by Jack Hodgins
She moved the toe of her shoe over the offending step. As if she could feel, through the sole, the imperfections his hand could detect almost without touch. “Let’s go home.”
He pulled his hand back in, started to rise, and then slumped again. “Aw Gladdy, don’t go, not yet. Sit here for a while. Just till I catch my breath.”
“Sit on cement?” she said. But sat, all the same, and smiled. The bloody dress had already fallen apart — what more damage could she do it?
She looked out across the street to where the HOTEL ARBUTUS HOTEL sign splashed light down the front of the building and out over the roofs of cars. Someone inside the ballroom laughed. Gladdy Roote in that moment throbbed with the rich blood of her possibilities.
The Lepers’ Squint
TODAY, WHILE MARY Brennan may be waiting for him on that tiny island high in the mountain lake called Gougane Barra, Philip Desmond is holed up in the back room of this house at Bantry Bay, trying to write his novel. A perfect stack of white paper, three black nylon-tipped pens, and a battered portable typewriter are set out before him on the wooden table. He knows the first paragraph already, has already set it down, and trusts that the rest of the story will run off the end of it like a fishing line pulled by a salmon. But it is cold, it is so cold in this house, even now in August, that he presses both hands down between his thighs to warm them up. It is so cold in this room that he finds it almost impossible to sit still, so damp that he has put on the same clothes he would wear if he were walking out along the edge of that lagoon, in the spitting rain and the wind. Through the small water-specked panes of the window he can see his children playing on the lumpy slabs of rock at the shore, beyond the bobbing branches of the fuchsia hedge. Three children; three red quilted jackets; three faces flushed up by the steady force of the cold wind; they drag tangled clots of stinking seaweed up the slope and, crouching, watch a family of swans explore the edges of a small weedy island not far out in the lagoon.
A high clear voice in his head all the while insists on singing to him of some girl so fair that the ferns uncurl to look at her. The voice of an old man in a mountain pub, singing without accompaniment, stretched and stiff as a rooster singing to the ceiling and to the crowd at the bar and to the neighbours who sit around him. The ferns uncurled to look at her, so very fair was she, with her hair as bright as the seaweed that floats in from the sea. But here at Ballylickey the seaweed is brown as mud and smells so strong your eyes water.
Mrs. O’Sullivan is in the next room, Desmond knows, in her own room, listening. If he coughs she will hear. If he sings. She will know exactly the moment he sets down his next word on that top sheet of paper. Mrs. O’Sullivan is the owner of this house, which Desmond rented from home through the Borde Failte people before he discovered that she would live in it with them, in the centre of the house, in her two rooms, and silently listen to the life of his family going on around her. She is a tall dry-skinned old woman with grey finger-waves caged in a blue hairnet, whose thick fingers dig into the sides of her face in an agony of desire to sympathize with everything that is said to her. “Oh I know I know I know,” she groans. Last night when Desmond’s wife mentioned how tired she was after the long drive down from Dublin, her fingers plucked at her face, her dull eyes rolled up to search for help along the ceiling: “Oh I know I know I know.” There is no end to her sympathy, there is nothing she doesn’t already know. But she will be quiet as a mouse, she promised, they won’t know she is here.
“Maybe she’s a writer,” Desmond’s wife Carrie whispered to him, later in bed. “Maybe she’s making notes on us. Maybe she’s writing a book called North Americans I Have Eavesdropped On.”
“I can’t live with someone listening to me breathe,” Desmond said. “And I can’t write with someone sitting waiting.”
“Adjust,” his wife said, and flicked at his nose. She who could adjust to anything, or absorb it.
On this first day of his novel Desmond has been abandoned by Carrie, who early this morning drove the car in to Cork. There are still, apparently, a few Seamus Murphy statues she hasn’t seen, or touched. “Keep half an eye on the kids,” she said before she left. Then she came back and kissed him and whispered, “Though if you get busy it won’t matter. I’m sure Mrs. O’Sullivan won’t miss anything.” To be fair, to be really fair, he knows that his annoyance is unjustified. He didn’t tell her he intended to work today, the first day in this house. She probably thinks that after travelling for six weeks through the country he’ll rest a few more days before beginning; she may even believe that he is glad to be rid of her for the day, after all those weeks of unavoidable closeness. She certainly knows that with Mrs. O’Sullivan in the house no emergency will be overlooked, no crisis ignored.
Desmond, now that his hands have warmed a little, lifts one of the pens to write, though silently as possible, as if what he is about to do is a secret perversion from which the ears of Mrs. O’Sullivan must be protected. But he cannot, now, put down any new words. Because if the novel, which has been roaring around in his head all summer and much longer, looking for a chance to get out, should not recognize in the opening words the crack through which it is to spring forth, transformed into a string of words like a whirring fishline, then he will be left with all that paper to stare at, and an unmoving pen, and he is not ready to face that. Of course he knows the story, has seen it all in his mind a hundred times as if someone else had gone to the trouble of writing it and producing it as a movie just for him. But he has never been one for plunging into things, oceans or stories, and prefers to work his way in gently. That opening paragraph, though, is only a paragraph after all and has no magic, only a few black lifeless lines at the top of the paper. So he writes his title again, and under it his name: Barclay Philip Desmond. Then he writes the opening paragraph a second time, and again under that, and again, hoping that the pen will go on by itself to write the next words and surprise him. But it does not happen, not now. Instead, he discovers he is seeing two other words which are not there at all, as if perhaps they are embedded, somehow, just beneath the surface of the paper.
Mary Brennan.
Desmond knows he must keep the name from becoming anything more than that, from becoming a face too, or the pale scent of fear. He writes his paragraph again, over and over until he has filled up three or four pages. Then, crumpling the papers in his hand, he wonders if this will be one of those stories that remain forever in their authors’ heads, driving them mad, refusing to suffer conversion into words.
It’s the cold, he thinks. Blame it on the bloody weather. His children outside on the rocky slope have pulled the hoods of their jackets up over their heads. Leaves torn from the beech tree lie soaked and heavy on the grass. At the far side of the lagoon the family of swans is following the choppy retreating tide out through the gap to the open bay; perhaps they know of a calmer inlet somewhere. The white stone house with red window frames in its nest of bushes across the water has blurred behind the rain, and looks more than ever like the romantic pictures he has seen on postcards. A thin line of smoke rises from the yellowish house with the gate sign Carrigdhoun.
But it is easier than writing, far easier, to allow the persistent daydreams in, and memory. That old rooster-stiff man, standing in the cleared-away centre of the bar in Ballyvourney to pump his song out to the ceiling, his hands clasping and unclasping at his sides as if they are responsible for squeezing those words into life. The ferns uncurled to see her, he sings, so very fair was she. Neighbours clap rhythm, or stamp their feet. Men six-deep at the bar-counter continue to shout at each other about sheep, and the weather. With hair as bright as the seaweed that floats in from the sea.
“’Tis an island of singers sure!” someone yells in Desmond’s ear. “An island of saints and paupers and bloody singers!”
But Desmond thinks of Mary Brennan’s hot apple-smelling breath against his face: “Islands do not exist until you have loved on them.” The words are a Caribbean poet’s,
she explains, and not her own. But the sentiment is adaptable. The ferns may not uncurl to see the dark brown beauty of her eyes, but Desmond has seen men turn at her flash of hair, the reddish-brown of gleaming kelp. Turn, and smile to themselves. This day while he sits behind the wooden table, hunched over his pile of paper, he knows that she is waiting for him on a tiny hermitage island in a mountain lake not far away, beneath the branches of the crowded trees. Islands, she had told him, do not exist until you’ve loved on them.
Yesterday, driving south from Dublin across the Tipperary farmland, they stopped again at the Rock of Cashel so that Carrie could prowl a second time through that big roofless cathedral high up on the sudden limestone knoll and run her hands over the strange broken form of St. Patrick’s Cross. The kings of Munster lived there once, she told him, and later turned it over to the church. St. Patrick himself came to baptize the king there, and accidentally pierced the poor man’s foot with the point of his heavy staff.
“There’s all of history here, huddled together,” she said, and catalogued it for him. “A tenth-century round tower, a twelfth-century chapel, a thirteenth-century cathedral, a fourteenth-century tower, a fifteenth-century castle, and . . .” she rolled her eyes, “a twentieth-century tourist shop.”
But it was the cross itself that drew her. Originally a cross within a frame, it was only the central figure of a man now, with one arm of the cross and a thin upright stem that held that arm in place. Rather like a tall narrow pitcher. There was a guide this second time, and a tour, and she pouted when he insisted they stick to the crowd and hear the official truths instead of making guesses or relying on the brief explanations on the backs of postcards. She threw him a black scowl when the guide explained the superstition about the cross: that if you can touch hand to hand around it you’ll never have another toothache as long as you live. Ridiculous, she muttered; she’d spent an hour the last time looking at that thing, marvelling at the beautiful piece of sculpture nature or time or perhaps vandals had accidentally made of it, running her hands over the figures on the coronation stone at its base and up the narrow stem that supported the remaining arm of the cross.
He was more curious, though, about the round swell of land which could be seen out across the flat Tipperary farms, a perfect green hill crowned with a circle of leafy trees. The guide told him that after one of the crusades a number of people returned to Ireland with a skin disease which was mistaken for leprosy and were confined to that hill, inside that circle, and forbidden to leave it. They were brought across to Mass here on Sundays, she said, before leading him back inside the cathedral to show a small gap in the stones far up one grey wall of the empty Choir. “The poor lepers, a miserable lot altogether as you can imagine, were crowded into a little room behind that wall,” she said, “and were forced to see and hear through that single narrow slit of a window. It’s called the Lepers’ Squint, for obvious reasons.”
Afterwards, when the crowd of nuns and priests and yellow-slickered tourists had broken up to walk amongst the graves and the Celtic crosses or to climb the stone steps to the round tower, Desmond would like to have spoken to one of the priests, perhaps the short red-faced one, to say, “What do you make of all this?” or “Is it true what she told us about that fat archbishop with all his wives and children?” But he was intimidated by the black suit, that collar, and by the way the priest seemed always to be surrounded by nuns who giggled like schoolgirls at the silly jokes he told, full of words Desmond couldn’t understand. He would go home without ever speaking to a single member of the one aristocracy this country still permitted itself.
But while he stood tempted in the sharp wind that howled across the high hump of rock the guide came over the grass to him. “’Tis certain that you’re not American as I thought at first,” she said, “for you speak too soft for that. Would you be from England then?”
“No,” he said. And without thinking: “We’re from Vancouver Island.”
“Yes?” she said, her eyes blank. “And where would that be now?”
“A long way from here,” he said. “An island, too, like this one, with its own brand of ruins.
“There’s a tiny island off our coast,” he said, “where they used to send the lepers once, but the last of them died a few years ago. It’s a bare and empty place they say now, except for the wind. There are even people who believe that ghosts inhabit it.”
But then there were people, too, who said he was crazy to take the children to this uneasy country. It’s smaller than you think, they said. You’ll hear the bombs from above the border when you get there. What if war breaks out? What if the IRA decides that foreign hostages might help their cause? What about that bomb in the Dublin department store?
Choose another country, they said. A warmer safer one. Choose an island where you can lie in the sun and be waited on by smiling blacks. Why pick Ireland?
Jealousy, he’d told them. Everyone else he knew seemed to have inherited an “old country,” an accent, a religion, a set of customs, from parents. His family fled the potato famine in 1849 and had had five generations in which to fade out into Canadians. “I don’t know what I’ve inherited from them,” he said, “but whatever it is has gone too deep to be visible.”
They’d spent the summer travelling; he would spend the fall and winter writing.
His search for family roots, however, had ended down a narrow hedged-in lane: a half-tumbled stone cabin, stony fields, a view of misty hills, and distant neighbours who turned their damp hay with a two-tined fork and knew nothing at all of the cabin’s past. “Fled the famine did they?” the old woman said. “’Twas many a man did that and was never heard from since.”
The summer was intended as a literary pilgrimage too, and much of it was a disappointment. Yeats’s castle tower near Coole had been turned into a tourist trap as artificial as a wax museum, with cassette recorders to listen to as you walk through from room to room, and a souvenir shop to sell you books and postcards; Oliver Goldsmith’s village was not only deserted, it had disappeared, the site of the little schoolhouse nothing more than a potato patch and the parsonage just half a vine-covered wall; the James Joyce museum only made him feel guilty that he’d never been able to finish Ulysses, though there’d been a little excitement that day when a group of women’s libbers crashed the male nude-bathing beach just behind the tower.
A man in Dublin told him there weren’t any live writers in this country. “You’ll find more of our novelists and poets in America than you’ll find here,” he said. “You’re wasting your time on that.”
With a sense almost of relief, as though delivered from a responsibility (dead writers, though disappointing, do not confront you with flesh, as living writers could, or with demands), he took the news along with a handful of hot dogs to Carrie and the kids, who had got out of the car to admire a statue. Watching her eat that onion and pork sausage “hot dog” he realized that she had become invisible to him, or nearly invisible. He hadn’t even noticed until now that she’d changed her hair, that she was pinning it back; probably because of the wind. In the weeks of travel, in constant too-close confinement, she had all but disappeared, had faded out of his notice the way his own limbs must have done, oh, thirty years ago.
If someone had asked, “What does your wife look like?” he would have forgotten to mention short. He might have said dainty but that was no longer entirely true; sitting like that she appeared to have rounded out, like a copper Oriental idol: dark and squat and yet fine, perhaps elegant. He could not have forgotten her loud, almost masculine laugh of course, but he had long ago ceased to notice the quality of her speaking voice. Carrie, his Carrie, was busy having her own separate holiday, almost untouched by his, though they wore each other like old comfortable unnoticed and unchanged clothes.
“A movie would be nice,” he said. “If we could find a babysitter.”
But she shook her head. “We can see movies at home. And besides, by the evenings I’m tired out from all w
e’ve done, I’d never be able to keep my eyes open.”
After Cashel, on their way to the Bantry house, they stopped a while in the city of Cork. And here, he discovered, here after all the disappointments, was a dead literary hero the tourist board hadn’t yet got ahold of. He forgot again that she even existed as he tracked down the settings of the stories he loved: butcher shops and smelly quays and dark crowded pubs and parks.
The first house, the little house where the famous writer was born, had been torn down by a sports club which had put a high steel fence around the property, but a neighbour took him across the road and through a building to the back balcony to show him the Good Shepherd Convent where the writer’s mother had grown up, and where she returned often with the little boy to visit the nuns. “If he were still alive,” Desmond said, “if he still lived here, I suppose I would be scared to come, I’d be afraid to speak to him.” The little man, the neighbour, took off his glasses to shine them on a white handkerchief. “Ah, he was a shy man himself. He was back here a few years before he died, with a big crew of American fillum people, and he was a friendly man, friendly enough. But you could see he was a shy man too, yes. ’Tis the shy ones sometimes that take to the book writing.”
Carrie wasn’t interested in finding the second house. She had never read the man’s books, she never read anything at all except art histories and museum catalogues. She said she would go to the park, where there were statues, if he’d let her off there. She said if the kids didn’t get out of the car soon to run off some of their energy they would drive her crazy, or kill each other. You could hardly expect children to be interested in old dead writers they’d never heard of, she said. It was no fun for them.
He knew as well as she did that if they were not soon released from the backseat prison they would do each other damage. “I’ll go alone,” he said.
