An Out-and-Out Free Gift



WHEN Jimmy began to get out of hand, his father was both disturbed and
bewildered. Anybody else, yes, but not Jimmy! They had always been so
close! Closer, indeed, than Ned ever realized, for the perfectly
correct picture he had drawn of himself as a thoughtful, considerate
father who treated his son as though he were a younger brother could
have been considerably expanded by his wife. Indeed, to realize how
close they had been you needed to hear Celia on it, because only she
knew how much of the small boy there still was in her husband.

Who, for instance, would have thought that the head of a successful
business had such a passion for sugar? Yet during the war, when sugar
was rationed in Ireland, Celia, who was a bit of a Jansenist, had felt
herself bound to give up sugar and divide her ration between Ned and
Jimmy, then quite a small boy. And, even at that, Ned continued to
suffer. He did admire her self-denial, but he couldn’t help feeling
that so grandiose a gesture deserved a better object than Jimmy. It
was a matter of scientific fact that sugar was bad for Jimmy’s teeth,
and anything that went wrong with Jimmy’s teeth was going to cost his
father money. Ned felt it unfair that in the middle of a war, with his
salary frozen, Celia should inflict additional burdens on him.

Most of the time he managed to keep his dignity, though he could
rarely sit down to a meal without an angry glance at Jimmy’s sugar
bowl. To make things harder for him, Jimmy rationed himself so that
toward the end of the week he still had some sugar left, while Ned had
none. As a philosopher, Ned wondered that he should resent this so
deeply, but resent it he did. A couple of times, he deliberately stole
a spoonful while Celia’s back was turned, and the absurdity of this
put him in such a frivolous frame of mind for the rest of the evening
that she eventually said resignedly, “I suppose you’ve been at the
child’s sugar again? Really, Ned, you are hopeless!” On other
occasions, Ned summoned up all his paternal authority and with a
polite “You don’t mind, old man?” took a spoonful from under Jimmy’s
nose. But that took nerve, and a delicate appreciation of the precise
moment when Jimmy could be relied on not to cry.

Towards the end of the war, it became a matter of brute economic
strength. If Jimmy wanted a bicycle lamp, he could earn it or pay up
in good sugar. As Ned said, quoting from a business manual he had
studied in his own youth, “There is no such thing in business as an
out-and-out free gift.” Jimmy made good use of the lesson. “Bicycle
lamp, old man?” Ned would ask casually, poising his spoon over Jimmy’s
sugar bowl. “Bicycle lamp and three-speed gear,” Jimmy would reply
firmly. “For a couple of spoons of sugar?” his father would cry in
mock indignation. “Are you mad, boy?” They both enjoyed the game.

They could scarcely have been other than friends. There was so much of
the small boy in Ned that he was sensitive to the least thing
affecting Jimmy, and Jimmy would consult him about things that most
small boys keep to themselves. When he was in trouble, Ned never
dismissed it lightly, no matter how unimportant it seemed. He asked a
great many questions and frequently reserved his decisions. He had
chosen Jimmy’s school himself; it was a good one for Cork, and
sometimes, without informing Jimmy, he went off to the school himself
and had a chat with one of the teachers. Nearly always he managed to
arrange things without embarrassment or pain, and Jimmy took it for
granted that his decisions were usually right. It is a wise father who
can persuade his son of anything of the sort.

But now, at sixteen, Jimmy was completely out of control, and his
mother had handed him over to the secular arm, and the secular arm,
for all its weight, made no impression on his sullen indifference. The
first sign of the change in him was the disintegration of his normally
perfect manners; now he seemed to have no deference towards or
consideration for anyone. Ned caught him out in one or two minor
falsehoods and quoted to him a remark of his own father’s that “a lie
humiliates the man who tells it, but it humiliates the one it’s told
to even more.” What puzzled Ned was that, at the same time, the
outbreak was linked in some ways to qualities he had always liked in
the boy. Jimmy was strong, and showed his strength in protecting
things younger and weaker than himself. The cat regarded him as a
personal enemy because he hurled himself on her the moment he saw her
with a bird. At one time, there had been a notice on his door that
read, “Wounded Bird. Please Keep Out.” At school, his juniors
worshipped him because he would stand up for them against bullies, and
though Ned, in a fatherly way, advised him not to get mixed up in
other people’s quarrels, he was secretly flattered. He felt Jimmy was
taking after him.

But the same thing that attracted Jimmy to younger and weaker boys
seemed now to attract him to wasters. Outside of school, he never
associated with lads he might have to look up to but only with those
his father felt a normal boy should despise. All this was summed up in
his friendship with a youngster called Hogan, who was a strange
mixture of spoiling and neglect, a boy who had never been young and would
never be old. He openly smoked a pipe, and let on to be an authority
on brands of tobacco. Ned winced when Hogan addressed him as a
contemporary and tried to discuss business with him. He replied with
heavy irony—something he did only when he was at a complete loss. What
went on in Hogan’s house when Jimmy went there he could only guess
at. He suspected that the parents went out and stayed out, leaving the
boys to their own devices.

At first, Ned treated Jimmy’s insubordination as he had treated other
outbreaks, by talking to him as an equal. He even offered him a
cigarette—Jimmy had stolen money to buy cigarettes. He told him how
people grew up through admiration of others’ virtues, rather than
through tolerance of their weaknesses. He talked to him about sex,
which he suspected was at the bottom of Jimmy’s trouble, and Jimmy
listened politely and said he understood. Whether he did or not,
Ned decided that if Hogan talked sex to Jimmy, it was a very different
kind of sex.

Finally, he forbade Hogan the house and warned Jimmy against going to
Hogan’s. He made no great matter of it, contenting himself with
describing the scrapes he had got into himself at Jimmy’s age, and
Jimmy smiled, apparently pleased with this unfamiliar picture of his
grave and rather stately father, but he continued to steal and lie, to
get bad marks and remain out late at night. Ned was fairly satisfied
that he went to Hogan’s, and sat there smoking, playing cards, and
talking filth. He bawled Jimmy out and called him a dirty little thief
and liar, and Jimmy raised his brows and looked away with a pained
air, as though asking himself how long he must endure such ill
breeding. At this, Ned gave him a cuff on the ear that brought a look
of hatred into Jimmy’s face and caused Celia not to talk to Ned for
two days. But even she gave in at last.

“Last night was the third time he’s been out late this week,” she said
one afternoon in her apparently unemotional way. “You’ll really have
to do something drastic with him.”

These were hard words from a soft woman, but though Ned felt sorry for
her, he felt even sorrier for himself. He hated himself in the part of
a sergeant-major, and he blamed her for having let things go so far.

“Any notion where he has been?” he asked stiffly.

“Oh, you can’t get a word out of him,” she said with a shrug. “Judging
by his tone, I’d say Hogan’s. I don’t know what attraction that fellow
has for him.”

“Very well,” Ned said portentously. “I’ll deal with him. But, mind,
I’ll deal with him in my own way.”

“Oh, I won’t interfere,” she said wearily. “I know when I’m licked.”

“I can promise you Master Jimmy will know it, too,” Ned added grimly.

At supper he said in an even tone, “Young man, for the future you’re
going to be home every night at ten o’clock. This is the last time I’m
going to speak to you about it.”

Jimmy, apparently under the impression that his father was talking to
himself, reached for a slice of bread. Then Ned let fly with a shout
that made Celia jump and paralyzed the boy’s hand, still clutching the
bread.

“Did you hear me?”

“What’s that?” gasped Jimmy.

“I said you were to be in at ten o’clock.”

“Oh, all right, all right,” said Jimmy, with a look that said he did
not think any reasonable person would require him to share the house
any longer with one so uncivilized. Though this look was intended to
madden Ned, it failed to do so, because he knew that, for all her
sentimentality and high liberal principles, Celia was a woman of her
word and would not interfere whenever he decided to knock that
particular look off Master Jimmy’s face. He knew, too, that the time
was not far off; that Jimmy had not the faintest intention of obeying,
and that he would be able to deal with it.

“Because I warn you, the first night you’re late again I’m going to
skin you alive,” he added. He was trying it out, of course. He knew
that Celia hated expressions of fatherly affection like “skin you
alive,” “tan you within an inch of your life,” and “knock your head
off,” which, to her, were relics of a barbarous age. To his great
satisfaction, she neither shuddered nor frowned. Her principles were
liberal, but they were principles.



Two nights after, Jimmy was late again. Celia, while pretending to
read, was watching the clock despairingly. “Of course, he may have
been delayed,” she said smoothly, but there was no conviction in her
tone. It was nearly eleven when they heard Jimmy’s key in the door.

“I think perhaps I’d better go to bed,” she said.

“It might be as well,” he replied pityingly. “Send that fellow in on
your way.”

He heard her in the hallway, talking with Jimmy in a level, friendly
voice, not allowing her consternation to appear, and he smiled. He
liked that touch of the Roman matron in her. Then there was a knock,
and Jimmy came in. He was a big lad for sixteen but he still had
traces of baby fat about the rosy cheeks he occasionally scraped with
Ned’s razor, to Ned’s annoyance. Now Ned would cheerfully have given
him a whole shaving kit if it would have avoided the necessity for
dealing with him firmly.

“You wanted to talk to me, Dad?” he asked, as though he could just
spare a moment.

“Yes, Jimmy, I did. Shut that door.”

Jimmy gave a resigned shrug at his father’s mania for privacy but did
as he was told, and stood against the door, his hands joined and his
chin in the air.

“When did I say you were to be in?” Ned said, looking at the clock.

“When?”

“Yes. When? At what time, if you find it so hard to understand.”

“Oh, ten,” Jimmy replied wearily.

“Ten? And what time do you make that?”

“Oh, I didn’t know it was so late!” Jimmy exclaimed with an astonished
look at the clock. “I’m sorry. I didn’t notice the time.”

“Really?” Ned said ironically. “Enjoyed yourself that much?”

“Not too bad,” Jimmy replied vaguely. He was always uncomfortable
with his father’s irony.

“Company good?”

“Oh, all right,” Jimmy replied with another shrug.

‘Where was this?”

“At a house.”

“Poor people?” his father asked in mock surprise.

“What?” exclaimed Jimmy.

“Poor people who couldn’t afford a clock?”

Jimmy’s indignation overflowed in stammering protest. “I never said
they hadn’t a clock. None of the other fellows had to be in by ten. I
didn’t like saying I had to be. I didn’t want them to think I was a
blooming ...” The protest expired in a heavy sigh, and Ned’s heart
contracted with pity and shame.

“Juvenile delinquent,” he added patiently. “I know. Neither your
mother nor I want you to make a show of yourself. But you didn’t
answer my question. Where was this party? And don’t tell me any lies,
because I’m going to find out.”

Jimmy grew red and angry. “Why would I tell you lies?”

“For the same reason you’ve told so many already—whatever that may
be. You see, Jimmy, the trouble with people who tell lies is that you
have to check everything they say. Not on your account but on theirs;
otherwise, you may be unfair to them. People soon get tired of being
fair, though. Now, where were you? At Hogan’s?”

“You said I wasn’t to go to Hogan’s.”

“You see, you’re still not answering my questions. Were you at
Hogan’s?”’

“No,” Jimmy replied in a whisper.

“Word of honor?”

“Word of honor.” But the tone was not the tone of honor but of shame.

“Where were you, then?”

“Ryans’.”

The name was unfamiliar to Ned, and he wondered if Jimmy had not just
invented it to frustrate any attempt at checking on his statements. He
was quite prepared to hear that Jimmy didn’t know where the house
was. It was as bad as that.

“Ryans’,” he repeated evenly. “Do I know them?”

“You might. I don’t know.”

“Where do they live?”

“Gardiner’s Hill.”

“‘Whereabouts?”

“Near the top. Where the road comes up from Dillon’s Cross, four
doors down. It has a tree in the garden.” It came so pat that Ned felt
sure there was such a house. He felt sure of nothing else.

“And you spent the evening there? I’m warning you for your own
good. Because I’m going to find out.” There was a rasp in his voice.

“I told you I did.”

“I know,” Ned said between his teeth. “Now you’re going to come along
with me and prove it.”

He rose and in silence took his hat from the hall stand and went
out. Jimmy followed him silently, a pace behind. It was a moonlit
night, and as they turned up the steep hill, the trees overhung a high
wall on one side of the street. On the other side, there were steep
gardens filled with shadows.

“Where did you say this house was?”

“At the top,” Jimmy replied sullenly.

The hill stopped, the road became level, and at either side were
little new suburban houses, with tiny front gardens. Near the corner,
Ned saw one with a tree in front of it and stopped. There was still
light in the front room. The family kept late hours for Cork. Suddenly
he felt absurdly sorry for the boy.

“You don’t want to change your mind?” he asked gently. “You’re sure
this is where you were?”

“I told you so,” Jimmy replied almost in exasperation.

“Very well,” Ned said savagely. “You needn’t come in.”

“All right,” Jimmy said, and braced himself against the concrete
gatepost, looking over the moonlit roofs at the clear sky. In the
moonlight he looked very pale; his hands were drawn back from his
sides, his lips drawn back from his teeth, and for some reason his
white anguished face made Ned think of a crucifixion.

Anger had taken the place of pity in him. He felt the boy was being
unjust toward him. He wouldn’t have minded the injustice if he’d ever
been unjust to Jimmy, but two minutes before he had again shown his
fairness and given Jimmy another chance. Besides, he didn’t want to
make a fool of himself.

He walked up the little path to the door, whose colored-glass panels
glowed in light that seemed to leak from the sitting-room door. When
he rang, a pretty girl of fifteen or sixteen came out and screwed up
her eyes at him.

“I hope you’ll excuse my calling at this unnatural hour,” Ned said in
a bantering tone. “It’s only a question I want to ask. Do you think I
could talk to your father or your mother for a moment?”

“You can, to be sure,” the girl replied in a flutter of
curiosity. “Come in, can’t you? We’re all in the front room.”

Ned, nerving himself for an ordeal, went in. It was a tiny front room
with a fire burning in a tiled fireplace. There was a mahogany table
at which a boy of twelve seemed to be doing his lessons. Round the
fire sat an older girl, a small woman, and a tubby little man with a
graying mustache. Ned smiled, and his tone became even more jocular.

“I hope you’ll forgive my making a nuisance of myself,” he said. “My
name is Callanan. I live at St. Luke’s. I wonder if you’ve ever met my
son Jimmy?”

“Jimmy?” the mother echoed, her hand to her cheek. “I don’t know
that I did.”

“I know him,” said the girl who had let him in, in a voice that
squeaked with pride.

“Fine!” Ned said. “At least, you know what I’m talking about. I wonder
if you saw him this evening?”

“Jimmy?” the girl replied, taking fright. ““No. Sure, I hardly know
him only to salute him. Why? Is anything wrong?”

“Nothing serious, at any rate,” said Ned with a comforting
smile. “It’s just that he said he spent the evening here with you. I
daresay that’s an excuse for being somewhere he shouldn’t have been.”

“Well, well, well!’ Mrs. Ryan said anxiously, joining her
hands. “Imagine saying he was here! Wisha, Mr. Callanan, aren’t they a
caution?”

“A caution against what, though?” Ned asked cheerfully. “That’s what
I’d like to know. I’m only sorry he wasn’t telling the truth. I’m
afraid he wasn’t in such charming company. Good-night, everybody, and
thank you.”

“Good-night, Mr. Callanan,” said Mrs. Ryan, laying a hand gently on
his sleeve. “And don’t be too hard on him! Sure, we were wild
ourselves once.”

“Once?” he exclaimed with a laugh. “I hope we still are. We’re not
dead yet, Mrs. Ryan.”

The same girl showed him out. She had recovered from her fright and
looked as though she would almost have liked him to stay.

“Good-night, Mr. Callanan,” she called blithely from the door, and
when he turned, she was silhouetted. against the lighted doorway, bent
halfway over, and waving. He waved back, touched by this glimpse of an
interior not so unlike his own but seen from outside, in all its
innocence. It was a shock to emerge on the roadway and see Jimmy still
standing where he had left him, though he no longer looked
crucified. Instead, with his head down and his hands by his sides, he
looked terribly weary. They walked in silence for a few minutes, till
they saw the valley of the city and the lamps cascading down the
hillsides and breaking below into a foaming lake of light.

“Well,” Ned said gloomily, “the Ryans seem to be under the impression
that you weren’t there tonight.”

“I know,” Jimmy replied, as though this were all that might be
expected from him.

Something in his tone startled Ned. It no longer seemed to breathe
defiance. Instead, it hinted at something very like despair. But why?
he thought in exasperation. Why the blazes did he tell me all those
lies? Why didn’t he tell me even outside the door? Damn it, I gave him
every chance.

“Don’t you think this is a nice place to live, Dad?” asked Jimmy.

“Is it?” Ned asked sternly.

“Ah, well, the air is better,” said Jimmy with a sigh. They said no
more till they reached home.

“Now, go to bed,” Ned said in the hallway. “I’ll consider what to do
with you tomorrow.”

Which, as he well knew, was bluff, because he had already decided to
do nothing to Jimmy. Somehow he felt that, whatever the boy had done
to himself, punishment would be merely an anticlimax, and perhaps a
relief. Punishment, he thought, might be exactly what Jimmy would have
welcomed at that moment. He went into the sitting room and poured
himself a drink, feeling that if anyone deserved it, he did. He had a
curious impression of having been involved in some sort of struggle
and escaped some danger to which he could not even give a name.

When he went upstairs, Celia was in bed with a book, and looked up at
him with a wide-eyed stare. She proved to be no help to him. “Jimmy
usen’t to be like that,” she said wistfully, and he knew she had been
lying there regretting the little boy who had come to her with all his
troubles.

“But why, why, why, in God’s name, did he tell me all those lies?” Ned
asked angrily.

“Oh, why do people ever tell lies?” she asked with a shrug.

“Because they hope they won’t be found out,” Ned replied. “Don’t you
see that’s what’s so queer about it?”

She didn’t, and for hours Ned lay awake, turning it over and over in
his mind. It was easy enough to see it as the story of a common
falsehood persisted in through some mood of bravado, and each time he
thought of it that way he grew angry again. Then, all at once, he
would remember the face of Jimmy against the pillar in the moonlight,
as though he were being crucified, and give a frustrated sigh.

“Go to sleep!” Celia said once, giving him a vicious nudge.

“I can’t, damn it, I can’t,” he said, and began all over again.

Why had the kid chosen Ryans’ as an excuse? Was that merely to put him
further astray, or did it really represent some dream of happiness and
fulfillment? The latter explanation he rejected as too simple and
sentimental, yet he knew quite well that Ryans’ house _had_ meant
something to the boy, even if it was only an alternative to whatever
house he had been in and the company he had met there. Ned could
remember himself at that age, and how, when he had abandoned himself
to something or somebody, an alternative image would appear. The image
that had flashed up in Jimmy’s mind, the image that was not one of
Hogan’s house, was Ryans’. But it needed more than that to explain his
own feeling of danger. It was as though Jimmy had deliberately
challenged him, if he were the man he appeared to be, to struggle with
the demon of fantasy in him and destroy it. It was as though not he
but Jimmy had been forcing the pace. At the same time, he realized
that this was something he would never know. All he ever would know
was that somewhere behind it all were despair and loneliness and
terror, under the magic of an autumn night. And yet there were
sentimental fools who told you that they would wish to be young
again. 



Next morning at breakfast, he was cold and aloof, more from
embarrassment than hostility. Jimmy, on the other hand, seemed to be
in the highest spirits, helping Celia with the breakfast things,
saying ‘Excuse me, Daddy,” as he changed Ned’s plate. He pushed the
sugar owl towards Ned and said with a grin, “Daddy likes sugar.”

Ned just restrained himself from flinging the bow] at him. “As a
matter of fact, I do,” he said coldly.

He had done the same sort of thing too often himself. He knew that,
with the threat of punishment over his head, Jimmy was scared, as well
he might be. It is one thing to be defiant at eleven o’clock at night,
another thing altogether to be defiant at eight in the morning.

All day, at intervals, he found himself brooding over it. At lunch he
taked to his chief clerk about it, but MacIntyre couldn’t advise
him. “Godd, Ned,” he said impatiently, “every kid is
different. There’s no laying down rules. My one told the nuns that her
mother was a religious maniac and kicked the statue of the Blessed
Virgin around the floor. For God’s sake, Ned, imagine Kate kicking a
statue around the floor!”

“Difficult, isn’t it?” replied Ned with a grin, though to himself he
thought complacently that that sort of fantasy was what he would
expect from Kate’s daughter. Parents so rarely sympathize with one
another.

That evening, when he came in, Celia said coolly, “I don’t know what
you said to Jimmy, but it seems to have worked.”

Relief came over Ned like a cold shower. He longed to be able to say
something calm like “Oh, good!” or “Glad I could help” or “Any time I
can advise you again, just let me know.” But he was too honest. He
shook his head, still the schoolboy that Celia had loved such a long
time ago, and his forehead wrinkled up.

“That’s the awful part of it,” he said. “I said nothing at all to
him. For the first time in my life I didn’t know what to say. What the
hell could I say?”

“Oh, no doubt you said something and didn’t notice it,” Celia said
confidently. “There’s no such thing in business as an out-and-out free
gift.”


146
(1957)
Source: Collected Stories, 1981