Minding Frankie (2 page)

By the time he was sixteen they realized that he had stopped going to Sunday Mass. Someone had seen him up by the canal when he was meant to have been to the early Mass up in the church on the corner. He told them that there was no point in his staying on at school, as there was nothing more he needed to learn from them.
They were hiring office staff up at Hall’s, the big builders’ merchants, and they would train him in office routine. He might as well go to work straightaway rather than hang about.

The Brothers and the teachers at his school said it was always a pity to see a boy study and leave without a qualification, but still, they said, shrugging, it was very hard trying to interest the lad in anything at all. He seemed to be sitting and waiting for his schooldays to end. Could even be for the best if he left school now. Get him into Hall’s; give him a wage every week and then they might see where, if anywhere, his interest lay.

Josie and Charles thought sadly of the fund that had been growing in the post office for years. Money that would never be spent making Noel into a reverend. A kindly Brother suggested that maybe they should spend it on a holiday for themselves, but Charles and Josie were shocked. This money had been saved for God’s work; it would be spent on God’s work.

Noel got his place in Hall’s. He met his work colleagues but without any great enthusiasm. They would not be his friends and companions any more than his fellow students at the Brothers had become mates. He didn’t
want
to be alone all the time, but it was often easier.

Over the years Noel had arranged with his mother that he would not join them at meals. He would have his lunch in the middle of the day and he would make a snack for himself in the evening. This way he missed the Rosary, the socializing with pious neighbors and the interrogation about what he had done with his day, which was the natural accompaniment to mealtimes in the Lynch household.

He took to coming home later and later. He also took to visiting Casey’s pub on the journey home—a big barn of a place, both comforting and anonymous at the same time. It was familiar because everyone knew his name.

“I’ll drop it down to you, Noel,” the loutish son of the house would say. Old Man Casey, who said little but noticed everything, would look over his spectacles as he polished the beer glasses with a clean linen cloth.

“Evening, Noel,” he would say, managing to combine the courtesy of being the landlord with the sense of disapproval he had of Noel. He was, after all, an acquaintance of Noel’s father. It was as if he were glad that Casey’s was getting the price of the pint—or several pints—as the night went on but as well as this he seemed disappointed that Noel was not spending his wages more wisely. Yet Noel liked the place. It wasn’t a trendy pub with fancy prices. It wasn’t full of girls giggling and interrupting a man’s drinking. People left him alone here.

That was worth a lot.

When he got home, Noel noticed that his mother looked different. He couldn’t work out why. She was wearing the red knitted suit that she wore only on special occasions. At the biscuit factory where she worked they wore a uniform, which she said was wonderful because it meant you didn’t wear out your good garments. Noel’s mother didn’t wear makeup so it couldn’t be that.

Eventually he realized that it was her hair. His mother had been to a beauty salon.

“You got a new hairdo, Mam!” he said.

Josie Lynch patted her head, pleased. “They did a good job, didn’t they?” She spoke like someone who frequented hairdressing salons regularly.

“Very nice, Mam,” he said.

“I’ll be putting a kettle on if you’d like a cup of tea,” she offered.

“No, Mam, you’re all right.” He was anxious to be out of there, safe in his room. And then Noel remembered that his cousin Emily was coming from America the next day. His mother must be getting ready for her arrival. This Emily was going to stay for a few weeks, apparently. It hadn’t been decided exactly how many weeks.…

Noel hadn’t involved himself greatly in the visit, doing only what he had to, like helping his father to paint her room and clearing out the downstairs storage room, where they had tiled the walls and put in a new shower. He didn’t know much about her; she was an older
person, in her fifties, maybe, the only daughter of his father’s eldest brother, Martin. She had been an art teacher but her job had ended unexpectedly and she was using her savings to see the world. She would start with a visit to Dublin, from where her father had left many years ago to seek his fortune in America.

It had not been a great fortune, Charles reported. The eldest brother of the family had worked in a bar, where he was his own best customer. He had never stayed in touch. Any Christmas cards had been sent by this Emily, who had also written to tell first of her father’s death and then her mother’s. She sounded remarkably businesslike and said that when she arrived in Dublin she would expect to pay a contribution to the family expenses and that since she was letting her own small apartment in New York during her absence, it was only fair. Josie and Charles were also reassured that she seemed sensible and had promised not to be in their way or looking for entertainment. She said she would find plenty to occupy her.

Noel sighed.

It would be one more trivial happening elevated to high drama by his mother and father. The woman wouldn’t be in the door before she heard all about his great future at Hall’s, about his mother’s job at the biscuit factory and his father’s role as a senior porter in a very grand hotel. She would be told about the moral decline in Ireland, the lack of attendance at Sunday Mass and that binge drinking kept the emergency departments of hospitals full to overflowing. Emily would be invited to join the family Rosary.

Noel’s mother had already spent considerable time debating whether they should put a picture of the Sacred Heart or of Our Lady of Perpetual Succour in the newly painted room. Noel had managed to avoid too much further discussion of this agonizing choice by suggesting that they wait until she arrived.

“She taught art in a school, Mam. She might have brought her own pictures,” he had said, and amazingly his mother had agreed immediately.

“You’re quite right, Noel. I have a tendency to make all the decisions
in the world. It will be nice having another woman to share all that with.”

Noel mildly hoped that she was right and that this woman would not disrupt their ways. This was going to be a time of change in their household anyway. His father was going to be retired as porter in a year or two. His mother still had a few more years in the biscuit factory but she thought she might retire also and keep Charles company, with the two of them doing some good works. He hoped that Emily would make their lives less complicated rather than more complicated.

But mainly he gave the matter very little thought.

Noel got by well by not thinking too deeply on anything: not about his dead-end job in Hall’s; not about the hours and money he spent in Old Man Casey’s pub; not about the religious mania of his parents, who thought that the Rosary was the answer to most of the world’s problems. Noel would not think about the lack of a steady girlfriend in his life. He just hadn’t met anyone, that’s all it was. Nor indeed did he worry about the lack of any kind of mates. Some places were easy to find friends. Hall’s wasn’t one of those places. Noel had decided that the very best way to cope with things not being so great was not to think about them at all. It had worked well so far.

Why fix things if they weren’t broken?

Charles Lynch had been very silent. He hadn’t noticed his wife’s new hairdo. He hadn’t guessed that his son had drunk four pints on the way home from work. He found it hard to raise any interest in the arrival next morning of his brother Martin’s daughter, Emily. Martin had made it clear that he had no interest in the family back home.

Emily had certainly been a courteous correspondent over the years—even to the point of offering to pay her bed and board. That might come in very useful indeed these days. Charles Lynch had been told that morning that his services as hotel porter would no longer be needed. He and another “older” porter would leave at the
end of the month. Charles had been trying to find the words to tell Josie since he got home, but the words weren’t there.

He could repeat what the young man in the suit had said to him earlier in the day: a string of sentences about it being no reflection on Charles or his loyalty to the hotel. He had been there, man and boy, resplendent in his uniform and very much part of the old image. But that’s exactly what it was—an old image. The new owners were insisting on a new image, and who could stand in the way of the march of progress?

Charles had thought he would grow old in that job. That one day there would be a dinner for him where Josie would go and wear a long frock. He would be presented with a gold-plated clock. Now none of this was going to happen.

He was going to be without a job in two and a half weeks’ time.

There were few work opportunities for a man in his sixties who had been let go from the one hotel where he had worked since he was sixteen. Charles Lynch would have liked to have talked to his son about it all, but he and Noel didn’t seem to have had a conversation for years now. If ever. The boy was always anxious to get to his room and resisted any questions or discussions. It wouldn’t be fair to lay all this on him now.

Charles wouldn’t find a sympathetic ear or any font of advice. Just tell Josie and get it over with, he told himself. But she was up to high doh about this woman coming from America. Maybe he should leave it for a couple of days. Charles sighed again about the bad timing of it all.

“I wonder, should we have gone out to the airport to meet her?” Josie Lynch said for the fifth time next morning.

“She said she would prefer to make her own way here,” Charles said, as he had on the previous four occasions.

Noel just drank his mug of tea and said nothing.

“She wrote and said the plane could be in early if they got a good wind behind them.” Josie spoke as if she were a frequent flyer herself.