Let The Great World Spin: A Novel - By Colum McCann Page 0,6
sat outside the door. Silent at first, she let her feet stretch across the landing, then laid her head against the doorjamb and sighed: it was as if she too were in a bath, stretching out towards days yet to be remembered.
He put on his clothes, stepped out into the landing, and she toweled his hair dry.
“You won’t drink again, will you, love?”
He shook his head no.
“A curfew on Fridays. Home by five. You hear me?”
“Fair enough.”
“Promise me now.”
“Cross my heart and hope to die.”
His eyes were bloodshot.
She kissed his hair and held him close. “There’s a cake downstairs for you, love.”
Corrigan took two weeks off from his Friday jaunts, but soon began to meet the drunks again. It was a ritual he couldn’t give up. The down-and-outs needed him, or at least wanted him—he was, to them, a mad, impossible angel. He still drank with them, but only on special days. Mostly he was sober. He had this idea that the men were really looking for some type of Eden and that when they drank they returned to it, but, on getting there, they weren’t able to stay. He didn’t try to convince them to stop. That wasn’t his way.
It might’ve been easy for me not to like Corrigan, my younger brother who sparked people alive, but there was something about him that made dislike difficult. His theme was happiness—what it is and what it might not have been, where he might find it and where it might have disappeared.
I was nineteen, and Corrigan was seventeen, when our mother died. A short, quick struggle with kidney cancer. The last thing she told us was to take care to close the curtains so the light didn’t fade the living room carpet.
She was taken to St. Vincent’s Hospital on the first day of summer. The ambulance left wet tracks along the sea road. Corrigan cycled furiously after it. She was put in a long ward full of sick patients. We got her a private room and filled it with flowers. We took turns sitting at her bedside, combing her hair, long and brittle to the touch. Clumps of it came out in the comb. For the first time ever she had a jilted air about her: her body was betraying her. The bedside ashtray filled with hair. I clung to the idea that if we kept her long gray strands we could get back to the way we once were. It was all I could manage. She lasted three months, then passed on a September day when everything seemed split open with sunlight.
We sat in the room waiting for the nurses to appear and take her body away. Corrigan was in the middle of a long prayer when a shadow appeared in the hospital doorway.
“Hello, boys.”
Our father had an English accent on his grief. I hadn’t seen him since I was three years old. A stringpiece of light fell on him. He was pale and hunched. There was a smattering of hair across his scalp, but his eyes were a pellucid blue. He took off his hat and put it to his chest. “Sorry, lads.”
I went across to shake his hand. It startled me that I was taller than him. He gripped my shoulder and squeezed.
Corrigan remained silent, in the corner.
“Shake my hand, son,” our father said.
“How did you know she was sick?”
“Go on, now, shake my hand like a man.”
“Tell me how you knew.”
“Are you going to shake my hand or not?”
“Who told you?”
He rocked back and forth on his heels. “Is that any way to treat your father?”
Corrigan turned his back and laid a kiss on our mother’s cold brow, left without saying a word. The door closed with a snap. A cage of shadow crossed the bed. I went to the window and saw him yank his bicycle away from a pipe. He rode through the flowerbeds and his shirt flapped as he merged into the traffic on Merrion Road.
My father pulled up a chair and sat beside her, touched her forearm through the sheets.
“When she didn’t cash the checks,” he said to me.
“Pardon me?”
“That’s when I knew she was sick,” he said. “When she didn’t cash the checks.”
A sliver of cold moved down my chest.
“I’m only telling you the truth,” he said. “If you can’t stand the truth, don’t ask for it.”
Our father came to sleep in our house that night. He carried a small suitcase with a black mourning suit and a pair of polished shoes.