Green Shadows, White Whale Part 11

I turned into the shadow. This little man, in the direst tones, said, "I've a job in Belfast if I just had a pound for the train fare!" I hesitated.

"A most important job!" he went on swiftly. "Pays well! I'll- I'll mail you back the loan! Just give me your name and hotel."

He knew me for a tourist. It was too late; his promise to pay had moved me. The pound note crackled in my hand, being worked free from several others.

The man's eye skimmed like a shadowing hawk.

"And if I had two pounds, why, I could eat on the way."

I uncrumpled two bills.

"And three pounds would bring the wife, not leave her here alone."

I unleafed a third.

"Ah, h.e.l.l!" cried the man. "Five, just five poor pounds, would find us a hotel in that brutal city, and let me get to the job, for sure!"

What a dancing fighter he was, light on his toes, in and out, weaving, tapping with his hands, flicking with his eyes, smiling with his mouth, jabbing with his tongue.

"Lord thank you, bless you, sir!"

He ran, my five pounds with him.

I was halfway in the hotel before I realized that for all his vows, the man had not recorded my name.

"Gah!" I cried then.

"Gah!" I cried now, my director behind me, at the window.

For there, pa.s.sing below, was the very fellow who should have been in Belfast two nights before.

"Oh, I know him," said John. "He stopped me this noon. Wanted train fare to Galway."

"Did you give it to him?"

"No," said John simply. "Well, a s.h.i.+lling maybe ..."

Then the worst thing happened. The demon far down on the sidewalk glanced up, saw us, and d.a.m.n if he didn't wave]

I had to stop myself from waving back. A sickly grin played on my lips.

"It's got so I hate to leave the hotel," I said.

"It's cold out, all right." John was putting on his coat.

"No," I said. "Not the cold. Them."

And we looked again from the window.

There was the cobbled Dublin street, with the night wind blowing in a fine soot along one way to Trinity College, another to St. Stephen's Green. Across by the sweet shop, two men stood mummified in the shadows. On the corner, a single man, hands deep in his pockets, felt for his entombed bones, a muzzle of ice for a beard. Farther up, in a doorway, was a bundle of old newspapers that would stir like a pack of mice and wish you the time of evening if you walked by. Below, by the hotel entrance, stood a feverish hothouse rose of a woman, a force of nature.

"Oh, the beggars," said John.

"No, not just 'oh, the beggars,' " I said, "but oh, the people in the streets, who somehow became beggars."

"It looks like a motion picture. I could direct the lot," said John. "All of them waiting down there in the dark for the hero to come out. Let's go to dinner."

"The hero," I said. "That's me. d.a.m.n."

John peered at me. "You're not afraid of them?"

"Yes, no. h.e.l.l. It's a big chess game for me now. All these months I've sat up here with my typewriter, studying their off hours and on. When they take a coffee break I take one, run for the sweet shop, the bookstore, the Olympia Theatre. If I time it right, there's no handout, no my wanting to trot them into the barbershop or the kitchen. I know every secret exit in the hotel."

"Jesus." John laughed. "You're driven."

"I am. But most of all by that beggar on O'Connell Bridge! He's a wonder, a terror. I hate him, I love him. Come on."

The elevator, which had haunted its untidy shaft for a hundred years, came wafting skyward, dragging its unG.o.dly chains and dread intestines after. The door exhaled open. The lift groaned as if we had trod its stomach. In a great protestation of ennui, the ghost sank back toward earth.

On the way John said, "If you hold your face right, the beggars won't bother you."

"My face," I explained patiently, "is my face. It's from Apple Dumpling, Wisconsin; Sarsaparilla, Maine. 'Kind to Dogs' is writ on my brow. Let the street be empty, then let me step forth and a strikers' march of freeloaders leap from manholes for miles around."

"If you could just learn to look over, around, or through those people, stare them down." John mused. "I've lived here for two years. Shall I show you how to handle them?"

"Show me!"

John flung the elevator door wide, and we advanced through the Royal Hibernian Hotel lobby to squint out at the sooty night.

"Jesus come and get me," I murmured. "There they are, their heads up, eyes on fire. They smell apple pie already."

"Meet me down by the bookstore," whispered John. "Watch."

"Wait!" I cried.

But he was out the door, down the steps and on the sidewalk.

I watched, nose pressed to the gla.s.s pane.

The beggars on one corner, the other, across from, in front of the hotel leaned toward my employer. Their eyes glowed.

John gazed calmly back at them.

The beggars hesitated, creaking, I was sure, in their shoes. Then their bones settled. Their mouths collapsed. Their eyes snuffed out. Huston stared hard. They looked away.

With a rap-rap like a drum, John's shoes marched briskly away. From behind me, in the b.u.t.tery, below, I heard music and laughter. I'll run down, I thought, slug in a quick one, and bravery resurgent . . .

h.e.l.l, I thought, and swung the door wide. The effect was as if someone had struck a great Mongolian bronze gong.

I heard shoe leather flinting the cobbles in sparks. The men came running, fireflies sprinkling the bricks under their hobnailed shoes. I saw hands waving. Mouths opened on smiles like old pianos. Someone shouted, "There's only a few of us left!"

Far down the street, at the bookshop, my director waited, his back turned. But that third eye in the back of his head must have caught the scene: Columbus greeted by Indians, Saint Francis amidst his squirrel friends, with a bag of nuts. Or he saw me as the Pope on Saint Peter's balcony, with a tumult below.

I was not half off the hotel steps when a woman in a gray shawl charged up, thrusting a wrapped bundle at me. "Ah, see the poor child!" she wailed. I stared at her baby. The baby stared back.

G.o.d in heaven, did or did not the thing wink at me? No, the babe's eyes are shut, I thought. She's filled it with gin to keep it warm for display.

My hands, my coins, blurred reaching out to her and the rest of her team.

"G.o.d thanks you, sir!"

I broke through them, running. Defeated, I could have scuffed slowly the rest of the way, my resolve so much putty in my mouth, but no, on I rushed, hearing a babe's wail down the cold wind. Blast! I thought, she's pinched it to make it weep and crack my soul!

John, without turning, saw my reflection in the bookshop window and nodded.

I stood getting my breath, brooding at my own image: my summer eyes, my ebullient and defenseless mouth. "Say it!" I sighed. "I hold my face wrong!" "I like the way you hold your face." John held my arm. "I wish I could do it too."

We looked back as the beggars strolled off in the blowing dark with my s.h.i.+llings. The street was empty now. It was starting to rain.

"Well," I said at last, "let me show you the even bigger mystery: the man who provokes me to wild rages, then calms me to delight. Solve him and you solve all the beggars that ever were."

"On O'Connell Bridge?" John guessed.

"On O'Connell Bridge," I said.

And we walked on down in the gently misting rain.

Halfway to the bridge, as we were examining some fine Irish crystal in a window, a woman with a shawl over her head plucked at my elbow.

"Destroyed!" The woman sobbed. "My poor sister. Cancer. Her dead next month! Ah, G.o.d, can you spare a penny!"

I felt John's arm tighten to mine. I looked at the woman, split, one half of me saying, "A penny is all she asks!" the other half doubting: "Gah, she knows that by underasking you'll overpay]"

I gasped. "You're . . ."

Why, I thought, you're the woman who was just back by the hotel with the babe!

"I'm sick!" She pulled back in shadow. "And asking for the half dead!"

You've stashed the babe somewhere, I thought, and put on a green instead of gray shawl and run the long way 'round to cut us off.

"Cancer ..." One bell in her tower, but she knew how to toll it. "Cancer ..."

John cut in crisply. "Pardon, but aren't you the same woman he just paid at the hotel?''

The woman and I were both shocked at this rank insubordination.

The woman's face crumpled. I peered closer. And G.o.d, it was a different face. How admirable! She knew what actors know, sense, learn: that by thrusting, yelling, all fiery-lipped arrogance, one moment you are one character; then by sinking away, crumpling the mouth and eyes, in pitiful collapse, you are another. The same woman, yes, but the same face and role? No, no!

"Cancer," she whispered.

John lost my arm, and the woman found my cash. As if on roller skates, she whisked around the corner, sobbing happily.

"Lord!" In awe, I watched her go. "She's studied Stanislavsky. In one book he says that squinting one eye and twitching one lip to the side will disguise you. And what if it was true? Everything she said? And she's lived with it so long she can't cry anymore, and so has to playact in order to survive? What if?"

"Not true," said John. "But by G.o.d, she gets a role in Moby d.i.c.k Can't you see her down at the docks, in the fog, when the Pequod sails, wailing, mourning? Yes!"

Wailing, weeping, I thought, somewhere in the chimney-smoking dark.

"Now," said John, "on to O'Connell Bridge?"

The street corner was probably empty in the falling rain for a long time after we were gone.

There stood the gray-stone bridge bearing the great O'Connell's name, and there the River Liffey rolling cold gray waters under, and even from a block off I heard faint singing. My mind ran back to ten days before.

"Christmas," I murmured, "is the best time of all in Dublin."

For beggars, I meant, but left it unsaid.

For in the week before Christmas the Dublin streets had teemed with raven flocks of children herded by schoolmasters or nuns. They cl.u.s.tered in doorways, peered from theater lobbies, jostled in alleys, "G.o.d Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen" on their lips, "It Came Upon a Midnight Clear" in their eyes, tambourines in hand, snowflakes shaping a collar of grace about then" tender necks. It was singing everywhere and anywhere in Dublin on such nights, and there was no night I had not walked up Grafton Street to hear "Away in a Manger" being sung to the queue outside the cinema or "Deck the Halls" in front of The Four Provinces pub. In all, I counted in Christ's season one night half a hundred bands of convent girls or public-school boys lacing the cold air and weaving great treadles of song up, down, over, and across from end to end of Dublin. Like walking in snowfalls, you could not walk among them and not be touched. The sweet beggars, I called them, who gave in turn for what you gave as you went your way.

Given such examples, even the most dilapidated beggars of Dublin had washed their hands, mended their torn smiles, borrowed banjos or bought a fiddle and killed a cat. They had even gathered for four-part harmonics. How could they stay silent when half the world was singing and the other half, idled by the tuneful river, was paying dearly, gladly, for just another chorus?

So Christmas was best for all; the beggars worked-off key, it's true, but there they were, one time in the year, busy.

But Christmas was gone, the licorice-suited children back in their aviaries, and most of the beggars of the town, shut and glad for the silence, returned to their workless ways. All but the beggars on O'Connell Bridge, who, through the year, most of them, tried to give as good as they got.

"They have their self-respect," I said, walking with John. "I'm glad that first man up ahead strums a guitar, the next one a fiddle. And there, now, by G.o.d, in the very center of the bridge!"

"The man we're looking for?"

"That's him. Squeezing the concertina. It's all right to look. Or I think it is."

"What do you mean? He's blind, isn't he?"

The rain fell gently, softly upon gray-stoned Dublin, gray-stoned riverbank, gray lava-flowing river.

"That's the trouble," I said at last. "I don't know."

And we both, in pa.s.sing, looked at the man standing there in the very middle of O'Connell Bridge.

He was a man of no great height, a bandy statue swiped from some country garden perhaps, and his clothes, like the clothes of most in Ireland, too often laundered by the weather, and his hair too often grayed by the smoking air, and his cheeks sooted with beard, and a nest or two of witless hair in each cupped ear, and the blus.h.i.+ng cheeks of a man who has stood too long in the cold and drunk too much in the pub so as to stand too long in the cold again. Dark gla.s.ses covered his eyes, and there was no telling what lurked behind. I had begun to wonder, weeks before, if his sight prowled me along, d.a.m.ning my guilty speed, or if only his ear caught the pa.s.sing of a harried conscience. There was an awful fear he might seize, in pa.s.sing, the gla.s.ses from his nose. But I feared much more the abyss I might find, into which his senses, in one terrible roar, might tumble. Best not to know if civet's...o...b..or interstellar s.p.a.ce gaped behind the smoked panes.

But even more, there was a special reason why I could not let the man be.

In the rain and the wind and snow, for many long cold weeks, I had seen him standing here with no cap or hat on his head.

He was the only man in all of Dublin I saw in the downpours and drizzles who stood by the hour alone with the drench mizzling his ears, threading his ash-red hair, plastering it over his skull, rivuleting his eyebrows, and was.h.i.+ng over the coal-black insect lenses of the gla.s.ses on his rain-pearled nose.