O summer and soft wind. Relieves the heart and makes living cheaper. Get that fire out in the grate. Get it out. That's better.
There's the butcher a few houses up the street. A tram line goes by the window. And across the road is the most fantastic laundry with forty girls and great steaming vats. O I think they are a bunch for using just the little touch of acid.
Mr. and Mrs. Sebastian Dangerfield and their daughter, Felicity Wilton, late of Howth, are now residing at 1 Mohammed Road, The Rock, Co. Dublin.
It was decided to get out of the haunted house of Howth. But there were hesitations till the morning after the storm when Marion opened the kitchen door to get the milk and she screamed and Sebastian came running and they looked down into a mud stained sea into which had fallen the back garden and turf shed. They moved.
The new house was not new. And you didn't want to walk too fast in the front door or you'd find yourself going out the back. Mr. Egbert Skully took Mr. Dangerfield aside and said he was glad he could rent to an American because he and his wife had worked for twenty years in Macy's Department Store and loved New York and was pleased he could find tenants like themselves. And I hope you, your wife and little one will be happy here. I know it's a little small but I think you'll like the cozy quality, ha, you look like a gentleman, Mr. Dangerfield as likes his cozy comforts, and do you play golf? O aye. But my clubs are indisposed. Having them looked over by a professional for flaws, particular about alignment, you know. A very good idea, Mr. Dangerfield and perhaps my wife can give yours some recipes. Great.
Walls newly papered with brown flowers even feel soggy to the touch. And a nice brown, fourth-hand Axminster rug on the sitting room floor and a scabrous, blue settee. The kitchen was fine but the tap and sink were out the door. Up steep narrow stairs, a closet with plate sized skylight, the conservatory. And a toilet bowl wedged between two walls, the lavatory. Tory was a great suffix in this house. And the sitting room window two feet off the sidewalk was perfect for the neighbors passing by, so don't want to get caught with the pants down. But the tram rumbling by keeps one on one's guard.
A visit to the fuel merchant for coal to keep piled under the stairs. Marion got crates and covered them with table cloths for color and respectability. And my special maps one or two of which are rare and old. The one I have of a cemetery I keep under thick glass. And got the card table for a desk under the window. The laundry girls will take me mind off the awful grind of studying. They come out twice a day, hair in curlers and breasts like needles in these American uplift bras. Think the Bishop had something to say about that and rightly too. Then watch them line up for the tram, a row of steamed white faces. And some of them giving a giggle in this direction at the madman behind the curtain.
Facing the summer ahead. Living in this little house was calm. No drinking and minding the baba when Marion was off to shop. Had a cup of beef tea in the morning. Also see a rather pleasant creature up there in the window. Catch her looking in here with rather large brown eyes, no smiles or giggles. A little disdain, her dark hair straight and thick. And I think I see intelligence, a little embarrassing that look. Retreat into the kitchen. Most exciting.
Made a little case and filled it with books of law, a short life of Blessed Oliver Plunket and others on birds. Bottom shelf for business magazines for the big days ahead. And then a section for my extensive collection, which, God forgive me, I stole from Catholic Churches. But I did it because I needed strength in paupery. My favorites are, "This Thing Called Love," "Drink Is A Curse," and "Happiness In Death."
The first morning tram almost shakes one to the floor and Felicity gives the twisted cry from the conservatory. Growl back to sleep. Pull the legs up in the foetal crouch. Marion wearing my underwear. Sometimes the sun would sneak in. Then Marion beating barefoot on the linoleum. Entreaties. O do get up. Don't leave me to do everything every morning. In my heart where no one else can hear me, I was saying, now for God's sake, Marion, be a good Britisher and get down there in that little nest of a kitchen and buzz on the coffee like a good girl and would you, while you're at it, kind of brown up a few pieces of bread and I wouldn't mind if maybe there was just the suggestion of bacon on it, only a suggestion, and have it all ready on the table and then I'll come down and act the good husband with, ah darling good morning, how are you, you're looking lovely this morning darling and younger every morning. A great one that last. But I come down martyred and mussed, feeble and fussed, heart and soul covered in cement.
But later in the morning great things were to be seen. Sound of horses on the cobble stones. Then up to the bedroom to look down in the street. These sleek black animals glistening in soft rain. Heads high, driving slits of steam in the morning air. Sometimes I see through the little glass windows, a lily on a pine box. Take me with you too. And I can't help murmuring from memory poems I read in the Evening Mail:
Sleep thy last sleep,
Free from care and sorrow.
Rest where none weep,
And we too, shall follow.
And I see the grinning faces popping out the windows of the cab, radiant with the importance of the dead. Hats being tipped along the road and hands moving in a quick sign of the cross. Whiskey passed from hand to hand. Green, greedy mouth is dead. A fiddle across the fields. Mushrooms fatten in the warm September rain. Gone away.
Then time to go for the paper. And back with it to the lavatory. Between the green peeling walls. Always feel I'm going to get stuck. One morning there was sunshine and I was feeling great. Sitting in there grunting and groaning, looking over the news, and then reach up and pull the chain. Downstairs in the kitchen, Marion screamed.
"I say, Marion, what is it?"
"For God's sake, stop it, stop it, Sebastian, you fool. What have you done?"
Moving with swift irritability down the narrow stairs, stumbling into the kitchen at the bottom. Perhaps things have gotten too much for Marion and she's gone mad.
"You idiot, Sebastian, look at me, look at the baby's things."
Marion trembling in the middle of the kitchen floor covered with strands of wet toilet paper and fecal matter. From a gaping patch in the ceiling poured water, plaster and excrement.
"God's miserable teeth."
"Oh damnable, damnable. Do something, you fool."
"For the love of Jesus."
Sebastian stalking away.
"How dare you walk away, you damnable rotter. This is horrible and I can't bear any more."
Marion broke into sobs, slammed into silence with the front door.
Walking past the parking lot, down the little hill to the station. Stand by this wall here and watch the trains go by. Just take a crap and look what happens. This damn Skully probably put in rubber pipes. Three pounds a week for a rat hole, with brown swamp grass on the walls and cardboard furniture. And Marion has to be standing right under it. Couldn't she hear it coming? And the sun's gone in and it looks like rain. Better get back to the house or it'll weaken my position. Get her a little present, a fashion magazine filled with richery.
Marion sitting in the easy chair sewing. Pausing at the door, testing the silence.
"I'm sorry, Marion."
Marion head bent. Sebastian tendering his gift.
"I really am sorry. Look at me, I've got a present for you. It's hot tamale with ink dressing, see."
"O."
"Nice?"
"Yes."
"Like the gold teeth of God?"
"Don't spoil it now."
"My little Marion. I'm such a bastard. I tell you the whole thing up there is just a bunch of roots."
"I'll have something to read in bed."
"I'm an incredible pig, Marion."
"Aren't these suits nice."
"Don't you hear me, Marion? I'm a pig."
"Yes, but I wish we were rich and had money. I want to travel. If we could only travel."
"Let me kiss you, Marion, at least."
Marion arose, embracing him with blond arms, driving her long groin against his and her tongue deep into his mouth.
Marion you're good underneath it all and not a bad feel, just irritable at times. Now go in there and cook the dinner. And I'll relax here in the chair and read my Evening Mail. I see listed conscience money. Great thing, the conscience. And letters about emigration and women who marry for quids. And here's a letter about Blessed Oliver Plunket. Went up to see him there in the St. Peter's Church, Drogheda. A decapitated, two hundred and sixty year old head. Made me feel hushed. Gray, pink and battered and a glint of dead, bared teeth in the candle light. Charwomen told me to touch it, touch it now, sir, for it's great for luck. I put my finger, afeared, in the mouldy nose hole, for you can't have too much luck these days.
Now I see them across the street coming out of the laundry. Pouring into the road, faces lining up for the tram. There's the girl with the brown eyes and dark hair, her face colorless but for handsome lips. Her legs in lisle stockings and feet in army surplus boots. Hatless and hair in a bun. Goes to the newsboy, calves knotting softly on the backs of her legs. Tucks the paper under her arm and waits in the queue.
In my heart I know she isn't a virgin, but perhaps childless with pink buds for nipples or even if they're sucked and dark I don't mind. Wears a green scarf around her nice neck. Necks should be white and long with a blue nervous vein twitching with the nervousness of life in general. My good gracious savior, she's looking over here. Hide? What am I? A scoundrel, a sneak? Not a bit. Face her. You're lovely. Absolutely lovely. Put my face on your spring breasts. Take you to Paris and tie your hair in knots with summer leaves.
"Sebastian, it's ready, do bring in the chair."
In the kitchen cutting a thick slice off the loaf, scraping butter out of a cup.
"Sebastian, what about the toilet?"
"What about it?"
"Who's going to fix it?"
"Marion, I beg of you, this is dinner time. Do you want to give me ulcers?"
"Why won't you take some responsibility?"
"After dinner. Don't drive me up the wall over Irish plumbing, it's new to the country and the pipes got mixed."
"But who'll pay?"
"Skully out of his little gold egg."
"And the smell, Sebastian. What can we do about the smell."
"It's just healthy shit."
"How dare you use that ugly word."
"Shit's shit, Marion, even on judgement day."
"It's foul and I won't have it said in the same house as Felicity."
"She'll hear it and also in the matter of foulness I'll see to it she's laid before she's fifteen."
Marion silently seized. Putting egg shell in the coffee to make it settle. Notice her fingers bitten. She moves through the mess.
"All right, Marion, take it easy. It's just adjustment. Got to get used to it here."
"Why must you be so raw?"
"The mean meat in me."
"Be sincere. You weren't like this before we came to Ireland. This vulgar filthy country."
"Easy now."
"Children running barefoot in the streets in the middle of winter and men wagging their things at you from doorways. Disgusting."
"Untruths. Lies."
"They're a foul lot. I understand now why they're only fit to be servants."
"I say, Marion, a little bitterness?"
"You know it's true. Look at that frightful O'Keefe and his dirty ideas. America doesn't seem to help. Brings the worst out in them. He's not even fit to be a servant."
"I think Kenneth's a gentleman in every respect. Have you ever heard him fart? Now, have you?"
"Absolute frightful rot. One has only to watch him leering over the cat when it's in heat to see he's dreadfully base. When he comes into the room I feel he's criminally assaulting me in his mind."
"It's legal."
"It's the revolting lechery of an Irish peasant. And he tries to give the impression of good breeding. Watch him eating. It's infuriating. Grabs everything. That first time we had him to dinner he just came in as if we were servants and proceeded to eat before I even had time to sit down. And pulling hunks out of the bread, how can you be blind to these things."
"Now, now, a little patience with the people who have given your country a Garden of Eden to play in, make your fires and serve your tea."
"I wished we had stayed in England. You could have waited for Oxford or Cambridge. And we could have at least maintained a measure of dignity."
"I'll admit there's not much of that."
Long limbed Marion settled in the chair. What makes you so tall and slender. You raise your eyelids and cross your legs with something I like and wear sexless shoes with sexiness. And Marion I'll say this for you, you're not blatant. And when we get our house in the West with Kerry cattle out on the hills sucking up the grass and I'm Dangerfield K.C., things will be fine again.
A tram pounding by the window, grinding, swaying and rattling on its tracks to Dalkey. A comforting sound. Maps shaking on the wall. Ireland a country of toys. And maybe I ought to go over to Marion on the couch. We're experimenting with marriage. Got to find the contraceptives or else another screaming mouth for milk. The brown-eyed girl in the laundry is about twenty-five. Marion sucking on her false teeth again, I think it must be a sign of wanting it.
In the bedroom, Dangerfield rubbing stockinged feet on the cold linoleum. And the sound of Marion using the piss pot behind Skully's genuine Ming dynasty screen. And a little tug at these tattered shades for the privacy. Even in this great Catholic country you've got to keep covered, you know, or they watch you undress, but mind you, the Protestants use a field glass.
And Marion clutching the hem of her dress and drawing it over her shifting shoulders. She said there was only thirty shillings left.
"Our good accents and manners will see us right. Didn't you know, Marion, they can't put Protestants in jail?"
"You've no responsibility and to have my child raised among a lot of savage Irish and be branded with a brogue for the rest of her life. Pass me my cream, please."
Sebastian passing the cream, smiling and waving his feet from the edge of the bed. Letting his body fall with a squeal of springs and looking at the patches of pink in the ceiling. Marion a bit upset and confused. Difficult for her. She was breaking. Isn't as strong as me, led a sheltered life. Maybe shouldn't have married me. Matter, all of it, of time. Pumping it around and around and around, air in, air out and then it all goes like the shutters of a collapsing house. Starts and ends in antiseptic smell. Like to feel the end would be like closing leaves of honeysuckle, pressing out a last fragrance in the night but that only happens to holy men. Find them in the morning with a smile across the lips and bury them in plain boxes. But I want a rich tomb of Vermont marble in Woodlawn Cemetery, with automatic sprinkler and evergreens. If they get you in the medical school they hang you up by the ears. Never leave me unclaimed, I beg of you. Don't hang me all swollen, knees pressing the red nates of others where they come in to see if I'm fat or lean and all of us stabbed to death on the Bowery. Kill you in the tenement streets and cover you in flowers and put in the juice. By God, you hulking idiots, keep the juice away from me. Because I'm a mortician and too busy to die.
"Marion, do you ever think of death?"
"No."
"Marion, do you ever think you're going to die?"
"I say, Sebastian, would you mind awfully stopping that sort of talk. You're in that nasty mood."
"Not at all."
"You are. Coming up here every morning to watch the funerals of these wretched people. Dreadful and sordid. I think you get a perverse pleasure out of it."
"Beyond this vale of tears, there is a life above, unmeasured by the flight of years and all that life is love."
"You think you're frightening me with these sinister airs of yours. I find them only boring and they tend to make you repulsive."
"What?"
"Yes, they do."
"For the love of Jesus, look at me. Look at my eyes. Go ahead, come on."
"I don't want to look in your eyes."
"Honest globes they are."
"You can't talk seriously about anything."
"I just asked you about death. Want to know how you feel, really get to know you. Or maybe you think this is forever."
"Rubbish. You think it's forever, I know you do. You're not as flippant as this in the mornings, I notice."
"Takes me a few hours to adapt. Snap out of the dream."
"And you scream."
"What?"
"You were yelling a few nights ago, how do I get out of this. And another time you were screaming, what's that white thing in the corner, take it away."
Dangerfield holding his belly, laughing on the squeaking springs.
"You can laugh, but I think there's something serious at the root of it."
"What's at the root? Can't you see I'm mad. Can't you see? Look. See. Madness. E. I'm mad."
Sebastian ogled and wagged his tongue.
"Stop it. Always willing to clown but never to do anything useful."
Dangerfield watched from the bed as she flexed her long arms behind her back and her breasts fell from the cups of her brassiere, tan nipples hardening in the cold air. Red line on her shoulder left by the strap. Stepping wearily out of her underpants, facing the mirror and rubbing white cream into her hands and face. Little brown strands growing round the nipples. You've often said, Marion, about giving it the wax treatment but I like them that way after all.
Sebastian quietly stepping from the bed approaching the naked body. Pressing his fists against her buttocks and she pushes his hands away.
"I don't like you touching me there."
And kissing her on the back of the neck. Wet the skin with the tongue and the long blond hair gets in the mouth. Marion taking the blue nightdress from the nail. Sebastian stripping and sitting naked on the edge of the bed, taking white fluff out of the navel, and doubling himself, plucking the congealed dirt from between his toes.
"Sebastian, I wish you'd take a bath."
"Kills the personality."
"You were so clean when I first knew you."
"Given up the cleanliness for a life of the spirit. Preparation for another and better world. Hardly take offence at a little scruffiness. Clean soul's my motto. Take off your nightie."
"Where are they?"
"Under my shirts."
"And the vaseline?"
"Behind the books on the box."
Marion ripping the silver paper. Americans great for packages. Wrap anything up. And she draws the opening of her nightdress back from her shoulders, letting it fall to her feet and folding it carefully across the books. She kneels on the bed. What are other men like, do they grunt and groan, are they all curved and circumcised, with or without. She climbs into bed, a soft voice.
"Let's do it the way we used to in Yorkshire."
"Umn."
"Do you still like my breasts the way they are?"
"Umn."
"Tell me things, Sebastian, talk to me. I want to know." Sebastian rolled near, pressing the long, blond body to his, thinking of a world outside beating drums below the window in the rain. All slipping on the cobble stones. And standing aside as a tram full of Bishops rumbles past, who hold up sacred hands in blessing. Marion's hand tightening and touching in my groin. Ginny Cupper took me in her car out to the spread fields of Indiana. Parking near the edge of woods and walking out into the sunny rows of corn, waving seeds to a yellow horizon. She wore a white blouse and a gray patch of sweat under her arms and the shadow of her nipples was gray. We were rich. So rich we could never die. Ginny laughed and laughed, white saliva on her teeth lighting up the deep red of her mouth, fed the finest food in the world. Ginny was afraid of nothing. She was young and old. Her brown arms and legs swinging in wild optimism, beautiful in all their parts. She danced on the long hood of her crimson Cadillac, and watching her, I thought that God must be female. She leaped into my arms and knocked me to the ground and screamed into my mouth. Heads pressed in the hot Indiana soil and pinned me in a cross. A crow cawed into the white sun and my sperm spurted into the world. Ginny had driven her long Cadillac through the guard rails of a St. Louis bridge and her car shone like a clot of blood in the mud and murk of the Mississippi. We were all there in the summer silence of Suffolk, Virginia, when the copper casket was gently placed in the cool marble vault. I smoked a cigarette and crushed it out on the black and white squares of the tomb. In the stagnant emptiness of the train station after the cars were gone, I walked into the women's toilet and saw the phallic obscenities on the wooden doors and gray walls. I wonder if people will think I'm a lecher. Ginny had gardenias in her lovely brown hair. I hear the train, Marion's breath in my ear. My stomach's shaking, my last strength. The world's silent. Crops have stopped growing. Now they grow again.