Emerald Germs of Ireland Read Online Free PDF Page A

hear me? Do you hear me, Pat McNab?”
    Fearfully, Pat replied, “Yes, Mrs. Tubridy!”
    “Now get up them stairs and do the bedrooms,” she insisted. “Do you hear me?”
    His reply—predictable by now—was in the affirmative. The older woman composed herself.
    “And when I come up—if I find so much as a speck of dirt! If I find so much as a speck of—”
    Pat interrupted her.
    “Yes, Mrs. Tubridy,” he said.
    “Now! Go on!” she icily instructed.
    The moon shone on the window. Mrs. Tubridy was asleep now. Or so Pat thought as he lay there in his striped pajamas, consumed by a huge, ocean-sized sadness. Until he heard the whisper, “Pat?”
    His response was timid—fearful, even. But it need not have been.
    “Yes?” he said.
    “I’m sorry for what I said earlier,” said Mrs. Tubridy, abstractedly adjusting a curler beneath her hair net.
    “It’s all right, Mrs. Tubridy,” said Pat.
    She coughed—ever so politely. She could be so polite sometimes, Mrs. Tubridy.
    “I know you’re not like him.”
    “Yes, Mrs. Tubridy.”
    “But, Pat—you know something? He wasn’t always like that either.”
    Pat’s eyes nervously followed the Ganges-like crack on the ceiling.
    “Was he not, Mrs. Tubridy?” he said.
    “He used to come marching down the aisle after Communion with a lovely quiff in his hair and a black tie and there wasn’t a woman in the town but didn’t have her eye on him. Including—”
    Mrs. Tubridy broke off abruptly. The moon’s light fell on the little carved feet of the wardrobe. The silence fed upon itself until Pat said, “Hmm, Mrs. Tubridy?”
    “Including your own mother,” Mrs. Tubridy said.
    Pat’s heart leaped.
    “My own mother, Mrs. Tubridy?”
    Pat could feel Mrs. Tubridy’s body tensing up as she prepared herself to speak.
    “She used to think she could get him. The way she thought she could get everybody. But she didn’t get him. He never let on he seen her.”
    Pat frowned and felt his mouth go dry.
    “Never let on …?”
    “I used to go by with my arm in his—and the face of her!”
    “The face of her, Mrs. Tubridy?”
    “Lepping, Pat! She used to be absolutely lepping with rage! Couldn’t bear to think of anyone wiping her eye! Must have thought she was Rita Hayworth or someone, the eejit! Sure he never even so much as let on he seen her!”
    Pat construed his mouth being filled up with a substance not unlike glue or perhaps, thick tasteless preserves.
    “Yes, Mrs. Tubridy,” he said, crestfallen.
    “But you liked her, didn’t you, Pat?” said Mrs. Tubridy, adding more forcefully. “Didn’t you?”
    “Yes, Mrs. Tubridy,” Pat replied.
    “Even though she didn’t look after you right—you still liked her.”
    A piece of wire seemed to tighten itself around the top of Pat’s chest.
    “No, Mrs. Tubridy—she did look after me right.”
    “No, Pat, she didn’t. She’d give you soup and a potato when she should have been cooking you a dinner. A dinner with mash and gravy and a nice wee bit of meat. Instead of doing that she’d be up and down the town trying to get other women’s men to look at her. Either that or tramping off to the bingo again.”
    Pat’s resolve appeared to momentarily stiffen.
    “Mrs. Tubridy—you go to the bingo yourself.”
    Her balled fist placed itself behind his shoulder blades. A slight push dislodged him.
    “What did you say? That I go to the bingo? But I don’t have wains, do I, Pat McNab? I don’t have a little boy whose future is my responsibility! I don’t have a litde boy to leave behind and see to it that he grows up quare on account of my neglect! I don’t have him, you know!”
    This was more than Pat could endure. He cried aloud in the moon-washed darkness: “I’m not quare!”
    Mrs. Tubridy’s reply was instant.
    “No! You’re not now! And thanks to me you won’t be! You’ll be one of the best-looking, handsomest men in the town! I’ll see to it you drive them all mad, you wait and see! By