Maggie's Breakfast

by Gabriel Walsh

  “You are in many ways very fortunate, Gabriel. I, on the other hand, got so caught up with this damn animal called art I found I could never satisfy it or be satisfied by it. No matter what I said or did or sang. No matter how much I trained and practised. I was always reaching out and up and stretching my guts and heart out, trying to appease some little echo that said I could have a better tone or a more perfect way of caressing a note when I opened my mouth to sing. Of course I don’t sing any more. Sometimes I imagine I do, but I don’t. I really can’t, but don’t tell anyone that. The truth is half the time I just wanted to puke it all out of me and drop it on the floor like a cow scuttering in a field after eating too much grass.” She reached for the glass of water on the table and refreshed her throat. She looked directly at me and asked me a question I didn’t know how to answer. “What do you say to that?”

  I was shy about being put on the spot. As I listened to Maggie I felt myself floating about the room in an odd kind of Limbo. I thought I was in some kind of dream or something. I looked about the restaurant and observed the familiarity of it. Numerous times I had carried dishes and walked in and out of the place. I could still hear the voices of some of the waiters I worked with. I had met all kinds of people who sat and ate here every day. Sitting in a booth with Maggie Sheridan at the beginning of dinner hour made me feel insecure and it was not a place I had ever imagined myself being in.

  Maggie sensed I was feeling awkward and had retreated into myself. As if to wake me up she began to talk again. “Anyway that’s how I feel sometimes! I’m not telling you a lie. My problem is everything is stuck and living in my veins and throat and I can’t puke it out when I want to be alone with myself. I’m never able to be by myself. I was always glued to this wish of wanting to make my voice the best part of my existence and that is a fatal flaw if I ever had one or heard of one.” She paused, looked in her purse that was on the table in front of her and took out her room key. She held it tightly in her right hand, and then continued. “I suppose that’s what being an artist is.” After a moment she stood up, wiped her lips again with the linen napkin and dropped it on the table. “Gabriel, be good now and mind yourself. I’m going upstairs to finish packing and I hate it.”

  She slowly walked out of the restaurant. When she passed from view I noticed the red lipstick marks on the napkin and wondered how the hotel laundry would react to it when it was delivered for cleaning.

  * * *

  Early on the morning of my departure I lay awake and imagined my father and mother lying asleep in their sagging bed. The bedspring had yet again been repaired with strands of rope and wire but the centre of the spring and mattress still almost touched the floor. I imagined them sleeping back to back. Did they know what each other looked like, I wondered? Neither seemed to want to acknowledge the life they lived together. They were attached by some mixture of pain and pleasure and didn’t know how to separate. Pain was such a silent darkness you could depend on it more than the weather. Paddy and Molly walked in different directions and often passed each other on the street without saying hello or ‘How are you?’ It was as if they didn’t want to acknowledge or accept the fact that they knew each other. Both of them lived with an unspoken sense of regret and neither seemed to be able to identify what it was exactly. In spite of the obvious estrangement, night with its absence of light brought my parents back to each other for a brief period of time. In a world of one shade and colour they probably made an effort to soften their mutual resentment. The bed apparently was the only place they could be together without wanting to kill each other.

  As they lay in their private slumber I sensed a detachment in myself and for a moment or two I believed I didn’t exist at all. I wasn’t sure where the feeling came from. Was it because of Paddy and Molly? In many ways I didn’t know my own mother and father. I felt the same way about my brothers and sisters. In that very cold and early morning I thought again that something was very wrong with the way we lived.

  Downstairs in the small cold front room my polished shoes with my new pair of socks awaited my feet. My sister Rita had given the socks to me as a going-away present. The night before, my mother made me a corn-beef sandwich on white bread and left it in the box outside on the windowsill overnight. The cold moist air would keep it from going stale when I took it on my journey. I lay awake in my small slim cot trying to imagine myself getting up, getting dressed and leaving home. There was a bus, a train and a boat out there waiting to take me away. The dark cold winter morning wasn’t encouraging me to get out of bed either. As I thought of myself standing on the deck of the big ship that was to sail from Cobh in Cork to New York, I heard my father snoring again and I began to think that maybe he was only pretending to be asleep. Maybe he didn’t want to say goodbye and wish me luck. I tightened the blanket on the bed around my body to keep me from shivering.

  Nobody in the family except Rita had paid attention when I told them I was going away to America. They might have thought I was making it up.

  In many ways my father’s indifference was more painful than my mother’s obsession with religion. It was easy to react and respond to Molly because it was clear what she was doing and thinking. My father seemed to never be fully present. I knew him more by the smell of his clothes than the sound of his voice. His clothes smelled of tobacco and dampness. He appeared to live as if nothing took place in his life. I thought to myself that a wife and children were things that happened to my father when he lost his way or didn’t know what he was doing and the responsibilities of children were a punishment that he silently resented. Maybe it had more to do with not knowing how to like anything or anybody after he came back from the war. Paddy gave the impression that he was constantly amazed when he looked at us. I think he questioned himself about who we were and who he was and how and why we were all related to each other. My father appeared to be always waiting for something or someone in Ireland to reach out to him and tell him he was welcome and that he belonged and was cared for and appreciated. Somehow that simple wish eluded him and he retreated so far into himself that he became practically invisible. For most of the day Paddy went about life, indifferent to the point where he was his one and only companion. Contentment was something he saw in his teacup when he sat down for a cup of tea. As far as my mother was concerned, pleasure was not just a curse but an enemy. Only Heaven was to be looked forward to and the only way to get there was to live a life as wretched, dismal and unhappy as possible. My father left home at about the same age as I was now. I wondered if he ever had second thoughts about it. Did he begrudge my Uncle John his simpler life in Ireland? Did he resent the fact that he was not very welcome when he came back home years earlier? Was it that he had regrets about marrying my mother? Was that the fatal mortal wound to his heart and soul? Was my mother the bane of his existence? Was it that in Ireland he could do very little about his plight? As a soldier he felt empowered to enforce. As a father he felt awkward, perhaps useless. How could he enforce fatherhood? In some respects all of his children were what post-war Ireland was to him: a strange new experience that he knew and cared little about.

  As I began to separate myself from my blanket I became more convinced than ever that I would never know what the union of my parents was about.

  I couldn’t understand why he was still in bed and not in the small room downstairs waiting for me to get up. This was to be the moment that my parents would show they cared. Every other day of her life my mother was the first out of bed. She’d have the fire going and the tea made before anyone else had a chance to complain about the weather. But this late winter morning she was still slumbering next to my father. I wanted to wake them up but I was afraid to. The small room I was sleeping in began to look bigger and the bed my parents slept in seemed to have shrunk. For some reason it didn’t appear to be as big as I used to think it was. Maybe it was because I gave up on wondering about Molly and Paddy lying in it. Or maybe I had hoped they’d somehow turn to each other and change, eve
n a little bit. I never saw two strangers so physically close to each other as my mother and father as they lay every night in the old bed like two tired stray dogs that had nothing to eat all day long. If beds could talk they’d say a lot more than walls. The bedspring had burst open a few weeks earlier and my father, perhaps for the fortieth time, knitted wire through it like a tailor sewing a pair of trousers. The chamber-pot, because it had been dropped so many times when my mother went to empty it in the outhouse had chips of its enamel peeled off it – it wasn’t pushed completely under the bed. The large black handle on it was still sticking out from under the bed and it was in danger of being turned over when either my mother or father decided to use it. I only remember this happening once in my lifetime. It was when my father, after coming home from a funeral of one of his army buddies, had too much to drink. That night he woke up in his sleep singing soldier songs from World War I. My mother called him a “good for nothin’”. In his retreat to get away from her that night Paddy stepped on the handle of the pot and it tipped over. My mother then leaped out of the bed and ran to the kitchen for a bucket and a handful of old rags to wipe up the mess.

  I quietly got out of bed, crawled into my trousers and tiptoed out of the bedroom. When I stepped onto the stairway I made sure not to lean too heavily on the creaky stairs. I didn’t want my two brothers and sisters to think I was waking them up so that they could say goodbye to me. Downstairs I put on the shirt I had placed in front of the fireplace the night before. The fading embers from the previous night’s fire kept the chill out of it. I put my hands under the cold-water tap and sprinkled water on my face. The water was icy but I wasn’t surprised. In less than a few seconds I had the new pair of socks on my feet. It was one of the rare times in my life that I had ever worn anything new and I took my time with the ceremony. Within minutes I was fully dressed. I opened the back-yard door and stepped out into the dark cold rainy morning for my corn-beef sandwich. The sandwich had been wrapped in old newspaper and I noticed that the print had come off on the bread. I took a bite out of it anyway and put the rest of it into my jacket pocket. I went back into the house and sat down on the chair in front of the fireplace and stared at my old suitcase that was held together by a long piece of twine. It looked like it had been around the globe at least twice before.

  I looked around the house and noticed every little thing: the curtains, statues, chairs, and the dish that my mother put the pig’s cheek on. The cups I drank my tea out of. I was looking forward to leaving but now when it was all a reality I wasn’t sure. The little house and the small rooms didn’t look so bad after all. Pictures and statues which I hadn’t paid much attention to before were now looking warm and friendly. Even the statue of the Infant of Prague looked like it was related to me. The Sacred Heart of Jesus with his bleeding heart looked like a real person who had lived in the house ever since I could remember. I began to think they might be lonely and miss me when I departed. I was thinking of apologising for leaving.

  I sat in the semi-darkness and wondered if I should wake up the rest of my family and remind them I was going away and might not be back ever again. If I made a noise somebody would wake up and come down and say goodbye to me. I put a spoon in a teacup and began tapping the inside of the cup. There was no response from anyone upstairs. I stopped the activity after about a minute. Everything around me was so dark I could hardly see myself. All was still and silent. I stood alone and I began to feel frightened. I was even afraid to reach down and pick up the suitcase. My wish to leave home was now terrifying me. If the weather was bad, which it was, I’d have an excuse for not leaving. I’d be able to tell anyone and everyone who asked that the weather kept me from leaving.

  I opened the front door. The street was dark and the curtains in the windows of the small red-brick houses were fully drawn. It was even too early for Mrs. Mack to open her window. The street was wet but the rain had stopped and the sky appeared to be turning brighter. I stood outside the door and hoped the rain would come again and that the wind would blow and thunder and lightning would appear and wake everybody up so that they would know I couldn’t travel in such bad weather. The longer I stood outside my house wishing for bad weather the clearer the sky became.

  I stepped back into my house and sat again in front of the fireplace and waited for somebody to get up and tell me not to leave. My impatience grew. I walked up the staircase again and leaned heavily on the wooden steps and made them squeak and creak. When I got to the top of the landing there was the same stillness and the musical snore of my father. I coughed as if I was sick and suffering from pneumonia. I turned and jumped back down the stairs, hoping somebody would tell me to be quiet.

  Down in the front room I was again wrapped in silence and loneliness. I stood in front of the mantelpiece and touched the photograph of my brother Nicholas and wondered what he would say if he knew I was leaving home without anyone in my family saying goodbye to me. If he was home he would tell me not to leave. He would tell me he wanted me to stay and play with him and be part of his life. Nicholas would cry if I told him I was leaving home. He’d beg me to stay. I opened and closed the door a few times, assuming somebody upstairs would think I had left the house and they’d rush down to tell me not to leave. Even with the banging of the door nobody got up.

  In the hallway my eyes focused on the old gramophone. One of our two records was in place on the turntable. Fast and furious I wound the machine up. The record started to squeak and squawk and made a terrible noise that would wake the dead. “I love you like I’ve never loved before . . .” I let it squawk a while then stopped it. Did it wake anybody up? I listened. No. All was silent. I looked up the stairs hoping I’d see somebody, anybody, walking towards me. But I didn’t. I saw the empty staircase looking down at me. No one was getting up. Not even to use the piss-pot. I felt I was at my own funeral. When my mother and my father, my brothers and sisters, wake up they’ll find me gone, I thought. It was as if I hadn’t lived in this little house at all.

  Doing my best not to cry out loud, with each passing minute I began to accept that it was too late for me and my mother and father and the rest of the family to put together what had always seemed broken. I was one of ten children and I began to accept the fact that I was alone. I was alone then and I was alone now. Back before I reached my fifth birthday my mother once told me she was going to give me away. She said she would give me to the beggar man who showed up on our street once a week begging for money. For a very long time, until perhaps I was seven years old and had made my First Communion, the thought of the beggar man taking me away frightened me more than anything I could imagine. It was rumoured on the street that the beggar man had no home and no family and lived under a bush in a field a few miles outside of Dublin. Whenever my mother threatened to give me away I fell into a deep state of fear and cried until she reassured me that she wasn’t really going to part with me. Even the shrill sound of the Banshee crying in the middle of a dark rainy winter’s night, foretelling a death in the neighbourhood, didn’t frighten me as much. The Banshee, I was told and it seemed to be accepted by everyone in Ireland at the time, was an old ghost-like woman with long dark hair that covered her entire body. The Banshee appeared or settled near a house that had a sick family member. In the middle of the night the Banshee cried and continuously combed her hair. It was believed that when the Banshee finished combing her hair the person she had come to cry over died.

  I reached for the old suitcase and decided I had no choice but to leave. I opened the front door, placed my suitcase outside, looked back into the living room, pulled the front door shut and walked away from my home. Before I got to the corner I stopped and sat down on the suitcase.

  Then, as if out of a cloud, the milkman and his horse and cart walked past me. “You’re up early,” he said as he placed his bottles of milk in front of the doors.

  I was dying to talk to somebody, anybody, so I called after him. “I’m goin’ away.”

  He didn’t
seem a bit surprised. “Where ya off ta?” he asked matter-of-factly.

  “New York,” I called to him. “I’m leavin’ here.”

  “Ya want to take me with ya? You want to know how long I’ve been doin’ this?” The man had been delivering the milk for as long as I could remember. He then called to me as I walked away from him. “Ya don’t owe me any money by any chance, now do ya?”

  For a second or two I thought he was serious.

  He then quickly reassured me. “Ah I’m only jokin’. Listen to me, have a great time over there with the Yanks. I’ve a few relatives in Boston. If ya bump into any of ’em tell them to send me the fare and I’ll be off meself.”

  He went on about his job and I was glad to have had contact with somebody on the lonely street so early in the morning. When the milkman’s horse and cart turned the corner and went to another street I walked on, then stopped again to see if anyone in my family had remembered me. I looked up the street and it was empty.

  Then, as I turned to go, I heard my mother’s voice: “Gabriel? Gabriel?”

  I looked back. She was running towards me. I was too frightened and confused to run towards her so I waited for her to catch up with me. As she approached I pretended to be strong and in control. When she caught up with me I couldn’t look her straight in the eyes and tell her I might never see her again so I walked alongside her in silence, pretending I was happy to leave and looking forward to where I was going.

  “I’ll be over in America by this time next week, Ma. I’ll send you a picture of me when I’m there. Miss Sheridan said the first thing I’m goin’ to learn to do is drive a car. She said Mrs. Axe has about three or four cars and I can drive one of them.”

  My mother didn’t react to what I was saying. I continued talking as fast as I could just to keep myself from breaking down.

  “The ship I’m goin’ on is half the size of Inchicore. You could fit two or three Shelbourne Hotels in it. The thing is so big it can’t even come into the harbour in Cork. That’s the truth, Ma.”