The Best of Frank O'Connor

by Frank O'Connor

  ‘Ladies first! Ladies first!’ the baby shrieked in a frenzy of rage. ‘Father, will I be your altar boy?’

  ‘Go on!’ Brendan said scornfully. ‘Little girls can’t be altar boys, sure they can’t, father?’

  ‘I can,’ shrieked Ita, who in her excitement exactly resembled her mother. ‘Can’t I, father?’

  ‘We might be able to get a dispensation for you,’ said the curate. ‘In a pair of trousers, you’d do fine.’

  He was in a wistful frame of mind when he came downstairs again. Children would always be a worse temptation to him than women. Children were the devil! The house was gay and spotless. They had no fine mahogany suite like his, but Una managed to make the few coloured odds and ends they had seem deliberate. There wasn’t a cigarette end in the ashtrays; the cushions had not been sat on. Tom, standing before the fireplace (not to disturb the cushions, thought Fogarty), looked as if someone had held his head under the tap, and was very self-consciously wearing a new brown tie. With his greying hair plastered flat, he looked schoolboyish, sulky, and resentful, as though he were meditating ways of restoring his authority over a mutinous household. The thought crossed Fogarty’s mind that he and Una had probably quarrelled about the tie. It went altogether too well with his suit.

  ‘We want Father Fogey!’ the children began to chant monotonously from the bedroom.

  ‘Shut up!’ shouted Tom.

  ‘We want Father Fogey,’ the chant went on, but with a groan in it somewhere.

  ‘Well, you’re not going to get him. Go to sleep!’

  The chant stopped. This was clearly serious.

  ‘You don’t mind if I drop down to a meeting tonight, Jerry?’ Tom asked in his quiet, anxious way. ‘I won’t be more than half an hour.’

  ‘Not at all, Tom,’ said Fogarty heartily. ‘Sure, I’ll drive you.’

  ‘No, thanks,’ Whitton said with a smile of gratitude. ‘It won’t take me ten minutes to get there.’

  It was clear that a lot of trouble had gone to the making of supper, but out of sheer perversity Tom let on not to recognize any of the dishes. When they had drunk their coffee, he rose and glanced at his watch.

  ‘I won’t be long,’ he said.

  ‘Tom, you’re not going to that meeting?’ Una asked appealingly.

  ‘I tell you I have to,’ he replied with unnecessary emphasis.

  ‘I met Mick Mahoney this afternoon, and he said they didn’t need you.’

  ‘Mick Mahoney knows nothing about it.’

  ‘I told him to tell the others you wouldn’t be coming, that Father Fogarty would be here,’ she went on desperately, fighting for the success of her evening.

  ‘Then you had no business to do it,’ her husband retorted angrily, and even Fogarty saw that she had gone the worst way about it, by speaking to members of his committee behind his back. He began to feel uncomfortable. ‘If they come to some damn fool decision while I’m away, it’ll be my responsibility.’

  ‘If you’re late, you’d better knock,’ she sang out gaily to cover up his bad manners. ‘Will we go into the sitting-room, father?’ she asked over-eagerly. ‘I’ll be with you in two minutes. There are fags on the mantelpiece, and you know where to find the whi-hi-hi – blast that word!’

  Fogarty lit a cigarette and sat down. He felt exceedingly uncomfortable. Whitton was an uncouth and irritable bastard, and always had been so. He heard Una upstairs, and then someone turned on the tap in the bathroom. ‘Bloody brute!’ he thought indignantly. There had been no need for him to insult her before a guest. Why the hell couldn’t he have finished his quarrelling while they were alone? The tap stopped and he waited, listening, but Una didn’t come. He was a warm-hearted man and could not bear the thought of her alone and miserable upstairs. He went softly up the stairs and stood on the landing. ‘Una!’ he called softly, afraid of waking the children. There was a light in the bedroom; the door was ajar and he pushed it in. She was sitting at the end of the bed and grinned at him dolefully.

  ‘Sorry for the whine, father,’ she said, making a brave attempt to smile. And then, with the street-urchin’s humour which he found so attractive: ‘Can I have a loan of your shoulder, please?’

  ‘What the blazes ails Tom?’ he asked, sitting beside her.

  ‘He – he’s jealous,’ she stammered, and began to weep again with her head on his chest. He put his arm about her and patted her awkwardly.

  ‘Jealous?’ he asked incredulously, turning over in his mind the half-dozen men whom Una could meet at the best of times. ‘Who the blazes is he jealous of?’

  ‘You!’

  ‘Me?’ Fogarty exclaimed indignantly, and grew red, thinking of how he had given himself away with his pictures. ‘He must be mad! I never gave him any cause for jealousy.’

  ‘Oh, I know he’s completely unreasonable,’ she stammered. ‘He always was.’

  ‘But you didn’t say anything to him, did you?’ Fogarty asked anxiously.

  ‘About what?’ she asked in surprise, looking up at him and blinking back her tears.

  ‘About me?’ Fogarty mumbled in embarrassment.

  ‘Oh, he doesn’t know about that,’ Una replied frantically. ‘I never mentioned that to him at all. Besides, he doesn’t care that much about me.’

  And Fogarty realized that in the simplest way in the world he had been brought to admit to a married woman that he loved her and she to imply that she felt the same about him, without a word being said on either side. Obviously, these things happened more innocently than he had ever thought possible. He became more embarrassed than ever.

  ‘But what is he jealous of so?’ he added truculently.

  ‘He’s jealous of you because you’re a priest. Surely, you saw that?’

  ‘I certainly didn’t. It never crossed my mind.’

  Yet at the same time he wondered if this might not be the reason for the censoriousness he sometimes felt in Whitton against his harmless bets and his bottles of wine.

  ‘But he’s hardly ever out of your house, and he’s always borrowing your books, and talking theology and church history to you. He has shelves of them here – look!’ And she pointed at a plain wooden bookcase, filled with solid-looking works. ‘In my b-b-bedroom! That’s why he really hates Father Whelan. Don’t you see, Jerry,’ she said, calling him for the first time by his Christian name, ‘you have all the things he wants.’

  ‘I have?’ repeated Fogarty in astonishment. ‘What things?’

  ‘Oh, how do I know?’ she replied with a shrug, relegating these to the same position as Whelan’s bank-balance and his own gadgets, as things that meant nothing to her. ‘Respect and responsibility and freedom from the worries of a family, I suppose.’

  ‘He’s welcome to them,’ Fogarty said with wry humour. ‘What’s that the advertisements say? – owner having no further use for same.’

  ‘Oh, I know,’ she said with another shrug, and he saw that from the beginning she had realized how he felt about her and been sorry for him. He was sure that there was some contradiction here which he should be able to express to himself, between her almost inordinate piety and her light-hearted acceptance of his adoration for her – something that was exclusively feminine, but which he could not isolate with her there beside him, willing him to make love to her, offering herself to his kiss.

  ‘It’s a change to be kissed by someone who cares for you,’ she said after a moment.

  ‘Ah, now, Una, that’s not true,’ he protested gravely, the priest in him getting the upper hand of the lover who had still a considerable amount to learn. ‘You only fancy that.’

  ‘I don’t, Jerry,’ she replied with conviction. ‘It’s always been the same, from the first month of our marriage – always! I was a fool to marry him at all.’

  ‘Even so,’ Fogarty said manfully, doing his duty by his friend with a sort of schoolboy gravity, ‘you know he’s still fond of you. That’s only his way.’

  ‘It isn’t, Jerry,’ she went on obstinately
. ‘He wanted to be a priest and I stopped him.’

  ‘But you didn’t.’

  ‘That’s how he looks at it. I tempted him.’

  ‘And damn glad he was to fall!’

  ‘But he did fall, Jerry, and that’s what he can never forgive. In his heart he despises me and despises himself for not being able to do without me.’

  ‘But why should he despise himself? That’s what I don’t understand.’

  ‘Because I’m only a woman, and he wants to be independent of me and every other woman as well. He has to teach to keep a home for me, and he doesn’t want to teach. He wants to say Mass and hear confessions, and be God Almighty for seven days of the week.’

  Fogarty couldn’t grasp it, but he realized that there was something in what she said, and that Whitton was really a lonely, frustrated man who felt he was forever excluded from the only things which interested him.

  ‘I don’t understand it,’ he said angrily. ‘It doesn’t sound natural to me.’

  ‘It doesn’t sound natural to you because you have it, Jerry,’ she said. ‘I used to think Tom wasn’t normal, either, but now I’m beginning to think there are more spoiled priests in the world than ever went into seminaries. You see, Jerry,’ she went on in a rush, growing very red, ‘I’m a constant reproach to him. He thinks he’s a terrible blackguard because he wants to make love to me once a month.… I can talk like this to you because you’re a priest.’

  ‘You can, to be sure,’ said Fogarty with more conviction than he felt.

  ‘And even when he does make love to me,’ she went on, too full of her grievance even to notice the anguish she caused him, ‘he manages to make me feel that I’m doing all the love-making.’

  ‘And why shouldn’t you?’ asked Fogarty gallantly, concealing the way his heart turned over in him.

  ‘Because it’s a sin!’ she cried tempestuously.

  ‘Who said it’s a sin?’

  ‘He makes it a sin. He’s like a bear with a sore head for days after. Don’t you see, Jerry,’ she cried, springing excitedly to her feet and shaking her head at him, ‘it’s never anything but adultery with him, and he goes away and curses himself because he hasn’t the strength to resist it.’

  ‘Adultery?’ repeated Fogarty, the familiar word knocking at his conscience as if it were Tom Whitton himself at the door.

  ‘Whatever you call it,’ Una rushed on. ‘It’s always adultery, adultery, adultery, and I’m always a bad woman, and he always wants to show God that it wasn’t him but me, and I’m sick and tired of it. I want a man to make me feel like a respectable married woman for once in my life. You see, I feel quite respectable with you, although I know I shouldn’t.’ She looked in the mirror of the dressing-table and her face fell. ‘Oh, Lord!’ she sighed. ‘I don’t look it.… I’ll be down in two minutes now, Jerry,’ she said eagerly, thrusting out her lips to him, her old, brilliant, excitable self.

  You’re grand,’ he muttered.

  As she went into the bathroom, she turned in another excess of emotion and threw her arms about him. As he kissed her, she pressed herself close to him till his head swam. There was a mawkish, girlish grin on her face. ‘Darling!’ she said in an agony of passion, and it was as if their loneliness enveloped them like a cloud.

  As he went downstairs, he was very thoughtful. He heard Tom’s key in the lock and looked at himself in the mirror over the fireplace. He heard Tom’s step in the hall, and it sounded in his ears as it had never sounded before, like that of a man carrying a burden too great for him. He realized that he had never before seen Whitton as he really was, a man at war with his animal nature, longing for some high, solitary existence of the intellect and imagination. And he knew that the three of them, Tom, Una and himself, would die as they had lived, their desires unsatisfied.

  THIS MORTAL COIL

  EVERY SUNDAY morning, at a time when the rest of the city was at church, a few of us met down the quays. We ranged from a clerical student with scruples to a roaring atheist. The atheist, Dan Turner, was the one I liked best. He was a well-built, fresh-coloured man who looked like a sailor or farmer, but was really a County Council official. Part of my sympathy for him was due to the way he was penalized for his opinions. Long before, at the age of eighteen, he had had to give evidence in a taxation case and refused to take the oath. That finished him. Though he was easily the cleverest man in the Courthouse, he would never be secretary or anything approaching it. And knowing that, and knowing the constant intriguing to keep him from promotion, only made him more positive and truculent. Not that he thought of himself as either; in his own opinion he was a perfect example of the English genius for compromise, but the nearest thing he ever got to ignoring some remark he disagreed with was to raise his eyebrows into his hair, turn his blue eyes the other way, and whistle.

  ‘You take things to the fair, Dan,’ I said to him once.

  ‘All I ask,’ he replied reasonably enough, ‘is that bloody idiots will keep their opinions to themselves and not be working them off on me.’

  ‘If you want bloody idiots to do anything of the kind,’ I said, ‘you should go somewhere you won’t be a target for them.’

  ‘And if we all do that, this country will never be anything, only a home for idiots,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, of course, if you want to make a martyr of yourself in the interests of the country, that’s a different thing,’ I said. ‘But it seems to me very queer conduct for a man that calls himself a rationalist. I call that sentimentality.’

  He nearly struck me over calling it sentimentality, but, of course, that’s what it was. For all the man’s brains, he was as emotional as a child. He was cut to the heart by all the intrigues against him. He lived in an old house on the quays with a pious maiden sister called Madge who adored him, cluck-clucked and tut-tutted his most extravagant statements, and went to Mass every morning to pray for his conversion. Though it hurt him that she called in outside aid (even if it was purely imaginary), he was too big a man to hold it against her, and according to his lights he did his best to bring her to some sense of proportion.

  ‘That’s not religion at all,’ he would shout, slapping the arm of his chair in vexation. ‘That’s damn superstition,’ but Madge only pitied and loved him the more for it, and went on in her own way believing in God, ghosts, fairies and nutmegs for lumbago.

  It wasn’t until well on in his thirties that Dan fell in love, and then he did it in a way that no rationalist could approve of. Tessa Bridie wasn’t very young either, but, as with many another fine girl in the provinces, she found the fellows that wanted to marry her were not always those she wanted to marry. As a last resort she was holding on to a clerk in an insurance office, called MacGuinness, with jet-black curly hair, nationalist sentiments, and great aspirations after the religious life, which, I suppose, is the only sort of life a clerk in an insurance office can aspire to.

  In spite of the way he had been spoiled by Madge, Tessa was convinced for a long time that Dan was the answer to her prayers. But Dan in his simple, straightforward way wouldn’t let her be. He explained that he couldn’t be the answer to anyone’s prayer, because there was no one to answer prayers, and it was foolishness, foolishness and madness, to imagine they were answered. Now, Tessa wasn’t by any means a bigoted girl; she had several brothers and she knew that in the matter of religion and politics every man without exception had some deficiency, but this cut at the very roots of her existence. Because if Dan wasn’t the answer to her prayers, what was he? She quietly started a novena for enlightenment, hoping to bring in a verdict in his favour, but so acute was her awareness of his view that there was no enlightenment either, only whatever you wanted to believe yourself, that it ended by convincing her that it was her duty to give him up. He begged and prayed, he cursed and blinded; he assured her he was the most tolerant man in the world and she could believe in any damn nonsense she liked if only she’d marry him, but he had no chance against a direct revelation from heaven. She
got engaged to MacGuinness.

  I thought it a pity, because she was a really nice girl, and MacGuinness was only a poor dishcloth of a man.

  Then I heard through my sister that Dan was behaving very queerly. It seemed he had deserted all his old haunts (he no longer came down the quays on Sundays), refused to eat or talk, and didn’t stir out at night until after dark, when he went for long, lonesome walks in the country. People who had met him talked about the way he passed them without looking or the brief nod he gave them. I knew the symptoms. I felt it was up to me to do something. So one fine spring evening I called. Madge opened the door, and I could see that she had been crying.

  ‘I didn’t see Dan this long time, Madge,’ said I. ‘How is he?’

  ‘Come in, Michael John,’ she said, taking out her handkerchief. ‘He’s upstairs. He didn’t stir out this last couple of days. Sure, you know the County Council will never stand it.’

  I followed her up the stairs. Dan was lying on the bed, dressed but without collar and tie, his two hands under his head, apparently studying the ceiling. When I came in he raised his brows with his usual look of blank astonishment as much as to say: ‘What the hell do you want?’

  ‘Would you like a cup of tea, Dan?’ Madge asked anxiously.

  ‘If ’tis for me you needn’t mind,’ said Dan with a patient, long-suffering air that made it only too plain what he thought of the suggestion that he could be snatched back from the gates of the grave by a cup of tea.

  ‘Wisha, I’m sure Michael John would like one,’ said Madge.

  ‘You’re not feeling well, I hear?’ I said.

  ‘I don’t know how you heard anything of the kind,’ said Dan, rolling his blue eyes to the other side of the room, ‘because I’m sure I didn’t say anything about it.’

  ‘Wisha, Michael John,’ Madge burst out, ‘did you ever in all your life hear of a grown man carrying on like that on account of a woman?’

  ‘Now,’ Dan said, raising his voice and turning the flat of his hand in her direction like a partition wall, ‘I told you I wasn’t going to discuss my business with you.’