Collected Stories (44 page)

Tommy Dodd was the only man she met who even looked as though he had the makings of a saga hero in him. Tommy was the town's smartest solicitor, a tall, handsome man with a heroic build, a long pale face, dark hair, and an obstinate jaw. He was built more for defense than attack; a brusque man, rude and loud-voiced when it suited him, polite and stiff when it didn't. He was a high official in a Catholic secret society, the members of which wore colored cowls and robes in the manner of the Ku Klux Klan, talked in an elaborate jargon with titles like “Worthy Warden,” and had a complicated system of grips and signs. He was almost obtrusively pious, and went to Mass each morning before breakfast. His room was filled with mechanical gadgets which were supposed to develop different parts of him, and he was quite obtrusively pernickety about food, insisting on all sorts of unusual things like bran, nuts, and nettles. He became quite violent if Joan, the landlady's daughter, crossed him in this fad.

“Take that away, Joan,” he would say in a dead voice whenever she happened to bring him the wrong thing.

“Oh, Law!” Joan would exclaim with a laugh. “Aren't you eating that now?”

“I never eat it. Are there any oranges left?”

“Oranges, oye!” Joan would mutter. “A wonder you don't turn into a monkey!”

“If you knew anything about the general health of monkeys, you wouldn't talk about them in that ignorant way,” said Tommy. “I don't know how you eat that stuff at all, Deirdre,” he would go on anxiously. “You should see what that does to your insides. I couldn't touch it at all. 'Twould kill me.”

As hard as Deirdre tried, this solicitude about what she ate was as close as she could get to a lover's attention from Tommy. He seemed more interested in her bowels than any other part of her. It was the same when they went driving. Tommy had a fine but blunted intelligence, so that he never seemed to know what would interest her. It took her quite a while to get him talking about his job (“Ah, what is it only old rubbish? You wouldn't care about things like that”), but when he did, he was fascinating. He knew who everyone was and what everybody was worth.

“How do you get all the information?” she asked. “I suppose the bank manager is in the Ku Klux Klan as well?”

“Is it Con Doody?” exclaimed Tommy, giving nothing away. “Ah, Con is too smart for that.”

“He'd want to be.”

“Begor, he would. And even then he's not as smart as the last man. Delaney used to have a phone on his desk, and if you asked him for an overdraft, he'd ring up head office in Dublin and recommend you. Oh, one of his most valued customers! And you wouldn't know the phone wasn't connected.”

“But why would he do that?” she asked in bewilderment.

“Because after hearing all he said about you, you'd blame the bank and not him at all. Oh, begor, Delaney was a first-rate man.”

“And did he charge for the calls?” Deirdre asked coldly.

“How would I know?” exclaimed Tommy in astonishment. “Why?”

“Is there anyone in this town that isn't an exploiter?” she asked with burning indignation.

“An exploiter?” echoed Tommy in bewilderment. “How do you make that out?”

“But you're all exploiters, man,” cried Deirdre. “Doctors, priests, bank managers, and solicitors; you're out only for what you can get. Don't you ever want to give people anything?”

“I'm sure I'm as charitable as the next,” Tommy said in a hurt tone. “Last year I must have given a good slice of my income in charity.”

“Ah, who's talking about charity?” she cried impatiently. “You don't even know what I mean. Ye all have the minds of robbers, even you. This isn't a town at all. It's a camp of highway robbers.”

“Begor, I wish it was,” Tommy said blandly, stepping on the accelerator. “You'd get nice pickings.”

F
OR A MAN
of such piety his morality struck Deirdre as deplorable. His sentiment was just as bad, and she sometimes wondered if she'd ever get down to the saga hero in him. He was far from being an uneducated man, and he had a lot of books of his own—serious works on history and philosophy which he read right through. The lighter types of literature he borrowed from her, and she made him read Joyce, George Moore, and Hemingway, in the hope that they might fan the spark of passion in him; but if they did, he managed to conceal it well. Instead he embarked on long and obscure arguments about St. Thomas Aquinas, Communism, the sanctity of marriage, and even anatomy. He called this “picking her brains.” When he had got all he wanted, he said he had “got great value out of her.” He talked as though she were another sort of chest-developer.

“But you wouldn't call that girl's conduct natural, would you?” he asked one night when he was discussing some novel she'd given him. “You don't imagine Joan here would let a fellow behave like that with her?”

“And who said Joan was natural?” asked Deirdre.

“Begod, I don't know,” he said with a laugh. “Maybe she isn't. But to come back to the girl in the story. Now, she knew the man was living with somebody else already. Wouldn't that show her he wasn't reliable?”

“She mightn't want someone reliable,” suggested Deirdre. “Anyway, lots of women would like it.”

“Would you say that, Deirdre?” he asked in surprise, sticking his thumbs in the armholes in his vest. “Why would they like it?”

“Well, at least they'd know where they were with him,” said Deirdre with a laugh.

“Excuse my being personal,” he went on, “but as I'm picking your brains, I'd like to know what you think of it yourself. Would you like it?”

“That would depend on the man, Tommy,” she replied. “Damn it, the girl was in love with him.” Then seeing from the blank expression on Tommy's handsome face that he didn't even know what she was getting at, she beat the sofa cushion in exasperation. “Love, Tommy, love!” she cried. “Don't tell me you never heard of it.”

“Oh, begor, I heard of it all right,” said Tommy, who was very difficult to shake when he was on the defensive. “I was through it all before you were out of long clothes. I'm past it now though.”

“Why? How old are you?”

“Thirty-five,” he said with finality.

“But, my God, that's only the prime of life!”

“You feel the years beginning to tell on you all the same,” said Tommy gravely. “What I'd like now is to settle down.”

“Settle down?” Deirdre repeated in disappointment (as if anybody ever heard of a saga hero settling down!). “What do you want to settle down for?”

“I want a home of my own, of course,” said Tommy. “You don't think I'm going to go on living in lodgings for the rest of my life, where I can't get a bit of decent food or anything?”

“And have you a girl?”

“I have not. Not yet.”

“Ah, Tommy, you're putting the cart before the horse,” she said mockingly. “You should get the girl first.”

“I believe 'tis customary,” said Tommy without permitting himself to get ruffled.

“But, Tommy,” she burst out, “you don't want to make a home for a girl till there's nothing else left for you to do with her. She'd hate it. Surely you understand that?” But it struck her that he didn't; not entirely, at any rate; and if she wanted to reach down to the passion in him, she would have to begin in a key without sharps or flats. “Anyway,” she added, “you'll find plenty to jump at you.”

“I dare say,” replied Tommy complacently. “I mightn't want to jump at them though.”

“Now, who is there you couldn't get if you wanted to?” she asked cajolingly. “A fine, upstanding man like yourself!”

“Can't you guess?” he asked, causing her to groan within. This wasn't even C major; it was more like puff-puffs.

“Do I know her?”

“What would you say to the doctor?” asked Tommy.

“Dr. O'Brien?” said Deirdre with a sinking of the heart. She knew now she wasn't in for courting, but confidences, and if there was one thing more than another that destroyed her self-respect, it was confidences. It was revealed to her at that precise moment that the nuns and herself would have to part company. It was bad enough in the mornings, having to hitch down her dress behind to cover her chest without having to endure fellows talking to her about the charms of other women. “I suppose she has bags of tin?” she added.

“Fifteen thousand,” replied Tommy complacently.

“You'd overlook a lot for that,” said Deirdre.

“Begor, you would,” said Tommy thoughtfully. “But isn't she very good-looking, Deirdre? I'd say she had great distinction.”

“Another five thousand would make her a beauty,” said Deirdre. “Honest to God, I used to think I knew what Irish towns were like, but I was only fooling myself. They're nothing but calculation and greed and cunning.”

“Oh, come, Deirdre!” said Tommy gravely. “Aren't you taking things to the fair?”

“No,” groaned Deirdre. “That's where ye take them.”

S
HE WAS SO
disgusted that next day she told it all to Joan. It wasn't that she particularly cared for Joan, who, in her opinion, was the sort of Irishwoman who make Irishmen what they are, but she had no one else to discuss it with. Joan was a big, platter-faced Child of Mary who scouted round men like some member of a primitive tribe observing the behavior of the first pale-faces.

“Mother of our Divine Redeemer!” she cried dramatically. “The box of chocolates!”

“What box of chocolates?”

“He have them for days hidden inside a clean shirt. Maybe he thought we wouldn't find them! Would you ever be equal to men? And what did he want telling you about her for?”

“I suppose he wanted someone to talk to,” said Deirdre.

“He did, I hear!” retorted Joan ironically. “I suppose he thought you might put in a good word for him.”

“But how could I when I don't even know the girl?”

“Maybe you might know someone that do,” Joan suggested shrewdly. “Or maybe your father might have influence.”

“Ah, it's not that at all,” Deirdre said impatiently. “The man is soft on her, and he wants someone to talk to. Sure, 'tis only human nature.”

“The divil a much nature that fellow have unless it suited his book,” said Joan derisively. “He wouldn't tell you the time of day unless he wanted to borrow a match from you.”

This all-pervading cynicism about love didn't agree with Deirdre at all. The country had obviously gone to hell since saga times. She wrote to a friend in Dublin, asking her to find her a job; after that she felt considerably better.

A few nights later Tommy invited her to the pictures. Afterwards, as they came down Main Street in the moonlight, he looked so imposing with his great build and long, handsome Viking head that she took his arm. She stopped him at the bridge. The abbey tower soared over its cluster of ragged gables with its fantastic battlements like cockades in the moonlight, and the water, tumbling over the weir, was so hatched with shadow that it seemed still, like seaweed left after the tide. There was a great sense of space and joy and contemplativeness inside her, as if a bit of the night had gone astray and nested in her.

“God, Tommy, isn't it lovely?” she whispered.

“Tell me,” he asked, as though he were picking her brains again, “what do you see particularly beautiful about that?”

“Ah, stop your old catechism and try and feel something, man!” she said impatiently.

“I don't know why you say that,” Tommy said in a hurt tone as he rested on the parapet of the bridge. “As a matter of fact, I feel things very deeply. As a kid, I was so unhappy at home that I had a row with my father and ran away to sea.”

“Did you?” she asked in surprise. “How long were you at sea?”

“A fortnight,” said Tommy.

“You didn't stop long enough, Tommy,” she said as she sat up on the bridge. “Tommy,” she added coaxingly, “did you ever go to bed with a girl?”

He flashed her a quick look of mistrust.

“Why?” he asked suspiciously. “Did someone tell you?”

“Nobody told me anything. I only asked. Did you?”

“Oh, begor, I did,” said Tommy with a nod of his head.

“I never did anything like that,” she said regretfully. “At least, I did, once, but the fellow said he respected me too much.”

“Begor, I hope so,” Tommy said in some alarm. “You're too young to be going in for that sort of thing, Deirdre.”

“Ah, I don't know,” Deirdre said, shaking her head regretfully. “People think they have time enough, and then, before they know where they are, their lives are wasted and they have nothing to show for them. For God's sake, look at the people of this town, Tommy! You'd think it was something they could put in the bank. Was this some girl you picked up?”

“No,” replied Tommy, getting more and more guarded. “A girl in a house I was lodging in in Dublin.”

“Was she nice?”

“I thought so anyway,” said Tommy gallantly.

“But were you in love with her?”

“Oh, begor, I was in love with her all right,” he said with a laugh.

“Ah, but I mean really, madly, hopelessly in love,” persisted Deirdre, exasperated by his temperate tone.

“I was mad enough.”

“And why didn't you marry her?”

“I wasn't in a position to marry her. My family wasn't well off and I couldn't afford it.”

“Ah,” Deirdre said angrily, as much to the night as to Tommy, “I have no patience with that sort of talk. Ye wouldn't starve.”

“I wouldn't be too sure of that.”

“And if ye did, what matter?”

“What matter if we starved?” he asked incredulously.

“What matter if ye lived? God, if I loved a man, I'd marry him on tuppence ha'penny. You're all terrified out of your wits of life, as if it was going to bite you.”