This Is Happiness

by Niall Williams

  In normal weather, the church river-cold and the cruciform three-door draughts mortifying the flesh, the scent of the blooms would have been contained inside the altar-rails. But this year the sun amplified their perfume and men, women and children were not only bombarded by Doreen O Dea’s douse of French toilet water that gave the lilies a run for their money but encompassed inside a white sweltry bouquet that made thin their breathing and took their thoughts elsewhere. Christy was already sweating. I had a sense, perhaps incorrect, that he had not been in a church for some time. He seemed in some inner negotiation, eyes slipping up to the crucifix and head dipping after. There were already plenty of parishioners in place, but as far as I could tell Annie Mooney was not among them.

  First Mass drew an older congregation. By apparition almost, and with an accompanying cloud of inexpensive florals, the Women’s Aisle filled with an antique collection of females, in hats and bonnets of all colours, styles and engineering. As I’ve said, there was an unwritten but understood placement in the pews, in the front directly across from Matthew Leary in the Men’s, Mrs Frawley, who had one day decided to go on living and had now reached the folkloric age of a hundred, by which time life had pared away all sentiment and bestowed on her the fierce and forbidding eye of an ancient crow. Among the seniors, seniority counted, in Faha survival the only victory that mattered, and due deference was granted anyone who had been left on the planet that long. Next to Mrs Frawley, Mrs O Donnell, a spring chicken of ninety on far-sighted lookout for a potential husband across the way. Eyes straight ahead, the women prayed that kind of timeless praying that rises murmurous and general the way you imagine the land might pray, dangles of rosary beads moving through fingers like some circular riverworks of soul.

  The Men’s Aisle didn’t fill until after the Women’s. What became apparent was that, by whoever in a distant elsewhere had calipered the Standard Size, the feet of Faha were not that. Because of inadequacies of measurement, a weakness for the modish, or because they didn’t want to admit that from tramping out the land their feet had grown outlandish, women wore an astonishment of ill-fitting footwear. The men were no better, out of wellingtons and boots, in black shoes that might have passed for boats, for the early Mass there were some dragging a foot, some favouring the left, some the right, some who had been lamed by a beast, who had caught a foot in a wheel, under a wheel, who had lost a toe, lost two toes, who had heel-spurs, hammer-toes, ankles ballooned and in all manner bocketty, who had been foot-mangled by farm machinery one way or the other (that is, in all the ways that farming could figure out to do it), had gaits fouled in small or large measure, and on top of this (both in the tradition of and an advancement on their great-grandfathers and -grandmothers who had come barefoot to the village carrying the shoes they only put on once they arrived at one of the four crosses, coming new-shod into church), they wore the good shoes that, though laced and shining, from small use and foot disorder were pure murder.

  So, the general sigh when all sat down. And my feeling that I was in the company of the heroic or the needing to be healed.

  Father Tom said the first Mass. He said it swift and without sermon, a kind of no-nonsense service that went down the tracks of the iron faith of all parishioners. You were witnesses more than participants then, you watched the Mass pass by and later when you were asked Did you catch Mass? there was just that instant of uncertainty that in fact you had.

  The Latin rose and hung above the candled altar like air carvings, intricate and ornamental, and other, which was how God was supposed to be at the time. Christy kept his eyes out for Annie Mooney, and only when at Communion he was certain she was not there did he push back into the pew and his whole body relaxed. We alone, I think, did not go to receive Communion. Mrs Frawley received first, the gravity of her person and century of living causing Father Tom to wait at the rails for her, in the pause one of the Kellys dandling the paten and earning the cuff he’d get later.

  There was time to pass before the next Mass. We filed out with everyone else, and because Christy had set in his mind how and where he wanted to see Mrs Gaffney for the first time, we strode out of the village and went down by the river. ‘She’ll be at the ten,’ he said, drew out his cigarettes, patted in vain for matches, and, once I had struck one for him, released some of what had been inside him in a ladder of smoke.

  When I think of it now, I think how improbable it was that after six decades a man could retain in himself the derided, outmoded, naïve, but still-alive dream of a happy ending, of meeting again a woman he had loved decades earlier and imagining that the result could be anything other than catastrophe.

  If we spoke by the river, I forget what we said. Nothing pertinent, most likely.

  St Cecelia’s was full half an hour before ten o’clock Mass began. This is the big one, the church seemed to say, and an entirely different congregation assembled, one notable for brightness of colour and a quiet if unexpressed joy that once again Christ had risen. We met Ganga and Doady as they came down Church Street, and accompanied them in the Long Aisle, Doady, wearing the triumph of her bouncing do, and walking an inch taller with the risen station of having a lodger, the electricity man, Ganga in thrall to the splendour of occasion. ‘O now.’

  All the pews were filled as we came in past Mick Madigan standing by the door. This made no earthly difference to Ganga, who chose a midways pew and waited while its outer occupant pushed in a bit, then Doady sat and sidled in, then Ganga sat and did the same, then Christy did, and I did. I didn’t dare look in along the line crushed to the wall. But the same thing was happening all over the church as the latest Christians hurried in, genuflected and, without looking, sat themselves into a space that to that moment had not existed. The pew sucked in its breath, concertina-ed closer, and the church became one living sea of the washed, the ironed, the shampooed and the shone.

  In the time before Mass the congregation participated in one of the characteristic joys of all mankind, looking at itself. Easter being a time for bonnets, Maura Sexton had outdone herself with a hat that this year came not only with feathers but fruit. Maureen Mungovan had taken licence from the weather and wore a sundrop dress of lemon linen. There was Greavy the guard, over here, Bubs in a daylight version, and Sheila Sullivan wiping her son’s mouth in a halved-nappy hanky. There was the world of children, twisting, turning, being sat, leg-dangling, Stop that, turning, staring fresh-faced and wide-eyed at the mystery of an adult on their knees behind them, being pulled back, being sat again but soon sliding off, finding the pews to be perfect pirate gangways, castle ramparts, and if you slipped past the knees of just one you could walk along the kneelers, and by an unwritten statute of Church law be beyond the reach of reprimand, until you remembered there was chocolate at stake.

  The next of the Kellys jingled the bell and Father Coffey came from the vestry. The primacy of the feast day had come to the surface in the phosphor of his cheeks, and, against the white of his vestments, lent him a paschal look. He said the Mass with high seriousness, as if he’d never said one before, and it touched me, the way something you’ve lost can. In his saying of them, the Kyrie and the Confiteor were like stone tablets, ancient and indisputable. He lifted his face and upturned his palms, as though through the stained glass above the Long Aisle he could catch the sunbeams reflecting right then off the risen Christ.

  For his sermon, Father Coffey chose the simplest of arguments: by the fine weather we were all being blessed, and, with clerical sidestep, did not draw the corollary: that up to now we had been cursed. He was midways through his delivery when Christy pinched my arm, his face was in thrall, and when I turned he nodded across the aisle and there I saw Mrs Gaffney.

  I had seen her once before, I now realised.

  In Faha, at that time, people who in the normal course of life never gambled made an exception for the Aintree Grand National. Because town was distant, and fortune craved, unofficial bookies sprung up where they could. In Faha, one such operated out of
Arnold Gaffney’s chemist, and one April Saturday when I had been sent down for the Easter holidays, Ganga had brought me in there. I was to say nothing to Doady. We’d surprise her with the winnings later, he said, and I think it was that surprise more than the money he was looking forward to. Mr Gaffney was a short man with the quick, blinking eyes of a man married to someone too beautiful. The fact of that had made him a natural cousin to good fortune and, by the way these things come about, given birth to a sideline as a bookmaker. He was not handsome, but he was lucky, his soft smile said. Some time back, in a gesture perhaps to increase his allure, he had purchased a pair of the large black-framed glasses of Cary Grant, but to small effect, his three crossing strands of hair attached by Brylcreem, his well-worn white shirt and shirt garters lending him the look of a cowboy saloon-keep.

  Luck, like justice, love, and maybe everything else of worth, being blind, Ganga selected his horse by flying a forefinger on to the runners and then seeing who he’d chosen. His wager was in coins, it can’t have been much, but just the placing of it made him boyish and I remembered that his only song, sung in the small hours after a funeral feed of porter, was Bet my money on the bobtail nag. Somebody bet on the grey.

  Mr Gaffney was noting the wager in a ledger when his wife came through the strips of hanging rainbow that divided the shop from the house. What did she look like? The truth is, I didn’t really take notice. I didn’t take much notice of anyone until I was seventeen and began to realise there were more people living than myself, but she did have an extraordinary long thick wave of brown hair and the kind, sad eyes some women have looking at a small child when they’ve had none. She gave me a twisted stick of crystallised ginger.

  Now, here she was in St Cecelia’s. I saw her and felt an involuntary fall in my heart because, though still extraordinarily long, her hair was a weave of almost-white. In profile her face had a graven look, but also something of what, I would only come to understand years later, time did to great beauty, refine it, as though after coming through a fire. The bones of her cheeks were prominent. She kept her head erect and tilted slightly back. I couldn’t speak to beauty then, but I could to dignity and bearing and deep quietude in her. Sorrow, I thought, had given her a look classical and apart. I’m not sure what I was expecting. But what I felt was sadness. I might have turned to Christy to see his reaction, but there was no time because the whole church was moving. Communion was beginning.

  ‘I’m not going,’ I whispered. ‘I’ll watch from here.’

  He looked but didn’t argue. There was no time.

  It turned out that those who had originally been sitting on the outer pew were the ones most desperate to be first to receive. It was why they had sat on the edge, but meekness and charity had forced them to slide in. Now, they stood the moment the Domine non sum dignus had ended and a general shuffling happened as they tried to come out past those whose consciences were larger and were still kneeling. The Long Aisle filled in a bumping instant. Two lines were formed, both heading to the altar-rails, but, because those in the pews nearer the front kept joining, for a time the line went backwards and Christy was nearly out the back door.

  He had sight of Annie Mooney. Then he didn’t.

  What he thought of her, what impact the sight of her had on him was unknown. Whether he had worked out the detail of his meeting her again after so many years, whether he had thought the thing to do would be to arrive on his knees at the altar-rail alongside her, I can’t say. But if so he had underestimated the imperative of Communion at Easter, and the chaotic nature of how things happened in Faha. There was a crush, a slow rush, a small push and pull back as the whole line shuffled backwards when someone returning from the rails had to be readmitted to their pew. In the host-traffic I lost sight of Annie Mooney, not least because of the dazzlement of the three Troy sisters. Christy craned his head. For a moment I thought he would say ‘Excuse me now’ and start pushing his way up through a parting sea. I thought: Here comes pandemonium. But he held off. She was above at the rails now, now Father Coffey was before her. Christy’s moment had passed, he was still some ways down the aisle of St Cecelia’s whose windows had never been opened and whose airless atmosphere was made unreal by Mrs Reidy’s organ music, incense, and the actual sun outside approaching noon.

  He resolved on a new strategy. Annie Mooney would be back in her pew by the time he passed, so in the slow procession of souls he would be able to pause before her. He would pause alongside her, his prayer-hands would hold in and press upward the loose-strung girth of him, he would throw back his shoulders and angle his chin just so to defeat the years and allow her to recognise the Christy he had once been.

  The line shuffled forward, stopped, backed up, shuffled on again, stopped again.

  At last, he was alongside her. The line surged and a gap opened but Christy delayed and offered her his profile, and from my place I watched her make just the slightest turn of her face in which she had to have seen him.

  But she showed no sign of it. She turned away almost at once.

  There was not the slightest change in her expression that I could see.

  Nor was there when Christy did the same on the way back.

  ‘Well?’

  We had come out in the flow and press of the congregation, both lighted and lightened in the sloping churchyard. Mrs Gaffney had gone out ahead of us, for the third time been three feet from Christy and for the third time not taken notice of him. She was gone into the chemist’s, Closed hanging in the door. The post-office windowsill was already full, there was a cluster around Conlon the newspaperman, and over everything this far-fetched and foreign sunlight turning Church Street a pale lemon colour I believed I would never forget, until I did, but remembered years later in a gallery where I found out it was called Naples Yellow, and that name would take me back to the magnanimous feeling that was a Naples light falling in Faha that Easter morning.

  Christy tugged at my sleeve. ‘Well? Did she show any sign? Anything of a smile?’

  I blame the sunlight. I blame the eagerness and hope in his eyes. I blame the Easter morning and the bestowed innocence that blanches the soul after Mass when you are returned to your child self and can believe the plots turn out all right.

  ‘Yes,’ I lied. ‘There was.’

  17

  What does it matter? What does it matter what one old man was hoping one time? I haven’t the wit to argue it now. All I can say is I know it did matter and knew it then too. We’re more than bones and flesh. That underlies it. And a man in his sixth decade trying to make amends for the mistakes in his life, that speaks to me. Spoke to me then too, although less deeply than it does now. I’ll say nothing of his carrying a torch for that long.

  Easter Sunday dinner, it was decided, would be served outdoors. The decision was not Doady’s. ‘Bring in the table, let ye,’ she had said, getting down off the horse car, unbuttoning her coat and heading into the scullery with the valorous look of Napoleon’s marshal. She kept the headscarf on the while and the curls contained.

  ‘No need,’ Ganga told Christy and I when we set about the table. ‘We’ll eat outside, like the Lord.’

  By the time Doady discovered, the argument had passed. All that existed of it was a look in my grandmother’s eye with which it was clear my grandfather would have to negotiate later.

  But all argument was postponed under the imperative of the Easter feast. There was a general to-do again in all houses in the parish, pots boiling, lids clattering, roasting trays checked, fingers burned and final touches applied, and all under the scrutiny of astute generals in wrap-around housecoats and floral aprons. The thing for you to get, I suppose, was that it felt personal. The religion wasn’t abstracted, historic or chosen. The Lord had risen, it was fact. To Ganga and Doady, Easter was an inarguable actuality same as the rain or the river, and with as little call for debate. I wasn’t wise enough to envy them then. Christy and I went in and out of the house following orders that, under the pressure of e
ngagements on multiple fronts, Doady abbreviated to single words, ‘Napkins!’, ‘Salt!’, ‘Mint!’ Christy was three inches off the ground now. My lie about Mrs Gaffney had gladdened him beyond words, and beyond words was a dangerous place. He had achieved the next stage of his plan. He had found Annie Mooney, he had come to Faha, and now she had seen him. More, she had recognised him, and had, it seemed, smiled. He let the thought of that feed him, the way lovers do, and he fed it in turn with an Easter optimism and the time-worn fantasy of things turning out according to plan.

  I of course was bound up with an indigestible guilt, and the feeling of transgression you didn’t escape just by turning your back on the Church, but there wasn’t time to adjudicate between sins venial and mortal. A leg of lamb appeared, I don’t know what paid for it. Then, moments before the dinner was to be called, Ganga set a fifth place at the table, and moments after that, a car drove up and, again like a great black-and-white bird, Mother Acquin landed.

  I had not seen her since my mother’s funeral, when she had presided from a front pew with a pale, august solemnity that let all know she was a close cousin to Death. Nuns at that time were a kind of aristocracy and a Mother Abbess was up there, as they say. She changed the air around her and, whether intentional or not, had the effect of making most people smaller in her company. After removing the headscarf and the housecoat and giving a little up-push to both sides of her curls, Doady came outside with a girlish timidity just as Ganga was pumping Mother’s hand like a well. ‘Now,’ he kept saying. ‘O now.’

  Doady did a small genuflect with her face. ‘Welcome, Mother.’

  ‘We’re dining in the garden?’ Mother Acquin asked. There was a skill in how much she could fit into a single question.