The other one hundred forty-odd nights, at the door of the old Georgian house I had accepted from my employer a fiery douse of scotch or bourbon or some-such drink ‘against the chill.’ Then, breathing summer wheat or barley or oats or whatever from my scorched and charcoaled mouth, I had walked out to a cab where sat a man who, during all the long evenings’ wait for me to phone for his services, had lived in Heber Finn’s pub.
Fool! I thought, how could you have forgotten this!
And there in Heber Finn’s, during the long hours of lacy talk that was like planting and bringing to crop a garden among busy men, each contributing his seed or flower, and wielding the implements, their tongues, and the raised, foam-hived glasses, their own hands softly curled about the dear drinks, there Nick had taken into himself a mellowness.
And that mellowness had distilled itself down in a slow rain that damped his smoldering nerves and put the wilderness fires in every limb of him out. Those same showers laved his face to leave the tidal marks of wisdom, the lines of Plato and Aeschylus there. The harvest mellowness colored his cheeks, warmed his eyes soft, lowered his voice to a husking mist, and spread in his chest to slow his heart to a gentle jog trot. It rained out his arms to loosen his hard-mouthed hands on the shuddering wheel and sit him with grace and ease in his horse-hair saddle as he gentled us through the fogs that kept us and Dublin apart.
And with the malt on my own tongue, fluming up my sinus with burning vapors, I had never detected the scent of any spirits on my old friend here.
‘Ah,’ said Nick again. ‘Yes; I give up the other.’
The last bit of jigsaw fell in place.
Tonight, the first night of Lent.
Tonight, for the first time in all the nights I had driven with him, Nick was sober.
All those other one hundred and forty-odd nights, Nick hadn’t been driving careful and easy just for my safety, no, but because of the gentle weight of mellowness sloping now on this side, now on that side of him as we took the long, scything curves.
Oh, who really knows the Irish, say I, and which half of them is which? Nick? – who is Nick? – and what in the world is he? Which Nick’s the real Nick, the one that everyone knows?
I will not think on it!
There is only one Nick for me. The one that Ireland shaped herself with her weathers and waters, her seedings and harvestings, her brans and mashes, her brews, bottlings, and ladlings-out, her summer-grain-colored pubs astir and advance with the wind in the wheat and barley by night, you may hear the good whisper way out in forest, on bog, as you roll by. That’s Nick to the teeth, eye, and heart, to his easygoing hands. If you ask what makes the Irish what they are, I’d point on down the road and tell where you turn to Heber Finn’s.
The first night of Lent, and before you count nine, we’re in Dublin! I’m out of the cab and it’s puttering there at the curb and I lean in to put my money in the hands of my driver. Earnestly, pleadingly, warmly, with all the friendly urging in the world, I look into that fine man’s raw, strange, torchlike face.
‘Nick,’ I said.
‘Sir!’ he shouted.
‘Do me a favor,’ I said.
‘Anything!’ he shouted.
‘Take this extra money,’ I said, ‘and buy the biggest bottle of Irish moss you can find. And just before you pick me up tomorrow night, Nick, drink it down, drink it all. Will you do that, Nick? Will you promise me, cross your heart and hope to die, to do that?’
He thought on it, and the very thought damped down the ruinous blaze in his face.
‘Ya make it terrible hard on me,’ he said.
I forced his fingers shut on the money. At last he put it in his pocket and faced silently ahead.
‘Good night, Nick,’ I said. ‘See you tomorrow.’
‘God willing,’ said Nick.
And he drove away.
There was a tap on the door, the bell was not rung, so I knew who it was. The tapping used to happen once a week, but in the past few weeks it came every other day. I shut my eyes, said a prayer, and opened the door.
Bill Westerleigh was there, looking at me, tears streaming down his cheeks.
‘Is this my house or yours?’ he said.
It was an old joke now. Several times a year he wandered off, an eighty-nine-year-old man, to get lost within a few blocks. He had quit driving years ago because he had wound up thirty miles out of Los Angeles instead of at the center where we were. His best journey nowadays was from next door, where he lived with his wondrously warm and understanding wife, to here, where he tapped, entered, and wept. ‘Is this your house or mine?’ he said, reversing the order.
‘Mi casa es su casa.’ I quoted the old Spanish saying.
‘And thank God for that!’
I led the way to the sherry bottle and glasses in the parlor and poured two glasses while Bill settled in an easy chair across from me. He wiped his eyes and blew his nose on a handkerchief which he then folded neatly and put back in his breast pocket.
‘Here’s to you, buster.’ He waved his sherry glass. ‘The sky is full of ’em. I hope you come back. If not, we’ll drop a black wreath where we think your crate fell.’
I drank and was warmed by the drink and then looked a long while at Bill.
‘The Escadrille been buzzing you again?’ I asked.
‘Every night, right after midnight. Every morning now. And, the last week, noons. I try not to come over. I tried for three days.’
‘I know. I missed you.’
‘Kind of you to say, son. You have a good heart. But I know I’m a pest, when I have my clear moments. Right now I’m clear and I drink your hospitable health.’
He emptied his glass and I refilled it.
‘You want to talk about it?’
‘You sound just like a psychiatrist friend of mine. Not that I ever went to one, he was just a friend. Great thing about coming over here is it’s free, and sherry to boot.’ He eyed his drink pensively. ‘It’s a terrible thing to be haunted by ghosts.’
‘We all have them. That’s where Shakespeare was so bright. He taught himself, taught us, taught psychiatrists. Don’t do bad, he said, or your ghosts will get you. The old remembrance, the conscience which doth make cowards and scare midnight men, will rise up and cry, Hamlet, remember me, Macbeth, you’re marked, Lady Macbeth, you, too! Richard the Third, beware, we walk the dawn camp at your shoulder and our shrouds are stiff with blood.’
‘God, you talk purty.’ Bill shook his head. ‘Nice living next door to a writer. When I need a dose of poetry, here you are.’
‘I tend to lecture. It bores my friends.’
‘Not me, dear buster, not me. But you’re right. I mean, what we were talking about. Ghosts.’
He put his sherry down and then held to the arms of his easy chair, as if it were the edges of a cockpit.
‘I fly all the time now. It’s nineteen eighteen more than it’s nineteen eighty-seven. It’s France more than it’s the US of A. I’m up there with the old Lafayette. I’m on the ground near Paris with Rickenbacker. And there, just as the sun goes down, is the Red Baron. I’ve had quite a life, haven’t I, Sam?’
It was his affectionate mode to call me by six or