John McGahern - The Pornographer

“You were very lucky to get this place,” I felt I had to praise it again.

“It’s only once in a lifetime a place like this comes on the market. And the man and the money was waiting. Wouldn’t I be in a nice fix now if I’d gone on depending on other people?”

“The man with the money,” I echoed to tease. “I’ll be round with the hat any one of these days.”

“That’ll do you now,” he shook with pleasure. “That’ll do you now.”

The house was so crowded when we got back that it was hard to get through the hallway and I was so tired that I no longer cared how my appearance was taken, but enquiries had been made, and the car crash was in general circulation. People sympathized with me over the accident in the same tone as over my aunt’s death.

Then a murmur ran through the house that the hearse was outside, and all except the close relatives, and a few people asked to stay, filtered silently out, some glancing furtively back as they went. The coffin was brought in, eased up the narrow stairs, lifted across the banister, turned sideways in the door, put on chairs alongside the bed. There was no priest in the house, and the only four people in the room were the undertaker, his assistant, myself, my uncle.

“Is there any more that wants to come up?” the undertaker asked, and I marvelled at the tact that omitted to look on her a last time in the world .

When there was no answer he asked in a whisper, “Does Cyril want to come up?”

My uncle went out on the stairs, and in some silent, mysterious way the question was conveyed down below. When my uncle came back to the room he said, “No. He doesn’t want,” in a voice clear with self-righteousness.

“I suppose we can begin,” the undertaker said and looked around, “Let one of the women come up.”

For what? startled across my mind when the undertaker said again, “Let some of the women come up to see that everything is done right,” as if he’d heard my silent enquiry. Was the division between men and women so great, the simple facts of sex so tabernacled, that a woman had to be chaperoned between deathbed and coffin? In the same mysterious way as word had been conveyed to Cyril it went down to the “women” and none of them wanted to come up.

“It’s all right. We can go ahead,” the undertaker said. He drew back the sheet. Silently we took hold of her and lifted her from the bed. Her lightness amazed me, like a starved bird. The undertaker arranged her head on the small pillow, and looked at us in turn, and when we nodded he put the lid in place, turning the silver screws that were in the shapes of crosses. There was a brown stain in the centre of the snow-white undersheet where she had lain.

The superstitious, the poetic, the religious are all made safe within the social, given a tangible form. The darkness is pushed out. All things become interrelated. We learn sequence and precedence, grown anxious about our own position in the scheme, shutting out the larger anxiety of the darkness. There’s nothing can be done about it. There’s good form and bad form. All is outside.

At heartsease we can roll about in laughter at all divergences from the scheme of the world. We master the darkness with ceremonies: of delight at being taken from the darkness into this light, of regret on the inevitable leaving of the light, hope as founded on the social and as firm as the theological rock.

“It is nothing. It’s not what we struggled towards in all the days and nights of longing. We better look at it again in case we’ve missed something we find at the end of each arrival. But then many see that they’ve arrived in the longing of eyes that used to be their own.”

“It’s always this way,” an old voice says. “Everything. Sex, money, houses. Death will be the same way too, except this time you won’t even realize it. You will be nothing.”

“Since it’s this way it’s still better to pretend. It makes it easier, for yourself and others. And it’s kinder.”

“But I don’t need kindness.”

“You will,” a ghostly voice said. “You will. We all will before we’ll need nothing.”

Outside, the large crowd waited across the road for the coffin to come out of the blinded house. They had already parked their cars and would follow the slow hearse the hundred yards or so on foot to the church where the old and some women and children had already taken their places. The crowd stood on the tarmac where the stone wall once ran to the railway gates, the three blackened and malformed fir trees, the two carriages and the square guard’s van waiting to go to Drum-shambo. Behind the mourners, the large water-pipe that looked like an elephant’s trunk was missing from the sky. Those images of day that greeted her every morning when she went out to lift the shutters from the shop windows had proved even more impermanent than she.

My uncle asked me to drive the big car at the funeral.

“I can only see properly out of one eye.”

“It’ll be still better than my two. I can’t manage slow driving, and we’ll be right behind the hearse. It’s the distance between that beats me.”

“All right,” I was secretly glad to have the driving. I was in more pain now than the day after the beating, and was glad of anything that forced me to concentrate elsewhere. My uncle handed me the car keys as soon as we left the house, “You might as well get the feel of it now,” to drive to the church for the High Mass. The hearse was parked in front of the church gates, its carriage door raised like an open mouth; and I parked the big car behind it. The first thing I noticed as I got out was Maloney standing on the tallest step between the gate and door. He was dressed all in black, and the wide-brimmed black hat made him look more like an ageing danceband personality than a mourner. I detached myself from my uncle to go to meet him. “What are you doing here?”

“Paying my last respects.”

“How did you know about the Mass?”

“I read the papers. And ye put it in de papers. And I’m pleased to see that you’re properly turned out for the occasion. Yes,” he grinned from ear to ear beneath the big hat, mimicking a Negro blues accent, “very pleased, to see you formally turned out for the occasion, in black and blue.”

“This is all we need,” I said before I realized that my uncle was standing close, and I introduced them.

“I’ve put up at the Commercial,” he said, gesturing to the hotel just across the road from the church.

“I’ll see you there later, then,” I saw that my uncle was impatient at the interruption.

After the High Mass she was wheeled from the altar on a shining new trolley not unlike the trolleys used to gather in trays and used dishes in big wayside cafeterias, and we carried her on shoulders down the steps to the open back of the hearse. The hearse crawled slowly through the small town, stopped for a few moments outside the blinded house, but as soon as it passed the town-sign it gathered speed. Soon we were climbing into the mountains, passing abandoned houses, their roofs fallen in, water trickling from the steep sides onto the road, the brown of sulphur on the rocks. We drove immediately behind Cyril’s car; and as we climbed, the coffin, in its glass case, seemed to rise continually in air above us.

“It’s a big funeral,” my uncle said with satisfaction as he looked back on a whole mile-long stretch of road below us still covered with cars. “That Mr Maloney that was at the church,” he cleared his throat. “He’s a friend of yours?”

“I do work for him.”

“Writing work?”

“That’s right. What do you think of him?”

“Seemed a bit overdressed for the part,” he probed cautiously.

“He’s all right. He likes to make a bit of a splash. It’s a way of getting attention.”