I Sing the Body Electric (41 page)

“It's a matter of timing, too,” said the lawyer. “Ten years ago you wouldn't have got the death penalty. Ten years from now you wouldn't, either. But they had to have an object case, a whipping boy. The use of marionettes has grown so in the last year it's fantastic. The public must be scared out of it, and scared badly. God knows where it would all wind up if it went on. There's the spiritual side of it, too, where does life begin or end? are the robots alive or dead? More than one church has been split up the seams on the question. If they aren't alive, they're the next thing to it; they react, they even think. You know the ‘live robot' law that was passed two months ago; you come under that. Just bad timing, is all, bad timing.”

“The government's right. I see that now,” said George Hill.

“I'm glad you understand the attitude of the law.”

“Yes. After all, they can't let murder be legal. Even if it's done with machines and telepathy and wax. They'd be hypocrites to let me get away with my crime. For it
was
a crime. I've felt guilty about it ever since. I've felt the need of punishment. Isn't that odd? That's how society gets to you. It makes you feel guilty even when you see no reason to be....”

“I have to go now. Is there anything you want?”

“Nothing, thanks.”

“Good-bye then, Mr. Hill.”

The door shut.

George Hill stood up on the chair, his hands twisting together, wet, outside the window bars. A red light burned in the wall suddenly. A voice came over the audio: “Mr. Hill, your wife is here to see you.”

He gripped the bars.

She's dead, he thought.

“Mr. Hill?” asked the voice.

“She's dead. I killed her.”

“Your wife is waiting in the anteroom, will you see her?”

“I saw her fall, I shot her, I saw her fall dead!”

“Mr. Hill, do you hear me?”

“Yes!” he shouted, pounding at the wall with his fists. “I hear you. I hear you! She's dead, she's dead, can't she let me be! I killed her, I won't see her, she's dead!”

A pause. “Very well, Mr. Hill,” murmured the voice.

The red light winked off.

Lightning flashed through the sky and lit his face. He pressed his hot cheeks to the cold bars and waited, while the rain fell. After a long time, a door opened somewhere onto the street and he saw two caped figures emerge from the prison office below. They paused under an arc light and glanced up.

It was Katie. And beside her, Leonard Phelps.

“Katie!”

Her face turned away. The man took her arm. They hurried across the avenue in the black rain and got into a low car.

“Katie!” He wrenched at the bars. He screamed and beat and pulled at the concrete ledge. “She's alive! Guard! Guard! I saw her! She's not dead, I didn't kill her, now you can let me out! I didn't murder anyone, it's all a joke, a mistake, I saw her, I saw her! Katie, come back, tell them, Katie, say you're alive! Katie!”

The guards came running.

“You can't kill me! I didn't do anything! Katie's alive, I saw her!”

“We saw her, too, sir.”

“But let me free, then! Let me free!” It was insane. He choked and almost fell.

“We've been through all that, sir, at the trial.”

“It's not fair!” He leaped up and clawed at the window, bellowing.

The car drove away, Katie and Leonard inside it. Drove away to Paris
and Athens and Venice and London next spring and Stockholm next summer and Vienna in the fall.

“Katie, come back, you can't
do
this to me!”

The red taillight of the car dwindled in the cold rain. Behind him, the guards moved forward to take hold of him while he screamed.

S
unday in Dublin.

The words are Doom itself.

Sunday in Dublin.

Drop such words from a cliff and they never strike bottom. They just fall through emptiness toward five in the gray afternoon.

Sunday in Dublin. How to get through it somehow.

Sound the funeral bells. Yank the covers up over your ears. Hear the hiss of the black feathered wreath as it rustles, hung on your silent door. Listen to those empty streets below your hotel room waiting to gulp you if you venture forth before noon. Feel the mist sliding its wet flannel tongue under the window ledges, licking hotel roofs, its great bulk dripping of ennui.

Sunday, I thought. Dublin. The pubs shut tight save for a fleeting hour. The cinemas sold out two or three weeks in advance. Nothing to do but perhaps go stare at the uriny lions at the Phoenix Park Zoo, at the vultures looking like they'd fallen, covered with glue, into the rag-pickers' bin. Wander by the River Liffey, see the fog-colored waters. Wander in the alleys, see the Liffey-colored skies.

No, I thought wildly, stay in bed, wake me at sunset, feed me high tea, tuck me in again, good night, all!

But I staggered up, a hero, under the crashing blow of Sunday, shaved, and in a faint panic at noon considered the day ahead from the corner of my eye. There it lay, a deserted corridor of hours, colored like the upper side of my tongue on a dim morn. Even God must be bored with days like this, in northern lands. I could not resist thinking of Sicily, where any Sunday is a fete in regalia, a celebratory fireworks parade as springtime flocks of chickens and humans strut and pringle the warm pancake-batter alleys, waving their combs, their hands, their feet, tilting their sun-blazed eyes, while music in free gifts leaps or is thrown from each never-shut window.

But Dublin! Dublin! Ah, you great dead brute of a city! I thought, peering from my window at the snowed-on, sooted-over corpse. Here are two coins for your eyes!

Then I opened the door and stepped out into all of that criminal Sunday which awaited only me.

I shut another door. I stood in the deep silence of a Sabbath pub. I moved noiselessly to whisper for the best drink and stood a long while nursing my soul. Nearby, an old man was similarly engaged in finding the pattern of his life in the depths of his glass. Ten minutes must have passed, when, very slowly, the old man raised his head to stare deep beyond the fly specks on the mirror, beyond me, beyond himself.

“What have I done,” he mourned, “for a single mortal soul this day? Nothing! And that's why I feel so terrible destroyed.”

I waited.

“The older I get,” said the man, “the less I do for people. The less I do, the more I feel a prisoner at the bar. Smash and grab, that's me!”

“Well—” said I.

“No!” cried the old man. “It's an awesome responsibility when the world runs to hand you things. For an instance: sunsets. Everything pink and gold, looking like those melons they ship up from Spain. That's a gift, ain't it?”

“It is.”

“Well, who do you thank for sunsets? And don't drag the Lord in the bar, now! Any remarks to Him are too quiet. I mean someone to grab and slap their back and say thanks for the fine early light this morn, boyo, or, much obliged for the look of them damn wee flowers by the road this day, and the grass laying about in the wind. Those are gifts, too, who'll deny it?”

“Not me,” I said.

“Have you ever waked middle of the night and felt summer coming on for the first time, through the window, after the long cold? Did you shake your wife and tell her your gratitude? No, you lay there, a clod, chortling to yourself alone, you and the new weather! Do you see the pattern I'm at, now?”

“Clearly,” I said.

“Then ain't you horribly guilty, yourself? Don't the burden make you hunchback? All the lovely things you got from life and no penny down? Ain't they hid in your dark flesh somewhere, lighting up your soul, them fine summers and easy falls, or maybe just the clean taste of stout here, all gifts, and you feeling the fool to go thank any mortal man for your fortune. What befalls chaps like us, I ask, who coin up all their gratitude for a lifetime, and spend none of it, misers that we be? One day, don't
we crack down the beam and show the dry rot? Some night, don't we smother?”

“I never thought…”

“Think, man!” he cried. “Before it's too late. You're American, ain't you, and young? Got the same natural gifts as me? But for lack of humbly thanking someone somewhere somehow you're getting round in the shoulder and short in the breath. Act, man, before you're the walking dead!”

With this he lapsed quietly into the final half of his reverie, with the Guinness lapping a soft lace mustache slowly along his upper lip.

I walked from the pub into the Sunday weather.

I stood looking at the gray stone streets and the gray stone clouds, watching the frozen people trudge by exhaling gray funeral plumes from their wintry mouths, dressed in their smoke-colored suits and soot-black coats, and I felt the white grow out in my hair.

Days like this, I thought, all the things you never did catch up with you, unravel your laces, itch your beard. God help any man who hasn't paid his debts this day.

Drearily, I turned like a weathercock in a slow wind, started my remote feet back toward the hotel.

Right then, it happened.

I stopped. I stood very still. I listened.

For it seemed the wind had shifted and now blew from the west country and brought with it a prickling and tingling: the strum of a harp.

“Well,” I whispered.

As if a cork had been pulled, all the heavy gray sea waters vanished roaring down a hole in my shoe; I felt my sadness go.

And around the corner I went.

And there sat a little woman, not half so big as her harp, her hands held out in the shivering strings like a child feeling a fine clear rain.

The harp threads flurried; the sounds dissolved like shudders of disturbed water nudging a shore. “Danny Boy” leaped out of the harp. “Wearin' of the Green” sprang after, full-clothed. Then “Limerick Is My Town, Sean Liam Is My Name” and “The Loudest Wake That Ever Was.” The harp sound was the kind of thing you feel when champagne, poured in a full big glass, prickles your eyelids, sprays soft on your cheeks.

My mouth was pinned high at both corners. Spanish oranges bloomed in my cheeks. My breath fifed my nostrils. My feet minced, hidden, a secret dancing in my motionless shoes.

The harp played “Yankee Doodle.”

Had the lady seen me stand near with my idiot fever? No, I thought, coincidence.

And then I turned sad again.

For look, I thought, she doesn't see her harp. She doesn't hear her music!

True. Her hands, all alone, jumped and frolicked on the air, picked and pringled the strings, two ancient spiders busy at webs quickly built, then, torn by wind, rebuilt. She let her fingers play abandoned, to themselves, while her face turned this way and that, as if she lived in a nearby house and need only glance out on occasion to see her hands had come to no harm.

“Ah…” My soul sighed in me.

Then:

Here's your chance! I almost shouted. Good God, of course!

But I held to myself and let her reap out the last full falling sheaves of “Yankee Doodle.”

Then, heartbeat in throat, I said:

“You play beautifully.”

One hundred pounds melted from my body.

The woman nodded and began “Summer on the Shore,” her fingers weaving mantillas from mere breath.

“You play very beautifully indeed,” I said.

Another seventy pounds fell from my limbs.

“When you play forty years,” she said, “you don't notice.”

“You play well enough to be in a theater.”

“Be off with you!” Two sparrows pecked in the shuttling loom. “Why should I think of orchestras and bands?”

“It's indoors work,” I said.

“My father,” she said, while her hands went away and returned, “made this harp, played it fine, taught me how. God's sake, he said, keep out from under roofs!”

The old woman blinked, remembering. “Play out back, in front, around the sides of theaters, Da said, but don't play in where the music gets snuffed. Might as well harp in a coffin!”

“Doesn't this rain hurt your instrument?”

“It's inside places hurt harps with heat and steam, Da said. Keep it out, let it breathe, take on fine tones and timbres from the air. Besides, Da said, when people buy tickets, each thinks it's in him to yell if you don't play up, down, sideways, for him alone. Shy off from that, Da said; they'll call you handsome one year, brute the next. Get where they'll pass on by; if they like your song—hurrah! Those that don't will run from your life. That way, girl, you'll meet just those who lean from natural bent in your direction. Why closet yourself with demon fiends when you can live in the streets' fresh wind with abiding angels? But I
do
go on. Ah, now, why?”

She peered at me for the first time, like someone come from a dark room, squinting.

“Who are you?” she asked. “You set my tongue loose! What're you up to?”

“Up to no good until a minute ago when I came around this corner,” I said. “Ready to knock over Nelson's pillar. Ready to pick a theater queue and brawl along it, half weeping and half blasphemous…”

“I don't see you doing it.” Her hands wove out another yard of song. “What changed your mind?”

“You,” I said.

I might have fired a cannon in her face.

“Me?” she said.

“You picked the day up off the stones, gave it a whack, set it running with a yell again.”

“
I
did that?”

For the first time, I heard a few notes missing from the tune.

“Or, if you like, those hands of yours that go about their work without your knowing.”

“The clothes must be washed, so you wash them.”

I felt the iron weights gather in my limbs.

“Don't!” I said. “Why should we, coming by, be happy with this thing, and not you?”

She cocked her head; her hands moved slower still.

“And why should you bother with the likes of
me?
”

I stood before her, and could I tell what the man told me in the lulling quiet of Dooley's Pub? Could I mention the hill of beauty that had risen to fill my soul through a lifetime, and myself with a toy sand-shovel doling it back to the world in dribs and drabs? Should I list all my debts to people on stages and silver screens who made me laugh or cry or just come alive, but no one in the dark theater to turn to and dare shout, “If you ever need help, I'm your friend!” Should I recall for her the man on a bus ten years before who chuckled so easy and light from the last seat that the sound of him melted everyone else to laughing warm and rollicking off out the doors, but with no one brave enough to pause and touch the man's arm and say, “Oh, man, you've favored us this night; Lord bless you!” Could I tell how she was just one part of a great account long owed and due? No, none of this could I tell. So I put it this way:

“Imagine something.”

“I'm ready,” she said.

“Imagine you're an American article writer, looking for material, far from home, wife, children, friends, in a hard winter, in a cheerless hotel, on a bad gray day with naught but broken glass, chewed tobacco, and
sooty snow in your soul. Imagine you're walking in the damned winter streets and turn a corner, and there's this little woman with a golden harp and everything she plays is another season, autumn, spring, summer, coming, going in a free-for-all. And the ice melts, the fog lifts, the wind burns with June, and ten years shuck off your life. Imagine, if you please.”

She stopped her tune.

She was shocked at the sudden silence.

“You
are
daft,” she said.

“Imagine you're me,” I said. “Going back to my hotel now. And on my way I'd like to hear anything, anything at all. Play. And when you play, walk off around the corner and listen.”

She put her hands to the strings and paused, working her mouth. I waited. At last she sighed, she moaned. Then suddenly she cried:

“Go on!”

“What…?”

“You've made me all thumbs! Look! You've spoilt it!”

“I just wanted to thank—”

“—me behind!” she cried. “What a clod, what a brute! Mind your business! Do your work! Let be, man! Ah, these poor fingers, ruint, ruint!”

She stared at them and at me with a terrible glaring fixity.

“Get!” she shouted.

I ran around the corner in despair.

There! I thought, you've done it! really done it! By thanks destroyed, that's her story. And yours, too, you must live with it! Fool, why didn't you keep your mouth shut?

I sank, I leaned, against a building. A minute must have ticked by.

Please, woman, I thought, come on. Play. Not for me. Play for yourself. Forget what I said!
Please
.

I heard a few faint, tentative harp whispers.

Another pause.

Then, when the wind blew again, it brought the sound of her very slow playing.

The song was an old one, and I knew the words. I said them to myself.

Yes, I thought, go on.