Maeve Brennan - The Visitor

Anastasia screamed out loud and jumped away from the table. Katharine rushed around to help her but she was already at the door.

“You don’t like me either! I didn’t know. Honestly I didn’t. Ah, I never saw it before, but now I do. Now I see it all right. Why did you let me come home? Oh, who will help me now?”

She leaned against the wall and moaned.

“Mother of God,” said Katharine in an agony of fright. “She’ll have a fit.”

Mrs King was lost in a dream, praying for her son. Her head was bent, and she kissed each separate bead of the rosary eagerly as she prayed. Katharine went to put an arm around Anastasia, but she pulled away and went down the hall and, opening the door, let herself out into the open. She was down the steps and on the path and going along in some direction.

“For God’s sake, child, where are you going with no coat on?” cried Katharine, distracted, standing at the top of the steps with her cardigan pulled tight about her against the cold.

When she reached the corner, walking evenly, Anastasia remembered that Katharine had said that. She thought, I know where I’m going, I know where I’m going. She thought, Ah, my gentle father. But it was her mother who walked along with her. Because we walked this way many times, she thought, that I can remember. She saw her father in his coffin with his eyes closed against them all. How do people die, she thought, letting go of life, becoming small and clutching like infants, and with eyes staring up all questions?

She reached the church and hurried in, but it was half full. Confession night, she thought in her hurry, and went to the nearest box, pausing dismayed at the line that waited kneeling, heads bent. She knelt down trembling, and the woman next her turned to stare at her. She leaned toward her.

“Have you had a fright, dear?” she asked in concern. “You look a bit upset. Can I do anything for you?”

“I have to go to confession,” said Anastasia loudly. “I’m in a hurry.”

Some heads raised and turned, blank with prayer. The woman frowned in surprise. She wore a shawl around her head.

“You have to wait, dear,” she said. “It won’t be long. Say a prayer. Prepare yourself.”

“I confess to Almighty God,” said Anastasia in panic.

She tried to remember the prayer to say to the priest.

“Bless me, Father, for I have sinned. It’s a long time since my last confession.”

How long? How many times? Who with?

She rose in her nervousness and began to walk to the front of the chapel, passing the pale abstracted faces in the seats along the aisle. Some moved to look at her as she passed, and some remained motionless. People in the aisle moved quietly, saying the Stations of the Cross. One woman genuflected suddenly as she passed, blocking her way for the moment. She got up heavily from her knees and looked deliberately at Anastasia and still continued to move her lips in prayer.

She said, “You’ve no hat on.”

“What?”

“Are you a Catholic at all?”

“Yes, I am.”

“What are you doing here without a hat on? How dare you come into the chapel without a hat on? Desecrating the Lord’s house. Go home and get your hat.”

“Leave me alone, will you?”

“Are you in the parish at all? What’s your name?”

“I don’t know.”

“You’re drunk, girl.”

“Yes.”

She continued on till she came to the shrine of Our Lady, where she knelt to light a candle. She had no money. She thought, I’ll owe it to you, and smiled imploringly at the face of the statue. The pale averted face, sweet and moodless, struck her.

I lit a candle for you, John, said her mother’s voice in a sigh. Ah, Mammy, Mammy, she whimpered brokenly, and she put her face, which was sticky and stiff with tears, down into her hands.

She felt a tap on her shoulder and turned to see that the Stations of the Cross woman was back, and with her a young nun with an innocent worried face.

“Here she is, Sister,” said the woman. “She’s been drinking and she shouldn’t be in the church.”

“Is this true?” asked the young nun in a whisper.

“Oh, yes, yes, yes,” said Anastasia.

“Yes, Sister,” said the woman.

“I think you should go, and come back when you are in a better state,” said the nun reluctantly. “Would you like to come to the rectory and rest?”

“No.”

The woman at the confessional came up with a troubled face.

“She’s wanting to go to confession,” she said to the nun. “She told me, Sister. Come on now, dear. There’s only a short line.”

“She’s not fit to be in the church,” said the Stations of the Cross woman. “She’s been drinking.”

“Ah, let her be,” said the woman. “She wants to see the priest.”

“No. Not any more,” said Anastasia.

She turned to the statue.

“I want to stay here,” she said.

“Come with me,” said the young nun.

They walked slowly to the back of the church and paused at the door.

“Say a prayer to our good Mother and ask her to help you,” said the young nun. “Have you fallen into the ways of sin, my child?”

“How can you be putting me out of the church like this?” asked Anastasia in a thin voice.

“Because you are not fit to be here. When you are in the proper condition you may return,” said the nun gently and reproachfully.

Anastasia walked slowly home, unthinking.

When she reached the front door she remembered at last what she should have said to the nun. She should have said, Who are you to say I should not be here? But it was already too late then.

She sat down on the edge of her bed. Her eyes were wide open and she felt quiet. She shivered with the cold, and yawned. She fell forward with her face in the soft pillow. Now the evening lifted away from her and she looked at it in despair. What a fuss. Her thoughts dissolved into lively impatience and she ground her face into the pillow.

Downstairs her grandmother’s door creaked open. She sat up and listened. There was her slow step on the stairs. She was coming up. Now there was no escaping her words. The door opened and she stood there. They regarded each other in silence, without malice and without love.

“I wanted to say a prayer with you, Anastasia,” she said in a loud confidential whisper. She knelt with painful haste beside the bed, and huddled down upon it, and upon her rosary. “We’ll say a rosary for them, won’t we. For both of them. And then we’ll go to sleep and forget the whole business. Kneel down here beside me and answer the prayers, like a good girl.”

She closed her eyes and began to pray in a familiar galloping monotone, tremendous interminable prayers for the dead. Anastasia answered her, at first nervously, then mechanically.

Afterward she flattened herself out between the cool sheets of her bed, and cried a moment’s dutiful hopeless tears, and slept.

Now in the city there are two worlds. One world has walls around it and one world has people around it. The second world is outside, with the late-winter sky and the bare trees and the hard pavements that stretch in every direction, and with the bright shining shop windows and the chattering crowds. This world has a sightless malicious face, which is the face of the crowd. The face of the crowd is not immediately to be seen, it only becomes apparent after a while, when it shows itself in wondering side-long looks and sharp glances.

There is a limit to the time one can spend watching the ducks at that grassy place in Stephen’s Green (where we always went after mass) or even in fingering books outside the old corner shop on the quays. One goes to stand alone on a city bridge, to look over at the water, and suddenly one’s eyes are sliding from right to left, from left to right, to see if some person is watching, some stranger who thinks it odd to stand alone, looking over the bridge with nothing to do. One must be about one’s business. There is no patience for solitary aimless wistful hangers-on who want to sit and watch, or who ludicrously join the crowd in its rush to the end of the street, and then pause at the corner, confused, directionless, stupid.