It was when I was doing a line with Maire Daly that I first came to know Winifred Jackson. She was my first Protestant.
The opening line of this story is indicative of how the bulk of Frank O’Connor stories. He is a writer who is at most at home crawling inside the skin of a character and telling their tale from within. First-person is by far O’Connor’s preferred perspective.
“Is it in America he is?” I asked. (It is to America all the boys of the locality go when they leave home.)
The parenthetical addendum to the spoken question hints at the period of time when this story—and so many others by O’Connor—was written. The assumption—or is it an assertion—that a mass exile of young males from the town across the sea to America subtly hints at the economic deprivation suffered by the characters. After all, why leave Ireland for America if not for the potential to substantially increase one’s economic status?
“Sure you won’t be late, Jerry?” said the mother and I going out.
“Am I ever late?” said I, and I laughed.
That was all we said, Michael John, but it stuck in my mind.
Jerry is yet another of O’Connor’s first-person narrators, but in this case he tweaks the perspective with a little mysterious twist. After the opening slice of dialogue, the narration commences with Jerry addressing Michael John. He will address the same individual again in the next paragraph, but then the mysterious Michael John becomes an elusive figure in the narrator, not reappearing in either thought or action until just a few paragraphs short of the story’s conclusion. This choice allows O’Connor to subtly manipulate time; the opening dialogue turns out to have taken place sometimes before the narration which is revealed to be an intimate conversation I which the reader is invited to fill the role of Michael John.
I understood it all, and it was almost more than I could bear; that there was no Santa Claus, as the Dohertys said, only Mother trying to scrape together a few coppers from the housekeeping; that Father was mean and common and a drunkard, and that she had been relying on me to raise her out of the misery of the life she was leading. And I knew that the look in her eyes was the fear that, like my father, I should turn out to be mean and common and a drunkard.
The world that is seen through O’Connor’s many first person narrators is usually a harsh one lived close to the bone where there is often little room for sentiment to grow too wild and life presses too close to allow for much philosophizing. The narrator of this story is recalling a Christmas that is transformative and philosophical; heartbreaking and eye-opening. The stripping away of the shiny veneer of fantasy to reveal the scratched, dented and faded reality beneath is a recurring theme in the endings of many of these stories, but this may be the most on-the-nose with a little boy literally having belief in Santa Claus ripped away from him.
Father Fogarty, the curate in Crislough, used to say in his cynical way that his greatest affliction was having to serve the teacher’s Mass every morning.
and
Father Fogarty, the curate in Crislough, was sitting by the fire one evening when the housekeeper showed in a frail little woman of sixty or sixty-five.
Interestingly, in those stories in which O’Connor features one of his recurring characters like Father Fogarty, he chooses to drop the usual standard of first-person perspective and engage the story through a third-person narrator. Fogarty features in seven of the Collected Stories of O’Connor and each are told using third person. For the record, these are the only two of those stories that commence with the same six words, though a few other do begin with a similar close-up mage of the priest engaged in though or action.
