Minding Frankie

by Maeve Binchy

  Josie agreed with him. “You see, Emily, Paddy and Molly Carroll are neighbors. It would be odd to ask them to pay Charles to walk that big foolish dog. It would sound very grasping.”

  “I see that, of course, and you wouldn’t want to be grasping, but then again he might see a way to giving you some lamb chops or best ground beef from time to time.” Emily was a great believer in barter, and Charles seemed to think that this was completely possible.

  “But would there be a real job, Emily, you know, a profession, a life like Charles had in the hotel, where he was a person that mattered?” Josie asked.

  “I wouldn’t survive just with dog walking alone, but maybe I could get a job in a kennel—I’d really love that,” Charles said.

  “And if there was anything else that you had both really wanted to do?” Emily was gentle. “You know, I so enjoyed looking up all my roots and making a family tree. Not that I’m suggesting that to you, of course.”

  “Well, do you know what we always wanted to do?” Josie began tentatively.

  “No. What is that?” Emily was interested in everything so she was easy to talk to.

  Josie continued. “We always thought that it was a pity that St. Jarlath was never properly celebrated in this neighborhood. I mean our street is called after him, but nobody you’d meet knows a thing about him. Charles and I were thinking we might raise money to erect a statue to his memory.”

  “A statue to St. Jarlath! Imagine!” Emily was surprised. Perhaps she had been wrong to have encouraged them to be freethinkers. “Wasn’t he rather a long time ago?” She was careful not to throw any cold water on Josie’s plan, especially when she saw Charles light up with enthusiasm.

  Josie waved this objection away. “Oh, that’s no problem. If he’s a saint, does it matter if he died only a few years back or in the sixth century?”

  “The sixth century?” This was even worse than Emily had feared.

  “Yes, he died around A.D. 540 and his Feast Day is June sixth.”

  “And that would be a very suitable time of the year for a little procession to his shrine.” Charles was busy planning it all already.

  “And was he from around these parts?” Emily asked. Apparently not. Jarlath was from the other side of the country, the Atlantic coast. He had set up the first archdiocese of Tuam. He had taught other great holy men, even other saints: St. Brendan of Clonfert and St. Colman of Cloyne. Places that were miles away.

  “But there was always a devotion to him here,” Charles explained.

  “Why would they have named the street after him otherwise?” Josie wanted to know.

  Emily wondered what would have happened if her father, Martin Lynch, had stayed here. Would he have been a simple, easily pleased person like Charles and Josie instead of the discontented drunk that he had turned into in New York? But all this business about the saint who had died miles away, hundreds of years ago, was a fantasy, surely?

  “Of course, the problem would be raising the money for this statue and actually earning a living at the same time,” Emily said.

  That was apparently no problem at all. They had saved money for years, hoping to put it towards the education of Noel as a priest. To give a son to God. But it hadn’t taken. They always intended that those savings be given to God in some way, and now this was the perfect opportunity.

  Emily told herself that she must not try to change the world. No time now to consider all the good causes that that money could have gone towards—many of them even run by the Catholic Church. Emily would have preferred to see it all going to look after Josie and Charles, and give them a little comfort after a life of working long, hard hours for little reward. They’d had to endure what to them must have been a tragedy—their son’s vocation “hadn’t taken,” to use their own words. But there were some irresistible forces that could never be fought with logic and practicality. Emily Lynch knew this for certain.

  Noel had been through a long, bad day. Mr. Hall had asked him twice if he was all right. There was something behind the question, something menacing. When he had asked for the third time, Noel inquired politely why he was asking.

  “There was an empty bottle which appears to have contained gin before it was empty,” Mr. Hall said.

  “And what has that to do with me and whether I’m all right or not?” Noel asked. He was confident now, emboldened, even.

  Mr. Hall looked at him long and sternly from under his bushy eyebrows. “That’s as may be, Noel. There’s many a fellow taking the plane to some faraway part of the world who would be happy to do the job you are meant to be doing.” He walked off and Noel saw other workers look away.

  Noel had never known Mr. Hall like this—usually there was a kindly remark, some kind of encouragement about continuing in this work of matching dockets to sales slips, of looking through ledgers and invoices and doing the most lowly clerk duties imaginable.

  Mr. Hall seemed to think that Noel could do better and had made many positive suggestions in earlier days. Times when there was some hope. But not now. This was more than a reprimand; it was a warning. It had shaken him, and on the way home he found his feet taking him into Casey’s big, comforting pub. He vaguely recalled having had one too many the last time he’d been here but he hesitated for only a moment before going in.

  Mossy, the son of Old Man Casey, looked nervous. “Ah, Noel, it’s yourself.”

  “Could I have a pint, please, Mossy?”

  “Ah, now, that’s not such a good idea, Noel. You know you’re barred. My father said …”

  “Your father says a lot of things in the heat of the moment. That barring order is long over now.”

  “No, it’s not, Noel. I’m sorry, but there it is.”

  Noel felt a tick in his forehead. He must be careful now.

  “Well, that’s his decision and yours. As it happens, I have given up drink and what I was actually asking for was a pint of lemonade.”

  Mossy looked at him openmouthed. Noel Lynch off the liquor? Wait till his father heard this!

  “But if I’m not welcome in Casey’s, then I’ll have to take my custom elsewhere. Give my best to your father.” Noel made as if to leave.

  “When did you give up the gargle?” Mossy asked.

  “Oh, Mossy, that’s not any of your concern these days. You must go ahead serving alcohol to folks here. Am I interfering with your right to do this? I am most definitely not.”

  “Wait a minute, Noel,” Mossy called out to him.

  Noel said he was sorry but he had to go now. And he walked, head high, out of the place where he had spent so much of his leisure time.

  There was a cold wind blowing down the street as Noel leaned against the wall and thought over what he had just said. He had spoken only in order to annoy Mossy, a foolish, mumbling mouthpiece for his father’s decisions. Now he had to live with his words. He could never drink in Casey’s again.

  He would have to go to that place where Declan Carroll’s father went with his huge bear of a dog. The place where nobody had friends or mates or people they met there. They called them “Associates.” Muttie Scarlet was always about to confer with his Associates over the likely outcome of a big race or a soccer match. Not a place that Noel had enjoyed up to now.

  Wouldn’t it be much easier if he really had given up drink? Then Mr. Hall could find whatever bottles he liked. Mr. Casey would be regretful and apologetic, which would be a pleasure to see. Noel himself would have all the time in the world to go back to doing the things he really wanted. He might go back and get a business certificate so as to qualify for a promotion. Maybe even move out of St. Jarlath’s Crescent.

  Noel went for a long, thoughtful walk around Dublin, up the canal, down through the Georgian squares. He looked into restaurants where men of his own age were sitting across tables from girls. Noel wasn’t a social outcast, he was just in a world of his own making where these kind of women were never available. And why was this? Because Noel was too busy with his snout in the t
rough.

  It would not be like this anymore. He was going to give himself the twin gifts of sobriety and time: much more time. He checked his watch before letting himself into Number 23 St. Jarlath’s Crescent. They would all be safely in bed by now. This was such an earthshaking decision he didn’t want to muddy it all up with conversation.

  He was wrong. They were all up, awake and alert at the kitchen table. Apparently his father was going to leave the hotel where he had worked all his life. They appeared to have adopted a tiny King Charles spaniel called Caesar, with enormous eyes and a soulful expression. His mother was planning to work fewer hours at the biscuit factory. His cousin Emily had met most of the people in the neighborhood and become firm friends with them all. And, most alarming of all, they were about to start a campaign to build a statue to some saint who, if he had ever existed, had died fifteen hundred years ago.

  They had all been normal when he left the house this morning. What could have happened?

  He wasn’t able to manage his usual maneuver of sliding into his room and retrieving a bottle from the box labeled ART SUPPLIES, which contained mainly unused paintbrushes and unopened bottles of gin or wine.

  Not, of course, that he was ever going to drink them again.

  He had forgotten this. A sudden, heavy gloom settled over him as he sat there trying to comprehend the bizarre changes that were about to take place in his home. There would be no comforting oblivion afterwards, instead, it would be a night of trying to avoid the ART SUPPLIES box or maybe even pouring the contents down the hand basin in his room.

  He struggled to make out what his father was talking about: walking dogs, minding pets, raising money, restoring St. Jarlath to his rightful place. In all his years of drinking, Noel had not come across anything as surreal and unexpected as this scene. And all this on a night when he was totally sober.

  Noel shifted in his seat slightly and tried to catch the eye of his cousin Emily. She must be responsible for all this sudden change of heart: the idea that today was the first day of everybody’s life. Mad, dangerous stuff in a household that had known no change for decades.

  In the middle of the night, Noel woke up and decided that giving up drink was something that should not be taken lightly or casually. He would do it next week, when the world had settled down. But when he reached for the bottle in the box, he felt, with a clarity that he had not often known, that somehow next week would never come. So he poured the contents of two bottles of gin down his sink, followed by two bottles of red wine.

  He went back to bed and tossed and turned until he heard his alarm clock the next morning.

  In her bedroom, Emily opened her laptop and sent a message to Betsy:

  I feel that I have lived here for several years and yet I have not spent one night in the country!

  I have arrived at a time of amazing change. Everyone in this household has begun some kind of journey. My father’s brother was fired from his job as a hotel porter and is now going to go into a dog-walking business, his wife is hoping to reduce her hours at her place of employment and set up a petition to get a statue erected to a saint who has been dead for—wait for it—fifteen hundred years!

  The son of the house, who is some kind of recluse, has chosen this, of all days, to give up his love affair with alcohol. I can hear him flushing bottles of the stuff down the drain in his bedroom.

  Why did I think it would be peaceful and quiet here, Betsy? Have I discovered anything about life or am I condemned to wander the earth learning little and understanding nothing?

  Don’t answer this question. It’s not really a question, more a speculation. I miss you.

  Love,

  Emily

  Chapter Two

  Father Brian Flynn could not sleep in his small apartment in the heart of Dublin. He had just heard that day that he had only three weeks to find a new place to stay. He hadn’t many possessions, so moving would not be a nightmare. But neither had he any money to speak of. He couldn’t afford a smart place to live.

  He hated leaving this little flat. His pal Johnny had found him this entirely satisfactory place to live, only minutes from his work in the immigrant center, and only seconds from one of the best pubs in Ireland. He knew everyone in the area. It was worrying to have to move.

  “Couldn’t the Archbishop find you a place?” Johnny was unsympathetic. He himself was going to move into his girlfriend’s place. This wasn’t a solution open to a middle-aged Catholic priest. Johnny was in the habit of saying to anyone who would listen that a man must be certifiably mad to be a priest in this day and age and the least the Archbishop of Dublin could do was provide lodgings for all these poor eejits who had given up anything that mattered in life and went around doing good day and night.

  “Ah, it’s not really the Archbishop’s job. He has more important things to do,” Brian Flynn said, “but it should be no trouble to find a place.”

  It was proving more troublesome than he had thought possible. And there were only twenty days to go.

  Brian Flynn could not believe the amounts people were asking as rent. Surely they could never get sums like that? In the middle of a recession as well! Other things kept him awake too. The appalling priest who had broken his leg in Rome falling down the Spanish Steps and who was still out there eating grapes in an Italian hospital. Father Flynn was therefore still acting chaplain in St. Brigid’s Hospital, with all the many complications that this added to his life.

  He kept hearing reports from his old parish in Rossmore. His mother, who was already fairly confused and in a home for the elderly, was thought to have seen a vision, but it turned out she was talking about the television, and everyone in the old people’s home was greatly disappointed.

  He found himself increasingly brooding about the meaning of life now that he had to see so much of the end of life in St. Brigid’s. Look at that poor girl Stella who seemed to like him just because he had arranged for a hairdresser to come in and visit her. She was pregnant as well as dying. She had lived a short and vaguely unsatisfactory life but then she told him that almost everyone else did as well. She seemed not even marginally interested in preparing to meet her Maker, and Father Flynn was always very firm about this; unless the patients brought the matter up themselves, it wasn’t mentioned. They knew what his job description was, for heaven’s sake. If they wanted intervention made, prayers said or sins forgiven, then he would do that; otherwise he wouldn’t mention the topic.

  He and Stella had had many good conversations about single-malt whiskey, about the quarterfinals in the soccer World Cup, about the unequal division of wealth in the world. She said that she had one more thing to do before she was off to the next world, whatever it might bring. Just one thing. But she had a sort of hope that it was all going to work out all right. And could Father Flynn kindly ask that nice hairdresser to come again fairly soon? She needed to look well when she did this one last thing.

  Father Flynn paced his small apartment with the soccer posters nailed to the wall to cover the damp patches. Maybe he would ask Stella did she know anywhere for him to live. It might be tactless since he was going to live and she wasn’t, but it would be better than looking into her ravaged face and haunted eyes and trying to make sense of it all.

  In St. Jarlath’s Crescent, Josie and Charles Lynch whispered long and happily into the night. Imagine—this time last night they hadn’t even met Emily and now their lives had been turned right around. They had a dog, they had a lodger and, for the first time in months, Noel had sat and talked to them. They had begun a campaign to have St. Jarlath recognized properly.

  Things were better on every front.

  And, amazingly, things continued well on every front.

  A message came to the hotel from a psychiatric hospital saying that Caesar’s mother, Mrs. Monty, was unavoidably detained there and that she hoped Caesar was being adequately looked after. The hotel manager, bewildered by this, was relieved to know that the matter was all in hand and somewh
at embarrassed to learn that the rescuer had been that old porter he had just made redundant. Charles Lynch seemed to bear him no ill will but let slip the fact that he was looking forward to some kind of retirement ceremony. The manager made a note to remind himself or someone to organize something for the fellow.

  At the biscuit factory they were surprised to hear that Josie was going to work part-time and raise money for a statue to St. Jarlath. Most of the others who worked with her were desperate to hold on to their jobs at any cost.

  “We’ll have to give you a great sendoff when you finally retire, Josie,” one of the women said.

  “I’d really prefer a contribution to the St. Jarlath’s statue fund,” Josie said. And there was a silence not normally known in the biscuit factory.

  · · ·

  Noel Lynch found the days endless in Hall’s Builders’ Merchants. The mornings were hard to endure without any alcohol. The nice fuzzy afternoons were gone and replaced now by hours of mind-numbing checking of delivery dockets against sales slips. His only pleasure was leaving a glass of mineral water on his desk and watching from the distance as Mr. Hall either smelled it or tasted it.

  Noel could see only too well that his job could easily be done by a not-very-bright twelve-year-old. It was hard to know how the company had survived as long as it had. But in spite of everything he stuck to it, and before too long he was able to chalk up a full week without alcohol.

  Matters were much helped by Emily’s presence at Number 23. Every evening there was a well-cooked meal served at seven o’clock and, with no long evenings to spend in Casey’s bar, Noel found himself sitting at the kitchen table eating with his parents and cousin.

  They fell into an easy routine: Josie set the table and prepared the vegetables, Charles built up the fire and helped Noel to wash up. Emily had even managed to put off the Rosary on the grounds that they all needed this joint time to plan their various crusades, such as what strategy they should use to get the fund-raising started for St. Jarlath’s statue and how Emily could go out and earn a living for herself and where they would find dogs for Charles to walk and if Noel should do night classes in business or accountancy in order to advance himself at Hall’s.