An Only Child AND My Father's Son

by Frank O'Connor

  ‘He showed me into a bloody enormous waiting-room with folding doors, and he left me there for about five minutes. Suddenly the folding doors were thrown back and in came this wizened-looking old woman of a man and sat down in a big chair. I knelt and kissed his ring, and then I told him what I came for. He put on a sad air.

  ‘“But you see, Father,” he said, “this convent is in a very remote area. The people are poor; they are rather simple-minded and they have a great veneration for St Brigid. I am afraid, Father, that if there was any question of interfering with the relic there would be danger of violence. In my position I cannot risk the possibility of riots and publicity. I am sure you will understand.” “I understand, Your Eminence,” says I.

  ‘And then the same idea crossed my mind and I nearly laughed into the old ruffian’s face. “I’m not in my own diocese. There’s nothing whatever he can do to me.” So I put my hand in my pocket and took out my wallet – did you ever see a film called The Clutching Hand?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, you should. Because it happened to me. Suddenly I saw the Clutching Hand reaching out for my wallet – like a bird’s claw with the long nails on it. Before I could take it out he had the five-pound note out of my fingers. “One moment, Father, and I’ll see what I can do,” he said and left the room. In another ten minutes back comes the greasy Monsignore with the written authority for me to break the thighbone of St Brigid and bring it back to Ireland with me.’

  And then, because he was proud of his Church, he gave me a dirty look and said, ‘You can say what you like about the Irish priests, but you couldn’t buy an Irish bishop for five pounds.’

  But, of course, marriage was the greatest might-have-been of all, and on that he could talk for hours. Like most priests (and indeed lawyers and doctors), he had seen its shady side. When my own marriage (which he had opposed) broke up, he stopped all traffic at a busy intersection to come out of his car and shout at me, ‘I told you she was too tough for you!’ Even Natalie’s marriage he felt bitter about because she had talked too freely of the man she had married; and when he was telling me about some particularly sordid episode he had encountered in his parish, he comforted himself with the usual seminary sour grapes. Once he told me about a parishioner who was convinced that his wife was trying to poison him, and another night about a man and wife who occupied separate rooms and communicated only by notes in the hall-way.

  ‘There’s marriage for you now!’ he said with gloomy pride.

  ‘Oh, for God’s sake, that isn’t marriage,’ I replied.

  ‘It could have happened exactly the same to me,’ he said.

  ‘It couldn’t,’ I said. ‘It could happen only to someone who had the capacity for behaving like that. You haven’t.’

  ‘What do you think I’d have done?’ he asked, delighted to explore imaginatively that land which for him would for ever be unknown.

  ‘Nothing, probably,’ I said. ‘You’d have been too busy, worrying about the kids.’

  ‘You might be right there,’ he said scowling. ‘I often wonder what sort of father I’d have made.’

  ‘You needn’t worry,’ I said. ‘You’d have been a very good one, only a little bit too conscientious. You’d have fretted yourself into the grave about their marks at school.’

  ‘That was the way Mother was with us,’ he said.

  He had a peculiarly intense relationship with his mother, who, after his father’s death, had brought up and educated two fine sons entirely by her own efforts as a dressmaker and small shopkeeper. He was too clever not to have observed all her little foibles and vanities. He had been compelled to wear an Eton collar, which distinguished him from the toughs of the neighbourhood, and he had not quite forgiven her that. She had had him trained to play the violin, and a neighbouring shopkeeper with a son who was to be a priest had taken up the challenge and had her son taught to play the piano. As the other shop had a narrow stairway the piano had to be lifted by crane to an upper-storey window, which had caused the Traynors great satisfaction.

  But when he had to play at a convent concert and the rival shopkeeper had arranged that his name would be omitted from the concert programme, she had stalked out of the concert hall with Traynor at her heels and refused to allow him to play at all. (‘And you were perfectly right, Mrs Traynor,’ her friend among the nuns had told her.)

  ‘Once, when I was at University College, Cork,’ he said to me, ‘I made an excuse not to come home for the weekend. I pretended I had a lot of work to do, but, really, all I wanted was to get off with a couple of fellows for a weekend in Youghal. When we were walking along the promenade, who do you think we met, but Mother? She’d got lonely at home and come down for a day excursion. When she saw me she smiled and bowed and said, “Good evening”, and all I could do was to raise my hat. But after that she wouldn’t even let me talk about it. “Ah, you have no word!” she said. Wasn’t that a terrible thing for her to say – “You have no word”?’

  It was a phrase my mother used to me. ‘Word’ meant ‘honour’, and I knew exactly how he felt.

  At the same time he was too imaginative a man not to realize the full extent of her sacrifice for himself and his brother. When she died, he felt it was his duty to read the burial service.

  ‘Don’t do it, Tim,’ another priest warned him. ‘You’ll only break down.’

  But Traynor felt he owed this last duty to his mother. He didn’t even need to read the service: he loved the poetry so much that he knew it by heart and recited it to me, but the poetry was too much. After a few moments he burst into helpless sobbing, and his friend took the book from his hand and finished it for him.

  All the imaginative improvisation was only the outward expression of a terrible inward loneliness, loneliness that was accentuated by his calling. In that sense only could I ever admit that he was not a good priest – he should have had a tougher hide. Priests in Ireland are cut off from ordinary intercourse in a way that seems unknown in other countries. Once when we were arguing he made me impatient and I said, ‘Ah, don’t be a bloody fool, Tim!’ His face suddenly went mad, and for a moment I thought he meant to strike me. Then he recollected himself and said darkly, ‘Do you know that nobody has called me a bloody fool since I was sixteen?’ Then the humour of it struck him, and he described how, once, when he was home on holidays from the seminary he was pontificating at the supper table and suddenly caught his uncle winking at his mother. Then he grew angry again.

  ‘People like you give the impression that it’s our fault if the country is priest-ridden. We know it’s priest-ridden, but what can we do about it? I can’t even get on a tram without some old man or woman getting up to offer me his seat. I can’t go into a living-room without knowing that all ordinary conversation stops, and when it starts again it’s going to be intended for my ears. That’s not a natural life. A man can’t be sane and not be called a bloody fool now and again.’

  That, of course, was my function, though we both knew that his friendship with me was highly dangerous to him. One night after dark, when he was sitting with the other two curates on the sea-front, I passed and he hailed me. Immediately the others rose and strode off without an apology, while Traynor sat there, mad with chagrin, muttering, ‘Dirty ignorant louts!’

  Before I knew him he spent his holidays as a stretcher-bearer in Lourdes: somehow the contact with people who were ill and dying satisfied the gentleness and protectiveness in his nature. There was an enormous amount of this, but it never went on for long because when he felt rebuffed, brooding and anger took its place. In those years he took every chance of spending a few days in Gougane Barra in the mountains of West Cork. He stayed at the inn, abandoned his Roman collar and served at the bar, went fishing and argued with the visitors and (if I knew him) got involved personally and vindictively in every minor disagreement for miles round. His loneliness was of a sort that made it difficult for him to become involved with anything except as a protagonist. Most of his evenings
he spent with Tim Buckley, the Tailor, who had nicknamed him ‘The Saint’.

  The Tailor was a very remarkable man, a crippled old man of natural genius, with a wife as remarkable as himself. Ansty was thin, tragic and sour; the Tailor was plump, wise and sweet-tempered. He sat on a butter-box and blew the fire with his old hat, and carried on an unending dialogue with his wife about the fire, the cow and the Cronins who kept the inn, but their real subject was always human life. He was one of the greatest talkers I have known; and if in the way of great talkers he did occasionally hold the floor too much, it was never because he was self-assertive, but because he had a sort of natural authority that asserted itself without assistance. He suffered from the fact that his cultural tradition was an oral, and hence a very fallible one, so that faced with the unfamiliar it always rationalized, turning everything to folklore. For instance, nothing could persuade him but that the Boer general, De Wet – one of the heroes of his youth – was not a County Cork man who had introduced himself to the black men with a ‘Dia dhuit’, the Gaelic ‘Good day’, and much of what he took for granted was of the same order of knowledge. But he knew almost all that was good in the oral tradition, and because he was a man of natural genius was never completely contained in it, and like Traynor himself he overflowed.

  Literally he was a man who did not know which century he lived in. He lived it intensely in his own as perceived from a little cottage above the mountain road to Gougane Barra, with Hilter, St Patrick and Danny Cohalan, the Bishop of Cork, as strict contemporaries. His favourite song in English was ‘The Herring’, which Cecil Sharp collected also in the Appalachians, but any story or verse he quoted might be of the nineteenth or the fifteenth century, or indeed, from the world of prehistory, and he used it all to serve his own Johnsonian purpose of commenting on the vagaries of human existence. When Ansty tried to rouse him to a state of activity which he found unnatural, he blew the fire with his hat and commented on her folly in the words of the Gárlach Coileánach – ‘My mother was drowned a year ago; she’d have been round the lake since then’; and it was only after his death that it dawned on me that the Gárlach Coileánach was only a corruption of Gárlach loldánach, the Youth of Many Arts, which is one of the ancient names for the Celtic god Lug who gave his name to such faraway places as Lyon and Laon. ‘Take life easy and life will take you easy,’ he used to say, and life had taken him fairly easy up to that: he had never seen a volcano or a bishop in eruption. His time was coming.

  I spent one delightful Christmas with Traynor in Gougane, because I knew that he was feeling restless and lonely. There was no one else at the inn but a middle-aged lady who had known Sir Basil Zaharoff intimately from childhood and had come to spend a few days of perfect peace in the mountains. Traynor, who was gloomily convinced that she was having us on or someone was having her on, had her luggage examined and it contained two dance frocks that Ansty made great play of. ‘Jesus Christ!’ she would mutter mournfully, returning from one of her excursions after the cow. ‘Two young strong men and no wan at all to give the poor woman a tickle!’

  The Tailor knew that I was searching for a song called ‘Driving the Geese at Evening’, which was too broad for the local folklorists to record, and he had ordered down old Batty Kit from the hill to sing it for me. At the sight of Traynor Batty dried up; it was not only in the towns that the conversation changed when a priest came into the room, but the Tailor would have none of this. ‘’Tis a bit barbarous,’ Batty said. ‘Even so, even so,’ said the Tailor. ‘It wasn’t you who wrote or composed it.’ Actually, Batty was crazy to sing. He was a melomaniac and in spite of his great age had a beautiful voice. He lay in wait for the children from the local national school to learn their latest songs, and it was extraordinary to hear that remarkable old man, whose sense of music and language were impeccable, imitating the metronomic beat and the synthetic accent that the schoolchildren had picked up – a horrifying example of what we do to ancient cultures when we try to revive them.

  However, he did sing the song, and I got it down as well as I could, while he interrupted me to point out some verbal felicity. The first verse begins ‘One lovely evening at the yellowing of the sun’, and he stopped and cried, ‘There’s a beautiful phrase for you – “the yellowing of the sun”. There’s a cartload of meaning in that – Tá lán trucaill de bhrí annsan.’

  I had brought whiskey and the Tailor provided beer, and as we left Batty Kit threw his arms round my neck and sobbed, ‘Thanks be to God, Frinshias, we had one grand dirty night.’ Then, as we went up the mountain road in the moonlight, Traynor stopped and looked back.

  ‘Now they’re beginning to talk about us,’ he said darkly.

  ‘Let them,’ I said, but I knew that he was haunted by the thought that whenever he was not there Life in some unimaginably interesting way was going on.

  Then came a tragedy that none of us had expected. A young chemist from London who was camping in Gougane Barra became friendly with the Tailor and made an enchanting record of his conversation and stories to which I wrote an introduction. Mr Edward de Valera’s government immediately banned it as being ‘in its general tendency indecent and obscene’. It was a staggering blow for that kind old couple, who had no notion of how their simple country jokes and pieties would be regarded by illiterate city upstarts. The scores of students who had accepted their hospitality affected never to have heard of them. Their neighbours boycotted them; all but the sergeant of the local police, who cycled out regularly to see that they were not interfered with. Three louts of priests called and forced the old man to go on his knees before his own hearth and burn his copy of the book.

  The Tailor found one defender in a Protestant landlord, Sir John Keane, who spoke of him in the Senate. But the Government henchmen would have none of it, and Mr de Valera’s friend, Senator Bill Magennis, made a speech in which he referred to Ansty as ‘a moron’.

  It was almost as hard on Traynor as it was on the old couple, for his position as a priest made it impossible for him to speak out. He and I visited them together. Nobody from the neighbourhood called, but the Tailor made light of it all. In fact I rarely heard him talk so well. When we rose to go, we found that some local hooligans had rammed the branch of a tree between the latch and the wall so that we were imprisoned until someone got through the little cottage window and released us. Ansty, dreading that the hooligans intended to burn them alive in their home, began to sob, and the Tailor patted her gently and said, ‘There, there, girl! At our age there is little more the world can do to us.’

  Years later, the Irish Government appointed an Appeal Board, which instantly discovered that The Tailor and Ansty was neither indecent nor obscene, but by that time the book was out of print and the Tailor and Ansty were dead, so it was all quite proper and perfectly safe.

  Traynor died while I was in America, and somehow or other his priest friends managed to bury him where he had always wished to be buried, in Gougane Barra: how, I don’t know for, being Traynor, he died penniless and intestate; the rules dictated that he should be buried in the town, and the island cemetery he wished to be buried in had been closed by order of the bishop.

  But even in death he was a romantic, bending circumstances to his will, and his old friends brought him there on Little Christmas Night, when the snow was on the mountains, and the country people came across the dangerous rocks and streams with their lanterns, and an array of cars turned headlights on the causeway to the island church where he was to spend his last night above ground.

  At the other side of the causeway lies the Tailor, under the noble headstone carved for him by his friend Seamus Murphy, with the epitaph I chose for him – ‘A star danced and under it I was born’. I was glad that Traynor permitted that, though he refused to allow Murphy to do what he wanted and replace the cross with an open shears. He himself has no gravestone, but the country people have not forgotten him and on his grave his initials are pricked out in little coloured stones. Even in death the thi
ngs that Traynor would have most liked to know have been hidden from him.

  16

  In 1937, two years after Russell’s death, I had a dress rehearsal of the death that had haunted me from the time I was a child. For years Father had been nagging at me in his own quiet way to get hold of Mother’s birth certificate. At last, he wrote me a peremptory letter, and off I went, half angry, half amused, to the Custom House and wasted time searching for the entry of her birth where I felt it ought to be until I found it more or less where Father said it should be – seventy years back, all but a month or so. I was slightly shocked and very sad, because I had never thought her old at all, but she didn’t seem to take it personally. ‘Your poor dad will be so pleased,’ she said thoughtfully, evoking a very clear picture of Father’s boyish pride and the excitement with which he would report it to the family and friends.

  She was staying with me at the time, and for the first birthday party she would remember I brought home a bottle of champagne. I should have had sense enough to realize the effect that even a glass of sherry could have on her. After supper I went for my usual walk. When I came home she was in the kitchen and she rushed out to greet me. Between the hall door and the kitchen there were seven or eight steps and before my eyes she tripped and tumbled down into the hall-way at my feet. When I tried to lift her she moaned, and I realized that she was badly injured. The McGarrys, who owned the house I lived in, carried her to bed and telephoned for Hayes. I was no help to them because I was hysterical. It seemed to me unbelievable coincidence that she should die after her first birthday party, and I blamed myself and my damned champagne.