by Edna O'Brien
After Christmas there was a ghastly rumor and it was that Mabel was having a baby. It resounded throughout the parish. It was at first hotly denied by Mabel’s mother, who was told it in the strictest confidence by my mother. Mabel had grown a bit stout, her mother conceded, but that was because she ate too much griddle bread. The denial and the excuse pacified people, but not for long. Within a month Mabel had swelled, and one day a few of the women set a terrible trap for her. Polly, the ex-midwife and her nearest neighbor, who had fainted upon hearing of Mabel’s downfall, enlisted Rita, a young girl, to help in their ruse.
The plan was that they would invite Mabel to tea, flatter her by telling her how thin she looked, and then, having put her off guard, Rita was to steal up on her from behind and put a measuring tape around her waist. It turned out that Mabel was gross, and by nightfall the conclusion was that Mabel was indeed having a baby. After that she was shunned at Mass, shunned on her way down from Mass, and avoided when she went into the shops. People were weird in the punishments they thought should be meted out to her. Throughout all this Mabel did nothing but grin and smile and say what marvelous weather it was. If people were too snooty, she went up to them and said, “Go on, tell me what you’re thinking of me.” She would dare them to give an opinion. My mother said that it would be a mercy if someone were to take a stick to Mabel, and her mother said that when Mabel’s father got to hear of it, he would kick her arse through the town. Mabel had few friends—the lady publican, the postman, who himself had once got a girl into trouble, and the dummies, who mauled her as she came out of Mass, not knowing that she was to be ostracized. She went to the town at all hours and cadged cigarettes off the men once they were drunk.
“Whose is it, Mabel?” she was asked by one of these drunkards.
“Your guess is as good as mine,” she said, manifesting no shame at all. She did not go to see Matt and she did not even mention him. He kept to himself and was not seen at Mass. Strange that a posse of men led by her father did not go either. It may have been because Matt was superior, having been to Canada, and also, he kept a shotgun and might fire as they came through the yard. The priest promised her mother that he would go when the weather got finer, but he kept putting it off and instead made a most lurid sermon about impurity. The women in the congregation coughed, blushed, and were deeply affected by it. All Mabel did was smirk and cross her legs, which was a disrespectful thing to do in a holy place. It was decided that she was losing her reason, hence her outrageous behavior. She alternated between being very talkative and being gloomy. She sat in the hen house for hours, smoking and brooding. Getting cigarettes was at that time one of her biggest problems, because she had extended her credit in all the shops. She asked me if ever I got a shilling or found money to get her a packet of fags. Then she made me listen at the wall of her stomach and said wasn’t it full of mischief.
My parents were enlisted to help. A stranger was to come to our house and I was not sure what he was to do for Mabel, but he was crucial. A man in a long brown leather coat and matching gauntlet gloves arrived in his motor just before dark. He was shown into the front room, where my parents and Mabel’s mother spoke to him. Mabel was with me in the kitchen, where she did nothing but make faces. She had discovered the satisfaction of making faces. She scrunched up her nose, stuck out her tongue, and rolled her eyes in all directions.
“I can paddle my own canoe,” she said as she paced back and forth. Watching her I kept imagining the most terrible metamorphosis going on inside her and tried to calculate how old the thing was. She asked if the people up the street ever spoke about her and I lied by saying no. She said a lot of people had a lot of bees in their bonnet, yet when they reproached her she quailed. She went in with bowed head and bowed back. Presently my mother came out and said to lay a tray quickly. She was surprisingly cheerful, as if he had promised to perform a miracle. She bustled about the kitchen and said what a mercy it was that we did not have such a cross to bear. Then she asked me to put a doily on the cake plate and to make sure that the cake knife had no mold or rust.
To this day I do not know whether the stranger was a faith healer or a quack, or perhaps a bachelor in search of a wife. At any rate, after he left, spirits sagged. There was another consortium and it was decided that they would tell Mabel’s father that night. His shock upon hearing it was such that he could be heard roaring half a mile away, and it seems it took three people to hold him down as he threatened to go to Mabel’s room in order to kill her. Gradually he was mollified with hot whiskey and the assurance that the event had happened in the most untoward and unfortunate way, in short, that Mabel had been molested by a stranger. Thus, rage was transferred to a brute who had come and gone, and now Mabel was told to come down and eat her supper. It seems she sat hunched over the fire sniveling and fiddling with the tongs while her father ranted. He had somehow got it into his head that it was a tinker who had done the deed, and he cursed every member of that fraternity, both male and female. He was made to swear that he would not strike her, and when my parents left, the family was as happy as might be expected under such woeful circumstances.
The next day Mabel’s mother went to the town to buy wool, and in her spare time she began to knit vests, matinee coats, and little boots. But it could not be said that she and Mabel became reconciled. Her mother would sit out in the yard scraping the ground with a stone or a stick, making V’s and circles, and asking her Maker to take pity on her. Not a word passed between the two women, only growls. When the mother came into the kitchen Mabel went out to the hen house. No one knew where the birth would take place and no one knew when. No arrangements were made. Mabel got highly strung when asked and burst into tears and said that no one in the whole wide world loved or understood her. She was a sight, in a brown tweed coat and a knitted cap. Being large did not become her, and in contrast her face looked minute. She went to the chapel every afternoon as if to atone, and as it got nearer her time, people were less vicious about her.
It was a summer’s day and the men were in the hayfield when Mabel’s labor commenced. The Angelus had just struck. When her mother heard the first howl, she ran with the tongs still in her hand onto the road for help. She hailed a passing cyclist and told him to get the doctor quick. The doctor, who was a locum, was bound to be in the dispensary at that hour. I was nearby playing shop with two of my friends and we were sent to fetch my mother. Soon pots of water were boiled, Mabel was crying and begging for ether. My friends and I were both drawn to the house and repelled by it. At every sound Mabel’s mother asked was it coming, yet she avoided going into the room. She merely called in through the open door. Mabel was becoming delirious as the pains got worse, but mercifully we saw the doctor arrive. He was brusque, asked what the trouble was, and said, “Tch … tch … tch,” when told.
“Why haven’t I seen her sooner?” he said, and then frowned as if he decided that everyone in the neighborhood was wanting. Mabel was howling as he entered, but soon after, a calm descended, and we remained in the kitchen, full of suspense and muttering a prayer. It was not long until he came out.
“You can put that stuff away,” he said, referring to the swaddling clothes and the aluminum bath that was filled with water. Mabel’s mother concluded that the infant was dead and said, “Lord have mercy on its soul.”
“There is no it,” he said. “She’s no more pregnant than I am.”
My mother and Mabel’s mother were aghast. It was as if some terrible trick had been played on them. Naturally they were incredulous.
“There’s nothing there, I’ve examined her.”
“But, Doctor, is that possible?” my mother asked accusingly.
“It’s all hogwash,” he said. He did not know the circumstances and nobody bothered to tell him. He simply said that it was a pity he had not been consulted sooner and then announced that his fee would be two pounds and he’d like it there and then. From the room the crying had stopped and no one took the slightest trouble to go
in. No one went near her. It was as if she had taken on the marks of a leper. Her mother glared in that direction and said that her only daughter had brought them nothing but disaster. To have to tell this to the parish was the last straw. The waves in her white hair bristled, and she reminded me of nothing so much as a weasel, poised to spit. Her withheld temper was worse than all her husband’s exclaiming.
“Let her break it to him herself,” she said, pointing a fist toward the closed door. If one can curse in silence, she did it then, so resolute and so full of hatred was her expression. By way of consolation my mother said that surely Mabel could not be right in the head. Her words were hardly a solace.
From the room now there was a low keen. No doubt Mabel was still lying down, bunched up as she had been in labor and perhaps waiting for a kind word. No one ventured in. Her mother emptied the tea leaves into the front garden and with a swish told my two friends, who had been waiting outside, to vamoose. Back in the kitchen she began to list Mabel’s faults and lament the money she had cost them since she came home. Money on tonics, money on style, money on faddish food when she got those cravings at night.
“Tinned salmon, no less,” she said sourly, and told my mother that her pension each week had gone toward Mabel’s fancies. Then for no reason she recalled a large beautiful hand-painted urn that Mabel had broken when young. It seems that from the confines of her pram Mabel had reached up to embrace it and toppled it instead. This announcement seemed to confirm that Mabel was, from birth, a rotten egg. Mabel’s attraction to the opposite sex had been in the nature of a disease.
It would be funny to see her thin, having just seen her that morning large and cumbersome. The rush crib was still on the kitchen table and the sight of it an affront. I wanted to bring her a slice of cake, or tea in her favorite china cup, but I was afraid to disobey them. I felt that this now would be as much a quality of mine as my eyes or my hair, this paralysis in my character, this wanting to step in but not daring to, this dreadful hesitancy. I would, I wouldn’t. Thus I wrestled, but the weight and depth of their opprobrium won and I did not go in, nor did they, and the whimpering went on, the chant of a hopeless creature.
We did not lay eyes on Mabel again. Just as the shame of pregnancy had made her brazen and untoward, so now the shame of non-pregnancy had made her withdrawn. She refused to see anyone and barely broke her fast. One evening, after dark, she left as she had once arrived, in a hackney car, and from that moment her memory was banished. The only reminder was that next day on the clothesline were her blankets, her patchwork quilt, and some baby clothes. Her parents had a Mass said in the house, and in time it was as if she bad never come home, as if she were still in Australia.
Some said that she was in Dublin working for nuns, others said that she worked in a nursing home, and still others that she was a charwoman. These were just stories. No one ever knew the truth, but it is certain that Mabel withered and finally died without ever having been reinstated with family or friends, and that she is buried in some strange and unmarked place.
Courtship
A favorite school poem was “The Mother” by Patrick Pearce. It was a wrenching poem condoling the plight of a mother who had seen her two strong sons go out and die, “in bloody protest for a glorious thing.” Mrs. Flynn had also known tragedy, her husband having died from pleurisy and her youngest son, Frank, having drowned while away on holiday. For a time she wept and gnashed, her fate being similar to the poor distraught mother’s in the poem. I did not know her then but there were stories of how she balked at hearing the tragic news. When the guards came to tell her that Frank was drowned, she simply pressed her hands to her ears and ran out of the house, into the garden, saying to leave her alone, to stop pestering people. When at last they made her listen, her screaming was such that the curate heard it two miles away. Her son was eighteen and very brainy.
By the time I met her she seemed calm and reconciled, a busy woman who owned a shop and a mill and who had three other sons, all of whom were over six feet and who seemed gigantic beside her, because she was a diminutive woman with gray permed hair. Her pride in them was obvious and transmitted itself to all who knew her. It was not anything she said, it was just the way she would look up at them as if they were a breed of gods, and sometimes she would take a clothes brush and brush one of their lapels, just to confirm that closeness. They all had dark eyes and thick curly hair, and there was not a girl in the parish who did not dream of being courted by one of them. Of the three, Michael was the most sought after. It was his lovely manner, as the women said; even the old women melted when they described how he put them at their ease when they went to sell eggs or buy groceries. He was a famous hurley player, and the wizard way that he scored a goal was renowned and immortalized in verses that the men carried in their pockets. If his team was ever in danger of losing and he had been put out for a foul—as he often was—the crowd would clamor for him and the referee had no choice but to let him back. His specialty was to score a goal in the very last minute of the game, when the opposing team thought themselves certain of victory; and this goal and the eerie way in which it was scored would be a talking point for weeks. Then after the match the fans would carry him on their shoulders, and the crowd would mill around, trying to touch his feet or his hands, just as in the Gospels the crowd milled about trying to touch Our Lord. That night in a dance hall, girls would vie to dance with him. He had a steady girl called Moira, but when he traveled to hurling matches he met other girls at dances, and for weeks some new girl, some Ellen, or some Dolly, or some Kate, would plague him with love letters. I learned this from Peggy, their maid, when I went there on my first ever holiday. I had yearned to go for many years and at last the chance came, because my sister, who used to go, had set her sights on the city and went instead to cousins in Limerick who had a sweet shop that adjoined a chip shop. As in many other things I had taken her place; I was her substitute, and the realization of this was not without its undercurrent of jealousy and pique.
On my first day in their house I felt very gawky, and kept avoiding the brothers and crying in the passage. I wanted to go home but was too ashamed to mention it. It was Michael who rescued me.
“Will you do me a favor?” he said.
The favor was very simple—it was to make him apple fritters. If there was anything in the world he craved, it was apple fritters. I was to make them surreptitiously, when his mother was not looking.
“Can’t,” I said.
His mother and Peggy were constantly about and the thought of defying them quite impossible.
“Suppose they went off for a day, would you make them then?”
“Of course.”
That “of course,” so quick, so yielding, already making it clear that I was eager to serve him.
In a matter of days I had settled in and thought no place on earth so thrilling and so bustling as their house and their shop. They stocked everything—groceries, animal feed, serge for suits, winceyette, cotton, paraffin, cakes, confectionery, boots, Wellingtons, and cableknit sweaters that were made by spinsters and lonely women up in the mountains. They even sold underwear for ladies and gents, and these were the subject of much innuendo and mirth. The ladies’ corsets were of pink broderie Anglaise, and sometimes one of the brothers would take one out of its cellophane and put it on over his trousers, as a joke. Of course, that was when the shop was empty and his mother had gone to confession, or to see a sick neighbor. They respected their mother and in her presence never resorted to shady language.
What I liked about staying there was the jokes, the levity, and the constant activity—cakes being delivered, meal being weighed, eggs being brought in and having to be counted as well as washed, orders having to be got ready, and at any moment a compliment or a pinch in the arm from one of the brothers. It was all so exhilarating. At night more diversion, when the men convened in the back bar, drank porter, and talked in monosyllables until they got drunk, and then ranted and raved and got obstre
perous when it came to politics. If they were too unruly Michael would roll up his sleeves, take off his wristwatch, and tell them that unless they “cut out the bull” they would be rudely ejected to the yard outside.
In the morning the brothers joked and made references to the dramas of the night before, while their mother always said it was inviting disaster to have men in after hours. The guards rarely raided because of once having to give the terrible news about Frank, but she was always in fear that she might be raided, disgraced, and brought to court. The brothers used to tease her about being a favorite with the sergeant, and though pretending to resent this, she blushed and got very agitated and looked in all directions so as to avoid their insinuations. I wore a clean dress each day and, to enhance myself, a starched white collar which gave me, I thought, a plaintive look. I was forever plying them with more tea or another fried egg or relish. Michael would touch my wrist and say, “That the girl, that the girl,” and I hoped that I would never have to go home. I even harbored a dream about being adopted by his mother, so that I would become his sister and shake hands with him, or even embrace, without any suggestion of shame or sin.