“The money you’re going to get, kid, in May from those sweet people in New York City?”
“Oh, that money.” I scarfed my toast, ignored their stares.
“Well, you listening? Jake, don’t you agree? We go to Phoenix Park tomorrow and pick the best horse in eight races and you lay it, the whole amount, on one horse, win or lose! How does that sound?”
“Nope,” I said, at last.
“What kind of answer is that? That’s not even accepted grammatical English.”
“Nope? Sounds good to me. Nope.”
“Holy shit,” cried John, “what have I got on my hands here? A yellow belly? A coward? A gutless wonder?”
“That about describes it, and proud to be,” I admitted.
“Moby Dick would spit on you.”
“Most likely.”
“Melville throw up on you.”
“Don’t doubt it.”
“Hemingway wouldn’t sit a two-hole outhouse crapper with you for shared male experience.”
“No. I wouldn’t share any outhouse with him.”
“Look at him, Jake.”
“I’m looking,” said Jake.
“He’s refusing!”
“Pretty yellow,” said Jake.
“That’s it,” I said, and arose.
By then I was sick to my stomach. I took the cable out of my pocket. It was empty. There were no words on it. They had managed to burn, ravage, erase, and destroy the words, the message, the joy, during one long terrible hour.
I would have to go to a quiet room in Dublin with the empty paper and touch it with lit matches to scorch forth the gift: You have been awarded. You count. You are okay, or whatever in hell it had said at nine this morning. Whatever it was, I could not read it now.
I might have thrown the cable down, but I saw John was waiting for that pleasure. I wadded the cable and shoved it in my pocket.
“For your information,” I said. “I have thought it over. Carefully. And at the last race in Primrose Park, I’m betting my found money, everything I’ve got—on—Oscar Wilde!!”
Then I picked up my Bloody Mary and very slowly strolled, did not stride angrily but strolled at leisure, waving my drink at John and Jake.
I went out the door.
Ricki found me on the back stone porch of Courtown House ten minutes later. Tears were dripping off the end of my nose.
“God,” she said, “you’re a wonderful son of a bitch.”
“I wish I felt wonderful,” I murmured.
I handed her the wadded cablegram. “Has it come back yet?”
“What?”
“The words. The prize. The announcement.”
She held it up to the dim light.
“Yes.” And then, quietly, seeing my face, “Yes!”
And the words were back because she read them to me.
And I believed.
I telegraphed New York and I said I would be there, May 24, to get the award from John Hersey and Robert Sherwood and Norman Cousins and Lillian Hellman and all the rest.
I never mentioned the cable again.
Nor did John or Jake.
Chapter 25
In a dream, I heard a wild knocking on my hotel door. I blundered up and staggered over to throw the door wide and find John himself standing astride my sill, grinning, dressed in a black wetsuit-and-snorkel outfit, holding a mask, a bright yellow bottle of oxygen, and an airgun harpoon.
“C’mon, kid!” he cried. “I’ll teach you to snorkel!”
“At three in the morning?” I yelled.
“C’mon, kid, don’t be chicken, don’t be yellow!” he cried.
And like a damned fool, I went with him.
To be drowned.
And wake up from the nightmare in a blizzard of sweat.
Chapter 26
Finn shook my elbow.
“Lad,” he said gently, “you’d best be off.”
“What?” I said.
“It’s the philosopher’s cubby you been in all the while. That last drink did it. I had no heart to disturb, so I let you grind your teeth and fret in your sleep.”
“Fret? Teeth?” I shrugged back from the enclosure of the private cubby.
“How do you feel?” asked Finn anxiously.
“Mad.”
“Because you woke or because the dream wasn’t true after all?”
“Both.”
“I was beating the wife once and awoke. Seeing as I’d never laid hands on the woman in me life, it was a dread awakening. You need, once in a while, to even scores …”
“In your dream, did your wife scream?”
“She took her punishment quietly, which ruined my endeavor. It’s just as well. I could not look at her by day if she complained to God in my nightmare.”
“What time is it?”
“Late. Himself called, asking for your body if not your soul. I told him you were not here, which is a kind of truth, seeing as you looked not so much mad as sad when you came in. Was it a sadness that drove you mad?”
“It was.”
“Is there something beyond drink I could hand to you?”
“Like what, Finn!?”
“A great lie based on a small truth. Another collision of genius: a grand old man in his automobile years ago, and myself, a young soak.”
Finn paused.
“Go on, Finn. I admit you’re a genius. Who was the other?”
“The greatest playwright since Shakespeare!”
I perked up.
“And that would be …?”
“First things first …”
“Tell it all, Finn.”
“Do you mean that?” Finn shaped me with one eye and conjured memory with the other.
“I do. I’m in need of cheer, Finn. My head is full of beggars and rain!”
“Do you have the time?”
“I do, I do!”
Finn refilled my glass, then leaned forward with both elbows on the bar and fixed his gaze to some other bright, and distant year.
“Well, then,” he said. “Hear this …”
God, they say, works in mysterious ways (said Finn). He may not always note the sparrow fallen, but he has a sharp eye for the incongruities.
Which is to say, given half a chance, on certain days, God seems to lean toward borrowing a flint from Lucifer and a stone from Beelzebub, the better to light a path and ensure a collision.
On this particular day, bored out of mind, as any Irish God would be half through Sunday, the Lord bent a road and prepared the way for the arrival of a touring car lost from Dublin and aching with genius.
The particular car, having taken a wrong turn because God said so, and the driver drunk on top of that, arrived in the vicinity at about half past two this particular Sunday when the sun promised but the rain delivered. There was a parting of the storm long enough for the touring car to explode a tire and sink to its knees like a rifled elephant.
The sound of the explosion was such that the mob inside the pub soon became the mob outside, looking for the gunshot victim but finding instead the drunken chauffeur wandering about the chopfallen car, kicking the good tires as if that might reinvigorate the flat without having to pump.
Then like the devil’s head popping into view on a small Punch and Judy stage, an old man’s face suddenly rose in the car’s rear window. His bright mean eyes flashed as he pointed his reddish beard and fired off his mouth:
“Sir, the tire, do not kick it to death. Where are we?”
“At the center of the universe!” I cried, wiping my hands on a barcloth, standing in the door.
“Finn’s!” echoed each and all.
The old man’s face vanished from the window but to reappear as he leaped out of the car door and stood with his hands on his hips. What a sport he was to behold, dressed in a fine woven hunting-walking suit with a Norfolk jacket. His eyes blazed with admiration. “A man is best known by his pride. You must be Finn!” he cried.
“Well said.” I laughed. “And will you come in from the rain, your honor?”
“It’s not raining!”
It began to rain.
“Thanks and done.” The old man marched with the brisk stride of one forty years younger. The rain parted to let him pass.
“Gangway!” I said, and the mob parted, likewise to run for drinks. “And now, sir, before the world ends, your name?”
“Shaw!” cried the old man. “George Bernard Shaw!”
“And …” The tall man with the blazing beard made a path through the pub that caused the air to rush, in a clap of thunder, behind. “And,” he announced somewhat joyfully, “I am a teetotaler!”
The mob veered off as if he had pronounced a plague.
“And are you happy with that half-state of being?” I responded.
“If being busy instead of inebriated is happy, I am happy,” said Shaw. “But since my car is ill in the road, I am sorely tempted to order a small drink. Something incredibly weak, if you please.”
“Like the one son in each family is handed over to the Church, your honor?”
Shaw’s beard liked that and beamed.
“You are all writers, it seems.”
“If being poor and waiting in line for drinks and shooting off your mouth is writers, we’re writers.” I shoved a brandy at him. “Sink your teeth in this, sir!”
“No, no,” he cried. “By weak I meant a simple glass of water.”
“Ah, God,” I said. “The last time we saw something that simple it was the priest’s sister from Cork, Mr. Shaw!”
“Shaw?” said Timulty suddenly, bugging his eyes. “Hold on! I seen your picture in the Irish Times. It was you lit the fire beneath Saint Joan!”
“I wrote the play, yes!” said Shaw.
“Also,” Doone piped in, “was it not you claimed the definition of an Irishman was a man who would climb over six naked women to reach his mother?”
“That’s near the truth,” said Shaw.
“If there’s to be a plague of truth here,” said Murphy, “we’d best not be sober for it.”
I measured Shaw’s shadow in the light.
“If you’ll pardon, sir, I think it’s time, once in a life, for a brandy offered in friendship.”
Looking exasperated by the day and put upon by the attention, Shaw winced, looked left and right, and swigged the drink.
He worked his mouth over some unexpressed words, debated with himself and an invisible opponent, shrugged,
