Mrs Eckdorf in O'Neill's Hotel Read online

  She placed a warm plate containing eggs and rashers before him.

  ‘Have you thought of a birthday present?’ she said.

  ‘I’ll get a tray-cloth.’

  ‘That’s nice. Eat up now. Don’t be late.’

  ‘I won’t be late, Mother.’

  She smiled and he tried to smile back, ashamed of not being able to stop thinking about the probing of instruments and the sudden striking of a nerve, and ashamed as well of being afraid to tell her that for too many years he had found her love oppressive.

  ‘I’ll bring her the gooseberry jam and maybe something else as well,’ she said. ‘She’ll like the jam we made.’

  ‘She’s fond of gooseberry.’

  ‘She is,’ said Philomena.

  They’d made the jam together. At the kitchen table he had prepared the fruit for her, one evening a month ago, while she had drawn from him the details of his day. ‘We’ll save a few pots for your grandmother’s birthday,’ she’d said at the time. ‘She’s fond of gooseberry.’

  ‘You’ll get a tray-cloth in Arnott’s,’ she said now. ‘You’ll probably get it in your lunch-time.’

  He nodded. He saw her looking at the clock on the windowsill.

  ‘Don’t be late for the dentist now,’ she said again.

  She smiled as he rose from the table. ‘Don’t forget to give your teeth a good wash,’ she said.

  O’Shea bought five herrings at a stall not far from the canal. He was a familiar sight in the neighbourhood of Thaddeus Street and beyond it, a man who was the same age as Eugene Sinnott and who wore on all occasions his uniform: epaulettes on a blue jacket, gold-coloured buttons, gold braid stretching the length of cherry-red trousers. His greyhound was always a pace or two behind him, and often as they walked O’Shea would speak to his pet, although he rarely turned his head to do so. In the evenings he polished the buttons of his uniform and placed, at night, the cherry-red trousers beneath his mattress in order to gain a crease for the following day.

  ‘You gave me stale ones last week,’ O’Shea complained to the elderly woman who was selling him the fish. ‘We were sorry to see that.’

  He spoke sadly. He listened to the protestations of the fishseller, nodding when he heard her say that the herrings she had sold him last week were the freshest that had ever passed through her hands. He nodded, not because he agreed but because he accepted that the elderly fish-woman believed what she was saying. She had been hood-winked by a wholesaler: she could not be blamed for her simplicity.

  ‘It’s all right,’ he said.

  ‘Ah, I only have the freshest. What use is a fish to you if it’s in a bad condition, sir?’

  ‘No use at all.’

  ‘Is Mrs Sinnott fit?’

  ‘Mrs Sinnott will be ninety-two tomorrow.’

  ‘Isn’t she a great woman? There’s not many women like that these days, sir. There’s not many that spend a lifetime in silence and would be smiling at ninety-two.’

  She put in an extra small herring for which, she said, she would make no charge in honour of Mrs Sinnott’s approaching birthday. ‘She’s never heard the song of a bird,’ she said, and O’Shea agreed that this was so. ‘God bless the poor soul,’ said the fish-seller.

  For her birthday O’Shea had purchased, a month ago, a small ivory-white image of the Virgin Mary. Wrapped in tissue paper, it was in a small cardboard box that he often opened. He imagined her opening it herself, tomorrow afternoon in the kitchen with everyone around her, and looking at him, to thank, him. It would be there in her room always, to remind her of his affection and his gratitude. I did not know my parents at all, he had written for her forty-four years ago, having been sent to her hotel from the orphanage which was his home. She had smiled at him and agreed that he might come and work for her, running errands and helping in the kitchen. In those days she took an interest in everything: when a man complained about a maggot in the bacon he was eating she tasted the meat herself to set the man at ease.

  ‘She had an ear for everything in your mind,’ O’Shea said to his dog, ‘even though she never heard you.’ He spoke in an emotional voice, causing the greyhound to wag its tail vigorously and to rub its head against his legs. It was a dog that had walked into the back-yard of the hotel seven years ago and had remained since, rarely leaving O’Shea’s side.

  The two hurried on, through streets that many said wouldn’t be the same without their regular presence. The ivory-white statue, he thought, would stand among all the other sacred pieces he had given her on her birthday over the years, for it had always seemed suitable that he should offer her gifts of this nature. For the last three years her son had given her a pencil-sharpener. on each occasion requesting O’Shea to buy it for him. It saddened O’Shea that Eugene Sinnott should devote so little of his energy and imagination to the selection of a gift: he had pointed out that in Mrs Sinnott’s room there were now many pencil-sharpeners, of different shapes and in different colours, all of which were adequate for the purpose for which they’d been designed. A pair of scissors, he considered, or a bowl for flowers would have been more suitable than the little red pencil-sharpener, made of plastic, that last year Eugene had selected out of the half dozen he had brought back to the hotel for Eugene’s perusal. ‘He chose the worst,’ the man had said when O’Shea returned with the others, and O’Shea had felt ashamed.

  He would fry her the nicest of the herrings, and butter a little bread for her and make tea in the small tin tea-pot that was offered only to her. He would write down a few details about the people he had seen that morning. One day, he knew, he would go up the stairs with her breakfast tray and find her gazing ahead of her without any sight left in her eyes, without warmth in her body. And what would happen then? Her wish was that he should remain in the hotel, in charge of her son, a man who drank too much, whose only other interest was betting on horses and greyhounds and the retailing of his dreams. The hotel was in its present state because Eugene Sinnott, whose duty it was, could not be bothered to run it on efficient lines. He lived on his mother’s money, on money accumulated at a time when O’Neill’s Hotel had always been full of commercial travellers going to and fro. Fifteen years ago O’Shea had stood in the hall turning men away courteously, as she had taught him. It was her wish, he believed, that before or after her death the hotel should regain its lost glory even if a miracle had to happen. Her father had founded it: in her mind, O’Shea believed, it was a memorial to him, a man she had honoured and loved. Yet it was not her nature to complain, but rather to live in hope. It was not her nature to write, for her son to see, a message that questioned the poor state of her property today. ‘Have glasses of sherry destroyed him?’ said O’Shea aloud. ‘Is there no cure at all?’

  The dog made a noise and the two strode on, O’Shea moving swiftly on the pavement, his body bent, his motion like that of a hurrying crab’s. It was quiet, that warm morning in the neighbourhood that O’Shea and the dog passed through. Few voices were raised in Bond Street or Pim Street or in the streets near them, in Morning Star Road or Rosary Road. In greengrocers’ shops unshaven men in their shirt-sleeves and waistcoats sat with a morning newspaper. Cats slept in doorways, children eyed through sweet-shop windows boxes of liquorice pipes and pink money-balls, women sniffed at fish.

  The area reflected the impression of Thaddeus Street. There was waste ground, where weeds and rough grass grew among bricks and rusting tins, and old prams lay discarded on a litter of paper. Tall houses here and there rose on their own, lonely edifices in cement, exposed by demolition and yet untouched by it. Humbler red-brick dwellings filled quiet roads, their gardens neat, a few with coloured elves reclining.

  In Dolphin’s Barn that quiet morning a patient in the New Coombe Maternity Hospital gave birth to identical twins in so quiet and matter-of-fact a manner that all but one who tended her were amazed. ‘I have seen it before,’ said the one who was not, an Indian doctor from Deogiri. ‘Fine weather and poverty keep the pregnant silen
t.’ The nurses glanced at one another, doubting the theory, for they knew that the man from Deogiri was keen on joking. In Reuben Street a widow said to her priest that her life had been hard. ‘But you are grateful for the life?’ the priest urged, and the woman, consumed by an illness, said she was grateful. A child sent out by her mother to purchase sugar in a nearby shop observed the hunched form of the hotel porter moving swiftly towards her with a greyhound. She noted that the man was murmuring and she stared with interest at the sorrowfully moving lips. She had noticed this figure a few times before but always at a greater distance, the coloured uniform tending to draw attention from afar.

  ‘Hullo,’ said the child to O’Shea, smiling at him with a mouth that was bare of teeth.

  O’Shea stopped and the greyhound stopped. He regarded the child, feeling nervous, knowing that the children of the district were given to mockery.

  ‘What do you want?’ he demanded.

  ‘I was sent out to get sugar, mister. I like the clothes you have. Are they special clothes, mister?’

  ‘I’m the porter at O’Neill’s Hotel.’

  ‘I seen you on Tuesday, turning the corner of Cork Street.’

  In the distance, hunched in a doorway, smoking a cigarette, O’Shea saw Morrissey. Pretending otherwise, he was with some interest observing O’Shea’s encounter with the toothless child.

  ‘Can a girl be a porter?’

  O’Shea shook his head. The child said that when she was bigger she’d like to wear a uniform like this, which was why she’d asked the question. She liked the colours. She asked if she could touch it.

  He saw Morrissey watching intently while the child stepped forward and touched him.

  ‘It’s nice,’ she said.

  It meant something, he thought, that this child had come up to him. He was aware of wanting to talk to her about the hotel as once it had been, how he had stood in the hall waiting for people to arrive, how he had carried suitcases and advised about bus routes, how he had done good work and understood his place in the world. The child touched his uniform a second time, and he knew then that he must not speak in that manner and that he must not speak of himself.

  ‘Maybe you’d work in an hotel in some other way,’ he said. ‘Maybe you’d be a maid. You’d have a little uniform to be a maid.’

  ‘Maybe I would, mister.’

  The child began to go away. ‘Excuse me,’ said O’Shea, calling after her. He looked down at the child, trying to smile and then finding the effort beyond him. It was difficult to say some things, especially to a child who was strange to you, especially when you weren’t used to the company of children. He believed he had to speak because when the child had touched him he had felt the urge of his duty and he had also been aware of the precise form of the statement he had to make.

  ‘Mister?’ said the child.

  ‘Don’t ever go into a church without a covering on your head. D’you understand that? No girl or woman should ever enter a church without the head is covered.’

  He walked away, not waiting for the child’s response. Morrissey would be wondering what had occurred between the child and himself. He had never spoken to Morrissey, but he knew the kind of person he was. Morrissey was always on the streets, stopping people and trying to talk to them. He would probably stop the child and ask her what had been said to her, and when she told him he wouldn’t understand. Not if he sat and thought about it for two years, O’Shea reflected, would Morrissey understand that a child had been sent to a hotel-porter so that she could be given a necessary command. Morrissey took advantage of Mrs Sinnott, writing down rubbish in her books, wasting good paper. Morrissey crept into the hotel at night, he brought Agnes Quin there, he passed water in the back-yard, on a little flowerbed that O’Shea had made himself.

  He stopped and prayed, with his eyes tightly closed. He prayed that the child whose name he did not know would not pass the doorway where Morrissey was standing and so be exposed to the evil that came from him. He prayed that in return for performing his duty by the child’ he would be granted that favour. When he opened his eyes he felt it had been said to him that all he’d asked had been decided anyway, that the child was being well watched over. He turned and saw the child running on the pavement, far away from where Morrissey stood.

  If he could see the cut of himself, Morrissey was thinking, the tall eejit. It was scandalous that a man like that should be allowed on the streets, tramping about with an old dog, bothering people. He’d often thought of the old dog lying in the backyard, with its interior thrown up on the flower-bed. It was totally scandalous that a man like O’Shea was alive at all, let alone in a position to raise his boot to a fellow human being. Morrissey is passing nights in the hall, he had read in O’Shea’s handwriting in one of the old woman’s exercise-books. If O’Shea complained to Eugene he’d be asked what harm could it do, a homeless man lodging for a little while in the hall until he settled himself out? Eugene wouldn’t care a damn if the national army laid itself down in the hall, and why in the name of God should he? ‘O’Shea’s a jealous man,’ he had taken the opportunity of saying to Eugene. ‘Jealousy has him cantankerous.’ One of these nights he’d walk up the stairs and enter a bedroom like a civilized human being: was it right that a whole hotel was sitting there while a human being could be homeless through no fault of his own?

  He imagined O’Shea asking Eugene to explain to him how a man could get into the hotel at night when it was locked, and Eugene shrugging his shoulders and telling O’Shea not to be annoying him. O’Shea knew that a key had been borrowed out of Eugene’s pocket and that Morrissey had gone down to Wool-worth’s to have another one cut. O’Shea had guessed that this was the only explanation, only O’Shea wouldn’t say it outright because he wasn’t made like that. O’Shea’d be afraid that Eugene would say no one could borrow a key out of his pocket without his knowledge. He’d be afraid Eugene would challenge him and then he’d have to say that anyone could borrow a key from a drunk man in Riordan’s public house, which was a statement that might cause Eugene to give O’Shea a blow on the face.

  Morrissey touched his body where the porter’s boot had earlier struck it. It was extraordinary, any man doing a thing like that for no reason whatsoever, and not doing it once but regularly and without ever speaking a word. He remembered the first time he’d seen O’Shea, the first time he’d entered the hotel. He’d said hullo to him and O’Shea had turned his head and gone off in another direction. Morrissey had been thinking at the time that a porter in an hotel was a man with whom he might exchange a civil word and might on later occasions hold other conversations. He’d been thinking generously, anxious to please a person who was a stranger to him, addressing him with good intentions. It was extraordinary that any human being could be so entangled inside himself, and so cantankerous that he couldn’t bring himself to issue a single word but could only raise his boot. Another man would have taken a knife to O’Shea by now, but Morrissey knew that if he lifted a knife he would have the misfortune to be observed by some woman looking in through a window, just as if he poisoned the old dog they’d put him in gaol for ten years, saying he intended the poison for a human being.

  Morrissey was singularly small, a man in his mid-thirties who had once been compared to a ferret. He had a thin trap of a mouth and greased black hair that he perpetually attended, directing it back from his forehead with a clogged comb. He was dressed now, as invariably he was, in flannel trousers and the jacket of a blue striped suit over a blue pullover, and a shirt that was buttoned to the neck but did not have a tie in its collar.

  A few weeks ago he’d been asked to vacate his lodgings owing to a failure to pay the rent regularly, and his life had since become complicated in detail. Late at night, long after O’Shea had gone to bed – for the porter retired at nine o’clock – Morrissey shaved himself in the hotel kitchen. He washed his hands and face and rubbed oil into his hair, afterwards hiding his meagre toilet equipment behind one of the two kitchen
dressers. The remainder of his clothes and belongings were in a canvas bag in the left-luggage department of Connolly Station, in custody until he had again established himself permanently.

  Loitering in the doorway and thinking about the difficulties in his life and the nature of O’Shea, Morrissey watched a horse and dray bearing sacks of coal go by, its bell jangling loudly. He watched the driver seize a piece of coal and hurl it at a mongrel dog that was running wildly about, barking at the legs of the horse. The coal struck the animal on the back and Morrissey saluted the driver, wagging his head in approbation of the action. It would have been good, he thought, if the dog had been O’Shea’s greyhound and if the lump of coal had destroyed it: he imagined the greyhound dead on the street and O’Shea lifting the carcass, crying out in distress, and the coalman kicking O’Shea on the jaw. He laughed and spat on the pavement and went on his way. He walked towards no particular destination, until suddenly he thought that he’d go down to Woolworth’s and see if he could take a little brooch or a jewel off one of the counters, as a gift for the old woman’s birthday.

  On that same morning of Friday, August 9th, a man from Liverpool, a salesman of cardboard, rose from his breakfast table in another Dublin hotel and whistled briefly through his teeth. He was a man who wore rimless spectacles and had fair, balding hair and a small mouth. His name was Mr Smedley and, like Mrs Sinnott and all her regular visitors, he did not at that time know the woman called Ivy Eckdorf. Yet Mr Smedley, before he left this city, was to know her and was to remember her with vividness for the remainder of his life. He crossed the floor of the hotel breakfast-room, wondering about the city that was as strange to him as it was to Mrs Eckdorf, and wondering what, apart from business, it held for him.