Niall Williams - As It Is in Heaven

And some form of all this Philip Griffin read in his son’s position on the chessboard that long night while Stephen slept with the queen in his fingers.

“God, Anne,” he said, “it’s worse than I thought.” He lowered his head, and his bald pate caught the streetlight and flashed like an orange moon falling to rest on Stephen’s arm. The size of his son compared with him made Philip’s desire to cradle him in his arms first awkward and then impossible. He could not even reach around the girth of him in the armchair, and comforted himself with the small gesture of taking Stephen’s free hand. The other one was still holding the chess piece, and the father knew enough not to disturb it, for it might easily be the branch his son clung to, keeping him from drowning altogether in the other world of dreams. He knelt there on the carpet and took his son’s hand. Pools of a clear black sadness kept filling inside him, for he imagined it was hopeless, because everything about Stephen was, and that hopelessness was Philip’s own. He could not look at his son without feeling that the difficulties his son faced in the world were the failings of himself, that every pain and hardship Stephen endured were caused by some lacking in Philip, and that the true measure of the progress of manhood is the ruthless exposure to all fathers of the indefensible vulnerability of their children.

He could see the future the way one sees accidents half-moments before they happen. He could see his son’s heart breaking, and wanted to cry out against it. But he did not. Instead, he knelt and kept his head down against Stephen’s hand, feeling the heat of desire still burning away in the skin, the raging inside him as he alternated between struggle and surrender, rolling his head, moaning, humming fragments of music and waving the chess queen like a slow-motion baton to the orchestra of dreams.

“What’ll I do, Anne?” Philip whispered, for she was standing not far away from him. “What’ll I do?”

He did not raise his head to look at his wife; he did not need to. She was more vivid than seeing could make her, and her advice was more audible for being silent.

It was not yet dawn. But the slow high hum of the milk van outside signalled the beginning of morning. Once, the clinking of bottles being delivered had woken Philip Griffin by Anne Nolan’s side, and daily he had kissed her the kiss of good morning while she slept on and he sat and slowly stood to look out the upstairs window at Tom Boylan and his son slipping in and out of the gardens with empties and refills. It was not the kiss of the passionate or raptured, it declared no intent further than the ordinariness of loving her, and most often she did not respond to it in her sleep. It had become to Philip Griffin the milk-bottle kiss, the beginning of a new day, a motion reflex of his heart so natural that years later, when the milk bottles had been replaced by clinkless cartons and Boylan’s son only sometimes took his father on the rounds, Philip Griffin still kissed his wife with the delivery of the morning.

He heard the footsteps in the leaves beneath the chestnut tree in the garden and thought, young Boylan slips over the wall of MacMahon’s next door. He can do eight houses that way while the father gets to drive the float at walking pace past the sleeping houses. The footsteps moved quickly up across the grass, and the single carton was left by the door, then the figure of Eddie Boylan moved across the opened blinds towards Lynch’s. Only when he had gone, and with him the fleeting memory of the morning kiss, did Philip Griffin try to stand up, only to find that his knees had locked.

“Shaggit.”

He couldn’t move. He pressed down on the armrest beside Stephen, but wasn’t strong enough to raise himself; he was trying for the third time, cursing his knees and the absurdity of age, when the queen fell from his son’s fingers and Stephen woke up. It was a moment before the startling reality of Stephen’s dreams disappeared and he saw the old man kneeling beside him.

“I was getting something. You dropped it,” said the father. “Shaggit, I can’t get up. Feckin knees.”

There was a pause, Stephen didn’t move. He rubbed his eyes, he felt the dryness of his lips and saw the chessboard in the half-light by his father’s head. Then, as Philip Griffin raised the queen in his left hand as an explanation, Stephen supposed he had only closed his eyes for a millisecond, that the chess game was still continuing, and that the extraordinary journeys on the humpbacked hills of his dreams where he had been looking for his voice had been an illusion so condensed that in fact no time had passed. He stood up and bent down. Philip Griffin clasped onto him. His son’s hand was damp with ardour, and as Philip was pulled to his feet, his heart sank further with the certainty that he was to live to oversee more failure and grief.

“God Almighty,” he said, when Stephen had straightened him. He still held the queen in his right hand, but once he was standing he handed it to his son like an embarrassment he was glad to be rid of, and then announced he was going outside to get the milk for the breakfast.

While Stephen replaced the queen in the vulnerable position in the centre of the board, Philip opened the front door and stood outside on the step. He looked down at the carton on the mat and reminded himself to remind Boylan to put it on the windowsill instead so he wouldn’t have to bend for it. He looked at the deep blue of the sky that was not yet lit with morning and felt the chill of the winter ahead on the small hairs at the back of his neck. He had imagined this would be his last winter, the cancer would finally overtake him, and he would not be sad. Or so he had thought. But now, standing there on the threshold of the house of his life and feeling the thin crisp quality of the air — the polished and brittle stillness of that Dublin morning that he knew would harden daily now until it became the brutal relentlessness of iron — Philip Griffin knew that he must try to live on for Stephen’s sake.

“God, Anne,” he had whispered when she had told him. He reached his hand to touch the red brick of the house to steady himself. Oh God. He heard her tell him again, more softly this time, as if she did not understand that the very gentleness of her spirit made him want to be with her all the more. She was the most tender woman, and while he stood with her on the doorstep he knew that more suffering was required before he could join her for eternity in heaven. No, he couldn’t die and be with her yet. He stood there and looked down at the milk carton; he felt the V of cold where his cardigan exposed his chest, and he measured in a single look the distance between standing and lying down.

The first cars passed along the road towards the city, and the soft whoosh of their passing emphasized the absence of possibilities; once, he could have gotten in his car and driven into Clery’s, stitching anger, loss, and mysteries into the hems of trousers and knowing that briefly they were resolved as he fit another man into the world. Now there was no escaping, but as he stood on his doorstep and felt the morning, Philip Griffin told his wife that she was right and that, in the strange physics of love, the weight on his heart would be lighter for carrying Stephen.

He bent and picked up the milk carton. He went into the kitchen and called Stephen in to join him. He boiled the kettle and made tea in the half-dark of the dawn, picking cups from the sink and rinsing them lightly while Stephen stood between dreams and waking, waiting by the table. Then, as the light was coming up across the back garden, both men sat down in their positions like pieces in a chess game, saying nothing, but dwelling in a gentle quietness that was as comfortable as old blankets and gathering themselves for the long game of Love and Death that lay ahead.