But the rest of Mike, above the cigarette, was changed as if the Adversary himself had squeezed, molded, and fired him with dark hands. There he was, whirling the wheel round about, over around; here we frenzied under trestles, out of tunnels, here knocked crossroad signs spinning like weathercocks in whirlwinds.
Mike’s face: the wisdom was drained from it, the eyes neither gentle nor philosophical, the mouth neither tolerant nor at peace. It was a face washed raw, a scalded, peeled potato, a face more like a blinding searchlight raking its steady and meaningless glare ahead while his quick hands snaked and bit and bit the wheel again to lean us round curves and jump us off cliff after cliff of night.
It’s not Mike, I thought, it’s his brother. No, a dire thing’s hit his life, some affliction or blow, a family sorrow or sickness, yes, that’s it.
And then Mike spoke, and his voice, it was changed too. Gone was the mellow peat bog, the moist sod, the warm fire in out of the cold rain, gone the gentle grass. Now the voice cracked at me, a clarion, a trumpet, all iron and tin.
“Well, how ya been since! How is it with ya!” he cried.
And the car, it too had suffered violence. It protested the change, yes, for it was an old and much-beaten thing that had done its time and now only wished to stroll along, like a crusty beggar, toward sea and sky, careful of its breath and bones.
But Mike would have none of that, and cadged the wreck on as if thundering toward Hell, there to warm his cold hands at some special blaze. Mike leaned, the car leaned; great livid gases blew out in fireworks from the exhaust. Mike’s frame, my frame, the car’s frame, racked all together, shuddered and ticked wildly.
My sanity was saved from being torn clean off the bone by a simple act. My eyes, seeking the cause of their plaguing flight, ran over the man blazing there like a sheet of ignited vapor from the Abyss, and laid hold to the answering clue.
“Mike,” I gasped, “it’s the first night of Lent!”
“So?”
“So,” I said, “remembering your Lenten promise, why’s that cigarette in your mouth?”
Mike cast his eyes down, saw the jiggling smoke, and shrugged.
“Ah,” he said, “I gave up the ither.”
“The ither?” I cried.
“The other!” He corrected the word.
And suddenly it was all clear.
For what seemed like a thousand nights, at the door of the old Georgian house, I had accepted from Odd John a fiery douse of Irish “against the chill.” Then, breathing hot summer charcoal from my scorched mouth, I had walked out to a cab where sat a man who, during all the long evenings’ waiting for me to phone for his services, had lived in Heeber Finn’s pub.
Fool! I thought. How could you have forgotten!
And there in Heeber Finn’s, during the long hours of lazy talk that was like planting and bringing to crop a garden among busy men, each contributing his seed or flower, and wielding the implements, their tongues, and the raised, foam-hived glasses, their own hands softly curled about the dear drinks, there Mike had taken into himself a mellowness.
And that mellowness had distilled itself down in a slow rain that damped his smoldering nerves and put the wilderness fires in every limb of him out. Those same showers laved his face to leave the tidal marks of wisdom, the lines of Plato and Aeschylus, there.
The harvest mellowness colored his cheeks, warmed his eyes soft, lowered his voice to a husking mist, and spread in his chest to slow his heart to a gentle trot. It rained out his arms to loosen his hard-mouthed hands on the shuddering wheel and sit him with grace and ease in his horsehair saddle as he gentled through the fogs that kept us and Dublin apart.
And with the malt on my own tongue, fluming up my sinus with burning vapors, I had never detected the scent of any spirits on my old friend here.
“Ah,” said Mike again, “yes; I give up the other.”
The last bit of jigsaw fell in place.
Tonight, the first night of Lent.
Tonight, for the first time in all the nights I had driven with him, Mike was sober.
All those other one hundred and forty-odd nights, Mike hadn’t been driving careful and easy just for my safety, no, but because of the gentle weight of mellowness sloping now on this side, now on that side of him as we took the long, scything curves.
Oh, who really knows the Irish, and which half of them is which? Mike? Who is Mike—and what in the world is he? Which Mike’s the real Mike, the one that everyone knows?
I will not think on it! I thought.
There is only one Mike for me. The one that Ireland shaped herself with her weathers and waters, her seedings and harvestings, her brans and mashes, her brews, bottlings, and ladlings-out, her summer-grain-colored pubs astir and advance with the wind in the wheat and barley by night: you may hear the good whisper way out in forest, on bog, as you roll by. That’s Mike to the teeth, eye, and heart, to his easygoing hands. If you ask what makes the Irish what they are, I’d point on down the road and tell where you turn to Heeber Finn’s.
The first night of Lent, and before you could count nine, we were in Dublin!
The next night I was at Kilcock and coming out of the great himself’s house, and there was my taxi waiting and puttering its motor. I leaned in to put a special bottle in the hands of dear Mike.
Earnestly, pleadingly, warmly, with all the friendly urging in the world, I looked into that fine man’s raw, strange, torchlike face.
“Mike,” I said.
“Sir!” he shouted.
“Do me a favor,” I said.
“Anything!” he shouted.
“Take this,” I said. “It’s the best bottle of Irish moss I could find. And just before we leave now, Mike, drink it down, drink all or some. Will you do that, Mike? Will you promise me, cross your heart and hope to die, to do that?”
He thought on it, and the very thought damped the ruinous blaze in his face.
“Ya make it terrible hard on me,” he said.
I forced his fingers shut on the bottle.
“Give up something else for Lent, Mike,” I said.
“There’s nothing else to give up, in all of Ireland. Wait a minute! I’ll give up women!”
“Have you ever had any?”
“No,” said Mike, “but I’ll give them up anyway!”
He drank.
And as he drank, a great calm, a great peace, a great serenity came over his mouth, his eyes, his face; his bones quietly slumped in his clothes.
I looked into that face.
“Ah, Mike, Mike,” I said, “you’re back!”
“I was long away,” he said.
We drove to Dublin, slowly.
Chapter 23
It was when I was going into the Royal Hibernian Hotel that a beggar woman shoved her filthy baby in my face and cried:
“Ah, God, pity! It’s pity we’re in need of! Have you some?!”
I had some somewhere on my person, and slapped my pockets and fetched it out, and was on the point of handing it over when I gave a small cry, or exclamation. The coins spilled from my hand.
In that instant, the babe was eyeing me, and I the babe.
Then it was snatched away. The woman bent to paw after the coins, glancing up at me in some sort of panic.
“What on earth?” I guided myself up into the lobby, where, stunned, I all but forgot my name. “What’s wrong? What happened out there?”
It was the baby, the beggar’s child. It was the same, same nose and mouth, but the eyes, the same eyes seen years ago, when I traveled Ireland and saw the poor. Far back in 1939, yes, but—my God!—the same!
I walked slowly back to the hotel door and opened it to look out.
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 damnation.
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 passed?
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
