The family wore mourning, Mrs Eckdorf saw: the women’s faces were hardly visible behind veils, O’Shea looked like an undertaker. She moved gently through the people until she came to where he was.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry I was like that to you. I’m sorry she’s dead, O’Shea.’
He turned his damp face towards her. He wiped his mouth with the back of a hand. He shook his head, and thin looked away again.
‘Oh God, by whose mercy the souls of the faithful have rest …’ intoned Father Hennessey. ‘Release from all bondage of sin…’
‘O’Shea,’ she said. She sought his hand, thinking to stand there with him, together at the funeral of the good woman. But his hand was clenched and he did not release it. ‘It’s all right,’ she said. ‘It’s all right, O’Shea.’
She felt tears on her cheeks and she wanted O’Shea to see them. She wanted to make it plain to O’Shea that she was the last of Mrs Sinnott’s visitors, that if Mrs Sinnott hadn’t died she would have come to her room as all the other visitors had, until she felt at peace with the people who had made her a victim, until she felt she could forgive. O’Shea was the only person by the graveside who would understand her, because he had under-stood her once before. The priest had taken against her, as Eugene Sinnott and all the others had, as Miss Tample had when she would not allow Miss Tample to take her hand, as her mother had because she was a nuisance in the house when her mother wished for privacy with a friend.
The coffin had been wheeled on a barrow from the little chapel in the older part of the cemetery, where it had rested for a brief time. She had walked at the end of the procession, following the wheeled coffin, behind the priest who had been no help to her, behind all the people who had respected Mrs Sinnott in life and continued to do so now. Motor-cars had halted while they crossed a main road to the newer part of the cemetery, where white marble tombstones gleamed harshly and in thou-sands on a windswept plain. On other barrows other coffins moved slowly towards open graves. ‘Is this the Kinsella funeral?’ a man with a woman and two children had asked her, and she had said it was, anxious that there should be as large a crowd as possible at Mrs Sinnott’s burial. People came away from burials that had taken place, chattering and sometimes smoking. ‘Well, that’s that,’ a man had remarked, stepping briskly by.
‘O’Shea,’ she said, seeking his hand again. ‘I’m sorry for my lies, O’Shea. I’m crying too, O’Shea.’
But O’Shea moved slightly away, his attention on the coffin that was now being lowered.
‘Our Father who art in Heaven,’ said Father Hennessey.
‘I loved her too,’ she said to O’Shea, touching him again. ‘I would have loved her more than anyone.’
She sobbed more noisily, and then her sobs became hysterical. She pushed through the people and clambered on to the dug soil and into the grave itself.
With her head bowed, feeling cool in the fresh morning air, Agnes Quin heard a woman screaming and looked up to see that Mrs Eckdorf was being pulled out of the grave of Mrs Sinnott by two grave-diggers. People edged forward, trying to see. Mr Gregan’s voice rang loudly out in protest. Father Hennessey seemed uncertain about procedure. One of the children whom Mrs Eckdorf had enticed to the graveside screamed also.
Typical, thought Morrissey, that a scene should take place, a woman screeching and fighting. He watched while, her clothes dirtied with clay, she was led away by the two grave-diggers. Tears were streaming from her eyes, her body was quivering, she appeared to be unable to stand properly It pleased Morrissey to witness this because he knew that, as well as the blows she had struck him, he owed his treatment at the hands of Mr Smedley to her. He followed the grave-diggers, one of whom was murmuring to Mrs Eckdorf in a consoling voice.
‘Don’t waste your time with that one,’ he said.
‘What’s the matter with her?’ one of the grave-diggers quietly enquired, and Morrissey replied that Mrs Eckdorf was keen on methylated spirits.
‘Is she a member of the family?’ the grave-digger asked, still marching Mrs Eckdorf along with the aid of his colleague. Morrissey laughed.
She heard the laughter, having previously heard Morrissey saying that she was keen on methylated spirits: she did not mind. Both her stockings were torn, she was filthy with dirt from an open grave. In a strange city, her own voice said to her, she had fallen upon a coffin in a grave. Her finger-nails had broken, scratching at the varnished wood. I am dying too, her voice cried out to her, but she knew that was not so.
‘She wanted to speak to the woman,’ she heard one of the grave-diggers say to Morrissey. ‘She kept screaming she wanted a word with her.’
‘She was screaming for her mother,’ the other man contradicted.
‘She didn’t know who she was screaming for,’ said Morrissey.
‘She mentioned God,’ said the grave-digger who had spoken first.
She did not remember screaming. She remembered, the day before, taking the knife from the breakfast table in the hotel and going to the other hotel with it. She remembered taking it from her handbag and holding it in front of her. She didn’t know why she had done that. She remembered photographing Mrs Sinnott when she was dead: she had done that because the photograph might be useful in a book that had to do with forgiveness and the myth of God. The potency of the myth was what she had to show, how good could come out of people’s delusions.
‘I’m all right now,’ she said. ‘I’m quite O.K. again.’
The grave-diggers cautiously released her. The left side of her body was sore with bruising. She said she had a car waiting for her.
‘Typical,’ said Morrissey, as she walked away, ‘a female like that to spoil a funeral.’
17
On Tuesday afternoons, which was the time he regularly visited her, she was not the same as she had been. Her hair did not gleam like pale gold, but seemed to be a shade of grey. It was tired hair that she’d asked should be cut off short to save her the bother of attention. Her finger-nails were cut back too, and were not brightly red; her lips were as bloodless as any human lips he’d ever seen. A fieriness that had often flashed in her eyes was there no more, and tears belonged to the past. She sat in the clothes they had given her, a grey dress that hung about her like an overall and the black laced shoes of a woman who had not long ago died. She could have new clothes, they’d said to her, now that her money had come through, but she said she didn’t want new clothes. Her lips were drawn back crookedly from her teeth in a smile that never left her face-not even, he was told, in sleep. ‘Tell me about them,’ was what she said, first of all, when he came to her on Tuesday afternoons. ‘And the yellow hotel, Father, which has a hornbeam tree outside its kitchen windows. Tell me.’
She talked only about the hotel and the people whose lives she had advanced upon, arriving in an aeroplane. She did not ever again mention her mother or her father, or her mother’s lovers, or the schoolmistress at St Monica’s School for Girls, or her two German husbands. ‘I am sorry about that man I locked up,’ she always said at some point during his visits, adding that she knew she had been silly to go on about anointing a stranger’s feet: it made no sense to her now, the notion of doing that. Her mind retained only the events of a few days in her life. Her childhood and her marriages were gone from her for ever. ‘Tell me,’ she said on Tuesday afternoons, and then she would talk herself.
An officer of the gardai had come to his house on the afternoon of Mrs Sinnott’s funeral to say that a woman had created a scene in a children’s playground on the south side of the city. She had been playing with the children, running about with them as though she were a child herself, and then she had frightened them by screaming. She had taken a knife from her handbag, appearing to imagine that she must protect herself against attack. She had called out his name and the name of Thaddeus Street, she had talked about O’Neill’s Hotel and a tragedy there. Then she had calmed down and had gone away, and the children had reported the matter: it woul
d be as well, the officer pointed out, to know something about this woman. The address of the hotel to which she had returned after leaving O’Neill’s was ascertained from O’Shea, but when the officer went in search of her there he was informed that she had already left. Father Hennessey and O’Shea had said she came from Munich, but in the hotel register her address was given as Maida Vale, London.
People that night, the night of Mrs Sinnott’s funeral, saw Mrs Eckdorf looking into the river from Usher’s Quay. She had requested a taxi-driver to drop her at a certain spot, a request the man had questioned, because the hour was late and there was nothing in the way of an hotel or a lodging house near the spot she indicated. People saw her, after the taxi had driven away, opening her white suitcases and emptying their contents into the water below her. They saw her drop the suitcases into the river too, and then she took from her neck a camera and threw it far away. The people watching heard the splash and then, worried about her, began to move to where she stood. As they advanced they saw her take off her hat and then her shoes and then her clothing. She was a naked woman when they arrived at her side. She was as she came into the world, she told them. The world had distressed her, she complained. She said she was happy now.
After she had been admitted to the asylum the same police officer had come again to Thaddeus Street, to tell Father Hennessey all that. They would keep her in the asylum, he said, unless it was the wish of someone that she should be moved to another place. It might be better, he suggested, if she could be returned to Munich or to Maida Vale, or wherever it was she had come from, so that family and friends could visit her on visiting days. ‘I think it’s Munich,’ Father Hennessey said. ‘A street called the Lipowskystrasse.’
The officer went away and returned a few weeks later to say that that was correct. The cinder-grey apartment had been discovered; there was quite a lot of money in the bank account of Ivy Eckdorf. She was, or had been, a photographer of some kind, apparently. ‘Of some kind,’ Father Hennessey repeated. ‘She certainly took pictures here.’
In the asylum they suggested to her that perhaps she’d like to return to Munich, but she replied that she had never heard of Munich and would not go there. She asked that Father Hennessey should visit her and when he came the first time she told him that there was something like a night in her mind, a blackness she could not penetrate and must not ever again attempt to penetrate. It was lovely, she said, being where she was. She told him how she felt for the people of O’Neill’s Hotel the love that Mrs Sinnott had felt for them, and when he asked her if she would like one or two of them to visit her, Mrs Gregan and Philomena perhaps, she replied that they all did visit her. ‘Tell me about them,’ she would say then, always in the same way, and he would pause and she would tell him.
‘I was a stranger to them and yet they took me in. They made me one of the family, they gave me birthday tea. When they are not here I think of them the whole day long. Father, can you understand a thing like that?’
He had never told them that she was still in the city, in a room in an asylum, and that their faces and their bodies were all she knew now. He saw Eugene in Thaddeus Street and O’Shea in his uniform, occasionally on the streets he caught a glimpse of Morrissey. The others, he imagined, continued as they had continued before, while occupying, for her, a heaven.
On Tuesday afternoons Father Hennessey left behind him the lives of the saints and made his way across the city, on a pilgrimage that was a penance. Always at the same time, at halfpast four, he visited the woman who once had been a stranger to him, a woman who in her madness confused all the facts of living, who saw things as they were not and people as they were not, who turned everything upside down and inside out. Often he asked her to pray, but she would not pray, saying that to pray was to address absurdly a bearded face. Her God was different, she said: the God that had been in the azure room, the balm that had reached out from an old, dead woman.
‘How could your God create that life for Morrissey or have the parents of Agnes Quin throw her away? How could your God give that life to O’Shea or that one to Eugene Sinnott? We arrive alone in the world, Father: your God’s another word for human comfort, and maybe it’s enough. But don’t be silly, Father: no God created a world like this one.’
In late September, on the last day of that summer, she told him that morning O’Shea had visited her. ‘He came with his greyhound,’ she said, ‘and we lay together, O’Shea and I.’
For a moment he thought she spoke in reality, so matter-of-fact her voice was. ‘He thought I was your holy Virgin,’ she said. ‘O’Shea forgives me.’
She sat in the plain room that she wished to be in and for which her money paid, a room with a bed on a stained floor, two chairs and a cupboard. Through stout green bars she looked out on trees and the gardens of the asylum, in which on warm days she walked herself with other lunatics. She was a good patient.
‘When do people die?’ she asked Father Hennessey on the day she told him that O’Shea had come with his greyhound.
‘At different times,’ he answered. ‘Sometimes a child dies. People live to be a hundred.’
She shook her head. ‘Mrs Sinnott was dead already when I met her in that hotel. She had been dead for years and years, sitting at her window, looking into Thaddeus Street. And Eugene had the smell of death about him too. Her goodness killed some spirit in him, as perhaps his act of violence had killed her. People do kill one another, Father.’ He listened while she drifted into muddled talk, about the Gregans and Philomena’s love for her son. ‘I am dead myself,’ she said. ‘I am in my heaven.’
She told him about walking in the sunshine through the gardens and the conversations she had, sometimes while she walked and sometimes in her room, with the people of the hotel. ‘It is risen like a phoenix-bird,’ she said. ‘O’Shea was measured today for two new uniforms. O’Shea carries suitcases up and down the stairs, and people come from the Far and the Near East, from Europe and Australia and the two Americas. Eugene Sinnott presides like a king, sharing with favoured guests a bottle of old claret, smoking rich panatellas. There’s a red rose in the button-hole of his blue-striped business suit, bonhomie bursts from him, he gives to charity. His wife bustles through the bedrooms, keeping an eye on all her maids, his son draws up accounts and corresponds with foreigners, his sister cooks rare dishes in the kitchen. Timothy John brings a wife to this family hotel, and Philomena kisses her with pleasure because her son is happy. Her son will remain for ever in the prosperous hotel and Philomena is pleased for that, and then forgets about her son, for she has much to do. In the dining-room Agnes Quin, in the black and white habit of her calling, serves the food of Mrs Gregan. Three other maids hurry beneath her scrutiny, carrying plates of soup and oysters and peppery moussaka. In a field some miles away Mr Gregan toils beneath the kindly sun, urging lettuces and tomatoes from the fertile soil. He grows all vegetables, and flowers as well. The little fruit trees he planted will yield, he says, next summer. Youths labour all around him, and Morrissey, his friend and foreman, is always near his side. On two bicycles these friends convey to the hotel the bounty they have grown, wheeling the bicycles over the cobbled yard to the kitchen door. Mrs Gregan smiles, and the two companions return to the good earth, pausing on the way only to savour a little refreshment, for cycling is thirsty work. O’Shea and Morrissey, who occasionally meet, respect one another and have come to admire the qualities that each possesses.
‘In turn throughout the year everyone’s birthday is celebrated, with paper-chains hanging in the kitchen and nuts and fruit and a specially baked cake, and the favourite sandwiches of the birthday person, and biscuits wrapped in silver paper. Eugene claps his hands at the head of the table. O’Shea pours port. The air is pleasant with the smell of Eugene’s cigar. Morrissey reads out the birthday person’s luck for the year ahead, Mr Gregan tells a joke or two, his wife touches him affectionately with her hand. Eugene, a heavy drinker, dreams profitably by night and gambles by day, but s
uch play does not affect his proprietorship of O’Neill’s Hotel. He has grown a moustache and wears a watch-chain now. In the autumn of last year, when the seasonal pressure had ended, he brought Philomena to Venice, for Eugene is proud of his Venetian blood. He is proud of Philomena too, and who can blame him? Philomena has aged so gracefully. They sat together in the Piazza San Marco listening to the café orchestras, Eugene beating time with a thin walking-stick. One night just after dinner, Philomena wept with happiness. Do you believe me, Father?’
He nodded. ‘Of course,’ he said.
‘On August 11th every year they do not fail to remember specially the old woman who died. She is a legend now in the hotel, among the new people who have come there and among guests who happen to be staying. Those who did not know her see in their mind’s eye a woman in an azure room with children’s exercise-books all around her, a woman who had never heard the human voice and who had never spoken. In all the bustle of the hotel she is not forgotten, just as she in her time ordained that her husband who was shot, and her own parents, were not forgotten either. A family is a lovely thing, a family stretches back with memories, and reaches to the future. They live the lives they were born to live; there is happiness everywhere in O’Neill’s Hotel, and warmth among its people.’
He left her on that September Tuesday, knowing that for the remainder of his life he would hear her speaking as she had spoken now. In the asylum they said she was the happiest woman they had ever admitted, and he remembered her distraught face and her more wretched craziness when first he had met her. In the bus that carried him away he thought again that it was a strange thing to have happened, a woman to have gone mad in a city that was unknown to her, who believed now that she was dead and in a heaven. Was it, as she had once suggested, the emptiness in her life that had bred a desperation which in the desperation which in the end had maddened her? Would she be a normal woman now, living some normal life, married and with children, if once in her distressful need she hadn’t thought that the notion of God was absurd? He could offer himself no answer to such questions.
Mrs Eckdorf in O'Neill's Hotel Page 28