As It Is in Heaven

by Niall Williams

  For ten days Stephen searched for Gabriella. He asked for her and said her name at shops and fish stalls, and then, in desperation, visited damp candlelit churches, where he prayed that he might find her, until at last, his coughs choking in his chest and his body releasing a kind of rheumy film of sweat and anguish, he surrendered, took the vaporetto back up the canal, and returned to Ireland.

  7

  On the twenty-third of January Philip Griffin awoke with no pain. The morning was brilliantly lit. It was as if spring was being previewed, and so when he got out of bed he chose the light fabric of his green trousers with the blue blazer that he had worn in the summertime. He breakfasted with Puccini. He played the music so loud that down the little street Mrs. Flynn and Mrs. Hehir listened while they cleaned their windows and hummed the airs without knowing them. (The music slipped inside their minds like birds in trees, and within two days both of them had bought discs of Turandot.) Philip left the music player on Repeat and polished his shoes to the infinite sweetness of “In questa reggia.” When he had finished, he looked at himself in the mirror and was suddenly himself forty years younger, looking at the fresh face of his youth before going to meet Anne for the first time.

  The music soared through the rooms. He almost wept with happiness. His pain had died away. At last, he thought. At last. Stephen was in Venice. And Philip had given him the ticket, had urged him to go. If it wasn't for me he mightn't have gone. But now he will be all right. He will be there and have met her, and she must love him, after all. He shook his head with the surge of gratitude he felt, that his son's life would turn out well in the end, that Stephen would not be left abandoned again, and that God had been listening, after all. Suddenly the logical formula of his life was made clear: while love progressed in Venice, the cancer grew in Dublin. The fact that that morning he felt no pain meant that there was nowhere else for the cancer to go, his healthy tissue had been eaten up. This he took to be a good sign. Now is the time, I must be ready to meet her now.

  He walked out the door, leaving Puccini playing as the best defense against the daylight thieves that robbed the houses on the street in numerical sequence. He took his car and drove to the bank with the excitement of a youth on his first date. He called for the manager and withdrew everything he had left in his account, taking the cash and putting it in a plastic shopping bag before heading for Stephen's Green.

  The morning had a soft quality that Philip Griffin imagined had been prepared for him like a bed. Sunlight danced across the windows of buses. The perfumes of spring were awakened and mingled beneath the leafless trees of Stephen's Green, catching the moving crowds and teasing them with a sense of rebirth. At the first railings he came to, Philip stopped and reached in the bag. He let his fingers clutch the money blindly and looked up at the blue sky, as if he could see there the face of lost love. The brim of his hat dribbled a small sweat. With only a half glance about him, he took a fistful of twenty-pound notes and stuffed them quickly into the bushes at the muddy bottom of the railing. Then he walked on. He didn't hurry. He had a lot to get rid of, and knew that when the last of his lifetime's savings had been given away, he would have exhausted his source of good acts and at last death would arrive. He would fall down in the street, and his wife would be there.

  He had no pain. The sun pressed its palms on the back of his blazer. He smiled, thinking of Stephen in Venice, and wondered if that was where the weather had come from. He stopped and leaned against the railings, letting the city pass him for a few moments. Then he reached into the shopping bag and drew out another thousand pounds. He was about to make the second down payment and had turned to put the money through the railings when a blow struck his head.

  His hat fell forward onto his face. A man wrenched his arm backward. He cried out, but his cry was short and went downward instead of up, so that the sound was lost. There were two men. They were not men, they were youths, he thought. He was expecting angels. A woman walking past was looking at them. “Hey,” she said. And the second blow landed in Philip's stomach, and his head fell down and he vomited on himself. For an instant he clung backhandedly to the railing behind him as he was swaying over, holding an instant as if there was still some chance the world was reparable and he could catch the ship of death.

  “Hey, stop that!” the woman called from another world. This brought another blow, hasty, more urgent. Any moment there might be rescue, he thought. Help me, please. Still, Philip did not let go of the bag. Not until he felt teeth biting into his hand. They grated on his bone and a searing pain ran through him, so he screamed and let go. Then the men were running away, and the money was gone.

  The world hung and swayed in the sunlight. The old tailor slid down the railing to the ground.

  8

  To his later regret, Stephen did not call his father when he returned to Ireland. He could not face the disappointment he would bring him, and so instead slipped into Dublin, took his car from where he had left it at the airport, and drove across the country to Clare. In the cottage by the sea he lay on the bed, with no music playing, and waited for his flu to pass. He lived in the hollow emptiness of the lost and did nothing. When, after a week, he was able to move around without betraying too blatantly the evidence of heartbreak, he drove to the school and asked if he could return to teaching.

  Eileen Waters was astonished. She did not believe his excuses; she eyed him distrustfully, like the vision of her own misjudgement, and was not prepared to be caught off guard again. She kept the interview going longer than necessary, leaving Stephen in the office and visiting her bathroom where she took time to examine her facial expressions for signs of weakness. Only when she was convinced that she looked severe, that she was not a woman to be trifled with, did she return to the interview.

  “Your condition,” she said, “the one this doctor referred to, is it passed?”

  Stephen looked at her across the emptiness of the world. “Yes,” he whispered.

  Eileen Waters paused. “Probation,” she said then. “I can take you back on probation.” She fixed her eyes on him like grappling hooks and tried to hoist herself up inside the shadowy mystery of him. What the hell was this man's problem? What was he hiding from her?

  “I've had to take your classes myself,” she said. “We couldn't get a sub. We've all had to cover. A situation like this is hard on all the staff.”

  “I'm sorry.”

  “Yes. Well.” She paused and stopped herself from going on. It was a trick she had learned: use pauses. Silence is a strong weapon. Let him feel my silence now, she thought, and turned her tongue along the front of her teeth.

  “Well?” Stephen said.

  “I was very … very …” She paused again. She released her hands from each other and placed them flatly on the table, as if just keeping it from floating upward. “Very disappointed.”

  Stephen just sat, slouched in his father's suit, his spirit too low to make a stronger case. He felt he was deep in ashes. When he moved the slightest muscle, they blew up into his eyes.

  “As it happens,” Eileen Waters told him, “it would not be possible to replace you for the remainder of the school year, in any case. So you can be on probation until June. I will expect full attendance until that time.” She announced rather than spoke, obscuring the weakness of her character with performance.

  Secretly she longed for Stephen to break down, to slide onto his knees and weep, to confess and reveal to her there in the office exactly where he had been and what terrible turbulence had left him like this now. She wanted to be the rock he clung to and, despite herself, turned her most compassionate gaze on him as he stood up to leave.

  “It has been unfortunate,” she said. “But it is now behind you.” She held the doorknob but did not turn it. For a brief moment the hope crossed her eyes and she imagined one last time that he might stop and truly speak to her. But it passed and she composed herself, readjusting the face of consternation as she drew open the door and let the ashen figure
leave.

  And so Stephen's life resumed. He taught classes in history. He walked the beach with the great weight of nothing pressing his footsteps deep into the sand. He had lost love and accepted the harshness of the winter storms as if they were a personal judgement. On his first day back in the school he waited for an eruption among the boys, but it did not come. It was as if the pallor of his complexion, the tone of his voice, or the general aspect of his demeanour all broadcast the same message: Here is a broken man, leave him alone.

  He went home in the last light of the afternoon and was lying on his bed fifteen minutes after finishing work. He lay in the suit that was coming apart a little more every day. He did not know yet that his father had been robbed of his life-time's savings or that he had told the doctors his son was unreachable in Venice and was spending days in hospital while Puccini played on in the empty house without him.

  Stephen did not know the half of it; he did not know that Gabriella Castoldi lay like him on a bed of diminished hope, that she waited for a sign that did not come, and balanced on the edge of new life unable to move. For the plots of love and death had stopped altogether. It was a time when nothing happened. A cold, strange, wind-and-rain-beaten season of its own. It arrived in off the Atlantic and smashed on the rocks with destructive gladness. Hail fell out of the night skies into the churned-up waves. People hurried from their houses to their cars; they held their complaints closed on their chests and then gasped with released curses and coughs when they stepped inside shelter. A brutal weather held the towns of the west captive, and in it nothing grew. Gorse and white-thorn bushes slanted eastward and the cattle huddled beneath them. Caps blew off. Puddle-mirrors loomed in the yellowing grass, and everything waited.

  9

  When Gabriella Castoldi awoke in the dawn light on the morning of the last day of January, she smelled smoke. She rose from her bed and opened the window to be sure it was not a fire in her dreams. It was not. The sky above the red rooftops wore a grey smudge and the air of Venice smelled bitter with grief.

  It was half an hour before she discovered what had happened. She dressed quickly, prompted by a sudden sense of urgency. When she stepped into the street, the disappointed light of the January morning met her like a returned memory from childhood. She drew her green coat across her chest and walked toward the smoke. When she was crossing the Campo Manin, she already feared what had happened. Others were walking talking in the same direction, hurrying along like blood to a bruise.

  They crossed the Campo San Angelo and were stopped by polizia.

  They stood, the gathering excited crowd, and heard the truth of their fears confirmed. The Teatro la Fenice, one of the most spectacular opera houses in the world—the building, it was said, was like being inside a diamond—had been burned to the ground again.

  Gabriella heard it in disbelief. “Non si credo.” She gasped a shallow breath and felt the blood rush to her face. “O mio Dio.” She looked away and back again at the billowing smoke and thought she would fall down. The vision struck her forcibly like the phantasms of nightmare, and her heart raced with the distress of it. She wanted to cry out and run away, but stood with the others staring at the dark swirls rising and smudging the sky. She watched, and though she could not see the teatro itself, she felt the loveliness burn, she felt the stage she had stood on crackle with the licking flames and herself falling through it, downward into the darkness. And in that moment of freefall, even while she was standing there in the bitter fume-soured air of the Calle Caotorta and seeing burn so much more than the teatro, seeing the burning of all her yesterdays in that city, Gabriella thought suddenly of Stephen and knew that to go forward she had to go back to Kerry, and that the puzzle of love was that the pieces did not seem to fit but lay in the palm of your hand like some insoluble cipher, until at last you let them go and saw them fall, gradually, into place.

  10

  When Philip Griffin opened his eyes he did not see the face of God.

  He saw the round, mobile face of Michael Farrell like a placid moon hovering beside his hospital bed.

  There was more of Michael Farrell than God intended. He sat beside the bed in a chair that did not fit him. He wore an expanse of grey cloth with a white shirt and a yellow tie. He was immaculately groomed and kept his hands on the great globes of his knees. The absurd smallness of his shoes squeaked on the polished floor like minor jokes.

  “Well,” he said.

  “Well well well,” he said. “There you are now.” He leaned forward, the chair drew breath. “You don't know me, of course.” He blinked his eyes together. “I work for Fitzgerald & Carey. The solicitors,” he added, struck as he always was that the name brought no recognition and that as a large man his junior capacity diminished him. He brought the very tip of his tongue peeping out between his lips and kept it pressed briefly, stoppering further announcement.

  He looked down at the small broken figure of the tailor in the bed and thought that the lack of reaction was perhaps nothing but fear. So, withdrawing his tongue, he threw up the eyebrows to say, “No no, there's no trouble. Nothing wrong. We sent you a couple of letters, Mr. Griffin. They're at your house waiting. In any case, we learned about your misfortune, and well, I live across from the hospital here and I thought I'd check up on you myself …”

  He waited a moment to see if any light dawned on Philip Griffin's face. But it did not. The old man just watched him with a kind of frozen bewilderment.

  “Yes indeed,” he said. “Well, you know the late Dr. Tim Magrath?”

  Philip Griffin made no gesture or expression. He lay motionless in the deep confusion and abandonment of those who feel God has not heard their calling.

  Michael Farrell paused a final time, took a white handkerchief from inside his jacket, and dabbed at the damp leakage all over his face. “Well,” he said, “it's Mr. Considine who will tell you, but Dr. Magrath had no family as such, and well, you've been named prominently in his will.” He paused. “Very prominently,” he added, and then leaned forward to pat a huge hand on the tailor's shoulder, saying, “Now, isn't that good news?”

  11

  From the moment Gabriella returned to the apartment, Maria Feri knew that her dream of being the twin mother of the child had burst. Gabriella would not stay in Venice. When she walked in the door there were ashes in her hair, her eyes burned with a kind of wild indignation as she paced in the living room and would not sit down. The bird flew about in his cage.

  “They have burned down La Fenice,” she said.

  “Santo cielo. Oh, Gabriella, be calm. Calm yourself. Sit down.”

  “No, I can't. I don't want to. I feel like …”

  She thumped the back of the armchair hard. The acrid smell of destruction rose in the air, and the ashes spun from her head in a pale beam of sunlight. She could not be still, and while her cousin leaned against the press that displayed the serene blue glass of Murano, Gabriella kept moving back and forth across the light, twisting like a fish on a grim hook.

  The disaster of the opera house spoke to her personally, like a moral fable; and it was less than an hour before she had discovered the sharpness of its meaning inside her: we cannot remake the past nor build a new life on the ruins of the old.

  It was so obvious, and painful. The city was spoiled for her now, and even though it was long before she heard the faintest rumours that her brother Antonio had in some way been involved in the fire, that Giovanni had laughed in his cell so loudly when he heard, that the jailors had gagged him, Gabriella knew that she would leave Venice for good. She couldn't fathom the murky depth of that evil, to destroy the glittering place of music.

  “I can't believe it,” she said, and struck at the wing of the chair.

  Maria felt the glasses tremble in the press behind her and saw anew how one grief impacts on another. She raised the sharp angle of her nose as a precaution against tears and held on to the press with pale, hidden hands. The bird watched her and did not sing.

 
; “It is barbarous. It is, you know. It is …”

  “It is very sad,” said Maria from the shadowed side of the room, her voice low as a sigh in an ancient chair as her spirit subsided into it.

  “It was like a jewel, La Fenice.”

  “Yes.”

  Gabriella lost her words. She leaned on the window, and at once the full force of man's stupidity, meanness, and malevolence caught up with her and crushed the energy of her rage. She could say nothing. The two women stood in the room silently apart and the light diminished. They could not speak. It was as if the room were flooded to the very rims of their lips with the despair of mankind and to utter another sound could only drown them. Maria Feri felt her own frailty and the great sudden pressure of the world. She told herself to concentrate. She made a mental ladder of prayers and thought of her favourite story of Venice, of how once, when the city had a plague, the population had prayed so fervently that their prayers became a wind that reached Mary in heaven, and how when the plague had passed, they had built her an impossible church on water. It was her favourite story, for Maria knew intimately the quality of that beseeching and could easily imagine the force of yearning transformed into something elemental. While Gabriella looked out on the smudge of man on the Venetian sky, Maria Feri held herself stiffly against the press and longed for what she already knew was impossible.