Authors: Michael Redhill
“I’ve never met her.”
“She must have changed her name,” he mused, then looked up brightly. “She must have married.”
“You never spoke to any of them again.”
He was lost in a reverie, slowly rubbing his forearm. “Take me up, and cast me forth into the sea; so shall the sea be calm unto you: for I know that for my sake this great tempest is upon you.” He looked up at me. “Jonah.”
“I know who it is.”
“I must have been a very great sinner. Terrible things happened to us.”
“Is that why you had Martin baptized?”
“He told you that, did he?”
“Yes. He said you took him into a church and the priest touched holy water to his forehead.”
He looked up at me, and around the room, where the futile accretions of his remorse had risen up like monuments.
“I couldn’t bear that he’d grow up not being watched over.”
“He
wasn’t
watched over, Colin. He was a lot of things, but
watched-over
wasn’t one of them. You pushed everything you were afraid of on him, and he carried it. He had no faith in anything because of you.”
He listened, watching me with bone-pale eyes. He didn’t speak for a moment. Then he said, “Is it Jolene?”
“Yes.”
“I’m hungry,” he said. “I don’t eat very well.”
I felt my face buckle. There was nothing worse than this, to be here with these very last atoms of this ruined line. I straightened my back. “I’ll make you something,” I said. “What do you want?”
“Can you bake?”
Colin Sloane’s kitchen reminded me of Daniel’s, only it was the kitchen of a man whose body no longer needed much more than bread and butter (and milk) to live on. Judging from the contents of the fridge, which had one pound of butter in the door and five others in the freezer, that was in fact all he ate. A loaf of fresh bread sat on a cutting board covered in a tea towel. I cut a slice, buttered it, and ate as I searched the cupboards for the ingredients to make the lemon pie he’d asked me to make. His supplies were the sorts of staples that couldn’t be eaten on their own; they connoted the end-run of a grocery list whose more easily consumable items had long ago been eaten. There was chutney, but no soup; flour but no rice; honey but no cookies. The ingredients for the pie (and how long had he been craving it?) were scattered on the shelves. Cornstarch, sugar, an unopened bottle of lemon juice. The recipe was in a well thumbed binder full of loose index cards and handwritten notes. He confirmed it was Adele’s hand and the recipe I was to use hers. She’d first made the pie for him when they were dating in Dublin, just after he’d brought her back to his own coast, snatching her from her future in Canada. Although it had been only delayed. Maybe that’s the case with fate anyway, I thought, with all its postponements in vain.
I went down to the street to get the eggs the recipe called for, the two fresh lemons. I was in a kind of trance, worried for Molly and longing for Daniel. And I felt relief as well. That my own answers, the ones I made up for my own consolation, would not be disturbed. When I got back to the house, Colin Sloane was still sitting at the kitchen’s small breakfast table, itself piled as high with detritus as any other horizontal surface in the place. He obviously ate walking around or in his bed. He watched me make the pie crust, pressing it into the tin for me like a child helping his mother. I boiled water, poured it into the dry ingredients, and then thickened it on the stove with the eggs and lemon juice. He closed his eyes as the scent began to fill the room. “This takes me back,” he said. “What a lovely time.”
“It doesn’t make you sad?”
“Oh yes. But much more as well.”
I baked the pie shell as the mixture set, then poured it in, added the zest, and baked it again. He watched it in the oven. Then I cut us each a slice and we ate together in his blissful silence in the front room again, another glass of cold milk each. He smacked his mouth in pleasure, and my heart went out to him, in his loneliness, in which he longed for something he couldn’t have and would settle instead for lemon pie.
“Martin had a sweet tooth, too,” I said.
“He liked sweet sweets. Chocolate, hard candy. I like it sour.” He continued to eat in silence, then glanced over at the pie when his plate was empty, and I cut him another slice.
I didn’t know what else to talk to him about. I’d seen enough, and yet it felt that being the only visitor for some time, I had an obligation to stay. “Can I do some shopping for you before I go?” I asked. He declined, saying he had enough to live on. I let him eat quietly on his own and got up to look around some more. The bedroom, I saw, was empty but for the bed with its heavy sheets askew. There was not so much as a bedside table with a book on it, or even a dresser. His clothes were elsewhere, perhaps in a closet. The bedroom’s nakedness filled me with shame: the rest of the apartment resonated with mad hope, here was only the acknowledgement of death, its simplicity. I made the bed up, smoothing down the sheets, and had the image of myself spending the night there, sitting at the side of the bed and watching him sleep.
When I came out, he was standing beside the table. I went and stood beside him in silence, stood looking over the half-finished works, the copies made blindly, acts of helpless love. And who had I loved like that? Had I ever been gripped by love like that? Had I submitted to it, or had I stood remote from it, looking for assurance, wanting its sanctuary but not its chaos? Had it not been Molly, after all, who would have known what to do with real love if it had ever seen fit to seek her out? What lay arrayed on the table, that elemental memory, reproached me in its uselessness, in its desolate tie to living things, to living memory, to the child this man had loved, who I had loved in my dumb hopefulness, but also in my openness to the terrors of love.
“Take something,” Colin said.
“You didn’t make these for me.”
“I must have, though,” he said. “You’re the only one here.” He held his hand over the jumble of objects, then brushed aside some tinsel on top of a tiny box and put it in my hands. It was something he had made himself, not a copy of one of Martin’s works. A small thing, clumsily made. I held it at eye level and saw, behind a little pane of glass, a lead horse pulling a cart down a city street. There was a rider on top, a boy, his face averted, his eyes shaded, lost in thought. Two bent nails locking the wheels in place, preventing the cart from moving. Keeping the boy from his errands. Keeping him.
“He loved horses,” he said. I bent forward and kissed him on his cheek and he leaned against me, his eyes shut, accepting my warmth. He would live in only my stories now, my memory the vanishing point for both father and son.
“You know our prayers won’t be answered, Colin.”
“I know,” he said. “I do my penance anyway.”
Down, down into the streets and parks, along the river, past the churches and squares. Down Domenick and back over the river at the top of Claddagh Quay, and down to New Dock, past the restaurants and the trinket-sellers. The dead village covered over, the thatch huts and the fishing nets rotting under sand at the water’s edge, a whole way of life silted over, progress, the future, whatever it gets called, I ran, I ran past the historical markers and down to the old dock where the ships left for what they still called the New World. I looked over it, my chest aching for breath, and I could almost see him: the child in his good suit, his pasteboard suitcase hanging limp from his hand, searching back over the crowd for a single receding form.
In this place, he was still a child. I could reach out and touch him, turn him to me, his small body as thin and hollow as a bird’s, and stop him from looking on the great ship bearing down on them, cover his ears to its metal bellowings, keep its power from him, its power to move his life in a way he would never recover from. But he was going to go into the ship, he was leaving everything that ever mattered to him, he would do it again, and he would teach me that love is not a home, it is not safe to love other people, our faith in love is misplaced. Although, after all this time, I still don’t know where else to put it.
I looked out over the black ocean, its unthinkable distances.
Stay with me.
This is a work of fiction, but it is rooted in the art of Joseph Cornell, and the boxes depicted here are indebted to the spirit of his work. I’m grateful for the assistance I was given while researching Cornell’s art, especially to Susan Cross at the Guggenheim Museum and Christina Lee and Mark Williams at the Museum of Modern Art who allowed me access to works in permanent collections. Amy Poll of the Leo Castelli Gallery made a number of important out-of-print books available to me. My gratitude to these people and institutions for their assistance.
In Ireland, my thanks to the Gilbert Library in Dublin (and especially Máire Kennedy), Asher Siev of the Irish-Jewish Museum in Dublin, Diane Dixon of the EU Projects Office of the Dublin City Public Libraries, and Bernie Finan of the University College Library in Galway.
I am greatly indebted to those who read this book at various stages in its composition and offered their insights.Much thanks to André Alexis, Michael Helm, Dennis Lee, Tim and Nial Meagher, Michael Ondaatje, Anne Simard, Linda Spalding, Esta Spalding, and Eddy Yanofsky. Fashions by Ruth Marshall, with thanks. To my editor, Maya Mavjee, my agents Jennifer Barclay and Ellen Levine, and to Martha Kanya-Forstner, Carla Kean, Samantha Mitschka, and Adrienne Ball at Doubleday Canada, much gratitude as well. My thanks as well to Emily Salkin Takoudes at Little, Brown’s Back Bay Books, and Ravi Merchandani at Heinemann UK for their warmth and enthusiasm.
The translator of the quote from
Alcestis
that opens this book is Richard Lattimore.
The song on page 30 is “When Day is Done,” by Robert Katscher, 1926, English lyrics by B.G. DeSylva.
Finally, many thanks to Mary Lindsay and Eddy Yanofsky, who made me the gift of a space in their house to write. I spent two years of afternoons there and their friendship and generosity, known in these parts as typical, was greatly appreciated.
MR
Toronto 1992–2001