A much less painful case

IN 1961, as a sophomore, I read James Joyce's A Painful Case. The story, in Dubliners, touched me deeply, influenced my eventual choice of sociology as a career and occasionally echoes within me today. It is a sad little story about a man who by circumstance and choice lives almost completely atone. I believe that what I saw in it then, with some trepidation, was an image of what I might become.

In the story, Mr James Duffy, a middleaged bachelor, lives in a boarding house in a Dublin suburb. His room is modestly furnished and orderly. It mirrors his orderly, compartmentalised and emotionally barren life. He takes the tram to work every morning to his job as a bank teller. He never gives "alms to beggars", has no friends, visits his family at Christmas and accompanies them to their graves. Duffy is self estrangement personified. He is quintessential 20th century urban man: isolated, alienated from others, estranged from his feelings and sexually repressed. His intellect dwarfs his emotion. But that intellect cannot prevent the need for human contact from surfacing.

One evening he attends a concert at the Rotunda music hall where he finds himself sitting next to a middle aged woman, Mrs Emily Sinico, and her grown daughter. Mrs Sinico is married to a boat captain who has "dismissed his wife ... from his gallery of pleasures". The bachelor and the dismissed wife are both properly middleclass, emotionally starved and share an interest in music.

They talk and by chance meet at two more concerts. They begin to see each other. Duffy lends her books. They listen to music. She becomes his "confessor". As their relationship develops the emotionally barren Duffy grows.

One evening the couple are alone in her "little cottage" listening to music. Darkness descends upon the room where they have been sitting. Caught up in the romance of the moment and her feelings toward him, Mrs Sinico "passionately" takes his hand and presses it to her cheek. On the surface Duffy reveals nothing. His emotionally insulated defences, however, have been utterly violated. This mere touch for all practical purposes ends their relationship.

After their break up he returns to his solitary habits while she turns to drink. Four years later, while eating dinner alone in a restaurant, he reads of her death in a newspaper. Attempting to cross the tracks one evening at the Sydney Parade train station near her home just outside Dublin centre she is hit and killed by an oncoming train. The article states that according to her daughter she often went out at night to buy alcohol.

If Mrs Sinico's touch violated Mr Duffy's defences, her death shatters them. At first he is shocked and then repulsed by her "commonplace" ending. Overcome by emotion he leaves the restaurant. Unable to stay in his room he goes to a public house, where he has two hot punches. Walking through a November Dublin evening in the Phoenix Park, he realises just how empty her life had been because of lost affections - first from her husband and then from himself. He guiltily blames himself for the loneliness which led to alcohol dependence and ultimately to her death. Joyce leaves him with the crushing realisation that he is utterly alone, the reader may easily infer that he will remain so for the rest of his life. The painful case of a life sadly ended is now the painful case of a life to be lived.

In 1981, by then a sociology professor, I lived in Dublin with a family for three weeks and visited a number of the places in the story. In going to some of the places where the story had taken place, literally walking in their footsteps, I saw the world through their eyes and learned something about them as human beings.

The train station at Sydney Parade, scene of Mrs Sinico's death is small, the neighbourhood old and stately, the houses solid brick.

It all had a quiet elegance. An afternoon walk around it afforded me insight into Mrs Sinico's life and her subsequent death.

It was no suicide. Not in any conscious sense. It was the result of three things. One was alcohol which is endemic to Irish culture.

The second was the estrangement from her husband and subsequent rejection by Duffy, which drove her to alcohol. Third is the role of women in turn of the century Dublin. The first two need no explanation. The last does.

The world of turn of the century Dublin, clerical and repressive, had one role for women. They were wives and mothers obedient to their husbands and to the church. Women did not yet have the right to vote much less have careers. With only one child, who was of marriageable age, Mrs Sinico was a mother in name only. The same may be said for her role as a wife. At the age of 39 her life as a useful person was all but over. She was left to live in an empty iron cage. What else might she have done but turn inward to alleviate her deep pain?

Suicide would have left a shame and a stigma for her daughter and her husband. Her neighbours would have gossiped. The church would not have buried her in consecrated ground. I simply think that one night in a careless, mildly drunken state she attempted to walk across the tracks of a simple, small, suburban train crossing and was accidentally killed.

HAVING described Mr Duffy's life up to Mrs Sinico's death I want to suggest what may have happened to him after her death. Joyce leaves him among the living dead at the story's conclusion.

I want to suggest a different possibility for Mr Duffy because I have sound reason for believing that his life would have been better than the one drawn for him by Joyce. I also have a vested interest in believing so. My life, which I feared would be like Duffy's, didn't turn out that way. For this reason I cannot bring myself to leave Mr Duffy turning to ash.

Duffy had struggled against a loveless existence. The proof of that struggle was his affair with Mrs Sinico. Her ultimate gift to Mr Duffy was to begin to free him from his self estrangement. Mrs Sinico's death rendered him capable of being in touch at least, with a desire not to be alone. His guilt about her coupled with a desire not to be alone would have enabled him to seek out another woman.

Urban physical proximity and population density, even in small, turn of the century Dublin, would probably have put a number of women in the path of his everyday compartmentalised routine. It is the business districts of cities where St rangers meet in public places that Duffy would have met women. He ritually eats alone and feels he is an "outcast from life's feast". Food therefore is the key to Mr Duffy ending his isolation. Where he gets food is where he will come in from life's cold.

Who Duffy would have met would have to do partially with the shattering experience of Mrs Sinico's death. His aloofness would have been strongly tempered. A restaurant or a shop was where Mr Duffy was likely to encounter a woman similar in social class - a lower middle class woman. Duffy would then have been most likely to meet a waitress or a shop girl.

When I have thought about who Duffy would meet I see in my mind's eye the oval faced girl, who appears to be daydreaming, in Edouard Manet's A Bar At The Folies Bergere". Such a woman might have been younger but this is no deterrent given the fact that Irishmen have often married women significantly younger than themselves. A younger woman might be, in his mind, more submissive and compliant than the bold Mrs Sinico.

In my mind's eye I have many pictures of A Painful Case. I know what Mr Duffy looks like and can see him, mouth open, putting down his fork upon reading the news of Mrs Sinico's death. I can see his orderly room. My favourite is the one which I see through the window of Mrs Sinico's "little cottage" as she presses Mr Duffy's hand to the cheek of her smiling and maternal face.

I was 38 years old when I went to the places in the story; almost the same age as Mr Duffy when he met Mrs Sinico. I had some months before I met a woman 10 years older than me and recently widowed. We are now married. It was at this time that I began to pursue what really interested me. That I started to live, rather than walk through my life, was no accident. It coincided with meeting her.

Like Mrs Sinico she is strong and caring. She asked me questions and made me truly look at my life. She gave me the impetus to step sidewards and explore areas of life for which I have had real interest and experienced joy. In short she loves me and I cannot imagine my life without her. Without that love I might not have gone to the places in the story. I've lived better than Mr Duffy because of her.