by Edna O'Brien
A
Fanatic
Heart
SELECTED STORIES OF
Edna O’Brien
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Table of Contents
About the Author
Copyright Page
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Foreword
You see a country and a culture impressing itself deeply on this writer. The country is Ireland, and from the evidence available, she is more succubus than mother. The need to escape is visceral. There is a sense of protest in these stories, but it is often concealed or channeled into pain, perhaps because the author is a woman. The aggression takes the form of an arresting and unfaltering scream. When the background is rural—even barbaric—there is a rawness and earthiness in Edna O’Brien that some critics have compared with Colette. But she is not like Colette, because the stories are darker and full of conflict. In an essay about James Joyce, Frank Tuohy says that while Joyce, in Dubliners and Portrait of the Artist, was the first Irish Catholic to make his experience and surroundings recognizable, “the world of Nora Barnacle had to wait for the fiction of Edna O’Brien.”
The stories set in the heartland of Ireland almost always depict women—with men, without men, on the make, on the loose, cracking up, women holding to reality by the skin of their teeth. Many are love stories, among them eerily intimate stories relating to sexual love, and these are what people chiefly associate with Edna O’Brien. But her range is wider than that and there is an acute, sometimes searing, social awareness. The worlds depicted are not just those of small farms full of lovelorn women and inebriate men, but also the larger world of cities, of resorts, of estrangement, the world of the very rich and careless. In a long story, a novella really, “Mrs. Reinhardt,” there is an idyllic recapture of the countryside of Brittany that ends in disenchantment and havoc; in another story, “Paradise,” the narrator says of the fashionable house guests, “All platinum … They have a canny sense of self-preservation; they know how much to eat, how much to drink … you would think they invented somebody like Shakespeare, so proprietary are they … You could easily get filleted. Friends do it to friands.”
The sensibility is on two levels and shuttles back and forth, combining the innocence of childhood with the scars of maturity. It is what gives these stories their wounded vigor. The words themselves are chiseled. The welter of emotion is rendered so sparsely that the effect is merciless, like an autopsy.
—Philip Roth
Out of Ireland have we come.
Great hatred, little room,
Maimed us at the start.
I carry from my mother’s womb
A fanatic heart.
—W. B. Yeats, “Remorse for Intemperate Speech”
Returning
1981
The Connor Girls
To know them would be to enter an exalted world. To open the stiff green iron gate, to go up their shaded avenue, and to knock on their white hall door was a journey I yearned to make. No one went there except the gardener, the postman, and a cleaning woman who told none of their secrets, merely boasted that the oil paintings on the walls were priceless and the furniture was all antique. They had a flower garden with fountains, a water-lily pond, a kitchen garden, and ornamental trees that they called monkey-puzzle trees. Mr. Connor, the major, and his two daughters lived there. His only son had been killed in a car accident. It was said that the accident was due to his father’s bullying of him, always urging him to drive faster since he had the most expensive car in the neighborhood. Not even their tragedy brought them closer to the people in the town, partly because they were aloof, but being Protestants, the Catholics could not attend the service in the church or go to the Protestant graveyard, where they had a vault with steps leading down to it, just like a house. It was smothered in creeper. They never went into mourning and had a party about a month later to which their friends came.
The major had friends who owned a stud farm, and these were invited two or three times a year, along with a surgeon and his wife, from Dublin. The Connor girls were not beauties but they were distinguished, and they talked in an accent that made everyone else’s seem flat and sprawling, like some familiar estuary or a puddle in a field. They were dark-haired, with dark eyes and leathery skin. Miss Amy wore her hair in plaits, which she folded over the crown of her head, and Miss Lucy’s hair, being more bushy, was kept flattened with brown slides. If they as much as nodded to a local or stopped to admire a new baby in its pram, the news spread throughout the parish and those who had never had a salute felt such a pang of envy, felt left out. We ourselves had been saluted and it was certain that we would become on better terms since they were under a sort of obligation to us. My father had given them permission to walk their dogs over our fields, so that most afternoons we saw the two girls in their white mackintoshes and biscuit-colored walking sticks drawing these fawn unwieldy beasts on leashes. Once they had passed our house they used to let their dogs go, whereupon our own sheepdogs barked fiercely but kept inside our own paling, being, as I think, terrified of the thoroughbreds, who were beagles. Though they had been passing by for almost a year, they never stopped to talk to my mother if they met her returning from the hen house with an empty pail, or going there with the foodstuff. They merely saluted and passed on. They talked to my father, of course, and called him Mick, although his real name was Joseph, and they joked with him about his hunters, which had never won cup or medal. They ignored my mother and she resented this. She longed to bring them in so that they could admire our house with all its knickknacks, and admire the thick wool rugs which she made in the winter nights and which she folded up when no visitors were expected.
“I’ll ask them to tea this coming Friday,” she said to me. We planned to ask them impromptu, thinking that if we asked them ahead of time they were more likely to refuse. So we made cakes and sausage rolls and sandwiches of egg mayonnaise, some with onion, some without. The milk jelly we had made was whisked and seemed like a bowl of froth with a sweet confectionery smell. I was put on watch by the kitchen window, and as soon as I saw them coming in at the gate I called to Mama.
“They’re coming, they’re coming.”
She swept her hair back, pinned it with her brown tortoiseshell comb, and went out and leaned on the top rung of the gate as if she were posing for a photograph, or looking at a view. I heard her say, “Excuse me, Miss Connor, or rather, Miss Connors,” in that exaggerated accent which she had picked up in America, and which she used when strangers came, or when she went to the city. It was like putting on new clothes or new shoes which did not fit her. I saw them shake their heads a couple of times, and long before she had come back into the house I knew that the Connor girls had refused our invitation and that the table which we had laid with such ceremony was a taunt and downright mockery.
Mama came back humming to herself as if to pretend that it hadn’t mattered a jot. The Connor girls had walked on, and their dogs, which were off the leashes, were chasing our young turkeys into the woods.
“What will we do with this spread?” I
asked Mama as she put on her overall.
“Give it to the men, I expect,” she said wearily.
You may know how downcast she was when she was prepared to give iced cake and dainty sandwiches to workmen who were plowing and whose appetites were ferocious.
“They didn’t come,” I said stupidly, being curious to know how the Connor girls had worded their refusal.
“They never eat between meals,” Mama said, quoting their exact phrase in an injured, sarcastic voice.
“Maybe they’ll come later on,” I said.
“They’re as odd as two left shoes,” she said, tearing a frayed tea towel in half. When in a temper, she resorted to doing something about the house. Either she took the curtains down, or got on her knees to scrub the floors and the legs and rungs of the wooden chairs.
“They see no one except that madman,” she said, mainly to herself.
The Connor girls kept very much to themselves and did most of their shopping in the city. They attended church on Sundays, four Protestant souls comprising the congregation in a stone church that was the oldest in our parish. Moss covered the stones, and various plants grew between the cracks, so that in the distance the side wall of the church was green from both verdure and centuries of rain. Their father did not attend each Sunday, but once a month the girls wheeled him down to the family vault, where his wife and son were intened. Local people who longed to be friends with them would rush out and offer their sympathy, as if the major were the only one to have suffered bereavement. Always he remained brusque and asked his daughters the name of the man or woman who happened to be talking to him. He was known to be crotchety, but this was because of his rheumatism, which he had contracted years before. He could not be persuaded to go to any of the holy wells where other people went, to pray and seek a cure for their ailments. He was a large man with a very red face and he always wore gray mittens. The rector visited him twice a month and in the dapping season sent up two fresh trout on the mail car. Soon after, the Connor girls invited the rector for dinner and some of the toffs who had come for the dapping.
Otherwise they entertained rarely, except for the madman, who visited them every Sunday. He was a retired captain from the next town and he had a brown mustache with a red tint in it and very large bloodshot eyes. People said that he slept with the Connor girls and hence he had been given the nickname of Stallion. It was him my mother referred to as the madman. On Sundays he drove over in his sports car, in time for afternoon tea, which in summertime they had outdoors on an iron table. We children used to go over there to look at them through the trees, and though we could not clearly see them, we could hear their voices, hear the girls’ laughter and then the tap of a croquet mallet when they played a game. Their house was approached from the road by a winding avenue that was dense with evergreen trees. Those trees were hundreds of years old, but also there were younger trees that the major had planted for the important occasions in his life—the Coronation, the birth of his children, England’s victory in the last war. For his daughters he had planted quinces. What were quinces, we wondered, and never found out. Nailed to the blue cedar, near the gate, was a sign which said BEWARE OF DOGS, and the white pebble-dashed walls that surrounded their acres of garden were topped with broken glass so that children could not climb over and steal from the orchard.
Everyone vetted them when they came out of their stronghold on Sunday evening. Their escort, the Stallion, walked the girls to the Greyhound Hotel. Miss Amy, who was younger, wore brighter clothes, but they both wore tweed costumes and flat shoes with ornamental tongues that came over the insteps and hid the laces. Miss Amy favored red or maroon, while Miss Lucy wore dark brown with a matching dark-brown beret. In the hotel they had the exclusive use of the sitting room, and sometimes when they were a little intoxicated Miss Lucy played the piano while her sister and the Stallion sang. It was a saucy song, a duet in which the man asked the pretty maid where she was going to, and eventually asked for her hand in marriage. Refusing him, she said, “I will not marry, marry, marry you,” and then stamped her feet to emphasize it, whereupon the men in the bar would start laughing and saying Miss Amy was “bucking.” There was much speculation about their lives, because the Stallion always spent Sunday night in their house. Hickey, our hired help, said they were all so drunk that they probably tumbled into bed together. Walking home on the frosty nights, Hickey said it was a question of the blind leading the blind, as they slithered all over the road and, according to Hickey, used language that was not ladylike. He would report these things in the morning to my mother, and since they had rebuffed her, she was pleased, and emphasized the fact that they had no breeding. Naturally she thought the very worst of the Stallion and could never bring herself to pronounce his Christian name. To her he was “that madman.”
The Stallion was their sole escort until fate sent another man in the form of a temporary bank clerk. We reckoned that he was a Protestant because he didn’t go to Mass on the first Sunday. He was most dashing. He had brown hair, he too had a mustache, but it was fuller than the Stallion’s and was a soft dark brown. Mostly he wore a tweed jacket and matching plus-fours. Also he had a motorcycle, and when he rode it, he wore goggles. Within two weeks he was walking Miss Amy out and escorting her to the Greyhound Hotel. She began to pay more attention to her clothes, she got two new accordion-pleated skirts and some tight-fitting jumpers that made her bust more pronounced. They were called Sloppy Joes, but although they were long and sloppy, they were also sleek, and they flattered the figure. Formerly her hair was wound in a staid plait around her head, but now it was allowed to tumble down in thick coils over her shoulders, and she toned down the color in her cheeks with pale powder. No one ever said she was pretty, but certainly she looked handsome when she cycled to the village to collect the morning paper, and hummed to herself as she went freewheel down the hill that led to the town.
The bank clerk and she were in love. Hickey saw them embrace in the porch of the Greyhound Hotel when Miss Lucy had gone back in to get a pack of cigarettes. Later they kissed shamelessly when walking along the towpath, and people said that Miss Amy used to nibble the hairs of his luxurious mustache. One night she took off her sandal in the Greyhound Hotel and put her bare foot into the pocket of his sports jacket, and the two of them giggled at her proceedings. Her sister and the Stallion often tagged along, but Miss Amy and the bank clerk would set off on his motorcycle, down the Shannon Road, for fun. It was said that they swam naked, but no one could verify that, and it was possible that they just paddled their feet.
As it happened, someone brought mischievous news about the bank clerk. A commercial traveler who was familiar with other parts told it on good authority that the bank clerk was a lapsed Catholic and had previously disgraced himself in a seaside town. People were left to guess the nature of the mistake, and most concluded that it concerned a girl or a woman. Instantly the parish turned against him. The next evening when he came out from the bank he found that both wheels of his bicycle had been ripped and punctured, and on the saddle there was an anonymous letter which read “Go to Mass or we’ll kill you.” His persecutors won. He attended the last Mass the following Sunday, and knelt in the back pew with no beads and no prayer book, with only his fingers to pray on.
However, it did not blight the romance. Those who had predicted that Miss Amy would ditch him because he was a Catholic were proven wrong. Most evenings they went down the Shannon Road, a couple full of glee, her hair and her headscarf flying, and chuckles of laughter from both of them as they frightened a dog or hens that strayed onto the roadside. Much later he saw her home, and the lights were on in their front parlor until all hours. A local person (the undertaker actually) thought of fitting up a telescope to try to see into the parlor, but as soon as he went inside their front gate to reconnoiter, the dogs came rearing down the avenue and he ran for his life.
“Can it be serious, I wonder.” So at last my mother admitted to knowing about the romance. She could
not abide it, she said that Catholics and Protestants just could not mix. She recalled a grievance held for many years from a time in her girlhood when she and all the others from the national school were invited to the big house to a garden party, and were made to make fools of themselves by doing running jumps and sack races and were then given watery lemonade in which wasps floated. Her mind was firmly made up about the incompatibility of Catholics and Protestants. That very night Miss Amy sported an engagement ring in the Greyhound Hotel and the following morning the engagement was announced in the paper. The ring was star-shaped and comprised of tiny blue stones that sparkled and trembled under the beam of the hanging lamp. People gasped when told that it was insured for a hundred pounds.
“Do we have to give Miss Amy some sort of present?” my mother said grudgingly that evening. She had not forgotten how they snubbed her and how they barely thanked her for the fillets of pork that she gave them every time we killed a pig.
“Indeed we do, and a good present,” my father said, so they went to Limerick some time after and got a carving knife and fork that were packed in a velvet-lined box. We presented it to Miss Amy the next time she was walking her dogs past our house.
“It is kind of you, thanks awfully,” she said, as she smiled at each one of us, and told my father coyly that as she was soon to be hitched up, they ought to have that night out. She was not serious, of course, yet we all laughed and my mother did a tch tch in mock disapproval. Miss Amy looked ravishing that day. Her skin was soft and her brown eyes had caught the reflection of her orange neck scarf and gave her a warm theatrical glow. Also she was amiable. It was a damp day, with shreds of mist on the mountains, and the trees dripped quietly as we spoke. Miss Amy held out the palms of her hands to take the drips from the walnut tree and announced to the heavens what a “lucky gal” she was. My mother inquired about her trousseau and was told that she had four pairs of court shoes, two camel-hair coats, a saxe-blue going-away suit, and a bridal dress in voile that was a cross between peach and champagne color. I loved her then, and wanted to know her and wished with all my heart that I could have gone across the fields with her and become her confidante, but I was ten and she was thirty or thirty-five.