“How?”
“Why, just by being itself. It made the air so quiet, Willie, you wouldn’t believe. We all felt someone had died.
“After a while, with no one saying but everyone feeling it, people just got in their cars and drove away. The orchestra shut up its music and sped off in ten limousines. There went the entire party, around the lake drive, as if heading for a midnight outdoor picnic, but no, just going to the airport or the boats, or Galway, everyone cold, no one speaking, and the house empty, and the servants themselves pumping away on their bikes, and me alone in the house, the last party over, the party that never happened, that never could begin.
As I said, I slept on the lawn all night, alone with my old thoughts, and I knew this was the end of all the years, for I was ashes, and ashes cannot build. It was the new grand lovely fine bird lying in the dark, to itself. It hated my breath in the dooryard. I was over. It had begun. There.”
Nora was finished with her story.
We sat silently for a long while in the very late afternoon as dusk gathered to fill the rooms and put out the eyes of the windows. A wind rippled the lake.
I said, “It can’t all be true. Surely you can stay here.”
“A final test, so you’ll not argue with me again. We shall try to spend the night here.”
“Try?”
“We won’t make it through till dawn. Let’s fry a few eggs, drink some wine, sleep early. But lie on top of your covers with your clothes on. You shall want your clothes, swiftly, I imagine.”
We ate almost in silence. We drank wine. We listened to the new hours striking from the new brass clocks everywhere in the new house.
At ten, Nora sent me up to my room.
“Don’t be afraid,” she called to me on the landing. “The house means us no harm. It simply fears we may hurt it. I shall sleep in a sleeping bag out on the front walk. When you are ready to leave, no matter what hour, come for me.”
“I shall sleep snug as a bug,” I said.
“Shall you?” said Nora.
And I went up to my new bed and lay in the dark, drinking cognac, feeling neither afraid nor smug, calmly waiting for any sort of happening at all.
I did not sleep at midnight.
I was awake at one.
At three, my eyes were still wide.
The house did not creak, sigh, or murmur. It waited, as I waited, timing its breath to mine.
At three-thirty in the morning the door to my room slowly opened.
There was simply a motion of dark upon dark. I felt the wind draft over my hands and face.
I sat up slowly in the dark.
Five minutes passed. My heart slowed its beating.
And then, far away below, I heard the front door open.
Again, not a creak or whisper. Just the click and the shadowing change of wind motioning the corridors.
I got up and went out into the hall.
From the top of the stairwell I saw what I expected: the front door open. Moonlight flooded the new parqueting and shone upon the new grandfather’s clock which ticked with a fresh-oiled bright sound.
I went down and out the front door.
“There you are,” said Nora, standing down by her car in the drive.
I went to her.
“You didn’t hear a thing,” she said, “and yet you heard something, right?”
“Right.”
“Are you ready to leave now, Willie?”
I looked up at the house. “Almost.”
“You know now, don’t you, it is all over? You feel it, surely, that it is the dawn come up on a new morning? And feel my heart, my soul beating pale and mossy within my heart, my blood so black, Will, you have felt it often beating under your own body, you know how old I am. You know how full of dungeons and racks and late afternoons and blue hours of French twilight I am. Well …”
Nora looked at the house.
“The night I telephoned you, I lay in bed at two in the morning, I heard the front door drift open. I knew that the whole house had simply leaned itself ajar to let the latch free and glide the door wide.
I went to the top of the stairs. And looking down, I saw the creek of moonlight laid out fresh in the hall. And the house so much as said, Here is the way you go, tread the cream, walk the milky new path out of this and away, go, old one, go with your darkness. You are with child. The sour-gum ghost is in your stomach. It will never be born. And because you cannot drop it, one day it will be your death. What are you waiting for?
“Well, Willie, I was afraid to go down and shut that door. And I knew it was true, I would never sleep again. So I went down and out.
“I have a dark old sinful place in Geneva. I’ll go there to live. But you are younger and fresher. Will, so I want this place to be yours.”
“Not so young.”
“Younger than I.”
“Not so fresh. It wants me to go too, Nora. The door to my room just now. It opened too.”
“Oh, William,” breathed Nora, and touched my cheek. “Oh, Willie,” and then, softly, “I’m sorry.”
“Don’t be. We’ll go together.”
Nora opened her car door.
“I’ll drive. I must drive now, very fast, all the way to Dublin. Do you mind?”
“No. But what about your luggage?”
“What’s in there, the house can have. Where are you going?”
I stopped. “I must shut the front door.”
“No,” said Nora. “Leave it open.”
“But … people will come in.”
Nora laughed quietly. “Yes. But only good people. So that’s all right, isn’t it?”
I finally nodded. “Yes. That’s all right.”
I came back to stand by the car, reluctant to leave. Clouds were gathering. It was beginning to rain. Great gentle soft flurries fell down out of the moonlit sky as harmlessly soft as the gossip of angels.
We got in and slammed the car doors. Nora gunned the motor.
“Ready?” she said.
“Ready.”
“William?” said Nora. “When we get to Dublin, will you sleep with me, I mean sleep, the next few days? I shall need someone for a few nights. Will you?”
“Of course.”
“I wish,” she said, and tears filled her eyes, “oh, God, how I wish I could bum myself down and start over. Burn myself down so I could go up to the house now and go in and live forever like a dairy maid full of berries and cream who might walk by tomorrow and see the open door and the house will let her in and let her stay. Oh, but hell. What’s the use of talk like that?”
“Drive, Nora,” I said gently.
And she drummed the motor and we ran out of the valley, along the lake, with gravel buckshotting out behind, and up the hills and through the deep forest, and by the time we reached the last rise, Nora’s tears were shaken away, she did not look back, and we drove fast through the dense, falling and thicker night toward a darker horizon and a cold stone city, and all the way, never once letting go, in silence I held one of her hands.
The next morning I woke and the bed was a fall of snow with dents in it. I arose feeling, inside my mildewed suit, that I had just taken a four-day, four-night trip across country in a Greyhound bus.
There was a note pinned to the other pillow:
“Gone to Venice or Hell, whichever comes first. Thanks for the snugfest. If your wife ever leaves, come find: Nora of the long rains and the terrible fires.”
“Nora,” I said, looking out the window at the storm. “Goodbye.”
Chapter 16
Finn had an eye in the midst of the white hair over his medulla oblongata. The hair stirred. Finn’s back stiffened.
“Do I hear a Yank’s tread half in the door?” he said, peering into a goblet he was wiping dry, as if it were a crystal ball.
“Is my walk familiar?” I asked.
“Fingerprints and the way men walk; no two alike.”
Finn turned to consider my face, hovering in gloom above the aforementioned tread.
“Are you fleeing himself?”
“Does it show?”
“He does not let up, does he?”
Finn looked around at his grand organ-console display of stouts and ales, but decided on a cognac and waited for me to come fetch.
“That will take the hinges off the hatch,” he observed.
“They’re gone.” I wiped my mouth.
“Is it that you work seven days a week, seven to ten hours a day, with no time off? Does he let you go to the cinema?”
“Only by permission.”
“To the Gents’?”
“I must beg to be excused.”
“Forgive the intrusion, lad, but since you been here all this while, have you shadowed the path of any of our nice spring onion colleens, or the rutabaga and bag-of-potatoes mothers or aunts of the like? Excuse.”
“I have a wife married to me at home,” I said, “who may soon be here. She’ll find no lipstick on my collar or long hairs on my coat.”
“Pity, and you look as if you had the strength of nine.”
“Illusion,” I said. “Women knock me down and carry me out.”
“There’s all sorts of ways to travel,” admitted Finn. “But now, this day, you are in need of a brief rest before going back to hand-wrestle the two Beasts, one in the sea, one
