by Edna O'Brien
There was much speculation about the wedding. No one from the village had been invited, but then that was to be expected. Some said that it was to be in a Registry Office in Dublin, but others said that the bank clerk had assured the parish priest that he would be married in a Catholic church, and had guaranteed a huge sum of money in order to get his letter of freedom. It was even said that Miss Amy was going to take instruction so as to be converted, but that was only wishful thinking. People were stunned the day the bank clerk suddenly left. He left the bank at lunchtime, after a private talk with the manager. Miss Amy drove him to the little railway station ten miles away, and they kissed several times before he jumped onto the moving train. The story was that he had gone ahead to make the plans and that the Connor girls and their father would travel shortly after. But the postman, who was a Protestant, said that the major would not travel one inch to see his daughter marry a Papist.
We watched the house and gate carefully but we did not see Miss Amy emerge throughout the week. No one knows when she left, or what she wore, or in what frame of mind. All we knew was that suddenly Miss Lucy was out walking with the Stallion and Miss Amy was not to be seen.
“And where’s the bride-to-be tonight?” inquired Mrs. O’Shea, the hotel proprietor. Miss Lucy’s reply was clipped and haughty.
“My sister’s gone away, for a change,” she said.
The frozen voice made everyone pause, and Mrs. O’Shea gave some sort of untoward gasp that seemed to detect catastrophe.
“Is there anything else you would care to know, Mrs. O’Shea?” Miss Lucy asked, and then turned on her heel and left with the Stallion. Never again did they drink in the Greyhound Hotel but moved to a public house up the street, where several of the locals soon followed them.
The mystery of Miss Amy was sending people into frenzies of conjecture and curiosity. Everyone thought that everyone else knew something. The postman was asked but he would just nod his head and say, “Time will tell,” although it was plain to see that he was pleased with the outcome. The priest, when asked in confidence by my mother, said that the most Christian thing to do would be to go down on one’s knees and say a prayer for Miss Amy. The phrase “star-crossed lovers” was used by many of the women, and for a while it even was suggested that Miss Amy had gone berserk and was shut up in an asylum. At last the suspense was ended, as each wedding present was returned, with an obscure but polite note from Miss Lucy. My mother took ours back to the shop and got some dinner plates in exchange. The reason given was that there had been a clash of family interests. Miss Lucy came to the village scarcely at all. The major had got more ill and she was busy nursing him. A night nurse cycled up their avenue every evening at five to nine, and the house itself, without so much coming and going, began to look forlorn. In the summer evenings I used to walk up the road and gaze in at it, admiring the green jalousies, the bird table nailed to the tree, the tall important flowers and shrubs, which for want of tending had grown rampant. I used to wish that I could unlock the gate and go up and be admitted there and find the clue to Miss Amy’s whereabouts and her secret.
We did in fact visit the house the following winter, when the major died. It was much more simply furnished than I had imagined, and the loose linen covers on the armchairs were a bit frayed. I was studying the portraits of glum, puffy, grave ancestors when suddenly there was a hush and into the parlor came Miss Amy, wearing a fur coat, looking quite different. She looked older and her face was coarse.
“Miss Amy, Miss Amy,” several people said aloud, and flinching she turned to tell the driver to please leave her trunk on the landing upstairs. She had got much fatter and was wearing no engagement ring. When the people sympathized with her, her eyes became cloudy with tears, and then she ran out of the room and up the stairs to sit with the remains.
It did not take long for everyone to realize that Miss Amy had become a drinker. As the coffin was laid in the vault she tried to talk to her father, which everyone knew was irrational. She did not just drink at night in the bar, but drank in the daytime, and would take a miniature bottle out of her bag when she queued in the butcher’s shop to get chops and a sheep’s head for the dogs. She drank with my father when he was on a drinking bout. In fact, she drank with anyone that would sit with her, and had lost all her snootiness. She sometimes referred to her engagement as “my flutter.” Soon after, she was arrested in Limerick for drunken driving, but was not charged, because the superintendent had been a close friend of her father’s. Her driving became calamitous. People were afraid to let their children play in the street in case Miss Amy might run them over in her Peugeot car. No one had forgotten that her brother had killed himself driving, and even her sister began to confide to my mother, telling her worries in tense whispers, spelling the words that were the most incriminating.
“It must be a broken heart,” my mother said.
“Of course, with Dad gone, there is no one to raise any objections now to the wedding.”
“So why don’t they marry?” my mother asked, and in one fell swoop surrendered all her prejudices.
“Too late, too late,” Miss Lucy said, and then added that Miss Amy could not get the bank clerk out of her system, that she sat in the breakfast room staring at photographs they had taken the day of her engagement and was always looking for an excuse to use his name.
One night the new curate found Miss Amy drunk in a hedge under her bicycle. By then her driving license had been taken away for a year. He picked her up, brought her home in his car, and the next day called on her because he had found a brooch stuck to the fuchsia hedge where she came a cropper. Furthermore, he had put her bicycle in to be repaired. This gesture worked wonders. He was asked to stay to tea, and invited again the following Sunday. Due to his influence, or perhaps secretly due to his prayers, Miss Amy began to drink less. To everyone’s amazement the curate went there most Sunday nights and played bridge with the two girls and the Stallion. In no time Miss Amy was overcome with resolve and industry. The garden, which had been neglected, began to look bright and trim again, and she bought bulbs in the hardware shop, whereas formerly she used to send away to a nursery for them. Everyone remarked on how civil she had become. She and my mother exchanged recipes for apple jelly and lemon curd, and just before I went away to boarding school she gave me a present of a bound volume of Aesop’s Fables. The print was so small that I could not read it, but it was the present that mattered. She handed it to me in the field and then asked if I would like to accompany her to gather some flowers. We went to the swamp to get the yellow irises. It was a close day, the air was thick with midges, and they lay in hosts over the murky water. Holding a small bunch to her chest, she said that she was going to post them to somebody, somebody special.
“Won’t they wither?” I said, though what I really wanted to know was who they were meant for.
“Not if I pack them in damp moss,” she said, and it seemed that the thought of dispatching this little gift was bringing joy to her, though there was no telling who the recipient would be. She asked me if I’d fallen in love yet or had a “beau.” I said that I had liked an actor who had come with the traveling players and had in fact got his autograph.
“Dreams,” she said, “dreams,” and then, using the flowers as a bat, swatted some midges away. In September I went to boarding school and got involved with nuns and various girl friends, and in time the people in our parish, even the Connor girls, almost disappeared from my memory. I never dreamed of them anymore, and I had no ambitions to go cycling with them or to visit their house. Later when I went to university in Dublin I learned quite by chance that Miss Amy had worked in a beauty parlor in Stephens Green, had drunk heavily, and had joined a golf club. By then the stories of how she teetered on high heels, or wore unmatching stockings or smiled idiotically and took ages to say what she intended to say, had no interest for me.
Somewhat precipitately and unknown to my parents I had become engaged to a man who was not of our relig
ion. Defying threats of severing bonds, I married him and incurred the wrath of family and relatives, just as Miss Amy had done, except that I was not there to bear the brunt of it. Horrible letters, some signed and some anonymous, used to reach me, and my mother had penned an oath that we would never meet again this side of the grave. I did not see my family for a few years, until long after my son was born, and having some change of heart they proposed by letter that my husband, my son, and I pay them a visit. We drove down one blowy autumn afternoon and I read stories aloud as much to distract myself as to pacify my son. I was quaking. The sky was watery and there were pale-green patches like holes or voids in it. I shall never forget the sense of awkwardness, sadness, and dismay when I stepped out of my husband’s car and saw the large gaunt cut-stone house with thistles in the front garden. The thistle seed was blowing wildly, as were the leaves, and even those that had already fallen were rising and scattering about. I introduced my husband to my parents and very proudly I asked my little son to shake hands with his grandfather and his grandmother. They admired his gold hair, but he ignored them and ran to cuddle the two sheepdogs. He was going to be the one that would make our visit bearable.
In the best room my mother had laid the table for tea, and we sat and spoke to one another in thin, strained, unforgiving voices. The tea was too strong for my husband, who usually drank China tea anyhow, and instantly my mother jumped to get some hot water. I followed her out to apologize for the inconvenience.
“The house looks lovely and clean,” I said.
She had polished everywhere and she had even dusted the artificial flowers, which I remembered as being clogged with dust.
“You’ll stay a month,” she said in a warm commandeering voice, and she put her arms around me in an embrace.
“We’ll see,” I said prudently, knowing my husband’s restlessness.
“You have a lot of friends to see,” she said.
“Not really,” I said, with a coldness that I could not conceal.
“Do you know who is going to ask you to tea—the Connor girls.” Her voice was urgent and grateful. It meant a victory for her, for me, and an acknowledgment of my husband’s non-religion. In her eyes Protestants and atheists were one and the same thing.
“How are they?” I asked.
“They’ve got very sensible, and aren’t half as stuck up,” she said, and then ran, as my father was calling for her to cut the iced cake. Next afternoon there was a gymkhana over in the village and my parents insisted that we go.
“I don’t want to go to this thing,” my husband said to me. He had intended to do some trout fishing in one of the many mountain rivers, and to pass his few days, as he said, without being assailed by barbarians.
“Just for this once,” I begged, and I knew that he had consented because he put on his tie, but there was no affability in him. After lunch my father, my husband, my little son, and I set out. My mother did not come, as she had to guard her small chickens. She had told us in the most graphic detail of her immense sorrow one morning upon finding sixty week-old chicks laid out on the flagstone dead, with their necks wrung by weasels.
In the field where the gymkhana was held there were a few caravans, strains of accordion music, a gaudy sign announcing a Welsh clairvoyant, wild restless horses, and groups of self-conscious people in drab clothes, shivering as they waited for the events to begin. It was still windy and the horses looked unmanageable. They were being held in some sort of order by youngsters who had little power over them. I saw people stare in my direction and a few of them gave reluctant half smiles. I felt uneasy and awkward and superior all at once.
“There’s the Connor girls,” my father said. They were perched on their walking sticks, which opened up to serve as little seats.
“Come on, come on,” he said excitedly, and as we approached them, they hailed me and said my name. They were older but still healthy and handsome, and Miss Amy showed no signs of her past despair. They shook my hand, shook my husband’s hand, and were quick to flirt with him, to show him what spirited girls they were.
“And what do you think of this young man?” my father said proudly as he presented his grandson.
“What a sweet little chap,” they said together, and I saw my husband wince. Then from the pocket of her fawn coat Miss Amy took two unwrapped jelly sweets and handed them to the little boy. He was on the point of eating them when my husband bent down until their faces were level and said very calmly, “But you don’t eat sweets, now give them back.” The little boy pouted, then blushed, and held out the palm of his hand, on which rested these absurd two jellies that were dusted over with granular sugar. My father protested, the Connor girls let out exclamations of horror, and I said to my husband, “Let him have them, it’s a day out.” He gave me a menacing look, and very firmly he repeated to the little boy what he had already said. The sweets were handed back, and with scorn in her eyes Miss Amy looked at my husband and said, “Hasn’t the mummy got any say over her own child?”
There was a moment’s strain, a moment’s silence, and then my father produced a pack of cigarettes and gave them one each. Since we didn’t smoke we were totally out of things.
“No vices,” Miss Lucy said, and my husband ignored her.
He suggested to me that we take the child across to where a man had a performing monkey clinging to a stick. He raised his cap slightly to say his farewell and I smiled as best I could. My father stayed behind with the Connor girls.
“They were going to ask us to tea,” I said to my husband as we walked downhill. I could hear the suction of his galoshes in the soggy ground.
“Don’t think we missed much,” he said, and at that moment I realized that by choosing his world I had said goodbye to my own and to those in it. By such choices we gradually become exiles, until at last we are quite alone.
My Mother’s Mother
I loved my mother, yet I was glad when the time came to go to her mother’s house each summer. It was a little house in the mountains and it commanded a fine view of the valley and the great lake below. From the front door, glimpsed through a pair of very old binoculars, one could see the entire Shannon Lake studded with various islands. On a summer’s day this was a thrill. I would be put standing on a kitchen chair, while someone held the binoculars, and sometimes I marveled though I could not see at all, as the lenses had not been focused properly. The sunshine made everything better, and though we were not down by the lake, we imagined dipping our feet in it, or seeing people in boats fishing and then stopping to have a picnic. We imagined lake water lapping.
I felt safer in that house. It was different from our house, not so imposing, a cottage really, with no indoor water and no water closet. We went for buckets of water to the well, a different well each summer. These were a source of miracle to me, these deep cold wells, sunk into the ground, in a kitchen garden, or a paddock, or even a long distance away, wells that had been divined since I was last there. There was always a tin scoop nearby so that one could fill the bucket to the very brim. Then of course the full bucket was an occasion of trepidation, because one was supposed not to spill. One often brought the bucket to the very threshold of the kitchen and then out of excitement or clumsiness some water would get splashed onto the concrete floor and there would be admonishments, but it was not like the admonishments in our own house, it was not calamitous.
My grandfather was old and thin and hoary when I first saw him. His skin was the color of a clay pipe. After the market day he would come home in the pony and trap drunk, and then as soon as he stepped out of the trap he would stagger and fall into a drain or whatever. Then he would roar for help, and his grandson, who was in his twenties, would pick him up, or rather, drag him along the ground and through the house and up the stairs to his feather bed, where he moaned and groaned. The bedroom was above the kitchen, and in the night we would be below, around the fire, eating warm soda bread and drinking cocoa. There was nothing like it. The fresh bread would only be an
hour out of the pot and cut in thick pieces and dolloped with butter and greengage jam. The greengage jam was a present from the postmistress, who gave it in return for the grazing of a bullock. She gave marmalade at a different time of year and a barmbrack at Halloween. He moaned upstairs, but no one was frightened of him, not even his own wife, who chewed and chewed and said, “Bad cess to them that give him the drink.” She meant the publicans. She was a minute woman with a minute face and her thin hair was pinned up tightly. Her little face, though old, was like a bud, and when she was young she had been beautiful. There was a photo of her to prove it.
Sitting with them at night I thought that maybe I would not go home at all. Maybe I would never again lie in bed next to my mother, the two of us shivering with expectancy and with terror. Maybe I would forsake my mother.
“Maybe you’ll stay here,” my aunt said, as if she had guessed my thoughts.
“I couldn’t do that,” I said, not knowing why I declined, because indeed the place had definite advantages. I stayed up as late as they did. I ate soda bread and jam to my heart’s content, I rambled around the fields all day, admiring sally trees, elder bushes, and the fluttering flowers, I played “shop” or I played teaching in the little dark plantation, and no one interfered or told me to stop doing it. The plantation was where I played secrets, and always I knew the grownups were within shouting distance, if a stranger or a tinker should surprise me there. It was pitch dark and full of young fir trees. The ground was a carpet of bronzed fallen fir needles. I used to kneel on them for punishment, after the playing.