“For God’s sake, Miz O’Toole,” said the loud-mouthed man, “you can’t get around that now, can you? Why, that’s the most remarkable thing I ever heard!”
Dennis rose, creaking a little, and hobbled around to the east side of the house in time to see a round man with a flabby red face climbing into a rusty old car with a sign painted on the door. “Always something, now,” he commented, putting his head in at the kitchen door. “Always telling a tall tale!”
“Well,” said Rosaleen, without the least shame, “he wanted a story so I gave him a good one. That’s the Irish in me.”
“Always making a thing more than it is,” said Dennis. “That’s the way it goes.” Rosaleen turned a little edgy. “Out with ye!” she cried, and the cats never budged a whisker. “The kitchen’s no place for a man! How often must I tell ye?”
“Well, hand me my hat, will you?” said Dennis, for his hat hung on a nail over the calendar and had hung there within easy reach ever since they had lived in the farm house. A few minutes later he wanted his pipe, lying on the lamp shelf where he always kept it. Next he had to have his barn boots at once, though he hadn’t seen them for a month. At last he thought of something to say, and opened the door a few inches.
“Wherever have I been sitting unmolested for the past ten years?” he asked, looking at his easy chair with the pillow freshly plumped, side ways to the big table. “And today it’s no place for me?”
“If ye grumble ye’ll be sorry,” said Rosaleen gayly, “and now clear out before I hurl something at ye!”
Dennis put his hat on the parlor table and his boots under the sofa, and sat on the front steps and lit his pipe. It would soon be cold weather, and he wished he had his old leather jacket off the hook on the kitchen door. Whatever was Rosaleen up to now? He decided that Rosaleen was always doing the Irish a great wrong by putting her own faults off on them. To be Irish, he felt, was to be like him, a sober, practical, thinking man, a lover of truth. Rosaleen couldn’t see it at all. “It’s just your head is like a stone!” she said to him once, pretending she was joking, but she meant it. She had never appreciated him, that was it. And neither had his first wife. Whatever he gave them, they always wanted something else. When he was young and poor his first wife wanted money. And when he was a steady man with money in the bank, his second wife wanted a young man full of life. “They’re all born ingrates one way or another,” he decided, and felt better at once, as if at last he had something solid to stand on. In October a man could get his death sitting on the steps like this, and little she cared! He clacked his teeth together and felt how they didn’t fit any more, and his feet and hands seemed tied on him with strings.
All the while Rosaleen didn’t look to be a year older. She might almost be doing it to spite him, except that she wasn’t the spiteful kind. He’d be bound to say that for her. But she couldn’t forget that her girlhood had been a great triumph in Ireland, and she was forever telling him tales about it, and telling them again. This youth of hers was clearer in his mind than his own. He couldn’t remember one thing over another that had happened to him. His past lay like a great lump within him; there it was, he knew it all at once, when he thought of it, like a chest a man has packed away, knowing all that is in it without troubling to name or count the objects. All in a lump it had not been an easy life being named Dennis O’Toole in Bristol, England, where he was brought up and worked sooner than he was able at the first jobs he could find. And his English wife had never forgiven him for pulling her up by the roots and bringing her to New York, where his brothers and sisters were, and a better job. All the long years he had been first a waiter and then head waiter in a New York hotel had telescoped in his mind, somehow. It wasn’t the best of hotels, to be sure, but still he was head waiter and there was good money in it, enough to buy this farm in Connecticut and have a little steady money coming in, and what more could Rosaleen ask?
He was not unhappy over his first wife’s death a few years after they left England, because they had never really liked each other, and it seemed to him now that even before she was dead he had made up his mind, if she did die, never to marry again. He had held out on this until he was nearly fifty, when he met Rosaleen at a dance in the County Sligo hall far over on East 86th Street. She was a great tall rosy girl, a prize dancer, and the boys were fairly fighting over her. She led him a dance then for two years before she would have him. She said there was nothing against him except he came from Bristol, and the outland Irish had the name of people you couldn’t trust. She couldn’t say why — it was just a name they had, worse than Dublin people itself. No decent Sligo girl would marry a Dublin man if he was the last man on earth. Dennis didn’t believe this, he’d never heard any such thing against the Dubliners; he thought a country girl would lep at the chance to marry a city man whatever. Rosaleen said, “Maybe,” but he’d see whether she would lep to marry Bristol Irish. She was chambermaid in a rich woman’s house, a fiend of darkness if there ever was one, said Rosaleen, and at first Dennis had been uneasy about the whole thing, fearing a young girl who had to work so hard might be marrying an older man for his money, but before the two years were up he had got over that notion.
It wasn’t long after they were married Dennis began almost to wish sometimes he had let one of those strong-armed boys have her, but he had been fond of her, she was a fine good girl, and after she cooled down a little, he knew he could have never done better. The only thing was, he wished it had been Rosaleen he had married that first time in Bristol, and now they’d be settled better together, nearer an age. Thirty years was too much difference altogether. But he never said any such thing to Rosaleen. A man owes something to himself. He knocked out his pipe on the foot scraper and felt a real need to go in the kitchen and find a pipe cleaner.
Rosaleen said, “Come in and welcome!” He stood peering around wondering what she had been making. She warned him: “I’m off to milk now, and mind ye keep your eyes in your pocket. The cow, now — the creature! Pretty soon she’ll be jumping the stone walls after the apples, and running wild through the fields roaring, and it’s all for another calf only, the poor deceived thing!” Dennis said, “I don’t see what deceit there is in that.” “Oh, don’t you now?” said Rosaleen, and gathered up her milk pails.
The kitchen was warm and Dennis felt at home again. The kettle was simmering for tea, the cats lay curled or sprawled as they chose, and Dennis sat within himself smiling a sunken smile, cleaning his pipe. In the barn Rosaleen looped up her purple gingham skirts and sat with her forehead pressed against the warm, calm side of the cow, drawing two thick streams of milk into the pail. She said to the cow: “It’s no life, no life at all. A man of his years is no comfort to a woman,” and went on with a slow murmur that was not complaining about the things of her life.
She wished sometimes they had never come to Connecticut where there was nobody to talk to but Rooshans and Polacks and Wops no better than Black Protestants when you come right down to it. And the natives were worse even. A picture of her neighbors up the hill came into her mind: a starved-looking woman in a blackish gray dress, and a jaundiced man with red-rimmed eyes, and their mizzle-witted boy. On Sundays they shambled by in their sad old shoes, walking to the meeting-house, but that was all the religion they had, thought Rosaleen, contemptuously. On week days they beat the poor boy and the animals, and fought between themselves. Never a feast-day, nor a bit of bright color in their clothes, nor a Christian look out of their eyes for a living soul. “It’s just living in mortal sin from one day to the next,” said Rosaleen. But it was Dennis getting old that took the heart out of her. And him with the grandest head of hair she had ever seen on a man. A fine man, oh, a fine man Dennis was in those days! Dennis rose before her eyes in his black suit and white gloves, a knowledgeable man who could tell the richest people the right things to order for a good dinner, such a gentleman in his stiff white shirt front, managing the waiters on the one hand and the customers on the other, and making good money at it. And now. No, she couldn’t believe it was Dennis any more. Where was Dennis now? And where was Kevin? She was sorry now she had spited him about his girl. It had been all in fun, really, no harm meant. It was strange if you couldn’t speak your heart out to a good friend. Kevin had showed her the picture of his girl, like a clap of thunder it came one day when Rosaleen hadn’t even heard there was one. She was a waitress in New York, and if ever Rosaleen had laid eyes on a brassy, bold-faced hussy, the kind the boys make jokes about at home, the kind that comes out to New York and goes wrong, this was the one. “You’re never never keeping steady with her, are you?” Rosaleen had cried out and the tears came into her eyes. “And why not?” asked Kevin, his chin square as a box. “We’ve been great now for three years. Who says a word against her says it against me.” And there they were, not exactly quarrelling, but not friends for the moment, certainly, with Kevin putting the picture back in his pocket, saying: “There’s the last of it between us. I was greatly wrong to tell ye!”