Swords and Crowns and Rings (2 page)

Jackie knows a handful of people through his life, Cushie's world is confined to her family, Maida's is even smaller; yet these are people for whom love is not a mere feeling but a verb, and for this reason they are unforgettable. In the end, innocence, identity and integrity all lead back to the same thing, expressed by Cushie Moy as a child: ‘Deep and true in her soul she knew only that she believed in loving, and all denial of this was dishonour.'

 

For
Gwen Gerrard Kennedy
and Her Friends

 

In the landscape of spring there is neither better nor worse;

The flowering branches grow naturally,

Some long, some short.

(
AN OLD CHINESE POEM
)

1

Jackie Hanna, Cushie Moy 1907–1918

In a red weeping dawn the child was born at last. His mother gave a long cry of such peculiar poignancy that her husband, drowsing in the front room, started out of his chair and knocked the French china clock to the floor. This seemed to him to be the last straw. Tears squirted into his eyes. The sleepless night, the awful anxiety of the day that had preceded it, the nightmarish dislocation of his routine, which was all that kept his irritable nerves on an even keel, were summed up in this one sharp, irremediable smash. He knelt amongst the lustrous shards and blubbered.

In the bedroom Mrs Hanna, gasping and moaning, said, ‘What is it, what is it, doctor?'

‘A boy, strong as an ox,' he replied shortly.

The nurse, a gentle maternal body, took the bloody bundle into the warm kitchen where she had already made preparations for the washing and clothing of the newborn.

‘Ah, me wee rabbit,' she said. ‘Me poor wee rabbit.'

She had never seen such a one before, but she knew at once what his future was to be. Yet the life ran strongly in him. He mewed as the warm water touched him, moving arms and legs with feeble yet angry movements.

Above the yelling of the baby she heard a knock at the kitchen door.

‘That you, Mr Hanna?' she called. ‘I'll be ready to show you your son in a moment. Better go and see your wife, she'll be looking for you.'

The doctor left husband and wife alone. He stood looking down at Mrs Hailstone as she sat with the shawled baby in her arms before the kitchen stove. ‘No mistake, eh?' he said, and sighed.

‘No, sir,' said Mrs Hailstone. ‘Little pudden limbs, and see his hands!' She spread out the minute, fan-shaped hand.

The doctor ran his hand over the silky skin of the baby's face. He felt the bulging frontal and parietal eminences.

‘Poor little devil, it's a damned shame. And he's a healthy child, too. God knows how Hanna will take it; he's a morose lump of a man.'

The doctor waited several days before telling him and his wife that their son was a dwarf. Mrs Hanna, who had been listless since the birth, said nothing but, ‘I thought something was wrong. He doesn't look right, somehow.'

But Walter Hanna, his face suddenly plum red, stood straight up and belted his wife across the face. ‘You did it, you sow. It's your fault, smoking like a chimney all the time you were carrying him. I told you, I told you every day.'

The doctor was a hot-tempered man. He spun the grocer about, shouting, ‘I ought to flatten you, Hanna! It's no more her fault than it is yours. These things are handed down. It's hereditary. The child could have been crippled or imbecile. How would you like that, man? As it is there's not a thing the matter with him except that he'll never be as tall as others.'

‘I wish to God he'd been born dead,' cried the father.

The remark, even more than the blow, seemed to put life back into Mrs Hanna. As a girl, she had been wild and humorous, full of go, a woman with crimson cheeks and crowded teeth that seemed to have a life of their own. Into her strong-boned face there now poured the old red. Fierce as a new-whelped bitch, she glared at her husband.

‘That's my girl,' thought the doctor.

‘You mongrel, Walter,' she said. ‘This is our son, no matter what's amiss with him. Never you breathe again that you wish him dead, or I'll put poison in your tea, I swear to God I will.'

The father threw a hand over his eyes and stumbled from the room, sobbing.

‘Pay no attention,' advised the doctor. ‘It'll upset your milk. Besides, he'll come round in time.'

But Walter Hanna never did. From then on he hated life; he could have gouged its eyes out. The infant was six months old before his father could bear to look at him. Always a secretive man, Walter Hanna became glum and silent. Trade fell off at the shop. People who had taken their custom to Hanna's since Walter's father's time were depressed by his surliness and went to the Chinese General Store instead. The sympathy the birth of the child had engendered for him and his wife faded.

‘We've all got troubles,' people said. ‘Why does he make so much of it? Peggy Hanna's come to terms with it, but Walter's taken it real personal.'

Walter Hanna's inward sufferings were terrible. After the birth of Jackie he had an endlessly busy conviction that he had done something wrong. He thought the child's deformation a judgment. But why?

It seemed to him that his life had been blameless, indeed, exemplary. Just over ten years he had been engaged to Peggy Hough, while she'd looked after that tyrannical old cow of a mother, bedridden with asthma, able to bring on an attack whenever Peggy broached the subject of marriage. He'd been faithful, respectful. He'd never laid a hand on her in a place that Father Link would not approve. He was, in fact, undersexed almost to the point of impotence, and had found distasteful the warm-blooded Peggy's passionate disposition as disclosed in the marriage bed.

Could that be the reason for the mishap with the child? It wasn't natural for a woman to be the way Peggy was, was it?

He spent more and more time in the front room with the clocks. His uncle the watchmaker had left four or five to him—the carriage clock with the wooden works, the grandmother with the ship painted on the face, the grandfather with the green enamel weights. As he had grown older he had added more to his collection. They were his only true friends, reliable, unemotional, firm and single in their intention of life. Ever since his twelfth birthday he had wound them according to schedule, checked and oiled them regularly, kept them clean.

The hour struck like an orchestra; but the front room was scarcely used and the noise never bothered Mrs Hanna. It was to her a remote angelic chorus of tinkles, bongs, and portions of tunes.

She cared for no one and nothing but the infant. After the first shock and grief of the child's disability, she made up her mind that no matter what sort of a mess God Almighty had made of her son there was no reason why she shouldn't try to improve on things. In this the doctor was her strong ally.

‘I'll tell you this, Peg,' he said; ‘it rests with you and Hanna to work it either that the child feels himself a monster, fit for nothing but jeers and cruelties, or he accepts the way he is and gives the world as good as he gets. He's got to feel himself special. Can you put your mind to it, Peggy?'

Mrs Hanna's eyes sparkled. ‘Show me how,' she said. ‘But you can count my old fella out. It's not in him to help when he sets his jaw against it.'

The doctor opened the glass-fronted cupboard behind his desk.

‘I've taken it upon myself to send away for some books on dwarfism,' he said, ‘some medical—and they're for my own education—and some for you and Jackie, to show you both that there have been plenty of dwarfs that have led natural happy lives, married full-sized people and produced full-sized children. And there were some that became famous: there was a French statesman who was a dwarf, would you believe it?'

‘It isn't the riches that bother me,' said Mrs Hanna, ‘but the happiness.' She gave a little whoop of excitement. ‘Do you think I can do it, doctor?'

‘No woman could do it better,' he said soberly. ‘See here, Peg.'

He opened the top book and showed her the picture of a little man, Alypius of Alexandria, under two feet high, described as an excellent philosopher and mathematician, hardly anything more than spirit and soul.

The doctor looked at the mother. ‘Do you see what I mean, lass?'

‘I do see, I do. I must make his soul grow, to make up for the other. God help me, is it in me to do it?'

‘If the child takes after you,' thought the doctor, ‘the task won't be so hard.' But he said nothing, putting the books in her arms, and pushing her smiling from the room.

Mrs Hanna ran home, forgetting her husband's silence and depression, thrusting the books excitedly before him. ‘There've been others that have done well, why not our Jackie? The doctor says we can turn him out tough enough to face anything!'

Wordlessly the father turned the pages, bitterly eyeing the paintings of pale-eyed, potato-nosed Flemish dwarfs; arrogant, richly clad diminutive women who belonged to queens and duchesses; Italian feasts, all lanterns and shadows and flushed revellers, gathered about a jolly little monster who sprang from an ornamented pie. With a cry of outrage he slammed shut the book.

‘We've got no choice, Walter, don't you see?' said Mrs Hanna with pity. Almost for the first time she sympathised with his shame and suffering. ‘I've been heedless,' she said, ‘heedless and hard. But it hasn't been easy for me, either, you know. Last month when Mrs Moy over the road had her little girl, like a doll, perfect like a doll, I was so jealous I could have chewed rope. But it wasn't to be. We got Jackie the way he is and we have to help him all we can.'

Without a word her husband left the room, and the books were not discussed again between Mr and Mrs Hanna. Sometimes the mother hoped that he listened while she read to the enthralled Jackie tales of clever and heroic dwarfs, dwarfs that were the finest goldsmiths and jewellers in the world.

‘He understands every word I say, I do believe,' Mrs Hanna told the doctor. The doctor rolled over the two-year-old child, already muscular and extremely active, prodding him till he shrieked with laughter.

‘Of course he does,' he said. ‘If brain weight is important, and many scientists think it is, Jackie's is about one-nineteenth of his body weight. Mine is only one-thirty-second; yet it's served me well enough.'

Sometimes, too, the mother slapped Jackie as she recited the list of his blessings, his good eyesight, his strength, his home, his ability to be like those other heroic little people in the books. She slapped him to make him remember and wept stormily because she had to. The doctor shook his head over this but admitted she had to work with the child according to her own nature.

Walter Hanna died when Jackie was five, never having really recovered from the birth of his only child. He came down with bronchitis, and went off with double pneumonia, very angry, fighting for breath, his last words to his wife being: ‘Wind clocks. Schedule on mantelpiece.'

In his later years, when forgotten memories of childhood began to return to him, Jackie often recalled his father, clear as day, sitting on a stump with a rabbit rifle across his knees, hoarsely crying, ‘Why?' Jackie remembered, too, that he was a man with a rupture, and wore a clumsy truss that bulked out his trousers and often gave off a smell like a hot-water bottle. He sometimes had mentioned that his feet hurt, and he had had flat, thin hair that smelled rather sweetly of sweat and pomade. The older Jackie ached for that man, the questions unasked, the sorrows and disappointments never understood or lamented by his only son.

Mrs Hanna had loved her husband with a pitying, exasperated love. Her grief after his death was genuine and unbearable. She threw herself into it as though into the path of an oncoming train, hoping it would destroy her quickly. She carried on with the rundown shop, trying to scrape a living out of it, and out of sympathy many of the old customers came back. She spoke freely to them of her bereavement, explaining her guilt and remorse over the estrangement that had existed since Jackie's birth, her inability to get the child's father to see things her way and help her to make Jackie as normal and carefree a child as possible.

But that was not the whole story. Part of her grief was because her youth had gone into the grave with him, years and years, pell-mell, packed into the coffin, into the grave, under the sod, with nothing to show that it had ever existed at all.

After all the customers had gone and she had locked up the shop, the false consolation of their compassion faded and sorrow submerged her once more. Puffing cigarettes until her throat burned, she walked distraughtly about the unlighted cave of a place that smelled of mouldy oats and pollard, half-scrubbed floors, and damp, greening potatoes. The street lights shone subaqueously through the ginger-beer bottles in the window. Shadow-shows went on outside the window, people meeting, kissing, quarrelling; and she watched them enviously.