Brooklyn by Colm Toibin

Author:Colm Toibin [Toibin, Colm]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: General Fiction
ISBN: 9781439148952
Amazon: 1439148953
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2009-01-02T00:00:00+00:00

Part Four

Her mother showed Eilis Rose’s bedroom, which was filled with light from the morning sun. She had left everything, she said, exactly as it was, including all of Rose’s clothes in the wardrobe and in the chest of drawers.

“I had the windows cleaned and the curtains washed and I dusted the room myself and swept it out, but other than that it’s exactly the same,” her mother said.

The house itself did not seem strange; Eilis noted only its solid, familiar aura, the lingering smell of cooked food, the shadows, the sense of her mother’s vivid presence. But nothing had prepared her for the quietness of Rose’s bedroom and she felt almost nothing as she stood looking at it. She wondered if her mother wanted her to cry now, or had left the room as it was so she could feel even more deeply Rose’s death. She did not know what to say.

“And some day now,” her mother said, “we can go through the clothes. Rose had just bought a new winter coat and we’ll see if it suits you. She had lovely things.”

Eilis suddenly felt immensely tired and thought that she should go to bed once they had eaten breakfast but she knew that her mother had been planning this moment when they would both stand in this doorway together and contemplate the room.

“You know, I sometimes think she’s still alive,” her mother said. “If I hear the slightest sound upstairs, I often think it must be Rose.”

As they ate breakfast Eilis wished she could think of something more to say but it was hard to speak since her mother seemed to have prepared in advance every word that she said.

“I have arranged a wreath to be made specially for you to leave on her grave and we can go out in a few days if the weather keeps up and then we can let them know it’s time to put Rose’s name and her dates below your father’s.”

Eilis wondered for a moment what might happen were she to interrupt her mother and say: “I am married.” She thought her mother would have a way of not hearing her, or of pretending that she had not spoken. Or else, she imagined, the glass in the window might break.

By the time she managed to say that she was tired and would need to lie down for a while, her mother had not asked her one question about her time in America, or even her trip home. Just as her mother seemed to have prepared things to say and show to her, Eilis had been planning how this first day would go. She had planned to give an account of how much more smooth the crossing from New York to Cobh had been than her first voyage from Liverpool, and how much she had enjoyed sitting up on deck taking in the sun. She had planned also to show her mother the letter from Brooklyn College telling her that she had

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