The Ikon Maker

by Desmond Hogan

  She paid the taxi-driver. Walked on in. With her, a son. A goose who was travelling over gardens quacked at her.

  ‘Well, love, you’re home.’

  He entered. There was joy on his face. He’d explained how he’d missed the train the previous night. She heard a train ruminate in the distance. Over the picture of the Sacred Heart a shadow was cast.

  ‘Diarmaid you look so different.’

  He just smiled and said simply, ‘I don’t feel different.’

  She took him at his word.

  Outside a school bus ran.

  She felt its colour, yellow, and thought how quickly time passed.

  She made coffee. He preferred that now. They ate home-made bread. She often, quite expressionlessly, looked out the window.

  He talked of Camden Town, a time with a friend from Dublin there. He’d been working in a Jewish bakery. All the cakes, all the bread had gone by. He’d decided eventually to come home, he said, looking at an advertisement for Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid in Camden Town.

  He’d seen it with his mother in Loughrea once; both had enjoyed it immensely, gone for a walk by the lake afterwards.

  And his mother had said, ‘You’ve a bit of a tinker in you.’ Why she said that he’d never know.

  ‘You mean you’ve come back to find out?’

  ‘Not exactly.’ Diarmaid was silent.

  ‘I’ve come back to – ’

  She knew what he was going to say.

  ‘To get away.’

  Wasn’t everybody saying it these days?

  ‘No. To be alone.’

  The remark lingered; soon it was dark. She made brown bread, cake. Also she made coffee, warm vibrant coffee. They sat and ate the cake which was a coffee cake.

  Diarmaid’s pullover was purple and red and mauve. There were collars on it. He sat with arms folded, sleeves pulled up. On his arms hairs spread – a richness. She felt as though she were gliding into the past – towards safety.

  They were together again. She turned on the radio. The music that issued was a negro’s. Singing a dark song.

  ‘Do what you gotta do.’

  The music seemed to tangle Diarmaid’s muscles. She wanted to cry out. Instead she went to the window. Outside a train – distantly – imparted silence.

  She watched it fade, its lights.

  And in her now was the sense of one of life’s few moments of peace.

  Here was her son. She was here, too. She was happy.

  7

  He behaved strangely, quietly.

  Always by himself, brooding.

  Emptying little things on the table. He’d begun making ikons again – feathers, beads, paper accumulated.

  All sorts of items.

  He began making pictures, Diarmaid did. ‘Collages’, he called them, though in Mrs O’Hallrahan’s mind they would always be ikons. She remembered an article she’d read on ikons in a missionary magazine many years before. Ikons from Russia, faces of the Madonna in blues and greens, and when Diarmaid started with his odds and ends Mrs O’Hallrahan called him in her mind ‘the ikon maker’.

  One day – in March – he created Kew Gardens, all colours, browns, greys of grass, blues of flowers, a mixture of colours for dresses and one solitary hippie amid the throng.

  On him a coat of many colours.

  And suddenly Susan realized. That was it. Her son had become a hippie.

  Vacant his face was. His forehead sometimes like an old man’s.

  Something keen, something frustrated, something far away about him.

  The realization was a sad one, a lonely one.

  It was like reading something on the paper. Diarmaid was far away from her now; old in his way, wise in his way.

  He walked the streets of the village.

  Head down. Strangers looked at him – closely.

  And Mrs Conlon peered at him. Out her window. She looked like a witch the way she squinted.

  All tucked in. And one day while Mrs O’Hallrahan and Mrs Conlon were looking out the window at Diarmaid they mutually observed one another.

  The experience was embarrassing. They both turned away – and probably both in some way had realized they were looking at a misfit.

  8

  One day by consent of both of them they went to Galway. They took a train from Woodlawn. The morning was bright.

  A gull sat on a bench and of last year’s leaves one or two were left under a bench.

  Beside them a woman smoked cigars; a lady with blue hair and a feather in her hat.

  Mrs O’Hallrahan quietly informed her son that the lady was wife of a local doctor. Last year she’d tried to commit suicide by drowning herself in a bog hole.

  She was a sad and lonely woman who drank gins and often stayed – openly – in Hayden’s Hotel in Ballinasloe with young men.

  ‘You’re gossiping’, Diarmaid accused her.

  ‘No,’ Mrs O’Hallrahan said. ‘I’m telling a truthful story.’

  The train came.

  In less than an hour Galway met them, sledge, sea, white on it, gulls rearing, clouds closing in over ship masts. At the station Mrs O’Hallrahan felt a loud whisper of failure in her, the last weeks, Diarmaid saying little, maybe telling her about a concert, a film he’d seen.

  Once he described a homosexual he knew.

  An old man, Greek, who was forever asking Diarmaid to sleep with him.

  ‘And what did you do?’ she asked.

  ‘Nothing.’

  Surprised at her own frankness Mrs O’Hallrahan laughed.

  ‘God you’re awful.’

  And realizing it was the wrong thing she’d said qualified her statement.

  ‘No, love, you did right.

  There are some people it’s wrong to pity though because pity isn’t fair.

  It tends to destroy.’

  Diarmaid had gazed at her. There’d been a ray of sunlight fixed in the room. His hair quite white. And he’d looked at her strangely.

  As though she weren’t his mother at all but a beautiful stranger.

  Sounds of Galway met them; a young tinker boy sang ‘Faith of our Fathers’ outside Lydon’s teahouse. An old man begged; young executive types rushed everywhere.

  First they stopped in O’Gorman’s and there they bought a copy of Sinéad Bean de Valera’s fairy stories.

  ‘I’ll give it to Etty’s child,’ Susan said.

  Etty was a widow-woman who had two children. She sustained herself by making carpets. Her husband had died in a car accident.

  Like an increasing number of people in the neighbourhood.

  Next they visited Kenny’s art shop.

  From a painting women in scarlet gazed out.

  ‘Lovely,’ Mrs O’Hallrahan said, like a very cultured art dealer.

  On the Claddagh their hair shook. Swans moved.

  Like a thousand ships.

  A priest hurried by and as though seized by something Mrs O’Hallrahan lifted her hands.

  ‘It’s lovely.’

  Her son agreed.

  Together they walked. ‘I used to come here with your father when salmon swarmed under the weir.’

  ‘That must have been a good while ago.’ Diarmaid said, innocently enough.

  ‘Not that long ago.’

  In Lydon’s they had lunch.

  And the modernity of the place was unfavourable. As quick as possible they left, up University Road. Young students floated by on bicycles. A girl and a boy on the one bicycle, blue. Flowers already grew; crocuses on the plain outside college, and the ramparts of the university rose.

  ‘Sure you can go there next year. We’ll find money.’

  However Diarmaid just looked at her. His anger was small but she recognized, Mrs O’Hallrahan did, that he had no intention of going to college. That soon he’d return to England. Even as his father left for the States. Salthill; water surfaced, waves.

  Diarmaid threw in a stick, a dog followed it.

  And inside her now Mrs O�
��Hallrahan felt it like a graveyard; hope gone.

  The few desolate figures of her life wending towards her.

  When Diarmaid had gone to the toilet she sat on the beach, wept.

  No one saw.

  And looking up Clare shone opposite her, over the bay.

  And inside her a young girl seemed to yawn, the girl who’d married George O’Hallrahan. And the same girl who’d had no idea what lay before her in the line of tragedy. A husband dead and a son – like gulls – distant from her.

  9

  He’d gather cowslips, return with an impending bunch. Like a little girl. Forehead delicate, eyes auburn. China cups choked with cowslips.

  And at night together in the kitchen they’d talk.

  Diarmaid quietly recalled London, his winter there, old ladies with ulcers abandoned around Charing Cross, a young man on winter evenings playing a viola; sunsets on the Thames and at night Chinese cafés and faces.

  Other Irish exiles looking keenly into space. Diarmaid coming and going to films. His winter seemed more like a summer.

  ‘Your life is so rich now,’ his mother said.

  And in her mind she was wandering again with him in Dublin Zoo, 1959, when he was small and hippopotami browsed from grottoes, opening mouths into caves.

  ‘Your life is so rich.’ And on an Irish Catholic headline she saw that a bishop was dead.

  He walked down a laneway one day. She watched from her mother’s house.

  His hair in little wiggles. Like Marilyn Munroe’s.

  She felt herself praying for him. Yet the dense area of prayer in her seemed a betrayal now.

  Sometimes – sometimes he could almost feel there was no God.

  Alice said, ‘He’s a strange lad.’ Her niece. Almost as old as herself.

  Alice was pouring tomato ketchup on chips.

  She’d been talking about the Battle of Aughrim, the battle which the Irish had lost to William of Orange, the battle fought nearby where many thousands of Irish were either slaughtered or had fled in ignominy. The defeat was remembered vividly, reminisced about in ballads, in folk stories, in the dying legends of a race.

  Her mother lay in bed in the kitchen.

  Alice tended to her chips.

  ‘Your son is a strange breed,’ her mother said. ‘A strange breed. He’ll go far.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘Travel afar. He’s got wanderlust in him. He’s a child who intends to travel.’

  ‘Travel leads you nowhere,’ Susan said with unexpected bitterness.

  ‘You never went far,’ Alice said. Not with any malice.

  ‘London during the Second World War was as far as one could go,’ Susan said. ‘The bitter things of life were there.’

  And she realized she’d gone as far as a person could go.

  From an Egyptian restaurant in Soho in those years to blazing flesh and the sight of a woman running with a girl’s strapless shoe.

  Yes, she’d gone as deep into people as was possible; deeper than most.

  She turned about. Her son entered. A stranger in the house.

  Under a picture of the Sacred Heart his forehead gleamed.

  ‘We were just talking about the Battle of Aughrim,’ Alice said.

  ‘Why that?’

  ‘We’re interested.’

  Alice was being funny.

  ‘Interested?’

  ‘Shouldn’t everybody be interested in their local history?’

  ‘I suppose so,’ Diarmaid said. ‘Drunk boys in London. Guys from Kilconnell vomiting in Kilburn.’

  ‘Don’t say you were among them.’

  ‘No. Not yet.’

  His mother looked at him, distraught.

  ‘We live in a sad country,’ Alice said into the wash-basin.

  And in Susan’s mind now, prompted by the remark and by the sound of suds, were visions of gulls.

  Gulls over Galway; the Claddagh wrapped in swans.

  All the time swans on the Claddagh in the late forties.

  ‘Funny you should say that,’ Susan said. ‘I remember George, Diarmaid’s father, once telling me Ireland was the saddest country on earth because it didn’t know its own soul.

  What he meant I never knew until recently.’

  Alice looked in amazement. Her mother stared approvingly.

  ‘We just don’t know how to manage. Don’t know what to do, how to act in extreme situations.

  Irish people make fools of themselves because they’ve no beliefs. No real beliefs.’

  She stared out the window.

  Most of the time now she didn’t know what she was saying.

  But looking out the window – fields green and turf glimmering – she realized that at least she’d had a beautiful, a lovely youth.

  10

  Diarmaid took to her philosophical turns of phrase strangely.

  Looked at her – half-suspiciously. The way he looked at television.

  All in all it had to be admitted that Susan’s family – if nothing else – were a thinking family.

  Over the days Susan and her son grew closer, walked by ragged hedges together, Susan in a pink cardigan.

  And it occurred to Susan that she and Diarmaid were like brother and sister rather than mother and son.

  Their laughter rang; Diarmaid patted a donkey one day.

  And his mother took a photograph of him.

  The boy laughed. Together they ran through the fields and sat by a pond.

  ‘There was a pond like this in school,’ Diarmaid said. ‘I used to go there with Derek O’Mahony.’ His stance flowered. He grew larger. It was as though he could speak for the first time about a subject.

  ‘We were great friends.’

  ‘I know.’

  ‘Mammy, I loved that boy, I loved him so much. I hated to see other boys torment him. That’s why I stood beside him. So they’d torment me, too. They never did. They sort of respected me.

  I’m not sure why.

  He was a funny bloke. He’d write poems about swans and then make paper boats of them. A bit mad. Not too mad though.

  He loved Keats and Shelley.

  And then one day, one day I suppose he hanged himself.’

  On the famine tree, Susan said to herself.

  God help us. Christ be with us.

  They rose. Perished by religious truth she drew her cardigan about her.

  Stiffened. Walked on. Christ had been nowhere to be seen the day Derek O’Mahony had died.

  Everywhere people suffered without a God, Susan thought.

  Fearing the verdict of all this she gave up thinking.

  But later that night by her bed she opened an old missal – unused for years – and found a declaration. ‘Susan, 1938, Galway.’

  And she thought – fondly – of a tinker child she’d known in Galway in those years, his feet long and spare – like a swan’s.

  ‘God bless your youth,’ people would say then.

  And she realized, deep in her then, that God was spare in his blessings.

  But exact.

  He proportioned everything evenly.

  Life was a sacrifice, a flow, a gregarious mixture of hope, defeat, despair.

  And out of despair – as out of a dark room in a country cottage you found a lovely old earthenware jug – so also you found hope.

  Going to buy groceries in the morning she noticed how fine the day was.

  Passing by a tinker said ‘Hello.’

  And turning about she saw her son, Diarmaid, play with a child.

  11

  She’d tell him about the war at nights, crippledom of electricity, of transport.

  ‘One day on a platform in Hyde Park a woman got up to sing “The Vale of Avoca”. An Irish woman. A bit mad. But she was wonderful. It’s funny what you remember, isn’t it?’

  Diarmaid nodded in agreement. ‘The Rolling Stones play there now.’

  ‘Who?’ – and then she remembered the pale faces, some looking rather like clowns, on an ol
d record sleeve.

  ‘Are they still around?’

  ‘Well I suppose it’s an exaggeration to say they play in Hyde Park. But they’re still around.’

  Cups washed they went to bed; outside lights burned, subserviently.

  It was as though they were graciously bowing before a God.

  Some presence in the night. Yet the east Galway nights were lonely ones. Full of cows calving, farmers farting, old women dying somewhere of cancer or a loneliness they’d once picked up at a fair.

  This indeed was a countryside of betrayal. The dead seemed to linger. Something unspoken in their lives. Only in summer when poppies vagrantly lined the walls and the sound of Chopin came from the local doctor’s house where a woman, his wife, frigidly obeyed the laws of summer.

  Somewhere now a curlew called.

  She was back in a train going north during the war. Up to Durham through lovely countryside to see a boy she’d known in Galway who was dying of T.B.

  A blond-headed boy, not unlike Diarmaid now, up through hills where shadows crossed to a town of pipelines and factories. Her mind was again in that train; she’d been reading a book.

  Mary Lavin. Tales from Bective Bridge. Some item of Irish literature which had emerged at the time.

  The boy, her friend from Galway, of whom her husband George was jealous because in ways he was more beautiful then him, died.

  They’d never bothered to bring him back to Ireland because of the war. They’d buried him – funnily enough – in London. Brought his body down as bombers wheeled in neighbouring cities and in the newspapers. Buried him beside a grand-uncle in Harrow.

  ‘Requiescat in pace.’ The words came back. Fear also. Would Diarmaid die too? He looked so like that boy she’d known in Galway. Dismissing the thought from her mind Susan feigned interest in a song on the radio. Billie Holiday, a bejewelled voice from yesterday, singing ‘Solitude’.

  12

  His collages were becoming bloodier, all red; one day he smeared lipstick over eggshells.

  ‘Is this because of the war stories I’ve been telling you?’ she asked.

  ‘No,’ he said simply. He was wearing a brown polo-neck jumper. He looked at her. Blond streaked his forehead and she noticed he’d won a few freckles from recent sunshine. Large ones. Like tadpoles.

  ‘Love, I’m sorry,’ she said.

  He turned away.