The Leaves on Grey

by Desmond Hogan

  ‘He was led like a sheep to be slaughtered and like a lamb that’s dumb before the shearer he does not open his mouth. He has been humiliated and has no redress. Who will be able to speak of his posterity? For he is cut off from the world of living men.’ His figure became more wasted, his eyes sallowed in pain. Nothing reached him, the Tennessee Williams show, news that my flatmate had been arrested while on a raid to the North – he’d been a member of the IRA all this time. These signs were wasted on him.

  Christine up and went to Paris. The last I saw of her was on O’Connell Bridge, scarlet scarf blowing against the lowly skyline known to poet and painter.

  He saw me dating a lovely country girl, knew that no matter what happened I’d be OK. He applied for many jobs, many scholarships. In June he received news that he’d been accepted on scholarship to an American university to do a thesis on the American poet Hart Crane. Though it was summer it might have been winter, a new age had come, laughter scarcer, broad-brimmed hats fewer and pleasure in the hands of glutton, not artist.

  On 23 August Liam’s father drove to Dublin. He entertained Liam and me in the Shelbourne lounge. We had lemonade. Then we commenced on afternoon tea. Liam had rung Sarah’s house the previous evening. Sarah’s mother answered. Sarah had finished her period as a postulant and had entered the novitiate.

  I could feel the edge in Liam’s voice, the greyness, the stammer swift as a Woodbine cigarette in the hands of a nervous cleric.

  Women shot their wares of marigolds against Nelson’s pillar. A Pier Angeli feature was advertised at the Ambassador. A brand of cigarettes was flaunted over the entrance to the slum area of Sean McDermott Street.

  I knew he was thinking of Sarah, of Walt Whitman, of the boat going to England from Dun Laoghaire pier. I knew by the look on his face.

  We arrived at the airport.

  ‘You haven’t been home all summer,’ Liam’s father said.

  Liam’s face looked curiously lamb-like against the sultry August sky. His eyes for one moment tuned blue, the blue the sky should have been. I wanted to touch his lips, his body, to greet him like one cavalier to another. That was no longer possible. Liam’s father was mumbling about modern American poets – a senior Belgian diplomat was shown through the airport – and an Aer Lingus plane took off for London, its nose seeking the sky like a watchful terrier.

  ‘You’ll be home soon.’ Words dashed, stubbed against the sky. A scream was rising within me worse than planes taking off.

  ‘It’s lovely at home,’ Liam’s father said. He talked of the river. I’d had a nightmare the river had run dry. He talked of the garden forever blooming and eventually he mentioned Elizabeth Kenneally.

  “She’ll be praying for you,’ Liam’s father said like a remorseful Catholic.

  I enumerated these things in my mind, orphans, peas, leeks, an oak tree, striped deckchairs, a Russian woman, gone mad with the grief of living, Irish Catholicism, missals, and somewhere stuck in that experience the faces of Christine, unrepentant, Sarah, another Irish woman somehow unable to contain her purity.

  The moments dragged like years of history. Nuns were packed off to Rome. Sarah would be going to Africa on one of those planes. Liam’s father droned about the Galway races. Horses raced in my mind, coming into the final post.

  I held out a hand.

  ‘Liam, goodbye,’ I said.

  He looked at me. His eyes were blue, blue of the sea, blue of the Californian sky to which he was heading, blue of a country far, far happier than the one he was leaving. He was like a dying person who wanted to say something but couldn’t. I watched him walk away. I wanted to cry but I didn’t. I knew my tears would not help.

  I turned away. Though I would not be at the airport when Sarah would be going I said goodbye to Sarah then too, and to Christine. ‘They’ll be selling peaches now,’ Liam’s father said, ‘at the Leopardstown races.’ And I looked at him and thought him a man gone mad. A plane screamed into time and history.

  I had a secret that I shared with no one. When my flat-mate was arrested after his mysterious disappearance the flat was raided. Little of interest was discovered – a book by Paul Claudel, Davitt’s account of his prison days – but on a summer’s morning spring-cleaning I found a gun under the floorboards. A treasure. I kept it there. For me it spoke of that young man’s daring and the silent grief of Northern Irish Catholics. I held on to it, often lifting the floorboards to admire it. In one moment if I fired it I would shatter a heritage into fragments. I returned home that evening. My girlfriend had ceased her studies and was back in Galway. Huge tractors were digging craters outside, preparing the way for a massive new hospital.

  I opened the floorboards, took out the gun. I stood before a mirror, gun to my head, recalling Camus’ ultimate dictum on suicide, knew there were two choices, to live or to die, understood the dictatorship of the mundane, knew looking at a mirror which refracted tractors tunnelling through clay that I was not the suicidal type.

  I put the gun down.

  Yes, that young man I’d been sharing my flat with had been funny even if I hadn’t noticed.

  I reread a letter from my father, asking me to return home and be his assistant. For weeks I’d brooded on the letter. Now I jotted a reply. Yes, I would go home.

  I lingered in Dublin some weeks.

  Lace was blown from hats in front of ladies’ faces. Autumn scoured Marlborough Road. Someone whistled a tune by the Irish poet Patrick Kavanagh that haunts memory like a child’s golden coin.

  On Raglan Road on an autumn day I met her first and knew

  That her dark hair would weave a snare that I might one day rue;

  I saw the danger, yet I walked along the enchanted way,

  And I said let grief be a fallen leaf at the dawning of the day.

  On an October day I left Dublin, city of churches, rife with bicycles, young priests and doldrum waitresses, locking the door of a room that held a gun and a lucid picture of Albert Camus and went home.

  BOOK THREE

  Driving to Derry on a May evening in 1972 there was much to think about. Sun penetrated the windscreen; sun urged into a ruby over Sligo Bay, distilling the grave of Queen Maeve on Knocknarea into an aura of magic. I was going to meet Liam. The sun eventually planted itself on the sea. Sligo Bay was lost and Donegal took over, inlets, strips of sand, a monumental Gothic castle on the sea. The road wound north through the night. I passed tinker encampments and ridiculously sprawling towns. In Ballyshannon I slept for the night near an alarm clock. Tomorrow I would confront Liam for the first time in fifteen years.

  I didn’t sleep too well that night. The room was foreign to me, white sheets, narrow windows, antique clocks, chairs, each with a voice, a character.

  I sat up, smoked. Gradually the night eased about me, ghosts disappeared, a banshee was recalled to the distant bogs and the inveigling mountains of Donegal and I, Sean McMahon, thirty-seven by the calendar, married with three children, a revered solicitor and public man slept, some Atlantic breeze winnowing through the window-pane and plucking at my hair. Why are there moments when one is called upon to give account of oneself, to reckon with ancient forces one has been seeking to hide or bury in remote places, where no hands will touch, albeit the fingers of a curious child.

  I was a father now. I had grown children. Why this detour into the past? There were questions I couldn’t answer but I had to obey. The night fell softly on my head and again for a few hours images flung into my life like handballs. I was reliving moments, spruce as new daffodils, tall and healthy as twelve-year-old boys.

  The first thing I want to say about those fifteen years – and I want to tell you a lot about them – was that Elizabeth Kenneally never left us. A woman who contained herself in my years at college walked again, a Lazarus in the years that gave birth to my children. I suppose it was the way that I handled her ghost that allowed her so much freedom but that being so, I’ll go on piecing together a time that was almost wasted but wasn’t by v
irtue of Laura, my wife, and my children, Patrick, Annabelle and Jason in that order.

  The first time I intuited her was in Avila, spring 1958. I went there with my mother on a pilgrimage. We took a bus. The little convent of St Teresa inspired my mother, a woman of the country, given airs and graces all her life, to pray, a few moments on a pew, recollecting a life of golf and of bridge, a moment of excellence as all these things, the herbs and scents and golf-course earth of bourgeois Ireland rose in defiant prayer to God. I was touched by something else. I’d accompanied my mother much to the chagrin of my girlfriend. But now, caught unawares in a white-washed cell, I was reminded of the artist friend of Mrs Kenneally, a plucky lady in black who defied a bishop once and confessed to an admiration of St Teresa, priestess of the female psyche.

  ‘They shall not deal in silver or in gold.’ Teresa of Avila’s admonition was a phrasing of what the maker of stained glass had done, what Mrs Kenneally had done by her breakdown, what Sarah had done by joining the nuns and what Liam was doing in California, one of these sepulchral people who disdained ordinary human intercourse to attain some other order of being, a more private one, helped by an astonishment with growing things, with the winds and the trees and the turf of this universe.

  I’d heard from Liam a few times the previous winter. I imagined him, a young man crossing the grass of Berkeley, a knitted scarf transcending his neck, and books beneath his arm, books the colour of egg yolks with faces of grave authors on them, while always lights lit the skyline, lonely, semi-blue American lights.

  I held on to his letters for a long time. Then one day by virtue of some travesty they were burnt. I always blamed Laura for that. I never forgave her for it though it was possibly someone else who did it. Yet in Avila, spring 1958, the dukebox playing Chuck Berry and American girls sitting in cheap bars, I was with Liam, one hundred per cent, with the spirit of his letters, a bouquet of words thrown across time.

  1005 Ashby,

  Berkeley,

  22 November 1957

  Dear Sean,

  How are you? The weather’s lovely here. Autumn but the sky still clear and blue. I live in a little apartment on Ashby. A room. Photographs of James Joyce looking needled with frail spectacles, Yeats, the Russian poets Pasternak, Mayakovsky. A woman of iron. Anna Akhmatova. The room stinks of dwarf dahlias. I moved in here after staying with an uncle in San Jose. It’s good Sean, good. Wonderful the clear skies, the clear mornings. One can feel the sea. It’s as though I missed the sea from my life for a very long time. I haven’t met anyone yet. To stroll here, across campus, is to understand something dangerous and lovely, the past. No one touches me. I can feel the past without any obstacles, touch your face, Sarah’s.

  Sometimes I can feel it, a shot; Dublin, the endless days of rain and the avenues reflecting rain, the nuns and the varicose veins. I pick out a student, his pimples. I am wakeful to the shadows of rain. Then it goes.

  I am again here.

  Yesterday, Sean, I went into San Francisco. In a café in North Beach I encountered two bearded poets who’d visited the Aran Islands. They gave me their address.

  Sometimes it’s wonderful to be here. A bridge separates Berkeley from San Francisco, a frail fine pointed bridge, consumed at night by light and by activity. I often look out my window at that bridge. There’s music here at night, a strange new music. Songs about highways and runaway teenagers. If you’re feeling sad you get an enormous milkshake bedecked with roses of strawberry juice. Sean, do you think it was all madness, Dublin and all that?

  I often see Sarah’s face crying in the rain though I don’t know if it’s her tears or just the rain, splashing down.

  I think of you often and wonder about you, there in Ireland. It seems far away now. They tell me the whales are hooting now in the far north and one day I will up and listen to them call. I wish you well Sean.

  Send me any copies of The Irish Times you can, especially if there are reviews of books by Irish writers.

  I’m going to Thanksgiving dinner this week. A professor married to an Irishwoman invited me. Take care of yourself.

  Liam.

  P.S. Give my love to Daddy.

  10 December 1957

  Dear Sean,

  Went to Thanksgiving dinner. It was great. The Irishwoman turned out to be from Galway. She spoke with a rich Galway accent and the table was marked by festival, turkey, cranberry sauce, sweet potatoes bedecked by marshmallow. Three candles lighting, she addressed me about family, family connections.

  I said I had a mother born and raised in Moscow and she said she’d heard of this woman; what a tragedy her death had been.

  My mother is famous I suppose; I don’t feel very Russian here. I feel totally Irish, as though my roots shoot back to the bards and the cavaliers, the native Irish aristocrats, those who dealt in wine before Cromwell came.

  I want to address a huge question to you. Do you believe in time? Last night I looked at the sea and disbelieved in it. I was standing in eternity.

  Love,

  Liam.

  New Year a belated Christmas card had arrived. It bore a Venetian nativity scene, greetings to me and my family.

  In February before I left for Avila I got a letter speaking of a trip he’d made south, he’d seen Big Sur, the activity of the ocean and people building newly, a new class of gypsy bearing driftwood from the sea and constructing cabins.

  When I returned from Avila it was my turn to write. I wrote about Laura, about the winter, rugby sessions, rain, the geese flying over the river, the tobacco-coloured marshland. I told him about Avila, when I went there. I wrote how I thought of his mother in a white cell, the Russian woman with the golden hair and sometimes the unmatching earrings. Then I tore up that letter. It was not appropriate. He had known too much grief without being constantly reminded of that grief, even at a distance of six thousand miles. So instead I wrote about the spring, the journey to Spain, the Spanish gypsies, the wine bars, the white squares, the dissolute Spaniards, my mother’s prayers, and the night when donkeys brayed and edifying breezes blew in from Castile.

  When both my parents were killed in a head-on collision on the Dublin road that June I wrote too – for comfort. The letter must have been late arriving for I did not receive comfort until September when I wed – and then it was too late.

  My parents’ death had come when it was least expected, a time of dining in Laura’s home, feasting by an oak table, being ministered with country bread, liquid country butter, castles of scones, ramparts of rock buns. Her home was thirteen miles from town, a country house with a black door, a golden knocker, larch trees on either side. Her father usually spent his time in the Dáil in Dublin, arguing about the price of cattle or the heads of small farmers. Laura and I were the beatified couple, the couple who most swooned to people’s attention by virtue of our compatibility, our acceptable good looks, my job, Laura’s father. There seemed to be a defined road in front of us, a road that knew no holes until my parents were killed and townspeople gathered in my home on a mist-darkened June evening, expressing their grief, ladies’ hats sponged into wetness.

  Laura fetched a bottle of Beaujolais that night and the young woman I thought to be a simple country girl opened a bottle of wine and dark hair pulled back on strong buttermilk features said, ‘Death is close to festivity. The gods of mirth are forever regarding the gods of death,’ surprising me into a new and unique awareness of the girl I’d brought to the pictures and whom I’d mistaken for a simple-minded country coquette.

  Over the summer we sailed, swam, ate in the succour of Laura’s home, the larch trees buzzing with flies. Often my eyes lingered on Laura’s fingers holding a teacup printed with blue stripes or a ring on her finger, silver. She had grace, her hair tied back in a ponytail, her features eager, protruding.

  I knew death to be reneguing in those summer breezes, I knew doors to be closing on Dublin. I realized inwardly I was beginning again and on no account did I desire to be dragged back to Dublin,
to doors leading to certain lounges like the doors of confessionals.

  We married in September in a gregarious social wedding. Laura was bedecked in white, white flourishing from her like a bed of begonias. We were photographed against the limp trees of the prom. Her father was bedazzled with smiles. Huge contingents of relatives gathered, uncles, aunts flown back from the States, heavy emerald in evidence in hats and coats.

  I wished Liam had been there, but all there was was a card from him, showing a log cabin and redwood trees, from some place in northern California. I realized as the cameras flashed that there was something of his knowingness, his austerity on my face – Liam attended by proxy. He, the elegant young man brimful of ideas, haunted my features. The card from Liam contained condolence for the fate of my parents, good wishes for my future with Laura, whichever I wished to choose from. I chose neither. His message was too curt, too far away, too oblique and though I replied I didn’t hear from him again for fifteen years, nothing, neither wind, ocean nor war prevailed upon him to contact me.

  The reception for my wedding took place in the local hotel, a floor crowded with antiquated couples waltzing and young secretaries, Laura’s comrades from a boarding school, crowded about her, cheeks red as saffron roses. Laura was the centre of august attention, the first of her classmates to wed, the most attractive of them, today more matriarch than queen, elegant, watchful, firm.

  An orchestra that was falling apart played dilapidated tunes like ‘Galway Bay’ or ‘Bless this House’. Despite the rural background of Laura’s relatives there was a near-elegance in the dress, slate-greys, Connemara greens, a dullness yet a pride and no face without its distinctive smile. As couples waltzed and Laura betrayed her virtue to a host of bank clerks and fellow rugby players, a young academic from Dublin, dripping with drink, confronted me. ‘You’re a friend of Christine Canavan’s, aren’t you?’ I nodded. ‘Well she’s in a mental hospital in Limerick.’