John McGahern - Amongst Women

He must be dying, Luke thought after he read the letter. He put it aside at first but then after rereading it he felt the same for Moran as he would feel for any mortal and wrote back in kind. He felt no bitterness or reproach. There was nothing to forgive. He was sorry and asked to be forgiven for any hurt he had caused. It is not what he wants but it will have to do, he thought.

Maggie rang to say that she was going home and wanted Luke to go with her. They were all going to Great Meadow for Monaghan Day. ‘Daddy is not well. Do you remember in the long ago when McQuaid used to come to the house for Monaghan Day? We feel it could give Daddy heart again if we were there. Rose said he was so much better after we were all there for Christmas.’

‘I’d be no use,’ Luke said. ‘I can’t go.’

‘He wants to see you.’

‘He wrote me a letter.’

‘I know.’

‘I wrote him back.’

‘He didn’t get that letter yet.’

‘I wrote him as he wrote me. I have no bitterness. I have nothing.’

‘Why can’t you come home with us then?’

‘I’d be no use. We don’t get on.’

‘You never really tried.’

‘It’s too late now.’

‘You’re no help. You’re no help to us at all.’

Moran did not lack for attention. All the girls came to the house and came again and again. They planned and arranged the entire summer so that Rose was as little on her own as possible. Michael and his wife and their two children came in August. Once the summer ended Mona came every single weekend from Dublin. Sheila also came whenever she could. Moran grew weaker. He had a number of small strokes. They began to feel that this once powerful man who was such an integral part of their lives could slip away from them at any time into the air. They all came for Christmas and then they decided to come again at the end of February to revive Monaghan Day. They explained to Rose how McQuaid used to come to the house for a grand tea, recalling the nervousness, the excitement, the glory of the stories, the whiskey McQuaid drank.

Rose was doubtful about the idea from the beginning. She could not see how any miracle could be managed by the simple revival of a day she herself had never heard about until now but the girls clung so much to the idea that Rose felt she couldn’t stand in their way. They wanted it to be a surprise. Against all reason they felt they could turn his slow decline around to bring back all his old spirit in one bound.

They came for Monaghan Day. They brought him gloves for his cold hands. Acknowledging that they had come distances for him, he broke his embargo on the past and spoke of the war and McQuaid and the lost Monaghan Days. At the end of the Rosary that wrapped up the day, he prayed for James McQuaid’s soul; but the attempt to revive Moran with the day had been futile.

The failure to change anything only strengthened their determination not to let him slip from them. They began to be in Great Meadow more than in their own homes. Muted complaints about neglected children, the mounting cost of Maggie’s air fares, had to be faced; but they grew so upset when faced with anything that interfered with their concern for Moran that the charges were always let drop, for when faced with their deep turmoil it was easier to let commonsensical objections out the window: air fares could be paid for later, lost hours worked. They were so bound together by the illness that they felt close to being powerful together. Such was the strength of the instinct that they felt that they could force their beloved to remain in life if only they could, together, turn his will around. Since they had the power of birth there was no reason why they couldn’t will this life free of death. For the first time in his life Moran began to fear them.

‘You’ll have to shape up, Daddy. You’ll just have to pull yourself together and get better.’

‘Who cares? Who cares anyhow?’

All they felt he had to do was to turn his life over to them and they would will him back to health again. It ran counter to the way he had managed his own life. He had never in all his life bowed in anything to a mere Other. Now he wanted to escape, to escape the house, the room, their insistence that he get better, his illness. The first time he went missing there was panic. They searched the bathroom, all the other rooms, and when they reached the stone hallway they saw that the front door was open.

They found him leaning in exhaustion on a wooden post at the back of the house, staring into the emptiness of the meadow. He did not speak as they led him back to the house. They thought it was a wayward fit of delinquency to test their vigilance. They watched him more closely after that but there were times when he slipped out to the fields in spite of their care and always in the same direction. Past the old pear tree in brilliant white blossom against the wall, last year’s nettles withered and tangled in the abandoned mowing machine beneath the tree, the corrugated roof of the lean-to he had built as a workshop for wet days, and on to the meadow. It was no longer empty but filling with a fresh growth, a faint blue tinge in the rich green of the young grass. To die was never to look on all this again. It would live in others’ eyes but not in his. He had never realized when he was in the midst of confident life what an amazing glory he was part of. He heard his name being called frantically. Then he was scolded and led back to the house. He stopped stubbornly before the door. ‘I never knew how hard it is to die,’ he said simply.

One day later the priest came to the house to hear his Confession, to give him Communion and Extreme Unction. ‘I never met a priest yet who wasn’t afraid of death. What do you think that means?’ he said to Rose.

‘Maybe that’s why they become priests.’

‘What good does that do them?’

‘They make sure of their own place in heaven that way.’

‘Then they shouldn’t be afraid to die.’

‘I suppose everybody is afraid.’

‘If they believed what they preach they shouldn’t be afraid. Who knows anyhow? Who cares?’

One evening when Mona was sitting by his bed thinking he was asleep he surprised her by asking, ‘Do you think I am finished, Mona?’

‘Of course not,’ she chided, surprised. ‘You’re going to have to work at it though if you want us to get you better. Trying to go out to look at the meadow is no help at all.’

Late one night Mona said to Rose, ‘I wonder why Daddy wants so much to get to the meadow. He’s always looking out at the same place. He must see something there.’ And without meaning to both women suddenly began to cry.

The girls had to return to their own homes. He worsened. The brown habit was bought and brought into the house and hidden. When the girls came back and saw the state he was in they lost all thought of ever leaving the house again while he lived. They sent for Michael and he came with his son.

There are some who struggle and rave on the edge of dying, others who make a great labour of it like a difficult birth, but Moran slipped evenly out of life. He just faded away in front of their eyes. They were all gathered around him.

‘Why aren’t you praying?’ he demanded as if he knew he was slipping away.

They immediately dropped to their knees around the bed.

‘Thou, O Lord, wilt open my lips,’ Rose began.

Tears slipped down their faces as they repeated the ‘Our Fathers’ and ‘Hail Marys’. Maggie had begun her Mystery when it grew clear that Moran was trying to speak. She stopped and the room was still. The low whisper was unmistakable: ‘ Shut up !’ They looked at one another in fear and confusion but Rose nodded vigorously to Maggie to ignore the whispered command and to continue. She managed to struggle back into the rhythm of the prayers when Mona cried out, ‘Daddy’s gone!’ They got up off their knees and stood over the bed. Weeping loudly Maggie and Sheila embraced one another and Mona ran angrily from the room, slamming doors on the way, shouting, ‘That doctor shouldn’t have been let give him that injection this morning.’ Rose turned to Maggie, ‘Would you mind going after Mona to see that she’s all right. I think that must be Michael’s car I hear turning in at the gate.’