by David Miller
“The children stay,” Brian said. “Pauline. Did you hear me?”
“No,” said Pauline. “Yes I heard you but –”
“All right. You heard me. Remember. The children stay.”
It was all he could do. To make her see what she was doing what she was ending, and to punish her if she did so. Nobody would blame him. There might be finagling, there might be bargaining, there would certainly be humbling of herself, but there it was like a round cold stone in her gullet, like a cannonball. And it would remain here unless she changed her mind entirely. The children stay.
Their car – hers and Brian’s – was still sitting in the motel parking lot. Brian would have to ask his father or his mother to drive him up here today to get it. She had the keys in her purse. There were spare keys – he would surely bring them. She unlocked the car door and threw her keys on the seat and locked the door on the inside and shut it.
Now she couldn’t go back. She couldn’t get into the car and drive back and say that she’d been insane. If she did that he would forgive her, but he’d never get over it and neither would she. They’d go on, though, as people did.
She walked out of the parking lot, she walked along the sidewalk, into town.
The weight of Mara on her hip, yesterday. The sight of Caitlin’s footprints on the floor.
Paw. Paw.
She doesn’t need the keys to get back to them, she doesn’t need the car. She could beg a ride on the highway. Give in, give in, get back to them any way at all, how can she not do that?
A sack over her head.
A fluid choice, the choice of fantasy, is poured out on the ground and instantly hardens; it has taken its undeniable shape.
This is acute pain. It will become chronic. Chronic means that it will be permanent but perhaps not constant. It may also mean that you won’t die of it. You won’t get free of it, but you won’t die of it. You won’t feel it every minute, but you won’t spend many days without it. And you’ll learn some tricks to dull it or banish it, trying not to end up destroying what you incurred this pain to get. It isn’t his fault. He’s still an innocent or a savage, who doesn’t know there’s a pain so durable in the world. Say to yourself, You lose them anyway. They grow up. For a mother there’s always waiting this private slightly ridiculous desolation. They’ll forget this time, in one way or another they’ll disown you. Or hang around till you don’t know what to do about them, the way Brian has.
And still, what pain. To carry along and get used to until it’s only the past she’s grieving for and not any possible present.
Her children have grown up. They don’t hate her. For going away or staying away. They don’t forgive her, either. Perhaps they wouldn’t have forgiven her anyway, but it would have been for something different.
Caitlin remembers a little about the summer at the lodge, Mara nothing. One day Caitlin mentions it to Pauline, calling it “that place Grandma and Grandpa stayed at.”
“The place we were at when you went away,” she says. “Only we didn’t know till later you went away with Orphée.”
Pauline says, “It wasn’t Orphée.”
“It wasn’t Orphée? Dad used to say it was. He’d say, And then your mother ran away with Orphée.”
“Then he was joking,” says Pauline.
“I always thought it was Orphée. It was somebody else then.”
“It was somebody else connected with the play. That I lived with for a while.”
“Not Orphée.”
“No. Never him.”
UNDER THE ROSE
Julia O’Faolain
Julia O’Faolain (b.1932) is the daughter of Sean O’Faolain. Married to the historian Lauro Martines, she is the author of several collections of stories and novels, including The Irish Signorina, No Country for Young Men and a memoir, Trespassers. She lives in London.
Dan said – to be sure, there was only his word for this; but who would invent such a thing? – that, in their teens, his brother and he had ravaged their sister on the parsonage kitchen table. Their father was a parson, and when the rape took place the household was at Evensong. Dan described a fume of dust motes sliced by thin, surgical light, a gleam of pinkish copper pans and, under his nose, the pith of the deal table. Outside the door, his sister’s dog had howled. The truth was, said Dan, that she herself did not resist much. She’d been fifteen, and the unapologetic Dan was now twenty. It had, he claimed, been a liberation for all three.
“The Bible’s full of it,” he’d wind up. “Incest!”
The story was for married women only. Dan specialized in unhappy wives. Mal mariées. He sang a song about them in French, easing open the tight, alien vowels and letting the slur of his voice widen their scope: ma-uhl mah-urrr-ee-yeh. It was a Limerick voice, and those who resisted its charm said that the further Dan Lydon got from Limerick the broader his accent grew. The resistant tended to be men; women always liked Dan. To hear him lilt, “My lo-hove is lo-ike a r-red, r-red r-ro-rose” was, as respected matrons would tell you, like listening to grand opera. His vibrancy fired them. It kindled and dazzled like those beams you saw in paintings of the Holy Ghost, and his breath had a pulse to it, even when all he was ordering was the same again, please, and a packet of fags. Words, moving in his mouth like oysters, put town dwellers in mind of rural forebears and of the damp, reticent lure of the countryside.
The parsonage of Dan’s youth lay in the grasslands watered by the River Shannon, flat country shadowed by those cloud formations known as mackerel backs and mare’s tails – arrangements as chameleon as himself. He was a bright-haired, smiling boy, who first reached Dublin in 1943, a time when the Japanese minister rode with a local hunt and the German one did not always get the cold shoulder. Dan’s allegiance was to the noble Soviets, but he was alive, too, to sexual raciness blown in like pollen from the war zones. Change fizzed; neutrality opened fields of choice, and values had rarely been shiftier.
“So where is your sister now?”
Mrs. Connors did and did not believe his story.
“Tea?” she offered. Tea was his hour. Husbands tended to be at work. Mr. Connors was a civil servant.
Dan took his tea. “She had to be married off,” he admitted. “She has a sweet little boy.”
Mrs. Connors dared: “Yours?”
“Or my brother’s? I’d like there to be one I knew was mine.” His eyes held hers. Putting down the cup, he turned her wrist over, slid back the sleeve, and traced the artery with a finger.
“The blue-veined child!” he murmured. “Don’t you think children conceived in passion are special? Fruits of willfulness! Surely they become poets? Or Napoleons?”
Phyllis Connors was sure Napoleon’s family had been legitimate. On her honeymoon, before the war, she had visited Corsica. “Their mother was addressed as Madame Mère.”
“Was that the model Connors held up to you? ‘Madame Mère’!” Dan teased. “On your honeymoon! What a clever cuss!”
The teasing could seem brotherly; but Dan’s brotherliness was alarming. Indeed, Phyllis’s offer to be a sister to him had touched off the nonsense – what else could it be? – about incest.
Nonsense or not, it unsettled her.
He was predatory. A known idler. Wolfed her sandwiches as though he had had no lunch – and maybe he hadn’t? The parson had washed his hands of him. But Dan had a new spiritual father in a poet who had stopped the university from kicking him out. Dan’s enthusiasm for poetry – he was, he said, writing it full-time – so captivated the poet that he had persuaded the provost to waive mundane requirements and insure that the boy’s scholarship (paid by a fund for sons of needy parsons) be renewed. Surely, urged Dan’s advocate, the alma mater of Burke and Sam Beckett could be flexible with men of stellar promise? Talents did not mature at the rate of seed potatoes, and Ireland’s best-known export was fractious writers. Let’s try to keep this one at home.
The poet, who ran a magazine, needed someone to do the legwork and when
need be plug gaps with pieces entitled “Where the Red Flag Flies,” “A Future for Cottage Industries?,” or “Folk Memories of West Clare.” Dan could knock these off at speed, and the connection gave him prestige with the fellow-undergraduates, at whose verse readings he starred.
It was at one of these that Phyllis Connors had first heard him recite. The verse had not been his. That, he explained, must stay sub rosa. Did she know that Jack Yeats, the painter, kept a rose on his easel when painting his mad, marvellous pictures of horse dealers, fiddlers, and fairs? Art in progress was safest under the rose.
After tea, Dan talked of procreation and of how men in tropical lands like Ecuador thought sex incomplete without it. That was the earth’s wisdom speaking through them. R.C.s – look at their Madonnas – had the same instincts. Dan, the parson’s son, defended the Pope, whose church had inherited the carnal wit of the ancients. “The sower went out to sow his seed… .”
Talk like this unnerved Phyllis, who was childless and unsure what was being offered. What farmer, asked Dan, would scatter with an empty hand? “Your women are your fields,” he quoted, from the Koran. “Go freely into your fields!” Then he extolled the beauty of pregnant women – bloomy as June meadows – and recited a poem about changelings: “Come away, O human child… .”
Phyllis, thinking him a child himself, might have surrendered to the giddiest request. But Dan made none. Instead, he went home to his lodgings, leaving her to gorge her needs on the last of the sandwiches.
He came back, though, for her house was near the poet’s, and after drudging with his galleys would drop by to cup hands, sculpt air, praise her hips, and eat healthy amounts of whatever was for tea. Refreshed, he liked to intone poems about forest gods and fairy folk. “And if any gaze on our rushing band,” he chanted, “We come between him and the deed of his hand, We come between him and the hope of his heart.”
Why did he not come after what he implied was the hope of his own heart? Wondering made her think of him more than she might otherwise have done, and so did seeing him in the Singing Kettle, eating doughnuts with the poet’s wife. Peering through trickles in a steamy window, she thought she saw the word “love” on his lips. Or was it “dove”? His motto, “Let the doves settle!” meant “Take things as they come.”
Phyllis decided that some doves needed to be snared.
Soon she was pregnant, and when she went into the Hatch Street Nursing Home to give birth Dan brought her a reproduction of Piero della Francesca’s Madonna del Parto, with the pale slash where the Virgin, easing her gown off her round belly, shows underlinen more intimate than skin. His finger on Phyllis’s stomach sketched an identical white curve. He teased the nurses, relished the fertility all about, and was happy as a mouse in cheese.
It turned out that the poet’s wife was here, too, and for the same reason. Her room was on another floor, so Dan yoyoed up and down. Sometimes he brought gifts that had to be divided: fruit, for instance, from the poet, who still used Dan to run errands. Or books, review copies from the magazine. When a nurse let drop that the poet’s wife had the same Piero Madonna on her side table, Phyllis wrapped hers in a nappy and put it in the trash. If there had been a fireplace, she would have burned it, as she had been trained to do with unwanted religious objects.
Her baby received her husband’s first name, and the poet’s baby the poet’s. Dan – though neither couple asked him to be godfather – presented both infants with christening mugs. One had been his and the other his brother’s, and both were made of antique Dublin silver. Early Georgian. The official godfathers, fearing odious comparisons, returned their purchases to Weirs Jewellers and bought cutlery. Phyllis wondered if Dan’s brother knew what had happened to his mug. Though the war was now over, he was still overseas with the British Army.
“He’ll not be back,” Dan assured her, and revealed that the parsonage had been a dour and penurious place. Its congregation had dwindled since the R.C. natives took over the country in ’21, and attendance some Sundays amounted to less than six. Pride had throttled Dan’s widowed father, who did menial work behind the scenes and made his children collect firewood, polish silver, and dine on boiled offal.
“He wouldn’t want the mug,” said Dan. “Too many bad memories!” The brothers had left as soon as they could, and getting their sister pregnant had been a parting gift. “If we hadn’t, she’d still be Daddy’s slave.”
Some years went by, and Dan was a student still, of a type known to Dubliners as “chronic,” one of a ragged brigade who, recoiling from a jobless job market, harked back to the tribally condoned wandering scholars of long ago. This connection was often all that raised the chronics above tramps or paupers, and the lifeline was frail.
But out of the blue, opportunity came Dan’s way. The poet, who had to go into the hospital, asked him to bring out an issue of the magazine bearing on its masthead the words “Guest Editor: Daniel Lydon.” Here was challenge! Dan toyed excitedly with the notion of publishing his secret poetry, which he yearned, yet feared, to display. These urges warred in him until, having read and reread it, he saw that it had gone dead, leaking virtue like batteries kept too long in a drawer. Stewing, he fell behind with the magazine and had to ghostwrite several pieces to pad the thing out. As part of this process, he decided to publish photographs of A Changing Ireland. Hydrofoils, reapers-and-binders, ballpoint pens, and other such innovations were shown next to Neolithic barrows. The Knights of Columbanus in full fig appeared cheek by jowl with an electric band. Portraits of “the last Gaelic storyteller” and some “future Irishmen” rounded out the theme. The future Irishmen, three small boys with their heads arranged like the leaves of a shamrock, were recognizably Dan’s nephew and the recipients of his christening mugs – and what leaped to the eye was their resemblance to himself. The caption “Changelings” drove the scandal home.
The poet, convalescing in his hospital bed after an operation for a gentleman’s complaint, told his wife, in an insufficiently discreet hiss, that he had paid Dan to do his legwork, not to get his leg over. Reference was made to “cuckoo’s eggs,” and it was not long before echoes of this reached the ear of Mr. Connors, the proverbial quiet man whom it is dangerous to arouse. Connors, who had done a bit of hacking in his bachelor days, had a riding crop. Taking this to the student lodgings where Dan lived, he used it to tap smartly on the door.
When Dan opened this, Connors raised the crop. Dan yelled, and his neighbor, a fellow-Communist, who was on the varsity boxing team, came hurtling to the rescue. Assuming the row to be political and Connors a member of the Blue Shirts only reinforced his zeal. Shoving ensued; Connors fell downstairs; gawkers gathered, and the upshot was that an ambulance was called and the opinion bandied that the victim had broken his back. Some genuine Blue Shirts were meanwhile rustled up, men whose finest hours had been fighting for Franco, singing hymns to Cristo Re, and beating the sin out of Reds; they were spoiling for a scrap, and if it had not been for Dan’s friend spiriting him out the back they might have sent him to join Mr. Connors – who, as it would turn out, had not been injured, after all, and was fit as a fiddle in a couple of weeks.
Dan, however, had by then prudently boarded the ferry to Holyhead, taking with him, like a subsidiary passport, the issue of the magazine bearing his name as “guest editor.” It got him work with the BBC, which, in those days of live programming, needed men with a gift of the gab and was friendly to Celts. Louis MacNeice and Dylan Thomas were role models, liquid stimulants in high favor, and Dan was recruited straight off the boat.
So ran reports reaching Dublin. Pithy myths, these acquired an envious tinge as Dan’s success was magnified, along with the sums he was earning for doing what he had formerly done for free: talking, singing, and gargling verse. Others were soon dreaming of jobs in a London whose airwaves vapored with gold. Hadn’t Dubliners a known talent for transubstantiating eloquence into currency? And couldn’t every one of us talk at least as well as Dan Lydon?
Dec
lan Connors doubted it. Despite himself, he’d caught snatches of what nobody had the indecency to quote quite to his face: a saga featuring Dan as dispenser of sweet anointings to women. These, Connors understood, had needed preparation. Persuasion had been required, and Dan’s boldness at it had grown legendary, as an athlete’s prowess does with fans. The gossips relished Dan’s gall, the airy way he could woo without promise or commitment – arguing, say, that in a war’s wake more kids were needed and that his companion’s quickened pulse was nature urging her to increase the supply. Nature! What a let out! Any man who could sell a line like that in Holy Ireland could sell heaters in hell.
“He’s a one-man social service!” A wag raised his pint. “Offers himself up. ‘Partake ye of my body.’ He’d rather be consumed than consume!”
The wag drained his glass. His preferences ran the other way. So did those of the man next to him, whose tongue wrestled pinkly with ham frilling from a sandwich. All around, males guzzled: women, in this prosperous pub, were outnumbered ten to one. Connors, sipping his whiskey, thought, No wonder Lydon made out – we left him an open field!
He could no longer regret this, for after ten barren years of marriage, Phyllis had had three children in quick succession. It was as if something in her had been unlocked. He supposed there were jokes about this, too, but he didn’t care. His master passion had turned out to be paternal, and Declan Junior was the apple of his eye. The younger two were girls and, as Phyllis spoiled them, he had to make things up to the boy.
For a while after the scandal, the couple had felt shy with each other, but they had no thoughts of divorce. You couldn’t in Ireland, and it wasn’t what they wanted. They were fond of each other – and, besides, there was Declan, of whom it was said behind Mr. Connors’ shrugging back that he used his blood father’s charm to wind his nominal father around his little finger. A seducer ab ovo.