Niall Williams: As It Is in Heaven

“You think you might like it here?” she asked Stephen.

“I can’t tell you,” he said.

“I’m sorry?”

“The future has no history. We can’t know anything of tomorrow, can we?”

Mrs. Waters stared at him; it was an outlandish remark, and she had to pause a moment to decide if she was being insulted.

“I think I will, that’s why I’m here. But I don’t know.” Stephen looked directly at her. “I’d like the chance to work here, I know that.”

It was not exactly what Mrs. Waters wanted to hear. But she nodded and pursed her lips.

“You’d teach all classes?”

“Yes.”

“We believe in discipline here. We have school rules.”

Stephen said nothing, he simply looked back at her, and Eileen Waters could not tell if he was agreeing or not. She was a good judge of men; she often said so. She had judged her husband, Eamon, at forty-three and married at last, congratulating herself on not surrendering to any number of brutish fellows and finding in the assistant librarian in Ennis the quietest man in Clare. He had not disappointed her. She was a good judge. But with Stephen Griffin she was lost. It was a feeling to which she was not accustomed, and to escape the discomfort, she decided on him. He was the best of the three applicants by far, she told herself. That he was the only man and the other two women candidates had both seemed powerful, competent figures who might have challenged her was beside the point. No, this fellow is the best. It was only when Eileen Waters stood up to congratulate Stephen on getting the job that the thought occurred to her that he might be a dreadful teacher. It was only a passing impression, and she drove it, like everything else, resolutely out of her mind by shaking Stephen’s hand forcefully and telling him three times how wonderful it was all going to be.

In the years before he arrived at the concert in Ennis that Friday evening, time had stopped for Stephen Griffin. He had found the house and moved into it, taken the job at the school, and fit his life into the routine of both of them, paring down his days until they had arrived at a still and unbroken sameness.

Then time stopped altogether.

He was the teacher who lived in the house. He was a quiet and shy man. He didn’t go to the pubs at night, nor join the little golf club on the dunes at Spanish Point. The Clancys, who lived in the small cottage down the road, hardly saw him; the word in Marrinan’s shop was that he was writing a book and wanted to be left alone. And so he was. He taught his classes, he lived in the house by the sea and visited his father in Dublin once every month. He felt himself grow old.

Then one day he was asked to buy a ticket for Michael Mooney’s concert.

He was called Moses Mooney. He had a great fluff of white beard and walked down the streets of Miltown Malbay with his head held backward to let it flow. He had two coats and wore them both in winter, one on top of the other, so the fullness of his figure as he came towards you seemed a statement of intent. His eyes were blue gimlets. He had sailed the seas of the world for many years, and three times died and lived again according to his own tales. Each encounter with God had left him with the remarkable blueness of his eyes made brighter and the rosiness of his cheeks proof of the health-enhancing properties of resurrection. He was an extraordinary man. Moses Mooney had grown up in a house of music, the notes were in his ears when he was born, for his father, Thomas, was rumoured to have fiddle calluses on his fingers when he arrived in the world and his mother was the singer Angela Duff, who had made men weep in the kitchen when she sang “Spancil Hill.” He had grown up with the music and then left for England and the sea. It was on the third of his meetings with God, when he was fifty-two years old, that Moses Mooney realized what he was to do with his life and returned from the shores of Brazil to Miltown Malbay with the project of building an opera house by the sea.

At first, of course, it was not an opera house. He told the people who would listen to him in bemused amazement in Clancy’s bar that it was a concert hall. That the sides would be removeable to see the sea, and that in summertime they would lift off to let the roaring of the ocean meet the playing of the music in the fabulous symphony of Man and God. He was perfectly clear about it. Everything about him seemed convincing, and for as long as his vision remained the wildest and least probable of all dreams, the people indulged his fantasy and bought him drinks. Moses Mooney was a figure around the town, that was all. He did not tell anyone yet that the building was to be an opera house, nor that the music he had heard in God’s company was not like any other and that only later when he had arrived back on the shores of Brazil and heard on an old radio the singing of Maria Callas did he recognize that that was the music of God.

How he intended to build the opera house was not at first clear to him either. All he knew was that he had to come home to Clare, that his travelling days were over, and that this project was what he had to pursue until the day that he died. When he arrived back at his home cottage, the roof had fallen in. There were two cats living in the parlour in a clump of old thatch, and when Moses stood in the doorway, they came to him with such gentleness and affection that he told his neighbour he would name them after his parents. It took him three months to get the house partially repaired. He had money saved from his sailoring, and before he had declared his full intentions, he used what he had left to buy an acre of ground next to the golf course at Spanish Point.

And there it remained. The west Clare opera house. Grass grew within the barbed-wire boundaries of the field, while all about it were the fairways and greens of the golfers. Every day Moses would walk across the field and imagine the dimensions of the building shaping around him; from the whispering of the sea winds he dreamed the singing of the future, the magnificent music that was as yet unheard by everyone but himself.

Other than this vision, Moses Mooney showed few signs of oddity in his behaviour. He was a churchgoing man and kept himself comfortably once he had repaired the cottage. He was the owner of a thousand tales and could tell them with such conviction that two priests, three bankers, and one insurance man were among his regular company in the late-evening sessions in Clancy’s. He had gone out into the world and brought more than his share of it back with him, and when he told of unknown tribes in Chile, the bizarre habits of the male cockatoo, or the weird majesty of a communal dream shared by each of eighty sailors one night after a storm off the Cape of Good Hope, no one walked away. He finished a story and sat back, palming his great beard gently, and then sipping his stout as if chastened by the things he had lived to see.

It was two years after he had bought the field that the idea of the concerts came to him. When he first dreamed the opera house into the space where the tufts of grass blew in the wind, he did not think of how the money would be raised. It was only afterwards, when the emptiness of the field began to spread in his mind like an ache, that he wondered if there was not a serious flaw in God’s vision, or if perhaps he had resurfaced too soon in the southern Atlantic before getting the entire message. With the childlike innocence of the visionary, he had supposed that once he announced his intentions the money would be forthcoming. When it wasn’t and nobody stopped him on the street with the offer of finances, he decided that information was the problem, and stayed awake all the following night making three bright posters with red and yellow crayons, announcing the number of the bank account he had opened and telling the good people that he was going to donate his field and all his personal savings to the cause of building a place for music of the sea. He hung the posters the following day before dawn. The town was asleep and only a brisk salty wind passed along the street. Thomas and Angela, the two cats, had followed him from the house and stood together beneath the lamppost while he pressed home the thumbtacks. When he had done all three, he walked down the empty town with a pure and clear pride glistening inside himself; he was as clean-souled as after Communion, and turned to look back at the announcements with such a blaze of joy that they might have told of the coming of Christ Himself. Moses Mooney walked home and went to bed. He slept with the two cats at his feet and dreamed the town was waking up and seeing the notices, an infection of delight enveloping the people at the whimsical originality, the daring and wonder of the plan, and the queues spreading from Bank Place down to Clancy’s.