Milo’s head is on the table amidst the pickle jars. Since his arms are crossed over it for protection, Marie-Thérèse sometimes smashes his hands with the receiver. She’s out of control.
“Your slut of a mother didn’t want you. Minute you came out, she tossed you into the trash bin!” (Bong!) “That’s the way savages behave: mothers flick their babies away like gobs of snot.” (Bong!) “They don’t give a hoot in hell about their children’s souls!” (Bong!)
Just then the door bursts open and Régis stomps into the house, his boots covered in snow. A freezing gust of wind enters the room with him.
“Christ it’s cold out there!. . Hey! What’s going on?”
Seeing herself as he must see her, sweating, shouting and disheveled, towering over the cowering child, Marie-Thérèse freezes.
“Gotta teach him a lesson,” she mutters, hanging up the phone. “He’s bad seed. I gotta knock some sense into him.”
“Well, stop clobbering him over the head!” says Régis in an uncharacteristic display of marital authority. “Whip his ass, if you gotta whip something!”
“Yeah, a lot of good your discipline has done our boys. You never wanted to hit them, and look how they turned out! Two big brutes with no ambition. All they care about is getting drunk and chasing skirts. Those two’ll never be able to take over the farm.”
“At least find something else to hit him with. That phone’s brand new! You’ll damage it.”
“So. . I won’t let you spoil Milo the way you spoiled the other two, you hear me? I’ll take care of Milo. Listen, Régis” (she lowers her voice), “that boy is smart.”
“Okay, do as you please. I could care less about Milo, anyway. He’s your nephew, not mine. Do as you please.”
“You bet I will!”
Régis treads out of the room, exhausted, and Marie-Thérèse sits down next to Milo on the bench.
“Come on, little one,” she says, cajoling and kissing him. “Let’s make up. I like you a lot, you know. The two of us are going to get along just fine, you’ll see. Come on, relax, sit down beside me. . I’m your mom now. You know that, don’t you? Your other mom’s probably no longer of this world. . The gutter kills. . She prob’ly shot up, too. . Hey, come on, Milo, darling, give Auntie Thérèse a little kiss. .”
She pulls him close, but he goes so rag-doll limp that all she can do with his body is release it.
“Okay, well. . It’s getting late. Go ahead, run off to bed. I’ll finish up the job by myself, as usual. No hard feelings, hey? No hard feelings, Milo?”
BLACKOUT. .
I REALLY SHOULD write a book about passivity someday. I hope you’ll forgive me for having put my own words in Thom’s mouth, in the scene at Saint Stephen’s Green: Passivity! The greatest force in human history! Also one of the most cruelly underestimated, since people prefer to see themselves as courageous, in charge of their own lives. . and, especially, free! Freedom is described in contemporary novels and newspapers as that without which human beings cannot survive — oh, but we can, we can, and we do! Freedom is anything but an irresistible impulse, an overwhelming urge, the smallest common denominator of humankind. On the contrary, it’s a rarity. A luxury, like gilt hummingbirds’ eggs. The vast majority of human beings don’t give a hoot in hell about freedom. They care about two other things — doubtless wired together in our reptilian brains — survival and group acceptance.
No, love, I’m not talking about you — I know you’re no more passive than a possum. But you’re the one who got me interested in the subject, and. . Okay, Astuto, okay, I’ll stop speechifying. No need to rub it in. I know I’m in no state to write a book.
• • • • •
Neil, September 1917
WE COME UPON our young hero hunched over his desk in a corner of his bedroom. Sun streams through the frilly white curtains to his left, making the blankness of his pages painfully bright. Behind him, the maid is loudly plumping up the pillows on the bed.
“Shall I make you a cup of tea, sir?”
“No. Please. Please, Daisy, how often must I ask you not to speak to me when I’m writing? Can you see that I’m writing, yes or no?”
“No, sir.”
“Oh! Even when his pen isn’t dashing madly across the page and being dipped into fresh ink every few seconds, a man seated at a writing desk in front of a sheet of paper is writing, Daisy.”
“Yes, sir.”
“An important part of writing, indeed the most important part, takes place before the pen gets set to paper, inside the brain. The mysterious, burning furnace of the brain, wherein spiritual metals are molten and smolten. Through a series of chemical reactions, these cause floating, inchoate forms to appear, then thrust them into reality, where they miraculously crystallize into works of art that seem to us as immutable and inevitable as if they had always existed.”
“Yes, sir,” repeats Daisy. And she beats a retreat with a false obsequiousness that verges on insolence, moving backward, curtsying and waving her feather duster, finally pulling the door to behind her.
“How dare she?” fumes Neil, swerving angrily back to the blank page on the table in front of him.
He scrawls a sentence on it, and we hear him think it as he writes: There were numerous truths of the Easter Rising, depending upon one’s vantage point. He crosses out one’s vantage point and writes, instead, who and where one was. Crosses out was and replaces it with happened to be. Crosses out everything, crumples the page and tosses it into the wastebasket.
No, no, no, no, we hear him say to himself. Though a thousand things were indeed occurring simultaneously in different parts of the city, we have no choice but to recount them successively. No blah blah, no holding forth. We must be in the action. In, for instance, the body of the young Sinn Féiner shot to death by the sniper on the roof of Trinity College. No, that’s no good. . He died on Tuesday; his chapter would be far too short. Well, how about a seagull, then, watching events unfold from above? No, ridiculous. Gulls cannot fathom human behavior, let alone human speech. Thom, I want to do this for you. You lost your life and I did not, so it’s serious now. I need to do it. All right, let’s just start somewhere, anywhere, it doesn’t matter where; we can correct it later.
Bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, his sister pops her head through the door.
“So you’re staying at home again today, are you?”
Neil doesn’t deign to turn toward her.
“You’re not going out to look for work today then, Neil?”
“I am working, Dorothy.”
“Are you, then? Sure and it looks like hard labor you’re doing, too! And a great lot of money I’m sure it will bring in to help with the family finances, justifying the lengthy and expensive education you were given. Don’t wear yourself out too much, now, will you? When your fingers tire of holding the pen, be sure to take a nice long bath to relax them.”
“Dorothy, have I not ordered you on several occasions to refrain from bursting into my room without knocking?”
“Oh, sorry. Simply wanted to wish you a good day, brother. You’ve grown more and more irritable since you decided art was your true calling in life — d’you know that, Neil Kerrigan?”
“Might I prevail upon you to leave my room at once?”
“I liked you little enough as a lawyer, but as a novelist you’re insufferable. Ta, then. I hope you’ll at least make yourself useful by helping Daisy peel the potatoes for our supper!”