Lake of Sorrows

Owen Cadogan hated the train station—the cold tile floors, the huge ticking clock, all the lifeless gray cinders that lay beneath the tracks. Perhaps the aversion was left over from his childhood, when the whole family would go down to see his father off on his way back to work in England. All that false hope, the forced emotion, the tears…it was dreadful. The father had made it home every few months at first, then he’d come back only at Christmas, and eventually he’d stopped coming back altogether. He had to find work, he’d said, and England was where the work was, but they all wondered what else he had found over there. Owen knew he wasn’t in any position to judge, considering what he’d done with his own life, but that didn’t make his father any less guilty.

He stood in the ticket queue, looking back occasionally to where Pauline sat with the children on a wooden bench against the wall. They were going up to visit her mother in Mayo for a fortnight, something they did every summer without him. A holiday at the seaside did the children good, Pauline said. And she was probably right, because Pauline was always right. The worst thing wasn’t the fact that she was always right, but that she knew it. The woman’s awareness of her own superiority hung around her like a stifling cloud. He’d never understand women. First they laid traps for you with their soft voices, the way they smelled and felt under your hands, and once you were reeled in and caught it was too late; you were marched before the judge and informed of the way things were going to be. When she finally had the two children she’d always wanted, Pauline’s interest in him had abruptly terminated. Then she was off-limits, the door closed in his face whenever he came near her. She didn’t want to have to move to a separate bedroom, she’d said, for the sake of the children, but she would if he persisted.

So he played his role as provider—the wallet, the moneybox, the bank—he’d always played that part all right. It was just in every other area that he couldn’t seem to measure up. No one really understood his position, at home or at the job. He thought of all the workers who’d be losing their jobs at the end of this season. They couldn’t see into the future for themselves, didn’t even fucking try; they just put their heads down and went to work every day, hoping desperately that no one would force them to think too hard about the choices they had made. In many ways they were like overgrown children, and they expected to be taken care of like children for the rest of their lives. He was the one who had to tell them that things didn’t work that way anymore.

He glanced back again at his family. They were his family; why should he feel like such an outsider? He studied the dark hair falling down Deirdre’s back and wondered what his daughter thought of him. Children were very sensitive about these things. Did she see him for the failure of a man that he was? Stephen raised his eyes at the same moment, and Cadogan felt himself shrink under their gaze. The roundness of Stephen’s head and the set of his shoulders, that confidence of youth, suddenly made him feel like weeping. They knew all about him, it was clear. And they had always been their mother’s children, never his. He looked at his daughter’s hands clutching the small suitcase, her knuckles still dimpled with a babyish plumpness—touching, but already lost to him. If they never came back from Mayo they wouldn’t miss him a bit. He wished the train would come and take him away, once and for all, so that he would never have to look at them or think about them ever again. But just then the woman in front of him stepped away from the ticket window, and the clerk addressed him: “Where to, sir?”

“Three return tickets to Westport, one adult and two children.”

“The missus taking the little ones on holiday, is she?”

“Yes.”

“They’re a fine-looking family.”

“Yes.” Cadogan’s hackles rose as he watched the man’s eyes flit over toward his family once more; the gray eyes glittered, the pink tongue darted out to moisten cracked lips. But when the clerk handed over the three return tickets with nicotine-stained fingers, Cadogan saw the man for what he really was: a harmless old bastard stuck behind a ticket counter for forty years. What was wrong with him? He must be losing his mind, seeing the iniquities within himself manifest themselves in everyone around him. He felt queasy, and turned away without a word of thanks.

The children led the way out to the platform. The train wasn’t due for another couple of minutes, and his son went immediately to the tracks and peered into the distance for it.

“Will you get away from there, Stephen?” Pauline scolded. It was the very same tone of voice, Cadogan realized, that she often used with him as well.