by Greg Fields
The merchants had the best of it, although by no means could they be considered secure. They had higher incomes, but they also had higher expenses, and more risk. This was no middle class. Some stores and homes had been mortgaged many times over. And many were themselves the sons of merchants, the same fate they would hand down to their own sons.
Nothing ever changed here. Nothing ever changed at all. Only the first names.
The women as a whole were largely nondescript. McIlweath saw them as an extension of a cultural conservatism, dictated by the Church, that impelled modest standards, adherence to moderation and an emphasis on the hearth. He noted few professionals—lawyers, doctors, or even shop keepers. It was as if he had stepped back a full century. Nearly all had grown up in the same area and taken husbands from the same pool of young men who were their neighbors. They had their friends, they gathered to chat and to gossip, they came together socially when they could, but their best energies were expended in the maintenance of their households, however they were defined. That was the way it had always been, and no one expected much more than that. A woman might feel proud if she had a loyal, sober husband, well-mannered children, food on the table and a regular seat at Mass. Many apparently considered anything beyond that to smack of pretension. Conceptions of a broader, more fluid society were well hidden. The college, along with its more progressive notions, kept to itself.
The town, the region, perhaps all of Ireland itself, seemed impervious to time, impervious to change. The struggles of existence were the same as they had always been. The roles were identical. McIlweath might well have been stepping into the eighteenth century. Only the manner of dress and the appearances of modern devices made this any different. The people in their nature had not changed since the days of Pearse, of Cromwell, of Brian Boru. Borderlines remained drawn in the same places as during the time of Parnell or Wolfe Tone. And always the pungent odor blew in from the sea, the everlasting sign of their everlasting fate.
The people around him allowed themselves no variances; they could imagine none. A man’s fate came to him through his bloodlines. It would be passed on intact, and that was that. Existence, the daily pattern of struggle and reconciliation, of victory and defeat, of gain and loss and all the panoply of glorious emotion, had absolutely no meaning beyond the souls themselves that preserved it.
Rare was the individual who ventured afield from this enforced order, who left to find a new place, a new purpose, a new self. The remainder had been robbed of any context. They were merely and solely part of a greater process that not even the smartest or most intuitive among them could understand. They took what little the land or sea or town afforded them, chewed it up mechanically and fed it back. It was not theirs. Nothing was theirs, not aspiration or definition or imagination. The boldest personality, the quickest wit, the strongest grip counted for nothing because nothing they ever did counted for itself. Theirs was a subdued existence, absent of design, of mystery, of potential, and so it was a dead existence. They may as well have been rabbits in a warren.
The realization brought McIlweath to the brink of physical illness as he sat in his rooms one Sunday afternoon and regarded what he had come to conclude. He lay down on his bed and waited for the nausea to leave him.
For reasons he could not fathom, Conor Finnegan kept running through his thoughts. His friend haunted him now as thoroughly as any disquieted spirit in this ancient land fixed to the site of its doom. A new ghost had risen in Ireland, hardly a rare event. The youngest Finnegan had joined the wandering specters of his wretched ancestors.
For his part, McIlweath had no fixed world view, no Weltanschauung, to complicate the task at hand. He needed to identify the fundamental fibers and currents of his own life before he could begin to consider where he fit in the broader scheme of things. He had been driven by a near manic compulsion to rid himself of all expectations.
By contrast, Finnegan had never been one to study what he assumed was already in place. With his own affairs in such good order, it had been easy for Finnegan to be outgoing, enthusiastic, charming, and ultimately wedded to ideals rather than processes. Better, thought McIlweath, if Finnegan had used his immense gifts—the active and agile intelligence, the congenial wit, the boyish good looks, the ruddy athleticism—to make certain first of his own destiny. To know himself before seeking to know others. Now, unprepared, he moved through a practical world that had no stomach for fanciful inventions. He had become another rabbit in the warren.
The rock that had jammed in McIlweath’s insides gave no sign of dislodging. It rolled over several times causing the walls of his stomach to lurch and spasm. McIlweath had taken rooms in one of the smaller residences, a ponderous stone building erected in the 1890s, drafty and dank but not unpleasant. His rooms, a bedroom where he now lay and a sitting room where he kept most of his books, were comfortable enough, if a bit unadorned.
The spirit of the place served as its principal decoration. This was Ireland, boggy and sorrowful, and this was a modest seat of learning in the Land of the Saints. His bedroom window opened to a wide courtyard. Usually there was some sound rising up—the swish of the traditional academic gowns worn by the masters and required of all who entered the dining hall to take their meals, perhaps casual voices, or maybe the shouts and calls of a game of football. Today, though, there was nothing, a dead stillness on a barren, pensive afternoon. It had been too much. McIlweath’s head began to ache in echo of his stomach, and a weariness claimed his limbs. He closed his eyes and let sleep take its hold.
He awoke two hours later to a gentle knocking on his door. He rose unsteadily, the disorientation of new surroundings causing him to hesitate, and shuffled through to the outer room. To his relief, his nausea had disappeared and his head felt clear, the dull throb that had risen up beaten back by his nap. At the door stood the broad, amiable face of Gowan Phelan, a fellow graduate who had taken a great liking to the unassuming Yank. McIlweath had reciprocated, taking pleasure in Phelan’s open and obvious goodwill. McIlweath had found a number of friends here in a very short time.
The Irish students were drawn to Tom McIlweath’s quietly sincere demeanor, the peculiarity of his American identity aside. Most of the Americans they had met on campus had been more boisterous. The Yanks came bounding through with an overflow of self-assurance, willing not so much to learn as to teach. They set a fast pace, darting here and there, trying to piece together a comfortable, unpressured situation, and many grew resentful when they looked back to notice that the natives were not following. The Irish set their own pace, unhurried and deliberate. What attracted them to McIlweath was that he honored what was in place, and sought to absorb it rather than amend it. McIlweath let it be known early on that he was a visitor, not a proprietor. He was there to sit among them. They swapped stories and impressions most night in someone’s rooms, getting to know each other with a delicate mutual respect for the others’ experience. No, this Yank was quite different from most of the others who had wandered through over the years.
Had there been any doubters about McIlweath’s adaptability, they were dispelled one Saturday afternoon in late September. McIlweath had joined a group of his mates as they loped away from campus to the playing fields behind the spired chapel. He was out for a run, saw his acquaintances heading out, and ran with them out of the courtyard. He had not noticed that one of them was toting a rugby ball. When they got to the fields they began to choose sides for the match, and McIlweath stood aside watching them. Gowan Phelan was among them.
“Rugby, Gowan?”
“Right, Tom. You’ve never played, I’ll bargain. Most Yanks don’t know anything about it.”
“Do you mind if I give it a try?”
Phelan was genuinely surprised. The Americans he had known had treated the sport with disdain. If they had not played it in the States, then certainly it was a silly and unimportant pastime. A good number refused to play because they were afraid that under the game’s liberal rules they mig
ht be targeted for a special pounding. But here was a Yank eager to join in.
“You know the rules?”
“As I see it, there aren’t a whole lot. Pass the ball backwards and get it over the line.”
“That’s about it. But it does get choppy out there. Think you can handle it?”
“Don’t know. There’s something to be said for trial by fire, though.”
“Come on then. You’re a winger.”
Those who played and the few who watched saw the young American throw himself at their game with a reckless enthusiasm. He did not shy away from tackles, even when the burliest of his opponents hurtled across the field at him. He dove at their churning knees and leapt on their backs to wrestle them down. McIlweath was the slightest player, a slender reed in comparison to those bigger men who had played this game most of their lives, but his speed served him well. He ran the ball fearlessly, absorbing the blows of his tacklers with a cavalier resiliency.
McIlweath did not play well. He made numerous mistakes, running when he should have kicked, and conversely. He was worthless in the scrums because he was unsure of just what he was trying to do. But he played hard, as hard as he could. Each time he was knocked down he bounced up quickly, relishing the grit of the Irish soil on his knees, elbows and back, rejoicing in the taste of his own sweat. He applauded his teammates and clapped the backs of his opponents. At the end of the game, McIlweath made a special point to congratulate them all, smiling broadly. He thought his team had lost, but he was not certain. It didn’t matter, of course. What he had done, what his purpose had been, was to claim another small variable. This was Ireland, and this was rugby, and the two went together, and here he was with something he had never done before.
Yes, this Yank was not like the others. Both his teammates and his opponents took him under their wing from that point on, pleased in fact to know this considerate, pensive, adventurous newcomer.
Now Gowan Phelan was at his door. “’Evening, Tom,” he said. “I hope I haven’t disturbed you too much. I thought you might like some dinner in town for a change of habit.”
“Jesus,” said McIlweath. “Is it that late? I was taking a nap.”
“It’s nearly six. I’m sorry. I must have roused you. Poor timing once again.”
“No, not at all. Dinner would be great. Come on in while I revive myself. There’s some port next to the smaller bookcase. Help yourself.”
“You’re a hospitable man, McIlweath. Shall I pour you a glass?”
“Of course. I’ll be right out,” he called from his bedroom. He changed his slacks and put on a sweater. He also splashed himself with cologne, an act of defiance against the pervasive sea-scent. No one wore cologne here.
He stopped, then, to look out onto the courtyard. In the glimmering final throes of yet another woolen day it appeared harshly somber, its thick green carpet drained of color so that it appeared a putrescent, loamy gray. The spired buildings around it, created in a pretentious neo-Gothic that seemed completely anomalous in so simple a setting, faded to mere outlines.
McIlweath moved from his bureau to the window so that he could take it all in. Not that there was anything to see. What he wanted to absorb was the flood of satisfaction this common scene engendered.
His life here was as uncluttered as ever he could have imagined it. All elements had been reduced to their simplest denominator. McIlweath had resurrected the joy he had found years before in his studies. The mysteries spoke to him again, their melodic words and strange symbols titillating his imagination. Antiquity had been recreated. There in his study, the dim light of evening eking through his window in a lyrical, battered land, McIlweath constructed for himself a vicarious identity with the long-dead classical writers and statesmen. He shared in their profound excursions by having embarked on his own. The symmetry of it inspired him. Their very names, once flat echoes it pained him to hear or read, now undulated poetically, magically before him: Livy, Ovid, Themistocles, Virgil, Aristophanes, Aeschylus, Catullus. This place, in its stolid testament to the durability of man’s creations, had brought them alive to him once more, and he reveled in the rediscovery.
Rediscovery. That was the key to it all, wasn’t it? He could not tell whether the reclamation of his spirit would be permanent. In fact, he tended to doubt it. Something ahead would likely derail him again so that the agonizing process of recalibration would have to be repeated. At least he knew what would be necessary now.
McIlweath gazed across the yard. The falling night and its attendant misty reflection transformed the solid building into nebulous shapes, jagged in their massive points and sweeping vertical lines. Illusion, all of it. He knew enough to see it as such, to see through it to where the cold, hard weightiness stood rooted in the soil.
But he knew enough not to be afraid of even the most deceptive illusion.
McIlweath realized that not one person in this yard or its surrounding buildings, not one, had denied him, even subtly. He walked among them as an equal, as if he, too, were part of the damp, gritty Irish loam. Perhaps it was the accumulated wisdom of an old land that permitted him to take his place here without expectation, without demand. Whatever he generated, for good or ill, would be its own determinant. If he proved fallow, so be it. He alone would have to address the consequences. But if he showed himself to be a rich and creative contributor to the ancient fabric of this place, if he should show a ready curiosity and peculiar wit, illustrate disparate avenues of a developed mind, sport a strong set of shoulders and a rapid gait, if he, in short, proved himself—as he must—a unique, capable creature of some dimension, he would be welcomed without affectation. That much had become obvious. The remainder now rested solely within his own temperament, within his own spirit. One could not ask for more than that.
The courtyard this evening, like life here generally, was simple, unadorned and quiet, broad enough for each observer to impart whatever interpretation he chose. He found the view comforting. The evening chill came so quickly, all at once, as to be visible between the spires. McIlweath pulled on his heaviest sweater, but even then he knew that it would not be enough. He would need a jacket as well. And wine. He would need several glasses of wine.
For quite some time he had wrestled with the ageless questions each young person of some promise and awareness had to pose: ’Where shall I go now? What shall I do? Where will it all come together, and be right?’ McIlweath had let those questions torment him. They had wrenched him into contrived poses in the expectation that, should he stay in his contortions long enough, he would grow into them and assume the forms they demanded. He had condemned himself as weak, and let others do likewise.
And now, on a cool Irish evening, he looked out at the site of his evolution’s latest chapter, enraptured, content, yet cognizant that the questions would not go away. ’Where shall I go now? What shall I do?’ Because, of course, this satisfaction could not be permanent, nor could his stay within these walls be prolonged.
But none of that mattered.
Tom McIlweath recognized that his mistake had been in presuming that the questions demanded answers. They did not. What mattered was the asking. It was the questions themselves, that was all. Should he ever fail to pose them, should he ever reach the point where the coming mystery would be once and forever resolved, should he ever come to believe that his course was obvious and irresistible, that all creation pointed him in a single irreversible direction, he will have perished.
’Where shall I go now? What shall I do?’ That would be the point—to keep the questions alive forever, so that he should be alive with them.
McIlweath turned from the window and went back to the outer room. Phelan was already halfway through his glass. With a gesture of his hand he indicated McIlweath’s glass on a corner table. McIlweath crossed to it, and without a word raised it to his lips. Phelan smiled and said something which McIlweath did not hear above the interior sound of his swallowing. The heavy taste of the wine clung to the roof of his mou
th, and a warm shaft trickled down his throat to an empty stomach.
“Take this, all of you, and drink it. This is the cup of my blood, the blood of the new and everlasting covenant.”
CHAPTER XXVIII
The world breaks everyone and afterward many are strong at the broken places. But those that will not break it kills. It kills the very good and the very gentle and the very brave impartially. If you are none of these you can be sure it will kill you too but there will be no special hurry.
—Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms
Conor Finnegan did not know what part of his disrupted spirit compelled him to undertake such a melancholy journey. Was it some longing, unarticulated, in his bloodlines, or possibly a last measure to derive a logistical understanding of what had deserted him and why? It was an act of desperation, founded in frustration and fed by the constant memory of dissipated expectations. He had run short of options, so he had to head for the heartland. Go for the heart.
And so he pushed his car westward through a chilled and rainy autumn. It took two days. The rain, which never ceased, not for a second, plastered the fading greenery against the rolling cornucopia of Pennsylvania and drenched the flat checkered farmlands of Ohio and Indiana, darkening what already lacked color or dimension. The highways Finnegan followed took him through small anonymous towns, horribly depressing in their unchangeable stolidity. He could not relate to what he saw: the old drafty houses with chipped drab paint, the family stores, the decrepit, dusty diners with their broken signs. The people here echoed their timeless desolation, although they would not have seen it as such. They had lived in these towns all their lives. It was all they knew, and they found it to be sturdy and secure. A form of modern-day Calvinism this was: here they would live, and here die, generation after generation with little variance. Those who left were mavericks, or worse. Many eventually came back.
