by Edna O'Brien
Baba, quick to deduce things, sang, “Where did you get that coat?” to the air of “Where did you get that hat?”
“My father sent me the money,” I lied.
“Your aul fella is in the workhouse!” She had no brassiere on, and you could see the shape of her nipples through the white jumper.
“What’s for tea?” I asked again.
“Roly-poly pud,” Baba said. The sudden ring of the doorbell impinged on her high voice, and I ran upstairs to put some powder on.
Baba let him in.
I put on a pale blue dress, because pale colors suit me. It had a silver, crystalline pattern like snow falling, and the neck was low. It was a summer dress, but I wanted to look nice for him.
Outside the dining-room door I rubbed the gooseflesh on my arms and paused to hear what they were saying to him. I could hear his low voice, and Baba using his Christian name already. Awkwardly I went in.
“Hello,” he said as he stood up to shake hands with me. Baba sat next to him, her elbow resting on the curved back of his chair. He looked very tall under the low ceiling and I was ashamed of the little room. It seemed more shabby with him in it; the lace curtains were gray from smoke, and the smiling china dogs on the sideboard looked idiotic.
“You found us easily enough?” I said, pretending not to be shy. It’s funny that you’re more shy with people in your own house. Out on the street I could talk to him, but in the house I was ashamed of something.
Joanna carried in the roly-poly pudding—wrapped in muslin—on a dish.
“Mein Gott, is, is so hot,” she said, as she laid the plate down on a pile of homemade table mats which Gustav had cut from a spare piece of linoleum. She unwrapped the wet muslin.
“Hot cuisine,” Baba said to Eugene, and winked. The pudding looked white and greasy; it reminded me of a corpse.
“My own, homemake,” Joanna said proudly. She cut the pudding into sections, and as she cut it, trickles of hot raspberry jam flowed onto the dish; then she respooned the jam back onto each portion.
“For my nice new guest,” she said, giving him the first helping. He declined it, saying that he never ate pastry.
“No, no, is no pastry,” Joanna said, “good Austrian recipe.”
“The seeds of raspberry jam get stuck between my teeth,” he said, half joking.
“Take your teeth out, eh?” she suggested.
“They’re my own teeth.” He laughed. “Let’s just have a nice cup of tea?”
“You not eat my food.” Her poor face looked hurt, and she grinned stupidly at him.
“It’s my stomach,” he explained. “I’ve got a hole in it, in there,” and he put his hand over his black pullover and tapped his stomach. Earlier on he had asked Joanna’s permission to take off his jacket. The black pullover suited him. It gave him a thin, religious look.
“Constipate?” Joanna asked. “I have the bag upstairs brought with me from my own country, what d’you call, enema?”
“Holy God,” Baba said. “Let him have his tea first.”
“It’s just a pain I have,” Eugene told her, “anxiety …”
“Anxiety—a rich man?” Joanna said. “What anxiety can a rich man have?”
“The world,” he said.
“The world,” she shouted. “You are a little bit mad, I think.” Then, fearing that she had overstepped her place, she said, “It is so terrible for your poor stomach, you poor man,” and she touched the bald patch in the center of his head and petted it as if she had known him all her life. Within a minute she fetched dill pickles, salami, black olives, smoked ham, and a dish of homemade macaroons.
“Oh, goodie,” Baba said, cooing. She took a moist black olive and held it between her fingers while she kissed it.
“No, a mistake,” Joanna said, taking it back, “these are special for Mr. Eugene.”
“That’s right, Joanna, we foreigners must stick together,” he said—but when she went out to make tea he made us a ham sandwich each.
“What made me think that girls ate delicately?” he said to the jam dish, and this set Baba off on one of her laughing fits. Baba had developed a new, loud laugh.
She turned to Eugene and said, “There’s nothing I like so much as a cultivated man.”
He bowed from the waist and smiled at her.
Baba looked very nice that particular evening. She has a small, neat face with dark skin. Her eyes are small too, and shiny and very alert. They remind you of a bird darting from one thing to another. Her thoughts also dart, and she gives the impression of having great energy.
“I used to know a girl like you once,” he said to her, and Baba just went on smiling.
“Good, best tea,” Joanna said as she came in with the silver teapot and a dented tin hot-water jug.
“Nice? Good? Eh?” she asked before he brought the cup to his lips.
“Breathtaking,” he said.
He inquired about her country, her family, and if she intended going back there. She answered with the long rigmarole about brothers and good family which Baba and I had heard five thousand times.
“Open the hooch,” Baba said to me, nodding toward the bottle of wine which Eugene had brought.
“She’ll open it soon as she gets sentimental,” I said. Joanna was so busy talking that she did not hear us.
“She’s at the height of her sentimental now, she’s passed that slob bit about her slob brother changing her nappie when she was two and he was four,” Baba said.
“My brothers spent me a night at the opera …” Joanna rambled on; then Baba tapped her elbow and, pointing to the wine, said, “Give the man a drink.”
Joanna’s face fell, she got confused, she said, “You like tea, eh?”
“Yes,” he said, “I don’t drink wine really.”
“Wise man, I like you.” She beamed at him, and Baba sighed out loud.
“You must not marry a shop girl from Ireland,” Joanna said. “You must marry somebody from your own country, a countess.” Joanna was so stupid that she didn’t think I’d mind her saying a thing like that. I singed the hair on her bare arms with my cigarette.
“Mein Gott, you are burning me.” She jumped up.
“Sorry.”
Then Gianni, the other lodger, came in, and in the confusion of introducing Eugene, I did not have to apologize any further.
When Joanna stood up to get his cup and saucer, she hid the wine behind one of the china dogs.
“That’s that,” Baba said, and poured herself some cold tea.
“Mi scusi,” Gianni, the lodger, was saying as he asked Baba to pass the sugar. He was showing off, using his hands and making false, conceited faces—I didn’t like him. He had arrived at Joanna’s the day I hoped to go to Vienna with Mr. Gentleman, and at first I helped him with his English and we went to The Bicycle Thief together. Later he gave me a necklace and thought that he could make very free with me because of that. When I wouldn’t kiss him on the landing one night, he got huffy and said the necklace cost a lot of money. I offered to give it back, but he asked for the money instead, and we had remained cool ever since.
“Some more dirty, foreign blood,” Eugene said good-humoredly.
“I come from Milano,” Gianni said, offended. He had the least sense of humor of anyone I ever met.
“She can’t inhale,” Baba said when Eugene passed me another cigarette. I took one anyhow. Holding the match for me, he whispered, “You’ve polished your eyes and everything,” and I thought of the delicate moist kisses which he had placed upon my eyelids and of the things he whispered to me when we were alone.
“You know Italy well?” Gianni asked then.
Eugene turned away from me and let the match die in the glass ashtray which Gustav had pinched from Mooney’s snug, GUINNESS IS GOOD FOR YOU was written in red on the gold-painted ashtray.
“I worked in Sicily once. We were making a picture there about fishermen and I lived in Palermo for a couple of months.”
�
��Sicily is not good,” Gianni said, making his boyish, contemptuous face.
He’s a selfish fool, I thought as I watched him pack sausages into his mouth. He got sausages because he was a male lodger. Joanna had some idea that male lodgers should get better food. I was watching him when it happened. My cigarette fell inside my low-necked dress. I don’t know how, but it did; it just slipped from between my fingers, and next thing I was burning. I yelled as I felt my chest sting and saw the smoke rising toward my chin.
“I’m on fire, I’m on fire.” I jumped up. The cigarette had lodged at the base of my brassiere and the pain was awful.
“Mein Gott, quench her,” Joanna said as she dragged my dress and tried to pull it away from me.
“Jesus,” Baba said, and she roared laughing.
“Do something, hah,” Joanna shouted, and Eugene turned to me and immediately began to smile.
“She did it for notice,” Baba said, picking up the jug of milk and proceeding to pour it down inside my dress.
“The good, best milk,” Joanna said, but it was too late, I was already soaking from half a jug of milk, and the cigarette went out naturally.
“Honestly, I thought it was some joke you were playing,” Eugene said to me.
He was trying to control his laughing in case I should be offended.
“You are a silly girl,” Joanna said to either Baba or me. I went out to change my dress.
“What’n the name of Christ were you doing, mooning like that?” Baba said out in the hall. “You’re a right-looking eejit.”
“I was just thinking,” I said. I had been thinking of a plan to get Eugene to bring me out, away from them, so that we could kiss in the motorcar.
“Of what, may I ask?” I did not tell her. I had been thinking of the first night he kissed me. Suddenly one rainy night as we walked down by the side of the Liffey toward the Customs House to the city, he said, “Have I ever kissed you?” and he kissed me quite abruptly, just as people flocked out of a cinema. I felt faintly sick and giddy, and I have no idea whether that kiss was quick or prolonged. I loved that part of Dublin then and forever, because it was there I laid my lips to the image of him that I had created, and the pigeons droppings on the Customs House were white flowers which splashed the dark, ancient stone of the steps and porch. Afterward in the car, I tasted his tongue and we explored each others face in the way that dogs do when they meet, and he said, “Wanton,” to me. While I had been thinking of all this, Baba looked inside my dress to see what damage the cigarette had done. It lay there, all gray and soggy, and my chest had got burned.
“Go up and change your dress,” she said.
“Come up with me.” I did not want her with Eugene. Already I was jealous of the way she said, “Absolutely,” to everything he said, and showed her dimples.
“Not on your life,” she said as she held the doorknob and patted her dark bouffant of hair before going back into the room, to sit near him. She looked silly from behind, with the cardigan on back to front and the buttons running down her back and a V of darkly flushed back.
I put on lashings of her perfume upstairs, and more powder and another dress.
When I came down, Gianni was sitting at the old piano, striking chords softly from its yellowed keys and humming something amid the talk which had risen in the room. The table was pushed back near the window, and Baba told me that we were going to have a singsong. She leaned on the corner of the sideboard and in her light, girlish, early-morning voice she began to sing:
I wish, I wish, I wish in vain,
I wish I was a child again,
But this I know it never will he,
Till apples grow on a willow tree …
And then before we could clap she began another song, which was incredibly sweet and sad. It was about a man who had seen a girl in the woods of his childhood and had gone out into the world haunted by her image. The refrain was “Remember me, remember me, remember for the rest of your life …” Toward the end Baba’s voice quavered as if the words meant something very special to her, and Eugene said that she sang like a honey bird. She blushed a bit, and pushed her sleeves above her elbows, because the room was warm. Her bare arm with the fuzz of gold hair looked dainty as she rested it on the sideboard and murmured about being hot. I saw him look at her and knew that her singing would often dance across his memory.
Gustav came in, and Joanna opened the wine and served it in liqueur glasses to make it go far. On and off, Baba or Gianni sang. Baba then said that I would have to recite, being as I couldn’t sing.
“I can’t,” I said.
“Oh, please, Kate.”
“Go on,” Eugene said. He had sung “Johnnie I Hardly Knew You,” in a pleasant, careless voice.
I recited “The Mother” by Patrick Pearse, which was the only poem I knew. It was far too emotional for that small, hot room. As I recited:
Lord thou art hard on mothers
We suffer in their coming and their going …
Baba sniggered and said aloud, “What about the children’s allowance?” Everyone laughed then, and I felt a fool, and though he said, “Bravo, bravo,” I hated him for laughing with the others.
Baba sang several more songs, and Eugene wrote the words of some on a piece of paper, which he put into his wallet. Her cheeks were red, not with rouge, but with a flush of happiness.
“You’re warm,” he said to her, and stood in front of the fire to keep the heat away from her.
Greater love than this, no man hath, I thought bitterly as he stood in front of the fire and grinned at Baba, because of the duet which Gustav and Joanna had begun to sing.
For me the night was long and disappointing. When he left around eleven, he did not kiss me or say anything special.
Even in sleep I worried about losing him. First thing when I woke I remembered Baba singing “Scarlet Ribbons” and the way he smiled at her. It was cold, so I stood on my nightgown and put my clothes on. The window was white with frost and uneven icicles clung to the top part of the frame.
I went to work early as it was Saturday, our busy day, and I wanted to have the shelves well stocked with provisions.
“Oh, darling,” Mrs. Burns said when I let myself in. She had come out to get sausages and rashers from the tray of meat things which was kept on the marble shelf behind the counter. I was wearing the coat which he had given me and she admired it. I told her that Eugene Gaillard had given it to me, and she stared and said, “What! Him!”
I guessed what she had to say, even before she began. He was a married man, she warned, and God only knew the number of innocent little girls whom he had started on the road to ruin.
There are no innocent girls, I thought. They’re all scarlet girls like Baba, with guile in their eyes; and I asked if he was really married.
She said she had read all about it in the paper a year or two before. She remembered reading it the time she was in hospital having her veins cut, and the woman in the bed next to her commented on him and said that she knew him when he had holes in his shoes.
“He married some American girl. She was a painter or an actress or something,” Mrs. Burns said, and I took the coat off and let it fall in a heap on the floor. I hated it then.
“A good job, I told you,” she said as she went inside with black pudding, two eggs, and some back rashers.
I closed my eyes and felt my stomach sinking down and down. That explained everything—his reserve, the house in the country, those stories of deserted California beaches with beer cans and rotting oranges, his aloneness.
One sadness recalls another: I stood there beside the new, crumpled coat and remembered the night my mother was drowned and how I clung to the foolish hope that it was all a mistake and that she would walk into the room, asking people why they mourned her. I prayed that he would not be married.
“Oh, please, God, let him not be married,” I begged, but I knew that my prayers were hopeless.
Automatically I filled shelves with tins
of things, and I took eggs from a wooden crate and cleaned them one by one with a damp cloth. I put a pinch of bread soda on the stains which would not come out easily, and then I counted half dozens of clean eggs in sectioned boxes that were marked “Fresh country eggs.”
Two eggs cracked in my hand; they were going off slightly, and that strange, sulphurous smell of rotting eggs has forever been connected in my mind with misery.
At times I felt violent and wanted to scream, but the Burnses were in the kitchen eating a fry and there was nothing I could do.
He rang me at eleven o’clock. The shop was packed and both Mr. and Mrs. Burns were serving at the counter.
He sounded very cheerful. He rang me to invite me to his house the following day. He had talked of inviting me once or twice before.
“I’d love to meet your wife. It was a wonder you didn’t tell me you were married,” I said.
“You never asked me,” he said. He was not apologetic. His voice sounded sharp and I imagined that he was going to put the telephone down.
“Do you wish to come tomorrow?” he asked. My legs began to tremble. I knew that customers were looking at my back, listening to what I said. They used to joke me about boys.
“I don’t know … maybe … will your wife be there?”
“No.” Pause … “She’s not there now.”
“Oh.” Suddenly I was filled with hope and vague rapture. “She isn’t dead, by any chance?” I asked.
“No, she’s in America.”
I heard the ring of the cash register behind my back and knew that Mrs. Burns would sulk for the day if I stayed any longer on the phone.
“I have to go now, we’re busy,” I said, my voice high and nervous.
He said that, if I wished, he could collect me at nine the following morning.
“All right, at nine,” I said.
He put the telephone down before I did.
On and off throughout the day, I cried, in the lavatory and places. I rang Tod Mead to ask all about the marriage, but he was not in his office, so I learned nothing that day.