As It Is in Heaven

by Niall Williams

  “Mr. Griffin? Oh, Mr. Griffin?”

  He did not answer, and Moira walked slowly from the kitchen to the door of the sitting room. Everything about that minor journey—the condition of the carpet, the faded greyish quality of the wallpaper, cool as old skin when she touched it, and the swell of melancholy in that movement of the music that was tangible in its pain and dying—made her afraid. When she put her hand on the door and moved it ever so slowly open, she was inseparable from her own visions of television women detectives arriving on the scene of murder.

  She eased open the door and put her head around it first. Then she saw him: Stephen Griffin, poleaxed, lying back in the armchair with his head turned to one side. His right hand conducted in a slow waving. His eyes were closed; he did not sense her beside him, and even when she said his name again with some alarm, nothing happened. Then Moira pulled out the plug of the music system.

  “Mr. Griffin?”

  Stephen opened his eyes. He did not want to.

  “Mr. Griffin, are you all right?” She was standing over him. She did not ask him if he was injured or ill or if he wanted to get up; she did not suppose that he had been drinking, nor that a sudden seizure had knocked him back into the chair. Moira Fitzgibbon was more intelligent than that. The knowledge had gathered in her before she had to think of it.

  “I said I’d call in because of tonight,” she said. “I have a complimentary ticket for the concert in Galway.”

  19

  Stephen took the ticket. Of course he did. He took the ticket as if it were a hand reaching down to him and drove the yellow car to Galway that night to hear Gabriella Castoldi play Vivaldi in the Town Hall. By the time he had arrived in his seat, his inner organs had each contracted into tight balls of anticipation and he carried them like a bag of stones inside the tight sweated cotton of his shirt. But when the musicians came onto the stage and Gabriella lifted her bow to the first note, the stones dissolved and everything was forgotten. He could breathe. There was a scent of lilies in the air, and as the concert continued, this time he did not take his eyes from the slender woman with the sorrowful face. He looked at her throughout. There was something about her face, he thought, something there in the places beneath her eyes, in the washed and drawn pallor of her skin, the smallness of her mouth, which was turned so minutely downward, the furrow in her brow as she frowned over the instrument and gazed down along the strings as if looking for evidence of the impossible. She is as fragile as the violin, he thought, and thought of the mesmerism of her sadness and how it merged into the notes. He loved how she played and loved the sorrow, too, seeing some part of himself reflected in her, the way lovers do.

  Since Stephen Griffin had abandoned the idea of romantic love, he was not even aware of it emerging like translucence on his face, sweetening his tongue, and giving him the strange radiance of saints. He was not aware that Paolo Mistra and Maria Motte, across their cello and violin, could notice it, or that Gabriella herself recognized him as the man who had crashed his car and was now placed like a yellow light in the fourth row. Stephen did not think of these things. He was aware only of wanting the concert to continue indefinitely, of feeling the uneasy combination of peace and longing battling in the lower regions of his stomach.

  When the interval arrived he realized his clothes were wet, but not that the man and woman sitting next to him had been soaked also, nor that the scent of lilies was emanating not from the stage or the perfumed ladies of Galway town but from between the fingers of his two clasped hands. He wondered if he should get up, if a walk around the foyer might dry him off, but when he moved his feet forward and saw the extent of the stains behind the knees of his trousers, he sat still while everyone else moved. He was so intensely in his own world that the ceiling might have fallen on him and white angels descended and he would not have moved but waited for the concert to resume.

  The second half passed dreamlike as the first. When it ended the audience stood to applaud, and fanned the scent stageward. Standing quickly Stephen felt his head become a stone; its weight nearly toppled him, he lost the balance of himself as though the world he stood in was suddenly tilted now. He looked down, he opened his mouth to suck in the air, he reached for the back of the seat in front of him and then raised his head to look at her before she left. And for the briefest moment, a semiquaver, the slightest note in the music of what happens, he saw Gabriella Castoldi see him standing there.

  Then she looked away.

  20

  And nothing more.

  No words, no greeting, no meeting after the concert. A shambles of desire collapsing steadily in upon itself.

  And some form of all this Philip Griffin read in his son’s position on the chessboard that long night while Stephen slept with the queen in his fingers.

  “God, Anne,” he said, “it’s worse than I thought.” He lowered his head, and his bald pate caught the streetlight and flashed like an orange moon falling to rest on Stephen’s arm. The size of his son compared with him made Philip’s desire to cradle him in his arms first awkward and then impossible. He could not even reach around the girth of him in the armchair, and comforted himself with the small gesture of taking Stephen’s free hand. The other one was still holding the chess piece, and the father knew enough not to disturb it, for it might easily be the branch his son clung to, keeping him from drowning altogether in the other world of dreams. He knelt there on the carpet and took his son’s hand. Pools of a clear black sadness kept filling inside him, for he imagined it was hopeless, because everything about Stephen was, and that hopelessness was Philip’s own. He could not look at his son without feeling that the difficulties his son faced in the world were the failings of himself, that every pain and hardship Stephen endured were caused by some lacking in Philip, and that the true measure of the progress of manhood is the ruthless exposure to all fathers of the indefensible vulnerability of their children.

  He could see the future the way one sees accidents half-moments before they happen. He could see his son’s heart breaking, and wanted to cry out against it. But he did not. Instead, he knelt and kept his head down against Stephen’s hand, feeling the heat of desire still burning away in the skin, the raging inside him as he alternated between struggle and surrender, rolling his head, moaning, humming fragments of music and waving the chess queen like a slow-motion baton to the orchestra of dreams.

  “What’ll I do, Anne?” Philip whispered, for she was standing not far away from him. “What’ll I do?”

  He did not raise his head to look at his wife; he did not need to. She was more vivid than seeing could make her, and her advice was more audible for being silent.

  It was not yet dawn. But the slow high hum of the milk van outside signalled the beginning of morning. Once, the clinking of bottles being delivered had woken Philip Griffin by Anne Nolan’s side, and daily he had kissed her the kiss of good morning while she slept on and he sat and slowly stood to look out the upstairs window at Tom Boylan and his son slipping in and out of the gardens with empties and refills. It was not the kiss of the passionate or raptured, it declared no intent further than the ordinariness of loving her, and most often she did not respond to it in her sleep. It had become to Philip Griffin the milk-bottle kiss, the beginning of a new day, a motion reflex of his heart so natural that years later, when the milk bottles had been replaced by clinkless cartons and Boylan’s son only sometimes took his father on the rounds, Philip Griffin still kissed his wife with the delivery of the morning.

  He heard the footsteps in the leaves beneath the chestnut tree in the garden and thought, young Boylan slips over the wall of MacMahon’s next door. He can do eight houses that way while the father gets to drive the float at walking pace past the sleeping houses. The footsteps moved quickly up across the grass, and the single carton was left by the door, then the figure of Eddie Boylan moved across the opened blinds towards Lynch’s. Only when he had gone, and with him the fleeting memory of the morning kiss, did Philip Griffin
try to stand up, only to find that his knees had locked.

  “Shaggit.”

  He couldn’t move. He pressed down on the armrest beside Stephen, but wasn’t strong enough to raise himself; he was trying for the third time, cursing his knees and the absurdity of age, when the queen fell from his son’s fingers and Stephen woke up. It was a moment before the startling reality of Stephen’s dreams disappeared and he saw the old man kneeling beside him.

  “I was getting something. You dropped it,” said the father. “Shaggit, I can’t get up. Feckin knees.”

  There was a pause, Stephen didn’t move. He rubbed his eyes, he felt the dryness of his lips and saw the chessboard in the half-light by his father’s head. Then, as Philip Griffin raised the queen in his left hand as an explanation, Stephen supposed he had only closed his eyes for a millisecond, that the chess game was still continuing, and that the extraordinary journeys on the humpbacked hills of his dreams where he had been looking for his voice had been an illusion so condensed that in fact no time had passed. He stood up and bent down. Philip Griffin clasped onto him. His son’s hand was damp with ardour, and as Philip was pulled to his feet, his heart sank further with the certainty that he was to live to oversee more failure and grief.

  “God Almighty,” he said, when Stephen had straightened him. He still held the queen in his right hand, but once he was standing he handed it to his son like an embarrassment he was glad to be rid of, and then announced he was going outside to get the milk for the breakfast.

  While Stephen replaced the queen in the vulnerable position in the centre of the board, Philip opened the front door and stood outside on the step. He looked down at the carton on the mat and reminded himself to remind Boylan to put it on the windowsill instead so he wouldn’t have to bend for it. He looked at the deep blue of the sky that was not yet lit with morning and felt the chill of the winter ahead on the small hairs at the back of his neck. He had imagined this would be his last winter, the cancer would finally overtake him, and he would not be sad. Or so he had thought. But now, standing there on the threshold of the house of his life and feeling the thin crisp quality of the air—the polished and brittle stillness of that Dublin morning that he knew would harden daily now until it became the brutal relentlessness of iron—Philip Griffin knew that he must try to live on for Stephen’s sake.

  “God, Anne,” he had whispered when she had told him. He reached his hand to touch the red brick of the house to steady himself. Oh God. He heard her tell him again, more softly this time, as if she did not understand that the very gentleness of her spirit made him want to be with her all the more. She was the most tender woman, and while he stood with her on the doorstep he knew that more suffering was required before he could join her for eternity in heaven. No, he couldn’t die and be with her yet. He stood there and looked down at the milk carton; he felt the V of cold where his cardigan exposed his chest, and he measured in a single look the distance between standing and lying down.

  The first cars passed along the road towards the city, and the soft whoosh of their passing emphasized the absence of possibilities; once, he could have gotten in his car and driven into Clery’s, stitching anger, loss, and mysteries into the hems of trousers and knowing that briefly they were resolved as he fit another man into the world. Now there was no escaping, but as he stood on his doorstep and felt the morning, Philip Griffin told his wife that she was right and that, in the strange physics of love, the weight on his heart would be lighter for carrying Stephen.

  He bent and picked up the milk carton. He went into the kitchen and called Stephen in to join him. He boiled the kettle and made tea in the half-dark of the dawn, picking cups from the sink and rinsing them lightly while Stephen stood between dreams and waking, waiting by the table. Then, as the light was coming up across the back garden, both men sat down in their positions like pieces in a chess game, saying nothing, but dwelling in a gentle quietness that was as comfortable as old blankets and gathering themselves for the long game of Love and Death that lay ahead.

  II

  1

  That morning Stephen left at ten o’clock and drove the yellow car from his father’s house in Dublin to return to the west once more. He did not tell his father any more than he had already revealed in the chess game, but as he drove out the Templeogue Road, having waved goodbye, he had the strange sensation of having shared secrecies.

  The moment his son had left, Philip had hurried upstairs and taken out his green Harris tweed, white shirt, and thick brown trousers. When he put on the trousers, he was pleased to discover that the material did not cling or bunch about the knees but fell cleanly to his feet. The line of the trousers was critical to a man’s well-being. How often he had seen customers in Clery’s with sagging and baggy trousers, miscut and misshapen, drawn by machines for men that did not exist and worn with a grey pathos, as if declaring how the wearer knew that nothing in the world ever measured up. When the knee pressed the trouser leg the line was lost, a man walked as if he were pushing a wheelbarrow, and shortly life provided him one. If the seat was tight, so too was the life, and soon no button or zip would restrain the pressure. It was a simple philosophy, the metaphysics of tailoring, and Philip Griffin applied to his own clothes everything that thirty years in Clery’s had taught him about humanity. In his bedroom was a full-length mirror, not for the pleasure of his vanity, but because it was only when he was looking at himself in his clothes that he could appreciate the condition of his own health. So when he saw the line of the trousers in the mirror he was relieved; he was still the same distance from the ground as a year previously. None of the raised hemming that was the first sign of certain death was needed, and he began to think that the intrusion of the cancer might not be as far progressed as he had imagined. Then he put on the white shirt. It was cotton. Cotton is a cloth full of forgiveness, and even as Philip buttoned it over the small upturned bowl of his stomach he could feel the innocence in the material. When he had it closed under his chin he was in the morning of his own First Communion and was his father’s hands doing the buttons under his seven-year-old chin. It smelled clean as grace; the buttons were just so, neither slipping back through the holes like those of inveterate gamblers nor resisting going through, like the shirts of bridegrooms. He ran his hands down the sides of his torso and delighted briefly in the smooth and simple elegance of a white shirt. Then he chose a tie; only three in a hundred men knew how to knot a tie. He had proven the figure once with young Dempsey, counting the inept nooses that choked the greater portion of their customers and suggesting it was among the critical wisdoms a father could pass to his son: how to knot a tie. He passed his hand across his face doing his, as if it were a blessing, and then took his jacket from the wardrobe. A tweed; you have to be a certain age to wear tweed, to have the woven strands of your own life reflected in the griefs, hardships, and pleasures of the cloth, and not lost within them like an overcoat. The green Harris was a jacket Philip Griffin had worn for fifteen years; the moment he put his arm through the sleeve he could feel its cool lining like a second skin. The comfort he felt in the jacket was a testimony to his own life, the weight of it, the roughness of the cloth that had diminished now to a rubbed softness; he wore it like evidence of himself, and once he had put it on looked in the mirror to see if he still looked the same.

  He did.

  “The cancer hasn’t shrunk you yet,” he told himself.

  He took the keys to his car and went downstairs. The urgency of what he must do struck him once more as he confirmed the direness of Stephen’s heart by a glance at the chessboard in the sitting room. In the daylight it was more alarming than ever, and a moment later he was driving quickly into the city in the car that held like a stubborn memory the scent of white lilies. He drove as quickly as he could in the impossible knot of the morning traffic. The sky was pasty and mottled, holding away the light above the gathered clouds like a resentment, and preparing the lunchtime rain. Dublin barely moved in the early mornin
g; rather, from the ringed estates of new houses that had taken away the mountains, cars hurtled a quarter of a mile and then slowed abruptly into the swollen and choked arteries of the city, where they inched like thick oil towards the heart. Philip Griffin drove a half metre behind the backside of a bus. He had not been in traffic since he had retired and felt with a small fall of his heart how the city had grown without him. We are smaller and more insignificant than we ever imagine, he told his wife. But then the scent of the lilies reached him again and he felt only the significance and urgency of his own role in the plot of his son’s loving. He rolled down the window and waved his arm at the young driver in the car next to him.

  “Emergency!” he cried out, and pulled the car into the outer lane.

  It was half an hour later when he arrived in the waiting room of Dr. Tim Magrath. He had no appointment, but told the receptionist he needed to know how long he had to live and would wait to find out. He opened the button of his jacket and sat down. He took his fresh handkerchief and dabbed the top of his head. His head was damp and his lips were dry, but otherwise he showed no signs of a fatal illness, and for a moment considered the remote possibility that in fact he was not carrying a cancer after all. From the morning he had diagnosed himself he had never sought any medical confirmation; he had been more certain of his condition than any test could prove. The cancer was his companion, and on wet mornings in early summer he could sometimes feel it invade a new region of his bowel, moving like a dark liquid or a shadow in the undetected privacies of his organs. He read its evidence in a dozen different ways: in the slowness of his movements when he sat on the toilet, in the taste of chewed chalk that prevailed on his palate when he ate beef, in the interminable bouts of his gas, the sudden exhaustion in mid-afternoon, and the pain that was like passing marbles when he urinated. And of very many, these were only a few. Until the moment he sat in the doctor’s waiting room he had not considered for one minute that he could be wrong. But now, briefly, within the inviolable comfort of the Harris tweed, and desperate for a stay of death to help his son, Philip wished heartily that he was. Or at least he wished that death was not so close, that the latest rumblings and squelchings he heard below his stomach in the early morning were not the telltale signs of the further progress of the disease. If I can live for another while, he thought. If I can live long enough to see Stephen through the far side of this. He swallowed the sadness that rose in his throat at the thought of his son, but it kept coming, and he had to tilt his head back and pretend to admire the ceiling.