by Colum McCann
There was a loud banging on the door and Manyaki burst into the room. I spluttered up naked from the water. My body, obedient to the ongoing forces of gravity. He shuffled backwards, embarrassed beyond himself, out of the bathroom.
“I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” he called from the corridor, “I’ve just been knocking. I thought you were maybe sick, or something.”
The water was freezing. I must have been lying there for quite a while. I ran the hot water and climbed back in. Aoibheann came up moments later with a cup of tea for me. “I gave your husband quite an eyeful, I’m afraid.”
She threw her head back and laughed: no derision.
“He might need therapy,” I said.
“Oh, we know all about therapy in this house.”
There was something pure and familiar about her. A device, perhaps, to help her shuck her father’s notoriety. She fanned the hot water upwards with her hands to warm me, dropped a couple more soft bath beads in without ever looking at my body.
“I’ll leave you be,” she said.
“No, that’s all right. You can stay.”
“Oh,” she said.
“Quite frankly I’d like the company. I really don’t want to fall asleep again.”
She dragged up a chair and sat in the middle of the floor, a strange privacy between us. I noticed for the first time that her left eye was just slightly lazy and it gave her the look of a woman who had overcome some distant sadness.
There was a frosted window in the bathroom and she looked towards it as she spoke. An outdoor lamp brightened the dark. She had met Manyaki, she said, at university in London. She had been studying fashion design, he was in the English department. He had come to one of her shows with a girlfriend of his—one of many, she said, he was never short in the girlfriend department—and had stood in front of her thesis project, a line of high-fashion skirts and blouses supposedly inspired by tribal nomads.
“He snorted at it,” she said. “Right there in the gallery. Just straight out snorted. I was mortified.” Aoibheann reached for the hot-water tap again, fanned a little more water down by my feet. “I hated him.” She laughed a little, gathering the folds of her humiliation.
She saw him years later at a publishing party in Soho where he’d written an essay called “The Politics of the African Novel.” She tried to ridicule the article while he was in earshot, but the problem was that the article was pure irony, head to toe, he had designed it that way.
“There I was, lambasting him, and guess what. He started laughing again. A real smartarse.”
She knuckled the moisture out of her lazy eye.
“So I told him what lake to jump in. I won’t tell you how he replied. I hated myself for it, but I was fascinated by him. So the next week I sent him a Bedouin robe, along with a barbed letter saying how he had embarrassed me, that he was an obnoxious arsehole, a git of the highest order, and I hoped he would rot in hell. He wrote a four-page letter back about my pretentious fashion instinct, and how it might be an idea to learn a culture before I slapped it on a million asses.”
I shifted a little in the bath, the water growing cold again.
“It’s hardly a love story, but we’re married eight years now, and he still wears that robe as a dressing gown. Just to get a rise out of me.”
We sat a moment in silence. It seemed to me that it was possibly the weight of her family she carried. I had heard that her father had once been arrested, or at least questioned, for some financial irregularities just after the boom years. It was hardly any of my business, and I avoided the temptation. I moved to get out of the bath.
“I’m glad you came to visit,” she said. “We keep to ourselves a lot these days.”
I put my elbow on the rim, and she guided her arm in underneath me, helped me out. I kept my back to her. There’s only so much embarrassment we can bear. She took a heated towel from the hot-water press, and put it around my shoulders. She gripped my shoulders from behind.
“We’ll get you a good night’s sleep, Hannah,” she said.
“Am I that bad?”
“I have half a sleeping pill if you want one.”
“I’d rather a brandy to be honest.”
When I came downstairs she had made a hot brandy with cloves in a beautiful crystal glass. The conspiracy of women. We are in it together, make no mistake.
I STAYED FOUR more days. Aoibheann washed my clothes and nursed me back to some semblance of rest. I missed my cottage, but the sea kept me company. I walked along the pier with Georgie. There could always be one last emigrant in my family. A friend of mine once wisely said that suicide only suits the young. I counseled myself to stop sulking and simply enjoy my time there.
On the last day of my visit, I rose from the bed and went down to the small garden at the back of the house. I sat on a deckchair, made patterns out of the wisteria. I heard the door handle turn behind me. A quiet cough. Manyaki was barefoot, still in his pajamas. He wore wire-rimmed glasses. His dreadlocks were askew.
He dragged up a flowerpot, turned it upside down, sat beside me. I could tell immediately from the hunch of his shoulders. The collector had emailed him back about the letter, he said. He rubbed the white of his feet along the stone. “He’s interested,” he said, “but only willing to pay a thousand dollars.” I shifted a little in the deckchair. I had known, but did not want to be told. I had to feign a quick happiness: rosin on the bow seconds after the violin has been smashed.
Manyaki cracked his fingers together. He thought perhaps the collector might go as high as two or three thousand, but I would have to give him proof that the letter related to Douglass. There was none that I knew of, short of opening the letter and reading it, which was just as likely to make it worthless.
“I’ll consider it,” I said, but we knew full well that it wouldn’t happen. I would rather just let the letter go. It was hardly worth a drop in the ocean now.
Manyaki drummed his fingers a moment on the base of the flowerpot. He reached across and petted Georgie on the neck.
“Sorry,” he said.
“There’s nothing for you to feel sorry about.”
The light fell slant in the back garden: it was a beautiful bright day. Aoibheann and Manyaki accompanied me out to the road where we said our good-byes. She had packed me a little brown bag of sandwiches and a yogurt, along with some biscuits. Days of school lunches. They smiled politely. I pulled out into the road and made my way along the coast. A long drive home.
Obama was, by all accounts, arriving at Baldonnel Airport that very day. Hurrah for Ireland. The sky would keep me company all the way home.
THE DARKNESS DROPPED from the bent limbs of the trees. The lough was perfectly calm. I pushed open the door and smushed the waiting envelopes up against the wall. The cottage was freezing. I had forgotten to bring in any wood. I lit a tilley lamp and put it on the mantelpiece.
I had expected an immense relief at coming home, but the house pushed a sharp cold into my bones. Georgie nudged up beside me. There was a little bit of kindling and a few peat briquettes. I lit a fire starter and shoved the bills in with them.
I searched out the wetsuit. A faint smell of mold off it. I warmed it up by the fire. Georgie watched me, her head on her paws. She seemed to own a strong reluctance, but she came down through the grass and stood at the edge of the wall while I waded into the water. A quiet night. Three stars and a moon and a lone plane traveling the high dark. The wind came off the water as if looking for company, the living and the dead passing into each other. The breeze rattled the large windows and then curled around the gable end, settled down.
DAVID MANYAKI CALLED in the morning to say that I had left the letter behind. I knew perfectly well. I had left it square on the bedside table, placed a glass paperweight upon it.
Lord knows, you can’t grow this old without looking for others to shoulder our burdens. I told him he could open it. Excuse me? he said. You can open it, David. He called my bluff almost immediately. The ro
om grew small, the ceiling close. I was breathing through muslin. He had short, stubby hands, I remembered that. The tops of his fingernails were very white. His cuticles were chewed. He asked me again if I was sure, and I said yes of course. I thought I heard the envelope tear but there was the archival plastic surely. He was opening that. I tried to recall what the bedroom looked like. His house. The children’s curtains on the windows. An eiderdown with a shellfish motif. He must have had the phone cradled at his ear. He eased the letter out of the plastic. His voice grew faint. He had put me on speaker. The phone must have been lying on the bed. Holding the letter in his right hand, slowly easing under the flap with his left. I was in my kitchen looking out to the lough. The weather was perfectly banal. A low roll of gray. What might happen if it tore altogether? How dare he. There was a silence on the other end of the line. He couldn’t do it. He would send it express post. The sky lightened out the window. No, I said, just read it to me please, for godsake. The hollow sound of the phone moving. The ceiling dipped. The letter was open now, would I like now for him to unfold the paper? A bolt of blood to my temple. An attempt at nonchalance. Is the envelope torn? No, he said, it was open, but not torn. A gray carpet on the floor. Children’s clothes hanging in the cupboard. A tree outside his window, the branch touching against the frame. He unfolded the paper. The little café in Dublin where the small crumb had fallen from the plastic. Two pages, he said. It was written on headed notepaper from the Cochrane Hotel. Blue paper with a silver embossing at the top. They were small pages, folded over in half. The handwriting was faded but legible. Fountain ink. He took the phone off speaker. The branch maybe touched against the window. It’s dated, he said. Exactly what I had expected. June 1919. Emily Ehrlich. I am sending this letter in the hope that it will make it into your hands. My mother, Lily Duggan, always remembered a kindness shown to her by Miss Isabel Jennings. The sharp cut of his African accent. Slowly he read. Blue paper. The marks around his cuticles. It is just as likely that this will be lost at sea, but if they make it, perhaps you will receive this from two men who have knocked the war from a plane. They ditched in Clifden. Caught in the hard roots. The living sedge. They had carried the letter across the Irish Sea. We seldom know what echo our actions will find, but our stories will most certainly outlast us. The foghorns along the pier. The traffic sounding outside his window. The stone tower on the waterfront. This, then, is just a simple acknowledgment. Emily Ehrlich’s blouse splattered with ink. Tapping the edge of the inkpot with the nib of the pen. My mother, Lottie, standing over her shoulder, watching. Out the window, a shape against the sky. I send it with deepest thanks. The grass bent backwards. My son walked in the back door. The world does not turn without moments of grace. Who cares how small. A heavy dew soaked his trouser cuffs. I asked him then to read it to me again. Hold on a moment, Manyaki said. I heard the crackle of paper. It was short enough to commit to memory.
I PUT THE cottage up for auction in the early summer of 2011. The furniture was shifted, the paintings taken down from the wall. The air buzzed with lawn mowers. The green grass ran swiftly down to the lough. The window frames and doors were painted. A fresh air moved through the house. The hinges on the half-doors were oiled. The Aga stove was scrubbed. The cushions in the sunroom were patched and the Admiralty charts dusted off.
The past got up and shook itself loose. I stacked my possessions in cardboard boxes and put them in the shed out the back. A cupboard full of vintage dresses. Wooden tennis racquets and presses. Yards of fishing rods and reels. Old boxes of bullets. Useless things.
Jack Craddogh and his wife, Paula, drove out from Belfast to help me pack. I think she wanted to peer into the last of my possessions. I held up an old pair of jodhpurs and wondered how they had ever fit. Jack folded the last of my husband’s clothes into a series of cardboard boxes. They were interested in my mother’s final drawings. At the end she used oils like watercolor, making the paint appear raw, layering it with radiating currents of color. She had a way of distorting or elongating figures: a sort of hunger.
Jack and Paula offered me a small amount for the sketches. They were really after the frames. I didn’t want the money. It was not needed anymore. The bank had extended my overdraft. I took my favorite ones, gave them the rest. They loaded the paintings up in the rear of their car: birds in flight.
Simon, the bank manager, moped around, hangdog with guilt. He walked from room to room, calculating a price that would eventually be his. A peculiar species of real-estate broker came with him in lipstick and a pencil-thin skirt. She had a southern accent. I told her that if she used the word heritage in my presence one more time I’d peck her liver out. Poor thing, she began trembling in her high heels. She was, she said, only doing her job. Fair enough, I said. I showed her where the teakettle sat. She ghosted through the cottage, avoiding me.
Whenever a buyer came, it always seemed that it was never to buy, but to probe the ache. I took to walking Georgie around the island. She kept close at my heels as if she, too, knew that she might have to remember some day soon. An island with edges. It was not so much the memories that tied me to the place, as how it might look years from now. The trees were stubborn against the wind, their branches twisted inland.
I sat on the shoreside rocks. Georgie lowered herself in a heap. I was hardly guiltless in all of this. There was once so much I could have done. Ever since my son was murdered—I had finally learned how to say it—I’d allowed things to dissolve. All of it of my own making. Reckless. Sunken. Fearful.
My visitors wanted to talk to me, investigate their own desire, but they reeked of insincerity, and I couldn’t bring myself to be anything but an ancient curmudgeon. I swished the blackthorn stick through the long grass and shuffled along. When the visitors left, I went back inside and finished off whatever packing needed to be done.
THREE DAYS BEFORE the auction there was a knock on the windowpane. Georgie rose and loped, animated, to the front.
I opened the half-door tentatively. Aoibheann thrust out a bottle of fine French brandy in my direction. David Manyaki was in the car, his face obscured in shadow, the windscreen shaded by the angle of light. I had just about forgotten. He had promised that he would bring the letter intact. He was rummaging in the back, unloosening his sons from their car seats.
“We’ll just air them out a little bit if you don’t mind,” said Aoibheann, but the children were already running around. “We tried calling you. Hope it’s no bother. David’s on his way to Belfast for a conference tomorrow.”
“It’s a bit Mother Hubbard, I’m afraid.”
We made our way through the empty house. Aoibheann wore a long sundress, Manyaki was in one of his bright dashikis. They moved slowly, taking stock of the emptiness. Evidence everywhere. The walls were less faded where the pictures had been. Nail holes in the plaster. Marks of furniture on the floor. A wind came down the chimney and turned the ashes.
They went through the living room, past the fireplace, beyond the kitchen. They were careful enough with their silence. Manyaki put the letter down on the table. I unfolded the envelope and examined the handwriting. It was rather ragged. What mystery we lose when we figure things out, but perhaps there’s a mystery in the obvious, too. Nothing but a simple note. I closed it again and thanked him. It was entirely mine, I would keep it now: no university, no philatelist, no need for archives.
We sat in the sunroom where we could watch the boys run around the garden. I made a lunch of tinned tomato soup and soda bread.
A couple of jet skis hummed their savage insectry across the water. Manyaki rattled my tired heart when he stood politely from the chair and went down to the waterfront and waded in the shallows with his boys, shooed the jet skis away with a shout and a wave of his hands. His short dreadlocks bounced about his jaw. He and the boys walked together along the seawall, dipped out of sight, then came up the garden with three oysters. He shucked them with a screwdriver, and placed them in the fridge in a small tray of seawater. An ho
ur later—he had to drive to the village to get milk for his boys, he said—he prepared them in the pan. White wine and chopped garlic and rosemary.
I asked them to stay the night. Manyaki and his sons dragged the old mattresses out from the barn. Small puffs of dust rose when they hit the floor. We fluffed the pillows and put fresh sheets on the beds. I got predictably teary-eyed. Aoibheann poured a little ledge of brandy into my glass, kept me from dropping off the cliff.
Just after dinner the older of Manyaki’s sons, Oisin, stamped his little feet and said he wanted to feed the gulls. We had half a loaf of bread left. He took my hand and, along with his young brother, Conor, we scattered it up and down the lawn. A little beyond dusk we looked out the window to a herd of red-tail deer stepping high-legged through the gravel. Oisin and Conor sat at the window with their hands against the cold glass, watching. I didn’t have the courage to say anything about how the deer would trample the last of my garden, and I held Conor by the window, until he fell asleep, all five years of him in my arms, and I walked out to shoo the deer away.
I stood in the yard, in the near-dark, listening. The sky was a long scene of silhouettes. The nearest trees seemed blue. The moon appeared, shallow and brittle over the lough. Water lapped up against the shore. The dark descended fully.
When I got back inside, Aoibheann was changing the boys into their pajamas. They bawled a little, then quieted down. She sat at the foot of the makeshift bed and read them a story from her mobile phone.
Once upon a time, she began. I stood at the door and listened. There isn’t a story in the world that isn’t in part, at least, addressed to the past.