As It Is in Heaven (24 page)

“I wish each of you a happy and joyful Christmas,” he said, and then swallowed his breath and lost the rest of his sermon,
realizing he had reached the tranquil and easeful end of words, saying nothing, just holding out his hands for a long moment
in front of him, as if passing to everyone an invisible gift of joy.

To the surprise of his heart Stephen Griffin received it. He felt a strange and spreading lightness, and by the time he was
sitting and watching his father go to receive Communion, he discovered he had somehow been gifted a piece of white linenlike
optimism. He rose and passed his father coming back along the aisle. He took the host in his mouth for the first time in years
and felt it taste like the memory of goodness. He returned and knelt down and prayed for his mother and his sister in the
prayers he did not know were the echoes of his father's. Then the Mass was over and the old priest left the altar a last time.
The Griffins stood up at the same time, moving from the church with the melted Communion still lingering like grace and their
spirits joined with something rare and fragile as faith.

Things could still work out. Believe it.

Stephen put his hand on his father's back, and when they reached the church door he raised an umbrella over the old man as
they walked out beneath the dark and starless heavens that spilled with rain.

When they returned home, it was half past eleven. Inside the house, where all his Christmases had been, Stephen made tea while
his father sat in the front room and put on
“E Lucevan le stelle.”
The music travelled through the house like an old guest and became, in the metamorphic magic of notes and rhythm, the true
expression of those two men. It contained the full and varied complexity of their separate longings, and when they sat to
have their tea, they did not speak across it. It was only when the disc had ended that Stephen picked up the opened letter
that had been put by the side table for him to find. It was the angry missive from Eileen Waters, a slightly less bitter replica
of the three others which Stephen had found inside his front door when he had returned to Miltown Malbay. It was school holidays
and he had driven directly to Dublin without going near the principal. Now he read the letter she had sent to his father demanding
to know where he was, and across the faint humming of the stilled music player, he said, “You know I was in Kenmare?”

“Yes. I got the card,” his father said. The old man raised his small face to pass his son only the slightest encouragement
to talk on.

Stephen was looking away. The rain sounded on the windows and made a muffled dullness of the distant ringing of churchbells.

“I mentioned bringing a friend,” Stephen said, and paused and sighed and breathed the scent of lilies that was expiring from
the pores on his neck.

“Oh yes, I was wondering.”

“She plays the violin.”

“Is that right?”

“Yes. Her name is Gabriella Castoldi. She is from Venice.”

He could not tell it without half-smiling now. He said her name and felt wings opening in his chest. Then at last he told
his father all. He spoke without pause and began by saying the three words “I love her,” and then spinning out the tale of
his loving across the midnight of Christmas like the newest fable in the oldest book of stories, telling the remarkableness
of his own emotions as if they were so entirely unexpected and even unimaginable gifts that unknown friends had dropped at
his door, telling the sunshine and the cloudlessness, and making his father smile away wet smiles towards the window, where
the narrative of love was the certain and indisputable proof of the listening ear of God.

When Stephen had told him everything, silence fell like snow. It gathered about their ankles and rose slowly. When it was
threatening to leave them frozen on the opposite sides of love, Philip Griffin raised his hand and pointed to the old chess
game. Despite the sharp ending of the tale, he was not discouraged by what he had heard: goodness had travelled to his son,
only it was clear now that Philip needed to do more.

“Do you …?”

Stephen joined his father's eyes on the chessboard.

“It's a mess,” he said. “I …”

“No no,” said Philip, pushing the board into place between them, “I thought that, but no, your position isn't so hopeless
at all. One move changes the game.”

  On Christmas morning Stephen awoke to find the suit his father had made him. He did not put it on until late morning, after
he had already given Philip Griffin the new discs of three Puccini operas and four of the violin concerti by Vivaldi which
were playing constantly in his head. When, later, he appeared downstairs in the suit, he looked like a newer version of himself.
The cut of the cloth was so perfectly made that for the first time in his life he experienced the naturalness of clothes and
wore them with confidence. His father in the downstairs hall eyed him with a scrupulous air of self-examination, and then
nodded, acknowledging that transforming moment in which the son passes the father like opposite but identical travellers on
the up-and-down elevators of life. Stephen was going on, Philip thought, and renewed in himself the difficult faith that after
so much that was ineffective and muddled and wasted in his life, this much was going to be right. He saw his son with his
wife's eyes and felt her pride in him, too, and then led Stephen out the door of Christmas morning to drive together to the
graveside.

In the days that followed, Stephen stayed in Dublin and visited Venice in his mind. When the bookshops reopened, he drove
across the glitterfrost of the New Year and bought a life of Vivaldi and three histories of Venice. He came home, and while
his father paced on the creak of the upstairs bedroom floor and wondered what God would want him to do next, he sat in the
front room and read. He read the shadowy insubstantial version of the life of the composer, of his birth in Venice in the
bleak March of 1678 in the sestiere of Castello, his father a barber who gifted his son the red hair which was startling enough
to name Vivaldi later as the Red Priest of Venice, when he was already teaching violin to orphaned girls at the Ospedale della
Pietà and earning in the autumn of 1703 a salary of five ducats a month. He was Maestro di Violino, the priest who did not
say Mass, who left the altar with chest pains and said he could not return to it, who lived his entire life as a priest, but
whose only sacrament was music, writing notes quick-handed on roughened parchment, as if taking dictation from God.

Stephen sat in Dublin in the frozen first days of January and read himself into Vivaldi's Venice. There, in fragments and
hints, oblique suggestions, was the composer's relationship with the singer Annina Giro, the daughter of a French wigmaker,
for whom he wrote now forgotten operas, and the all but vanished music for a voice none but he thought was so fine. Stephen
played the discs he had bought his father and then read hour after hour the gilded and glorious fable that was the history
of Venice, of its flamboyant past made of silks and cloths of gold, of spices and scents, of galleons and golden gondolas,
the palace and power of the Doge and the ever-lapping green waters of the lagoon across which came, like rightfully returned
sisters, the potent and influential magic of Arabia and China. When Stephen read of Venice, he read of Gabriella. Like every
lost lover, he sought in the large room of her absence the smallest continual reminders, the dust of her presence. It did
not matter that Gabriella herself had left Venice and preferred the mountains of Kerry to the bridged and watery maze of the
city where she was born, when Stephen's eyes travelled the pages and read the names of streets and squares, the
calles
and
campos
that gathered like excitement in the long S of the Canal Grande, he was closer to her.

When in the evenings he played a halfhearted and uninspired chess with his father, he played with a map of Venice at his feet.

“Here.”

Philip Griffin was standing inside the door of the front room, having just returned from the city. He had business to attend
to, he had told Stephen, leaving his son in the diminished dream that was his condition in the first cold days of January
and which his father saw with increasing panic was each day undoing the good of December. He had gone into Dublin with a new
withdrawal, and telling God that it was just this once, he bypassed the park railings and went instead into the travel agency
of Jimmy Galvin, a man who had played soccer for Ireland and once bought from Philip Griffin four suits of blue green purple
and grey tweed with specifically tailored elephantine flared trouser legs and twenty-nine-inch waists. Jimmy Galvin did not
remember him. He bought his clothes off the rack now and wore them with a thoughtless monotony that reflected his life since
glory. He had three girls working for him at the counter and sat in the back room behind a window, where he lived on the phone,
untying the knots of foreign agencies, commissions, and airport pickups, and all but forgetting the moments only his legs
remembered when he had scored twice against Spain.

Philip watched the top of his head and wondered if Jimmy would recognize him. He didn't, and a small loss smarted in the tailor
like a sudden discovery in the death notices. He held out his money to the girl at the counter and paid in cash for a ticket
and a hotel room. Then he drove to the hospital and spoke with Hadja Bannerje.

Finally, he arrived home with the envelopes in his pocket, like the folded certificates of his fatherhood. He stood inside
the door and gasped as the pain roiled and made his eyebrows rise involuntarily, as if making room in his face for new suffering.

“Here,” he said, and held out the envelopes.

The first one Stephen opened was the headed notepaper of Dr. Hadja Bannerje and the declaration in slanted blue ink that Stephen
Griffin was currently the patient of the undersigned and that he could not return to work at the present time, for his condition
necessitated monitoring under the care of yours sincerely, Dr. Hadja Bannerje.

Stephen finished reading it and looked at where the grey slump of his father was leaning against the door.

“Well?” said Philip Griffin with a breathy inhale. “That's, her complaints fecked. We'll send that off to the old bitch tomorrow.
Open the next one.” The father nodded, he touched his tongue to wet his lips and half-grinned half-grimaced at the madcap
and wild plan, its rash and foolhardy nature that was not in his character, that was the reversal of his previous position,
but to which he had given himself with a kind of sweet and feckless madness that made him imagine, against all the evidence
of his life and amidst the broken and long-smouldering ruins of his own heart, that here now, at last, for his son, he could
play the angel of love.

Stephen opened the second envelope and found the ticket to Venice.

“Go,” his father said, and did not move, speaking with that purity of motive that makes men saints, and hearing himself say
the words he wanted said to him and which instead, for another while at least, stayed suspended in the lonely silence of his
eyes.

“Go,” he said. “Go and find her.”

  By the time Gabriella Castoldi had arrived back in Venice, she knew she was carrying Stephen Griffin's child, and bore it
with sour bouts of illness up and down the steps of the Rialto and through the fish-fumed air of the narrow streets to the
house of her spinster cousin, Maria, in the Calle dei Botteri. Maria Feri was fifty years old and still worked in the
papeterie
in the Calle Piovan where she had first earned wages as a girl. She welcomed Gabriella on the day before Christmas, when
the grey dampness seeped through the air of the city like the cloths of drowned ghosts, and the seasonal efforts of the inhabitants
to hold off melancholia was mostly manifest in the quickened movements down the alleyways and across the bridges, a hastening
towards the year's end, urgent with shopping and the little clusters of families hurrying to and from visits with unbearable
relatives.