As It Is in Heaven

by Niall Williams

  It was a season of love in the afternoon; of slow time and long caresses, of strawberries… passing from mouth to mouth like the wet, ripe and softly bruised essence of pleasure itself…

  Lyrical prose and lush imagery have earned Niall Williams international acclaim. His first novel, Four Letters of Love, was selected as one of the Most Notable Books of the Year by the New York Times. Now this gifted author offers a tale of dreams granted and stolen, of life given and denied, and of love as everlasting on this earth…

  Time has already stopped for Stephen Griffin when he moves into the little house by the sea. Twenty-eight years old and haunted by death, the tall, awkward, shy schoolteacher is content to care for his father in Dublin and let life pass him by.

  Then a miracle appears: a string ensemble from Venice and, with it, a violinist named Gabriella Castoldi. Even though the worldly, beautiful musician seems incapable of giving her heart, love seizes Stephen Griffin… unbidden and shaking every particle of his spirit.

  Stephen’s ailing father sees it and fears for his naïve son. Nelly Grant, the green-grocer, predicted it and welcomes its sheer joy Moses Mooney, the blind musician, has sensed its coming. None, however, can envision the depth and consequence of this union. For Gabriella will change not only Stephen’s life but, in the deepest sense, the lives of everyone around them.

  AS IT IS IN HEAVEN evokes the magical essence of romance and its miraculous ability to grace even the darkest life with light. Splendidly crafted and charged with poignancy, it firmly establishes Niall Williams as a master storyteller in the grand tradition of Irish literature.

  AMELIA STEIN

  NIALL WILLIAMS was born in Dublin in 1958. He is a playwright and the author of four books written with his wife, the artist Christine Breen, about their life in County Clare with their two children.

  A Featured Alternate of The Literary Guild and of Doubleday Book Club

  To learn more about this book and author, visit our Web site at www.warnerbooks.com

  Jacket design by Flag

  Jacket photograph by John Heseltine

  ALSO BY NIALL WILLIAMS

  Four Letters of Love

  COPYRIGHT

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 1999 by Niall Williams

  All rights reserved.

  Hachette Book Group

  237 Park Avenue

  New York, NY 10017

  Visit our website at www.HachetteBookGroup.com

  First eBook Edition: August 1999

  ISBN: 978-0-446-93038-3

  For Chris, who made the garden,

  and for Deirdre and Joseph,

  who play the music in it

  “… on earth as it is in Heaven.”

  —Our Father

  “… ma gia volgeva il mio disio e’l velle

  si come rota ch’igualmente e mossa,

  l’amor che move: i sole e l’altre stelle.”

  “… as a wheel turns smoothly, free from jars,

  my will and my desire were turned by love,

  The love that moves the sun and the other stars.”

  —Dante, Paradiso

  Contents

  Also by Niall Williams

  Copyright

  Part I

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Part II

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Part III

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Part IV

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Part V

  Chapter 1

  Criticas Adore Four letters of Love

  I

  1

  There are only three great puzzles in the world, the puzzle of love, the puzzle of death, and, between each of these and part of both of them, the puzzle of God.

  God is the greatest puzzle of all.

  When a car drives off the road and crashes into your life, you feel the puzzle of God. You feel the sharpness of its edges fall on top of you and know the immensity of the puzzle from the force of the life being crushed out of you. You want to lift the pieces and throw them away into the darkness. You feel the chill of loss, the drafty air, as if the walls of your soul have been knocked down in the night and you wake to realize that you are living in a vast exposed emptiness.

  When the man driving the car turns out to be a drunken priest who receives only minor injuries, you wonder if God was ever there at all, or if the puzzle itself was your own invention to excuse the existence of the random and the brutal where they crisscrossed our days.

  Philip Griffin wondered. He wondered what crime his ten-year-old daughter could have committed, what grievous error she had made that had drawn the priest’s car upon her that afternoon. What fault could his wife, Anne, have been guilty of as she drove into Ranelagh to collect rosin for her daughter’s half-sized cello? In the weeks and months following the accident Philip Griffin asked the questions and could arrive at only one answer: there was none. The fault was his own, the judgement had fallen not on them but upon him. For it was the survivor who suffered. In the weeks following the funeral of his wife and daughter he had scoured the burnt bottom of his soul for the myriad failings of his love—the days he had said nothing, had returned from work with some bitterness and left the children doing their homework, telling them to leave him alone when they came with copies, raising his newspaper like a drawbridge and retreating inside the loveless world of facts and news, until a knock came on the room door and he walked out to tea; the evenings he did not tell them he loved them but told them only to go to bed and be quiet or he’d be cross. He searched out each of his failings and then concluded t
hat they were so numerous it was perfectly clear why God had smote his life with suffering. Understanding that was the only way he was able to continue living, for in his eyes his living with the hurt was a kind of cleansing. Mary and Anne were in heaven awaiting him, and he would be there to join them one day, when he had done whatever he could for his remaining child, Stephen; when life had at last purged his sins and cancer would arrive.

  There was peace in that. The puzzle of God was not so bad after all, and Philip could endure suffering, knowing that at least when it was over it would mean he was forgiven.

  In twenty years that day had not come. His son, Stephen, had become a schoolteacher and moved away from Dublin to the west. The fracture that had fallen between them the day of the crash, when they had each retreated into great guilty rooms of silence, had grown steadily wider, and the father had felt each year the weakening of his ability to reach his son. Stephen was a lone figure; he was tall and silent and intense, and had vanished from his father into the world of history books before he had finished his teens. Now he arrived one weekend a month to sit opposite his father in the sitting room and correct copies and read the newspaper while Puccini played on the small stereo and the light died in the street outside.

  “Hello.”

  It was a late-autumn afternoon. The chestnut leaves had fallen in the garden and blackened the grass, which Philip Griffin did not rake. A small man, he sat in the front window with the Venetian blinds open and watched the road for the coming of his son’s car. When it entered the driveway, he had looked away and gazed at the air as if watching the music. He heard Stephen turn his key in the door, but he did not get up. He sat with his hands on his knees and waited with the terrible immobility of those who have lost the means of talking to their children.

  “Hello,” Stephen said again.

  The music was playing. His father raised his right hand three inches off his knee as a greeting, but said nothing more. He was listening to the singing like a man looking at a faraway place. There were words in the air, but Philip Griffin did not need to say them, he did not need to say: “When your mother was alive, she liked this one,” for Stephen already knew it. He knew the terrible sweetness of the melancholy in that music and how it soothed his father to be there within it. He said nothing and sat down.

  On the small tape recorder beside his chair Philip Griffin turned up the volume and let the music fill the space between them. They had not seen each other for three weeks, but sat in their armchairs, surrounded by Puccini, as if the spell of the music would bear no interruption and the memory of the slim and tall figure of Anne Griffin was walking in the room. The sorrowfulness of the aria was cool and delicious; it was beyond their capability of telling, and while it played, father and son lingered in its brief and beautiful grief, each thinking of different women.

  The heavy golden curtains of the room were tied back from the window; they had not been closed in many years, and their gathered folds held within them the ageing dust of the man who sat there every day. Philip Griffin had his face turned to the open Venetian blind, and bands of orange light fell across it as the streetlights came on. He was sixty-eight years old. He had never been handsome, but had once been lively. Now his hair grew like curling grey wires over his ears and in his ears, while the crown of his head was so bare it looked vulnerable and expectant of blows. As he sat he held his hands in his lap and sometimes looked down at them and turned them over, as if searching for traces of the cancer he imagined must be growing inside him. He was a tired man who had grown to dislike company. The place in his spirit where he was broken had grown so familiar to him, and he had so long ago abandoned the notion of any fingering or magic that could repair it, that his living had assumed a frayed quality, waiting for the last thread to give.

  The music played, he held his hands. When three arias had ended, he reached down and clicked off the machine. “Well,” he said, and looked through the darkness of the room to see with astonishment the changed face of his son.

  2

  You can know a lot about a man when you are measuring him for trousers. You can know his own sense of expectation about the world and whether he feels himself fitting into it or not. Sometimes he has grown beyond himself, and the extra inches that may be the loss of youth are hidden by the quick thumb on the tape measure. Sometimes the inches are the inches of pleasure and the man allows them like the proof of his own expansion, the feasting and fortune he has known. He can be told he is larger now, for he feels the responsibilities of his age and is not yet aware of his own diminishment. The tape measure tells a thousand stories. As a tailor in Clery’s, Philip Griffin had made a legion of men fit better into the world and, looking at his son in the armchair, knew the slackness of his trouser belt, the looseness of his collar were the telltale signs of love or death. God could not kill the whole family before him, he figured, and so he knew it was the former.

  “Put on the light,” he said.

  Stephen stood up. When he clicked the switch, his father was startled even more by the look of him. Stephen had emerged from adolescence with an angular air of oddity; his body was thin and long and crooked, and his head was enormous. He was almost twice the length of his father. But as he stood there in the room the thinness of him seemed stretched by the pressure of his feelings. His clothes did not fit him; you could put three fingers inside the belt of his trousers, his father thought, your whole hand inside his shirt. The tailor had seen this shrinking often before, he had measured men who trembled silently in the dressing room, feeling the wasting of themselves beneath the power of a passion, but it belonged to springtime. It was a May-time rapture, an annual fact of men in their clothes like the brief season of happiness in summer when satisfied love made every man larger in his chest by an inch. No, this was different; Stephen was alarmingly thin, and even before he had turned his face fully towards his father, Philip Griffin had begun to formulate who the woman might be.

  “I’ll make tea,” Stephen said.

  “If you want.”

  “Do you?”

  “If you’re making it.” Stephen turned to leave the room. “I don’t need the light,” said his father, and sat back into the darkness when the switch clicked. Alone, he quickly glanced outside at the old car Stephen had driven up from the west and saw that one side of it had been recently dented.

  “My God,” he said aloud to his wife, and then reminded himself not to talk to her while Stephen was in the house. He sat and listened. He heard the loping of his long son moving about the kitchen down the hallway. It was an empty place, made all the more so by how full it had once been with the presence of a woman and two children; on its clean counters and polished tabletop were the memories of the ten thousand meals of childhood, the smallest of tarts and jam, the hiss of the iron and sizzle of fry. They were not entirely vanished into the walls, and Philip Griffin knew that as Stephen made the tea and stood by the counter the sense of loss would still be potent. He should have sold the house after Anne and Mary died. He should have moved out and left the place; for no matter how glowing were all the moments of the past, the first years of marriage, the happiness of Stephen’s birth, then two years later, his sister Mary, the tumble and laughter, the evenings at the Dublin Grand Opera Society, the Christmases, none of it mattered or survived that afternoon he had been called from the tailoring in Clery’s to come to the hospital and identify his wife and daughter after the car crash.

  He should have sold the house then, but didn’t. He couldn’t, the grief was too great. He breathed the death in the living room air, the sorrow that lingered in the stairs, until it got inside him. He never knew that a small man could carry so much grief and was amazed that the years did not diminish it but amplified it, until the day three years ago when he had woken up and realized with a huge sigh of peace that at last he was dying.

  Now, as he sat in the darkness listening to Stephen in the kitchen, he knew memories grew sharper with time. For the measure of his pain in losing
Anne Nolan was the measure of his love; perhaps if he had loved her less he might have endured the world better afterwards; perhaps it was never intended that we give ourselves so much to one person that the vanishing of their face makes us feel the world is only a shadow. So, as he sat there in his armchair looking towards the street, he prayed that his son would feel the emptiness of the kitchen like a pain, and somehow realize he must not love too deeply.

  “Here’s the tea. Do you want the light?”

  “Not unless you do.”

  “All right.”

  Stephen left the light off and came in carefully with the tray.

  They sat with their tea. In the time since he had realized he was dying, Philip had not mentioned it to his son. He hoped the illness would sweep through him swiftly. He imagined waking one morning moments before his death and then surrendering in a long gasp; his good suit was ready in the closet with one of the silk ties from Harry O’Connell up in Brown Thomas. He would be no burden on Stephen and didn’t want his son worrying about him. The boy had had enough. No, any day now it would arrive; for a man who had already put up with as much as he had, there would be no painful deterioration. He was certain of it. One day he would be alive, sitting in his chair, the next he would be dead.

  He sipped his tea and looked at his son. He even looks like a history teacher, Philip decided. There’s something dishevelled about history, goes well in a tweed jacket, or even a corduroy. But not those jumpers he wears, not on a man over thirty. No, a man should wear a jacket.

  “How is school going?” he asked. It was what he always asked, and always received the same answer.

  “It’s fine.”

  And there was comfort in that, too, like throwing a ball back and forth to each other, the familiarity and simplicity of its rhythm making everything seem in its place in the world.

  There is no way he can tell me, thought Philip. No way he can begin to say, I have fallen in love. And that this is already different from anything else, that already he knows that there is a greater magnitude of feeling in his heart than he had possibly imagined before. There is no way he can tell me, even as I cannot tell him I am dying.