The Mangan Inheritance

by Brian Moore

  He would, and he did. The oil portraits were mostly oval in shape, the work of artists who aimed at a likeness but who were weak on anatomical details and lacked the skill to depict the folds of garments. Each portrait had some obvious defect which gave it a naïve quality, an ill-formed hand, an awkward pose, a wooden pleat of dress. The clothes of the subjects labeled the sitters within their particular era. Thus, the earliest was of an elderly man who wore a high hat and knee breeches with a fob sticking out from under his cutaway coat in the style of the late eighteenth century. The portrait next to it was of a stout person wearing a Vandyke beard and mustache, with a black cravat wound around his high collar in the nineteenth-century manner. There was also a woman in a wasp waist and leg-of-mutton sleeves, a matriarch of Victorian times. A man in black string tie and fustian suit seemed from a later period. At least, Mangan thought, if all of them are Mangans, we were not peasants. Nor gypsies hiding in the bogs. But it was the framed photographs, the daguerreotypes, calotypes, and tintypes which most attracted his interest. He moved about, peering, searching for a face which might be his own.

  Suddenly the girl behind him said, “It stinks in here. There must be a dead rat someplace.” Her diminutive brother had already seated himself at a writing desk and now took from the bottom drawer a large photograph album, which he hunched over like a child, turning the pages of a book too big for him to handle. “This is the old album,” he said. “It’s here someplace, that photo. What did you say your great-grandfather’s first name was, again?”

  “Patrick James.”

  “It’s someplace,” the little man repeated.

  The girl walked to the window and stood, hands on hips, leaning forward to peer through the cracked, dusty panes at something in the yard. Seen thus, silhouetted against the blear, bright light, she seemed curiously childish, out of place among the dead heavy portraits in this room. He felt like one of those lecherous older men who stand outside schoolyards watching schoolgirls in their gym dresses. She had allowed him to kiss her. She might allow him to do more.

  “Hah!” The little man rose, beckoning. “Come and look at this.”

  The girl turned around. Mangan went over to the desk. On a page of the big album which contained several other snapshots stuck in by passe-partout edgings was a sepia studio photograph of a British soldier standing by a packed kit bag, to which was tied an old-fashioned solar topee. Underneath the portrait was a notation in faded violet ink.

  PAT. Portobello Barracks, Dublin. 1863.

  On draft for India. 1st Batt. Old Bombays

  (Now Royal Dublin Fusiliers).

  “This lad here,” said the little man, putting his nicotine-stained forefinger on the photograph face. Patrick James Mangan. It is my guess and I am right, I will wager, that this lad is your great-grandfather. And the same man is my grandfather Conor Mangan’s father. So we are the same family, do you see? From the selfsame man. Your man here. And I will tell you that this man is buried now in the graveyard down by Dunmanus Coos. And that he came home from service in India and died in British Army Married Quarters in Cork City.”

  “How did you know all that?” the girl asked.

  “There’s a lot of things I know and a lot more I make it my business to find out, my girl.” The little man turned and looked up at Mangan. “I have the same interest as our friend Jim. I want to know who are the people who made me what I am today.”

  “They could have made you a bit bigger,” the girl said.

  “Good goods go in small parcels. Do you know, Jim, there were no small people before me on either side of the family. Were there some small people in your own family?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “Ah, don’t heed this fellow,” the girl said to Mangan, and laughed. “Sure he’s not my brother at all. The Wee People left him under a cabbage in our yard.”

  “Don’t make fun of what you know nothing about,” the little man snapped. “Those that makes fun of the Wee People, their teeth will drop out.”

  “Tell that to your granny,” she said. “You’ll have Jim here thinking we’re a lot of ignorant culchies. Wee People, how are you!”

  “Ah, shut your mouth,” the little man shouted. He turned to Mangan. “As I was saying, Jim, if this photo is right, and I’d say it is, then you and me would be cousins.”

  Again, Mangan bent over the album. The sepia-toned photograph revealed the young soldier, awkward and lumpish in his ill-fitting tunic and regimental cap. He had a mustache which drooped doggily about his mouth, giving him an apologetic look. Pat for Patrick. Was that the Patrick for whom Mangan’s father had been named? He bore no facial resemblance to Mangan’s father. His face seemed stupid, his body graceless. He was a victim, a poor Irish peasant who had taken the English Queen’s shilling to sweat for five years on the barracks square in Bombay, the raw, Regular Soldier of a Kipling tale.

  He looked up from the photograph. The girl is right, he thought. There is a smell of decay in this room. Could this young private be a descendant of the poet Mangan? Was this dull face, content to end its days in British Army Married Quarters in Cork, Ireland, the same face that sired my grandfather, who sat at ease in rooms designed by Stanford White in the Mount Royal Club, comptroller of all the millions in the Canadian Pacific Railway’s purse? And did my father, the managing editor, spring from this dolt’s family tree? He peered closer at the photograph face, little bigger than a postage stamp. But the bland young features gave back no secrets.

  The girl, pretending to examine the photograph, leaned into him from behind. At once, like the flick of a whip, the touch of her body brought him to heel. “A soldier,” she said. “I hate soldiers. Taking orders and drilling and evicting people from their houses.”

  “You’re soldier stock yourself,” her diminutive brother snapped.

  “I’d rather be a tinker.”

  The little man shook his head, as though to brush away this remark. “Come here, Jim,” he said. “Look, this is my grandfather, and my grandmother with him.”

  The photograph now held out for his inspection showed a family grouped together in a photographer’s studio, wearing the Sunday best of seventy years ago: a man and his wife staring into the camera with wild, wind-burned faces, and about them their life’s harvest, two little girls in pinafores, three boys in short trousers. “This boyo here is my da,” said the little man, pointing to one of the children. “He has the look of me, they say.”

  He had. But he did not look like Mangan, who turned from the book and continued his inspection of the photographs on the mantelpiece and on the walls. The girl rose and went out of the room, saying she was cold and it stank.

  “Light the stove in the kitchen, then,” the little man said. “We’ll be in directly. Do you want to look some more at this album, Jim? Is there somebody you’re looking for in particular?”

  “Did you ever hear of James Clarence Mangan?”

  “Clarence,” the little man said. “That’s a queer sort of a name.”

  “A poet.”

  “We had an uncle who was a bit of a poet. And I think there was one before that. I heard my daddy talk about that lad.”

  “But you never heard of James Clarence Mangan? He was a famous poet. His poems are still taught in the schools.”

  “I’m not much of a scholar,” the little man said. He shut the album and put it back in the drawer. “Come in the kitchen, we’ll have a drink. My uncle that’s dead, now, he was a poet. He had his writing published in the newspapers in Dublin and Cork.”

  “What was his name?”

  “Michael,” the little man said, mysteriously dropping his voice to a whisper. “Michael Mangan.” He stood and nodded his head toward the kitchen. “He’s a bit of a sore subject in this family. Especially with her nabs there, Kathy. So mum’s the word, if you follow me.” He ushered Mangan into the hallway and shut the parlor door carefully behind him. “Rats,” he explained. “I try to keep them out of the parlor. That’s one of t
he good rooms that’s not too spoiled by drips and drabs from the bloody roof. There’s a very few leaks in that room.”

  He turned and led Mangan into the kitchen, a narrow, high-ceilinged place which ran the length of the back of the house and was not, as it would be in an Irish farmhouse, the hub of daily living. For one thing, there were no pictures on its gray damp walls, and the fireplace, hung with cooking pots, had a look of disuse. It was a cold room with dripping taps and cracked sinks, its only furniture a long wooden table and rough kitchen chairs. Heat came from a butane heater camped in the center of the room, with three of the wooden chairs around it. The girl, already in place, stood straddled over this heater, warming her slim buttocks as the little man led Mangan through a maze of buckets and tin cans, into each of which, from time to time, a slow drip fell.

  Mangan was all eyes for the girl, and as she watched him approach, he was again struck by her resemblance to a statue, the slum pallor accentuated by the gray tones of this dismal room. “Are youse two going to drink?” she asked suddenly.

  “Of course we’re going to drink, Kathleen mavourneen,” the little man said. “It’s your cousin from America that’s here. If that’s not an occasion for drinks and jollification, I don’t know what is.”

  “Then where is it?” the girl asked.

  The little man laughed. “Get us glasses,” he said. He himself went out of the kitchen, leaving Mangan and the girl looking at each other in the complicit stormy manner of people between whom some physical contact is imminent.

  “He’s a cute one,” she said. “He always keeps it hid. Have you drunk poteen before?”

  “No.”

  “Con has good stuff. You’re safe with his stuff. ’Tis one of his sidelines.” She smiled at him, filling him with illicit hope. “You’re a gas man,” she said suddenly. “Imagine dropping in out of the sky like this to someplace you’ve never been.”

  “A what man?”

  “A gas man. Do you not have that saying in America?”

  “No.”

  “A gas man, did she say?” Conor Mangan came quickly back into the room, carrying two Coca-Cola bottles filled with what looked like plain water. He winked at Mangan. “A gas man is a man who is good gas. A man you can joke with. A man who can make you laugh.”

  “I see.”

  “Dinny Mangan, now, my sainted cousin down Duntally way, is no gas man. Did you say you were going to meet him this evening?”

  Mangan had no memory of saying any such thing, but he nodded. “Yes. After six. He’s coming over to Duntally.”

  “Have you seen the mother yet?” the girl asked.

  “I haven’t met any of his family.”

  “God help you, then.” The little man poured the watery fluid into their glasses.

  “Not too much, now,” the girl warned.

  “Listen to her,” said the little man, laughing, pouring generously, then raising his own glass in a toast. ”Sláinte!”

  ”Sláinte!” Mangan said, clinking glasses. The liquid did taste like whiskey and was not harsh as he had feared. He drank it as they did, swallowing it down, and almost immediately felt it go to his head. He smiled at the girl, whose slovenly beauty was so different from Beatrice’s American girl-next-door good looks.

  “Grand stuff,” the little man said, pouring again.

  “No, no,” Mangan said. “Easy there.”

  But he was gone. He knew it. The stout and now the poteen, the intoxication of the girl’s presence, all of it filled him with a sensation close to tears, not of sorrow, but of release. And forming as in a turning kaleidoscope, fragmenting, forming again, there came before him a series of images from his former life; the Place Vendôme, when he and Beatrice stayed at the Ritz; a hundred invited guests milling on the lawn in Amagansett at a summer cocktail party; Beatrice’s name in lights on the marquee of a Forty-sixth Street theater; the bank of red poinsettias and greenery in the Frank E. Campbell Funeral Chapel. These images collided, fell away, like images in a film already fading in his memory. Here, in a dank kitchen sitting with this slovenly Irish pair drinking illicitly distilled spirits, he felt at home as he had never felt at home in New York or Montreal.

  “Oh, he’s a gas man, all right,” the girl said, laughing, putting her arm around Mangan’s neck. “Sure, I think he was only codding us when he said he wasn’t in the fillims. He is in the fillims, I tell you. Tell us, Jim, what fillim stars do you know? I mean to chat to.”

  “Dozens.”

  “Do you, now?” The little man rose up, clapped his hands together above his head, and began a merry little jig. “How would I be for the fillims?” he cried. “Would I be a Fred Astaire or even a Mickey Rooney? I’ll have you know you are watching a semifinalist in the Three County Junior Ballroom and Tap Dancing Contest held four years ago this summer at the Empress Ballroom in Cork City.”

  Jigging and heel-clicking, the little man weaved in and out among the buckets and tin cans, as the girl, releasing her hold on Mangan, began to clap her hands; Mangan then followed suit, handclapping in a bout of hilarity which ended with the little man coming to a heel-stomping finale in front of the heater. The girl, laughing, turned to Mangan, putting her arms around him in a hug, throwing her head back at the same time as she pressed her soft thigh against his genitals.

  “Let’s have another wee jorum, the lot of us,” cried the little man, taking up the second Coke bottle and pouring three stiff pegs of poteen. “And, by the holy, there’s a picture I forgot to show you. It’s right at the beginning of the album. It was a famous picture in its time. Wait now and I’ll get it.” He poured poteen into the glasses, then skipped out of the room, leaving Mangan with the girl, her arms still around him, her soft thigh nudging his prick, which swelled and grew erect. In all the years he had been married to Beatrice he had not slept with another girl. He had even felt ashamed of his lustful feelings for his father’s young wife. But here he was, contemplating sleeping with a girl just out of her teens, carousing with her ne’er-do-well, midget brother in the manner of that opium-taking, drunken eccentric, the first poète maudit of Europe, before Baudelaire, before the term itself was invented. Perhaps that was why Jamie Mangan had never written great poetry. He had not lived a poet’s life; he had lived as a conventional student, a conventional newspaper reporter, and a conventional husband and dogsbody to a famous wife. He had not sought the life of his ancestor, a life of poetry induced by stimulants, by a deliberate derangement of the senses, by wandering the streets like a mendicant, sitting all evening in stinking taverns, everything in excess, even the poetry itself:

  O, the Erne shall run red,

  With redundance of blood . . .

  And gun-peal and slogan-cry . . .

  Ere you shall fade, ere you shall die,

  My Dark Rosaleen!

  My own Rosaleen!

  Life lived in a heightened, hallucinatory state, eroding one’s health, hastening death. And from the sacrificed flesh, a few phoenix verses which would last.

  And now the little man skipped back into the room, winking complicitly as he saw Mangan with his arms around his sister. “I have it here,” the little man cried. “It’s a postcard, do you see. This is the oldest photo you’ll find in this part of Ireland. That’s my great-great-grandmother, that woman there. Would you credit that, now?”

  “What year is it?”

  “I’ll tell you the year. It’s marked here on the back. 1880. Do you see it there in the corner? Now this is what is called one of the Lawrence Views. A Dublin man called Lawrence that went up and down the country—he was the very first to do it—taking views for picture postcards. He asked my great-great-grandmother to come out on the road and stand for him. And afterward he sent her this copy. It was a picture postcard that was sold in the shops, the same as they are today.”

  It was, indeed. Printed across the bottom of the card in white lettering was GORTEEN, WEST CORK. A lonely winding road ascended to a ridge of mountain, the same road Mangan had
come up earlier, the road outside this house. On that road a woman stood as though commanded to stop by the photographer. She was old, her long, black dress draggled at the hem, a dark wool cloak about her shoulders, a high black bonnet on her head, its laces tied under her chin. Her face weathered by sun and wind, she stared at the strange contraption that was the camera.

  “It was her that lived in the house that was here before this one was built. She was an O’Keefe from Skibbereen. First she married a grocer, a man called Boylan who had two shops in Skib. He died when she was only twenty-five, and she went up to Dublin and met and married a man called Mangan. And they had a child, a little boy, and the story is she fell out with Mangan and came back here without him.”

  “But that must be him!” Mangan cried. “James Clarence Mangan, the poet. The dates are right, Skibbereen. It’s the same story I heard in Montreal.”

  “Anyway,” the little man said. “She came back here with the little boy and that little boy grew up and built this house. And had three boys himself. And one was my grandfather and the other was murdered, they say. I don’t know about the third one, but that could be your connection.”

  “It must be,” Mangan said. “The third son would be James Patrick Mangan, my grandfather. One of the three grandsons of the poet himself.”

  “Well, there were poets in our family, all right,” the little man said. “My uncle and his uncle are the ones I heard tell of. But, d’you know, I think that the name James Clarence Mangan rings a bell, after all. I heard of it someplace. At least I think I did.”

  “Did you ever hear of ‘My Dark Rosaleen’?”

  “The Rose of Tralee,” the girl suddenly sang out. “That’s the one I like.” She began to sing.

  “Oh, the pale moon was rising above the green mountain,