As It Is in Heaven (9 page)

  Stephen did not realize rescue was at hand. He was at the bridge of his life without knowing it and sat stunned in the rainy
night, unable to move. His head hurt, but not badly, yet he could not free himself from the fierce grip of the dream of dying.
He imagined he was his mother and his sister. He was in the car they drove that afternoon so many years ago, and this was
the crash, the suspended moment when their lives had stopped and dreams perished. This was the instant the world had become
immobile and deaf and mute, and the darkness had fallen in like earth on a coffin. He imagined with terrible clarity the anguish
of it, the sheer and merciless shattering as the other car came crashing in on them, the jerking backward of his mother and
Mary, and the cries; if there was time for cries. Stephen imagined it as he sat there in the crashed car, and he could not
move. He felt the steering wheel, but it seemed unreal, and the pallor of his hands upon it was the lone white thing in the
darkness.

I cannot move, he thought. I cannot move from here.

And if the car had blown up and burned there on the side of the road, Stephen Griffin would have burned with it and not regretted
it, surrendering to the ceaseless prompting of his life that grief triumphs on earth and that all our plots unravel in the
end.

But then Moira Fitzgibbon arrived. When she pulled open the car door, the rain lashing down on her head made freakish streaks
of her hairdo and the taste of her makeup washed into her mouth. She spat and called out, but Stephen did not move. He was
like a deep-water swimmer uncertain whether to kick for the surface and kept his eyes looking at the long-gone world where
the spirits of his mother and sister were so close it made him ache.

“Mr. Griffin, is that you? Do you hear me? Mr. Griffin?”

There were mudspatters on Moira’s stockings, the heel of her left shoe was loosened, and the navy-blue outfit she had bought
for the evening of Venetian music was soaked against her back. She had no idea why the sky had fallen in or why hers had to
be the car to first come upon the crash, knowing that she could not drive past it although everything in her had wanted to.
She understood nothing yet, but cursed God and cursed the weather and cursed Tom and the west of Ireland and the godforsaken
roads like this that were full of holes and went on for miles and made this man crash in front of her.

“Feck it. Feck it. Oh God, forgive me, feck it. Mr. Griffin! Mr. Griffin!”

She cried out his name, as if he could help her understand. She looked out the back window to see if help might be coming,
but saw only the emptiness of the dark fields unrelieved by light or hope in the harsh, starless wind. She said Stephen’s
name loudly again, and then, as she reached in to shake him by the shoulder, her knee touched something on the passenger seat,
and she discovered a fragment of meaning and held up close to her face in the darkness the tickets for the concert.

  Gabriella Castoldi, Paolo Mistra, Piero and Maria Motte were already sitting at the front of the concert room in the Old Ground
Hotel by the time Stephen Griffin arrived there with Moira Fitzgibbon. He was still in a daze and passed up the red carpeted
stairs of the hotel unsure in which world he was walking. When he had felt the woman’s hand on his shoulder in the car, he
had imagined at first it was the buffeting of the storm. Then she smacked his face and turned him towards her. He remembered
her: the woman from the staff room, the woman they said afterwards was the dimmest pupil the school had ever had. He remembered
her. Moira shook him from himself. They had gotten out of his car together and were blown along the road to hers. When they
sat into it, Moira turned the heat full on and they drove towards Ennis in a gusting tropical balminess that dried their clothes
and hair stiffly and made the rain-run places of Moira’s makeup look like the tracks of ancient tears. She was taking him
to the hospital, she told him, even though she would be late for the concert.

“I want to go to the concert,” he said. He said it very calmly, without looking at her. He was stooped forward towards the
windscreen, with his black hair fallen over his right eye. “I want to go to the concert.”

(Later, when he was sitting at the fire in the house by the sea, listening to another storm blowing in across the invisible
horizon of the nighttime, Stephen would wonder back to that moment and smile at the strange and unknowable conspiracies of
the world, how the notion of the concert had become a resolve and how the night had almost blown him off its edge before the
woman pulled over. He would read it for its meaning, and glimpse in that evening the shape of the world, a puzzle so intricate
that not even the millionth part of the outer edge of its frayed pieces is discernible until so much later. Then it would
make sense to him, and he would understand that the journey to the concert was the beginning of the most important journey
of his life, and that the moment he insisted on going to the concert, he was acting out of a blind foreknowledge that told
him it was the right thing to do, supposing that rightness was something that existed for every moment of every life and that
the possibilities of humankind were so myriad and tortuous that knowing the right thing to do and then choosing it were the
longest odds in man’s history. But just then in the car Stephen had chosen; and later, to that moment, like an old explorer
fingering the route he had taken across the unknown, he would trace all his happiness.)

They drove past the hospital to the hotel. Moira talked. She told him about Moses Mooney; she told him she wasn’t sure why
or how she had become involved in the concert; Stephen had probably heard of her in the school, she said, she was too stupid
for them to teach her anything, so it was the last thing she expected to be doing, running a concert of Italian music in Ennis;
she had two children for goodness’ sake, and Tom is back in Miltown Malbay now, sitting on a high stool and telling jokes
about how his missus is off having a bit of culture. “Agri or horti, that’s his joke,” she said. “That’s what he says, because
I’m thick. He thinks that’s a great joke. They get you to do it because they don’t want to do anything themselves, Tom says.
Why are you running it? he says.

“And I can’t answer him. Especially when you see a night like this and you think you’re mad. You’re just mad, Moira. There’ll
be nobody there and you’ll be walking in like this in a state with your eighteen-pound hairdo looking like a wet monkey’s
backside, and four Italian musicians looking at you wondering why in the name of … I’m talking too much, I’m sorry, Mr. Griffin,
I always talk too much when I’m nervous.”

“Stephen.”

“Stephen. Sorry, Stephen. Would you open that? See is there lipstick in it?”

The carpark was full. Moira bumped the car onto the footpath outside and then apologized to Stephen for forgetting he had
just had an accident. When they got out of the car the rain was not falling. The ivy on the front of the old hotel was lit
with hidden lamps, puddles glistened with reflection, and the slick black of the tarmac might have been the low waters of
a canal in Venice. Or so Moira imagined. She raised her head as Stephen lowered his, and they strode forward with the brief
invulnerability of the rescued.

At the front door they heard the buzz of people and the strains of the strings playing. For an instant, they imagined the
same thing: that their watches had stopped and time had moved on without them, the concert was about to end. But by the time
they had reached the doorway at the top of the red stairs, it was clear that the musicians were only warming up their instruments,
and Moira Fitzgibbon blinked tears of gratitude, seeing the throng of people waiting in the rows of high-backed dining chairs
and realizing that there was something fine and good and true in their being there, and that the bringing of the music and
the people together that was the dreaming of old Mooney was worth the price of her hairdo, the ruining of her new suit, and
the enduring of fatigue, hardship, and mockery.

In the delay, Councillor O’Rourke had seen his opportunity and taken Moira’s position at the front of the room. He was a skeletal
man with a sharp nose and the largest Adam’s apple in Clare. He was a man who believed in men, as long as he was leading them,
and derided Moira Fitzgibbon for her bluntness and well-meaning, and for not being at home. He held his nose high and smiled
with narrow squints of his eyes, turning the immaculate whiteness of his soap-scented hands and letting only the rise and
fall of his gorge betray how he disliked the company of his constituents. He was about to announce the opening of the evening’s
concert when the figure of Moira Fitzgibbon appeared. He lifted a white hand and let the dismay suck and plunge in his throat.
Bloody woman!

“Moira.” O’Rourke mouthed her name without sounding it and smiled thinly as she came through the room. Stephen Griffin sat
in a chair towards the back, and Moira Fitzgibbon walked away from him, minding the loosened heel in her left shoe and taking
the nods and greetings of the audience, who, she realized with a flood of warmth and thanksgiving, were the people of Miltown
Malbay, dressed in their best and looking at her like a friend. When she reached the podium at the front of the room, Councillor
O’Rourke stepped aside slightly and hovered. Moira turned to the musicians. “I’m so sorry,” she said, “there was a man crashed
off the road.” She motioned towards Stephen with her head; it was the smallest movement, but the musicians looked down into
the audience all the same. They were already feeling the extraordinary electricity of that room, the heated expectancy that
fanned upwards towards them. It was as if they were bringing music for the first time to a country long deaf and only recently
healed, as if the notes they were about to play were the ancient medicine of youth and happiness. The Italians sensed it in
the air like the presence of white birds; Paolo Mistra fingered his cello and felt the sweat running across his left wrist
and down inside the cuff of his white shirt; Piero Matte moved his neck to the right before placing his violin and found the
cords of his muscles were tightened like a boxer’s. Gabriella Castoldi looked down; she too was astonished, the simplicity
of these people sitting there, the generosity of spirit, a man who crashed off the road and still came to hear the music?
Tonight, if ever, please, God, she thought, may I do the music justice.

  Life is not simple, nor love inevitable. Stephen sat with his hands on his knees and his head stooped over. The black thinning
mop of his hair fell forward, and when he looked down he saw the thick mud on his shoes from when he had stepped out into
the ditch. He moved them back beneath the seat as if they were evidence against him, obscure proof that he was a misfit. It
was a common feeling for him. He didn’t quite fit and, knowing this, took it with an embarrassed acceptance, as if it were
an unsuitable birthday gift that could not be returned. So he sat there waiting for the concert and kept his head low between
his shoulders.