Lark's Eggs Read online

  ‘Hi, I’m Nick.’

  ‘I’m Chris.’

  A former chaperon of nuclear missiles on a naval ship, now studying Pascal, his broad shoulders cowering into a black leather jacket, accompanied Chris to George’s bar one Saturday night. They collected others on the way, a girl just back from the People’s Republic of China who said she’d been the first person from her country to do a thesis at Harvard—hers was on nineteenth-century feminist writers. George’s bar enveloped the small group, its low red, funeral-parlour light—the lights in the window illuminating the bar name were both blue and red.

  Autumn was optimistic and continuous, lots of sunshine; girls basked in shorts as though for summer; the physique of certain girls became sturdier and more ruddy and brown and sleek with sun. Chris found a tree to sit under and meditate on her background, Irish Catholic, its sins against her—big black aggressive limousines outside St Grellan’s on Sunday mornings unsteadying her childhood devotions, the time they dressed her in emerald velvet, cut in triangles, and made her play a leprechaun, the time an Irish priest showed her his penis under his black soutane and she’d wondered if this was an initiation into a part of Catholicism—and her deliverance from it now. The autumn sun cupped the Victorian villas in this town in its hand, the wine-red, the blue, the dun villas, their gold coins of autumn petals.

  Chris was reminded sometimes by baseball boys of her acne—boys eddying along the street on Saturday afternoons, in from the country for a baseball match—college boys generally gave her only one to two glances, the second glance always a curious one as she had her head down and did not seem interested in them. But here she was walking away from her family and sometimes even, on special occasions, she looked straight into someone’s eyes.

  What would Sister Honor have thought of her now? O God, what on earth was she thinking of Sister Honor for? That woman haunts me. Chris walked on, across the verdure, under the Capitol building beside which cowboys once tied their horses.

  The Saturday-night George’s bar group was deserted—Nick stood on Desmoines Street and cowered further into his black leather jacket, muttering in his incomprehensible Marlon Brando fashion of the duplicity of the American government and armed forces—Chris had fallen for a dance student who’d raised his right leg in leotards like a self-admiring pony in the dance studio. The plan to seduce him failed. The attempted seduction took place on a mattress on the floor of his room in an elephantine apartment block which housed a line of washing machines on the ground floor that insisted on shaking in unison in a lighted area late into the night, stopping sometimes as if to gauge the progress of Chris’s and her friend’s lovemaking. In the early stages of these efforts the boy remembered he was a homosexual and Chris remembered she was a virgin. They both turned from one another’s bodies and looked at the ceiling. The boy said the roaches on the ceiling were cute. Chris made off about three in the morning in a drab anorak, blaming Catholicism and Sister Honor, the autumn river with its mild, off-shooting breeze leading her home. Yes, she was a sexual failure. Years at convent school had ensured a barrier between flowing sensuality and herself. Always the hesitation. The mortification. Dialogue. ‘Do you believe we qualify, in Martin Buber’s terms, for an I-thou relationship, our bodies I mean?’ ‘For fuck’s sake, my prick has gone jellified.’

  Chris knew there was a hunch on her shoulders as she hurried home; at one stage, on a bend of the river near the road, late, home-going baseball fans pulled down the window of a car to holler lewdnesses at her. She’s never been able to make love—‘Our bodies have destinies in love,’ Sister Honor rhetorically informed the class one day—and Chris had been saving her pennies for this destiny. But tonight she cursed Sister Honor, cursed her Catholicism, her Catholic-coated sense of literature and most of anything Sister Honor’s virginity which seemed to have given rise to her cruelty. ‘Chris, the acne on your face has intensified over Easter. It is like an ancient map of Ireland after a smattering of napalm.’ ‘Chris, your legs seem to dangle, not hold you.’ ‘Chris, walk straight, carry yourself straight. Bear in mind your great talent and your great intelligence. Be proud of it. Know yourself, Chris Gormley.’ Chris knew herself tonight as a bombed, withered, defeated thing. But these Catholic-withered limbs still held out hope for sweetening by another person.

  Yes, that was why she’d left convent school—because she perceived the sham in Sister Honor, that Sister Honor had really been fighting her own virginity and in a losing battle galled other people and clawed at other people’s emotions. Chris had left to keep her much-attacked identity intact. But on leaving she’d abandoned Sister Honor to a class where she could not talk literature to another pupil.

  Should I go back there sometime? Maybe? Find out what Honor is teaching. Who she is directing her attentions to. If anybody. See if she has a new love. Jealousy told Chris she had not. There could never have been a pair in that class to examine the Ecclesiastes like Honor and herself—‘A time of war, and a time of peace.’ Chris had a dream in which she saw Honor in a valley of vines, a biblical valley, and another night a dream in which they were both walking through Spenser’s Cork, before destruction, by birches and alders, hand in hand, at home and at peace with Gaelic identity and Gaelic innocence or maybe, in another interpretation of the dream, with childhood bliss. Then Sister Honor faded—the nightmare and the mellifluous dream of her—the argument was over. Chris settled back, drank, had fun, prepared for autumn parties.

  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 o
f 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.