THE WIG MY FATHER WORE
Other books by Anne Enright:
What Are You Like?
The Pleasure of Eliza Lynch
The Gathering
The Wig My Father Wore
ANNE ENRIGHT
Copyright © 1995 by Anne Enright
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, or the facilitation thereof, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003.
First published by in Great Britain in 1995 by Jonathan Cape
Printed in the United States of America Published simultaneously in Canada
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Enright, Anne, 1962-
The wig my father wore / Anne Enright.
p. cm.
eBook ISBN-13: 978-0-8021-9726-9
1. Women in television broadcasting—Fiction. 2. Dublin (Ireland)—
Fiction. 3. Young women—Fiction. 4. Angels—Fiction. I. Title.
PR6055.N73 W5 2001
823′\914—dc21 2001033520
Grove Press
an imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
841 Broadway
New York, NY 10003
Distributed by Publishers Group West
FOR MARTIN
Stephen
By that time I needed anything I could get, apart from money, sex and power which were easy but hurt a lot. The angel rang at my door with an ordinary face on him and asked for a cup of tea, as was his right. He revealed himself on the threshold with broad comments about my fertility. Who needs it? I felt like taking the cup right out of his hand.
We wrestled for a while, which was just part of the job as far as he was concerned. I thought he had been wafting about since Aye began, in that place where grief and joy are one, where knowledge is an old joke and Time is just another window. I thought he might do a lot of singing. I was wrong. The angels he knew were ordinary men who killed themselves once when times were bad. Now they had to walk everywhere, setting despair to rights, growing their wings.
I said I was glad that this was the way it turned out, that I thought everyone was too hard on suicides. It isn’t as if, I said, you did it just for fun. He said being an angel wasn’t a free ride either. There was a lot of wrestling involved, a lot of regret. He wished, for example, that I would stop looking where his crotch kind of glittered while the rest of him glowed. He asked me how the despair was coming along. I smiled. I told him he was wasting his time on me.
Stephen had been gaffer for a construction company in Canada with some accounting duties and responsibility for a lot of materials and transport. He built a bridge in Regina and went on from there. Getting married was one of those surprises, he said, when you’re just a kid yourself, but his daughters were the saving of him (they taught him how to read), and the bridges were great. Then there was all that clear sky and the crisp winters when your hand might freeze to the girders and you couldn’t feel a spanner except as a burn. He was in Ontario in 1934 with a job nearly done, each side of the span cantilevered out over the water and gaping. One night he walked up to where the road stopped and stepped over to the other side. Actually, the noose froze. It was the cold that did for him in the end.
That was it, he said, and nothing left, apart from a lingering pain for humanity and a susceptibility to the weather. He gave me a smile of celestial beauty which spread over most of him, but missed the marks on his neck.
‘So what’s it like since God died?’ I asked with a laugh. He looked at me.
‘And how’s your mother?’ he said. Which I thought was a little low, since she is fairly happy now, considering. Besides, there are things between every mother and child best forgotten, when we all settle^ down and just get on with it.
Apparently this was just a stock question and second on the list. His own mother had doubled up with grief one day while clearing the dishes. She looked like she was trying to push her head into the teapot, because she had to press her face against something and she could not cry.
I was disappointed with all this mother-and-teapot lark. She was not the last thing he had thought of, before he died. I told him to get on with it and he went through the list.
THE LIST
Did my mother weep, did my father die, did the two happen around the same time and which one caused the other.
Did I leave lightbulbs burning alone, did I draw the curtains at night, did I ever put a plug in a socket just to make it feel happy.
Had I ever pissed myself in public, did I take pleasure in it. Did I suffer from the feeling that I had left something behind in a train. Is that why I smoked, so I could check my pockets for cigarettes.
Had I ever been overheard in a private conversation. Had I ever put blood on a mirror. During the sexual act did I suffer from regret.
Did beauty disgust me.
Did Jesus Christ die for me.
Did I ever hoard parts of another person’s body, for example a lock of hair.
Had I ever seen a pregnant woman swimming on her back.
I found my sexual feelings for Stephen quite disturbing. He had taken the precaution of sleeping with me at night. We were both looking for the question that was missing off the list and we needed all the time we could get.
Besides, there were problems at work. I thought about him as he lay beside me, not making a dent. Just my luck I said, cold hands and a rope burn, but he whispered in his sleep until even the sheets looked happy.
And then there was always his ineffable smile of incredible beauty. There was also the fact that he was blessed, that all the blessings ever given or withheld seemed to sit in him, for example the blessing my mother never gave me and the one I never gave her, despite the fact that we are both superstitious that way.
There was also awe and awfulness, always a good one between the sheets. Not to mention the unutterable, the unspeakable and the inexpressible, lying by my side in hand’s reach.
‘You’re forgetting about purity, wisdom and grace,’ he said. ‘Even a human can have them.’
‘No I’m not,’ I said and made a pass at him saying ‘This is pure, isn’t it? This is wise?’ and a lot of other very embarrassing things, as one does in these situations.
He said he thought that nymphomania was out of fashion now, but where he came from it caused a lot of parental concern. Various procedures might be followed, with or without the aid of anaesthetic, he said, and the mildest cure of all was a bag of powdered camphor hung around the woman’s neck. So he got out of the bed to look for