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Tom looked at her steadily.
“No,” said Lisa, “I’m not.”
Tom patted her leg. “Good girl.” He nodded up at John. “How about giving us a road test?”
“Road test it is!”
We drove the rest of the way to Kilcock at eighty miles an hour. Lisa blinked quite often. Tom didn’t blink at all, watching Ireland loom at him in landfalls of green.
I kept my eyes shut most of the way.
There was a problem having to do with a hunt wedding. Quite suddenly we discovered that none had been held in Ireland for years. How many years, we never found out.
The second and greatest problem was the Church.
No self-respecting priest was about to show up to fuse the lusts of two Hollywood characters, although Lisa Helm was from Boston and a thoroughly nice lady, but Tom Hurley was from all the points of Hell, a cross-country horseman who played destructive tennis with Darryl Zanuck and advised the Aga Khan on the insemination of thoroughbreds.
No matter. For the Church, it was out of the question. Besides which (John had never bothered to ask), neither Tom, despite his Irish background, nor Lisa was Catholic.
What to do? There were no other churches near Kilcock. Not even a paltry small Protestant chapel you might sleepwalk in for a long Sunday noon.
So it finally fell to me to inquire of the local Unitarian church in Dublin. What’s worse than a Protestant? A Unitarian! It was no church and no faith at all. But its keeper, the Reverend Mr. Hicks, agreed, in a rather hyperventilated exchange on the phone, to assume the task because he was promised his rewards on Earth by John Huston rather than in Heaven by a God who was rarely named, so as to save embarrassment.
“Have they been living in sin?” asked the Reverend Mr. Hicks abruptly.
I was shocked. I had never heard such talk before.
“Well …” I said.
“Have they?”
I shut my eyes to focus the bridal pair, loud in the Dublin streets noon and night.
They had had a fight about one wedding ring, then another, a fight about possible flowers, a fight about the day and date, a fight about the minister, a fight about the location of the ceremony, a fight about the size of the wedding cake, with or without brandy, a fight about the horses and hounds, and even a fight with the master of the hunt, a fight with his assistant, a fight with the Courtown butler, an altercation with a maid, a carousal with the pub owner about liquor, another brannigan with the liquor merchant in town for not giving a markdown on three cases of not very excellent champagne, plus fights in restaurants and pubs. If you wanted to keep a record of the fights in one week, the best way to imprint it on the calendar was with a shotgun.
John loved it all.
“Always like a good scrap!” he exclaimed, his grin so wide it needed sewing. “My cash is on the lady’s nose. Tom may ride the days, but she’ll win the nights. Besides, everyone has his foibles. Tom drinks too much Old Peculier—”
“Is that a real name?”
“An English ale, uh-huh. Old Peculier. But that’s Tom. A pal, nevertheless. They’ll finish the fights and settle in for a soft marriage, you wait and see.”
“Reverend Hicks,” I said over the phone, “Tom and Lisa fight a lot.”
“Then they’ve sinned a lot!” the reverend mourned. “You’d best send them round.”
Tom and Lisa fought about going to see Mr. Hicks.
They fought going in.
They argued in front of him.
They yelled coming out.
If a voice can be pale, the reverend’s voice was pale describing the pair.
“This is not a marriage,” he protested. “It is a rematch!”
“Exactly my sentiments, Reverend,” I agreed, “but will you advise them of the boxing rules and send them to their corners?”
“If they’ll promise to stay there four days out of five. Is there a Bible chapter, I wonder? Futilities, verse four, paragraph two?”
“There will be.”
“And will I write it?”
“I have faith in you. Father!”
“Reverend!” he cried.
“Reverend,” I said.
“Well, how in hell we got into this mess is what I’d like to know!” Ricki said into the phone.
John’s voice barked back from Paris, where he was interviewing actors for our film. I could hear him loud and clear as I helped lug in the flowers and place the table for the wedding cake and count the cheap champagne in cases along the wall.
“Mess!” John yelled. “It’s no mess, by God; it’s going to be the greatest goddamn event in Irish history. They’ll start the uprising over. Are the flowers there?”
“The damn flowers are!”
“Has the cake been ordered?”
“You know it has!”
“And the champagne?”
“The worst, but it’s here.”
“Better get hold of Heeber at his pub. Tell him to bring in the best. God, I’ll pay for it. It’s time Tom scared the moths out of his wallet, but hell! Call Heeber!”
“The alien from Mars just did that—”
“Is he there? Put him on!”
Ricki threw the phone at me. I dodged but caught.
“John, I’ve finished the Saint Elmo’s fire scene and—”
“To hell with that, kid. I’ve fallen—”
“With whom?” I said automatically.
“No, no, for Christ’s sake, no woman! This is more important. Off a horse!”
“Fell off?”
“Shh! Don’t let Ricki hear! She’d cancel the hunt! I’m okay. Just some pulled ligaments. Unconscious five minutes and limping like mad. The Gimp, by God, the Gimp. But I’ll be home late today. Check the last flight from London. I rode at Longchamps at dawn two days ago.”
“I thought you were casting—”
“Sure! But the damn horse jumped when some car horn blew. I flew a mile high. I’m okay now. With a slight tendency, without warning, to fall down and writhe in agony when my back gives. Don’t let me scare you, kid.”
“I’m scared, John. If you die, I’m dead!”
“Nice sentiment. You’re the screwed-tight optimist. Just tell me I won’t fall down and writhe with Saint Vitus at the wedding.”
“Heck, you’d do it just to steal the show.”
“Why not? Hire a cab, pick me up at the airport tonight, tell me the Saint Elmo’s fire scene on the way. Can I stay in your room at the Royal Hibernian overnight? I should be walking without crutches by morning.”
“Holy God, John, crutches?”
“Pipe down! Is Ricki in the room, for Christ’s sake?”
“She went to answer the door. Wait …”
Ricki stood in the hall looking at a piece of paper in her hand. Her face was a fall of snow and her eyes were beginning to drop tears. She came and handed me the paper.
John’s voice said, “I hear someone crying.”
“They are, John.”
I read from the scribbled note.
“ ‘Alma Kimball O’Rourke fell under her horse today. She was killed instantly and the horse was destroyed.’ ”
“Omigod,” said John, five hundred miles away in Paris.
“She was the wife of the Kildare Hunt’s captain, wasn’t she?” I asked.
“Jesus, yes,” said John quietly.
I finished reading the note. “ ‘The funeral’s day after tomorrow. The entire hunt will be there.’ ”
“My God,” murmured John, growing quieter still.
“That means …?” I said.
“The hunt wedding,” Ricki said, “must be called off.” John heard and said, “No, no. Only delayed.”
Mike drove me into Dublin to find Tom, who had taken a room at the Russell Hotel. He and Lisa had fought about that too. He wanted to stay at Huston’s with her. But the Catholics and the Protestants, she pointed out, were both watching. So it was the hotel for Tom until the ceremony. Besides, he could play the stock market better, alone in his Dublin hotel room. That cinched it. Tom checked in.
I found Tom in the lobby of the hotel, mailing some letters.
I handed him the note and said nothing.
There was a long pause, and then I could see the thin transparent inner lids of Tom’s eyes, his eagle’s eyes or his lizard’s eyes or his cat’s eyes, slide down between us. They did not slam like the great gates of Kiev, but it was just as final, just as definite, just as complete. The noise his eyelids made closing, while he continued to stare at me, was awful in its silence. I was outside in my world, if my world existed at all, and Tom was inside his.
“She’s dead, Tom,” I said, but that was useless. Tom had switched off whatever batteries kept him tuned to the audible universe, to any air that held words and phrases. I said it again. “She’s dead.”
Tom turned and strode up the stairs.
I spoke to Mike at the door. “The minister? The Unitarian. We’d better go tell him.”
Behind me, I heard the elevator door open.
Tom was there in the doorway. He did not step out. I hurried over.
“Yes, Tom?”
“I was just thinking,” said Tom. “Someone should cancel the wedding cake.”
“Too late. It arrived as I was leaving Courtown.”
“Christ,” Tom said.
The elevator door shut.
Tom ascended.
The plane from London was late getting into Shannon. By the time it arrived, I had made three trips to the Gents’, which shows you how much ale I had downed, waiting.
John waved his crutches from the top of the landing steps and almost fell the length in his eagerness to get down to me. I tried to help, but he all but struck me with his implements, hurrying along in giant bounds like someone who was born and raised an athlete on crutches. With every great jump forward, favoring one leg, he cried out half in pain, half in elation:
“Jesus, God, there’s always something new. I mean, when you’re not looking, God gives you a tumble. I never fell like this. It was like slow motion, or going over a waterfall or shooting the rapids just before you wake—you know how it is, every frame of film stops for a moment so you can look at it: now your ass is in the air, now your spine, vertebra by vertebra, now your neckbone, collarbone, top of your head, and you can see it all rotating, and there’s the horse down there, you can see him too, frame by frame, like you’re taking a picture of the whole damn thing with a box Brownie working away thirty frames a second, but all perfectly clear and held in the second, which expands to hold it, so you can see yourself and the horse, waltzing, you might say, on the air. And the whole thing takes half an hour in seconds. The only thing that speeds up the frames is when you hit the turf. Christ. Then, one by one, you can hear your suspenders snapping, your tendons, that is, your muscles.
“You ever walk out at night in winter and listen? Damn! The branches so loaded with snow they might burst! The whole tree’s a skeleton, you hear the sap bend and the wood creak. I thought all my bones would shatter, shale, and flake down inside my skin. Wham! Next thing I know, they run me to the morgue. Not that way, I yelled. Turned out it was an ambulance, and I only thought it was the coroner!
“Hurry up, for Christ’s sake—I’m running faster than you are. I hope I don’t fall down right now and have one of my convulsions. You’d really see something. Flat on my back like a Holy Roller, talking in tongues, blind with pain. Wham! Where’s Tom?”
Tom was waiting for us in the Buttery of the Royal Hibernian Hotel. John insisted on crutch-vaulting down to find the American Irishman.
“Tom, by God, there you are!” said John.
Tom turned and looked at us with that clear cold sky-blue winter-morning gaze.
“Jesus,” gasped John. “You look mad. What are you so mad about, Tom?”
