The Best of Frank O'Connor

by Frank O'Connor

  They settled down in a modern bungalow outside the town, on the edge of the harbour. Elsie’s mother, who flew over for the wedding, said dryly that she hoped Elsie would be able to make up to Tom for the loss of his mother’s services. In fact, it wasn’t long before the Barrys were saying she wasn’t, and making remarks about her cooking and her lack of tidiness. But if Tom noticed there was anything wrong, which is improbable, he didn’t mention it. Whatever his faults as a sweetheart, he made a good husband. It may have been the affection of a sensitive man for someone he saw as frightened, fluttering, and insecure. It could have been the longing of a frustrated one for someone that seemed to him remote, romantic, and mysterious. But whatever it was, Tom, who had always been God Almighty to his mother and sisters, was extraordinarily patient and understanding with Elsie, and she needed it, because she was often homesick and scared.

  Jerry Coakley was a great comfort to her in these fits, for Jerry had a warmth of manner that Tom lacked. He was an insignificant-looking man with a ravaged dyspeptic face and a tubercular complexion, a thin, bitter mouth with bad teeth, and long lank hair; but he was so sympathetic and insinuating that at times he even gave you the impression that he was changing his shape to suit your mood. Elsie had the feeling that the sense of failure had eaten deeper into him than into Tom.

  At once she started to arrange a match between him and Tom’s elder sister, Annie, in spite of Tom’s warnings that Jerry would never marry till his mother died. When she realized that Tom was right, she said it was probably as well, because Annie wouldn’t put his socks on him. Later she admitted that this was unfair, and that it would probably be a great relief to poor Jerry to be allowed to put on his socks himself. Between Tom and him there was one of those passionate relationships that spring up in small towns where society narrows itself down to a handful of erratic and explosive friendships. There were always people who weren’t talking to other people, and friends had all to be dragged into the disagreement, no matter how trifling it might be, and often it happened that the principals had already become fast friends again when their friends were still ignoring one another in the street. But Jerry and Tom refused to disagree. Jerry would drop in for a bottle of stout, and Tom and he would denounce the country, while Elsie wondered why they could never find anything more interesting to talk about than stupid priests and crooked politicians.

  Elsie’s causes were of a different kind. The charwoman, Mrs Dorgan, had six children and a husband who didn’t earn enough to keep them. Elsie concealed from Tom how much she really paid Mrs Dorgan, but she couldn’t conceal that Mrs Dorgan wore her clothes, or that she took the Dorgan family to the seaside in the summer. When Jerry suggested to Tom that the Dorgans might be doing too well out of Elsie, Tom replied, ‘Even if they were, Jerry, I wouldn’t interfere. If ’tis people’s nature to be generous, you must let them be generous.’

  For Tom’s causes she had less patience. ‘Oh, why don’t you people do something about it, instead of talking?’ she cried.

  ‘What could you do, Elsie?’ asked Jerry.

  ‘At least you could show them up,’ said Elsie.

  ‘Why, Elsie?’ he asked with his mournful smile. ‘Were you thinking of starting a paper?’

  ‘Then, if you can’t do anything about it, shut up!’ she said. ‘You and Tom seem to get some queer masochistic pleasure out of these people.’

  ‘Begor, Elsie, you might have something there,’ Jerry said, nodding ruefully.

  ‘Oh, we adore them,’ Tom said mockingly.

  ‘You do,’ she said. ‘I’ve seen you. You sit here night after night denouncing them, and then when one of them gets sick you’re round to the house to see if there’s anything you can do for him, and when he dies you start a collection for his wife and family. You make me sick.’ Then she stamped out to the kitchen.

  Jerry hunched his shoulders and exploded in splutters and giggles. He reached out a big paw for a bottle of stout, with the air of someone snaring a rabbit.

  ‘I declare to God, Tom, she has us taped,’ he said.

  ‘She has you taped anyway,’ said Tom.

  ‘How’s that?’

  ‘She thinks you need an American wife as well.’

  ‘Well, now, she mightn’t be too far out in that, either,’ said Jerry with a crooked grin. ‘I often thought it would take something like that.’

  ‘She thinks you have problems,’ said Tom with a snort. Elsie’s favourite word gave him the creeps.

  ‘She wouldn’t be referring to the mother, by any chance?’

  For a whole year Elsie had fits of depression because she thought she wasn’t going to have a baby, and she saw several doctors, whose advice she repeated in mixed company, to the great embarrassment of everybody except Jerry. After that, for the best part of another year, she had fits of depression because she was going to have a baby, and she informed everybody about that as well, including the occasion of its conception and the probable date of its arrival, and again they were all embarrassed only Jerry. Having reached the age of eighteen before learning that there was any real difference between the sexes, Jerry found all her talk fascinating, and also he realized that Elsie saw nothing immodest in it. It was just that she had an experimental interest in her body and mind. When she gave him bourbon he studied its taste, but when he gave her Irish she studied its effect – it was as simple as that. Jerry, too, liked explanations, but he liked them for their own sake, and not with the intention of doing anything with them. At the same time, Elsie was scared by what she thought was a lack of curiosity on the part of the Cork doctors, and whenher mother learned this she began to press Elsie to have the baby in America, where she would feel secure.

  ‘You don’t think I should go back, Tom?’ she asked guiltily. ‘Daddy says he’ll pay my fare.’

  It came as a shock to Tom, though the idea had crossed his mind that something of the kind might happen. ‘If that’s the way you feel about it, I suppose you’d better, Elsie,’ he replied.

  ‘But you wouldn’t come with me.’

  ‘How can I come with you? You know I can’t just walk out of the office for a couple of months.’

  ‘But you could get a job at home.’

  ‘And I told you a dozen times I don’t want a job in America,’ he said angrily. Then, seeing the way it upset her, he changed his tone. ‘Look, if you stay here, feeling the way you do, you’ll work yourself into a real illness. Anyway, sometime you’ll have to go back on a visit, and this is as good an occasion as any.’

  ‘But how can I, without you?’ she asked. ‘You’d only neglect yourself.’

  ‘I would not neglect myself.’

  ‘Would you stay at your mother’s?’

  ‘I would not stay at my mother’s. This is my house, and I’m going to stop here.’

  Tom worried less about the effect Elsie’s leaving would have on him than about what his family would say, particularly Annie, who never lost the chance of a crack at Elsie. ‘You let that girl walk on you, Tom Barry,’ she said. ‘One of these days she’ll walk too hard.’ Then, of course, Tom walked on her, in the way that only a devoted brother can, but that was no relief to the feeling that something had come between Elsie and him and that he could do nothing about it. When he was driving Elsie to the liner, he knew that she felt the same, for she didn’t break down until they came to a long grey bridge over an inlet of water, guarded by a lonely grey stone tower. She had once pointed it out to him as the first thing she had seen that represented Ireland to her, and now he had the feeling that this was how she saw him – a battered old tower by a river mouth that was no longer of any importance to anyone but the sea gulls.

  She was away longer than she or anyone else had expected. First there was the wedding of an old school friend; then her mother’s birthday; then the baby got ill. It was clear that she was enjoying herself immensely, but she wrote long and frequent letters, sent snapshots of herself and the baby, and – most important of all – had named the baby f
or Jerry Coakley. Clearly Elsie hadn’t forgotten them. The Dorgan kids appeared on the road in clothes that had obviously been made in America, and whenever Tom met them he stopped to speak to them and give them the pennies he thought Elsie would have given them.

  Occasionally Tom went to his mother’s for supper, but otherwise he looked after himself. Nothing could persuade him that he was not a natural housekeeper, or that whatever his sisters could do he could not do just as well himself. Sometimes Jerry came and the two men took off their coats and tried to prepare a meal out of one of Elsie’s cookbooks. ‘Steady, squad!’ Tom would murmur as he wiped his hands before taking another peep at the book. ‘You never know when this might come in handy.’ But whether it was the result of Tom’s supervision or Jerry’s helplessness, the meal usually ended in a big burnup, or a tasteless mess from which some essential ingredient seemed to be missing, and they laughed over it as they consoled themselves with bread and cheese and stout. ‘Elsie is right,’ Jerry would say, shaking his head regretfully. ‘We have problems, boy! We have problems!’

  Elsie returned at last with trunks full of new clothes, a box of up-to-date kitchen stuff, and a new gaiety and energy. Every ten minutes Tom would make an excuse to tiptoe upstairs and take another look at his son. Then the Barrys arrived, and Elsie gave immediate offence by quoting Gesell and Spock. But Mrs Barry didn’t seem to mind as much as her daughters. By some extraordinary process of association, she had discovered a great similarity between Elsie and herself in the fact that she had married from the south side of the city into the north and had never got used to it. This delighted Elsie, who went about proclaiming that her mother-in-law and herself were both displaced persons.

  The next year was a very happy one, and less trying on Elsie, because she had another woman to talk to, even if most of the time she didn’t understand what her mother-in-law was telling her, and had the suspicion that her mother-in-law didn’t understand her either. But then she got pregnant for the second time, and became restless and dissatisfied once more, though now it wasn’t only with hospitals and doctors but with schools and schoolteachers as well. Tom and Jerry had impressed on her that the children were being turned into idiots, learning through the medium of a language they didn’t understand – indeed, according to Tom, it was a language that nobody understood. What chance would the children have?

  ‘Ah, I suppose the same chance as the rest of us, Elsie,’ said Jerry in his sly, mournful way.

  ‘But you and Tom don’t want chances, Jerry,’ she replied earnestly. ‘Neither of you has any ambition.’

  ‘Ah, you should look on the bright side of things. Maybe with God’s help they won’t have any ambition either.’

  But this time it had gone beyond a joke. For days on end, Tom was in a rage with her, and when he was angry he seemed to withdraw into himself like a snail into a shell.

  Unable to get to him, Elsie grew hysterical. ‘It’s all your damned obstinacy,’ she sobbed. ‘You don’t do anything in this rotten hole, but you’re too conceited to get out of it. Your family treat you as if you were God, and then you behave to me as if you were God! God! God!’ she screamed, and each time she punched him viciously with her fist, till suddenly the humour of their situation struck him and he went off into laughter.

  After that, he could only make his peace with her and make excuses for her leaving him again, but he knew that the excuses wouldn’t impress his sisters. One evening when he went to see them, Annie caught him, as she usually did, when he was going out the front door, and he stood looking sidewise down the avenue.

  ‘Are you letting Elsie go off to America again, Tom?’ she asked.

  ‘I don’t know,’ Tom said, pulling his long nose with an air of affected indifference. ‘I can’t very well stop her, can I?’

  ‘Damn soon she’d he stopped if she hadn’t the money,’ said Annie. ‘And you’re going to let her take young Jerry?’

  ‘Ah, how could I look after Jerry? Talk sense, can’t you!’

  ‘And I suppose we couldn’t look after him either? We’re not sufficiently well read.’

  ‘Ah, the child should be with his own mother, Annie,’ Tom said impatiently.

  ‘And where should his mother be? Ah, Tom Barry,’ she added bitterly, ‘I told you what that one was, and she’s not done with you yet. Are you sure she’s going to bring him back?’

  Then Tom exploded on her in his cold, savage way. ‘If you want to know, I am not,’ he said, and strode down the avenue with his head slightly bowed.

  Something about the cut of him as he passed under a street lamp almost broke Annie’s heart. ‘The curse of God on that bitch!’ she said when she returned to her mother in the kitchen.

  ‘Is it Elsie?’ her mother cried angrily. ‘How dare you talk of her like that!’

  ‘He’s letting her go to America again,’ said Annie.

  ‘He’s a good boy, and he’s right to consider her feelings,’ said her mother anxiously. ‘I often thought myself I’d go back to the south side and not be ending my days in this misfortunate hole.’

  The months after Elsie’s second departure were bitter ones for Tom. A house from which a woman is gone is bad enough, but one from which a child is gone is a deadhouse. Tom would wake in the middle of the night thinking he heard Jerry crying, and be half out of bed before he realized that Jerry was thousands of miles away. He did not continue his experiments with cooking and housekeeping. He ate at his mother’s, spent most of his time at the Coakleys’, and drank far too much. Like all inward-looking men he had a heavy hand on the bottle. Meanwhile Elsie wavered and procrastinated worse than before, setting dates, cancelling her passage, sometimes changing her mind within twenty-four hours. In his despondency Tom resigned himself to the idea that she wouldn’t return at all, or at least persuaded himself that he had.

  ‘Oh, she’ll come back all right,’ Jerry said with a worried air. ‘The question is, will she stay back.… You don’t mind me talking about it?’ he asked.

  ‘Indeed no. Why would I?’

  ‘You know, Tom, I’d say ye had family enough to last ye another few years.’

  Tom didn’t look up for a few moments, and when he did he smiled faintly. ‘You think it’s that?’

  ‘I’m not saying she knows it,’ Jerry added hastily. ‘There’s nothing calculating about her, and she’s crazy about you.’

  ‘I thought it was something that went with having the baby,’ Tom said thoughtfully. ‘Some sort of homing instinct.’

  ‘I wouldn’t say so,’ said Jerry. ‘Not altogether. I think she feels that eventually she’ll get you through the kids.’

  ‘She won’t,’ Tom said bitterly.

  ‘I know, sure, I know. But Elsie can’t get used to the – the irremediable.’ The last word was so unlike Jerry that Tom felt he must have looked it up in a dictionary, and the absurdity of this made him feel very close to his old crony. ‘Tell me, Tom,’ Jerry added gently, ‘wouldn’t you do it? I know it wouldn’t be easy, but wouldn’t you try it, even for a while, for Elsie’s sake? ’Twould mean a hell of a lot to her.’

  ‘I’m too old, Jerry,’ Tom said so deliberately that Jerry knew it had been in his mind as well.

  ‘Oh, I know, I know,’ Jerry repeated. ‘Even ten years ago I might have done it myself. It’s like jail. The time comes when you’re happier in than out. And that’s not the worst of it,’ he added bitterly. ‘The worst is when you pretend you like it.’

  It was a strange evening that neither of them ever forgot, sitting in that little house to which Elsie’s absence seemed a rebuke, and listening to the wind from the harbour that touched the foot of the garden. They knew they belonged to a country whose youth was always escaping from it, out beyond that harbour, and that was middle-aged in all its attitudes and institutions. Of those that remained, a little handful lived with defeat and learned fortitude and humour and sweetness, and these were the things that Elsie, with her generous idealism, loved in them. But she couldn�
�t pay the price. She wanted them where she belonged herself, among the victors.

  A few weeks later, Elsie was back; the house was full of life again, and that evening seemed only a bad dream. It was almost impossible to keep Jerry Og, as they called the elder child, away from Tom. He was still only a baby, and a spoiled one at that, but when Tom took him to the village Jerry Og thrust out his chest and took strides that were too big for him like any small boy with a father he admired. Each day, he lay in wait for the postman and then took the post away to sort it for himself. He sorted it by the pictures on the stamps, and Elsie noted gleefully that he reserved all the pretty pictures for his father.

  Nobody had remembered Jerry’s good advice, even Jerry himself, and eighteen months later Elsie was pregnant again. Again their lives took the same pattern of unrest. But this time Elsie was even more distressed than Tom.

  ‘I’m a curse to you,’ she said. ‘There’s something wrong with me. I can’t be natural.’

  ‘Oh, you’re natural enough,’ Tom replied bitterly. ‘You married the wrong man, that’s all.’

  ‘I didn’t, I didn’t!’ she protested despairingly. ‘You can say anything else but that. If I believed that, I’d have nothing left, because I never cared for anyone but you. And in spite of what you think, I’m coming back,’ she went on, in tears. ‘I’m coming back if it kills me. God, I hate this country; I hate every God damn thing about it; I hate what it’s done to you and Jerry. But I’m not going to let you go.’

  ‘You have no choice,’ Tom said patiently. ‘Jerry Og will have to go to school, and you can’t be bringing him hither and over, even if you could afford it.’

  ‘Then, if that’s what you feel, why don’t you keep him?’ she cried. ‘You know perfectly well you could stop me taking him with me if you wanted to. You wouldn’t even have to bring me into court. I’ll give him to you now. Isn’t that proof enough that I’m coming back?’

  ‘No, Elsie, it is not,’ Tom replied, measuring every word. ‘And I’m not going to bring you into court either. I’m not going to take hostages to make sure my wife comes back to me.’