by Jack Hodgins
“But don’t be long. We’ve got a good ways to go yet if we’re going to make it to that house today.”
So he went in search of the second house, the house the writer had lived in for most of his childhood and youth and had mentioned in dozens of his stories. He found it high up the sloping streets on the north side of the river. Two rows of identical homes, cement-grey, faced each other across a bare sloping square of dirt, each row like a set of steps down the slope, each home just a gate in a cement waist-high wall, a door, a window. Somewhere in this square was where the barefoot grandmother had lived, and where the lady lived whose daughter refused to sleep lying down because people died that way, and where the toothless woman lived who between her sessions in the insane asylum loved animals and people with a saintly passion.
The house he was after was half-way up the left-hand slope and barely distinguishable from the others, except that there was a woman in the tiny front yard, opening the gate to come out.
“There’s no one home,” she said when she saw his intentions. “They weren’t expecting me this time, and presumably, they weren’t expecting you either.”
“Then it is the right house?” Desmond said. Stupidly, he thought. Right house for what?
But she seemed to understand. “Oh yes. It’s the right house. Some day the city will get around to putting a plaque on the wall but for the time being I prefer it the way it is. My name, by the way,” she added, “is Mary Brennan. I don’t live here but I stop by often enough. The old man, you see, was one of my teachers years ago.”
She might have been an official guide, she said it all so smoothly. Almost whispering. And there was barely a trace of the musical tipped-up accent of the southern counties in her voice. Perhaps Dublin, or educated. Her name meant nothing to him at first, coming like that without warning. “There would be little point in your going inside anyway, even if they were home,” she said. “There’s a lovely young couple living there now but they’ve redone the whole thing over into a perfectly charming but very modern apartment. There’s nothing at all to remind you of him. I stop by for reasons I don’t begin to understand, respect perhaps, or inspiration, but certainly not to find anything of him here.”
In a careless, uneven way, she was pretty. Even beautiful. She wore clothes — a yellow skirt, a sweater — as if they’d been pulled on as she’d hurried out the door. Her coat was draped over her arm, for the momentary blessing of sun. But she was tall enough to get away with the sloppiness and had brown eyes which were calm, calming. And hands that tended to behave as if they were helping deliver her words to him, stirring up the pale scent of her perfume. He would guess she was thirty, she was a little younger than he was.
“Desmond,” he said. “Uh, Philip Desmond.”
She squinted at him, as if she had her doubts. Then she nodded, consenting. “You’re an American,” she said. “And probably a writer. But I must warn you. I’ve been to your part of the world and you just can’t do for it what he did for this. It isn’t the same. You don’t have the history, the sense that everything that happens is happening on top of layers of things which have already happened. Now I saw you drive up in a motor car and I arrived on a bus so if you’re going back down to the city centre I’ll thank you for a ride.”
Mary Brennan, of course. Why hadn’t he known? There were two of her books in the trunk of his car. Paperbacks. Desmond felt his throat closing. Before he’d known who she was she hadn’t let him say a word, and now that she seemed to be waiting to hear what he had to offer, he was speechless. His mind was a blank. All he could think of was Mary Brennan and wish that she’d turned out to be only a colourful eccentric old lady, something he could handle. He was comfortable with young women only until they turned out to be better than he was at something important to him. Then his throat closed. His mind pulled down the shades and hid.
All Desmond could think to say driving down the hill towards the River Lee, was: “A man in Dublin told me there was no literature happening in this country.” He could have bitten off his tongue. This woman was what was happening. A country that had someone like her needed no one else.
She would not accept that, she said, not even from a man in Dublin. And she insisted that he drive her out to the limestone castle restaurant at the mouth of the river so she could buy him a drink there and convince him Dublin was wrong. Inside the castle, though, while they watched the white ferry to Swansea slide out past their window, she discovered she would rather talk about her divorce, a messy thing which had been a strain on everyone concerned and had convinced her if she needed convincing that marriage was an absurd arrangement. She touched Desmond, twice, with one hand, for emphasis.
Oh, she was a charming woman, there was no question. She could be famous for those eyes alone, which never missed a detail in that room (a setting she would use, perhaps, in her next novel of Irish infidelity and rebellion?) and at the same time somehow returned to him often enough and long enough to keep him frozen, afraid to sneak his own glances at the items she was cataloguing for herself. “Some day,” she said, “they will have converted all our history into restaurants and bars like this one, just as I will have converted it all to fiction. Then what will we have?”
And when, finally, he said he must go, he really must go, the park was pretty but didn’t have all that much in it for kids to do, she said, “Listen, if you want to find out what is happening here, if you really do love that old man’s work, then join us tomorrow. There’ll be more than a dozen of us, some of the most exciting talent in the country, all meeting up at Gougane Barra . . . you know the place, the lake in the mountains where this river rises . . . it was a spot he loved.”
“Tomorrow,” he said. “We’ll have moved in by then, to the house we’ve rented for the winter.”
“There’s a park there now,” she said. “And of course the tiny hermitage island. It will begin as a picnic but who knows how it will end.” The hand, a white hand with unpainted nails, touched him again.
“Yes,” he said. “Yes. We’ve been there. There’s a tiny church on the island, he wrote a story about it, the burial of a priest. And it’s only an hour or so from the house, I’d guess. Maybe. Maybe I will.”
“Oh you must,” she said, and leaned forward. “You knew, of course, that they call it Deep-Valleyed Desmond in the songs.” She drew back, biting on a smile.
But when he’d driven her back to the downtown area, to wide St. Patrick’s Street, she discovered she was not quite ready yet to let him go. “Walk with me, ” she said, “for just a while,” and found him a parking spot in front of the Munster Arcade where dummies dressed as monks, and Vikings and Celtic warriors glowered at him from behind the glass.
“This place exists,” she said, “because he made it real for me. He and others, in their stories. I could never write about a place where I was the first, it would panic me. I couldn’t be sure it really existed or if I were inventing it.”
She led him down past the statue of sober Father Matthew and the parked double-decker buses to the bridge across the Lee. A wind, coming down the river, brought a smell like an open sewer with it. He put his head down and tried to hurry across.
“If I were a North American, like you,” she said, “I’d have to move away or become a shop girl. I couldn’t write.”
He was tempted to say something about plastering over someone else’s old buildings, but thought better of it. He hadn’t even read her books yet, he knew them only by reputation, he had no right to comment. He stopped, instead, to lean over the stone wall and look at the river. It was like sticking his head into a septic tank. The water was dark, nearly black, and low. Along the edges rats moved over humps of dark shiny muck and half-buried cans and bottles. Holes in the stone wall dumped a steady stream of new sewage into the river. The stories, as far as he could remember, had never mentioned this. These quays were romantic places where young people met and teased each other, or church-goers gathered to gossip after Mass, or old p
eople strolled. None of them, apparently, had noses.
Wind in the row of trees. Leaves rustling. Desmond looked at her hands. The perfect slim white fingers lay motionless along her skirt, then moved suddenly up to her throat, to touch the neck of her sweater. Then the nearer one moved again, and touched his arm. Those eyes, busy recording the street, paused to look at him; she smiled. Cataloguing me too? he thought. Recording me for future reference? But she didn’t know a thing about him.
“I’ve moved here to work on a book,” he said.
Her gaze rested for a moment on the front of his jacket, then flickered away. “Not about here,” she said. “You’re not writing about this place?” She looked as if she would protect it from him, if necessary, or whisk it away.
“I have my own place,” he said. “I don’t need to borrow his.”
She stopped, to buy them each an apple from an old black-shawled woman who sat up against the wall by her table of fruit. Ancient, gypsy-faced, with huge earrings hanging from those heavy lobes. Black Spanish eyes. Mary Brennan flashed a smile, counted out some silver pieces, and picked over the apples for two that were red and clear. The hands that offered change were thick and wrinkled, with crescents of black beneath the nails. They disappeared again beneath the shawl. Desmond felt a momentary twinge about biting into the apple; vague memories of parental warnings. You never know whose hands have touched it, they said, in a voice to make you shudder in horror at the possibilities and scrub at the skin of fruit until it was bruised and raw.
Mary Brennan, apparently, had not been subjected to the same warnings. She bit hugely. “Here,” she said, at the bridge, “here is where I’m most aware of him. All his favourite streets converge here, from up the hill. Sunday’s Well, over there where his wealthy people lived. And of course Blarney Lane. If you had the time we could walk up there, I could show you. Where his first house was, and the pub he dragged his father home from.”
“I’ve seen it,” Desmond said, and started across the bridge. She would spoil it all for him if he let her.
But she won him again on the way back down the other side with her talk of castles and churches. Did he know, she asked, the reason there was no roof on the cathedral at Cashel? Did he know why Blackrock Castle, where they’d been a half-hour before, was a different style altogether than most of the castles of Ireland? Did he know the origin of the word “blarney”?
No he did not, but he knew that his wife would be furious if he didn’t hurry back to the park. They passed the noise of voices haggling over second-hand clothes and old books at the Coal Market, they passed the opera house, a tiny yellow book store. She could walk, he saw, the way so many women had forgotten how to walk after high-heeled shoes went out, with long legs and long strides, with some spring in her steps as if there were pleasure in it.
“Now you’ll not forget,” she said at his car, in his window. “Tomorrow, in Deep-Valleyed Desmond where the Lee rises.” There was the scent of apple on her breath. Islands, she leaned in to say, do not exist until you’ve loved on them.
But today, while Mary Brennan waits on that tiny island for him, Philip Desmond is holed up in the back room of this house at Bantry Bay, trying to write his novel. His wife has taken the car to Cork. When she returns, he doesn’t know what he will do. Perhaps he’ll get into the car and drive up the snaking road past the crumbling O’Sullivan castle into the mountains, and throw himself into the middle of that crowd of writers as if he belongs there. Maybe he will make them think that he is important, that back home he is noticed in the way Mary Brennan is noticed here, that his work matters. And perhaps late at night, when everyone is drunk, he will lead Mary Brennan out onto the hermitage island to visit the oratory, to speak in whispers of the stories which had happened there, and to lie on the grass beneath the trees, by the quiet edge of the lake. It is not, Desmond knows, too unthinkable. At a distance.
The piece of paper in front of him is still blank. Mrs. O’Sullivan will advertise the laziness of writers, who only pretend they are working when they are actually dreaming. Or sleeping. She will likely be able to tell exactly how many words he has written, though if he at the end of this day complains of how tired he is, she will undoubtedly go into her practised agony. He wonders if she too, from her window, has noticed that the tide had gone out, that the lagoon is empty of everything except brown shiny mud and seaweed, and that the nostril-burning smell of it is penetrating even to the inside of the house, even in here where the window hasn’t been opened, likely, in years. He wonders, too, if she minds that the children, who have tired of their sea-edge exploring, are building a castle of pebbles and fuchsia branches in the middle of her back lawn. The youngest, Michael, dances like an Indian around it; maybe he has to go to the bathroom and can’t remember where it is. While his father, who could tell him, who could take him there, sits and stares at a piece of paper.
For a moment Desmond wonders how the medieval masses in the cathedral at Cashel must have appeared to the lepers crowded behind that narrow hole. Of course he has never seen a Mass of any kind himself, but still he can imagine the glimpses of fine robes, the bright colours, the voices of a choir singing those high eerie Latin songs, the voice of a chanting priest, the faces of a few worshippers. It was a lean world from behind that stone wall, through that narrow hole. Like looking through the eye of a needle. The Mass, as close as they were permitted to get to the world, would be only timidly glimpsed past other pressed straining heads. For of course Desmond imagines himself far at the back of the crowd.
( “Yes?” the guide said. “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. You’ve never heard of it, though it’s nearly the size of Ireland?”
“I have, yes. And it’s a long way you’ve come from home.”
“There’s a tiny island just off our coast where they used to send the lepers, but the last of them died there 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.”)
What does the world look like to a leper, squinting through that narrow hole? What does it feel like to be confined to the interior of a circle of trees, at the top of a hill, from which everything else can be seen but not approached? Desmond likes to think that he would prefer the life of that famous fat archbishop, celebrating Mass in the cathedral and thinking of his hundred children.
Somewhere in the house a telephone rings. Desmond hasn’t been here long enough to notice where the telephone is, whether it is in her part of the house or theirs. But he hears, beyond the wall, the sudden rustling of clothes, the snap of bones, the sound of feet walking across the carpet. Why should Mrs. O’Sullivan have a phone? There are so few telephones in this country that they are all listed in the one book. But her footsteps return, and he hears behind him the turning of his door handle, the squeal of a hinge. Then her voice whispering: “Mr. Desmond? Is it a bad time to interrupt?”
“Is it my wife?”
No it is not. And of course Desmond knows who it is. Before he left the castle-restaurant she asked for his address, for Mrs. O’Sullivan’s name, for the name of this village.
“I’m sorry, Mrs. O’Sullivan,” he said. “Tell her, tell them I’m working, they’ll understand. Tell them I don’t want to be disturbed, not just now anyway.”
He doesn’t turn to see how high her eyebrows lift. He can imagine. Working, she’s thinking. If that’s working. But when she has closed the door something in him relaxes a little — or at least suspends its tension for a while — and he writes the paragraph again at the top of the page and then adds new words after it until he discovers he has completed a second. It is not very good; he decides when he reads it over that it is not very good at all, but at least it is something. A beginning. Perhaps the dam has been broken.
But there is a commotion, suddenly, in the front yard. A car horn beeping. The children run up the slo
pe past the house. He can hear Carrie’s voice calling them. There is a flurry of excited voices and then one of the children is at the door, calling, “Daddy, Daddy, come and see what Mommy has!”
What Mommy has, he discovers soon enough, is something that seems to be taking up the whole back seat, a grey lumpy bulk. And she, standing at the open door, is beaming at him. “Come help me get this thing out!” she says. There is colour in her face, excitement. She has made another one of her finds.
It is, naturally, a piece of sculpture. There is no way Desmond can tell what it is supposed to be and he has given up trying to understand such things long ago. He pulls the figure out, staggers across to the front door, and puts it down in the hall.
“I met the artist who did it,” she says. “He was in the little shop delivering something. We talked, it seemed, for hours. This is inspired by the St. Patrick’s Cross, he told me, but he abstracted it even more to represent the way art has taken the place of religion in the modern world.”
“Whatever it represents,” Desmond says, “we’ll never get it home.”
Nothing, to Carrie, is a problem. “We’ll enjoy it here, in this house. Then before we leave we’ll crate it up and ship it home.” She walks around the sculpture, delighted with it, delighted with herself.
“I could have talked to him for hours,” she says, “we got along beautifully. But I remembered you asked me to have the car home early.” She kisses him, pushes a finger on his nose. “See how obedient I am?”
“I said that?”
“Yes,” she says. “Right after breakfast. Some other place you said you wanted to go prowling around in by yourself. I rushed home down all that long winding bloody road for you. On the wrong side, I’ll never get used to it. Watching for radar traps, for heaven’s sake. Do you think the gardaí have radar traps here?”
But Desmond is watching Mrs. O’Sullivan, who has come out into the hall to stare at the piece of sculpture. Why does he have this urge to show her his two paragraphs? Desmond doesn’t even show Carrie anything until it is finished. Why, he wonders, should he feel just because she sits there listening through the wall that she’s also waiting for him to produce something? She probably doesn’t even read. Still, he wants to say, “Look. Read this, isn’t it good? And I wrote it in your house, only today.”
