Thomas Murphy Read online

  In 1909 they’re soldering the bolts of Titanic in Belfast (it was okay when it left here—old Irish joke). And Babe Ruth is testing his teenage pitching arm, and the Archduke Ferdinand is not archduking it out with anyone yet and Tsar Nicholas is still tsaring in his own show. Shackleton is shackled to the South Pole, as Admiral Peary veers toward the North. Baby Simone Weil arrives, as do babies Isaiah Berlin and Max Baer and James Mason and Gene Krupa and Eudora Welty. Someone is singing “Shine On, Harvest Moon” for the first time. Can you hear her?

  Come to the window. There’s Paul Robeson, age eleven, walking hand in hand with his ma. He looks up in wonder. Do you know what that is? his mother asks him. The boy shakes his head. That’s the Belnord, Paul. That’s the Belnord!

  THAT’S BOTSFORD. He parks his Vespa near the fountain in the courtyard, where the chrome catches the lights of the building and the blue chassis gleams like the blue eye of the vampyroteuthis infernalis, the vampire squid from hell. The great globular eye staring at you, taking you in, sizing you up. The Vespa is that eye, blue eye, the blue with a light in it. I stop and walk around it. And again. Most every night. The tan leather seat, a saddle for a show horse. I know where Botsford keeps the key in the building office, know exactly where it hangs on a hook. Never rode one of these babies. Never took one of these bad boys out for a spin. You know what they say. If you put a loaded Vespa in a play, eventually someone is going to have to ride it. That’s what they say.

  DEAR MURPH,

  It occurs to me—your brooding mind being what it is—that you may think I’m trying to lock you up in the loony bin. I’m not. You probably ought to be locked up in the loony bin, but that condition long preceded your recent shenanigans. I’m concerned that you’ll harm yourself. It’s that simple.

  Your dutiful and loving daughter,

  Máire

  Dear Dutiful and Loving,

  I’m sorry, but I never had a daughter, and I don’t know anyone named Máire. My friend Greenberg used to sing about a table down at Morey’s. Is that you? Or are you the old gray mare, who ain’t what she used to be? Ah, but who is?

  Dear Murph,

  Go fuck yourself.

  Dear Máire,

  Oh! Now I remember you.

  MY DRINKING BUDDY sits beside me on the couch. She has milk, I have coffee. She writes too, with a purple crayon and a legal pad half her size. Every so often, she glances up at me, as if to check that we’re both on course. I look back at her and nod. Her legs stretch not quite to the rug. We continue this way, in silence, writer and writer. Oona sneaks us a look and smiles.

  Something telling about my drinking buddy from the start. Self-confidence absent of self-interest. I am driving her and four other little girls home from a birthday party. They sit in the back. One of the girls gets carsick, and heaves. Three of the others back away, with ewws and grosses. Only my drinking buddy goes to comfort the girl. She holds her hand and wipes her mouth and the front of her dress.

  My drinking buddy and I dine out in a fancy restaurant, just us two. Oona stays home. She wants us to have a special evening. My drinking buddy dresses in a white blouse, a little green tunic, high white socks, and Mary Janes. She prances into the restaurant, like a rich girl, but without the hauteur. Part sashay, part swagger. No sooner have we been guided to our table than she announces she has to go to the ladies’ room. She walks off, returning shortly. A minute or so later, she goes to the ladies’ room again. Returns. Sits. Then she has to go again. I ask her if she’s sick. No, she says, I just like going to the ladies’ room.

  My drinking buddy wants to change her name. None of her fellow second graders can pronounce it. They’ll learn, I say. That accent mark, she says. They don’t get it. They’ll learn, I say. Even my teacher, Mrs. Rosario, can’t pronounce it. She’ll learn, I say. It’s an ancient Irish name, I tell her. Máire. It goes back to the Norman invasion. The normal invasion? Norman, I say. Norman who? she says. Daad! I want a regular girl’s name, like Tiffany or Skye. Tell you what, I say. We’ll call you Ralph. Good, she says, hands on hips. I’m Ralph.

  A framed photo of my drinking buddy riding a camel in Jerusalem stands on the piano. Beside it, a photo of her in a Sailfish. Beside that, one at her graduation from Brown, the mortarboard deliberately cockeyed on her head. Beside that, her holding just-born William.

  Before that, she is in business school at NYU, and she comes over late at night, and sits beside me on the couch. Oona is long asleep, so it’s just us two. We listen to the old songs, the standards, on the radio. Mr. Jameson joins us. My drinking buddy always has taken to whiskey, a genetic inheritance, and can drink her old man under the table, though she rarely tries. We sit and chat and sing in thirds harmonies—“If you’re ever in a jam, here I am.” Sometimes I’m writing, and sometimes she has homework. She looks across at me every so often, for old times’ sake. Mon semblable. Mon scold.

  WHEN SAINT JOHN JAMESON established the Bow Street Distillery in Dublin, in 1780, what tests did he devise for the whiskey to see if it was good? I wonder. Body? Color? Did he work out the balance between malted and unmalted barley, and dry the liquid in a kiln to achieve just enough sweetness on the tongue and burn on the throat? Or did he use a different sort of test entirely, one that led to one million gallons of Jameson produced every year? Did he say to himself, if this makes grief go away, it’s a keeper?

  ONE FOR THE ROADS? All Inishmaan roads are divided in three parts: the stone walls on either side, the two tracks for carts and cars, and the island of tall grass and flowering weeds between the tracks. Of these three, only one is connected with motion or travel. The island and the walls represent the stationary. In every road, therefore, lies the dual possibilities of Ireland. Stay or go. But the road remains the same, giving of nothing, no hint as to which way of life it tends or recommends. Like certain poems.

  You can thus read into each road a lesson in freedom of choice. I made no such reading. I knew I would go eventually, and I saw the roads only as statements of clean clarity, nouns, beautiful for what they were, and not for the ways they might relate to me. The same was true of the trees on Inishmaan and the gaggles of wildflowers and the houses and the pubs and the pigs in their folklore. Each life unto itself in this stupefying world.

  INTO THE SAME NIGHT I walk as I did as a child, welcoming the same defeats, desires, usurpations. This irrevocable pilgrimage. As one says after a good conversation with a friend, where did the time go? Emerging from At Swim-Two-Birds, I battle a snootful. Grim kids swagger on Eighty-seventh and Columbus. A wintry creature, his keen animal’s face shining in the hoarfrost, takes command of the curb. I know him from the church shelter where I teach a poetry workshop to my homeless beauties once a month. Murph! he cries. Arthur! I cry. He is huge, made of heavy curves and rounded edges. Arthur the Bear! Nobody knows if he’s black or white, his skin is so caked with soot. Murph the Bard! He’s in a good mood tonight. You can tell when he’s not. Dr. Reynolds, the minister at the shelter, the only clergyman I’ve ever known with a sense of humor, calls Arthur a bi-polar bear. Murph! Arthur and I greet each other as if at sea.

  All is in decline. Empires, literacy, gaudy birds. I follow a trail of rotting flowers from the Koreans’ convenience store to a snowy ravine where ice has seized the upper boughs. My teeth clench. One of these days I’m going to learn to hold my liquor. One of these days I’m going to learn to hold my recriminations. S’long, Murph! See you, Arthur! Show me the way to go home.

  Why did I not write Snodgrass? It was 1975, and he’d liked a poem of mine in the Antioch Review. I cannot recall why I did not write him back. Snodgrass. Poet of “Heart’s Needle” and “April Inventory.” Poet of quiet dread and silver maples. I have come to a stage of recriminations when one wonders not why one did certain things in a life, but rather why not. And all the things not done are almost always the easy things, requiring the least amount of effort. Life defined by the loss of casual opportunities. Small beer. Why did I not write Snodgrass?
To thank him. To gush. To tell him, if only some day, one day, even if by dumb luck, I could write a line like “my lady’s brushing in sunlight,” well I’d die happy. We had a friendship in the offing. I offed it. I was stunned. Was that it? I was scared. Was that it? I was a cocky bastard, thinking, of course he likes my work. Why shouldn’t he? We’re equals, Snodgrass and I. Two peas in a poem. Was that it? Why did I not write Snodgrass?

  TO WALK THROUGH the landscape of a life. Odd, the scenes and moments that elbow their way to positions of prominence. The dear, quiet morning in the field with my ma, when she was naming a flower. The student at Marymount, the ecology zealot. Such a mouth on her, but oh, could she write. A broom leaning in the corner of the cottage. A saw’s wheezing through a plank of pine. A chastised dog. Cait’s freckled thighs. The blunt smell of dung and oil lamps. Soggy biscuits on a yellow plate. The time in Long Island Sound when Oona learns to swim. You go, girl. A sky slumps, defeated. Trout in flight. The wing of a silver seaplane, tipping toward the horizon. Ella on the radio. “Come Rain or Come Shine.” So perfect was her pitch, the members of the band tuned their instruments to her voice. A plough making a circle as it passes over a field. A cloud of lambs. The poise of an egret. The bent teeth of a harrow. The brainstorm. The fury. The pudgy school friend of Máire who asked what a poet does, and when I told him, he laughed. Ubi sunt, ubi sunt. The rocks of Inishmaan. The pigs of Inishmaan. The mud. The mud of Inishmaan, thick, dark, descending in layers to the center of the Earth. A hearse drawn by a farm horse, the wood painted red and black. Oona answers the priest, I do—mostly. Greenberg hoists us in a chair. An aged woman at an outdoor reading smiles and nods at every right word, the grass trembling at her feet. Her eyes, bright gray. Snodgrass. Where did the time go?

  OVER THE ROCK FIELDS I climbed to Synge’s Chair—that formation of rocks shaped like a caveman’s throne, where J. M. Synge is said to have brooded his plays and essays into being. Synge’s Chair. Have I told you about this? That great granite head of his, and the iron mustache. I would trudge to Synge’s Chair, yearn toward the Atlantic, remain till nightfall, and mark the red declension of the sun. Then I’d return home and my da would read to me in my bed. My unshaven, baritone da of the red creased neck and the whiskey breath. He would prop his one existing leg on the low stool in front of the fire, and read me Padraic Colum and James Stephens, and sometimes even Kavanagh, when da was in his cups.

  His favorite was Yeats. He’d read me the early poems, easier for a boy to understand, such as “At Galway Races,” “These Are the Clouds,” and “Brown Penny.” He loved “Brown Penny”—a young man’s poem, he said—and he recited it from memory. Lusty, wistful, plain sad sometimes, as he’d glance at his left leg, then at the space where his right leg used to be. He’d lost that one in a thresher, when he was eighteen. He never complained, never a word, just that glance at the absent leg. More than the books, that taught me how to write a poem.

  They really aren’t difficult, my poems, no matter what the good Dr. Spector says. Greenberg got ’em readily enough. Oh, I’ll toss in a wild word from time to time, to keep the reader on his toes, the way Heaney does, and Paul Muldoon. But neither of those great fellas is hard to understand, and I’m not either. Most of the poets of my race are not hard to understand. We just play hard to get.

  Basically, we’re piano bar players, singing our guts out and writing by ear. Which is probably why the ancient Irish poets were known in their kingdoms as The Music. Poets were called The Music. When the kings did battle with one another, which was every other day, they dispatched their soldiers with orders to kill everyone in the enemy camp, every man, woman, and child, including the opposing king. Kill ’em all, said the king. Except The Music. The soldiers were forbidden ever to kill The Music. Because he was The Music.

  A POEM SHOULD consist of two parts rocks, one part daisy. ’Tis my opinion, anyway. If the rocks aren’t in the poem, you won’t be able to appreciate the daisy. And if you take out the rocks, so all that’s left is daisy, well, that’s all that’s left. It’s not so yellow anymore. It wilts. You want hard language to convey soft thought, because in the end all poetry is about love, and no one wants love without a backbone. It’s about contrast, see. The kiss and the slap. Oona and I never fucked so brilliantly as when we’d gone at each other beforehand, really torn each other up, tooth and claw. Then we’d hurl ourselves into bed and make a poem.

  Live like a bourgeois and think like a god.

  —Flaubert, in Thomas Murphy’s Book of Dandy Quotations

  AND WHAT DO YOU suppose that means? I ask my homeless beauties as we sit around two card tables pressed together in the rec room of the church. “‘Live like a bourgeois and think like a god.’” What’s a bourgeois? says Malik, a man of indeterminable age, with a mound of brown hair piled on his head, and wearing a blue scarf like a blanket. He looks like hell. They all look like hell in the shelter, which accounts for their loveliness. A bourgeois, an ordinary person, I tell him. A shopkeeper. You call that ordinary? says Malik. If I had a shop, I’d be a king. The four others nod, all except Arthur, who moves to a different drummer. His actions are slow and definite, unconnected to anything in the conversation. He seems in a dark mood today.

  If I had a shop, says Katie, I’d sell blouses. Katie’s in her fifties, I think, and dresses only in white—white sweater, white slacks, white shoes. If I had a shop, says Florence, I’d sell myself. Everyone laughs. Were floozies still in sway, Florence would be their queen. We’re off the subject, I tell them. What does it mean to live like a shopkeeper, like a regular Joe, and think like a god? It means, says Alexander, as if drawing on a pipe, that one must dream above one’s station. Alexander was once a private secretary to a billionaire. He is tall, reed thin, and southern. He went to Princeton, and speaks of stations. Station? says Florence. I lived in Grand Central two years, and I’ll tell you, it was hard to live above it. Look, I say, sorry I brought up Flaubert in the first place. It’s always a bad idea to begin a class with a Frog. Look, Alexander is right, mostly, I tell them. The idea is to live a simple life, which is constricted and has boundaries, but to dream without limits, to have that power. Like a god, says Malik. Like a god, I repeat. Yes, Malik.

  What does that have to do with writing poems, Murph? asks Florence. You tell me, my beauty. She brightens when I call her that, and gives me a smile and a wink. It means, says Alexander, that we must be clear and simple in the way we write our poems, but soar to the heavens in our subjects. Very good, Alexander, I tell him. He never reacts to compliments. Doubtless, the billionaire hired him for his discretion and decorum. We must write in a way that people understand our poems, I say. Calmly and quietly. But what we write about can and should take off like a rocket.

  In fact, they all are quite good poets, naturals. Nearly every client in the shelter is schizophrenic, which means they have trouble making narrative connections. What’s anathema for normal social life is meat for the poet. The poet doesn’t want to make connections. He leaves that to others. Mustn’t congratulate them on their illnesses, however. Somewhere in the holy messes of their minds, they would prefer to be pain free, not poets.

  We pass around the poems they’ve done in the month since our last meeting. Katie has written a haiku. “She loves to wear white./ Daddy will be in her room./ White is her color.” Do you want to talk about your poem, Katie? I ask. She keeps her head down. You never know how far to go with them. At the same time, you want to get even the worst things out on the table. Is this about sex abuse? I ask her. Sure it is, says Florence. Katie keeps still. Well (I gulp), let’s look at what Katie has given us as a poem, not as something that happened. Happens to everyone, says Florence. But see how Katie has written it, I say. Why does she write “Daddy,” and not “My father”? Too many syllables for the haiku, says Alexander, looking smug. To show she loves him anyway, says Florence. And what does Daddy do with her love? I ask. Crushes it, says Malik. Rapes it, whispers Katie. Yes, Katie, I reach across the ta
ble and touch her white sleeve. And this is terrible, the worst thing. But, darlin’, see what you have done with this terrible thing. You have made it into a work of art. She keeps her head down still. This is what we sometimes do as poets, you see? I tell them, taking the spotlight off Katie. We say to our readers, this is how bad life can be. But this is also how gorgeous we can make it, by way of art. Do my beauties understand? I’m not sure.

  Arthur has written a poem consisting of one line. What’s it called, Arthur? “Black,” he says. It’s called “Black.” Will you read it to us, Arthur? His voice rises from a well. “My cave is black,” he says. Is that the whole deal? says Malik. Arthur says nothing. His mind is elsewhere. Inadequate, says Alexander. Woefully inadequate. I like it, says Katie. Me too, says Florence. It’s direct. It says all that Arthur wants to say about his cave. Good, Florence, I say. When Arthur is not staying at the shelter, he lives in a cavelike arrangement of boulders near Wollman rink in the park, an oversize version of Synge’s Chair. He calls it his summer place. I start to say a few encouraging words about his poem, but he cuts me off. Murph! he shouts exuberantly, as if aware of my presence for the first time. Murph the Bard! Arthur the Bear! I say. He turns away.

  I’M HERE to pick up my best friend.

  It figures that your best friend is a four-year-old, says Máire. She calls, William? Your best friend is here to go for a walk with you. Máire and William live one block east of the Belnord, on Eighty-sixth between Columbus and Amsterdam. Makes it easier for her to get to me, and Perachik to her.