After the Wake (4 page)

I needn’t have worried about the suit lasting forever. Miss McCann didn’t. The next winter was not so mild, and she was whipped before the year was out. At her wake people said how she was in a habit of her own making, and my father said she would look queer in anything else, seeing as she supplied the dead of the whole quarter for forty years, without one complaint from a customer.

At the funeral, I left my topcoat in the carriage and got out and walked in the spills of rain after her coffin. People said I would get my end, but I went on till we reached the graveside, and I stood in my Confirmation suit drenched to the skin. I thought this was the least I could do.

When he sent to tell me she was dead, I thought that if the dead live on – which I don’t believe they do – and know the minds of the living, she’d feel angry, not so much jealous as disgusted, certainly surprised.

For one time she had told me, quoting unconsciously from a book I’d lent him, ‘A woman can always tell them – you kind of smell it on a man – like knowing when a cat is in a room’.

We often discussed things like that – he, always a little cultured, happy, and proud to be so broad-minded – she, with adolescent pride in the freedom of her married state to drink a bottle of stout and talk about anything with her husband and her husband’s friend.

I genuinely liked them both. If I went a week without calling up to see them, he was down the stairs to our rooms, asking what they’d done on me, and I can’t resist being liked. When I’d go in she’d stick a fag in my mouth and set to making tea for me.

I’d complimented them, individually and together, on their being married to each other – and I meant it.

They were both twenty-one, tall and blond, with a sort of English blondness.

He, as I said, had pretensions to culture and was genuinely intelligent, but that was not the height of
his attraction for me.

Once we went out to swim in a weir below the Dublin Mountains. It was evening time and the last crowd of kids too shrimpish, small, neutral cold to take my interest – just finishing their bathe.

When they went off, we stripped and, watching him, I thought of Marlowe’s lines which I can’t remember properly: ‘Youth with gold wet head, through water gleaming, gliding, and crowns of pearlets on his naked arms’.

I haven’t remembered it at all, but only the sense of a Gaelic translation I’ve read.

When we came out we sat on his towel – our bare thighs touching – smoking and talking.

We talked of the inconveniences of tenement living. He said he’d hated most of all sleeping with his brothers – so had I, I’d felt their touch incestuous – but most of all he hated sleeping with a man older than himself.

He’d refused to sleep with his father which hurt the old man very much, and when a seizure took his father in the night, it left him remorseful.

‘I don’t mind sleeping with a little child,’ he said, ‘the snug way they round themselves into you – and I don’t mind a young fellow my own age’.

‘The like of myself,’ and I laughed as if it meant nothing. It didn’t apparently, to him.

‘No, I wouldn’t mind you, and it’d be company for me, if she went into hospital or anything,’ he said.

Then he told me what she herself had told me sometime before, that there was something the matter with her, something left unattended since she was fourteen or so, and that soon she’d have to go into hospital for an operation.

From that night forward, I opened the campaign in jovial earnest.

The first step – to make him think it manly, ordinary to manly men, the British Navy, ‘Porthole Duff’, ‘Navy Cake’ stories of the Hitler Youth in captivity, told me by Irish soldiers on leave from guarding them; to remove the taint of ‘cissiness’, effeminacy, how the German Army had encouraged it in Cadet Schools, to harden the boy-officers, making their love a muscular clasp of friendship, independent of women, the British Public Schools, young Boxers I’d known (most of it about the Boxers was true), that Lord Alfred Douglas was son to the Marquess of Queensbury and a good man to use his dukes himself, Oscar Wilde throwing old ‘Q’ down the stairs and after him his Ballyboy attendant.

On the other front, appealing to that hope of culture – Socrates, Shakespeare, Marlow – lies, truth and half-truth.

I worked cautiously but steadily. Sometimes (on the head of a local scandal) in conversation with them both.

After I’d lent him a book about an English schoolmaster, she’d made the remark about women knowing, scenting them as she would a cat in a dark, otherwise empty room.

Quite undeliberately, I helped tangle her scents.

One night we’d been drinking together, he and I, fairly heavily up in their rooms.

I remember when he’d entered and spoken to her, he said to me: ‘Your face lights up when you see her’. And why wouldn’t it? Isn’t a kindly welcome a warming to both faith and features?

I went over and told her what he’d said.

‘And my face lights up when I see yours‚’ she said, smiling up at me in the charming way our women have with half-drunk men.

The following morning I was late for work with a sick head.

I thought I’d go upstairs to their rooms and see if there was a bottle of stout left that would cure me.

There wasn’t, and though she was in, he was out.

I stopped a while and she gave me a cup of tea, though I’d just finished my own down below in our place.

As I was going she asked me had I fags for the day. I said I had – so as not to steal her open store, as the saying has it – and went off to work.

She, or someone, told him I’d been in and he warned me about it the next time we were together. He didn’t mind (and I believed him) but people talked, etc.

From that day forward I was cast as her unfortunate admirer, my jealousy of him sweetened by my friendship for them both.

She told me again about her operation and asked me to pray for her. When I protested my unsuitability as a pleader with God, she quoted the kindly, highly heretical Irish Catholicism about the prayers of the sinner being first heard.

The night before she went into hospital we had a good few drinks – the three of us together.

We were in a singing house on the Northside and got very sob-gargled between drinking whiskey and thinking of the operation.

I sang
My Mary of the Curling Hair
and when we came to the Gaelic chorus, ‘
siúil
,
a
ghr
á
’ (‘walk, my
love’), she broke down in sobbing and said how he knew as well as she that it was to her I was singing, but that he didn’t mind. He said that indeed he did not, and she said how fearful she was of this operation, that maybe she’d never come out of it. She was not sorry for herself, but for him, if anything happened her and she died on him, aye, and sorry for me too, maybe more sorry, ‘Because, God help you,’ she said to me, ‘that never knew anything better than going down town half-drunk and dirty rotten bitches taking your last farthing’.

Next day was Monday, and at four o’clock she went into the hospital. She was operated on on Thursday morning and died the same evening at about nine o’clock.

When the doctor talked about cancer, he felt consoled a little. He stopped his dry-eyed sobbing and came with me into a public-house where we met his mother and hers and made arrangements to have her brought home and waked in her own place.

She was laid out in the front room on their spare single bed which was covered in linen for the purpose. Her habit was of blue satin and we heard afterwards that some old ones considered the colour wrong – her having been neither a virgin nor a member of the Children of Mary Sodality.

The priest, a hearty man who read Chesterton and drank pints, disposed of the objection by saying that we were all Children of Mary since Christ introduced St. John to our Lady at the foot of the Cross – Son, behold thy Mother; Mother, behold Thy Son.

It is a horrible thing how quickly death and disease can work on a body.

She didn’t look like herself, any more than the
brown parchment-thin shell of a mummy looks like an Egyptian warrior; worse than the mummy, for he at least is dry and clean as dust. Her poor nostrils were plugged with cotton-wool and her mouth hadn’t closed properly, but showed two front teeth, like a rabbit’s. All in all, she looked no better than the corpse of her granny, or any other corpse for that matter.

There was a big crowd at the wake. They shook hands with him and told him they were sorry for his trouble; then they shook hands with his and her other relatives, and with me, giving me an understanding smile and licence to mourn my pure unhappy love.

Indeed, one old one, far gone in Jameson, said she was looking down on the two of us, expecting me to help him bear up.

Another old one, drunker still, got lost in the complications of what might have happened had he died instead of her, and only brought herself up at the tableau – I marrying her and he blessing the union from on high.

At about midnight, they began drifting away to their different rooms and houses and by three o’clock there was only his mother left with us, steadily drinking.

At last she got up a little shakily on her feet and, proceeding to knock her people, said that they’d left bloody early for blood relatives, but seeing as they’d given her bloody little in life it was the three of us were best entitled to sit waking – she included me and all.

When his mother went, he told me he felt very sore and very drunk and very much in need of sleep.
He felt hardly able to undress himself.

I had to almost carry him to the big double bed in the inner room.

I first loosened his collar to relieve the flush on his smooth cheeks, took off his shoes and socks and pants and shirt, from the supply muscled thighs, the stomach flat as an altar boy’s, and noted the golden smoothness of the blond hair on every part of his firm white flesh.

I went to the front room and sat by the fire till he called me.

‘You must be nearly gone yourself,’ he said, ‘you might as well come in and get a bit of rest.’

I sat on the bed, undressing myself by the faint flickering of the candles from the front room.

I fancied her face looking up from the open coffin on the Americans who, having imported wakes from us, invented morticians themselves.

‘And the priest turns round to me’ says Ria, ‘and says he: “But you don’t mean to say that this person still goes down to see him?”’

‘“I do, Father.”’

‘“And brings him cigarettes?”’

‘“Not now, Father, not cigarettes, he’s gone past smoking and well past it, but a drop of chicken soup, though he can’t manage that either, these last few days.”’

‘“Well, chicken soup or cigarettes,” says the priest, “what really matters is that this person continues to visit him – continues to trouble his conscience – continues as a walking occasion of sin to stand between him and heaven. These Pigeon House people must be, shall be, told straight away. They’ll be informed that you, and you only, are his lawfully wedded wife, and that she is only – what she is. Anyway, this way or that, into that sanatorium she goes no more.”’

‘You know‚’ puts in Máire, when Ria had finished, ‘it’s a known thing and a very well-known thing, that a person cannot die while there’s something not settled in his conscience. That one going to see him so, outside of the insult to Mammy here, his lawful wife, not to mind me, his only daughter, for all we’re
away from him since I was five – on the top of all that she was doing his soul the height of injury, not to mind holding his body in a ferment of pain, below on this earth, down in that Pigeon House.’

‘But no matter,’ says Ria, ‘the. priest wasn’t long about seeing the Reverend Mother and leaving strict instructions that she wasn’t to be let in any more – that she was no more his lawful wedded wife than the holy nun herself.’

‘So now,’ said Máire, ‘if you don’t go down early tomorrow you’ll not see him at all, because I doubt if his struggling spirit will back away from Judgement any more, now that all is settled, and his mind at ease.’

He was still alive when I got down to the Pigeon House but she wasn’t far out, because he didn’t last out the night.

His face all caved in, and his hair that was once so brown and curly was matted in sweat, and God knows what colour.

Ah, you’d pity him all right, for the ruined remains of what was once the gassest* little ex-Dublin Fusilier in the street – off with the belt and who began it – Up the Toughs, Throttle the Turks, and Hell blast Gallipoli.

Ria, his wife, was the kindest woman in Ireland, and (I’ve heard my mother say) in her day, the best looking.

He died that night and the nun and Ria and Máire were charmed that he’d no mortal sin on his soul to detain him in torment for any longer than a few short years of harmonious torture in Purgatory.

The priest was delighted too, because, as he said: ‘It’s not when you die, but how you die that matters.’

As for the woman, no one saw her to know what she thought of it, but the priest gave strict orders that she wasn’t to be let near the funeral.

The funeral was on the day after. He’d lain the night before in the mortuary chapel. They’ve a mortuary chapel in the Pigeon House sanatorium, nice and handy, and most soothing, I’m sure, to new patients coming in, it being close by the entrance gate.

There used to be an old scribble on the porch that said: ‘Let all who enter here, leave hope behind.’ But some hard chaw* had the beatings of that and wrote: ‘It’s only a step from Killarney to heaven – come here and take the lift – any lung, chum?’

We had a few prayers that night, but she never turned up, and I was sorry, because to tell the truth, I was curious to see her.

At the funeral next day, our cars (Ria did it in style all right, whatever lingering scald her heart might hold for him) greased off the wet Pigeon House Road, through Ringsend, and into Pearse Street, and still no sign of her. Right up the Northside, and all the way to Glasnevin, and she never appeared.

Ria had the hearse go round the block where we’d all lived years ago – happy, healthy, though riotous betimes – fighting being better than loneliness.

I thought she’d have ambushed us here, but she didn’t.

I had some idea of a big car (owned by a new and tolerant admirer) sweeping into the cortège from some side street or another, or else a cab that’d slide in, a woman in rich mourning heavily veiled in its corner.

But between the Pigeon House and the grave not a
one came near us.

The sods were thrown in and all, and the grave-diggers well away to it when Máire spotted her.

‘Mother, get the full of your eyes of that one.’

‘Where,
alanna
*?,’ asks Ria.

‘There,’ said Máire, pointing towards a tree behind us. I looked towards it.

All I could see was a poor middle-aged woman, bent in haggard prayer, dressed in the cast-off hat and coat of some
flahool
*
old one she’d be doing a day’s work for (maybe not so
flahool
either, for sometimes they’ll stop a day’s pay on the head of some old rag, rejected from a jumble sale).

‘But I thought,’ says I to Ria, ‘that she’d be like – like – that she’d be dolled up to the nines – paint and powder and a fur coat maybe.’

‘Fur coat how are you!,’ said Ria scornfully, ‘and she out scrubbing halls for me dear departed this last four years – since he took bad.’

She went off from behind her tree before we left the cemetery.

When Ria, Máire and myself got into The Brian Boru, there she was at the end of the counter.

I called two drinks and a mineral for Máire, and as soon as she heard my voice, she looked up, finished her gill of plain porter and went off.

She passed quite near us and she going out the door – her head down and a pale hunted look in her eyes.