Thomas Murphy Read online

  RABBI BEN MURPHY

  Grow old along with me.

  The rest is yet to be.

  The last of life for which God made the first.

  Goodbye to mates and friends.

  Hello to (Christ!) Depends.

  You only have rehearsed for being hearsed.

  PETITION. THE RESIDENTS OF THE BELNORD APARTMENT HOUSE DEMAND THE EXPULSION OF THOMAS J. MURPHY FROM THE BUILDING AS SOON AS POSSIBLE. MANY OF US HAVE COMPLAINED OF MR. MURPHY’S PUBLIC DISPLAYS IN RECENT MONTHS. HIS LATE-NIGHT SINGING IN THE COURTYARD, IN INAPPROPRIATE DRESS AND IN AN INEBRIATED CONDITION. HIS CONTINUALLY LEAVING HIS FRONT DOOR OPEN, AS WELL AS HIS ATTEMPT TO BREAK INTO MRS. LIVINGSTON’S APARTMENT. HIS CARELESSNESS IN HIS KITCHEN, LEADING TO A NEAR FIRE IN THE BUILDING. MOST RECENTLY, HIS ATTEMPT TO STEAL MR. BOTSFORD’S VESPA AND THEN PUSHING IT TO THE GROUND, AWAKENING THE RESIDENTS. THESE DISTURBANCES HAVE PROMPTED THE OWNERS OF THE BUILDING TO ASK MR. MURPHY TO LEAVE, TO WHICH REQUEST MR. MURPHY HAS NOT RESPONDED. WE THE UNDERSIGNED SUPPORT THE OWNERS’ EFFORTS IN THIS REGARD. ONCE SIGNED, THIS PETITION WILL BE PRESENTED TO THE BUILDING’S ATTORNEYS FOR IMMEDIATE ACTION.

  DANIEL A. PERACHIK

  SUPERINTENDENT

  TELL ME WHAT I see, she says. I position her, as if she were posing for a portrait. Synge’s Chair never looked lovelier, the rocks tinged with moss and orange-iron. Even the scraggy fields glow green. She is wearing an Irish sweater she bought herself for the trip, and with her hair blowing about in the cold sunshine, you never would know that she was not born and reared in my native land. In certain poses, at certain times, Oona would take my breath away. Sarah takes my breath away here. It has been a while since I felt a surge of happiness, or freedom for that matter. I clasp her by the shoulders, and kiss her for the first time, at long last. She kisses back. Enough of that for the time being, she says. Tell me what I see.

  Directly in front of you, the rocks of Synge’s Chair are mostly flat and arranged in a semicircle with a narrow opening to the right through which you entered, I tell her. The line of the Atlantic is narrow from this vantage point. You see a blue slash of water, as if an artist had moved his brush under the horizon with a lateral sweep of the hand. Above that, the sky is a mixture of blue and white, the white wispy and hazy, coquettish, vague. It stands out against the black rocks directly before you.

  Ah, the rocks, she says. You love the rocks. I do, I say. One sits in Synge’s Chair, I tell her, and automatically the eye goes to the sea and sky, skipping over the very sight that makes the sea and sky beautiful. The topmost rock looks like a hog’s skull. The one to the left of it, a caveman’s head with a protruding jaw. Both rocks rest on one that resembles a stubborn potentate with a white nose. He is wearing the two rocks above him as a headdress, perhaps a pair of turbans. To the left and right of him are two children rocks, leaning on their da. I see it, says Sarah.

  In the crevices of the rocks lie secrets, I tell her. Notes and poems and fragments of thoughts people wrote a thousand years ago, rolled them into scrolls, and stuck them deep in the dark damp holes, too deep for us to reach. If we listen attentively, we can hear the messages buried in the holes. But they come out jumbled and incoherent, so rather than try to make out the words, we hear them all combined into a solemn piece of music. Monks’ chants. I am trying to hear that music, says Sarah. But what more can I see? The sky is changing shape, I say. The white clouds swell in a pulse, and are larger and more pronounced. Do the rocks change as the sky changes? she asks. If you look long and hard, they do. Yes, I say. She says, I’ll look long and hard.

  What’s to the left of me, Murph? Flat land sloping. Green, gray, white, and then the sea, I tell her. Now here, from this perspective, the line of the Atlantic appears much thicker than a brushstroke, and the blue is deeper, stronger, like a decision made and stuck to after much waffling. It is definite, the right decision. What has been decided? she asks. You’ll have to ask the ocean, I tell her. Three white-walled cottages crop up where the green meets the gray. From here they look quite small, I say, like the toy houses provided with electric train sets. One has a tin roof, and a red door. The doors of the other two are black, and the roofs are thatch. If one peers closely, it appears that the white wall of the tin-roofed cottage has strands of silver and blue in it, like swimming herring, and pink flowers growing at the base. One of the flower heads is bowed in meditation. You can’t see it from here, says Sarah. You’re making that up. I am, I tell her. She smiles.

  Inside the cottage with blue and silver fish in the walls, I go on, a couple sits reading in frayed chintz chairs. How old are the couple? she asks. He’s seventy-two. She looks to be in her early, perhaps midthirties. Early, says Sarah. Definitely early. Anyone can see that. So, they are father and daughter? says Sarah, forcing her face into innocence. Let me look closer, I say. No. The way their bodies are angled toward each other, they appear to be lovers, or man and wife. The two being mutually exclusive? says Sarah. What are they reading? Can you make that out? I tell her, I can’t see what the woman in her early thirties is reading (the Sarah smile), but the man has a book of Ben Jonson’s poems. Wait. He’s reading “His Excuse for Loving.” Do you know it? Sarah shakes her head. The print is too small for me to read, but by a lucky coincidence, I know the poem by heart. That is lucky, says Sarah. What’s the poem about? she asks. It’s about the love of an old man for a much younger girl, I tell her. Never happens, she says. Recite it?

  Let it not your wonder move,

  Less your laughter, that I love.

  Though I now write fifty years,

  I have had, and have, my peers;

  Poets, though divine, are men,

  Some have lov’d as old again.

  And it is not always face,

  Clothes, or fortune, gives the grace;

  Or the feature, or the youth.

  But the language and the truth.

  She says nothing, but rather turns her head to the side. What’s to the right of me, Murph? To the right of you, the land begins with boulders, then slopes down past the stiles to the sea that looks different yet again. Here the water is tinged with pink and gray, and appears less definite, though not wishy-washy. More like someone accustomed to ambiguity. On the shore, several seagulls stand tall and still, as if listening to instructions. They face east, every one of them. The grasses around them are yellow-green. The sky directly over them shows a gray funnel at the top. Are there more rocks on this side of me? she asks. No, I tell her. Here it is clear, save for a donkey about fifteen yards away, standing as still as the birds. His belly is a brownish gray, and his legs and face are white. He seems both drowsy and anxious. If you were my grandson, William, I’d tell you the donkey has wings, great golden wings. Does he have wings? asks Sarah. Yes, I say.

  What else is there to see, Murph? Well—scanning the scene again—there. How did I miss that? Someone has created a tall stack of flat stones in the shape of a giant beehive. Really? she says. Yes, I tell her. I mean, really? she says. Yes. This is true. It’s quite remarkable. Must be seven or eight feet high. And there are two sheep on either side of it, standing like royal guards. Why would someone build such a thing out here, asks Sarah, where no one will see it? I could make up something about man controlling nature, or art for art’s sake, I tell her, but my guess is that whoever built the thing simply did it to see if it could be done. A beehive made of stones. Like a poem, says Sarah. Like a poem, I say. Was that all there was to the Ben Jonson poem? she asks. No, I tell her, it goes on.

  With the ardour and the passion,

  Gives the lover weight and fashion.

  If you then will read the story,

  First prepare you to be sorry

  That you never knew till now

  Either whom to love or how:

  But be glad, as soon with me,

  When you know that this is she

  Of whose beauty it was sung;

  She shall make the old man young,

  Keep the middle age at stay,


  And let nothing high decay,

  Till she be the reason why

  All the world for love may die.

  She is small, silent, motionless in Synge’s Chair. Is that everything? she says finally. Do I see everything there is to see? There are two more things, I tell her. Over the top of the rock pile behind you, you can make out the horns of a cow with a white head, and brown eyes staring. Horns, she says. How do you know it’s not a bull? It’s a cow, I tell her. You can tell by the size of the head. And if I were to go around to the other side of the rocks, there are other ways of telling a bull from a cow. And the second remaining thing I see? she says. That’s me, I tell her. Me looking at you. Oh, she says. I always see you, Murph. I’ll sleep with you tonight, I say. You’d better, she says.

  HOW WILL I KNOW it’s you at the door? she asks, because we have separate rooms across the hall from each other in the B and B, and Mrs. McGeary, our hag of a landlady, gave us the fish eye when we registered. I tell her I’ll knock four times—two knocks followed by a pause followed by two more knocks. And I’ll be as quiet as a mouse, I say, because if Mrs. McGeary senses any hanky-panky, the whole of greater Inishmaan will be giggling at us in the morning. Well, says Sarah, you might not make much noise with your four knocks, but the two of us may be making a ruckus after that. We may just have to live with the giggles.

  To tell you the truth, I was wondering if I could get it up even once after all this time, but the wondering evaporated at the sight of Sarah. I knocked my four knocks, and she opened the door naked, her body spotlit by the light in the hall. Murph? She laughed. This had better be you. I got it up once, and I got it up twice, with a half hour’s interval. And after the second time, we lay in the cool sheets, with the smell of turf around us, and her sweet head resting on the white hairs of my chest. After a long silence, we said I love you, at exactly the same time, as if each of us were disclosing a secret. And right after that, her cell phone made the voice mail sound.

  SOMEWHERE A CHILD CRIES tonight. A wailing, then a whimper. Outside my window branches appear then disappear. The wind blows them into view, then takes them away. If you pay attention, you can hear the air shrink in the cold. Nowhere near the Atlantic, I can see it nonetheless, on two shores. It rears up and gallops from here to Inishmaan and back. I can make out every wave and whitecap. I can make out the lines in each whitecap, and the tangles in the lines. Dr. Spector spoke of the end of a life attended by a final lucidity. Is this final lucidity? When I had the chance, I should have asked the doctor if the term meant the last moment of lucidity, or lucidity at last. I feel a surprising strength.

  NASA says it has discovered 715 new planets with its Kepler Space Telescope. With my naked eye I can detect 633. There is life on four of them. One is green. One is secular. One is populated by sculptors. One, by gossips. As for our terra firma, a frosty fog has obscured the particulars. But just beside it, or above, or below (it seems continually to shift its position, like the branches) I see the not at last, the world’s not, and it is as clear as a bell, or a raindrop—every petal booming and clanging. Thank you, Professor Dodds. The final lucidity is the world’s not. I should tell someone. Whom should I tell? To whom should I report my newfound clarity? I am Ella Fitzgerald singing “All through the Night,” pitch-perfect. So run my dreams.

  Cold, cold. I should mind it more than I do, dressed only in pajamas, and no shoes. I don’t know. It feels balmy, like Greece perhaps. Is this where vines grow out of the planks of ships? I crave gaudier miracles. They dwell here, somewhere, I am sure of it. I shall find them. We shall find them. Together we shall oversee Máire and William, Sarah, too, and Arthur, and my homeless beauties, the sullen carriage horses, even Jack, even (am I about to say this?) Perachik—all those who need oversight from our place of difference, our irrational world. Will I write poems here? Less lyrical, I think. More like the old heroic stuff created not because more heroes were in abundance in the ancient then, but rather because poets felt the need for heroes so urgently, they were compelled to bring them to life.

  But I also may do no poems in this place. Maybe there are no poems here. Maybe those who live here feel that poetry has had its day, the product of an elementary stage of evolution when the race was conscious of itself but little else. Maybe we are supposed to be the poems.

  See here. A rose full of stars. Wells in the riverbanks. A keyhole in a badger. A sword swallower with bright blond hair and a love song stuck in his gullet. The painted windows of a church rattling in tune. Thatch. Turf. Uncertain loveliness. I walk warm paving stones, like ellipses, toward a Dionysian freedom disrupting the degrading monuments, the square this and the locked that, striding from the clinging snow into spring again. My birth lies in the raw silence of the day of the week beyond Sunday, the death beyond death, a cloven light. Lucid, pellucid. Final, eternal. When all that one has known or been withdraws, what then? Where am I standing, or not standing? A rustling from behind a pyramid of sedge. Darlin’, is that you?

  IS THAT YOU, Mr. Murphy? I think so, Mrs. Lewis, I barely say. She is standing with her husband in front of me near the fountain in the courtyard. I must have wandered here in my sleep. Oh, my dear man, she says. Let us walk with you back to your apartment. You just returned from Ireland. Didn’t you? You must be jet-lagged. Yes, jet-lagged, I say. You’ve been very kind to me. Very good neighbors. I’ll miss you both. Are you going somewhere, Mr. Murphy? says Mrs. Lewis. The petition, I tell them. I’m sure you saw it, even if you didn’t sign it. They’re tossing me out on my ear.

  They stand there stunned, she with tears in her eyes. And I am moved that this lovely woman, whom I know only from the building, is crying for me. And she is, but not in the way I’m thinking. Don’t you know, Mr. Murphy? she says, touching my arm. There wasn’t a single signatory to that ridiculous petition. Not a one. Unless you count that wretched nosy parker, Perachik. And he won’t be with us much longer, if the Tenants Committee has anything to say about it. No, no, no, dear Mr. Murphy. We tore down that petition the day after you left for Ireland, and all your friends and admirers in the Belnord got together, and agreed to tell you that, and to tell you why. Don’t you know how we cherish you, Mr. Murphy? Why, man, says Mr. Lewis, you’re our poet. You’re our music. We’d kick out Perachik in a shot. But you? You’re the music.

  Speaking of which, it turned out, according to the Lewises, that no one had objected to my singing in the courtyard. They liked it. And no one gave a shit about the open doors, or about my trying to get in Mrs. Livingston’s apartment, especially Mrs. Livingston. Botsford was tickled that I admired his Vespa so much I’d try to ride it. As for nearly setting my apartment on fire because of the eggs, Mr. Lewis said that half the tenants do that, and that he himself left his coffeemaker on last Labor Day weekend, and it burned a crater in the kitchen counter. Jones, Berman, and the DeBoks took up a petition insisting that I stay put. And Mrs. Ginnilli’s book club has decided to dedicate the year to all my works, and voted that I must attend every one of their meetings as punishment, and explain myself. I am teary, and the Lewises are teary, and by the time we mount the steps and stagger to the elevator, the three of us look like drunken sailors err-lie in the morning.

  I DON’T KNOW what else to tell you. The voice mail Sarah received from Jack heaved with remorse and contrition. He was full of shame, and full of sorrow, and he begged Sarah to take him back. He even quoted me (without attribution) from our chat in At Swim-Two-Birds, saying how smart and good a person Sarah is. I wasn’t moved, and I don’t think Sarah was either. But, as much as she loved me, she said, she would give him one more chance, or, as she put it, one more look. She had said she was cursed with feeling sorry for Jack, and so it seemed. I said nothing. Much as I loved her, what was there to say? One of the reasons I adored Sarah was her sense of honor and fair play. Who would I love after Oona but such a person?

  On Aer Lingus back to New York, I told her I thought she was doing the right thing. The difference in our
ages was a cold fact. Even if I do have another twenty years coming to me, when I finally go, she’ll be in her fifties, with no husband and nearly half a life spread out before her like the Gobi Desert. Sarah answered that the trouble was she was too old for me, and she had a point. But what was real was real. The rocks.

  And there was the matter of the prospect of my incredible shrinking brain. And if it happens that my bloody system does contain the e-4 time bomb, and that my memory is on its way out, why on earth would I want to hand this blessed girl one more disability? Her response was like her. Everyone is disabled, she said. Love exists for our disabilities. And if love were the only thing to consider, she continued . . . But then her voice trailed off, and she fell asleep on my shoulder for the rest of the flight.

  Máire and William are coming over in a few weeks, so that’s a good thing. I’d thought of visiting them when I was in Ireland, but I wouldn’t have wanted Sarah to travel home alone. And my black Irish mood was blacker than ever, so why expose Máire and William to that. I haven’t worked on Oona’s poem in a while, or Greenberg’s, but I’ll get there. I have a new book in mind, too. Only a title so far. Stone Harvest. In the meantime, there’ll be readings here and there, and appearances where I’ll play the public man and yearn for home. Sounds corny, I know, but there’s nothing in a poet’s life like doing poems. In the morning stillness, my coffee, my chair, my legal pad, my mulling. For now, I pour myself a nightcap. Sláinte.

  In bed on Inishmaan, I’d asked Sarah if she’d given any more thought to my question, What am I doing the rest of my life, and she sang, Spend it all with me. Naturally, that was before Jack’s message. Yet she was right. What should one do with the rest of one’s life? Spend it with Sarah. If you can’t do that, shoot yourself. And if you won’t do that, do whatever you did before the rest of your life. What you did in order to get to the rest of your life in one piece. You lived. So live. More noisily than ever. Court life. Woo the fucker. Sing it a love song. Belt it out at the top of your lungs. A pure restatement of the original theme. You never crash if you go full tilt. What is articulated strengthens itself. Sing it. In the courtyard, in the ashen sea, the muddied air, the bloodstained snow, the blackthorn bush, the damp straw, the field, the turf, the cold-eyed stars, and in the rocks, the rocks, the rocks. Sing it.