Araby

by GRETTA MULROONEY

  ‘I don’t need me husband to fight me battles for me,’ she told me with satisfaction, ‘I raise me own banner, not like some I could mention.’

  I opened the cupboard under the stairs and had a look at the shoes in there but I couldn’t find any missing or coated in tell-tale black.

  The next outbreak of hostilities that I was aware of featured shoes again; the victory on that occasion went to Assumpta, whose usually prinked-up mouth relaxed half a centimetre. Her attack came during the annual pilgrimage to Walsingham in Norfolk, a feast of praying, hymn-singing and sermonizing dedicated to Our Lady. My mother and I had gone with a group of about thirty parishioners in a coach one Sunday morning. Assumpta was there, and to my mother’s chagrin had bagged the seat at the front nearest the priest; honour dictated that we had to sit as far away from her as possible at the rear of the coach, thus depriving us of the priest’s witticisms. Assumpta’s tinkling laugh danced down to us. My mother got her rosary beads out, assumed a devout expression and recited a litany.

  It was a baking June day and my mother’s corns were giving her hell. I was going through a holy period at this stage, thinking about becoming a priest or a monk, so I was determined to ignore any discomfort caused by the heat and offer it up as proof of my suitability for a vocation in the clerical life. I was looking for a sign from the day, a nod via God’s mother to confirm that I was on the right track. At Walsingham we formed up with coachloads of other pilgrims, joining the procession that would walk several miles to the shrine, behind a huge statue of Our Lady. The statue, resplendent in blue-and-white robes and with a garland of pink roses in its head, was carried on a platform by six sturdy men, Knights of Saint Columbanus. It was the custom for pilgrims to walk barefoot. I slipped off my shoes and tied them to my belt via their laces; my mother carried her sandals in her hand.

  Assumpta was several rows behind us, still tagging along with the priest. We set off, the heat from the tarmac making us shuffle uncomfortably. My mother groaned as her corns objected to the rough surface but I reminded her that her suffering would be noted on her credit sheet in heaven. We sang ‘Oh Queen of Heaven, the Ocean’s Star’, and ‘Ave Maria’, my mother and Assumpta attempting to out-trill each other in the still air.

  Then about a mile from the shrine, the catastrophe happened. One of the Knights, overcome by the heat, the weight of the statue and his constricting sash of honour, stumbled, lost his footing and in going down, tripped the Knight behind. There were cries from the front; we saw the high statue waver, tip from side to side, its rose crown flying into the hedge, then fall from sight. The cries turned to shouts and white plaster sprayed into the air.

  ‘Our Lady!’ my mother gasped, ‘Our Lady’s hurt!’

  She darted out of line and disappeared up the side of the road towards the injured Madonna. I followed her, breaking into a run. The statue was in several dozen pieces, one of its outstretched arms lying across the neck of the unconscious Knight who had caused the accident. There was mayhem for some time, while the statue was cleared from the road and the Knights were sorted out. One had sprained his ankle in falling and another had been hit in the chest by a carrying pole; there was a suspected cracked rib. An ambulance was called and by the time the dregs of the procession were ready to carry on, an hour had passed. My mother had been helping to collect fragments of the statue, kissing each piece before she added it to the plaster pile. As we re-formed our ranks for the procession she looked around and then at me.

  ‘Where’s me sandals?’

  ‘I don’t know. You were carrying them.’

  ‘I must have thrown them down by the side of the road. Help me look for them.’

  The procession set off as we went back over our tracks, searching the verges. The sandals were nowhere to be seen.

  ‘Sweet Jesus on high take pity on me,’ my mother said. ‘They’re gone. Me feet’U be in ribbons. Someone must have took them.’ She contemplated her sweating feet and then flicked her thumb against her forefinger.

  ‘What was that Flanagan one doing all the time I was helping with Our Lady?’

  I shook my head. ‘No idea, I didn’t see her.’

  ‘That jade’s taken them, I bet me bottom dollar. She’s probably hiked them into a field or buried them. Lord God, I’ll melt her so I will. I’ll have her jelly guts for garters!’

  We set off after the pilgrims who had vanished, my mother grimacing as her feet struck the road in the noon heat. Near the shrine we caught up with them and my mother made a bee-line for Assumpta who was clasping one of the roses from Our Lady’s crown to her scrawny breast.

  ‘Come here to me,’ my mother said, pushing her on the shoulder. ‘What have ye done with me sandals?’

  Assumpta stepped back. ‘What are you talking about, Mrs Keenan?’

  ‘Don’t ye Mrs Keenan me! Ye know what I’m talking about, ye jade ye. Ye’ve made off with me sandals.’

  Assumpta sniffed at the rose. ‘I’ve no idea what you’re going on about. I expect you’ve put them down somewhere.’

  ‘Yes, like I put me duster down in the typing room and when I came back from relieving meself ’twas gone!’

  People were turning and looking disapprovingly. I moved behind a shrub and pressed my nose into its foliage. It smelled like cat’s pee. Our parish priest hurried over to my mother and asked what seemed to be the problem? My mother launched into a heated explanation while Assumpta looked cool and disdainful. These were canny tactics and timing on Assumpta’s part; the priest who had departed the parish a couple of months previously, Father Corcoran, had been my mother’s crony. He was a man in his fifties from Donegal who liked his food and the horses. He called regularly at our house to knock back porter cake and bottled Guinness while he and my mother sat cracking jokes by the fire and jawing about the old days in the Emerald Isle. His replacement, Father Berry, was a sober, intense young man from Colchester who only paid home visits if his parishioners were sick or dying. Cultivating menopausal middle-aged ladies was not his forte.

  ‘But it’s such an odd allegation to make, Mrs Keenan,’ he said, in his nasal tones, ‘you’ve no proof at all.’

  ‘I know what I know,’ my mother gulped, ‘I know she’s taken them.’

  ‘Really, Father,’ said Assumpta, ‘I think Mrs Keenan must be suffering heat stroke.’

  ‘Ask her about me missing duster,’ my mother said wildly.

  Father Berry looked pained. ‘You do seem very hot, Mrs Keenan,’ he said. ‘Come into the chapel and sit down; it’s cooler in there. Maybe it will help get things in perspective.’

  ‘D’ye mean ye’re not going to do anything about it?’ demanded my mother. ‘How am I to get home without me sandals?’

  ‘We’ll think of something,’ the priest advised, looking sterner. ‘Now I must insist that we move inside. People have already had a terrible shock with the accident and it isn’t seemly for ladies to be squabbling like this on a holy day.’ He gestured for her to enter the chapel.

  I had rarely seen my mother lost for words but she was then; she couldn’t disobey a man of the cloth and he was obviously giving her no quarter. As she plodded into the shadow I saw the glimmer of a smile on Assumpta’s lips. I had to hand it to her; she had seized an unexpected opportunity and executed her attack with guile, in the best guerrilla tradition.

  I waited outside the chapel while the short service was conducted; I knew that it would seem hollow without the statue as its centrepiece. I decided that Our Lady was indicating in a dramatic fashion and at great personal inconvenience that the priesthood wasn’t to be my calling; obviously God’s grand plan for me sketched a different route.

  Over the years, my mother and Assumpta kept careful check that they were level-pegging in holy business; like competitive traders in a spiritual stock market, they were always on the look-out for shares in the Deity. Both were members of The Catholic Women’s League, The Madonna’s Sodality and The Guild of Saint Teresa and subscribed postally to The P
oor Boys’ Appeal, which trained the said boys for priesthood in the missions. My mother edged forward on the latter front by striking up a correspondence with Father Bhattacharya, the appeal’s organizer. Judging by his letters he was either very simple or very cunning because they were full of sycophantic and gushing expressions of thanks which my mother made a point of reading out aloud in the church porch, within earshot of Assumpta. The two of them made a point of attending as many masses, benedictions, holy hours and retreats as possible; you could always tell if Assumpta had missed out by the contented look on my mother’s face when she came home. I think that my mother’s interest in funerals started when she realized that they offered a way of increasing the number of masses she could notch up in a week; she also upped the stakes by going to other parishes, thus cannily spreading her share portfolio. My mother bested Assumpta by getting our names in the Book of the Sacred Heart first, but Assumpta beat her when she asked her cousin to have a rosary blessed for her in St Peter’s by the Pope.

  The battle of the flowers was the last great stand-off that I knew of before I left home. It caused my mother and Assumpta to be the unacknowledged subject of a Sunday sermon. Father Berry had foolishly allowed both of them to join the rota for arranging the church flowers; any sensible person would have realized that this was a guaranteed recipe for disaster, but the priest had a pitiful belief in his parishioners’ ability to overcome their differences and pull together for the sake of the greater good.

  By some dreadful irony of fate – some might have seen Satan’s hand in the matter – their two names came up for decorating the church for Corpus Christi, along with a Mrs Deasy who was felled by a kidney infection three days before the event. The light of combat entered my mother’s eye and her words of sympathy for Mrs Deasy rang false. She knew that she had to have her wits about her because Assumpta’s sister was a florist. They had brief words about what display they should concoct; Assumpta was in favour of a single theme of massed lilies – her sister had a plentiful supply – but my mother snorted that lilies were an unmanly flower; she wanted deep-red roses, signifying the blood of Christ. My father had an allotment stocked with them and they were going cheap in the High Street. Both refused to budge; hostilities declared, they beetled away to amass their chosen blooms.

  The feast day, a holy day of obligation, was on a Thursday. On the Wednesday evening my mother and Assumpta got their respective husbands to drive them to the church, the car boots swollen with flowers. They waved their spouses goodbye without any acknowledgement of each other’s presence. Wordlessly, they set about snipping, trimming and arranging their lilies and roses in jugs and vases, dashing for spaces and jumbling the displays together. The church was drenched in perfume and the altar, where all eyes would focus, was swathed so heavily in flowers that the tabernacle was hardly visible. They watched each other with eagle eyes at the end; my father turned up before Mr Flanagan, but my mother wouldn’t leave before Assumpta was safely in her car.

  The next morning, my mother rose at six and headed off to the church, telling my father that she wanted to make some last minute adjustments and mist-spray the roses to freshen them for Our Lord. She was back at eight for breakfast, humming and making a hearty fry-up. Nine o’clock was the first mass. When the congregation arrived they witnessed an altar stacked high with roses; an extra line of them had been added since the night before, strung in a half-circle across the front of the white linen altar cloth. Lilies featured only at the back and sides of the church and they looked a little worse for wear. Assumpta took one look at the sabotage and stormed out, crossing to the presbytery and waiting for the priest to finish the service.

  When he phoned my mother later in the morning, she acted the innocent saying that yes, she had reorganized the lilies because when she’d hurried to the church very early, anxious to make sure the display was looking its best, they had been drooping; maybe Mrs Flanagan hadn’t realized that the blooms weren’t in their first flush and would fade so quickly. Sure her sister, the florist, had probably had them in a back room for days, whereas most of the roses had only been cut the night before. She’d tried to reason with Mrs Flanagan the other day but unfortunately that lady hadn’t wanted to listen.

  ‘Sure I didn’t do wrong, did I, Father?’ my mother asked meekly. ‘I got up at six to make sure everything was ship-shape. Ye can imagine me disappointment when I saw the lilies past their best. I thought I was doing Mrs Flanagan a favour in the heel of the hunt, but sure I know that whatever I do, she’ll point the finger at me. There’s some people that can’t help thinking ill of their fellow men.’

  Father Berry gave up. The following Sunday he preached about brotherly and sisterly love, avoiding pettiness in life and putting aside our differences in our love of Christ. My mother sat nodding in agreement.

  Temporarily routed, Assumpta took herself off to mass in the next parish for several weeks, then regrouped by initiating a collection for a new mosaic for the side chapel.

  Assumpta died suddenly of a thrombosis in 1972, leaving a huge gap in my mother’s life; the war had been won, but victory was hollow because the enemy had beaten an unexpected final retreat. My mother attended her funeral and placed a bunch of roses by her grave.

  SIX

  The doctor invited my father and me into a small room near her office. I knew that my worst fears were about to be confirmed when she offered us tea.

  ‘Your brother?’ she enquired.

  ‘He had to fly back to Hong Kong this morning,’ I told her.

  He had looked puzzled as I said goodbye to him, like a man who can’t quite remember what he wanted to say.

  ‘She used to be so much bigger,’ he’d mused as he wiped his windscreen. ‘She had a lot of life in her; she’d sing songs. Do you remember “Dear Old Skibbereen”?’

  The doctor waited until my father had stirred his tea, then told us that my mother had advanced cancer of the liver; it had started in the ovaries, hence the bleeding, and then spread. It was rapid, very rapid. They would give her morphine, palliative treatment, that was all. She could come home tomorrow.

  My father put his tea on the floor beside him and sat forward, head lowered, hands resting between his knees.

  ‘How long does she have?’ he asked.

  ‘Not long; maybe a month.’

  ‘Have you told her?’ I touched my father’s knee. My hand felt like lead.

  ‘No. We didn’t know what you would want.’

  My father cleared his throat. ‘I don’t want her told. She has a horror of cancer, a horror.’

  The doctor said she’d leave us for a bit and get on with making arrangements for discharge. My father put his head back against the wall and closed his eyes.

  ‘Ah God, ah God,’ he said quietly. ‘Of all the ways to go … this.’

  I sat in silence. I should have prepared him, I thought; this shouldn’t have come as a shock. I cursed myself for avoiding it, but I had kept my own counsel, hoping against hope that I was wrong.

  ‘What’ll we tell her, Rory?’ my father asked me. ‘She knows something’s up. How will we explain?’

  I thought of her eyes as she had clutched at Dermot and her attempts to resist the biopsy. She knows anyway, I thought, inside herself she knows; how would you not know that you’re being eaten away, that you’re gradually fading, giving up? But I thought that she wouldn’t want it named or to name it herself; if it had no name it would have no true claim to her.

  I turned to my father. His light blue eyes, the eyes she’d always reckoned had made other women look twice, were washed with fear.

  ‘Let’s see how it goes. We’ll say her liver’s in a bad way. Being able to come home will distract her anyway.’

  My father took out a hanky and rubbed his mouth. ‘Could you go and see her? I’ll just sit a while.’

  I stood, knowing that I was about to start the longest walk of my life. As I opened the door I heard my father say, ‘Will she make Christmas, I wonder?’
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  My shirt was sticking to my back in the intense hospital heat. I took a few minutes outside the ward to compose myself. This would be the first time I’d seen her since the scene with Dermot. The night after that had happened, I’d walked the lanes around the house, cursing her, dwelling on all the instances in years gone by when she had needled and embarrassed me. I was in my late twenties before I finally felt that I had stepped out of her shadow; her obsessions had held our household in thrall, my father and I standing by as spectators, an audience responding to the drama being enacted.

  Angela, my ex-wife, had accused me of being like my father; emotionally illiterate. She had seen him retreat behind his book or paper when my mother was waxing lyrical. One day Angela had startled me by asking had I never considered that my mother might be the way she was because my father had such limited responses? When I pressed her to explain, she’d asked why my mother had turned her enormous energy, all her creativity, inwards, focusing on illness and depression. Then she supplied the answer; because she was married to a self-effacing man who’d rather run a mile than discuss anything personal. She had got up to mischief because he supplied no stimulus; all her nonsense was an effort to create a bit of interest. Angela didn’t like my mother, but she said she felt sorry for her; born in a different generation, given an education, she could have been a successful entrepreneur or maybe a politician – after all, she certainly had a way with words.

  My grandmother had rarely exchanged confidences with me, but once, when there was a coolness between my parents during a visit, she had commented that it reminded her of the time my mother had run away from my father. I was all ears, eager for the gossip but undermined by it too; looking back, my grandmother was playing her own game in telling this to a boy of thirteen. She revealed to me that my mother had abandoned my father in London when she was six months pregnant with Dermot, and turned up without warning at the cottage near Bantry. She had left him, she said, because he wouldn’t talk to her; when he came home from work he stuck his nose in a book and there was no budging him. Letters went back and forth across the Irish sea. It struck me that my father hadn’t shown himself over-enthusiastic to retrieve his bride; had it not occurred to him to hop on a boat himself or was he already, even in those early days, baffled and paralysed by her moods and actions? My mother gave birth to Dermot and stayed on. My father finally arrived and took her back to England; his first-born son was four months old before he set eyes on him.