by Edna O'Brien
“How’s life?” Baba said.
“Lousy,” Martha said, and she told us all that had happened since we went away. The fire had died into a bed of gray ashes before we climbed the stairs. Martha carried the lamp and its light was very dim, because the oil was nearly burned out. She put it in the hallway between our room and hers, and when we had undressed she came out and quenched it. Mr. Brennan was snoring, and she went to her own room, sighing.
11
Next day was cold. Mr. Gentleman called for me after lunch. Baba had gone up the street to show off her new mohair coat, and Martha was lying down. Baba told me in great secrecy that Martha was going through the change of life, and I sympathized with her. I didn’t know what it meant, except that it had something to do with not having babies.
Molly was brushing the collar of my coat in the hall when the doorbell rang.
“You wanted a seat to Limerick,” Mr. Gentleman said. He was wearing a black nap coat, and his face looked petrified.
“I do,” I said, and kicked Molly’s toe with my shoe. Earlier I had told her that I was going out to visit my mother’s sister, and that he was giving me a lift.
We said nothing for a long time after I got into the car. It was a new car with red-leather seats, and the ashtray was stuffed with cigarette butts. I wondered whose they were.
“You got plump,” he said finally. I hated the sound of the word. It reminded me of young chickens when they were being weighed for the market.
“You got pretty, too—terribly pretty,” he said, frowning. I thanked him and asked him how his wife was. Such a stupid question! I could have killed myself.
“She’s well, and how are you? Have you changed?” There were all sorts of meanings behind his words and behind the yellow-gray luster of his eyes. Even though his face was weary, life-weary, and dead in a peculiar way, his eyes were young and large and fiercely expectant.
“Yes, I have changed. I know Latin and algebra. And I can do square roots.” He laughed and told me that I was funny; and we drove away from the gate, because Molly was looking out the sitting-room window at us. She had a corner of the lace curtain lifted, and her nose flat against the windowpane.
I closed my eyes as we passed our own gate. I had no wish to see it.
“Can I hold your hand?” he asked gently. His hand was freezing and his nails were almost purple with the cold. We drove along the Limerick road, and while we were driving it began to snow. Softly the flakes fell. Softly and obliquely against the windshield. It fell on the hedges and on the trees behind the hedges, and on the treeless fields in the distance, and slowly and quietly it changed the color and the shape of things, until evening outside the motorcar had a mantle of soft white down.
“There’s a rug in the back of the car,” he said. It was a tartan wool rug and I would have liked to wrap it around us, but I was too shy. I watched the snowflakes tumble through the air. The car was slowing down and I knew that before the flakes began to show on the front hood Mr. Gentleman was going to say that he loved me.
True enough, he drove down a side track and stopped the car. He cupped my face between his cold hands and very solemnly and very sadly he said what I had expected him to say. And that moment was wholly and totally perfect for me; and everything that I had suffered up to then was comforted in the softness of his soft, lisping voice, whispering, whispering, like the snowflakes. A hawthorn tree in front of us was coated white as sugar, and the snow got worse and was blowing so hard that we could barely see. He kissed me. It was a real kiss. It affected my entire body. My toes, though they were numb and pinched in the new shoes, responded to that kiss, and for a few minutes my soul was lost. Then I felt a drip on the end of my nose and it bothered me.
“Blue Noses,” I said, looking for my handkerchief.
“What are blue noses?” he asked.
“The name for winter noses,” I said. I had no handkerchief so he loaned me his.
On the way back he had to get out a few times because the windshield wipers got choked up. Even for the second he was away I was lonesome for him.
I was home in time for tea. We had boiled eggs. Mine was fresh and boiled to the right hardness; I had forgotten its lovely country flavor. Eating it, I thought of Hickey, and I decided to post him a dozen fresh eggs to Birmingham.
“Can you post eggs to England?” I asked Baba. There was egg yolk all over her lips and she was licking it.
“Can you post eggs to England? Of course you can post eggs to England if you want the postman to deliver a box of sop and mush with egg white running up his sleeve. If you want to be a moron you can post eggs to England, but they’ll turn into chickens on the way.”
“I only asked,” I said peevishly.
“You’re a right-looking eejit,” she said. She was making faces at me. There were only the two of us at the table.
“What are you sending Cynthia for Christmas?” I asked.
“I won’t tell you. Mind your own bloody business.”
“I won’t tell you,” I said.
“As a matter of fact, I have given her mine. A valuable piece of jewelry,” Baba told me.
“Not the ring I gave you?” I asked. It was the only piece of jewelry she had brought with her to the convent. We weren’t allowed to wear trinkets there, so she kept the ring in her rosary-bead purse. I finished my tea quickly and went out to the hall and searched her pocket for the purse. The ring was gone out of it. Mama’s favorite ring. Once Baba had got something, she no longer valued it.
I put on my coat and went upstairs for my flashlight. There was a light showing under Martha’s door so I knocked and stuck my head in. She was sitting up in bed with a cardigan over her shoulders.
“I’m going up the street. I won’t be long,” I said.
“Don’t. We’re playing cards tonight, all of us. Your dad is coming over.” She smiled faintly. She was suffering. She was paying back for all the gay nights that she’d spent down at the hotel, her legs crossed, her tongue tasting a thick, expensive liqueur. She and Mr. Brennan slept in separate beds.
The snow had turned to slush in the few hours and the footpath was slippery. The battery of my flashlight was almost gone and the light kept fading. It was hard to see and I wasn’t used to the darkness. Still, I remembered where the steps were, just before the hotel, and two more steps before I crossed the bridge. The water had the same urgent sound and I thought of the day Jack Holland and I leaned over the stone bridge and looked for fish down underneath. I was on my way to see him, just then.
Water ran down the street, too, in the gutters where the snow had melted. It was bitterly cold.
There had been a turkey market that day and there were a lot of horses and carts outside the shops. The horses were neighing and jerking their heads to keep themselves warm and you could almost see their breaths turning into plumes of frost. The windows of the drapery shops were dressed for Christmas with holly and Christmas stockings and shreds of tinsel. I couldn’t see them very well with my flashlight but inside in the shops there were countrywomen buying boots and vests and calico. I looked in the doorway of O’Brien’s drapery and saw Mrs. O’Brien, under the lamplight, measuring curtain material. There was a country man sitting on a chair fitting on a pair of boots, and his wife was feeling the leather with her hands and searching to see if his toe came to the very tip of the boot. Jack’s shop was next door. I went in, hoping there would be lots of people drinking in the bar. Alas, it was empty. Jack sat like a ghost behind the counter, writing in a ledger by the light of a very dim hand lamp.
“Dearest,” he said, when he looked up and saw me. He took off his steel-rimmed glasses and came outside to greet me. He brought me in behind the counter and sat me on a tea chest. There was an oil stove at my feet and it was smoking. The shop smelled of paraffin oil.
“An Irish colleen,” he said, and sneezed fiercely. He took out an old flannel rag, and while he was blowing his nose I looked at the ledger that he had been writing in. There
was a dead moth on the opened page and a brown stain just below it. When he saw that I was looking at it, he closed the book, being very secretive about his customers.
“Who’s there? Who is it, Jack?” a voice called from the kitchen.
It was exactly the voice one would expect from an old, dead woman. It was high and hoarse and croaking.
“Jack, I’m dying,” the voice moaned. I jumped off the tea chest, but Jack put a hand on my shoulder and made me sit down again.
“She’s just curious to know who’s here,” he said. He didn’t bother to whisper.
“It’s thrilling to see you,” he said, beaming at me. The beam divided his lips and I saw his last three teeth. They were like brown, crooked nails and I imagined that they were loose.
“Thrilling,” I said to myself, and wondered if he thought Goldsmith thrilling.
“Jack, I’m dying,” the voice said again, and Jack swore bad-temperedly and ran into the kitchen. I followed him.
“Good God Almighty, you’re on fire,” he shouted. There was a smell of something burning.
“On fire,” she said, looking at him like a baby.
“Goddamn it, take your shoe out of the ashes,” he said. She had the toe of her black canvas shoe in the bed of ashes under the grate.
She was an old bent woman dressed in black, a little black shadow doubled up in a rocking chair. The fire had died into gray clinkers that were still red in the center and the ashes hadn’t been cleaned out for a week. The kitchen was big and drafty.
“A sup o’ milk,” she said. I was sure she was dying. Her eyes had that desperate, dying look. I looked in the jugs along the table for milk. There was some in the bottom of two jugs, but it had gone sour.
“Over there,” Jack said, pointing to a fresh can of milk on the form along the wall. He was holding her by the shoulders because she had taken a fit of coughing. There were hens on the form picking out of a colander of cold cabbage, and when I went near them they flew down and crossed over to the bottom step of the stairs. The milk was fresh and yellow and there were specks of dust floating on the top of it.
“It’s dusty,” I said.
“There’s a cheesecloth on the dresser.” He pointed. I strained some of the milk through the yellowed, smelly strip of dried muslin, and he put the cup to her lips.
“I don’t want it,” she said, and I could have shaken her. After all that commotion she said she wanted a sweet.
“A sweet for the cough,” she said, gasping for breath between the words. He took some sugar-coated pastilles out of the salt hole in the wall and wiped the dust off them. He put two between her lips and she sucked them like a child. Then she looked at me and beckoned for me to come over.
A candle stood on the mantelpiece beside her, and though it had nearly burned out, the wick had sprung into a final, tall flame and I could see her face very clearly. The yellow skin stretched like parchment over her old bones, and her hands and her wrists were thin and brown like boiled chicken bones. Her knuckles were bent with rheumatism, her eyes almost dead, and I hated to look at her. I was looking at death.
“I must go, Jack,” I said suddenly. I was suffocating.
“Not yet, Caithleen,” he said, and he eased her back in the chair. He put a cushion at the back of her head so that the hard chair did not hurt her scalp. Her hair was white and thin like an infant’s. She smiled as I walked away.
Out in the shop Jack filled me a glass of raspberry cordial and I wished him a happy Christmas.
“Thank you for your letters,” I said.
“You have caught their full implication?” he said, raising his eyes so that his forehead broke into worried lines.
“What implications?” I asked foolishly. So very foolishly.
“Caithleen,” he said, as he breathed deeply and caught hold of my hands. “Caithleen, in time to come I hope to marry you,” and the red cordial in my throat froze to ice.
I got away somehow. There was a threat that the chapped colorless lips would endeavor to kiss mine, so I put the glass on the counter and said, “My father is waiting outside, Jack, I’ll have to run.” I ran and the little latch that clicked as I closed the door clicked on Jacks face, which was transformed by a vague, happy smile. I suppose he thought that he had made a success of it.
I fell over a damn dog in the outside porch. He yelped and turned around as if he was going to bite me, but in the end he didn’t.
“Happy Christmas,” I said to him in gratitude, and went down the street. A motorcar drove up the hill toward me. The headlights were blinding. It slowed down as it came to the top of the hill. It was Mr. Gentleman’s.
“Are you going somewhere?” I asked.
“Yes, I came over for petrol,” he said. It was a lie. I sat in beside him and he warmed my fingers. I put my gloves in my coat pocket.
“Will we go into Limerick for dinner?” he asked. His voice was very tentative, as if he expected to be refused.
“I can’t. I’m going home to play cards. I promised them, and my father is coming over.” He sighed, but otherwise he was quite resigned. It was then that he noticed that I was shivering.
“Caithleen, what’s wrong?” he asked. I tried to tell him about Jack and the old woman’s shoe smoldering away, and the sour milk, and the candle dying in the dirty saucer, and the smell of must on everything. And I told him also about Jack’s proposal and how idiotic it was.
“Curious,” he said, as he smiled.
Please have more feeling, Mr. Gentleman, I begged of him in my mind.
“Have to go now,” he said, and he turned the car in the alley of the bakery shop. I was lonely with him then, because he had not understood what I had been telling him.
He dropped me at the gate and said that he was going home to bed.
“So early?” I asked.
“Yes, I didn’t sleep last night, only on and off.”
“Why not?”
“You know why.” His voice caressed me and his eyes were almost crying when I got out and shut the door gently. He had to open it again and give it a proper bang.
When I went into the hall I knew there was something wrong. Molly and Martha had decorated the Christmas tree and it was standing in a red wooden bucket at the side of the hall stand. It was pretty, with icicles trembling on it and orange sugar-barleyed candles rising out of the green needles. But something was wrong.
“Caithleen.” Martha called me into the room.
“Caithleen,” she said fatally, “your daddy hasn’t come.”
“Why?” I asked, not thinking of the old reason.
“He’s gone, Caithleen—off on a batter. He was giving away fivers in a hotel in Limerick half an hour ago.” I sat down on the arm of her chair and played with the button of my coat and felt the happiness drain out of me.
Molly stopped blowing balloons for a second to tell me something.
“He came here looking for you in the evening, and he said ‘twas a wonder you didn’t go over to see your father instead of off driving with big shots,” Molly said calmly. Mr. Gentleman was a big shot because he never drank in the local pubs, and because he had visitors from Dublin and foreign places. They came to stay with him in the summer. Once a Chief Justice from New York had come and it was mentioned in the local paper.
Baba had the pack of cards in her hands and she was juggling them idly. We played, as we had arranged, and they were all very nice to me and Baba let me win, even though I was a fool at cards. Afterward Molly carried the tree in and put it beside the piano. Some of the icicles fell off and she had to pick them up again.
That Christmas, then, like all the others, was one of waiting, waiting for the worst, except that I was safe in the Brennans’ house. But of course I was never safe in my thoughts, because when I thought of things I was afraid. So I visited people every day, and not once did I go over the road to look at our own house. Declan told me that there were shutters on the windows, and I wondered what the foxes thought when they went into th
e empty hen houses. Bull’s-Eye came most days for food, and he cried and moaned the first day when he saw me and smelled my clothes.
Late on Christmas Eve Mr. Gentleman came when all the others were out. Molly had gone to get a seat in the chapel, two hours before the midnight Mass, and the Brennans went to Limerick to get wine and last-minute things for the Christmas dinner. The turkey was stuffed, and there were several boxes wrapped in fancy paper laid under the tree. A lot of the pine needles had dropped onto the fawn carpet and I was picking them up when he rang. I guessed that it was him. He came in and kissed me in the hall and gave me a little package. It was a small gold watch with a bracelet of gold lace.
“It ticks,” I said, putting it to my ear. It was so small that I had expected it to be a toy. He was going to kiss me again, but we heard a car and he drew back from me, guiltily.
“Oh, Caithleen, we’ll have to be very careful,” he said. The car went past the gate.
“It’s not them,” I said, and went closer to thank him for the beautiful present.
“I love you,” he whispered.
“I love you,” I said. I wished that there was some other way of saying it, some more original way.
My neck was hurting the way he had me held, but it was nice, despite that. I knew the smell of his skin by then and the strength of his arms, shielding me.
“We’ll have to be very careful,” he said a second time.
“We are,” I replied. I hadn’t seen him for two days and thought it a lifetime.
“I can’t see you too often. It’s difficult,” he said. He stammered over the last word. He hated to say it. I shook my head. I, too, was sorry for that tall, dark woman who lived so entirely to herself behind the trees and the white stone house. No one ever saw her except to get a glimpse of her when she knelt in the back seat of the chapel on Sundays. She always hurried away before the last gospel and drove off in Mr. Gentleman’s car. I admired her strength, and it puzzled me why she never bothered to make herself handsome. Always in tweed things and flat laced shoes and mannish hats with a wide brim on them.