As It Is in Heaven

by Niall Williams

  This, he thought, is my happiness, to be given this chance to make her happy.

  While Gabriella elaborated on how the teachers were to be enlisted, where the pupils might come from, what instruments, Stephen had risen from the chair and paced about. Soon he was finishing the sentences she started. They were unable to speak quickly enough, telling of the different studios there could be, of the long panels of glass that would view the sea, of rooms, too, where parents could wait and listen to anything from a full library of discs, how there could be special morning classes for the retired or the unemployed, how the school itself could have guest rooms where visiting musicians might come and stay, and would, too, because there would be no charge but the sharing of their musicianship, and in that place where they made this building, somewhere right there by the sea, music would be celebrated and made alive and reach out into the lives of people. “And we,” said Gabriella, “can make that…”

  “…happen,” said Stephen, “Yes.”

  He stood in the kitchen with his hands prayerlike beneath his chin. “O God,” he said, seeing the shape of his life and hers, and finding in that almost surreal vision the answers to many questions. It was a moment when he glimpsed where all the tortuous plotting of his days had been leading; it included the music of his father, the buying of the ticket to first hear Gabriella play, the journeys to find her, the money he was to inherit, and the flight out of Kerry to the cottage where, like some agonizingly slow healing of all the griefs from childhood to disappointed adulthood, Gabriella had dreamt the music school.

  * * *

  They drove into Miltown Malbay, unaware that a pale white scent was following them and spreading like a sweet contagion through the town the instant they arrived. Stephen went to the bank. Gabriella walked up the street to find rhubarb and honey, whose conflicting tastes are the antidotes to the sudden giddiness suffered by those who are airy with dreams.

  She was crossing the street when Moira Fitzgibbon saw her. At first Moira did not believe it could be the same woman. She had fallen into a season of doubt and lost the conviction that had once seemed to visit her like an angel with a sword. Her hopes had been dulled; the death of Moses Mooney had taken her by surprise, and in its aftermath she had woken each morning with the sour berries of blame in her mouth. She could not spit them out, and for a time was a half sister of herself looking in at the empty tedium of a life drying out in the salt wind. She despised the hopes she had, and protected herself with a tone of mockery her teachers had taught her. She muttered names at herself alone at the sink and did not respond when the calendar reminded her she should make new appeals to raise funds for the Mooney Memorial Hall. Before the spring she let the days go by. She took her daughters to school, collected them, had their meals ready, made another for her husband, and lived on, letting yesterday's hopes slip like a bandaged corpse into the cold sea. Who did you think you were? her face said to her, and she could make no reply. Then she saw Gabriella Castoldi on the street in Miltown Malbay. When she saw her features she was startled—it was an apparition, a ghost rising out of her conscience, and she thought of what she had done to that poor man Griffin in giving him the false hope of her address. (Often since she had considered it, and on Friday nights, when the late TV movie had finished some time after the Late Late Show and Tom was snoring on the couch like a gored beast, Moira chided herself on holding even the thinnest illusion that such romance existed, that somehow the long teacher might have found her, and they might have been happy together. It belonged in girls' comics, she had told herself, and pushed Tom on the back to tell his startled, slack-jawed face it was time for bed.)

  The apparition walked towards her, and Moira touched her fingers on the glass of Casey the auctioneer's window. Its cold reaffirmed her, and in those astonished moments in which a mind reverses itself and discovers that its lies were truths, Moira saw the shape of the child and dared to imagine it might be Stephen's.

  She moved a step from the window. Her eyes were quicker than her mouth. In an instant, they had alighted on the ring and saw the happiness of the woman; the shock of new reality surged through Moira like a charge that explodes blossoms on the trees. She stepped forward and held out an uncertain hand.

  “Excuse me,” she said. “I'm sorry I…”

  Gabriella was standing beside her. She smiled. “Yes?”

  “Is it, are you? … I'm sorry, I'm a terrible fool, I never know what to, I just blurt. You won't remember me, but I … You are …?”

  “I remember you. Yes, I do. You are the woman here, in Ennis. The concert. Yes.” Gabriella took her hand and held it. She did not know then that she was part of the fulfillment of Moira Fitzgibbon's hopes, that her arrival in Mil-town Malbay was like the return of a long-sent messenger upon whose news a whole city of dreams had been waiting, and for whose return hope had finally been surrendered. She did not know when she held Moira's hand that she was holding the hand of the future manager of the music school, or that she could have met no one else in that town who would help her make it a reality. Gabriella knew only that it was a good sign and waited in that astonished moment for the shock to pass. It took Moira another minute before she could approach the question of who Gabriella's husband might be, and then she saw Stephen Griffin walking up the street and she laughed out loud.

  Stephen wore his bashfulness like a confirmation suit, and stood next to the two smiling women. “It was Mrs. Fitzgibbon who sold me the ticket to come and hear you,” he said, nodding the flashing pate of his head towards Moira.

  “Otherwise you would not have come,” Gabriella teased him, and turned to Moira. “So, you are Cupid.”

  “Well, I don't know.”

  “Yes, you are,” Stephen said. And there was a brief moment of quiet acknowledgement in which Moira Fitzgibbon felt her spirits lift and fly about. They were still in the air when, like a tireless conjuror outdoing each extraordinary trick with another, Stephen announced: “We are going to build a music school. Here, out by the sea.”

  17

  Within half an hour Moira Fitzgibbon was getting out of Stephen's car and leading the two of them up the grassy pathway to the ruined cottage of Moses Mooney. On the short journey from the town Moira had reminded Stephen and told Gabriella the story of the old man.

  “I know it was mad, and it was, it was mad, mad altogether,” she said, walking them to the door. “I mean, he had notions, wild mad notions, and to look at him you would think he was for the canaries, the big beard, the look he had when he went blind, like he was seeing something all the time somewhere else and, oh, I don't know, but there was something made me think of him, you know, that he had this one dream of the music, and well, he had no hope in the earthly world of making it happen, and maybe that was it, maybe that was what clicked with me. Anyway …”

  She stopped and opened the front door. They peered inside.

  “He bought the field over,” Moira said, “for his concert hall. It's mostly hares.”

  They looked in at the purple shadows of the old man's life, until at last the prompting of the sun on their backs turned them around and they saw the startling view of the sea. The light on the water made the sea seem like sky and the horizon infinitely in the distance.

  “I think we should buy it,” Stephen said. “Gabriella, it can be here.”

  She took his hand and held it, and was stilled with the knowledge of how much he wanted to give her. “I don't know. Do you think?”

  “Yes,” he said, and already it was decided. Already, within the space of less than twenty-four hours since their arrival in Clare, they had mapped out a life and found the place to begin building it. With the force of will and single-mindedness that sometimes belongs to those called simple, they saw the music school rise in the hillocky green field next to the house of Moses Mooney, they saw the money arriving from Dublin to Miltown Malbay and their hasty spending of it to secure first the field and then the planning permission and then the builders and then the students.
Nothing that April day seemed beyond the capacity of their imagining, for the measure of love was to be not words or air but blocks and mortar and timber and glass, and in the bigness of their hearts that day they carried whole walls, windows, and doors with no effort at all.

  They walked away from the cottage back to the car. Moira Fitzgibbon could scarcely believe what was happening, and said she needed the bracing exercise of a good walk back to the town to reassure herself that she had in fact got out of bed. “Go on,” Moira said, shooing them off like hens, “you go away, I'll walk. I'll call up to the house tomorrow.”

  And it was only when they had driven away, and Moira had turned one last time to look back at the old man's cottage and whisper to him that maybe his dream was going to happen, that she saw three black cats coming from the cottage and tumbling on the wild long grass of the lawn.

  18

  The progress of dreams is in fits and starts. Time hastens and slows and makes of the clock of desire not minutes and hours but fevers, flushes, and languid long eternities. So in one day everything happened, and after it almost nothing at all.

  Money does not travel quickly, and the more of it there is, the more leisurely its pace, Stephen learned. He imagined Moran, the assistant manager in Kenmare, reading with tight small eyes the request for the transfer of funds, and delaying it with a kind of exquisite spite that is the triumph of the small-minded. Nothing happened, no money arrived. Mr. MacNamara, a small man who came in a large exhausted car, told Stephen and Gabriella he was the auctioneer for the Mooney property. He laughed into his fist, as if holding a small microphone, and said yes yes yes in constant repetition, replying to some question no one could hear but himself. He looked at them and said yes yes yes; he looked at the window and did the same. When Stephen told him they were only waiting on the money to arrive, Mr. MacNamara gave his triple affirmative and added a wink, running his tongue about the inside of his mouth so it appeared he was chasing a lozenge and not a sale. He left abruptly after that, but returned the next day as if he had forgotten that he had ever been there. He stood in the doorway and said yes yes yes when Stephen told him he had no news. In the following two weeks he made six appearances, sometimes standing in the sitting room with his hands lost behind his back under the flaps of his jacket and looking about him for a clue as to his purpose.

  While the plans for the building were in stasis, other aspects of the music school were not. Gabriella struck up a friendship with Moira Fitzgibbon, and in morning meetings over the strong tea which Stephen made in the kitchen they planned together how the word might be spread. Gabriella grew bigger almost by the moment. She sat at the table and bloomed, as if the hope in her spirit grew the child more quickly now and warmed the air in the room with incipient life. Moria Fitzgibbon gave her tips and counselled sea walks on the noon shore; she recounted the adventures of her own pregnancies, and through the simple means of her own personality gave Gabriella Castoldi the gift of being grounded. So while the talks began in air and music, they ended in the earthed practicalities of house heating, plumbing, and a place for the cot. After Moira's third visit, Gabriella had redrawn the inside of the cottage; as Stephen watched with a kind of fearful astonishment, she showed him where they should break out the roof and add skylights, where the extra bedroom needed to be made off their own, where the central heating pipes could run and the bathroom replace the hose-like shower that hung over a discoloured draining sink.

  So, in those light blustery days at the end of April, when the sun appeared in the sky above the sea like a promise delivered, builders arrived at the cottage and broke holes in the slate for the skylights. Corry & Son & Nephew opened the roof like a great wound, pushing aside a thickly woven web of time and watching spiders fall down and scurry to new hiding across the floor below. Because Gabriella loved the idea of them so, Stephen doubled the order to four skylights and watched as the series of squares were cut away from the roof, making the house suddenly appear absurdly vulnerable and exciting at the same time, as if it were a giggling and intrepid centenarian going across the sunlit grass in the nude. Birds flew in and out of the house and bats arrived in the twilight, flickering across the starred heavens to alight inside the high ceilings in a sign Tom Clancy said guaranteed good fortune. For three days the house breathed through its top while Corry & Son & Nephew climbed the ladders and sat on the roof and smoked Woodbines, looking out at the fine view of the ocean; Corry said sometimes you wouldn't think it stretched all the way to America and watched the waves from that high position with a kind of grieven mesmerism that only Son knew betrayed he was thinking of Son Two, who was that noontime waking to work in Duggan's Bar in Brooklyn. The Corrys took their time; they threw down the old slates, which Son said were as crisp as cream crackers, and when Stephen at last broke through his diffidence and asked if the windows would be in soon because he feared a change in the weather, the father shouted down to him that he had it on several counts—the frog spawn, the movements of the heron, and the cloud formations reported over Mount Brandon—that the dry spell would continue for weeks. Nephew concurred. He had it from Sky News Long Range, he said, and looked up at the blue heavens as if towards a satellite God.

  19

  In a house of birds, bats, and spiders, then, Gabriella and Stephen lived within the breathing of the sea. Little by little word of their arrival had reached every house in the town and beyond. But there was something in that parish—perhaps it was the notion of its own broadmindedness, the influence of summer continentals, or the whole bizarre history of life which had finally exhausted the parish imagination and capacity for being surprised—that meant the news of Stephen and Gabriella did not raise an eyebrow, not even when the story of their proposed music school reached the bars at Considine's and Clancy's and circulated with the strange scent of apple blossom.

  In the first days of May a letter came announcing that the money had arrived in Miltown Malbay.

  There was £267,000.

  That the figure was astonishingly high, and arrived now at the moment they needed it, did not strike Stephen as strongly as it might, for he believed that it came from his father, that it was evidence of his spirit watching over him and making easier the way ahead.

  Mr. MacNamara was in the house on one of his visits when the news arrived, and saying yes yes yes to Corry & Son & Nephew, looking down through the skylights on the roof above him. When Stephen told him he was ready to pay for the Mooney land, Mr. MacNamara looked sincerely surprised, as if it was a remarkable coincidence that there might be some business to be done. “That's grand,” he said, and scratched his left temple to recall who Mooney was. The following day Moira Fitzgibbon arrived in the olive-carpeted sitting room of Councillor O'Rourke and told him they would be seeking planning permission. She told him of the importance of the school, the need for the permission to be hurried, and knew enough to make the case seem impossible unless he was able to help them. She puffed a despairing sigh and watched it cross the room to arrive in the magnanimous heart of the councillor. He paused, and then like an emperor nodded a single nod.

  Maytime blossomed. In the deep calm of mid-morning Stephen and Gabriella took walks into the west Clare countryside. They did not go far. Ten minutes outside the town they walked along roads where the hedgerows of blackthorn were deeply tangled with wild blackberry. Birds flew before them and sang the songs of summer in the blue air. Dung flies buzzed where the cows had passed and formed into diamond-shaped gauzes as the walkers came upon them. The sound of tractors travelled everywhere, and was so steadily part of those walks that it became one with the landscape and was as if the throttling of those engines was the action of a supernatural sewing machine, going back and forth, stitching into being the patchwork of the fields. The noise itself was reassuring, and lent the walks the indolent pleasure of summer-afternoon sleeps while the lawn mower mows.

  It was perfect. For Gabriella had arrived that May in a mood of quiet ease. The mid-wife had told her the pregnancy
was going well, and by the time the first plans for the music school had been tacked up on the wall of the kitchen, she was feeling the absence of regret for the first time in her life. She sang notes in her bed in the morning while Stephen brought her herbal teas. She allowed her anxieties and the rigour of her self-criticism to slip gradually away, and instead adopted the new life in that cottage by the sea as if it were she and not the child that was being born.

  In the afternoons she played the violin. When Stephen wanted to sit in the room listening, she told him it was not a public performance and laughed, saying, “Well, perhaps it is, for one member of the public.” So he sat outside the door and listened; he heard her playing her way back into the first rooms of her childhood, heard the first music Scaramuzza had taught her returning now like a new season for the child she was carrying. She played the infant beginner's tunes with such feeling that even outside the door Stephen could imagine her weeping as she played. She played “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” and then slid from the simple notes into a series of variations which grew ever more ornate and intricate, until they were the music of ineffable hope and longing, the music that contained the boundless dreams of mothers for their children's happiness. Gabriella played for an hour each afternoon, and Stephen did not disturb her. When she came out of the room she wore a rosy bloom and pretended she had not heard Stephen hurry away from the door.