Thomas Murphy

by Roger Rosenblatt

  DEAR SARAH, I wanted to tell you how I drowned my best friend Cait. We were eighteen, and had been on-and-off lovers, but mainly friends all our lives. In a place as small as Inishmaan, a good friend is a treasure, and Cait was that to me. She had the heart of a lion. Her death too, like your brother’s, occurred on a beach. We were there one spring evening, the two of us, looking out toward Galway Bay and the mainland. Cait brought a jug of poteen, our Irish homemade hooch, and we were getting pretty smashed. I was half dozing, when Cait thought it a good idea to take off her clothes and swim out to a rock island sticking up out of the bay. She was always doing daring stuff like that, and I thought little of it. I should have swum out with her. I knew she was drunk. And then I saw her slip off the rock and go under. When she didn’t surface, I went after her, swimming around the rock, and calling her name the way your folks called David’s. Funny about that. We call out the names, though we know it’s no use, as if the sound of the name itself were a lifesaving measure. But I did find her, and brought her, still alive, to the shore. Her eyes swam in her head, and her limbs were limp. By the time we got her to the hospital in Galway, she was as good as dead, the doctors said, brain dead. When I’d carried her from the water, she felt light as a sheet of paper.

  I LIKE THIS GIRL, Oona. I’m telling you now in case anything develops between us, and I don’t want you saying, Isn’t this a fine how-do-you-do! The truth is, you would not be surprised that I like her, at least not any more surprised than I am. Love comes to old Murph one last time? I don’t know. It may not be love yet. But as the song says, it’ll do until the real thing comes along. It’s just that I feel a strength in her, akin to yours, and a basic goodness, akin to yours, and a horse sense akin to yours, too. She isn’t you, old girl. No one could be. But she has something that gets under my skin, in a peace-giving way, as if I knew her a long time ago.

  There have been but three women in my life, that is, if Sarah qualifies as the third. One I found and lost on Inishmaan. One to whom I gladly gave my heart and vows. You know that one. And now this girl, who steps in so quietly, you’d hardly know she’s there. Oh, nothing will come of it, most likely. There are more years that separate our ages than years she’s been alive. And she’s got a husband, to boot. God knows where. But still. And I really don’t know if I have any love left in me, after you.

  Her being blind? You might worry about that, since I’m having a little trouble taking care of one person, who at least can see what he’s messing up. The odd thing is, she makes me quite comfortable with her blindness. She gets around well on her own, but that’s not what I mean. Most of the time, I do not notice that she’s blind. I guess age does that to you, makes you focus on what counts. And she seems comfortable not being able to see me. I try to tell her of the glory that she’s missing. She fires back that my mind is so dazzling, she does not know if she could survive the blaze of my physical beauty. You can see what I like in her. It’s you.

  What she sees in me, I have no idea. Apart from my manly manliness, brains, and rugged good looks, I mean. Frankly, I don’t really know if she sees anything in me at all. But she sees, this blind girl, Oona. She sees.

  Of course, if Sarah and I do get together, I’d have to divorce you, since I still feel married to you. But divorce it must be, old girl. Sorry about that. Alert the Church and the Holy Father. Oh, is that so? you say. And divorce on what grounds? you say. The oldest, I say. Infidelity. With Heaney. And don’t deny it. Heaney bought the farm less than a year ago. And I know you, Oona. You always liked him better than me, and now you have your chance. I’ll divorce you for playing around with Seamus, shacking up in heaven. And you’ll both live in disgrace among the angels. Just like Adam and Eve. How do you like that apple—my dearest, darlin’ love?

  I WHISPERED, “I am too young,”

  And then, “I am old enough”;

  Wherefore I threw a penny

  To find out if I might love,

  “Go and love, go and love, young man,

  If the lady be young and fair.”

  Ah penny, brown penny, brown penny,

  I am looped in the loops of her hair.

  O love is the crooked thing,

  There is nobody wise enough

  To find out all that is in it,

  For he would be thinking of love

  Till the stars had run away

  And the shadows eaten the moon.

  Ah penny, brown penny, brown penny,

  One cannot begin it too soon.

  DEAR MURPH. It occurs to me that you may be wondering why a glamorous exotic beauty such as myself would be wasting her glamorous exotic time with a possibly demented, hoary fellow such as yourself. So here goes.

  They’ll tell you love is blind, but not for the blind. We need to know what we’re doing. And if ever we do behave as though love is blind, or should be, we wind up with our geese cooked, as I did with Jack. I’m not angry with Jack. Pissed off about there being another woman, of course, but that’s more human reflex than anything heartfelt. I’m sorry for Jack. I’ve always been sorry for him. He has a knack for making people feel sorry for him, which is how he gulled you with his cock-and-bull story about dying. There’s a sweetness and basic goodness about Jack, but his true, virtuoso gift is making people feel sorry for him. And I wonder now if I originally fell in love with him because he was in worse shape than I was, and I could take care of him, and feel less like an object of pity myself. We may have shared an eight-year marriage consisting of the blind leading the blind. Who knows.

  No one feels sorry for you, Murph. You won’t permit it. And that’s one of the things that draws me to you. You work at one of the most selfish jobs there is—a writer. Yet your view of everything goes outward. If I employed a guide dog, it would be you (though I’d need a steel muzzle). And though you sometimes appear lost, you really aren’t. You use the feeling of being lost to discover someplace better. It’s where your poems come from, I’m sure of it, and where I discovered you long before we met. Your poems are unalloyed generosity. They reach for the reader’s lost soul, and say, Let’s lose ourselves together, and see what place we’re in.

  And this, too, about your poems: you never end a thought on one line without beginning another thought on the same line. Is that because you don’t think anything ends? You fear death but do not believe in it, sort of the opposite of how you feel about God. Right? Nothing ends. So you’re old, but you have no age. I have no idea what sex would be like with you, if you don’t mind my raising the subject. But I’ll tell you this: if ever you and I do wind up between the sheets, I’ll bet you it will go on and on and on, like one of your lines. And wouldn’t that be fun for me, for a change.

  When you’re blind, you learn everything from something else. I know the location of my front door when my knuckles brush the top of a ladder-back chair in the kitchen. When I feel bread crumbs underfoot, or coffee grounds, I know it’s time to sweep the floor. The dry leaves in a flowerpot tell me to water the flowers. You may think, how limited her life. In fact, it’s an arrangement of endless expansions. Every element betrays its position by relating to another element, and you know the world by these implications.

  So it is that I know the world through your touch. You take my hand when we walk, and you think you’re protecting me. I appreciate the gesture, but the pleasure’s all mine. I love touching you, and you touching me, however grazingly. I love brushing against your shoulder, accidentally or not. (You think I can’t see where I’m going.) I love it when we sit side by side in a tight place, and our knees touch, bone to bone. I love to grasp your elbow, or laugh so hard that my head collides with your chest. I love the feel of your flat palm on the small of my back when you steer me from behind. If you had to reduce all the reasons for my attraction to you, it would be this nonreason. Pure unreasoned touch. So this is what I think you wanted to know, dear Murph. You are my braille.

  UNDER MY FRONT DOOR slithers a letter from my landlord offering me $500,000 to giv
e up my apartment. Since $500,000 is more money than I make most weeks from my poetry, I give the letter my rapt attention. After some de rigueur niceties about how honored the Belnord has been to have me as a tenant for the past forty years, the letter goes on to cite my “erratic behavior” in recent months, of which my landlord has been apprised by the filthy, greasy, creepy crawly Daniel A. Perachik. Would I not be happier and safer, posits my landlord, in an assisted living facility, where people could look after me. Teary am I that he and Perachik are so concerned about my welfare. His proposition is worth considering for a second and a half. If I took the money and ran, would I be the superstar of my nursing home, king of the living assisted, with half a million simoleons to toss around? Think of how many kazoos I could buy. Fuck ’em. We Irish are used to evictions.

  Simoleons, yes. Never been much interested in money, but the terms for it are grand. Simoleons. A conjoining of Simon, British slang for “sixpence,” and Napoleon, French slang for “Napoleon.” Moola, smackers, loot, long green, a five-spot, a fin, a tenner, a grand, lucre, dough, dead presidents, cabbage, Benjamins, bones, folding stuff, large, sawbucks, a wad. I’ve spent a lifetime shooting wads. Poets do that. We cannot bring ourselves to care about the stuff. When Auden had a place on Second Avenue, he was so poor he was starving to death. One day, Christopher Isherwood paid him a visit and discovered a check for $10,000 in a letter from Auden’s publisher, buried under a pile of papers, that the poor man had neglected to open.

  The main reason I’m so bad with money is genetic, because I’m Irish. Sure, there are a few rich Irish, like the Kennedys. My own Máire makes other people rich. But in general the chips don’t suit us. The whole idea of money goes with high-hatting and putting on airs. We can be loaded, all right, just not that way. And whenever one of us has money to burn, he usually does it. Besides, poverty serves our literature. In Liam O’Flaherty’s “The Informer” (speaking of Perachik), no sooner does Gypo Nolan get ahold of his twenty pounds of flesh for turning in Frankie McPhillip than he blows the reward money on booze, talks too much, is found out, and shot. There isn’t a single Irish play, not Synge’s or O’Casey’s or Behan’s, where the central problem could not be solved by eight or nine pounds. I toss the landlord’s letter.

  Then let the sleet and the mist and the darkness descend.

  We’ll wing our cries above them till the end.

  —John Ennis, in Thomas Murphy’s

  Book of Dandy Quotations

  IF NOW YOU’RE EXPECTING me to paint the scene at JFK when Máire, William, and I are saying our good-byes, and bawling like bleating sheep, with William’s little arms locked around my neck and Máire choked with sobs, and I a wreck-and-a-half, knees buckling, barely able to stand—well, you can whistle for it. I’m not going through that again. What I will tell you is that once they were safely off, I headed straight to an airport saloon, downed nine fingers of Jameson (three glasses, three fingers each), and dumped myself into a cab. And I will also tell you that, reeling into the Belnord courtyard, I decided that this would be the night for Botsford’s Vespa. So I snatched the key off the hook in the office and started up the blue beauty. At this point, I could also tell you that I jumped aboard like a cowboy bandit, and gave the engine a few revs, and took the darlin’ blue-eyed devil for the ride of its mechanical life, shooting round and round the courtyard at sixty. I could tell you that. But what really happened was that I tripped on the kickstand, and the Vespa toppled over on my right foot. And everyone in the building heard the banging, and stuck their heads out their windows like gargoyles. And Botsford ran downstairs, and good guy that he is, was more worried about me than the Vespa, and half carried me to my apartment, where I hit the bed, fell into a drunken sleep in my clothes, and dreamed that I was visited by Marilyn Monroe, Zero Mostel, and Isaac Bashevis Singer, the two men in drag like Jack Lemmon and Tony Curtis. Then we all sang “Runnin’ Wild,” with Isaac on sax, Zero on bass, and Marilyn on the uke. How about that?

  HOW TO LIVE OLD

  by Thomas J. Murphy, PC, DDS, CPA, AARP

  Being old and alone is not all it’s cracked up to be. Yet the last stages of living can offer great fun and many rewards if one pays heed to a few basic tenets. The following rules of conduct are intended for those who have just crossed the border of their seventies, and anticipate living on into their nineties. What should I do to make the best possible use of these added years? How best to spend my time? I’m glad you asked.

  1. Cultivate your most irritating qualities. This rule may seem counterintuitive, because you have bought into the idea that old people should be sweet and wise. Well, first of all, you are not going to get any wiser in old age than you were in young age. In fact, you are likely to become a great deal stupider, and even on those rare occasions where you luck into a wise solution to someone’s problem or to one of your own, by the time you are prepared to implement it, you will have forgotten it. As for sweet, why should you strain for that? It goes against all normal human inclinations. And if you walk around with a marzipan smile on your puss all the time, you will be taken for an idiot. Everyone who is not sweet (the world’s great majority) will take advantage of you. No. What you must do is to discover the most annoying qualities you displayed before you turned seventy, and triple their intensity. If you were cheap, behave so parsimoniously that your former self will seem profligate in comparison. If occasionally you were irritable, become a full-blown crank. And don’t let up on any one of these tendencies. What you want is for all those around you to make your excuses for you by shrugging and sighing, ah well, he’s old.

  2. Ever a dull moment. Excitement is an overrated reaction to things, usually events we anticipate, such as seeing a new promising movie, or meeting a new promising friend. Inevitably all such promises, when realized, turn out to be disasters, so why not cut them off at the pass? Lower your expectations, not just a little. Lower your expectations to the subbasement. By your seventies, life has taught you that nothing is as predictable as disappointment, so listen to your broken heart. To be sure, you will not get much pleasure out of this exercise, but it passes the time, and you can always congratulate yourself on how wise the years have made you, though they haven’t (see Rule #1).

  3. Develop a good false stare. Old people spend much of the time staring, anyway, so no one will know when you’re faking it. But your stare need not be as vacant as it appears. An old man’s stare is useful for girl-watching, for instance, without giving offense. To anyone observing you, including the object of your attention herself, it will seem that you are hypnotized, or dead, and she might even give you a sympathetic if condescending smile. I enjoy staring at the trees in Central Park. I appear to be engaging in the old brainless pastime, when in fact, I’m counting the number of greens in a grove. Sarah says she stares all the time. People think she’s merely being blind, but for her it’s a mode of contemplation. Naturally, the best thing about a good stare is that it keeps people from talking to you. Any activity that keeps people from talking to you is a good activity.

  3a. And don’t worry about being impolite. Politeness is for occasions where nothing is at stake. You never heard anyone say, Pardon me for ruining your life.

  4. Watch your step, literally. After the age of seventy, you should regard your body as scrupulously as a garage attendant inspecting your car for dents. I walk up and down stairs (down is worse), as if I were stepping from stone to stone in a mile-wide Irish creek. I am as graceful as a tank. So hesitant and awkward am I descending a staircase, I have had frail schoolchildren come up to me to ask if I’m all right. Of course I’m all right, I bark. Remember when your bones were not twigs? Remember when you didn’t think about your bones? Remember when you had muscles on some of them? Remember when you didn’t devote every hour of every day to exquisite self-inspection? Aw, fuck it.

  5. Do not attempt to make amends with past enemies. This is a common inspiration in old age, to be dismissed from the mind as soon as it enters. Oh, you’ll feel c
leansed and noble when you write old McMinus, and tell him, after all the long years, let bygones be bygones. But once McMinus writes back or phones, or worse, meets you for a drink, you’ll remember at once why you hated the bastard in the first place. And now you’ll hate yourself. Nothing is so satisfying as a well-placed bitterness. Enjoy. In a similar vein, suppress urges to visit old friends. They’re fine as they are, and things can only get worse. Ditto for class reunions. These lurches lead nowhere. Relax.

  5a. And if you have no enemies? Where’s your sense of judgment, man?!

  6. If you find yourself saying, I’ve wasted my life, you will. Don’t say it, even if you can prove it. It’s my experience that only men whine about such stuff. Women, smarter, just get on with it. Juno v. Paycock. In general don’t despair, and if you must, don’t force your despair on others. It’s unfair to add your despair to theirs.

  7. Save the world. Age affords an excellent opportunity to save the world. But you’re running out of time. Know what gets Murph? He’s lived seventy-plus years without having rid the world of barbarians, tyrants, traitors, cowards, bullies, murderers, liars, thieves, crooks, backbiters, and grinning accommodators. Also, he has not cured the world’s diseases, from sniffles to the Ebola virus to endometrial cancer. He has not prevented droughts, floods, tsunamis, tornados, cyclones, and earthquakes. He has not eradicated poverty, famine, waste, ignorance, or bigotry. He has not stopped the glaciers from melting or the trees from falling. He has not put an end to injustice, or even to casual cruelty. Neither has he established freedom and goodwill everywhere. He has not seen to it that everyone leads a useful and productive life, and exhibits only tenderness and generosity toward one another. He has not unified the races, or equalized the genders, or protected and educated the children. Nothing he has done, not a single line of a single poem, has resulted in a complete global reformation. In all his seventy-plus years, nothing. Disgraceful.