Irish Literature - House of Mourning and Other Stories

of this small city Chris saw a little girl in a blue crinoline frock, mushrooming outwards, running towards the expectant arms of a father. Red apples bounced on this image.
    Why had she been thinking of Sister Honor so much in the last few months? Why had Sister Honor been entering her mind with such ease and with such unquestioning familiarity? What was the sudden cause of this tide in favour of the psyche of a person you had tried to dispose of two years beforehand? One afternoon on Larissa Street Chris decided it was time to put up barriers against Sister Honor. But a woman, no longer in a nun’s veil, blonde-haired, hair the colour of dried honey, still tried to get in.
    Chris was studying English literature in the university—in a purple-red, many-corridored building—and the inspection of works of eighteenth-and nineteenth-century literature again leisurely evoked the emotion of the roots of her interest in literature, her inclination to literature, and the way Sister Honor had seized on that interest and so thoughts of Sister Honor—in the context of her study of literature—began circulating again. Sister Honor, in her mind, had one of the acerbic faces of the Celtic saints on the front of St Grellan’s, a question beginning on her lips, and her face lean, like a greyhound’s, stopped in the act of barking.
    ‘Hi, I’m Nick.’
    ‘I’m Chris.’
    A former chaperon of nuclear missiles on a naval ship, now studying Pascal, his broad shoulders cowering into a black leather jacket, accompanied Chris to George’s bar one Saturday night. They collected others on the way, a girl just back from the People’s Republic of China who said she’d been the first person from her country to do a thesis at Harvard—hers was on nineteenth-century feminist writers. George’s bar enveloped the small group, its low red, funeral-parlour light—the lights in the window illuminating the bar name were both blue and red.
    Autumn was optimistic and continuous, lots of sunshine; girls basked in shorts as though for summer; the physique of certain girls became sturdier and more ruddy and brown and sleek with sun. Chris found a tree to sit under and meditate on her background, Irish Catholic, its sins against her—big black aggressive limousines outside St Grellan’s on Sunday mornings unsteadying her childhood devotions, the time they dressed her in emerald velvet, cut in triangles, and made her play a leprechaun, the time an Irish priest showed her his penis under his black soutane and she’d wondered if this was an initiation into a part of Catholicism—and her deliverance from it now. The autumn sun cupped the Victorian villas in this town in its hand, the wine-red, the blue, the dun villas, their gold coins of autumn petals.
    Chris was reminded sometimes by baseball boys of her acne—boys eddying along the street on Saturday afternoons, in from the country for a baseball match—college boys generally gave her only one to two glances, the second glance always a curious one as she had her head down and did not seem interested in them. But here she was walking away from her family and sometimes even, on special occasions, she looked straight into someone’s eyes.
    What would Sister Honor have thought of her now? O God, what on earth was she thinking of Sister Honor for? That woman haunts me. Chris walked on, across the verdure, under the Capitol building beside which cowboys once tied their horses.
    The Saturday-night George’s bar group was deserted—Nick stood on Desmoines Street and cowered further into his black leather jacket, muttering in his incomprehensible Marlon Brando fashion of the duplicity of the American government and armed forces—Chris had fallen for a dance student who’d raised his right leg in leotards like a self-admiring pony in the dance studio. The plan to seduce him failed. The attempted seduction took place on a mattress on the floor of his room in an elephantine apartment block which housed a line of washing machines on the ground floor that insisted on shaking in unison in a lighted area late into the night, stopping sometimes as if to gauge the progress of Chris’s and her friend’s lovemaking. In the early stages of these efforts the boy remembered he was a homosexual and Chris remembered she was a virgin. They both turned from one another’s bodies and looked at the ceiling. The boy said the roaches on the ceiling were cute. Chris made off about three in the morning in a