Ghost Light

by Joseph O'Connor

  So let’s see. Them’s your characters. And what happens next? Where are we going, Molly? Something needs to happen. And if only the pretty nurse would come in with the injection. Jesus, my soul for a drink. Well, they board the long train, Moody hefting the luggage – and she coming and going, going and coming – and seeing Madame into the First Class compartment, if you don’t mind, where cooled white towels have been provided in stacks, and the arms of the purple, calfskin seats all edged with the trims of grubby lace.

  ‘New York City,’ calls the neat conductor. (Did any of this happen, Molly? Aren’t the dates incorrect? Sure it’s only a story. What matter?) Let’s call him a tall, grey man, nice and spruce in his bearing, like a steward on one of them liners, the Cunard or something, and the pleats of his sky-blue uniform pants pressed so sharp they’d cut you if you mocked him. His hair white and short, in these soft snowy curls, and the buttons on his coat glittered so golden with the polish you’d swear they was the eyes of the saints themselves and he whistling Thomas Moore through his beautiful white teeth it would be a pleasure and a privilege to be bitten by.

  Believe me if all those endearing young charms

  Which I gaze on so fondly today …

  Well, into the compartment slowly, with a proprietor’s air, or maybe like the curator of some queer auld museum nobody’d be bothered to visit any more. And he switching on the reading lamp with this bamboozled expression, as though he’s not sure how it got there or what exactly it does. Then he turning to Madame and Moody with this forbidding auld face that seems at odds with the hospitality of his words.

  ‘You ladies are welcome this morning. You got everything you want?’

  ‘What is your name, my handsome fellow?’ Miss O’Neill asks abruptly.

  ‘Virgil, ma’am.’

  ‘Thank you, goodly Virgil, you are a stout-heart and a hero. Now fetch me a fearsome Bloody Mary and see that I am otherwise undisturbed. Oh, and Moody will take a cordial of some innocuous description, devoid of the spirituous essences. She becomes violent when drunk. There have been unfortunate incidents.’

  ‘I ain’t allowed sell you no liquor, Miss. Not till we’re running. That’s law in the state of California.’

  ‘Permit me, if you will, to clarify one matter for you, Virgil. I do not give two living damns for the state of California. A Bloody Mary this very minute and don’t stint with the electric juice or I will know. Be off with you to the bar. Run along.’

  The conductor eyes Moody, but Moody looks away and she busying herself unpacking a valise. Madame’s fraying nightclothes and other nocturnal requirements she begins arranging on the berth-side table. The conductor, as though not wishing to observe such a dispersal (he was married one time and once was enough) turns heel and quickly leaves the uncomfortably hot compartment, sliding closed the heavy door behind him. Moody continues at her duties, working quietly, methodically. She is accustomed to making the best of intimate spaces; indeed her dependant often says it is her only talent. Outside on the track a beggar boy knocks on the window, a mask of pitiable hopefulness on his doleful face. Moody, without a word, draws the shade on the daylight and his thankfully muffled blasphemies.

  ‘I suppose my sister has managed to board without being engulfed by her admirers?’

  Moody says nothing. It is taken as affirmation.

  ‘What a relief that the Police Department did not have to hose back the throng. Or beat them down with truncheons, as usual.’

  ‘Take your medicine this morning?’

  ‘Balls to my medicine.’

  ‘Ain’t gonna funnel it down you. You know what the doctor say. Seem to me like you need it but if you wants to be ornery, you fire on ahead and die.’

  ‘You’d like that.’

  ‘Yes, I would.’

  ‘You are the devil’s very handmaid.’

  ‘Been times I get to thinking that’s true.’

  ‘Leave me,’ commands Madame. ‘I wish to rest up.’

  ‘Where in the Hell would you like me to go?’

  ‘Sit down, then. You’re rocking the boat.’

  And as the train jolts away – goodbye, San Francisco – Old Moody is reading Leviticus. You close and rub your eyes but your eyeballs creak. Like a rusty old gate in Mount Jerome. And you raise the crinkled blind to a scene of almost miraculous tedium. The wet brown wheat-fields extend to the horizon, only here and there a barn and after a while, near a town, an enormous black water-tank on stilts. DUBLIN OHIO painted on the cistern. Three farmhands gaping up at it, and they scratching their heads, as though it has only recently landed there and they don’t know what to do, or it sprouted like a gargantuan mushroom. One of them swivels towards the train as it decelerates and passes and you notice he has a rifle in his hands.

  You give a pull on the bell-cord but the conductor doesn’t come and you begin to feel anxious, full of darkness. A halfempty tumbler of vodka on the table. It wants ice but you drink it down anyway. The conductor appears in the corridor, rocking fluently on his heels. Virgil, his name. Strange scenes out the window. The stillness of the back lanes around Mary Street, the market. A cartwheel on the wall of a blacksmith’s forge. And walking now. On the Lower East Side. Onward, through the cacophony of Orchard Street New York, past pedlars and stallholders, through clusters of hawkers, past the windows of Schubert’s butcher shop, past the little German beer hall where carters are unloading clanking crates. And the pictures do be blurring like the spokes of a wheel. Where is the nurse? I am thirsty.

  Embrittled, scooped-out, you walk as in a dream. Your eyes are weary. You are burning. Strange languages swirl around you like flutters of streamers: tongues of Saxony, Bavaria, Piedmont, Prussia; faraway places and wandering peoples. The smells of strange food. Spices you cannot name. From the embrasure of a window comes the sound of rabbinical singing, for a boy who loves Jehovah lives in that room. And there, on the corner of Stanton and Essex, stands the little Florentine pedlar, with his ribbons and combs. This city with its hundreds of thousands of immigrants, its parlances, its musics, its impenetrable slangs, its countless deities, its ghettos and rookeries, has nothing to say to your grief. A black woman is selling strawberries: people say she was once a slave. Everyone in this neighbourhood has a story behind them. So does Miss Maire O’Neill.

  Every second Tuesday morning, quietly as a rumour, she leaves the small apartment, which is on 8th Street and First, and hobbles over to Christopher Street, to the premises of her doctor, whom she calls ‘my alchemist’ or ‘Ludwig’. His name is not Ludwig, nor is he even German, but she has convinced herself, wrongly, that he looks like Beethoven. She is the kind of woman who persists in the face of hard evidence. It has caused her much grief, this trait.

  Quarter after nine. Correct your watch by her, gents! The bell of St Mark’s-in-the-Bowery gives its single leaden clong – and here she comes crossing by Second Avenue and 10th, accompanied by old Moody, her dresser. Moody is ancient and slow, a skeletal piece of work, has on spectacles of bottle-black glass, which make her appear like a blind woman. There is no doubt who is the employer and who the servant, even when Moody walks in advance, as she usually does, for Miss O’Neill has been trained to communicate with the body as well as with words. One might think she is an old woman but she is not yet forty. Some years ago, back in Ireland, her fiancé died. Their love affair was difficult, secretive.

  An incident last winter, in which Miss O’Neill’s ankle was broken, is responsible for her laborious gait. Slowly, unsteadily, as though burdened, she shambles, disregarding the streetcars and the bawls of the newsboys, the clank of shutters opening, the lines of singing schoolchildren, her pale, unblinking gaze indomitably fixed on the shifting horizons of downtown. Past the fruiterer’s, the grocer’s, the entrances to the dives, the little five-and-dimes, the ironmongers and hobos. Her skirts so unfashionably long that the passers-by do not perceive that she is wearing a man’s carpet slippers, unmatched.

  Miss O’Neill dresses in her
finery for this fortnightly appointment, in her Strass Paste jewels and feathered chapeau, in a threadbare velvet cape she wore eleven years ago in a production of Wuthering Heights at Philadelphia. Her gloves – ebon-black, the lace long sundered – are made of the skin of a fish. A first-night gift from the poet William Yeats who had admired her in one of his plays. She is carefully made up, black lines around her eyes and a dusting of glitter in her curled, greying hair, and pan-stick, white, with the faintest hint of blue, for a slight touch of blue conceals wrinkles.

  The storekeepers know this curious duo of old and often trade bantering rumours about them. They are sisters, or cousins. One of them was jilted at the altar. The tenement room they share contains only one bed. Moody is ‘the man’, it is whispered. They are wildly rich. They are abysmally poor. Miss O’Neill was once the mistress of a famous theatre critic in Germany, or in Prague or Vienna or London. And Moody, some say, is the oldest woman in New York. She murdered a wicked priest in Louisiana. The shimmers of whispers, the storekeepers nodding or raising their hats, and this morning it is so hot, a steaming Manhattan July, and the men are sweaty and red. Look at them. Dear Jesus. The sufferings of their wives. Imagine them naked. Sweet Mary.

  Dr Millstein, a Muscovite, has the old-school courtliness of a country physician in a play. He is bearded, well turned out – his late wife was English – and he moves among his bell jars and stethoscopes sombrely, as though they radiate religious significance. He offers tea and small cakes. He is proud of his samovar, the only object he brought with him when he fled the extremists, he says sadly. They talk for a while about nothing and everything: the news, or young people today. His profession, like Miss O’Neill’s, is a matter of appearances, fidelities as well as great knowledge. He considers himself a sort of artist, and who is not an artist in that city of immense verticalities? These little rites fulfilled, he rinses his hands carefully and injects his only Irish patient with the elixir that brings tranquillity – he pronounces the word trankvilidy.

  Millstein is famously, forbiddingly expensive, attending all the least tranquil of Manhattan’s numerous actors, and other ladies and gentlemen whose sensitivities are onerous, but it is years since the question of the root of all evil was last raised between Miss O’Neill and himself. Perhaps he does it as a charity. Perhaps her tranquillity is payment enough. Or perhaps there is something in the picture we need not be told plainly, for every female member of her profession has on occasion been asked for the nothing about which there is much ado.

  He injects her, dabs the pinprick with a bundling of gauze, then measures the pulse in her stick-like wrist, making note of its count in a small leather notebook he keeps by a bust of Mozart. Oh, a great man entirely for the notes is ould Ludwig and a maniac for the Wolfgang Amadeus. All this is done quietly, his eyes on the grandfather clock, his brows moving curiously as though counterpointing its plack, and Moody like a gargoyle in the corner. ‘There was pain, Miss O’Neill?’ He always asks if there was pain, and always she answers that there was none, although in fact there always is. Sometimes he bends low as he gauges her blood pressure, the strap around her arm, the egg of his bald skull, and he mumbles almost silently, in Russian. His nurse, a beautiful black woman, comes in and out with documents, which he signs with barely a glance. ‘You are feeling well, Miss O’Neill? The quietness is coming now?’ She can hear the rattle of streetcars, the calls of the newsboys, the whining of a violin from the apartment above the surgery – the neighbourhood is not what it was. His syringe is carefully placed in a small silver box. He touches his fingertips, briefly bows. His politesse.

  ‘Lyubimaya. Do svidaniya.’ Goodbye, my beloved.

  Thus becalmed, assuaged, she returns to her apartment, which is noisy in the daytime in a way that used to bother her; but we accustom to anything, as she often says to Moody, who looks at her almost violently, the old viper. In the street below the window, the people come and go and often there is the explosive ruckus of a cockfight. Miss O’Neill is put to bed, for the injection makes her weak, and sometimes even weepy, though less so lately – and she finds, on those afternoons of opiate dreams, that a presence comes out from backstage.

  The smell of his tweeds, of a French tobacco he used to favour. The sea is here too, its ammoniac headiness, and the crunch of his boots breaking mussel-shells. A wave sucks lustily on the pale brown stones. There is spray in his beard and his hair.

  I see him walking near the lead mine, pointing to its chimney. I am climbing its spiral in the wrench of a hurricane, wet leaves flapping around me, and his murmurings, coaxings. The distant hoots and whistles of the tugs on the East River. I am turning into the city, my body a map, its capillaries laneways, my heart is Times Square. Last night I dreamed I was a storybook with my pages still uncut. A poor yoke nobody opened.

  I am dressing, with the assistance of Moody, who has prepared hot tea and lemon, for soon it will be time to go. The walk will be arduous. The director can be difficult. It would not do to keep him waiting.

  Moody has marked up a script, underscored the lines of dialogue. The part is that of Gertrude in Hamlet. It is a role I never understood but such a confession cannot be made at any audition for you’d be shown the fucking door in a moment. Moody warns me to be good, on best behaviour. The role represents a last chance.

  The afternoon is sunny, so painfully sunny, and the walk to 42nd Street takes time. On the corner of 30th and Fifth, a streetcar accident has attracted a crowd, and out of the huddle steps an elderly policeman who could only be from one country on earth.

  —Excuse me, Miss? Begging your pardon. But is it yourself? Who I think?

  —I am Maire O’Neill. Do I know you, Officer?

  A look of preposterous satisfaction illuminates his face, which is round and pleasant and sore-looking around the chin, as though he shaved himself too closely or once had an illness that chronically afflicts the skin. He salutes and offers his hand, but then, as an afterthought, wipes it bleakly on his lapel, before holding it out to you again.

  —I’ve seen you many times, Miss. You’re the finest actress in America. There’s none could hold a candle to you so there isn’t.

  You will spin this out, for it will irritate Moody enormously. And the best way to prolong it is to say nothing at all, for if you remain silent he will have to keep talking.

  —I seen you Adam’s years ago in that play about the ploughboy killed his da. What’s this is the name of it? You were mighty in that play. Myself and the wife nearly died laughing so we did. Hand to God I nearly bust myself laughing.

  —You are gracious. Thank you, Officer. You are an Irishman, I think.

  —From Mayo. Michael Mulvey. I had the pleasure of meeting you before.

  —Oh yes?

  —You were in Wicklow one time. When the world was only made. On your holidays, you were. In a cottage by Glencree. I was stationed down in Annamoe and didn’t I meet you on the roads. A cup of tea you gave me and we chattering like the wrens. You were the most beautiful girl I ever seen.

  —We are late, Moody mutters.

  —Don’t rush me, bitch.

  —We are late.

  —I am dealing with my public!

  The theatre is cool, pleasantly dark, like a church. The stage is in half-light, almost bare. Carpenters and their lads sawing quietly in the aisles. A girl distributing sandwiches and coffee. Gilded stuccoes and velvet seats and the sheen of the chandelier. Up in one of the boxes two scrubwomen are working, dusting at the cretonnes of the drapery. And from the gods unseen, at the very top of the house, comes the warble of a man singing a ballad self-mockingly, his mellow, faltering tenor far better than he pretends, and the dull, flat jeers of his fellows.

  Brave manly hearts confer my doom

  That gentler ones may tell

  Howe’er forgot, unknown my tomb,

  I like a Soldier fell!

  You ascend the steps to the stage, test the angle of the rake. The auditorium is cavernously large and deep
. It will be important to project but your training has prepared you: throw the voice like a ball; aim to hit the back wall. In backstage you glimpse a prompter repeating lines from a soliloquy in a monotonous burr to his assistant. A stagehand is unwrapping rapiers; a boy polishes their blades. A woman who must be the costumemistress is measuring an enormously fat man, her tape around his waist while he puffs on a cigar and natters of the Brooklyn Dodgers.

  —Molly, how have you been? I wasn’t expecting –

  —Good afternoon, Christopher, it is agreeable to be working with you again. I am sorry we are a little late. I was detained on the way. Fellow who’d seen me in a production – you know what they’re like. Sign this and sign that and the dear knows what. It happens every time I leave the house.

  —Molly –

  —But to business. To business. I have never understood Gertrude. You shall have to advise me very closely. The text I find confusing. The rhythms, the metres. She is not one of Shakespeare’s best women. But we shall find the truth of course. We always do.

  —Gertrude has been offered. I’m sorry, Molly. I auditioned someone else Monday.

  Moody is staring. Nothing is said. The director peers bleakly at his hands.

  —I need a servant for Act Three. I can pay the union rate.