by Edna O'Brien
“Ladies and gintlemin, would yous be so kind as to come and be sated and take a crust from me humble table,” the missus said, ringing a little glass bell after Father Bob had arrived profuse with apologies. They trooped in to the dining room, rapturous once again over the beautiful linen, the array of crystal at each place setting, and the red candle in a scooped-out turnip for a rustic effect.
Mr. Keating read aloud from the table d’hôte that the missus had written on a sheet of parchment.
Green Turtle Soup
Roast Goose
Stuffing Ensemble
Pig’s Crubeens and Cabbage
Battered Eggplant
Spuds
Vegetables Galore
Sauces Galore
Plum Pudding, Trifles, Jellies
Napoleons with Fluffy Strawberry Sauce
No hotel in the city could better it. The gourmet touch and the human touch. The napoleons, she reminded them, were so named because of Napoleon getting indigestion from the pastry and thereby losing the Battle of Waterloo. They all laughed and said Bony had it coming to him. Seeing us, Solveig and me, in our black shoes and our black stockings, like nuns with our white lace overalls and caps, Mr. said that the little girlies must get some credit too.
“Oh, I have to watch them,” the missus said and snapped her fingers for us to start passing the turtle soup around.
Unfolding her napkin and seeing the M in red silk, Finoola said it brought tears to her eyes, it was like seeing the fuchsia flower on the hedges in Kerry long ago. They vied with each other over memories and the talk then went to the vaudeville shows that were all the rage, the home life of Paddy the drunken Irishman and Mrs. Paddy his half-drunken wife, fighting it out, he with the leg of a chair and she with a flatiron, in their hovel of a kitchen. Scandalous altogether. A bloody slur on the race, on the Paddies, depicted with ape lips and grass hair, pick and shovel in the hands. Kevin then put it to them if there was a man or a woman who could do justice to the history of their country, their dear Dark Rosaleen, their Kathleen ni Houlihan. One said Yeats, at which Kevin shook his head but Eamonn, who had not spoken a word, piped up to recite the line “Said Pearce to Connolly there’s nothing but our own red blood can make a right rose tree.” From Yeats it gravitated toward Maud Gonne, his muse, some praising her, some saying she was a firebrand, exhorting young men to put dynamite in bags of coal bound for England and before long there was a slanging match, Felim and Mr. Keating, haranguing each other, both at opposite political poles. A flood of accusation and counter-accusation, rebellions, botched rebellions, informers, Robert Emmet’s speech from the dock, and Mr. Keating going too far by claiming that the men of 1916 were nothing but boy scouts, laughed at when they surrendered and were led out of the post office. Felim rose, the pieces of goose crumbling on his fork, his neck muscles bunched and gathered, said no doubt it was cowardly to die for your country, cowardly to face the firing squad, his wife clutching and re-clutching her cameo pendant out of shame and Eamonn egging him on, shouting, “Keep it up, Felim, keep it up.” Felim was there to tell his right honorable friend Mr. Keating, an English lackey, that no Irishman had ever done a dishonorable deed in his life. It was too much. Mr. Keating exploded, cited the savage murder of the English lord lieutenant and his secretary on their way to the Viceregal Lodge in Phoenix Park, minding their own business but stabbed to death with surgical knives by the said honorable Irishmen.
“Political necessity,” Felim thundered back.
“Political necessity, my arse,” Mr. Keating said, and Matilda pleaded with Father Bob to reason with them, to put a stop to this appalling language and appalling behavior. He stood with his arms out as if to embrace the gathering, his voice muted: “Friends, we’re all fellow Irishmen and Irishwomen, our country in the cradle of her independence … we are here to heal wounds, not to open them,” to which Mr. followed with a toast—“To the freedom of Ireland, to the freedom of Ireland”—and they all stood to respond. Sitting down, Father Bob asked the good people did they realize that Irish scroll work, Irish symbols, Irish illuminations, torques, knots, and crosses were copied in Egyptian halls and later adopted for their beauty in the schools of Charlemagne.
“Excuse my Dutch, Father Bob,” Felim said, still seething. “But it’s an effing disgrace when people who have never set foot in Ireland feel nothing for her, only insult and disdain.”
“And what did you ever do for Ireland?” Mr. Keating said, his mouth full of food, eating with hard vexed jaws, his wife tugging at him to sit down.
“I’ll tell you what I did for Ireland,” Felim replied and rolled up his sleeve to show the knife wounds he had incurred from a bastard who simply could not stomach the fact that Christopher Columbus was not the first man to discover America, that an Irishman, Patrick McGuire, was the first to step on American soil. Mr. was by his side, praising him for his patriotism, saying to put politics aside for one day, and begging him not to get the hump up. Felim sulked, turned his chair to one side, and Mr. Keating, feeling victorious, asked Father Bob if he might regale them concerning the rocky courtship of Pascal and Matilda and he, having played gooseberry, party to it all. Father Bob thought it a capital idea and with a braggart air Mr. Keating began: “Pascal and myself would go dancing to the Hibernian on a Saturday night and before many moons Pascal and Matilda had clicked, except that the good lady began to play tricks on us, began to vanish. She would promise to meet us but come Saturday night, our eyes peeling the hall, there would be no sign of Matilda. We asked around. It turned out that she had signed up for dancing lessons with a Parisian woman. We tracked her down and one evening after a class I confronted her. I said, ‘Whatever you do, Matilda, don’t go over to the Hibernian anymore.’ That shook her. She went wild altogether when I told her about the Mayo girl that had set her cap on Pascal and what brilliant partners they were—Charleston, Velincia, Black Bottom, Caledonian. She could have put a knife through me. A Mayo girl! Mayo, God help us! Galway was where kings, queens, and chieftains sprung from. Following Saturday she arrives, dressed to the nines, taps him on the shoulder and said, ‘Hello, stranger,’ and the denouement, well, the denouement is right here at this gathering with hosts whose generosity and hospitality is a byword in the parish.”
After the clapping, Kevin stood up, his yellow paper hat askew on his head, and asked Mr. if it was time for his ghost story.
“Cripes, I hate ghost stories. They give me the runs,” Chrissie said.
“Will someone rap her knuckles,” the missus called and Chrissie limped off, said she knew where she was not wanted, Father Bob having to follow her and bring her back with his “Chrissie Asthor, Chrissie Mavourneen, Chrissie Macrae.”
Kevin stood by the sideboard, so as to be in view of all.
“There was this girl at home, Dotey was her name. She had only months to live, consumption eating her, neighbors stopped coming in case it was contagious. No appetite, a spoon of jelly or blancmange and to make matters worse her father and mother were not hitting it off. Her father left for Scotland to get work picking the potatoes, gone six months and never wrote a line home. Her poor mother seeing her child wasting away, five younger children half hungry, and the hour came when Dotey opened her eyes for the last time and the death rattle started and I tell you this, her father beyond in Scotland saw her in her bed gasping for her life. She appeared to him and said, ‘Come home, Dad, come home,’ so he ran from that field and got a lift on a cattle boat and when he came into the room in his own house the women were all crying; he walked through them and Dotey sat up and kissed him, kissed him fondly, and from that day on he was a model father and a model husband. You see, Dotey had been dead twelve hours before he got there … it was her ghost that sat up and pleaded with him beyond in Scotland.”
The talk was of ghosts that prowled the city, the Bowery, Hell’s Kitchen, the Five Points, Harlem, soldiers from the Civil War appearing to their mothers and their sweethearts, because they had died too young.
“Goodness gracious, we are getting very morbid,” Father Bob said and decided that the moment had come for Matilda to give them a song in her inimitable soprano. Everyone knew that the missus’s aria was the highlight of the party and she knew it too, but she made much of declining, said she couldn’t, she simply couldn’t, her throat, her larynx, asking to be excused, citing the lovely records that she had ordered specially, songs that would far surpass her little repertoire: “Where the Shannon River Meets the Sea,” “Little Brown Jug,” “May I Sleep in Your Barn Tonight.”
She started out very hesitant, like she was singing to herself, and then her voice got high and coaxing, just as Solveig and I had heard every morning when she practiced in the bath for this performance. She had one hand on the rung of the chair and the other extended, her chest rising, swelling, so that the rubies palpitated and the perfumed sachet in her bosom jutted out:
There’s a bridle hanging on the wall
There’s a saddle in a lonely stall
No more I answer to your call
For that bridle’s hanging on the wall.
Bravo. Brava. Calls for an encore. Nellie Melba wasn’t in it. Matilda could knock spots out of the Caucasian or Russian ladies, could be in Carnegie Hall, the star attraction under the baton of a great conductor. In the commotion, the congressman glided in, like he had materialized out of nowhere, in a long fawn coat, a deputy behind him.
“The hall door was open,” he said with an easy smile and the missus brimmed over with welcome and fluster, getting three people up as if he required three chairs, then as he sat next to her, introducing him to the faces down both sides of the table, all of whom were enrapt except for Chrissie, who was drooping, her head on Kevin’s shoulder.
Whereas it was Father Bob this and Father Bob that, now it was congressman this and congressman that and he took her compliments with aplomb. Everything about him spoke of assurance—his smile, his gold-capped teeth, the gold ring with the wax seal on his little finger, and the abandon with which he allowed the coat to slip off his shoulders and slide on the floor. He repeated everyone’s name and tried to guess from the accents what county they had come from, smiting himself when he got it wrong. When Mr. Keating tried to engage him about some marshal involved in a scandal and getting a licking in the newspapers, the congressman sidestepped it and said, “I can promise you it will all blow over.”
If he hadn’t asked me to sing and if afterward he hadn’t come over, all pie, and said, “Thank God that there are girls like you” it mightn’t have happened, except that it did. “The Castle of Dromore.” October winds. The emptied lofty halls. Afterward such a rush of compliments, Mr. and he surpassing each other, what a voice, what purity, what feeling, and the missus taking it all into her heaving outraged heart. He asked our names, Solveig’s and mine, and said we would never be true Yanks until we came to Jersey City and promised that he would send a car to fetch us one day.
Then he was gone.
The gift he had brought them was opened. It was a chocolate cake in the shape of a log with her name and Mr.’s name piped in cream icing and the message on the card read “Cherish the traditions but embrace the newfound liberty.” What a beautiful message, so edifying. What a great man and what a great Irishman, on a par with Boss Tweed, John Kelly, the folk heroes, starting from nowhere, his father dying young, eleven children, up the ladder in the district, learning the ropes, no job too big or too little, the loyalty to his own, an Irishman drowned on the fleets up in the Cape and the congressman was there, an Irishman crushed by a beam on the railways and the congressman was there, an Irishman suffocated in the mines and the congressman was pressing for compensation for wife and children.
“Wasn’t there some other lady, Louella?” Chrissie said.
“She was never a factor in the marriage,” Pascal said, chastisingly.
“Oh, I don’t know … he has a reputation for the ladies,” Ea- monn interrupted, because he had read that she followed him to a big party and he was with the wife and she threw down the fur coat he had bought her, told him to take it back.
“He’s the coming man … rumor hath it that he might even be president one day,” Father Bob said, in nearly sacred tones.
“God … and he came here,” Pascal said, amazed.
“And he liked the little lassie … the little linnet,” Felim said and looked at me and wondered when I’d be summoned to Jersey City. It was too much for Matilda. She barked at them, told the men to get out on the porch for their pipes and cigars and the women to go to the drawing room where the coffee would be served.
Mr. quenched the candles, some with a snuffer and the one in the turnip with his fingers, then tiptoed out. The yellowish smoke fogged the room. The missus had not got up, she was sitting, her breathing pronounced and her cousin Jenny leaning in over her, comforting her. Only her lips moved.
“Did you see the way he looked at her … the pair of them … I don’t know which of them was the biggest ape, Pascal or him.”
“Ah, that’s men all over … pay no heed to them,” Jenny said, kissing her.
Realizing that I was by the sideboard, she shunted the dishes in my direction and roared at me to go to the pantry and serve the sweetmeats.
* * *
It was the party but not the party. I was in a jaunting car at home, the posh table out in the field, the visitors with the paper hats that they’d pulled out of the crackers and Father Bob giving me the dime that he’d got from the plum pudding. Then it was not a dream. The missus shouting at us, “Get up, get up,” and half asleep, rubbing our eyes, not knowing what had happened, Solveig and I staggered out of bed and clung to one another.
“Thieves, thieves,” she was screaming it. Her sapphire ring was missing. I was nervy because secretly I loved that ring, the blue of it so various, so varying, seas of blue in the square nugget with its two shoulders of diamond, the two shoulders of diamond alone worth a fortune. I remembered the day that I’d cleaned it, dipped it in the ammonia water, then scrubbed it delicately with a toothbrush, rinsed and placed it on a soap dish to dry. She had supervised me, but when she was called downstairs to the telephone I tried it on and twirled it round and round, admiring it on my finger. Her fingers were fatter than mine.
Our drawers were ransacked, our mattresses turned over, and the letters my mother wrote me tossed to one side.
Mr. was holding a hand lamp and she was shouting at him to hold it higher as the paraffin was dripping. She was in her quilted dressing gown, metal curlers above her ears, and she looked like a big, fat doll gone mad.
Solveig’s autograph book was opened, all her secrets disclosed, the hand-pressed flowers from Malmo and the motto her friend Greta had written: “For Solveig, this is my farewell present to her, forever.”
Next it was the scapulars belonging to my brother and feeling the relic inside the cloth the missus decided that undoubtedly it was her ring. With a glee she cut it open and when she found that it was not the ring, she swung the legs of the scissors in a chopping movement close to my eyes.
“It is not nice what you are doing to her,” Solveig said.
Then it was back downstairs to their room. Cushions and pillows strewn about, drawers pulled open, drawers with his socks and his underwear and the gifts she had been brought for the party, the perfumes and soaps and frosted bottles of talc, discarded, as if they were useless.
“It must be somewhere, Matilda,” Mr. kept saying, stooping to search in the carpet and the pile of the new rugs and she shrieking back at him, “Find it, find it.”
My tin box with the picture of a glen in Scotland where they malted whiskey was the next thing to arouse her suspicion. She shook it and listened. The shopkeeper at home had had a little padlock made, for safekeeping on the passage over.
“Open it,” she said.
I defied her. I would not open it. I defied her for as long as I could.
When she lifted the lid she was triumphant because inside lay the ev
idence of my thievery. A scarf of hers that was in flitters and the ends of bars of soap that smelled of lavender and rose water, then worst of all there was a white pompom that had fallen off Solveig’s knitted cap. That did it. The missus exulted, told her husband that the proof was there in that very box, and struck a division between Solveig and me by dispatching her to the guest room until she was called.
My nightgown lay in a heap, bagging around my ankles, where I’d had to pull it down for her to inspect me. Her eyes went up and down my body, a violence in them, as if she would kill me for being thin and young and a favorite with her husband.
* * *
I thought I would be left there forever. It was a cupboard under the attic stairs, filled with suitcases, quilts, bolsters, pillows that smelled of dust and feathers, a dungeon, where I was quartered until I owned up.
She would come up from time to time and rap on the door. No words were said. The three or four raps were simply to know if I was ready to confess. Then I would hear the thud of her footsteps going back down the stairs.
It was dark by the time Mr. came up and shone the lamp in over me, tearing through the thick skin of cobweb. He just leaned in blinking and his voice was hoarse and wearied.
“Give it back and we won’t tell the fathers,” he said.
“I don’t have it to give back.”
“Is that true, Dilly?”
“That’s true … I’ll swing for it if I have to.”
He beat his head against a wall, again and again, as if he wanted to dash his brains out, dash his memory out, and dash every piece of jewelry to smithereens.
“Come on,” he said, and I crawled out.
The missus was still in her dressing gown, her feet inside the fender warming herself, and yet she shivered all over. There was a tray with food that she had not touched.
“You haven’t had your tea, Matilda,” he said.
“The fecking milk is gone off,” she said and turning with a victorious expression said, “So she has confessed.”