The Light of Evening (13 page)

Kitty came back beaming, like she had won money. The priest was so kind, so obliging, and had given her a holy medal that she allowed me to kiss.

We walked through crowded, rundown streets, losing our way more than once, they full of bravado, mouthing the home truths they would tell him, yet Kitty unloosening her black hair from its thick slide, quivering as she had quivered that day in Coney Island when she spoke to him, and Mary Kate squeezing me for courage.

It was a squalid street of tenement houses, children playing, drunk people, bicycles, lame people on crutches, arguments, a laundry, and a foul smell from the river. They rang the doorbell several times before anyone appeared, then a woman stuck her head out an upper window, the cord broken so that she had to hold up the frame with one hand as she shone a bit of candle down. They asked to see Rita Thing-um-bob and were told that we had no business coming to that address. They asked if she was home and were told to scoot it. They asked if they could pass a note through the letterbox and have it read, which maddened her even more.

“You sure stick your noses into other people’s business,” she shouted, and a big spurt of hot candle grease was flung in our direction.

We stood there like three apes, a fresh fall of snow swirling down, and I knew the way one knows in one’s gut that I would not ever see Gabriel again.

*      *      *

Yet all the way up to Christmas I kept listening for him, listening for his whistle along the street, the way a dog listens and can hear its master, except that he did not come. Christmas Day was the worst. After the dinner the lodgers played hide and seek, up and down the stairs, into the garden, into the basements, anywhere and everywhere, and at times I had to escape to Ma Sullivan’s bedroom to cry my eyes out.

It was her idea that I go home. This pining was no good, I was like a scarecrow, but the fresh air and my own people would console me. She gave me the fare, said I could pay it back in installments, and arranged with my supervisor that I would get my job back when I returned.

Why I brought my scissors I will never know. My big scissors, cumbersome as shears, that traveled home with me on the boat. To cut clothes, to cut their hair, or maybe to cut something out of myself?

Homecoming

at first glance in our kitchen I mistook the oxtail for trifle, a pinkish mass on a plate with white streaks in it, which I thought to be trifle and whipped cream. The lamp on the settle bed threw out such a feeble light that everything else was in semidarkness, the neighbors so shy, and my mother all in black, shrunken and weeping. There was the smell of turf smoke and milk going off and cold potato skins on the dresser, high up where the dog could not snatch them. My mother stared at me and squeezed my hands while the others admired my brown trunk with its brass latches and my name painted in bold letters.

“At long last, at long last,” they kept saying, as though it were a dirge.

Keepsakes of my brother everywhere, a photo of him in uniform, his leggings, his revolver, and a letter in a frame that a priest
—
who had risked coming into that square to give him absolution
—
copied out in those last moments, in broiling heat.

My father was upstairs bed-bound and they sent me up with a cup of tea so full that it sloshed onto the saucer. Since he had taken to his bed he ate almost nothing, only currant-top biscuits, which he dipped in his tea. His teeth didn’t fit, so he couldn’t chew. My poor father, too proud to let me see him without his false teeth, his stubble white and raw and sharp as thorn, saying that he meant to shave for me, that he should have shaved in my honor but that he would do so next day, I would bring up the

mirror, a bowl of water, his shaving brush, and his cutthroat razor and guide his hand while he did it. He was so thankful that I had come. He said I had grown to be quite a swank but there was no sarcasm in his voice or his saying it.

At the supper it was nothing but questions. Questions. Was New York full of gangsters, how wide were the streets, what friends had I made, what foods did people eat, and did the different races live in ghettos and come out to challenge one another? A child under the table kept on tying and untying the shoelaces of my brown high-heeled shoes, then its mother, Josie, smarted at the fact that I didn’t realize whose child it was, it was hers and Ned’s, Ned that I’d driven cattle with and forked manure with before I went off and forgot them all. My mother kept urging me to eat up and not to be so standoffish. How long was I staying? They both asked and answered for me. I would not leave a mother alone in her plight. They described how she had kept the news of my brother’s death from our ailing father and on the evening that he was brought home, chapel bells rang out and kept ringing in honor of him, his valor, and my father kept asking if it was a bishop or something that was visiting the parish, not knowing that it was his own son. He was not told of it until the day of the funeral itself, because they believed that if they had told him earlier he would insist that the lid be lifted and it would be too much for him to see a son with half of him blasted off.

The neighbors were at great pains to remark on the spread my mother had got ready for me, the oxtail that she had ordered weeks before, fearing that either it or I would arrive too soon. Noni described how it had to be left to simmer for hours, then taken out and my mother having to remove the root and the gristly bits, the broth half-jellied and my mother thickening it with a corn flour for flavor. So why was I not eating it? The overstrong smell of the country butter that I had not smelled since I left had made me nauseous. They remarked on how different

I was from the good-natured girl who had left with the oilskin bag and her few treasures in the tin box that Dinnie had padlocked.

My mother fed the crusts of dry bread that she had soaked in cold tea to the dog at her feet. It was a new dog, the spitting image of the old one, black with white splotches on her forehead and mismatching eyes. Princess she was called, on account of the other dog being called Prince.

They were eager as they stood around the open trunk while I took out the presents, my mother instantly saying that my father would have no use for fur-lined gloves, nor she for a black coat with a turquoise clasp, but the others grateful, over-grateful, for the things I had given them: a rope of artificial pearls, a glitterish bracelet, a nightdress case, and a box of handkerchiefs with lace borders and embroidered mottoes.

The rain wakened me, the mountain through the back window lost in gray drizzle, the few cattle and our one horse huddled under a wall but not lowing, just standing there shivering, because they were soaked wet.

My mother was crisp with me for coming down in my style and would not hear of me going out to the yard with her to do the jobs. I was a lady now. There was a gulf between us, she knowing I had already gone and I not knowing how soon I could break it to her. After she went out, I did something rebellious. I emptied the contents of the cutlery drawer onto the floor and poured a kettle of boiling water over them to clean the stains, egg yolk and meal and cod-liver oil, wanting to throw away everything that was sad and poor and stale and musty and rancid.

Silverfish

it was tess who told me about the crowd going to the all-night dance. We’d been school friends. We’d picked mushrooms and pretended to have seen a big ship. She had got married since I went away; it was a made match, a man from the midlands, a Donal, who had worked in a garage but took to farming, out all day, draining fields and callows so that he could till them and sow corn. It was Tess that put the keepsake in my hand, saying it would bring good luck. It was a silverfish with gold-threaded scales and when she put it in the palm of my hand, I felt it spring backward as if it was a real fish, something telling in it. Their new house, built on the grounds next to the old thatched cottage, was ugly, it felt like a barracks, the walls only recently plastered and damp coming up from the cement floor. We were in the good room and at first she had been shy, remarking on the change in me, my clothes, and even a bit of a twang. The wedding presents, even after a year, still lay on the dining room table, a tea set, sheets, pillowcases, small blue glasses, and a blue decanter with a silver chain hanging on its throttle that read claret. Among them the silverfish that she made me take. She was happy I was home, I would come often, I would be company, Donal was the best man, the kindest man, but men were not company. On the floor there was a cradle, a low cradle like a little boat, padded and lined with white linen, and she was praying for it to be filled, for a baby to fill the days. Then all of a sudden she ran out

and I could hear her mounting the stairs as I looked at the one picture on the wall, a petrol-blue sea, the waves moiling but the ship with its sails and rigging bellied out, ready to go. She came back with what remained of her wedding cake. It was in a white cake box with a doily and the icing had to be hammered with the handle of a knife before we could crack our teeth on it.

She said lads would be going to the dance-cum-card party the following Sunday, and telling it she blushed scarlet as if she harbored a secret yearning to go.

Revel

the lorry to collect me hooted and I ran down to the stile in my silver-crusted shoes, my long velvet coat trailing in the grass.

There were six men, all in their good suits, and they gabbled their names as I mounted the high step and a hand helped me in. I was squeezed between Iggy the driver and a man named Cornelius, a chain-smoker, his brown hair flopping over the side of his lean face, the others all beholden to him and Iggy telling me to watch out for that man, that he was Mr. Coaxyoram himself and many a young girl soft on him, but oh, what a gentleman and from a scion of gentlemen. I learned that it was his horse, Red River, that would be played for. He had given it to his friend Jacksie who had lost his all gambling, and the lady he’d been engaged to had jilted him and had not even returned the engagement ring that was his mother’s, which was an heirloom.

Careering along the country road and then onto byroads that were wet and icy, there was such jocularity, their telling me I might be out for a week or more.

Carts and sidecars had pulled up in the big courtyard of Jacksie’s house, horses feeding out of oat bags and a fiddler ignoring the rain, coming out to usher us in. Jacksie was dressed as a bandit, had a patch over one eye, and ran to Cornelius to tell him that twelve tables had been taken, six players per table at five quid a head, packs of cards and grog donated by publicans

far and wide, and Red River, as he whispered, in a barn miles away, because with a crowd like that and maybe a bit of jealousy, a horse could get stolen or poisoned or nobbled or anything.

Greyhounds rushed and yelped around the hall where there were pots and pans put down to take the rain that came pouring in.

“Have a tour, have a tour,” Jacksie said to me and regretted the fact that since his poor dear mother died, the rooms lacked a woman’s warmth, a woman’s touch. In the kitchen two big women in cooks’ outfits were carving legs of ham and beef for the sandwiches that would be served all through the game, then a big breakfast at dawn.

The players were mostly seated, itching to begin, impatient men shuffling the packs of cards, a center lamp on each table, and a hail of welcome as Cornelius entered. From the moment they started, everything quieted, the faces serious and concentrated, except for two men who were drunk and skittish asking if Red River had been covered by Man O’ War himself.

The players were mostly men, with only two women, a Mrs. Hynes, who kept shouting to her partner to remember more of the red and less of the black
—
“Remember more o’ the red and less o’ the black, Timmy”
—
and a Miss Gleason, who had kept her hat on, a pearled hatpin skewering the cloth, the pearling a sickly yellow.

Nobody danced but the fiddle squeaked in fits and starts and the greyhounds slipped in and out under the tables that wobbled as fists were banged in recrimination. Disputes after each round as to how many tricks this person or that person had got, and muting when Miss Gleason got flustered, first reneged on herself, then played her best card, which she needn’t have, and her partner, a gruff man, jumping up, calling her a mad Irish eejit and telling everyone, “She can’t count, she can’t blasted count, she doesn’t even know that a five is better than a knave.” Poor Miss Gleason mortified, her cheeks the same vermilion as the walls,

asking him in a screechy voice to take that remark back and people next to her pulling her to sit down, then Jacksie standing on a chair and in a thunderous voice declared her a liability in any game. She sat frail and sulking, her cheeks scalding, vowing that she would never darken his doorstep again, some hushing her and others sniggering at her disgrace.

Cornelius and Iggy were in the final round and their opponents, who were from the city, displeased and spiteful, not a sound in that room until, at the very zenith, cries of disbelief as it turned out that Cornelius had the knave, the ace, and the king, each of which he threw down with a braggart air and Iggy pooled the winning cards onto his lap. They were the joint winners. They agreed to toss for it and one of the women from the kitchen, being thought to be impartial, was called in to throw a half crown into the air. She flipped it up with such vigor and the excitement was contagious as we watched and saw it spin through the air, almost invisible to the eyes in its dizzy descent. And then the whirl and rewhirl before it made up its mind to land. She stood with her arms kilted out so that nobody could trespass, her arms the two boundaries around the spot where the coin had fallen, and shouted “harp,” which meant Cornelius had won the toss.