A few weeks later it was Isobel who arranged their marriage by ‘the turkey who lives on the hill’. The turkey turned out to be a pleasant young Methodist minister; the hill, Society Hill. It wasn’t so much marriage, Isobel explained to him, as the question of his visa, his freedom to stay in the United States. She said this very delicately as if she feared he might take offence. Afterwards she took him to lunch at a fish restaurant called Bookbinders and ordered him lobster. The waitress produced a huge paper towel which she tied around his neck and Looksmart felt very embarrassed to be wrapped like a parcel. With his knife he tapped an anxious tarradiddle on the red beast’s back. Isobel asked about his mother.
Looksmart’s mother had been called Agnes. That much he did remember. Up from the kraal, a raw farm girl, she came to the capital in search, not of work, but of her husband who worked on the gold mines. Which mine? No one knew. One day her husband’s letters had stopped. Worse still, so had the money he used to send. So Agnes brought her sons to the city and failed to find him. She was told to go home and wait. But she couldn’t do that, her children had no food. She looked for work. Those to whom she applied warned her, threatened her: she had no papers, no permission, no future, no business to be there. Tap, tap went Looksmart’s knife on the lobster’s gate of bone behind which the beast hid and would not let him in, knock as he might. The hot, salt, sea flesh inside steamed in his nostrils. He realised then what was to be done in order to eat a lobster, why the huge paper bib, the finger bowl. You were supposed to tear it apart with your bare hands. His mother would have fled from this monster. The lobster fixed him with hard, unblinking eyes. Never mind, he would outstare it, using his bad eye.
Agnes, Looksmart’s mother, arrived at Father Lynch’s front door clutching Gabriel’s hand and Looksmart, then still a baby, strapped to her back. Lynch took her on immediately, impressed on the one hand by her inability to do any cooking or washing or ironing or sewing. These were deficiencies he approved of heartily. Coming into contact with the white madams who taught these things was the ruination of many a good person, he liked to say. Lynch was delighted by the impressionable enthusiasm she showed and her lack of bad culinary habits. He taught her to cook what he called Irish food, plain and solid, stews and roasts and soups and plenty of potato with everything, since that was the way it was done in Ireland, his country, God help it, a tiny island no bigger than the tip of a finger nail, and here he squeezed between thumb and forefinger the requisite area of nail for her inspection. A little place so full of priests it would sink beneath their weight into the sea one day.
So much for the wedding lunch and Looksmart’s mother. It was Isobel who acknowledged that she would awake one morning and find him gone, having slipped away in the night, summoned by his comrades to return home and fight for the cause of freedom.
And it was Isobel, above all, who sent him out one day with instructions to cast an eye over ‘our revolution’.
Down Walnut Street Looksmart scrabbled towards that amazing rectangle bounded by Second Street and Sixth, by Larch Street and Spruce, the launching pad of the American revolution. He visited the Declaration Chamber in Independence Hall along with a bunch of tourists. Their guide was a bluff young man who wore what looked to him like a scout’s uniform, but who turned out to be a Ranger in the Parks Department. He discovered that the area of Independence Hall was designated a National Historical Park. How strange America was! In his country the national parks were full of animals; here, they were full of people. The crowds stood behind the railing which enclosed the sacred area where the furious debates about independence had taken place. They stared at the tables covered with green baize and the crowded, spindle-legged Windsor chairs, the papers, the quills, the inkstands. They saw the Speaker’s Chair with its rising sun motif and heard how Benjamin Franklin sat day after day, during deliberations that led to the Declaration, wondering whether that sun was rising or setting. He gazed at the silver inkstand designed by Philip Synge for the Speaker’s Table, he learnt that unlike most of the other furniture, the inkstand was original; from it had come the ink that had loaded the quills that signed the Declaration of Independence adopted by this rumbustious, Second Continental Congress of 1776. The tourists stared at the crowded tables and chairs in that silent, empty chamber and tried to imagine the bells, the bonfires, the cheers and the shots with which the revolution began. Most of them were dressed in jeans or slacks and had this shifty, almost guilty look about them, Looksmart thought, as if try as they might they simply couldn’t imagine that such climactic matters had begun in this small place. Afterwards, Looksmart bought a copy of the Declaration Document and a postcard of Trumbull’s painting, The Signing, with its bouquet of American flags and its serried racks of bewigged and utterly respectable gentlemen who beneath their composure and their wigs had proved to be wild and redhot revolutionaries.
Looksmart visited, that same day, the House of Representatives Chamber in Congress Hall, as well as the Senate Chamber. He stared at the great star-spangled eagle painted on the ceiling overhead with its claw full of arrows. He admired the creamy symmetry of the old Supreme Court Chamber and he walked across Market Street and joined the crowds thronging the Glass Pavilion where the Liberty Bell hung.
He arrived home that night loaded with papers. He had gone out a tourist and come back a recruit to the American revolution. Something had caught fire within him and the roar of its flames competed with the deep internal cranial rumblings and explosions inside his damaged head and sometimes, hallelujah! overcame them and drove them out, even quietened the continuous buzzing in his ear, warmed his stiff and stupid tongue, disciplined the feet that each went their stupid, separate ways. He carried brochures, postcards, maps, prints and an armful of books he had discovered on sale at the Visitors’ Centre on Second Street. Isobel was amused by this enthusiasm. He lay there that night staring up at her sizeable breasts, swinging like bells. Later, while Isobel slept, he got up and went through his papers.