As It Is in Heaven (25 page)

Maria Feri had prepared for Christmas alone, but the unexpected arrival of her cousin visited her like a secret blessing.
Her heart fluttered, roses shot out in the pale powders on her cheeks. She sat Gabriella in her only comfortable chair and
tapped the cage of Goldoni, the yellow-feathered bird she had named with an endearing lack of originality, who was her truest
companion and could, she said, flushing with shyness, sing finer than Pavarotti. While Gabriella sat with the bird, Maria
made more welcoming the guest room where no guest had ever stayed; she carried through the sitting room extra blankets, a
jug of fresh water, two apples, and the potted lemon plant which was dying in the kitchen, all the time struggling to keep
the deep joy of her visitor's arrival from showing beneath it a half century of loneliness.

Gabriella sat with Goldoni. Sickness came in waves, and when she went to the window for air, the familiar mildly bitter scent
of the canal water turned her insides with a swift churn. She gasped and held on to the rail, feeling both the illness of
her pregnancy and the stronger, older malady that was the returning loss and disappointment of her childhood. She caught the
air and gagged as if it were brown water. There she was, herself at nine years of age going to the window as if it were a
portal of escape from the sharp censure of her father, who sat at the table asking questions of geography and knuckling her
brothers' heads when they failed to answer correctly. Gabriella had only just slunk back into the armchair when the angular
face of her cousin reappeared through the doorway. Maria saw the pallor of the other woman and supposed it to be sisterly
shock at the news of Giovanni. She sat down on the hard chair opposite Gabriella and gave her a glass of mineral water.

“They arrested him last Tuesday,” she said.

She was a thin yet strong woman, whose bones might have been made of an assemblage of the wooden handles of farm tools with
skin drawn over them. Her lips were so used to tightness they held her expressions unfreed in a clamp which dared not release
the yearning for all the unlived love her life had missed.

“I didn't think it was right,” she said, “Christmas.”

Gabriella smiled a half-grimace. She had not known and took the news like the latest in a long line of defeats above which
the ghost of her father was laughing bitterly.

“They said Giovanni had done terrible things. He has been implicated in …” Maria stopped when she saw the wound open in her
cousin's expression.

“I cannot help him,” said Gabriella, “it is his own life. I don't know what I could do.” She raised her hands and let them
fall with uselessness.

“No, of course,” said Maria Feri, and reached with the large fingers of her hand to touch Gabriella's knee. “You must be tired.
Will you come and see if the room is all right? I can change anything you don't like.”

And then it was Christmas in Venice. Rain that was falling in Dublin fell, too, into the Canal Grande and emptied the narrow
streets, bathing them in a flowing melancholy until they seemed sometimes awash with the waters of sadness. The buildings
perched lofty and aloof from each other, as if they could ignore entirely their lower beginnings and the certainty of their
sinking to the victor of Time. The city closed in on itself, and in the sitting room of the house of Maria Feri the two women
sat on either side of despair. Gabriella had not told her cousin of her pregnancy. She had given her as a Christmas gift the
two bottles of bath powders that Nelly Grant had concocted as a complement to love, but Maria had put them safely away in
a dry press, where all her treasured things awaited the arrival of happiness. She sat and made coffee and read long novels
and fussed over her visitor. She fed Goldoni French biscottes and carried his cage away from the draught of the window when
she realized he had not sung in three days.

Gabriella did not know what she was doing there. She did not know yet that she could not repair the past, and so her mind
brooded on the failed pregnancies of her mother, the miscarried sisters who, like some treasured but lost luggage, had never
appeared, and left her gaping at a revolving emptiness. Gabriella questioned herself with the rigour of her father. She interrogated
Love until it could not answer and broke down in choked-up confusion that could only mean there was none: she did not love
Stephen Griffin. Time and again, she sat under the glare of examination and, while her cousin whistled at the bars of the caged bird, she turned over in her head the impossible questions. What should she do? How could she be in love with that man? He did not love her either, did he? He loved her violin. He loved the idea of her, and had fallen in love with his own imagination.

But now the child, the child was not imaginary, she heard her father chide her: “It's irresponsible and stupid. You're a fool like your brothers. There are laws, there are rules for living and we follow them,” he said, “whether we like them or not.” He stood across the room from her and leaned his disgust against the wall. He held his head angled backward to aim the shot of his anger like spit.

“Andiamo a pranzo?”
Maria Feri asked, and at once he vanished.

Under a black umbrella then, they went through the grey and green wateriness of the city for lunch. The air blew cold. Many places were closed, and they had to make do with the
brasserie-birreria
of Antonio Renato, who had opened for the few tourists and to escape the madness that was his family upstairs. He served the cousins a pizza primavera with a small nod and a kind of quiet and restrained decorum, as if attempting to make himself invisible. He polished the counter and gazed regretfully at the street outside.

“Will you be staying for long?” Maria Feri dared at last to ask her cousin, and then flushed with embarrassment. “Of course you are welcome for as … I mean, well, I am very glad.”

“And you are very kind.”

Maria smiled and looked down at her lunch, hoping that her schooled air of politeness concealed her desperation for Gabriella to stay.

“I don't know exactly. I have to decide some things. I would like to stay a few weeks if I could.”

“Oh, a few weeks, yes. Of course.” The older woman lifted her glass of wine with a shaking hand and held it tight against her lip, lest it show her disappointment.

While the rest of the city greeted the New Year with a mixed response of religion and carnival, the cousins lived with the
quietness of convalescents and waited for the cold rain to lift. Gabriella played the violin for herself, and in the other
room Maria listened and experienced the astonished awe that those with undiscovered talent sometimes feel for the gifted.
The music was played not with sweetness but with a sharp and quickened intensity that even Goldoni the bird recognized was
the playing of the heart. Gabriella played it for herself; she played it in the city where her music had begun, and in the
playing revisited the rooms of her home; she played it for the child not yet born, and for the thousand unanswerable questions
of its future. She played the music for its own order, for the pleasure of its form, which was in itself the one perfect thing
in her life. And when she had finished, and the door of her cousin's room creaked and the bird began to sing, she lay on the
bed in the kind of exhaustion that makes do for peace.

It rained on. When the rain lifted, the mist clung in the sleeves of the streets. Venice dripped into itself. Short damp days
passed moments after they had begun. Gabriella awoke with the door closing behind her cousin going out to work. Then she turned
over in the deep blankets of the bed and it was afternoon and the grey light of another day was sliding softly into the waters.
She rose and walked around the apartment in her nightgown. She watched from the window, throwing a cloth over the birdcage
when the manic gaiety of his chirping stitched like a needle along the soft rim of her brain. Gabriella returned to her bed.
With her hands on her unborn child, she turned into the pillow and became her mother. She became the woman giving birth to
grief, to loss, and to the failure of hope. Sweat ran down her face, her hair matted in wild short ropes, her mouth dried,
and her tongue wore a white fur. She cried without tears, and, in that room in Venice, felt pressing down on her the terrible
loneliness of those who seek like saints to know and do the right thing. Oh God, she thought, closing her eyes for clearer
vision and looking in the darkness for a sign, Oh, God, what am I to do?

  When Philip Griffin waved Stephen goodbye from the edge of the front garden, he felt a weight lifting in his spirit and looked
down to see that his shoes were still touching the ground. It was the day after the Feast of the Epiphany. There was a sense
of slow waking in the drizzling air, as if Christmas like a reluctant guest was only now leaving the suburbs; the streets
were drowsy with aftermath.

Knowing that Stephen was leaving for Venice, both men had woken up mute and spent breakfast with the studied concentration
of wordless monks. Stephen wore his father's suit, with the tickets and his passport next to his breast. The bigness of his
feelings kept colliding within him. The round enormity of his gratitude rose in his gorge like a ball cock. He could say nothing.
His fingers twisted in knots of yearning that kept coming apart beneath the table and leaving him feeling the emptiness of
air with a free-falling panic. He thought of Gabriella vanished into Venice and, in the suit of Philip Griffin, was briefly
courageous, balanced on a thin and heroic belief like some latter-day Icarus moments before he chanced the waxen wings and
leapt into the air. I will find her, he thought. I'm sure I will. He gulped his tea. The sweat ran off his shoulder blades
into the small channel of his back. He took leave of his father with the delicate and mismatched embrace of a crane above
a small building, then walked out across the weather to his car.

Philip watched him drive away. He watched the emptiness after the car had gone and then let the wordlessness of his morning
escape in a low groan. He opened his mouth to let his relief float out and followed it immediately with the quick prayer:
“Oh God, Anne, I hope it works out.” Then he went back inside the house, where he climbed the stairs to his bedroom slowly,
gripping the bannister like the nearness of his last days, ascending, going to take out the bank book, where he could recheck
the balance of his account and calculate anew the cost of living.

  Beneath the powders with which she tried to smooth away some of the wrinkles of her life, Maria Feri's face bloomed crimson.
Her cousin was pregnant. Gabriella was sitting in the dim light in such a fallen torpor that Maria had to disguise her delight
when she was told, and she turned instead to Goldoni in his cage. She tapped him the news until his heart was fluttering.
She wanted to share with him the extraordinary vision of it: a child, a child could be born here, right here. And in the vastness
of her loneliness a pure joy flew, white as a dove. Maria did not think of the father, of the missing man; she had lived her
life in the company of that absence, moving from the days of promise, when any moment he might appear, to a slow, sad reckoning
that was like the slow and unannounced fall of petals from last week's flowers; she did not think to ask Gabriella. Instead,
she turned her back momentarily and tapped the birdcage to see if Goldoni could sing her mood. Her cousin had come to live
with her and now was going to have a baby. For Maria Feri it seemed as if everything in her life might have been waiting for
this; it was the arrival of significance. Here was a meaning that washed clean the smudge of ordinary days, weeks, and years.
Here, after all, was discovered purpose; she was to be the child's other mother. Goldoni sang. Maria regained the composure
that was her learned manner with the world and turned to her cousin.

“You are run down,” she said. “We must take good care of you. Of course you should have told me sooner. My bed is much more
comfortable. I will move you in there tonight.”