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Intro
The protagonist returns home from studying at his girlfriend’s house to visit his Great Aunt Mary on her deathbed in her final hours. Kneeling on the threshold of the crowded room, observing Mary’s shrunken, pained figure, he reflects on how much dignity she has lost. He can’t bear witnessing her like this and retreats to her sitting room.
The story flashes back as the protagonist remembers what Mary was like when he was a child. She lived with his family in an apartment at the back of the house, and she was always small and dignified, with no jewelry except for a ring and locket. He used to ask her about the ring when she read stories to him. She would tell him that her grandmother had given it to her, but she tired quickly of his questions and went back to reading.
One day, the protagonist entered Mary’s study to ask for stamps for his stamp collection. She unlocked her bureau, revealing an organized array of papers, and told him he could steam the stamps off her postcards. While removing the stamps, he noticed that many of the postcards were from someone named Brother Benignus. She said only that he was a friend who had died. The protagonist then reached over to read her collection of letters, but she firmly told him that he was never to touch them. Instead, he looked through some old photographs and found a picture of a young man standing in front of the ocean, with the inscription, “John, Aug ‘15 Ballintoye” on the back. He asked if this man was Brother Benignus, but Aunt Mary didn’t respond.
One summer evening, after Aunt Mary left the house to go to Devotions, the protagonist snuck up to her room, unlocked the bureau, and opened the bundle of letters. He found that they were all written to Mary from John during World War I. In the first letter, John told Mary that the war had begun and he missed her deeply. In the next letter, he wrote that his memories of her were keeping him sane as he endured the war, and passionately recalled their first kiss. But in the next letter, written in the deep cold of winter, John told Mary about the horrors of war, describing how the dead lay frozen on the ground. He wrote that he felt numb and full of “anger which ha[d] no direction.”
In the final letter, John wrote Mary from a hospital bed, telling her regretfully that in order to make sense of the war, he needed to break off their relationship and become a Catholic monk. As the protagonist finished reading this final letter, Aunt Mary entered the room. Betrayed by the protagonist’s invasion of her privacy, she slapped him on the face and said, “you are dirt, and always will be dirt. I shall remember this till the day I die.”
Back in the present, the protagonist builds a fire in his Aunt Mary’s fireplace. She has passed away, and the protagonist’s mother wants to clear out her things so that the protagonist can use the room as his study. He asks his mother who Brother Benignus was, but she doesn’t know, since Aunt Mary was a very private person. She starts to burn the papers from the bureau in the fire. As the protagonist watches the letters burn, he asks his mother if Aunt Mary said anything about him before she died. His mother responds that Aunt Mary “was too far gone to speak” and continues to burn the letters. Afterwards, studying alone in his room, the protagonist cries silently for the “woman who had been his maiden aunt, his teller of tales, that she might forgive him.”
