The River Capture

by Mary Costello

  What random, incidental information is revealed in the letters?

  That among the Clarks’ possessions were a summer house on Martha’s Vineyard, a villa in the Bahamas, a ranch in California, a plane, two yachts – one moored at Edgartown, Massachusetts, the other in Nassau. That, though Mr Clark was a blue blood, the wealth originated with Mrs Clark – whose grandfather founded a pharmaceutical company. That Mr Clark was an alcoholic. That Mossie Mulvey was a poor speller. That Ellen watched the TV series Men into Space. That on St Patrick’s night 1962 she attended a concert in Carnegie Hall featuring Joe Feeney and Carmel Quinn. That she was bereft when young Hubie Clark went away to school in Groton, Massachusetts. That the travel itinerary for Mr and Mrs Clark in the spring of 1962 included a cruise in the Caribbean and an overnight stay at the Dalton ranch in Texas before flying up to New York to attend a party at the Governor of Vermont’s residence in Montpelier. That, at all times, Ellen worked behind the scenes, packing Clark bags, ironing Clark linen, rearing Clark children. That the first TV arrived in Ardboe in October 1963.

  From the collection of documents and correspondence to hand, can Luke deduce how the legal case proceeded?

  Yes. The accusation of defamation brought by the Plaintiff (Ellen) against the Defendant (Mulvey) consisted of ‘making and spreading serious, unwarranted and wrong imputations against Ellen O’Brien’s chastity and good name’. In his defence Mulvey denied falsely or maliciously publishing of the Plaintiff that she was unchaste, but admitted that he refused to marry her because of anonymous writings ‘against her chastity’ which he had received and which left him in ‘insufferable doubt’. Ellen’s senior counsel advised serving a notice of trial, but warned there was a risk of proceeding to trial and beating the lodgement of £780 that Mulvey had already made in the Court – a manoeuvre intended to defeat Ellen’s claim. In a character reference, Mrs Clark praised Ellen’s honesty and trustworthiness, stating she was ‘part of this family’ and ‘one of God’s people’. A medical report from Homer B. Goldin, M.D., a gynaecologist and obstetrician of 2088 Park Avenue, New York, stated that Ellen’s abdomen and breasts were free of striae, her pelvic floor was tight, her fundus was small and her hymen was intact, thus confirming that not only was she a virgin but she had never been delivered of a child. On Tuesday, 9 March 1965 the Irish Times published – between a notice of a point-to-point race meeting at Oldtown, Co. Meath and an article suggesting money may become obsolete – a court report entitled ‘Breach Damages for Nurse’ which described Ellen as an Irish nurse working in America and gave an account of the breach of promise and defamation case mentioned in the High Court the day before. The report revealed that the case had been settled on the terms that, as well as a public apology, Maurice Mulvey would pay Ellen O’Brien £1500 damages, £312 expenses and £480 costs.

  After reading the files, what action does Luke take?

  For an unknown and unmeasured number of minutes he remains seated at the table, physically arrested and emotionally disconcerted by the contents of the files and letters.

  Amid the emotional disconcertment, what pleasing patch of reverie does he stray upon?

  He recalls how, as a child, he had felt closely connected to the Clark family and had, for a time, believed they were related to his family and could therefore – and did, vicariously – partake of their glamorous lifestyle. The incidental details recorded in Ellen’s letters now evoke a feeling of nostalgia associated with that time. Tonight we had Mr Clark’s law partners and their wives for dinner so I didn’t get to bed until midnight … Mr and Mrs Clark are flying down to the Caribbean & boarding their boat for a month’s cruise … Hubie had four college friends here for the weekend, they acted like a crowd of schoolboys and then they tell me they’re men … I hope Mr Clark will straighten himself out and we can be a happy house again.

  Rising, finally, what does Luke do?

  Rising and simultaneously pushing back his chair, he inclines his torso, spreads his arms and, with a sweeping motion, gathers the documents into a pile in the centre of the table. He then makes coffee, lights a cigarette, inhales, exhales, lifts his eyes to the clock on the wall and reads the time: five minutes past twelve.

  What fear suddenly assails him?

  The arrival of the noonday demon: the evagatio mentis, the weariness and loathing of life, the torpidity and lethargy that afflicts the minds, bodies and spiritual lives of its victims, alighting just as the sun reaches the highest point in the sky, bringing waves of sloth and sorrow, tedium, idleness and inertness, a soul sickness that caused, in medieval times, the most religious men and women to grow careless, listless and dejected until they raised their eyes in flight from work and gazed sleepily at walls, falling headlong into the paralysing sin of acedia.

  Has he had prior visitations from the noonday demon?

  Yes. It descends and enters him regularly and not only at noon and not always in its medieval form.

  Enters him? In what form?

  It announces itself with lethargy, torpidity, a wandering mind, thoughts that swing suddenly from the banal to the grandiose, the inflationary, the fantastical, and are frequently punctuated by a mental cataloguing of his own virtues, talents, aptitudes, abilities – all of which, he adduces, have gone entirely unnoticed and unappreciated by others for years (at least since the death of his mother). Remembrance of his virtues, talents and abilities provokes in him a remembrance of the dearth of virtues, talents and abilities in others and a remembrance of prior grudges and grievances directed at those employed in fields as far ranging as agriculture and the arts, and more specifically at those individuals who differ from him ideologically and whose mediocrity enrages him – precisely because they possess no ideological beliefs or stances. Said grievances ferment until they advance with incremental intensity from seething resentment to malevolence to an insatiable desire to see these mediocrities – who are now mortal enemies – vanquished, but not before he mentally enumerates their faults, failings and sins (ignorance, avarice, corruption, deception, cowardice, treachery, crime, cunning, cruelty, mendacity) while simultaneously listing and cursing the culprits – whose range, by the way, extends from the parochial (the town’s supermarket proprietor, butcher, baker, property developer, two county councillors, two TDs) to the national (four government ministers, two ex-Taoisigh, the top brass of the Garda, the top brass at Hawkins House, the majority of priests, bishops and members of religious orders) to the global (the fathers of Western syphilisation and economic imperialism; the fathers of empire and bureaucratic cant; the pope, his cardinals and their yay-saying minions; the CEOs of giant corporations, big pharma, big oil, big capitalism; bigots, holocaust deniers, climate-change deniers, animal experimenters; Russia, China, the UK, the US, the state of Israel, the FBI, the CIA, MI5, Mossad, the 54 countries that supply extraordinary rendition, the multitudinous countries who supply ordinary rendition, the purveyors of FGM, circumcision and gay-bashing, the Charles Taylors, Baby Doc Duvaliers, Jean-Pierre Bembas and others), and whose number now include one Maurice Mulvey, deceased. In continuing frustration and agitation (but in tentative anticipation of a little antidotal schadenfreude), he begins to concoct fitting punishments to be meted out, where possible, by those who have suffered at the hands of the mediocrities. He occasionally idles hours away in such truncated, trancelike states, roused intermittently by a fresh surge of rancour. Then, mentally exhausted, he reaches a point of arrival that has nothing to offer and no path leading forward or back. It is at this point that, depending on the time of day and his fiscal situation, he either (a) surrenders to sleep or (b) opens another bottle of red wine and advances deeper into the evagatio mentis.

  What mental attitude – followed by physical action – does he now adopt to fight the demon?

  He suppresses the longing to curl foetally on the plum-coloured velvet sofa in the drawing room, resists even the temptation to cross his arms on the table, lay his head down and succumb to the seductive lure of sleep. Inste
ad, after finishing his coffee and turning his body at an angle of approximately one hundred and twenty degrees to the left, he lifts one leaden foot and places it in front of the other and repeats the action until a fine stride is achieved and with such strides he leaves the kitchen, proceeds along the back hall, crosses the red-carpeted front hall and exits the house by the front door.

  What bodily posture does Luke adopt on leaving the house?

  He opens his mouth wide, lifts his face to the breeze blowing up from the river, feels the reassuring contact of his feet on the ground and the weight of flesh on his bones. He strides at a brisk pace, hands in pockets, head held high, down the avenue, the urge to light a cigarette thwarted by the realisation that his cigarettes are on the kitchen table. Cool fresh air flushes through his lungs. Then, a realisation, a trepidation: that the world is not as it had been this morning and that all that surrounds him – daylight, sky, green lawn, stone house, avenue, lone sycamore, old oaks and beeches, the distant rumble of a lorry, the pebbles resting at the grass verge, the cats prowling, the dog ambling from the yard, the sun about to glare on the glass of the front landing window as it does most days around noon – is not real. And that, if he permits this glancing thought (or realisation or trepidation) to take hold, his whole organism will intuit his fears and he will balk, like a child learning to cycle, and his feet will fail to ferry him and his body will not uphold him.

  What dominant thoughts emerge from the riot of all others as he proceeds down the avenue?

  That something not visible to him has set the events of the morning in motion. That he has entered a complex maze, a zone of danger. That he is completely alone now, sans father, sans mother, sans sister, sans aunt, sans lover. That he will forever sleep in his own arms.

  What dominant memory emerges?

  A morning when he was about three, observing his mother writing a letter at the kitchen table. Sunlight was streaming in the tall window. As she wrote a tear rolled down her face. Then she paused and shook her hand and blue ink fell onto the page and he thought the ink originated in her body and that it possessed some secret precious knowledge concerning his mother. The notion formed in him that any knowledge that is secret or precious or worth having passes through us in this fashion. A short time afterwards he learned to read and write and for some time after that he would sit at the kitchen table on the chair his mother had sat on and imagine the words in size and shape he supposed his mother had written that morning and strive to recreate them on his own page. He would look out and see the sycamore tree on the lawn and his father’s Hereford cows in the field beyond the lawn, and though he did not look beyond the field at the line of trees on the river bank or at the stepped roofs of the town or the church steeple or the river itself, he was aware of them there in the periphery of his vision as they had been in the periphery of his mother’s vision, and he had the sense that they – and the light coming in the window and the table and chairs and dresser and the air and atmosphere around her in the kitchen, and even his own presence – had flowed into his mother and mingled inside her and were constituent parts in the creation of her words. He cannot remember what, if anything, he produced, but when he sat there and strove to recreate her words, he felt, for a few moments, intense happiness, that he was in the glowing presence of his mother, a far warmer and more glowing presence than was ever afforded him in her actual presence. With only the vaguest sense of what he was after all his life, he now realises it is those mysterious words that came out of his mother’s body onto the page and the ensuing feeling that the image of her that morning engendered that he has always hankered after, and he thinks this image of his mother in the window light has always existed in his mind as an enduring image of absence.

  What feeling suddenly afflicts him?

  Dread.

  What vision suddenly afflicts him?

  His life rewound, run backwards. This existence now a subset of a larger hypothetical existence containing a house with an avenue and painted gates and a farm with tilled fields. A teeming house – an abode of bliss, a hypothetical marriage now unwound, hypothetical children running backwards/upwards/downwards on non-hypothetical stairs, going in and out of non-hypothetical rooms and cars and cots and beds, shrinking in size and retreating to toddlerhood, then infancy, then being packed back inside their hypothetical mother’s womb, then said mother retreating down the avenue, back along the marriage years to the wedding, to her first appearance behind the windscreen of a little yellow car bouncing up the avenue. Other hypotheticals rewound, undone: the baby names Lara (originating in Larissa, daughter of Pelasgus, mortal princess of Argos, a moon orbiting Neptune) and Clara (from D.H. Lawrence), and Andrew and David (conveying refinement and culture); the dog’s name Athos, loyal pet of Rudolph Bloom, Queens Hotel, Ennis; the family holidays, the people-carrier, the social life, the PT meetings, the teenage angst, the career choices – it is surely environmentalists, civil rights lawyers, MSF doctors he would engender. They would be tall. One might be gay … But, alas, all hope is gone now. This is the end of hope.

  Why the end of hope?

  Because there is no more Ruth.

  Why no more Ruth? Did he not insist to Ellen that Ruth was innocent?

  Innocent, yes, but the good is gone now. The damage is done. It was done fifty years ago and lay there waiting for them, like a snare. All that remains now is nostalgia for a lost future.

  Is he certain?

  He’s certain of nothing.

  What mental mathematical calculation does he now attempt?

  He tries to calculate his exact age in days. With the primary operation (365 × 34) demanding more concentration than he is willing to muster up, he rounds the three-hundred-and-sixty-five upwards and the thirty-four downwards, and instantly arrives at a figure of twelve thousand. He knows Ellen for approximately twelve thousand days.

  As opposed to?

  Knowing Ruth for thirty days. During which they spent three overnights together (approximately 18 hours × 3), also parts of two Fridays (approximately 4 hours × 2), parts of three Saturdays (approximately 7 hours × 3), parts of four Sundays (approximately 6 hours × 4), which, in addition to talking on average 1.5 hours on the phone per night Mon–Thurs for four weeks, amounts to 131 hours, approximately, spent in each other’s company.

  At the end of the avenue what urgent action is he compelled to take?

  He has to hunt Paddy back up the avenue. After waving his arms and shouting, the dog, alarmed, turns and trots back towards the house. Quickening his pace Luke passes between the piers and strides along the road towards the bridge.

  What sound momentarily diverts his attention to the field on his right?

  The sound of a horse pissing. A bay of approximately fourteen hands high stands inside the ditch, the tail held gracefully aloft as the hot stream falls heavily on the ground, hard after the dry summer to date. The rest of the horse – the head, the long pale face – remains motionless, in the manner of a sleeping horse. He thinks of the horses that served the farm before his time, then makes a mental list of the horse categories that have served man since time immemorial: farm horses, transport horses, war horses, ranch horses, race horses, wagon horses, circus horses, police horses, therapy horses, meat horses. He thinks of the horse latitudes, the equine graveyard somewhere in the calm, subtropical Pacific where, on long voyages to the colonies, horses were thrown overboard to lighten the load and save on water.

  Looking to his right, what diverts his attention from the horse?

  The glassy light of the river beyond the horse. The dark woods beyond the river. The grey rooftops beyond the woods. The blue-grey sky beyond the rooftops.

  What first alerted him to the presence of the river?

  Bioacoustics. The sound world of living things, the song of trees and leaves, the syllables of rain. The vibrations he felt in the air on the riverbank one morning when he was ten, different from the vibrations on the lawn or in the yard or in the fields, different from thos
e among humans or animals or buildings. Notes, softly rolling emanations, faintly whispering and falling from the branches and drifting over the water towards him, containing the measure and memory of trees and river, inseparable from each other for eons. Invisible spores, particles and vapours coalescing and swelling and rising in mist above the forest canopy and tumbling and rolling and frolicking in a joyousness invisible to all but him as he dissolved into the pulse of time and space and trees and river that morning.

  Has he ever since experienced any similar dissolution of the self?

  On certain late nights, alone, with the assistance of smooth jazz and approximately three glasses of red wine, a similar spiritual communion and exultation of the soul is experienced. On certain mornings, noons and nights, watching from the landing window as tricks of light and perspective conjure rainbows, fogbows, dawn spectres, white-outs, irradiated illusions brought on by snow, mist, cloud, distance, the blue hills of childhood, the imagined eyes of creatures looking out from the dark of woodlands. Transfixed, alert to every sound and movement, he is convinced in those moments that everything is connected and everything – every birdsong, every cloud scud, every movement of leaf or twig or branch – carries within it a cosmic message.

  What urge, acute as he approaches the red iron bridge, forces him to turn back?

  The urge to empty his bladder.

  Turning in the avenue, what vision of the future suddenly confronts him?

  The day when he’ll be gone from here. The house and land and river will still exist. Ivy will snarl over the front door, over gutters and downpipes, creeping across windowpanes. Slates will be missing, chimney pots collapsed. Musty old clothes in wardrobes, old sweet papers under beds. His Aussie niece or nephew or some hired hand will enter the rooms, dismantle beds and chandeliers, pack up the detritus of his life and of those that went before him and all the things he values and enjoys and are meaningful to him will be disposed of, and his time spent with them will be of no avail to him or to them. Objects will be wrenched from each other – cups separated from dressers, cutlery from drawers, pillows from mattresses, his boots parted from his knitted socks.