Thomas Murphy Read online

  This afternoon, William has brought a red helium-filled balloon to send to his grandmother in that older heaven. Just three of us now, we stand about the grave site, William holding his balloon until the moment he deems right. Máire takes my hand, and says nothing. I say nothing myself. I can hear Oona chuckling—so it took this to keep you quiet. The great trees, stark in winter, stand stolid, as if bracing themselves for an inevitable wind. The silence of the others buried here feels respectful. More of the dead lie in this place than the residents of Green-Wood. Before this land became a formal cemetery, it was the site of the Battle of Long Island, eventually lost by Washington and his men, some of whom lie here too, but in the long run, a victory. The stupid Brits took so long winning here, they exhausted their forces. Americans lost the battle, yet you know the rest.

  We mark the first anniversary of Oona’s death. It was William’s idea. He asked if we could go. He and Oona didn’t get on in the way that William and I get on, man to clone. She was clearly a superior grown-up, the one to turn to if a T-shirt was on backward or a shoe had been lost in the trash, or when a Band-Aid required someone to put it on right. He called her Toona, deliberately. You think I’m a fish? she said to him. Well, you look a little like a fish, Grandma, William said. But I heard someone called a Big Tuna on TV. He was the boss. So I’m going to call you Toona, ’cause you’re the boss. Give us a kiss, she said.

  Máire has brought roses, which she places on the dark earth of the grave. I think, a red rag on a hedge. Something I saw in Inishmaan a long time ago. A red rag on a hedge. William says, I’m going to send this to Toona now. And he releases the red balloon into the sky. About a hundred feet up it is caught by a breeze, and it dances in the air like a lantern swung by the train conductor at the end of a caboose. The breeze then carries the balloon to the naked branches of a tall tree, where it snags. Oh, William cries in disappointment. Give it a minute, Máire tells him. Sure enough, the balloon is soon blown free, and shoots up straight to Toona.

  NOTHIN’ TO IT, our original threesome. There was nothing to it. Miles. Queen. The Huckabee dance, in which I stomped around the kitchen stooped like Groucho, singing, Huckabee for President, instead of Wintergreen. A day trip to Carthage. Another to Troy. Elvis on the phone for you, Máire. Who bought this orange-scented soap? Who bought these vegetables? Let’s declare world peas. Dad, I’m going to marry Dennis Rodman. Me too, says Oona. Me too, says I. Trivial Pursuit. Significant Pursuit. I hate my teacher. Okay, my girl. I’ll kill her. Dad, can I watch? Take Your Daughter to Work Day. Where should I take her, Oona? To your desk. Yakety yak, night and day. Standing outside the front door one night, Greenberg wondered if we were throwing a party. What did the man say as he walked past the sad horse? Hey, Mom, Dad’s drunk again. Get the bottle, dear. Let’s join him. He said, Why the long face? This is the worst kale I ever et. Is there any other kind? Draw us a cello. Draw us some Jell-O. A Jell-O cello. This is not a pipe? Sure, it’s a pipe. Are you blind? That’s a pipe. Dad, what’s a courtesan? A Porta Potti for judges. Are the two of you ever coming to dinner? NO! Dad, the toilet’s cracked. Psycho-ceramic? And a missing-forever flashlight and an uncooked turkey at Thanksgiving and a jig in the Vatican and no waste. There was no waste, you see. Downtown subway run all night? Doo da, doo da. You should have seen us on a good day. I don’t remember any others. Our trip on the QE2. Dad! I’m so excited to see Ireland. Darlin’, everyone is, until they get there.

  OUR LIFE BEGINS in dreams, but does not stay with them. Think of the days it took for the crossing from Ireland to America. I stood at the ship’s brass railing and addressed the sea, rippling and throbbing like my heart’s blood. What if my ship never reached its destination? What if the old European fools were right, and there was no other side to sail to? Only those bucktoothed dragons and a cliff wall, emptying down to a hell of ice and shoveled ashes. The ship chugs on blithely to the edge of nothing. Or else, what if there were no end to the voyage at all? On and on forever. No dragons, no cliffs, no shore to come to? Would I make use of the endless space? I wondered. Would I inscribe poems on it? Eventually, I assured myself that the ship’s engines would slow to a murmur and I would see the harbor lights. What would I be doing the rest of my life?

  In a championship fight with George Foreman, Muhammad Ali was beating Foreman badly, and was trash-talking him all the way. In a clinch near the end of the fight, Ali taunted the exhausted Foreman, “This would be a bad time to get tired,” he said. Tired? Not yet. Not hitting the canvas just yet.

  IF I SIT DOWN will I get up? That is the question. Others might say, What’s a legally dead old jackass like me doing participating in a sit-in protesting the use of horse-drawn carriages in Central Park? As protests go, this one is pretty penny ante, certainly as compared with the civil rights protests of fifty years ago, or women’s rights protests, or the ones for farmworkers. Something was at stake in those to-dos, other than a horse’s well-being. And if you want to know the cruel truth, horses aren’t the smartest animals in the world anyway, which I know for having grown up beside ’em and on top of ’em and sometimes under ’em, as they’d as soon throw you as take a jump. They probably don’t mind pulling these carriages. They might need the work. So, I must tell you, it’s not the particular issue that has me sitting cross-legged where the unplowed snow clings to the sidewalk. It’s the principle. Civil rights is civil rights, two-legged or four. Still, as the news people like to put it, the question remains: If I sit down will I get up?

  Out of the corner of my eye I spot Arthur. He trots laboriously along Central Park West, head down, a huge bale of fur. I call out to him. Arthur! Arthur the Bear! He proceeds without looking up.

  The others sitting here are younger. (Who isn’t?) When they’re not shivering and burying their heads in their scarves and coat collars, they give me smiles and fist bumps. I try to dredge up the old passions that went with sitting in at Woolworth’s in the 1960s. Come to think of it, that was where I met Greenberg, the mere recollection of which warms me to the present occasion. One of the protest organizers has brought a roan, bay and sorrel in color, a dour little thing no more than thirteen hands, tied to a lamppost and standing in the street, with its head stuck in a bucket of feed. A white fur diamond dominates its forehead. To its bridle a hand-drawn sign has been affixed: FREE ME. If the poor beast wants anything, I suppose it’s to go back to what it was originally. (Who doesn’t?) So I’m on its side. That’s all civil rights means anyway—returning to a state of natural dignity. The movements are called revolutionary, but they’re really restorative. All we ever wanted in Ireland was to be Irish.

  Thinking about that Ali-Foreman fight, I remember reading a story in Richard Wright’s Black Boy, about when he was a young man in Memphis, grinding lenses in an eyeglass factory. His supervisor told him that Harrison, a black coworker, held a grudge against Wright. It wasn’t true. The white men in the factory were trying to instigate a boxing match between the two black boys, for their own sick entertainment. At first, Wright and Harrison refused. But the white men persisted, eventually offering them five dollars apiece to put on the fight. Thinking it easy money, the two finally agreed, and the match took place in a basement on a Saturday afternoon, before an all-white crowd shouting obscenities. The boys jabbed lightly at first, pulling punches, then they punched harder, then a lot harder, until they’d beaten each other senseless. After the fight, they were full of shame and would not speak to each other. In the end they’d become the enemies the white subhumans had said they were in the beginning, turning a lie into the truth. Wright and Harrison had allowed themselves to be degraded to the level of the white scum who had goaded them, and they were nothing like their original selves. I catch the horse’s doleful eye. It catches mine.

  What are you doing there, Mr. Murphy? I look. Jesus. It’s Mrs. Lewis from the Belnord. I’ve always liked her and her husband—well-bred, well-heeled, with a spark of mischief in a touch of class. I’m protesting horse-drawn carriages, Mrs. Le
wis. I smile up to her. What do you suppose the horses will do when they’re free at last, Mr. Murphy? she asks. I hope they’ll give us free rides, Mrs. Lewis. I indicate an open space on the sidewalk. Won’t you join us? No, Mr. Murphy. She smiles back. I think I’ll let you represent our building in the struggle, she says. And off she goes.

  By late afternoon, the freeze of the sidewalk has become too much for my fellow civil rightsers. One by one, they up and leave, until only I and a wispy, hair-in-ringlets girl remain. Aren’t you cold, sir? she says. I am, I tell her. I hope you won’t mind, sir, she says, but I promised my boyfriend I’d meet him at the movies. I hate to leave you all alone. Think nothing of it, I tell her. It was a good demonstration, wasn’t it, sir? she says. It sent a message? It’s important to send messages, even if no one receives them. Isn’t that right, sir? I tell her, It is. We smile to each other as she rises from her squat like a ballerina swan, and glides away. I maintain my place and trace a crack in the sidewalk with my finger. It becomes the bare branch of a tree. I give it leaves.

  SAYS HERE THAT “Retirees Flounder with Nothing to Do.” Makes you wonder about the retired flounder. What does he do, may I ask. Join AARF? Poor fish, he spends a lifetime bent over his subaqueous desk in his airtight cubicle, filling out the same forms, tracing the same flow charts, dining at the same seafood luncheonette, with the same soggy menu, year after year. So at last he retires, and there is nothing ahead but Social Security, Medicare, and swimming swimming swimming. And blowing a few bubbles. Maybe on a Caribbean cruise he’ll meet the love of his life, and go to live somewhere near a beach, since he can’t go up on the beach, but it’s unlikely. Anything good that happens to him from here on out would be a fluke.

  Give me a break. “Retirees Flounder with Nothing to Do” but roll around heaven all day? Hmm. Let us address this monumental societal problem, girls and boyos. Whatever can they do? Well, for starters they might sing “What’ll I Do” for a year or two. That would be something to do. Or they could sing “Time on My Hands,” or more to the point, “What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life?” You know what Thoreau said—that great old retiree, Thoreau? He said, You can’t kill time without injuring eternity. What do you think of that?

  Something to do. How about a hobby? Taxidermy? No one talks of taxidermy since Roy and Dale stuffed Trigger, but you don’t need to go that big. You can always stuff a flounder. Many have. Speaking of stuffing, how about sticking ships into bottles. Or easier still, placing bottles on ships. How about skeet shooting? Philately? Philandery? Golf? Nothing more exciting than stomping around green places like zombies with sticks in their hands. How about writing a how-to book—How to Live Old? I could do that. Make me a mint. Yoga parties? Toga parties?

  What about fishing itself? If you’re going to flounder, after all, why not go for them, too? Retirees of North America, I have an idea. If, at age sixty-five (what wouldn’t Murph give to be that again?) you find yourself floundering and asking yourself, what am I doing the rest of my life, here’s a thought: live.

  YOU DIDN’T KNOW Greenberg but you would have hated him. Everybody did. He was tall as a tree, with eyes like Lawrence of Arabia. (O’Toole’s take on Lawrence, anyway. And don’t get me started on Peter O’Toole. If every Irishman looked like that, we’d have knocked the bejesus out of the Britons by the year 600.) Yeah, Greenberg was tall and beautiful, and he had hair like an ocean and not a crease or a stain on his happy, open face even when he was well into his sixties. Live? He knew how to live. We were the same age. Strangers took me for his da. And the hated Greenberg went to Yale, where he lettered in lacrosse and baseball, and Harvard Law School, where he was editor of the Law Review. He never told me most of this himself. I learned it from friends who hated him as much as I did, and from the other speakers at his memorial service, where I also learned he won the Navy Cross flying choppers over Cambodia. What’s worse, he was kind to everyone, and when he made himself rich, he gave his money anonymously to victims of AIDS, wounded vets, war widows, Harlem schools, and to anyone else who needed a hand. His law partners called him Sonny Pro Bono. Did I mention that he played a killer jazz piano, and that he cooked like a chef?

  As if that weren’t irritating enough, he was great with kids. William worshipped him, and he adored William. I want this, he’d say to me, indicating the boy. A child? I’d ask. No, William, he’d say. Name your price, said Máire.

  The time after Oona died, I was sitting the Irish version of shiva, growing a beard, and plastered. Greenberg came over bearing liquid coals to Newcastle, or Coles, to be precise. CDs by Nat and Natalie. Some Blossom Dearie and Linda Ronstadt. Also, a dozen movies. Have I told you about this? Two days, two nights we sat and watched Dr. Strangelove, Duck Soup, The Horse’s Mouth, Kind Hearts and Coronets, Morgan, Fletch, The Road to Zanzibar, Caddy Shack, The Pink Panther, Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein, Animal House, and Airplane. Surely you don’t know any of these films, he said as he walked in the house. I know ’em all, I said. And don’t call me Shirley.

  What was there not to hate about Greenberg? He laughed at other people’s jokes. He knew when not to say anything. He knew poetry, came to every one of my readings, with his partner, Barry. It was Barry who killed him, clubbed Greenberg with the base of a bronze table lamp as he lay napping. The only thing Barry told the cops was, He was too good to me. I found his sister Julia’s address in Schenectady, and paid her a call. Greenberg was her only sibling. She sat on the flowered couch in the three-story Victorian her brother had bought for her, and served me tea and cookies. After a silence, Julia said, How could he die this way? He didn’t have an enemy in the world.

  ASK ME ABOUT SOULS? I haven’t a clue. I believe in them, but that’s as far as I go. It’s hard to picture the little buggers. Maybe, once they leave our bodies, they’re like flapjacks, lying around on plates. Or sponges. Or something gooey and bouncy like jellyfish. Like gumdrops. Pulsating like a . . . pulse. Whatever shape they’re in, they must long for the bodies they exited. Don’t you think? That’s what they were used to, after all. It creeps me out, actually, to imagine all the souls of the world flopping around on a beach somewhere, fish out of water. Not a soul in sight but other souls. Heaving with yearning, full of hope and despair, confused, a compound of all we ever were, the essential, fundamental us. Greenberg? Beached? He deserves better.

  FIRST THE SEAWEED was dried on the beach, then collected, then loaded on a sorrowful horse and carried somewhere for burning. I watched men do it, and then when I was grown, I did it too. So sad and stupid, the process. So sad and stupid, every process on the island. Collecting the rye straw. Bringing home the straw. Collecting kelp. Bringing home the kelp. A spinning wheel. Threads for a spinning wheel. Harnessing a pony. Threshing. Rope making, so that you could tie the rope to a curragh, tow it out to sea, and die there. Rethatching the roof of a cottage from which, in a year or two, you might be evicted by the Royal Irish Constabulary. If you looked closely at where the thatch was tied to the pegs in the wall, you would make out the different colors—brown, tan, beige, white. Horses’ tails in a row. But no one looked closely. No one marveled.

  I wondered at the hats of the men, the woolen caps shaped like sagging pancakes. Quirky haberdashery. The poor man’s tam-o’-shanter. In their vests and hats the men would pace on the beach with their hands behind their backs, as if they were contemplating issues of great moment. They were not even contemplating issues of small moment. Pacing with their hands behind their backs was just what they did. Animal habit.

  They stayed so far away from the women—morning, afternoon, and evening, too, as far as I could tell—it was a miracle that babies ever appeared on Inishmaan. No wonder everyone made such a fuss about praying to the Virgin. I saw it all as a dance in water, figures painted on earthenware. They were candles. They were rumors, made not of fact but rather of implication, tending toward the corner of a whitewashed room, or toward the sea. They had forgotten how to be sad. A life without protest or accusation. A
life without vision, guilt, or redemption, slow dancing in the valley of the shadow, flightless, remorseless, at sea.

  THE POET’S BUSINESS is to describe everything, but not everything. And the everything he does not describe may be as vivid as the everything he does. The space where my da’s leg used to be, if you see what I mean. Mark Doty, poet’s poet, says as much in his Art of Description, when he writes of a morality involved in refusing to describe certain things. He quotes Wisława Szymborska’s poem about the people jumping hand in hand from the World Trade Center towers. She shows them in the act of falling, complete, with faces and “blood well hidden,” but she will not add “a last line” to her poem, or to their lives. So I too describe what I can of Inishmaan in my poems, but never the faces of the dead. As a boy, I came upon the body of a fisherman washed up on the shore near Allaire’s farm. He had on one pampootie, a skin sandal worn by men of the island. A purse remained in his shirt pocket, and he had a box for tobacco in his blue fist. I was alone with the man until the grown-ups arrived, and I saw his face clearly, unclear as it was. That face. But I would never describe it in a poem. The rocks around the body were sufficient. Don’t fuck with rocks. They know what they’re doing.

  To be a poet is to have a soul so quick to discern, that no shade of quality escapes it, and so quick to feel, that discernment is but a hand playing with finely-ordered variety on the chords of emotion—a soul in which knowledge passes instantaneously into feeling, and feeling flashes back as a new organ of knowledge.