The Light of Evening by Edna O’Brien Page A

replete with pillows, she calling him “Baby, baby,” he nearly died. She asked him his name, was he shy, was it his first time, and so forth and unable to restrain himself a second longer, he tore off his disguises and said, “Annie, Annie,” which was her real name. She drew back, thinking maybe that he had a dagger or a gun. He told her not to be frightened, he was her brother and loved her as a brother and had come to get her out of there. She hung her head. He thought it was shame. He begged of her to put her clothes on and walk out of that house with him, but she refused. He pleaded. He asked her why. She said for his own sake he’d better leave, as there were toughs on call, who would beat him to a pulp. Finally she said that she had no wish to go. His own sister. “What will I tell our mother?” he asked.
    “Tell her I’m dead,” she answered.
    Mary Kate was crying buckets, for Annie, for herself, and seeing that she had softened a bit I said, “Mary Kate, I want to go home.”
    “You can’t go home,” she kept saying, hysterically, and it was like a death sentence.

    Dear Billy

    i could  hear my mother talking to me the second I opened her letter, talking and scolding.

    I take my pen in my hand twice within a month to say how worried I am about your silence. I have not heard from you in two weeks. I beg you to write to us. Do you not know, do you not recall our situation here? We are barely able to keep a roof over our heads. To make matters worse we had a setback. Things have conspired against us. Your father swore me to secrecy, but I have to tell someone, what with your brother hardly ever here. With the money he got for the corn that he brought to the mill, he decided to treat himself to a pair of boots and unfortunately got the shopkeeper to grease them in order to wear them on the ten-mile walk home. That was his mistake. He was crippled in them but could not return them because of having been seen to wear them. They’re no good to anyone. You say you are looking for a post and I pray that you have secured it by now. It seems your cousin is not as friendly to you as she could be. That’s sincerity for you. I will say nothing to her mother about it as there would only be a coolness. I’ll be watching for the postman. I now bring this letter to a close, your loving mother,
    Bridget

    Mass

    i could not write back and tell her how strange and false everything was. My cousin drinking in secret and hiding the empty bottles in a shoebox under the bed. My cousin pretending she was a nurse when it turned out that she washed patients and dressed them, her hands pink and raw-looking from all the washing.
    In the lodging house the people kept to themselves, slunk into their rooms, their doors usually locked, and in the kitchen and in the icebox their names printed on their provisions, on the strange foods that they ate, bread that was a brown-black and little cucumbers that tasted vinegary. We stole a few when we were hungry, which was usually at the end of the week when Mary Kate’s money ran out. The gold sovereign and the florin my mother gave me was confiscated toward my keep.
    Everything hinged on money, the paved street and the parts where the paving ran out and pigs ran wild and were pelted with cabbage stalks.
    That first Sunday in the palatial church with its altar and side altars, the priest’s sermon centered on the parable of the camel unable to pass through the eye of the needle, no more than the rich man would be able to enter heaven. He was a visiting priest, his skin dark and shining like dark shining mahogany, the folds between his dark fingers were a pale shell-pink and there swam in his eyes such faith, such fervor. The congregation, he said, was
    indeed lucky to be living in such a leafy borough with its clapboard houses, its stone mansions, and its lines of beautiful trees, but that such comforts had been obtained at a price. The past could not be blotted out. The very site on