The man took the belt from Jean, showing no surprise at all. Without too much fluster he bent down to reinstate his trousers, muttering something about ‘a copy taker above’ as he buckled himself up. Then he resumed his straight but slightly unsteady posture and returned his attention to the window.
‘I have beautiful girls taking my breeches off in the street now, Aisling! And if you don’t come down to me in ten seconds I’m going off with her. Right – I’m gone!’
He pressed his finger to Jean’s chest and told her to speed along. She turned to walk beside him. He walked with his head stooped, giving just the one glance back at the upper-storey window. Only when they had reached the corner with D’Olier Street did he look up at Jean. And he did have to look up at Jean: she was a good three inches taller than him.
‘You’re a big girl all the same,’ he said.
‘Where are we going?’
‘That depends on whether you’re happy to come along.’
‘I am.’
‘You know who I am, then, yes?’
‘I don’t.’
‘Just as well. Will you come and have a drink with me?’
‘Yes.’
‘I’m up at Jury’s. This is my last night in Dublin.’
She went in with him to the grand old hotel on Dame Street, where a cheerier and more civilised hubbub prevailed than out on the street. He ordered her a gin and tonic at the bar and, for himself, a glass of milk.
‘The ruination of the singer’s voice, milk,’ he said. ‘But I’ve done enough for the day.’ Then, shooting out a hand, he introduced himself as: ‘Denny Kennedy-Logan.’
‘Jean Dotsy,’ Jean replied.
‘Do you know who I am now?’
Jean hesitated.
‘Denny Logan?’ said the man.
‘Denny Logan …’
‘I suppose you’re all very taken with the rock and roll?’ said Denny.
‘No,’ said Jean. ‘No, I don’t really care for that kind of music.’
‘What do you like?’
‘Emmm,’ said Jean, thinking. ‘I like … I just like a good song, sung well. I like more of the old-time stuff. John McCormack would have been a favourite in our house.’
‘Ah well then you will have heard of me. Think about it now.’
Jean rolled her eyes to the floor to make like she was searching her memory. In truth, a tiny bell did tinkle.
‘Yes, I have heard of you, I think,’ she said.
He wiped away a milk moustache. ‘There you are.’
‘And you say this is your last night in Dublin. Are you emigrating tomorrow?’
‘No, I’m heading off home tomorrow. I’m only on a visit to Dublin. But I don’t intend to ever come back. No sirree, this is the last time,’ he said, banging his glass down on the counter. ‘Shall we go somewhere more comfortable?’
They took two soft low seats at a table. This left them some feet apart. It was more effort to talk over the clamour so they contented themselves with resting in their chairs. Not that Jean could ever rest very much. ‘At rest’ she was a ball of wire – people had pointed this out to her; at her Christmas drinks she remained with her shoulders hunched up around her neck as if she was still at her desk. She was aware that her shoulders were like this now, and she slowly let them down, and stiffly reclined into her chair. In contrast the man seemed at ease in his own body, and with his chair. From the crazed blackguard who had made a show of himself on the street he had now transformed into a ‘cool’-looking sophisticate. Each pose, in its way, showed equal indifference to what people thought. Slumped almost sideways with his legs crossed, he was smoking a cigarette with steely relish. The brown suit he wore was woollen of a very fine grade. She knew from looking at him that the country he had come from and the country he would return to tomorrow was America.
As meanly as he had been enjoying his cigarette he was eyeing her now, she noticed.
‘Will you have another drink?’ he said.
‘I will.’
He went to the bar, and came back with a gin and tonic, and another glass of milk for himself.
‘You are very disciplined,’ she said.
‘How do you mean?’
‘When you said earlier that you’d done enough for the day, you clearly meant it.’
He looked at his glass of milk and laughed. ‘Oh no. I meant I’d done enough singing. Sure I haven’t drunk a drop of alcohol in over two years.’ He looked quickly about the bar. ‘Do you know,’ he said, and with a little impatience, ‘we have awful trouble hearing one another in this place. Let’s go to my room where it’s quieter.’
She rose from her seat, inhaling deeply. As she stood beside him again, he seemed to tighten slightly, like a slug. His face showed uncertainty, and his skin turned pink. ‘This way,’ he said, ushering her with his hand. It was as if he’d forgotten and now was reminded of the height difference between them. She became conscious, as she so often did, of her own ungainliness. He slipped a couple of paces behind her on the stairs. ‘This way,’ he said again on the landing on his floor. His room was a single-bed, very small, with a low ceiling. She had expected something bigger and smarter. Even the tartan-patterned curtains showed tobacco staining.
He pulled out the seat under the desk; she sat at the end of his bed. Taking the shape of the stiff wooden chair, he seemed to regain his composure, and studied her silently again. She folded her hands on her lap and mainly looked at his feet. She slid one foot out of her shoe, and slid it back in. She asked herself if she felt anything. Genuinely she did not. She didn’t know what she was doing. She had vowed to herself earlier in the week that she would not think any more about her actions, and would allow herself to be guided by events and impulses until something happened to her. Well, these were events, at least; but impulses – she did not feel any of those.
‘America,’ she said. ‘Tell me about it. I have always wanted to go there.’
‘Mm-hmm,’ he hummed into his cigarette, then ripped it from his mouth, blowing out the smoke. ‘America, yes, great country.’
‘Is it just like it is in the pictures?’
‘The thing about America,’ he said, and he returned the cigarette to his lips, and savoured a slow drag, ‘the thing about it is, the reason it’s the best country in the world, is that it takes the best of all times. It takes the best of the past, and thinks only of the best sort of future, and in that way it makes for itself the best kind of present. You take this country – it seems fixated on only the dankest aspects of its history. And the future! Well, there is no future on this earth, that’s what they tell you in Ireland! And what’s the point in earthly ambition when there’s no future!’
Jean nodded. ‘The best of the past. It’s a nice way to go about it.’
‘Do you know when you think back on your childhood, and you remember sunshine and ball games and ice cream, and you edit out the wet stockings and the fits and the fevers? A similar process happens to you when you arrive in America. All these people come from every part of the world, many fleeing hardship, and it’s as if, at the gates of New York and Boston, they shed the memories of war and famine, and they bring with them into the heartland the most beloved aspects of their histories and cultures, and make them into something again.’
‘And it’s full of millionaires, they say. And anyone can make millions.’
‘What they say is true. It’s true! You’re looking at a living example of it.’
‘A millionaire?!’
‘Well. Let’s just say I’ve made enough money in the couple of years I’ve been in America not to have to worry very much about work again.’
‘My goodness! How did you make your fortune?’
‘Sales. I was a travelling salesman.’
‘Did you see much of the desert? And the prairies?’
‘Yes. Both. But cities and prairies mostly.’
‘What are the prairies like?’
‘Lots of cattle and great big farms.’
/>
‘And the desert?’
‘Buffalos and escarpments.’
‘What did you sell?’
‘I sold sheet music. Books of songs. I picked up some work with a music publisher, PD Decker, of Broadway. They were one of the last of their kind in New York. Specialised in all the very old Irish ballads.’
‘I would not have thought there was much money in that kind of thing any more.’
The man sank down in his chair, and joined his hands on his chest. He looked dead centre at the bed between Jean’s legs. ‘I was told I had a very narrow window of opportunity. When I set off, there were still people who bought songs in that form. There were many pianos still in front parlours. But I knew, anyhow, that within the souls of a great many of the American people was a latent affection for this sort of music. Americans love the emotion of these songs. It speaks to that side of them that yearns for their ancient homelands. So, it was a matter for me then, as a salesman, of trying to appeal to that side.’
‘And how did you do that?’
‘By using picturesque folk costume and through performance. I found it all very easy. I didn’t think I’d take to it as well as I did, but I did. Well, I suppose I am a performer by training. But I collected so many orders. I sold sheet music to people with not a trace of Irish ancestry – Russians, Armenians, Swedes, you name it. I sold sheet music to households with no pianos in them. The American people delighted me. They say this country here is the land of a thousand welcomes. Well, you should come to America. A stranger is often treated like a hero. A stranger is valued.’
Jean repeated the words: ‘A stranger is valued.’
‘The frontiersman and the moneymaker. They’re the two model heroes of America. The travelling salesman is the both of those in one. The motor car is his steed. You’re nothing without the motor car over there.’ He stretched his legs in front of him, touching the valance with his feet between Jean’s own. ‘Ah, it’s a good life for those with the gift for it. Full of adventure. Sometimes I would feel quite lost, an Irishman out in those big open spaces. But curiously it was rarely a lonely job, though people think that it is. There was a good camaraderie among those of us that did it. You met some interesting people on the road. Selling all sorts of wares. I owe a lot of my success to one man that I met. Though he was a rival to begin. That’s how I saw him. I used to see him ahead of me on the road, his car ahead of mine, all the time. I got to memorise his number plate. Every pit stop along the way his car would be there. Often I would be walking up a drive to a house and I would see his head and shoulders over the fence in the property next door. It was getting to be a bit of a joke. One day he turned around to me on a quiet suburban road in Chicago. He used to wear a suit of all-white. He turned around to me and he said, “Okay.” We went and had lunch. He was selling a religion. That was his product. That is another one of the great freedoms permitted in America. Anyone can be a prophet. Some can even be a messiah. I admire those people. They’re in business like any other. This man was preparing the world for the coming of a new god. It was the god of technology. An actual god – he was not speaking in figurative terms about technology itself. Like the god of cereal, or the god of the sea, this was the god of technology. This was what he believed, or had invented. It was all in his bible, or manual as he referred to it. To prepare for the coming of the god of technology, man had to make certain technological changes. People took his manual out of fear. But he was a decent sort. He assured me that my ideas could coexist with his. When my car broke down in Omaha, I rode with him. We went on a great circular tour of the western half of the United States, like Moody and Sankey, ending up back in Omaha to pick up my car. In those two days we visited several million homes. I don’t know how we covered the ground. We were like Santa Claus. Make love to me, please.’
His hand was on Jean’s knee. He was staring up at her with fierce electric eyes.
‘Please,’ he said. ‘Give yourself up. Become an animal.’
‘Mister … Logan.’
She lifted her hand from the bed. An inch from his a snap was heard and simultaneously a jolt ran through her body. They both winced; he jumped back into his seat.
‘Mister Logan,’ she said.
He kept his gaze on her as if nothing had just happened; his jaw, though, trembled like a sick dog’s. He said, ‘You should go to America. Anyone can make themselves up over there. Some people call it a project, not a country.’
‘It’s not that I –’
‘It’s true, all that they say.’
He hoisted his chair around so that he was sitting into the desk. Then he stood up and handed her a piece of the hotel’s headed paper with his American contact details scribbled on it.
She went away with her admiration for the man deepened. He had great purpose of movement and manner, and great control over atmosphere, and yet there was a pitiable quality about him that would make him a fine job for some wife some day, she thought. She went away too with his call for her to become an animal resounding in her head, remembering how she herself had called out to be transformed into an animal on Mazzard Hill the previous weekend. In the days after, it was those words, and the pleading delivery, that most stayed with her from her encounter with the man, his cry reinforcing her earlier thought. From a bench in Mount Argus she took keen notice of a ruck of pigeons making a meal of the crusts of her sandwich, crusts that lay on the dirty ground and that in any event were covered in large human germs from her lips, and she thought of the pigeons’ tiny fast-beating hearts and wondered how they survived. On another day in Rathgar she saw a dog sniff and then lick and then eat its own filth: and this was not a street dog but a small and clearly well-looked-after animal that was as clean and well groomed as its owner. She decided that it would not be a bad idea to test her own system out by being careless about food cleanliness. She began by deliberately dropping a couple of slices of apple on her floor, waiting for them to go brown, and then picking them up and eating them. Then she tried a pinch of cold potato from the plughole of her sink. Over the next week she ate whatever she could find in public waste bins. By the end of that week she was quite sick. The sickness manifested itself as vomiting but also an added fluttering in her heart. It was then that her fainting fits began.
16
The Filipina lady, Rosa, came in and tossed some logs from the basket into the grate. She watched for a minute until the wood caught flame, and sighed along with the hissing. The drawing room filled with a churchy smell. She scolded them for letting the fire go so low. ‘You can’t let it look like a picture of the fire I take for my children,’ she said. ‘Even when the fire is angry, when I take a picture of it for my children it doesn’t look angry. And when I come in the room I was not looking at a picture of it for my children and it didn’t look angry.’
Without quite knowing what she was talking about everybody in the room felt the scorn in her words. They all looked glumly at the flame-wrapped logs. Each man – there were seven of them – turned in his seat towards the fire even if it put a crick in his neck. They stared straight in at the flames with shamed expressions and dared not look Rosa in the eye. The room was quiet tonight because a monthly board meeting was on and all the most boisterous and go-ahead club members were upstairs in attendance, or where they usually were: inside, playing cards.
Rosa put her hand on the shining soapstone chimney breast and leaned against it and shouted at them like some fat southern housemaid from the bad old times. ‘You’re like babies, all of you. I leave you alone for an hour and you’re like babies.’
Normally Rosa was not in such bristly form. But sometimes when she felt she had a nice group of them like this on their own she let them have it. It was almost as if she were punishing them for being the weaker ones. When she left the room every man turned back to face the way that was most comfortable for him. Then the heavy oak door burst open with unseemly force, and a club member called Lancelot, a normally elegant and sullen grey-bearded black man, ch
arged into the room with pursed lips, bowed head and excitement in his eyes.
‘Evening, Lancelot,’ muttered the men in staggered unison.
Lancelot went to the middle of the room and sat on the wooden chest there, knocking over a pile of golf magazines. Nobody had sat on the three-hundred-year-old chest before. It groaned under Lancelot’s huge weight. He crossed his legs. The logs snapped in the grate. The only other sound was of Lancelot’s breath.
‘Gentlemen,’ he said. ‘Some news from the board.’
He paused another moment.
‘Perhaps this circular that we’ve just drafted will best explain it.’
He gave each man a letter. It began:
The Finance Committee and Long-Range Planning Committee, in consultation with the House Committee, with reference to the Articles of Incorporation and Bylaws set down by the Temporal Founders of C.B.K. Lodge 8, New York City, U.S.A., under the guidance of Our Always-Smiling Founder, Cha Bum Kun, in The Year of Our Lord, 1886 A.D., and in consultation with the Father Lodge in Pusan …
The men, nonplussed, scrunched their eyes to comprehend the text, or at the import of it, the papers shaking in their hands.
‘Look,’ said Lancelot, ‘in summary, we’ve provisionally agreed to sell the building for one billion dollars.’
He licked his lips in expectation of the reaction.
‘When do they want us out?’ howled one of the men.
‘As soon as possible, Gilbert. And we’re ready to sign. We’ve been talking to the boys in Pusan, and it’s all okay by them, and we are ready – if you guys are – to sign.’
‘So we’ll be homeless?’ said Gilbert.
‘For a while, perhaps. Until we find someplace new. That’s if you even want to continue.’
The men croaked and grumbled like a pond of angry frogs.
‘I said, that’s if you want to continue, because from now on we’ll all be busy with our turbo-powered golf carts, or our luxury yachts, or our space rockets to the moon, or our moon rockets to space. There are two hundred and sixty-three members of this lodge, and by the rules of the club all proceeds from the sale of property must be disbursed among members. So what’s one billion dollars divided by two hundred and sixty-three?’
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