THE FRYING-PAN

Father Fogarty’S only real friends in Kilmulpeter were the
Whittons. Whitton was the teacher there. He had been to the seminary
and college with Fogarty, and, like him, intended to be a priest, but
when the time came for him to take the vow of celibacy, he had
contracted scruples of conscience and married the principal
one. Fogarty, who had known her too, had to admit that she wasn’t
without justification, and now, in this lonely place where chance had
thrown them together again, she formed the real centre of what little
social life he had. With Tom Whitton he had a quiet friendship
compounded of exchanges of opinion about books or wireless talks. He
had the impression that Whitton didn’t really like him and considered
him a man who would have been better out of the Church. When they went
to the races together, Fogarty felt that Whitton disapproved of having
to put on bets for him and thought that priests should not bet at
all. Like other outsiders, he knew perfectly what priests should be,
without the necessity for having to be that way himself. He was
sometimes savage in the things he said about the parish priest, old
Father Whelan. On the other hand, he had a pleasant sense of humour
and Fogarty enjoyed retailing his cracks against the cloth. Men as
intelligent as Whitton were rare in country schools, and soon, too, he
would grow stupid and wild for lack of educated society.

One evening Father Fogarty invited them to dinner to see some films he
had taken at the races. Films were his latest hobby. Before this it
had been fishing and shooting. Like all bachelors, he had a mania for
adding to his possessions, and his lumberroom was piled high with
every possible sort of junk from chestdevelopers to field-glasses, and
his library cluttered with works on everything from Irish history to
Freudian psychology. He passed from craze to craze, each the key to
the universe.

He sprang up at the knock, and found Una at the door, all in furs, her
shoulders about her ears, her big, bony, masculine face blue with cold
but screwed up in an amiable monkey-grin. Tom, a handsome man, was
tall and self-conscious. He had greying hair, brown eyes, a prominent
jaw, and was quiet-spoken in a way that concealed passion. He and Una
disagreed a lot about the way the children should be brought up. He
thought she spoiled them.

‘Come in, let ye, come in!’ cried Fogarty hospitably, showing the way
into his warm study with its roaring turf fire, deep leather chairs,
and the Raphael print above the mantelpiece, a real bachelor’s
room. ‘God above!’ he exclaimed, holding Una’s hand a moment longer
than was necessary. ‘You’re perished! What’ll you have to drink, Una?’

‘Whi-hi-hi—’ stammered Una excitedly, her eyes beginning to pop. ‘I
can’t say the bloody word.’

‘Call it malt, girl,’ said the priest.

‘That’s enough! That’s enough!’ she cried laughingly, snatching the
glass from him. ‘You’ll send me home on my ear, and then I’ll hear
about it from this fellow.’

‘Whiskey, Tom?’

‘Whiskey, Jerry,’ Whitton said quietly with a quick conciliatory
glance. He kept his head very stiff and used his eyes a lot instead.

Meanwhile Una, unabashably inquisitive, was making the tour of the
room with the glass in her hand, to see if there was anything new in
it. There usually was.

‘Is this new, father?’ she asked, halting before a pleasant
eighteenth-century print.

‘Ten bob,’ the priest said promptly. ‘Wasn’t it a bargain?’

‘I couldn’t say. What is it?’

‘The old courthouse in town.’

‘Go on!’ said Una.

Whitton came and studied the print closely. ‘That place is gone these
fifty years and I never saw a picture of it,’ he said. ‘This is a
bargain all right.’

‘I’d say so,’ Fogarty said with quiet pride.

‘And what’s the sheet for?’ Una asked, poking at a tablecloth pinned
between the windows.

‘That’s not a sheet, woman!’ Fogarty exclaimed. ‘For God’s sake, don’t
be displaying your ignorance!’

‘Oh, I know,’ she cried girlishly. ‘For the pictures! I’d forgotten
about them. That’s grand!’

Then Bella, a coarse, good-looking country girl, announced dinner, and
the curate, with a self-conscious, boyish swagger, led them into the
dining-room and opened the door of the sideboard. The dining-room was
even more ponderous than the sitting-room. Everything in it was large,
heavy and dark.

‘And now, what’ll ye drink?’ he asked over his shoulder, studying his
array of bottles. “There’s some damn good Burgundy ~ ’pon my soul,
’tis great!’

‘How much did it cost?’ Whitton asked with poker-faced humour. ‘The
only way I have of identifying wines is by the price.’

‘Eight bob a bottle,’ Fogarty replied at once.

‘That’s a very good price,’ said Whitton with a nod. ‘We’ll have some
of that.’

‘You can take a couple of bottles home with you,’ said the curate,
who, in the warmth of his heart, was always wanting to give his
treasures away. ‘The last two dozen he had—wasn’t I lucky?’

‘You have the appetite of a canon on the income of a curate,’ Whitton
said in the same tone of grave humour, but Fogarty caught the scarcely
perceptible note of criticism in it. He did not allow this to upset
him.

‘Please God, we won’t always be curates,’ he said sunnily.

‘Bella looks after you well,’ said Una when the meal was nearly
over. The compliment was deserved so far as it went, though it was a
man’s meal rather than a woman’s.

‘Doesn’t she, though?’ Fogarty exclaimed with pleasure. ‘Isn’t she
damn good for a country girl?’

‘How does she get on with Stasia?’ asked Una—Stasia was Father
Whelan’s old housekeeper, and an affliction to the community.

‘They don’t talk. Stasia says she’s an immoral woman.’

‘And is she?’ Una asked hopefully.

‘If she isn’t, she’s wasting her own time and my whiskey,’ said
Fogarty. ‘She entertains Paddy Coakley in the kitchen every Saturday
night. I told her I wouldn’t keep her unless she got a boy. And wasn’t
I right? One Stasia is enough for any parish. Father Whelan tells me
I’m going too far.’

‘And did you tell him to mind his own business?’ Whitton asked with a
penetrating look.

‘I did, to be sure,’ said Fogarty, who had done nothing of the sort.

‘Ignorant, interfering old fool!’ Whitton said quietly, the ferocity
of his sentiments belied by the mildness of his manner.

“That’s only because you’d like to do the interfering yourself,’ said
Una good-humouredly. She frequently had to act as peacemaker between
the parish priest and her husband.

‘And a robber,’ Tom Whitton added to the curate, ignoring her. ‘He’s
been collecting for new seats for the church for the last ten
years. I’d like to know where that’s going.’

‘He had a collection for repairing my roof,’ said the curate, ‘and
’tis leaking still. He must be worth twenty thousand.’

‘Now, that’s not fair, father,’ Una said flatly. ‘You know yourself
there’s no harm in Father Whelan. It’s just that he’s certain he’s
going to die in the workhouse. It’s like Bella and her boy. He has
nothing more serious to worry about, and he worries about that.’

Fogarty knew there was a certain amount of truth in what Una said, and
that the old man’s miserliness was more symbolic than real, and at the
same time he felt in her words criticism of a different kind from her
husband’s. ‘Though Una wasn’t aware of it she was implying that the
priest’s office made him an object of pity rather than blame. She was
sorry for old Whelan, and, by implication, for him.

‘Still, Tom is right, Una,’ he said with sudden earnestness. ‘It’s not
a question of what harm Father Whelan intends, but what harm he
does. Scandal is scandal, whether you give it deliberately or through
absent-mindedness.’

Tom grunted, to show his approval, but he said no more on the subject,
as though he refused to enter into an argument with his wife about
subjects she knew nothing of. They returned to the study for coffee,
and Fogarty produced the film projector. At once the censoriousness of
Tom Whitton’s manner dropped away, and he behaved like a pleasant and
intelligent boy of seventeen. Una, sitting by the fire with her legs
crossed, watched them with amusement. Whenever they came to the
priest’s house, the same sort of thing happened. Once it had been a
microscope, and the pair of them had amused themselves with it for
hours. Now they were kidding themselves that their real interest in
the cinema was educational. She knew that within a month the cinema,
like the microscope, would be lying in the lumber-room with the rest
of the junk.

Fogarty switched off the light and showed some films he had taken at
the last race meeting. They were very patchy, mostly out of focus, and
had to be interpreted by a running commentary, which was always a shot
or two behind.

‘I suppose ye wouldn’t know who that is?’ he said as the film showed
Una, eating a sandwich and talking excitedly and demonstratively to a
couple of wild-looking country boys.

‘It looks like someone from the Country Club,’ her husband said dryly.

‘But wasn’t it good?’ Fogarty asked innocently as he switched on the
lights again. ‘Now, wasn’t it very interesting?’ He was exactly like a
small boy who had performed a conjuring trick.

‘Marvellous, father,’ Una said with a sly and affectionate grin.

He blushed and turned to pour them out more whiskey. He saw that she
had noticed the pictures of herself. At the same time, he saw she was
pleased. When he had driven them home, she held his hand and said they
had had the best evening for years a piece of flattery so gross and
uncalled-for that it made her husband more tongue-tied than ever.

‘Thursday, Jerry?’ he said with a quick glance.

‘Thursday, Tom,’ said the priest.

The room looked terribly desolate after her; the crumpled cushions,
the glasses, the screen and the film projector, everything had become
frighteningly inert, while outside his window the desolate countryside
had taken on even more of its supernatural animation: bogs, hills, and
field, full of ghosts and shadows. He sat by the fire, wondering what
his own life might have been like with a girl like that, all furs and
scent and laughter, and two bawling, irrepressible brats
upstairs. When he tiptoed up to his bedroom he remembered that there
would never be children there to wake, and it seemed to him that with
all the things he bought to fill his home, he was merely trying
desperately to stuff the yawning holes in his own big, empty heart.


On Thursday, when he went to their house, Ita and Brendan, though
already in bed, were refusing to sleep till he said goodnight to
them. While he was taking off his coat the two of them rushed to the
banisters and screamed: “We want Father Fogey.’ 

When he went upstairs they were sitting bolt upright in their cots, a
little fat, fair-haired rowdy boy and a solemn baby girl.

‘Father,’ Brendan began at once, ‘will I be your altar boy when I grow
up?’

“You will to be sure, son,’ replied Fogarty.

‘Ladies first! Ladies first!’ the baby shrieked in a frenzy of
rage. ‘Father, will I be your altar boy?’

‘Go on!’ Brendan said scornfully. ‘Little girls can’t be altar boys,
sure they can’t, father?’

‘I can,” shrieked Ita, who in her excitement exactly resembled her
mother. ‘Can’t I, father?’

‘We might be able to get a dispensation for you,’ said the curate. ‘In
a pair of trousers, you’d do fine.’

He was in a wistful frame of mind when he came downstairs
again. Children would always be a worse temptation to him than
women. Children were the devil! The house was gay and spotless. They
had no fine mahogany suite like his, but Una managed to make the few
coloured odds and ends they had seem deliberate. There wasn’t a
cigarette end in the ashtrays; the cushions had not been sat on. Tom,
standing before the fireplace (not to disturb the cushions, thought
Fogarty), looked as if someone had held his head under the tap, and
was very self-consciously wearing a new brown tie. With his greying
hair plastered flat, he looked schoolboyish, sulky, and resentful, as
though he were meditating ways of restoring his authority over a
mutinous household. The thought crossed Fogarty’s mind that he and Una
had probably quarrelled about the tie. It went altogether too well
with his suit.

‘We want Father Fogey!’ the children began to chant monotonously from
the bedroom.

‘Shut up!’ shouted Tom.

‘We want Father Fogey,’ the chant went on, but with a groan in it
somewhere.

‘Well, you’re not going to get him. Go to sleep!’

The chant stopped. This was clearly serious.

‘You don’t mind if I drop down to a meeting tonight, Jerry?’ Tom asked
in his quiet, anxious way. ‘I won’t be more than half an hour.’

‘Not at all, Tom,’ said Fogarty heartily. ‘Sure, I’ll drive you.’

‘No, thanks,’ Whitton said with a smile of gratitude. ‘It won’t take
me ten minutes to get there.’

It was clear that a lot of trouble had gone to the making of supper,
but out of sheer perversity Tom let on not to recognize any of the
dishes. When they had drunk their coffee, he rose and glanced at his
watch.

‘I won’t be long,’ he said.

‘Tom, you’re not going to that meeting?’ Una asked appealingly.

‘I tell you I have to,’ he replied with unnecessary emphasis.

‘I met Mick Mahoney this afternoon, and he said they didn’t need you.’

‘Mick Mahoney knows nothing about it.’

‘I told him to tell the others you wouldn’t be coming, that Father
Fogarty would be here,’ she went on desperately, fighting for the
success of her evening.

‘Then you had no business to do it,’ her husband retorted angrily, and
even Fogarty saw that she had gone the worst way about it, by speaking
to members of his committee behind his back. He began to feel
uncomfortable. ‘If they come to some damn fool decision while I’m
away, it’ll be my responsibility.’

‘If you’re late, you’d better knock,’ she sang out gaily to cover up
his bad manners. ‘Will we go into the sitting-room, father?’ she asked
over-eagerly. ‘I’ll be with you in two minutes. ‘There are fags on the
mantelpiece, and you know where to find the whi-hi-hi—blast that
word!’

Fogarty lit a cigarette and sat down. He felt exceedingly
uncomfortable. Whitton was an uncouth and irritable bastard, and
always had been so. He heard Una upstairs, and then someone turned on
the tap in the bathroom. ‘Bloody brute!’ he thought indignantly. There
had been no need for him to insult her before a guest. Why the hell
couldn’t he have finished his quarrelling while they were alone? The
tap stopped and he waited, listening, but Una didn’t come. He was a
warm-hearted man and could not bear the thought of her alone and
miserable upstairs. He went softly up the stairs and stood on the
landing. ‘Una!’ he called softly, afraid of waking the children. There
was a light in the bedroom; the door was ajar and he pushed it in. She
was sitting at the end of the bed and grinned at him dolefully.

‘Sorry for the whine, father,’ she said, making a brave attempt to
smile. And then, with the street-urchin’s humour which he found so
attractive: ‘Can I have a loan of your shoulder, please?’

“What the blazes ails Tom?’ he asked, sitting beside her.

‘He—he’s jealous,’ she stammered, and began to weep again with her
head on his chest. He put his arm about her and patted her awkwardly.

‘Jealous?’ he asked incredulously, turning over in his mind the
half-dozen men whom Una could meet at the best of times. ‘Who the
blazes is he jealous of?’

‘You!’

‘Me?’ Fogarty exclaimed indignantly, and grew red, thinking of how he
had given himself away with his pictures. ‘He must be mad! I never
gave him any cause for jealousy.’

‘Oh, I know he’s completely unreasonable,’ she stammered. ‘He always
was.’

‘But you didn’t say anything to him, did you?’ Fogarty asked
anxiously.

‘About what?’ she asked in surprise, looking up at him and blinking
back her tears.

‘About me?’ Fogarty mumbled in embarrassment.

‘Oh, he doesn’t know about that,’ Una replied frantically. ‘I never
mentioned that to him at all. Besides, he doesn’t care that much about
me.’

And Fogarty realized that in the simplest way in the world he had been
brought to admit to a married woman that he loved her and she to imply
that she felt the same about him, without a word being said on either
side. Obviously, these things happened more innocently than he had
ever thought possible. He became more embarrassed than ever.

‘But what is he jealous of so?’ he added truculently.

‘He’s jealous of you because you’re a priest. Surely, you saw that?’

‘I certainly didn’t. It never crossed my mind.’

Yet at the same time he wondered if this might not be the reason for
the censoriousness he sometimes felt in Whitton against his harmless
bets and his bottles of wine.

‘But he’s hardly ever out of your house, and he’s always borrowing
your books, and talking theology and church history to you. He has
shelves of them here—look!’ And she pointed at a plain wooden
bookcase, filled with solid-looking works. ‘In my b-b-bedroom! That’s
why he really hates Father Whelan. Don’t you see, Jerry,’ she said,
calling him for the first time by his Christian name, ‘you have all
the things he wants.’

‘I have?’ repeated Fogarty in astonishment. ‘What things?’

‘Oh, how do I know?’ she replied with a shrug, relegating these to the
same position as Whelan’s bank-balance and his own gadgets, as things
that meant nothing to her. ‘Respect and responsibility and freedom
from the worries of a family, I suppose.’

‘He’s welcome to them,’ Fogarty said with wry humour. ‘What’s that the
advertisements say?—owner having no further use for same.’

‘Oh, I know,’ she said with another shrug, and he saw that from the
beginning she had realized how he felt about her and been sorry for
him. He was sure that there was some contradiction here which he
should be able to express to himself, between her almost inordinate
piety and her light-hearted acceptance of his adoration for
her—something that was exclusively feminine, but which he could not
isolate with her there beside him, willing him to make love to her,
offering herself to his kiss.

‘It’s a change to be kissed by someone who cares for you,’ she said
after a moment.

‘Ah, now, Una, that’s not true,’ he protested gravely, the priest in
him getting the upper hand of the lover who had still a considerable
amount to learn. ‘You only fancy that.’

‘I don’t, Jerry,’ she replied with conviction. ‘It’s always been the
same, from the first month of our marriage—always! I was a fool to
marry him at all.’

‘Even so,’ Fogarty said manfully, doing his duty by his friend with a
sort of schoolboy gravity, ‘you know he’s still fond of you. That’s
only his way.’

‘It isn’t, Jerry,’ she went on obstinately. ‘He wanted to be a priest
and I stopped him.’

‘But you didn’t.’

‘That’s how he looks at it. I tempted him.’

‘And damn glad he was to fall!’

‘But he did fall, Jerry, and that’s what he can never forgive. In his
heart he despises me and despises himself for not being able to do
without me.’

‘But why should he despise himself? That’s what I don’t understand.’

‘Because I’m only a woman, and he wants to be independent of me and
every other woman as well. He has to teach to keep a home for me, and
he doesn’t want to teach. He wants to say Mass and hear confessions,
and be God Almighty for seven days of the week.’

Fogarty couldn’t grasp it, but he realized that there was something in
what she said, and that Whitton was really a lonely, frustrated man
who felt he was forever excluded from the only things which interested
him.

‘I don’t understand it,’ he said angrily. ‘It doesn’t sound natural to
me.’

‘It doesn’t sound natural to you because you have it, Jerry,’ she
said. ‘I used to think Tom wasn’t normal, either, but now I’m
beginning to think there are more spoiled priests in the world than
ever went into seminaries. You see, Jerry,’ she went on in a rush,
growing very red, ‘I’m a constant reproach to him. He thinks he’s a
terrible blackguard because he wants to make love to me once a
month. ...I can talk like this to you because you’re a priest.’

‘You can, to be sure,’ said Fogarty with more conviction than he felt.

‘And even when he does make love to me,’ she went on, too full of her
grievance even to notice the anguish she caused him, ‘he manages to
make me feel that I’m doing all the love-making.’

‘And why shouldn’t you?’ asked Fogarty gallantly, concealing the way
his heart turned over in him.

‘Because it’s a sin!’ she cried tempestuously.

‘Who said it’s a sin?’

‘He makes it a sin. He’s like a bear with a sore head for days
after. Don’t you see, Jerry,’ she cried, springing excitedly to her
feet and shaking her head at him, ‘it’s never anything but adultery
with him, and he goes away and curses himself because he hasn’t the
strength to resist it.’

‘Adultery?’ repeated Fogarty, the familiar word knocking at his
conscience as if it were Tom Whitton himself at the door.

‘Whatever you call it,’ Una rushed on. ‘It’s always adultery,
adultery, adultery, and I’m always a bad woman, and he always wants to
show God that it wasn’t him but me, and I’m sick and tired of it. I
want a man to make me feel like a respectable married woman for once
in my life. You see, I feel quite respectable with you, although I
know I shouldn’t.’ She looked in the mirror of the dressing-table and
her face fell. ‘Oh, Lord!’ she sighed. ‘I don’t look it. ...I’ll be
down in two minutes now, Jerry,’ she said eagerly, thrusting out her
lips to him, her old, brilliant, excitable self.

“You’re grand,’ he muttered.

As she went into the bathroom, she turned in another excess of emotion
and threw her arms about him. As he kissed her, she pressed herself
close to him till his head swam. There was a mawkish, girlish grin
on her face. ‘Darling!’ she said in an agony of passion, and it was
as if their loneliness enveloped them like a cloud.

As he went downstairs, he was very thoughtful. He heard Tom’s key in
the lock and looked at himself in the mirror over the fireplace. He
heard Tom’s step in the hall, and it sounded in his ears as it had
never sounded before, like that of a man carrying a burden too great
for him. He realized that he had never before seen Whitton as he
really was, a man at war with his animal nature, longing for some
high, solitary existence of the intellect and imagination. And he knew
that the three of them, Tom, Una and himself, would die as they had
lived, their desires unsatisfied.


(1947)
Source: The Best of Frank O’Connor, 2009