The Empty Family (v5)

by Colm Toibin

  And now she had seen it again, enacted by a porter in the National Gallery, not having seen it for thirty years, having believed it was something that had belonged to Luke alone. He was dead for more than a decade. She had trained herself in the early years of losing him not to miss him or give him a thought. On this and other visits to Dublin since his death, she had kept him out of her mind. But she had not bargained for what she had just seen, the core of his personality, what she remembered most about him, appearing again as a part of life.

  She was busy for the rest of the day with meetings and then, since she was too tired to go downstairs, she had her supper in her room and read for a while before falling asleep. In the morning, as arranged, the car took her to the studio; on the way she marked the scenes in the script where she thought she might heighten the colour, but she would make no final decisions on this until she spoke to the director again. She would need, in case he was against the idea, to make sure that the studio could quickly change the previous plans, but she believed that if she saw the director on his own and was absolutely clear about what she had in mind, then he would not be opposed to what she would suggest.

  She had not dreamed in the night and had woken fresh, ready for work, so it was only now in the car as a drizzle settled over south Dublin and the strong coffee she had taken over breakfast started to kick in that the scene in the National Gallery came into her thoughts again. She had been with Luke for twelve years, but she had never lived with him. They had mostly met in New York, or London, or Paris. And his way of greeting her, or of seeing her to a taxi, almost tearful in the amount of tenderness he could offer, stood in for the domestic life they never had together.

  When he was not talking about his work – and she had loved these discussions with him, had loved his earnestness about the roles he played and how he prepared for them – then he was busy making her laugh. When they met, they drank and stayed up late, but she knew there was another side to him, that he was disciplined, a rigid timekeeper, that he was deeply committed to his life in the theatre, but oddly tolerant of directors and writers and other actors, as long as they had something he could work with, even if it was something that irritated him, or that he found difficult. He was, she knew, the best comic actor of his generation, and if he had been luckier, and maybe if he had not been Irish, she thought, he could have been better again, he could have played more serious parts. Somehow, the gap between the two – his immense talent and his sense that it would come to nothing except playing clowns and fools – had eaten away at him, and at her too, as the years went on, no matter how much he tried to play the hero for her in their time together, the time they snatched between jobs.

  A few times he came to Hollywood to act in Irish films and in a small part as an Irish-American barman and these visits might have appeared to other people, she thought, like the happiest times for her and for Luke. But they were not the happiest times, despite the parties and all the hours they could be with each other. How he worked affected Luke, as though work were a season and bit parts were a harsh winter, just as anything by Eugene O’Neill or Sean O’Casey would always belong to high glorious summer. She saw how easily he could become despondent and how hard it was for him not to show contempt when he felt it.

  Their happiest times, she thought, were spent alone in the dark with each other. His body was much stronger than it seemed. Sex excited him, or maybe it was she who excited him. There were nights in hotel rooms, nights when he had had a few drinks after a performance, nights when his own deep confidence in himself and a tender strength, things he kept mostly hidden, things he folded away wrapped in cynicism and self-mockery, were not afraid to appear. This was when she had loved him most.

  He was the sort of man, she thought, that women might wish to reform or mother. But she had wanted none of this. She had her own needs; she never once, for example, let him get in the way of her work. This made their meetings all the more intense, but chaotic too, and there were years when her phone bill was almost higher than her tax bill and certainly higher than the money she spent on food. As Luke approached each new performance, he needed to talk to her, to tell her about it in detail, and she loved his voice and his seriousness and then the jokes he told. She never minded that it was often the middle of the night when she put the phone down. At the end of these long calls he left her smiling.

  She was smiling now at the memory of this as the car pulled up outside the studio.

  ‘How long will you be?’ the driver asked her.

  ‘I don’t know,’ she replied as she gathered her papers.

  ‘I mean, will I come back for you, or will I wait?’

  ‘You will wait,’ she said.

  As always, she needed to identify someone among the team with whom she could work. It could be someone young or old, who spoke early in the meeting or who remained silent throughout, who nodded when she emphasized a point or who seemed to resist every idea she had. She would know him – it was usually a male – by an aura of pure, calm competence he gave off. She would watch for the person who appeared to be concentrating most, the one least open to distraction.

  She did not speak as she was introduced to the staff.

  ‘Is everyone here?’ she asked.

  ‘You mean …?’ the studio manager asked.

  ‘I mean everyone who will be working with me. The painters, the builders, the props manager.’

  ‘No, some of them are …’

  ‘Get them all here. I need to see all of them.’

  Gabi had made large and more detailed drawings from the outlines she had given her and mounted these on cardboard so that they looked like paintings.

  ‘Can these be copied?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes, I have made copies,’ Gabi replied. ‘And can make more.’

  She tapped the table with the index finger of her left hand as Gabi looked on.

  ‘Well?’ Gabi asked.

  ‘Well what?’

  ‘Are you not going to say thank you? I was up all night. Did you lose your manners in America?’

  The manager and the props manager, who had just arrived, looked at them both, alarmed.

  ‘Yes, I did,’ she replied. ‘That’s where I lost my manners. Now, young girl, get me a jug of iced water with plenty of lemon in it.’

  Gabi stood up and pushed her chair back. She glared at her briefly and then laughed.

  ‘I’ll pour iced water over your fucking head,’ she said and grinned defiantly.

  ‘OK, do that, darling,’ Frances said, looking down at the drawings as though nothing special had been said. ‘Now hurry. Your drawings are wonderful and you are a national treasure. Is that enough? Now get the water. And don’t forget the lemon. Did you hear? Lemon!’

  The morning was easier than she had expected. She liked the woman who was in charge of props and was happy that nobody was too visibly disturbed when she explained to them that she had two different looks in mind for some scenes of the film and they would have to be ready to go with whichever one the director wanted.

  On the way back into the city with Gabi she could sense the driver’s resentment, which now bordered on rudeness. In the back of the car, she pointed her finger towards his back and indicated to Gabi by running her finger across her throat that he would have to go. Gabi shook her head in mock rebuke.

  ‘What are we going to do about you?’ Gabi asked.

  In the days that followed she often had time to spare. When she went back to the National Gallery, she found the high-ceilinged room with the two staircases she remembered, and wandered around in the upper rooms before looking again at the colours in the Irish paintings in the room on the ground floor. She did not see the porter whom she had watched on her first visit. She phoned her niece and they arranged to spend a day together when her work on the film was finished.

  The director, with whom she had a progress meeting one day in the lounge of the hotel, looked more like an actor, she thought, oddly baby-faced but with a strange brutality
about him. He seemed even more distracted this time than when she had seen him in Los Angeles and New York but distracted by his own dreams rather than the film he was about to shoot. It was only when she told him about the colours that she had in mind, emphasizing that some of them would be almost garish, that he grew attentive. He looked at her and nodded, but said nothing; suddenly, she saw, he had become interested in her.

  ‘But you’re really Irish, aren’t you?’ he asked.

  ‘Yes,’ she said. ‘I worked in the Abbey before you were born.’

  ‘Do you like being back here?’

  His smile was almost cruel.

  ‘No,’ she said and looked at him steadily.

  Luke lost interest in her and that at the time was a shock. He still needed to talk to her, tell her what he was doing, or what work he was turning down, but when they met it was clear to her, once they were in the dark, that he did not want to make love any more. She sighed now at the thought that it had never occurred to her that as she grew older he would be happier to sleep close to her on the nights when they managed to be together, embrace her and sleep beside but not make love with her. And that he would also, on the nights when he was tense from working, be happier to stay in the bar with anyone at all rather than come to bed with her.

  She had not asked the director if he really wanted the pub in Wicklow used in the film; if he had changed his mind about it someone would have told her. But when she went to see it with Gabi she realized how hard it was going to be, so much would have to be removed, and there was so little space, and the owner, although he was being well paid, was grumpy and appeared uneasy in the presence of two women walking around discussing which pictures would have to be taken down, and how an entire wall would have to be painted.

  ‘It would be so simple to build this,’ Gabi said in a loud voice. ‘Wouldn’t it?’

  ‘Why don’t you then?’ the owner asked. He seemed wounded and then belligerent.

  ‘It’s a lovely place,’ Gabi said as Frances went to the window, ignoring both of them. ‘I’ve always heard about it but never been here. I just hope we’re not going to get in your way too much.’

  He did not reply at first and then asked if they would like a drink.

  ‘Not today,’ Gabi said.

  ‘On the house,’ he said as Frances turned around.

  They agreed to have a glass of beer each and sat near the window away from the owner until Gabi had to make a phone call and Frances was left with him as he moved up and down behind the bar like an animal long used to its cage. They did not speak. She was happy somehow when she had established for herself that there was nothing in him that reminded her in any way of Luke, that she was not going to go through Ireland finding middle-aged men who had something of Luke in them.

  But the end of their time together, how they both behaved, came to her now in this dimly lit space full of dust and old picture frames and faded paintwork; her feelings about what happened were tinged with regret, but not too much, more the sadness that it was all so long ago and that he was dead more than ten years and that she never saw him again after one night when he had not come back to the hotel room with her, but had stayed in the bar.

  She remembered that when she woke in the morning all those years before, she had realized that he had slept elsewhere, or not at all. And they had not made love for the first two nights of her visit, and this was her third night and there were two more left. She decided that if he had not returned by eleven o’clock that morning, she would check out and go back home and that she would not see him again.

  She remembered that she calmly watched the clock moving and began packing at ten and preparing to go, leaving his clothes strewn on the floor and his things in the bathroom. The room was booked in his name; he could, she thought, also pay the bill. It was a decision that, in its clarity and resolution, almost gave her pleasure, or perhaps it was pain, but she did not allow herself to feel pain, then or afterwards. She carried her bags to the lift at five past eleven and handed the key in at the desk, saying that her husband would be back soon but she must leave. And then she got a taxi to the airport and waited until there was a free seat on a plane home to the west coast.

  ‘Why are you smiling?’ Gabi asked. ‘You look like someone in love.’

  Frances sighed.

  ‘Dressing this pub for the film is going to be tough work,’ she said.

  When the phone rang night after night, she knew it was Luke but she did not answer. Each time she thought it might be him, she let the phone ring out and then took the receiver off the hook. She knew that he also rang Ito and Rosario but they were careful to say very little. And then she was busy with a film in Brazil and then had work in the studios. She did not go to New York or London or Dublin for a long time. He never wrote, but if he had written, she would not have opened a letter from him.

  She could not help following his career, however, because his Con in A Touch of the Poet won him a Tony nomination and his one-man show based on Eugene O’Neill’s father won him all the awards in both New York and London. She could not have avoided either the news of his wedding to a woman who had been an actress, Rachael Swift. They looked happy in the wedding photograph published in the gossip magazines. She was blonde, it was hard to tell what age she was. She told a reporter that now that she and Luke were married, she hoped never to leave his side.

  The only time in all the years when Frances felt regret over what had happened and wished she had kept in touch with him was when she heard the news that he had died. She would like to have been with him when he was sick, she thought. She knew that, no matter how happily married he had been, with her he had something he would not have forgotten, especially if he had had time to think about things at the end of his life. He would have thought of her, as she would of him. She would like to have touched his dead body, or maybe been at his funeral, but she was not sure.

  But it might have been easier, she thought, to have regretted nothing at all, except that certain things are inevitable, including the fact that he grew tired of her. It was all a long time ago, she thought, brought back into her mind by two porters in the National Gallery and the shifting clouds in the Irish sky.

  She did not have much time in the days that followed to think about anything except the film. She got up with the dawn and left nothing to chance; she worried about the lighting cameraman, who was too ambitious, too ready to establish his own style. Maybe she had made some of the sets look too ordinary, she thought, taken no risks with them. This man was all risk and brilliance, and she admired his daring but wished she had worked with him before so that she could know whether he got results only from sets that were as interesting in themselves as the sort of light he cast on them. He avoided her and she wondered if this was because of her reputation for being difficult or if he simply had no interest at all in consulting with her or asking her to make changes in what she was doing.

  Slowly, she became anxious to leave. The lowness of the buildings in Dublin, shops that were cheap imitations of larger and better stores in bigger cities, ways of dressing that were either shabby or pretentious, and ways of moving in the street that lacked alertness or any style, all began to irritate her. At the weekend, especially on Fridays, the hotel lobby and the bars filled up with drinkers, and once or twice, having pushed her way through a crowd of half-drunken men and women, she was proud of having lived most of her life away from such people and glad that the staff of the hotel, unfailingly polite and self-effacing, came from elsewhere.

  It struck her that she really would not come back, that she would work in future anywhere but here. Even Gabi’s efficiency and sweetness seemed complacent to her, and some of the men moving sets were too slow, almost openly lazy. She found it difficult, especially in the third and fourth weeks of filming, not to show her impatience. She loved intelligent, decisive people who did things briskly, and on a few occasions when she had to phone home and found herself speaking down the line to Rosario, she realized how
much she missed Rosario’s intelligence, almost exquisite at times in its depth of perception, and her way of moving, so elegant and careful and poised.

  They had learned over time to read each other’s mind. Rosario was better, she thought, at reading hers, but Frances, too, was able to catch in a gesture, or a moment’s hesitation, something that Rosario wished to communicate. In all the years, she had been ill only once, and that was two years earlier. It was a virus of some kind and, at its most severe, it had lasted a day and a night and a day. When she was feverish and helpless, Rosario seemed to be always in the room with her. She felt that she was watched over. The sheets and pillowcases were changed every few hours.

  Frances remembered vigorously resisting the idea of going to a hospital. But even when she could sit up, she was too weak to do much and had no appetite. Rosario fed her and stayed with her and then left her alone to sleep when she thought that she could.

  Once in those days Rosario had asked her if there was someone in Ireland she wished to contact. Frances shook her head; there was nobody. Rosario smiled and continued putting sheets into the laundry basket as though none of this mattered. Frances had not wanted her niece to be alarmed about her, or to hint in any way that her niece should travel to Los Angeles and oversee her care. It was best, she thought, not to get in touch with her at all unless she became much worse, or if it was clear that she was dying.

  In those days she realized what was on Rosario’s mind. Since Ito and Rosario had seen the will, they knew that she had not mentioned anything about a grave, or what should happen to her body after her death. This was partly why she loved America, its lack of interest in death; no one she worked with ever bothered about where they would be buried; so many of her friends and colleagues would be happy, she knew, to have their ashes scattered somewhere, or have their body buried in whatever cemetery was closest. But Ito and Rosario cared deeply for the dead; they had been grateful when she had paid for Ito’s mother’s coffin to be flown back to Guatemala, but had she not done so they would have raised the money themselves. When they went home every few years they made sure to visit the graves.