The Light of Evening

by Edna O'Brien

  He is behind, trying to catch up with her, the impediment in his voice worsening, pleading to be heard, explaining how there are thieves everywhere, women’s jewelry swiped off them, hooligans coming in off the street to rob.

  “At least hear me out,” he begs, but she can’t. The frenzy to find the bag is all-enveloping.

  He stands a gaunt, abject figure, apologizing for his foolish mistake as the steel doors of the lift meet and shut him out.

  The Little Parlor

  SISTER CONSOLATA was expecting me, the electric fire turned on, a tea tray with a mohair tea cozy with a picture of a quaint cottage, sandwiches and assorted biscuits, and on the circular table, written immaculately on a ruled sheet of paper, was the inventory of my mother’s belongings.

  I longed to ask her to go at once and get the bag but decency forbade it. Word had reached her that I had been hasty with Pat the porter and she regretted that and assured me that there was no kinder or more trustworthy person.

  The room felt icy, even though the fire was on. It was one of those tall electric fires fronted with a simulation of logs, broken chunks of coal, lit from within by a red bulb that gave a semblance of heat, but not real heat.

  Rain rushed down without warning. It came plopping through the trees and plashing onto the grass, sheeting the flowerbeds and then smack up against the glass pane as if there were hailstones in it, frozen beads of water running down the long double windows that rattled. How they rattled.

  Her voice though very low was full of rapture and as she spoke her tiny hands kept darting in and out of her wide, black, capacious sleeves. She described being called out of the chapel of the retreat house to be given the urgent news, then being excused by one of the fathers and tearing from the south side of the city in rush-hour traffic, the young nun, her chauffeur, jumping traffic lights, nearly mowing people down, only to come through the front door five minutes too late. My mother was already in the operating theater. She and Nolan, as she said, outside, both with hankies, pacing and praying and poor Nolan distraught because she had been the last to be with my mother, had helped her along to bed after her tumble in the hall, had gone to make her a hot drink and come back to find her missing, found her nearly unconscious in the toilet, poor Nolan shouting, shouting, the cardiac team with the crash trolley arriving in seconds, one giving her mouth-to-mouth resuscitation and the other with compressions to her chest and Nolan calling, “Say hello to Elvis, missus.” She said how one of the doctors had told her afterward how my mother’s mind came and went, one minute lucid, the next minute flustered, saying the dinner wasn’t ready and asking if for marmalade you double the amount of sugar. They waited in order to put in the pacemaker, sometimes her pulse was there and other times it had almost gone, and they feared that she was dying on them. Father Conmee was sent for. He anointed her and gave her the last sacraments and it seems she got very highly strung and asked for the courage to go bravely and for forgiveness for any wrongs she might have done. Then she whispered to him to come a bit nearer and take off her wedding ring, which he did, but he couldn’t hear her last wish as the breath had gone. After that it was very fast, very fast.

  “A little clot to the brain most likely,” she said.

  “Is that what she died of?” I asked ashamedly.

  “She died from her heart, child,” she said, her single caustic note.

  It seemed an eternity before she went off to get the belongings. I kept thinking—as before an examination—that if I registered every feature of that room that I would be absolved and that my mother would not have read the journal. I noted the damp senna-colored stains on the blue border of the wallpaper, pictures of saints so very pensive, a more cheerful picture of the foundress of the order, and interred in a green glass bottle, ears of corn and grass stalks that had long since withered.

  In a cardboard box there was my mother’s angora beret and fawn coat, her shoes, odds and ends, her wedding ring in a small manila envelope, and her white rosary beads inside a prayer book along with a prayer composed by a Trappist monk that the Sister had copied out for her. On impulse she read it, said it was bound to be efficacious:

  Anna was something of a local phenomenon in Jerusalem. Everyone knew the story, how as a young widow she had come to the temple one day to pray and had been there praying and fasting ever since—for all of sixty years. She was a tradition, they used to say. Simeon was only some old man down by the gate but no one took note of him. Anna, the temple figure, and Simeon of no renown yet Providence chose both as the Savior’s childhood prophets. The somebodies and the nobodies equally the instruments of God.

  Snatches of prayer, ejaculations, as she moved to the window, her hands on the dark sheen of glass and her wide sleeves winging out as if she were shielding us against the infernal hosts.

  The bag looked exactly as I had left it, the two handles clasped together and the diary snug in its place, the mottled brown binding like that of an old dictionary or a prayer book. I leafed through it rapidly. There were no marks, no tear stains, but I could feel that my mother had read it, her spirit seemed to permeate it, and in that instant I found her glasses, steel-rimmed and mended in several places with cellophane tape that had yellowed, the little lenses so comical, like child’s goggles peeping up at me. There was a cry that must have been mine because it was not the sister’s, stunned and silent as she was, gazing upward as if questioning those legions of angels she had so confidently implored.

  It was terrible. A moment of pure terror at being found out, forever damned.

  She came across and took the glasses out of my hand and put them in their metal case, which she snapped shut, then tucked everything into the cardboard box to be rid of them. She did not attempt to soften matters, she simply said we would not know, not now, not ever. Except that we did know. The very chill in the room seemed to confirm it, as did the pockets of dark in the four corners of the high ceiling, and from everywhere there seemed to descend little accusing hisses, legions of them.

  The mystery remained as to why my mother, having read it, having felt, as she must, such a violation, still determined to give me Rusheen. Was that love or was it despair? I put it to her.

  “That’s her secret and she has taken it to the grave with her,” she said and in a gesture of clemency, she took the wedding ring out of the manila envelope and slid it onto my finger, as though to bind past and present, land and story, to effect as it were a truce between living and dead.

  “Let’s sit,” she said after some time and I crossed and sat, the two chairs side by side, beneath the window, the freezing cold creeping in through the cracks of the wooden frame and the rain now soft and subdued, almost a comfort.

  She spoke in a whisper. My mother had told her many things, had opened her heart, things that could scarcely be uttered, the milestones, our life together, my mother’s and mine, the night my father held us hostage for several hours with a loaded revolver in that crazed and reeking room, that other time when he almost burned the house down, we flinging furniture and pictures and linen out into the garden, and then his sojourn with the monks, contrite, eating milk puddings and swearing never to touch another drink. She had heard it all. My mother not wanting ever to let me go, but having to let me go, having to bear it, having to bear everything, her one indulgence the letters she wrote on the Sunday nights, asking to be heard, asking to be understood, crossing the sea to be with me.

  “She knew you loved her … she knew how much you loved her,” she said, her voice full of faith, the stark white of her dimity and her guimpe so ghostly in the thickening shadows and it was then I cried, cried for the fact of not having cried and for the immensity of tears yet to be shed.

  We sat for a long time, the room filled with a soft weeping, hers and mine, the single drops of rain blinking, then gliding down the windowpane in serried succession. Somewhere not too distant a bell was rung, light and silver-tongued, then after an interval it was rung again, perhaps a supper bell except that there were
no tramping feet, there was only us, in a freezing cold room, the encroaching shadows, and the moment when I would have to get up and take my leave of her.

  At the hall door she said we would have to be crafty and she pointed to a little madwoman, elderly but with a childlike canter, jumping up and down, the small hands in vain trying to wrestle with the stout wooden knob to escape. Sister scolded her, ordered her back to bed at once, Mrs. Lavelle, then told me how Mrs. Lavelle was forever trying to get home.

  “Call in, when you’re back,” she said and took both my hands in hers, held them with an intenseness, and it was as if we had lived a lifetime up there in that cold parlor, which in a sense we had.

  The cars whizzed by and with a vengeful glee puddles of water were swooshed onto the pavement.

  Part VIII

  Letters

  MY MOTHER’S LETTERS, heady and headlong, forgiving and unforgiving, lay in a box, or rather in a series of velveteen boxes, in which there had been bottles of toilet water or talcum powder and hence gave off a faint lavenderish or lily of the valley smell that sometimes prevailed and sometimes did not.

  Dear Eleanora,

  Another photo of you in the paper, your hairstyle more sophisticated but maybe not as natural. Still you are your own mistress now. The youngster we got to help doesn’t know a thing about farming but how could he, worked in a garden below in Monasterboice and then went to England, came back a drifter, asks me the most stupid questions, rushed a cow, and she slipped on a timber gate that had fallen and could have broken her neck. Your father was away I didn’t tell him or won’t. As one gets old there is less to look forward to the only pleasure is to be with one’s own and that is not always how life deals the cards. If you want any garments sewn bring them when you come, as we can get them done here more easily. A nurse here saw you on a stage in Dublin and said you looked lovely but she’d never know it was you only hearing your name, said you were very capable at handling the questions. The pace is too fast for you. As for the second heater you say you want to get us, winter is almost done and there will be twenty-five percent off them so far wiser to wait than dishing out the full sum. Always after Christmas everyone is broke and Santa Claus gone back to Elkland or wherever he’s supposed to hail from. Sheila, the chiropodist that knows my feet, was off sick and the new one, a strap, had to cut my big toenail down the side to keep it from in-growing, cut it and jagged at it, a real demon but then we’re not all born to be alike. The things you do for me and God grant that you will be repaid one day.

  Dear Eleanora,

  The mare ran last week came third only thirty pounds for us as against three hundred for first. The galling part is she can win if she likes but she’s temperamental, there were twenty in the race and twelve were near-winners, she can be last and out of the blue pass them out if she feels like it. Horses are the ruination of everyone, your father has a craze for them but then we all do crazy things. You work too hard it’ll get to your nerves in time. I haven’t got the same energy but didn’t I do my bit for ye all and maybe God will give me a few more years though I’d be no loss to anybody. Sad to say, years and months seem all one now, the same pattern, eat, feed the animals, sit at the fire at night and brood. The coat you sent me I wear all the time, I hate to put on anything else, I had an old Persian lamb collar from a black coat of years back stitched onto it and people rave about it. The horse did not run well yesterday, when one sees that they are losing and losing it’s time to say Enough but I don’t utter a word as it would lead to civil war. The weather the past week bitter cold with frost. I went all day with my old coat on and a headscarf on me but it’s not so bad if we don’t get the snow. I don’t think I could do a slimming fast even a bit of dry bread would suffice. I barely eat cake now. The one I’m sending you, make a hole on the top with a knitting needle and pour a glass of whiskey into it to keep it moist. Last week I drew I don’t know how many buckets of water and sprayed the whole avenue to kill the weeds. It’s sad if things get neglected but I should have sense enough not to bother but when you spend your whole life in a place you like to see it as spic as it can be. Since I came back from you from London I haven’t been out, only to Mass and Tom Holland’s funeral. That restaurant with the fortunes in the cookies was just out of this world and the spice in the Moroccan lamb so individual. The new shoes you got me will have a rest for a while. You didn’t tell me if they exchanged the sideboard for you or if they were canny enough to find some mark on it. You had great pluck asking them at all, being as you had it a week. I like little bits of news: is the black lace frock you wore that evening we went out an antique? I do hope you get to come soon. I sent you yesterday eighteen large lace doilies eighteen small ones and four center ones, I am praying you will make use of them if not you can give them to someone. Cold sores all around my nose and mouth for a week and the last bit I had to eat was in a hotel the day your father had to see a trainer about the mare. The moods since diabolical. I suppose he longs for drink sometimes and isn’t he great to have given it up, to have conquered his weakness.

  Dear Eleanora,

  Thanks a million for your all to me and may the New Year bring you what is best for you but remember love is all bull, the only true love is that between mother and child. All them paintings Italians do with mothers holding their infants and angels above them like the beautiful one in the chapel in Limerick can’t be for nothing. I needn’t tell you as you know from your own experience men think five pounds should do for a year. We were hit hard with the foot and mouth disease, no fairs, no marts for three months so that we couldn’t sell an animal. If I were young again I’d find a job, I haven’t your brains of course but I always thought I’d do well in hotel business, meeting people and showing them around. I confess that I shed tears with the cold it was that bitter. I had to ring the electricity people to come and install a storage heater but the man got sick and had to go to hospital and his wife was dead two mornings after so we all have our troubles, heat or no heat. My darling, I might have sounded odd when you rang but sometimes I get distracted, I forget now if there was someone in the room I only wish I could see you oftener. I used to like style when I was young, the world my oyster. Horses will be here I suppose long after me.

  Dear Eleanora,

  This is to tell you I had a bad turn. I got very stunned for a week and nothing mattered to me but don’t worry you won’t bury me this time come what may. I wish I could see the Statue of Liberty once more and my old favorite haunts of Brooklyn which I loved and where I loved. The skirt you sent me is too narrow I am trying to get it let out. I dream so often of you, thinking you are not happy and it makes me sad each night as I lay in bed, but I know you love your children, little princes, may they never renege on you. Put your trust in God, He is the good shepherd the one man who will not let you down. Our beautiful sheepdog, Rover, got killed and I think it’s not long before Dixie his partner joins him. Nature in animals is a remarkable thing, far superior to humans. Did you ever put up the chandelier I sent you? If any part got broken I can get it fixed. I am mailing a blouse I had crocheted for you, the work is very tedious, you may have to put a little pleat under each arm if it’s baggy. The only snag is I could not get another done as she who did it says she’d never do another, too trying on the eyes. Don’t you know I am constantly thinking of you, many don’t know the first thing about loving a child. Here I was, wondering if you went away for your work. My prayer was answered as your letter came. My little needs are well taken care of with the money you send and now the extraordinary pleasant surprise that ye’ll be coming in the summer so herewith questions to be answered: for ye’er meal on Sunday when ye arrive is it to be hot or cold fare. I do not want ye to have even a cup of tea at Shannon Airport, complete waste of money. Since you said you might build in the kitchen garden I go up there more often than I did and try to picture you in a new house and the old stone wall of the garden to protect you, back to your roots where your heart is. I pray that I live to see it up.
There is so much red tape in passing on a bit of land but it shall be done. The surgeon who does the veins wouldn’t do mine, told me to get a pair of elastic stockings and wear them permanently, my age no doubt. Four people buried here this week a Mrs. Whiley in her thirties and three that died of some flu that’s going around, Hong Kong or Kong Hong, or whatever it’s called.

  Dear Eleanora,

  Your brother called with his darling wife stayed one night. I got up at three in the morning and found them in the hall arguing, God knows why. The plants you put in the front garden are doing all right. We had the man from the council, the Gate Lodge has to be demolished and they won’t give a penny but it must go. Mrs. Noonan was buried last week, a massive funeral down as far as the Rock. We’ve started the fires, only for the television it would be so lonely. Your Christmas cake is on its way, a bakers will ice it, for if I iced it it would get broken. When you wash my cushion covers do it yourself as you don’t want the colors of the embroidery to run, don’t ever fold them up wet that’s what happened the last time. Do you still wear the grosgrain black dress and the turquoise brooch from Tibet? I went to Dublin with your father just to be sure he’d come home okay, sold three horses but the stud farm got most of it. I’m happy they’re disposed of, trainers and jockeys telling him he’d win races, all bull, the sense you pay for is the best sense. I walked Dublin to try and get you a white counterpane of long ago but I failed so do not blame me. I didn’t buy a thing only four side combs. I wouldn’t live in the city for love or money, it’s a rat race. Thank God for the fresh air and the quiet, fears come on at night that never do in daytime. In years to come cities will be overcrowded and life so very mixed up that a peaceful spot will be impossible, so make your plans for the kitchen garden, it will be yours and no one else’s, it’s a home for the future. I got a good cough bottle with some of the money and thanks for the beautiful velvet jacket but to tell the truth I am bursting in it, even the armpits are too small. I will take off the buckle and put it on another garment. Four boys here coming home from a dance drove into a stationary lorry, the road a battlefield with dead and dying.