Collected Stories (95 page)

“Where did you say this house was?”

“At the top,” Jimmy replied sullenly.

The hill stopped, the road became level, and at either side were little new suburban houses, with tiny front gardens. Near the corner, Ned saw one with a tree in front of it and stopped. There was still light in the front room. The family kept late hours for Cork. Suddenly he felt absurdly sorry for the boy.

“You don't want to change your mind?” he asked gently. “You're sure this is where you were?”

“I told you so,” Jimmy replied almost in exasperation.

“Very well,” Ned said savagely. “You needn't come in.”

“All right,” Jimmy said, and braced himself against the concrete gatepost, looking over the moonlit roofs at the clear sky. In the moonlight he looked very pale; his hands were drawn back from his sides, his lips drawn back from his teeth, and for some reason his white anguished face made Ned think of a crucifixion.

Anger had taken the place of pity in him. He felt the boy was being unjust toward him. He wouldn't have minded the injustice if he'd ever been unjust to Jimmy, but two minutes before he had again shown his fairness and given Jimmy another chance. Besides, he didn't want to make a fool of himself.

He walked up the little path to the door, whose colored-glass panels glowed in light that seemed to leak from the sitting-room door. When he rang, a pretty girl of fifteen or sixteen came out and screwed up her eyes at him.

“I hope you'll excuse my calling at this unnatural hour,” Ned said in a bantering tone. “It's only a question I want to ask. Do you think I could talk to your father or your mother for a moment?”

“You can, to be sure,” the girl replied in a flutter of curiosity. “Come in, can't you? We're all in the front room.”

Ned, nerving himself for an ordeal, went in. It was a tiny front room with a fire burning in a tiled fireplace. There was a mahogany table at which a boy of twelve seemed to be doing his lessons. Round the fire sat an older girl, a small woman, and a tubby little man with a graying mustache. Ned smiled, and his tone became even more jocular.

“I hope you'll forgive my making a nuisance of myself,” he said. “My name is Callanan. I live at St. Luke's. I wonder if you've ever met my son Jimmy?”

“Jimmy?” the mother echoed, her hand to her cheek. “I don't know that I did.”

“I know him,” said the girl who had let him in, in a voice that squeaked with pride.

“Fine!” Ned said. “At least, you know what I'm talking about. I wonder if you saw him this evening?”

“Jimmy?” the girl replied, taking fright. “No. Sure, I hardly know him only to salute him. Why? Is anything wrong?”

“Nothing serious, at any rate,” said Ned with a comforting smile. “It's just that he said he spent the evening here with you. I daresay that's an excuse for being somewhere he shouldn't have been.”

“Well, well, well!” Mrs. Ryan said anxiously, joining her hands. “Imagine saying he was here! Wisha, Mr. Callanan, aren't they a caution?”

“A caution against what, though?” Ned asked cheerfully. “That's what I'd like to know. I'm only sorry he wasn't telling the truth. I'm afraid he wasn't in such charming company. Good-night, everybody, and thank you.”

“Good-night, Mr. Callanan,” said Mrs. Ryan, laying a hand gently on his sleeve. “And don't be too hard on him! Sure, we were wild ourselves once.”

“Once?” he exclaimed with a laugh. “I hope we still are. We're not dead yet, Mrs. Ryan.”

The same girl showed him out. She had recovered from her fright and looked as though she would almost have liked him to stay.

“Good-night, Mr. Callanan,” she called blithely from the door, and when he turned, she was silhouetted against the lighted doorway, bent halfway over, and waving. He waved back, touched by this glimpse of an interior not so unlike his own but seen from outside, in all its innocence. It was a shock to emerge on the roadway and see Jimmy still standing where he had left him, though he no longer looked crucified. Instead, with his head down and his hands by his sides, he looked terribly weary. They walked in silence for a few minutes, till they saw the valley of the city and the lamps cascading down the hillsides and breaking below into a foaming lake of light.

“Well,” Ned said gloomily, “the Ryans seem to be under the impression that you weren't there tonight.”

“I know,” Jimmy replied, as though this were all that might be expected from him.

Something in his tone startled Ned. It no longer seemed to breathe defiance. Instead, it hinted at something very like despair. But why? he thought in exasperation. Why the blazes did he tell me all those lies? Why didn't he tell me even outside the door? Damn it, I gave him every chance.

“Don't you think this is a nice place to live, Dad?” asked Jimmy.

“Is it?” Ned asked sternly.

“Ah, well, the air is better,” said Jimmy with a sigh. They said no more till they reached home.

“Now, go to bed,” Ned said in the hallway. “I'll consider what to do with you tomorrow.”

Which, as he well knew, was bluff, because he had already decided to do nothing to Jimmy. Somehow he felt that, whatever the boy had done to himself, punishment would be merely an anticlimax, and perhaps a relief. Punishment, he thought, might be exactly what Jimmy would have welcomed at that moment. He went into the sitting room and poured himself a drink, feeling that if anyone deserved it, he did. He had a curious impression of having been involved in some sort of struggle and escaped some danger to which he could not even give a name.

When he went upstairs, Celia was in bed with a book, and looked up at him with a wide-eyed stare. She proved to be no help to him. “Jimmy usen't to be like that,” she said wistfully, and he knew she had been lying there regretting the little boy who had come to her with all his troubles.

“But why, why, why, in God's name, did he tell me all those lies?” Ned asked angrily.

“Oh, why do people ever tell lies?” she asked with a shrug.

“Because they hope they won't be found out,” Ned replied. “Don't you see that's what's so queer about it?”

She didn't, and for hours Ned lay awake, turning it over and over in his mind. It was easy enough to see it as the story of a common falsehood persisted in through some mood of bravado, and each time he thought of it that way he grew angry again. Then, all at once, he would remember the face of Jimmy against the pillar in the moonlight, as though he were being crucified, and give a frustrated sigh.

“Go to sleep!” Celia said once, giving him a vicious nudge.

“I can't, damn it, I can't,” he said, and began all over again.

Why had the kid chosen Ryans' as an excuse? Was that merely to put him further astray, or did it really represent some dream of happiness and fulfillment? The latter explanation he rejected as too simple and sentimental, yet he knew quite well that Ryans' house
had
meant something to the boy, even if it was only an alternative to whatever house he had been in and the company he had met there. Ned could remember himself at that age, and how, when he had abandoned himself to something or somebody, an alternative image would appear. The image that had flashed up in Jimmy's mind, the image that was not one of Hogan's house, was Ryans'. But it needed more than that to explain his own feeling of danger. It was as though Jimmy had deliberately challenged him, if he were the man he appeared to be, to struggle with the demon of fantasy in him and destroy it. It was as though not he but Jimmy had been forcing the pace. At the same time, he realized that this was something he would never know. All he ever would know was that somewhere behind it all were despair and loneliness and terror, under the magic of an autumn night. And yet there were sentimental fools who told you that they would wish to be young again.

N
EXT MORNING
at breakfast, he was cold and aloof, more from embarrassment than hostility. Jimmy, on the other hand, seemed to be in the highest spirits, helping Celia with the breakfast things, saying “Excuse me, Daddy,” as he changed Ned's plate. He pushed the sugar bowl towards Ned and said with a grin, “Daddy likes sugar.”

Ned just restrained himself from flinging the bowl at him. “As a matter of fact, I do,” he said coldly.

He had done the same sort of thing too often himself. He knew that, with the threat of punishment over his head, Jimmy was scared, as well he might be. It is one thing to be defiant at eleven o'clock at night, another thing altogether to be defiant at eight in the morning.

All day, at intervals, he found himself brooding over it. At lunch he talked to his chief clerk about it, but MacIntyre couldn't advise him. “God, Ned,” he said impatiently, “every kid is different. There's no laying down rules. My one told the nuns that her mother was a religious maniac and kicked the statue of the Blessed Virgin around the floor. For God's sake, Ned, imagine Kate kicking a statue around the floor!”

“Difficult, isn't it?” replied Ned with a grin, though to himself he thought complacently that that sort of fantasy was what he would expect from Kate's daughter. Parents so rarely sympathize with one another.

That evening, when he came in, Celia said coolly, “I don't know what you said to Jimmy, but it seems to have worked.”

Relief came over Ned like a cold shower. He longed to be able to say something calm like “Oh, good!” or “Glad I could help” or “Any time I can advise you again, just let me know.” But he was too honest. He shook his head, still the schoolboy that Celia had loved such a long time ago, and his forehead wrinkled up.

“That's the awful part of it,” he said. “I said nothing at all to him. For the first time in my life I didn't know what to say. What the hell could I say?”

“Oh, no doubt you said something and didn't notice it,” Celia said confidently. “There's no such thing in business as an out-and-out free gift.”

The Corkerys

M
AY
M
AC
M
AHON
was a good-looking girl, the only child of Jack MacMahon, the accountant, and his wife, Margaret. They lived in Cork, on Summerhill, the steep street that led from the flat of the city to the heights of Montenotte. She had always lived the life of a girl of good family, with piano lessons, dancing class, and crushes on her school friends' brothers. Only occasionally did she wonder what it was all about, and then she invariably forgot to ask her father, who would certainly know. Her father knew everything, or almost everything. He was a tall, shy, good-looking man who seemed to have been expecting martyrdom from his earliest years and drinking Irish whiskey to endure it. May's mother was small and pretty and very opinionated, though her opinions varied, and anyway did not last long. Her father's opinions never varied, and lasted forever.

When May became friendly with the Corkery family, it turned out that he had always had strong opinions about them as well. Mr. Corkery, a mild, inarticulate solicitor, whom May remembered going for lonely walks for the good of his health, had died and left his family with very limited means, but his widow had good connections and managed to provide an education (mostly free) for all six children. Of the boys, the eldest, Tim, was now a Dominican, and Joe, who came next in line, was also going in for the priesthood. The Church was in the family's blood, because Mrs. Corkery's brother was the Dean and her sister was Mother Superior of the convent of an enclosed order outside the city. Mrs. Corkery's nickname among the children was “Reverend Mother,” and they accused her of imitating her sister, but Mrs. Corkery only sniffed and said if everybody became priests and nuns there would soon be no Church left. Mrs. Corkery seemed to believe quite seriously that the needs of the Church were the only possible excuse for sex.

From knowing the Corkerys May began to realize at last what life was about. It was no longer necessary to ask her father. Anyway he wouldn't know. He and her mother were nice but commonplace. Everything they said and did was dull and predictable, and even when they went to Mass on Sunday they did so only because everyone else did it. The Corkerys were rarely dull and never predictable. Though their whole life seemed to center on the Church, they were not in the least pietistic. The Dean fought with Mrs. Corkery; Father Tim fought with Joe; the sisters fought with their brothers, who, they said, were getting all the attention, and fought one another when their brothers were not available. Tessie, the eldest girl, known as “The Limb of the Devil,” or just “The Limb,” was keeping company with a young stockbroker who told her a lot of dirty stories, which she repeated with great gusto to her brothers, particularly to Father Tim. This, however, was for family reasons, because they all agreed that Tim was inclined to put on airs.

And then The Limb astonished everybody by entering the convent where her aunt was Mother Superior. May attended the reception in the little convent chapel, which struck her to the heart by its combination of poverty and gentility. She felt that the ceremony might have been tolerable in a great cathedral with a choir and thundering organ, but not in that converted drawing room, where the nuns knelt along the side walls and squeaked like mourners. The Limb was laid out on the altar and first covered with roses as though she were dead; then an old nun clipped her long black hair with a shears. It fell and lay at her head as though it too had died. May drew a quick breath and glanced at Joe, who was kneeling beside her. Though he had his hand over his face, she knew from the way his shoulders moved that he was crying. Then she cried too.

For a full week the ceremony gave her the horrors every time she remembered it, and she felt she should have nothing more to do with such an extraordinary family. All the same, a week with her parents was enough to make her realize the attraction of the Corkerys even more than before.