Irish Literature - House of Mourning and Other Stories

heaving in her frail bed. With other sisters she changed from black to white and was seen off with red carnations. The local newspaper had photographed them. But the photograph appeared in a newspaper in Detroit. A plane landed in an airport by the ocean, miles from a city which was known to be at war but revealed itself to them in champagne and palm trees. A priest at the American Embassy gave them champagne and they were photographed again.
    There was a rainbow over the city that night. Already in that photograph when it was developed Honor looked younger. Blonde hair reached down from under her white veil, those Shirley Temple curls her father had been proud of and sometimes pruned to send snippets to relatives. In a convent twenty miles from the city Honor found a TV and a gigantic fridge. The Reverend Mother looked down into the fridge. She was fond of cold squid. A nearby town was not a ramshackle place but an American suburb. Palm trees, banks, benevolent-faced American men in panama hats. An American zinc company nearby. The girls who came to be taught were chocolate-faced but still the children of the rich—the occasional chocolate-faced girl among them a young American with a tan. Honor that autumn found herself teaching Spenser to girls who watched the same TV programmes as the girls in the city she left. An American flag fluttered nearby and assured everyone, even the patrolling monkey-bodied teenage soldiers, that everything was all right. Such a dramatic geographical change, such a physical leap brought Honor in mind of Chris Gormley.
    Chris Gormley had captivated her from the beginning, her long, layered blonde hair, her studious but easy manner. Honor was not in a position to publicly admire so she sometimes found herself insulting Chris. Only because she herself was bound and she was baulking at her own shackles. She cherished Chris though—Chris evoked the stolidity and generosity of her own background; she succeeded in suggesting an aesthetic from it and for this Honor was grateful—and when Chris went Honor knew she’d failed here, that she’d no longer have someone to banter with, to play word games with, and so left, hoping Chris one day would make a genius or a lover—for her sake—or both. Honor had been more than grateful to her though for participating in a debate with her and making one thing lucid to her—that occasionally you have to move on. So moving on for Honor meant travel, upheaval, and finding herself now beside a big Reverend Mother who as autumn progressed kept peering into a refrigerator bigger than herself.
    A few months after she arrived in the convent however things had shifted emphasis; Honor was a regular sight in the afternoons after school throwing a final piece of cargo into a jeep and shooting—exploding—off in a cantankerous and erratic jeep with other nuns to a village thirty miles away. She’d become part of a cathectics corps. Beyond the American suburb was an American slum. Skeletal women with ink hair and big ink eyes with skeletal children lined the way. Honor understood why she’d always been drawn to Elizabethan Irish history. Because history recurs. For a moment in her mind these people were the victims of a British invasion. At first she was shy with the children. Unused to children. More used to teenage girls. But little boys graciously reached their hands to her and she relaxed, feeling better able to cope. The war was mainly in the mountains; sometimes it came near. But the children did not seem to mind. There was one child she became particularly fond of—Harry after Harry Belafonte—and he of her and one person she became drawn to, Brother Mark, a monk from Montana. He had blond hair, the colour of honey, balding in furrows. She wanted to put her fingers through it. Together they’d sit on a bench—the village was on an incline—on late afternoons that still looked like autumn, vineyards around, facing the Pacific which they could not see but knew was there from the Pacific sun hitting the clay of the vineyards, talking retrospectively of America. Did she miss America? No. She felt an abyss of contentment here among the little boys in white vests, with little brown arms already bulging with muscles. Brother Mark dressed in a white gown and one evening, intuiting her feelings for him—the fingers that wanted to touch the scorched blue and red parts of his head—his hand reached from it to hers. To refrain from a relationship she