The Night Stages (29 page)

He woke the following morning recalling his workmate’s words concerning the house where Susan lived, its position on the wooded hill that rose up behind the streets of the town, and he knew he must go there, believing that even the walls that surrounded her might have something to teach him. As he walked through the cottage and out into the faint beginnings of dawn he could hear Gerry-Annie snoring gently in her room behind the hearth. The light rain was soft on his face, and the crust of bread he had snatched as he passed the table was moist in his mouth. He swung his leg over the bicycle and set out, allowing gravity to pull him down toward the dreaming town. Soon he was standing on the pedals, propelling the bicycle up the incline through Carhan Wood. The rain had stopped and the low sun silvered the road and the holly bushes in the hedgerows. As he passed gate after gate, one dog after another announced his presence. They were answered in turn by those in the valley below. He had forgotten about the dogs: the ones that lay waiting in ditches, the ones who ran down lanes, those who sat in the yard with their backs turned and appeared to pay no attention to him at all except for the barking.

In the end, as he came closer to where she lived, he merely slowed down in the vicinity of the two concrete gateposts that flanked the entrance to her lane, proceeding a mile or two farther along the road, as if he were going to the house of his workmate. He came to the end of the public road and a farm gate closed against him, and the sorrow of Tadhg, his separation from his beautiful cattle, touched him on the shoulder. The dogs had quieted now, but all courage had nevertheless fallen
from him, leaving only the sorrow. There was nothing for it, he concluded, but to turn around and go down into the town, where he was still working on the sidewalks. When he passed the lane again, he allowed himself to look at the house he knew was hers, and as he did so, he saw the light above the door go cold and he vowed he would never return to the place.

T
am herself had never sought anyone, not even Niall, at least not outwardly. In fact, she was almost always the one being searched for, almost pursued. She wonders now if she had encouraged this, had somehow constructed a self that would be just out of reach. Plans to hunt her down and bring her to her senses were often being conceived of by adults during her childhood and early womanhood. Had she sometimes disappeared in hopes of being found? Is that what she was unconsciously hoping for now, that Niall, the great seeker, would begin to search for her?

He had insisted that he had begun to look for his brother almost by accident during a trip to London a few years after Kieran disappeared. No one, not his father, not Gerry-Annie, knew where Kieran had gone, and no one had heard from him since. “A sad situation altogether,” Annie had apparently said. “He didn’t even take his bicycle.”

She worried that he might have gone north to join the Provos, this being after the Rás and all the desperate politics she was certain had ridden alongside it, but neither Niall nor his father thought that was likely. “He doesn’t have a taste for politics,” Niall’s father had maintained. “It wouldn’t be like him at all.”

Tam recalls Niall imitating Annie’s country intonations while he was speaking about his brother being gone. “Oh I hope he hasn’t gone and joined the fighting men and been killed,” he’d said in a high, womanish voice, throwing his hands in the air. “I’ve been like a mother to him!” She also remembers how he caught himself in the midst of that, and had apologized, saying that Annie was a treasure and that he shouldn’t be making light. He told her that Annie couldn’t understand why Kieran hadn’t taken the bicycle with him, why he had left it leaning against the wall, and had disappeared some time in the night. She couldn’t understand why he hadn’t wakened her to say goodbye. “This was a devastating loss for her,” Niall said.

Niall hadn’t wanted to go to the conference as it involved crossing the channel in February, and he was a man who had known seasickness. But McWilliams had other matters to attend to and asked him specially to stand in for him. “While you are there,” the older man had said, “take another few days and see the place. Go see the John Constable oil studies of skies. They are in the Victoria and Albert Museum. No serious climatologist should miss them. That infinite variety.”

It was while walking back to his hotel after looking at the Constables that Niall heard Irish being spoken near a worksite and, in a halting approximation of that language, he asked one of the men where he was from. The man, hardly more than a boy, answered in English, said he was from Clare, a farm near Shanavogh.

Was there no work on the farm? Niall wanted to know.

“Plenty of work,” the lad answered. “But no money.” The young labourer’s hands, resting on the shovel, were plum-coloured in the cold. “There’s loads of us Irish boys over here, all sending money home. There’s thousands of us.”

Niall recalled Kieran telling him about the bicycles at Annie’s wall, how it was discovered they had all belonged to those who had left for England or America. No wonder Kieran had left the Purple Hornet at that spot.

“Any Kerrymen?” he had asked.

“God love us,” said the young man. “The Kerrymen are as thick on the ground as a snowfall after Christmas.”

Niall continued then, knowing chances were slim. “Would you know my brother then, a man called Kieran Riordan?”

The young man thought a bit, then shook his head. “No,” he said, “I’d say I do not.”

An older man standing nearby suddenly entered the conversation. “You mean the Wheel.”

Niall had no reply for that. “What do you mean, the Wheel?” he asked.

“Damned if I know,” the man said, “it was a name he wanted for himself, evidently, or one the other boys gave
him. But I saw he was Riordan. I saw that name once on a pay packet in his hand, and I know he was from South Kerry, as I am myself. We worked in the same gang here in this city. But he’s gone, since, to the Motorways in the north, and a good while back at that.”

Much later Niall would think about the chances of having stopped at that precise site the moment he did, the strangeness of having all of Constable’s clouds still navigating through his mind while talking to the one man in a city of millions who knew something about where his brother was. “Motorways,” he said.

“So they say.” The man pushed his shovel into the hole where he had been digging. As he walked away, Niall turned and called out to him, “Is there more than one motorway?”

“There’s to be a whole cartload of them,” the labourer shouted back.

And so began his interest in motorways. Niall told Tam that McWilliams had been bewildered and amused by this obsession, motorways being the one subject he knew nothing about, although, he conjectured, there was no doubt that climatologists were involved in the planning stages of these speed-tracks, as he called them. What falls from the skies and blows around the surfaces, McWilliams was never tired of reminding those near him, affects absolutely everything.

One day McWilliams arrived at the station with news of the Preston Bypass. Eight and a half miles and a half a dozen
bridges, he told Niall, just to avoid Preston. What made the place such an anathema that all this effort was put into not going near it? Pity the poor farmer, he’d said, whose house or byre was in the way. It was to have been finished months ago, but the weather – he’d laughed then – the weather had apparently got in the way.

But the worksite around Preston had yielded nothing more than vague rumours when McWilliams had consulted the climatologist hired by the contractor. Some of these rumours were dire. The Wheel had tumbled from a bridge, or had been run over by one of the large noisy machines that ground back and forth in the vicinity. He had stolen a bicycle and ridden north to Scotland, where he had fallen into extreme drinking because of the easy availability of the malts. He had lost his wages in a poker game and had murdered the winner and was now mouldering in an English jailhouse. And at last, finally, someone said that Kieran Riordan had been banned from work on future motorways – the crime that precipitated this was not specified – and had gone to America.

Motorways, thinks Tam now, not for the first time. The mysterious brother might have worked on sites controlled by her father. “Everything you pull out of the earth needs to be taken somewhere else.” She remembers her father saying this, or something to this effect. She thinks of the demolished village. “Anything that moves forward, anything at all progressive, leaves something raw and wounded behind it. Look at America.” Had he said that too? Or was this observation simply her own inner voice, instructing her?

America. It was possible that Kieran had passed through this airport.

When Niall went to New York that July of 1958, a full summer front had arrived in the city. The air was hot and still, saturated with humidity, and yet there was not a trace of rain in the forecast. He had never experienced, never even predicted, weather like this, and for the first few days it stunned him. All he could do was sleep, naked, on the sagging bed beside the open window of the fifth-storey hotel room he had rented in lower Manhattan. His dreams were laced with travelling, and discomfort. Sometimes his brother appeared, diving from Culloo Rock. Sometimes he dove with him. There was no sense of danger, until he woke, full of panic, believing his brother was dead. And then he remembered it was his mother, not his brother, who had died at that spot.

An old schoolmate, now a plumber in New York who had recently gone home when he heard that his mother was dying, had been the reason for Niall making the trip. The poor fellow had been too late to see the mother alive, arriving just in time for the funeral, which Niall had attended with his wife and almost everyone else in town. It was in the midst of the drinking that followed that the man had touched Niall’s arm. “I saw your brother,” he had said, “one day on the Bowery when I was on a job. And I was surprised to see him there, it being so far from anywhere the Irish might be boarding.” The man had paused, as if deciding whether or not to continue. “He was in
a bad way,” he said. “He was sleeping rough or, now and then, in what he called Cage Hotels. I remembered this because of the oddness of the name, Cage Hotel.”

Cage Hotel. Niall had mentally filed this name.

“On the Bowery,” the man said. “The last place, believe me, you’d ever want to be.”

Niall had told a few people where he was going, but not why. This private quest seemed more filled with ambivalence, secrecy, and guilt than any clandestine love affair, and that may very well have been why, Tam would later conjecture, the lover in him grew cold when he was preparing to search for Kieran. It was as if he could only manage one system of deceit at a time. Only McWilliams knew the truth of it, or the part of the truth that involved Niall’s anguish over what might have become of his brother. “Don’t give up on the hope,” he said more than once. “You at least know your brother is not dead. You may very well find him. And then, with any luck, you can bring him home.”

Something we Irish were always attempting to do, Niall thought. We are always trying to bring people home.

And so McWilliams became a willing partner, passing on information about conferences and talks in London, and then, later, about new theories he had heard Americans were developing. Niall would visit the Department of Climatology at Columbia. Then, as McWilliams had suggested, he would make the eighteen-mile journey out to the recently established Earth Observatory at Palisades, where core samples from the bottom of the ocean were being examined for clues concerning
shifts in sea currents. Yes, he would do this, but when he had fulfilled these obligations he would begin the search again, for it was the search that had really brought him to New York.

On his fourth day in the hotel, he woke before the summer dawn had broken, knowing it would be already ten in the morning in Ireland. Tam walked into his mind then, as she often did at this time of the day, and opened her arms to him, but he pushed even the thought of her away. The puzzle of that connection, the mystery, could not erase the shadows that he felt were moving through the streets of this city to meet him.

He walked out of the hotel, up Orchard Street, and took the first left at Hester. The humidity had survived the night and had preserved the city’s smells so that he came to believe that the odours of garbage and exhaust fumes were being absorbed by his skin. He walked four blocks along Hester until he reached the Bowery, then turned right on this thoroughfare, heading toward the elevated tracks he could see silhouetted in the distance.

He felt immediately that he had entered a grim geography. Brick walls appeared porous and insubstantial, as if they had been submerged for several decades, as if when touched they would turn to powder in the hand. On the sidewalks, angled against walls or collapsed near doorways, grey shapes shifted or remained entirely still. It was the sound of retching that caused him to realize that these shapes, slowly becoming three-dimensional in a faintly increasing morning light, were human. A hand grabbed his ankle and he shook his leg violently to free himself from the grasp. He heard the man’s voice
but not the specifics of the plea. There was the smell of urine and vomit, a line of soot-covered, broken windows by his elbow, and the crunch of broken glass under his feet. No colony of lepers could have affected him more. He was dizzy with disgust, but determined to proceed. When the next arm reached for his trouser leg, he bent over and said “Cage Hotel” in the direction of the face that emerged from an unsavoury mop of damp cloth, but the figure shuddered and turned away.