The Best of Frank O'Connor

by Frank O'Connor

  *

  That evening, the two priests set off in Fogarty’s car for the city. Jackson brought Fogarty to a very pleasant restaurant for dinner. He was a tall, thin man with a prim, watchful, clerical air, who knew his way round. He spent at least ten minutes over the menu and the wine list, and the headwaiter danced attendance on him as headwaiters do only when there is a big tip in view or they have to deal with an expert.

  ‘I’m having steak,’ Fogarty said to cut it short.

  ‘Father Fogarty is having steak, Paddy,’ said Jackson, looking at the headwaiter over his spectacles. ‘Make it rare. And stout, I suppose?’

  ‘I’ll spare you the stout,’ said Fogarty. ‘Red wine.’

  ‘Mind, Paddy,’ said Jackson warningly. ‘Father Fogarty said red wine. You’re in Ireland now, remember.’

  Next morning, they went to the mortuary chapel, where the coffin was resting on trestles before the altar. Beside it, to Fogarty’s surprise, was a large wreath of red roses. When they rose from their knees, Devine’s uncle Ned had come in with his son. Ned was a broad-faced, dark-haired, nervous man, with the anaemic complexion of the family.

  ‘I’m sorry for your trouble, Ned,’ Father Fogarty said.

  ‘I know that, father,’ said Ned.

  ‘I don’t know if you know Father Jackson. He was a great friend of Father Willie’s.’

  ‘I heard him speak of him,’ said Ned. ‘He talked a lot about both of you. Ye were his great friends. Poor Father Willie!’ he added with a sigh. ‘He had few enough of them.’

  Just then the parish priest entered and spoke to Ned Devine. He was a tall man with a stern, unlined, wooden face. He stood for a few moments by the coffin, then studied the breastplate and the wreath, looking closely at the tag of the wreath. It was only then that he beckoned the two younger priests aside.

  ‘Tell me,’ he asked in a professional tone, ‘what are we going to do about this?’

  ‘About what?’ Fogarty asked in surprise.

  ‘This wreath,’ said Father Martin, giving him a candid glare.

  ‘What’s wrong with it?’

  ‘ ’Tis against the rubrics.’

  ‘For Heaven’s sake!’ Fogarty said impatiently. ‘What have the rubrics to do with it?’

  ‘The rubrics have a lot to do with it,’ Martin said sternly. ‘And, apart from that, ’tis a bad custom.’

  ‘You mean Masses bring in more money?’ Fogarty asked with amused insolence.

  ‘I do not mean Masses bring in more money,’ said Martin, who seemed to reply to every remark verbatim, like a solicitor’s letter. ‘I mean that flowers are a pagan survival.’ He looked at the two young priests with the same innocent, anxious, wooden air. ‘And here am I, week in, week out, preaching against flowers, and a blooming big wreath of them in my own church. And on a priest’s coffin too, mind you! What am I going to say about that?’

  ‘Who asked you to say anything?’ asked Fogarty. ‘The man wasn’t from your diocese.’

  ‘Oh, now, that’s all very well,’ said Martin. ‘And that’s not the whole story, and you know it.’

  ‘You mean, the wreath is from a woman?’ broke in Jackson.

  ‘I do mean the wreath is from a woman.’

  ‘A woman?’ Fogarty exclaimed in astonishment. ‘Does it say so?’

  ‘It does not say so. But ’tis red roses.’

  ‘And does that mean it’s from a woman?’

  ‘What else could it mean?’

  ‘It could mean it’s from somebody who didn’t study the language of flowers the way you seem to have done,’ said Fogarty.

  ‘Oh, well,’ Jackson intervened again with a shrug, ‘we know nothing about it. You’ll have to decide about it yourself. It’s nothing to do with us.’

  ‘I don’t like doing anything when I wasn’t acquainted with the man,’ said Martin, but he made no further attempt to interfere, and one of the undertaker’s men took the wreath and placed it on the hearse. Fogarty controlled himself with difficulty. As he banged open the door of the car and started the engine, his face was very flushed. He drove with his head bowed and his brows jutting down like rocks above his eyes. As they cleared the Main Street he burst out.

  ‘That’s the sort of thing that makes me ashamed of myself! “Flowers are a pagan survival.” And they take it from him, Jim! They listen to that sort of stuff instead of telling him to shut his ignorant gob.’

  ‘Oh, well,’ Jackson said in his nonchalant, tolerant way, ‘he was right, of course.’

  ‘Right?’

  ‘I mean, on the appearance of the thing. After all, he didn’t know Devine.’

  ‘All the more reason why he shouldn’t have interfered. Do you realize that he’d have thrown out that wreath only for us being there? And for what? His own dirty, mean, suspicious mind!’

  ‘Ah, I wouldn’t say that. I wouldn’t have let that wreath go on the coffin.’

  ‘You wouldn’t? Why not?’

  ‘It was from a woman all right.’

  Jackson lit his pipe and looked over his spectacles at Fogarty.

  ‘Yes, one of Devine’s old maids.’

  ‘Ever heard of an old maid sending a wreath of red roses?’

  ‘To tell you the God’s truth,’ Fogarty confessed with boyish candour, ‘it would never have struck me that there was anything wrong with it.’

  ‘It would have struck the old maid, though.’

  Fogarty missed a turning and reversed with a muttered curse.

  ‘You’re not serious, Jim?’ he said after a few moments.

  ‘Oh, I’m not saying there was anything wrong in it,’ Jackson replied with a shrug. ‘Women get ideas like that. You must have noticed that sort ofthing yourself.’

  ‘These things can happen in very innocent ways,’ Fogarty said with ingenuous solemnity. Then he began to scowl again, and a blush spread over his handsome craggy face that was neither anger nor shame. Like all those who live greatly in their imaginations, he was always astonished and shocked at the suggestion that reached him from the outside world: he could live with his fantasies only by assuming that they were nothing more. The country began to grow wilder under the broken spring light; the valley of the river dropped away with a ruined abbey on its bank, and a pine-clad hill rose on their right, the first breath of the mountains. ‘I can’t believe it,’ he said angrily, shaking his head.

  ‘You don’t have to believe it,’ Jackson said, nursing his pipe. ‘I’d nearly be glad if Martin’s suspicions were right. If ever a man needed somebody to care for him, Devine did.’

  ‘But not Devine, Jim,’ Fogarty said obstinately. ‘You could believe a thing like that if it was me. I could nearly believe it if it was you. But I knew Devine since we were kids, and he wouldn’t be capable of it.’

  ‘I never knew him like that,’ Jackson admitted mildly. ‘In fact, I scarcely knew him at all, really. But I’d have said he was as capable of it as we are. He was a good deal lonelier than we’ll ever be.’

  ‘God, don’t I know it!’ Fogarty ground out in self-reproach. ‘If it was drinking, I could understand it.’

  ‘Devine was too fastidious.’

  ‘But that’s what I say.’

  ‘There’s a big difference,’ said Jackson. ‘A very intelligent woman, for instance, might have appealed to him. You can imagine how he’d appeal to her. After all, you know, what he meant to us; the most civilized chap we could meet. Just fancy what a man like that would mean to some woman in a country town: maybe a woman married to some lout of a shopkeeper or a gentleman farmer.’

  ‘He didn’t tell you about her?’ Fogarty asked incredulously, because Jackson spoke with such plausibility that it impressed him as true.

  ‘Oh, no, no, I’m only guessing,’ Jackson said hastily, and then he blushed too.

  Fogarty remained silent, aware that Jackson had confessed something about himself, but he could not get the incredible idea of Devine out of his mind. As the country grew wilder and furze bushe
s and ruined keeps took the place of pastures and old abbeys, he found his eyes attracted more and more to the wreath that swayed lightly with the swaying of the hearse and seemed to concentrate all the light. It seemed an image of the essential mystery of a priest’s life.

  What, after all, did he know of Devine? Only what his own temperament suggested, and mostly – when he wasn’t being St Francis of Assisi, in Devine’s phrase – he had seen himself as the worldly one of the pair, the practical, coarse-grained man who cut corners, and Devine as the saint, racked by his own fastidiousness and asceticism that exploded in his bitter little jests. Now his mind boggled at the agony which could have driven a man like Devine to seek companionship in such a way; yet the measure of his incredulity was that of the conviction which he would soon feel, the new level on which his thought must move.

  ‘God!’ he burst out. ‘Don’t we lead lonely lives. We probably knew Devine better than anyone else in the world, and there’s that damn thing in front of us, and neither of us has a notion what it means.’

  ‘Which might be just as well for our own comfort,’ Jackson said.

  ‘If you’re right, I’ll take my oath it did very little for Devine’s,’ Fogarty said grimly.

  ‘Oh, I don’t know,’ Jackson said. ‘Isn’t that the one thing we all really want from life?’

  ‘Would you say so?’ Fogarty asked in astonishment. He had always thought of Jackson as a cold fish, a go-getter, and suddenly found himself wondering about that too; wondering what it was in him that had appealed so much to Devine. He had the feeling that Jackson, who was, as he modestly recognized, by far the subtler man, was probing him, and for the same reason. Each of them was looking in the other for the quality which had attracted Devine, and which having made him their friend might make them friends also. ‘I couldn’t do it though, Jim,’ he said sombrely. ‘I went as close to it as I’m ever likely to do. It was the wife of one of the chaps that was with me in the seminary. She seemed to be all the things I ever wanted a woman to be. Then, when I saw what her marriage to the other fellow was like, I realized that she hated him like poison. It might have been me she hated that way. It’s only when you see what marriages are like, as we do, that you know how lucky we are in escaping them.’

  ‘Lucky?’ Jackson repeated with light irony. ‘Do you really think we’re lucky? Have you ever known a seminary that wasn’t full of men who thought themselves lucky? They might be drinking themselves to death, but they never once doubted their luck. Clerical sour grapes.… Anyway, you’re rather underrating yourself if you think she’d have hated you.’

  ‘You think I might have made her a good husband?’ Fogarty asked, flushing with pleasure, for this was what he had always thought himself when he permitted his imagination to rest on Una Whitton.

  ‘Probably. You’d have made a good father at any rate.’

  ‘God knows you might be right,’ said Fogarty. ‘It’s easier to do without a woman than it is to do without kids. My mother was the same. She was wrapped up in us; she always wanted us to be better than anyone else, and when we did badly at school or got into trouble it nearly broke her heart. She said it was the Fogarty blood breaking out in us – the Fogartys were all horse dealers.’ His handsome, happy face clouded again with the old feelings of remorse and guilt, unjustified, like most of his self-reproach. ‘I’m afraid she died under the impression that I was a Fogarty after all.’

  ‘If the Fogartys are any relation to the Martins, I’d say it was most unlikely,’ said Jackson.

  ‘I never really knew till she was dead how much she meant to me,’ Fogarty said broodingly. ‘I insisted on performing the burial service myself, though Hennessey warned me not to. My God, the way we gallop through it till it comes home to ourselves! I broke down and bawled like a kid and Hennessey got up and finished it.’

  Jackson shook his head uncomprehendingly. ‘You feel these things more than I do. I’m a cold fish.’

  It struck Fogarty that, though this was precisely what he had always believed, he would now believe it no longer. ‘That settled me,’ he said. ‘Up to that, I used to be a bit flighty, but afterwards, I knew I could never care for another woman as I cared for her.’

  ‘Nonsense!’ Jackson said lightly. ‘That’s the best proof you could offer a woman that you’d care for her as much. Love is just one thing, not a half dozen. If I had my eye on a woman, I’d take good care to choose one who cared that way for her father. You’re the sort who’d go to hell for a woman if ever you let yourself go. I couldn’t go to hell for anybody. The nearest I ever got to it was with one woman in a town I was in. I didn’t realize the state she was getting herself into till I found her outside my door at two o’clock one morning. She wanted me to take her away! You can imagine what happened to her afterwards.’

  ‘She went off with someone else?’

  ‘No. Drink. And it was nothing but loneliness. After that, I decided that people of my sort have no business with love.’

  At the word ‘love’ Fogarty felt his heart contract. It was partly the wreath, brilliant in the sunlight, that had drawn him out of his habitual reserve and linked him with a man of even greater reserve, partly the excitement of returning to the little town where he had grown up. He hated it; he avoided it; it seemed to be the complete expression of all the narrowness and meanness that he tried to banish from his own thoughts; but at the same time, it contained all the violence and longing that had driven him out of it, and when once he drew near it a tumult of emotions rose in him that half strangled him.

  ‘There it is!’ he said triumphantly, pointing to a valley where a tapering Franciscan tower rose from a clutter of low Georgian houses and thatched cabins. ‘They’ll be waiting for us at the bridge. That’s the way they’ll be waiting for me when my turn comes.’

  ‘They’ were the priests and townspeople who had come out to escort the hearse to the cemetery. Ned Devine steered people to their places. Four men shouldered the coffin over the high-arched bridge past the ruined castle and up the hilly Main Street. Shutters were up on the shop fronts, blinds were drawn, everything was at a standstill except here and there where a curtain was lifted and an old woman, too feeble to make the journey, peered out.

  A laneway led off the hilly road, and they came to the abbey; a tower and a few walls with tombstones thickly sown in choir and nave. The hearse was already drawn up and people gathered in a semi-circle about it. Ned Devine came hastily up to the car where the two priests were donning their surplices.

  ‘Whisht, Father Jerry,’ he muttered in a strained, excited voice. ‘People are talking about that wreath. I wonder would you know who sent it?’

  ‘I know nothing at all about it, Ned,’ Fogarty replied roughly, and suddenly felt his heart begin to pant violently.

  ‘Come here a minute, Sheela,’ Ned called, and a tall, pale girl in black, with the stain of tears on her long, bony face, left the little group of mourners and joined them. ‘You know Father Jerry. This is Father Jackson, Father Willie’s other friend. They don’t know anything about it.’

  ‘Then I’d let them take it back,’ she said doggedly.

  ‘What would you say, father?’ Ned asked, appealing to Fogarty.

  Fogarty suddenly felt his courage desert him. In arguing with Martin, he had felt himself dealing with an equal, but now the intense passions and prejudices of the little town seemed to rise up and oppose him, and he felt himself again an adolescent, rebellious but frightened.

  ‘I can only tell you what I told Father Martin,’ he blustered.

  ‘Did Father Martin talk about it too?’ Ned asked sharply.

  ‘He did.’

  ‘There!’ Sheela said vindictively. ‘What did I tell you?’

  ‘Well, the pair of you may be cleverer than I am,’ Fogarty said. ‘I can only say what I said before: I’d never have noticed anything wrong with it.’

  ‘It was no proper thing to send to a priest’s funeral,’ she hissed with prim fury. ‘Whoever sent it
was no friend of my brother.’

  ‘You wouldn’t agree with that, father?’ Ned asked anxiously.

  ‘But I tell you, Uncle Ned, if that wreath goes into the graveyard we’ll be the laughing-stock of the town,’ she said furiously.

  ‘Whisht, girl, whisht, and let Father Jerry talk!’ he snapped angrily.

  ‘Well, Ned, it seems to me to be entirely a matter for yourselves,’ Fogarty replied. ‘I can only tell you what I think.’ He was really scared now; he realized that he was in danger of behaving imprudently in public, and that sooner or later the story would get back to the Bishop and it would be suggested that he knew more than he pretended.

  ‘If you’ll excuse my interrupting, father,’ Jackson said suavely, giving him a warning glance over his spectacles, ‘I know it isn’t my place to speak –’

  ‘But that’s the very thing we want, father,’ Ned said passionately. ‘If you say ’tis all right, that’s enough for me.’

  ‘Oh, well, Mr Devine, that would be too great a responsibility for me to take,’ Jackson said with a cautious smile, though his pale face had grown flushed. ‘You know this town. I don’t. I only know what it would mean in my own place. I’ve told Father Fogarty already that I agree with Miss Devine. I think it was wrong to send it. But,’ and his mild voice suddenly grew menacing, and he shrugged his shoulders and spread out his hands with a contemptuous look, ‘if you were to send that wreath back from the graveyard, you’d make yourself something far worse than a laughing-stock. You’d throw mud on a dead man’s name that would never be forgotten for you, the longest day you lived.… Things may be different here, of course,’ he added superciliously.

  Ned Devine suddenly came to his senses. He clicked his fingers impatiently.

  ‘Of course, of course, of course,’ he snarled. ‘That’s something we should have thought of ourselves. ’Twould be giving tongues to the stones.’

  And he took the wreath and carried it behind the coffin to the graveside. That was sufficient to dissipate the growing hysteria which Fogarty felt about him. He touched Jackson’s hand lightly.