As It Is in Heaven

by Niall Williams

  “You can’t drown if you are born to die in your bed,” he said with a giddy glee, raising the great tangle of his beard to let out the laughter like birds. “Nothing stops the future. Oh no,” he said, “indeed no.”

  The rain quickened like a pulse beating against the window. The night thrashed about with the growing storm, taking the salt from the sea, until even in the thickly curtained bedrooms and kitchens of Miltown Malbay the air tasted of bitterness and disappointment. It was such a night. The stars had withdrawn behind the many layers of the gusting clouds, and there was no moon. Only wind and rain. Moses Mooney nodded his head and patted the cats to reassure them as the window in his bathroom flew open and he felt the breath of the sea coming in about him. “Ha ha, smell that,” he said, and raised the eyebrows of his blind eyes to catch what he knew was the scent of a storm in Brazil moments after he thought he had drowned for the third time. Here it is, he thought. Here is the shaking up of the world.

  “Go on. Go on,” he said.

  Then the lights went out.

  Moses Mooney knew it, though he could not see it. He heard them going off in the town and thought that the darkness of all his neighbours was a symbolic blindness and a token of God’s sympathy for him. They were all to share his vision, he realized, and lay back against the pillows, which were wet now like tears. It’s black for miles around, he told the cats with mixed comfort and awe, catching a glimpse at the same instant of that elsewhere which he alone saw, where Stephen Griffin had crashed the yellow car into the black bog water of the ditch on the road outside Inagh. And in that dreamlike and vivid moment of clairvoyance, Moses Mooney saw the collapsed figure of Stephen Griffin, and he clapped his hands together in the bed, relishing the wild improbability of all plots before reaching out and patting the cats in the darkness.

  12

  Moira Fitzgibbon was late. She had already been to the Old Ground Hotel twice that day to make arrangements and meet the quartet when they arrived from Limerick. She had learned a few phrases in Italian in honour of the visit and listened to the music of Scarlatti and Vivaldi for two weeks. When she stood in the lobby of the hotel to meet the musicians, she felt her head spinning. They shook her hand and stood, smiling with the strange complicity of those brought together over music. Any fear or dread Moira had felt passed like a grey bird and left her feeling she herself had wings. When the musicians went to their rooms, she drove back to Miltown Malbay to cook dinner for Tom and her two children, but afterwards watched through the back window above the sink as clouds advanced in across the Atlantic. She washed the dishes and prayed. She prayed first that the storm would not come; then, when the first black bullets started falling, prayed that it would not be a real storm, that it would pass over.

  By the time she had collected Aoife Taafe, the babysitter, and set the two girls in their pyjamas in the sitting room and said good night to Tom, who was heading down to the pub, Moira Fitzgibbon was half an hour behind herself. A week earlier, planning the evening, she was already back in Ennis by now and Tom was minding the children and it was not raining. Now she hurried out of the house into the gale, and when she sat into the car she let out a cry at the ferocity of the world outside and the mad bouffant of her hairstyle. Then, as her car was moving out into the street, the lights in Miltown Malbay went out. She knew her children would be crying and Aoife running for the candles, but Moira Fitzgibbon drove away anyway, drove out of the darkened town with the tight fervour of a pilgrim, and rocked herself slightly forward, as if her own momentum might aid the car or the wind carry it onward like a sailboat.

  A mile outside Miltown Malbay the darkness was thickly fallen. The fields were the fields of childhood nightmares, whose cows and sheep blew off the edge of the world in hurricane and tornado. Wisps of barbed wire had come undone from the fenceposts and whipped across the road in the wind. Plastic bags, drink cans, stuff blew from nowhere and danced. Then the rain thickened and beat faster than the wipers. Why? Why is it like this? Moira Fitzgibbon asked. On the one night, the one night. Who would go out on a night like this? There’d be nobody there. God, Why?

  There was no answer from the heavens, but there were red smears on the windscreen, and when the wipers cleared the rain she saw the red backlights of the crashed car in the ditch ahead of her.

  13

  Stephen did not realize rescue was at hand. He was at the bridge of his life without knowing it and sat stunned in the rainy night, unable to move. His head hurt, but not badly, yet he could not free himself from the fierce grip of the dream of dying. He imagined he was his mother and his sister. He was in the car they drove that afternoon so many years ago, and this was the crash, the suspended moment when their lives had stopped and dreams perished. This was the instant the world had become immobile and deaf and mute, and the darkness had fallen in like earth on a coffin. He imagined with terrible clarity the anguish of it, the sheer and merciless shattering as the other car came crashing in on them, the jerking backward of his mother and Mary, and the cries; if there was time for cries. Stephen imagined it as he sat there in the crashed car, and he could not move. He felt the steering wheel, but it seemed unreal, and the pallor of his hands upon it was the lone white thing in the darkness.

  I cannot move, he thought. I cannot move from here.

  And if the car had blown up and burned there on the side of the road, Stephen Griffin would have burned with it and not regretted it, surrendering to the ceaseless prompting of his life that grief triumphs on earth and that all our plots unravel in the end.

  But then Moira Fitzgibbon arrived. When she pulled open the car door, the rain lashing down on her head made freakish streaks of her hairdo and the taste of her makeup washed into her mouth. She spat and called out, but Stephen did not move. He was like a deep-water swimmer uncertain whether to kick for the surface and kept his eyes looking at the long-gone world where the spirits of his mother and sister were so close it made him ache.

  “Mr. Griffin, is that you? Do you hear me? Mr. Griffin?”

  There were mudspatters on Moira’s stockings, the heel of her left shoe was loosened, and the navy-blue outfit she had bought for the evening of Venetian music was soaked against her back. She had no idea why the sky had fallen in or why hers had to be the car to first come upon the crash, knowing that she could not drive past it although everything in her had wanted to. She understood nothing yet, but cursed God and cursed the weather and cursed Tom and the west of Ireland and the godforsaken roads like this that were full of holes and went on for miles and made this man crash in front of her.

  “Feck it. Feck it. Oh God, forgive me, feck it. Mr. Griffin! Mr. Griffin!”

  She cried out his name, as if he could help her understand. She looked out the back window to see if help might be coming, but saw only the emptiness of the dark fields unrelieved by light or hope in the harsh, starless wind. She said Stephen’s name loudly again, and then, as she reached in to shake him by the shoulder, her knee touched something on the passenger seat, and she discovered a fragment of meaning and held up close to her face in the darkness the tickets for the concert.

  14

  Gabriella Castoldi, Paolo Mistra, Piero and Maria Motte were already sitting at the front of the concert room in the Old Ground Hotel by the time Stephen Griffin arrived there with Moira Fitzgibbon. He was still in a daze and passed up the red carpeted stairs of the hotel unsure in which world he was walking. When he had felt the woman’s hand on his shoulder in the car, he had imagined at first it was the buffeting of the storm. Then she smacked his face and turned him towards her. He remembered her: the woman from the staff room, the woman they said afterwards was the dimmest pupil the school had ever had. He remembered her. Moira shook him from himself. They had gotten out of his car together and were blown along the road to hers. When they sat into it, Moira turned the heat full on and they drove towards Ennis in a gusting tropical balminess that dried their clothes and hair stiffly and made the rain-run places of Moira’s makeup look l
ike the tracks of ancient tears. She was taking him to the hospital, she told him, even though she would be late for the concert.

  “I want to go to the concert,” he said. He said it very calmly, without looking at her. He was stooped forward towards the windscreen, with his black hair fallen over his right eye. “I want to go to the concert.”

  (Later, when he was sitting at the fire in the house by the sea, listening to another storm blowing in across the invisible horizon of the nighttime, Stephen would wonder back to that moment and smile at the strange and unknowable conspiracies of the world, how the notion of the concert had become a resolve and how the night had almost blown him off its edge before the woman pulled over. He would read it for its meaning, and glimpse in that evening the shape of the world, a puzzle so intricate that not even the millionth part of the outer edge of its frayed pieces is discernible until so much later. Then it would make sense to him, and he would understand that the journey to the concert was the beginning of the most important journey of his life, and that the moment he insisted on going to the concert, he was acting out of a blind foreknowledge that told him it was the right thing to do, supposing that rightness was something that existed for every moment of every life and that the possibilities of humankind were so myriad and tortuous that knowing the right thing to do and then choosing it were the longest odds in man’s history. But just then in the car Stephen had chosen; and later, to that moment, like an old explorer fingering the route he had taken across the unknown, he would trace all his happiness.)

  They drove past the hospital to the hotel. Moira talked. She told him about Moses Mooney; she told him she wasn’t sure why or how she had become involved in the concert; Stephen had probably heard of her in the school, she said, she was too stupid for them to teach her anything, so it was the last thing she expected to be doing, running a concert of Italian music in Ennis; she had two children for goodness’ sake, and Tom is back in Miltown Malbay now, sitting on a high stool and telling jokes about how his missus is off having a bit of culture. “Agri or horti, that’s his joke,” she said. “That’s what he says, because I’m thick. He thinks that’s a great joke. They get you to do it because they don’t want to do anything themselves, Tom says. Why are you running it? he says.

  “And I can’t answer him. Especially when you see a night like this and you think you’re mad. You’re just mad, Moira. There’ll be nobody there and you’ll be walking in like this in a state with your eighteen-pound hairdo looking like a wet monkey’s backside, and four Italian musicians looking at you wondering why in the name of … I’m talking too much, I’m sorry, Mr. Griffin, I always talk too much when I’m nervous.”

  “Stephen.”

  “Stephen. Sorry, Stephen. Would you open that? See is there lipstick in it?”

  The carpark was full. Moira bumped the car onto the footpath outside and then apologized to Stephen for forgetting he had just had an accident. When they got out of the car the rain was not falling. The ivy on the front of the old hotel was lit with hidden lamps, puddles glistened with reflection, and the slick black of the tarmac might have been the low waters of a canal in Venice. Or so Moira imagined. She raised her head as Stephen lowered his, and they strode forward with the brief invulnerability of the rescued.

  At the front door they heard the buzz of people and the strains of the strings playing. For an instant, they imagined the same thing: that their watches had stopped and time had moved on without them, the concert was about to end. But by the time they had reached the doorway at the top of the red stairs, it was clear that the musicians were only warming up their instruments, and Moira Fitzgibbon blinked tears of gratitude, seeing the throng of people waiting in the rows of high-backed dining chairs and realizing that there was something fine and good and true in their being there, and that the bringing of the music and the people together that was the dreaming of old Mooney was worth the price of her hairdo, the ruining of her new suit, and the enduring of fatigue, hardship, and mockery.

  In the delay, Councillor O’Rourke had seen his opportunity and taken Moira’s position at the front of the room. He was a skeletal man with a sharp nose and the largest Adam’s apple in Clare. He was a man who believed in men, as long as he was leading them, and derided Moira Fitzgibbon for her bluntness and well-meaning, and for not being at home. He held his nose high and smiled with narrow squints of his eyes, turning the immaculate whiteness of his soap-scented hands and letting only the rise and fall of his gorge betray how he disliked the company of his constituents. He was about to announce the opening of the evening’s concert when the figure of Moira Fitzgibbon appeared. He lifted a white hand and let the dismay suck and plunge in his throat. Bloody woman!

  “Moira.” O’Rourke mouthed her name without sounding it and smiled thinly as she came through the room. Stephen Griffin sat in a chair towards the back, and Moira Fitzgibbon walked away from him, minding the loosened heel in her left shoe and taking the nods and greetings of the audience, who, she realized with a flood of warmth and thanksgiving, were the people of Miltown Malbay, dressed in their best and looking at her like a friend. When she reached the podium at the front of the room, Councillor O’Rourke stepped aside slightly and hovered. Moira turned to the musicians. “I’m so sorry,” she said, “there was a man crashed off the road.” She motioned towards Stephen with her head; it was the smallest movement, but the musicians looked down into the audience all the same. They were already feeling the extraordinary electricity of that room, the heated expectancy that fanned upwards towards them. It was as if they were bringing music for the first time to a country long deaf and only recently healed, as if the notes they were about to play were the ancient medicine of youth and happiness. The Italians sensed it in the air like the presence of white birds; Paolo Mistra fingered his cello and felt the sweat running across his left wrist and down inside the cuff of his white shirt; Piero Matte moved his neck to the right before placing his violin and found the cords of his muscles were tightened like a boxer’s. Gabriella Castoldi looked down; she too was astonished, the simplicity of these people sitting there, the generosity of spirit, a man who crashed off the road and still came to hear the music? Tonight, if ever, please, God, she thought, may I do the music justice.

  15

  Life is not simple, nor love inevitable. Stephen sat with his hands on his knees and his head stooped over. The black thinning mop of his hair fell forward, and when he looked down he saw the thick mud on his shoes from when he had stepped out into the ditch. He moved them back beneath the seat as if they were evidence against him, obscure proof that he was a misfit. It was a common feeling for him. He didn’t quite fit and, knowing this, took it with an embarrassed acceptance, as if it were an unsuitable birthday gift that could not be returned. So he sat there waiting for the concert and kept his head low between his shoulders.

  Then the music began.

  It began with pace and rhythm. It swept into the air like a bird with four wings, as the four musicians bowed their strings and released the notes that had been gathering within them all evening. The music flew through the room and filled it with a kind of sweet breathing that rose and fell in the breasts of the audience. They were mesmerized at once. The musicians played beyond themselves, and within instants of beginning they knew it was a concert they were to remember years later. They dared brief glances at each other; Paolo Mistra looked up from the cello into the face of Gabriella Castoldi and saw the light gleaming from it. They were playing Scarlatti’s Quartet in C minor, and by the time they had reached the allegro the warm air of the long room seemed to be dancing in white shapes above them. The room grew warmer each minute. (Kiaran Breen startled himself by standing up in the middle of the audience to look towards the window and see if it was not in fact morning and the sun was coming up.) In the middle of the third piece the audience started taking off their coats. Briefly they jostled in their seats and then lay the coats across their laps, so that from the front of the room their bright blouse
s and blue and white shirts looked like spring in Italy. The music transported them. Every man and woman was already in some Italy of the mind, and the storm of the November night blew outside with all the fruitlessness and ineffect of a government warning. When they had finished playing the Vivaldi, the people swept to their feet and let their coats fall to the floor. They applauded loudly and with such frantic joy that Piero Motte felt tears spring up in his eyes. With the applause ringing in the high chandeliers above them, the musicians looked at each other in bewilderment. The room was balmy with delight. And when the people sat again for the slow and romantic melancholy of the Puccini, they were pillowed on a deep and heartfelt gladness. Eamon Waters took the plump and warm fingers of his Eileen’s right hand and held them in his lap. Smelling the deepening scent of her perfume rising in the heat of the room, Jack Nolan at fifty-seven kissed Margaret Mungovan on the side of her neck and only barely kept himself from telling her he was ready to marry again. (It did not matter, for she knew it already, and when the music began once more, she allowed her head to lean against his shoulder and let him know in the silent language of perfume that she wanted his arms around her.)

  In the back row, Stephen Griffin held his face in his hands and stared at the woman playing the violin. He, too, had been taken from himself by the music; the music offered an invisible opening to another place, and through it, like a secret river, flowed the frustrations, sorrows, and ceaseless longings of everyone there. For each of them, it became the music of themselves.

  By the time the Puccini was being played, Stephen found himself looking at no one but the slender figure of Gabriella Castoldi. Even when she was playing the quick fluttered notes of the Vivaldi allegro her expression remained one of frowning intensity. The bow flew back and forth across the strings like a sweet yet almost unendurable torture. Stephen looked at the woman whose name he did not yet know and his heart raced. The air in the room wavered with warmth. Men and women closed their eyes and, in the minor pause between notes, swallowed hard the emotions that rose within them.