THE AMERICAN WIFE


Elsie Colleary, who was on a visit to her cousins in Cork, was a
mystery even to them. Her father, Jack Colleary’s brother, had
emigrated when he was a kid and done well for himself; he had made his
money in the liquor business, and left it to go into wholesale produce
when Elsie was growing up, because he didn’t think it was the right
background for a girl. He had given her the best of educations, and
all he had got out of it was to have Elsie telling him that Irishmen
were more manly, and that even Irish-Americans let their wives boss
them too much. What she meant was that he let her mother boss him, and
she had learned from other Irish people that this was not the custom
at home. Maybe Mike Colleary, like a lot of other Americans, did give
the impression of yielding too much to his wife, but that was because
she thought she knew more about things than he did, and he was too
soft-hearted to disillusion her. No doubt the Americans, experienced
in nostalgia, took Elsie’s glorification of Irishmen good-humouredly,
but it did not go down too well in Cork, where the men stood in
perpetual contemplation of the dangers of marriage, like cranes
standing on one leg at the edge of the windy water.

She stood out at the Collearys’ quiet little parties, with her high
waist and wide skirts, taking the men out to sit on the stairs while
she argued with them about religion and politics. Women having
occasion to go upstairs thought this very forward, but some of the men
found it a pleasant relief. Besides, like all Americans, she was
probably a millionaire, and the most unworldly of men can get a kick
out of flirting with a real millionaire.

The man she finally fell in love with did not sit on the stairs with
her at all, though, like her, he was interested in religion and
politics. This was a chap called Tom Barry. Tom was thirty-five, tall
and thin and good-looking, and he lived with his mother and two
good-looking sisters in a tiny house near the Barrack, and he couldn’t
even go for a walk in the evening without the three ABROAD 537

of them lining up in the hallway to present him with his hat, his
gloves, and his clean handkerchief. He had a small job in the
courthouse, and was not without ambition; he had engaged in several
small business enterprises with his friend Jerry Coakley, but all they
had ever got out of these was some good stories. Jerry was forty, and
he had an old mother who insisted on putting his socks on for him.

Elsie’s cousins warned her against setting her cap at Tom, but this
only seemed to make her worse. ‘I guess I’ll have to seduce him,’ she
replied airily, and her cousins, who had never known a well-bred
Catholic girl to talk like that, were shocked. She shocked them even
more before she was done. She called at his house when she knew he
wasn’t there and deluded his innocent mother and sisters into
believing that she didn’t have designs on him; she badgered Tom to
death at the office, gave him presents, and even hired a car to take
him for drives.

They weren’t the only ones who were shocked. 'Tom was shocked himself
when she asked him point-blank how much he earned. However, he put
that down to unworldliness and told her.

‘But that’s not even a street cleaner’s wages at home,’ she said
indignantly.

‘I’m sure, Elsie,’ he said sadly. ‘But then, of course, money isn’t
everything.’

‘No, and Ireland isn’t everything,’ she replied. It was peculiar, but
from their first evening together she had never ceased talking about
America to him—the summer heat, and the crickets chattering, and the
leaves alive with fireflies. During her discussions on the stairs, she
had apparently discovered a great many things wrong with Ireland, and
Tom, with a sort of mournful pleasure, kept adding to them.

‘Oh, I know, I know,’ he said regretfully.

‘Then if you know, why don’t you do something about it?’

‘Ah, well, I suppose it’s habit, Elsie,’ he said, as though he weren’t
quite sure. ‘I suppose I’m too old to learn new tricks.’

But Elsie doubted if it was really habit, and it perplexed her that a
man so clever and conscientious could at the same time be so lacking
in initiative. She explained it finally to herself in terms of an
attachment to his mother that was neither natural nor healthy. Elsie
was a girl who loved explanations. 538 THE BEST OF FRANK O’CONNOR

On their third outing she had proposed to him, and he was so
astonished that he burst out laughing, and continued to laugh whenever
he thought of it again. Elsie herself couldn’t see anything to laugh
at in it. Having been proposed to by men who were younger and
better-looking and better off than he was, she felt she had been
conferring an honour on him. But he was a curious man, for when she
repeated the proposal, he said, with a cold fury that hurt her,
‘Sometimes I wish you’d think before you talk, Elsie. You know what J
earn, and you know it isn’t enough to keep a family on. Besides, in
case you haven’t noticed it, I have a mother and two sisters to
support.’

“You could earn enough to support them in America,’ she protested.

‘And I told you already that I had no intention of going to America.’

‘I have some money of my own,’ she said. ‘It’s not much, but it would
mean I’d be no burden to you.’

‘Listen, Elsie,’ he said, ‘a man who can’t support a wife and children
has no business marrying at all. I have no business marrying
anyway. I’m not a very cheerful man, and I have a rotten temper.’

Elsie went home in tears, and told her astonished uncle that all
Irishmen were pansies, and, as he had no notion what pansies were, he
shook his head and admitted that it was a terrible country. Then she
wrote to Tom and told him that what he needed was not a wife but a
psychiatrist. ‘The writing of this gave her great satisfaction, but
next morning she realized that her mother would only say she had been
silly. Her mother believed that men needed careful handling. The day
after, she waited for Tom outside the courthouse, and when he came out
she summoned him with two angry blasts on the horn. A rainy sunset was
flooding the Western Road with yellow light that made her look old and
grim.

‘Well,’ she said bitterly, ‘I’d hoped I’d never see your miserable
face again.’

But that extraordinary man only smiled gently and rested his elbows on
the window of the car.

‘I’m delighted you came,’ he said. ‘I was all last night trying to
write to you, but I’m not very good at it.’

‘Oh, so you got my letter?’ ABROAD $39

‘I did, and I’m ashamed to have upset you so much. All I wanted to say
was that if you’re serious—I mean really serious—about this, I’d
be honoured.’

At first she thought he was mocking her. Then she realized that he
wasn’t, and she was in such an evil humour that she was tempted to
tell him she had changed her mind. Then common sense told her the man
would be fool enough to believe her, and after that his pride wouldn’t
let him propose to her again. It was the price you had to pay for
dealing with men who had such a high notion of their own dignity.

‘I suppose it depends on whether you love me or not,’ she
replied. ‘It’s a little matter you forgot to mention.’

He raised himself from the car window, and in the evening light she
saw a look of positive pain on his lean, sad, gentle face. ‘Ah, I do,
but —’ he was beginning when she cut him off and told him to get in
the car. Whatever he was about to say, she didn’t want to hear it. 



They settled down in a modern bungalow outside the town, on the edge
of the harbour. Elsie’s mother, who flew over for the wedding, said
dryly that she hoped Elsie would be able to make up to Tom for the
loss of his mother’s services. In fact, it wasn’t long before the
Barrys were saying she wasn’t, and making remarks about her cooking
and her lack of tidiness. But if Tom noticed there was anything wrong,
which is improbable, he didn’t mention it. Whatever his faults as a
sweetheart, he made a good husband. It may have been the affection of
a sensitive man for someone he saw as frightened, fluttering, and
insecure. It could have been the longing of a frustrated one for
someone that seemed to him remote, romantic, and mysterious. But
whatever it was, Tom, who had always been God Almighty to his mother
and sisters, was extraordinarily patient and understanding with Elsie,
and she needed it, because she was often homesick and scared.

Jerry Coakley was a great comfort to her in these fits, for Jerry had
a warmth of manner that Tom lacked. He was an insignificant-looking
man with a ravaged dyspeptic face and a tubercular complexion, a thin,
bitter mouth with bad teeth, and long lank hair; but he was so
sympathetic and insinuating that at 540 THE BEST OF FRANK O’CONNOR

times he even gave you the impression that he was changing hi: shape
to suit your mood. Elsie had the feeling that the sense oi failure had
eaten deeper into him than into Tom.

At once she started to arrange a match between him and Tom’s elder
sister, Annie, in spite of Tom’s warnings that Jerry would never marry
till his mother died. When she realized that Tom. was right, she said
it was probably as well, because Annie wouldn’t put his socks on
him. Later she admitted that this was unfair, and that it would
probably be a great relief to poor Jerry to be allowed to put on his
socks himself. Between Tom and him there was one of those passionate
relationships that spring up in small towns where society narrows
itself down to a handful of erratic and explosive friendships. There
were always people who weren’t talking to other people, and friends
had all to be dragged into the disagreement, no matter how trifling it
might be, and often it happened that the principals had already become
fast friends again when their friends were still ignoring one another
in the street. But Jerry and Tom refused to disagree. Jerry would drop
in for a bottle of stout, and Tom and he would denounce the country,
while Elsie wondered why they could never find anything more
interesting to talk about than stupid priests and crooked politicians.

Elsie’s causes were of a different kind. The charwoman, Mrs Dorgan,
had six children and a husband who didn’t earn enough to keep
them. Elsie concealed from Tom how much she really paid Mrs Dorgan,
but she couldn’t conceal that Mrs Dorgan wore her clothes, or that she
took the Dorgan family to the seaside in the summer. When Jerry
suggested to Tom that the Dorgans might be doing too well out of
Elsie, Tom replied, ‘Even if they were, Jerry, I wouldn’t
interfere. If ’tis people’s nature to be generous, you must let them
be generous.’

For Tom’s causes she had less patience. ‘Oh, why don’t you people do
something about it, instead of talking?’ she cried.

“What could you do, Elsie?’ asked Jerry.

‘At least you could show them up,” said Elsie.

‘Why, Elsie?’ he asked with his mournful smile. “Were you thinking of
starting a paper?’

‘Then, if you can’t do anything about it, shut up!’ she said. “You and
Tom seem to get some queer masochistic pleasure out of these
people.’

‘Begor, Elsie, you might have something there,’ Jerry said, nodding
ruefully.

‘Oh, we adore them,’ Tom said mockingly.

“You do,’ she said. ‘I’ve seen you. You sit here night after night
denouncing them, and then when one of them gets sick you’re round to
the house to see if there’s anything you can do for him, and when he
dies you start a collection for his wife and family. You make me
sick.’ Then she stamped out to the kitchen.

Jerry hunched his shoulders and exploded in splutters and giggles. He
reached out a big paw for a bottle of stout, with the air of someone
snaring a rabbit.

‘I declare to God, Tom, she has us taped,’ he said.

‘She has you taped anyway,’ said Tom.

“How’s that?’

‘She thinks you need an American wife as well.’

“Well, now, she mightn’t be too far out in that, either,’ said Jerry
with a crooked grin. ‘I often thought it would take something like
that.’

‘She thinks you have problems,’ said Tom with a snort. Elsie’s
favourite word gave him the creeps.

‘She wouldn’t be referring to the mother, by any chance?’

For a whole year Elsie had fits of depression because she thought she
wasn’t going to have a baby, and she saw several doctors, whose advice
she repeated in mixed company, to the great embarrassment of everybody
except Jerry. After that, for the best part of another year, she had
fits of depression because she was going to have a baby, and she
informed everybody about that as well, including the occasion of its
conception and the probable date of its arrival, and again they were
all embarrassed only Jerry. Having reached the age of eighteen before
learning that there was any real difference between the sexes, Jerry
found all her talk fascinating, and also he realized that Elsie saw
nothing immodest in it. It was just that she had an experimental
interest in her body and mind. When she gave him bourbon he studied
its taste, but when he gave her Irish she studied its effect—it was as
simple as that. Jerry, too, liked explanations, but he liked them for
their own sake, and not with the intention of doing anything with
them. At the same time, Elsie was scared by what she thought was a
lack of curiosity on the part of the Cork doctors, and when her mother
learned this she began to press Elsie to have the baby in America,
where she would feel secure.

‘You don’t think I should go back, Tom?’ she asked guiltily. ‘Daddy
says he’ll pay my fare.’

It came as a shock to Tom, though the idea had crossed his mind that
something of the kind might happen. ‘If that’s the way you feel about
it, I suppose you’d better, Elsie,’ he replied.

‘But you wouldn’t come with me.’

‘How can I come with you? You know I can’t just walk out of the office
for a couple of months.’

‘But you could get a job at home.’

‘And I told you a dozen times I don’t want a job in America,’ he said
angrily. Then, seeing the way it upset her, he changed his
tone. ‘Look, if you stay here, feeling the way you do, you’ll work
yourself into a real illness. Anyway, sometime you’ll have to go back
on a visit, and this is as good an occasion as any.’

‘But how can I, without you?’ she asked. ‘You’d only neglect
yourself.’

‘I would not neglect myself.’

‘Would you stay at your mother’s?’

‘I would not stay at my mother’s. This is my house, and I’m going to
stop here.’

Tom worried less about the effect Elsie’s leaving would have on him
than about what his family would say, particularly Annie, who never
lost the chance of a crack at Elsie. ‘You let that girl walk on you,
Tom Barry,’ she said. ‘One of these days she’ll walk too hard.’ Then,
of course, Tom walked on her, in the way that only a devoted brother
can, but that was no relief to the feeling that something had come
between Elsie and him and that he could do nothing about it. When he
was driving Elsie to the liner, he knew that she felt the same, for
she didn’t break down until they came to a long grey bridge over an
inlet of water, guarded by a lonely grey stone tower. She had once
pointed it out to him as the first thing she had seen that represented
Ireland to her, and now he had the feeling that this was how she saw
him —a battered old tower by a river mouth that was no longer of any
importance to anyone but the sea gulls.


She was away longer than she or anyone else had expected. First there
was the wedding of an old school friend; then her mother’s birthday;
then the baby got ill. It was clear that she was enjoying herself
immensely, but she wrote long and frequent letters, sent snapshots of
herself and the baby, and—most important of all—had named the baby for
Jerry Coakley. Clearly Elsie hadn’t forgotten them. The Dorgan kids
appeared on the road in clothes that had obviously been made in
America, and whenever Tom met them he stopped to speak to them and
give them the pennies he thought Elsie would have given them.

Occasionally Tom went to his mother’s for supper, but otherwise he
looked after himself. Nothing could persuade him that he was not a
natural housekeeper, or that whatever his sisters could do he could
not do just as well himself. Sometimes Jerry came and the two men took
off their coats and tried to prepare a meal out of one of Elsie’s
cookbooks. ‘Steady, squad!’ Tom would murmur as he wiped his hands
before taking another peep at the book. ‘You never know when this
might come in handy.’ But whether it was the result of Tom’s
supervision or Jerry’s helplessness, the meal usually ended in a big
burnup, or a tasteless mess from which some essential ingredient
seemed to be missing, and they laughed over it as they consoled
themselves with bread and cheese and stout. ‘Elsie is right,’ Jerry
would say, shaking his head regretfully. ‘We have problems, boy! We
have problems!’

Elsie returned at last with trunks full of new clothes, a box of
up-to-date kitchen stuff, and a new gaiety and energy. Every ten
minutes Tom would make an excuse to tiptoe upstairs and take another
look at his son. Then the Barrys arrived, and Elsie gave immediate
offence by quoting Gesell and Spock. But Mrs Barry didn’t seem to mind
as much as her daughters. By some extraordinary process of
association, she had discovered a great similarity between Elsie and
herself in the fact that she had married from the south side of the
city into the north and had never got used to it. This delighted
Elsie, who went about proclaiming that her mother-in-law and herself
were both displaced persons.

The next year was a very happy one, and less trying on Elsie, because
she had another woman to talk to, even if most of the time she didn’t
understand what her mother-in-law was telling her, and had the
suspicion that her mother-in-law didn’t understand her either. But
then she got pregnant for the second time, and became restless and
dissatisfied once more, though now it wasn’t only with hospitals and
doctors but with schools and schoolteachers as well. Tom and Jerry had
impressed on her that the children were being turned into idiots,
learning through the medium of a language they didn’t
understand—indeed, according to Tom, it was a language that nobody
understood. What chance would the children have?

‘Ah, I suppose the same chance as the rest of us, Elsie,’ said Jerry
in his sly, mournful way.

‘But you and Tom don’t want chances, Jerry,’ she replied
earnestly. ‘Neither of you has any ambition.’

‘Ah, you should look on the bright side of things. Maybe with God’s
help they won’t have any ambition either.’

But this time it had gone beyond a joke. For days on end, Tom was in a
rage with her, and when he was angry he seemed to withdraw into
himself like a snail into a shell.

Unable to get to him, Elsie grew hysterical. ‘It’s all your damned
obstinacy,’ she sobbed. ‘You don’t do anything in this rotten hole,
but you’re too conceited to get out of it. Your family treat you as if
you were God, and then you behave to me as if you were God! God! God!’
she screamed, and each time she punched him viciously with her fist,
till suddenly the humour of their situation struck him and he went off
into laughter.

After that, he could only make his peace with her and make excuses for
her leaving him again, but he knew that the excuses wouldn’t impress
his sisters. One evening when he went to see them, Annie caught him,
as she usually did, when he was going out the front door, and he stood
looking sidewise down the avenue.

‘Are you letting Elsie go off to America again, Tom?” she asked.

‘I don’t know,’ Tom said, pulling his long nose with an air of
affected indifference. ‘I can’t very well stop her, can I?’

‘Damn soon she’d he stopped if she hadn’t the money,’ said Annie. ‘And
you’re going to let her take young Jerry?’

‘Ah, how could I look after Jerry? Talk sense, can’t you!’

‘And I suppose we couldn’t look after him either? We’re not
sufficiently well read.’

‘Ah, the child should be with his own mother, Annie,’ Tom said
impatiently.

‘And where should his mother be? Ah, Tom Barry,’ she added bitterly,
‘I told you what that one was, and she’s not done with you yet. Are
you sure she’s going to bring him back?” 

Then Tom exploded on her in his cold, savage way. ‘If you want to
know, I am not,’ he said, and strode down the avenue with his head
slightly bowed.

Something about the cut of him as he passed under a street lamp almost
broke Annie’s heart. ‘The curse of God on that bitch!’ she said when
she returned to her mother in the kitchen.

‘Is it Elsie?’ her mother cried angrily. ‘How dare you talk of her
like that!’

‘He’s letting her go to America again,’ said Annie.

‘He’s a good boy, and he’s right to consider her feelings,’ said her
mother anxiously. ‘I often thought myself I’d go back to the south
side and not be ending my days in this misfortunate hole.’

The months after Elsie’s second departure were bitter ones for Tom. A
house from which a woman is gone is bad enough, but one from which a
child is gone is a deadhouse. Tom would wake in the middle of the
night thinking he heard Jerry crying, and be half out of bed before he
realized that Jerry was thousands of miles away. He did not continue
his experiments with cooking and housekeeping. He ate at his mother’s,
spent most of his time at the Coakleys’, and drank far too much. Like
all inward-looking men he had a heavy hand on the bottle. Meanwhile
Elsie wavered and procrastinated worse than before, setting dates,
cancelling her passage, sometimes changing her mind within twenty-four
hours. In his despondency Tom resigned himself to the idea that she
wouldn’t return at all, or at least persuaded himself that he had.

‘Oh, she’ll come back all right,’ Jerry said with a worried air. ‘The
question is, will she stay back. ...You don’t mind me talking about
it?’ he asked.

‘Indeed no. Why would I?’

‘You know, Tom, I’d say ye had family enough to last ye another few
years.’

Tom didn’t look up for a few moments, and when he did he smiled
faintly. ‘You think it’s that?’

‘I’m not saying she knows it,’ Jerry added hastily. ‘There’s nothing
calculating about her, and she’s crazy about you.’

‘I thought it was something that went with having the baby,’ Tom said
thoughtfully. ‘Some sort of homing instinct.’

‘I wouldn’t say so,’ said Jerry. ‘Not altogether. I think she feels
that eventually she’ll get you through the kids.’

‘She won’t,’ Tom said bitterly.

‘I know, sure, I know. But Elsie can’t get used to the—the
irremediable.’  The last word was so unlike Jerry that Tom felt he
must have looked it up in a dictionary, and the absurdity of this made
him feel very close to his old crony. ‘Tell me, Tom,’ Jerry added
gently, ‘wouldn’t you do it? I know it wouldn’t be easy, but wouldn’t
you try it, even for a while, for Elsie’s sake? ’Twould mean a hell of
a lot to her.’

‘I’m too old, Jerry,’ Tom said so deliberately that Jerry knew it had
been in his mind as well.

‘Oh, I know, I know,’ Jerry repeated. ‘Even ten years ago I might have
done it myself. It’s like jail. The time comes when you’re happier in
than out. And that’s not the worst of it,’ he added bitterly. ‘The
worst is when you pretend you like it.’

It was a strange evening that neither of them ever forgot, sitting in
that little house to which Elsie’s absence seemed a rebuke, and
listening to the wind from the harbour that touched the foot of the
garden. They knew they belonged to a country whose youth was always
escaping from it, out beyond that harbour, and that was middle-aged in
all its attitudes and institutions. Of those that remained, a little
handful lived with defeat and learned fortitude and humour and
sweetness, and these were the things that Elsie, with her generous
idealism, loved in them. But she couldn’t pay the price. She wanted
them where she belonged herself, among the victors.

A few weeks later, Elsie was back; the house was full of life again,
and that evening seemed only a bad dream. It was almost impossible to
keep Jerry Og, as they called the elder child, away from Tom. He was
still only a baby, and a spoiled one at that, but when Tom took him to
the village Jerry Og thrust out his chest and took strides that were
too big for him like any small boy with a father he admired. Each day,
he lay in wait for the postman and then took the post away to sort it
for himself. He sorted it by the pictures on the stamps, and Elsie
noted gleefully that he reserved all the pretty pictures for his
father.

Nobody had remembered Jerry’s good advice, even Jerry himself, and
eighteen months later Elsie was pregnant again. Again their lives took
the same pattern of unrest. But this time Elsie was even more
distressed than Tom. 

‘I’m a curse to you,’ she said. ‘There’s something wrong with me. I
can’t be natural.’

‘Oh, you’re natural enough,’ Tom replied bitterly. ‘You married the
wrong man, that’s all.’

‘I didn’t, I didn’t!’ she protested despairingly. ‘You can say
anything else but that. If I believed that, I’d have nothing left,
because I never cared for anyone but you. And in spite of what you
think, I’m coming back,’ she went on, in tears. ‘I’m coming back if it
kills me. God, I hate this country; I hate every God damn thing about
it; I hate what it’s done to you and Jerry. But I’m not going to let
you go.’

‘You have no choice,’ Tom said patiently. ‘Jerry Og will have to go to
school, and you can’t be bringing him hither and over, even if you
could afford it.’

‘Then, if that’s what you feel, why don’t you keep him?’ she
cried. ‘You know perfectly well you could stop me taking him with me
if you wanted to. You wouldn’t even have to bring me into court. I’ll
give him to you now. Isn’t that proof enough that I’m coming back?’

‘No, Elsie, it is not,’ Tom replied, measuring every word. ‘And I’m
not going to bring you into court either. I’m not going to take
hostages to make sure my wife comes back to me.’

And though Elsie continued to delude herself with the belief that she
would return, she knew Tom was right. It would all appear different
when she got home. The first return to Ireland had been hard, the
second had seemed impossible. Yet, even in the black hours when she
really considered the situation, she felt she could never resign
herself to something that had been determined before she was born, and
she deceived herself with the hope that Tom would change his mind and
follow her. He must follow her. Even if he was prepared to abandon
her, he would never abandon Jerry Og.

And this, as Big Jerry could have told her, was where she made her
biggest mistake, because if Tom had done it at all it would have been
for her. But Big Jerry had decided that the whole thing had gone
beyond his power to help. He recognized the irremediable, all right,
sometimes perhaps even before it became irremediable. But that, as he
would have said himself, is where the ferryboat had left him.

Thanks to Elsie, the eldest of the Dorgans now has a job in Boston and
in the course of years the rest of them will probably go there as
well. Tom continues to live in his little bungalow beside the
harbour. Annie is keeping house for him, which suits her fine, because
Big Jerry’s old mother continued to put his socks on for him a few
years too long, and now Annie has only her brother to worship. To all
appearances they are happy enough, as happiness goes in Cork. Jerry
still calls, and the two men discuss the terrible state of the
country. But in Tom’s bedroom there are pictures of Elsie and the
children, the third of whom he knows only through photographs, and
apart from that, nothing has changed since Elsie left five years
ago. It is a strange room, for one glance is enough to show that the
man who sleeps there is still in love, and that everything that
matters to him in the world is reflected there. And one day, if he
comes by the dollars, he will probably go out and visit them all, but
it is here he will return and here, no doubt, he will die.



(1961)
Source: Best of Frank O’Connor, 2009