All the Lonely People

by Barry Callaghan

  She closed her eyes, straightening her shoulders, and then smiled warmly, looking up as if she were pleasantly startled and had just seen him for the first time in a long while. “About Saint Teresa,” she said.

  “I didn’t know you went in for the lives of saints.”

  “I don’t,” she said, lifting the lid of the silver soup tureen, preparing to serve him. “I found it among your father’s books.”

  “Really,” he said. “I didn’t know he went in for saints either.”

  “He certainly did,” and she smiled coyly.

  “I don’t know, I get my saints confused, but wasn’t Teresa the little girl who slept with her mouth open until one day a bee flew into her mouth? It buzzed around but it didn’t sting her?”

  “I really wouldn’t know.”

  “And Christ is the bee with His blessed little stinger.”

  “He is?”

  “Sure, but He’s come and gone. The rest of us got stung.”

  She handed him his bowl of soup, a steaming fish soup, and for a moment he lost his breath because he thought he saw an eye floating in the broth, but it was only a bubble that suddenly broke, and with relief he said, “Well, what does little Miss Teresa have to say?”

  “It’s quite wonderful,” she said, ladling soup into her own bowl. “She says that if God hadn’t created heaven for Himself, He would have created it for her.”

  “There’s a ripe little bitch.”

  “Oh, I don’t know.”

  “You think that’s wonderful?”

  “I find it amusing.”

  “Sounds like she’s having a wet dream,” he said and spread his napkin over his knees.

  “Really. You can be so crude,” she said and scowled.

  “All right, a dry dream,” he said.

  They ate in silence, their knives and forks clicking on the bone china, the cat scratching and mewing by the back screen door. He wondered if the cat had brought a dead bird to the doormat again. As his mother cut her meat into tiny pieces, he suddenly felt queasy and had the uneasy sense that he was on the verge of swirling into deep sleep, slipping down into an inner twirling cocoon, the walls of this cocoon just beyond his touch. Afraid that he was going to pass out, he almost reached out to hold on to his mother, but then the spell passed and she crossed her knife and fork on her plate and said, as if there’d been no silence between them, “I think we should take coffee in the other room. And the chartreuse.” There was a slice of veal on his plate, untouched, but he got up and followed her.

  They sat in maroon leather easy chairs in the living room, with a silver coffee pot and a silver plate of little meringue biscuits on the pedestal table between them. “You still haven’t told me,” she said, “why you’ve come home, why you’ve quit teaching.”

  “Home is where the heart is.”

  “Don’t be facetious.”

  “You want me to tell you the truth, now that we’re done with supper?” he asked.

  She dabbed the corner of her mouth with the napkin. “I’m not sure,” she said.

  “Let’s just say that when you love children too much you make childish mistakes.”

  “Do you?”

  “Yes, you do,” he said. “That’s what love is, a mistake. All the best things we do are mistakes.”

  “I did my best with you,” she said.

  “That was probably a mistake, so who could blame you?”

  “I honestly don’t know what you’re talking about, except I know your father would not agree with you,” she said.

  “Oh yes, he would,” he said, getting up and coming around behind her chair so that he could lean over her, into the lamplight. “Yes, he would. He did all the right things all his life and he knew every one of them was completely wrong. He should have been a man of the sea, a real captain, instead of frittering his life away with all those hours of dreaming, making his model boats, his little toys.” And then he whispered in her ear, “That’s where his heart was, with his toys.”

  “Oh,” she said. “Your father was not a childish man. And he certainly loathed people who made mistakes.” She straightened her collar. “Imagine, thinking you could know what was in your father’s heart better than I could, the woman who listened to his heart in his bed. I can still sometimes hear the pounding of Tom’s heart.”

  “Ah, yes, the bed,” he said. “It all begins in the bed.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Nothing,” he said and he took a cigarette from a black lacquered box. He lit it from the candle on the mantelpiece, blowing a smoke ring. He watched it dissipate. Then he blew another ring.

  “You can’t say something like that and then just say ‘Nothing.’”

  “What’s there to say?” he asked. “That I used to lie there on my bed when I was a boy, pretending to be asleep, watching you watch me?”

  “What do you mean, watch you?”

  “Just that. You stared and stared, with some stern little hairball of a thought inside your skull. How could I know what was eating at you?”

  “I loved you very much,” she said.

  “Of course, you did. You were my mother. It’s just that I hadn’t seen that look of yours for a long time.”

  “What look? When?”

  “When the headmaster at the school agreed that I should quit teaching boys, he stared at me a long time and all I kept thinking was, where have I seen that look before?”

  “What look?”

  “Your look,” he said. “Distaste.”

  She sat with her eyes closed. He stood blowing smoke rings in the silence, and then, after a long time she said softly, “Put on some music, Henry. A little Schubert, perhaps. Schubert is so simple, so intimate, so much the way the heart is.” She set her cup and saucer aside. “We’ll have to get to know each other again, Henry. Do you still have trouble sleeping? I used to listen to you when you came back as a boy from boarding school. It was frightening, listening to a grown young man cry out in his sleep.”

  “Sure, it’s frightening,” he said. “Sometimes I used to walk through the student dormitory at the school,” and he drew away from her, a pained look in his eyes, “early in the morning, before dawn, listening to the smaller boys cry in the night, but it wasn’t so much crying. More like a whimper. It’s terrible to think that a child, free in his dreams, ends up whimpering.”

  “And what do you think’s wrong with them?” she asked.

  “They know they have two legs but they think they’re crippled.”

  They sat listening to Schubert.

  “I think,” he said at last, “I’ll take a bath.”

  In a little while, she snuffed the candles and went upstairs, pausing at the top of the stairs. She heard a voice and slowly went down to the end of the hall and stood by the bathroom door, listening to a low intoning that soothed and enticed her, so that without thinking and full of curiosity, she quietly opened the door to the large tiled room, the window filled with hanging potted plants, and saw Henry in the big old claw-foot tub, reading aloud:

  Hear the tolling

  of the bells, iron bells!

  What a world of solemn thought

  their monody compels.

  In the silence of the night,

  how we shiver with affright…

  at the bells bells bells…

  “How beautiful,” she said, “how very beautiful.” Then she saw that Henry was surrounded by his father’s model boats, all of them afloat. He rose out of the water, glaring, and the book slipped from his hands and sank. Water streamed from his naked body, swamping the boats, and she was astonished at how much black hair there was all over his body, wondering as she backed out if he could really be her child with all that hair, murmuring, “His boats, his silly little boats.”

  Henry screamed, “How dare you, how dare you!” as she backed down the hall to her bedroom.

  3

  Through the following week, she slept late in the morning and began to take a sip of sher
ry before coming downstairs. She wore the same black blouse for three days. He wasn’t sure if she was washing in the morning. Then she appeared for lunch wearing a black lace mantilla around her head. She ate very little, only green salads and bowls of steamed rice with honey, and she insisted on carrying the cat in her arms from room to room, though the cat mewed and sometimes struggled to get away. Henry watched her, head cocked to the side, with an almost languid aloof sadness, as if he were bored, and he played with a little silver pocketknife while he sat silently across from her in the late afternoon on the verandah. There was menace in the way he toyed with the tiny knife. It looked like he was trying to frighten her, but he was only keeping his nails clean, the cuticles cut back. He didn’t want to frighten her at all. He only wanted to watch her, in silence. He wanted her to feel his presence. The weight of it. The bulk of it. “I am a bit of a bastard,” he said to her quietly one day, but she said nothing. The cat started to spit. She let the cat go.

  Then, one afternoon she kicked her comforter away from around her legs and suddenly pulled the cords to all the blinds in the living room, flooding the room with light. “You’re just like your father,” she said. “You think I owe you an apology. You want me to feel as if I’m in your debt, but I’m not in your debt. I am your mother.”

  “Whatever you say,” he said and opened the door to the verandah. The late-blooming asters were fading. He sat outside, and she came out, too. They sat side by side for a while, bundled against the chill of a sudden east wind, saying nothing, until at dusk, because it was so cold, they went in and she poured a glass of chartreuse and a glass of whisky. “Cheers.” In the bleak light from the bay windows, he saw that a large painting on the east wall was hanging crooked and when he straightened it there was a clean slash of white left on the wall. “We can’t have that,” he said. “It looks like a scar.” He moved the frame so that it was crooked again and the scar was hidden. The painting was of barley fields and a setting sun that was bathing a white stone cottage in a sepia light.

  “That’s my painting. I love it,” she said with sudden eagerness.

  “It was hanging crooked,” he said, tapping the ornate frame with his forefinger. “It’s only the same old stone cottage it’s always been.”

  “Only a stone cottage to you,” she said.

  “That old butcher general, Kitchener, he used to say the heart of the empire was the stone cottage.”

  “The empire, my foot. What the devil do we know about empires?”

  “We know,” he said, “that they fall down,” and suddenly he sang out:

  London Bridge

  Is falling down,

  Falling down,

  My fair lady-o.

  “There are times,” she said, “when you sound like a lunatic.”

  “It’s my childhood,” he said. “A childhood song. Anyway, that’s what’s lovely about anyone’s childhood. It was always a little on the lunatic side.”

  “You think so?” she said coldly.

  “Sure. As soon as you grow up, everything turns into a lie, a good sensible lie, so everybody can get along. There are even crippled men who will tell you they’ve got two good legs,” and he laughed.

  “You are a lunatic,” she said.

  “Too long in the noonday sun,” he said.

  “There was one summer month,” she said, “before I got married, that I rented a stone cottage. Alone. I was very happy there alone. That’s the truth and it’s still true, even if you think everything’s a lie,” and she closed her eyes, saying, “You are much crueller than your father.”

  The cat was curled in her lap, staring at Henry, purring. “Tomorrow’s my birthday,” he said, but she did not answer and he realized that, with her empty glass in her hand, she was sound asleep. He took the glass out of her hand. “You should pay more attention, Mother,” he said sourly. “You never paid attention.” The cat leaped away as he stood up. He wanted to hurt the cat, beat it with a stick, break its back. He didn’t know why he hated the cat because he didn’t really care about the birds that it killed. He cared about the mess of bone and feathers on the mat. He felt so enraged that he suddenly wanted to cry, to beat his fists on the table, overwhelmed by sorrow, by a terrible sense of being cheated. “I don’t care, I don’t care, I don’t care.” He felt ice cold. He saw himself hanging by snowshoes tangled in tree branches, upside down, gleaming in the spring sun, a skeleton. He began to sing:

  There are rats, rats,

  Big as alley cats,

  At the door, at the door…

  Early the next evening, with his loping boyish stride, he hurried up the front walk carrying a cardboard box. His face was ruddy from the wind. He’d been away all afternoon. “Hello, Mother,” he called, but as he got to the top step she said, “Hush, hush, only badly bred children yell like that.” He gave her a dry laugh and went into the house. She could hear the faint crying out of children in the trees back behind the house. She suddenly wanted to cut down all the trees, so the children would have to go away forever. They would have no place to hide. No place to seek.

  In about half an hour, Henry came out onto the verandah. Her head had fallen forward and she was dozing with a smile on her face. He banged the ship’s bell, two good clangs that resounded down the lane, and she bolted up, dazed, crying, “Tom, Tom.” She sounded so vulnerable, so afraid, that he suddenly felt reluctant and full of remorse though he’d done nothing to her, nothing except wake her up, but then she wheeled on him with disdain. “You’re not Tom. You’re not my Tom.” He said, “No, no,” and laughed and took her arm. “I’m glad you stopped wearing that damned mantilla,” he said and led her into the house and down the dark hall, past the cabinet of rare porcelain that Tom had bought for her.

  “Henry, I think your life has been too easy,” she said, “so easy that you’ve turned into someone quite hard.” They went into the dining room. She had regained her composure as she sat down at the head of the table, facing the French doors to the garden. “No, not hard, Mother,” he said. “Hard’s the wrong word. I’ve just learned to love kids the way my father loved his toys.” The chandelier lights were on. He’d lit the sideboard candles and set the long table, covering it with a lace cloth and laying out silver and Crown Royal china. She was too startled by the light and the table to say anything. She sat with her mouth open, gaping at an enormous birthday cake. “Close your mouth, Mother,” he said. “Or you’ll get stung.” On top of the cake, she saw a ship made of marzipan, surrounded by little candles. “I knew you wouldn’t want to forget, Mother,” he cried. “You wouldn’t forget my birthday,” and then she heard shuffling and muffled giggling outside, and someone clanged the bell out on the porch as the French doors were thrown open and a huddle of small boys, all wearing coloured paper hats and blowing their new plastic police whistles, broke into the room, crying, “Happy birthday, Henry, happy birthday…”

  They sped around the table, squealing and banging into one another, terrifying the cat, picking up forks and plates and waving them in the air. They also had wooden whistles with rolls of paper attached to the ends, and when they blew, the paper unfurled into long coloured stingers and they spun around her, bees stinging one another with glee. Buzz… Buzz… Henry, beaming at his mother, drove the silver cake knife into the heart of the icing, crying, “How do you like my little darlings, Mother?” She clasped her hands to her throat, unmoving, stricken by a pain, a closure on her lungs that she had not known since childbirth, a pain that burned through the arteries in her neck so that she felt her collarbone was cracking, and she tried to choke the pain off with her hands as the boys piled cake on their plates and let forkfuls of icing slide onto the carpet, hooting and hurdling over one another, clutching at her legs, fat little boys fastening on to her ankles until she closed her eyes and cried, “It’s unfair, it’s unfair.”

  Seeing her stricken, Henry pried her hands from her throat. Two of the boys let go of her legs and backed away. She began to pound the table, pounding
with her eyes closed, her face ashen, whispering, “It’s unfair, it’s unfair.” All the boys were backing away, not just from her but as if they were suddenly uncertain of Henry, even afraid of him. He was enraged by the wariness in their eyes and yelled at them, telling them to go away. As they trailed out of the room, he pulled his chair in front of hers and sat down. Their knees touched. He looked at her thin legs, shaken by how thin she actually was, and how big he was. “How in the world did I get born?” he asked, and reached to the cake, flicked a fingerful of icing into his mouth, and said, “Look, Mother…”

  She stared at him, her mouth open, her pale eyes unblinking, and he put a finger full of icing in her mouth.

  “Look,” he said, as she licked his finger, “in a hundred years life could be very beautiful.”

  BETWEEN TRAINS

  It was a small train station. I sat in the stifling stillness of the waiting room, staring at junk food vending machines until the storyteller came in and sat down and offered me a drink from his silver flask. “Bourbon,” he said, “Knob Creek,” sitting back in his chair, waiting for me to say something about whatever it was I had on my mind about stories, because that’s what he had agreed to come down from his house in the hills to talk about after I had called him up, telling him, “I’m between trains.”