This Is Happiness

by Niall Williams

  I didn’t walk away then. I took up a new position further along, bringing with me a fine host of flies that were already drunk on the heady stuff of vocation. In the distance O Leary’s ass roared and didn’t stop, the roaring of an ass savagely eloquent and immensely pitiful.

  An hour or so later, the doctor drove out again, and again looked at me, and again didn’t stop. For a time after I thought: She might walk down now. He might have told her, Young Crowe’s at the end of the avenue, and she might have said nothing but gone upstairs to her room and looked out the top half of the sash window that couldn’t see the gates proper but the turning to them and she might have imagined me standing there. She might have enacted in her mind the same encounter I did and soon enough be unable to leave it in imagination. Soon enough she might be coming in her low boot-shoes down the avenue, the hot gravel crackling and the birds announcing.

  You see, I had a nineteenth-century imagination. I pushed the quiff. I took up a better position only to find it worse, picking another on the lumpish grass to the west and engaging there in a vain battle to stop sweating.

  When the doctor drove back later that’s where I was. He looked at me again as he turned in the avenue, this time stopping the car just inside the gates. For a moment it just waited there, exhausting itself in a vexed plume, the doctor’s eyes boxed in the rear-view mirror. Then, with some resistance, the window was cranked down a portion and through the narrow opening came a hand. When it was just outside in the air, its forefinger beckoned a single beckon.

  It was less invitation than command. I walked across to the car and Doctor Troy tilted back his hat to look up at me.

  ‘Are you sick?’

  ‘No, Doctor.’

  He moved his moustache some. Since the passing of his wife his eyes had the tide gone out in them, what was left were suds of feeling, but one of them was caught in his vision then because he turned away and looked straight ahead up the avenue and looked at the next part of raising his three swans of daughters and all that would entail, and then he turned back and considering what to say moved the moustache a small bit before looking up at me and delivering his verdict. ‘Go home, son.’ He touched the rim of his hat a touch, cranked the window and coughed the car into gear.

  It was both defeat and victory. I felt I had taken a step. I had announced myself and went back into the village not a little charged up. I had not planned to call on Annie Mooney. I think that’s fair. But stand a few hours outside the gates of love, just stand waiting a long time anywhere on the planet and your mind will not be standing, it’ll be travelling at a speed ten thousand times faster than it can when your body’s moving. It’ll arrive at places hitherto unvisited, which in my case meant north of renunciation, a refusal to let things unfold in what in those days in Faha was considered God’s plan. If I couldn’t do anything yet about Sophie Troy I could about Annie Mooney.

  Now, as far as I was concerned there are two ways of living, and because we’re on a ball in space these were more or less exactly poles apart. The first, accept the world as it is. The world is concrete and considerable, with beauties and flaws both, and both immense, profound and perplexing, and if you can take it as it is and for what it is you’ll all but guarantee an easier path, because it’s a given that acceptance is one of the keys to any kind of contentment. The second, that acceptance is surrender, that there’s a place for it but that place is somewhere just before your last breath where you say All right then, I have tried and accept that you have lived and loved as best you could, have pushed against every wall, stood up after every disappointment, and, until that last moment, you shouldn’t accept anything, you should make things better. This was more or less the philosophy of Tess Grogan, who, well into her nineties, kept the finest garden in Faha. We lost a garden, she’d say, speaking of the time of Adam like it wasn’t so long ago, pressing gently the swollen joints of her arthritic fingers and smiling the sagacious smile of the nonagenarian, ‘We lost a garden, our whole lives we have to remake it.’

  The other thing is this. I was implicated in what happened between Christy and Annie Mooney. I hadn’t intended to be but I was, the way you can be first through company, just sharing a living space with another human being and being drawn inside the ambit of their person.

  Some of all this was likely criss-crossing in my mind the time I was standing outside the gates of Avalon. In any case, alive now with the jittered pulse that comes from acting on emotion, I was momentarily freed from fear of embarrassment, and so, as unlike myself as Launy-the-lover Logue, I walked up the winding slope of Church Street to knock on the closed door of the chemist’s.

  I forgot with my bound wrists I shouldn’t knock, and the pain smarted nicely. When no response came at once I tapped two taps with my elbow.

  You understand nothing in the time when it’s happening. I’ve decided that’s a fair creed to live by. Most of the time you don’t estimate the good or the bad you do and you have to operate on a small and labouring engine of hope with a blind windscreen and pray you’re going in a direction that not’s too far off good intention.

  When Annie Mooney unlocked the door she supposed I was in need of medication. She didn’t question or hesitate and when I stepped inside she locked the door after me. She was wearing a long green cardigan and her silver hair was tied in a single bind midways down. Her face had the same graven look of ancient beauty and her eyes the same sorrowfulness that some call wisdom, but what struck me most was her air of stillness. Perhaps because it was the very opposite of what I was feeling.

  ‘Do you have a prescription?’

  ‘I want to talk to you.’

  There was a pressed-down pause. It was as though into that single instant a long history had been compressed and between the tick and tock of the second hand all of it was there and she put both hands into the pockets of the cardigan and, in the trapped heat of the half-day in that armoury wherein was redress for all that could and did go wrong in man woman child and beast, read what was to be read in my demeanour and said, ‘Come through.’

  We went through the dry click of a ribboned plastic curtain, into and out of a stacked stockroom in which there were more medicaments than the population of Faha, across the once flood-swollen and now lifted-in-places linoleum of a back passageway, up three concrete steps foot-worn smooth in the centre and through a cream door into an amber sitting room of oak flooring and Persian rug where Father Coffey was just finishing his tea and cake.

  ‘This is…’

  ‘O I know,’ he said, the sun-fired face of him flaming a little more.

  ‘Father.’

  ‘Mr Crowe wants a word.’

  ‘Yes. Yes. I see.’ He put his cup carefully in its saucer, backhanded a crumb off the crease of his trouser, and stood gravely.

  ‘We can go to the Parochial House,’ he said. ‘Thank you for the tea, Mrs Gaffney.’ He passed her a look whose meaning I couldn’t make out except to know it was not about tea. ‘Come on so.’ He held out a shepherd’s hand to guide me to the door.

  ‘It’s me, Father,’ Annie said. ‘It’s me he wants to speak to.’

  At that time Father Coffey was a poor reader of human nature. He was a better reader of divine nature was the corollary. But he didn’t like to be caught out. He had supposed I had sought him out and that it was to do with the torment he saw in me at the altar-rail. He lowered the shepherd’s arm, gave me a hawkish, Thomas Aquinas look. ‘I see,’ he said, but he didn’t and for an elastic second just looked at me with cheeks blazing, once more learning the hard lesson that the unexpected was a meaningless term in Faha.

  Annie went out with him. They had a muffled exchange. I didn’t think anything of it. I was standing in the sitting room gathering the bits of my speech.

  ‘Sit, please.’

  Some people have a gift of naturalness. There was something about Annie Mooney that made it seem no calamity could overwhelm her. She had what I thought then an improbable evenness of temperament, and w
hen her eyes met yours what you felt was her clarity and calm, as though by life she had been distilled. This was not the girl I had imagined when I had first heard of her, this was not the impetuous girl in Kerry who could fall in love with a man like Christy, and, seated in the feather hollow Father Coffey had left, I found myself in the footless place between story and truth. For no reason I can come up with here I hunched forward and tapped the underside of his saucer.

  ‘Would you like tea?’

  ‘No. No thank you.’

  ‘I feel I should sit down for this.’ She smiled saying it and sat across from me and folded her arms and waited, as though there were a draughtboard between us and this time I was white.

  ‘It’s about Christy.’

  She was thin, I was realising. The way she held her arms across herself showed her wrists and that she was even thinner than you thought. She had a pared-away sense, as though the features of her face had come forward and were of this startling lucidity. Her eyes were grey. Her voice was kind and indulging of me, but there was weariness not far. I’ll say here that I sensed that. I may not have at the time.

  ‘He didn’t send me. He doesn’t know I’m here. He wouldn’t want me to be here. Not for him, not on his behalf. He’d probably, I don’t know what, if he knew. But anyway, he doesn’t, that’s important. It’s not that he… I’m here on my own.’

  She was sitting upright on the edge of the armchair, her back straight, watching me the way you might watch a patient presenting, not wanting to jump to conclusions, or to show yourself jumping anyway. ‘You’re sure you wouldn’t like tea?’

  ‘No.’

  She moved her upper body slightly, angling it forward, and the smallest crease of a wince parenthesised the corners of her lips. ‘A glass of water?’

  ‘Thank you no. I’m here to say something and if I don’t say it quickly I… I’m here on my and he doesn’t know, didn’t suggest it, it didn’t wouldn’t occur to him to because he well he, what he, I shouldn’t put words in his mouth and I’m not, that’s not what, he put some in mine and that was fair enough I’m, but no nothing I’m here to say he told me.’

  ‘I think I’ve got that.’

  ‘I don’t want you to hold it against him.’

  ‘I won’t.’

  The room was grander than I’d thought, but more faded too. Its dimensions those of the few fine square buildings that had formed the first street of Faha and lent it for a time the air of a town, expecting for a time it might become a town too, and for all time after wearing the look of disappointed elder. The windows were long and the ceilings high. The furniture was heavy and dark and saw no sunlight, and since the chemist’s death had not been moved or changed, so the room retained not only his ghost and the ghost of the village’s origins but that of something that was not yet dead too. In my memory it was late afternoon but may not have been that late in fact and may only have acquired that sense of lateness from the dimness of the deep room and the embers of love. Because of the room’s dimensions Annie was sitting further across from me than usual, the gentry having longer legs or not wishing to sit too close to each other. The more I spoke the further I leaned out towards her and the louder my voice.

  ‘The thing you’re here to say?’ she prompted gently.

  ‘Yes.’

  It’s not that I had forgotten it. It’s that I felt like Francie Dunne when he tried to eat the football.

  ‘You’re not unlike him,’ she said. And some figment of that passed through her expression and she released the arms crossed on herself and drove a crease on her skirt down and away. ‘When he was your age.’

  I was too het up to decide if this was good or bad. I pushed the quiff across and blew out the football. ‘He came here for you. That’s why. There was no other reason. He came with the electricity but he worked it so he came to Faha once he knew you were here. You’re it. You’re his purpose. He has thought of nothing and no one else in coming here. He went to Kerry first looking, did you know that? He did, he wasn’t even in this country but he came back and he went there and asked and heard that you were married here and he came anyway not because he wanted anything, he didn’t, from you I mean, except to see you and speak to you.’

  It was important to take a breath. I think that’s in Cicero. ‘You’re the whole reason he’s here.’

  ‘I think that’s probably true.’

  ‘It is.’

  ‘But it was foolish.’

  Her eyes were still the same even calm wise eyes and her voice was still the same even calm wise voice but there was something extra in both, I want to say sadness but it was more than that, it was experience and knowledge, it was the world as it is and not how we wish it to be.

  ‘It doesn’t have to be foolish. Why can’t it be that…?’

  ‘Because he doesn’t know me. Because I don’t know him. Because we are strangers who know nothing about each other.’ It was a three-part death knell and finished off with the cold truth of: ‘It was several lifetimes ago.’

  The lower half of the sash windows were raised but no air was coming in and nothing stirring in that wine-carpeted mausoleum except what I had been trying to resurrect by forced speech and forehead sweat. Outside, a horse and car came and went in rattle and clop and a clipping of conversation between Mona Ryan and Marie Sweeney rose as far as the curtain before transitioning into mumble.

  ‘He didn’t come for love,’ I said, both surprised and not by a high tone and troubadour’s diction spouting out of my mouth. ‘He came to ask you to forgive him, that’s all. He woke up six months ago with one thought. He wanted to ask for forgiveness of anyone he had wronged.’

  Once I said it I knew I had reached her. She didn’t react right away, didn’t betray surprise or derision or disbelief at the idea both simple and grandiose, she had lived too long and known too much for hasty response, but I knew by the pause she gave it. I knew as Nolan’s car purred down Church Street and idled outside the post office, the car door opening and clunking, and opening and clunking again once he’d dropped the letters in the box.

  ‘And has he?’

  ‘I think so.’

  This time she couldn’t help herself. There came a comment through her nose, a short puff of air. Later I would interpret this widely, as wordless expression of the vexing truth that all men are impossible sentimentalists, who invented a religion of forgiveness and grace in the full knowledge of their own waywardness, all sorts, who sought forever the consolation of clemency and the embrace of their mothers. Later I would think her comment stinging, but then she said nothing. She crossed her arms on herself and drew back her head a little, not unlike Ganga considering a position on the draughtboard. Her eyes, whether from deep feeling or falling light, were striking. I hadn’t lived enough yet to think of them as beautiful. Then the parentheses occurred at the corners of her lips again and she shifted her position and stood. ‘Thank you for coming to tell me.’

  She walked to the door and held it open, and soon we were back inside the shut chemist shop and she was turning the Yale lock and opening the door on the un-humming humdrum of Faha where the scene just ending took on the swift dissolve of dream.

  ‘Can I tell him to come see you?’

  ‘I think it’s best not to.’

  ‘But just to talk to you? He just wants to talk to you.’

  She smiled her no, then said, ‘But you can come again.’ And she touched my arm fondly, as though there I wore the armband of the ardent. Whether to be pitied or prized for it I couldn’t rightly say.

  32

  The next time my mother fell I was not with her. I came home from school and found her on the floor in the kitchen. I lost my balance, she said, quiet and contrite and ashamed as though it were a thing she had misplaced and maybe I could find where she’d left it, and she reached out a hand that shook in the air, a hand that shakes in the air still as I tell this.

  I couldn’t lift her. She was not large but the parts of her seemed to pull in diffe
rent directions and some element of the shock must have weakened me. I had never tried to lift another adult and never put my arms around my mother except to receive her embrace, already a long time since, and I was awkward and embarrassed I suppose and some ways wanting to pretend this wasn’t happening. When I took hold of her it was around her back on the coarse stuff of a worsted wine dress. It was twisted up and showed below it the cream of a slip and the fawn of her stockings with fawn worms where the material had gathered, and there was shock in that too, in the rout of the private, in the disarray and helplessness. I was thinking to support her as she stood not realising all the power of her legs had left her and she would never walk on them again. I heaved up and she groaned out of the deep centre of her, and I couldn’t lift her and had to let her back down on to the floor. O Noel, she said, I’m sorry. And she started crying then, small spouts of cries like a not-yet-running tap. She tried to choke them back, but that tap wasn’t for turning, because she knew what this fall meant, knew it wasn’t a misstep, uneven flooring, or any fault in the surrounds, but was in herself, and the knowledge of that was running and flowing fast now and couldn’t be turned off. Mam, I can lift you. And I grappled on to her harder than I should have because of the crying and because of the wild terror that was in that box kitchen then. It was like a force had escaped its casing and been released.