Niall Williams - As It Is in Heaven

But now the child, the child was not imaginary, she heard her father chide her: “It's irresponsible and stupid. You're a fool like your brothers. There are laws, there are rules for living and we follow them,” he said, “whether we like them or not.” He stood across the room from her and leaned his disgust against the wall. He held his head angled backward to aim the shot of his anger like spit.

“Andiamo a pranzo?” Maria Feri asked, and at once he vanished.

Under a black umbrella then, they went through the grey and green wateriness of the city for lunch. The air blew cold. Many places were closed, and they had to make do with the brasserie-birreria of Antonio Renato, who had opened for the few tourists and to escape the madness that was his family upstairs. He served the cousins a pizza primavera with a small nod and a kind of quiet and restrained decorum, as if attempting to make himself invisible. He polished the counter and gazed regretfully at the street outside.

“Will you be staying for long?” Maria Feri dared at last to ask her cousin, and then flushed with embarrassment. “Of course you are welcome for as … I mean, well, I am very glad.”

“And you are very kind.”

Maria smiled and looked down at her lunch, hoping that her schooled air of politeness concealed her desperation for Gabriella to stay.

“I don't know exactly. I have to decide some things. I would like to stay a few weeks if I could.”

“Oh, a few weeks, yes. Of course.” The older woman lifted her glass of wine with a shaking hand and held it tight against her lip, lest it show her disappointment.

While the rest of the city greeted the New Year with a mixed response of religion and carnival, the cousins lived with the quietness of convalescents and waited for the cold rain to lift. Gabriella played the violin for herself, and in the other room Maria listened and experienced the astonished awe that those with undiscovered talent sometimes feel for the gifted. The music was played not with sweetness but with a sharp and quickened intensity that even Goldoni the bird recognized was the playing of the heart. Gabriella played it for herself; she played it in the city where her music had begun, and in the playing revisited the rooms of her home; she played it for the child not yet born, and for the thousand unanswerable questions of its future. She played the music for its own order, for the pleasure of its form, which was in itself the one perfect thing in her life. And when she had finished, and the door of her cousin's room creaked and the bird began to sing, she lay on the bed in the kind of exhaustion that makes do for peace.

It rained on. When the rain lifted, the mist clung in the sleeves of the streets. Venice dripped into itself. Short damp days passed moments after they had begun. Gabriella awoke with the door closing behind her cousin going out to work. Then she turned over in the deep blankets of the bed and it was afternoon and the grey light of another day was sliding softly into the waters. She rose and walked around the apartment in her nightgown. She watched from the window, throwing a cloth over the birdcage when the manic gaiety of his chirping stitched like a needle along the soft rim of her brain. Gabriella returned to her bed. With her hands on her unborn child, she turned into the pillow and became her mother. She became the woman giving birth to grief, to loss, and to the failure of hope. Sweat ran down her face, her hair matted in wild short ropes, her mouth dried, and her tongue wore a white fur. She cried without tears, and, in that room in Venice, felt pressing down on her the terrible loneliness of those who seek like saints to know and do the right thing. Oh God, she thought, closing her eyes for clearer vision and looking in the darkness for a sign, Oh, God, what am I to do?

When Philip Griffin waved Stephen goodbye from the edge of the front garden, he felt a weight lifting in his spirit and looked down to see that his shoes were still touching the ground. It was the day after the Feast of the Epiphany. There was a sense of slow waking in the drizzling air, as if Christmas like a reluctant guest was only now leaving the suburbs; the streets were drowsy with aftermath.

Knowing that Stephen was leaving for Venice, both men had woken up mute and spent breakfast with the studied concentration of wordless monks. Stephen wore his father's suit, with the tickets and his passport next to his breast. The bigness of his feelings kept colliding within him. The round enormity of his gratitude rose in his gorge like a ball cock. He could say nothing. His fingers twisted in knots of yearning that kept coming apart beneath the table and leaving him feeling the emptiness of air with a free-falling panic. He thought of Gabriella vanished into Venice and, in the suit of Philip Griffin, was briefly courageous, balanced on a thin and heroic belief like some latter-day Icarus moments before he chanced the waxen wings and leapt into the air. I will find her, he thought. I'm sure I will. He gulped his tea. The sweat ran off his shoulder blades into the small channel of his back. He took leave of his father with the delicate and mismatched embrace of a crane above a small building, then walked out across the weather to his car.

Philip watched him drive away. He watched the emptiness after the car had gone and then let the wordlessness of his morning escape in a low groan. He opened his mouth to let his relief float out and followed it immediately with the quick prayer: “Oh God, Anne, I hope it works out.” Then he went back inside the house, where he climbed the stairs to his bedroom slowly, gripping the bannister like the nearness of his last days, ascending, going to take out the bank book, where he could recheck the balance of his account and calculate anew the cost of living.

Beneath the powders with which she tried to smooth away some of the wrinkles of her life, Maria Feri's face bloomed crimson. Her cousin was pregnant. Gabriella was sitting in the dim light in such a fallen torpor that Maria had to disguise her delight when she was told, and she turned instead to Goldoni in his cage. She tapped him the news until his heart was fluttering. She wanted to share with him the extraordinary vision of it: a child, a child could be born here, right here. And in the vastness of her loneliness a pure joy flew, white as a dove. Maria did not think of the father, of the missing man; she had lived her life in the company of that absence, moving from the days of promise, when any moment he might appear, to a slow, sad reckoning that was like the slow and unannounced fall of petals from last week's flowers; she did not think to ask Gabriella. Instead, she turned her back momentarily and tapped the birdcage to see if Goldoni could sing her mood. Her cousin had come to live with her and now was going to have a baby. For Maria Feri it seemed as if everything in her life might have been waiting for this; it was the arrival of significance. Here was a meaning that washed clean the smudge of ordinary days, weeks, and years. Here, after all, was discovered purpose; she was to be the child's other mother. Goldoni sang. Maria regained the composure that was her learned manner with the world and turned to her cousin.

“You are run down,” she said. “We must take good care of you. Of course you should have told me sooner. My bed is much more comfortable. I will move you in there tonight.”

“No, please.”

“Yes.” She touched a fallen ash-grey hair back from her eye and had the brief dizzy sensation of feeling pregnant herself. “ Mia cara cugina. Gabriella. You are my guest here. Please let me make you welcome. It is my happiness.”