Niall Williams - As It Is in Heaven

He was a quiet fellow. He did not go to the dances on Friday nights, nor heed his father’s urging to go down and sit with the others in the students’ bar. So solitary was his life that Philip Griffin grew fearful that his son had been overprotected since the trauma of the tragedy and would never emerge in the plain daylight of the world. He sat downstairs and worried, while Stephen lay in the bedroom overhead with a book propped on his chest. It did not bother Stephen that no other student was like him. He passed the summer exams, and within two years had read every university book of merit on the subject of European history at the turn of the century. His face grew pale as paper; his eyes had the peering expression of the myopic, and his lips thinned and grew light-coloured, as if they had never tasted fruit.

He lived in books, and by the time he was ready to graduate with honours from the history department of University College, Dublin, his complexion was delicate and radiated the grey light of imminent illness. In May of his final year he stood in the doorway of his tutor’s room, and Dr. Margaret McCormack realized that he was almost lost to life. She had seen students almost devoured by the study of history before, but it had always been temporary. Usually they reached a point — often in April — when the sudden sweetness of the sensual world swept over them. Their books became weighty and dry in the perfumed air that spun and dazzled and was blown about with almond blossom.

But for Stephen Griffin it was not like that. For three years he had sat in the lecture halls and quietly taken his notes in longhand. He handed in his papers on time and worked through the brightening days of spring, barely lifting his head when the brilliance of the May sunshine made his pages too white for reading. None but his father had told him to stop, and even Philip Griffin surrendered, imagining that his son knew better than he what was needed for a university degree.

So, in the last weeks of his final year, Stephen stood in the doorway of his tutor’s room and told her he was hoping to be accepted for the master’s degree, and then the doctorate. Dr. McCormack looked at him and then looked away. The sunlight flooded into the room through the window behind her, she could feel its warmth pressing on her back.

“Doctorate?” she said. “I see.”

“Yes,” he said, hanging there in the doorway, his eyes gazing downward, as if he had just confessed a crime.

Dr. McCormack had to hold her breath. She had been teaching for twenty years in the second-floor room which was the reward for her own schoolday acuity at history, a permanent office. And she despised it. But she was fit for nothing else; she knew it, and knew that each day she moved further along the dull inevitability that had been her life since she came to college to study history. There in the sunlight she looked at the pale man with the white face and thin black hair. He was transparent. There was about him such a pitiful shrinking from life that it caused a lever to release in Margaret McCormack and the truth of her own lifetime of withdrawal, timidity, and ungrasped opportunity to be unloaded with a crash upon her.

“The doctorate, yes,” she said, and touched the stilled flowers in subdued yellow that decorated her dress. The sun was two warm hands on her back. She felt her own dust falling in the air.

“I’m hoping you’ll give me a recommendation,” said Stephen.

That’s not what you’re asking, thought Margaret McCormack. You’re asking for an escape, you’re asking to be allowed to slip in here to one of these box rooms where you can gather books on the shelves and turn the pages of students’ essays until they tap on your shoulder and say next year is your retirement.

Margaret did not answer him at once. She felt a varicose vein on the inside of her left leg begin to throb, and turned from him and sat down.

“Thank you for telling me,” she said and, looking down at the coffee mug that held her pens, added, “I’ll certainly give it my consideration.”

In fact, she had already decided. By the time Stephen was walking down the green carpeted corridor to the library once more, Margaret McCormack had made up her mind that Stephen Griffin was to be saved from her own fate, and that the rejection he would feel when the letter came telling him he had not been accepted into the program would in fact be the coded message of her own mercy ushering him forward into the world. He was worse than she, she thought; he was a book. And only twenty-two years old. She sat at her desk after he left and felt a sense of mission. It’s everything he wants, but only because he cannot imagine facing the terrible realities of the world. He does not really want it, she thought, it is fear. She touched the small drops of perspiration that had arrived on her top lip. She knew what it was like to have no gift for small talk and feel the alarming sense of being the only person unable to relax into a fragment of conversation or idle a moment with a colleague on the stairs. She had recognized herself so acutely in Stephen Griffin that she could not bear it.

She picked up her pen and wrote a letter to the head of the department outlining why she could not recommend Stephen Griffin for the master’s program at this time. She finished the letter as the sun was moving from her window. Then she put her head on the desk and softly cried.

By midsummer of that year, when Stephen had been turned down for the master’s program, he received an offer of a place for the Diploma in Education course. He was so astonished by the rejection that he did not think clearly of the possibilities of his life but enrolled with the narrowed vision of those who have lost confidence in their future. One year later, he emerged from university a teacher. It was not a career he seemed suited for; at first he read from the textbook and lost the class, and it was only when he stopped reading and looked down at the pupils that he suddenly realized he was building a wall between them and himself. He stopped reading in class after that and began a new, risky tactic: talking the history out, telling it, unwinding the moments as if they were the first slender threads of a long, deeply entwined rope that led, impossibly, all the way back to that very moment in the classroom, the very instants of their breathing there in the school. And somehow it worked. Somehow the seriousness of him, the undiminished intensity of his focus, won over the classes, and the brightest followed him while the weakest looked away in dreams.

Stephen Griffin had bought the ticket for the concert when Moira Fitzgibbon had brought them into the staff room at breaktime. Every teacher had taken two, and although he had no intention of going himself, never mind the impossibility of bringing anyone, he had taken a pair of tickets and put them in the pages of Ireland since the Famine. Half the staff were not intending to go either, and some of the men unknowingly mirrored the behaviour of the boys outside by teasing each other about who would be interested in classical music. They threw the word “culture” at each other like dried dung. Their laughter proved their distance from it. It was a thing for the women. But they bought the tickets anyway, to give them to their wives or put them on the windowsill, for Moira Fitzgibbon had a forbidding sense of mission as she stood among them. She was not slow to remind them of the sorry fate of Moses Mooney or to make them feel an uneasy guilt at how many of them had singularly failed to teach her anything and how the failure of her Leaving Certificate examinations in six subjects was the single most unmentioned achievement of the school in the past fifteen years.