Collected Stories (96 page)

“Did it scare you, May?” Rosie, the second girl, asked with a wicked grin. “Cripes, it put the fear of God into me. I'm not having any of that
de profundis
stuff; I'm joining a decent missionary order.” This was the first May had heard of Rosie's vocation. Inside a year, she, too, was in a convent, but in Rome, and “having a gas time,” as she casually reported home.

They really were an extraordinary family, and the Dean was as queer as any of them. The Sunday following the ceremony May was at dinner there, and he put his hand firmly on her shoulder as though he were about to yank off her dress, and gave her a crooked smile that would have convinced any reasonable observer that he was a sex maniac, and yet May knew that almost every waking moment his thoughts were concentrated on outwitting the Bishop, who seemed to be the greatest enemy of the Church since Nero. The Bishop was a Dominican, and the Dean felt that a monk's place was in the cloister.

“The man is a bully!” he said, with an astonishment and grief that would have moved any audience but his own family.

“Oh, now, Mick!” said Mrs. Corkery placidly. She was accustomed to hearing the Bishop denounced.

“I'm sorry, Josephine,” the Dean said with a formal regret that rang equally untrue. “The man is a bully. An infernal bully, what's more. I'm not criticizing you or the order, Tim,” he said, looking at his nephew over his spectacles, “but monks simply have no place in ecclesiastical affairs. Let them stick to their prayers is what I say.”

“And a queer way the world would be only for them,” Joe said. Joe was going for the secular priesthood himself, but he didn't like to see his overwhelming uncle get away with too much.

“Their influence on Church history has been disastrous!” the Dean bellowed, reaching for his cigarette case. “Always, or almost always, disastrous. That man thinks he knows everything.”

“Maybe he does,” said Joe.

“Maybe,” said the Dean, like an old bull who cannot ignore a dart from any quarter. “But as well as that, he interferes in everything, and always publicly, always with the greatest possible amount of scandal. ‘I don't like the model of that church'; ‘Take away that statue'; ‘That painting is irreverent.' Begob, Joe, I don't think even you know as much as that. I declare to God. Josephine, I believe if anyone suggested it to him that man would start inspecting the cut of the schoolgirls' panties.” And when everyone roared with laughter, the Dean raised his head sternly and said, “I mean it.”

Peter, the youngest boy, never got involved in these family arguments about the Bishop, the orders, or the future of the Church. He was the odd man out. He was apprenticed in his father's old firm and would grow up to be owner or partner. In every Irish family there is a boy like Peter whose task it is to take on the family responsibilities. It was merely an accident that he was the youngest. What counted was that he was his mother's favorite. Even before he had a mind to make up, he knew it was not for him to become too involved, because someone would have to look after his mother in her old age. He might marry, but it would have to be a wife who suited her. He was the ugliest of the children, though with a monkey ugliness that was almost as attractive as Father Tim's film-star looks and Joe's ascetic masculine fire. He was slow, watchful, and good-humored, with high cheekbones that grew tiny bushes of hair, and he had a lazy malice that could often be as effective as the uproarious indignation of his brothers and sisters.

May, who saw the part he had been cast for, wondered whether she couldn't woo Mrs. Corkery as well as another girl.

A
FTER
Rosie there was Joe, who was ordained the following year, and then Sheela did what seemed—in that family, at least—the conventional thing and went into the same convent as Tessie.

It was an extraordinary family, and May was never quite able to understand the fascination it had for her. Partly, of course—and this she felt rather than understood—it was the attraction of the large family for the only child, the sheer relief of never having to wonder what you were going to play next. But beside this there was an attraction rather like that of a large theatrical family—the feeling that everything was related to a larger imaginative world. In a sense, the Corkerys always seemed to be playing.

She knew that her own being in love with Peter was part of her love affair with the family as a whole, the longing to be connected with them, and the teasing she got about Peter from his brothers and sisters suggested that they, too, recognized it and were willing to accept her as one of themselves. But she also saw that her chance of ever marrying Peter was extremely slight, because Peter was not attracted by her. When he could have been out walking with her he was out walking with his friend Mick MacDonald, and when the pair of them came in while she was in the house, Peter behaved to her as though she were nothing more than a welcome stranger. He was always polite, always deferential—unlike Tim and Joe, who treated her as though she were an extra sister, to be slapped on the bottom or pushed out of the way as the mood struck them.

May was a serious girl; she had read books on modern psychology, and she knew that the very quality that made Peter settle for a life in the world made him unsuitable as a husband. It was strange how right the books were about that. He was dominated by his mother, and he could flirt with her as he never flirted with May. Clearly, no other woman would ever entirely replace his mother in his heart. In fact (May was too serious a girl not to give things their proper names), Peter was the very type of the homosexual—the latent homosexual, as she learned to call it.

Other boys
wanted
to go out with her, and she resented Peter's unfailing courtesy, though in more philosophic spells she realized that he probably couldn't help it, and that when he showed his almost boyish hero worship of Mick MacDonald before her it was not his fault but Nature's. All the same, she thought it very uncalled-for on the part of Nature, because it left her no particular interest in a world in which the only eligible young man was a queer. After a year or two of this, her thoughts turned more and more to the quiet convent where the Corkery girls contentedly carried on their simple lives of meditation and prayer. Once or twice she dropped a dark hint that she was thinking of becoming a nun herself, but each time it led to a scene with her father.

“You're a fool, girl!” he said harshly, getting up to pour himself an extra drink. May knew he didn't altogether resent being provoked, because it made him feel entitled to drink more.

“Now, Jack, you must not say things like that,” her mother said anxiously.

“Of course I have to say it. Look at her! At her age! And she doesn't even have a boy!”

“But if there isn't a boy who interests her!”

“There are plenty of boys who'd interest her if only she behaved like a natural girl,” he said gloomily. “What do you think a boy wants to do with a girl? Say the Rosary? She hasn't behaved naturally ever since she got friendly with that family—what's their name?”

“Corkery,” Mrs. MacMahon said, having failed to perceive that not remembering the Corkerys' name was the one way the poor man had of getting back at them.

“Whatever their name is, they've turned her into an idiot. That's no great surprise. They never had any brains to distribute, themselves.”

“But still, Jack, you will admit they've got on very well.”

“They've got on very well!” he echoed scornfully. “In the Church! Except that young fellow, the solicitor's clerk, and I suppose he hadn't brains enough even for the Church. They should have put him in the friars.”

“But after all, their uncle is the Dean.”

“Wonderful Dean, too,” grumbled Jack MacMahon. “He drove me out of twelve-o'clock Mass, so as not to listen to his drivel. He can hardly speak decent English, not to mind preaching a sermon. ‘A bunch of baloney!'” he quoted angrily. “If we had a proper bishop, instead of the one we have, he'd make that fellow speak correctly in the pulpit at least.”

“But it's only so that his congregation will understand him, Jack.”

“Oh, his congregation understands him only too well. Himself and his tall hat and his puffed-up airs! Common, that's what he is, and that's what all the family are, on both sides. If your daughter wants to be a nun, you and the Corkerys can arrange it between you. But not one penny of my money goes into their pockets, believe me!”

May was sorry to upset him, but for herself she did not mind his loathing of the whole Corkery family. She knew that it was only because he was fond of her and dreaded being left without her in his old age. He had spoiled her so long as she was not of an age to answer him back, and she guessed he was looking forward to spoiling his grandchildren even worse because he would not live long enough to hear them answer him back. But this, she realized, was what the Corkerys had done for her—made all that side of life seem unimportant.

She had a long talk with Mother Agatha, Mrs. Corkery's sister, about her vocation, which confirmed her in her resolution. Mother Agatha was very unlike her sister, who was loud-voiced and humorous. The Mother Superior was pale, thin, cool, and with the slightest trace of an ironic wit that might have passed unnoticed by a stupider girl. But May noticed it, and realized that she was being observed very closely indeed.

She and her mother did the shopping for the trousseau, but the bills and parcels were kept carefully out of her father's sight. Drunk or sober, he refused to discuss the matter at all. “It would only upset him just now, poor man,” her mother said philosophically. He was drinking heavily, and when he was in liquor he quarreled a lot with her mother about little things. With May he avoided quarrels, or even arguments, and it struck her that he was training himself for a life in which he would no longer have her to quarrel with. On the day of the reception he did not drink at all, which pleased her, and was icily polite to everybody, but when, later, she appeared behind the parlor grille, all in white, and the sun caught her, she saw his face in the darkness of the parlor, with all the life drained out of it, and suddenly he turned and left without a word. It was only then that a real feeling of guilt sprang up in her at the thought of the miserable old age that awaited him—a man like him, who loved young creatures who could not answer him back, and who would explain to them unweariedly about the sun and moon and geography and figures. She had answered him back in a way that left him with nothing to look forward to.

A
LL THE SAME
, there was something very comforting about the life of an enclosed order. It had been organized a long, long time before, by people who knew more about the intrusions of the outside world than May did. The panics that had seized her about her ability to sustain the life diminished and finally ceased. The round of duties, services, and mortifications was exactly what she had needed, and little by little she felt the last traces of worldliness slip from her—even the very human worry about the old age of her father and mother. The convent was poor, and not altogether from choice. Everything in the house was mean and clean and cheerful, and May grew to love the old drawing room that had been turned into a chapel, where she knelt, in her own place, through the black winter mornings when at home she would still be tucked up comfortably in bed. She liked the rough feeling of her clothes and the cold of the floor through her sandals, though mostly she liked the proximity of Tessie and Sheela.

There were times when, reading the lives of the saints, she wished she had lived in more heroic times, and she secretly invented minor mortifications for herself to make sure she could endure them. It was not until she had been in the convent for close on a year that she noticed that the minor mortifications were liable to be followed by major depressions. Though she was a clever woman, she did not try to analyze this. She merely lay awake at night and realized that the nuns she lived with—even Tessie and Sheela—were not the stuff of saints and martyrs but ordinary women who behaved in religion very much as they would have behaved in marriage, and who followed the rule in the spirit in which her father went to Mass on Sundays. There was nothing whatever to be said against them, and any man who had got one of them for a wife would probably have considered himself fortunate, but all the same, there was something about them that was not quite grown-up. It was very peculiar and caused her great concern. The things that had really frightened her about the order when she was in the world—the loneliness, the austerity, the ruthless discipline—now seemed to her meaningless and harmless. After that she saw with horror that the great days of the Church were over, and that they were merely a lot of perfectly commonplace women play-acting austerity and meditation.

“But my dear child,” Mother Agatha said when May wept out her story to her, “of course we're only children. Of course we're only play-acting. How else does a child learn obedience and discipline?”

And when May talked to her about what the order had been in earlier days, that vague, ironic note crept into Mother Superior's voice, as though she had heard it all many times before. “I know, sister,” she said, with a nod. “Believe me, I do know that the order was stricter in earlier times. But you must remember that it was not founded in a semi-arctic climate like ours, so there was less chance of the sisters' dying of double pneumonia. I have talked to half the plumbers in town, but it seems that central heating is not understood here.… Everything is relative. I'm sure we suffer just as much in our very comfortable sandals as the early sisters suffered in their bare feet, and probably at times rather more, but at any rate we are not here for the sole purpose of suffering mortification, whatever pleasures it may hold for us.”

Every word Mother Agatha said made perfect sense to May while she was saying it, and May knew she was being ungrateful and hysterical, but when the interview was over and the sound of her sobs had died away, she was left with the impression that Mother Agatha was only another commonplace woman, with a cool manner and a sarcastic tongue, who was also acting the part of a nun. She was alone in a world of bad actors and actresses, and the Catholicism she had known and believed in was dead.