‘My father,’ one boy had said, ‘wouldn’t ever let my mother live in a place like that. He’d have been over after her on the next plane.’
‘Why’d he let her take you?’
‘People in those places are all from the slums.’
‘No,’ Cormac was an expert on his sad subject. ‘There was a vicar’s wife, even.’ But he was sorry he had given them ammunition to use against him. What sort of parents let their children lodge with the children of mad vicars? Now there was a loony right here in the house and his mother spent hours at a stretch talking to her. This morning he had heard the two planning to take a trip. He could hardly believe it. His mother was in need of a firm hand but who was to supply it? He had considered asking the parish priest but knew a fourteen-year-old would not be listened to and, besides, his mother wouldn’t listen to the priest. She was forever giving out about priests. She was out of control, and what his school mates would think of this new move he couldn’t think. For the moment, at school, nobody knew of his mad aunt. Cormac wanted to keep it that way. But his mother’s plan – it was hard to believe even of her – was to get the aunt on television. He’d heard them discussing it and it was hard to say which of the two sounded more spastic.
‘Do you remember the American who was here last week?’ his mother had asked. ‘He carried you upstairs.’
‘Sparky Driscoll?’
‘No, but he’s interested in Sparky Driscoll. He makes television films. He could put you in one, like an actress. Would you like that? Would you tell him your memories, Aunt Judith?’
‘But what about Owen?’
‘He’s dead; there’s only you left to tell us the story.’
‘Would they put me in prison?’
‘Not prison, Aunt Judith, television.’
‘Don’t breathe a word, girl,’ said the old loony. ‘Especially to an American. There was money involved. Millions. The money de Valera raised in America. So he was important to both sides, do you see.’
‘Sides of what?’ asked his mother.
He wondered did she think the aunt meant sides of bacon? One was as daft as the other. They’d turn the family into laughing stocks if they appeared on RTE.
‘Are you listening?’ Doris wanted to know. She’d been telling him about the film she’d seen. ‘Or are you on the moon?’ She was cleaning the windows. Insides only. Time was when window-cleaning was a char’s job but, as Doris regularly reminded Cormac’s mother, ‘Them days is gone!’ She demanded extra pay even for insides. Making extra was Doris’s passion. She hoarded it. It was hers: a secret from Ted, her useless husband, and she could do exactly what she wanted with it. Sometimes she had given Cormac some when he was smaller, saying ‘Go buy yerself sweeties,’ with a queenliness which, even at the age of eight, he had recognized as touching. He liked Doris. She had always been there and he knew how to deal with her changeable humours. Sometimes she was his friend, united against his parents, when she helped him break some rule of the house or when he connived with her against his mother. ‘No need to tell yer Ma I’m borrowing this,’ she’d said one time and slipped a dress of his mother’s inside her coat as she was leaving. ‘I’ll have it back on Monda.’ Cormac had been shocked for a moment, but had quickly seen that there was indeed neither need nor advantage to tale-telling. That was in the days when Doris still went to dances and liked to cut a dash. She could also gang up with his mother against himself, or she might remind them both that her real friends were the neighbours in her little back street, the working people who were at last coming into their own now that they had free medical care and other benefits. ‘It’s about time too,’ said Doris ungratefully, and gave out about doctors who paid less attention to her ailments than she suspected they did to their paying patients’ ones. She was spending time with a psychologist once a fortnight. ‘Time was,’ said Doris, getting angry with the past, ‘when you’d have to be dying for them to pay attention to you in them dispensaries. But them days is gone.’ They were indeed. Cormac’s mother said she couldn’t afford a psychologist. He wondered did she need one?
Doris was still talking about the film.
‘He had a son.’ She sprayed a window-pane with a great generous sweep of Windolene. ‘And the only joy in his heart was this little son.’ She spoke in time to her window-cleaning movements which were broad and swishy. ‘And he was very cruel to his wife. Very unfair and the money was running low.’ Doris took a breath and moved her cloth in an arc across the hazy glass. ‘Their fortunes were going into a decline. Then the stepson decided to wreak vengeance.’
Cormac tended to listen to Doris’s film-stories with half an ear. It was soothing to know that the thing had a perfectly accessible pattern which he needn’t consider. There it was: contained and remote and unlikely to spill out of its limits and bother him. But his attention had just been caught.
‘The mother’s heart was broken.’ Doris attacked the next freshly fogged pane with wastes of paper towel. She deliberately used too much of everything. This made it easier to pinch stuff for her own household: perks. ‘But she deserved all she got for bringing in an outsider to squander her son’s inheritance. Even the son’s kindness was gall to her for he chased away her beloved Barry and she’ – squeak went the paper on glass – ‘had to spend her days in shame and loneliness’ – squeak – ‘watching her wronged boy rebuild his ruined estates.’
Doris became noble and sad when she talked about movies. Cormac felt stimulated by this story.
‘How long’s it on for?’ he asked. ‘I might like to see it.’
‘Too late,’ Doris told him. ‘It’s left. I’m going now.’ She took off her overall and took a pair of high-heeled shoes out of her shopping bag. ‘Have to go and clean up my own place. No rest for the wicked. Listen, I forgot to make a note of it so will you tell yer Ma a gentleman called? A Mr Duffy. Don’t forget now.’
‘No,’ said Cormac. ‘I won’t.’ One way to deal with his mother would be to complain about her to Uncle Owen Roe. If Daddy’s job depended on him, that meant he was boss, didn’t it? They’d both have to listen to him and, after all, Cormac would only be doing it for their own good. ‘I won’t forget,’ he promised Doris.
6
James wrote to his wife and to Larry on postcards showing spinach-green countryside and villages where cement-fronted houses were aligned with the austerity of tombstones. The air here, he told them, was metallic and effervescent. The people were a disappointment. They reminded him of Middle America, that sector of the US psyche which Californians despise. He had driven with a taxi-man who favoured cutting off the hands of bank robbers.
‘There isn’t a week goes by without a hold-up,’ he told James. ‘They have the economy destroyed.’
‘Are they raising funds for the IRA?’
The man snorted. ‘Maybe ten per cent of the robberies. The rest have jumped on the band-wagon, learned the tricks, profited from the situation, don’t you know. The police are at their wits’ end and when they rough up a suspect the papers start yelling “torture” and “human rights”. I’d give those yobbos rights. I’d cut off their right hands. It’s in the Bible.’ said the taxi-man.
‘Are you sure?’ It wasn’t a book James had read much, but he was surprised.
‘Tis,’ said the man, ‘and tis what those layabouts need: discipline. Sure you can’t walk down O’Connell Street after dark now without being mugged. I’d bring back the cat o’ nine tails and the birch. They have that in the Isle of Man. The government there tried to ban it but the people wouldn’t let them. They know what’s good for Law and Order. Give power to the ordinary men in the street and they’d settle the disorderly elements in no time. You’d see. Settle their hash for them in two shakes.’
The taxi-driver’s brother-in-law, he told James, was a money-lender who had been obliged to take the law into his own hands.
‘People wouldn’t pay up,’ he explained. ‘Nothing but hard-luck stories. You could predict them: husband ou
t of work, father got a heart-attack and nyanyanya, crying this year for next year. The police wouldn’t help.’
‘Why? How high was the interest?’
‘Why? How do I know? Anyway, the brother-in-law wasn’t standing for that. He hired a few fellows who knew their own minds. Got them to give his debtors a pasting. Men and women. The brother-in-law believes in equal rights, ha ha. A right pasting his lads gave them and then they paid up. They had it all the time you see. The money. Might is right,’ said the taxi-man and proceeded to overcharge James, who only realized this later.
‘So you’d support the IRA?’ James asked, mindful of his assignment to take the country’s pulse.
‘Support them? I’d support them on to a gallows, and pull away the stool.’
*
‘Driscoll?’ said Great-aunt Judith, her eyes bright with whiskey punch, ‘Is it Sparky Driscoll? Sure the chap practically moved in with us in the summer of 1921. I remember as if it were yesterday coming home from school in June and finding him ensconced like a long-lost relative. He was always dropping in to chat with my Da about Boston and Philadelphia. The Da had been to those places as a young man and didn’t often get a chance to have a bit of crack with someone who knew what he was talking about, so he was forever pressing Sparky to stay for supper. I didn’t take to him as much as the others did. Well, that was pique at finding him settled in like one of the family without my having had a say in the matter. It put my nose out of joint. But the other thing I had against him was more serious. You see, to my mind it wasn’t the Da he came for at all but Kathleen, and Kathleen was engaged to Owen who was in prison. People took a poor view of girls who played around when their men were behind bars, doing their bit for the country. And we had no mother. Seamus was away a lot and our father had no sense. Or so I thought. What was it you wanted to know about Sparky? Politics? Ah, I’d be no help to you there. No, I was young for my age, the last of the brood, don’t you know. The others could never believe I’d grown. They kept me in the dark. I’d be no help to you about politics. What was he like? Giddy. Light-headed. Always skitting and laughing and playing silly jokes. He used to tell Kathleen that she should assert herself more and that women in America were freer. Well, what use was that sort of talk, I ask you, when she was engaged to a fellow like Owen, a spoilt priest, set in his ways and hard to get on with? If the same Sparky Driscoll had had it in mind to marry her and take her off to America, there might have been some sense in it, but not at all. One time I heard him telling her that she should emigrate.
‘Is it on my own?’ says she, giving him a chance to say that maybe he’d look after her, but he didn’t take it up.
‘Owen must have heard something because when he came home from gaol he never liked the Yank. One time Kathleen and myself took him to the Devereux Estate to show him where the dance had been that the Tans had raided. You’ll have heard of that? Yes? Well, Timmy, the caretaker, played his accordion and Sparky and myself did a few turns on the ballroom floor for a lark. Afterwards, Owen got to hear of it and got it into his head that it was with Kathleen that Sparky had danced. Nothing would persuade him of the contrary. Sparky didn’t like Owen either. They were like cat and dog. Politics? Oh, I suppose it came into it. What didn’t it come into in those days? But no, I can’t remember exactly. I will. I’ll try to remember so. I’ll tell you if anything strikes me.’
*
The humidity was tangible, a membrane through which people moved with effort. Belted into raincoats, pedestrians had a look of parcels. Cornices dripped. James bought a paper and shoved it inside his jacket to keep dry. In the nearest pub he brushed drops from his hair, ordered a whiskey – he had begun to see why people here drank – and opened the paper to see what they might be reading.
Item: a small one-engine plane had flown across the city trailing a banner inscribed with a patriotic slogan. The string of the banner had got entangled in the plane’s motor causing it to crash in a rugby field. The pilot had been knocked senseless by the propeller and subsequently died. Item: a girl in South Dublin had bitten into a commercially made doughnut containing a rat’s leg. ‘It was very disgusting,’ said Miss Maire Breen, ‘I shall never again eat anything but cakes baked at home by my mother.’ Under Positions Wanted James noted several gentlewomen looking for posts as housekeepers. A lady desiring room and board in exchange for light duties, stated ingenuously – or not? – ‘anything considered’. The Minister for Health had revealed that nearly half the hospital beds in the country were occupied by mental patients. This reminded James that he was to lunch again with Mrs O’Malley. She claimed to have a plan to stir the memories of her aunt, whose recollections had dried up disappointingly when confronted with a tape-recorder.
*
‘No,’ said the aunt. ‘I never wanted to leave the convent. Why would I? What sense would my life make elsewhere? I believe,’ said she smoothly, ‘in the spiritual life. Prayer.’ She closed her eyes while she said this and gabbled inaudibly. The moustache on her upper lip was like a hump of stubbly earth with a mouse rooting beneath it. The deceitful mouse was her tongue, wriggling darkly in deceptions.
‘You said,’ her niece tried to remind her, ‘you said that Owen wouldn’t let you out. That you wanted to come out, and he bullied you.’
‘No.’ The aunt closed her mouth like a trap. ‘You got it wrong.’
‘Sorry,’ said her niece in disbelief.
A nod acknowledged this.
‘More tea?’ Cajolingly.
Another nod. They were at the RTE studios. Sun shone on lawns, and green lozenges of glassy reflections climbed the windows, breaking down barriers between indoors and out.
‘Nice and modern,’ the aunt had said when she arrived. She had been elated at this trip and chatted intriguingly. Then something roused her suspicions and she turned morose.
James tried another tack. ‘Tell us about Owen?’ he suggested. ‘What was he like?’
‘Turn off that machine.’ The aunt was cagey now. ‘That recorder. Policemen use that,’ she said venomously. ‘I’ve seen them in films.’
‘I’m not a policeman.’
‘Turn it off so.’
He turned it off.
‘He came out of the seminary. Gave it up. That was a shock to his family. They moved heaven and earth to stop him but he wouldn’t be stopped.’
‘Because he was in love with your sister?’
The old woman picked her teeth with her nail. She had curiously foul habits. The niece’s hands twitched. She wanted to stop her but didn’t want to interrupt the old woman’s train of thought, which had been so promising just now. Sister Judith farted. She seemed unaware of other people most of the time, then suddenly stricken to know they had been watching while she forgot about them. ‘Love?’ She considered the word. ‘He was too gone on himself and too mad about Ireland to have time for love. They were all like that then. You wouldn’t imagine. Idealistic. Cold. Stiff with righteousness. Sometimes they were gay too. Too much, you might say. It could have been nerves. They were all for horseplay and wrestling with each other and practical jokes.’
‘But there was a row between you?’
‘Between who?’
‘You said so, Aunt Judith.’
‘It’s on tape. You said it just a while ago.’
‘I won’t talk with that machine on any more.’
*
Later, Mrs O’Malley had said, ‘She forgets things.’
‘Or lies,’ James thought. ‘Or loses track.’
‘Does it matter?’
‘Well, it undermines credibility. I’d want an interview where she said what she said in a sequential, reasonable way.’
‘Why? You’re telling a story?’
‘Other people on the film will do that. My job is to establish facts.’
‘What did she say?’
‘I’ll play it back for you,’ he said.
Corny Kinlen had taken the old nun off on a tour of the building and Mrs O
’Malley leaned back in her chair as James rewound the tape. Listening to its fricative lick and whirr, she said, ‘She gets under my skin. I hate myself for not feeling sorrier for her, but she’s like a bundle of old things I thought I’d thrown out which suddenly turn up strewn around the place to shame me: the unwanted past. Can you imagine? Poor thing, it’s dreadful to strike people that way. Like old droppings. Her stale phrases, her nunny words: stuffy, niffy, lower-middle class, and dull. I hate myself for hating her style. Perhaps the whole generation was like that: the wild boys, the heroes?’
‘I don’t notice her saying nunny things. Which?’
‘I don’t even mean religious things. It’s more the way she uses “refined” as a good word, whereas now it’s a bad word. Hers was a revolutionary family, but it’s the snobbery and resignation which strike me in her talk. The tags: “buckle down”, “grit your teeth”, “toe the line”, be “up to the mark”, “offer it up” – Jesus.’
No Country for Young Men Page 13