I Sing the Body Electric (11 page)

“Listen,” said his wife much later. “Listen.”

In the night, the river came through the town, the river of metal quiet now but still coming and going with its ancient smells of tidelands and dark seas of oil. Its glimmer, on the ceiling above their graveyard bed,
had the shine of small craft gliding upstream and down as their eyelids slowly, slowly shut and their breathing took on the regular sound of the motion of those tides … and then they slept.

In the first light of dawn, half the bed lay empty.

Clara sat up, almost afraid.

It was not like Charlie to be gone so early.

Then, another thing frightened her. She sat listening, not certain what had suddenly made her tremble, but before she had a chance to find out why, she heard footsteps.

They came from a long distance away and it was quite awhile before they came up the walk and up the steps and into the house. Then, silence. She heard Charlie just standing there in the parlor for a long moment, so she called out:

“Charlie? Where you been?”

He came into the room in the faint light of dawn and sat on the bed beside her, thinking about where he had been and what he had done.

“Walked a mile up the coast and back. All the way to those wood barricades where the new highway starts. Figured it was the least I could do, be part of the whole darn thing.”

“The new road's open…?”

“Open and doing business. Can't you tell?”

“Yes.” She rose slowly up in bed, tilting her head, closing her eyes for a moment, listening. “So that's it? That's what bothered me. The old road. It's
really
dead.”

They listened to the silence outside the house, the old road gone empty and dry and hollow as a river bottom in a strange season of summers that would never stop, that would go on forever. The stream had indeed moved and changed its course, its banks, its bed, during the night. Now all you could hear were the trees in the blowing wind outside the house and the birds beginning to sing their arousal choirs in the time just before the sun really made it over the hills.

“Be real quiet.”

They listened again.

And there, far away, some two hundred fifty or three hundred yards off across a meadow field, nearer the sea, they heard the old, the familiar, but the diminished sound of their river taking its new course, moving and flowing—it would never cease—through lengths of sprawling land away north and then on south through the hushed light. And beyond it, the sound of real water, the sea which might almost have drawn the river to come down along the shore…

Charlie Moore and his wife sat not moving for a moment longer, with that dim sound of the river across the fields moving and moving on.

“Fred Ferguson was there before dawn,” said Charlie in a voice that already remembered the Past. “Crowd of people. Highway officials and all. Everyone pitched in. Fred, why he just walked over and grabbed hold of one end. I look the other. We moved one of those wood barricades, together. Then we stood back … and let the cars through.”

G
ood God in heaven, what's that?”

“What's what?”

“Are you blind, man, look!”

And Garrity, elevator operator, looked out to see what the hall porter was staring at.

And in out of the Dublin morn, sweeping through the front doors of the Royal Hibernian Hotel, along the entryway and to the registry was a tall willowy man of some forty years followed by five short willowy youths of some twenty years, a burst of bird song, their hands flapping all about on the air as they passed, their eyes squinching, batting, and flickering, their mouths pursed, their brows enlightened and then dark, their color flushed and then pale, or was it both?, their voices now flawless piccolo, now flute, now melodious oboe but always tuneful. Carrying six monologues, all sprayed forth upon each other at once, in a veritable cloud of self-commiseration, peeping and twitting the discouragements of travel and the ardors of weather, the
corps de ballet
as it were flew, cascaded, flowed eloquently in a greater bloom of cologne by astonished hall porter and transfixed elevator man. They collided deliciously to a halt at the desk where the manager glanced up to be swarmed over by their music. His eyes made nice round o's with no centers in them.

“What,” whispered Garrity, “was that?”

“You may well ask,” said the porter.

At which point the elevator lights flashed and the buzzer buzzed. Garrity had to tear his eyes off the summery crowd and heft himself skyward.

“We,” said the tall slender man with a touch of gray at the temples, “should like a room, please.”

The manager remembered where he was and heard himself say, “Do you have reservations, sir?”

“Dear me, no,” said the older man as the others giggled. “We flew in unexpectedly from Taormina,” the tall man with the chiseled features and the moist flower mouth continued. “We were getting so awfully bored, after a long summer, and someone said. Let's have a complete change, let's do something wild. What? I said. Well, where's the most improbable place in the world? Let's name it and go there. Somebody said the North Pole, but that was silly. Then I cried, Ireland! Everyone fell down. When the pandemonium ceased we just scrambled for the airport. Now sunshine and Sicilian shorelines are like yesterday's lime sherbet to us, all melted to nothing. And here we are to do … something
mysterious!
”

“Mysterious?” asked the manager.

“We don't know what it is,” said the tall man. “But we shall know it when we see it, or it happens, or perhaps we shall have to make it happen, right, cohorts?”

The cohorts responded with something vaguely like tee-hee.

“Perhaps.” said the manager, with good grace, “if you gave me some idea what you're looking for in Ireland, I could point out—”

“Goodness, no,” said the tall man. “We shall just plummet forth with our intuitions scarved about our necks, taking the wind as 'twere and see what we shall tune in on. When we solve the mystery and find what we came to find, you will know of our discovery by the ululations and cries of awe and wonder emanating from our small tourist group.”

“You can say
that
again,” said the hall porter, under his breath.

“Well, comrades, let us sign in.”

The leader of the encampment reached for a scratchy hotel pen, found it filthy, and flourished forth his own absolutely pure 14-carat solid gold pen with which in an obscure but rather pretty cerise calligraphy he inscribed the name
DAVID
followed by
SNELL
followed by dash and ending with
ORKNEY
. Beneath, he added “and friends.”

The manager watched the pen, fascinated, and once more recalled his position in all this. “But, sir, I haven't said if we have space—”

“Oh, surely you must, for six miserable wanderers in sore need of respite from overfriendly airline stewardesses—one room would do it!”

“One?” said the manager, aghast.

“We wouldn't mind the crowd, would we, chums?” asked the older man, not looking at his friends.

No, they wouldn't mind.

“Well,” said the manager, uneasily fumbling at the registry. “We just happen to have two adjoining—”

“
Perfecto!
” cried David Snell-Orkney.

And the registration finished, the manager behind the desk and the
visitors from a far place stood regarding each other in a prolonged silence. At last the manager blurted. “Porter! Front! Take these gentlemen's luggage—”

But just then the hall porter ran over to look at the floor.

Where there was no luggage.

“No, no, none.” David Snell-Orkney airily waved his hand. “We travel light. We're here only for twenty-four hours, or perhaps only twelve, with a change of underwear stuffed in our overcoats. Then back to Sicily and warm twilights. If you want me to pay in advance—”

“That won't be necessary.” said the manager, handing the keys to the hall porter. “Forty-six and forty-seven, please.”

“It's done,” said the porter.

And like a collie dog silently nipping the hooves of some woolly longhaired, bleating, dumbly smiling sheep, he herded the lovely bunch toward the elevator which wafted down just at that precise moment.

At the desk, the manager's wife came up, steel-eyed behind him. “Are you mad” she whispered, wildly. “Why? Why?”

“All my life,” said the manager, half to himself, “I have wished to see not one Communist but ten close by, not two Nigerians but twenty in their skins, not three cowboy Americans but a gross fresh from the saddle. So when six hothouse roses come in a bouquet, I could not resist potting them. The Dublin winter is long, Meg; this may be the only lit fuse in the whole year. Stand by for the lovely concussion.”

“Fool.” she said.

As they watched, the elevator, freighted with hardly more than the fluff from a blown dandelion, whisked up the shaft, away.

It was exactly at high noon that a series of coincidences occurred that tottered and swerved toward the miraculous.

Now the Royal Hibernian Hotel lies half between Trinity College, if you'll excuse the mention, and St. Stephen's Green, which is more like it, and around behind is Grafton Street, where you can buy silver, glass, and linen, or pink hacking coats, boots, and caps to ride off to the goddamned hounds, or better still duck in to Heeber Finn's pub for a proper proportion of drink and talk—an hour of drink to two hours of talk is about the best prescription.

Now the boys most often seen in Finn's are these: Nolan, you know Nolan; Timulty, who could forget Timulty; Mike MaGuire, surely
everyone's
friend; then there's Hannahan, Flaherty, Kilpatrick, and. on occasion, when God seems a bit untidy and Job comes to mind, Father Liam Leary himself, who strides in like Justice and glides forth like Mercy.

Well, that's the lot, and it's high noon, and out of the Hibernian
Hotel front who should come now but Snell-Orkney and his canary five.

Which resulted in the first of a dumfounding series of confrontations.

For passing below, sore torn between the sweet shops and Heeber Finn's, was
Timulty
himself.

Timulty, as you recall, when Blight, Famine, Starvation, and other mean Horsemen drive him, works a day here or there at the post office. Now, idling along between dread employments, he smelled a smell as if the gates of Eden had swung wide again and him invited back in after a hundred million years. So Timulty looked up to see what made the wind blow out of the Garden.

And the wind, of course, was in tumult about Snell-Orkney and his uncaged pets.

“I tell you,” said Timulty, years later, “I felt my eyes start as if I'd been given a good bash on the skull. A new part ran down the center of my hair.”

Timulty, frozen to the spot, watched the Snell-Orkney delegation flow down the steps and around the corner. At which point he decided on sweeter things than candy and rushed the long way to Finn's.

At that instant, rounding the corner. Mr. David Snell-Orkney-plus-five passed a begger-lady playing a harp in the street. And there, with nothing else to do but dance the time away, was Mike MaGuire himself, flinging his feet about in a self-involved rigadoon to “Lightly o'er the Lea.” Dancing, Mike MaGuire heard a sound that was like the passing by of warm weather from the Hebrides. It was not quite a twittering nor a whirr, and it was not unlike a pet shop when the bell tinkles as you step in and a chorus of parakeets and doves start up in coos and light shrieks. But hear he did, above the sound of his own shoes and the pringle of harp. He froze in mid-jig.

As David Snell-Orkney-plus-five swept by all tropic smiled and gave him a wave.

Before he knew what he was doing, Mike waved back, then stopped and seized his wounded hand to his breast. “What the hell am I waving for?” he cried to no one. “I don't know them,
do
I?”

“Ask God for strength!” said the harpist to her harp and flung her fingers down the strings.

Drawn as by some strange new vacuum cleaner that swept all before it, Mike followed the Team down the street.

Which takes care of two senses now, the sense of smell and the use of the ears.

It was at the
next
corner that Nolan, leaving Finn's pub because of an argument with Finn himself, came around the bend fast and ran
bang into David Snell-Orkney. Both swayed and grabbed each other for support.

“Top of the afternoon!” said David Snell-Orkney.

“The Back Side of Something!” replied Nolan, and fell away, gaping to let the circus by. He had a terrible urge to rush back to Finn's. His fight with the owner of the pub was obliterated. He wished now to report upon this fell encounter with a feather duster, a Siamese cat, a spoiled Pekingese, and three others gone ghastly frail from undereating and overwashing.

The six stopped outside the pub looking up at the sign.

Ah, God, thought Nolan. They're going in. What will
come
of it? Who do I warn first? Them? Or Finn?

Then, the door opened. Finn himself looked out. Damn, thought Nolan, that spoils it! Now we won't be allowed to describe this adventure. It will be Finn this, Finn that, and shut up to us all! There was a long moment when Snell-Orkney and his cohorts looked at Finn. Finn's eyes did not fasten on them. He looked above. He looked over. He looked beyond.

But he
had
seen them, this Nolan knew. For now a lovely thing happened.

All the color went out of Finn's face.

Then an even lovelier thing happened.

All the color rushed back into Finn's face.

Why, cried Nolan to himself, he's…
blushing!

But still Finn refused to look anywhere save the sky, the lamps, the street, until Snell-Orkney trilled, “Sir, which way to St. Stephen's Green?”

“Jesus,” said Finn and turned away. “Who knows
where
they put it,
this
week!” and slammed the door.

The six went on up the street, all smiles and delight, and Nolan was all for heaving himself through the door when a worse thing happened.

Garrity, the elevator operator from the Royal Hibernian Hotel, whipped across the sidewalk from nowhere. His face ablaze with excitement, he ran first into Finn's to spread the word.

By the time Nolan was inside, and Timulty rushing in next, Garrity was all up and down the length of the bar while Finn stood behind it suffering concussions from which he had not as yet recovered.

“It's a shame you missed it!” cried Garrity to all. “I mean it was the next thing to one of them fiction-and-science fillums they show at the Gayety Cinema!”

“How do you mean?” asked Finn, shaken out of his trance.

“
Nothing
they weigh!” Garrity told them. “Lifting them in the elevator was throwing a handful of chaff up a chimney! And you should have
heard
. They're here in Ireland for…” He lowered his voice and squinched his eyes. “…for
mysterious reasons!
”

“Mysterious!” Everyone leaned in at him.

“They'll put no name to it, but, mark my declaration, they're up to no good! Have you ever seen the like?”

“Not since the great fire at the convent,” said Finn. “I—”

But the word “convent” seemed one more magic touch. The doors sprang wide at this. Father Leary entered in reverse. That is to say he backed into the pub one hand to his cheek as if the Fates had dealt him a proper blow unbewares.

Reading the look of his spine, the men shoved their noses in their drinks until such time as the father had put a bit of the brew into himself, still staring as if the door were the gates of Hell ajar.

“Beyond,” said the father, at last, “not two minutes gone, I saw a sight as would be hard to credit. In all the days of her collecting up the grievances of the world, has Ireland indeed gone mad?”

Finn refilled the priest's glass. “Was you standing in the blast of
The Invaders from the Planet Venus
, Father?”

“Have you seen them, then, Finn?” the father said.

“Yes, and do you guess them bad, your Holiness?”

“It's not so much bad or good as strange and
outré
, Finn, and words like rococo, I should guess, and baroque if you go with my drift?”

“I lie easy in the tide, sir.”

“When last seen, where heading?” asked Timulty.

“On the edge of the Green,” said the priest. “You don't imagine there'll be a bacchanal in the park now?”

“The weather won't allow, beg your pardon, Father,” said Nolan, “but it strikes me, instead of standing with the gab in our mouth we should be out on the spy—”

“You move against my ethics,” said the priest.

“A drowning man clutches at anything,” said Nolan, “and ethics may drown with him if
that's
what he grabs instead of a lifebelt.”