A BRIEF FOR OEDIPUS

To watch a law case between husband and wife is like watching a
performance of Oedipus. You know that, whatever happens, the man has
no chance, because every judge has a mother fixation and any lawyer
would as soon take a brief for Oedipus.

It has been said that the nearest a man ever got to averting the
Furies was the day Micky Joe Spillane defended a countryman called
Lynam whose wife was suing for legal separation on the usual grounds
of cruelty and adultery. Separation was all she could get, and,
indeed, all she wanted; and even this she could not get without
proving cruelty, which, in the present-day decline of manliness, is
not as easy as it sounds.

Mrs Lynam at least had no trouble about that. The adultery was
admitted, if not actually gloried in, and all that was needed to prove
the cruelty was to put the Respondent in the box. He was a big,
good-looking man with a stiff, morose manner—one of those Irish
countrymen who are deceptively gentle, who are so generous that they
will give you the shirt off their back, and will then knock you
unconscious over some trifling remark about politics.

His wife was a trim, mousy little woman of about half his height and a
quarter his weight, with an anxious face and a gentle, bedraggled,
virginal air. She was pathetically anxious to make a good impression:
she cocked her little head as she listened to her counsel’s questions,
as though they were in French, and replied to them in something like
the same way, raising her colourless little voice and illustrating her
answers with vague, half-completed gestures.

You could see that O’Meara, the judge, adored her. ‘Come over here
where we can hear you, ma’am,’ he said, pointing to a seat beside him
on the bench. Poor O’Meara was a bad case: he had blood pressure as
well as a mother fixation.

Once or twice as she gave her evidence she glanced forgivingly at her
husband who only stared back with a gloomy hatred that was
awe-inspiring. Most men are embarrassed, hearing what they are
supposed to have done to their wives, but Lynam paid attention to
nobody, and just watched his wife as if he were wondering why the
blazes he hadn’t taken a hatchet and finished the job while he was at
it.

‘And what did he do then?’ asked her counsel, Kenefick, having gone
through the demolition of the house, chair by chair and cup by cup.

‘He called me—do I have to repeat it, my lord?’

‘Ah, not at all, ma’am, not at all,’ he said encouragingly. ‘Write it
down.’

The clerk gave her pencil and paper. Mrs Lynam wrote as she talked,
slowly and carefully, raising her eyes to the ceiling. Then she handed
the paper to the clerk, who passed it to O’Meara. O’Meara glanced at
it expressionlessly and passed it down to counsel. Tom Lynam, black
with rage, whispered something to his solicitor, Quill, but Quill only
shook his head. He had never liked the case from the first day, and if
he had had his way, would have settled it out of court. He had allowed
himself to be over-persuaded by his truculent client and by his
counsel, Mickie Joe, who had got into a tantrum and said it was a
scandalous case and should be fought in the public interest. Public
interest, indeed! Quill felt it was his own fault for briefing an
unstable man like Mickie Joe,

‘And did he say anything else?’ Kenefick murmured sympathetically.

‘Only if I didn’t get out of the house in five minutes, sir, that he’d
do to me what the Jews did to Jesus.’

“What the Jews did to who? O’Meara asked incredulously.

‘Jesus, my lord,’ she repeated, bowing reverently for the second
time. ‘Our Blessed Lord, my lord. Crucify me he meant.’

‘Huh!’ snorted O’Meara, his blood pressure going up. Adultery and
cruelty were bad enough, but when you had blasphemy thrown in Ireland
was certainly going to the dogs.

‘Now tell my lord what happened then,’ prompted Kenefick, scaling up
the sympathy to the degree of emotion the judge seemed to require.

‘So then I told him I could not go out of the house at that hour and
the state I was in,’ Mrs Lynam continued with growing animation. ‘And
with that, he dragged me off the sofa and twisted my wrist behind my
back.’ (‘Wrist’ and ‘back’ she illustrated by another feeble gesture
that she did not complete.)

‘And this was at a time when you were seriously ill?’

‘I was at death’s door, sir,’ she said candidly. ‘The whole day I
wasn’t able to get up off the sofa even to feed the children. That was
what he had against me the whole time,’ she said, shaking her little
head vivaciously. ‘Shamming, he said I was.’

‘And then what happened?’ Kenefick asked, yearning over her.

‘He kicked me right out the front door, sir,’ she replied, raising her
hands as though to avert the crash. ‘I fell on the path on my hands
and knees. Tommy—that’s our little boy ran out and began to cry, and
my husband said for him to get to bed quick or he’d do the same to
him.’

‘And your little boy is—how old?’ Kenefick asked with a positive
tremolo in his voice.

‘Five, sir, the fourteenth of February.’

‘And did your husband make any effort to see if you were injured
by the fall?’

‘Why, then, indeed, he did not, sir,’ she replied with a smile that
was like a rainbow—an optical illusion between two downpours. ‘Only
to give me another kick into the flower bed. Then he made use of a
filthy expression and banged the door behind him.’

‘And those were the marks that you showed next day to Dr O’Mahoney?’

“They were, sir. The very same. A week he made me stop in bed, with my
back.’

After this, it was scarcely necessary to emphasize her husband’s bad
behaviour with Nora Magee, a woman of notorious bad character, for in
fact, she had had a child by him, he had been seen minding it, and
rumour in the town held that Nora had never had it so good.

‘And did you have any conversation with your husband about this
woman?’ Kenefick asked gravely.

‘A dozen times, sir, she replied. ‘I asked him a dozen times,
practically on my bended knees, to give her up, for the children’s
sake if not for mine.’

‘And what was his reply?”

‘His reply, sir, was that the child was a Lynam, and he wouldn’t give
up one Lynam for all the Hanafeys that were ever pupped...Hanafey is
my maiden name,’ she added. ‘He meant the children took after me.’

At this Kenefick sat down, looking old and broken, and Mickie Joe got
up. Now, the best day he ever was, Mickie Joe was no great shakes as a
lawyer. He had begun life as a schoolmaster and given it up for the
law. He really loved the art of oratory, and would sit with a childish
expression of delight, listening to a good sermon or a good speech or
a good summing up, but his own voice was like a train-whistle, and the
only effect he had on an audience was to make it laugh. If it laughed
too much, he would stop and scold it, which only brought more
laughter.

He had a tendency to identify himself with his client, a thing no real
lawyer will do. A client is a fact, and a true lawyer hates facts. He
is an artist—a dramatist and actor—whose job it is to make little
dramas out of the sordid and trivial material his clients provide. The
one thing he hates is to be reminded by the characters themselves of
what the real story is. Mickie Joe had very little of the artist in
him, and as a result, had a tendency to get rattled when his client
got the worst of a case and start barging his opponent like an old
market-woman.

Kenefick had obviously told Mrs Lynam not to be afraid of him and she
wasn’t. She clutched the arms of her chair, raised herself in it as if
in anxiety to give the best that was in her and answered patiently and
quietly. Yes, sir, she had been educated in a convent. Yes, indeed,
she was a very old friend of Sister Dominic. And of Father O’Regan,
the parish priest. Yes, she had asked their advice before beginning
proceedings because it was a thing she would not take on herself. Yes,
she was a member of the Women’s Sodality and the Children of Mary as
well as the St Vincent de Paul. Kenefick looked up doubtfully at
Mickie Joe, wondering where the hell he was going from that, unless it
was to prove that Mrs Lynam was a saint as well as a martyr.

Kenefick saw soon enough and it startled him even more.

‘And when you went to the Women’s Sodality, who got your husband’s
supper?’ Mickie Joe asked in a wailing voice.

‘Ah, well, sometimes he got it for himself.’

‘And the children’s supper as well?’

‘He might get that, too, of an odd time.’

‘And when you were at Mass, I dare say he got his own breakfast?’

‘Unless he waited till I got in.’

‘But you always got it for him when you came in?”

‘Always, except when I wasn’t able.’

‘And I take it, Mrs Lynam, you weren’t always able?’

‘Well, no, I wasn’t,’ she admitted candidly. ‘Not always.’

She still didn’t take him seriously or realize her danger, but she was
the only one who didn’t. Breakfast, after all, is a serious matter.

‘You were able to go to Mass, but you were not able to get your
husband’s breakfast?’ asked Mickie Joe. ‘Is that what you’re telling
my lord?’

‘I often went to Mass when I wasn’t able either,’ she replied
with a noble pathos that would have silenced anyone else but Mickie
Joe. He was still hot on the trail of the missing breakfast.

‘You went to Mass when you weren’t able, but you didn’t get your
husband’s breakfast when you weren’t able?’ he asked in his shrill
monotonous voice. ‘Is that what you mean?’

‘I think I should explain that,’ she said, looking nervously at the
judge. ‘I’m rather delicate, of course. I have a pain in my back. I
hurted it years ago in a fall I got on the ice. Doctor O’Mahoney
treated me.’

This was a really dangerous admission which any other counsel would
have been after like a greyhound, but Mickie Joe didn’t even seem to
realize that it had been made. By this time he was getting furious.

‘And you suffer from headaches, too, I suppose?’ he went on. ‘I do,
sir,’ she replied, with one small hand sketching a gesture at her
stomach. ‘Bilious.’

But O’Meara was tired of Mickie Joe. He liked his breakfast as well as
the next, but for a judge with a mother fixation to listen to the poor
victim being badgered like that was too much.

‘Really, Mr Spillane,’ he asked in a distant voice, ‘do we have to go
into the lady’s bilious headaches?’

But for once Mickie Joe did not give way. He looked reprovingly at
O’Meara over his pince-nez and his voice went off into an unearthly
wail.

‘My lord, if the Petitioner is presented to the court as something out
of a medical museum, I can hardly say much more.’

‘Oh, go on, Mr Spillane, go on!’ O’Meara said. All the same he
blushed. It was beginning to dawn even on him that you couldn’t always
treat Mickie Joe as a figure of fun. He did not quite know why. It
never occurred to him that the one man who can stand up to a mother
fixation in fair fight is a woman hater.

And, in a curious way, Mickie Joe’s passion was beginning to affect
the general view. It wasn’t only that you couldn’t any longer afford
to bully or patronize him. A picture was beginning to emerge of a
woman who was not only useless but was at the same time bold, ruthless
and designing,

The court had begun to fill as it usually does when a case grows
interesting, and Lynam himself seemed to pluck up courage. Instead of
glowering at his wife, he looked back defiantly at the court as
though to see whether anyone now believed the lies that had been
told. A tall, bald man at the back gave him an encouraging wave and
Lynam returned the salute austerely.

‘Did you and your husband go out together much, Mrs Lynam?’ Mickie Joe
asked, changing his tack abruptly.

‘Well, you can’t do much with two children, can you, sir?’ she asked
with soft reproach.

‘That depends, ma’am,’ he said with a wintry smile. ‘Don’t other
people do it?’

‘I dare say they have servants,’ she said nervously.

‘You don’t mean that people in the humbler walks of life have no
friends, do you, ma’am?’ he asked.

‘Or neighbours, of course,’ she added, filling out her original reply.

‘I’m glad you thought of the neighbours,’ he said, ‘I was coming to
them.’

‘But you can’t always be asking them for favours, can you?’ she said.

‘When you quarrelled with your husband, ma’am, didn’t you go to the
neighbours?’

‘Sure, when I was crippled with the kicks he gave me!’

‘But you couldn’t ask them to mind the children when he wanted to go
out and enjoy himself?’

‘Ah, ’tisn’t alike,’ she said, showing irritation for the first time.

‘No, ma’am, it isn’t,’ he agreed. ‘How old did you say the little girl
was?’

‘Ten.’

‘And you mean to say a girl of ten couldn’t look after her brother for
a couple of hours?’

‘Well, I can explain that,’ she said hastily. ‘You see, they don’t get
on—you know the way it is between girls and boys—and you wouldn’t
like to leave her alone with him.’

‘Do you mean she’d beat him?’

‘Well, she mightn’t beat him exactly, Mrs Lynam replied nervously,
‘but she might be tormenting him.’

‘Mrs Lynam,’ he asked severely, ‘isn’t it true that those children of
yours are utterly ruined?’

‘Ruined?’ she cried indignantly, starting up with an outraged
glance. ‘Certainly not. I never heard such a thing!’

‘On your oath, ma’am, wasn’t that what your husband meant when he said
they weren’t Lynams at all?’

‘How could he?’ she asked. ‘There isn’t a word of truth in it.’

But Lynam looked at Mickie Joe with such an expression of astonishment
that everyone knew there was. Mickie Joe knew it too, and for the
first time a prim, watery smile of satisfaction played on his thin,
old-maidish mouth.

‘Did many of your husband’s friends visit you?’

‘Some of them, yes,’ Mrs Lynam replied anxiously, trying to grasp the
drift of the question. She was afraid of him now, all right.

‘He had a lot of friends when he married you?’

Kenefick rose with an air of deep distress to say his learned friend
was straying from the point, but even O’Meara realized that straying
was the one thing Mickie Joe was not doing.

‘Answer the question, ma’am.’

‘He had—of a kind,’

‘Of the wrong kind, you mean?’

‘Well, not my kind.’ It was not exactly a tactful answer.

‘He was what you’d call a popular man?’

‘Well, he was an athletic sort of man. I don’t know you would call him
popular exactly.’

‘And at the time of this unfortunate break-up, how many of them were
still coming to the house?’

Mrs Lynam’s eye sought out the tall bald man at the back of the court
and confirmed an impression that he might have a story to tell.

‘Well, I’m sure I couldn’t say,’ she replied doubtfully. “Mr Malone
was at the house two or three nights a week.’ You could almost hear
the note of grievance in her voice.

‘And what happened the rest?’

‘I’m sure _I_ couldn’t say, sir.’

“They just stopped coming, and you never once asked your husband
“What’s wrong with Joe or Pat or Willie?” ’

‘No. What business was it of mine?’

‘I’m asking the questions, Mrs Lynam. You never gave them reason?’

‘Never,’ she replied earnestly.

‘Never let them see that they weren’t your—kind, as you call it?’

‘Certainly not,’ she replied self-righteously. ‘I hope I always
behaved like a lady.’

‘And I dare say,’ Mickie Joe drawled with the first really pleasant
smile he had shown that day, ‘when this last remaining friend—this
Last Rose of Summer left blooming alone—came to bring your husband
out, it sometimes happened that they couldn’t go?’

“Well, I explained about my back,’ she said, sketching another gesture
behind her.

‘You did, ma’am, fully,’ Mickie Joe agreed with a wicked chuckle.
‘We’re better acquainted with your back now than we are with any other
part of you.’

The bald man at the back was having the time of his life. It was his
day as much as Mickie Joe’s. He smiled and nodded amiably at the
judge, the clerk and even the pressman. The Last Rose of Summer—a
shy, neighbourly man—was clearly delighted that at last someone was
getting down to business. Lynam, who had been staring in surprise at
Mickie Joe, whispered something to his solicitor, but Quill only shook
his head and frowned. As producer of the show, Quill was beginning to
be impressed by the performance of his great new star, and, like any
other theatre man, had no time to spare for the author’s views.

‘Tell me, ma’am,’ Mickie Joe asked keenly, ‘when did you last have
relations with your husband?’

‘When did I what, sir?’ she asked in a baby voice, putting her finger
to her mouth.

‘When did you last go to bed with him with a view to matrimony?’
Mickie Joe translated boisterously.

‘Oh, I forgot to mention that,’ she said hastily. ‘He has a room of
his own, of course.’

‘Oh, has he?’ Mickie Joe asked with a new light in his eye. ‘But that
wasn’t the question I asked you. I asked how long it was since you had
relations with him.’

‘Well, with my back...’ she began pathetically, and suddenly Mickie
Joe interrupted her with a positive squeal of rage.

‘Ah, give your back a rest, ma’am!’ he cried, growing purple. ‘Give
your back a rest! It isn’t your back we’re discussing now. How long is
it, I say.’

‘Oh, I suppose a couple of years,’ she replied doubtfully, and he
pounced on her.

‘Two years?’

‘Two or three.’

‘Or four?’

‘I don’t think ’twas as long as that,’ she said wonderingly. ‘What
difference does it make?’

‘Only the difference between a human being and a monster, ma’am,’ he
said. ‘So in those impassioned scenes in which you begged your
husband, “almost on your bended knees”, to come back to you, you
didn’t want him to come back? And when he was at Mrs Magee’s, looking
after his child, he was in the only decent home he ever had?’

Mickie Joe, of course, had made his usual mistake and lost all
restraint. At once, Kenefick was on his feet, protesting, and O’Meara
rebuked Mickie Joe, who stood there humbly with his head down, thanked
O’Meara for the rebuke, and went on just the same.

‘Would it be true to say that you don’t think much of marriage,
ma’am?’

‘Oh, I wouldn’t say that,’ she replied almost patronizingly. ‘The
Church of course takes a rather high view of it.’

‘I was asking about you, ma’am, not the Church,’ Mickie Joe said
icily. ‘The Church is quite capable of speaking for itself. But
weren’t you always grousing to Sister Dominic about married life?’

‘I went to her for advice,’ Mrs Lynam said anxiously, clearly
wondering whether Mickie Joe was guessing or Sister Dominic gossiping.

‘And to Father O’Regan when you were trying to turn him against your
unfortunate decent husband?’

‘I never tried to turn Father O’Regan against him,’ she cried. ‘Never!
All I asked Father O’Regan to do was to talk to him and tell him to be
more natural.’

‘Natural?’ repeated Mickie Joe bitterly. ‘Four years sleeping in a
room by himself? Is that what you call natural?’

‘Natural, reasonable—call it what you like. Ah, now, Mr Spillane,’
she went on angrily, ‘’tis all very well for you to be talking. That
sort of thing may do all right for young people that don’t know
better, but for people of our age, ’tis disgusting. Positively
disgusting!’

She had said too much, Even she knew that, though she didn’t know how
much damage she had done herself. A judge with a mother fixation may
overlook the prospect of having to get his own breakfast but not that
of four years in the spare room. There is a limit to human
endurance. Even the policemen at the back of the court who had wives
of cast iron were looking disapprovingly at the gentle, insinuating
little woman who had revealed herself as a grey, grim, discontented
monster with notions above her station.

When the court adjourned Mickie Joe had not done with her though he
could well have left his case there. She was probably the only one who
didn’t yet know that she had lost, but even she was badly shaken. She
grabbed her handbag and waddled quickly out. To everyone’s
astonishment, Tom Lynam hurried after her. Kenefick made an alarmed
face at Mickie Joe who went after Lynam as fast as he could. Neither
he nor Quill wanted to see their client finish off the job in the
hall.

But when they got out Lynam was talking to her in a low voice. She was
half turned away from him as though interrupted in flight. At last he
came over to Mickie Joe and Quill.

‘She wants to settle this,’ he muttered apologetically, blushing and
stammering.

‘I’m damn full sure she does,’ said Quill. ‘Tell her there’s
nothing to settle.’

‘I know that, Mr Quill,’ said Lynam gloomily. ‘I know you and Mr
Spillane did your best for me. But I wouldn’t like her to have to
answer any more questions. She thinks I made them up. Sure, I never
told Mr Spillane half the things he said,’

‘You mean you’re going to go back and live with that woman?’ Mickie
Joe asked with cold anger.

‘That’s what she wants, sir,’ said Lynam.

‘And do you know that in forty-eight hours she’ll be making your life
a hell again?’

‘She says she’ll try to do better the next time,’ Lynam said, staring
at him.

‘Is it a woman that five minutes ago was perjuring herself black in
the face only to destroy you?’ Mickie Joe asked sayagely. ‘How could
you believe daylight from a woman like that? And next time she gets
you here you won’t be so lucky.’

‘She says she won’t go to court again,’ Lynam said, scowling.

‘And when she does, she needn’t be afraid of me,’ Mickie Joe said
shrilly. ‘You can find someone else to represent you. A man is only
wasting his time trying to save people like you. It is like trying to
keep a lunatic from suicide.’

‘Nor I wouldn’t have you again,’ Lynam shouted, flaring up. ‘Nor I
wouldn’t have had you today if I knew what you were going to do. I
don’t know who your spies were but they were no friends of mine, and
for the future I’ll see you keep your tongue off my wife.’

He was flushed and incoherent, and Quill realized again that he was an
ugly customer to cross. But Mickie Joe was good enough for him.

‘Fitter for you to make her keep her tongue off yourself,’ he
hissed. ‘You would if you were man enough.’

‘Mickie! Mickie!’ said Quill, pulling his arm.

‘What’s that you said? I’ll show you whether I’m man enough or not.’

‘Come on, man, come on!’ Quill said in alarm.

But all that evening Mickie Joe was in a terrible humour. He knew now
that he would never see justice done to a husband in a court of
law. You might as well hold a brief for Oedipus against the Fates.

(1954)