The Divine Fireplace by Maeve Brennan, 1956
The magic trick:
Taking the joke into a depressing scene
Maeve Brennan’s Herbert Retreat stories, as we’ve seen this week on SSMT, often deal in irony or outright jokes. Today’s feature moves past the gentle satire into a more direct and dark critique.
Here, we get the story of a Saturday night in the Tillbright’s house from the vantage point of the housekeeper, Stasia, as she relates it to her fellow Irish immigrant hired hands on the way to Sunday morning mass. It starts out funny – they’ve made a drunken mess of their house – when it’s broadly described. But when Stasia dives into the detailed retelling, putting the reader in the scene, it gets downright sad. Mr. Tillbright’s serial womanizing, the self-medication through alcohol, and the extraordinary gap between imagined life and reality – all of it crosses the line from obnoxious people getting what they deserve to something so sad it humanizes them and earns the reader’s sympathy.
And that’s quite a trick on Brennan’s part.
The selection:
“And what hotel will I say?” Stasia asked.
“I said I’ll call her,” Mr. Tillbright snarled.
Trying to run away, eh, Stasia thought, and she watched him fumble with his quaint little wall cupboard in which the car keys were kept. She said nothing, and after a minute or so he spoke, without turning around to look at her. No manners, none of them have any manners, Statia thought good-humoredly.
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