Lark's Eggs (24 page)

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, 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, 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 though 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 volunteered for the mountains.

What she was there would always be in her face, in her eyes. Hornet-like helicopters swooped on dark rivers of people in mountain-side forests and an American from San Francisco, Joseph Dinani, his long white hair likes Moses' scrolls, hunched on the ground in an Indian poncho, reading the palms of refugees for
money and food. He'd found his way through the forests of Central America in the early 1970s. There were bodies in a valley, many bodies, pregnant women, their stomachs rising out of the water like rhinoceroses bathing. Ever after that there'd be an alarm in her eyes and her right eyebrow was permanently estranged from her eye. She had to leave to tell someone but no one in authority for the moment wanted to know. The Americans were in charge and nothing too drastic could happen with the Americans around.

She threw herself into her work with the children. For some hours during the day she taught girls. The later hours, evening closing in in the hills, the mountains, she spent with the children. They became like her family. Little boys recognized the potential for comedy in her face and made her into a comedienne. In jeans and a blouse she jived with a boy as a fighter bomber went over. But the memory of what she'd seen in the mountains drove her on and made every movement swifter. With this memory was the realization,
consolidating
all she felt about herself before leaving the school in the Midwest, that all her life she'd been running away from
something
—boys clanking chains in a suburb of a night-time Midwest city, hosts of destroyers speeding through the beech shade of a
fragment
of Elizabethan Irish history—they now were catching up on her. They had recognized her challenge. They had singled her out. Her crime? To treat the poor like princes. She was just an ordinary person now with blonde curly hair, a pale pretty face, who happened to be American.

The Reverend Mother, a woman partly Venezuelan, partly Brazilian, partly American, took at last to the doctrine of liberation and a convent, always anarchistic, some nuns in white, some in black, some in jeans and blouses, became more anarchistic. She herself changed from black to white. She had the television removed and replaced by a rare plant from Peru. An American man in a white suit came to call on her and she asked him loudly what had made him join the
CIA
and offered him cooked octopus. Honor was producing a concert for harvest festivities in her village that autumn.

There was a deluge of rats and mice—no one seemed quite sure which—in the tobacco-coloured fields that autumn and an influx of soldiers, young rat-faced soldiers borne along, standing, on
front of jeeps. Rat eyes imperceptibly took in Honor. They had caught up with her. A little girl in a blue dress crossed the fields, tejacote apples upheld in the bottom of her dress. A little boy ran to Honor. They were close at hand. At night when her fears were most intense, sweat amassing on her face, she thought of Chris Gormley, a girl at a school in the Midwest with whom she'd shared a respite in her life, and if she said unkindnesses to her she could say sorry now but that out of frustration comes the tree of one's life. Honor's tree blossomed that autumn. Sometimes rain poured. Sometimes the sky cheerily brightened. Pieces moved on a chess table in a bar, almost of their own accord. In her mind Honor heard a young soldier sing a song from an American musical: ‘Out of My Dreams and Into Your Arms.'

The night of the concert squashes gleamed like moons in the fields around the hall. In tight jeans, red check shirt, her curls almost peroxide, Honor tightly sang a song into the microphone. Buddy Holly. ‘You go your way and I'll go mine, now and forever till the end of time.' A soldier at the back shouted an obscenity at her. A little boy in front, in a grey T-shirt from Chicago, smiled his pleasure. In her mind was her father, his grey suit, the peace promised once when they were photographed together on a broad pavement of a city in the Midwest, that peace overturned now because it inevitably referred back to the turbulence that gave it, Irish–America, birth. And she saw the girl who in a way had brought her here. There was no panic in her, just an Elysium of broad, grey pavements and a liner trekking to Cobh, in County Cork. ‘Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and staff they comfort me.' In the morning they found her body with that of other nuns among ribbons of blood in a
rubbish
dump by a meeting of four roads. No one knew why they killed her because after the concert a young, almost Chinese-skinned
soldier
had danced with her under a yellow lantern that threw out scarlet patterns.