J. Powers - The Stories of J.F. Powers

Stability, Daddy would think.

On some evenings, when the younger children were in bed and he was saying good night to them (another nice family scene) he would hear something to his credit, that the little girl liked living so close to the sea, the boys so close to the trains — sea and trains thanks to him, he’d think then, though the railway was now owned by Beebee, he understood. He was wary of Beebee. The millionaire had such a poor opinion of the Westward Ho that he wouldn’t buy it, he said — when Beebee spoke, it was through the older boy, dryly, rather like Mama’s father — but Beebee wasn’t in such good shape himself. He was worn smooth in places, and had a new nose (thanks to Mama) of different material, which he was sensitive about, withdrawing from the conversation if it was mentioned, as he did when frivolous remarks were made about his extreme wealth. “Well, good night, Millions,” Daddy would say — and might be told that Beebee (though present) was somewhere in the Indian Ocean, aboard Butterscotch , his yacht, on a trip around the world, and on his return would be buying new motorbikes for Lion and Bear, who, being teenagers, had crashed theirs. “On the yacht?” “They’re not with Beebee now. They radioed him about it.” “What’d Beebee say?” “‘Crazy kids. Just have to buy ’em new ones.’” The older boy would gurgle, and Daddy would shake his head in wonder at Beebee’s magnanimity. “Lion and Bear — they’re back at the ranch?” “Um.” “That’s the one in Colorado?” “Partly.” “It’s a big ranch.” “Um.”

Daddy would then retire to the same room he and Mama had occupied on the first night, where they now had two relatively easy chairs and special lighting — they now sat by two brass table lamps that he’d picked up at an auction, instead of under the traditional bulb suspended from the ceiling — and there, with the radio and the electric fire playing between them, with their reading matter and drinks, they’d spend the long evening.

By the middle of December, they were talking more about their problem. They had looked at a couple of houses that were too small, and one just not what they’d come to Ireland to live in (a thirties-period “villa” of poured concrete spattered with gravel — the agent had called it “pebbledash”), and one very nice place, “small Georgian,” with a saint’s well on the grounds, but unfurnished and rather remote and , it then came out, not for rent, the agent having presumed that they, as Americans, might buy it. That was all they’d done about their problem by the middle of December.

They weren’t worried yet. They had the hotel, if need be, through January, and felt secure there, so secure that on some evenings they were inclined — at least Daddy was — to feel sorry for their homeowning friends in America. He wouldn’t, he’d tell Mama, want to be Joe out there in the country, with the highway, perhaps, to be rerouted through his living room; or Fred by the river, with the threat of floods every spring (the American Forces Network, Europe, reporting six-foot drifts in the Midwest); or Dick in town, with that big frame house to paint every five years and those big old trees that, probably now heavy with snow and ice, might not fall away from the house if they fell.

One evening, after doing a spot of plumbing — Ireland, the land of welcomes, is also the land of running toilets — he told Mama that hard though it was to go through life making repairs in other people’s houses and hotels, knowing that whatever you did you’d probably be doing again somewhere else, it was better than making repairs in your own home, knowing that THIS IS IT, that the repairs might well outlast you, or the dissolution of your household. This was one of the consolations of vagrancy that he hadn’t heard about until he heard it from his own lips, and he liked it very much. Mama took exception to it.

One evening he told her that he’d heard a man on the BBC, on Woman’s Hour , say that mobile families were superior families — and she took exception to it. He hadn’t been listening carefully until it was too late, so couldn’t give her the details, only remembered that mobile families were more… couldn’t remember exactly what, only that they were superior, that the man, who was the spokesman for some association or group that had carried out a survey and issued a report, had said that mobile families were more…

“ More mobile? ”

One of her conversational tricks.

One morning, about a week before Christmas, they had a letter from Mrs Maroon. She thanked them for sending on the mail, said that cabbages were very dear in London, and asked to be remembered, as her husband did, to the children and Happy. In a postscript, she said not to send on the mail for the time being, as she and her husband would be at the hotel shortly.

Mama and Daddy then had a lengthy discussion about “shortly,” about whether it only meant soon or could conceivably mean briefly .

That evening, the Maroons returned.

Happy was glad to see them, and others were, too. “How long you staying?” the older boy asked them right away — a good question, but lost in the excitement. “ Daddy calls Happy Slap !” the youngest child informed them, and Mama quickly offered them tea.

With the proprietors in residence again, the hotel wasn’t what it had been for the tenants — their relationship to the dog, for instance, wasn’t the same. No, even though proprietors and tenants went their own way, ate at opposite ends of the dining room, and in the evening at different times (like first and second sittings at sea, parents with small children at the first), it wasn’t the same. And again, as before the proprietors left for London, there was a certain amount of overlap and flap in the kitchen. (Mama had once expected to have her very own.) Daddy was in trouble, too. After two days, he moved from the part of the hotel now occupied by the proprietors — lest his typing disturb them, his playing the radio during working hours scandalize them — to the part occupied by the tenants.

The next morning, in his new office, listening to Music While You Work on the BBC and reading the Irish Times before getting to grips with the light-hearted play (in which the campers were now Americans), he came upon an item of professional interest to him: “County councils and urban district councils throughout Ireland are awaiting the publication of a report prepared by the Government Commission on Itineracy.” Shouldn’t that be Itinerancy? “It is expected that the report will contain several broad proposals for integrating itinerants into the normal life of the community. Their presence has often caused friction, particularly in Limerick and Dublin suburbs, where residents claim that they indulge in fighting and leave a large amount of litter.” Yes, he’d seen some of it, and while the women, babes in arms, begged in the streets, the men, as somebody had said in a letter to the Irish Times , drank and played cards in a ditch. “During the winter, the tinkers usually camp at sites in these suburbs, or at sites in provincial towns, but some caravans stay on the road all the year round.” Nothing new here, nothing for him. “There are six main tinker tribes.” Oh? “The Stokeses, Joyces, MacDonaghs, Wards”… now, wait a minute… “and Redmonds.”

So the odds against him were greater than he’d thought.

He took the next train into Dublin, left the Irish Times on it, and gave the first tinker woman he met a coin, wanting and not wanting to know her name.

On the Quays, he found some secondhand paperbacks for the younger children, and was tempted by a copper-and-brass ship’s lamp, not a reproduction and not too big, to be auctioned that afternoon (“about half-four,” he was told). He bought a French paring knife for Mama in a restaurant-supply place — he liked doing business in such places.