The Corkerys

May MacMahonn was a good-looking girl, the only child of Jack
MacMahon, the accountant, and his wife, Margaret. They lived in Cork,
on Summerhill, the steep street that led from the flat of the city to
the heights of Montenotte. She had always lived the life of a girl of
good family, with piano lessons, dancing class, and crushes on her
school friends’ brothers. Only occasionally did she wonder what it was
all about, and then she invariably forgot to ask her father, who would
certainly know. Her father knew everything, or almost everything. He
was a tall, shy, good-looking man who seemed to have been expecting
martyrdom from his earliest years and drinking Irish whiskey to endure
it. May’s mother was small and pretty and very opinionated, though her
opinions varied, and anyway did not last long. Her father’s opinions
never varied, and lasted forever.

When May became friendly with the Corkery family, it turned out that
he had always had strong opinions about them as well. Mr. Corkery, a
mild, inarticulate solicitor, whom May remembered going for lonely
walks for the good of his health, had died and left his family with
very limited means, but his widow had good connections and managed to
provide an education (mostly free) for all six children. Of the boys,
the eldest, Tim, was now a Dominican, and Joe, who came next in line,
was also going in for the priesthood. The Church was in the family’s
blood, because Mrs. Corkery’s brother was the Dean and her sister was
Mother Superior of the convent of an enclosed order outside the
city. Mrs. Corkery’s nickname among the children was “Reverend
Mother,” and they accused her of imitating her sister, but
Mrs. Corkery only sniffed and said if everybody became priests and
nuns there would soon be no Church left. Mrs. Corkery seemed to
believe quite seriously that the needs of the Church were the only
possible excuse for sex.

From knowing the Corkerys May began to realize at last what life was
about. It was no longer necessary to ask her father. Anyway he
wouldn’t know. He and her mother were nice but commonplace. Everything
they said and did was dull and predictable, and even when they went to
Mass on Sunday they did so only because everyone else did it. The
Corkerys were rarely dull and never predictable. Though their whole
life seemed to center on the Church, they were not in the least
pietistic. The Dean fought with Mrs. Corkery; Father Tim fought with
Joe; the sisters fought with their brothers, who, they said, were
getting all the attention, and fought one another when their brothers
were not available. Tessie, the eldest girl, known as “The Limb of the
Devil,” or just “The Limb,” was keeping company with a young
stockbroker who told her a lot of dirty stories, which she repeated
with great gusto to her brothers, particularly to Father Tim. This,
however, was for family reasons, because they all agreed that Tim was
inclined to put on airs.

And then The Limb astonished everybody by entering the convent where
her aunt was Mother Superior. May attended the reception in the little
convent chapel, which struck her to the heart by its combinaion of
poverty and gentility. She felt that the ceremony might have been
tolerable in a great cathedral with a choir and thundering organ, but
not in that converted drawing room, where the nuns knelt along the
side walls and squeaked like mourners. The Limb was laid out on the
altar and first covered with roses as though she were dead; then an
old nun clipped her long black hair with a shears. It fell and lay at
her head as though it too had died. May drew a quick breath and
glanced at Joe, who was kneeling beside her. Though he had his hand
over his face, she knew from the way his shoulders moved that he was
crying. Then she cried too.

For a full week the ceremony gave her the horrors every time she
remembered it, and she felt she should have nothing more to do with
such an extraordinary family. All the same, a week with her parents
was enough to make her realize the attraction of the Corkerys even
more than before.

“Did it scare you, May?” Rosie, the second girl, asked with a wicked
grin. “Cripes, it put the fear of God into me. I’m not having any of
that _de profundis_ stuff; I’m joining a decent missionary order.”
This was the first May had heard of Rosie’s vocation. Inside a year,
she, too, was in a convent, but in Rome, and “having a gas time,” as
she casually reported home.

They really were an extraordinary family, and the Dean was as queer as
any of them. The Sunday following the ceremony May was at dinner
there, and he put his hand firmly on her shoulder as though he were
about to yank off her dress, and gave her a crooked smile that would
have convinced any reasonable observer that he was a sex maniac, and
yet May knew that almost every waking moment his thoughts were
concentrated on outwitting the Bishop, who seemed to be the greatest
enemy of the Church since Nero. The Bishop was a Dominican, and the
Dean felt that a monk’s place was in the cloister.

“The man is a bully!” he said, with an astonishment and grief that
would have moved any audience but his own family.

“Oh, now, Mick!” said Mrs. Corkery placidly. She was accustomed to
hearing the Bishop denounced.

“I’m sorry, Josephine,” the Dean said with a formal regret that rang
equally untrue. “The man is a bully. An infernal bully, what’s
more. I’m not criticizing you or the order, Tim,” he said, looking at
his nephew over his spectacles, “but monks simply have no place in
ecclesiastical affairs. Let them stick to their prayers is what I
say.”

“And a queer way the world would be only for them,” Joe said. Joe was
going for the secular priesthood himself, but he didn’t like to see
his overwhelming uncle get away with too much.

“Their influence on Church history has been disastrous!” the Dean
bellowed, reaching for his cigarette case. “Always, or almost always,
disastrous. That man thinks he knows everything.”

‘Maybe he does,” said Joe.

“Maybe,” said the Dean, like an old bull who cannot ignore a
dart from any quarter. “But as well as that, he interferes in everything,
and always publicly, always with the greatest possible amount of
scandal. ‘I don’t like the model of that church’; ‘Take away that
statue’; ‘That painting is irreverent.’ Begob, Joe, I don’t think even
you know as much as that. I declare to God. Josephine, I believe if
anyone suggested it to him that man would start inspecting the cut of
the schoolgirls’ panties.” And when everyone roared with laughter, the
Dean raised his head sternly and said, “I mean it.”

Peter, the youngest boy, never got involved in these family arguments
about the Bishop, the orders, or the future of the Church. He was the
odd man out. He was apprenticed in his father’s old firm and would
grow up to be owner or partner. In every Irish family there is a boy
like Peter whose task it is to take on the family responsibilities. It
was merely an accident that he was the youngest. What counted was that
he was his mother’s favorite. Even before he had a mind to make up, he
knew it was not for him to become too involved, because someone would
have to look after his mother in her old age. He might marry, but it
would have to be a wife who suited her. He was the ugliest of the
children, though with a monkey ugliness that was almost as attractive
as Father Tim’s film-star looks and Joe’s ascetic masculine fire. He
was slow, watchful, and good-humored, with high cheekbones that grew
tiny bushes of hair, and he had a lazy malice that could often be as
effective as the uproarious indignation of his brothers and sisters.

May, who saw the part he had been cast for, wondered whether she
couldn’t woo Mrs. Corkery as well as another girl.


After Rosie there was Joe, who was ordained the following year, and
then Sheela did what seemed—in that family, at least—the conventional
thing and went into the same convent as Tessie.

It was an extraordinary family, and May was never quite able to
understand the fascination it had for her. Partly, of course—and this
she felt rather than understood—it was the attraction of the large
family for the only child, the sheer relief of never having to wonder
what you were going to play next. But beside this there was an
attraction rather like that of a large theatrical family—the feeling
that everything was related to a larger imaginative world. In a sense,
the Corkerys always seemed to be playing.

She knew that her own being in love with Peter was part of her love
affair with the family as a whole, the longing to be connected with
them, and the teasing she got about Peter from his brothers and
sisters suggested that they, too, recognized it and were willing to
accept her as one of themselves. But she also saw that her chanee of
ever marrying Peter was extremely slight, because Peter was not
attracted by her. When he could have been out walking with her he was
out walking with his friend Mick MacDonald, and when the pair of them
came in while she was in the house, Peter behaved to her as though she
were nothing more than a welcome stranger. He was always polite,
always deferential—unlike Tim and Joe, who treated her as though she
were an extra sister, to be slapped on the bottom or pushed out of the
way as the mood struck them.

May was a serious girl; she had read books on modern psychology, and
she knew that the very quality that made Peter settle for a life in
the world made him unsuitable as a husband. It was strange how right
the books were about that. He was dominated by his mother, and he
could flirt with her as he never flirted with May. Clearly, no other
woman would ever entirely replace his mother in his heart. In fact
(May was too serious a girl not to give things their proper names),
Peter was the very type of the homosexual—the latent homosexual, as
she learned to call it.

Other boys _wanted_ to go out with her, and she resented Peter’s
unfailing courtesy, though in more philosophic spells she realized
that he probably couldn’t help it, and that when he showed his almost
boyish hero worship of Mick MacDonald before her it was not his fault
but Nature’s. All the same, she thought it very uncalled-for on the
part of Nature, because it left her no particular interest in a world
in which the only eligible young man was a queer. After a year or two
of this, her thoughts turned more and more to the quiet convent where
the Corkery girls contentedly carried on their simple lives of
meditation and prayer. Once or twice she dropped a dark hint that she
was thinking of becoming a nun herself, but each time it led to a
scene with her father.

“You’re a fool, girl!” he said harshly, getting up to pour himself an
extra drink. May knew he didn’t altogether resent being provoked,
because it made him feel entitled to drink more.

“Now, Jack, you must not say things like that,” her mother said
anxiously.

“Of course I have to say it. Look at her! At her age! And she doesn’t
even have a boy!”

“But if there isn’t a boy who interests her!”

“There are plenty of boys who’d interest her if only she behaved like
a natural girl,” he said gloomily. “What do you think a boy wants to
do with a girl? Say the Rosary? She hasn’t behaved naturally ever
since she got friendly with that family—what’s their name?”

“Corkery,” Mrs. MacMahon said, having failed to perceive that not
remembering the Corkerys’ name was the one way the poor man had of
getting back at them.

“Whatever their name is, they’ve turned her into an idiot. That’s no
great surprise. They never had any brains to distribute, themselves.”

“But still, Jack, you will admit they’ve got on very well.”

“They’ve got on very well!” he echoed scornfully. “In the Church!
Except that young fellow, the solicitor’s clerk, and I suppose he
hadn’t brains enough even for the Church. They should have put him in
the friars.”

“But after all, their uncle is the Dean.”

“Wonderful Dean, too,” grumbled Jack MacMahon. “He drove me out of
twelve-o’clock Mass, so as not to listen to his drivel. He can hardly
speak decent English, not to mind preaching a sermon. ‘A bunch of
baloney!’” he quoted angrily. “If we had a proper bishop, instead of
the one we have, he’d make that fellow speak correctly in the pulpit
at least.”

“But it’s only so that his congregation will understand him, Jack.”

“Oh, his congregation understands him only too well. Himself and his
tall hat and his puffed-up airs! Common, that’s what he is, and that’s
what all the family are, on both sides. If your daughter wants to be a
nun, you and the Corkerys can arrange it between you. But not one
penny of my money goes into their pockets, believe me!”

May was sorry to upset him, but for herself she did not mind his
loathing of the whole Corkery family. She knew that it was only
because he was fond of her and dreaded being left without her in his
old age. He had spoiled her so long as she was not of an age to answer
him back, and she guessed he was looking forward to spoiling his
grandchildren even worse because he would not live long enough to hear
them answer him back. But this, she realized, was what the Corkerys
had done for her—made all that side of life seem unimportant.

She had a long talk with Mother Agatha, Mrs. Corkery’s sister, about
her vocation, which confirmed her in her resolution. Mother Agatha was
very unlike her sister, who was loud-voiced and humorous. The Mother
Superior was pale, thin, cool, and with the slightest trace of an
ironic wit that might have passed unnoticed by a stupider girl. But
May noticed it, and realized that she was being observed very closely,
indeed.

She and her mother did the shopping for the trousseau, but the bills
and parcels were kept carefully out of her father’s sight. Drunk or
sober, he refused to discuss the matter at all. “It would only upset
him just now, poor man,” her mother said philosophically. He was
drinking heavily, and when he was in liquor he quarreled a lot with
her mother about little things. With May he avoided quarrels, or even
arguments, and it struck her that he was training himself for a life
in which he would no longer have her to quarrel with. On the day of
the reception he did not drink at all, which pleased her, and was
icily polite to everybody, but when, later, she appeared behind the
parlor grille, all in white, and the sun caught her, she saw his face
in the darkness of the parlor, with all the life drained out of it,
and suddenly he turned and left without a word. It was only then that
a real feeling of guilt sprang up in her at the thought of the
miserable old age that awaited him—a man like him, who loved young
creatures who could not answer him back, and who would explain to them
unweariedly about the sun and moon and geography and figures. She had
answered him back in a way that left him with nothing to look forward
to.



All the same, there was something very comforting about the life of an
enclosed order. It had been organized a long, long time before, by
people who knew more about the intrusions of the outside world than
May did. The panics that had seized her about her ability to sustain
the life diminished and finally ceased. The round of duties, services,
and mortifications was exactly what she had needed, and little by
little she felt the last traces of worldliness slip from her—even the
very human worry about the old age of her father and mother. The
convent was poor, and not altogether from choice. Everything in the
house was mean and clean and cheerful, and May grew to love the old
drawing room that had been turned into a chapel, where she knelt, in
her own place, through the black winter mornings when at home she
would still be tucked up comfortably in bed. She liked the rough
feeling of her clothes and the cold of the floor through her sandals,
though mostly she liked the proximity of Tessie and Sheela.

There were times when, reading the lives of the saints, she wished she
had lived in more heroic times, and she secretly invented minor
mortifications for herself to make sure she could endure them. It was
not until she had been in the convent for close on a year that she
noticed that the minor mortifications were liable to be followed by
major depressions. Though she was a clever woman, she did not try to
analyze this. She merely lay awake at night and realized that the nuns
she lived with—even Tessie and Sheela—were not the stuff of saints and
martyrs but ordinary women who behaved in religion very much as they
would have behaved in marriage, and who followed the rule in the
spirit in which her father went to Mass on Sundays. There was nothing
whatever to be said against them, and any man who had got one of them
for a wife would probably have considered himself fortunate, but all
the same, there was something about them that was not quite
grown-up. It was very peculiar and caused her great concern. The
things that had really frightened her about the order when she was in
the world—the loneliness, the austerity, the ruthless discipline—now
seemed to her meaningless and harmless. After that she saw with horror
that the great days of the Church were over, and that they were merely
a lot of perfectly commonplace women play-acting austerity and
meditation.

“But my dear child,” Mother Agatha said when May wept out her story to
her, “of course we’re only children. Of course we’re only
play-acting. How else does a child learn obedience and discipline?”

And when May talked to her about what the order had been in earlier
days, that vague, ironic note crept into Mother Superior’s voice, as
though she had heard it all many times before. “I know, sister,” she
said, with a nod. “Believe me, I do know that the order was stricter
in earlier times. But you must remember that it was not founded in a
semi-arctic climate like ours, so there was less chance of the
sisters’ dying of double pneumonia. I have talked to half the plumbers
in town, but it seems that central heating is not understood
here. ... Everything is relative. I’m sure we suffer just as much in
our very comfortable sandals as the early sisters suffered in their
bare feet, and probably at times rather more, but at any rate we are
not here for the sole purpose of suffering mortification, whatever
pleasures it may hold for us.”

Every word Mother Agatha said made perfect sense to May while she was
saying it, and May knew she was being ungrateful and hysterical, but
when the interview was over and the sound of her sobs had died away,
she was left with the impression that Mother Agatha was only another
commonplace woman, with a cool manner and a sarcastic tongue, who was
also acting the part of a nun. She was alone in a world of bad actors
and actresses, and the Catholicism she had known and believed in was
dead.

A few weeks later she was taken to a private nursing home. “Just for a
short rest, sister,” as Mother Agatha said. “It’s a very pleasant
place, and you will find a lot of other religious there who need a
rest as well.”



There followed an endless but timeless phase of weeping and confusion,
when all May’s ordinary life was broken up and strange men

burst into her room and axamined her and asked questions she did not
understand and replied to questions of hers in a way that showed they
had not understood them either. Nobody seemed to realize that she was
the last Catholic in the world; nobody understood her tears about
it. Above all, nobody seemed to be able to hear the gramophone record
that played continuously in her head, and that stopped only when they
gave her an injection.

Then, one spring day, she went into the garden for a walk and a young
nurse saw her back to her room. Far ahead of them, at the other end of
a long, white corridor, she saw an old man with his back to her, and
remembered that she had seen his face many times before and had
perceived, without paying attention to, his long, gloomy, ironic
face. She knew she must have remembered him, because now she could see
nothing but his back, and suddenly the words “Who is that queer old
man?” broke through the sound of the gramophone record, surprising her
as much as they seemed to surprise the young nurse.

“Oh, him!” the nurse said, with a smile. “Don’t you know him? He’s
here for years.”

“But why, nurse?”

“Oh, he doesn’t think he’s a priest, and he is one really, that’s the
trouble.”

“But how extraordinary!”

“Isn’t it?” the nurse said, biting her lower lip in a smile. “Cripes,
you’d think ’twas something you wouldn’t forget. He’s nice, really,
though,” she added gravely, as though she felt she had been
criticizing him.

When they reached May’s room, the young nurse grinned again, in a
guilty way, and May noticed that she was extravagantly pretty, with
small, gleaming front teeth.

“_You’re_ getting all right, anyway,” she said.

“Oh, really?” May said vaguely, because she knew she was not getting
all right. “Why do you think that, nurse?”

“Oh, you get to spot things,” the nurse said with a shrug, and left
May uncomforted, because she didn’t know if she really did get well
how she could face the convent and the other nuns again. All of them,
she felt, would be laughing at her. Instead of worrying about the
nuns, she went into a mournful daydream about the old priest who did
not think he was a priest, and next day, when her father called, she
said intensely, “Daddy, there’s a priest in here who doesn’t believe
he’s a priest—isn’t that extraordinary?” She did not hear the tone of
her own voice or know how reasonable it sounded, and so she was
surprised when her father looked away and started fumbling
mechanically in his jacket pocket for a cigarette.

“Well, you don’t have to think you’re a nun either,” he said, with an
unsteady voice. “Your mother has your own room ready for you when you
come home.”

“Oh, but Daddy, I have to go back to the convent.”

“Oh, no you don’t. No more convents for you, young lady! That’s fixed
up already with Mother Superior. It was all a mistake from the
beginning. You’re coming straight home to your mother and me.”

Then May knew she was really going to get well, and she wanted to go
home with him at once, not to go back up the stairs behind the big
iron door where there was always an attendant on duty. She knew that
going back home meant defeat, humiliation, and despair, but she no
longer cared even about that. She just wanted to take up her life
again at the point where it had gone wrong, when she had first met the
Corkerys.



Her father brought her home and acted as though he had rescued her
from a dragon’s den. Each evening, when he came home from work, he sat
with her, sipping at his drink and talking quietly and comfortably.
She felt he was making great efforts to assure that she felt protected
and relaxed. Most of the time she did, but there were spells when she
wanted her mother to put her back in the nursing home.

“Oh, I couldn’t do that,” her mother said characteristically. “It
would upset your poor father too much.”

But she did discuss it with the doctor—a young man, thin and rather
unhealthy-looking, who looked as though he, too, was living on his
nerves—and he argued with May about it.

“But what am I to do, doctor, when I feel like this?” she asked
plaintively.

“Go out and get jarred,” he said briskly.

“Get what, doctor?” she asked feebly.

“Jarred,” he repeated without embarrassment.  “Stoned.
Polluted. Drunk. I don’t mean alone, of course. You need a young
fellow along with you.”

“Oh, not that again, doctor!” she said, and for some reason her voice
came out exactly like Mother Agatha’s—which was not how she intended
it to sound.

“And some sort of a job,” he went on remorselessly. “There isn’t a
damn thing wrong with you except that you think you’re a failure.
You’re not, of course, but as a result of thinking you are you’ve
scratched the surface of your mind all over, and when you sit here
like this, looking out at the rain, you keep rubbing it so that it
doesn’t heal. Booze, love-making, and hard work—they keep your hands
away from the sore surface, and then it heals of its own accord.

She did her best, but it didn’t seem to heal as easily as all
that. Her father got her a job in the office of a friend, and she
listened, in fascination, to the chatter of the other secretaries. She
even went out in the evening with a couple of them and listened to
their common little love stories. She knew if she had to wait until
she talked like that about fellows in order to be well, her case was
hopeless. Instead, she got drunk and told them how she had been for
years in love with a homosexual, and, as she told it, the story became
so hopeless and dreadful that she sobbed over it herself. After that
she went home and wept for hours, because she knew that she had been
telling lies, and betrayed the only people in the world whom she had
really cared for.

Her father made a point of never referring at all to the Corkerys, the
convent, or the nursing home. She knew that for him this represented a
real triumph of character, because he loathed the Corkerys more than
ever for what he believed they had done to her. But even he could not
very well ignore the latest development in the saga. It seemed that
Mrs. Corkery herself had decided to become a nun. She announced
placidly to everyone that she had done her duty by her family, who
were now all comfortably settled, and that she felt free to do what
she had always wanted to do anyhow. She discussed it with the Dean,
who practically excommunicated her on the spot. He said the family
would never live down the scandal, and Mrs. Corkery told him it wasn’t
the scandal that worried him at all but the loss of the one house
where he could get a decent meal. If he had a spark of manliness, she
said, he would get rid of his housekeeper, who couldn’t cook, was a
miserable sloven, and ordered him about as if he were a schoolboy. The
Dean said she would have to get permission in writing from every one
of her children, and Mrs. Corkery replied calmly that there was no
difficulty whatever about that.

May’s father didn’t really want to crow, but he could not resist
pointing out that he had always said the Corkerys had a slate loose.

“I don’t see anything very queer about it,” May said stubbornly.

“A woman with six children entering a convent at her age!” her father
said, not even troubling to grow angry with her. “Even the Dean
realizes it’s mad.”

“It _is_ a little bit extreme, all right,” her mother said, with a
frown, but May knew she was thinking of her.

May had the feeling that Mrs. Corkery would make a very good nun if
for no other reason than to put her brother and Mother Agatha in their
place. And of course, there were other reasons. As a girl she had
wanted to be a nun, but for family reasons it was impossible, so she
had become a good wife and mother, instead. Now, after thirty years of
pinching and scraping, her family had grown away from her and she
could return to her early dream. There was nothing unbalanced about
that, May thought bitterly. She was the one who had proved unbalanced.

For a while it plunged her back into gloomy moods, and they were made
worse by the scraps of gossip that people passed on to her, not
knowing how they hurt. Mrs. Corkery had collected her six letters of
freedom and taken them herself to the Bishop, who had immediately
given in. “Spite!” the Dean pronounced gloomily. “Nothing but
spite—all because I don’t support his mad dream of turning a modern
city into a medieval monastery.”

On the day of Mrs. Corkery’s reception, May did not leave the house at
all. It rained, and she sat by the sitting-room window, looking across
the city to where the hills were almost invisible. She was living
Mrs. Corkery’s day through—the last day in the human world of an old
woman who had assumed the burden she herself had been too weak to
accept. She could see it all as though she were back in that mean,
bright little chapel, with the old woman lying out on the altar,
covered with roses like a corpse, and an old nun shearing off her thin
gray locks. It was all so intolerably vivid that May kept bursting
into sudden fits of tears and whimpering like a child.



One evening a few weeks later, she came out of the office in the rain
and saw Peter Corkery at the other side of the street. She obeyed her
first instinct and bowed her head so as not to look at him. Her heart
sank as he crossed the road to accost her.

“Aren’t you a great stranger, May?” he asked, with his cheerful grin.

“We’re very busy in the office these days, Peter,” she replied, with
false brightness.

“It was only the other night Joe was talking about you. You know Joe
is up in the seminary now?”

“No. What’s he doing?”

“Teaching. He finds it a great relief after the mountains. And, of
course, you know about the mother.” This was it!

“I heard about it. I suppose ye’re all delighted?”

“_I_ wasn’t very delighted,” he said, and his lips twisted in
pain. “’Twas the most awful day I ever spent. When they cut off her
hair—”

“You don’t have to remind me.”

“I disgraced myself, May. I had to run out of the chapel. And here I
had two nuns after me, trying to steer me to the lavatory. Why do nuns
always think a man is looking for a lavatory?”

“I wouldn’t know. I wasn’t a very good one.”

“There are different opinions about that,” he said gently, but he only
hurt her more.

“And I suppose you’ll be next?”

“How next?”

“I was sure you had a vocation, too.”

“I don’t know,” he said thoughtfully. “I never really asked myself. I
suppose, in a way, it depends on you.”

“And what have I to say to it?” she asked in a ladylike tone, though
her heart suddenly began to pant.

“Only whether you’re going to marry me or not. Now I have the house to
myself and only Mrs. Maher looking after me. You remember Mrs. Maher?”

“And you think I’d make a cheap substitute for Mrs. Maher, I suppose?”
she asked, and suddenly all the pent-up anger and frustration of years
seemed to explode inside her. She realized that it was entirely
because of him that she had become a nun, because of him she had been
locked up in a nursing home and lived the life of an emotional
cripple. “Don’t you think that’s an extraordinary sort of proposal—if
it’s intended to be a proposal.”

“Why the hell should I be any good at proposing? How many girls do you
think I’ve proposed to?”

“Not many, since they didn’t teach you better manners. And it would
never occur to yourself to say you loved me. Do you?” she almost
shouted. “Do you love me?”

“Sure, of course I do,” he said, almost in astonishment. “I wouldn’t
be asking you to marry me otherwise. But all the same—”

“All the same, all the same, you have reservations!” And suddenly
language that would have appalled her to hear a few months before
broke from her, before she burst into uncontrollable tears and went
running homeward through the rain. “God damn you to Hell, Peter
Corkery! I wasted my life on you, and now in the heel of the hunt all
you can say to me is ‘All the same.’ You’d better go back to your damn
pansy pals, and say it to them.”

She was hysterical by the time she reached Summerhill. Her father’s
behavior was completely characteristic. He was the born martyr and
this was only another of the ordeals for which he had been preparing
himself all his life. He got up and poured himself a drink.

“Well, there is one thing I’d better tell you now, daughter,” he said
quietly but firmly. “That man will never enter this house in my
lifetime.”

“Oh, nonsense, Jack MacMahon!” his wife said in a rage, and she went
and poured herself a drink, a thing she did under her husband’s eye
only when she was prepared to fling it at him. “You haven’t a scrap of
sense. Don’t you see now that the boy’s mother only entered the
convent because she knew he’d never feel free while she was in the
world?”

“Oh, Mother!” May cried, startled out of her hysterics.

“Well, am I right?” her mother said, drawing herself up.

“Oh, you’re right, you’re right,” May said, beginning to sob
again. “Only I was such a fool it never occurred to me. Of course, she
was doing it for me.”

“And for her son,” said her mother. “And if he’s anything like his
mother, I’ll be very proud to claim him for a son-in-law.”

She looked at her husband, but saw that she had made her effect and
could now enjoy her drink in peace. “Of course, in some ways it’s
going to be very embarrassing,” she went on peaceably. “We can’t very
well say ‘Mr. Peter Corkery, son of Sister Rosina of the Little
Flower’ or whatever the dear lady’s name is. In fact, it’s very
difficult to see how we’re going to get it into the press at
all. However, as I always say, if the worst comes to the worst,
there’s a lot to be said for a quiet wedding. ... I do hope you were
nice to him, May?” she asked.

It was only then that May remembered that she hadn’t been in the least
nice and, in fact, had used language that would have horrified her
mother. Not that it would make much difference. She and Peter had
travelled so far together, and by such extraordinary ways.



160
(1966)
Source: Collected Stroies, 1981