An Only Child AND My Father's Son

by Frank O'Connor

  Each of them had had one son: Alice’s had died tragically under a cloud, the sort of cloud that Irish respectability creates over a mere indiscretion: I was just beginning to make a small reputation for myself; and even the touch of envy on Alice’s part, of complacency on Mother’s, could not conceal the deep affection between two women who had shared real happiness together.

  It was the great age of the butter-and-egg trade. The Barrys were wealthy and lived in a beautiful house, with gardens before and behind producing strawberries, raspberries, pears, apples and peaches. Like the Jewish merchants of the time, the Catholic merchants did things in style, far beyond the level of their Protestant neighbours. Like the Jews, they were emerging from an age of persecution and, full of self-confidence, were the principal supporters of Charles Stewart Parnell. His fall was the first real shock to their self-confidence. On the day he died, Alice came down to the kitchen to tell Mother, and the two of them sat there all evening, weeping.

  Meanwhile, the great stag parties went on, catered for by a restaurant in town, and the big house was always full of life, for Barry was so good-natured that he could not pass a policeman on his beat without bringing him home for a drink, or a poor prostitute without bringing her home for a meal, and often when Mother came down to the kitchen in the morning the pantry was bare and the decanter empty. Half the girls in town seemed to want to marry him, but his sister took their letters from the hall stand and, having read them out scornfully to Mother, destroyed them. Of course, he never noticed. He was a rattlepate and never in time for anything. He would arrange to take Alice to the theatre, and she would dress and wait for him, but he never showed up on time. After the performance had already begun, he would rush in in a frenzy of efficiency and dash upstairs to dress, with Mother at his heels to fix the studs in his dress shirt. But Alice was endlessly patient with him.

  Then a child, a niece who had been left an orphan, came to live with them, and soon after that Alice married. She married because she felt she ought to be married rather than because she really wanted to marry. I suspect she was one of those dreamy, romantic women whose marriage, to be successful, must first make smithereens of their personality, but, in the way of women like that, she drew back from the danger. She had been very much in love with a doctor, but refused to marry him because he drank. He took up with another girl, and one day when the three of them met at the races, he threw his arms about Alice and said: ‘I have you now, and I’ll never let you go.’ ‘Oh, yes, you will,’ the other girl said not in the least discomposed, and detached him from Alice. Alice came home in a state of collapse. The kind, bookish man she finally married was not the sort to make smithereens of anyone, and she returned from the honeymoon in despair. ‘I should never have left Ned,’ she told Mother. When it was all over and Alice was settled with her husband in a little village in East Cork, Mother was sick with loneliness. While the child stayed with them, Barry pulled himself together and took Mother and her to the Opera House every week, but when she went off to school, he did his entertaining in a hotel in the city, and Mother lay awake half the night listening for the sound of his step. The old house was full of noises and had the reputation of being haunted.

  Reverend Mother insisted that she must not stay on in the house unchaperoned, and pressed her to leave, but Mother hated to do that. Her reputation never worried her much at any time. There were good people and bad people, and she had her own standards of both, and the reputation she might retain by not associating with people she thought good did not interest her. She had been happier there than she had ever been in her life before, and she clung to her position like an old dog to a deserted house, waiting for Alice’s brief visits and the child’s return from school. When she had been living there for a year without a chaperon, Reverend Mother issued an ultimatum: Mother must choose between Barry and her, between the house and convent. Mother wrote distractedly to Alice, who replied shrewdly that Mother should take in another of the orphans as maid. Reverend Mother refused to accept the suggestion, saying that Barry’s reputation was too bad. This is the point in the story at which I begin to wonder whether Reverend Mother’s ultimatum was not directed at him rather than at her – she may well have been trying to prevent Mother’s staying on as housekeeper so that she could come back as mistress of the house. I am quite sure that Mother never considered that aspect of it at all. She was blinded to everything in the world by the fact that she regarded the house as her home.

  Terrified of a breach with Reverend Mother, Mother at last gave notice and told Barry that the nuns refused to let her remain. He was bitterly offended.

  ‘The nuns are no friends of yours, Minnie,’ he said – a phrase that, again, could mean something different from what she saw in it. I have a suspicion, which may be mere daydreaming, that he had considered marrying her, and that only his vanity had kept him back. The man who married his housekeeper was too obvious a subject for ridicule. And now that she had given notice, Mother was almost insane with worry and fear and loneliness. Finally, unable to bear it any longer, she told her friends in the convent that she intended to remain on, and withdrew her notice. But now it was his turn to be stiff. He told her that he had already engaged another housekeeper, and, seeing her gesture of love slighted, she grew really angry. She told him curtly that it was just as well that way. It wasn’t, as she soon discovered. When she tried to show the new housekeeper, a crude country girl, the workings of the house, she showed no interest, and spent her time in Mother’s bedroom, trying on her hats.

  The night the covered car came to take Mother and her trunk away, she was broken-hearted. All she had ever asked was a home, and for eight years she had had a perfect one, with a man and woman she loved and who valued her love, and she knew that no other house in the world would mean as much to her. It was, as she said, the tragedy of the orphan, who clings to any place where she is happy. She still went back in the mornings, to try to train the new housekeeper, and afterwards, during the school holidays, to act as companion to Barry’s niece and buy whatever she needed. The new housekeeper, who by this time had managed to introduce her mother into the house to help her, and later brought her sisters as well, was very cordial and insisted on showing all the presents she received from Barry. One day as Mother and she were passing through his bedroom, she pointed slyly to a pair of women’s slippers under his bed. ‘He gave me them too,’ she said.

  Mother did not see Barry again until six years later, when she was married and I a baby in her arms. During the first three of these she was employed in four houses, sufficient indication of the fever of restlessness in which she found herself. After Barry’s she found it impossible to settle anywhere, and that, too, I think, is part of the orphan pattern. For me, it was best illustrated in one of the most moving stories she told about the orphanage. Reverend Mother, whose brother, a priest, had died young, was convinced that the reason for his death was that he, like other priests, was confined to the dragons who in Ireland become priests’ housekeepers. She decided to train as housekeepers a few of the orphans who had real intelligence, and one of these, May Corcoran, first underwent training in a really good town house and was then sent as housekeeper to a young priest in the country. After six months she returned to the orphanage, nobody knew why. She went out again as housekeeper to a priest of more settled age and again in a short time she returned. This time the secret was out. She had ‘made herself cheap’ – that is, she had fallen in love with each priest in turn, until her innocent adoration of him and concern for his comfort had made him a laughing-stock among his fellow priests and his parishioners. The experiment of training priests’ housekeepers was at an end, and May was found a job as nursery governess with a wealthy family who were delighted with her gentleness and gracious manners. She, on the other hand, filled with restlessness and resentment, had no affection to spare for them. She fell ill and an operation became necessary, but she refused to undergo it in Cork. She arranged for her admission to a Dublin hospital
and on the evening before the operation was to take place, destroyed every particle of writing by which she could be identified, and then went into the hospital and died after the operation. Only a letter from Reverend Mother that had slipped down inside the lining of her coat showed who she was.

  Mother’s restlessness led her to take a job in England, but she stood this only six months, and preferred to repay the advance that she had received for her passage money. By August of ‘98 she was in a position in East Cork with a well-to-do family of millers who behaved in the way of lords of the manor in England, had their old pensioners to the house every Saturday to draw their pensions, and gave expensive entertainments to the children of their mill-hands at Christmas. The lady of the house was the daughter of a general much in favour with the Queen, who was godmother to the second son – called, of course, Victor – and presented him with a silver baby service. The second maid was a girl from Limerick called Molly, who arrived while Victor was being born, with references that were not checked until later and that turned out to have been forged. Molly was the mistress of a son in another big house closer to Cork, and had taken the situation to be nearer him. When he wished to take her off on holiday, Molly sent herself a wire announcing that her father was dying, and went off, wearing Mrs Armitage’s jewellery and clothes. Molly returned from the holiday and presented herself before Mrs Armitage wearing a gold locket that had been one of Mrs Armitage’s wedding presents. When she looked at it and took it, Molly tried to grab it back. Discharged next morning, she wrote from Cork to say that she was employing a solicitor, but, she added, ‘what better could you expect from a woman who did not go to Confession and Communion?’ Like many of her race, Molly believed firmly in the superiority of faith over morals.

  Here at least Mother was able to visit Alice Barry and her husband. By this time Tim had become engaged, and Alice insisted on Mother’s bringing him and his girl as well. There was a brief interlude when one of the orphans induced her to take a job outside Limerick where the boss and the Swiss butler, Armady, fought a running battle in the manner of Figaro as to which was to pay attention to the maids. In 1901 she took a job with the family of a naval paymaster in Queenstown. In the meantime Tim had married; his daughter, Julia, was born on a Saturday and on the following Monday he set sail from Queenstown for the South African War. He had to be carried, blind drunk, on to the troopship while Mother held his hand, and my conscientious father, afraid he would die of thirst on the long voyage, hurled a bottle of whiskey on board, to be caught by his comrades. As the troopship moved away, my uncle distinguished himself further by trying to throw himself overboard, but his companions caught and held him. Along with a holy medal, Mother had given him her gunmetal watch, which contained a photograph of Mother Blessed Margaret. On the second day out, he staked it at cards and lost it. That was typical of Tim. But it was also typical of him to order from London an expensive gold watch to replace it, and in his letters he continued to warn her against my father. ‘Have nothing to do with Mick Donovan,’ he wrote. ‘He’s a good friend, but he’ll make a poor husband.’ Poor man, I’m afraid he did.

  The marriage may have been precipitated by a mean trick of the paymaster’s wife. She brought Mother on a long holiday to her own mother’s house in Sheerness as nurse to her daughter, aged five, but in England she decided that what she really wanted was an English nurse, and she proposed to bring her back to Ireland on the return half of Mother’s ticket. Without consulting Mother, she arranged employment for her as parlourmaid in a house in the dockyards. ‘I told you I would not live in this country,’ Mother said angrily. ‘I came with you and I intend to go back with you.’ On her return she married Father, and they went to live with his parents, who then had a house in Maryville Cottages in Barrackton that they could not afford to keep on their own. There was some ugly story about this incident, but I have forgotten the details. I know that Mother was disgusted and horrified by the dirt and drunkenness and complained that it had not been part of their bargain. I think it was probably Father who said: ‘It’s done now, and it can’t be undone,’ because the words rankled in her mind for forty years. When he went off to the South African War, she took rooms with Miss Wall in Douglas Street, and I was born when he was still away. When he returned they set up house in Blarney Lane, and Mother opened a little shop. This was the one period of her life that she always refused to speak about, and it was clearly a horror to her. The whole idea of her keeping a shop was absurd, because she could never refuse anybody anything, and when at last she had to abandon it she was owed money all over the place. But I don’t think Father gave her any chance of continuing. For Tim had proved to be a prophet. Father drank his way through the shop, and with it all her other treasures, including Tim’s gold watch, which she sold for five pounds.

  One morning at Mass in Sunday’s Well Church, I cried and had to be taken out on to the porch. The church door opened and Ned Barry came out. Mother was horrified at his appearance. He was pale and hollow-cheeked, and she felt sure he was dying. In the old, good-natured way he stopped to speak to me and pat me on the head, as he would have done with any baby, but without once looking at her or recognizing her, and she was too taken aback to remind him of who she was. He had reached the chapel gate before she made a move. But he was a brisk walker, and she was burdened with me and, hard as she ran, she could only keep him in view down the length of Sunday’s Well, till he turned in the gateway of his house. As the door closed behind him, she ran up the avenue. She rang the bell, and the housekeeper put her head out of a bedroom window.

  ‘The Boss isn’t in,’ she said shortly.

  ‘I saw him go in just a moment ago,’ said Mother.

  ‘Well, he’s not in now, anyway,’ the other woman said, and banged the window shut.

  When Mother saw Barry again a few months later, he was dead. Alice had looked through the house, which was filthy, and found a compromising letter from the housekeeper to a man, inviting him to the house while her mother was at the church. The lawyers, too, had stepped in and cancelled the order for a piano which the housekeeper had issued for her own entertainment. Alice and she sat with the body in the bedroom of the house where all three of them had been so happy together. I was put to sleep on the sofa beside him, and the two women talked till night fell of his kindness and his charm, while the housekeeper and her many relations sat below in the kitchen and did not once approach them.

  5

  I suspect that it was that house, rather than the convent, that really left its mark upon my mother’s character and established, if it did not give her, standards of behaviour that would have been exacting in any social group and were impossible in the gutter where the world had thrown her. She rarely permitted herself to comment on any tiny treachery she had observed in one of my friends, and I used to persuade myself that she had not noticed, but if worse happened, and she felt free to speak, it became clear that she had seen every detail and felt it more than I. Sometimes she observed things that nobody else had observed. Once I laughed outright at her when she said of a brilliant young artist who came to the flat: ‘I’d have nothing to do with that boy. There’s a streak of imbecility in him,’ but time proved her right.

  She rarely asked anything for herself, never made scenes, and often went for months without the commonest necessities rather than complain. On her seventieth birthday she had a very bad fall, and the doctor who examined her told me that all her life she had suffered from chronic appendicitis. When she really did want something – usually something that involved the pleasure of a third party, like the cousins of mine to whom in her last years she was devoted – she dripped hints like a leaky old tap. On the other hand, ‘hints’ is a crude word for the photograph casually dropped where I would be bound to see it, or for the gossamer off-key phrases that seemed to be intended as a sort of psychological conditioning that might ultimately influence my conduct subconsciously; and I noticed that when the hints went on too long and I shouted at her, she s
eemed to be less hurt by the shout than by my discovery of her innocent little plot. At such moments, I fancy, she probably blamed herself severely for a lack of delicacy.

  That curious negative energy gave her an almost uncanny power of inducing people to confide in her. She woke very early, with a passion for tea, and when we were staying in a London hotel I made a deal with the chambermaid to bring it to her when she herself came on duty. When I called for her at nine o’clock Mother had acquired the material for a full-length novel of life in Devon from the maid. On the same morning I had an interview with my agent, and left her sitting in Trafalgar Square. When I returned forty-five minutes later, a good-looking woman was sitting beside her. Mother had got the material for another novel. By that time she knew as much about the life of ordinary people in England as I would learn in years. She was uncomfortable abroad even more than I was but for the same reason – all that lovely material going to waste – but in Switzerland she met the Swiss woman who spoke English and got her life story as well.

  Naturally, with that sort of mind she loved novels, particularly Victorian novels, but she had a similar passion for classical music. She made a point of never intruding on me, because I might be ‘thinking’, but she reserved her rights in respect of thinking to music, and I had only to put the needle on a gramophone record to see her shuffle in, smiling, her shawl round her shoulders, and settle on the chair nearest the door. The smile, as well as the choice of chair, clearly indicated that she was not disturbing me because she wasn’t really there. Sometimes if I had visitors she didn’t want to interrupt, she would give the handle of my door a gentle twist, leave the door ajar, and then sit on a chair outside. She had a passion for Schubert and Mozart, and loved soprano voices and violins – the high, pure, piercing tone. It took me longer to discover her taste in fiction, because her comments on anything were so direct and simple that they could appear irrelevant. She talked as a child talks, completely without self-consciousness. Once she practically burst into tears when I brought her a novel of Walter Scott’s and cried: ‘But you know I can’t read Scotch!’ It took me years to discover that she didn’t really like dialect. Another time I brought her a novel by Peadar O’Donnell, whom she loved, but she had read only a few pages when I saw her getting fretful.