by Brian Moore
“Yes, I am.” He gestured back toward the rocky bluff. “I was just taking a leak.”
“Right,” said the policeman who had spoken. “Are you staying in the caravan, here? Can we go in a minute?”
“Of course.” He led them up the steps. Inside, he found matches and lit the kerosene lamp. The policemen were both younger than he and had the purplish windburned skin of the Irish countryman. They waited respectfully until he had finished with the lamp, then one of them said: “We’ve been trying to get in touch with you, sir, one way or another, all day long. We were up here earlier, but you were out.”
“Yes, I was in Bantry.”
“They have been telephoning you from America,” one of the policemen said. He reached in his tunic pocket and took out a notebook.
“Canada,” the second policeman corrected him.
“That’s right, Canada. There was a lady called this morning to the Sceptre Hotel in Drishane, very urgent. Then called back asking for the police, and so the matter was referred to us in Skull. You see, your caller couldn’t trace you, because it seems you never stayed at the Sceptre, did you?”
“No.”
“Anyway, she’s called again a couple of times since. It’s very urgent, she says. I’m sorry to tell you, now, but this is the message.” He began to read from his notes. “It’s a Mrs. Mangan and she said your father is very ill with a stroke and wanting to see you, most urgent; he’s very anxious to speak to you about some matter. And she says if we find you, can you telephone this number at once. It’s a hospital.” The policeman took a slip of paper from his notebook and passed it over. “There’s a phone in Drishane. We could take you down there. But then, you have your own car, don’t you?”
“Yes,” Mangan said. “Yes, I’ll take my car. Thank you very much.”
“Not at all, not at all,” the policeman said, beginning to move toward the door. “We’re sorry now to bring you such bad news,” one said.
“The phone is in the Sceptre Hotel,” the second policeman said. “The hotel does be open till ten and the switchboard to the exchange is open all night. Will you be coming down directly?”
“I’ll just close up here first,” Mangan said. “Thanks again.”
He watched them recross the field and get into the police car. When they started the engine, they turned off the purple flasher. As they drove off down the steep road, he looked up toward the rocky bluff behind the caravan and saw her emerge, ghost-white in her dress, coming toward him, not watching him, but with her eye on the police car’s headlights as it wended its way past Gorteen and around a lower bend in the road. Only then did she turn to him. “It was the summons, wasn’t it?” she asked angrily.
“It was a message for me.”
“What message?”
“My father is very ill. I have to get to a phone.”
“Ah, Jim,” she said, and came up the caravan steps to him. “I’m sorry, now. Weren’t you right to go out and talk to them. Come on. There’s a phone in Drishane. What’s the matter with him?”
He told her about the message as she blew out the lamp and locked the caravan door. They hurried to the car, her dog running and barking behind them as the car started off down the steep road. He drove recklessly, only half answering her questions about his father’s age and what he did. What could it be that his father so desperately wanted to talk to him about? Would his father be able to speak to him on the phone from his hospital room? Were there night planes from Shannon? How long would it take to drive to the airport? Six or seven hours?
At the entrance to Gorteen he veered right and drove up to the front door. “Just be a minute,” he said and, jumping out, found the door key, and knocking over tin cans in the dark corridor, he made his way upstairs to the bedroom. As he lit the lamp and began to throw his things in the bag, she came up onto the landing, looking in. Her face seemed frightened. “Do you mean you might have to go home right away?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “He’s very ill.”
He blew out the lamp and followed her downstairs. For a moment as he passed the shut door of the ground floor he paused, thinking of the portraits and photographs, the recorded images of all the Mangans in that room, a mute parliament of the dead, waiting for his father to join them. “Are you ready?” she called back, her body silhouetted against the moonlight in the front doorway.
“Coming.” He hurried out, slamming the front door, and drove off with her, the car headlights illuminating the roller-coaster dips in the narrow road ahead. It was just after seven o’clock when they drove into Drishane. Its shops were shuttered and the only light was from the pubs, from which the noise of talk and laughter spilled into the dark street. He went into the Sceptre Hotel. At the front desk sat the same old woman he had met the first day he had gone in there. When he asked if he could use the phone for a long-distance call, she said: “You’ll be the American, the one they were ringing up for. Did you get your message?”
The telephone was in the front hallway, in sight of the bar, where a few fishermen and farmers sat over black pints of porter. The local operator passed him to the Skibbereen exchange. “Hello, Skib, is that Skib? Skib here. What number? Hold on please, I’ll call you back. Hang up, sir, we’ll call you back.”
“It’s very urgent,” he told the operator. Kathleen was standing behind him. He put the phone down. “They’ll call me back,” he told her.
“Will we go into the bar, then, and wait?” she asked, but he shook his head.
“You go. I don’t want to miss the call.”
She smiled up at him and took his arm, leaning into him, waiting with him there in the narrow hall, a waif-like figure in her bedraggled long white dress, her red hair tangled by the wind, her face reflecting his anxiety. From the nearby bar came a rising tide of talk, breaking in a muffled roar of laughter. What could his father want to speak to him about? What if his father was already dead? Images of his father smiling, then serious, then shaking his head came back to him in dim memory. But he could not remember his father asleep.
The telephone rang. Kathleen looked at him worriedly as he picked up the receiver. “You’re through now,” an Irish voice said, and he heard a phone ringing somewhere, ringing in the familiar American tone of home.
“Hello?” It was Margrethe’s voice.
“Margrethe, it’s Jamie.”
“Oh, Jamie. Oh, I’m so glad they found you. We tried everything. Your father has had a stroke and he’s in an intensive-care unit. He’s very anxious to talk to you about something, but the trouble is there’s no phone in there where they’re working on him. Listen, I think you should come. He wants to see you very much.”
“What does the doctor say?”
“It’s serious.” She seemed about to cry. “Apparently with a stroke it often takes two or three days before they know. When could you get here, do you think?”
“I could drive to Shannon in about six hours, but it depends on when I can get a flight out to Montreal or one that connects with Montreal. Maybe, by sometime tomorrow. You don’t think he could speak to me on the phone?”
“I told you, he’s in an intensive-care unit and there’s no phone there. Besides, his speech has been affected. It’s hard to understand what he says.”
“Okay. I’ll come at once. Tell him I’m coming. And, Margrethe? Have you any idea what it is he wants me for?”
“No. He just keeps asking for Jamie. And says it’s important. He keeps saying, ‘I must tell Jamie. Where’s Jamie?’”
“Okay. I’ll try to phone you from Shannon as soon as I have a flight.”
“Good. We’ll meet you. I’ll get Don or someone.”
“Right.” He hung up, and as he did, Kathleen’s pale face moved in front of him. “You have to go?”
“Yes. Right away.”
In the bar, the murmur of talk rose, then fell. He looked into her face, saw that there were tears in her eyes. “It’s the end of us, then,” she said. He put his arm around
her shoulders and walked her past the bar and into the tiny front lounge of the hotel.
The old woman at the desk looked up. “Did you get your call all right, sir?”
“Yes, thanks.”
“They’ll be ringing back now, with the charges,” she said and got up, going down the hall to the telephone, leaving him alone with Kathleen in that little room with its desk and chair, its rack of picture postcards, its wall clock and calendar, and a green plastic-covered sofa bench. He led her to the bench and sat her down, himself beside her. “Listen,” he said. “This is what I’m going to do.” He took out a book of checks on which were printed his and Beatrice’s names and the Fifty-first Street address. He wrote a check payable to Kathleen Mangan, tore it out of the book, and gave it to her. “That’s your fare,” he said. “And some money to get you started. And if you want to stay in the States, you can give my name and the address that’s on that check and I’ll write a letter, or whatever, to act as your guarantor.”
She read the check and looked at it blankly. “You’re joking me. This is a joke, isn’t it? How much is this in pounds? Jesus, if I bring this into a bank they’ll throw me out on the street.”
“No, they won’t,” he said. “The check is good. Two thousand dollars is about a thousand pounds. And it’s not a loan, it’s a gift. You can do what you want with it.”
Down the hall the phone rang. The old woman picked it up.
“A gift?” Kathleen gave a shaken little laugh. “You’re serious?”
“Yes.”
“I feel as if I’ve won the Sweep. God, you must be rolling in it. Do you always do things like this with girls you just met?”
The old woman came up. “That will be eight pounds and ten pence, sir.”
He handed her a ten-pound note. “I’ll just get your change now,” she said, and went to her desk. He turned to Kathleen, who looked again at the check and then at him.
”I’d better give you some change,” she said. “If I take all this, I’ll be robbing you.”
“There you are, sir.” The old woman handed him a pound and ninety pence. “Thank you,” he said, and turned to Kathleen. “Don’t worry about the money. You’re not robbing me. I didn’t earn it. It was given to me.”
“You’re sure?”
“Of course, I’m sure.” With the old woman as audience, he took Kathleen in his arms and kissed her. “I have to go now.”
She hugged him. “I hope all will go well for your father. And thanks, Jim. Thanks. God, aren’t you the great fellow altogether.”
“I’m not. I wish I were.”
Part Three
Mangan left Ireland on a rain-filled morning, flying up the mouth of the Shannon River toward the Atlantic, the plane rising high above a winter storm. He flew to New York, landing in another rainstorm, and caught a flight to Montreal. And so he arrived home eighteen hours after he had first spoken to Margrethe, not knowing whether his father was alive or dead.
As he stood in the Montreal terminal waiting to clear customs, he saw, rising above other waiting heads in the outside gallery above him, Don Duncan, his father’s old friend, dressed in a heavy sheepskin collared coat, waving to him; a comic figure, but also a figure of dread, for in his face Mangan could read neither hope nor sorrow. And so, as he went out to meet Don, who bulled his way through the crowd, coming toward him, he felt a premonition that the news would be bad, that his father had died, that what his father had wanted to ask him or tell him would never be said. His face must have signaled his fear, for Don, joining him, at once embraced him in a bear hug, saying: “Good you got here. He’s still hanging in.”
For the first time since he had heard the news of his father’s stroke, he wept, tears on his face as he went with Don out into the snowbanks and freezing winter winds, a winter landscape unchanged in the weeks since he had left Montreal. “How is he? Is he able to speak?” he asked, and Don said yes, his speech was affected but he could speak.
And then, when they were in the car and driving out of the airport entrance, Don turned to him and said: “Did Margrethe tell you? It’s a bad stroke. He could go any time. It’s a slow thing, a stroke. It may take two or three days before it goes either way.”
Mangan, staring ahead, saw the steaming exhausts of other cars, the high dirty slabs of shoveled snow, the cleared lanes of traffic racing in the smoking Arctic air: a landscape of death. “Is he still in intensive care?”
“No, he’s back in his own room, now.”
“So, he’s a bit better.”
“Not necessarily. I asked the doctor about that. There’s not a lot they can do for a stroke victim. They just have to wait and see if he’ll pull through.”
“How’s Margrethe?”
“She’s a great girl,” Don said.
The hospital, the Montreal General, was familiar. Mangan had visited it years back, when his mother was operated on for a benign tumor. His father was on an upper private floor. Don showed him the way, pointing out the room, then shaking hands. “I’ll be back after supper,” Don said. “It’s right there, number 423.”
The sign on the door said no visitors. Mangan did not know whether to knock and so decided to push open the door. When he did, he saw Margrethe sitting in the room. His father, lax in the bed, seemed to be asleep. Margrethe, her face drawn, wearing no makeup, dressed in a long woolen sweater and gray flannel skirt, rose, smiled at him, and came outside to join him in the corridor.
“How is he?”
“He’s much the same. Oh, I’m so glad you managed to make it. Was it a terrible flight?”
“Is he asleep or what?”
“He dozes most of the time. His breathing is difficult. Anyway, he’s going to be very happy that you’re here. Look, you go in now and sit by him. He’ll wake in a while. Maybe when he sees you, he’ll manage to tell you whatever it is that’s worrying him. It’s hard to understand him. You have to listen carefully.”
“Aren’t you coming in?”
“No. I’m going down to the cafeteria to get a coffee. I think it would be better if you were alone with him. I’ll be back. I’ll check with you, okay?”
He nodded and watched her go off down the corridor, her straight back, her lithe walk, this thirty-year-old bride of his father’s last years. He wondered if his mother had been told. But, of course, they would have told her. She might even be here. He looked along the corridor again. Margrethe was standing by the elevator, waiting to go down. She waved to him. He waved back and then, fear in his mouth, pushed open the heavy hospital room door and went in.
In the room, the overhead lights had been switched off and a light was lit over his father’s head, its beam like an aureole behind the long thinning locks of gray hair which straggled around his ears. His father’s eyes were closed and his breathing was stertorous, labored, as though each breath were being torn from unwilling lungs. In the white hospital robe his father’s neck seemed particularly bare and vulnerable, an old child in a nightshirt, the skin pale, almost translucent, as though its normal ruddy color had been drained out. To Mangan’s surprise there was no heart-monitoring machine, nor were there any intravenous plastic tubes attached to his father’s arms. He lay in the bed, solitary, linked to no technology, as though his case had been considered and abandoned.
Mangan tried a small, throat-clearing sound as he sat in the chair vacated by Margrethe, but as he did, he realized that the loud, labored breathing in the struggling chest of the ill man must shut out all other noise. One hand lay lax on the sheet, discolored by bruises or the marks of needles. Mangan reached out and took that hand in his. At once, his father opened his eyes, turned his head, and looked at him, at first seeming to see nothing, his eyes blinded by the labor of gasping for breath. And then, with a sudden cough, his father said: “Jamie—it’s you. Jamie.”
“Yes, it’s me.” He rose up and, as he had rarely done in his life, kissed his father on the brow, felt clammy sweat on his lips. He sat again. “I came from Ireland this
morning.”
“Ireland.” His father said the word perfectly, then nodded. “Tracing . . . your . . . double.” His eyes sought the ceiling as though he were summoning up his strength. “Any . . . luck?”
“I don’t know if luck is the right word,” Mangan said. “But listen, Dad, Margrethe said you wanted to talk to me. You wanted to tell me something.”
His father nodded. His breathing seemed to stop, then started again. Mangan noticed rivulets of sweat running in the corded gulleys of his neck. “Yes,” his father said. “I’m glad you . . . came before I . . . kick off.”
“You’re not going to kick off.”
His father shrugged his shoulders in a painful parody of his usual noncommittal shrug. “Maybe,” he said, at last. “But . . . if I die . . . I’m in a . . . mess, Jamie. My . . . fault.” He turned his head and tried to smile, then reached out his hand as if to hold Mangan’s hand. Mangan took the offered hand, felt the old man’s fingers grip him tightly, then lie loose in his own.
“What is it, Dad?”
“Margrethe,” his father said, gasping again. And then said something Mangan did not hear, the words slurred to unintelligibility. “You see?” he added.
“Sorry, I didn’t hear that. What was it?”
“I said . . . she’s . . . pregnant,” his father said. “And I don’t . . . have . . . savings. House is . . . mortgaged, has been ever . . . since . . . your mother . . . got divorce. She . . . needed money . . . then. And I . . .” Suddenly, surprisingly, he smiled. “I over . . . extended.”
“Don’t worry, I got money from Beatrice. A lot.”
“So . . . you said on the . . . telephone. Before you . . . went to . . . Ireland.” His father stopped and gasped painfully for breath, gasped and gasped until Mangan was sure he was having some sort of attack. Then suddenly he said, “It’s not . . . fair to . . . ask you but I’m . . . asking. She’ll need . . . help.” Again his father stopped and labored to breathe. “At least . . . until she . . . mmmarries . . . again.” He coughed. “And the . . . child is going to . . . need someone for . . . longer. That’s what I . . . wanted to . . . ask. Will you keep . . . an eye . . . on it?”
