“You’re not a guest in the hotel, sir?” Maurice Harty thought the visitor might faint. “There’s tea served in the lounge if you’d care for it.”
But Stephen did not move or answer. He only nodded his head slowly, watching a place on the carpet, waiting, swallowing the bitterness, and then taking the decision not to be defeated, not to see as failure the dreamlike journey across the Shannon and through the mountains to see the woman who was not there, not to suppose these were signs or messages and that he should abandon everything and return to Clare. When he lifted his head and thanked Maurice Harty, he had regained some balance and, assuring the porter that he would return to hear the music on Friday, he walked out and down the steps of the hotel into the moist blackness of the night, returning to the yellow bedroom in the guesthouse of Mary White, to lie in his clothes on top of the blankets and eat slowly, one after the other, the dark and delicious fruit of the plums.
9
When Philip Griffin returned home from the hospital he wore the cancer like a suit of clothes two inches too tight in all measurements. His life was constricting about him, and although he played Puccini and left the lights burn through the night, he could not escape the feeling of things closing about him. He had three bottles of tablets, but only the white ones were painkillers. These he took three times a day, imagining them as timber ramparts against an advancing army of iron. Since he had been in the hospital the pain had increased enormously. Often when he was tailoring he had heard stories of men and women being opened in surgery and the doctors seeing the cancer almost growing in the exposure of the air and quickly stitching the patient closed again. Air makes it multiply was the given wisdom among the middle-aged men standing for their leg measurements, and Philip Griffin had believed them, taking the strange apposition of air and death as another of the mysteries of life and thinking on it no further. Until now. Now the pain that rode up his stomach into his heart seemed better for air, and he wondered if the ease of pain when he walked outside was in fact the approach of death.
Since he made the pact with God in the hospital, he had had little chance for good deeds. He had tried to do what the nurses told him, had eaten the mild-flavoured yogurt-like food that slid like wet paste in his throat, and not pressed the call button when Healy in the bed beside him stole his sleep by venting all night his repressed anger in urgent, snapping snores and bulbous farts. But Philip feared that this was not enough. It was when he was home again in the empty house behind the chestnut tree that he knew he must get under way a daily practice of goodness. What it might be, or how he might achieve it, he had no idea. Vaguely he supposed that it would be something to do with the people he would meet that he would see things in the course of an ordinary day, and that all that could be expected of him would be to react in as kind and generous a manner as he could.
On his third full day home he left the house in the afternoon with the painkiller still dissolving on his tongue and drove into the city centre. For the first time in years he did not drive the car with any impatience or haste, but motored instead through the begrimed streets like a Sunday driver in the pastoral quietude of a country lane. He waved like a mad uncle at passersby. He touched the brim of his hat at a mother and child on a pedestrian crossing, and allowed cars to pull out of side streets in front of him. While the painkiller made numb his inner organs, he smiled at Dublin and softly whistled “Dixie” when the car in front of him took the last space on Stephen’s Green. He wanted to park nowhere else, and so contented himself by driving around the green park repeatedly. When at last he found a space, it was the middle of the afternoon. Philip stepped out onto the path. Goodness, he thought. Acts of goodness. He moved along the path with pleasantness on his face. He prepared a kind of wordless greeting in his raised eyebrows and gave it continuously to the people coming against him, hoping that it was not misunderstood and that God was watching. When he had greeted a hundred Dubliners like this along the top of Stephen’s Green, he took their lack of acknowledgement as a judgement and headed down to the crush and hurry of Grafton Street with a growing awareness of how difficult goodness was going to be.
When he reached the traffic light at the top of the street, the wind pressed on his back and he had to hold on to his hat. In that instant the light changed and the people hurried across past him. He was left standing there, and felt the pulling away of life. He didn’t move, and the light changed again. It was a moment before another cluster of people gathered around him. He gave some of them small smiles and a parcel of nods, but they paid him—an odd little man holding his hat at the traffic lights—no attention. As the light changed once more, a woman with two young children was on the kerbside next to him. Philip Griffin offered a child his hand to cross the street, but the mother drew away the child at once and was gone.
Again he stood there and did not move. He watched the city, the city he was born in. He watched its grey relentless tide of forlorn faces, the figures of the windblown and harried, dispossessed of dreams, hastening along the street in the narrowness of shopping and getting home. He heard the noise of people and traffic and knew how each one was lost in the privacy of his own pursuit, not noticing one another. No hand reached out to touch him. The lights changed three times while he stood on the edge of Stephen’s Green. Courier cycles flew past. A taximan paused his cab and waved the old man to cross, but Philip Griffin declined. He was stilled on the point of an epiphany, and as the first spits of rain hit the crown of his head, he imagined that he saw only for the first time the vast monstrosity of selfishness and meanness that had become the world. Across the street he could read the headlines of the evening papers: TAKEAWAY KILLING. FATHER RAPIST. The city he was born in was now this, and Philip Griffin had to hold on to the traffic light for something solid.
It was raining heavily now, and darkness was descending rapidly into the afternoon.
Philip’s face was wet when he turned to walk back to his car, defeated. He had thought that if he walked into the centre of the city his footsteps would be guided to the person who was in need of his help. But nothing had happened. There was a woman sitting on the ground begging, not far from the top of Dawson Street. Another was across the way at the gates to the Green, and a child with a cardboard begging tray was beyond. What was he supposed to do? When he reached his car he had still not resolved it. He carried the load of his ungiven goodness like a burden of treasure. I am unused to people, he thought. I don’t have the faintest idea how to approach anyone. He leaned against the top of his car. It was cold, and city grime soiled his face.
Then, abruptly and without further thought, he took out his wallet, drew out all the notes that were inside it, and walked over to the park railings of Stephen’s Green.
He glanced around to see who was looking at him. But he needn’t have. Men and women passed without noticing, and Philip Griffin was able to take all the money he had, place it on the ground under the bushes inside the bottom of the railing, and walk away.
It is not much, he thought, but it is something. Let God direct whoever He wants to find it.
The following day he did the same thing. Only this time he chose a different railing.
That evening, while “O mio babbino caro” played loudly in the sitting room, Philip Griffin counted his money. He had been a prudent man. He had modest savings and investments, and lived his quiet life without show. The money he had saved had been put aside for a future that never arrived. Ultimately it would have been Stephen’s, but now he reasoned that the sale of the house would be enough. Besides, obscurely, it was all for Stephen, the given-away money being the acts of goodness which would buy Philip the time on earth to help Stephen through the breaking of his heart.
He calculated the figures in a jotter with his reading glasses halfway down his nose, poring over them into the night like God’s accountant, balancing the books of good deeds against the rest of his life. How many more weeks did he need, and how much per week, per day, did that require? His wife was
beside him while he did the calculations, doing the figures as if budgeting the time and money for a holiday together.
They could be together in heaven in less than a year, he figured. “Is that all right, love?” he whispered in the lamplight. In a year Stephen would have survived and be returned to his ordinary life once more. In a year Philip could have given away all the money, arriving at a zero balance like a cleansed soul and hearing the trumpets coming to get him. He would be doing it for Stephen, doing it out of that most potent mixture of love and regret, as if he could now and here make recompense for the innumerable small failures of his fatherhood, the doomed and islanded silence in which he had left his son for so long, repairing in small measure the great gap that he had let grow between them.
Philip did not want to calculate the exact day, for he supposed that was a vanity and taking the control from God. It was enough, he thought, to know the rough time, and that when he had exhausted the wallet of goodness God Himself would not be long arriving to keep up His end of the pact. That night he went to sleep with the painkiller tasting like almonds in his mouth and the prospect of the year ahead brightened with visions of giving. He lay in the blankets and felt Christmas coming. He placed his hands on his stomach and sensed their heat travelling like a minor army to meet the cancer. He had named it Prendergast for the despised, low-sized, and sly figure of his first boss—a tailor at Clery’s who had routinely ripped out Philip Griffin’s stitches, saying butchers could do better, and had forced him to work long evenings on repairs when he should have been courting Anne Nolan. Prendergast was a bastard. But as the tablets took action he was masked and made invisible, erased until three o’clock in the morning, when he would come as fire in the old man’s insides and reawaken the world to the certainty of suffering and woe.
The following day Philip Griffin drove to his bank on Merrion Square and withdrew £5,000. When the teller heard the amount he hesitated and disappeared. An assistant arrived, and Philip Griffin was drawn down the counter and asked what he wanted the money for.
“To give away,” he said.
“I’m sorry, sir?”
“To get rid of, to give away,” the old man said, “not that it’s your business. It’s my money”
“Yes, sir, only that …”
“What?” He shot the word so quickly and with such pointed indignation that the assistant manager withdrew. “I’ll get you a draft, sir,” he said.
“Cash. It must be cash.”
There was a flat, beaten moment between them.
“Five thousand pounds? In cash?”
“Correct.” The old tailor looked the other man directly in the eyes. How difficult is goodness, he thought, everything blocks it. And deep within him, Prendergast turned like a knife.
It was half an hour before he got the money. It lay neatly in a long envelope, and when he walked out the doors of the bank it conferred on Philip Griffin a sudden power of joy. He was exuberant with possibility. His small eyes flickered at the city, as if seeing everywhere now the chance to touch another’s life. And, in a moment of beatific vision as he passed a bus queue, he wondered if many others were not secretly engaged in doing the same.
This time he did not wait to get the car, but walked directly towards Stephen’s Green. It was, he had decided, the appropriate place, and would remind God of the reason for their pact, Stephen, Stephen’s green. He smiled to himself at the small joke, although in fact the banknotes were less green and more the colour of bruises.
As Philip neared the park once more, he reached inside the envelope and took a clutch of twenty-pound notes. He kept them in his hand and walked on. Sweat gathered in the brim of his hat and he felt his trouser catch at the back of his knee. Three hours had passed since he had taken his morning painkiller, and now he was emerging from it like from a tunnel into the bright searing of the pain. God, help me. The money was wet in his hand inside his pocket, the railings made him dizzy, and he had to stop and lean and wait for a small group of schoolchildren and their teacher to pass by. Then, once they had passed, he took £480 and quickly slipped it down onto the ground between the railings.
He had to hold on for breath. He could have changed his mind and reached in and withdrawn the money. But he did not. He knew that it could be taken by dogs, eaten by rats, or befouled in any number of ways, that it could be found by the avaricious or the mean-spirited, any number of the evil or selfish undeserving as easily as by the needy. But that did not matter to him. For he trusted in God, and knew that the puzzle of His ways is beyond us, and only vanity leads us ever to imagine that there is more than only the smallest corner of the jigsaw perceivable at any time. No, the money would go where it was to go, Philip reasoned. His job was only to drop it off there, like a deposit of good energy given back into the universe. He watched the winter sky as if light might suddenly break through the heavy blankets of the cloud. But nothing changed, and he walked on. The city of Dublin trundled past, and the small man in the felt hat was lost in the crowds.
(It was only later, when he was back in the sitting room, looking at the set-up chess game on the small table and listening to the music of Madama Butterfly with the painkiller blurry in his stomach that Philip Griffin could sigh and think of Stephen and wonder if the love affair was progressing now, if a father could touch his son on the other side of the country, if goodness travelled through the air like luck or love and could arrive unexpected and simple as a blue sky over Stephen’s head two hundred miles away in the west.)
10
During the night the mist withdrew like an artist’s drapery and in the morning revealed that the mountains had moved closer to Kenmare. It was a John Hinde postcard sky, a blue so intense that it seemed the unreal season of childhood memory. Summer had arrived in Kerry in time for Christmas, and while Stephen sat to the softly boiled egg Mary White had prepared for him, he heard birds singing in the garden. Mary came and went like moments of kindness. She brought him more toast, a fresh pot of tea, entering the room from where she sat for her own tea in the kitchen with the raised eyebrows and pursed mouth of gentle apology, moving around the guest in her own house with the air of being herself an unfortunate interruption. She did not enquire what Stephen was doing in Kenmare, nor did she hover in the room about him while he ate. When he told her after breakfast that he would like to stay until after the weekend, she said only one word, “Lovely,” and allowed herself to smile at the simplicity of this small joy as she hugged with thin arms the long-felt loss inside her.
For Stephen there was almost a week to wait. He did not know whether Gabriella Castoldi had returned yet to Kenmare. The fear of actually meeting her tied the knots of his stomach. But finally, when Mary White knocked softer than a knock on his door and asked if she might tidy his room now, Stephen walked outside into the sunshine. When he reached the town he did not know where to go. He walked around the lampposts like a man looking for his dog. The morning sunshine saddled his shoulders. By half past eleven he had toured the triangle of the streets seven times and had already been noticed by all the shopkeepers. (Mick Cahill on the door at the bank had decided he could be up to no good and must have come over the mountain from Limerick or somewhere to rob them. Veronica Hehir up at the bookshop considered he was a renegade priest, exactly like the one in the book she was reading. When she told Kathleen O’Sullivan, Kathleen replied that he was the eighth that week alone. What was it in Kenmare that drew them?)
“You brought the weather with you.”
Nelly Grant stopped him from her doorway. She had sensed the energy of his restlessness arriving in the town fifteen minutes before she saw him and had kept an eye over the shoulders of her customers for the confirming vision of him loping down the street.
“I’m sorry?”
“The weather.”
“Oh yes,” he said weakly, and then added, “Thank you.”
“We get that here sometimes. Balmy as summer. Makes you think somebody has been looking through the books and
decided we’re due a few more good days before the year’s end.” She watched how he stood there, the mute tightened presence of him that bespoke imbalance and combustion at the same time. “How did you like the plums?” she asked him.
“Very well. Thank you.”
His politeness barely contains him, she thought, like a paper cup of scalding water.
“Come in for more.”
She was abrupt and jovial in the same moment, generous and insistent, and for the second time Stephen Griffin entered the fruit and vegetable shop to be given the plums of balance. Within five minutes Nelly had drawn from him that he was going to stay for the rest of the week, and while she weighed the plums on the old-fashioned scale on the side of the counter, she decided that he was in love. It was the gift of her character that she could be pointed without wounding, and when she told Stephen that he should visit Sonny Sugrue, the barber across the street, she was able to make it seem not a comment on his looks but a prescription for the health of his spirit.
“The growing of hair,” she told him, “can steal our energy. Visit Sonny, and come back for your plums,” she said, and raised her hands to relieve him of his coat before he was aware of it.
Sonny Sugrue was waiting. He was reading a newspaper in the spin-around red-leather chair of his customers and following closely the case of a murder trial in California. He was a man of mostly stomach. That and his hairless head gave him a double roundness that he imagined were comment enough on his pleasure at the world. He had been a barber in Manchester, New York, and Chicago before the arrival of muffled speech like cottonwool in his ears signalled the beginning of his deafness and forced him to return to Kenmare, where he did not need to hear his customers’ requirements. His left ear heard nothing, and his right caught the distinctions of instructions only when his hearing aid was at full volume, something he considered an unnecessary waste of its battery. Sonny cut hair short, or off. When Stephen Griffin appeared in the doorway before him, he looked up from knife murder in California and smiled. There was cutting in this one, he thought.
As It Is in Heaven Page 12