like dumb fools.’
‘Oh, that’s a shame.’
‘I tried to get them to do something, but they just stood around. Only eight of them showed up, eight out of twenty, eight, and me the only one in costume. I tell you. The only one. What a bunch of fools.’
‘After all your trouble, too.’
‘They had their girls and they just stood around with them and wouldn’t do anything, no games, nothing. Some of them went off with the girls,’ he said, in the dark, seated, not looking at her. ‘They went off up the beach and didn’t come back. Honest to gosh.’ He stood now, huge, and leaned against the wall, looking all disproportioned in the short trousers. He had forgotten the child’s hat was on his head. He suddenly remembered it and took it off and threw it on the floor. ‘I tried to kid them. I played with a toy dog and did some other stuff but nobody did anything. I felt like a fool the only one there dressed like this, and them all different, and only eight out of twenty there, and most of them gone in half an hour. Vi was there. She tried to get me to walk up the beach, too. I was mad by then. I was really mad. I said no thanks. And here I am. You can have the lollipop. Where did I put it? Pour the cider down the sink, drink it, I don’t care.’
She had not moved so much as an inch in all the time he talked. She opened her mouth.
The telephone rang.
‘If that’s them, I’m not home.’
‘You’d better answer it,’ she said.
He grabbed the phone and whipped off the receiver.
‘Sammy?’ said a loud high clear voice. He was holding the receiver out on the air, glaring at it in the dark. ‘That you?’ He grunted. ‘This is Bob.’ The eighteen-year-old voice rushed on. ‘Glad you’re home. In a big rush, but – what about that game tomorrow?’
‘What game?’
‘What game? For cri-yi, you’re kidding. Notre Dame and S.C.!’
‘Oh, football.’
‘Don’t say oh football like that, you talked it, you played it up, you said—’
‘That’s no game,’ he said, not looking at the telephone, the receiver, the woman, the wall, nothing.
‘You mean you’re not going? Heavy-Set, it won’t be a game without you!’
‘I got to water the lawn, polish the car—’
‘You can do that Sunday!’
‘Besides, I think my uncle’s coming over to see me. So long.’
He hung up and walked out past his mother into the yard. She heard the sounds of him out there as she got ready for bed.
He must have drubbed the punching bag until three in the morning. Three, she thought, wide awake, listening to the concussions. He’s always stopped at twelve, before.
At three thirty he came into the house.
She heard him just standing outside her door.
He did nothing else except stand there in the dark, breathing.
She had a feeling he still had the little boy suit on. But she didn’t want to know if this were true.
After a long while the door swung slowly open.
He came into her dark room and lay down on the bed, next to her, not touching her. She pretended to be asleep.
He lay face up and rigid.
She could not see him. But she felt the bed shake as if he were laughing. She could hear no sound coming from him, so she could not be sure.
And then she heard the squeaking sounds of the little steel springs being crushed and uncrushed, crushed and uncrushed in his fists.
She wanted to sit up and scream for him to throw those awful noisy things away. She wanted to slap them out of his fingers.
But then, she thought, what would he do with his hands? What could he put in them? What would he, yes, what would he do with his hands?
So she did the only thing she could do, she held her breath, shut her eyes, listened, and prayed, O God, let it go on, let him keep squeezing those things, let him keep squeezing those things, let him, let him, oh let, let him, let him keep squeezing … let … let …
It was like lying in bed with a great dark cricket.
And a long time before dawn.
So you want to know all the whys and wherefores of the Irish? What shapes them to their Dooms and runs them on their way? you ask. Well, listen, then. For though I’ve known but a single Irishman in all my life, I knew him, without pause, for one hundred and forty-four consecutive nights. Stand close; perhaps in him you’ll see that entire race which marches out of the rains but to vanish through the mists; hold on, here they come! Look out, there they go!
This Irishman, his name was Nick.
During the autumn of 1953, I began a screenplay in Dublin, and each afternoon a hired cab drove me thirty miles out from the River Liffey to the huge gray Georgian country house where my producer-director rode to hounds. There, we discussed my eight pages of daily script through the long fall, winter, and early spring evenings. Then, each midnight, ready to turn back to the Irish Sea and the Royal Hibernian Hotel, I’d wake the operator in the Kilcock village exchange and have her put me through to the warmest, if totally unheated, spot in town.
‘Heber Finn’s pub?’ I’d shout, once connected. ‘Is Nick there? Could you send him along here, please?’
My mind’s eye saw them, the local boys, lined up, peering over the barricade at that freckled mirror so like a frozen winter pond and themselves discovered all drowned and deep under that lovely ice. Amid all their jostlings and their now-here’s-a-secret-in-a-stage-whisper commotion stood Nick, my village driver, his quietness abounding. I heard Heber Finn sing out from the phone. I heard Nick start up and reply:
‘Just look at me, headin’ for the door!’
Early on, I learned that ‘headin’ for the door’ was no nerve-shattering process that might affront dignity or destroy the fine filigree of any argument being woven with great and breathless beauty at Heber Finn’s. It was, rather, a gradual disengagement, a leaning of the bulk so one’s gravity was diplomatically shifted toward that far empty side of the public room where the door, shunned by all, stood neglected. Meantime, a dozen conversational warps and woofs must be ticked, tied, and labeled so next morn, with hoarse cries of recognition, patterns might be seized and the shuttle thrown with no pause for breath or thought.
Timing it, I figured the long part of Nick’s midnight journey – the length of Heber Finn’s – took half an hour. The short part – from Finn’s to the house where I waited – took but five minutes.
