by Richard Ford
“I do sometimes,” I said, on the subject of missing my dad. I could hear my voice under the movie sound. It was as if somebody else was using my words, saying my thoughts. Only, I didn’t want to be talking about these things. My heart right then began to race—at the possibility of saying something that would make me start blubbering. It had happened before.
“You know what I’d welcome the chance to do,” Niall said and reached across the warm, empty space between us and put his hand against my cheek—which startled me. It was nothing like him hitting me on the shoulder. It was more like what my mother had done many times in the past months.
“No,” I said, though there were not many choices of things two people could do. Two boys.
“Give you a wee kiss,” Niall said and let his rough hand roam back through my crew cut the way my mother did. Popcorn smell was on his fingers, and the gin and his lemony fragrance. I looked right at Niall’s thick, dark eyebrows. They were dense and wiry, like a man’s. “It might set things straight a bit,” he said, leaning closer.
“I don’t know,” I said, my heart still hammering. It had not had time to slow down.
“Just give us a try,” Niall said. He put his hand on my knee, put his weight on it, and with his other hand turned my cheek and my mouth toward him and brought his face up to mine. And he kissed me. On the lips. Just like I’d seen two movie stars kiss up on a screen, or the way my mother would kiss my father when she loved him.
I can’t say I wasn’t shocked. And I can’t tell you what I did while Niall MacDermott was kissing me, which was only for a moment. I know I didn’t move my arms or my hands, didn’t move my face away or toward him. I didn’t take a breath or let a breath out. My heart did suddenly slow down, and the rigidness from when Niall was mad at me began to seep out. I can’t explain it, but I felt myself relax—not as if someone was kissing me, but as if someone had taken me aside and said something kind—which only my mother had done up to then.
Niall made a low noise in his throat just at the moment he was kissing me. An mmmm sound, which seemed unnatural, but was something he wanted to do. I did not make a noise that I know of and was glad when he pulled away. He licked his lips as he sat back and stared straight at me, right into my eyes. He seemed to be asking me something—to say words or to do something. Maybe kiss him. But I had no intention of doing that. For two boys to kiss wasn’t the worst thing. It really wasn’t so different from kissing my mother, though it wasn’t really like movie stars kissing when they were supposed to be in love. I hadn’t enjoyed it. He had kissed me. I hadn’t kissed him.
“So how was that?” Niall said. His wiry eyebrows rose, as if he expected to hear back something he liked. And I would’ve said something to make him happy, only I had nothing to say. It had been a great surprise, since I’d never kissed a boy or even a girl. But I had no intention of doing it again. Though it didn’t really matter that we’d done it. Or that he had.
“Did you hear me what I said?” Niall had pulled back against his door again. He’d taken his hand off my knee, though he was smiling. “I said something,” he said. “I said, ‘How was that?’”
“It was all right,” I said.
“It was all right,” Niall said. “A bit of all right? Take it or leave it?”
“Yes,” I said. I didn’t know what else to say, except “leave it,” which I knew he wouldn’t like.
Niall turned toward the steering wheel, put his two clenched fists on each side of the circle and tapped them. On the screen, far into the night, Anita Ekberg was in the fur coat, looking beautiful on the deck of the ocean liner.
“Jesus,” Niall said—not to me I didn’t think, but to himself—as if I wasn’t there. “You’re a fuckin’ waste, aren’t you? A fuckin’ little waste.”
“I thought . . .” I started to say. Who knows what I intended. I trusted the right words would come, and they did not.
“You thought . . .” Niall looked over at me where I’d moved against my own door, as if I might be ready to jump out. His smile was the sneer I’d seen before. “You thought . . . what? You thought I liked you? You thought I thought you were cute? You thought—I don’t know what?” He seemed not to be angry, just disappointed at what he’d hoped to accomplish by kissing me not having worked out. I was sorry it hadn’t, either.
“I thought you were sorry about my father being dead,” I said. It was now very, very hot in the car, and the movie’s sound, even softer, filled the space.
“I am,” Niall said. “Didn’t I say that? Don’t be tellin’ your mam about this. Is that a deal? Between us? She wouldn’t take to it. She’d have me sent off. Not being an entitled citizen.”
“I won’t,” I said. Getting Niall sent off was the last thing I’d ever want to do. He was the only friend I had. If I lost him I might as well give up on life. If we went to the movies again, I thought, I’d kiss him, since all in all it really didn’t matter so much to me.
ON THE WAY HOME, NIALL DROVE THE WAY I ADMIRED—ONE-HANDED, window down, elbow cocked out, the cool night flooding in, brightening his cigarette end between his fingers. I had my own window down, and the night came spinning in around me. My head had quit aching. We hadn’t stayed for the whole movie. Niall had lost interest, though I’d liked parts where the characters went to Paris, a place I’d done a World Book report on and wanted to see—though Niall said the Paris streets on the screen were all in California.
Niall did not speak for a long time. He seemed to be thinking. I wondered if possibly kissing me had been just a normal act of consideration, and if you were Irish you knew that, and no one got confused. A kiss could mean different things. I felt better for having gone to the drive-in with him, no matter what had gone on between the two of us.
“Tell me something,” Niall said, not taking his eyes off the road. We were back onto the old town streets. To the world outside, we were a taxi, not two boys in a car coming back from the picture show. I felt secret and protected.
“What?” I said.
“What’s the very worst thing you ever did do?” He took a deep drag off his Pall Mall and blew smoke into the night out the side of his mouth.
For a long moment I didn’t say anything. And I can’t say I was trying to think of an answer. I was intending not to answer at all.
“I can unquestionably tell you mine,” Niall said. “Or at least the top three. Possibly, of course, they’re only the ones I’m willing to admit to, with the worse remaining in the cupboard. Maybe start with the best thing you ever did, which should be easy since you’re such a pattern of perfection. Tell us the prizewinner. Your secret’s safe with me.” He smiled as if he was pleased with himself.
“I haven’t done many good things,” I said, and in fact couldn’t think of one good thing I’d ever done. Though I’d never tried.
“We’ll forgive that,” Niall said. “You have it in common with others.”
“What did you do good?” I said.
“Failed to fuck me sister when she asked me to. My crowning moment so far. Which didn’t last long. I eventually let my guard down shamefully. You mustn’t tell your mam that either.”
“I won’t,” I said. It didn’t truly seem like the worst thing a boy could do. Though I didn’t have a sister.
“So now you,” Niall said. “I have to hold something over you. So you don’t rat me out. Come on.”
“I lied to my mother,” I said. We were on our street, coasting down the hill past the old residences and the brick school named after the Civil War hero.
“I don’t care a monkey’s fat arse about that,” Niall said. “There has to be worse. Brave up. This is what friends do. Reveal their awfullest.”
I didn’t want to reveal my awfullest, but I said it then because I wanted Niall to be my friend more than I wanted to protect myself.
“When my father died,” I said, “I wasn’t as sad as I should’ve been. I felt terrible, but it didn’t seem like enough.”
“Aw, come o
n,” Niall said. “Do you feel worse about yourself than you do about him dyin’ off?”
“Yes,” I said. “I do.”
“Well then, te absolvo,” Niall said, stopping in front of the DIAL house, where there were lights in most of the windows and one had a jack-o’-lantern with a candle. Our house was dark. My mother was still at work.
We sat for a moment then, the engine ticking, the fragrance of sycamores in the air around us. With his hand holding his cigarette, Niall made a gesture in the darkness between us.
“What’s that mean?” I said.
“It means all’s forgiven. It’s what the pansy priests say at you through the grate when you spill it. It’s a way of sayin’ ‘Who gives a shite. You’ll do worse. You’ll kill and steal and break people’s hearts and fuck your sister and burn down houses.’ I’ve often wished me own pap was dead. Top that one. I wasn’t going to bleat it. But there we are. We’ve pled our troth. Whatever. Te absolvo.”
Having said that, he popped open his door. “Come along,” he said. “It’s time for innocent little Harrys to be in their beds. We’ve done our best and our worst, and we don’t even know the difference.”
Which was how that night ended—with the difference between good and bad blending together in the darkness. As if this was all that life had so far taught us.
NIALL MACDERMOTT DIDN’T STAY MUCH LONGER IN THE DIAL HOUSE. For maybe a month, he was around our house. My mother continued to take an interest in him, despite her age. It seemed unusual, but that’s the worst you would say about it. In any case, I saw Niall more and was happier and began for a while to get along better in school.
One day when I got home, my mother said, “Niall’s joined up. There’s been some scrape with the taxi and the blacks.” A judge, she said, had given Niall a choice of fates, and Niall had taken the easy one and had gotten on the Trailways to Louisiana the very afternoon. He’d said good-bye to my mother but not to me, which I took hard, given that we were friends.
In not too much time, Niall’s family left out of the DIAL house. The cab disappeared. Their windows were dark. My mother didn’t know where they’d gone, though after a while Niall wrote and said they’d gone to New York, but could soon be back in Strathfoyle. He told us he’d thought the service would solve his problems, but realized he wasn’t cut out for the military life, had no stomach for fighting. He’d “picked up a blue ticket,” he said and would take a freighter back, himself. Things would be happier now.
When I read the letter, I wondered what kind of boy would I say Niall MacDermott was. We go through life with notions that we know what a person is all about. He’s this way—or at least he’s more this way than that. Or, he’s some other way, and we know how to treat him and to what ends he’ll go. With Niall you couldn’t completely know what kind of boy he was. He was good, I believed, at heart. Or mainly. He was kind, or could be kind. He knew things. But I was certain I knew things he didn’t and could see how he could be led wrong and be wrong that way all his life. “Niall will come to no good end,” my mother said a day after his letter came. Something had disappointed her. Something transient or displaced in Niall. Something had been attractive to her about him in her fragile state, and been attractive to me, in my own fragile state. But you just wouldn’t bank on what Niall was, which was the word my poor father used. That was what you looked for, he thought, in people you wanted closest to you. People you can bank on. It sounds easy enough. But if only—and I have thought it a thousand times since those days, when my mother and I were alone together—if only life would turn out to be that simple.
Crossing
They were three ladies. Together, he gathered. Taking the ferry over from Holyhead. Americans—as he was. Though the one might’ve been Canadian, the silver-haired, shorter, laughing one who seemed to be having a better time. Something . . . oot, aboot, the hoose . . . made him think that. They were all high-spirited. Going across to some concert in Dublin. Some place on the docklands, he’d overheard. Some others on the ferry were going as well. From where, were these women?
At one moment they all three sang together—loudly. “Once, twice, three times a lady,” then laughed in a silly way. Whoever’d recorded that song was who they were traveling over to see—possibly that night—then be on the boat back tomorrow. What was it about them? Americans traveling to Ireland from Wales. Ladies of a certain age, his mother might’ve said. Why did he think they might be music teachers? From the Midwest. Three classmates. Taking the grand tour.
Most others in the wide, echoing lounge were more subdued. Typical for the ferry. Things on their minds, duties of the day, troubles out ahead. The boat trip not a novelty for them. Even the children were quiet, nibbling their sour, tinned-meat sandwiches and warm dills, staring sleepily out at the gray, tilting sea. All of inside smelled of burnt coffee and disinfectant and crisps and something treacly. Rubbish. “Once, twice, three times . . .” They re-tried the line with less brio. No one seemed to notice.
He himself was coming over to settle with his solicitors. The dull and lengthy formalities. Documents needing signatures. Rights to assign. An oath. Nothing that included Patsy—who’d departed now, was tucked away with the older girl in the far North. He might’ve flown from Bristol. But the train and the boat, he’d thought, might make a dismal day less so. There was little hurry.
A young woman sitting across on the hard green bench reminded him of her, although Patsy was handsome, and this woman not. The Irish look. Chin slightly incomplete. The rounded, palely flawless cheeks. Two plump hands. The placid blue-eyed gaze of profound un-interest. It could make for great appeal, depth, even beauty. Or it could not. Here was not beauty or appeal. Only forbidding depth. Heaviness. The waist an equator, the legs large in a too-tight brown skirt that rode up revealingly. The tribal features.
Something about this woman, for a moment, reminded him of college, in Ohio, of a quality in himself that had often led to ill. An autumn, like now. A party in a rented house in the countryside. Late at night. Drinking. He’d offered to take a similarly large, unattractive girl back to town. Just a ride in. He didn’t know her, but thought he experienced a vagrant appeal. At a certain point they’d pulled off to “look at the stars” above the river. It had seemed the moment to kiss—to which she’d acquiesced without conviction. Then she’d said, “No more of that.” “Why?” he’d asked. “Why ruin this?” she’d said. He hadn’t thought there was a this to be ruined. There was only now. He hadn’t known what to say, but wanted this—whatever it was—to turn out better than ruin. He’d asked her when precisely in the night’s ribbon of events she’d realized she would not do more with him than kiss. What had he done to make that be all—if it was. He was wheedling and ignominious. But he wanted (he thought) for there to be something they would say, some connection, if there was going to be nothing else. “There wasn’t a moment,” she said, looking indifferently into the still spring night and the river. She was from across in Pennsylvania. A mill town. Not far. He was a scholarship student from Louisiana, far, far from there. Though he sat very close to her now, felt confident about girls from the North. “I’m not attracted to you,” she said. “Plus, I have my period. Can’t we go?”
Later, he heard she’d married some loutish boy from home. It was understood the boy drank too much. From time to time he would see them at school and wonder if she’d told the tosspot husband about his pitiful attempt, about quizzing her—which in his mind was the worst of it. The quizzing after failure. When she saw him, he thought to speak, offer her a word. Possibly apologize. But she stared at him spitefully, as if he’d played some part—some mean part—in how things had turned out for her. A shitty chain of events. Though he knew—as stupid as he’d been—that this could not be true.
Though that impulse—to want to “understand,” to interrogate; it was just the wish to have his way. It was what Patsy had thrown at him when things grew no longer bearable for her, would not forgive him for, took their daughters, mo
ved out of reach, disappeared forever—or so it seemed.
Last night, having gone to sleep thinking of the journey today, he’d had the ridiculous sensation—not quite a dream—that the entire passage of life, years and years, is only actually lived in the last seconds before death slams the door. All life’s experience just a faulty perception. A lie, if you like. Not actual. At the end, though, to feel this way was freeing. It was his habit to imagine many things as freeing.
THE AMERICAN WOMEN HAD MOVED ON TO MICHAEL JACKSON. THEY all started their sentences, he noticed, with “okay,” then answered back in a rushed way. “Okay. Listen, listen. This is how it goes.” They had seen a documentary in which Michael Jackson had been portrayed as a childlike genius who everybody loved, instead of as a leering, predatory molester. The short woman—not a Canadian, he now thought—said she’d seen it many times and always cried at the end when “Michael” died of drugs. She couldn’t believe he was really dead. “Yep. Yep. Yep. Gone as gone can be,” one of the others said. It did not damp their spirits.
The night things had come all unraveled, he and Patsy were in Dawson Street. Raining and cold. November. Buses rattled round the sharp turn into Nassau Street across from Trinity, down from Stephen’s Green. Always the buses came too fast, especially on a shining wet, lightless night with traffic teeming. They’d been walking to a lecture in College, had stopped at the light. A boy had been standing beside them, toes to the curb. Just when the big bus rumbled past—too close—someone pushed this boy from behind. A tire—they all saw it—went onto his head. Dead instantly in front of everyone. Silence set in for one great and terrible moment, then everyone began calling. Stop! Stop!
