by Mary Gordon
So Dan became a boy brought up by grandparents. His ex-wife threw it up to him when she felt he’d failed her: “You don’t know how to love. How could you love, the way you were brought up?”
He thinks that’s wrong; it’s not that he can’t love, it’s that he can love only in the way of orphan children, brought up apart from ordinary life. He’d been spared the anger of young, overtired parents but burdened with the fears of two whose bodies were beginning to let down. As a small child he felt archaic. The ordinary objects of his life marked him as different. The other children brought to school bologna sandwiches in lunchboxes with blazoned pictures of Roy Rogers, The Lone Ranger, Mickey Mouse. But he carried, in a workman’s black, serious lunchbox, leftovers his grandmother had put aside or re-invented for his taste: meat pasties, ham salad made from Sunday’s meat, a chicken wing, a thermos full of pea soup or beef stew. Each lunchtime was a mortification to him, though he knew his food tasted better than the other children’s. He hated the smell of their flat sandwiches, even as he craved them. But he would never tell his grandmother; she was old, he loved her, why open her up to his shame.
Upstairs in the grammar school, two grades ahead, Cam, carrying the same lunchboxes, but, combative, adversarial, and quick, made the other children think her lunches were a prize and made them buy the homemade cakes and tarts her grandmother had baked. For Cam her grandmother’s foreign life was an adventure, but for Dan it was the shame he loved and must protect. So, when the fracas came about the chickens, he hid in the living room, abashed, while Cam stood on the sidewalk with their grandmother and stared the policeman down.
“Who do you think you’re talking to now, Jerry Flynn,” Ellen had said to the policeman. “I had to chase you and my John off the neighbor’s apple tree, you’d both have been in jail. Which would have been the end of you at the policemen’s ball, and all your dreams of glory.”
Dan stood on the screened-in porch, ashamed to hear his grandmother talk that way to a policeman. Even Cam hung back at first, he saw, but then she took hold of herself and stood beside her grandmother.
“Mrs. M., look here, the neighbors here filed a complaint. It’s just my job.”
“What neighbors?”
“I’m not at liberty to say.”
“Don’t bother. It’s the two over there. It’s not refined for them, chickens in the neighborhood. Too bad for them. I was here with chickens when they were in a dirty tenement sucking at their mothers’ tits. So let them come to me if they have a complaint. I’ll tell ’em.”
Ellen’s chickens. In the twenties, when she first moved to Queens, there were only two houses on the street: the MacNamaras’ and the Bakers’, who were Germans and who had five girls. Mrs. Baker was sick and for long periods could not care for her children. Ellen would take them in, not asking Vincent; she would bring mattresses up from the basement; one child slept on the living-room couch. In the night sometimes the knock: Mr. Baker calling for Ellen’s help: “My Mrs. is bad.” Always they called each other Mr., Mrs., through the years of nursing, burying, the marriages and christenings, the food passed back and forth. They didn’t visit each other in their houses; they talked on the sidewalk and the porch. Then other houses sprang up, gradually, magically, the street grew full and Ellen built a chicken fence, a wire pen so she could keep her birds. At first she’d had a rooster, but by the forties, she’d given that up, thinking it would be her one concession to the neighborhood, and vowing she would make no more.
Of course the two policemen, half her age, one in the class in grammar and high school of her late son, the hero of the War, could not stand up to her. And the disapprobation of her neighbors wouldn’t have stopped her; she’d have enjoyed it; combat thinned her blood, like warmer weather; it made her feel the joy of movement and its force. But she did kill the chickens; it was Dan who wanted it. He couldn’t stand the shame of it. She would not have him unhappy. She saw he was but he would not say why.
He heard Ellen ask, “Camille, what is it with him?”
Camille was nine. He knew that she knew his double shame; he was ashamed of how his grandmother stood out in the world, that she was not like others, but he loved her and was shamed by his own shame. He longed to be like other people, and he hated the chickens, for their part in keeping him from this. He knew Cam had seen him that winter afternoon doing the one cruel thing he’d ever done: she’d seen him throwing snowballs at the chickens. And another time she’d seen his face grow horrified when Ellen had them catch the old hen, no longer worth her feed, and hand it over to be beheaded, dropped then on the floor, flapping until its heart had lost sufficient blood. Ellen had thrown the hen’s head to Tramp the dog, and never seen Dan’s horror. But Cam saw.
They both knew Ellen wanted the chickens to stay in the yard. Dan knew that Cam loved her grandmother’s defiance, loved that they had stood together on the sidewalk and made two policemen walk away. But she saw that he suffered, and she would always act to keep back suffering from this boy, more than brother, orphaned even more than she and even more bereft.
She said to her grandmother: “He got upset about the chickens. When the two policemen came.”
“For God’s sake, what’s the matter with him.”
Cam looked at her grandmother. She said nothing.
Ellen understood. So one day when the children were at school, Ellen MacNamara killed the chickens, demolished the chicken house she’d built twenty-five years before, took down and cleared away the wire that made up the pen. And when Dan and Cam came home and saw it, she said nothing, and allowed ho comment on this corner of the yard now naked, derelict, bereft. She served the children custard, warm and liquidy in soup bowls she called basins. In the houses of their friends, they’d eaten from small cold glass stemmed dishes of chocolate pudding with black skin on the top and over that a rosette of whipped cream. Eating the custard at his grandmother’s table, Dan had to think: Am I happy? Am I glad the chickens are gone? Have I failed her, failed what she thought I was? He could see his cousin Cam entirely absorbed in her enjoyment of the custard; a dart of simple love shot from his heart towards her and he wondered: Why am I like this? And then his grandmother began to sing. No words he knew, or even understood. They helped her with the dishes. The warm suds, the music with no words he knew blanketed his heart. He could be happy.
Alone now with his grandmother, holding her papery hand, he thinks about the chickens, of his mother, of the custard and the music and the dishpan and the suds. He sees her eyes; he sees that they see nothing. The eyes try to find him in the room, give up, and close.
“She’s sleeping now,” says his cousin Marilyn. “You go now for your walk. Go on,” she says, “go on with Cam.”
PART II
1
THIS IS THE WAY she told the story out in company. Her best story: she made everybody laugh. She told them this when they asked her why she came to America, could she not have stayed at home?
She always began in the same way. “Bit by bit the news spread through the town.”
She’d look around to make sure everyone was listening well. She didn’t want to waste her effort. She refused to. Lying now, refusing to become the one event, her death, she sees herself talking.
“The news spread through the town. ’Twas not a big town, you know, Tulla, but a market town. So Thursday, market day, everyone was gathered in the square, or I should say the men were gathered, God alone knew where the women were.
“ ‘The bees are in the church now,’ they were all saying, as if it was good news, some relative from America, or that the roses were full out, or you could get a good price for your bullock.
“ ‘Bees, then,’ they were saying, and that was the end of it.
“Of course we lived in the town, my father was a publican, right in the main street we lived, so of a Thursday morning, market day, I’d pull the curtains of the parlor windows and see a bullock’s face pressed up against the glass. And what the street was like after they l
eft, the pack of them, the people and the cattle both. I’m on your side, I’ll keep it from you. So I’m hearing there’s bees in the church, but never in my wildest dreams could I have thought of what it was. On Sunday, we went up to the church, of course, my dad and myself walking. Everyone was there, just in the usual way. Then you walked in and, Holy God, ’twas nothing but a swarm, sounding like thunder. And not a blessed person saying one word on the subject and the priest up there on the altar, normal. Though he had the sense to cut the sermon short.
“You couldn’t hear a word of any part of it, Mass or the sermon, for the swarming. And after Mass, like always, each went about his business, not a word was said. I thought ’twas safe back home to ask my father couldn’t anyone do anything about the bees and was cuffed right then and there for my damned insolence. Three weeks this went on, once a week the woman who cleaned out the church went in to sweep away the corpses. The fourth Sunday the place was spotless. There’d been these lines of honey, and then clots of it dripping down the wall, they’d stuck there, but the woman, God knows I don’t remember her name, who cleaned up the church had got rid of that somehow. The priest stood in the pulpit and thanked God that through this tribulation no one had been stung, especially the children, and he offered three Hail Marys of Thanksgiving to the Blessed Mother, Patroness of Ireland, who sheltered all within her motherly embrace.
“ ’Twas then I packed my bags,” she always ended the story. “And I booked my passage.”
“How old were you, Ellen?” people would ask her.
“Sixteen, but I knew ’twas not the place for me. And right I was.”
“And you don’t want to go back?”
“What would I go for? Pigs and dirt and begging relatives. No thanks, none of that ‘I’ll Take You Home Again Kathleen’ cod for me, thank you. That’s my husband’s department. Say the word bog only and he’s drowning in the water of his tears.”
2
IN REALITY, THE SOUND of swarming bees has been, throughout her life, the sound of all her terror. She was sixteen, that much was the truth, but she wasn’t living in the town, not living in her father’s house, but in the country with her mother. Her mother, who sat in the darkness gibbering. Supplicating in the Irish tongue: “God take me from this life.”
The year is 1911. A quarter-mile from the main road, and never visited, is a stone house. The others in the countryside are whitewashed and their roofs are thatched. Their look is welcoming; inside these houses could be cheerful life. A woman bending at the fire, and at least the possibility: a steaming kettle, laundry whitening on the hedge. But this house belonging to Tom Costelloe, Ellen’s father, is a place where there can be no hope. It is the house where Ellen lives. Its stones are dark; in the whole house there are only two windows. The roof is slate; in a storm the slates loosen and fall off. When Ellen tells her father this, he sends a man to fix it, one of his men, the one perhaps who drives her in the dog cart to the Presentation Sisters every morning and in the afternoons is waiting, when she walks out of the door, to drive her home. She will not board there with the sisters, though her father many times has said that he will pay. She won’t board; she won’t leave her mother.
It could be the man who drives her who comes to fix the broken roof, or it could be another. Her father has many men in his employ. For he has many occupations. He is a publican, a grocer, a seller of animal feed. He has been clever with his money; he has prospered.
Her mother has not prospered, and will never prosper. They are in the house because her father saw this and put his wife away, from his sight, and from the sight of all his customers. The trouble, Ellen sees, has its source in her mother’s womb. From that womb she alone escaped alive. Three ghost brothers and sisters perished in the womb: born dead, their green skeletons all in the graveyard. And the other five, too young for bone: the bloody messes and her mother lying on the floor. “Go call your father, tell him come, tell him it’s too late. It’s all over.” She would leave her mother lying in the blood that was the brother or the sister, bloodying the bedsheets with the family blood. And she would hear her mother weeping to her husband, “I’m no good, Tom. Once again I’ve failed you.” And Ellen would see the father leaving, sickened by the woman’s mess of it, not coming back till morning, or for days, saying the business took him, it was unavoidable.
3
TOM COSTELLOE HAD TRUSTED his daughter with money from the time that she was young. It was nearly half her life, then, being with her father. He was proud of her, he wanted her beside him. They were living behind the pub. All day long it was dark, and noisy in the evening, and the smell of beer was everywhere. You would have thought they’d be unhappy there. They weren’t. He was free much of the day. It was just the three of them, and they went walking in the countryside, long walks, sometimes to his parents’ farm; the land belonged to the elder brother now and to the brother’s family: his dour wife, Kathleen, and their four boys, who frightened Ellen, meaning to—they hated her for living in the town. Her father’d saved his wages working for the Shaughnessys across the road; his elder brother, too, had helped him buy the pub and start himself, a part of it was his. It did not make the brothers love each other. Tom Costelloe resented Jack, his brother, for his place as firstborn, his smaller talents. Jack in turn thought his young brother fast and never to be trusted, though he saw that these same qualities made him prosper, and he loved prosperity, kept his brother near him to be near its touch.
The pub had a back door that opened onto the Protestant graveyard. They had a morsel of a garden where her mother set the washtub in fine weather; she would sing then as she washed and when they finished, she and Ellen would take a piece of bread and butter in a napkin and walk among the dead Protestants till they got to the hill above the graveyard with the best view of the valley. She would sit beside her mother. Sometimes they sat silent, sometimes they talked like sisters, sometimes her mother would unplait Ellen’s hair and hold it in her hands then plait it up again, just for the pleasure of it. Sometimes the father joined them. They would look down at the valley below, spread around them like a lap. He’d put his daughter on his back and run down the hill with her, and the mother, laughing, would beg them to slow down, she’d never catch up to them, they were merciless, the two of them, they were two villains, they must take pity on a poor old woman’s tired bones. He’d slow down for her. When she caught up, she’d wink at Ellen and say, “Race you, then.” Ellen would jostle on her father’s back. She knew he let her mother win. He’d put his daughter down and say: “ ’Tis a terrible thing to be married to a woman that cute she’d deceive her husband.” He would kiss the hair his wife was pinning up and for a moment Ellen hated her, the beautiful mother, who had only to pin her hair atop her head to steal the father, turn him into her husband merely, and the two of them turn away, away from Ellen, in their pleasure in each other, and their pride. They were better-looking than the parents of the other children. When they stood up for the Gospel during Mass she was proud to stand beside them. She imagined herself envied for her parents and it was the secret jewel she hoarded in her mind: the stranger’s envious stare.
Her father bought up the grocer’s shop next: then they were happiest. She sat beside him on a high stool. She was seven years old, she was eight: she gave change back to customers. Occasionally she’d get something for her father, when he said, “Would you run for that, now, Ellen, like a good girl. Get the brown soap in the back for Mrs. Lavery.” She loved the ledger books her father kept, the black ink of his writing, the thin red line of the columns separating numbers.
That was the time of the first stillborn baby. The mother in the room above the shop, a nice room with curtains you could open to look out. Ellen had been sent to fetch her aunt Kathleen, expecting she’d come home to find a brother or a sister. But nothing, no word. Silence. Her father grim-lipped, coming for her in a week. Her mother white-faced. Slower-moving. Only when they were alone, her mother took Ellen to her, to the arc her bo
dy made. “The poor babe was born dead. There’s nothing for it.”
It began then. She’d catch her mother out in weeping, in the vague looks, in the silence and the slower tread. And people told her, “You must be kind to her, poor thing.”
As if she ever had not been kind. As if the mother, beautiful in movement or stillness, ever had called up from her heart anything but yearning, pride, the pull to be as near her as she could. The first day she’d gone out to school was death, just down the road, but really exile. All day in school she longed to be running up the road, dusty from chalk, back to the heaven of the room she lived in with her mother, to hear the sure click of her thimble, the wooden spoon against the pot side, the rustle of her mother’s dress as she lifted up her arm to the high shelf for salt, for flour.
When had she not been kind? When had she not seen her mother as the treasure she would die for? Die for in an hour, gallant, soldierly. She would feel privileged to lay down her life.
Her mother took to resting in the afternoons. She was nearly always pregnant, or getting over the loss of a child. But she was never whole with child. The children broke her, or they broke her heart. He went on doing it, the thing he did to her that made it happen. Every few months something terrible.
He hired Anna Foley then to help the mother with the housework. She was younger than the mother, eighteen, ten years older than Ellen was herself, but she seemed much older than all of them and she worshipped in the mother the traces of preserved youth she had never seen in the overworked women she’d been brought up among.