Maeve Brennan - The Visitor

That week the days passed quickly, and then on Saturday was Christmas Eve. Anastasia went to midnight mass. She knelt alone and saw the people all around her, and her heart went out in tenderness to embrace them all. The church was full, people in their best clothes all kneeling too close together, all turning their heads curiously, and looking around at the church and at each other as though they found themselves there for the first time. Only a few seemed to devote themselves to prayer, and to the bright dazzling altar.

She stared at the altar and prayed sincerely. The candles fluttered, the small bell sounded suddenly, all the choir sang out together. The mass proceeded slowly as though to the time of a swinging pendulum. Altar boys, tall and short, genuflected and passed each other back and forth across the altar. The priest’s arms opened and shut, and his head bowed down. He blessed the people without looking at them, his eyes far over their heads. The people rustled and moved on their knees. They listened to the organ and the choir. They were alert for distraction. The people were a ruffled lake, surging gently, and the altar in their midst an island, with one live movement on it. The priest’s sermon seemed endless, but when it was over the rest of the mass went quickly.

There was the crib, over in a shadowy corner of the church. Anastasia had a glimpse of it before leaving for home. There was a light in the basement window when she got home. Katharine is having tea, she thought, and she let herself quietly in and stole through the hall. She felt the stillness of the house gather deliberately about her as she went upstairs. How silent it was in the darkness. Every turn in the stairs was a new blackness, and with relief she came to the top landing, and switched on the light in her own room. Her room seemed unreal in the sudden yellow light. It was like a stage room, clear to the eye and familiar, but far off and too neat. She dropped her hat and coat across the bed. It was very cold. She rubbed her hands against the cold and sat down beside the little table of presents. There were three presents each for her grandmother and for Katharine, and one for Miss Norah Kilbride, who was coming to Christmas dinner. She sat there and in her own stillness heard the echo of all the things she had done. It was Christmas morning now, the magic morning of childhood, and she thought of all the Christmas mornings long ago, when she had turned over in her sleep to feel the knobby bundles beside her bed.

One of Katharine’s presents was long and flat, the gloves. One was small and square, the brooch. One was oblong, the cologne. I should never have bought so much. She took them in her hand and rushed downstairs on one fearful breath. In a dream one flies downstairs, merely touching the steps with ballet toes, one hand light on the banisters. How the heart jumps with fright at night like this.

Katharine sat at the kitchen table eating thick toast and jam. She too had attended midnight mass, with her sister. She had not taken off her hat. It sat flat on her head, like a ship in full sail. Her tidy black clothes sat straightly on her. The long mass, the incense, had given her a Sunday-morning air, and she looked in a pious holiday mood. Her fat prayer book, bulging out with holy pictures, memory cards, extra prayers copied out and stuffed in for good measure, sat near her plate, beside her black woolen gloves.

She smiled joyfully at Anastasia. She brushed her hands together to free them of the crumbs.

“Well,” she said. “Well, well, well.”

“Happy Christmas!” cried Anastasia, and she laid the presents in Katharine’s lap. “We deserve a cup of tea, after all our praying.”

She got a cup and sat down at the table. Katharine, watching her, stopped smiling. She looked tremulously down at her presents.

“What made you do this now? Now what made you do this at all?”

Her voice was higher than usual and not hearty.

“Happy Christmas,” said Anastasia, flourishing her voice and smiling. “Isn’t it a lovely night? The stars are all out, and the moon. None of these things are of any real use, Katharine, I picked them for their frivolity, if you don’t mind. Now will you open them or do you want me to open them for you?”

Katharine said slowly, “To think of this. Is this what you’ve been up to, up there in your room by yourself?”

She arranged the packages carefully on the table. She began to undo the small square one, and suddenly took out a large white handkerchief and blew her nose and laughed. She looked up earnestly. What a foolish worried honest face.

“Child, why don’t you get yourself a few friends? Sure it isn’t doing you any good to be always alone, the way you are.”

“I will, I will. Don’t worry about me, Katharine. I’m only just starting to settle down. It takes a while, you know. But things will be different now, I think. I feel it in my bones.”

“Ah, I’m glad to hear you say that.”

She stared pensively down at the tea she was stirring, and said shyly, “I’ve been wanting to ask you, ever since you got home, what sort of a life did you have over there. You know I was very fond of your mother.”

“I know you were, Katharine.”

She paused, thinking dreamily back. All the years in Paris seemed to be gathered and enclosed in one word, and she could not remember the word, although she sat thinking familiarly of it.

“We had a lovely flat,” she said at last. “It was furnished, but Mother added a lot of things, and planned the decoration and so on. It was very good for her. We had no friends at all, at first. Anyone we might have known would have been a family friend, and she didn’t want to see anyone like that. We knew the nuns, of course, at the convent where she had gone to school. She was with them when I got over there, but she didn’t want to stay with them. We moved to a hotel, and then we took the flat. It was all right. I took classes at the convent, but only for a year.”

Katharine was listening attentively.

She said, “You must have met a lot of friends in your classes, then?”

“Yes.”

Anastasia was silent. She did not know what to say about that.

“They were all very nice, of course. I was very friendly with them all. But most of them were boarders, they had their own crowd. Besides, Mother wouldn’t pay any calls. She had an idea that people were talking about her. Anyway, I only went for a year. I did enroll at the University, but that was the winter she first got sick and we went to Switzerland for a month, and when I came back it was too late to start in. Besides, I didn’t really want to, to tell you the truth.”

She yawned.

“It was nice,” she said. “We did what we liked. Mother went to mass all the time, and she spent a lot of time with the nuns.”

“And did you never meet any nice young men that you could run about with?”

She said, “No, somehow not.”

She gathered herself sleepily up from the table.

“I’m off to bed. I’m dead. Goodnight, Katharine.”

Katharine was still sitting thoughtfully over her tea.

“Goodnight, lovey,” she said. “And Happy Christmas again.”

On the second landing, drowsy as she was, something caught her attention and she stopped. The crackle of a fire, surely. She considered a moment and then opened the door to her father’s room. There was the fire burning brightly, flickering over his books, his writing desk, his high bed. He might have been lying there watching the flames as she had often seen him, after a little illness, a sore throat, a cold. Or he might have gone down the hall a minute, or be on his way up from downstairs. Then the mother would come in later, soft-footed, with her quick concerned eyes and kind hands, and go swiftly round the bed and stand to survey him. She would say “What can I get you now?” or “How’s the chest?” He would lay his book face downward on the bed beside him, and complain with joyful bitterness about the treatment he was getting, and he would look to the door, to Anastasia, for a smile.