The Gathering by Anne Enright Page A

stick with this. A satin slip, with the lace a little torn. A picture of the Virgin put in a drawer, until he goes. A romance of falling. And shivering in the doctor’s waiting room, clutching your wool coat at the neck, where the button has gone. A dusty, middle-class fantasy, of crinkled stockings, and TB, and hunkering to wash over a basin on the floor.
    So there are priests in the front lounge of the Belvedere Hotel that evening in Lent: and a madam, and our man with the Milk Tray, Frank Duff. They are buying the madam off. Quietly. They are closing her down.
    Outside, Ada and Nugent listen, and then forget to listen to the thin line of talk that trickles out of the front lounge. For a moment at least, they merely sit across from each other–the man from the Legion and the little seamstress-whore. What odds? She is beautiful. And he is no better than he should be. The city is quiet and the hotel is quiet, and there is no one here to tell Lamb Nugent that he will sit in this woman’s good, front room for the rest of his life, holding out his little china cup for More tea, Lamb?
    No one, that is, until Charlie Spillane walks in the door.
    ‘Ma’am,’ he says, tipping his non-existent hat. ‘I hope this fellow has been keeping you amused.’

    Michael Weiss, as I say, loved it–but as soon as he loved it, I changed my mind. As soon as he said the word ‘prostitution’ it shrank away, my little snail of a story poking its way out into the world. He never met Ada. He didn’t have a clue what I was talking about. I was talking about family. I was talking about what we were doing, three times a night. I was talking about the meaty flower of my cunt, under his hand.
    Meanwhile Liam turned up and left again. He had a room going in a dive in Stoke Newington, and he was twitchy about the exams; our father going beetroot when he talked about the waste of his talent and of the good money thrown away on fees.
    ‘Tell that brother of yours. If you see him. Tell that brother of yours to face me if he can. Tell him from me.’
    ‘Oh, what Daddy? Tell him what?’
    ‘What do you mean, what ?’
    ‘All right. I’ll tell him.’
    ‘ What? ’
    ‘I’ll tell him.’
    Mammy saying, ‘Who? Tell who?’
    The American part of Michael Weiss thought the Hegarty family a blast. He met Liam in the Belfield bar now and then, and the two of them got on in that surprising way that men have–the man you are sleeping with and your brother, for example, who look at each other, and nod, and get on . It drove me slightly bats, actually, watching the two of them go off for a game of pool, while I sat there on my own with a glass of Satzenbrau.
    But we had some good nights, the three of us, myself and Liam doing a thing we started that first summer in London, which was telling stories about our family like they were all made up. We had a double act about Ernest’s ordination, the horrible yellow soles of his feet as he lay prostrate on the altar, the sight of our mother, when all the voodoo was done, tottering across to dress him in his robes, and then later, at a sort of wedding reception, the two of them cutting the cake together, my brother and my mother, and kissing when it was done.
    ‘I don’t believe it,’ said Michael Weiss. ‘Your mother! I don’t believe it!’ and he might start in on something about his own bar mitzvah, which we, of course, ignored.
    Though some of the things we found funny about our family he didn’t find funny at all. My older baby brother Stevie–the one who died when he was two–‘She did it,’ said Liam. ‘She put a pillow over his face,’ and we’d laugh our heads off. ‘Well, come on, she was pregnant all the time. All the time.’
    ‘Wouldn’t you?’
    It wasn’t long before Michael wanted to call to the house. I didn’t know how to explain to him that no one cared if he called or not, but everyone would laugh at him for a year if he showed up at the door. In the event he rang the bell