“It’ll be his own decision anyway. I’ll not interfere. He won’t have me to blame in after years. That’s the only sure thing,” Mahoney bloomed in the attention.
You watched Mahoney with cold and hidden fury, you’d been in this restaurant days and they’d learned more about you in this half-hour than all the days together. All this air of importance and wisdom breathed through their cigarette smoke was horrible, it was your life they talked about, but soon it’d be over.
“I’ll not be going home till tomorrow and I was wondering if you’d be able to fix me up for the night,” Mahoney asked after the meal.
“We’ll fix you up, but you won’t have a room. It’s either fix a bed for you downstairs or the double bed is big enough for two since it’ll be only for one night. That’s if you don’t mind,” Mrs. Ridge said.
“Not at all. We’re easy. That has the whole thing solved. Thanks very much. You’re very good, Mrs. Ridge.”
“That’s great. Everything is settled for the night, you feel easier, and do you know I was thinking that the best thing we could do is get a priest’s advice. The Franciscans of Galway are famous, they’re gentle the Franciscans, more like ordinary people,” Mahoney said soon as they were alone on the streets.
“What good would that do?”
“A priest is sort of on the fence. They can see better. We could go and put your case and I am sure we wouldn’t get bad advice.”
“Alright so,” it would finish it, moments it seemed once talk had started that it might be better to take the risk and stay at the University. Chained to a desk in Dublin no matter what security attended it might prove no easier bed of roses, all this deciding was a horror.
“I think if we’re to get advice, one of the Deans of Residence at the College would be best. That’s his job, to look after students, he’d know more about that kind of problem than the Franciscans.”
“That’s alright so, as long as it’s some priest,” Mahoney agreed.
You walked across the town, father and son, and when you met students from the University you were ashamed of your father, and then fiercely loathed yourself for being ashamed, there was no real reason, except stupid resentment of your own unique identity being associated with your father, you’d be linked with and associated with your father, instead of being utterly alone and free against a background of snow.
“So this is the University,” Mahoney wondered. “A bit on the style of a castle. It’d cost a quare penny to put up a building like that nowadays, even if they had the tradesmen.”
It was the University, you looked at it, the shambles of a dream. Never would you walk again with a dream through the archway and by the canal through the Spanish Arch and out towards the sea on the Long Walk. You’d swot towards the B.Sc. here or you’d leave it for the E.S.B.
The Dean received you in his office without any waiting: the Dean, a tall lean man with eyes that weren’t easy to meet, they were cold and sharp.
“I am a student here. I have a Scholarship. I have been offered a clerkship in the E.S.B. My father thought you might be able to advise us what to do,” you tried to put it bare as possible, awkward and a fool in the stumbling words.
“That’s right, father,” it was relief that Mahoney was staying in the background.
“Which would you like to do yourself?” the priest probed calmly.
“I don’t know, father.”
“What course did you intend to follow?”
“Science I think, father.”
“You don’t have any keen interest in it?”
“No, father. It’d be easy to get a job out of it afterwards. I wanted to do Medicine first, but the course is too long. The Scholarship is only for four years.”
“What do you feel about staying on at the University?”
“I don’t know, father. It’s not like I thought it’d be,” you saw both of you look mean and shabby in the priest’s eyes.
“If you’re a scholarship boy, you’ll probably do well at the University. If you did you’d get a much more pleasant job than the E.S.B. out of the University. So I think you should stay,” what he said was like shock of cold water, he was too clever to give advice, he was throwing down the gauntlet to see if you had the wish to pick it up and he knew you hadn’t. And you saw and resented his calculated probing or attack.
“I’m afraid I might get sick or fail and there’s more in the house besides me, father,” and it sounded as lame as it was.
“You’re afraid of failing?”
“I am, father.”
“You’d not have to worry about that in the E.S.B.,” the priest looked you straight in the face and you saw what he was doing and hated him for it. The Dean was forcing you to decide for yourself.
“No. I’d not have to worry.”
“Well, I definitely think you should take the E.S.B. so,” there seemed contempt in his voice, you and Mahoney would never give commands but be always menials to the race he’d come from and still belonged to, you’d make a schoolteacher at best. You might have your uses but you were both his stableboys, and would never eat at his table.
It was hard to walk quiet out of the University at Mahoney’s side and see the goalposts luminous in the grey light of the rain and not give savage expression to one murderous feeling of defeat.
Though not even that lasted for long, the rage and futility gradually subsiding as you walked through the streets of that wet day. What right had anybody or anything to defeat you and what right had you to feel defeated, who was to define its name?
One day, one day, you’d come perhaps to more real authority than all this, an authority that had need of neither vast buildings nor professorial chairs nor robes nor solemn organ tones, an authority that was simply a state of mind, a calmness even in the face of the turmoil of your own passing.
You could go to the E.S.B. If it was no use you could leave again, and it didn’t matter, you could begin again and again all your life, nobody’s life was more than a direction.
You were walking through the rain of Galway with your father and you could laugh purely, without bitterness, for the first time, and it was a kind of happiness, at its heart the terror of an unclear recognition of the reality that set you free, touching you with as much foreboding as the sodden leaves falling in this day, or any cliche.
31
IN THE BEDROOM THAT NIGHT ON PROSPECT HILL THE ROSARY was said before undressing. There was morbid fascination in watching Mahoney take off his clothes, down to the long Johns, some obscenity about the yellow shade of the wool, and the way they stretched below the knees, the curly hair of the leg between that and the ankle.
Memories of the nightmare nights in the bed with the broken brass bells came, and it was strange how the years had passed, how the nights were once, and different now, how this night’d probably be the last night of lying together.
“That’s a relief,” he sighed as he sank down into a creak of springs. “The town wears you out. You walk miles without noticing, each street is so short.”
“Not being used to the concrete probably accounts for it too.”
“Well, we decided anyhow. So let’s hope for the best. It’s a relief to me too. The University had me worried. I’d never have told you though only you’ve decided this way. I wasn’t going to interfere with your decision. It had to be your own. But I’m the father to the others as well. I have to think about them as well. I was worried.”
“It’s the best decision I think.”
“You’ll go to Dublin tomorrow?”
“At nine. They said at the station that the early train goes at nine. The early train would give more chance to look around.”