“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 good-bye 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 grass 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.
“But then part of my decision happened early on. I knew—I swear I did!—the quality of my own thespian performance!
“I heard it from every decent beggar in Dublin when I was nine days old. ‘What a beggar’s babe that is!’ they cried.
“And my mother, standing outside the Abbey Theatre in the rain when I was twenty and thirty days old, and the actors and directors coming out tuning their ears to my Gaelic laments, they said I should be signed up and trained!
So the stage would have been mine with size, but size never came. And there’s no brat’s roles in Shakespeare. Puck, maybe; what else? So meanwhile at forty days and fifty nights after being born my performance made hackles rise and beggars yammer to borrow my hide, flesh, soul, and voice for an hour here, an hour there. The old lady rented me out by the half day when she was sick abed. And not a one bought and bundled me off did not return with praise. ‘My God,’ they cried, ‘his yell would suck money from the Pope’s poor box!’
“And outside the cathedral one Sunday morn, an American cardinal was riven to the spot by the yowl I gave when I saw his fancy skirt and bright cloth. Said he: ‘That cry is the first cry of Christ at his birth, mixed with the dire yell of Lucifer churned out of Heaven, and spilled in fiery muck down the landslide slops of Hell!’
“That’s what the dear cardinal said. Me, eh? Christ and the devil in one lump, the gabble screaming out my mouth half lost, half found—can you top that?”
“I cannot,” I said.
“Then, later on, many years further, there was this old wise church bishop. The first time, he spied me, took a quick look, and … winked! Then grabbed my scabby fist and tucked the pound note in and gave it a squeeze and another wink, and him gone. I always figured, whenever we passed, he had my number, but I never winked back. I played it dumb. And there was always a good pound in it for me, and him proud of my not giving in and letting him know that I knew that he knew.
“Of all the thousands who’ve gone by in the grand ta-ta, he was the only one ever looked me right in the eye, save you! The rest were all too embarrassed by life to so much as gaze as they paid out the dole.
“Well, I mean now, what with that bishop, and the Abbey Players, and the other beggars advising me to go with my own natural self and talent and the genius busy in my baby fat, all that must have turned my head.
“Added to which, my having the famines tolled in my ears, and not a day passed we did not see a funeral go by or watch the unemployed march up and down in strikes … well, don’t you see? Battered by rains and storms of people and knowing so much, I must have been driven down, driven back, don’t you think?
“You cannot starve a babe and have a man; or do miracles run different than of old?
“My mind, with all the drear stuff dripped in my ears, was it likely to want to run around free in all that guile and sin and being put upon by natural nature and unnatural man? No. No! I just wanted my little cubby, and since I was long out of that, and no squeezing back, I just squinched myself small against the rains. I flaunted the torments.
“And do you know? I won.”
You did, Brat, I thought. You did.
“Well, I guess that’s my story,” said the small creature there perched on a chair in the empty saloon bar.
He looked at me for the first time since he had begun his tale.
The woman who was his sister, but seemed his gray mother, now dared to lift her gaze also.
“Do,” I said, “do the people of Dublin know about you?”
“Some,” the babe said. “And envy me. And hate me, I guess, for getting off easy from God and his plagues and fates.”
“Do the police know?”
“Who would tell them?”
There was a long pause.
Rain beat on the windows.
Somewhere a door hinge shrieked like a soul in torment as someone went out and someone else came in.
Silence.
“Not me,” I said.
“Ah, Christ, Christ …”
And tears rolled down the sister’s cheeks.
And tears rolled down the sooty strange face of the babe.
Both of them let the tears go, did not try to wipe them off, and at last they stopped, and they drank up the rest of their gin and sat a moment, and then I said: “The best hotel in town is the Royal Hibernian—the best for beggars, that is.”
“True,” they said.
“And for fear of meeting me, you’ve kept away from the richest territory?”
“We have.”
“The night’s young,” I said. “There’s a flight of rich ones coming in from Shannon just before midnight.”
I stood up. “If you’ll let … I’ll be happy to walk you there now.”
“The saints’ calendar is full,” said the woman, “but somehow we’ll find room for you.”
Then I walked the woman McGillahee and her brat back through the rain toward the Royal Hibernian Hotel, and we talked along the way of the mobs of people coming in from the airport just before twelve, drinking and registering at that late hour, that fine hour for begging and, with the cold rain and all, not to be missed.
I carried the babe for some part of the way because she looked tired, and when we got in sight of the hotel, I handed him back, saying:
“Is this the first time, ever?”
“We was found out by a tourist? Aye,” said the babe. “You have an otter’s eye.”
“I’m a writer.”
“Nail me to the Cross,” said he. “I might have known! You won’t …”
“No,” I said. “I won’t write a single word about this, about you, for another thirty years or more.”
“Mum’s the word?”
“Mum.”
We were a hundred feet from the hotel steps.
“I must shut up here,” said Brat, lying there in his old sister’s arms, fresh as peppermint candy from the gin, round-eyed, wild-haired, swathed in dirty linens and wools, small fists gently gesticulant. “We’ve a rule, Molly and me, no chat while at work. Grab ahold.”
I grabbed the small fist, the little fingers. It was like holding a sea anemone.
“God bless you,” he said.
“And God,” I said, “take care of you.”
“Ah,” said the babe, “in another year we’ll have enough saved for the New York boat.”
“We will,” she said.
“And no more begging, and no more being the dirty babe crying by night in the storms, but some decent work in the open, do you know, do you see, will you light a candle to that?”
“It’s lit.” I squeezed his hand.
“Go on ahead.”
“I’m gone,” I said.
And walked quickly to the front of the hotel, where airport taxis were starting to arrive.
Behind, I heard the woman trot forward, I saw her arms lift, with the Holy Child held out in the rain.
“If there’s mercy in you!” she cried. “Pity …!”
And heard the coins ring in the cup and heard the sour babe wailing, and more cars coming and the woman crying Mercy and Thanks and Pity and God Bless and Praise Him, and wiping tears from my own eyes, feeling eighteen inches tall, somehow made it up the high steps and into the hotel and to bed, where rains fell cold on the rattled windows all the night and where, in the dawn, when I woke and looked out, the street was empty save for the steady-falling storm …
Chapter 24
The incredible news came by cable.
The National Institute of Arts and Letters was proud to award me a special prize in literature and a cash stipend of five thousand dollars. Would I please appear in New York City on May 24 to receive the Award, the plaudits, and the check?
Would I?!
My God, I thought. At last! God! For years people have called me Buck Rogers or Flash Gordon. People have
