Green Shadows, White Whale Part 23

"Both."

"I was beating the wife once and awoke. Seeing as I'd never laid hands on the woman in me life, it was a dread awakening. You need, once in a while, to even scores^.

"In your dream, did your wife scream?"

"She took her punishment quietly, which ruined my endeavor. It's just as well. I could not look at her by day if she complained to G.o.d in my nightmare."

"What time is it?"

"Late. Himself called, asking for your body if not your soul. I told him you were not here, which is a kind of truth, seeing as you looked not so much mad as sad when you came in. Was it a sadness that drove you mad?"

"It was."

"Is there something beyond drink I could hand to you?"

"Like what, Finn!?"

"A great lie based on a small truth. Another collision of genius: a grand old man in his automobile years ago, and myself, a young soak."

Finn paused.

"Go on, Finn. I admit you're a genius. Who was the other?"

"The greatest playwright since Shakespeare!"

I perked up.

"And that would be . . . ?"

"First things first ..."

"Tell it all, Finn."

"Do you mean that?" Finn shaped me with one eye and conjured memory with the other.

"I do. I'm in need of cheer, Finn. My head is full of beggars and rain!"

"Do you have the time?"

"I do, I dol"

Finn refilled my gla.s.s, then leaned forward with both elbows on the bar and fixed his gaze to some other bright, and distant year.

"Well, then," he said. "Hear this ..."

G.o.d, they say, works in mysterious ways (said Finn). He may not always note the sparrow fallen, but he has a sharp eye for the incongruities.

Which is to say, given half a chance, on certain days, G.o.d seems to lean toward borrowing a flint from Lucifer and a stone from Beelzebub, the better to light a path and ensure a collision.

On this particular day, bored out of mind, as any Irish G.o.d would be half through Sunday, the Lord bent a road and prepared the way for the arrival of a touring car lost from Dublin and aching with genius.

The particular car, having taken a wrong turn because G.o.d said so, and the driver drunk on top of that, arrived in the vicinity at about half past two this particular Sunday when the sun promised but the rain delivered. There was a parting of the storm long enough for the touring car to explode a tire and sink to its knees like a rifled elephant.

The sound of the explosion was such that the mob inside the pub soon became the mob outside, looking for the gunshot victim but finding instead the drunken chauffeur wandering about the chopfallen car, kicking the good tires as if that might reinvigorate the flat without having to pump.

Then like the devil's head popping into view on a small Punch and Judy stage, an old man's face suddenly rose in the car's rear window. His bright mean eyes flashed as he pointed his reddish beard and fired off his mouth: "Sir, the tire, do not kick it to death. Where are we?" "At the center of the universe!" I cried, wiping my hands on a barcloth, standing in the door. "Finn's!" echoed each and all.

The old man's face vanished from the window but to reappear as he leaped out of the car door and stood with his hands on his hips. What a sport he was to behold, dressed in a fine woven hunting-walking suit with a Norfolk jacket. His eyes blazed with admiration. "A man is best known by his pride. You must be Finn!" he cried.

"Well said." I laughed. "And will you come in from the rain, your honor?"

"It's not raining!"

It began to rain.

"Thanks and done." The old man marched with the brisk stride of one forty years younger. The rain parted to let him pa.s.s.

"Gangway!" I said, and the mob parted, likewise to run for drinks. "And now, sir, before the world ends, your name?"

"Shaw!" cried the old man. "George Bernard Shaw!" "And ..." The tall man with the blazing beard made a path through the pub that caused the air to rush, in a clap of thunder, behind. "And," he announced somewhat joyfully, "I am a teetotaler!"

The mob veered off as if he had p.r.o.nounced a plague.

"And are you happy with that half-state of being?" I responded.

"If being busy instead of inebriated is happy, I am happy," said Shaw. "But since my car is ill in the road, I am sorely tempted to order a small drink. Something incredibly weak, if you please."

"Like the one son in each family is handed over to the Church, your honor?"

Shaw's beard liked that and beamed.

"You are all writers, it seems."

"If being poor and waiting in line for drinks and shooting off your mouth is writers, we're writers." I shoved a brandy at him. "Sink your teeth in this, sir!"

"No, no," he cried. "By weak I meant a simple gla.s.s of water."

"Ah, G.o.d," I said. "The last time we saw something that simple it was the priest's sister from Cork, Mr. Shaw!"

"Shaw?" said Timulty suddenly, bugging his eyes. "Hold on! I seen your picture in the Irish Times. It was you lit the fire beneath Saint Joan!"

"I wrote the play, yes!" said Shaw.

"Also," Doone piped in, "was it not you claimed the definition of an Irishman was a man who would climb over six naked women to reach his mother?"

"That's near the truth," said Shaw.

"If there's to be a plague of truth here," said Murphy, "we'd best not be sober for it."

I measured Shaw's shadow in the light.

"If you'll pardon, sir, I think it's time, once in a life, for a brandy offered in friends.h.i.+p."

Looking exasperated by the day and put upon by the attention, Shaw winced, looked left and right, and swigged the drink.

He worked his mouth over some unexpressed words, debated with himself and an invisible opponent, shrugged, opened his eyes, and said, quietly, "There." For his hand had crawled, under the influence of the drink, to a carpetbag he had placed on the bar.

"What's that?" I said.

"It could be a bomb," said Shaw. The men gasped. "Or it could be decorations for your honorable pub. Open it."

"I will," I said, and did.

I lifted out and placed on the bar four half largish pieces of painted porcelain.

"That's no bomb," I said.

"It's too early to tell," said Shaw.

There were words on the porcelain.

"STOP," I said, reading one.

"THINK," said Kelly, reading the next.

"CONSIDER," said Timulty.

"DO," Doone said.

"Strange," said Shaw. "I do not quite know what moved me, but I spied these in a tinker's roadside tray this morning. The very ba.n.a.lity of their advice amused me. I spent four s.h.i.+llings for what now seems nothing."

"Well," said Doone, "whoever made these out of clay had reasons unaccountable. They're sort of toys, don't you see, to be played with. If you laid them about here, on the shelves, or on the bar, would they not open the trapdoors on our half-blind minds, Mr. Shaw?"

"I had no intention of starting a cla.s.s in philosophy," said Shaw.

"But college it is. And each of these bits, these toys," said Doone, "the names of courses to be taken and wisdoms to be learned. Mr. Shaw, advise us. If these trinkets were yours to decorate Finn's as if it were hearth and home, would such decorations increase the IQ of all those who stand before you?"

"If I said no, you would think I perceive your intelligence as not capable of perfection," said Shaw. "If I say yes, you'll think I flatter you under the influence of drink." "Ah, h.e.l.l, flatter us!" said Timulty.

"Place the mottoes and make more brilliant your already brilliant minds," said Shaw.

"Done!" cried Doone, grabbing a porcelain word and hustling about the pub. "We put STOP by the door. That way it nails the gobs coming in and warns them to leave the world behind whilst here. And also STOP going out, so you run back to the bar for one last Guinness against the wife!" "Go it, Doone!" said all.

I, being the pub's owner, grabbed the last two as Doone placed CONSIDER at the far end of the bar for consideration of all. "What," I then asked, "do we do with THINK?" Mr. Shaw, having watched the behavior of Doone, all but dancing about the place, cleared his throat, which cleared the noise.

"May I suggest," he said tartly, "that since there is one place in your honorable pub where the gaze is constantly and irrevocably fixed that you place THINK there? The mirror beyond your shoulder. That lake of ice beneath which all Ireland is sunk and where it sees itself yesterday midnight and tomorrow at twilight.'

"G.o.d love us all," I said. "With forty years of glances and glares, it's a wonder the ice has not flaked from that mirror's backside. Here's THINK!"

And I hung the strange advice in the midst of the gla.s.s.

"Everyone," I cried. "Are you thinkingT'

"We are!" said the mob.

"And DO," I added, handing it to Doone, "also by the exit, so you'll see STOP again and pause for a moment before you DO something stupid. Now what?"

"Do not take this as advice." Shaw stood ramrod straight at the bar, drinking plain water, which I had now served. "We simply . . . wait."

"For what?"

"Ah, well," said Shaw, and looked around mysteriously.

As did we all, fastening our eyes first to STOP and then CONSIDER and then along to THINK and ending the tour with DO.

The men sipped their drinks and the clock ticked and the wind blew ever so gently through the swinging doors.

I could hear the men's eyes slide now to this corner, now that, and the breath bending the hair in their nostrils and the suds popping in the gla.s.ses.

I held my breath.

My pub was still as the tomb.

Silence.

The men stood along the bar like a forest of Sleeping Beauties. It was like the night before Creation or the day after Annihilation.

"Free drinks!" I cried.

"Double rounds for all!" I went on, but no one stirred.

"Mr. Finn," said Shaw in his best stage whisper. "What," he wondered, "has," he went on, and finished, "happened?"

"Jaisus," I muttered. "This is the first hour and the first d.a.m.ned minute in twenty years there has been Silence in Finn's. Listen!''

Shaw listened and moved quietly among the men as if they were worn statues in an old museum.

"Send for the priest," I whispered.

"No!" said a voice. "The priest is here"

Shaw wheeled to point his beard at the far end of the bar, where Father O'Malley, hidden till now in the private cubby, lifted his gray head, like Lazarus summoned.

"You." The priest fixed the old playwright with a gaze like Job accusing G.o.d. "Look what you've done!"

"I?" Shaw flushed with guilt whilst protesting innocence. "I?"

"You," said Father O'Malley, honing his razor to shave the beard, "and your devil's signs, your self-conscious blathering and annunciations. The Luciferean mottos. Those."