Black Dance

IV. MALÍCIA

Milo, 1958–62

THE CHILD OF absence is in the closet again — or rather in a closet again, not the same one as before. There’ve been a number of closets already in his short life and he’s found a way to survive in there — he makes an even darker closet for himself inside his head, enters it of his own volition and firmly closes the door behind him. Calling out to no one, needing no one, finding what he needs within himself.

Once he’s in there, in the dark of the dark, he’s filled with anticipation because, closing his eyes, he can summon images and voices and they will come to him. He can elicit the cocker spaniel at the house next door to the German family when he was little and play with it as he was never allowed to at the time, since there was a picket fence between them and only two of the pickets were broken. Now he can throw a stick and the dog will bark excitedly, scamper to fetch the stick and bring it back to him, growling in pride — a game to be endlessly repeated. Then Milo can pet the dog’s head, say Good boy, reward it with a biscuit and feel its small wet scrapy tongue lick his palm because they love each other more than anything in the world. In the dark of the dark he can also meet up with his best friend, an imaginary boygirl named Ness like the Loch Ness monster, and the two of them can take off for wild adventures on the moon or Mars or under the sea or in the jungle or the desert or on the tundra, or exploring glaciers at the North Pole or volcanoes in South America or the topmost tips of the Himalayas. .

(The self-created closet gradually became your carapace, Milo. It would protect you forever. Your concentration was so extreme in there that you could accept literally anything — blows, rape, verbal attacks — and keep a hot star burning in your brain. .)

Other times, in the closet, little Milo hears his mother’s voice singing to him and whispering his secret name, or the voice of Sara Manders reading him a bedtime story. He feels Sara’s ample bosoms against his back as she holds him on her lap and cuddles him, strokes his head and marvels at the beauty of his hair. . Curled on the closet floor, he hugs his own body and sometimes, listening to these beautiful women’s voices or feeling their breasts, his hand slips into his pants and he strokes himself and whines and pants until a blaze of light happens in his brain, after which he can relax and sometimes fall asleep. One day he’s doing this and suddenly the blaze of light turns into a real light, pale and appalling — his foster mother has opened the closet door and flicked on the switch and found him there with his hand inside his pants and his head thrown back, drinking in the slow deep joy of a woman’s flesh moving softly on his skin. She yells, catapulting him out of his reverie, then grabs the weapon nearest to hand — the long metal tube of the vacuum cleaner — and clobbers him over the head with it: God forgive me, but if I don’t beat this evil out of you there’ll be no hope left, you’ll grow up to be a criminal just like your parents! Bad seed on bad ground! As her blows rain down on Milo’s head and back and shoulders — his arms protect his face — the woman also kicks him with her pointed shoes wherever she can fit a kick in. .

YOU’RE RIGHT, MILO — MOVIEGOERS enjoy blood and gore of all sorts; they’ll watch in mesmerized delight as people cut each other’s head off, stab each other in the back, or bomb whole cities to oblivion; many of them also revel in seeing adult males rape little girls; but for some reason, though it’s one of the most widespread forms of violence on the planet, grown women hitting little boys makes them squirm. . Go figure, eh?

(Hear that, Milo? You’ve even taught me to say eh? like a Canadian. Hey. Are you doing all right? Are we doing all right? Can we go on, my love? I love you, Astuto. Let’s go on. Yes, yes, we’ll change the name, no problem — do it in a single click, soon as we finish the first draft. .)

THE LITTLE BASTARD knows how to read now, in English. He learned to read with a vengeance. Having completed the first two grades of school in a single year, he reads everything he can get his hands on, even if it’s only the dreary Reader’s Digest in the bathroom or the newspaper called the Gazette or the Bible his current foster mother keeps on her bedside table for daily inspiration. The printed words waft him away to freedom, set his mind spinning with stories. The main thing is to be out of this world, out, out. .

Though we can also toss in a few images of Milo’s so-called real life during those years (Milo in the classroom, his attention riveted on the teacher, on the blackboard, oblivious to the children around him. . Milo in the school courtyard, bullied by older boys and unexpectedly fighting back so that within three seconds the leader’s nose is gushing with blood. . Milo walking home alone in the four o’clock December dark. . Milo shoveling snow. . mowing the lawn. . sitting stiff and straight on the pew of a Protestant church between two stiff and straight adults, one male, one female, whose heads we’ll never see), it’s clear that his real real life now unfolds inside the closet, in the dark of the dark. Ecstasy of images, voices drifting through silence. . He’s become addicted to solitude.

And then — brutally — he gets weaned of it. Cold turkey.

He comes home from school one warm June day, opens the screen door and brings up short. His foster parents (still headless torsos) are seated in the front room with a gray-bearded stranger; packed and waiting in the hallway is Milo’s suitcase. At lightning speed, his eyes shift from grown-up to suitcase to grown-up, but no matter how often he changes the order of his perusal, he still can’t fathom what’s going on.

CUT to the enormous, dimly lit hall of Windsor Station in Montreal. Chaos. Hordes of people rushing every which way amidst the hiss of steam engines and the strident sigh of whistles, shouting, smoking, waving, embracing and calling out to each other, dragging bags and trunks in their wake. Spiffy, red-hatted, chocolate-skinned porters shoving luggage carts. Arrival and departure announcements that sound like threats, reverberating over the loudspeaker in French. After scanning the crowd, the camera zooms in from behind on the old man, who is pulling Milo’s heavy suitcase with one hand and Milo with the other.

The boy balks, in shock. The gray-bearded stranger turns to him and at last we see his face. It may take us a moment to recognize Neil.

“Come on,” he says. “We’ll miss the train.”

“I don’t want to go.”

“What?”

“I don’t want to go.”

“They beat the bejesus out of you and you want to stay with them?”

“I don’t want to go.”

“I didn’t ask you if you wanted to go. I’m your grandpa and I’m taking you out of that Protestant hellhole.”

“You’re not my grandpa.”

“So I am, bless you. Look.” He draws an Irish passport from his breast pocket. “Know how to read? Neil Noirlac. You see, it’s written there. And what’s your name?”

“. .”

“What’s your name, young’un?”

“Milo.”

“Milo what?”

The boy can’t help muttering Noirlac under his breath.

“Right. And where would you have gotten a name like Noirlac?”

“I don’t want to go.”

“Do you know its meaning?”

“I don’t want to go.”

“Black lake, it means. Did you know your name was black lake, my boy? Do you speak French?”

“I don’t want to go.”

“Come on, now, Milo, or we’ll be missing our train! Way they’ve been treating you, those Protestants are lucky I came without my gun.”

“You got a gun?”

“Naturally, for hunting rabbit and lynx and moose.”

“Will you teach me how to hunt?”

Neil gathers the child in his arms and pretends for a moment that he is strong enough to carry him. He isn’t, though, and, sensing this, Milo gives in.

“I’ll come wit you,” he says, “if you teach me to hunt.”

“You’ve got a deal.”

CUT to the two of them in a train, hurtling northeastward through the province of Quebec. Around them, other passengers are chattering in French. Neil takes out a paper bag and hands a sandwich to Milo, who accepts and devours it without a word, staring out the window at flash-by forest as he chews. Never before has he set foot outside of Montreal.

CUT to a Dubé family meal, the noonday meal they call dinner, in the kitchen of a large farmhouse in Mauricie. Seated on benches on either side of a long maple wood table are Neil’s oldest daughter, a brittly pretty woman named Marie-Thérèse; her husband, Régis Dubé, his cheeks mottled with smallpox scars; and their two strapping teenagers, François-Joseph and Jean-Joseph, all slurping soup and shouting in French at the same time.

Milo is lost. Even were he able to revive the dormant rudiments of French he once possessed, this clipped, slanted, rural version of the tongue would be opaque to him. Occasionally Neil leans down to translate for him, but every time she catches him at it Marie-Thérèse slams her hand on the table.

“Papa! Stop that at once! This is a French-speaking house, he might as well get used to it from the start. I don’t want you running off at the mouth again with your bullshit bilingual notions, do you hear me?”

“How can he be expected to learn?” Neil protests, stroking his beard. “The poor kid doesn’t understand a word we’re saying.”

“He’ll learn as he goes along, like everybody else.”

“Gotta be patient,” Régis suggests, his mouth three or four centimeters away from his bowl of soup. (Régis is a cowed man who seems perpetually to be ducking, even when not bent over to eat.) “Rome wasn’t built in a day,” he adds, so softly as to be inaudible to all but us.

“So where did this Anglo cousin come from?” queries François-Joseph.

“Yeah, Grandad, where’d you dig him up? ‘S not every day you get to meet a cousin who’s already eight years old!”

“He’s Declan’s boy. .”

“Who else?” grumbles Marie-Thérèse.

“But where’s he kept him all these years? We never saw Uncle Declan with a kid. .”

“I had no idea, either,” says Neil. “Declan came over last week to try to wangle some money out of me. .”

“Nothin’ new about that,” observes Marie-Thérèse.

“Just as you say! I told him he’d exhausted my patience, to say nothing of his credit. . So to force me to give in, he wound up telling me the fifty bucks weren’t for him. Claimed he needed the money for his son’s pension. .”

“Doesn’t it just break your heart?” says Marie-Thérèse, shaking her head.

“I didn’t believe him myself. Come on, I told him, you can’t pull the wool over my eyes with tall tales like that! Where is this so-called son of yours?”

“A miracle he could even remember, after so many whiskys. .”

“Well it turned out to be a miracle indeed! He fished out the child’s birth certificate and a whole slew of official papers. . Believe it or not, Milo had been in five different foster families and Declan had never lost track of him. .”

“Good heavens!”

“You were in five different families?”

Milo shrugs, gaze trained on his plate. He can tell the conversation revolves around him, but the gist of it escapes him.

“Why’d they move him around so much?”

“Beats me. But the idea that a grandson of mine had been living in Montreal all this time without my knowing about it. . well, I just couldn’t stand it. I had to go get him.”

“I understand,” Régis mutters. “You did the right thing.”

“Just makes one more mouth for us to feed!” Marie-Thérèse sighs.

“Oh, one mouth more or less,” says Neil.

“Easy to say, for people who have their noses in books all day long,” says Marie-Thérèse. “The rest of us work hard to make ends meet!”

“Come on, now, Marie-Thérèse!” says Neil. “I couldn’t leave him in a Protestant household!”

This is his last card, but it’s a joker and he knows it. Of all the tales of his youth in Ireland with which Neil had regaled the family when Marie-Thérèse was little, the one about the stolen children had made the deepest impression on her. During the endless merciless strike that had paralyzed and famished the entire city of Dublin in 1913, British soldiers had gone stomping into strikers’ homes, kidnapped their children and shipped them off to Great Britain to be taken in by Protestant families. And what honest Catholic worker could bear the prospect of finding himself with a stubborn, glitter-eyed little Protestant at his own kitchen table? They’d returned to the factories. .

After dinner, Milo’s cousins take him on a guided tour of the farm. Close-up on their great rubber boots squelching in the mud as he follows them across the barnyard. In the barn, he recoils at first from the clouds of bottle flies and the pungent smell of manure, but is soon irresistibly drawn to the cows. He feels more empathy with these big kind warm brown tail-swishing dumb beasts than with Jean-Joseph and François-Joseph, fourteen and thirteen respectively, who belch and fart, smoke and swear and swagger to make sure he knows who’s boss.

“Cat got your tongue?” they ask him.

He says not a word in the course of the visit. . CUT.

A SERIES OF ephemeral, floating scenes to sketch out the following year. Milo at school, Milo in the stable. . lingering a moment over Milo at church. We recognize him squeezed into one of the front pews along with his young schoolmates. . His cousin’s classes are farther back; the rows for parents and grandparents start in the middle of the church. We notice that Marie-Thérèse and Régis are among them, but not Neil. .

Dissolve to a winter evening on the farm. Marie-Thérèse has summoned Milo to help her with the job of pickling cucumbers. The kitchen air is opaque with steam.

(The telephone plays a role in this scene, so we’ll have to go back and establish its presence during Milo’s first dinner at the farm: a black Bakelite contraption on the wall above the table. Maybe Marie-Thérèse could mention it, proud of having a telephone at last. Or maybe it could ring during the meal, causing everyone to jump because they’re not used to it yet. . We’ll see. .)

Seated next to the wall, at the farthest end of the long maple wood table, Milo carefully pours vinegar into jars as his aunt peels and chops garlic across from him. Suddenly she looks up at him.

“You’re a little infidel, aren’t you?”

“Sorry?”

“You lived with a Protestant family and they put a bunch of lies in your head?”

“I dunno.”

“Do you believe, at least?”

“Believe what?”

“In everything the preacher says at Sunday Mass. In God the Father and the Holy Virgin and Our Lord who died on the Cross for our sins, and all the rest, and that if you don’t believe you’ll go to Hell?”

“. .”

“You don’t listen at all in church, do you?”

“. .”

“Don’t think I don’t notice it. I watch you and I can tell you’re not paying attention. You don’t sing with the rest of us and you don’t pray with the rest of us, you just sit there. You go off somwhere else in your head.”

“. .”

“That’s what you do, isn’t it, Milo? I’ve seen you, there’s no point in denyng it.”

“I don’t deny it.”

“Well, believe me, Milo, this won’t do at all. Because in two or three years you’ll have to go to catechism classes, and prepare for your confirmation, and prove that you’ve grasped the essence of the True Religion!”

“. .”

“That you’re not a heretic Protestant like the family your grandad found you in!”

“I’m not anything.”

Marie-Thérèse’s voice begins to rise.

“What do you mean, you’re not anything? You live with the rest of us, don’t you? Your name’s Noirlac, isn’t it? Like it or not, you’re part of this family, and I’m gonna teach you to be a good Catholic!”

The child’s stubborn silence makes her see red.

“You hear me, Milo? Otherwise you’ll land up at Bordeaux like your good-for-nothing of a father. . A lazybones delinquent! A parasite! Hey, are you listening to me? Hey, I’m talking to you! All right. .”

Taking the receiver off its hook on the wall, she clobbers him over the head with it. Bong!

Involuntary tears start to Milo’s eyes but he turns his head, looks out the window and concentrates on the falling snow. Joins up with the lion, the witch and the wardrobe, the little match girl, the ruby-eyed nightingale, the ugly duckling. Will not give his aunt the pleasure of making him cry. . (I can just see you, Milo, sitting way at the end of that table, scrunched up against the wall. I can see you. .) She hits him again. Bong! She’s acquiring a taste for that Bong!

“You’re proud, aren’t you? A boy from the big city, hey? Too good for us country bumpkins, hey? Is that it? Is that it, hey, you whore-son?” (Bong!) “Hey! Answer when you’re spoken to!” (Bong!) “Do you at least know you’re a whoreson? Well, if you didn’t know it before, you know it now. Oh, the bitch and the boozer, your parents were made for each other! Two losers! Two nothings! Son of nothing, son of less than nothing, that’s what you are — you hear me?” (Bong, bong!) “Son of absence!”

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!”

And, with a peal of laughter as intolerably bright as the sunlight, Dorothy vanishes.

His nerves at snapping point, Neil grips his pen tightly and we hear his inner voice. .

The question is not only how to be in different places at the same time, but how to be in the same place at different times. The place, assuredly, is Dublin City. But we cannot talk about the Easter Rising of 1916 if we do not understand the strikes of 1913–1914. . the rise and fall of Parnell in the 1890s. . or the six-hundred-year history of the British occupation. And we must go not only backward but forward in time as well. Show how the people of Dublin, though not supportive of the rebellion during Easter Week itself, gradually came to espouse the rebels’ cause as, day after day, early in May, their leaders were cruelly and systematically executed by British firing squads. Pearse, Plunkett, MacDonagh, Connolly. . sixteen in all, including the one whom I personally denounced, Major John MacBride. A swaggerer to the end: boasting that he’d faced British fire before, he met his death without the customary blindfold. And then I was denounced. By whom? Must have been that blond kid in the bushes. To whom? I’m still not sure — both ways? To the government and the rebels? A two-way traitor, I became. Traitor to my class — the bar defrocked me. Traitor to my cause — the Sinn Féin cast me out. But it’s not my own tale I want to tell, it’s the tale of my city. The upheaval of Easter 1916 left dear dark Dublin ruined and ravished but renewed. Ripe for revolution.

Neil’s knuckles are white from squeezing the pen too tightly.

Three loud, swift knocks at the door.

“What now? Who is it?” he shouts, leaping to his feet.

“Your mother,” comes the icy answer.

Yanking the door open, he sees fear in his mother’s eyes and realizes he must be a sight: hair on end, rumpled shirttails, wrinkled trousers, suspenders awry; he hasn’t slept a wink.

“Your father would like to have a word with you,” says Mrs. Kerrigan stiffly, advancing not so much as the pointed toe of her pink velvet mule beyond his threshhold.

CUT to Judge Kerrigan’s den, replete with all the symbols of virile wealth and power: leather-bound books serried on bookshelves, framed diplomas, green lampshades, polished oak desk, gilt leather blotters and paperweights. . you get the picture. The man’s success is ostentatious not to say ferocious, and any one of our potential spectators could probably write the ensuing dialogue as well as we can, Milo.

“You wished to see me, Father?”

“I did.”

“Well, here I am.”

“I’ve been thinking about your future, Neil. Things cannot go on like this. It’s been eighteen months since we learned of your involvement with the rabble rebels, a year since the bar defrocked you. .”

“My dream, as you know, Father, is not to be refrocked. Not as long as every court of law in Dublin is run by the occupying forces.”

The judge’s voice booms out, covering his son’s.

“Neil, I’m convinced it is not completely hopeless. There might be a way for you to regain access to your profession.”

Neil waits, and knows he won’t have long to wait. Turning his back on his son, Judge Kerrigan moves to the window and lights his pipe.

“You must volunteer to join the army.”

“Impossible.”

“I’ve made preliminary inquiries at the Castle. Because of their respect for me, two or three individuals are willing to put in a good word for you. You could start out directly with officer rank.”

“Despite my besmirching of the family name?”

“Yes, that could be overlooked. Give it some thought. I advise you to seize the opportunity. It is unlikely that a second chance for saving your reputation will come along.”

“Father, I am twenty-five years old. You are aware of both my political convictions and my artistic aspirations, and yet you find it natural to ask me to betray both, simply for the sake of restoring the name Kerrigan to its virginal purity. .”

“You will not address your father in such terms, young man. I am not a blank page to be sullied by the smutty mutterings of scribblers such as yourself and Jimmy Joyce. Portrait of the Young Man as an Artist, indeed! How gumptious can you get?”

“It’s the other way around, Father. Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.”

“Traitors, the lot of you! Your country is in need? Joyce runs off to hide in Switzerland, and you can think of nothing better to do than take up with a crowd of rag-a-tag outlaws! Well, now that your mates have all been shot, why don’t you go help the Bolsheviks who are currently laying waste to Russia? Perhaps they have a better chance of winning!”

“I’m a writer, Father.”

“Neil, I am most weary of awaiting evidence of that claim’s validity.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means that unless you either accept the generous offer I’ve just made you or give me some tangible proof that you’ve become a respectable member of the Irish literary establishment, you will no longer be welcome in my household. Writers are known to enjoy starving in miserable garrets at the outset of their careers, are they not? Find yourself a miserable garret in which to starve. Kindly remove your belongings from the premises by next Sunday.”

“I’ll give you the proof.”

“That will be all, Neil.”

“I’ll give you the proof!” says Neil in a slightly louder voice.

Ignoring him, Judge Kerrigan sits down at his desk and violently opens a ledger.

CUT to Neil dragging a box of old papers from under his bed and rummaging through it. Finding his old manuscript of poems. Slipping it into a black folder.

CUT to County Galway: a cab deposits Neil in front of Thoor Ballylee. Black folder under left arm, he walks toward the tower. Close-up on his face. His expression is part awe, part amazement at his own audacity. Weeds and wildflowers grow rampant at the tower’s base; no glass graces its windows. .

(Think we can do this, Milo? Think we can get permission to shoot inside Yeats’ Tower itself? Wouldn’t that be fantastic? With. . uh, say, Lambert Wilson in the role of Willie Yeats? Yeah. . Fantastic.)

Neil is let into the tower by a portly, gray-haired maid, complete with white cap and apron. After leading him up a winding flight of rickety stairs, she ushers him into the poet’s drawing room. The place being as yet unfurnished, the echoes of their footsteps ricochet on stone walls. . Yeats seems in a bit of a dither. Spectacles askew, gray jersey misbuttoned, he paces up and down the room and runs his hands through his hair.

“So you’re the young poet who wrote to me last week.”

“I am, sir.”

“Did you see the wild swans?”

“The. .”

“Did you see them, the wild swans, as you were brought here?”

“I’m afraid I didn’t notice them, sir. Was it today they flew south, then?”

“How. . how. . how are they the same swans every year? The same uplifting passion, the same fierce beating of wings against the sky? Flinging themselves multitudinously southward in the same breathtaking flight, while we humans. . age, change, hesitate, lose our certainties and our teeth. .”

“Uh. . that’s true, sir.”

“Why have you come to me?”

“I need help, sir.”

Yeats glances discreetly at the envelope on his desk.

“Your letter said as much, Mr. . ah. . Kerrigan, but why have you come to me?”

“Only because. . er. . I once tried to help you, sir.”

“Kindly explain yourself. I’m certain I never set eyes on you before today.”

“Well, sir. . though myself the son of a Dublin magistrate, in 1914 I became involved with the Irish Volunteer movement. . and. . um. . er. . being aware of the. . ah, unfortunate impediments in the way of. . er. . Mrs. MacBride’s obtaining a divorce, I. .”

Suddenly attentive, Yeats turns to him.

CUT to half an hour later. Yeats is serving them each a brandy and laughing uproariously.

“I don’t believe it. . You denounced Major John MacBride! You!”

“I did, sir.”

“And now, in return for this favor you did me, unsolicited and indeed unbeknownst to me, you wish for me to do you a favor and help you find a publisher! Oh it’s a marvelous tale, Neil Kerrigan! A marvelous tale indeed. Unfortunately, your hopes will be dashed. At twenty-five, it’s time you learned that one’s fondest hopes and dreams in life are generally dashed. D’you see this thoor?”

“I do, sir.”

“I purchased it six months ago, in March. . Here is the deed. I own it now. Well. What do you say to that?”

“It is. . ah. . very. . spacious, sir.”

“Too spacious for a man who lives on his own, is that what you mean?”

“Perhaps, sir.”

Yeats downs a second glass of brandy.

“More fitting for a family man. . am I correct, Kerrigan? I should bring a wife here, is that what you mean? But what wife? Ay, that’s where the shoe pinches! What wife? You’re right: since 1889, my body has cried out with the need to love Maud Gonne, and my poetic imagination has depended on her! A decade ago, after torturing me with her elegance and eloquence for fifteen long years, she finally deigned to open her robe and her thighs to me. . but doused my passion by praying daily that we be released from earthly desire.”

“I understand your. . frustration, sir.”

“The woman has a terror and a horror of physical love, Kerrigan. Is it not a crying shame, given her spectacular shape, skin and allure? How are you fixed in this area, by the by?”

“Well, sir, though I’ve made a few forays into Talbot Street like everyone else, I mostly please myself.”

“And confess it afterward?”

“Oh, no, sir. I’ve not set foot in a church since the Easter Rising. The priests’ unconscionable behavior during the events cured me of my faith for good. . So if I understand correctly, Mr. Yeats. . er. . despite the fact that Major MacBride has now gone on to a better world, Maud Gonne MacBride has once again declined to be your wife?”

Willie tips back his head and sips.

“Once again, this time, was once too often. Having once again gone down to Normandy last summer, having once again found her surrounded by a squawking growling twittering menagerie, I once again threw myself on my knees before Maud, pressed her hand to my lips and begged her to be mine. (Singing)

Oh my lovely, be thou not hard

Look thou kindly upon me

Wilt thou not come with an aging bard

All the way to Ballylee?

“. . Though she spoke warmly to me and played tarot with me and assisted me in interpreting my dreams, she scoffed at my advances. No, Mr. Kerrigan, Mrs. Gonne MacBride will never have me, and at last I have understood why: she is married to her dead father, and to the cause of Ireland he espoused. But did you know that in addition to her young son sired by the rustic major, Mrs. MacBride has an older, illegitimate daughter by a French journalist?”

“Yes, I have heard as much.”

“A girl by the name of Iseult, now twenty-two. As heartbreakingly beautiful as her mother at that age. I’ve known and loved Iseult since she was born.”

“I see.”

“So last month, with Maud’s I must say insultingly skeptical permission, I threw myself on my knees before Iseult, pressed her hand to my lips, and begged her to be mine.” (Singing)

Oh my lovely, be thou not hard

Look thou kindly upon me

Wilt thou not come with an aging bard

All the way to Ballylee?

“And she?”

“Said no.”

Yeats falls into a prolonged silence.

“And so?” Neil prods him gently after a while, seeing that the daylight is waning in the sky.

“Well, I recently made the acquaintance of another young woman, a certain Georgina Hyde-Lees, also three decades my junior. . So last week I threw myself on my knees before sweet Georgie, pressed her hand to my lips, and begged her to be mine. (Singing)

Oh my lovely, be thou not hard

Look thou kindly upon me

Wilt thou not come with an aging bard

All the way to Ballylee?

“And she?”

“Said yes. The banns were published yesterday and our wedding is scheduled for a fortnight from today. Children must play at the foot of my thoor, do you understand?”

Not knowing what to answer, Neil remains silent.

“But let us come back to you, Neil Kerrigan. You want to write, so?”

“I do.”

“Then leave Ireland.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“No one can write here. Go away. Your father’s advice is excellent. He’s doing you a favor by kicking you out. Desert his home.”

“But surely not for the British army?”

“No. For literature.”

“He says I’ve besmirched the family name.”

“Change names. Change countries. Change selves.”

Yeats leafs rapidly through Neil’s manuscript of poems.

“Forget these. They were written before the Rising, by a bright young lad all puffed up with ambition but empty of wisdom. Then the British savaged our city and shot our sixteen leaders; your cousin Thom was killed before your eyes; Dublin’s finest buildings burned to the ground; the poor came wailing out of their houses. . and

all changed, changed utterly.

A terrible beauty was born.

. . I believe you now have an inkling of what wisdom might be, or at least where to look for it. Am I correct?”

“I hope so, sir.”

“Then go. Go to England. Or, better still, to the Americas.”

“But our cause? The national cause of Ireland and Irish freedom, for which Thom and so many others gave their lives?”

“Don’t worry. Events will follow their course. You won’t forget the cause. May I read you a few lines from one of my recent poems? I have it in manuscript only; it may be years before Ireland is ready to read it. It’s called ‘The Leaders of the Crowd.’”

(Jaysus, I don’t know, Milo. Are you sure? The whole feckin’ poem, as the Irish would say? That’s the schmaltzy side of your personality, nice in real life, but disastrous in art. . Whoa, okay, don’t have a conniption fit. . you’ve got your poem! As Lambert Wilson reads it out loud, we can go wafting out the open window and hurtle through the sky of County Galway with the wild swans. .)

They must to keep their certainty accuse

All that are different of a base intent;

Pull down established honour; hawk for news

Whatever their loose phantasy invent

And murmur it with bated breath, as though

The abounding gutter had been Helicon

Or calumny a song. How can they know

Truth flourishes where the student’s lamp has shone,

And there alone, that have no solitude?

So the crowd come they care not what may come.

They have loud music, hope every day renewed

And heartier loves; that lamp is from the tomb.

. . Do you understand, Kerrigan?”

“It’s not easy to grasp at first hearing, but I think I get the gist of it, sir.”

“The most important lines are these:

How can they know

Truth flourishes where the student’s lamp has shone,

And there alone, that have no solitude?

. . Remain a student, Neil. Protect thy solitude. And keep thy lamp shining.”

“Why is the lamp said to be from the tomb?”

“Where will you find wisdom, Kerrigan, if not in the words of dead men?”

“In the arms of living women?”

William Yeats bursts out laughing.

“Ah, you’re a lad after my own heart! Here. . Allow me to give you one of my books.”

He picks up a copy of The Wind Among the Reeds and writes in it.

For Neil Kerrigan. May he not follow in the faltering footsteps of this aging bard, but blaze his own young virile path with words, carving momentary meaning out of the rich dark nothing that surrounds us all. W. B. Yeats, 16 September 1917.

BLACKOUT.

• • • • •

Awinita, June 1951

RADIO MUSIC. . A vague gurgle of babbling, squabbling girls. . The camera explores the home Awinita shares with a dozen other prostitutes in their late teens and early twenties, some native, some not — a run-down ground-floor apartment somewhere on the Plateau Mont-Royal. Burlap curtains on the windows are permanently drawn to discourage neighborly curiosity.

Arriving in the kitchen, the camera discovers Liz, a buxom, fortyish brunette dressed in a yellow pantsuit, sitting smoking at the table. She runs the place, and all the girls who work for her know that Friday is accounts day. Before her are a ledger and a cashbox; coffee percolates on the stove nearby. In various states of dress and undress, the girls file in one by one, sit down across from her and hand her their weekly earnings. Licking a finger, Liz carefully counts the bills into her cashbox, inscribes the amount in the ledger, deducts what the girls owe her for rent, clothing and drugs, and hands them back the difference.

Awinita wanders woozily into the kitchen dressed in a cheap black satin kimono, her pregnant tummy now at full ripeness. The world wobbles and blurs before her eyes. The envelope she hands Liz seems almost weightless. The procuress peers into it and frowns.

“What’s this supposed to be? I hope this isn’t supposed to be your rent money, Nita. . You already owe me. . ah. . seventy-four bucks in back rent, to say nothing of the advances I’ve made you. . Ten for clothing. . twenty for medication. . that brings us to a grand total of one hundred and four. I’ve told you before, Nita, this isn’t a charity operation.”

“De guys,” Nita says in a low voice, “. . dey scared to go up with me. Dey scared sometin’ could happen while dey up dere.”

“When are you due?”

“Any day.”

“Okay. . And your plan is to give up the baby?”

“Yeah.”

“At once?” “Yeah.” “So you think you could be back at work when?”

“Like a week or two.”

“Okay, listen. You know, I don’t mean to be hard on you, Nita, but I’ve got my books to balance. One more week of credit is all I can give you. Either you catch up on your debts or you find someplace else to live.”

“Sure.”

“All right. One more week’s delay for the rent. Think you can do without your pills this week?”

“I need ‘em.”

“At least try to cut down, for your baby’s sake. Let me give you half the usual amount, that way you won’t be tempted.”

“Gimme the pills. . I’ll try and cut down myself.”

“Price of diazepam went up to twelve bucks last week.”

As Liz inscribes her new debt in the ledger, Awinita virtually wrenches the tube from her hand.

CUT to the bathroom, where she gulps down a pill and stands waiting for it to take effect.

We find her on her mattress in a corner, snoring softly, as Deena, Cheryl and Lorraine paint their fingernails and chatter up a storm.

CUT to a few hours later. The quality of the light has changed. The other girls have left. The bedroom floor is strewn with underwear, balled-up tissue papers, candy wrappers, twisted nylon stockings and half-spilled ashtrays. . Alone on her mattress, Awinita has her first contraction. She calls out to her mother in Cree.

Subjective camera: we stare up at the roof of the ambulance beyond the mountainside of our stomach. In our peripheral vision, city lights flash by unevenly. Sound track: siren wail, muttered exchange between two male orderlies in the front seat and, occasionally, our own deep, wrenching groans.

CUT to the emergency room of a large Montreal hospital. We’re giving birth. The world is rendered blurry and fantastic by our pain. Flustered nurses cluster around us. (All or nearly all of them would be nuns — right, Milo, in Montreal in 1951?) Their hands on and in our body are ungentle, and their words no less wounding for being prudishly spelled out.

“Another Injun b-a-s-t-a-r-d.”

“I’ve seen a dozen this past month, if I’ve seen one!”

“They’ve got no future, God bless ‘em. You almost feel like putting them out of their misery before it begins.”

“The ways of the Lord are unfathomable, Sister Anne.”

“She’s giving it up for adoption?”

“Yes. Doesn’t even want to see it.”

“How hypocritical can you get? Doesn’t make what she did any less of a sin.”

“Maybe she was r-a-p-e-d?”

“How would I know?”

“Can a s-l-u-t be r-a-p-e-d?”

Soft feminine gales of laughter. “God only knows!”

We close our eyes beneath the blindingly bright lights.

Tall trees crash headlong to the ground, crushing bushes and undergrowth. Forest animals bolt away with terror in their eyes. A fire starts, spreads and rises, leaping into the air to meet the sun. Then the sun vanishes and thunderclouds make war upon the fire, hurling their rain-bullets at its ecstatic, dangerously rearing body.

A gigantic grunt of relief issues from our guts and lungs and we hear, severally:

“Ah! Here it comes!” “Here it comes at last!” “It’s a girl!” “It’s a little girl!” “Don’t you want to see your daughter, miss?”

The pink light on the screen moves slowly from left to right and back again: we’re shaking our head no.

Soft, thin pink material, pink cloth, floats and sways in the air, curves and dances until it becomes a butterfly. Moving slowly and gracefully, the pink butterfly approaches the burning forest. Its wings evaporate in the scorching heat before the flames touch them. Its narrow dark body bakes to a crisp, freezes with the extreme heat, then crumbles into ash like a cone of incense.

The baby is gone. A male voice suddenly resonates above the women’s: the obstetrician has arrived.

“You should have done an episiotomy, she’s all torn up. What did she have?”

“A girl.”

“Normal?”

“Oh, yes, Doctor. Everything’s A-OK.”

“All right. I’ll go fill out the adoption forms, then.”

A swinging door goes thuck as he passes through it.

“A-OK, Doctor,” one of the nurses whispers sarcastically. “Apart from the fact that it’s an Injun bastard, of course. .”

The others huff with laughter.

“Shall I sew her up, or shall you?”

“You go ahead. I’ll make you a cup of tea for the nausea afterward. Deal?”

“Deal. . Maybe I should just sew it up completely so she’d stop corrupting our poor vulnerable men. Eh, Sister Anne? What do you think? Maybe we should just sew up the whole yawning mess?”

“Now, now, Sister Claire. Don’t forget, sinning in word is as bad as sinning in deed.”

Back to the sweltering shadows of Awinita’s mind.

Terrified kittens hunching in withdrawal, puffed-up with hostility, their saucer-eyes sizzling with resentment.

Finally the stitching is done and we sink gratefully into oblivion. .

DOES THE GIRL get a name, Milo? No, not in our film. There she is, barely born and we’re gonna have to push her out of the story. Let’s at least take a good look at her before she disappears.

Hey. . you doing all right? We can stop talking for a while if you like. I could even come back tomorrow. . Okay, no sweat. I’ll stay. Must be weird, to say the least, to think you have a half sister walking around somewhere on the planet and you’ll never know who she is, where she is or what kind of life she lived. .

Hang in there, Astuto. This is no time to give up. The Good Lord will be coming by with your daily tritherapy a mere few hours from now.

• • • • •