As It Is in Heaven

by Niall Williams

  “What are you playing at, Doctor?” la senora asked him.

  “Vivaldi's ‘Summer,’” he said, and tapped on, his face against the creamy smell of her skin and his ear listening on the other side of where Gabriella was hearing that first music and flicking about her tiny body in response.

  “Play music in the room, you might save this one,” said the doctor when he stood up at last. “Her spirit dances.”

  He walked out of the dream from where Gabriella saw him in the womb, and she thrashed in the blankets and hummed broken music, until at last she stopped and heard it playing, and it was her father playing his fingers on her mother like a bow on strings, making a music both harmonious and discordant in turns, a music that rose and filled Gabriella's sleeping until she dreamt she could feel the child inside her dancing to it.

  In the morning Gabriella awoke to the tender February light with a new feeling of calm. She had told Nelly the night before that she felt she could never know the reality of true love or the certainty of goodness sometimes given to the sainted or the insane. There was no answer to that, Nelly Grant had told her, but she herself had learned slowly, stubbornly, and with the deepest resistance that at last we must trust the energy of things, to wait and feel the tug of the planet as it swings round and carries us all relentlessly forward.

  “Everything,” she said, “is not up to us. The thing is, Gabriella, to care for the child, Yes?” she said, and sounded almost in echo of Maria Feri as she pressed her warm palm on the woman's stomach.

  Now in the new day Gabriella sat in the kitchen, where the door was open to the view of the mountains and the birds came and went across the dew-silvered grass. The air was fresher than in Venice, and the pale blue of the sky seemed the colour of mercy. The calm Gabriella felt was like the furled bud of the season, and for the first time that morning she dared to imagine it flowering. Imagine, she thought, imagine just for a moment it could be perfect.

  She opened the case of her violin and, as if for many children, born and unborn, she played her music out the cottage door.

  2

  There was a small congregation at the funeral of Philip Griffin. Snow flurried in the air. The roads were iced and the limbs of the trees beseeching. A little cluster of old men in well-cut coats and felt hats stood at the graveside like last sentries, watching the disappearance underground of another of their world and time. The son of Tobias Madigan was there. He gripped Stephen's hand with gloved fingers and held his eyes with his as if he glimpsed there the retreating figure of Philip Griffin skating away across the immaculate ice of the heavens. Then he released the hand and said, “He was a good man. A lot of good men are gone now.”

  One man was not wearing a long overcoat. Hadja Bannerje was muffled in wool hat and scarf and a thick anorak. He stepped forward only when the others had gone.

  “I know you very well,” he said. “I am so very very sorry, Stephen.” The snow fell across them. He held out a hand and Stephen took it, and in that moment Hadja Bannerje felt he understood something of the mystery of our connectedness, of how the old man's life had longed for some redemption, for the passing to his son of an immeasurable and secret grace, which now, at that moment, by the crazy mechanism of the world through which one person's life touches anothers, Hadja Bannerje himself was empowered to bestow.

  “I must tell you how your father loved you,” he said simply.

  The light snow flew about. Stephen looked down at the fresh earth and felt the loss grow huge inside him. The last time he had seen his father was when he left for the airport in the blue suit. “He wanted you to be happy,” said the Indian. “It is what all fathers want. You should not be sad.”

  Stephen stood there. He looked up into the snow sky and felt the pieces of it fall into his eyes.

  “I am sorry I did not come to see him,” he said quietly. “I did not even know.”

  “Don't regret it. He saw you,” said Hadja. “He saw you in Venice, he told me so in the hospital. It was better you did not come. He died a happy man.”

  Later, they returned to the house, and the Indian doctor sat in the room where the last chess game was still apparent. Stephen brought him tea as if Hadja were his father, and was astonished to find that since he had last played, his position in the game had been greatly improved.

  “Your father played your moves,” said Hadja. “I am afraid I played his.”

  Stephen sat in his usual chair, and while the clock ticked in the hallway, the tears fell down his face. They fell in the dead stillness of the early afternoon in that suburban house where a long, ordinary everyday tale of grief and longing and regret had finally ended, where the last shadow seemed to have fallen. The queen's knight's pawn, which had been unremarkable and forlorn, was now moved forward, until it arrived at the seventh rank of the board, threatening to transform defeat into victory.

  “He kept on moving that white pawn,” said the doctor. “I was distracted from it. Now it is hopeless for Black.” He smiled and tapped the palms of his hands softly beneath his chin.

  The afternoon died away, but Stephen Griffin did not turn on the light. The companionship of the other man touched him in a way he had not experienced in his adult life. The silence was soothing, like the deep blankets of a morning bed. And in the dying half-light of the snowy afternoon, gradually, almost imperceptibly at first, the figure of the other man across the chessboard became the figure of Philip Griffin, as it became, too, for Hadja Bannerje, the figure of his father, whom he had heard from his brother in Bombay was dying now from a slow disease in his bloodstream.

  And in that time, that grey and easeful afternoon while the two men sat after the funeral in the old armchairs and said almost nothing, there was something like peace shared between them. The pawn at the seventh rank did not need to be moved forward. The board faded into the dimness and floated away, and the snow fell. It fell forever out of the Dublin nighttime, and was falling still when at last Hadja Bannerje stood up and shook Stephen's hand again and said goodbye and that they must see each other again. And Stephen agreed and said that he would like that very much, and then opened the door and watched the muffled doctor print his footsteps out the driveway and away, vanishing into the blown and falling flurries of the snow, and (although Hadja did not know it yet) out of Stephen Griffin's life forever, as, three days later, Hadja would leave Dublin to return to his father in India.

  3

  In the days that followed, Stephen lived in the house and journeyed through the places of regret and loss, until he became aware that he was gradually feeling more love than grief. The face of Gabriella appeared in his mind, and he knew now that the loving of her was centrally connected to the meaning of his world. The air lightened. He opened all the windows, and the house whistled with a steady music. The clarity of the notes was remarkable, and as the wind rose and fell in the giddy and capricious games of early spring, the spirits of the dead Griffins danced. All the memories of the house nudged Stephen as he came and went on the stairs and in the hallway, carrying boxes of books and papers. He paused a half dozen times on each journey, bewildered, until slowly he became accustomed to the presence of the reunited family, the strange harmonious sense of them all together there in the house. He remembered more than he remembered he had forgotten, then discovered for himself the truth that nothing of life vanishes completely but can be recovered whole from the past. It was like memories of kisses on the skin. So, in three bright, wind-polished days of early February, when light snow came and went on the air and the music of Puccini played without being switched on, Stephen was joined in the house by Mary his sister, Anne his mother, and Philip his father. The many persons of himself were there, too. He was himself at age four watching his father in the hallway on the evening his parents were going out to the Rathmines Opera. His father wore a black suit and a scent of sweet oil as he hummed an air to the hall mirror. His mother's shoes came down the stairs, slipping slightly on the carpet, they were so light and thin and silver
y. He was himself at eight looking at his sister sleeping; he was ten and at the kitchen table while his mother served skinless white boiled potatoes and peas alongside slivers of roast beef that were islands in gravy; he was hearing the first cello notes from Mary's quarter-sized cello in the front room, where the wallpaper was the same still and where the family had smiled watching her, and he had passed jealousy and rivalry and felt simply the visit of a communal happiness. All of himself was there in the house, and all of the others, too. And the more they were present, the lighter was the burden of grief, until it lifted up and floated away altogether, disappearing down the road like a noxious yellow cloud, to be blown into another household, visiting it like a sour priest and smelling of bitter lemons.

  4

  Two days later Stephen left the house. He took his father's car. He put the Puccini in the boot and the folded-up, faded chessboard with the little box of pieces.

  For a week the snow had dusted upon the windows of the house, but when Stephen came out and walked down the garden beneath the chestnut tree there was no whiteness on the ground. For a moment he thought it might be some weird meteorological condition and that the snow was falling only about their own house, but then realized that the snow was falling only, it was not alighting. It lived in the air and vanished into the ground, like a spirit.

  Stephen drove away from Dublin a last time and headed west on the road where already he was thinking of Gabriella and where the air was too warm for snow. He drove the Galway road towards a bright sky, and in the early afternoon turned off at Loughrea to head down into Clare. Past noon the day had begun to leak a little of its brilliance, the colour thinning and the line between land and air blurred. Bits of sky had fallen on the fields. And by two o'clock on the road out of Loughrea there were low white spumes of mist scattered here and there inside the stone walls. In that sleeping landscape Stephen thought of Gabriella and in his mind played a passage he remembered of the Vivaldi “Summer.” By the time he passed the sign that welcomed visitors to County Clare, the interior of the car was deeply perfumed once more with the scent of lilies.

  Then, by the bad bend at Crusheen, Stephen misjudged the sharpness of the curve and briefly threatened to hit the wall of the bridge at speed. At the last moment he managed to save himself, just. He pulled the car over beneath the hedgerows. His face glistened, and he brought his hands up over it to cover his eyes, where briefly he was seeing the vision of his father and mother and sister in the backseat behind him. Philip Griffin had his arm on his wife, guarding her around the bad bend. It was the briefest moment, and gone by the time Stephen had palmed the cold sweat from his forehead, but it broke like a dawn inside him, nonetheless, and made him fully understand a simple truth about his father: Philip Griffin had loved Anne with his life; he had loved her so entirely with himself that when she died, there was little left of him, only the corner he had kept alive for his son. She was everything to him. She was the figure behind all that music that rang out and sang through the little house in her absence, she was behind each of those infinitesimally aching arias that Philip Griffin listened to year after year with his head back and his eyes shut and his hands holding the armrests, as if taking off after her into the heavens.

  And with that understanding Stephen drove from Crusheen and left the grief behind him, and felt newly the resolve of life that for him was the loving of Gabriella Castoldi.

  5

  Eileen Waters was warned by her secretary when Stephen arrived in the carpark. She looked out and saw him alight from his father's car and come quickly up the driveway. What she did not see was the zeal in his eyes or the sense of mission that carried him forward and bounding up the school steps.

  “Tell him to wait when he comes,” Mrs. Waters said. “Tell him I'm on the phone, I'm busy.” She went back inside her office and examined her face. She moved the files into neater piles that they might establish more clearly her power. She pared two pencils and placed them lead upright in the green beaker before her. Then she looked across at the timetable on the wall opposite her, to remind herself of all the staff that were under her, the numbers enrolled, the size of the building, and the full and varied dimensions of her power. She waited fifteen minutes. Finally, she brought the largeness of her soft self forward so that no vulnerable space existed between her and the desk, and then placed her two pink hands together in a mime of tranquil forbearance.

  “Carol.”

  Carol Blake opened the door.

  “Will you bring me in the attendance book for 3A?”

  “I'm sorry, Mrs. Waters, Mr. Griffin is here to see you.”

  “Really?” She enjoyed that, and said it louder to be sure he heard. “Really, Mr. Griffin?” She said his name as if it were an antiquated appellation from the Old Testament.

  “Will I bring him in?”

  “Do.”

  Outside, the class bell sounded and the corridors of the school echoed with the jostle and rush of the students.

  “You are back with us again,” Eileen Waters said to Stephen as he came in the door. She pursed her lips and narrowed her eyes. “I had thought … I had thought you might have been back last week. Or even the week before. I had thought—while of course a family bereavement is—I had thought, a week, a week or ten days tops.” The pink hands floated up before her and palmed the underside of the air, as if fondling amorphous bosoms of power. She weighed them like moralities and looked gravely. “I have to tell you, Mr. Griffin,” she said, “you put me in a very difficult position. I have been forced to make allowances again, and some of the other members of the staff …”

  “Mrs. Waters.”

  The principal was vexed to stop mid-sentence. It was not even the end of her paragraph. She opened her mouth and shrank three inches smaller. Her eyes were blurry with unease.

  “I didn't come to hear your lecture,” Stephen said. “I want to say something.”

  “If you think a brief apology …”

  “I have nothing to apologize for. Mrs. Waters, I'm not here for apology.” Stephen looked directly at her and saw the fright freeze her expression. “I'm here because I've reached the end of this life, I'm not going to be back here anymore, I'm stopping teaching.”

  Mrs. Waters's face dropped; it fell on the desk with the powdery softness of marshmallow. It was a moment before she could recover it.

  “Well,” she said, having no idea what to say next.

  “I'll tell you the truth: I'm not really a teacher anyway, I don't care enough about codes of discipline, acceptable standards of uniform, punctuality, all that.” He waved his hand as if clearing a desk. His eyes were burning. “I care about the history and the few who want to learn it. But what I have discovered is this: it's not my life. It's someone else's life that I'm living, that I just fell into, the way people take wrong turns and don't know it and just keep going because it's too hard and frightening not to, and then they find themselves years later in some place they never wanted to be, with the regrets eating them up like cancers.”

  The air in the room throbbed. Stephen's words came quickly and the passionate fluency of his expression flooded the small world of the woman and drowned the minor armies of her objections. She could not imagine this was happening. She could not imagine such rashness.

  “Someone else's history is the coming and going from here every day,” Stephen said, “not mine. Staff meetings and test results and …” He raised his eyes to the ceiling, where he knew his family were watching him. “Anyway, it's over. Thank you for giving me the job, but it was a mistake. I won't be coming back.”

  Stephen stood up. He was a different man from the one Eileen Waters had reprimanded earlier. He was already un-stooped and taller, and met her eyes with the strange defiance of those who imagine they have suddenly seen the plot of the world. She stared at him as if he were visiting from another planet. Her blood pressure pounded along the hardening arteries of her heart, her eyelashes felt cakey and weighted with the falling dust of years.
>
  “What are you going to do?” she said. Her voice was as faint and whispery as the turning of pages in an old copybook.

  Stephen raised his two hands into the air, and then he smiled. It was the first time she had seen him smile. It became a small laugh, and then he said; “I don't have the slightest idea.” The smile kept circling around his lips and made glisten his eyes. “I'm in love,” he said, saying those simple words there in that office and not even realizing that they sounded to Eileen Waters strangely childish and unreal, as if they belonged to some outmoded and tarnished notion of romance that no longer had any place in the country she lived in, which by the end of that millennium had been hardened by a thousand revelations of abuse and corruption and greed, until the very notion of a man declaring such a thing out loud in an office seemed as farfetched as a fairy tale.

  “There is a woman, she's in Kerry, she …” He stopped. He seemed to be seeing someone else in the room. “Well, goodbye,” he said then, and walked out of the office, never to return, leaving Eileen Waters stunned and wordless and diminished as she watched the empty space after him and tried to repair and close the chasm that had opened between the life she was living and the one Stephen Griffin had briefly shown her.