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The Light of Evening

Page 4

by Edna O'Brien


  The basin of the Atlantic Ocean is a long trough, separating the old world from the new. This ocean furrow was probably scored into the solid crust of our planet by the almighty hand—that there be waters which he calls seas might be gathered together so as to let dry land appear. Could the waters of the North Atlantic be drawn off so as to expose to view this great sea gash, which separates continents and extends from the Arctic to the Antarctic, it would present a scene most rugged, grand, and imposing, the very ribs of the solid earth with the foundations of the sea would be brought to light and we should have at one view in the empty cradle of the ocean, a thousand fearful wrecks, with that fearful army of dead men’s skulls, great anchors, heaps of pearls, and inestimable stores, which in the poet’s eye lay scattered at the bottom of the sea, making it hideous with the sights of ugly death.

  Ellis Island

  IN THE BIG HALL under a roof that leaked, we were herded into different groups, our names and our numbers tagged onto our chests, the inspectors like hawks, looking for every sickness, every flaw, every deformity, brutes at sending people back.

  I had never known, never thought, that God had created so many different races—different attires, different hairstyles and headgears, men with ringlets and small skullcaps, women the size of tubs because of the clothes, the bundles they had wrapped around themselves, and their children roped to them in case they got lost. When children cried parents gave them their dolls and demanded medicines for them, which they fed them off spoons as if they were little gods. Suspicion in all eyes. Exiled from where we came and exiled now from each other, the waiting as dreadful as the journey on the ship.

  To have caught sight of New York, the tops of the tall buildings pink in the dawn haze, was to wish more than ever to be set down in it. It seemed so idyllic, barges and boats moored in the harbor, the water calm and glassy, and the birds not at all like the venomous ones that had gone down after the little corpse.

  On the island of tears, we were subjected to every kind of humiliation, our tongues pressed, our eyelids lifted with a button- hook, our hearts listened to, our hair examined for lice, then our bodies hosed down by foreign ladies who had not a shred of modesty.

  Then came the test for our reading and writing skills. People stammering and hesitating as they stumbled over the words of the Psalms:

  This our bread we took hot for our provisions out of our houses on the day we came forth unto you.

  Behold thy time was the time of love and I spread my skirt over thee and covered thy nakedness.

  All around there were tears and pleadings, people sent back to wait, others dispatched into nearby rooms, and one lady in a scraggy fur coat down on her knees, holding her husband’s ankles, clinging to him, “Aoran, Aoran,” his tag a different color from hers, signifying that he was being sent back, forever. The whole hall was looking at her and though she spoke in a foreign tongue, it was clear that she would not be parted from him. He tried reasoning with her but to no avail, then all of a sudden she spat onto her fingers, wiped them on his eyelids, and then ran her damp fingers across her own, to contract the eye disease that she guessed he had. The guards were on her like dogs. She whirled and struck out, they grappling but unable to hold her and her husband looking at her with a coldness, such a coldness, as if he did not love her, had never loved her, as that was the only way to make her go on.

  The inspector, scrutinizing my passbook where my mother had made me copy out household hints, called a second inspector over and I thought it meant refusal. They read it together and then told me to read it aloud and I realized that I was being made a laughingstock, a greenhorn with her household tips.

  Rules for Management of Family Wash:

  Rub line with a cloth to ensure cleanliness.

  Economize on space and pegs.

  Hang all garments the wrong side out.

  Place all garments with their openings to the wind.

  Put pegs in thickest part of garment folding.

  Hang tablecloths bag shaped.

  Hang flannels in shade.

  Hang stockings within one inch of toe, wrong side out.

  When my papers were stamped, I smarted at seeing the words domestic servant, but I had passed and I was trooping out into a world that seemed both strange and carnival-like, people bustling around, youngsters tugging and grabbing at my luggage, hawkers with baskets of fruits, apples and peaches, a blush on their soft skins as if they had been randomly rouged.

  The Great Hall

  WHAT HAD THOSE white-tiled walls and black pillars not witnessed?

  People so overjoyed at being united that they wept with relief, others with despair in their eyes, fearing the worst, and Mary Angela in a blue knitted suit, like a mermaid, molded into it, walking up and down, gauging her chances. Before long she caught the attentions of a man who had hurried in, a well-dressed man with a mustache. They hadn’t even exchanged a word, only gestures, and yet she knew, knew by the black armband on his sleeve, by his gaze, that he was a husband in mourning. All she did was put one hand under her breasts like she was weighing them and he came across to her, and soon after they went upstairs to an office, where it seemed he got her papers sanctioned to leave with him. She told us that she was going to be a wet nurse to his little son. We hadn’t seen her since the evening of the drowning, but we’d heard that she had made herself very popular in the upper quarters and milked Captain DeVere’s goats, morning and night.

  My cousin had not come.

  A sign above Madam Aisha’s beauty parlor offered to curl women’s hair and paint their faces for a reasonable sum. Many availed of it before having their photographs taken at the kissing station. Couples gazing into each other’s eyes. A lady kept begging of me, “Do something for me, my most beloved sister,” except that I couldn’t. My cousin had not come. Boats came on the hour, people left, and the brown puddly water kept plashing on the shore, endlessly, and it was as if I were imprisoned there forever.

  If my cousin did not come I would be put in one of the brick buildings with flags flying from the turrets, put there and be kept until my parents had sent the money for my passage home. Even Sheila had gone. “Call up some Sunday if you’re passing,” she said as she left with three friends. She lived on 22nd Street, wherever that was. A tall man kept pestering me, kept saying, “You must be Mary Mountjoy,” and I pretended that I didn’t understand him, in case I was kidnapped. That was the word, Sheila had dinned into us on the voyage, not to be kidnapped and not to have cheeky youngsters run off with our luggage, pretending that we were bound for Baltimore or Connecticut, or places unknown to us.

  When my cousin came it was not the reunion I expected. She said why the tears, why the sulking. Did I not know she would come? She was not in the least bit like the tinted picture of herself that her mother had shown my mother; she was much stouter and her clothes were drab.

  Where we docked it was bitter cold, the remains of snow on a swerve of dirty grass, a black man with long tapering fingers played a fiddle, played the different tunes to appeal to the emigrants, jog memories of their homelands. “Enjoying yourself, honey … going to marry the man you dreamed of,” he said to me and started to dance a jig. Mary Kate was furious and lugged me away. He laughed and called after her, “It’s not a funeral, baby,” and dragging me she said, “You stay near me now, you stay near me now,” vexed because he had made fun of her.

  Everything then so hurried, getting the ticket, getting on the train, going through tunnels, then ugly sooted buildings, depots, rundown houses, and not a word exchanged between us. I could feel she was angry with me because of my gawkiness, because of my accent and my oilskin bag, bound with twine. She talked to herself, mumbled, as the train rumbled along. Then all of a sudden her mood changed and she kissed me and hugged me and said my mother and her mother were first cousins and that meant that she and I were second cousins and would be buddies. We were going to the borough, the borough being much nicer than the city, leafier and closer to nature
.

  The boarding house was in a street of houses that were all identical and in the dusk they looked mud-colored, but afterward in daylight I saw that they were more the color of rhubarb. We had to tiptoe. There were umbrellas and a walking stick in a china holder in the hall. She said he was a blackamoor. He had a brown face, his red eyes rimmed with silver ore. The kitchen was shared with many others, their foodstuffs on different trays with their names and a very old icebox that grunted and had odd things in it, like soft cheese in muslin and a bowl of beetroot soup. She made me stick my head inside it to feel how cold it was. Ice was precious. In the hospital where she worked packs of ice were put over the heads of the lunatics so that they could rant and rave without being heard. She had kept me some eats—bread with meat paste and a cold rice pudding. A lady came to fetch something out of the icebox but didn’t throw us a word. After she left Mary Kate stuck her tongue out, said she didn’t like her, she was foreign, all the other lodgers were foreign except us. We didn’t stay long in the kitchen, it being communal, whereas her bedroom was private. We had to go through another bedroom with a couple and a baby and my heavy laced boots creaked awful.

  It was topsy-turvy in her quarters, clothes, shoes, dishes, and coat hangers skewed about. A red quilt with herringbone stitch was pulled up over her bed, by way of making it. She was an auxiliary nurse but training to be a true nurse because that was her calling, to serve mankind. She was a Martha. There were Marys and Marthas, but Marys got all the limelight because of being Christ’s handmaiden, but Marthas were far more sincere. Because it was a special occasion she would allow herself a little toddy. She wanted me to know that she was not a drinker but now and then had a drink as a pick-me-up. From a small bottle she poured some into a mug, kicked her shoes off, then threw off her glasses, and her eyes without them looked dopey and sheepish. Tears gushed out of her when I gave her the porter cake my mother sent and she hugged me. After that it was all “gee whiz.” Gee whiz, I was out of the bogs now, I was in the beautiful borough, starting a new life. We would go to Coney in the summer. I didn’t know what Coney was but imagined it a place full of rabbits. She laughed at that. Coney was the last word in thrills, roller-skating, love rides, stunts such as being sucked into the mouth of a giant tobacco pipe and slid out through the bowl at the other end. She’d gone there in the summer with a beau, a beau that worked in construction but announced one day he had to move on. That was the thing about America, people always moving on, so that a girl had to snap up a beau as fast as she could. She recalled the day, the petting, dancing cheek to cheek in the open air with the ocean breezes drifting in and she believing that she was hitched up.

  The bathroom was on the other side of the bedroom where the couple with the baby slept. It meant disturbing them. The first two times she came with me and showed me a knack of pulling the chain so that it made the least amount of noise. By the third time she was furious. What was wrong with me. Did I have a tapeworm or what. She raised the sash of the window as far up as it would go and lifted me out onto the stone ledge, then pulled the window down to teach me a lesson. I could hear the rumble of cars in the street beyond. Perched there, terrified and certain that I would fall or jump, she laughing at the joke, I saw again the sign in the examination hall that had said CRIPPLES NOT WANTED and began to batter on the window.

  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 fr
om 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 lych-gate 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.

 

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