Johanna was capricious at the best of times, but when she was in bed sick she was very hard to deal with. Today she had decided that she wanted the back bedroom and the fire that was in it all to herself. Ellen would have liked to sit by the fire there and read her book, and Bridget said she might like to stay there, too, because it was a novelty to have a fire in the bedroom, but Johanna wouldn’t listen to them. She said she was too sick to have people talking in the room. She wasn’t too sick to sit up in bed with a shawl around her, playing with her crayons and her books, but she was too sick to let Ellen and Bridget share her fire. Ellen said Johanna was selfish, but Johanna only smiled and said nothing. Johanna often said nothing.
The kitchen was small and square and it had a red tile floor. The fire in the coal range turned red with the heat and roared like a lion behind its little iron door. The three stray cats that had found lodging in the woodshed for the winter had been let in for the day and they had curled themselves up on the floor as close to the range as they could get, and as the day wore on and they got over their wariness at being inside the house they breathed more easily and their fur went up and down and their round curled bodies seemed to expand and grow softer, as though they had made themselves into sponges to soak up as much heat as they could while they had the chance. Bridget was wedged into the small child’s chair that Ellen and Johanna had owned in their turn, and Ellen had made a table for her out of one of the kitchen chairs and put the old tin tray with the plasticine on it. The mother finished the washing early and pegged it across a line she had put up under the kitchen ceiling. The arms of the father’s shirts hung down like streamers, stiff and dry, and brushed the mother’s light-brown hair as she moved about the kitchen. At four o’clock she went up to the back sitting room to light the gas fire to warm up the room for the evening, and then they all moved up there, Ellen with her book, which was about the adventures of a fifteen-year-old Spanish princess in a strict girls’ school in England, and Bridget, laboriously, with the plasticine on the old tin tray. The back sitting room had linoleum, and the grate was really a coal grate but a gas fire had been fitted into it. Folding doors divided it from the front sitting room, where there was a patterned carpet and an open grate and French windows that opened out like doors. The linoleum in the back sitting room was not the same as the linoleum in the hall. The linoleum in the hall had been there when they moved into the house, and they had paid extra for it. The only other decoration that had been left in the house by the people who had been there before was the shiny paper—red and green diamonds all over it—that was pasted over the inside of the glass panel in the door of the bathroom upstairs. Bridget could not be left alone in the bathroom because she would tear the paper off, reaching up and tearing off little bits that she would lick and paste to her face so that she could run around the house saying, “Look at me. Who am I? No, no, I am not Bridget. No, I am not a strange little woman. No, I am not the child next door. I am a bathroom window.” Only her mother and her father and her sisters could understand anything Bridget said.
The dining room smelled fresh and cool after the hot stuffy kitchen, and the mother said it was nice to get out of the kitchen after having been there all day. She smiled at Bridget, who had already settled herself on the hearthrug. Then she pulled Bridget gently to her feet and kissed her, and she bent down low and lifted the plasticine tray from the floor and put it up high on the mantelpiece.
“Upstairs now, Bridget,” the mother said, “and you’re to lie down at once and shut your eyes up tight.”
Bridget went off upstairs obediently, because she knew there was a fire in the room upstairs and that the room would be nice and warm. The mother opened the big lumpy cotton bag of mending and darning that sat on top of the sewing machine, but she tied it up again without taking anything out. She yawned and sat down on her low chair by the fire, and when the knock came at the door she told Ellen to run and see who it was.
The man who had knocked at the door was not standing up on the mat in the recess, out of the rain. He was standing below the step, with his cap in his hands. He was all wet, and his eyes were full of rain. Ellen thought he might be blind, but then she saw it was only that he was all wet, and the rain was so straight and heavy that even at this short distance it fell like a curtain between them. She had to hold the door with both hands to keep it from blowing wide in the wind.
“Would you ask your mother if she has a pair of old boots she wants to give away?” the man said.
“A pair of old boots,” the mother said when Ellen went back with the message. “I’ve no boots. I’d better go out. He must be in a bad way, to go around in this weather.”
Ellen wanted to go with her and look at the man again, but the mother closed the door into the hall so firmly that Ellen stayed where she was, listening. She heard the front door open and close, and then she heard her mother go along the hall on her way to the kitchen, and after her mother the man. She felt left out. She would have liked to go into the kitchen, too. She was standing in the middle of the room, trying to think of an excuse that would take her back to the kitchen, when her mother came in.
“Poor fellow,” she said. “God help him, I gave him something to eat. I left him there by himself. I knew he wouldn’t touch anything as long as I was in the room. Now, don’t you go down there bothering him. I wish I had a pair of shoes to give him. He hasn’t even a pair of socks on him. I gave him a pair of socks. I’m going to run up and see if I can get Johanna to lie down for a sleep. She’s been sitting up in the bed all day. I’ll be down in a minute. And don’t you go near the kitchen.”
Ellen was always very curious about the poor men and women who came to the door, especially when they had a boy or girl of her own age with them. She liked it when her mother gave her something to give to them. She was interested in the man in the kitchen, and when she went back by the fire to her book she continued to listen for the sound of the kitchen door opening, or for some sign that he was in the house. There was no sound, except the slapping of the rain outside and the rattle at the windows where the wind tugged the house. Then the door opened, and Bridget came in, smiling and hanging from the doorknob.
“I sat down the stairs,” Bridget whispered. “I was good. I was quiet.”
“Where’s Mammy?” Ellen asked.
“Mammy’s asleep. In Johanna’s bed.”
Johanna often refused to go to sleep unless her mother lay down beside her. Ellen lifted the old tin tray of plasticine off the mantelpiece and put it on the floor at a safe distance from the fire, and Bridget sat down beside it and began to pummel it.
Ellen went very quietly out of the room and down the three steps from the hall to the kitchen and opened the kitchen door and peered in. The man was asleep. He lay huddled over the table, and his arms were around his head, hiding his face. As she opened the door he spoke out suddenly in a loud voice, but did not move, and she stepped quickly back out of the kitchen and closed the door. When she heard him speak out loud again, she slipped back into the kitchen and closed herself in with him and stood watching him. She hoped he would not speak again. She wanted him to be quiet, as he had been, and she thought that if she stared at him he would be quiet, or wake up, but the words came out growling and roaring and bubbling in a voice that was much too fierce to belong to the poor little man who lay all wet across the table. She was as distressed as though a dog or a cat had implored her in words that she knew but could not understand because the voice was animal. The man didn’t sound at all as he had sounded when he asked for the boots. He was wearing the socks her mother had given him, and his broken boots were drying on a chair by the range, together with his cap. She wished he would come out of his nightmare and raise his head. The warmth of the fire was lost on him. His voice stumbled on, and then he gave a great groan, or a sigh, or a cry, and gave up. She thought he was beginning to wake up; he stirred and his fingers opened, but he lay quiet. She hurried out of the kitchen and went upstairs to get her mother, b
ut her mother lay on Johanna’s bed, fast asleep. She was sleeping with her head thrown back and her mouth a little open. Ellen moved to waken her, with a little touch on her shoulder, but then she held back and did not waken her. It would be nice if her mother could just sleep on.
She went downstairs and into the back sitting room, where Bridget still played with her plasticine. The gas fire gave out great warmth. No one but Bridget could play with the plasticine, because she had mauled all the colors together and ruined it to suit herself. Ellen sat down on the floor beside Bridget.
“Bridget,” she said, “everybody is asleep except you and me. Johanna’s asleep. Mammy’s asleep. Everybody’s asleep.”
“Everybody,” Bridget said, and paused to look thoughtfully up into Ellen’s face.
The clock on the mantelpiece—the glass clock that you could see the works of—said ten minutes to six. The father would be home soon. Ellen knew that she ought to do something, but she sat still. She sat up close to Bridget and watched Bridget’s hands in the plasticine and smelled the plasticine. The room was much too dark. She ought to light the light. She ought to wake the man and then wake her mother. Or wake her mother and let her wake the man. There were a whole lot of things she ought to do. She didn’t know which of them to do first. Then, too, her mother would want time to get the washing down off the line before she began to get the tea ready. The tea would be late now anyway, and there now, there was her father at the door, opening it with his key, coming into the hall. All the time she had been sitting doing nothing he had been waiting in the rain for the tram, getting into the tram, sitting in the tram, and walking from the tram stop up to their gate. She ran out into the hall to confront him. Any other night she would have raced to meet him, but tonight she edged toward him, waiting while he shook out his coat and spread it all over the hall stand to dry, and shook out his hat, and took his evening paper out of his pocket. He turned and saw her, and as he looked down at her she remembered the Saturday afternoon she had been sent to do a message at one of the shops up the main road, and on her way back through the shopping crowds she had seen him coming toward her and he had not seen her. She had waited for him to see her, and then she had run up to him and touched him and said “Da!” and he had said he was delighted to see Miss Ellen promenading on such a fine day and he had brought her into Kennedy’s and bought her a bag of glacier mints. When they parted, she to go along home and he to go wherever he was going, she stood and watched with tears in her eyes because they had said goodbye, till he was far away in the crowd, and then he disappeared from sight so suddenly that she ran across and put one foot off the path and down into the road, craning to see if she could get a last glimpse of him, and there he was standing down in the road looking for her, and he raised his arm up high and opened his hand and then shut it again, and opened it and shut it again, in the gesture of farewell that he always gave to all of them. And she turned and ran home so wildly that she collided with a woman who was wheeling a big baby in a pram, and the woman caught her by the shoulder and said, “You young bandit, mind where you’re going! What’s wrong with your mother that she can’t teach you manners?” and Ellen pulled herself away and shouted, “Let go of me, y’oul bag,” and then she was terrified that her mother would find out how she had spoken to the woman, and she walked properly the rest of the way home.
But tonight she whispered to her father, “Da, don’t make a sound. Johanna’s upstairs asleep and Mammy’s in the kitchen making a surprise for the tea. And the back sitting room is lovely and warm, only Bridget is at her plasticine.”
The father said, “Oh, the plasticine,” and made an exaggerated show of tiptoeing down the hall and into the room, getting lower and lower toward the floor as he went and then, when he got near the fire, stepping on Bridget, who gave a cry of happiness and outrage and struck out at him.
“What’s that?” he cried. “What’s that? What’s that I stepped on—a lump in the rug? Is that what it is?” Then he pretended that Bridget had caught fire and he smacked her all over until
she hung limp as a rag doll from his hands. At last he sat down in his chair by the fire and tried to open his paper, which was all wet. Ellen slipped out and up to the bedroom. The room was dark now, and she felt her way across to Johanna’s bed, but before she could speak the mother woke up and sat straight up in bed.
“Oh, Ellen,” she said, “you gave me a fright. What time is it? Put on the light. Why didn’t you wake me? Is your father in?”
“He’s in the dining room, Mammy,” Ellen said. “He only just came in. He’s reading the paper. And Mammy, the poor man fell asleep in the kitchen and he’s still there.”
“The poor man—the poor man that wanted the boots. Oh, Ellen, Ellen, why didn’t you wake me? What possessed you to let me sleep on? Oh, what’ll I do now?”
She got stiffly off the bed and put her hands up to her hair, which was straggling after her heavy sleep.
“Oh dear,” she said. “Oh dear, dear, dear.”
There was still a red glow in the fireplace, and she went across and poked it up and put on a shovel of coal.
“Don’t you get out of bed,” she said to Johanna, who watched her sleepily. “And Ellen, you go on downstairs and keep your father company. And keep the door to the hall shut.”
When Ellen went back to the back sitting room, her father was spreading his paper over the table to dry it.
“The news is wet tonight, Ellen,” he said. “It’s a rotten old paper anyway. I wonder why I buy it. Now, where are the cards? We’ll have a game of old maid before tea.”
As her father was shuffling the cards, Ellen heard a sound in the hall. She knew what had happened. The man had stumbled against the top of the three steps up from the kitchen. The father heard him, too, and he got up.
“Don’t tell me she’s carrying the tea up here?” he said. “And me with the old paper all over the table.”
He opened the door. The mother stood against the banisters, looking at them. The man stood beside her, caught in flight, and his face wore the artful, afflicted smile that Ellen recognized from seeing it on her mother’s face. He was afraid. The father walked past the man and along the hall and opened the front door and the man followed him. As the man was going past him the father said, “Have you a place to go for the night?” and then he put his hand in his waistcoat pocket and gave the man something—sixpence or a shilling, maybe both. “Good night, good night, good luck,” he said, and shut the door, and came back down the hall and into the dining room and sat down again in his chair by the gas fire. They all went in after him.
The mother said, “I’m sorry, John.”
The father looked up at her.
“It isn’t that I mind the cups of tea and all the rest of it,” he said. “It isn’t that I mind the way every man, woman, and child that comes near the place can get around you. What I mind is hiding down there in the kitchen and teaching the children to tell me lies. That’s what I mind. And I won’t have it. Do you hear me? I won’t have it.”
“I was only afraid you’d be angry,” the mother said.
“You’re always being afraid,” the father said. “That’s all I hear—that you’re afraid. What’s there to be afraid of? What’s wrong with you? And you’re making Ellen the same way.”
“Oh, leave Ellen out of it,” the mother whispered.
“How did he get here, that’s what I’d like to know,” the father said. “What brings them all to this house? Not content with opening the door and giving them money I can’t spare, you have to invite them to come in and sit down and make themselves at home. What’s the matter with you?”
“He only wanted to know if I had a pair of old boots,” the mother said.
Bridget turned from watching her mother’s face and looked at her father’s shoes. Ellen also looked at them, and the father looked down at them.
“I’m wearing them out as fast as I can,” he said, and he began to laugh. Then he stopped laughing and
he put his elbows on his knees and buried his face in his hands. Bridget tried to do the same thing, although she was standing up.
“Would you like your tea on a tray by the fire here?” the mother asked.
“All right,” he said.
The mother brought a tray to her husband, and Ellen carried a tray up to Johanna, who was sitting up in bed with her crayons and a picture book.
“There was an awful row,” Ellen said. “And Mammy is crying in the kitchen and she won’t have any tea.”
“Oh, she’s always crying,” Johanna said.
The back bedroom held two narrow beds for Ellen and Johanna and a high-sided iron cot, painted white, that Bridget still slept in. They always left one side of the cot down so that Bridget would know she wasn’t really a baby any longer. Halfway up the stairs, in the boxroom, the father had a gramophone and a set of French Linguaphone records, and a set of the Encyclopaedia Britannica that he was buying in installments from a man who came selling it at the door. There was a lumpy little bed in the room, a spare bed. Later in the evening, as she was going upstairs to bed, Ellen heard a French voice talking in there, a man’s voice. That meant her father was sitting in there alone, sitting on the edge of the bed, listening to the gramophone, learning French. He often went in there to have an hour to himself after tea, or on a Sunday afternoon. Sometimes after tea he went to see a play in town, but the mother never went with him, because she had the children to mind. He said that when Ellen was bigger she could go with him. He liked to go for long walks in the Dublin hills on Saturdays and Sundays in the good weather, and in the summertime he often went to Wicklow and had a few days by himself. He said that when Ellen’s legs were longer she could go on the walks with him, too. Sometimes in the summer holidays the father took them all to Killiney or Greystones for the day, but the strand was always crowded, and one or another of them generally lost something in the soft sand. Ellen had lost her First Communion medal and the chain that held it around her neck. The father liked to go swimming, and he used to dip the children in and out of the water and then carry them back on his wet sharp shoulders to the mother, who would dry them under a very big towel that would keep the other people from seeing them when she stripped their bathing dresses off.
The Rose Garden Page 21