Green Shadows, White Whale Page 9

  “Jesus.” John laughed. “You’re driven.”

  “I am. But most of all by that beggar on O’Connell Bridge! He’s a wonder, a terror. I hate him, I love him. Come on.”

  The elevator, which had haunted its untidy shaft for a hundred years, came wafting skyward, dragging its ungodly chains and dread intestines after. The door exhaled open. The lift groaned as if we had trod its stomach. In a great protestation of ennui, the ghost sank back toward earth.

  On the way John said, “If you hold your face right, the beggars won’t bother you.”

  “My face,” I explained patiently, “is my face. It’s from Apple Dumpling, Wisconsin; Sarsaparilla, Maine. ‘Kind to Dogs’ is writ on my brow. Let the street be empty, then let me step forth and a strikers’ march of freeloaders leap from manholes for miles around.”

  “If you could just learn to look over, around, or through those people, stare them down.” John mused. “I’ve lived here for two years. Shall I show you how to handle them?”

  “Show me!”

  John flung the elevator door wide, and we advanced through the Royal Hibernian Hotel lobby to squint out at the sooty night.

  “Jesus come and get me,” I murmured. “There they are, their heads up, eyes on fire. They smell apple pie already.”

  “Meet me down by the bookstore,” whispered John. “Watch.”

  “Wait!” I cried.

  But he was out the door, down the steps and on the sidewalk.

  I watched, nose pressed to the glass pane.

  The beggars on one corner, the other, across from, in front of the hotel leaned toward my employer. Their eyes glowed.

  John gazed calmly back at them.

  The beggars hesitated, creaking, I was sure, in their shoes. Then their bones settled. Their mouths collapsed. Their eyes snuffed out. Huston stared hard. They looked away.

  With a rap-rap like a drum, John’s shoes marched briskly away. From behind me, in the Buttery, below, I heard music and laughter. I’ll run down, I thought, slug in a quick one, and bravery resurgent …

  Hell, I thought, and swung the door wide.

  The effect was as if someone had struck a great Mongolian bronze gong.

  I heard shoe leather Hinting the cobbles in sparks. The men came running, fireflies sprinkling the bricks under their hobnailed shoes. I saw hands waving. Mouths opened on smiles like old pianos. Someone shouted, “There’s only a few of us left!”

  Far down the street, at the bookshop, my director waited, his back turned. But that third eye in the back of his head must have caught the scene: Columbus greeted by Indians, Saint Francis amidst his squirrel friends, with a bag of nuts. Or he saw me as the Pope on Saint Peter’s balcony, with a tumult below.

  I was not half off the hotel steps when a woman in a gray shawl charged up, thrusting a wrapped bundle at me.

  “Ah, see the poor child!” she wailed.

  I stared at her baby.

  The baby stared back.

  God in heaven, did or did not the thing wink at me?

  No, the babe’s eyes are shut, I thought. She’s filled it with gin to keep it warm for display.

  My hands, my coins, blurred reaching out to her and the rest of her team.

  “God thanks you, sir!”

  I broke through them, running. Defeated, I could have scuffed slowly the rest of the way, my resolve so much putty in my mouth, but no, on I rushed, hearing a babe’s wail down the cold wind. Blast! I thought, she’s pinched it to make it weep and crack my soul!

  John, without turning, saw my reflection in the bookshop window and nodded.

  I stood getting my breath, brooding at my own image: my summer eyes, my ebullient and defenseless mouth.

  “Say it!” I sighed. “I hold my face wrong!”

  “I like the way you hold your face.” John held my arm. “I wish I could do it too.”

  We looked back as the beggars strolled off in the blowing dark with my shillings. The street was empty now. It was starting to rain.

  “Well,” I said at last, “let me show you the even bigger mystery: the man who provokes me to wild rages, then calms me to delight. Solve him and you solve all the beggars that ever were.”

  “On O’Connell Bridge?” John guessed.

  “On O’Connell Bridge,” I said.

  And we walked on down in the gently misting rain.

  Halfway to the bridge, as we were examining some fine Irish crystal in a window, a woman with a shawl over her head plucked at my elbow.

  “Destroyed!” The woman sobbed. “My poor sister. Cancer. Her dead next month! Ah, God, can you spare a penny!”

  I felt John’s arm tighten to mine. I looked at the woman, split, one half of me saying, “A penny is all she asks!” the other half doubting: “Gah, she knows that by underasking you’ll overpay!”

  I gasped. “You’re …”

  Why, I thought, you’re the woman who was just back by the hotel with the babe!

  “I’m sick!” She pulled back in shadow. “And asking for the half dead!”

  You’ve stashed the babe somewhere, I thought, and put on a green instead of gray shawl and run the long way ’round to cut us off.

  “Cancer …” One bell in her tower, but she knew how to toll it. “Cancer … ”

  John cut in crisply. “Pardon, but aren’t you the same woman he just paid at the hotel?”

  The woman and I were both shocked at this rank insubordination.

  The woman’s face crumpled. I peered closer. And God, it was a different face. How admirable! She knew what actors know, sense, learn: that by thrusting, yelling, all fiery-lipped arrogance, one moment you are one character; then by sinking away, crumpling the mouth and eyes, in pitiful collapse, you are another. The same woman, yes, but the same face and role? No, no!

  “Cancer,” she whispered.

  John lost my arm, and the woman found my cash. As if on roller skates, she whisked around the corner, sobbing happily.

  “Lord!” In awe, I watched her go. “She’s studied Stanislavsky. In one book he says that squinting one eye and twitching one lip to the side will disguise you. And what if it was true? Everything she said? And she’s lived with it so long she can’t cry anymore, and so has to playact in order to survive? What if?”

  “Not true,” said John. “But by God, she gets a role in Moby Dick! Can’t you see her down at the docks, in the fog, when the Pequod sails, wailing, mourning? Yes!”

  Wailing, weeping, I thought, somewhere in the chimney-smoking dark.

  “Now,” said John, “on to O’Connell Bridge?”

  The street corner was probably empty in the falling rain for a long time after we were gone.

  There stood the gray-stone bridge bearing the great O’Connell’s name, and there the River Liffey rolling cold gray waters under, and even from a block off I heard faint singing. My mind ran back to ten days before.

  “Christmas,” I murmured, “is the best time of all in Dublin.”

  For beggars, I meant, but left it unsaid.

  For in the week before Christmas the Dublin streets had teemed with raven flocks of children herded by schoolmasters or nuns. They clustered in doorways, peered from theater lobbies, jostled in alleys, “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen” on their lips, “It Came Upon a Midnight Clear” in their eyes, tambourines in hand, snowflakes shaping a collar of grace about their tender necks. It was singing everywhere and anywhere in Dublin on such nights, and there was no night I had not walked up Grafton Street to hear “Away in a Manger” being sung to the queue outside the cinema or “Deck the Halls” in front of The Four Provinces pub. In all, I counted in Christ’s season one night half a hundred bands of convent girls or public-school boys lacing the cold air and weaving great treadles of song up, down, over, and across from end to end of Dublin. Like walking in snowfalls, you could not walk among them and not be touched. The sweet beggars, I called them, who gave in turn for what you gave as you went your way.

  Given such examples, ev
en the most dilapidated beggars of Dublin had washed their hands, mended their torn smiles, borrowed banjos or bought a fiddle and killed a cat. They had even gathered for four-part harmonics. How could they stay silent when half the world was singing and the other half, idled by the tuneful river, was paying dearly, gladly, for just another chorus?

  So Christmas was best for all; the beggars worked—off key, it’s true, but there they were, one time in the year, busy.

  But Christmas was gone, the licorice-suited children back in their aviaries, and most of the beggars of the town, shut and glad for the silence, returned to their workless ways. All but the beggars on O’Connell Bridge, who, through the year, most of them, tried to give as good as they got.

  “They have their self-respect,” I said, walking with John. “I’m glad that first man up ahead strums a guitar, the next one a fiddle. And there, now, by God, in the very center of the bridge!”

  “The man we’re looking for?”

  “That’s him. Squeezing the concertina. It’s all right to look. Or I think it is.”

  “What do you mean? He’s blind, isn’t he?”

  The rain fell gently, softly upon gray-stoned Dublin, gray-stoned riverbank, gray lava-flowing river.

  “That’s the trouble,” I said at last. “I don’t know.”

  And we both, in passing, looked at the man standing there in the very middle of O’Connell Bridge.

  He was a man of no great height, a bandy statue swiped from some country garden perhaps, and his clothes, like the clothes of most in Ireland, too often laundered by the weather, and his hair too often grayed by the smoking air, and his cheeks sooted with beard, and a nest or two of witless hair in each cupped ear, and the blushing cheeks of a man who has stood too long in the cold and drunk too much in the pub so as to stand too long in the cold again. Dark glasses covered his eyes, and there was no telling what lurked behind. I had begun to wonder, weeks before, if his sight prowled me along, damning my guilty speed, or if only his ear caught the passing of a harried conscience. There was an awful fear he might seize, in passing, the glasses from his nose. But I feared much more the abyss I might find, into which his senses, in one terrible roar, might tumble. Best not to know if civet’s orb or interstellar space gaped behind the smoked panes.

  But even more, there was a special reason why I could not let the man be.

  In the rain and the wind and snow, for many long cold weeks, I had seen him standing here with no cap or hat on his head.

  He was the only man in all of Dublin I saw in the downpours and drizzles who stood by the hour alone with the drench mizzling his ears, threading his ash-red hair, plastering it over his skull, rivuleting his eyebrows, and washing over the coal-black insect lenses of the glasses on his rain-pearled nose.

  Down through the greaves of his cheeks, the lines about his mouth, and off his lips, like a storm on a gargoyle’s flint, the weather ran. His sharp chin shot the guzzle in a steady fauceting off in the air, down his tweed scarf and locomotive-colored coat.

  “Why doesn’t he wear a hat?” I demanded.

  “Why,” said John, “maybe he hasn’t got one.”

  “He must have one,” I cried.

  “He’s got to have one,” I said, quieter.

  “Maybe he can’t afford one.”

  “Nobody’s that poor, even in Dublin. Everyone has a cap at least!”

  “Well, maybe he has bills to pay, someone sick.”

  “But to stand out for days, weeks in the rain and not so much as flinch or turn his head, ignore the rain—it’s beyond understanding.” I shook my head. “I can only think it’s a trick. Like the others, this is his way of getting sympathy, of making you cold and miserable as you pass, so you’ll give him more.”

  “I bet you’re sorry you said that already,” John said.

  “I am. I am.” For even under my cap the rain was running off my nose. “Sweet God in heaven, what’s the answer?”

  “Why don’t you ask him?”

  “No!”

  Then the terrible happened.

  For a moment, while we had been talking in the cold rain, the beggar had been silent. Now, as if the weather had freshened him to life, he gave his concertina a great mash. From the folding, unfolding snake box he squeezed a series of asthmatic notes which were no preparation for what followed.

  He opened his mouth. He sang.

  The sweet clear baritone voice which rang over O’Connell Bridge, steady and sure, was beautifully shaped and controlled, not a quiver, not a flaw, anywhere. The man just opened his mouth, which meant that all kinds of secret doors in his body gave way. He did not sing so much as let his soul free.

  “Fine,” said John, “lovely.”

  “Lovely,” I said. “Oh, yes.”

  We listened while he sang the full irony of Dublin’s Fair City where it rains forty days a month the winter through, followed by the white-wine clarity of Kathleen Mavourneen, Macushla, and all the other tired lads, lasses, lakes, hills, past glories, present miseries, but all somehow revived and moving about young and freshly painted in the light spring, suddenly-not-winter rain. If he breathed at all, it must have been through his ears, so smooth the line, so steady the putting forth of word following round-belled word.

  “Why,” John murmured, “he should be on the stage. He’s too good to be standing here.”

  “I’ve thought that often.”

  John fumbled with his wallet. I looked from him to the beggar singing, the rain washing his bare head, streaming through his shellacked hair, trembling on his earlobes.

  And then, the strange perversity. Before John could move to pay, I took his elbow and pulled him to the other side of the bridge. John resisted, gave me a look, then came along, cursing.

  As we walked off, the man started another song. Glancing back, I saw him, head proud, black glasses taking the pour, mouth open, and the fine voice clear:

  I’ll be glad when you’re dead

  in your grave, old man,

  Be glad when you’re dead

  in your grave, old man.

  Be glad when you’re dead,

  Flowers over your head,

  And then I’ll marry the journeyman …

  “Why won’t you give him, of all people, money!?” said John.

  The beggars of Dublin, who bothers to wonder on them, look, see, know, understand?

  I for one did not in the next days.

  When I did, I was sure that that stone-gargoyle man taking his daily shower on O’Connell Bridge while he sang Irish opera was not blind. Then again, his head to me was a cup of darkness.

  One afternoon I found myself lingering before a tweed shop near O’Connell Bridge, staring in at a stack of good thick burly caps. I did not need another head cover, I had a life’s supply collected in a suitcase, yet in I went to pay out money for a fine warm brown-colored cap, which I turned round and round in my hands, in a trance.

  “Sir,” said the clerk. “That cap is a seven. I would guess your head, sir, at a seven and one half.”

  “This will fit me. This will fit me.” I stuffed the cap into my pocket.

  “Let me get you a sack, sir—”

  “No!” Hot-cheeked, suddenly suspicious of what I was up to, I paid and fled.

  And there waited the bridge in the soft rain. All I need do now was walk over and—

  In the middle of the bridge, the capless blind beggar was gone.

  In his place stood an old man and woman cranking a great piano-box hurdy-gurdy, which ratcheted and coughed like a coffee grinder eating glass and rocks, giving forth no melody but a grand and melancholy sort of iron indigestion.

  I waited for the tune, if tune it was, to finish. I kneaded the new tweed cap in my sweaty fist while the hurdy-gurdy prickled, spanged, and thumped.

  “Be damned to ya!” the old man and old woman, furious with their job, seemed to say, their faces thunderous pale, their eyes red hot in the rain. “Pay us! Listen, but we’ll give you no tune! Make up
your own!” their mute lips said.

  And standing there on the spot where the beggar always sang without his cap, I thought: Why don’t they take one fiftieth of the money they make each month and have the thing tuned? If I were cranking the box, I’d want a song, at least for myself! If you were cranking the box! I answered. But you’re not! And it’s obvious they hate the begging job—who’d blame them—and want no part of giving back a familiar song as recompense.

  How different from my capless friend.

  My friend?

  I blinked with surprise, then stepped forward and nodded.

  “Beg pardon. The man with the concertina …”

  The woman stopped cranking and glared at me.

  “Ah?”

  “The man with no cap in the rain.”

  “Ah, him!” snapped the woman.

  “He’s not here today?”

  “Do you see him?” cried the woman.

  She started cranking the infernal device.

  I put a penny in the tin cup.

  She peered at me as if I’d spit on her hand.

  I added another penny.

  “Do you know where he is?” I asked.

  “Sick. In bed. The damn cold! We heard him go off, coughing.”

  “Do you know where he lives?”

  “No!”

  “Do you know his name?”

  “Now, who would know that!”

  I stood there, feeling directionless, thinking of the man somewhere off in the town, alone. I looked at the new cap foolishly.

  The two old people watched me.

  I put a last shilling in the cup.

  “He’ll be all right,” I said to no one.

  The woman heaved the crank. The bucketing machine let loose a fall of glass and junk in its hideous interior.

  “The tune,” I said. “What is it?”

  “You’re deaf!” snapped the woman. “It’s the national anthem! Do you mind removing your cap?”

  I showed her the new cap in my hand.

  She glared up. “Your cap, man, your cap!”

  “Oh!” Blushing, I seized the old cap from my head.