Hanging with the Elephant (14 page)

In my childhood, mother wore frocks and dresses and light-blue mohair cardigans around her shoulders, and strings of pearls down along her bodice. I remember her wearing dainty hats with feathers sticking up, and black patent shoes. And I’ll never forget the night I saw her in a black strapless evening gown swishing in circles at the mirror, in anticipation of a night’s dancing and drinking and the whizz of posh gossip.

I remember going to a film in the Magnet Cinema in Cavan when I was very young and seeing a slim woman on the screen, in a long raincoat belted at the waist and a scarf hiding her hair; she was standing in a doorway in some black-and-white thriller. In the next scene, the door opened and she went inside and took off the wet coat and the scarf and
a strange man with a moustache threw a cardigan around her shoulders and she sat down and leaned her elbow on a dining table, and I trembled with astonishment. I thought it was her. I thought it was Mammy. My own film star mammy in one of her perfect frocks. And I knew where frocks came from because I remember going regularly to a dressmaker’s house on Church Street with her. We would go upstairs to the fitting room. The dressmaker, Miss Brady, was old by then, and had been making and altering clothes for Mother since Mother was a child. There too, with just the three of us in the room, I can recall sitting on the floor watching her swish around at the mirror, so lovely to behold.

Those were the days when I was enraptured by her joy and her capabilities, and I loved every moment in her company.

Every Sunday of my childhood, my mother boiled a chicken in the same manner as her mother had taught her. If there was anything that signalled to me my mother’s love and affection, it was the taste of chicken soup.

I was six when she learned to drive my father’s Austin A40 and I remember sitting in the passenger seat after school one particular Friday afternoon when she took me with her to do the weekly messages. Firstly she collected the groceries in town as usual, calling to Baxter’s chemist, Foster’s newsagent and providers on Main Street, where the men behind the counter like Mr Dolan had brown
overcoats and could wrap twine round brown paper parcels of cold meat or loaves of bread and then snap the twine apart with a flick of their fingers. She went to the butcher, a huge, tall man with enormous hands, who stood behind his chopping block of bone and flesh and who said the same thing every week.

‘Is this the youngest one, Nellie?’ And I would bow my head and stare at the sawdust on the floor as they discussed whom I looked like.

Then we drove seven winding miles out the narrow roads to the creamery in Ballyhaise where boys in white coats and little white hats filled one can with cream and another one with buttermilk, and she walked across the road to the Agricultural College to buy eggs and fresh vegetables from the farm shop. Finally on our way back, she turned in the gates of Reilly’s farm near Crossdoney and drove up a long avenue of beech trees into a broad, grey concrete yard. The yard was as busy as an industrial zone with trailers of animal feed coming and going, and huge cages of chickens and half a dozen helpers in wellingtons and blue overalls, and gated pens of chickens in every corner and a long, grey galvanised shed with enormous sliding doors at the far end.

‘That’s where the chickens are,’ Mother said, although there were chickens everywhere. ‘It’s where they hang the dead ones,’ she explained.

I was getting a bit uneasy so I just flicked through the
Beano
while Mother watched Mr Reilly, a lanky old man with white hair, stride across the yard towards the car.

‘Nellie Finlay,’ he said, ‘it’s great to see you. That’s a cold day.’

‘How is Helen?’ my mother enquired.

‘She’s home,’ he said. ‘Why don’t you go inside and say hello?’

I guessed Helen must be his wife and she may have been in hospital.

‘I don’t want to be disturbing her. She has her hands full with the baby.’

‘Yerra go on,’ he said, almost shouting with joy. ‘She’d love to see you.’

And so Mother decided to go in and have a cup of tea. But she wasn’t sure what to do with me for the moment.

‘The little man can help me find a chicken,’ Mr Reilly suggested.

A cigarette hung from the side of his mouth. He wore braces over a blue shirt and black trousers stuffed into hobnailed boots.

‘Go in and have tea, I’m telling you,’ he repeated, ‘and leave the little man to me. I’ll show him the chickens.’

‘But I can see the chickens from here,’ I said, still in the car and thinking that it would be better to stay with the
Beano
than go traipsing into unknown territories with the lanky, chain-smoking Mr Reilly.

‘She’ll be only delighted to see Nellie Finlay. Go in, will
you, for God’s sake.’ It felt like she was being asked to go and have tea on the moon. Although Mr Reilly seemed very determined that she’d go inside. He always called my mother Nellie Finlay. It was her name before she married and I guessed they’d known each other since they were young.

Then he turned to me and said, ‘Now, young lad, do you want to see the chickens?’

I could see hundreds of chickens, many of whom had surrounded the grey Austin A40 as if they too might have an interest in the
Beano
.

‘Has your wife had a baby?’ I asked, with childlike intuition.

He doubled over with laughter. Then he stopped suddenly, and was very still and eyeballed me through the window.

‘Wife’s long dead,’ he whispered, with an expressionless face. ‘The light of heaven to her.’

He opened the door of the car as if to force me out.

‘Helen is my daughter. And, yes, she’s just had a baby. Now, come on.’

He turned on his heel and I followed as he led me towards the shed where he hefted the sliding door open and we walked into a vast darkness full of dead things, hung from hooks on endless lines. They were naked and wrinkled like an old man’s neck, hanging upside down by strings tied to their yellow claws, their heads bloated from the blood that
had drained downwards from their bodies. I speculated on the manner of their execution as I followed Mr Reilly’s jaunty step down one aisle and up another between the endless rows; a thousand dead birds on either side, but I was too afraid to speak.

‘What would you like?’ he asked.

‘A boiling fowl,’ I said.

‘A boiler,’ he said.

‘She wants a nice young boiling fowl,’ I repeated, just as my mother would say it.

‘She does indeed,’ he said. ‘The young birds are tender. Isn’t that the truth?’

‘Aye, that’s the truth,’ I said, affecting a rustic disposition that seemed appropriate.

And off he went down another aisle humming ‘Love Me Tender’, with a cleaving knife swinging from his left hand.

And then he spotted one.

‘Here she is,’ he said. And he lifted a little pullet off its hook, his knife in one hand and the bird swinging in the other as he went to a table back near the door where with one chop he took the head off and swept it into a steel bin.

‘Will she take the gizzard?’ he wondered.

‘Oh, aye,’ I said, ‘for the soup.’

‘For the soup exactly,’ he repeated, because he was only humouring me with questions. ‘Sure you can’t make soup without the gizzard. And the neck?’ he wondered. ‘Does she want the neck?’

‘Aye, she does,’ I said. ‘The neck and the gizzard please.’

These things he put aside when he was cleaning the bird; slicing and pulling and flinging the slops into the bin. He chopped the legs off with another single stroke of the cleaver and approached me with the claws.

‘D’ye want these?’ he asked, as he pulled a tendon that made the little claws open and close. I took them from him and pressed them into my coat pocket and I couldn’t wait to be back in the car with Mother so that I could show them to her.

When she died, her clothes were a consolation. I touched them, held them, hugged them, and inhaled from them the remnant of the feminine beauty that had once seduced my father. I sat on her bed, and looked out the window for ages. Then I opened a drawer in her dressing table and was overwhelmed by a sense of intense intimacy. The puff of air still carried something from long ago. It was like a sudden memory and the image of a satin purse flashed through my mind and immediately I went rummaging for it in every drawer in the room.

In photos she is always slim; a young woman bursting out of her skin with excitement. I loved all her clothes. Her red coats, her flower-patterned frocks belted tight at the waist and her cute skullcaps with white feathers. She smiled with outrageous confidence at every camera. As an old woman, she had worn conservative suits in more restrained colours, and understated, low-heeled footwear. Almost everything
was still in the room, folded neatly, tucked into drawers or hanging on clothes hangers. But it was her purse I wanted. And I rummaged through the wardrobes with a desperate longing to find it again – vivid and fresh and soft. A black satin purse with a black bow at the top and two golden clasps that clipped it shut.

I remember the night she went out in the black dress with no straps. The dress that spread out at the hem and was trimmed with purple velvet ribbons, and she held this purse and clasped it shut and, as she turned around to say goodnight, I knew she was happy, the tiny black feathery cap on her head, her eyes dramatically dark and lined with black pencil. I had seen her draw the lines with the delicacy of a painter. I had leaned over her shoulder and stared into the mirror as the pencil slid across her eyelid. She kissed me goodnight and I tasted her lipstick. I was only six. And then, over fifty years later, in the bottom of a wardrobe, up from under the layers of old coats and high-heeled shoes and feather pillows it came, the little purse, soft as a sleeping thrush, back to my fingertips and I felt shameful touching it and my face reddened with a delicious pleasure.

I always dreamed that my mother’s dressmaker would make me something to wear too. She seemed to bring such gladness into my mother’s heart with her scissors and her pins and her needle and thread. But the tailor I was sent to for Communion or Confirmation suits was a mournful old man with a bald head. When I was heading
for the seminary to study for the priesthood, he made me a soutane, a long black frock that buttoned at the front from chin to toe. It felt like being fitted for a shroud. The letter from the seminary said that an umbrella and a hat were also essential requirements. I stood in the tailor’s shop among the dummies and the long rolls of black wool on the counter as the tailor knelt between my legs and pinned stripes of white paper to the inside of my trouser leg, and underneath my arms. His spectacles were balanced on the edge of his nose and he was holding a bunch of pins between his lips.

‘You don’t look very happy,’ he muttered.

I wasn’t. But I thought it might have cheered my mother up to see me dressed in a long black cassock. And eventually it did.

When I was ordained a priest ten years later, Mother came with me to the parish, and she was over the moon about having a son in the clergy. They might as well have ordained the two of us. She was actually better at the job than I was. When I worked as a parish curate in Fermanagh, she came to visit every weekend, and answered any ring at the front door as if she was running the show, and her clothes sense was certain and confident. She was in her late sixties by then. A hand-knitted green cardigan with Celtic patterns and a navy brown tweed skirt. Gold on her wrists and around her neck and her earlobes adorned with pearls, her thin feminine frame, the lightness of her feet and her
gracious smile surprising whatever poor soul stood in the porch, in a scarf and overcoat, clasping five pounds, and a mass card for the priest to sign.

One Sunday morning, a young man in extreme depression came to the door at nine o’clock. We sat in the front room for an hour as I listened to his woes and Mother swept the hall outside. He lay limp in an armchair, sharing his anxieties, and he was almost catatonic from the power of melancholy. I needed to go and celebrate Sunday mass, so I told him to stay where he was until I got back. The truth is that even as a priest I was more confused than he was about the meaning of life, so I was going to be of no help to him at all apart from referring him to some professional counsellor. In the kitchen, I spoke to my mother.

‘Make him some tea, but don’t go near him and I’ll try to find someone who can help later in the morning.’

When I returned she was sitting with him, in full flight about how much mothers worry about their children. In fairness, he was smiling and I marvelled at her capacity as a therapist. Though she was sitting on the opposite armchair, she was, in a sense, holding him, deeply and intimately. I might as well have been watching a therapist from uptown New York. And she was wearing that elegant green cardigan, the same cardigan that dangled from a hanger in her wardrobe with everything else after she died.

Perhaps I needed someone who didn’t know her to come and clean up all that mess in her house; to take the clothes
to a charity shop and throw everything else in a skip and then the job would be done. But I couldn’t hear of it. She was a month dead, but this museum of her unconscious mind, this catalogue of her desires, disappointments and secrets, constituted a fabric of broken energy that entangled me and that I carried with me through life, and I alone could disentangle myself and dismantle her web. After all, she was my mother. I looked again at the combs on the dressing table. There were strands of grey hair in the teeth. I took up a silver brush and kissed the back of it. It was getting dark outside, but I didn’t want to leave.

I remember going to see her on Christmas morning in 2011. I passed through the nursing home, smiling at the staff. The corridors were warm and cosy, although outside there was snow on the ground and ice-blue skies over the canal. My mother, and her elderly companions, were wheeled into the day room with great fuss and fanfare.

Bald heads dappled in the winter sunlight turned to examine me. Withered eyes squinted at the Christmas tree and the colourful lights and the presents that the staff distributed. Later when a musician arrived, everyone danced, even my mother, who was in a wheelchair. Though she didn’t really know what day it was. She clutched the handbag in which she kept everything that mattered: her photographs, her rings, her chequebook and other remnants of the past. Times when her husband was young and they danced on New Year’s Eve at the golf club. Times when her
children were small and she baked Christmas cakes, and puddings, and arranged precious baubles on the Christmas tree to amaze them. She was wearing a scarf that we had brought her that morning as a gift, though she paid it little attention. She just closed her eyes and opened her eyes. And breathed in and out. That was about it. Her companions were looking great. Nurses had helped to powder noses, and apply lipstick and make-up, and there was a tint of colour and a lively shape in everyone’s hair, thanks to Majella the hairdresser who had called in a few days earlier. Then came the Christmas dinner and all the good china and the paper hats and my mother looked bewildered as she stared at the Christmas pudding and the pot of coffee.