The Pornographer

by John McGahern

  “Paying my last respects.”

  “How did you know about the Mass?”

  “I read the papers. And ye put it in de papers. And I’m pleased to see that you’re properly turned out for the occasion. Yes,” he grinned from ear to ear beneath the big hat, mimicking a Negro blues accent, “very pleased, to see you formally turned out for the occasion, in black and blue.”

  “This is all we need,” I said before I realized that my uncle was standing close, and I introduced them.

  “I’ve put up at the Commercial,” he said, gesturing to the hotel just across the road from the church.

  “I’ll see you there later, then,” I saw that my uncle was impatient at the interruption.

  After the High Mass she was wheeled from the altar on a shining new trolley not unlike the trolleys used to gather in trays and used dishes in big wayside cafeterias, and we carried her on shoulders down the steps to the open back of the hearse. The hearse crawled slowly through the small town, stopped for a few moments outside the blinded house, but as soon as it passed the town-sign it gathered speed. Soon we were climbing into the mountains, passing abandoned houses, their roofs fallen in, water trickling from the steep sides onto the road, the brown of sulphur on the rocks. We drove immediately behind Cyril’s car; and as we climbed, the coffin, in its glass case, seemed to rise continually in air above us.

  “It’s a big funeral,” my uncle said with satisfaction as he looked back on a whole mile-long stretch of road below us still covered with cars. “That Mr Maloney that was at the church,” he cleared his throat. “He’s a friend of yours?”

  “I do work for him.”

  “Writing work?”

  “That’s right. What do you think of him?”

  “Seemed a bit overdressed for the part,” he probed cautiously.

  “He’s all right. He likes to make a bit of a splash. It’s a way of getting attention.”

  “I could see that end of it,” he said.

  When we got out of the car onto the hard gravel of the road the whole air felt rainwashed. The slopes were bare. And the urgent, rapid sound of racing water ran between the scrape of shoes on gravel, the haphazard banging of car doors, the subdued murmur of voices. We carried her round to the back of the small church, bare as the slopes on which it stood. On the rain-eaten slab of limestone above the open grave I was able to make out my mother and father’s names and my grandmother’s name, Rose; but you would need a nail or a knife to follow the illegible lines of the other impressions they were that eaten away. Through the silence of the prayers a robin sang against the race of water somewhere in the bare bushes. After the decade of the Rosary I was waiting for the shovels to start filling in the clay when the undertaker unrolled a green mat of butcher’s grass and placed it over the grave. They’d fill in the grave as soon as the churchyard was empty, some barbarous notion of kindness.

  Standing around and shaking hands afterwards in the graveyard I introduced Maloney to Cyril, who had been weeping during the prayers; and Cyril seemed as impressed as my uncle had been resolutely unimpressed, and invited Maloney back to the house. Five or six cars drove together back to the house.

  “When are you going back to Dublin?” I asked Maloney in the house.

  “Whenever you want. I can offer you a lift.”

  “Would tomorrow morning be too late for you? My uncle sort of expects me to stay that long.”

  “Not at all, dear boy. I’d like to look over the town. It reminds me of our old Echo days. I’d like to view the quality of the local blooms, the small-town Helens. I have a room in the Commercial. We can leave round lunchtime.”

  “Earlier than that.”

  “Whenever you want. I’m at your service.”

  Cyril heard us and came over. He’d bought a headstone and wanted us to see it before we left in the morning. Apprehensively he included my uncle in the invitation, but it was brutally refused. “Some people still have to work. The mill will be going tomorrow.”

  “It’s marble,” Cyril said. “It’s the best that money could get.”

  My uncle turned his back. It was crossing and recrossing my mind that the headstone must have been ordered while my aunt was still alive.

  “We’re being invited to an unveiling,” Maloney reminded me coolly.

  “All right. I’ll be glad to see it,” I agreed, and Cyril arranged to collect us in the hotel at ten. I was almost as impatient as my uncle to get out of the house. As we left, I saw Maloney’s head bent low to Cyril’s, in an exaggeration of listening.

  “Where are we going?” I asked my uncle as I handed him back the car keys.

  “I suppose we better go out to my place and make tea or something. If we went to a restaurant it’d be all over town that we didn’t want to eat anything in the house.”

  “Or weren’t given anything?”

  “Or weren’t given anything,” his laugh was a harsher echo.

  He wanted to show me his fields and stock. Perhaps because of my affection, I took pleasure in his pure pleasure, and I didn’t have to talk at all. Then he insisted we go over to my place, pointing out things in need of repair or change, past the point when I no longer listened.

  “You should stock that land yourself,” he said later in the evening. “You shouldn’t let it any more when this letting runs out.” He’d forgotten that till he’d stocked his own land he was against all stocking. “Nothing but trouble,” he used to declare. “It’s a full-time job. Don’t say anything more.”

  “Who’d look after it for me?” I asked tiredly.

  “I would—until you’d come yourself. Who’s for my place after me but yourself? With everything running well there’d be no stronger men than us round here.”

  I rose when I heard his alarm go the next morning. He was making breakfast when I got down, rigged out in boots and overalls for the mill.

  “You’ll think over what I said last night?” he pressed as we ate.

  “Sure.”

  “And you’ll be down soon?”

  “Or you’ll be up,” I said without thinking.

  “No, I won’t be up. Not if I can possibly help it,” he half laughed. There were certain places and people to stay clear of, such as hospitals and undertakers.

  “All right. I’ll be down,” I said.

  Maloney was at breakfast when I went into the Commercial. He probably had a hangover. He was in a sour mood.

  “How did you find the local blooms?” I asked.

  “This isn’t Grenoble and I’m not Stendhal’s uncle. Have some coffee? Tell me how you got your decorations.”

  “She had the child. I went to see her in London. She had a protector who beat me up.”

  “And your aunt inconveniently died next day?”

  “Right.”

  “Did this gentleman give any reason for beating you up?”

  “He said that I had had my fun and I should pay for it.”

  “I agree with him. And don’t think you’re washed clean by the beating. Don’t imagine you’ve been washed in the blood of the lamb or any of those cathartic theories. Don’t try to slip out in any of those ways. I know you.”

  “Haven’t I done enough?”

  “By no means. We can’t have people running round the country with their flies open and all male members at the ready. I’m glad you got beaten up. You’ll get beaten up many times. You deserve to get beaten up.”

  “Why?”

  “Because,” he used his spoon to point, “you behaved stupidly. People should always get punished for behaving stupidly and they generally do. I always did,” and suddenly he shouted, “Here comes the happy widower. All dressed for the unveiling. He’s not behaving stupidly,” and he let go a long deep groan that could have passed for a poor imitation of a donkey’s bray. From the groan and the over-elaborate greeting—florid to the point of insult—I guessed he’d passed the rest of the funeral drinking with Cyril. Cyril noticed nothing. He was clearly impressed with Maloney and greeted
us both with extreme affability, exuding the self-satisfaction and sense of anticipation of a man about to show off a racehorse or a girl that he felt reflected flatteringly on himself.

  Cyril led us towards the red shop front with its wire grille and as he pushed open the door a warning bell rang. It was a shop I’d loved, and though it had been enlarged, the essential feel of it had hardly changed at all. The long solid counter with its brass measuring yard ran past the wood and smoked glass that partitioned off the bar near its end. Neat rows of boxes stood in line: seeds, nails, bolts, door handles, fishing hooks, a special offer of cartridge. Tools leaned all around the walls. Buckets, Wellingtons, bridles hung from the ceiling. A rotavator and a shining copper spraying machine stood side by side in the centre of the floor. The old foreman recognized us and came over. Cyril introduced Maloney, “Mr Maloney … down from Dublin … for the funeral,” in an impressed-with-himself-being-impressed hush of voice.

  “I thought those days were gone,” Maloney picked up the copper spraying machine by its leather straps.

  “You’d be surprised at how many of our customers haven’t managed to fit in with the new way of going about things,” Brady, the old foreman, said. “But there’s no doubt those days are gone. I suppose ten years at most. But we’ll stock them as long as there’s a demand and they can be got.”

  We moved through the partition into the bar. It was very small, two wooden stools at the counter, bare benches around the walls, one table at the back. It was no place for drinking sessions but rather for having a sobering drink while waiting for a large order to be put together in the shop or settling bills or ordering a tombstone or coffin. The door of the bar opened on to another shop and a farther yard where the plastic wreaths were kept and graveclothes and coffins and tombstones and the two hearses.

  “Whiskey,” Maloney said.

  “Whiskey,” I said.

  “Three whiskeys,” Cyril ordered, but Brady nodded to the young girl that the drinks were on the house. I noticed they served Bovril and coffee and fresh sandwiches as well. Black coffee bubbled in a jug beside a tray of sandwiches from which green leaves of lettuce bulged.

  “Your good health,” Maloney toasted the foreman with suitable gravity. “This is certainly the old style.”

  “You have to give the people something back,” the foreman smiled. “It’s not even good business to be taking all the time.”

  “Is Mr Comiskey about?” Cyril asked.

  “He’s in his office. He’s expecting you. But there’s no hurry. Anytime. Enjoy your drinks whatever ye do. I’ll show ye up to him after a while.”

  “Do you still make coffins or do you just order them?” I asked.

  “Order them,” he answered. “No more than the poor spraying machine the days of making your own coffins is gone. There was a time you just nailed a few deal boards together and that was that. In the thirties, none of yous would remember, when I started here, people couldn’t afford to even have the coffins painted. The few bare boards was wrapped in a black sheet and carried to the church and grave covered with the sheet so no one could see the lack of paint or handles. Now it’s the opposite: oak and walnut, brass and silver. It’ll be gold handles next. People have to be kept back from spending money now. And it all goes down into the ground anyhow. And who can tell the man that wore the ragged jacket?” he quoted expansively.

  “Still, I suppose they’re expressing their feelings,” I said in deference to Cyril’s increasing discomfort during the speech.

  “People are anxious to do the best they can,” Cyril added. Maloney, who had his arms folded, unbuttoned himself enough to take out his spectacles, polish them, put them on, inspect Cyril as if he was some rare botanical specimen for a long minute. Then he went through the same silent show while returning the spectacles to their pocket.

  “Apparently it’s a sight all together in America,” the foreman went on. “The boss was out at a conference in Los Angeles a few months back. Apparently they’ve gone wild there. The sky’s the limit. Apparently the whole talk at the conference was how to interest people again in the plainer type of burial.”

  “Thanks very much,” Maloney put down his glass firmly. “Having thus regaled ourselves we may as well see—is it Mr Comiskey?—about the rest of our business,” but if he thought he could march to the office, see the marble slab, and get out, he was wrong. When we opened the bar door two coffins stood on iron trestles and beside them a pair of sleek hearses. The names were already on the nameplates. One had yesterday’s date as the date of death; but the second had the day’s date. The person, James Malone, had been alive a few hours before. I had never thought of history as so recent. On the shelves were plastic wreaths, and flat brown boxes which must have held the graveclothes.

  “They’re just ready to go out,” the foreman said when he saw us linger.

  “I didn’t know you could get the information on the nameplate so quickly,” I gestured to the day’s date.

  “It only takes a few minutes. Getting the spelling right is the main thing. Sometimes they don’t even have their own names spelled right, but when it’s pointed out to them that it’s wrong by someone else, they’re apt to storm in and kick up one unholy fuss. By that time, of course, the coffin is in the ground. It doesn’t happen often. We either know the person or can check. But we always keep the slip they give us just in case.”

  “This man must have died since midnight?”

  “I can answer that in fact,” the foreman said proudly. “I took the order myself just after opening the shop. He died at six o’clock this morning; ah, a quiet inoffensive little man, you’d often see him round the town with a hat, very fond of a pint.”

  “You see,” I said to Maloney. “This is as good as your Paris venture. And it’s not made up either.” I thought I heard him curse, but my ribs and jaw gave warning not to laugh.

  “Ah yes,” Cyril said sententiously, standing between the pair of coffins and their waiting hearses. “Ah yes, when you think of it, life’s a shaky venture,” and they did hurt, even more so when I saw Maloney glower at him as if to eat him up, before the foreman led us up the wooden stairs, showed us into the office and withdrew.

  Comiskey came out from behind the desk to shake our hands. He had on a worsted blue suit, shiny at the back and elbows, a Pioneer Pin, and an array of fountain pens and biros across the breast pocket to the lapel. His silky brown hair was combed back. It was not that he was very fat, but that the rich covering of flesh, sleek as any of his hearses, seemed to shake inside the cloth, and there was a permanent blush of raw beefsteak on both cheeks.

  “We finished everything for you, Cyril, last thing yesterday evening,” he said in a tone that managed to be both authoritative and familiar. In a slow jog he led us down the stairs, rubbing his hands and talking as he went. He led us away from the hearses and out into a big yard. He paused at an enormous slab of black marble. “There we are,” Comiskey stood to one side.

  Beside my aunt’s name and dates in gold on the marble was the silhouette of a fashionable young woman. On the base of the marble, in gold too, was Cyril’s family name, o’doherty. I looked at Maloney but he lifted his eyes briefly to the sky and then fixed them intently on the points of his shoes.

  “It’s very nice,” I said to break the growing tension of the silence. “It must have cost a lot of money.”

  “We tried to do the best we could,” Cyril said, again in his hushed voice. “She was a fine person. Her generosity to me was abundant. She left me everything she had.”

  “It’s the best,” Comiskey said, “It’ll look very nice,” and if his foreman had all day to discourse he plainly hadn’t, and he led us back to the bar, “These gentlemen will have a drink on the house,” he said in a lordly way to the girl, shook our hands, and left us. We had whiskeys again.

  “Her generosity to me was abundant.” I marvelled at the phrase as I looked at Cyril’s handsome, dull face and wondered if he’d bought it with the marble.


  “What are you going to do with the old limestone?” I asked.

  “Well,” he said ponderously, “I gave it a good deal of thought, and I didn’t like to have to remove it, but there comes a time, just the same as with old houses, when you can’t do them up any more. You’re throwing good money after bad. You’re far better to start from the ground up again. I think the marble will be no insult.”

  “Quite right,” Maloney chorused with alarming fierceness.

  The rain had already half eaten many of the names: Rose, Jimmy, Bridie.… Soon the limestone would not be able to give them even that worn space. They would be scattered to the mountain air they once breathed. It would be a purer silence.

  “You’ll have one more drink on me,” Cyril pressed.

  “No,” I said. “We have to be back.”

  “We’re late,” Maloney added. We shook hands with the foreman on our way out, with Cyril outside the door.

  “You’ll be very welcome any time you’re down,” he said in the first generous flush of his new estate.

  “He’s your uncle-in-law,” Maloney said before Cyril was even out of earshot.

  “That’s right.”

  “Well your uncle-in-law is an eejit.”

  “I concur.”

  “And by the way that was a cheap crack about the Paris business, and like all cheap cracks full of a little truth, helping it up into a bigger lie. Nobody would pay the slightest attention to you wheeling a baby around in a coffin in this misfortunate country. They’d think you couldn’t afford a pram,” he said fiercely. “Look at today—isn’t the whole country going around in its coffin! But show them a man and a woman making love —and worst of all enjoying it—and the streets are full of ‘Fathers of eleven’, ‘Disgusted’ and the rest of them. Haven’t I been fighting it for the past several years, and giving hacks like you employment into the bargain. But what’ll work here won’t necessarily work elsewhere and vice-fucking-versa. That’s why I’m not giving up my Paris idea. Every country has their own half-baked version of it and they wave it around like their little flags. It’s coffins here. It’s class in England. It’s something stupid or fucking other everywhere.”