Collected Stories (85 page)

But she knew he really meant it, and that day she had great boasting over it among the neighbors. “A boy of fourteen, ma'am, that was never away from home all the days of his life, coming back like that, on an old bicycle, without food or sleep. Oh, my! Where would you find the likes of him?”

The neighbors, too, were impressed. “Well, Jimmy,” they said, when he came back at the end of the holidays, to go to school. “You couldn't do without us, I see.”

There was only one change in the relationship between Kate, James, and Jimmy. The day after his return, Jimmy said, “I'm not going to call you Mammy any more.”

“Oye, and what are you going to call me?” she asked with sour humor.

“I'm going to call you Granny,” he said. “The other sounds too silly.”

After a few weeks James said “Granny,” too. Though she didn't complain, she resented it. Stumbling about the house, talking to herself, she would suddenly say, “Glad enough they were of someone to call Mammy.”

A
FTER
Jimmy had been back for a year or so, Kate's health began to break up. She had to go to hospital, and Nora and Molly offered to take one of the boys each. But neither Jimmy nor James would agree to this. They didn't want to leave the house and they didn't want to be separated, so they stayed on, and each week one of the girls came to clear up after them. They reported to Kate that the mess was frightful. But it wasn't this that really worried her, it was the wild streak in Jimmy. In the evenings, instead of doing his lessons like James, he was tramping the city with wild young fellows. He had no sense of the value of money, and when he wanted it thought nothing of stealing from herself or James.

She came home before she should have, but even then she was too late to prevent mischief. While she was away, Jimmy had left school and got himself a job in a packing store.

“Oh, you blackguard, you!” she said. “I knew well you'd be up to something when my back was turned. But to school you go tomorrow, my fine gentleman, if I have to drag you there myself.”

“I can't go back to school,” Jimmy said indignantly. “They could have the law on me if I didn't give a month's notice.” He knew she was very timid of policemen, lawyers, and officials and even at her age was in great dread of being dragged off to jail for some crime she didn't even know she had committed.

“Who's the manager?” she said. “I'll see him myself.”

“You can't,” said Jimmy. “He's on holidays.”

“Oh, you liar,” she muttered. “The truth isn't in you. Who is it?”

“Anyway, I have to have a job,” said Jimmy. “If anything happened you while you were in hospital, who was going to look after James?”

She was taken aback, because that was something that had been all the time on her own mind. She knew her James, and knew that if she died and he was sent to live with some foster mother who didn't understand him, he would break his heart. In every way he was steadier than Jimmy, and yet he was far more defenseless. If you took Jimmy's home away from him, he would fight, steal, or run away, but James would only lie down and die. Still, though she was impressed by Jimmy's manliness, she wasn't taken in by it. She knew that in an emotional fit he was capable of these big gestures, but he could never live up to them, and in no time he would be thinking how he could turn them to his own advantage.

“'Tisn't James at all with you,” she said. “'Tis more money you want for yourself. Did you tell your mother first?”

“I'm working till after six every night!” he cried, confounded by her injustice. “What time have I to write to my mother?”

“Plenty of time you have to write to her when 'tis something you want,” she said. “Sit down and write to her now, you scamp! I'm not going to be taking the blame for your blackguarding.”

Jimmy, with a martyred air, sat at the table and agonized over a note to his mother. “How do you spell ‘employment'?” he asked James.

“Listen to him!” Kate said, invoking Heaven. “He wants to give up school and he don't know how to spell a simple word.”

“All right, spell if you, so,” he said.

“In my time, for poor people, the education was not going,” she replied with great dignity. “Poor people hadn't the chances they have now, and what chances they had, they respected, not like the ones that are going today. Go on with your letter, you thing!”

A
GAIN
his Uncle Tim came and argued with him. He explained patiently that without an education Jimmy would get nowhere. Unless he finished his schooling, he couldn't go to the University. Jimmy, who couldn't stand gentleness in an argument, broke down and said he didn't want to go to the University, he only wanted to be independent. Kate didn't understand what Jimmy's stepfather meant, but she felt that it was probably only the old conflict in a new form: Jimmy's stepfather wanted him to be one of his own class, and Jimmy didn't. Leaving school at that age was what a working-class boy would do. Except for the occasional brilliant boy who was kept on at the monks' expense, there was no education beyond sixth book.

His stepfather seemed to realize it, too, for he gave in with a suddenness that surprised her. “Oh, all right,” he said. “But you'd better let me try and find you something better than the job you have. And for God's sake go to night school and learn office work.”

When he left, Jimmy accompanied him to the car, and they had a conversation that made Kate suspicious.

“What were you talking to your stepfather about?” she asked.

“Nothing,” said Jimmy. “Only asking him who my father was.”

“And did he tell you?”

“He said he didn't know.”

“How inquisitive we're getting!” said Kate.

“He said I was entitled to know,” Jimmy said defensively. “He told me to ask Nance the next time I go up to them.” She noticed that sometimes he said “Mother” and sometimes “Nance,” and both sounded awkward.

When next he came back from a holiday in Dublin he had discovered what he wished to know. As he described the scene with his mother, Kate was again overcome by a feeling of the strangeness of it all. At first his mother had refused point-blank to tell him anything. She had been quite cool and friendly about it, and explained that she had been only a girl when it all happened and when she had been deserted had cut Jimmy's father out of her life. She hadn't spoken his name since and never proposed to speak it. When Jimmy persisted, arguing and pleading with her, she had grown furious. “Christ, boy,” she said, “it's my life as well as yours!” Then she had wept and said she never wanted him in the house again. At this moment, her husband had walked into the room, looking like murder, Jimmy said, and snapped, “All right, Jimmy. Beat it!” He had closed the door after Jimmy, and Jimmy heard the pair of them arguing from the kitchen. Finally, his stepfather had come out and shouted, “Your mother wants to see you, Jimmy,” and rushed upstairs. When Jimmy went into the living room, she was standing by the fireplace, pale and dry-eyed. “Your father's name is Tom Creedon,” she said coolly. “He had a business in Tramore, but he's left it for years. The last I heard of him he was in London. If you want any more information, you'll have to ask one of his friends. A man called Michael Taylor in Dungarvan is your best chance.” And then she, too, had gone out and followed her husband upstairs, and Jimmy had sat by the fire and sobbed to himself till it was nearly out and the whole house was silent. He felt he had outraged two people who cared for him for the sake of someone who had never inquired whether he was alive or dead.

When he had finished his story, Kate felt the same. “And what use is it to you, now you know it?” she asked maliciously.

“I had to know it,” Jimmy said with easy self-confidence. “Now I can go and see him.”

“You can what?” she asked wearily.

“I can go and see him. Why wouldn't I?”

“Why wouldn't you, indeed, and all the attention he paid to you,” she said sourly. “You're never right.”

There were times when she almost thought he wasn't right in the head. For months on end he never seemed to think at all of his parentage, and then he would begin to daydream till he worked himself up into a fever of emotion. In a fit like that she never knew what he might do. He was capable of anything—of anything, that is, except writing a letter. One weekend he set off on his bicycle for County Waterford and came back with his father's address. After that it was only a question of getting a friend on the cross-Channel boat to fix him a passage for nothing.

All the time he was away Kate fretted, and, being Jimmy, he didn't even send her as much as a picture postcard. She had the vague hope that he wouldn't be able to locate his father. She thought of it all as if it were something she'd read in a newspaper—how in a terrible fit of anger Jimmy struck and killed his father and then turned himself in to the police. She could even see his picture in the paper with handcuffs on his wrists. “Ah,” Hanna Dinan said, “God is good!” But this didn't comfort Kate at all.

And then, one autumn morning after James had left for school, Jimmy walked in. He had had no breakfast, and she fumbled blindly about the little kitchen getting it ready for him, and cursing old age that made it seem such a labor. But all the same, her heart was light. She knew now that she had only been deceiving herself, pretending to think that Jimmy and his father might disagree, when all she dreaded was that they would agree too well.

“Well,” she said fondly, leaning on the kitchen table and grinning into his face. “Now you seen him, how do you like him?”

“Oh, he's all right,” Jimmy said casually—too casually, for her taste. “He's drinking himself to death, that's all.” And instantly she was ashamed of her own pettiness, and tears came into her eyes.

“Wisha, child, child, why do you be upsetting yourself about them?” she cried. “They're not worth it. There's no one worth it.”

She sat in the kitchen with him while he unburdened himself about it all. It was just as when he had described to her how he had asked his mother for his father's name, as though he were saving up every detail—the walk across England, the people who had given him lifts, the truck driver who had given him a dinner and five bob after Jimmy confided in him, till the moment he knocked at the door of the shabby lodging house near Victoria Station and an unshaven man with sad red eyes looked out and asked timidly, “Yes, boy, what is it?” As though nobody ever called on him now with anything but bad news.

“And what did you say?” Kate asked.

“I said, ‘Don't you know me?' and he said, ‘You have the advantage of me.' So I said, ‘I'm your son.'”

“Oh, my!” exclaimed Kate, profoundly impressed, though she had resolved to hate everything she heard about Jimmy's father. “And what did he say to that?”

“He didn't say anything. He only started to cry.”

“'Twas a bit late in the day for him,” said Kate. “And what did he say about your mother?”

“Only that she didn't miss much when she missed him.”

“That was one true word he said, anyway,” said Kate.

“He paid for it,” said Jimmy.

“He deserved it all,” said Kate.

“You wouldn't say that if you saw him now,” said Jimmy, and he went on to describe the squalid back room where he had stayed for a week with his father, sleeping in the same dirty bed, going out with him to the pub. And yet through Jimmy's disillusionment Kate felt a touch of pride in the way he described the sudden outbursts of extravagant humor that lit up his father's maudlin self-pity. He described everything, down to the last evening, when his father had brought him to Paddington Station, forced him to take the last five shillings he had in the world, tearfully kissed him, and begged him to come again.

She knew from Jimmy's tone that it was unlikely that he would go again. His father was only another ghost that he had laid.

W
HEN
he was eighteen, Jimmy took up with a girl of his own, and at first Kate paid no attention, but when it went on for more than six months and Jimmy took the girl out every Friday night, she began to grow nervous. Steady courting of one girl was something she had never thought him capable of. When she learned who the girl was, she understood. Tessie Flynn was an orphan who had been brought up by a staid old couple on the road as their own daughter. They had brought her up so well that every other young fellow on the road was in dread to go near her, and when the old couple discovered that she was actually walking out with Jimmy they didn't talk to her for days. She wasn't allowed to bring Jimmy to the house, and Kate, for the sake of her own self-respect, was forced to invite her instead.

Not that this made her like Tessie any the more. She dreaded Friday evenings, when Jimmy would come in from work, and shave, and strip to wash under the tap in the back yard, and then change into his best blue suit and put cream on his hair.

“You won't be late tonight?” she would ask.

“Why wouldn't I be late?” Jimmy would ask cheerfully.

“You know I can't sleep while you do be out.”

It was true. Any other night of the week she could sleep comfortably at her proper time, but when she knew he was out with “that vagabond,” as she called poor Tessie, she would lie awake worrying and saying her rosary. Even James reproved her. One Friday evening, he closed his book carefully, raised his big glasses on his forehead, and said, “Granny, you worry too much about Jimmy and his girl friend. Jimmy is much steadier than you think.”

But James didn't realize, as she did, that even in his choice of a girl Jimmy was only reliving the pattern of his own life. To anyone else he might seem the most ordinary of young fellows, but she could watch the fever mount in him, and always she was taken aback at the form it took. Once, he lit out on his bicycle to a little town eighty miles away, where his father's brother had a grocery shop. Another time, with the help of his sailor friend, he crossed again to Fishguard and cycled through southern England to the little seaside town in Dorset where he had been born. And she knew that whatever she might say he would go on like that to the end of his days, pursued by the dream of a normal life that he might have lived and of a normal family in which he might have grown up.