Niall Williams - As It Is in Heaven

For Stephen, his father wanted the suit to be the shadow of himself. When he cut out the arms he wanted them to be his own and laid them in gestured embrace across the chest of the unmade jacket, hoping that the tenderness he felt in working on the cloth would become part of the suit and forever evident to his son, that the failings and remoteness of his fatherhood would be forgiven and redeemed in this tailoring that was to be his last gift to Stephen.

He switched on the light over his head and worked on while the headlamps of cars coming home arced across the window like searchlights for love. He worked on into the evening, lying down on his back when his knees locked and delivering a series of short blows to them with his two fists until they loosened and he could kneel like a priest to the work once more. He worked on until the pain knotted up again and he had to stop and wait for the tablet to work. It was while he was sitting there, feeling the now familiar dissolve inside him and the medication taking the pain to someplace beyond Dublin, that the doorbell rang.

Philip left the cloth on the ground and went to answer it. He was the kind of man who expected that only calamity could make the doorbell ring late in the evening, and was surprised when he saw the thin figure of Hadja Bannerje standing at the door.

“Mr. Griffin,” he said, “I was wondering how you were doing.”

The Indian was younger than Stephen. He had come from the hospital to find the dying man because he could not forget how the old patient had told him of his son being in love, and because the tailor had mentioned Dr. Tim Magrath. He had come, too, for reasons he did not yet understand, some part of that submerged algebra of our actions that makes obtuse and elaborate relation between X, the absence of his own father in India, and Y, the man wanting to live a little longer for his son. He came into the front room, where the cloth was cut out and the sewing machine had been uncased, and when Philip Griffin told him that he was making a suit for Stephen, Hadja Bannerje made a small bow, acknowledging the act as something true and correct in the unclear workings of the world. He sat down and saw the chess game laid out on the side table.

For a few moments the tailor said nothing. He sat in the chair across the room with the suit on the ground between them. He lowered his head and ran his hand up over it, as if smoothing the ghosts of his vanished hair. He was fearful for a while that the Indian had come to tell him the tests had revealed something new, and only when the silence had settled like old spirits between them did he look across the space. Hadja Bannerje was waiting.

“You have not heard the news of Dr. Magrath,” said the Indian.

Philip felt a chill on the back of his neck. Here it was, calamity after all.

“He died this afternoon.”

When I should have, thought Philip Griffin, when I was fallen against the wall and it passed over. Oh God.

Silence clotted the air with the unsayable sorrow. Philip Griffin was painted in a stained wash of guilt and put his hands beneath his chin to keep his head from falling. He felt the old unworthiness of those who survive and the loss of the man who had helped him.

“I am sorry, to tell you,” said Hadja. “I remember you mentioned his name.”

“Yes.”

“It was heart failure. He was dead in his home.”

Tim Magrath's heart had failed so long before, thought the tailor. He held his head like an iron weight and breathed the short, shallow breaths of upset, until his visitor asked him could he make him a cup of tea.

“No. No, thank you.” A small emptiness, and then, lifting his spirit with weary effort into the lightweight world of politeness, Philip asked, “Would you like one?”

“No. Not for me, thank you very much, Mr. Griffin.”

“Right.”

The two men sat still in the late evening. The doctor was wearing a pale green raincoat, and with his arms folded and his face restful, he dwelt in such apparent ease that it did not seem necessary to speak.

It was some time before the tailor noticed him looking over at the chess game.

“Do you play?” Philip asked him.

“This is a vulnerable position.”

“Yes.” He nodded to the truth. “My son is White. You can see what he is like. But he's a fine player most of the time.” Philip stood up and went over to the board. “Would you like to play a game?”

“This is not finished,” said the Indian. “You don't want to disturb it.”

But already the older man was taking the pieces and resetting them to begin. “I have it memorized,” he said, and lifted the suit cloth from the floor and laid it aside and drew his chair closer.

And so they played. It was past ten o'clock. A glittering cold was falling on the unwalked paths and stilled driveways of Dublin, where the windscreens of cars went blind with ice. Television light died away and families were curtained into sleep while the doctor and the tailor played a game of chess. Hadja was an accomplished player; he had been gifted with that quality of deep patience and forbearance which characterize the ultimately victorious, and which allowed him to suffer many losses without ever losing sight of his long-term goal. He took the capture of his king's knight without the slightest expression of sorrow, and neither did he rejoice when, almost an hour later, he won Philip Griffin's queen's bishop in a forked move on the king's side. It was the game and not the men that spoke. Positions and counter-positions of the pieces flowed between them as its own language, and in that exchange both men got to know each other in a way that would scarcely have been possible in the three hours the game lasted. In that playing each man revealed his own suffering and small triumphs; the chess game mirrored perfectly the pattern of life, and showed in the gradual dwindling of pieces the ceaseless exhausting of energy that is the action of time.

When Philip Griffin could see more board than pieces, it was already one o'clock in the morning. He was a slow player who did not believe in the constraints of a stop-clock. Although, by that hour, he was aware of the hopelessness of his position, he did not consider resigning. He liked the game played out to its end, for even the coming of the inevitable had a certain beauty. His only gesture at resistance was that, with the Indian about to checkmate him in four moves, he took longer and longer over his turn, gazing down at the checked timber forever, until at last Hadja Bannerje looked over at him and, seeing the transfixed expression of a dream, realized that his opponent was soundly asleep.

Gabriella Castoldi walked with Stephen Griffin into the night, unaware that it was the transforming moment of her life or that the farfetched and wildest happenstance could sometimes be the inevitable. She took his arm when they reached the night air. He is shaking like a tree on fire, she thought, and steadied herself against him, walking out through the grounds of the hotel to where a river waterfall was lit brilliant and white, the last expression of mountain streams as they jabbered in the swollen throat of the river running down into the free translation of the sea.

They were mismatched: his long legs and arms, the extra foot of his stride he had to keep shortening, the loom of his head over hers that made him seem craning, crooked, slowing and then towing her, all combined to make them seem oddly paired, a knee- and an ankle-sock out walking. The spray came up to meet them. Immediately their faces were wet.

“I love this,” she said and, letting go his arm, stepped towards the bank of the rushing water and opened her mouth wide to meet the spray. She was a slight figure in a grey wool coat. Her hair was pulled back and lost in the collar, and the light off the water found the vulnerable places above the angles of her cheekbones. She stood and he waited three feet behind her. He had no idea what to do. Gabriella looked back at him.