Thomas Murphy

by Roger Rosenblatt

  9. I had a stroke of genius once or twice, but it evaporated before I could get to the typewriter. Do you have strokes of genius at The Ohio State University? The addition of the article The before your name seems like such a stroke. I wonder if other institutions will follow suit, such as The Vanderbilt, and The Amherst.

  10. Both. But don’t worry about it, me Buckeyes.

  11. No, but plenty of people wish I would. Are you among them?

  ALL RIGHT. One time they don’t know about. I forgot my area code. I was FedExing poems to the Kenyon Review, and you know? Where the FedEx form asks you for your phone number? I wrote down 122. That didn’t look right, so I put 221, then 121. I stared at the numbers a minute, and finally asked the FedEx man, what’s the area code for New York City? He gave no contempt with his answer. Oh, yes, I said. Sure. Thanks. I should have remembered it was a palindrome beginning with 2. Yeah, he said. A palindrome.

  All right. Two. But that second time was different. I’m not sure if I forgot something, or if I was remembering something that didn’t happen yet, like a dream. I was walking back to the Belnord, on Eighty-sixth between Central Park West and Columbus. Then I stopped, stood still. That much is fact. I don’t know why I stopped, but I think I was scared or disoriented, the way one is when seated in a parked car in a parking lot, and the two cars on either side of you start to move backward. You think you are moving forward, but you are stock-still.

  Well, that’s what happened with me and Eighty-sixth Street. The entire boulevard liquefied and began to move toward me, like a whitewater river. As it flowed, it gained steam. I looked for something to grab on to, to keep from being swept away, but nothing presented itself—only me and the boulevard river rushing in the direction of the park, and making a godawful whooshing and gurgling noise, as it carried away TV repairmen, doctors, nannies, manicurists, policewomen, people who worked in Starbucks, dogs on leashes, and all the denizens of Eighty-sixth Street, everyone shouting and barking and waving arms in a desperate effort to remain afloat. There followed fire hydrants, trucks, buses, and larger debris still—huge trees and an entire town house, all rushing down the rapids. Withal, I managed to stand my ground, expecting the river to gobble me up too, but it did not. And then it was gone, just like that, and Eighty-sixth Street was back to its original shape. Pedestrians were staring at me as they passed, wondering if I were ill. A beer delivery guy was the only one to stop and ask, Mister? You okay? I said, Maybe.

  SEE HERE, BUCKEYES. How sure are you about memory, anyway? Is it always applied to what you remember? For instance, I’ve always suspected that Shakespeare was really Charles Darwin. Or vice versa. I never know how one should put it. Oh, I appreciate that Bacon and Marlowe are assumed to be the chief contenders, since it’s unthinkable that Shakespeare could have been Shakespeare. But, no offense, how obvious can you get. Anyone could name a literary contemporary of Shakespeare’s and call him Shakespeare. Nothing to it. It takes someone with a real nose for crime to figure out that while Darwin was writing The Origin of Species in the nineteenth century, he was also polishing off Hamlet in the seventeenth. At first I merely surmised that only a man like Darwin had the sort of genius Shakespeare had, that is, the galactic imagination to perceive and declare connections among invisible stages of development. But then I found an actual clue, a typo in Hamlet. “To be or not to be” was intended to read “To be and not to be.” There you go.

  Do you follow? What if memory does not apply to the past, after all, but rather to something that will occur tomorrow or next week, and the past is something we only forget? And that would be grand, ’cause most of what we can remember is terrible. Looking back on our lives, we don’t stand a ghost of a chance. But looking ahead to our past, why, ma’am, you’ve won the lottery. For all you know, the things you remember haven’t happened yet. Small wonder you’re confused. This is bound to affect your actions and decisions, because if you base either or both on your recollection of something occurring tomorrow or next week, you’re bound to screw up. Yet even that conclusion would be based on projected memory. One thing, though. If memory is unusable in the traditional way, the mania for daily slaughter might be reduced. We Irish would lose our grudges. Unthinkable. History could not be held responsible for repeating itself. As a bonus, we would not need to hear that droning quote from Santayana anymore.

  Which brings me to that old bird I’m passing at Eighty-sixth and Broadway right now. What if I only think of him as old because that’s how he appears to me. My memory tells me that he is how an old man looks. He looks like me. But if my memory of such categories has not happened yet, then neither has he, and he cannot be old. Why, he’s a kid. A spring chicken. I don’t look old to him, either. I, too, am a spring chicken. We cluck good morning to each other. There are two ways to look at people, I think. One way is as they are. One is as they will be. That old bird at Eighty-sixth and Broadway. He’ll be learning to sit up and crawl soon. Not long after that, he’ll stand and walk. Good for him.

  Which brings me to that girl Sarah, whom I have not met. Yet I have met her picture, snapped in the past. We are old friends who have yet to make each other’s acquaintance. Sarah, do you recall what I started to say to you?

  We have to rethink this whole business of time. Don’t you agree, Buckeyes? I mean, since time does not exist and never has, we ought to reconsider the entire question. Remember two months from now? Maybe it’s language that confines us. We simply do not have the language to deal with the past in the future. We don’t have the grammatical tense. If we did, we might say some remarkable things in our beautiful garbled new tongue. The language spoken in the world’s not. And everyone would listen to our language, because it speaks the truth, and people would learn from it when they grow young again, and eventually are born. We must love the world. Is that not so, my Buckeyed friends? I refuse to budge from my trance.

  IN THEIR TRANCE, the grown-ups sat in concentric circles in a field, the men in the inner circle, the women in the outer. Have I told you about this? We children were excluded, but were permitted to watch. What good these ancient harvest rituals were supposed to accomplish confused me, since the only crop I ever saw on Inishmaan was potatoes, and little enough of that, studding the land like the rocks. Still, the grown-ups prayed, like their Druid ancestors, year after year. They were more successful when they asked divine powers for fish, the invisible crop that seduced men to the ocean, where many died. Synge caught the repetitive sadness of the island fisherman in Riders to the Sea—the relentless scraping of the curraghs on the pebbles, looking like the shells of mussels, but heavy. Four big men at a time hauling the boats to a place on the shore where the vessels could float. The men would climb aboard and wobble out, slowly out and slowly back, if ever they came back.

  In their circle in the field, the men sat bobbing back and forth as if at sea themselves, like the davening of Jews of which I learned from Greenberg much later in America—bodies rocking, keening for the dead, and for their lives. The women surrounding them did the same. They wore hats of red and brown wool, and their great arms glistened in the moonlight that beamed behind the ribs of the clouds. They prayed in Irish, the lilt of the rhythms lifting up and down in the human circles, rising and falling like boats. At the top of a hill, a thick gray horse halfheartedly grazed.

  Outside the two circles we children played like sprites and ghostly figures. We dressed up as animals, I don’t remember why. It wasn’t part of the ritual, I’m pretty sure of that. Perhaps one child did it once, long ago, and the custom caught on. We dressed as goats and hares and sheep and unreal animals too, satyrs and unicorns, in a concocted mythology. The liquid shapes of us moving about the shadows, and the moaning of our parents and grandparents. One year I was a boar. Another, a wolf. One time a ram. I snorted and spat like a ram. I spoke the language of rams.

  What all this looked like from above, I cannot imagine. The elders prayed under the sighs of the moon. I remember thinking, What sort of God would be
moved by such a sight? What God would be impressed by the prayers of a people as small and miserable as my own? In the center of the circle of the men a turf fire burned in dull ashes. It neither flared nor tapered nor extinguished itself, but held to a steady warmth and its shifting colors of red and brown. After several hours, the gray smoke generated by the fire rose and settled on the people like a cloud descended. It filled our noses, ears, our eyeballs. My senses were filled with smoke.

  The night I was a ram I met a bull. Timmy Leary was the bull. His horns were alder branches. While the grown-ups prayed, we had it out head to head on the dead plain, near an outcropping of chipped rocks. We stalked each other as the moon swirled around us. On a patch of frozen rainfall I got him down, though Timmy was bigger, a wide table of a kid. Still, I gathered up my ramness, lowered my great round horns, and hit him hard in the stomach. He hit his head on a rock, and was dazed. Lying on his back he eventually opened his eye like an owl’s, and I picked up a rock, as if I were about to kill him. Timmy Leary, the sweet laughing boy, who never did me a moment’s harm. As we were walking back to the circles of grown-ups, he asked me why I did that. I told him, It wouldn’t be you I was killing, it would be them. Them? he said. But by then I had left him to go his own way, and I turned toward the cliff over the skull of the sea.

  DEAR MR. MORPHY,

  We at AARP have checked our records and note that you have never chosen to join our ranks. Mr. Morphy, we are taking this opportunity, once again, to ask you to be a valued part of AARP. We see that you are seventy-two years young. If you are in good mental and physical health—and we certainly hope you are—our actuarial charts indicate that you will live another twenty years, perhaps more. So, Mr. Morphy, don’t you think it’s time that you joined the tens of millions of Americans in AARP, enjoying the many benefits of membership? All you need do is check YES on the enclosed card. After that, AARP will do its best to make your next twenty years the happiest of your life. Best wishes from your friends at AARP.

  Dear AA,

  Forgive the informal address. The reason I never have joined AARP is that you don’t have a clubhouse. I only join clubs with clubhouses. And you’re not exclusive enough. I like clubs that exclude left and right, and hurt people’s feelings. As for my next twenty years, I seriously doubt that they will be the happiest of my life, unless, of course you can bring back my wife, Oona, and my friend Greenberg. If resurrection is included among your many benefits, sign me up. Otherwise, I simply have too much on my plate at the moment. That is, when I don’t spill half of it on the floor. Much as I would love to join my fellow members in Malaysian cooking classes and games of Mad Libs, what with my sudden urge to skin mules, split rails, and raise dead beets, well, where’s the time? To be sure, my mental health seems to be in question at the moment, so you never know. I may change what’s left of my mind. One more thing? It’s Murphy, not Morphy, though I admire your suggestion of change by the spelling. And I must tell you, seeing Morphy in print is so attractive, Morphy it will be from this day forward. Thank you, AA.

  Best wishes from your friends near the bone yard,

  Morph.

  MURPH? I’ve been thinking about our plan. Jack picks me up at my apartment house in his red Corvair, and is making the turn off Second, heading for the Queensboro Bridge. I start to tell him that I’ve been thinking about it too, and am getting cold feet, when he says he thinks that one visit with Sarah would be too abrupt. I mean, I bring a stranger home for dinner, a guy I met in a bar, and he’s here to tell my wife that she’ll be without a husband in a couple of months. I know what I said about you having the words, Murph. But maybe I didn’t think it through. I ask him what he’s getting at. Well, he says, what would you think of this being just a first visit, where you and Sarah get to know each other a little. And then, after four or five more visits, when you’ve become more of a friend of the family, so to speak, you and I can sit down with her and lower the boom. Lower the boom, indeed, I tell him. I wish you’d thought of this before, Jack. I’d have held to my no, and sent you packing. Now you’re asking me to become part of your household, you and Sarah.

  He goes quiet and looks ashamed, like a little boy who had misplaced an expensive gift. I remind myself that the poor slob is dying. Now we are across the bridge and into Woodside. I know there’s no turning back, and I’m still curious to meet Sarah of the bittersweet smile. I want to look at her. So, I tell Jack not to worry. I will meet Sarah today, enjoy my dinner, I’m sure . . . Oh, yeah, she’s a kick-ass cook, says Jack . . . and then we’ll all sit down together the second time I visit, and, as you say, lower the boom, as gently as possible. But we must tell her that this was our arrangement from the start, Jack. That this is what you wanted me to do, and that’s why I was doing it. If we’re up front with her, she’s likely to appreciate the trouble you took, and how careful you have been about her feelings. And, Jack? I give him my coldest Irish stare. There will be only one more time, not four or five. He nods. I understand, he says. I nod too, more unsure than ever of what I’m getting myself into.

  There’s something else you should know about Sarah, says Jack. I think, She’s deaf? She reads like crazy, he says. She went to a fancy college. Smith. In Massachusetts. Ever hear of it? Oh, sure you have. Can you beat that? he says. She’s blind and she sails through Smith College at the top of her class. God knows what she saw in me. Need, I suggest. That’s what she said, Murph! Need! I never knew if she meant hers or mine. You two really are going to hit it off! Anyway, she’s an amazing reader. Has a thousand books in braille. And, I don’t know, a million books on tape. When I told her you were coming for dinner, she mentioned a title of one of your books, or poems, I don’t know which. Just like that. Off the top of her head. She knows everything you’ve written. He goes on talking talking talking.

  You can see I’m nervous, he says. I tell him I’m nervous too. He chuckles. Maybe Sarah is the only one of the three of us who isn’t nervous, Murph. She’s a calm sort of person. Inside. Serene, I offer. Yeah. That’s the word. Serene. See? I knew you were the man for this job. A few minutes more and we pull into a driveway beside a squat two-story wood-and-brick house, which looks like a sad passing thought. Here we are, says Jack, a pig in shit.

  YOU’RE ASKING YOURSELF how we got together, aren’t you, Murph? He passes the roast. Sure you are. Everyone does. Everyone wonders how a dashing, sophisticated fellow such as myself got hooked up with a lumbering brute like Sarah. It was like this. In the summer of 2005, I was working as a lifeguard at the big beach in East Hampton. I was young, tan, ripped, you get the picture. It was early one Saturday morning, long before the crowds came out, and I was getting the lifeguard stand ready, stacking the PFDs, and lugging out the big yellow umbrellas for the rich, arranging the towels, stuff like that. It couldn’t have been six-thirty yet, when out of the corner of my eye I see this long-legged beauty walking toward the ocean. Stepping slow and careful, as if she’s in her sleep, not running the way most of the younger people do. So I went on with my work, but I kept an eye on her at the same time. She was wearing a dark blue one-piece suit, and with that dusty gold hair of hers and those legs, I can tell you, it wasn’t hard to keep watching. Then, as she’s standing ankle-deep in the water, out of nowhere, a wave, maybe ten feet high, comes up and knocks her out of my sight. So I ran like crazy. The wave receded, and she was lying faceup on the pebbles, out cold. Like the superhero I am, I picked her up on my arms and carried her to dry sand, and gave her mouth-to-mouth. I’m not sure it was necessary, you know, but I wanted to get my mouth on hers, if you get my drift. And whack! She hauls off and slaps me. I’m telling you, Murph. She’s small, but she packs a punch. She knocked me on my backside. Me! And then, if you believe it, she stands, extends her little hand and pulls me up.

  Hey! I tell her. I was saving your life. Is that what you call it? she says. I laughed, and she laughed, and only then could I see she was blind. Later, she’d tell our friends, why else would I have fallen for Jack
. Had to be blind. Isn’t that right, babe? I tell her that she ought not to be coming to the beach alone, the way she is. And what does she say, Murph? She says, Everyone’s alone, which told me then and there I was way out of my class. She says she lives with her folks just down the road from the beach, and she’s been coming there ever since she was a kid, and no hulking ape of a lifeguard was going to tell her different, and why don’t I mind my own business. Not a word about almost drowning, you understand. And I call her a stuck-up ungrateful bitch, and she smiles that amazing smile, and I ask her out, and she says, Anywhere but the movies. And that was that. I won’t tell you how hard a time her folks gave us, or how I first had her in her own bedroom while her folks were fighting downstairs. Maybe later. But that’s our story, Murph. And when anyone asks how we got together, I tell them, She swept me off my ass.

  Throughout the length of Jack’s dinner table monologue, Sarah smiles her dark chocolate smile from time to time, but says not a word. While listening to Jack, I mainly hear her silence.

  NOISELESS, I have drawn my straw pallet to lie on the floor beside my da’s bed. Above me, he breathes like the polar sea. He floats in his sleep. I would like to ride the current with him—the two of us on a mare heading to deep waters, under the sea’s sun. But he is alone in his dying, as I am alone in my living. I lie on my makeshift bed, my arms behind my head like angel wings. Every so often, I look up. He begins to appear as glass, as a glass ink bottle into which I may dip my pen. I dip my pen in my father and write what he tells me. “Ah penny, brown penny, brown penny.” And now I am reborn, a new child again, learning to make my way in the new world. What is a rock? What is a daisy? Hours pass and I crawl around the poem I write of him and me. Soon I pull myself upright, vertical man, and I write of that, as my father instructs me. Automatic writing. Then it stops, and there are no further instructions, so I put down my pen and cap the ink bottle, resting my head on the parchment of his arms.