Thomas Murphy (3 page)

It was her smile that kept me staring. Poets have a hard time conveying the quality of smiles. Cleopatra? Helen? I don't know. That caption of the Charles Addams cartoon showing Leonardo instructing the girl, “All right now, a little smile.” What came to mind in Sarah's smile was breakfast. She had a smile like breakfast, like the beginning of a day of bright thoughts. She was unable to see the brightness she projected, yet she was that brightness. Promise, I thought. And kindness. A repertoire of encouraging remarks.

And yet, lurking within all that, like a shadow on the moon, was a spot, a grove of disappointment, as though
the breakfast she had prepared with so much hope in it, had gone cold. Or perhaps the one for whom she had prepared it had arrived late and caused it to go cold. Beauty. I used to think it consisted of flowers and the arts. No longer. The idea of beauty that grows in the mind as one ages, and finally presents itself as a fact, has discarded all former impressions and standards. Its eyes are tired now. It wears a shawl. Its sun subdued. It is sadder than phlox and angrier than Lear. The beauty of the lurid lights in the hallway of an apartment building. Of a smudged forehead on Ash Wednesday. The beauty of rocks in a field. You are aware only of its denials. The other night I caught the face of a bitter man on TV. I did not know the source, but it was beautiful, his bitterness.

I placed Sarah's photo on my writing desk, beside the drawing of Synge. I don't know why. Now she did not seem so alone.

ALONE. THE OTHER
DAY
the TV had a news story about an outbreak of the Ebola virus in Nigeria and Sierra Leone. The TV doctor made earnest reassurances that the pandemic will not come here. This isn't Africa, he said. But where it is Africa, another doctor working with those who have contracted the virus reported on what it's like to die of the Ebola. The TV showed a man in an isolation ward, disappeared into a head-to-toe white Hazmat suit, with
a chicken's-head cap and his eyes like dark stones in a whiteout. When you have the Ebola, said the doctor, you die alone. No family member can touch you. No one can touch you or be near you. Jeez. Living alone is one thing. But dying alone?

IF WE'RE TALKING
DYING
, you should have seen the way we did a funeral on Inishmaan. When anyone checked out, the family placed the coffin in front of the cottage door, and women from all over the island would come and keen and beat the boards of the coffin with their fists. After that, the men would tie ropes around the coffin, and take it by cart to the graveyard that sloped to the sea. Then the family grave was opened—there was one grave per family—and the blackened boards and the bones of the previous tenant were removed to make room for the new one. Sometimes the skull of an old family member would be propped up on a gravestone. I saw Mrs. Fallon take her mother's skull, toss it in the air, laugh like a hyena, and carry it back to her house. The men would measure the length and breadth of the new coffin with switches cut from brambles near the road. When the coffin was ready to be lowered into the grave, the women came to it again, like hungry birds, and keened and beat it with their fists, more fiercely than before. The grave was filled with dirt, and the islanders returned to their lives.

SAYS HERE
,
in
this article on biology and aging (whoever thought I'd be reading this stuff?), that nature doesn't give a shit about the parts of our makeup that deal with thinking and reading and feeling and love. Or, it gives a shit, but only for a time. The repository for those functions is our somatic cells, which serve as mere protectors, bodyguards, to the germline DNA. The somatic cells of each generation become irrelevant genetically once the germline DNA goes about its re-creating business. Somatic cells are destroyed at the end of every generation and have to be regenerated, or created whole cloth with every baby born. In other words, if I understand this aright, those activities we prize for making us most human do not count in the species' pursuit of itself.

No surprise, when you think about it. Flynn dies. Oona dies. Greenberg dies, though not because of his DNA. Maybe because of the DNA of the man who killed him. I, in stark contrast, live. So do Máire and Dr. Spector. So do Jack and Sarah and Jimmy, the bartender. And the creep, Perachik. He lives. Can't say selection isn't random.

And I'm not sure about this anyway. I mean, if love and feeling need to be re-created with each generation, with no DNA to carry their somatic cells forward, why do children seem to love their parents right off, soon as they pop out? Suckling? Not all kids suckle, but they seem to be born cooing and gooing toward ma and da. My grandson William loves me and I love him, and that's the way
it's been with us since our eyes first locked. Can't tell me that we learned to love each other, that we calculated the academic subject of each other and then arrived at an informed decision. We just loved. Like that. Like his mother with Oona and me, and us with her. We just did it. I don't know. Maybe it's the pure biology of need. But it seems more intuitive, uh, natural than that to me. As I said, what do I know?

On the other hand, what's so bad about each generation having to drum up its own inclinations for thinking and reading and feeling and love? Its own love songs. Every generation has its own love songs. You can say that nature's relegation of such features to mere guardian status shows how little it cares for those features. But, in a poetic sense, the only sense I have, the fact that our humanness has to be born again and again, may test the worth of the race far more severely than seeing whether or not we can grow to fight off some germs. Maybe nature is showing exactly how much it values us by requiring our artistic and spiritual regeneration. Tests how durable we are in terms of creativity. Oh, nature. You sly devil. The Romantics went all jelly-kneed thinking that babies were originally born in heaven, and they may have dreamed up this notion because they could not abide the idea that people have to start life anew, every human for himself. I, for one, love that idea. It makes each of us a god of our own creation. Including Danny Perachik. Did I say that?

TO THINK OF
IT!
A pip-squeak like Perachik, with the brain of a dead mole, in charge of a gem like the Belnord! The Belnord! The Beautiful North. Belle of the North. An old beauty, like meself. Windows wide as a man's wingspan. Italianate arches. Limestone walls. I grew up with limestone, and now I live in it. The vast front hall of our apartment. Four enormous bedrooms. Four bathrooms with little octagonal white tiles on the floors. A bathroom for the two maids' rooms (not that we had a single maid, or even a part-time cleaning lady, since you can guess what Oona said about the necessity of that). Parquet floors everywhere. Black and white squares for the kitchen linoleum. The floor space of the kitchen itself, larger than my childhood cottage. Closets you could not just walk in. You could ride your trike in 'em, like Máire. Twelve-foot ceilings, with wavy plaster designs near the top. And all this magnificence for a rent that's stabilized, unlike meself.

Up goes the building in 1909, a full square block reaching from Amsterdam to Broadway, and from Eighty-sixth to Eighty-seventh. Twelve stories of apartments as big as my own in a blockade surrounding a courtyard, with landscaped gardens and pathways leading to the entries and a fountain in the center like an open rhododendron. There I am. See? On a stone bench, and Máire on her trike, taking the pathways in her giggly zoom. And beneath that courtyard, at the basement level, yet another courtyard the same size, where horse-drawn wagons
deliver milk and ice, and where the superrich residents, lured by architectural elegance from downtown to the northwest prairie, keep their own horses. Soon Isaac Bashevis Singer will be in residence here. And Zero Mostel. And Marilyn Monroe, would you believe it. Not to mention, the incomparable, unflappable, unforgettable, unstoppable poet of the age, Sir Thomas James Murphy, Esq. himself. OBE, QED, LBJ, TNT.

In 1909 they're soldering the bolts of
Titanic
in Belfast (it was okay when it left here—old Irish joke). And Babe Ruth is testing his teenage pitching arm, and the Archduke Ferdinand is not archduking it out with anyone yet and Tsar Nicholas is still tsaring in his own show. Shackleton is shackled to the South Pole, as Admiral Peary veers toward the North. Baby Simone Weil arrives, as do babies Isaiah Berlin and Max Baer and James Mason and Gene Krupa and Eudora Welty. Someone is singing “Shine On, Harvest Moon” for the first time. Can you hear her?

Come to the window. There's Paul Robeson, age eleven, walking hand in hand with his ma. He looks up in wonder. Do you know what that is? his mother asks him. The boy shakes his head. That's the
Belnord
, Paul. That's the
Belnord
!

THAT'S BOTSFORD.
He
parks his Vespa near the fountain in the courtyard, where the chrome catches the lights of
the building and the blue chassis gleams like the blue eye of the
vampyroteuthis infernalis
, the vampire squid from hell. The great globular eye staring at you, taking you in, sizing you up. The Vespa is that eye, blue eye, the blue with a light in it. I stop and walk around it. And again. Most every night. The tan leather seat, a saddle for a show horse. I know where Botsford keeps the key in the building office, know exactly where it hangs on a hook. Never rode one of these babies. Never took one of these bad boys out for a spin. You know what they say. If you put a loaded Vespa in a play, eventually someone is going to have to ride it. That's what they say.

DEAR MURPH,

It occurs to me—your brooding mind being what it is—that you may think I'm trying to lock you up in the loony bin. I'm not. You probably ought to be locked up in the loony bin, but that condition long preceded your recent shenanigans. I'm concerned that you'll harm yourself. It's that simple.

Your dutiful and loving daughter,

Máire

Dear Dutiful and Loving,

I'm sorry, but I never had a daughter, and I don't know anyone named Máire. My friend Greenberg
used to sing about a table down at Morey's. Is that you? Or are you the old gray
mare,
who ain't what she used to be? Ah, but who is?

Dear Murph,

Go fuck yourself.

Dear Máire,

Oh! Now I remember you.

MY DRINKING BUDDY
sits beside me on the couch. She has milk, I have coffee. She writes too, with a purple crayon and a legal pad half her size. Every so often, she glances up at me, as if to check that we're both on course. I look back at her and nod. Her legs stretch not quite to the rug. We continue this way, in silence, writer and writer. Oona sneaks us a look and smiles.

Something telling about my drinking buddy from the start. Self-confidence absent of self-interest. I am driving her and four other little girls home from a birthday party. They sit in the back. One of the girls gets carsick, and heaves. Three of the others back away, with
eww
s and
gross
es. Only my drinking buddy goes to comfort the girl. She holds her hand and wipes her mouth and the front of her dress.

My drinking buddy and I dine out in a fancy restau
rant, just us two. Oona stays home. She wants us to have a special evening. My drinking buddy dresses in a white blouse, a little green tunic, high white socks, and Mary Janes. She prances into the restaurant, like a rich girl, but without the hauteur. Part sashay, part swagger. No sooner have we been guided to our table than she announces she has to go to the ladies' room. She walks off, returning shortly. A minute or so later, she goes to the ladies' room again. Returns. Sits. Then she has to go again. I ask her if she's sick. No, she says, I just like going to the ladies' room.

My drinking buddy wants to change her name. None of her fellow second graders can pronounce it. They'll learn, I say. That accent mark, she says. They don't get it. They'll learn, I say. Even my teacher, Mrs. Rosario, can't pronounce it. She'll learn, I say. It's an ancient Irish name, I tell her. Máire. It goes back to the Norman invasion. The normal invasion? Norman, I say. Norman who? she says. Daad! I want a regular girl's name, like Tiffany or Skye. Tell you what, I say. We'll call you Ralph. Good, she says, hands on hips. I'm Ralph.

A framed photo of my drinking buddy riding a camel in Jerusalem stands on the piano. Beside it, a photo of her in a Sailfish. Beside that, one at her graduation from Brown, the mortarboard deliberately cockeyed on her head. Beside that, her holding just-born William.

Before that, she is in business school at NYU, and she
comes over late at night, and sits beside me on the couch. Oona is long asleep, so it's just us two. We listen to the old songs, the standards, on the radio. Mr. Jameson joins us. My drinking buddy always has taken to whiskey, a genetic inheritance, and can drink her old man under the table, though she rarely tries. We sit and chat and sing in thirds harmonies—“If you're ever in a jam, here I am.” Sometimes I'm writing, and sometimes she has homework. She looks across at me every so often, for old times' sake.
Mon semblable. Mon scold
.

WHEN SAINT JOHN
JAMESON
established the Bow Street Distillery in Dublin, in 1780, what tests did he devise for the whiskey to see if it was good? I wonder. Body? Color? Did he work out the balance between malted and unmalted barley, and dry the liquid in a kiln to achieve just enough sweetness on the tongue and burn on the throat? Or did he use a different sort of test entirely, one that led to one million gallons of Jameson produced every year? Did he say to himself, if this makes grief go away, it's a keeper?

ONE FOR THE
ROADS?
All Inishmaan roads are divided in three parts: the stone walls on either side, the two tracks for carts and cars, and the island of tall grass and flowering weeds between the tracks. Of these three, only one is
connected with motion or travel. The island and the walls represent the stationary. In every road, therefore, lies the dual possibilities of Ireland. Stay or go. But the road remains the same, giving of nothing, no hint as to which way of life it tends or recommends. Like certain poems.