On the way my wife said, “If you held your face right, the beggars wouldn’t bother you.”
“My face,” I explained patiently, “is my face. It’s from Apple Dumpling, Wisconsin, Sarsaparilla, Maine. ‘Kind to Dogs’ is writ on my brow for all to read. Let the street be empty, then let me step out and there’s a strikers’ march of freeloaders leaping out of manholes for miles around.”
“If,” my wife went on, “you could just learn to look over, around or through those people, stare them down.” She mused. “Shall I show you how to handle them?”
“All right, show me! We’re here!”
I flung the elevator door wide and we advanced through the Royal Hibernian Hotel lobby to squint out at the sooty night.
“Jesus come and get me,” I murmured. “There they are, their heads up, their eyes on fire. They smell apple pie already.”
“Meet me down by the bookstore in two minutes,” said my wife. “Watch.”
“Wait!” I cried.
But she was out the door, down the steps and on the sidewalk.
I watched, nose pressed to the glass pane.
The beggars on one corner, the other, across from, in front of, the hotel, leaned toward my wife. Their eyes glowed.
My wife looked calmly at them all for a long moment.
The beggars hesitated, creaking, I was sure, in their shoes. Then their bones settled. Their mouths collapsed. Their eyes snuffed out. Their heads sank down.
The wind blew.
With a tat-tat like a small drum, my wife’s shoes went briskly away, fading.
From below, in the Buttery, I heard music and laughter. I’ll run down, I thought, and slug in a quick one. Then, bravery resurgent …
Hell, I thought, and swung the door wide.
The effect was much as if someone had struck a great Mongolian bronze gong once.
I thought I heard a tremendous insuck of breath.
Then I heard shoe leather flinting the cobbles in sparks. The men came running, fireflies sprinkling the bricks under their hobnailed shoes. I saw hands waving. Mouths opened on smiles like old pianos.
Far down the street, at the bookshop, my wife waited, her back turned. But that third eye in the back of her head must have caught the scene: Columbus greeted by Indians, Saint Francis amidst his squirrel friends with a bag of nuts. For a terrific moment I felt like a pope on St. Peter’s balcony with a tumult, or at the very least the Timultys, below.
I was not half down the steps when the woman charged up, thrusting the unwrapped bundle at me.
“Ah, see the poor child!” she wailed.
I stared at the baby.
The baby stared back.
God in heaven, did or did not the shrewd thing wink at me?
I’ve gone mad, I thought; the babe’s eyes are shut. She’s filled it with beer to keep it warm and on display.
My hands, my coins, blurred among them.
“Praise be!”
“The child thanks you, sir!”
“Ah, sure. There’s only a few of us left!”
I broke through them and beyond, still running. Defeated, I could have scuffed slowly the rest of the way, my resolve so much putty in my mouth, but no, on I rushed, thinking, The baby is real, isn’t it? Not a prop? No. I had heard it cry, often. Blast her, I thought, she pinches it when she sees Okeemogo, Iowa, coming. Cynic, I cried silently, and answered, No—coward.
My wife, without turning, saw my reflection in the bookshop window and nodded.
I stood getting my breath, brooding at my own image: the summer eyes, the ebullient and defenseless mouth.
“All right, say it.” I sighed. “It’s the way I hold my face.”
“I love the way you hold your face.” She took my arm. “I wish I could do it, too.”
I looked back as one of the beggars strolled off in the blowing dark with my shillings.
“‘There’s only a few of us left,’ ” I said aloud. “What did he mean, saying that?”
“‘There’s only a few of us left.’ ” My wife stared into the shadows. “Is that what he said?”
“It’s something to think about. A few of what? Left where?”
The street was empty now. It was starting to rain.
“Well,” I said at last, “let me show you the even bigger mystery, the man who provokes me to strange wild rages, then calms me to delight. Solve him and you solve all the beggars that ever were.”
“On O’Connell Bridge?” asked my wife.
“On O’Connell Bridge,” I said.
And we walked on down in the gently misting rain.
Halfway to the bridge, as we were examining some fine Irish crystal in a window, a woman with a shawl over her head plucked at my elbow.
“Destroyed!” The woman sobbed. “My poor sister. Cancer, the doctor said, her dead in a month! And me with mouths to feed! Ah, God, if you had just a penny!”
I felt my wife’s arm tighten to mine.
I looked at the woman, split as always, one half saying, “A penny is all she asks!,” the other half doubting: “Clever woman, she knows that by her underasking you’ll overpay!,” and hating myself for the battle of halves.
I gasped. “You’re …”
“I’m what, sir?”
Why, I thought, you’re the woman who was just back by the hotel with the bundled baby!
“I’m sick!” She hid in shadow. “Sick with crying for the half dead!”
You’ve stashed the baby somewhere, I thought, and put on a green instead of a gray shawl and run the long way around to cut us off here.
“Cancer …” One bell in her tower, and she knew how to toll it. “Cancer …”
My wife cut across it. “Beg pardon, but aren’t you the same woman we just met at our hotel?”
The woman and I were both shocked at this rank insubordination. It wasn’t done!
The woman’s face crumpled. I peered close. And yes, by God, it was a different face. I could not but admire her. She knew, sensed, had learned what actors know, sense, learn: that by thrusting, yelling, all fiery-lipped arrogance one moment, you are one character; and by sinking, giving way, crumpling the mouth and eyes, in pitiful collapse, you are another. The same woman, yes, but the same face and role? Quite obviously no.
She gave me a last blow beneath the belt. “Cancer.”
I flinched.
It was a brief tussle then, a kind of disengagement from one woman and an engagement with the other. The wife lost my arm and the woman found my cash. As if she were on roller skates, she whisked around the corner, sobbing happily.
“Lord!” In awe, I watched her go. “She’s studied Stanislavsky. In one book he says that squinting one eye and twitching one lip to the side will disguise you. I wonder if she has nerve enough to be at the hotel when we go back?”
“I wonder,” said my wife, “when my husband will stop admiring and start criticising such Abbey Theatre acting as that.”
“But what if it were true? Everything she said? And she’s lived with it so long she can’t cry any more, and so has to play-act in order to survive? What if?”
“It can’t be true,” said my wife slowly. “I just won’t believe it.”
But that single bell was still tolling somewhere in the chimney-smoking dark.
“Now,” said my wife, “here’s where we turn for O’Connell Bridge, isn’t it?”
“It is.”
That corner was probably empty in the falling rain for a long time after we were gone.
There stood the graystone bridge bearing the great O’Connell’s name, and there the River Liffey rolling cold gray waters under, and even from a block off I heard faint singing. My mind spun in a great leap back to December.
“Christmas,” I murmured, “is the best time of all in Dublin.”
For beggars, I meant, but left it unsaid.
For in the week before Christmas the Dublin streets teem with raven flocks of children herded by schoolmasters or nuns. They cluster in do
orways, peer from theater lobbies, jostle in alleys, “God Rest You Merry, Gentlemen” on their lips, “It Came Upon a Midnight Clear” in their eyes, tambourines in hand, snowflakes shaping a collar of grace about their tender necks. It is singing everywhere and anywhere in Dublin on such nights, and there was no night my wife and I did not walk down along Grafton Street to hear “Away in a Manger” being sung to the queue outside the cinema or “Deck the Halls” in front of the Four Provinces pub. In all, we counted in Christ’s season one night half a hundred bands of convent girls or public-school boys lacing the cold air and weaving great treadles of song up, down, over and across from end to end of Dublin. Like walking in snowfall, you could not walk among them and not be touched. The sweet beggars, I called them, who gave in turn for what you gave as you went your way.
Given such example, even the most dilapidated beggars of Dublin washed their hands, mended their torn smiles, borrowed banjos or bought a fiddle and killed a cat. They even gathered for four-part harmonies. How could they stay silent when half the world was singing and the other half, idled on the tuneful river, was paying dearly, gladly, for just another chorus?
So Christmas was best for all; the beggars worked—off key, it’s true, but there they were, one time in the year, busy.
But Christmas was over, the licorice-suited children back in their aviaries, and the beggars of the town, shut and glad for the silence, returned to their workless ways. All save the beggars on O’Connell Bridge, who, all through the year, most of them, tried to give as good as they got.
“They have their self-respect,” I said, walking my wife. “I’m glad this first man here strums a guitar, the next one a fiddle. And there, now, by God, in the very center of the bridge!”
“The man we’re looking for?”
“That’s him. Squeezing the concertina. It’s all right to look. Or I think it is.”
“What do you mean, you think it is? He’s blind, isn’t he?”
These raw words shocked me, as if my wife had said something indecent.
The rain fell gently, softly upon graystoned Dublin, graystoned riverbank, gray lava-flowing river.
“That’s the trouble,” I said at last. “I don’t know.”
And we both, in passing, looked at the man standing there in the very middle of O’Connell Bridge.
He was a man of no great height, a bandy statue swiped from some country garden perhaps, and his clothes, like the clothes of most in Ireland, too often laundered by the weather, and his hair too often grayed by the smoking air, and his cheeks sooted with beard, and a nest or two of witless hair in each cupped ear, and the blushing cheeks of a man who has stood too long in the cold and drunk too much in the pub so as to stand too long in the cold again. Dark glasses covered his eyes, and there was no telling what lay behind. I had begun to wonder, weeks back, if his sight prowled me along, damning my guilty speed, or if only his ears caught the passing of a harried conscience. There was that awful fear I might seize, in passing, the glasses from his nose. But I feared much more the abyss I might find, into which my senses, in one terrible roar, might tumble. Best not to know if civet’s orb or interstellar space gaped behind the smoked panes.
But, even more, there was a special reason why I could not let the man be.
In the rain and wind and snow, for two solid months, I had seen him standing here with no cap or hat on his head.
He was the only man in all of Dublin I saw in the downpours and drizzles who stood by the hour alone with the drench mizzling his ears, threading his ash-red hair, plastering it over his skull, rivuleting his eyebrows, and purling over the coal-black insect lenses of the glasses on his rain-pearled nose.
Down through the greaves of his cheeks, the lines about his mouth, and off his chin, like a storm on a gargoyle’s flint, the weather ran. His sharp chin shot the guzzle in a steady fauceting off in the air, down his tweed scarf and locomotive-colored coat.
“Why doesn’t he wear a hat?” I said suddenly.
“Why,” said my wife, “maybe he hasn’t got one.”
“He must have one,” I said.
“Keep your voice down.”
“He’s got to have one,” I said, quieter.
“Maybe he can’t afford one.”
“Nobody’s that poor, even in Dublin. Everyone has a cap at least!”
“Well, maybe he has bills to pay, someone sick.”
“But to stand out for weeks, months, in the rain, and not so much as flinch or turn his head, ignore the rain, it’s beyond understanding.” I shook my head. “I can only think it’s a trick. That must be it. Like the others, this is his way of getting sympathy, of making you cold and miserable as himself as you go by, so you’ll give him more.”
“I bet you’re sorry you said that already,” said my wife.
“I am. I am.” For even under my cap the rain was running off my nose. “Sweet God in heaven, what’s the answer?”
“Why don’t you ask him?”
“No.” I was even more afraid of that.
Then the last thing happened, the thing that went with his standing bareheaded in the cold rain.
For a moment, while we had been talking at some distance, he had been silent. Now, as if the weather had freshened him to life, he gave his concertina a great mash. From the folding, unfolding snake box he squeezed a series of asthmatic notes which were no preparation for what followed.
He opened his mouth. He sang.
The sweet clear baritone voice which rang over O’Connell Bridge, steady and sure, was beautifully shaped and controlled, not a quiver, not a flaw, anywhere in it. The man just opened his mouth, which meant that all kinds of secret doors in his body gave way. He did not sing so much as let his soul free.
“Oh,” said my wife, “how lovely.”
“Lovely.” I nodded.
We listened while he sang the full irony of Dublin’s Fair City where it rains twelve inches a month the winter through, followed by the white-wine clarity of Kathleen Mavourneen, Macushlah, and all the other tired lads, lasses, lakes, hills, past glories, present miseries, but all somehow revived and moving about young and freshly painted in the light spring, suddenly-not-winter rain. If he breathed at all, it must have been through his ears, so smooth the line, so steady the putting forth of word following round belled word.
“Why,” said my wife, “he could be on the stage.”
“Maybe he was once.”
“Oh, he’s too good to be standing here.”
“I’ve thought that often.”
My wife fumbled with her purse. I looked from her to the singing man, the rain falling on his bare head, streaming through his shellacked hair, trembling on his ear lobes. My wife had her purse open.
And then, the strange perversity. Before my wife could move toward him, I took her elbow and led her down the other side of the bridge. She pulled back for a moment, giving me a look, then came along.
As we went away along the bank of the Liffey, he started a new song, one we had heard often in Ireland. Glancing back, I saw him, head proud, black glasses taking the pour, mouth open, and the fine voice clear:
“I’ll be glad when you’re dead
in your grave, old man,
Be glad when you’re dead
in your grave, old man.
Be glad when you’re dead,
Flowers over your head,
And then I’ll marry the journeyman.…”
It is only later, looking back, that you see that while you were doing all the other things in your life, working on an article concerning one part of Ireland in your rain-battered hotel, taking your wife to dinner, wandering in the museums, you also had an eye beyond to the street and those who served themselves who only stood to wait.
The beggars of Dublin, who bothers to wonder on them, look, see, know, understand? Yet the outer shell of the eye sees and the inner shell of the mind records, and yourself, caught between, ignores the rare service these two halves of a bright sense are up to. br />
So I did and did not concern myself with beggars. So I did run from them or walk to meet them, by turn. So I heard but did not hear, considered but did not consider:
“There’s only a few of us left!”
One day I was sure the stone gargoyle man taking his daily shower on O’Connell Bridge while he sang Irish opera was not blind. And the next his head to me was a cup of darkness.
One afternoon I found myself lingering before a tweed shop near O’Connell Bridge, staring in, staring in at a stack of good thick burly caps. I did not need another cap, I had a life’s supply collected in a suitcase, yet in I went to pay out money for a fine warm brown-colored cap which I turned round and round in my hands, in a strange trance.
“Sir,” said the clerk. “That cap is a seven. I would guess your head, sir, at a seven and one half.”
“This will fit me. This will fit me.” I stuffed the cap into my pocket.
“Let me get you a sack, sir—”
“No!” Hot-cheeked, suddenly suspicious of what I was up to, I fled.
There was the bridge in the soft rain. All I need do now was walk over—
In the middle of the bridge, my singing man was not there.
In his place stood an old man and woman cranking a great piano-box hurdy-gurdy which racheted and coughed like a coffee grinder eating glass and stone, giving forth no melody but a grand and melancholy sort of iron indigestion.
I waited for the tune, if tune it was, to finish. I kneaded the new tweed cap in my sweaty fist while the hurdy-gurdy prickled, spanged and thumped.
“Be damned to ya!” the old man and old woman, furious with their job, seemed to say, their faces thunderous pale, their eyes red-hot in the rain. “Pay us! Listen! But we’ll give you no tune! Make up your own!” their mute lips said.
And standing there on the spot where the beggar always sang without his cap, I thought, Why don’t they take one fiftieth of the money they make each month and have the thing tuned? If I were cranking the box, I’d want a tune, at least for myself! If you were cranking the box, I answered. But you’re not. And it’s obvious they hate the begging job, who’d blame them, and want no part of giving back a familiar song as recompense.