Niall Williams - As It Is in Heaven

Every day Stephen visited the building. The closer it came to being completed, the more uncertain he became that they would find the pupils to fill it. In the colder weather the population of the town shrunk. The whole landscape took on the air of a child crouching before a blow. And the rain swept on. Cold squalls blew in off the watery horizon, they lashed the coast of Clare, but according to the evening news on the television, seemed to have blown out and vanished long before they reached Dublin.

By the end of September Gabriella had returned to the violin with renewed energy. She played for Alannah, then played some more when the child was sleeping. Somewhere in the time she had spent away from it her style had changed. She had lost the sharp, edgy quality that was characteristic of her previous intensity. Now instead, she created a fuller and rounder sound and made a music that to Stephen seemed to echo his own feelings of grace. The two Fitzgibbon girls came for lessons. And one evening while Ciara, who was seven, was waiting in the sitting room, Stephen saw her looking at the chess set.

“Would you like to learn?” he asked her.

“Is it very hard?”

“Not for a girl who can play the violin.”

And so they began. He taught her how to play while the rain whipped against the windows and her sister bowed “Song of the Wind” on the violin. He showed her the moves and watched her innocence and astonishment at the bizarre secrets of the game, how the knight could jump and the king castle, and as he lifted the pieces and spoke of them, he had to pause three times in mid-sentence, for in the timbre of his own voice he heard the unmistakable speech of Philip Griffin teaching him the same game so many years before. He moved the bishop and looked at his own hand holding it and, seeing the wrinkling he had not noticed before, realized how he had become his father.

* * *

On Saturday, the fifth of October, Stephen and Gabriella opened the music school in the pentagonal building of glass and stone in Mooney's field on the west coast of Clare. It was a day of wild weathers, and the beginning of that long season of flu, head colds, and chest coughs that were to mark that year's winter like overdue payment for a good summer. It was the predicted gloom that made happy the misfortunate. The wind came in broken, sudden breaths, as if the lungs of the year had collapsed inwards, and a momentary stillness was followed by forceful gasping. Rain was spat out and then vanished, then clattered again on the glass.

For a week the school had been advertised. Moira had made posters. She had spoken to the people at the Clare Champion and been promised an article, which did not appear. She had mentioned the virtuosity of Gabriella Castoldi, the great progress on the violin her own daughters were making, the opportunity of the school. She had even let slip the name of Moses Mooney and used it like a touchstone to remind those who did not wish to remember that he was a blind old man who had died disappointed. Moira had campaigned for the school tirelessly, but on the morning of the fifth of October she awoke with the terrible unease of those who are about to be ill. The weather was a bad omen. Perhaps no one will come, she thought. And for a final time in her life returned to the old doubt in herself: Perhaps behind my back they are laughing, thinking, Who does she think she is, she who failed more exams than anyone in the parish. Moira had stood at the rain window and cursed. Then said, God forgive me.

By ten o'clock she had arrived at the new building, where Stephen and Gabriella and the baby were waiting for her. The air in the school smelled of painted colours. Inside the front hall there was a music system softly playing Vivaldi's Concerto in G major for violoncello, strings, and basso continuo; there was a table with cheese and wine, and another with leaflets and admission forms overhung by the green and yellow paper ribbons that Moira had saved since the last World Cup. At half past ten Councillor O'Rourke arrived. He held his head at such a high angle that it was impossible to tell whether it was in disdain or approval (and in fact he himself was undecided and would wait for confirmation one way or the other when his constituents arrived); he studied the building carefully to avoid conversation and looked at his watch with the practised air of a man who must always seem to be urgently needed elsewhere.

Gabriella paced with the baby, and Stephen made small circles in the front hallway behind her. He was wearing the repaired suit made by his father. His eyes followed the floor. He walked and stopped abruptly, listening intently into the wind for the sound of cars and then hurrying on when there was none. Whenever he arrived close to Gabriella, he tried to tell her it would be all right. But by the fourth time he gave up and used only his eyes to give her the calm he did not possess.

It did not work. Gabriella glistened with perspiration. Alannah, picking up the high-frequency signal of her mother's fear, fretted and made a low moaning sound that wavered as Gabriella rocked her in her arms.

They walked around the hallway. They tried not to look out the long windows that showed the road where no cars were coming. The rain fell, and to protect the terrible vulnerability of their dream, Moira turned the music up loud, then took the councillor on a tour through the empty rooms.

It was eleven o'clock, half an hour past the advertised opening. At last, as if she had finally paced all the way to the far end of hope, Gabriella stopped in the middle of the hallway. She paused a moment for her spirit to break. Then Stephen told her, “There are two cars.”

It was a moment typical of their life together, for within it was a kind of desperate yearning, an outrageous dreaming that belonged to a more innocent world than this, and which appeared to be always on the point of crashing headlong into the chill reality of failure, but then was rescued. As if God were juggling glass-ball moments with mischievous riskiness, letting them hurtle towards the ground and then defying the odds to pull off once more the little miracle of salvation.

There were two cars, the Kennys' and the O'Connells'. Then there were three more, The Mulvihills', Mangans', and Greenes'. They came in with the low-chinned circumspection of those who enter new rooms for the first time. They had come from the Lahiffe funeral, they explained over the Vivaldi, draining the councillor's face when he realized he had missed it. They smiled and shook hands and did not seem to resist the sudden switch from the mood of the graveside to the bright triumphant joy of the music. Others were coming along, Joe Kenny said. But the traffic was all caught up in Miltown Malbay. He took the wine Moira offered him and drank it back in a shot, then looked up at the bare walls as if at paintings.

Big Tom Lernihan came in the door. Then Josie Hassett, Nuala Normoyle, the three Looney girls, the Penders, the Reidys, the Mohallys, and six families of Ryans. Within half an hour the funeral had arrived at the music school. There were a hundred people in the hallway, and the mud of the graveyard slipped from their boots, and the heat of their bodies rose and filled the air with the smell of rain returning heavenward. The music played through the talking, the deep notes of the cello beating like rhythmic wings across the space above them all. Timmy Purtill said it was music like he'd never heard in his life and sat beside the speaker eating a cheese from Denmark. Mary Enright took the arm of Gabriella and told her she had a boy who wanted lessons. So did Maura Galvin. Then the barrel-chested Donie Cussen, who was called Casanova, smiled his full mouth of teeth at Gabriella and said, “Any chance of a tune for us?”

Then she was playing.