Irish Literature - House of Mourning and Other Stories

drab anorak, blaming Catholicism and Sister Honor, the autumn river with its mild, off-shooting breeze leading her home. Yes, she was a sexual failure. Years at convent school had ensured a barrier between flowing sensuality and herself. Always the hesitation. The mortification. Dialogue. ‘Do you believe we qualify, in Martin Buber’s terms, for an I-thou relationship, our bodies I mean?’ ‘For fuck’s sake, my prick has gone jellified.’
    Chris knew there was a hunch on her shoulders as she hurried home; at one stage, on a bend of the river near the road, late, home-going baseball fans pulled down the window of a car to holler lewdnesses at her. She’s never been able to make love—‘Our bodies have destinies in love,’ Sister Honor rhetorically informed the class one day—and Chris had been saving her pennies for this destiny. But tonight she cursed Sister Honor, cursed her Catholicism, her Catholic-coated sense of literature and most of anything Sister Honor’s virginity which seemed to have given rise to her cruelty. ‘Chris, the acne on your face has intensified over Easter. It is like an ancient map of Ireland after a smattering of napalm.’ ‘Chris, your legs seem to dangle, not hold you.’ ‘Chris, walk straight, carry yourself straight. Bear in mind your great talent and your great intelligence. Be proud of it. Know yourself, Chris Gormley.’ Chris knew herself tonight as a bombed, withered, defeated thing. But these Catholic-withered limbs still held out hope for sweetening by another person.
    Yes, that was why she’d left convent school—because she perceived the sham in Sister Honor, that Sister Honor had really been fighting her own virginity and in a losing battle galled other people and clawed at other people’s emotions. Chris had left to keep her much-attacked identity intact. But on leaving she’d abandoned Sister Honor to a class where she could not talk literature to another pupil.
    Should I go back there sometime? Maybe? Find out what Honor is teaching. Who she is directing her attentions to. If anybody. See if she has a new love. Jealousy told Chris she had not. There could never have been a pair in that class to examine the Ecclesiastes like Honor and herself—‘A time of war, and a time of peace.’ Chris had a dream in which she saw Honor in a valley of vines, a biblical valley, and another night a dream in which they were both walking through Spenser’s Cork, before destruction, by birches and alders, hand in hand, at home and at peace with Gaelic identity and Gaelic innocence or maybe, in another interpretation of the dream, with childhood bliss. Then Sister Honor faded—the nightmare and the mellifluous dream of her—the argument was over. Chris settled back, drank, had fun, prepared for autumn parties.
    The Saturday-night George’s bar group was resurrected—they dithered behind one another at the entrance to parties, one less sure than the other. Chablis was handed to them, poured out of cardboard boxes with taps. A woman in black, a shoal of black balloons over her head, their leash of twine in her hand, sat under a tree in the garden at a party one night. She was talking loudly about an Egyptian professor who had deserted her. A girl approached Chris and said she’d been to the same convent as Chris had been. Before the conversation could be pursued the room erupted into dancing—the girl was lost to the growing harvest moon. Chris walked into the garden and comforted the lady in black.
    ‘Dear Sister Honor.’ The encounter prompted Chris to begin a letter to Honor one evening. Outside, the San Francisco bus made its way up North Dubuque Street—San Francisco illuminated on the front—just about overtaking a fat negro lady shuffling by Victorian villas with their promise of flowers in avenues that dived off North Dubuque Street, heaving her unwieldy laundry. But the image of Sister Honor had faded too far and the letter was crumpled. But for some reason Chris saw Honor that night, a ghost in a veil behind a desk, telling a class of girls that Edmund Spenser would be important to their lives.
    Juanito was a Venezuelan boy in a plum-red T-shirt, charcoal hair falling over an almost Indian face which was possessed of lustrous eyes and lips that seemed about to moult. He shared his secret with her at a party. He was possessed by demons. They emerged from him at night and fluttered about the white ceiling of Potomac apartments. At one party a young man,