MY DA

It’s funny the influence fathers can have on fellows—I mean without
even realizing it. There was a lad called Stevie Leary living next
door to us in Blarney Street. His mother and father had separated when
he was only a baby, and his father had gone off to America and never
been heard of after. His mother had left Stevie behind and followed
him there, but of course she had never found him.

Stevie was a real comical artist. We all laughed at him but he didn’t
seem to mind. My mother had great pity for him because she thought he
was a bit touched. She said he was a good poor slob. Even his own
mother hadn’t much to say for him. “Ah, he’ll never be the man his
father was, ma’am,” she’d say mournfully, over-right the kid
himself. He didn’t seem to worry about that, either. He was a big
overgrown streel of a boy with a fat round idiotic face and a rosy
complexion, a walk that was more of a slide, and a shrill scolding
old-woman’s voice. He wore baggy knickerbockers and a man’s cap
several sizes too big for him. 

Stevie took life with deadly seriousness. It might have been that his
mother had told him the life story of some American millionaire, for
he was full of enterprise, always in a hurry, and whenever he stopped
it was as thought someone were pulling the reins and forcing him to a
halt. He slithered and skidded till he stopped, with his big moony
face over one shoulder, like some good-natured old horse. He collected
swill for the Mahonys who kept pigs, and delivered messages for the
Delurys of the pub where his mother worked, and for a penny would
undertake anything from minding the baby to buying the week’s
groceries. He had no false pride. He had a little tuppenny notebook he
wrote his commissions in with a bit of puce pencil that he wet with
his tongue, trying to look as much like a commercial traveller as he
could, and with that queer crabbed air of his he’d rattle away in his
shrill voice about what was the cheapest sort of meat to make soup
of. “You ought to try Reillys, ma’am. Reillys keeps grand
stewing-beef.” He suggested modestly to Reillys that they might
consider giving him a commission, but they wouldn’t. He pretended to
think we made fun of him only because we were jealous, because we were
only kids and didn’t know any better. He said no one need be poor!
Look at him with a Post Office account; good money accumulating at two
per cent! “Aha, boy,” he said gloatingly, “that’s the way to get on!”
The fellow really behaved as though the rest of us were halfwits. You
couldn’t help feeling he was touched. °

There was only one obstacle to Stevie’s progress towards a million,
and that was his mother, a grand bosomy capacious woman whom my mother
was very fond of. Sometimes they’d sit for a whole evening over the
fire, taking snuff and connoisseuring about Mrs. Leary’s unfortunate
marriage. Innocence and experience were nothing to them, with
Mrs. Leary saying in her husky voice that a man would never love you
till he’d beat you, and that if it was the last breath in her body
she’d have to hit back. “That’s how I lost my good looks, girl,” she
would say. “I had great feelings, and nothing ages a woman like the
feelings.”

But she still had plenty of feelings left, and sometimes they got the
upper hand of her. Stevie would be sitting outside the cottage of an
evening, watching the kids playing with a smile that was both lonesome
and superior, as befitted a fellow with a Post Office account, when
some little girl would come up the road, bawling out the news.

“Stevie Leary, your old one is on it again.”

* Stevie’s smile would fade, and he would wander off aimlessly down
the road, till, getting out of our sight, he put on his businessman’s
air, and darted briskly into each pub he passed in search of his
mother.

“You didn’t see my ma today, Miss O.?” he would shout. “She’s on it
again.”

Eventually he would run her to earth in some snug with a couple of
cronies. Mrs. Leary was never the lonesome sort of boozer; she liked
admirers.

“God help us!” one of the hangers-on would say hypocritically when
Stevie tried to detach them from their quarry, “isn’t he a lovely
little boy, God bless him?”

“Ah, he’ll never be the man his father was, ma’am,” Mrs. Leary would
say with resignation, taking another pinch of snuff.

“But with the help of God he’ll be steadier,” another crony would
add meaningly.

“Ah, what steady?” Mrs. Leary would retort contemptuously. “I wouldn’t
give a snap of my fingers for a man that wouldn’t have a bit of the
devil in him. Old mollies!”

It might be nightfall before Stevie manoeuvred her home, a mountain of
a woman who’d have stunned him if she fell on him.

“Wisha, indeed and indeed, Mrs. Leary,” Mother would say as she tried
to settle her, “you ought to be ashamed of yourself. Look at the cut
of you!”

But before bedtime Mrs. Leary would be on the prowl again, with Stevie
crying: “Ah, stop in, Ma, and I’ll get it for you,” and his mother
shouting: “Gimme the money, can’t you? Gimme the money, I say!”

With the low cunning of the drunkard she knew to a penny how much poor
Stevie had, and night after night she shambled down to Miss O.’s with
nothing showing under the peak of her shawl but one bleak, bloodshot
eye; and tuppence by tuppence Stevie’s savings vanished till he
started life again with all the bounce gone out of him, as poor as any
of us who had never heard the life story of an American millionaire.
He tried to get her to regard it as a loan and pay him interest on it
at the rate of a penny in the shilling, but a woman of such feelings
couldn’t be expected to understand the petty notions of finance. To be
a proper millionaire you need a settled home life.

Then one night to everyone’s astonishment Frankie Leary came home from
America, There was nothing you could actually call a homecoming about
it. Father and I were at the door when we spotted the strange man
coming up the road; a lean, leathery man with a long face, cold eyes,
and a hard chin. You wouldn’t have been surprised if you heard he came
from the North Pole. He went next door, and Father at once turned in
to the kitchen to ask Mother who he could be. There were screams and
sobs from next door. “’Tis never Frankie!” said Mother, growing
pale. “But the man hadn’t as much at a kitbag,” said Father. Ten
minutes later Mrs. Leary herself came in to tell us. She was delirious
with excitement. “The old devil!” she said with her eyes shining. “I
wouldn’t doubt him. He never lost it.” It seems that when she tried to
embrace him in a wifely way he merely said coldly that he had a crow
to pluck with her, and that when Stevie, who was equal to any social
occasion, asked him if he had had a nice journey, he never replied at
all. Of course; as Mother said, he might have had a nasty crossing.

For weeks Frankie’s arrival kept Stevie in a state bordering on
hysteria. In one way Frankie was a disappointment, the first American
Stevie had heard of who returned home without a rex. But that was only
a trifle beside the real thing. For the first time in his life Stevie
had a father of his own like the rest of us, and if he had given birth
to him himself he couldn’t have had more old swank about it. America
was an additional feather in his cap; day in, day out, we heard
nothing but the wonders of America, houses and trains, taller and
longer. No normal son would ever have behaved like that, but then
Stevie wasn’t normal. As fathers were generally called in for the sole
purpose of flaking hell out of us, Stevie felt it was up to him to go
in fear and trembling too; it gave him a sort of delighted
satisfaction to refuse good money for going on a message, all because
of what his father might say. He turned down the money for the
pleasure of calling attention to the fact that he had a father; pure
showing off.

Frankie knew as little about being a father as Stevie did about being
a son, and compromised on an amateurish imitation of an elder
brother. He soon discovered Stevie’s passion for America, and talked
about it to him in a heavy, informative way, while Stevie, in an
appalling imitation of a public-house expert, sat back with his hands
in his trouser pockets. When Frankie did check him it was about things
like that, and the effect on Stevie was magical. It was as though
these were the words of wisdom he’d been waiting for all his life. He
began deliberately trying to moderate his shuffle so that he wouldn’t
have to pull himself up on the rein, and to break his voice of its
squeak. Stevie trying to be tough like his old fellow was one of his
funniest phases for, undoubtedly, Frankie was the man he’d never be.

Frankie was a queer man, an arid, unnatural man. The first evening my
father and he talked at the door, Father described him as “a most
superior, well-informed, manly chap,” but he changed his views the
very next day when Frankie all but cut him at the foot of Blarney
Street. Father was a sociable creature; he felt he might have said
something wrong; he begged Mother to ask Mrs. Leary if Frankie hadn’t
misunderstood some remark of his, but Mrs. Leary only laughed and
said: “He never lost it.” “I wouldn’t doubt him,” and “he never lost
it,” two highly ambiguous sayings, were as close as she ever got to
defining her husband’s character. After that, Father put him down as
“moody and contrary” and kept his distance.

But he had good points. He was steady; he didn’t drink or smoke. He
made Mrs. Leary give up the daily work and wear a hat and coat instead
of the shawl; he made Stevie give up the swill and messages and learn
to read and write, accomplishments which were apparently omitted from
the curriculum of whatever millionaire Stevie was modelling himself
on. The change in the cottage was remarkable.

At times of course there were rows when Mrs. Leary came home with the
sign of drink on her, but they weren’t rows as we understood
them. Frankie didn’t make smithereens of the furniture or fling his
wife and child out of doors in their nightclothes the way other
fathers did, but, trifling as they were, they left Stevie
shattered. He burst into tears and begged his parents to agree.

One night about six months later Mrs. Leary rambled in, a bit more
expansive than usual. She wasn’t drunk, just amiable. Frankie, who had
been waiting for his tea, looked up from the paper he was reading.

“What kept you?” he asked in his shrill voice.

“I ran into Lizzie Desmond at the Cross and we started talking,” said
Mrs. Leary, so snug in her hammock of whisky that she never noticed
the vessel begin to roll.

“Ye started drinking, I suppose,” said Frankie.

“Wisha, we had a couple of small ones,” said Mrs. Leary. “That old
Cross is the windiest hole to stand talking in! Have you the kettle
boiling, Stevie, boy?”

“You’d better remember what the small ones did for you before,”
Frankie said grimly.

“And wasn’t I well able for it?” she retorted, beginning to raise her
voice.

“Whisht, Ma, whisht!” Stevie cried in an agony of fear. “You know my
da is only speaking for your good.”

“Speaking for my good?” she trumpeted, her feelings overcoming her all
at once at the suggestion that she needed such correction. “How dare
you!” she added to Frankie, drawing herself up with great dignity and
letting the small ones speak for her. “Is that my thanks after all I
done for you, crossing the briny ocean after you, you insignificant
little gnat?”

“What’s that you said?” asked Frankie, throwing down his paper and
striding up to her with his fists clenched.

“Gnat!” she repeated scornfully, looking him up and down. “If I might
have married a man itself instead of an insignificant little article
like you that wouldn’t make a bolt for a back door!”

Even before Stevie knew what he was up to, Frankie drew back his fist
and gave it to her full in the mouth. Mrs. Leary let one great shriek
out of her and fell. Stevie, who was as strange as my mother to the
ways of a man in love, let out another shriek and threw himself on his
knees beside her.

“Oh, Ma, look at me, look at me!” he bawled distractedly. “I’m Stevie,
your own little boy.”

That didn’t produce whatever it was intended to produce in the way of
response, so Stevie cocked an eye up at his father.

“Will I get the priest for her, Dadda?” he asked in languishing
tones. “I think she’s dying.”

“Get to hell out of this,” said Frankie shortly. “It’s time you were
in bed.”

It wasn’t, but Stevie knew better than to contradict him. A little
later Frankie went to bed himself, leaving his wife lying on the
floor—dead, no doubt. Mother wanted to go in to her, but Father
stopped that at once.

“Now,” he said oracularly, “there’s a man in the house,” and for years
afterwards I found myself at intervals trying to analyse the finality
of that pronouncement. An hour later, Mrs. Leary got up and made
herself a cup of tea. “She can’t be so badly hurt,” said my mother
with relief. I could see she was full of pity for Stevie, having to
allow his mother to remain so long like that, without
assistance. There was a man in the house all right.

Next morning, the poor kid woke with all the troubles of the world on
him. He poured them all out to Mother. Things were desperate in the
home. All the light he had on it was one sermon he had heard at a
men’s retreat which he shouldn’t have attended, in which the missioner
had said that a child was the great bond between the parents. “Would
you say I’d be a bond, Mrs. O.?” squeaked Stevie. Doing his best to be
a bond, he gave his mother a pot of tea in bed and made his father’s
breakfast. After Frankie had gone to work, he begged his mother to
stay in bed, and even offered to bring her up the porter, but she
wouldn’t. Her pride was too hurt. Stevie knew she was much more
frightened of Frankie than he was, but her pride wouldn’t let her
yield.

In the afternoon he found her again in a pub in town and brought her
home, shaking his head and cluck-clucking fondly over her. She was a
sight, the hood of her shawl pulled down over her face, and a
bloodshot eye and a bruised mouth just visible beneath it. Stevie did
all he could to make her presentable; brewed her tea, washed her face,
combed her hair, and even tried to make her take shelter with us and
leave him to deal with his father, but compromise was an expression
she didn’t understand.

At six Frankie came in like a thundercloud, and Stevie bustled round
him eagerly and clumsily, getting his supper. He had everything neat
and shining. In his capacity as bond he had reverted to type.

“You’d like a couple of buttered eggs?” he squeaked cheerfully. “You
would to be sure. Dwyers keeps grand eggs.”

Neither of his parents addressed one another. After supper Frankie
took his cap to go out.

“You won’t be late, Dadda?” Stevie asked anxiously, but his father
didn’t reply. Stevie went to the door after him and watched him down
the road. ,

“I’d be afraid he mightn’t come back,” he said.

“That he mightn’t!” his mother said piously. “We done without him
before and we can do without him again. Conceited jackeen!”

Then he came into our house to report his lack of success as a
bond. What made it so queer was that he sounded cheerful.

“A father is a great loss, Mr. O.” he said to my father. “A house is
never the same without a man.”

“You ought to see is he in your Uncle John’s,” said my mother a bit
anxiously.

“I wouldn’t say so,” said Stevie. “The sort my da is, he’d be too
proud. He wouldn’t give it to say to them.”

The child showed real insight. However he’d managed it, Frankie was
off on his travels again, with a fresh disillusionment to fly
from. Even my mother didn’t blame him, though she thought he should
have done something for Stevie. Little by little, the old air of
fecklessness and neglect came back. Stevie was completely wretched—a
fellow who couldn’t mind a father when he got one. He lost his bounce
entirely, and took to mooning about the chapel, lighting candles for
his father’s return. Mrs. Leary went back to the shawl and the daily
work, Stevie to the swill and the messages, all exactly as though
Frankie had never returned, as though it had all been a dream.

But if it had become a dream, the dream had the power of robbing
reality of its innocence. Because it was the only thing Frankie had
asked of him, the only way in which he could get closer to his father,
Stevie took to attending night school and joined the public
library. Sometimes I met him coming back over the New Bridge with his
books and we exchanged impressions. Clearly he didn’t think much of
the Wild West stories I loved.

Stevie being intellectual made us laugh, but it was nothing to what
followed, because, as a result of something the teacher in the
Technical School said to the Canon, the Canon saw Stevie, and
Mrs. Leary got regular cleaning-work in the presbytery while Stevie
went to the seminary. It seemed he had suddenly discovered a vocation
for the priesthood!

This was no laughing matter. It was almost a scandal. Of course, even
if he got ordained, it wouldn’t be the same thing as Mrs. Delury’s son
who had been to Maynooth; it could only mean the Foreign Mission, but
you’d think that even the Foreign Mission would draw a line. Mother,
in spite of her pity for him, was shocked. I was causing her concern
enough as it was, for I had just lost my faith for the first time,
and, though she never put it in so many words, I fancy she felt that
if the Church had to fall back on people like Stevie Leary, I might
have some reason.

I remember the first time I saw him in his clerical black I realized
that he had heard about my losing my faith, for he behaved as though I
had lost the week’s wages. It was exactly like our meetings on the way
to the library. I could almost hear him say that no one need lose his
faith in the same tone in which, as a kid, he used to say that no one
need be poor. All you had to do was put it in the Post Office. “Aha,
boy, that’s the way to get on!” I felt that he might at least have
shown some sympathy for me.

Not that anyone showed him much—except Mother. When he said his first
Mass in the parish church we all turned up. Mrs. Delury, her two sons
and a daughter, were all there, boiling with rage to think of their
charwoman’s son being a priest like their own Miah, and blaming it all
on America. Such a country!

Stevie preached on the Good Shepherd and, whether it was the
excitement or the sight of four Delurys in one pew—a sight to daunt
the boldest—he got all mixed up between the ninety-nine and the one;
though in his maundering, enthusiastic style it didn’t make much
difference. But you could almost hear the Delurys crowing.

My mother and I went round to the sacristy to get his blessing (by
this time I had got back my faith and didn’t lose it again for another
two years), but as we knelt I could scarcely keep my face straight
because, God forgive me, I expected at every moment that Stevie would
say: “Wouldn’t a few pounds of stewing-beef be better, ma’am?”

The Opposition, headed by Mrs. Delury, was in session outside the
church when we left.

“Poor Father Stephen got a bit mixed in his sums,” Mrs. Delury said
regretfully.

“Ah, the dear knows, wouldn’t anybody?” retorted my mother, flushed
and angry.

“I don’t suppose in America they’ll notice much difference,” said
Mrs. Delury.

“America?” I said. “Is that where he’s going?”

And suddenly it struck me with the force of a revelation that fathers
had their good points after all. That evening I dropped in on the
Learys. I wanted to see Stevie again. I had realized after Mass that,
like the Delurys, I had for years been living with a shadow-Stevie, a
comic kid who had disappeared ages ago under our eyes without our
noticing. I wasn’t surprised to meet for the first time an unusually
intelligent and sensitive young man.

“Ah, he’ll love it in America; Larry,” his mother said in her snug,
husky voice. “’Twill be new life to him; fine open-handed people
instead of the articles we have around here that think they’re
somebody. The dear knows, I wouldn’t mind going back myself.”

But we all knew there wasn’t much chance of that. If there’s one thing
a young priest has to deny himself, it’s a mother whose feelings
become too much for her, and though the whole time he was at home she
was irreproachable, the night she saw him off, a good-natured
policeman had to bring her home and my mother put her to bed.

“Ah, indeed and indeed, Mrs. Leary,” said my mother, quivering with
indignation to see a woman so degrade herself, “you ought to be
ashamed of yourself. What would Father Stephen say if he saw you now?”

But there was no Father Stephen to see her, then or any other
time. Stevie had at last become the man his father was and left us all
far behind him.