The baby stared back.
God 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.
“God 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 shillings. 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, God, 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 God, 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 God, she gets a role in Moby Dick! 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 clustered in doorways, peered from theater lobbies, jostled in alleys, “God 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 their 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 God, 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 passing, 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 blushing 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 glasses covered his eyes, and there was no telling what lurked behind. I had begun to wonder, weeks before, if his sight prowled me along, damning my guilty speed, or if only his ear caught the passing of a harried conscience. There was an awful fear he might seize, in passing, the glasses 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 orb or interstellar space 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 washing over the coal-black insect lenses of the glasses on his rain-pearled nose.
Down through the greaves of his cheeks, the lines about his mouth, and off his lips, like a storm on a gargoyle’s flint, the weather ran. His sharp chin shot the guzzle in a steady fauceting off in the air, down his tweed scarf and locomotive-colored coat.
“Why doesn’t he wear a hat?” I demanded.
“Why,” said John, “maybe he hasn’t got one.”
“He must have one,” I cried.
“He’s got to have one,” I said, quieter.
“Maybe he can’t afford one.”
“Nobody’s that poor, even in Dublin. Everyone has a cap at least!”
“Well, maybe he has bills to pay, someone sick.”
“But to stand out for days, weeks in the rain and not so much as flinch or turn his head, ignore the rain—it’s beyond understanding.” I shook my head. “I can only think it’s a trick. Like the others, this is his way of getting sympathy, of making you cold and miserable as you pass, so you’ll give him more.”
“I bet you’re sorry you said that already,” John said.
“I am. I am.” For even under my cap the rain was running off my nose. “Sweet God in heaven, what’s the answer?”
“Why don’t you ask him?”
“No!”
Then the terrible happened.
For a moment, while we had been talking in the cold rain, the beggar had been silent. Now, as if the weather had freshened him to life, he gave his concertina a great mash. From the folding, unfolding snake box he squeezed a series of asthmatic notes which were no preparation for
