Her face became still.
“I’ve been trying to think about what’s the best thing for us to do here,” I said. “I was walking around the town, thinking.”
“You just told me that,” she said.
“Yes.” I brought the train ticket out of my coat pocket and unfolded it. I pushed it across the table to her.
“You’re leaving?” She looked up at me with complete bewilderment. “You’re this close and you’re going to turn around and go?”
“No,” I said. “Not me.” I waited for my words to come clear. She looked back down at the ticket and saw her name there. Then she laughed.
“I’m not leaving now.”
“You are Molly. I understand why you think you should be a part of this, but you shouldn’t be.”
She folded up the train ticket and pushed it back into the middle of the table between us. “Were you waiting the whole time to do this?”
“No.”
“Does it feel good?”
“What have I got to be angry at you for, Molly? You haven’t done anything wrong.”
“If I haven’t done anything wrong, then why ask me to leave?”
“Because you think you can fix what went wrong in my life.”
“It went wrong in mine too whether or not you want to admit it. So I have a right to see this through.”
“No,” I said, angrily. “You don’t belong in this part of my life, Molly, it doesn’t matter how much you wish it on yourself. It’s not right for you to be here. I don’t even think it’s safe for you to be here.”
“Hah,” she said, her mouth turned down. “You’ll say anything now.”
“What if after all this time, you weren’t able to do for me what you’d come here to do?”
“At least I’d know I’d tried.”
“Yes,” I said. “You did, Molly. And it’s more than anyone’s ever done for me.” I put the ticket in her hand. “Now trust me to do something for you, please. I haven’t been a friend to you until now.” She was slowly shaking her head. “This comes out of love,” I said. “And gratitude, Molly. But you do have to go.”
Finally tears poured from her eyes. She looked beautiful like this, fixed in an attitude of terror and courage, and I wanted to move around to her side of the table and hold her. But like all the people in her life who’d known they had to turn her out, I hardened my heart enough to remain still. She took the ticket.
“I’ll get you packed,” I said, and I got up from the table.
In the room, I took down the things she’d hung up in the closet, folded them, and put them in the suitcase. Then I dropped the counterfeited Pond in there among her things, emblem of our friendship with its missing stars, its incomplete atonements. I looked at my watch: her train was to leave in less than an hour. I closed the suitcase and stood it by the door.
Outside, students bicycled past the windows of the inn, under the streetlamps, many with their leather satchels slung in their baskets. Girls with cotton skirts, boys with gleaming black shoes. I’d be home in a day, I realized, and the night after that, I’d be seeing my own students again. They wouldn’t know where I’d been, what I’d done, and I’d seem the same to them. The stillness, the completeness of our elders. Not knowing the incipient unravelling that continues, that gets contained only by submission to it, strangely enough. We were due to move on to Wordsworth, but now I thought I would backtrack and bring Milton into the conversation. Milton, my oldest love, who I’d taught at Indiana, but in Toronto, the evening-school bosses thought Milton too dense, too fundamentalist for the liberal arts. And who could handle Paradise Lost after a long day manning the telephones somewhere? But no, it would be Milton, Milton with his faith, Milton, damned to knowledge but still hanging on to God in the face of all the evil he himself had proved compelling. Staying the hopeless course.
But I also wanted to talk to them about the daughters too. His diligent daughters who stayed at his side through his blindness and wrote down the poem as it unfurled in his mind, night by night. Who withstood his hoarse rages and abuse and saw him through the spectacle of his love and his devotion to art. These women who history then forgot, perhaps ruined, although they are woven into the poem — heaven’s last best gift — the Eves in his lost garden. Poetry doesn’t exist in a realm outside of people, I’ll say to my students. Art is not separate from lives. The love of those girls is also the body of their father’s poetry and all art instructs us how to love. So pay attention to that, I’ll say to them.
There was a click behind me, the door handle turning. I watched her come into the room. She was calmer now, her eyes clearer. I sat in the chair I’d earlier folded her clothes over. She looked in the closet, and then closed it, and saw her suitcase by the door. “Have you ever felt like you didn’t know what the world was trying to tell you?”
“I’ve never thought it was talking to me.”
“You know what I mean.”
“No, I don’t,” I said. “I don’t think everything comes together with me as part of the plan. I did as a child, but children should believe that.”
She listened, sitting on the bed, bent over on her elbows. Her forearms lay crossed in her lap. “That scares me if it’s true.”
“Why shouldn’t it be, true, Molly? It doesn’t mean you’re nothing. It just means you’re on your own.”
“And you think that’s a good thing?”
“No,” I said. “It’s the only thing. So we might as well get used to it.”
She shook her head, but whatever she was thinking, she decided not to speak it. After a moment, she got up with a heavy breath, and stood with her arms limp by her sides. “When’s this train?”
“It goes every hour.” She looked at her watch. “When will you go back to New York?” I said.
“I can go whenever I want.” She leaned down to pick up her suitcase and I got up from the chair. We stood, a few feet between us, our bodies half turned toward each other. “If the thing about that Bible was a lie,” she said, “maybe Martin was never truthful.”
“What he told you about the Clonmacnoise Bible wasn’t a lie, Molly. It was a story. And it was true to him. That would have been another thing he would have been happy for you to take the way it was intended.”
“Will you believe what he tells you now?”
“I already believe it.” She looked up at me, uncomprehending. I held my hand out to her.
XIII.
GRAND CENTRAL, 1955. 12" X 14" X 2" BOX CONSTRUCTION. WOOD AND GLASS WITH FABRIC AND PAPER. BELIEVED DESTROYED. A CINEMA AUDITORIUM IN WHICH THE CURTAINS ARE PULLED BACK TO REVEAL A NIGHT SKY WITH THE CONSTELLATION CYGNUS MISSING.
THEY LASTED TWO MORE YEARS. THEIR HEARTS SOFTENED a little toward the place, but it never yielded to them. Colin Sloane hired a felt cutter in the fall of 1938, just as the hints of war were building over Europe. Business was good; enough to keep them all going.
In the spring of 1939, the Spanish Civil War ended and Hitler annexed Slovakia. The Cadburys moved from number 4 St. Mary’s Terrace to a nicer address in Salthill, and Hannah Mosher took ill in Montreal. Martin had never seen a telegram before — a man came to the door with a yellow sheet of paper on which were glued strips of words. It said, MOTHER ILL STOP WIRING MONEY FOR PASSAGE STOP FATHER. He watched his mother read the message and her face lifted and she was staring, her eyes white like the boy’s in the story William had once told him.
That night she explained to him and Theresa that she had to go overseas. She didn’t know how long she would be gone, but she would write to them all, and before long they would all be together again. Their father sat half in the dark, folding the telegram into smaller and smaller squares.
He’s finally got his revenge, he said. Your father. Duped, he was, now he’s getting you to take the rest of the trip.
Don’t be morbid, Colin. Are you saying he’s lying about my mother?
Not lying, but it’s convenient, isn’t it. See now, his daughter’s an Irishwo
man married to a Mick, he’ll do anything to turn back the clock. She went to the stairs and motioned for him to come, but he stayed rooted to his chair, disconsolate, and it frightened them to see him that way. No need to have this talk in private, Addie. The kids should know how ashamed your father is.
My father loves me, and he loves his grandchildren as well as their father. So don’t be twisting this into something you can’t twist back. Honestly, Colin, and with my mother sick enough that my father would spend the money on a telegram! You should know to think of something more than yourself!
For the love of God! he said. If she died without warning, you’d have no choice.
That would suit you well, wouldn’t it? Well, I have a choice, and I’m going. And if you’re finished talking your nonsense, I’ll be upstairs to pack.
She turned her back to him and proceeded up the stairs, and he rose and bellowed behind her: Just when we’re getting settled, aye! This! A curse on us all!
They’d never heard him raise his voice before, and Martin saw his face was red, and his cheeks were shaking. This is all my fault, he said miserably.
Theresa edged her way around her father’s paralyzed form and went up the stairs behind her mother. When his father, Martin followed her up, giving a wide berth to the throbbing, mussed head of his father. Upstairs, the two of them watched their mother pack, their sullen faces hovering behind the open lid of the case. She folded her silk bed-gown into a gleaming square that smelled of spice and lavender, and she tucked it into the corner. Martin put his hand on it; its formlessness was disheartening, knowing it would cover the miles of darkened sea with his mother’s body in it, but him back on another coast.
Are you worried about the boat? she asked him.
No, he said. You’ll be fine, I know. You almost went the first time. When you met Dad. Good things happen on boats.
Will you have enough to eat? asked Theresa.
They have food for the whole journey. She closed the lid and sat beside Martin and touched his hair. It was unbearable, as their father had said, that just as their lives were settling such an upset would occur.
I want you to be patient and treat your father well. He’ll recover from his bad mood. No matter what happens for good or bad, family is all we have. Do you understand? She turned to each of them to receive their acknowledgements.
Martin knew that he would do anything for her then, to save her, to take away the pain that she was surely feeling for her own mother. When he’d imagined how his death would have saved the family, it was the image of his mother’s grief as he was buried that ultimately made him want to live, even if it destroyed all their other dreams. Right then he knew that everything that was chosen in life created a single path and destroyed all the alternatives, and that meant, probably, that you could not choose how to live and also be happy. It was true here: his mother could not choose to remain in Galway and so not be with her mother. Nor could she go to her and also be spared the anguish of watching her die and upsetting her family. There was no choice that did not amplify pain elsewhere; it was a cruel balance. It could only and ever be so, or it would not be at all.
She leaned down and kissed him on the downy hair at his crown, and pulled Theresa in toward her as well. His sister was crying, silently tears went down her face, even though her expression was still. Then she placed Theresa’s hand over his, and without words they both knew any feud between them was to end here. As they left her, they passed their father in the hall, his face ashen and knowing.
The next day, their mother climbed the gangplank and disappeared into the giant ship. It turned around in the bay and pointed out toward the sun, then put on steam and began to get smaller. The ocean was huge, and dark, and cold. Martin tried not to think about it.
Afterwards, they did their best to return to normal life, but normal life had been suspended. The house was eerily silent without her, and they all went about their various tasks in the sun-starved house quietly, as if they were in mourning and risked offending the gravity of their circumstance. They saw that their father had begun talking to himself — at least it seemed that way with his lips moving — and when he sometimes gave breath to the shapes of words, they heard bits of their mother’s instructions to him: the lever, or Wednesdays. It was comforting to hear her channelled through him, and even moreso when he attributed an action to her, such as when he added an egg to chopped steak, or squeezed a lemon over half a cantaloupe to help it keep its colour in the icebox.
In the mornings, they saw that he sometimes pulled down both sides of the bed and then made both sides, even though her side was untouched.
The first week passed. Theresa did the laundry as best she could, and Martin swept the halls and the kitchen. But their father began to fade. He said to Martin, See what God will take away? and his eyes were a little unfamiliar, as if they were vigilant for something Martin could not see coming.
As the days went by, it became clearer that their father was not going to be able to keep up. The meals, which had at first been hearty, if flavourless, grew smaller, and then became alarming. One night, he put plates of raw rice in front of them, with lashings of hot tomato sauce across it. Let it sit a moment to soften, he told them. Theresa sneaked out next door after supper and wept in Mrs. Raleigh’s arms. The next day, large tubs of stew and hot breads and jars of pickles began appearing, and the Raleigh girls secretly told their friends that the Sloanes had become family members because they could not feed themselves and were being nourished on their mother’s cooking.
The nights were difficult. Martin woke up feeling a cold pall had enveloped the house, and for the first time since before he became ill, Theresa pulled back her covers for him and let him nestle against her. At night, alone in the house without their mother, sharing a bed was the only way of dealing with the anxiety of distances. Their grandmother (whom they had never met, in fact) was surely dying, but in a part of the world so far away that neither of them could conceive of the kind of love that would drive a person to go that far.
By August, their mother’s letters began arriving, and she described the city of Montreal as if it were more like Dublin than Dublin had been: the smell of fresh bread everywhere, the river full of ships, and horses in the streets. Of course, many of the people spoke French, but it was charming. It had been hot, in fact the summer there had been unbearable. She wrote to their father that he would love the city: it was surmounted by a hill with an iron cross atop it, and at night it was lit up like a beacon to the faithful. It was taller than Nelson’s pillar, she wrote.
Their father read and reread her letters, as if the sound of her voice could actually rise off the page, material. Each letter (and now they arrived with regular frequency, each about a month and a half old), told more of a life in a place it was becoming clear to him she would never return from. The letters became imploring in tone, saying that she missed them all dearly, and she signed some of them je vous adore. Finally, in September, she sent a telegram, as her own father had, and begged them to sell everything and come to Canada. Her mother had stabilized, but she could not leave. No, she did not want to leave. There was no argument from Martin or Theresa — they missed her too much to consider such a thing as a country or a home of any importance, but their father was grief-struck anew. Galway was the edge of the very known world to him, and although he had no relations but a brother in Belfast, his country was all of who he was. But he had foreseen having to leave, as he had said to Martin. God will find you and drive you out.
They began to divest themselves of unnecessary possessions, and before long, all possessions seemed unnecessary. The grandfather clock, which had paced Martin’s entire life with a stately tick and gong, went. Then the sofas and the beds. Their father sold his business to his felt cutter, who changed the shop’s name to Caprani. He’d come from Naples.
Passenger travel had been restricted out of Galway since the sinking of the Athena off the Hebrides earlier in the month. (Gabriel had told Martin
that the cries of the dying were heard in Sligo.) They waited until late October for the shipping lanes to reopen, and the sea was buff and cold, the waves even near the shore tipped white. A hansom cab took them down to the docks to wait with the hundreds of others for whom this ship was their first chance to leave Ireland since the end of the summer. The massive form of the M.S. St. Louis stood against the black sky, taking on passengers who moved slowly up a gangway and through a dimly lit door to the insides.
Martin stood with his father, the smell of the damp thatch behind them in the Claddagh, the pong of salt all around. Theresa had pushed forward already into the throng of passengers, and he could see her by the new hat their father had made for her. A lady’s hat, he’d said, for a young lady. Above them, the passengers taken on in Dover, in Dublin, in Cork waved from the foredecks, the plumes of steam and grit chuffing out of the funnels, the horses quietly moored to their posts as the porters unloaded the carriages. This was the great ship’s last stop before it would sail over the Atlantic to Halifax and then Montreal.
He was nearly eleven now; there was a past behind him. He stood, waiting with all the others, his mind blank with trepidation and sadness, his pasteboard suitcase beside him with its keepsakes safely wrapped inside. He held his father’s hand, not wanting them to get separated in the crowd; he felt angry at his sister for getting ahead of them. She was more and more turning into a showoff. Their father should never have said lady’s hat; it had gone to her head in more ways than one.
The crowd pushed against them, moving them along whether they wanted to or not. Martin could see that the ship now blotted out most of the sky and sea; the gangway was less than twenty yards off. Theresa was nearly at the bottom of it. Martin’s father leaned forward over him and tugged his woollen topcoat up square on his body. He put his mouth beside Martin’s ear. You take care of your mother, he said.
We will all have to take care of her. Especially if Grandma is still unwell.
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