The Pornographer

by John McGahern

  I slept late, but my aunt did not wait for my appearance to heal.

  Mrs O’Doherty died at four, the telegram said.

  I knew by the formality of the name that my uncle had sent the telegram. I watched the coarse paper start to shake in my hand and tried to say, backing away from the emotion I could not fight down, that I had known for a long time she would not get better, and it would be like her to pick this most inconvenient time to go, when my appearance was guaranteed to cause general mirth and head-wagging all over the small countryside: “Did you see the appearance of your man carrying the coffin? He was a sight”; but still emotion kept rising treacherously: her sturdy independence, her caustic laugh, her anger and her kindness, her person, the body of all life, growing, fighting, joying, weeping, falling, and now gone; and suddenly it beat me. I broke, and far off I could hear the wildness in my crying. Guard the human person well even in all its meanness, in its open hand, spite, venom, horror, beauty —profane sacredness, horrible contradiction.

  I was so disturbed I needed to tell some person and walked to the end of the road and rang Maloney. I was surprised by my own matter-of-factness as I told him that I’d be out of the city for some days because of my aunt’s death. He received the news with formal gravity. He even asked me her name and where she was likely to be buried.

  When I rang my uncle I could tell even on the phone that he was practically unable to move with the sense of his own importance in the importance of the occasion. He insisted that he meet me off the train and when I glimpsed him as the train pulled into the small station he had taken up the most prominent position on the platform, iron-clad in the security of his role.

  “Well,” he was coming comfortably towards me with some profundity like She’s gone or an equally swollen silence, when my appearance brought him to a quick check. First I saw disbelief, then outrage, and in a voice that clearly accused me of having done it all to embarrass him, he said, “I take it that the other fella is at least dead.”

  “I’m sorry,” I found the laughing painful but couldn’t stop it.

  “Well what’s happened?” he cleared his throat, his face an exaggerated version of hurt, and I decided not to lie. His focus was now so sharp that he’d probably be able to tell if I was lying.

  “I got beaten up,” I said.

  “Tell me more news,” he interposed sarcastically. “You’ll be a wonderful addition for the next few days. You might even make the papers.”

  “Anybody can get beaten up. Somebody just turned on me. It wasn’t my fault. There wasn’t even a fight,” but I saw the question did not go from his eyes but held steady. “Yes, there was a woman mixed up in it. It hurts like hell to have to talk.”

  “You’ll never learn sense,” he said.

  He had brought the big car to the station. After about a mile of silence I said, “It’s done now and I’m sorry. I was hoping she wouldn’t go so soon. The question is what am I to say?”

  “Say what?”

  “How it happened. I don’t suppose I should tell the truth.”

  “Are you joking?” the way he said it I knew all was well. That great institution, the family, was closing ranks.

  “Well, what will I say?”

  “Didn’t you go to school long enough to think something up?”

  “It’s not all that easy when yourself is at the centre of the trouble.”

  “Well, why don’t you say”—he cleared his throat, sounding like a sudden change of faulty gears—“Why can’t you say you were in a car crash?”

  “Will they believe it though?”

  “What do you care whether they believe it or not? As long as they have no way of finding out!”

  There were several cars in front of the house. Inside the house all the doors were open.

  “I’m sorry,” I shook Cyril’s hand in the hallway.

  “I know that.”

  “I’m sorry to look like this. I was in a car crash.”

  “You’re sure you’re able to be up?” he asked.

  “I’m all right. It just looks bad.”

  Several people shook my hand, “I’m sorry for the trouble.”

  “I know that indeed,” the response had been fashioned for me long years ago. I climbed the stairs to her room. There were four people sitting about the bed on chairs, two women and two men. I knelt at the foot of the bed. I looked at her face, her form beneath the raised sheet, the beads twined through her fingers. What a little heap of grey flesh the many coloured leaping flame burns down to. The two men were drinking whiskey with a chaser of beer. There was port or sherry in the women’s glasses. One of the men was remembering her when she first came to the town as a young girl to work in Maguire’s shop, and how young she was still when she opened her first shop, in this very house, above which she was now lying. They mustn’t have been used to ashtrays, for one of the men pushed his cigarette end into the neck of the beer bottle between his feet where it began to hiss. When I rose from my knees the four people shook my hands and one of the men offered me his chair which I was able to refuse.

  My uncle was waiting for me at the foot of the stairs, clearing his throat before saying loudly, “We better go now and see that man about the car insurance.” Some people stopped me to shake my hands as I followed him out in an uncaring numbness.

  “She looks good,” he said as we got into the big car.

  “Who laid her out?” and he named two women.

  “They did a nice job. What men do we have to see about the insurance?”

  “No man,” he laughed. “It was an excuse to get you out. Haven’t you been in a car crash! We won’t need to go back now till the removal. And I thought we might as well dawnder out to my place. That’s where you’ll be staying tonight. There’s a room made up.”

  “What happened in the end?” I asked.

  “I’ll tell you in a minute,” he said as he suddenly turned up the avenue to his new house. “I’ll tell you in the house.”

  It was a big slated nineteenth-century farmhouse, five front windows and a solid hall door looking confidently down on the road. We drove round by the cobbled back and parked in the yard, which was completely enclosed by out offices, their red iron roofs dull with rain. It was very warm in the kitchen, and the first thing he did was to shake down the Stanley and pile in more coal. Blue and white mugs hung from hooks on the deal dresser, and an oilcloth in blue and white squares covered the big deal table. Wedding and baptism photos, even one ordination group, hung with the religious pictures around the tall walls. I found it very lovely.

  His old face was as excited as a boy’s as he searched my battered face to see his excitement mirrored.

  “Well, what do you think?” his voice was nervous.

  “I think it’s lovely.”

  “I threw in a few extra hundred and they agreed to leave everything as it was. Tables, chairs, beds, dresser—everything.”

  “You got away with murder.”

  “I’d say, safely—with two murders. You wouldn’t be started till you’d see a thousand pounds in this room, and there are ten rooms.”

  “Some woman must have been fond of blue,” I said.

  “What do I care what they were fond of?” he chuckled so deep he shook, “It’s ours now!”

  I had to turn away because the laughing hurt. He thought I was laughing with him, and he was partly right; for he showed me the rest of the house in such an extravagance of delight that the tears streamed down his face.

  “What have you done with the land?”

  “It’s stocked, with bullocks. They don’t need much minding.”

  “Well, tell me what happened?” I said in an old armchair one side of the Stanley.

  “What’ll you have first?”

  “I’m all right.”

  “You’ll have to have something. It’s your first time in the house.”

  “Whiskey, then.”

  He opened a cupboard across from the dresser. “Are you sure you wouldn
’t sooner something different?” to show that the cupboard was bursting with drinks. The same bottles would probably be there at the same level next Christmas.

  “No. Just whiskey,” and he poured me a large tumblerful, turning his back to pour only the minutest nip for himself.

  “Well, tell me what happened?” I said, the whiskey making the inside of my mouth smart like hell.

  “Well, Cyril will never forget it,” he began powerfully. “She left him everything. And I don’t begrudge him a penny. In the end he earned it, down to the last farthing.”

  “How?”

  “Well, as soon as she got home she sent for Delehunty and made her will. They spent a long time making it and then she sent for me. She told me straight out that she was leaving everything to Cyril. She’d have left me something but she said she knew I had enough,” his voice thickened and grew hesitant. He had obviously been hurt.

  “And you have, of course. You have more than enough.”

  “O I told her that. And in no uncertain terms. And I told her as far as I was concerned she could fire her money and houses out into the street, for all I cared.”

  “She can’t have taken too kindly to that.”

  “No,” he crowed. “She told me to shut up, that she always knew I was an eejit. I told her whether I was an eejit or not she’d never find me giving my money to strangers. She mentioned you, that she was thankful, and all that, and that she’d thought of you, but that you were young and had an education as well as your own place.”

  “So Cyril got everything. I’m not surprised.”

  “Wait,” he laughed. “The best is on its way. She then sent for Cyril. She told him that she was leaving him everything but that it was on condition he never tried to see her again. He had only bothered with her when she was well and wanting something off her. He hadn’t come near her since she’d got badly sick. And now she didn’t want him at the end.”

  “How did you find out this?”

  “The poor fella was so upset that he came out here and cried it all out.”

  “What did you say?”

  “What do you expect? I told him of course that the woman wasn’t in her right mind,” he chuckled. “When it was about the only time she was in her right mind lately.”

  “Who took care of her?”

  “The nurse was in. And she didn’t even want the nurse. There was an invitation too to a wedding, far out cousins of ours from the mountains, the Meehans. One of the girls was getting married. She sent them a present. But she said that she’d not be at the wedding, that she had a much harder thing to do, and that she wished them as much joy and fun from the wedding as they could get, for one day they’d have to do the same hard thing that she had to do now.”

  “Did you see her again?”

  “Yesterday morning. I went in to tell her that I had given the Meehans the present, when who did I meet scrubbing the stairs but those two Donnelly sisters. One of them is a friend of Cyril’s. Did you ever notice that when things are rightly bad there’ll always be some stupid woman to be found who’ll have started scrubbing or tidying?”

  “What did you do?”

  “I ran them.”

  “Did she have any idea of this?”

  “Not at all. If she was even half right they wouldn’t get within a mile of the place. The nurse was there when I went in and the room was in half darkness. I thought at first that she was talking to the nurse, but then I saw she wasn’t talking to the nurse at all. Her voice was so low that it was hard to hear it, but I think she was talking to your mother, God rest her. Whatever it was it must have been funny for she seemed to be laughing a great deal or it was like as if she was laughing.”

  “Was she talking all the time?”

  “No. She’d talk and then go quiet as if listening. It’s in those times that she’d start to laugh. Then she’d start up talking again. I suppose the poor thing was going out of her mind in the finish.”

  “Did you say anything?”

  “No. The nurse told me there was no use. In about five hours after that she went.”

  “I’ll miss her. But with the way she was it was an ease.”

  “We’ll all miss her. But things have been going wrong with her for a long time. I don’t think they were ever right since the day she married. That was the real turning point.”

  “I suppose you’ll close down for the whole of the week?”

  “For the whole week, are you joking! There’s enough gone wrong without us going the same way. Jim too was thinking we mightn’t start up for the week but he got a land. We’ll be starting first thing the morning after the funeral.”

  Before we left, he shook down the Stanley again and heaped in more coal. “Coal is the only thing that gets up a real heat. I bought five tons back there. Wood is all right but only for getting the fire going. You’ll find the place will be roasting when we get back.”

  “You were very lucky to get this place,” I felt I had to praise it again.

  “It’s only once in a lifetime a place like this comes on the market. And the man and the money was waiting. Wouldn’t I be in a nice fix now if I’d gone on depending on other people?”

  “The man with the money,” I echoed to tease. “I’ll be round with the hat any one of these days.”

  “That’ll do you now,” he shook with pleasure. “That’ll do you now.”

  The house was so crowded when we got back that it was hard to get through the hallway and I was so tired that I no longer cared how my appearance was taken, but enquiries had been made, and the car crash was in general circulation. People sympathized with me over the accident in the same tone as over my aunt’s death.

  Then a murmur ran through the house that the hearse was outside, and all except the close relatives, and a few people asked to stay, filtered silently out, some glancing furtively back as they went. The coffin was brought in, eased up the narrow stairs, lifted across the banister, turned sideways in the door, put on chairs alongside the bed. There was no priest in the house, and the only four people in the room were the undertaker, his assistant, myself, my uncle.

  “Is there any more that wants to come up?” the undertaker asked, and I marvelled at the tact that omitted to look on her a last time in the world.

  When there was no answer he asked in a whisper, “Does Cyril want to come up?”

  My uncle went out on the stairs, and in some silent, mysterious way the question was conveyed down below. When my uncle came back to the room he said, “No. He doesn’t want,” in a voice clear with self-righteousness.

  “I suppose we can begin,” the undertaker said and looked around, “Let one of the women come up.”

  For what? startled across my mind when the undertaker said again, “Let some of the women come up to see that everything is done right,” as if he’d heard my silent enquiry. Was the division between men and women so great, the simple facts of sex so tabernacled, that a woman had to be chaperoned between deathbed and coffin? In the same mysterious way as word had been conveyed to Cyril it went down to the “women” and none of them wanted to come up.

  “It’s all right. We can go ahead,” the undertaker said. He drew back the sheet. Silently we took hold of her and lifted her from the bed. Her lightness amazed me, like a starved bird. The undertaker arranged her head on the small pillow, and looked at us in turn, and when we nodded he put the lid in place, turning the silver screws that were in the shapes of crosses. There was a brown stain in the centre of the snow-white undersheet where she had lain.

  The superstitious, the poetic, the religious are all made safe within the social, given a tangible form. The darkness is pushed out. All things become interrelated. We learn sequence and precedence, grown anxious about our own position in the scheme, shutting out the larger anxiety of the darkness. There’s nothing can be done about it. There’s good form and bad form. All is outside.

  At heartsease we can roll about in laughter at all divergences from the scheme of the world. We maste
r the darkness with ceremonies: of delight at being taken from the darkness into this light, of regret on the inevitable leaving of the light, hope as founded on the social and as firm as the theological rock.

  “It is nothing. It’s not what we struggled towards in all the days and nights of longing. We better look at it again in case we’ve missed something we find at the end of each arrival. But then many see that they’ve arrived in the longing of eyes that used to be their own.”

  “It’s always this way,” an old voice says. “Everything. Sex, money, houses. Death will be the same way too, except this time you won’t even realize it. You will be nothing.”

  “Since it’s this way it’s still better to pretend. It makes it easier, for yourself and others. And it’s kinder.”

  “But I don’t need kindness.”

  “You will,” a ghostly voice said. “You will. We all will before we’ll need nothing.”

  Outside, the large crowd waited across the road for the coffin to come out of the blinded house. They had already parked their cars and would follow the slow hearse the hundred yards or so on foot to the church where the old and some women and children had already taken their places. The crowd stood on the tarmac where the stone wall once ran to the railway gates, the three blackened and malformed fir trees, the two carriages and the square guard’s van waiting to go to Drum-shambo. Behind the mourners, the large water-pipe that looked like an elephant’s trunk was missing from the sky. Those images of day that greeted her every morning when she went out to lift the shutters from the shop windows had proved even more impermanent than she.

  My uncle asked me to drive the big car at the funeral.

  “I can only see properly out of one eye.”

  “It’ll be still better than my two. I can’t manage slow driving, and we’ll be right behind the hearse. It’s the distance between that beats me.”

  “All right,” I was secretly glad to have the driving. I was in more pain now than the day after the beating, and was glad of anything that forced me to concentrate elsewhere. My uncle handed me the car keys as soon as we left the house, “You might as well get the feel of it now,” to drive to the church for the High Mass. The hearse was parked in front of the church gates, its carriage door raised like an open mouth; and I parked the big car behind it. The first thing I noticed as I got out was Maloney standing on the tallest step between the gate and door. He was dressed all in black, and the wide-brimmed black hat made him look more like an ageing danceband personality than a mourner. I detached myself from my uncle to go to meet him. “What are you doing here?”