Fatty O'Leary's Dinner Party (2 page)

“Yes,” said Fatty. “Maybe they were. But we still need dentists.”

“We sure do,” said Tubby. “Thank God for dentists.”

“Okay,” said Porky. “We need dentists, but not everyone has to be a dentist, right?”

The three friends used to meet every other week to play poker. Fatty had also taught them Mah Jong, and they occasionally played that, although Tubby did not enjoy it as much as poker, which he almost always won. This was, in fact, a potential source of tension, as Tubby won so often that Porky began to suspect him of cheating. Fortunately he never made a direct accusation to this effect, as Tubby would never have done anything dishonest.

Betty thought Tubby the most handsome man she had ever met. She said that if Tubby had gone to Hollywood, he would almost certainly have been snapped up by the movie people. She once told Tubby this, at a party, and he laughed and said, “You've had too much to drink, Betty. I'd never have got far in the movies: those guys in the movies carry a bit less weight than I do.”

Joan O'Rourke, Tubby's wife, said, “Tubby can't act, anyway.”

T
HIS IS THE STORY OF
the events that took place round Fatty's fortieth birthday in the summer of 1979 when Fatty paid his first visit to Ireland. This trip was Betty's birthday present to her husband, who had long talked about an Irish holiday but who had never seemed to find the time to organise one. Like Betty, Fatty considered himself every bit as Irish as he was American. His credentials for this identity were impeccable: not only was there his name, which was quintessentially Irish, but he could also point to the exact identity of the Irish forebear who had decided that enough was enough. This was his grandfather, also called Cornelius Patrick O'Leary – or Corny P. O'Leary, as he became known – who had emigrated from an obscure corner of County Tipperary to establish the family home in Fayetteville four years before the outbreak of the First World War. Arkansas, with its abundant supplies of timber, was an ideal place for the furniture factory that Corny set up. He had gone to America to get away from everything that he regarded as being wrong with Ireland – persistent rain, congenitally arrogant Anglo-Irish gentry, and a legion of squabbling relatives. Freed of Ireland, he became enthusiastically more Irish than ever before, and set to the
establishing of a modest dynasty of O'Learys, centred upon the rambling double-storey house, Tipperary View, that he built in the centre of Fayetteville. It was not at all clear why he should have called the house this. It never had much of a view, and certainly not one of Tipperary, from which it was separated by three thousand miles of ocean and a considerable slice of the American continent; but, as Fatty once remarked to Betty, we see what we want to see in this life, and it was undoubtedly true that if his grandfather had dreamed of seeing anything, it would have been those soft and distant Irish hills.

As Fatty's birthday approached, a visit to Ireland had not been the first possibility Betty explored. She had looked into the feasibility of a week or two in Honolulu, but had decided that Fatty would probably dislike this. Neither of them particularly took to crowds and busy hotels, and she was sure that they would find both of these in Hawaii. Besides, she knew that a trip to Ireland would enable Fatty to seek out the ancestral farm from which the original Cornelius O'Leary had set forth on the fateful day in July, 1910. It was possible that there were still O'Learys there, and to locate some distant relatives would be a bonus. Fatty was proud of the O'Leary family, and would be delighted to make contact with any Irish cousins who might still
be lurking in Tipperary. Betty was more cautious: she wondered what sort of unenterprising people would choose to remain in Ireland when they could easily have left the country, even if only to take the ferry to Liverpool. Well, they would soon find out, and if the Irish relatives proved to be at all … at all embarrassing they could be left right there. If, on the other hand, they were promising, they might be persuaded to emigrate, as Betty assumed that all sensible Irish people had either already emigrated to America or were at least actively contemplating doing so. Indeed, it was quite surprising that anybody remained there at all, other than those few needed to act as curators.

Fatty was enthusiastic when he heard that Betty had booked the flights. They were to fly to Dallas and from there they would continue their journey to Shannon. There they could hire a car and drive the short distance to Tipperary.

“How do you picture Ireland, Fatty?” Betty asked dreamily. “Do you have a clear image of it?”

“I certainly do,” replied Fatty. “A lush green landscape, dotted with tiny whitewashed cottages. And a patchwork of fields.”

“And rain?” prompted Betty.

“Oh yes,” said Fatty. “Lots of rain.”

“Marvellous!” said Betty. “Except perhaps for the rain.”

“Gentle rain,” went on Fatty, “barely noticeable, Irish rain – quite different from the rain we get out here. A little bit like whiskey, I think. Very weak, but still with the taste of the barley on it.”

Betty laughed.

Fatty shook his head fondly. “Oh, Betty,” he said, “you're a genius to have thought of all this!”

They had only three weeks to wait. Then, on the morning of their departure, they closed up the house and were driven to the airport by Porky Flanagan. There they caught their plane to Dallas and were eventually herded through to the waiting room for the departure of their flight to Shannon. When he saw the name Shannon on the departure board, Fatty grabbed Betty's arm in excitement.

“I feel we're really on our way now,” he said. “Shannon! That's Ireland, Betty! That's Ireland!”

Betty planted a kiss on his cheek. “You've worked hard for this,” she said. “Forty years of hard work.”

“Well hardly,” said Fatty. “I didn't start working the day I was born. Nobody does. Twenty years perhaps. Seventeen if you don't count college.”

“Well that's still a lot of work,” said Betty.

Fatty smiled. Betty was quite right: he did deserve a bit of leisure. He had been successful. Indeed, if he wanted to stop working even at forty, he could do so and live very comfortably for the rest of his days. Perhaps a condominium in Florida and a fishing boat for him and … and something or other, a refrigerator perhaps, for Betty. But could he fish? He had never fished before, and he had never played golf. All he knew about, when one came to think about it, was antique tables and the like; if he wanted to busy himself in retirement, then he would have to try to broaden his interests. Betty would be able to amuse herself by putting things in the refrigerator and then taking them out. He wouldn't even have that.

Of course forty was far too early to be thinking about retirement. Some people started a second career at that stage, or even married again and began a family. Fatty could not imagine himself doing that. He and Betty had not had children, but that was just the way things worked out and they had been perfectly happy by themselves. He could not imagine himself ever marrying anybody other than Betty. We've grown forty together, he mused, wondering whether that could ever be made into a song:
We've grown forty together / We've put on a bit of weight / We've grown forty together / But, darling, it's never too late
.

Never too late for what? Fatty was uncertain. The lines certainly had the makings of a popular song, and perhaps one day he would show it to Tubby O'Rourke, who composed songs in his spare time. Tubby had never met with any success with his compositions, but perhaps they could make a team, rather like Rodgers and Hammerstein, or Gilbert and Sullivan. Leary and Rourke sounded quite professional. The new musical by Leary and Rourke:
Forty Years On
. Or perhaps they could have a clever title such as
Forty Years O' O'Leary and O'Rourke
. Possibly, but one should not try to be too clever, he thought.

Fatty looked at his watch. The plane was due to leave at ten p.m. and it was now nine forty-five. If they did not start boarding the passengers soon, he imagined that there would be no possibility of taking off anywhere near the flight's allotted time. But did it mater? They were on holiday and they were going to Ireland, and Ireland was the sort of place, he suspected, that didn't mind when you arrived. You could be a year or two late and they would still welcome you.
Yes, we expected you last year, but the important thing is that you're here, to be sure …
 As he was considering this, the public address system crackled into life.

The airline much regretted it, they were told, but the plane was overbooked. Fortunately it was only overbooked
by one passenger, and they were therefore asking for a volunteer to offer to stay behind until tomorrow evening's flight, in return for a cash reward. The passengers sat stony-faced. Nobody stirred.

“Now, ladies and gentlemen,” said a disembodied voice. “We must again ask for one passenger to offer to stay behind. An aircraft has a finite number of seats and we cannot take off with somebody standing.” The announcer laughed nervously. “So we need one passenger to step forward.”

Fatty looked at his shoes. He was certainly not going to volunteer. They had arranged reservations at the other end and, besides, he was now forty. Younger people could give up their seats more easily than middle-aged people – everybody would recognise the justice of that.

There was a knot of discussion at the desk. One of the passengers had approached and was talking to an official.

“Look,” said Fatty to Betty. “The volunteer. How good of him. Now we can get on our way.”

But the volunteer had now half-turned round and was pointing in Fatty's direction. He said something to the official, who nodded and started to make his way over to Fatty.

“Excuse me, sir,” the official said. “It has been suggested to us that you might care to volunteer.”

“Good idea!” muttered somebody from a seat behind, to be greeted with a glare from Betty.

“Me?” said Fatty indignantly. “Why me?”

The airline official looked slightly embarrassed. “Well, sir, it appears that you are the … the largest of the passengers and that the most weight would be saved if you were to stay behind. The aircraft really is very full and is up against the weight limit for our fuel load. Almost over it, in fact. If you stayed we would probably be all right. You wouldn't want to be responsible for the aircraft not making it off the runway, would you?”

Fatty's eyes opened wide with outrage. He glanced sideways at Betty, now glaring at the official with an anger matching that of her husband.

“How dare you suggest such a thing!” Fatty exploded. “How dare you pick on me like this!”

The official held up his hands. “I'm sorry, sir,” he said. “I don't mean to give offence. I was merely being practical.”

“So it's practical to insult your passengers, is it?” blurted out Betty. “Is that the way you treat all stout people, may I ask?”

The official backed away. “I'm terribly sorry,” he said.
“Let's leave it. I had no idea you people would be so hypersensitive about being so …”

He glanced behind him. One of his colleagues was signalling from the desk.

“Ah,” he said. “They've sorted it out. Somebody else has taken up the offer. Please excuse me.”

Fatty settled back in his seat.

“I can't recall when I was last so insulted,” he muttered to Betty. “I'm going to write to the airline about this.”

“You have every right to do just that,” agreed Betty, reaching across to touch Fatty on his still-offended arm. “Still, let's not allow it to spoil our holiday. Things will be different in Ireland.”

B
ECAUSE OF THE FULLNESS OF
the flight and the vagaries of the seat allocation system, Fatty and Betty were separated from one another. Fatty was placed in the front row of the economy cabin, while Betty was seated ten rows behind him, lost in the sea of faces that a large aircraft so quickly becomes. Fatty craned his neck to get a glimpse of his wife, and she waved cheerfully to him before they both settled. Then the procedures of departure began, and they were soon heading north-east, climbing up over Texas, on the very reverse bearing to that pursued by Corny P. O'Leary those many years ago.

Fatty felt uncomfortable. The seats in the economy class of passenger jets are designed for the average frame, and often badly designed at that. Fatty was far from average, tending, in his words, to the generously proportioned. Although he just managed to squeeze between the armrests of the middle seat in which he was placed, the passengers on either side of him found that their own space was substantially encroached upon by various parts of Fatty. His elbows, which were stout in the extreme, were touching the sides of each neighbour, digging into their chests. His legs, which again were well
covered, were pressed hard against the thighs of each, and every time that Fatty breathed in, the other passengers felt a great pressure against their own chests, requiring them to exhale as he inspired, and vice versa.

It was clearly going to be an impossible trip, and it was not long before the two affected passengers were exchanging surreptitious glances.

“Going to Ireland?” Fatty addressed the man on his right cheerfully.

“Well, that's where this plane's going …” began his travelling companion, but then Fatty breathed in and the rest of his sentence was cut short.

“And you?” asked Fatty conversationally, turning to the woman on his left. “Have you been to Ireland before?”

She tried to speak, but failed, being virtually winded. She looked imploringly at the man beyond Fatty who nodded in sympathy and reached for the call button to summon help. When the cabin attendant arrived, Fatty's neighbour rose from his seat, pushing hard on Fatty's elbow to allow him to do so, and engaged in an earnest, whispered conversation with the attendant.