THE PARAGON

Jimmy Garvin lived with his mother in a little house in what we called
the Square, though there wasn’t much of a square about it. He was
roughly my own age, but he behaved as if he were five years older. He
was a real mother’s darling, with pale hair and eyes, a round, soft,
innocent face that seemed to become rounder and softer and more
innocent from the time he began to wear spectacles, and one of those
astonishingly clear complexions that keep their owners looking years
younger than their real age. He talked slowly and carefully in a
precise, old-fashioned way and hardly mixed at all with the other
kids.

His mother was a pretty, excitable woman, with fair hair like Jimmy’s,
a long, thin face, and a great flow of nervous chatter. She had been
separated for years from her husband, who was supposed to be in
England somewhere. She had been a waitress in a club on the South
Mall, and he was reputed to be of a rather better class, as class is
understood in Cork, which is none too well. His family made her a
small allowance, but it was not enough to support herself and Jimmy,
and she eked it out with housework. It was characteristic of our
poverty-stricken locality that the little allowance made her an object
of great envy and that people did not like her and called her “Lady
Garvin.”

Each afternoon after school you would see Jimmy making for one of the
fashionable districts where his mother worked, raising his cap and
greeting any woman he knew in his polite old-fashioned way. His mother
brought him into the kitchen and gave him whatever had been left over
from lunch, and he read there till it was time for them to go home. He
was no trouble; all he ever needed to make him happy was a book—any
book—from the shelves or the lumber room, and he read with his head
resting on his hands, which formed a screen between him and the
domestic world.

“Mum,” he would say, beaming, “this book is about a very interesting
play they have every year in a place called Oberammergau. Oberammergau
is in Germany. In Germany the language they speak is German. Don’t you
think I should learn German?”

“Should you, Jimmy?” she would ask tenderly. “Don’t you think you’re
learning enough as it is?”

“But if we go to Germany,” he would exclaim with his triumphant smile,
“one of us has to know German. If we don’t know how to ask our way to
the right platform, how will we know we’re on the right train? Perhaps
they’ll take us to Russia.”

“Oh, dear,” she would say, “that would be dreadful.”

At the same time she was, of course, terribly proud of him,
particularly if the maid was there to hear him. For as Jimmy told the
story, his mother was always the heroine and he Prince Charming. In a
year or two he would begin to earn a lot of money, and then they would
have a big house on the river, exactly like the one they were in, with
a maid to wait on them who would be paid more than any maid in the
neighbourhood, and they would spend their holidays in France and
Italy. If his mother was friendly with the maid she was working with,
he even offered the position to her. There was nothing like having the
whole thing arranged.

This was how he liked to pass the time while his mother worked,
reading, or—if she had the house to herself—wandering gravely from
room to room and imagining himself already the owner, looking at
himself in the dressing-table mirrors as he poured bay rum on his hair
and brushed it with the silver brushes, and speaking to himself in a
lingo he took to be German, touching the keys of the piano lightly, or
watching from the tall windows as people hurried by along the river
bank in the rainy dusk. Late in the evening his mother and he would go
home together, holding hands, while he still chattered on in his
grave, ancient, innocent way, the way of a child on whom Life has
already laid too heavy a burden.

But as time went on things grew easier. The monks saw that Jimmy was
out on his own as a student. Finally, Mrs. Garvin gave up the
housework and took in boarders. She rented a big house on the road
near the tram-stop and accepted only lodgers of the best class. There
at last Jimmy could have a piano of his own, though the instrument he
did take up was the violin.

II By the time he was ready for the University he had developed into a
tall, gangling, good-looking boy, though his years of study had left
their mark on him. He had a pleasant tenor voice and sang in one of
the city choirs. He had got the highest mark in Ireland in the
Intermediate exams, and his picture had appeared in the Examiner, with
his right arm resting on a pedestal and his left hand supporting it to
keep it from shaking.

And this, of course, was where the trouble really began, for his
father’s family saw the picture and read the story and realized that
they—poor innocent, good-natured, country folk—were being done out of
something by the city slickers. The Garvins were a family you couldn’t
do out of much, and they coveted their share of Jimmy’s glory, all the
more because they saw that he had got it all from the Garvins, who had
always been intellectual—witness Great Uncle Harvey, who had been the
greatest scholar in the town of Macroom, consulted even by the parish
priest. Some sort of reconciliation was necessary; Mrs. Garvin’s
allowance was increased, and she was almost silly with happiness since
it seemed so much like a foretaste of all the things Jimmy had
promised to do for her.

At the same time she feared the Garvins, a feeling with which Jimmy
could not sympathize because he had no fear whatever of his father’s
family. He was mildly curious, that was all. To him they were just
another audience for whom he could perform on the violin or to whom he
could explain the facts of the international situation. At her request
he called on his Aunt Mary, who lived in a new red-brick house a
stone’s throw from the College. Aunt Mary had been involved in a
peculiar marriage with a middle-aged engineer, who had left her some
money but no children. She was a shrewd, coaxing old West Cork woman
with a face that must once have been good-looking. No sooner did she
realize that Jimmy was presentable as well as “smart” than she saw
that it was the will of God that she should annex him. She was the
family genealogist, and while she fed him excellently on tea, homemade
scones, and cake, she filled in for him in a modest and deprecating
way the family background he had missed.

It never occurred to her that this might come as an anticlimax to
Jimmy. He listened to her with a vacant smile, and even made fun of
Great Uncle Harvey to her face, a thing no one had ever presumed to do
before, and when he left her she sat, looking out the window after his
tall, swinging figure, and wondered if it was really worth her while
to pay the call she had promised.

Mrs. Garvin had even worse misgivings.

“I don’t want that woman in the house, Jimmy,” she said, clasping her
hands feverishly. “She’s the one I really blame for the trouble with
your father.”

“Well, she’s hardly going to make trouble between you and me,” said
Jimmy, who had privately decided that his aunt was a fool.

“That’s all you know,” his mother said bitterly.

In this she was right, but even she did not realize the full extent of
the trouble Aunt Mary was preparing for them when she called. From
Jimmy’s point of view there was nothing wrong. Aunt Mary cluck-clucked
with astonishment when he played the violin for her, when he sang, and
when he really explained what was happening in Europe.

“Oh, Jimmy,” she said, “I’d love your father to hear you sing. You
have his voice. I can hear him in you.”

“Oh, no, I don’t think so, Mrs. Healy,” his mother said
hastily. “Jimmy has far too much to do.”

“Ah, I was only thinking of a week or ten days,” Aunt Mary
said. “’Twould be a change for him.”

“I think he’s much too young to travel alone,” Mrs. Garvin said,
quivering. “In a year or two, perhaps.”

“Oh, really, Mum!” exclaimed Jimmy, cast down from the heights of
abstract discussion. “I think I’m able to travel alone by now.”

Aunt Mary had engaged his interest, and well she knew it. He had
always been curious in a human way about the father he did not
remember, and, being a born learner, was even more curious about
England, a country he was always reading about and hearing of, but had
never seen. He had more than his share of boyish vanity, and he knew
that English contacts would assure him prestige among his
fellow-students.

For twelve months, off and on, he argued with his mother about it, but
each time it alarmed her again. When she finally did consent, it was
only because she felt that it might be unfair to deprive him of a
chance of widening his knowledge of the world.

So, at least, she said. But whatever she might say, and for all her
fears, she was flattered, and with every bit of feminine vanity in her
she desired the opportunity of showing off to her husband and his
family the child they had abandoned and whom she had made into a
paragon.

III Jimmy’s first sight of his father in Paddington Station came as a
considerable shock to him. Somehow, whenever he had imagined his
father it had been as a heavy man with a big red face and a grey
moustache, slow-spoken and portentous; but the man who met him in a
bowler hat and a pale grey tie was tall and stringy with a neat dark
moustache and an irritable, worried air. His speech was pleasant and
well-bred; his manner was unaffected without being demonstrative; and
he had a sense of quiet fun that put Jimmy at his ease. But he didn’t
like to see such a distinguished-looking man carrying his cheap
suitcase for him.

“Do let me carry that!” he said anxiously.

“Oh, that’s all right, son,” his father said lightly. “By the way,” he
added smoothly, “you’ll find I talk an awful lot, but you don’t have
to pay any attention. If you talk, too, we’ll get on fine. That’s a
hell of a heavy bag. We’d better get a taxi.”

It was another surprise to Jimmy when, instead of taking him to some
boarding house in the suburbs, his father took him on an electric
train to a station twenty-odd miles from London. To Jimmy it seemed
that this must be the heart of the country, but the big houses and the
tall red buses he saw did not seem countrified. There was a car
waiting outside the station, and his father drove him over high hilly
country full of woods and streams down into a little red-brick market
town, with a market house on stilts in the middle of the street, and
up the hills again. To Jimmy it was all new and exciting, and he kept
looking out and asking intelligent questions to which he rarely got
satisfactory answers.

“Oh, this damn country!” his father said testily. “You have to drive
five miles out of your way to avoid a hole in the road that’s
preserved because Alfred the Great fell into it. For God’s sake, look
at this for a main road!”

While Jimmy was still wondering how you would preserve a hole in the
road, they reached a village on top of the hills, a long, low street
open on to a wide common, with a school, a church, a row of low
cottages, and a public house with a brightly painted inn-sign and with
green chairs and tables ranged in front of it. They stopped a little
up the road outside a cottage with high pilastered chimneys and
diamond-paned windows, and a row of tall elms behind.

“You’d want to mind your head in this damn hole,” his father said as
he pushed in the door. “It may have been all right for Queen
Elizabeth, but it’s not all right for me.”

Jimmy found himself in a combination living- and dining-room with a
huge stone fireplace and low oak beams. A door on the right led into a
modern kitchen, and another at the end of the room seemed to lead on
to a stairway of sorts. A woman and a little girl of four or five came
slowly through this door, the woman lowering her head.

“This is Martha, Jim,” his father tossed off lightly as he kissed
her. “Any time you want her, just let me know. She’s on the youthful
side for me. Gussie, you old humbug,” he added to the little girl,
“this is your big brother. If you’re nice to him he might give you
five bob.”

Jimmy was stunned, and his face showed it. This was something he had
never anticipated and did not know how to deal with. He was too
innocent to know even if it was right or wrong. Of course, things
might be different in England. But, whatever he believed, his
behaviour had been conditioned by years of deference, and he smiled
shyly and shook hands with Martha, a heavy, good-looking woman, who
smiled back without warmth. As for Gussie, she stood in a corner with
her legs splayed and a finger in her mouth.

“Sherry for you, son,” his father called from the farther room. “I
have to take this damn whiskey for my health.”

“Before you take it, I’d better show you your room,” said Martha,
picking up his case. “You’ll need to mind your head.”

“Oh, please, Martha!” he said anxiously, but she preceded him with the
bag, through the farther room where his father was measuring whiskey
in a glass against the light and up a staircase similar to that in the
dining-room. In spite of the warning, Jimmy bumped his head badly, and
looked in good-humoured disgust at the low doorway. The stairs opened
on to an attic room with high beams, a floor that sloped under the
grey rug as though the house were on the point of collapse, and a low
window that overlooked the garden, the roadway, and the common beyond,
a cold blue green compared with the golden green of home. Beyond the
common was a row of distant hills.

When he went downstairs again they all sat in the big room under his,
and he took the sherry his father offered him. He was too shy to say
he didn’t drink. It was a nice room, not too heavily furnished, with
its diamond-paned windows looking on to the gardens at the front and
back, and with a small piano. This gave Jimmy the opening he
needed. It seemed that Martha played the piano. In spite of their
common interest, he found her very disconcerting. She was polite, and
her accent was pleasant, but there seemed to him to be no warmth in
her. He had trained himself to present a good impression without
wasting time; he knew that he was polite, that he was intelligent, and
that he had a fine voice; and it was a new experience for him to find
his friendliness coming back to him like a voice in an empty house. It
made him raise his voice and enlarge his gestures until he felt that
he was even creating a disturbance. His father seemed to enjoy his
loud-voiced caricature of Aunt Mary extolling the scholarship of Great
Uncle Harvey, a character who struck Jimmy as being pure farce, but a
moment later, having passed from amusement to indignation, he was
irritably denouncing Great Uncle Harvey as the biggest bloody old
humbug that had ever come out of Macroom. He was a man who seemed to
move easily from mood to mood, and Jimmy, whose own moods were static
and monumental, found himself laughing outright at the sheer
unexpectedness of his remarks.

After supper, when Martha had gone to put Gussie to bed, his father
stood with his hands behind his back before the big stone fireplace
(which, according to him, had already asphyxiated three historical
personages and would soon do for him). He was developing a stomach and
a double chin, and Jimmy noticed a fundamental restlessness about him,
as when he failed to find some letter he was searching for and called
petulantly for Martha. She came in with an expressionless air, found
the letter, and went out again. He was a man of many enthusiasms. At
one moment he was emotional about Cork and its fine schools, so
different from English ones, where children never learned anything but
insolence, but a few minutes later, almost without a change of tone,
he seemed to be advising Jimmy to get out as quick as he could before
the damn place smothered him. When Jimmy, accustomed to an adoring
feminine audience, gave him the benefit of his views on the Irish
educational system, its merits and drawbacks, he sat with crossed
legs, looking away and smiling as though to himself while he twirled
the glass in his long sensitive fingers. He was something of a puzzle
to Jimmy.

“I suppose you must think me a bit of a blackguard,” he said gruffly,
rising again to give the fire a kick. “The truth is, I hadn’t the
faintest idea what was happening you. Your mother wouldn’t write—not
that I’m criticizing

her, mind you, We didn’t get on, and she deserves every credit for
you, whatever your aunt or anyone else may say. I’d be proud of her if
she was my mother.”

“So I am,” said Jimmy beaming with a smile.

“All I mean is that she put herself to a lot of unnecessary trouble,
not letting me help you. I can easily see you through college if
that’s what you want.”

“Thanks,” Jimmy replied with the same air of triumph. “But I think I
can manage pretty well on scholarships.”

“All the better. Anyway, you can have the money. It’s an
investment. It always pays to have one member of the family with
brains: you never know when you’ll need them. I’m doing fairly well,”
he added complacently. “Not that you can be sure of anything. Half the
people in a place like this are getting by on credit.”

It was all very strange to Jimmy. He bumped his head again going up to
bed, and chuckled to himself. From far away he heard the whistle of a
train, probably going north on its way up the valley towards Ireland,
and for a long time he lay in bed, his hands joined on his stomach,
wondering what it all meant and what he should do about it. It became
plainer when he contemplated it like this. He would just ask his
father as man to man whether or not he and Martha were married, and if
the answer was unsatisfactory, he would pack his bag and go, money or
no money. No doubt his father would make a scene, and it would all be
very unpleasant, but later on he would realize that Jimmy was
right. Jimmy would explain this to him, and make it clear that
anything he did was done as much in his father’s interests as his own;
that nothing was to be gained by defying the laws of morality and the
church. Jimmy knew he had this power of dominating people; he had seen
old women’s eyes filled with tears when he had sung “I’ll Take You
Home Again, Kathleen,” and, though he rejoiced in the feeling of
confidence it gave him, he took care never to abuse it, never to try
and convince unless he was first convinced himself. He fell asleep in
a haze of self-righteousness.

Next morning, after his father had driven him to Mass in the gymnasium
of the local club, it did not seem quite so easy. His father seemed a
more formidable character than any he had yet met. But Jimmy had
resolution and obstinacy. He summed it all up and asked in a casual
sort of way: “Was it there you were married?”

His father’s face grew stern, but he answered urbanely enough.

“No. Why?”

“Nothing,” Jimmy said weakly. “I just wondered.”

“Whether a marriage in a gymnasium would be binding? I was wondering
the same thing myself.”

And, as he got into the car, Jimmy realized that this was as far as
ever he would get with his big scene. Whatever the reason was, he was
overawed by his father. He put it down partly to the difference in
age, and partly to the inflexibility of his own reactions. His
father’s moods moved too fast for him; beside him he felt like a
knight in heavy armour trying to chase a fleet-footed mountainy
man. He resolved to wait for a more suitable opportunity. They drove
on, and his father stopped the car near the top of the hill, where
there was a view of the valley up which the railway passed. Grey trees
squiggled across it in elaborate patterns, all grey church towers and
red-tiled roofs showed between them in the sunlight that overflowed
into it from heavy grey-and-white clouds.

“Lovely, isn’t it?” his father said quietly.

Then he smiled, and suddenly his face became extraordinarily young and
innocent, There was a sort of sweetness in it that for a moment took
Jimmy’s breath away.

“You see, son,” he said, “When I was sixteen my father should have
taken me aside and told me something about women. But he was a shy
man, and my mother wouldn’t have liked it, so, you see, I’m in a bit
of a mess. I’d have done the same for you, but I never got the chance,
and I dare say when you’re a bit older you’ll find yourself in a
thundering big mess, too. I wouldn’t worry too much about it if I were
you. Time enough for that when it happens.”

Then he drove on to the pub, apparently under the impression that he
had now explained everything. It struck Jimmy that perhaps he would
never reach the point of asking his father for an explanation.

His father had changed again and become swaggering and insolent. He
made Jimmy play a game of darts with him, flirted with the woman of
the house, and made cutting remarks to her husband about the local
cricket team which her husband seemed to enjoy. Jimmy had the
impression that for some reason they all liked his father.

“Silly bloody game, anyway,” he added with a snort. “More like a
serial story than a game. Give me a good rousing game of hurling where
somebody’s head gets split.”

“God, this is a beautiful country,” he muttered to Jimmy, standing at
the door with one hand in his trousers pocket, the other holding his
pint, while he smiled across the sunlit common, and again his face had
the strange sweetness that Jimmy had noticed on it before. “You’d be a
long time at home before you could go into a country pub on Sunday and
meet a crowd like this.”

There was a sort of consistency about his father’s inconsistencies
that reminded Jimmy of the sky with its pennants of blue and cascades
of silver, but he found he did not like him any the less for these. He
did not feel quite so comfortable on the train back to Ireland,
wondering what he should tell his mother, feeling that he should tell
her nothing, and knowing at the same time that this was something he
was almost incapable of doing.

Naturally, he told her everything in the first half-hour, and, when
she grew disgusted and bitter, felt he had betrayed a confidence.

“What did I say about your aunt?” she exclaimed. “All the time she was
pressing you to go there, she knew what it was like.”

“I’m not so sure that she did know,” Jimmy said doubtfully. “I don’t
think Father tells her much.”

“Oh, Jimmy, you’re too innocent to know what liars and cheats they all
are, all the Garvins.”

“I didn’t think there was much of the cheat about Father,” Jimmy
protested. “He was honest enough about it with me.”

“He was brazen about it,” his mother said contemptuously. “Like all
liars. ’Tisn’t alike.”

“I’m not sure that he was brazen,” Jimmy protested weakly, trying in
vain to assert himself again in his old authoritative way. “It’s just
that he’s not a good liar. And, besides,” he added knowingly, folding
his hands on his lap and looking at her owlishly over his spectacles,
“we don’t know the sort of temptations people have in a place like
England.”

“Temptations aren’t confined to England,” she said with a flash of
temper.

By this time she was regretting bitterly her own folly in allowing him
to visit his father. She resented, too, his father’s having brought
him to a public house, even though Jimmy explained that he had only
drunk cider, and that public houses there were different. But her full
bitterness about this was reserved till later, when Jimmy started
going to public houses on his own. He now had a small allowance from
his father, and proceeded to indulge his mother and himself. He had
made friends with a group that centred on the College: a couple of
instructors, some teachers, some Civil Servants—the usual run of
small-town intellectuals. Up to now, Jimmy had been a young fellow
with no particular friends, partly because he had had no time for
them, partly because, like most kids who have no time for friends, he
was scared of them when they made advances to him.

It was about this time, too, that he acknowledged my existence, and
the pair of us went for occasional walks together. I admired him
almost extravagantly. Whatever he did, from the way he chose his ties
to the way he greeted a woman on the road or the way he climbed a
fence, was done with an air, while I stumbled over all of them. It was
the same with ideas; by the time I had picked myself up after making a
point, Jimmy would be crossing the next obstacle, looking back at me
and laughing triumphantly. He had a disciplined personality and a
trained mind, and, though he was sometimes impressed by my odd bits of
knowledge, he was puzzled by my casual, impractical interests and
desultory reading. He was a good teacher, so he lent me some
elementary books and then started to take me through them step by
step, but without much effect. I had not even the groundwork of
knowledge, while he was a natural examination-passer with a power of
concentration that I lacked completely.

At the same time I was put off by his other friends. They argued as
people do who spend too much of their time in public houses—for
effect. They were witty and clever and said wounding things. In spite
of my shortcomings, I had a sort of snobbery all my own. I felt they
were failures, and I had the feeling that Jimmy only liked them for
that very reason. His great weakness was showing off. I sat with them
one evening, watching Jimmy lower his beer and listening to him defend
orthodoxy against a couple of the others who favoured various forms of
agnosticism. He argued well enough in the stubborn manner of a
first-year philosophy student. Then he sang for us, a little too well
for the occasion. I did not like it, the picture of the fellow I had
known as a slim-faced, spectacled school-boy, laying down the law and
singing in a pub. He was idling, he was drinking—though not anything
like as much as his mother believed—and he had even picked up a girl,
a school-teacher called Anne Reidy with whom he went to Crosshaven on
week-ends. In fact, for the first time in his life Jimmy was enjoying
himself, and, like all those who have not enjoyed themselves in
childhood, he was enjoying himself rather too much.

At first his mother was bewildered; then she became censorious and
bitter. Naturally she blamed his father for it all. She even told
Jimmy that his father had deliberately set out to corrupt him just to
destroy whatever she had been able to do for him, which wasn’t exactly
tactful as Jimmy felt most of the credit was due to himself. And then
she, who for all those years had managed to keep her mind to herself,
started to complain to Jimmy about her marriage, and the drinking,
cheating, and general light-mindedness of his father, exactly as
though it had all just newly happened. Jimmy listened politely but
with a wooden face, which would have revealed to anyone but her that
he thought she was obsessed by the subject.

She was a pathetic figure because, though she was proud and sensitive
beyond any woman I knew—the sort who would not call at all unless she
brought some little gift, and who took flight if you put on the kettle
or looked at the clock—she haunted our house. She was, I think,
secretly convinced that I had influence over Jimmy. It made me
uncomfortable because not only did I realize how much it cost her to
plead for her paragon with a nonentity like myself, but I knew I had
no influence over him. He was far too clever to be influenced by
anyone like me. He was also, though I do not mean it in a derogatory
way, too conceited. Once when I did try in a clumsy way to advise him,
he laughed uproariously.

“Listen to him!” he said. “Listen to the steady man! Why, you slug,
you never in your whole life put in one week’s connected work at
anything.”

“That may be true enough, Jimmy,” I said without rancour, “but all the
same you should watch out. You could lose that scholarship.”

“Oh, I don’t think so,” he said with a smile which expressed his
enormous self-confidence. “But at any rate, even if I did, the old man
has plenty.”

But, though his mother continued to appeal to me silently, in
conversation she developed a sort of facile pessimism that I found
harder to understand. It was a kind of cynicism which failed to come
off.

“Oh, I know what will happen,” she said with a shrug. “I’ve seen it
happen before. His father will get tired of him as he gets tired of
everybody, and then he’ll find himself with nothing.”

IV

That was not quite how it happened. One month Jimmy’s allowance failed
to arrive, and when he wrote his father a bantering letter,
threatening to refer the matter to his lawyers, it was Martha who
replied. There was no banter about her. His father had been arrested
for embezzlement, and house, furniture, and business had all been
swallowed up. Martha wrote as though she blamed his father for
everything.

“I suppose God’s vengeance catches up on them all sooner or later,”
Mrs. Garvin said bitterly.

“Something caught up on him,” Jimmy said with a stunned air. “The poor
devil must have been half out of his mind for years.”

“And now it’s the turn of the widows and orphans he robbed,” said his
mother.

“Oh, he didn’t rob anybody,” Jimmy said.

“You should tell the police that.”

“I’m sure the police know it already,” said Jimmy. “People like Father
don’t steal. They find themselves saddled with an expensive wife or
family, and they borrow, intending to put it back. Everybody does it
one way or another, but some people don’t know where to stop. Then
they get caught up in their own mistakes. I wish to God I’d known when
I was there. I might have been able to help him.”

“You’ll have enough to do to help yourself,” she said sharply.

“Oh, I’ll manage somehow,” he said doubtfully. “I dare say I can get a
job.”

“As a labourer?” she asked mockingly.

“Not necessarily,” he said steadily, looking at her with some
surprise. “I can probably get an office job.”

“Yes,” she said bitterly, “as a clerk. And all your years of study to
go for nothing.”

That was something she scarcely needed to remind him of, though when
he tried to get help he was reminded even more forcefully of the fact
which most paragons learn sooner or later: that a cracked paragon is
harder to dispose of than plain delft. He had made too much of a fool
of himself. The County Council scholarship would not be renewed, and
the College would promise nothing.

Even his mother had lost confidence in him, and as time went on his
relations with her became more strained. She could not resist throwing
the blame for everything on his father, and here she found herself up
against a wall of obstinacy in him. He had already silently separated
himself from his Aunt Mary, who had thrown herself on him in tears and
told him his father had dragged the good name of the Garvins in the
gutter. Jimmy didn’t know about the good name of the Garvins, but
somewhere in the back of his mind was a picture of his father facing a
police officer alone with that weak innocent smile on his face, and
whenever he thought of it a cloud came over his mind. He even wrote
affectionately to his father in prison—something his mother found it
hard to forgive. Her taunts had become almost a neurosis because she
could not stop them, and when she began, nothing was too extravagant
for her. Not only had his father deliberately corrupted Jimmy, but it
would almost seem as if he had got himself gaoled with no other object
than that of disgracing him.

“Oh, give it a rest, Mum,” Jimmy said, glowering at her from over his
book. “I made a bit of a fool of myself, but Father had nothing to do
with that.”

“Don’t tell me it wasn’t his fault, Jimmy,” she said cuttingly. “Is it
you who never touched drink till you set foot in his house? You who
never looked at the side of the road a girl walked at till you stayed
with that—filthy thing ?”

“All right, all right,” he said angrily. “Maybe I am a blackguard, but
if I am, that’s my fault, not his. He only did what he thought was the
best thing for me. Why do you always assume that everybody but
yourself is acting with bad motives?”

“That’s what the police seem to think, too,” she said.

Jimmy suddenly lost all control of himself. Like all who have missed
the safety-valves of childhood, he had an almost insane temper. He
flung his book to a corner of the room and went to the door, white and
shaking.

“Damn you!” he said in a low bitter voice, “I think you’re almost glad
to see that poor unfortunate. devil ruined.”

It scared her, because for the first time she saw that her son, the
boy for whom she had slaved her life away, was no better than a
stranger. But it scared Jimmy even more. He had become so accustomed
to obedience, gentleness, and industry that he could not even imagine
how he had come to speak to his mother in such a tone. He, too, was a
stranger to himself, a stranger who seemed to have nothing whatever to
do with the Jimmy Garvin who had worked so happily every evening at
home, and all he could do was to get away from it all with a couple of
cronies and drink and argue till he was himself again.

What neither of them saw was that the real cause of the breach was
that his mother wanted him back, wanted him all to herself as in the
old days, and to forget that he had ever met or liked his foolish,
wayward father, and that this was something he could not forget, even
for her.

The situation could not last, of course. One evening he came in,
looking distressed and pale.

“Mum,” he said with a guilty air, “I have the offer of a room with a
couple of students in Sheares’ Street. I can help them with their
work, and Ill have a place to myself to do my own. I think it’s a good
idea, don’t you?”

She sat in the dusk, looking into the fire with a strained air, but
when she spoke her voice was even enough.

“Oh, is that so, Jimmy?” she said. “I suppose this house isn’t good
enough for you any longer?”

“Now, you know it’s not that, Mum,” he replied. “It’s just that I have
to work, and I can’t while you and I are sparring. This is only for
the time being, and, anyway, I can always spend the week-ends here.”

“Very well, Jimmy,” she said coldly. “If the house is here you’ll be
welcome. Now, I’d better go and pack your things.”

By the time he left, he was in tears, but she was like a woman of
ice. Afterwards she came to our house and sat over the fire in the
kitchen. She tried to speak with calm, but she was shivering all over.

“Wisha, child, what ails you?” Mother asked in alarm.

“Nothing, only Jimmy’s left me,” Mrs. Garvin answered in a thin,
piping voice

“Who?” Mother asked in horror, clasping her hands. “Jimmy?”

“Packed and left an hour ago. He’s taken a room with some students in
town. ... I suppose it was the best thing. He said he couldn’t stand
living in the same house with me.’

“Ah, for goodness sake!” wailed mother.

“That’s what he said, Mrs. Delaney.”

“And who cares what he said?” Mother cried in a blaze of anger. “How
can you be bothered with what people say? Half their time they don’t
know what they’re saying. Twenty-five years I’m living in the same
house as Mick Delaney, and where would I be if I listened to what he
says? ... ’Tis for the best, girl,” she added gently, resting her hand
on Mrs. Garvin’s knee. “’Tisn’t for want of love that ye were hurting
one another. Jimmy is a fine boy, and he’ll be a fine man yet.”

Almost immediately Jimmy got himself a small job in the courthouse
with the taxation people. In the evenings he worked, and over the
week-ends he came home. There was no trouble about this. He enjoyed
his good meals and his soft bed, and in the evenings you could hear
him bellowing happily away at the piano. His mother and he were better
friends than they had been for a long time, but something seemed to
have broken in her. Nothing, I believe, could now have roused her to
any fresh effort. At the best of times she would have taken her son’s
liberation hard, but now the facile pessimism that had only been a
crust over her real feelings seemed to have become part of her. It
wasn’t obtrusive or offensive; when we met she still approached me
with the same eagerness, but suddenly she would give a bitter little
smile and shrug and say: “It’s well to be you, Larry. You still have
your dreams.” She seemed to me to spend more of her time in the
church.

The rooms in Sheares’ Street were not all they might have been, and
Jimmy finally married Anne Reidy, the girl he had been walking out
with. Anne had always struck me as a fine, jolly, bouncing girl. They
lived in rooms on the Dyke Parade with the gas stove in the hall and
the bathroom up the stairs, and even for these small comforts Anne had
to hold down a job and dodge an early pregnancy, which, according to
her, was “a career in itself.” Jimmy was studying for a degree from
London University, and doing the work by post. They were two
hot-blooded people and accustomed to comfort, and the rows between
them were shattering. Later they reported them in detail to me, almost
as though they enjoyed them, which perhaps they did. Sometimes I met
them up the tree-shadowed walk late at night, and went back for an
hour to drink tea with them. Jimmy was thin, and there was a
translucency about his skin that I didn’t like. I guessed they were
pretty close to starvation, yet in their queer way they seemed to be
enjoying that, too.

By this time Jimmy could have had a permanent job in the County
Council—people like him have the knack of making themselves
indispensable—but he turned it down, foolishly, I thought. He wanted a
degree, though he seemed to me to have no clear notion of what use it
was going to be to him when he got it. He talked of Anne and himself
getting jobs together in England, but that struck me as no more than
old talk. It was only later that I understood it. He wanted a degree
because it was the only pattern of achievement he understood, and the
only one that could re-establish him in his own esteem. This was where
he had failed, and this was where he must succeed. And this was what
they were really fighting for, living on scraps, quarrelling like
hell, dressing in old clothes, and cracking jokes about their poverty
till they had the bailiffs in and Anne’s career of childlessness had
broken down with a bang.

Then one night I found them at supper in a little restaurant in a lane
off Patrick Street. Jimmy was drunk and excited, and when he saw me he
came up to me demonstratively and embraced me.

“Ah, the stout man!” he shouted with his eyes burning. “The steady
Delaney! Look at him! Thirty, if he’s a day, and not a letter to his
name!”

“He’s celebrating,” Anne said rather unnecessarily, laughing at me
with her mouth full. “He’s got his old degree. Isn’t it a blessing?
This is our first steak in. six months.”

“And what are you going to do now?” I asked.

“Tomorrow,” said Jimmy, “we’re going on our honeymoon.”

“Baby and all!” Anne said, and exploded in laughter. “Now tell him
where!”

“Why wouldn’t I tell him where?” shouted Jimmy. “Why wouldn’t I tell
everybody? What’s wrong with going to see the old man in gaol before
they let him out? Nobody else did, even that bitch of a woman. Never
went to see him and never sent the kid.”

“That’s right,” Anne said almost hysterically. “Now tell him about
baby sister Gussie. That’s the bit my mother is dying to hear.”

“You know what your mother can do!” Jimmy said exultantly. “Where’s
that waitress?” he called, his long, pale face shining. “Delaney needs
drink.”

“Garvin has too much drink,” said Anne. “And I’ll be up all night
putting wet cloths on his head. ... You should see him when he’s
sick,” she said indignantly. “‘Oh, I’m finished! Oh, I’m going to
die!’ That’s what his mother did for him!”

That may have been what his mother had done for him—I didn’t know—but
what interested me was what his father had done for him. All that
evening, while they chattered and laughed in a sort of frenzy of
relief, I was thinking of the troubles that Jimmy’s discovery of his
father had brought into his life, but I was thinking, too, of the
strength it had given him to handle them. Now whatever he had
inherited from his parents he had combined into something that
belonged to neither of them, that was his alone, and that would keep
him master of his destiny till the day he died.

(1957)
Source: Domestic Relations, 1957