Long After Midnight (16 page)

 
          
"Katie,
come back, you can't
do
this to
me!"

 
          
The
red taillight of the car dwindled in the cold rain. Behind him, the guards
moved forward to take hold of him while he screamed.

 
          
Sunday
in
Dublin
.

 
          
The
words are Doom itself.

 
          
Sunday
in
Dublin
.

 
          
Drop
such words from a cliff and they never strike bottom. They just fall through
emptiness toward five in the gray afternoon.

 
          
Sunday
in
Dublin
. How to get through
it.somehow
.

 
          
Sound
the funeral bells. Yank the covers up over your ears. Hear the hiss of the
black feathered wreath as it rustles, hung on your silent door. Listen to those
empty streets below your hotel room waiting to gulp you if you venture forth
before
noon
. Feel
the mist sliding its wet flannel tongue under the window ledges, licking hotel
roofs, its great bulk dripping of ennui.

 
          
Sunday,
I thought.
Dublin
. The pubs shut tight save for a fleeting
hour. The cinemas sold out two or three weeks in advance. Nothing to do but
perhaps go stare at the
uriny
lions at the Phoenix
Park Zoo, at the vultures looking like they'd fallen, covered with glue, into
the rag-pickers' bin. Wander by the River
Liffey
, see
the fog-colored waters. Wander in the alleys, see the
Liffey
-colored
skies.

 
          
No,
I thought wildly, stay in bed, wake me at sunset, feed me high tea, tuck me in
again, good night, all!

 
          
But
I staggered up, a hero, under the crashing blow of Sunday, shaved, and in a
faint panic at
noon
considered the day ahead from the corner of my eye. There it lay, a deserted
corridor of hours, colored like the upper side of my tongue on a dim morn. Even
God must be bored with days like this, in northern lands. I could not resist
thinking of Sicily, where any Sunday is a fete in regalia, a celebratory
fireworks parade as springtime flocks of chickens and humans strut and
pringle
the warm pancake-batter alleys, waving their combs,
their hands, their feet, tilting their sun-blazed eyes, while music in free
gifts leaps or is thrown from each never-shut window.

 
          
But
Dublin
!
Dublin
! Ah, you great dead brute of a city! I
thought, peering from my window at the snowed-on,
sooted
-over
corpse. Here are two coins for your eyes!

 
          
Then
I opened the door and stepped out into all of that criminal Sunday which
awaited only me.

 
          
I
shut another door. I stood in the deep silence of a Sabbath pub. I moved
noiselessly to whisper for the best drink and stood a long while nursing my
soul. Nearby, an old man was similarly engaged in finding the pattern of his
life in the depths of his glass. Ten minutes must have passed, when, very
slowly, the old man raised his head to stare deep beyond the fly specks on the
mirror, beyond me, beyond himself.

 
          
"What
have I done," he mourned, "for a single mortal soul this day?
Nothing! And that's why I feel so terrible destroyed."

 
          
I
waited.

 
          
"The
older I get," said the man, "the less I do for people. The less I do,
the more I feel a prisoner at the bar. Smash and grab, that's me!"

 
          
"Well-"
said I.

 
          
"No!"
cried the old man. "If s an awesome responsibility when the world runs to
hand you things. For an instance: sunsets. Everything pink and gold, looking
like those melons they ship up from
Spain
. That's a gift,
ain't
it?"

 
          
"It
is."

 
          
"Well,
who do you thank for sunsets? And don't drag the Lord in the bar, now! Any
remarks to Him are too quiet. I mean someone to grab and slap their back and
say thanks for the fine early light this morn,
boyo
,
or, much obliged for the look of them damn wee flowers by the road this day,
and the grass laying about in the wind. Those are gifts, too, who'll deny
it?"

 
          
"Not
me," I said.

 
          
"Have
you ever waked middle of the night and felt summer coming on for the first
time, through the window, after the long cold? Did you shake your wife and tell
her your gratitude? No, you lay there, a clod, chortling to yourself alone, you
and the new weather! Do you see the pattern I'm at, now?"

 
          
"Clearly,"
I said.

 
          
"Then
ain't
you horribly guilty, yourself? Don't the burden
make you hunchback? All the lovely things you got from life and no penny down?
Ain't
they hid in your dark flesh somewhere, lighting up
your soul, them fine summers and easy falls, or maybe just the clean taste of
stout here, all gifts, and you feeling the fool to go thank any mortal man for
your fortune. What befalls chaps like us, I ask, who coin up all their
gratitude for a lifetime, and spend none of it, misers that we be? One day,
don't we crack down the beam and show the dry rot? Some night, don't we
smother?"

 
          
"I
never thought..."

 
          
"Think,
man!" he cried. "Before it's too late. You're American,
ain't
you, and young? Got the same natural gifts as me? But
for lack of humbly thanking someone somewhere somehow you're getting round in
the shoulder and short in the breath. Act, man, before you're the walking
dead!"

 
          
With
this he lapsed quietly into the final half of his reverie, with the Guinness
lapping a soft lace mustache slowly along his upper lip.

 
          
I
walked from the pub into the Sunday weather.

 
          
I
stood looking at the gray stone streets and the gray stone clouds, watching the
frozen people trudge by exhaling gray funeral plumes from their wintry mouths,
dressed in their smoke-colored suits and soot-black coats, and I felt the white
grow out in my hair.

 
          
Days
like this, I thought, all the things you never did catch up with you, unravel
your laces, itch your beard. God help any man who hasn't paid his debts this
day.

 
          
Drearily,
I turned like a weathercock in a slow wind, Started my remote feet back toward
the hotel.

 
          
Right
then, it happened.

 
          
I
stopped. I stood very still. I listened.

 
          
For
it seemed the wind had shifted and now blew from the west country and brought
with it a prickling and tingling: the strum of a harp.

 
          
"Well,"
I whispered.

 
          
As
if a cork had been pulled, all the heavy gray sea waters vanished roaring down
a hole in my shoe; I felt my sadness go.

 
          
And
around the comer I went.

 
          
And
there sat a little woman, not half so big as her harp, her hands held out in
the shivering strings like a child feeling a fine clear rain.

 
          
The
harp threads flurried; the sounds dissolved like shudders of disturbed water
nudging a shore. "Danny Boy" leaped out of the harp. "
Wearin
' of the Green" sprang after, full-clothed. Then
"
Limerick
Is My Town, Sean Liam Is My Name" and
"The Loudest Wake That Ever Was." The harp sound was the kind of
thing you feel when champagne, poured in a full big glass, prickles your
eyelids, sprays soft on your cheeks.

 
          
My
mouth was pinned high at both corners. Spanish oranges bloomed in my cheeks. My
breath fifed my nostrils. My feet minced, hidden, a secret dancing in my
motionless shoes.

 
          
The
harp played "Yankee Doodle."

 
          
Had
the lady seen me stand near with my idiot fever? No, I thought, coincidence.

 
          
And
then I turned sad again.

 
          
For
look, I thought, she doesn't see her harp. She doesn't hear her music!

 
          
True.
Her hands, all alone, jumped and frolicked on the air, picked and
pringled
the strings, two ancient spiders busy at webs
quickly built, then, torn by wind, rebuilt. She let her fingers play abandoned,
to themselves, while her face turned this way and that, as if she lived in a
nearby house and need only glance out on occasion to see her hands had come to
no harm. —"Ah ..." My soul sighed in me.

 
          
Then:

 
          
Here's
your chance! I almost shouted. Good God, of course!

 
          
But
I held to myself and let her reap out the last full falling sheaves of
"Yankee Doodle."

 
          
Then,
heartbeat in throat, I said:

 
          
"You
play beautifully."

 
          
One
hundred pounds melted from my body.

 
          
The
woman nodded and began "Summer on the Shore," her fingers weaving
mantillas from mere breath.

 
          
"You
play very beautifully indeed," I said.

 
          
Another
seventy pounds fell from my limbs.

 
          
"When
you play forty years," she said, "you don't notice."

 
          
"You
play well enough to be in a theater."

 
          
"Be
off with you!" Two sparrows pecked in the shuttling loom. "Why should
I think of orchestras and bands?" -

 
          
"It's
indoors work," I said.

 
          
"My
father," she said, while her hands went away and returned, "made this
harp, played it fine, taught me how. God's sake, he said, keep out from under
roofs!"

 
          
The
old woman blinked, remembering. "Play out back, in front, around the sides
of theaters,
Da
said, but don't play in where the
music gets snuffed. Might as well harp in a coffin!"

 
          
"Doesn't
this rain hurt your instrument?"

 
          
"Ifs
inside places hurt harps with heat and steam,
Da
said. Keep it out, let it breathe, take fine tones and timbres from the air.
Besides,
Da
said, when people buy tickets, each
thinks ifs in him to yell if you don't play up, down, sideways, for him alone.
Shy off from that,
Da
said; they'll call you handsome
one year, brute the next. Get where they'll pass on by; if they like your song—hurrah!
Those that don't will run from your life. That way, girl, you'll meet just
those who lean from natural bent in your direction. Why closet yourself with
demon fiends when you can live in the streets' fresh wind with abiding angels?
But I
do
go on. Ah, now, why?"

 
          
She
peered at me for the first time, like someone come from a dark room, squinting.