“When you went into the Army, telegrams were sent me, and I answered them. I’m not interested in your police record. I’ve one of my own, it may surprise you to learn. I got into a brawl on O’Connell Street one night, and before I was done with it they had me in Dublin Castle and some filthy jail, and it was days before I was done with it, and was out. It’s not important, and it’s been years since I thought of it. But the frilled shirt on the statue of George III, but a few blocks up the street, in the old Grattan’s Parliament Room of the Bank of Ireland, that’s important, and it’s of such things I’d like to talk to you about. Think of it, every thread, every knot, every flower, is hewn from the virgin marble, with the light showing through every tiny opening, and one mislick with a tool could have ruined it. John Bacon spent years on it, and even then died before it was done, and his son, John Bacon, Jr., had to finish it. It’s a trivial conception, like engraving the Lord’s Prayer on the head of a pin, and yet it represents one man’s consecration, and a second man’s acceptance of it, to an ideal, and has sustained me at times when I thought about it. I’m not talking of jails, or police, or incidental things. I’m talking of fundamentals, of what men believe in, and dedicate their lives to, of what your heart dreams of, and may yet have, and what mine wanted, and lost.”
“Threw away, I’ve heard said.”
“Aye.”
That had slipped out on me, but the quick way he agreed to it set me back on my heels, and for some time nothing was said. Then: “You did big things, Jack — or so I was told.”
“Anyhow, I was proud of them.”
“Are you still?”
“I don’t know. They’re a closed chapter.”
“But they were big?”
“The blues were a million dollars. I call that big.”
“And I. If for no other reason, I can understand that you were proud. The man doesn’t live, though he damn it and denounce it, who doesn’t think a million dollars is a matter for pride, and I agree with Julius Caesar, who once boasted he lacked fifteen million sesterces of having nothing at all, that even such a debt is something in the nature of an accomplishment. I now make you an overture. I should like to hear more about it.”
“That I can’t tell you.”
“Why not, if the ice is broken?”
“I’ve no gift for words, Dad. I’d tell the brawl on O’Connell Street and leave out the statue of George III. I’d tell the what, and leave out the why.”
“I’ve had similar trouble, trying to piece together what happened to me. Because on the face of it I was a fool, as were Brutus, Columbus, Burr, Davis, Bryan, and all the misfits of history. And yet when somebody takes one of these, an Othello, a Macbeth, a Hamlet, a George III if you like, and carves a little deeper than the world’s eye sees, he achieves something not possible with heroes. I believe it to be no accident, Jack, that the world’s great literature is peopled by a swarm and rabble and motley of a hundred-per-cent heels.”
“I should fascinate.”
“And I.”
The flicker of a smile passed between us, one of the few we’d ever had. He said: “And Jack, these medals didn’t come by cultivating the colonel’s good regards. You’ve been places only a brave man would venture into.”
“Who’s brave? If you’re really brave you’re a fool. If you’re not you’re a fake. I’ve saluted brave men, but they were dead.”
“There was a battle once, Jack, in what this country calls the Revolutionary War, fought in the South, at a place called the Pens, or Cowpens, as the town is now named. It’s lovingly studied by the military men, as General Daniel Morgan, the American, defeated General Banastre Tarleton, the Englishman, in a battle of decisive consequence. The point of interest is that Morgan disposed his green men, with reference to the terrain, so they couldn’t run and had to fight. ’Twas the last word in cynicism, the disbelief in heroism and glory and the colors of a parade, but I’ve often wondered if it didn’t summarize most what’s known of courage and war.”
“I’ve run. Or as we say now, ducked.”
“And lived to fight another day, I see.”
“Anyway, I’m here.”
“Jack, it’s melted a bit. Our barrier.”
“Then fine.”
“But not completely. I don’t think it will. And yet, I’ve hit on a plan that may help. That will help us both, if you like it.”
“Which is?”
“Write it.”
“Who — me?”
“Well, in my condition, hardly I.”
“I’m sorry, I’ll never learn grammar.”
“The American distrusts it, for its exactitude, which he associates with theology and metaphysics and logic, and identifies with superficiality. I don’t say he’s not right, but I’m a Trinity College man myself, and had as lief drop egg on my waistcoat as split an infinitive. I don’t wholly accept the American canon. Yet it’s wholly distinctive and I hope you don’t hesitate on that account. Never forget, the foreign colony, during the Civil War, looked down on Mr. Lincoln because of his uncouthness of speech. The greatest literary genius who ever sat in the White House, which is indeed a title — and the precisionists voted him down. Can you quote one phrase ever uttered by the minister from the Court of St. James during this memorable administration? Do you even know who he was?”
“If I ever knew, I’ve forgotten.”
“He bitterly criticized the gorilla Lincoln for his syntax.”
“Getting back to me, I can’t write.”
“The art of writing consists of having something to say.”
“And wanting to say it.”
We dropped it for two or three days. I found a place for my car, took my stuff to my room, settled down. It was all pretty much as I’d left it, and it touched me, the way they had kept it for me. I’d get a little thick, when I’d remember how he was leaving out the one thing that had to be told, which was what had happened about Helen, and where she was now, and all the rest of it, things Denny hadn’t gone into, or Margaret. Then I’d ask myself if I wanted to know about Helen, after what had happened in Charleston. Something had gone wrong between me and that girl which I didn’t understand, but given a little time, I’d catch up with her, and maybe get going again. Then something happened that made me want to please my father, whether it pleased me or not. I don’t know if you’ve seen a man in one of those spells they have with angina, but if you have I don’t think you’ll forget it in a hurry. First of all the color left his face until it was gray. Then his eyes took on a set, terrible stare. Then he began to labor. He didn’t move, and yet you could see he was doing everything God would let him do, just to get his breath. I jumped up, began calling for my aunts, and held him up straight in his chair. He began banging on the arm of it, with a handkerchief he had crumpled in his fist. Something went clink, and he held the handkerchief over his nose. A funny smell filled the room, he relaxed, and I could feel he was getting relief. What got me was that when he was himself again, maybe in five minutes, he never said a word, but picked up his paper and went on reading. If that wasn’t enough to start me off writing, the cable from Douvain was. I’d written him where I was, and why, and now came this wire saying he was tied up until the end of winter, but to count him in, definitely, and get things in shape for him when he was free. It didn’t worry me, I mean I wasn’t afraid he was backing out. But it would be three or four months. Between him and this girl I couldn’t find, I suddenly thought about writing — anything, to keep from going nuts. And so, one morning I cleared out a room over the garage, had a typewriter sent up, and got going.
So I’ve been at it all winter. As I’d finish it I’d show it to him, one hunk at a time. He cut it up into chapters, and put some curlicues in to break it up, and cut out a lot of stuff where I’d repeated myself. I let him. I caught it before very long that at last, in his death chair, he was doing something literary, something that hooked up with what he had studied when he was young, and that didn’t have to do with cam shafts or differentials or fan belts or grease. He wasn’t easy to please. About some things he told me stuff I hadn’t known. For instance, about my mother. That morning in church was the one time I saw her, but she saw me, he said, many times. About some of it he got bitter, not so much at me as at himself, and specially the way he had thrown away my money, after insisting on keeping it for me. I tried to get over to him I didn’t hold it against him. On my GI’s he convinced me it was not my fault. On Buck, he took the better part of two days, talking to me, explaining it to me, getting it through my head it was only partly my fault. He didn’t try to say it wasn’t at all my fault, but he kept pressing on “partly.” “You were caught in a web of circumstances unsurpassed for cruelty, for I hold the depression that began in 1929 was one of the most tragic eras ever seen. It broke up homes, it cut the heart out of the nation, it dismayed young people as nothing ever did. If, in consequence, you were planning a hold-up, God help you there were plenty more, and they had their reasons! If the boy got killed, you didn’t kill him, and if the other limither, the one you call Hosey, was unable to implicate you, so much the better for justice and the good sense of the police. They’re a peculiar breed. In some ways, the stupidest of men, but on a moral matter, strangely profound. They know, as ’tis said, the difference between a crook and a crook. As they released you, I think you may trust them, and no longer concern yourself.”