Collected Stories (88 page)

Nobody had remembered Jerry's good advice, even Jerry himself, and eighteen months later Elsie was pregnant again. Again their lives took the same pattern of unrest. But this time Elsie was even more distressed than Tom.

“I'm a curse to you,” she said. “There's something wrong with me. I can't be natural.”

“Oh, you're natural enough,” Tom replied bitterly. “You married the wrong man, that's all.”

“I didn't, I didn't!” she protested despairingly. “You can say anything else but that. If I believed that, I'd have nothing left, because I never cared for anyone but you. And in spite of what you think, I'm coming back,” she went on, in tears. “I'm coming back if it kills me. God, I hate this country; I hate every God damn thing about it; I hate what it's done to you and Jerry. But I'm not going to let you go.”

“You have no choice,” Tom said patiently. “Jerry Og will have to go to school, and you can't be bringing him hither and over, even if you could afford it.”

“Then, if that's what you feel, why don't you keep him?” she cried. “You know perfectly well you could stop me taking him with me if you wanted to. You wouldn't even have to bring me into court. I'll give him to you now. Isn't that proof enough that I'm coming back?”

“No, Elsie, it is not,” Tom replied, measuring every word. “And I'm not going to bring you into court either. I'm not going to take hostages to make sure my wife comes back to me.”

And though Elsie continued to delude herself with the belief that she would return, she knew Tom was right. It would all appear different when she got home. The first return to Ireland had been hard, the second had seemed impossible. Yet, even in the black hours when she really considered the situation, she felt she could never resign herself to something that had been determined before she was born, and she deceived herself with the hope that Tom would change his mind and follow her. He must follow her. Even if he was prepared to abandon her, he would never abandon Jerry Og.

And this, as Big Jerry could have told her, was where she made her biggest mistake, because if Tom had done it at all it would have been for her. But Big Jerry had decided that the whole thing had gone beyond his power to help. He recognized the irremediable, all right, sometimes perhaps even before it became irremediable. But that, as he would have said himself, is where the ferryboat had left him.

Thanks to Elsie, the eldest of the Dorgans now has a job in Boston and in the course of years the rest of them will probably go there as well. Tom continues to live in his little bungalow beside the harbor. Annie is keeping house for him, which suits her fine, because Big Jerry's old mother continued to put his socks on for him a few years too long, and now Annie has only her brother to worship. To all appearances they are happy enough, as happiness goes in Cork. Jerry still calls, and the two men discuss the terrible state of the country. But in Tom's bedroom there are pictures of Elsie and the children, the third of whom he knows only through photographs, and apart from that, nothing has changed since Elsie left five years ago. It is a strange room, for one glance is enough to show that the man who sleeps there is still in love, and that everything that matters to him in the world is reflected there. And one day, if he comes by the dollars, he will probably go out and visit them all, but it is here he will return and here, no doubt, he will die.

The Impossible Marriage

I
T WASN'T
till he was nearly thirty that Jim Grahame realized the trick that life had played on him. Up to that time he had lived very much like any other young man, with no great notion that he was being imposed upon. His father had died ten years before. Jim, an accountant in a provision store, had continued to accept his father's responsibilities, and his mother, a lively, sweet-natured little woman, had kept house for him in the way that only mothers can. They lived on in the house into which she had married; a big, roomy, awkward house on the edge of the country where the rent they paid was barely enough to keep the building in repair. Jim had never been very shy with girls, but none of them he had met seemed to him to be half the woman his mother was, and, unknown to himself, he was turning into a typical comfortable old bachelor who might or might not at the age of forty-five decide to establish a family of his own. His mother spoiled him, of course, and, in the way of only children, he had a troubled conscience because of the way he took advantage of it. But spoiling is a burden that the majority of men can carry a great deal of without undue hardship.

Then, by the seaside in Crosshaven, one Sunday, he went for a walk with a girl called Eileen Clery who lived in the same quarter of Cork as himself, though he had never noticed her before. She wasn't the sort of girl who thrusts herself on people's attention, though she was good-looking enough, with a thin face that lit up beautifully when she smiled, and pale hair with gold lights in it. He tried to flirt with her, and was surprised and a little offended by her quick, almost violent, withdrawal. He had not mistaken her for a flighty type, but neither had he expected to meet an untouchable.

The curious thing was that she seemed to like him, and even arranged to meet him again. This time they sat in a nook on the cliffs, and Jim became more pressing. To his astonishment, she began to cry. He was exasperated, but he pretended a solicitude he did not altogether feel, and when she saw him apparently distressed, she sat up and smiled, though her tears still continued to flow freely. “It's not that I wouldn't like it, Jim,” she said, drying her eyes and blowing her nose into a ridiculous little scrap of a handkerchief, “only I don't like thinking about it.”

“Why on earth not, Eileen?” he asked with some amusement.

“Well, you see, I'm an only child, and I have my mother to look after,” she said, still sniffing.

“And I'm an only child, and I have a mother to look after,” Jim replied triumphantly, and then laughed outright at the absurdity of the coincidence. “We're a pair,” he added with a rueful chuckle.

“Yes, aren't we?” Eileen said, laughing and sobbing at once, and then she rested her head on his chest, and made no further difficulties about his love-making.

N
OW
, all books on the subject describe attraction in similar terms; tanned chests and voluptuous contours which really have very little to do with the matter. But what they rarely mention, the most powerful of all, is human loneliness. This is something that women face earlier than men, and Eileen had already faced it. Jim, though he had not faced it in the same way, was perceptive enough to see it reaching out before him, and up there on the cliffs overlooking Cork Harbour, watching a score of little sailing-boats headed for Currabinny, they realized that they were in love, and all the more in love because their position was so obviously hopeless.

After that, they met regularly every week in Cork, to walk, or go to the pictures when it rained. They did it in the way of only children, taking precautions that became something of a joke to those who knew them. One evening, a girl crossing the New Bridge saw Jim Grahame standing there, and when she came to the second bridge was amused to see Eileen. “Excuse my interfering, Miss Clery,” she said, “but if it's Mr. Grahame you're waiting for, he's waiting for you at the other bridge.” Eileen didn't know where to look; she blushed, she laughed, and finally joined her hands and said, “Oh, thank you, thank you,” and ran like the wind.

It was like them to meet that way, miles from home, because they were pursued by the sense of guilt. They felt more pity for their mothers than for themselves and did their best to hide their dreadful secret out of some instinctive understanding of the fear of loneliness and old age that besets women whose families have grown and whose husbands are dead. Perhaps they even understood it too well, and apprehended more of it than was really there.

Mrs. Grahame, whose intelligence service was better than Mrs. Clery's, was the first to speak of the matter to them.

“I hear you're great friends with a girl called Clery from the Cross,” she said one evening in a tone of modest complaint. Jim was shaving by the back door. He started and turned to her with a look of amusement, but she was absorbed in her knitting, as always when she did not wish to look him in the face.

“Go on!” he said. “Who told you that?”

“Why wouldn't I hear it when the whole road knows it?” she replied, avoiding his question. She liked her little mysteries. “Wouldn't you bring her up some night?”

“You wouldn't mind?”

“Why would I mind, child? Little enough company we see.”

This was another of her favorite myths; that she never saw or spoke to anyone, though Jim could do little or nothing that she didn't hear about sooner or later.

One evening he brought Eileen home for tea, and though she was nervous and giggly, he could see that his mother took to her at once. Mrs. Grahame worshipped her son, but she had always wished for a daughter, someone she could talk to as she could not talk to a man. Later in the evening, Eileen, realizing that she really was welcome, began to relax, and she and his mother exchanged the sort of gossip they both loved.

“Ah, Dinny Murphy was a bad head to her,” his mother would say darkly, referring to some object of charity in the neighborhood.

“No, no, no, Mrs. Grahame,” Eileen would say hastily, in her eagerness laying her hand on Mrs. Grahame's arm. “Poor Dinny wasn't the worst.”

“Look at that now!” Mrs. Grahame would cry, putting down her knitting to fix Eileen with eyes that were bleak with tragedy. “And the things they said about him! Eileen, haven't people
bad
tongues?”

“No, he wasn't, he wasn't,” Eileen would repeat, shaking her head. “He took a drop, of course, but which of them doesn't, would you tell me?”

And Jim, who said nothing, smiled as he noticed how the voice of Eileen, young, eager, and intelligent, blended with his mother's in a perfect harmony of gossip. Mrs. Grahame did not let her go without hinting delicately at her lost and lonely condition that made it impossible for her to know the truth about anything, and made her promise to come again. She became accustomed to Eileen's visits, and was quite hurt if a week went by without one. She even said with great resignation that of course she was no company for a lively young girl like that.

Then it was Mrs. Clery's turn. She might hear of Eileen's visits to the Grahames, and be upset, but, on the other hand, she might be equally upset by an unexpected visit. So Eileen had to prepare her by telling her first how Jim was situated with regard to his own mother so that she wouldn't think he came to the house with any designs on Eileen. All they had to live on was Eileen's earnings and a few shillings' pension which her mother drew.

They lived in a tiny cottage in a terrace off the road, with a parlor, a kitchen that they used as a living room, and two attic bedrooms upstairs. Mrs. Clery was a shrewd old lady with a battered humorous face. She suffered from a variety of ailments, and, being slightly deaf, complained of them at great length in a loud, hectoring tone. She would put a firm hand on her interlocutor's knee while she talked, to make sure he didn't escape, and then stare blankly at the fireplace in concentration.

“So then, Jim, I had this second pain I was telling you about, and I had Doctor O'Mahoney to the house, and he said—what did doctor O'Mahoney say about the second pain, Eileen?”

“He said you were an old humbug,” bawled Eileen

“Dr. O'Mahoney?” her mother said in wonderment. “He did not. Ah, you divil you!”

At home, Eileen talked nervously, at the top of her voice, interrupting, contradicting, and bantering her mother till the old woman's face wrinkled up with glee and she blinked at Jim and groaned: “Didn't I say she was a divil, Jim? Did you ever hear a girl talk to her mother that way? I'll engage you don't talk like that to your own poor mother.”

“His mother isn't always grousing,” Eileen yelled blithely from the back yard.

“Grousing? Who's grousing?” asked Mrs. Clery, her eyes half-closing with pleasure, like a cat's when you stroke it. “Oh, my, I live in terror of her. Jim, boy, you never heard such a tongue! And the lies she tells! Me grousing!”

A
LL THE SAME
it was pleasant for Jim and Eileen to have a place to turn to on a wet night when they didn't want to go to the pictures. Mostly, they went to Jim's. Mrs. Grahame was more jealous than Eileen's mother. Even a hint of slight on the part of either of them would reduce her to mutinous tears, but if they sat with her for half an hour, she would get up and tiptoe gently out of the room as though she thought they were asleep. Her jealousy was only the measure of her generosity.

“Wisha, Jim,” she said roguishly one evening, putting down her knitting, “wouldn't you and Eileen make a match of it?”

“A match?” Jim repeated mockingly, looking up from his book. “I suppose you want to get rid of me?”

His mother could usually be diverted from any subject by teasing because she took everything literally even if she rarely took it far.

“Indeed, what a thing I'd do!” she said in a huff and went on with her knitting, full of childish rage at his reception of her generous proposal. But, of course, it didn't last. Ten minutes later, having forgotten her huff, she added, this time as though speaking to herself: “Why, then, you wouldn't find many like her.”

“And where would we live?” he asked with gentle irony.

“My goodness, haven't ye the house?” she said, looking at him severely over her glasses. “You don't think I'd stop to be in your way?”

“Oh, so you'd go to the workhouse and let Mrs. Clery come here?”

“Wisha, aren't things very peculiar?” she said vaguely, and he knew that she was brooding on the coincidence by which he and Eileen had been drawn together. His mother and he were both familiar with the situation in its simple form, common as it is in Ireland, and could have listed a score of families where a young man or woman walked out for years before he or she was in a position to marry, too often only to find themselves too old or tired for it.