9
My schooldays were not the happiest days of my life. Mr Curtin, the vice principal, a man of sixty with thinning grey hair and full dark eyebrows that were combed outwards into outlandish wings, thrummed above the days. He was a man who couldn’t sit down, who liked to pace with hands together butterflying gently behind him until he turned his eyebrows upon you and you felt them coming for you, hands and eyebrows, blackbirds of anger or accusation. He walked around us, keeping the eyebrows to himself for a while, listening to answers, hands flickering behind. He stopped and stood so close you felt the sourness of his breath and saw speckled bits of yellow between his teeth. ‘Come with me, you,’ he said, leading one away.
In those large white rooms with cracked ceilings and nailed-down windows began my growing up. Mr Curtin’s eyebrows flew about us. He walked his restless suspicion in creaking shiny shoes, endlessly circling. He made us demonstrate the comic hopelessness of our understanding of the Irish language. We were the ridiculous boys of 4B, astounding him with our stupidity, and sending the eyebrows ever higher with the outlandish absurdity of our answers. How could you think that, but how, tell me, please!
In that room in 4B, under the glowering of Mr Curtin, I first realised that God must have something special in store for me too.
That winter my father stayed at home. He rose in the mornings before me and moved about the freezing kitchen in his vest and trousers, making tea and toast that I brought upstairs to my mother and her radio. He said almost nothing to me that I remember from that time. I had not altogether lost my confidence in him, but ever since his return at the end of summer I had realised that happiness for us was not meant to come simply, that in some way our little family had been singled out. We were a sort of test unit for God, I imagined, a kind of three-person Moses or Job or somebody, a little household upon which He had decided to lay the burdens of His presence because in some way my father was chosen. When we froze or caught colds, when I grew hungry or tired of thinly buttered stacks of toast, I sat upstairs in my room telling myself to learn the lesson that there was no such thing as fairness in life. Beauty or genius, cleverness or stupidity were visited upon the deserving and undeserving alike, I told myself; a family could go to sleep, switch out the lights in a fairytale cosiness of loving and wake in the morning amidst the ruins of all that they had cherished. It was a mystery, that was the thing. But more and more I began to wonder, of what in all the mysterious ways ahead was specially intended for me?
When I went to school my father went into his room. Sometimes when I came home in the darkened gloom of the winter afternoons, cycling home through the coalsmoke on the air and the little avenues of skeletal trees clawing the sky, I was afraid he would be gone again. I came inside the house and listened for him, standing with my ear to the door for the tiniest sounds of his brush moving on the canvas. I heard the rattle and small swish in the glass jar of his turpentine and stood back. He was in there. He was painting. Light came out under the door. In the darkened house where there was barely enough money to pay the electricity to heat our food, he kept himself in a room of five lightbulbs or more, working eight hours in a brilliant whiteness of false light and urging on the faith that an inner voice was guiding his hand.
I never entered his room any more. I had no idea then that he was still working on the canvases he had brought back from the west. I didn’t know that what my mother and I had seen were only the rough underpaintings, the crudest renderings of what all winter long he would try to bring forth as his remembered vision of the glory of God. I didn’t know. I realised, I suppose, that he was in there struggling, and that was all. In a way, it was enough. His struggle, like everything else about him, seemed to my boyhood eye cast on a monumental scale.
On weekends he would sometimes take me with him on walks. I cannot remember exactly how it started; I remember no invitation, but somehow it happened and became a habit, the two of us leaving the house for three- or four-hour rambles while my mother slipped out of her bed and in a pink dressing gown came down on a once weekly reconnaissance of the squalor and wreckage that was once her home.
My father and I set off at a brisk pace, heading always for the hills beyond the housing estates, striding away so quickly we were always breathlessly ahead of the possibility of our dialogue. When we returned we could see the signs of my mother’s visit, the traces of her energy in the perfect still lifes of cups on saucers, stacked plates, cutlery back in a drawer.
She did not know that she was losing her mind, that the firmness of her grip on the little interior world of the household had become maniacally tight. She returned things to their places with such a concentrated and urgent energy that it seemed each week the setting of cups back on their saucers was the last chance risky business that kept her sane. It was in fact a sign of the very opposite. This woman, on the weekend afternoon, swept down the stairs with a fierce light in her eye, a ruthlessness for order. It was as if all week the jumble of our collected life had amassed in the drawing room of her mind, blocking out the white space in which ideas might have lived, and charging her down the stairs at the end of the week to clear her head. She washed the clothes, she ironed with a kind of genius, pushing creases to the farthest edges of the world, and folding my father’s paint-stained and tattered shirts, as if preparing him for Monday at the office. She scrubbed around the sink until the plumpish fingers of her left hand were swollen and bright pink, rising above the golden hoop of her wedding ring so that it appeared embedded into her hand. She ironed socks and underpants, folded everything, swept imaginary mounds of dirt back and forth across every floor in the house except the studio, and reached a state of exhausted exhilaration, a dust-free haven of pure order, as the evening darkness was drawing in. When she went back upstairs to her bedroom her mind had been swept clean of the clutter of the present. She sat on the bed’s edge gazing out the window with the beatified expression of a serene angel, staring out beyond the rooftops to the distant hills and falling back into the sweet dreams of the past.
10
When my mother met my father she was sixteen. He was four years older than she, and had already begun his ill-fated career in the civil service. He was a proper boy, her mother had told her. He was honest and hardworking; he came from hardworking people. He was quiet, but yes, they liked him. They liked the way he came to call for her on time, the dark blue suits he wore, the clean-shaven boyish look of him with his thinning hair combed back, already showing the massive dome of his forehead. Mrs Conaty liked the way he brought flowers for her daughter, how he stood, the great gangling length of him in the porchlight, cradling the tulips across his arm like an infant, saying the few obligatory words to her with such weighty deliberation that she knew he was bursting with love. Her daughter was too young yet for this quiet prince, but in a few years they would make a match; she decided it as if choosing a wallpaper. She encouraged my mother and told Granda to do the same. He was a nice fellow, this William Coughlan. Granda asked him about his job and didn’t listen to the answers, smiling blithely through the first stages of his imminent deafness, nodding and grinning while the awful realisation that his youngest daughter was grown tore out his heart.
Amidst the bright rays of her parents’ approval my mother suddenly lost the excitement she had felt the first evening she had seen this man walk into the dance hall. She was afraid of something. His quietness drew and repelled her. She fell in love with drawing him out of himself, and like many of her schoolfriends mistook the new delight of seeing her effect on a man’s heart with the ecstasy of being in love. When she sat in school waiting for Friday night, it was the thought of how she would tease him from that stiff high silence of his that excited her. She became addicted to the warm flush in her cheeks when his face collapsed with pleading or she said she didn’t love him.
There was a little season of nights then, those Friday and Saturday nights of her girlhood when she walked out with this quiet man beneath the almond-scented trees of t
he springtime avenues. She mocked him unmercifully, flirting in a yellow dress with red shoes, tossing back the wavy curls of her hair to look sideways at him, drawing out a long strand of hair between her fingers and turning it in front of her face intentionally as she asked him how much he loved her.
She had a laugh he loved. She skipped a few steps ahead of him and he came lankily hoofing along after her calling out for her to stop. He was no fun, she told him, when he preferred not to go dancing, insisting instead they should use the bright summer nights to walk as far as the sea. He always wanted to walk. And if after two years of courtship in which she had dictated the pace of loving, allowed or not allowed the kisses, directed his hand and his lips, the truth was that she did not really know him as he knew her.
It was he who was in love. In this girl of eighteen William Coughlan had found the first evidence of the life-changing power of beauty. She flashed upon his life with an electric energy, shattering every day’s effort at work and leaving a kind of glimmering burning feeling all day and night around the edges of his heart. He sat in his office distracted to the point where for two years of courtship he performed his office duties in a kind of uninterested stupor, all the more remarkable for not being noticed by his superiors. It took him a week to write a letter; he disappeared into the library and file room for hours every day, turning over sheets of paper upon which he imagined he saw glimpes of her face. For whole weeks he was sick with waiting to see her, a kind of inflated longing took over his insides, ballooning up in the thinness of his body until he had to sit and close his eyes and wait for it to pass. Across the desk from him a man called Flannery thought my father was dying, and after work introduced him to a short whiskey. He was the first person to whom my father explained that he was in love, saying the words out loud in the Fleet bar and feeling the rush of relief pouring out of him until he was able to go home laughing, kicking his long lanky legs out in a little skip-dance beneath the million-starred canopy of the December night. He was in love with her. By the time he reached home that night and had turned the key in his parents’ small house on the edge of the city she was already a part of him. That Friday night he asked her to marry him.
She said no. She teased around true reasons; he didn’t like dancing, he was too tall, he didn’t like parties and never introduced her to friends. (This last was a thing she hated him for until the day of their wedding when walking up the aisle she looked around and suddenly realised with the swiftness of a blow that he had none.) No, she could not marry him. She stood back beneath the streetlamp that was shaded with a sycamore and bit her lip. The huge leap into his life was beyond her. Her eyes filled with tears as she saw the heart of this tall man collapse like a skyscraper before her. He could say nothing; he could not even plead, and stood there a little apart from her, tilting alarmingly as the flecks of cold sweat gleamed on his forehead.
‘I’m sorry, William,’ she said. ‘I just can’t say yes, like that.’
He stood there, mute and hopeless as the trees, the life draining out of him, the big shiny shoes alone keeping him upright on the world.
‘You shouldn’t have surprised me like that,’ she said, turning the blame back on him even as she was blaming herself. Why, why could she not simply have said yes and end the pain? She took a breath, the leaves whispered. But no, no she couldn’t; she wasn’t prepared, not right at that moment anyway. My father could not breathe. It seemed to him that his world had come crashing headlong to this moment on the suburban night street. He could not imagine a string of tomorrows without this girl, for, although he did not know it yet, he had invested in her all of his imagination. He had created her, this girl in the yellow dress, to become the woman into which flowed all his dreams. He could not move from the footpath. Cars passed.
It was she who moved first, taking his arm and steering them in a stiff and floundering silence away down the street beneath the lamps and the trees. At the door to her house she leaned up and broke a kiss on his cold cheek and said her goodnight, leaving him to move like a man on stilts down the path and out the garden gate into the ruins of his fallen-down world.
He did not rise for work the next day, nor the one after that. When he did finally arrive at the office, Flannery sitting across the table from him saw at once the embedded dagger of one-way love still hanging from between my father’s ribs. When he opened his hopeless downturned mouth, the butterflies of love might have escaped. Flannery offered advice, a liquid lunch and the music of Bach, for no woman, he pronounced sagely, was worth it, and he himself had no intention, no intention at all of ever being hooked, hitched or otherwise yoked.
Still my father could not rally. He had a gift for intense feeling, for looming over the pain, and as he loped through the office corridors his forehead glistened, his pale eyes staring away like a pilgrim’s. He could not work, the pen in his hand jaggered like a pulse graph; he broke in sweats and fits of dryness and sounded silently his own name in the way she said it.
When at last he could bring himself to write, sitting in the silver suit with his sharp knees pressing into the creases of his pants and his left hand holding from falling the immensity of his head, he began without address or name with the three words that had been flying around and around the rooftops of his mind like a madness: I love you.
Just that. I love you. Perhaps he thought to write nothing more, for there is a marked pause, a change of ink and a handwriting that slants to the right, as if ever so gently toppling out the emotions, when the words resume.
I love you. You must know that. I love you so, that I cannot imagine my life now without you. I cannot sleep, I lie awake all night turning and turning about and saying your name. I have never felt like this before and understand now how a man could cut off his hand or slit his throat in the torment of such feeling. I love you. I say it over and over in my mind and see you standing there under the tree and the streetlight and suddenly it seems as if I can hardly breathe. Everything of the world that is beautiful to me is bound up in you. You are those trees, that light, the loveliness of everything I am cut off from if you say no. I tell myself that in those moments on Friday night when my ears were ringing and my mouth dry I heard you say ‘Not yet, William’. It may not be true. But I hope with all my heart it is and know that I can wait however long for you.
I will not call to your house nor write again unless I hear from you.
I love you
William
He signed the letter in a shaky hand and sealed it inside a Department envelope, stepping outside in his grey suit and striding down the bright raucous street to post it, staring straight ahead of him, not yet knowing that he carried in his hand the first true turning point of his life.
11
All of this I learned from my mother. I saw the letter and heard her repeat fragments of it to herself in the solitary bedroom when she thought only the ghosts of the past were listening. The letter had won her heart. She had taken it from her mother’s hand upstairs to her bedroom and laid her face into it with a smile. How wonderful it was to have him write like that to her! She rolled over on the bed and suddenly exploded into tears, crying uncontrollably until her mother’s soft knocking came on the door. It’s all right, she called, standing up with the letter still in her hand and going over to the door in the terrible, dawning realisation that she had already chosen to marry this man.
The wedding was in the little church of St Joseph on an April Saturday pouring with rain. Flannery was my father’s best man. In her small white bag, clutched before her, my mother carried the letter like the absolute certification of love.
Now, in the upstairs bedroom in the swept-clean house, my mother remembered. It was the only time she left the radio switched off, and in the following few years my ears grew tuned to that silence of her memories. I came in the door from school and listened at the foot of the stairs, hearing, if the radio was off, the dead voices of the past whispering in my mother’s head and the scenes of her girlhood-loving f
lashing past her gazing eyes.
It was gradually of course that I understood all this. At first I interrupted her, coming into her room with red cheeks from walking and the smell of fresh air and the countryside in my hair. In the half-darkness she would be looking out the window; if she turned to see me there would always be the same smile, a smile from before I was born and perhaps a phrase issued across the expanse of innocence and hope when all her life was still an excitement of flowers and chocolates and the marvellousness of a man sickening for her kiss, Is he downstairs waiting for me?
If my father noticed this, he did not say so. He waited for me to realise it on my own, and then acted as if we had had a lengthy conversation about it and everything was understood between us. On those days when we walked together there was, for the most part, no talking. Up in the hills, away from the houses, the afternoon light was a thin clear serenity along the roads. Children’s voices died away in the distance, the football games on the streets where I might have kept goal vanished behind us as we strode on, putting a hurried breathless mile between us and the cataclysm of our home life. We almost never met anyone. It seemed prearranged. The trees I remember are the trees of winter, their bare limbs aloft in a kind of mute beseeching, as if the spring would never come and no leaf or bird ever move again in the dream of April. There was a pale, suspended emptiness we walked through, emptying me in turn, pulling free the tight gathered knot of worries and imaginings the week had spun inside me. It felt clean. And although my father seldom spoke and never in any way referred to or urged on me the benefits of these marches, I felt the cleaning wind blow through the thinness of him too.
Four Letters of Love Page 4
