An Arrow In Flight – Mary Lavin

“Maudie, my dear!” She had to stare fixedly at her in an effort to convey the sympathy, which, tongue-tied, she could express in no other way. They shook hands, wordlessly. “I’m deliberately refraining from expressing sympathy—you know that?” said Mary then, as they sat down at the checkered table.

“Oh, I do!” cried Maudie. And she seemed genuinely appreciative. “It’s so awful trying to think of something to say back!—Isn’t it? It has to come right out of yourself, and sometimes what comes is something you can’t even say out loud when you do think of it!” It was so true. Mary looked at her in surprise. Her mind ran back over the things people had said to her, and the replies. Them: It’s a good thing it wasn’t one of the children. Her: I’d give them all for him.

Them: Time is a great healer. Her: Thief would be more like: taking away even my memory of him. Them: God’s ways are wonderful. Someday you’ll see His plan in all this. Her: Do you mean, someday I’ll be glad he’s dead? So Maudie apprehended these subtleties too? Mary looked hard at her. “I know, I know,” she said. “In the end you have to say what is expected of you— and you feel so cheapened by it.”

“Worse still, you cheapen the dead!” said Maudie. Mary looked really hard at her now. Was it possible for a young girl—a simple person at that—to have wrung from one single experience so much bitter knowledge? In spite of herself, she felt she was being drawn into complicity with her. She drew back resolutely. “Of course, you were more or less expecting it, weren’t you?”

she said, spitefully. Unrepulsed, Maudie looked back at her. “Does that matter?” she asked, and then, unexpectedly, she herself put a rift between them. “You have the children, of course!” she said, and then, hastily, before Mary could say anything, she rushed on. “Oh, I know I have my baby, but there seems so little link between him and his father! I just can’t believe that it’s me, sometimes, wheeling him round the park in his pram: it’s like as if he was illegitimate.

No! I mean it really.

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You will continue to receive exclusive offers in your inbox. 1kitap1.com/en 1kitap1.com/en INTRODUCTION Like Myra in her story “A Memory,” Mary Lavin lived in a mews house behind Fitzwilliam Square in Dublin. She also had a house on a bend of the river Boyne in County Meath, north of Dublin, a place inhabited by some other characters in her fiction. When I came to Dublin as a student in 1972, Mary Lavin was a familiar presence in the city.

I watched her as she moved with a sort of stateliness in the Reading Room of the National Library, or as she sat in a small café known as the Country Shop, or as she drank coffee in Bewley’s in Grafton Street. She was usually alone. She wore black. Her hair was parted in the middle and pulled untidily into a bun at the back. Her gaze was kind and sad and oddly distracted, but it had a funny strength as well. She had spent her life describing others and finding strategies to create versions of herself on the page; it was not easy to categorize her.

Although Lavin’s stories were mostly set in Dublin or in County Meath, they did not deal in predictable local color. And although they were mainly set in the 1940s and 1950s, they have not dated. But neither are they timeless. They belong fiercely to their own moment and emerge from a vision that is exact and precise, deceptively gentle, and then sharp and direct.

I have no clear memory of how I knew that Mary Lavin was a widow with children at a young age, but I might have read it in The Irish Times. I was interested in the word “widow” and I would have paid real attention to a writer, or anyone at all indeed, who was a widow, since my mother was one. Or it may have been when we studied a story by Mary Lavin in secondary school called “The Widow’s Son.”

This is a short excerpt from the opening of “” by Unknown, quoted for review and introduction purposes. All rights belong to the copyright holders.

Book Information

• Unique ID: 80451995928432f3
• File Extension: .pdf
• File Size: 4,023,802 bytes (3.837 MB)
• Title: –
• Author: Unknown
• Pages: 350
• Language: English (en)

Reading & Word Statistics

• Estimated Reading Time: 670.72 minutes
• Total Words: 134,144
• Total Characters: 709,921
• Average Words per Page: 383.27
• Average Characters per Page: 2028.35

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