And your sister, Martin. You will be the man of the house. Martin looked at his father, and searched his face.
Where are your bags? he asked him.
I’m not going, Martin, his father said.
You have forgotten your bags, said Martin, his heart quickening. He put his suitcase down. Theresa was already on the gangplank. He called to her. Theresa! Come back! Daddy has forgotten his bags!
But his sister turned and looked through the crowd at them both, her eyes first to him, and then raised to their father in knowledge. Then she continued up the ramp. Martin fastened himself to his father’s arm, the swill of the air surrounding him pushing him down to his knees. His father lifted him and held him and Martin put his face against his father’s neck, his shouts muffled there, and he gasped in the scent of his father, of their house, of their houses — that scent had followed him his entire life. In that scent was the windows, the doors, all the rooms of their lives. All the lamps and spoons and flowerpots. The weathers, the skies, the streets and rivers, the voices of the people, the fragrance of their cooking. All the unnamed legions of birds, the swaybacked horses, all the fish in the lakes and the oceans. Uncontainable life! His father lowered him trembling to the ground, pushed his suitcase against him and forced Martin into the body of the crowd, and he was borne up, his small body as thin and hollow as a bird’s, the ship bearing down on him now, its metal bellowings, and his father, now on docks, watching without expression, his hands hidden in his pockets.
Night had fallen in Galway, and it was clear and dark above, the stars bright as ice. He’d walked back up from the bottom of town, his mind a mass of grief, and there had been people everywhere. They were sitting on benches with ice creams, carriage-horses walking past bearing their passengers behind white-curtained doors, children taking the night air with their parents, moving slowly through the leftover heat of the day. Maybe they would have come to love this ritual if circumstance hadn’t rent them. Maybe if he had waited and kept his children there, she would have returned eventually, she would have had no choice. A couple got out of the horse carriage in front of Eyre Square and paid the driver. Tourists recreating the past, as I was, picturing Martin’s father, his back rounded under his black coat, crossing the river to home.
I climbed Prospect Hill and knocked on the front door. Above, on the landing, a slice of greyish light appeared, and then a shape on the stairs, a shadow in the glass.
When he opened the door I said, “I’m sorry to be disturbing you so late. My name is Jolene Iolas.” He stood with a hand on the door-edge. “I was a friend of your son’s.”
“Come in,” he said.
He held the railing tightly as I followed him up the stairs. He had on the same clothes from earlier in the day. Grey slacks under the blue sweater. Beyond the landing, a door led to a long hall. The walls were draped with newspaper clippings and there were musty piles of magazines and books leaning against the walls on either side, making a passageway that was wide enough only for us to pass one after the other. The dust that caked everything hung in the air, disturbed by even the slightest of movements through the space. I walked down the hall toward the open room and passed an archway into a kitchen and eating area. The simple accoutrements of a light eater were arrayed on the stove; I could see a single plate and a single enamel coffee cup sitting in a drainer beside the sink. “Did you see Francine?” We’d come into the main room, the one with the plants in the window.
“I did.”
“Lenore told me she had to go to the hospital.”
“I don’t know what happened.”
He was at least ninety-five. On level with him, I could take in his face: his eyes had gone to pearl, slivers of black iridescence in the middle of cloudy whites, and I saw now the flesh on his face was as thin as onionskin. His head quavered. His white hair, still copious, sat tight on top of his head, a bird’s nest. Standing there in front of me, he seemed a part of all the things in the room, just one more thing in a crowded room. “I couldn’t take care of her anymore,” he said. “It’s better this way. She has company.”
“The two of them mount your exhibitions.”
“It’s better to use the Dublin galleries.” He held a finger up for me to wait and he walked into the kitchen; there was a second entrance to it off the living room. He came back a moment later holding a bottle each of milk and whiskey and drinking glasses dangled from two fingers. I presumed I was to sit, and I took off my coat and slung it over the back of a chair opposite the couch. He lowered his offering to the table between us, which was ajumble with museum books, catalogues, photographs, illustrated collections. He sat and gestured for me to pour. “Milk for me,” he said. I picked up the milk bottle and poured us each a glass. He raised his slightly to me and drank. “Keeps my bones from turning to kindling,” he said.
I cast my eyes around the room. There were more yellowing piles of paper lining the baseboards. A glass-fronted bookcase was stuffed to nearly bursting with more. Behind me, over by an upright piano that was laden with old record albums and more books, a piece called The Swan was hanging on the wall. The sequins that came down in the guise of snow shone in the poor light of the room like eyes in a cave. A few feet away from us, what had once been a dining table was covered with junk. “Is that one of yours?” I asked. “The Swan?”
“No. He sent me that. More than twenty-five years ago now. No way of contacting him and no letter.”
“Were you surprised?”
“No.”
“And what is all that?” I said, nodding to the table.
“Go look if you want.”
I rose and went over. The junk was arranged in piles, incomplete collations of artworks that were in public galleries all over the world. Here was Crossing, the ship already complete, the woman’s face affixed along the topdecks, the moss dried and painted for the bottom of the box. But he hadn’t figured out how to create the effect of the face against the underside of the glass. Plus, it would have required a picture of himself. Other piles were less complete. A plastic ballerina from a jewel box, separated from her mechanism; a clay pipe; a tin train conductor holding a bell; an empty glass sphere. I picked up the ship and came back to sit beside him. I held it in front of us, the funnels turned in.
“The picture on the glass was a very time-consuming thing,” I said. “He used a screen of the photo, so it had dots like in a newspaper picture, and he transferred it to the topside of the glass. Then, wherever there was a dot, he glued the end of a black thread on the underside of the glass, more ends if there was a grouping of dots, and when he was finished, he twisted the threads into three pillars and inserted one into each of the funnels. Then he pulled the transfer of the photo off the glass, and there you were. Hovering in the night sky like a guardian angel.”
He took the boat and turned it around in his hands. “I thought it was something like that. I couldn’t tell from the pictures.”
“Also,” I said, “Pond has seven feathers in it. I don’t know what it looks like in the Carnegie catalogue, but it must have been taken flat on. You missed the one at the very lip of the bowl.”
“Why seven?”
“That’s the number of stars in Cygnus.”
Colin put the ship down and turned stiffly to me. The couch sent up little puffs of dust. “What was he like?”
I shook my head and looked away from him. “Whatever I tell you about him will just end up being about myself. He was talented and generous,” I said tentatively. “Interested in a lot of different things. And a good storyteller. And secretive.”
He leaned in toward me as I spoke, his eyes hooded, one ear pointed slightly toward me. He dipped his chin at each descriptive as if somehow this sparse picture of a man missing longer for him than for me confirmed his suspicions. His hopes. He covered my hand with one of his. His skin was smooth and dry. “It sounds like he grew into a good man. Was he a good man?”
“He didn’t know how to live, Colin. And he damaged the
people who were closest to him. In the end, that’s all that mattered.”
His face reddened a little and he nodded curtly, almost to himself, and pushed forward on the couch. I stood and hooked a hand under his arm and lifted him up. “Come on,” he said. “If you want to see the rest.” We walked into a hallway that went down to the bathroom and two bedrooms, one of which was, impossibly, more densely packed with papers and objects than the rest of the flat. He brought me in, a hand lightly on my upper arm, and showed me where the order of the place began, and spiralled out. “These here,” he said, sweeping his hand over pillars of newsprint, “are the clippings from the Montreal and Toronto papers, sent over by packet ship from 1939 to 1975. After that, I was able to get some of the papers locally, you understand, they were bringing them right into Galway. So I always knew a little something about their lives over there. The daily events, the parades, what plays they might have been seeing. The weather. When the winters were very cold, I would worry. Adele had poor circulation.” He riffled the edges of a pile over by one of the walls. “She died in 1981. I found the announcement. But Theresa?”
“I’ve never met her.”
“She must have changed her name,” he mused, then looked up brightly. “She must have married.”
“You never spoke to any of them again.”
He was lost in a reverie, slowly rubbing his forearm. “Take me up, and cast me forth into the sea; so shall the sea be calm unto you: for I know that for my sake this great tempest is upon you.” He looked up at me. “Jonah.”
“I know who it is.”
“I must have been a very great sinner. Terrible things happened to us.”
“Is that why you had Martin baptized?”
“He told you that, did he?”
“Yes. He said you took him into a church and the priest touched holy water to his forehead.”
He looked up at me, and around the room, where the futile accretions of his remorse had risen up like monuments.
“I couldn’t bear that he’d grow up not being watched over.”
“He wasn’t watched over, Colin. He was a lot of things, but watched-over wasn’t one of them. You pushed everything you were afraid of on him, and he carried it. He had no faith in anything because of you.”
He listened, watching me with bone-pale eyes. He didn’t speak for a moment. Then he said, “Is it Jolene?”
“Yes.”
“I’m hungry,” he said. “I don’t eat very well.”
I felt my face buckle. There was nothing worse than this, to be here with these very last atoms of this ruined line. I straightened my back. “I’ll make you something,” I said. “What do you want?”
“Can you bake?”
Colin Sloane’s kitchen reminded me of Daniel’s, only it was the kitchen of a man whose body no longer needed much more than bread and butter (and milk) to live on. Judging from the contents of the fridge, which had one pound of butter in the door and five others in the freezer, that was in fact all he ate. A loaf of fresh bread sat on a cutting board covered in a tea towel. I cut a slice, buttered it, and ate as I searched the cupboards for the ingredients to make the lemon pie he’d asked me to make. His supplies were the sorts of staples that couldn’t be eaten on their own; they connoted the end-run of a grocery list whose more easily consumable items had long ago been eaten. There was chutney, but no soup; flour but no rice; honey but no cookies. The ingredients for the pie (and how long had he been craving it?) were scattered on the shelves. Cornstarch, sugar, an unopened bottle of lemon juice. The recipe was in a well thumbed binder full of loose index cards and handwritten notes. He confirmed it was Adele’s hand and the recipe I was to use hers. She’d first made the pie for him when they were dating in Dublin, just after he’d brought her back to his own coast, snatching her from her future in Canada. Although it had been only delayed. Maybe that’s the case with fate anyway, I thought, with all its postponements in vain.
I went down to the street to get the eggs the recipe called for, the two fresh lemons. I was in a kind of trance, worried for Molly and longing for Daniel. And I felt relief as well. That my own answers, the ones I made up for my own consolation, would not be disturbed. When I got back to the house, Colin Sloane was still sitting at the kitchen’s small breakfast table, itself piled as high with detritus as any other horizontal surface in the place. He obviously ate walking around or in his bed. He watched me make the pie crust, pressing it into the tin for me like a child helping his mother. I boiled water, poured it into the dry ingredients, and then thickened it on the stove with the eggs and lemon juice. He closed his eyes as the scent began to fill the room. “This takes me back,” he said. “What a lovely time.”
“It doesn’t make you sad?”
“Oh yes. But much more as well.”
I baked the pie shell as the mixture set, then poured it in, added the zest, and baked it again. He watched it in the oven. Then I cut us each a slice and we ate together in his blissful silence in the front room again, another glass of cold milk each. He smacked his mouth in pleasure, and my heart went out to him, in his loneliness, in which he longed for something he couldn’t have and would settle instead for lemon pie.
“Martin had a sweet tooth, too,” I said.
“He liked sweet sweets. Chocolate, hard candy. I like it sour.” He continued to eat in silence, then glanced over at the pie when his plate was empty, and I cut him another slice.
I didn’t know what else to talk to him about. I’d seen enough, and yet it felt that being the only visitor for some time, I had an obligation to stay. “Can I do some shopping for you before I go?” I asked. He declined, saying he had enough to live on. I let him eat quietly on his own and got up to look around some more. The bedroom, I saw, was empty but for the bed with its heavy sheets askew. There was not so much as a bedside table with a book on it, or even a dresser. His clothes were elsewhere, perhaps in a closet. The bedroom’s nakedness filled me with shame: the rest of the apartment resonated with mad hope, here was only the acknowledgement of death, its simplicity. I made the bed up, smoothing down the sheets, and had the image of myself spending the night there, sitting at the side of the bed and watching him sleep.
When I came out, he was standing beside the table. I went and stood beside him in silence, stood looking over the half-finished works, the copies made blindly, acts of helpless love. And who had I loved like that? Had I ever been gripped by love like that? Had I submitted to it, or had I stood remote from it, looking for assurance, wanting its sanctuary but not its chaos? Had it not been Molly, after all, who would have known what to do with real love if it had ever seen fit to seek her out? What lay arrayed on the table, that elemental memory, reproached me in its uselessness, in its desolate tie to living things, to living memory, to the child this man had loved, who I had loved in my dumb hopefulness, but also in my openness to the terrors of love.
“Take something,” Colin said.
“You didn’t make these for me.”
“I must have, though,” he said. “You’re the only one here.” He held his hand over the jumble of objects, then brushed aside some tinsel on top of a tiny box and put it in my hands. It was something he had made himself, not a copy of one of Martin’s works. A small thing, clumsily made. I held it at eye level and saw, behind a little pane of glass, a lead horse pulling a cart down a city street. There was a rider on top, a boy, his face averted, his eyes shaded, lost in thought. Two bent nails locking the wheels in place, preventing the cart from moving. Keeping the boy from his errands. Keeping him.
“He loved horses,” he said. I bent forward and kissed him on his cheek and he leaned against me, his eyes shut, accepting my warmth. He would live in only my stories now, my memory the vanishing point for both father and son.
“You know our prayers won’t be answered, Colin.”
“I know,” he said. “I do my penance anyway.”
Down, down into the streets and parks, along the river, past the churches and s
quares. Down Domenick and back over the river at the top of Claddagh Quay, and down to New Dock, past the restaurants and the trinket-sellers. The dead village covered over, the thatch huts and the fishing nets rotting under sand at the water’s edge, a whole way of life silted over, progress, the future, whatever it gets called, I ran, I ran past the historical markers and down to the old dock where the ships left for what they still called the New World. I looked over it, my chest aching for breath, and I could almost see him: the child in his good suit, his pasteboard suitcase hanging limp from his hand, searching back over the crowd for a single receding form.
In this place, he was still a child. I could reach out and touch him, turn him to me, his small body as thin and hollow as a bird’s, and stop him from looking on the great ship bearing down on them, cover his ears to its metal bellowings, keep its power from him, its power to move his life in a way he would never recover from. But he was going to go into the ship, he was leaving everything that ever mattered to him, he would do it again, and he would teach me that love is not a home, it is not safe to love other people, our faith in love is misplaced. Although, after all this time, I still don’t know where else to put it.
I looked out over the black ocean, its unthinkable distances.
Stay with me.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
This is a work of fiction, but it is rooted in the art of Joseph Cornell, and the boxes depicted here are indebted to the spirit of his work. I’m grateful for the assistance I was given while researching Cornell’s art, especially to Susan Cross at the Guggenheim Museum and Christina Lee and Mark Williams at the Museum of Modern Art who allowed me access to works in permanent collections. Amy Poll of the Leo Castelli Gallery made a number of important out-of-print books available to me. My gratitude to these people and institutions for their assistance.
In Ireland, my thanks to the Gilbert Library in Dublin (and especially Máire Kennedy), Asher Siev of the Irish-Jewish Museum in Dublin, Diane Dixon of the EU Projects Office of the Dublin City Public Libraries, and Bernie Finan of the University College Library in Galway.
Martin Sloane Page 25