On Canaan's Side (8 page)

‘I don’t see why not,’ said Hannah.

But Tadg didn’t think that was very wise.

‘We cannot do that,’ he said, that evening. I had fried up some wondrous big sausages for him, and he was devouring them, even though they looked a little lonely on the plate, for want of potatoes. ‘The new names are no good to us either. It would be a very poor thing to use them, and then someone thinking later we were brother and sister. And the old names might be the death of us. It’s a third set of names we need, Lilly.’

‘And can we do that in America?’

‘There must be some way here of getting names officially and I am going to have to look into it.’

But he had little enough time to be doing that. At six in the morning he went down to his work, and in the cold evening he returned, and in a few weeks he grew thinner and darker. And stranger.

We had a narrow thin bed for ourselves and we lay on it side by side in the dark, with everything we had heaped up on us against the cold. The lake wind blew down from Canada and in through the slats of our room, and played about our faces and hands, and snuck into our layers of socks, and found out our vulnerable toes.

In our courtship we had kissed. It felt like a long time ago, sitting on the farthing seats in Stephen’s Green in the traitorous sunshine of the Irish spring, holdings hands in the threadbare heat, or withdrawing into the shadows of one of the bandstands there, and trying our chances in each other’s arms. And I had delighted in his kisses, and loved the big bloom of warmth in me they caused, and how in the summer, such as it was, we started to be baked by our kissing, my breast sweating against his chest, in a far from disagreeable manner.

But here, in those first weeks, with the wind, and the sound of the lake massively beyond our window, a dirty gungrey in the darkness, and Hannah and her husband snoring the other side of the wall, when we might have gone at each other like the first lovers on earth, we lay close together but as utterly apart as if a priest had put a curse on us.

And that I do think now was part of the terror, that though we were adrift in America – and for all we knew hunted, although Tadg
said
he was confident we might have slipped through – we were no longer united as we had been, but bizarrely sundered by the very threat of this intimacy.

For my part I mightn’t have been so minded, because he was a lovely long man, but for that first while he was a person frozen, and fixed in an unknown intent. And maybe that was because, in some manner, with a death sentence on his head, he felt a little murdered already, at least his life greatly altered. He had not even had time to be in touch with his mother in Cork, and I don’t think he liked to think of her there, knowing nothing of him, or why he had disappeared.

I don’t think he liked that at all, and it was then I began to wonder, did he blame me to some degree for our predicament, or rather, I began to wonder,
was
I to blame? I had made his doings in Wicklow very personal by being from Wicklow myself. He had lost the anonymity of the policeman working far from his own district, as policemen always do. I had destroyed his namelessness, and put a name on something frightening in the landscape, a lorry passing through with guns and maybe laughter and certainly reckless, ruined hearts aboard, and then the ambush, and the local boys killed, and the seeming readiness of the Tans – my fault, my fault. I had said nothing to Tadg about anything, but it was still my fault. It was such matters, like a hopelessly knotted ball of wool, that kept us apart also in our apparent closeness, lying perforce arm to arm, the mere heat of his body so desirable in the cruel cold of that room, his red beard jutting from his face like a figure on a tomb in Christ Church Cathedral.

Even as I write this, I long to be back there and turn to him, and hold him, and prove to him that at least one saving grace of us as a creature might be that everything can be unknotted by a simple gesture.

That the darkness of a room can be solved by a single candle.

I wish, I wish, that we had not wasted so much of our time together.

But there was a loosening. Perhaps the few dollars and cents he was given for his work was little enough compared to his pay in the Tans, but it seemed to me a magical affair, because it guaranteed our ability to continue there, in what was beginning to feel like safety. My father had sent me a letter through a P.O. box number, giving me the precious details of Maud’s wedding to her Matthew, and although his account was spare and perfunctory, as was his fashion, my imagination supplied what was missing, and at the heart of it I thought I saw Maud smiling her rare smile. I hoped she would make a habit of that smile, because it was a good one, if rare, and I hoped, while knowing nothing about such a possibility, being in the dark myself about all things, that she might be well beloved by her husband.

And as I read and reread the letter, I felt certain pangs of sadness too, and a homesick pain, and yes, jealousy.

But Tadg and myself were beginning to thaw out, and as Chicago loosened itself from winter and spring, we loosened.

‘I’m going to say I like this place,’ he said. ‘I like it.’

It was easier for us there certainly, because there was no history. I realised slowly that as my father’s daughter, unthinkingly, I had lived as a little girl and young woman through a certain kind of grievous history, where one thing is always being knocked against another thing. Where my father’s respect for the King was knocked against Tadg’s father being in the Irish Volunteers, where Willie’s going to war was knocked against his dying, where even Wicklow life was knocked against Dublin life, the heather that came up to us on the bus knocked against its eventual blackening, its little darkened flowers saying, time passeth, time flyeth. Where the very fact of my being alive was knocked against the fact that my mother had died in giving me that life.

I just did not know yet what things knocked against other things here in America.

Tadg had begun not just to like Chicago. He had begun to use the word ‘home’ and he no longer meant Cork or Ireland, but that wretched wooden room where we still boarded, able now to give my cousin something approaching a rent. And slowly all the things about us widened into a sort of personal kingdom, the nervy lake that thought it was the sea, the accumulated buildings of the city that we began to use as our landmarks in conversation and in dreams.

And then something grand happened.

We were lying side by side one Sunday morning and with one accord, without real thought, with the simple instinct of ordinary human creatures, we turned to each other and gently kissed, then fiercely, like wakening beasts, and before we knew where we were, like a sudden walking storm down the lake that we had witnessed in the deeper weather, we seemed to go into a stormy gear, we clutched at each other, we got rid of our damned clothes, and clung, and he was in me then, and we were happy, happy, young, in that room by the water, and the poetry that is available to anyone was available to us at last, and we breathed each other in, and in those moments both knew we would marry each other after all, and not a word needed to be spoken about it.

A cold-minted yellow light I remember that Sunday then as Tadg and me strolled into the city, like people restored to life. Maybe in truth the warmth of early summer had taken a step back, as if unsure of itself. But we were walking arm in arm, jubilant, exultant, and barely noticed, and anyway did not care.

He was suddenly full of plans. It was as if he had awakened to being in America, abruptly made manifest to him as a place of safety, maybe infinite safety. As if he had suddenly remembered he was young, and though banished from his own country, might have come to America anyway, in the natural way of an Irish person, and now it was all laid out before him, before us, like a glittering Canaan.

I will never forget his happiness in that ordinary Chicago afternoon, and I give God thanks for it.

I give Him thanks, I give Him thanks.

We came up the wide steps of the Art Institute. One of Tadg’s pals among the pilings was an Armenian man, who in his former existence as an Armenian in Armenia had studied painting at some academy, before his people had been dissolved like sugar in tea by the Turks. ‘He said
lonesome
academy,’ Tadg said, ‘what do you think he meant by that? He has the most beautiful and interesting English. Or I suppose it is American.’ But his mother, Tadg said, had been killed before his eyes. She had died as it happened in his arms. He was wielding spades and pickaxes now in America, there by the shore of Chicago, and he had no money for brushes and paints. But he had told Tadg about a wonderful building in the city, where for nothing at all, not two cents asked, you could see room after room of paintings,
windows of beauty
, he called them, said Tadg. Now Tadg was not a man for such things, ordinarily, and it was maybe partly out of liking for his small and passionate Armenian friend that he had decided to bring me there that Sunday, added to which might well have been the enormous optimism that somehow or other our lovemaking had created in us.

And into a great hall, which in itself seemed a marvel to us. It had a high roof and hordes of dark-suited men and women in bright dresses. They were passing in and out through the many doors, little rivers of blackness and brightness going along you might think because of the slope of the earth. And then, like tadpoles gnawing away at pondweed, little stranded groups of them at particular pictures, gawping. And there were children doing their immortal traipsing, and here I spotted a pregnant stomach, and there I spotted a withered man, but in general as we entered we caught a strange note of gaiety and completion, as if this great building might be a hospital of sorts, but curing the unknown and
non-specific
maladies of the daily soul.

And we felt it. All other matters fled away. It constituted a moment of clear thought, such as you might get only three or four times in a life. When the sea-fog clears from the sea and the blue expanse is revealed like an explanation. I loved my father and my sisters and the memory of my brother, yet would most likely never see Ireland again. But there was this new ease with Tadg, this pleasant wandering, and surely now we would be married soon, and both of us glad that it would be so. I suddenly for that second, and maybe never so clearly again, knew who I was, or thought I did, and knew who Tadg was, my husband, and God forgive me, he seemed to me a resplendent husband, a shining man. In my so-called clarity I thought I was lucky. I felt lucky. And I must have been giggling away to myself like an eejit.

‘What are you laughing at, Lilly?’ said Tadg, not entirely approvingly.

Then he stopped by a particular painting. Just then there was no one else near us. He stopped, and I imagined in a crazy moment that everything stopped, his heart, his story, because he seemed to bunch himself up, he seemed to pause mightily. He began not just to look at the painting, but to gaze at it, gaze at it. I stood at his left elbow, looking at him, and looking at the painting.

‘What is it, Tadg?’ I said.

‘Look at the painting,’ he said, ‘look at the blessed thing.’ It was a portrait of a man, young enough or not too old, it was hard to say, because it was to my eyes quite roughly painted. We were close up to it, and there was a label beside it, that said it was a self-portrait by the artist Van Gogh, with a date, and where he came from, and the name of a foreign town. I had never heard of such a person, and I do not know if Tadg had, but the name stuck in my brain, it printed there, Van Gogh, in the selfsame black letters of the notice. I smiled up at Tadg, not that he saw me, and put my hand on his sleeve, and said again, with an instinctive quietness, as if sensing an unusual mystery in him, he who was a haunted man, I said again:

‘What is it, Tadg?’

‘Do you not see, Lilly, do you not see?’

‘What, Tadg?’

‘It is a picture of myself.’

I looked again with renewed effort. I was startled. What did he mean? Maybe there was a resemblance. The face in the picture had a rough red beard just like Tadg’s right enough. The strangely shifting lines of the painting, as if this Van Gogh had made his picture out of strings, one packed against the next, and of different colours, like from a darning bag of ends and oddments, made it difficult to decide. Whatever I thought of it, Tadg seemed to see his exact image. He was transfixed by it. He stared and stared.

Now over to my right, in the very corner of my eye, I started to pick up a movement. Again pure instinct, no actual thought crossed my mind. And I looked over that way, towards one of the entrances into the deeper galleries. A figure, one among many, had issued forth from the blackness, and what it was about him that had caught my eye I do not know, unless it was his long coat in that improved weather, although there were plenty of men in coats. He wore a black hat, but there was nothing unusual about a hat, it was the great heyday of hats and caps, indoors and out. Maybe the person, the darkness of him, the thinness, matched something in some dream I had dreamed, as Cassie Blake’s book of dreams might claim. I do not know. I do know I followed his progress across the wide red marble floor, he was coming at the angle a trout does in its first strength after being hooked, when the fisher is exerting pressure, and the trout will not deign to come in a straight line. It was like this dark man found the floor at a bit of an angle, and was falling ever so slightly down that angle, and it was bringing him nearer and nearer to us.

I plucked at Tadg’s sleeve.

‘Tadg, Tadg,’ I said. ‘Tadg, love.’

‘But Lilly,’ he said. ‘How could there be a picture of me in here?’

‘I don’t think it can hardly be of you, Tadg, look at the little notice, it is a picture from Holland or somewhere.’

‘I was never in Holland,’ said Tadg, as if offering an irrefutable fact that yet I might be about irrefutably to disprove. ‘Was I, Lilly? I never was.’

The black-coated man was halfway across the floor to us. I don’t know if I was frightened in that moment. But in the next moment, I thought he made an odd movement, a sort of fishing movement in the drape of his coat, for he did not have his arms in the sleeves, I saw that now, and maybe that was what had attracted my attention, one hand was acting like a brooch and was clutching the two sides of his coat at the breast, but the other hand was invisible, except for that dipping motion, except for that dip also of one leg, a little stooping gesture, as if fetching something, fetching something out.