Colum McCann - Thirteen Ways of Looking

He raps his walking stick on the marble floor. Once. Twice. They’re gossiping still around the corner. A high laugh and then a low whisper and then another cackle from Sally herself. What was it like in the Garden of Eden before there was a snake? No wonder Adam went for the apple. Or was it Eve who ate the apple? Strange how the simplest things slip from our minds. The original tale, and he can’t even recall who it was that transgressed. Or maybe nobody transgressed at all. Maybe they bit the apple together. Shared it. And why not? There was an old rhyme he knew as a ten-year-old: Wouldn’t it have been jolly if Eve’s leaf had been holly? What a marvelous thing, a woman’s body. Curved and designed for delight. Full and glorious and open for invitation, invocation, inhalation. Lord, he loved lying with Eileen on a Sunday morning, especially after high-jinks if they got the chance. They would watch the light crawl into the room, beckon it, good days, the horn of plenty, so to speak, once upon a time.

He hits his walking stick on the floor once more. Oh, come on now, Sally. Lord above. Onwards. Old men grow older quicker. Sally up, Sally forth, Sally sixth.

— Right there, Mr. J.

— I haven’t got all day, you know.

She pops her head around the corner.

— Right with you, Mr. J.

And then he hears a complicated sigh. And a giggle.

I hope to God that she isn’t telling them about my adventures in the diaper trade. You work your whole life to become a pillar of the community and then it all disappears in front of your eyes.

Perhaps he should just strike out into the snow on his own. Hand me my oxygen tank. Pull my hat down around my ears. Sir Edmund, hitting the slopes. Once he climbed the mountains in Italy with Eileen. Up in the beautiful Dolomites. They stayed in a chalet under the shadows of the mountains and in the mornings, after breakfast, they climbed up through the spectacular forests, hand in hand, and then used carabiners to clip themselves in to scale the via ferrate, high into the sky. The amazing thing about the Italians was that they had rifugios on the top of the mountains. You could eat a bowl of pasta and drink a glass of pinot grigio twelve thousand feet in the air. A civilized bunch. He often wishes that he had a little of the Italian blood in him, that big expansive generosity, that color, that style, but it’s all Lithuanian, which, of course, is its own little mishmash, Polish and Russian and German and Viking too.

Curious thing, the blood we inherit. Slapping around inside, making us who we are: the landscape itself gets a say in the outcome of the mind. Tobago with its beaches and sunlight and palm trees, no doubt, where life is designed to slow things down. Still, Sally somehow gets things done, it always amazes him at the end of the day the place is clean, the laundry is folded, the dishes are washed, the beds are tucked, and she disappears to her little room, where she keeps a picture of her nephew, or her grandson, on the table, and once or twice he has heard her weeping, but most of the time she goes happily off to sleep, or so it seems. Oh, nature’s soft nurse, how I have frighted thee.

Still and all, he wishes she would get a move on. He gazes the length of the lobby towards the snow falling white and fat-flaked outside. Strange how life becomes a telescope: the distance lengthening the older we get. He has lived in this building the best part of twenty years and the lobby has never been longer. He raises a salutary finger to Tony the doorman who is outside sprinkling rock salt on the ground. He has known Tony for two decades now. Seen him age and bloom and indeed balloon. Time. The great leveler. Since when did Tony suddenly hit the far side of middle age? It’s not as if this sort of thing happens overnight, or is it? Found him once reading a copy of Kant. Tried to make a joke. I tried Kant, but couldn’t. Fell flat. To Tony anyway. Which I might well do right now. Flat on my face in the lobby, waiting. Come on, Sally, for crying out loud.

There was a while in his own life, in his late thirties, when everything just fell away so suddenly: the hair, the ease, the grace. Walked around with a big lump of anxiety in his heart. A midlife crisis they called it. Didn’t begin to feel reinvigorated, really, until he reached the age of fifty. Elected, then, to Supreme Court, Kings County. Hardly a runaway election, but the party backed him, they even made him little buttons and leaflets to hand out at the polling stations around Brooklyn. Truth was they needed a liberal Jew and he just about fit the bill. They liked his Catholic wife as well, two birds with one poll. They lived in the Heights, so they had the cachet. Dugan Brothers Bakery Delivered to Your Door. He walked every day to the courts on Adams Street. The great thing about being a justice of the court was that you didn’t have to retire until seventy, seventy-six if you pushed it. It was written there under Judiciary Law, three two-year extensions. Sure, they put the thumbscrews on and the inevitable hints were dropped, especially because he moved to Manhattan — he was no longer their Brooklyn boy, how dare he move to the city? — but he hung in there until the end, especially after Eileen left, oh Lord, the day. He was in the bathroom on Eighty-sixth Street having a shave, half his face covered in foam, when he heard the thumping fall outside the door. She’d been sick for a long time but he had no idea that she was going to pass just like that — a quick fall as she stepped out of bed — and there she was, Eileen, lying on the carpet, gone, gone, a chuisle mo chroí . He leaned down and stroked her hair. That’s what he would remember, the feel of her hair. They say that it’s one of the last things to go. That it keeps on growing. Even days after. That’s why they have to shave the dead.

— Isn’t that right, Sally?

She has come, at last, around the corner, the little hem of her nurse whites showing beneath the dark of her coat.

— What’s that Mr. J.?

— I was just thinking—

— Yes? she says with a swell of boredom. She reaches up and adjusts his scarf tight around his neck.

— About Mrs. Mendelssohn.

— Yes, sir, Mr. J., sir. A fine woman, Miss Eileen.

— I do, I do.

— Excuse me, sir?

— Oh, don’t worry about me, Sally.

— On you go, Mr. J., I got you.

The dead are with us. They glide along behind us on our endless journeys, they accompany us in our smallest gestures, tuck themselves into our dark shadows, they even come along on our little lunchtime sojourns to Chialli’s. She used to comb her hair with a gold-handled brush. He loved watching her by the mirror, the stroke of the brush and the fan of her hair, pressing the long strands together with thumb and forefinger.

— Lovely once and always.

— Mr. J.?

— It’s an old tune.

— Yes, sir. Of course.

— Lovely once and always, moonlight in her hair.

— Yes, sir.

Sally is of course quite thoroughly confused, but how could she have any idea in heaven or hell what he’s talking about, unless the song got diverted and made it all the way to Tobago. And damn it all anyway. He can feel a little tremor in his pocket but he’s not about to stop out here, now, in the lobby, no matter who’s calling, God or Elliot or Job or anyone else for that matter. How odd to get that little vibration down below. A wocket in my pocket. He used to read Dr. Seuss to Katya long ago. They were good days, reading to the children when he had the time. Odd thing, time. So much of it now and we spend it all looking back. Lovely once and always with moonlight in her hair.

— Lord above, says Sally, looking out to the weather. You sure you want to venture out, Mr. J.?