and social issue of the day. Even the smell of the hotel was something I looked forward to. There was always the smell of something cooking or the remnants of tobacco burning in a pipe being smoked by the odd characters who used the hotel lobby as a home away from home.
While I pedalled the bicycle the sounds the man made on the guitar were ringing in my ears to the point where I thought I couldn’t get rid of them. I worried that I might even get an earache that wouldn’t go away. Mr. Segovia, a nice man, up at seven in the morning practising when he could have been sleeping. The sounds he made were very different from the noise and sounds of where I lived. As I cycled down the steep hill past Saint James’s Hospital, sometimes referred to as “The Kip”, which old people entered to die, the wind blowing into my ears blew away the sights and sounds of the hotel and both were soon replaced in my mind by the time I reached Inchicore.
* * *
When the phone from the hotel kitchen rang I was sitting around the table in the service pantry. One of my work mates, Dessie O’Neill, picked it up. The voice on the other end of the phone was so loud it must have curled the gristle of Dessie’s right ear.
“Be quick about serving 507! D’ya hear me?” Dessie turned back towards Liam Twohig, the other service waiter, and with a shrivelled voice called out, “Her breakfast is on its way up!” He slapped down the phone.
Liam shouted so loud I thought he swallowed the teapot. “The fuckin’ bitch! I’ll lose me job if I go in there and serve that woman. I’m not servin’ her!”
“I won’t do it either,” Dessie O’Neill shot back.
“You will!” Liam responded.
“I will in me balls,” Dessie answered.
Then as quick as a forgivable sin Liam dashed out of the pantry.
Dessie yelled after him. “Don’t leave me with this! It’s your turn!”
It was too late. Liam was gone.
Dessie gazed over at me. His eyes behind his spectacles were spinning in their sockets like two flies chasing each other. “I’m goin’ to report that bastard so I am.”
He looked as if he was going to jump out the window when the dumb waiter arrived with the breakfast for room 507.
“I don’t want to do this. I don’t want to,” he moaned.
“What’s wrong?”
“I’m not even supposed to be workin’ today! I’m not servin’ that bitch!”
“Who the hell are ya talkin’ about?”
“You’ll know about it soon enough.”
The phone rang again.
I picked it up.
“Who’s this?” the shrill voice on the other end asked.
“Me,” I answered.
“Who’s me?” the voice yelled.
“Gabriel Walsh. Who’s this?” I asked.
I then heard a scream.
“I’m the assistant manager!”
I got frightened and thought I might be fired. “Mornin’, Mr. Brown!”
“Forget the good-mornin’ blabber! Did you serve 507 yet?”
“I just came in. I haven’t had a cup of tea yet.”
“Just came in? Where were you?”
“I was a few minutes late.”
“Who’s up there?”
“Dessie and meself,” I answered.
“Where’s Twohig?”
“He left.”
“Left for where?”
“I think he had to go take a piss.”
“Is O’Neill there?”
“Yes.”
“Tell him to serve 507 right away.”
I looked at Dessie. “Mr. Brown said you’re to serve the breakfast right away.”
Dessie wasn’t happy. “I’m supposed to be on me day off!” he yelled back at me.
Over the phone the assistant manager’s voice screamed back. “I’m coming up there and that breakfast better be served! You hear me?”
“I just got in,” I answered, half-frightened of losing my job.
“I’m talking to the other two!” Mr. Brown shouted into my ear again and then hung up.
Two floor maids, Mary from Cork and Nuala from Kerry, came rushing into the pantry. Both looked as if they had suffered a seizure.
N
uala was shaking and carrying a batch of clean towels in her arms. “Did ye serve her yet? I’m afraid to start up the vacuum until she’s finished with breakfast. I’m not going near her room until she’s finished with her grub and the tray has come out of there.” She dropped several towels on the floor.
“Divine Jesus of Nazareth, save me from her yells and moans this mornin’!” said Mary as she picked up Nuala’s towels and handed them back to her.
“Has her grub come up?” Nuala asked.
“Just this second,” Dessie answered.
“It hasn’t been served yet,” I said.
“Christ in heaven, somebody better be servin’ it before she has the manager up here!” Nuala said with the grin of a Kerry goat on her face.
At the same time Dessie was timidly inspecting the breakfast tray. “Everythin’s here. Fried kippers. Toast! Marmalade! Tea! Milk and sugar! Napkin! And spotless silver. That woman will be the cause of me crucifixion. I’ll piss all over meself before I’ll enter that room. Last summer she almost had me sacked for not knowing if her fried eggs were fresh or not.” He appeared to be in serious pain.
“Get it to her before we’re all sacked and out of a job!” Mary howled as she and Nuala scampered out of the pantry.
“Where the fuck did that Liam go?” Dessie said with an agonised shrill.
“The breakfast will be cold if you keep fightin’ and arguin’,” I said. “Nobody can be as bad as you’re talkin’ about.”
I then impulsively volunteered.
“I’ll serve it,” I said.
There was a silence as if Judgment Day had occurred.
Dessie’s mouth opened wide. “Thanks, Walsh,” he responded with eyes looking up at the ceiling.
I picked up the tray and walked out of the pantry as Dessie blessed himself. A sense of redemption was written all over his face and as I got further away from him I heard him calling, “Thanks, Walsh, and good luck!”
Mary and Nuala followed me along the corridor to Room 507. When they spoke about her, their voices trembled.
“Nothin’ is ever right. Your hands and fingernails are dirty and your slip needs starch. There’s grease on your apron and soup on your shoes. The bed-sheets are not properly ironed. And that bloody record player she leaves on all day! The screechin’ and singin’ stuff that comes out of it would give ya an earache. I’ve never heard anythin’ like it in all me life and that’s as true as God. I was in cleanin’ the bathroom once when she put on that screechy thing.”
Maggie's Breakfast Page 17
