“Well, Edwina, we have a misunderstanding here, haven’t we? But that’s all right. All wives need to be taught how to obey their husbands—isn’t that right, ladies and gentlemen?” To this he received a mixed cheer. “But Edwina is at last going to put on her dress and act like a lady.” To me he hissed, “Do as I say. You are under my command.”
Idiot. That was my first thought. Next thought? This is all going exactly to plan. And it was, and continued to do so—for the next few moments.
I took the coat, opened it out, began to slip it on in an exaggeratedly female fashion, and then, when I had secured a button or two in what I thought passed for a ladylike way, I put out my hands like a boxer, closed my fists, and began to spar with Jack.
He didn’t know what to do. He was, as you know, shorter than me and a great deal thinner, he didn’t have my reach, and he couldn’t stop my hands from tapping his face. I crowded him and danced away, moved in again, huffing and puffing, dancing on the balls of my feet, feinting and jabbing.
Trying to go along with it, he turned his back on me and walked to the front of the stage.
“Ladies and gentlemen,” he began.
From behind, I grabbed him by the collar and shook him like a dog.
“This fellow—” I shouted. “No gentleman. Let me tell you about him. He beats the shit out of women. Want proof? I have plenty. I’ve seen the bruises.”
After a stunned gasp, some shouts floated up:
“Get off.”
“Get out of here.”
“Go on with the show.”
Jack wriggled, but he couldn’t wrench himself out of my grip. I needed only one hand to hold him by the scruff of the neck, turn him around, and run him off backstage. As we ran I could feel the hammer jolting in my pocket.
The next part had to work fast—because I had to get away. I had parked the car two streets from the hall, and I calculated that the shock of the incident, and his fallen body, would delay any pursuit. But I knew I had to be quick.
It didn’t happen. Backstage stood two men, hefty and louche. They knew Jack had nothing like this in his act.
“Grab him!” Jack shouted, and they did, and ran me to the street door.
For the next three or four minutes they held me splayed and wide as Jack kicked me, pummeled me, blackened my eyes, broke several teeth. He used his elbow first to hit me where I wore the glasses. For weeks, the rings around my eyes made me look like a blue raccoon. He broke my nose and two ribs, and only his henchmen stopped him from kicking in my head.
They threw me into the street with a flurry of kicks. My haunches still feel their boots when frost descends. I never got to throw a punch; that fact hurt most of all.
114
Confession is its own engine, an unstoppable impetus: tell one sin and you want to tell all. Especially if that sin was committed in cold blood. It took some time for my blood to cool—and then it went icy. I knew exactly what I wanted done and how to make it happen; I was prepared to take my time; I merely needed to do the planning, nothing more. My country’s history helped. I visited a hero.
When I fear the final ravages of age, I think of Dan Barry. I found him at home, reduced to a hank of bones, imprisoned in his bed by a fierce housekeeper. She allowed me to see him for five minutes, then told me to scram. More or less. But his eyes said something else; his eyes said, I’m more alert than I seem. We shared a silent nod. My unspoken message: I understand. And I’ll be back.
Learning had authority back then. A college degree had a pride of place. Add medicine and you faced no challenge, not even from a savage housekeeper who was trying to bully an old man into changing his will.
The world gives us two kinds of magic, hard and soft. Hard takes your breath away—John Jacob met his only and long lost brother in Vienna when he dropped his matches on the floor of a bus: that’s “hard” magic. Usually, though, I think of coincidence as “soft” magic.
I didn’t know any doctors near Dan Barry’s house, so I asked in a pub. (Where else?) The drinkers directed me to the “new fellow, but he’s green; he’s only just out of college.”
He weighed a ton and a half; his neck bulged from his collar like two rolls of sausage. Most usefully, though, he had the small, piggy eyes of a bully.
“Where were you before here?” I asked him—and, soft magic, I knew the answer. When he told me I said, to make him my slave, “They had polio over there, didn’t they? Were you involved in that?” He grunted, and I took him captive. As we drove I said, “I came to you because this needs a man with authority. You’ll see what I mean.”
Of course, like all bullies when you give them a free hand, he almost overdid it. By the time we left he had taken down the housekeeper’s home particulars, interrogated her about her nursing experience, asked for references, and told her he was sending in a nurse. I saw him as an advance squad—clearing the ground. He terrified her: you can always bully a bully: they live on fear.
The next day I came back, to assess what had to be done. Mr. Barry had to be fed, but with care. The nurse we’d found arrived an hour after I did, and together we drew up a menu and directed the housekeeper to go shopping. We changed his room—from the dark little closet overhung by trees at the back of the house to a wide-windowed, sunny room at the front.
“This is my own room again,” he said.
The nurse mouthed to me, “That bitch.”
Who soon returned. When I saw the car, I let the nurse loose. “Say what you like,” I told her. “Make sure there are no witnesses.”
Ten minutes later, she came back smiling. “She thinks she’s going to jail.”
We searched his closets, his dressers. He had clothes he’d never worn, pajamas, shirts, underwear still in their shop wrappings. I paid the nurse, who said she’d stay the night. The housekeeper not only held the front door open as I left the house, she darted ahead of me and opened the car door, too. The first part of the plan had clicked firmly into place.
Sunlight picked out Phase Two. She wore red; he, a white shirt. Even at several hundred yards I could see how their relationship had waxed. To a full moon. They heard the car, turned around, waved—and leaned against each other.
Take it easy. Slow walk. Watch them. Yes, no question. James Bermingham has been staking a claim. Planting a flag. Is this going to work? Second part, yes. Phase Three? I hope so; I just flocking hope so.
“What are you doing?”
“Hiya, Ben!” She ran across the grass barefoot and threw her arms around me; her hair smelled of lemon.
“Stranger,” said Jimmy Bermingham. “The man. How’s she cuttin’?”
“In little slices,” I said. We had so many of those meaningless banter phrases, those icebreakers. And each had a variety of answers. To “How’s she cuttin’?” I might have said, “Up the middle and down the sides” or “Around the front and across the back” or “Round as a hoop and you’d roll it.”
Everybody in the country had them. My father said to people, “Where-where-where are you goin’ with no bell on your bike?” Large Lily said to all and sundry, “Well, look what happens when you’re not lookin’.” Billy Moloney, her husband, seemed to have an anthology of them: “The river’s flockin’ risin’ and it’s not flockin’ full.” And “Up and down like a hoor’s drawers.” And “Wherever you see a fox, there’s always a flockin’ hen.”
As I say, they were meaningless—but without malice or harm, and they helped awkward people get over their embarrassment at being alive.
Jimmy looked me up and down. “You’re as healthy as a brown dog,” he said.
“Are you fully recovered?” I asked.
Elma answered, addressing first me, then Jimmy: “He’s still coughing up marbles—aren’t you?”
Behind them on the ground sat a bucket of walnut-sized stones.
“What were you doing?” I asked.
“Jimmy’s improving my aim.”
In the next few minutes I understood why Jimmy got pa
id for his patriotism. Along the fence he had set out five old blue tin mugs. One or two bore dent marks.
“He’s trying to get me to hit them mugs,” said Elma Sloane, “and sure the fence won’t let me hit them, and anyway, amn’t I as left-handed as a duck.”
In fact she was right-handed, but with poor aim. I tried, and hit not a mug.
“We’ll go closer,” I suggested, and Elma said, “No, let Jimmy have a go.”
Thirty yards, I’d say—and he knocked every mug. When he saw my eyebrow raised he nodded, and he was saying to me, Yes. With a gun, too.
We sat on the vanquished fence. No wrinkles of fear threatened Elma’s forehead; the sun landed on her hair like a butterfly; the world around her sang and danced.
“How’s Randall?” I asked.
They looked at each other.
“He’s as cross as a bag of cats,” said Elma.
“Artistic temperament,” suggested Jimmy.
“He’s out with me,” said Elma. Translation: “He’s not speaking to me.”
“When did this happen?”
Jimmy said, “He was bilious the day after I came here.”
“But you’re still all right to stay?”
Elma nodded. “I’m still posing for him.”
Jimmy cut in: “Yeh, you’re still stripping off your clothes for him.”
“But wasn’t that the arrangement? That Elma would be safe here and learn to pose for Randall.”
“He hates me,” said Jimmy. “But he’s afraid to throw me out.”
So that’s why Randall didn’t acknowledge me at the studio window that bad night. I controlled my rising excitement.
“Let me go and talk to him.”
I drove the final stretch of avenue. And saw how Randall got inspired. The lake, gray and long, dull under the cloud cover, yet had a shimmer. Like one of his fish.
He heard the door close behind me and shouted. I followed the yell down the same corridor.
“We’re in here.”
In a new work space, opened beneath a long window, Annette lay on her side, facing Randall. Naked, of course. And unaffected by my arrival. I peered around his shoulder at the canvas: would this be another voluptuous fish?
He looked grumpy. I asked, “How are you, Randall?”
“Can you get that fellow out of here?” He didn’t say it; he shouted it. Annette would have shrugged if she could have raised a shoulder.
Done. My task complete. I needed to tie the ends, but I saw it all. And it played out as simply as I had hoped. That afternoon I joined all the dots. The next day I completed the picture.
Mr. Barry welcomed every move. Jimmy Bermingham loved it. Elma saw the sense. Saw the future. As to her old fears—no worry necessary. I said to her, “You know Jimmy’s connections, don’t you?”
“The things he told me,” she said.
Randall’s mood improved at dinner. “But you’ll still come and pose for me.”
“If he’ll let me,” said Elma.
I said, “He will.”
We went out in the night, Jimmy and I, and when our eyes made the darkness brighter, we looked at the lake.
“What about Marian, though?”
I said, “She has a boyfriend. Longtime. He’s a big cop.”
“Ah,” said Jimmy. “That’s why she couldn’t accommodate me. Opposite sides of the fence.”
Letting him have his justification, I said, “Are you done with all that?”
“I can go back anytime I like. But the flood scared me, to tell you the truth.”
“This is a better deal, Jimmy. He doesn’t have long to live, he’ll leave everything to Elma, and you’ll marry her.”
Jimmy said, “I might have to, anyway.”
“I thought as much. Is that why Randall was furious?”
Jimmy said, “Ah, there was a bit of stuff about Annette, too.”
“Jimmy, you’re a goat.”
“I owe you,” he said to me. “If there’s ever anything I can do.”
Oh, there is, Jimmy, oh, there is. And another piece of the jigsaw slipped into place. Or, should I say, a bolt slid home. Was there a moment in which I hated myself for the coldness of my long-term scheming? Not then.
115
The next day, I drove to Mr. Barry’s house—twice. First, to reconnoiter. And, indeed, the nurse had taken control.
“The bitch won’t stay long.”
“But she doesn’t bully him anymore?”
“Put money on that. She knows I’d wring her neck.”
“How is he?”
The nurse said, “D’you know what? I never met a nicer man. He’s great company. I could listen to him all day. The books that man has read.” She folded another towel. “But he hasn’t long left.”
“Did he say anything about a girl?”
The nurse gave me her complete attention. “D’you know what? I think she should be here.”
“How much of the story has he told you?”
She said, “D’you know what? I know the Sloanes. Elma is over in England.” She winked at me. “Or so everyone says.”
“In Ireland,” I sighed, “a secret is something everyone else knows about you.”
“She’s a very nice girl,” said the nurse, “and she has a very nice mother. And an animal for a father.”
“Wave a magic wand,” I said, needing confirmation. “What do you think should happen?”
“If there was some way that girl could live here. All he wants to do is look at her and talk to her. He’s not able to do much more than that, anyway.”
“Could he live long?”
She grimaced. “He’s going down the home straight. The body is weak, and that bitch downstairs wore him down.”
“Let me try something on you. If there was a way of fixing it so that Elma could live here—would it work?”
“She’d need protection. From that bloody housekeeper. And I can’t be here all day, every day. But he’s stone mad about Elma.”
“Make sure he looks his best in about two hours,” I said.
She grinned and winked.
Jimmy took his brief with great attention. He looked at me from time to time with surprise. I told him not to interrupt me.
“He will leave Elma everything. I don’t know how much money he has, but I’d say it’s a lot. And the place is top-notch. You just have to be patient. You can’t marry her till he’s dead. He’ll love you anyway—he’ll love your involvement with what you call ‘the cause’ and he calls ‘the movement.’ He can never know that there’s anything between you and Elma. You have to be discreet. He won’t be leaving that room often. But just be careful. And leave it to me—I’ll build the bridge. You’ll never have to do a day’s work for the rest of your life.”
I finished. Jimmy looked at me, mouth open, eyes wide.
“I didn’t know you were a wizard. Ben the magic man.”
I said, “But it’s good magic. We’re going to do it in stages.”
The nurse announced us: “Mr. Barry, you have visitors.”
I could see him in the distance across his wide room. My God, he’s even frailer today. I forget how ancient he is. This is like looking into the past. Did he suddenly let go of his defenses with the new nurse? But he’s lucid, that’s for sure.
“How are you?” I said, as I walked toward his bed. “Look who’s here.”
Elma, as instructed, had slipped in behind me so that I masked her. When I stepped aside, he gasped. At the other side of the bed, the nurse helped him sit up.
“Now, Mr. Barry, isn’t that a nice visitor to get? Hallo, Elma.”
“Howya, Irene. Hello, Dan.” Elma handled it with warmth and grace. She reached for Mr. Barry’s hand, then leaned in and kissed him on the forehead.
“Are you back or am I dreaming?”
“This is me, Dan, in all my little glory,” she said. “How are you at all?”
“But—but, I mean—are you really back? For good?”
“F
or good and bad,” she said, and laughed.
“Will you come here to stay with me?”
She said, “I will, that’s why I’m here, Dan. To look after you.”
Malachi MacCool took one look at the girl and reeled back.… His heart’s desire.… A flash of forked lightning …
“I knew it’d happen one day,” he said. “I had faith.” And he leaned back on his pillows.
Elma stood by the bed, not relinquishing his hand.
“Didn’t I always say I was the bad penny, Dan? That I’d always turn up?”
When he opened his eyes, the girl hadn’t gone away.… A pillar of the gentle light.… Sweet as cane sugar, thoughtful and serene … of a fond nature.
“And you’ll be here with me?”
She squeezed his hand. “For ever and a day, Dan.”
My head began to spin.
What am I doing? What have I done? Played games with an old heart? Or looked to the future? What ethics? Where is this ethical? Do the emotions have their own ethical compass? Then the ice in me set again, and I didn’t care about ethics.
Dan Barry, barely able to speak, asked, “Elma, will you marry me?”
She looked around the room. “You’ll all have to go out for a minute; I’ll call you all back.”
Nurse Irene and I walked—and waited. Within minutes Elma called. We went back in as soft-footed as though going to a wake.
Elma said, “Dan has proposed to me, and I’ve accepted.”
Mal couldn’t speak, except in his head, where he kept saying, “Oh.” At last he took the girl’s hand and welcomed her.
Irene hugged her. I said, “Another good man gone. There’s only a few of us bachelors left.” Dan Barry wept.
“This,” he said, eventually, “is the happiest day of my life.”
My father’s voice in my head. Machiavelli was Irish, Ben. His-his-his name was actually Mac Hiavelli. Like MacMahon. Or MacCormack. Or MacCarthy. We-we-we’re the same Mac as Machiavelli. Didn’t you know that? Ask-ask-ask your mother. She’ll tell you.
When the excitement settled down, Irene took Elma downstairs. To bring back a bottle of something. Glasses should be raised. While they were gone, I settled by the bed.
“Did you do all this?”