The Collar

by Frank O'Connor

‘How does she get on with Stasia?’ asked Una – Stasia was Father Whelan’s old housekeeper, and an affliction to the community.

  ‘They don’t talk. Stasia says she’s an immoral woman.’

  ‘And is she?’ Una asked hopefully.

  ‘If she isn’t, she’s wasting her own time and my whiskey,’ said Fogarty. ‘She entertains Paddy Coakley in the kitchen every Saturday night. I told her I wouldn’t keep her unless she got a boy. And wasn’t I right? One Stasia is enough for any parish. Father Whelan tells me I’m going too far.’

  ‘And did you tell him to mind his own business?’ Whitton asked with a penetrating look.

  ‘I did, to be sure,’ said Fogarty, who had done nothing of the sort.

  ‘Ignorant, interfering old fool!’ Whitton said quietly, the ferocity of his sentiments belied by the mildness of his manner.

  ‘That’s only because you’d like to do the interfering yourself,’ said Una good-humouredly. She frequently had to act as peacemaker between the parish priest and her husband.

  ‘And a robber,’ Tom Whitton added to the curate, ignoring her. ‘He’s been collecting for new seats for the church for the last ten years. I’d like to know where that’s going.’

  ‘He had a collection for repairing my roof,’ said the curate, ‘and ’tis leaking still. He must be worth twenty thousand.’

  ‘Now, that’s not fair, father,’ Una said flatly. ‘You know yourself there’s no harm in Father Whelan. It’s just that he’s certain he’s going to die in the workhouse. It’s like Bella and her boy. He has nothing more serious to worry about, and he worries about that.’

  Fogarty knew there was a certain amount of truth in what Una said, and that the old man’s miserliness was more symbolic than real, and at the same time he felt in her words criticism of a different kind from her husband’s. Though Una wasn’t aware of it she was implying that the priest’s office made him an object of pity rather than blame. She was sorry for old Whelan, and, by implication, for him.

  ‘Still, Tom is right, Una,’ he said with sudden earnestness. ‘It’s not a question of what harm Father Whelan intends, but what harm he does. Scandal is scandal, whether you give it deliberately or through absent-mindedness.’

  Tom grunted, to show his approval, but he said no more on the subject, as though he refused to enter into an argument with his wife about subjects she knew nothing of. They returned to the study for coffee, and Fogarty produced the film projector. At once the censoriousness of Tom Whitton’s manner dropped away, and he behaved like a pleasant and intelligent boy of seventeen. Una, sitting by the fire with her legs crossed, watched them with amusement. Whenever they came to the priest’s house, the same sort of thing happened. Once it had been a microscope, and the pair of them had amused themselves with it for hours. Now they were kidding themselves that their real interest in the cinema was educational. She knew that within a month the cinema, like the microscope, would be lying in the lumber room with the rest of the junk.

  Fogarty switched off the light and showed some films he had taken at the last race meeting. They were very patchy, mostly out of focus, and had to be interpreted by a running commentary, which was always a shot or two behind.

  ‘I suppose ye wouldn’t know who that is?’ he said as the film showed Una, eating a sandwich and talking excitedly and demonstratively to a couple of wild-looking country boys.

  ‘It looks like someone from the County Club,’ her husband said dryly.

  ‘But wasn’t it good?’ Fogarty asked innocently as he switched on the lights again. ‘Now, wasn’t it very interesting?’ He was exactly like a small boy who had performed a conjuring trick.

  ‘Marvellous, father,’ Una said with a sly and affectionate grin.

  He blushed and turned to pour them out more whiskey. He saw that she had noticed the pictures of herself. At the same time, he saw she was pleased. When he had driven them home, she held his hand and said they had had the best evening for years – a piece of flattery so gross and uncalled-for that it made her husband more tongue-tied than ever.

  ‘Thursday, Jerry?’ he said with a quick glance.

  ‘Thursday, Tom,’ said the priest.

  The room looked terribly desolate after her; the crumpled cushions, the glasses, the screen and the film projector, everything had become frighteningly inert, while outside his window the desolate countryside had taken on even more of its supernatural animation; bogs, hills, and fields, full of ghosts and shadows. He sat by the fire, wondering what his own life might have been like with a girl like that, all furs and scent and laughter, and two bawling, irrepressible brats upstairs. When he tiptoed up to his bedroom he remembered that there would never be children there to wake, and it seemed to him that with all the things he bought to fill his home, he was merely trying desperately to stuff the yawning holes in his own big, empty heart.

  On Thursday, when he went to their house, Ita and Brendan, though already in bed, were refusing to sleep till he said goodnight to them. While he was taking off his coat the two of them rushed to the banisters and screamed: ‘We want Father Fogey.’ When he went upstairs they were sitting bolt upright in their cots, a little fat, fair-haired rowdy boy and a solemn baby girl.

  ‘Father,’ Brendan began at once, ‘will I be your altar boy when I grow up?’

  ‘You will to be sure, son,’ replied Fogarty.

  ‘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 net 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 recognise 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 desperate
ly, 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 warmhearted 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 realised 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 that 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 realised 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.’

  Fogary couldn’t grasp it, but he realised 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 s
ee, 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.

  THE TEACHER’S MASS

  FATHER FOGARTY, the curate in Crislough, used to say in his cynical way that his greatest affliction was having to serve the teacher’s Mass every morning. He referred, of course, to his own Mass, the curate’s Mass, which was said early so that Father Fogarty could say Mass later in Costello. Nobody ever attended it, except occasionally in summer, when there were visitors at the hotel. The schoolteacher, old Considine, served as acolyte. He had been serving the early Mass long before Fogarty came, and the curate thought he would also probably be doing it long after he had left. Every morning, you saw him coming up the village street, a pedantically attired old man with a hollow face and a big moustache that was turning grey. Everything about him was abstract and angular, even to his voice, which was harsh and without modulation, and sometimes when he and Fogarty came out of the sacristy with Considine leading, carrying the book, his pace was so slow that Fogarty wondered what effect it would have if he gave him one good kick in the behind. It was exactly as Fogarty said – as though he was serving Considine’s Mass, and the effect of it was to turn Fogarty into a more unruly acolyte than ever he had been in the days when he himself was serving the convent Mass.

  Whatever was the cause, Considine always roused a bit of the devil in Fogarty, and he knew that Considine had no great affection for him, either. The old man had been headmaster of the Crislough school until his retirement, and all his life he had kept himself apart from the country people, like a parish priest or a policeman. He was not without learning; he had a quite respectable knowledge of local history, and a very good one of the ecclesiastical history of the Early Middle Ages in its local applications, but it was all book learning, and like his wing collar, utterly unrelated to the life about him. He had all the childish vanity of the man of dissociated scholarship, wrote occasional scurrilous letters to the local paper to correct some error in etymology, and expected everyone on that account to treat him as an oracle. As a schoolmaster he had sneered cruelly at the barefoot urchins he taught, describing them as ‘illiterate peasants’ who believed in the fairies and in spells, and when, twenty years later, some of them came back from Boston or Brooklyn and showed off before the neighbours, with their big American hats and high-powered cars, he still sneered at them. According to him, they went away illiterate and came home illiterate.