Peeling Oranges

by James Lawless

  ‘You take his books, Derek; you might make use of them.’

  My mother never goes near my father’s things except to dust them occasionally with her long feather duster. She treats them as fixtures. Her feather brushes lightly over them as if they are little sticks of furniture with nothing inside.

  ‘Were there many break-ins, Mam?’

  ‘Ever since forty seven, that terrible winter, the house was never secure.’

  She sighs so deeply, I feel as if her whole life is expiring. Words are breaths. We are allowed so many, and then they are all used up.

  ‘No more. They took my cross and chain.’ She is suddenly alarmed. ‘Where’s my cross and chain?’

  She did not have a cross and chain.

  My mother’s mind wanders between solid worlds and floating worlds. ‘We have to bear our cross.’ She stares at me accusingly, as if to say I am responsible for all her misery. Then she smiles and says matter-of-factly, ‘I’ll be safer in a flat with a caretaker, don’t you know?’

  I have a recurring nightmare since boarding school of a man, a huge man with a revolver, his face covered, crouching over a blond woman. She is holding a scissors and wearing a flimsy nightdress, delicate like gossamer. It’s a dream that never reaches a conclusion. I always waken before it ends.

  I had often asked my mother to keep me at home, to educate me locally so that I could protect her. But it was as if she thought it was ordained for me to go away, almost like a priestly novice. And all the time I felt she was using education as an excuse for not wanting me around. She was using it to try to change me.

  ‘Education is a mould,’ she said. ‘It can mould you into something different from what you are.’

  ‘Like Nelson, Mam.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Like changing the statue?’

  ‘Don’t you get me rag out.’

  My mother never got her rag out. It was just her way of speaking.

  ‘But I don’t want to be different, Mam.’

  ‘Sure, everyone wants to be different.’ She looked anxious. ‘Everyone wants to be someone else; don’t you know that?’

  ***

  There are lots of references in the diaries to routine diplomatic activities: sending off letters, making reports, asking a certain señora Martínez to type such and such. The typist seemed to irritate my father:

  She is always fussing over me. She is also quite inquisitive, always asking me where I’ve been. Sometimes I think she is trying to read my mind.

  ***

  I prefer his observations outside the realm of work:

  How we judge by appearance. A man with a crutch was jeered as he stumbled. He was trying to catch the Barcelona train. He hobbled along with all his might, as the train pulled out, to the taunts of the healthy-limbed who were securely on board. Is it the Old Testament rather than the New that is followed here? Human defects mean kinship with the Devil and unworthiness in the sight of God. I myself do not escape with my stoop, and then there is the other matter, the secret matter which makes me feel like half a man. I feel I am the butt of their jokes. JB has gone to America to do further research. There is no one I can talk to. I am surrounded by machos. I just live for Thursdays. Words written to M or JB have limited therapeutic power because they are not tactile. One cannot live on ink alone. The price of a career.

  ***

  After their honeymoon, when my mother had returned to Ireland, he wrote:

  The body is evil. At night I sleep with my hands crossed on my chest and I utter pious ejaculations to ward off impure thoughts, just as we were taught in school.

  ***

  November 1941:

  I have been reading Spallanzani (JB’s book). How advanced his knowledge was. He was ahead of his time. How sad that the Preformation theory was proved wrong; he showed clearly that there must be contact between egg and semen for the creation of life. But he instils hope as I read of his successful experiments with artificial insemination; and all this as far back as 1769. If I could only beget a child, even if not spontaneously. Human sperm can be stored, can hibernate like a flower seed in a pod and grow into life in the spring. It is our duty as a species to provide a continuity.

  ***

  ‘Mam was I adopted?’

  She is dusting the mantelpiece with her feather. She stops, startled. ‘What a thing to say? Of course you weren’t. It must be from him you get your flights of fancy. Oh no.’

  She has remembered something. ‘What is it, Mam?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  She floats away just when I thought she was becoming lucid.

  How many people talk to each other but don’t know what each other thinks? Where does one find what a person thinks? In the eyes, the posture, the gesticulation, the slipped epithet, revealing a crevice, a ray of illumination?

  ***

  July 1945:

  At last I have perfected the refrigerating system that will withstand Spanish heat. The glycerol and carbon dioxide work perfectly just as JB predicted they would. For the experiment to succeed it is paramount that the seed be kept deep-frozen until needed. The whole thing is compact and will travel well. It is so exciting to see the blue irradiation shining on my little ‘altar’ and the test tube rising up like a monument in the middle of the simulated garden which I have made for it with miniature plants surrounded by ice and artificial snow.

  ***

  I think of the erection of empires, of Nelson’s stump, of Wellington’s monument in the Phoenix Park, of a phallus as impotent as stone.

  ***

  A marital criticism: August 1946:

  M is restless here. She complains about the heat. She moons about. She is in love with love and romance, but it’s all girlish fantasy.

  ***

  Mam is sitting by the fire, staring into the flame.

  ‘Your father and I were happy in Spain.’

  She speaks as if knowing telepathically the fragment I have just read.

  ‘Tell me about my father, Mam?’

  ‘Your father, don’t talk to me…’

  She is angry, momentarily, and then calm once more. ‘You were only two…’

  ‘I know, but is there nothing? Some detail?’

  ‘Your father was a good man.’

  ‘Whatever happened to Mr Counihan, Mam?’

  ‘Counihan?’

  ‘The insurance collector.’

  ‘Oh, the society man. That was years ago. We changed insurance since then.’

  ‘Why, Mam?’

  ‘Why? Because… I honestly can’t remember why. But sure don’t you know insurance companies change all the time?’

  ***

  The moon shines through the window of my bedroom. I can read by it. Contrary to what my mother says, it is clear from the diaries that she found it difficult to settle in Spain. Despite the dangers during the War years, she commuted at regular intervals between her host and native countries.

  Absence makes the heart grow fond once more: September 1947:

  One more month and my little angel will be with me. We can at least talk and touch and hold.

  Underneath the diaries there is a photograph of my father. A sort of dreamy veil hangs over his face. He has wistful brown eyes and a moustache. I look like my mother.

  When I lie down I place my fingers on buttons, pressing them for answers.

  October 1947:

  M is with me now. She said the house was burgled. It was a terrible experience for her. She was quite shaken by it.

  ***

  It is late. I hear my mother checking bolts on doors. I go out to her.

  ‘Mam, what was it like here in the forties? Was there much violence then?’

  ‘It was worse then.’ She pulls at the sleeve of her cardigan. ‘There were worse things.’

  ‘What things, Mam?’

  She doesn’t answer.

  ‘What things?’

  ‘Don’t be always at me,’ she snaps irritably, moving away.

  *
**

  Christmas Day 1947:

  There is blood in the snow as I look from my window on to the embassy garden. A little robin I think, got at by the cats.

  ***

  The moon is covered over. There are no stars to guide the Wise Men in their path. I see the light on the stairs. It leaves two steps in darkness. I am used to nocturnal perambulation. (It was at boarding school I learned my insomnia tables by heart). On the wall of the landing there is a wedding photograph of Martha Foley. A beautiful lady, immortalised behind glass.

  My mother has not aged. She has metamorphosed.

  In the drawing-room Mam is propped up with cushions on an armchair. The fire has gone out. She is wearing her overcoat and is struggling with a brooch which she is unable to fasten.

  ‘What’s wrong, Mam?’

  ‘I’m losing the use of myself. The pin is bent. That’s what life does.’

  I fasten the brooch on to her overcoat.

  She taps her chest. ‘Don’t mind me. I can breathe better when I’m up.’

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘I’m all right now.’

  ‘Why don’t you tell me about being burgled? It must have been horrible.’

  She clears her throat. ‘It was such a long time ago. Patrick … your father… he was in Spain…’

  She stares beyond my forehead as if searching for something in a distance. ‘Horrible?’ she says. ‘What was horrible?’

  ***

  I light a lamp in the study.

  New Year’s Eve 1947:

  Martha is not happy. She is keeping some secret from me. It is New Year’s Eve and she is not happy. Maybe she is homesick.

  6 January 1948:

  Martha is with child. The day of the Magi. If she would only confess that she was unfaithful I would forgive her, but she just bursts into tears and says she wants to go to London to see Marie Stopes. She saw her poster there on our honeymoon on our way to Spain. It became fixed in her mind. She doesn’t realise that what she is saying is, Close the stable door after the horse has bolted. She is unpredictable, irrational. As days and weeks pass, I watch her stomach rise like yeast. I am perturbed. She is melancholy – so unlike the girl I first knew. She will not confide in me.

  18 June 1948:

  A baby boy was born at 4.05 a.m. It was a difficult birth – Caesarean. Martha lacked the will needed to push the child into the light. She kept saying she wished she were dead. Both baby and mother were nearly lost, very nearly lost.

  ***

  On the same day a telegram was sent from Madrid to Dublin to record the birth of Derek Foley. It didn’t record the long travail which the birth entailed. Telegrams don’t record marathons. Letters of congratulations arrived from Muddy and Peg and some friends from the Liberties on the occasion of ‘the happy event’.

  Some of the letters in the desk drawer are from a Gearóid MacSuibhne or from my mother. (Did she keep copies of her letters or were some of them ever sent?). I open one of my mother’s letters to Gearóid MacSuibhne: faded writing on yellowing pages. An initially neat hand succumbing to a spidery scrawl. A gush of words, impatient for ink, flying in many directions, trying to find something to stab. Written in Irish. Accent marks land randomly, surprising letters not used to stress. She speaks of ‘watching this mountain growing inside me’, while back in the Liberties Muddy was knitting me a blue matinée coat, and Peg bought a pram, and the rocking cot that went back in generations in the Woodburn family was made ready for me. It was enough to break a heart.

  July 1948:

  Martha weeps and weeps and weeps. I ask her if she wants Peg or Muddy over for company, but she says she doesn’t want to see anybody. I ask her why she is so sad. She says, ‘Sadness! Some seek it out (I’m sure she is referring to me), ‘and others have it thrust upon them.’ She won’t explain what she means. I am nearly at my wits’ end. I thought I could adapt. Isn’t it a child I wanted all along? But not like this. Do they know the circumstances back home? She says they don’t. They’ll make a laughing stock of me or stone her to death with their big white stones.

  ***

  I read these entries over and over. ‘Unfaithful?’ Where does that leave me? How can one confront an ailing mother about a past infidelity, even if it led to the spawning of oneself? A child is not the moral guardian of his parent.

  I write in my own diary:

  Who was my father? I walk in a fatherless world. Can one parent rear a whole child? Am I maimed?

  December 1949:

  My indigestion is bad today – severe pains in my chest. I must eat less red meat.

  August 1950:

  There is such heat. It rebounds off the pavements with its muscle, trying to fell one with its blows. There is no ventilation anywhere. The buildings are so high, they contain the heat within the streets like an oven. Outside the city the orange trees have dried up. The fruit is withered and sickly. It is so difficult to breathe. I must get to the sea. I must contact L. I have not been for some time. She is agreeable to do what I ask. I must write to JB and make all the arrangements. With M here it is very difficult. I am losing my grip. How suddenly it can happen. And yet, when one looks at all my neat files, one could say this man led an ordered life.

  That was Patrick Foley’s last entry in his diaries.

  ***

  ‘Who was L?’ I ask at breakfast.

  ‘L? L is for the..’ Saliva appears around her lips.

  ‘Why didn’t you move long ago, Mam?’

  She’s got a half vacant stare. ‘You go to school and you come home, don’t you know? You’re a big boy now.’

  ‘Do you have any secrets, Mam?’

  ‘Lord, secrets, is it secrets?’

  Her eyes light up like a child about to play a game. She starts to sing. ‘L is for the way you look at me…’

  ***

  She did try to abandon me. In one of her letters to Gearóid MacSuibhne she relates that she brought me back from Madrid to Dublin a few weeks after giving birth to me. She was evidently distraught at the time. Patrick records her saying, ‘Moses was abandoned, and there was no rebuke from the pulpit.’

  She brought me to the Coombe Maternity hospital, supposedly for a check-up. The truth was she couldn’t stand the sight of me – they were her actual words. (How insensitive my mother was to discovery. Did she think that such outpourings were covert in Irish?). She left me in the ward of the Holy Angels and walked away. She walked to the end of Dean Street and then turned around and came back. All the time she kept thinking that I had stopped breathing – I had the croup at the time, according to her letter. It kept nagging at my mother. She couldn’t have it on her conscience if I had died. She took me back. And that is why (I know now) right up to the time I went to boarding school, she never went to bed without coming into my room and putting her ear near to my face (without ever touching it) to check that I was still breathing. Sometimes I was awake and, with my eyes closed, I naively entertained the luxurious possibility of receiving a hug or a caress, but the examination was always impersonal, peremptory, a medical check.

  She enquired about adoption:

  There are many women – unmarried mothers – who are leaving their children with the nuns for adoption in America. Imagine, Gearóid, America, so far away. Archbishop McQuaid is insisting that the families have money and strong Catholic morals. They’re going mad for children over there ever since the War. And some of them even in their forties are being allowed to adopt. It’s all to do with money. They are paying one hundred and fifty pounds per child. O’Malley is calling for an enquiry in the Dáil, but it is all covered up. Somebody is making a tidy sum. Perhaps I could consider it, but it would only open up a can of worms, don’t you know? Papers would have to be signed. Things could be found out. Oh, it wasn’t meant to be like this.

  I storm out of the study shouting for my mother, but she has gone hiding behind her dementia cover like a butterfly behind a leaf. I am fearful of upsetting her, of damaging her frail h
ealth even further, but I persist. I must persist.

  ‘Why did you send me away, Mam?’

  She has her back to me, putting plates on the dresser.

  ‘Send you away, is it? I will never send you away. We will all go together like leaves in the wind.’

  ‘Could you not stand looking at me, Mam?’

  ‘What’s that? Don’t talk like that.’

  I knew I had said the wrong thing. Her voice breaks down and she starts to cry. Do all mothers cry as much as mine? She is a broken woman. She was always broken ever since I can remember. But I had pushed her too hard. Emotion has made her lucid. She reaches for her Sweet Afton, as if such poison were a lifebuoy, and coughs so violently that I fear her delicate frame could shatter like a shell. She gasps for breath.

  ‘My tablets. Where did I leave them?’

  ***

  Ever since I was small, she tried to condition me not to pry. I remember word for word her cautionary tale of Labhras Loingseach. It was the only night time story she ever told me. I was tucked up in bed and asking her questions, always asking questions about anything that came into my head. It was my way of trying to keep my mother a little longer in my bedroom. I dipped my fingers into her silky curls, but she put my hands under the bedclothes and told me to stop asking questions.

  ‘Stay quiet now and I’ll tell you a story.’

  I sat up straight in the bed scarcely able to contain my excitement.

  ‘Labhras Loingseach was a king in ancient Ireland.’

  ‘Was he king of all Ireland, Mam?’

  ‘No, he was one of many kings. Listen. This king had horse’s ears.’

  I chuckled. ‘How could he have horse’s ears, Mam?’

  ‘Stop asking all the questions or I won’t tell you the story. The king had horse’s ears. Some humans had a bull’s head or a serpent’s tail. It was long, long ago. All right?’