Green Shadows, White Whale Part 20

The street was empty. The beggar woman and her bundle had run off to some other alley, some other hotel, some other arrival or departure.

I shut the door and wandered to the elevator.

"No!" I said. "It can't be."

And suddenly remembering to move, got in.

The child would not go away.

The memory, that is.

The recollection of other years and days in rains and fogs, the mother and her small creature, and the soot on that tiny face, and the cry of the woman herself, which was like a shrieking of brakes put on to fend off d.a.m.nation.

Sometimes, late at night, I heard her wailing as she went off the cliff of Ireland's weather and down upon rocks where the sea never stopped coming or going but stayed forever in tumult.

But the child stayed too.

I caught myself brooding at tea or after supper over the Irish coffee and saying, "That again? Silly! Silly!"

I've always made fun of metaphysics, astrology, palmistry. But this is genetics, I thought. That is the same woman begged my gaze and displayed an unlovely unwashed child fourteen years ago! And what of that child; did she have a new one, or borrow one to display, as the seasons pa.s.sed?

Not quite, I thought. She's a solved puzzle to me. But the babe? There was the true and incredible mystery! It, like her, had not changed! Incredible! Impossible! Madness!

And so it was I found myself, whenever I fled encounters with the two destroyers, film director and Whale, searching the Dublin streets for the beggar woman and her changeless babe.

From Trinity College on up O'Connell Street and way around back to St. Stephen's Green, I pretended a vast interest in fine architecture but secretly watched for her and her dire burden.

I b.u.mped into the usual haggle of banjo pluckers and shuffle dancers and hymn singers and tenors gargling in their sinuses and baritones remembering a buried love or fitting a stone on their mother's grave, but nowhere did I surprise my quarry.

At last I approached the doorman at the Royal Hibernian Hotel.

"Nick," I said.

"Sir," said he.

"That woman who often lurks about at the foot of the steps . . ."

"Ah, the one with the babel"

"Do you know her!"

"Know her! Sweet Jesus, she's been the plague of my years since I was thirty, and look at the gray in my hair now!"

"She's been begging that long?"

"And forever beyond."

"Her name . . . ?"

"Molly's as good as any. McGillahee, I think. Beg pardon, sir, why do you ask?"

"Have you looked at her child, Nick?"

His nose winced at a sour smell. "Years back, I quit. These beggar women keep their kids in a dread style, sir, a condition roughly equivalent to the bubonic. They neither wipe nor bathe nor mend. Neatness would work against beggary, do you see? The fouler the better, that's the motto, eh?"

"Right. Nick, so you've never really examined that infant?"

"Aesthetics being a secret part of my life, I'm a great one for averting the gaze. It's blind I am to help you, sir. Forgive."

"Forgiven, Nick." I pa.s.sed him two s.h.i.+llings. "Oh . . . have you seen those two lately?"

"Strange. Come to think, sir. They have not come here in"- he counted on his fingers and showed surprise-"why, it must be a couple of weeks! They never done that before."

"Never? Thanks, Nick."

And I wandered down the steps, back to the search.

It was obvious she was hiding out.

I did not for a moment believe she or the child was sick.

Our collision in front of the hotel, the baby's eyes and mine striking flint, had startled her like a fox and shunted her off G.o.d-knows-where, to some other alley, some other road, some other town.

I smelled her evasion. She was a vixen, yes, but I felt myself, day by day, a better hound.

I took to walking earlier, later, in the strangest locales. I would leap off buses in b.a.l.l.sbridge and prowl the fog, or taxi halfway out to Kilc.o.c.k and hide in pubs. I even knelt in Dean Swift's church to hear the echoes of his Houyhnhnm voice, but stiffened alert as the merest whimper of a child carried through.

It was all madness, to pursue such a brute idea. Yet on I went, scratching where the d.a.m.ned thing itched.

And then by sheer and wondrous accident, while I took my nightly swim in a dousing downpour that smoked the gutters and fringed my cap with a thousand drops, I turned a corner . . .

And this woman shoved a bundle in my face and cried a familiar cry: "If there's mercy in your soul-"

She stopped, riven. She spun about. She ran.

For in the instant, she knew. And the babe in her arms, with the shocked small face and the swift bright eyes, he knew tool Both let out some kind of fearful cry.

G.o.d, how that woman could race.

She put a block between her backside and me while I gathered breath to yell: "Stop, thief!"

It seemed an appropriate yell. The baby was a mystery I wished to solve. And there she vaulted off with it, a wild thief.

So I dashed after, crying. "Stop! Help! You there!"

She kept a hundred yards between us for the first half mile, up over bridges across the Liffey and finally up Grafton Street, where I jogged into St. Stephen's Green, to find it ... empty.

She had absolutely vanished.

Unless, of course, I thought, turning in all directions, letting my gaze, idle, it's into The Four Provinces pub she's gone . . .

That's where I went.

It was a good guess.

I shut the door quietly.

There, at the bar, was the beggar woman, putting a pint of Guinness to her own face and giving a shot of gin to the babe for happy sucking.

I let my heart pound down to a slower pace, then took my place at the bar and said, "Bombay gin, please."

At my voice, the baby gave one kick. The gin sprayed from his mouth. He fell into a spasm of choked coughing.

The woman turned him over and thumped his back to stop the convulsion. As she did so, the red face of the child faced me, eyes squeezed shut, mouth wide, and at last the seizure stopped, the cheeks grew less red, and I said: "You there, baby."

There was a hush. Everyone in the bar waited.

I finished.

"You need a shave."

The babe flailed about in his mother's arms with a loud strange wounded cry, which I cut off with a simple: "It's all right. I'm not the police."

The woman relaxed as if all her bones had gone to porridge.

"Put me down," said the babe.

She put him down on the floor.

"Give me my gin."

She handed him his little gla.s.s of gin.

"Let's go in the saloon bar, where we can talk."

The babe led the way with some sort of small dignity, holding his swaddling clothes about him with one hand and the gin gla.s.s in the other.

The saloon bar was empty, as I had guessed. The babe, without my help, climbed up into a chair at a table and finished his gin.

"Ah, Christ, I need another," he said in a tiny voice.

While his mother went to fetch a refill, I sat down, and the babe and I eyed each other for a long moment.

"Well," he said at last, "what do ya think?"

"I don't know. I'm waiting and watching my own reactions," I said. "I may explode into laughter or tears at any moment."

"Let it be laughter. I couldn't stand the other."

On impulse, he stuck out his hand. I took it.

"The name is McGillahee. Better known as McGillahee's Brat. Brat, for short."

"Brat," I said, and gave him my name.

He gripped my hand hard with his tiny fingers.

"Your name fits nothing. But Brat, well, don't a name like that go ten thousand leagues under? And what, you may ask, am I doing down here? And you up there so tall and fine and breathing the high air? Ah, but here's your drink, the same as mine. Put it in you, and listen."

The woman was back with shots for both. I drank, watched her, and said, "Are you the mother . . . ?"

"It's me sister she is," said the babe. "Our mother's long since gone to her reward: a ha'penny a day for the next thousand years, nuppence dole from there on, and cold summers for a million years."

"Your sister?!" I must have sounded my disbelief, for she turned away to nibble her ale.

"You'd never guess, would you? She looks ten times my age.

But if winter don't age you, poor will. And winter and poor is the whole tale. Porcelain cracks in this weather. And once she was the loveliest porcelain out of the summer oven." He gave her a gentle nudge. "But mother she is now, for thirty years-"

"Thirty years you've been . . . !"

"Out front of the Royal Hibernian Hotel? And more! And our mother before that, and our father too, and his father, the whole tribe! The day I was born, no sooner sacked in diapers then I was on the street and my mother crying Pity and the world deaf, stone dumb blind and deaf. Thirty years with my sister, ten years with my mother, McGillahee's Brat has been on display!"

"Forty?" I cried, and drank my gin to straighten my logic. "You're really forty? And all those years . . . how?"

"How did I get into this line of work?" said the babe. "You do not get; you are, as we say, bom in. It's been nine hours a night, no Sundays off, no time clocks, no paychecks, and mostly dust and lint fresh paid out of the pockets of the rambling rich."

"But I still don't understand," I said, gesturing to his size, his shape, his complexion.

"Nor will I, ever," said McGillahee's Brat. "Am I a midget born to the blight? Some kind of dwarf shaped by glands? Or did someone warn me to play it safe, stay small?"

"That could hardly-"

"Couldn't it! It could! Listen. A thousand times I heard it, and a thousand times more my father came home from his beggary route and I remember him jabbing his finger in my crib, pointing at me, and saying, 'Brat, whatever you do, don't grow, not a muscle, not a hair! The Real Thing's out there; the World. You hear me, Brat? Dublin's beyond, and Ireland on top of that, and England hard-a.s.sed above us all. It's not worth the consideration, the bother, the planning, the growing up to try and make do, so listen here. Brat, we'll stunt your growth with stories, with truth, with warnings and predictions, we'll wean you on gin and smoke you with Spanish cigarettes until you're a cured Irish ham, pink, sweet, and small-small, do you hear, Brat? I did not want you in this world. But now you're in it, lie low, don't walk, creep; don't talk, wail; don't work, loll; and when the world is too much for you, Brat, give it back your opinion: wet yourself! Here, Brat, here's your evening poteen; fire it down. The Four Hors.e.m.e.n of the Apocalypse wait by the Liffey. Would you see their like? Hang on. Here we go!'

"And out we'd duck for the evening round, my dad banging a ? banjo, with me at his feet holding the cup, or him doing a tap I dance, me under one arm, the musical instrument under the other, both making discord.

"Then, home late, we'd lie four in a bed, a crop of failed potatoes, discards of an ancient famine.

"And sometimes in the midst of the night, for lack of something to do, my father would jump out of bed in the cold and run outdoors and fist his knuckles at the sky-I remember, I remember, I heard, I saw-daring G.o.d to lay hands on him, for so help him, Jesus, if he could lay hands on G.o.d, there would be torn feathers, ripped beards, lights put out, and the grand theater of Creation shut tight for Eternity! Do ya hear, G.o.d, ya dumb clod with your perpetual rainclouds turning their black behinds on me, do ya care!?

"For answer the sky wept, and my mother did the same all night, all night.

"And the next morn out I'd go again, this time in her arms, and back and forth between the two, day on day, and her grieving ; for the million dead from the famine of '51 and him saying goodbye to the four million who sailed off to Boston . . .

"Then one night Dad vanished too. Perhaps he sailed off on some mad boat like the rest, to forget us all. I forgive him. The poor beast was wild with hunger and nutty for want of something to give us and no giving.

"So then my mother simply washed away in her own tears, dissolved, you might say, like a sugar-crystal saint, and was gone before the morning fog rolled back, and the gra.s.s took her, and my sister, aged twelve, overnight grew tall, but I, me, oh, me? I grew small. Each decided, you see, long before that, of course, on going his or her way.