This Year It Will Be Different

  “And do you say it?” she asked.

  “Not nowadays, I did when I was a young fellow. Once it worked spectacularly. I won at the horses, the dogs, and poker. All in one week.” He looked very happy at the memory.

  “I don’t think you were meant to pray about those kinds of things. I didn’t think it worked for gambling.”

  “It didn’t in the long run,” he said ruefully, and went back to his chess.

  Meg noticed that Tom O’Neill drank nothing and ate little; he had glass after glass of water. Eventually she commented on it. The meals were one of the few pleasures of long-haul flying, and the drink would help sleep.

  “I have to be in good shape when we arrive,” he said. “I’ve read that the secret is buckets and buckets of water.”

  “You’re very extreme the way you take things,” Meg said to him, half admiring, half critical.

  “I know,” Tom O’Neill said, “that has been the curse and the blessing of my life.”

  There were still fifteen hours to go. Meg didn’t encourage any stories of his life. Not so early in the trip. When they had only four hours left she began to ask him about his life. It was a story of a daughter who had been wild. Once the girl’s mother had died, Tom hadn’t been able to control her. The girl had done what she liked when she liked. Now she was living in Australia. Not just staying there, mind, but living there. With a man. Not a husband, but what they called a De Facto. Very liberal, very modern, his daughter living with a man openly and telling the Australian government this too, proud as punch. He shook his head, angry and upset by it all.

  “I suppose you will have to accept it. I mean coming all this way, it would be a bit pointless if you were to attack her about it,” Meg said. It was so easy to be wise about other people’s business.

  She told him in turn about Robert, and how she hadn’t been invited to the wedding. Tom O’Neill said wasn’t it a blessing? She’d have had to make conversation to her ex and a lot of people who hadn’t a word of any language between them. Much better to go now. What was a wedding day? It was only a day—not that he seemed likely to be having the opportunity of seeing one in his circumstances.

  His daughter was called Deirdre, a good Irish name, but now she signed herself Dee, and her man friend was called Fox. What kind of name was that for a human being?

  The blinds were raised. They had orange juice and hot towels to wake them up. Meg and Tim felt like old friends by this stage. They were almost loath to part. As they waited for their luggage they gave each other advice.

  “Try not to mention their wedding day,” Tom warned.

  “Don’t say anything about the living-in-sin bit. They don’t think that way here,” she begged.

  “I wrote out my address,” he said.

  “Thank you, thank you.” Meg felt guilty that she hadn’t thought to write her son’s address. Perhaps it was because she did not want Robert to think she was pathetic, picking up a strange Irishman on the plane and giving him her phone number.

  “I’ll leave it to you then … to get in touch or whatever,” he said, and she could sense the disappointment in his voice.

  “Yes, yes, what a good idea,” Meg said.

  “It’s just a month is a long time,” he said.

  Earlier they had both told each other that it was a very short time. Now they were on Australian soil and both of them slightly nervous of meeting their children … it seemed too long.

  “It’s in Randwick,” Meg began.

  “No, no, you ring me if you’d like a cup of coffee someday. Maybe we could have a bit of a walk and a chat.”

  He looked frightened. The endless glasses of water had left him in no state to deal with a man called Fox on equal terms. He didn’t look like a man who was going to remember that his daughter called herself Dee and that she thought she was married, a De Facto being more or less the same. Meg felt protective of him.

  “Certainly I’ll call you. In fact, I think we will both possibly need to escape a little from the culture shock,” she said.

  She knew she looked anxious. She could feel the frown developing on her forehead, the squeezing of her eyebrows together which made people at work say that Meg was getting into a tizz, and made her son beg her to stop fussing. She wished she could go on talking to this easy man. Why couldn’t they sit down on chairs and talk for an hour or so, get themselves ready for a very different kind of Christmas than they had ever had before, and for a different lifestyle.

  She realized suddenly that this was what they were both doing. They were coming to give their blessing to new lifestyles. Tom was here to tell Dee that he was glad she had found Fox and he didn’t mind about their not being married properly. She was here to tell Robert that she couldn’t wait to meet her new daughter-in-law and all her family, and not to hint that she ever gave her absence from their actual wedding day a thought. It would be good to meet Tom again and to know how it was all going. If they had been old friends, then obviously they would have done, but being single and middle-aged and having just met on the plane it would call for many more explanations. Possibly Robert would pity her. Or else Rosa would think that it was wonderful, perhaps, that Mother had actually found herself a bloke on a plane trip. In either case it would have been embarrassing.

  “I thought I might tell Deirdre, Dee, her name is Dee. Lord God, I must remember her name is Dee,” Tom began.

  “Yes?”

  “I thought I might tell her that you and I were friends from way back. You know?”

  “I know,” she said, with a very warm smile.

  They could have said more, a great deal more. In fact, they needed to find out a bit more about each other if they were meant to be friends. But it was too late. They were wheeling their trolleys through the passage to where a crowd of sun-tanned, healthy-looking young Australians waited for the crumpled rellies to stagger from the long journey. And people were calling and crying out and raising children up in the air to wave. And it seemed to be the middle of summer.

  And there was Robert in shorts with long, suntanned legs and his arm around the neck of a tiny little girl with huge eyes and black curly hair biting her lip anxiously as they raked the crowd to find Meg; and when they saw her, Robert shouted, “There she is!” as if nobody else had traveled all those hours on the plane, and they were hugging her and Rosa was crying.

  “You are so young, too young to be a grandmother,” she said, and patted her little tummy with such pride that Meg started to cry too. And Robert held her and didn’t ask her not to fuss. Over her son’s shoulder Meg could see Tom O’Neill’s beautiful daughter, the girl who had been wild all her life but didn’t look wild anymore. Dee was shyly introducing a round-faced, redheaded, bespectacled boy who was loosening the unaccustomed collar and tie he had put on specially to meet the father-in-law from Ireland. Tom was indicating the boy’s hair, making some joke maybe about how he knew now why he was called Fox. Whatever he said, they were all laughing.

  And now Robert and Rosa were laughing too as they wiped their tears and led her toward the car. Meg looked back in case she could catch the eye of her friend Tom O’Neill, the old friend she had met by chance on the plane. But he, too, was being bundled off. It didn’t matter. They would meet here in Australia, maybe two or three times so that they would not always be in the young people’s way. But not too often, because a month was a very short time for a visit. And Christmas was for families. And anyway they could always meet back on the other side of the world in a time and a place where there wouldn’t be so much to do.

  WHAT IS

  HAPPINESS?

  They had called him Parnell to show how Irish he was. At school they called him Parny, so that was it. Anyway Katy and Shane Quinn could always explain it to anyone who mattered that his real name was Parnell, like the great leader. It was just as well nobody asked them too much about the great leader. They were somewhat hazy about what he was leading and when and why. They liked the Parnell Monument when they came to
Dublin, but they didn’t like at all the news that the great leader had been a Protestant, and a womanizer. They hoped that this was just a local story.

  Parny liked Dublin, it was small and kind of folksy. People seemed poor compared to at home and it was hard to find the downtown area, but it was much better than being at home for Christmas. Much much better.

  At home there would have been Dad’s receptionist, Esther. Esther had worked for Dad for nine years, since Parny was a baby. Esther was a wonderful receptionist but a sad, lonely person according to Dad. Esther was a nutter who was in love with Parny’s father according to Mom. Last Christmas, Esther had come to the house and sat down on the doorstep and cried until they had to let her in for fear of the neighbors complaining. She had shouted at them and gone round and banged on windows. Esther had said that she would not be cast aside. They had all asked Parny to go to bed.

  “But I’ve only just got up. It’s Christmas Day, for the Lord’s sake!” he had cried, not unreasonably. They begged him to go back to bed with his toys. He agreed grudgingly because his mom had whispered that mad Esther would go sooner. He had listened on the stairs, of course, it had been very bewildering indeed.

  He gathered that Dad must have had a romance with Esther at one stage. It sounded impossible what with Dad being so old, desperately old now, and with Esther looking like she did, terrible. And it seemed hard to know why Mom was so upset, she must be well finished with Dad now. But that was definitely what it was about.

  There were enough kids at school who had moms and dads split up for him to know about this, and Esther kept shouting that Dad had promised to divorce Mom as soon as the brat was old enough. Parny was very annoyed to be called a brat and bristled on the stairs, but both Mom and Dad seemed very annoyed too and had rushed to his defense, so Esther had lost out on that one, and at least his parents seemed to be on his side. Parny gave it up after a while and had gone back to his room to play with his presents as they had advised.

  “I want some happiness. I want to be happy too,” he heard Esther shouting downstairs. “What’s happiness, Esther?” he had heard his father asking wearily.

  They had been right, it was the best thing for him to go upstairs. Later when she was gone, they came to get him. They were full of apologies. Parny was more interested in it all than frightened.

  “Did you plan to divorce Mom and go off with her, Dad?” he inquired, for the record, as it were. There was a lot of bluster.

  Eventually Dad said, “No, I told her I would, but I didn’t mean it. I told her a lie, Son, and I’m paying for it dearly.”

  Parny nodded. “I thought that was it,” he said sagely. Mom was pleased with this explanation of Dad’s. She patted Dad’s hand.

  “Your father is a mighty brave man to admit that, Parny,” she said. “Not all men are so severely punished for straying from the home.”

  Parny said that having Esther screaming on the doorstep was a terrible punishment all right. Did she scream and rave in the surgery too? he wondered.

  No, apparently not, she was nice and calm and official when wearing her white coat. It was only in leisure times and particularly high holidays that she became upset and carried on. Labor Day, and Thanksgiving she had called, but she had not been so disturbed. During the year Esther had come to the house again; she came on New Year’s Eve, and on Dad’s birthday and in the middle of the St. Patrick’s Day party they held, and they saw her turning up for the Fourth of July picnic just as they were unpacking the barbecue, and Dad and Mom had leapt back into the car and they had driven for miles looking over their shoulder in case she was behind.

  So this year, to escape her, they had come to Ireland. They had always wanted to visit the home of their ancestors, they had said, but now with Parny being old enough to appreciate everything, and the dollar being such a good little spender in terms of Irish money, well, why not? And actually things were getting very urgent now. At this year’s Thanksgiving Esther had arrived wearing a spaceman suit and they thought she was a singing telegram and opened the door. Then she was in like a flash.

  So that’s why they were in the land of his ancestors at last. Parny was glad, he missed his friends at Christmas but he was becoming as edgy as Mom and Dad about any celebration in case he saw the red mad face of Esther appearing.

  He had half hoped she would turn up at his own birthday. It would have been something for the school to talk about for months. But she didn’t. It was only official celebrations and Dad’s birthday. She must be nearly mad enough to be put away, Parny thought. Seriously he wondered why nobody had. “She had nobody to put her away,” Mom had explained.

  Parny thought this might be Esther’s bit of good luck. If you had had as much bad luck as she had, then maybe it was only fair that fate should deal you the good card of having nobody around to get you locked up. She could roam free for a bit longer.

  He asked why Dad couldn’t fire her. Dad said there were laws about this sort of thing, and if Esther was a very good worker, which she was, and not at all mad in the office, if he fired Esther there would be a huge protest and he might be sued.

  Dad and Mom seemed nice and relaxed now that there was no Esther. Parny saw that they held hands sometimes, which was very embarrassing to watch, but at least there was nobody here that would know them so it was okay.

  The hall porter became a great friend of Parny’s: he told the boy all about the days when there were dozens and dozens of American tourists staying in the hotel, when they came and hired his brother out to drive them all over Ireland and then back to the hotel again. The porter’s name was Mick Quinn, and he said it was an undeniable fact that he and Parny must be some kind of relations, otherwise why would they be called the same name? Mick Quinn had all the time in the world to spare for Parny since the hotel was almost empty, and Parny’s Mom and Dad were given to looking into each other’s eyes and having long conversations about life.

  This was all to the good. Parny used to go with Mick to collect the newspapers in the morning and helped with the luggage; he even got a tip once.

  He was most useful to Mick by holding the cigarettes. Mick wasn’t supposed to smoke on duty, so it just looked as if Parny was a forward American brat allowed to do what he liked, including smoking at the age of ten.

  Parny was great at sidling up when the coast was clear to give Mick a drag. Mick was married to a woman called Berna. Parny asked a lot about Berna. “She’s not the worst,” Mick would say. “Who is the worst?” Parny always wanted to know. If Berna wasn’t, someone must be the worst, but Mick said it was only a manner of speaking. Mick and Berna had grown-up children now, they were away, all of them. Three in England, one in Australia, and one at the other side of Dublin—which was the same as being in Australia.

  What did Berna do all day when Mick was in the hotel? Parny wondered. His mom worked in a flower shop, which was very smart and a perfectly fine place for a dentist’s wife to work. But Berna worked nowhere.

  She spent the day in a state of discontent, Mick revealed one time. She didn’t know the meaning of happiness. But he seemed ashamed he had told Parny this and never wanted to bring the subject up again.

  “What is happiness exactly, Mick?” Parny asked.

  “Well, if you don’t know, a fine young fellow like you who has everything he wants, then it would be hard for the rest of us to know.”

  “I suppose I do have a lot of things,” Parny said. “But then so has Esther, and not only is she not happy but she’s crazy as a box of birds.”

  “I don’t think there is anything crazy about a box of birds,” Mick said unexpectedly.

  “No, neither do I,” said Parny. “It’s like you said about Berna not being the worst. It’s only a manner of speaking.”

  “I’m very fond of birds in fact,” Mick Quinn said, having a quick drag out of Parny Quinn’s cigarette. “I’d have liked pigeons, but Berna said they were dirty.” He shook his head sadly and Parny felt that Berna must be very nearly the
worst.

  “Who is this Esther anyway?” Mick said, anxious to drag his thoughts and conversation away from the unsatisfactory Berna.

  “It’s all too long and complicated to explain, unless we had time,” Parny said. You couldn’t do justice to the madness of Esther in the fairly uneasy atmosphere of the hall, waiting for a manager to appear suddenly or a guest to need some assistance and advice.

  In fact something made Parny wonder if his new friend Mick would ever understand about Esther. “Maybe you might like to come on a tour with me this afternoon, you could tell me then?” Mick said.

  “Yes, and you could tell me about the birds you might have,” Parny said.

  “I’ll show you some birds, that would be better still.”

  Parny’s mom said they had been neglecting him. She and Dad had been feeling very guilty, but they had many important things to talk about. This very afternoon they would take him to a movie house. He could choose which one and if they could bear his first choice, they would all go to that, but if they really couldn’t bear his first choice, they might ask him to make a second choice. Parny said that he and Mick were going to visit some birds.

  “That means girls in this part of the world,” Parny’s dad said.

  “No.” Parny was very clear on this, it didn’t. Not with Mick. Mick had his fill of women, he had Berna who was always in a state of discontent, he wanted no more truck with women, he had told Parny that personally.

  Parny’s mom thought Mick had made a right choice. She looked meaningfully at Parny’s dad and said sooner or later most men come to that conclusion.

  Mick looked different in his ordinary clothes, not as splendid as in the porter’s uniform, but he said he felt free as a seagull that soared when he put on his old jacket and trousers. He led Parny to a bus. “Is it an aviary?” Parny asked, interested.