[My contest entry to write a James Joyce's Dubliners short story entitled Ulysses.]
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| diethyl ether |
She sat at the desk lightly reading, alert for sounds. Her head was inclined to The Irish Times and in her nostrils was a faint, nauseating odour of diethyl ether. She felt she might be sad.
Few sounds intruded. No footsteps clacked towards the oaken door on the concrete pavement of Holles street. Beyond a molly cat yowled at a tom's mounting. From the ward a newborn mewled despite a hushabying mother's softly soothing cooing.
While she sat behind the door she preferred to read. Nightly she would begin with the Times and would continue until dawn reading The Gentlewoman or a novel. This night she had The Murder of Delicia. She had exchanged Paul Clifford unfinished as contrived and quaint. Reading passed the time. Reading lulled her memories she believed. She sat waiting to admit any who arrived in labour beneath what was a waning crescent moon through the open window this spring night. In the Times she read:
HENDERSON—June 11 at her residence, 74 Haddington road, Dublin, Margaret, relict of the late Robert Henderson.
HUNTER—June 10 at his residence, 23 Great Charles street, Alfred H. Hunter, youngest son of the late Cuthbert J. Hunter, Esquire, of Belfast. Departed from this sorrowful world and regretted by his sorrowing wife, Marion B. Hunter.
They had not been graced with time enough to marry, but that is what he—what they—had planned for. Bert had been manly, open-hearted and so clever, albeit lacking even a pound of rental income. In the time after they would have established what would certainly have become the flourishing practice of a tony medical practitioner: he would have drawn a handsome fee for his services. She would have furnished the capital. Her father had favoured their future union. He had favoured her plans for Bert’s practice. Her da had not known of, or had he suspected not remarked upon, the other. She knew he knew she knew prophylaxis.
“Brrhhaaeeeeuukk,” more yowling came from beyond the open window.
They had been careful. Last August, embarking on the London and North Western Railway steamer at the North Wall quay they had done so separately. Disembarking at Holyhead Refuge Harbour they had done so as a couple. From Holyhead Terminal via the L. & N. W. Ry. coach eastward across Anglesey island, then along the Irish Sea coast to Llandudno junction, then southward through the nigh interminable Vale of Conway to Llanrwst station, and, at last, via hotel omnibus to the Glanrafon, they had travelled as mister and missus. He had strutted seasonably stylish in straw boater and flannel, turnedup trousers, while she had felt herself femininely flattered in Fanning’s kid fitting corset. By day they took the chalybeate waters at the spa, they took the paddle steamer Queen of the Conway downriver to the sea and they took in the Grey Mare’s Tail cascade, among other attractions. By night they took each other with fluid ease. By their first week’s end she knew she could contentedly ever after be taken as Mrs Mastiansky had once to her confided.
NURSES: Experienced Nurse, young, Protestant; baby from birth; understands bottle feeding; good references; country or England; wages £18 to £20. E. P. Blackwood's Office, 41 Lower Mount street, Dublin.
LAW: Exper Shorthand Writer desires evening work; fees very moderate; Advertiser has own typewriter (Smith Premium No 2). Address "L 829, Legal" this office.
CLERICAL: Locum Tenens Wanted, August, country; Sunday duty only; £1 per Sunday, rectory & fare. Address "Z 578, Clerical" this office.
Bert had not fared well. The onset she had remarked at Hallow Eve when his well-cut tweed jacket looked too large on him. He had confided anorexy. He, citing nausea, had diagnosed gastroenteritis. He had treated himself. A fortnight then three passed but by then even his black felt hat failed to fit. In view of symptomatic cachexia and relenting his pride he had assented to her heartfelt plea that he consult a specialist. Subsequently Bert had proposed they be married the next August. He would be cured quickly, he believed, cured from Dwynwen's Well on Anglesey. He’d read of miracles wrought through faith that science would never explain, he had confessed in her lamplit parlour beneath scared, smokeblue eyes, horripilation patent. "Môn, Mam Cymru, Mona, Mother of Wales," he had recited as if the form of a prayer or of a lover’s plea. His buccal fetor had given mute testimony to his latest episode of emesis. She had doubted but he had believed. Then he went, alone. Lachrymation followed. Yes, the prognosis was right: he died in Wales quickly. His faith had not cured the terminal gastric adenocarcinoma science had diagnosed. The Blessed Dwyn had failed him. The Welsh patroness of lovers had failed them. Thinking how fleeting love had fared but how final death remains made her sadder still.
Frseeeeeefronnng, a train whistled.
Still she felt admiration from the male staff. Doctor Dixon she had caught more than once casting sideways for an eyeful as she typed records and he was no old devil. Horne and other medicals too. If she had wanted that, she could have. She felt no need. Her father had provided well for her. He’d furnished her her own house nearby on Holles street, the ancient esquire’s escutcheon as conspicuous in her parlour as in his legal office: or, on a bend gules three martlets argent,
beneath a crest: a demi griffin rampant gules.
The upper floor she sometimes let to unfortunate couples or families of three. She had more than enough provided she let to neither drinkers nor spongers but only to those earning wages and running short only of a spot of sense or of luck or of time. If ever she needed the subsherriff then her father’s partner, Mr Murphy, would file to distrain, gratis for her. The August her mother departed she had not yet seen seventeen. Thereafter, she had known having more than enough. There was only her da and herself.
She read:
SITUATIONS VACANT: Wanted, smart...
as bingbing a moth twice binged against the lamp glass, spiraled to the tessellated linoleum, fluttered momentarily, fluttered again and stopped.
Like that moth and glass she judged she had reached a terminus and fared alike.
As a child she had imagined herself like that rambling red griffin in her family’s crest.
"Listen here,” intruded from the direction of Merrion square with footsteps andante crescendo and a tenor voice lilting in falsetto, “He kicked me and punched me this morning,” then emphasising in a manly register, “Ka-bang.”
“And made my poor face such a fright, ow-eee.”
“Ah ha” and “Good night,” echoed an appreciative two-bloke audience stepping audibly out of step apace.
Quavered the falsetto, “My eyes he bunged up without warning," and higher, “Scree-eee,” as, crossing Denzille lane, diminuendo, "But I'll tap his claret tonight, she-bang,” that drew barely audible “Ha” and “Right” before the intrusions faded into Holles silence.
He hurts her then she pays him off in kind, spiraling down and down until a bad end, she thought: that poor Teresa McCarthy, the beating she got from her husband and her stillborn and then her dying the day next: sad lives end lives. Thinking whatever love the McCarthys had known before gestation had died before delivery kept her sadder still.
In the Times she read about some evildoing nearly nightly. In her boudoir chest she had secreted Bert’s gifts of Wicklow gold gimmal ring and locket, his portrait in health therein:
...his pipe and other mementos including two clippings pinned together, his last testimony:
CHARGE OF MURDER. Yesterday in South Police Court before Mr Swift, Patrick McCarthy, who was on remand, was charged with wilful murder of his wife Teresa, by having violently assaulted her at their residence in Dawson court, off Stephen street.
pinned to:
Dr O'Hare, of the Holles street [Maternity] Hospital, stated that the deceased had been brought there in an unconscious condition. On the ninth instant she gave birth there to a child stillborn, and died the following day. A post mortem examination showed that there was an abscess on the membranes of the brain. The assaults described might have set up the abscess. The prisoner was committed for trial at the next commission.
"Ahggghhh, a Dhia, cuidigh liom," wardleaving, a woman's cry signaled increasing cervical dilation.
The papers are barren of details, she thought. People cannot help wanting to read about such as the McCarthys. She believed she could weave together Bert’s yarns and the better classes would read a moral, factual account by Doctor Cuthbert Michael O'Hare. "Dead cert," Dixon's sponger might tout through his booser's breath, she thought. She pondered: people know he died: change the name. She ran through names she preferred and chose for a pen name Doctor Ulysses O Hehir, like Lord Tennyson's who is so clever. With his physician's factual material coupled to her spinning their lurid lives with the departed's trauma by the miscreant's wilful and premeditated injury: the Irish Homestead might be interested by what a physician pens, she thought. An untitled woman's scribbling isn’t worth her efforts to submit, she judged.
She folded the Times into a neat square and laid it to one side, removed from a drawer a sharpened pencil—a fluke—and a sheet and atop the scratched desktop began to scrawl:
The man staggered into the kitchen and barked,“What’s for me to eat?”
“I am going… to cook,” snarled the woman.
“When? You let that fire die! Streel, I’ll make you smell hell for ill treating me like your starving mongrel.” His fist he
but she halted, disheartened, distressed by the McCarthys. Then she remembered that Miss Mountjoy had arrived later that month.
She turned the sheet over and without halting scrawled:
It was the coldest and snowiest February midnight. The snow fell into drifts—except at irregular intervals when a violent gust wound the snow into higher drifts. Along frozen Ely place a weak and weary woman wrapped in a pus-green coat too small and lacking galoshes, although being afoot and at full term, wended solitary destining for the National Maternity Hospital. She stopped twice or thrice along Merrion square north to wipe claret-dark venous blood from the temple of her perniciously anemic pale face, which was discoloured by contusion, to see through the sleet, which was blinding. "I long for Holles street," she shivered. At some length, with chilblains through to the distal phalanges of every extremity, she arrived and on the oaken door bangbang her gloveless forearm banged pittifully.
"Who's there?" asked a comforting, womanly voice.
"My water's broke,” spurted a husky reply. The wind gusted a bitterer cold.
"MacWatter’s bloke, who?”
“O, poor me! Broke! Ahggghhh!”
“None of your slack-jaw. My patience are exhausted, Miss Brooke O’Pourmee."
The weak and weary woman was welcomed into warmth by one endowed with comeliness of face and person as drap, amniotic fluid, then drup, urine, dripped onto the linoleum.
"Ehggghhh."
She continued to scrawl:
By dawn she was delivered. Not an hour passed before mother Mountjoy, sighing softly, enjoyed lactation as baby suckled.
She laid the now blunt pencil to the other side. She felt less sad. She read the sheet. Removing a vulcanized rubber from the drawer she rubbed out "pittifully" and “north.” She rubbed away the residue. Replacing the rubber in her hand with the pencil she amended "west” and "pityfully" into the erasures. Grimacing she lined through the lines of dialogue with a grin. An idea—an insertion “p. v.” following “fluid”—swelled in her, made her nose crinkle but waned.
Of Mountjoy she remembered having resented that cancer stopped her entertaining her darling ever after with her tale of Mountjoy.
She turned the sheet over. She started at what had been halted. She replaced pencil and rubber in the drawer, centered the sheet on the scratched desktop, laid the square of the Times thereupon and set both hands on top, palms down. She judged it was not right how she had met death: how to write her story? Her head was inclined unreading to the Times between the backs of her hands. She thought of how she might imagine the threads of the McCarthys’ marital rites and martial fights and of how she had never undertaken weaving such into a colourful fabric—a fabrication. She would unshroud one Paddy’s evildoing: The Murder of Martha she'd call it. A title she had. An exemplar she lacked. If only she might be taught by someone. Eliza Twigg had confided she aids Mr Russell lately.
"Eeeehhhhgggghhhh," laboured a third wail from the ward above. "God, help me. Don't let me die."
"Ethel."
She froze: she had heard that prayer and plea coupled to her Christian name verbatim in her parlour in his voice before, "Alone," concluding "...Don't let me die, Ethel, alone." She felt her heart palpitating.
"Nurse Callan."
Her palms pressed the Times flatter. Her time-seeking eyes glanced up for the moon, which had set further beyond the window, in vain. Unsettling sentiments were churning and muddled her thoughts. Nurse Quigley’s contralto was concluding her nigh nightly recital with, "Come up.” She was being summoned to the ward and wails. She glanced down at the linoleum where her moth had not moved.
“She'll live,” Ethel murmured and literally felt splanchnic tremours of acute remorse. Ethel was sorry.
Hm. Hm. Sniffing that faint, nauseating odour she would mutely ever after misformulate as die-ethel-peroxide, she untucked from under her apron belt her handkerchief, perfumed by sweet myrrh with a little jessamine mixed, and bringing it to her nostrils inhaled slowly. She dabbed dry the wetting from her lachrymal ducts. She composed herself. Thinking how she had been put down as the dormouse so Quigley could flutter eyelashes at the new chemist and no mistake made her mad. Not for much longer would she scurry nocturnally through this noisome place, suffering her and Dixon or Horne and the patients. She would go. Another world beyond for herself she doubted not she would hatch, no, parturiate, and momentarily she felt so clever.
While rising from the desk but before turning to ascend the stairs her sadstill eyes glanced at SITUATIONS VACANT and slyly crinkled slightly reading:
...lady typist to aid gentleman in literary work.
© 2018 Wilson Varga, all rights reserved.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Credits:
The rendering of the diethyl ether molecule (Diethyl-ether-3D-balls.png) has been released into the public domain by its author, Benjah-bmm27.
In the Times she read about some evildoing nearly nightly. In her boudoir chest she had secreted Bert’s gifts of Wicklow gold gimmal ring and locket, his portrait in health therein:
...his pipe and other mementos including two clippings pinned together, his last testimony:
pinned to:
Dr O'Hare, of the Holles street [Maternity] Hospital, stated that the deceased had been brought there in an unconscious condition. On the ninth instant she gave birth there to a child stillborn, and died the following day. A post mortem examination showed that there was an abscess on the membranes of the brain. The assaults described might have set up the abscess. The prisoner was committed for trial at the next commission.
"Ahggghhh, a Dhia, cuidigh liom," wardleaving, a woman's cry signaled increasing cervical dilation.
The papers are barren of details, she thought. People cannot help wanting to read about such as the McCarthys. She believed she could weave together Bert’s yarns and the better classes would read a moral, factual account by Doctor Cuthbert Michael O'Hare. "Dead cert," Dixon's sponger might tout through his booser's breath, she thought. She pondered: people know he died: change the name. She ran through names she preferred and chose for a pen name Doctor Ulysses O Hehir, like Lord Tennyson's who is so clever. With his physician's factual material coupled to her spinning their lurid lives with the departed's trauma by the miscreant's wilful and premeditated injury: the Irish Homestead might be interested by what a physician pens, she thought. An untitled woman's scribbling isn’t worth her efforts to submit, she judged.
She folded the Times into a neat square and laid it to one side, removed from a drawer a sharpened pencil—a fluke—and a sheet and atop the scratched desktop began to scrawl:
“I am going… to cook,” snarled the woman.
“When? You let that fire die! Streel, I’ll make you smell hell for ill treating me like your starving mongrel.” His fist he
but she halted, disheartened, distressed by the McCarthys. Then she remembered that Miss Mountjoy had arrived later that month.
She turned the sheet over and without halting scrawled:
It was the coldest and snowiest February midnight. The snow fell into drifts—except at irregular intervals when a violent gust wound the snow into higher drifts. Along frozen Ely place a weak and weary woman wrapped in a pus-green coat too small and lacking galoshes, although being afoot and at full term, wended solitary destining for the National Maternity Hospital. She stopped twice or thrice along Merrion square north to wipe claret-dark venous blood from the temple of her perniciously anemic pale face, which was discoloured by contusion, to see through the sleet, which was blinding. "I long for Holles street," she shivered. At some length, with chilblains through to the distal phalanges of every extremity, she arrived and on the oaken door bangbang her gloveless forearm banged pittifully.
"Who's there?" asked a comforting, womanly voice.
"My water's broke,” spurted a husky reply. The wind gusted a bitterer cold.
"MacWatter’s bloke, who?”
“O, poor me! Broke! Ahggghhh!”
“None of your slack-jaw. My patience are exhausted, Miss Brooke O’Pourmee."
The weak and weary woman was welcomed into warmth by one endowed with comeliness of face and person as drap, amniotic fluid, then drup, urine, dripped onto the linoleum.
"Ehggghhh."
She continued to scrawl:
By dawn she was delivered. Not an hour passed before mother Mountjoy, sighing softly, enjoyed lactation as baby suckled.
She laid the now blunt pencil to the other side. She felt less sad. She read the sheet. Removing a vulcanized rubber from the drawer she rubbed out "pittifully" and “north.” She rubbed away the residue. Replacing the rubber in her hand with the pencil she amended "west” and "pityfully" into the erasures. Grimacing she lined through the lines of dialogue with a grin. An idea—an insertion “p. v.” following “fluid”—swelled in her, made her nose crinkle but waned.
Of Mountjoy she remembered having resented that cancer stopped her entertaining her darling ever after with her tale of Mountjoy.
She turned the sheet over. She started at what had been halted. She replaced pencil and rubber in the drawer, centered the sheet on the scratched desktop, laid the square of the Times thereupon and set both hands on top, palms down. She judged it was not right how she had met death: how to write her story? Her head was inclined unreading to the Times between the backs of her hands. She thought of how she might imagine the threads of the McCarthys’ marital rites and martial fights and of how she had never undertaken weaving such into a colourful fabric—a fabrication. She would unshroud one Paddy’s evildoing: The Murder of Martha she'd call it. A title she had. An exemplar she lacked. If only she might be taught by someone. Eliza Twigg had confided she aids Mr Russell lately.
"Eeeehhhhgggghhhh," laboured a third wail from the ward above. "God, help me. Don't let me die."
"Ethel."
She froze: she had heard that prayer and plea coupled to her Christian name verbatim in her parlour in his voice before, "Alone," concluding "...Don't let me die, Ethel, alone." She felt her heart palpitating.
"Nurse Callan."
Her palms pressed the Times flatter. Her time-seeking eyes glanced up for the moon, which had set further beyond the window, in vain. Unsettling sentiments were churning and muddled her thoughts. Nurse Quigley’s contralto was concluding her nigh nightly recital with, "Come up.” She was being summoned to the ward and wails. She glanced down at the linoleum where her moth had not moved.
“She'll live,” Ethel murmured and literally felt splanchnic tremours of acute remorse. Ethel was sorry.
Hm. Hm. Sniffing that faint, nauseating odour she would mutely ever after misformulate as die-ethel-peroxide, she untucked from under her apron belt her handkerchief, perfumed by sweet myrrh with a little jessamine mixed, and bringing it to her nostrils inhaled slowly. She dabbed dry the wetting from her lachrymal ducts. She composed herself. Thinking how she had been put down as the dormouse so Quigley could flutter eyelashes at the new chemist and no mistake made her mad. Not for much longer would she scurry nocturnally through this noisome place, suffering her and Dixon or Horne and the patients. She would go. Another world beyond for herself she doubted not she would hatch, no, parturiate, and momentarily she felt so clever.
While rising from the desk but before turning to ascend the stairs her sadstill eyes glanced at SITUATIONS VACANT and slyly crinkled slightly reading:
...lady typist to aid gentleman in literary work.
© 2018 Wilson Varga, all rights reserved.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.
Credits:
The rendering of the diethyl ether molecule (Diethyl-ether-3D-balls.png) has been released into the public domain by its author, Benjah-bmm27.
The Road and Rail Map of North Wales is excerpted from the London and North Western Railway Tourist Guide to North Wales dated 1909.
The Callan escutcheon is © Eddie Geoghegan and is reproduced under "fair use" for non-commercial purposes (cf The General Armory of England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales by Sir Bernard Burke, 1884, pages 160 and 744).
A red griffin rampant appears in the arms of the dukes of Pomerania (cf The Book of Public Arms, 1915, POMERANIA, Province of [Prussia], pages 616-17).
The Callan escutcheon is © Eddie Geoghegan and is reproduced under "fair use" for non-commercial purposes (cf The General Armory of England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales by Sir Bernard Burke, 1884, pages 160 and 744).
A red griffin rampant appears in the arms of the dukes of Pomerania (cf The Book of Public Arms, 1915, POMERANIA, Province of [Prussia], pages 616-17).
The section from the 1883 Letts Sns & Co. Plan of the City of Dublin map showing Merrion Square, Denzille Lane, and Holles Street is from the online David Rumsey Historical Map Collection.
The photograph of Doctor John J. O'Hare is cropped from "Resident Staff at the Mater Misericordiae Hospital, Dublin" taken in Summer 1902. (See "A floor plan for the Holles Street Hospital" on James Joyce Online Notes, www.jjon.org. For more on the real-life Doctor O'Hare's life and death see: Downing, Gregory M. "Life Lessons from Untimely Death in James Joyce's Ulysses." Literature and Medicine, vol. 19 no. 2, 2000, pp. 182-204. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/lm.2000.0022.)
The text above incorporates minor amendments (to punctuation, capitalization, and selected names or to typography due to the limitations of this blogging platform) to the version that was submitted to the James Joyce Quarterly's Ulysses short-story contest on 19 January 2018, which was judged a non-winning entry.
The photograph of Nurse Violet Jessop, created by the United Kingdom Government, is in the public domain.
The 19 February 1904 Irish Times description of the Charge of Murder surrounding the death of Teresa McCarthy is excerpted from Ulysses Annotated: Notes for James Joyce's Ulysses, by Don Gifford and Robert Seidman, for the entry labeled U3.181-82 (41:36-37).
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The text above incorporates minor amendments (to punctuation, capitalization, and selected names or to typography due to the limitations of this blogging platform) to the version that was submitted to the James Joyce Quarterly's Ulysses short-story contest on 19 January 2018, which was judged a non-winning entry.
