"Why aren't you Daddy?"

  He could not get away from it, he could not get away from her, from the thoughts at the back of his mind, from the hungers natural to his age and manhood. Mostly he managed to push it all below consciousness, but when she flaunted tangible evidence of her lust before his eyes, threw her mysterious activity with that lecherous old beast in his very teeth .... How could he think of it, how could he consent to it, how could he bear it? He wanted to be able to think of her as totally holy, pure and untainted as the Blessed Mother, a being who was above such things though all her sisters throughout the world be guilty of it. To see her proving his concept of her wrong was the road to madness. It had become necessary to his sanity to imagine that she lay with that ugly old man in perfect cha/y, to have a place to sleep, but that in the night they never turned toward each other, or touched. Oh, God!
  A scraping clang made him look down, to find he had twisted the brass rail of the bed's foot into an S.
  "Why aren't you Daddy?" he asked it.
  "Frank," said his mother from the doorway.
  He looked up, his black eyes glittering and wet like rained-upon coal. "I'll end up killing him," he said.
  "If you do that, you'll kill me," said Fee, coming to sit upon the bed. "No, I'd free you!" he countered wildly, hopefully. "Frank, I can never be free, and I don't want to be free. I wish I knew where your blindness comes from, but I don't. It isn't mine, nor is it your father's. I know you're not happy, but must you take it out on me, and on Daddy? Why do you insist upon making everything so hard? Why?" She looked down at her hands, looked up at him. "I don't want to say this, but I think I have to. It's time you found yourself a girl, Frank, got married and had a family of your own. There's room on Drogheda. I've never been worried about the other boys in that respect; they don't seem to have your nature at all. But you need a wife, Frank. If you had one, you wouldn't have time to think about me."
  He had turned his back upon her, and wouldn't turn around. For perhaps five minutes she sat on the bed hoping he would say something, then she sighed, got up and left.
  After the shearers had gone and the district had settled into the semi-inertia of winter came the annual Gillanbone Show and Picnic Races. It was the most important event in the social calendar, and went on for two days. Fee didn't feel well enough to go, so Paddy drove Mary Carson into town in her Rolls-Royce without his wife to support him or keep Mary's tongue in its silent position. He had noticed that for some mysterious reason Fee's very presence quelled his sister, put her at a disadvantage. Everyone else was going. Under threat of death to behave themselves, the boys rode in with Beerbarrel Pete, Jim, Tom, Mrs. Smith and the maids in the truck, but Frank left early on his own in the model-T Ford. The adults of the party were all staying over for the second day's race meeting; for reasons known best to herself, Mary Carson declined Father Ralph's offer of accommodation at the presbytery, but urged Paddy to accept it for himself and Frank. Where the two stockmen and Tom, the garden roustabout, stayed no one knew, but Mrs. Smith, Minnie and Cat had friends in Gilly who put them up. It was ten in the morning when Paddy deposited his sister in the best room the Hotel Imperial had to offer; he made his way down to the bar and found Frank standing at it, a schooner of beer in his hand.
  "Let me buy the next one, old man," Paddy said genially to his son. "I've got to take Auntie Mary to the Picnic Races luncheon, and I need moral sustenance if I'm going to get through the ordeal without Mum." Habit and awe are harder to overcome than people realize until they actually try to circumvent the conduct of years; Frank found he could not do what he longed to do, he could not throw the contents of his glass in his father's face, not in front of a bar crowd. So he downed what was left of his beer at a gulp, smiled a little sickly and said, "Sorry, Daddy, I've promised to meet some blokes down at the showground."