Horse Heaven (61 page)

“They are quite interesting.”

“Aren’t they, though? Absolutely useless, of course.” He grasped a little knob between his forefinger and his thumb, and pulled out a drawer. “Now, what would you put in that? It’s too shallow.”

“It’s not for putting into,” said Rosalind, “it’s for looking at.” And indeed it was, because the bottom of the drawer contained a whole inlaid scene in various shades of wood. Up in the left-hand corner was a wolf, and down in the right-hand corner was a man. Crossing a hill between them, in various attitudes of excitement, was a pack of wolfhounds. The “drawing” of the animals was astounding, not only in detail but in line. Each hound, or part of a hound (some were partly hidden behind others), was distinct and full of energy and movement. “May I touch it?” said Rosalind.

“Thank you for asking. Yes, you must.”

But there were no edges. The inlay had been sanded and smoothed.

She stepped back. The outside of the chest was simple until you looked at it and saw that the boards had been split and bookmatched, so that the deep golden grain of the wood formed a helical pattern up the side of the chest, and then a sunburst pattern over the top, but it was subtle.

“I’ll tell you this, if you don’t mind,” said the proprietor. “Padraig Mahoney never makes a mistake. You see how smooth these corners are, all the corners? The average cabinetmaker gives himself a bit of decoration here and there so he can make a mistake, but this lad Mahoney, he does every bit with antique planes he’s restored, and he never makes a mistake.”

“They don’t look stark, though,” said Rosalind.

“Ah, well, he has a sensuous eye, doesn’t he?”

Rosalind turned her head and looked at the proprietor, who was looking at the chest with manifest pleasure. She said, “Yes, he does.”

“Yes indeed,” said the man. The shop bell rang, and the man glanced around. Someone had come in, so he said, “I’ll leave you to admire this piece, then. Take your time.”

And she did. Beginning at the top, she opened every drawer. There were twenty of them, twenty episodes of the story that included the man and the dogs and the wolf, and also a woman combing her hair, and a pair of horses trotting between the shafts of a carriage. The marvel was not that this Padraig Mahoney took a year to make one of these, but that he took only a year to make one. Even so, she felt her spirits sink as she closed the bottom drawer. It was marveling that did it, in the end. Of course she was not, she thought, an artist of shopping, or a first-class appreciator; it was all too evident that she was not an artist of anything. She got down on her knees then and bent down and twisted her head to see underneath the chest. Sure enough, there was yet another scene, this one a portrait of a man with an aquiline nose and heavy eyebrows. Above her, the proprietor, who had returned, said, “Ah. There you go. That’s the artist. He puts that on the underside of every piece. I had one customer—he bought the chest from 1975, I believe—he called me a year ago and said that he’d only just discovered the picture. And they’re all different, too. You could stand them all up, from all these years, and see Padraig mature and age.”

“I’m amazed at this.”

“He does that to us all. Let me help you up, dear. Yes. It’s no use comparing ourselves to Padraig Mahoney. Or to any of them. I grew up comparing myself to Laurence Olivier. My goodness, I wanted to be an actor like that. An
English
actor, mind you, though we have some fine Irish players, but being an Irish player wasn’t good enough for me. I’m happier now, as a useful sort of man who opens the shop and does the books and closes for the night.”

“Has he made any with a racing theme?”

“Ah, yes—1994. He lost a bit of money at the Curragh, and tried to recoup it over at Cheltenham. You know, when they run the Gold Cup, they take enough away from the Irish punters to finance English racing all the year round.” He opened a drawer, then another one. No narrative, this time, but a myriad of racehorses, running, jumping, falling, jumping, rearing, bucking, running, jumping, chestnuts, blacks, grays, bays, browns, all rendered in glorious detail. Rosalind said, “How much?”

“I’ll not tease you, they don’t come cheap.”

“How much?”

“Fifty thousand pounds for the racing one, fifty-five for the other one.”

And here was where everyone became happy, because it did seem cheap to Rosalind, both because of how much money she had and because of the care and inspiration that had gone into what she was buying. She said, “I’ll take the racing one, for my husband. He’s a racing man.”

“Wonderful. Mr. Mahoney will be pleased, indeed, as he rarely has a sale. He will come to Dublin himself to oversee packing and shipment, and if it arrives with the least damage, which has never happened, he will fly to your home and repair it himself.”

“Thank you. I feel truly as though I’ve never seen or bought anything like this.”

“You haven’t, darlin’.” And it was true. And Al, who came as close to having everything as anyone in the world, most assuredly did not have one of these. There couldn’t be a more perfect culmination of her work, Rosalind thought, than to give Al something on her own birthday that he did not have and could not have found and didn’t know existed and that wasn’t in the least useful to him.

Sometime later, she found herself out of the shop, standing in the street again. There were urchins and people playing music and general happy chaos. The weather actually wasn’t bad for the time of year. There was even a bit of sun. She continued walking and looking into windows, but then she thought, having had a peak shopping experience, she might as well knock off for the rest of the day. No china, no item of clothing, no painting, no musical instrument, nothing was going to beat this.

And so Rosalind proceeded down the street, looking into the shop windows still, but doing as others did it, and she herself once did it, separated, as if by glass, as if by no money. After a while she crossed. After a while she turned, walked down another, less busy street, turned again. What a sunny day it was. Everyone she passed commented on it. First sunny day all winter. She looked at her watch. She was born now. Her own birth, of course, was the only one she had ever experienced. Perhaps, she thought, that was an odd thing. Especially odd here in Ireland, of course.

If there had been a time when Rosalind wanted children, she couldn’t remember it. When she married Al, who was forty-five to her thirty, part of her relief had been that of course there would be no children; Al, as he said then, needed some God-damned rest. Melissa would have been thirteen or fourteen, Al Junior a senior in high school, and Georgina a senior at Wellesley. Now, of course, it struck her as odd that this choice on her part had gone unexamined, had not even seemed like a choice. There were so many things in her life like
that, weren’t there? How she put up her hair. What she put on in the morning. Whom she had lunch with. Even where she lived. After moving into Al’s house all those years ago, she had redecorated it from top to bottom, but it had never occurred to her that they could live somewhere else. Maybe Al had even asked her if she wanted to build another place, but maybe she hadn’t even heard the question. Maybe the only things she had ever chosen were purchases after all. She looked up. She was coming to some large, official-looking buildings. She had no idea what they were for—some sort of government offices, perhaps. She paused and stared at them, not because she wanted to know what they were, but because she wanted to know why she had never chosen whether to have children or not.

The image of her mother came into her mind. How many years had she spent listening to her friends complain about their mothers? Forty? And she had never joined in. Rosalind’s mother was someone you could not complain about, try as you might. She was calm, affectionate, stoic without being long-suffering. She had never spoken to Rosalind or either of her sisters in an unreasonable voice. She had a beautiful smile. It was a smile that a daughter could not get tired of. Rosalind supposed that she had been quite enamored of her mother. Her sisters had been, too. No disagreement there. But even so, her mother had always said, “Children are such a responsibility.” And she had taken her responsibility toward them very seriously, doing homework with them, sewing their clothes, making sure that they had the most nutritious possible meals, talking to them seriously about boys and dating and sex, showing them how to clean their rooms, how to do laundry properly (she had a special thing about leaving clothes in the dryer after it stopped—no matter what she was doing, she would leap up and run down into the basement to take out the clothes and hang them or fold them), how to make a white sauce and a pie crust. She had overseen their piano practicing and gone to every school function. It was clear from every moment of Rosalind’s childhood that motherhood left no time for anything else, and was not an enterprise to be entered upon with a light heart, though, of course, Rosalind’s mother didn’t have a naturally light heart, either. Ah, well. Sometimes Rosalind didn’t miss her. Sometimes her sisters didn’t miss her. They had confided that to one another once, in Antigua.

She thought she could almost feel a bit of resentment rising up within. And then a man who was passing said to her, “Here’s the bus you want.”

There were buses right in front of her. She hadn’t noticed them, and didn’t want one.

“This is the one that will take you. You go to the end of the line, and get off right there. It’s only about a twenty-minute ride.”

“Are you talking to me?” said Rosalind. The man was very handsome, about forty, she thought, in a soft blue sweater.

“Better get on, luv,” he said. “He’s ready to leave.”

And so she did. He waved to her as the bus pulled away from the curb. She waved back, and mouthed, “Thank you.”

She settled back into the seat, prepared to take on her resentment of her mother, but then she couldn’t find it. Her mother was her mother. It was as if she had left her resentment standing at the bus stop. She laughed. Was it as easy as that? Did you leave your emotions behind you, holograms of yourself dotting the landscape? It seemed as though you could, in Ireland.

The bus went away, crossed a river—that would be the Liffey—then sped onward. It was about half full. Once in a while it stopped, but no one got off or on. Somehow, the fact that it was an Irish bus explained this, and so Rosalind stopped wondering about it. The scenes they passed were flat, not picturesque in particular. At the end of the line, they came to a large, surprisingly green space for this time of year. When the bus stopped, she said to the driver, “Where are we now?”

“This is Phoenix Park, dear. The bus leaves here for the city center every twenty minutes until six this evening, then every forty minutes thereafter.” And she got off. She looked at her watch. It was almost noon. Maybe it had been a decade or two since she had spent an afternoon in a park. In the first place, she was a culture girl, not a nature girl, and in the second place, walking in the park was for people who had nothing else to do and no money to do it with. In the third place, it was the third of January, which was, perhaps, why the place was deserted. And so she walked in the park.

What exactly her mood was, she could not say. Normally, she would be feeling a certain impatience, a certain fear of boredom at the prospect of an afternoon alone with trees and grass. She was fifty years old now. For the last thirty years, with a machinelike implacability, she had planned her days, her weeks, her years. She traveled with guidebooks and systems. When she came away from the new place, she had an excellent overview of historic sites, fine-art and decorative-arts museums, better shopping, restaurants, and musical venues. When she came back to these places later, she always knew what she had missed and wanted to see this time. Her friends called her all the time and asked her what they should see and where they should eat in any given spot, and she always had a brilliant suggestion. In retrospect, it was as if she had been mapping the world. But what for? Perhaps, she was willing to admit, it was because she didn’t have anything better to do.

Here in this park, with no one around, it was easy to think of all the things that there were to do in the world. She was standing in this still, empty center,
and spiraling around her in a great galaxy of activity were five, six billion people, all of them busy except her, and she would be busy again soon. In one of the outer arms of the galaxy was Al, who was walking with some men around a site. Everyone was talking excitedly in English and Russian about building a road, bringing in water, carrying off wastes. It was a vast undertaking, made all the more exciting by the prevailing local conditions, which were worse than primitive—the original, primitive potential of the site had been destroyed. Rebuilding was next to impossible, and so the challenge was even more exhilarating. In another arm was Dick, now just getting to the track, just beginning to sort through the daily requirements of fifty horses, ten exercise riders, eighteen grooms, twenty owners, five hot walkers, the feed man, the vets, the bookkeeper, all the others. It was a vast undertaking, made all the more exciting by the unknowability of the horses and the myriad opinions clinging to every one of them. Her friends in New York would still be sleeping, but they were busy, too, dreaming one dream after another. How many children were there in the world? And so how many mothers and fathers and grandmothers and aunts and uncles and child-minders were wiping faces, offering food, pushing little arms through little sleeves, tying shoes, talking about, reading aloud to, reprimanding, kissing, tucking in, looking for, playing pattycake with, lamenting over, cleaning up after, walking beside, throwing into the air, explaining something to, ignoring the cries of, beating, hugging, expecting, missing, touching the face of, holding the hand of one child or another? How many were hoeing, planting, cultivating, pruning, harvesting something or another? How many were cooking? How many were eating? How many were defecating? How many were picking up their tools, putting down their tools, turning on the television, turning off the television, placing telephone calls, playing a musical instrument, dancing? How many were talking? Arguing? Making love? Picking up weapons? How many were whispering a secret to someone else? How many were answering the telephone calls that others had just placed? How many were waiting for something? How many were standing in line, driving cars, riding buses, hailing taxicabs, climbing onto trains, walking down jetways, taking off? How many were walking down a lane in the country? Mucking out after cows or pigs, walking dogs? How many were planning to buy? How many were planning to sell? How many were worrying about money? How many were placing one stone upon another? How many were felling trees? How many were reading quietly? How many were looking at paintings? How many were logging on to the Internet? How many were floating on a lake, a river, the ocean? How many were making their way through heavy jungle, up steep mountain slopes, over ice fields, down Broadway, down Rodeo Drive, along the Champs-Élysées, through Tiananmen Square, through
the Piazza San Marco? How many were looking at the moon? How many were looking at the sun? How many were contemplating death, marriage, love? Billions and billions, of course.