The Light of Evening by Edna O’Brien Read Free Book Online Page A

and she hugged me. After that it was all “gee whiz.” Gee whiz, I was out of the bogs now, I was in the beautiful borough, starting a new life. We would go to Coney in the summer. I didn’t know what Coney was but imagined it a place full of rabbits. She laughed at that. Coney was the last word in thrills, roller-skating, love rides, stunts such as being sucked into the mouth of a giant tobacco pipe and slid out through the bowl at the other end. She’d gone there in the summer with a beau, a beau that worked in construction but announced one day he had to move on. That was the thing about America, people always moving on, so that a girl had to snap up a beau as fast as she could. She recalled the day, the petting, dancing cheek to cheek in the open air with the ocean breezes drifting in and she believing that she was hitched up.
    The bathroom was on the other side of the bedroom where the couple with the baby slept. It meant disturbing them. The first two times she came with me and showed me a knack of pulling the chain so that it made the least amount of noise. By the third time she was furious. What was wrong with me. Did I have a tapeworm or what. She raised the sash of the window as far up as it would go and lifted me out onto the stone ledge, then pulled the window down to teach me a lesson. I could hear the rumble of cars in the street beyond. Perched there, terrified and certain that I would fall or jump, she laughing at the joke, I saw again the sign in the examination hall that had said cripples not wanted and began to batter on the window.
    Later in bed she said that people at home, her people, my people, believed that America was a land of riches but that nothing could be further from the truth. America was a land of bluff and blighted dreams and I would be lucky if I got a job as a maid in a big house. I would be a Biddy, a kitchen canary.

    A Blind Man

    one of the lodgers worked odd hours and when she came in I bolted, without even a coat. The wind was at my back and I sped down the series of hills to get to the city, but it was not like a city at all, not like the city I’d seen on a calendar with ladies in fur coats, stepping out of a carriage, snowflakes on their fur collars and their cloche hats. It was higgledy-piggledy, trolley buses and horse-drawn carts, a fish wagon, a coal wagon, an oyster wagon, and men with pickaxes hitting stones to make a road where the road ran out. Noise poured out of the saloons and boys in long overalls were running hither and thither to deliver jugs of foaming beer, and in an alley children in rags and tatters were chasing young pigs with cabbage stalks and bits of stick.
    There was music coming out of the saloons and different music that the organ grinder played, a monkey on his shoulder with a collection mug in the crook of its paw. Hardly had I stopped to look and to listen when a row broke out, the monkey and the organ grinder on one side and on the opposite a blind man in a belted coat that was too small for him and a white stick that needed scouring. He was in their patch and they were telling him to scoot it, that he was a bum, a clunk, to move on. The monkey was yapping away, as cross as his master, and the blind man refusing to budge. Then it was name-calling and the blind man’s pencils, which he was hoping to sell, tossed in the air and rolling over the pavement. I ran to retrieve a few, but most of them had
    rolled out onto the street where there were the cars and the carts trundling by.
    He thanked me, said I was a nice girl, a clean girl, the only person to show a bit of kindness to the blind man who was jostled and robbed and kicked and called a bum and called a clunk.
    He leaned on me as we crossed the street, because they were still shouting and haranguing him, and we walked lopsided, but once on the other side he would not let go of me. I knew he was mad, he had to be mad, the way he raved: Walt Whitman, the city’s poet, Walt Whitman’s masts of