Remembering Light and Stone

by Deirdre Madden

  ‘You see, I was there. I was in Germany at the end of the last war, and I can’t forget it. I still feel guilty – not for anything I did,’ he added hastily. ‘I didn’t do anything there to be ashamed of. But I still feel guilty about things I saw, and sometimes I think that’s even worse.’

  At that moment, Susan came back in, and Bob immediately changed the subject. ‘Never saw a cat that loved its food as much as Uncle Silas. Maybe we’ll give him a little bit more, eh? What do you say to that?’ The cat started to mew again as Bob opened a second tin.

  I thought life in America was so hard for people, and it didn’t take me too long to work out the reason. America isn’t a country, it’s a continent. It’s too big for people to live comfortably there, because it isn’t on a human scale. The human body isn’t designed to cope with the dimensions in which it finds itself there. Because the country is out of proportion to people, they try to make themselves feel safe by bringing things up to the same large scale. That was the only plausible reason I could think of for the size of everything, for the excess which amounted to so little: the vast fridges and freezers crammed to bursting point with jumbo-sized packets of food; the huge televisions with thirty-nine channels; fat newspapers with more supplements than you could ever be reasonably expected to read; the big cars in which people spent absurdly long periods of time going from place to place. I found all this enervating rather than comforting, and I think it has the same effect on most people. America isn’t so much a country as a phenomenon.

  On our last day in Washington, I stayed at home with Susan while Ted went into town to do some things. Susan and I had a good morning together. We made fudge brownies and drank coffee; she showed me all the things her new food processor could do, and I gave her some pasta recipes. It was pleasant and relaxed in a way that would have been impossible had I been with my own mother, but with Susan it was no problem because we both knew it was all a game. Without a word being said about it, we pretended that things were as they might have been twenty years ago. I was the nice girl who was going to marry Ted, and I’d be like a daughter to Susan. Ted and I would buy a house and have a couple of children and I’d make fudge brownies in my own kitchen and bring them over to her, and we’d swop household hints and go shopping together, and everything would be just dandy. And because we both knew there was never the slightest possibility of that happening, we could pretend for a while, and enjoy the illusion.

  After lunch, which we made together, Susan brought out a box and poured a heap of old family photographs on to the kitchen table. We looked through them together. It was funny seeing pictures of Ted, because he’s one of those people who remain completely recognizable throughout their lives. He looked himself in his baby photos, and if he lives to be ninety, he’ll probably be just an older version of himself as he is now. It might almost go without saying that I’m not at all like that. I once showed Ted a photo of myself when I was a student, and not only did he not recognize me, he would hardly believe it when I told him it was me. I just changed as I grew up: you would never know me from my baby photos, but I have to admit that I’ve also worked a lot on changing my image and appearance at different periods in my life. You can do a lot with clothes and hairstyles and make-up if you know what you’re about. There were photos of Ted sitting on the bonnet of an old 1950s car, Ted in a little baseball suit with a bat as big as himself, Ted sitting on the knee of an old lady – the ‘Grammy’ he had told me about the first time I went to visit him in Florence – Ted in his teens wearing a tuxedo, taking his girlfriend to a Prom.

  Ted’s sister Amy was in some of the photos, a happy little girl when she was small, but as she grew older her face became progressively more sullen and shut, until she was about twenty. There were no photos of her after that age. ‘Amy’s in Phoenix now. I’m not really sure what she’s doing there: working in a hotel but I don’t know exactly what she’s doing. Bob and I had hoped she’d be able to come home for Thanksgiving last year, but she never came.’

  Bob came into the kitchen to make a coffee while we were there, and he came over to the table to look at the photographs too. There was one of him in his army uniform, which he laughed at. ‘Skinny little guy, wasn’t I? Don’t remember being so skinny!’ Then he picked up a family group, and he laughed again. ‘God, look at us, Susan! We look like Mr and Mrs America 1958, we look like we were advertising something.’ Then Ted came back, and he groaned when he saw what we were doing. ‘Mom, I can’t believe you,’ he said, but he was fascinated too, and began to look through the photographs with us. Bob took his coffee and two brownies back to his own room, and Ted, Susan and I went on looking at the old pictures together until Ted at last said, ‘That’s enough. Let’s put all this away, it’s making me feel ancient.’

  15

  Ted and I were to travel to New York by train, and Bob offered to drive us to Union Station. Susan made us a big packed lunch to eat on the train, even though Ted told her twice that it wasn’t necessary, that we would be in New York long before lunch time. When I said goodbye to Susan she hugged me, but I could see that she expected never to see me again, and that it didn’t bother her at all. She would forget me, she was starting to forget me even before I left. I wasn’t the first woman she had seen Ted with, and I wouldn’t be the last. If I had been foolish I would have been hurt or upset by this. Her attitude made me realize and admit to myself that Ted and I would go our separate ways sooner or later. Susan was only being realistic, not spiteful.

  But when Bob said goodbye to me at the station, he had tears in his eyes. He also knew that he would probably never see me again, but it was as if he knew that the frailty of my relationship with Ted wasn’t the only reason, that it also had something to do with Bob himself. It was as if he were going to his death, and it was that which was causing us to part, rather than that Ted and I were going to New York on a train. He looked so lonely, and suddenly I could see the emptiness of his life: a distant son, a hostile daughter, a wife with whom he had little in common. I pictured him in his room, alone, smoking, still trying to make sense of his memories of war. Maybe it was because he looked like Ted that I found it so sad. It was like meeting Ted years hence, and seeing that his life had been unhappy. We were bound to part but I would still care for him, and I hated to think that his life might end like his father’s. I couldn’t bear to watch Bob as he walked away from us.

  I was a bit thrown by what had happened when I was saying goodbye: even though, as we sat on the train and I thought about it, nothing had really happened. Ted and I didn’t talk about it: I wondered had he even noticed anything amiss. I looked at him from time to time as we went north, reading the Washington Post, occasionally glancing out of the smoked-glass windows of the train. Ted was inscrutable in the way good-natured people often are. I didn’t know how he felt about leaving his parents, whether it bothered him or not. It was strange, because in some ways we were so close, and yet often I had no idea what was going on in his mind.

  When I was a child, I was always getting into trouble for staring at people. Once a week, I used to go with my mother by bus to Ballyvaughan to do some shopping, and she always used to warn me before we left home to behave myself, and not gawp and gawk at people. I found it very hard to resist. When you’re a child, strangers are completely fascinating. The world you move in is so familiar that things beyond it catch your imagination: pictures in books of foreign countries, and people you don’t know. I used to look at the people on the bus, and I’d wonder about them. What was that woman in the tweed coat and flat shoes really like? If she was my mother, would she be good to me? Would she be like my mother and cook me turnips once a week, even though she knew I hated them? If that boy with the sports bag was my brother, would he have given me a kitten the way Jimmy did? Was that man as cross as he looked? If I was his daughter, what would he do to me? And then I would look back at my mother, and feel comforted, safe from any worries that might have been stirred up by my thoughts. I enjoyed the fris
son of fear that came from imagining the woman across the aisle thrashing me with her shoe, or locking me in my room because I wouldn’t eat my dinner, for I knew my own mother wouldn’t do those things. It reassured me to look at her, because she was as familiar to me as my own fingers. I felt safe with my mother.

  Imagining strangers as my parents was one thing. Imagining my parents as strangers was another. I began to play that game too, and I found that it was more dangerous than the other one. In the end, I couldn’t handle it.

  One day I was out in the car with my father. He was driving to the next village to collect a piece of farm machinery. I was on holiday from school, and he had asked if I wanted to go with him so I’d said yes. He didn’t say anything as we drove along. My father didn’t talk much at any time, and I often used to wonder what he was thinking. I prattled on to him for a bit, then I fell quiet. I started to do the same thing that I would do on the bus. I wiped from my mind all memory of my father, and pretended he lived in a different place, perhaps with another family, perhaps on his own. Maybe he wasn’t a farmer but a lorry driver, or a man who owned a shop. I looked at his thick fingers gripping the steering wheel, and I wondered what he sold, groceries or hardware. I imagined him wearing an overall the colour of a brown paper bag, and people coming to him to buy hammers and nails and tins of paint. And then suddenly it wasn’t make-believe any more: this man was a total stranger. I was terrified. ‘Who is this person?’ I thought. ‘Where is he taking me? What will he do with me when he gets there?’ I looked up at his face. His heavy brow was angry and cruel. ‘Stop the car, please,’ I said. He glanced over at me. ‘What is it Aisling?’ he asked. ‘Don’t you feel well?’ but although he slowed down, he didn’t stop. I still didn’t trust this man. ‘Stop the car!’ I screamed, fumbling with the locks to get out, and this time he did, the brakes screeching. I already had the door of the car open, and the sight of the road moving beneath me frightened me so much, I let the door slip closed again, and started to cry.

  Immediately the spell was broken, I knew he was my father, and I cried and cried, whingeing out between my tears, ‘I’m sorry, Daddy, I’m sorry,’ but I wouldn’t tell him what I was sorry for. Of course he took me straight back home. I flung myself howling at my mother’s skirts, and I said over and over silently to myself, ‘This is my mother, this is my mother, she will look after me.’ I gave my imagination no possible leeway. They thought I was sick and I let them; they wanted to put me to bed and I went. They brought me tea and toast later in the day, and although I was just at the stage when I was growing out of bears and soft toys, I spent the rest of the day with a teddy wedged firmly under my arm. When my mother brought me the toast, she tried to coax out of me what the problem was, but I only started to cry again, so she let the matter drop. The next morning, I was the first one up in the house, and I was resolutely cheerful. I didn’t let anyone talk much about what had happened, and before long it was forgotten. But I didn’t forget.

  Now it was years since I had thought about that day, and sitting beside Ted on the train to New York, I realized that I was in danger of doing exactly the same thing again. If I thought about it too much, I would begin to wonder who this man beside me was, why on earth was I going to New York with him, what would happen to me when we got there? I struggled to distract myself from my own imagination. I asked him if there was anything interesting in the paper, and started to poke in the bag of food his mother had given us. Ted looked at me in amazement. ‘You can’t possibly be hungry already,’ he said, as I pulled out apples and muffins, and of course I wasn’t.

  I looked out of the train window and asked him where we were. He said that he wasn’t sure. It was the sort of journey where if you didn’t bother to look out the window for a long time, you could be fairly sure that you weren’t missing anything much. I pulled a doughnut apart and nibbled at it. The train stopped in Philadelphia, and I remember thinking that even by just looking at the city through a train window, you could tell that there was something missing. It reminded me of the area beyond S. Giorgio, where I worked. In Ireland I had seen little fields which had more psychic energy in them than you can sometimes find in whole cities. I could imagine hundreds of cities all over America which looked like this: activity, speed, emptiness; concrete, metal, glass, nothing. I wondered what it would be like to come from such a city, and then of course I glanced again at Ted. He had put on his Walkman: The Magic Flute was leaking out of the headphones. His eyes were closed, his face contented as a sleeping baby’s. I saw then how foolish my line of thought was. As if all city people were inevitably alienated, and country people balanced and whole! I was the one who came from what looked like a rural idyll, and I was the one who was anxious and tormented. I was annoyed with myself for having fallen into this stupid notion, for I’d known for years that big cities didn’t have the monopoly on evil, hate and unhappiness.

  My first sensation as we approached New York was of claustrophobia. This feeling stayed with me and grew stronger the whole time we were there. The train disappeared into a tunnel, and we stayed underground until we arrived in Penn Station. Moments later, we were closed up in a taxi, and I really mean closed up. There was a thick, dirty perspex screen between us and the driver, with a cluster of little holes to speak through, and a hatch for money. The tight, closed space of the taxi contrasted strangely with the long high streets along which we sped. A short while later we were sitting in the dimmest and most cramped hotel room I’d ever seen. I felt a mounting sense of panic, which Ted didn’t pick up on. He suggested that we rest a while before going out into the city and I readily agreed. We lay beside each other for an hour or so, and Ted fell asleep, but I didn’t.

  When he awoke, we went out for a walk. Every city has its own smell, and New York smells of concrete and iron. I thought it was strange to see the steam coming from the manholes in the road, pluming up in the cold air. In Central Park it was wintry, the ground yellow and hard, but the sun shone from a clear sky on the joggers in their shiny tight Lycra suits. I’d expected to see people jogging there, but I hadn’t expected to see the stones, the huge bare rocks that broke the ground in Central Park. They surprised me because my image was of a completely artificial city, where every last vestige of nature had been obliterated. I had expected the park to be as featureless as a football pitch, and I was amazed to see these ancient rocks. Although they were in themselves completely unattractive, they delighted me simply by being there.

  The following morning we had breakfast at a diner on Lexington Avenue which Ted knew from previous visits to New York. We sat up on high stools at the counter, and watched a man in a greasy white overall cook rapid breakfasts on a big hotplate. We took our time: watching him flip over rashers of bacon and pour eggs into metal rings was as important to me as the coffee and cinnamon toast I’d ordered. A waiter came over and apologized to the cook for some mistake he’d made. ‘Sorry,’ the waiter said, and the cook replied, ‘Yeah, well don’t be sorry, be careful.’ We seemed to be the only people who weren’t in a rush. Around us customers came and went, their food quickly ordered, quickly served, quickly eaten, and then they were gone. There was a big poster on the wall about what to do if someone chokes. I supposed they needed it because people ate so quickly there that they were probably quite likely to choke. I tried to keep my hands under the counter as much as possible, because they were shaking with nervousness, and I didn’t want Ted to see that.

  ‘I’m glad this place is still here,’ he said. ‘In Manhattan, you can never be sure: shops and restaurants are always folding. You go back to a place you knew and liked, and you find it’s gone, it’s as if it never existed.’ What he said didn’t surprise me. Already I had felt in the city that uneasy contrast of the solid and the evanescent. Even though it was a vast metropolis of metal and stone, you could smell the impermanence. Later in the day we saw the Trump Tower, a perfect name for a perfect example of this phenomenon. Outside it was a huge solid building; inside it was as vulgar a
nd frail as a poor man’s dream of riches. The crass pink marble walls with a fake waterfall running down them looked like they had been built yesterday, and would be dismantled again the day after tomorrow. I’d seen the same thing in reverse in S. Giorgio: on a summer morning when I drove down to the plain and looked back, the little town could seem like something in a dream. A cluster of creamy-coloured buildings girdled by a wall and wrapped in a pearly soft light, it was like a mirage: but those walls were two metres thick, and they had been there when Manhattan was a bare island with just a few ancient rocks sticking out of the soil.

  A city acts on you like alcohol: it only brings out what is already there – sleepiness, laughter, violence – but it doesn’t actually cause these things. New York brought out in me a deep anxiety, and a sense of distance from Ted. More unsettling, it brought out a sense of distance from myself. At night, looking out of the hotel windows at the water towers, the fire escapes, the tall buildings riddled with lit windows, where strangers moved, I began to feel a stranger to myself.

  I went into the bathroom, locked the door and looked in the mirror. ‘This is my face, my hair, my eyes, my self,’ I said over and over again, and I conned the details of my own life to remind myself who I was. I tried to make myself believe in the reality of my own past, but it didn’t work. On the middle finger of my right hand, I wear my mother’s wedding ring. After she died Jimmy took the ring from her finger and gave it to me. I put it on, and I’ve never taken it off since then. It’s the only thing I own that I really care for: all my other possessions mean nothing, they’re like parts of a costume. When I left Paris, if I could have afforded it, I’d have thrown away every last thing I owned, gone to Italy in what I stood up in, and started there all over again. But looking now at my mother’s ring in the hotel bathroom, I couldn’t connect with it. Like seeing a ring on a stranger’s hand in a public place, I knew it was charged with emotional significance: but not for me. I was indifferent to my own life, and yet I felt a sense of panic that this should be so. It frightened me to lose myself to myself in this way.