Free My Oedipus Complex by Frank O'Connor Page A

fittings it was well above the level of a village shop. I regretted that Mr Riordan was dead because I would like to have seen him for myself instead of relying on Mother’s impressions which seemed to me to be biased. Since he had, more or less, died of grief on Mother’s account, I conceived of him as a really nice man; lent him the countenance and manner of an old gentleman who always spoke to me when he met me on the road, and felt I could have become really attached to him as a father. I could imagine it all: Mother reading in the parlour while she waited for me to come home up Sunday’s Well in a school cap and blazer, like the boys from the Grammar School, and with an expensive leather satchel instead of the old cloth school-bag I carried over my shoulder. I could see myself walking slowly and with a certain distinction, lingeringat gateways and looking down at the river; and later I would go out to tea in one of the big houses with long gardens sloping to the water, and maybe row a boat on the river along with a girl in a pink frock. I wondered only whether I would have any awareness of the National School boy with the cloth school-bag who jammed his head between the bars of a gate and thought of me. It was a queer, lonesome feeling that all but reduced me to tears.
    But the place that had the greatest attraction of all for me was the Douglas Road where Father’s friend, Miss Cadogan, lived, only now she wasn’t Miss Cadogan but Mrs O’Brien. Naturally, nobody called Mrs O’Brien could be as attractive to the imagination as a French chef and an elderly shopkeeper with eleven thousand pounds, but she had a physical reality that the other pair lacked. As I went regularly to the library at Parnell Bridge, I frequently found myself wandering up the road in the direction of Douglas and always stopped in front of the long row of houses where she lived. There were high steps up to them, and in the evening the sunlight fell brightly on the house-fronts till they looked like a screen. One evening as I watched a gang of boys playing ball in the street outside, curiosity overcame me. I spoke to one of them. Having been always a child of solemn and unnatural politeness, I probably scared the wits out of him.
    â€˜I wonder if you could tell me which house Mrs O’Brien lives in, please?’ I asked.
    â€˜Hi, Gussie!’ he yelled to another boy. ‘This fellow wants to know where your old one lives.’
    This was more than I had bargained for. Then a thin, good-looking boy of about my own age detached himself from the group and came up to me with his fists clenched. I was feeling distinctly panicky, but all the same I studied him closely. After all, he was the boy I might have been.
    â€˜What do you want to know for?’ he asked suspiciously.
    Again, this was something I had not anticipated.
    â€˜My father was a great friend of your mother,’ I explained carefully, but, so far as he was concerned, I might as well have been talking a foreign language. It was clear that Gussie O’Brien had no sense of history.
    â€˜What’s that?’ he asked incredulously.
    At this point we were interrupted by a woman I had noticed earlier, talking to another over the railing between the two steep gardens. She wasa small, untidy-looking woman who occasionally rocked the pram in an absent-minded way as though she only remembered it at intervals.
    â€˜What is it, Gussie?’ she cried, raising herself on tiptoe to see us better.
    â€˜I don’t really want to disturb your mother, thank you,’ I said, in something like hysterics, but Gussie anticipated me, actually pointing me out to her in a manner I had been brought up to regard as rude.
    â€˜This fellow wants you,’ he bawled.
    â€˜I don’t really,’ I murmured, feeling that now I was in for it. She skipped down the high flight of steps to the gate with a laughing, puzzled air, her eyes in slits and her