Collected Stories (69 page)

Counsel for Oedipus

T
O SIT
in court and watch a case between wife and husband is like seeing a performance of
Oedipus
. You know that no matter what happens the man hasn't a chance. A colt will consider it a matter of conscience to pass a filly, and a court of law is the same. Even the man's own counsel will be ashamed of him and envy counsel for the wife, who, whatever she did or didn't do, has the ear of the court. As for judges—every single one that I've known had a mother fixation.

But the worst thing of all is that even the man is divided against himself. Now, take the day when Mickie Joe Dougherty was defending a big country man called Lynam, whose wife was suing him for legal separation and accusing him of cruelty and adultery. The adultery was admitted, and all that was needed to prove the cruelty was to put Tom Lynam in the box. He was a big, good-looking man with a stiff, morose manner; one of those men who are deceptively quiet and good-humored for months on end and then lay you out with a stick for a casual remark about politics.

His wife was a trim, mousy little female about half his height and a quarter his weight, with an anxious face and a gentle, bedraggled air. She cocked her little head while she listened to her counsel's questions, as though they were uttered in a foreign language, and replied to them in something of the same way, raising her colorless little voice and illustrating her answers with pathetic, half-completed gestures. It reminded you of fourth-form French. All the same, it gave impressiveness to the picture she drew of her husband, drunk and violent, smashing everything in the kitchen on her. You could see O'Meara, the judge, adored her. “Come over here where we can hear you, ma'am,” he said, pointing to a seat on the bench beside him, and he leaned one elbow on the bench, crossed his legs, and studied her. Poor O'Meara was a bad case; he had blood pressure as well as a mother fixation. Once or twice, as she gave her evidence, she glanced sadly and pityingly at her husband, who stared back at her with a gloomy hatred that was awe-inspiring. Most men, hearing how they have beaten and strangled their wives, even if they never laid a finger on them, don't know where to look—the poor devils are wondering what everyone thinks of them—but here was a man who watched his wife as if he was wondering why the blazes he hadn't taken a hatchet and finished the job as he was at it.

“And what did he say then?” asked Kenefick, her counsel.

“He called me—do I have to say that?” she asked with a wistful girlish look at O'Meara.

“Oh, not at all, not at all, ma'am,” he said hastily. “Write it down,” and pushed pencil and paper towards her. She wrote as she talked, slowly and carefully, raising her eyes sightlessly as she thought of all the cruel things her husband had said to her. Then she passed the paper apologetically to the judge, who glanced at it and passed it down to counsel. Tom Lynam, his face black with fury, leaned forward and whispered something to his solicitor, Matt Quill, but Matt only shook his head. If Matt had had his way, he'd have settled the case out of court.

“Did he say anything else?” asked Kenefick.

“Only if I didn't get out of the house in five minutes, sir, that he'd do to me what the Jews did to Jesus.”

“What the Jews did to who?” O'Meara asked incredulously.

“Jesus, my lord,” she replied, bowing her head reverently at the Holy Name. “Our Blessed Lord, you know. Crucify me, he meant.”

“Huh!” snorted O'Meara with his blood pressure going up several degrees.

“Tell my lord what happened then,” prompted Kenefick.

“So then I told him I could not go out at that hour of night, and the state of feebleness I was in,” Mrs. Lynam continued with growing animation, “and he dragged me off the sofa and twisted my wrist behind my back.” She illustrated “wrist” and “back” with another feeble gesture which she didn't complete.

“And did he know the state you were in?”

“Sure, how could he not know it?” cried Mrs. Lynam with her little hands outspread. “I wasn't able to get up from the sofa the whole day. That was what he had against me, of course. He wouldn't believe I was sick. Shamming he said I was.”

“And what did he do?”

“Oh, he kicked me.”

“Where was this?”

Her hand went to her back again, and she blushed. “Oh, in the—”

“No, no, no. I don't mean that. Where did this occur? What direction did he kick you in?”

“Oh, out the front door, sir,” she replied hastily. “I fell on the path. Tommy—that's our little boy—knelt alongside me and began to cry, and my husband told him if he didn't get to bed, he'd do the same to him.”

“He'd do the same to Tommy. How old is the child?”

“Five, sir, the fourteenth of February.”

“And your husband made no effort to see were you injured in the fall?”

“Oh, indeed he didn't, sir,” she replied with a smile like a rainbow—an optical illusion between two downpours. “Only to give me another kick off the path and into the flower-bed.”

“And didn't you, at any time, make some appeal to him to cease this cruel treatment?” demanded Kenefick, stepping up his voice to indignation.

“Oh, indeed, I did, sir,” she replied, responding sadly with a shake of her head. Whatever brand of French she spoke, it was clearly going down well, and she was beginning to enjoy it herself. “I asked him did he think I was in a fit state to go crawling across the fields in the dark to a neighbor's house, but he only used a filthy expression and banged the door in my face.”

“And those were the marks that you showed next day to Dr. O'Mahony?”

“They were, sir. The same. A week he made me stop in bed with them.”

“Tell me, ma'am,” the judge interrupted, “this second kick he gave you—the one that sent you off the path into the flower-bed—where were you when he did that?”

“Oh, on the ground, my lord. I was too bad to get up. Half the way across the fields, I was crawling like that, on my hands and knees.”

After this it was scarcely necessary to prove her husband's behavior with Nora MacGee, a woman of notorious bad character, for in fact she had had a child by him and his paternity was not denied. He had even visited her and nursed the child himself.

“And did you ask him to give up seeing this woman?”

“Why then, indeed, I did, sir. A dozen times if I did it once.”

“And what did he say?”

“He said he wouldn't give up seeing a Lynam child for all the Hanafeys that were ever pupped, sir. The Hanafeys are my family,” she added with her rainbow smile.

At this, Kenefick sat down as though he could not bear to prolong the poor woman's agony further, and Mickie Joe rose. Now, it cannot be pretended that, the best day he ever was, Mickie Joe was much of a lawyer or made a good appearance in court. Mickie Joe had begun life as a schoolmaster, but abandoned it, first for politics and then for the law. He really loved the art of oratory, and his soul filled with emotion whenever he spoke of the great orators of old who swayed vast audiences with the power of their voices, but Mickie Joe's own voice was like the whistle of a train, and the only effect he had ever had on an audience was to make them laugh. He had a long, thin, mournful face, and big, blackberry-colored sunken eyes, and he looked at you over his pince-nez as though at any moment he might burst into tears. Everybody loved Mickie Joe, everybody tried to throw business in his way, but nobody ever took him seriously. He had a tendency which was very obvious in the Lynam case to identify himself with his client, a thing no real lawyer will do. A client is a fact, and a true lawyer hates facts. A lawyer is like an actor who can never bother about what sort of play he appears in, but tells himself some little story to cover as many of the incidents as he can be bothered to remember. The only thing he hates is to be reminded—for instance by the author—what the real story is about.

But Mickie Joe got up bursting with indignation, and even O'Meara smiled at the picture of Mickie Joe, who never said a cross word to anybody, identifying himself with this uproarious, drunken farmer. He felt Tom Lynam had been wronged and was bent on proving it. What made it funnier was that he began with a series of questions which nobody understood, which only reflected further Mrs. Lynam's virtue and his client's beastliness, but which he asked with a bitter reserve. Mrs. Lynam wasn't afraid of him. No woman was ever afraid of Mickie Joe. She answered steadily and quietly. Yes, she had been educated in a convent. Yes, she was a great friend of Sister Dominic. And of Father O'Regan, the parish priest. Yes, she had asked their advice before beginning proceedings against her husband. Yes, she was a member of the Women's Sodality and the Children of Mary.

Then Mickie Joe began to expand, and it became clear what his purpose had been. But it also looked as though Mickie Joe had lost his reason. It's bad enough to attack a woman, but to attack her because she's a pious woman is to go looking for trouble.

“And when you were at the Women's Sodality,” he asked icily, looking at her between the wig and the pince-nez, “who got your husband's supper?”

“Sometimes he got it himself.”

“And the children's supper?”

“Of an odd time.”

“And when you were out at Mass, he got his breakfast, I suppose?”

“Unless he wanted to wait till I got in.”

“But you always got it for him when you came in?”

“Always, except when I wasn't able.”

“And I take it you weren't always able?”

“Well, no,” she admitted candidly. “Not always.” She still didn't take him seriously.

“You were able to go to Mass,” he said, drawling every word, “but you were not able to get your husband's breakfast? Is that what you're telling my lord?”

“Sometimes I went to Mass when I wasn't able, either,” she replied with a noble pathos which would have silenced another man but not Mickie Joe.

“You went to Mass when you weren't able,” he repeated with a bitter smile, “but you didn't get your husband's breakfast when you weren't able. Is that what you mean?”

“I think I ought to explain that,” she said, beginning to get flurried. “I'm not strong. I have a pain in my back. I hurted it years ago in a fall I got. Dr. O'Mahony treated me.”

“Mrs. Lynam, do you also suffer from headaches?”

“I do. Bilious,” she replied, pointing to her stomach.

“Really, Mr. Dougherty,” said O'Meara wearily, “if a headache is an offense we're all bad characters.”

Of course, by this time O'Meara was champing at the bit, waiting to get on with his judgment. For a judge with a mother fixation to listen to evidence at all when he wants to rush to the rescue of some poor afflicted female is an ordeal in itself, but it made it worse that all there was between himself and it was a poor fish like Mickie Joe. But for once Mickie Joe did not give way. He looked at the judge reprovingly over his pince-nez and replied in a wail:

“My lord, if the petitioner is presented to the court as something out of a medical museum, I have nothing more to say.”

“Oh, go on, Mr. Dougherty, go on!” said O'Meara, but all the same he grew red. He was beginning to notice like the rest of us that Mickie Joe had ceased to be a figure of fun, but no more than ourselves did he realize what was happening. The truth was that there is only one person who can stand up to a man with a mother fixation, and that is a woman-hater. Exactly as O'Meara wanted to get at that big hulk of a man in the court, Mickie Joe wanted to get at that gentle, pious little woman sitting up beside the judge with her hands in her lap. And, in a queer way, his dislike was beginning to affect people's opinion. It wasn't only that you couldn't any longer patronize Mickie Joe. You couldn't any longer see her the way you had seen her first. Whether it was right or wrong, another picture was beginning to emerge of a woman who was both ruthless and designing and who ruled her great brute of a husband by her weakness. This was only one stage of his ruin. In the next she would be living in comfort in a terrace house on his earnings, while he dragged out an impoverished and lonely existence.

Lynam himself began to perk up, and, instead of looking at his wife, looked at the people round him. The court had gradually begun to fill up, the way it does when a case gets interesting. He still scowled, but now he seemed to be challenging the people in court to say if he wasn't justified.

“Did you and your husband do much visiting together, Mrs. Lynam?” Mickie Joe asked gently.

“Well, you can't do much with two children, sir, can you?” she asked with soft reproach.

“That depends, ma'am,” he said with a mournful smile. “A lot of people seem to be able to do it.”

“I dare say they have servants,” she said nervously.

“Strange to say, ma'am, friendships have been known to persist even in the humblest homes,” sighed Mickie Joe with a smile like a glacier.

“I'm sure I don't know how they manage it, then.”

“There are such things as neighbors, ma'am.”

“Well, you can't be always asking the neighbors.”

“No,” he said bitterly. “You can ask them to put you up after a quarrel with your husband, but you can't ask them to mind your children. And how much attention do the children need? What age is your little girl, ma'am?”

“She's ten.”

“And she couldn't look after the little fellow and herself?”

“Well, I can explain that,” she said with a nervous glance at the judge. “You see, they don't get on, and you couldn't leave little Tommy with her, on account of that.”

“You mean, she would beat him?” Mickie Joe asked sternly.

“Well, not beat him exactly,” said Mrs. Lynam, getting more rattled than ever. “But she might be tormenting him.”