When he was nine, John began to write poetry. One Sunday night, he stood up during a lull in the conversation and asked his mother for permission to speak. She smiled beamingly at him and nodded, and glanced around at the others, and his father turned away from his discussion with the girl who taught French to smile and clap his hands noiselessly, for encouragement.
“I would like to read a poem I have written,” John said in a rather artificial voice that was modeled after his father’s reciting voice. “It is called ‘To My Mother.’
“I love my mother, darling Jane,
Who brought me to this world of pain.
She is my dear, my hope, my joy.
I’ll always be her loving boy.
“She works that I may dine on cake.
I’d walk through fire for her sake.
If she should die I could not live.
To be with her my life I’d give.
“At night upon my knees I pray
That she’ll be safe an extra day.
I love her more than all the rest.
I love my mother, Jane, the best.”
When he had finished, John sat down on the piano stool and stared at the floor. His face was flushed. His mother rushed forward and took him in her arms. She pressed her face against his cheek. She was weeping. The rest of the audience murmured appreciatively. George came over to pat his son’s head. “I am greatly moved,” he said. “We must see that you have your chance.”
“That young man will be heard of,” said one of the men present, a government worker who acted in his spare time. He had a long gaunt face, and he took his pipe from his mouth and nodded at John. “Mark my words,” he said, “a new young poet for Ireland.”
“Will you read that for the class tomorrow, John?” his English teacher asked deferentially.
After that, John read a poem every Sunday, and on Mondays read it again before his composition class. The other children tried to make a joke of him, but he took comfort in the words of his elders, and realized that all people of talent suffered from the sneers of the ignorant. He tried to tell the other children this, and they laughed more than ever.
When John was fourteen, he had enough poems for several volumes, but it was hard to find a publisher. However, on two occasions his poems appeared in the Sunday newspaper.
About this time, his father began to write a book about theories of acting. “Those things sell well in the United States,” he said.
He and John used the same typewriter—John to type his poems, George to type pages of manuscript. Jane was very happy with all this activity. She was very proud of them both. She still wore her tweed Rossetti dresses, her hand-wrought jewelry, and her amber beads. At Christmastime she painted little cards and sent them to her friends.
Their house had French windows, upstairs and downstairs. On summer evenings they used to sit near the open windows, and the people walking by would glance in at them and know who they were. John never went out to play with the other children. He enjoyed sitting between his distinguished parents—the musician, the young poet, and the actor. On winter evenings they lighted the fire and drew the blinds. Sometimes John played chess with his father. George often read out parts of his book, and explained them at length to his wife and son. Sometimes John retired upstairs to write a poem. It was understood between them that John needed solitude for his poems. He had a little room of his own at the back of the house, overlooking the pretty garden. Beyond the red wall of the garden was a tennis club, and the green lawns stretched away to a large grove of tall trees. He was able to lie on his back in bed and watch the clouds pass across the sky.
Every poet has to wait for recognition, and while waiting John decided to take a government examination. He passed without trouble and got an appointment. They were all very happy. Now all three were adults, John thought, working.
At last his father’s manuscript was completed, and they put him on the boat for England and a publisher. He had considered an Irish publisher and rejected the idea, because he believed, he said, that English bookmen have a wider circulation, and more money. “When I come back with all the money,” he said, “we’ll move to the country somewhere, wherever Jane likes, and lead a proper life.” He stood against the rail, waving to them.
“How fine he looks,” Jane said.
“He’s an actor to his fingertips,” John said proudly. “Look at the way his scarf is slung over his shoulders.”
George came back before they expected him, with no warning. He let himself in quietly with his key one night and sat down in front of the fire as though he had been out for a stroll. “They wanted me to leave the manuscript,” he said. “I wouldn’t hear of it. Thieves they are, every last one of them. As soon as we can scrape together the fare, we’ll go to America, and I’ll find a better publisher there. But I won’t send it out. Whoever reads it, I’ll be there in the room to see he takes no notes.”
“You’re right, Father,” John said. He was a slim, nice-looking boy, with clear skin and a long slender nose like his mother’s. “Better wait and have it done properly. Isn’t that right, Mother?”
“Of course it is,” she said. “And we’ll all go together. I won’t let you go off alone like that again, George. Do you hear me?”
A fortnight afterward, she caught pneumonia and died inside of a few hours. She came home one afternoon at her usual time, and instead of going down to the kitchen to start the tea, she stood in the parlor door and told George she thought she’d go up and lie down. By the time they thought of calling a doctor she was too far gone to be saved. After she was buried, John took the amber beads out of her drawer and put them with his own things.
“I hope you’re not letting up on your writing, John,” his father said one night. “Your mother put all her hopes in you.”
“I’m going to dedicate my first volume to her, Father—to her memory,” John said.
He wrote a great many poems about his mother’s death. When spring came, he and George went out and trimmed the grass in the back garden, but left her flowers untended.
One morning in May, John went in to rouse George, who never awakened of his own accord, and found him dead in bed.
There was nothing to do but sell the house and move into a flat in the middle of town. He did quite well for a while, between the money he got for the house and his salary. However, after two years the money was all gone—not a penny left. He had only his salary and he had to move into lodgings. Now that he needed it so badly, the work grew enormously distasteful to him. It deadened his spirit. He found it hard to write in the evenings. Still, he occasionally put down a poem.
One day, strolling idly along the quays, reluctant to go back to his room at the boarding house, he passed a row of used-furniture shops. An old piano stool standing outside the door of one of them caught his eye, and he stopped for a closer look. It was the one they had had at home, the very same. Indeed it was. He stood staring at it, and thought his heart would break, remembering the pleasant evenings, and the loving eyes, and all the words of praise so freely given.
He wrote a poem about this encounter. In his poem, which was a sonnet, he said that it was winter, not only in the city of Dublin but in his heart; that he felt once again that art is long and life is fleeting; that things had not turned out as he expected; and that it is a hard thing for a person to be left in the world after his mother and father are gone.
The Rose Garden
Mary Lambert, an Irish shopkeeper, was left a widow at the age of thirty-nine, after almost ten years of marriage. She was left with two children—Rose, seven, and Jimmy, two. As far as money was concerned, she was no worse off than she had been, since it was she who supported the family, out of the little general shop she kept.
Her husband, Dom, first showed his illness plainly in the month of October, but he lingered on, seeming to grow stronger at Christmastime, and died early in February, at about seven in the morning. Mary and a young priest of the parish, Father Mathews, were in the room wi
th him when he died. Mary had Dom’s comb in her hand, because he had asked her, one time during the night, to comb the hair back off his forehead. The comb was broken in half. She was accustomed to use the coarse-toothed half for her own hair, which was long and black. The fine-toothed half had been suitable for his lifeless invalid’s hair. Even in health his hair had been fine and lifeless, but now it just looked dusty against the pillow. Father Mathews, who was anxious to get away, asked Mary if she would like him to send the woman next door up to see her, but she shook her head violently, and said that she’d be forced to make an exhibition of herself soon enough, at the wake and the funeral, and that for the time being she’d just as soon be left alone.
She sat down beside the bed, on the chair she had carried up from the parlor the morning she first had to send for the doctor. It was a straight-backed mahogany chair with a black horsehair seat. Ordinarily there would be no chair in the bedroom. She had expected the doctor to sit on it, but instead he had put his black bag down on it. She stared at the room. The room, its walls, its dull color, its scarce furniture, its dust, its faded holy pictures, its bad, sick aspect, disgusted her, and the body on the bed was a burden she could not bear. The seat of the little parlor chair was hard under her. There was no rest in the room. Her legs were tired. One leg was shorter than the other, so that she had to walk crookedly, leaning forward and sideways. The exertion she had to make gave her great power in her right leg. She wore long skirts, and tall black boots laced tightly in but leaving her knees free. The laced boots were very solid and hard-looking, as though the feet inside them were made of wood. The feet inside were not made of wood. She had a great feeling in them, and in all parts of her body.
She was big, with a narrow nose, and a narrow-lipped mouth too small for the width of her face. She was well aware that she was ugly and awkward, especially from the back. She said that the crookedness in her legs came from climbing up and down the twisted stairs of this house, in which she was born. The house was really two corner houses that had been knocked into one. The houses had been thrown together, and the staircase twisted determinedly from one house up into the other, although it was impossible to tell whether it had been built from the first floor up or from the second floor down, the construction of it was so ungainly and uneasy. The stairs thrust its way, crooked and hard, up through the house, and some of its steps were so narrow it was difficult to find a foothold on them, and some started wide and narrowed to nothing at the other side, so that they could not be depended on going down as they could going up. It was a treacherous stairs, but no one had ever been known to slip on it, because it forced respect and attention, and people guarded themselves on it.
Mary knew it very well. She knew where the hollows were, and the worn places, and where it turned, and where it thinned off. It changed appearance as the hours of the day went by, and looked entirely different at night, in lamplight or candlelight. In the wintertime the bottom step was always slippery with wet feet in from the street. In the summertime the top step was warmed by sun from a stray window, and when Mary was a child she often sat there for hours, because her father spent all his time in the shop downstairs. Her mother had died at Mary’s birth. Her father, a retired policeman, was sixty when she was born. In his shop, in what had once been the parlor of one of the houses, he sold bread, sugar, milk, tea, cigarettes, apples, penny sweets, and flour. The milk stood in a big tin can on the counter, with a dipper hanging from the side of it, to measure out the customers’ pints. The same farmer who brought the milk brought eggs and butter. There was a sack of potatoes slumped open against the wall in one corner.
From the time she could walk, Mary hung around the shop. Because of her crippled leg, she often was allowed to miss school. Sometimes her father would sit her up at the window, which was filled with sweets, pencils, and cigarettes, and she would play with the sweets, and eat them, and look at the other children playing in the street or looking in at her. She grew fat, and by the time she was twenty she had settled into a wide, solid fatness. She developed a habit, in the street, of whirling around suddenly to discover who was looking at her ungainly back, and often she stood and stared angrily at people until they looked away, or turned away. Her rancor was all in her harsh, lurching walk, in her eyes, and in the pitch of her voice. She seldom upbraided anybody, but her voice was so ugly that she sounded rough no matter what she said.
She was silent from having no one to talk to, but she was very noisy in her ways. When she was left in charge of the shop, she would push restlessly around behind the counter, and move her hands and feet so carelessly that by the time her father got back, half the stock would be on the floor. There would be cigarettes, spilt sugar, toffees, splashes of milk, and even money down there by her boots. Her father would get down on his knees and scramble around, picking up what could be picked up, and cursing at her. She cared nothing for what he said. She had no fear of him, and he was not afraid of her, either. He had forgotten her mother, and she had no curiosity about her mother.
The counter in the shop was movable, and when she took charge, she made her father help her shove it forward from where she sat, to give her legs plenty of room. She always went to early Mass, when the streets were deserted, so that no one would have a chance to see her awful-looking back and perhaps laugh at her. During the whole year, there was only one occasion, apart from Mass time, when she willingly went outside the door, and that was in June, on the Feast of the Sacred Heart, when the nuns of the Holy Passion, who occupied a convent on a hill over the town, opened their famous rose garden to the public.
These nuns lived and had their boarding school in a stately stone building surrounded by smooth green lawns and spiky boxwood hedges, and hidden from the world by towering walls and massive iron gates. Except for the one day of the year when they threw open their garden, they had very little to do with the daily life of the town. Their rose garden was very old. An illustrious family had once owned these grounds, and it was they who had marked out the garden, and dug it, and planted it, and enjoyed it, long ago, years before the nuns came. Surrounded by its own particular wall, and sealed by a narrow wooden door, the garden lay and flourished some distance behind the convent, and it could be reached only by a fenced-in path that led directly out of the back door of the convent chapel. Only the nuns walked there. It was their private place of meditation, and because of its remoteness, and also because of the ancient, wild-armed trees that dominated the old estate, it could not be viewed from any window of the convent.
All during the year the nuns walked privately in their garden, and opened it to ordinary people only the one day. It is a pity that everyone in the world could not be admitted at one time or another to walk in that garden, best of all to walk there alone, it was so beautiful in the sun. The nuns walked there undisturbed, apparently, and still it was altogether a stirring place, warm red, even burning red, the way it filled the nostrils and left a sweet red taste in the lips, red with too many roses, red as all the passionate instruments of worship, red as the tongue, red as the heart, red and dark, in the slow-gathering summertime, as the treacherous parting in the nuns’ flesh, where they feared, and said they feared, the Devil yet might enter in.
Even if there wasn’t much of a summer, even if the sun was thin, what heat there was somehow collected itself inside the high stone walls of the garden. The walls should have been covered by a creeper, a red leaf or a green leaf, but instead they were bare and clean, warm under the hands. The tall walls of the garden were uncovered and stony under the sun, except for one, the end wall, which was covered by forsythia, yellow at its blooming time, on or about Christmas Day. Then the forsythia wall would stand up overnight in a brilliant tracery of true yellow, a spidery pattern of yellow, more like a lace shawl than a blanket, but none the less wonderful for that. Of course, the forsythia showed to great advantage then, with the rest of the garden a graveyard.
When word came of the yellow blooming, the nuns would come out together in
twos and threes, with their black wool shawls around their shoulders, to witness the miracle. It was a great pleasure to them, confused in their minds with the other joys of Christmas, and they compared the delicate golden flowers to “baby stars in the canopy of heaven” and “tiny candles lighted to honor the coming of Our Lord.” All of their images were gentle and diminutive, and they spoke in gentle excited voices, crying to each other across the frosty air, “Sister, Sister, did you hear what Sister just said?” “Sister, have you noticed how clear and silent the air is this morning?”
But with the coming of June the roses arrived in their hundreds and thousands, some so rich and red that they were called black, and some so pale that they might have been white, and all the depths between—carmine, crimson, blush, rose, scarlet, wine, purple, pink, and blood—and they opened themselves and spread themselves out, arching and dancing their long strong stems, and lay with lips loose and curling under the sun’s heat, so that the perfume steamed up out of them, and the air thickened with it, and stopped moving under the weight of it.
Mary loved that burning garden. From one summer to the next, she never saw the nuns, nor did she think of them. She had no interest in them, and there was not one among them who as much as knew her name. It was their urgent garden she wanted. She craved for her sight of the roses. Every year she made her way up the hill, alone, and went into the garden, and sat down on a stone bench, covering the bench with her skirt so that no one would offer to share it with her. She would have liked to go in the early morning, when few people would be there and she would have a better look at the garden, but she was afraid she would be too much noticed in the emptiness, and so she went in the middle of the afternoon, when the crowd was thickest.
Once she had seen the garden in the rain. That was the year she remembered with most pleasure, because the loitering, strolling crowd that usually jammed the narrow paths between the rose beds was discouraged by the weather. She had the garden almost to herself, that time. Wet, the roses were more brilliant than they ever had been. Under the steady fine rain the clay in the beds turned black and rich, and the little green leaves shone, and the roses were washed into such brightness that it seemed as though a great heart had begun to beat under the earth, and was sending living blood up to darken the red roses, and make the pink roses purer.
The Rose Garden Page 18