The Heat of the Sun

A Story

by SEAN O’FAOLAIN

THEY never said, “Let’s go down to Rodgers’,” although it was old Rodgers who owned the pub; they said, “Let’s go down to Uncle Alfie.” A good pub is like that, it is the barman who makes it, not the boss. They gave their custom to Rodgers; they gave their confidence to Alfie. He knew them all, some of them ever since they were old enough to drink their first pint in a pub. He knew their fathers, mothers, brothers, sisters, girls, prospects, wages, hopes, fears, and what they were always calling their ideas and their ideals and that he called their ould guff. Always their friend, sometimes their philosopher, he was rarely their guide. Your da gave you money (sometimes) and you hardly thanked him for it. Alfie loaned it. Your da gave you advice and you resented it. Alfie could give you a rap as sharp as lightning, and you accepted it because he gave it as your equal. Your da never had any news. Alfie knew everything. He was your postman, passing on bits of paper with messages in pencil: “Deirdre was asking after you, try 803222, Hughesy.” Or, “For Jay’s sake, leave a half-note for me, Paddywhack.” He might hand you out a colored postcard with a foreign stamp, taken from the little sheaf stuck behind the cash register. The sheeting around the register was as wallpapered as a travel bureau with colored postcards from all over the world. Best of all, he was there always: his coat off, his shirt sleeves rolled up, his bowler hat always on his balding red head, a monument in a white apron, with a brogue like an echo in an empty barrel.

You pushed the two glass doors in like a king.

“Hi, Alfie!”

“Jakus, Johnny, is that yourself?” With a slap on the shoulder and your drink slid in front of you unasked. “Fwhere were you this time? Did yoo have a good voyage?”

“Not bad. Same old thing — Black Sea, the Piraeus, Palermo, Naples, Genoa. Crummy dumps!” Your half-pint aloft. “What’s the best port in all creation, Alfie?”

“As if yoo needed to ask me!”

“Here’s to it, and God bless it. ‘Dublin town, O Dublin town/ That’s where I long to be,/ With the friends’ so dear to me,/ Grafton Street where it’s all so gay,/ And the lights of Scotsman’s Bay.' Theme song of every poor bloody exile of Erin. Up the rebels. Long live the Queen of Sheba. How’s Tommy? How’s Angela? How’s Casey, Joanna, Hughesy, Paddywhack? Does my little black-eyed Deirdre still love me?”

“Paddy was in on Ghuesday night. He’s working with the Gas Company now.”

“Poor old Paddywhack! Has he the gold wristlet still? And the signet ring? Will the poor bugger never get a decent job?”

(He noticed that Deirdre was being passed over.)

“His wife had another child. That’s six he has now.”

“Sacred Heart!”

“Hughesy is going strong with Flossie.”

“Sure that line is four years old. When is the bastard going to make an honest woman of her?”

“Is it a busman? She’s aiming higher than that. The trouble with yoo young fellows is ye pick gurls beyond yeer means. Yeer eyes are bigger than yeer balls. Leave them their youth. Wedded, bedded, and deaded, the world knows it.”

Alfie was anti-woman. Everybody knew he had a wife somewhere, and three kids, separated live years ago. She was before their time — none of them had ever seen her. Poor old Alfie! In hope and in dreams and in insecurity is life. In home and in safety is . . .

It would make you sick the way they always want to corral you into the blooming home. Like tonight: “Oh, no, Johnny! You’re not going out from us on your first night home? We haven’t seen you for four months! And your father and me looking forward to a nice bit of a chat. About your future, Johnny. About your plans, Johnny. About your prospects. Sit down there now and be talking to us.”

You sat back. They talked. You mumbled. The end of it was always the same. After another half hour of twitching you said it again.

“I think I’ll drop down to Uncle Alfie for an hour to see the boys. I won’t be late, Mum. But leave the key under the mat. Don’t wait up for me. I’ll creep in like a mouse.”

Hating the way they looked at one another, knowing well that you wouldn’t be in before one in the morning — if then—shoes in hand, head cocked for the slightest tweak of a bedspring upstairs, feeling a right bastard, or if, with God’s help, you were tight enough, feeling nothing but your way. Hell roast ‘em! Why couldn’t they understand that when you cabled “COMING HOME THURSDAY STOP LOVE STOP JOHNNY,” it meant you wanted to see them, okay, and you were bringing presents for them, okay, and it would be nice to have your own old room, okay, but what you were really seeing was the gleam of the bottles, and the wet mahogany, and the slow, floating layers of smoke, shoulders pushing, hands shooting, everybody talking at the top of his voice to be heard, and old Alfie grinning at ye all like an ape. God Almighty! When a fellow has only seven lousy days’ shore leave . . .

IT WAS dry October, the softest twinge of faintest fog, the streets empty, a halo around every light, a right night for a landfall. Tramping downhill, peaked cap slanted, whistling, he foresaw it all. A dollar to a dime on it — Alfie would resume exactly where they left off four months ago:

“Johnny! It is high time yoo thought of settling down.”

“Gimme a chance, Alfie. I’m only twentythree. I’ll settle down someday. Why don’t you say that to Loftus or Casey?”

“Loftus will find it hard. With that short leg. Anyway, I mean settle down ashore. That wandering life you’re leading! It’s no life!”

“I’m not ready, Alfie. I want to meet the right girl. I’m mad about Deirdre, but she’s always talking about motorcars, and houses in Foxrock, and Sunday morning sherry parties. I’m not sure of her. The right girl is damn hard to find. It’s a funny thing, Alfie, all the nice women I meet are married women.”

“An ould shtory. And the ladies tell me all the nice men are married men. I think the truth is that no wan is ready until they know by heart the music that tames the wild bashte — know it and are beginning to forget it. I don’t think Deirdre is the right sawrt for you at all, Johnny. She’s too expensive for you. She’s too ambitious. She’s like Flossie — playing with Hughesy, trying to learn the chune on the cheap, as you might say. Johnny! If I were you, I’d choose a woman of experience. What’d suit you, now, down to the ground would be a nice, soft, cozy, widow woman that knows every chune in the piper’s bag.”

“Oh, for God’s sake, Alfie! With a wooden leg? And a yellow wig? And a blue bankbook? I’m young, Alfie. What I dream about, in the middle watch, looking up at the stars, is a young, beautiful, exquisite, lovely, fond, right-dimensional Irish girl of eighteen. Like my little Deirdre. Pure as the driven snow. Loyal and true. Gentle as the dawn. Deirdre, without the motorcar!”

Alfie would draw up from the counter and make a face as if he was sucking alum.

“Yoo could sing it if yoo had the voice for it. 1 She was luvely and fair, as the roase of the Summer,/ But it was not her beauutye aloane tha-at won me’ ” —

He would snatch it from him tonight:

“ ‘Oh, no! ‘Twas the truth in her eyes ever dawning,/ That made me love Mary, the Rose of Tra-a-leee.’ A hundred percent right, Alfie. Lead me to her.”

“I wouldn’t give you two pinnies for a gurl of eighteen — she couldn’t cook an egg for you. And dimensions are all very fine and dandy, but they don’t lasht, boy. They don’t lasht! Did I ever tell yoo about the fellow that married the opera singer? She was like an angel out of heaven on the stage. In the bed she was no better to him than an ould shweeping brush. He used to wake her up in the middle of the night and say, ‘Sing, damn yoor sowl!’ ”

Aboard ship he had told them that one many times. Always the old deckhands would nod solemnly and say, “And e’s dead right, chum! Feed me and love me, what more can a man ask for?” Well, if he said it tonight he would be ready for him; drawing himself up, with one hand flat on his top left brass button:

“Alfie! In this rotten, cheating, stinking, lousy, modern world my generation is going to fight for our ideals!”

FOUR miles out over the shadowy sea the light on the Kish bank winked drowsily. Fog? It was so quiet along the promenade that he could hear the small waves below him sucking into the rocks. Wind soft from the south. The only person he passed was a civic guard in a cape. He turned right, then left, passed the Goal Harbor, wheeled right again, left, and there were the lights flowing out on the pavement. He pushed the two glass doors in like a king.

“Hi! . . .”

He stopped. The young barman was staring at him with uplifted eyebrows. He looked around. The place was like a morgue. He recognized old Molly Goosegog, her fat legs spread, soaking it up as usual with the one-armed colonel. Three business types, their hats on, hunched over a table, talking low. In the farthest corner two middleaged women were drinking gins and bitters. Dyed, dried, skewered, and skivered, two old boiling hens, cigarettes dangled from their red beaks. He moved slowly to the counter.

“Where’s Alfie?” he asked quietly.

“On leave.”

“Alfie never took leave in his life unless he took leave of his senses.”

“Well, he’s on leave now. What can I get you, sir?”

Sir! Sullenly he said, “A large whiskey,” although lie had been planning a night of draft porter. Alfie would have said, “Johnny! There is no such thing on earth as a large whiskey.” Or he might have said nothing but come back with a half-pint of draft and said, “That’ll be better for you.”

Was it because it was Thursday night? Nobody much ever came on Thursday night: less even than came on Friday night. Everyone stony. Behold my beeves and fallings are all killed, and nobody cometh to eat them. Seven lousy nights and the first a flop? Go forth into the highways and byways. From pub to pub? The whiskey appeared before him. The barman stood waiting. He looked up.

“Four and sixpence, sir.”

With Alfie, you let it run for a week, for two, for three, for as long as you liked. Then you asked, “What’s on the slate, Alfie?” and if you were flush, you paid a half-note over and above for future credit. Man knoweth not the hour nor the night. He paid out four shillings and a sixpenny bit. The barman rang it up and retired down the counter to lean over his Herald.

“How long is Alfie going to be on leave?”

The fellow barely glanced up.

“I don’t know, I’m only here this past two weeks.”

“Is the boss in?”

“He’s gone down to the chapel. The October Devotions.”

Thinking of his latter end. Dies irae, dies ilia. Back in Newbridge with the Dominicans. All Souls’ Night. He glanced at the door. Would there be anyone down at The Blue Peter? Or in Mooney’s? Maybe in The Purty Kitchen?

“Any message for me there behind the old cash box?”

“Name?”

“Kendrick.”

The barman, his back to him, went through the light sheaf. Without turning, he said, “Nothing,” shoved it back, and returned to his Herald. Out of sight, out of mind. Bugger the whole lousy lot of them! And Deirdre along with them! The glass doors swished open, and there were Paddywhack and Loftus. He leaped from his stool.

“Hi, scouts!”

“Johnny!”

Handshakes all around. Paddy was as hungrylooking as a displaced Arab. His shirt sleeves too long. The gold wristlet. The signet ring. Loftus, as always, as lean and yellow as a Dane. Hoppity Loftus with his short leg. He never worked. He was a Prod and had an English accent, and he lived off his mother. All he did was to get her breakfast in the morning and have her supper ready for her at night. She worked in the Sweep.

“Name it, boys! I’m standing!”

Paddy looked thirstily at the glass of whiskey.

“Are you on the hard tack?”

“Naw! Just this bloody place gave me the willies. The usual?” He commanded the barman. “Two half-pints. Make it three, and I’ll use this as a chaser. God, it’s marvelous to see ye! Come on, come on! Give! Give! Gimme all the dirt. Tell me more, tell me all. Are you still with the Gas Company, Paddy?”

“I’m with a house agent now. Looney and Cassidy. In Dame Street.” He made a fish face. “N.B.G. Paid on commission. Just to tide me over a bad patch.” He laughed cheerfully. “The wife is preggers again.”

“Paddy! I dunno how you do it.”

“I’m told,” said Loftus lightly, “that it’s a very simple matter, really.”

“How’s your mother, Loftus?”

A rude question. Loftus shrugged it away. They took their drinks to one of the round tables. Paddy lifted his glass.

“Johnny! You don’t know how lucky you are. A steady job, cash in your pocket, a girl in every port.”

“And as brown,” said Loftus lifting his glass, “and as round as a football.”

“Me round?” he shouted, ripped open the jacket of his uniform, and banged his narrow waist. “Feel that, go on, feel it! Hard as iron, boy! Eight stone ten. You,” he said condescendingly, rebuttoning, “must be about ten stone eight.” He paused. Then he had to say it: “Does Deirdre still love me?”

Loftus’ eyes glinted as he proffered the sponge on the spear.

“I saw her two weeks ago in a red Triumph. A medical student from Trinity, I believe. She looked smashing.”

His heart curdled, his throat tightened, he laughed loudly.

“So the little bitch is betraying me, eh?”

He could see her, with her dark hair curled down on one shoulder as if she had a monkey on her head. The red lips. The high bosoms.

“It’s just because you’re not around much,” Paddy said comfortingly. “Wait until she hears you’re home!”

“How are all those girls of yours?” Loftus smiled. “In foreign parts.”

Paddy poured sad oil.

“Too bad about poor Alfie?”

“I heard nothing,” he said sourly. “Nobody writes to me. Where is the ould divil?”

“You didn’t know! Hospice for the Dying. Cancer. These last three months. It’ll be any day now.”

It gagged him. There was a long silence. His first death. The double doors let in Hughesy and Flossie; their oldest and youngest—a blond mop, black lashes, a good looker, but not a patch on his D. Their welcomes were muted. They sat down stiffly like people who did not mean to stay.

“ ‘Here,’ ” he chanted mournfully, “ ‘here, the gang’s all here.’ ”

“Not all of us,” Paddy said.

“This is a committee meeting, really,” Hughesy said, taking charge of it at once. “Well?” he asked Paddywhack and Loftus. “How much can we raise?”

“We’re gathering for Mrs. Alfie,” Paddywhack explained. “She hasn’t a sou.”

“I managed to borrow five bob,” Flossie said, taking two half crowns from inside her glove and laying them on the table.

“That,” said Hughesy, putting down half a crown, “is all I can manage.”

Paddywhack squirmed and said, “Six kids and another coming, and Thursday night.”

Loftus showed empty palms. “Unless I could pop something?”

He felt worse than a wanderer — a stranger.

“Mrs. Alfie? How in God’s name did ye meet her?” he asked Hughesy.

“It was Alfie asked us to keep an eye on her and the kids. I saw him again today,” he told the others.

“How is he?” he asked.

Hughesy looked away.

“Alas, poor Yorick,” Loftus said. “A skull!”

Flossie began to cry.

“But where’s the rest of the gang? Joanna, and Tommy, and Angela, and Casey.”

He stopped short of Deirdre. Paddywhack shook his head and made faint gestures.

“I nearly didn’t come myself. Can you manage anything, Johnny?”

He took out his pocketbook and planked down a pound note.

“Good man!” said Hughesy, and looked up at the barman standing over them, and down at the pound note. He smiled apologetically at Johnny. “Any more of that nice stuff?”

“Come on, scouts, I’m standing. If it’s to be a wake, for Christ’s sake let it be a wake. What’s yours, Flossie? Still sticking to the dry sherry? Hughesy? The old pint?” He nodded to the barman, who departed silently. “Let me in on this. Tell me all about Alfie.”

AS THE drinks warmed them they talked. A man, by God! A true friend if there ever was one. They don’t often come like that nowadays. True from his bald head to the soles of his feet. Tried and true. A son of the soil. A bit of old Ireland. Vanishing down the drain. Not one bit of cod about him. His jokes . . . We shall not look upon his like again. The pound note melted. Paddywhack said, “Life is a mystery all right. She looks such a nice woman, and she is a nice woman, and full of guts, not one word of complaint, and three kids. What in God’s name happened to them?” They told him, asking how she lived, that she used to work as a dressmaker. “Yes, he did!” Loftus answered him. “After a fashion, he did. He supported her. After a fashion.” Flossie said she would never come to this pub again. They agreed with Hughesy that Dublin wouldn’t be the same without him. She said the fact was he had nothing to do with all those . . . They followed her eyes down to Molly Goosegog and the onearmed colonel, and the three business types, and the two boiled hakes with the gins and bitters. Hughesy slapped the table. “And that’s a true bill, Flossie! He was one of us. Old in body but young in heart. You agree, Johnny?” He agreed that Alfie was the only man he ever met who understood them. “He fought for his ideals.” They talked of understanding, and ideals, and truth, and true love, and how well Alfie understood what it means to be young, and to believe in things, that was it — to believe in things. A second pound was melting, and it was after ten when Flossie said to Hughesy that she must go home soon.

“Mind your few quid, Johnny,” Hughesy said. “What’s left there will be enough. A dozen bottles of stout, say a dozen and a half. Just to cheer her up. We’ll drop around for a minute, Flossie. Just to cheer her up.”

“One for the road,” he insisted, and held them. They leaned back.

It was nearly eleven when they left in a bunch, carrying the three brown paper bags of stout, out into the dry streets, the nebulous night, under the dim stars and the gathering clouds that were lit by the city’s glow. Loftus said it was a fine night for a ramble. Hughesy laughed and said, “Or for courting,” Two by two, hooting merrily backwards and forwards at one another, they wound up among shaggy, dim-lit squares with names like Albert Gardens, Aldershot Place, or Portland Square, all marked on green and white tablets in Irish and English, until they came to a basement door, and stepping down to it, rang and waited in a bunch under a stone arch. In the dark they were suddenly silent, listening. A light went on over the door. She opened it.

Alfie’s youth. She was soft and welcoming. All the parts of her face seemed to be running into one another, dissolving like ice cream in the sun, her mouth melting, her blue-blue eyes swimming. A loose tress of her gray-fair hair flowed over a high forehead. Her voice was as timid as butter. She was not a bad-looking woman, and for a moment a little flame of youth flared up in her when they introduced him to her, and she laughed softly and said, “So this is Johnny! He said you were the baby of the lot.” She held his hand in her two hands, moist and warm as if she had been washing something, and he remembered a line from a poem they used to read at school, long forgotten, never understood. “Fear no more the heat of the sun . . .”

“Glad to meet you, Mrs. Alfie,” he said, and realized for the first time that he did not know Alfie’s name.

“We brought a few drinks,” Hughesy explained. “Just to brighten the night.”

“Come in, boys, come in. Talk low,” she begged. “Jenny is only just gone to sleep.”

The low room was small and untidy, and smelled of soap. The fire was ashen. She had only two glasses. They sat in a circle and drank out of cups, or from the bottle necks. Moist cloths hung drooping and wet on a line; the stuffing of the chairs tufted out; he saw a toy horse with three legs, torn green paperbacks, a house of cards half-collapsed on a tray. Staring at her, he heard nothing of their whispering; both surprised and pleased to hear her laugh so often. He became aware that Hughesy and Flossie were fading out, for the last bus. Around midnight Paddywhack said he must give the wife a hand with the kids, and slid away. She put a few bits of sticks in the grate and tried ineffectually to remake the fire. Then Loftus clumped off home to his mother, and there were only the two of them in the room, stooping over one flicker in the ashes, whispering, heads together.

Only once again did she mention Alfie; when she said, “They’re a grand bunch. Ye are all good boys. Decent young men. It was what he always said about ye.”

“Did you see him often?”

“Hardly at all. He might drop in after he shut the pub. To see the children. He told me he was always at ye to settle down. Hughesy, and Flossie, and Casey, and Loftus, and you. Do you like Loftus?”

“He’s cold. And bitter.”

“Is Deirdre your girl?”

“Yes. But I think she’s letting me down. Did you meet her? She’s a smasher.”

“She is a beautiful girl. I don’t want to interfere in your life, Johnny, but I would be inclined to think that I would nearly say that she might have a hard streak in her.”

“Not like you?” he smiled.

“I’m not faulting her. A woman must think of her own good.”

There he was off, full-cock, about youth, ideals, loyalty, truth, honesty, love, things that only the gang understood, everybody else talking to you about your future, and good jobs, and making money. “Ireland is the last fortress. The Noah’s Ark of the world. No place like it.” And he should know, an exile! She agreed, she agreed. She said, “The people here are warm and natural still in spite of all.” He was with her, all the way with her. “We are not materialists. Not the best of us.” At that they were both off, whispering, breaking into louder talk, hushing, glancing fearfully at the door of the bedroom.

THE last flicker of the fire died away. They drank the last bottle of stout between them, passing it from mouth to mouth. Her voice grew softer, her hand when she held his was padded like a cat’s. The night became a fugitive. Faintly a foghorn in the bay moaned through a muffled blanket. He looked out and up through the window and saw a yellow blur of street light, and the mist that clung wetly to a fogged tree. She got up to make tea. He followed her into the messy kitchen to help and talk. They came back, and she put a few more futile chips of sticks on the warm ashes. She laughed at the slightest thing — when the toy horse toppled, or when he told her about the dog, kicked, and beaten, and mangy, that he bought in Palermo, and how it swam ashore back to its Moorish slum. Or that night in Odessa in the Y.M.C.A. when he got into a fight by pretending that the C stood for Communist.

When it was two o’clock he said, “You must send me away.” She said, “Listen to the dripping outside. Oh, don’t go away, Johnny!” He said, “You must sleep.” She said, “I don’t know what sleep is,” and held him by his wrist, frightened to be left alone. “Listen to the drip-drop,” she wheedled. “And look! It’s yellow as mustard outside. Sleep here. Sleep in my bed. We’re friends, aren’t we? Just lie and sleep. You’re a good boy. I know you. Go in there and lie down.” She led him into the bedroom with its unmade bed. He barely made out the child asleep on a camp bed, one arm hooped around its head. She took her nightgown from a chair and went out.

He hung up his jacket, removed his shoes, and lay down, gazing out the door at the yellow blur of the street lamp. It was as cold as the grave in the bed. She came back in her rumpled nightdress, her hair about her shoulders, got in under the clothes beside him, and put out the light. The yellow street lamp bleared in through the bedroom door.

“It’s bloody cold,” he said.

“We’ll soon warm up. You should have taken your clothes off and got under the blankets, sure what does it matter?”

He undressed to his underpants, and got under the blankets beside her warmth.

They lay in silence for a while, hearing nothing but their breathing and the faint, far foghorn. He moved closer and began to whisper into her ear about what it means to be homeless, and she whispered to him about the time she came up to Dublin for the first time from County Cavan, for her honeymoon. She never once went back there. He whispered to her, “You are a heroine.” She said, “You’re a good lad, Johnny.”

After a while more she said, “We must sleep,” and he lay on his back, his hands clasped behind his head. After a long while he said, “Deirdre is a bitch,” and she said, “She is very young.” After another while he whispered, “Try to sleep,” and she whispered, “Yes.” After another long time he said, “You’re not sleeping. You are thinking of him. When will you know?” She said, “It might be any minute. Then I’ll sleep. And sleep. And sleep.”

Sleep stole on him. He woke abruptly, at five o’clock. She was no longer in the bed. He saw her in the front room, a man’s overcoat on her shoulders, leaning her elbows on the windowsill, staring out. In his stocking feet he went to her and put his arm around her shoulder.

“You can’t sleep?”

She did not stir. Her face had melted completely, her two cheeks were wet. He did not know what to say to her. By the cleansed lamplight outside he saw that the fog had lifted. She whispered, “It’s all over.”

“You can’t tell!”

“I know it. I’ll go out and ring the hospital at six o’clock. But I know it.” Her face screwed up, and more tears oozed from her closed eyes. “You’d better go, Johnny. Your people may be worrying.”

He dressed, shivering, among the empty bottles of stout on the floor, some of them standing to attention, some of them rolled on their sides. He put on his peaked cap with the white top, patted her hooped back, said, “God help you,” and went out up the steps to the street level. It was black as night. From the pavement he looked down at the shadow of her face behind the misty glass, lifted a hand, and walked away.

When he came to the Coal Harbor he halted on the center of the railway bridge and leaned his hands on the wet parapet. Six miles across the level bay a string of orange lights flickered along the shoreline, and farther west the city’s night glow underlit its mirror of cloud. The harbor water, dark as oil, held the riding light of a coal tub. He drew in deep breaths of the raw air and blinked his sanded eyes. He said quietly, “I still love you, you bitch.” Then he lifted his head, put his two palms about his mouth like a megaphone, and howled in a long, wild howl across the bay, “Do you love me?”

The city lay remote under its mirror.

He rubbed the stone and remembered, “Quiet consummation have: and renowned be thy grave!” — and marched homewards, arms swinging, chin up, white cap slanted. The water of the main harbor was inscribed by a slow wheel of light. Far out from the Kish bank a flight of light beamed and died at regular intervals. The whole way home the only sound he heard was a faint humming like a bee, a dawn flight out of Dublin fading into silence across the sea.