by Colm Toibin
As the night wore on, some of the men fell asleep or had to be helped to the toilet. The two Miss Murphys made pots of tea and there was Christmas cake. Once the singing ended some of the men found their coats and came up to thank Father Flood and the Miss Murphys and Eilis, wishing them a happy Christmas before setting out into the night.
When most of the men had left and several who remained seemed to be very drunk, Father Flood told Eilis that she could go if she wanted and he would ask the Miss Murphys to accompany her to Mrs. Kehoe’s house. Eilis said no, she was used to walking home alone, and it would in any case, she said, be a quiet night. She shook hands with the two Miss Murphys and with Father Flood and wished each of them a happy Christmas before she set out to walk through the dark, empty streets of Brooklyn. She would, she thought, go straight to her room and avoid the kitchen. She wanted to lie on the bed and go over everything that had happened before falling asleep.
Part Three
In January, Eilis felt the fierce sharp cold in the mornings as she went to work. No matter how fast she walked, and even when she bought thick socks, her feet felt frozen by the time she arrived at Bartocci’s. Everyone in the streets was covered up as though afraid to show themselves, wearing thick coats, scarves, hats, gloves and boots. She noticed that they even covered their mouths and noses with thick scarves or mufflers as they moved along. All she could see was their eyes, and the expression seemed alarmed by the cold, made desperate by the wind and the freezing temperatures. At the end of the lectures in the evening, the students huddled in the hallway of the college, putting on layer after layer of clothes as a defence against the cold night. It was, she thought, like a preparation for a strange play, with all of them trying on costumes, their gestures slow and deliberate, looks of blank determination on their faces. It appeared impossible to imagine a time when it was not cold and she could walk these streets thinking about something other than the warm hallway of Mrs. Kehoe’s house, the warm kitchen and her own warm bedroom.
One evening, as she was about to go upstairs to bed, Eilis saw Mrs. Kehoe standing in the doorway of her own sitting room, hovering there in the shadows as though afraid to be seen. She beckoned to Eilis without speaking, motioned her into the room and then quietly closed the door. Even as she crossed the room and sat in the armchair by the fire, indicating to Eilis that she should sit in the armchair opposite, she said nothing. The look on her face was grave as she put her right hand out and lowered it, suggesting to Eilis that if she were to speak her voice should not be loud.
“Now,” she said and looked into the fire, which was burning brightly in the grate, before placing a log and then another on the flames. “Not a word that you ever even came in here? Promise?”
Eilis nodded.
“The truth is that Miss Keegan is departing and the sooner the better as far as I’m concerned. I have her sworn not to say a word to anyone. She’s very West of Ireland and they’re better at saying nothing than we are. So it suits her because she doesn’t have to say any farewells. She’ll be gone on Monday and I want you to move into her room in the basement. It’s not damp now so don’t look at me like that.”
“I’m not looking at you,” Eilis said.
“Well, don’t.”
Mrs. Kehoe studied the fire for a moment and then the floor.
“It’s the best room in the house, the biggest, the warmest, the quietest and the best-appointed. And I don’t want any discussion about it. You are getting it and that’s that. So if you pack your things on Sunday, on Monday when you’re at work I’ll have them moved down, and that’ll be the end of it. You’ll need a key for down below because you have your own entrance, which you share with Miss Montini, but of course even if you lose the key, there’s still the stairs between the basement and this floor so don’t look so worried.”
“Will the others not mind that I’m getting the room?” Eilis asked.
“They will,” Mrs. Kehoe said and smiled at her. She then looked into the fire, nodding her head in satisfaction. She raised her head and gazed bravely at Eilis. It took Eilis a moment to realize that this was a signal from Mrs. Kehoe that she should leave. She stood up quietly as Mrs. Kehoe once more stretched out her right hand to make clear that Eilis should not make a sound.
It struck Eilis, as she made her way up the stairs to her bedroom, that the basement room could, in fact, be damp and small. She had never heard anyone say before that it was the best room in the house. She wondered if all this secrecy was not merely a way of landing her there without giving her a chance to see where she was going or make any protest. She would have to wait, she realized, until she came back from her classes on Monday night.
Over the next few days she began to dread the move and resent the idea of Mrs. Kehoe moving her cases when she was out of the house and putting them into a place from which Miss Keegan emerged daily in a state that did not seem to Eilis to suggest that she had the best room in the house. She realized also that she could not appeal to Father Flood were the room dingy or dark or damp. She had used up enough of his sympathy and she knew that Mrs. Kehoe was fully aware of this.
On the Sunday, as she packed her cases and left them by the bed, finding that she had acquired more belongings than she could fit into them and having to go downstairs and quietly ask Mrs. Kehoe for some carrier bags, she felt that Mrs. Kehoe had taken advantage of her, and she found herself suffering the beginnings of the terrible homesickness she had gone through before. That night, she did not sleep.
In the morning there was a biting wind that was new to her. It seemed to blow fiercely in every direction; it carried ice with it and people moved in the streets with their heads bowed, some of them dancing up and down with the cold as they waited to cross the street. It made her almost smile at the idea that no one in Ireland knew that America was the coldest place on earth and its people on a cold morning like this the most deeply miserable. They would not believe it if she put it in a letter. All day in Bartocci’s people roared at anyone who left the door open for a second longer than necessary and there was a brisk trade in heavy woollen underwear, even more than usual.
That evening as she took notes during the lectures Eilis was struggling so hard to stay awake that she put no thought into what she would find when she returned to Mrs. Kehoe’s and, when walking home from the trolley-car, decided she did not care what her new room was like as long as it was warm and had a bed where she could sleep. The night was still, the wind having died down, and there was a dryness and a punishing intensity in how the icy air bit into her toes and fingers and hurt the skin on her face and made her pray that this journey by foot would end even when she knew that she was only halfway there.
As soon as she had opened the front door Mrs. Kehoe appeared in the hallway and put her fingers to her lips. She motioned for Eilis to wait, returned a moment later and, having checked that no one was coming into the hallway from the kitchen, handed Eilis a key; she then directed her back out into the night, closing the front door softly behind her. Eilis walked down the steps to the basement. By the time she had opened the door Mrs. Kehoe was already waiting for her.
“Don’t make a sound,” she whispered.
She opened the door that led into the front room of the basement, the room recently vacated by Miss Keegan. A standard lamp in the corner and a lamp by a bedside table were already lit, and these, with the low ceiling and the dark velvet curtains and the richly patterned bedspread and the rugs on the floor, made the room seem luxurious, like something from a painting or an old photograph. Eilis noticed a rocking chair in the corner and saw that there were logs in the fireplace and paper under them waiting to be lit. The room was twice the size of her old bedroom; it also had a desk where she could study and an easy chair on the other side of the hearth to the rocking chair. It had none of the functional, almost Spartan aura of the room she had slept in until now. She knew that all of her fellow lodgers would have wanted this room.
“If any of them ask you, just
say that your own room is being decorated,” Mrs. Kehoe said as she opened a large built-in closet whose wood was stained a dark reddish colour, to show Eilis where the suitcases and bags were. Because of the way Mrs. Kehoe stood watching her, her gaze proud but almost soft and sad as well, it struck Eilis that this room might have been created in the time before Mr. Kehoe left home. As she looked at the double bed she wondered if this had been their bedroom. She wondered if they had rented out the rooms on the upper floors.
“The bathroom is at the end of the corridor,” Mrs. Kehoe said. She stood in the shadowy room uneasily, as though she were trying to regain her composure.
“And say nothing to anyone,” she added. “You can never go wrong if you follow that policy to the letter.”
“The room is lovely,” Eilis said.
“And you can light a fire,” Mrs. Kehoe said. “But Miss Keegan only ever did on Sundays because it eats wood. I don’t know why.”
“Will the others not be raging?” Eilis asked.
“It’s my house so they can rage all they like, the more the merrier.”
“But—”
“You are the only one of them with any manners.”
Mrs. Kehoe’s tone, as she tried to smile, caused, Eilis felt, a sadness to come into the room. She believed that Mrs. Kehoe was giving her too much without knowing her well enough and just now had also said too much. She did not want Mrs. Kehoe to become close to her or come to depend on her in any way. Eilis left silence for a few moments, even though she knew that this might make her seem ungrateful. She nodded almost formally at Mrs. Kehoe.
“When will the others know that I am here for good?” she asked eventually.
“In their own good time. It’s none of their business anyway.”
As she took in the implications of what Mrs. Kehoe had done and the trouble it was now likely to cause her with her fellow lodgers, Eilis wished she had been left alone in her old bedroom.
“I hope they won’t blame me.”
“Pay no attention to any of them. I don’t think either of us needs to lose a night’s sleep over them.”
Eilis stood up straight, attempting to make herself taller, and stared coldly at Mrs. Kehoe. It was clear to her that her landlady’s last remark carried with it the firm idea that she and Eilis stood apart from the other lodgers and were prepared to intimate to them that they had conspired in this. Eilis believed that this was a piece of gross presumption on Mrs. Kehoe’s part but also that the decision to give her, the most recently arrived, the best room in the house not only would cause bitterness and difficulty between herself and Patty, Diana, Miss McAdam and Sheila Heffernan but would come to mean, in time, that Mrs. Kehoe herself would feel free to call in the favour she had done her.
She could, Eilis saw, do this if she needed something urgently, or allow it to cause a familiarity in their relationship, a sort of friendship or close connection. As they stood in the room, Eilis felt almost angry with Mrs. Kehoe, and this feeling, mixed with tiredness, seemed to give her courage.
“It’s always better to be honest,” she said, imitating Rose when Rose found her dignity or sense of propriety challenged in any way. “I mean with everybody,” she added.
“When you’ve gone through the world like I have,” Mrs. Kehoe replied, “you’ll find that that only works some of the time.”
Eilis looked at her landlady, not flinching at the wounded aggression in the way her look was returned. She was determined not to speak again, no matter what Mrs. Kehoe said. She felt the older woman’s irritation directed against her as though she had betrayed her in some incalculable way, until she realized that giving her this room, the act of generosity, had released something in Mrs. Kehoe, some deep resentment against the world, that Mrs. Kehoe was now putting carefully back in its place.
“The bathroom as I said is down the corridor,” she finally said. “And I’m leaving the key here.”
She put the key on a side table and left the room, banging the door so that the whole house would hear her.
Eilis wondered if the others would ever believe her if she told them that she had not asked for the room. She avoided the kitchen at breakfast-time and, on meeting Diana at the bathroom door on the second morning, rushed by her without saying a word. She knew, however, that when the weekend came it would be impossible to avoid a discussion with the others. Thus on the Friday evening, when Mrs. Kehoe had left the kitchen, and Miss McAdam said that she would like to speak to her alone, Eilis was not surprised. Under Miss McAdam’s watchful gaze, as though she were a prisoner on parole who might try to abscond, she lingered in the kitchen after all the others had gone.
“I suppose you heard what happened,” Miss McAdam said to her.
Eilis tried to look blank.
“You had better sit down.”
Miss McAdam moved over to the kettle as it began to boil and she filled the teapot before she spoke again.
“Do you know why Miss Keegan left?” she asked.
“Why should I know?”
“So you don’t know? I thought so. Well, that Kehoe woman knows and all the others know.”
“Where has Miss Keegan gone? Was she in trouble?”
“To Long Island. And for good reasons.”
“What happened?”
“She was followed home.” Miss McAdam’s eyes seemed to glitter with excitement as she spoke. She poured the tea slowly.
“Followed?”
“Not one night but two, or maybe more for all I know.”
“You mean followed to this house?”
“That’s exactly what I mean.”
Miss McAdam sipped her tea while looking at Eilis sharply all the time.
“Who followed her?”
“A man.”
As Eilis put milk and sugar into her tea, she remembered something that her mother always said.
“But sure if a man ran off with Miss Keegan, he’d drop her the minute he got to the first lamp-post and he could see her clearly.”
“But it wasn’t an ordinary man.”
“What do you mean?”
“The last time he followed her he exposed himself to her. He was that sort of man.”
“Who told you this?”
“Miss Keegan spoke to Miss Heffernan and myself privately before she left. She was followed to the very door of this house. And as she walked down the steps, the man exposed himself.”
“Did she call the police?”
“She certainly did, and then she packed her bags. She thinks she knows where the man lives. And he followed her before.”
“Did she tell the police all of this?”
“Yes, but there is nothing they can do unless she is ready to identify him and she isn’t ready to do that. So she packed her bags. And she’s moved in with her brother and his wife in Long Island. And then, to make matters worse, the Kehoe woman wanted to move me down to Miss Keegan’s room. She went on about it being the best room in the house. I put her in her place. And Miss Heffernan is in a terrible state. And Diana has refused to stay in the basement on her own. So she put you down there because none of the others would go.”
Eilis noticed how pleased with herself Miss McAdam seemed. As she watched the older woman sipping her tea, it occurred to Eilis that this could easily be her revenge on Eilis and Mrs. Kehoe over the room. On the other hand, she reckoned, it could be true. Mrs. Kehoe could have used her, the only lodger who did not seem to know why Miss Keegan had left. But then she thought that Mrs. Kehoe could not have been sure in the days before she moved her to the basement that Eilis would not find out. The more she watched Miss McAdam, the more she was convinced that if she was not inventing the story of the man who exposed himself, then she was exaggerating it. She wondered if Miss McAdam had been encouraged to do this by the other lodgers or if she were doing it alone.
“It’s a lovely room,” Eilis said.
“Lovely it may be,” Miss McAdam replied. “And you know we all wanted that room when Miss Keegan
got it, all the better to stop that Kehoe woman snooping around you every time you came in the door. But I wouldn’t want to be down there now with the light on for all to see. Maybe I shouldn’t say any more.”
“Say what you like.”
“Well, for someone who walks home alone at night, you seem very calm.”
“If anyone exposes himself to me, you’ll be the first to know.”
“If I am still here,” Miss McAdam said. “It might be Long Island for us all.”
In the days that followed, Eilis could not make her mind up about what Miss McAdam had told her. At meals in the kitchen with the rest of the lodgers she veered from believing that all of them had conspired to frighten her in revenge for her being installed in Miss Keegan’s room to believing that Mrs. Kehoe had placed her there not because she favoured her but because she thought she was the least likely to protest. She studied their faces as they addressed her, but nothing became clear. She wanted to allow for the possibility that everyone’s motives were good, but it was unlikely, she thought, unlikely that Mrs. Kehoe had genuinely given her the room out of pure generosity and unlikely also that Miss McAdam and the others really did not mind this and had merely wanted to warn her about the man who had followed Miss Keegan so that she would be careful. She wished she had a real friend among the lodgers whom she could consult. And she wondered then if she herself were the problem, reading malice into motives when there was none intended. If she woke in the night, or found time going slowly at work, she went over it all again, blaming Mrs. Kehoe one moment, Miss McAdam and her fellow lodgers the next, and then blaming herself, eventually coming to no conclusion except that it would be best if she stopped thinking about it altogether.