Green Shadows, White Whale Read online

  Now I had a cap in each hand.

  The woman cranked. The “music” played. The rain pelted my head, my eyelids, my mouth.

  On the far side of the bridge, I stopped for the hard, the slow decision: which cap to pull on my drenched skull?

  During the next week I passed the bridge often, but there was always just the old couple there with their pandemonium device, or no one there at all.

  And then on a Friday night John brought a bottle and a retyped script to my room. Our talk was long and constructive, the hour grew late, there was a fire like an orange lion on the hearth, big and lively, and brandy in our glasses, and silence for a moment in the room, perhaps because quite suddenly we found silence falling in great soft flakes past the high windows.

  John, glass in hand, watched the continual lace, then looked down at the midnight stones and at last said, under his breath, “ ‘There’s only a few of us left.’ ”

  I waited a moment and said: “I heard one of those beggars say that. What does it mean!”

  John watched all those figures down there standing in the shadows and sipped his whiskey.

  “Once I thought it meant he fought in the Troubles and there’s just a few of the IRA left. But no. Or maybe he means in a richer world the begging population is melting away. But no to that too. So maybe, perhaps, he means there aren’t many ‘human beings’ left to look, see, and understand well enough for one to ask and one to give. Everyone busy, running, jumping, there’s no time to study one another. But I guess that’s bilge and hogwash, slop and sentiment.”

  John turned from the window, walked over and took the new tweed cap from where I had placed it off the mantel and said, “Did you see the paper today?”

  “No.”

  John took a crumpled tear sheet out of his pocket.

  “There’s just the item, bottom half of page five, Irish Times. It seems that beggar on O’Connell Bridge just got tired. He threw his concertina into the River Liffey. And jumped after it.”

  He was back again, then, yesterday! I thought. And I didn’t see!

  “The poor bastard.” John laughed with a hollow exhalation. “What a funny, horrid way to die. That damn silly concertina—I hate concertinas, don’t you?—wheezing on its way down, like a sick cat, and the man falling after. I laugh and I’m ashamed of laughing. Well. They didn’t find the body. They’re still looking.”

  “Oh, God!” I cried, getting up. “Oh, damn!”

  John watched me carefully now. “You couldn’t help it.”

  “I could! I never gave him a penny, not one, ever! I’ve been around town, shoveling out pennies. But never to him! Hell!”

  I was at the window now too, staring down through the falling snow. “I thought his bare head was a trick to make me feel sorry. Damn, after a while you think everything’s a trick! I used to pass there winter nights with the rain thick and him there singing, and he made me feel so cold I hated his guts. I wonder how many other people felt cold and hated him because he did that to them? So instead of getting money, he got nothing in his cup. I lumped him with the rest. But maybe he was one of the legitimate ones, the new poor just starting out this winter, not a beggar ever before, so you hock your clothes to feed a stomach and wind up a man in the rain without a cap.”

  The snow was falling fast now, erasing the lamps and the statues in the shadows of the lamps below.

  “How do you tell the difference between them?” I asked. “How can you judge which is honest, which isn’t?”

  “The fact is,” said John quietly, “you can’t. There’s no difference between them. Some have been at it longer than others and have gone shrewd, forgotten how it all started a long time ago. On a Saturday they had food. On a Sunday they didn’t. On a Monday they asked for credit. On a Tuesday they borrowed their first match. Thursday a cigarette. And a few Fridays later they found themselves, God knows how, in front of a place called the Royal Hibernian Hotel. They couldn’t tell you what happened or why. One thing’s sure, though: they’re hanging to the cliff by their fingernails. Poor bastard, someone must’ve stomped on that man’s hands on O’Connell Bridge, and he just gave up the ghost and went over. So what does it prove? It’s hard to stare them down or look away from them. I’m good at it, most of the time, but you can’t run and hide forever. You can only give to them all. If you start drawing lines, someone gets hurt. I’m sorry now I didn’t give that blind singer a shilling. Well. Well. Let us console ourselves, hope it wasn’t money but something at home or in his past did him in. No way to find out. The paper lists no name.”

  Snow fell silently across our sight. Below, the dark shapes of men waited. It was hard to tell whether snow was making sheep of the wolves or sheep of the sheep, gently mantling their shoulders, their backs, their hats and shawls.

  John said good night and left.

  Five minutes later, going down in the haunted night elevator, I carried the new tweed cap in my hand.

  Coatless, in my shirtsleeves, I stepped out into the winter night.

  I gave the cap to the first man who came. I never knew if it fit. What money I had in my pockets was soon gone.

  Then, left alone, shivering, I glanced up. I froze, blinking up through the drift, the drift, the silent drift of blinding snow. I saw the high hotel windows, the lights, the shadows.

  What’s it like up there? I thought. Are fires lit? Is it warm as breath? Who are all those people? Are they drinking? Are they happy?

  Do they even know I’m here?

  Chapter 14

  “Well, have you solved the puzzle of the Irish as yet?” said Finn.

  “They are a crossword puzzle with no numbers,” I said, red-penciling a scene from my screenplay, laid out on the bar.

  “We are that,” said Finn proudly.

  It was the hour before opening and Finn had let me in through the side door so I might have a quiet time flensing if not solving the Whale and his territories.

  “There’s not a one of us knows who he is, nor would we want to know,” added Finn, wiping the bar as if his words were there temporarily and must now be erased. “We are a mystery inside a box inside a maze with no door and no key. We are a soup that’s all flavor and little sustenance.”

  “I wouldn’t say that, Finn.”

  “All right then, I take it back. If you have not solved the Irish, have you X-rayed the Whale and discovered the bones?”

  “A rough equivalent.” I underlined some words in my text. “He was all white, white as an ice floe at dawn, white as a panic dream that will not turn off. An illumination gone to sea. A terror behind your eyes that will not fade. Which, Finn?”

  “Put ’em all in,” said Finn. “They pass the time.”

  “You’re not supposed to pass the time in screenplays, Finn.”

  “It’s my way of speaking. But you must admit, most fillums pass time but do not serve.”

  “Why, you’re a movie critic, Finn!”

  “No, only one who when he finds the popcorn unsalted knows he’s in for a bad night. When you finish that damned script, will you leave the day before or the week after? I mean, if you haven’t figured Eire out, would you linger to read between the lines?”

  “I am of two minds, Finn.”

  “Well, don’t tear yourself in half. Lie easy in the ditch, as the hog farmers say.”

  “Let me write that down!”

  “Lie easy …” Finn dictated it, leaning over the bar, pleased. “… in the ditch …”

  Chapter 15

  The phone rang at three in the morning.

  My wife, I thought, and then, no.

  Nora, I thought. She’s the only one in all the world, in all my life, would call and call at three a.m., of all ungodly hours.

  I reached out from my bed in the dark, found the phone, put it to my ear, and declared:

  “Nora!”

  “My God,” a woman’s voice said, “how did you guess?!”

  “Simple,” I said, beginning to laugh. “It’s th
e middle of the night, halfway to sunrise. The only other one who bothers this late, this early, is God.”

  “Oh, William, Willy, Will!” cried Nora, off somewhere in snowstorms of static. “William!”

  She had long ago dubbed me Shakespeare Second or was it Third, and never called me anything else except.

  “Willie. Will! What’s all this about White Whales and screenplays and famous directors? Are you fabulously rich at last? And do rich writers buy fabulous estates?”

  “At five hours before dawn, if dawn ever comes in Ireland? Nora, Nora, don’t you ever say hello?”

  “Life’s too short for hellos, and now there’s no time for decent goodbyes. Could you buy Grynwood? Or might you take it as a gift if I gave it?”

  “Nora, Nora, your family house, two hundred rich years old? What would happen to wild Irish social life, the parties, drinks, gossip? You can’t throw it all away!”

  “Can and shall. Oh, I’ve trunks of money waiting out in the rain this moment. But, Willie, William, I’m alone in the house. The servants have fled to help the Aga. Now, on this final night, Will, I need a writer man to see the Ghost. Does your skin prickle? Come. I’ve mysteries and a home to give away. Willie, oh, Will, oh, William!”

  Click. Silence.

  John was off in London to cast our film, so I was free. But it was too late Friday and too early Saturday for me to bother Mike to come from Kilcock to drive me to Bray, so I hired a chauffeur and car and we motored down the snake roads through the green hills toward the blue lake and the lush grass meadows of the hidden and fabulous house called Grynwood.

  I laughed again, recalling our meeting so many years ago, a beggar writer taken in off the Dublin streets by this madwoman driving by! Nora! Nora! For all her gab, a party was probably on the tracks this moment, lurched toward wondrous destruction. Actors might fly from London, designers from Paris, some of the Guinness girls might motor over from Galway.

  You’ll be beautifully mellow by eight o’clock, I thought, ricocheted to sleep, if you’re not careful, by concussions of bodies before midnight, drowse till noon, then even more nicely potted by Sunday high tea. And somewhere in between, the rare game of musical beds with Irish and French countesses, ladies, and plain field-beast art majors crated in from the Sorbonne, some with chewable mustaches, some not, and Monday ten million years off. Tuesday, I would call Mike and motor oh so carefully back to Dublin, nursing my body like a great impacted wisdom tooth, gone much too wise and avoiding encounters with women, pain-flashing with memory and able, if my wife called, to plead innocence.

  Traveling, I remembered the first time I had arrived at Nora’s.

  Nora had sent someone to pick me up. A mad old duchess with flour-talcumed cheeks and the teeth of a barracuda had wrestled me and a sports car down an Irish road that night, braying into the warm wind:

  “You shall love Nora’s menagerie zoo and horticultural garden! Her friends are beasts and keepers, tigers and pussies, rhododendrons and flytraps. Her streams run cold fish, hot trout. Hers is a great greenhouse where brutes grow outsize, force-fed by unnatural airs, enter Nora’s on Friday with clean linen, sog out with the wet wash-soiled bedclothes Monday, feeling as if you had meantime inspired, painted, and lived through all Bosch’s Temptations, Hells, Judgments, and Dooms! Live at Nora’s and you reside in a great warm giant’s cheek, deliciously gummed and morseled hourly. You will pass, like victuals, through her mansion. When it has crushed forth your last sweet-sour sauce and dismarrowed your youth-candied bones, you will be discarded in a cold iron-country train station lonely with rain.”

  “I’m coated with enzymes?” I cried above the engine roar. “No house can break down my elements or take nourishment from my Original Sin.”

  “Fool!” The duchess laughed. “We shall see most of your skeleton by sunrise Sunday!”

  I came out of memory as we came out of the woods at a fine popping glide and slowed because the very friction of beauty stayed the heart, the mind, the blood, and therefore the foot of the driver upon the throttle.

  There under a blue-lake sky by a blue-sky lake lay Nora’s own dear place, the grand house called Grynwood. It nestled in the roundest hills by the tallest trees in the deepest forest in all Eire. It had towers built back in time by unremembered people and unsung architects for reasons never to be guessed. Its gardens had first flowered five hundred years ago, and there were outbuildings scattered from a creative explosion two hundred years gone amongst old tombyards and crypts. Here was a convent hall become a horse barn of the landed gentry, there were new wings built on in 1890. Out around the lake was a hunting-lodge ruin where wild horses might plunge through minted shadow to sink away in green-water grasses by yet further cold ponds and single graves of daughters whose sins were so rank they were driven forth even in death to the wilderness, sunk traceless in the gloom.

  As if in bright welcome, the sun flashed vast tintinnabulations from scores of house windows. Blinded, the driver clenched the car to a halt.

  Eyes shut, I licked my lips, remembering that long-ago first night at Grynwood.

  Nora herself opening the front door. Standing stark naked, she announced:

  “You’re too late, Duchess! It’s all over!”

  “Nonsense. Hold this, boy, and this.”

  Whereupon the duchess, in three nimble moves, peeled herself raw as a blanched oyster in the summer doorway.

  I stood aghast, gripping her clothes.

  “Come in, boy, you’ll die of the heat!” And the bare duchess walked serenely away among the well-dressed people.

  “Beaten at my own game,” cried Nora. “Now, to compete, I must put my clothes back on. And I was so hoping to shock you.”

  “Never fear,” I said. “You have.”

  “Come help me dress.”

  In the alcove, we waded among her clothes, which lay in misshapen pools of musky scent upon a parqueted floor.

  “Hold the panties while I slip into them.”

  I flushed, then burst into an uncontrollable fit of laughter. “Forgive me,” I said at last, snapping her bra in back. “It’s just here it is early evening, and I’m putting you into your clothes. I—”

  A door slammed somewhere. I glanced around for the duchess.

  “Gone,” I murmured. “The house has devoured her already.” True.

  I didn’t see the duchess again until the rainy Monday morn she had predicted. By then she had forgotten my name, my face, and the soul behind my face.

  “My God,” I said. “What’s that, and that?”

  Still dressing Nora, we had arrived at the library door. Inside, like a bright mirror-maze, the weekend guests turned.

  “That”—Nora pointed—“is the Ballet Russe. Just arrived. To the left, the Viennese Dancers. Divine casting. Enemy ballet mobs unable, because of language, to express their scorn and vitriol. They must pantomime their catfight. Stand aside, Willie. What was Valkyrie must become Rhine Maiden. And those boys are Rhine Maidens. Guard your flank!”

  Nora was right.

  The battle was joined.

  The tiger lilies leaped at each other, jabbering in tongues. Then, frustrated, they fell away, flushed. With a bombardment of slammed doors, the enemies plunged off to scores of rooms. What was horror became horrible friendship, and what was friendship became steam-room oven-bastings of unabashed and, thank God, hidden affection.

  After that it was one grand crystal-chandelier avalanche of writer-artist-choreographer-poets down the swift-sloped weekend.

  Somewhere I was caught and swept in the heaped pummel of flesh headed straight for a collision with the maiden-aunt reality of Monday noon.

  Now, many lost parties, many lost years later, as my car drove away, here I stood.

  And there stood Grynwood manse, very still.

  No music played. No cars arrived.

  Hello, I thought. A new statue down by the lake. Hello again. Not a statue … but Nora herself, seated alone, legs drawn under her dress, face pale,
staring at Grynwood as if I had not arrived, was nowhere in sight.

  “Nora …?” But her gaze was so steadily fixed to the house wings, its mossy roofs and windows full of empty sky, I turned to stare at it myself.

  Something was wrong. Had the house sunk two feet into the earth? Or had the earth sunk all about, leaving it stranded forlorn in the high chill air? Had earthquakes shaken the windows atilt so they mirrored intruders with distorted gleams and glares?

  The front door of Grynwood stood wide open. From this door, the house breathed out upon me.

  Subtle. Like waking by night to feel the push of warm air from your wife’s nostrils, but suddenly terrified, for the scent of her breath has changed, the smells of someone else! You want to seize her awake, cry her name. Who is she, how, what? But heart thudding, you lie sleepless by some stranger in bed.

  I walked. I sensed my image, caught in a thousand windows, moving across the grass to stand over a silent Nora.

  A thousand of me sat quietly down.

  Nora, I thought. Oh, dear God, here we are again.

  That first visit to Grynwood …

  And then here and there through the years we had met like people brushing in a crowd, like lovers across the aisle and strangers on a train, and, with the whistle crying the next quick stop, touched hands or allowed our bodies to be bruised together by the crowd cramming out as the doors flung wide, then, impelled, no more touch, no word, nothing for years.

  Or it was as if at high noon midsummer every year or so we ran off up the vital strand, never dreaming we might come back and collide in mutual need. And then somehow another summer ended, a sun went down, and there came Nora dragging her empty sand pail and here I came with scabs on my knees, and the beach empty and a strange season gone, and just us left to say hello Nora, hello William, as the wind rose and the sea darkened as if a great herd of octopi suddenly swam by with their inks.

  I had often wondered if a day might come when we would circle the long way round and stay. Somewhere back in time there had been one moment, balanced like a feather trembled by our breaths from either side, that held our love warmly and perfectly in poise.