As It Is in Heaven

by Niall Williams

  Five days before Christmas, when the people of the town had begun complaining that the sunny weather had robbed the season of its spirit, Gabriella lay across the body of Stephen and decided she had to break the back of love.

  If it would break.

  Nothing that is good in the world can last long, she believed, and the sweetness of those days and nights in the cottage had brought her to a frightening vulnerability.

  She lay where Stephen could not see her face and she told him that he must go back to Clare.

  “You must go back to your job,” she said.

  He said nothing. He touched the top of her head and stroked her hair.

  “I have no job,” he said.

  “You have. You will get it back.” She was still not looking at him. “Then you will be going to your father for Christmas.”

  “I have sent him a card. I told him I was going to ask you to come.”

  “I won't,” she said, and then, while moving her right hand slowly across the pale softness of his belly in a gesture that would lodge in the underwater sand of his memory, she took a firm blow at love and said, “I am leaving. I am going back to Venice.”

  Silence. Her back was to him. When Stephen spoke, his voice cracked like glass in the blind air behind her.

  “How long will you be … Will you be …” He didn't want to say coming back, he wanted the small room hope needs to survive.

  “I don't know,” said Gabriella, “I have to go. For now. I have to,” she said, weeping onto his skin, kissing it gently like a farewell, and wondering why she felt the brutal necessity of testing love, of bending its back towards breaking, and trying to bring on before time the grief she imagined was inevitable.

  Slowly she ran her hands down the length of his legs in last caresses. Then she turned over and saw the vanquished ruin of his face, and without telling him that she already suspected that she was pregnant, or that she could not herself dare to imagine as true and durable the love he was offering her, she reached out and touched his wet cheek and said, “Stefano, make love to me.”

  III

  1

  It was Christmas Eve when Stephen drove across the country once more to the house of his father. A misting rain was falling and the still unrepaired rubber of his windscreen wipers smeared it on the glass like fingers at the blood of a wound. He peered forward, but drove into unseeable country, his heart leaking the disconsolate acid of lost love. Three times he was stopped at Garda checkpoints, where big-shouldered men wore the rain like a stain on their backs and dripped it from the brims of their caps, leaning down to check the Christmas drivers for drunkenness. Stephen told one of them he did not drink, but his words came out warped with emotion and he was Breathalyzed all the same. When he was closer to the city, driving down the last part of the motorway into the four o'clock darkness, he almost crashed, as in a disturbed dream, into the white flanks of a wild horse.

  In all, there were nine of them, galloping like a bizarre vision across the thrown lights of the cars and taking off down the motorway ahead of him. They flashed across the darkness, charging before the headlights into Dublin. For a mile the horses kept to the motorway. They trotted past the lights that changed green before they got there and disappeared, like ghosts of themselves, into the places where had once been fields.

  Stephen drove the first car behind the horses and thought of Gabriella. He had already realized without shock that when you give yourself completely to someone else you see the world through their eyes, and easily imagined her own delight at the strange wildness of the scene. But then, when the horses took off to gallop to the left along the toll road to the airport, he turned right and felt the leaving of Gabriella like phantom pain in a lost limb.

  When he arrived, the house lights were on. He found his key and walked across the wet lawn and was on the point of opening the door when Philip Griffin did it before him.

  “Stephen,” he said, briefly looking into the space where the woman was not with him and, with the strange awkwardness of those facing unfamiliar mechanics, reaching suddenly forward to embrace his son.

  Together, after ham sandwiches and Mr. Kipling's mince pies, Philip and Stephen Griffin drove to Midnight Mass, which was at ten o'clock. Earlier that afternoon, on the numbing tide of his third painkiller, Philip had slipped £600 between the railings of Stephen's Green, and had gone home hoping to see in his son's expression something of the fair justice of God. He had now deposited £5,387 in the green place of the city centre. He had never put the money in the same place twice, nor had he ever gone back to see if it was gone.

  The Griffins drove into the city beneath the lights of Christmas. They did not speak, but instead passed small comments on the lights, the traffic, or the rain, making use of that ancient code like spies burdened with the secret vulnerability of the world. They arrived at the Church of the Blessed Sacrament and hurried across the black weather into the organ music and the rising hum of the Rosary. They knelt and said nothing. They were two men missing women, and until the priest arrived they stayed on their knees and were, like everyone else, lost in the privacies of their own personal longing and beseeching, silent voices ascending to unknowable heaven.

  The Mass began. The priest was an old man. He had said Christmas Mass in eighteen parishes, including three in Africa, and, like Philip Griffin, fully expected this to be his last. He said the prayers slowly, as if journeying back on each one into the memories of the past. And when he came to the small stand of the pulpit for the sermon, he looked down at the faces of the congregation with the serene and beatific expression of a man who has at last made peace with himself.

  “I wish each of you a happy and joyful Christmas,” he said, and then swallowed his breath and lost the rest of his sermon, realizing he had reached the tranquil and easeful end of words, saying nothing, just holding out his hands for a long moment in front of him, as if passing to everyone an invisible gift of joy.

  To the surprise of his heart Stephen Griffin received it. He felt a strange and spreading lightness, and by the time he was sitting and watching his father go to receive Communion, he discovered he had somehow been gifted a piece of white linenlike optimism. He rose and passed his father coming back along the aisle. He took the host in his mouth for the first time in years and felt it taste like the memory of goodness. He returned and knelt down and prayed for his mother and his sister in the prayers he did not know were the echoes of his father's. Then the Mass was over and the old priest left the altar a last time. The Griffins stood up at the same time, moving from the church with the melted Communion still lingering like grace and their spirits joined with something rare and fragile as faith.

  Things could still work out. Believe it.

  Stephen put his hand on his father's back, and when they reached the church door he raised an umbrella over the old man as they walked out beneath the dark and starless heavens that spilled with rain.

  When they returned home, it was half past eleven. Inside the house, where all his Christmases had been, Stephen made tea while his father sat in the front room and put on “E Lucevan le stelle.” The music travelled through the house like an old guest and became, in the metamorphic magic of notes and rhythm, the true expression of those two men. It contained the full and varied complexity of their separate longings, and when they sat to have their tea, they did not speak across it. It was only when the disc had ended that Stephen picked up the opened letter that had been put by the side table for him to find. It was the angry missive from Eileen Waters, a slightly less bitter replica of the three others which Stephen had found inside his front door when he had returned to Miltown Malbay. It was school holidays and he had driven directly to Dublin without going near the principal. Now he read the letter she had sent to his father demanding to know where he was, and across the faint humming of the stilled music player, he said, “You know I was in Kenmare?”

  “Yes. I got the card,” his father said. The old man raised his small face to pass h
is son only the slightest encouragement to talk on.

  Stephen was looking away. The rain sounded on the windows and made a muffled dullness of the distant ringing of churchbells.

  “I mentioned bringing a friend,” Stephen said, and paused and sighed and breathed the scent of lilies that was expiring from the pores on his neck.

  “Oh yes, I was wondering.”

  “She plays the violin.”

  “Is that right?”

  “Yes. Her name is Gabriella Castoldi. She is from Venice.”

  He could not tell it without half-smiling now. He said her name and felt wings opening in his chest. Then at last he told his father all. He spoke without pause and began by saying the three words “I love her,” and then spinning out the tale of his loving across the midnight of Christmas like the newest fable in the oldest book of stories, telling the remarkableness of his own emotions as if they were so entirely unexpected and even unimaginable gifts that unknown friends had dropped at his door, telling the sunshine and the cloudlessness, and making his father smile away wet smiles towards the window, where the narrative of love was the certain and indisputable proof of the listening ear of God.

  When Stephen had told him everything, silence fell like snow. It gathered about their ankles and rose slowly. When it was threatening to leave them frozen on the opposite sides of love, Philip Griffin raised his hand and pointed to the old chess game. Despite the sharp ending of the tale, he was not discouraged by what he had heard: goodness had travelled to his son, only it was clear now that Philip needed to do more.

  “Do you …?”

  Stephen joined his father's eyes on the chessboard.

  “It's a mess,” he said. “I …”

  “No no,” said Philip, pushing the board into place between them, “I thought that, but no, your position isn't so hopeless at all. One move changes the game.”

  2

  On Christmas morning Stephen awoke to find the suit his father had made him. He did not put it on until late morning, after he had already given Philip Griffin the new discs of three Puccini operas and four of the violin concerti by Vivaldi which were playing constantly in his head. When, later, he appeared downstairs in the suit, he looked like a newer version of himself. The cut of the cloth was so perfectly made that for the first time in his life he experienced the naturalness of clothes and wore them with confidence. His father in the downstairs hall eyed him with a scrupulous air of self-examination, and then nodded, acknowledging that transforming moment in which the son passes the father like opposite but identical travellers on the up-and-down elevators of life. Stephen was going on, Philip thought, and renewed in himself the difficult faith that after so much that was ineffective and muddled and wasted in his life, this much was going to be right. He saw his son with his wife's eyes and felt her pride in him, too, and then led Stephen out the door of Christmas morning to drive together to the graveside.

  In the days that followed, Stephen stayed in Dublin and visited Venice in his mind. When the bookshops reopened, he drove across the glitterfrost of the New Year and bought a life of Vivaldi and three histories of Venice. He came home, and while his father paced on the creak of the upstairs bedroom floor and wondered what God would want him to do next, he sat in the front room and read. He read the shadowy insubstantial version of the life of the composer, of his birth in Venice in the bleak March of 1678 in the sestiere of Castello, his father a barber who gifted his son the red hair which was startling enough to name Vivaldi later as the Red Priest of Venice, when he was already teaching violin to orphaned girls at the Ospedale della Pietà and earning in the autumn of 1703 a salary of five ducats a month. He was Maestro di Violino, the priest who did not say Mass, who left the altar with chest pains and said he could not return to it, who lived his entire life as a priest, but whose only sacrament was music, writing notes quick-handed on roughened parchment, as if taking dictation from God.

  Stephen sat in Dublin in the frozen first days of January and read himself into Vivaldi's Venice. There, in fragments and hints, oblique suggestions, was the composer's relationship with the singer Annina Giro, the daughter of a French wigmaker, for whom he wrote now forgotten operas, and the all but vanished music for a voice none but he thought was so fine. Stephen played the discs he had bought his father and then read hour after hour the gilded and glorious fable that was the history of Venice, of its flamboyant past made of silks and cloths of gold, of spices and scents, of galleons and golden gondolas, the palace and power of the Doge and the ever-lapping green waters of the lagoon across which came, like rightfully returned sisters, the potent and influential magic of Arabia and China. When Stephen read of Venice, he read of Gabriella. Like every lost lover, he sought in the large room of her absence the smallest continual reminders, the dust of her presence. It did not matter that Gabriella herself had left Venice and preferred the mountains of Kerry to the bridged and watery maze of the city where she was born, when Stephen's eyes travelled the pages and read the names of streets and squares, the calles and campos that gathered like excitement in the long S of the Canal Grande, he was closer to her.

  When in the evenings he played a halfhearted and uninspired chess with his father, he played with a map of Venice at his feet.

  “Here.”

  Philip Griffin was standing inside the door of the front room, having just returned from the city. He had business to attend to, he had told Stephen, leaving his son in the diminished dream that was his condition in the first cold days of January and which his father saw with increasing panic was each day undoing the good of December. He had gone into Dublin with a new withdrawal, and telling God that it was just this once, he bypassed the park railings and went instead into the travel agency of Jimmy Galvin, a man who had played soccer for Ireland and once bought from Philip Griffin four suits of blue green purple and grey tweed with specifically tailored elephantine flared trouser legs and twenty-nine-inch waists. Jimmy Galvin did not remember him. He bought his clothes off the rack now and wore them with a thoughtless monotony that reflected his life since glory. He had three girls working for him at the counter and sat in the back room behind a window, where he lived on the phone, untying the knots of foreign agencies, commissions, and airport pickups, and all but forgetting the moments only his legs remembered when he had scored twice against Spain.

  Philip watched the top of his head and wondered if Jimmy would recognize him. He didn't, and a small loss smarted in the tailor like a sudden discovery in the death notices. He held out his money to the girl at the counter and paid in cash for a ticket and a hotel room. Then he drove to the hospital and spoke with Hadja Bannerje.

  Finally, he arrived home with the envelopes in his pocket, like the folded certificates of his fatherhood. He stood inside the door and gasped as the pain roiled and made his eyebrows rise involuntarily, as if making room in his face for new suffering.

  “Here,” he said, and held out the envelopes.

  The first one Stephen opened was the headed notepaper of Dr. Hadja Bannerje and the declaration in slanted blue ink that Stephen Griffin was currently the patient of the undersigned and that he could not return to work at the present time, for his condition necessitated monitoring under the care of yours sincerely, Dr. Hadja Bannerje.

  Stephen finished reading it and looked at where the grey slump of his father was leaning against the door.

  “Well?” said Philip Griffin with a breathy inhale. “That's, her complaints fecked. We'll send that off to the old bitch tomorrow. Open the next one.” The father nodded, he touched his tongue to wet his lips and half-grinned half-grimaced at the madcap and wild plan, its rash and foolhardy nature that was not in his character, that was the reversal of his previous position, but to which he had given himself with a kind of sweet and feckless madness that made him imagine, against all the evidence of his life and amidst the broken and long-smouldering ruins of his own heart, that here now, at last, for his son, he could play the angel of love.

  Step
hen opened the second envelope and found the ticket to Venice.

  “Go,” his father said, and did not move, speaking with that purity of motive that makes men saints, and hearing himself say the words he wanted said to him and which instead, for another while at least, stayed suspended in the lonely silence of his eyes.

  “Go,” he said. “Go and find her.”

  3

  By the time Gabriella Castoldi had arrived back in Venice, she knew she was carrying Stephen Griffin's child, and bore it with sour bouts of illness up and down the steps of the Rialto and through the fish-fumed air of the narrow streets to the house of her spinster cousin, Maria, in the Calle dei Botteri. Maria Feri was fifty years old and still worked in the papeterie in the Calle Piovan where she had first earned wages as a girl. She welcomed Gabriella on the day before Christmas, when the grey dampness seeped through the air of the city like the cloths of drowned ghosts, and the seasonal efforts of the inhabitants to hold off melancholia was mostly manifest in the quickened movements down the alleyways and across the bridges, a hastening towards the year's end, urgent with shopping and the little clusters of families hurrying to and from visits with unbearable relatives.

  Maria Feri had prepared for Christmas alone, but the unexpected arrival of her cousin visited her like a secret blessing. Her heart fluttered, roses shot out in the pale powders on her cheeks. She sat Gabriella in her only comfortable chair and tapped the cage of Goldoni, the yellow-feathered bird she had named with an endearing lack of originality, who was her truest companion and could, she said, flushing with shyness, sing finer than Pavarotti. While Gabriella sat with the bird, Maria made more welcoming the guest room where no guest had ever stayed; she carried through the sitting room extra blankets, a jug of fresh water, two apples, and the potted lemon plant which was dying in the kitchen, all the time struggling to keep the deep joy of her visitor's arrival from showing beneath it a half century of loneliness.