“Ah,” said Jimmy, “we all get that way betimes.”
“Yeah,” said Rose, “but they’re all desperate worried because Mr. Handel, he had a stroke, and they’re afraid he’ll have another one, and if he does while he’s in their house, what’ll the king say? I mean—they don’t care if he has a stroke and dies on the boat going back to England, so long as he doesn’t die on them.”
“That’s not very nice,” said Jimmy. And then he thought for a minute. “D’you know what, Rose, my father got a stroke and he didn’t die of it. And d’you know why he didn’t die of it? ’Cause I was there. And I stopped him getting a second stroke.”
“Ya did not?” said Rose, not inclined to believe him.
“Go down Henrietta Street and ask anyone, and they’ll tell you,” said Jimmy. “Ask ’em, did Jimmy Hanly stop his own father dying of a stroke and then stop him from getting a fatal second stroke, and they’ll tell you he did. That’s the God’s honest truth.”
Rose was a good girl, and she was well thought of by her employers, who were Mr. Handel’s hosts. When she went to work the next day the German gentleman was worse than ever, pacing the place and effing and blinding or whatever they did in them days.
Rose says to her mistress, “Ma’am, a friend of mine, I hope I’m not speaking above my station, ma’am, he told me he kept his father alive after getting a stroke and he stopped him from getting a second stroke.”
The woman of the house looked at her as if she was after falling down off of a cloud, and she says to Rose, “How did he do it? For I’d give a lot to know that secret.”
And Rose says, “Ma’am, I’ll ask him.”
When she was knocking off from work that day, Rose met Jimmy Hanly outside on the street.
“Come here to me, your father and the stroke—how did ya do it?”
“Who wants to know?” said Jimmy.
“My lady,” said Rose, “’cause she’s only demented from Mr. Handel, he’s worse every day, and last night he went without his breath for a minute, nearly purple he was.”
Jimmy saw his chance. “This isn’t something I can tell anyone,” he said. “This is something I can only do.”
Rose thought about this. “I dunno. Everybody’s gone out from him, his temper is so bad. He had a clerk and secretary and a fella to copy his music, and they’re all gone, he won’t let them near him.”
“And what’s he doing all day?” said Jimmy.
“He’s sitting down moping, or he’s walking up and down snarling,” said Rose.
“Tell everyone they’ve only a few days left, in my opinion,” said Jimmy, “before his heart bursts with another stroke.”
Rose went pale, but she reported Jimmy’s words back to her mistress. And the mistress went pale, and she reported to her husband, who said, “Bring that fella in. He can’t do worse than the people what’s gone before him.”
This was a big house with a grand staircase. If there were ten people living there, they had thirty servants; if there were twenty people, they had sixty servants—it was that kind of a place. They paid them that worked there no more than pennies a week and a share of the food, but it was a good station if you didn’t mind being a servant. And it was one of the first grand houses in an Irish city that wasn’t a castle nor a hut, like. It was built of good strong stone out of a quarry in Kildare, and it had been drawn up by an architect.
Rose brought Jimmy in, and he stood at the foot of the stairs. He stared all around him—at the curtains and the windows and the lovely flagstones on the floors and the chairs with their crimson brocade and the green walls and the mahogany table with the big silver urn full of flowers and the huge logs in a fireplace you could stand up in and the fire sizzling because the heavy rain outside was spitting down the chimney into the flames and the long painting over the mantel showing the man of the house leaning against a tree with a gun crooked over his arm and his two dogs beside him—and this is only the hallway we’re talking about.
“What are you looking at?” said a voice, real angry like.
Jimmy looked around him, and he couldn’t see nobody, but he answered all the same, “I’m looking at these gorgeous things.”
The voice said, “Are you planning to steal them?”—because Jimmy, being from a poor family, was not in the best of clothes: he was not what you might call a picture of sartorial discrimination.
“Whoever you are, sir,” said Jimmy to the voice he couldn’t see, but of course he guessed from the thick accent who it might be, “let me tell you that the only thing Jimmy Hanly ever stole was his own father’s life. And the person from whom he stole it was Death himself.”
The man with the thick voice came out of a room, big face on him.
“What’s your name?”
“Hanly,” says Jimmy.
“Handel?” says our man, a big stomach on him from eating truffles.
“No, sir,” said Jimmy. “You’re Handel right enough, I’m Hanly. But we might be related.”
Handel looked at Jimmy, and Jimmy looked at Handel. He saw a heavy man with a red nose, a bit like his own father, and a man who was worried about himself. He walked slowly, he blinked a lot, and his left arm dragged a bit; that was another thing Jimmy recognized from seeing the effects of a stroke. And when Handel looked at Jimmy, he saw a tall young fellow in his middle twenties, sort of sandy-haired, with a pair of kind eyes.
“No, we’re not related,” said Handel. “I’m from Germany and you’re not.”
“Ah, sir, sure we’re all related under God.”
“Leave God out of it,” said Handel. “I’m annoyed with him.”
“Why has he you annoyed, sir?” said Jimmy, and he took a step closer to the big man. “And what happened to your arm? Aw, would you look at that. You poor man.”
Now, the thing is—great people never have anyone to give them sympathy. They get praise, sure, and they get admiration and they get patted on the back and they get the best of everything, pork and fresh herrings and mashed potatoes with cream. But they never get sympathy, because they look so successful and confident that nobody ever thinks they need it. Jimmy Hanly, though, had found out that his father, who worked on the docks and was a hard man with a bad temper, was much easier to manage when he got a bit of soft talk and compassion.
The same turned out to be the case for George Frideric Handel. He held out his arm to Jimmy like a dog holding up a sore paw, and he said, “I had a stroke.” He said it the way a small child would say, “I cut my finger.”
Jimmy looked at the arm, and he saw that it wasn’t too bad—it was a bit floppy, but the gentleman had some use of it.
“But that’s what my father had, sir. He had a stroke.”
“Your father?” said Handel. “Whose life you say you stole back from Death?”
“One and the same man,” said Jimmy.
“Come in here, sit down beside me and tell me how you did it,” said Handel, “for I’m half out of my mind with worry that I’ll get another stroke and that it’ll finish me. But I seem to be doing everything I can to bring it onto myself.”
“Isn’t that always the case?” said Jimmy. “We’re always trying to cause the one thing we should be trying to stop.”
“Let me think about that,” said Handel. “That seems to me a very wise statement.”
To cut a long story short, they sat on a couch cheek by jowl, and Handel said to Jimmy, “I’d ask you if you’d like a cup of tea, only there’s nobody here to make it for us.”
“I thought this house was full of people,” said Jimmy, “and I know for a fact that my friend Rose works here, for it was her brung me in.”
Handel said, “I think I’ve frightened everybody away.”
“A nice man like you, sir?” said Jimmy Hanly. “Ah, no, not at all, there must be some other reason. I’ll go find Rose.”
“No. Stay here and talk to me,” said Handel. “They’ll have to come out of their hidey-holes eventually.”
By
the time Handel’s host and hostess appeared, the great man had been taken over by Jimmy Hanly’s charm. Now that sounds as if it was all very shallow—but it wasn’t. In fact what happened was very important; Jimmy made Handel relax, made him shake off his bad humor, and made him feel better—so much that Handel said to his host and hostess that he wished Jimmy to start the very next morning as his clerk for as long as he’d be staying in Dublin.
They agreed but they tipped the wink to Rose to tell Jimmy come along good and early so’s they could put a decent suit of clothes on him.
Nine o’clock next morning, after being an hour with the valets of the house, Jimmy turns up like a new pin in Mr. Handel’s chamber. The German gentleman is sitting up in bed, and he’s humming like a rail that’s expecting a train.
“Good morning, sir,” said Jimmy. “How are you this morning?”
“Is this my cousin?” jokes Handel. “I’m glad to see that you know a good suit of clothes when you see one.”
“Now, sir,” said Jimmy, “it’s still raining out there, and the wind is howling along the street like a pair of bellows you’d use to blow the fire hot. So you can’t sail today either. And into the bargain, on my way here I met a farmer from north county Dublin who’s very good at forecasting the weather, and he says ’tis going to be bad for at least another week because the birds are flying upside down.”
Well: instead of fuming like a giant, Handel started to laugh, and he said to Jimmy, “Flying upside down. That’s very funny. You’re the only one around here understands anything. The others only give me good news. If there is any. They do it to please me, but the thing about writing music is—you have to tell people the bad news as well as the good.”
“Oh? Did I walk in on you, sir, while you’re writing music? Because if so, I’m very sorry of the interruption.”
“Ahhhh,” said Mr Handel. “If only you had.”
“But,” says Jimmy, “isn’t that your job, like? Writing music?”
“I’m not able to do it anymore,” said Handel. “If I could, I wouldn’t mind the bad weather so much.”
“And why aren’t you able to do it?” says Jimmy.
“I don’t know. I’ve nothing to write about.”
“What are you talking about? Haven’t you the whole wide world to write about?”
Handel looked at him from under his heavy eyelids. “Cousin Jimmy,” says he. “Isn’t that why I’m annoyed with God? He won’t let me do it.”
Jimmy Hanly looked at Handel, and Handel looked at Jimmy Hanly, two paragons each in his own way. And Jimmy said, “Mr. Handel, I know how to fix that.”
“If you do,” said Handel, “I’ll make sure that the next piece of music I write will be performed first here in your own native Dublin.”
Well: there’s nothing like pride in his own city to get a Dublinman’s faculties working. Jimmy Hanly would have winked at the big German gentleman in the bed if it wasn’t disrespectful.
“My dear sir,” said Jimmy, taking the liberty of sitting down on the blanket near Handel, “when a man has a problem, he should always go to what’s causing the problem to find the solution.”
“Them are good words and wise,” said Handel, “but what do youse mean like?”
“I mean, you’re saying God’s not listening to you—so I say, Make him listen.”
“My prayers have a broken wing these days,” said Handel, “kinda like myself,” and again he holds up the feeble arm.
“This is what you do,” said Jimmy—and this is where he made history. “Stop praying to God and start writing about him.”
“How would I do that?” says Handel.
“Suppose,” says Jimmy, “suppose you wanted to tell me a story. Wouldn’t it be about somebody?”
“It’d hardly be about a pool of water,” said Handel.
“Or a pot of milk.”
“Fair enough. It’d be about someone or his family.”
“What are you driving at?” said Handel.
“I’m saying—you’re having a bit of difficulty getting God’s attention. So—why don’t you write about his family?”
Handel looked at Jimmy. “Are you serious?”
“Yeah. Easy enough too. He had only the one son and no daughters. And the family story is well known.”
Handel stroked his chin, and he looked out the window, and he stroked his chin again, and then he climbed out of the bed and he said to Jimmy, “Wherever I am during the next few days and weeks, make sure you’re nearby.”
He started work that very morning.
For three weeks George Frideric Handel worked like a nailer, a flying slave. He rose at cockcrow, he had Jimmy sharpen all his quill pens and line up piles of music paper on the floor beside his desk, and he wrote like a man with an engine. And while he wrote his nature changed—people couldn’t believe the difference in him. He hummed, he sang, he laughed, and several times a day he’d say to Jimmy Hanly, “Listen to this, cousin.” He’d hum a few passages, and he’d say, “Isn’t that sublime?”
And Jimmy would reply, “Only sublime, sir.”
Once or twice, Jimmy would put in his oar, and Handel would listen, nod, and say, “Yes, that’s a good idea,” and he’d scribble faster. For instance, Jimmy said, “Sir, begging your pardon like—that word there, ‘disliked’—I think you’ll find it isn’t the same word as the scripture has.”
“The scripture says ‘despised,’ but is it going to be a big enough word, strong enough I mean?”
“You mean—it’s a bit puny like?”
Jimmy, now, was perched on a couch, or sitting on the floor near Mr. Handel, peeling an apple or something like that.
“What about ‘detested’?”
“H’m?” said Jimmy and wrinkled his nose.
“Loathed? Abhorred? Abominated?”
“He was abominated,” said Jimmy, testing the word on his tongue. “Try a few more.”
“Hated? Contumeliated?”
“We’re getting there,” said Jimmy Hanly. “D’you know—I think the first word’s the best.”
“I’ll do that,” said Handel. “I’ll stick to ‘Despised.’”
“You can always drag out the note,” said Jimmy, “so you’re doing grand.”
Three weeks and a day Handel sat in that house, writing like a trooper. From time to time Jimmy’d make him stop, and he’d lead Mr. Handel over to the nearest wall of the room, and he’d say to him, “Now. Put your poor hand on the wall there and make your fingers crawl up and down.” And every day he’d make Mr. Handel’s hand climb a little higher—because all the time he was getting the gentleman to exercise the arm that had the stroke in it. Jimmy did it with his own father, that’s how he knew. And the German gentleman could see that his hand was getting stronger and stronger, and consequently, to the astonishment of precisely nobody in particular, he composed his music better and better.
Halfway through the composition he said to Jimmy Hanly, “We’re going to need a big choir.”
“That’s no bother,” said Jimmy. “There’s a grand stack of singers over at Saint Patrick’s Cathedral.”
And so, as the Bible says, it came to pass—a gala night, one of the most famous nights ever in Dublin, don’t we talk about it still, the first night of The Messiah. The place was packed; everyone turned up in their finery, and so did Jimmy. Handel had him seated in a place of honor, where he could see him, and Jimmy nodded every time his German friend did a piece of extra grand conducting. And I can tell you for a fact—he gave an extra special smile when he saw Handel manage to use the bad arm if he wanted to add a bit of spice to the proceedings.
Everyone was on their best behavior. The choir of Saint Patrick’s sang their hearts out like birds in a garden. There was a girl over from England, a married lady, like, an actress, and her name was Mrs. Cibber. She sang what Jimmy came to think of as the bit he wrote, which Handel added a syllable onto and turned it into “He was despised.”
Now being an actress
in those days was only one step up from what we were calling a “working girl,” no respect at all, like. But this Mrs. Cibber, she sang this like an angel, and when she was after singing her heart out, over there in the New Music Hall in Fishamble Street, Dr. Delany, who was a dean or a canon or something high up over in the cathedral, jumped to his feet and shouted out, “Madam, for this thy sins are forgiven thee.”
The night was a great success altogether, and the people in the know, by which I mean the German gentleman’s host and hostess, they said it couldn’t have happened if Jimmy Hanly hadn’t handled Handel.
And Mr. Handel himself—he said from the podium where he was conducting, “This oratorio is for the relief of prisoners in Dublin’s jails so’s they can have decent food. And I have to say to you—we’d need a lot less money for relief if we weren’t packing the jails with youngsters who are only accused of stealing an apple or an orange. What young fella wouldn’t do that if he got the chance?”
Jimmy’s brother was released out of the jail the next day.
Handel, of course, went back to England and spent the rest of his life conducting his Messiah here, there, and everywhere. And not only that; his success with it lifted his spirits, that and the fact that he wrote it in three weeks flat. And didn’t he get back nearly all the power of his left arm?
Jimmy was given a job as the butler in the house where Handel stayed, and for the rest of his life they gave James Hanly credit for helping Handel to write The Messiah, and as he walked the streets of Dublin, as slow and dignified as any respectable man, he was always pointed out to people as “the Only Man Who Could Handle Handel.”
Ronan looked at Carmel and Yvonne to gauge their reactions; they had let their mouths fall open.
“Dickie, is that story true?” said Carmel.
“Is it?” said Yvonne.
“Ach, what’s true—’course ’tis true, everything I say is true.”