The Light of Evening (24 page)
“I only had a mineral,” Con says, reading the anxiety in her eyes at the fact that Billy is staggering because he has had a few, waving his arm to praise the lineaments of a young nurse hurrying by.
Con is wearing the new shoes and asks her to guess how they differ from all the other pairs of shoes he has bought over the years. She cannot. They have a feature that is unique. What is it? Shock absorbers. What are they? I’m telling you, shock absorbers. He removes one shoe and points to a nodule of raised metal, guaranteed to absorb any shock, then re-dons it and does a circuit around her bed for her to admire them. She guesses the price almost to a shilling.
“Jaysus, they didn’t give us the box of free polish,” Billy declares. When Billy bought a pair of shoes in distant times there was always a box of polish thrown in and a spare pair of laces, but times, as Billy says, though skittishly, are tougher.
“We should hit the road, I suppose,” Con says, not looking at her.
“Rightio,” Billy says, overeager. Then, emboldened from drink, he raves on about shadows lengthening, mist on the rivers creeping in over bog land and headland, blinding headlights, woeful altogether, and their engine ready to conk it at any minute.
“Are you sure you’re fit to drive?” she asks.
“Sure! Haven’t we a chauffeur?” and she learns how they’d hired a youth from the factory to drive them. What with scolding them about the extravagance, thanking them for coming, and reminding Con to give the dog a bit of something when he gets home late, she forgets altogether to hand him the letter.
Holding it after he has left she thinks of the many crucial things left unsaid.
Buried Love
for three nights in a row, Dilly has dreamed of Gabriel, a look of yearning on his face, the clothes hanging off him, making no attempt to come to her and yet making his presence felt, standing on an empty road, like he was waiting. Three nights in a row.
“It must mean that he’s trying to reach you,” Sister says.
“It doesn’t,” Dilly answers and says that she believes he is dead. A letter she wrote the year previous was returned, having gone to various addresses across America. Sad, she and Sister concur, when things of that nature are left unfinished. She recalls their last encounter, or rather their last, missed encounter.
“I was back in Brooklyn with Cornelius, a bride, much more palatial lodgings than Ma Sullivan’s, his lordship off in the bars every night, spending all before him, when one evening the landlady taps on my door and hands me a box with a ribbon round it. A glass dish, a red cranberry that resembled a jug he had won in Long Island long before, and a note wishing myself and Cornelius every happiness. I ran down the stairs in my bare feet and ran out into the street to ask anyone if anyone had seen the tall bearded man, but it was already dark and no one had sighted him. Back upstairs, I studied it, the color like the color that summer’s day, but the P.S. on his letter so blunt, so final: ‘I am not in the place I was anymore.’ That was all. That was Gabriel. I’d wronged him and he paid me back. I’d been told that he was go-
ing with another girl when he wasn’t, at the time he was sick, unconscious, after an accident in Wisconsin hauling timber, but these two girls, these two friends, deceived me into believing that I was jilted, which I wasn’t.”
“Wasn’t that very bad,” Sister says in a voice of commiseration.
“Worse than bad,” Dilly replies and muses aloud on the crosses that beset love.
Sister nods, hesitates, then she sits and recounts, in a voice quite other to her everyday chattery voice, her downfall, the one time when she reneged on Christ the Redeemer.
“I, who had consecrated myself, I who had offered my life, my thoughts, my desires, my long black hair, my everything to Him. In the bodily garden the apple lurks. It was ward seventeen. Six of my urinals gone missing. I knew the culprit to be Sister Xavier. Sent to try me, always poking her nose in my business. I went straight across to have words with her. Words. A flaming row, first she denied it then said I’d have to make do with jam jars. My patients reduced to jam jars. Shame on you, Xavier. Oh, we tussled. Like two washerwomen jawing and then, then, this arm came around my waist and a male voice said, ‘Don’t worry, I’ll see that you get six more’ and I laid eyes on him for the first time, a new junior doctor, handsome, with that Cork lilt, an Aengus, the name of the wanderer. I was called over the coals after night prayers, Matron saying there had been a complaint about me, I had upset another sister. I was given penances, made to lift the heavy patients, turning them over in the bed, sponge them, and then turn them back again, having to scrub the stone stairs and the porches three times a week with Jeyes fluid. That’s where I met him. Again and again. He had a little dog in his car, a cocker spaniel that he had to let out twice a day. Buttons was its name. Buttons, a whiz at hunting birds, knew all the places down in Cork, in the briars and the undergrowth where the pheasants hid and in the reeds where the coots and the moor-
hens were, flushed them out. Each day Buttons perched on the bonnet of his sports car, ears cocked, lifting one paw and then another, like a ballerina. Buttons, our accomplice. Aengus plying me with questions. At what moment in my life did I realize that I had a vocation? I told him how I came home from a dance one night, I was about seventeen, a bit wound up from the dancing, and I sat by the fire and read the paper and came on an article about the foundress of our order, Catherine McAuley, an heiress who might have led a butterfly existence but instead opened Coolock House to the poor and set herself a crusade to help the children in the lanes and alleyways of Dublin and at fifty entered a novitiate and became a nun.
“As time went on things got more dangerous, those telling looks, whispering in my ear, who cut my hair and how often did I change my habit, wanting to know every single thing about my habit, the material, the veiling, the length of the train, the dimity, the guimpe, the cincture, the inner sleeving, the outer sleeving, the pocket handkerchief, the night cap, and the night veil of cotton calico that we nuns wear for sleep. Had to know it all. Then on the spur of the moment he picks up my rosary to look at the black beads with the two crosses, the ebony and the ivory, then the ring on the marriage finger that signifies betrothal to the Lord. Soon after the gifts, harmless at first, bars of scented soap, a paperweight that housed a universe of flaked snow, and then the tantalizing one, a little blue bottle of perfume, my daring to unscrew the top, prizing out the pink rubber nozzle and basking in that profane smell.
Oh, Blood of Christ, save me. Body of Christ, inebriate me.
Doing everything to avoid him and yet and at unexpected moments walking straight into him and blushing; having to abstain from the sacraments because my confessor must not learn of my sin, Mother Superior summoning me to her private parlor for a stiff talk. Why had I not received the Holy Host for five weeks? Was it the sin of pride? Me unable to answer. Punishments. Not even allowed to listen with the other nuns to the
ballad program on the radio of a Sunday evening, I who loved those ballads and doing my tasks always hummed them. Then the fall. Agreeing to meet him in the pharmacy where he would have to go nights to collect the sleeping drafts for the patients and where I would also have to go to collect my medicines, suppositories, or whatever. He would shut the door, softly. We would each ask how the other was but not answer. He put it in writing to me, tucked the letter up inside my inner sleeve, saying I could read it in seclusion. Read it a thousand times. The last line crucifying me: ‘Why are you staying when you do not wish to stay?’ In three months he was leaving for the States, he had secured a post in a hospital in Buffalo and was asking me to go with him as his wife. Instead of a silver ring, as he remarked, I would have the prouder gold wedding band. If traveling together was too awkward he suggested that I could follow in a week. ‘Why are you staying when you do not wish to stay?’ He gave me time to think it over and promised to deprive himself of my company. He would not seek me out, far from it, he had himself transferred to the new wing that had been opened down the street. Looking up Buffalo in the globe atlas in the office, spinning it round and round but unable to find it. Voices telling me, ‘Consolata, this is the time of your trial.’ It was clear to all my sisters in God that there was something wrong with me because the weight fell off me and I walked around like a ghost. The Holy Office that we are obliged to say twice daily, merely mouthed, the beautiful words of the Psalms wasted on me. Asking myself, what would I look like in street clothes, the habit gone, the veiling gone, the yards and yards of camouflage material stripped away, and my white legs that he had never seen. Shoes and stockings having to be bought in Buffalo. How many letters did I write to my archbishop to say that I wished to renounce my vows and leave the order. How many letters did I write and then tear up. I would rehearse the interview with Mother Superior. I would see her face, grained like wood as I broke it to her and worse was the
breaking of it to my mother. Writing a letter, her reading it in the kitchen and most probably having a seizure. I went from one chore to the next, asking the good God whom I was betraying to see me through. At moments I would savor the joys ahead: Buffalo, Aengus, cooking a dinner and going out to the cinema, high heels and a handbag. Sisters from the various convents were brought to persuade me, harsh and compassionate by turn. The worst was a mother superior from our branch in Liverpool, a very tall commanding person of whom it was rumored that she suffered night and day with migraines and never slept. She did not mince her words. They would not release me, at least not for five years, and then if I wished I could go my infidel way. Did I not see, she kept insisting, that I was being tested, did I not see the honor the good God placed on me by allowing me to immerse myself in the way of the cross. She cited the path that led to Calvary, Satan leading Judas to betrayal, Peter’s denial, Pilate washing his hands of the case, insisting that Satan had singled me out by sending me this temptation, Satan had contemplated the masterpiece of crucifying Christ all over again by my defecting. ‘Did Christ shrink from sacrifice?’ ‘No, Mother.’ ‘Nor must you.’ The curtain of worldly desire must be ripped in half and I must look into my own soul and overcome the pit of hell. T am in hell,’ I blurted to her. She almost struck me with her raised withered hand. After that it was banishment. I was sent to a sister house in Ballinasloe, silence and meditation, excused from all manual work, alone with myself, no patients to occupy the welter of my thoughts. A card was forwarded at Easter. From him. Yellow buttercups and yellow chicklets, not the image of the Christ on the cross. He was waiting, he was fretting, while I meanwhile was being watched for the sea change that would transpire in my soul. One day a young nun, a postulant in her white habit, came and sat next to me on a garden seat, sat by my side, the two of us facing a cherry tree coming into flower and knowing that I was under the vow of silence she did not utter a
word. She just sat there and began to cry softly and earnestly. To this day I do not know if she cried with me or for me, all I know is she had been sent in some miraculous guise, because not long after I wakened saying and re-saying, ‘In the juvenescence of the year came Christ the Tiger.’ My turning point.
“It seems like only yesterday,” she said, rising, then placing her hand on the damp of the misted window brought it to the guimpe that covered her forehead, pressing on it, then back to the window again and to her forehead, too overwrought to say anything more.
The Visit
“oh beautiful day, beautiful day altogether, such a change, my my, such a change after that bitter wind, that bitter March wind that would go through you and the temperature has shot up after being minus what and thank God, a nice crisp morning and little shoots on the trees, little furls and the bushes atwitter with the birds.”
How they laugh, how they fuss, their fussing and laughter filling that end of the ward, overflowing, one bringing a chair for Eleanora, another a cup of coffee, marveling that at long last she has come, they fearing, as her mother feared, that she had gone somewhere as far-flung as Peru, but at least it was only Denmark and for a conference, as they’d been told, to do with her work.
Her mother is propped on several pillows, her hair neatly swept up with side combs, her face heavily powdered, the too-pink powder not patted in. She twirls the two blue ribbons of her bed jacket, unable to contain her pride and joy in the fact that her daughter has come. Nuns and a nurse have converged for the welcome and what a welcome it is, compliments at the beautiful bouquet of flowers, chocolates and macaroons and fudges in a gift basket, mouth-watering, and look at those dates so moist, so luscious, all the way from Gibraltar.
Then it is to Eleanora’s smart outfit, ultra feminine, the color suggestive of the fuchsia in the hedges and one of the nuns, flushed with excitement, marvels at the resemblance between
mother and daughter. It is Sister Consolata to whom she is ceremoniously introduced. Sister touches her lapel and says she’ll stay a month, be a balm to her mother’s brooding, and listen to her mother’s fund of stories, maybe put them in a book.
“I knew you’d come, I knew you’d come,” Dilly says, tears and joy striving for mastery in her. Sister Rosario, a postulant in white, her face pale and chiseled like ivory, stops on her way by to meet the visitor and admire the beautiful fringed shawl, the gift for Dilly that has been spread over the bed, the better to study the colors and the patterns, birds and branched tracery. They surpass one another in deciding on its exact color. Is it brown, is it cocoa, is it cinnamon, arguing, then conceding that it is all these colors, the warm colors of the baked earth where the sun beats unfailingly down. The shawl is draped over Dilly’s shoulders and yielding now to tears she says, “It’s too good for me, it’s far too good for me” to which Sister Rosario with a petulance asks why should it be too good for her, she a mother like every Irish mother, sacrificing her own life for her young.
