Thomas Murphy

by Roger Rosenblatt

  I SAW GREENBERG weep only once. Not weep, exactly. Tear up. Have I told you about this? We were lounging in the backyard of the frame house in Sunset Park we lived in before he found Barry for himself and Oona for me. We were twenty-eight, twenty-nine, with little to do during the week but work (he at law, I at teaching Catholic girls in short plaid skirts) and tell each other stories on the weekends. I was exotic to him for Inishmaan. He was exotic to me for everything—Harvard, Yale, lacrosse, the navy. One delicious summer evening, as we stretched out in our cheap chaises, he grew quiet at something I had said that reminded him of an incident with a kid named Forrest. It was at Groton, and Forrest, a rich thug from Greenwich, began to taunt Greenberg, first for being Jewish, then for being gay. He blustered into my room, and loomed over me, Greenberg said. I sat at my desk, trying not to acknowledge him, but Forrest persisted. Hey Jewboy. Hey fag. I was bigger and stronger than he was, and I knew how to box, so I kept my cool for as long as I could. Then I told him to leave the room. He tipped my chair so that I fell to the floor on my back. Without thinking, I leapt to my feet and punched him hard in the face, four or five times in rapid succession. I heard his nose break. Then I hit him in the eyes, and I heard one of the sockets crack, too. It was all over in a matter of seconds, and he stumbled from my room, screaming and wailing. We both were just fifteen. No one ever blamed me. Not the headmaster. Not even Forrest’s parents, who were too familiar with their son’s foul temperament. But when Forrest was out of my room, I closed the door and wept. Why? I asked him. He had turned me into a savage, Murph, he said. Just like him.

  ONE THING we never did. We never took revenge on the bastards. When we’d won our freedom, and could have raped their women, burned their fields, hobbled their horses, and taken apart their manses stone by stone, we did not. Know why? Because Irishmen are angels? Hardly. It was because we didn’t want to create a national memory of which we’d live to be ashamed. Purely a practical measure. ’Twas that simple.

  I don’t know that people appreciate how much of so-called civic virtue consists of purely practical measures. We had an ancient system of land distribution on Inishmaan that sounds as if it was the result of high-minded democratic thinking. It was called rundale, and, as far as I know, it’s still practiced on the island. Every landowner had three fields, enclosed by rock walls. One field was good, tillable land, one was so-so, and one was good for nothing. The distribution was the same for everyone, so that no one ever felt too rich or too poor. Now you might say that such a system presaged socialism or communism or something aggressive like that. But no one ever heard of those things on Inishmaan. And neither was rundale worked out to effect justice and fair play on the island. It was just common sense. With a system like that in place, no one would ever be knocked off for his land. And no one was.

  Know why I work with the homeless? Because I feel sorry for them? Because I think everyone should do things like that? Because I believe that the homeless deserve all the kindness we can give them? Yes, on all counts. Gotcha.

  WHICH REMINDS ME, I haven’t looked in on the folks in the shelter in a couple of weeks. So, with nothing more pressing to do, to put it mildly, I head over to the church. Reynolds and I hug and chat. I must say, it took me a while to get used to men hugging the way we do these days. On the island, if a boyo hugged you, he was passing-out drunk. I tell the minister I’ve seen Arthur a couple of times recently. He looks in pretty good shape, I say—I mean, for Arthur. Good shape? says Reynolds. Arthur the Bear? You haven’t read about Arthur? I haven’t read about anybody, I say. Poor Arthur, says Reynolds. Last Monday, in the middle of the afternoon, he climbed into a cage at the park zoo, the one vacated by Gus, the polar bear who died a couple of years ago. He bounded around on all fours and swiped his arms in the air like paws and reared up, as if on hind legs. Zoo visitors thought he was playing at first. Then they recognized the horror. Arthur had gone totally mad. The Bear became a bear. He’s in Manhattan State now. You know? The mental hospital near the East River? They have him in an isolated cell. Can he receive visitors? I ask. I went yesterday, says Reynolds. It’s pointless. I think, Poor Arthur. What do we know? What do we ever know?

  THE OTHER DAY, the TV had a news story about a Piper Cub in Florida. The pilot radioed that he was running out of gas, and that he was going to make a forced landing on a nearby beach. As he was bringing down his plane, a little girl was walking near the edge of the water. The wing of the plane clipped the little girl and decapitated her. The pilot was unhurt. What do we ever know? If the girl had not been walking in that exact spot, if the pilot had better calculated the amount of fuel in his tank before taking off, if he’d chosen another beach, if she’d chosen another beach, and so forth. As it was, the pilot climbed out of his cockpit, looked around in gratitude for his safety, and saw the head of a little girl bobbing in the surf.

  WHAT DO WE KNOW? Poets like to revel in the power of language. Words. Glorious words. But there’s Gabriel in “The Dead,” who also thinks that words constitute a life and a love. And there’s Joyce, too, who believed in words as an artist, even as he picked apart Gabriel’s narcissisms. It’s nice that we believe in the power of words, but that power is nothing compared to the power of the life it aspires to represent. A Piper Cub. A little girl. Nothing. Sometimes I think writers suffer from a vanity about words, and this leads to a smugness of thought, a silly self-satisfaction and an undeserved ennobling. My da would have looked away in contempt and spat a chaw. “Brown penny, brown penny.” Yes, Michael Furey was passionate. Yes, he died for love. Yes, Gretta yearned for that passion, and Gabriel will never know it. But what is all this to a life of real struggle? Arthur the Bear’s poor life, for example. If you ask me, Maria of “Clay” is more alive (read heroic) than the whole lot of ’em in “The Dead,” because she dares to wake up every morning and face life in the laundry. The daughter of a friend, another poet, died a few years ago. Billy Collins wrote him, “Sometimes there are no words.” It was a beautiful thing to say, and also right. Sometimes there are no words. And when we come upon those times, we are not living in “The Dead” or writing “The Dead.” We are dwelling helplessly in life, on the sunny beach in Florida. I love being a poet. And I do the best I can to make my writing useful (aesthetically, philosophically, practically) for others. But not for a moment do I think that my words are equal to life. If anything, they prove how inadequate I am to the grand discombobulation. So maybe that’s the true power of words—to show us how puny they are in the face of everything they attempt to say. And maybe that’s why poets write, to show the power of our powerlessness, in a storm at sea.

  TWO LETTERS, back to back:

  Dear Murph, My demi-thought of the day: Jack has disappeared. But does anybody disappear? I don’t mean in the way of Amelia Earhart, Judge Crater, and Jimmy Hoffa. I mean every one of us. Memory keeps us all alive, so no one ever dies and no one disappears. D. B. Cooper. Didn’t you see him last week, shopping in Bergdorf’s? Elvis? I’m sure that cop on the beat is Elvis. Not that I want to elevate Jack to the realm of disappeared celebrities. But whether he shows up or shows up dead, he cannot disappear. He lives in my mind, even in yours. This is immortality, isn’t it? I read that Lewis Thomas said that while he did not believe in reincarnation, he had to concede the scientific proposition that nothing in nature ever disappears. So people remain, loitering in the corners of our recollections. As ever, Sarah.

  Dear Murph, Still nothing from or about Jack. Is he dead, do you think? Murdered by someone he bounced in his bar? Or by his girlfriend? If she did it, depending on the circumstance, I might serve as a character witness for the defense. I don’t mean that. Just a wisecrack. I don’t wish Jack ill. I’m not even sure I want him back. The first couple of weeks were hard. But now it’s different. You know the song “I Get Along Without You Very Well”? About someone who doesn’t mean it? I mean it. I do miss the little noises. The silence gets to me. But I’m not sure I miss Jack. What was your wife like, Murph? Let m
e guess. Irish no-nonsense? I think she had to be that way because she married nonsense, for balance, just as you married good sense. These winter days are lovely, are they not? The wind kicks up, sways you as if you were dancing with it. You poets make a fancy fuss about the snow and rain. If I were you, I’d take up the wind. It’s an under-appreciated element of nature. Do it, Murph. A poem about wind. As ever, your windbag, Sarah.

  SHE HAS SOMETHING there, about silence, Sarah does. It can get on your nerves, seep into your skin, especially when you contrast it with sounds you are used to, as Sarah is doing now. But there’s more to it, don’t you think? There are two kinds of silence, it seems to me. One is that place where we tuck our thoughts and feelings. You can betray in silence, brood in silence, envy, pity, plot, yearn, admire, condemn, lie to yourself, lie to your conscience, forgive yourself, forgive others, all in silence. Love. You can love in silence. You usually do.

  Which leads to the second kind of silence, where you find yourself from time to time, surrounded by, engulfed in—that greater silence, to which all other silences run, when you realize that we are all part of the same poem, the same vast poem that began in the first cosmic spark and will end at the last amalgamation of the stars—a limerick, a sonnet, a fucking epic to which surrender becomes a kind of understanding. It’s as if sound, all sound, constituted an intrusion people invented because they could not stand the overwhelming power of that silence. We Cro-Magnons knocked off the Neanderthals because we could not bear their silence. That’s Murph’s theory anyway. The Neanderthals, bless ’em, had the horse sense to keep their mouths shut. Da would have approved of the Neanderthals.

  Take the silence of Jesus and Mary when they were starting out. Will you? She rocking him in that stable. So quiet. Silent night, holy night. Not a bang or a whimper. Just sitting and rocking there, in the presence of absence, serene and dazzled by the mystery in which both were involved. This silence in our ears, in our blood, that roars at our imaginations. We can’t take the din. We love the din.

  On the island, the silence began in my little bed, then seeped out under the door of my room into the kitchen, where it flung itself from wall to wall, thence to the road outside the cottage, on which it hesitated at first, then took off like a bat out of heaven, and ran to Gallagher’s field, where the men were making rope, thence to Synge’s Chair, thence to the Atlantic and America, where it beat Columbus by a hair and settled in Jamestown and Plymouth and the great New York, which gave it the star treatment for a while, until it realized it had to go west and farther west, curling round Cape Horn, and eventually sailing east again, reentering my cottage and my kitchen and my sheets.

  IN THE LAST FIELD on the left, just before the land slopes to the sea, lies silent Cait, beneath a murder of crows. They pace and strut. Their interest in death is purely edible, not standing on ceremony, but rather stomping noiselessly, looking at one another or at the rocks, perpetually in motion. What Thomas Gray would have made of this site I can only guess—the one-grave cemetery, not holy enough for a churchyard. Home tombing. They bury family dogs like that.

  The rain’s tracery on the windows distorts the picture for those inside the cottage, the scene concealed in ice crystals. Perhaps they don’t look out anymore. Perhaps they have forgotten that anything resides there with the crows and rocks, the dark gray of the earth with which Cait, by now, has merged. I do not forget. Under turgid clouds in this perpetual motion city far away, I raise Cait.

  DID YOU THINK I’d forgotten the brain scan? Okay. I won’t offend you with the old joke about the scan showing nothing, because in fact it did indicate that my wonderful brain is ebbing a bit. Some science shit about my beta-amyloid plaques, and my neurofibrillary tangles, to say nothing of my reactive gliosis. I could have told Dr. Spector all that beforehand. She showed me the image, saying that my scan revealed hippocampal atrophy. Could have told her that, too. Christ, any hippo that has been camping out in a man’s brain all these years is bound to atrophy. So what do you make of all this, doc? I ask the little cutey. Nothing yet, she says. But I can give you a blood test, something new, that can tell you if you have the e-4 gene, and are likely to develop Alzheimer’s. There’s nothing certain about it. You could have the e-4, and be okay. In any case, there are new experimental drugs to slow cognitive decline in high-risk patients. Would you want to take the blood test?

  Why do you ask? I say. Because a lot of people would not want to know, Mr. Murphy. If the results are positive, they might get withdrawn, depressed. Withdrawn? Depressed? I say. Not I, doc. If the test shows I’m not going to get Alzheimer’s, I’ll dance a jig, of course. But if it shows I have that little e-4 sucker, I’ll dance a jig, too, though I might forget I did it. Win, win, doc. That’s what I say. If you and Máire know I’m getting Alzheimer’s, you’ll treat me so much better, more sympathetically. Think of the stuff I’ll get away with. Poor Murph. He doesn’t know what he’s saying. He doesn’t know what he’s doing. Sings in the courtyard. Strangles Danny Perachik like a dog. By the time I’m caught, my guilt will be a moot point. Bring on the test, doc.

  She regards me as if I were an experimental animal myself. Hmm, she says. The same wiseacre who was intent on subverting all these procedures a few weeks ago is now gung ho to try anything. I wonder if you’re experiencing what they call a “final lucidity” that sometimes happens to people at the end of their lives. Yes. That must be it, Mr. Murphy. A final lucidity. She studies my face. Joke, Mr. Murphy. If you’re scared, I don’t blame you.

  Me? Scared? I say. Well, I didn’t want to lie to her outright. So we make a deal, the doc and I. I shall take the blood test to learn if I’m programmed to lose my mind. Fate, do your stuff. If the test proves positive, I’ll go for the experimental drugs, too. What would I have to lose? I can’t wait to call Máire, to tell her that her old man has come over to her side, and is at last taking care of himself. Oh, Dad, she says. I’m so happy. When will you take the test? What test? I ask.

  WHAT I MISS MOST, Oona, it’s curious, I know, is the first time we met. Here’s why. Because if I could have that moment back, I could savor you rather than savor me savoring you. You have no idea how lovely you looked that day, like a gesture linking intelligence, sex, and grace, all bundled in you. A look capable of understanding and forgiveness on the large scale—not forgiveness for this transgression and that, but rather for the whole race, as if you were embracing all human ecstasy and error in your smiling eyes. When Greenberg introduced us—Oona, here’s Tom Murphy. He’s a poet—your look had interest in it, so naturally, vain cockhead that I am, I thought about myself. Was she impressed at meeting an honest-to-God poet? Did she like what she saw? I wondered only how you were judging me.

  If I could get that first meeting back, I’d cut me out of the picture and focus only on you. That’s how I’d make best use of the time. I’d hear only your voice and behold only your smile and lose myself in the experience, the way Keats talks about dying into life—lose myself and dream into you, as I try to dream into life when I write. I would stop all the clocks around us, too, so that we might freeze our moment, freeze the shot the way they do in movies. The brown redness of your long hair, the firmness in your face, your shoulders, arms, would be there before me. I would lack for nothing.

  There were times over the long years when I’d catch you catch the light. Standing in the park, or in the hallway. Unaware that I was watching. And then you would see me, and you would be embarrassed by my admiration and shoo me off with a wave. If I notice a similar light these days, I picture you under it. That’s but one of the things that bring you back to me. A little girl on a trike looks like Máire. A piano playing somewhere in the building. A crash of dishes on the day you cracked your hip. Someone sings “Come Rain or Come Shine” or “True Love.” A tapping on a pipe. I hear your two-step. All connections are welcome to me, and precious. My endometrial dancer.

  But if I could have just one moment back, it would be that first meeting, which was like a wor
d one puts in a poem, a noun probably, since nouns contain the power of things. A word you search for all your life. And who shows up bearing that word but the great Greenberg? Figures. The word, the one and only word, standing in front of me, extending her hand.

  UNTITLED

  for Greenberg

  (draft)

  If at last I wandered

  Past the monody of the surf

  Into a place of pure beauty and kindness,

  What would that look like? I ask you.

  You walk ahead of me. You ought to know.

  Summer grass on fire? The screaming of a beast?

  I have been pursuing you

  To ask about all this. And now that I am near,

  You say there is nothing to report. We have wandered

  Into a place of pure beauty and kindness together,

  You say. We are unmoored, you say.

  Is that not sufficient?