Brian Friel Plays 2 (61 page)

In other words she
had
vision – but a vision that was utterly useless to her.

Blindsight … curious word …

I remember in Cleveland once, Bloomstein and Maria and I were in a restaurant and when Maria left the table Bloomstein said to me,

‘Beautiful lady. You
do
know that?’

‘I know,’ I said.

‘Do you really?’

I said of course I did.

‘That’s not how you behave,’ he said. ‘You behave like a man with blindsight.’

Frank
We were in the pub this night, Billy Hughes and myself, just sitting and chatting about – yes! I remember what we were talking about! An idea Billy had of recycling old tea-leaves and turning them into a substitute for tobacco. We should have followed that up.

Anyhow – anyhow, this man comes up to me in the bar, says he’s a journalist from a Dublin paper, asks would I be interested in giving him the full story about Molly.

He seemed a decent man. I talked to him for maybe an hour at most. Of course it was stupid. And I really didn’t do it for the bloody money.

Jack from next door spotted the piece and brought it in.
Miracle
Cure
False
Dawn.
Molly
sulks
in
darkness.
Husband
drowns
sorrow
in
pub.

Of course she heard about it – God knows how. And now I was as bad as all the others: I had let her down, too.

Molly
During all those years when my mother was in the hospital with her nerves my father brought me to visit her only three times. Maybe that was her choice. Or his. I never knew.

But I have a vivid memory of each of those three visits.

One of the voice of a youngish woman. My father and mother are in her ward, surrounded by a screen, fighting as usual, and I’m standing outside in the huge echoey corridor. And I can hear a young woman sobbing at the far end of the corridor. More lamenting than sobbing. And even though a lot of people are passing along that corridor I remember wondering why nobody paid any attention to her. And for some reason the sound of that lamentation stayed with me.

And I remember another patient, an old man, leaning over me and enveloping me in the smell of snuff. He slipped a coin into my hand and said, ‘Go out and buy us
a fancy new car, son, and the two of us will drive away to beautiful Fethard-on-Sea.’ And he laughed. He had given me a shilling.

And the third memory is of my mother sitting on the side of her bed, shouting at my father, screaming at him, ‘She should be at a blind school! You know she should! But you know the real reason you won’t send her? Not because you haven’t the money. Because you want to punish me.’

I didn’t tell Mr Rice that story when he first asked me about my childhood. Out of loyalty to Father, maybe. Maybe out of loyalty to Mother, too.

Anyhow those memories came into my head the other day. I can’t have been more than six or seven at the time.

Mr Rice
In those last few months it was hard to recognize the woman who had first come to my house. The confident way she shook my hand. Her calm and her independence. The way she held her head.

How self-sufficient she had been then – her home, her job, her friends, her swimming; so naturally, so easily experiencing her world with her hands alone.

And we had once asked so glibly: What has she to lose?

Molly
In those last few months I was seeing less and less. I was living in the hospital then, Mother’s old hospital. And what was strange was that there were times when I didn’t know if the things I did see were real or was I imagining them. I seemed to be living on a borderline between fantasy and reality.

Yes, that was a strange state. Anxious at first; oh, very anxious. Because it meant that I couldn’t trust any more what sight I still had. It was no longer trustworthy.

But as time went on that anxiety receded; seemed to be a silly anxiety. Not that I began trusting my eyes again. Just that trying to discriminate, to distinguish between
what might be real and what might be imagined, being guided by what Father used to call ‘excellent testimony’ – that didn’t seem to matter all that much, seemed to matter less and less. And for some reason the less it mattered, the more I thought I could see.

Mr Rice
In those last few months – she was living in the psychiatric hospital at that point – I knew I had lost contact with her. She had moved away from us all. She wasn’t in her old blind world – she was exiled from that. And the sighted world, which she had never found hospitable, wasn’t available to her any more.

My sense was that she was trying to compose another life that was neither sighted nor unsighted, somewhere she hoped was beyond disappointment; somewhere, she hoped, without expectation.

Frank
The last time I saw Rice was on the following Easter Sunday; April 7; six months to the day after the first operation. Fishing on a lake called Lough Anna away up in the hills. Billy Hughes spotted him first.

‘Isn’t that your friend, Mr Rice? Wave to him, man!’

And what were Billy and I doing up there in the wilds? Embarrassing. But I’ll explain.

Ballybeg got its water supply from Lough Anna and in the summer, when the lake was low, from two small adjoining lakes. So to make the supply more efficient it was decided that at the end of April the two small lakes would be emptied into Lough Anna and it would become the sole reservoir for the town. That would raise the water-level of Anna by fifteen feet and of course ruin the trout fishing there – not that that worried them. So in fact that Easter Sunday would have been Rice’s last time to fish there. But he probably knew that because Anna was his favourite lake; he was up there every chance he got; and he had told me once that he had thought of putting a boat on it. Anyhow – anyhow.

Billy Hughes and his crazy scheme. He had heard that there was a pair of badgers in a sett at the edge of the lake. When Anna was flooded in three weeks’ time, they would be drowned. They would have to be moved. Would I help him?

Move two badgers! Wonderful! So why did I go with him? Partly to humour the eejit. But really, I suppose, really because that would be our last day together, that Easter Sunday.

And that’s how we spent it – digging two bloody badgers out of their sett. Dug for two-and-a-half hours. Then flung old fishing nets over them to immobilize them. Then lifted them into two wheelbarrows. Then hauled those wheelbarrows along a sheep track up the side of the mountain – and each of those brutes weighed at least thirty pounds – so that we were hauling half-a-hundred-weight of bloody badger-meat up an almost vertical mountainside. And then – listen to this – the greatest lunacy of all – then tried to force them into an old, abandoned sett half-way up the mountain! Brilliant Billy Hughes!

Because of course the moment we cut them out of the nets and tried to push them down the new hole, well naturally they went wild; bit Billy’s ankle and damn near fractured my arm; and then went careering down the hillside in a mad panic, trailing bits of net behind them. And because they can’t see too well in daylight or maybe because they’re half-blind anyway, stumbling into bushes and banging into rocks and bumping into each other and sliding and rolling and tumbling all over the place. And where did they head for? Of course – of course – straight back to the old sett at the edge of the water – the one we’d destroyed with all our digging!

Well, what could you do but laugh? Hands blistered, bleeding ankle, sore arm, filthy clothes. Flung ourselves on the heather and laughed until our sides hurt. And then
Billy turned to me and said very formally, ‘Happy Easter, Frank’ and it seemed the funniest thing in the world and off we went again. What an eejit that man was!

Rice joined us when we were putting the wheelbarrows into the back of Billy’s van.

‘I was watching you from the far side,’ he said. ‘What in God’s name were you doing?’

Billy told him.

‘Good heavens!’ he said, posh as ever. ‘A splendid idea. Always a man for the noble pursuit, Frank.’

The bastard couldn’t resist it, I knew. But for some reason he didn’t anger me that day; didn’t even annoy me. Maybe because his fishing outfit was a couple of sizes too big for him and in those baggy trousers he looked a bit like a circus clown. Maybe because at that moment, after that fiasco with the badgers, standing on that shore that would be gone in a few weeks’ time, none of the three of us – Billy, Rice, myself – none of the three of us seemed such big shots at that moment. Or maybe he didn’t annoy me that Easter Sunday afternoon because I knew I’d probably never see him again. I was heading off to Ethiopia in the morning.

We left the van outside Billy’s flat and he walked me part of the way home.

When we got to the courthouse I said he’d come far enough: we’d part here. I hoped he’d get work. I hoped he’d meet some decent woman who’d marry him and beat some sense into him. And I’d be back home soon, very soon, the moment I’d sorted out the economy of Ethiopia … The usual stuff.

Then we hugged quickly and he walked away and I looked after him and watched his straight back and the quirky way he threw out his left leg as he walked and I thought, my God, I thought how much I’m going to miss that bloody man.

And when he disappeared round the corner of the
courthouse, I thought, too – I thought, too – Abyssinia for Christ’s sake – or whatever it’s called – Ethiopia – Abyssinia – whatever it’s called – who cares what it’s called – who gives a damn – who in his right mind wants to go there for Christ’s sake? Not you. You certainly don’t. Then why don’t you stay where you are for Christ’s sake? What are you looking for?

Oh, Jesus …

Mr Rice
Roger Bloomstein was killed in an air-crash on the evening of the Fourth of July. He was flying his plane from New York to Cape Cod where Maria and he had rented a house for the summer. An eyewitness said the engine stopped suddenly, and for a couple of seconds the plane seemed to sit suspended in the sky, golden and glittering in the setting sun, and then plummeted into the sea just south of Martha’s Vineyard.

The body was never recovered.

I went to New York for the memorial service the following month. Hiroko Matoba couldn’t come: he had had a massive heart attack the previous week. So of the four horsemen, the brilliant meteors, there were only the two of us: Hans, now the internationally famous Herr Girder, silver-haired, sleek, smiling; and myself, seedy, I knew, after a bad flight and too much whiskey.

Girder asked about Molly. He had read an article George Wallace had written about ‘Mrs M’ in the
Journal
of
Psychology.
The enquiry sounded casual but the smiling eyes couldn’t conceal the vigilance. So the vigilance was still necessary despite the success, maybe more necessary because of the success.

‘Lucky Paddy Rice,’ he said. ‘The chance of a lifetime. Fell on your feet again.’

‘Not as lucky as you, Hans.’

‘But it didn’t end happily for the lady?’

‘’Fraid not,’ I said.

‘Too bad. No happy endings. So she is totally sightless now?’

‘Totally.’

‘And mentally?’

‘Good days – bad days,’ I said.

‘But she won’t survive?’

‘Who’s to say?’ I said.

‘No, no. They don’t survive. That’s the pattern. But they’ll insist on having the operation, won’t they? And who’s to dissuade them?’

‘Let me get you a drink,’ I said and I walked away.

I watched Maria during the service. Her beauty had always been chameleon. She had an instinctive beauty for every occasion. And today with her drained face and her dazed eyes and that fragile body, today she was utterly vulnerable, and at the same time, within her devastation, wholly intact and untouchable. I had never seen her more beautiful.

When the service was over she came to me and thanked me for coming. We talked about Aisling and Helga. They were having a great time with her parents in Geneva; they loved it there and her parents spoiled them; they weren’t good at answering letters but they liked getting mine even though they were a bit scrappy. They were happy girls, she said.

Neither of us spoke Roger’s name.

Then she took my hand and kissed it and held it briefly against her cheek. It was a loving gesture. But for all its tenderness, because of its tenderness, I knew she was saying a final goodbye to me.

As soon as I got back to Ballybeg I resigned from the hospital and set about gathering whatever belongings I had. The bungalow was rented, never more than a lodging. So the moving out was simple – some clothes, a few books, the fishing rods. Pity to leave the lakes at that time of year. But the lake I enjoyed most – a lake I had
grown to love – it had been destroyed by flooding. So it was all no great upheaval.

I called on Molly the night before I left. The nurse said she was very frail. But she could last for ever or she could slip away tonight. ‘It’s up to herself,’ she said. ‘But a lovely woman. No trouble at all. If they were all as nice and quiet …’

She was sleeping and I didn’t waken her. Propped up against the pillows; her mouth open; her breathing shallow; a scarlet coat draped around her shoulders; the wayward hair that had given her so much trouble now contained in a net.

And looking down at her I remembered – was it all less than a year ago? – I had a quick memory of the first time I saw her in my house, and the phantom desire, the insane fantasy that crossed my mind that day: Was this the chance of a lifetime that might pull my life together, rescue a career, restore a reputation? Dear God, that opulent fantasy life …

And looking down at her – the face relaxed, that wayward hair contained in a net – I thought how I had failed her. Of course I had failed her. But at least, at least for a short time she did see men ‘walking as if like trees’. And I think, perhaps, yes I think she understood more than any of us what she did see.

Molly
When I first went to Mr Rice I remember him asking me was I able to distinguish between light and dark and what direction light came from. And I remember thinking: Oh my God, he’s asking you profound questions about good and evil and about the source of knowledge and about big mystical issues! Careful! Don’t make a fool of yourself! And of course all the poor man wanted to know was how much vision I had. And I could answer him easily now: I can’t distinguish between light and dark, nor the direction from which light comes, and I certainly
wouldn’t see the shadow of Frank’s hand in front of my face. Yes, that’s all long gone. Even the world of touch has shrunk. No, not that it has shrunk; just that I seem to need much less of it now. And after all that anxiety and drudgery we went through with engrams and the need to establish connections between visual and tactile engrams and synchronizing sensations of touch and sight and composing a whole new world. But I suppose all that had to be attempted.