The Light of Evening (10 page)

Then he was gone.

The gift he had brought them was opened. It was a chocolate cake in the shape of a log with her name and Mr.’s name piped in cream icing and the message on the card read “Cherish the traditions but embrace the newfound liberty.” What a beautiful message, so edifying. What a great man and what a great Irishman, on a par with Boss Tweed, John Kelly, the folk heroes, starting from nowhere, his father dying young, eleven children, up the ladder in the district, learning the ropes, no job too big or too little, the loyalty to his own, an Irishman drowned on the fleets up in the Cape and the congressman was there, an Irishman crushed by a beam on the railways and the congressman was there, an Irishman suffocated in the mines and the congressman was pressing for compensation for wife and children.

“Wasn’t there some other lady, Louella?” Chrissie said.

“She was never a factor in the marriage,” Pascal said, chastisingly.

“Oh, I don’t know … he has a reputation for the ladies,” Eamonn interrupted, because he had read that she followed him to a big party and he was with the wife and she threw down the fur coat he had bought her, told him to take it back.

“He’s the coming man … rumor hath it that he might even be president one day,” Father Bob said, in nearly sacred tones.

“God … and he came here,” Pascal said, amazed.

“And he liked the little lassie … the little linnet,” Felim said and looked at me and wondered when I’d be summoned to Jersey City. It was too much for Matilda. She barked at them, told the men to get out on the porch for their pipes and cigars and the women to go to the drawing room where the coffee would be served.

Mr. quenched the candles, some with a snuffer and the one in the turnip with his fingers, then tiptoed out. The yellowish smoke fogged the room. The missus had not got up, she was sitting, her breathing pronounced and her cousin Jenny leaning in over her, comforting her. Only her lips moved.

“Did you see the way he looked at her … the pair of them … I don’t know which of them was the biggest ape, Pascal or him.”

“Ah, that’s men all over … pay no heed to them,” Jenny said, kissing her.

Realizing that I was by the sideboard, she shunted the dishes in my direction and roared at me to go to the pantry and serve the sweetmeats.

It was the party but not the party. I was in a jaunting car at home, the posh table out in the field, the visitors with the paper hats that they’d pulled out of the crackers and Father Bob giving me the dime that he’d got from the plum pudding. Then it was not a dream. The missus shouting at us, “Get up, get up,” and half asleep, rubbing our eyes, not knowing what had happened, Solveig and I staggered out of bed and clung to one another.

“Thieves, thieves,” she was screaming it. Her sapphire ring was missing. I was nervy because secretly I loved that ring, the blue of it so various, so varying, seas of blue in the square nugget with its two shoulders of diamond, the two shoulders of diamond alone worth a fortune. I remembered the day that I’d cleaned it, dipped it in the ammonia water, then scrubbed it delicately with a toothbrush, rinsed and placed it on a soap dish to dry. She had supervised me, but when she was called downstairs to the telephone I tried it on and twirled it round and round, admiring it on my finger. Her fingers were fatter than mine.

Our drawers were ransacked, our mattresses turned over, and the letters my mother wrote me tossed to one side.

Mr. was holding a hand lamp and she was shouting at him to hold it higher as the paraffin was dripping. She was in her quilted dressing gown, metal curlers above her ears, and she looked like a big, fat doll gone mad.

Solveig’s autograph book was opened, all her secrets disclosed, the hand-pressed flowers from Malmo and the motto her friend Greta had written:
“For Solveig, this is my farewell present to her, forever.”

Next it was the scapulars belonging to my brother and feeling the relic inside the cloth the missus decided that undoubtedly it was her ring. With a glee she cut it open and when she found that it was not the ring, she swung the legs of the scissors in a chopping movement close to my eyes.

“It is not nice what you are doing to her,” Solveig said.

Then it was back downstairs to their room. Cushions and pillows strewn about, drawers pulled open, drawers with his socks and his underwear and the gifts she had been brought for the party, the perfumes and soaps and frosted bottles of talc, discarded, as if they were useless.

“It must be somewhere, Matilda,” Mr. kept saying, stooping to search in the carpet and the pile of the new rugs and she shrieking back at him, “Find it, find it.”

My tin box with the picture of a glen in Scotland where they

malted whiskey was the next thing to arouse her suspicion. She shook it and listened. The shopkeeper at home had had a little padlock made, for safekeeping on the passage over.

“Open it,” she said.

I defied her. I would not open it. I defied her for as long as I could.

When she lifted the lid she was triumphant because inside lay the evidence of my thievery. A scarf of hers that was in flitters and the ends of bars of soap that smelled of lavender and rose water, then worst of all there was a white pompom that had fallen off Solveig’s knitted cap. That did it. The missus exulted, told her husband that the proof was there in that very box, and struck a division between Solveig and me by dispatching her to the guest room until she was called.

My nightgown lay in a heap, bagging around my ankles, where I’d had to pull it down for her to inspect me. Her eyes went up and down my body, a violence in them, as if she would kill me for being thin and young and a favorite with her husband.

I thought I would be left there forever. It was a cupboard under the attic stairs, filled with suitcases, quilts, bolsters, pillows that smelled of dust and feathers, a dungeon, where I was quartered until I owned up.

She would come up from time to time and rap on the door. No words were said. The three or four raps were simply to know if I was ready to confess. Then I would hear the thud of her footsteps going back down the stairs.

It was dark by the time Mr. came up and shone the lamp in over me, tearing through the thick skin of cobweb. He just leaned in blinking and his voice was hoarse and wearied.

“Give it back and we won’t tell the fathers,” he said.

“I don’t have it to give back.”

“Is that true, Dilly?”

“That’s true … I’ll swing for it if I have to.”

He beat his head against a wall, again and again, as if he wanted to dash his brains out, dash his memory out, and dash every piece of jewelry to smithereens.

“Come on,” he said, and I crawled out.

The missus was still in her dressing gown, her feet inside the fender warming herself, and yet she shivered all over. There was a tray with food that she had not touched.

“You haven’t had your tea, Matilda,” he said.

“The fecking milk is gone off,” she said and turning with a victorious expression said, “So she has confessed.”

“She didn’t steal it,” he said.

“She didn’t steal it,” she almost spat at him and then laughed and asked if he had taken leave of his senses. When he said that it could be anyone, any of the guests who had gone up and down the stairs throughout the day, it could have been her cousin Jenny or Chrissie, she slapped him, fiercely, and a rush of blood to one of his cheeks contrasted with the other, which was deathly pale. He smarted at the humiliation, began walking around, his fists clenched, and then he looked across at the writing desk and it was as if he had been guided to it. He sprang but she was ahead of him, sprawled on it, her arms spread out like a wading bird. He tried pulling back the roll-top lid but she thwarted him.

“It’s locked,” he said.

“Yes, it’s locked,” she said.

“It’s not usually locked,” he said, and they faced each other with a submerged world of wrongs and then he knew and she knew that he knew.

“And I’m not doing anything about the fecking milk either,” he said as he stormed to the door.

I was given a quarter of an hour to pack my things.

Exile

it would bea row over a biscuit or a comb that was missing. The truth was they did not want me there. I was an extra person and an extra body in the bed. In return for my lodgings I did the laundry and ironing, all the cleaning and sewing for Betty, who was mad for style. Betty was boss, a big girl with big feet and big hands, always making novenas because her hair was falling out and she feared that no man would want to marry a bald woman.

Nan was the most money-minded. One evening she came home jubilant because a workman carrying a ladder had hit her by accident, struck her close to her eye, and she had insisted there and then on compensation. It was a dollar. It was put under an ink bottle to be smoothed out because it had been folded many times inside his pocket. I never knew what to expect. Sometimes they were friendly and sometimes not. All four of us slept in the one bed, two at the bottom and two at the top. All of us tossed and turned and raved in our sleep.

They would drop hints for my benefit about the landlady threatening to raise the rent, on account of an extra person, the extra person being me. Other times they would be all pie. Nan gave me a cardigan, a purple cardigan with knitted violets that served as buttons, said the buttons got on her nerves because of the way they never stayed shut. A week later she asked for it back. It was nothing but moods, moods.

Then one evening when I got back from the convent where I

worked part-time my clothes were in a bundle on the step, my name in big print on a label on top. At first I thought it was a joke, but when I examined it I saw that every stitch I owned was in there, my pleated skirt, my good shoes, laddered stockings, my brush and comb, my prayer book, everything. They were telling me to go. It was the month of May and there was a magnolia tree in bloom in the garden. The blinds inside the house were drawn, all the blinds, the way they are when someone has died. I reckoned they had conferred with other lodgers and had done it as a team. It did something to me. I stood there and called up, thinking that one of them would come down and, seeing I had no one to turn to, would take pity on me and let me back. No one came.

In the waxen flower of the magnolia that was wide as a saucer, a tawny bee fed itself on the saffron threads and I thought,
I’ll never forget this moment, the hum of the bee, the saffron threads of the flower, the drawn blinds, nature’s assiduousness and human cruelty.

*      *      *

Dear Dilly,

Black and Tans and their elite brothers in terror called here two nights back, they burst in with blackened faces, seven or eight of them and I had to make a dive for my life. Your father had his hands and feet bound while they searched. Having failed to find your brother I had to act as candle bearer, going around the house while they rooted in drawers and presses, everything skiving out and then one said to the gang leader, a big tall fellow with a military cast, said, “C’mon, Reg, there’s nothing here,” and the leader struck him and used the most terrible language because of his name being said. They do not want their names known for fear of reprisal, but it is creatures like us that the reprisals are vented on, hay and crops burned, animals slaughtered, taking revenge on families that they suspect have housed the volunteers. Shops and business prem-

ises have been set fire to. Even a doctor that rendered medical aid to a wounded volunteer had his automobile burned and he is frightened for his life. A man beyond Tulla that was a known sympathizer was taken out of his house along with his wife and children, then the house set fire to and the man thrown back into it, his wife and children looking on and the gang shouting, “Let him fry, let him fry.” They were drunk as they so often are.

Write to me, in God’s name, write to me.

Bridget

Coney Island

the sun was a bowl of fire above us. There was no escaping it. It poured onto the sea, the ranges of color blue and blue-green and turquoise that stretched all the way to home and back again, the same waves but in different colors, different tumblings, home that I wanted to forget and both could and couldn’t.

Jugglers, sword swallowers, men in turbans and togas, young boys in every kind of uniform, tugging at our sleeves: “Step right up, ladies, step right up, ladies, everybody wins.”

There was Mary Kate and Kitty and Noreen and me. Kitty was the fashion plate in a pale buttercup muslin dress with leg-of-mutton sleeves, her eyes the color of snuff, needly and inquisitive. She was Mary Kate’s friend. And Noreen, with flat feet, in her flat shoes and long black streelish skirt, stopping to gape at the sights, the domes and palaces painted the white of wedding cake, the roller coaster, the cannon coaster, the bamboo slide, the barrel of love, saying the same thing over and over again: “Aaragh, shure, isn’t it all marvelous.”

The smells of frying oil and sugared doughnuts made us ravenous, but Kitty was in charge of the money that we’d pooled. People were dancing cheek to cheek in broad daylight, different bands clashing, German and Cuban and Mexican, an oriental woman dancing by herself, an array of silver coins clunking on her chest, her arms bangled and with the writhe of a serpent, men around her, staring, her smile for everyone and for no one,