Irish Literature - House of Mourning and Other Stories

bread knife through someone. If only the police officer who allowed his poodle to excrete outside her street-level apartment. Ella had picked up the sense of a father of stature from Chris and that arranged her attitude towards Chris; Chris had a bit of the Catholic aristocrat about her, her father an Irish-American building contractor who held his ground in windy weather outside St Grellan’s on Sunday mornings, his granite suit flapping, a scarlet breast-pocket handkerchief leaping up like a fish, his black shoes scintillating with his youngest son’s efforts on them and his boulder-like fingers going for another voluminous cigar. ‘Chris, you have the face of fortune. You’ll meet a nice man. You’ll be another Grace Kelly. End up in a palace.’ Chris saw Grace Kelly’s face, the tight bun over it, the lipstick like an even scimitar. She saw the casinos. Yes she would end up living beside casinos in some mad, decadent country, but not Monaco, more likely some vestige of Central or South America.
    ‘Chris, will you come and visit me at Hallowe’en?’ The dreaming Chris’s face was disturbed. ‘Yes, Yes, I will.’
    Summer was over without any great reckoning when Sister Honor and Chris slid south, through the corn, to a city which rose over the corn, its small roofs, its terracotta museums by the clouded river, its white Capitol building, a centrepiece like a Renaissance city.
    Sister Honor had imbibed Chris from the beginning as she would a piece of revealing literature; Chris had been established in class as a reference point for questions about literary complexities. Sister Honor would raise her hand and usher Chris’s attention as if she was a traffic warden stopping the traffic. ‘Chris, what did Spenser mean by this?’ Honor should have known. She’d done much work in a university in Virginia on the poet Edmund Spenser; her passion for Spenser had brought her to County Cork. She’d done a course in Anglo-Irish literature for a term in Cork University. Red Irish buses had brought her into a countryside, rich and thick now, rich and thick in the Middle Ages, but one incandesced by the British around Spenser’s time. The British had come to wonder and then destroy. Honor had come here as a child of five with her father, had nearly forgotten, but could not forget the moment when her father, holding her hand, cigar smoke blowing into a jackdaw’s mouth, had wondered aloud how they had survived, how his ancestry had been chosen to escape, to take flight, to settle in a town in the Midwest and go on to creating dove-coloured twentieth-century skyscrapers.
    Perhaps it had been the closeness of their backgrounds that had brought Chris and Honor together—their fathers had straddled on the same pavement outside St Grellan’s Catholic Church, they’d blasted the aged and lingering Father Duane with smoke from the same brand of cigars. But it had been their ever-probing interest in literature which had bound them more strongly than the aesthetic of their backgrounds—though it may have been the aesthetic of their backgrounds which drove them to words. ‘Vocabularies were rich and flowing in our backgrounds,’ Sister Honor had said. ‘Rich and flowing.’ And what did not flow in Sister Honor she made up for in words.
    Many-shaped bottoms followed one another in shorts over the verdure around the white Capitol building. The atmosphere was one of heightened relaxation; smiles were 1950s-type smiles on girls in shorts. Chris found a place for herself in George’s bar. She counted the lights in the constellation of lights in the jukebox and put on a song for Sister Honor. Buddy Holly. ‘You Go Your Way and I’ll Go Mine.’ A long-distance truck driver touched her from behind and she realized it was two in the morning.
    She had imagined Sister Honor’s childhood so closely that sometimes it seemed that Sister Honor’s childhood had been her childhood and in the first few weeks at the university—the verdure, the sunlight on white shorts and white Capitol building, the fall, many-coloured evening rays of sun evoking a primal gust in her—it was of Sister Honor’s childhood she thought and not her own. The suburban house, hoary in colour like rotten bark, the Maryland farm she visited in summer—the swing, the Stars and Stripes on the verdant slope, the first-or second-edition Nathaniel Hawthorne books open, revealing mustard, fluttering pages like an evangelical announcement. In the suburbs