Green Shadows, White Whale Part 6

"They are, John."

I read from the scribbled note.

" 'Alma Kimball O'Rourke fell under her horse today. She was killed instantly and the horse was destroyed.' "

"OmiG.o.d," said John, five hundred miles away in Paris.

"She was the wife of the Kildare Hunt's captain, wasn't she?" I asked.

"Jesus, yes," said John quietly.

I finished reading the note. " The funeral's day after tomorrow. The entire hunt will be there.' "

"My G.o.d," murmured John, growing quieter still.

"That means . . . ?" I said.

"The hunt wedding," Ricki said, "must be called off."

John heard and said, "No, no. Only delayed."

Mike drove me into Dublin to find Tom, who had taken a room at the Russell Hotel. He and Lisa had fought about that too. He wanted to stay at Huston's with her. But the Catholics and the Protestants, she pointed out, were both watching. So it was the hotel for Tom until the ceremony. Besides, he could play the stock market better, alone in his Dublin hotel room. That cinched it. Tom checked in.

I found Tom in the lobby of the hotel, mailing some letters.

I handed him the note and said nothing.

There was a long pause, and then I could see the thin transparent inner lids of Tom's eyes, his eagle's eyes or his lizard's eyes or his cat's eyes, slide down between us. They did not slam like the great gates of Kiev, but it was just as final, just as definite, just as complete. The noise his eyelids made closing, while he continued to stare at me, was awful in its silence. I was outside in my world, if my world existed at all, and Tom was inside his.

"She's dead, Tom," I said, but that was useless. Tom had switched off whatever batteries kept him tuned to the audible universe, to any air that held words and phrases. I said it again. "She's dead."

Tom turned and strode up the stairs.

I spoke to Mike at the door. "The minister? The Unitarian. We'd better go tell him."

Behind me, I heard the elevator door open.

Tom was there in the doorway. He did not step out. I hurried over.

"Yes, Tom?"

"I was just thinking," said Tom. "Someone should cancel the wedding cake."

"Too late. It arrived as I was leaving Courtown."

"Christ," Tom said. The elevator door shut. Tom ascended.

The plane from London was late getting into Shannon. By the time it arrived, I had made three trips to the Gents', which shows you how much ale I had downed, waiting.

John waved his crutches from the top of the landing steps and almost fell the length in his eagerness to get down to me. I tried to help, but he all but struck me with his implements, hurrying along in giant bounds like someone who was born and raised an athlete on crutches. With every great jump forward, favoring one leg, he cried out half in pain, half in elation: "Jesus, G.o.d, there's always something new. I mean, when you're not looking, G.o.d gives you a tumble. I never fell like this. It was like slow motion, or going over a waterfall or shooting the rapids just before you wake-you know how it is, every frame of film stops for a moment so you can look at it: now your a.s.s is in the air, now your spine, vertebra by vertebra, now your neckbone, collarbone, top of your head, and you can see it all rotating, and there's the horse down there, you can see him too, frame by frame, like you're taking a picture of the whole d.a.m.n thing with a box Brownie working away thirty frames a second, but all perfectly clear and held in the second, which expands to hold it, so you can see yourself and the horse, waltzing, you might say, on the air. And the whole thing takes half an hour in seconds. The only thing that speeds up the frames is when you hit the turf. Christ. Then, one by one, you can hear your suspenders snapping, your tendons, that is, your muscles.

"You ever walk out at night in winter and listen? d.a.m.n! The branches so loaded with snow they might burst! The whole tree's a skeleton, you hear the sap bend and the wood creak. I thought all my bones would shatter, shale, and flake down inside my skin. Wham! Next thing I know, they run me to the morgue. Not that way, I yelled. Turned out it was an ambulance, and I only thought it was the coroner!

"Hurry up, for Christ's sake-I'm running faster than you are. I hope I don't fall down right now and have one of my convulsions. You'd really see something. Flat on my back like a Holy Roller, talking in tongues, blind with pain. Wham! Where's Tom?"

Tom was waiting for us in the b.u.t.tery of the Royal Hibernian Hotel. John insisted on crutch-vaulting down to find the American Irishman.

"Tom, by G.o.d, there you are!" said John.

Tom turned and looked at us with that clear cold sky-blue winter-morning gaze.

"Jesus," gasped John. "You look mad. What are you so mad about, Tom?"

"She was riding sidesaddle," said Tom evenly. "She should not have been riding sidesaddle, d.a.m.n her."

"Now, who would that be?" asked John, with that oiled and easy polite but false voice of his. "What woman is thatT'

At noon the next day, Mike and I drove John out to Kilc.o.c.k. He had practiced some great healthy crutch bounds and was apishly exuberant at his prowess, and when we reached Courtown he was out of the car ahead of us and half across the bricks when Ricki came running down the steps.

"My G.o.d! Where were you! Be careful! What happened!" At which point John dropped his crutches and fell writhing in the drive. Which, of course, shut Ricki up.

We all half-lifted, half-carried John into the house.

Ricki opened her trembling mouth, but John lifted his great glovelike hand and, eyes shut, husked: "Only brandy will kill the pain!"

She brought the brandy, and over her shoulder he spied Tom's champagne cases in the corridor.

"Is that crud still here?" he said. "Where's the Dom Perignon?"

"Where's Tom?" Ricki countered.

The wedding was delayed for more than a week out of respect for the lady, who, as it turned out, had not ridden sidesaddle but whose misfortune it was to be a small object under a more than substantial burden.

On the day of her memorial service, Tom spoke seriously of going home.

A fight ensued.

When Lisa finally convinced Tom to stay, she fell into a depression and warned of a similar trip, because Tom insisted on not ordering a fresh wedding cake and on keeping the old one as a dust-catcher for more than a full week of mourning.

Only John's intervention stopped the fights. Only a long and inebriated dinner at Jammet's, the best French restaurant in Ireland, restored their humor.

"Quiet!" said John as we dined. "The kitchen door as it opens and shuts, opens, shuts! Listen!"

We listened.

As the door squealed wide on its hinges, the voice of the chef could be heard shrieking in frenzies at his cooks.

Open: A shriek!

Shut: Silence.

Open: A scream!

Shut: Silence.

"You hear that?" whispered John.

Open. Shriek!

"That's you, Tom."

Shut, silence. Open, scream.

"That's you, Lisa."

Open, shut, open, shut.

Scream, shriek, shriek, scream.

"Tom, Lisa, Lisa, Tom!"

"My G.o.d!" cried Lisa.

"Dear Jesus!" said Tom.

Scream, silence, scream.

"Is that us!" both said.

"Or an approximation," said John, his cigarillo smoking in his languid mouth. "Give or take a decibel. Champagne?"

John refilled our gla.s.ses and ordered more.

Tom and Lisa laughed so much they had to grab each other, and then their heads fell to each other's shoulders, choking and breathless.

Very late, John called the chef out to stand in the kitchen door.

Wild applause greeted him. Amazed, he shrugged, nodded, and vanished.

As John paid the bill, Tom said, very slowly, "Okay. She was not riding sidesaddle."

"I was hoping you'd say that, Tom." John exhaled a long slow stream of cigarillo smoke, laying out the tip. "I was hoping you would."

Mike and I picked up the Unitarian minister, the Reverend Mr. Hicks, the night before the great hunt wedding and drove him to Kilc.o.c.k.

On his way to the car he had something fine to say about Dublin. As we drove from Dublin he had something truly excellent to say about the outskirts and the River Liffey, and when we hit the green countryside he was most effusive of all. It seemed there was no speck or seam visible on, in, or through this county or the next. Or if flaws were there, he chose to ignore them for the virtues. Given time, he would speak the list. Meanwhile, the hunt wedding lay like white lace on the morning sh.o.r.e ahead and he focused on it, with his pursed mouth, his red pointy nose, and his flushed eyeb.a.l.l.s.

As we churned gravel in the yard, he gasped, "Thank G.o.d, there's no moon! The less seen of me arriving, the better!"

"The whole town will see you through the windows tomorrow," I observed, dryly, "holding the pagan service and fluting the blasphemous oration."

The Reverend Mr. Hicks turned to a shape carved from a moonstone. "Find me a bottle," he husked, "and put me to bed."

I awoke just before dawn in a high attic servant's room and lay conjuring the great day in the morning this was promised to be.

The theater of Ireland waited.

I thought I heard brogues below, going home late from Finn's or arriving early for the Protestant Embarra.s.sment.

I thought I heard the huntsman's horn, practicing on the green rim of the world.

I imagined I heard a fox yipping in response.

There was a small shadow on the edge of the land; the hunted beast, I was sure, arriving to be first onstage.

Then, sprawled in bed, eyes shut, I conjured up the arrival of hounds in tumult and then horses, s.h.i.+vering their skin over their flesh, in bad need of psychologists' advice, and none here. That was silly, of course. Horses and hounds do not arrive first. The kennelmaster must lead one and the various bluebloods rein and rea.s.sure the others. Yet I did hear blood cries and yawps somewhere in my half sleep, and the jingling of accoutrements galloped to a halt.

Not wis.h.i.+ng to be stage director to it all, I churned over into a whimpering and talkative sleep, warning myself to burrow deep and listen not.

Only to hear John's voice at the door to my room, as he stirred the parquetry with his crutches. "No use, kid. Time to get up."

And the real hounds and horses arrived below.

All was in readiness. The stale wedding cake, growing more ancient by the hour, awaited. The tooth-aching and tongue-blistering champagne was laid by.

The horses were steaming the air and smiling derisive smiles in the courtyard.

The hounds were padding in circles, wetting bricks, hooves, and boots.

The lords and ladies and the owners of liquor shops all across Eire had arrived, of course, and dismounted to the nibbling smiles of horses and the suspicious protests of the hounds.

"Stirrup cups for all!" someone cried.

"That's before we ride," a lady corrected. "And it's just for the groom."

"What I meant to say is, is the bar open?"

"There is no bar," announced the Reverend Mr. Hicks, standing so straight and correct it was obvious he had just been there, "but there is champagne, good silver buckets and bad. Beware of the s.h.i.+lling poison up front. Demand the pound sterling Mumm's."

The horses were quickly abandoned and the hounds left to hara.s.s the kennelmaster and water the yard.

The guests booted up the steps, making hollow clubbing sounds on the concrete, their faces distorted not by fun house mirrors but by ancestry alone. Time and the patient chromosome had worked their clay, bucking the teeth, rheuming the eye, elongating the lip, beaking the nose, cleaving the chin, hollowing the cheek, jugging the ears, eroding the hair, tufting the eyebrows, bleaching the eyelids, waxing the complexion, pocking the brow, and k.n.o.bbing the elbows, wrists, and fingers. Some looked as if they had stood too many years inside and looking out from stable doors.

My G.o.d, I thought, what a jumble sale of skulls and ears, lower lips and high-flung eyebrows. Here danced the spider, there thundered the hippo, here the spaniel eye wet itself with Irish sunlight, there the hound mouth drooped into despairs of days when no sun rose. Not quite crayfish, a fiddle-crab liquor salesman sidled up the steps, bringing with him the eyes of Adonis locked in a face so crimson he might have parboiled himself for breakfast. Here they all came, in pink or black coats, with bloated brows, insucked nostrils, and wharf-piling jaws.

I reeled back and drifted with the clamor of boots to see elbows shoving about in the rummage for Mumm's as against Twelvetrees bubbly.

"Who put the poison above and the remedy below?"