The springs of affection, p.31
The Springs of Affection, page 31
The great day dawned when the pigs were to be sold. Their father was gone before any of them were awake, and he didn’t come home until long after the hour when they were supposed to be in bed. They weren’t in bed. They all waited up for him. When he came in they were all sitting around the stove in the kitchen waiting for him. They heard him coming along the passage from the door at the Georges Street side of the house and, as their mother had instructed them to do, they remained very quiet, so that he thought there was nobody up. At the doorway he saw them all, and he looked surprised and not very pleased. Then he put his hand in his top pocket and took out the money, which he had wrapped in brown paper, and he walked over to the kitchen table and put it down.
“There’s the money,” he said to Bridget. “Blood money.”
He looked very cold, but instead of getting near the stove to warm himself he sat down at the table and put his elbows on the table and his head in his hands.
“What sort of acting is this?” Bridget asked. “What ails you now, talking about blood money in front of the children. Will you answer me?”
“I’m no better than a murderer,” he said. “I’ll never forget the look in their eyes till the day I die. I shouldn’t have sold them. I lay awake all last night thinking of ways to keep them, and all day today after I sold them I kept thinking of ways I could have kept them in hiding someplace where nobody would know about them — I got that fond of them. They knew me when they saw me.
Bridget stood up and walked to the table and picked up the money and put it into her apron pocket. She was a very small, stout, vigorous woman with round blue eyes and straight black hair, and she was proud of the reputation she had for speaking her mind. She was proud, cunning, suspicious, and resourceful, and where her slow, stumbling husband was concerned she was pitiless. She didn’t want the children to grow up to be like him. She didn’t want them to be seen with him. She told them she didn’t want them dragging around after him. She had long ago grown tired of trying to understand what it was that was holding him back, and so impeding them all. But tonight, for once, it was clear to her that he was going to make an excuse of the pigs for doing nothing at all about anything for weeks or even months to come. It would be laughable if it weren’t for the bad effect his laziness might have on the children. But he was useful to her around the house, as a bad example. The children were half afraid of him, because they were afraid of being drawn into his bad luck. They were ashamed of him. Min thought anybody could tell by the way her father spoke that he couldn’t read or write. Maybe that was the great attraction between him and the pigs. He always seemed to be begging for time until his speech could catch up with his memory, and he never seemed to have come to any kind of an understanding with himself. He always seemed to be looking around as though somebody might arrange that understanding for him, and tell him about it.
On the night he came back so late after having sold the pigs, he was so distressed that he forgot to take off his hat. It was a hat he had worn as long as any of the children could remember, and Bridget told them he had been wearing it the first time she ever set eyes on him. She said she was so impressed by the hat that she hardly noticed him at first. It was a big, wide-brimmed black hat, a very distinguished-looking hat, although it was conspicuous now for its shabbiness. It was green with age, and the greenness showed up very much in the lamplight that night as he sat by the table with his face in his hands, grieving for his pigs. He never went out without first putting his hat on. He was never without it. He depended on it, and the children depended on being able to spot it in time to avoid meeting him outside on the street someplace. When the money was safe in Bridget’s deep pocket she reached out and snatched the hat off her husband’s head. “Haven’t I told you never to wear that hat in the house?” she said.
He looked up at her in bewilderment and then he stood up and reached out his hand for the hat. “Give me back my hat,” he said, looking at her as though he were ready to smile.
Min hated her father’s weak, foolish smile. Sometimes Martin smiled like that, when he was trying to prove he understood something he couldn’t understand. She thought Martin and her father were both like cowards alongside her mother. She wished her mother would throw the hat in her father’s face and make him go away. She wished everything could be different — no pigs, no old hat, no struggling and scheming. She wished her mother hadn’t snatched the hat off her father’s head. She didn’t like it when her mother started fighting, and sometimes it seemed she was always fighting. She even went out of the house sometimes and went into the house of somebody who had annoyed her and started fighting there. Then she would come home and tell the children what she’d said and what had been said to her.
One time Bridget’s sister Mary came storming into the house. Bridget and Mary hated each other. They began fighting, and then they began hitting each other. Bridget hit the hardest, and Mary ran out of the house with her children screaming at her heels. Martin and Min saw it all, and they told their mother she was very brave, but they were frightened. Afterward, when Bridget told the story of the battle, she always ended by saying, “And there was my sister Mary with her precious blood running down her face.” Min despised her father, but she hoped her mother wouldn’t hit him. She didn’t want to see his precious blood running down his face. She began to cry, and when Clare and Polly saw their formidable older sister crying they began crying along with her. Martin stood up and begged, “Give him the hat, Mam, give him his hat!” And then he began crying and lifting his feet up and down as though he was getting ready to run a race.
“You’ll frighten the wits out of the children,” their father said, and for once in his life he sounded as though he knew what he was saying. “Give me that hat this minute. I’m going out. I’m getting out of here.” And he made a grab for the hat, which Bridget was holding behind her back.
She struck out at him. “Don’t defy me, I’m warning you!” she screamed. But he dodged her hand and reached behind her to snatch the hat away, and then he hurried out of the kitchen, and they heard the Georges Street door bang after him.
He didn’t come home again that night, but he was there in the morning, sitting at the kitchen table, and Bridget gave him his tea as usual. The children looked around for the hat. It was in its usual place, where he always left it, on top of a cupboard that stood to one side of the door that led out into the yard. He used to lift the hat from his head and toss it up on top of the cupboard in one gesture. Always, when he walked in from outside, he threw the hat up, as though he were saluting the wall of the house. And when he was going out, in one gesture he lifted his arm to reach the hat and put it on his head, often without even looking at it. One afternoon, when they were all in the kitchen after school, Bridget decided to play a little trick on their father, a joke. She said he needed a new hat anyway, and that a cap would suit him better. A cap would be better for keeping out the rain — a nice dark blue or dark gray cap. He looked a sketch in the old hat, and it was time he got rid of it. Once he was rid of it, he would be glad, and he would thank them all, but there was no use trying to persuade him to get rid of it himself — he would only say no. He could feel loyalty for anything, even an old hat. Look at the way he had gone on about those pigs. He wasn’t able to deal with his own feelings, that was his weakness. There are only certain things a person can be true to, but he didn’t know that. Once the hat was gone he’d soon forget about it, and it was a shame to see him going around with that monstrosity on his head. She had an idea. They would take the hat down and cut the crown away from the brim and then put the whole hat back on the top of the cupboard and see what happened when he lifted it down the next time he was going out. They got the hat down and Bridget cut the brim away, but she left a thin strip of the velours — hardly more than a thread — to hold the two parts of the hat together when their father lifted it down onto his head. It all happened just as they expected — the brim tumbled down around their father’s face and hung around his neck. He put his hands up and felt around his face and neck to see what had happened, and then he took the hat off and looked at it.
“Which of you did this?” he said.
“We all did it,” Bridget said.
He held the hat up and looked at it. “It’s done for,” he said, but he didn’t seem angry — just puzzled. Then he went out, carrying the hat in his hand, and they heard no more about it.
Not long after that, Bridget went to see a man she knew who worked in Vernon’s on the Main Street, and he arranged for her to buy a sewing machine on the installment plan, and she set about teaching herself to make dresses. Min was the one who helped her mother, so Min was sentenced to a lifetime of sewing, when she had her heart set on going to a college and becoming a teacher. Min wanted to teach. She wanted to have a dignified position in the town, to be appointed secretary to different committees, to meet important people who came to Wexford, and to have numbers of mothers and fathers deferring to her because she had their children under her thumb. But she learned to cut a pattern and run a sewing machine, and the only committee she ever sat on was the Committee of One she established in her own place on the Main Street. She always thought if her father had gone ahead with the pigs, and learned to control his feelings, and if he had cared anything about her, she would have had a better chance. But all the chances in the family had to go to Martin, because he was the boy, and because he had the best brains, and because he was the only hope they had of struggling up out of the poverty they lived in. He was doing very well and turning out to have a good business head when he threw it all away to get married. The best part of their lives ended the day Martin met Delia. Min remembered the nights they all used to sit around talking, sometimes till past midnight. They were happy in those years, when they were all out working, and at night they had so much to talk about that they didn’t know where to start or when to stop. Clare used to bring all the new books and papers and weeklies home from the news agent’s on the sly for them to read. Polly and Martin had joined the Amateur Dramatics, and they were always off at rehearsals and recitations, and they began to talk knowledgeably about scenery and costumes and dialogue and backgrounds. They talked about nothing but plays and acting, and they knew everything that was going to happen — they had all the information about concerts and performances and competitions that were coming off, not merely in Wexford but in Dublin. Min thought the future was much more interesting when you knew at least a few of the things that were going to happen. There was something going on every minute, and it was really very nice being in the swim. People went out of their way to say hello to the Bagots in the street. They had a piano now, secondhand but very good. It was the same shape as their tiny parlor and it took up half the space there. They took turns picking out tunes, but Clare had the advantage over all, because she had had a few lessons from the daughter of a German family that lived in the street for a short time. The Germans knew their music — you had to admit that. Clare felt that with a few more lessons she might have made a good accompanist. They all liked to sing — they got that from Bridget. Martin went off by himself to Dublin once in a while, just for the night, and he always brought back something new — a song sheet, or a book. He always went to a concert, or a play, or to hear a lecture.
Martin and Polly liked to act out scenes, and Min used to get behind them and imitate their gestures until her mother said that she’d rather watch Min than the real thing any day. Min was glad she had found a way to join in the fun. She hadn’t as much voice as the others, and serious acting was beyond her.
In one way it was a pity their father wasn’t there to witness their prosperity, but in another way it was just as well, because he would have done something to spoil things — not meaning any harm but because he couldn’t help himself. Min remembered how irritating it used to be to have him hanging around, like a skeleton at the feast. And he got on their mother’s nerves, because they all knew he didn’t understand a word of what they talked about. And he had a peaceful death. He must have been glad to go. He was never more than a burden to himself and to everybody else.
Min always remembered how stalwart and kind Martin was, comforting her mother after their father’s death, and she never could understand how he could be so thoughtful, and make the promises he made, and pretend the way he did, and then run off and leave them all the first chance he got. She always said, “I can get along without the menfolk. They are more trouble and annoyance than they’re worth.” But she had liked very much having Martin in her life. She liked it very much when he crept upstairs to her workroom in the Main Street and stood outside the door and called out, “There’s a man in the house. Will you let me in, Min?” And he would stand outside making jokes while all the women scurried about pretending to be alarmed and making themselves decent. The women used to tease her about having such a handsome brother, and ask her if she wasn’t afraid some girl would steal him away. And Min always replied that Martin thought far too much of his mother ever to leave home.
“He’s devoted to my mother,” she always said, lowering her eyes to her work in a way that showed Martin’s devotion to be of such magnitude that it was almost sacred, so that the mere mention of it made her want silence in the room. Silence or an end to that kind of careless meddlesome talk.
“Martin has no time to spend gadding around,” she said to a customer who teased her too pointedly.
“Oh, Min, you’re a real old maid,” the customer said. “Martin’s going to surprise you all one of these days. Some girl will come along and sweep him off his feet. Wait and see.”
Min told her mother about that remark. “Pay no attention to her, Min,” Bridget said. “Martin’s no fool. He knows when he’s well off. He’s too comfortable ever to want to leave home. He’s as set in his ways as a man of forty. Martin’s a born bachelor.”
And of course, the next thing they knew, Martin was married and gone. And then Polly ran off with the commercial traveler, a Protestant, and it turned out he was tired of traveling and wanted to settle down. Being settled didn’t suit him either; he was never able to make a go of anything. And Clare married another Protestant, an old fellow who made a sort of living catching rabbits, and he used to walk into the house as if he owned it, with the rabbits hanging from his hand, dripping blood all over Bridget’s clean floor.
Min never understood how things could come to an end so fast and so quietly. It was as though a bad trick had been played on them all. There was an end to order and thrift and books and singing, and the house seemed to fill up with detestable confusion and noise. Everywhere you turned, there was Clare’s husband or Polly’s children, he with his dead rabbits and his smelly pipe and the children always wanting a bag of sweets or wanting to go to the lavatory or falling down and having to be picked up screaming. She couldn’t stick any of them, couldn’t stand the sight of them. And then Martin moved off to Dublin in anger, telling them that his mother wouldn’t let Delia have a minute’s peace, that Delia had no life at all in this place, and that there was no future in Wexford anyway. Bridget always said that Delia had ruined Martin’s life, and Min agreed with her, except that Min said Delia ruined all their lives. They were a good team before Delia arrived on the scene. The saying was that when a couple got married they went off by themselves and closed the door on the world, but Min thought that in her family what they did was to get married and let the whole world into the house so that there wasn’t a quiet minute or a sensible thought left in this life for anybody. Such a din those marriages made, such racket and confusion and expense and quarreling. She thought it was awful that brothers and sisters could shape your whole life with doings that had nothing at all to do with you. She felt they were all tugging at her, and that her mother was on their side.
When Min got back to Wexford after Martin’s death, and got her flat all cleared out and arranged with her new acquisitions — Delia’s things, Martin’s things, their set of wedding furniture, and their books and pictures and lamps — she suddenly realized that she was at home for good. There was nobody left who mattered to her, nobody to disturb her. The family circle was closed. She was the only one left of them. She could only think of them as the crowd in the kitchen at home long ago, and she felt it was they who had finally died, not the men and women they had turned into, who had been such an aggravation to her. She dismissed Delia. Delia was just a long interlude that had separated Martin from his twin, but the twins were joined at the end as they had been at the beginning. Min was Martin’s family now.
It was hard to believe that only nine years had elapsed between her father’s death and Martin’s marriage. Those were the best years. She remembered the day her father died, giving them all a great fright. None of them really missed him. It was a relief not to have to worry about him — an old man not able to write his name, going around looking for work, or pretending to look for work. He couldn’t stay in the house. He was gone before any of them got up in the morning, but he was always there to spoil their dinnertime, and to spoil their teatime. And often in the evening he was there listening to them, although they all knew he couldn’t understand a word they said. What was most annoying to Min was that he took it for granted he had a right to come in and join them and sit down in the corner and settle himself as though he had something to offer. He had nothing to offer except his restlessness. He always seemed to be on the point of leaving. He even interrupted their conversations to describe long journeys he might take, but he never went anywhere in particular. He just wandered. The restlessness that brought him to Wexford afflicted him till the day he died.
