The Best of Frank O'Connor

by Frank O'Connor

  At first his mother was bewildered; then she became censorious and bitter. Naturally she blamed his father for it all. She even told Jimmy that his father had deliberately set out to corrupt him just to destroy whatever she had been able to do for him, which wasn’t exactly tactful as Jimmy felt most of the credit was due to himself. And then she, who for all those years had managed to keep her mind to herself, started to complain to Jimmy about her marriage, and the drinking, cheating, and general light-mindedness of his father, exactly as though it had all just newly happened. Jimmy listened politely but with a wooden face, which would have revealed to anyone but her that he thought she was obsessed by the subject.

  She was a pathetic figure because, though she was proud and sensitive beyond any woman I knew – the sort who would not call at all unless she brought some little gift, and who took flight if you put on the kettle or looked at the clock – she haunted our house. She was, I think, secretly convinced that I had influence over Jimmy. It made me uncomfortable because not only did I realize how much it cost her to plead for her paragon with a nonentity like myself, but I knew I had no influence over him. He was far too clever to be influenced by anyone like me. He was also, though I do not mean it in a derogatory way, too conceited. Once when I did try in a clumsy way to advise him, he laughed uproariously.

  ‘Listen to him!’ he said. ‘Listen to the steady man! Why, you slug, you never in your whole life put in one week’s connected work at anything.’

  ‘That may be true enough, Jimmy,’ I said without rancour, ‘but all the same you should watch out. You could lose that scholarship.’

  ‘Oh, I don’t think so,’ he said with a smile which expressed his enormous self-confidence. ‘But at any rate, even if I did, the old man has plenty.’

  But, though his mother continued to appeal to me silently, in conversation she developed a sort of facile pessimism that I found harder to understand. It was a kind of cynicism which failed to come off.

  ‘Oh, I know what will happen,’ she said with a shrug. ‘I’ve seen it happen before. His father will get tired of him as he gets tired of everybody, and then he’ll find himself with nothing.’

  IV

  That was not quite how it happened. One month Jimmy’s allowance failed to arrive, and when he wrote his father a bantering letter, threatening to refer the matter to his lawyers, it was Martha who replied. There was no banter about her. His father had been arrested for embezzlement, and house, furniture, and business had all been swallowed up. Martha wrote as though she blamed his father for everything.

  ‘I suppose God’s vengeance catches up on them all sooner or later,’ Mrs Garvin said bitterly.

  ‘Something caught up on him,’ Jimmy said with a stunned air. ‘The poor devil must have been half out of his mind for years.’

  ‘And now it’s the turn of the widows and orphans he robbed,’ said his mother.

  ‘Oh, he didn’t rob anybody,’ Jimmy said.

  ‘You should tell the police that.’

  ‘I’m sure the police know it already,’ said Jimmy. ‘People like Father don’t steal. They find themselves saddled with an expensive wife or family, and they borrow, intending to put it back. Everybody does it one way or another, but some people don’t know where to stop. Then they get caught up in their own mistakes. I wish to God I’d known when I was there. I might have been able to help him.’

  ‘You’ll have enough to do to help yourself,’ she said sharply.

  ‘Oh, I’ll manage somehow,’ he said doubtfully. ‘I dare say I can get a job.’

  ‘As a labourer?’ she asked mockingly.

  ‘Not necessarily,’ he said steadily, looking at her with some surprise. ‘I can probably get an office job.’

  ‘Yes,’ she said bitterly, ‘as a clerk. And all your years of study to go for nothing.’

  That was something she scarcely needed to remind him of, though when he tried to get help he was reminded even more forcefully of the fact which most paragons learn sooner or later: that a cracked paragon is harder to dispose of than plain delft. He had made too much of a fool of himself. The County Council scholarship would not be renewed, and the College would promise nothing.

  Even his mother had lost confidence in him, and as time went on his relations with her became more strained. She could not resist throwing the blame for everything on his father, and here she found herself up against a wall of obstinacy in him. He had already silently separated himself from his Aunt Mary, who had thrown herself on him in tears and told him his father had dragged the good name of the Garvins in the gutter. Jimmy didn’t know about the good name of the Garvins, but somewhere in the back of his mind was a picture of his father facing a police officer alone with that weak innocent smile on his face, and whenever he thought of it a cloud came over his mind. He even wrote affectionately to his father in prison – something his mother found it hard to forgive. Her taunts had become almost a neurosis because she could not stop them, and when she began, nothing was too extravagant for her. Not only had his father deliberately corrupted Jimmy, but it would almost seem as if he had got himself gaoled with no other object than that of disgracing him.

  ‘Oh, give it a rest, Mum,’ Jimmy said, glowering at her from over his book. ‘I made a bit of a fool of myself, but Father had nothing to do with that.’

  ‘Don’t tell me it wasn’t his fault, Jimmy,’ she said cuttingly. ‘Is it you who never touched drink till you set foot in his house? You who never looked at the side of the road a girl walked at till you stayed with that – filthy thing?’

  ‘All right, all right,’ he said angrily. ‘Maybe I am a blackguard, but if I am, that’s my fault, not his. He only did what he thought was the best thing for me. Why do you always assume that everybody but yourself is acting with bad motives?’

  ‘That’s what the police seem to think, too,’ she said.

  Jimmy suddenly lost all control of himself. Like all who have missed the safety-valves of childhood, he had an almost insane temper. He flung his book to a corner of the room and went to the door, white and shaking.

  ‘Damn you!’ he said in a low bitter voice. ‘I think you’re almost glad to see that poor unfortunate devil ruined.’

  It scared her, because for the first time she saw that her son, the boy for whom she had slaved her life away, was no better than a stranger. But it scared Jimmy even more. He had become so accustomed to obedience, gentleness, and industry that he could not even imagine how he had come to speak to his mother in such a tone. He, too, was a stranger to himself, a stranger who seemed to have nothing whatever to do with the Jimmy Garvin who had worked so happily every evening at home, and all he could do was to get away from it all with a couple of cronies and drink and argue till he was himself again.

  What neither of them saw was that the real cause of the breach was that his mother wanted him back, wanted him all to herself as in the old days, and to forget that he had ever met or liked his foolish, wayward father, and that this was something he could not forget, even for her.

  The situation could not last, of course. One evening he came in, looking distressed and pale.

  ‘Mum,’ he said with a guilty air, ‘I have the offer of a room with a couple of students in Sheares’ Street. I can help them with their work, and I’ll have a place to myself to do my own. I think it’s a good idea, don’t you?’

  She sat in the dusk, looking into the fire with a strained air, but when she spoke her voice was even enough.

  ‘Oh, is that so, Jimmy?’ she said. ‘I suppose this house isn’t good enough for you any longer?’

  ‘Now, you know it’s not that, Mum,’ he replied. ‘It’s just that I have to work, and I can’t while you and I are sparring. This is only for the time being, and, anyway, I can always spend the week-ends here.’

  ‘Very well, Jimmy,’ she said coldly. ‘If the house is here you’ll be welcome. Now, I’d better go and pack your things.’

  By the time he left, he was in tears, but she
was like a woman of ice. Afterwards she came to our house and sat over the fire in the kitchen. She tried to speak with calm, but she was shivering all over.

  ‘Wisha, child, what ails you?’ Mother asked in alarm.

  ‘Nothing, only Jimmy’s left me,’ Mrs Garvin answered in a thin, piping voice while she tried to smile.

  ‘Who?’ Mother asked in horror, clasping her hands. ‘Jimmy?’

  ‘Packed and left an hour ago. He’s taken a room with some students in town.… I suppose it was the best thing. He said he couldn’t stand living in the same house with me.’

  ‘Ah, for goodness’ sake!’ wailed Mother.

  ‘That’s what he said, Mrs Delaney.’

  ‘And who cares what he said?’ Mother cried in a blaze of anger. ‘How can you be bothered with what people say? Half their time they don’t know what they’re saying. Twenty-five years I’m living in the one house with Mick Delaney, and where would I be if I listened to what he says?… ’Tis for the best, girl,’ she added gently, resting her hand on Mrs Garvin’s knee. ‘’Tisn’t for want of love that ye were hurting one another. Jimmy is a fine boy, and he’ll be a fine man yet.’

  Almost immediately Jimmy got himself a small job in the courthouse with the taxation people. In the evenings he worked, and over the week-ends he came home. There was no trouble about this. He enjoyed his good meals and his soft bed, and in the evenings you could hear him bellowing happily away at the piano. His mother and he were better friends than they had been for a long time, but something seemed to have broken in her. Nothing, I believe, could now have roused her to any fresh effort. At the best of times she would have taken her son’s liberation hard, but now the facile pessimism that had only been a crust over her real feelings seemed to have become part of her. It wasn’t obtrusive or offensive; when we met she still approached me with the same eagerness, but suddenly she would give a bitter little smile and shrug and say: ‘It’s well to be you, Larry. You still have your dreams.’ She seemed to me to spend more of her time in the church.

  The rooms in Sheares’ Street were not all they might have been, and Jimmy finally married Anne Reidy, the girl he had been walking out with. Anne had always struck me as a fine, jolly, bouncing girl. They lived in rooms on the Dyke Parade with the gas stove in the hall and the bathroom up the stairs, and even for these small comforts Anne had to hold down a job and dodge an early pregnancy, which, according to her, was ‘a career in itself’. Jimmy was studying for a degree from London University, and doing the work by post. They were two hot-blooded people and accustomed to comfort, and the rows between them were shattering. Later they reported them in detail to me, almost as though they enjoyed them, which perhaps they did. Sometimes I met them up the tree-shadowed walk late at night, and went back for an hour to drink tea with them. Jimmy was thin, and there was a translucency about his skin that I didn’t like. I guessed they were pretty close to starvation, yet in their queer way they seemed to be enjoying that, too.

  By this time Jimmy could have had a permanent job in the County Council – people like him have the knack of making themselves indispensable – but he turned it down, foolishly, I thought. He wanted a degree, though he seemed to me to have no clear notion of what use it was going to be to him when he got it. He talked of Anne and himself getting jobs together in England, but that struck me as no more than old talk. It was only later that I understood it. He wanted a degree because it was the only pattern of achievement he understood, and the only one that could re-establish him in his own esteem. This was where he had failed, and this was where he must succeed. And this was what they were really fighting for, living on scraps, quarrelling like hell, dressing in old clothes, and cracking jokes about their poverty till they had the bailiffs in and Anne’s career of childlessness had broken down with a bang.

  Then one night I found them at supper in a little restaurant in a lane off Patrick Street. Jimmy was drunk and excited, and when he saw me he came up to me demonstratively and embraced me.

  ‘Ah, the stout man!’ he shouted with his eyes burning. ‘The steady Delaney! Look at him! Thirty, if he’s a day, and not a letter to his name!’

  ‘He’s celebrating,’ Anne said rather unnecessarily, laughing at me with her mouth full. ‘He’s got his old degree. Isn’t it a blessing? This is our first steak in six months.’

  ‘And what are you going to do now?’ I asked.

  ‘Tomorrow,’ said Jimmy, ‘we’re going on our honeymoon.’

  ‘Baby and all!’ Anne said, and exploded in laughter. ‘Now tell him where!’

  ‘Why wouldn’t I tell him where?’ shouted Jimmy. ‘Why wouldn’t I tell everybody? What’s wrong with going to see the old man in gaol before they let him out? Nobody else did, even that bitch of a woman. Never went to see him and never sent the kid.’

  ‘That’s right,’ Anne said almost hysterically. ‘Now tell him about baby sister Gussie. That’s the bit my mother is dying to hear.’

  ‘You know what your mother can do!’ Jimmy said exultantly. ‘Where’s that waitress?’ he called, his long, pale face shining. ‘Delaney needs drink.’

  ‘Garvin has too much drink,’ said Anne. ‘And I’ll be up all night putting wet cloths on his head.… You should see him when he’s sick,’ she said indignantly. ‘ “Oh, I’m finished! Oh, I’m going to die!” That’s what his mother did for him!’

  That may have been what his mother had done for him – I didn’t know – but what interested me was what his father had done for him. All that evening, while they chattered and laughed in a sort of frenzy of relief, I was thinking of the troubles that Jimmy’s discovery of his father had brought into his life, but I was thinking, too, of the strength it had given him to handle them. Now whatever he had inherited from his parents he had combined into something that belonged to neither of them, that was his alone, and that would keep him master of his destiny till the day he died.

  DARCY IN THE LAND OF YOUTH

  ONE OF the few things Mick Darcy remembered of what the monks in the North Monastery had taught him was the story of Oisin, an old chap who fell in love with a fairy queen called Niamh and went to live with her in the Land of Youth. Then, one day when he was a bit homesick, he got leave from her to come back and have a look at Ireland, only she warned him he wasn’t to get off his horse. When he got back, he found his pals all dead and the whole country under the rule of St Patrick, and, seeing a poor labourer trying to lift a heavy stone that was too big for him but that would have been nothing at all to fellows of his own generation, Oisin bent down to give him a hand. While he was doing it, the saddle-girth broke and Oisin was thrown to the ground, an old, tired, spiritless man with nothing better to do than get converted and be thinking of how much better things used to be in his day. Mick had never thought much of it as a story. It had always struck him that Oisin was a bit of a mug, not to know when he was well off.

  But the old legends all have powerful morals though you never realize it till one of them gives you a wallop over the head. During the war, when he was out of a job, Mick went to England as a clerk in a war factory, and the first few weeks he spent there were the most miserable of his life. He found the English as queer as they were always supposed to be; people with a great welcome for themselves and very little for anyone else.

  Then there were the air-raids, which the English pretended not to notice. In the middle of the night Mick would be awakened by the wail of a siren, and the thump of faraway guns like all the window-panes of Heaven rattling: the thud of artillery, getting louder, accompanied a faint buzz like a cat’s purring that seemed to rise out of a corner of the room and mount the walls to the ceiling, where it hung, breathing in steady spurts, exactly like a cat. Pretending not to notice things like that struck Mick as too much of a good thing. He would rise and dress himself and sit lonesome by the gas fire, wondering what on earth had induced him to leave his little home in Cork, his girl, Ina, and his pal, Chris – his world.

  The daytime was no bett
er. The works were a couple of miles outside the town, and he shared an office with a woman called Penrose and a Jew called Isaacs. Penrose called him ‘Mr Darcy’, and when he asked her to call him ‘Mick’ she wouldn’t. The men all called him ‘Darcy’, which sounded like an insult. Isaacs was the only one who called him ‘Mick’, but it soon became plain that he only wanted to convert Mick from being what he called ‘a fellow traveller’, whatever the hell that was.

  ‘I’m after travelling too much,’ Mick said bitterly.

  He wasn’t a discontented man, but he could not like England or the English. On his afternoons off, he took long, lonesome country walks, but there was no proper country either, only red-brick farms and cottages with crumpled oak frames and high red-tiled roofs; big, smooth, sick-looking fields divided by low, neat hedges which made them look as though they all called one another by their surnames; handsome-looking pubs that were never open when you wanted them, with painted signs and nonsensical names like ‘The Star and Garter’ or ‘The Shoulder of Mutton’. Then he would go back to his lodgings and write long, cynical, mournful letters home to Chris and Ina, and all at once he and Chris would be strolling down the hill to Cork city in the evening light, and every old house and bush stood out in his imagination as if spotlit, and everyone who passed hailed them and called him Mick. It was so vivid that when his old landlady came in to draw the black-out, his heart would suddenly turn over.