The old man said nothing, for there was nothing really to say that wouldn’t be obvious as their pale breaths ghosting the wind. Then, very quietly, he opened wide the front door and had the decency not even to nod or point.
Slowly and silently they began to file by, as past a familiar teacher in an old school, and then faster they moved. So in flowed the river returned, the Ark emptied out before, not after, the Flood, and the tide of animals and angels, nudes that flamed and smoked in the hands, noble gods that pranced on wings and hoofs, went by, and the old man’s eyes shifted gently, and his mouth silently named each, the Renoirs, the Van Dycks, the Lau tree, and so on, until Kelly, in passing, felt a touch at his arm.
Surprised, Kelly looked over.
And saw that the old man was staring at the small painting beneath Kelly’s arm.
“My wife’s portrait of me?”
“None other,” said Kelly.
The old man stared at Kelly and at the painting beneath his arm and then out toward the snowing night.
Kelly smiled.
Walking soft as a burglar, he vanished out into the wilderness, carrying the picture. A moment later, you heard him laughing as he ran back, hands empty.
The old man shook Kelly’s hand, once, tremblingly, and shut the door.
Then he turned away, as if the event was already lost to his wandering child mind, and toddled down the hall with his scarf like a gentle weariness over his thin shoulders, and the mob followed him inside, where they found drinks in their great paws and saw that Lord Kilgotten was blinking at the picture over the fireplace as if trying to remember, was the Sack of Rome there in the years past? or was it the Fall of Troy? Then he felt their gaze and looked full on the encircled army and said:
“Well now, what shall we drink to?”
The men shuffled their feet.
Then Flannery cried, “Why, to His Lordship, of course!”
“His Lordship!” cried all eagerly, and drank, and coughed and choked and sneezed, while the old man felt a peculiar glistening about his eyes, and did not drink at all till the commotion stilled, and then said, “To our Ireland,” and drank, and all said Ah, God and amen to that, and the old man looked at the picture over the hearth and then at last shyly observed, “I do hate to mention it … that picture …”
“Sir?”
“It seems to me,” said the old man apologetically, “to be a trifle off center, on the tilt. I wonder if you might …”
“Mightn’t we, boys!” cried Casey.
And fourteen men rushed to put it right.
“… put it right,” said Finn, at the end of his tale.
There was silence.
At almost the same moment, John and I leaned forward and said:
“Is all that true?”
“Well,” said Finn, “it is the skin of the apple, if not the core.”
Chapter 13
“A fool,” I said. “That’s what I am.”
“Why?” asked John. “What for?”
I brooded by my third-floor hotel window. On the Dublin street below, a man passed, his face to the lamplight.
“Him,” I muttered. “Two days ago …”
Two days ago, as I was walking along, someone had hissed at me from the hotel alley. “Sir, it’s important! Sir!”
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, hell!” 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, passing 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 shilling maybe …”
Then the worst thing happened. The demon far down on the sidewalk glanced up, saw us, and damn 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. Damn.”
John peered at me. “You’re not afraid of them?”
“Yes, no. Hell. 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 ungodly 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 glass 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 Buttery, below, I heard music and laughter. I’ll run down, I thought, slug in a quick one, and bravery resurgent …
Hell, I thought, and swung the door wide.
The effect was as if someone had struck a great Mongolian bronze gong.
I heard shoe leather Hinting 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
