My Oedipus Complex

by Frank O'Connor

  May, who saw the part he had been cast for, wondered whether she couldn’t woo Mrs Corkery as well as another girl.

  After Rosie there was Joe, who was ordained the following year, and then Sheela did what seemed – in that family, at least – the conventional thing and went into the same convent as Tessie.

  It was an extraordinary family, and May was never quite able to understand the fascination it had for her. Partly, of course – and this she felt rather than understood – it was the attraction of the large family for the only child, the sheer relief of never having to wonder what you were going to play next. But beside this there was an attraction rather like that of a large theatrical family – the feeling that everything was related to a larger imaginative world. In a sense, the Corkerys always seemed to be playing.

  She knew that her own being in love with Peter was part of her love affair with the family as a whole, the longing to be connected with them, and the teasing she got about Peter from his brothers and sisters suggested that they, too, recognized it and were willing to accept her as one of themselves. But she also saw that her chance of ever marrying Peter was extremely slight, because Peter was not attracted by her. When he could have been out walking with her he was out walking with his friend Mick MacDonald, and when the pair of them came in while she was in the house, Peter behaved to her as though she were nothing more than a welcome stranger. He was always polite, always deferential – unlike Tim and Joe, who treated her as though she were an extra sister, to be slapped on the bottom or pushed out of the way as the mood struck them.

  May was a serious girl; she had read books on modern psychology, and she knew that the very quality that made Peter settle for a life in the world made him unsuitable as a husband. It was strange how right the books were about that. He was dominated by his mother, and he could flirt with her as he never flirted with May. Clearly, no other woman would ever entirely replace his mother in his heart. In fact (May was too serious a girl not to give things their proper names), Peter was the very type of the homosexual – the latent homosexual, as she learned to call it.

  Other boys wanted to go out with her, and she resented Peter’s unfailing courtesy, though in more philosophic spells she realized that he probably couldn’t help it, and that when he showed his almost boyish hero-worship of Mick MacDonald before her it was not his fault but Nature’s. All the same, she thought it very uncalled-for on the part of Nature, because it left her no particular interest in a world in which the only eligible young man was a queer. After a year or two of this, her thoughts turned more and more to the quiet convent where the Corkery girls contentedly carried on their simple lives of meditation and prayer. Once or twice she dropped a dark hint that she was thinking of becoming a nun herself, but each time it led to a scene with her father.

  ‘You’re a fool, girl!’ he said harshly, getting up to pour himself an extra drink. May knew he didn’t altogether resent being provoked, because it made him feel entitled to drink more.

  ‘Now, Jack, you must not say things like that,’ her mother said anxiously.

  ‘Of course I have to say it. Look at her! At her age! And she doesn’t even have a boy!’

  ‘But if there isn’t a boy who interests her!’

  ‘There are plenty of boys who’d interest her if only she behaved like a natural girl,’ he said gloomily. ‘What do you think a boy wants to do with a girl? Say the rosary? She hasn’t behaved naturally ever since she got friendly with that family – what’s their name?’

  ‘Corkery,’ Mrs MacMahon said, having failed to perceive that not remembering the Corkerys’ name was the one way the poor man had of getting back at them.

  ‘Whatever their name is, they’ve turned her into an idiot. That’s no great surprise. They never had any brains to distribute, themselves.’

  ‘But still, Jack, you will admit they’ve got on very well.’

  ‘They’ve got on very well!’ he echoed scornfully. ‘In the Church! Except that young fellow, the solicitor’s clerk, and I suppose he hadn’t brains enough even for the Church. They should have put him in the friars.’

  ‘But after all, their uncle is the Dean.’

  ‘Wonderful Dean, too,’ grumbled Jack MacMahon. ‘He drove me out of twelve o’clock Mass, so as not to listen to his drivel. He can hardly speak decent English, not to mind preaching a sermon. “A bunch of baloney!” ’ he quoted angrily. ‘If we had a proper bishop, instead of the one we have, he’d make that fellow speak correctly in the pulpit at least.’

  ‘But it’s only so that his congregation will understand him, Jack.’

  ‘Oh, his congregation understands him only too well. Himself and his tall hat and his puffed-up airs! Common, that’s what he is, and that’s what all the family are, on both sides. If your daughter wants to be a nun, you and the Corkerys can arrange it between you. But not one penny of my money goes into their pockets, believe me!’

  May was sorry to upset him, but for herself she did not mind his loathing of the whole Corkery family. She knew that it was only because he was fond of her and dreaded being left without her in his old age. He had spoiled her so long as she was not of an age to answer him back, and she guessed he was looking forward to spoiling his grandchildren even worse because he would not live long enough to hear them answer him back. But this, she realized, was what the Corkerys had done for her – made all that side of life seem unimportant.

  She had a long talk with Mother Agatha, Mrs Corkery’s sister, about her vocation, which confirmed her in her resolution. Mother Agatha was very unlike her sister, who was loud-voiced and humorous. The Mother Superior was pale, thin, cool, and with the slightest trace of an ironic wit that might have passed unnoticed by a stupider girl. But May noticed it, and realized that she was being observed very closely indeed.

  She and her mother did the shopping for the trousseau, but the bills and parcels were kept carefully out of her father’s sight. Drunk or sober, he refused to discuss the matter at all. ‘It would only upset him just now, poor man,’ her mother said philosophically. He was drinking heavily, and when he was in liquor he quarrelled a lot with her mother about little things. With May he avoided quarrels, or even arguments, and it struck her that he was training himself for a life in which he would no longer have her to quarrel with. On the day of the Reception he did not drink at all, which pleased her, and was icily polite to everybody, but when, later, she appeared behind the parlour grille, all in white, and the sun caught her, she saw his face in the darkness of the parlour, with all the life drained out of it, and suddenly he turned and left without a word. It was only then that a real feeling of guilt sprang up in her at the thought of the miserable old age that awaited him – a man like him, who loved young creatures who could not answer him back, and who would explain to them unweariedly about the sun and moon and geography and figures. She had answered him back in a way that left him with nothing to look forward to.

  All the same, there was something very comforting about the life of an enclosed Order. It had been organized a long, long time before, by people who knew more about the intrusions of the outside world than May did. The panics that had seized her about her ability to sustain the life diminished and finally ceased. The round of duties, services, and mortifications was exactly what she had needed, and little by little she felt the last traces of worldliness slip from her – even the very human worry about the old age of her father and mother. The convent was poor, and not altogether from choice. Everything in the house was mean and clean and cheerful, and May grew to love the old drawing-room that had been turned into a chapel, where she knelt, in her own place, through the black winter mornings when at home she would still be tucked up comfortably in bed. She liked the rough feeling of her clothes and the cold of the floor through her sandals, though mostly she liked the proximity of Tessie and Sheela.

  There were times when, reading the lives of the saints, she wished she had lived in more heroic times, and she secretly invented minor mortificat
ions for herself to make sure she could endure them. It was not until she had been in the convent for close on a year that she noticed that the minor mortifications were liable to be followed by major depressions. Though she was a clever woman, she did not try to analyse this. She merely lay awake at night and realized that the nuns she lived with – even Tessie and Sheela – were not the stuff of saints and martyrs, but ordinary women who behaved in religion very much as they would have behaved in marriage, and who followed the rule in the spirit in which her father went to Mass on Sundays. There was nothing whatever to be said against them, and any man who had got one of them for a wife would probably have considered himself fortunate, but all the same there was something about them that was not quite grown-up. It was very peculiar and caused her great concern. The things that had really frightened her about the Order when she was in the world – the loneliness, the austerity, the ruthless discipline – now seemed to her meaningless and harmless. After that she saw with horror that the great days of the Church were over, and that they were merely a lot of perfectly commonplace women play-acting austerity and meditation.

  ‘But my dear child,’ Mother Agatha said when May wept out her story to her, ‘of course we’re only children. Of course we’re only play-acting. How else does a child learn obedience and discipline?’

  And when May talked to her about what the Order had been in earlier days, that vague, ironic note crept into Mother Superior’s voice, as though she had heard it all many times before. ‘I know, Sister,’ she said, with a nod. ‘Believe me, I do know that the Order was stricter in earlier times. But you must remember that it was not founded in a semi-arctic climate like ours, so there was less chance of the sisters dying of double pneumonia. I have talked to half the plumbers in town, but it seems that central heating is not understood here.… Everything is relative. I’m sure we suffer just as much in our very comfortable sandals as the early sisters suffered in their bare feet, and probably at times rather more, but at any rate we are not here for the sole purpose of suffering mortification, whatever pleasures it may hold for us.’

  Every word Mother Agatha said made perfect sense to May while she was saying it, and May knew she was being ungrateful and hysterical, but when the interview was over and the sound of her sobs had died away, she was left with the impression that Mother Agatha was only another commonplace woman, with a cool manner and a sarcastic tongue, who was also acting the part of a nun. She was alone in a world of bad actors and actresses, and the Catholicism she had known and believed in was dead.

  A few weeks later she was taken to a private nursing home. ‘Just for a short rest, Sister,’ as Mother Agatha said. ‘It’s a very pleasant place, and you will find a lot of other Religious there who need a rest as well.’

  There followed an endless but timeless phase of weeping and confusion, when all May’s ordinary life was broken up and strange men burst into her room and examined her and asked questions she did not understand and replied to questions of hers in a way that showed they had not understood them either. Nobody seemed to realize that she was the last Catholic in the world; nobody understood her tears about it. Above all, nobody seemed to be able to hear the gramophone record that played continuously in her head, and that stopped only when they gave her an injection.

  Then, one spring day, she went into the garden for a walk and a young nurse saw her back to her room. Far ahead of them, at the other end of a long, white corridor, she saw an old man with his back to her, and remembered that she had seen his face many times before and had perceived, without paying attention to, his long, gloomy, ironic face. She knew she must have remembered him, because now she could see nothing but his back, and suddenly the words ‘Who is that queer old man?’ broke through the sound of the gramophone record, surprising her as much as they seemed to surprise the young nurse.

  ‘Oh, him!’ the nurse said, with a smile. ‘Don’t you know him? He’s been here for years.’

  ‘But why, Nurse?’

  ‘Oh, he doesn’t think he’s a priest, and he is one really, that’s the trouble.’

  ‘But how extraordinary!’

  ‘Isn’t it?’ the nurse said, biting her lower lip in a smile. ‘Cripes, you’d think ’twas something you wouldn’t forget. He’s nice, really, though,’ she added gravely, as though she felt she had been criticizing him.

  When they reached May’s room, the young nurse grinned again, in a guilty way, and May noticed that she was extravagantly pretty, with small gleaming front teeth.

  ‘You’re getting all right, anyway,’ she said.

  ‘Oh, really?’ May said vaguely, because she knew she was not getting all right. ‘Why do you think that, Nurse?’

  ‘Oh, you get to spot things,’ the nurse said with a shrug, and left May uncomforted, because she didn’t know if she really did get well how she could face the convent and the other nuns again. All of them, she felt, would be laughing at her. Instead of worrying about the nuns, she went into a mournful daydream about the old priest who did not think he was a priest, and next day, when her father called, she said intensely, ‘Daddy, there’s a priest in here who doesn’t believe he’s a priest – isn’t that extraordinary?’ She did not hear the tone of her own voice or know how reasonable it sounded, and so she was surprised when her father looked away and started fumbling mechanically in his jacket pocket for a cigarette.

  ‘Well, you don’t have to think you’re a nun either,’ he said, with an unsteady voice. ‘Your mother has your own room ready for you when you come home.’

  ‘Oh, but Daddy, I have to go back to the convent.’

  ‘Oh, no you don’t. No more convents for you, young lady! That’s fixed up already with Mother Superior. It was all a mistake from the beginning. You’re coming straight home to your mother and me.’

  Then May knew she was really going to get well, and she wanted to go home with him at once, not to go back up the stairs behind the big iron door where there was always an attendant on duty. She knew that going back home meant defeat, humiliation, and despair, but she no longer cared even about that. She just wanted to take up her life again at the point where it had gone wrong, when she had first met the Corkerys.

  Her father brought her home and acted as though he had rescued her from a dragon’s den. Each evening, when he came home from work, he sat with her, sipping at his drink and talking quietly and comfortably. She felt he was making great efforts to assure that she felt protected and relaxed. Most of the time she did, but there were spells when she wanted her mother to put her back in the nursing home.

  ‘Oh, I couldn’t do that,’ her mother said characteristically. ‘It would upset your poor father too much.’

  But she did discuss it with the doctor – a young man, thin and rather unhealthy-looking, who looked as though he, too, was living on his nerves – and he argued with May about it.

  ‘But what am I to do, Doctor, when I feel like this?’ she asked plaintively.

  ‘Go out and get jarred,’ he said briskly.

  ‘Get what, Doctor?’ she asked feebly.

  ‘Jarred,’ he repeated without embarrassment. ‘Stoned. Polluted. Drunk. I don’t mean alone, of course. You need a young fellow along with you.’

  ‘Oh, not that again, Doctor!’ she said, and for some reason her voice came out exactly like Mother Agatha’s – which was not how she intended it to sound.

  ‘And some sort of a job,’ he went on remorselessly. ‘There isn’t a damn thing wrong with you except that you think you’re a failure. You’re not, of course, but as a result of thinking you are you’ve scratched the surface of your mind all over, and when you sit here like this, looking out at the rain, you keep rubbing it so that it doesn’t heal. Booze, lovemaking, and hard work – they keep your hands away from the sore surface, and then it heals of its own accord.’

  She did her best, but it didn’t seem to heal as easily as all that. Her father got her a job in the office of a friend, and she listened, in fascination, to the chatte
r of the other secretaries. She even went out in the evening with a couple of them and listened to their common little love stories. She knew if she had to wait until she talked like that about fellows in order to be well, her case was hopeless. Instead, she got drunk and told them how she had been for years in love with a homosexual, and, as she told it, the story became so hopeless and dreadful that she sobbed over it herself. After that she went home and wept for hours, because she knew that she had been telling lies, and betrayed the only people in the world whom she had really cared for.

  Her father made a point of never referring at all to the Corkerys, the convent, or the nursing home. She knew that for him this represented a real triumph of character, because he loathed the Corkerys more than ever for what he believed they had done to her. But even he could not very well ignore the latest development in the saga. It seemed that Mrs Corkery herself had decided to become a nun. She announced placidly to everyone that she had done her duty by her family, who were now all comfortably settled, and that she felt free to do what she had always wanted to do anyhow. She discussed it with the Dean, who practically excommunicated her on the spot. He said the family would never live down the scandal, and Mrs Corkery told him it wasn’t the scandal that worried him at all but the loss of the one house where he could get a decent meal. If he had a spark of manliness, she said, he would get rid of his housekeeper, who couldn’t cook, was a miserable sloven, and ordered him about as if he were a schoolboy. The Dean said she would have to get permission in writing from every one of her children, and Mrs Corkery replied calmly that there was no difficulty whatever about that.

  May’s father didn’t really want to crow, but he could not resist pointing out that he had always said the Corkerys had a slate loose.

  ‘I don’t see anything very queer about it,’ May said stubbornly.

  ‘A woman with six children entering a convent at her age!’ her father said, not even troubling to grow angry with her. ‘Even the Dean realizes it’s mad.’