Niall Williams - As It Is in Heaven

The music soared through the rooms. He almost wept with happiness. His pain had died away. At last, he thought. At last. Stephen was in Venice. And Philip had given him the ticket, had urged him to go. If it wasn't for me he mightn't have gone. But now he will be all right. He will be there and have met her, and she must love him, after all. He shook his head with the surge of gratitude he felt, that his son's life would turn out well in the end, that Stephen would not be left abandoned again, and that God had been listening, after all. Suddenly the logical formula of his life was made clear: while love progressed in Venice, the cancer grew in Dublin. The fact that that morning he felt no pain meant that there was nowhere else for the cancer to go, his healthy tissue had been eaten up. This he took to be a good sign. Now is the time, I must be ready to meet her now.

He walked out the door, leaving Puccini playing as the best defense against the daylight thieves that robbed the houses on the street in numerical sequence. He took his car and drove to the bank with the excitement of a youth on his first date. He called for the manager and withdrew everything he had left in his account, taking the cash and putting it in a plastic shopping bag before heading for Stephen's Green.

The morning had a soft quality that Philip Griffin imagined had been prepared for him like a bed. Sunlight danced across the windows of buses. The perfumes of spring were awakened and mingled beneath the leafless trees of Stephen's Green, catching the moving crowds and teasing them with a sense of rebirth. At the first railings he came to, Philip stopped and reached in the bag. He let his fingers clutch the money blindly and looked up at the blue sky, as if he could see there the face of lost love. The brim of his hat dribbled a small sweat. With only a half glance about him, he took a fistful of twenty-pound notes and stuffed them quickly into the bushes at the muddy bottom of the railing. Then he walked on. He didn't hurry. He had a lot to get rid of, and knew that when the last of his lifetime's savings had been given away, he would have exhausted his source of good acts and at last death would arrive. He would fall down in the street, and his wife would be there.

He had no pain. The sun pressed its palms on the back of his blazer. He smiled, thinking of Stephen in Venice, and wondered if that was where the weather had come from. He stopped and leaned against the railings, letting the city pass him for a few moments. Then he reached into the shopping bag and drew out another thousand pounds. He was about to make the second down payment and had turned to put the money through the railings when a blow struck his head.

His hat fell forward onto his face. A man wrenched his arm backward. He cried out, but his cry was short and went downward instead of up, so that the sound was lost. There were two men. They were not men, they were youths, he thought. He was expecting angels. A woman walking past was looking at them. “Hey,” she said. And the second blow landed in Philip's stomach, and his head fell down and he vomited on himself. For an instant he clung backhandedly to the railing behind him as he was swaying over, holding an instant as if there was still some chance the world was reparable and he could catch the ship of death.

“Hey, stop that!” the woman called from another world. This brought another blow, hasty, more urgent. Any moment there might be rescue, he thought. Help me, please. Still, Philip did not let go of the bag. Not until he felt teeth biting into his hand. They grated on his bone and a searing pain ran through him, so he screamed and let go. Then the men were running away, and the money was gone.

The world hung and swayed in the sunlight. The old tailor slid down the railing to the ground.

To his later regret, Stephen did not call his father when he returned to Ireland. He could not face the disappointment he would bring him, and so instead slipped into Dublin, took his car from where he had left it at the airport, and drove across the country to Clare. In the cottage by the sea he lay on the bed, with no music playing, and waited for his flu to pass. He lived in the hollow emptiness of the lost and did nothing. When, after a week, he was able to move around without betraying too blatantly the evidence of heartbreak, he drove to the school and asked if he could return to teaching.

Eileen Waters was astonished. She did not believe his excuses; she eyed him distrustfully, like the vision of her own misjudgement, and was not prepared to be caught off guard again. She kept the interview going longer than necessary, leaving Stephen in the office and visiting her bathroom where she took time to examine her facial expressions for signs of weakness. Only when she was convinced that she looked severe, that she was not a woman to be trifled with, did she return to the interview.

“Your condition,” she said, “the one this doctor referred to, is it passed?”

Stephen looked at her across the emptiness of the world. “Yes,” he whispered.

Eileen Waters paused. “Probation,” she said then. “I can take you back on probation.” She fixed her eyes on him like grappling hooks and tried to hoist herself up inside the shadowy mystery of him. What the hell was this man's problem? What was he hiding from her?

“I've had to take your classes myself,” she said. “We couldn't get a sub. We've all had to cover. A situation like this is hard on all the staff.”

“I'm sorry.”

“Yes. Well.” She paused and stopped herself from going on. It was a trick she had learned: use pauses. Silence is a strong weapon. Let him feel my silence now, she thought, and turned her tongue along the front of her teeth.

“Well?” Stephen said.

“I was very … very …” She paused again. She released her hands from each other and placed them flatly on the table, as if just keeping it from floating upward. “Very disappointed.”

Stephen just sat, slouched in his father's suit, his spirit too low to make a stronger case. He felt he was deep in ashes. When he moved the slightest muscle, they blew up into his eyes.

“As it happens,” Eileen Waters told him, “it would not be possible to replace you for the remainder of the school year, in any case. So you can be on probation until June. I will expect full attendance until that time.” She announced rather than spoke, obscuring the weakness of her character with performance.

Secretly she longed for Stephen to break down, to slide onto his knees and weep, to confess and reveal to her there in the office exactly where he had been and what terrible turbulence had left him like this now. She wanted to be the rock he clung to and, despite herself, turned her most compassionate gaze on him as he stood up to leave.

“It has been unfortunate,” she said. “But it is now behind you.” She held the doorknob but did not turn it. For a brief moment the hope crossed her eyes and she imagined one last time that he might stop and truly speak to her. But it passed and she composed herself, readjusting the face of consternation as she drew open the door and let the ashen figure leave.

And so Stephen's life resumed. He taught classes in history. He walked the beach with the great weight of nothing pressing his footsteps deep into the sand. He had lost love and accepted the harshness of the winter storms as if they were a personal judgement. On his first day back in the school he waited for an eruption among the boys, but it did not come. It was as if the pallor of his complexion, the tone of his voice, or the general aspect of his demeanour all broadcast the same message: Here is a broken man, leave him alone.