“What are you reading now?”
“Everything!”
Everything! That’s Olivia. Everything. Like what, I wonder. I don’t have to ask. She’s off. She’s always loved writers, even more than the books I think. They’re like personal friends to her. When she finds a book she likes she has to read everything ever written by the author. Then she’s in love: “I’m in love with Balzac, or Henry James …” Though he had the disadvantage that I introduced him to her. She likes to discover her own passions.
“Victor Hugo, Balzac, still mad about him. Ionesco, he writes mad plays. I understand them. Now.”
Oh God.
“Ibsen, Strindberg. Everything.”
“Good,” I whisper. But a whisper is better than silence. I suppose.
“Good? It’s better than good. I know everything. I know the whole world through reading and I know everything about a small town: I know about convents, I know about doctors, death, mothers.”
What can I say to her? I shake my head. And I look away from her.
“I know that mothers need protection.”
Poor Olivia. I’m so sorry. I’ve let you down terribly. Maybe eventually, Olivia, all mothers let their children down. Or maybe mothers get careless. Will I remember this? Will this be taken from me? “Short-term memory,” he said. To me, who never did a thing with only the short-term in mind? Will this defeat be taken from me? This defeat, by this child who when she was born was the triumph of my life? This child who first allowed me to say “I am a mother.” Who allowed me to understand the special meaning of “Mary, the Mother of God,” that first of all she was a mother. Was this what my mother’s hands to her face meant when I told her that I would marry Tom? But what else had she hoped for than that I would marry the love of my life and have children? Have I forgotten? Did I not wish to remember? Because it didn’t suit me? Ah my darling Olivia, what will you remember of this terrible time? Through times to come. Decades to come? The seventies? I suppose they’ll come and they’ll go. And then there’ll be the eighties? The nineties? 2000? What a thought! Oh I’ll be gone by then. Well gone. If I get through this time I’ll be gone in time to come. And then? What then? After I’m gone? Long after I am gone, who will I be to you, Olivia? When I drift up and down the colonnades of your mind? This woman, this mother, as she is now? This now-mother? Will she cancel everything that was the beauty of me and you? Who will I be? Drifting in and out of your life and dreams, child? Trailing what, child? Trailing what? Trailing love, child? My love, child … Oh trailing love … Or trailing what?
TEN
… and from the day my mother walked back into our house she seemed to be her old self again. The old self we’d all loved. She’d slipped behind the event and gone back to who she was before. Or so it seemed to us. Perhaps a brain scan could follow the trail, trace the indentation or the scars as the tissue of memory had been burned out of her. I’ve learned a few things about ECT since then. The majority of patients evidently respond well. Now that’s a shock, to play with the word. Yes, perhaps neuroscience could ascertain the truth. But she is dead now. So I will never know. Besides, why should I prove one way or another who or what worked the miracle? She came back to herself. To her old self. That’s all. That’s everything.
And she said little that first day she returned to us. To me, shamefully full of shame still, to my father, full of longing, a man waiting to be plugged back into life, and to Daragh, who seemed to have painted blank-white over everything and who smiled straight at us, when what we wanted was just the hint of a shadow playing within the brilliant light of that famous Daragh smile. Some hint of a shadow, which would assure us that he understood.
She wore pale blue the day she came back. The black was gone. She’d put it away or left it behind her I suppose, with the rest of what she’d left behind her, like slipping out of a habit, black serge on the floor. Yes. She was into the blue again. He’d bought her a new pale blue twinset. “I’ll help you Dada,” I’d said when he’d set out for Miss Coyle’s drapery shop with a determined look on his face. “No. No, child. I’d like her to know her normally colour-blind husband did it himself. Besides, if I’m confused as to the shade I’ll remember her eyes. I was never colour-blind to those eyes. Was I ever blind to those eyes?” “No, Dada,” I’d nodded. And that day, the day she came back, the expression in those high-blue eyes of hers seemed to me to be the same as of old. Honestly! Though I suppose were I to lie, how would you know?
We were aware that day, the day she came back, that she would have to walk around the house. Sooner or later. And better to start right away, on that first day. The house needed to be possessed again. Perhaps it needed to know we could, and would, go on. It wasn’t a large house, the walkabout would not take long. Still, we all knew it was a momentous journey and fraught with many perils. And when she arrived at his room! Our hearts! The beat of them! And we waited, afraid to move or to say anything. I watched her hands. Was there a tremor of hesitation before she opened the door? Then her face. I looked at her face, which demanded from me more courage than I’d imagined.
I was willing her to soldier on. And she did. She was leading us, I suppose. Her gaze, it seemed to me, was steady. But she did not test her strength too hard, which was a kindness to us. She bowed her head for a second and moved on to my room, which was all neat and tidy. I’d made preparations for a visitor. That’s a way of looking at it. Who knows? Who knows anything? After her tour she sat down in her chair in the kitchen. And there was the hint of a smile. Honestly.
“My God Tom! The house looks spotless. Are you trying to put me out of a job?”
The relief! They say it floods over you, and as a description there’s not much wrong with it. But it doesn’t quite get that stomach thing, the way relief makes the muscles untwist and you start to breathe calmly.
“Well we worked all night. Didn’t we, children?”
And we, the chorus, smaller now, answered together.
“Yes we did, Dada.”
And she, in that awful gentleness of hers, smiled again. Yes. It was quite clearly a smile.
“And you on your Easter holidays. Thank you, Daragh. Thank you, Olivia.”
And we told her she looked grand.
“You look grand. Really grand, Mama.”
“Well you haven’t seen me for a while; not really, not the old me.”
Yes. She actually said that. The phrase rings clearer now that I haven’t seen her in years and would give … What? Almost anything to see her again. Well, up to the point of sacrificing those I love now who are alive, here, with me. Selfish, you see, still, to the last. Anyway, back to that day …
“I went on a journey,” she said, “and they thought it best if I went alone. Though I was grateful for your visit, after the incident in the hospital. You remember, Olivia?”
“Yes, Mama. I remember.”
“I hope, in time, you’ll forget,” she said.
But I never have.
“I thought you were in the hospital all the time. So where else did you go, Mama?” asked Daragh, with that weird innocence of his. It was as good a shield as anything else, his innocence. It went straight to the point and then straight past it. It’s the way he got through, I suppose.
“Ah nowhere you’d want to follow me,” and she bowed her head at that.
“Do you know, Dada?” asked Daragh.
And on he went, Daragh, with a look on his face that implied he was trying to help the conversation by giving it a little push. And my father, knowing everything, knew when to exclude him.
“I do Daragh. But that’s between us.”
And she did her bit. She knew the moment was dangerous and that something, a few words at least, were required of her.
“Daragh, you can go back to playing your music. Now that I’m home.”
Oh his face! The light!
“Are you sure, Mama?”
And my father, in the glow of Daragh’s smile, said, “He can beam, that b
oy, can’t he Sissy?”
And they were right. He could beam in and out of smiles, and down airwaves—after he left. And he rang us often, after he left. In the beginning.
“Are you sure Mama?” he asked again.
“Of course I am, Daragh.”
“Ah that’s great. That’s great.”
“Let me make you some tea Mama.”
“Thank you, darling.”
“Look Sissy! It’s snowing. Come to the window.”
And at that we trembled. The window! And all it looked out on. And all it looked back on. Maybe, through snow? Softer? Maybe through snow.
“Let me see! Ah! Ah Tom! The snow! And oh … oh …”
And oh God how I shook inside. Please hold on, I begged her silently, please hold on.
And she did.
“And Tom, you got the gate! You never told me,” she said.
As though we were talking about just a gate! And I thought, she’s done it! She’s through!
“I wanted to surprise you Sissy. Something new for you, for your coming-home day. Not that it’s new, of course.”
“No. Who’d make a gate like that now? So the German gave it to you after all?”
“He did. And sent Tim down to help. And Bogus came over and even Jim Brannigan helped, and Father Dwyer said he’d bless it for us whenever we want.”
“It looks great. It makes the place, that place, well… it’s such an important gate. You’d think you were going into a huge garden, all laid out. And for him. It’s … ah now, now … I’ll have that tea now Olivia. Sorry. I’m doing all right now. Don’t worry, just a little moment. Memory, you know. Just for a minute. Gone now. All gone now.”
ELEVEN
I remember that “all gone now.” And it seemed to be true. Her old self seemed to be back with us, and since the old self had been so very loved by us we wanted it back. Very much. It was what we’d prayed for, even me, and done novenas for, had gone to Mass for. And our prayers were answered and peace came back into our house. And she walked anywhere and everywhere, into all the rooms, including his, and they went for their walks, the Start-rite kids, holding hands, talking, always talking. Though of one thing they never talked, at least not to Daragh and me. Over time our questions grew as the more we learned about her treatment, little snippets here and there, the more we wondered, had it worked? Or was she just being good to us? As she’d always been, good to us. But apart from that story they seemed to talk of everything and seemed to understand everything and to accept everything and to absolve everyone, delighting even in their little foibles: in Bogus Brogan, in what she called the sweetness of his vanity; in May Garvey, whose previous harsh brilliance with words had made each one sound angular somehow and who now fashioned her conversation into a single poem, a lyric of triumphant motherhood, unable to rustle up any of her old witticisms and criticisms of our national obsession with history or of Yeats’s dream-world, now that she was in her own and had mastered its new language, in which every sentence would contain the words “my son,” in a voice that my mother said would almost “sparkle out of her” when she spoke of “my son, Phil,” named after her husband because “you can never have too many Phil Garveys in the world.” May told my mother she’d once thought of naming him “after the lad” but thought it best not to. And my mother agreed. I too thought it a wise decision. When they talked of the Brannigans and of what it was had happened to Jim Brannigan, they looked for ways to understand. They were certain it had happened young to him, happened early and that it had grown some thing in him, something gnarled that had made him so fierce with fear and hatred of his boys that he’d dangled them out the window to terrify them. Someone hadn’t loved him enough and, maybe more than that, some weakness in him, some blindness, had made him not see where love lay. For it lay close to him, in his own adult home with Marjorie the magnificent, with her tumbling brown-haired beauty and her long, long legs, “an occasion of sinful thoughts to many” as Bogus used to say, with a wink even a nun would not object to. And they talked of Eamonn and the love of his life, which was mechanical, for he worshipped the cold and gleaming perfection of the bishop’s Mercedes. They laughed at Eamonn’s foot-on-the-accelerator driving: “the closest he would ever come to power in his life,” my father said. They noted the bishop’s great affection for Eamonn and they spoke in awe of the bishop’s daily demonstration, as he sat serenely in the back of the car, of his absolute faith in the goodness of God. And Daragh and I would hug these bits of wisdom, half-overheard, during the four years we stayed, after the event, to be with them, to listen to them and to witness the miracle. And though we would forget many seemingly important things that were taught us in the long school of life we didn’t forget those lessons in the years that were waiting for us. Which were—and this is natural—more numerous than theirs.
TWELVE
And in those years I left Ireland. It was late in a decade that was beating a wild-rhythm celebration by boy-men called Mick and Paul and John who were rolling all over us. Though not over me. Nor over many who remained in the place I’d left, who certainly heard the music but missed the message. And would get it later, much later. When boys called Bob and Bono would bring their own wild-rhythm celebration and the world would fall down in worshipful hallelujahs as it again acknowledged Ireland’s capacity to create missionaries. So what if they were “the boys in the band”? They sang from a pulpit, an enormous pulpit looking down on a congregation that would knock your eyes out. A city that had produced Joyce and Beckett and Yeats, a country that produced poet-heroes and more priests and nuns per head of population than almost any on earth was not going to spawn boys who just wanted to stand before a packed hall of gyrating teenagers and strum their guitars and sing. They had to have a message. One of salvation; they were in it to save the world. Like I said, we’re teachers, missionaries.
I left when I thought my time at home with my parents was finished. When I was certain that they no longer needed me. And I bumped into a life. Many people do. I worked in theatre. That phrase alone tells you I had no vocation for it. I stumbled into acting. It happens. Rarely. It suited me. The disciplined dreaming, the timed surrender to the putting-away of self. At which I became adept. A double life, one that required a daily performance, the same part. They “got me,” as they say. I was Irish, very Irish. “Enough said,” as we say—in Ireland. I believe I gave a performance that was true to life and its expected truth, which they believed they discerned just in the sound of my voice. People hate surprises, particularly sound surprises. And the living life of the imagined world, my remembered world and its people and their voices, that went on of course, through the hours of the days of performance as they beat their way steadily down to “Five minutes to curtain, Miss O’Hara.” Miss O’Hara, who made a bit of a name; reliable third lead, I suppose you could call it. “She brings her usual precise intelligence to the small but nevertheless important part of…” I had one or two triumphs. Everyone does. Everyone gets something to hold on to. Ivanov was mine, the part of Anna, the dying wife, watching her husband’s future with Sasha unfold before her fading eyes. What an image to take to the grave. Ivanov followed her quickly enough—though not for love. Savage play for a twenty -seven-year-old to write. But then some lessons are learned early.
I was better than good as Anna but that’s all. Which is not enough for many, but it was for me. I was offered a season at the National and a film. To which I said no, to my own amazement, never mind anyone else’s. I’d decided I was happy where I was. Third lead, some decent TV, the classics, Dickens, always reliable, radio, talking books, some teaching, then more teaching. All the while I was looking for some thing. I found it. But that’s another story. The film role made the name of the girl who played it, “big time,” as they say. As though time could ever be increased or cut down to size. But I’m a careful person when on life’s surface, the surface that for many gives some recognisable shape to the experience. Only a fool plays with fame, as fame i
s played now, a lethal game of mathematics in which body and soul are weighted with the essential audience that hangs like an albatross around both. The goal, when you score it, ensures that you will be known by more people than you know, since the people you know are clearly not satisfying enough. Fame is toxic to those who dare not test the thinness of the ice. The weight could bring them down. Warriors, in the ancient world, put their souls away for safe keeping during times of danger. I’d put mine away and didn’t want strangers to search for it. I might lose it. I’d watched those who’d thrown their souls in front of strangers and their bemusement when it was handed back to them, marked and scratched. Sometimes they didn’t even get it back. Well, they’d been careless. Some of them wept, of course. But it was too late. It’s murderously difficult to get your soul back, in any condition, once you’ve let it slip away from you. There’s no search party willing to go out in all weathers to find your lost soul. So I was careful, or maybe I just lacked the courage.
Over the years I laid a structure on what I believed were shaky foundations, and lived long enough to reverse that assessment. But, like I said, that’s another story. If you’ve got time. Someday, not today. But the note in my voice will be different when I tell it. In voce veritas. It’s a lovely story, a kind of miracle. But it’s not for now. On this story, the one I’m telling you, shadows fall on the landscape of my heart and they have no fault lines. Shadows never do and as they slip away, as shadows do, a mist descends so thick it almost chokes me, like drifting smoke from embers, and I find it hard to breathe so the rhythms of my voice become different. Slower. Heavier. The words are weighted. They could carry me down. Down through dark waters. But I resist their cur rent. I’m a long-distance swimmer. We keep on to the shore. Our stroke beats constant on the water. One-two-three, one-two-three, one-two-three. Yes. I am built for the long haul, for seeing things through to the end. So I swim on, often exhausted, above the deep dark, through the rivers of unending silence broken only by the steady breathing in and out of my incantation, one-two-three, one-two-three, one-two-three. I owe them that. I owe my parents that at least. The memory of their battle was an order from on high. Do not fail us. Do not fail life. These orders, which in time resonated from their graves, are, I believe now, the very soul of action. Sometimes, of course, out of reverence for the dead, we ignore the fact that the voices of the dead do not always command us to life and its living, as theirs had. No, sometimes the dead whisper-shout other commands.
The Truth About Love Page 11