Peeling Oranges

by James Lawless

  The shop is no more; it was taken over by an Italian fish and chips’ café. The same building, the same bricks breathing different worlds. Commerce imposes incongruities on culture. Will the Italians find the secrets hidden in stone? Or will they find a chair passing strange in the drawingroom where Michael Collins once sat? Stones and wood build history. New stones replace old stones. History is painted over.

  I remember as a small child that Muddy said the Rosary a lot. Like most Catholics of her generation she was not encouraged to read the Bible. (Patrick and his store of bibles was to mark a new generation, or perhaps an individual departure). There was never a Bible to be seen in Liberties’ homes. Reading such a book could lead to individual, therefore erroneous, therefore heretical interpretations, characteristic of Protestants. One would be better off with one’s Rosary beads – and yet the name of Muddy’s daughter, Martha, is quintessentially biblical.

  It was not uncommon to see Muddy or other elderly women going around with beads hanging from their aprons, almost like nuns you might say. Indeed their lives weren’t very different: celibate in the main, and enclosed within a cloister by the grey walls of the Liberties.

  But the Rosary is essentially a social prayer. Whoever happened to be in the shop at the time, when Muddy called for the Rosary, fetched beads or prepared to use fingers as digits. In the drawing-room above the shop we formed a circle and went on our knees. Some of the men propped their hands against a chair to hold their heads up, as if their weight of sorrow was too heavy to bear. These were men who just a minute earlier had been light-hearted and cracking jokes in the shop below. And now on a higher level they were suddenly transformed into supplicating penitents. Some of them buried their faces completely in their hands and mumbled their responses through gaps in their fingers.

  I thought a couple of the men – Jack Ó Súileabháin in particular – were very good at disguising their voices. Jack made the Hail Mary and Our Father sound like the inarticulate droning of aeroplanes. I closed my eyes when it was his turn to recite a decade and imagined that I was in the Blitz (which I had read about in the English comics). I would have liked to have shared this fantasy with him but I was afraid of offending him. He wasn’t joking. I guess we all try to make our own individual sounds on our way to Heaven.

  They never made a mistake in the sequence of the Mysteries, or never skipped over a bead. I often wondered about the fingering of beads. I guess it had some therapeutic effect – going round and round on beads in a never-ending circle. Maybe an intimation of eternity. We all carried beads in those days. I carried mine in a leather purse in my left trouser pocket as per school instructions. The right pocket was for a handkerchief.

  The last rosary I remember was the evening when the circle voiced the Hail Mary and my mother was silent. She refused her turn to say a decade. She had a sore throat or something like that. ‘Stop moidering me,’ she said, when I pressed her about it later, and Aunt Peg said she always used to take her turn before she was married.

  The truth, and I knew it now, was she couldn’t bring herself to say the words: Blessed be the Fruit of Thy Womb.

  ***

  Muddy got her name because it was the first sound her children made in their quest for a matrix. It was a name that scorned generations, because I, her grandchild, called her by that title too. She supported Sinn Féin and Arthur Griffith, that is, she was a pacifist Republican. Tomás hid the revolver from her because of her non-violent beliefs. She later came to admire Collins, however, and often gave him shelter; but it was the charm of the man that won her. She did not know, or at least pretended not to know, about his ‘executions’.

  My aunt Peg was my maiden aunt. I never liked the word spinster especially when tripped off a Dublin tongue (usually preceded by a denigratory adjective which was spat out: ‘An oul spinstah’). In addition to her photographs and cuttings of British royalty, she also had miniature royal coaches made of silver in her glass cabinet. I even remember her getting newly-minted coins at a later stage in Belfast for the Queen’s Jubilee. She had befriended a cook up there, a Protestant called Wendy something or other. I don’t know how they came to meet. But I do remember being brought to Belfast at the age of three or four by my aunt Peg. Maiden aunts sometimes appear altruistic to their nieces and nephews. But they are really trying to dam the lonely river that flows inside themselves. I remember she used to twist my hand, not in any hurtful way, but as one would turn a tap to stop the flow.

  I remember the fresh scones that Wendy baked. The big Protestant house where she worked. The light coming through the wide glass window from a large, green garden. The train journey. The Union Jack which my aunt bought me. I remember waving it out the window of the train coming home, a toy, something that caught the wind. Then a stout woman who had been sitting opposite us snatched the flag from me, and broke it, and threw it out the window. It was the first time I ever remember my aunt was speechless. I was surprised. I expected her to leap to my defence. Her small frame never deterred her in the past. Instead, for the rest of the journey she and the stout woman sat glaring at each other.

  She was proposed to once by a man from Wexford. At that time – the turn of the century – Dublin was a universe unto itself. There were few motor cars, and people rarely strayed far from home, and my aunt’s perceptions of the world were very much conditioned by the ethos of a city and British emulations thereof. ‘What would I be doing marrying him with his trousers always at half mast?’ she is reported to have said about the man from Wexford. And I thought how I always seemed to associate my aunt with the language of flags.

  She did fancy someone once. Her ‘old flame’, whom I saw in a tiny, sepia-coloured photograph, was a soldier in the British army – standing tall and thin with hat under oxter and dark, oiled hair, perfect creases in the pants, pristine before battle. It was an illusion, a myth, an attempt to give war a dignity. He was sent home shell-shocked from the European war in 1917. My aunt brought me to visit him years later in Saint Ita’s hospital in Portrane. He was at Mass, and I saw him rocking back and forth, and he got excited at the sound of the Consecration bell. She brought him Woodbines. But I don’t think he ever recognised her.

  In one of Gearóid’s nostalgic letters to my mother, he recalls a day when, as children, he and my mother and my uncle Tomás were playacting in Tomás’ room over the shop. The book exposing the revolver was open on the bed (the same bed incidentally on which a generation later I was to offer Sinéad the plastic ring). Suddenly, Muddy shouted from the hall, ‘Stop acting the maggot, the Tans are in the street.’ My mother quickly hid the revolver down the front of her knickers, and kept it there until the danger passed.

  After Tomás died, Gearóid took the revolver. He wrote in his customary Irish to my mother: ‘Every time I put my hand on the revolver I feel your heat there. It gives me courage when I’m on my own in the dark night.’

  ***

  When George V visited Dublin on the eighth of July 1911, my mother was seven years old. It was one of her earliest memories of national assertion that she deemed to relate to me. Countess Markievicz opposed the visit and set the Union Jack alight with paraffin from the roof of the Royal Dublin Society. Tomás, who was four years older than my mother, was very impressed by this act of rebellion, and so was his school friend Gearóid. They walked home from the demonstration animatedly decrying the foreign power which occupied their native land. My mother followed nervously behind them hearing every word.

  ‘But Muddy went back further,’ Mam said, when I prodded her memory. ‘She was a member of Inghnidhe na hÉireann when Queen Victoria visited Dublin in 1900. Maud Gonne was in charge of the organisation. They wanted to get the children away from the curtseying and servility which they would have had to show towards the foreign monarch. So they organised an outing for them in the Phoenix Park.

  My mother relates how, even at that early stage, Muddy had difficulties with Peg. My aunt refused to accompany them, and instead went off to the
parade to wave an English flag at an English Queen.

  Lots of generous donations were made for the outing, and one fruit seller from the markets, a Mr Cole, donated one thousand Spanish oranges. Oranges replaced the sixpenny bribe to be given to the children for attending the queen’s procession. My mother said (according to Muddy), the children had a wonderful time, but Mr Yeats was not happy. He wondered would such an exercise have the effect of making the children carry bombs instead of oranges when they grew up.

  ‘Sure what would he know about it in his ivory tower?’ Mam said, clearly not enamoured of the poet.

  My aunt’s relationship with her mother broke down irrevocably after the queen’s visit. All Peg’s years of growing up, from First Communion to Confirmation to single adulthood, were marred by friction. ‘She is a most contrary woman,’ my mother said, quoting Muddy. ‘If she went into the sea, she’d argue with the waves.’

  When I came on the scene, I sometimes had to act as an intermediary between them. Aunt Peg lived in her own flat not far from the shop, but far enough away to avoid ‘ideological warfare,’ as my mother put it, with Muddy. I remember calling on my aunt once when I was home on holidays from boarding school. I had hoped to ask her questions, deep questions about my mother and me. (I had just seen a photograph of my mother in an old newspaper at a Nationalist rally in O’Connell Street. But all my mother said when I enquired about it was that she was just passing that way at the time while shopping, and the camera caught her).

  My aunt, however, was pretty down when I arrived at her flat. She was drinking a Baby Power whiskey and staring at the old family cot.

  ‘Was that my cot, Aunt Peg?’ I said.

  ‘Your greatgranddad made that. She never threw it out.’

  ‘Who never threw it out?’

  ‘Your mother. She landed it on me of course, out of her way, but she refused to put you into it.’

  ‘Why, Aunt Peg?’

  ‘Why? Too old-fashioned,’ she said. ‘She bought you a factory-produced one, not nearly as well made.’

  She paused and looked at me. ‘It was the strangest thing. Don’t you think it was the strangest thing?’

  ‘Yes, Aunt Peg, but...’

  ‘Leave it, Derek,’ she said sternly. ‘We might as well all paint our arses red and go mad.’

  I wasn’t shocked by the vulgarism. I was used to hearing such language from my aunt and even at times from my mother.

  She took another swig from her whiskey. ‘Here,’ she said, dipping into her bib and handing me a sixpence.

  When I went home, I asked my mother what was wrong with Aunt Peg. ‘She’s on the whiskey again,’ my mother said. ‘She goes like that every so often, pining for her soldier boy.’

  ***

  I bought an Easter lily to commemorate the 1916 rising. I hadn’t put much thought into the purchase of the lily. I had come out of the National library and was walking into O’Connell Street, my head abuzz with history, and I bought it as one would buy a flag for a charity. Perhaps the seller was aggressive, I can’t remember, or maybe there were crowds around the GPO, and one bought something simply to gain a passageway. I didn’t see that it was Sinn Fein or the IRA that was blocking my way. I didn’t see history unfolding in the streets.

  ‘What’s that thing sticking out of you?’ my mother says when I come in the door.

  ‘A lily, Mam.’

  ‘Are you trying to torment me?’

  ‘Why are you saying that, Mam?’

  ‘I never liked the lily. It’s for death and for mourning. Didn’t I give enough of them out in Cumann na mBan?’

  I know I have made a breakthrough. Formerly, my mother had denied any political involvement in nationalist politics.

  ‘When they came out first in1929, we only sold one thousand, but in 1930 we sold ten times that amount’. She is speaking almost triumphantly. ‘But now it’s different; it has all gone sour. Death, that’s what it stands for now. For your granddad and your uncle Tomás and…’ she sighs deeply…‘for others who might as well be dead for all the good they do.’

  I decide to go gently with my mother, to prod her memory, to coax her.

  ‘There, Mam,’ I say, tearing off the lily and throwing it in the bin, ‘there’s no need to upset yourself any more, but tell me….’

  ‘When I think of it, Maud Gonne and the rest of us giving out pamphlets to girls who were keeping company with British soldiers, warning them about the dangers.’

  ‘What dangers, Mam?’ I say, trying to keep with her meandering.

  ‘Of what could happen to them, don’t you know?’

  Suddenly her face lights up as her mind enters another random channel. She starts lilting: ‘Every British sweet you eat deprives an Irish mouth of meat.’

  ‘ Jelly Babies.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Don’t you remember?’

  She laughs and then suddenly becomes serious. ‘They smashed our windows. We were put on the black list. Muddy was even threatened – the ingratitude, how short their memories were. How could we have sold only Irish sweets? How could we have survived?’

  She groans. ‘Oh, my legs are troubling me. The stockings are too tight.’

  I loosen the elastic stockings on my mother’s varicosed legs. The lumpy veins. I think of hidden rivulets, of clots as dams built by tiny beavers inside her legs.

  ‘All things once beautiful.’ She sighs. ‘Maud all gone. Some men used to flatter me, and said I wasn’t too fair behind her. Too fair? Did I say too fair? I mean too far. Sure it’s the same thing.’

  She gladdens once more, the old laughter lines groaning perhaps at such late curtain calls.

  ‘She wore a veil when she was older. I remember seeing her with her face covered at Whitefriar Street sodality. Beauty doesn’t need age to fade.’ She is wandering off. ‘Beauty is lost when love is lost.’

  I try to bring her back. ‘Her husband was in Jacob’s in 1916?’

  ‘Whose husband?’

  ‘Maud Gonne’s.’

  ‘That’s right. Coming home from a wedding he was when he heard the commotion, so he just rolled up his sleeves and joined in. Could you credit that?’

  She looks directly at me. ‘And do you know why the men in Jacobs gave themselves up? It was “to save the crowded district of the Liberties from indiscriminate firing by the English”. They were their exact words.’

  She coughs. ‘My throat is going dry. Are there oranges?’

  ‘I’ll peel one for you, Mam.’

  She lights a cigarette and holds it in the corner of her mouth like some of the Hollywood starlets of the forties, only removing it to suck the orange, or when she wants to tap the ash into her Spanish shell ashtray.

  ‘You should try to cut down, Mam.’

  ‘If I gave them up now, I’d die for the want of them.’

  She is wheezing, almost panting now as she speaks, each of her breaths frantically supplanting the one that went before.

  ‘There’s always a time… (pause, breath)…for doing things.’

  ‘How do you mean, Mam?’

  ‘A time,’ she snaps impatiently. ‘Don’t you know? Did they teach you anything in that boarding school? Everyone has a time when their life takes on a meaning.’

  She coughs, sucks a section of orange and looks at me. That strange quizzical look of non-recognition once more. Who are you sitting opposite me? Where did I get you from? They are the questions written on her face. Questions she would never voice.

  ‘Tomás said it was King George’s visit that did it for him, but I was too young then; mind you, not that I was ever as extreme as Tomás. No, it was five years later for me. To latch on to such a belief is something very strong. It’s a sort of religion, I suppose. But I think it is more instinctive. For me it was like the very first realisation that you had a body, and that there were some parts to it which you had no control over, don’t you know?’

  She looks intently at me. ‘You are mature now, Derek, you unde
rstand. I can talk to you now.’

  ‘Yes, I understand, Mam,’ I say quickly. I am excited for her to continue. I never found my mother so revelatory. I understand her now. I had been too young previously. That’s what it was. She was afraid I wouldn’t be able to take the truth.

  ‘I was cleaning in Tomás’ room. I found the revolver in the hollow book. It was so heavy I had to lift it with my two hands. It was real shiny, covered in a chamois. For the first time I understood the power a gun confers on the hand that holds it. What good was Muddy’s pacifism? I asked myself. What country ever got its freedom without violence?’

  Her wheezing gets louder.

  ‘Easy, Mam,’ I say. ‘Take your time. Take another piece of orange.’

  She sucks the orange. ‘I’m all right now,’ she says. ‘But the thought that this power lurked secretly in our little shop. It opened up so many possibilities in my mind, the feeling that with this... this wonderful piece of technology you could get what you wanted in life, don’t you know? Words just seemed…’ she thinks for a moment… ‘impotent.’

  She looks across at me as if to weigh the impact of what she is saying. ‘You know what that means?’

  ‘Yes, Mam.’

  ‘It means weak. It means not being able to produce anything. It means worthless. You know what I’m saying?’

  ‘I know, Mam.’ I feel a tension, an uncomfortable feeling in the presence of my own mother.

  ‘But the gun can have other… ramifications.’

  ‘How do you mean, Mam?’

  She looks at me, up and down, and across, and through me.

  ‘You poor boy,’ she says, ‘you poor, poor boy,’ and she opens her arms as if she is going to embrace me and then, as if catching herself on, closes them again and says, ‘Ah, but I was young then. Young and innocent.’