As It Is in Heaven

by Niall Williams

  “You have been doing great work out here,” she said when she came across him in the kitchen.

  “Oh yes.” He turned to run a cloth across the sink. She stood beside him. “Feel,” she said, and took his hand and put it on the place where the child was moving like a swimmer in a sea. “It's the music.” They stood, innocent and hopeful, by the kitchen sink, and imagined the possibility that life could after all be that simple, that nothing would come and threaten that easeful and tender living by the sea, and that God was merciful and good and redeemed all grief in the end. They stood there, wordless, and felt the child. Looking on the slope of grass that ran down towards the fall to the sea, Gabriella said, “Could we have a garden?”

  The following day Stephen bought a shovel and pitchfork. He returned from McInerney's in Miltown Malbay with the white wooden handles sticking out the car window and carried the tools onto the grassy space with the set jaw of a Wild West pioneer. He went to foot the shovel into the ground, but the old tufted grass resisted and the shovel made a slow fall to the side. Stephen was not to be outdone. He spat somewhat carefully on his hands and walked over the ground where during the evening Gabriella had imagined out loud a perennial border. The grass was tall and wild and was like a long-enduring and hairy demon upon whom the shovel struck but made no impact. Stephen drove the blade again and again as a moon row of blisters opened in his palms. His long back curved into it. He had never dug a day in his life, and now in the breeze that came up from the sea he hacked and jabbed at the ground for the beginnings of a dream garden. His sweat fell in grey droplets. He watched the embrowned flaps of the blisters open and fingered them back into place like a child imagining damage repaired. The white handles of the shovel and fork grew smeared with the dull colour of labour.

  That afternoon he worked on while the birds gathered. The following day and the next, though he woke with his body stiffly locked like a coffin, he did the same. He stretched his fingers and sat while Gabriella poured olive oil on them. He opened the ground for a vegetable garden, for a herbal border, and the curved shape where he imagined flowers would bloom for Gabriella and his child. He worked in silence to the whispering collapse of the sea, the crown of his head burning a red corona until Tom Clancy, admiring the work from the stone wall that surrounded it, brought Stephen a straw hat that made him look like a gondolier.

  20

  The following day they bought the plants. Gabriella had a book with colour plates of poker-headed kniphofia, bright yellow achilleas, and crimson rosa moyesii, and with the childlike fantasy of a first gardener imagined them growing in the brown ground outside the window. In Miltown Malbay the selection of plants was too narrow for such dreams, and so they drove into north Clare to the hidden nursery of Mick Kinsella. He was a tall, ponytailed figure in jeans who had for fifteen years pretended to be an accountant in Dublin, until the morning he realized that he could not remember the smell of roses. Since then he had run the nursery in the hills of north Clare and with his wife, Maggie, reared three wild-looking girls among the tangle of flowers that were his garden. He sat inside the gateway in a small wooden hut, where he used his laptop computer to browse among the world's exotic plant catalogues. When Stephen and Gabriella arrived he told them he had just found a new terrestrial orchid from New Zealand and ordered three dozen of them. Then he walked them through the heavily scented grass path into the garden proper, pushing aside the flowerheads.

  “We have a garden dug out,” Gabriella told him.

  Mick Kinsella looked at them. “It's your first?” he said.

  “Yes.”

  “Here, take a chair,” he told Gabriella, and sat her in the garden, where she could watch while he and Stephen walked back and forth picking out the plants that were not the ones in the book but were the ones Mick Kinsella said would grow. Stephen and Gabriella brought them home, packed into the back of the car like children going on summer holidays. That evening they placed them out in the garden that faced the sea, and sat and watched them until the light died away.

  And so the summer rolled in. Somewhere out in the Atlantic a dazzling blue formed and stilled the winds and made the sea warm and gentle and inviting, lapping all the way to the shores of Clare. The sun shone like Spain. Sombreros appeared like strange blooms, and the smell of almond oil hung in the air above the salmon-skinned and the freckled. Miltown Malbay sold out of electric fans. The evening the schoolchildren were released for the summer, the sea at Spanish Point was thronged with leaping white bodies, beating winglike arms against the waves that collapsed across their thighs. All through June the soft blue filled the sky. The tenderness of the days was a blessing which some called a curse and said the end of the world was beginning with a drought. But in the garden behind the house of Stephen and Gabriella the plants of Mick Kinsella grew. Stephen watered them three times a day. He fed them no fertilizer but, when Tom Clancy suggested it, he barrowed cow dung down the road and made a kind of manure dressing which stunk the air and kept the cats away for three days.

  In the cool of the stone house Gabriella hid from the sun. The moment she appeared in the daylight, the sweat gathered beneath the heaviness of her breasts and ran cold rivers down her stomach. The heat made her heavier, and so instead, she sat in the lie-out chair-bed inside the house with the fan oscillating across her while she played the violin to the unborn. She wrote three short letters to Maria Feri, telling her in discreet language the progress of love, and then wrote another to Nelly Grant explaining the strange mixture of marvel and terror that was alternating through her spirit. No reply arrived from either woman.

  Still, the days were delivered like polished gems. Gabriella said she woke and saw the sea and thought she was in Italy. Stephen opened all the skylights, and the house slept like that, with arched eyebrows, where the moon was reflected in quadruple. By the end of July Gabriella found it impossible to sleep during the nights. She lay on the bed beside the exhausted figure of Stephen and tapped his shoulder when his snoring sounded like pain. He woke with a suddenness, as if his world were a rolling glass globe, and shot out his hands to catch it in the dark. But she was all right. Sometimes she wanted to talk, sometimes she didn't. He brought her cocoa and herbal teas and water and chocolate. She told him he was too good for her, and sometimes the very act of him coming through the door with the mug made tears start in her eyes. “You are a saint,” she said.

  “No, I'm not.”

  “But I think you are. I am in bed with a saint.” She said it and looked at him and smiled, and then she told the child and lay there in the grey starlight, where her face was lost and none could read the gratitude and prayer in her eyes.

  Often in those dead hours between the sunset and the four o'clock dawn they talked of the music school. It added another meaning to their days, though it still existed more solidly in words than in stone. They talked it into happening. They lay with their faces to the open skylight and told how it would be, as if telling the heavens to prepare the way. There was comfort in the company of that dream, and so almost like an incantation Stephen told Gabriella what it would be like, how the lessons would be, and the pupils, and the concerts they could have on the grass between the school and the sea. He told her until at last she asked him no more and he supposed she was sleeping. But she was not. She was closing her eyes and watching beneath her eyelids the extraordinary edifice of love built in solid air. And it was only in those moments, in that strange starry stillness when the world seemed to sleep without her, that she truly dared to believe it might happen.

  21

  Finally, the builders arrived in the hillocky field and began to dig out the foundations as the hares darted about into the dunes. To relieve herself of the overattentiveness of Stephen, Gabriella insisted he go each day to see what was happening and walk back along the seashore before coming to tell her. It gave her an hour on her own. For in the nearness of the birth she was revisited by visions of her mother's miscarriages, and although she was safely beyond misc
arriage, she fretted about the possibility of an invisible curse moving in her bloodline. She sat in the deep armchair that looked out on the sea and tried to breathe with the focussed concentration she had when about to play extraordinary music.

  Stephen stood, she sat in the chair.

  “You'll stay there?” he said.

  “Of course I will.”

  He put on a disc of Vivaldi's concertos. “I'll be back before it's over,” he said.

  “I know you will.”

  He went out the door. She stayed in the chair.

  The music played.

  Five minutes later she had risen with a sudden impatience. She saw the bitter face of her pregnant mother standing scouring the sink in the kitchen of their house in the Calle Visciga. She saw it. She saw the fist of steelwool circling, and she cried out. She stood up and crossed to turn the music up louder. She moved the volume until the notes were huge and full and pulsing through the cottage.

  Then the pain lanced through her and she slid to the floor.

  “O mio Dio.”

  She reached for the counter, but her fingers clenched in spasmic fists and hit against the wood. The sharpness of the pain was so severe that her back arched and her mouth opened wide with a soundless cry. She lay on the cold tiles and banged against them with the back of her head, sucking and blowing as if drowning in the tide of life. A minute seemed endless. The pain had a narrowness of point so exquisite that it seemed to find her deeply and then rip upwards. The floor pooled with a little blood and water. Gabriella screamed into the Vivaldi and banged her head again. She screamed so loudly through the music that the blackbirds rose off the roof and flew in the air about the house with the strange and morbid excitement of funeral-goers. They hung around. They mirrored her woe with a beakish crying that upset the cats who lay in the shadow of the plants in the garden and made them come to the windowsill, where the saucer was empty of milk. Time stopped. There was nothing but the waves of pain in the throbbing music, the urgent and relentless hurting that was the pain of sorrow and loss and doomed love and expectant tragedy, and was the pain of the beginning of life, too.

  Oh God, Gabriella thought, we are going to die. Then the air seemed rung with muffled hornlike sounds and thickened with floating pinpricks of dusted light that were the onrush of a violent dizziness. And then, blackout.

  22

  Moira Fitzgibbon found her lying on the floor.

  There had been no answer to the doorbell, and when Moira let herself in through the back door she caught at once the queer whiff of disaster. The atmosphere was weirdly aslant, like the grin on a misbehaved child when the crime is as monstrous as he imagines. The molecules themselves seemed disordered, as though the world had been bumped against and some secret and perfect order was discovered enormously flawed. Moira came in slowly, she called and heard no answer. The music player had stopped and was buzzing with the loud volume of emptiness.

  Then Moira heard the breathing and, like a finger held upon a wound and now releasing, time rushed like blood. Gabriella was still alive, the child was not yet born. Moira Fitzgibbon made bloodprints with her feet and rang the mid-wife and the doctor and opened the door and called for Stephen in a voice the seawind whipped away. She hurried and ran water and got towels and lifted Gabriella's head and told her not to die, talked to her in a long and seamless stream of urgings that were the confession of her own longing for the child to be born and for the music lessons and the school and the dream of their life by the sea that she told Gabriella was proof of something, and which offered Moira, when she lay in the dark, the single best example of something good and true and beautiful.

  23

  On the beach Stephen walked beneath the crying of the seabirds. A breeze was gathering from somewhere out in mid-ocean, and the gulls came before it like grey prophecies across the cloudless sky. The wind was salted and dry. Stephen carried his shoes and walked in the wet sand, where the waves painted his turned-up trouser legs. He walked in the place where once he had thought his life was going to end. Now, on that afternoon beach, he walked to re-encounter that earlier self and renew his gratitude for so much that was given to him. The music school had been started, Gabriella was in their house where the garden was begun. He believed newly in God and felt the simplicity of grace.

  He tried not to think that the music school might be a folly, that it might be built beside the sea and open and find no pupils. That within a year it might be an empty shell whistling the long, unhappy note of doomed dreams. That Gabriella might change her heart and want to leave. He did not want to think of such things and kept a waferlike belief in goodness balanced on his soul. He walked the long beach until he was past the cliffs and out almost to the broken rocks, where his figure was too small to be seen by those searching for him along the sand.

  When he reached the remote end, he turned, tossed a Stone in the water, and held back his head a moment until the brilliant light of the sky bathed his face.

  He narrowed his eyes at the sun and did not hear the cries. The waves slapped. Gulls soared and screamed.

  Then Stephen turned to see the three Coughlan children clambering over the rocks to tell him to come quickly, there was trouble.

  His heart stopped. He imagined he was in a nightmare, for the journey back across the summer beach seemed to take place amidst the garish light and hollow cries of grim hallucination. Sunbathers sat up on their towels and watched him. He could not hurry quickly enough, and his long strides sank in the softened sand and gave him the jagged, uneven rhythm of a jogger suffering heart attack. His long neck angled forward, his arms pumped, and when his hat flew off he left it behind him on the water, running in a gasping horror, as if across his wide eyes there suddenly flashed the doomed future of all their loving, and upon his getting to the cottage depended one last chance for its rescue.

  He came up the dunes on all fours. He saw the cars at the gateway to the cottage. Then he slowed down. His rib cage hurt, his arms were heavy. The blood in his legs felt like molten lead and swayed his walking, so that the Coughlans caught up with him and took his hands on either side, guiding him the last paces along the road to the cottage that he was now afraid to enter. He stopped at the gate. He stared at the house, and the children looked up at him. And for a moment he waited. His breath escaped in long sighs. And while he stood there, on that cusp of what he supposed to be unutterable loss, he begged God in a prayer for it not to be so.

  Then he heard the baby cry.

  24

  Gabriella Castoldi did not die that afternoon in the hot July of the long summer but lived when her doctor said she should not have, and gave birth to a baby girl they called Alannah. A small, brown-eyed baby, she was born with a face that revealed neither her mother nor her father, though they each took turns to declare she was exactly like the other; as though they could not quite believe such tender beauty was their own.

  For four days after Alannah was born, Gabriella did not move from her bed; she refused to travel to the hospital in Ennis and instead took the difficulties of the birth as a sign that within life was an inevitable force of goodness which flowed beyond our understanding. She relied upon the ancient knowledge of the mid-wife and summoned the healing energy of Nelly Grant to awaken within her. She wept and drowned the bed in water and milk, turning the bedroom air a pale creamy colour that was more filling than food and strangely without the scent of sourness. The near-tragedy brought company. When the word of what had happened reached the town, it had the double effect of raising anger by highlighting the absence of maternity facilities in Ennis and transforming Gabriella into a native of the parish. Visiting ladies brought Lucozade and chocolates and made soft noises above the baby. They relived the hard labour in vivid imaginations and revisited through the new mother their own birthings years earlier. Throughout the first week they came and went like swaddling maternal tides, sliding in around the sleeping mother and child to breathe the thick warm smell of the newborn like an aromatherapeutic
remedy, and nodding themselves into dreamy naps that were filled with the downy comfort of first blankets. At once Stephen understood that the birth did not belong to Gabriella and him alone. So he made tea and brought it to the ladies and did not show surprise or resentment when he sometimes opened the bedroom door and saw a half-dozen women over sixty sitting around the bed.

  It was in the evenings when the visitors left that he lay with Alannah on the bed. He could not look at her without seeing God. He did not deserve her, he thought, and then held the child in his arms in the tenderest embrace while the stars rose in the skylight overhead.

  She became the clock of the cottage. Her wakes and sleeps dictated the rhythms of their days and nights. She was dark-haired and seemed in Stephen's arms the impossible lightness of air. He carried her around the house like the smallest parcel of hope, and though her eyes could not see that far, he pointed out the garden and the sea and then played softly the aching music of Tosca while she fell asleep on his shoulder.

  When Moira Fitzgibbon called, he hugged her in the doorway with that combination of awkwardness and sincere deep feeling that was the badge of his character. He cut her flowers from the garden and doubled his own blushes when he saw how she almost wept to receive them. Then, for Alannah's first trip outside the cottage, he urged Moira to join them and drove in his father's car along the western edge of Clare, where the fine summer was just beginning to fade and the yellow stubble of the mown fields was giving way to the last soft green. On the quiet backroads between Miltown Malbay and the sea Stephen stopped the car time and again, and taking one of four dozen packets he had bought in the town, he got out and scattered wildflower seeds in the ditches and beneath the hedgerows.