As It Is in Heaven Page 2

  “That’s nice tea,” said Philip, and looked down at his hands. He waited some time and said, “Will we get to evening Mass?”

  They left the house and pulled the door shut and went into Dublin. Philip drove the car and Stephen sat beside him. The night had fallen. There were no stars or moon. While they drove, Stephen said nothing. His knees were crooked up in front of him. His breath steamed the window excessively; the warmth of his thoughts about the woman he had met rose against the glass until at last his father asked him to open the window. When he did, Gabriella Castoldi flew out on the night air 160 miles from where she was in the city of Galway. Stephen rolled up the window, but it was quickly fogged with her again, the car air smelling increasingly of white lilies and clouding the view ahead so utterly that neither of the two men could bring themselves to mention it but instead drove on, peering outward through the fogged windscreen of hopeless love.

  The journey was fifteen minutes. Philip parked the car in NO PARKING before the gate of an office building. He saw the sign but paid it no attention, getting out of the car with his hat on his head and telling Stephen not to bother to lock it: when the plot of your life is written, there is no need to worry about trivialities. The two men stepped onto the path; they smelled the lilies escaping with them and noticed an elderly woman waiting for the 46 bus raise her nose and catch the scent as it passed down the street. But they said nothing about it. Silence was the family code.

  Philip touched the brim of his hat slightly. He stepped into the street without looking.

  But nothing was coming; it never was. That was the monotony of being spared: God was always there before him. The Dublin evening pressed like a damp cloth across the backs of their necks, and the two men hurried across to the door of the Church of the Blessed Sacrament. When they opened it, Mass began. Philip Griffin took off his hat. He knelt into the pew farthest from the altar, closed his eyes, and told his wife there might be a delay, but he hoped he would be there before too long.

  3

  That evening they played chess in the dark. Not that it was entirely dark, but the only light came from the low table lamp in the hallway and cast elongated shadows across the board, making the pieces larger and giving the impression to anyone passing outside that the men were playing with giants. Over the years of Stephen’s visits it had become routine to play after Mass. The language of chess was much like the secret language of men’s clothes, only it took longer to discover. Now Philip knew that there existed in the movement of the pieces a communication infinitely more true than anything he and Stephen might have said to each other.

  So, as one game followed the next, the movement of the chess pieces was the ancient vocabulary through which Stephen began to tell his father that he was daring to believe in love. All his moves signalled it; his knights flew into the midst of the board, his bishops ventured crisscross along diagonals that bespoke the innocence of a beginner or the blind invulnerability of dreams. Stephen moved his queen constantly, taking the piece in his fingers and holding it a moment suspended above the game before once again releasing it to the danger of the board.

  Stephen lost the first game, and then the second; by the time they had begun the third, his father had already understood the turbulence of his son’s heart and wondered at how he was managing to play at all. They had played together for years. Once Philip had been the Master; he had first learned the game as a boy with the Christian Brothers in Westland Row. Later, he played against the newspaper, opening a pocket set in the tailoring room and playing against the puzzle between stitches, looking at the solution only before he pulled on his jacket and walked across the emptied ground-floor lobby to go home. He had taught his son when Stephen was fifteen, and beaten him consistently until a June evening five years later, when the matchless audacity of Stephen’s moves told his father that he had finished rearing him. From then on, the fluctuations of his form reflected his spirit so keenly that within five moves of beginning a game, Philip Griffin could already tell the depth of Stephen’s grief, anger, or frustration.

  So it was. They did not speak, they played chess in the dark. They played without a clock, making the moves the way other men beat a ball with a racket or a club, releasing the demons that lay in the low places of their spirits, and seeing arise in the ever more complex patterns of the board the perfect reflection of their lives.

  “We’ll play again?”

  Stephen had lost for the fourth time and was already resetting the pieces when he asked his father. It was past midnight. Three times the tape of Puccini’s La Bohème had replayed itself, and Philip Griffin had lowered his head until his chin was propped just above the board on the knuckles of his joined hands. He cannot play himself out of it, he thought. No number of games will free him from thinking of her. He looked down at the white king’s knight, which had already begun the new game by jumping forward. What could he tell Stephen? How could he instruct him in caution, in restricting the wild movements of his pieces that so clearly told the story of his heart? He could not. He looked at the backs of his hands and felt the papery skin at the top of his cheeks. He felt an enormous tiredness opening itself like a great cloak within him. He wanted to go to bed, but he played again, and again after that. Time ran away; no cars moved down the empty suburban road outside. Dublin was asleep beneath its streetlights, the autumn night foggy with dreams, while son and father played on. They did not look up from the board, nor did Philip remark when the scent of the lilies arose and filled the room. He breathed their perfume and kept his gaze fixed on the queen, recalling how Anne, too, had smelled of those flowers, and realizing there and then that life repeats itself over and over, and that, though the game might change, its patterns were the same, his son’s loving was his own, and it would be morning before Stephen exhausted himself telling of it and fell across the chessboard asleep.

  4

  While Stephen slept, his father watched him. The king’s knight’s pawn was in his son’s hand, but his body had slumped backward into the armchair. Whatever move he had intended to make was frozen in his hand and the game lay suspended, its communication broken, like a missing page in an old love letter.

  Philip Griffin watched him. He had watched him for thirty years, watched him more carefully than any father watched his son. He loved Stephen as a wall loves a garden. He knew his son’s life was lacking in excitement or joy, but believed that it needed to be fiercely protected from the treachery of dreams.

  He watched over his son. The visions that rode Stephen in sleep gave his face the look of fearful anticipation; his eyebrows were knotted, the lids of his eyes shut tight. His father did not think to move him. He had waited almost half an hour for Stephen to make a move, not looking at him in the half-light, keeping his eyes fixed on the board and continuing to read the fable of his son’s loving. In that half an hour he had realized that the love was not returned at all yet, and that the desperation of the position that Stephen kept creating in each game was the plain metaphor of his heart. When at last he dared to look up, Philip thought at first that time had stopped. He thought it was he who had died and that it was his spirit looking down at the stilled picture of the world as he was leaving it. Nothing was moving, there was no sound in the room nor in the street outside, and he had to lower his hands slowly to touch the armrests of the chair to be sure that he was not floating away.

  It would have been a peaceful death; but almost at once a new pain arrived swiftly. It lanced him like a kitchen knife: he was not going to die just yet, he was not going to be allowed to sit out his days and wait for the moment when he would topple sideways from his chair onto the carpet and meet his wife and daughter again. No, he was to live to see this: to see the unrequited love of his son burn the boy’s soul until there was nothing left of him, too. Philip was sure of it. That the relationship might unfold happily, that it might be reciprocated and the feelings amplified, was a foolish impossibility to him. Even to think that was a way of thinking he had long ago aband
oned, and he remembered it now only as the skin remembers its scars.

  In the sudden spring that arrived three years after his wife and daughter had died, Philip had opened the door one morning to feel the warmth of the air come like a caress across his face and to hear the birdsong, rapturous in the awakening limbs of the old chestnut tree. Spring was throbbing in the air, he saw it but somehow could not accept the pleasure of it. It was as if the grief had already enwrapped his life and he had settled into it like a comfort. It was easier to live like that. But that morning, as he travelled to work, he kept noticing the small tilting trees that grew in grass verges next to the path; they had leafed overnight, it seemed. He looked at them as if seeing them for the first time and wondered if it was three years since the last spring. That afternoon he had slipped away from the shop and left a pair of trousers in the hands of young Dempsey while he went to the doctor. Walking across Dublin in the remarkable blue of that afternoon, catching something of the quickened heartbeat, the gaiety that moved tangibly through the crowds on Grafton Street, he had no idea exactly what he was going for. He sat in the high-ceilinged waiting room of Dr. Tim Magrath’s surgery on Fitzwilliam Street; the window was raised on its pull cords and the city stayed with him. When at last he was called in, he took the big doctor’s handshake and held on to it. Philip had tailored Tim Magrath’s clothes for eighteen years, and although he had spoken to the doctor often and about every possible subject while measuring him in Clery’s, he had never consulted him and they had never met anywhere else. That afternoon, when Tim Magrath saw him there, he had imagined at first that Philip Griffin had come to make a delivery, that he had forgotten some trousers or a jacket and the tailor had been good enough to bring them over. It was only when he felt the hand of the other man holding on to him and noticed that he had brought nothing with him that he realized there was something else. Philip sat down on the leather couch. He left his hat on and looked directly at the doctor’s grey eyes.

  “I can’t feel any joy,” he said.

  Tim Magrath said nothing. He felt the eyes of the patient staring at him for an answer, but was so surprised that he had to get up and look at the street outside. He watched the cars passing for a moment.

  “My wife died. My daughter died with her.”

  The doctor felt a shiver of guilt run down his spine; he had heard of the crash, of course, but had missed the funeral, and then let the facts of it slip away beyond acknowledgement.

  “It was three years ago,” Philip said, “and it’s just, I can’t feel any joy. In anything. Maybe I’m not supposed to. But I just thought I’d mention it to somebody. I wonder, will I? … I just can’t seem to.” He was not distressed, he spoke about it as if telling a mildly unusual facet of his diet.

  Tim McGrath did not know what to say; he looked out the window. (He did not yet know the prescription for loss, and would not even understand the ailment until four years later, when he would return from golf at the Grange on a Saturday afternoon and find his wife, Maire, dead on the bed upstairs. Then the loss would descend upon him and he would walk out across the manicured summer lawns of his front garden and feel nothing. Then he would recall the tailor and realize with a blow that made him sit down on the grass that in fact he knew nothing about healing.)

  But he did not know yet that the incredible world could vanish from the living as easily as from the dead. He looked out the window and watched the traffic in a practised way that he knew looked as if he were thinking. Finally Dr. Magrath turned around to face his patient. “Are you sleeping at night?” he asked.

  And that was it. When Philip walked back across the city to the shop, he had a bottle of sleeping tablets in his jacket pocket. He had never taken them, and gradually allowed the promise of spring to die away into the wet summer of that year, taking with it the faint prompting at the corners of his mind that perhaps there was a way back to joy. By the autumn, the relentless and immutable progress of sorrow had continued like an intimacy in Philip Griffin’s heart. He anticipated affliction and imagined that by doing so his life was more bearable.

  No, happiness did not run in the Griffin family, it fled away; for them there was no relief to balance tragedy. In quiet moments after Stephen had moved to the west, Philip had begun to hope that his son’s life would simply escape into ordinariness, that nothing remarkable would happen. But now, sitting opposite him at the chessboard in the dark, he realized that was not the case. And worse, that he was to live to see it.

  He looked at the chessboard and memorized the position. He would lay it out again after Stephen had driven away and study it for clues. He knew the woman Stephen was in love with was unsuitable, but was not sure yet why. Perhaps she was married or did not care for him at all.

  It was a little time before Philip stood up and moved past the sleeping figure. He moved out into the hallway and in the hot press found a blanket. When he came back and laid it over his son, the young man seemed to him to have grown younger. He was smaller, too. And for the four hours that remained until morning Philip decided to sit there in the armchair opposite him.

  They had had so much time together since the day, that day; years of living in the same house that had taught them the fine skills of walking in empty rooms and being aware of the ghosts. They had lived around each other as much as with each other. But the invisible bond that held them together was the searing memory of those first moments after the accident when they had seen each other for the first time and stood in mute but tearless rage as they felt the burning pain of love and the perishing of hope. The funeral had been automatic; it was as if two other people and not Philip and Stephen were there. But afterwards, in the unnaturally stilled days when father and son came from their rooms in the house only when they knew they would not encounter each other, when they stole down the stairs laden with the guilt of having survived, the bond between them had grown. It grew without their speaking of it. It grew while they lay in their beds in the dark, sleepless and angry, asking God over and over why it was they who had lived. Why not kill me? And as week after week passed and they still lived on, the man and his son washing the dishes at the counter, hanging out the clothes on the line where the ghost of the mother was already standing, Philip and Stephen carried the burden of their survival in exactly the same manner. They did not speak of it but took the puzzle of their days everywhere with them, growing an identical jagged wrinkle across the middle of their foreheads and talking fitfully in the brief periods of their night sleep.

  Now, fifteen years later, Philip Griffin saw that his son had not entirely escaped the habits of those years. For at once, instants after the blanket had been put across him in the armchair, Stephen began talking in his sleep. His words were unintelligible at first, and even though his father got from his chair and knelt down beside him like a priest, he could make nothing of them. He touched the sweat on his son’s forehead, where it glistened in the low light. He was startled at how cold it was. It was as chill as seawater. He was thinking to get another blanket, or wake Stephen and move him to the bed, when he finally realized that the words his son was speaking were Italian.

  5

  Stephen Griffin had first seen Gabriella Castoldi playing violin in a concert in the thick-curtained upstairs room of the Old Ground Hotel in Ennis in County Clare. He had not intended to be there and marvelled often afterwards how one moment leads to the next, until the pattern of our lives seems inevitable. He worked as a history teacher in a grey school by the sea at Spanish Point twenty miles away and lived in a house with no curtains, where the Atlantic sprayed his windows and whispered like a mystery in every room. He had lived there for three years since taking the job. The day he came for the interview he drove west until he met the coastline and knew at once not that he wanted the position but that he wanted to be there in the west, for that sense of arrival in reaching the edge of the country. He had searched for the house for the same reason, finding a place that was small and damp but, unlike so many of the other old
cottages, turned outward to the sea. Its front-room window looked out over a small slope of burnt grass that fell away in a sharp cliff into the alarming pounding of the tide. When he sat in the front room and looked westward into the slow movement of the swollen waters, he did not know it but he was the mirror of his father sitting in Dublin.

  “History is disappearing,” the principal, Mrs. Waters, told him at the interview. “Nobody wants to do history anymore. It’s a terrible shame.” The students preferred computers, she said with a tone of derision. “History is long and difficult, Mr. Griffin; there’s a lot of reading in it,” said Mrs. Waters. “That’s the reason. They don’t like reading. They’re too lazy. Your classes will be small. But maybe you’ll be able to change all that.” It was a little threat. Mrs. Waters was a big woman with a small mouth; she seemed to know that the smallness of her mouth betrayed some lack of feeling and had overpainted her lips, which she pursed constantly to reassure herself. She sat across the table from Stephen and wondered would he do. It wasn’t everybody who could stick it out, the west was bleak in the winter, and between the broken Atlantic skies and the rough sea, few souls not born to it endured. So Mrs. Waters imagined, sitting in the neatness of her principal’s office and priding herself on the rigid indestructibility of her own person.

  “You think you might like it here?” she asked Stephen.

  “I can’t tell you,” he said.

  “I’m sorry?”

  “The future has no history. We can’t know anything of tomorrow, can we?”

  Mrs. Waters stared at him; it was an outlandish remark, and she had to pause a moment to decide if she was being insulted.