As It Is in Heaven (2 page)

There was peace in that. The puzzle of God was not so bad after all, and Philip could endure suffering, knowing that at least
when it was over it would mean he was forgiven.

In twenty years that day had not come. His son, Stephen, had become a schoolteacher and moved away from Dublin to the west.
The fracture that had fallen between them the day of the crash, when they had each retreated into great guilty rooms of silence,
had grown steadily wider, and the father had felt each year the weakening of his ability to reach his son. Stephen was a lone
figure; he was tall and silent and intense, and had vanished from his father into the world of history books before he had
finished his teens. Now he arrived one weekend a month to sit opposite his father in the sitting room and correct copies and
read the newspaper while Puccini played on the small stereo and the light died in the street outside.

“Hello.”

It was a late-autumn afternoon. The chestnut leaves had fallen in the garden and blackened the grass, which Philip Griffin
did not rake. A small man, he sat in the front window with the Venetian blinds open and watched the road for the coming of
his son’s car. When it entered the driveway, he had looked away and gazed at the air as if watching the music. He heard Stephen
turn his key in the door, but he did not get up. He sat with his hands on his knees and waited with the terrible immobility
of those who have lost the means of talking to their children.

“Hello,” Stephen said again.

The music was playing. His father raised his right hand three inches off his knee as a greeting, but said nothing more. He
was listening to the singing like a man looking at a faraway place. There were words in the air, but Philip Griffin did not
need to say them, he did not need to say: “When your mother was alive, she liked this one,” for Stephen already knew it. He
knew the terrible sweetness of the melancholy in that music and how it soothed his father to be there within it. He said nothing
and sat down.

On the small tape recorder beside his chair Philip Griffin turned up the volume and let the music fill the space between them.
They had not seen each other for three weeks, but sat in their armchairs, surrounded by Puccini, as if the spell of the music
would bear no interruption and the memory of the slim and tall figure of Anne Griffin was walking in the room. The sorrowfulness
of the aria was cool and delicious; it was beyond their capability of telling, and while it played, father and son lingered
in its brief and beautiful grief, each thinking of different women.

The heavy golden curtains of the room were tied back from the window; they had not been closed in many years, and their gathered
folds held within them the ageing dust of the man who sat there every day. Philip Griffin had his face turned to the open
Venetian blind, and bands of orange light fell across it as the streetlights came on. He was sixty-eight years old. He had
never been handsome, but had once been lively. Now his hair grew like curling grey wires over his ears and in his ears, while
the crown of his head was so bare it looked vulnerable and expectant of blows. As he sat he held his hands in his lap and
sometimes looked down at them and turned them over, as if searching for traces of the cancer he imagined must be growing inside
him. He was a tired man who had grown to dislike company. The place in his spirit where he was broken had grown so familiar
to him, and he had so long ago abandoned the notion of any fingering or magic that could repair it, that his living had assumed
a frayed quality, waiting for the last thread to give.

The music played, he held his hands. When three arias had ended, he reached down and clicked off the machine. “Well,” he said,
and looked through the darkness of the room to see with astonishment the changed face of his son.

You can know a lot about a man when you are measuring him for trousers. You can know his own sense of expectation about the
world and whether he feels himself fitting into it or not. Sometimes he has grown beyond himself, and the extra inches that
may be the loss of youth are hidden by the quick thumb on the tape measure. Sometimes the inches are the inches of pleasure
and the man allows them like the proof of his own expansion, the feasting and fortune he has known. He can be told he is larger
now, for he feels the responsibilities of his age and is not yet aware of his own diminishment. The tape measure tells a thousand
stories. As a tailor in Clery’s, Philip Griffin had made a legion of men fit better into the world and, looking at his son
in the armchair, knew the slackness of his trouser belt, the looseness of his collar were the telltale signs of love or death.
God could not kill the whole family before him, he figured, and so he knew it was the former.

“Put on the light,” he said.

Stephen stood up. When he clicked the switch, his father was startled even more by the look of him. Stephen had emerged from
adolescence with an angular air of oddity; his body was thin and long and crooked, and his head was enormous. He was almost
twice the length of his father. But as he stood there in the room the thinness of him seemed stretched by the pressure of
his feelings. His clothes did not fit him; you could put three fingers inside the belt of his trousers, his father thought,
your whole hand inside his shirt. The tailor had seen this shrinking often before, he had measured men who trembled silently
in the dressing room, feeling the wasting of themselves beneath the power of a passion, but it belonged to springtime. It
was a May-time rapture, an annual fact of men in their clothes like the brief season of happiness in summer when satisfied
love made every man larger in his chest by an inch. No, this was different; Stephen was alarmingly thin, and even before he
had turned his face fully towards his father, Philip Griffin had begun to formulate who the woman might be.

“I’ll make tea,” Stephen said.

“If you want.”

“Do you?”

“If you’re making it.” Stephen turned to leave the room. “I don’t need the light,” said his father, and sat back into the
darkness when the switch clicked. Alone, he quickly glanced outside at the old car Stephen had driven up from the west and
saw that one side of it had been recently dented.

“My God,” he said aloud to his wife, and then reminded himself not to talk to her while Stephen was in the house. He sat and
listened. He heard the loping of his long son moving about the kitchen down the hallway. It was an empty place, made all the
more so by how full it had once been with the presence of a woman and two children; on its clean counters and polished tabletop
were the memories of the ten thousand meals of childhood, the smallest of tarts and jam, the hiss of the iron and sizzle of
fry. They were not entirely vanished into the walls, and Philip Griffin knew that as Stephen made the tea and stood by the
counter the sense of loss would still be potent. He should have sold the house after Anne and Mary died. He should have moved
out and left the place; for no matter how glowing were all the moments of the past, the first years of marriage, the happiness
of Stephen’s birth, then two years later, his sister Mary, the tumble and laughter, the evenings at the Dublin Grand Opera
Society, the Christmases, none of it mattered or survived that afternoon he had been called from the tailoring in Clery’s
to come to the hospital and identify his wife and daughter after the car crash.

He should have sold the house then, but didn’t. He couldn’t, the grief was too great. He breathed the death in the living
room air, the sorrow that lingered in the stairs, until it got inside him. He never knew that a small man could carry so much
grief and was amazed that the years did not diminish it but amplified it, until the day three years ago when he had woken
up and realized with a huge sigh of peace that at last he was dying.

Now, as he sat in the darkness listening to Stephen in the kitchen, he knew memories grew sharper with time. For the measure
of his pain in losing Anne Nolan was the measure of his love; perhaps if he had loved her less he might have endured the world
better afterwards; perhaps it was never intended that we give ourselves so much to one person that the vanishing of their
face makes us feel the world is only a shadow. So, as he sat there in his armchair looking towards the street, he prayed that
his son would feel the emptiness of the kitchen like a pain, and somehow realize he must not love too deeply.

“Here’s the tea. Do you want the light?”

“Not unless you do.”

“All right.”

Stephen left the light off and came in carefully with the tray.

They sat with their tea. In the time since he had realized he was dying, Philip had not mentioned it to his son. He hoped
the illness would sweep through him swiftly. He imagined waking one morning moments before his death and then surrendering
in a long gasp; his good suit was ready in the closet with one of the silk ties from Harry O’Connell up in Brown Thomas. He
would be no burden on Stephen and didn’t want his son worrying about him. The boy had had enough. No, any day now it would
arrive; for a man who had already put up with as much as he had, there would be no painful deterioration. He was certain of
it. One day he would be alive, sitting in his chair, the next he would be dead.

He sipped his tea and looked at his son. He even looks like a history teacher, Philip decided. There’s something dishevelled
about history, goes well in a tweed jacket, or even a corduroy. But not those jumpers he wears, not on a man over thirty.
No, a man should wear a jacket.

“How is school going?” he asked. It was what he always asked, and always received the same answer.

“It’s fine.”

And there was comfort in that, too, like throwing a ball back and forth to each other, the familiarity and simplicity of its
rhythm making everything seem in its place in the world.

There is no way he can tell me, thought Philip. No way he can begin to say, I have fallen in love. And that this is already
different from anything else, that already he knows that there is a greater magnitude of feeling in his heart than he had
possibly imagined before. There is no way he can tell me, even as I cannot tell him I am dying.

“That’s nice tea,” said Philip, and looked down at his hands. He waited some time and said, “Will we get to evening Mass?”

They left the house and pulled the door shut and went into Dublin. Philip drove the car and Stephen sat beside him. The night
had fallen. There were no stars or moon. While they drove, Stephen said nothing. His knees were crooked up in front of him.
His breath steamed the window excessively; the warmth of his thoughts about the woman he had met rose against the glass until
at last his father asked him to open the window. When he did, Gabriella Castoldi flew out on the night air 160 miles from
where she was in the city of Galway. Stephen rolled up the window, but it was quickly fogged with her again, the car air smelling
increasingly of white lilies and clouding the view ahead so utterly that neither of the two men could bring themselves to
mention it but instead drove on, peering outward through the fogged windscreen of hopeless love.

The journey was fifteen minutes. Philip parked the car in
NO PARKING
before the gate of an office building. He saw the sign but paid it no attention, getting out of the car with his hat on his
head and telling Stephen not to bother to lock it: when the plot of your life is written, there is no need to worry about
trivialities. The two men stepped onto the path; they smelled the lilies escaping with them and noticed an elderly woman waiting
for the 46 bus raise her nose and catch the scent as it passed down the street. But they said nothing about it. Silence was
the family code.

Philip touched the brim of his hat slightly. He stepped into the street without looking.

But nothing was coming; it never was. That was the monotony of being spared: God was always there before him. The Dublin evening
pressed like a damp cloth across the backs of their necks, and the two men hurried across to the door of the Church of the
Blessed Sacrament. When they opened it, Mass began. Philip Griffin took off his hat. He knelt into the pew farthest from the
altar, closed his eyes, and told his wife there might be a delay, but he hoped he would be there before too long.

  That evening they played chess in the dark. Not that it was entirely dark, but the only light came from the low table lamp
in the hallway and cast elongated shadows across the board, making the pieces larger and giving the impression to anyone passing
outside that the men were playing with giants. Over the years of Stephen’s visits it had become routine to play after Mass.
The language of chess was much like the secret language of men’s clothes, only it took longer to discover. Now Philip knew
that there existed in the movement of the pieces a communication infinitely more true than anything he and Stephen might have
said to each other.