The Best of Frank O'Connor

by Frank O'Connor

  As much as Michael’s wife took to them, they took to her. Joan would have wept her eyes out for a homeless dog, but Kate’s sympathy was marked by a certain shrewdness.

  ‘You had small luck in your marriage,’ she said once.

  ‘How?’ The young woman looked at her blankly.

  ‘For all you’re only married a year you had your share of trouble. No honeymoon, then the sickness and now the separation.’

  ‘You’re right. It’s nothing but separations.’

  ‘Ye had only seven months together?’

  ‘Only seven.’

  ‘Ah, God help you, I never saw a lonelier creature than you were the night you came. But that’s how we grow.’

  ‘Is it, I wonder?’

  ‘ ’Tis, ’tis. Don’t I know it?’

  ‘That’s what Father Coveney says,’ wailed Joan, ‘but I could never understand it myself. All the good people having all the misfortunes – that don’t deserve them, and the bad ones getting off.’

  ‘You’ll be happier for it in the latter end, and you’ve a good boy in Michael … Musha, listen to me talking about Michael again. One’d think I was his mother.’

  ‘You might be.’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘He has a lot of your ways.’

  ‘Ah, now, I always said it! Didn’t I, Joan? And why wouldn’t he? When his mother leathered him ’twas up to me he came for comfort.’

  ‘He often said it – you made a man of him.’

  ‘I did,’ said Kate proudly. ‘I did so. Musha, he was a wild boy and there was no one to understand him when he was wild. His mother – not judging her – was born heavy with the weight of sense.’

  Kate rarely lost the chance of a jeer at Maire.

  ‘You’re getting to like us, I think?’ she said at last.

  ‘I am,’ admitted the girl. ‘When I came first I was afraid.’

  ‘You won’t be so glad to get back to the States.’

  ‘I wish I never saw the States again.’

  ‘Och, aye!’

  ‘It’s true.’

  ‘Ah, well. Two years more and ye’ll be back together. And what’s a couple of years to one of your age?’

  ‘More than you think.’

  ‘True, true, years are only as you feel them.’

  ‘And I’ll never come back here again.’

  ‘Ach, bad cess to you, you’re giving into it again! And now, listen to me. ’Tis a thing I often said to Tom Shea, why wouldn’t ye come back? What’s stopping ye? Never mind that ould fool telling you Michael wouldn’t get a job! Why wouldn’t he? And only Tom was such a gligin he’d never have left the boy go away.’

  To Tom’s disgust the weather cleared without heavy rain, though there was little sun, and that wandering, bursting out here and there on the hills or in mirror-like patches on the water and then fading into the same grey sultry light. Now, early and late, Michael’s wife was out, sitting on the rocks or striding off to the village. She became a familiar figure on the roads in her blue dress with her ashplant. At first she stood far off, watching the men at the nets or sitting at the crossroads; as time went on she drew nearer, and one day a fisherman hailed her and spoke to her.

  After that she went everywhere, into their houses, on to the quay and out in the boats when they went fishing. Maire Shea didn’t like it, but all the men had known Michael as a boy and had tales of him and his knowledge of boats and fishing, and after a few days it was as though she too had grown up with them. It may be also that she gathered something from those hours on the water, in silent coves on grey days when the wind shook out a shoal of lights, or in the bay when the thunderous light moved swiftly, starting sudden hares of brightness from every hollow, blue from the hills, violet from the rocks, primrose from the fields, and here and there a mysterious milky glow that might be rock or field or tree. It may be these things deepened her knowledge so that she no longer felt a stranger when she walked in the morning along the strand, listening to the tide expand the great nets of weed with a crisp, gentle, pervasive sound like rain, or from her window saw the moon plunge its silver drill into the water.

  But there was a decided change in her appearance and in her manner. She had filled out, her face had tanned and the gloomy, distraught air had left it.

  ‘There,’ said Tom, ‘didn’t I tell ye we’d make a new woman of her? Would anyone know her for the girl she was the night she came? Would they? I declare to me God, the time she opened the door and walked down the stairs I thought her own were calling.’

  Kate and Joan, too, were pleased. They liked her for her own sake and Michael’s sake, but they had come to love her for the sake of her youth and freshness. Only Maire held her peace. Nothing had ever quite bridged the gap between the two women; in every word and glance of hers there was an implicit question. It was some time before she succeeded in infecting Tom. But one day he came for comfort to Kate. He was downcast, and his shrewd brown eyes had a troubled look.

  ‘Kate,’ he said, going to the heart of things as his way was, ‘ ’tis about Michael’s wife.’

  ‘Och, aye! What about her?’ asked Kate, pulling a wry face. ‘’Tisn’t complaining you are?’

  ‘No, but tell me what you think of her.’

  ‘What I think?’

  ‘ ’Tis Maire.’

  ‘Well?’

  ‘She’s uneasy.’

  ‘Uneasy about what, aru?’

  ‘She thinks the girl have something on her mind.’

  ‘Tom Shea, I tell you now as I told you many a time before, your wife is a suspicious woman.’

  ‘Wisha, wisha, can’t you forget all that? I never seen such a tribe for spite. We know ye never got on. But now, Kate, you can’t deny she’s a clever woman.’

  ‘And what do the clever woman think?’

  ‘She thinks the pair of them had a row; that’s what she thinks now plain and straight, and I won’t put a tooth in it.’

  ‘I doubt it.’

  ‘Well now, it might be some little thing a few words would put right.’

  ‘And I’m to say the few words?’

  ‘Now Kate, ’twas my suggestion, my suggestion entirely. The way ’tis with Moll, she’d say too much or say too little.’

  ‘She would,’ agreed Kate with grim amusement. Maire Shea had the reputation for doing both.

  Next day she reported that the idea was absurd. He had to be content, for Kate too was no fool. But the question in Maire’s manner never ceased to be a drag on him, and for this he did not know whether to blame her or the girl. Three weeks had passed and he began to find it intolerable. As usual he came to Kate.

  ‘The worst of it is,’ he said gloomily, ‘she’s making me as bad as herself. You know the sort I am. If I like a man, I don’t want to be picking at what he says like an ould hen, asking “What did he mean by this?” or “What’s he trying to get out of me now?” And ’tisn’t that Moll says anything, but she have me so bothered I can hardly talk to the girl. Bad luck to it, I can’t even sleep … And last night –’

  ‘What happened last night?’

  He looked at her gloomily from under his brows.

  ‘Are you making fun of me again?’

  ‘I am not. What happened last night?’

  ‘I heard her talking in her shleep.’

  ‘Michael’s wife?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘And what harm if she do in itself?’

  ‘No harm at all!’ howled Tom in a sudden rage, stamping up and down the kitchen and shaking his arms. ‘No harm in the bloody world, but, Chrisht, woman, I tell you it upsot me.’

  Kate looked at him over her wire spectacles with scorn and pity.

  ‘Me mother’s hood cloak that wasn’t worn since the day she died, I must get it out for you. You’ll never be a proper ould woman without it!’

  ‘Moll,’ said Tom that night as they were going to bed, ‘you’re dreaming.’

  ‘How so?’

  ‘About Michael’s
wife.’

  ‘Maybe I am,’ she admitted grudgingly, yet surprising him by any admission at all.

  ‘You are,’ he said, to clinch it.

  ‘I had my reasons. But this while past she’s different. Likely Kate said something to her.’

  ‘She did.’

  ‘That explains it so,’ said Maire complacently.

  Two nights later he was wakened suddenly. It happened now that he did waken like that at any strange noise. He heard Michael’s wife again speaking in her sleep. She spoke in a low tone that dwindled drowsily away into long silences. With these intervals the voice went on and on, very low, sometimes expressing – or so it seemed to him – a great joy, sometimes as it were, pleading. But the impression it left most upon him was one of intimacy and tenderness. Next day she came down late, her eyes red. That same day a letter came from Donegal. When she had read it she announced in a halting way that her aunt was expecting her.

  ‘You won’t be sorry to go,’ said Maire, searching her with her eyes.

  ‘I will,’ replied the girl simply.

  ‘If a letter comes for you!’

  ‘’Tisn’t likely. Any letters there are will be at home. I never expected to stay so long.’

  Maire gave her another long look. For the first time the girl gave it back, and for a moment they looked into one another’s eyes, mother and wife.

  ‘At first,’ said Maire, turning her gaze to the fire, ‘I didn’t trust you. I’m a straight woman and I’ll tell you that. I didn’t trust you.’

  ‘And now?’

  ‘Right or wrong, whatever anyone may say, I think my son chose well for himself.’

  ‘I hope you’ll always think it,’ replied the girl in the same serious tone. She looked at Maire, but the older woman’s air repelled sentiment. Then she rose and went to the door. She stood there for a long time. The day was black and heavy, and at intervals a squall swept its shining net over the surface of the water.

  And now the positions of Tom and his wife were reversed, as frequently happens with two such extremes of temperament. Before dusk rain began to fall in torrents. He went out late to the post office and sat between his two sisters, arguing.

  ‘There’s a woman all out,’ he said bitterly. ‘She upsets me and then sits down on me troubles. What’s on the girl’s mind? There’s something queer about her, something I can’t make out. I’ve a good mind to send word to Michael.’

  ‘And what would you say?’ asked Kate. ‘Disturbing him without cause! Can’t you be sensible!’

  ‘I can’t be sensible,’ he replied angrily. ‘She’s here in my charge and if anything happened her—’

  ‘Nothing will happen her.’

  ‘But if it did?’

  ‘She’s all right. She got back her health that none of us thought she would. Besides, she’s going away.’

  ‘That’s what’s worrying me,’ he confessed. ‘She’ll leave me with the trouble on me, and I haven’t the words to walk back and have it out with her.’

  He returned late through the driving rain. The women had gone to bed. He turned in but could not sleep. The wind rose gradually from the squalls that shook the house and set the window-panes rattling.

  All at once he caught it again, the damned talking. He lay perfectly still in order not to wake Maire. Long intervals of silence and then the voice again. In a sudden agony of fear he determined to get up and ask what was on her mind. Anything was better than the fear that was beginning to take hold of him. He lifted himself in the bed, hoping to crawl out over Maire’s feet without waking her. She stirred, and he crouched there listening to the wind and the voice above his head, waiting till his wife should settle out again. And then, suddenly in a moment when wind and sea seemed to have died down to a murmur, the voice above him rose in three anguished mounting breaths that ended in a suppressed scream. ‘Michael! Michael! Michael!’

  With a groan he sank back and covered his eyes with his hands. He felt another hand coldly touching his forehead and his heart. For one wild, bewildering moment it was as though Michael had really entered the room above his head, had passed in his living body across all those hundreds of miles of waves and storm and blackness; as though all the inexpressible longing of his young wife had incarnated him beside her. He made the sign of the cross as if against some evil power. And after that there was silence but for the thunder of the rising storm.

  *

  Next morning he would have avoided her eyes, but there was something about her that made him look and look in spite of himself. A nervous exaltation had crystallized in her, making her seem ethereal, remote and lovely. Because of the rain that still continued to pour Maire would have had her remain, but she insisted.

  She went out in heavy boots and raincoat to say good-bye to Kate and Joan. Joan wept. ‘Two years,’ said Kate in her hearty way, ‘ ’twill be no time passing, no time at all.’ When she left it was as if a light had gone out in the childless house.

  Maire’s good-bye was sober but generous too.

  ‘I know Michael is in good hands,’ she said.

  ‘Yes,’ replied the girl with a radiant smile, ‘he is.’

  And they drove off through the rain. The sea on which she looked back was blinded by it, all but a leaden strip beside the rocks. She crouched over her black trunk with averted head. Tom, an old potato bag over his shoulders, drove into it, head down. The fear had not left him. He looked down at her once or twice, but her face was hidden in the collar of her raincoat.

  They left the seemingly endless, wind-swept upland road and plunged down among the trees that creaked and roared above their heads, spilling great handfuls of water into the cart. His fear became a terror.

  When he stood before the carriage door he looked at her appealingly. He could not frame the question he looked; it was a folly he felt must pass from him unspoken; so he asked it only with his eyes, and with her eyes she answered him – a look of ecstatic fulfilment.

  The whistle went. She leaned out of the carriage window as the train lurched forward, but he was no longer looking. He raised his hands to his eyes and swayed to and fro, moaning softly to himself. For a long time he remained like that, a ridiculous figure with the old potato bag and the little pool of water that gradually gathered in the platform about his feet.

  From MY FATHER’S SON – THE AMERICAN LINER

  I ENJOYED having him [Father] with us because he was an even better walker than myself, though a more perfunctory one. On a visit to the country his trained military eye sized up the number of roads, and he liked to inspect each once, and when the inspection was complete to go home. The fact that a road was attractive did not mean it needed a second inspection.

  One of these walks in Courtmacsherry is very vivid in my memory, and I wrote a story about it long after. We had climbed a hill overlooking the sea, and on the horizon, apparently moving across it in a series of jerks, like the swan in Lohengrin, was an American liner on its way into Cobh. A farmer working in a field by the road joined us; he too had been watching the liner and it had reminded him of his son who had emigrated to America when he was quite young. After a few years the boy had married an Irish-American girl whose family had come from Donegal, and soon after ceased to write home, though his wife continued to write. Then she fell ill and her doctor suggested a holiday in Ireland. She had arrived one day on a liner like the one we were watching, and her father-in-law had met her at the station with his horse and cart. She had stayed with them for weeks, regained her health, and gradually won the affection of the family. After that she had set off to visit her parents’ family in Donegal, and it was only then that the old Cork couple had learned from a letter to a neighbour that their son was dead before ever she left America.

  Up there on the hill in the evening with the little whitewashed farmhouse beside us and the liner disappearing in the distance, it was an extraordinarily moving story, all the more so because the farmer was obviously still bewildered and upset by it.

  ‘
Why would she do a thing like that to us?’ he asked. ‘It wasn’t that we weren’t fond of her. We liked her, and we thought she liked us.’

  Clearly he suspected that some motive of self-interest was involved, and I was afraid to tell him my own romantic notion that the girl might have liked them all too well and kept her husband alive in their minds as long as she could and – who knows? – perhaps kept him alive in her own.

  I knew that some time I should have to write that story, but Father only listened with the polite and perfunctory smile that he gave to the scenery. Both, no doubt, were suitable for people living in backward places, but did not call for closer inspection, and next morning he was up at six to make sure of catching the noon bus for Cork.

  He was the most complete townie I ever knew.

  8 LAST THINGS

  PREFACE

  ON THE last page of An Only Child O’Connor wrote:

  All our arguments about the immortality of the soul seem to me to be based on one vast fallacy – that it is our vanity that desires eternity. Vanity! As though any reasonable man could be vain enough to believe himself worth immortality! From the time I was a boy and could think at all, I was certain that for my own soul there was only nothingness. I knew it too well in its commonness and weakness. But I knew that there were souls that were immortal, that even God, if He wishes, could not diminish or destroy, and perhaps it was the thought of these that turned me finally from poetry to story-telling, to the celebration of who for me represented all I should ever know of God.