Thomas Murphy

by Roger Rosenblatt

  DEAR MURPH, I’ve been involving you in a plan about light this morning. Most blind people are able to make out light from dark. I cannot. The condition is called NLP, no light perception. Been this way from birth, which means that all I know of light comes from what others tell me, or what I read. You could say, I’ve been in the dark about light. This may exaggerate the importance of light in my mind. You know? The thing one cannot attain? Not that I have a quarrel with darkness. Sometimes I’m bored with it, the way anyone might be bored with one’s hometown, from which he may never travel. But the mere suspicion of light, the mention of it, is enthralling to me. I picture sailors in a black storm at sea, suddenly spotting the beam from a lighthouse. Or the proverbial tunnel with the light at the end of it. I’ve listened to movies in which a blind person has his sight restored by an operation. The bandages are removed, and oh my! Someday, Mr. Poet, I’d like you to tell me what light is like, so that at last I might see it in my darkness. Think you could do that? As ever, Sarah.

  RIDING FAST in the darkness, past a rotted bole, I came to a rock wall. It stood no higher than three feet, an easy jump for me and the horse. We had taken jumps higher than that lots of times, higher and deeper, without hesitation. But on that tarnished-silver afternoon, with the sun in hiding and the sky turned black, the horse refused. At the approach, instead of gearing up the way horses do, it veered off to the side of the wall, and we swung away.

  Which one of us refused to take that jump, do you think? In his book, Professor Dodds uses this very situation as an example of the unconscious at work. But long before I read Dodds, I lived the riddle. Who faltered? The horse or the rider? If I say it was I who refused to take the jump, the explanation is rational. At that particular moment on that particular afternoon on the island of Inishmaan, I made a conscious judgment that whatever past experience may have told me to the contrary, we were not going to clear that wall.

  But if it was the horse that decided to veer to the side, then something wholly irrational may have been at work in that field. The animal had become the instrument of my subconscious, and for no discernible reason—no premonition of danger, nothing like that—it decided to go its own way. The horse had refused to take the wall not out of fear, but in rebellion to something hidden from us both, and never to be understood by either of us. From such impulses madmen murder, poets write, and old fools fall in love.

  GO AHEAD, he said. Plant one on me. Standing next to me at the bar in At Swim-Two-Birds is Jack, out of nowhere, with his hat in his hand, and his face a sea of gloom. Do it, Murph. I deserve it. Give me a shot to the kisser. And he juts out his big jaw. What do you want, Jack? I turn away. To apologize, he says. It’s not me you need to apologize to, boyo. I know, I know, he says. I tried to tell her how sorry I am in a voice mail, but . . . Sarah quoted it to me, I tell him. It could not have been more pathetic. Ya see? he says. Ya see? Pathetic. I don’t even know when I’m being pathetic. But it’s always the same with Sarah, Murph. I can’t tell her about important things, the things I feel, ’cause I don’t know how to relate to her. She’s better than I am. Smarter, educated. No matter what, I screw up. He sits beside me, uninvited. Why don’t you have me apologize for you? I ask. That way she’ll be sure to know it’s bullshit. How’s your colon cancer, by the way, Jack? Acting up, is it? Look, he says. I know I did the wrong thing. But I wasn’t really lying to you. I’ve never had the nerve to talk to Sarah. And Christ, I couldn’t tell her about Peggy Ann. I mutter, Peggy Ann. So I came up with this harebrained scheme involving you. All wrong, I do know that. But the reason I did it, Murph, that was the truth. I don’t have the words.

  Boyo, you may have made a career spouting this kind of horseshit, I tell him. But don’t expect me to go along, and clap you on the back. Let me be clear, Jack. I don’t accept your apology. Not because you hoodwinked me. I can handle myself. But you hurt a wonderful woman, who has it hard enough without being saddled with a lying, cheating fuck-off who thinks he can talk his way out of any jam he makes. Jesus, Jack. Look at yourself. You say you don’t have the words. Fuck, man. Words is all you have. What you lack is a sense of basic decency. He turns away.

  Give me a break, Murph? A little slack? There are two sides to every story, you know. I roll my eyes. It’s no picnic living with Sarah, he says. I mean, she’s wonderful, like you say. But she’s hard, too. There’s no give to her. And what sort of give are you looking for, Jack? Permission to butt-fuck every Peggy Ann who winks and hikes up her skirt? Now, that’s not fair, Murph, he says. You don’t know Peggy Ann. No, boyo. But I know Sarah, a little at least. And what I know is that all she asks of life is a straight shooter. She cannot see what’s going on around her. She’s vulnerable to every drunk driver, every careless kid on roller skates or a bike, every pickpocket and exuberant joker who gesticulates as he babbles along the street and bumps into her and says, Hey lady, why don’t you look where you’re going! That is what the world is like for Sarah, Jack, which you, more than anyone, ought to know. So, it isn’t too much to ask of the man who’s married to her, who has promised her his love and protection, to treat her as if she exists.

  Jesus, Murph. You sound as if you know her better than I do. I signal Jimmy for another. Let me ask you something, Jack. What sort of woman did you think you were getting in Sarah, when you married her eight years ago? You must have recognized how smart she is, how plain damn good she is. How kind, he says, I saw how kind she was, is. I guess I needed kindness. You don’t know anything about me, Murph. Actually, Sarah knows very little herself, because I’m ashamed. Ashamed of my folks who were blackout drunks, and the Quonset hut we lived in near the Navy Yard. And the screaming all the time. And the banging on the walls. And the filth that never washed off. And Mr. Porty next door, with the greasy hands, who gave me a dollar for every blow job. The only thing I could do well as a kid was swim. In the summers I escaped to Riis Park, and when I got big enough they trained me as a lifeguard. That’s how I got out of the Quonset hut. I swam out. The lifeguard board located me in East Hampton. I had enough dough for a room of my own over Starbucks, where I could smell through the floorboards the coffee I couldn’t afford. But at least I was out. And then, early one morning, there was Sarah, walking down the beach like a visiting angel. And I knew soon as I saw her, soon as she knocked me on my ass, that if I could be with a girl like that, I might be saved. And what about Sarah? I say. What did you think you were going to give to your angel? What were you going to do for her? He shrugs and looks down at the floor.

  Oh Christ. What am I here? The Grand Inquisitor? I could grill this dumb slob from here to Sunday, and nothing would come of it. Why am I bullying this jackass? I should know by now, people are not to be explained or reformed. We are what we are, what we’ll always be. I never saw a change worth warm spit in anyone past the age of three. And the truth is, Jack isn’t a bad guy. He’s a battered guy, who never received love. And I’m telling you, if you don’t receive love, if you’ve never received love as a child, you’re a goner. Half the kids I grew up with on Inishmaan were Jack—not necessarily brutalized like Jack, but treated as surplus furniture, as junk, just as their ma and da had been treated before them. In their case, it wasn’t parents who didn’t love them. It was life itself.

  A writer I know was working on a memoir that, he told me, surprised him the deeper he got into it. He had always resented the killing coldness of his parents. For all his life, he’d hated them. They should not have had children, he said. But you know, Murph? he told me at this very bar. The more I wrote about my folks, this sin and that, I realized that all they were is people, just people. Flawed, sure. Destructive, unconsciously cruel. All that. But in the end, just people. That was Jack—flawed, destructive, unconsciously cruel, yet human. As a poet, I am supposed to understand such things. As a man, it’s more difficult. In the silence between us I find myself resisting the impulse to give Jack a comforting pat on the shoulder.

  But I resist it anyway, and spin the big guy
around where he sits, and give him a knuckle sandwich, square in his right eye. He rocks back, shocked. Then he laughs. So, you forgive me, Murph?

  SHE HAS ME THINKING about blindness. I never gave it much thought before. There was a Portuguese novel I read a long time ago, called just that, Blindness—about a mass epidemic in an unnamed city. Everyone but a doctor’s wife is stricken, and she, because she has retained her sight, is mistrusted and scorned by the blinded citizens. One character stands out: a beautiful girl struck down during casual sex in a hotel room. Tough and icy at first, she is humanized by her blindness, and she takes care of an orphan boy. When she no longer is able to see, she finds that she can dream reality, and recognize the beautiful without seeing it. Perhaps that’s why I can remember her.

  Tiresias, Polyphemus, Jesus healing the blind. Milton, of course, and Homer, and Blind Lemon Jefferson and Ray Charles and George Shearing. Others. Once you’re on the subject, the names, real and fictional, roll out. Velázquez painted a blind woman with Sarah’s Madonna-like serenity, her eyes cast down in the portrait. H. G. Wells had a story called “The Country of the Blind.” A sighted man finds himself trapped in a land where no one else can see. He endures prejudice turned on its head.

  Sarah’s blindness affects the way I think about her. It lends her a kind of magnetism. I am drawn to her darkness, as if I am able to join her there in the permanently dark room of her mind. Yet her mind is not dark in the sorrowful or funereal sense. It is more like a photographer’s darkroom, in which it takes time for a picture to develop. She is willing to wait. I am, as well. She was born blind, and all she knows of the light comes from what she is told or what she reads. I find her darkness enlightening. My eyesight is improved by it.

  One blind old woman I knew on Inishmaan. She scared the shit out of me, perched in a wicker chair before her cottage, all day, every day, even in the rain. She was not frightening because of anything she did or said, but simply because she embodied aloneness. One felt alone enough on the island, without an extra kick in the pants, like blindness or deafness, or being crippled like my uncomplaining da. Sarah feels alone, too, so she says. But I think she is using the word only technically. She appears so self-contained, one feels she needs nothing she does not seek. So she seeks me. That’s interesting, because I seek her. Dancing in the dark?

  SHE HAS ME thinking about sight, too, and foresight. During a phone chat the other day, out of the blue she asks how I intend to spend the rest of my life. I think about little else, I tell her. People do tend to go on these days, she says. Ten more years for you, Murph? Twenty? Any suggestions? I ask her. I’ll think about it, she says. What do you see in my future, Madam Sarah? What do your tarot cards tell you? She puts on a sort-of-Hungarian accent. Your future, Meester Murphy? Your future? Better I see your past.

  You’ve helped me see, you know, Murph. How so? I ask. Your poems see quite well. You make the reader see. But you never have seen the things I describe in my poems, I tell her. How do you know I’m right? I want you to be wrong, she says, and you never fail me. You imagine things your way, not as they are, which allows me to imagine them based on your imaginings. You make me see best, she says, when you apply your imagination to things that are real, things I know the shape of already. When you write about them, I see them your way. You have a poem about a chameleon warming itself in the tropical sun. I’ve never seen a chameleon, so all I know is that it camouflages itself by adopting the colors of its surroundings. What I did not know—and thanks to you I now do—is that a chameleon takes R & R.

  I ask her, Do you suppose I can imagine what I’ll be doing the rest of my life? For that to happen, Meester Murphy, she says, you may need to imagine what you already know.

  ARTHUR ZEROES IN on me through the thick Plexiglas window in his cell door. His eyes burn deep in his fur. I do not know what to do. I wave meekly, hoping he’ll recognize me. Arthur! His dark lips do not move. Nothing on him moves. His doctor tells me that he has made not a sound since they brought him in. Silent in his cell, he eats dishes of berries. Sometimes he paces, says the doctor. Mainly he stares, watches. The hospital staff is waiting for a change in behavior, in effect waiting for Arthur to become human again.

  Dark, dark. His eyes blaze blackness, like black gemstones in a velvet box. Do you want to kill me, Arthur? Do you want to kill us all? There are no bears in Ireland. They vanished in the tenth century, after the Vikings killed them off for the pelts. I stand at the Plexiglas window for maybe twenty minutes. I do not budge. Neither does Arthur. He doesn’t flinch, doesn’t blink. What do we know? What do we ever know? Bear paws at his side. Bear claws showing. He has scratched himself. Bear blood.

  TO IMAGINE WHAT YOU already know. Solitary on the bay side of the island, on the flats leading to the water, were the remains of a cottage consisting of three stone walls. One was the back of the house. Two stood at each end, where the thatched roof once had lain between them. How old the place was—a hundred years, six hundred—no one seemed to know. Do you remember who lived there? I asked my da. It stood just as it is now, when I was a boy, he said. The upper portions of the side walls looked like bookends, with no books in between. They supported only themselves. A road curved off to the right of the house, and the bay lay under clouds beyond.

  Throughout my childhood, I kept waiting for the house to fall into ruin, but it did not. No one tore it down, no one rebuilt it. It belonged to no one, just standing where it always had stood, a monument to what Synge, referring to the old empty British manor houses, called the “splendid desolation of decay.” Was it incomplete? I wondered, since it had been complete at one time. I felt that you called something incomplete only if you thought it was heading, or hoping, for completeness. The house was complete in its incompleteness.

  Sometimes I’d take it in from a great distance, viewing the house as part of the whole Inishmaan landscape. Then it looked small to me, incidental. Sometimes, I’d stand inside the three walls, among the grasses and the weeds. Then the house seemed to constitute the world. Once I stood within the walls during a rainstorm, trying to hear what the family to whom the house had belonged and to which it belonged in turn, would have been speaking of, as the rain beat down on the thatch all those years ago. There’s a leak on the east side of the roof, said the ma. The pa said, I’ll see to it in the morning.

  CHRIST WAS PREACHING up a storm on St. Nicholas Avenue, when I happened by. Kids paused their game of stoop ball to laugh at him and his sermon on greed and luxury. Just you wait, he told the kids, beseeching heaven for their sins. And in a New York minute, sure enough. A storm.

  Do they who live here feel the strangeness that I feel? There is no sign of it. Inishmaan, Manhattan, the same. The people live where they live, and I as well, with them. Yet to me, a solitary fisherman, the bitter rains, the plumage of the ladies, the mad laughter of birds (etc., et al.), exist in a luminous incompleteness, like that three-walled cottage, as if I, and I alone, their distant, present cousin, had been created to perceive the whole. The glowing restaurant, the smoke-glass reservoir, the doorman in his epaulets, the family’s promiscuous maid, Arthur the Bear—who lives where I live? Hello, stranger. I am greeted by the owner of a bookstore I haven’t visited for years. Hello, stranger. She has no idea.

  And the people in my building. I’m sorry to learn they complain about me and have no affection for me, ’cause I have tons of affection for them. Botsford of the blue Vespa. The Lewises. The DeBoks, natural aristocrats, whom I see every Christmas at the local soup kitchen dishing out grub. We just nod. Says everything, a nod. Mr. Jones, a widower like me, but more dignified. Who couldn’t be? And Dr. Berman, the only Belnord resident crustier than I am, who grumbles past me in the hallways like a cement mixer. I speak his language. I grumble back. And relentless Mrs. Ginnilli, who keeps trying to collar me for her book club meetings, so that I’ll talk poetry with the ladies. We need your brains, Mr. Murphy, says the sweet thing. Oh, I’m sorry, Mrs. Ginnilli, I tell her. I’m having my
brains removed next week. All of them adorable, admirable, and to me, magical.

  Time was, I am told, there was more magic in the world than world. And the red eyes of daisies and the men who spoke reindeer were as common as rocks. Whenever you wanted something, anything, you needed to do nothing but dream. Say you wanted the morning light to be condensed into a hunting bow, or to spend Easter vacation on the far side of a mirror. You had only to say so. And presto. Magic. Bring back the dead for a dance at Roseland? For one last spin around the floor? Not a problem.

  DEAR MURPH, I wanted to tell you how I drowned my brother David. I was eight. He was two. We were with our parents on the beach in East Hampton, on a rainy Sunday. No one else was there, as far as I could tell. My folks never left David and me alone for more than a few minutes, and they would tie a little rope around his waist and around my wrist, so that I would feel it if he tugged. That afternoon, I had brought a braille copy of Little Women to the beach and I was lost in it, so I did not notice when there was no tension in the rope. Where’s David? My mother fairly screamed from up the beach. David? David! We all cried. I felt the rope that had been around his waist, slack in my hands. There was a lot of screaming of David’s name, both from my parents and from others elsewhere who had heard the screaming. I just sat where I had been, Little Women in my lap. In a few minutes I heard police and ambulance sirens. I remained sitting. My father cried, Oh God! Oh God! My mother was hysterical. I did not move. My face felt paralyzed. There! There! A man’s voice. And people running in shoes on the sand. Someone said, Again. Someone else said, Keep trying. A great silence followed, and I continued to sit and listen. Finally, I heard a terrible weeping from my parents, and their footsteps as they approached my blanket. They said not a word to me till we were home.