Colm Tóibín - The Empty Family

Stories

COLM TIBN

VIKING
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PENGUIN BOOKS

VIKING

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First published 2010

Copyright Colm Tibn, 2010

The moral right of the author has been asserted

All rights reserved

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book

One Minus One and The Colour of Shadows were previously published in the New Yorker; The Pearl Fishers and Barcelona, 1975 in the Dublin Review; Silence in Boulevard Magenta, published by IMMA; Two Women in the Financial Times; and The Empty Family in Vija Celmins: Dessins/Drawings, published by the Centre Pompidou. The Street first appeared in McSweeneys and is also published in a limited edition by Tuskar Rock Press

A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

ISBN: 978-0-67-091819-5

By the same author

FICTION

The South

The Heather Blazing

The Story of the Night

The Blackwater Lightship

The Master

Mothers and Sons

Brooklyn

NON-FICTION

Bad Blood: A Walk Along the Irish Border

Homage to Barcelona

The Sign of the Cross: Travels in Catholic Europe

Love in a Dark Time: Gay Lives from Wilde to Almodvar

Lady Gregorys Toothbrush

PLAY

Beauty in a Broken Place

For Anthony Cronin

The moon hangs low over Texas. The moon is my mother. She is full tonight, and brighter than the brightest neon; there are folds of red in her vast amber. Maybe she is a harvest moon, a Comanche moon. I have never seen a moon so low and so full of her own deep brightness. My mother is six years dead tonight, and Ireland is six hours away and you are asleep.

I am walking. No one else is walking. It is hard to cross Guadalupe; the cars come fast. In the Community Whole Food Store, where all are welcome, the girl at the checkout asks me if I would like to join the stores club. If I pay seventy dollars, my membership, she says, will never expire, and I will get a seven per cent discount on my purchases.

Six years. Six hours. Seventy dollars. Seven per cent. I tell her I am here for a few months only, and she smiles and says that I am welcome. I smile back. The atmosphere is easy, casual, gracious.

If I called you now, it would be half two in the morning; I could wake you up. If I called, I could go over everything that happened six years ago. Because that is what is on my mind tonight, as though no time had elapsed, as though the strength of the moonlight had by some fierce magic chosen tonight to carry me back to the last real thing that happened to me. On the phone to you across the Atlantic, I could go over the days surrounding my mothers funeral. I could go over the details as though I were in danger of forgetting them. I could remind you, for example, that you wore a suit and a tie at the funeral. I remember that I could see you when I spoke about her from the altar, that you were over in the side aisle, on the right. I remember that you, or someone, said that you had to get a taxi from Dublin because you missed the train or the bus. I know that I looked for you among the crowd and could not see you as the hearse came after Mass to take my mothers coffin to the graveyard, as all of us began to walk behind it. You came to the hotel once she was in the ground, and you stayed for a meal with me and Sinead, my sister. Jim, her husband, must have been near, and Cathal, my brother, but I dont remember what they did when the meal had finished and the crowd had dispersed. I know that as the meal came to an end a friend of my mothers, who noticed everything, came over and looked at you and whispered to me that it was nice that my friend had come. She used the word friend with a sweet, insinuating emphasis. I did not tell her that what she had noticed was no longer there, was part of the past. I just said yes, it was nice that you had come.

You know that you are the only person who shakes his head in exasperation when I insist on making jokes and small talk, when I refuse to be direct. No one else has ever minded this as you do. You are alone in wanting me always to say something that is true. I know now, as I walk towards the house I have rented here, that if I called and told you that the bitter past has come back to me tonight in these alien streets with a force that feels like violence, you would say that you are not surprised. You would wonder only why it has taken six years.

I was living in New York then, the city about to enter its last year of innocence. I had a rented apartment there, just as I had a rented apartment everywhere I went. It was on 90th and Columbus. You never saw it. It was a mistake. I think it was a mistake. I didnt stay there long six or seven months but it was the longest I stayed anywhere in those years or the years that followed. The apartment needed to be furnished, and I spent two or three days taking pleasure in the sharp bite of buying things: two easy chairs that I later sent back to Ireland; a leather sofa from Bloomingdales, which I eventually gave to one of my students; a big bed from 1-800-Mattress; a table and some chairs from a place downtown; a cheap desk from the thrift shop.

And all those days a Friday, a Saturday and a Sunday at the beginning of September as I was busy with delivery times, credit cards and the whiz of taxis from store to store, my mother was dying and no one could find me. I had no mobile phone, and the phone line in the apartment had not been connected. I used the pay phone on the corner if I needed to make calls. I gave the delivery companies a friends phone number, in case they had to let me know when they would come with my furniture. I phoned my friend a few times a day, and she came shopping with me sometimes and she was fun and I enjoyed those days. The days when no one in Ireland could find me to tell me that my mother was dying.

Eventually, late on the Sunday night, I slipped into a Kinkos and went online and found that Sinead had sent me email after email, starting three days before, marked Urgent or Are you there or Please reply or Please acknowledge receipt and then just Please!!! I read one of them, and I replied to say that I would call as soon as I could find a phone, and then I read the rest of them one by one. My mother was in the hospital. She might have to have an operation. Sinead wanted to talk to me. She was staying at my mothers house. There was nothing more in any of them, the urgency being not so much in their tone as in their frequency and the different titles she gave to each email that she sent.