Brennan Maeve

The Visitor

Maeve Brennan

The Visitor

Foreword

A good novella should be as compact and elegant as a perfect cocktail and pack just such a punch. Novellas such as Nabokov’s Transparent Things, Turgenev’s A Russian Beauty and Chekhov’s Lady with Lapdog are slender telescopes on large and luminous worlds. Their success depends on perfect focus, physical and emotional. In the right hands they are infinitely superior to the vast numbers of pretentious and overweight novels being written today.

It would be difficult to find the equal of the three short works mentioned above, but The Visitor (discovered after the author’s death as an eighty-page typescript) merits a place in their company. As a study in desolation and monstrous selfishness it stands on its own.

The Visitor tells of Anastasia’s return to Dublin after the death of her mother. She had been in Paris comforting the distraught woman, who ran away from a disastrous marriage. Like a wounded animal blindly burrowing for shelter, Anastasia scurries back to the house in Ranelagh where she was raised. To the frightened twenty-two-year-old the suburban house spells just one thing: “home”. But “home” is now the preserve of her grandmother, Mrs King, an obtuse, religious, self-satisfied old woman who bears a grudge against her granddaughter for siding with the woman who took her only son away from her and then left him. She feels no pity for the young girl, only the strength of her own resentment and the need to avenge it. It soon becomes evident that it was the grandmother herself who destroyed her son’s marriage by a campaign of cruelty against Anastasia’s sensitive mother. Now she has a fresh victim. The ensuing cat-and-mouse game is made all the more horrifying by Anastasia’s determination to make a nest for herself in the only refuge she knows.

The author of this poignant short work is an enigma. How could this superb manuscript have lain unpublished until after her death? In her lifetime Maeve Brennan was both a celebrated literary figure and a celebrated beauty, a key figure of The New Yorker set, yet until a recent revival of her work, few in the contemporary literary world had even heard of her.

Brennan made a dramatic entry into the world in Dublin in 1916, the year in which her father, Robert Brennan, fought in the Easter Rising and was sentenced to death for his part in it. His sentence was commuted and on his release from prison he became a servant of the new state. His appointment in 1934 as Ireland’s first American ambassador seemed set to give his good-looking daughter a privileged start. When the family returned to Ireland, Maeve stayed on and was eventually head-hunted by The New Yorker, where she worked as a diarist on “The Talk of the Town”. Later, her short stories were published there. At the height of her career she married The New Yorker’s managing editor, St Clair McKelway, and went to live with him in Sneden’s Landing, an exclusive retreat on the Hudson River.

Observers must have imagined this marriage set the seal on Maeve’s dazzling career. But McKelway was an alcoholic and the shallow-minded snobbery of Sneden’s Landing would have marked her as an outsider. The marriage broke up and Maeve became a wanderer. She was an exile in the most painful sense. She had nowhere to call home and no kindred spirit with whom to share her unique vision of the world. It may well have been that her removal from her native country at a vulnerable age established her sense of homelessness. “Home,” she wrote in The Visitor, “is a place in the mind. It is a silly creature that tries to get a smile from even the most familiar and loving shadow. Comical and hopeless, the long gaze is always turned inward.”

Ranelagh remained with her as a setting for many of her short stories as well as this novella (one of her earliest works of fiction, written in the 1940s when she was still in her twenties). Sneden’s Landing became the fictional Herbert’s Retreat in a savagely satirical set of short stories. But her own life began to disintegrate as she got older. In a letter to her long-time editor, William Maxwell, she wrote: “All we have to face in the future is what happened in the past. It is unbearable.” After a nervous breakdown in her middle years, she stopped writing and became an eccentric squatter in a tiny boxroom behind the ladies’ lavatory at The New Yorker offices. She emerged only to abuse staff and visitors and eventually ended up in a series of mental hospitals, before her death at the age of seventy-six.

The word “lonely” tolls like a solitary bell throughout the pages of The Visitor. Brennan doesn’t just write about loneliness. She inhabits it. She exhibits it. She elevates it to an art form. The shy, the dispossessed, the dominated, are seen not in the world but teetering on some perilous rim of it, from where they cannot possibly keep their balance but have a unique view. The painful self-consciousness of her characters is reflected in a constant feeling of watchfulness. In one of her short stories, “A Snowy Night on West Forty-Ninth Street”, an elderly Frenchman whose solitude is exposed as he dines alone in a restaurant is “as proud and indifferent as though he were facing a firing squad”. Inanimate objects have their own bizarre life. The street lamps “drew flat circles of light around them and settled down for the night”. Later, when the streets were emptied (and therefore safe) the same circles of light were “changed to shining pools of darkness and made crooked mirrors for faraway stars”.

The sense of understated foreboding that runs through the pages of The Visitor reminds one of another superb short work, The Turn of the Screw by Henry James. The suburban house in Ranelagh, with its memories and resentments, is permeated by a sense of danger and unease, heightened by Anastasia’s lack of awareness and her monumental lack of judgement. The late Penelope Fitzgerald wrote that Brennan’s writing “carries an electric charge of resentment and quiet satisfaction in revenge that chills you right through”.

In the grandmother, Brennan has created one of the great monsters of modern Irish fiction. Yet Mrs King is never unmannerly or ill-tempered. She is merely selfish. She smiles angrily. She feeds daintily on the fears of the vulnerable, waiting with a quiet and patient pleasure as they blunder into self-destruction. In a sequence of almost unbearable pathos Anastasia begs to bring home her mother’s body for burial with her father. As the grandmother delicately dismantles her arguments, Anastasia “saw the miserable gate of her defeat already open ahead. There only remained for her to come up to it and pass through it and be done with it. Be done with it, she thought, be done with it”.

Brennan’s extraordinary control is evident in her refusal to use her heroine to mark a contrast. In her own way, Anastasia is shown to be as narrow as her grandmother. Another despairing soul, Miss Kilbride, seeks Anastasia’s help. Dominated by a dreadful mother, who addressed her as “Other Self” and destroyed her only love affair, Miss Kilbride is now dying. But when the time comes, Anastasia is too self-absorbed to carry out Miss Kilbride’s dying request.

William Maxwell observed that Maeve Brennan set great store by W B. Yeats’ statement: “Only that which does not teach, which does not cry out, which does not persuade, which does not condescend, which does not explain, is irresistible.” Brennan’s great skill is to never exaggerate, never emphasise. Her language sometimes seems so direct as to be childlike, but it has a visionary clarity. Cats are seen “running like rocking horses”. A cottage resembling its large neighbouring house appears to have been “baked from a bit of dough left over”.

Edward Albee compared Maeve Brennan to Chekhov and Flaubert but for me there are echoes of two other great Irish writers here — Elizabeth Bowen and William Trevor. Both Bowen and Trevor were masters of mannered spite and emotional dislocation. Maeve Brennan could also be an elegant and savage satirist. Her stories set in Herbert’s Retreat explore the malice and vulnerability of the rich. Baiting the weakest member is the community’s favourite sport, while they in turn are watched and tyrannised by their domestic servants. Most of Brennan’s short and powerful body of work has a common theme of spite and vulnerability. Everybody is afraid of something. Someone can and will find our weakness. But while her consummately skilled and sophisticated short stories convey their themes with irony, The Visitor is an intimate engagement with loneliness and despair.

In a short story called “The Door on West Tenth Street”, Maeve Brennan wrote an imaginary history for a small bird found dead in a shabby New York park. “He was a sparrow, whatever that is. Samuel Butler said life is more a matter of being frightened than being hurt. And the sparrow might have replied, ‘But Mr Butler, being frightened hurts.’ ”

In spite of her glamour and her brief eminence, there was something of the sparrow to Brennan. John Updike wrote: “She is constantly alert, sharp-eyed as a sparrow for the crumbs of human event, the overheard and the glimpsed and the guessed-at, that form a solitary person’s least expensive amusement.” It is likely that the key to the enigma of Maeve Brennan’s disappearance into the shadows lies in this. Even at the height of her fame she was always solitary. Her stark and pure vision of the world was also a frightening one. And being frightened hurt.

Clare Boylan

The Visitor

The mail train rushed along toward Dublin, and all the passengers swayed and nodded with the uneven rhythm of it and kept their eyes fixed firmly in front of them as though the least movement would bring them to the end of their patience. Luggage had been piled hastily out in the corridor, and some people left their seats and stood there, leaning against windows all cloudy with breath and smoke.

Anastasia King rubbed a clear spot in her window and stared out, but in the rushing darkness only a few stray lights were discernible, blurred by the rain. She turned back into the corridor and took out a cigarette.

Around her in the garish yellow trainlight faces were shadowed and withdrawn, indifference heightened by the deafening clatter of the train. The din automatically raised a barrier of hostile irritation to daunt the chummy souls. She was glad of this.

A man spoke to her, standing very close because of the noise, startling her.

“May I borrow a match?”

“Of course.”

She frowned nervously. It occurred to her that he might have asked some other person, and she looked along the corridor. He caught the direction of her glance. He smiled a little.

“They all looked half-asleep,” he said, “but I saw you look out through the window there.”

“I looked out but I didn’t see much. It’s raining hard and it’s very dark.”

“It was raining when I left here. That was nearly two years ago.” His voice was idle and friendly. “Have you been away long?”

“Oh, yes, a long time. Six years last month.”

“That is a long time. You haven’t been back at all?”

“No.”

After a moment she said, “I’ve been living in Paris, with my mother. We moved there, six years ago.”

“I see.” He rubbed a place in the window and peered out. “Well, it’s raining all right. You know, if I wasn’t sure I’d been away I might think I hadn’t gone at all. It was exactly like this the day I left.”

He continued to stare out and Anastasia looked at her suitcases again.

I might be leaving too, she thought, instead of coming back.

She rocked with the train, her back to the window, and felt once again that she was remembering a long dream.

The future is wearisome too. I can’t imagine it now. It’s very late in the evening.

Her thoughts went back to Paris; dwindling uncertain pictures formed in her mind. Again she was saying goodbye to her father. There he was in miniature, and she also, in a clear cold miniature room. He turned and faded out through the hotel door that opened inward. He looked a bit like a tortoise, all bent and curving in on himself, carrying his hat in his hand. For the first time she had wanted to say she was sorry, at last to say how sorry she was, but he was already down the corridor and around the corner and gone.

He was alone and sad. Behind her in this tiny hotel room of memory her mother sat in a chair near the window. Her mother’s face was soft from crying, her hands were clasped upturned in her lap, and she met her daughter’s gaze with a glance of passive recognition and that was all.

The man beside her turned suddenly from the window to face her.

“Ah, I’m glad to be back again,” he said with a contented sigh. “I suppose you are too. People to visit, places to see. But you’ll find a lot of changes too, and so will I, I suppose. Even two years is a long time, these days.”

He smiled and she nodded at him and smiled too. He straightened himself and looked at his watch.

“Well, I’ll run along and get my stuff together. We’ll soon be pulling in. Thanks for the match. Goodbye now.”

A few steps away he turned.

“Have a nice holiday now,” he yelled above the train noise.

“It isn’t a holiday.”

“Oh, well.” He was uncertain. “Have a good time. Goodbye.”

“Goodbye.”

Bags were tumbling down from racks and coats were being pulled on. She looked out again into the darkness, but now there was nothing to be seen but the distorted reflection of the excited scene behind her.

“Here we are in Dublin,” said an English voice close to her.

Her eyes filled with tears. She bent to her suitcases. Somewhere in her mind a voice was saying clearly, “Ireland is my dwelling place, Dublin is my station.”

Then the porter had found her a taxi and was putting her bags in. She thanked him and tipped him and climbed in alongside the luggage.

She put one hand out to balance the smaller bag, which was in danger of falling, and then suddenly they had left the dim taxicab lane and were in the street, and there were many people, ordinary people, not travelers, walking along the rainy streets. The faces looked just as self-intent and serious as the faces in the strange cities she had seen; they seemed no different.

In a moment the windows were blurred with running water and the streets slid by unnamed and unrecognized. The rain fell slantwise on rows and rows of blank-faced houses, over the slate roofs, past their many windows. Anastasia slumped lower into her seat, trying not to recognize the sudden melancholy that was on her. The cabman drove without a word and his silence seemed sullen. She felt rebuffed for no reason.

It seemed too long to her grandmother’s house, but she was startled when the car drew up at last, and she looked up apprehensively and saw the familiar door of years ago. The lights were on in the front hall. They had been waiting for her, her grandmother and Katharine. The door opened wide and lighted the steps for the cab driver, who was struggling up to the door with her bags.

She kissed her grandmother hastily, avoiding her eyes. The grandmother did not move from the door of the sitting room. She stood in the doorway, having just got up from the fireside and her reading, and contemplated Anastasia and Anastasia’s luggage crowding the hall. She was still the same, with her delicate and ruminative and ladylike face, and her hands clasped formally in front of her. Anastasia thought, She is waiting for me to make some mistake. Katharine stood as ever in the background, anxious and smiling in her big white apron, her scrubbed hands already reaching to help with the luggage, her eyes lively with pleasure and curiosity.

Anastasia said rapidly, “Did he bring all the bags? I was afraid he’d forget one. It’s the little one I’m worried about. It’s always getting lost, it’s so small. He was an idiot, that man. He talked the head off me, all the way from the station, really—”

The grandmother waited for her to finish.

She said, “It is nice to see you again, Anastasia. You are looking well. Isn’t she, Katharine?”

Her voice was cool and unemphatic. Hearing it, Anastasia was held to attention.

“Indeed, she looks grand!” Katharine said enthusiastically. “She’s a real young lady! I’d never have known her. How old is it you are,now?”

“Twenty-two,” said Anastasia. She touched her hair nervously and smiled at them. Her hair was dark and brushed smoothly back from her forehead. Her mouth was stubborn and her eyes were puzzled under faint, flyaway brows. She was anxious to please.

The grandmother finished looking at her.

“Well,” she said. “Katharine tells me your room is all ready for you. Would you like to go on up, and take off your coat?”

This was her own room, the room that had been hers since childhood. It was at the back of the house, on the third floor, and its windows overlooked the garden. She stood for a while by the window, and stared down where the garden was. She yielded for a moment to the disappointment that had been spreading coldly over all the homecoming. She tried to grow quiet, leaning against the hard window glass. She thought of her mother, who had been dead only a month, and the glass became hot with her forehead, and she pressed her hands to her face and tried to forget where she was, and that she was alone in her home.

Home is a place in the mind. When it is empty, it frets. It is fretful with memory, faces and places and times gone by. Beloved images rise up in disobedience and make a mirror for emptiness. Then what resentful wonder, and what half-aimless seeking. It is a silly state of affairs. It is a silly creature that tries to get a smile from even the most familiar and loving shadow. Comical and hopeless, the long gaze back is always turned inward.

The mother’s face, intent and gentle, is closer than the rest. Now it is a dead face, with no more bewilderment in it. She used to walk alone in the garden every evening after dinner. Close the eyes to see her again, a solitary figure in the fading light, wandering slowly down the garden and slowly back, between the neat black flowerbeds. It is unbearable to remember.

That was a time of uncertain mood, that time when she used to walk in the garden. Then the family, the sparse little family, was together, the grandmother, the father, the mother, the child. They were together and it was no satisfaction to them.

At night after supper they gathered together around the living-room fire and then quite soon separated, and went to their own rooms. While Anastasia was small she went the first. Taking her mother’s hand she proceeded upstairs and was put to bed. Her room was papered with pink and blue rosebuds in fancy baskets and she was in the habit of watching one of the baskets until she fell asleep. Her mother would fuss quiedy about, tidying things away, arranging clothes, straightening up. Often Anastasia roused from sleep to see her mother sitting motionless at the window, looking out at the darkness. She would speak to her.

“Mother.”

“Yes, pet. Go back to sleep.”

“What’s out there, mother?”

“The garden, silly.”

“It’s dark in the garden now, isn’t it?”

“Yes. Very dark. You ought to be asleep.”

“What time is it?”

“It’s terribly late. It’s nine-thirty, and time for you to shut up both eyes and go fast asleep. Fast asleep, now.”

Fast asleep. Once the mother came and crept into Anastasia’s bed at night.

She said, “I’m cold, pet, and you’re warm as toast always.”

The bed was too narrow for the two of them. After a while they fell asleep.

At breakfast time Anastasia said proudly to her father, “Mother says I’m warm as toast.”

He laughed at her.

“I’m sure you are, at that.”

“She came and got into bed with me last night She was cold and I warmed her up.”

The father looked up in surprise.

The mother said, “You’re a great talker, Anastasia.”

“Why on earth was that necessary, Mary?”

“Ah, John, don’t be angry. I was only cold.”

“I’m not angry, for God’s sake. Haven’t you enough blankets on your bed without disturbing the child in the middle of the night?”

“Ah, I was lonely, that’s all.”

She began to cry, stirring her tea.

The father said, “Anastasia, go away and play like a good girl.”

The grandmother, Mrs King, came in, prayer book in hand from early mass.

“What’s this?” she said. “What’s this now?”

She said, “John, tell me what’s up. Why is Mary crying?”

“It’s nothing, mother.”

She sat down at the head of the table, facing her son, and poured tea for herself.

“This is ridiculous,” she said, “scenes at breakfast. It’s something I’m not accustomed to in this house.”

The mother looked up with a wet trembling face. She looked back then in desperation at the tea she was stirring.

“I’m not accustomed to them either. I’m not accustomed to them either. You needn’t belittle me.” Her voice shook, and her mouth lifted nervously into an imitation smile.

“Great God,” said the father. “You’ll drive me mad.”

“Mary,” said the grandmother, smiling, “you’re making a fool of yourself.”

“You’re trying to belittle me,” said the mother in a disappearing voice. “In front of the child. That’s what you’re after, to turn her against me too.”

The father threw his cigarette on the floor.

The grandmother looked at him.

“What brought all this on anyway?” she asked pleasantly.

She began to butter her toast. One hand held the toast firm. The other spread a neat layer of butter. Anastasia’s mouth watered, although she had just finished breakfast. The grandmother stretched across the table to her.

“Here, pet,” she said, “have this nice toast.”

“It’s nothing at all,” said the father. “Only a stupid argument. Mary hasn’t enough blankets, and she had to sleep with Anastasia last night, she was so cold.”

“Is that true, Mary? You know you can have all the blankets you want. All you have to do is tell me.”

The mother folded her napkin and stood up. She was no longer crying.

She said, “It’s all right.”

“What’s all right?” asked the father. “Why don’t you come right out with it, whatever it is?”

She said again, “It’s all right,” and she pushed her chair tidily into place and went out of the room.

“Poor child,” said the grandmother conversationally. “She’s too intense altogether. She takes things to heart.”

“She does that,” said the father. “I never know how to take her. I never know what to say. Whatever I say is wrong.”

“That’s the way it is with some people,” said the grandmother. “Don’t blame her. It’s the way she was brought up.”

Anastasia finished her toast and waited for a nod from her grandmother. She wanted a smile of approval. She wanted to be seen. But they were busy with politics, and after a few restless minutes she slipped down from her chair and away without being noticed.

The trees around Noon Square grew larger, as daylight faded. Darkness stole out of the thickening trees and slurred the thin iron railings around the houses, and spread quickly across the front gardens, making the grass go black and taking the colour from the flowers. The darkness of night fell on the green park in the middle of the square, and rose fast to envelop the tall patient houses all around. The street lamps drew flat circles of light around them and settled down for the night.

All the houses in the square were tall, with heavy stone steps going up to the front doors. They were occupied by old people, who had grown old in their houses and their accustomed ways. They disregarded the inconveniences of the square houses, their dark basements and drafty landings, and lived on, going tremulously from one wrinkled day to the next, with an occasional walk between the high stone walls of their gardens.

It was November when Anastasia came home from Paris. She sat in the living room, across the fire from her grandmother. It was an enormous shadowy room, and for light they had only the fire and one lamp. The fire was hot and bright. It threw trembling light to the farthest corner of the room, and hesitated across the old dull pattern of the wallpaper. There was no movement in the room except the wild movement of the fire-flames and the light they let go. The light washed up and down the room like thin water over stones.

Anastasia looked suddenly up at the mirror that hung over the mantel. It did not lie flat against the wall, but hung out slightly at the top. It reflected the fringed hearthrug where she had played when she was a little child, hearing the conversation go to and fro over her head. She looked hard at it, thinking that somewhere in its depths it must retain a faint image of the faces it had reflected.

She had often looked up and seen her father and mother stirring there, faces half in shadow and half in light, and sometimes one of them had looked up and found her watching. During these evenings it had been her habit to steal away from the fire and hide herself behind the heavy window curtains, wrapping herself in their musty voluminous depth, so that the room sounds were muffled and only the silent, dimly lighted square below was real, and that not too real, with its infrequent lamps, its brooding trees, and the shrouded passersby.

Standing behind the curtain she would launch herself into a world of dreams; she would deliberately absorb herself in a long, long dream, which would suddenly end and start all over again before the moment of discovery and the safe journey home to bed.

She rose abstractedly and crossed the room and twitched the curtains apart. There was no one standing behind the curtains. The square below was the same. The lamps were no brighter than she remembered, and the trees seemed the same. A lonely figure went along in the darkness as she watched.

She turned and looked at the mirror, but it reflected only empty chairs, and the firelight played indifferently on polished furniture as it had once across her parents’ faces. There is the background, and it is exactly the same. She let the curtains fall back into place and went back to her chair.

Her grandmother roused and put aside her book and took off her spectacles and sat moving them in her hand.

She said, “How long do you intend to stay here, Anastasia?”

Anastasia shrank in surprise.

“Well, indefinitely, Grandmother.”

After a time, into the silence, she said lamely, “Why, Grandmother? I’m afraid I didn’t consider doing anything else, except coming here. After she died, I came straightaway, as soon as I could settle things. She wanted me to.”

“Did she?”

Mrs King said in her gentle voice, “You know, Anastasia, you made a serious choice when you decided to stay with your mother in Paris. You were sixteen then, not a child. You knew what she had done. You were aware of the effect it was having on your father.”

She turned the spectacles thoughtfully in her hands.

“Didn’t you know what state he was in, when he left you in Paris, after trying to get you to come back here, and had to come alone?”

“Oh, Grandmother,” cried Anastasia, “how could I leave her?”

“We won’t go into that. I am going to be very matter-of-fact with you, Anastasia.”

Her voice was very matter-of-fact.

“You know that your mother disgraced us all, running off the way she did, like some kind of a madwoman.”

She said, half-amused, “Did you know that she went to one of the clerks in your father’s office, begging money for her ticket?”

Anastasia stood up in great agitation.

“She hardly knew what she was doing, Grandma. You should have seen her when I saw her, in Paris that time. She was half out of her mind.”

She began to cry, helplessly and awkwardly.

“She is dead, the Lord have mercy on her,” said Mrs King cautiously. “I’ll speak no ill of her. Don’t cry, Anastasia, I didn’t mean to hurt your feelings.”

She glanced toward the window.

“What did she go to Paris for, of all places? Will you tell me that?”

Remember that sad elderly pilgrimage, made long before its time, to a strange French address. They found the street with difficulty, and then the house, but no one there remembered the name they mentioned. Anastasia tried automatically to recall the address, and frowning, caught her grandmother watching her.

She said without interest, “I’m not sure what she wanted. She didn’t know herself. She was looking for someone she remembered from when she was at school there, but they had moved away It was just an idea she had.”

Mrs King drew back and sighed.

“Ah, I suppose it was a pitiful case, at that.”

She was silent, reviewing something bitter in her mind.

She said at last, “A pity she sent for you, Anastasia, and a pity you went after her. It broke your father’s heart.”

Anastasia said nothing. She felt tired, and sat down where she stood, on the hearthrug.

“Well, it’s a good thing that you came home, even if only for a visit. Your father would be glad to know that you are here, God rest his soul.”

The grandmother got up and collected her things from the table beside her. Her movements were stiff but determined. She always moved as though she knew exactly what she was doing.

“Are you ready for bed now, child?”

“Not yet, Grandma. I’ll stay by the fire a while.”

She looked up timidly.

“Grandma, what did you mean just now, ‘only for a visit’? I was really hoping to stay here for good.”

Mrs King turned to her.

“No, Anastasia. That’s out of the question. You kept the flat there, didn’t you?”

“Yes. I was in a hurry to get away. I thought I’d go back later and clear things up.”

“I’m afraid you’ve been counting too much on me. You mustn’t do that. I have no home to offer you. This is a changed house here now. I see no one whatsoever.”

She smiled with anger.

“I stopped seeing them after she ran off, when I found them asking questions of Katharine in the hall outside. I go out to mass, that’s all. When I got your telegram, I hadn’t the heart to stop you. You need a change. It’s natural that you should want to pay a visit here. But more than that, no. It might have been different, maybe, if you’d been with me when he died. But you weren’t here.”

There was no comfort in her. Anastasia gazed at her, and afterward gazed at the place where she had been standing. She watched the leaping flames till they began to die down. The red bars of the grate turned to gray and then to rusty black. There was an occasional weak flicker in the fading coals. She dozed, sitting on the rug. Shortly after midnight a light rain fell again, spit down the chimney and knocked a sizzle out of the dead fire. The little sound disturbed her and she sat up drowsily, chilled by the passing of a cold breeze that blew down the chimney and skittered soundlessly about the room. The silent dark room frightened her and she stumbled to the doorway. But the light in the hall reassured her, and so did the steady rise and fall of her grandmother’s breathing as she passed the open bedroom door on the second floor.

Anastasia slept heavily through the rest of the night, while the rain fell down outside. Some people in the city half wakened and listened for a while to the steady drumming on their dripping windowsills. Underneath the street lamps the circles of light were changed to shining pools of darkness and made crooked mirrors for faraway stars. All the clocks tolled the hours slowly, till the first spreading light of day came to show a gray morning, inside the house and out.

Always, through the winter months, the house and garden remained apart, as though they had been separated from each other. It had been like that since earliest memory. The low stone walls closed in tight around the empty flowerbeds and the patch of grass, now frozen hard, or soggy after rain. The wooden seat near the laburnum tree never dried enough to sit on. If one looked from the house the garden seemed enclosed in hard silence. And yet if by chance one walked to the end of the garden and turned to see, then the house itself had a withdrawn look, a severe incurious aspect. Standing outside in the wintertime one was cut off and left, because the green life in the earth around was discouraged now, or secret, and in any case offered no welcome.

In the kitchen the big oven was kept going from morning till night, and it filled the basement with great comfortable heat. On the worst winter days, and on other days, Katharine brought poor men in to sit at her table and gave them a meal. A lot of poor men and poor women came asking at the basement door. Sometimes they sang outside first, with quick eyes searching the upper windows; or they carefully unwrapped a tin whistle or a violin and played for a while; or they sold shoelaces and pencils; but they were all poor people.

(“Don’t ever say beggar,” said Katharine to Anastasia in a fierce whisper. “He’s a poor man, God help him.”)

People seldom went through the back door that led from the garden into the narrow alley behind the house in wintertime, because the way grew caked with leaves then, and slushy. Errand boys on bicycles used it as a shortcut. They slithered up and down at high speed. They whistled as they went and greeted each other in loud voices.

All the long-ago winters seemed to have disappeared in fire-light. In memory the silent flames played gently from all the small grates in the house, warming the hands and faces of the family. There was Katharine, bending herself down to poke at a stubborn log. And the mother, that pale and most unluxurious person, drawing close to the heat after a walk outside.

With the coming of spring, windows were thrown wide all over the house, and the garden seemed to smile with the new colours in it. The cat waited impatiently for her breakfast on the cement outside the kitchen door, instead of huddling by the warm stove as she did in the cold weather. In the early spring and summer mornings the sun lay clean across the cement outside the door there, and the cat laid her ears back and made the milk fly. There were little creeping insects that came out of the wall to walk in the sun, but Katharine’s broom made short work of them.

Plants were taken out of their pots and planted into the earth, and the red flowerpots were put away till next winter.

Next winter and next winter and next winter. In the mind they passed all slowly, like clouds across a summer sky, but a sudden call or turn of the head and they disappeared in a rush, shuttling quickly one after the last till nothing was left but a strangeness in the mind, a drop of thought that trembled a moment and was gone, perhaps.

Anastasia walked in the park, in front of the house. She walked along the edge path as far as she could go, until she had walked around the whole park twice. Then she changed her direction and went straight into the not mysterious middle of the park, where she found, as she expected, a small stone house, a summer house that contained two long stone benches where nursemaids had been apt to sit in the sunny weather. She went in and sat down.

The summer house was open on all sides, and from where she sat she could see her grandmother’s house. She could feel the silence of it, and she stared at it. This raw cold day the park had been deserted since morning, and now evening was closing quickly in, closing down on the city. She sat there in the cold.

Someone came hurrying around the corner and went straight to the house as she watched. Who could it be? It was a woman and she wore a hat and beyond that there was nothing to remark about her. She had a hand at the doorbell, and Anastasia watching felt the sudden ringing through the house. How astonished they must be. She knew how it sounded. Sudden and loud in the kitchen, where Katharine would at this moment be gathering herself in annoyed surprise for the climb to the hall. Distant and sweet in her grandmother’s room, still more distant in her own room.

I doubt if that bell has rung since I rang it myself the first night home, five weeks ago.

Then she remembered how the door had opened while she was still in the taxicab. That night there had been no necessity to ring the bell at all. Now Katharine opened the door and the visitor stepped in. She stepped into the hall and the door closed on their faces, turned to each other. Immediately the light went on in the sitting room and there they were again, vaguely. Katharine came to the window and drew the curtains. She had her head turned, talking behind her. The light went on in Mrs King’s room. She has roused from her nap, and is coming down. Anastasia pictured her grandmother sitting on the edge of her large bed, touching her hair, fastening the collar at her throat, staring a moment at the floor before starting stiffly into the evening’s activity: tea and the fireside, dinner and the fireside.

Someone came out on the steps. It was Katharine in her big white apron. She waved vigorously at Anastasia. Probably she is smiling. Even if she can’t see me, she knows I’m here. She’s been watching all the time, thought Anastasia, and she looked up high above the roof of the house, up to the deepening sky, to shut out Katharine and her wave and the open door. When she looked again, warily, Katharine was still there, still waving, and the visitor had come to the window and was standing between the curtains looking out.

Anastasia looked at Katharine, waving on the steps. She searched for the spot where Katharine’s eyes, now frowning, might be. She looked straight at Katharine’s eyes and gave no sign at all that she saw her. She did not move. Katharine turned and went into the house and shut the door behind her. In the sitting-room window the curtains fell to. Now she could see the darkness. There were the lonely lights of the street lamps, and a faint gray haze in the air, left over from daytime. That will soon disappear, and the stars will be out full. Not yet a while.

She got up and walked toward the house, back across the park. It was teatime and a little after. She entered the house by a side door and went silently up to her room. Sometime later Katharine tapped on the door. She came in smiling. There was no ill temper in her face. She looked tired and pleasant.

“Your grandmother says will you come down and have a cup of tea with herself and Miss Kilbride. Miss Kilbride wants to see you particularly. You’ll remember her. She’s the only one comes now at all.”

“Oh, I do remember her, very well. My mother was very fond of her. Of course I remember.”

She went to the mirror.

She said, “Nobody comes at all, do they?”

Katharine looked at her with a distant considering eye.

“No one much comes, no. Did you have a nice walk? I tried to catch you earlier, to get you in, but you weren’t looking. Well, do you want your tea? I put on an extra cup for you.”

“I’m coming.”

She went down. The grandmother was in her usual place in her own chair. Facing her was a small wrinkled woman with faded green eyes and astonishing coal black hair, which she wore parted in the middle and drawn into a bun low on her neck. She was smoking, holding the cigarette delicately as though it might explode in her face. She held the cigarette to one side and looked carefully at Anastasia’s legs, and then she looked at her face and smiled affably and held out her hand.

“My dear, dear child,” she said. “Do you remember me at all?”

She had a breathless voice, and she coughed gently.

Anastasia smiled warmly at her. She was glad she had come down. She glanced at her grandmother, who apparently was admiring the teacups. Katharine came in with hot water and a plate of scones. Katharine hoped the tea was strong enough.

Anastasia thought, She’s always carrying a tray or something. She’s always been carrying things in and out through doorways, and then she must know a lot too. She must think to herself a great deal.

Katharine straightened up from the tea tray.

She said, “My sister was telling me a terrible thing. About a mother of a friend of hers who was killed by a train the other day. No. The train didn’t really kill her. She wandered away from them, out of the house one night. A humour took her, she went down on the tracks. She got past the tracks all right, and then she fell down. It was the sight and noise of the big engine so close, I suppose. She got up later and talked all right, but she died the next day.”

She looked at them all with a frightened inquiring glance. They were silent to her.

Anastasia said, “Poor old woman.”

Mrs King said, “Her time had come, Katharine.”

“Will there be anything else?” asked Katharine, and she went out of the room and shut the door quietly behind her.

They all sat there with their tea. Miss Kilbride sat in her chair, not relaxed. She paid attention to everything; even a sudden spurt from the fire drew a little smile from her. Her eyes went constantly to Anastasia’s face, and Anastasia knew of this scrutiny, and the grandmother knew of it too, and was no longer amused by it, but uncomfortable and cross because of it. Her crossness showed in the abrupt way she handled the teacups. She was irritated at the sudden life that moved in the room, seeing curiosity and conjecture where for so long there had been only unaltering melancholy and lengthening memories. Yet she was complacent, being removed from the shy conversational strivings that marked the renewing of acquaintance between Anastasia and Miss Norah Kilbride. They were lonely and unsatisfied, and she was lonely and satisfied and closed.

At six o’clock Miss Kilbride got up and put on her hat, a little round hat that looked like a man’s bowler, with a curling feather at the side. She peered into the mirror and patted her hair. She said goodbye, and, smiling and nodding, made Anastasia promise to visit her soon.

“She is mad as a hatter,” said the grandmother cheerfully, after she had gone. “She is my oldest friend, but I think she’s mad. That’s a wig she wears.”

“Is she bald?”

“I think she is, or nearly so, anyway. She had an illness years ago, and her health never really returned to her. That was when she began to lose her hair. She used to have rather fair brown hair. She had a demon of a mother, who was bedridden but ruled her house with a rod of iron. She managed to stop Norah from marrying, too. She’s thirty years dead, and she still has that girl under her thumb.”

Anastasia sat on the edge of her chair and looked into the fire. The grandmother sighed.

“Listen to me,” she said, “calling her a girl. She’s over seventy and younger than I am myself at that. We two were at school together. Poor Norah. I think she likes her wig, though.”

Anastasia smiled over at her.

“She pats it as if she were fond of it,” she said.

“You ought to go see her soon,” said Mrs King. “She’s a poor lonely thing.”

After a time the Christmas season came. Anastasia found a great deal of pleasure in buying presents for her grandmother and for Katharine. She wrapped them in ceremonial paper, in secret, and hid them in a low drawer in her wardrobe. She spent every afternoon in the shops. She found herself walking down Grafton Street. The crowd surrounded her with noise and hurry, the Christmas crowd, inattentive, preoccupied with lists and plans, while she, without pressing business, kept her mind with her and took notice of small things that interested her. She listened to the excited voices of the children and watched their mothers, those with money and those with little to spare.

In one large shop on Grafton Street she stood irresolute and watched two girls choose a necklace. They looked up and saw her, and she pretended to be watching for someone. People were coming into the shop, and she watched from where she stood and found after a time that she was looking intently for her mother’s face.

Then it seemed that her mother entered, wearing the familiar small black hat, and walked toward the staircase with precise busy steps. Her face was serene, and her eyes held the clear look she wore for strangers.

I can see her back, even. And she watched the slender upright back disappear up the stairs.

She thought, She has gone to the dress department, and without hesitation she hurried herself to the dress department.

“Have you seen my mother?” she asked one of the girls. “She’s not very tall, wearing a black coat and a small hat with a bird on it. She was just here, I think.”

“We’ve been busy, Miss,” said the girl. “I noticed no one in particular.”

Well, I can’t leave her here, thought Anastasia. She wandered idly about for a few minutes but could not bring her mother’s face to mind.

She left the shop and went into a church nearby, where she lighted a candle and knelt to pray. After a time she saw her mother slip into a place a few seats ahead of her. There she knelt motionless as she always knelt, with her face upturned to the altar. Her hands were gathered in front of her, holding her rosary.

I can leave her here — and she stepped reluctantly out into the aisle and genuflected. Happy Christmas, she whispered as she bent her knee, and she made her way slowly to the back of the church. She slipped an offering into the poor box and blessed herself with holy water. She was trembling, and in that soft uncertain grateful mood that easily gives way to tears. It was already dark, but the air in the street seemed to shine after the heavy darkness of the chapel.

In the hall at home Katharine came smiling to greet her. She was tying her apron behind her back.

“Your grandmother wanted a word with you when you came in. She’s at her tea. You look perished with the cold, child.”

“I am a bit cold.”

She threw her coat across the hall chair. She looked into the hall mirror and smoothed her hair. The grandmother was waiting for her. Her white hair lifted lightly away from her forehead, from her cool old blue eyes.

“Had you a nice walk, Anastasia?”

“I did a little shopping. It was crowded but I liked it I spent the whole afternoon in the shops.”

“As long as you didn’t spend your whole money in the shops.”

They smiled and Anastasia took a cup of tea.

“About money — have you enough?”

“Plenty, thanks.”

“Let me know if you run short. Now, I wonder if you want to attend midnight mass on Saturday. I’m not going to go. You can use my ticket if you like, but I’d want to let Father Duffy know.”

“Yes, I’d like to go. Couldn’t the two of us go?”

“I’m not up to it, Anastasia. I’d rather go to mass in the ordinary way Christmas morning, anyway.”

“Well, it is apt to be a bit tiring. Will you give me the ticket then?”

“Yes, of course, and you want to get there well before midnight, to be sure of a place.”

Her voice was raised and cheerful. She sounded as though she were saying, Welcome home. Anastasia felt eagerness swell up inside her, and she searched for some good thing to say and found nothing. She smiled in her excitement. She felt herself approved. It must be the mass that did it. She’s pleased that I’m going. She felt the nervous stiffness that she had not known was in her flow down and away. She searched hard for an easy natural word to say but there was no word. It did not matter. Now she would get up for mass every Sunday. She looked from the floor to the ceiling along the walls, looking at her home. For the second time that day the weak silly tears came to her eyes. My home, she thought, and settled back into it.

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.

How did the fire happen to be there? She went across the room and sat down by the hearth, close to the wall. She leaned her face against the papered wall. The thought of her grandmother’s new friendliness came joyfully to her mind. Then again she felt doubt. It might only be my imagination, she thought.

All of a sudden something moved in the dark doorway. Down the hall it had come and stood looking in with a white face. Her grandmother stood there, supporting herself against the door jamb with one hand, her long white nightgown touching the floor, a dark shawl around her shoulders.

“Anastasia, here?”

“Yes.” Shivering a little, she got to her knees.

“What are you doing in this room? I thought you were in bed hours ago.”

“I heard the fire. I came in a minute. Nothing at all, I just came in, you know.”

“Now, child, get along to your bed. It’s very late. You’ll be dead tired in the morning.”

Anastasia sat back on her heels and smiled.

“I forgot, Grandma. A Happy Christmas to you. I had breakfast with Katharine after I got in from mass, and took her presents down to her. She was simply delighted. She was really very pleased.”

“Was she?”

Mrs King gathered her shawl about her and stood waiting. She looked impatient. Her hair was plaited and hanging down her back.

“Look, Anastasia, run along off to bed now. It’s too late for you to be up like this. You might catch a cold, and then where would we be?”

Her voice was sharp and cross. Anastasia looked quickly at her and the gaiety fell away from her. Where is the unforced smile now, and the ease? Get up off your knees.

“Do get up off your knees, your stockings will be ruined.”

She came hesitantly into the room.

“I’ve lighted this fire every Christmas since your father died. It brings the room to life, and I sit here a while. That’s all.”

After her voice ceased there was an end to the conversation and nothing more to be said. Anastasia slipped awkwardly past her and up to her own room.

There, in the yellow light, was the little table of presents.

She switched out the light and undressed hurriedly in the dark. Her mind was full of wry, distressed thoughts. The thought of her grandmother’s unfriendliness gave her deep shame, and she strove to forget it. I am a visitor here, she thought in despair and anger, and fell into a frightened sleep, filled with dreams.

The Christmas season passed. The days came and went, bringing nothing. There was a listlessness about the house that had seemed absent in the days before Christmas. The grandmother sat daily by the fire and Anastasia seldom joined her. With the growing of the year their separate lives seemed to dwindle away in shyness, and the house enclosed them aloofly, like a strange house that had not known them when they were happier.

One day, early in the new year, Anastasia stood outside Miss Kilbride’s house, looking in. The house had always been in her memory as any far-off thing is, and now she looked at it intently and even anxiously. She had come here very seldom in the time before, and yet the place was dear to her because she had first come as a child, being led by the hand and walking with some awe. She remembered her mother’s hand, strong and careful then, and her mother’s pale veiled face.

She opened the gate with an impatient sigh. This was the house where Miss Kilbride had lived in her youth, and she still cultivated flowers in the same round-and-round stepping patterns that had been laid out when she was young. The small gate opened with a squeak into the frozen desolate garden and Anastasia closed it gently behind her and went to knock on the front door. A young maid wearing a neat white apron opened the door. She left Anastasia in the little front parlour.

Miss Kilbride hurried in almost immediately.

“I’m glad you thought of coming,” she said excitedly. “I was sitting up there dying for someone to talk to. The weather has been so bad, you know, I can’t go out.”

She put a match to the fire and sat down, and at once scrambled to her feet and peered around the room for ashtrays. Under a stiff, high-belted skirt her hips were high and narrow and bony. As she talked her hands clung nervously together, even while they held a cigarette; they separated only to smooth her blouse, or pull the front of her skirt, or touch the great brooch at her chicken throat. She watched Anastasia, covertly and openly, and met her smiles with a quick smile, and her remarks with a serious, edgy attention.

Her room was small and tidy, a parlour, not formal, but stiff in a gentle unconscious way. There were two upright upholstered chairs, and a small settee with curved arms that had a small sausage-shaped bolster at either end. And there were a patterned carpet, and patterned wallpaper, and a tall many-sided screen, and a great many china knickknacks. The window hangings were looped back with tasseled cords. Over the mantelpiece hung a large oil painting, a portrait of Miss Kilbride’s mother, who had been a straight-haired blonde woman with a long mouth and large suspicious blue eyes.

“Do you remember that picture of my mother from when you were last here, Anastasia?”

“Oh, yes. I remember it very well.”

She glanced up at it, at the stare, and the carefully painted, useless hands, grasping a small white fan.

“You know she was bedridden for many years before she died. She lay in her room upstairs for so many years that sometimes I think she’s up there still. But of course that’s very silly. And I rarely sit here. My books are all up in my room.”

She was self-conscious. She chattered with animation, and smoked.

Anastasia said, “You must have been very lonely after she died.”

“I was. I missed her voice and her concern for me. And the little demands that her life made on me. All the little demands that one usually makes on oneself, she made on me. That was very natural. Sometimes I thought it must seem touching to others, to see such a strong-minded, beautiful woman so dependent. The window in her room, for instance. She liked it open at a certain time. I used to go in at the time and open it, and go out again, back to whatever I was doing. Then there it was open, you see, just as though she had done it herself. Then the door to her room. She liked me to leave it open from breakfast till noon, when the household work was being done. So that she might feel that she was overseeing her home as she always had. During that time she wrote letters and did her accounts and things like that. Then from twelve to one-thirty her door was closed and she rested, and at one-thirty I opened it again, and she had lunch. And so on. She used to joke and say I was her other self. Sometimes she would call me that. She would say ‘Other Self, I think the window has to be closed a littler earlier today’; or something like that. Then we would laugh.

“She used to say that we were very much alike. I was delicate as a child, a weak little thing. She almost died when I was born, and so did I. She became bedridden when I was seventeen. Nowadays they might have cured her, who can tell. But why should I depress you with all this?”

“You’re not depressing me at all. But you don’t look a bit like your mother, I think. At least not the way the picture shows her here.”

“That was painted when she was married. I did look quite like her, actually, except that I was darker. We often dressed alike. She was very feminine, you know, she always had very pretty dresses. I had lovely things too. She always changed her dress at five, for the evening. Or if there was a visitor for tea, she would change specially. The dressmaker would come often with patterns of material, and we would spend hours looking and choosing. I loved that. The dresses were charming then, I think. I had a pale gray wool dress with small French buttons on it that was especially becoming. We took a great deal of care with our things then. No going down to the shops and picking things out in an hour.”

“Everything was more slowly paced then,” said Anastasia. “No radio, no telephone, no cars—”

She stopped. She was astonished at the dullness of what she was saying.

Miss Kilbride said seriously, “That’s true.”

She stood up suddenly.

“Look,” she said.

She stretched over the mantelpiece and turned the portrait of her mother face to the wall. There it hung blankly.

“Do you see what I’ve done?” she said, giving Anastasia a cunning look.

Not speaking, Anastasia stared back at her. She felt afraid. Miss Kilbride turned the picture right side out again.

She said, “One of these days you’ll understand why I did that. I wanted you to know about it.”

She sat down again.

“You know,” she said in a new voice, “I have the feeling that you may be having a hard time with your grandmother. I hope it doesn’t make you unhappy. It will pass, when she becomes accustomed to having you back again. It broke her heart when he died, you know. She is very bitter and very lonely.”

“I know that,” said Anastasia.

She looked straight at Miss Kilbride.

“I want so much to stay,” she said. “I don’t want to go away again. I can’t bear the thought of going away again.”

“And why would you go? It’s your home.”

“I feel I’m not welcome. Sometimes I think maybe she’s glad to have me — but mostly I know she’s not.”

“Whatever she says, she loves you. It’s just that you remind her of all that’s past, and that makes her sharp at times, perhaps.”

Anastasia nodded without conviction. After a few minutes she stood up to go.

Miss Kilbride said urgently, “Please come again soon. Very soon. I have something to ask of you. It is very important to me. I don’t want to speak of it today, but very soon.”

She saw Anastasia to the door. She stood looking out at her, and peering up at the sky, and smiling her timid restless smile. She held her collar to her throat in an old useless gesture, and the black hairs in her wig stayed close in place, and were dead to the breeze, and did not stir even when she bobbed her head in a final farewell to Anastasia, who turned at the corner to wave her hand and smile.

A week later Miss Kilbride became ill. The grandmother spoke about it at breakfast. Outside was no sunshine, only a cold grayness over everything, and sharp chilling winds, and the low dark sky. Anastasia thought of the fire in her room, and the area of certain warmth around it, and she longed to get back there. She looked up startled when her grandmother spoke. It was always in her mind that her visit might be called to an end suddenly, perhaps on a morning like this.

Mrs King said, “Norah asked after you. You should try to get over to see her if you can. She seems extraordinarily anxious to see you.”

“Is it serious?”

“Ah, I don’t know. She’s not getting any better.”

Katharine came in. She was tightly clothed in woolen things, but she did not look warm. She lifted the lid of the teapot and poured in some hot water.

“Poor thing,” she said in a large strong voice that drowned all echoes of the grandmother’s indifferent tones. “She was never very strong at all.”

“I’ll go over there today,” said Anastasia reluctantly. “I’ll be needing a walk.”

She started off in the middle of the afternoon and walked to Miss Kilbride’s house, a walk of half an hour. After the first few minutes her spirits rose and she fairly flew along the streets. Her mind soared easily away in a dream of some kind, and she forgot herself till at last she reached the gate of the house.

Miss Kilbride lay in bed, propped against the pillows. She smoothed the sheet across her chest and smiled sweetly, holding out her hand.

“You’re welcome as the flowers in spring,” she cried. “Twice as welcome.”

Anastasia put down her purse. She took the little hand, felt its loose skin and, underneath, the soft thin coldness of the flesh. She was ashamed of her reluctance to come on this visit.

“How are you?” she said warmly. “You look awfully well.”

Awkward, she took herself to the window and looked out. The house faced across the street on other houses just like itself, tall gray houses with square black front gardens looking disproportionately small, and polished brass on the hall doors.

“No nice wide park to look at here,” said Miss Kilbride, and Anastasia, turning into the room again, saw that she had lighted a cigarette and was smoking vigorously in her erratic fashion. It seemed not right for her to smoke in bed like that. They were in a neat genteel room of good size. The old hangings on the windows wore tidy tassels, and the faded sprigged wallpaper had a frieze of demure shepherdesses running around it at the edge, just at the ceiling. There was an array of china ornaments on the mantelpiece, china dogs and horses and hens. Anastasia’s eyes came to them. Miss Kilbride had been watching her.

“My mother liked china ornaments, and I never put them away. I think I must have got to like them too, after looking at them for so many years. That’s what happens. She was a long time in her bed before she died (thirty years, you know) but she liked to know that things were as she wanted them. She used to ask me about things downstairs, oh, various things, many times. Is my white cat still above the hanging bookcase? she would say. And then she had two tall china dogs that stood one at each end of the fireplace, in the front sitting room. She often asked about them. They had been wedding presents to her. She was very particular about everything in her house. I changed nothing after she died. I never had the heart.”

“It must have been dreadfully lonely for you then.”

She was afraid of saying the wrong thing.

“Yes. I was alone then as you are now.”

“I suppose that’s right.”

Her heart sank with the certainty of coming boredom. In sudden bad temper she lighted a cigarette and sat down beside the fire.

“Oh, help yourself to cigarettes,” said Miss Kilbride. “They’re on the table beside you.”

She closed her eyes slowly. Her eyelids fell over her quick open eyes, and Anastasia thought that a sudden silence had fallen in the room, because closed like that her face lost all curiosity and wonder and became only sad, the mouth drooping and unexpectedly small, the forehead worn and bleak. And the dull black wig, clamped on, hid the farthest line of the forehead and broke into the silence of the face so that there was no peace there. She did not sleep. She opened her eyes shortly, and took another cigarette.

“They’re bad for me,” she said pleasantly. “They call them coffin nails.”

It seemed as though a great expanse of words and silences lay around them, and they picked their way through to find things to say to each other.

“You know, Anastasia,” she said, “your mother was perhaps my best friend, in spite of the great distance in age between us. That is, as much as she had a friend. I suppose I was the first person she met, after your father brought her home with him, after they were married first.”

She sighed and glanced at Anastasia.

“You know, I’ve often thought it was a pity your father didn’t warn your grandmother that he was intending to marry. It was a great shock to her. I remember the afternoon well. I was there visiting her. As a matter of fact we were just talking about him. She was expecting him back from a holiday. (You’ve heard all about it, I know.) Suddenly in he walked, and your mother with him. She was only nineteen, and very shy. She was no match for your grandmother, I’ll say that much.”

“He was much older,” said Anastasia wanly.

“Yes, he was. He was nearly forty then.”

“They had a sad life together.”

“Yes.”

Anastasia looked desolately out through the window. A single spray of ivy hung stiffened there against the pane. It seemed to tap at the glass, but there was no sound from it. It obeyed the wind and danced blindly on the air, and if it made some faint whisper against the pane, even that was lost somewhere outside.

She said, “I don’t see what else I could have done but go over after her. I got that letter from her, as I was starting out to school one morning. It was a terrible, incoherent letter. I was afraid they wouldn’t let me go, so I ran away.”

“I remember. Your father went after you.”

Miss Kilbride lay back in bed and her mouth folded up and her eyes folded up and she seemed almost to wither away in her sigh.

She said suddenly, “Oh, I’m very tired.”

Anastasia looked at her in alarm.

“Now don’t talk any more today. You’ll wear yourself out. I’ll come very soon again and we can talk. Tomorrow if you like.”

“No, no, no, I must talk to you now. Don’t think of going. Anything might happen. You might not come. I might not be here. I won’t last much longer. Now don’t shake your head at me. I know the state I’m in.”

She smiled nervously and darted a look at Anastasia.

“The truth is, I want to ask you a favour,” she said in a low voice.

“Of course. What is it?”

“It’s so difficult to talk. I have a reason for talking like this. It’s very difficult. It’s a hard thing to talk about. It’s one of those things you keep locked away in your mind, or in your heart, and go over and over it again, and when it comes out it’s difficult and awkward, and the words sound foolish. Nothing sounds the way it is at all.

“Will you have patience with me, while I tell you a story?”

“Of course I will. It’s no question of patience at all. I’m very much interested.”

“Well, you know that my poor mother was bedridden, from the time I was seventeen. The time I want to tell you about was when I was twenty-eight years old. Before I begin I must tell you that she was very kind to me always. She loved me very much. But, the way it is with a lot of mothers, she was jealous of me.

“When I was twenty-eight I chanced to meet a man named Frank Briscoe. Never mind how we met, it was by chance. He was a year younger than I. He was an architect. We fell in love with each other, and wanted to get married. My mother, when I told her about it, was very much upset. She refused even to meet him.

“I did the wrong thing. I met him secretly a few times before I told her about him. That turned her against him, when she knew I had deceived her.

“It was a very sad time for me. I remember it very well. You can imagine it, Anastasia. She would fall into a dreadful fit every time I mentioned his name. She threatened to send the maid away and die there alone if I left her. And a lot more. No use to go into it. After all, I was all she had in the world.

“Well, things smoothed out a bit, as they will in the long run, and he used to visit me, once a week. On Tuesday nights. Of course we were all by ourselves downstairs. He used to come at seven and leave at ten-thirty. I lived for those evenings.”

Anastasia thought, She lived for those evenings. I knew she would say that. She lived for those evenings. It is pitiful. We are all just the same, and yet we go over and over our little lives time and time again, looking at each other and talking earnestly.

She listened earnestly.

“After he left me, those nights, I would go in and kiss my mother goodnight, and she would look up from her book and smile at me, and raise her head for me to fix her pillow, and I would take down her hair and brush it for the night. She never guessed what there was between us.

“How am I to tell you? I was neither a wife to him nor a daughter to her. I was nothing at all, just a stupid creature who went between them. I could not believe myself, no matter what I was doing. I loved him dearly. It seemed little enough to lie down with him, when he wanted me to. And I wanted to, though I should be ashamed to say it.

“I’ve always been glad. I’ve never been sorry at all. I never told it in confession. It saved me from being an old maid. I’m not an old maid.”

She looked at Anastasia in frightened triumph.

“You’re an angel,” said Anastasia helplessly.

“He was the angel. He was so bewildered by it all. And he loved me, so he did. He often swore he’d never come back, with things the way they were, but he always returned to me. Oh, thank God for that. That was for two years, that went on. I saw him every week. Sometimes on Sundays too, in the afternoons. But not often. Mother liked to have me stay here on Sundays, because people often came to visit then.”

She paused, and her mouth knotted up in bitter regret.

She said, “I used to think, We have more time than she has. And I would give in to her. More than that. I knew it pleased her, and I would stay.”

Her mind traveled drearily on to the end of her story.

She said, in a sick voice, “God help me, he was drowned then. He went off for a little holiday at Killiney, and there was some kind of an accident. I heard it from a friend of his, a stranger who sent me a letter, and he was already ten days buried by then. My mother was very kind to me then. She was very understanding. I used to go down there to the old settee where we had been together, and I put my face in the cushion there, and cried my eyes out many a time.

“Then I would hear my mother’s voice, calling to me to come to her. I can still hear her voice, much plainer than I can hear his. And her face is more plain to me than his is. This is his picture.”

She showed a ghostly brown photograph.

“He was very handsome, and scholarly. We used to laugh a lot when we first knew each other. We thought it would only be for a little while, that mother would give in. And then the time dragged on and on. He used to get very angry then. Sometimes he would arrive here in a great temper. I think he often hoped she’d die, God forgive us. But she outlived him by many years.

“Ah, well, that’s the way it is.”

“It must have been terrible for you.”

“It was hard. I never got over it.”

They were silent a while. Then Miss Kilbride said, “I want you to promise me something.”

She drew a deep breath and went on. The words came easily from her as though she recognized them. She did recognize them. She lay in peace and watched herself saying them at last.

“I have a ring he gave me once, a wedding ring. When I’m dead, and I soon will be dead, I want you to place it on my wedding finger and see that I’m buried with it on. Will you do that for me, Anastasia? It means more to me than Extreme Unction, God forgive me.”

Anastasia came over to the side of the bed. Her eyes were full of tears.

“Of course I will. You know I will. But we needn’t be thinking of it yet a while. Don’t think of it yet. Don’t get ideas like that into your head.”

Miss Kilbride seemed hardly to hear her.

“I must think about it. I don’t want to ask the priest about it. There’d be questions, and anyway it’s not quite fitting. I can ask only you. I’d be glad if no one could notice it but yourself. Maybe you could wind the rosary over it in some way.”

“Yes, I’ll do that. But wouldn’t you feel safer to keep the ring, and slip it on yourself?”

“Well, Anastasia, there was little enough dignity for us as it was. It would be the last straw if I had to slip that ring on myself in a furtive way. I wouldn’t wear it when he was living. I was hoping I’d get to wear it properly. And after he was gone I put it on a chain around my neck.

“But, more than anything else in the world, I want to wear it in my coffin. It’s all I want now. It’s all I ask of anybody, to be let wear his ring. So will you put it on my hand then, and say a prayer for the two of us when you put in on, and hide it over with the rosary? Will you promise to do this, Anastasia?”

“I promise.”

“My hand will be very cold, but you mustn’t be frightened. God bless you, you are a dear child.”

From beneath the sheet she took a tiny package wrapped in tissue paper. Anastasia understood, and received it in her open palm. Miss Kilbride settled back, satisfied, and fixed her eyes directly on Anastasia.

“Well, I’ve talked your head off.”

She laughed in embarrassment.

“Will you have another cigarette?”

“No thanks. I’ll go along now. I think you should rest.”

“Maybe you’re right. I’m very tired. Will you come again soon?”

“I will come soon. I’ll come very soon.”

“Will you help me off with this shawl? I want to sleep a little.”

Anastasia took the soft shawl and put it on a chair by the bed. Miss Kilbride looked at her with wistful, loving eyes.

“I wonder what the others thought of him, the ones I knew. It doesn’t matter, but I often thought they might have laughed at him and his weekly visit. And then after, I had an illness and began to lose my hair. I’m a fright now, but they say in heaven we’re all thirty-three, no matter what age we live to here on earth. Do you believe that?”

“Yes, I’m sure of it.”

Miss Kilbride began to smile, and fell asleep instead.

Anastasia picked up her purse. She slipped the tiny package into it, and went softly downstairs. She paused at the door of the sitting room and looked in. There was the hard little settee, an improbable place for romance. There were the two china dogs, guarding the fireplace with curly gaze. And over the fireplace the mother’s portrait, the wide blue eyes, the long closed mouth.

She walked out along the shallow path. At the gate she turned to look up at Miss Kilbride’s window. It was blind and closed, like a person sleeping. Like Miss Kilbride, lying on her back in difficult slumber. And later, waking to dream of a doubtful deadily union with her long-lost young hero, with whom she had once struggled in valiant, well-dressed immodesty on a small settee, for love’s sake.

Anastasia questioned her grandmother about it at suppertime.

She said, “I was over visiting Miss Kilbride today.”

“God help her, I’m afraid she’s not getting much better. Ah, she won’t be with us very much longer, I think.”

Anastasia took a piece of bread and placed it on her plate.

“She was telling me about a young man she was in love with one time. Did you ever know him?”

The grandmother looked at her in malicious amusement.

“Is she on to him again? No, I never knew him. It was a great affair, but some of us wondered if there was as much to it as she thought. What did she tell you about him?”

“Oh, nothing much. She said he was drowned.”

“I believe he was. She took it very hard.”

She stared at the eggs on her plate and poked at them.

“Eggs are plentiful this year, Katharine tells me. The laburnum will be good this year. It has been mild enough so far. We won’t be needing the fire much longer at this rate.”

Katharine marched in with the jam.

She said, “There are a few snowdrops in the back garden. I’ll pick them in time for you to take with you tomorrow.”

They all knew what she meant. Mrs King visited her son’s grave every afternoon.

She said now in a pensive voice, “I ordered my name put on his stone. On John’s stone. I want it the way I want it. I want no mistake about the way it is.”

Katharine did not go away. She began to cut bread, slice after slice, very slowly. She sliced away noiselessly, and her fingers held the pulpy bread in a delicate grasp.

Anastasia said, “We’d better order my mother’s name put on it too. I wanted her brought home. I know the way she wanted it. She wrote it out for me one time. I have it in my missal.”

Her voice was surprised and breathless, as though she had hardly meant to speak. She began to smile, to make things natural and conversational, but her lips were dry.

The grandmother said pleasantly, “Surely you’re not thinking of that, Anastasia. It’s out of the question, all the way from Paris. What put that in your head?” She took a finger of bread and dipped it into the egg on her plate.

Anastasia said, faltering, “She was counting on it. I promised it to her, when it would be possible. I don’t know why I didn’t mention it before this. It wouldn’t cost too much. She wanted to be with my father.”

“Then, dear child, why did she not stay here?”

“She wanted just to get away for a little while. And then she was afraid to come back. All the time we were away she kept saying, Maybe we’ll go back next year. She did want to come.”

“Anastasia, I do not mean to speak ill of the dead, least of all your mother, but she was never able to make up her mind. It’s childish to think of bringing her all the way back, and it’s silly. A body is only a body after all, and she has a Catholic grave, I trust.”

Anastasia found with astonishment that she was still sitting at the table in the place where she had been. Katharine had finished cutting up the loaf and now she was patting it with both hands, trying to put it back together. She stared at Anastasia with terrified, tear-laden eyes. Anastasia looked away from her and looked at her grandmother, who was pretending to eat. She saw the miserable gate of her defeat already open ahead. There only remained for her to come up to it and pass through it and be done with it. Be done with it, she thought, be done with it. She advanced toward her grandmother’s passionless gaze with frightened thin-voiced pleading and no fight in her at all.

“Ah, Grandma, don’t you remember her? Don’t you remember her at all? Don’t say that. Don’t you remember the way she used to be here with us? Katharine, you say—”

She choked and the tears ran down her face. She ran around the table and took her grandmother’s hand.

“Be kind, Grandma, don’t leave her there alone. It wouldn’t cost much. Please, she isn’t just a body.”

She sobbed out loud, to her distress. She saw that Katharine looked piteously at her. Her hand felt clammy and she took it away from her grandmother. She thought, How unpleasant it must feel, for her to touch.

“You’re a little hysterical, Anastasia, and you’re upsetting me. I’m sorry if you’re disappointed, but it’s out of the question. There’s no question, and never has been, of moving your mother’s body. It’s not a matter of money, as you know full well. I doubt very much if your father would have wanted it. Now please sit down and finish your supper.”

Anastasia leaned against a chair and spoke to her grandmother.

“You never liked her at all, and you made her feel it. You’re trying to make her feel it still. But you can’t any more. I’ll bring her home on my own.”

“This is ridiculous, this quarrel over a grave.” She cast a nervous look at Katharine. “I am his mother, and my place is with him. His place is with me. God knows I loved him more than anyone else ever loved him, my only child. He should never have married, and he knew it himself, to his grief.”

Katharine blessed herself.

“God forgive you,” cried Anastasia. “How can you say the like of that? I’ll bring her home and bury her here, no matter what you say.”

The grandmother gave her a cold compassionate look.

“You’re all worked up, child. It’s bad for you. There’s room for only one more in the grave, and my name will be on the headstone. Why don’t you stop all this nonsense? Katharine, take her upstairs and give her some hot milk.”

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.

Even in a shop, when one sits down for a lemonade, there comes the moment to stand up and pay the cashier and go out on the street again and start walking again. One is bound to be sent scurrying back to the place one came from, which is the other world, the first world, the one with walls around it.

This is quite different. It is a standstill. There is silence upstairs and downstairs, behind the closed doors and in the hall and on the landings. There is no compulsion at all. The slow-turning malicious sightless eye of the crowd is not here. One can spend hour upon hour here, watching through the window the changing sky, or reading books, papers, and magazines, or even sleeping. Inside the house there is no further step to be taken, except perhaps to find a coat and gloves, and go out again onto the street.

It was late February, and frosty weather.

Anastasia came slowly in from the street and closed the front door behind her. She loosened her coat and took off her gloves. At the foot of the stairs the crackle and bang of the newly lighted fire caught her ear and drew her to the sitting-room door. She leaned against the door frame and gazed absently into the room, shrugging her shoulders a little to throw off the chill that clung to her. The dark masses of the room loomed toward her, soft gloom broken briefly by the sputtering fire, and again twice by the large rectangular windows, through which the square could be seen lying like a pale stage backdrop, out there beyond.

She heard Katharine begin her ascent of the stairs from the kitchen, climbing heavily from step to step, carrying the heavy tea tray. Katharine is kind, but she is inquisitive and officious. She owns the place.

Over by the fireplace the first warm waves began to circle out. She went to lean against the mantelpiece and felt the heat on her legs. There in the mirror was Katharine, easing the heavy curtains over so that they joined together and shut out the square and the pale evening sky. The twilight was gone, shut out of the room. There was only the fire left to turn to. It threw noisy sparks up into the chimney and out onto the hearthrug, while at its center it burned away forever without end.

One lamp was switched on and Katharine stood in the middle of the room.

“I can see you in the mirror, Katharine.” All teasingly.

“Indeed you can, I know that well.” Katharine gave her an odd look, half-startled.

She thinks I’m a queer one, thought Anastasia indifferently. Mrs King came into the room in silence. She sat down without speaking, arranging her long black skirt about her long-hidden, unimaginable knees, and examining the tea tray with a critical eye. Katharine peered into the teapot and assured herself that the tea was ready. She went away.

Mrs King glanced up at Anastasia.

“It’s nice to see you down to tea for a change, child. Why don’t you sit down and be comfortable?”

She filled the cups. They added sugar and cream. Anastasia added a little more sugar. The room was very still again, except for the large disturbing movement of the firelight. Once or twice Mrs King stirred uneasily and glanced across the hearth at her granddaughter. There was impatience and distress on her face.

Anastasia thought, As usual I’m being a strain on her. She stood up and put down her cup.

“Excuse me, Grandma. I have a bit of reading to do.”

“Anastasia. Wait a minute. I want to have a word with you.”

She put aside her teacup.

“Look here, Anastasia,” she said decisively. “What plans have you made for yourself?”

“I haven’t made any plans.”

Mrs King sighed with irritation.

“Don’t you think it’s about time you did make some plans?”

“Why? I want to stay here.”

The grandmother raised her hands and dropped them helplessly.

“You are trying to drive me mad,” she said distinctly. “I wish to God, and wish this every day of my life, that you would go away and leave me alone here. You cry, you’re forever opening a door and coming into the room where I happen to be at the moment, and so on and on—”

“I don’t mean it.”

“You’re not happy here, that’s plain. It is really better all around if you go back to Paris as soon as possible.”

“What would I do there?” asked Anastasia weakly.

“At your age there are many things you can find to do. You must have friends there. You can stay with the nuns till you get settled somewhere, if you don’t want to go back to the flat you shared with your mother (God rest her). As a matter of fact, it might not be quite suitable for you to live alone there. There’s that to think of. And you can find some work perhaps, teaching in a school. You might like library work. Have you thought of that?”

“Oh, I have no training, you know that.”

“Never mind about that. I have written to the Mother Superior already. She is delighted to have you as assistant in the library, and you can live at the school with the other teachers.”

Anastasia had retreated across a wide distance in her mind.

She said unevenly, “Whatever I do, I won’t live at the convent. I can work in a library here. I’ll take a room and stay in Dublin.”

“I control your allowance, Anastasia, and I know what’s best for you.”

She got up suddenly.

“I’ll arrange about money, and so on,” she said in a low voice.

She walked rapidly and nervously out of the room. After a moment Anastasia followed her, gathering her coat and gloves as she passed through the hall. Upstairs in her room she closed the window and began to change her dress. With her belt unfastened and hanging loosely she walked over to the window and looked out.

In the late-evening light the garden seemed unreal, a careless impression of a garden with all the colours running into one another. On the end wall was a blurred yellow smudge. That would be the early forsythia. The laburnum tree spread crooked brown arms over the low stone wall. Later it would be a fragrant yellow cloud, shedding its little shining flowers with every ripple of the air. There was a woodshed down there too, almost out of sight from the window, it was so close to the house. It had a slanting corrugated tin roof, and on wet days the rain hammered thunderously down on the roof, filling the interior of the shed with mad imperious sound, so that sometimes a little child playing there would suddenly become terrified, and would run to the kitchen door and enter in breathless haste, to find the sound still persisting, but more remote now, and not so urgent.

This was the shadowy twilight time, when at a little distance familiar things seemed half-strange, when the face of the city seemed averted and almost hidden in the low sky, and drifting clouds came down and fumbled in the outlying hills, to the confusion of the watcher. Anastasia stared listlessly in the direction of the hills, and she fancied she glimpsed them.

That night she had a vivid dream. She dreamed that on a walk down Noon Square she stopped to look behind her, and on turning again to go on her way she found herself tangled in a gardenia bush, which grew up against the window of a big old house. The bush was covered with flowers, creamy white, large and perfect. She stayed to admire them and noticed with a start a wrinkled, purplish old hand that fumbled against the inside of the window without knocking.

A maid came to the door, an old woman, and told her to go away. Anastasia said, with friendly dignity, in her dream, “I am waiting for someone, and as I dropped a piece of paper here, I thought I would wait here.”

But the owner of the wrinkled hand, who was the mistress of the house, came out, and with her came her two aged sisters, and they all stood together on the steps of the house. They were all old, with thin, hostile faces, and they told Anastasia to go away, without listening to her friendly dignified speech.

Whereupon she lost her temper and called loudly to the oldest one, “You are a hateful bloody old bitch.”

She woke excited with the words in her mouth. Katharine was knocking at the door, and calling her sharply.

“Oh, come on in, Katharine,” she cried impatiently. “What is it?”

Katharine came in, weeping.

“Miss Kilbride is dead, the Lord have mercy on her.”

She went to close the window.

“We just got word. The maid found her this morning when she went in with a cup of tea to her. She must have died during the night, all alone there, not a soul near. They’re burying her on Friday.”

Anastasia threw back the bedclothes and pulled on a dressing gown. She sank down on the bed and stared at the floor.

She said, “It’s all very sad.”

She felt nothing but a suffocating impatience with Katharine. She wished that Katharine would go away and leave her alone.

“There’s a letter she left for you,” said Katharine, curiosity lending new life to her voice.

It was addressed in Miss Kilbride’s handwriting, which Anastasia had never seen before. Miss A. King. Deliver at once. Dear Anastasia, dear child, do not forget me. God bless you. Norah K.

Katharine stood close and Anastasia handed the note to her.

“Read it if you like,” she said indifferently. “It’s about some masses she asked me to have said for her, in case of her death.”

“A word from the dead,” said Katharine, and she read it reverently and handed it back. Anastasia folded it and laid it away on the table and stared at it with heavy eyes.

“You know, Katharine,” she said. “I’ll be leaving soon. My grandmother wants me to go back to Paris.”

“Well, now, child,” said Katharine in a soothing voice. “Maybe it’s for the best. Sure, this is no sort of a house for a young girl to be living in, with two old women like your grandmother and me.”

“I don’t know why you’re all so anxious to get rid of me,” cried Anastasia, between tears and anger. “This is my home. I don’t know what harm I’m doing you all, that you object to me so.”

Katharine sat down confidentially on the edge of the bed beside Anastasia.

“Your grandmother is doing what she thinks is best for you, child. You know she wouldn’t want to hurt you.”

Anastasia gave her a look, and got to her feet. She crossed to the dressing table and began to brush her hair.

“Well, there’s no sense talking about it. I have to go, that’s plain enough. And you seem to agree with her, so what chance do I have?”

“You’d better get along down to her, Katharine. She’s probably upset by all this. And take the note. She’ll be wanting to see what’s in it.”

Katharine looked at her helplessly and went out. She stuck her head back into the room.

“Your breakfast will be ready when you are. Your grandmother will be going over to the house this afternoon. Will I tell her you’ll go with her? Miss Kilbride was very fond of you.”

“No.” Anastasia turned on her. “I won’t go over there. I couldn’t bear it. Don’t tell her I’ll go.”

Katharine was shocked.

“You can talk to her about it yourself, downstairs,” she said, in deep disapproval, and closed the door.

After she had gone, Anastasia took the envelope Miss Kilbride’s letter had come in and tore it into little bits. She dressed quickly, found her purse, and left the house without seeing anyone. The thought of her dream of the gardenias returned to her. I think too much about myself, she thought. I think too much about myself. But this idea did not really worry her, for she felt cut off from all the other people in the street around, and more isolated than they.

It was about nine o’clock in the morning, a fine sunless day. People were going to work. She took a bus to a place outside the city, near an old water-filled quarry that was said to be bottomless. She had to walk a way from the bus to get there, but the way was familiar to her. She found that she knew every turn of the road. Some landmarks came sooner than she expected, and some she had entirely forgotten but recognized at once on seeing them. It seemed as though, if she took the time, she could recall some story about every tree along the way. Her mind was disturbed with indistinct memories, but she continued walking and made her way along — it was a rough countryside road, hardly more than a lane — without attempting to trace back any of the thoughts that started up within her. Coming at last to the quarry, she felt as though she had passed through a crowd of old friends, without having paused to call one name to mind.

She went to the very edge, walking cautiously over the stony waste ground that surrounded it. It was the story that a stone dropped there would never stop falling. Little boys playing liked to test the story, throwing stones in there, time and time again. They would hurl with all the strength of their weedy little arms and listen fearfully for the distant sound that should come when the stone hit bottom. There was never any sound, no sound whatever, and only the quiet looping ripples to satisfy them that they had done any throwing at all.

Anastasia took Miss Kilbride’s wedding ring from her purse. It was still wrapped in tissue paper, a tiny package. She tossed it into the water. It made no sound, going. She hardly knew that it had left her hand. There it would fall forever with the falling stones, past and to come. She backed away from the edge and stood a moment abstracted in a stare. Poor little Other Self, she thought, and contemplated the cold thankless water, which shook a little in the wind.

The look of the water was unpleasant, and she left it, walking quietly back to the bus along the quiet hedgebound country road. Occasionally she saw a house, sitting well back in its own land, but there was not a soul in sight. How peaceful it was that morning, without sun or sound.

She thought of her grandmother, entering Miss Kilbride’s house, viewing the body of her friend. She was glad not to be there, pressing through their common grief to smell the new grave flowers. She was glad to be rid of the wedding ring. Yet now her hasty morning bravado deserted her, and she was tormented with flabby disgust of herself and her cowardice, which sucked away at her will and left her weak and bent with humiliation. She gazed upward at the sky in a childish gesture of question. Then she remembered that her decision had been made for her, and the flat in Paris rushed at her, and the thought of her mother’s thin face pinched her heart, and she bowed her head in sickness of memory. The days ahead stretched back to a delirium of loneliness. What to do? What to do? There is no choice, she thought, nodding her head ruefully.

She got up on the bus and paid her fare mechanically. She was being carried back through a stretch of gentle listless countryside, neat fields and hedges and solitary houses with gardens beside them. A quick sentimental sadness touched her, warming her like a soft and familiar coat, sweetening the unhappiness, sweetening it.

It occurred to her, suddenly, that her grandmother might have changed her mind. With Miss Kilbride’s death and all, things might be different. This seemed reasonable, even probable. There was almost no doubt about it. She hurried.

The house was empty. They were over at Miss Kilbride’s. She lighted the fire in the sitting room and sat down beside it to wait, and yawned at the clock. It was exactly noon. The room grew more and more silent. There was the distant ringing that lies at the end of long deep silence, so that one listens, and slips from listening into reverie, and thence by degrees to some place where the mind has no anchor, and the heart ceases to complain, and beats privately back and backward, toward some endlessly distant and gentle beginning.

Their voices clattered loudly into her sleep. The grandmother advanced across the floor and Katharine crowded behind her. She jumped up and confronted them with a timid smile of welcome. Their faces were depressed and cross. Even Katharine seemed abstracted, as she took Mrs King’s hat and then her coat. She shook the coat out and laid it over her arm, and thoughtfully stuck the long hatpins side by side into the band of the hat.

“I’ll get you a cup of tea, ma’am,” she said with doleful matter-of-factness, and went out at once. Mrs King sat stiffly down in her chair and glanced at Anastasia.

“Well. So now you won’t even go pay your respects to our dead friend, God rest her. Our only friend, who would have given her right arm to help any one of us.”

“I couldn’t go, Grandma. I didn’t think you’d mind.”

She met a smile of irritation.

“The number of times I’ve heard your mother say just that. ‘I didn’t think you’d mind.’ ”

She changed the subject with a change in her voice. “To get back to our conversation of last night, Anastasia. About your going. I’ve asked Katharine to get out your suitcases. I’ve written to the bank about money arrangements. And I’ve written to the Mother Superior at the convent to expect a visit from you in the near future. If you don’t want to go to a hotel, you can stay with them till you get the flat opened. I have also written to a Mrs Drumm, a very old friend of mine, to keep an eye on you. She has your address and so on. I suppose you have all the keys.”

“Yes, I have them,” said Anastasia hopelessly.

“Don’t look at me as though you were being condemned to death, child. The sooner you get this over with, the better for all of us.”

She gazed at her with impatient pity and annoyance.

Anastasia stammered, “You really do want to be rid of me, don’t you?”

“Oh, now, now, now.”

She plucked nervously at her long skirt and stood up. Katharine came in with the tea. Mrs King spoke sharply to her.

“I’ll drink it upstairs in my room, Katharine. I’d like to lie down for an hour.”

Katharine glanced at them with alarmed curiosity and backed out.

“Oh, Grandma, Grandma, I’m the only one you have. I don’t want to go.”

“We can do without that, Anastasia.”

Anastasia found herself looking at the shut door. Her hands held each other in a strong and comfortless grip, and they had grown large.

“Shame on you!” she called out loudly. “Oh, shame on you!”

There was a suitcase flat on the floor under the wardrobe in her room and she rushed upstairs and pulled it out and began to lift things into it.

Katharine came to the door and went away. At once Mrs King came, shutting the door behind her and looked concernedly about.

“Katharine told me you were packing to go,” she said. “There’s no need for this. There’s no need for all this rush, Anastasia. Now take your time and come and have something to eat. Let the packing wait till tomorrow. Come, now, Anastasia, speak to your grandmother.”

Anastasia straightened from packing and looked at her.

“Ah, yes,” she said absently. “Off I go.”

Mrs King looked distraught. She picked up a pair of gloves lying in an open drawer of the dressing table and looked at them. She took the photograph of the father from the dressing table and surveyed it.

“This was taken in his last year at university,” she said mournfully, with an eye on Anastasia.

“I have to leave,” said Anastasia. “It might as well be now.”

“Have you enough money?”

“Yes.”

At the door the grandmother turned, uncertain.

“Well, then,” she said. “You’ll wait till tomorrow morning.”

“No. I’ll go when I have this bag packed. Katharine can send the other things later.”

As soon as she was alone again, Anastasia felt a sudden surge of anger that left her shaking with spite. Oh, shame on her! she thought. Shame on her! I have no one to stand up for me.

Tears of self-pity started to her eyes.

Off I go.

The suitcase was hard to manage. Katharine came rushing up the stairs to meet her and help her. Katharine was crying but saying nothing.

She bade her grandmother goodbye, where she had come out to stand watching by the sitting-room door, near the hat stand and the hall chair. The grandmother pressed her arm as they kissed, and thrust an envelope of money into her hand.

“Here,” she whispered. “God bless you.”

She looked strange, senile with emotion, with some distress. Anastasia was full of tears, so that her face pained with the effort of holding them. Katharine had the suitcase. There was a taxicab waiting, and Katharine placed the bag in, clumsily, and closed the door and bent her face to the window. Her face was streaming with tears, and anguished. She had her apron on and the cuffs of her dress were rolled back.

“Goodbye, pet, goodbye. God bless you and keep you. Goodbye, now. Goodbye.”

Anastasia nodded wonderingly at her and drove off.

The driver said, “Station?”

“No. The Murray Hotel.”

“Oh, I guessed it was to the station you were going,” he said mildly.

It was a five-minute drive to the hotel. She used the time to think things through, the clerk and what she would say to him. The driver carried her bag inside and she paid him. She went to the front desk.

“Is Mrs Dolores Kinsella here?” she asked.

The clerk foraged around at the books in front of him.

“No Kinsella at all here, Miss.”

“Oh, dear,” she said in humourous distress. “I’ll wait for her then. She said she’d be here about this time.”

She sat down and looked around her. It was pleasant to rest. She thought of how she had allowed herself to be thrust from her house without a single protest, without one angry word. How easy she had made it for them. She thought, I am not very clever. People can get away with anything.

She had been sitting about ten minutes when she got up and approached the clerk again. He turned to her with a smile.

“She seems to be very late,” said Anastasia. “I was going on the mail boat with her.”

He glanced efficiently at the clock.

“You have plenty of time. You can catch the late train.”

“We were supposed to meet some friends. We thought we’d go on an early train,” said Anastasia worriedly.

Now he grew concerned.

“That leaves you very little time. But I’m sure she’ll be along soon.”

She nodded at her suitcase.

“Will you watch that for me? I have an errand to do, and if Mrs Kinsella isn’t back by the time I return, I’ll go on without her. I won’t be long.”

He nodded in satisfaction at her decision.

She walked composedly out into the street and turned in the direction of Noon Square. She walked without haste. She thought ahead, methodically, to the station, and the boat train, and the boat. Continuing to walk, she opened her purse and searched for the keys to the Paris flat. They were all there, along with the key to her grandmother’s house. Everything was in order. She cleared her throat a couple of times.

She walked more slowly as she came to the house, examining it as one might examine a house that had been shuttered for a long time. The steps going up like that to the front door made her sick with longing, to run quick up, and in, and up to her own room with its own view of the meager, dreaming garden.

It was time for tea, once more, the last time. One of the sitting-room windows was wide open. She stared eagerly up at the black open window and immediately was filled with fear that they would close it first. She fancied she heard a noise up there, and thought of them talking unsuspectingly, Mrs King sitting, Katharine standing, the two of them lost in lifeless discussion, perhaps talking of her by the fire. Comfortable and quiet they are, if sad. How little they know what they will do.

Now then, the square was as busy as ever it was. There were strollers around and in the park, and a noisy knot of errand boys arguing among themselves on the corner. She turned away from them all with a wispy, frightened smile and took her purse and her hat and her gloves and put them down on the path in front of her, and took off her high-heeled shoes and put them with the pile, and leaning awkwardly against the lamp post, pulled off her stockings and tucked them carefully into her shoes.

She stepped back barefooted into the street with her eyes turned expectantly up to the open window. Full of derision and fright, watching where their faces would appear she stared up and began to sing, sudden and loud as one in a dream, who without warning finds a voice in some public place:

“There is a happy land

Far far away

Where we have eggs and ham

Three times a day

Oh it’s a happy land

Yes it is. ”

She was sure of all the words. It was a song she had learned by heart one time, at school. The rowdy errand boys became instantly silent, and so did all the place around, and a passing motorist came to a halt, for a look.

Then there were the two faces, both of them at the window, looking out at her and waving as though they were the ones sailing away, while she called up to them. “Goodbye, Grandmother. Goodbye, Katherine. You see, I haven’t gone yet. ”

Editor’s note

Saul Bellow once said that most writers come howling into the world, blind and bare. A few, a handful in every generation, arrive with nails, hair, and teeth, and with eyes that see everything. They speak clearly and coherently, and immediately take up fork and knife at the grownups’ table.

The late Maeve Brennan was one of the few. A native Dubliner and a longtime member of the staff of The New Yorker, she published her first short story in 1950, when she was thirty-four. “The Holy Terror” was not an apprentice piece; it was the early work of a mature writer, one already in full command of her style and signature subject matter. It tells the story of Mary Ramsay, the ladies’ room lady in the Royal Hotel in Dublin, who for thirty years kept a tireless, sour vigil from “a shabby, low-seated bamboo chair set in beside a screen in the corner of the outer room.” “She was all eyes and ears.” “She took a merciless pleasure in watching women as they passed before her in their most female and desperate and comical predicaments.” “Her dislike of these women possessed her completely.” “She bore in her heart a long, directionless grudge, a ravenous grudge.”

Mary Ramsay, or rather the spirit that animates her, recurs in a number of Maeve’s other stories. It is there in Mary Lambert, who in “A Young Girl Can Spoil Her Chances” attempts to “talk sense” to her daughter’s suitor, to discourage him from marrying the foolish child who has so often embarrassed her and who now enrages her with the prospect of leaving home. It is there too in Min Bagot, who in “The Springs of Affection” takes revenge on her beautiful, despised sister-in-law by surviving her and appropriating her many fine things.

And it is there in Mrs King, the grandmother in The Visitor. This novella, recently discovered in a university archive and published here for the first time, is the earliest of all of Maeve’s known writings. It is also the most representative. It is the ideal place for one to begin with her work, for not only does it show where she set out from but it also explores so much of her later fictional world in small compass. The completeness of vision of The Visitor, and the ease with which the novella takes its place among her finest stories, is astonishing. This ferocious tale of love longed for, of love perverted and denied, is one of her finest achievements.

Mrs King is an embodiment of one side of the Irish temperament, the selfish, emotionally unreachable side. She takes great satisfaction in bringing pain to those who would come between her and her happiness, and her happiness lies in the total possession of her son. There is little natural affection in her, and even less compassion. Her motive force is contempt, especially for those who think her capable of softheartedness.

Mrs King smiles, but only in anger. Her granddaughter, Anastasia, craves nothing so much from her as a smile of kindness, of approval. This troubled young woman is another of Maeve’s archetypes. There is something of her in Delia Bagot, a woman who features in so many of Maeve’s best stories, another unloved soul whose neediness drives her toward madness, another motherless daughter who sometimes sees ghosts. There is even more of her in the long-winded lady, the “I” of Maeve’s first-person sketches for The New Yorker’s Talk of the Town. The long-winded lady is the Flying Dutchman of Manhattan, an exile from a lovingly remembered past, doomed to roam the city with no real home of her own. She is a sad, self-conscious, but exquisite observer, a traveler in residence, a visitor to this life.

In the music of Maeve Brennan, three notes repeatedly sound together — a ravenous grudge, a ravenous nostalgia, and a ravenous need for love. In The Visitor she plays this chord for the first time, announcing the key of all the songs to follow.

It is not known exactly when Maeve began to write The Visitor, but she completed it sometime in the middle 1940s, when she was living at 5 East Tenth Street, in her adopted Manhattan. If the year is uncertain, the address is not — it is penciled on the cover sheet to the original, an eighty-page, double-spaced, fair-copy typescript.

This typescript — the only extant copy of the work — is now in the Archives of the University of Notre Dame. It came to the library in 1982 as part of its purchase of the business files of Sheed & Ward, the premier Catholic publisher of its day. Maisie Ward, a guiding spirit of the firm, was a well-known figure in the Irish life of mid-century Manhattan, a life that welcomed Maeve upon her coming to the city in 1940. Both women were daughters of illustrious Irishmen — Maisie’s father, Wilfrid Ward, was editor of the Dublin Review; Maeve’s father, Robert Brennan, was the first Irish ambassador to the United States — and it seems that their paths crossed more than once. Maeve probably sent Maisie Ward The Visitor, perhaps for possible publication, more likely for general literary advice. All of this is conjecture; exactly how it came to Sheed & Ward is unknown and, according to everyone who knew Maeve, will probably remain so. She was modest, even secretive, about her literary business, and she seldom saved a letter.

I have edited all four of Maeve Brennan’s posthumous books. While the others drew on previously published material, most of it from The New Yorker, this book marks the first time I’ve worked on her prose in typescript. I approached it not as a textual scholar but as a trade book editor; that means I cut a repetition here, identified a speaker there, and made a number of small, silent, thrice-considered changes throughout. There were no major cruxes, yet I worried over some of what I did, and still have many questions that I wish I could ask the author, including the very biggest: Why did you never publish this? Was it too short for a first book? Too long for a magazine story? Did you misplace your only carbon of the original? Did you even make a carbon? Or did you just move on, having so many stories yet to tell?

William Maxwell, Maeve’s editor at The New Yorker, told me that she was a shrewd judge of her own prose, never showed him work in progress, and never submitted a story until she could stand by every word of it. I don’t know — maybe no one living knows — her own shrewd judgment on The Visitor. I can only hope that it was kind, and that she would have stood by this, the published version.

Christopher Carduff

Content

Brennan Maeve The Visitor

Maeve Brennan The Visitor

Foreword

The Visitor

Editor’s note