Collected Stories (94 page)

“I wonder if you saw what I did?” Joe said at last to break the silence, and Coleman stared at him despairingly.

“I'm in dread I'll never forget it,” he said.

An Out-and-Out Free Gift

W
HEN
Jimmy began to get out of hand, his father was both disturbed and bewildered. Anybody else, yes, but not Jimmy! They had always been so close! Closer, indeed, than Ned ever realized, for the perfectly correct picture he had drawn of himself as a thoughtful, considerate father who treated his son as though he were a younger brother could have been considerably expanded by his wife. Indeed, to realize how close they had been you needed to hear Celia on it, because only she knew how much of the small boy there still was in her husband.

Who, for instance, would have thought that the head of a successful business had such a passion for sugar? Yet during the war, when sugar was rationed in Ireland, Celia, who was a bit of a Jansenist, had felt herself bound to give up sugar and divide her ration between Ned and Jimmy, then quite a small boy. And, even at that, Ned continued to suffer. He did admire her self-denial, but he couldn't help feeling that so grandiose a gesture deserved a better object than Jimmy. It was a matter of scientific fact that sugar was bad for Jimmy's teeth, and anything that went wrong with Jimmy's teeth was going to cost his father money. Ned felt it unfair that in the middle of a war, with his salary frozen, Celia should inflict additional burdens on him.

Most of the time he managed to keep his dignity, though he could rarely sit down to a meal without an angry glance at Jimmy's sugar bowl. To make things harder for him, Jimmy rationed himself so that toward the end of the week he still had some sugar left, while Ned had none. As a philosopher, Ned wondered that he should resent this so deeply, but resent it he did. A couple of times, he deliberately stole a spoonful while Celia's back was turned, and the absurdity of this put him in such a frivolous frame of mind for the rest of the evening that she eventually said resignedly, “I suppose you've been at the child's sugar again? Really, Ned, you are hopeless!” On other occasions, Ned summoned up all his paternal authority and with a polite “You don't mind, old man?” took a spoonful from under Jimmy's nose. But that took nerve, and a delicate appreciation of the precise moment when Jimmy could be relied on not to cry.

Towards the end of the war, it became a matter of brute economic strength. If Jimmy wanted a bicycle lamp, he could earn it or pay up in good sugar. As Ned said, quoting from a business manual he had studied in his own youth, “There is no such thing in business as an out-and-out free gift.” Jimmy made good use of the lesson. “Bicycle lamp, old man?” Ned would ask casually, poising his spoon over Jimmy's sugar bowl. “Bicycle lamp
and
three-speed gear,” Jimmy would reply firmly. “For a couple of spoons of sugar?” his father would cry in mock indignation. “Are you mad, boy?” They both enjoyed the game.

They could scarcely have been other than friends. There was so much of the small boy in Ned that he was sensitive to the least thing affecting Jimmy, and Jimmy would consult him about things that most small boys keep to themselves. When he was in trouble, Ned never dismissed it lightly, no matter how unimportant it seemed. He asked a great many questions and frequently reserved his decisions. He had chosen Jimmy's school himself; it was a good one for Cork, and sometimes, without informing Jimmy, he went off to the school himself and had a chat with one of the teachers. Nearly always he managed to arrange things without embarrassment or pain, and Jimmy took it for granted that his decisions were usually right. It is a wise father who can persuade his son of anything of the sort.

But now, at sixteen, Jimmy was completely out of control, and his mother had handed him over to the secular arm, and the secular arm, for all its weight, made no impression on his sullen indifference. The first sign of the change in him was the disintegration of his normally perfect manners; now he seemed to have no deference towards or consideration for anyone. Ned caught him out in one or two minor falsehoods and quoted to him a remark of his own father's that “a lie humiliates the man who tells it, but it humiliates the one it's told to even more.” What puzzled Ned was that, at the same time, the outbreak was linked in some ways to qualities he had always liked in the boy. Jimmy was strong, and showed his strength in protecting things younger and weaker than himself. The cat regarded him as a personal enemy because he hurled himself on her the moment he saw her with a bird. At one time, there had been a notice on his door that read, “Wounded Bird. Please Keep Out.” At school, his juniors worshipped him because he would stand up for them against bullies, and though Ned, in a fatherly way, advised him not to get mixed up in other people's quarrels, he was secretly flattered. He felt Jimmy was taking after him.

But the same thing that attracted Jimmy to younger and weaker boys seemed now to attract him to wasters. Outside of school, he never associated with lads he might have to look up to but only with those his father felt a normal boy should despise. All this was summed up in his friendship with a youngster called Hogan, who was a strange mixture of spoiling and neglect, a boy who had never been young and would never be old. He openly smoked a pipe, and let on to be an authority on brands of tobacco. Ned winced when Hogan addressed him as a contemporary and tried to discuss business with him. He replied with heavy irony—something he did only when he was at a complete loss. What went on in Hogan's house when Jimmy went there he could only guess at. He suspected that the parents went out and stayed out, leaving the boys to their own devices.

At first, Ned treated Jimmy's insubordination as he had treated other outbreaks, by talking to him as an equal. He even offered him a cigarette—Jimmy had stolen money to buy cigarettes. He told him how people grew up through admiration of others' virtues, rather than through tolerance of their weaknesses. He talked to him about sex, which he suspected was at the bottom of Jimmy's trouble, and Jimmy listened politely and said he understood. Whether he did or not, Ned decided that if Hogan talked sex to Jimmy, it was a very different kind of sex.

Finally, he forbade Hogan the house and warned Jimmy against going to Hogan's. He made no great matter of it, contenting himself with describing the scrapes he had got into himself at Jimmy's age, and Jimmy smiled, apparently pleased with this unfamiliar picture of his grave and rather stately father, but he continued to steal and lie, to get bad marks and remain out late at night. Ned was fairly satisfied that he went to Hogan's, and sat there smoking, playing cards, and talking filth. He bawled Jimmy out and called him a dirty little thief and liar, and Jimmy raised his brows and looked away with a pained air, as though asking himself how long he must endure such ill breeding. At this, Ned gave him a cuff on the ear that brought a look of hatred into Jimmy's face and caused Celia not to talk to Ned for two days. But even she gave in at last.

“Last night was the third time he's been out late this week,” she said one afternoon in her apparently unemotional way. “You'll really have to do something drastic with him.”

These were hard words from a soft woman, but though Ned felt sorry for her, he felt even sorrier for himself. He hated himself in the part of a sergeant-major, and he blamed her for having let things go so far.

“Any notion where he has been?” he asked stiffly.

“Oh, you can't get a word out of him,” she said with a shrug. “Judging by his tone, I'd say Hogan's. I don't know what attraction that fellow has for him.”

“Very well,” Ned said portentously. “I'll deal with him. But, mind, I'll deal with him in my own way.”

“Oh, I won't interfere,” she said wearily. “I know when I'm licked.”

“I can promise you Master Jimmy will know it, too,” Ned added grimly.

At supper he said in an even tone, “Young man, for the future you're going to be home every night at ten o'clock. This is the last time I'm going to speak to you about it.”

Jimmy, apparently under the impression that his father was talking to himself, reached for a slice of bread. Then Ned let fly with a shout that made Celia jump and paralyzed the boy's hand, still clutching the bread.

“Did you hear me?”

“What's that?” gasped Jimmy.

“I said you were to be in at ten o'clock.”

“Oh, all right, all right,” said Jimmy, with a look that said he did not think any reasonable person would require him to share the house any longer with one so uncivilized. Though this look was intended to madden Ned, it failed to do so, because he knew that, for all her sentimentality and high liberal principles, Celia was a woman of her word and would not interfere whenever he decided to knock that particular look off Master Jimmy's face. He knew, too, that the time was not far off; that Jimmy had not the faintest intention of obeying, and that he would be able to deal with it.

“Because I warn you, the first night you're late again I'm going to skin you alive,” he added. He was trying it out, of course. He knew that Celia hated expressions of fatherly affection like “skin you alive,” “tan you within an inch of your life,” and “knock your head off,” which, to her, were relics of a barbarous age. To his great satisfaction, she neither shuddered nor frowned. Her principles were liberal, but they were principles.

T
WO
NIGHTS
after, Jimmy was late again. Celia, while pretending to read, was watching the clock despairingly. “Of course, he may have been delayed,” she said smoothly, but there was no conviction in her tone. It was nearly eleven when they heard Jimmy's key in the door.

“I think perhaps I'd better go to bed,” she said.

“It might be as well,” he replied pityingly. “Send that fellow in on your way.”

He heard her in the hallway, talking with Jimmy in a level, friendly voice, not allowing her consternation to appear, and he smiled. He liked that touch of the Roman matron in her. Then there was a knock, and Jimmy came in. He was a big lad for sixteen but he still had traces of baby fat about the rosy cheeks he occasionally scraped with Ned's razor, to Ned's annoyance. Now Ned would cheerfully have given him a whole shaving kit if it would have avoided the necessity for dealing with him firmly.

“You wanted to talk to me, Dad?” he asked, as though he could just spare a moment.

“Yes, Jimmy, I did. Shut that door.”

Jimmy gave a resigned shrug at his father's mania for privacy but did as he was told, and stood against the door, his hands joined and his chin in the air.

“When did I say you were to be in?” Ned said, looking at the clock.

“When?”

“Yes. When? At what time, if you find it so hard to understand.”

“Oh, ten,” Jimmy replied wearily.

“Ten? And what time do you make that?”

“Oh, I didn't know it was so late!” Jimmy exclaimed with an astonished look at the clock. “I'm sorry. I didn't notice the time.”

“Really?” Ned said ironically. “Enjoyed yourself that much?”

“Not too bad,” Jimmy replied vaguely. He was always uncomfortable with his father's irony.

“Company good?”

“Oh, all right,” Jimmy replied with another shrug.

“Where was this?”

“At a house.”

“Poor people?” his father asked in mock surprise.

“What?” exclaimed Jimmy.

“Poor people who couldn't afford a clock?”

Jimmy's indignation overflowed in stammering protest. “I never said they hadn't a clock. None of the other fellows had to be in by ten. I didn't like saying I had to be. I didn't want them to think I was a blooming …” The protest expired in a heavy sigh, and Ned's heart contracted with pity and shame.

“Juvenile delinquent,” he added patiently. “I know. Neither your mother nor I want you to make a show of yourself. But you didn't answer my question. Where was this party? And don't tell me any lies, because I'm going to find out.”

Jimmy grew red and angry. “Why would I tell you lies?”

“For the same reason you've told so many already—whatever that may be. You see, Jimmy, the trouble with people who tell lies is that you have to check everything they say. Not on your account but on theirs; otherwise, you may be unfair to them. People soon get tired of being fair, though. Now, where were you? At Hogan's?”

“You said I wasn't to go to Hogan's.”

“You see, you're still not answering my questions. Were you at Hogan's?”

“No,” Jimmy replied in a whisper.

“Word of honor?”

“Word of honor.” But the tone was not the tone of honor but of shame.

“Where were you, then?”

“Ryans'.”

The name was unfamiliar to Ned, and he wondered if Jimmy had not just invented it to frustrate any attempt at checking on his statements. He was quite prepared to hear that Jimmy didn't know where the house was. It was as bad as that.

“Ryans',” he repeated evenly. “Do I know them?”

“You might. I don't know.”

“Where do they live?”

“Gardiner's Hill.”

“Whereabouts?”

“Near the top. Where the road comes up from Dillon's Cross, four doors down. It has a tree in the garden.” It came so pat that Ned felt sure there was such a house. He felt sure of nothing else.

“And you spent the evening there? I'm warning you for your own good. Because I'm going to find out.” There was a rasp in his voice.

“I told you I did.”

“I know,” Ned said between his teeth. “Now you're going to come along with me and prove it.”

He rose and in silence took his hat from the hall stand and went out. Jimmy followed him silently, a pace behind. It was a moonlit night, and as they turned up the steep hill, the trees overhung a high wall on one side of the street. On the other side, there were steep gardens filled with shadows.