Green Shadows, White Whale Read online

  Nora looked at the house.

  “The night I telephoned you, I lay in bed at two in the morning, I heard the front door drift open. I knew that the whole house had simply leaned itself ajar to let the latch free and glide the door wide. I went to the top of the stairs. And looking down, I saw the creek of moonlight laid out fresh in the hall. And the house so much as said, Here is the way you go, tread the cream, walk the milky new path out of this and away, go, old one, go with your darkness. You are with child. The sour-gum ghost is in your stomach. It will never be born. And because you cannot drop it, one day it will be your death. What are you waiting for?

  “Well, Willie, I was afraid to go down and shut that door. And I knew it was true, I would never sleep again. So I went down and out.

  “I have a dark old sinful place in Geneva. I’ll go there to live. But you are younger and fresher. Will, so I want this place to be yours.”

  “Not so young.”

  “Younger than I.”

  “Not so fresh. It wants me to go too, Nora. The door to my room just now. It opened too.”

  “Oh, William,” breathed Nora, and touched my cheek. “Oh, Willie,” and then, softly, “I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be. We’ll go together.”

  Nora opened her car door.

  “I’ll drive. I must drive now, very fast, all the way to Dublin. Do you mind?”

  “No. But what about your luggage?”

  “What’s in there, the house can have. Where are you going?”

  I stopped. “I must shut the front door.”

  “No,” said Nora. “Leave it open.”

  “But … people will come in.”

  Nora laughed quietly. “Yes. But only good people. So that’s all right, isn’t it?”

  I finally nodded. “Yes. That’s all right.”

  I came back to stand by the car, reluctant to leave. Clouds were gathering. It was beginning to rain. Great gentle soft flurries fell down out of the moonlit sky as harmlessly soft as the gossip of angels.

  We got in and slammed the car doors. Nora gunned the motor.

  “Ready?” she said.

  “Ready.”

  “William?” said Nora. “When we get to Dublin, will you sleep with me, I mean sleep, the next few days? I shall need someone for a few nights. Will you?”

  “Of course.”

  “I wish,” she said, and tears filled her eyes, “oh, God, how I wish I could bum myself down and start over. Burn myself down so I could go up to the house now and go in and live forever like a dairy maid full of berries and cream who might walk by tomorrow and see the open door and the house will let her in and let her stay. Oh, but hell. What’s the use of talk like that?”

  “Drive, Nora,” I said gently.

  And she drummed the motor and we ran out of the valley, along the lake, with gravel buckshotting out behind, and up the hills and through the deep forest, and by the time we reached the last rise, Nora’s tears were shaken away, she did not look back, and we drove fast through the dense, falling and thicker night toward a darker horizon and a cold stone city, and all the way, never once letting go, in silence I held one of her hands.

  The next morning I woke and the bed was a fall of snow with dents in it. I arose feeling, inside my mildewed suit, that I had just taken a four-day, four-night trip across country in a Greyhound bus.

  There was a note pinned to the other pillow:

  “Gone to Venice or Hell, whichever comes first. Thanks for the snugfest. If your wife ever leaves, come find: Nora of the long rains and the terrible fires.”

  “Nora,” I said, looking out the window at the storm. “Goodbye.”

  Chapter 16

  Finn had an eye in the midst of the white hair over his medulla oblongata. The hair stirred. Finn’s back stiffened.

  “Do I hear a Yank’s tread half in the door?” he said, peering into a goblet he was wiping dry, as if it were a crystal ball.

  “Is my walk familiar?” I asked.

  “Fingerprints and the way men walk; no two alike.”

  Finn turned to consider my face, hovering in gloom above the aforementioned tread.

  “Are you fleeing himself?”

  “Does it show?”

  “He does not let up, does he?”

  Finn looked around at his grand organ-console display of stouts and ales, but decided on a cognac and waited for me to come fetch.

  “That will take the hinges off the hatch,” he observed.

  “They’re gone.” I wiped my mouth.

  “Is it that you work seven days a week, seven to ten hours a day, with no time off? Does he let you go to the cinema?”

  “Only by permission.”

  “To the Gents’?”

  “I must beg to be excused.”

  “Forgive the intrusion, lad, but since you been here all this while, have you shadowed the path of any of our nice spring onion colleens, or the rutabaga and bag-of-potatoes mothers or aunts of the like? Excuse.”

  “I have a wife married to me at home,” I said, “who may soon be here. She’ll find no lipstick on my collar or long hairs on my coat.”

  “Pity, and you look as if you had the strength of nine.”

  “Illusion,” I said. “Women knock me down and carry me out.”

  “There’s all sorts of ways to travel,” admitted Finn. “But now, this day, you are in need of a brief rest before going back to hand-wrestle the two Beasts, one in the sea, one on a horse.”

  I sighed, and Finn replenished my brandy.

  “Has he got you to take riding lessons yet?” guessed Finn. “He’s great for that. A dozen pals have run through here, hired the horse, followed the hunt, and broken their selves, collarbone over ass, in the years before you limped in.”

  “It’s these riding boots I bought.”

  “Which makes you halfway to the stable or the hospital or both, as of this hour. But here comes the boyos. Say not a word about himself. They would look down on you if they knew what you were hiding from here.”

  “Don’t they look down on me already?”

  “As a yank? Sure. But as a fellow drinker? No. Hush.”

  And the young men and the old of Kilcock blundered in for the stuff that cleans mirrors and makes headlights shine.

  I retreated to the philosopher’s cubby to think.

  Chapter 17

  I walked straight into the back workroom of Courtown House, where John was going over and answering some mail, and I did not hand him my usual six pages of screenplay. Instead, holding the pages in my hand, I took my tweed cap off my head, looked at it, looked down at my hacking coat and twill pants and jodhpur half boots and said, “John, I’m getting rid of at least half of these clothes.”

  John looked up and gave me that lazy, half-lidded iguana stare.

  “Now, why would you do that, kid?” he said.

  “No more riding lessons, John.”

  “Oh?”

  “No more lessons and no more even trying around the edges to ride to hounds.”

  “Why do you say that, kid?”

  “John.” I took a deep breath. “What’s more important, riding to hounds or killing the Whale?”

  John mused it over behind his eyelids for a moment.

  “What counts?” I said. “Me alive and the Whale dead or me six feet under and the screenplay not finished?”

  “Let me get this clear—”

  “No, John, let me get this clear. I almost fell three times this morning at the riding academy. It’s a long way down from a horse, John, and I’m not going to go there.”

  “Jesus, kid, you sound upset.”

  “Do I?” I listened to myself. “Yeah, I am. Is it a deal, John? From here on, no black horses, just white whales?”

  “Jesus Christ,” said John, “if that’s the way you feel about it—”

  Chapter 18

  Someone’s born, and it may take the best part of a day for the news to ferment, percolate, or circumnavigate the Irish mea
dows to the nearest town, and the dearest pub, which is Heeber Finn’s.

  But let someone die, and a whole symphonic band lifts in the fields and hills. The grand ta-ta slams across country to ricochet off the pub slates and shake the drinkers to calamitous cries for More!

  So it was this long day with suddenly no rain and—look there!—the sun returned in fraudulent simulation of some lost summer. The pub was no sooner opened, aired, and mobbed than Finn, at the door, saw a dust flurry up the road.

  “That’s Doone,” muttered Finn. “Swift at bringing news. And the news is bad, it’s that fast he’s running!”

  “Ha!” cried Doone, as he leapt across the sill. “It’s done, and he’s dead!”

  The mob at the bar turned, as did I.

  Doone enjoyed his moment of triumph, making us wait.

  “Ah, God, here’s a drink. Maybe that’ll make you talk!”

  Finn shoved a glass in Doone’s waiting paw. Doone wet his whistle and arranged the facts.

  “Himself,” he gasped at last. “Lord Kilgotten. Dead. And not an hour past!”

  “Ah, God,” said one and all, quietly. “Bless the old man. A sweet nature. A dear chap.”

  For Lord Kilgotten had wandered their fields, pastures, barns, and this bar all the years of their lives, they agreed. His departure was like the Normans’ rowing back to France or the damned Brits pulling out of Bombay.

  “A fine man,” said Finn, drinking to the memory, “even though he did spend two weeks a year in London.”

  “How old was he?” asked Brannigan. “Eighty-five? Eighty-eight? We thought we might have buried him long since.”

  “Men like that,” said Doone, “God has to hit with an ax to scare them off. Paris, now, we thought that might have slain him, years past; but no. Drink, that should have drowned him, but he swam for the shore; no, no. It was that teeny bolt of lightning in the field’s midst an hour ago, and him under the tree picking strawberries with his nineteen-year-old secretary lady.”

  “Jesus,” said Finn. “There’s no strawberries this time of year. It was her hit him with a bolt of fever. Burned to a crisp!”

  They fired off a twenty-one-gun salute of laughs that hushed itself down when they considered the subject, and more townsfolk arrived to breathe the air and bless himself.

  “I wonder,” mused Heeber Finn at last, in a voice that would make the Valhalla gods sit still at table and not scratch. “I wonder. What’s to become of all that wine? The wine, that is, which Lord Kilgotten has stashed in barrels and bins, by the quarts and the tons, by the scores and precious thousands, in his cellars and attics and, who knows, under his bed?”

  “Aye,” said everyone, stunned, suddenly remembering. “Aye. Sure. What?”

  “It has been left, no doubt, to some damn Yank drift-about cousin or nephew, corrupted by Rome, driven mad by Paris, who’ll jet in tomorrow, who’ll seize and drink, grab and run, and Kilcock and us left beggared and buggered on the road behind!” said Doone, all in one breath. “Forgive my going on, Yank.” He turned to see me exiting the cubby. “I meant only half what I said.”

  “Aye.” Their voices, like muffled dark velvet drums, marched toward the night. “Aye.”

  “There are no relatives!” said Finn. “No dumb Yank nephews or dimwit nieces falling out of gondolas in Venice but swimming this way. I have made it my business to know.”

  Finn waited. It was his moment now. All stared. All leaned to hear his mighty proclamation.

  “Why not, I been thinking, if Kilgotten, by God, left all ten thousand bottles of Burgundy and Bordeaux to the citizens of the loveliest town in Eire? To us!”

  There was an antic uproar of comment on this, cut across when the front doorflaps burst wide and Finn’s wife, who rarely visited the sty, stepped in, glared around, and snapped:

  “Funeral’s in an hour!”

  “An hour?” cried Finn. “Why, he’s only just cold—”

  “Noon’s the time,” said the wife, growing taller the more she looked at this dreadful tribe. “The Doc and the priest have just come from the place. Quick funeral was His Lordship’s will. ‘Uncivilized,’ said Father Kelly, ‘and no hole dug.’ ‘But there is!’ said the Doc. ‘Hanrahan was supposed to die yesterday but took on a fit of mean and survived the night. I treated and treated him, but the man persists! Meanwhile, there’s his hole, unfilled. Kilgotten can have it, dirt and headstone.’ All’s invited. Move your bums!”

  The double-wing doors whiffled shut. The mystic woman was gone.

  “A funeral!” cried Doone, prepared to sprint.

  “No!” Finn beamed. “Get out. Pub’s closed. A wake!”

  I followed them, glad to be silent myself.

  “Even Christ,” gasped Doone, mopping the sweat from his brow, “wouldn’t climb down off the cross to walk on a day like this.”

  “The heat,” said Mulligan, “is intolerable.”

  Coats off, they trudged up the hill, past the Kilgotten gatehouse, to encounter the town priest, Father Padraic Kelly, doing the same. He had all but his collar off, and was beet-faced in the bargain.

  “It’s hell’s own day,” he agreed. “None of us will keep!”

  “Why all the rush?” said Finn, matching fiery stride for stride with the holy man. “I smell a rat. What’s up?”

  “Aye,” said the priest. “There was a secret codicil in the will—”

  “I knew it!” said Finn.

  “What?” asked the crowd, fermenting close behind in the sun.

  “It would have caused a riot if it got out,” was all Father Kelly would say, his eyes on the graveyard gates. “You’ll find out at the penultimate moment.”

  “Is that the moment before or the moment after the end, Father?” asked Doone innocently.

  “Ah, you’re so dumb you’re pitiful.” The priest sighed. “Get your ass through that gate. Don’t fall in the hole!”

  Doone did just that. The others followed, their faces assuming a darker tone as they passed through. The sun, as if to observe this, moved behind a cloud, and a sweet breeze came up for some moment of relief.

  “There’s the hole.” The priest nodded. “Line up on both sides of the path, for God’s sake, and fix your ties, if you have some, and check your flies, above all. Let’s run a nice show for Kilgotten, and here he comes!”

  And here, indeed, came Lord Kilgotten, in a box carried on the planks of one of his farm wagons, a simple good soul, to be sure, and behind that wagon, a procession of other vehicles, cars and trucks that stretched half down the hill in the now once more piercing light.

  “What a parade,” I said, but no one heard.

  “I never seen the like!” cried Doone.

  “Shut up,” said the priest politely.

  “My God,” said Finn. “Do you see the coffin?”

  “We see, Finn, we see!” gasped all.

  For the coffin, trundling by, was beautifully wrought, finely nailed together with silver and gold nails, but the special strange wood of it …?

  Plankings from wine crates, staves from boxes that had sailed from France, only to collide and sink in Lord Kilgotten s cellars!

  A storm of exhalations swept the men from Finn’s pub. They toppled on their heels. They seized each other’s elbows.

  “You know the words, Yank,” whispered Doone. “Tell us the names!”

  I eyed the coffin made of vintage shipping crates and at last exhaled:

  “Good lord! There’s Châteauneuf-du-Pape, Château Lafite Rothschild! Upside down, that label, Le Corton! Downside up: La Lagune! What style, my God, what class! I wouldn’t so much mind being buried in burned-stamp-labeled wood like that myself!”

  “I wonder,” mused Doone. “Can he read the labels from inside!”

  “Put a sock in it,” muttered the priest. “Here comes the rest!”

  If the body in the box was not enough to pull clouds over the sun, this second arrival caused an even greater ripple of uneasiness to oil the sweating men.


  “It reminds me of that wake,” Doone murmured, “when someone slipped, fell in the grave, broke an ankle, and spoiled the whole afternoon!”

  For the last part of the procession was a series of wagons and trucks ramshackle-loaded with French vineyard crates, and finally a great old brewery wagon from early Guinness days, drawn by a team of proud white horses, draped in black and sweating with the surprise they drew behind.

  “I will be damned,” said Finn. “Lord Kilgotten’s brought his own wake with him!”

  “Hurrah!” was the cry. “What a dear soul.”

  “He must’ve known the day would ignite a nun, or kindle a priest, and our tongues out on our chests!”

  “Gangway! Let it pass!”

  The men stood aside as all the vehicles, carrying strange labels from southern France and northern Italy, making tidal sounds of bulked liquids, lumbered into the churchyard.

  “Someday,” whispered Doone, “we must raise a statue to Kilgotten, a philosopher of friends!”

  “Pull up your socks,” said the priest. “It’s too soon to tell. For here comes something worse than an undertaker!”

  “What could be worse?” I blurted, then stepped back.

  With the last vehicle drawn up about the grave, a single man strode up the road, hat on, coat buttoned, cuffs properly shot, shoes polished against all reason, mustache waxed and cool, unmelted, a prim case like a lady’s purse tucked under his clenched arm, and about him an air of the icehouse, a thing fresh born from a snowy vault, tongue like an icicle, stare like a frozen pond.

  “Jesus,” said Finn.

  “It’s a lawyer!” said Doone.

  All stood aside.

  The lawyer, for that is what it was, strode past like Moses as the Red Sea obeyed, or King Louis on a stroll, or the haughtiest tart on Piccadilly: choose one.

  “It’s Kilgotten’s law,” hissed Muldoon. “I seen him stalking Dublin like the Apocalypse. With a lie for a name: Clement! Half-ass Irish, full-ass Briton. The worst!”