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, God, there’s always something new. I mean, when you’re not looking, God 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 ass 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 damn 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? Damn! 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 Buttery of the Royal Hibernian Hotel. John insisted on crutch-vaulting down to find the American Irishman.
“Tom, by God, 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, damn her.”
“Now, who would that be?” asked John, with that oiled and easy polite but false voice of his. “What woman is that!”
At noon the next day, Mike and I drove John out to Kilcock. 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 God! 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 God!” cried Lisa.
“Dear Jesus!” said Tom.
Scream, silence, scream.
“Is that us?” both said.
“Or an approximation,”
