Irish Literature - House of Mourning and Other Stories

José from Puerto Rico, came naked, crossed his hairy legs in a debonair fashion and sipped vodka. So demented was he in the United States without a girlfriend that he forgot to put on clothes. Juanito from Venezuela recurred again and again. The demons were getting worse. They seemed to thrive on the season of Hallowe’en. There was a volcanic rush of them out of him now at night against the ceiling. But he still managed to play an Ella Fitzgerald number, ‘Let’s Fall in Love,’ on a piano at a party. José from Puerto Rico found an American girlfriend for one night but she would not allow him to come inside her because she was afraid of disease, she told him, from his part of the world.
    Chris held a party at her apartment just before the mid-term break. Juanito came and José. She’d been busy preparing for days. In a supermarket two days previously she’d noticed as she’d carried a paper sack of groceries at the bottom left-hand corner of the college newspaper, a report about the killing of some American nuns in a Central American country. The overwhelming feature of the page, however, had been a blown-up photograph of a bird who’d just arrived in town to nest for the winter. Anyway the sack of groceries had kept Chris from viewing the newspaper properly. The day had been very fine and Chris, crossing the green of the campus, had encountered the bird who’d come to town to nest for the winter or a similar bird. There was goulash for forty people at Chris’s party—more soup than stew—and lots of pumpkin pie, apple pie and special little buns, speckled by chocolate, which Chris had learned to make from her grandmother. The party was just underway when five blond college boys in white T-shirts entered bearing candles in carved pumpkin shells flame coming through eyes and fierce little teeth. There were Japanese girls at Chris’s party and a middle-aged man frequently tortured in Uruguay but who planned to return to that country after this term in the college. He was small, in a white T-shirt, and he smiled a lot. He could not speak English too well but he kept pointing at the college boys and saying ‘nice.’ At the end of the party Chris made love in the bath not to one of these boys who’d made their entrance bearing candles in pumpkin shells but to a friend of theirs who’d arrived later.
    In the morning she was faced by many bottles and later, a few hours later, a ribboning journey through flat, often unpeopled land. The Greyhound bus was like her home. She sat back, chewed gum, and watched the array of worn humanity on the bus. One of the last highlights of the party had been José emptying a bottle of red wine down the mouth of the little man from Uruguay.
    When she arrived at the Greyhound bus station in her city she understood that there was something different about the bus station. Fewer drunks around. No one was playing the jukebox in the café. Chris wandered into the street. Crowds had gathered on the pavement. The dusk was issuing a brittle, blue spray of rain. Chris recognized a negro lady who usually frequented the bus station. The woman looked at Chris. People were waiting for a funeral. Lights from high-rise blocks blossomed. The negro woman was about to say something to Chris but refrained. Chris strolled down the street, wanting to ignore this anticipated funeral. But a little boy in a football T-shirt told her ‘The nuns are dead.’ On a front page of a local newspaper, the newspaper vendor forgetting to take the money from her, holding the newspaper from her, Chris saw the news. Five nuns from this city had been killed in a Central American country. Four were being buried today. One was Honor.
    When Chris Gormley had left the school Sister Honor suddenly realized now that her favourite and most emotionally involving pupil—with what Sister Honor had taken to be her relaxed and high sense of destiny—had gone, that all her life she had not been confronting something in herself and that she often put something in front of her, prize pupils, to hide the essential fact of self-evasion. She knew as a child she’d had a destiny and so some months after Chris had gone Honor flew—literally in one sense but Honor saw herself as a white migrating bird—to Central America with some nuns from her convent. The position of a teaching nun in a Central American convent belonging to their order had become vacant suddenly when a nun began having catatonic nightmares before going,