Amongst Women by John McGahern
The changeless image of itself that the house so fiercely held to was now being threatened in small ways by the different reality the untutored and uncaring outside world saw. Instead of passing the day in Strandhill or Enniskillen Moran decided to go into the bank to get the manager’s advice on whether to sell or keep certain government bonds he held.
When Rose and Moran went to the counter to ask to see the manager none of the staff knew who either of them were. They were asked to sit down and wait outside the manager’s office.
‘You’d think we were looking for Confession on Christmas Eve,’ Moran complained to Rose after a long while had passed. ‘It can’t be long now. There must be some business keeping him.’
When the manager emerged he was in affable conversation with a customer as he courteously showed him to the main entrance. One of the counter staff indicated the old couple waiting on the chairs. When he returned he asked them into the office. He was tall and grey haired and did not know them. As he was searching for Moran’s file, a girl knocked and entered with a cup and saucer. They could smell the coffee. Two fig roll biscuits were balanced on the rim of the saucer. Then the phone rang. As soon as the manager discovered who the caller was he abandoned his search for the file and pulled his chair up to the desk. A long conversation began about a golf club election during which the manager ate both fig rolls and drank the cup of coffee. Several times Rose looked anxiously at Moran. If this had happened when they first met he would have been up and out of both office and bank long ago. Instead he continued sitting dejectedly and a little tiredly, not looking around him. He was still there when the manager put down the phone and apologized. Somehow he seemed to think that their business had been concluded and proceeded to show them out the door quite graciously. They left without a word. Once out on the pavement it was Rose who was beside herself with anger.
‘I never saw such manners in all my life,’
‘Who cares anyhow?’ Moran said. ‘Nobody cares.’
‘I care,’ she said passionately.
‘That doesn’t count. Nobody bothers these days.’
At the weekend Rose complained so much about the incident to Mona that Mona grew enraged. She was intent on taking the Monday off and going to the bank to attack the manager.
‘I’m telling you there was a time he wouldn’t have done that to Daddy. By the time I’m finished with him he’ll know something. And I’ll report him.’
‘Don’t waste a day on him,’ Rose now found herself counselling. ‘Let it go. If he’s that ignorant, you’d only be contributing to his education,’ she began her old laugh.
‘There was a time Daddy would have brought him up fairly short.’
‘I’m going to report him,’ Mona said. But she never did.
During the long nights as he once again added up the monies that he had or wrote to Michael or Michael’s wife or one of the girls, he kept repeating to Rose how he felt that he had only really failed with one of his children and that it troubled him more than any of his other dealings throughout his life.
‘I think he feels I did him some wrong or harm.’
‘You know that’s not true. Luke always took those things too personally. Differences take place in every family but no one pays heed to them the way he does,’ Rose said.
‘I’d like to see him but I know he won’t come. I have nothing against him. For my part I forgive him everything. If I write him that, at least I’ll feel that the fault won’t be mine. He won’t be on my conscience.’
He spent several nights writing the letter. Some of his old fire and anger returned as he wrote. The finished letter was short. He did not show it to Rose. ‘There are times in my life when I have pondered my sanity,’ it began. ‘“They are all mad but me and thee and I have doubts of me.” Rose thinks that we are as good or bad as anyone in life and my life is now too short to keep a grudge, real or imaginary. My present capabilities are of little matter. Let me say I had no wish to harm you in the past and I have no wish to harm you in the future and if I have done so in thought, word or deed I am sorry. The daffodils are nearly in bloom, also shrubs, flowers, fruit, etc. It’ll soon be time for planting. Tired now and of that thought, who cares anyhow? Daddy.’
He must be dying, Luke thought after he read the letter. He put it aside at first but then after rereading it he felt the same for Moran as he would feel for any mortal and wrote back in kind. He felt no bitterness or reproach. There was nothing to forgive. He was sorry and asked to be forgiven for any hurt he had caused. It is not what he wants but it will have to do, he thought.
Maggie rang to say that she was going home and wanted Luke to go with her. They were all going to Great Meadow for Monaghan Day. ‘Daddy is not well. Do you remember in the long ago when McQuaid used to come to the house for Monaghan Day? We feel it could give Daddy heart again if we were there. Rose said he was so much better after we were all there for Christmas.’
‘I’d be no use,’ Luke said. ‘I can’t go.’
‘He wants to see you.’
‘He wrote me a letter.’
‘I know.’
‘I wrote him back.’
‘He didn’t get that letter yet.’
‘I wrote him as he wrote me. I have no bitterness. I have nothing.’
‘Why can’t you come home with us then?’
‘I’d be no use. We don’t get on.’
‘You never really tried.’
‘It’s too late now.’
‘You’re no help. You’re no help to us at all.’
Moran did not lack for attention. All the girls came to the house and came again and again. They planned and arranged the entire summer so that Rose was as little on her own as possible. Michael and his wife and their two children came in August. Once the summer ended Mona came every single weekend from Dublin. Sheila also came whenever she could. Moran grew weaker. He had a number of small strokes. They began to feel that this once powerful man who was such an integral part of their lives could slip away from them at any time into the air. They all came for Christmas and then they decided to come again at the end of February to revive Monaghan Day. They explained to Rose how McQuaid used to come to the house for a grand tea, recalling the nervousness, the excitement, the glory of the stories, the whiskey McQuaid drank.
Rose was doubtful about the idea from the beginning. She could not see how any miracle could be managed by the simple revival of a day she herself had never heard about until now but the girls clung so much to the idea that Rose felt she couldn’t stand in their way. They wanted it to be a surprise. Against all reason they felt they could turn his slow decline around to bring back all his old spirit in one bound.
They came for Monaghan Day. They brought him gloves for his cold hands. Acknowledging that they had come distances for him, he broke his embargo on the past and spoke of the war and McQuaid and the lost Monaghan Days. At the end of the Rosary that wrapped up the day, he prayed for James McQuaid’s soul; but the attempt to revive Moran with the day had been futile.
The failure to change anything only strengthened their determination not to let him slip from them. They began to be in Great Meadow more than in their own homes. Muted complaints about neglected children, the mounting cost of Maggie’s air fares, had to be faced; but they grew so upset when faced with anything that interfered with their concern for Moran that the charges were always let drop, for when faced with their deep turmoil it was easier to let commonsensical objections out the window: air fares could be paid for later, lost hours worked. They were so bound together by the illness that they felt close to being powerful together. Such was the strength of the instinct that they felt that they could force their beloved to remain in life if only they could, together, turn his will around. Since they had the power of birth there was no reason why they couldn’t will this life free of death. For the first time in his life Moran began to fear them.
‘You’ll have to shape up, Daddy. You’ll just have to pull yourself together an
‘Who cares? Who cares anyhow?’
All they felt he had to do was to turn his life over to them and they would will him back to health again. It ran counter to the way he had managed his own life. He had never in all his life bowed in anything to a mere Other. Now he wanted to escape, to escape the house, the room, their insistence that he get better, his illness. The first time he went missing there was panic. They searched the bathroom, all the other rooms, and when they reached the stone hallway they saw that the front door was open.
They found him leaning in exhaustion on a wooden post at the back of the house, staring into the emptiness of the meadow. He did not speak as they led him back to the house. They thought it was a wayward fit of delinquency to test their vigilance. They watched him more closely after that but there were times when he slipped out to the fields in spite of their care and always in the same direction. Past the old pear tree in brilliant white blossom against the wall, last year’s nettles withered and tangled in the abandoned mowing machine beneath the tree, the corrugated roof of the lean-to he had built as a workshop for wet days, and on to the meadow. It was no longer empty but filling with a fresh growth, a faint blue tinge in the rich green of the young grass. To die was never to look on all this again. It would live in others’ eyes but not in his. He had never realized when he was in the midst of confident life what an amazing glory he was part of. He heard his name being called frantically. Then he was scolded and led back to the house. He stopped stubbornly before the door. ‘I never knew how hard it is to die,’ he said simply.
One day later the priest came to the house to hear his Confession, to give him Communion and Extreme Unction. ‘I never met a priest yet who wasn’t afraid of death. What do you think that means?’ he said to Rose.
‘Maybe that’s why they become priests.’
‘What good does that do them?’
‘They make sure of their own place in heaven that way.’
‘Then they shouldn’t be afraid to die.’
‘I suppose everybody is afraid.’
‘If they believed what they preach they shouldn’t be afraid. Who knows anyhow? Who cares?’
One evening when Mona was sitting by his bed thinking he was asleep he surprised her by asking, ‘Do you think I am finished, Mona?’
‘Of course not,’ she chided, surprised. ‘You’re going to have to work at it though if you want us to get you better. Trying to go out to look at the meadow is no help at all.’
Late one night Mona said to Rose, ‘I wonder why Daddy wants so much to get to the meadow. He’s always looking out at the same place. He must see something there.’ And without meaning to both women suddenly began to cry.
The girls had to return to their own homes. He worsened. The brown habit was bought and brought into the house and hidden. When the girls came back and saw the state he was in they lost all thought of ever leaving the house again while he lived. They sent for Michael and he came with his son.
There are some who struggle and rave on the edge of dying, others who make a great labour of it like a difficult birth, but Moran slipped evenly out of life. He just faded away in front of their eyes. They were all gathered around him.
‘Why aren’t you praying?’ he demanded as if he knew he was slipping away.
They immediately dropped to their knees around the bed.
‘Thou, O Lord, wilt open my lips,’ Rose began.
Tears slipped down their faces as they repeated the ‘Our Fathers’ and ‘Hail Marys’. Maggie had begun her Mystery when it grew clear that Moran was trying to speak. She stopped and the room was still. The low whisper was unmistakable: ‘Shut up!’ They looked at one another in fear and confusion but Rose nodded vigorously to Maggie to ignore the whispered command and to continue. She managed to struggle back into the rhythm of the prayers when Mona cried out, ‘Daddy’s gone!’ They got up off their knees and stood over the bed. Weeping loudly Maggie and Sheila embraced one another and Mona ran angrily from the room, slamming doors on the way, shouting, ‘That doctor shouldn’t have been let give him that injection this morning.’ Rose turned to Maggie, ‘Would you mind going after Mona to see that she’s all right. I think that must be Michael’s car I hear turning in at the gate.’
Some of the anger at the death veered towards Michael as soon as he appeared in the hallway. Being left on the periphery of what was happening he had become bored and driven to town with his son. ‘You’re a nice gentleman. You couldn’t even manage to be in the house when Daddy was going.’ He did not realize at first what had taken place and put up his hands in jocose surrender to these fierce and impossible women but went very pale and still as soon as he understood that his father had just died. Gently Rose opened the door to the room and he nodded silently to her and went in. Then she took his son by the hand. The child and woman went from room to room until they had stopped each dock in the house and covered every mirror.
It was a blessing that so many practical things had to be quickly attended to. Word had to be sent to Woods to come and lay out the body. Whiskey and sherry and stout had to be bought for callers, sandwiches made, the priest and the doctor to be notified. Rose insisted on going herself to the undertakers. She looked at all the coffins in the showroom and picked the most expensive, a beautiful oak casket. A grave had to be dug. There was an argument between the girls over whether or not Luke should be notified. A telegram was sent but he neither replied nor came.
When Woods came to the house the Franciscan habit was taken from its hiding place. The door to the room was closed while he laid the body out. His Rosary beads were taken from the little black purse and twined through his fingers clasped together on the breast of the brown habit.
In ones and twos callers trickled to the stilled house all that evening. They murmured ‘Sorry’ as they shook hands with Rose and Michael and the three girls, blessed themselves as they entered the room, knelt by the foot of the bed to pray, and touched the dead hands or forehead in a gesture of leave- taking when they rose. They then sat on chairs by the bed and were offered whiskey or beer or wine or tea. Few of the callers had ever been in the house before and they looked about them with unabashed curiosity.
All through the night they kept vigil by his side. Time should have stopped with the clocks but instead it moved in a glazed dream of tiredness without their ticking insistence. Morning stole over the fields. The callers continued coming to the house throughout the day. At six the body would be taken to the church. As it drew closer to six the minutes seemed to race.
The hearse was coming, turning at the wooden gate. A row of cars had gathered out on the road. The empty coffin was taken in. The house was closed.
They all had to go into the room to look on him a last time. They would never see him in the world again but he was already gone from them. The coffin was then brought into the room and laid on chairs beside the bed. The room was closed. Someone started a Decade of the Rosary and it was taken up by those standing between the flowerbeds of the little lawn just outside the door. A cry sounded from within the house as the heavy closed coffin was edged slowly out of the room. The front door was opened. The coffin was carried to the open door of the hearse. The hearse crawled out to the iron gate and turned right under the yew. All that night the coffin would lie before the high altar, only a few feet away from where he had waited so impatiently for his best man the day he had married Rose.
It was a heartbreakingly lovely May evening when they returned from the church but they couldn’t bear to walk about among the trees in the light. They went round the house to let up the blinds one by one and then they made tea.
‘My hand feels as if it’s been through a wringer,’ Mona said.
‘Mine is no better. I thought the line would never end. Some of the hands were like shovels,’ Sheila said.
‘They like to give you a really good friendly healthy shake,’ Rose was the most in control, even now laughing her low, humorous laugh. ‘They feel you mi
‘The poor devils mean well,’ Michael said combatively but it was let go by.
More arrangements needed to be seen to. Sean and Sheila’s children were coming in the morning for the funeral. A discussion started as to where they would sleep if they decided to stay overnight. Sheila said before the conversation got properly under way that they would all definitely be going back after the funeral. They were all numb with tiredness but no one wanted to go to bed. They continued talking and making cups of tea as if they were afraid to let go of the day.
After morning High Mass they buried him in a new plot beneath a yew tree. The birds sang in their territories high in the branches of oak and ash and evergreen, and little wrens and robins flitted hither and thither along the low graveyard wall. The Plains were bathed in sunshine and in all the fields between the stone walls the unhoused cattle were grazing greedily on the early grass.
All through High Mass and the slow funeral a faded tricolour covered the coffin; and as the casket stood on the edge of the grave a little man in a brown felt hat, old and stiff enough to have fought with Fionn and Oisin came out of the crowd. With deep respect he removed his hat before folding the worn flag and with it he stepped back into the crowd. There was no firing party.
As the shining ornamented oak coffin was lowered with ropes, a whisper loud enough to cause heads to turn in the crowd was heard: ‘That man would have died to see so much money go down with him into the ground.’
Two local politicians who had vied with one another for prominence all through the funeral now fell back from the crowd as the prayers began. They walked away to the boundary wall and leaned together out over the stones in amiable conspiratorial camaraderie, sometimes turning their heads to look back to the crowd gathered about the grave in undisguised contempt.