Ghost Light (22 page)
Authors: Joseph O'Connor
ST MATTHEW’S CHURCH RUSSELL SQUARE
4.03 p.m.
Agnes beatae virginis
natalis est, quo spiritum
caelo refudit debitum
pio sacrata sanguine …
natalis est, quo spiritum
caelo refudit debitum
pio sacrata sanguine …
The nave is cold and dark. Candles burn before the statues. The odour of beeswax and incense. You are trying to pray for Ernest Duglacz but the praying is hard, and the words of the prayers turn to steam. That gently intolerant, scrupulous, irascible, eternally Luddite old bookseller. He regarded the portable typewriter as an instrument of the devil, believed in sealing wax and quills and ornate sans serif the way others believe in Christ. No prayers exist any more for such believers as these; their credo is a thing of the past. But you try. Yes, you try. Perhaps attempting it is everything. But strange pictures come, which you don’t understand. The night the flying bomb fell on the street parallel to the Terrace, the queer
whirr
in the moments immediately before it struck. Sara in her costume when the two of you were in a picture. Sara in the limousine to Elstree. Mr Hitchcock was the director. It was a great chance, she told you. Really, you would have to stop drinking.
whirr
in the moments immediately before it struck. Sara in her costume when the two of you were in a picture. Sara in the limousine to Elstree. Mr Hitchcock was the director. It was a great chance, she told you. Really, you would have to stop drinking.
And the incense or the odour of the beeswax polish raises a chapel in New York, on the East Side of the city. The rich, heavy wood of the serried lines of benches, and the purple of the confessional curtains. And high in the rafters, the carved faces
of men and women, cut there by the boatwrights who had fashioned the timberwork on the corbels. The images of their people back in Ireland, it was rumoured, though nobody knew if it was true. And one of those graven, imperturbable faces always reminded you of an uncle who went away one autumn to pick a harvest in England and never came back to Mary Street. Mercy for Ernest Duglacz. My dear, dear friend. You look up at the altar through the mote-filled beam of light. Mercy for all the departed.
of men and women, cut there by the boatwrights who had fashioned the timberwork on the corbels. The images of their people back in Ireland, it was rumoured, though nobody knew if it was true. And one of those graven, imperturbable faces always reminded you of an uncle who went away one autumn to pick a harvest in England and never came back to Mary Street. Mercy for Ernest Duglacz. My dear, dear friend. You look up at the altar through the mote-filled beam of light. Mercy for all the departed.
And you are remembering a wreath of lilies before a plaque in that church, for the Irish boys who died in the Civil War. The fighting Irish. Heroes of Gettysburg. Champions of brotherly freedom. Sara had no time for ‘all that auld talk’. They want the Irish to build their railroads, fight their wars, kill their Indians, whose land was robbed off them for nothing, Sara said. Then get soused and die quiet in some gin-shop, she said. And that’s the great plan for the Irish. The way some Americans go on, you’d swear no Irishman ever did anything bar shooting someone in the head and spouting the rosary. She liked being mischievous. It was one of the reasons you always loved her. She saw the world differently. Her own woman.
The third time you came to New York, America was about to go to war. Recruiting officers were waiting on the waterfront. You and the other actors had watched some of the boys sign up to fight, as though they were joining some fraternity of revellers on a spree. Not a minute in America, like foals with the staggers, pucking one another, joshing, moon-eyed with exhilaration. A lad Sara had taken a shine to, Michael English from Ennis, had led two of his cousins to the tent in Castle Gardens and asked the Yankee corporal for a uniform and a gun, for he wished to prove himself for the Republic of liberty.
Tis a tiger you’re looking at here, boss. I’ll kill a thousand before breakfast.
It had seemed strange to you – to come all this way in the hope of a new life, only to fight in another man’s war.
Tis a tiger you’re looking at here, boss. I’ll kill a thousand before breakfast.
It had seemed strange to you – to come all this way in the hope of a new life, only to fight in another man’s war.
You didn’t understand the war in Europe, its causes, its
purposes. Sara had tried to explain it to you, but you suspected she didn’t understand it either. You suspected that nobody did. Her eyes were sea-green and they shone like dappled water. She adored America. She would make herself a home here. If you’d half a pick of sense, you’d do the very same, she told you. Jesus God, was she bossy. Dear Sara.
purposes. Sara had tried to explain it to you, but you suspected she didn’t understand it either. You suspected that nobody did. Her eyes were sea-green and they shone like dappled water. She adored America. She would make herself a home here. If you’d half a pick of sense, you’d do the very same, she told you. Jesus God, was she bossy. Dear Sara.
Her hope was to make that home in a German or Italian neighbourhood in New York, for Germans were hard-working, proud, staunch Americans, and Italians so beautiful to look at. Her children would be Americans. It was the freest country on earth, the land where everyone married whoever they wanted and if anyone didn’t like it, go hump. How little she knew, but how lovely her ignorance. Sometimes she spoke in contradictions.
You think of her now. My difficult sister. Maybe she is in Paradise today. God help the poor angels, she’ll be ordering them about, getting them organised into a trade union before she’s done. There is a wedding in progress in the chapel near the transept. The party is small, no more than a dozen guests, but the bride and groom, who look anxious and thrilled, are as magnetic as a wedding couple always is. The groom is a soldier, his uniform pressed and neat. The bride fidgets with the hems of her sleeves. Two elderly women are observing, taken by the spectacle. ‘In’t she beautiful,’ one of them says. ‘Pretty as a postcard.’ The fumbling for the wedding ring. Avuncular laughter from the Padre. You are an old lady watching a wedding.
It was the way he had looked at you sometimes, in his dishevelled little bookshop: an expression of such kindness, of hopefulness and courage. His gaiety was a sort of currency, self-replenishing, always new. You weep, wishing not to, wiping your tears with your wrists. And the bride and the groom, alerted by your quietly echoed sobbing, turn from the side altar and stare at you a little resentfully. You cross yourself and move away, towards the doors.
A memory whispers up, of a time you were playing in New York when the child of one of the costume-girls died of meningitis. The woman was from Galway, her husband from Clare. You and Sara attended the wake out of duty or sympathy. Nobody else from the company was free. The funeral was to be held early the following day, for a longer period of mourning would be unwise, the undertaker said. He spoke with the practised diplomacy of all his profession, in euphemisms, sidelong looks; in silences. Flowers would be useful to have in the room. Lilies, if possible, for their aroma is heavy. Better for the casket to be closed, he had murmured, when the deceased was so young, and so thin. You and Sara were silent, as though guilty for something. And mainly because there was nothing to say.
You watched as they draped the ancient mirror in the parlour, as the country people back in Ireland prepare for a waking; for at the hard time of life an old custom can seem important, the practice you might mock at the easier time. The few dollars the father had managed to raise at the pawnshop on 7th Street were spent on food and drink for the mourners. There must always be tobacco at a wake, the father had insisted. A wake must be done with propriety.
Was he trying to help his wife? Did he think it what she wanted? Or somehow did he want it himself? He had borrowed chairs from some of the neighbours, placed them carefully about the parlour, efficiently, like a waiter preparing a function, never once glancing at the terrible object in the corner. His face was slick with sweat.
They filed into the parlour quietly, as though trespassing on a privacy, the women clutching rosary beads, the men with hats in hand. It was as though they were waiting for something important to happen: some sacrament or a revelation produced by their solidarity, their sitting together in a room. Some of the callers were neighbours in the tenement building; others nobody knew very well. Men from the fire station where the father drove a wagon, you assumed, for one or two of them seemed to know
his name. Police officers, stevedores, navvies: all Irish, and a man who was an organiser of some sort for the Democratic Party, and another, from the Ancient Order of Hibernians, which was said to have offered a little money towards the funeral. And others who had insisted on condoling in Gaelic, as though the vowels of the old language could heal. And the German and Italian women who lived in the tenement coming in, in twos and threes, or some of them alone, speaking quietly in their own languages, which the mother did not understand, or in broken phrases of English, or saying nothing at all, but sadly shaking their heads and touching the mother’s hand because conversation was impossible now. How it must have hurt her to be condoled with, for there was nothing to say, no matter the language or the kindness lying behind it. How you wished for her that they would all go away.
his name. Police officers, stevedores, navvies: all Irish, and a man who was an organiser of some sort for the Democratic Party, and another, from the Ancient Order of Hibernians, which was said to have offered a little money towards the funeral. And others who had insisted on condoling in Gaelic, as though the vowels of the old language could heal. And the German and Italian women who lived in the tenement coming in, in twos and threes, or some of them alone, speaking quietly in their own languages, which the mother did not understand, or in broken phrases of English, or saying nothing at all, but sadly shaking their heads and touching the mother’s hand because conversation was impossible now. How it must have hurt her to be condoled with, for there was nothing to say, no matter the language or the kindness lying behind it. How you wished for her that they would all go away.
You sat together in the room, the women around the coffin, the men in a huddle by the kitchen. Perhaps there was a priest but you do not remember that. The firefighters bowed their heads. Some wept. You had been sick that morning. It was the year the drinking worsened. It was as though you could hear the mother’s thoughts.
That is not a body. That is my child. Why are all these people in my home?
Candles burned down. The visitors murmuring. The mother was told the child had gone to a better place. A place where there is no suffering, where the poor are loved and honoured. It was how the people in Mary Street used to talk about America. A paradise of honey and milk.
That is not a body. That is my child. Why are all these people in my home?
Candles burned down. The visitors murmuring. The mother was told the child had gone to a better place. A place where there is no suffering, where the poor are loved and honoured. It was how the people in Mary Street used to talk about America. A paradise of honey and milk.
O come to the land where we will be happy.
Don’t be afraid of the storm or the sea,
And it’s when we get over, we soon shall discover
That place is the homeland
Of Sweet Liberty.
Don’t be afraid of the storm or the sea,
And it’s when we get over, we soon shall discover
That place is the homeland
Of Sweet Liberty.
And you recalled the waking held for a neighbour’s girl on her last night in Dublin. Her father and mother and the
gathering of relations. An uncle singing ‘The Twang Man’ in a corner of the house and then a man with a melodeon, but he wasn’t good. ‘Get up with me, Bridget,’ said the father, late in the night, ‘and face me in a step. Will you do that for me, girl? For likely it’s the last dance we’ll ever have in this world.’ And the girl and her father had danced in the kitchen. And in the morning she had left for the steamer at Kingstown, with a couple of shillings and an address in New York: an agency placing Irish girls as maids of all work in the houses of the wealthy of Manhattan.
gathering of relations. An uncle singing ‘The Twang Man’ in a corner of the house and then a man with a melodeon, but he wasn’t good. ‘Get up with me, Bridget,’ said the father, late in the night, ‘and face me in a step. Will you do that for me, girl? For likely it’s the last dance we’ll ever have in this world.’ And the girl and her father had danced in the kitchen. And in the morning she had left for the steamer at Kingstown, with a couple of shillings and an address in New York: an agency placing Irish girls as maids of all work in the houses of the wealthy of Manhattan.
Dear mother
. More mourners arrived and tobacco smoke purpled the air. The mother couldn’t write, her parents in Ireland couldn’t read, so it was you and Sara who helped her write the letter, as best you could, and someone back in Ireland – the schoolmaster, was it? – would read it aloud to her people. It would be the voice of some elderly schoolmaster that would pronounce the terrible words of the letter: that a child who had lived only five months in this world had lost her life in America. On the night of her funeral you would appear in a play. It seemed absurd and obscene. It seemed pointless.
. More mourners arrived and tobacco smoke purpled the air. The mother couldn’t write, her parents in Ireland couldn’t read, so it was you and Sara who helped her write the letter, as best you could, and someone back in Ireland – the schoolmaster, was it? – would read it aloud to her people. It would be the voice of some elderly schoolmaster that would pronounce the terrible words of the letter: that a child who had lived only five months in this world had lost her life in America. On the night of her funeral you would appear in a play. It seemed absurd and obscene. It seemed pointless.
My child is dead. Why can’t you understand? There is nothing I want said to me now.
An old Connemara woman who lived in the slums of the Five Points had shuffled into the apartment, leather-faced, Iberian, clad in the ragged tweed shawl of her homeplace. She touched her forehead to the tiny coffin and began an ancient keening: a soft ululation, wordless at first, but soon widening into the
ochóns
and
bróns
of Gaelic. The German women stared at her. Many of them looked frightened. You and Sara were frightened too.
ochóns
and
bróns
of Gaelic. The German women stared at her. Many of them looked frightened. You and Sara were frightened too.
From outside in the street came the bawls of the vendors, then a shrieked obscenity, and the rattle of a cart. Rain spattered on the windows. The room was too full. The children were restless on the floor. And the main memory you have is of wanting to hold the author of that play, whose lines you would speak
that night in New York. To see him again, just for minutes or seconds. But he was gone, as the child had gone.
that night in New York. To see him again, just for minutes or seconds. But he was gone, as the child had gone.
And you leave the chapel now, into the cold light of London. Must be morning-time in New York and you picturing the busy streets, the workers crossing the avenues and the park. Children in the playgrounds. Someone ringing a handbell. Is there any freer city in God’s wide world? Will you ever see it again? Or Dublin? A long time now since you walked Mary Street or the Coombe, saw the sea at Killiney or Dalkey or Howth. The word ‘Kingstown’ has vanished. It is now called ‘Dun Laoghaire’, a name foreigners find hard to pronounce. And you seem to hear him say it – Dunn Leary – Doon Leerah – as you cross by the gates of the chapel.
And perhaps to change the name is to alter the essence too, as a woman changes her name upon marriage? But maybe baptism means nothing, and marriage means nothing – perhaps they are only words. What has happened has happened and you will always carry Kingstown, no matter the name ever given it. And you are there once again, in a place whose name has gone, as you walk the dirty fog of Russell Square. In whatever cells of memory you haven’t succeeded in destroying, you will always be there, old girl. It visits you in dreams and in strange irruptions of the day, the eternal Kingstown, its unease. On your left is the coal harbour, on your right the black belfries, and the slow train is empty but for you. Through the high ivied corridors, the tunnels and cuttings, past embankments of wilderweed and overgrown gorse that nobody can be bothered to burn. And it chunters again into Glenageary station and stops with a screeching of steel on steel. He is buried in Mount Jerome, with his mother, his people. Cruel, to think of it. His body corrupting. And the house looms up at you, grey, many-windowed, asterisks of gull-shit down its half-collapsed storm porch. You think of snow falling into the sea.
You have received a telegram at the theatre. His uncle needs to speak with you. That is why you are looking at the house.
I am alone in the hallway. Dark, wainscoted walls. The pier
glass that wanted silvering is gone. In an alcove, framed in bog oak, an ancient map of Kerry. Mounted above a dresser, his violin. And there are photographs of Connemara and the Aran Islands maybe: stone-filled fields, battered thatched cabins, coracles upended on dulse-strewn strands like beached seadragons in a dream. I am not thinking about the photographs but of the eye that framed them. The photographer is always in the picture.
glass that wanted silvering is gone. In an alcove, framed in bog oak, an ancient map of Kerry. Mounted above a dresser, his violin. And there are photographs of Connemara and the Aran Islands maybe: stone-filled fields, battered thatched cabins, coracles upended on dulse-strewn strands like beached seadragons in a dream. I am not thinking about the photographs but of the eye that framed them. The photographer is always in the picture.
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