As It Is in Heaven

by Niall Williams

  “It is widespread,” he said. “It is growing all the time.”

  “How long? Tell me.”

  “We can’t tell the time precisely. It is not exact.” He paused; the patient was waiting for more. “There is no science, Mr. Griffin, for the passing of a spirit.”

  “It’s for my son,” Philip said. “He’s in love.”

  Dr. Bannerje looked at the old man and saw the watery signs of illness in his eyes.

  “We’ll do more tests,” he said. “You can consider radiation, but in your case …”

  “Will I have six months?”

  “You must have terrible pain. There are many with less than your condition who are dead.”

  “Will I have six months?”

  The young Indian did not answer at once. He was twenty-nine years old and had come to Dublin from Bombay. The second son, he was the one chosen to be the doctor, while his brother had taken over the small family shop. He had a stillness like white linen folded inside him. But when he heard in the man’s tone the desperate beseeching for life, Hadja Bannerje felt the grief rumple him like an illness of the stomach and acknowledged in himself the awfulness of reaching this place at the end of medicine. This, he thought, is beyond the last page of all the books I have studied. This is a place further than prescription.

  And yet it was familiar to him. His dark eyes turned to the thin curtain about the bed, and for a moment he was not seeing it. He was a twelve-year-old boy seeing his mother when she was dying in the small bed in the back room with the candles lit beside her. His father had moved out into the tiny bedroom of his sons and transformed what had once been the untidy room of his marriage into the ordered and serene place of the dying. The old man had carried lotus and jasmine from the market in his arms and filled bowls, jugs, and vases about the room so that the scent in the air was more heavy and beautiful than sorrow. He had told Hadja death was coming, and the young boy had sat by the bedside waiting for it daily. His mother had lost speech, but lay in the bed weeping and moaning continuously until the medication daily slipped her through the door of oblivion and settled a small peace. When she awoke, two hours before she was allowed the next injection of the morphine, she opened her eyes to see Hadja sitting there and began weeping at once. She could move her hands only in hopeless wavering gestures that fell away from what they reached. Within minutes of her waking, the pain would burn through her again, and she would cry and groan with it. He had thought she was trying to tell him something, and time and again leaned down to moisten her dry and flaked lips and place his ear next to her mouth. But the message never came, she could make no words. Day after day she lingered in that place between living and dying. His father threw out the flowers onto a growing heap in the back yard and brought new ones, sitting through the night in that room where the pain kept coming back and death did not arrive. He held her hand as he would a child’s crossing the road, but no crossing happened, only the agony inside her and the cries they could not cure. She endured for five weeks and two days, and in that time Hadja, who had already been nominated a future doctor by his father and his teacher, sat beside her bed and understood in her eyes that the beseeching was not for death but for life. She could not let go despite the pain, and the waves of it that rode her body could not wash away that final resolve to cling. His father had thought there was something she wanted to say to them, and had assembled the two boys, an aunt, and two uncles by her bedside. The heat outside fell on Bombay like hell’s blanket, and the little group stood around the dying woman waiting. Hadja’s father held a copybook and pencil to note down the slightest sounds that might have been curled-up words. But there was only moaning and the human evidence of anguish. Sweat dripped off them, and the perfume of the flowers made their heads swim. She might be trying to say goodbye to us, his father had said. But Hadja knew it was not that, and when, after elaborate and suggestive goodbyes, the aunt and uncles had gone, he stayed by the bedside and watched his mother’s milky eyes flash with the desperate longing for him to help her. She did not want to die, and threw her head backward and forward on the feather pillow, crying out in terror when she saw the spirits in the room waiting to take her.

  Dr. Hadja Bannerje remembered his mother in the thin white curtain about the hospital bed, and then turned to Philip Griffin.

  “We have no science to say how long,” he said. “We die when we die, Mr. Griffin. We treat the body, not the spirit, but sometimes it is the spirit that is sick. No medicine for the body cures the spirit.” He paused and looked at the tailor, who was leaning forward in the bed as if for some hope in the doctor’s tone, which was soft as the word “India.”

  “This is not what Mr. Higgins, the oncologist, will say to you. It is my own foolishness perhaps, and you will forgive me for saying it. But there is nothing here for you. Mr. Higgins will say you will die when the disease shuts down the vital organs.”

  “Soon?” Philip wet his lips. “Tell me.”

  The Indian nodded. “Mr. Higgins will say so,” he said.

  Philip Griffin slipped back into the clutch of the blankets. He felt suddenly more ill than he had ever felt in his life, and imagined he could see each of his vital organs struggling under the duress of the cancer. His heart seemed to be racing, his breath was shallow, as if all the air of the world were swiftly being sucked away from him.

  Dr. Bannerje watched the news age the patient. “Is there somebody I can call for you?” he said.

  “No. No, thank you.”

  “I will come back and talk to you again,” said Hadja Bannerje, turning slowly to draw back the white curtain from around the bed and walk out of the ward, the weight of failure on his slim shoulders and the smell of smoke about him as he saw his father on the evening of his mother’s death setting fire to the great mound of dead flowers in the back yard in Bombay, the glitter of the stars, and the ashes of love spiralling upward and then falling and alighting in his hair.

  After the doctor had gone, Philip Griffin lay in the thin air left to him at the edge of the world. The illness was increasing so rapidly, he imagined, that he could be dead by evening. Already he felt the cotton of his pyjamas loosening from the wastage of his body and feared that when he stood to go to the bathroom he would have to grab a handful of the material at his waist. He looked across the ward at two other men who were sleeping like corpses in the deep dream of their medication. Oh God, he thought, he will be destroyed if I die now. I can’t die now.

  He turned to his side and wept into the pillow. He smelled the smell of hospitals, in which there was no season or life, and was stricken with a new terror that he might never leave the ward again. In the big window a thin rain was blurring the view of Dublin like an overwashed water-colour, and sharp short gusts of wind blew, weakening the resolve of the sick to get better and be outside. But not Philip Griffin: I have to stop it, just delay it. Oh, please, God. If I die on him now I’ll have done nothing but bring him grief all his life.

  Where no one could see him, and while he was turned on his side towards the gloom of the November afternoon, he raised his right hand slowly to his forehead and blessed himself. He did not know if he believed that God could help, for He had not helped Anne or Mary.

  Still, he prayed. He said the Our Father five times. Then, in the beginning of the sixth, he stopped. The pain was sharp in his chest and he clutched himself.

  “Shaggit!”

  He waited a moment. In his mind he saw the cancer moving like a shadow into a new, still healthy corner of his organs. The room darkened. The sky outside fell like the sea in thickened grey waves, as if the world was spinning upside down and the air was flooded and the light was lost. It was like night in daytime.

  I don’t know if you are there, Philip Griffin said in a silent voice. I don’t know if you can hear me. But please let me live for another while. For my son.

  He paused and hugged himself against the pain. Then added: If you let me live, I will try and do …

  He couldn’
t find the word.

  I will try and do some … some act of goodness each day.

  Philip Griffin waited, but nothing happened. The pain continued like a fierce storm that November afternoon, pain like rain, falling like a cold monsoon on the head of Dr. Hadja Bannerje in the car park of St. Vincent’s, where he missed his mother and promised himself to return to his father in Bombay at the end of his final residency, pain falling out of the grey heavens in a deluge of despondency and loss, until at last Nurse Grainne Mangan came into the ward and turned on all the lights, and Philip Griffin did not tell her to turn them off.

  5

  The icy grip of the Atlantic cracked Stephen like thin glass, and his cries flew as shards into the air. He was breathless as the dead and saw the night sky disappear into the foam of a wave passing over him. Underwater he was borne towards the shore, and at last stood up in the rolling tumble of the tide and screamed. He screamed as evidence of his own durability, trying to outcry the noise of the waves and to free his jaw from the frozen fingers of death. His hands shook wildly, and then, as the wind caught him, his knees did the same, convulsing him in tremors until he was a blurry out-of-focus figure on the sand and had to kneel down and put his hands out like a man trying to hold on to the spinning of the world.

  It was an hour before he had dressed himself, drawing the clothes over his wet and sand-stuck body, and walking gingerly up from the sea onto the roadside like a new arrival on the planet. When he reached home he sat and played the Vivaldi disc, this time not resisting the image of the woman playing the violin, and wondering only how he was going to see her again.

  The following morning Stephen went to school and made an appointment with Carol Blake, the secretary, to see the principal at the end of the day. At once Carol noticed a difference in him, and from the magazines in which she read widely was able to interpret all aspects of men’s motives and behaviour.

  “Something up with him all right,” she told Eileen Waters later during their tea break.

  “Really?”

  “Oh yes,” said Carol, dunking her biscuit. “I’d say he’s in love.”

  “Mr. Griffin? I hardly think so. With whom, for goodness’ sake?” asked Mrs. Waters, relishing the unexpected foray into the wildly improbable.

  “Some man, I’d say.”

  This news hit Mrs. Waters like two fists in the generosity of her stomach.

  “A man?” she said.

  “You can tell,” said Carol Blake. “I can tell, anyway.”

  “Oh God.”

  Eileen Waters leaned against her desk. News reports of sexual scandal and abuse in schools mottled in her mind, and she was suddenly stricken with visions of infamy. She took to her office. She could not sit down, she paced about, she plucked up her ruler like rectitude, and was still in a state hours later, when Carol Blake knocked on the door and introduced the figure of Mr. Griffin. The principal turned on him like a gunship and saw at once the confirming evidence of her own fantasy.

  “Thank you, Carol,” she said. “Close the door.”

  From the delicate manner of Stephen’s sitting it was apparent to Eileen Waters that Carol Blake was correct, and how she had not seen it before she did not know. In the moments before she spoke she chastened her own judgement severely and made a minute shaking of her head at how devious the world had become. Then she pursed her lips at the teacher and narrowed her green eyes to say:

  “You have a problem, Mr. Griffin?”

  “I want to take some personal time,” he said. His fingers were touching the desk, and his eyes were moving to the window.

  Mrs. Waters moved her ruler forward an inch with both hands, tapping the two ends of it with her forefingers for the small comfort of something solid in the world. She felt her anger reddening beneath her makeup.

  “I realize it’s inconvenient.”

  “Yes, it is,” she spat out.

  “I’m sorry.”

  Righteousness lodged like a boiled sweet in her throat, and she coughed it forward, letting go of the ruler on the desk and seeing her right hand fly up before her.

  “We are teachers. We are moral leaders in the community, Mr. Griffin. We have to think of the consequences of our actions. We can’t simply behave the way everyone else does. I hope that’s not what you think, because that’s not what I want, that’s not what I expect.” She paused and reloaded, drawing air through her nostrils, and was delivering what she hoped was the full broadside of her gaze when Stephen said:

  “It’s because of my father. He’s dying.”

  There was a stunned moment, a flattened instant of time during which the mind of Eileen Waters faltered and fell through the gape of her mouth onto the desk in front of her. There was a soft plop just barely audible to Carol Blake listening at the door outside, and then nothing. The principal could not speak, the top button of her blouse was too tight. She was looking down at her desk, which was swimming like wreckage on the watery uncertainty of the moment. She opened her small lips and tried to smile.

  “I’m very sorry,” she whispered, and held on to the desk with her right hand. She was still grasping it a moment later when Stephen stood and left, walking out of the office and down the cool emptiness of the school’s corridors, an inch taller than he was before, the line of his trousers falling perfectly, not rumpled, and the slap of his shoes crisp with resolve.

  6

  An hour after school, in the falling darkness, Stephen called at the front door of Moira Fitzgibbon’s house. A small girl of about eight opened the door five inches and looked at him. When he asked for her mother, the girl stood motionless, as if she was looking at some strange colour radiating about the visitor. Then Moira Fitzgibbon was standing behind her, opening the door.

  How one person’s life touches upon the edge of another’s and moves it like a wheel was a small mystery Moira had learned to accept since first hearing the story of Moses Mooney and his dream of a concert hall. So when Stephen Griffin appeared at her doorstep she sensed the role she was to play before she knew it and was not surprised when he asked her, please, to help him. Her husband was in the sitting room watching television. Cait, her daughter, was still standing in the hallway, gazing past her at the stranger, and Ciara was in the kitchen sprawled over the careful homework of six-year-olds. Like a set bomb, there would be ten seconds before one of them would call her, and so Moira did not invite Stephen in. She stepped forward and drew the door nearly closed behind her.

  “I want to know where I can find her,” Stephen said. “The woman who played the violin. Gabriella Castoldi, her name is.”

  “Who’s there, Cait? Who’s at the door?” Tom Fitzgibbon was calling from the sitting room. Cait’s face was pressed like a mask against the opaque glass of the door. “A man, Daddy,” she shouted.

  Already Tom Fitzgibbon was rising in his chair.

  “I don’t know,” Moira whispered quickly. “I don’t know where she is. I’ll …”

  Her husband’s hand was on the door lock.

  “I’ll try and find out,” she said and, motioning Stephen backward with her head, added in a louder voice, “Thank you now, goodbye,” before turning back to meet her husband coming out the door. “Some business of the Development Association,” she said, and went back inside.

  At ten o’clock that evening Stephen was sitting in the front room of his house awaiting the inevitability of fate. When he saw the headlights move in an arc across the far wall, he did not need to turn around and look out the window, but knew that it was Moira Fitzgibbon and that the plot of his life was moving now in swift grand strokes that made little of great difficulty and certainty out of the improbable. He opened the front door as she was about to knock. The wind shouldered past him like a sea lord and banged the doors of the two rooms.

  “I won’t come in,” Moira said. Her words were blowing back into the town along the road where Moses Mooney was listening for them. The car’s engine was running, and its lights had been left on as if to illumi
ne the murky turning of the plot and make clear the way ahead, for Moira Fitzgibbon was not sure why she had come, why the intensely burning figure of the man at her door had moved her so, or what it was in the disconsolate beseeching of his eyes that made her slip upstairs to her bedroom and go through the letters and papers she had until she found a mention of Gabriella Castoldi playing a residency in a hotel in Kenmare; she did not know why, other than that it was the response of her heart, which, like the purest of souls, felt the grief of another like the grief of herself, and by healing it could heal the world.

  “I won’t come in,” she called again into the wind, for the door was still held wide open and the weather was running through the house like a party of drunken ghosts. “I found something,” she said. “Maybe she’s not there now, I don’t know.”

  “Where?”

  She held up a pamphlet that the wind-ghosts almost took.

  “Kenmare,” she said, “in Kerry. She plays there. Or did, anyway.”

  The teacher took the paper and looked at her. “Thank you,” he said.

  She looked at him, and then could not look at him, as if his vulnerability and innocence in dreaming of love were a sweetness so easily shattered that she dared not imagine it for long. “I have to go, Mr. Griffin,” she said.

  He reached to touch her shoulder.

  “Thank you,” he said.

  And she was gone.

  Stephen brought the piece of paper inside. He sat where the wind had been sitting in the low chair by the fireless chimney and greedily read the words until he found her name. Gabriella Castoldi. What it was to read her name. What it felt like to see the figuration in print and allow himself to imagine her now in the small gatherings of those letters. He touched them, traced them, he sounded the name slowly, Gabriella, and then quickly, calling it softly at first and then getting up and walking through each room and calling it, Gabriella, as if summoning her there at the very moment that she was just leaving each room, as if her name was the first part of her that he could claim in the privacy of that house by the sea and the saying of it was a kind of company that admitted without rejection his outrageous declaring of love. Gabriella.