As It Is in Heaven (13 page)

The moment his son had left, Philip had hurried upstairs and taken out his green Harris tweed, white shirt, and thick brown
trousers. When he put on the trousers, he was pleased to discover that the material did not cling or bunch about the knees
but fell cleanly to his feet. The line of the trousers was critical to a man’s well-being. How often he had seen customers
in Clery’s with sagging and baggy trousers, miscut and misshapen, drawn by machines for men that did not exist and worn with
a grey pathos, as if declaring how the wearer knew that nothing in the world ever measured up. When the knee pressed the trouser
leg the line was lost, a man walked as if he were pushing a wheelbarrow, and shortly life provided him one. If the seat was
tight, so too was the life, and soon no button or zip would restrain the pressure. It was a simple philosophy, the metaphysics
of tailoring, and Philip Griffin applied to his own clothes everything that thirty years in Clery’s had taught him about humanity.
In his bedroom was a full-length mirror, not for the pleasure of his vanity, but because it was only when he was looking at
himself in his clothes that he could appreciate the condition of his own health. So when he saw the line of the trousers in
the mirror he was relieved; he was still the same distance from the ground as a year previously. None of the raised hemming
that was the first sign of certain death was needed, and he began to think that the intrusion of the cancer might not be as
far progressed as he had imagined. Then he put on the white shirt. It was cotton. Cotton is a cloth full of forgiveness, and
even as Philip buttoned it over the small upturned bowl of his stomach he could feel the innocence in the material. When he
had it closed under his chin he was in the morning of his own First Communion and was his father’s hands doing the buttons
under his seven-year-old chin. It smelled clean as grace; the buttons were just so, neither slipping back through the holes
like those of inveterate gamblers nor resisting going through, like the shirts of bridegrooms. He ran his hands down the sides
of his torso and delighted briefly in the smooth and simple elegance of a white shirt. Then he chose a tie; only three in
a hundred men knew how to knot a tie. He had proven the figure once with young Dempsey, counting the inept nooses that choked
the greater portion of their customers and suggesting it was among the critical wisdoms a father could pass to his son: how
to knot a tie. He passed his hand across his face doing his, as if it were a blessing, and then took his jacket from the wardrobe.
A tweed; you have to be a certain age to wear tweed, to have the woven strands of your own life reflected in the griefs, hardships,
and pleasures of the cloth, and not lost within them like an overcoat. The green Harris was a jacket Philip Griffin had worn
for fifteen years; the moment he put his arm through the sleeve he could feel its cool lining like a second skin. The comfort
he felt in the jacket was a testimony to his own life, the weight of it, the roughness of the cloth that had diminished now
to a rubbed softness; he wore it like evidence of himself, and once he had put it on looked in the mirror to see if he still
looked the same.

He did.

“The cancer hasn’t shrunk you yet,” he told himself.

He took the keys to his car and went downstairs. The urgency of what he must do struck him once more as he confirmed the direness
of Stephen’s heart by a glance at the chessboard in the sitting room. In the daylight it was more alarming than ever, and
a moment later he was driving quickly into the city in the car that held like a stubborn memory the scent of white lilies.
He drove as quickly as he could in the impossible knot of the morning traffic. The sky was pasty and mottled, holding away
the light above the gathered clouds like a resentment, and preparing the lunchtime rain. Dublin barely moved in the early
morning; rather, from the ringed estates of new houses that had taken away the mountains, cars hurtled a quarter of a mile
and then slowed abruptly into the swollen and choked arteries of the city, where they inched like thick oil towards the heart.
Philip Griffin drove a half metre behind the backside of a bus. He had not been in traffic since he had retired and felt with
a small fall of his heart how the city had grown without him. We are smaller and more insignificant than we ever imagine,
he told his wife. But then the scent of the lilies reached him again and he felt only the significance and urgency of his
own role in the plot of his son’s loving. He rolled down the window and waved his arm at the young driver in the car next
to him.

“Emergency!” he cried out, and pulled the car into the outer lane.

It was half an hour later when he arrived in the waiting room of Dr. Tim Magrath. He had no appointment, but told the receptionist
he needed to know how long he had to live and would wait to find out. He opened the button of his jacket and sat down. He
took his fresh handkerchief and dabbed the top of his head. His head was damp and his lips were dry, but otherwise he showed
no signs of a fatal illness, and for a moment considered the remote possibility that in fact he was not carrying a cancer
after all. From the morning he had diagnosed himself he had never sought any medical confirmation; he had been more certain
of his condition than any test could prove. The cancer was his companion, and on wet mornings in early summer he could sometimes
feel it invade a new region of his bowel, moving like a dark liquid or a shadow in the undetected privacies of his organs.
He read its evidence in a dozen different ways: in the slowness of his movements when he sat on the toilet, in the taste of
chewed chalk that prevailed on his palate when he ate beef, in the interminable bouts of his gas, the sudden exhaustion in
mid-afternoon, and the pain that was like passing marbles when he urinated. And of very many, these were only a few. Until
the moment he sat in the doctor’s waiting room he had not considered for one minute that he could be wrong. But now, briefly,
within the inviolable comfort of the Harris tweed, and desperate for a stay of death to help his son, Philip wished heartily
that he was. Or at least he wished that death was not so close, that the latest rumblings and squelchings he heard below his
stomach in the early morning were not the telltale signs of the further progress of the disease. If I can live for another
while, he thought. If I can live long enough to see Stephen through the far side of this. He swallowed the sadness that rose
in his throat at the thought of his son, but it kept coming, and he had to tilt his head back and pretend to admire the ceiling.

An hour passed. Philip studied the backs of his hands, where he knew all manner of signs were made visible, and that the freckles
and sunspots of early vitality became there the bumps and splotches, scaliness, discoloration, and moles in which every organ
speaks. The more time passed, the more ill he felt himself becoming. It was too warm in the bright room; there was a cramping
sensation in his left thigh, the toes of his right foot were going numb. He was breathing shallowly. He asked for a glass
of water, but was even more alarmed when he drank it and realized it tasted of bitter lemons.

When the last patient had left the waiting room, Philip Griffin stood up, felt his heart racing, and quietly began to say
the Our Father. It was not something he was accustomed to doing, and he began it slowly and carefully, feeling with each phrase
the discernible slowing of his heart rate and the evanescence of his panic. Our Father who art in Heaven, hallowed be Thy
name, Thy kingdom come, Thy will be done, on earth as …

“Philip.”

Tim Magrath was standing in the doorway.

The doctor looked like his own grandfather. Since his wife had died he had suffered what was once called nerves, and was in
fact the collapse of his soul. The subsequent vacuum in his chest had reduced his shirt size by four inches, and his head
of hair seemed dusted with the white talcum makeup of a theatrical ghost. His eyes floated in sunken bags of skin and were
caught in fine nets of blood vessels that looked on the point of bursting. Tim Magrath held his hands while he stood. There
was no discernible line to his lips, as if he had sucked them in and mutely gnawed on his grief until only the thin gap remained.
When he spoke, his voice was a whispery remnant of a voice.

“Philip, how are you? Please come in.”

Although the man had changed, the room had not. Philip sat in the same seat as before, looked across at the bare trees of
the square, and then made an announcement.

“I’m not a man who believes in medicine,” he said.

Tim Magrath sat down. He held his hands still and made the slightest quivering in the muscles of his mouth.

“I’m not here for miracles, Doctor,” Philip Griffin added.

“Tim.” It was less than a whisper.

“I’m not here for miracles, Tim. I’ve cancer. I’ve had it for years. It’s moving into the final stages now and I want to know
how much longer I have.” He paused and looked across at the doctor, who had slid like a shadow into a seat by the wall. “It’s
not fear,” he said, “it’s not that I want to cancel it out, it’s just a question of how long, do you get me? I need a delay
in it. That’s all.”

“I’m sorry. I didn’t know. How long have you been …”

The whisper died, the lipless mouth dried the words into an ashen silence, and Tim Magrath raised the fingers of his right
hand to see if he could find them.

“I was never checked. I know it myself. It’s here.” He patted his stomach and below. “And here. Spreading. A pain in the morning
like I’ve swallowed knives. There’s an aching round the back, and this, see.” He stuck out the wedge of his tongue. “That’s
not right, is it?” He had closed his mouth again before the doctor had even risen to look.

Tim Magrath did not know what to say; he himself looked more like death than the majority of his patients. He could outnumber
the ailments of any of them and had already moved into that company of men whose gatherings in the clubhouse were dominated
by discourse of disease and the dropped dead. He had weekly funerals to go to, and eyed the mourners with the small comfort
of knowing that at least some of them would be at his. Now he lowered the grey head of his hair and looked at the fine carpet
on the floor. He felt the disconsolate, irredeemable sense of dread in his soul, the feeling he had experienced daily since
the death of his wife that he was in fact an impostor, that he had dressed himself in a fine suit and sat with patients for
thirty-six years in a room where he wrote prescriptions for drugs that merely masked and postponed the true pain of life.
That medicine cannot stop illness or death but merely divert it was a truth he had denied daily. To fifty patients a week
there was little Tim Magrath could say, and even as his doubts in the efficacy of medicines grew, he was unable to sit by
the bedside and say there is no cure for this condition we live in, and instead felt the gratitude and hope of the sick swim
over him when he said, Take three of these every morning noon and night.

But Philip Griffin was different: he didn’t want curing, he wanted time, and in the moments while Tim Magrath stared at the
carpet he gathered in himself the resolve to speak the truth and not offer the bald man the bottle of tablets. When he looked
up the patient was looking directly at him.

“It’s for my son,” Philip said. “He’s in love.”

  And so, like medieval knights bound on a ceaseless quest for an obscure and chivalrous honour, for the defence of an unattainable
ideal with which they themselves had only the briefest acquaintance but whose threatened extinction provoked in each of them
the deepest resolve, for the victory of Love over Death, Tim Magrath and Philip Griffin plotted into the afternoon how they
would slow down the cancer. The first thing to find out was the size and age and speed of the enemy. Philip needed tests.
The earliest available appointment with Carthy, the specialist, was two and a half months later, February 1.

“By then you could be dead,” Tim told him.

“I could,” Philip agreed.

They sat on the moment and felt the November light dying behind them. Cars were moving outside with the illusion of progress,
but the clock was almost standing still. February seemed several years away, and the fear of the winter ahead crept in their
skin like age. The weathers of wind and rain, of chill, frost, and hail, blew in imagination at the backs of the old men’s
necks as they sat wondering how they would outwit Time. The stilled air was grey between them, and they held their hands between
their knees and their heads bowed while the icy weight of the word “winter” lodged on their spirits like a sentence.

Then Tim Magrath spoke.

“Fall down,” he said. “Go on, fall down, cry out.”

There was a half-second, a moment it took for the complicity to register, and then, as if his seat had suddenly been thickly
oiled, Philip Griffin slid down onto the carpet at the doctor’s feet. His first cry was smaller than a bird’s.

“Louder,” the doctor whispered over him. “Scream it out, and keep doing it until you are in a hospital bed.”