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

Manhattan and tall hills of Brooklyn, Walt Whitman, who had fallen, just like the blind man, into the mire, as had Horace who succumbed to the lures of a perfume seller. I was a clean girl in a city of vice, ancient Egypt or ancient Babylon no more wicked or no more corrupt. He had been a player once, in the saloons, at the trotting races, chancing his arm, scoring, and even the reverent fathers had singled him out. Sold religious articles, up in the silk stocking district, going from door to door, his valise crammed with holy statues, books, leaflets, novenas, miniature altars, miraculous medals, could put the sales over with a real punch, sold more in a day than the peanut man or the hot dog man. Flying it. Long-lashed Lenny as he was known. Face to face with the ladies and their nice drawl, in their morning coats, with their little lap dogs nested in their laps, time on their hands, their husbands making the loot. Yes, the swank ladies in their swank houses. One in particular. A doll. Wanted for nothing but her cup was never full. He knew the cup she meant. He filled the cup. Sweet as butter grass. Blonds, brunettes, redheads. One played him false or maybe more than one. Went from being a player to a human cockroach. Wakened one morning in some dive to know the game was up. Nausea, the shivers, the disease that bums, stevedores, poets, and the city elders all fell foul to. The syph. Had to be burned out of him. Oh man, the mercury that cured also took away, a descent into blindness. “I have sewed sackcloth upon my skin and defiled my horn in the dust.”
    We were by the trough where the horses drank and a few of the drivers sat with their heads down, dozing. A woman he knew who ran a little food stall gave us two minute cups of black coffee and when he drank it he slugged it down, just like the horses.
    He must have sensed that I wanted to get away, because he said that I was his guardian angel who had been sent to him for that day.
    It wasn’t yet dark, but I knew it soon would be and that I would have to leave him. His hands searched my face as if they could see, whereas by contrast his eyes were quenched, a yellowish pus caked on the cracks of his eyelids. We would go to Wonderland. Wonderland was a home where little blind girls lived and every so often had a fete, sold cakes and tarts and muffins to rich ladies, to show that they were useful in the community. He’d been told of it, how they stood in their aprons behind a long table, with their sieves and their weighing scales and their baking tins, little blind girls, a credit to the community.
    “I’ll come tomorrow,” I said, wrenching my arm away from him.
    “You won’t … you won’t come tomorrow,” he said, and he started to curse. How lost he looked there in the belted coat that was too small for him and the dirty white stick, unable to hide the sad truth that no one wanted to listen to him, tears running down his cheeks. God knows where he slept.
    Then I was lost. Up streets, down streets, the same streets or different, it was impossible to tell. I couldn’t remember where I lived. Near a park. “But which park?” she asked, as there were many. She was a child’s nurse in uniform, wheeling a pram, and her mistress would be furious if she was late back. The small shops that sold coal and bundles of timber had their shutters down. Knocking on a brown door and a man in shirtsleeves holding a violin bow answered it then glared, the door in my face within seconds.
    Darkness coming on. The lamplighter going from post to post with a ladder, climbing up, the sputter, as the flames took,
    the light ash-white that made the hurrying faces look consumptive. Holding on to the black iron base to read street names that meant nothing. Flatbush. Pacific. Lafayette. Atlantic.
    Then running up a road and crossing to an intersection where there was a statue of a man on an iron horse, the same statue that I’d seen when I was with the blind man. A streetcar going by