by Sara Dillon
There have been brave and rebellious Japanese.
But I thought he would come to me and it would be like a dream of flying; not daily delight but something complex and deep and infinitely satisfying. Rooms in a Tokyo apartment, overlooking the endless roofs. The bright summer night lights of the city; the smell of fresh straw and carpet.
Would he have slept in his sunglasses, fearful of being wakened in the night without his disguise? No more silly than me in my lipstick when no one was there to see, I suppose. Only a bit more extreme.
I thought we would travel and only be in Japan once a year or so; I thought that he wanted to be elsewhere, to be free of having to go on stage and strum and sing the old tunes.
Funny thing about the internet; I saw that he was doing more concerts than he ever did in his youth; calling together teenage choruses, he with a big unfamiliar smile who had rarely smiled, at least who rarely smiled without it looking like a great strain. I didn’t know what he was doing; I guess I would have to consult the blog; family barbeque, taking photos of the family cat with a cell phone.
Well, see you guys. Bye bye.
And so it was like Kido died; it had the same effect as an announcement that he had died in some abrupt, far away way, invisible to me. He was gone. It wasn’t even tragic, and barely even sad. He was meeting and greeting his fans, holding court in the green room, taking bouquets of flowers, a frozen smile.
I left the Greensboro Free and headed down the lawn; I had to get the kids, they would be waiting.
I thought of Kido saying goodbye and leaving me, walking away into the heavy trees. I had thought he would come back, I felt him longing and dissatisfied, but Una, with her pithier approach to things, had a point.
Wherever he was, he wasn’t coming to me.
Next year in Park Baun; 2004
It was cruel the way I heard about it.
Months before I’d left Boston and the law school, a letter came from my cousin Bridie; I could always tell the writing; barely legible, a scrawling hand with several letters either left out or at best scarcely there, sometimes written in pencil.
Well, Clement passed away a fortnight ago. Too bad, but listen he was a good age.
Oh, it was hard, standing there with the little slip of a letter, the pencil scrawl, the friend of my whole life slipping away.
They had sent him off to Galway City to the retirement home for brothers. I could only imagine the traffic noise and congestion, something of which Clement would never complain, as, like other country people from the West of Ireland, traffic noise equated to prosperity and should never be complained of. He fell ill and came back to the old monastery, recently turned into a nursing home. They allowed him back in his old room, the one that overlooked his boyhood home. In the night, he simply died, not a word to anyone.
He had written to me just a few weeks before, Will write to you, Cat, in the New Year, DV. No hint that he would be leaving, no hint that this was the last of his narrow angular script that I would see in this life.
He had befriended Gramma back when she was a lovely young girl, writing to her regularly, to her and to her mother from East Galway, with whom she lived, back in a lost world of dances and soldiers on Gramma’s side; old people down overgrown boreens on his.
He didn’t have much of a life, did he? Gramma said incongruously when I told her, though I’m not at all sure he would have seen it like that. Into the Brothers at twelve or thirteen, on the pretence that he had a vocation, washing dishes, doing the accounts.
He had taken me in, sight unseen, back in the seventies, and never had anything but the sweetest words to me from that moment on. We would ride on his motor bike, through the countryside, past the fairy mounds and old gravesites, the abandoned famine houses and disappearing lakes. He didn’t evaluate or criticize, but only waited to hear and then brought out the brandy and the ashtray, the packet of ten cigs, the space heater flipped on in the corner.
How many old houses of our cousins he had brought me to, most of them empty or knocked down now, approaching first as if on a scouting party, turning back to me and laughing in his strange and slightly mad way, This way, Cat, nothing will hurt you.
Some wrote that Hidden Ireland died in the fifteenth century, some the eighteenth, still more the nineteenth with the Famine; as far as I could see, it began its final death march just in the seventies, when those who knew the stories and the fun and the long warm summer evenings began to be lost.
But Clement had lived on, and stuck with me, in thick and thin, he thought I was the best.
Back then, he must have heard from others what I was doing at all times, out late, at the dance halls. He not only thought it was delightful, but that I was embracing the place, into it completely. Be it Tony, be it Tom, it was all the same to Clement, who loved me unreservedly no matter what I did.
He seemed to be there right from my earliest childhood, with his mysterious gift of plastic encased shamrocks every March 17th, still smelling faintly of sod and water. My mother would open these carefully, separate the roots as if loathe to harm them. The card always showed Saint Patrick himself, holding his great shield and staff; I assumed he was a great character from far over the sea, like one in a book.
Then Clement took me in, met me in a dark and dripping square in Galway and off across the Galway night, such a night as no longer existed. Under a sky such as no longer existed, into the rumbly talk of a pub such as no longer existed, familiar and warm, no worries, the old men in their wellies perched on stools.
All my best to your mother, Cat, he wrote, and then within days, he simply left. Had he thought I was never coming back to see him? Was there anything he would have said to me if he could? Or did he want to leave it like that, ready to go, a catch in the heart valve, but they say I’ve a bit left in me yet, he’d insisted.
There was no one to lament with, no one who would have got it; wasn’t that true and getting truer. The news came as I slogged my way through the law school lunches, meetings on the grading curve and whether First Year Contracts should be four credits or three.
Maybe I had intended never to go back to Galway. I had lost the ability to plan, to see ahead, had lost the wish to do anything that involved clear moves forward or back.
He had met Madina when she was small, called her a darling little girl, offered her a lemonade, but didn’t miss a beat just the same. The brandy and ashtray were set out for me just the same, the same mad giggle. I don’t expect he believed I would learn Irish, and escape for good and all towards the West, if such a place could be found. Others criticized me for trying to block new houses, it was even written up in the Tuam Herald; how she had formed a group and was going to object to the planning applications.
Big houses, aren’t they, Cat? he had laughed, gazing into my face. If I thought it was a good cause, there must be something in it.
How awful all the extended family members could be to each other, the Irish genius for cursing in full flight: that greedy feck, rotten full of himself, never a thought for us, yet Clement could smooth the waters for each of them, bringing one to the other, leading some down the road and up the pathway into a house with an open door, understanding that the old one with bad legs couldn’t make it up out of the chair, we’d expect no such thing, and sitting quietly in the corner, brightly smiling to see everyone talking on, peaceful as can be. My going there made it a new place for him, and he made it a place for me to go to, to enter through a magic door.
I remembered him talking to the young policeman when I had just arrived and needed to register with them and attest that I would be there all the year, and make no trouble. Yes, Guard, no, Guard, he said, polite as you please, but under it that wish to burst into quiet laugher. I could see him arriving on his motorbike, removing his helmet outside the pub’s plate glass window, gentle with the rain, nonjudgmental about it.
Will we go for a spin, Cat?
Brother, how are you keeping, Frank would welcome him.
&nbs
p; It wasn’t so much that Clement lamented I had gone and would not come back. People came and went from America, that was part of the order of things, the way of the world. But just as I did, he missed our meetings at the monastery door on a brilliant summer’s day, the monastery dog loping back and forth, the valley below us. He liked it best when I cycled over, confirming for him again that I was still a great girl, I was always a great girl.
Once in a great while, as I was leaving, heading out into what he thought was a great adventure, a summer’s evening almost unbearable in its beauty, he would whisper in my ear, Love you, love you, Cat. It was his one chance in life to say these words.
Book VI
Fish
Raphael Alberti was born in Puerto de Santa Maria; so Calvin had told me, and it turned out to be true. The town where I danced on tables, where the sweet smell of fish came in on every summer night breeze. I liked seeing photos of Alberti, though I never truly got the point of surrealism, what its underlying obsessions were about. I was stubborn; I never tried to understand what didn’t suit me. But Alberti followed me everywhere, his books were never lost or stashed away out of reach in a damp cardboard box.
Say it’s so,
compañera,
marinera,
say it’s so.
He followed me through various forms of boredom, including walking to the office in the rain in Dublin, plotting my next move for the salvation of the Irish landscape. The sweet smell of the fish pier, the thick air of a summer night.
Tell me I must see the sea,
that I must want you in the sea.
I had an endless capacity for producing things that went nowhere; reams of poems and stories in particular. Perhaps they were invisible, but fine if I did say so myself. I had always kept on producing these items for an invisible audience. During law school, in the loud and unsettled New York nights, I would stay up—and I was no night owl—just to keep writing poems and novellas, only to stick them in a drawer and take out my exam outlines, the dead and icy principles of law, endorsements of paperwork, matters of intestacy.
Remember me on the high seas
My love, when you leave
Alberti was born in Puerto de Santa Maria. It was a non-translatable, virtually unusable fact, but a question of high importance to me. When you leave and never return. When a storm drives a spear into the sail. I left Andalusia and boarded a train. When the captain on watch doesn’t move. When the wireless no longer understands.
There were long periods of boredom, but I had endless patience.
Poor John Merrill. When I lived in Dublin, I conceived of a cycle of poems, epic in nature, meant to capture the Ireland of way back when, the Ireland of Sandy, the Ireland of plotting and planning to save the place; I packed it up in sections and units, like a house that could be carted off in pieces, and sent it to him in aesthetically pleasing envelopes. I inserted cover letters, saying that I feared I was forgotten, banished. I never said by whom, but this did not seem to faze Merrill.
His letters took a while to come, but they always did. Catherine, his oversized handwriting across the page, you are not forgotten, or banished. Read your cycle of poems. Send me final version when in hand, and I will show them around. Just suppose I had written, Dreary here, am coping on innate insanity and an occasional dip into Alberti, similarly he would not have minded or been fazed.
The dreary, dirty boredom of the double decker buses and the rain that blurred the edges between the seasons; the walking back and forth; the meetings in half restored Georgian houses.
No one could keep track of my addresses. I was always changing, every year most typically, every two at the outset. Yet my new addresses must have been noted and kept at least long enough to send me off a letter. Catherine, good to hear from you. Not overdone, just right.
The cycle would bear the title, The Happiest Night of Your Life. It was a good title. And a subtitle, also good, Or, Carna, Mon Amour. I had thought of Hiroshima, Mon Amour, a strange film I always liked; and then I substituted Carna for Hiroshima, a touch of madness that equally, as is clear by now, also did not faze Merrill.
I had walked a good deal in the rain, in both the boring rainy seasons and more unexpected showers. I had passed the time in transport public and private, airplanes and trains and occasionally taxis. I carried my notebook, something I’d picked up all the way back from Harriet the Spy.
When the foremast finally
Is swallowed by the waves.
When you are a siren
At the bottom of the sea.
I doubt that Merrill wrote back reluctantly. What he thought of my zanier affairs I couldn’t be sure, but I doubt he thought about them that way. I had a great power of sound, and only required an occasional airmail letter to confirm it was still intact.
Stannard; 2007
It was the sort of thing either Calvin or Una would have called me out for, my agitated planning for the next comp lit seminar; at least they would have made a derisive remark or two. Sasha did admire me. But for God’s sake, even I needed to talk to someone, and most of the time it was just Madina and Emmet.
Sasha had no idea, of course, as to why I chose the books I did for the seminar. But he listened and made suggestions, almost like a research assistant. No doubt he was not crazy about being at Stannard, and had wanted to attend a more prestigious college. His parents could hardly wait for him to graduate and get to work, so that he could help bail them out of their often harebrained business ventures. But Sasha liked hanging out and talking about books, liked the book covers and names of authors and had interesting tidbits of information from their biographies. He did strike me as a ski instructor manqué, but he could be good company on those long late spring afternoons as I got ready for my upcoming Stannard seminar. Solzhenitsyn sounded as ancient to him as Tolstoy did to me; poor fellow, he said innocently that it was “neat” I was thinking of including Japanese novels in the mix.
Little did he know on that score.
Maybe it was a mistake to dredge this up again, on the pretence that I wanted to include some books from out of my former “expertise.” I had already done it to death. The nights in California, love sick, riding my bike under the stars and listening to Barber’s Adagio, parsing and analyzing The Setting Sun, Dazai’s Shayō; my dissertation with its manic quality, brought to life by my own persistent wish to triumph over Japan. Poor dear Sasha; yes, it was neat all right.
I was to have a little office of my own. I’d bought a small boom box, and on a really fine day might listen softly to Françoise Hardy or Leo Ferré, even the theme song from the movie Un homme et une femme. Maybe it was time to bone up on French literature, Spanish literature, and the one I wished all along I’d done, Portuguese.
The problems of Dazai and his alter ego of the forlorn Japanese family man did not have to be my concern any more.
Yes, but Japanese literature is just a subculture; it has its own themes that are hard to convey.
Sasha thought I was talking about some other kind of obscurity than what I was. I felt like I was doing Dazai a favor at this stage.
It was long ago, in California, that I worked for up to seventeen hours a day, going through Dazai line by line for evidence of what I knew to be true: Dazai imagined himself as a great artistic hero, but enjoyed seeing himself pulled down by those around him who completely failed to get it. Enjoyed may not be the right word, but there was a certain cruel delight in describing that process of death by misunderstanding. And in those days, I gave myself over to Dazai, and by extension to Kido. I didn’t have to do that anymore.
Dear Calvin:
You will not believe what I have pulled off. I can hardly take it in. I am staying here, at Stannard, and I can teach whatever I want. I am living like Eva Trout, but what’s new? What do you think of this? Will you come to Greensboro? I would love to show you our house. I have a swish little office now at Stannard; do you remember the day long ago we came here to read our poetry, and they asked
me about houses and I had no idea what I was writing or what it meant. Kids are good, a bit nutty. Come see us soon; it is spring. The meadows are so overgrown, compared to what they used to be.
Calvin wrote nice poems, even sometimes great poems, about navy blue water and the waves running smooth against the side of the sailboat. He knew about most everything. However off base it might make me seem, I couldn’t get over the idea that Calvin and I were on a team, and that I should periodically prove to him that I was still alive.
Calvin would have agreed with me that it was time for Dazai to shove off; that his problems were not my problems any more. Even if Dazai was restrained, repressed and his life distorted, what had that to do with me? It had caused enough trouble.
Madina and Emmet were happier now that mud season was over. They had stopped asking when we were going back to Boston. I was evasive enough for long enough, and they took it for granted that we would be staying in Greensboro. Emmet wanted to know when the ice cream store would open.
I remember that day I finally heard once again from Merrill. I made the familiar trek to the Greensboro Free, signed in and sat down at the computer. When I saw his message, a bolt of joy went through me. He had seen mine, he had written back, he was there. Catherine, he wrote, and I could hear the heavy sighing, the weight of his breath as it had always been. Somehow lost your email, and couldn’t reply. Then it turned up, so am sending this now. Am so pleased to hear you’ve done this. As you know, I am in my seventies. Somehow I’m not writing any more, maybe I have said everything. I had hoped you would write again. Do write when you can.
