As It Is in Heaven

by Niall Williams

  “You are well today,” she said, raising a lemon to her face and breathing the sharpness of its fragrance for clarity.

  “You are a wonderful woman,” Stephen said. “I feel very well.”

  “The concert was good?” She did not need to ask him, but wanted to hear in the timbre of his voice the inflection of the spirit.

  “There was almost nobody there. Ha!” He laughed despite himself, thinking about it. “Well, she was. They both were. He played the piano, she …”

  And the words were gone, vanished on the moment when he was about to speak of her and leaving him to fall into the whiteness of space, where his praise and yearning went, unsayable and vast. His Adam's apple, large as a Granny Smith, plunged and rose in the narrow and ropey confines of his gorge.

  “Sit down in there. Drink this,” Nelly told him.

  “What is it?” he asked her as she was stepping past him towards the ash-blond and supercilious figure of Helena Cox, the forty-five-year-old wife of the twenty-six-year-old butcher, Francie, who was just then entering the shop.

  “Water. Good morning, Helena.”

  “Isn't the weather so unpredictable?” said the butcher's wife, looking about for the disappeared man she knew was there. She had seen him come in all week from her window across the street and only now managed to arrive across in time before he left. Her face fell twelve years when she realized she had missed him.

  “Like all of us,” said Nelly, taking with the smallest of smiles the net bag of Brussels sprouts that Helena held and which she knew were not the vegetable that the bound bowels of the Coxes needed. When the customer was gone, moving slowly with heavy weights of suspicion about the thickness of her ankles, Nelly Grant returned to Stephen in the backroom.

  “She thinks you're having an affair with me,” she said, folding her arms on the warmth of herself and beaming at the man who was gulping the water and gazing on the air. “She senses love, though she doesn't know it. She has not found it with the butcher and is afraid somebody else might have found some.”

  “I want something,” Stephen said. “I want something to help keep this, this.” He gestured at the air about himself as though there were visible a cloud.

  “Strawberries,” she said. “Fruit of optimism.” And handed him a punnet she had bought at the morning market in Cork.

  14

  Darkness fell at four o'clock. It was the first day of December, and when the sunlight was thinned out like beaten metal in the mid-afternoon the fog floated in like fine wrapping. The air smelled of wool and herbs, and might have slipped the town into fairytale sleep had it not been for the iron clatter of Guinness barrels, the last delivery between the mountains, and the twin Keogh brothers carting crates of empties that cackled with remembered delight like false teeth come alive.

  Meanwhile, the town readied itself for Saturday night; it held its breath and did the small jobs. It hurried around the yard, it checked the football scores and ate its bread and butter and its slice of curranty brack, hearing the nightly tragedies on the news with mute and impotent anger, before washing its face, putting on a clean shirt, and going to stand outside seven o'clock Mass. By the time Father Moriarty was giving out Communion to the variously odoured breaths of his congregation, the pulse of the town had quickened, and for the first of the escapees, who had drifted away on the last word of the Gospel, the porter was already filling pint glasses on mahogany counters.

  When Stephen walked out into the night, it was like walking into a pillow. He had to hold his face upward towards the obscured moon to find air. Scarves of fog entwined the mountains. When he arrived at the hotel, Maurice Harty on the door gave him a nod like a movie spy; the same girl was at Reception, and while she gave him his ticket she told him with deep self-pity that the crack at the previous night's computer bingo had supposedly been Unreal.

  There were forty people for the concert. He sat in the third row in the aisle seat and did not take his eyes off Gabriella from the moment she entered in a blue dress.

  While she bowed the thousand notes, she saw and heard nothing else, and neither the polite applause nor the coughing fit that took one of the elder Donoghue sisters moved her from the far country of the music. It was only between the pieces that she sometimes glanced down at the audience, turning the sheet music with her bow hand and looking briefly at the faces of those astonished to have found such a musician playing in the hotel. It was in those moments that she looked for the face of Stephen Griffin and found him there in the third row looking at her. She saw him and he looked away, and before she had drawn breath to begin the Kreisler, she was already moved by him. A quality of longing in his look pierced her, and as she pressed into her chin rest, she had to steady herself against the suddenness of feeling. (Although she did not know it yet, there was common ground between them, for Gabriella Castoldi shared with Stephen Griffin the expectation of failure and the familiarity of despair. Neither did she realize yet that grief is a kind of glue, too, that the essence of humanity is this empathy, and that we fall together in that moment of tenderest perception when we see and feel each other's wounds and know another's sorrow like a brother of our own.) She did not think of this yet. She played the Kreisler. She played the Elgar after that, and did not look down at him again until the concert was over. Then, as unexpectedly as life, Gabriella Castoldi walked down amongst the chairs and the departing audience to Stephen Griffin and asked him if he would like to walk out into the fog with her.

  15

  When the salt-smelling letter of Eileen Waters arrived at his house, demanding to know the whereabouts of Stephen and stressing his responsibilities to his students, Philip Griffin realized the love affair must be progressing. He felt the pain less keenly that morning and thanked God for keeping their bargain while he skipped the first tablet of his day. By eleven o'clock the pain that was overdue had still not arrived in his insides, and he stood by the front window looking out on the tranquillity of the suburban street for a sign of anything changed in the world. But there was nothing. The chestnut tree was bare and hung its limbs in the still air above the green pentagon of lawn. A few women and old men walked by to the shops.

  “Well,” he said at last to his wife. “This might go quicker than I thought, love.” And then, with a sudden but muddled enlightenment that perhaps Christmas was to be somehow significant, that patterns ancient as creation make meaning of our days, he added, “I'll go to Toby Madigan's for cloth. I'll make him a suit.”

  And so that morning, without his painkiller, Philip drove into Dublin and left God the extra bonus of £345 behind the railings, before walking over to the brown dust-snowed premises of Tobias Madigan, & Son. It was Son he dealt with. Son was already a grandfather, but his son had decided to be the retail manager of a branch in a cheap clothing chain and the old shop had been left to fade into the line of other buildings that were the ragged endpieces of the street's memory moments before renovation took it away. Son answered the door when Philip knocked. He was all neck wattles and loose skin; he had an air of sagging, as if he were a cloth man or his bones had already preceded him into the next life. He knew Philip Griffin when he saw him and raised the shallow purses beneath his watery eyes as a greeting. “Ah, Phil,” he said, “long time.”

  When the tailor told him what he wanted, Son drew him into the back room, where they walked across newspapers that Time had worked into the floor and reached the bolts of material that Son brushed left to right with a flimsy hand. He was famous once in Dublin for the quality of his cloth, in the vanished era when such things mattered.

  “What about some of this?” he said, drawing out a yard of navy-blue material that was the fabric he had sold to his last customer, the minister, almost two years earlier and before his appearance at the first Tribunal.

  Philip felt it for texture and made a few short tugs between thumb and forefinger, as if teasing the cloth for weakness, the way life does a man. He held the material sideways to the slant of low light that fe
ll diffused through the grimy window and then said he would take it. When Son was measuring and cutting, Philip waited in the front room, which had once been busy enough to keep three salesmen when Prendergast had sent the young tailor across the river to buy more cloth. He stood where he had stood as a young man and felt the heaviness of the years. Then, as he took the cloth, folded in brown paper wrapping and tied with twine, he felt come on again the sharp pain of the cancer. He left the old shop quickly, saying goodbye to Tobias Madigan's son as if not wanting to delay the old man's imminent departure into ghosthood and squeezing gently the offered palm of his hand like a cool white handkerchief damp with tears.

  The pain turned inside him as he walked back to his car. It seemed larger than his insides, in the same way that the immensity of our sorrows dwarfs the smallness of our hearts. His breathing was lumpy, his throat was swollen inwards, and he could not draw inside him the cool air of the December noon. He had to lean against a wall.

  Oh God, he thought, not now. Not here. He saw his hand against the grey building, how it appeared like a freckled fallen bird, useless, trembling with last life. He turned and saw people walking past him. He imagined with brief cruelty against himself the thought of those who had found his money now passing by and his dying against the wall and falling on the cloth of Stephen's unmade suit. His faith wavered and buckled like thin metal in heat; was there no pact after all? Was nobody listening? He reached the knot of his tie with his left hand and pulled it back for air. His right hand clutched at his stomach. He was going to die right there, and then suddenly, like light breaking, the pain eased once more.

  He made it to his car and drove home for his lunchtime painkiller.

  In the afternoon, when the medication had twirled the air about him into a white fuzz like candy floss, Philip opened the cloth out onto the carpet in the front room. Then he lay down upon it. His son was nothing like himself, they were different as tweed and cotton, but in lying on the blue cloth the father could imagine its shape upon his son. He knew Stephen's dimensions chiefly in relation to his own and held out invisible extensions of his arms to the six extra inches in length that measured the unreachable hands of his son. He marked the cloth without use of a tape measure, turning over on the ground and bringing his face so close to the fabric that he could smell the shop forty years earlier, when he had gone there as an apprentice. To save his ruined muscles Philip rolled over to get up. This would be the last suit he would make, and in the silence of the empty house on that darkening December afternoon, he wished to make it better than any he had before. This was to be the last testament of his skill and craft, the final expression of the many years spent cutting and shaping cloth, suiting the city's men in the good-looking fabrics that not only dressed the body but, through some ancient magic of tailoring, bestowed grace, too. This was to be the last one, the last Philip Griffin, and he took the thirty-year-old scissors and slipped it like a surgeon into the thin veins of the cloth. He did not snip; he moved the scissors with an even confidence, making the first cuts with that quality of assurance that he knew transferred itself directly into the finished garment.

  For Stephen, his father wanted the suit to be the shadow of himself. When he cut out the arms he wanted them to be his own and laid them in gestured embrace across the chest of the unmade jacket, hoping that the tenderness he felt in working on the cloth would become part of the suit and forever evident to his son, that the failings and remoteness of his fatherhood would be forgiven and redeemed in this tailoring that was to be his last gift to Stephen.

  He switched on the light over his head and worked on while the headlamps of cars coming home arced across the window like searchlights for love. He worked on into the evening, lying down on his back when his knees locked and delivering a series of short blows to them with his two fists until they loosened and he could kneel like a priest to the work once more. He worked on until the pain knotted up again and he had to stop and wait for the tablet to work. It was while he was sitting there, feeling the now familiar dissolve inside him and the medication taking the pain to someplace beyond Dublin, that the doorbell rang.

  Philip left the cloth on the ground and went to answer it. He was the kind of man who expected that only calamity could make the doorbell ring late in the evening, and was surprised when he saw the thin figure of Hadja Bannerje standing at the door.

  “Mr. Griffin,” he said, “I was wondering how you were doing.”

  The Indian was younger than Stephen. He had come from the hospital to find the dying man because he could not forget how the old patient had told him of his son being in love, and because the tailor had mentioned Dr. Tim Magrath. He had come, too, for reasons he did not yet understand, some part of that submerged algebra of our actions that makes obtuse and elaborate relation between X, the absence of his own father in India, and Y, the man wanting to live a little longer for his son. He came into the front room, where the cloth was cut out and the sewing machine had been uncased, and when Philip Griffin told him that he was making a suit for Stephen, Hadja Bannerje made a small bow, acknowledging the act as something true and correct in the unclear workings of the world. He sat down and saw the chess game laid out on the side table.

  For a few moments the tailor said nothing. He sat in the chair across the room with the suit on the ground between them. He lowered his head and ran his hand up over it, as if smoothing the ghosts of his vanished hair. He was fearful for a while that the Indian had come to tell him the tests had revealed something new, and only when the silence had settled like old spirits between them did he look across the space. Hadja Bannerje was waiting.

  “You have not heard the news of Dr. Magrath,” said the Indian.

  Philip felt a chill on the back of his neck. Here it was, calamity after all.

  “He died this afternoon.”

  When I should have, thought Philip Griffin, when I was fallen against the wall and it passed over. Oh God.

  Silence clotted the air with the unsayable sorrow. Philip Griffin was painted in a stained wash of guilt and put his hands beneath his chin to keep his head from falling. He felt the old unworthiness of those who survive and the loss of the man who had helped him.

  “I am sorry, to tell you,” said Hadja. “I remember you mentioned his name.”

  “Yes.”

  “It was heart failure. He was dead in his home.”

  Tim Magrath's heart had failed so long before, thought the tailor. He held his head like an iron weight and breathed the short, shallow breaths of upset, until his visitor asked him could he make him a cup of tea.

  “No. No, thank you.” A small emptiness, and then, lifting his spirit with weary effort into the lightweight world of politeness, Philip asked, “Would you like one?”

  “No. Not for me, thank you very much, Mr. Griffin.”

  “Right.”

  The two men sat still in the late evening. The doctor was wearing a pale green raincoat, and with his arms folded and his face restful, he dwelt in such apparent ease that it did not seem necessary to speak.

  It was some time before the tailor noticed him looking over at the chess game.

  “Do you play?” Philip asked him.

  “This is a vulnerable position.”

  “Yes.” He nodded to the truth. “My son is White. You can see what he is like. But he's a fine player most of the time.” Philip stood up and went over to the board. “Would you like to play a game?”

  “This is not finished,” said the Indian. “You don't want to disturb it.”

  But already the older man was taking the pieces and resetting them to begin. “I have it memorized,” he said, and lifted the suit cloth from the floor and laid it aside and drew his chair closer.

  And so they played. It was past ten o'clock. A glittering cold was falling on the unwalked paths and stilled driveways of Dublin, where the windscreens of cars went blind with ice. Television light died away and families were curtained into sleep while the doctor and the tailor played
a game of chess. Hadja was an accomplished player; he had been gifted with that quality of deep patience and forbearance which characterize the ultimately victorious, and which allowed him to suffer many losses without ever losing sight of his long-term goal. He took the capture of his king's knight without the slightest expression of sorrow, and neither did he rejoice when, almost an hour later, he won Philip Griffin's queen's bishop in a forked move on the king's side. It was the game and not the men that spoke. Positions and counter-positions of the pieces flowed between them as its own language, and in that exchange both men got to know each other in a way that would scarcely have been possible in the three hours the game lasted. In that playing each man revealed his own suffering and small triumphs; the chess game mirrored perfectly the pattern of life, and showed in the gradual dwindling of pieces the ceaseless exhausting of energy that is the action of time.

  When Philip Griffin could see more board than pieces, it was already one o'clock in the morning. He was a slow player who did not believe in the constraints of a stop-clock. Although, by that hour, he was aware of the hopelessness of his position, he did not consider resigning. He liked the game played out to its end, for even the coming of the inevitable had a certain beauty. His only gesture at resistance was that, with the Indian about to checkmate him in four moves, he took longer and longer over his turn, gazing down at the checked timber forever, until at last Hadja Bannerje looked over at him and, seeing the transfixed expression of a dream, realized that his opponent was soundly asleep.