‘Although,’ said Jeremiah, caressing his forehead, ‘I’ve observed this about women: they don’t have the power to overpower men and yet they walk about carefree as you like, so delicate’ – his caressing became a forceful strumming – ‘around the hollows of their ankles and in the glides of their necks and at the houghs of their knees, as if they are never in danger. I’m not sure if that’s of any use to you.’
Denny, studying him with an ambivalence of pity and awe, said, ‘No, Jeremiah, it is not. Is there anything more useful you can tell me about women from your vantage of bemusement and dispassion?’
Jeremiah looked back at him with rubbed-red bright smiling eyes.
‘Is there anything you can tell me from your vantage of great experience and knowledge?’ the shee said.
Denny, stroking his chin, said, ‘You are blessed by your nature, Jeremiah the Shee, and you’re as well away from them.’
‘I think I would like to know more about women.’
Denny, thinking for a moment, said, ‘Some information you might like to know about women can be found in this song.’
He noticed something slosh across the muscles of Jeremiah’s face, like a wave in a tray of water. A smirk broke from the shee’s lips. Denny closed his eyes tightly and gave it as well as he had it within him, singing ‘Two Sisters of Outstanding Charms’:
‘Then one day I knew what it was –
My poor benighted mind!
This charm was but an illusion of sight
And was I ever but blind?
One sister was the half of her head
Where feel and instinct wrought.
The other close sister was the half
Of soundness, nerve and thought.
Wasn’t I the fool to ever believe
The marriage was her and me?
The union true was prestidigitator
And the woman that I could see.’
A distressing fact of Denny’s singing, and one that he wondered about others detecting, was that he could not meet anybody in the eye when he was in the act.
He placed his knees neatly together and his hands on his lap.
Instead of articulating a response Jeremiah said, after a moment, ‘The sounds you hear now are of tunnelling and underground exploding. All sorts of groupings are in on it. New York City is being undermined.’
Denny believed he could feel the vibrations of this activity through the legs of his stool.
‘Tell me this now,’ he said. ‘If I called a tune, any tune, like the one I have just sung, would you be able to play it?’
‘I’d be able enough to have a crack at it. If that doesn’t sound too proud.’
‘I don’t doubt that you would be able. I have heard you play, and you have a rare ability.’
‘Have you a specific task in mind, Mister Kennedy-Logan?’
‘I do. I have a concert upcoming on March the sixth and need someone to play the piano for me.’
‘That doesn’t leave a lot of time.’
‘No it does not, I suppose.’
‘I mean this with the greatest of respect.’
‘I hadn’t considered it a slight until now.’
Denny inclined on the arc of his arm, racked with a surge of internal insubstantial misfirings.
‘And tell me this now,’ he continued. ‘Was it you or your brothers behind this radio-station business?’
Jeremiah gave a big open smile and tilted his head.
‘You’ve got me in a corner and I cannot tell a lie. It was me the cause of it all right.’
‘A shee’s machinations. I thought so.’
‘Only machinery. And benign espionage. Mister Kennedy-Logan, I must admit that the last time wasn’t the first time I stood outside your door listening to your singing. And not the final time either.’
‘How did you know to come? Did the neighbours complain?’
‘No, no. You’ve been perfectly discreet. But to be in charge of plumbing in a building such as this is to have an ear in every room, you’ll understand. The pipes led me to you. And most Thursdays and Sundays now I’ve liked to stand outside your door enjoying the nice sound. All these songs of home make me feel sick for Ireland, but in a good sort of way that brings me right the way up before they sluice out of me again as a purgative and leave me feeling tired and wanting more. And you sing them very well, all of you. But do you know, the first time I heard you through the plumbing it was all warmth and not so much clarity. Outside your door I get less warmth but better clarity. I think the latter is the better of the two compromises. But a compromise is a compromise and I can’t encounter a problem within my jurisdiction without wanting to try to fix it.’
‘And how was that accomplished?’
‘Well, the door, I felt, was a boon, acting like a resonator, or a tympanic membrane, as it were, and I knew that I would keep the door, and so I didn’t bother to knock on your door to ask your permission to stand the other side of it with my recording equipment. A bit of that then, but also the software I have on my computer there behind. It took a bit of fiddling, but after a time I felt I had a file showing the Free ’n’ Easy Tones’ singing to its best advantage. It was a very beautiful piece of sound production, if I may compliment you. And compliment you I will, as the beauty did not originate with me – I was merely the usher of the beauty.’
‘Thank you, Jeremiah.’
‘You’re welcome. Yes. No. For a time I found myself wondering if it was vanity had come over me, listening over and over again to the music in the file; was it that I felt proud admiring my own part in its effect? And then, after I would turn off the computer to rush upstairs to listen outside your door of a Thursday or Sunday evening, I realised that a more honest admission was that it was a weakness for beauty caused this obsession.’
‘Thank you again.’
‘You’re welcome. And when you finished singing and I rushed back down below I became very sorry that by having to switch on my computer again the beauty was locked away de-constituted at all. And when I did reopen the file it made me terrified with a thought: the perilousness of it. How easy the zero negates the one; how greedy is the interstice for that which bounds it, for it is tropic to the void, which is all beyond the bounds, which is the rigid simplicity of nothing, which is the opposite of beauty. It is no wonder we are all so afraid of the dark, for the dark itself equals nothing, it is the encroachment of nothing, it is the overlap of space. Turning on the lights or making the most of the hours that the sun graces our yardages of earth is just about all we can do in the midst of it. But there is another thing we can do: we can try and give back to that infinitely large and sublime space the immaterial beauty fully constituted it begs for. Which is why to my mind came the idea that I would send the file of music, on a disc, to a radio station, where it might be decoded and the beauty transmitted in the straightest of lines that would cut away from the curvature of the earth and continue for ever and ever into the darkness.’
Denny had been squirming about on his seat as if he had worms in his bottom.
‘That’s all well and good, Jeremiah. But the upshot is that I now have a concert date and I don’t have a piano. Nor have I had time to organise an accompanist.’
At that moment young Spanish-coloured Breffny emerged from the door to his room. He had a little hammer and some rattly bits of blue metal in one hand and was wiping orange axle grease on his trousers with the other.
‘Good evening, Denny,’ he said, and again: ‘I said: Good evening, Denny.’
‘Good evening, Breffny. And what are you making for the benefit of the world?’
‘Some braces for the brother above.’
‘To hold up his trousers?’
‘To straighten his teeth.’ He showed Denny the pieces of metal flat in his hand and shook them. He went on: ‘Denny, I hope you don’t mind but I couldn’t help hear you say that you needed an accompanist for a music concert. And what, with the greatest respect, were you all this time thinki
ng by not having an accompanist? Why don’t you ask the brother here?’
‘Jeremiah?’
‘You know of his talents. Call any tune and he’ll play it. Sing something now, Denny.’
‘We’ve done that bit,’ said Jeremiah.
‘And I have no doubt he would have accompanied me perfectly,’ said Denny.
‘What about it, Jeremiah?’ said Breffny to his brother.
Denny said: ‘As a result of your machinations, Jeremiah, the Free ’n’ Easy Tones have been offered a concert on the sixth of March. I came down here to ask your advice in buying a portable electric piano. Now I feel that you owe us your assistance in playing the piano.’
‘I think you are very kind,’ said Breffny. ‘Jeremiah spends too little time outside of his basement making himself better and fresh for the work he has to do. Some day we fear he will place his head under the clock weight of the elevator in despair and then he will be no use to us at all.’
‘You are not the master of me,’ said Jeremiah with a snap.
There followed a heated conversation between the brothers in Old Irish, only a tiny fragment of which Denny could understand. Eventually, though, an amicable and indeed amusing consensus seemed to have been reached.
‘What are you so giddy about?’ said Denny, leaning in and wanting to join the fun.
‘I was just saying,’ said Jeremiah, ‘that you have a most unique voice.’
‘Oh dear,’ said Breffny, pressing a knuckle into a swollen wet eye. ‘Yes. You’ll be all right for this concert. Jeremiah will do a fine job for you.’
***
Denny went back to his apartment with the goblin men’s laughter ringing in his ears. It continued to bother him through the day. He did not like that these indeterminately young persons had cheeked him, their de facto employer, and he especially did not like that he had not had a plan in place.
Oh to hell with the idea, he thought. They would use this woman’s accompanist or they would sing unaccompanied: that was always the plan.
There was never a plan.
Drat it, Aisling.
He was alone again, in his living room, with no piano taking up space, no piano to walk around. An imprint, buffed at the edges, soaked wet in one corner, marked the site on the carpet.
‘Bit!’ he cried.
The brothers saw things more clearly than he did. Poor Jeremiah, Jeremiah who was so awesome and pitiful, he was not so pitiful that he could not speak the truth as he heard it. And he had heard it with his own ears: Denny could not sing above or below one note. Jeremiah might tell him which note. The D flat of the cuckoo. Worse – the gargle of the magpie.
Denny could not sing. He had a stone in his throat. He could not sing: say it loud, he said to himself. He was saying it, he thought. There is no one here to hear it.
‘Bit!’ he cried again.
That is saying it.
And so. The plan was.
Bitching heat.
‘Blasted heat!’
The plan had been.
Simply this. To sing again before his time ran out. To clear his throat of that stone. Not much more thought-through than that. He would enlist his friend, Clive. (Clive? Really?) And somebody else, the somebody else who happened to be the boy with the ill-fitting hemispheres for a head.
The plan: to see that stone on the floor, reddened and wrinkled. That would be swell.
Stuck there since the day she left him.
The irony being there had been such grand opera in their parting.
‘You will not survive on your own! You will die! I hope you die! If you think you can sing for your supper – well! You’ll never earn a penny! You’ve never had an ounce of talent! It was me who had all the talent! I was your “meal ticket”, Aisling! I curse that I ever met you! I curse that day!’
‘And I curse you!’ she had said. ‘I curse you!’
He drank ten bottles of porter that night, tried to sing for the boys in Mulligan’s. Nothing but pain for all. They patted him on the back, punched him in the stomach, told him to put it down to grief. It’s humours, toothless Billy assured him. Your bile is black from trauma, your throat is heavy with the weight. Humours or possibly tumours. Oh machree, machree, he said. Make it go away. It never went away. She haunted him, always and still, did Aisling.
Did Aisling.
It meant vision, it meant spectre.
Too painful, too painful.
His little cornflour rabbit. He would feel the smoothness of her cheek with his finger. If only she had come to America with him and she would have been his little malted milk ball, his little malted milk ball.
Aisling that meant ‘vision’, as every Irish schoolboy knew. The spectre of Mother Ireland whose appearance heralded a revival in fortunes.
O!
And what a vision she had been when he first saw her!
Eyes, two eyes in a room. Sleepy kind eyes behind mother-of-pearl lids. In a neat, somewhat ‘Continental’, face. A prim, laterally, but full, longitudinally, set of lips. Straight feet. Small figure, but sharply outlined. She would be up to no further than his chin, which was important. By far the best he had seen in a long while.
He saw her first one Saturday afternoon while standing in a cold and bright and echoey hall. Vehicles passed in the near distance. The shouts of some corner boys came from over the wall outside. Easy to know the ones who will die young and those who drink their milk, he thought. Many thoughts came to him. Thirty expectant faces stared at his. She was wearing a green woollen suit; he was wearing a waistcoat that was intended to look serious. This was an intermediate and uncertain time in his life. He had a foretelling of the seizure to come when he found he could not summon a note. It is possible, he thought, that many of these young men and women, many the same age as myself and many attendees or recent graduates of the university, have heard of the ignominy of the months before in the pages of their College Tribune.
But all he had to do was look at those kind encouraging eyes and he felt a flap of feathers in his heart. He realised that the terror that had seemed to go on for an hour must only have filled him for a second. Suddenly everything was well. And he sang, eventually, like a nightingale. He sang ‘Claim Me in Spring’.
This was a time in Ireland when you married the first girl that you met and loved.
***
As agreed, following his performance Missus Dwyer, the choral-society president, asked him questions in front of the group. They were very searching questions. Evidently she had got her mitts on that copy of the College Tribune that carried the story of his defeat and embarrassment in Italy.
‘Well we knew you would be good and aren’t you “the business”. But tell us now about your time in Milano with Silvio Tosi. Did he find that there were limits to what he could teach the Irish tenor? We are not at cellular level so “hot” on the high B flats, are we? I’m told it’s to do with the positioning of our clavicles in relation to the ribs around the other side. The audiences in those opera houses in the small towns really “know their stuff” I have heard.’
‘They are demanding people, but they are not wealthy people, so they are naturally demanding,’ said Denny.
‘They let their feelings be known, to the debutante as well as to the singer of many years’ experience, if they don’t like what they hear, isn’t that true?’
‘I don’t know about that, Missus Dwyer.’
He looked back at the girl in the green suit and found that her sleepy eyes continued to show encouragement and also a curious tolerance. It gave him the strength not only to carry on under this line of questioning but to not be afraid of speaking about his failings.
‘No, no, I mean to say, indeed they do, Missus Dwyer. And the same audience does not give you a second chance. Well – there are some regional opera houses that might give the beginner a fresh start, it’s true, but by that stage Maestro Tosi had already decided that an opera career was not for me.’
He said all of this with his eyes
fixed on the girl.
‘Are you determined now to prove that his judgement was wrong?’ said Missus Dwyer.
‘No I am not,’ said Denny. ‘Don’t you know what pride comes before, Missus Dwyer? I will never enter that world again. I will make my name instead as a singer of the type of ballad I have just sung for you. I see myself very much of that world instead. It is a world more humble and in almost every way more honest than that of Italian opera. Give me the moon rising over Gougane Barra over the sun setting on Sorrento Bay any day, Missus Dwyer!’
‘Such an interesting and novel and sentimental outlook, Mister Logan.’
‘Let me tell you a piece of bunk that Maestro Tosi once told me.’
Warming now to his oratory, he made sure the eye-to-eye connection with the girl was firm and unmistakable.
‘It came in the form of a piece of supposed advice on the art of acting. “Play-acting” in all senses of the term. He said that in order to win over the women in the audience you must project your understanding of the character of the role you are playing to the farthest one of them, in the same way that you might project your voice, the hope being that they will develop feelings for a figment of your imagination. Well let me tell you about another piece of advice, much better advice, not from the Maestro but from a weary baritone in his circle. This man had said: The things that give the most uncomplicated pleasure are most connected to our survival on earth. And these themselves are uncomplicated things. Eating, love, assembling fires – but most of all love! Love is all that matters in the end. (Forgive the imagery, Missus Dwyer.) And when you find love (and please forgive my Italian accent here too), thissa granda lifestyle of the opera house willa disappeara, no notta really, but I mean that it willa seema that way and it willa not be a disaster.’
‘And what is your reading of that?’
‘It is open to interpretation, Missus Dwyer. Something to do with falsity, and honesty, and the first overcoming the second through learned behaviour, and how this might be reversed. This baritone was a grown man of great experience, and he could diagnose something in me that I could not see myself. I speak now as one youth to the very best of youth before me. I say, away with the pomposity and the grandiosity! Go with what is in your heart! Let the gold leaf lift and the stucco crumble and show you are as brittle as the balconies that keep men in the gods! Better to tell a girl that she is beautiful and that you are a fool.’
Green Glowing Skull Page 8