The Light of Evening

by Edna O'Brien

  It was when she saw the pencil that the blind man had given me that she went berserk.

  “Who was the blind man?”

  “He didn’t say.”

  “What did he want?”

  “Nothing.”

  “What did he do to you?”

  “Nothing.”

  “Where did he want to take you?”

  “To Wonderland.”

  Wonderland! She went mad at the word. It was the very same as if he had kidnapped me. Kidnapped. She said it three times. One of the lodgers preparing her supper looked on, aghast. Her daughter said, “Mama take dictionary,” and they took a dictionary from the dresser but Mary Kate’s tirade was too fast for them. She was wording the telegram of condolence that she must send to my mother and father. “My dear Katherine and James, it is with the deepest regret that I have to inform you that your daughter is missing.” She believed it. She who had vouched for me, she who had hawked all the way to the depot to meet me and had welcomed me was now the one to have to forward the bad news. The woman holding the dictionary threw it down: “She crazy, she get crazier, all the Irish people they go crazy … they drunkards … they break the tooths.”

  In bed Mary Kate cried, said she shouldn’t have shouted at me but it was for my own good, I could have ended up in a house of shame. Then, and between swigs from the bottle that was under her pillow, she relayed the story of Annie, a girl from Wicklow. She’d met Annie’s brother Pol, a broken man, going around to the bars and the dance halls, telling his story, or rather Annie’s story. When Annie’d got off the boat aged sixteen there was no one to meet her, the cousins that were to meet her had not shown up. Seeing her all alone and unbefriended, a well-dressed woman came across to her and offered to give her shelter, had papers to vouch for her character. So she went with her, thinking she was going to a convent. Instead she was brought to a big house with a madam, where she was made a prisoner and groomed to be a prostitute. No one heard from her back at home, her poor mother getting more and more anxious as time passed, until eventually they realized that something dreadful had happened to her and they scraped and they scraped to find the money for her brother to come to America, which he did. He went from one borough to the next, went to the priests who referred him to the bishop, paid a detective agency, and finally Annie’s whereabouts were discovered. He went one night, wearing a trilby hat, disguised as much as he could, showed up as a customer, sat in a room along with the other men, drinking, waiting their turns to go upstairs, and the madam, realizing it was his first time, showed him photos of her little troupe. He chose his sister. The madam said he would have to wait quite a while as the lady, Vivien she called her, was extremely popular, especially with the regular clients. He drank champagne since that was the thing to do, but kept sober. When he found himself in the room with Vivien, in a gown, with soft lighting and the bed replete with pillows, she calling him “Baby, baby,” he nearly died. She asked him his name, was he shy, was it his first time, and so forth and unable to restrain himself a second longer, he tore off his disguises and said, “Annie, Annie,” which was her real name. She drew back, thinking maybe that he had a dagger or a gun. He told her not to be frightened, he was her brother and loved her as a brother and had come to get her out of there. She hung her head. He thought it was shame. He begged of her to put her clothes on and walk out of that house with him, but she refused. He pleaded. He asked her why. She said for his own sake he’d better leave, as there were toughs on call, who would beat him to a pulp. Finally she said that she had no wish to go. His own sister. “What will I tell our mother?” he asked.

  “Tell her I’m dead,” she answered.

  Mary Kate was crying buckets, for Annie, for herself, and seeing that she had softened a bit I said, “Mary Kate, I want to go home.”

  “You can’t go home,” she kept saying, hysterically, and it was like a death sentence.

  Dear Dilly

  I COULD HEAR my mother talking to me the second I opened her letter, talking and scolding.

  I take my pen in my hand twice within a month to say how worried I am about your silence. I have not heard from you in two weeks. I beg you to write to us. Do you not know, do you not recall our situation here? We are barely able to keep a roof over our heads. To make matters worse we had a setback. Things have conspired against us. Your father swore me to secrecy, but I have to tell someone, what with your brother hardly ever here. With the money he got for the corn that he brought to the mill, he decided to treat himself to a pair of boots and unfortunately got the shopkeeper to grease them in order to wear them on the ten-mile walk home. That was his mistake. He was crippled in them but could not return them because of having been seen to wear them. They’re no good to anyone. You say you are looking for a post and I pray that you have secured it by now. It seems your cousin is not as friendly to you as she could be. That’s sincerity for you. I will say nothing to her mother about it as there would only be a coolness. I’ll be watching for the postman. I now bring this letter to a close, your loving mother,

  Bridget

  Mass

  I COULD NOT write back and tell her how strange and false everything was. My cousin drinking in secret and hiding the empty bottles in a shoebox under the bed. My cousin pretending she was a nurse when it turned out that she washed patients and dressed them, her hands pink and raw-looking from all the washing.

  In the lodging house the people kept to themselves, slunk into their rooms, their doors usually locked, and in the kitchen and in the icebox their names printed on their provisions, on the strange foods that they ate, bread that was a brown-black and little cucumbers that tasted vinegary. We stole a few when we were hungry, which was usually at the end of the week when Mary Kate’s money ran out. The gold sovereign and the florin my mother gave me was confiscated toward my keep.

  Everything hinged on money, the paved street and the parts where the paving ran out and pigs ran wild and were pelted with cabbage stalks.

  That first Sunday in the palatial church with its altar and side altars, the priest’s sermon centered on the parable of the camel unable to pass through the eye of the needle, no more than the rich man would be able to enter heaven. He was a visiting priest, his skin dark and shining like dark shining mahogany, the folds between his dark fingers were a pale shell-pink and there swam in his eyes such faith, such fervor. The congregation, he said, was indeed lucky to be living in such a leafy borough with its clapboard houses, its stone mansions, and its lines of beautiful trees, but that such comforts had been obtained at a price. The past could not be blotted out. The very site on which we knelt had been stolen from others. He cited the first settlers, mostly Dutch, who had come to the new world, the New Amsterdam, come to the fields of wild blackberries and hickory, where deer, muskrat, and wild turkeys roamed, honest men and women by their own standards and yet prepared to cheat the tribes of Lenape Indians, traded guns and wool for the pelts of animals that they sold for fortunes, gradually acquiring the deeds of those lands so that the native tribes were driven out, the great open tracts cut up in lots, to make houses, to make streets, to make progress, to make the colossal wealth that some, but not all, enjoyed. And what, he asked, did the newspapers and the politicians do? They colluded in their corruption, in their greed, backroom politics, and party patronage, ensuring that the cunning few reaped the fat of the land.

  People coughed and fidgeted to show their disapproval, a few even walked out and afterward he was shunned when he stood outside the chapel door in his gold vestments to greet them. Mary Kate shook his hand and lingered because he was so good-looking and on the way home said that it was all right to shake hands with a priest because a priest was made in the image of Christ, it was not like kissing a beau in one of the rides, at Coney.

  Mr. and Mrs. McCormack

  A DIFFERENT PRIEST brought me to my first job. His car was chocolate-colored with a hooded top, the smell of the leather seats so clean, so cleansing, and he put on motor gloves befo
re we set out.

  He kept impressing on me how eminent my new employers were, esteemed in the parish, the husband high up in a bank, his wife so musical that she paid to have the choir trained because she liked a sung Mass. He reckoned I was lucky to be placed in such a select neighborhood, what with the park opposite with its meadows and waterfalls, and moreover I wouldn’t feel lonesome as there were sheep in it and I could hear them bleating at night.

  It was a big stone house with stone figures on the gable ends and a foot scraper at the top of the flight of steps. The double glass doors were fronted with wrought iron so that nobody could see in, but the woman inside who was waiting for us was tapping irritably on the glass. Mrs. McCormack, my future boss. “What an hour of night to come,” she said to him, then throwing me a sarcastic look she asked, “Is she from Roscommon, one of the sheep stealers?” The priest tried to smooth matters, said he had had a sick call and hence the inconsiderate hour.

  It was the husband, Pascal, who led me to my sleeping quarters. Two flights of carpeted stairs with brass rods and then linoleum the higher we went. The last bit of stairs was so narrow that we had to walk sideways and my bag that had crossed the seas kept bumping into him. He opened a bedroom door and sent me in. There were two narrow beds with a girl in one of them. In the light from the landing I could see she was blond, nearly an albino, and wore a nightgown that buttoned up to her throat. She was like a weasel.

  “You are in my sleeping room,” she said as she sat up and thrashed her arms to get rid of me. I forget how I undressed in the dark, but I must have and I must have slept because I wakened with her pulling me out of the bed because the missus was calling for her breakfast. The missus shouted her orders from three floors down, shouted them into a pipe, and we heard them through a hole in the wall that had a brass shield over it. The girl, her name was Solveig, tore to the kitchen, with me trailing her. That morning, as with all the mornings, it was the missus’s breakfast, her husband’s breakfast, then running her bath and her footbath and laying out her clothes for the day. She had such a rich assortment of corsets, frilly drawers, and morning coats and her day jewelry was kept separate from the jewelry down in the safe.

  She had a down on me from day one, remarking on the way I clumped, my flat arches, my brogue, my unkempt crop of hair.

  Nothing but rules. Rule the first: no callers at the front door. Rule the second: no callers at the back door. Rule the third: no going out after dark. The six dusters had to be washed each evening and accounted for. She took me on a tour of the house, blowing about everything, Chesterfield this and Chesterfield that, the grand piano that was never played in all the time I was there, the Ormolu clock, the terracotta busts, the jasper veinings in the marble fireplace, a cellarette with decanters of port and sherry and, most prized of all, her secretaire, a Napoleon III desk, full of nooks and crannies and pigeonholes, where she and I and Mr. would have our battle one day.

  After that it was into the dining room to point to the dinner set, to have me count it, white plates with birds on swinging boughs, soup plates, starter plates, dinner plates, gravy boats, platters, her saying that if one got broken there would be hell to pay. She said maids were notorious for breaking things. She read from a newspaper clipping that she kept in the cutlery box: “Does your maid waste food spilling and dropping, do mop and broom in her hands do their task slightingly, does your treasured china slip through her fingers, is she a genius at chipping the edges of your beautiful cut glasses?”

  By the time I was finished I had furniture and ornaments coming out of my ears, rosewood, tulip wood, apple wood, burnt elm, the swan neck pediment, the foliate dragon, and a brass eagle that I must remember to dust religiously.

  Boasting and bluffing and still she counted the biscuits in the tin in case Solveig and I touched one.

  Solveig was higher up than me. She had a white apron. She was the cook. Sieving and singing hymns that her pastor in Sweden had taught her. Her eyes were the beautiful twinkling blue of a sleeping doll. She had a wooden box for her shoes and her shoe polish and was allowed out to a language school three afternoons a week. She cooked dishes I’d never heard of, lobster in aspic and shoestring potatoes for the lunch parties that the missus had for her girlfriends. Mamie and Gertie and Peg and Eunice. They were forever saying each other’s names. Mamie and Gertie and Peg and Eunice, all the size of her, boasting about the presents their husbands gave them for their birthdays and their anniversaries. The missus would point to the big white box of flowers on the hall table that her husband had sent, every single flower in a snood of tissue paper, the box left there for them to see and for her to say, “Oh, how he spoils me, that man of mine.”

  After the lunch the card table would be moved closer to the fire for their bridge game. They nibbled bonbons and truffles and sometimes they bickered over the cards.

  My work was rougher than Solveig’s, cleaning the ashes, laying the three fires, polishing the grates, then the silver, then all the dusting, the cornices, the moldings, the legs and paws of the several chairs and her heaps of ornaments: shepherds, shepherdesses, jugs, vases, rose bowls, powder bowls, and the big brass eagle that had a venomous look.

  The carpet in the sitting room was gorgeous. It was like sand, the various colors that sand can be, sand that water had seeped into and sand that water had drained out of, patterns of roses and rose blood, spatters where a rose had bled and elsewhere clusters of rosebuds, dangling.

  About a month after I began, I was down on my knees with a nailbrush, getting the stains out of it, when Mr. came in, gave me the fright of my life. Was I saying the Angelus he wondered and knelt down beside me.

  “Your hair, your hair,” he kept saying, asking did other people remark on my hair, the red-gold halo all around it, asking how long it took to brush, morning and night, said what a ray of sunshine I was to the house.

  * * *

  Dear Dilly,

  A reign of terror has started up. Once more our fields are Calvary. On the day of the annual horse fair it was decided to attack RIC enemy barracks in the old jail in Ennis. It was a well-known fact that the changing of the guard took place at six P.M. and that was the hour when the volunteers struck, others all along the street in case of mishap, the buying and selling of horses continuing as if all was normal, which of course it wasn’t. When the whistle blew they opened fire, English soldiers running it seems like red shanks, three captured and brought to Daly’s stables, relieved of their ammunition and taken away. There were twenty local men in the raid, which did not include our Michael, whom we believe is training others in the woods beyond Cratlow. Searches all over. Your father was searched on his way to the common land up the mountain. Finding a bottle of milk in his pocket, the British officer tried to make out that he was bringing it to his son or another bastard volunteer.

  “I’m bringing it to drink,” he told them. They did not let him go for over an hour. All this and you not here to help us.

  Your poor mother,

  Bridget

  Solveig

  SOLVEIG WOULD PUT small knobs of dough on top of the bread, baby loaves, for our clandestine feasts in our bedroom at night.

  Come butter come

  Come butter come

  Little Johnny’s at the gate

  Waiting for his buttered cake.

  She learned that rhyme from me and would say it, though it clashed with the hymns. It was no longer her sleeping room, it was our sleeping room now. We made friends the night it thundered, big claps of it and forked lightning flared then sizzled inside the room, she cowering under my bed, terrified that Eric Eric, the man with the clapper who broke up the big ships in the harbor in Malmo, was coming for her.

  Ever after we were friends, we put paper curls in each other’s hair, and I helped her with her English compositions:

  Snow is frozen moisture that comes away from the clouds.

  Snow falls in feathery flakes.

  Boys make snowballs to pelt at one another.
<
br />   Snow crystals are a beautiful sight.

  The whole world falls asleep when snow settles.

  How we scoured the magazines and the newspapers that the missus threw out.

  A great-grandpa cut a tooth and a Mrs. White who lost a silver mesh bag with a pair of glasses and money was offering a substantial reward. A hostess, we learned, took poison at her own party and her husband was trying to hush it up. The Harts would be remaining at Huntingdon for the season but the Hammonds had gone to Connecticut and a Mrs. Harding had offered her beautiful home in Southampton to the president and was awaiting a favorable reply. A flighty Mrs. Stillman had formed an intimacy with her Indian servant while her financier husband was in a romance with a revue girl, and Mrs. Stillman’s substantial alimony was only because of a baby just born, but, as the judge said, she would carry a stain that could never be erased. Houdini, who lived only a few streets away from us and who could do amazing stunts, such as escape from a barred prison cell, or a first-class straitjacket, met his Waterloo on a crowded streetcar at rush hour, realizing he was going in the wrong direction. Houdini tried to get out, had to wriggle, squirm, twist, and elbow his way and when by dint of sheer muscle he did escape, he fainted on the platform with nerves.

  We had yet to get on a streetcar.

  Up there in our attic room, dreaming of crush-proof blouses and coatees and capes and stoles and muffs, we were happy, because we had each other.