Mrs Eckdorf in O'Neill's Hotel

by William Trevor

  ‘What happened, O’Shea?’

  He was silent for a while, and then he said that Eugene was late for her birthday that day. He had come into the kitchen saying he had been to Baldoyle, where Southern Dandy had won at a hundred to eight. She had a great keenness for birthdays, O’Shea said: everyone’s birthday was celebrated in turn: her own, her son’s, her daughter’s, and the birthdays of all she employed. She loved ceremonies and games and watching people talk, and giving people special things to eat, and giving people presents.

  ‘He sat down,’ said O’Shea, ‘and laughed. “Southern Dandy,” he said. You could smell his breath even though he was smoking a cigarette.’

  He had sat down and his mother had made the best of things. The cake and all the teatime food she liked were brought to the table: barm brack, Jacob’s Mikado biscuits, egg sandwiches. Eugene didn’t take much, a piece of birthday cake or so, a cup of tea. Kathleen Devinish cleared away the plates, the cards were dealt and port was offered. O’Shea remembered the evening coming to an end in a quiet way. Eugene had said he was tired; his mother smiled at him. Her daughter and the maids had said good night to her, and Kathleen Devinish had said the same. O’Shea himself had not said good night, since he would see her in the hall as she passed through it on her way upstairs; which she did a minute or so later, with her two cats.

  ‘Yes,’ said Mrs Eckdorf.

  The next thing that happened, as far as O’Shea was concerned, was that he was wakened by a screaming in the hotel. Having listened and heard nothing more, he had drawn an overcoat about him and had left his room. No one else had apparently been roused. He passed down the stairs and saw from the first-floor landing the figure of Eugene sitting on one of the tall chairs in the hall, with a glass in his hand and a bottle on the floor beside him. It was the first time that anyone had sat like that, drinking in the hall of O’Neill’s Hotel, although now Eugene Sinnott often sat in that same chair, with a bottle and a glass.

  As he watched, Eugene’s sister had passed him without acknowledging his presence, without, so O’Shea’s impression had been, even seeing him. She had descended the stairs and had struck the face of her brother with a small brass ornament. ‘You have torn the soul of God,’ she cried, saying that over and over again. Her brother did not move.

  O’Shea’s voice continued or ceased, Mrs Eckdorf was not sure which. The scene repeated itself in her mind. ‘You have torn the soul of God,’ cried the square-faced woman with whom she had that afternoon eaten macaroons, insistent in her accusation, yet gaining from her brother no response.

  Mrs Eckdorf nodded. She said:

  ‘And then, O’Shea?’

  Eugene’s sister left the hotel the next morning and did not return to live there. She married, O’Shea said, not long afterwards: she married Mr Gregan.

  She married a man, Mrs Eckdorf corrected, for whom she had little love: it was not enough to say that she married Mr Gregan. Soon after that, she added, Eugene himself married one of the maids, an orphaned girl called Philomena, and then one day Philomena took her baby from the hotel.

  ‘Well, yes,’ said O’Shea.

  ‘Why did they quarrel on the night of the birthday, O’Shea?’

  O’Shea replied that it must have been that there’d been a family disagreement between them. It was none of his business, he said. He’d gone back to bed, thinking that.

  ‘O’Shea, you can be honest with me.’

  She said that she was tired by now. She said that only her professional side was conducting this enquiry. What did Eugene Sinnott think that afternoon when he was late for the birthday, twenty-eight years ago? With steady emphasis she asked that question and others too. O’Shea spoke in reply.

  She watched his mouth opening and closing. She heard the words he uttered, and then it seemed to her that her questions were being answered anyway, without his help, by the intuitions that had set her on this journey. She closed her eyes so as not to see the moving lips, since it was not necessary to see them.

  The small woman who had showed her pictures of her son sat in the kitchen of the hotel, desired across the birthday table by Eugene Sinnott, who was flushed with race-course drink. He felt rebellious, returning late to the heaviness of the hotel. He looked at his mother sitting silently there, not passing judgement, a woman famed for her goodness to orphaned children, a serene person who kept as pets two cats, although the exercise-books revealed, years later, that Eugene had always had a fear of cats. He hated her for a moment; he hated for a moment all the traditions of the hotel, all the reverence for her dead husband and for her father and her Venetian mother. He felt overshadowed by those two dead men who so often occupied his mother’s thoughts, as though in some way they accused him. He desired the small maid, with her black hair and her olive face; he desired her in the same moment that he hated his mother.

  ‘Would I make a cup of tea?’ said the voice of O’Shea, coming into the birthday scene. He went on talking, speaking of buttered bread and mackerel, and then his voice faded away.

  In her ears she heard screaming and knew that it came, not from the square-faced woman, but from the maid. She saw Eugene going down the stairs, and his sister, alarmed by the screaming, going to Philomena. She saw O’Shea standing, confused, on the landing, and then she saw Eugene’s face while his sister cried at him that he had torn the soul of God. She had gone from the hotel, and Mrs Sinnott, being told the facts, decreed that her son must stand in marriage by the ravaged girl. And Timothy John was born.

  ‘It would be a private matter,’ said O’Shea, ‘what they quarrelled about that time in the hall. I left it as it was.’

  And yet, thought Mrs Eckdorf, they all come back: they sit together once a year on an old woman’s birthday, looking at one another as though nothing had ever happened, the sister thinking now of the man she’d married in order to escape the hotel that once she’d loved, Philomena thinking of her son, and Eugene Sinnott of race-course revelations in his nightly dreams.

  ‘And they forgive,’ said Mrs Eckdorf.

  She asked O’Shea to get up and help her sort out the exercise-books and to return them to Mrs Sinnott’s room. He put an overcoat on over his pyjamas and in his bare feet accompanied her to her bedroom. He felt bewildered by Mrs Eckdorf. The ebullience that had accompanied her earlier had turned itself inside out: he could hardly hear what she said when she spoke, for a humbleness came from her that had not come before. She had sat in silence, seeming unaware that he was in the room with her; several times she had spoken mysteriously. Why had she taken the exercise-books from Mrs Sinnott’s room? Why had she read them?

  As he helped her to sort them out, he asked her. She paused in what she was doing and looked at him closely, without smiling.

  ‘Forgiveness,’ she said.

  He carried the books back to where they belonged, and when he had carried them all he said good night to her. She did not smile, but looked again closely at his face. She spoke in a whisper: she said she felt a love for Mrs Sinnott, and not for Mrs Sinnott alone but for all the people of the exercise-books. The goodness of Mrs Sinnott, she whispered, had taught her family to forgive: the sympathy she offered made all forgiving easy.

  She spoke to him of other people, of her own mother and of some other woman, and of men. The beauty of a woman’s goodness continuing while an hotel decayed should not go unnoticed in a world that needed goodness. That was one thing, she gently said: there was a greater thing. And while O’Shea’s bare feet were cold on the linoleum of her room, and while he did not mind the coldness, she told him.

  She whispered and sometimes her whispering ceased and she stood still, saying nothing. Words came, when they came at all, in broken sentences. He wanted to interrupt her, to tell her that he knew now that she had read the exercise-books because she had been told to do that. She loved the people of the exercise-books, she had said; she loved Mrs Sinnott, whose place she would take. He wanted to tell her he had seen her that morning with a light coming out
of her clothes, but when he attempted to speak she restrained him.

  Tears moistened her cheeks as the voice that was intermittent for O’Shea continued in her mind consistently. It said that as a child she had imagined a bearded face glancing from behind a cloud and had prayed to the face before going to sleep. It said she had laughed one day at the bearded face, that she had ceased to pray. At St Monica’s School for Girls she had laughed at Elsie Timson, who read the Book of Common Prayer in bed. She had flushed Elsie Timson’s What Jesus Said down the lavatory. She saw in this early morning that she had been punished ever since. She had been punished by her disgraceful mother, by the predatory Miss Tample, and the bitter failure of her marriages.

  O’Shea went, because having told him that, she signalled that he should.

  She stood alone then, in the centre of her bedroom, thinking that she had come in arrogance and treachery, the woman her life had made her. Yet without knowing a thing about it, she had come so that she, too, might learn forgiveness. She would display now for all the hard world to see a human story that was her own story also: she would tell how she had felt her intuitions working and how, through the example of the people of the exercise-books and the goodness of Mrs Sinnott, she had herself been given the strength to forgive those whose victim she had been, for she believed that strength was now being offered to her. The pages of her book would turn, leading strangers through a city to O’Neill’s Hotel, where they would see the image of a woman who once had wakened to find herself assaulted accepting a biscuit from the plate that her assailant offered her. They would see the child who had been born in crime, and beside him the father whose crime had brought that life about. They would sec the sister smile across the icing of a birthday cake at the brother who had driven her to dreariness. On azure-tinted photogravure paper she would show the working of a forgotten God.

  12

  The early mist of that morning did not presage heat. It turned to rain, which the people of Dublin, waking to this unwelcome advent, deplored in their different ways. It fell on the swollen face of Timothy John as he descended the steps of his dentist’s house, but Timothy John did not mind: he had left the tooth behind. There was an aching in his jaw, but he knew that with time that pain would fade away. He had felt sick when he saw the needle of the hypodermic, thinking that he wouldn’t be able to open his mouth, that the muscles would contract of their own will and hold his two jaws tightly clamped. But when the moment came the muscles obeyed him: he felt the needle plunging into his gum and plunging again and then again. ‘The weather’s gone,’ the dentist said while waiting for the anaesthetic to take effect. ‘You’ll feel me pressing,’ he had warned. ‘Don’t worry about that at all.’ The tooth had come out with stabbing agony, during which he longed for death.

  But now, in the rain, he was joyful as he walked. He bought fudge in a shop and saw the confectioner eyeing his face. ‘I’ve had a terrible molar out,’ he said. He thought of Daisy Tulip.

  In Dublin the rain fell heavily that morning. Turf in public parks became soft underfoot and the unpainted wood of hoardings changed colour and soon could absorb no more. Water spilt from chutes, gutters ran, puddles were everywhere. Raindrops spattered on all the formal water of the Garden of Remembrance in Parnell Square and on the water in old horse-troughs, and on horses themselves standing drenched between the shafts of tourist jaunting-cars. Statues glistened: washed of their summer dust, gesturing figures seemed less jaded in their stance, eyes stared out with a liveliness. Rain ran on Robert Emmet and Henry Grattan, on Thomas Davis, on O’Connell with his guardian angels, and gentle Father Mathew, apostle of temperance. It dribbled from the moustached countenance of Lord Ardilaun and fell on Lecky and on William Conyngham, and on the empty pedestal of the Earl of Eglinton and Winton. It damped the heads of Mangan and Tom Kettle and the Countess Markievicz, it polished to a shine the copper-green planes of a tribute to Yeats. Moore and Burke, Wolfe Tone and Charles Stewart Parnell, Goldsmith and ghostly Provost Salmon: dead men of Ireland were that morning invigorated.

  Timothy John clambered to the upper deck of a bus. He thought about his father, his mind inspired in that direction by the memory of the woman who had talked to him yesterday. In the bungalow they never discussed his father, which was understandable. The marriage had been a mistake, a fact that had quickly manifested itself, apparently: he himself was all that had come out of it, the only real reminder that it had ever occurred. He found it impossible to imagine a life in which his father played a part: he couldn’t see his father in the bungalow, sprawled out on a chair, smoking cigarettes while he and his mother made jam. Nor could he easily visualize the three of them together in the hotel. His father lived a lonely life, he often thought, doing no work, going on from day to day, seeming to have neither a past nor a future, and seeming not to care. Yet, as the woman had implied, if his father didn’t exist he would not exist himself, nor would his mother’s life be what it was. It was best to live apart, he thought, when a mistake had been made; it would have been impossible if his grandmother hadn’t helped, which was why, no doubt, all three of them felt a debt to her.

  He watched the rain trickling on the window of the bus. His mother had been excited last night, talking about the woman who said she wanted to buy the hotel. They’d find something out today, she’d concluded, when they went there for the birthday; but when he’d seen her that morning all the excitement had vanished, dissipated by her concern for his toothache. She would be waiting for him when he got back, with aspirins and consolation, and breakfast, he supposed. With her face vivid in his mind, he got off the bus, although he was still a distance from his destination. For ever, he thought, he would climb the stairs of these cream-and-blue city buses, going to and from the insurance company, returning always to the bungalow and her folded hands. He walked slowly, hearing her saying that it was foolish to walk in the rain after a tooth had been taken out. People were always telling him things and advising him; always, it seemed, he stood still, listening and then agreeing. He would have preferred the Motor Department, he felt sure of it. He should have said more firmly to his uncle that he wished to be transferred, he should have said to his mother that he had fallen in love with a girl in Lipton’s.

  Ahead of him he saw a telephone-box and for a moment he thought he would step into it and dial his uncle’s number and tell him, while he still had the courage, that on Monday morning he would seek a transfer to the Motor Department, and tell him too that he had just had a molar out.

  He passed the telephone-box, although it was empty and inviting. He walked more quickly now. It was ridiculous of the woman to go on about the way his father spent his day. His father was a man who had no interest in him, whose hand, as far as he could remember, he had never shaken. He had a life of his own to live, as his mother had too. It was difficult enough without bringing his father into it.

  Forcing himself not to slow his pace, he walked ahead, seeing the shops and knowing that in one of them she’d be standing in her overall. Her nakedness haunted him again with familiar suddenness: her bosom rose and fell, her hands hung by her sides, her thighs were as white as paper. He caressed her back through the wool of a red jumper. Her breath was warm on his face.

  In the shop she saw him coming and was surprised. She smiled at him, putting pieces of cheese for display on greaseproof paper. He saw her wondering about his swollen face, which was flushed by now and wet as well.

  ‘I’ve had a molar out,’ he said. His stomach heaved over, not at the memory of the tooth coming out, but at the thought of her body again, seeing it with that familiar suddenness. His hands felt clammy. They touched her body, warm like that. He wanted to talk to her forever. He wanted to carry her breakfast in bed. He wanted to see her sitting in an armchair. He wanted her hands to cook him food. He wanted to tend her in illness, to hold out medicine to her on a spoon, to smooth a pillow for her, to forbid her to exert herself. He wanted to hear her voice telling him who she was, speaking of her child
hood and of her father and her mother. He wanted to hold her body to his and for both of them to die in the same instant.

  ‘You’re a hard case,’ she said.

  Stumbling over the words, he asked her if she’d come for a walk some time, or maybe to the pictures. She laughed at him and said that maybe she would.

  He turned away, unable to say anything else, and in the moment that he did so his uncle, three miles away, said that he had lain awake since half-past five worrying about this would-be purchaser of the hotel. As well as that, he reported that the rain depressed him, since he’d been looking-forward to a good morning’s work in his field. She should have telephoned him immediately, he reprimanded his wife, when the woman had arrived. It was incredible that this person had apparently talked to every member of the family except himself; it was incredible that no one had put her in the picture as to the part he had endeavoured to play in the family over the years. He asked Mrs Gregan if she had not explained, and Mrs Gregan looked up from a newspaper and shook her head, not knowing what he was talking about. As far as she was concerned, all the conversational value had by now been squeezed from the fact that a strange woman had appeared among them: time would sort that matter out. ‘Did you not say,’ pursued Mr Gregan, ‘that with your brother the way he is, it has fallen on myself to give a lead in family matters? Did you not explain the interest we have in Timothy John, how I kept a fatherly eye on him?’ He reminded her of the number of times he had visited the hotel to give her mother a piece of advice that might be necessary. She cleared away the breakfast dishes, hearing his voice repeating that he felt depressed.