The Undertaking Read online

  Such stillness leaves us moving room by room rummaging through cupboards and the closetspace for any remembrance of our dead lovers, numbering our losses by the noise they made at home—in basements tinkering with tools or in steamy bathrooms where they sang in the shower, in kitchens where they labored over stoves or gossiped over coffee with the nextdoor neighbor, in bedrooms where they made their tender moves; whenever we miss that division of labor whereby he washed, she dried; she dreams, he snores; he does the storm window, she does floors; she nods in the rocker, he dozes on the couch; he hammers a thumbnail, she says Ouch!

  This bridge allows a residential route. So now we take our dead by tidy homes with fresh bedlinens hung in the backyards and lanky boys in driveways shooting hoops and gardens to turn and lawns for mowing and young girls sunning in their bright new bodies. First to Atlantic and down Mont-Eagle to the marshy north bank of the Huron where blue heron nest, rock-bass and bluegill bed in the shallows and life goes on. And on the other side, the granite rows of Johnsons, Jacksons, Ruggles, Wilsons, Smiths—the common names we have in common with this place, this river and these winteroaks.

  And have, likewise in common, our own ends that bristle in us when we cross this bridge—the cancer or the cardiac arrest or lapse of caution that will do us in. Among these stones we find the binding thread: old wars, old famines, whole families killed by flues, a century and then some of our dead this bridge restores our easy access to. A river is a decent distance kept. A graveyard is an old agreement made between the living and the living who have died that says we keep their names and dates alive. This bridge connects our daily lives to them and makes them, once our neighbors, neighbors once again.

  Sweeney

  Sweeney: Ah! Now the gallows trap has opened that drops the strongest to the ground! Lynchseachan: Sweeney, now you are in my hands, I can heal these father’s wounds: your family has fed no grave, all your people are alive.

  SEAMUS HEANEY, SWEENEY ASTRAY

  My friend, the poet, Matthew Sweeney, is certain he is dying. This is a conviction he has held, without remission, since 1952 when he first saw the light, in its gray Irish version, in Ballyliffin, in northernmost Donegal. He knew even then, though he was some years from the articulation of this intelligence, that something was very, very wrong.

  What was it the pink infant Sweeney sensed, aswaddle in his bassinet, warmed by the gleeful cooing of his parents, a peacetime citizen of a green and peaceful place, that made him conscious of impending doom?

  Nor did his more or less idyllic childhood, his education at the Malin National School, his successful matriculation from the Franciscans at Gormanstown, nor his successful escape from university—first from Dublin, then from North London Polytechnic, and finally from Freiburg University (where he befriended, for reasons soon to be illumined, a corps of medical students)—or any of the several other blessing this life bestows, disabuse him of the sense, continuously a part of his psychology, that there was a deadly moment in every minute; an end with his name on it ever at hand.

  Even after his successful wooing of the most beautiful woman in the neighboring parish, the former Rosemary Barber of Buncrana, praised in local song and story for the fierceness of her eyes, the depth of her intellection, the lithe perfection of her form, and the sensibilities of character—even after such a triumph the niggling gloom that attended his conviction, far from going hush, grew louder still. For now he had not only a life to lose but a life made precious by the blissful consortium of married life. (A consortium on which his forthcoming collection The Bridal Suite will no doubt shed inspired light.) In like manner, the birth of his daughter Nico, his heart’s needle if ever was, followed by the birth of his son Malvin, who soon enough would call him Daddy, made him immediately happier and accordingly sadder.

  If you love your life in this world, Matthew remembered Paul opining, you will lose it. He loved his life. What sane man wouldn’t. Loss, he figured, stalked him with its scythe.

  He’d written poems. He liked the sound of words of his own making in his own mouth. He’d met with early and deserved critical success. The Sweeneys had long since settled in London, the better to pursue his literary career. The better, likewise, for a man whose fear of driving was, by his own admission, consummate—a dread driven by visions of his body and the bodies of his children entangled with metal to their disadvantage. London, with its Underground, buses, and reliable taxi hacks, unlike the hinterlands of Donegal, gave Matthew the mobility he needed without the morbidity risked by driving a car. What’s more, the Kingdom’s capital is one of the great ambulatories of the world, providing access, at every turn, to the retail purveyors of essential and elective goods.

  Thus, from the stoop of his ample flat in Dombey Street, Matthew Sweeney need only travel eastward less than two hundred meters whereupon he finds himself in Lambs Conduit Street—a walking mall of small shops and markets. Within a stone’s throw of his premises is a pharmacist (to whom Mr. Sweeney addresses frequent queries), a French bakery for croissants, a florist (from whom Mr. Sweeney purchased the wee cacti that became the title poem of his most recent and acclaimed collection), his local public house, The Lamb (for the usual wetgoods), a dry cleaners, two coffee shops, a grocery and a greengrocer (with whom Mr. Sweeney has long debated the use and abuses of diverse lettuces, aubergine, and chili peppers), two victualers (one Irish, one Prussian), an herbalist (on whose custom I am unqualified to comment), and the Bloomsbury office of A. France Undertakers—one of London’s eldest and most respected carriage-trade mortuaries, passing by whose black and gilded storefront, Mr. Sweeney can be observed to quicken his pace and heard to whistle the fragments of a Tom Waits tune. Only the loss, in 1991, of Bernard Stone’s Turret Bookshop (which housed the city’s most comprehensive selection of contemporary poetry along with Bernard Stone himself) diminished the hospitable cityscape outside the Sweeneys’ door.

  One block due north of which, it is worthy of notice, stands the ancient and imposing structure of The Royal London Homeopathic Hospital. No one of the hundreds of poets and writers who have made their pilgrimage to Matthew’s home regards this proximity as happenstance. But whether the availability of emergency care or the endless parade of distressed humanity within eyeshot of his fourth-floor living room adds to or subtracts from Matthew’s angst is anyone’s guess. Maybe Sweeney himself doesn’t know. But his frequent foot travels west into Queen’s Square to meet with his man at Faber & Faber, the publisher of Matthew’s children’s poems (whose appeal, according to reviewers, proceeds from their dark homage to monsters and menace and the inherent dangers of maturation), take him, inevitably, by the hospital’s massive edifice.

  Indeed, the Sweeney home in Bloomsbury (a place name from which a wordsmith of Matthew’s caliber can easily extract the vital and the morbid etymological strains) sits at an epicenter of the medical forces, to wit: the Royal College of Surgeons, the London University Hospital, the Society of Endocrinologists, Her Majesty’s Hospital for Neurological Disease, the Hospital for Tropical Diseases (where Matthew once left samples of urine and sputum to be screened for the Ebola virus), which, along with other regiments of the medical militia, all within walking distance, speak to the battle being endlessly waged between man (in the gender inclusive sense) and the microbial forces of nature by which he (see above) is infested, infected, afflicted, endangered, diseased, and ultimately—and this is Matthew’s point—put to death.

  Perhaps a little history here. It was in Bewley’s Museum over Grafton Street where I first met Matthew Sweeney. It was Dublin and springtime of 1989. The Irish launch of his fourth collection, Blue Shoes, occurred but the day before a reading I was giving in the upper room of the famous coffee emporium. He prevailed upon his editor, now our editor, to stay in Dublin an extra day so the two of them might come to my reading. One of our Dublin friends in common, Philip Casey, the poet and novelist, had given me Matthew’s poems and given Matthew some of mine. There followed a genial correspondenc
e on themes of admiration and shared acquaintance that prefaced our meeting face to face. We repaired to Grogan’s Bar according to the local custom. I was touched by his generous praise for my reading, by his interest in my occupational familiarity with the grisly dimensions of disease and pathology, and by his apparent preference for black attire, a preference I share of practical necessity.

  The audience was too brief, the barroom too noisy, I was jetlagged, and Matthew, not fully recovered from the night before. Happily, it was the first of many meetings since, in England and in Ireland and in Michigan, where each of us has enjoyed the comforts of the other’s home, the company of the other’s wife, the wonderments of the other’s children, and the society of the other’s friends. To which abundance must be added the dialogue of each other’s poems, in which reviewers have found different treatment of similar themes—of domestic perils, imminent damage, and the transcendent properties of death.

  Among the society of writers and foodies (about which, more anon) he keeps in London, Matthew is fashioned a charming neurotic of the hypochondriacal variety. There are accounts of his inflation of the common cold to pneumonia or tuberculosis. His headaches are all brain tumors; his fevers, meningitis; his hangovers, all peptic ulcers or diverticulitis. Any deviations from the schedule of his toilet are bowel obstructions or colon cancer. He has been tested for every known irregularity except pregnancy, though he takes, on a seasonal basis, medication for PMS from which, no one doubts, he suffers. He is a consumer of medical opinion and keeps a list of specialists and their beeper numbers on his person. A cardiologist, an acupuncturist, an immunologist, an oral surgeon, an oncologist, a proctologist, and a behavioral psychologist join several psychic and holistic healers from regional and para-religious persuasions to make up Matthew’s medical retinue. The same numbers are programmed on speed-dial from his home phone. And where most of his co-religionists wear a medallion that reads In Case of Emergency Call a Priest, Sweeney’s reads Call an Ambulance. Call a Doctor. Please Observe Universal Precautions.

  He has consulted for or imagined having every known malady of the human species from Albers-Schönberg disease to Zygomycosis infection and seems strangely uplifted by the transmigration of ailments between genus and sub-groups heretofore unknown. Thus, swine flu, deer tick disease, feline leukemia, brown bat rabies, and, of course, parrot fever must be ruled out at his quarterly physical exams.

  He is, and will suffer no quarrel on this account, the only known survivor of mad cow disease, caught, he insists, from the meagre-most portion of tenderloin that accompanied kippers and poached eggs at Simpsons-on-the-Strand, where he brunched, by appointment, with the restaurant reviewer for the London Observer. Their discussion of mushrooms in Southern French cuisine apparently filled Matthew with such overwhelming images of toxicity that the paramedics had to be called.

  The standing joke is that Matthew possesses an open offer of a sizable advance from a prominent publisher for an intimate treatise on hypochondria, which, alas, he has never felt well enough to do.

  But while others nod and wink and roll their eyes, I have come to wonder if he isn’t a harbinger, a kind of visionary, a prophet, a voice crying out in the urban desert, The End Is Near, It’s Later than You Think.

  It was not only the commuter services or the literary milieu or the world-class health care that brought Sweeney to London. It was the food. Unimaginative about the preparation of food, the British have brought the best from the far reaches of the former Empire to London. There is no regional or national or ethnic cuisine on the face of the planet that does not have an office in London. And Matthew has made it his mission to sample and to savor and to study each. He is a student of the palate and the plate, a sage of the taste buds, tongue, and tablefare. In this incarnation he has found the best Thai eatery (Tui in South Kensington, near the offices of Secker & Warburg), the best Afghan (The Caravan Serai in Paddington Street), the best Indian (The Red Fort in Soho), the finest dim-sum (Harbor City in Chinatown), the ultimate noodle-bar (Wagamama in Streathern Street behind the British Museum), the most reliable vegetarian curry (Mandeer in an alleyway behind Tottenham Court Road Station). The geography of taste is as boundless for a man as the sky is borderless to flighted birds. And Sweeney often seems—rapt in sampling some hitherto unknown morsel—almost winged with delight, a rare bird of an urban paradise.

  But where the goldfinch craves thistle and the pelican, fish, and the hummingbird, nectar, and the peregrine, meat; the free-range of Matthew’s hankerings is suited to the city’s cosmopolitan menu and he plots his daily flights according to a constellation of favorites that shine brightly in his firmament of food. On these crusades he is often accompanied by willing accomplices from the arts of verse or gourmandery for whom a meal shared with Matthew Sweeney is a tuition they are more than happy to pay. (Here, as elsewhere, the temptation to drop names, well known in the world of letters and epicures, is nearly unavoidable. But I was better raised than that. To err by silence is better than omission.)

  I should also say he is a superior cook who takes seriously every aspect of the selection, the preparation, the presentation, and the savoring of whatever bears the insignia of his kitchen.

  All of which I mention because this apprehension of and appreciation for food—sensory and spiritual and gastrointestinal—seems coincidental with what others call his hypochondria and what I have come to consider his rare antennae for the flavors of mortality, a keen aptitude for the taste of survival.

  What I mean to say is that over sashimi at the Ikkyu (Tottenham Court Road near the Goodge Street Station), the talk will inevitably turn to the number of Japanese (just south of five hundred in the most recent tally) killed every year by the ingestion of a toxin-containing organ in an otherwise harmless (when properly skinned and eviscerated) puffer fish called fugu. Did the menu predestine the conversation? Once preparing an Umbrian dish of sausage and lentils, meant to replicate a specialty of the Trattoria Dal Francese, in Norcia, he asked what I knew about urinary tract infections, male sexual dysfunctions, inflammations of the colon and diverticuli, the prognostic implications of chronic flatus. Was it the sausage and lentils? I wondered. Was there a connection between foodstuffs and the fear of doom in Matthew’s complex psychopathology? Why, for example, while precisely dicing the chives for inclusion in a garnish for rainbow trout, would the light-hearted chit-chat lurch from the morning’s catch (from a trout pond in northern Michigan) to the manifold dangers of microsurgery. “One infinitesimal slip of the wrist,” he said, “and you can’t walk, or can’t talk, or you’ll drool for the rest of your miserable life.” And once, over what I believe to be the hemisphere’s finest presentation of lobster at Manuel DiLucia’s in Corbally, near my cottage in Clare, Matthew began to question me on deaths by misadventure, especially falling from severe heights. In particular he wanted to know if any forensic evidence could be cited in support of his hope that such deaths occurred somewhere between the top and bottom of the fall rather than as a result of the ultimate impact of the fall itself.

  I have long thought it my professional duty, when questioned by someone of Matthew’s sensibilities, to either give the true answer when it is known to me, or to suggest a source in the topical literature where such an answer might be found, or, failing either of these, to make something up.

  In accordance with which personal maxim, I made mention to Matthew of a highly regarded theory, first proffered by a student of C. G. Jung’s, that the presence of an overwhelming existential threat to the organism produces glandular secretions and other biochemical adaptations that occlude the cerebral synapse through which the business of nerve cells is, in the norm, conducted. This psychobiological response amounts to none other than a kind of coma from which, depending on the distance of the fall, the victim either awakens with broken but reparable bones in the nearest emergency ward or does not awaken at all. In either event, it could be fairly stated, your man would never know what hit him or, in this case—since be
tween the faller and the fallen on, the former seems the more proactive—what he hit.

  Matthew, transfixed by my testimony, allowed himself a taste of the lobster, a bit of brown bread and a sup of Puligni-Montrachet. Rosemary, for the Sweeneys had come to West Clare en famille, assisted the children with the cracking of shells and the choice of utensils. I could see in her eyes the blue patience of the saintly who live with writers of Matthew’s stripe—a depth of comisery and understanding I’ve seen, alas, in my own darling Mary’s eyes. I thought we might ease our way toward orthodontics or adolescence or the shape of the universe or any of several more inclusive topics. But aflicker in Matthew’s eyes I could see uncertainty, insatiety, the lingering remnant of the reasonable doubt that has set free many a guilty man, and saved a few of the blameless, too.

  Was it because Manuel DiLucia’s (Our host was a descendant of one of the few survivors of the Spanish Armada run aground off the West Clare coast in a storm centuries ago. Most of those who crawled ashore, it is reported, were slaughtered by the native Irish.) was perched on a cliff overlooking Kilkee and the rugged coastline southwest to Loop Head? Were these treacherous precipices reminiscent, I wondered, of Matthew’s boyhood near Malin Head, the northernmost outpost of Ireland, where the land rises half a mile above the sea? I was reminded of my countryman, Edgar Allen Poe, whose “imp of the perverse” was the name he gave to that voice in all of us which, on the brink of such a deadly height, says “Jump!” Was it Poe who held that in everything’s creation is the kernel of its own destruction? Or Melville? My memory was foggy on these points with which Matthew no less might readily agree.