“Miss Naomi?” he called, smiling.
The light under her door clicked out at the sound of his voice.
He stared at the dark keyhole with disbelief.
“Oh, Miss Naomi?” he said again, quickly.
Nothing happened in the room. It was dark. After a moment he tried the knob experimentally. The knob rattled. He heard Miss Fremwell sigh. He heard her say something.
Again the words were lost. Her small feet tapped to the door. The light came on.
“Yes?” she said, behind the panel.
“Look, Miss Naomi,” he entreated. “Open the door. Look.”
The bolt of the door snapped back. She jerked the door open about an inch. One of her eyes looked at him sharply.
“Look,” he announced proudly, adjusting the toupee so it very definitely covered the sunken crater. He imagined he saw himself in her bureau mirror and was pleased. “Look here, Miss Fremwell!”
She opened the door a bit wider and looked. Then she slammed the door and locked it. From behind the thin paneling her voice was toneless.
“I can still see the hole, Mr. Lemon,” she said.
The First Night of Lent
So you want to know all the whys and wherefores of the Irish? What shapes them to their Dooms and runs them on their way? you ask. Well, listen, then. For though I’ve known but a single Irishman in all my life, I knew him, without pause, for one hundred and forty-four consecutive nights. Stand close; perhaps in him you’ll see that entire race which marches out of the rains but to vanish through the mists; hold on, here they come! Look out, there they go!
This Irishman, his name was Nick.
During the autumn of 1953, I began a screenplay in Dublin, and each afternoon a hired cab drove me thirty miles out from the River Liffey to the huge grey Georgian country house where my producer-director rode to hounds. There, we discussed my eight pages of daily script through the long fall, winter, and early spring evenings. Then, each midnight, ready to turn back to the Irish Sea and the Royal Hibernian Hotel, I’d wake the operator in the Kilcock village exchange and have her put me through to the warmest, if totally unheated, spot in town.
“Heber Finn’s pub?” I’d shout, once connected. “Is Nick there? Could you send him along here, please?”
My mind’s eye saw them, the local boys, lined up, peering over the barricade at that freckled mirror so like a frozen winter pond and themselves discovered all drowned and deep under that lovely ice. Amid all their jostlings and their now-here’s-a-secret-in-a-stage-whisper-commotion stood Nick, my village driver, his quietness abounding. I heard Heber Finn sing out from the phone. I heard Nick start up and reply:
“Just look at me, headin’ for the door!”
Early on, I learned that “headin’ for the door” was no nerve-shattering process that might affront dignity or destroy the fine filigree of any argument being woven with great and breathless beauty at Heber Finn’s. It was, rather, a gradual disengagement, a leaning of the bulk so one’s gravity was diplomatically shifted toward that far empty side of the public room where the door, shunned by all, stood neglected. Meantime, a dozen conversational warps and woofs must be ticked, tied, and labeled so next morn, with hoarse cries of recognition, patterns might be seized and the shuttle thrown with no pause for breath or thought.
Timing it, I figured the long part of Nick’s midnight journey—the length of Heber Finn’s—took half an hour. The short part—from Finn’s to the house where I waited—took but five minutes.
So it was on the night before the first night of Lent. I called. I waited.
And at last, down through the night forest, thrashed the 1931 Chevrolet, peat-turf colored on top like Nick. Car and driver gasped, sighed, wheezed softly, easily, gently as they nudged into the courtyard and I groped down the front steps under a moonless but brightly starred sky.
I peered through the car window at unstirred dark; the dashboard had been dead these many years.
“Nick …?”
“None other,” he whispered secretly. “And ain’t it a fine warm evenin’?”
The temperature was fifty. But, Nick’d been no nearer Rome than the Tipperary shore line; so weather was relative.
“A fine warm evening.” I climbed up front and gave the squealing door its absolutely compulsory, rust-splintering slam. “Nick, how’ve you been since?”
“Ah.” He let the car bulk and grind itself down the forest path. “I got me health. Ain’t that all-and-everything with Lent comin’ on tomorra?”
“Lent,” I mused. “What will you give up for Lent, Nick?”
“I been turnin’ it over.” Nick sucked his cigarette suddenly; the pink, lined mask of his face blinked off the smoke. “And why not these terrible things ya see in me mouth? Dear as gold-fillin’s, and a dread congestor of the lungs they be. Put it all down, add ’em up, and ya got a sick loss by the year’s turnin’, ya know. So ya’ll not find these filthy creatures in me face again the whole time of Lent, and, who knows, after!”
“Bravo!” said I, a non-smoker.
“Bravo, says I to meself,” wheezed Nick, one eye flinched with smoke.
“Good luck,” I said.
“I’ll need it,” whispered Nick, “with the Sin’s own habit to be broke.”
And we moved with firm control, with thoughtful shift of weight, down and around a turfy hollow and through a mist and into Dublin at thirty-one easy miles an hour.
Bear with me while I stress it: Nick was the most careful driver in all God’s world, including any sane, small, quiet, butter-and-milk producing country you name.
Above all, Nick stands innocent and sainted when compared to those motorists who key that small switch marked paranoia each time they fuse themselves to their bucket seats in Los Angeles, Mexico City, or Paris. Also, to those blind men who, forsaking tin cups and canes, but still wearing their Hollywood dark-glasses, laugh insanely down the Via Veneto, shaking brake-drum lining like carnival serpentine out their race-car windows. Consider the Roman ruins; surely they are the wreckage strewn and left by those motor-biking otters who, all night beneath your hotel window, shriek down dark Roman alleys, Christians hell-bent for the Colosseum lion pits.
Nick, now. See his easy hands loving the wheel in a slow clock-like turning as soft and silent as winter constellations snow down the sky. Listen to his mist-breathing voice all night-quiet as he charms the road, his foot a tenderly benevolent pat on the whispering accelerator, never a mile under thirty, never two miles over. Nick, Nick, and his steady boat gentling a mild sweet lake where all Time slumbers. Look, compare. And bind such a man to you with summer grasses, gift him with silver, shake his hand warmly at each journey’s end.
“Good night, Nick,” I said at the hotel. “See you tomorrow.”
“God willing,” whispered Nick.
And he drove softly away.
Let twenty-three hours of sleep, breakfast, lunch, supper, late night-cap pass. Let hours of writing bad script into fair script fade to peat mist and rain, and there I come again, another midnight, out of that Georgian mansion, its door throwing a warm hearth of color before me as I tread down the steps to feel Braille-wise in fog for the car I know hulks there; I hear its enlarged and asthmatic heart gasping in the blind air, and Nick coughing his “gold by the ounce is not more precious” cough.