Martin Sloane (30 page)

There was that door on Chapman, and the door on Service Road. The door on the house on St. Mary’s Terrace and the one on Prospect Hill. The door on Havelock, the only home I had now. The feeling that I could walk through any of them and not know which house I would find myself in.

Spheres within spheres, some part of me still curled up in his palm at the cold, dark centre of a vestigial universe.

Gotta go.

I walked back to Avalon House. I’d been gone for more than two hours, and when I came though the door of the inn, Molly was sitting in their coffee shop, reading the same newspaper I’d read over my slice of pie. An empty glass was pushed off to the side. Her colour was better, and when I got closer to her, she smelled of flowers.

“The champions of chess are converging on Galway,” she said. Her tone was brighter now. “We were lucky to get a room.”

“Did you sleep?”

“A little. No dreams.” She’d changed again, into the sleeveless number I’d first seen her wear in the window of the Spa Hotel. She was wearing it over bluejeans with a crease down to the knee.

“Where do you get your clothes, Molly?”

She looked down at herself. “All over,” she said. “Macy’s, Old Navy. I got this in the bin at Loehmann’s, though.” She fingered the sweater. “I can get you one.”

“Maybe,” I said. “I’m not sure it’d look as good on me.”

My compliment brought a look of worry to her face. “Where did you go?” she said.

“I went for a walk and looked around. I had a piece of pie in a nice little café near the park.”

“Is it like St. Stephen’s?”

“No,” I said. “Smaller.” I tried to keep a light tone in my voice, but my heart was getting heavy, trying to avoid its destination. “You could walk from one end of town to the other in fifteen minutes, it feels.” I sat down across from her. “I think we should go back to the room for a little bit.”

“I’m fine now.”

“I thought we could talk up there.”

Her face became still.

“I’ve been trying to think about what’s the best thing for us to do here,” I said. “I was walking around the town, thinking.”

“You just told me that,” she said.

“Yes.” I brought the train ticket out of my coat pocket and unfolded it. I pushed it across the table to her.

“You’re leaving?” She looked up at me with complete bewilderment. “You’re this close and you’re going to turn around and go?”

“No,” I said. “Not me.” I waited for my words to come clear. She looked back down at the ticket and saw her name there. Then she laughed.

“I’m not leaving now.”

“You are Molly. I understand why you think you should be a part of this, but you shouldn’t be.”

She folded up the train ticket and pushed it back into the middle of the table between us. “Were you waiting the whole time to do this?”

“No.”

“Does it feel good?”

“What have I got to be angry at you for, Molly? You haven’t done anything wrong.”

“If I haven’t done anything wrong, then why ask me to leave?”

“Because you think you can fix what went wrong in my life.”

“It went wrong in mine too whether or not you want to admit it. So I have a right to see this through.”

“No,” I said, angrily. “You don’t belong in this part of my life, Molly, it doesn’t matter how much you wish it on yourself. It’s not right for you to be here. I don’t even think it’s
safe
for you to be here.”

“Hah,” she said, her mouth turned down. “You’ll say anything now.”

“What if after all this time, you weren’t able to do for me what you’d come here to do?”

“At least I’d know I’d tried.”

“Yes,” I said. “You
did
, Molly. And it’s more than anyone’s ever done for me.” I put the ticket in her hand. “Now trust me to do something for you, please. I haven’t been a friend to you
until
now.” She was slowly shaking her head. “This comes out of love,” I said. “And gratitude, Molly. But you do
have
to go.”

Finally tears poured from her eyes. She looked beautiful like this, fixed in an attitude of terror and courage, and I wanted to move around to her side of the table and hold her. But like all the people in her life who’d known they had to turn her out, I hardened my heart enough to remain still. She took the ticket.

“I’ll get you packed,” I said, and I got up from the table.

In the room, I took down the things she’d hung up in the closet, folded them, and put them in the suitcase. Then I dropped the counterfeited Pond in there among her things, emblem of our friendship with its missing stars, its incomplete atonements. I looked at my watch: her train was to leave in less than an hour. I closed the suitcase and stood it by the door.

Outside, students bicycled past the windows of the inn, under the streetlamps, many with their leather satchels slung in their baskets. Girls with cotton skirts, boys with gleaming black shoes. I’d be home in a day, I realized, and the night after that, I’d be seeing my own students again. They wouldn’t know where I’d been, what I’d done, and I’d seem the same to them. The stillness, the completeness of our elders. Not knowing the incipient unravelling that continues, that gets contained only by submission to it, strangely enough. We were due to move on to Wordsworth, but now I thought I would backtrack and bring Milton into the conversation. Milton, my oldest love, who I’d taught at Indiana, but in Toronto, the evening-school bosses thought Milton too dense, too fundamentalist for the liberal arts. And who could handle
Paradise Lost
after a long day manning the telephones somewhere? But no, it would be Milton, Milton with his faith, Milton, damned to knowledge but still hanging on to God in the face of all the evil he himself had proved compelling. Staying the hopeless course.

But I also wanted to talk to them about the daughters too. His diligent daughters who stayed at his side through his blindness and wrote down the poem as it unfurled in his mind, night by night. Who withstood his hoarse rages and abuse and saw him through the spectacle of his love and his devotion to art. These women who history then forgot, perhaps ruined, although they are woven into the poem —
heaven’s last best gift
— the Eves in his lost garden. Poetry doesn’t exist in a realm outside of people, I’ll say to my students. Art is not separate from lives. The love of those girls is also the body of their father’s poetry and all art instructs us how to love. So pay attention to that, I’ll say to them.

There was a click behind me, the door handle turning. I watched her come into the room. She was calmer now, her eyes clearer. I sat in the chair I’d earlier folded her clothes over. She looked in the closet, and then closed it, and saw her suitcase by the door. “Have you ever felt like you didn’t know what the world was trying to tell you?”

“I’ve never thought it was talking to me.”

“You know what I mean.”

“No, I don’t,” I said. “I don’t think everything comes together with me as part of the plan. I did as a child, but children
should
believe that.”

She listened, sitting on the bed, bent over on her elbows. Her forearms lay crossed in her lap. “That scares me if it’s true.”

“Why shouldn’t it be, true, Molly? It doesn’t mean you’re nothing. It just means you’re on your own.”

“And you think that’s a
good
thing?”

“No,” I said. “It’s the only thing. So we might as well get used to it.”

She shook her head, but whatever she was thinking, she decided not to speak it. After a moment, she got up with a heavy breath, and stood with her arms limp by her sides. “When’s this train?”

“It goes every hour.” She looked at her watch. “When will you go back to New York?” I said.

“I can go whenever I want.” She leaned down to pick up her suitcase and I got up from the chair. We stood, a few feet between us, our bodies half turned toward each other. “If the thing about that Bible was a lie,” she said, “maybe Martin was never truthful.”

“What he told you about the Clonmacnoise Bible wasn’t a lie, Molly. It was a story. And it was true to him. That would have been another thing he would have been happy for you to take the way it was intended.”

“Will you believe what he tells you now?”

“I already believe it.” She looked up at me, uncomprehending. I held my hand out to her.

XIII.

GRAND CENTRAL, 1955. 12" X 14" X 2" BOX CONSTRUCTION. WOOD AND GLASS WITH FABRIC AND PAPER. BELIEVED DESTROYED. A CINEMA AUDITORIUM IN WHICH THE CURTAINS ARE PULLED BACK TO REVEAL A NIGHT SKY WITH THE CONSTELLATION CYGNUS MISSING.

THEY LASTED TWO MORE YEARS. THEIR HEARTS SOFTENED
a little toward the place, but it never yielded to them. Colin Sloane hired a felt cutter in the fall of 1938, just as the hints of war were building over Europe. Business was good; enough to keep them all going.

In the spring of 1939, the Spanish Civil War ended and Hitler annexed Slovakia. The Cadburys moved from number 4 St. Mary’s Terrace to a nicer address in Salthill, and Hannah Mosher took ill in Montreal. Martin had never seen a telegram before — a man came to the door with a yellow sheet of paper on which were glued strips of words. It said,
MOTHER ILL STOP WIRING MONEY FOR PASSAGE STOP FATHER
. He watched his mother read the message and her face lifted and she was staring, her eyes white like the boy’s in the story William had once told him.

That night she explained to him and Theresa that she had to go overseas. She didn’t know how long she would be gone, but she would write to them all, and before long they would all be together again. Their father sat half in the dark, folding the telegram into smaller and smaller squares.

He’s finally got his revenge, he said. Your father. Duped, he was, now he’s getting you to take the rest of the trip.

Don’t be morbid, Colin. Are you saying he’s lying about my mother?

Not lying, but it’s convenient, isn’t it. See now, his daughter’s an Irishwoman married to a Mick, he’ll do anything to turn back the clock. She went to the stairs and motioned for him to come, but he stayed rooted to his chair, disconsolate, and it frightened them to see him that way. No need to have this talk in private, Addie. The kids should know how ashamed your father is.

My father loves me, and he loves his grandchildren as well as their father. So don’t be twisting this into something you can’t twist back. Honestly, Colin, and with my mother sick enough that my father would spend the money on a telegram! You should know to think of something more than yourself!

For the love of God! he said. If she died without warning, you’d have no choice.

That would suit you well, wouldn’t it? Well, I have a choice, and I’m going. And if you’re finished talking your nonsense, I’ll be upstairs to pack.

She turned her back to him and proceeded up the stairs, and he rose and bellowed behind her: Just when we’re getting settled, aye! This! A curse on us all!

They’d never heard him raise his voice before, and Martin saw his face was red, and his cheeks were shaking. This is all my fault, he said miserably.

Theresa edged her way around her father’s paralyzed form and went up the stairs behind her mother. When his father, Martin followed her up, giving a wide berth to the throbbing, mussed head of his father. Upstairs, the two of them watched their mother pack, their sullen faces hovering behind the open lid of the case. She folded her silk bed-gown into a gleaming square that smelled of spice and lavender, and she tucked it into the corner. Martin put his hand on it; its formlessness was disheartening, knowing it would cover the miles of darkened sea with his mother’s body in it, but him back on another coast.

Are you worried about the boat? she asked him.

No, he said. You’ll be fine, I know. You almost went the first time. When you met Dad. Good things happen on boats.

Will you have enough to eat? asked Theresa.

They have food for the whole journey. She closed the lid and sat beside Martin and touched his hair. It was unbearable, as their father had said, that just as their lives were settling such an upset would occur.

I want you to be patient and treat your father well. He’ll recover from his bad mood. No matter what happens for good or bad, family is all we have. Do you understand? She turned to each of them to receive their acknowledgements.

Martin knew that he would do anything for her then, to save her, to take away the pain that she was surely feeling for her own mother. When he’d imagined how his death would have saved the family, it was the image of his mother’s grief as he was buried that ultimately made him want to live, even if it destroyed all their other dreams. Right then he knew that everything that was chosen in life created a single path and destroyed all the alternatives, and that meant, probably, that you could not choose how to live and also be happy. It was true here: his mother could not choose to remain in Galway and so not be with her mother. Nor could she go to her and also be spared the anguish of watching her die and upsetting her family. There was no choice that did not amplify pain elsewhere; it was a cruel balance. It could only and ever be so, or it would not be at all.

She leaned down and kissed him on the downy hair at his crown, and pulled Theresa in toward her as well. His sister was crying, silently tears went down her face, even though her expression was still. Then she placed Theresa’s hand over his, and without words they both knew any feud between them was to end here. As they left her, they passed their father in the hall, his face ashen and knowing.

The next day, their mother climbed the gangplank and disappeared into the giant ship. It turned around in the bay and pointed out toward the sun, then put on steam and began to get smaller. The ocean was huge, and dark, and cold. Martin tried not to think about it.

Afterwards, they did their best to return to normal life, but normal life had been suspended. The house was eerily silent without her, and they all went about their various tasks in the sun-starved house quietly, as if they were in mourning and risked offending the gravity of their circumstance. They saw that their father had begun talking to himself — at least it seemed that way with his lips moving — and when he sometimes gave breath to the shapes of words, they heard bits of their mother’s instructions to him:
the lever,
or
Wednesdays
. It was comforting to hear her channelled through him, and even moreso when he attributed an action to her, such as when he added an egg to chopped steak, or squeezed a lemon over half a cantaloupe to help it keep its colour in the icebox.