The Light of Evening (27 page)

about it. There in one of my cupboards. I threw it out, then had a change of heart and in the middle of the night went down to rummage in a dustbin to retrieve it. Things have as much a hold on us as people. Talismans maybe.

I’d met a young boy, a quite disturbed young boy with a series of bandages around his head in a waiting room, and he told me that he had gone to a hypnotist about his phobia, his disgust regarding his own nose and the noses of others, gave him the bejeebies they did. This hypnotist ordered him to write on a clean sheet of paper the saga concerning his phobia and give it back to his mother, rather to put it in one of her drawers, not a kitchen drawer but a drawer with her undies and lavender sachets and so forth and presto, his phobia went. He was in a waiting room, his head bandaged, a vindictive look in the eyes.

I was there for my own vacillations, wrongs, slights, frozen friendships, jiltings, the road not taken, and so forth. Friday’s appointment. Fifty minutes of every Friday devoted to raking up the past. Herr Inquisitor on a chair behind me stock-still. Sometimes I couldn’t talk at all, the influx was too much. Once I lay on that couch with its unassuming cottonette blanket, the doctor on a chair behind me, when something unfortunate happened. A sort of seizure, everything flooding in, truths, half-truths, limbs, litter, and of all things a shell-less egg that was mushy in the hand and that our workman Drue called a bugaun. He remained stock-still and seated. Then it was a descent down, down into this bloodied abode, blood and water, both, a door very low, swimming into view, a shut door, no entrance, no exit, no in, no out, the watery regions thrashed by hell’s flame and the gift of speech ebbing, then gone.

Everything gone. It was death without being dead. Nearly nonexistent, yet clinging on by mere threads of blood. Talking, prattling, to keep seizure at bay. No use. It came, in waves, in waves and that infantile cry for a hand, any hand, his or another’s. The begging bowl. God almighty, what mendicants we are.

I don’t know how I got out of there, possibly I staggered. The street a bedlam, but a quiet in all the treetops, the laced uppermost branches nodding, nodding gracefully, and the pavement soft as osier.

It must have been winter. Strange how all the sessions ran into one another, whereas the fifty pounds a go piled up. One check I paid got lost. I had to pay again. Someone I will never know benefited from these ravings.

Intemperate forays into the social melee. Salons lit as by showers of sunlight. Pearls. Sapphires. Platitudes. Choirs of laughter. A red-faced gent with spotted dicky bow and booming delivery assuring me there were not as many trees in my emerald isle as of yore, he had seen the whole country from a helicopter, went to stay with Teddy, lovely new wife, the azaleas absolutely splendid, absolutely ravishing, but the old Irish oaks thinning out.

My “turn” shook the inquisitor, because the following week the receptionist whispered to me that he had sent her out to the waiting room on the q.t. to see what sort of state I was in. She wasn’t supposed to tell me but she did. She liked me. She gave me a picture that she had painted, tore it from her artist’s jotter. It was a sunny field with a gate, a swing gate that led to heaven. She died suddenly not long after. The swing gate that led to heaven.

The inquisitor had moved to his own flat, further to the north side, away from the salubrious street of doctors, consultants, healers, and quacks. One went up in a lift dreading its rumbles and the way it lurched. He’d meet me at the doorway, see me in, where I sat, constrained, in a room that had fairly indifferent furniture, three irises in a vase, no knowing if they smelled. In the wings, the living area, there was a constant clatter, someone making its presence felt that I guessed to be his wife and that she resented he and I in there together, wondering what was transpiring in their sitting room where he and she sat by night. I had

caught a glimpse of her once getting out of the lift, caught her peeping from the end of the hall, a small neat woman, her hair tied back in a chignon, with a slightly nervous, perplexed expression. Lo and behold after a few further sessions I meet her. She is out on the street walking up and down past their gate, hair long, loose, painted like a streetwalker, gaudy-looking, walking there in order for me to see her, to confront her. Rivals. I found it funny but also sad. I wanted to say something to her, say that she belonged in a Chekhov story, a woman parading her foolishness, her jealousy, out there on the street, looking for her lost beauty, her lost paramours and so forth, but I did not say a word.

I can’t remember when I left him or perhaps he died. It just goes to show how callous I am as well as how craven.

There was a chenille cloth that I kept seeing in all its sumptuous-ness. Rich reds with lagoons of turquoise. It was where I did my homework, the ink bottle tipped on its side as it got down near the dregs, ructions if it spilled over. Then strangely a catalogue was put through my door. A tablecloth of the same terracotta reds, random slashes of blue, and long deep russet fringing. The shop was in an emporium of shops all housed under one vast glass dome so that it entailed going up flight after flight of stairs, taking side stairs, twice going astray, and praying that it would not have been sold since it seemed so necessary to me.

Then at last finding the right showroom, quite a large space, bales of carpeting, cushions, hanging tapestries, and in the furthest recess a dozy young man who did not bestir himself, simply ignored my call. I had to shout to ask the price and he came forward, reluctantly. I pointed to it in the window. It looked fetching on a round table in an alcove of the window with place settings to give the semblance of a gathering. One small disappointment was the feel of the material. It was a taffeta; it did not have the sumptuousness of velvet or nap, flimsy to the touch. Again I enquired the price. Either one hundred pounds or one

hundred and fifty pounds. Which? Somewhere between those figures. He could not say for certain and the lady who owned the shop was abroad. Might he look up the price in a ledger? There was no ledger. The lady herself kept the books. All he wanted was to get rid of me, to retreat back to his nook, to burrow down in the mounds of cushions and mope.

White Frost. Black Frost. Hoar Frost. Jack Frost. The family of Frosts, late for Mass, my mother and I. The first bell gone, the second bell pealing, the high grass plumed, starched, the cowpats iced over, and the ice in the puddles like the frozen sugar in the green and orange candied peel that was kept for flavoring the Christmas cakes. Helter-skelter. My mother and I. Late for Mass again.

At the chapel gate neighbors pushing through, smiling or sullen, icicles on the black spears like drop earrings, danglers, and inside on the altar an array of white flowers, the petals shredded, like the white shredding in the coconut biscuits, flowers that must have come from a shop in Limerick because not even weeds throve in winter. The cross priest that gave the cross sermons spoke first of sins mounting ever upward, of penance, then the message of the gospel according to Matthew, Mark, Luke, and John, concluding with some innovative farming tips.

Holy Communion. Up to the rails, one and all, except the three men, the pagans at the back, renowned for their nocturnal prowls, and when the moment came, up there, bowing my head to abstain.
Oh Lord, we are not worthy to enter under your roof.

Back in the pew dagger looks from my mother, who kissed and re-kissed the medal of her rosary beads and brought it to my lips in chastisement.

“Young lady,” my mother said as we went up our own avenue.
Why had I refused the Eucharist? No why. There must be a why, there is always a why. Why. Why why.

It was what happened some evenings. Three or four of us go-

ing to the bridge at dusk, well knowing that the man in the plus fours would be there. Intrigued by him, his plus fours, his cigars, his scorn, casual chatting that then led to the game, the game of him swinging us round and round in turn, ending in a kiss that tasted of cigars. Innocence and wrongdoing. Then his knowing look to Oonagh, the gamiest of us, and she following him over a heap of rubble where the corner of the bridge had been blown up, over the steppingstones by the edge of the river, to be alone with him in the lime kiln, in the dark, where couples who were not married went.

Would you believe it, Mother, but one of these specialists had the cheek to ask if there was a history of insanity in the family. I denied it. Stoutly. Yet could not forget our little turns, not to mention our big turns. I thought of the moths, the way they feasted on woolens and angoras and the furor the day we saw swarms of them. It was in the blue room with the walnut furniture and the cherished souvenirs, an alabaster china bowl cracked down the middle, and a bone vanity box, with, for ornamentation, the bald severed head of an infant. Yes, inside our clothes, into our hair, into our armpits, into every nook and corner of our being as we writhed and cried out helplessly to one another.

Every so often there would come on you this yen to find a particular brooch from the Brooklyn days. It was amber. It contained the shriveled threads of a gnat that had got trapped inside it.

You stood me on a chair to reach the top shelf of the wardrobe and pull out clothes that had been flung there, kept for no reason except for the keeping of them
—
squashed straw hats, cardigans, scarves in flitters
—
and there among them I came on the green snood that led to the fits. It literally crawled with moths, moth eggs and white larvae. It sent shivers through us. Deciding you must take action, you went and fetched the goose wing and a bit of cardboard to sweep them up, whereupon mat-

ters became far worse. The goose grease that had saturated that handle must have imparted its juices to them, because they acquired new life, new momentum, and began to circulate.

“Jesus, they’ll eat us alive,” you kept saying and threw off your jumper, believing that they already nested in it.

Of what were we so afraid? We did not know, all we knew was that life and quasi-life had been transpiring for years in that wardrobe.

Marching down the stairs, you held the strip of cardboard at arm’s length and I hummed to create a distraction. It was not onto the old rhubarb bed that you flung them, that would have been too near to the house. We went down the field, past the clothesline, to the old fort where bad spirits and bad secrets lurked and you cast everything, wing, cardboard, and crawling snood, into a swamp, itself foul with matter.

Yet in that same swamp the blue irises streaked with yellow would eventually flourish.

“Don’t let on,” you said as we walked back. So many binding secrets.

One evening we set out for your mother’s house in the mountains. I knew it must be a crisis. We took the back road, said to be shorter, a stony road, hard on the feet. I would beg for us to sit down but you discouraged it, knowing that sitting was fatal, because of the willpower required to get up again.

Your mother, a distant creature, draped in black, a black head rag, a consortium of black petticoats, and a black cloth purse that she sometimes took a threepenny bit from and gave to me, with a warning not to squander it.

There was fluster when we arrived, my grandmother, slightly huffed, saying why hadn’t we sent warning and you reasoning that a letter would have taken two days. My aunt tried to placate her mother, said what did it matter if the kitchen was untidy, if there were no dainties for us, were we not a family who didn’t

stand on ceremony. You hinted about there being a sword hanging over Rusheen. My grandmother asked if my father had broken out again, meaning was he drinking. You pretended not to hear her. There we were, in that dark flagged kitchen, an open fire, pots of water to boil or reboil, an Aladdin lamp stationed in the middle of the table, its coned mantle sooted, not yet shedding, but not plump, letting out a little purr. Three grown women, with evident strain between them. My aunt spoke of a new crop of potato that they had planted and said we must carry a few back because there was nothing to beat them for flavor.

The walk back lay ahead of us, the darker night, dogs, cats, badgers, pine martens, foxes, not to mention the sinners that might waylay us.

When you asked outright, there was disbelief. Five hundred pounds. Five hundred pounds! Where in God’s name would they get five hundred pounds? What did you think they were
—
  millionaires? My grandmother was furious. You mentioned a Damocles sword hanging over Rusheen. My grandmother said,
As ye sow so also shall ye reap.
You held out your worn hands, attesting to the hard work they had done. Matters came to a head when you broached the matter of your dowry, the amount that had been promised that February morning, when you set out to marry, your husband-to-be already in the city, almost two hundred miles away, having gone hence with bachelors for pre-wedding celebrations. My grandmother picked up the tongs and vented some of her anger on the various sods in the fire.
A dowry, my lassie.
The way my grandmother said
my lassie
was most stinging. You had a cheek in coming to ask for such a sum, showed a terrible absence of nature, not to mention ingratitude. You said feebly that you had never asked before and made a mistake of reminding your mother that when you had it, you gave in plenty. My aunt concurred but my grandmother, too irate, had already launched into the telling of the time my father had descended upon them in the middle of the night, roar-