After the Wake

  I visited the house and went to all their parties. Deirdre liked me a lot, Mairéad said I did Deirdre a lot of good, and was worth listening to, except when I was drunk, and Ciarán liked me a lot, because we were old comrades and as long as I did not attempt to involve myself with his sister.

  I liked them all but I am a proud man, and the last I resented.

  They all certainly liked me, except the old one’s and Loyola’s love for their children and, it may be mentioned, friendship for each other was only equalled by their disapproval of me as a friend for them.

  María’s disapproval changed to dislike when I went to her house in my professional capacity to wallpaper a room.

  She came down and asked me what I would like for my dinner, it being Friday. She was ever-generous with food and drink. She was never sure, she said, what religion I was. The old cow, and all belonging to me Catholics since 432 A.D. But I knew fish was scarce and not good that week, so I said I was a Protestant, and she gave me a steak.

  Later she discovered that I was not a Protestant, whatever I was, but a Catholic, and she denounced me to the children, and said I had sold Jesus Christ for threequarters of a pound of beef, and must never darken her door again. I don’t think she ever liked me darkening it, at that. But when this matter of Deirdre’s came up, Ciarán came looking for me to do something about it, and I did.

  María, through some way of her own, known only to religious people, pretended to think that Deirdre was only going on a holiday, though none of that household had ever used England for holidays, other than as a stepping-stone to Paris, Rome or Barcelona. She financed the trip to Bristol, and even said to Deirdre at the Airport, ‘Now, enjoy yourself, a stór.*’

  I was welcomed back to the house shortly after that, and once more was a welcome guest there any time I was too drunk to make my way home from a party.

  And this, the evening of Deirdre’s return, I was welcomed with open arms by her brother, who threw them round me, and María gave me qualified approval and a glass of whiskey.

  In a corner and blind-drunk as he had been for sixty years, was uncle Hymie.

  He was the second most blasphemous man I’d ever met, except during his hangover in the morning.

  Before he’d got a few glasses of whiskey into him he’d moan and groan about his past and sinful life, and quite sincerely pour himself a couple to give him the strength to get down to Mass. But by the time he had recovered sufficiently to get as far as the church door, he was strong in his unbelief again, and very coarse apart from blasphemous.

  When I walked in, he said to me, ‘How is the hammer hanging?’ adding in the same breath, ‘Deirdre is on the telephone talking to her intended. She looks well after her trip to the other side.’

  ‘Why wouldn’t she look well?’ said I, ‘and she a fine girl not twenty years of age? Aren’t you looking well, and you four times that age?’

  ‘I am by Jasus,’ said Uncle Hymie, ‘and six more years with it.’

  I knew he was eighty-five years old or more. He left the County Kildare the time of the Land War, in Parnell’s day. Hymie shot a landlord who was evicting a widow and six small children, and had to leave the country like many a decent man before and since.

  He went to Dublin on the run there, till the money would arrive from Mexico to take him to his people there.

  In the meantime, there was this fine summer’s day, and he went taking the fresh air for himself up in the Phoenix Park, and stood for a while watching a cricket match. One of the gentlemen players hit the ball, and it travelled about two hundred yards and looked like travelling another two hundred. Hymie walked casually along the side of the field almost as soon as the ball left the bat and reached up and caught it.

  The gentry were in amazement and came over to ask him whether he would care to join in a game, when one of their number stepped up beside him, slipped him a gold sovereign and said, in a low tone, ‘Get out of here, you bloody ruffian, while you’re safe. The Vice-Regal Lodge is only a few yards from here.’

  ‘How do you know me?’ asked Uncle Hymie.

  ‘Bloody well, I know you,’ says the gentleman. ‘Isn’t it many’s the time I saw you playing on the estate team. Only Hymie Bolívar could field a ball like that.’

  Hymie nodded to him, and went off out of the Park as quickly as he could with his sovereign.

  I never heard Hymie tell the story himself, though I heard him tell plenty of lies, but I knew that story was true because I heard it from other people.

  When the Irish Free State was established in 1922, Hymie came home from Mexico. He applied for a pension for his part in the Land War, and discovered that the official he gave an account of his deed to was a nephew of the landlord he’d shot.

  He lived for some time with his sister, back in the County Kildare, but had to leave her place and come to María’s place in Dublin, on account of a terrible thing he did on the poor woman and she lying ill in bed. The sister used to get people to read to her; books of devotion mostly, and prayers of a consolatory nature, to prepare her for the next world and ease her passage from this.

  Hymie went to the library and out of a pile of old books picked an antique volume with a leather cover. He told the sister it was The Imitation of Christ by Thomas à Kempis. He told her that when they opened his coffin to see whether his remains were incorrupt it was discovered that he had been buried alive, by the fact that he had gnawed away the top of his right shoulder, presumably in a frenzy when he woke up and found himself to have been buried.

  Hymie told the terrified sister that the same thing happened Juarez, the great Jesuit theologian.

  Then he read her a piece from his venerable leather-covered book: “It is well remembered here that, about seven years ago, one Frolick, a tall boy with lank hair, remarkable for stealing eggs and fucking them, was taken from the school in this parish …”

  ‘Be Christ, and that’s a remarkable thing,’ he says to the pour ould one in the bed, ‘“eggs, eggs”. I’ve heard of many things in my day between here and Casa Catalina’s but “eggs”, that’s a new one on me. I wonder how he managed it?’

  I was thinking that myself, when he asked me. ‘I hear you do a bit of writing?’

  ‘A bit,’ said I.

  ‘I seen a thing in one of them magazines they prints on straw or something, in this miserable country, about you being in prison in England for the cause.’

  ‘Like John Devoy, the Fenian – Recollections of an Irish Rebel, and all goddam lies. Every whoring thing in it.

  ‘I met him in ’Frisco in ’eighty-nine, when he came down from New York, with a lot of other gringo tinkers looking for subscriptions for Parnell. Myself and another young fellow, Argentine-Irish, were after coming from Mexico City to meet them, to hand over a big collection of money from Irish in America del Scot …’

  ‘From where?’

  ‘America, Latin America, the respectable bit. Anyway this boy with me was of a very old family, and could speak nothing but Spanish. There was a Bowery Boy with Devoy, and when he heard Patricio speak to me in Spanish he says, ‘Who is the greaser? I thought this was a Clann na nGael* meeting.’

  “This boy’s name is O’Brien,” said I, “I don’t know what yours is, you Yankee scum.”

  “Now, now,” says Devoy, “no fighting for God’s sake,” and turning to the other fellow, “I’ll explain in a minute. But they’ll only say here, it’s the Irish again, fighting amongst themselves.”

  ‘He was a cute little bastard all right, and settled the row and collected the diñero off of us.’

  ‘But,’ said Hymie, with a hard look at me, ‘you’re writing your Recollections of an Irish Rebel before you’ve had any goddam recollections – at twenty years of age!’

  ‘I’m twenty-one,’ said I.

  ‘Well, twenty-one. The way Ciarán talks about you, anyone would think you were Robert Emmet on a white mare. How the hell did you do three years in English jails, if you are only twenty-one?’
/>
  ‘I was sixteen when I was sentenced.’

  ‘In this paper you were writing it says …’

  ‘Listen Hymie, never mind my writing. How about your reading? What was the book you read to your sister with the dirt in it?’

  ‘There was no dirt whatsoever in it, though you are all so pig ignorant. It was The Rambler by Doctor Samuel Johnson, A Londoner’s Visit to the Country, if you want to know.

  So it was too, when I looked it up a few nights after, in the National Library.

  ‘Have another drink, Brendan Behan,’ said María. She always called me by my two names, so as to be polite, but at the same time not making too free with me.

  ‘I will, ma’am, thank you,’ said I, ‘I’d sooner the Vartry water than the soda water, if it’s all equal to you.’

  ‘For me, María, um, ah, whiskey solo,’ said Hymie, holding out his tumbler.

  ‘You’ve had your ’nough for the moment,’ said María.

  ‘Ah, María, your poor ould Tee Ah Och Aye me.’ (That’s how it sounded).

  She handed me a drink.

  ‘May the giving hand never falter,’ said I.

  You’re welcome this night, Brendan Behan. Take what you like out of that. Any other night, I supposed, the water out of the tap would be good enough for me. But like that again, that was not true either. Fair play is bonny play, and one thing about María or anyone belonging to her, they were never mean with drink.

  Hymie put forward his glass again and she refilled it, and her own, with resignation.

  ‘Salud and sláinte,’ said María.

  ‘Sláinte ’gus saol agaibh,’* said I.

  ‘Salud, sláinte, muchas pesetas,’ said Hymie adding something about my castinettas.

  ‘That’ll do you now,’ said María, ‘mind yourself. An old man like you, should be ashamed of yourself. On your knees you should be thinking of the next world.’

  ‘I thought that was supposed to be a great place,’ said Hymie.

  ‘It depends which part of it you go to,’ said María.

  ‘Be Jasus, and the Pope mustn’t think much of his chances of going to the good part, for there’s no great hurry on him going there. Any time he’s sick there’s about fifty medicos from every part of the world in attendance on him, whether it’s his arse or his elbow.’

  ‘Now, Uncle,’ said María, severely.

  ‘What was that he said in Spanish about castinettas?’ I asked her.

  ‘Don’t have me tell you,’ said she, ‘it was shocking anyway.’

  ‘Well,’ said Hymie, ‘what would shock that fellow would turn thousands grey. I only said …’

  ‘Never you mind what you only said,’ said María. ‘Tomorrow morning when you wake up, craw-sick, you’ll be down on your knees, praying for the wrath of God to be averted from a sinful old man. I know,’ she added, ‘because I’ve heard you in your room.’

  ‘Seeing as you listen to my prayers, it’s a wonder you wouldn’t be listening outside the retrate* as well, when I’d be relieving myself of a morning.’

  Hymie’s humour had changed. He was really annoyed.

  ‘Look,’ said I, ‘here’s the girl herself.’ Deirdre was coming down the stairs. ‘Fresh and well she’s looking after her trip.’

  ‘So well she might,’ muttered Hymie. María left us, to bring Deirdre over to someone to introduce them.

  ‘Hymie,’ said I, ‘Deirdre is very fond of you.’

  ‘Nobody’s fond of you when you are old,’ said he, ‘the only reason the other bitch has me here is because she can call me Uncle, and it makes her think she’s still young.’

  When her introductions to the new guest were complete, Deirdre came over to us. Her black hair gleaming, brushed back the way she always wore it, her oval face and brown eyes shining, innocent and understanding. The Madonna.

  I was not thinking of her recent adventure, and certainly I was not thinking in sarcasm.

  If she couldn’t resist a fellow, it was because she was too kind.

  ‘Feel better, now dear,’ is a cant phrase, but in Deirdre’s case, it was an exact description of her maternal attitude. Not exactly, because she had her own enjoyment too, and I know she had that as part of and as much as the head stroking and consoling.

  As natural and as pure as spring water, and I’d have done a lot for her, and did. Wasn’t I after organising what even to me, a bad Catholic, was a most grievous sin?

  ‘Well, a mhic,’ she looked at me, ‘How’s Brendan?’

  ‘Couldn’t be better,’ said I, ‘if I was any better, I couldn’t stick it. You’re looking smashing, Deirdre, after your trip.’

  She gave a class of a look more humourous than a wink, and said, ‘Why wouldn’t I?’

  ‘You took the words out of me mouth,’ said Hymie, who still had the spite, over María’s remarks to him.

  ‘You could offer Deirdre a more civil welcome than that,’ said I.

  ‘Oh,’ said Deirdre, ‘my Uncle Hymie welcomed me already. He was out at the airport with Ciarán and Mammy fighting,’ she turned to Hymie, who grunted. ‘I’ll get a drink for the three of us. Malt, Brendan; and you, Uncle? We have to ask the guests before the family. Malt? Right. And I’ll have a Cork Gin and tonic, and it looks like water, crystal clear, so as the people won’t know what I’m drinking.’

  We watched her at the sideboard. She poured a good measure of gin for herself.

  ‘For a girl of nineteen,’ said I, ‘she’s not a bad hand at filling them.’

  ‘She’s not, then, God bless her,’ said Uncle Hymie.

  ‘She never was though,’ said I, ‘she takes it as she takes everything, as something that is there to be enjoyed. I saw her when she was seventeen drink as much as any of us, cook us a breakfast of rashers and eggs and then ask us all to go swimming, and we lying half-dead trying to swallow a curer.’

  ‘It’s the likes of you has her the way she is,’ said Hymie, ‘her and Ciarán,’ he added, begrudgingly.

  ‘Oh, I shouldn’t have said that,’ said I, ‘about her drinking as much as any of us; I forgot that you’re her grand-uncle,’

  I forgot, said I, in my own mind, that you are a dying old bollocks, and that I’m only pleasing you, by drawing attention to your relationship to this lovely girl – lovely, in the way that bright eyes and softness and breasts and humour and good opening legs made her. You, said I to Hymie, are as much a relation of hers as what the man in the moon, whoever in Jasus’s name he is, is. Fucked up and dried up long since you are.

  She came back anyway with the drinks, and Hymie forgot his bad humour, talking and drinking again. And I forgot mine. Couldn’t I afford to? Poor old wretch. We all live to be as old as we can.

  Lifting my tumbler I said to Deirdre, ‘Céad míle fáilte – a hundred thousand welcomes to you, and you home.’

  ‘Go raibh mile maith agat, a Bhreandáin,’* said she, ‘it’s great to be home. Oh, there’s Mairéad.’ She took a running dive from Hymie and me, and went over to Mairéad Callan who was coming in the hall.

  There was a confusion of female embracing and clinching and, ‘Oh, Deirdre, you look marvellous,’ and more clinching and kissing, and ‘Oh, Mairéad, it’s lovely to see you,’ and ‘Oh, Deirdre, the trip did you good,’ and ‘Let me touch you.’

  ‘My Deirdre, and how you’ve grown,’ I muttered, watching this touching scene.

  ‘What’s that you said?’ said Hymie.

  ‘How about a rozziner?’ said I.

  ‘Musha then, it wouldn’t kill us,’ said Hymie.

  I brought over a whiskey bottle and filled our two tumblers.

  ‘Hombre,’ said Hymie.

  ‘The skin off your knackers,’ said I.

  Deirdre and Mairéad broke from their clinch.

  ‘Well, Brendan,’ said Mairéad, with heaving bosom, ‘and how are you?’

  ‘Only look at me,’ said I.

  ‘Good evening, Mr. Bolívar,’ said she, paying her respects to Hymie.

&nb
sp; ‘Ciarán is doing barman,’ said Deirdre, ‘he’ll be over in a minute.’

  ‘It’s not him I came to see at all,’ said Mairéad, with tempered judgement, ‘but yourself, Deirdre.’

  ‘Oh, is that the way with you,’ said I, ‘are you long going together?’

  ‘I can see Ciarán any time,’ said Mairéad.

  Ciarán joined us then and from that out the five of us were together.

  María was well on, and after a while got out the fiddle and a fellow from their part of the country came out with an accordion and we danced and had a great céilí*.

  Most of the guests were students at the National University and friends of the Bolívars from the rich plains of the Midlands and had every look of solid comfort about them.

  They had two ways of looking at me. They liked me, because I had served a sentence of three years for possessing explosives, but they didn’t like the fact that I was a Dublin jackeen*. They applauded vociferously when I sang nationalist songs about the 1916 Rising, but when I sang songs about the 1913 General Strike, they were only polite.

  Hymie had it both ways, and every way. He sang songs about the Land War, and with these students the memory of shooting English landlords was a worthy thing to be well remembered, but to go on strike against an Irish capitalist was not the same thing.

  I did not blame them for that. Many of them were the sons of gombeen-men, credit shopkeepers and moneylenders getting the profits of a whole district each containing maybe a thousand families, and some of their ancestors, at any rate, had suffered a lot under the landlords.

  Hymie sang: ‘Oh, and sure if he spent it on mountainy dew

  I’d sooner he drank nor gave it to you.

  You’re a rent agent get* should be hung from a yew

  tree, says the wife of the Bould Tenant Farmer.’

  and the lament for Lord Waterford, a big landowner:

  ‘“Oh, Lord Watherford is dead”, says the Shan Van Vocht

  “Oh, Lord Watherford is dead”, says the Shan Van Vocht.