by Edna O'Brien
God shone on me the day I knocked on Ma Sullivan’s door. “You’ve come to the right house anyhow,” she said and brought me in. She needed a girl, part-time, to help with the dinners when her boys, as she called them, came home in the evening. She kept eight lodgers, her wild geese, all from home and ravenous when they got back from the building sites and the railway lines where they worked, often miles outside the city. She was mother, landlady, nurse, and banker to every single one of them. She hid their wages so’s that they could save to go home, got them up for Mass of a Sunday, and saw to it that they were in bed early weeknights. Whatever ailment they had, she dosed them with castor oil, castor oil was the cure for everything, including, as I was to discover, a broken heart.
She and I slept in the same room, a room with twin beds, a big brown wardrobe, and a tin washstand with a china basin and ewer. She had had a son that got drowned up in Long Island and though he was never mentioned below stairs, she and me prayed for him every night, each at the end of our own beds, praying for our departed. He was a Michael too, same as my brother.
Her dances one Saturday a month were famous all over. The big kitchen would be turned into a dancehall, chairs and stools pushed back, the long table with a white cloth for a buffet supper that was either bacon and cabbage or mutton stew, the entrance charge half a dollar per head. Christy, a famous concertina player, provided the music. His concertina was kept in its folded box on the mantelpiece as she did not trust him to take it away, in case he pawned it for drink or left it in some dive.
Then one night Gabriel was there, the same long coat, the same reserve, and Ma Sullivan rushing to welcome him and sit him down for a drink. Several girls knew him and before long he was dragged up for the set dance, four men and four women facing each other, Christy’s face bent over his instrument as if it was part of him, the atmosphere so pent up, lighted lanterns at either end of the kitchen floor, and the men that were not dancing already tapping their feet to mark time with the music. The dancers faced each other and though they did not speak, they had already communed with their eyes. The music transformed them, gave them license to be wild, wilder, the hard high heels and the hard low heels stamping the flagged floor, girls looping in and out under the arms of their partners, sliding away but not before they had made some sort of pact with them and Gabriel the favorite. All wanted to be in his radius, smiling up at him.
At the end of a round Christy would play something quiet, eerie, eking notes out of the concertina that summoned bits of home, rocky land, fields, that limestone landscape with Cromwell’s curse: “No timber to hang a man, no water to drown a man, nor no earth to bury a man.”
Gabriel had come across to sympathize with me as Ma Sullivan had told him why I was not dancing and why I was in black. It was clear that he had not remembered me, not remembered Coney Island and the big waves and the place names, and reading it in my eyes, the slight disappointment, he just flinched and turned away.
When he left I thought it would be the best part of a year before we laid eyes on him again and I imagined the train covering those great distances, the Great Lakes, then the wheat fields, then the long and lonely stretches of prairie, and into the bush that Gussie said was a savage place and made men savage. Gussie had been there, had spent fifteen years of his boyhood and youth there, apprentice to a blacksmith, pulling off old horseshoes, digging the dirt from the hooves, paring the calluses but, as he said, he never got the promotion, never got to shoe a horse in his life. Gussie used to help around the house, fix lights and fuses, do a bit of plastering or painting in return for his dinner, and afterward he would sit by the stove drafting a letter to a widow woman in Longford who had gone home and had built a house on a hill, a big house that overlooked all the others. He kept hoping that she would send for him, but there was nothing in her letters to suggest it. Me mooning over Gabriel and Gussie over the Longford woman, and she boasting of the fine herd of sucklers and dairy cows that she owned.
Courtship
THE STAMP WAS GREEN with red-coated cavalry in a misted wood, their spears flying, the front legs of the horses charging and buckling in the frenzied air. I thought it was some cousin who had tracked me down, but it was Gabriel. The letter was short. “I am sorry you lost your brother. He put his country before himself and you can be proud of him. If you feel like sending me more place names or any bit of news, it would be appreciated. Thanks anyhow. Gabriel.”
They were not love letters; if anything they were letters determined to dampen any notion of love. They could have been letters to a man and yet they would arrive every three or four weeks, the envelope often damp and cold from being in a mailbag for so long, and mostly they were written on greaseproof paper. Where a word would have soaked in, I’d search for it on the other side with the beam of a candle, so as not to miss anything. They were snatches of his life, and through his eyes I could see the tracks of the wolves in the snow in the early morning, he and the men off, before sunrise in their hide boots, their socks tied up over their knee pants to keep out the slush. A lonely freezing place with clumps of green alder burning for a bit of warmth, the rasping of the saws all day long, pairs of men whose lives depended on one another, chopping, limbing, loading, and skedding, weary when evening came and they and the dogs glad to be going back for their suppers.
He would describe the forests and the different trees, pine and cedar and hemlock, trees two hundred feet high, tall and proud, like tall proud ships, and the fight that they put up against the hackings of the cross saw, the long battle, then the waver before the big crash, the long low hiss as it fell, a smell of wet sap, sap as alive as blood, as true as blood and the stumps sulky and lonely-looking, then the cut planks loaded onto the horse-drawn sleighs, down to the rapids to end up in the sawmills, for various items of furniture.
He and the cook were hoping, he said, to make a vegetable garden, to plant potatoes and onions, anything to make a change from the dreary diet of beans and pork soused in saltpeter, and he added that he might be asking Gussie to forward him a sack of seed potatoes.
One night they had a stag party that ended in a drunken brawl. He painted a picture of it, the vast forest, wild venison on slats over an open fire, the entrails left in for flavor but emptied halfway through, and juniper leaves or juniper berries put into the cavity, a makeshift dance place on a raised platform, the music hammered out on kettles or tin washboards, the one Indian woman with her baubles and paint, wife to none and temptation to many. Finns and Swedes and Canadians and Scots and Irish and South Americans getting blind drunk because they refused to water the rum, singing rival songs, shouting each other down concerning their country’s woes and their country’s injustices. A Finn and a Scotsman had gone a distance away to fight, had stripped to the waist, ready to kill each other, the lit pine branches held up, as in Roman times, men reveling in it, until the superintendent had to be brought to separate them, dousing them with bucket after bucket of water, both men rolling around in the snow, cursing but claiming victory.
Then it came, the letter that unknown even to myself I was waiting for. He couldn’t get to sleep, what with the lads snoring, the straw in the ticking itching his face, the wool blanket itching his feet, finding himself outside under a roof of frozen stars, he sat down and realized how he kept thinking of Dilly and wondering if it was too much to ask, to suppose that Dilly might be thinking of him. And she was.
And she was.
* * *
The first time that we kissed was in Ma Sullivan’s after a dance when he came up to the bedroom to get his coat. His coat, like himself, was made an exception of, other coats were kept on the floor of the back kitchen, and picking his up he bumped into me and kissed me even before he knew he had. Then he looked at me with such a baleful look and said, “It couldn’t be helped, could it.”
“She’ll be coming up,” I said. Ma Sullivan was very strict about boys.
“Come outside,” he said, and after he’d gone I climbed out the window
and into the garden and stood with him and we did not kiss then, just stood there, just looking, just drinking one another in.
* * *
It was snowing in the vast cemetery in Brooklyn, big bulky overcoats of snow on the tall tombs, draping the headstones and the flat tablets with their long loving recitations. Not a soul about. The paths cleared for visitors to walk on: the Ravine Path, the Cedar Path, the Waterside Path, the Sunset Path. We walked and walked. On the heads of the marble angels and archangels caps and skullcaps of snow, so jaunty, so jocular, and the silence so immense and Gabriel and me. We came upon a little house, a little vault with steps down to it and an entrance door with a woman’s face carved on the outside, a woman with a mourning expression and strands of long marble hair that fell down onto her shoulders.
“She looks a bit like you,” he said, and then he touched my arm with such a gravity and asked was I ready to be engaged. There in the ravine path or the sunset path or the waterside path, I forget which, the angels and archangels with their jaunty headgear, the blanketed tombs, he and me became engaged, without having to utter a word. Then he dug the end of a branch into the white earth and wrote our names—Dilly Kildea and Gabriel Gilchriest October 6th—and we looked down at them, so settled, as if they would never be effaced, the snowflakes like little morsels falling into the dark grooves of the lettering he had transcribed.
Betrayal
A THIN FALL of snow had turned to sludge and the wooden boards of the bridge were skiddy. Crowds were hurrying in both directions, some like us crossing into the city and some going back home, children with rosy cheeks holding magic packages to their chests, packages that could not be opened until Christmas, which was three weeks away.
The same Christmas that I’d lived for. I was making Gabriel a satin waistcoat. His measurements were taken by the cook and forwarded on bits of darning wool. All else about it was to be a surprise.
I’d never set foot on Brooklyn Bridge before, never had cause to. It was like a ship, the sides all steel and might, steel railings, steel cables, steel ropes, steel girders, and big steel pipes like crocodiles dipping down into the river.
In the distance lay Manhattan with its lit windows, a vast honeycomb of lit windows, behind one of which, as they maintained, he was lurking.
The way they broke it to me was vile because try as they might, there was gloating in their eyes. I’d come out just after six, along with all the other girls, into the fresh air, to window-shop and then walk the mile or so up the hill and home to Ma Sullivan’s.
The main window had only one item of clothing, a beaded satin dance dress across a chaise that rested on a floor of artificial snow that was strewn with snow-laden branches of silk fir trees and little toy silver motorcars. Santa Claus was ringing his big brass bell for money and the gifts for the poor were in a big heap, like the heap for a bonfire, the air biting cold and the singing from the choir reaching up into the heavens from where more snow was forecast.
The way they broke it to me: “You tell her. No. You tell her. No, you tell her. I don’t know how to break it to her, poor girl … poor Delia … poor Dilly.”
False sympathy oozing out of them, their eyes brimming with it, and then Kitty opening the sheet of folded ruled paper for me to read it myself by the light from the shop window: “Dilly Kildea will not be seeing Gabriel Gilchriest again but she doesn’t know it yet.” The words swam before my eyes like a mirage, like something there and then not there. It could not be true. He had promised. I knew the hour he was coming. I was making the waistcoat. It had a scarlet lining. He had a piece of jewelry for me that an Indian had specially made. I would have to keep guessing what it might be.
They were plying me with questions. Questions. “What had he promised?” Nothing. “What was between us?” Nothing. “Had he behaved dishonorably?” Nothing. My nothings infuriated them even more. Somehow they had got wind of the engagement. I wrote it once with white flour on the oven in Ma Sullivan’s, when I was making a pie, then rubbed it out.
The anonymous letter, they said, had come to Kitty’s lodgings, and she could swear who was behind it. Rita Thing-um-bob was behind it, an old flame of Gabriel’s, the girl that had taught him Irish and Irish dancing and still had a yen for him, had told the priest in her parish that she could wind him around her little finger and it seems she could. He was a ruthless man they said, false-hearted, like the false-hearted lover in the forester’s song.
My heart broke at what they had to tell me next. I had asked him once about his missing finger and he’d said the accident had happened very early one morning, before sunrise, the saw jamming in a tree, his comrade trying to undo it too fast and the saw flying up and backward, like a jackknife, taking one entire finger and the mound of his thumb. I’d asked him what he did with the finger and he said that he’d put it in his pocket, put a rag around the thumb, and that night in the camp, the blacksmith who doubled as doctor sewed the wound up, but as for the finger he forgot, it must have been thrown away. But it hadn’t. He had given it to Rita Thing-um-bob. A keepsake of him that, as she told the priest, was priceless, worth more than any engagement ring.
On the far side were the skyscrapers, reaching nearly to the stars, and that unbroken vista of lit windows that seemed to be spying on us who were heading to spy on him. We passed under the two tall arches, like the arches in an ancient church, and set foot in Manhattan, which he had said we would explore one day.
Twice on the bridge I had rebelled and said I would go no farther. They vacillated between sympathy and threats. A bronze plaque in the side wall had engravings of the many who had toiled and the many who had lost their lives in the twenty years of building it. Farther along, another plaque of clasped hands, signifying the clasped hands of the two cities, and I felt for a second the warmth of Gabriel’s hand, the splay and the safety of it.
Kitty had business with the priest who knew Rita Thing-um-bob and his church was just at the end of the bridge, in a backwater all to itself. No cars, no traffic, just one old Chinese woman in her slippers, pushing a barrow and holding a black umbrella that was broken. The rectory, as it was termed, was around the side, and she went across a little garden with steppingstones bedded into the clay, overgrown plants and fallen fruit bushes, like a cottage garden at home.
Mary Kate said that as the church was new to us we would go in and make three wishes for our special intentions. My three wishes were all rolled into one, which was that we would not find him. The inside of the church was a somber brown and gave off a smell of polish, brown pews, a brown gallery, a brown wooden crucifixion, brown pillars guarding the altar, and brown confessionals with thick brown curtains. The only bit of light was a gold shimmer from the edging of a huge missal, where the candle rays had caught it. She lit a candle for us both and whispered to me that probably oodles of girls had crushes on him.
Kitty came back beaming, like she had won money. The priest was so kind, so obliging, and had given her a holy medal that she allowed me to kiss.
We walked through crowded, rundown streets, losing our way more than once, they full of bravado, mouthing the home truths they would tell him, yet Kitty unloosening her black hair from its thick slide, quivering as she had quivered that day in Coney Island when she spoke to him, and Mary Kate squeezing me for courage.
It was a squalid street of tenement houses, children playing, drunk people, bicycles, lame people on crutches, arguments, a laundry, and a foul smell from the river. They rang the doorbell several times before anyone appeared, then a woman stuck her head out an upper window, the cord broken so that she had to hold up the frame with one hand as she shone a bit of candle down. They asked to see Rita Thing-um-bob and were told that we had no business coming to that address. They asked if she was home and were told to scoot it. They asked if they could pass a note through the letterbox and have it read, which maddened her even more.
“You sure stick your noses into other people’s business,” she shouted, and a big spurt of hot c
andle grease was flung in our direction.
We stood there like three apes, a fresh fall of snow swirling down, and I knew the way one knows in one’s gut that I would not ever see Gabriel again.
* * *
Yet all the way up to Christmas I kept listening for him, listening for his whistle along the street, the way a dog listens and can hear its master, except that he did not come. Christmas Day was the worst. After the dinner the lodgers played hide and seek, up and down the stairs, into the garden, into the basements, anywhere and everywhere, and at times I had to escape to Ma Sullivan’s bedroom to cry my eyes out.
It was her idea that I go home. This pining was no good, I was like a scarecrow, but the fresh air and my own people would console me. She gave me the fare, said I could pay it back in installments, and arranged with my supervisor that I would get my job back when I returned.
Why I brought my scissors I will never know. My big scissors, cumbersome as shears, that traveled home with me on the boat. To cut clothes, to cut their hair, or maybe to cut something out of myself?
Homecoming
AT FIRST GLANCE in our kitchen I mistook the oxtail for trifle, a pinkish mass on a plate with white streaks in it, which I thought to be trifle and whipped cream. The lamp on the settle bed threw out such a feeble light that everything else was in semidarkness, the neighbors so shy, and my mother all in black, shrunken and weeping. There was the smell of turf smoke and milk going off and cold potato skins on the dresser, high up where the dog could not snatch them. My mother stared at me and squeezed my hands while the others admired my brown trunk with its brass latches and my name painted in bold letters.