The Last Storyteller (49 page)

After about three weeks, in which we never moved from the same place, the police came by, and their glances didn’t take me for anything other than a traveler. They asked the man—who was not old, but it took time to see that—when he was moving on.

“Any day now,” he said.

“That’s what you told us last month.”

“Time flies,” said the traveling man, whom the woman called “Joe.” I never discovered her name, and she never spoke to me. I’d guess her age at early forties. Nor, in essence, did Joe have much to say, apart from a grunt here and there.

Yet they had some kind of tribal signals, because in the second week a rattling old van drew up, with six men. They all knew Joe and his wife, and they brought bottles of drink. One of them produced the necessary form for the surrendering of a car. In the box marked “Sale Price,” I wrote, “Nil. Gift.”

Had I been shriven? Did my burden of guilt and remorse feel lighter? Not then, not immediately. This house, where I’m writing now, sits, as you both know, on the side of a hill. Sometimes I get a little flooding at the end of the garden, as the water comes down after heavy rain. In my renovations, I had to take care that I laid wide, deep drains all around the walls, and they are effective; no water comes into the house.

The hill, however, brings a good consequence, too. When this house was built, the owners formed a loose cooperative with other houses on the hillside, and they built a reservoir near the top. It’s fed by rain and, since the late 1940s, by local mains, too.

As a result of the constant and abundant supply and the steepness of the gradient, we all have excellent water pressure. I was therefore able to install something almost unknown in Ireland back then: a shower. I think, Louise, you were the one who said to me once that the force of the water could take the skin off your shoulders!

I said goodbye to my travelers, to Joe and his nameless wife. As my last act, I bought parcels of clothing for them in Ennis and brought them down to the campsite. (It took a moment or two, and some evident banknotes, before the shopkeeper would do business with me.) When I returned to Dublin, I removed all my clothes, dumped them in the bathtub,
and stepped into the shower. I ran it until the water turned cold. Then, washed to my bones, I ate some real food.

Although reluctant to allow it into my life, I felt some ease beginning. I saw it almost as a distant light at night, and as I thought about it, I drew nearer to that light. Soon (and I know that I’m pushing the metaphor, but forgive me) I could look into the window of my own soul, as it were, and inspect the damage.

Call it considerable. Widespread. Deep. Savage. Once, in science class at school, we had to polish an old tin frying pan until we could see our faces in it. Then the teacher, with us watching from a safe distance, poured acid into it. We watched as the acid bit into the metal, and naturally we marveled, as we were expected to do—the teaching was in the emotion as much as the science.

In the next lesson, however, came the drama. The tin had blistered, and the blisters had burst, and now we had a surface of blackened, pitted metal. It looked like a dark moon seen through an unclean telescope. Here and there the acid had missed tiny spots, and they still shone brightly. The small places in my soul formed the areas that I had to expand.

That’s when I began to cope with my guilt—when I saw the extent of the damage. Oddly, my giving away of my treasured and useful car hadn’t helped as much as I’d imagined; in fact, I felt profound irritation at myself. So I went and bought another car. Had to. Couldn’t, I felt, go on otherwise.

The descent into a reduced and blatantly unclean way of life—that had helped. I found shriving there, but I also accused myself of being patronizing. Which I had been. And had intensified it by giving the couple clothes and some cash when I was leaving. The message to myself? Be careful how you view what you see as your charitable acts.

I did, however, find that I had experienced genuine healing, or the beginning thereof. It fell into two neat halves: that from a source I could identify and that I felt had yet to come but from a source I knew.

You won’t be surprised to learn what I first identified: the storytelling. Giving of myself in that way, sharing the delight I had always felt, choosing tales with some meaning—that’s where the strengthening began. When I thought of each tale, it was as though the black pittedness retreated
infinitesimally and another tiny area of bright tin began to gleam. Oh, sure, I had to polish it—but at least it was there to be polished.

So, in search of story, and in search of the food it provided, I went to work—in a way that paid dividends. Not only did I scan and devour James Clare’s notebooks, with all their stories, and leads to stories, and proverbs, and gnomic, gnostic sayings, I went to an even deeper well. In that month I stayed in Dublin—to re-right my life and stabilize—I began to build a library.

When you first came to this house, on that wondrous and memorable day, both of you did exactly the same thing: you walked around my “bookroom” (I’ve never had the nerve to call it “library”—too grand) and you touched the shelves of books. You took one down here, opened another there, and I saw your excitement. Well, if it proved joyous to you, imagine what it did for me—night after night after night.

Shakespeare led—no surprise there, although I had never expected his poetry to contain so many rewards. Chaucer became my friend, a man both rambunctious and boring—in other words, normal. I saw Dante and Virgil as the two most important figures in my life after Shakespeare, until Horace came along. And then Homer, now that I had a chance to read him at leisure, all but blitzed the lot of them. Until Coleridge came along, and Keats, and Wordsworth, and Samuel Johnson, and Daniel Defoe, and Charles Dickens and Oscar Wilde and W. B. Yeats and John Millington Synge, whom my father had once seen walking in Dublin.

It’s an easy picture to inspect, and although the world knows a great deal about self-healing today, we hadn’t a clue back then; I was flying blind.

Gradually, the days became more tolerable. That unceasing and violent drone of accusation in my head quieted—a little, to begin with, and then some more, and then some more. And so on. The familiar and dreaded waking-up pit in my stomach didn’t lurch so deep every morning.

I can’t and won’t put a time on any of this; I don’t know how long it took for tolerable ease to arrive and settle; to be truthful, I still get disturbed visions of those stiff black pools of blood, but not more than once in a while.

Still, I hear you say, and it’s accurate, “That reading of books and
poetry—that was all impersonal. What about people? Isn’t it the case that it’s people who heal people?”

I smile at that. Some whom I’ve met could be seen as living proof of the opposite. But it’s true, and that’s where I had the most work to do.

Where to begin? Obviously, with my parents. At last, after almost thirty years, I hauled out what I had been concealing and faced it. When my father ran off with Venetia, both parents made me somehow responsible. Or so it felt. My father broke the news to me that he was quitting home, and left me to deal with it. Mother sent me off to fetch him back; I was eighteen. I behaved like an obedient son, but a resentment grew in me.

When I then married Venetia, my father hated me for stealing his love object, and Mother didn’t wish to hear Venetia’s name. Worst of all, they destroyed—and I don’t know which of them did so—all of Venetia’s letters and telegrams to me, imploring me to come and bring her back from Florida. And bring the two of you, also. I had fuel for my fire, didn’t I?

Although I behaved courteously with them, and dutifully if required, the old warmth we’d had when I was growing up had gone. The jokes faded; the shared news, the funny, spiky gossip disappeared. For years after Venetia’s first disappearance, I didn’t go home. When I did, we moved around each other as gingerly as skaters on thin ice. We kept conversation to generalities, such as health, weather, politics, neighbors, farming.

I thought that I’d been the one who had wanted it that way. In my new easing out of my own spirit, though, it began to occur to me that they had felt betrayed by me when I married Venetia. A double betrayal, one for each parent. Perhaps triple—as I didn’t tell them. In fact, I’d never told them face-to-face; they’d learned it by other means, such as Miss Fay.

Time to put all that behind us, and I knew what to do. With one simple, unprecedented icebreaker. Since I’d left home, in all my travels
I’d never brought them a gift. Not for Christmas, not for birthdays. That gauges the depth of my resentment. Now I resolved to visit them, and I wrote a careful letter, inviting myself; it turned up in their papers after Mother died.

For Mother I found a shawl of gossamer tweed, woven by a woman out in Connemara. It had all the colors of the rainbow, but muted and elegant. She hid it minutes after I gave it to her, a sure sign that she thought it precious. It’s the shawl she wore in bed during her last illness, never parting from it.

For Harry I found something different. He liked to sing (I use the word in its loosest form) an old ballad about the racing greyhound Master McGrath, and by great good fortune, that expert in sanitary ware Mr. MacManus, the great bear of Limerick, found me a chamber pot with Master MacGrath’s picture and some verses of the ballad on it.

By the way, Mr. MacManus never mentioned “Alicia Kelly” to me, not once.

When I gave them their gifts, we knew—without a shared glance or word—that the gulf had closed. We had healed the rift. All three of us began to speak at the same time about different things, just as we had in the past. That Sunday with them became one of the happiest days I had known for many years. No difficult topic raised its head, no awkward missteps, no fumbled remarks, no silences.

When I was leaving, they both stood at the car with me, and we talked on for another fifteen minutes. I promised to visit them every few weeks, as I did for the rest for their lives. Sometimes I went oftener than that—despite my own new circumstances.

Miss Fay, Marian Killeen, Billy and Lily Moloney—when I look back it seems as though I must have sat down and taken inventory of the people who had an important emotional connection to me. I shepherded Miss Fay from the planet. She fought every fight she could find: arthritis, rheumatism, cancer.

“No knockout punch yet,” she’d say to me, and I’d ease her into the car in all her finery. She talked to me about James—that’s what she wanted to talk about. When they both woke in the middle of the night, they had long conversations. That’s what she missed most, that and watching him eat. “My mother didn’t like James; she said he ate like a hyena. He did, and I loved that about him.”

I went to Dan Barry’s funeral—along with half of the government. Suddenly the old IRA had become respectable. The grieving widow wore a veil—Jimmy Bermingham’s advice, I believe. Elma, Jimmy, and I walked from the cemetery together.

“Did he tell you?” she asked me.

“Go easy now,” Jimmy said. “It’ll take a while.”

“He’s going to run in the next election,” Elma said. “This border thing is fizzling out.”

Well, that circle has closed. Half gambler, half lounge lizard, looks like a bookie on a wet day. He’ll hold ministerial office in no time. My God, he looks important already. Has some of her bloom dimmed?

Jimmy turned on her. “Whatcha tell him that for? You’ll be putting it in the papers next.”

He saw my irked glance at his harsh tone and scuffled off a few feet ahead.

“Does he speak to you like that all the time?”

Elma said, “I never thought I’d miss Dan as much.”

Marian Killeen and I remained close. We met whenever I was in Dublin at any length. She came and stayed here; but you know that already. We had the most open friendship—even talked about what it would have been like had we married. She never wanted marriage, she said; she’d seen enough of it.

Her cleverness added to my fortunes. She had a nose for investments, so I took her advice and trebled my capital. And trebled, too, the proceeds of my parents’ estate.

It became possible for my parents to hire back Billy and Lily Moloney.

“We did it for the entertainment,” Mother said, and as Billy got older, he grew more tongue-tied in her presence, because he couldn’t curse in front of her. This afforded her great amusement, especially if he was fixing or repairing something for her and it wasn’t going his way.

“He’ll walk away,” she said, “and he’ll stand in front of a tree or wall, and he’ll address it as he would a human being. Sometimes I can hear him, and I wait for the wall or the tree to turn blue.”

Who was it said, “A man must keep his friendships in constant repair”? My father said it was Abraham Lincoln; I said it was Samuel Johnson. He argued that no Englishman would have been that clever; one day
I will check. But it’s what I now tried to do, and I believe it went well—I hope that my friends viewed me with the same kindness as I felt for them.

As you probably recall, I’ve described my father’s death elsewhere. The pain of it lingers; I had no idea how much I loved him until he had died. I’d have forgiven him anything—well, I did, I suppose.

When Mother went, I felt orphaned. How could I possibly replace such a person? Ever. For weeks I dredged up every good memory of her, and I soon saw how resourceful this shy, awkward woman had been. Somewhere in my papers you’ll find a recollection of mine about a stray horse that had broken its harness and looked prehistoric and dangerous. Mother soothed the creature with a word and a stroke. I wish she could have done the same for me, but I hold only the best feelings for her.

This new, careful, and deliberate behavior toward everyone had one sore outcome: I missed Venetia more than I’d ever done. No matter how I tried not to listen to the loss inside me, it reverberated. I coped with it; I had to. But time and again, leaving some village in the morning or arriving somewhere at dusk, I’d see her face in the sky—and I’d wish. Wishes, however, are frail things, smaller than hopes, weaker than dreams, and I put them aside with care and regret.