The Light of Evening by Edna O’Brien Page B

which we knelt had been stolen from others. He cited the first settlers, mostly Dutch, who had come to the new world, the New Amsterdam, come to the fields of wild blackberries and hickory, where deer, muskrat, and wild turkeys roamed, honest men and women by their own standards and yet prepared to cheat the tribes of Lenape Indians, traded guns and wool for the pelts of animals that they sold for fortunes, gradually acquiring the deeds of those lands so that the native tribes were driven out, the great open tracts cut up in lots, to make houses, to make streets, to make progress, to make the colossal wealth that some, but not all, enjoyed. And what, he asked, did the newspapers and the politicians do? They colluded in their corruption, in their greed, backroom politics, and party patronage, ensuring that the cunning few reaped the fat of the land.
    People coughed and fidgeted to show their disapproval, a few even walked out and afterward he was shunned when he stood outside the chapel door in his gold vestments to greet them. Mary Kate shook his hand and lingered because he was so good-looking and on the way home said that it was all right to shake hands with a priest because a priest was made in the image of Christ, it was not like kissing a beau in one of the rides, at Coney.

    Mr. and Mrs. McCormack

    a different priest brought me to my first job. His car was chocolate-colored with a hooded top, the smell of the leather seats so clean, so cleansing, and he put on motor gloves before we set out.
    He kept impressing on me how eminent my new employers were, esteemed in the parish, the husband high up in a bank, his wife so musical that she paid to have the choir trained because she liked a sung Mass. He reckoned I was lucky to be placed in such a select neighborhood, what with the park opposite with its meadows and waterfalls, and moreover I wouldn’t feel lonesome as there were sheep in it and I could hear them bleating at night.
    It was a big stone house with stone figures on the gable ends and a foot scraper at the top of the flight of steps. The double glass doors were fronted with wrought iron so that nobody could see in, but the woman inside who was waiting for us was tapping irritably on the glass. Mrs. McCormack, my future boss. “What an hour of night to come,” she said to him, then throwing me a sarcastic look she asked, “Is she from Roscommon, one of the sheep stealers?” The priest tried to smooth matters, said he had had a sick call and hence the inconsiderate hour.
    It was the husband, Pascal, who led me to my sleeping quarters. Two flights of carpeted stairs with brass rods and then linoleum the higher we went. The last bit of stairs was so narrow
    that we had to walk sideways and my bag that had crossed the seas kept bumping into him. He opened a bedroom door and sent me in. There were two narrow beds with a girl in one of them. In the light from the landing I could see she was blond, nearly an albino, and wore a nightgown that buttoned up to her throat. She was like a weasel.
    “You are in my sleeping room,” she said as she sat up and thrashed her arms to get rid of me. I forget how I undressed in the dark, but I must have and I must have slept because I wakened with her pulling me out of the bed because the missus was calling for her breakfast. The missus shouted her orders from three floors down, shouted them into a pipe, and we heard them through a hole in the wall that had a brass shield over it. The girl, her name was Solveig, tore to the kitchen, with me trailing her. That morning, as with all the mornings, it was the missus’s breakfast, her husband’s breakfast, then running her bath and her footbath and laying out her clothes for the day. She had such a rich assortment of corsets, frilly drawers, and morning coats and her day jewelry was kept separate from the jewelry down in the safe.
    She had a down on me from day one, remarking on the way I clumped, my flat arches, my brogue, my