Niall Williams - As It Is in Heaven

Things could still work out. Believe it.

Stephen put his hand on his father's back, and when they reached the church door he raised an umbrella over the old man as they walked out beneath the dark and starless heavens that spilled with rain.

When they returned home, it was half past eleven. Inside the house, where all his Christmases had been, Stephen made tea while his father sat in the front room and put on “E Lucevan le stelle.” The music travelled through the house like an old guest and became, in the metamorphic magic of notes and rhythm, the true expression of those two men. It contained the full and varied complexity of their separate longings, and when they sat to have their tea, they did not speak across it. It was only when the disc had ended that Stephen picked up the opened letter that had been put by the side table for him to find. It was the angry missive from Eileen Waters, a slightly less bitter replica of the three others which Stephen had found inside his front door when he had returned to Miltown Malbay. It was school holidays and he had driven directly to Dublin without going near the principal. Now he read the letter she had sent to his father demanding to know where he was, and across the faint humming of the stilled music player, he said, “You know I was in Kenmare?”

“Yes. I got the card,” his father said. The old man raised his small face to pass his son only the slightest encouragement to talk on.

Stephen was looking away. The rain sounded on the windows and made a muffled dullness of the distant ringing of churchbells.

“I mentioned bringing a friend,” Stephen said, and paused and sighed and breathed the scent of lilies that was expiring from the pores on his neck.

“Oh yes, I was wondering.”

“She plays the violin.”

“Is that right?”

“Yes. Her name is Gabriella Castoldi. She is from Venice.”

He could not tell it without half-smiling now. He said her name and felt wings opening in his chest. Then at last he told his father all. He spoke without pause and began by saying the three words “I love her,” and then spinning out the tale of his loving across the midnight of Christmas like the newest fable in the oldest book of stories, telling the remarkableness of his own emotions as if they were so entirely unexpected and even unimaginable gifts that unknown friends had dropped at his door, telling the sunshine and the cloudlessness, and making his father smile away wet smiles towards the window, where the narrative of love was the certain and indisputable proof of the listening ear of God.

When Stephen had told him everything, silence fell like snow. It gathered about their ankles and rose slowly. When it was threatening to leave them frozen on the opposite sides of love, Philip Griffin raised his hand and pointed to the old chess game. Despite the sharp ending of the tale, he was not discouraged by what he had heard: goodness had travelled to his son, only it was clear now that Philip needed to do more.

“Do you …?”

Stephen joined his father's eyes on the chessboard.

“It's a mess,” he said. “I …”

“No no,” said Philip, pushing the board into place between them, “I thought that, but no, your position isn't so hopeless at all. One move changes the game.”

On Christmas morning Stephen awoke to find the suit his father had made him. He did not put it on until late morning, after he had already given Philip Griffin the new discs of three Puccini operas and four of the violin concerti by Vivaldi which were playing constantly in his head. When, later, he appeared downstairs in the suit, he looked like a newer version of himself. The cut of the cloth was so perfectly made that for the first time in his life he experienced the naturalness of clothes and wore them with confidence. His father in the downstairs hall eyed him with a scrupulous air of self-examination, and then nodded, acknowledging that transforming moment in which the son passes the father like opposite but identical travellers on the up-and-down elevators of life. Stephen was going on, Philip thought, and renewed in himself the difficult faith that after so much that was ineffective and muddled and wasted in his life, this much was going to be right. He saw his son with his wife's eyes and felt her pride in him, too, and then led Stephen out the door of Christmas morning to drive together to the graveside.

In the days that followed, Stephen stayed in Dublin and visited Venice in his mind. When the bookshops reopened, he drove across the glitterfrost of the New Year and bought a life of Vivaldi and three histories of Venice. He came home, and while his father paced on the creak of the upstairs bedroom floor and wondered what God would want him to do next, he sat in the front room and read. He read the shadowy insubstantial version of the life of the composer, of his birth in Venice in the bleak March of 1678 in the sestiere of Castello, his father a barber who gifted his son the red hair which was startling enough to name Vivaldi later as the Red Priest of Venice, when he was already teaching violin to orphaned girls at the Ospedale della Pietà and earning in the autumn of 1703 a salary of five ducats a month. He was Maestro di Violino, the priest who did not say Mass, who left the altar with chest pains and said he could not return to it, who lived his entire life as a priest, but whose only sacrament was music, writing notes quick-handed on roughened parchment, as if taking dictation from God.

Stephen sat in Dublin in the frozen first days of January and read himself into Vivaldi's Venice. There, in fragments and hints, oblique suggestions, was the composer's relationship with the singer Annina Giro, the daughter of a French wigmaker, for whom he wrote now forgotten operas, and the all but vanished music for a voice none but he thought was so fine. Stephen played the discs he had bought his father and then read hour after hour the gilded and glorious fable that was the history of Venice, of its flamboyant past made of silks and cloths of gold, of spices and scents, of galleons and golden gondolas, the palace and power of the Doge and the ever-lapping green waters of the lagoon across which came, like rightfully returned sisters, the potent and influential magic of Arabia and China. When Stephen read of Venice, he read of Gabriella. Like every lost lover, he sought in the large room of her absence the smallest continual reminders, the dust of her presence. It did not matter that Gabriella herself had left Venice and preferred the mountains of Kerry to the bridged and watery maze of the city where she was born, when Stephen's eyes travelled the pages and read the names of streets and squares, the calles and campos that gathered like excitement in the long S of the Canal Grande, he was closer to her.

When in the evenings he played a halfhearted and uninspired chess with his father, he played with a map of Venice at his feet.

“Here.”

Philip Griffin was standing inside the door of the front room, having just returned from the city. He had business to attend to, he had told Stephen, leaving his son in the diminished dream that was his condition in the first cold days of January and which his father saw with increasing panic was each day undoing the good of December. He had gone into Dublin with a new withdrawal, and telling God that it was just this once, he bypassed the park railings and went instead into the travel agency of Jimmy Galvin, a man who had played soccer for Ireland and once bought from Philip Griffin four suits of blue green purple and grey tweed with specifically tailored elephantine flared trouser legs and twenty-nine-inch waists. Jimmy Galvin did not remember him. He bought his clothes off the rack now and wore them with a thoughtless monotony that reflected his life since glory. He had three girls working for him at the counter and sat in the back room behind a window, where he lived on the phone, untying the knots of foreign agencies, commissions, and airport pickups, and all but forgetting the moments only his legs remembered when he had scored twice against Spain.