by Brian Friel
‘And why not, Frank? Why not for God’s sake?’
Oh, yes, an enormous change. Something extraordinary about all that.
Then there was the night I watched her through the bedroom door. She was sitting at her dressing-table, in front of the mirror, trying her hair in different ways. When she would have it in a certain way, she’d lean close to the mirror and peer into it and turn her head from side to side. But you knew she couldn’t read her reflection, could scarcely even see it. Then she would try the hair in a different style and she’d lean into the mirror again until her face was almost touching it and again she’d turn first to one side and then the other. And you knew that all she saw was a blur.
Then after about half-a-dozen attempts she stood up and came to the door – it was then I could see she was crying – and she switched off the light. Then she went back to the dressing-table and sat down again; in the dark; for maybe an hour; sat there and gazed listlessly at the black mirror.
Yes, she did dive into the Atlantic from the top of Napoleon Rock; first time in her life. Difficult times. Oh, I can’t tell you. Difficult times for all of us.
Mr Rice The dangerous period for Molly came – as it does for all patients – when the first delight and excitement at having vision have died away. The old world with its routines, all the consolations of work and the familiar, is gone for ever. A sighted world – a partially sighted world, for that is the best it will ever be – is available. But to compose it, to put it together, demands effort and concentration and patience that are almost superhuman.
So the question she had to ask herself was: How much do I want this world? And am I prepared to make that enormous effort to get it?
Frank Then there was a new development – as if she hadn’t enough troubles already. A frightening new development. She began getting spells of dizziness when everything seemed in a thick fog, all external reality became just a haze. This would hit her for no reason at all – at work, or walking home, or in the house; and it would last for an hour, maybe several hours.
Rice had no explanation for it. But you could see he was concerned.
‘It’s called “gnosis”,’ he said.
‘How do you spell that?’
‘G-n-o-s-i-s.’
‘And what is it?’
‘It’s a condition of impaired vision, Mr Sweeney.’
He really was a right little bastard at times.
Anyhow, I looked it up in the library, and interestingly, interestingly I could find no reference at all to a medical condition called ‘gnosis’. But according to the dictionary the word meant a mystical knowledge, a knowledge of spiritual things! And my first thought was: Good old Molly! Molly’s full of mystical knowledge! God forgive me; I really didn’t mean to be so cheap.
I meant to tell Rice about that meaning of the word the next time I met him – just to bring him down a peg. But it slipped my mind. I suppose because the condition disappeared as suddenly as it appeared. And anyway she had so many troubles at that stage that my skirmishes with Rice didn’t matter any more.
Molly Tests – tests – tests – tests – tests! Between Mr Rice and Jean Wallace and George Wallace and indeed Frank himself I must have spent months and months being analysed and answering questions and identifying drawings and making sketches. And, God, those damned tests with photographs and lights and objects – those endless tricks and illusions and distortions – the Zöllner illusion, the Ames distorting room, the Staircase illusion, the Müller-Lyer illusion. And they never told you if you had passed or failed so you always assumed you failed. Such peace – such peace when they were all finished.
I stopped at the florist one evening to get something for Tony and Betty from this side – what was this side; Molly’s father and mother. For their wedding anniversary. And I spotted this little pot of flowers, like large buttercups, about six inches tall, with blue petals and what seemed to me a whitish centre. I thought I recognized them but I wasn’t quite sure. And I wouldn’t allow myself to touch them.
‘I’ll take these,’ I said to the man.
‘Pretty, aren’t they?’ he said. ‘Just in from Holland this morning. And do you know what? – I can’t remember what they’re called. Do you know?’
‘They’re nemophila.’
‘Are they?’
‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Feel the leaves. They should be dry and feathery.’
‘You’re right,’ he said. ‘That’s what they are. They have another name, haven’t they?’
‘Baby Blue Eyes,’ I said.
‘That’s it! I’d forgotten that. Getting too old for this job.’
Yes, that gave me some pleasure. One silly little victory. And when I took them home and held them up to my face and looked closely at them, they weren’t nearly as pretty as buttercups. Weren’t pretty at all. Couldn’t give that as a present next door.
Frank It was the clever Jean Wallace who spotted the distress signals first. She said to me: ‘We should be seeing a renaissance of personality at this point. Because if that doesn’t take place – and it’s not – then you can expect a withdrawal.’
And she was right. That’s what’s happened. Molly just … withdrew.
Then in the middle of February she lost her job in the health club. And now Rita was no longer a friend. And that was so unfair – Rita kept making allowances for her long after any other boss would have got rid of her; turning in late; leaving early; maybe not even making an appearance for two or three days. Just sitting alone in her bedroom with her eyes shut, maybe listening to the radio, maybe just sitting there in silence.
I made a last effort on the first of March. I took her new scarlet coat out of the wardrobe and I said, ‘Come on, girl! Enough of this. We’re going for a long walk on Tramore beach. Then we’ll have a drink in Moriarity’s. Then we’ll have dinner in that new Chinese place. Right? Right!’ And I left the coat at the foot of her bed.
And that’s where it lay for weeks. And weeks. In fact she never wore it out again.
And at that point I had come to the end of my tether. There seemed to be nothing more I could do.
Mr Rice In those last few months a new condition appeared. She began showing symptoms of a condition known as blindsight. This is a physiological condition, not psychological. On those occasions she claimed she could see nothing, absolutely nothing at all. And indeed she was telling the truth. But even as she said this, she behaved as if she could see – reach for her purse, avoid a chair that was in her way, lift a book and hand it to you. She was indeed receiving visual signals and she was indeed responding to them. But because of a malfunction in part of the cerebral cortex none of this perception reached her consciousness. She was totally unconscious of seeing anything at all.
In other words she had vision – but a vision that was utterly useless to her.
Blindsight … curious word …
I remember in Cleveland once, Bloomstein and Maria and I were in a restaurant and when Maria left the table Bloomstein said to me,
‘Beautiful lady. You do know that?’
‘I know,’ I said.
‘Do you really?’
I said of course I did.
‘That’s not how you behave,’ he said. ‘You behave like a man with blindsight.’
Frank We were in the pub this night, Billy Hughes and myself, just sitting and chatting about – yes! I remember what we were talking about! An idea Billy had of recycling old tea-leaves and turning them into a substitute for tobacco. We should have followed that up.
Anyhow – anyhow, this man comes up to me in the bar, says he’s a journalist from a Dublin paper, asks would I be interested in giving him the full story about Molly.
He seemed a decent man. I talked to him for maybe an hour at most. Of course it was stupid. And I really didn’t do it for the bloody money.
Jack from next door spotted the piece and brought it in. Miracle Cure False Dawn. Molly sulks in darkness. Husband drowns sorrow in pub.
Of course she heard about it – God knows how. And now I was as bad as all the others: I had let her down, too.
Molly During all those years when my mother was in the hospital with her nerves my father brought me to visit her only three times. Maybe that was her choice. Or his. I never knew.
But I have a vivid memory of each of those three visits.
One of the voice of a youngish woman. My father and mother are in her ward, surrounded by a screen, fighting as usual, and I’m standing outside in the huge echoey corridor. And I can hear a young woman sobbing at the far end of the corridor. More lamenting than sobbing. And even though a lot of people are passing along that corridor I remember wondering why nobody paid any attention to her. And for some reason the sound of that lamentation stayed with me.
And I remember another patient, an old man, leaning over me and enveloping me in the smell of snuff. He slipped a coin into my hand and said, ‘Go out and buy us a fancy new car, son, and the two of us will drive away to beautiful Fethard-on-Sea.’ And he laughed. He had given me a shilling.
And the third memory is of my mother sitting on the side of her bed, shouting at my father, screaming at him, ‘She should be at a blind school! You know she should! But you know the real reason you won’t send her? Not because you haven’t the money. Because you want to punish me.’
I didn’t tell Mr Rice that story when he first asked me about my childhood. Out of loyalty to Father, maybe. Maybe out of loyalty to Mother, too.
Anyhow those memories came into my head the other day. I can’t have been more than six or seven at the time.
Mr Rice In those last few months it was hard to recognize the woman who had first come to my house. The confident way she shook my hand. Her calm and her independence. The way she held her head.
How self-sufficient she had been then – her home, her job, her friends, her swimming; so naturally, so easily experiencing her world with her hands alone.
And we had once asked so glibly: What has she to lose?
Molly In those last few months I was seeing less and less. I was living in the hospital then, Mother’s old hospital. And what was strange was that there were times when I didn’t know if the things I did see were real or was I imagining them. I seemed to be living on a borderline between fantasy and reality.
Yes, that was a strange state. Anxious at first; oh, very anxious. Because it meant that I couldn’t trust any more what sight I still had. It was no longer trustworthy.
But as time went on that anxiety receded; seemed to be a silly anxiety. Not that I began trusting my eyes again. Just that trying to discriminate, to distinguish between what might be real and what might be imagined, being guided by what Father used to call ‘excellent testimony’ – that didn’t seem to matter all that much, seemed to matter less and less. And for some reason the less it mattered, the more I thought I could see.
Mr Rice In those last few months – she was living in the psychiatric hospital at that point – I knew I had lost contact with her. She had moved away from us all. She wasn’t in her old blind world – she was exiled from that. And the sighted world, which she had never found hospitable, wasn’t available to her any more.
My sense was that she was trying to compose another life that was neither sighted nor unsighted, somewhere she hoped was beyond disappointment; somewhere, she hoped, without expectation.
Frank The last time I saw Rice was on the following Easter Sunday; April 7; six months to the day after the first operation. Fishing on a lake called Lough Anna away up in the hills. Billy Hughes spotted him first.
‘Isn’t that your friend, Mr Rice? Wave to him, man!’
And what were Billy and I doing up there in the wilds? Embarrassing. But I’ll explain.
Ballybeg got its water supply from Lough Anna and in the summer, when the lake was low, from two small adjoining lakes. So to make the supply more efficient it was decided that at the end of April the two small lakes would be emptied into Lough Anna and it would become the sole reservoir for the town. That would raise the water-level of Anna by fifteen feet and of course ruin the trout fishing there – not that that worried them. So in fact that Easter Sunday would have been Rice’s last time to fish there. But he probably knew that because Anna was his favourite lake; he was up there every chance he got; and he had told me once that he had thought of putting a boat on it. Anyhow – anyhow.
Billy Hughes and his crazy scheme. He had heard that there was a pair of badgers in a sett at the edge of the lake. When Anna was flooded in three weeks’ time, they would be drowned. They would have to be moved. Would I help him?
Move two badgers! Wonderful! So why did I go with him? Partly to humour the eejit. But really, I suppose, really because that would be our last day together, that Easter Sunday.
And that’s how we spent it – digging two bloody badgers out of their sett. Dug for two-and-a-half hours. Then flung old fishing nets over them to immobilize them. Then lifted them into two wheelbarrows. Then hauled those wheelbarrows along a sheep track up the side of the mountain – and each of those brutes weighed at least thirty pounds – so that we were hauling half-a-hundred-weight of bloody badger-meat up an almost vertical mountainside. And then – listen to this – the greatest lunacy of all – then tried to force them into an old, abandoned sett half-way up the mountain! Brilliant Billy Hughes!
Because of course the moment we cut them out of the nets and tried to push them down the new hole, well naturally they went wild; bit Billy’s ankle and damn near fractured my arm; and then went careering down the hillside in a mad panic, trailing bits of net behind them. And because they can’t see too well in daylight or maybe because they’re half-blind anyway, stumbling into bushes and banging into rocks and bumping into each other and sliding and rolling and tumbling all over the place. And where did they head for? Of course – of course – straight back to the old sett at the edge of the water – the one we’d destroyed with all our digging!
Well, what could you do but laugh? Hands blistered, bleeding ankle, sore arm, filthy clothes. Flung ourselves on the heather and laughed until our sides hurt. And then Billy turned to me and said very formally, ‘Happy Easter, Frank’ and it seemed the funniest thing in the world and off we went again. What an eejit that man was!
Rice joined us when we were putting the wheelbarrows into the back of Billy’s van.
‘I was watching you from the far side,’ he said. ‘What in God’s name were you doing?’
Billy told him.
‘Good heavens!’ he said, posh as ever. ‘A splendid idea. Always a man for the noble pursuit, Frank.’
The bastard couldn’t resist it, I knew. But for some reason he didn’t anger me that day; didn’t even annoy me. Maybe because his fishing outfit was a couple of sizes too big for him and in those baggy trousers he looked a bit like a circus clown. Maybe because at that moment, after that fiasco with the badgers, standing on that shore that would be gone in a few weeks’ time, none of the three of us – Billy, Rice, myself – none of the three of us seemed such big shots at that moment. Or maybe he didn’t annoy me that Easter Sunday afternoon because I knew I’d probably never see him again. I was heading off to Ethiopia in the morning.
We left the van outside Billy’s flat and he walked me part of the way home.
When we got to the courthouse I said he’d come far enough: we’d part here. I hoped he’d get work. I hoped he’d meet some decent woman who’d marry him and beat some sense into him. And I’d be back home soon, very soon, the moment I’d sorted out the economy of Ethiopia … The usual stuff.
Then we hugged quickly and he walked away and I looked after him and watched his straight back and the quirky way he threw out his left leg as he walked and I thought, my God, I thought how much I’m going to miss that bloody man.
And when he disappeared round the corner of the courthouse, I thought, too – I thought, too – Abyssinia for Christ’s sake – or whatever it’s called – Ethiopia – Abyssinia – whatever it’s
called – who cares what it’s called – who gives a damn – who in his right mind wants to go there for Christ’s sake? Not you. You certainly don’t. Then why don’t you stay where you are for Christ’s sake? What are you looking for?
Oh, Jesus …
Mr Rice Roger Bloomstein was killed in an air-crash on the evening of the Fourth of July. He was flying his plane from New York to Cape Cod where Maria and he had rented a house for the summer. An eyewitness said the engine stopped suddenly, and for a couple of seconds the plane seemed to sit suspended in the sky, golden and glittering in the setting sun, and then plummeted into the sea just south of Martha’s Vineyard.
The body was never recovered.
I went to New York for the memorial service the following month. Hiroko Matoba couldn’t come: he had had a massive heart attack the previous week. So of the four horsemen, the brilliant meteors, there were only the two of us: Hans, now the internationally famous Herr Girder, silver-haired, sleek, smiling; and myself, seedy, I knew, after a bad flight and too much whiskey.
Girder asked about Molly. He had read an article George Wallace had written about ‘Mrs M’ in the Journal of Psychology. The enquiry sounded casual but the smiling eyes couldn’t conceal the vigilance. So the vigilance was still necessary despite the success, maybe more necessary because of the success.
‘Lucky Paddy Rice,’ he said. ‘The chance of a lifetime. Fell on your feet again.’
‘Not as lucky as you, Hans.’
‘But it didn’t end happily for the lady?’
‘’Fraid not,’ I said.
‘Too bad. No happy endings. So she is totally sightless now?’
‘Totally.’
‘And mentally?’
