I love the sky. When countries try to encourage people to visit them, they always cite the most obvious things: the sunshine, the food, the museums and monuments. They never suggest how good it might be just to smell a different air, or to see a new sky, and how strange and beautiful that could be. I always thought the summer sky in Italy to be over-rated. It was too empty, too high and featureless, too bald and blue, with a fierce sun in it. I think Ireland must have one of the loveliest skies in the world, I could sit and look at an Atlantic sky for hours on end, watching the marvellous clouds, the way you can look into a fire and never feel bored. I like to imagine the world from far away, the atmosphere surrounding it like a pearly skin. And then I think of that skin seen from the inside, with all the variable skies drifting imperceptibly into each other, changing as landscape changes when you travel through it. The sky is timeless, unlike the weathered stone of buildings or paintings that fade. You can look at the sky and after an hour it’s already different, but because of that it can look the same after a thousand years. The sky is as ancient as the sea, and I love them both for that.
‘Are you nervous?’ Ted suddenly asked me, taking my hand. I said that I was, just a little. There was no point in lying, because he could read my moods so well that it was hardly worth his while to ask me, and a lie would only have confused the issue. ‘But I’m happy too,’ I said. ‘I’m looking forward to the States.’
‘Well you should,’ he said, ‘because you’re going to have a ball.’
I started enjoying America even before we landed there, some eight hours later. As the plane was descending to the airport, we could already see the buildings below, when suddenly I knew we were flying over Manhattan, because the buildings bristled up below unexpectedly, and you knew to look at them that it was the immense height of the sky-scrapers that made this effect, not that the plane was flying lower.
As we went through customs, I felt glad about so many things: glad Ted was with me, glad somebody was with me, glad that I was only there for a holiday, that I spoke the language, that I had enough money. The official who checked my passport seemed disappointed that it was completely in order. He stamped it, then slammed it down on the counter with real violence.
The air was bitterly cold when we went outside to wait for a transfer bus to La Guardia. The darkening sky was full of planes, some taking off, some coming in to land. The coldness was a shock after the dried-out artificial air and the warmth of the plane and the airport. It was already dark when we got to La Guardia. When we boarded the Washington plane, we were ignored by the stewardesses, who were standing in a cluster gossiping about a difficult passenger on the preceding flight. I was glad they left us alone: they looked a bit frightening to me. The stewardesses looked oddly similar, as if they were made up to play sisters in a film. They were all very tall, with heaped blonde hair and an air of hard confidence. As the plane taxied, the stewardesses went through the safety drill, and once we were in the air, they moved through the plane doling out cans of Coke and bags of honeyroast peanuts.
Looking out of the window I saw Manhattan, as recognizable as it was unexpected, neat as a map, the lights glittering along its grids of streets. Ted said he’d never seen it so clearly before, even though he’d flown in and out of New York many times.
‘Do you think I’ll like New York?’ I asked him. ‘Oh, it’s hard to say. I hope you do, but there’s no way of knowing.’ Generally I like cities. I like how you can feel hidden in them. It was a bit similar to how I felt about my job in the factory. I liked being a small part in the whole process of making and selling things, and in the city, you can feel small and insignificant, but know that you’re still a part of the life of the city. It can be comforting to blend with the crowd.
If, when we arrived in Washington, I had had to get on yet another plane and sit there for another four hours, I would have done it uncomplainingly. It wasn’t because I was enjoying the journey, but because I was so weary that I wouldn’t have had the energy to resist. By the time we were dragging our suitcases off the carousel, I felt like a piece of luggage myself. Ted’s father met us. He looked like an older version of Ted, and he hugged us both. His mother hugged me too, when we arrived at the house about an hour later. I don’t remember much about that first night there. His mother gave me some milk and biscuits, and I remember seeing a big orange cat stalking across the carpet. After that, I went to bed and fell into a solid sleep and I remember that I didn’t dream at all.
When I woke up the next morning, for a split second I had that feeling of complete disorientation that you can have on waking in a strange place. Then I became aware of Ted’s mother’s voice through the floor-boards, and remembered where I was. It sounded like she was talking to herself, because her voice was the only one I could hear. When I went downstairs, I found that Ted and his father were also in the kitchen with her, mildly putting a word in edgeways when they had a chance. The big ginger cat I had seen the night before was sitting on Ted’s lap. Everybody else had been up long before me, and the pot of coffee sitting on the kitchen table was stone cold. I thought they might make a fresh pot, and I was a bit surprised when Ted’s mother just poured some of the old coffee into a mug for me, and then put it in the microwave to heat up. Ted nudged the cat on to the floor, and made me some toast.
Over breakfast, I tried to watch Ted’s mother out of the corner of my eye, to get the measure of her, but I had to abandon that before long, because I found that she was doing exactly the same thing to me. She won that little war of nerves, as I suspect she was used to doing. I was very interested in her, because I always think you can tell a lot about a man by looking at his mother.
I felt from the first that I’d probably met my match in Ted’s mother (‘Call me Susan,’ she’d said when Ted first introduced us). I don’t know what I’d expected her to be like, but I certainly hadn’t foreseen this tiny powerhouse: incessant, nervous and manipulative in a way that only another manipulator can detect. Yet she was gentle too, and vulnerable. I kept thinking of what Ted had told me about his grandmother, and I could see the effect she’d had on Susan. She was never able to stop and relax, because she always felt that something was expected of her by those around her. As small as I am, and slight, almost frail in build, Susan was soft-spoken, but made up in quantity for what she lacked in volume. While Ted, his father, (‘Hi, I’m Bob,’ he’d said simply) and I sat quietly at the table that morning, I watched her move restlessly round the kitchen, getting muffins out of a bag for me, taking a two-quart jar of cranapple juice out of the fridge and pouring a glass for Ted, and talking, talking, talking all the time.
‘Now, Ted, the very first thing I want you to do this morning is to start clearing out all those boxes.’ Ted groaned quietly. He had told me before we arrived that he had lots of things in his parents’ attic to clear out: ‘A mountain of junk,’ was how he’d cheerfully described it to me. His mother had written to him threatening to throw it all away if he didn’t come back and sort it out. The primary reason for his trip was that the college he taught at in Florence was affiliated to a private college in Washington, whose students had the option of going to Italy for a semester or for a year. He needed to see the head of the college to talk about some plans and improvements for the programme he taught. While he was in the States, he was going to sort out the things he’d left there. ‘I’m glad to have the opportunity,’ he’d said to me. ‘There comes a time in everyone’s life to throw things away, and for me that time is now.’ I thought that was a good enough reason in itself to cross the Atlantic. There wasn’t much left belonging to me in the house back in Clare, but there were some things, perhaps more than I cared to remember, and I thought that maybe sometime soon I’d get round to going home and doing the same thing as Ted.
I remembered how we’d once seen something in a newspaper about a hurricane in America, and Ted had remarked, ‘I think my Mom would be happy if the house was hit by a hurricane. She’d see it as a challenge to put th
e whole thing back together again.’ Now I understood what he’d meant. She wanted the attic cleared, because during the summer it was to be converted into an extra bedroom. ‘It’ll add so much to the value of the house,’ she said. There were already two spare bedrooms, a guest bathroom and a dining room which was never used. I also could understand now why Ted’s mother wasn’t interested in religion. Nothing that was spiritual or internalized interested her. For Susan, life was a series of external problems, connected with money and things: food, clothes, property. In the past, life had obligingly provided a wealth of these problems: children to be fed and dressed, a home to be made. But now everything was finished and complete, and so she was forced to create things for herself to do, such as this unnecessary attic conversion. Inside her, there was nothing but pure driven will, but she wasn’t aware of it, because she never thought about herself in this way. She had already planned the décor for the new room, and pulled out some thick books of swatches and samples to show us what she’d chosen. Her husband sneaked out of the room while she was busy with this, Uncle Silas the cat at his heels.
Bob reminded me of one of those trees you see in the West of Ireland, where the prevailing winds blow in off the Atlantic, and the tree grows completely flattened, all its branches pointing due East. He’d lived in the full blast of Susan’s willpower for nigh on half a century, and had yielded to it decades ago. If a genie had given him a wish, he’d have asked to be made invisible. In the absence of genies, he’d worked hard on the next-best thing: complete self-effacement. He was a sweet-natured man, and reminded me a lot of Ted. Later in the day he showed me his room with an air of shy delight, like a child telling you a secret.
‘Susan says I’m lazy because I spend so much time in here reading,’ he said. ‘As far as she’s concerned, books are just a waste of time. Sometimes I say to her, “I have nothing else to do these days, so I might as well read.” But she replies, “Well, I’m sure if you looked hard, you would find something to do.” Truth is, I don’t look hard. I don’t look at all. I like my books too much,’ and he indicated the shelves neatly lined with volumes relating mostly to the Second World War and scientific subjects. The room was high and bright. As well as the books, there was a television, a stereo, and a comfortable-looking armchair. On the floor by the chair was a beanbag covered in cotton printed with fishbones, where the cat was curled up asleep. ‘Uncle Silas keeps me company, don’t you?’ said Bob, and the cat at once lifted its head knowingly.
‘Now what can I play for you, Aisling?’ said Bob, crossing to the stereo. ‘What sort of music do you like? I’m afraid I don’t have anything recent, all my albums are probably too old to appeal to you.’ He started to rummage through his record collection. ‘This is a good one, I think you’ll like this. I haven’t listened to this one for a long time myself. Do you have Glenn Miller in Ireland? This brings back a lot of memories for me, of the time when Susan and I were young and just starting out together, like you and Ted.’
As soon as these words were out, Bob was covered in confusion. ‘That’s not to say you and Ted will – I mean, it’s not to say that you won’t, either …’ We were both embarrassed, and both grateful for the swell of plaintive music that suddenly filled the room, and allowed us to fall silent. Bob lit a cigarette and drew on it deeply. I smiled and said, ‘It doesn’t matter.’ He smiled back, grateful and relieved.
During the following days, Ted went to the college every morning. He dropped me off on the way there, most often at The Mall, and I visited the Vietnam Memorial and the National Gallery. Ted would meet me in the middle of the day and we’d have lunch, then we’d visit a museum or a gallery together.
On the third day, we went to the National Museum of Air and Space. For me, its greatest impact came from the size of the things it contained, and the amount of money you knew had been involved in putting them there (although it must be said that these were exactly the same factors that impressed me about the contents of Susan’s fridge). The main hall was large enough to contain several small aeroplanes and the nose cone of a rocket, yet it still seemed airy and spacious. It made me feel queasy to look at the nose cone, with its scorched surface. The compartments where the astronauts had sat while travelling back to earth were so tiny, it must have felt like they were coming back from the moon in the boot of a car.
‘Have you ever seen the moon dust in the Vatican?’ I asked Ted. He said that he hadn’t. I told him that in the Vatican Museums, as well as the Fra Angelico Chapel and Raphael’s fresco of the School of Athens, there’s also some moon dust, and a tiny Papal flag, said to have gone to the moon and back the first time the Americans went there. ‘There’s a card in front of them that says they were a gift to the Pope from President Nixon,’ I said. Ted thought this was hilarious. ‘If Nixon gave you a little bit of dirt and said it was moon dust, would you believe him?’ One of the things I like about the Vatican Museums is that mixture of sublime art and old junk: all the stuff you know the Cardinals feel obliged to hang on to, in case the Head of State who gave it to them ever comes calling again. So you look at this tiny flag and you know it’s been to the moon and back, and in one way that’s extraordinary, and then you think again, and it’s the most absurd thing you’ve ever heard. It means nothing: the ultimate big deal.
From the first, I took a flip attitude to the Air and Space Museum, and I was surprised to see that this annoyed Ted. I thought the whole place was something other than what it pretended to be. He didn’t see it that way at all, and thought I should have been more impressed than I was with the complicated toys and models demonstrating various scientific proofs and principles. It wasn’t designed to inform, but to stun.
There was a cinema in the museum, where we saw a short movie about space exploration called The Dream Is Alive. The screen was massive, and one’s senses were put under such heavy visual and auditory bombardment that while it lasted, it was hard to do anything as mundane as think. We saw pictures of the earth taken from space. I think people around me, including Ted, were a bit put out when I began to snigger, but it was more than I could do to stop myself as Walter Cronkite boomed over an image of the Mediterranean: ‘Greece: cradle of our civilization.’ I sniggered again when it showed shots of a rocket taking off, and all the men in mission control punched the air with clenched fists. It was as subtle as one of those Italian ads when they show a bottle of spumante being opened, and all the foam gushes down the sides. It didn’t say anything at all about the military implications, but we saw some cute pictures of bees that had been taken into space to see if they could make honey in zero gravity conditions, as if the whole point of the space programme was to make extra-terrestrial honey, and provide weird souvenirs for the Pope.
I laughed, but the final effect of the visit was to depress me, as did Washington cathedral, which we saw afterwards. I hated its twentieth-century gothic, its ersatz oldness. On the way home, we stopped at a Chinese restaurant, and bought four meals to go. By the time we got back to the house, the sweet-and-sour pork and the stir-fried rice were cold, so Susan heated them up in the microwave. She ate with Ted and me at the kitchen table, surrounded by the wreckage of cardboard cartons in which the food had come. Bob put his dinner on a tray, and took it off to eat in his room, where he had been watching a programme on television about the possible reunification of Germany.
‘I don’t get it,’ he said, standing with his tray in his hands. ‘I just don’t get it. How can Europe even begin to think of allowing Germany to get big again? Has everybody over there forgotten what it was like the last time? I haven’t forgotten. They’ll probably let the same thing happen all over again, and allow Germany to do whatever it wants until it gets out of control, and Europe can’t handle it. Then of course they call on America to sort things out, and of course we go running every time. The rest of the world sees us now for the suckers we are, but we never learn. It’s not our responsibility to sort out the messes other countries make for themselves.’
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�Bob,’ said Susan, ‘if I were you, I’d take that food away right this minute and eat it, because if it gets cold and has to be heated up again, it probably isn’t going to be worth eating.’ Bob looked down at the pork and rice as if he’d never seen them before, and without another word, he left the kitchen.
‘Your father never changes,’ said Susan, opening a bottle of soy sauce, ‘always talking and thinking about places and things far away, things that don’t concern him.’
‘He has a point,’ Ted said mildly. I could imagine Bob saying exactly the same thing in the same way, in defence of Ted. ‘After all, Mom, he was there, wasn’t he? Remember all those things he told us about being in Germany at the end of the war? He’s entitled to his opinion about what might happen in Europe, same as everybody else.’
But Susan couldn’t understand why anyone would want to claim their right to an opinion on so boring a subject. ‘I still don’t see what it has to do with him. Even if America does get involved, nobody’s going to ask him at his age to go back to Europe and fight the Germans, now are they? So why worry about it?’
When we’d finished eating, Susan cleared the table and tidied the kitchen before going off to watch television. Ted went out of the room too, and I was on my own when Bob came back with his tray, the cat at his heels. ‘Time to fix Uncle Silas his dinner, now that everybody else has got theirs.’ As Bob opened a tin of food the cat cried a little with anticipation, then silently set to wolfing it down, as soon as the plate was put before it. Bob and I vacantly watched Uncle Silas as he ate.
‘Susan thinks I think I know it all,’ Bob said suddenly, ‘but I don’t. I just know what I saw, and I know that we’d be crazy to let it happen again. Crazy.
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