Collected Stories (97 page)

A few weeks later she was taken to a private nursing home. “Just for a short rest, sister,” as Mother Agatha said. “It's a very pleasant place, and you will find a lot of other religious there who need a rest as well.”

T
HERE FOLLOWED
an endless but timeless phase of weeping and confusion, when all May's ordinary life was broken up and strange men burst into her room and examined her and asked questions she did not understand and replied to questions of hers in a way that showed they had not understood them either. Nobody seemed to realize that she was the last Catholic in the world; nobody understood her tears about it. Above all, nobody seemed to be able to hear the gramophone record that played continuously in her head, and that stopped only when they gave her an injection.

Then, one spring day, she went into the garden for a walk and a young nurse saw her back to her room. Far ahead of them, at the other end of a long, white corridor, she saw an old man with his back to her, and remembered that she had seen his face many times before and had perceived, without paying attention to, his long, gloomy, ironic face. She knew she must have remembered him, because now she could see nothing but his back, and suddenly the words “Who is that queer old man?” broke through the sound of the gramophone record, surprising her as much as they seemed to surprise the young nurse.

“Oh, him!” the nurse said, with a smile. “Don't you know him? He's here for years.”

“But why, nurse?”

“Oh, he doesn't think he's a priest, and he is one really, that's the trouble.”

“But how extraordinary!”

“Isn't it?” the nurse said, biting her lower lip in a smile. “Cripes, you'd think 'twas something you wouldn't forget. He's nice, really, though,” she added gravely, as though she felt she had been criticizing him.

When they reached May's room, the young nurse grinned again, in a guilty way, and May noticed that she was extravagantly pretty, with small, gleaming front teeth.

“You're
getting all right, anyway,” she said.

“Oh, really?” May said vaguely, because she knew she was not getting all right. “Why do you think that, nurse?”

“Oh, you get to spot things,” the nurse said with a shrug, and left May uncomforted, because she didn't know if she really did get well how she could face the convent and the other nuns again. All of them, she felt, would be laughing at her. Instead of worrying about the nuns, she went into a mournful daydream about the old priest who did not think he was a priest, and next day, when her father called, she said intensely, “Daddy, there's a priest in here who doesn't believe he's a priest—isn't that extraordinary?” She did not hear the tone of her own voice or know how reasonable it sounded, and so she was surprised when her father looked away and started fumbling mechanically in his jacket pocket for a cigarette.

“Well, you don't have to think you're a nun either,” he said, with an unsteady voice. “Your mother has your own room ready for you when you come home.”

“Oh, but Daddy, I have to go back to the convent.”

“Oh, no you don't. No more convents for you, young lady! That's fixed up already with Mother Superior. It was all a mistake from the beginning. You're coming straight home to your mother and me.”

Then May knew she was really going to get well, and she wanted to go home with him at once, not to go back up the stairs behind the big iron door where there was always an attendant on duty. She knew that going back home meant defeat, humiliation, and despair, but she no longer cared even about that. She just wanted to take up her life again at the point where it had gone wrong, when she had first met the Corkerys.

H
ER FATHER
brought her home and acted as though he had rescued her from a dragon's den. Each evening, when he came home from work, he sat with her, sipping at his drink and talking quietly and comfortably. She felt he was making great efforts to assure that she felt protected and relaxed. Most of the time she did, but there were spells when she wanted her mother to put her back in the nursing home.

“Oh, I couldn't do that,” her mother said characteristically. “It would upset your poor father too much.”

But she did discuss it with the doctor—a young man, thin and rather unhealthy-looking, who looked as though he, too, was living on his nerves—and he argued with May about it.

“But what am I to do, doctor, when I feel like this?” she asked plaintively.

“Go out and get jarred,” he said briskly.

“Get what, doctor?” she asked feebly.

“Jarred,” he repeated without embarrassment. “Stoned. Polluted. Drunk. I don't mean alone, of course. You need a young fellow along with you.”

“Oh, not that again, doctor!” she said, and for some reason her voice came out exactly like Mother Agatha's—which was not how she intended it to sound.

“And some sort of a job,” he went on remorselessly. “There isn't a damn thing wrong with you except that you think you're a failure. You're not, of course, but as a result of thinking you are you've scratched the surface of your mind all over, and when you sit here like this, looking out at the rain, you keep rubbing it so that it doesn't heal. Booze, love-making, and hard work—they keep your hands away from the sore surface, and then it heals of its own accord.”

She did her best, but it didn't seem to heal as easily as all that. Her father got her a job in the office of a friend, and she listened, in fascination, to the chatter of the other secretaries. She even went out in the evening with a couple of them and listened to their common little love stories. She knew if she had to wait until she talked like that about fellows in order to be well, her case was hopeless. Instead, she got drunk and told them how she had been for years in love with a homosexual, and, as she told it, the story became so hopeless and dreadful that she sobbed over it herself. After that she went home and wept for hours, because she knew that she had been telling lies, and betrayed the only people in the world whom she had really cared for.

Her father made a point of never referring at all to the Corkerys, the convent, or the nursing home. She knew that for him this represented a real triumph of character, because he loathed the Corkerys more than ever for what he believed they had done to her. But even he could not very well ignore the latest development in the saga. It seemed that Mrs. Corkery herself had decided to become a nun. She announced placidly to everyone that she had done her duty by her family, who were now all comfortably settled, and that she felt free to do what she had always wanted to do anyhow. She discussed it with the Dean, who practically excommunicated her on the spot. He said the family would never live down the scandal, and Mrs. Corkery told him it wasn't the scandal that worried him at all but the loss of the one house where he could get a decent meal. If he had a spark of manliness, she said, he would get rid of his housekeeper, who couldn't cook, was a miserable sloven, and ordered him about as if he were a schoolboy. The Dean said she would have to get permission in writing from every one of her children, and Mrs. Corkery replied calmly that there was no difficulty whatever about that.

May's father didn't really want to crow, but he could not resist pointing out that he had always said the Corkerys had a slate loose.

“I don't see anything very queer about it,” May said stubbornly.

“A woman with six children entering a convent at her age!” her father said, not even troubling to grow angry with her. “Even the Dean realizes it's mad.”

“It
is
a little bit extreme, all right,” her mother said, with a frown, but May knew she was thinking of her.

May had the feeling that Mrs. Corkery would make a very good nun if for no other reason than to put her brother and Mother Agatha in their place. And of course, there were other reasons. As a girl she had wanted to be a nun, but for family reasons it was impossible, so she had become a good wife and mother, instead. Now, after thirty years of pinching and scraping, her family had grown away from her and she could return to her early dream. There was nothing unbalanced about that, May thought bitterly.
She
was the one who had proved unbalanced.

For a while it plunged her back into gloomy moods, and they were made worse by the scraps of gossip that people passed on to her, not knowing how they hurt. Mrs. Corkery had collected her six letters of freedom and taken them herself to the Bishop, who had immediately given in. “Spite!” the Dean pronounced gloomily. “Nothing but spite—all because I don't support his mad dream of turning a modern city into a medieval monastery.”

On the day of Mrs. Corkery's reception, May did not leave the house at all. It rained, and she sat by the sitting-room window, looking across the city to where the hills were almost invisible. She was living Mrs. Corkery's day through—the last day in the human world of an old woman who had assumed the burden she herself had been too weak to accept. She could see it all as though she were back in that mean, bright little chapel, with the old woman lying out on the altar, covered with roses like a corpse, and an old nun shearing off her thin gray locks. It was all so intolerably vivid that May kept bursting into sudden fits of tears and whimpering like a child.

O
NE EVENING
a few weeks later, she came out of the office in the rain and saw Peter Corkery at the other side of the street. She obeyed her first instinct and bowed her head so as not to look at him. Her heart sank as he crossed the road to accost her.

“Aren't you a great stranger, May?” he asked, with his cheerful grin.

“We're very busy in the office these days, Peter,” she replied, with false brightness.

“It was only the other night Joe was talking about you. You know Joe is up in the seminary now?”

“No. What's he doing?”

“Teaching. He finds it a great relief after the mountains. And, of course, you know about the mother.” This was it!

“I heard about it. I suppose ye're all delighted?”

“
I
wasn't very delighted,” he said, and his lips twisted in pain. “'Twas the most awful day I ever spent. When they cut off her hair—”

“You don't have to remind me.”

“I disgraced myself, May. I had to run out of the chapel. And here I had two nuns after me, trying to steer me to the lavatory. Why do nuns always think a man is looking for a lavatory?”

“I wouldn't know. I wasn't a very good one.”

“There are different opinions about that,” he said gently, but he only hurt her more.

“And I suppose you'll be next?”

“How next?”

“I was sure you had a vocation, too.”

“I don't know,” he said thoughtfully. “I never really asked myself. I suppose, in a way, it depends on you.”

“And what have I to say to it?” she asked in a ladylike tone, though her heart suddenly began to pant.

“Only whether you're going to marry me or not. Now I have the house to myself and only Mrs. Maher looking after me. You remember Mrs. Maher?”

“And you think I'd make a cheap substitute for Mrs. Maher, I suppose?” she asked, and suddenly all the pent-up anger and frustration of years seemed to explode inside her. She realized that it was entirely because of him that she had become a nun, because of him she had been locked up in a nursing home and lived the life of an emotional cripple. “Don't you think that's an extraordinary sort of proposal—if it's intended to be a proposal.”

“Why the hell should I be any good at proposing? How many girls do you think I've proposed to?”

“Not many, since they didn't teach you better manners. And it would never occur to yourself to say you loved me. Do you?” she almost shouted. “Do you love me?”

“Sure, of course I do,” he said, almost in astonishment. “I wouldn't be asking you to marry me otherwise. But all the same—”

“All the same, all the same, you have reservations!” And suddenly language that would have appalled her to hear a few months before broke from her, before she burst into uncontrollable tears and went running homeward through the rain. “God damn you to Hell, Peter Corkery! I wasted my life on you, and now in the heel of the hunt all you can say to me is ‘All the same.' You'd better go back to your damn pansy pals, and say it to them.”

She was hysterical by the time she reached Summerhill. Her father's behavior was completely characteristic. He was the born martyr and this was only another of the ordeals for which he had been preparing himself all his life. He got up and poured himself a drink.

“Well, there is one thing I'd better tell you now, daughter,” he said quietly but firmly. “That man will never enter this house in my lifetime.”

“Oh, nonsense, Jack MacMahon!” his wife said in a rage, and she went and poured herself a drink, a thing she did under her husband's eye only when she was prepared to fling it at him. “You haven't a scrap of sense. Don't you see now that the boy's mother only entered the convent because she knew he'd never feel free while she was in the world?”

“Oh, Mother!” May cried, startled out of her hysterics.

“Well, am I right?” her mother said, drawing herself up.

“Oh, you're right, you're right,” May said, beginning to sob again. “Only I was such a fool it never occurred to me. Of course, she was doing it for me.”

“And for her son,” said her mother. “And if he's anything like his mother, I'll be very proud to claim him for a son-in-law.”

She looked at her husband, but saw that she had made her effect and could now enjoy her drink in peace. “Of course, in some ways it's going to be very embarrassing,” she went on peaceably. “We can't very well say ‘Mr. Peter Corkery, son of Sister Rosina of the Little Flower' or whatever the dear lady's name is. In fact, it's very difficult to see how we're going to get it into the press at all. However, as I always say, if the worst comes to the worst, there's a lot to be said for a quiet wedding.… I do hope you were nice to him, May?” she asked.