The Light of Evening (25 page)

“My cup it brimmeth over,” Dilly says, tasting one of the chocolates, saying that unlike Eleanora she has a sweet tooth, had it all her life and consequently a spare tire. Sister Consolata rebuts with a nonsense, nonsense, still a slip of a girl and such a crop of hair, a feature that she passed on to her daughter.

Sister Consolata then draws attention to Busby, the yellow dickie bird on his tall wooden perch. Had Eleanora noticed his lordship, the little mascot, out there in the garden, harking for wind, for gusts of wind to get his propellers rattling, to get moving, to get himself noticed. Yes, the propellers did the talking for him, did his singing, the little beak never uttering a note, but nature, as Sister said, always bettering, always surpassing the mechanical. Yet Busby, as she concedes, such a nice little guy, a feature for the patients to while the hours. An older sister, Aquinas, as she is told, had the gardener install Busby on some whim, but oh Aquinas, a contrary creature, always complaining, didn’t like

this one or that one, couldn’t stand onions, complained if there was onions in the stew.

All the while Eleanora is wondering about the time. She has not come for long but her mother does not know that yet. She is not wearing a watch. Siegfried is waiting for her, salt fish and crayfish, a ladder stairs to the loft room, setting out for the airport probably around then from the lair that he has borrowed for her coming.

Sister Consolata senses this restlessness and whispers if maybe she needs the facilities and upon being told not, claps her hands, joyous, resolute, says that it is time for mother and daughter to be left alone to retrace the sands of time. As she swishes the curtain around on its metal runner Eleanora relives the terror of the sliding wooden hatch of the confessional, in childhood, being drawn back, and the beefy face of the priest looming through the dark grille.

She has said nothing about leaving and yet it is as if her mother senses it, her face beginning to look sadder, squashed, the pride and jubilation of earlier eking out. Eleanora does unnecessary things such as altering the tilt of the lamp above the bed, resettling the paper doily over the jug of barley water, moving the flowers once, then back to their original place, saying that only the greenery smells, only the eucalyptus leaf had any smell.

Ten more minutes, otherwise she will miss the flight. She will have to send a telegram asking the Norseman to make the same journey on the morrow.

Blessedly she finds a little novelty, something that may interest her mother. It is a sewing kit from her hotel bedroom in Denmark where she and Siegfried had met, where they had flirted, walking at night after dinner in the cobbled streets, cyclists weaving in and out between them, church bells, his hair sometimes touching her cheek where he had bent to almost kiss her, though not actually kissing her, and afterward back in their hotel, occupying the pair of ample green armchairs on the land-

ing, smitten and unwilling to be parted so early. They laughed at all the pairs of shoes outside all the doors and once as a prank he changed a few pairs to engender a little confusion the next day.

She unfolds the scarlet pouch of the sewing kit. There are needles of different sizes, a minute gold safety pin, tiny pearl shirt buttons, and strands of thread folded tightly together, their colors lapping into one another like the colors of the rainbow. Dilly reckons it would be difficult to thread those needles, the eyes so small, especially with her cataracts.

Eight more minutes. A nurse with steel-gray hair, large in girth, her elbows angled out, comes to see the visitor, stands with a sharp questing look and slightly mockingly says, “So this is Terence’s famous sister, is it,” then goes.

Her mother tells how Nurse Flaherty rules the ward with an iron fist and how between them it was hostilities from day one. She still seethes, as she says, from the way she was bullied, was made to take sleeping pills by that strap of a nurse, forced to swallow them, her mind rambling, back in Brooklyn, bumping into people she had not met in years. It is from that to her dismay at Terence’s visit, so hurried, so callow, Madam Cindy choosing not to come in, but to sit in the car outside because hospitals upset her.

“No nature in them, in either of them,” Dilly says and then putting her hand out asks for it to be held and asks what Matron had told Eleanora when they met in private downstairs. Were they keeping something from her?

“They’re not … it’s just that they can’t operate until all the fluid is gone … until you’re fit enough … until you’re strong.”

“I’m not right, love … I’m not right,” Dilly says.

“You will be right … you will be,” Eleanora assures her, and then Dilly draws her nearer and whispers that she wants to give her Rusheen, she wants to go out home just for the day and go back to the same solicitor that she has already been to and make a new will giving her Rusheen.

“There’s no hurry,” Eleanora says.

“But you love it, don’t you?”

“Yes, I love it.”

“Then it’s decided … go downstairs to the matron and tell her we’re going out for the day …”

Eleanora looks rapidly and frantically about for a way to say it and to be excused for saying it and then in a hesitant voice says, “I have to go back to that conference … it wasn’t over when I left” and recognizes by the needlelike flicker in her mother’s eyes that she is not believed, the eyes cold and blue and repudiating, robbed of hop
e.

From under the pillow her mother takes a torn clipping, handing it to her assertively, all gentleness and docility gone. The time seems to crawl in that ghastly hiatus, her mother recognizing her glaring untruth.

“Read it, read it,” her mother insists.

Eleanora reads, somewhat stilted: “Often called the silent killer, ovarian cancer claims six thousand lives a year, yet the symptoms are almost undetectable. The cancer develops in the cells of the ovaries, two almond-shaped organs found at either side of the uterus that produce eggs; the more eggs your ovaries produce during your lifetime the more the cells need to divide and so the more opportunity for things to go wrong.”

“The silent killer,” Dilly says.

“But the picture is of two women who are cured.”

“As many die as don’t die,” Dilly says, flatly.

“I’ll be back in forty-eight hours,” Eleanora says.

“Do that … do that,” she is told.

Then Dilly raises herself up and is out of bed, panting with a rapid breath as she embraces her daughter, holds her in a tight, clumsy, angry, desperate, loving, farewelling embrace.

Eleanora moves, then turns, and the last thing she sees is her mother’s arm raised, her nightgown sleeve raised also, sawing the air, the bone of her elbow the loneliest blue and the pity she should have shown earlier has started up in her then.

Siegfried

a
low wooden house, like a barn, the entrance door tarred black and the straw from the thatched roof straggling over the eaves and the minute windowpanes. To one side there was a stack of chopped wood, an ax stuck rigid in the huge round log that obviously had failed to sunder and next to it a water barrel with a wooden gourd hanging on a bit of wet brown string. Everything bare and spartan in a gray sulky light.

Far from anywhere, in the north of the country, a cottage that he had borrowed from his friend Jakob, set down in a flat featureless field, similar to the flat fields that they had passed on the way from the airport, fields and occasionally a configuration of tall stones in some sort of ritualistic commemoration, then one tiny yellow-washed chapel, itself like a pilgrim that had been left stranded. They saw no animals but the smells from pig farms along the way were stifling.

He was not the same as the Siegfried who had flirted with her only days before; there he was charm, affability, with his hair shocking gold, like a firmament in the dreary room, and because it seemed to have been carelessly hacked, women were offering to trim it for him, many women at his beck and call.

The door opened into a room with a ladder stairs that led to an upper loft room and the walls gave off a faint smell of lime. Above the black iron stove on a rack are his socks, his shirt and pairs of gray underpants, a wool blanket, yellow and ocher,

stretched ceremoniously along the banister. The table has been laid, it would seem, for breakfast, mugs, a coffee flask, and small knitted bonnets placed beside the squat wooden eggcups.

Something has happened in the little time since they parted so wistfully.

She has left her mother and regrets it now, wants to leave at once, but is too nervous to tell him, he being so tetchy and critical. She guesses that he is married and that probably there were scenes at home before he left, guesses this because of his looking in several pockets for something, possibly a letter, and then making an initial on the whitewashed wall. It cannot simply be the eye shadow, she keeps saying, somewhat irked, to herself. The moment with the eye shadow had crushed her. As she walked toward him in the little airport lounge, he, wearing a flat cap with a fur border, alone and watchful, like a lone hunter, did not shake her hand or kiss her, merely ran his finger across her eyelids to erase the glaring terracotta that was an affront to him.

She recalled the previous week with a pang, the functional tables, the blue and white plastic chairs, jugs of water, and various speakers courteous and earnest, expounding on the future of the novel, the future of the cinema, drama versus documentary, the tedium of it made bearable by the fact that whenever she looked in his direction, he beamed at her, so young, so boyish, with his tangle of golden hair. When they filed out for lunch and took off their name tags and obligatory red cotton jackets, he would make sure to find a way to sit next to her and there she heard of the white nights, people sleeping outside, people getting crazy because of the endless daylight, then of the autumn in the forests, he and his friends eating the mushrooms and stripping naked to dance like dervishes.

When his turn came to take the platform, he chose to speak in English as a courtesy to the foreign guests, but she knew that it was for her. On a screen they saw haunting images of his landscape that he had been filming for many years
—
islands, fjords,

lakes, forests, and people old and young, children on sleighs whizzing with abandon. Afterward he was questioned as to why he had not made a film for some years, because many had seen the one that had made him famous.

“They call me a genius at the time … everybody calling me a genius for one month,” he said and laughed and assured them that he was no longer arrogant, no longer a genius, only a bum. The film he wished to make was too esoteric. It was the story of the poet Hölderlin, sick in his mind, imprisoned in a room in Tubingen for thirty-seven years, where he played piano night and day, carpenter Zimmer his surly guardian.

On their last evening, he and she played truant, did not attend the farewell reception in the small café inside the main door, but met instead in the sumptuous dining room on the third floor, a galaxy of welcoming lights, coronets of candles that swung low on hoops of wire, the reflections of stars racing across the ceiling, stars the size of big blooms, and elsewhere lagoons of lit candles, hosts of waiters and waitresses all in black, like fledgling birds, swooping to be of use.

It was during that dinner that he decided he would ask his friend Jakob to loan him the summerhouse and somehow she pictured it differently, rustic and hospitable. The young waiter explained the dishes to her in a singsong, recitative voice: “You have the pig with the apple inside, you have the red hare with the baby hare inside, you have the roebuck with the juniper berry inside, and the crayfish hot or cold with potato dill.” How flirtatious it was, Siegfried touching the silk of her sleeve, her pulse, whetting her longings, the color rising in her neck and in her cheeks, as it did in all the youthful faces around, the white complexions a mere gauze, housing the blood beneath, the blood pink and fresh and very innocent.

But now in the cold kitchen with its orderliness, its pipes and pipe cleaners, various pairs of boots and clogs that obviously are Jakob’s, every moment of the hospital tableau keeps appear-

ing before her eyes, those last seconds, the bone and joint of her mother’s elbow the famished blue, and she wants to tell him all this, to reach and be reached, to cry in his arms. She keeps walking to get warm, runs her hand over the dank wall, and stops before a blown-up poster of a pair of wolves, their gray-green coats perfectly flecked with snow, the dugs of the she-wolf drooping with milk, and she reads, “The alpha male follows his mate around faithfully before and during the heat period waiting for a chance to copulate. After mounting the female and inserting his penis the male dismounts while still attached, swivels one-hundred-and-eighty degrees and faces away from her. The pair either stand or lie locked together for a period of up to half an hour and this is when the actual bliss comes in, by the alpha female releasing her sex hormones.” He sees her reading but does not pause, moving hurriedly, swift and purposeful, bringing in wood, emptying it with a thud into the basket, and then taking a bicycle pump from the windowsill, telling her that the water in the pipe has frozen and that it can make a lot of trouble for them if they have no water.

It was when she asked for a drink
—
anything, whiskey, brandy, aquavit
—
that he flinched and enquired if she was an alcoholic, then was irked by her not appreciating his little joke. Except that there was no whiskey or brandy or aquavit, there was milk that he had brought from the city, along with pickled herrings, pumpernickel bread, spaghetti in a packet, and a tin bearing an image of ripe meaty tomatoes.