“Is it she that has the money, boy? Did the woman ever tell you?”
I shook my head. I said I had obtained no knowledge of the Messingers’ financial arrangements, or the source or distribution of their wealth. I was not telling the truth since I knew
Frau Messinger to have been a poor relation, and her husband to be a member of a well-to-do family. None of that seemed anyone’s business except their own; certainly it was not a titbit to be carried into the back bar of Viney’s hotel.
“There’s money there somewhere,” my father said.
We sat around the dining-room table, all of us eating sausages and fried bread, my grandmothers silently cantankerous with one another, my father airing his views. News he had heard during the day’s business was imparted at this hour, anecdotes repeated, deaths and births announced.
“They were saying in Viney’s,” he reported now, “that there’s marble on order for the front steps. Did you ever meet the beat of that, marble steps for a picture house!”
“Is it the Connemara marble?” my mother enquired.
“What else would it be? What’s the price of Connemara, Annie?”
It was a delusion of my father’s that because she kept the timberyard accounts Annie was conversant with the price of any commodity that had to do with the building trade. “Corrugated, Annie?” he had a way of saying in the diningroom. “What would I give for a three by six?” Further resentment in Annie would fester then, her face becoming even heavier in her resistance to all that was being foisted on her. “Ah, sure, she’s settled in well to the accounts,” I had heard him telling a man on the street one day. “Sure, what more could she want?”
“When they have the picture house built,” one of my brothers asked, “will they charge much to go in there?”
My mother told him not to speak with his mouth full of bread because no one could hear him properly. My father, to whom the same objection might have been put, said:
“I’d say they would. I’d say your man would need a big return on his money. What would he charge, Annie, to make sense of the thing?”
My sister said she had no idea. Briefly, she closed her eyes, endeavouring to dispose of my father and the ability she had ages ago been invested with as regards swift calculation. My father did not pursue the matter. Completing the consumption of another sausage, he turned to me.
“Did you ever find out are they Jews?”
“She’s a Protestant. They were married in a Catholic cathedral.”
“I’d say you had it wrong.”
At that time of my life, harshly judging my father’s opinions and statements, his dress, his clumsiness, his paucity of style, his manner of lighting a cigarette, I found it perhaps more difficult than I might have to forgive him for dismissing the answers I offered to his questions. In retrospect, of course, forgiveness is easier.
“That man’s not rough enough to be a Catholic,” my mother put in.
The squatter of my two grandmothers asked us what we were talking about. In a raised voice my father replied that the man out at Cloverhill was going to build a new picture house for the town. “I’ve nothing against ajew-man,” he said. “He has a head for business.”
“Isn’t Colonel Hardwicke out at Cloverhill?” my grandmother asked. “Running after the maids there?”
“Colonel Hardwicke’s dead,” my father shouted, and my other grandmother nodded disdainfully. “Dead as a doornail,” said my father.
My mother cut more bread. She poured tea into my father’s cup. “There’s a picture they’re after making in America that’s four hours long,” he said. “Did you hear about that one, Annie?”
“Gone with the Wind. ”
“What’s that, girl?”
“The name of the film is Gone with the Wind." “It was young Gerrity was telling me when he came into the yard. I’d say it was called something else.”
“ Gone with the Wind is the only picture that’s as long as that. It’s coming to the Savoy in Dublin. There’s people going up to see it.”
“Cripes!” one of my brothers exclaimed with enthusiasm. “Wouldn’t it be great to be in the pictures for four hours!”
Sharply, my mother told him not to say “Cripes” in the dining-room. She reminded him that she’d given a warning in this respect before. My brothers were getting rougher with every day that went by, she said, glaring at both of them.
“Mr. Wauchope’ll knock it out of them.” My father confidently wagged his head, at the same time turning it in my direction. He winked at me. “What’s that big stick you were telling me about, that Mr. Wauchope has in a cupboard?”
I looked at him dumbly, extreme denseness in my eyes. “What stick’s that?”
“Hasn’t he a blackthorn for beating the living daylights out of any young fellow who’d misbehave himself?” He released a guffaw, winking at me a second time.
“He has a rod for closing the windows with. You can’t reach the top part of the windows,” I explained to my brothers, “so old Wauchope has to hook the end of a rod into them.”
“Is it Mr. Conron I’m thinking of in that case?” my father persevered, his hand held up to disguise further winking from my brothers. One of my grandmothers asked him what the matter was, but he didn’t answer her. “Is it Mr. Conron that lays into you with the blackthorn?”
“Conron wouldn’t have the strength to hit anyone.” I paused, leisurely dividing a piece of fried bread into triangular segments. I imagined myself in the box-office, telling people who asked me that Gone with the Wind wouldn’t end till one o’clock in the morning. “Conron’s a type of loony,” I told my brothers.
My father was taken aback. The grin that had been twitching about his lips gradually evaporated. Before I’d been sent to lodge in the rectory he used to read from a letter he’d received from the Reverend Wauchope which itemised the attractions of the boarding arrangements for Lisscoe grammar school. Around this same dining-table we had listened to elaborate inaccuracies about well-heated rooms and plentiful supplies of fresh vegetables from the rectory’s own garden. The assistant master lodged at the rectory also, the letter said, so that discipline was maintained.
“That’s the stupidest thing I ever heard in my life,” my father muttered crossly.
“A boy from Enniscorthy says Conron was in the loony place they have there. He used to roll a hoop along the road. He thought he was Galloping O’Hogan.”
“That’s eejity talk, boy Don’t take any notice of it,” my father sternly advised my brothers.
“I’m only saying what I was told,” I said. “You’d be sorry for poor Conron.”
“What’s the trouble?” one of my grandmothers demanded, and I began to repeat all over again what I’d just told my brothers, but my father interrupted me and shouted at my grandmother not to waste her energy listening. “No man could teach in a classroom if he was a lunatic. We’ve heard enough of it.” he said to me. “Annie, did the pine come in?”
There was a film Houriskey had seen in which the main actor was employed in the box-office of a theatre when all the time he wanted to be on the stage. To make matters worse, he fell in love with an actress who passed by the box-office every night. That was the kind of thing you’d have to be careful about. You could become so familiar with a film actress on the screen that before you knew where you were you’d be in love with her, suffering like the actor, or poor Mandeville over the royal princess.
“What’s this?” my mother demanded, two days after my slandering of the assistant master. She held in the palm of her hand Frau Messinger’s Christmas present. I had hidden it under the drawer-paper in my bedroom.