Collected Stories (68 page)

“And I have to think of Susie and my mother,” said Jack with an embarrassed smile.

“I think you may have to choose between them, Jack,” Mrs. Dwyer said quietly.

“There are certain things you have no choice about, Mrs. Dwyer,” he said gloomily, and again she realized with irritation that this intolerably weak man, this sucker who was allowing himself to be imposed on by his mischievous and selfish mother, had some source of strength that made him immune from being imposed upon by a woman of character like herself.

“Well, don't blame me if you wreck your home, Jack,” she said with finality.

From that on, she refused to visit Jack's house again, and though the children came regularly to see her, and Jack himself came every Sunday morning after Mass and she received him warmly, the old relationship was at an end. She had too much pride to let herself be flouted.

It must be admitted that she had miscalculated Mrs. Cantillon's style though not her content. Mrs. Cantillon made hell of the home all right, but not in the straightforward way a woman of Mrs. Dwyer's character expected. She made no attempt to make Susie's life impossible. She contented herself with making Jack's impossible. The imbecility of women like Mrs. Cantillon has an aspect that is never far removed from genius. She knew Jack's weaknesses in a way Susie had never known them. She remembered with sentimental attachment childish humiliations he had suffered. She knew that though a married man and a father, he had always remained temperamentally a bit of a bachelor, remote from the stresses of courtship and marriage. Perhaps it is only bachelors who can have a sense of responsibility. He had lived all his life in one small corner of Cork, nodding and smiling to his neighbors without ever knowing more about them than was necessary for congratulation or sympathy. He had managed to head Susie off intimacies, but it would have taken a tank to head off his mother. To her, the great joy in life was knowing everybody's business.

She knew that after his day's work he liked to change ceremonially into old trousers and read or play with the children, so she began to jolly him into taking Susie out. On the surface it was the height of good nature, and Susie, who found long-extinguished flutterings revive in her, took it at its face value and seconded her mother-in-law.

“Ah, what other use is there for an old woman like me,” asked Mrs. Cantillon with a mournful smile, “except to let ye free to enjoy yeerselves?”

The extraordinary thing was that as the home grew more wretched, Susie came to depend more and more on her mother-in-law. She even had arguments with her mother about it. Mrs. Dwyer believed that Jack was weak, but nothing would persuade her but that his mother was bad to the heart. Susie argued with her. She said it wasn't Mrs. Cantillon at all; Mrs. Cantillon wasn't bad when you came to know her; it was Jack. She came to see that in all the disagreements between them, it was Jack with his monstrous selfishness who had been at fault. It seemed he had always been that way, even as a boy—hard-natured. She listened eagerly to Mrs. Cantillon's tales of Mick, who had none of Jack's faults, and though her own memory told her differently, she allowed herself to be persuaded that, even admitting everything, Mick was the better man. “Ah, poor Mick,” Mrs. Cantillon said with the tears in her eyes, “in spite of his little faults, you couldn't begrudge him anything.” If Madge Hunt had decided she had married the wrong brother, Susie was now well on the way to believing the same. Even Jack's one dirty word had ceased to cover the situation. He stayed out in the evenings, boozing.

O
NE DAY
Susie came in to find the children crying and Mrs. Cantillon sprawled at the foot of the stairs unconscious. For two days she hung on while Jack waited at the hospital. Mrs. Dwyer came to look after the children, and it was clear when they met that the old quarrel was over. In fact, it had been over for a long time, for it impressed her that Mrs. Cantillon had succeeded in moving Susie but not him. At the funeral he pretended no great grief, and Susie, who automatically broke down at all funerals, received the sympathy of a number of women who believed her to be the daughter of the deceased. This made her furious, and she said that Jack would show no more nature for her than he had for his mother.

Mrs. Dwyer had troubles of her own to think of at the time. Jim, the last of the boys, had married, and she was on her own. This, according to herself, was the day she had always been waiting for, and she plunged into a life of dissipation, going to the pictures, playing cards, and refusing to mind her grandchildren. “Wisha, aren't I right?” she asked Jack. “Aren't I fussing round them long enough? 'Tis time I had a bit of enjoyment out of life.” Then she developed arthritis. Susie came to nurse her, and after that it became clear to the family that their mother's short-lived period of independence was over. She could not be left in the house alone. She would have to go and live with one of the boys—a bitter humiliation for a strong-minded woman.

Tim, an easy-going fellow, would have had her willingly, but easygoing fellows get easy-going wives, and it wasn't likely that Mrs. Dwyer, who boasted that she had never seen the day when a properly cooked dinner was not served in her house, would long put up with Nora and her perpetual round of frying.

Ned's wife had six children, and there would be no room for her unless they took a bigger house. Jim, being just married, had only the minimum of furniture, and it would take a considerable capital expenditure to set him up. It wasn't that they didn't love their mother or wouldn't have died for her if occasion arose, but none of them wanted to be the sucker when a little hesitation might mean a considerable easing of the sacrifice asked of them.

Susie, who had a heart for everyone's troubles, understood it perfectly and wept for all of them equally, but her sister, Babs, told them they were a bloody pack of wasters and went upstairs to tell their mother the same. “How often did I say it to you?” she demanded. “You ruined that gang. One of us could get nothing in this house, and that's all the thanks you get for it.”

Babs was a forthright girl who could always be relied upon to make things as difficult as possible for everyone else. Her mother only listened to her splutterings with sly amusement.

“The Lord lighten their burdens!” she said dryly. “As if I'd be under an obligation to any of them!”

“Well, what are you going to do, woman?” asked Babs.

“Don't bother your head about what I'm going to do,” said her mother with a wave of her hand. “I'm going up to the Little Sisters where I can be properly looked after. I had all that arranged six months ago. Do you think, after all my years, I'm going into another woman's house to play second fiddle to her? I am not.”

The whole family realized when this was reported to them that it was precisely what they'd always imagined their mother would do, and, much as they regretted it, they were almost relieved. The only person who was not was Jack. When Susie told him he stretched his legs to the fire, pulled on his pipe, and looked grave.

“That will kill her, Susie,” he said at last.

“Do you think so really, Jack?” she asked wonderingly.

“I'm sure of it.”

“But anyway it's not as bad as having to live with an in-law.”

“Why?” he asked. “Do you think she's going to escape other women by going into a home?”

“I suppose not,” said Susie, beginning to be troubled again herself. “But what can you do with her? You know what she's like when she has her mind made up.”

“I wonder if she has her mind made up,” he said doubtfully.

The following evening he went for a long walk, up Montenotte and back by Mayfield. On his way home he called at the Dwyers'. Babs was there, and her mother instantly ordered her out to make tea for him. Marriage made no difference to the Dwyer girls. Inside her door they instantly reverted to a dependent position. Mrs. Dwyer never had had any regard for the principle of women's rights. “If they'll give me enough money, they can have their rights,” she had said, and only voted to humor her husband. “'Tis alike to me which of them gets in,” was her view.

“I hear you're going up to the Little Sisters?” said Jack as they sat over the fire together.

“Arrah, of course I am, child,” she replied lightly. “You know what I always thought of in-laws.”

“I do,” he replied with a grin.

“And can't you imagine me turned loose on them? Not, between ourselves, Jack Cantillon, that I'm not a better woman than any of them.”

“No one said you weren't.”

“God knows,” she went on with resignation, “I don't know what sort of women are they turning out. They're good for nothing only raising their elbows and resting their backsides. That wife of Tim's—I don't know is she ever right. If I was a man and a woman offered me sausages for my dinner, I'd take the frying-pan to her. I declare to God I would.”

“You wouldn't come to Susie and me?” he asked, dropping his voice. “You'd be no trouble. The room is there since the mother died.”

“Was Susie talking about it?” she asked sharply.

“She was not,” Jack replied with vigor, answering two questions; one which had been implied but not asked, the other not even implied. The implied question was “Are you encouraging Susie to patronize me?” “Of course, Susie must have the last word,” he added, answering the question which existed only in his own mind.

“Wisha, Jack, boy,” she said, dropping her defenses, “I'm easy where I go. I had my day, and I must only be satisfied. At the same time, mind you, I like to be asked. I suppose we all have our bit of vanity.”

“You're well entitled to it,” he said with a laugh. “Will you come?”

“I will not come, Jack, thanks all the same. Ye had enough of in-laws to last ye the rest of yeer lives—not criticizing your poor mother, God rest her, whatever I might have said when she was alive. 'Tis only when you come to it yourself that you realize. Besides,” she added with sudden candor, “I wouldn't give it to say to the boys.”

“I thought of that,” Jack agreed with a nod. “I don't think they'd mind if you let me put it up to them first. I think I might get round them. You see, we are a bit better off than they are, and I don't think they'd stand in the way of making you more comfortable.”

She looked at him closely to see if he was smiling, and realized that there was no intentional irony behind his remarks. She gave a sudden shrug.

“To tell you the God's truth, Jack,” she said, “I'd hate to be in an institution. I'd nearly sooner put up with Tim's wife. I could never get on with nuns, God forgive me. Half the time I don't think they're natural. Mind, Jack, I'll be no acquisition to you. I'll do my best but I won't promise you anything. Old people get very selfish. You have no idea. You'd be waiting here for a cup of tea, and if half Cork died, you wouldn't care till you got it. And isn't it only natural?” she asked, cocking an argumentative eyebrow. “What else have we to look forward to?”

Of course, it had to be done tactfully, and even then created a few scenes and some protests, but somehow, from the moment it was mentioned, it seemed the family had always known it would happen that way. Their mother would be impossible in an institution unless she were made matron at once. Jack was steady; he was fairly well-to-do; he was the born burden-carrier, and in the matter of money would be much easier to deal with than any member of the family.

Curiously, as things turned out, Mrs. Dwyer proved a real acquisition, at least to Jack. The thought that she hadn't to go into a home seemed to give her a new lease of life, and almost up to her death she was livelier than Susie. The first evening Jack came home from work, she had his old trousers warming on a chair at the fire and made him change there instead of in the bedroom. “Wisha, at my age, as if I couldn't look at a man with his trousers off! Do you want me to go out?” “I don't.” “Wisha, why would you?” Mrs. Dwyer looked after him as if he were a child, trying to judge what he really wanted—never an easy thing with a man so bottled-up. She was so pleased not to be treated as an imbecile the way “poor Dwyer” treated her that she even tried to develop an interest in politics to please him. When Susie started her first big row with him, her mother said sharply: “Susie, what way is that to talk to Jack?” and Susie broke down and went upstairs to weep. When Jack made to follow her, Mrs. Dwyer said firmly: “Stop where you are, Jack. You only make her worse.”

She went upstairs to deal with Susie herself. She knew Jack didn't like it; she knew he hated anybody's interfering between himself and Susie, but she also knew how women should be treated, which he never would.

“The trouble with you is that you don't know a good man when you see one,” she told Susie dryly. “I only wish to God I had a husband like him—not criticizing poor Dwyer.”

“God is good,” sniffed Susie. “I mightn't last long between the pair of ye.”

But Susie had enough respect for her mother to realize that she was right, and even after Mrs. Dwyer's death she no longer looked elsewhere for a model of what men should be. On her deathbed Mrs. Dwyer asked to be buried with Jack and Susie. She didn't ask it with any particular emotion, and even at that Jack was surprised, for she was a woman who loathed sentiment, disliked anyone who professed to ideals above money and security, and had always pretended complete indifference to where they slung her when her time was up, but he promised just the same.

He also broke his promise, but she would hardly have held that against him, because she knew how he hated to inflict unnecessary pain. All he had to remember her by was the undertaker's bill, which he kept and looked at from time to time. It puzzled him that he who had always hated his own mother should care so much for her. He didn't think it right that anyone else should share in the funeral expenses, and, fortunately, no member of the family wanted to contest the privilege with him.