by Mary Gordon
And in her father’s store, she’d tie her apron on, feel the cool coins between her fingers and the satisfying thump as they would drop down in the till. And she would think: Why leave? Her father’s silence, and his fear, she’d lose that prize as well. Then she would hear the words of Marin Monahan. “Tommy-love,” she’d say. And Ellen would think: I will leave this. I will take the mother; you, Marin Monahan, will die without your own kind, a barren woman on your bed alone.
Everyone in town had turned against Thomas Costelloe, his own family and Marin’s too. Behind his back people called him adulterer, and usurer, and thief, though he stole nothing: all his money he had earned from his intelligence and his hard work. She’d not let anybody say a word against her father. If they tried, if anybody tried—the townspeople, her ax-faced aunt, one of the nuns at school—she’d turn to them the proud face that was his face. They would be silenced. She wanted the job of his punishment for herself; she’d not let others share in it. She hadn’t a friend in the town now, only Anna Foley, who’d asked on Ellen’s sixteenth birthday, “When is it that you think you’ll make the trip?”
Would she have left if the bees in the church hadn’t so terrified her? Their noise was the clamor of her fear, the drone of her entrapment. Their stain, their leavings were the family sin. That day in church, the first day of their swarming, she’d broken into a sweat; each movement terrified her. But what appalled her most was her sense of being alone in her terror. No one in the pews around her seemed to fear the horror she could see about to strike them all. They moved their lips; they knelt, and sat, and rose again; they understood or did not understand the Latin. They didn’t break and run; they didn’t search for cover. Kind-and stupid-faced as the sheep on the hill outside, or unperturbed as stone, they formed a ring she couldn’t break or break into. Outside the church, the priest who called her “Ellen dear” and never felt the duty to bring the mother the sacrament joked with the young mothers and wondered at the weather.
In those nights she woke in terror at the sound of swarming in her dreams. But she didn’t leave for that. Her anger drove her out, anger at the gratitude of all the congregation when the bees were gone. They had done nothing to prevent the horror, but it had been prevented. Her idea of justice had been mocked; they thanked God for the mockery. She couldn’t wait to leave them.
She wrote to Delia saying she would come and Delia wrote back with information about her passage. She sent lists of prices and departures. The father never came to the stone house now.
It was easy to deceive him. Anna Foley paid her brother from her own wages to bring back the trunk that Ellen bought at Gort, and then to drive Ellen to Cork in the dog cart.
Coolly, Ellen did all the things that needed to be done. She wrote to Delia; she arranged her passage and her papers. She was nearly seventeen but looked much older. Yet the day before she was to leave, when she saw her father’s back in the town for what she knew would be the last time, the pain she felt was like a spike through the center of her chest. It was a child’s pain, allowing no hope of future relief. She longed for the father’s back, his boots, the harsh tweed of his jacket. She would not forgive him; he was a danger to her. Yet she knew these things of his were all she treasured; she longed to give herself up, to be carried on that back like a child, the weight of her life no longer her own, but a man’s. Her father’s.
“No use in staying any longer,” Anna Foley said, sensing the impatience of her brother’s horses. The mother looked out on the deadened grasses, did not look at her daughter. And the child’s heart in Ellen’s breast cried out, “Mother, tell me I can’t leave you.” But the dead eyes would not turn towards her, nor the hand return the pressure she applied.
She left by moonlight and the countryside she hated was saturated with beauty. The invisible meadows loomed in her mind. Her feet ached for the touch of the white road. She closed her eyes; she made herself desire nothing of what she passed.
The light came up as they approached Cork City. By the time they were in Queenstown, it was morning. Anna’s brother left her, silent, as he had been since she’d known him, on her own with her trunk at the office of the steamship line. Too frightened to talk to a city person, he took tail and left her by herself to sort out her business. And she was glad to see him go; his country boy’s sense of inferiority was right: he was a lesser mortal. It was her first time in a city, but she felt that she was born to it. She liked the bustle of the quayside, the forms she must fill out, and herself in the tumult, her own fixity within the moving crowd.
On the ship, she kept entirely to herself. She watched the other girls, who flirted and ate oranges, showing their large white teeth as they popped sections of the fruit into their mouths just to torment the men. She watched them run upstairs and downstairs, share their biscuits and their mother’s baking, speculate about the rich passengers, and look up longingly at the first-class deck. She would have none of it. She stood out on the second-class deck, letting the cold wind hurt her. And thought of her mother, sitting, noticing nothing, and the father’s high, proud back that she would never see again. She’d be interrupted in her thoughts by the foolish buzzing around her, the ridiculous girls talking, their words in the air around her when she stood out on the deck or when she tried to sleep. That buzzing that she hated. Nothing she could distinguish. But a danger to herself, that thing she was by herself, apart from other people, that thing that people had to keep their distance from. Throughout her life she’s had to fight against that buzzing, keep herself from it, tell the truth about it: it’s a danger, it makes you lose the things about yourself you know: who you are, what the truth of the world is. It makes you forget what’s important. Insistent, confusing, trivial: never going beyond itself, doubling back upon itself, thickening and crying out. Listen to me. Me.
That clear call from the outside world, the horn note sounded through bright air, the music that rang out, pointed, singular, it could so easily be lost in the buzzing, the swarm. You could so easily forget who you were, that large acts were possible, that the world could change, you could change, could get away. All her life it’s been around her; she’s had to fight it using all her strength. The hateful buzzing of the bees in Knock James Church that no one told the truth about or knew enough to fear. Lying in her bed, a ninety-year-old woman, her hair on her shoulders in the thin braids her granddaughter has plaited, she mutters against the girls aboard the ship. She clenches her hands that are claws now and she curses them all. The fools in her life that have crowded her, have buzzed around her. They’re round her again, buzzing voices, words said by whoever they are straightening her bedclothes, putting tubes into her mouth, her sex, taking her blood, making her eat when she can’t bear to eat, when she would like to be simple, empty, easily taken up into death, but they won’t let her, they won’t let her alone, they never have, she’s had to fight them. All her life.
She’s vanquished them sometimes, she’s been free of them, felt herself grow straight, become a bare branch against a brilliant sky, a spire pointing upwards, a lance, the dark horizontal stroke beneath a column of correctly added figures. She sees with satisfaction that her hands and arms are bone; the sharpness of her body is a source of pleasure to her. She will raise her bone hand to anybody who comes near her. She can’t move her body but she still can raise her arms. She will keep herself untouched. The touch of anything on her skin now is agony. They know it and keep on touching her. “Don’t touch me,” she keeps saying. They don’t listen.
She would like to die. But she refuses to become only her death.
At night on the ship she heard them crying for their mothers. She hated them for that. Grown girls, she said between her teeth, crying like babies. They’ll never make it in America. She created for each of them a separate dire end: for each of them a fate: drunk, slattern, streetwalker. She thought that in a few months, she’d pass them on the street and not give them the pennies that they begged for. Not a cent to any of them. Not a one of
them. Not a single one.
She is horrified by her physical weakness. She hasn’t liked her body. Times with Vincent, though, she did. Now she regrets what she let him do to her. She allowed him to unseal her; it is his fault now that life spills out of her, spills over into death. She wishes herself intact. She curses Vincent for the thing he did. Why did she let him? She wants a stone now for a body, smooth, a weapon, closed. Now her body keeps nothing back. The buzzing now is able to enter through her openness, travel through her blood into her skull, confusing everything, eating away the healthy living matter of her brain. She can’t distinguish and she cannot recognize.
Out of her mouth come filthy warnings. Words she doesn’t know she heard but understands. It must be stopped; she must tell all of them. She says the filthy things about the bodies of all men. Their filthy hands and mouths and hidden parts they show as if it were their glory. They do it to you and you lie in pools of blood. Your life goes out of you because of them.
She wants to warn someone, a woman, she does not know who. But no one understands her. She says the wrong things. She remembers now. The faces around her cannot understand her words. When she says, “Bring me my glasses,” they bring her a toothbrush, water, a handkerchief, a pill. When she throws it at them, knowing they’re trying to trick her, they say, “You asked for this. You asked for water.” She tries to find the word for glasses. She shines the light of her mind into the store of words and looks in the place where she sees the image of her glasses. There is no word there to go with the picture. Darkness. What was the storehouse of her words, stocked, overflowing, is a dusty emptiness. There are no words that name the things she sees. She shines the light of her mind backwards and forwards on the shelves of objects that she means to name. The light searches. Backwards and forwards. There is nothing. She used to think someone had done this to her as a punishment. But now she understands. There are no thieves or punishers. Nothing has been stolen or kept back. Everything is simply, for no reason, gone.
She is remembering the boat now. She remembers landing, but she can’t remember what she saw: the buzz around her took her up, so she saw nothing, barely heard her name, knew only that she’d been let through. Her father hadn’t sent the word ahead about her. No one in America had learned she was a thief.
Delia was there to meet the boat. With Jimmy Flaherty, her husband, born a fool like Delia, but good-natured like her too. That’s it, she remembers now. She wanted to forgive them for their natures. For not looking at the truth. For Delia making her say all these years: “Look at this, Delia, look at it now.” From childhood she’d had to push the truth under her friend’s nose. And even then Delia wouldn’t see.
She calls out Delia’s name. She hears Delia’s name in the room. She’s done it, it’s the right name, fitting the face she sees in her mind. The buzzing stops; the fog lifts. She remembers objects of the past and has the names of them. She remembers the kind of things she liked to look at. Things seen best from far away, or set apart from other things surrounding them. She sees posters slapped up against a wall: MEETING TONIGHT—FUN FAIR—VACCINATIONS FOR DISTEMPER. She sees brass numbers on a black door. A steel bridge. A steep-roofed house. She tries to make her mind stay with these things. If she can do it, she can break out of this dead light. The light she always hated is the envelope containing her whole life now; it is all she sees. As a girl, she’d hated the tall conifers outside the house her father had built to hide her mother. Their heavy needles hid the lines on the branches; their thick growth devoured light. She’d run, as a girl, to get away from those trees, out to the place on the road that opened up, where beech took over, larch, and the hawthorn began. Now there is no breaking out. The distorted light that won’t allow her to distinguish one thing from another, that won’t let her say: This thing, and that, and then the other—is the only light available to her. And yet she fears the loss of it. She’s not ready to relinquish herself to what she knows will follow. Darkness. Silence. The end of everything that is.
If she could see a face around her she could put a name to! But there is no familiar face. The objects merge and lose distinction. The fog covers over. The buzzing begins again. She’ll never find it now, that thing she wanted. She slips back; she feels tears coming; she has lost the thing she had a glimpse of. All she can see is Delia’s face.
She always had to keep telling Delia everything. She didn’t understand a blessed thing. But sometimes Ellen was grateful to her. Delia had seen the mother and been silent. In the town, in the stone house of the mother’s shame, and after in America. So there was that. But Delia did too much, Ellen couldn’t stand that, she could never stand it. Delia cried too easily; she laughed too loud. You could never get her to sit still and just look at a thing or listen long enough to get it right. The nuns were after her for it every minute. Delia’d be twisting in her seat, fiddling with her hair, examining her nails, her skirt, her handkerchief. She’d be wiping her eyes after a fit of laughing, with a fit of weeping on its heels. She’d be up getting you something: a cup of tea, a biscuit, a cardigan. She’d open a window for you. Did you feel a draft? She’d shut the door. No stillness. Vincent was the one for that. He could be still and listen to a thing and get it right. Bring up an angle of a thing you hadn’t thought of. But never Delia.
She wants to rise up so she can correct Delia. Then she remembers: Delia is dead. She wants to rise up against her old friend’s death. And then she understands: she can’t rise. They’ve strapped her in. That’s it, she remembers now. They’ve tied her up. A prisoner. A head of cattle. She won’t let them make her an animal. She’ll strike at them now. They can’t keep her down. She feels that, even dead, Delia needs her. Needs her to hold on to the image of her face so she won’t be swallowed up in darkness. She’s impatient now with Delia’s calling out to her, needing her to pull her back, to keep a hold on her.
She always needed something, Delia. Always needed help, always mucked up her life, always needed pulling out. Always Delia came to Ellen. At the Presentation convent: “Cripes, I’ve lost my Latin, I can’t find my Rosary, I’ve spent my mission money, El, I’m in the soup.” Delia that everybody liked. The yellow curls, pinchable cheeks, bottom asking for a man to slap it, round white arms. Too free, too thankful. The nice children she could not keep fed. Tears then. “I’ll have to give the youngest up. I’ll have to send him to the orphanage. I haven’t any choice.”
“I’ll take him for a while. You’ll not be sending him to any nuns.”
A nice boy, Delia’s Tommy, Grateful like his mother. Nicer than her own. Her own had hated it that she’d brought in a child to live with them who wasn’t of their blood. They’d grudged him every spoonful, every drop of medicine, every stitch of clothes, every kind word from her or Vincent. That was the girls. Did John? No, he couldn’t have. John had been kind.
Her girls were never nice. Vain, primping, thinking only of themselves. And supplicating. Do this for me. Give me that. Their greedy voices. Their refusal to take part in life. No, that was Magdalene. Theresa didn’t ask for things. Theresa refused. I’ll take nothing from you, she’d said, turning from the breast at six months, drinking from a cup to spite her mother. Vincent saw none of it. “They’re good girls. Be a little softer with them.” One a coward and the other heartless. Lacking the important thing, both of them, lacking what was needed. What would count. Life. They weren’t interested in life.
It wasn’t just that they were girls. Cam wasn’t like them. Cam was like Bella, her real friend. Where is Bella? She calls out to her. Why is it Delia’s face she sees when it’s Bella she wants? The both of them are dead; why is it Delia’s face that comes? Bella is somewhere in the fog. Among the other dead. She’s furious at Delia for taking the place she wants to give to Bella. It’s Delia’s fault, just as it had been Delia’s fault that Ellen’s first job had been in service. Delia with her greenhorn’s fear, her hiding out among her kind, her terror of the first thing not out of the same bog she came from. “My
Jimmy has a cousin has a friend, says there’s a place. All ready for you. El, you’d never have a moment’s worry.” Of course, she took the place, grateful as she was to Delia, and wet behind the ears, not knowing one thing about America, relying on Delia and Jimmy for advice. As good advice as she would have got from their Brendan, who was two when she arrived, or Margaret, who was just six months.
She’d never get over the disgrace of it. Even the words themselves shameful: “in service.” And why should she serve? Cleaning the shit of people she was better than. “But, El, you’ve such a lovely job,” Delia would say. “Mrs. Fitzpatrick’s lady’s maid. I’d give my eye teeth for it. Any girl would, Ellen. All the lovely stuff, the clothes, the hairbrushes. Tell me about those hairbrushes again.”
“I’ll not talk about the nonsense one more time to you. They could clothe and feed a family for a year, those hairbrushes.” She gave Delia the look she put on when she wanted Delia to know she had been stupid. She did it when she felt the rage coming on her, rage that she could do nothing about the circumstances of the world that held and choked her and kept back her life.
She had not had the strength to make her father do the right thing, leave that woman, come back to the stone house, cure her mother with his living there. Make her mother beautiful, make her sing. Make up for the blood. Make up for the body that would not hold. The failing body, all the parts of it that must be hidden, covered up.