The Last Storyteller (38 page)

“What’s your name, sir?”

“Eddie.”

“Is that Edwin, Edmund, or Edward?”

“Eddie. ’Tis Eddie, like.” I can do a Cork accent.

“Very well, Eddie. Now I want you to relax. Would you like to take off your hat?”

“No, thanks, I’m fond of it.”

The audience suspected something; they had long experience of outsiders being guyed and made foolish. They got it right, but for the wrong reasons. How could they have known?

Jack clapped his hands and turned to the audience.

“Now, ladies and gentlemen, Eddie doesn’t look like a lady, does he? But in a moment he will take off his coat and put it back on like a lady puts on a dress.”

He stood in front of me and stared into my eyes, the eyes I’d been
unable to look at in Templemore, the eyes I’d avoided on the stage of the Olympia, the eyes whose vile light I was about to extinguish. He passed his hands in front of my face, and I, with full resistance closed my eyelids. When he snapped his fingers I gave myself a little jolt and stayed locked, seemingly, inside his trance.

“Now, then, Eddie, I want to you take off your coat and put it back on just as you’ve seen your wife put on her frock. You know—tug all your underwear into place, pat it and pull it, and then put on your dress, because you’re going out shopping and you don’t want all the other ladies in Cork to see you looking dowdy.”

I could tell that he was leering at the audience; I heard their chuckles.

Behaving at first as though a little sleepy, I took off my gabardine coat. For extra effect I tipped forward the tweed hat. I trailed the coat a little, then picked it up again and inspected it, peering as though myopic. Some belly laughs rose, and a heckler shouted, “Edwina!”

For a moment or two I patted my shoulders and my chest, and then I opened out the coat, took it by the collar, and whirled it high above my head in a mad circle. I danced a little jig.

The audience roared and Jack went along with it, but through my half-closed eyelids I could see the irked query on his face:
What’s this fellow up to?

I let the coat fall to my side, holding it still by the collar.

“Well, I must say, Edwina”—he turned and winked to the crowd—“I don’t know where you take off and put on your dresses, do I? Now be a good girl and put your clothes on; there are people watching.”

Whirling the coat, I set off on a gallop around the stage, whinnying like a horse. Now the audience felt the prank, and like all local communities they liked nothing better than seeing a smooth-tongued outsider being bested—especially in Cork, and especially an Englishman.

I finished my gallop, came to a halt in front of Jack, pawed the ground, shook my head with a flurry, and went still again.

He didn’t know what to do—which surprised me; I’d have thought he must have been guyed before. Evidently not. He took my face in his hands, not kindly, and I had to suppress my revolted shudder. Hard hands; and I imagined them hitting Venetia.

“Well, Edwina, we have a misunderstanding here, haven’t we? But
that’s all right. All wives need to be taught how to obey their husbands—isn’t that right, ladies and gentlemen?” To this he received a mixed cheer. “But Edwina is at last going to put on her dress and act like a lady.” To me he hissed, “Do as I say. You are under my command.”

Idiot
. That was my first thought. Next thought?
This is all going exactly to plan
. And it was, and continued to do so—for the next few moments.

I took the coat, opened it out, began to slip it on in an exaggeratedly female fashion, and then, when I had secured a button or two in what I thought passed for a ladylike way, I put out my hands like a boxer, closed my fists, and began to spar with Jack.

He didn’t know what to do. He was, as you know, shorter than me and a great deal thinner, he didn’t have my reach, and he couldn’t stop my hands from tapping his face. I crowded him and danced away, moved in again, huffing and puffing, dancing on the balls of my feet, feinting and jabbing.

Trying to go along with it, he turned his back on me and walked to the front of the stage.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he began.

From behind, I grabbed him by the collar and shook him like a dog.

“This fellow—” I shouted. “No gentleman. Let me tell you about him. He beats the shit out of women. Want proof? I have plenty. I’ve seen the bruises.”

After a stunned gasp, some shouts floated up:

“Get off.”

“Get out of here.”

“Go on with the show.”

Jack wriggled, but he couldn’t wrench himself out of my grip. I needed only one hand to hold him by the scruff of the neck, turn him around, and run him off backstage. As we ran I could feel the hammer jolting in my pocket.

The next part had to work fast—because I had to get away. I had parked the car two streets from the hall, and I calculated that the shock of the incident, and his fallen body, would delay any pursuit. But I knew I had to be quick.

It didn’t happen. Backstage stood two men, hefty and louche. They knew Jack had nothing like this in his act.

“Grab him!” Jack shouted, and they did, and ran me to the street door.

For the next three or four minutes they held me splayed and wide as Jack kicked me, pummeled me, blackened my eyes, broke several teeth. He used his elbow first to hit me where I wore the glasses. For weeks, the rings around my eyes made me look like a blue raccoon. He broke my nose and two ribs, and only his henchmen stopped him from kicking in my head.

They threw me into the street with a flurry of kicks. My haunches still feel their boots when frost descends. I never got to throw a punch; that fact hurt most of all.

Confession is its own engine, an unstoppable impetus: tell one sin and you want to tell all. Especially if that sin was committed in cold blood. It took some time for my blood to cool—and then it went icy. I knew exactly what I wanted done and how to make it happen; I was prepared to take my time; I merely needed to do the planning, nothing more. My country’s history helped. I visited a hero.

When I fear the final ravages of age, I think of Dan Barry. I found him at home, reduced to a hank of bones, imprisoned in his bed by a fierce housekeeper. She allowed me to see him for five minutes, then told me to scram. More or less. But his eyes said something else; his eyes said,
I’m more alert than I seem
. We shared a silent nod. My unspoken message:
I understand. And I’ll be back
.

Learning had authority back then. A college degree had a pride of place. Add medicine and you faced no challenge, not even from a savage housekeeper who was trying to bully an old man into changing his will.

The world gives us two kinds of magic, hard and soft. Hard takes your breath away—John Jacob met his only and long lost brother in Vienna when he dropped his matches on the floor of a bus: that’s “hard” magic. Usually, though, I think of coincidence as “soft” magic.

I didn’t know any doctors near Dan Barry’s house, so I asked in a pub. (Where else?) The drinkers directed me to the “new fellow, but he’s green; he’s only just out of college.”

He weighed a ton and a half; his neck bulged from his collar like two rolls of sausage. Most usefully, though, he had the small, piggy eyes of a bully.

“Where were you before here?” I asked him—and, soft magic, I knew the answer. When he told me I said, to make him my slave, “They had polio over there, didn’t they? Were you involved in that?” He grunted, and I took him captive. As we drove I said, “I came to you because this needs a man with authority. You’ll see what I mean.”

Of course, like all bullies when you give them a free hand, he almost overdid it. By the time we left he had taken down the housekeeper’s home particulars, interrogated her about her nursing experience, asked for references, and told her he was sending in a nurse. I saw him as an advance squad—clearing the ground. He terrified her: you can always bully a bully: they live on fear.

The next day I came back, to assess what had to be done. Mr. Barry had to be fed, but with care. The nurse we’d found arrived an hour after I did, and together we drew up a menu and directed the housekeeper to go shopping. We changed his room—from the dark little closet overhung by trees at the back of the house to a wide-windowed, sunny room at the front.

“This is my own room again,” he said.

The nurse mouthed to me, “That bitch.”

Who soon returned. When I saw the car, I let the nurse loose. “Say what you like,” I told her. “Make sure there are no witnesses.”

Ten minutes later, she came back smiling. “She thinks she’s going to jail.”

We searched his closets, his dressers. He had clothes he’d never worn, pajamas, shirts, underwear still in their shop wrappings. I paid the nurse, who said she’d stay the night. The housekeeper not only held the front door open as I left the house, she darted ahead of me and opened the car door, too. The first part of the plan had clicked firmly into place.

Sunlight picked out Phase Two. She wore red; he, a white shirt. Even at several hundred yards I could see how their relationship had waxed. To
a full moon. They heard the car, turned around, waved—and leaned against each other.

Take it easy. Slow walk. Watch them. Yes, no question. James Bermingham has been staking a claim. Planting a flag. Is this going to work? Second part, yes. Phase Three? I hope so; I just flocking hope so.

“What are you doing?”

“Hiya, Ben!” She ran across the grass barefoot and threw her arms around me; her hair smelled of lemon.

“Stranger,” said Jimmy Bermingham. “The man. How’s she cuttin’?”

“In little slices,” I said. We had so many of those meaningless banter phrases, those icebreakers. And each had a variety of answers. To “How’s she cuttin’?” I might have said, “Up the middle and down the sides” or “Around the front and across the back” or “Round as a hoop and you’d roll it.”

Everybody in the country had them. My father said to people, “Where-where-where are you goin’ with no bell on your bike?” Large Lily said to all and sundry, “Well, look what happens when you’re not lookin’.” Billy Moloney, her husband, seemed to have an anthology of them: “The river’s flockin’ risin’ and it’s not flockin’ full.” And “Up and down like a hoor’s drawers.” And “Wherever you see a fox, there’s always a flockin’ hen.”

As I say, they were meaningless—but without malice or harm, and they helped awkward people get over their embarrassment at being alive.

Jimmy looked me up and down. “You’re as healthy as a brown dog,” he said.

“Are you fully recovered?” I asked.

Elma answered, addressing first me, then Jimmy: “He’s still coughing up marbles—aren’t you?”

Behind them on the ground sat a bucket of walnut-sized stones.

“What were you doing?” I asked.

“Jimmy’s improving my aim.”

In the next few minutes I understood why Jimmy got paid for his patriotism. Along the fence he had set out five old blue tin mugs. One or two bore dent marks.

“He’s trying to get me to hit them mugs,” said Elma Sloane, “and sure the fence won’t let me hit them, and anyway, amn’t I as left-handed as a duck.”

In fact she was right-handed, but with poor aim. I tried, and hit not a mug.

“We’ll go closer,” I suggested, and Elma said, “No, let Jimmy have a go.”

Thirty yards, I’d say—and he knocked every mug. When he saw my eyebrow raised he nodded, and he was saying to me,
Yes. With a gun, too
.

We sat on the vanquished fence. No wrinkles of fear threatened Elma’s forehead; the sun landed on her hair like a butterfly; the world around her sang and danced.

“How’s Randall?” I asked.

They looked at each other.

“He’s as cross as a bag of cats,” said Elma.

“Artistic temperament,” suggested Jimmy.

“He’s out with me,” said Elma. Translation: “He’s not speaking to me.”

“When did this happen?”

Jimmy said, “He was bilious the day after I came here.”

“But you’re still all right to stay?”

Elma nodded. “I’m still posing for him.”

Jimmy cut in: “Yeh, you’re still stripping off your clothes for him.”

“But wasn’t that the arrangement? That Elma would be safe here and learn to pose for Randall.”

“He hates me,” said Jimmy. “But he’s afraid to throw me out.”

So that’s why Randall didn’t acknowledge me at the studio window that bad night. I controlled my rising excitement.

“Let me go and talk to him.”

I drove the final stretch of avenue. And saw how Randall got inspired. The lake, gray and long, dull under the cloud cover, yet had a shimmer. Like one of his fish.

He heard the door close behind me and shouted. I followed the yell down the same corridor.

“We’re in here.”

In a new work space, opened beneath a long window, Annette lay on her side, facing Randall. Naked, of course. And unaffected by my arrival. I peered around his shoulder at the canvas: would this be another voluptuous fish?

He looked grumpy. I asked, “How are you, Randall?”

“Can you get that fellow out of here?” He didn’t say it; he shouted it. Annette would have shrugged if she could have raised a shoulder.

Done. My task complete. I needed to tie the ends, but I saw it all. And it played out as simply as I had hoped. That afternoon I joined all the dots. The next day I completed the picture.

Mr. Barry welcomed every move. Jimmy Bermingham loved it. Elma saw the sense. Saw the future. As to her old fears—no worry necessary. I said to her, “You know Jimmy’s connections, don’t you?”

“The things he told me,” she said.

Randall’s mood improved at dinner. “But you’ll still come and pose for me.”

“If he’ll let me,” said Elma.

I said, “He will.”

We went out in the night, Jimmy and I, and when our eyes made the darkness brighter, we looked at the lake.

“What about Marian, though?”

I said, “She has a boyfriend. Longtime. He’s a big cop.”

“Ah,” said Jimmy. “That’s why she couldn’t accommodate me. Opposite sides of the fence.”

Letting him have his justification, I said, “Are you done with all that?”