The taste at the back of Pat’s throat was sickly as he obsequiously slouched toward the flapping door of the coal house.
It was the following day when he was doing the vacuum-cleaning that he looked up to see Mrs. Tubridy putting her head around the door. “Pat? Are you there?” he heard her say.
“Yes I am, Mrs. Tubridy,” he replied, scooping up some dust which had gathered in behind the armchair close to the leg of the sideboard.
“I have a surprise for you-oo!” he heard her trill.
Pat jerked ever so slightly as the older woman entered the room bearing a tray upon which stood triumphantly a bottle of Taylor Keith lemonade and two glasses.
“Now, Pat!” she said. “Put that vacuum cleaner down and come over here to me! Put it down now, Pat!”
Pat could hear various acids coursing about deep within his stomach as Mrs. Tubridy raised one of the glasses in a toast and declared, “For all your hard work!” Her eyes seemed to dance as she gazed toward him, eagerly eliciting a reply. Which, eventually, he supplied, to wit, “Yes, Mrs. Tubridy.”
At which point the older woman frowned.
“Pat—there something wrong?” she said. “Aren’t you pleased?”
Yes, Mrs. Tubridy. I’m pleased,” said Pat.
You don’t look pleased to me, with that long face on you like a donkey. Is there something wrong with it? Is there something wrong with the lemonade I got specially below in Kinch’s for you?”
Pat’s eyelashes drooped.
“No, Mrs. Tubridy. There’s nothing wrong with it.”
“Well—drink it, then!” she insisted. “Drink it like a Christian, can’t you!”
Pat’s lips advanced and began to apply themselves to a tentative sip of the sparkling liquid. But this apparently did not satisfy the older woman, and to his horror Pat found the glass flying out of his grasp as her small pudgy hand hit it, and her words bit into him.
“No!” she barked. “It’s not good enough for you when I do it but if it was her you’d be gurgling away there like a half-wit till it choked you, wouldn’t you?”
“If it was who, Mrs. Tubridy?” Pat replied, almost shamefully, although he had nothing to be ashamed about.
Her response was astonishing as she faced him with an expression blank as the mirror on the bedroom wall.
“If it was who! If it was who! I’ll put a stop to your gallop yet and make no mistake, if you don’t stop playing the flyboy with me! I suppose you think you’re going to sneak bottles back in behind my back—I suppose that’s the little plan you have in mind!”
“No!” cried Pat. “No, Mrs. Tubridy—it’s not true!”
But she was having none of it.
“Just like him and every one of them!” she snapped inexplicably. “Pack of useless God’s cursed crowd of wasters, ne’er-do-wells, and gangsters! Stay away from the Tubridys, they have the hand out for everything they can get! I should have listened to my poor mother, God rest her! Rue the day! Rue the day, you will, she said! God but how she was right! Beat me black and blue he did! I’ll give it up, alanna, on my mother’s grave I’ll never touch another drop! Bruises the size of that on my back and on my legs! But you wait! You needn’t think you’ll get up to the same tricks, Mr. Pat McNab, for you won’t! Do you hear me, you treacherous litde pup, you?”
Out of nowhere, her hands began to beat Pat about the head like small, out-of-control birds. He pleaded in vain. “No, Mrs. Tubridy! Stop, stop!” he cried.
“You’ll not do what he did to me, nor any of your crowd!” she continued. “For I won’t give you the chance—I’ll do what I should have done long ago! Do you hear me? Do you hear me, Pat McNab?”
Fearfully, Pat replied, “Yes, Mrs. Tubridy!”
“Now get up them stairs and do the bedrooms,” she insisted. “Do you hear me?”
His reply—predictable by now—was in the affirmative. The older woman composed herself.
“And when I come up—if I find so much as a speck of dirt! If I find so much as a speck of—”
Pat interrupted her.
“Yes, Mrs. Tubridy,” he said.
“Now! Go on!” she icily instructed.
The moon shone on the window. Mrs. Tubridy was asleep now. Or so Pat thought as he lay there in his striped pajamas, consumed by a huge, ocean-sized sadness. Until he heard the whisper, “Pat?”
His response was timid—fearful, even. But it need not have been.
“Yes?” he said.
“I’m sorry for what I said earlier,” said Mrs. Tubridy, abstractedly adjusting a curler beneath her hair net.
“It’s all right, Mrs. Tubridy,” said Pat.
She coughed—ever so politely. She could be so polite sometimes, Mrs. Tubridy.
“I know you’re not like him.”
“Yes, Mrs. Tubridy.”
“But, Pat—you know something? He wasn’t always like that either.”
Pat’s eyes nervously followed the Ganges-like crack on the ceiling.
“Was he not, Mrs. Tubridy?” he said.
“He used to come marching down the aisle after Communion with a lovely quiff in his hair and a black tie and there wasn’t a woman in the town but didn’t have her eye on him. Including—”
Mrs. Tubridy broke off abruptly. The moon’s light fell on the little carved feet of the wardrobe. The silence fed upon itself until Pat said, “Hmm, Mrs. Tubridy?”
“Including your own mother,” Mrs. Tubridy said.
Pat’s heart leaped.
“My own mother, Mrs. Tubridy?”
Pat could feel Mrs. Tubridy’s body tensing up as she prepared herself to speak.
“She used to think she could get him. The way she thought she could get everybody. But she didn’t get him. He never let on he seen her.”
Pat frowned and felt his mouth go dry.
“Never let on …?”
“I used to go by with my arm in his—and the face of her!”
“The face of her, Mrs. Tubridy?”
“Lepping, Pat! She used to be absolutely lepping with rage! Couldn’t bear to think of anyone wiping her eye! Must have thought she was Rita Hayworth or someone, the eejit! Sure he never even so much as let on he seen her!”
Pat construed his mouth being filled up with a substance not unlike glue or perhaps, thick tasteless preserves.
“Yes, Mrs. Tubridy,” he said, crestfallen.
“But you liked her, didn’t you, Pat?” said Mrs. Tubridy, adding more forcefully. “Didn’t you?”
“Yes, Mrs. Tubridy,” Pat replied.
“Even though she didn’t look after you right—you still liked her.”
A piece of wire seemed to tighten itself around the top of Pat’s chest.
“No, Mrs. Tubridy—she did look after me right.”
“No, Pat, she didn’t. She’d give you soup and a potato when she should have been cooking you a dinner. A dinner with mash and gravy and a nice wee bit of meat. Instead of doing that she’d be up and down the town trying to get other women’s men to look at her. Either that or tramping off to the bingo again.”
Pat’s resolve appeared to momentarily stiffen.
“Mrs. Tubridy—you go to the bingo yourself.”
Her balled fist placed itself behind his shoulder blades. A slight push dislodged him.
“What did you say? That I go to the bingo? But I don’t have wains, do I, Pat McNab? I don’t have a little boy whose future is my responsibility! I don’t have a litde boy to leave behind and see to it that he grows up quare on account of my neglect! I don’t have him, you know!”
This was more than Pat could endure. He cried aloud in the moon-washed darkness: “I’m not quare!”
Mrs. Tubridy’s reply was instant.
“No! You’re not now! And thanks to me you won’t be! You’ll be one of the best-looking, handsomest men in the town! I’ll see to it you drive them all mad, you wait and see! By the time I’m finished with you, they’ll all want to be Pat McNab! Instead of being
a poor wee gom with the whole place laughing at you, the way she had you growing up!”
“It’s not true, Mrs. Tubridy!” cried Pat pitifully. “She had not!”
“‘It’s not true! It’s not true!‘” sneered Mrs. Tubridy. “Sure didn’t I see you going to school with my own two eyes, and a shirt on you like a girl and a wee wine tie with elastic on it. And them all falling about the place like Duffy’s circus had come to town!”
Pat was aware that he was beginning to choke now as he said, “It’s not true! They were not!”
But Mrs. Tubridy had not yet concluded.
“And the little ankle socks,” she continued, “the litde ankle socks she put on you! Is it any wonder they’d call you names and make a cod of you! Is it?”
“They didn’t!” shrieked Pat. “They didn’t make a cod of me!”
“They did, Pat. They did, and you know it! Every day you walked that street, they had a new name for you. And that’s why you were miserable. That’s why sometimes you even wanted to die. Because of her.”
“No, Mrs. Tubridy!” cried Pat, almost pleadingly. “You’ve got it all wrong!”
There was something shocking now in Mrs. Tubridy’s equanimity.
“I haven’t, Pat,” she said, “and the other person in this room knows it.”
The light of the moon glittered for a long time in Pat’s subsequent tears as his head forced its way toward her breast and she stroked his head as many times before.
“It’s going to be all right, Pat,” her soothing voice continued. “From now on, it’s going to be all right. Just so long as you remember that from now on you’re mine.”
She paused and inserted her litde finger into his ear.
“You’ll be just like my litde Paudgeen. You understand, don’t you, Pat?”
Pat nodded. This time he didn’t say, “Yes, Mrs. Tubridy.”
He knew she understood.
“I don’t blame you for doing what you did, Pat. Nobody would. She should have cared more. She just should have cared more.”
Throughout the following hours, the sobs of Pat McNab were pitiful as he found himself slipping away. As indeed did Mrs. Tubridy, to the hospital of a dream which seemed at once so strange and yet bewilderingly familiar. What appeared to be a younger—and startlingly attractive version of herself, sans head scarf—was sitting up in bed, clearly anxiously awaiting someone or something. It was only some moments before a grave young doctor arrived in his white coat.
“How is my baby?” the young Mrs. Tubridy cried. “How is my little baby?”
Tonelessly, the doctor replied, “I’m sorry, Mrs. Tubridy.”
The screams of that young woman, in a hospital of long ago—they just cannot be described. And go a long way toward explaining why exactly it was that within that dream Mr. Tubridy was to be found surrounded by a seemingly endless array of bottles and completely enshrouded in cigarette smoke, as Timmy Sullivan did his best to attract his attention, repeatedly insisting, “Mr. Tubridy! There’s a phone call for you! It’s about your son!”
Which succeeded only in eliciting the gruff reply, “What are you talking about? Give me another drink! What do I care about sons!”
As, far away at the other end of town, in a spodess but clinically spartan maternity ward, a heartbreak was borne alone.
Pat, approximately one week later, and in the middle of preparing the dinner—Brussels sprouts and fish—was shocked when he looked up to see Mrs. Tubridy, fresh from town, bearing in her arms a large brown parcel and uttering the words, “Wait till you see what I have for you!” Barely a few moments later, equally shocked, perhaps—although embarrassed is probably much more apt in the circumstances—to find himself attired from head to foot in a white shirt, black tie, and spotless white lounge jacket, with Mrs. Tubridy proud as punch extravagant with her compliments as she declaimed, “Now! Who are you going to make a nice cup of tea for because she’s good to you?”
Pat smiled at the request but there was something crushed and resentful about him as he inserted the plug of the electric kettle into the socket.
She always insisted on long, even strokes, so Pat endeavored to comply as he drew the brush through Mrs. Tubridy’s wavy salt-and-pepper hair as she continued talking where she was seated at the dressing table. “Oh, it’s not that I mind him having a drink!” she said, with a troubling bitterness. “Sure there’s nothing wrong with drink in moderation! But when you see what it does to people! Setting fire to the kitchen, insulting the priest! But—after Paudgeen—I didn’t care, you see! I didn’t care after that! Do you know what I mean, Pat?”
Pat brought the brush back from the pale, occasionally liver-spotted neck and replied, “Yes, Mrs. Tubridy.”
“He could drink himself from here to Mullingar after that as far as I was concerned. Because Paudgeen wasn’t going to grow up. Do you know what I mean, Pat?”
He nodded. There was a smell of perfume off the brush.
“He was never going to grow up. I was never going to be able to watch him grow. But if I had—if I had, Pat—do you know something?”
“What, Mrs. Tubridy?”
“He would have been one of the most handsome litde boys in the world, wouldn’t he?”
“Yes, Mrs. Tubridy.”
Mrs. Tubridy coughed—politely again, Pat noticed—and he caught the reflection of her raised eyebrow in the looking glass.
“Pat,” she continued, “would you mind if I called you something?”
“Called me what, Mrs. Tubridy?”
He caught a long strand of her hair between his fingers and removed it from the teeth of the brush.
“Paudgeen, Pat. Would you mind if I called you that?”
Pat perceived the blood coursing decisively in the direction of his cheeks.
“Mrs. Tubridy,” he said, “I’d rather you didn’t.”
Her expression in the mirror remained motionless.
“What?” she said and he jerked a litde.
“It’s just that,” he said, “it’s just that I’d rather you didn’t. It’s not my name!”
Mrs. Tubridy’s reaction shocked him.
“O it isn’t your name is it not!” she snapped. “Well—what name would you rather have? Pat McNab? You’d rather have that than Tubridy that everyone would look up to! You’d rather have that, after what you’ve done!”
At this, Pat’s left temple began to throb.
“After what I’ve done?” he ventured agitatedly.
“Yes! After what you’ve done!”
She eyed him with a stare of great significance, at that very moment lowering her voice as she said, “You know what I mean.”
Pat felt his cheeks turn from red hot to dough pale as she smirked and placed her hand on his and said, “You know what I mean—Paudgeen.”
Far off in the hallway, the grandfather clock ticked heavily.
“You do, don’t you?” she repeated.
“Yes, Mrs. Tubridy,” as he saw her smirk anew.
“No,” she said, “don’t call me that. Call me Mammy. Just for a laugh, will you call me that?”
A look of pain flashed across the countenance of Pat McNab.
“I can’t,” he pleaded, “please, Mrs. Tubridy. I can’t.”
There was nothing tender or considerate about the stare with which she fixed him, her voice cold as steel.
“Call me it!” she demanded.
Pat’s head fell upon his chest as though he had somehow been transformed into a pathetic nodding dog.
“Yes, Mammy,” were the words that passed his lips.
It is difficult to determine, certainly with any degree of exactitude, the significant occurrences in the life of Pat McNab which eventually led to his becoming the person he was, but it is unlikely that it could be contested that that incident and what had passed between them during it ought to be considered as one of such; for, almost as soon as she left the room, it became clear that Mrs. Tubridy had rendered Pat McNab into such a state of
high dudgeon and perspiring, overwhelming confusion (indubitably a consequence of the self-hatred and malignant shame that were themselves the results of his pitiful inaction) that his entire surroundings began to assume a startling, sharp-edged clarity, unsettlingly closer to the states of distorted hallucination familiar to habitual drug users than any feasible notion of tangible, empirical reality. Which explains, no doubt, why, when later that—again moon-washed—night, whilst in Mrs. Tubridy’s bed (for her instructions now extended to include his sleeping arrangements), he awoke to find himself staring directly into what could not possibly have been—but to all intents and purposes, clearly now was—the face of his own mother!
An enormous wave of sorrow swept through him as he touched his cheek and felt the moonlight play upon it. His mother’s smile too was sad.
“I know she did a lot of things, Tubridy. But this. This makes me sad, Pat.”
He repeated each word after her and every syllable that passed his lips was as a rusted fishhook drawn painfully and indulgently from his throat.
“Sad, Mammy?” he said then.
“Her lying there. Telling you lies. Because that’s what she’s doing, Pat.”
His throat dried up hopelessly.
“Mammy?”
It was a struggle to utter the word.
“Telling lies. Once, you know, a half-crown went missing on me. I asked her did she see it. And do you know where I found it?”
Pat was close to the edge of hysteria now.
“Where, Mammy?”
“In her handbag. Hidden inside her handbag behind her prayer-book. What do you think of that, Pat?”
Pat found himself instinctively grinding his teeth.
“It’s terrible!” he heard himself say.
“Not terrible compared to some of the other things she’s done. Did you know she put her husband Mattie in the mental hospital?”
“Mental hospital?”
“Poor Mattie Tubridy that was one of the handsomest men ever walked the streets of the town. Couldn’t let him be himself, you see. Why if you didn’t like him the way he was, you didn’t have to marry him, I said to her. And she did not like it! Because it was the truth! What harm if Mattie took a drink, God rest him. The only reason he took it was to get away from her. Just because she couldn’t have a wain, she didn’t have to take it out on him!”