Emerald Germs of Ireland (4 page)

“‘It’s not true! It’s not true!‘” sneered Mrs. Tubridy. “Sure didn’t I see you going to school with my own two eyes, and a shirt on you like a girl and a wee wine tie with elastic on it. And them all falling about the place like Duffy’s circus had come to town!”

Pat was aware that he was beginning to choke now as he said, “It’s not true! They were not!”

But Mrs. Tubridy had not yet concluded.

“And the little ankle socks,” she continued, “the litde ankle socks she put on you! Is it any wonder they’d call you names and make a cod of you! Is it?”

“They didn’t!” shrieked Pat. “They didn’t make a cod of me!”

“They did, Pat. They did, and you know it! Every day you walked that street, they had a new name for you. And that’s why you were miserable. That’s why sometimes you even wanted to die. Because of her.”

“No, Mrs. Tubridy!” cried Pat, almost pleadingly. “You’ve got it all wrong!”

There was something shocking now in Mrs. Tubridy’s equanimity.

“I haven’t, Pat,” she said, “and the other person in this room knows it.”

The light of the moon glittered for a long time in Pat’s subsequent tears as his head forced its way toward her breast and she stroked his head as many times before.

“It’s going to be all right, Pat,” her soothing voice continued. “From now on, it’s going to be all right. Just so long as you remember that from now on you’re mine.”

She paused and inserted her litde finger into his ear.

“You’ll be just like my litde Paudgeen. You understand, don’t you, Pat?”

Pat nodded. This time he didn’t say, “Yes, Mrs. Tubridy.”

He knew she understood.

“I don’t blame you for doing what you did, Pat. Nobody would. She should have cared more. She just should have cared more.”

Throughout the following hours, the sobs of Pat McNab were pitiful as he found himself slipping away. As indeed did Mrs. Tubridy, to the hospital of a dream which seemed at once so strange and yet bewilderingly familiar. What appeared to be a younger—and startlingly attractive version of herself, sans head scarf—was sitting up in bed, clearly anxiously awaiting someone or something. It was only some moments before a grave young doctor arrived in his white coat.

“How is my baby?” the young Mrs. Tubridy cried. “How is my little baby?”

Tonelessly, the doctor replied, “I’m sorry, Mrs. Tubridy.”

The screams of that young woman, in a hospital of long ago—they just cannot be described. And go a long way toward explaining why exactly it was that within that dream Mr. Tubridy was to be found surrounded by a seemingly endless array of bottles and completely enshrouded in cigarette smoke, as Timmy Sullivan did his best to attract his attention, repeatedly insisting, “Mr. Tubridy! There’s a phone call for you! It’s about your son!”

Which succeeded only in eliciting the gruff reply, “What are you talking about? Give me another drink! What do I care about sons!”

As, far away at the other end of town, in a spodess but clinically spartan maternity ward, a heartbreak was borne alone.

Pat, approximately one week later, and in the middle of preparing the dinner—Brussels sprouts and fish—was shocked when he looked up to see Mrs. Tubridy, fresh from town, bearing in her arms a large brown parcel and uttering the words, “Wait till you see what I have for you!” Barely a few moments later, equally shocked, perhaps—although embarrassed is probably much more apt in the circumstances—to find himself attired from head to foot in a white shirt, black tie, and spotless white lounge jacket, with Mrs. Tubridy proud as punch extravagant with her compliments as she declaimed, “Now! Who are you going to make a nice cup of tea for because she’s good to you?”

Pat smiled at the request but there was something crushed and resentful about him as he inserted the plug of the electric kettle into the socket.

She always insisted on long, even strokes, so Pat endeavored to comply as he drew the brush through Mrs. Tubridy’s wavy salt-and-pepper hair as she continued talking where she was seated at the dressing table. “Oh, it’s not that I mind him having a drink!” she said, with a troubling bitterness. “Sure there’s nothing wrong with drink in moderation! But when you see what it does to people! Setting fire to the kitchen, insulting the priest! But—after Paudgeen—I didn’t care, you see! I didn’t care after that! Do you know what I mean, Pat?”

Pat brought the brush back from the pale, occasionally liver-spotted neck and replied, “Yes, Mrs. Tubridy.”

“He could drink himself from here to Mullingar after that as far as I was concerned. Because Paudgeen wasn’t going to grow up. Do you know what I mean, Pat?”

He nodded. There was a smell of perfume off the brush.

“He was never going to grow up. I was never going to be able to watch him grow. But if I had—if I had, Pat—do you know something?”

“What, Mrs. Tubridy?”

“He would have been one of the most handsome litde boys in the world, wouldn’t he?”

“Yes, Mrs. Tubridy.”

Mrs. Tubridy coughed—politely again, Pat noticed—and he caught the reflection of her raised eyebrow in the looking glass.

“Pat,” she continued, “would you mind if I called you something?”

“Called me what, Mrs. Tubridy?”

He caught a long strand of her hair between his fingers and removed it from the teeth of the brush.

“Paudgeen, Pat. Would you mind if I called you that?”

Pat perceived the blood coursing decisively in the direction of his cheeks.

“Mrs. Tubridy,” he said, “I’d rather you didn’t.”

Her expression in the mirror remained motionless.

“What?” she said and he jerked a litde.

“It’s just that,” he said, “it’s just that I’d rather you didn’t. It’s not my name!”

Mrs. Tubridy’s reaction shocked him.

“O it isn’t your name is it not!” she snapped. “Well—what name would you rather have? Pat McNab? You’d rather have that than Tubridy that everyone would look up to! You’d rather have that, after what you’ve done!”

At this, Pat’s left temple began to throb.

“After what I’ve done?” he ventured agitatedly.

“Yes! After what you’ve done!”

She eyed him with a stare of great significance, at that very moment lowering her voice as she said, “You know what I mean.”

Pat felt his cheeks turn from red hot to dough pale as she smirked and placed her hand on his and said, “You know what I mean—Paudgeen.”

Far off in the hallway, the grandfather clock ticked heavily.

“You do, don’t you?” she repeated.

“Yes, Mrs. Tubridy,” as he saw her smirk anew.

“No,” she said, “don’t call me that. Call me Mammy. Just for a laugh, will you call me that?”

A look of pain flashed across the countenance of Pat McNab.

“I can’t,” he pleaded, “please, Mrs. Tubridy. I can’t.”

There was nothing tender or considerate about the stare with which she fixed him, her voice cold as steel.

“Call me it!” she demanded.

Pat’s head fell upon his chest as though he had somehow been transformed into a pathetic nodding dog.

“Yes, Mammy,” were the words that passed his lips.

It is difficult to determine, certainly with any degree of exactitude, the significant occurrences in the life of Pat McNab which eventually led to his becoming the person he was, but it is unlikely that it could be contested that that incident and what had passed between them during it ought to be considered as one of such; for, almost as soon as she left the room, it became clear that Mrs. Tubridy had rendered Pat McNab into such a state of high dudgeon and perspiring, overwhelming confusion (indubitably a consequence of the self-hatred and malignant shame that were themselves the results of his pitiful inaction) that his entire surroundings began to assume a startling, sharp-edged clarity, unsettlingly closer to the states of distorted hallucination familiar to habitual drug users than any feasible notion of tangible, empirical reality. Which explains, no doubt, why, when later that—again moon-washed—night, whilst in Mrs. Tubridy’s bed (for her instructions now extended to include his sleeping arrangements), he awoke to find himself staring directly into what could not possibly have been—but to all intents and purposes, clearly now was—the face of his own mother!

An enormous wave of sorrow swept through him as he touched his cheek and felt the moonlight play upon it. His mother’s smile too was sad.

“I know she did a lot of things, Tubridy. But this. This makes me sad, Pat.”

He repeated each word after her and every syllable that passed his lips was as a rusted fishhook drawn painfully and indulgently from his throat.

“Sad, Mammy?” he said then.

“Her lying there. Telling you lies. Because that’s what she’s doing, Pat.”

His throat dried up hopelessly.

“Mammy?”

It was a struggle to utter the word.

“Telling lies. Once, you know, a half-crown went missing on me. I asked her did she see it. And do you know where I found it?”

Pat was close to the edge of hysteria now.

“Where, Mammy?”

“In her handbag. Hidden inside her handbag behind her prayer-book. What do you think of that, Pat?”

Pat found himself instinctively grinding his teeth.

“It’s terrible!” he heard himself say.

“Not terrible compared to some of the other things she’s done. Did you know she put her husband Mattie in the mental hospital?”

“Mental hospital?”

“Poor Mattie Tubridy that was one of the handsomest men ever walked the streets of the town. Couldn’t let him be himself, you see. Why if you didn’t like him the way he was, you didn’t have to marry him, I said to her. And she did not like it! Because it was the truth! What harm if Mattie took a drink, God rest him. The only reason he took it was to get away from her. Just because she couldn’t have a wain, she didn’t have to take it out on him!”

Pat swallowed and did his level best to formulate the words he feared would elude him.

“Couldn’t have a wain?”

He felt—although it wasn’t, or to a casual observer would not have appeared so—as though the skin on his face had been drawn unreasonably tightly against his bones.

“Barren as Rogey Rock,” his mother informed him. “That’s what the doctor said, although not in those words.”

Thoughts appeared as randomly intersecting lights in the murkier corners of Pat’s mind.

“Mammy!” he said. “But are you sure? Are you sure all this is true?”

There was no mistaking the pain on his mother’s face.

“And now, worst of all—she’s turned my own son against me. My own son that would not have doubted me in his life. She’s turned him against me too!”

Something leaped inside Pat when he heard his mother say that, as certain as if a pebble or stone had been cast from a catapult. He clasped her right shoulder firmly with his hand.

“No, Mammy!” he cried aloud. “She hasn’t!”

It was hard for Pat to bear the sight of the salt tear that now gleamed
in the corner of his mother’s eye. But even harder to bear on opening his own to their optimum width and finding himself gazing no longer upon the mother who had carried him for nine months and cared and nurtured him for so long, but—
Mrs. Tubridy!
Upon her lips the words, “Paudgeen! What are you doing? It’s five o’clock in the morning!”

Pat felt the back of his throat contract until it was the size of a small seed.

“My name’s not Paudgeen!” he retorted angrily.

“Go back to sleep and no more lip out of you or it will be down to the station with me first thing in the morning. Do you hear me?”

Perhaps Mrs. Tubridy felt it was crucial for her to assert her authority in a firm and unequivocal manner at that time, and it is tempting to speculate as to what might have happened if she had adopted a more conciliatory approach. But she didn’t, and what was clear now was that in conjunction with what had taken place earlier—entirely unknown to Mrs. Tubridy, of course—the otherwise—or what seemed to be otherwise—placid Pat McNab had, although to all intents and purposes unaware of it himself, been set upon a course, the outcome of which could now but spell disaster. Although it is unlikely that an independent observer—as Pat in the days that followed continued to proceed around the kitchen, pottering awkwardly and muttering abstractedly, “Hello! My name is Paudgeen! Paudgeen Tubridy! Do you know me at all?”—would necessarily have drawn such a drastic conclusion. Or surmised that, from sudden cries of, “That’s me! Afraid to go down to Sullivan’s because my mammy won’t let me! She says if I do she’ll get the guards on me! She has me so scared, you see! Why, I’m so scared I think I need a drink!” a state of heartbroken, helpless anxiety might have inevitably ensued.

Far more likely is that the comments on such occasions (from independent observers, that is) would have been more along the lines of, “Poor Pat!” or “Isn’t he a sad case?” But perhaps these rather casual commentators—putative, it is true—might not have been so eager to declare him a sad case if they had observed him some evenings later, brandishing a bottle of Cointreau, the contents of which he had practically consumed in their entirety, donning one of Mrs. Tubridy’s hats (a blue one with a white net) and curtseying in pantomime fashion as he flailed about the kitchen, crying, “Howya, Mrs. Tubridy! How’s Paudgeen getting on? Like
I mean—is he born yet? Ha ha! Only coddin’!” as, as before, into the neck of his impromptu botttle-microphone, he began to sing, rotating his arms all the while, his voice attaining the very peak of his register:

It is difficult, perhaps, to describe the suddenness with which Pat lapsed into silence, or to adequately indicate the impact the glowering visage of Mrs. Tubridy actually had as the door opened and revealed her standing there in the shadowy aperture. Suffice to say that Pat felt his lips had been turned to stone, as had most of the rest of his body.

How unpleasant it was for him to end up in the cellar is equally difficult to convey to the reader. What is certain is that a stratagem which had been pitilessly devised to serve the purpose of ultímate punishment, to effectively cripple Pat’s spirit to the point where he would in future pursue his broom throughout the length and breadth of the house like a hapless ghost for the remainder of his mortal days, can be said to have failed utterly in its purpose. Had the independent observers referred to heretofore been calmly evaluating Pat at this point, however, this is the last thing they would have concluded from his general demeanor as he sat crouched in die dankest of corners. Their conclusion—if his wide, extended grin and happy, dancing eyes, were to be considered any indication—could but be that here was a man very much at ease with his surroundings, and indeed—aside, perhaps, from the whitish skin which stretched across the bones of his face which seemed about to snap at any time—deriving nothing less than great pleasure from them. And which, they would undoubtedly feel, explained the intermittent chuckles into the twins of his bunched fists and the occasional address to a visiting mouse who considered him insouciantly from a nearby air vent, along the lines of, “Putting me in prison now, if you don’t mind! Well, boys O boys! Have you any idea what next, mouse? For I’m afraid I don’t!”