Niall Williams - As It Is in Heaven

“…happen,” said Stephen, “Yes.”

He stood in the kitchen with his hands prayerlike beneath his chin. “O God,” he said, seeing the shape of his life and hers, and finding in that almost surreal vision the answers to many questions. It was a moment when he glimpsed where all the tortuous plotting of his days had been leading; it included the music of his father, the buying of the ticket to first hear Gabriella play, the journeys to find her, the money he was to inherit, and the flight out of Kerry to the cottage where, like some agonizingly slow healing of all the griefs from childhood to disappointed adulthood, Gabriella had dreamt the music school.

* * *

They drove into Miltown Malbay, unaware that a pale white scent was following them and spreading like a sweet contagion through the town the instant they arrived. Stephen went to the bank. Gabriella walked up the street to find rhubarb and honey, whose conflicting tastes are the antidotes to the sudden giddiness suffered by those who are airy with dreams.

She was crossing the street when Moira Fitzgibbon saw her. At first Moira did not believe it could be the same woman. She had fallen into a season of doubt and lost the conviction that had once seemed to visit her like an angel with a sword. Her hopes had been dulled; the death of Moses Mooney had taken her by surprise, and in its aftermath she had woken each morning with the sour berries of blame in her mouth. She could not spit them out, and for a time was a half sister of herself looking in at the empty tedium of a life drying out in the salt wind. She despised the hopes she had, and protected herself with a tone of mockery her teachers had taught her. She muttered names at herself alone at the sink and did not respond when the calendar reminded her she should make new appeals to raise funds for the Mooney Memorial Hall. Before the spring she let the days go by. She took her daughters to school, collected them, had their meals ready, made another for her husband, and lived on, letting yesterday's hopes slip like a bandaged corpse into the cold sea. Who did you think you were? her face said to her, and she could make no reply. Then she saw Gabriella Castoldi on the street in Miltown Malbay. When she saw her features she was startled — it was an apparition, a ghost rising out of her conscience, and she thought of what she had done to that poor man Griffin in giving him the false hope of her address. (Often since she had considered it, and on Friday nights, when the late TV movie had finished some time after the Late Late Show and Tom was snoring on the couch like a gored beast, Moira chided herself on holding even the thinnest illusion that such romance existed, that somehow the long teacher might have found her, and they might have been happy together. It belonged in girls' comics, she had told herself, and pushed Tom on the back to tell his startled, slack-jawed face it was time for bed.)

The apparition walked towards her, and Moira touched her fingers on the glass of Casey the auctioneer's window. Its cold reaffirmed her, and in those astonished moments in which a mind reverses itself and discovers that its lies were truths, Moira saw the shape of the child and dared to imagine it might be Stephen's.

She moved a step from the window. Her eyes were quicker than her mouth. In an instant, they had alighted on the ring and saw the happiness of the woman; the shock of new reality surged through Moira like a charge that explodes blossoms on the trees. She stepped forward and held out an uncertain hand.

“Excuse me,” she said. “I'm sorry I…”

Gabriella was standing beside her. She smiled. “Yes?”

“Is it, are you? … I'm sorry, I'm a terrible fool, I never know what to, I just blurt. You won't remember me, but I … You are …?”

“I remember you. Yes, I do. You are the woman here, in Ennis. The concert. Yes.” Gabriella took her hand and held it. She did not know then that she was part of the fulfillment of Moira Fitzgibbon's hopes, that her arrival in Mil-town Malbay was like the return of a long-sent messenger upon whose news a whole city of dreams had been waiting, and for whose return hope had finally been surrendered. She did not know when she held Moira's hand that she was holding the hand of the future manager of the music school, or that she could have met no one else in that town who would help her make it a reality. Gabriella knew only that it was a good sign and waited in that astonished moment for the shock to pass. It took Moira another minute before she could approach the question of who Gabriella's husband might be, and then she saw Stephen Griffin walking up the street and she laughed out loud.

Stephen wore his bashfulness like a confirmation suit, and stood next to the two smiling women. “It was Mrs. Fitzgibbon who sold me the ticket to come and hear you,” he said, nodding the flashing pate of his head towards Moira.

“Otherwise you would not have come,” Gabriella teased him, and turned to Moira. “So, you are Cupid.”

“Well, I don't know.”

“Yes, you are,” Stephen said. And there was a brief moment of quiet acknowledgement in which Moira Fitzgibbon felt her spirits lift and fly about. They were still in the air when, like a tireless conjuror outdoing each extraordinary trick with another, Stephen announced: “We are going to build a music school. Here, out by the sea.”

Within half an hour Moira Fitzgibbon was getting out of Stephen's car and leading the two of them up the grassy pathway to the ruined cottage of Moses Mooney. On the short journey from the town Moira had reminded Stephen and told Gabriella the story of the old man.

“I know it was mad, and it was, it was mad, mad altogether,” she said, walking them to the door. “I mean, he had notions, wild mad notions, and to look at him you would think he was for the canaries, the big beard, the look he had when he went blind, like he was seeing something all the time somewhere else and, oh, I don't know, but there was something made me think of him, you know, that he had this one dream of the music, and well, he had no hope in the earthly world of making it happen, and maybe that was it, maybe that was what clicked with me. Anyway …”

She stopped and opened the front door. They peered inside.

“He bought the field over,” Moira said, “for his concert hall. It's mostly hares.”

They looked in at the purple shadows of the old man's life, until at last the prompting of the sun on their backs turned them around and they saw the startling view of the sea. The light on the water made the sea seem like sky and the horizon infinitely in the distance.

“I think we should buy it,” Stephen said. “Gabriella, it can be here.”

She took his hand and held it, and was stilled with the knowledge of how much he wanted to give her. “I don't know. Do you think?”

“Yes,” he said, and already it was decided. Already, within the space of less than twenty-four hours since their arrival in Clare, they had mapped out a life and found the place to begin building it. With the force of will and single-mindedness that sometimes belongs to those called simple, they saw the music school rise in the hillocky green field next to the house of Moses Mooney, they saw the money arriving from Dublin to Miltown Malbay and their hasty spending of it to secure first the field and then the planning permission and then the builders and then the students. Nothing that April day seemed beyond the capacity of their imagining, for the measure of love was to be not words or air but blocks and mortar and timber and glass, and in the bigness of their hearts that day they carried whole walls, windows, and doors with no effort at all.