“I thought you were casting—”
“Sure! But the damn horse jumped when some car horn blew. I flew a mile high. I’m okay now. With a slight tendency, without warning, to fall down and writhe in agony when my back gives. Don’t let me scare you, kid.”
“I’m scared, John. If you die, I’m dead!”
“Nice sentiment. You’re the screwed-tight optimist. Just tell me I won’t fall down and writhe with Saint Vitus at the wedding.”
“Heck, you’d do it just to steal the show.”
“Why not? Hire a cab, pick me up at the airport tonight, tell me the Saint Elmo’s fire scene on the way. Can I stay in your room at the Royal Hibernian overnight? I should be walking without crutches by morning.”
“Holy God, John, crutches?”
“Pipe down! Is Ricki in the room, for Christ’s sake?”
“She went to answer the door. Wait …”
Ricki stood in the hall looking at a piece of paper in her hand. Her face was a fall of snow and her eyes were beginning to drop tears. She came and handed me the paper.
John’s voice said, “I hear someone crying.”
“They are, John.”
I read from the scribbled note.
“ ‘Alma Kimball O’Rourke fell under her horse today. She was killed instantly and the horse was destroyed.’ ”
“Omigod,” said John, five hundred miles away in Paris.
“She was the wife of the Kildare Hunt’s captain, wasn’t she?” I asked.
“Jesus, yes,” said John quietly.
I finished reading the note. “ ‘The funeral’s day after tomorrow. The entire hunt will be there.’ ”
“My God,” murmured John, growing quieter still.
“That means …?” I said.
“The hunt wedding,” Ricki said, “must be called off.” John heard and said, “No, no. Only delayed.”
Mike drove me into Dublin to find Tom, who had taken a room at the Russell Hotel. He and Lisa had fought about that too. He wanted to stay at Huston’s with her. But the Catholics and the Protestants, she pointed out, were both watching. So it was the hotel for Tom until the ceremony. Besides, he could play the stock market better, alone in his Dublin hotel room. That cinched it. Tom checked in.
I found Tom in the lobby of the hotel, mailing some letters.
I handed him the note and said nothing.
There was a long pause, and then I could see the thin transparent inner lids of Tom’s eyes, his eagle’s eyes or his lizard’s eyes or his cat’s eyes, slide down between us. They did not slam like the great gates of Kiev, but it was just as final, just as definite, just as complete. The noise his eyelids made closing, while he continued to stare at me, was awful in its silence. I was outside in my world, if my world existed at all, and Tom was inside his.
“She’s dead, Tom,” I said, but that was useless. Tom had switched off whatever batteries kept 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?”