On Canaan's Side (18 page)

His new plan was to drive me up to Washington, where his real sister lived.

‘Why would your sister be happy to see a stranger with a newborn baby?’

‘She’s a saint,’ he said. ‘I’ve been suffering from her saintliness all my life.’

When Ed was strong enough, he was to fetch me from the hospital in his automobile, just as family might.

The appointed day came, and I wrapped Ed in his blanket, and fetched on what finery I could muster of my own. I kissed some of the other women and said goodbye and even thanked the nuns. I stepped out into the winter air and the cold of the night gave me a fright. It was a heavy, damp cold, that had come up from the lake. There was a powdery snow blowing about and everything was eerie and strange. It was a shock to hear again the huge surging movement of the city. I could see automobiles pouring in great black snakes on the distant roads along the lake. I went on down the granite steps, afraid of the frost and the approaching darkness, one arm clutching Ed. The cold had already laid a tiny rheum of ice on his face, deep though it was in the blanket.

I stood out on the sidewalk on weakened legs and waited for Mike. Good as his word, it wasn’t too long before he pulled into the kerb. I thought I recognised the automobile.

‘Get in, Lilly,’ he said, leaning over and pushing the passenger door open, ‘for the love of God. It’s warm in here.’

‘Thank you, Mike, thank you. Is this Joe’s car?’ I said, settling in, gratefully. I felt Ed’s tiny self stirring in the blanket. At least I hadn’t killed him.

‘It is. I bought it off the pound for a couple of dollars. He left it parked down by the railway station. I thought, I’ll buy it, and give it back to him if he turns up.’

‘You weren’t able to trace him so?’

‘Not a sign of him. All I can say, he is somewhere in America. I guess he changed his name again. Who knows?’

Then Ed woke up properly and started to cry for milk. I put his tiny mouth to my breast.

‘Okay,’ said Mike, embarrassed as hell, but putting up with it. ‘Okay, okay. Washington, DC. Here we come.’

Mr Dillinger did come after all. I hadn’t been expecting anyone. I had seen no one for a couple of days, and thought that was right and proper. Sympathy has its term. They had done their duty, and a thousand times more. But he had been in New York, he said, attending to his new book. He said he was very excited about it, and also full of dread. He laughed heartily at his own two-headed self.

It was already dark when he arrived. There was a bird, most likely a marsh owl, calling out on the potato fields somewhere. I answered the door to him and we stood in the salty night air and listened to it. Mr Dillinger has travelled everywhere on the earth by all accounts. There is hardly a valley he has not peeked into, hardly a desert he has not endured. But tonight on the porch he declared this spot of God’s earth – whether he meant my house or the Hamptons in general, I could not tell – balanced in that moment in a state of earthly perfection. I asked him did he think it was ‘unobjectionable’. He laughed at the odd word, and said yes, that expressed it perfectly.

Then he moved into the strange gear of condolence. His body hunched, and he took one of my hands in his big hands. His long face, like a challenging sheer rock, pitted and lined, seemed to narrow further, and he leaned in.

‘I would be honoured if you would allow me to dedicate my new book to the memory of Bill. Do you think that would be possible? I know it is a big thing to ask. I would just put
In memoriam W.B.
’

‘Put William Dunne Kinderman Bere,’ I said, ‘put his full name.’

‘Will I? Then I will. I will do so. I will do so.’

I was tearful as I brought him inside, but the hall was dark and I could conceal my tears. I sat him down as always, and made tea, as always, though it was getting so late. My brain was rushing with gratitude, and though Mr Dillinger could not know it, a doubt came into my mind for the first time.

I had acquired great strength, I suspected, from my resolve not to live on. Mr Dillinger had shown me an example of the enormous effect of courtesy brought to the act of remembrance. Suddenly I was wavering. Now, sitting here, writing this out, I am not so sure. But for those moments he had brought me back to the pact we make with life. That we will see it through and live it according to the length of time bestowed on us. The gift of life, oftentimes so difficult to accept, the horse whose teeth we are so often inclined to inspect.

Then, his great action done, he relaxed. His very bones seemed to soften and he lay back in the chair. There was an old song that used to be sung by my brother Willie, called ‘The Spanish Lady’. In it there’s a line sung by the man in the song, who has told us about the great beauty of the Spanish lady, a harlot in Dublin, years before. And now, he says, ‘age has laid her hand upon me’. Age has not laid her hand on Mr Dillinger.

Willie sang that very song at a singing competition organised by the Capuchin Friars down by the river Liffey. Luckily the song is so mysteriously worded that an innocent listener would never know the poor Spanish lady was a harlot. He had a heart-rending voice, and even when he was only seven and did not know what the words of a song meant one way or another, could make people cry with his singing.
Who should I see but the Spanish lady, washing her feet by candlelight?

But Mr Dillinger was telling me a story about his days in China as a young man. It was his first voyage out of America, and he had acquired a great wish to see Peking and the Great Wall. He received permission to do so only after an enormous effort. In Peking he met a young man who came from northern China. Mr Dillinger struck up a friendship and was asked if he might not like to journey home with the young man. It was a part of China apparently that had not seen a Western person in two generations. They boarded a rackety old train dating from colonial times, belching great plumes of steam. On the way he was obliged to eat from the stalls on station platforms, cooked insects, scorpions and the like, which Mr Dillinger found delicious, if a little numbing on the tongue afterwards. With great difficulty the young man explained to him that he was not meant to eat the tail. Mr Dillinger became ill, and retreated to the primitive lavatory on the train, with that hopeless sickness that descends when the body has been poisoned. As he strained and despaired, cursing his wish to see China, he became dimly aware of a small screeching. His bowels loosened, exploded, but relief was his. When he opened the door, there was a tiny woman, screaming at him, tinily. He had been defecating while they stood at a station, a terrible sin. He felt the deepest shame.

When they reached the home of the young man, he was heartily welcomed. The young man’s family stood around him, and touched Mr Dillinger’s face, and climbed up nearer him on boxes, trying to match his great height. He was given the best bed in the house, and he was feeling fine again. How extraordinary to be in such a place, he thought. In a wooden house, in a wooded valley of almost violent green, heaped up to the very heavens. It was beautiful, austere, and silent. Then his door opened and a woman came in, the grandmother of the young man. It was dark in the room and he could barely see her. She was talking in Chinese, and gave him a little box, and was gesturing to him to eat, but Mr Dillinger didn’t dare do so, because of his recent illness. The old lady went away very disgruntled. In the morning he went out into the daylight with the little box, and looked in. It was a white moth with its wings removed, still alive, a great delicacy, the young man said, and a great honour to be offered it. He really should have taken the risk of eating it, the young man said. Again, great shame.

Here Mr Dillinger stopped. He smiled a rather private smile in the gloom of the kitchen, perhaps a gloom equal to that vanished Chinese gloom.

‘Sometimes,’ he said, as if this were the moral of his story, ‘it is dangerous to be honoured.’

I
t’s nearly two weeks since Bill was buried, according to Mr Eugenides’ calendar. Every Easter he hands them out.
Vangelis Eugenides, prop.
With pictures in it of the islands, Paros, Naxos, Sifnos – you can sail among the islands all year, in Mr Eugenides’ calendar. His own home town, not very beautiful to the stranger’s eye, and on the mainland, always gets April, when, he says, he misses his homeland most. Then he is thinking of the wild flowers lining the stony ways.

I had a good thought this morning about Mr Nolan, I must guard against that. It is something to do with the two weeks. I have been making an effort not to think about him, to banish him. I have refused to mourn him in any way. I have not wanted anyone to mention him to me, especially Mrs Wolohan, who probably thinks I am doubly bereft, why would she not? But I was suddenly sorry he was gone. A simple emotion, like a dog might have. There was a huge wall built against feeling that, but I felt it. I was thinking of the first time I met him, in the house where he died, a man in his late fifties, smoking a short slim cheroot, with his hair still brown, more or less, but shaved tight, like a military man. I thought he might have been somewhere, Korea maybe. He looked like he had come in a long way, from a war or a wilderness anyhow. With his boxes and books and gun-cases, all more or less as he had put them the day he had moved in, and never moved or improved as far as I ever saw. Sitting in his canvas chair, properly a beach chair of some sort, looking very serious. Mr Wolohan had sent me over to him, I had to search for the house among the spread of small dwellings along the Sag Turnpike, where many of the gardeners and other men offering labouring services lived. It was to tell him he would be starting Monday. A vanished Monday in the lost history of Mr Nolan in his prime.

He was very startled to see me, I thought. I had knocked on his porch door, but hearing no answer, ventured in. The old cream paint was peeling off the wooden-panelled walls. There wasn’t a picture hanging in the place, nothing.

‘Oh, thank you,’ he said, when I told him why I had come. I believe he had offered himself for work a few weeks before, but that place was already taken by Mr Cuffee, the Shinnecock man. But Mr Cuffee had gone off, taking a violent dislike to the large new mowing machine, which he deemed ‘no damn good’. So now the Wolohans did need a man after all, to follow the mower around their acres of grass, and a thousand other tasks. ‘I was just wondering, did I need to be thinking of moving on.’

In those days it was said work was more plentiful, but work always needs to be gone looked for, no matter what they say.

‘I’m really glad,’ he said. ‘I guess you work there in the house?’

‘I cook for the Wolohans,’ I said.

‘And I bet you’re a fine cook.’

‘Not so bad,’ I said.

‘You an Irish woman?’ he said. ‘Just going by the accent?’

‘Oh, yes,’ I said, ‘long ago. Long, long ago.’

‘I know,’ he said. ‘Tennessee myself, but – you know. Nolan. Inishmore, my grandpa was from there. I couldn’t say I’m just certain where that is. Ireland somewhere.’

‘You can come Monday, anyhow. Grass is coming up round our ears.’

‘You tell Mr Wolohan I’ll be there, bright early. Really good to meet you, ma’am.’

‘That’s all right,’ I said.

So I was remembering that. Nothing really, chit-chat, although vital to Mr Nolan’s well-being, or so I imagined at the time. It is a nice task to go over to someone and tell them they have a job. Work is the oil of the soul.

We ride to our doom, like the cowboys, we surely do. But not that time.

‘This is my sister Maria, the saint,’ said Mike, when we got to her little apartment in Washington.

‘Now, that’s what he says, Lilly,’ said Maria. She was wearing a lace-trimmed skirt and a lacy blouse. Her hair was in a motionless perm. ‘Me, I’m no saint. I never met a saint. I suppose some saints did good things. Our mama, she loved St Agatha of Sicily, whose breasts were cut off by the Romans. You can see her, Lilly, in her paintings, with her little breasts on a plate in front of her. They look like two baked buns. And that’s why she is patron saint of bakers, which was our father’s trade. Sensible work.’

‘Now I hear about myself, how
stupido
I am to be in this line of work,’ said Mike. ‘But it’s good work.’

‘Cheating couples. That’s not good work.’

‘Aiye …’

They were already rowing, brother and sister fashion, and I was hardly in the door of her apartment. Even as she spoke, turning her head to me, appealing to me as a woman for sense, like a little volcano of energy she had taken my baby, and was changing him on her kitchen table. She had already been primed up to get napkins for Ed, who right enough was wearing one so heavy with pee it was as big as the rest of him. Tiny and soft, as gentle-looking as the first thing in God’s creation to be called gentle, he made a miniature murmur under her ministrations.

‘And you can have your bath, Lilly, I have so much hot water in the cistern I could set out to sea with it like in a steamship. My God, I wait and wait. How long it take to drive down from Cleveland?’

‘A long, long, long, long time,’ said Mike, and I knew, exhausted as I was, that he was also in the deeps of exhaustion, the endless great river of headlamps on the highway having poured so much light into his brain he must have felt like he was permanently in the heart of an explosion. Ed had slept and fed, slept and fed, and I had followed suit, inescapably, but when I woke, every time, I said a prayer to God to thank him for sending me Mike Scopello, who seemed to me a winged man that time.

And I think the Sicilians could pray to St Maria of Washington if they wished. I bet she would get their prayers answered, double-quick time.

I must have been with Maria three years, and when I was fit and well, after a month, worked with her in the great fruit market outside the city, where the enterprising women there kept a crèche for the babies. There were lots of babies, Italian babies, and one Irish, or whatever Ed might be.