Archipelago

by R. A. Lafferty

  “What can you do, Finnegan?” Duffey asked him. “Have you a trade?”

  “Lots of them, and also an art, arts. I'm one of the most talented artists anywhere.”

  “I get a little bored with this bright brittle talk,” Duffey growled. “You seem to learn it from each other, all of you.”

  “I wish that were all it was,” Finnegan said sadly. “I wish I were not quite so good, so I could joke about being great. This isn't something I want. It scares me to death. I know how Henry felt when his Vocation came to him. There's a wild rush to be rid of the thing. This came to me a long time ago but I didn't accept it. I still don't. I'll run from the thing, I'll be out from under it, I'll lose it. Why is it given to fools anyhow? There are so many better men who could use it better: I can only misuse it when I use it at all. Did you ever pray at night that you would wake up in the morning and no longer have a special gift?”

  “Yes, I'm also a fool who's been given more than I know how to handle,” said Duffey. “But I don't run away from it, though it's true that I botch it. But aren't you going to work, Finnegan? You should.”

  “I'll wait till I run out of money. I've worked on river barge-trains and could still get on. And I can ship out of New Orleans. My Merchant Marine papers are in order. I've done bartending, but if I do that I should do it with Dotty. She has the money saved and a place ready to be bought. I think she's going to buy it, with or without me. Now she says that she has another idea that will amaze me and that it will be revealed in all good time. But if I go in with her, my mind will be made up for me.”

  “So, marry her and run the bar with her, and when you want to get crocked you can do it wholesale. Let her make up your mind.”

  “Vincent and his family want me to settle here and go to work,” Finnegan said, “but not in the bar business. They seem very anxious that everyone should go to work. I used to think that working was only a fad and would die out. Now many people take it seriously.

  “Hugh wants me to be a salesman for him. Philip wants me to be a shop man for him and learn to be a mechanic. And Tim says that he has a spot for me in his ready-mix concrete business. Dotty says it's probably modeling concrete overcoats. I don't think that Tim loves me as well as the rest of them do.”

  “Are you all right, Henry?” Mary Catherine asked. “Do you have any money, or how are these things handled?”

  “Yes, I have enough money. We're a bunch of money-making Frenchmen. And then, that's good priest country. They raise a lot of them there, and are always ready to start them off.”

  They drove to the city and went to the Stranahans. Everybody was too busy to bother with them except Maurine, Vincent's youngest sister.

  “You ran off from me this morning,” she challenged. “Let's go for another ride.”

  “You weren't even up,” Finnegan said. “Come here. You give me a ride.”

  “I will if you're not too chicken to do it,” Maurine bantered. “And none of you looked in at my class party last night.”

  “We'll be back next year when you graduate,” Duffey said.

  “Vincent is getting all the attention for getting married,” Maurine complained. “That's a lot easier than getting out of the eleventh grade. Anybody can get married.”

  “I know three girls who wouldn't agree,” Mary Catherine said: she was hugging Finnegan.

  “Oh, we don't have to marry monks or pinkos or banana-noses,” Mary Virginia laughed. “We could all get married. Yes, the eleventh grade is much harder.”

  “We're having a dance tomorrow,” Maurine said, “and I want to swipe one of the boys to take me. It's quite the thing to have a grown man take you. Finnegan, will you do it?”

  “Would they let me into a junior-year high-school dance?” Finnegan asked. And, however it happened, Finnegan was sitting on Mary Catherine's lap on the sofa.

  “Mary Catherine, you've got my guy,” Maurine said. “Sure they'll let you in, Finn. If sister says anything, I'll tell her that you're a junior from Sr. Philomena's and that you're retarded. And will you let me tell the other girls that we're engaged. Show Boat has a stage ring with a fake diamond as big as a wagon wheel that I can wear.”

  “Is this a Show Boat idea?” Finnegan asked.

  “Yes, Show Boat is my idea girl. Finnegan, how awful! You haven't met Show Boat.”

  “I wish I were sure of that,” Finnegan said uncertainly.

  Maurine was fifteen and looked younger. She was chubby and freckled and pretty and lively. And she would get prettier and livelier.

  “Come here, Finnegan,” she said. “I told you I'd give you a ride if you weren't chicken.”

  Finnegan wasn't chicken. He mounted on her back and rode her around and around the room.

  And Mary Catherine was smoldering about something. Why should she be? She was Casey's girl, and besides this was all in fun.

  “Marry me, Finnegan,” Maurine chattered. “I'll never be any younger.”

  “Wait five years,” said Finnegan, “and I'll come back.”

  “Don't go away and you won't have to come back. And who else will give you such a classy ride.”

  “I will,” said Mary Catherine Carruthers.

  “I will,” said Mary Virginia Schaeffer.

  And both did, either at that time or some other time.

  4.

  Patrick Stranahan was a big hairy man. He rumbled when he talked; he even rumbled when he didn't talk. He had a large busy stomach and there was always something going on in there. His face was like blue emery paper, and he had so much body hair that in trunks from a distance he looked like a Negro. His paunch was not at all. He also had the chest and arms and shoulders of a heavyweight wrestler. He was a friendly and quizzical face, and his eyebrows had each more hair than most men have on their heads.

  He was a good lawyer, and had been a magistrate in better days and under better administrations. He could look right through a man. One of the men he looked right through was Finnegan, but Patrick didn't enjoy what he saw there.

  “He is a schizo,” Patrick said. “He lives several lives. He believes that he is an alien being in one of those lives, and it may be that he is. I'm not very sure about myself on that score. He is only a case-history in the notebook of some doctor, but who is that doctor? Our Faith constrains us to deny that anyone is doomed; but it's a low twisted road that Finnegan has to follow and him done to death at the end of it. The only hope is that he has the talent to turn it into a happy death.”

  Patrick, of course, was fey. But he was never wrong.

  Patrick lived in the Cat Castle with his family. It was an old and large three-story house and had had that name as long as anybody could remember. The big house had been given to Patrick by a crone whom he had served, the Cat Woman. She had not really had fifty cats; she had kept only eight or nine. Nor had she been too eccentric; just old and cranky. Patrick had been her lawyer and she had left him the house.

  Stranahan was rich. He was Little-Irish Rich. He was lace-curtain and grand-piano Irish rich. This was nothing like being Big-German Rich or Old-French Rich. There were many kinds of rich in St. Louis. He really belonged to the poor rich.

  The four sons of Patrick all resembled him in descending degree: Philip, Hugh, Timothy, and Vincent, starting with the six-foot-four of the father, each was an inch shorter, of a little lighter bone structure, and a little less hairy. Vincent was an even six feet, lighter than any of the others, and of more modest but still extraordinary pilosity. He had the same crooked smile and eyebrows that were the family trait. All those men always appeared to have just said or to be about to say something very humorous. They had a reputation of wits, partly deserved and partly assumed. And they were all good-humored.

  This was a sporting family, all amateur boxers, all footballers. Vincent had intended to play ball in college, but it was not somehow agreed that he was not to go to college, but it was now somehow agreed that he was not to go to college. If it were Law, it could be learned in the Firm a
nd in the Extensions. If it were to be Business, he could start with one of his brothers. If it were Engineering, he probably had not the aptitude anyhow. If he wanted to be a doctor, he should have been born in a doctor family. If he desired the arts, he should first acquire a little wealth elsewhere, and then indulge himself lightly and with discernment. Or he could go to work as a worker. There was nothing wrong with that. The main thing was to avoid the minor professions which were unworthy of an Irishman.

  It was a family of hunters and fishermen. They had already made arrangements with Hans and Henry, God and circumstances permitting, for yearly forays after gulf marlin and Minnesota deer and Dakota pheasant. Chubby Maurine always referred to the male members of her family as the Rod and Gun Club, and the Club Room as the Fish Market.

  “They're all fakes,” she'd swear. “Some of those mounted fish aren't big enough to use for bait. They won't take me fishing anymore because I show them up. After they flash all those purple flies at the fish, I come along and live-bait them to death. A fish is just like a human. He doesn't want to try anything new, especially if there's nothing to it but silk thread and bristles.”

  Maurine did live-bait them to death, and this was irritating in a home where the fly was king.

  The Club Room had gun cases, and a simulated fireplace that was a sandbagged pistol range. Patrick would sit across the room from it many evenings and shoot from an easy chair. He had his own position and system for it, and was probably the best easy-chair pistol shot in town. For him this was the life. Some of the neighbors thought that anyone who shot guns in a house was an oddball: and some of the neighbors had less happy hopes than that of Patrick Stranahan.

  His was a sociable clan and there was much company: clients and clubbers, friends and visiting relations, old boxers, K.C.s and cronies, Philip's poker-playing and Hugh's bridge-playing friends, Tim's acquaintances who were mostly literate, school friends of Vincent, and the many circles of Monica and the girls. It was a good family and a good house, and Patrick was satisfied with it.

  And now Vincent was home again and was going to marry that odd little creature who was half Juliette and half urchin. Patrick had always referred to Show Boat simply as the Urchin.

  He had known her father, Papa Piccone, for years; had represented the excitable little Italian in quarrels and litigations, and they had become friends. Patrick's imitations of Piccone, all hands and voice and motion, were much appreciated in the family. What he did not know was that Piccone's imitations of him had a much wider audience. As Hallohan J. O’Hoolihan he had, unbeknownst to himself, strode the comic boards of the Star and Garter in the person of Papa Piccone for many years and had become a stock character. Whenever Show Boat called him O’Hoolihan he grinned, but he got only half the joke.

  Patrick and Papa, whose name was Gaetano, now spent many evenings in each other's company, drinking whisky at the Stranhans and vino at the Piccones, and discovering themselves to be pleasant and interesting antagonists for an endless stream of arguments. For they both could talk till the sun came up, and often they did.

  5.

  “You will have to help me with the wedding, Maurine,” said mamma Monica. “Nobody will help me. We don't even know who's coming to the reception. Teresa didn't use the invitations I had printed. She wrote hers all out on the backs of old Star and Garter programs and sent a sandwich-board man around to deliver them. Would you believe it? — she actually had an advertisement for the wedding printed on the sandwich-board. It said ‘Come one, come all’. What if everybody did come?” “She'd love it. And they probably will. Everybody in town knows her.”

  “Papa Piccone says he's going to play the accordion in the aisles during mass instead of having an organist. Father McGuigan says there's no liturgical objection.”

  “Oh mamma, they're kidding you! You'd better worry about the reception, not the wedding. Papa Piccone is going to roll in three barrels of wine and a bunch of jugs. He's damned if he's going to have them remember, two thousand years later, that he let them run out of wine like at Cana.”

  “I only hope our folks get along with the Italians. Can we trust Finnegan who is both? He's so charming and so outrageous at the same time. He sits on my lap and on Norma's. The way he carries on with that Mary Schaeffer is either a scandal or a circus. He rides on your back, young lady, and you tease him into doing it some more.”

  “Sure.”

  “Maurine, I don't even know whether you're supposed to be the bridesmaid. Show Boat is always fooling. I think you're supposed to be.”

  “She has a dress for a bridesmaid. She says, whoever the dress fits, let her wear it. I think that's an Italian proverb. I'll try it on.”

  6.

  The only explanation is that Finnegan was a complete fool, and later collateral evidence proves that this is the true answer. Dotty was magnetic, she was marvelous. There wasn't a man who didn't come to life when she was in the room. She was as large a girl as Marie, and had chestnut hair that would haunt you. She was smarter than the rest of them, and amazingly kind. But it wasn't her smartness or kindness that shook Patrick Stranahan when he saw her first and made him wonder if old-animal-he had gotten enough from life to make up for missing her. And what was it that made Hans clench his hands at first meeting till they bled from four deep cuts in each palm? We may know, but we cannot name it. After all, Hans had Marie who was abiding sensation.

  “There is a dimension in life that I hadn't known about,” said Henry. The fat Frenchman said it softly and rubbed his chin.

  And if, later, Dotty should say something prosaic, three words, a sentence, you must not imagine that it was the same thing or had the same effect as if an ordinary person had said it. There was a charge about Dotty.

  Now, it wasn't that Finnegan didn't know this. It wasn't that he hadn't thought about it many a midnight. Dotty was always like a great poem to him, but why should she always be a poem of irretrievable loss? Why had he always assumed that he had lost her when she was always waiting for him? Why the ever sad recollection of what was still in the future? Why did he say ‘Why couldn't it have been?’ when it was still to be. No two can come together perfectly, of course. But people do come together all the time.

  A crisis should have thunder and lightning in it. If Finnegan and Dotty had been able to generate a crisis with thunder and lightning, things might have been different. But what if the last anchor-cable parts when no one knows it, and the drift has already begun? This is the crisis come and gone. It may be that a little kadge-anchor still held Finnegan, but if so it was dragging rapidly. The main anchor-lines had all been cut. For others, this business of finding a niche was easy. For Finnegan it was impossible.

  On Wednesday they talked for an hour or more. And after that the door was still open between them, not wide open, but open. And when, the same day, Finnegan talked to Another, the opening narrowed to a crack. But the door was never closed all the way. The key was never turned in it. But, for all that, it had ended. Though Dotty hadn't admitted it, she was quietly desolate.

  But what was the nature and name of this impediment that ran across so many of the lives of Finnegan. The name of the impediment that ran across at least several of the lives was Teresa.

  7.

  Finnegan and Teresa were together for the first time late Wednesday afternoon. And about them was baleno invisible, ball-lightning. “Is it wrong to ask why it couldn't have been you and I, John?” Teresa questioned in the first words that passed between them. “I am not mistaken about this. We surely aren't two who would dream up a drama. If I had met you first, there wouldn't have been a problem. How is it that I know you so well? Wouldn't I have been the one?”

  “You are the one, Teresa. Now there will never be another.”

  “I can't have you both. I will be happy, I know, with Vincent. A chiodo in the heart, it never killed. Mary was in this morning. I told her that she just has to be part Italian. It may be, she said. She was from a mixed-blood province, and one of
her great-grandfathers did come from over the sea, she said. She says the history books are wrong. They did have coffee when she was a girl. She drinks it black. Are we being Italian about this?”

  “Scurament, how else would we be? And besides, you will give me an excuse. Now, when I look in the bottom of a glass, I can say ‘Teresa is the reason.’ Before, I could only say ‘Why do I do this thing?’

  “I used to think about her (you) and know exactly what she would look like. I am clairvoyant: I even saw the house and the block that we would live in. And I could journey to that town now, and to the block and the house, though it is a section I have never been in.

  “I thought, when I first heard of you, that you might be the one, and I hoped you were not, for you were the girl of my best friend. I was uneasy; for if you were the one, then it was only if he died that I could have you.

  “But when I saw your picture I was relieved. It was not you; you were just another dago kid. Later I saw another picture and I was frightened all over again. It was just possible that you could be. Your pictures are not quite like you; you are much prettier in your pictures.

  “But when I finally saw you just now, there was no doubt; and it seems there is no more hope in anything for me. Even your hands are as I knew they would be, your fingers pointed, and all put together in the damnest way, like a bunch of wires. I used to dream about your twisting fingers.”

  “Oh, I worked the puppets a lot with them. And the concertina spreads them, and tricks too. Did you know I do tricks, besides being clairvoyant also? Margie la Maga — the magician I am.”

  La Maga — La Strega — you are a witch. Do you know that you can tell a witch by the corners of her eyes and by the lay of her hair. It's in one of Hans’ old books, and you're a witch on all counts. And there are cabalistic marks on the moons of the fingernails — ”