Читать книгу Green Shadows, White Whales - Рэй Брэдбери, Ray Bradbury, Ray Bradbury Philip K. Dick Isaac Asimov - Страница 14
ОглавлениеIt’s not often in the life of a writer lightning truly strikes. And I mean, there he is on the steeple, begging for creative annihilation, and the heavens save up spit and let him have it. In one great hot flash, the lightning strikes. And you have an unbelievable tale delivered in one beauteous blow and are never so blessed again.
And here’s how the lightning struck.
I had been hard at it with harpoon and typewriter for three hours out at Courtown House when the telephone rang. John, Ricki, and I had gathered for lunch and another try at trapping the pale flesh of the great Beast. We looked up, glad for the interruption.
John seized the phone, listened, and gave a great gasping cry.
“Well, I’ll be goddamned!”
Each word was exquisitely pronounced—no, not pronounced: yelled—into the telephone.
“Well, I’ll be absolutely and completely goddamned!”
It seemed that John had to shout all the way to New York City and beyond. Now, gripping the phone, he looked out across the green meadows in December light as if somehow, too, he might stare long distance at that man he was yelling at so far away.
“Tom, is it really you?” he cried.
The phone buzzed: yes, it was really Tom.
John held the phone down and shouted the same way at Ricki, at the far end of the dining room table. I sat between, half buttering my toast.
“It’s Tom Hurley, calling from Hollywood!”
Ricki gave him one of her elusive, haunted smiles and looked down again at her scrambled eggs.
“Well, for God’s sake, Tom!” said John. “What are you up to? What are you doing?”
The phone buzzed.
“Uh-huh,” said John, emphatically, listening. “Uh-huh! Uh-huh!” He nodded. “Good, Tom. Fine, Fine. Lisa, yes, I remember Lisa. Lovely girl. When? Well, that’s wonderful, Tom, for both of you!”
The telephone talked for a long moment. John looked at me and winked.
“Well, it’s the hunt season here, Tom, yes, great fox-hunting country. Ireland’s the best in the world. Fine jumps, Tom, you’d love it!”
Ricki looked up again at this. John glanced away from her, out at the swelling green hills.
“It’s the loveliest land in creation, Tom. I’m going to live here forever!”
Ricki started eating rapidly, looking down.
“They have great horses here, Tom,” said John. “And you know horses better than I do. Well, you ought to come over and just lay your eyes on the beauties!”
I heard the voice on the phone say it wished it could.
John gazed at the green fields. “I’m riding with the Waterford Hunt Thursday, Tom. What the hell … hell, why don’t you just fly over to hunt with me?”
The voice on the phone laughed.
Ricki let her fork drop. “Christ,” she muttered. “Here it comes!”
John ignored her, gazed at the hills and said:
“I mean it, be our houseguest, bring Lisa too!”
The voice on the phone laughed, not so loud this time.
“Tom, look,” John pursued, “I need to buy one or two more horses to race or maybe breed, you could help me pick. Or—”
John stared out the window. Beyond, a hound trotted by on the green field. John sat up suddenly, as if the animal were inspiration.
“Tom, I’ve just got the damnedest wildest idea. Listen, you do want to bring Lisa along, yes? Okay, pile her into a plane tomorrow, fly to Shannon—Shannon, Tom—and I’ll come to Shannon myself to drive you here to Kilcock. But listen, Tom, after you’ve been here a week we’ll have a hunt wedding!”
I heard the voice on the phone say, “What?”
“Haven’t you ever heard of a hunt wedding, Tom?” cried John exuberantly. He stood up now and put one foot on the chair and leaned toward the window to see if the hound was still trotting across the field. “Tom, it’s just the best damn kind of wedding for a man like you and a woman like Lisa. She rides, doesn’t she? And sits a horse well, as I recall. Well, then, damn it, think how it would be, Tom! You’re getting married anyway, so why not you two pagans here in Catholic Ireland? Out here at my place …” He cast a quick glance at Ricki. “Our place. We’d call in every horse in ninety miles around and every decent hunter, and the lovely hounds, the loveliest hounds and bitches you ever saw, Tom, and everyone in their pink coats—what color, Tom—and the women in great-fitting black coats, and after the marriage service you and Lisa and I would go to hunt the finest fox you ever saw, Tom! What do you say? Is Lisa there? Put her on!” A pause. “Lisa? Lisa, you sound great! Lisa, talk to that bastard! No arguments! I’ll expect you here day after tomorrow for the Waterford Hunt! Tell Tom I won’t accept the charges if he calls back. God love you, Lisa. So long.” John hung up.
He looked at me with a chimpanzee smile of immense satisfaction.
“By God now! What have I done? Did you hear that? Will you help out, kid?”
“What about Moby Dick, John?”
“Oh, hell, the Whale will survive. God, I can just see the parish priest’s eyebrows burning. I can hear the rouse in the pubs when they hear!”
“I can watch myself cutting my throat in the bathtub.” Ricki headed for the door. It was always the horses to be ridden or tubs soaked in up to her mouth at a time like this, which was usually twice a week, living with a power unit like John. “So long, lousy husband. Goodbye, cruel world.”
The door slammed.
Not waiting to hear the fierce douse of water above in the giant bathroom, John grabbed my knee.
“God almighty, it’ll be a time!” he cried. “Ever seen a hunt wedding?”
“Afraid not.”
“Christ, it’s beautiful! Damn! Beyond belief!”
I looked at the door through which Ricki had gone.
“Will Tom and Lisa come, just like that?”
“They’re both sports.”
“Am I supposed to interpret that as positive assurance we’ll see them this week?”
“We’ll go to Shannon and drive them here, won’t we, kid?”
“I thought I was supposed to rewrite the solid-gold-doubloon-on-the-mast scene, John.”
“Oh, hell, we both need a few days off. Ricki!”
Ricki reappeared in the door, her face the color of snow and lilacs. She had been waiting for the call she knew would come.
“Ricki,” said John, beaming at her as on one of his children. “Goddamn, listen—here’s the plan!”
Tom and Lisa got off the plane fighting. They fought inside the door of the plane. They fought coming out the door. They yelled at each other on the top step. They shouted coming down the steps.
John and I just looked up, aghast. I was glad Ricki was off somewhere, shopping until suppertime.
“Tom!” cried John. “Lisa!”
Halfway down the steps, Lisa turned and ran back up, raving. She was going back to the States now! The pilot, on his way out, told her there was a rather slender chance of this, for the plane was not going back immediately. Why not? she demanded. By this time Tom had bounded back up to her side, yelling at the pilot that he should indeed turn the damn ship round and fly this madwoman back, he would pay double, triple, and if he could manage to crash on the way, fine.
John, listening, sat down on the steps of the unloading platform, shut his eyes, shook his head, and bellowed with laughter.
Hearing this, Tom came to the rail above and looked down sharply. “Jesus Christ, John!”
John went up and hugged and kissed Lisa a lot, which did it. We finally saw them through customs, packed them into the Jaguar, and tooled across the vast green pool table of Ireland.
“Beautiful! Beautiful!” cried Lisa, as the hills rushed by.
“What weather!” said Tom.
“Don’t let it fool you,” John announced. “Looks lovely, but it rains twelve days out of ten. You’ll soon be at the whiskey, like me!”
“Is that possible?” Tom laughed, and I laughed with him, looking over. What I saw was what I had seen for years around Hollywood, a man lean as whipcord and leather; hard riding, tennis every day, swimming, yachting, and mountain climbing had fined him down to this. Tom was fifty-three, with a thick shock of iron-gray hair. His face was unlined, deeply tanned, his jaw was beautifully sharp, his teeth were all there and white, his nose was a hawk’s nose, exquisitely pro wed in any wind anywhere in the world. His eyes were blue, water bright and intensely burning. The fire in him was a young man’s fire, and it would never go out: he would never let it go out himself, and there was no man with an ego powerful enough to kill it. Nor, for that matter, was there a woman in the world whose flesh could smother Tom. There never had been, and now, this late, there never could be. Tom was his own mount and saddle, he rode himself and did so with masculine beauty. I could see by the way Lisa held his arm that she both angrily and happily accepted him for what he was, a single-minded man who had roamed the world and done what he wanted to do when he wanted to do it, without asking anyone and without apologies. Any woman who tried to lay tracks down for Tom, why, he would simply laugh and walk away. Now, this day, he had decided to come to Ireland. Tomorrow he might be with the Aga Khan in Paris and the day after in Rome, but Lisa would be there, and it would go on that way until someday, many years from now, he fell from a mountain, a horse, or another woman, and died at the base of that mountain, horse, or woman, showing his teeth. He was everything men would like to be if they were honest with themselves, everything John wanted to be and couldn’t quite live up to, and a hopeless and crazily reckless ideal for someone like me to admire from a distance, having been born and bred of reluctance, second thoughts, premonitions, depressions, and lack of will.
“Mr. Hurley,” I couldn’t help asking, “why have you come to Ireland?”
“Tom is the name. And … John ordered me here! When John speaks, I come!” said Tom, laughing.
“Damn right!” said John.
“You called him, remember, Tom?” Lisa punched his arm.
“So I did.” Tom was not in the least perturbed. “I figured it had been too long since we saw each other. Years go by. So I pick up the phone and call the son of a bitch and he says, Tom, come! And we’ll have a wild week and I’ll go on my way and another two years will pass. That’s how it is with John and me, great when we’re together, no regrets apart! This hunt wedding, now …”
“Don’t look at me,” I said. “My ignorance is total.”
“Lisa, here, didn’t quite warm up to it,” Tom admitted.
“No!” cried John, swiveling to burn her with one eye.
“Nonsense,” said Lisa, quickly. “I brought my hunt wardrobe from West Virginia. It’s packed. I’m happy! A hunt wedding— think!”
“I am,” said John, driving. “And if I know me, it might just as easily be a hunt funeral!”
“John would love that!” said Tom, talking to me as if John were not present, riding through green and green again. “Then he could come to our wake and get drunk and weep and tell all our grand times. You ever notice—things happen for his convenience? People are born for him, live for him, and die so he can put coins on their eyelids and cry over them. Is there anything isn’t convenient or fun for John?”
“Only one thing,” Tom added after a pause.
John pretended not to hear.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Being alone.” Tom was suddenly serious. “John doesn’t like being alone, ever. You must never leave John alone, remember that, no matter what.” Tom looked at me with his keen, clear, bright-water eyes. “John once said to me, Tom, the loneliest time in a man’s day is the time between when he stops work and starts dinner. That single hour is as desolate as three in the morning of a long night, he said. Then is when a man needs friends.”
“I said that to you?” said John in fake astonishment.
Tom nodded. “I got a letter from you last year. You must have written it at five, some afternoon. You sounded alone. That’s why I call once in a while. That’s why I’m here. Jealous, Lisa?”
“I think I am,” said Lisa.
Tom looked at her steadily.
“No,” said Lisa, “I’m not.”
Tom patted her leg. “Good girl.” He nodded up at John. “How about giving us a road test?”
“Road test it is!”
We drove the rest of the way to Kilcock at eighty miles an hour. Lisa blinked quite often. Tom didn’t blink at all, watching Ireland loom at him in landfalls of green.
I kept my eyes shut most of the way.
There was a problem having to do with a hunt wedding. Quite suddenly we discovered that none had been held in Ireland for years. How many years, we never found out.
The second and greatest problem was the Church.
No self-respecting priest was about to show up to fuse the lusts of two Hollywood characters, although Lisa Helm was from Boston and a thoroughly nice lady, but Tom Hurley was from all the points of Hell, a cross-country horseman who played destructive tennis with Darryl Zanuck and advised the Aga Khan on the insemination of thoroughbreds.
No matter. For the Church, it was out of the question. Besides which (John had never bothered to ask), neither Tom, despite his Irish background, nor Lisa was Catholic.
What to do? There were no other churches near Kilcock. Not even a paltry small Protestant chapel you might sleepwalk in for a long Sunday noon.
So it finally fell to me to inquire of the local Unitarian church in Dublin. What’s worse than a Protestant? A Unitarian! It was no church and no faith at all. But its keeper, the Reverend Mr. Hicks, agreed, in a rather hyperventilated exchange on the phone, to assume the task because he was promised his rewards on Earth by John Huston rather than in Heaven by a God who was rarely named, so as to save embarrassment.
“Have they been living in sin?” asked the Reverend Mr. Hicks abruptly.
I was shocked. I had never heard such talk before.
“Well …” I said.
“Have they?”
I shut my eyes to focus the bridal pair, loud in the Dublin streets noon and night.
They had had a fight about one wedding ring, then another, a fight about possible flowers, a fight about the day and date, a fight about the minister, a fight about the location of the ceremony, a fight about the size of the wedding cake, with or without brandy, a fight about the horses and hounds, and even a fight with the master of the hunt, a fight with his assistant, a fight with the Courtown butler, an altercation with a maid, a carousal with the pub owner about liquor, another brannigan with the liquor merchant in town for not giving a markdown on three cases of not very excellent champagne, plus fights in restaurants and pubs. If you wanted to keep a record of the fights in one week, the best way to imprint it on the calendar was with a shotgun.
John loved it all.
“Always like a good scrap!” he exclaimed, his grin so wide it needed sewing. “My cash is on the lady’s nose. Tom may ride the days, but she’ll win the nights. Besides, everyone has his foibles. Tom drinks too much Old Peculier—”
“Is that a real name?”
“An English ale, uh-huh. Old Peculier. But that’s Tom. A pal, nevertheless. They’ll finish the fights and settle in for a soft marriage, you wait and see.”
“Reverend Hicks,” I said over the phone, “Tom and Lisa fight a lot.”
“Then they’ve sinned a lot!” the reverend mourned. “You’d best send them round.”
Tom and Lisa fought about going to see Mr. Hicks.
They fought going in.
They argued in front of him.
They yelled coming out.
If a voice can be pale, the reverend’s voice was pale describing the pair.
“This is not a marriage,” he protested. “It is a rematch!”
“Exactly my sentiments, Reverend,” I agreed, “but will you advise them of the boxing rules and send them to their corners?”
“If they’ll promise to stay there four days out of five. Is there a Bible chapter, I wonder? Futilities, verse four, paragraph two?”
“There will be.”
“And will I write it?”
“I have faith in you. Father!”
“Reverend!” he cried.
“Reverend,” I said.
“Well, how in hell we got into this mess is what I’d like to know!” Ricki said into the phone.
John’s voice barked back from Paris, where he was interviewing actors for our film. I could hear him loud and clear as I helped lug in the flowers and place the table for the wedding cake and count the cheap champagne in cases along the wall.
“Mess!” John yelled. “It’s no mess, by God; it’s going to be the greatest goddamn event in Irish history. They’ll start the uprising over. Are the flowers there?”
“The damn flowers are!”
“Has the cake been ordered?”
“You know it has!”
“And the champagne?”
“The worst, but it’s here.”
“Better get hold of Heeber at his pub. Tell him to bring in the best. God, I’ll pay for it. It’s time Tom scared the moths out of his wallet, but hell! Call Heeber!”
“The alien from Mars just did that—”
“Is he there? Put him on!”
Ricki threw the phone at me. I dodged but caught.
“John, I’ve finished the Saint Elmo’s fire scene and—”
“To hell with that, kid. I’ve fallen—”
“With whom?” I said automatically.
“No, no, for Christ’s sake, no woman! This is more important. Off a horse!”
“Fell off?”
“Shh! Don’t let Ricki hear! She’d cancel the hunt! I’m okay. Just some pulled ligaments. Unconscious five minutes and limping like mad. The Gimp, by God, the Gimp. But I’ll be home late today. Check the last flight from London. I rode at Longchamps at dawn two days ago.”
“I thought you were casting—”
“Sure! But the damn horse jumped when some car horn blew. I flew a mile high. I’m okay now. With a slight tendency, without warning, to fall down and writhe in agony when my back gives. Don’t let me scare you, kid.”
“I’m scared, John. If you die, I’m dead!”
“Nice sentiment. You’re the screwed-tight optimist. Just tell me I won’t fall down and writhe with Saint Vitus at the wedding.”
“Heck, you’d do it just to steal the show.”
“Why not? Hire a cab, pick me up at the airport tonight, tell me the Saint Elmo’s fire scene on the way. Can I stay in your room at the Royal Hibernian overnight? I should be walking without crutches by morning.”
“Holy God, John, crutches?”
“Pipe down! Is Ricki in the room, for Christ’s sake?”
“She went to answer the door. Wait …”
Ricki stood in the hall looking at a piece of paper in her hand. Her face was a fall of snow and her eyes were beginning to drop tears. She came and handed me the paper.
John’s voice said, “I hear someone crying.”
“They are, John.”
I read from the scribbled note.
“ ‘Alma Kimball O’Rourke fell under her horse today. She was killed instantly and the horse was destroyed.’ ”
“Omigod,” said John, five hundred miles away in Paris.
“She was the wife of the Kildare Hunt’s captain, wasn’t she?” I asked.
“Jesus, yes,” said John quietly.
I finished reading the note. “ ‘The funeral’s day after tomorrow. The entire hunt will be there.’ ”
“My God,” murmured John, growing quieter still.
“That means …?” I said.
“The hunt wedding,” Ricki said, “must be called off.” John heard and said, “No, no. Only delayed.”
Mike drove me into Dublin to find Tom, who had taken a room at the Russell Hotel. He and Lisa had fought about that too. He wanted to stay at Huston’s with her. But the Catholics and the Protestants, she pointed out, were both watching. So it was the hotel for Tom until the ceremony. Besides, he could play the stock market better, alone in his Dublin hotel room. That cinched it. Tom checked in.
I found Tom in the lobby of the hotel, mailing some letters.
I handed him the note and said nothing.
There was a long pause, and then I could see the thin transparent inner lids of Tom’s eyes, his eagle’s eyes or his lizard’s eyes or his cat’s eyes, slide down between us. They did not slam like the great gates of Kiev, but it was just as final, just as definite, just as complete. The noise his eyelids made closing, while he continued to stare at me, was awful in its silence. I was outside in my world, if my world existed at all, and Tom was inside his.
“She’s dead, Tom,” I said, but that was useless. Tom had switched off whatever batteries kept him tuned to the audible universe, to any air that held words and phrases. I said it again. “She’s dead.”
Tom turned and strode up the stairs.
I spoke to Mike at the door. “The minister? The Unitarian. We’d better go tell him.”
Behind me, I heard the elevator door open.
Tom was there in the doorway. He did not step out. I hurried over.
“Yes, Tom?”
“I was just thinking,” said Tom. “Someone should cancel the wedding cake.”
“Too late. It arrived as I was leaving Courtown.”
“Christ,” Tom said.
The elevator door shut.
Tom ascended.
The plane from London was late getting into Shannon. By the time it arrived, I had made three trips to the Gents’, which shows you how much ale I had downed, waiting.
John waved his crutches from the top of the landing steps and almost fell the length in his eagerness to get down to me. I tried to help, but he all but struck me with his implements, hurrying along in giant bounds like someone who was born and raised an athlete on crutches. With every great jump forward, favoring one leg, he cried out half in pain, half in elation:
“Jesus, God, there’s always something new. I mean, when you’re not looking, God gives you a tumble. I never fell like this. It was like slow motion, or going over a waterfall or shooting the rapids just before you wake—you know how it is, every frame of film stops for a moment so you can look at it: now your ass is in the air, now your spine, vertebra by vertebra, now your neckbone, collarbone, top of your head, and you can see it all rotating, and there’s the horse down there, you can see him too, frame by frame, like you’re taking a picture of the whole damn thing with a box Brownie working away thirty frames a second, but all perfectly clear and held in the second, which expands to hold it, so you can see yourself and the horse, waltzing, you might say, on the air. And the whole thing takes half an hour in seconds. The only thing that speeds up the frames is when you hit the turf. Christ. Then, one by one, you can hear your suspenders snapping, your tendons, that is, your muscles.
“You ever walk out at night in winter and listen? Damn! The branches so loaded with snow they might burst! The whole tree’s a skeleton, you hear the sap bend and the wood creak. I thought all my bones would shatter, shale, and flake down inside my skin. Wham! Next thing I know, they run me to the morgue. Not that way, I yelled. Turned out it was an ambulance, and I only thought it was the coroner!
“Hurry up, for Christ’s sake—I’m running faster than you are. I hope I don’t fall down right now and have one of my convulsions. You’d really see something. Flat on my back like a Holy Roller, talking in tongues, blind with pain. Wham! Where’s Tom?”
Tom was waiting for us in the Buttery of the Royal Hibernian Hotel. John insisted on crutch-vaulting down to find the American Irishman.
“Tom, by God, there you are!” said John.
Tom turned and looked at us with that clear cold sky-blue winter-morning gaze.
“Jesus,” gasped John. “You look mad. What are you so mad about, Tom?”
“She was riding sidesaddle,” said Tom evenly. “She should not have been riding sidesaddle, damn her.”
“Now, who would that be?” asked John, with that oiled and easy polite but false voice of his. “What woman is that!”
At noon the next day, Mike and I drove John out to Kilcock. He had practiced some great healthy crutch bounds and was apishly exuberant at his prowess, and when we reached Courtown he was out of the car ahead of us and half across the bricks when Ricki came running down the steps.
“My God! Where were you! Be careful! What happened?”
At which point John dropped his crutches and fell writhing in the drive.
Which, of course, shut Ricki up.
We all half-lifted, half-carried John into the house.
Ricki opened her trembling mouth, but John lifted his great glovelike hand and, eyes shut, husked:
“Only brandy will kill the pain!”
She brought the brandy, and over her shoulder he spied Tom’s champagne cases in the corridor.
“Is that crud still here?” he said. “Where’s the Dom Perignon?”
“Where’s Tom?” Ricki countered.
The wedding was delayed for more than a week out of respect for the lady, who, as it turned out, had not ridden sidesaddle but whose misfortune it was to be a small object under a more than substantial burden.
On the day of her memorial service, Tom spoke seriously of going home.
A fight ensued.
When Lisa finally convinced Tom to stay, she fell into a depression and warned of a similar trip, because Tom insisted on not ordering a fresh wedding cake and on keeping the old one as a dust-catcher for more than a full week of mourning.
Only John’s intervention stopped the fights. Only a long and inebriated dinner at Jammet’s, the best French restaurant in Ireland, restored their humor.
“Quiet!” said John as we dined. “The kitchen door as it opens and shuts, opens, shuts! Listen!”
We listened.
As the door squealed wide on its hinges, the voice of the chef could be heard shrieking in frenzies at his cooks.
Open:
A shriek!
Shut:
Silence.
Open:
A scream!
Shut:
Silence.
“You hear that?” whispered John.
Open. Shriek!
“That’s you, Tom.”
Shut, silence. Open, scream.
“That’s you, Lisa.”
Open, shut, open, shut.
Scream, shriek, shriek, scream.
“Tom, Lisa, Lisa, Tom!”
“My God!” cried Lisa.
“Dear Jesus!” said Tom.
Scream, silence, scream.
“Is that us?” both said.
“Or an approximation,” said John, his cigarillo smoking in his languid mouth. “Give or take a decibel. Champagne?”
John refilled our glasses and ordered more.
Tom and Lisa laughed so much they had to grab each other, and then their heads fell to each other’s shoulders, choking and breathless.
Very late, John called the chef out to stand in the kitchen door.
Wild applause greeted him. Amazed, he shrugged, nodded, and vanished.
As John paid the bill, Tom said, very slowly, “Okay. She was not riding sidesaddle.”
“I was hoping you’d say that, Tom.” John exhaled a long slow stream of cigarillo smoke, laying out the tip. “I was hoping you would.”
Mike and I picked up the Unitarian minister, the Reverend Mr. Hicks, the night before the great hunt wedding and drove him to Kilcock.
On his way to the car he had something fine to say about Dublin. As we drove from Dublin he had something truly excellent to say about the outskirts and the River Liffey, and when we hit the green countryside he was most effusive of all. It seemed there was no speck or seam visible on, in, or through this county or the next. Or if flaws were there, he chose to ignore them for the virtues. Given time, he would speak the list. Meanwhile, the hunt wedding lay like white lace on the morning shore ahead and he focused on it, with his pursed mouth, his red pointy nose, and his flushed eyeballs.
As we churned gravel in the yard, he gasped, “Thank God, there’s no moon! The less seen of me arriving, the better!”
“The whole town will see you through the windows tomorrow,” I observed, dryly, “holding the pagan service and fluting the blasphemous oration.”
The Reverend Mr. Hicks turned to a shape carved from a moonstone. “Find me a bottle,” he husked, “and put me to bed.”
I awoke just before dawn in a high attic servant’s room and lay conjuring the great day in the morning this was promised to be.
The theater of Ireland waited.
I thought I heard brogues below, going home late from Finn’s or arriving early for the Protestant Embarrassment.
I thought I heard the huntsman’s horn, practicing on the green rim of the world.
I imagined I heard a fox yipping in response.
There was a small shadow on the edge of the land; the hunted beast, I was sure, arriving to be first onstage.
Then, sprawled in bed, eyes shut, I conjured up the arrival of hounds in tumult and then horses, shivering their skin over their flesh, in bad need of psychologists’ advice, and none here. That was silly, of course. Horses and hounds do not arrive first. The kennelmaster must lead one and the various bluebloods rein and reassure the others. Yet I did hear blood cries and yawps somewhere in my half sleep, and the jingling of accoutrements galloped to a halt.
Not wishing to be stage director to it all, I churned over into a whimpering and talkative sleep, warning myself to burrow deep and listen not.
Only to hear John’s voice at the door to my room, as he stirred the parquetry with his crutches. “No use, kid. Time to get up.”
And the real hounds and horses arrived below.
All was in readiness. The stale wedding cake, growing more ancient by the hour, awaited. The tooth-aching and tongue-blistering champagne was laid by.
The horses were steaming the air and smiling derisive smiles in the courtyard.
The hounds were padding in circles, wetting bricks, hooves, and boots.
The lords and ladies and the owners of liquor shops all across Eire had arrived, of course, and dismounted to the nibbling smiles of horses and the suspicious protests of the hounds.
“Stirrup cups for all!” someone cried.
“That’s before we ride,” a lady corrected. “And it’s just for the groom.”
“What I meant to say is, is the bar open?”
“There is no bar,” announced the Reverend Mr. Hicks, standing so straight and correct it was obvious he had just been there, “but there is champagne, good silver buckets and bad. Beware of the shilling poison up front. Demand the pound sterling Mumm’s.”
The horses were quickly abandoned and the hounds left to harass the kennelmaster and water the yard.
The guests booted up the steps, making hollow clubbing sounds on the concrete, their faces distorted not by fun house mirrors but by ancestry alone. Time and the patient chromosome had worked their clay, bucking the teeth, rheuming the eye, elongating the lip, beaking the nose, cleaving the chin, hollowing the cheek, jugging the ears, eroding the hair, tufting the eyebrows, bleaching the eyelids, waxing the complexion, pocking the brow, and knobbing the elbows, wrists, and fingers. Some looked as if they had stood too many years inside and looking out from stable doors.
My God, I thought, what a jumble sale of skulls and ears, lower lips and high-flung eyebrows. Here danced the spider, there thundered the hippo, here the spaniel eye wet itself with Irish sunlight, there the hound mouth drooped into despairs of days when no sun rose. Not quite crayfish, a fiddle-crab liquor salesman sidled up the steps, bringing with him the eyes of Adonis locked in a face so crimson he might have parboiled himself for breakfast. Here they all came, in pink or black coats, with bloated brows, insucked nostrils, and wharf-piling jaws.
I reeled back and drifted with the clamor of boots to see elbows shoving about in the rummage for Mumm’s as against Twelvetrees bubbly.
“Who put the poison above and the remedy below?”
Instant silence followed as they beheld Tom Himself nodding his face toward the obscure-and-terrible as against the famed-and-fabulous.
“Let’s have a tasting,” someone said. “Compare old Sour Ditch to Kingsblood Royal.”
Tom could not prevent as several dozen hands emptied the tooth-destroyer to make way for Mumm’s mouthwash.
All was almost in readiness. Along with the killing wine and its cure, to one side were a few caviar sticks and cheese biscuits that Tom had laid on, while farther on, an ice floe frozen forever, the bridal cake waited for eternity.
Since it had already stalled eight days, its mesa and sides stalwart in the hours and quarter month just passed, the cake had an air of Miss Havisham about it, which, spied, was declared sotto voce innumerable times in earshot of the butlers and maids, who adjusted their ties and aprons and searched the ceiling for deliverance.
There was a sneeze.
Lisa appeared at the top of the stairs, only to sneeze again, spin about, and run back up. There was a sound of nose-blowing: the faintest whiff of hunting horn. Lisa returned, steadied herself, and sneezed on the way down.
“I wonder if this is a Freudian cold,” she said beneath the Kleenex over her nose.
“What in hell do you mean by that?” Tom scowled.
“Maybe my nose doesn’t want to get married.” Lisa followed this with a quick laugh.
“Very funny. Very, very funny. Well, if your nose wants to call off the wedding, let it speak.” Tom showed his teeth, nibbling the air much like the courtyard horses, to prove his humor.
Lisa half turned to flee, but another sneeze froze her in place. Any further retreat ceased when several crutches punched down the stairs, swinging between them in his pink coat the director as clown, the happy huntsman as lunatic gymnast. Taking the steps two at a time and swinging his long booted legs as if to project himself over our heads, John descended, talking over his shoulder and not minding where he fiddled his supports.
“It took an hour for the damned ambulance to get there; meanwhile, I twitched and snaked around and screamed so loud that windows slammed a hundred yards off. Six shots didn’t stop my yells. At the hospital, the Doc took one look, turned me over, and—crack! like a kick in the spine—the pain stopped, as did my screams. Then, by God, I began to laugh.”
Turning from John, I plowed through the champagne mob. “Get me one of those,” called John. “Make it two. Hello, Lisa, don’t you look fine, just fine!”
Lisa sneezed.
“My God, look at your nose, Lisa,” John commiserated. “So damn red it looks as if you’d been up five nights boozing!”
Lisa held to her stomach with one hand, her nose with the other, and ran upstairs.
“Thanks a lot,” said Ricki, halfway down.
“What’d I do?” John protested. “Where’s she going?”
“To powder her nose, dimwit.”
“Where’s Mr. Hicks?” said John, escaping swiftly in leapfrog vaults.
“Hello, hello!” He stopped in midhop to wave at all the windows along the back of the dining room, where two dozen or so local noses imprinted the panes.
The villagers, mad, angry, or irritated housewives, hesitated, not knowing how to swallow John’s happy salute.
A few waved back. The rest pulled off, not taken in by his apish Protestant amiability.
“Welcome, welcome!” John called, knowing they could not hear. “It’s the Hollywood sinner here, born in sin, living in sin, and soon to die, writhing, in sin. Hello!”
Some must have read his lips, for no fewer than a half dozen indignant villagers leaped back as if he had leavened the air with brimstone.
“Drink this against the day.” I arrived with the champagne.
“But will it cure at noon?” John drank.
“One hour at a time,” I said. “Where’s the reverend? Oh, there he is. Reverend!”
The reverend came from the hall, smelling of hounds and horses. “I have been out commiserating with them for partaking in this wicked enterprise,” he said, and added quickly, “Oh, not the wedding, for sure. But the hunt. Everyone seems happy. But no one has invited the fox.”
“We asked, but he pleaded business.” John smiled. “Are we ready?”
The Reverend Mr. Hicks grabbed a champagne from a tray as it passed, gulped it, and said, “As we’ll ever be.”
The lords and ladies and liquor merchants gathered, simmering with the good drinks, hiccuping with the bad—a medley of pink coats, celebrating joy; and black, promising unfaithful husbands and mournful wives.
The Reverend Mr. Hicks positioned himself in front of the glare of Tom and the dabbed-at and snuffling nose of Lisa, who peered around as if blind.
“Shouldn’t there be a Bible?” she wondered.
A Bible, the reverend almost cried out, as he searched his empty hands.
Tom scowled but said:
“Yes. While Unitarian, we are Protestants. A Bible!”
The reverend looked around for someone to fill his hands with such a useful tool, which Ricki did in great haste, wondering if it was proper.
Off balance in two ways, the weight of the thing being one, Unitarian practice another, the reverend clenched the book but did not open it, fearing that some lost chapter or verse might leap to disquiet his mind and capsize the ceremony. Placing the Bible like a brick on the lectern, an ignored cornerstone to his peroration, he lit out:
“Have you been living in sin?” he cried.
There was a still moment. I saw the muscles under Tom’s pink riding coat flex and tear themselves in several directions; one to punch, one to pray.
I saw the clear crystal lid come down over one of Tom’s blazing eyes, in profile, shutting out the dear minister.
Lisa’s tongue wandered along her upper lip, seeking a response, and, finding none, slipped back to neutral.
“What was that again?” Tom’s eyes were burning lenses. If they’d been out in the sun, the Reverend Mr. Hicks would long since have gone up in smoke.
“Sin,” said the Reverend Hicks. “Have you been living in it?”
Silence.
Tom said, “As a matter of fact, we have.”
Lisa jabbed his elbow and stared at the floor. There was an outbreak of muffled coughing.
“Oh,” said the Reverend Mr. Hicks. “Well, then.”
What followed was not a ceremony but a sermon and not a sermon but a lecture. Sin was the subject, and the bridal couple the object. Without actual circling and sniffing their hems and cuffs, the reverend managed to make everyone in the room acutely aware of underwear and of ties that choked. He wandered off the subject and then wandered back. It was sin this and sin that, sins of the lovers and future husbands, sins of the put-upon and not always guaranteed brides. Somewhere along in the hour he mislaid the ceremony. Finding it in the corners of his eyes, and in Tom’s concentrated glare, Mr. Hicks hesitated and was about to ricochet back to pure sin, if sin ever was pure, when John shortened the hour.
He let one crutch slip. It slammed the floor with a fine crack and rebounding clatter.
“Tom and Lisa, do you take each other as man and wife!” cried the Reverend Mr. Hicks.
It was over! No one heard the shots or saw wounds or blood. There was a shared gasp from three dozen throats. The reverend slapped his revised Unitarian Bible shut on mostly empty pages, and the locals from the pub and the town villagers, pressed to the windows, leaped back as if caught by lightning, to avoid the direct-current gaze of Tom, and at his elbow the downcast eyes of Lisa, still recirculating her blush. The reverend ran for the champagne. By some accident never to be explained in Ireland, some of the cheap had risen to spoil the best.
“Not that.” The reverend swallowed, grimaced, and gestured his goblet. “The other, for goodness’ sake!”
Only when he had rinsed his mouth and swallowed to improve the hour did color tint his cheek and spark his eyes.
“Man!” he shouted at Tom. “That was work. Refills!”
There was a show of hands waving goblets.
“Gentlemen, ladies!” John reminded them of their manners. “Cake to go with the champagne!”
“John!” Ricki jerked her head. “No!”
But it was too late. All turned to focus their lust on a bridal confection which had waited, gathering dust, for eight days.
Smiling like an executioner, John brandished the knife. Lisa took it as if she had just pulled it from her breast and desired to shove it back in. Instead she turned to bend over the lonely and waiting cake. I crowded near to watch the speckles of dust flurry up from frosting stirred by Lisa’s breath.
She stabbed the cake.
Silent, the cake was obdurate.
It did not cut, it did not slice, and it gave only faint tendencies to flake or chip.
Lisa struck again and a fine powder puffed up on the air. Lisa sneezed and struck again. She managed to dent the target in four places. Then she started the assassination. With a furious red face above and the knife gripped in both hands, she wrought havoc. More powder, more flakes.
“Is the damn cake fresh?” someone said.
“Who said that?” said Tom.
“Not me,” said several people.
“Give me that!” Tom seized the knife from Lisa’s hands. “There!”
This time, shrapnel. The cake cracked under his blows and had to be shoveled onto the plates with a dreadful clatter.
As the plates were handed round, the men in their pink coats and the women in their smart black stared at the broken teeth strewn there, the smile of a once great beauty laid to ruin by time.
Some sniffed, but no aroma or scent arose from the powdered frost and the slain brandy cake beneath. Its life had long since fled.
Which left the good souls with a confectioner’s corpse in one hand and a bad vintage in the other, until someone rediscovered the rare vintages stashed against the wall and the stampede for the saviors’ refreshment began. What had been a moment of statues-in-panic wondering how to be rid of two handfuls of failed appetite became a wonder of imbibation and loosened tongues. All babbled, churning around and about every few minutes for a refulfillment of Mumm’s while Tom, suffering the rejection of a lost salesman, slugged back brandies to relight the fury in his eyes.
John stomped through the crowd, not hearing but laughing at jokes.
“Pour some on my crutches,” he cried, “so I can move!”
Someone did.
It would have been pitiful had it not been ludicrous to see the gentry wandering with platefuls of hard rock-shrapnel cake, picking at it with forks, saying how delicious and demanding more.
On the third go-round the crowd turned brave, abandoned the vitrified cake, and filled their empty glasses with Scotch. Whereupon there was a general exodus toward the yard, with people feverishly seeking places to hide the last of the concrete cake fragments.
The hounds in the yard leaped, barking, and horses reared, and the Reverend Mr. Hicks hurried out ahead with what looked to be a double double in his fist, garrulous and cheerful, waving to what he thought were village Catholics near the hounds and Protestants by the horses. The villagers, stunned, waved back, in pretense of a religion they despaired of to the point of contempt.
“Did he …,” said Tom, behind me.
“Did he what?” Lisa sneezed.
“Did Mr. Hicks … did you hear him say, ‘I pronounce you man and wife’?”
“I think so.”
“What do you mean? Did he or didn’t he?”
“Something like.”
“Something like?” cried Tom. “Reverend …? Toward the end of the ceremony … ”
“Sorry about the living-in-sin bit,” said the reverend.
“Reverend Hicks, did you or did you not say ‘I now pronounce you man and wife’?”
“Ah, yes.” The reverend wrinkled his brow and took another snort. “Easily fixed. I now pronounce you man and wife. Go thou and sin some more.”
“And sin no more!” corrected Tom.
“Ah, yes,” said the Reverend Mr. Hicks, and wove himself into the crowd.
“I rather like that.” Lisa sneezed happily. “Go thou and sin some more. I hope you’ll be back early. I sent someone to dope the fox in hopes of an early night. Are you really going to climb on that silly horse with all those drinks?”
“I have only had six,” said Tom.
“Shit,” said Lisa. “I guessed it at eight. Can you really mount that damn horse drunk?”
“I’m in fighting trim. And I’ve never heard you swear. Why today!”
“The Reverend Hicks, in his sermon, said it was the end of the world. Can I help you up on the funny-looking steed?”
“No, my dear,” Tom said and laughed, because people were listening.
With great dignity he strode to his horse and propelled himself into the saddle. Through gritted teeth he said, “The stirrup cup!”
