by Edna O'Brien
“They’re having a row,” my sister said. We were used to rows. My mother and father had plenty.
“Sh-h-h, sh-h-h,” my brother said. “That’s nothing to say,” and he made us talk about something else. Within a few minutes, Hilda came back, smiling, but her eats and neck were blazing.
“Poor Jack is trying to get a snooze, the creature. We mustn’t make noise,” she said in a whisper, and wagged her finger at each of us in turn.
“Poor Jack, he was awake all night attending to me because I had a dose of heartburn,” and with her white, fat hand she touched her chest around about where her heart must have been beating. Then she suggested that we go down to the kitchen, as the bedroom was directly over the parlor and Jack was likely to be disturbed further if we stayed there. Very quietly, my brother let down the top of the piano, Hilda drew the blind, and we left the room as ghostly as we had found it, with dust on everything and dead moths clinging to the globe of the brass lamp that stood on the sideboard.
In the kitchen, the table was already laid for tea—white china cups with a thin gold scroll on them, two plates of sandwiches, rock buns, and marietta biscuits.
“She didn’t break her heart with preparations,” my sister said to me when Hilda was out in the scullery filling the kettle.
We all sat around, and Hilda said, “Have a tomato sandwich, children.”
We did. They were not real tomato sandwiches at all. Hilda had just smeared the slices of bread with tomato ketchup. I laughed, but was nudged by my brother, who began talking to Hilda about the distillation of alcohol. He always talked about lofty things.
“Have one of these,” my sister said as she passed me the second plate of sandwiches.
The filling was a curious red-brown color; I took a bite and for a minute could not identify the flavor. And then it came to me. Rhubarb sandwiches! I was choking with laughter by now, and my brother said, “Perhaps you’d like to share the joke.” However, he ate nothing himself except one rock bun, and he left the shreds of lemon peel on his plate. My sister ate like a horse; she was eleven at that time and reckoned that she had to eat a lot so that she would grow very tall. She longed to be a policewoman and heard that one had to be tall for that.
Hilda was uneasy—you could see by the way she sat on the edge of the chair with her ear cocked—and she asked us no questions. Normally, she tapped the window with her knitting needle and called us in on the way from school to ask about my mother and father and if there were any parcels from America and if Mama had got anything new. But that evening she said very little, and we left immediately after we had done the washing up. At home, we kept our parents laughing for an hour as we told them about the house and the food. Mama was very inquisitive to know what the furniture was like and if there were pretty knickknacks in the parlor. “Not as nice as ours?” she said, pleased that at least we had a large house furnished in the style and period of the twenties.
After our visit, Hilda began to call on us when Jack and she came each evening to milk the cow. Tina No-Nose milked in the mornings. (Tina was a flat-nosed girl who got fits.) While Jack was milking, Hilda came around to the back door to have a chat with Mama. “Am I making a nuisance of myself?” she asked the first evening, and Mama was very cold with her. But after some weeks Mama accepted the fact that the cow was there to stay and she talked to Hilda as she would to a friend. She may even have been glad of Hilda’s company, because our house was in the middle of a field and our nearest neighbors were a mile away. It was summertime when Hilda first came, and I recall them as they sat on the stone step of the back kitchen, Hilda with a glass of milk or homemade wine in her hand and Mama’s cheeks flushed with the excitement of talking about their gay days in America, because she also had worked there when she was young. They talked of Coney Island on Sundays, of a boy they had both known in Brooklyn—the lost curly-headed phantoms of their girlhood. And sooner or later Hilda would mention the terrible thunderstorms in New York. I can see her as she sipped the wine greedily—a clean, fat, pampered woman in a blue silk dress, with thick ankles that were brimming over the edges of her black leather shoes. It was my job to watch for Jack as he came out of the cowshed and went down the avenue toward the road. One evening, I missed him as I was gargling my throat, around the side of the house near the rain barrel.
“Your husband is gone, Mrs. Donnelly,” I said.
“Oh, I’ll be killed!” she said, and she ran after him, her great body flopping in her blue flared dress.
“Darling huh-huh!” she called as she ran, but he did not wait for her.
I grew up and went to boarding school with my sister; still Hilda came. I would see her at holiday time and note that she was getting breathless and gray. Each Christmas, she gave Mama a bottle of cooking sherry; they had become closer, and Mama was heard to say, “Hilda isn’t the worst, you know.” With the annual bottle of sherry, Hilda had found a way to Mama’s heart—not that Mama drank, but she liked getting something.
“Darling huh-huh!” Hilda always seemed to be calling when I was home on holiday.
“I don’t know what she sees in him; he’s a dry fish,” Mama said as we watched the two of them go out the gate one evening. “She hasn’t it all sunshine, either,” she added, showing a sly pleasure at the fact that someone else’s marriage was unhappy also.
Not that Hilda ever said anything openly. But once she hinted that she hoped life would be better in the next world, and quite often her eyelids were swollen from crying. When she sent to Dublin for her special corsets, she had to have them posted to our house and later she collected them there.
“What they don’t know doesn’t trouble them,” she said to Mama in her slow, false voice. Her voice is the thing I remember best—slow, unctuous, oversweet, like golden syrup.
The years passed. One Christmas morning, Hickey, our hired help, said to my mother, “Did you hear the news, missus?”
“No,” she said in a piercing voice. She was angry with Hickey, because he had come home drunk on Christmas Eve and had wakened us trying to get in through the back kitchen window, being too drunk to find the doorkey in its usual place under the soap dish on the window ledge.
“Hilda Donnelly is dead,” he said.
“Dead!” my mother said.
“Dead,” he repeated.
“My God!” Mama exclaimed, and let the straining cloth fall into the can of milk.
“How could she be dead?” Mama said.
Hilda had been over the previous evening with the bottle of sherry. We had all had tea together in our breakfast room, and Mama had given Hilda a little tray cloth.
“She’s dead, that’s all I know,” Hickey said. “Found her dead when he came down this morning. I heard it over at the creamery.”
“Who found her dead?”
Hickey raised his eyes to the ceiling to indicate to me that Mama was stupid.
“Jack Darlin’, of course—who else? She was dead for hours.”
She was found at the foot of the stairs, her face gashed and the lamp in pieces beside her. The thought of a dead woman, a broken globe, a lamp in smithereens, and a face running with blood was gruesome and just like a scene from a melodrama. My mother said it was lucky the house hadn’t burned down, and where was Jack Darling?
“Blankets town tram,” Hickey said, and imitated being asleep.
“And how did he sleep through the night and not miss her out of the bed—was he blind or something?” Mama said.
“You’re asking me?” Hickey shrugged. He was a workman, and as a workman he never said anything disrespectful about his superiors.
“She was at the foot of the stairs, stone dead, and the lamp in pieces beside her.”
“Lucky she wasn’t burned,” Mama said again.
“It wouldn’t have mattered once she was dead,” Hickey said, quite without pity.
My father came in from feeding the calves and Mama said to him, “Did you hear that, Father?”
“Hear what?�
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She told him word for word, as Hickey had told it to her. “Poor aul creature, I always liked her,” my father said proudly, as if his affection could bring Hilda back to life.
Our Christmas dinner was spoiled, because Mama talked of Hilda all the time.
“Well, for all we know now, this could be our last meal on earth. Little did Hilda think, this time yesterday,” she said in a voice that was close to crying. Eventually, my father asked her to shut up moaning and let us enjoy our turkey. When we were washing up, she said to me, “You never know the hour or the minute. You always want to be prepared, because when the Lord wants us, He just calls us …”
And we both looked through the misted window at the rain and the desolate black winter branches outside.
“And my little tray cloth,” Mama said regretfully.
After tea, we went to Hilda’s wake. As we set out, it was a bright frosty night with a vast tranquil sky made silver by so many stars—a beautiful, hushed night with white frost on the holly leaves and the ground frozen under our feet. I would rather have sat at home with my brother and sister and listened to the wireless, but Mama said, “You must come; Hilda was always fond of you.” To be honest, I hadn’t noticed that Hilda was fond of any children. When we got there, the side door was held open with the back of a chair, and we went in the hallway and up the stairs, toward a room where voices murmured softly. The dead room. People, women mostly, sat on the chairs, whispering, and two or three knelt beside the bed on which Hilda was laid out—Hilda, solemn and immaculate in a brown habit, younger-looking than when I had ever known her, with an amber rosary twined between her fingers. The flame of the candle threw crocus shadows on her face, and she looked almost beautiful. There was no gash to be seen on her face unless it was near the temple. Her snow-white hair was draped in curls all around her. It was odd hair, almost like angora. People remarked on her youthfulness. After we had prayed for her soul, we got up and looked around to sympathize with Jack, but he was not there. Dada concluded that he was downstairs, giving the men drinks in the kitchen, so he went down, and I shared the chair with Jack Holland.
“Was it a stroke, or what?” I heard one woman say.
“She always had an unhealthy flush,” another woman said, and then a third asked, “Where is himself tonight?”
“Uncle Jack is having to lie down because of the shock,” said Hilda’s niece, a flashy girl who was passing around glasses of port wine. She was a buttermaker in the next town.
“Oh,” somebody said knowingly.
The room smelled of damp, candle grease, and port wine. It was bitterly cold, as there was no fire at all, and you could see by the stains on the wallpaper that it had been a damp room all winter. Mama leaned over and whispered to me that I ought to go downstairs and see if Dada was all right. Then, out loud, she said to me, “You could make a cup of tea for the ladies.”
The niece told me where to get the cups and things, and I set off on tiptoe. Down in the kitchen, the men helped themselves to pints of porter, which they filled from the big barrel that rested on a stool. There was a cheerful fire, and they sat around talking.
By mistake, Jim Tuohey began to sing. He was nicknamed the Ferret, because he kept a ferret and hunted with it for foxes on Sundays. He sang, “If I were a blackbird I’d whistle and sing and I’d follow the ship that my true love sails in,” and my father shut him up with, “Bloody fool, have you no respect for the dead?”
The Ferret got very embarrassed and went out in the yard—and was sick.
“I’m making a cup of tea,” I said to my father.
“Good girl,” he said. I was thankful to him because he hadn’t touched a drink; I could tell by his eyes. Always when he drank his eyes got wild.
I carried a candle up to the parlor to get cups out of the sideboard. It was the room where we had sat so many years before. I could see Hilda as she was then, breathing heavily under her clean dress, and I was suddenly nervous in case she should appear to me. Quickly I opened the door of the sideboard to get the good cups. As I piled them on the tray, a thought came to me, but I put it aside. It went on bothering me like a stone in the shoe, and finally I could not stop myself. I put my hand under the table to see if the gun was there. I could not find it, so I shone the candlelight under the table and saw nothing but dust and a green bankbook. I felt certain that Jack had shot his wife and had hidden the gun somewhere. Should I run and tell my mother or someone? I ran out of the room with the tray in my hands and almost crashed into Hickey, who was in the hallway.
“God’s sake, will you look where you’re going!” he said angrily.
“What are you up to?” I asked.
“Mind your own business.” He was stealing a bottle of whiskey from the crate of drink under the stairs. “Jack Darlin’ won’t want it all,” he said, as he wrapped a piece of sacking around it.
I couldn’t tell Hickey; he would only laugh. He laughed at most things except riddles.
“Where is Jack?” I asked.
“Blotto,” Hickey said.
“Does he drink?” I asked. I had never seen him drunk.
“Can a duck swim?” Hickey said. He tiptoed up the hallway and went outside to hide the whiskey in some convenient spot where he could collect it when he was going home. I made the tea, gave my father a cup, and carried a tray upstairs.
“What time is High Mass in the morning?” I heard Mama ask.
“There isn’t a High Mass,” said the niece. “We couldn’t arrange it in time,” she added hurriedly.
“Not High Mass!” A sigh of indignation traveled around the room, and we looked at Hilda’s calm face as if to apologize to her.
On the way home, Mama said to my father, “Not a very nice house, John.”
“Oh, I was very disappointed in it,” he said.
“Not as nice as ours,” she said, knowing what his answer would be.
“Not a patch on ours,” he said proudly, and sniffed.
I could not tell them now about the gun, because in the clean air my suspicions seemed foolish and sordid.
“Poor man was drunk, it seems.”
“What did I always tell you? He never came to milk but there was a smell of whiskey off him.”
Mama sighed and said that Hilda ought to go straight to heaven, because she had earned it. Next morning, we went over to the low Mass. The remains had been brought from the house to the church, and Mass was offered for Hilda’s soul. As we knelt down, I nudged Mama and whispered, “There’s Jack up front there.” He was kneeling, with his head lowered and a black diamond of cloth stitched onto the arm of his raincoat, which the niece must have seen to. We were relieved to see him, because there was a lot of gossip about why he hadn’t appeared at the wake. After Mass, while we waited for the coffin to be put in the hearse and for people to get into their cars and pony traps, we went to sympathize with Jack. He looked stupefied and his nose was more purple than ever. Other people came and shook his hand, but he wore the same baffled expression and simply thanked them for coming.
Then the funeral procession began to move. The car following the hearse was the family car, in which sat the niece and her parents. There was a place for Jack, but he didn’t get in. He walked beside the hearse, and we all said, “Ah, the poor man,” thinking that he wanted to be close to her by walking the whole three-mile journey to the graveyard—the same road they had traversed each afternoon. My parents thought it a lovely sentiment and accused themselves of having misjudged him the previous evening.
When the hearse drove by the shop, Jack stepped out of line and went indoors. We gaped through the car window, and someone said that he must have felt faint and gone in for a drink or something. We were sure he would follow in another car. At the graveside, we looked for him; we could see the niece looking around anxiously, but like us, she did not find him. The coffin was lowered and we heard the eerie thud of the first sods as they were thrown in, but Jack had not come. He did not come at all. The mystery was s
olved, or partly solved, the following week, when the parish priest called on Jack. “I had enough of her,” Jack said, or so the priest’s housekeeper told us.
My father and the men in the village said it was a scandal and that they’d give Jack a good hammering to teach him a lesson. They were waiting for him to come out. A week passed, and still the blinds were drawn and the shutters remained on the shop window. The can of milk left by Tina No-Nose each morning had not been collected. People got worried and said that he must be dead. Tim Hayes decided to break in the side door one Monday morning. He burst it in with the aid of a sledgehammer and went in the hallway, shouting Jack’s name. He opened the various doors and found Jack asleep in an armchair in the parlor. There were rum bottles all around him and he had a rug over his shoulders.
“What has got into you?” Hayes asked.
Jack poured himself a tumbler of rum from the half-filled bottle on the mantelpiece and then looked at Hayes and began to laugh.
“The whole town is talking about you. Pull yourself together, man,” Hayes said. “The way your missus died and you didn’t even go to her funeral …”
Jack stopped laughing quite suddenly, and he rummaged behind the cushion of his chair to look for something. His gun. He held it in his hand, showing it to Hayes, and Hayes, who had deserted from the army for cowardice, ran for his life, up the hallway and into the street, telling everyone that Jack was “blind drunk.” After that, children and cats and mongrel dogs came to look in at the mysterious hallway, where Hilda’s gray coat and walking stick lay on the old-fashioned hall stand. Hearing them, Jack staggered to the doorway and shouted, “Be off!” whereupon they scattered like mice down the street. One day, he propped the door back in place, and from the inside he put furniture against it, to keep it from falling down. There were no more callers, except the niece, who cycled over on her half day to do some cleaning and to buy tea and sugar and things. Her visit coincided with the delivery day of the brewery people, and she opened one half of the shop door and took in whatever drink Jack had ordered her to. That was the time when Mama asked the niece if there was any chance of recovering the little tray cloth she had given Hilda; just for sentiment’s sake, Mama said, she would like to have it back. The niece gave it to us, along with a few dresses and some table linen. Herself, she took Hilda’s jewelry, as Jack had told her that he was going to burn “the whole damn lot.” True enough, we saw a bonfire in their garden one spring night, and the fire smoldered for close to two days.