“Don’t let it fool you,” John announced. “Looks lovely, but it rains twelve days out of ten. You’ll soon be at the whiskey, like me!”
“Is that possible?” Tom laughed, and I laughed with him, looking over. What I saw was what I had seen for years around Hollywood, a man lean as whipcord and leather; hard riding, tennis every day, swimming, yachting, and mountain climbing had fined him down to this. Tom was fifty-three, with a thick shock of iron-gray hair. His face was unlined, deeply tanned, his jaw was beautifully sharp, his teeth were all there and white, his nose was a hawk’s nose, exquisitely pro wed in any wind anywhere in the world. His eyes were blue, water bright and intensely burning. The fire in him was a young man’s fire, and it would never go out: he would never let it go out himself, and there was no man with an ego powerful enough to kill it. Nor, for that matter, was there a woman in the world whose flesh could smother Tom. There never had been, and now, this late, there never could be. Tom was his own mount and saddle, he rode himself and did so with masculine beauty. I could see by the way Lisa held his arm that she both angrily and happily accepted him for what he was, a single-minded man who had roamed the world and done what he wanted to do when he wanted to do it, without asking anyone and without apologies. Any woman who tried to lay tracks down for Tom, why, he would simply laugh and walk away. Now, this day, he had decided to come to Ireland. Tomorrow he might be with the Aga Khan in Paris and the day after in Rome, but Lisa would be there, and it would go on that way until someday, many years from now, he fell from a mountain, a horse, or another woman, and died at the base of that mountain, horse, or woman, showing his teeth. He was everything men would like to be if they were honest with themselves, everything John wanted to be and couldn’t quite live up to, and a hopeless and crazily reckless ideal for someone like me to admire from a distance, having been born and bred of reluctance, second thoughts, premonitions, depressions, and lack of will.
“Mr. Hurley,” I couldn’t help asking, “why have you come to Ireland?”
“Tom is the name. And … John ordered me here! When John speaks, I come!” said Tom, laughing.
“Damn right!” said John.
“You called him, remember, Tom?” Lisa punched his arm.
“So I did.” Tom was not in the least perturbed. “I figured it had been too long since we saw each other. Years go by. So I pick up the phone and call the son of a bitch and he says, Tom, come! And we’ll have a wild week and I’ll go on my way and another two years will pass. That’s how it is with John and me, great when we’re together, no regrets apart! This hunt wedding, now …”
“Don’t look at me,” I said. “My ignorance is total.”
“Lisa, here, didn’t quite warm up to it,” Tom admitted.
“No!” cried John, swiveling to burn her with one eye.
“Nonsense,” said Lisa, quickly. “I brought my hunt wardrobe from West Virginia. It’s packed. I’m happy! A hunt wedding— think!”
“I am,” said John, driving. “And if I know me, it might just as easily be a hunt funeral!”
“John would love that!” said Tom, talking to me as if John were not present, riding through green and green again. “Then he could come to our wake and get drunk and weep and tell all our grand times. You ever notice—things happen for his convenience? People are born for him, live for him, and die so he can put coins on their eyelids and cry over them. Is there anything isn’t convenient or fun for John?”
“Only one thing,” Tom added after a pause.
John pretended not to hear.
“What’s that?” I asked.
“Being alone.” Tom was suddenly serious. “John doesn’t like being alone, ever. You must never leave John alone, remember that, no matter what.” Tom looked at me with his keen, clear, bright-water eyes. “John once said to me, Tom, the loneliest time in a man’s day is the time between when he stops work and starts dinner. That single hour is as desolate as three in the morning of a long night, he said. Then is when a man needs friends.”
“I said that to you?” said John in fake astonishment.
Tom nodded. “I got a letter from you last year. You must have written it at five, some afternoon. You sounded alone. That’s why I call once in a while. That’s why I’m here. Jealous, Lisa?”
“I think I am,” said Lisa.
Tom looked at her steadily.
“No,” said Lisa, “I’m not.”
Tom patted her leg. “Good girl.” He nodded up at John. “How about giving us a road test?”
“Road test it is!”
We drove the rest of the way to Kilcock at eighty miles an hour. Lisa blinked quite often. Tom didn’t blink at all, watching Ireland loom at him in landfalls of green.
I kept my eyes shut most of the way.
There was a problem having to do with a hunt wedding. Quite suddenly we discovered that none had been held in Ireland for years. How many years, we never found out.
The second and greatest problem was the Church.
No self-respecting priest was about to show up to fuse the lusts of two Hollywood characters, although Lisa Helm was from Boston and a thoroughly nice lady, but Tom Hurley was from all the points of Hell, a cross-country horseman who played destructive tennis with Darryl Zanuck and advised the Aga Khan on the insemination of thoroughbreds.
No matter. For the Church, it was out of the question. Besides which (John had never bothered to ask), neither Tom, despite his Irish background, nor Lisa was Catholic.
What to do? There were no other churches near Kilcock. Not even a paltry small Protestant chapel you might sleepwalk in for a long Sunday noon.
So it finally fell to me to inquire of the local Unitarian church in Dublin. What’s worse than a Protestant? A Unitarian! It was no church and no faith at all. But its keeper, the Reverend Mr. Hicks, agreed, in a rather hyperventilated exchange on the phone, to assume the task because he was promised his rewards on Earth by John Huston rather than in Heaven by a God who was rarely named, so as to save embarrassment.
“Have they been living in sin?” asked the Reverend Mr. Hicks abruptly.
I was shocked. I had never heard such talk before.
“Well …” I said.
“Have they?”
I shut my eyes to focus the bridal pair, loud in the Dublin streets noon and night.
They had had a fight about one wedding ring, then another, a fight about possible flowers, a fight about the day and date, a fight about the minister, a fight about the location of the ceremony, a fight about the size of the wedding cake, with or without brandy, a fight about the horses and hounds, and even a fight with the master of the hunt, a fight with his assistant, a fight with the Courtown butler, an altercation with a maid, a carousal with the pub owner about liquor, another brannigan with the liquor merchant in town for not giving a markdown on three cases of not very excellent champagne, plus fights in restaurants and pubs. If you wanted to keep
