by Edna O'Brien
Dear Eleanora,
Great news that you are coming for a weekend. I had to read your card twice in case I imagined it. I hope to have chickens in good killing order and have a new recipe with apples and chestnuts, for the stuffing. We’ll go up the mountains to see the scenery like long ago. I must give you the tapestry picture of the Statue of Liberty as you will have it when I no longer exist, something you could never buy in a shop. This racing bug is a form of lunacy and he keeps getting into debt in the hope of getting out of debt, utter folly, he works for horses alone. I did more perhaps for your brother than for you long ago when I had a couple of pounds and went to Limerick on a lorry, deprived myself of even a cup of tea to come home with a tennis racket or a new flannel trousers for him that never even said thank you. I have a little request but really it’s not that important, if you can’t get it don’t worry, a copper bracelet for rheumatism to be worn on the arm and never taken off. A nurse told me about it, says it’s miraculous. Even my toes are rigid and sore. I set out to pick a few blackberries and ended up with half a bucket, I made fifty pounds of jelly and only wish I could hand it over the hedge to you. So please bring baskets galore when ye come. The boys love it on scones. You must be lonely without them. Let us pray they don’t grow up heartless and ungrateful and that they never take against you. The most unkindest cut of all, like you once read to me from some book.
Dear Eleanora,
The coat you posted is beautiful but it has one defective skin in the back which the manufacturers stretched to make it fit and I brought it to the furriers in Limerick to ask if they could put press studs in the vents down the back to make it sit but no go as it wasn’t bought there. They even showed me where and how the skin had been faultily cut as if I wanted to know. I got you a supper cloth as I remember you saying you liked them. Our dogs fought Saxton’s dog and ours got the worst of it, one had to be carried in, not even able to stand. The new fridge you ordered has been delivered, it’s pure marvelous as milk always went sour and meat kept only a day. I have a German lodger for six months but of course he has not two words of English. Great to-do here over your latest book, ninety-five percent shocked, they have borrowed from one another to see how revolting it is and ask why can you not write parables that would make pleasant reading. There are lovely teaspoons that I got for coupons out of cornflake packets and they are yours if you fancy them. Another death in the factory, an only son. So that girl you got to help you did something dishonorable I am not surprised. The fire barrel of the stove conked out on me and I will have to go to Teresa O’Gorman’s to have your Christmas cake baked. There are many parts of my life I would not want to relive but I must say I had good times of it in Brooklyn. New York I only set foot in once and on a very unhappy mission, searching for a friend who wasn’t even there at the time. How I long for us to have a big chat one day as there are things I’d like to tell you. You have not forgotten us or our creature comforts but there is something that bugs me. It hurts the way you make yourself so aloof, always running away from us, running running to where. Are we lepers or what …
Or …
What
Or …
What
Epilogue
We were sitting by the kitchen stove, my mother and myself. It must have been September, too early to light a fire in the front room, but nevertheless a bit of a chill to the evening, even the dog, the old rheumatic dog, had gone into his cubbyhole and we had not the slightest difficulty putting in the hens, they wandered in of their own accord. After she’d bolted the door we stood to look at a most ravishing sunset, a shocking pink that spanned a huge panoply of sky, rivers and rivulets crimsoning all before it, ruddying the fort of somber trees, seeping into cloud that was erstwhile and sullen and straggly.
“There’s no place like home,” she said, and I nodded because she wanted me to think likewise.
Once in the kitchen she opened the two oven doors to let the heat out and we sat for one of our chats. Quite unselfconsciously she ran her hands along her neck, all along the sides and then to the back to feel the stiffnesses, and though she had not asked me I felt without the words that she wished me to massage her and I did, searching out the knots and the crick, then along the nape, under her swallow, holding the bowl of her head in my hands, entreating her to let go, to let go of all her troubles and she replying, “If only we could, if only we could.”
Somewhat emboldened, she opened the top button of her good Sunday blouse so that I might lay my hands above the mesh of blue veins that were raised like braid over her sunken chest. She began to bask in it, her expression melting, a happiness at being touched as she had never been touched in all her life, and it was as though she was the child and I had become the mother.
* * *
Twilight falls upon her in that kitchen, in that partial darkness, the soft and beautiful light of a moment’s nearness; the soul’s openness, the soul’s magnanimity, falling timorously through the universe and timorously falling upon us.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
So many people helped me in my researches that I sincerely hope I have forgotten none: the Clare Heritage in Tuamgraney, the Irish Folklore Commission in Dublin, the National Library of Ireland, Ulster American Folk Park in Omagh, the Brooklyn Public Library, the New York Public Library, the New-York Historical Society, and the American Irish Historical Society in New York.
Of the many people who not only answered my questions but also encouraged me to look elsewhere, I would like to include Eilis Ni Duibhne, Criostoir Mac Carthaigh, Chris McIver, Kevin Whelan, Niamh O’Sullivan, Bernadette Whelan, Colum McCann, Chris Kelly, Emily Stone, Mike Onorato, Ron Schweiger, Judith Walsh, Joy Holland, and Dave Smith of the New York Public Library, all of whom were tireless in their continued efforts on my behalf.
In my native County Clare, I am indebted to my nephew Michael Blake, John Howard, Paddy Ryan, a faith healer, and Gerrard Madden, who allowed me to quote from his magazine Slieve Aughty.
Sister Maura, who befriended my mother, gave so much of her generous time. Her profound insights into the journey of death were an enlightenment to me.
I wish to thank Nadia Proudian, who typed the manuscript again and again with such meticulousness.
Also by Edna O’Brien
FICTION
Girl
August Is a Wicked Month
Casualties of Peace
A Pagan Place
Zee & Co.
Night
A Scandalous Woman
Johnny I Hardly Knew You
A Rose in the Heart
Mrs. Reinhardt
Some Irish Loving
Returning
A Fanatic Heart
The High Road
On the Bone
Lantern Slides
Time and Tide
House of Splendid Isolation
Down by the River
Wild Decembers
In the Forest
Saints and Sinners
The Love Object
The Little Red Chairs
The Country Girls: Three Novels and an Epilogue
NONFICTION
Mother Ireland
James Joyce
Byron in Love
Country Girl
Praise for The Light of Evening
“This is a book with an emotional punch that doesn’t hit you in the face but rather comes at you on reflection: the plight of mothers and daughters who love each other dearly yet never feel like kindred souls. The Light of Evening returns to the rural Ireland of O’Brien’s earliest work but carries all the emotional complexity of her later books.”
—Ellen Emry Heltzel, Chicago Tribune
“Philip Roth has called Edna O’Brien the most gifted woman now writing fiction in English, and it is hard not to agree … With The Light of Evening … O’Brien once again takes mothers and daughters as her subject, and yet she manages to make it all seem fresh.”
—Brooke Allen, The Wall Street Journal
“One is left with the wrenching image of young and old necessarily parted, and yet always straining toward each other as well, across a vast and impossible distance.”
—Alice Truax, Vogue
“O’Brien writes about women who are not strong; they are subject to doubts, panics, vanities and confusions—and they know all this, and it still does not make them strong. Dignity is their solace, and dignity makes them foolish, and they are always undone by desire. They are, as you may gather, completely honest, completely courageous, and heroic on the slenderest and most absolute of terms.”
—Anne Enright, The Guardian
“Where others turn away, O’Brien rushes forward, her knives drawn for clean parsing of the real feelings that pass between two people. The bookshops are lousy with mother-daughter novels. The Light of Evening stands apart, refusing to give mere comfort. O’Brien doesn’t just believe in the power of the bond between generations. She fears it.”
—Claire Dederer, Slate
A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR
EDNA O’BRIEN has written more than twenty works of fiction, most recently Girl. She is the recipient of numerous awards, including the Prix Femina, the PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature, the Irish PEN Lifetime Achievement Award, the National Arts Club Medal of Honor, and the Ulysses Medal. Born and raised in the west of Ireland, she has lived in London for many years. You can sign up for email updates here.
CONTENTS
Title Page
Copyright Notice
Dedication
Prologue
Epigraph
Part I
Dilly
Jerome
Flaherty
Gabriel
Part II
Mushrooms
Little Bones
Ellis Island
The Great Hall
A Blind Man
Dear Dilly
Mass
Mr. and Mrs. McCormack
Solveig
Photographic Studio
Bless This House
Exile
Coney Island
A Ghost
Ma Sullivan
Courtship
Betrayal
Homecoming
Silverfish
Revel
Fresh Horses
Part III
Nolan
Sister Consolata
Part IV Scenes From a Marriage
Scene One
Scene Two
Scene Three
Scene Four
Scene Five
Scene Six
Scene Seven
Scene Eight
Scene Nine
Scene Ten
Scene Eleven
Scene Twelve
Part V
Dickie Bird
Bart
Nolan
Cornelius
Buried Love
The Visit
Siegfried
Storm
Part VI The Journal
Part VII
Dilly
Moss
Cortege
Pat the Porter
The Little Parlor
Part VIII
Letters
Epilogue
Acknowledgments
Also by Edna O’Brien
Praise for The Light of Evening
A Note About the Author
Copyright
Picador
120 Broadway, New York 10271
Copyright © 2006 by Edna O’Brien
All rights reserved
Originally published in 2006 Weidenfeld & Nicolson, Great Britain
Published in the United States in 2006 by Houghton Mifflin Company, New York
First Picador paperback edition, 2020
The Library of Congress has cataloged the Houghton Mifflin hardcover edition as follows:
O’Brien, Edna.
The light of evening / Edna O’Brien.
p. cm.
ISBN-13: 978-0-618-71867-2
ISBN-10: 0-618-71867-2
1. Mothers and daughters—Fiction. 2. Women novelists—Fiction. 3. Ireland—Fiction. 4. Psychological fiction. I. Title.
PR6065.B7L54 2006
823'.914—dc22
2006006045
Picador Paperback ISBN: 978-0-374-53878-1
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eISBN 9780374721466
This is a work of fiction. All of the names, characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.