The Light of Evening (6 page)

Later in bed she said that people at home, her people, my people, believed that America was a land of riches but that nothing could be further from the truth. America was a land of bluff and blighted dreams and I would be lucky if I got a job as a maid in a big house. I would be a Biddy, a kitchen canary.

A Blind Man

one of the lodgers worked odd hours and when she came in I bolted, without even a coat. The wind was at my back and I sped down the series of hills to get to the city, but it was not like a city at all, not like the city I’d seen on a calendar with ladies in fur coats, stepping out of a carriage, snowflakes on their fur collars and their cloche hats. It was higgledy-piggledy, trolley buses and horse-drawn carts, a fish wagon, a coal wagon, an oyster wagon, and men with pickaxes hitting stones to make a road where the road ran out. Noise poured out of the saloons and boys in long overalls were running hither and thither to deliver jugs of foaming beer, and in an alley children in rags and tatters were chasing young pigs with cabbage stalks and bits of stick.

There was music coming out of the saloons and different music that the organ grinder played, a monkey on his shoulder with a collection mug in the crook of its paw. Hardly had I stopped to look and to listen when a row broke out, the monkey and the organ grinder on one side and on the opposite a blind man in a belted coat that was too small for him and a white stick that needed scouring. He was in their patch and they were telling him to scoot it, that he was a bum, a clunk, to move on. The monkey was yapping away, as cross as his master, and the blind man refusing to budge. Then it was name-calling and the blind man’s pencils, which he was hoping to sell, tossed in the air and rolling over the pavement. I ran to retrieve a few, but most of them had

rolled out onto the street where there were the cars and the carts trundling by.

He thanked me, said I was a nice girl, a clean girl, the only person to show a bit of kindness to the blind man who was jostled and robbed and kicked and called a bum and called a clunk.

He leaned on me as we crossed the street, because they were still shouting and haranguing him, and we walked lopsided, but once on the other side he would not let go of me. I knew he was mad, he had to be mad, the way he raved: Walt Whitman, the city’s poet, Walt Whitman’s masts of Manhattan and tall hills of Brooklyn, Walt Whitman, who had fallen, just like the blind man, into the mire, as had Horace who succumbed to the lures of a perfume seller. I was a clean girl in a city of vice, ancient Egypt or ancient Babylon no more wicked or no more corrupt. He had been a player once, in the saloons, at the trotting races, chancing his arm, scoring, and even the reverent fathers had singled him out. Sold religious articles, up in the silk stocking district, going from door to door, his valise crammed with holy statues, books, leaflets, novenas, miniature altars, miraculous medals, could put the sales over with a real punch, sold more in a day than the peanut man or the hot dog man. Flying it. Long-lashed Lenny as he was known. Face to face with the ladies and their nice drawl, in their morning coats, with their little lap dogs nested in their laps, time on their hands, their husbands making the loot. Yes, the swank ladies in their swank houses. One in particular. A doll. Wanted for nothing but her cup was never full. He knew the cup she meant. He filled the cup. Sweet as butter grass. Blonds, brunettes, redheads. One played him false or maybe more than one. Went from being a player to a human cockroach. Wakened one morning in some dive to know the game was up. Nausea, the shivers, the disease that bums, stevedores, poets, and the city elders all fell foul to. The syph. Had to be burned out of him. Oh man, the mercury that cured also took away, a descent into blindness. “I have sewed sackcloth upon my skin and defiled my horn in the dust.”

We were by the trough where the horses drank and a few of the drivers sat with their heads down, dozing. A woman he knew who ran a little food stall gave us two minute cups of black coffee and when he drank it he slugged it down, just like the horses.

He must have sensed that I wanted to get away, because he said that I was his guardian angel who had been sent to him for that day.

It wasn’t yet dark, but I knew it soon would be and that I would have to leave him. His hands searched my face as if they could see, whereas by contrast his eyes were quenched, a yellowish pus caked on the cracks of his eyelids. We would go to Wonderland. Wonderland was a home where little blind girls lived and every so often had a fete, sold cakes and tarts and muffins to rich ladies, to show that they were useful in the community. He’d been told of it, how they stood in their aprons behind a long table, with their sieves and their weighing scales and their baking tins, little blind girls, a credit to the community.

“I’ll come tomorrow,” I said, wrenching my arm away from him.

“You won’t … you won’t come tomorrow,” he said, and he started to curse. How lost he looked there in the belted coat that was too small for him and the dirty white stick, unable to hide the sad truth that no one wanted to listen to him, tears running down his cheeks. God knows where he slept.

Then I was lost. Up streets, down streets, the same streets or different, it was impossible to tell. I couldn’t remember where I lived. Near a park. “But which park?” she asked, as there were many. She was a child’s nurse in uniform, wheeling a pram, and her mistress would be furious if she was late back. The small shops that sold coal and bundles of timber had their shutters down. Knocking on a brown door and a man in shirtsleeves holding a violin bow answered it then glared, the door in my face within seconds.

Darkness coming on. The lamplighter going from post to post with a ladder, climbing up, the sputter, as the flames took,

the light ash-white that made the hurrying faces look consumptive. Holding on to the black iron base to read street names that meant nothing. Flatbush. Pacific. Lafayette. Atlantic.

Then running up a road and crossing to an intersection where there was a statue of a man on an iron horse, the same statue that I’d seen when I was with the blind man. A streetcar going by with passengers on the platform, holding on for dear life and me thinking that Mary Kate might be on it, but she wasn’t. All I could remember of the lodging house was the little black man that was on the umbrella stand and his curled hair a chocolate brown.

The chapel commanded half a street and ran around the side of another. Three entrance gates, but the three wooden doors all locked. A vault to one side also locked, but I found a little lychgate that opened in. How they found me I never knew. Maybe they’d gone to all the chapels. I hid at the back of the stone grotto, the picture of Our Lady in front in her niche and a little girl kneeling before her, probably St. Bernadette of Lourdes. I knew it was them, somehow knew, Mary Kate and the lodger, and when I called out they ran to me, our reunion, so glad, so joyous, the goodwill flowing from one to the other, her coat around me going up the hills, the wind in our faces, but safe and united.

It was when she saw the pencil that the blind man had given me that she went berserk.

“Who was the blind man?”

“He didn’t say.”

“What did he want?”

“Nothing.”

“What did he do to you?”

“Nothing.”

“Where did he want to take you?”

“To Wonderland.”

Wonderland! She went mad at the word. It was the very same

as if he had kidnapped me.
Kidnapped.
She said it three times. One of the lodgers preparing her supper looked on, aghast. Her daughter said, “Mama take dictionary,” and they took a dictionary from the dresser but Mary Kate’s tirade was too fast for them. She was wording the telegram of condolence that she must send to my mother and father.
“My dear Katherine and James, it is with the deepest regret that I have to inform you that your daughter is missing.”
She believed it. She who had vouched for me, she who had hawked all the way to the depot to meet me and had welcomed me was now the one to have to forward the bad news. The woman holding the dictionary threw it down: “She crazy, she get crazier, all the Irish people they go crazy … they drunkards … they break the tooths.”

In bed Mary Kate cried, said she shouldn’t have shouted at me but it was for my own good, I could have ended up in a house of shame. Then, and between swigs from the bottle that was under her pillow, she relayed the story of Annie, a girl from Wicklow. She’d met Annie’s brother Pol, a broken man, going around to the bars and the dance halls, telling his story, or rather Annie’s story. When Annie’d got off the boat aged sixteen there was no one to meet her, the cousins that were to meet her had not shown up. Seeing her all alone and unbefriended, a well-dressed woman came across to her and offered to give her shelter, had papers to vouch for her character. So she went with her, thinking she was going to a convent. Instead she was brought to a big house with a madam, where she was made a prisoner and groomed to be a prostitute. No one heard from her back at home, her poor mother getting more and more anxious as time passed, until eventually they realized that something dreadful had happened to her and they scraped and they scraped to find the money for her brother to come to America, which he did. He went from one borough to the next, went to the priests who referred him to the bishop, paid a detective agency, and finally Annie’s whereabouts were discovered. He went one night, wearing

a trilby hat, disguised as much as he could, showed up as a customer, sat in a room along with the other men, drinking, waiting their turns to go upstairs, and the madam, realizing it was his first time, showed him photos of her little troupe. He chose his sister. The madam said he would have to wait quite a while as the lady, Vivien she called her, was extremely popular, especially with the regular clients. He drank champagne since that was the thing to do, but kept sober. When he found himself in the room with Vivien, in a gown, with soft lighting and the bed replete with pillows, she calling him “Baby, baby,” he nearly died. She asked him his name, was he shy, was it his first time, and so forth and unable to restrain himself a second longer, he tore off his disguises and said, “Annie, Annie,” which was her real name. She drew back, thinking maybe that he had a dagger or a gun. He told her not to be frightened, he was her brother and loved her as a brother and had come to get her out of there. She hung her head. He thought it was shame. He begged of her to put her clothes on and walk out of that house with him, but she refused. He pleaded. He asked her why. She said for his own sake he’d better leave, as there were toughs on call, who would beat him to a pulp. Finally she said that she had no wish to go. His own sister. “What will I tell our mother?” he asked.

“Tell her I’m dead,” she answered.

Mary Kate was crying buckets, for Annie, for herself, and seeing that she had softened a bit I said, “Mary Kate, I want to go home.”

“You can’t go home,” she kept saying, hysterically, and it was like a death sentence.

Dear Billy

i could  hear my mother talking to me the second I opened her letter, talking and scolding.

I take my pen in my hand twice within a month to say how worried I am about your silence. I have not heard from you in two weeks. I beg you to write to us. Do you not know, do you not recall our situation here? We are barely able to keep a roof over our heads. To make matters worse we had a setback. Things have conspired against us. Your father swore me to secrecy, but I have to tell someone, what with your brother hardly ever here. With the money he got for the corn that he brought to the mill, he decided to treat himself to a pair of boots and unfortunately got the shopkeeper to grease them in order to wear them on the ten-mile walk home. That was his mistake. He was crippled in them but could not return them because of having been seen to wear them. They’re no good to anyone. You say you are looking for a post and I pray that you have secured it by now. It seems your cousin is not as friendly to you as she could be. That’s sincerity for you. I will say nothing to her mother about it as there would only be a coolness. I’ll be watching for the postman. I now bring this letter to a close, your loving mother,

Bridget

Mass

i could not write back and tell her how strange and false everything was. My cousin drinking in secret and hiding the empty bottles in a shoebox under the bed. My cousin pretending she was a nurse when it turned out that she washed patients and dressed them, her hands pink and raw-looking from all the washing.

In the lodging house the people kept to themselves, slunk into their rooms, their doors usually locked, and in the kitchen and in the icebox their names printed on their provisions, on the strange foods that they ate, bread that was a brown-black and little cucumbers that tasted vinegary. We stole a few when we were hungry, which was usually at the end of the week when Mary Kate’s money ran out. The gold sovereign and the florin my mother gave me was confiscated toward my keep.

Everything hinged on money, the paved street and the parts where the paving ran out and pigs ran wild and were pelted with cabbage stalks.

That first Sunday in the palatial church with its altar and side altars, the priest’s sermon centered on the parable of the camel unable to pass through the eye of the needle, no more than the rich man would be able to enter heaven. He was a visiting priest, his skin dark and shining like dark shining mahogany, the folds between his dark fingers were a pale shell-pink and there swam in his eyes such faith, such fervor. The congregation, he said, was