by Edna O'Brien
“He’s good to you?” Nell says.
“He’s quite good to me,” Jane says.
Men are hunting deer up in the hills, and the noise of the shots volleys across the field with far greater clarity because of the soundlessness created by the snow. Again, on their way back, they pass the snarling dogs, and they literally run down a hill and across a stubbled field to take a shortcut home. The menu is decided—artichoke soup, roast pork, fried potatoes, and pecan pie. They both profess to be starving. They pass through a village on the way home and Nell stays behind to buy wine and other treats. She lingers outside the one general store, imagining what it would be like to live in such a place—to be wife, widow, or spinster. She thinks again of her own stone house, the scene of occasional parties and gatherings, when her friends come and she and Biddy, a helper from the village, cook for days; then the aftermath, when they clean up.
The three village churches are white and enveloped in snow; the garage is offering a discount on snow tires, and an elderly woman is pushing in the door to the general store, bringing back three circulating-library novels. In the shop window are two hand-printed signs:
WE ARE A FAMILY OF THREE SISTERS LOOKING FOR A HOUSE TO RENT. WE CAN AFFORD UP TO $300.
LOST: HARVEST TABLE, WEATHERED.
She goes inside and buys rashly. Yes, she is curious. Something in Dan’s expression makes her tremble with pleasure. Already she has decided on her wardrobe for tonight, and resolves to be timid, in her best sky-blue georgette dress. She buys a gourd filled with sweets for the little girl and a storm lamp for the little boy.
The children are in the kitchen when she gets back, and how excited they are at receiving these presents. They gabble outrageously about their school lunch, and how gooey it was; then they sing a carol out of harmony; then the little girl admits in a whisper that she loves Nell and gives her a present of a composition she has just written about King Arthur. Nell reads it aloud; it is about King Arthur looking for a magic harp for his bride, Guinevere. The little boy says it is soppy and his sister whacks him with his new lamp. What can she do to help? Nell asks. Jane says she can do nothing. After the ordeal of the night before, and the fitful sleep because of the boiler going on and off, she must be tired and should nap. Jane tells the children that they must be like little mice and do their homework and not squabble.
There is a harness bell attached to the back door, and it trembles a second before it actually rings, and by then he is in. He is like someone out of Nell’s fantasy—an ascetic man in a long leather coat turned up about the neck, and he wears gauntlet gloves, which he immediately begins to remove. His children run to him; he kisses his wife; and, upon being introduced to Nell, he nods, There is something in that nod that is significant. It is too offhand. Nell sees him look at her with his lids lowered, and she sees him stiffen when his wife says that their guest will stay overnight and then points to the wine. He says, “Fancy,” as he looks at the labels with approval, and the children ask if they can make butter sauce for the pecan pie.
Nell is having to tell them, the children, the size of her house in Ireland, the kind of ceiling, the cornices, the different wallpapers in the bedrooms, the orchard, the long tree-lined drive, the white gate, the lych-gate, the supposed ghost, and everything else pertaining to the place. They say they will visit her when they come to Europe. He does not comment but keeps moving about the kitchen. He looks at the thermometer, pushes the kittens to one side with a toe of his shoe, rakes the stove, and then very slowly begins to open the wine. He smells the corks and very carefully attaches them to the sides of the bottles, using the metallic paper as a cord.
Jane is recalling London—springtime there, a hotel in Bays-water, a trip she had made as a girl with a blind aunt—and remarking to Nell how she saw everything so much more clearly simply by having had to describe it to her aunt. She speaks of the picture galleries, the parks, the little squares, the muffins they were served for breakfast, and the high anthracite-colored wire mesh around the London Zoo.
“I like being an escort,” she says shyly.
Suddenly Nell has to excuse herself, saying that she must take a last-minute nap, that her eyes feel scorched.
“I can’t,” she says later as she lies coiled on her bed, trying to eat back her own tears. All she wants is for the man to come up and nuzzle her and hold her and temporarily squeeze all the solitude out of her. All she wants is a kiss. But that is vicious. She foresees the evening, a replica of other evenings—a look, then ignoring him, then a longer look, a signal, an intuition, a hand maybe, pouring wine, brushing lightly against a wrist, the hair on his knuckles, her chaste cuffs, innocent chatter stoked with something else. She imagines the night—lying awake, creaks, desire fulfilled or unfulfilled. She sees it all. She bites the bedcover; she makes a face. Every tiny eye muscle is squeezed together. The chill that she felt up on the road is upon her again. She might clench the bedpost, but it is made of brass and is unwelcoming.
“I’m afraid I can’t,” she says, bursting into the bathroom where Jane has taken a shower. She knows it is Jane because of the shadow through the glass-paneled door.
“Oh, my dear,” Jane says, pushing the door open and stepping out.
“I just realized it isn’t possible,” Nell says, not able to make any excuse except that she has packed and that she must make her plane for New York. Jane says she understands and reaches for a towel to dry herself. Nell begins to help.
“I’m tiny up top,” Jane says, apologizing for her little nipples and flat chest. She drags on a thick sweater, slacks, her husband’s socks, and then she reaches to a china soap dish and picks up a cluster of hairpins, putting them quickly in her long damp hair.
Dan is in the toolshed, and the two women holler goodbye. The children say, “No, no, no,” and to make up for this sudden disappointment, Jane and Nell carry them to the car in their slippers and put them under a blanket on the back seat. They will come for the drive. In the car, Jane says that maybe next year, when the attic room is ready, Nell will come back and stay up there and write her poetry. Jane’s face is faintly Technicolor because of the lights from the dashboard, and her hair is gradually starting to fall down because of the careless way she has put in the hairpins. She looks almost rakish. She says what a shame that Nell has not seen one maple tree in full leaf, to which Nell says yes, that she might come back one day—but she knows that she is just saying this.
Does Jane know? Nell wonders. Does Jane guess? Behind that lovely exterior is Jane a woman who knows all the ways, all the wiles, all the heart’s crooked actions?
“Are you jealous, or do you ever have occasion?” Nell asks.
“I have had occasion,” Jane says.
“And what did you do?” Nell asks.
“Well, the first time I made a scene—a bad scene. I threw dishes,” she says, lowering her voice.
“Christ,” Nell says, but is unable to visualize it, is unable to connect the violence with Jane’s restraint.
“The second time, I started to teach. I kept busy,” Jane says.
They are driving very slowly, and Nell wonders if, in the back, the children are listening as they pretend to sleep under the blanket. Nell looks out of the window at rows of tombstones covered in snow and evenly spaced. The cemetery is on a hill and, being just on the outskirts of the town, seems to command it. It seems integral to the town, as if the living and the dead are wedded to one another.
“And now?” Nell says.
“I guess Dan and I have had to do some growing up,” Jane says.
“Who’s growing up—Daddy?” asks the little girl from under the blanket.
Her mother says, “Yes, Daddy,” and then adds that his feet are getting bigger.
All four of them laugh.
“He liked you,” Jane says, and gives Nell a little glance.
“I doubt it,” Nell says.
“He sure did,” Jane tells her, convinced.
Nell knows then that
Jane has perceived it all and has been willing to let the night and its drama occur. She feels such a tenderness, a current not unlike love, but she does not say a word.
In the airport, they have only minutes to check in the luggage and have Nell’s ticket endorsed. The children become exhilarated and pretend to want to place their slippered feet on the conveyor belt so as to get whisked away. The flight is called.
“I think you’re very fine,” Nell says at the turnstile by the passenger area.
“Not as fine as you,” Jane says.
Something is waiting to get said. It hangs in the air and Nell recalls the newly formed icicles that they had seen on their walk the day before. More than anything she wants to turn back, to sit in that house, beside the stove, to exchange stories and become a friend of this woman. Politeness drives her forward. Her sleeve catches in the metal pike of the turnstile and Jane picks it out, in the nick of time.
“Clumsy,” Nell says, holding up a cuff with one thread raveled.
“We’re all clumsy,” Jane says.
They exchange a look, and realizing that they are on the point of either laughing or crying, they say goodbye hurriedly. Ahead of her Nell sees a long slope of cork-covered floor and for a minute she’s afraid that her legs will not see her safely along it, but they do. Walking down, she smiles and thanks the small voice of instinct that has sent her away without doing the slightest damage to one who meets life’s little treacheries with a smile and dissembles them simply by pretending that they are not meant.
A Rose in the Heart of New York
December night. Jack Frost in scales along the outside of the windows giving to the various rooms a white filtered light. The ice like bits of mirror beveling the puddles of the potholes. The rooms were cold inside, and for the most part identically furnished. The room with no furniture at all—save for the apples gathered in the autumn—was called the Vacant Room. The apples were all over the place. Their smell was heady, many of them having begun to rot. Rooms into which no one had stepped for days, and yet these rooms and their belongings would become part of the remembered story. A solemn house, set in its own grounds, away from the lazy bustle of the village. A lonesome house, it would prove to be, and with a strange lifelikeness, as if it were not a house at all but a person observing and breathing, a presence amid a cluster of trees and sturdy wind-shorn hedges.
The overweight midwife hurried up the drive, her serge cape blowing behind her. She was puffing. She carried her barrel-shaped leather bag in which were disinfectant, gauze, forceps, instruments, and a small bottle of holy water lest the new child should prove to be in danger of death. More infants died around Christmastime than in any other month of the year. When she passed the little sycamore tree that was halfway up, she began to hear the roaring and beseeching to God. Poor mother, she thought, poor poor mother. She was not too early, had come more or less at the correct time, even though she was summoned hours before by Donal, the serving boy who worked on the farm. She had brought most of the children of that parish into the world, yet had neither kith nor kin of her own. Coming in the back door, she took off her bonnet and then attached it to the knob by means of its elastic string.
It was a blue room—walls of dark wet morose blue, furniture made of walnut, including the bed on which the event was taking place. Fronting the fireplace was a huge lid of a chocolate box with the representation of a saucy-looking lady. The tassel of the blind kept bobbing against the frosted windowpane. There was a washstand, a basin and ewer of off-white, with big roses splashed throughout the china itself, and a huge lumbering beast of a wardrobe. The midwife recalled once going to a house up the mountain, and finding that the child had been smothered by the time she arrived, the fatherless child had been stuffed in a drawer. The moans filled that room and went beyond the distempered walls out into the cold hall outside, where the black felt doggie with the amber eyes stood sentinel on a tall varnished whatnot. At intervals the woman apologized to the midwife for the untoward commotion, said sorry in a gasping whisper, and then was seized again by a pain that at different times she described as being a knife, a dagger, a hell on earth. It was her fourth labor. The previous child had died two days after being born. An earlier child, also a daughter, had died of whooping cough. Her womb was sick unto death. Why be a woman. Oh, cruel life; oh, merciless fate; oh, heartless man, she sobbed. Gripping the coverlet and remembering that between those selfsame, much-patched sheets, she had been prized apart, again and again, with not a word to her, not a little endearment, only rammed through and told to open up. When she married she had escaped the life of a serving girl, the possible experience of living in some grim institution, but as time went on and the bottom drawer was emptied of its gifts, she saw that she was made to serve in an altogether other way. When she wasn’t screaming she was grinding her head into the pillow and praying for it to be all over. She dreaded the eventual bloodshed long before they saw any. The midwife made her ease up as she put an old sheet under her and over that a bit of oilcloth. The midwife said it was no joke and repeated the hypothesis that if men had to give birth there would not he a child born in the whole wide world. The husband was downstairs getting paralytic. Earlier when his wife had announced that she would have to go upstairs because of her labor, he said, looking for the slightest pretext for a celebration, that if there was any homemade wine or altar wine stacked away, to get it out, to produce it, and also the cut glasses. She said there was none and well he knew it, since they could hardly afford tea and sugar. He started to root and to rummage, to empty cupboards of their contents of rags, garments, and provisions, even to put his hand inside the bolster case, to delve into pillows; on he went, rampaging until he found a bottle in the wardrobe, in the very room into which she delivered her moans and exhortations. She begged of him not to, but all he did was to wield the amber-colored bottle in her direction, and then put it to his head so that the spirit started to go glug-glug. It was intoxicating stuff. By a wicked coincidence a crony of his had come to sell them another stove, most likely another crock, a thing that would have to be coaxed alight with constant attention and puffing to create a draft. The other child was with a neighbor, the dead ones in a graveyard six or seven miles away, among strangers and distant relatives, without their names being carved on the crooked rain-soaked tomb.
“O Jesus,” she cried out as he came back to ask for a knitting needle to skewer out the bit of broken cork.
“Blazes,” he said to her as she coiled into a knot and felt the big urgent ball—that would be the head—as it pressed on the base of her bowels and battered at her insides.
Curses and prayers combined to issue out of her mouth, and as time went on, they became most pitiful and were interrupted with screams. The midwife put a facecloth on her forehead and told her to push, in the name of the Lord to push. She said she had no strength left, but the midwife went on enjoining her and simulating a hefty breath. It took over an hour. The little head showing its tonsure would recoil, would reshow itself, each time a fraction more, although, in between, it was seeming to shrink from the world that it was hurtling toward. She said to the nurse that she was being burst apart, and that she no longer cared if she died, or if they drank themselves to death. In the kitchen they were sparring over who had the best greyhound, who had the successor to Mick the Miller. The crucifix that had been in her hand had fallen out, and her hands themselves felt bony and skinned because of the way they wrenched one another.
“In the name of God, push, missus.”
She would have pushed everything out of herself, her guts, her womb, her craw, her lights, and her liver, but the center of her body was holding on and this center seemed to be the governor of her. She wished to be nothing, a shell, devoid of everything and everyone, and she was announcing that, and roaring and raving, when the child came hurtling out, slowly at first, as if its neck could not wring its way through, then the shoulder—that was the worst bit—carving a straight course, then the hideous turnabou
t, and a scream other than her own, and an urgent presage of things, as the great gouts of blood and lymph followed upon the mewling creature itself. Her last bit of easiness was then tom from her, and she was without hope. It had come into the world lopsided, and the first announcement from the midwife was a fatality, was that it had clubbed feet. Its little feet, she ventured to say, were like two stumps adhering to one another, and the blasted cord was bound around its neck. The result was a mewling piece of screwed-up, inert, dark-purple misery. The men subsided a little when the announcement was shouted down and they came to say congrats. The father waved a strip of pink flesh on a fork that he was carrying and remarked on its being unappetizing. They were cooking a goose downstairs and he said in future he would insist on turkey, as goose was only for gobs and goms. The mother felt green and disgusted, asked them to leave her alone. The salesman said was it a boy or a child, although he had just been told that it was a daughter. The mother could feel the blood gushing out of her, like water at a weir. The midwife told them to go down and behave like gentlemen.
Then she got three back numbers of the weekly paper, and a shoe box with a lid, and into it she stuffed the mess and the unnecessaries. She hummed as she prepared to do the stitching down the line of tom flesh that was gaping and coated with blood. The mother roared again and said this indeed was her vinegar and gall. She bit into the crucifix and dented it further. She could feel her mouth and her eyelids being stitched, too; she was no longer a lovely body, she was a vehicle for pain and for insult. The child was so quiet it scarcely breathed. The afterbirth was placed on the stove, where the dog, Shep, sniffed at it through its layers of paper and for his curiosity got a kick in the tail. The stove had been quenched, and the midwife said to the men that it was a crying shame to leave a good goose like that, neither cooked nor uncooked. The men had tom off bits of the breast so that the goose looked wounded, like the woman upstairs, who was then tightening her heart and soul, tightening inside the array of catgut stitches, and regarding her whole life as a vast disappointment. The midwife carried the big bundle up to the cellar, put an oil rag to it, set a match to it, and knew that she would have to be off soon to do the same task elsewhere. She would have liked to stay and swaddle the infant, and comfort the woman, and drink hot sweet tea, but there was not enough time. There was never enough time, and she hadn’t even cleaned out the ashes or the cinders in her grate that morning.