THE PARIAH

I disliked every single one of my sister’s fellows. Each of them
seemed more despicable than the last. Anyone who believes in morbid
psychology is welcome to make what he can of this. Maybe there was
something morbid in it, but I can’t help feeling that Sue brought out
all that was worst in them—because she was a girl of considerable
intensity, and, for short spells at least, she did fling herself on
young fellows in a way they weren’t used to and couldn’t
understand. Whenever I ran into her walking out with one of them, she
always looked like a restaurant cat, while he looked plain scared. “Go
on! Hit me!” was what her look seemed to say, but his, translated,
read: “I don’t really mind if she isn’t safe.” She was, of course:
that was the joke. It would have been hard to find a more genuinely
innocent and disinterested girl, and the things they read into her
conduct were only the reflection of their own timidity.

She and I quarrelled all the time about them, but nothing I ever said
made her change her views about the sort of juvenile delinquent she
preferred, and my mother, a vicarious romantic of an old-fashioned
sort, took her part. It reached such a pitch with me that if one of
them even liked something I liked, a novel or a symphony, I at once
began to see weaknesses in it. My dislikes were temporary like Sue’s
passion, because within three months she had forgotten all about the
young man and I had forgotten completely that I had ever—God forgive
me!—described Mozart as a pansy.

Then, at last, she started walking out with a fellow could really
respect. Terry Connolly was small, good looking, well educated, with
fair hair and an eager manner. Though I saw that he liked me too, I
did not build on it because I realized that he was the sort of chap
who tries to see good in everybody. His father had died when he was
young, leaving Terry fairly well off, but with a mother and sisters
who got on his nerves, so, with characteristic independence, he had
left home and taken a flat in town. He made no secret of the fact that
he wanted a home of his own or that he hoped Sue would marry him. He
made this plain to me the first evening we went for a walk together,
and I was deeply impressed. | liked his honesty and his ability to
make up his mind about what he wanted.

And for the first time I found myself in the position of wishing to
tell one of Sue’s boys that I wondered if she was really good enough
for him. It was a disturbing experience. I wanted to be frank with
Terry, but at the same time not be disloyal to Sue. Of course, I had
to concede that she had her good points. She was warm-hearted and
generous, and intelligent so far as a girl can be who has never read
anything but what she found in the john and never has the faintest
intention of doing so, Besides, she was a first-rate cook and
dressmaker when the fancy took her, which was usually at the last
possible moment before a dinner or a dance. But, at the same time I
had to make it clear that she wasn’t steady. She took violent likes
and dislikes; she was always on top of the world or in the depths of
despair, and she kept poor Mother trailing valiantly after her, up
hill and down dale. On the whole, I was probably more unfair to Sue
than to Terry, but it made no difference to him, because anything I
said in her favour only confirmed some impression he already had,
while everything I said against her positively enchanted him. He
thought it delightful. He was the sort of man who prefers to see only
the good side of people he likes, a point of view I can understand,
though I am of a different type myself, and perhaps I sometimes go to
the other extreme.

Anyway, that made no difference either. For some reason which I still
don’t understand, Sue would have nothing to do with him, and after a
few months she was insanely in love with a commercial traveller called
Nick Ryan, who was easily the worst of all her errors of judgement. He
was fat, he was smooth, he was knowing, with a sort of clerical
obesity, unction, and infallibility; though mainly I remember that he
admired Proust and soured me on one of my favourite authors for a
whole year. Like Proust, he had a mother, and, like Proust, he never
let you hear the end of her.

This time I really let Sue know what I thought of her, and she became
furious.

“You’re only saying that about Nick because I wouldn’t marry your
pal,” she said indignantly.

“Marry him!” I said scornfully. “As if an imbecile like you would have
such luck!”

“I suppose you think he didn’t ask me?” she yelped.

“Terry?” I asked incredulously. (Of course, I should have known he
would propose to her at once, but I still couldn’t imagine that anyone
would refuse him.)

“Yes. Half a dozen times.”

“And you were fool enough to turn him down?”

“What a fool I was!”

“Sure when the child doesn’t love him!” Mother burst in with a
pathetic defence of romantic love.

“Oh, so she doesn’t love him?” I said blandly. “She doesn’t love the
one decent man she’s ever likely to meet, and she does love a rat like
Ryan, and you talk about her likes and dislikes as if they were the
law of God. You’re becoming as big an idiot as she is.”

“My goodness!” Mother exclaimed indignantly. “The way you go on! One
would think you wanted to tie her up and hand her over like they did
in the bad old days.”

“You’re sure they were so bad?” I asked with a sneer.

“Such airs!” muttered Mother, addressing herself to the wall as she
did whenever she got mad. “That his own father wouldn’t say it to me.”

“Anyway, maybe Clare Noonan will have him,” Sue added
maliciously. “He’s going out with her now.”

This was a double-edged thrust because Clare was a girl I had an eye
on myself, and if circumstances had permitted me to think of getting
married I might even have married her. She was Sue’s great friend,
quiet and sweet and gay, and they made a very good couple, because
Clare would do all the thoughtful things it would never cross Sue’s
mind to do and then look up to Sue for not doing them. “I’ve no doubt
she will,” I said with dignity. “Then maybe you’ll realize what a damn
fool you were.”

I was wrong there, too, of course. After a few months, for all her
quietness and sweetness, Clare turned Terry down flat. She said she
didn’t love him. I was getting very tired of that word. He in his
good-natured way still continued to see her and Sue, and whenever they
were in difficulties for an odd man, they summoned him in the most
lordly way in the world, and he was always there to oblige, always
pleasant and always generous. It puzzled me, because, though I was
very fond of them, they were neither of them outstanding catches. They
were nice girls, pretty girls, good girls, but neither was brilliant
or a beauty, and in a town like Cork, where marriageable men are
scarce and exacting, they stood a remarkably good chance of not
marrying at all. I studied him closely, particularly in their company,
but damn the thing could I see wrong with him, and I ended by deciding
that what Mother called “the bad old days,” when the choice of a
husband was made for them by responsible relatives, were the best days
that brainless girls had ever known.

One night at the house, this blew up into an open row. For some reason
all Sue’s friends were there, and I was the only man. Sue and Clare
were whispering over the end of the sofa at one another, and I knew by
their malicious air that they were talking about Terry, who was now
walking out with a third girl.

“Well,” I said challengingly, bringing the whole group to attention,
“tell us what is wrong with Terry Connolly.”

“Tell him, Clare,” Sue said casually. “He won’t believe me.

“Why the hell would I believe anyone who goes out. with a fellow like
Nick Ryan?” I asked contemptuously. This was intended to be mean,
because I could see for myself that there were already feelings
between Sue and Ryan. It was meaner than I intended, because I didn’t
know until weeks after that there were also feelings between Sue and
Clare on the same subject.

“Go on, Clare!” Sue said grimly. “Why don’t you tell him?”

Clare bent down and clutched her shins—a trick she had when she was
thinking hard—and looked up at me with an innocent smile.

“I don’t know can I explain it, Jack,” she said timidly. “It’s just
that Terry isn’t attractive somehow.”

“Really?” I said, smiling back at her, but unable even then to be
cross with her, she was so sweet. “Is that all, Clare? But don’t you
think we should define our terms? What do you mean by attractive?”

“Well, Jack, it’s not so easy to say, is it?” she went on in the same
sweet trustful tone.

“He’s too blooming dull,” one of the girls, called Anne Doran, said in
a loud voice, but I paid no particular attention to this, as Anne was
the dumbest of all the decent girls that ever came out of Sunday’s
Well.

“Dull?” I replied sweetly. “He’s the most intelligent man in Cork, but
you find him dull! Don’t you think there’s something peculiar about
that?” |

“Still, Jack,” Clare said, laughing up at me, “he is a wee bit dull,
you know.”

“God’s sake, woman, the man would bore you stiff,” Sue said with her
brassiest air.

“Ah, no, Sue, I wouldn’t go as far as that,” protested Clare in her
gentle way. “You’re always taking things to the fair. I know what Jack
means, and, of course, he’s right. Terry is nice, and he is
intelligent, whatever he talks about.”

“Sure, what does that fellow want, only a wife?” bawled Anne.

“And what do you want, Anne?” I asked. “An establishment?”

“No, no, no, Jack,” Clare exclaimed, slapping at my feet to attract my
attention. “Anne is right, too. You don’t want a man just to want you
as a wife.”

“You mean you want him to want you as a mistress,” I said, “and then
make him want to want you as his wife?”

“That’s right, Jack,” said Clare, who was completely incapable of
enjoying a joke and an argument at the same time, and settled for the
joke.

“I don’t think it is right, Clare,” said a big nun-like college girl
with a governessy air that delighted me. “As I see it, you don’t like
a man because you want to be his wife, but you become his wife because
it’s the only way you have of showing that you like him.”

“Bunk, girl!” bawled Anne. “As if we didn’t all know it was plain
sex!”

This produced such a chorus of dissent that I let them to it, and only
realized after half an hour of it that they had left me as wise as I
was before. All I could see was that here were half a dozen nice
girls, all looking for husbands in a city where husbands were rare,
and all avoiding like the plague the one man whom another man would
have instantly chosen as the best husband for any of them; and the
only reason they could offer seemed to be that the man was too much in
earnest, made no secret of the fact that he wanted a wife, and always
looked for the sort of girl who would make him a good one. It was
beyond me. And obviously the thing was catching, because when Clare
had shaken herself free of him Terry knocked round with a couple of
other girls and got nowhere with them either. The man was a sort of
pariah.

Meanwhile, to my further confusion, Clare, somehow or other, was
supposed to be cutting the ground from under Sue in her romance with
Ryan. Sue was dreadfully upset by it. She loved Ryan, but she liked
Clare and the gentle flattery of Clare’s imitation. I knew things had
come to a crisis when Sue told me that Clare was sly. Things she had
said in confidence to Clare had been repeated back to Ryan, and now he
would have nothing to do with her. I found it hard to believe that
Clare could possibly be as designing as Sue made her out to be,
particularly considering the dinginess of the object, and I was sure I
was right after I had met Clare one night on the Western Road and
heard her version. According to her, she had had nothing whatever to
do with Ryan until he had come to her and told her that everything was
over between him and Sue. She knew for a fact that he and Sue had had
a terrible row about his mother, in which Sue had called his mother a
designing old bitch, and that he had sworn that never, never, would he
have anything more to do with a girl who spoke so disrespectfully of
his sainted mother; and all the things that Sue was now accusing Clare
of having repeated had really been said by herself to Ryan.

“You know Sue, Jack,” Clare said to me with eyes that were full of
tears.

“Oh, I know Sue, Clare,” I replied, and I saw her home and comforted
her the best way I could. I had no doubt whatever that she was telling
the truth.

But there was no comforting Sue, and to all my attempts at making
peace she listened in stony silence, her hands on her knees like some
statue of a mourning goddess.

“You don’t understand women, Jack,” she said in a dead voice such as
might have come from a statue. “You never did and you never
will. Clare only wants to hold on to you in case Nick might let her
down the way he let me down.”

“Thanks for suggesting I might do as a stop-gap,” I said. “I’m
overwhelmed.”

“I’m telling you the truth, Jack,” said Sue with the same glassy
stare. “You’ll never understand how treacherous women can be. You
couldn’t believe a word that girl would tell you.”

So Clare in her treachery became engaged to Ryan, whom she afterwards
married, and Sue took up with someone else, though it was quite clear
that after her break-down, as she would probably have described it,
Sue regarded herself as emotionally dead and incapable of ever loving
again. When a girl like that decides that her heart has been broken,
she usually makes her choice in the most arbitrary way. Why she should
have chosen Ryan rather than any of the less objectionable specimens
she had known I couldn’t imagine, unless Clare’s supposed ingratitude
gave it something more of the flavour of universal tragedy.

And then one day Terry came back from Dublin, engaged. “So he found
somebody at last,” Sue said with malicilous amusement. It was Sue who
told me about it and it was clear that she got a sour pleasure from
all the details. Terry had been in Dublin only for a few days for some
sort of conference and had met the girl one night and proposed to her
the next. Even I felt this was a bit precipitate and resigned myself
to the worst.

When I ran into himself and Martha in Patrick Street a few weeks
later, I wondered at my own innocence. She wasn’t merely nice, she was
stunning—tall and thin and dark and intense with a deep, husky
voice—and it was obvious, though not in an obvious way, that she
thought the sun shone out of Terry. She didn’t gush; she didn’t even
smile or flatter; she just turned on him with a wondering air, and
Terry, with his good-natured manner and his pipe, was elevated into
the realm of the supernatural.

She had come down to approve of the house that Terry was buying and to
select the furniture for it. As he had to go back to his office, I
escorted her to her hotel in King Street. For half the way we talked
of nothing but furniture, and then she suddenly stopped dead and
looked at me, clasping her hands.

“Jack,” she asked in a husky whisper, “do you think I’m in my right
mind?”

“I hadn’t noticed anything unusual,” I replied lightly,never having
seen technique like this before, if technique it was, which I doubted.

“I mean,” she said despairingly, touching her breast with one hand and
with the other pointing back up the street, “am I mad or is that
fellow as good as I think?”

“I always thought him pretty good,” I said with a smile.

“Pretty good!” she echoed, at a loss for words. “Oh, I know you don’t
mean it that way, of course,” she added hastily. “I know you were
always a good friend of his. But that’s why I wanted to talk to you. I
didn’t think fellows like that existed. When I met him at a party, I
nearly proposed to him myself. I said it to the girl that was with
me. ‘I’m going to marry that man or enter a convent,’ I said, and she
said: ‘You’ll have to work damn quick because he’s only here till
Saturday.’ And I didn’t have to work at all! Do you believe in
religion, Jack?” she added intensely.

“I never thought much about it,” I said, aghast at the way this
extraordinary girl sprang from bough to bough.

“I don’t suppose you do. Terry doesn’t. He says he’s an atheist or
something. What the hell do I care what he is? But I prayed that night
as I never prayed before in my life. I said to God: ‘God, if you don’t
get me that fellow I don’t want a fellow at all.’ And next night he
proposed to me! On his knees! ‘Terry Connolly,’ I said, ‘not in your
best trousers!’ And you say you don’t believe in religion!”

I hadn’t said anything of the kind, but that didn’t worry her. She
clasped her hands again and seemed to rise on her toes with the
ecstatic look of a saint in a stained-glass window, only she was
looking at me instead of at the symbol of her martyrdom.

“Honest, Jack,” she said, “I don’t know am I on my head or my
heels. When I think that after next month that fellow will be my
property and I can do what I damn well please with him without anybody
being able to say a word to me, I feel I’m going mad. Imagine it!” she
said with her eyes dancing. “‘Stop drinking!’ ‘Come to bed!’ Imagine
me talking to him like that. Sure, how the hell could I ever select
furniture?”

When I left her, my own head was spinning. She and Terry were coming
to my house next evening, and I looked forward to it with a certain
grim satisfaction. Having been crowed over, I felt I had a crow
coming, and I knew it would be a substantial one. At the same time I
was surprised to find that Sue was also glad of their coming. She
arranged the supper herself and spent an hour doing improbable things
to a grey dress, and when the visitors arrived she answered the door
herself, with her hair done up behind and a lace collar that made the
grey dress into something new and strange. There was no doubt about
Sue; she was always either a sloven, streaking about the house with
her hair hanging, or else a picture. She was a picture that night. She
and Martha disappeared up the stairs and left Terry and myself to the
whiskey. Mother came in, and Terry had a long chat with her. He was
very fond of her, and she would have been fond of him if only Sue had
allowed her. When the girls came down again they were as thick as
thieves, and Sue went out of her way to be angelic to Terry. What’s
more, when Sue wanted to be angelic, she did make you think of an
angel. She even began to remind Terry tenderly of places that he and
she had visited together and make him promise to take Martha there as
well. Her reminiscences were all entirely new to me, and I had never
given her credit for so much observation and such poetic feeling. For
a while I had the unpleasant impression that she was making a
last-minute attempt to detach him from Martha, but that was an
injustice to Sue. She was merely giving Martha the big build-up, and
in the process was creating something for herself. Her outings with
Terry were already beginning to sound desirable. As she was leaving,
Martha gave me an embrace that almost made me blush.

“I love your sister, Jack,” she said in a husky whisper. “But why the
hell didn’t she marry him?”

“Why didn’t she?” I replied, feebly enough, I knew, but with plenty of
feeling.

“I suppose it was intended,” Martha said solemnly. Intended for her, I
understood her to mean. I guessed it was.

When they had gone and Mother had gone to bed, Sue and I sat on over
the fire in the dark, as we have so often through the years, old
cronies, really devoted to one another, yet always at cross
purposes. I was waiting for my crow, and she handed it to me,
handsomely, I thought.

“God, isn’t she lovely?” she said with that generosity of sentiment
that had so often maddened me when applied to young men. “Terry was
born lucky.”

“Martha seems to think she was on the lucky side herself,” I said, and
then felt sick because I saw Sue’s eyes fill with tears.

“Don’t rub it in, Jackie, there’s a good boy!” she said, bending over
the match I held out to her while her eyes frowned into the cup of my
palm.

“I didn’t mean to rub it in,” I said contritely. “But I was afraid
after you and Clare that he mightn’t get a wife at all.”

“Poor old Clare!” Sue said in a would-be tough voice, blowing out a
mouthful of smoke. “She’s the one that can really regret it.”

“Why?” I asked in surprise. “Have you been meeting Clare again?”

“Ah, of an odd time,” Sue said darkly. “She had tea with them in town
yesterday. That’s how I knew about them.”

“Oh!” I said. It was gradually dawning on me that Terry’s engagement
had brought Sue and Clare together in one of those ways that no man
can ever comprehend, as though the fact of their both having rejected
him had given them a sort of corporate interest in his future.

“Ah, it’s no use keeping up old quarrels,” said Sue. “I think you were
probably right about that, and that it wasn’t Clare’s fault at
all. Even if it was, the poor girl paid for it.”

“She certainly did,” I agreed. I was relieved. I knew now that Martha
would have not one but half a dozen ex-sweethearts of Terry’s to march
in her conquering train, and for Terry’s sake I was glad, because I
felt he deserved it.

What I was not prepared for, and do not really understand even now,
was Sue’s belated devotion to him. But that was how it happened. For
the future when broken hearts were in fashion, Sue’s would be broken
for him and not for Nick Ryan, and all the places where she had been
bored by him would now be touched with romance and pathos. However,
seeing that women of Sue’s kind must wear a broken heart for someone,
I dare say it may as well be for one of the men they have given such a
very bad time to.


(1956)
Source: Domestic Relations, 1957