Grace Page #2

"Grace" is a short story featured in James Joyce's famous collection, Dubliners. The book is set in Dublin and provides a stark examination of Irish middle class society at the turn of the century. Despite its religious connotations, "Grace" is not about spirituality but rather offers commentary on relationships, social pretension, and the human condition. The plot involves a man named Mr. Kernan, who, after a drunken accident, is persuaded by his friends to attend a Catholic retreat. Its narrative explores themes of identity, redemption, and the influence of church in Irish society.

• Children

								


Mr Power, a much younger man, was employed in the Royal Irish
Constabulary Office in Dublin Castle. The arc of his social rise
intersected the arc of his friend’s decline, but Mr Kernan’s decline
was mitigated by the fact that certain of those friends who had known
him at his highest point of success still esteemed him as a character.
Mr Power was one of these friends. His inexplicable debts were a byword
in his circle; he was a debonair young man.

The car halted before a small house on the Glasnevin road and Mr Kernan
was helped into the house. His wife put him to bed while Mr Power sat
downstairs in the kitchen asking the children where they went to school
and what book they were in. The children—two girls and a boy, conscious
of their father’s helplessness and of their mother’s absence, began
some horseplay with him. He was surprised at their manners and at their
accents, and his brow grew thoughtful. After a while Mrs Kernan entered
the kitchen, exclaiming:

“Such a sight! O, he’ll do for himself one day and that’s the holy alls
of it. He’s been drinking since Friday.”

Mr Power was careful to explain to her that he was not responsible,
that he had come on the scene by the merest accident. Mrs Kernan,
remembering Mr Power’s good offices during domestic quarrels, as well
as many small, but opportune loans, said:

“O, you needn’t tell me that, Mr Power. I know you’re a friend of his,
not like some of the others he does be with. They’re all right so long
as he has money in his pocket to keep him out from his wife and family.
Nice friends! Who was he with tonight, I’d like to know?”

Mr Power shook his head but said nothing.

“I’m so sorry,” she continued, “that I’ve nothing in the house to offer
you. But if you wait a minute I’ll send round to Fogarty’s at the
corner.”

Mr Power stood up.

“We were waiting for him to come home with the money. He never seems to
think he has a home at all.”

“O, now, Mrs Kernan,” said Mr Power, “we’ll make him turn over a new
leaf. I’ll talk to Martin. He’s the man. We’ll come here one of these
nights and talk it over.”

She saw him to the door. The carman was stamping up and down the
footpath, and swinging his arms to warm himself.

“It’s very kind of you to bring him home,” she said.

“Not at all,” said Mr Power.

He got up on the car. As it drove off he raised his hat to her gaily.

“We’ll make a new man of him,” he said. “Good-night, Mrs Kernan.”

Mrs Kernan’s puzzled eyes watched the car till it was out of sight.
Then she withdrew them, went into the house and emptied her husband’s
pockets.

She was an active, practical woman of middle age. Not long before she
had celebrated her silver wedding and renewed her intimacy with her
husband by waltzing with him to Mr Power’s accompaniment. In her days
of courtship Mr Kernan had seemed to her a not ungallant figure: and
she still hurried to the chapel door whenever a wedding was reported
and, seeing the bridal pair, recalled with vivid pleasure how she had
passed out of the Star of the Sea Church in Sandymount, leaning on the
arm of a jovial well-fed man, who was dressed smartly in a frock-coat
and lavender trousers and carried a silk hat gracefully balanced upon
his other arm. After three weeks she had found a wife’s life irksome
and, later on, when she was beginning to find it unbearable, she had
become a mother. The part of mother presented to her no insuperable
difficulties and for twenty-five years she had kept house shrewdly for
her husband. Her two eldest sons were launched. One was in a draper’s
shop in Glasgow and the other was clerk to a tea-merchant in Belfast.
They were good sons, wrote regularly and sometimes sent home money. The
other children were still at school.

Mr Kernan sent a letter to his office next day and remained in bed. She
made beef-tea for him and scolded him roundly. She accepted his
frequent intemperance as part of the climate, healed him dutifully
whenever he was sick and always tried to make him eat a breakfast.
There were worse husbands. He had never been violent since the boys had
grown up and she knew that he would walk to the end of Thomas Street
and back again to book even a small order.

Two nights after his friends came to see him. She brought them up to
his bedroom, the air of which was impregnated with a personal odour,
and gave them chairs at the fire. Mr Kernan’s tongue, the occasional
stinging pain of which had made him somewhat irritable during the day,
became more polite. He sat propped up in the bed by pillows and the
little colour in his puffy cheeks made them resemble warm cinders. He
apologised to his guests for the disorder of the room, but at the same
time looked at them a little proudly, with a veteran’s pride.

He was quite unconscious that he was the victim of a plot which his
friends, Mr Cunningham, Mr M’Coy and Mr Power had disclosed to Mrs
Kernan in the parlour. The idea had been Mr Power’s but its development
was entrusted to Mr Cunningham. Mr Kernan came of Protestant stock and,
though he had been converted to the Catholic faith at the time of his
marriage, he had not been in the pale of the Church for twenty years.
He was fond, moreover, of giving side-thrusts at Catholicism.

Mr Cunningham was the very man for such a case. He was an elder
colleague of Mr Power. His own domestic life was not very happy. People
had great sympathy with him for it was known that he had married an
unpresentable woman who was an incurable drunkard. He had set up house
for her six times; and each time she had pawned the furniture on him.

Everyone had respect for poor Martin Cunningham. He was a thoroughly
sensible man, influential and intelligent. His blade of human
knowledge, natural astuteness particularised by long association with
cases in the police courts, had been tempered by brief immersions in
the waters of general philosophy. He was well informed. His friends
bowed to his opinions and considered that his face was like
Shakespeare’s.

When the plot had been disclosed to her, Mrs Kernan had said:

“I leave it all in your hands, Mr Cunningham.”

After a quarter of a century of married life, she had very few
illusions left. Religion for her was a habit and she suspected that a
man of her husband’s age would not change greatly before death. She was
tempted to see a curious appropriateness in his accident and, but that
she did not wish to seem bloody-minded, she would have told the
gentlemen that Mr Kernan’s tongue would not suffer by being shortened.
However, Mr Cunningham was a capable man; and religion was religion.
The scheme might do good and, at least, it could do no harm. Her
beliefs were not extravagant. She believed steadily in the Sacred Heart
as the most generally useful of all Catholic devotions and approved of
the sacraments. Her faith was bounded by her kitchen but, if she was
put to it, she could believe also in the banshee and in the Holy Ghost.

The gentlemen began to talk of the accident. Mr Cunningham said that he
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