A Fanatic Heart

by Edna O'Brien

  “I can’t,” she kept saying, “can’t, can’t,” and then she would refer to his hair, his brown tweed jacket, and the beautiful somberness of him, and then again she would remember the words, the fatal words, his Adam’s apple moving, juggling, and the way she bit at it out of love, out of need, and in the morning—yes, it was morning—when she folded his two legs together and kissed as much of him as protruded, and he asked would she do that when he was very old and very infirm and in an institution, and for a moment they both cried. He left. She knew in her bones that it was final, that he had deceived her, that all those promises, the reams of love letters, the daily pledge, “You, I hold fast,” were no longer true, and she thought with wizard hatred that perhaps they never had been true, and she thought uselessly but continuously of his house with the fawn blinds drawn down, his getting home after dark, putting his bag on a chair, throwing down the gauntlet at last, saying he was back for good and all, had sown his wild oats. That would not be for a few hours yet, because he was still traveling, but that is what would happen. To get through until dark, she asked of God, as if dark itself had some sort of solution to the problem. Two women held her pressed to a chair, and said commiseratingly to each other that it was impossible to help someone. Judging by their startled faces and by the words that flowed out of her mouth, she knew that she was experiencing the real madness that follows upon loss.

  “We’re here, we’re here,” her friend would say.

  “Where is he, where is he?” she said, rising, stampeding.

  The swivel chair was like a corpse in the room and she threw the paperweight at it. What had once been a dandelion clock inside pale-green glass was now pale-green splinters and smithereens. If he had had a garden, or rather, if he had tended their own garden, he would only cultivate green-and-white flowers, such things as snowdrops and Christmas roses. Between her tears she tried to tell them that, so they would have some inkling of what he was like, and what had gone on between them, and for a moment she saw those Christmas roses, a sea of them, pale and unassuming in a damp incline from the opposite side, and he eerily still.

  She went to a friend’s house to write it, being too afraid to do it in her own house, in case he might telephone. She used a friend’s foolscap paper and over that hour filled three full pages. It was the most furious letter she had ever written, and she wished that she had a black-edged envelope in which to post it. There was no tab on the postbox telling the time of the next collection, so she went into a nearby shop to ask if it was reliable. It was a lighting shop. Long glass shades hung down like crystals, like domes, like translucent mushrooms, reminding her of some nonexistent time in the future when she would entertain him. After posting the letter she went back to the friend’s house to finish her tea, and as she was being conveyed up the street, they saw an elderly woman with a big sheepdog in her arms, holding it upright, like a baby, and she wanted to run across and embrace both of them.

  “That woman saw her father being run over when she was fourteen and hasn’t been the same since,” her friend said.

  “And we think we’re badly off,” she said.

  She felt curiously elated and began to count, first in hours, then in minutes, then in seconds, the length of time before he received the epistle.

  He was sleeping in his wife’s bedroom again. That was part of the pact, that, and a vow that he would never travel abroad without her, that he would pay attention to her at parties, appreciate her more than he had been doing. He said yes to all her demands and thought that somehow they would not be exacted once she was over her fit. He slept badly. He talked, shouted in his sleep, and in the morning while being rebuked about it, he never inquired in case he might have said the other woman’s name. Her photo, the small snapshot of her that he had kissed and licked so many times, was in the woodshed along with the one letter that he had brought away out of the pile that he had left in her study for safety. It was the night of his thirty-fifth birthday, and they had been parted but a week. He stood over his son’s bed telling himself that what he had done was the right thing. The little boy had one finger in his mouth and the other hand was splayed out like a doll’s. “It’s the hands that kill you, isn’t it?” said his wife, who had crept in to enjoy the moment of domesticity.

  He kept going to the front door long before the visitors were due to arrive, and he was even in two minds about nipping the lead off to the master telephone, because he was in dread of its ringing. At the party he sang the same songs as he had sung to her, in fact, his repertoire. His wife drank his health, and the old nanny, who had been in the habit of hearing and seeing the most frightful things and had seen bottles flying, thought how changeable a thing human nature can be. Even staggering to bed he thought he heard footsteps. His wife dared him to fuck her, but it was a drunken dare and drunkenly dismissed; in fact, it made them laugh. She didn’t sleep well, what with her thirst, his tossing and turning, and those son-of-a-bitch snores. She was downstairs sipping black coffee, putting a touch of varnish on her nails, when the footsteps came over the gravel.

  Early Monday, she thought, and went out to open the door for the postman, who always said the same dumb thing—“Fine day, ma’am,” regardless of the weather. Now more than ever his letters concerned her, and her own letter from her sister in Florida took mere second place as she looked at the two business envelopes and then the large envelope with its deceiving blue-ribboned type. She decided to read it outdoors.

  “Drivel,” she said, starting in on the first stupid nostalgic bits, and then in her element as she saw words she knew, words that could have been her own, the accusation of his being a crooked cunt, the reference to his wife’s dandruffy womb, to his own idle, truthless, working-class stinking heart, and she knew that she had won.

  “What’s that?” she said, and snatched the letter from him. She read it with a speed that made him think for a minute she had written it herself. He saw her eyes get narrower and narrower, and she was as compressed now as a peach stone. She pursed her lips the way she did when entering a party. She got to the bits referring to herself, read them aloud, cursed, and then jubilantly tore it up and tossed the pieces in the air as if they were old raffle tickets. She danced, and said what whoopee, and said “kiss-kiss,” and said he’d be a good boy now. He got out of bed and said he had to go to the hotel, have a drink, and not to forget that they were going to a party that night and not to get “drunkies” early in the day, as there were plenty of parties for the summer vacation. As he left she was phoning to ask the girl in the boutique to send up some dresses, a few, and then she started discussing colors.

  “Wait a minute … hey …” He turned around in order to be asked if pale blue and baby blue were one and the same thing.

  “Just asking my beau,” she said to the girl on the telephone, but he was unable to give any reply.

  In the driveway he tried to remember the letter from start to finish, tried to remember how the sentences led from one to another, but all that he could remember were single vicious words that flew up into the air; it was the very same as if the black crows had turned into great black razors and were inside his head, cutting, cutting away. He would stay in the hotel for as long as possible, all day, all night maybe, and he would go back tomorrow and the next day, and maybe one day he would take a room and do the thing he wanted to do, maybe one day.

  They were simply little slabs of stone laid into and just beneath the level of the grass, about a hundred of them almost begging for feet to dance, or play hopscotch. Here and there was a vase or mug filled with flowers, mostly roses. She asked one of the gardeners what the slabs signified and he said each one covered someone’s ashes. “There’s two boxes in some, where was a husband and wife, but most of ’em there’s one,” he said. The words went straight to her heart. Not long after, she found a tomb with Jay’s name on it and nearby was his daughter’s name. These names swam before her eyes. She wished that her name were there, too, and began to search. She went around
and around the main graveyard, then to that part where the meadowsweet was so high, the tomb and the stone effigies were all covered over, and she could not read a thing. Some French children, on a conducted tour, were running back and forth, amused at what they saw and even more amused when they went in under the redstone ruin that had a big sign saying DANGEROUS STRUCTURE. A few hundred yards away they were setting up wagons for the weekend’s amusement fair, and men in vests with big muscles were laying aluminum tracks for the Dodg’em cars. Graveyard and pleasure green were side by side, with a tennis court and a miniature golf course at the northern end. The caravans had arrived, the women were getting out their artificial flowers, their china plates, and their bits of net curtain, to set up yet again their temporary dwellings. She tried to hold on to life, to see what she was seeing, these people setting up home fot a day or two or three, muscles, burial places, schoolchildren with no thought of death. It was a windy day, and the roses in the containers kept falling over and girls kept bullying each other to come on or not come on. In the Church of St. Nicholas she looked at the altar, at the one little slit of light from the aperture above, under half of which was stained and half was clear. Then she looked at oddments in a glass case, bits of tiling, and one tiny bit of bone as perfect as a pillar that had been found by a schoolchild whose statement it bore. Outside, the lawn mowers were full on, and those plus the shrieks of the visiting children tried to claim her head; she hoped that they would, thereby banishing forever the thought of all that had gone before. The sun came in fits and starts, the tiers of yellow bulbs were all bunched up, waiting to be lit, the haunted caravan with its black skull and its blooded talons looked a little ridiculous, since no wicked ogre lurked within. She had come on a train journey to consult a faith healer but was much too early. All was still, and only the bright garish daubs of paint suggested that by Saturday all would be in motion, and for better or worse people would go and get on the Dodgems and the mad merry-go-round.

  What would she have not given to see him for a moment, to clasp him utterly silent, no longer trusting to speech.

  It will pass, she thought, going from grave to grave, and unconsciously and almost mundanely she prayed for the living, prayed for the dead, then prayed for the living again, went back to find the tomb where his name was, and prayed for all those who were in boxes alone or together above or below ground, all those unable to escape their afflicted selves.

  The Small-Town Lovers

  It is a narrow country road in Ireland, tarred very blue and hedged in by ditches on either side. Growing along the ditches and fighting for place are hawthorns, fuchsias, elderberry trees, nettles, honeysuckle, and foxgloves, so that there is almost always a smell of flowers carried by the breeze from the water—the Shannon is only two fields away from the road. In the mild summer evenings, lovers cross the fields down to the water to lie or sit among the lush bamboos. In the morning, the priest reads his prayers there, and when tinkers come around to these parts they park a caravan in a disused gateway leading off that road.

  It was not the road I traveled to school, but I often went out there to convey a friend or collect day-old chicks from the Protestant woman who had the incubator. Always, either coming or going, I encountered the Donnellys—Jack and Hilda, the town lovers. They had met in America twenty or thirty years before, two lonely immigrants working in an asylum, and they had married and returned to Ireland, where they opened a little grocery and pub. They lived in the back of the shop, using some of the rooms as storerooms. It amazed me how anyone could love Hilda. She was fat, stolid, uninspiring. They passed me on the road but did not salute me, being too busy with one another.

  “Hilda, love, are we walking too fast?” Jack would say.

  “No, darling Jack.”

  “Just say so if we’re going too fast,” he would say, speaking lovingly to her powdered gooseflesh neck.

  “I’ll be all right.”

  Puffing, she would link him, and it seemed as if her entire weight rested on his arm. He was an insignificant little man in a gray flannel suit and black patent-leather shoes.

  When they reached that part of the road where there was a gap in the ditch, Hilda carefully edged sideways through the gap and Jack held briars aloft so that she did not scratch herself. Then he stepped in after her and they crossed the potato field toward the lake, hands joined, looking into one another’s face.

  It astonished everyone how they had not got bored with one another, especially as they had had no children. They were the laugh of the village—Hilda Love and Jack Darling. Each afternoon, they drew down the patched blue blind over the shop window, bolted the shop door, and set out for their walk. Their “bye-byes,” Hilda called it. Winter and summer, she wore a blue silk dress that had a flared skirt and a discreet V neck. It must have been the style of dress that was in fashion the year she fell in love, or else she thought it disguised her fat. In the V of the neck she had insertions of lace that she crocheted herself as she sat behind the counter waiting for customers. Waiting for customers that never came, that is, except for the few children who wanted a pennyworth of licorice sweets, or some old woman who would pretend that she was going in to buy groceries and so stop by just to have a chat with Hilda. The local fellows did not drink there, because there was no comfort in it—no fire in the big black grate, no free drinks at Christmastime, no cups of tea on a winter’s night, no generosity. Visitors to the house were never offered more than a drink of water, and that is why I feel so privileged to have been given tea in the kitchen.

  It was all due to my father. Once, when he was on a batter, Hilda let him have half a bottle of whiskey. Mama had hidden his wallet and he was so desperate for drink that he promised Hilda free grazing for her cow in exchange for the whiskey. He was true to his word, and the cow was driven over to our front field the next afternoon.

  On the following Sunday, Hilda rushed to greet my mother as we came out from Mass. Hilda beamed behind her gold-rimmed spectacles, but Mama looked away toward the horizon and said to us children that it looked like rain. Hilda was affronted. After all, Jack and she were a model couple, known to love one another, not to eat meat on Friday, to pay more than enough for their church dues, and, in fact, to be so generous as once to have gone bail for a local insurance collector who was in jail for embezzling money—though, of course, they got the insurance man to paint their house during the period of the bail and did not pay him for it.

  “How dare she, and only th’other day I read in the paper that they got another legacy!” Mama said as we walked home over the weary dusty road. Two mornings later, along with the ordinary mail, the postman brought a letter marked by hand. It was from Hilda. The letter was an invitation for my sister, my brother, and me to come to tea the following Sunday. Cunningly, she had not invited Mama, knowing, I suppose, that Mama was likely to get confidential and tell her that we could not really afford the free grazing, what with our own debts and everything.

  “They better go, Mama,” my father said, thinking it a great compliment that we were asked at all.

  Sunday came, and we set out in our best clothes and with clean hankies. It was exciting to go around to the hall door at the side of the house, tap the rusty knocker, and in a moment be greeted by Hilda, who was smelling of lavender water as she kissed us. She wore a clean brown dress and a lovely gold pendant, and I envied her the circumstances of her life—mistress of that large house, with money and perfume, and a piano at her convenience. One Sunday evening, the thin sound of piano music had wandered out into the street as we passed down the chapel road to devotions.

  Hilda led us across the tiled hallway and into the front parlor, where it was shaded, as the blind was drawn. She let it up halfway and we saw a large room with several armchairs, which were covered with loose pieces of frayed linen sheets. She lifted off one piece of sheet, and a cloud of dust rose up and swirled gently in the air as it approached the yellowed ceiling. The room smelled stale, and there was about the place a linger
ing smell of whiskey or porter.

  “Do any of you children play?” she asked, and very courteously my brother, who was thirteen, said that he played a little. She drew out the piano stool, and ceremoniously he sat down. We sat on high-backed chairs around the big mahogany table, and with my index finger I made patterns on the dusty surface. The table was old and stained, and it was also covered with circles of brown directly at the place where I sat—hundreds of circles running into one another. Being bored with the piano music, I put my hand underneath the table to see if there was anything hidden on the shelf that supported the top. Mama kept bars of chocolate hidden under our dining-room table. I felt splinters, cobwebs, then something cold made of metal. It felt like—I almost screamed. It was a gun. At that instant, my brother began to play loudly, and in keeping with the sentiments of the song (it was “Clare’s Dragoons”) he moved his head about frantically, so that his red hair fell down onto his forehead and he looked like a genius. None of us saw or heard the movement of the doorknob as it was turned; when we saw Jack, he was already standing in the room, in his shirt sleeves, livid.

  “Hilda!” he said in a cross voice.

  My brother stopped playing and I took my arms off the table, where they had left a pretty crescent on the surface. Jack stared at us but never said “You’re welcome,” or “Hello,” or anything. Hilda pushed him out of the room and went with him, closing the door behind her. We could not hear what they were saying, but we could feel the anger and rumpus in the hallway. We all felt it.