Mothers and Sons

by Colm Toibin

  *

  ON SATURDAY Luke told her that he had made their three albums into two CDs. Ian and himself had listened to them, he said, and she was right – some of them, especially the songs in Irish, were terrible. But some of the other songs, he added, were great and should be reissued. He was going to make a single CD of the band’s greatest hits, he said. Lisa observed his confidence, his ease discussing his own musical tastes, and his utter failure to notice her at all as he spoke. She wondered how many years more his innocence would last, how long it would he before he learned to read signs that things were not always simple. She could not say to him now that she did not want to hear the CD. She would, she supposed, have to listen to it.

  Luke knew, Lisa remembered, that Julie was dead. How strange that he would not ask himself if Julie’s death meant that her voice, recorded on all these songs, might not carry too much sadness with it, too much regret to be listened to casually after all the years.

  TWO AND A HALF years after the break-up of the band, two Guards came to her flat in the early morning and told her that Julie had been found dead in a hotel room in California. She took a taxi to her father’s house and woke him and told him.

  ‘That’s the end for me now,’ he said. ‘That’s the end.’

  When she asked him if he would come with her to identify the body, he seemed puzzled and wondered if Matt would not do that.

  ‘She died alone, the Guards told me,’ Lisa said.

  Her father said he did not want to go with her, and told her he did not care where Julie was buried, or where the funeral was. It was the last thing he cared about.

  ‘It’s all over for me,’ he said.

  She flew to London and then to Los Angeles and then, on a small plane, to Fresno in California where Julie’s body lay in a morgue. She had never been in the United States before, and perhaps, she thought, it was the hours flying and the day becoming night as much as the unfamiliarity that seemed to soften everything she saw and felt, seemed to render colours bland and voices hard to make out. The only hotel she knew was the one where Julie had been found. It did not occur to her to go anywhere else. It was a new motel at the edge of the city, and it was only when she had checked in and was lying on the bed that she realized this might not be the best place to stay. She thought of seeking out the manager and asking him to show her the room where her sister had been found, but she postponed the request. She studied the staff, wondering which of them had seen her sister dead and which of them would know if Matt had been with her on the night or day she died.

  In all the years that followed, she wondered why she did not go to the police, or ask to see the police, or find the Irish consul, and she still thought that one of the men in the morgue who witnessed her signature might have been a policeman. She had phoned the number given to her in Dublin and arranged to go to the morgue the next day. She had also given them Matt’s name and asked them that if he made contact, they were to tell him where she was. It sounded as though she were making a business transaction and this added to the strangeness of that time when no one recognized her, when no one spoke to her, when she could find no bar or restaurant or coffee shop where she felt comfortable. She was in a land of ghosts.

  She remembered the night and morning in Fresno before she went to see her sister’s body as interminable, a limbo time in which there was nothing to do, no duty to perform, no possibility of sleeping. She tried to take a taxi to the city centre so she could stroll in the streets, but after much misunderstanding, she discovered that there was no city centre, and no streets, merely long leafy rows of houses which led to more of the same, like an enclosed city of the dead, the houses like small tombs. She tried to phone friends in Ireland, but each call had to go through reception; the people who worked there were not in the habit of dealing with international calls and mostly failed to connect her. They began to view her lurking in the lobby waiting for taxis, her coming and going, with something between hostility and suspicion.

  She had seen America in the movies, but nothing here, a short plane ride from Hollywood, belonged to the images she had seen on the screen. The flatness, the deadness, the long waits for taxis, the tiredness of every object did not come from any Hollywood drama. Only once did she see a sight worthy of the movies. She had felt a craving for Chinese food, and had asked at reception for the name of the nearest Chinese restaurant. The receptionist seemed to have no idea what she meant. In the end, Lisa spoke directly to the taxi company, who dispatched a driver after forty-five minutes to take her to a nearby mall.

  On the way there, as evening fell, she saw the beautiful graveyard, the headstones all low and uniform, the grass freshly cut. She noticed the slanting sunlight, as though the graveyard were in brave Technicolor and the rest of the world in black and white. On the way back to the motel, having picked at her food and eaten almost nothing, she asked the driver to stop and she walked among the graves, looking at the foreign names and the foreign places of birth and sensing in this community of the dead, resting in this twilit clearance, some warmth, something even close to hope, and for some seconds the dread lifted of what was in store when she arrived at the morgue.

  She asked each time she returned to the motel if anyone had called, but there was no message. She had given the number to her father in case Matt rang. But there was nothing except the receptionist’s irritation. She presumed that the people at the morgue would know the circumstances of Julie’s death, whether anyone else had checked into the motel with her. Thinking about the questions she could ask distracted her.

  THEY WHEELED Julie’s body into a small, cold, narrow room. There was no sheet over her face so Lisa could instantly see her. Julie was smiling. It was not a dead or distant smile; no make-up artist could have painted it. It was a smile which belonged to Julie alone, it was how she often looked before she spoke, the smile impatient, it was how she smiled when she was ready to interrupt. It seemed astonishing that her face, being frozen and dead, could produce this smile. One of the orderlies who had wheeled the body in stood and waited as Lisa touched her sister’s hand and forehead and spoke to her, whispering what words she could, telling her how much they had loved her, adding what their father had said. She thought of singing a verse of something, but the thought was enough to make her cry.

  If only now, in this next half an hour, she had known what to ask, whom to ask for. She showed her passport and signed a form. There were, she remembered, three men in the room, but only one spoke and she had no idea who the other two were. She saw on the form that Julie had died of heart failure. She was so concerned that she could be allowed to see the body one more time that she requested nothing else. It was arranged that she could come back the next day.

  She went back to her graveyard, sunlit now, leaving a bewildered taxi driver waiting for her. She believed that she would find an office or a priest attached to the cemetery where her sister’s funeral could take place, but there was no chapel and the only people she met told her that this was an Armenian graveyard. Lisa found the most recent grave and looked at the unused plot beside it, and this was where she imagined her sister would lie in earth warmed by the sun, among these strangers in a place which was neither Ireland nor America. In these days, however, especially once she had slept for a while, she did not have the will or energy to organize it.

  JULIE’S FACE had changed when she saw her for the second time. Her smile had fallen inwards. There was no life in her.

  ‘She has gone,’ Lisa said to an orderly who nodded to her kindly.

  ‘She has gone,’ she repeated.

  She wondered if taking the body from the freezer the previous day might have caused this new deadness in her sister’s face, or if Julie had been mysteriously waiting, holding on, until her sister came. In life she had great strength; maybe in death, too. But it was gone now whatever it was, and there was nothing left. She phoned her father one more time to make sure that he did not want Julie’s body flown to Dublin. He assured her that he did not.
Through the morgue, she found a funeral director and arranged to have her sister buried, after Mass, at the edge of the Catholic graveyard at the other side of town among the emigrant Irish.

  OVER THE NEXT few years, as she worked as a photographer, she asked any musician she met who had been in the United States if they had ever seen Matt Hall, or even heard of him. Phil, when he came to Dublin, looked her up and remarked when they met how strange it was that Matt had disappeared. America was big but the music business was small. He must be in another business now, Phil said. Strangely, it was Shane, the member of the band who had been unhappiest with the music, who wanted the albums reissued when CDs became current, but by that time Lisa wanted to forget what had happened, and, to Shane’s puzzlement, she refused.

  She could not refuse Luke, however, since he was so proud of what he had done. She did not protest or announce that she would not listen. She kept a large camera close to her in case she would need to cover her face or distract herself.

  Luke was all competence and pride as he set up the disc in the player.

  ‘I put the best track first,’ he said, ‘and I had space at the end so I put it on a second time.’

  She knew what it would be, and, as Julie’s voice sang the opening verse of ‘Famous Blue Raincoat’ with no ornamentation or instrumental accompaniment, Lisa saw her face that day when she was dead, the features all filled with life, ready to start an argument, enjoying her own lovely authority. Soon, when the echo effect was added and the cello came in and Lisa’s own voice appeared, she was glad she had spent the years not hearing this music. Of all the songs on the CD this was the only one which still seemed alive, the rest were relics, but the song which began and ended the disc gave her a hint, in case she needed one, of her own reduced self, like one of her negatives upstairs, all outline and shadow, and gave her a clear vision of her sister’s face in the days when the recording was made. Now, as the CD came to an end, she hoped she would never have to listen to it again.

  A Priest in the Family

  SHE WATCHED the sky darken, threatening rain.

  ‘There’s no light at all these days,’ she said. ‘It’s been the darkest winter. I hate the rain or the cold, but I don’t mind it when there’s no light.’

  Father Greenwood sighed and glanced at the window.

  ‘Most people hate the winter,’ he said.

  She could think of nothing more to say and hoped that he might go now. Instead, he reached down and pulled up one of his grey socks, then waited for a moment before he inspected the other and pulled that up too.

  ‘Have you seen Frank lately?’ he asked.

  ‘Once or twice since Christmas,’ she said. ‘He has too much parish work to come and visit me very much, and maybe that’s the way it should be. It would be terrible if it was the other way around, if he saw his mother more than his parishioners. He prays for me, I know that, and I would pray for him too if I believed in prayer, but I’m not sure I do. But we’ve talked about that, you know all that.’

  ‘Your whole life’s a prayer, Molly,’ Father Greenwood said and smiled warmly.

  She shook her head in disbelief.

  ‘Years ago the old women spent their lives praying. Now, we get our hair done and play bridge and go to Dublin on the free travel, and we say what we like. But I’ve to be careful what I say in front of Frank, he’s very holy. He got that from his father. It’s nice having a son a priest who’s very holy. He’s one of the old school. But I can say what I like to you.’

  ‘There are many ways of being holy,’ Father Greenwood said.

  ‘In my time there was only one,’ she replied.

  WHEN HE HAD gone she got the RTE Guide and opened it for the evening’s television listings; she began to set the video to record Glenroe. She worked slowly, concentrating. In the morning, when the Irish Times had been read, she would put her feet up and watch this latest episode. Now in the hour she had to spare before she went out to play bridge, she sat at the dining-room table and flicked through the newspaper, examining headlines and photographs, but reading nothing, and not even thinking, letting the time pass easily.

  It was only when she went to fetch her coat in the small room off the kitchen that she noticed Father Greenwood’s car still in front of the house; as she peered out, she could see him sitting in the driver’s seat.

  Her first thought was that he was blocking her car and she would have to ask him to move. Later, that first thought would stay with her as a strange and innocent way of keeping all other thoughts at a distance; it was something which almost made her smile when she remembered it.

  He opened the car door as soon as she appeared with her coat held distractedly over her arm.

  ‘Is there something wrong? Is it one of the girls?’ she asked.

  ‘No,’ he said, ‘no, there’s not.’

  He moved towards her, preparing to make his way back into the house. She wished in the second they locked eyes that she could escape now to an evening of cards and company, get by him quickly and walk to the bridge club at the hotel, if she had to. Anything, she thought, to stop him saying whatever it was he had come to say.

  ‘Oh, it’s not the boys! Oh, don’t say it’s the boys have had an accident and you’re afraid to tell me!’ she said.

  He shook his head with certainty.

  ‘No, Molly, not at all, no accident.’

  As he reached her he caught her hand as though she would need his support nonetheless.

  ‘I know you have to go and play bridge,’ he said.

  She believed then that it could not be anything urgent or important. If she could still play bridge then clearly no one was dead or injured.

  ‘I have a few minutes,’ she said.

  ‘Maybe I can come back another time. We can talk more,’ he said.

  ‘Are you in any trouble?’ she asked.

  He looked at her as though the question puzzled him.

  ‘No,’ he said.

  She put her coat down on a chair in the hallway.

  ‘No,’ he said again, his voice quieter.

  ‘Then we’ll leave it for another time,’ she said calmly and smiled as best she could. She watched him hesitate, and she became even more determined that she would go immediately. She picked up her coat and made sure the keys were in the pocket.

  ‘If it can wait, then it can wait,’ she said.

  He turned away from her, walking out of the hallway towards his car.

  ‘Right you be,’ he said. ‘Enjoy your night. I hope I didn’t alarm you.’

  She was already moving away from him, her car keys in her hand, having closed the front door firmly behind her.

  THE NEXT DAY, when she had finished her lunch, she took her umbrella and her raincoat and walked to the library on the Back Road. It would be quiet, she knew, and Miriam the new girl would have time for her, she hoped. There was already a molly@hotmail.com, Miriam had told her on her last visit to learn how to use the library computer, so for her first email address she would need to add something to the word ‘Molly’ to make it original, like a number maybe, hers alone.

  ‘Can I be Molly80?’ she had asked.

  ‘Are you eighty, Mrs O’Neill?’

  ‘Not yet, but it won’t be long.’

  ‘Well, you don’t look it.’

  Her fingers had stiffened with age, but her typing was as accurate and fast as when she was twenty.

  ‘If I could just type, I’d be fine,’ she said now as Miriam moved an office chair close to the computer and sat beside her, ‘but that mouse will be the end of me. It doesn’t do what I want it to do at all. My grandsons can make it do whatever they want. I hate having to click. It was much simpler in my day. Just typing. No clicking.’

  ‘Oh, when you’re sending emails and getting them, you’ll see the value of it,’ Miriam said.

  ‘Yes, I told them I was going to send them an email as soon as I could. I’ll have to think of what to put into it.’

  She turned her head w
hen she heard voices and saw two women from the town returning books to the library. They were studying her with immense curiosity.

  ‘Look at you, Molly. You’ve gone all modern,’ one of them said.

  ‘You have to keep up with what’s going on,’ she said.

  ‘You never liked missing anything, Molly. You’ll get all the news from that now.’

  She faced the computer and began to practise opening her Hotmail account, as Miriam went to attend to the women, and she did not turn again when she heard them browsing among the stacks of books, speaking to one another in hushed voices.

  Later, when she felt she had used enough of Miriam’s patience, she walked towards the cathedral and down Main Street into Irish Street. She greeted people she met on the street by name, people she had known all of her life, the children of her contemporaries, many of them grown middle-aged themselves, and even their children, all familiar to her. There was no need to stop and talk to them. She knew all about them, she thought, and they about her. When news spread widely that she was learning how to use the computer in the library, one or two of them would ask her how it was going, but for the moment she would be allowed pass with a kind, brisk greeting.

  Her sister-in-law sat in the front room of her house where the fire was lighting. Molly tapped on the window and then waited while Jane fumbled with the automatic system.

  ‘Push now!’ She could hear her voice through the intercom.

  She pushed the door, which was stiff, and, having closed it behind her, let herself into Jane’s sitting room.

  ‘I look forward to Monday,’ Jane said, ‘when you come down. It’s lovely to see you.’

  ‘It’s cold outside, Jane,’ she said, ‘but it’s nice and warm in here, thank God.’