ORPHANS

Hilda Redmond lived across the road from us in Cork. She was a slight
fresh-complexioned woman with a long thin face and a nervous eager
laughing manner. Her husband was tall and big-built, good-looking but
morose, a man who you felt could never have been exactly gay. He was
very attached to his two children, two little girls whom you saw him
walking out in the country with every Sunday afternoon, each holding a
hand while their tall father bowed his head to answer their
questions. Though he and I became rather friendly, he never spoke to
me about his wife except once to make fun of her sense of her own
inadequacy, but this was sufficient to indicate how proud he was of
her. As for Hilda, she is the sort of girl who will always feel
inadequate; it is the way of women like her. Later, when heard her
story, I saw why her sense of inadequacy struck him as so absurd.

Hilda, you see, had been brought up in a town in the North of Ireland,
a small, black, bitter little seaside town rent by politics and
religion. She was an only child, earnest and rather humourless, the
sort of girl who in other circumstances would have devoted herself to
some cause; but, since there was no cause to attract her, she took it
out in piety. She was always a devout girl, conscientious almost to a
fault.

One evening during the war Hilda and another girl were out walking,
when they were accosted by two soldiers. Hilda had always been warned
by her parents to shun soldiers, but as she had also been warned never
to be rude, she found herself in a fix. Her companion, a flighty sort
of a girl, was no help to her. These were well-mannered boys, and
Hilda simply didn’t know how to get rid of them without rudeness. The
result might have been foreseen. Within ten minutes, through no fault
of her own, Hilda was being escorted back to town by a young soldier
called Redmond, who addressed her by her first name. He was a tall lad
with a very bony face and high cheek-bones, and he had a nice way of
smiling with a front tooth that wasn’t there.

He insisted on seeing her to her door, and this proved another trial
because Hilda felt it would be uncivil not to ask him in. She did so
with terror in her heart, and he accepted without a trace of
embarrassment. To Hilda there was something almost sinister about his
free-and-easy air. He greeted her father and mother as if they, too,
were old friends, though her father started every time he heard her
called “Hilda.” Being reserved and quiet people, they were even more
scared of him than Hilda was. Jim Redmond was a charmer, a bit of a
playboy, and he knew you had only to make people laugh to put them at
their ease.

He sat by the fire, bent over it, and picked up the poker —a funny
instinctive gesture that she frequently noticed in him later—and told
them about himself. He had been brought up in a Cork orphanage with
his younger brother, Larry. He described how his mother, when she fell
ill, had brought them to the orphanage door and left them with a
monk. As she went back down the avenue Larry had charged screaming
after her, demanding to be taken home. “Sure, I have no home now,
childeen,” she had said. After that, for close on a year, Larry,
against all the rules, had climbed into Jim’s bed, and Jim had got
punished for it.

He told it well—lightly, almost humorously, so that you could, if you
pleased, consider it as just another good story; but the Cramers did
not smile. Hilda saw the tears in her mother’s eyes. She never forgot
the picture of him that first evening, sitting across the fireplace
from her holding the poker, his eyes wide and unblinking, as he told
them about his youth in a quiet, husky voice that was rough but
well-bred.

When he left, it was with an invitation to come again, and he took
advantage of this to the point of bad manners, but somehow in him it
was not offensive. He took to the house as if he were some stray
animal who had adopted a home; he came at every free hour, to shave or
change or talk to Hilda’s parents, or go walking with her, and it
didn’t seem to matter much to him which of these he did. Her father
and Jim carried on what seemed to be a bloodthirsty feud in the
loudest, angriest voices which made Hilda and her mother tremble, but
after each round they only seemed to like one another better. In many
ways he was more like a brother than a sweetheart, and afterwards
Hilda thought that it might have been the family he cared for rather
than herself. There were things about him that continued to bother
her. He seemed to have no shyness and. no sense of money (which
shocked the Cramer family, who were all almost excessively thrifty),
and if he saw some little present that might conceivably please her
mother or herself, he bought it, even if he had to borrow the money
from Hilda. But even this had its pleasant side because the Cramers
enjoyed the slight feeling of dissipation that it gave them.

When Jim asked her to marry him, Hilda admitted in her candid way that
she liked him better than any fellow she knew (not that her
acquaintance with “fellows” was extensive), but she would have to be
said by her parents.

Her parents, of course, were disappointingly cautious. They liked Jim,
and they agreed that if in twelve months’ time Hilda and he felt the
same way it would be all right, but, meanwhile, there was the war
which made everything impossible, and Hilda was so young, and—though
they did not say this to Jim—they would not like her to be left a
widow so early in life.

Because Jim was easy-going and had adopted them almost as much as they
had adopted him, he could not be too insistent. At the same time Hilda
knew he was desperately anxious to marry at once, and he even talked
in his wild way about deserting the army and returning to Southern
Ireland, where he could not be reached. She felt torn between her
parents and him, and towards the end of his stay, she was strongly
tempted to marry him in spite of them.

She didn’t. Soon after that he was killed, and his death came as a
real shock to her. It was her first brush with tragedy, and she was
the stuff of which tragedy is made. Though her parents were upset,
they could scarcely avoid feeling that they had done the right thing,
but Hilda had no such satisfaction. She was convinced now that she had
done wrong; that Jim, who had never known a home, had wanted to make
one with her and that, through her own weakness of character, she had
deprived him of the chance. She was not fair to herself, but she was
an earnest girl, and earnest people rarely are fair to themselves.

At the same she had been brought up in a rigid code and felt that she
must not let her parents see that she blamed them or that Jim’s death
had changed her. A few months later she started to walk out again,
this time with a young mechanic called Jack Giltinan. He was a small,
plump, full-flavoured man who was going bald at an early age. He had a
small, round, wrinkled face and tiny, brown, twinkling eyes. There was
something birdlike about Jack, in his quickness and lightness, the
cock of his eye, and the angle of his head.

Hilda, who in her earnestness was intent on not pretending to things
she did not feel, thought it her duty to tell him all about Jim and
warn him that she could never feel the same about anyone else. This
did not seem to worry him at all.

“But it’s only natural, Hilda,” he said in his excitable, anxious
way. “After all, it happened, and you can’t make it happen different
now.”

“It’s only that I wouldn’t like to pretend anything, Jack,” she
explained regretfully.

“Och, there’s no need to pretend,” he said, fluttering in an agony of
concern. “If you were the sort to forget a fellow a week after he was
killed, that would be something to pretend about. No man minds things
like that. A fellow likes a girl to be sincere—yes, sincere,” he
added, as though he had only just made up his mind about the
appropriateness of the word. “It’s foolish, don’t you know, to be
jealous of that sort of thing as if there wasn’t love enough for all
of us in the world. My goodness, it’s crazy!”

Instead of pretending it hadn’t happened, they talked of Jim as though
he had been an old friend of both. They discussed what he would have
been like if he had lived, and wondered about his younger brother,
Larry. “I must say I’d like to see that boy,” Jack said
thoughtfully. “I think if I did, maybe I’d understand his brother
better. Sometimes I can’t help wondering about Jim, the way you
describe him. You won’t mind my saying it, Hilda? I sometimes wonder
was he steady.”

Hilda didn’t mind his saying it. He liked people to be “steady” much
as he liked them to be “sincere,” and he grew as embarrassed as a girl
when he noticed examples of “unsteadiness” among his friends.

II Then one evening when she came home from work her mother met her at
the door, her hand to her cheek.

“Guess who’s here!” she whispered dramatically. Mrs. Cramer was a
woman who loved a bit of drama if only she could be sure where the
dramatic interest lay.

“Who’s that, mum?” asked Hilda. She was always amused at her mother’s
hushed histrionics.

“Someone you were wondering about,” whispered her mother, the emphasis
hovering between grief and delight.

“I can’t guess,” said Hilda with a laugh.

“Jim’s brother.”

“Oh, dear!” said Hilda, and it was only later that she remembered what
her first reaction had been.

When she went down the steps to the snug little kitchen, a tall
officer rose slowly from his seat by the fire. She noticed at once how
he resembled Jim, though his face was broader and gloomier, and his
manners had none of his brother’s ease and self-confidence. She
suddenly found herself weeping quietly.

“Och, Larry,” she said, taking his hand in her two, “and it was only
two nights ago that Jack and myself were wondering what happened you.”

“Quite a lot,” he muttered in confusion. “I was in Egypt most of the
time.”

“And where are you staying now, Larry?”

“At the hotel. I was in the orphanage the last ten days. ... They let
us take our holidays there,” he added by way of explanation. “Besides,
I wanted to have another look at it.”

She noticed that he did not explain what he was doing in the North of
Ireland. It could, of course, mean that he was on special duty, but it
left her with a feeling of uneasiness. Her father, eager to know about
the war, monopolized him during supper, and then Jack came in. “Jack
and I are engaged,” Hilda said apologetically. She didn’t know why she
felt she had to tell him at all except that it saved
misunderstandings. “We must celebrate that,” he said firmly and
brought a bottle of whiskey from the pocket of his topcoat. Her father
and Jack each took a glass and then laid off, but he continued to
drink.

“It’s only for my health,” he said with a sly look.

“Why, Larry?” Hilda asked anxiously. “Is your health not good?”

She saw from the way Jack and her father laughed that she had said the
wrong thing as usual, but she didn’t mind because she saw now that
Larry enjoyed a joke exactly like Jim, though his style was slyer and
less boisterous. With Jim you could always tell when he was joking.

Jack, who had an early start at the machine-shop, left early and Hilda
accompanied him to the door to say good-night. She could see he was
impressed by Larry. As he put on his overcoat in his hasty,
absent-minded way, he murmured: “That’s a real nice fellow. He’s been
through a hell of a lot, though. More than he lets on. He needs a good
rest.” Larry stayed till close on midnight, and she had the feeling
that he would have stayed all night if given the chance. He was like
Jim in that also. She guided him through the black-out to his hotel,
past the narrow streets that let through the wind and the noise of the
sea.

“When do you have to go back, Larry?” she asked.

“I still have a few days’ leave,” he replied. “I thought I might spend
them here if I wasn’t in your way.”

“Och, Larry, how could you be in our way?” she asked in distress.

“I went to Cork to see the old spots where Jim and I used to be
together,” he went on. “I’d like to do the same here.”

“I don’t know that there are many places he used to go,” she said
anxiously. “He wasn’t here that long. I could take you to Inish
tomorrow afternoon. Jack has a Union meeting tomorrow night, so he
won’t be free.”

At the same time she was disturbed. Jim’s death, which had sunk into
the background of her thoughts, was now very much in her mind again,
and she found the hurt was no less. When she returned home and sat
before the fire for a few minutes, discussing Larry, it was just as if
Jim were between them, leaning forward from her father’s chair with
the poker in his hand.

She felt it even more the next day when Larry called for her and they
took the bus to the seaside town Jim had liked so much. Jim had always
loved crowds and the sea, unlike Jack, who liked country roads and
brisk cross-country walks, and she realized that she had not been to
Inish since Jim’s death.

“I suppose we stay away because we don’t want to think,” she said as
they walked up the little promenade over the beach.

“I suppose so,” he said doubtfully. “With me it’s the opposite.”

“But, Larry,” she asked timidly, “why do you do it if it upsets you?”

“I didn’t say it upset me,” he replied, frowning. “I like thinking of
him. I dare say that’s why I wanted to meet you and your family. He
wrote so much about you.”

“Oh, I know what you mean,” she said hastily, hearing a hint of
reproach in his words. “I told Jack I could never feel the same about
anyone again. ... It’s not that I wasn’t fond of Jim, Larry, you
know,” she added shyly. “But we have to live just the same, don’t you
think? It’s not fair to other people if we don’t. We have to remember
them, too.”

“Oh, I didn’t mean that,” he said quickly, beginning to blush. “It’s a
different thing entirely for you. You have your father and mother to
consider, but I never had anybody but Jim. The monks wanted me to take
a job in Cork, but I joined the army, hoping to be with him. Maybe if
I had he’d still be alive.”

“Och, Larry, that’s a thing we can’t know,” she sighed. They had
passed the promenade and were walking out along the little pier. They
sat on a heap of boulders and looked across the channel in the evening
light. She turned on him suddenly almost in desperation. Hilda had the
sudden forthrightness of very shy people. “You want to get yourself
killed, Larry, don’t you?” she asked gently.

The question seemed to startle him. He paused before answering.

“I suppose that’s true,” he said almost in a growl. “I never thought
of it that way, but I suppose that’s what I really want.”

“But you shouldn’t, Larry,” she said, pleading with him. “It’s
wrong. Really, it’s wrong. No matter how hard it is, we must try and
live.”

Then he said something in a very low voice, full of shame and anger,
which she just managed to catch.

“I could if I had you.”

She knew then that this was what she had been dreading the whole time
since her mother told her he was in the house. This was what had
brought him there. He had come there, as he had gone to Cork, to say
good-bye to her as to another part of his brother, but all the time
with the unconscious hope that through her he might again make contact
with the living world. And she knew that this was why she had told him
at once that she was engaged, hoping to head him off.

“But that’s impossible, Larry,” she whispered. “I told you already I’m
engaged to Jack.”

He went on talking as though she had not spoken, without looking at
her and almost as though he were talking to himself. He still had the
same resentful expression and angry tone, as though he felt
humiliated.

“I know I drink too much. Brother Murphy in the orphanage said he’d
knock me down next time I let the kids see me like that. But that’s
only since Jim’s death. I could give that up. I know I could. I’m not
boasting.”

“Och, it’s not the drink, Larry,” she cried in distress. “Not that I
like it—I never did, in anyone—but that’s not the reason. It’s Jack,
Larry. Jack helped me when I was feeling wretched, much the way you
are now, and I wouldn’t upset him for anything in the world.”

“I know that, Hilda,” he said, gaining control of himself. “I wasn’t
really expecting you to give him up. You made no mistake in him. He’s
a fine man. I only wanted to ask.”

They drove back over the hills in the dusk, Larry embarrassed and
Hilda almost hysterical. When they separated, he asked if he could
meet her again next evening, and she said at once that she thought it
better not. Then, as she heard the fear make her voice harsh, she
changed and suggested that they meet again the evening before he left.

“But you won’t mind if I ask you not to say a thing like that to me
again? she asked urgently.

“No, Hilda,” he said, “I won’t ask you again,” and she saw that he had
far less hope of influencing her than she had fear of being
influenced.

III Next evening Jack and she went for their favourite walk over the
hills to the main road. It was such a relief to be with him that she
told him the whole story. To her surprise, he seemed very much
disturbed. Somehow, after her previous experience with him, she had
grown to think of him as a rock of sense. He stood in the roadway and
looked at her, his head cocked like a bird’s and a look of dismay on
his round, russet face.

“But you’re not thinking of marrying him, are your” he asked
anxiously.

“Och, no, Jack, of course not,” she said with a shrug. “I asked him
not to mention it, and he won’t. I know he won’t. Why do you ask me
that?”

“Because I don’t like it, that’s all,” Jack said, shaking his head
anxiously. He pulled at a bough till it snapped and then began to
strip it of its leaves as they walked on. “I suppose it’s the way I’m
jealous,” he added with his usual frankness. “Of course, I am, too,
but it’s not only that. It’s unhealthy. That’s how I feel, and that’s
not all jealousy. No, no, no,” he went on, shaking his head again as
though reassuring himself of his own frankness, “it’s not. His brother
is dead, and he can’t bring him back to life. And that’s not the whole
story, Hilda. He likes thinking of his brother because he’s dead. The
dead have no minds of their own. You can’t fight with the dead. He
won’t give up the drink. I watched the way he lowered it. That fellow
will go dippy if he’s not careful.”

“But I thought you said you liked him, Jack,” she protested.

“Och, aye, I like him,” he went on, worrying it out. “Deep down he’s
probably all right. But I don’t like this clinging to the past, to
what can’t be remedied. It’s not healthy, I tell you. You’d want to
mind what you said to him, Hilda.”

“But I said nothing to him, Jack. Only what I told you. And I couldn’t
say more than that.”

“No, no, no, Hilda,” he said contritely. “I know you’d always do the
right thing. It’s only that I can’t help worrying about you. I was
hoping you were over this thing, and now it all seems to be beginning
again.”

As usual he was right. For her it was beginning again, and it was
unhealthy. She saw that Larry was attracted to her by the feeling of
his brother around her, and that this wasn’t right. And, as a result
of her talk with Jack, the whole situation had become more dangerous
and distressing, for while it was easy to say no to Larry while
thinking of her responsibility to Jack, it would not be so in the
future. Listening to him, she had realized that, though beside Larry
he gave an impression of lightness, physical and mental, he was really
in every way the stronger man. She had noticed, even in the way he
pulled himself up over a word, probing his own motives, that however
little there might be of him, he was in complete command of it. What
there was of him was all of a piece, all “steady,” but in Larry, as in
Jim, under the apparent manliness there was a quaking bog of emotion
that probably went back to their childhood loss. Jim, the more
instinctive of the two, would have married and made a home for himself
to take the place of the home he had lost, but Larry wanted a brother
as well as a wife—a brother probably more than a wife—and that, he
could only find in her. It was unhealthy, as Jack said, but maybe
because of that it attracted her more.

“What’s wrong, dear?” her mother asked her over breakfast next
morning. “Did something upset you?”

“Och, it’s only Larry,” Hilda said with an excuse for a smile. “He
asked me to marry him.”

“Marry him?” echoed her mother, feeling that the statement required a
dramatic response but uncertain what form it should take. “There’s a
surprise for you!” she said, clasping her hands, in case the required
response should be joyous. “He didn’t take long,” she added, to
protect her flank.

“Oh, it’s nothing,” said Hilda. “Only nice feeling. He knows how fond
we were of Jim. But it brought things back.”

“He shouldn’t do a thing like that, though,” said her mother,
realizing at last what form her response should take. “What did you
tell him?”

“Oh, just that I was engaged to Jack, of course,” Hilda said wearily,
repeating an argument that had begun to lose its force for her. She
knew now that she needed Jack more than he needed her. Then she said
something that surprised herself almost as much as it did her
mother. “Would Dad and you mind if I did marry him, Mum?”

Her mother, she could see, did not know what to say.

“Did you fight with Jack?” she asked, wiping her hands in her apron.

“Och, no, Mum, nothing like that. I’d never ask a better man than
Jack.”

“Of course, I couldn’t say, dear,” her mother said, seeing that she
was not going to expand on her relations with Jack. “I suppose it’s a
matter for yourself. We wouldn’t know how you felt.”

“I don’t know myself what way I feel,” said Hilda with a feeble
smile. “I can’t make up my mind. Jack says ’tis unhealthy, that it’s
wrong to keep thinking of the dead like that.”

“We can’t help thinking of the dead, child,” her mother said with a
sudden touch of sternness. “The older we grow, the more we have to
live with them. But this has nothing to do with Jim. It’s not Jim
you’d be marrying.”

“Oh, dear!” said Hilda, “if only it was as easy as that to separate
them!”

By this time she had a nervous headache and had to lie down. She was
so scared by the prospect of meeting Larry that she almost asked her
mother to go to the hotel and put it off. Yet when she opened the
front door that evening and saw him on the steps with the permanent
slight stoop of a man who is an inch or two too tall, she was so
relieved that she suddenly found herself becoming joyous and even
silly. Her mother noticed the change in her, and her own manner
towards him became warmer.

“Where will we go, Larry?” she asked almost flirtatiously as they went
down the little street. “As it’s your last night we ought to go
somewhere nice.”

“It was nice enough where we went the last time,” he said.

“No, Larry,” she said, shaking her head. “We won’t go where we went
last time. It’s wrong. Jack says it, and I agree with him. You can’t
like me just because I was Jim’s girl, and I can’t like you because
you’re his brother. We have our own lives to live.”

As she said it she gasped, because she realized that she had already
made up her mind, and the relief was enormous. She knew that Jack was
right, and that it was all unhealthy, but she also knew that she could
deal with it. Now it was only as Jim’s girl, the one living link with
his brother, and beyond that with a mother and home he had forgotten,
that he cared for her, and it might be years before he came to care
for her as the sort of girl she was, but that way she liked him
better. Like all earnest people, Hilda went through life looking for a
cause, and now he was her cause, and she would serve him the best way
she knew.

(1956)
Source: Domestic Relations, 1957