Thomas Murphy Read online

  Well, what can I tell you? I’m on your side. The whole thing sounds like horseshit. But there they were, nonetheless, the two of them. Or rather, the one of them, since Jack has flown the coop. There they were, in their tidy little Queens house, with their lies and their troubled marriage, and me in the middle, as well as the muddle. And as for the possibility that I’m remembering something that never happened, isn’t that nearly always the case? You think you remember this and that, but you don’t. You get it wrong. It wasn’t a Tuesday, it was Thursday. It wasn’t 2010. It was 1986. And she was left-handed, not right. And she wasn’t a she. But you believe in the memory anyway. Your childhood. Your parents. Your teachers. Your pals. Your lovers. Yourself. Your brave, cowardly, sensitive, senseless, adventurous, terrified self. You don’t have an accurate thought in your head, about you or anyone or anything in this holy mess of a life. But you believe you do. Memory is belief, a kind of faith. You have to dream it up. Otherwise you have no past to cling to. Right? You know I’m right.

  HERE’S MY GRIPE about forgetfulness. Not that you asked. My gripe is that not enough is said about the beauty of it, the wondrous, glorious loveliness of not remembering what you want to remember, or are supposed to remember. I mean, overcook a few eggs, and your daughter calls the booby hatch. Or visit your publisher Hornby’s house in Mamaroneck, and stroll into his swimming pool when you’re still wearing your jacket and slacks, because you’re daydreaming, and everyone is ready to strap on the straitjacket. Either they deem it a sin or a social crime, forgetfulness.

  But think of the fullness in forgetfulness—the universe of thought and feeling that forgetfulness replaces for the things forgotten. Or the people. Or the incidents. I think there’s a high selectivity that goes on in the brain, imaginatively choosing things we get wrong over things we get right. Words forgotten can be a pain. But the process of foraging for those words can be thrilling, like foraging for the right word in a line of a poem. The wrong word is wrong, to be sure. Still, it can be a beauty. A voyage. An obscenity.

  And incidents forgotten may be preferable to incidents remembered. You forget something that happened to you because it simply is too painful, like my da’s dying. The mother of a friend of mine has Alzheimer’s. She is eighty-six today. As a teenage girl she survived Auschwitz, the beatings and the rapes. Now, she has forgotten about everything, including Auschwitz. My friend says, with a saddened satisfaction, See? She has beaten the Nazis twice.

  And then there are incidents that never happened in the first place, ones you have made up whole cloth. You forget they never happened. You invented them because, for some shadowy reason, you needed them. You can get all bound up in them, carrying them to ridiculous lengths, because you wish that they had happened even though they hadn’t. It is pleasing, maybe rescuing, for you to think they happened. But they never did, and you forget.

  I probably forget a good deal more than I let on to you or to Máire or Dr. Spector. But those forgotten things, though they remain forgotten, have a life of their own. Don’t you think? And a place of their own, too. They live somewhere else, like the world’s not. They live in dreams. Professor Dodds has a chapter on Homer in which he writes of the early Greeks who believed so ardently in dreams, they saw themselves as living in two worlds at once—real life and dream life. Dual citizenship. The things we forget are no matter. They are another matter. Another kettle of eggs. A vine may grow out of a ship’s plank. Who would doubt it? You can sink your teeth into an idea like that, if sinking your teeth floats your curragh, because as any good Dionysian votary knows, time and space and their attending horseshit do not exist in the world’s not. And if everyone is lonely in the world, then it goes without saying that no one is lonely in the world’s not. Makes sense. No? Or nonsense.

  Let us hie thither, that’s what I say. Let us go nowhere. There’s beauty there, I’m sure of it. Or not. That’s the thing about nowhere. Everything forgotten exists and does not in the world’s not, world without end, or not. No end. Not not. Not you, not I. And if we look carefully enough, or carelessly as it were, or were not, we should find no meaning there. None. And wouldn’t that be nothing!

  THEN SHE WANDERED into McCraken’s field at four in the morning, hiked up her flannel nightie, and peed on a rock. Then she called me by Pa’s name. Then she caressed a shirt drying on the line, and when I said, Ma, what are you doing, she told me to hush, it was none of my business. Then she cursed a jackdaw in language so vile, I thought at first that she was gagging on a bone. There followed a long period of silence, followed by a period of equal duration in which she told me how a boy named Niall had loved her when she was in school, and how he wanted to marry her and take her to raise sheep in New Zealand. But he was so short, Tommy. Sweet but very short. You have to eat something, Ma, I said. Then she ate a little, and less each day. Then she stopped and had to be fed through a tube. Then she was clear as a bell for a couple of weeks, and I asked the doctor if she was coming back. No, he said. These spates of clarity are part of the progress of the disease. She will return to her darkness, soon, he said. And she did. And I wondered—in the times she was silent, or sleeping, or reviling the Jamaican nurse I’d got her from the mainland, or singing the wrong words to the wrong tune—if all that were kind of a terrible mask, and the woman wearing the mask, under the mask, was lucid, right as rain, with a mind as smart and pure as it had been before all this started. I wondered if that imprisoned mind was confused and frustrated at the things the mask was saying in her behalf, yet could do nothing to remove the mask. Was she, in other words, my ma? Then I found her poring over a book. Then I saw she had ripped out the pages.

  SUCH A (what do they call it?) learning experience, poring over The Atlas of the World with William. Is this a country or a city, Murph? What do you think, William? I think it’s an elephant. It looks like Elephantus, Murph! William! What would Elephantus be doing in an atlas? What does Elephantus do anywhere, Murph? Flops around. Jumps around. Ah, that’s where I’ve got you, my boyo. Elephants can’t jump. Wow! I never knew that, Murph. You know everything! Where’s Ireland? Here? No. That’s Africa. Is Ireland in Africa? I don’t think so. Is Africa in Ireland? Definitely. The little hand flips the pages. What’s this island, Murph? That’s Devil’s Island, William. Also known as England. Does the devil live there? Millions of ’em, I tell him. There’s a garden in this country, Murph. He points to Mozambique. How do you know, William? I can smell the bees, he says, in all seriousness. Well, William, you know what Gibbon said. Who’s Gibbon, Murph? Gibbon said education is lost on everyone except happy people, who don’t need it anyway. Is that Ireland, Murph? Peru, William. Close enough.

  THEY SAY THAT Irishmen drink to forget we’re Irish. I say we drink to remember we’re Irish, because our poor dismal history consists of English swine trying to kick the Irish out of us. We set up the hedge schools as a show of our determination to teach the Irish language. No one really wanted to learn it. Irish is a limited language, truth be told, especially for modern poetry, though there’s a sweet sound of whispers to it. No, the hedge schools were simply another way to stick it to the Brits. It takes a jar or three to remind an Irishman that he has a culture, a nation, a sound.

  Want to know why the Irish make good poets? Sure you do. You’re dying to know. Well, we make good poets because we know how to deal in absent things, the things taken from our lives, like food and dignity. And legs. We’ve been learning to do without since the ancient Irish writings left out vowels. No vowels in ancient Irish. Try pronouncing a sentence of that. Then again, the spoken language of today adds more words when you expect less, too, just to prove our English is different. There is no word for yes or no in Irish and none in our use of English either. Ask an Irish woman if it’s cold outside, she’ll say, “It is.” Ask an Irishman if he’s happy, he’ll say, “I am.” I take that back. No Irishman is happy. But you get the point. We stretch out the sentences. I mean, what the hell else do we have to do but talk?

 
Now I’m not including Kerrymen in all this because Kerry is the stupidest county in Ireland by miles, which is saying something, since all the counties in Ireland compete for the title of stupidest. But Kerrymen are also unique in that they only answer a question with a question. This proposition was put to the test one day when a visitor to the county stood directly across the street from the post office, and asked a Kerryman passing by if that was the post office over there. The Kerryman looked and said, Is it a letter you’d be mailin’? And they can be sharp when it suits them. At a Kerry funeral, someone was asked to say a few kind words about the deceased, who was hated by the whole town. The eulogist said, His brother was worse.

  Synge, my fellow Inishmaan resident, was more typically Irish than most of our writers, even though he was a Protestant, or a West Brit as we like to call ’em. But in his cramped rented room in the cottage on Inishmaan, called Synge’s Cottage today, he listened well to the talk going on in the kitchen. And because he had an ear for music, he picked up the rhythms of the talk for his dialogues. More than that, he caught the essence of the country, the beauty and the madness—how a blind couple could love and hate each other in The Well of the Saints, how a town could make a hero of a boy who boasted that he’d killed his da, in The Playboy of the Western World, and how an old man could break his heart over a young woman in love with a young man, and how all could be brought down in Deirdre of the Sorrows. Synge, who was dying when he wrote Deirdre, was in love with a much younger woman himself, the knockout actress Molly Allgood. He wrote a poem predicting how she would react to those who bore his casket, that she would rend them with her teeth.

  On the island Synge used to sit in a stone seat now called Synge’s Chair. Have I told you about this? Just messin’ with you.

  Rend. Teeth. Lovely words. Penny, brown penny. Lovely words. Oona was a lovely word. Greenberg was a lovely word. What happens to a person when the words go, do you suppose? And how do they go—in clusters, or one by one, like the lethal computer Hal in 2001, whose vocabulary dwindled to a precious few words after Keir Dullea pulled his plug? I don’t recall Hal’s very last words. What will be mine? I wonder. Something profound and ethereal, like Goethe’s “More light”? Maybe “More lite beer.”

  THOMAS JAMES MURPHY, the celebrated poet, genius, cardsharp, pop singer, piano bar player, raconteur, bon vivant, and all-around good guy died last night in his home in New York City, from complications arising from a loss of memory. His daughter, Máire, reports that for the past few months Mr. Murphy had been wondering which of two forms of death—of the body or the mind—would take him first. As it turned out, both forms reached him simultaneously. He forgot to go on living. Born on Inishmaan in the Aran Islands, Mr. Murphy, who was devilishly handsome, with a joie de vivre and a coupe de ville and his heavenly baritone voice and sea-blue eyes, sailed to New York in his early twenties, and at once established himself as a literary wunderkind. Lillian Hellman herself knew him as Timothy. And he never wrote back to W. D. Snodgrass. Critics hailed his work as astonishingly original, amazingly derivative, delightful, repellant, hard-edged, mawkish, brilliant, and stupid. His wife of fifty years, the former Oona O’Donnell, died of endometrial cancer, a year ago in January. It was said that “Murph,” as he was known, was never the same afterward, which most of his friends regarded as an improvement. Beside his perfect if pain-in-the-ass daughter, Mr. Murphy is survived by his delicious grandson, William, Jimmy the gabby publican, Jameson Distillers, by his new friend Sarah, and by the superintendent of his apartment house, Danny Perachik, a known rat. Mr. Murphy’s last words were . . . I forget.

  FROM THE FAR SIDE of her desk, that rises like the Great Wall of China, Dr. Spector regards me as if I were a can of spoiled sardines. In return I give her my cutest smile, which seems to further displease her. I know you’re used to people being charmed by you, Mr. Murphy, she says, and I’m sure you thought I’d be tickled pink by your answers to the Ohio State test I sent you home with. I start to say I didn’t know what color she’d be tickled, but she goes on. Mr. Murphy, I’m going to treat you like a grown-up. A stretch, I realize. But you have been wasting my time. And hard as it may be to believe, my time is valuable. Every second I devote to your nonsense, I take away from someone who wants and deserves to be helped.

  You’re also wasting your own time, she says, and there may not be much of that left. Your daughter tells me the super in your building reports that you’ve left your front door wide open at least half a dozen times in the past weeks. (I must remember to cut out Perachik’s liver.) That’s in addition to the now myth-size eggs and swimming pool stories. She says you’re also starting to make things up that could not have occurred, but you seem to believe them. (I meant to tell you about the front door business, but it slipped my mind.)

  So, these are signs, Mr. Murphy. I can’t say how bad, but definitely heading downward. I start to speak, but she shuts me up with a wave of her hand. I am finding her less like Joanne Woodward by the second, and more like Judith Anderson in Rebecca, without Judith’s puckish sense of humor.

  Let me tell you what we’re dealing with here, scientifically, Mr. Murphy. Memory is a tricky item. It resides in patterns of neural activity all throughout the brain. After “neural activity” I begin to tune her out. There follows science shit, followed by more science shit at “cortex,” followed by “FDA-approved drugs,” followed by two more references to science shit, followed by “fiber tracks,” followed by “schedule a brain scan for you,” followed by science shit, science shit, and science shit. Our one-sided colloquy concludes with, But until then, Mr. Murphy, I want you to shape up. And before you fall to your knees and assure me of your heartwarming reformation, since I don’t trust you, I’m going to inform your daughter of everything I’ve told you today. In short, you’re cooked, Mr. Murphy. She exits before I can ask her for a balloon.

  THE PARK IS GRAY and I am blue, thinking about how long it takes to live a life, and what do you wind up with? Age. People say it’s unseemly to feel sorry for yourself, but I enjoy feeling sorry for myself. Who else would feel sorry for me? It gives me a hole to crawl out of when I write my poems. Snap out of it, Murph, I say. And then I do. Oona used to say it for me. I hear her now. Snap out of it, Murph. I keep walking and try. September is New York’s best month, don’t you think? You feel the sunshine and the shrinkage all at once. Accordion days. Too bad it’s January.

  Three teenage girls sidle past me on the walking path. Two Irish, one Italian is my guess, each of them pretty and smiling and nodding to the old man. Snodgrass again: younger, pinker, out of reach. I smile back, like a dead star. I proceed a few steps and feel a hard shot to the nape of my neck. Now I’m down on my back in the path with the three darling teenage tree nymphs whom I passed a couple of seconds ago standing over me, and telling me to give them my money. See these? says the tall brunette, holding up the back of her hand and indicating her fingernails filed sharp as lobster forks. I’ll cut you with these. Then the plump blonde kicks me square in the ribs. The stash, she says. They still use that word?

  I reach under me for my back pocket and my wallet, and present all I have, maybe a hundred. That seems to drive the girls wild with happiness. The third girl, with the tattooed throat, gives me one more shot in the thigh for good measure before they all run off shouting and hooting. I’d have kicked their asses if I’d had four other guys with me.

  Limping home from the park, I spot the sometimes-poet Arthur again. Arthur! Murph! Arthur the Bear! Murph the Bard! Today his mood is up. He has established an outdoor living room in front of the church on Amsterdam and Eighty-sixth. Apparently he has scavenged furnishings from the local garbage, and has come up with a fairly complete place, consisting of a maroon sofa, with frayed floral-pattern upholstery, a Barcalounger with a missing arm, a couple of deck chairs, two unmatching end tables bearing two porcelain lamps plugged into nothing, and a three-legged plastic coffee table resting on an orange shag rug. I enter his room, and take one of the
deck chairs. Arthur sits on his sofa, as always bundled against the cold, and looking more bearlike than ever, but otherwise at ease and self-possessed.

  I just got mugged in the park, Arthur, I tell him. That’s nothing, Murph. When I’m living in my cave, I get mugged all the time. Well, maybe you’re right, I say. I’m probably making too much of it. How’s tricks, Arthur? Good, Murph. Good. Couldn’t be better. He hesitates. I want to remain with him in case the cops come, so I can explain his condition to them. But I’m kind of busy just now, he says. We sit in silence for a minute. He grumbles. Writing any poems? I ask. He shakes his massive head. I get the feeling I’m boring him. He stares at me impatiently. Finally, he says, I don’t mean to be rude, Murph. But I’m expecting guests.

  DEAR MURPH,

  I like good singing as much as the next guy. And I don’t have to tell you, you have great pipes. But when you stand in the courtyard at midnight, belting out “What Are You Doing the Rest of Your Life?” at the top of your lungs, all four verses, the people in the building complain. And I mean loud complaints. About twenty of them. So, please, Murph. No more. I wouldn’t want to have to report this to the landlord.

  Yours sincerely,

  Daniel A. Perachik (Dan)

  Superintendent

  P.S. It didn’t help that you were singing in your skivvies.