My Oedipus Complex

by Frank O'Connor

  ‘ “It is, Denis, it is indeed,” says she, “but you know I couldn’t help it.”

  ‘ “Don’t leave me any more now, Winnie,” says he, and then he said no more, only the two eyes lighting out on her as she sat by the bed. And Sean Donoghue brought in the little stooleen for me, and there we were, the three of us, talking, and Denis paying us no attention, only staring at her.

  ‘ “Winnie,” says he, “lie down here beside me.”

  ‘ “Oye,” says Sean, humouring him, “don’t you know the poor girl is played out after her days’ work? She must go home to bed.”

  ‘ “No, no, no,” says Denis and the terrible mad light in his eyes. “There is a high wind blowing and ’tis no night for one like her to be out. Leave her sleep here beside me. Leave her creep in under the clothes to me the way I’ll keep her warm.”

  ‘ “Oh, oh, oh, oh,” says I, “indeed and indeed, Miss Regan, ’tis I’m sorry for bringing you here. ’Tisn’t my son is talking at all but the madness in him. I’ll go now,” says I, “and bring Sean’s boys to put the ropes on him again.”

  ‘ “No, Mrs Sullivan,” says she in a quiet voice. “Don’t do that at all. I’ll stop here with him and he’ll go fast asleep. Won’t you, Denis?”

  ‘ “I will, I will,” says he, “but come under the clothes to me. There does a terrible draught blow under that door.”

  ‘ “I will indeed, Denis,” says she, “if you’ll promise me to go to sleep.”

  ‘ “Oye, whisht, girl,” says I. ‘ ‘ ’Tis you that’s mad. While you’re here you’re in my charge, and how would I answer to your father if you stopped in here by yourself?”

  ‘ “Never mind about me, Mrs Sullivan,” she said. “I’m not a bit in dread of Denis. I promise you there will no harm come to me. You and Mr Donoghue can sit outside in the kitchen and I’ll be all right here.”

  ‘She had a worried look but there was something about her there was no mistaking. I wouldn’t take it on myself to cross the girl. We went out to the kitchen, Sean and myself, and we heard every whisper that passed between them. She got into the bed beside him: I heard her. He was whispering into her ear the sort of foolish things boys do be saying at that age, and then we heard no more only the pair of them breathing. I went to the room door and looked in. He was lying with his arm about her and his head on her bosom, sleeping like a child, sleeping like he slept in his good days with no worry at all on his poor face. She did not look at me and I did not speak to her. My heart was too full. God help us, it was an old song of my father’s that was going through my head: “Lonely Rock is the one wife my children will know.”

  ‘Later on, the candle went out and I did not light another. I wasn’t a bit afraid for her then. The storm blew up and he slept through it all, breathing nice and even. When it was light I made a cup of tea for her and beckoned her from the room door. She loosened his hold and slipped out of bed. Then he stirred and opened his eyes.

  ‘ “Winnie,” says he, “where are you going?”

  ‘ “I’m going to work, Denis,” says she. “Don’t you know I must be at school early?”

  ‘ “But you’ll come back to me tonight, Winnie?” says he.

  ‘ “I will, Denis,” says she. “I’ll come back, never fear.”

  ‘And he turned on his side and went fast asleep again.

  ‘When she walked into the kitchen I went on my two knees before her and kissed her hands. I did so. There would no words come to me, and we sat there, the three of us, over our tea, and I declare for the time being I felt ’twas worth it all, all the troubles of his birth and rearing and all the lonesome years ahead.

  ‘It was a great ease to us. Poor Denis never stirred, and when the police came he went along with them without commotion or handcuffs or anything that would shame him, and all the words he said to me was: “Mother, tell Winnie I’ll be expecting her.”

  ‘And isn’t it a strange and wonderful thing? From that day to the day she left us there did no one speak a bad word about what she did, and the people couldn’t do enough for her. Isn’t it a strange thing and the world as wicked as it is, that no one would say the bad word about her?’

  Darkness had fallen over the Atlantic, blank grey to its farthest reaches.

  A Thing of Nothing

  1

  Ned Lynch was a decent poor slob of a man with a fat purple face, a big black moustache like the villain in a melodrama, and a paunch. He had a brassy voice that took an effort of his whole being to reduce it by a puff, sleepy bloodshot eyes, and a big head. Katty, who was a well-mannered, convent-educated girl, thought him very old-fashioned. He said the country was going to the dogs and the land being starved to put young fellows into professions, ‘educating them out of their knowledge’, he said. ‘What do they want professions for?’ he asked. ‘Haven’t they the hills and the fields – God’s great, wonderful book of Nature?’ He courted her in the same stiff sentimental way, full of poetic nonsense about ‘your holy delicate white hands’ and ‘the weaker sex’.

  The weaker sex indeed! You should see him if he had a headache. She havered for years about marrying him at all. Her family thought he was a very good catch, but Katty would have preferred a professional man. At last she suggested that they should separate for a year to see whether they couldn’t do better for themselves. He put on a sour puss at that, but Katty went off to business in Dublin just the same. Except for one drunken medical who borrowed money from her, she didn’t meet any professional men, and after lending the medico more money than she could afford, she was glad enough to come back and marry Ned. She didn’t look twenty-five, but she was thirty-nine. The day of the marriage he handed her three anonymous letters about herself and the medico.

  Katty thought a lot about the anonymous letters. She thought she knew the quarter they had come from. Ned had a brother called Jerry who was a different class of man entirely. He was tall and dark and lean as a rake, with a high colour and a pair of bright-blue eyes. Twenty years before, himself and Ned had had some disagreement about politics and he had opened Ned with a poker. They hadn’t spoken since, but as Jerry had two sons and only one farm, Katty saw just why it mightn’t suit him that Ned and herself would marry.

  She was a good wife and a good manager; a great woman to send to an auction. She was pretty and well behaved; she dressed younger than her years in short coloured frocks and wide hats that she had to hold the brim of on a windy morning. She managed to double the business inside two years. But before the first year was well out she began to see rocks ahead. First there was Ned’s health. He looked a giant of a man, but his sister had died of blood pressure, and he had a childish craze for meat and pastries. You could see him outside the baker’s, looking in with mournful, bloodshot eyes. He would saunter in and stroll out with a little bag of cakes behind his back, hide them under the counter, and eat them when she wasn’t looking. Sometimes she came into the shop and found him with his whole face red and one cheek stuffed. She never said anything then; she was much too much a lady, but afterwards she might reproach him gently with it.

  And then to crown her troubles one day Father Ring called and Ned and himself went connyshuring in the parlour. A few days later – oh, dear, she thought bitterly, the subtlety of them! – two country boys walked in. One was Con Lynch, Jerry’s second son. He was tall and gawkish, with a big, pale, bony face; he walked with a pronounced stoop as if his sole amusement was watching his feet, his hands behind his back, his soft hat down the back of his neck, and the ragged ends of his trousers trailing round the big boots.

  He looked at Katty and then looked away; then looked at her again and said: ‘Good morra.’ Katty put her hands on the counter and said with a smile: ‘How d’ye do?’ ‘Oh, all right,’ said Con, as if he thought she was presuming. Ned didn’t say anything. He was behind the counter of the bar in his shirt-sleeves.

  ‘Two bottles of stout, i’ ye plaze,’ said Con with a take-it-or-leave-it air, planking down the two-shilling pie
ce he had squeezed in the palm of one hand. Ned looked at the money and then at Con. Finally he turned to the shelves and poured out three stiff glasses of Irish.

  ‘Porter is a cold drink between relations,’ he said in his kind, lazy way.

  ‘Begor, ’tis true for you,’ said Con, resting his two elbows on the counter while his whole face lit up with a roguish smile. ‘ ’Tis a thin, cold, unneighbourly Protestant sort of drink.’

  After that Con and his brother Tom dropped in regularly. Tom was secretary of some political organization and, though very uncouth, able to hold his own by sheer dint of brass, but Con was uncouth without any qualification. He sat with one knee in the air and his hands locked about it as if he had sprained his ankle, or crouched forward with his hands joined between his legs in a manner that Katty would have been too ladylike to describe, and he jumped from one position to another as if a flea had bitten him. When she gave him salad for tea he handed it back to her. ‘Take that away and gi’ me a bit o’ mate, i’ ye plaze,’ he said with no shyness at all. And the funny thing was that Ned, who in his old-fashioned way knew so much better, only smiled. When he was going, Ned always slipped a packet of cigarettes into his pocket, but Con always pulled them out again. ‘What are thim? Faga? Chrisht! Ah, the blessings of God on you!’ And then he smiled his rogue’s smile, rubbed his hands vigorously, lowered his head as if he were going to butt the first man he met, and plunged out into the street.

  It was easy to see how the plot was developing. She was a year married and no child!

  2

  One day a few weeks later Katty heard a scuffle. She looked out the shop window and saw Jerry with the two boys holding him by the arms while he let on to be trying to break free of them.

  ‘Come on, come on, and don’t be making a show of us!’ said Tom angrily.

  ‘I don’t give a Christ in hell,’ cried his father in a shrill tremolo, his wild blue eyes sweeping the sunlit street in every direction except the shop. ‘I’ll go where I’m asked.’

  ‘You’ll go where you’re told,’ said Con with great glee – clearly he thought his father was a great card. ‘Come on, you ould whore you, come on!’

  Ned heard the scuffle and leaned over the counter to see what it was. He gave no sign of being moved by it. There was a sort of monumental dignity about Ned, about the slowness of his thoughts, the depth of his sentiment, and the sheer volume of his voice, which enabled him to time a scene with the certainty of an old stage hand. He lifted the flap of the counter and moved slowly out into the centre of the shop and then stopped and held out his hand. That, by the way, did it. Jerry gave a whinny like a young colt and sprang to take the proffered hand. They stood like that for a full minute, moryah they were too overcome to speak! Katty watched them with a bitter little smile.

  ‘You know the fair lady of my choice,’ said Ned at last.

  ‘I’m very glad to meet you, ma’am,’ said Jerry, turning his knife-blue eyes on her, his dropped chin and his high, small perfect teeth making it sound like the greeting of a well-bred weasel to a rabbit. They all retired to the back parlour, where Katty brought the drinks. The atmosphere was maudlin. After arranging for Katty and himself to spend the next Sunday at the farm, Ned escorted them down the street. When he came back there were tears in his eyes – a foolish man!

  ‘Well,’ he said, standing in the middle of the shop with his hands behind his back and his bowler hat well down over his eyes, ‘ ’twas nice being all under the one roof again.’

  ‘It must have been grand,’ said Katty, affecting to be very busy. ‘I suppose ’twas Father Ring did it,’ she added over her shoulder with subtle mockery.

  ‘Ah,’ said Ned, looking stolidly out at the sunlit street with swimming eyes, ‘we’re getting older and wiser. What fools people are to embitter their lives about nothing! There won’t be much politics where we’re going.’

  ‘I wonder if ’tis that,’ said Katty, as if she were talking to herself while inwardly she fumed at the stupidity of the man.

  ‘Ah, what else could it be?’ asked Ned, wrapped up in whatever sentimental fantasies he was weaving.

  ‘I suppose ’twould never be policy?’ she asked archly, looking up from under her brows with a knowing smile.

  ‘How could it be policy, woman?’ asked Ned, his voice harsh with indignation. ‘What has he to gain by policy?’

  ‘Ah, how would I know?’ she said, reaching towards a high shelf. ‘He might be thinking of the shop for Con.’

  ‘He’d be thinking a very long way ahead,’ said Ned after a pause, but she saw it had gone home.

  ‘Maybe he’s hoping ’twouldn’t be so long,’ she said smoothly.

  ‘How’s that?’ said Ned.

  ‘Julia, God rest her, went very suddenly,’ said Katty.

  ‘He’d be a very foolish man to count on me doing the same,’ boomed Ned, but his face grew purple from shame and anger – shame that he had no children of his own, anger that she had pricked the sentimental bubble he had blown about Jerry and the boys.

  It was a warning to Katty. Twice in the next year she satisfied herself that she was having a baby, and each time put the whole house into confusion. She lay upstairs on the sofa with a handbell at her side, made baby clothes, ordered the cradle, even got an option on a pram. To secure herself against accidents she slept in the spare room. And then it passed off and with a look like murder she returned to the big bedroom. Ned stared at her over the bedclothes with an incredulous, long-suffering air and then heaved a heavy sigh and turned in.

  She knew he blamed her. After being taken in like that it would be weeks before he started again. Weaker sex, indeed! One would think it was he that was trying to start the baby. But Katty blamed herself as well. It was the final year in Dublin and the goings-on with the drunken medico that had finished her. For days on end she sat over the range in the kitchen with a little shawl over her shoulders, shivering and tight-lipped, taking little tots of brandy when Ned’s back was turned and complaining of him to the servant girl. To make it worse, the daughter of another shopkeeper came home on holidays from England; a nurse with fast, flighty ways that appealed to Ned. He was always in and out there, full of old-fashioned gallantries. He kissed her hand and even called her ‘a rose’. It reached Katty’s ears and she clamped her lips. She was far too well bred to make vulgar scenes. Instead, with her feet on the fender, hands joined in her lap, she asked in the most casual friendly way:

  ‘Ned, do you think that was a proper remark to make to the Dunne girl?’

  ‘What remark?’ asked Ned, growing crimson – it showed his guilty conscience.

  ‘Well, Ned, you can hardly pretend you don’t know, considering that the whole town is talking about it.’

  ‘Are you mad, woman?’ he shouted, his voice brassy with rage.

  ‘I only asked a simple question, Ned,’ she said with resignation, fixing him with her clear blue eyes. ‘Of course, if you prefer not to answer there’s no more to be said.’

  ‘You have me driven distracted!’ cried Ned. ‘I can’t be polite to a neighbour’s daughter but you sulk for days on me.’

  ‘Polite!’ said Katty to the range. ‘However,’ she added, ‘I suppose I have no cause to complain. The man that would do worse to me wouldn’t be put out by a little thing like that.’

  ‘Do worse to you?’ shouted Ned, going purple as if he was in danger of congestion. ‘What did I ever do to you?’

  ‘Aren’t you planning to leave me in my old age without a roof over my head?’ she asked suddenly, turning on him.

  ‘I’m not planning to leave anything to anyone yet,’ roared Ned. ‘With the help of the Almighty God, when I do ’twill be to a child of my own.’

  ‘Indeed, I hope so,’ said Katty, ‘but after all, if the worst came to the worst – ’

  ‘If the worst came to the worst,’ he interrupted solemnly, ‘we don’t know which of us the Lord – glory and praise to His holy name – might take first.’


  ‘Amen, O Lord,’ breathed Katty piously, and then went on in her original tone. ‘I’m not saying you’ll be the first to go, and the way I am, Ned,’ she added bitterly, ‘I wouldn’t wish it. But ’tis only common prudence to be prepared for the worst. You know yourself how Julia went.’

  ‘My God,’ he said mournfully, addressing his remarks out the empty hall, ‘the foolishness of it! We have only a few short years on the earth; we come and go like the leaves of the trees, and instead of enjoying ourselves, we wear our hearts out with planning and contriving.’

  ‘Ah, Ned,’ she said, goaded to fury, as she always was by his philosophizing and poetry talk, ‘ ’tis easy it comes to you. I only wish the money would come as easy. I didn’t work myself to the bone in the shop to be left a beggar in my old age.’

  ‘A beggar?’ he cried. ‘Do you think I wouldn’t provide for you?’

  ‘Provide for me?’ she gibed. ‘Con Lynch in the shop and me in the back room! Fine provisions I’d get!’

  ‘I never said I’d leave it to Con Lynch,’ said Ned chokingly.

  ‘Then what is he coming here for?’ she shrieked, suddenly bounding into the middle of the kitchen and spreading out her arms. ‘What is he doing in my home? Can’t you do what any other man would do and let them know you’re leaving the shop to me?’

  ‘I can’t,’ he shouted back, ‘and you know I can’t.’

  ‘Why not?’ she said, stamping.

  ‘Because ’tis an old custom. The property goes with the name.’

  ‘Not with the people I was brought up with,’ she said proudly.

  ‘Well, ’twas with those I was brought up with,’ said Ned. ‘Women as good as you were satisfied. Ay, and better than you! Better than you,’ he added with a backward glance as he went out.