I Sing the Body Electric Page 10

  "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 declaratio
n, 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 outre, 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."

  "Off the Mount, Nolan," said the priest, "and enough of the Sermon. What's your point?"

  "The point is, Father, we have had no such influx of honorary Sicilians since the mind boggles to remember. For all we know, at this moment, they may be reading aloud to Mrs. Murphy, Miss Clancy, or Mrs. O'Hanlan in the midst of the park. And reading aloud from what, I ask you?"

  "The Ballad of Reading Gaol?" asked Finn.

  "You have rammed the target and sunk the ship," said Nolan, mildly irritated the point had been plucked from him. "How do we know these imps out of bottles are not selling real-estate tracts in a place called Fire Island? Have you heard of it, Father?"

  "The American gazettes come often to my table, man."

  "Well, do you remember the great hurricane of nineteen-and-fifty-six when the waves washed over Fire Island there in New York? An uncle of mine, God save his sanity and sight, was with the Coast Guard there which evacuated the entirety of the population of Fire Island. It was worse than the twice-a-year showing at Fennelly's dressworks, he said. It was more terrible than a Baptist Convention. Ten thousand men came rushing down to the stormy shore carrying bolts of drape material, cages full of parakeets, tomato-and-tangerine-colored sport coats, and lime-colored shoes. It was the most tumultuous scene since Hieronymus Bosch laid down his palette after he painted Hell for all generations to come. You do not easily evacuate ten thousand Venetian-glass boyos with their great blinky cow-eyes and their phonograph symphonic records in their hands and their rings in their ears, without tearing down the middle. My uncle, soon after, took to the heavy drink."

  "Tell us more about that night," said Kilpatrick, entranced.

  "More, hell," said the priest. "Out, I say. Surround the park. Keep your eyes peeled. And meet me back here in an hour."

  "That's more like it," cried Kelly. "Let's really see what dread thing they're up to!"

  The doors banged wide.

  On the sidewalk, the priest gave directions. "Kelly, Murphy, you around the north side of the park. Timulty, you to the south. Nolan and Garrity, the east; Moran, MaGuire, and Kilpatrick, the west. Git!"

  But somehow or other in all the ruction, Kelly and Murphy wound up at the Four Shamrocks pub halfway to the Green and fortified themselves for the chase, and Nolan and Moran each met their wives on the street and had to run the other way, and MaGuire and Kilpatrick, passing the Elite Cinema and hearing Lawrence Tibbett singing inside, cadged their way in for a few half-used cigarettes.

  So it wound up with just two, Garrity on the east and Timulty on the south side of the park, looking in at the visitors from another world.

  After half an hour of freezing weather, Garrity stomped up to Timulty and said, "What's wrong with the fiends? They're just standing there in the midst of the park. They haven't moved half the afternoon. And it's cut to the bone is my toes. I'll nip around to the hotel, warm up, and rush back to stand guard with you, Tim."

  "Take your time," called Timulty in a strange sad wandering, philosophical voice as the other charged away.

  Left alone, Timulty walked in and sat for a full hour watching the six men who, as before, did not move. You might almost have thought to see Timulty there, with his eyes brooding, and, his mouth gone into a tragic crease, that he was some Irish neighbor of Kant or Schopenhauer, or had just read something by a poet or thought of a song that declined his spirits. And when at last the hour was up and he had gathered his thoughts like a handful of cold pebbles, he turned and made his way out of the park. Garrity was there, pounding his feet and swinging his hands but before he could explode with questions, Timulty pointed in and said, "Go sit. Look. Think. Then you tell me."

  Everyone at Finn's looked up sheepishly when Timulty made his entrance. The priest was still off on errands around the city, and after a few walks about the Green to assuage their consciences, all had returned, nonplussed, to intelligence headquarters.

  "Timulty!" they cried. "Tell us! What? What?"

  Timulty took his time walking to the bar and sipping his drink. Silently, he observed his own image remotely buried beneath the lunar ice of the barroom mirror. He turned the subject this way. He twisted it inside out. He put it back wrong-side-to. Then he shut his eyes and said:

  "It strikes me as how--"

  Yes, said all silently, about him.

  "From a lifetime of travel and thought, it comes to the top of my mind," Timulty went on, "there is a strange resemblance between the likes of them and the likes of us."

  There was such a gasp as changed the scintillation, the goings and comings of light in the prisms of the little chandeliers over the bar. When the schools of fish-light had stopped swarming at this exhalation. Nolan cried, "Do you mind putting your hat on so I can knock it off!?"

  "Consider," Timulty calmly said. "Are we or are we not great ones for the poem and the song?"

  Another kind of gasp went through the crowd. There was a warm burst of approval. "Oh, sure, we're that!" "My God, is that all you're up to?" "We were afraid--"

  "Hold it!" Timulty raised a hand, eyes still closed.

  And all shut up.

  "If we're not singing the songs, we're writing them, and if not writing, dancing them, and aren't they fond admirers of the song and the writing of same and the dancing out the whole? Well, just now, I heard them at a distance reciting poems and singing, to themselves, in the Green."

  Timulty had something there. Everyone had to paw everybody and admit it.

  "Do you find any other resemblances?" asked Finn, heavily, glowering.

  "I do," said Timulty, with a judge's manner.

  There was a still more fascinated indraw of breath and the crowd drew nearer.

  "They do not mind a drink now and then," said Timulty.

  "By God, he's right!" cried Murphy.

  "Also," intoned Timulty, "they do not marry until very late, if ever at all! And--"

  But here the tumult was such he had to wait for it to subside before he could finish:

  "And they--ah--have very little to do with women."

  After that there was a great clamor, a yelling and shoving about and ordering of drinks and someone invited Timulty outside. But Timulty wouldn't even lift one eyelid, and the brawler was held off and when everyone had a new drink in them and the near-fistfights had drained away, one loud clear v
oice, Finn's, declared:

  "Now would you mind explaining the criminal comparison you have just made in the clean air of my honorable pub?"

  Timulty sipped his drink slowly and then at last opened his eyes and looked at Finn steadily, and said, with a clear bell-trumpet tone and wondrous enunciation:

  "Where in all of Ireland can a man lie down with a woman?"

  He let that sink in.

  "Three hundred twenty-nine days a damn year it rains. The rest it's so wet there's no dry piece, no bit of land you would dare trip a woman out flat on for fear of her taking root and coming up in leaves, do you deny that?"

  The silence did not deny.

  "So when it comes to places to do sinful evils and perform outrageous acts of the flesh, it's to Arabia the poor damn fool Irishman must take himself. It's Arabian dreams we have, of warm nights, dry land, and a decent place not just to sit down but to lie down on, and not just lie down on but to roister joyfully about on in clinches and clenches of outrageous delight."

  "Ah, Jaisus," said Flynn, "you can say that again."

  "Ah, Jaisus," said everyone, nodding.

  "That's number one." Timulty ticked it off on his fingers. "Place is lacking. Then, second, time and circumstances. For say you should sweet talk a fair girl into the field, eh? in her rainboots and slicker and her shawl over her head and her umbrella over that and you making noises like a stuck pig half over the sty gate, which means you've got one hand in her bosom and the other wrestling with her boots, which is as far as you'll damn well get, for who's standing there behind you, and you feel his sweet spearmint breath on your neck?"

  "The father from the local parish?" offered Garrity.

  "The father from the local parish," said everyone, in despair.

  "There's nails number two and three in the cross on which all Ireland's males hang crucified," said Timulty.

  "Go on, Timulty, go on."

  "Those fellows visiting here from Sicily run in teams. We run in teams. Here we are, the gang, in Finn's, are we not?"

  "Be damned and we are!"

  "They look sad and are melancholy half the time and then spitting like happy demons the rest, either up or down, never in between, and who does that remind you of?"

  Everyone looked in the mirror and nodded.

  "If we had the choice," said Timulty, "to go home to the dire wife and the dread mother-in-law and the old-maid sister all sour sweats and terrors, or stay here in Finn's for one more song or one more drink or one more story, which would all of us men choose?"