The Afterlife (23 page)

He had had three wives. He had meant Vivian to see him into the grave, but unexpected resistances in her were stimulating, rather than lulling, his will to live. In his simple and innocent manhood he had taken on a swarming host of sexist resentments—men were incompetent (his driving in foreign lands), men were ridiculous (his desire to see,
faute de mieux
, old Ireland’s lichened gray beehive huts, dolmens, menhirs, and ruined abbeys), men were lethal. Two years ago, out of sheer political superstition, this youthful wife had become furious in Gabriele D’Annunzio’s estate above Lake Garda, all because the world-renowned poet and adventurer had enshrined himself and his thirteen loyal followers in matching sarcophagi, lifted up to the sun on pillars. Men were Fascists, this had led Vivian to realize. She proved to be violently allergic to history, and her silver-haired husband loomed to her as history’s bearer. So he had, for their next trip abroad, suggested Eire, a land whose history was muffled in legend and ignominy. Just its shape on the map, next to Great Britain’s spiky upstanding silhouette, suggested the huddled roundness of a docile spouse.

“You insisted,” he repeated, “and then we got lost anyway, and saw none of the sights. I missed the Gallarus Oratory.”

Vivian brushed his resentful memory away, there by the hotel fire. “The whole countryside is the sight,” she said, “and
the wonderful people. Everybody knows that. And all day, with you jerking that poor Japanese compact this way and that like a crazy teenaged hood, I couldn’t enjoy looking out. If I take my eye off the map for an instant, you get us lost. You’re not getting me back into that car tomorrow, I tell you that.”

Itching to give the fire a poke, he gave it to her instead. “Darling, I thought we were going to drive south, to Bantry and Skibbereen. Bantry House in the morning, and Creagh Gardens in the afternoon, with a quick lunch at Ballydehob.” Allenson smiled.

“You’re a monster,” Vivian said cheerfully. “You really would put me through a whole day of you at the wheel on these awful roads? We’re going to
walk
.”

“Walk?”

“George, I talked it over with a man in the office, the assistant manager, while you were putting on a shirt and tie. He couldn’t have been sweeter, and said what the tourists do in Kenmare is they take walks. He gave me a map.”

“A map?” Another whiskey would sink him to the bottom of the sea. But would that be so bad? This woman was a talking nightmare. She had produced a little map, printed by photocopy on green paper, showing a pattern of numbered lines surrounding the phallic thrust of the Kenmare estuary. “I’ve come all this way to take a walk?” But there was no arguing. Vivian was so irrational that, because her predecessor wife had been called Claire, she had refused, planning the trip, to include County Clare, where the good cliffs and primitive churches were, and off whose shore part of the Spanish Armada had wrecked.

Next morning, the devil in him, prompted by the guidebook, could not resist teasing her. “Today’s the day,” he announced, “to drive the Ring of Beara. We can see the Ogham
Stone at Ballycrovane, and if there’s time take the cable car to Dursey Island, the only such wonder in this green and wondrous land. The blessed roadway meanders, it says here, through mountainous coastal areas providing panoramic views of both Bantry and Kenmare bays. A famous stone circle there is, and just two miles further, the ruins of Puxley’s mansion! A mere hundred and forty kilometers, the entire ring is claimed to be; that’s eighty-eight miles of purest pleasure, not counting the cable car.”

“You must be out of your gourd,” Vivian said, using one of those youthful slang expressions that she knew he detested. “I’m not getting back into any car with you at the wheel until we head to Shannon Airport. If then.”

Allenson shrugged to hide his hurt. “Well, we could walk downtown to the local circle again. I’m not sure I grasped all the nuances the first time.”

It had been charming, in a way. They had driven up a little cul-de-sac at the shabbier end of Kenmare and a small girl in a school jumper had been pushed from a house, while her mother and siblings watched from the window, and shyly asked for the fifty-pence admission. Then through a swinging gate and up a muddy lane the couple had walked, past stacks of roof tiles and a ditch brimming with plastic trash, arriving at a small mown plateau where fifteen mismatched stones in a rough circle held their mute pattern. He had paced among them, trying to unearth in his atavistic heart the meaning of these pre-Celtic stones. Sacrifice. This must have been, at certain moments of heavenly alignment, a place of sacrifice, he thought, turning to see Vivian standing at the ring’s center in too vividly blue a raincoat.

“We’re walking,” she agreed with him, “but not back to those awful rocks that got you so excited, I’ll never know why. It’s
stupid
to keep looking at rocks somebody could have arranged
yesterday for all we know. There are more of these supposedly prehistoric beehive huts today than there were a hundred years ago, the nice young man in the office was telling me yesterday. He says what sensible people who come to Kenmare do is take long walks.”

“Who is this guy, that he’s become so fucking big in my life suddenly? Why doesn’t
he
take you for the walk, if that’s what’s on his mind?”

Did she blush? “George,
really
—he’s young enough to be my son.” This was an awkward assertion, made in the sweep of the moment. She could be the mother of a twenty-one-year-old, if she had been pregnant at nineteen; but in truth she had never borne a child, and when they were first married, and she was in her mid-thirties, she had hoped to have a child by him. But he had ogreishly refused; he had had enough children—a daughter by Jeaneanne, two sons by Claire. Now the possibility had slipped away. He thought of his present wife as racily younger than himself but her fortieth birthday had come and gone, and since the days when they had surreptitiously courted, in the flattering shadows of Claire’s unknowing, Vivian’s face had grown angular and incised with lines of recurrent vexation.

The young man in the office—a kind of rabbit hole around the corner from the key rack, in which the Irish staff could be heard scuffling and guffawing—was at least twenty-five, and may have been thirty, with children of his own. He was slender, black-eyed, milky-skinned, and impeccably courteous. Yet his courtesy carried a charge, a lilt, of mischief. “Yes, and walking is the thing in these parts—we’re not much for the organized sports that are the custom in the States.”

“We passed some golf courses, driving here,” Allenson said, not really wanting to argue.

“Would you call golf organized?” the assistant manager said quickly. “Not the way I play it, I fear. As we say, it’s an ungrateful way to take a walk.”

“Speaking of walks—” Vivian produced her little green map. “Which of these would you recommend for my husband and me?”

With his bright-black eyes he looked from one to the other and then settled on looking at her, with a cock to his neatly combed head. “And how hardy a man would he be?”

Wifely to a fault, Vivian took the question seriously. “Well, his driving is erratic, but other than that he manages pretty well.”

Allenson resented this discussion. “The last time I saw my doctor,” he announced, “he told me I had beautiful arteries.”

“Ah, I would have guessed as much,” said the young man, looking him benignly in the face.

“We don’t want to start him out on anything too steep,” Vivian said.

“Currabeg might be your best option, then. It’s mostly on the level road, with fine views of the Roughty Valley and the bay. Take an umbrella against the mist, along with your fine blue coat, and if he happens to begin to look poorly in the face you might hail a passing motorcar to bring in the remains.”

“Are we going to be walking in traffic?” She sounded alarmed. For all her assertiveness, Vivian had irritating pockets of timidity. Claire, Allenson remembered, drove on a motor scooter all over Bermuda with him, clinging to his midriff trustfully, twenty years ago, and would race with the children on bicycles all over Nantucket. Jeaneanne and he had owned a Ford Thunderbird convertible when they lived in Texas, and would commonly hit a hundred miles an hour in the stretch between Lubbock and Abilene, the top down and
the dips in Route
84
full of watery mirages. He remembered how her hair, bleached blond in Fifties-style streaks, would whip back from her sweaty temples, and how she would hike her skirt up to her waist to give her crotch air, there under the steering wheel. Jeaneanne had been tough, but her exudations had been nectar, until her recklessness and love of speed had carried her right out of Allenson’s life. The loss had hardened him.

The assistant manager appeared to give Vivian’s anxiety his solemn consideration; there was, in his second of feigned thought, that ceremonious touch of parody with which the Irish bring music to the most factual transactions. “Oh, I judge this off-time of year there won’t be enough to interfere with your easiness. These are high country roads. You park at the crossing, as the map shows clearly, and take the two rights to bring you back.”

Still, Allenson felt, their adviser felt some politely unspoken reservation about their undertaking. In their rented car, with its mirrors where you didn’t expect them and a balky jumble of gears on the floor, while Vivian transparently tried to hold her tongue from criticism, he drove them out of Kenmare, past a cemetery containing famous holy wells, over a one-lane hump of a stone bridge, up between occluding hedgerows into the bare hills whose silhouettes, in the view from the Allensons’ hotel room, were doubled by the mirroring sheen of the lakelike estuary. They met no other cars, so Vivian had less need to tense up than on the ring roads.

The map in her lap, she announced at last, “This must be the crossroads.” A modest intersection, with barely enough parking space for one car on the dirt shoulder. They parked in the space and locked the car. It was the middle of a morning of watery wan sunshine. A bite in the breeze told them they were higher than in Kenmare.

On foot they followed a long straight road, not as long and shimmering as the straightaways in Texas, yet with something of the same potential for mirage. They crossed a stream hidden but for its gurgle in the greenery. A house being built, or rebuilt, stood back and up from the road, with no sign of life. Land and houses must be cheap. Ireland had been emptying out for ages. Cromwell had reduced the Irish to half a million, but they had stubbornly bred back, only to be decimated by the potato famine two centuries later.

At first, Vivian athletically strode ahead, hungry for hovels and unspoiled views. She had brought new running shoes on the trip—snow-white, red-chevroned, bulky with the newest wrinkles of pedal technology. They were not flattering, but, then, compared with Jeaneanne’s, this wife’s ankles were rather thick. Her feet looked silly, under the hem of her bright-blue raincoat, flickering along the road surface, striped like birds. Where were the real birds? Ireland didn’t seem to have many. Perhaps they had migrated with the people. Famines are hard on birds, but that had been long ago.

The hedgerows thinned, and after the invisible stream the road had a steady upward trend. He found himself overtaking his young wife, and then slowing his pace to match hers. “You know,” she told him, “I really
did
twist my back in the car yesterday, and these new sneakers aren’t all they were advertised. They have so much structure inside, my feet feel bullied. It’s as if they keep pushing my hips out of alignment.”

“Well,” he said, “you could go barefoot.” Jeaneanne would have. Claire might have. “Or we could go back to the car. We’ve gone less than a mile.”

“That’s all? I wouldn’t
dream
of telling them at the hotel that we couldn’t do their walk. This must be the first right turn already, coming up.”

The T-crossing was unmarked. He looked at the green
map and wished it weren’t quite so schematic. “This must be it,” he agreed, uncertainly, and up the road they went.

A smaller road, it continued the upward trend, through emptier terrain. Irish emptiness had a quality different from that of Texas emptiness, or that of the Scots Highlands, where he and Claire had once toured. The desolation here was intimate. Domes of stone-littered grass formed a high horizon, under roiling clouds with blackish centers. There was little color in anything; he had expected greener grass, bluer sky. The landscape wore the dull, chastened colors of the people in the towns. It was a shy, unassuming sort of desolation. “I suppose,” Allenson said, to break the silence of their laborious walking, “all this was once full of farms.”

“I haven’t seen a single hovel,” Vivian said, with a querulousness he blamed on her back.

“Some of these heaps of stones—it’s hard to tell if man or God, so to speak, put them there.” Jeaneanne had been a liberated Baptist, Claire a practicing Episcopalian. Vivian was from a determinedly unchurched family of ex-Catholic scientists whose treeless Christmases and thankless Thanksgivings Allenson found chilling. Strange, he thought as he walked along, he had never had a Jewish wife, though Jewish women had been his best lovers—the warmest, the cleverest.

“It said in the guidebook that even up in the hills you could see the green places left by the old potato patches but I haven’t seen a single one,” Vivian complained.

Time passed wordlessly, since he declined to answer. He hadn’t written the guidebook. The soles of their feet slithered and scratched.

Allenson cleared his throat and said, “You can see why Beckett wrote the way he did.” He had lost track of how long their forward-plodding silence had stretched; his voice felt
rusty. “There’s an amazing amount of nothingness in the Irish landscape.” On cue, a gap in the clouds sent a silvery light scudding across the tops of the dull hills slowly drawing closer.

“I
know
this isn’t the road,” Vivian said. “We haven’t seen a sign, a house, a car, anything.” She sounded near tears.

“But we’ve seen
sheep
,” he said, with an enthusiasm that was becoming cruel. “Hundreds of them.”