Answer as a Man Read online

  Unlike Jason, Jack was “delicate” and “unwell,” to quote innocent Kate, though Bernard would scoff and remark that so was a willow sapling, all sinew and flexibility, bowing meekly before the wind, then springing upright faster than any other tree. In height, John was almost as tall as his older brother, but he appeared emaciated in spite of his truly enormous appetite, an appetite which seemed to have escaped his mother, who was always forcing food upon him even at the expense of others in the family. John would protest—but he always ate, claiming it was only to please Kate. He also had a cultivated cough, which he hinted was due to his grandfather’s pipe, a hint he dared not mention in Bernard’s presence. John used that cough to great personal advantage and even had the stern nuns at the parish school pampering him, they who would not have pampered Jason had he come in with a broken leg. “Jack has a way with him,” Bernard would admit, without admiration.

  John had gray eyes, like his brother and grandfather, but his were open and deliberately candid, and he would stretch them because they were somewhat sunken on each side of a nose which, while well-formed, was rather large. His complexion was pale, though he was very healthy, and his face was hollowed out under broad colorless cheekbones. A long thin chin and a pallid strictured mouth added to his appearance of austere illness and asceticism. His hair was light brown and thin and shining on a skull which seemed fragile, for it was small and narrow, standing on a neck as slender as a girl’s. His shoulders were narrow also, his arms and legs spindly. All in all he had a spare look, though he was nearly as quick as his brother. He stood straight and with some stiffness, and his glance was unbending and severe. He was a good and dedicated student, which Jason was not, and the nuns assured Kate that he was every inch a budding priest. He had not a single vestige of humor, and his smile was astringent.

  “Not a Father. A monk, with a tin cup,” Bernard would jeer. “Much easier than earning an honest living.” Tears would come to Kate’s soft brown eyes, and then Bernard would awkwardly pat her shoulder and say, “Now, now, it’s a mean old bucko I am, Katie, and a priest he will be, though God knows where we’ll get the money to send him to a seminary.” “The Good Lord will provide,” Kate would say, and Bernard would suppress a snort.

  Then there was Joan, crippled from infantile paralysis since she had been an infant. Everyone loved Joan, except that unregenerate curmudgeon Bernard, her grandfather. Even the self-absorbed John loved her, after himself, and he loved no one else, not even his devoted mother, whom he exploited. Joan was beautiful in spite of her useless legs. The disease had not marred her otherwise, and she had a face like that of a marble nymph, smooth and white and miraculously carved. There was an other-world exquisiteness about her face, a certain dainty polish resembling pearl. At times her flesh appeared translucent, especially in a sharp light. All her features were perfect: her large and shimmering blue eyes with their long black lashes, her elegant little nose, her full red lips, her brows like bird’s wings-half-lifted in flight, her docile expression, and her billowing mass of satin black hair, brilliant with waves. She had small round arms and hands and a body which promised a charming miniature pulchritude in later years.

  “Resembles all the Garrity women,” Bernard would say with reluctance. But who would want to marry a crippled colleen? Joan could move about with the aid of canes, though with difficulty, and slowly, and no one saw the legs under the long frocks Kate made for her. She was never in pain, though strangers believed she was and therefore pitied her. Joan, who was very clever under all that lovely quiet, took advantage of this solicitude. Only Bernard suspected an innate shrewdness, a watchful cunning, a greed, and an enormous selfishness coiled in wait like a viper in Joan’s shriveled little heart. It amazed him, disillusioned though he was, that one so young and untouched and cosseted and petted could be so ruthless of temperament, so avid.

  I have only one true grandchild, he would say to himself with some sadness, and that is Jason, God help him. A true Garrity, Jason, but the others are not, and their father was not, either. Nor are they Shanahans, like poor Katie, all gentleness and kindness and faith. Where do they come from, these changelings? It grieved him that he could not love John Xavier and Joan Eleanor.

  He looked up, this gray, gritty morning in November, when Jason entered the kitchen on his way to the outside privy, his face flushed with vexation. “I see Jack’s run away again, the third time this week, and it is only Friday,” he said.

  “Mass, dear,” said Kate. Jason went out through the kitchen door, slamming it after him. Kate gave Bernard a helpless look, and he said, “Well, then, he has reason, Katie, and this his birthday. It’s too much to hope that Jack will say a prayer for him, I’m thinking.” His voice was deep and strong, as sure and loud as that of a much younger man, and his brogue was rich as peat. He was long and upright and solid of body and appeared much younger than his seventy-two years. Constant exposure to wind and weather had permanently browned his complexion, which was vital in spite of the dry folds on his lean cheeks. He had a tight and furious mouth and flared nostrils and black brows like bad-tempered crows, and his thin and curly hair was an absolute white, arching over his powerful face like a snowy cliff.

  Kate loved him more than she had loved her own father, and so did Jason. But John only feared and hated him, and Joan despised him, though she feared him also. She thought he was crude, and had he known this, he would have been pleased, for he was a man of no pretense, though he could be courtly at times.

  He said to Kate this morning, “We’ll be giving him his presents tonight, and not before?”

  “He’ll be too busy to enjoy them before tonight,” said Kate, and felt a thrill of pain in her gentle heart. Perhaps, today, it might have been well if Jackie had not gone to Mass, and so given his brother a little time, on this his birthday. But God came first, did he not, before any human consideration? Still, Kate was hurt for her elder son. Bernard studied her with his own sadness. Katie Shanahan had been such a sweet and lively lass, happily singing in spite of famine, illness, and despair, and the damp little shanty in which they had lived in Ireland. But she had stopped singing when her husband, Peter, whom she had considered the noblest and most gifted man in the world, and the loveliest, had died of “the consumption” in America. Small of stature, and very thin, she had lost most of the brilliance of her complexion, and her large and luminous brown eyes had a haunted expression, though she was usually smiling. Her thick black hair, and those eyes, were all that was left of her endearing young appeal. The tender and touching mouth, once so rosy, was now pale and often tremulous. Her teeth needed attention, which she could not afford, but no one heard her pain, except Bernard, who could only guess it when he would see a swollen cheek.

  Bernard was positive she was a saint, and the only saint in whom he believed. The small body, almost breastless and meager of hip, was neat and tidy under a gray calico dress with a sprightly apron starched to the stiffness and texture of cardboard. She moved about her sorry little rooms like a darting mouse, always busy, and to Bernard she seemed to move in light. There were times when he had to grunt and bend his head with a savage motion to hide his tears. He would think, for a moment, that he had caught a glimmer of radiance in the coiled masses of her black hair, which was always combed and neat.

  We could not be worse off if we’d remained in Ireland, Bernard thought. But Pete would come, yammering this was a free country. Is it? Free for what? To starve in, to be reviled in, to be treated with contempt? Even the blackamoors were accorded better in this land than the Irish. Still, men and women and children were not killed on the streets here for their religion, or for stealing a loaf of bread, and their churches were not wrecked by evil creatures. Were they? There had been rumors of such in the Boston papers, and a few months ago old Joe Maggiotti’s polished shop window had been shattered by a stone. A free country.

  Bernard pondered. There was no freedom, at all, in this world, and never would there be, for man was vile. The most te
rrible enemy of his brother, less merciful than a tiger, more to be dreaded than the plague. An alien in a world otherwise beautiful. Freedom was a delusion. Man was the slave of his own appalling self, and a slave enslaves others. Why had the Lord died for such? It was a mystery which no priest had explained to Bernard’s satisfaction.

  There was a shrill splatter of rain against the one kitchen window, and Kate anxiously glanced through the glass for her son. The blue-gray shadow of the morning had not lightened perceptibly. The wind was palpitating in the polished black stovepipe; then it brutally hit the side of the little house, and the thin wall shivered.

  “Where’s Jason?” Kate said.

  “Sure, and he’s not dreaming,” said Bernard.

  2

  But Jason was, though he could not be seen as yet in that shifting dull light before the sun rose. He had left the whitewashed outhouse which Kate kept so absolutely sanitary and scrubbed and limed, and stood for a moment just near the door. He looked up at the sky, striated now, in the east, by alternating bands of black and gray and faint white; weight of darkness, bloated, here and there, by shapeless and tenebrous clouds. A rain had begun, the drops as sharp and cold as splinters of ice, and a wind like a huge knife-edge cut through them. Jason stood and looked at the back of the little house which his family inhabited. The yellow lamplight did not lighten the gloom, brave though it shone from the kitchen window. The house was built of aged clapboard, with a shingled roof which Bernard and Jason had to repair frequently, and it was the color of the sky itself. The house contained but three rooms, the large brick-floored and brick-walled kitchen with its wooden ceiling—which Bernard frequently shellacked to keep it bright—and two bedrooms, one for Kate and Joan, the other for Jason and John. Bernard slept on a narrow cot in the kitchen, and under that cot lay his thin tin trunk which he had brought from Ireland and which was filled with his few articles of clothing and other necessities. During the day the cot was covered by a many-colored wool afghan Kate had knitted. It served Bernard as a blanket in winter and added gaiety to the room all year long, and so the cot was also a comfortable couch or a place for a furtive nap during the day when Kate was overcome by exhaustion. Joan frequently usurped it, however, and Kate never rebuked her. There was a long wooden table which Bernard had made for himself with exactitude and love, though it was only soft wood. He had painted it a brilliant green with a yellow edging. He had also made the five chairs that surrounded it, which he had painted in the same colors.

  He had also built the large cupboard, again in green and yellow, and Kate, out of scraps gathered over several years, had made a round braided rug for under the table. It protected feet against the chill of brick in the winter. Someone had given Kate some old lace curtains, which she had sedulously mended, and they covered the one kitchen window. Kate was saving pennies for curtains for the other two rooms. They would cost four dollars; she had saved two. In the meantime there were cracked canvas “blinds” at those windows, with ragged edges.

  Jason gazed at the house where he had lived since his birth. It stood at the rear of a larger house, where the landlord lived. The landlord was little more prosperous than the Garrity family and had a wife who “ailed.” He was a tinsmith, and could barely walk with his “rheumatism.” He charged the Garritys four dollars rent a month for their house, and supplied the coal for their stove. Mr. Carson was a sour old man with a justified hatred for the world, and he resented Bernard’s painless mobility and his “popish drunkenness.” The two old men were not friends, though they were polite to each other. “You don’t know what trouble is,” Mr. Carson had once grunted to Bernard. Bernard thought of his three brothers and one sister who had been publicly hanged in Dublin by the English, and his mother who had died of starvation during the Famine, and his father who had fought in the streets for the right to practice his religion and had been bayoneted. He thought of himself who had accepted the “queen’s shilling” and joined her army, in order to survive and procure bread for another sister and her brood. He had spent his youth in an English barracks, had married an Irish girl who was a servant in a London mansion, had produced one feckless son, Peter of the Poetry, and had then taken his young family back to Ireland at the end of his service. He had also brought with him four cherished pounds sterling, and three gold sovereigns.

  He had learned carpentry in the army and made a stringent living in Dublin, until his wife had taken “the consumption” and had died swiftly and uncomplaining in his arms. There was none to care for ten-year-old Peter except an “ould widow woman” in the shanty next door. Bernard’s tough heart had almost literally broken when his Agnes had died. He had not been able to buy enough blankets to keep her warm during her agonized illness, nor had he been able to buy the “nourishing food” the doctor had sternly recommended.

  On the occasion when Mr. Carson had complained that Bernard did not know what trouble was, Bernard had grimly nodded, had filled his noxious pipe. “Sure, and right you are,” Bernard had said, and had walked off, followed by the reproachful eyes of his landlord. Irishmen, according to Bernard, had their pride.

  The street on which the Garritys lived was narrow, cobblestoned, and never was free of the odor of coal gas, dust, horse manure, outhouses, and stagnant water caught in backyard pools at every rain. Belleville had little in the way of sewers, and gaslight had come here only recently, mainly for the streets. It was the rare house which had the luxury of gas lamps and running water and indoor bathrooms. There were a few concrete walks, but mostly the sidewalks were composed of planked wood, uneven and rotting.

  Bernard, accompanied by his son and Kate, had hoped to reach Pittsburgh, where he could practice his trade and where Peter might be able to find employment as a clerk in some office or shop. But the money did not last long enough to take them to that city. Peter had worked intermittently and listlessly at random employment, and then, shortly after Joan’s birth, had given up living, literally and figuratively. At night he had written many very bad poems, hoping someday they would be published. With what could be spared he had bought books, the only virtue his father could find in him. No one but Bernard himself, and now Jason, read those books. A number of them had been secondhand copies of great poets, and “useless novels,” as John called them. To John, all books without a religious theme were not to be considered worthy. Shakespeare’s sonnets and plays were “indecent.” “Wonder why he doesn’t find a lot of indecency in the Holy Bible, then,” Bernard had once remarked to Kate, and had laughed his grudging laugh. “Plenty of naughty tales of fornication and adultery and murder and such in the Book, none of which seemed to bother God very much. But then, I’m thinking Jack has a suspicion he’s purer than the Lord himself.”

  There was no need for a craftsman like Bernard in Belleville. Most furniture was now made in factories, and came from a place called Grand Rapids, in the state of Michigan, and was much cheaper than handmade furniture, as Bernard had discovered. He could not compete at even the smallest profit. Belleville was not a prosperous little town. It was not near any mining section; it was not on a big river; there was little lumber in the vicinity to support a sawmill. It had no assets but its proximity to the Poconos. It lived on the rural community, which was not prosperous either. It did have three small factories, which manufactured machine tools and horseshoes and sundry other articles, but they would hire no “foreigners,” and especially not “papist” ones. They had a warning sign on their walls to this effect.

  Belleville’s water system was provided by incredibly lavish wells, which fortunately never became dry, as its water tables were an underground stream.

  The town had no “opera houses.” But it did have several Baptist and Methodist churches, the one Catholic church, and one surprisingly active brothel. It did have church suppers and lawn fetes and strawberry “festivals,” and six saloons which did a very good business, especially on Sundays, via the back doors. It was, Bernard thought, a very mean little town, for he was a Dublin man. It was
also very shabby and had a special dreariness of its own. There were times when Bernard felt a silent, furious claustrophobia.

  There were two newspapers, a morning one, an evening one, owned by the same man, whom Bernard loathed for his politics. The papers were sprightly and optimistic—and childish to him. Bernard was well-read and too worldly to be euphoric about anything, and the papers’ bounding enthusiasm over almost everything revolted him. Occasionally he wrote acid letters to the papers, for which he was roundly abused by other readers. “Da,” Kate would say with smiling love, “you are a caution.” “So’s all truth,” Bernard would reply happily. “Besides, I’m literate, and nothing vexes the illiterate as much as literacy.” Bernard, like many Irishmen, had intensely considered the priesthood, and had, before his sojourn in England, spent two years in a seminary in Navan. The priests, not Bernard, had decided Bernard had no true vocation. He was too intransigent. He assented to almost nothing, and repelled any attempt at rigorous discipline. He thought most of the saints a boring, maudlin, and two-dimensioned lot, and said so. They had, as he openly remarked, no guts. He was not unhappy at being expelled.

  Until recently there had been only two large public schools in Belleville; then compulsory education had been inflicted on the people. Why people incapable of rational thought should be “educated” was a mystery to Bernard. Before compulsory education, only the intelligent, and those who longed for literacy, were educated beyond the first two or three grades. The others went out into the fields or the factories, to their greater peace of mind and their superior incomes. But now they were forced to attend school until they were fourteen, and so the number of schools and teachers had increased. The general thought behind it was contained in the Constitution, which declared that all men were equal before the law—that is, a man’s financial or social position had no impact on justice. A new and pernicious interpretation of the Constitution—that all men were equally endowed with intelligence and ability and excellent heredity at birth—resulted, in the schools, in a lowered curriculum. To rescue their children from this debacle, a number of financially able parents opened two private schools, where education was truly education. There was one Catholic school near the church, St. John the Baptist, where the nuns demanded the highest performance from their pupils, or expulsion. A boy or girl kept up with all the class, did all the strenuous homework, was subjected to intense and implacable discipline, or, to the humiliation of parents, was ousted.