Byzantium
Patrick Dawson
Even as she approaches sixty years of age, Mary still hears the frightened clip of her mother’s heels whenever she sees the stone façade of a church. It was unavoidable then, that this was the sound that greeted her as she shuffled down between the mahogany pews and took her seat near the front of the church hall. The soft yellow light glanced off her blue eyes like summer sunlight hitting shallow water and as she waited for the priest to begin she traced the veins on her forearms incessantly. People often say that she is beautiful but that it is a fragile beauty, the fragile beauty of a small, shivering bird in falling snow.
Laments and condolences bubbled up around her and became trapped in the congealed atmosphere of the funeral but she focused only on the slideshow projected on a loop behind the pulpit. It repeated the same, familiar story. In the first five photos, when her father was young and dashing and her mother was handsome and striking, her father stands with a slight dip in his left leg and his right arm gently draped over his wife. A young Mary does her best to hold the baby Anne in front of them. The weight is clearly difficult to bear and one can see her struggling with the squirming infant. There are five black and white photos that each show some small variation on this basic template, perhaps there is some change in the background or in the number of clouds in the sky, but always Mary is holding Anne and always their dad has his left leg bent as if he had just reached the end of a Parisian runway. Then, color comes flooding in and Mary and her mother are ripped from the photos. In these color photographs, her dad’s shoe-polish hair has turned silver, his arrogant patrician features have become softer and less domineering. He had never looked like a father but he had aged into a grandfatherly rectitude with the passing of the years. This impression is bolstered by the photos that display him surrounded by Anne’s children, smiling broadly and wearing an old woolen cardigan that he wouldn’t have been caught dead in when he was thirty.
Mary’s nephew, large and relaxed and already accustomed to speaking at funerals, approached the front of the church hall in a modest black suit. With a rueful smile he told the story of a summer spent on his grandad’s boat. One was barely out of the hinterlands of youth, the other was pushing eighty, yet they spent the sun-drenched months together drinking on the docks. One night, his grandad stumbled off the pier and into the Mediterranean Sea. He said he would never forget the sudden panic that gripped him, nor the relief when he heard him laughing and splashing down below his feet like some drunken Irish sea lion. Mary stole a furtive glance at her two sons beside her, both lithe and long-haired and English. She wondered how much they resent her for depriving them of such memories, of that connection to their ancestral homeland. They looked ahead, laughing solemnly and respectfully, the way one does when hearing stories of the recently dead, and she turned back to watch the cyclical disappearing act.
Her nephew finished his story. There was a faint rustle of paper amidst the thick silence, the sound of a bench creaking, and then Anne approached the pulpit. Her black dress revealed her thick, muscular biceps and powerful shoulders, the product of rowing the River Corrib each morning after the death of her husband. Her head is rather square and she tends to stare out at the world with the pugnacious air of a boxer. Only in their blue, almond-shaped eyes and thin, bloodless lips do the two sisters resemble one another.
Anne gripped the lectern on both sides until her knuckles turned white. She glared down at the single A4 sheet of paper she had carried up with her and, with a slight clearing of the throat, the first lines of “Sailing to Byzantium” stuttered out into the air.
“That is no country for old men,” her father would murmur from the other side of the room, a lit cigarette dancing in the dark in front of him like a firefly. Mary’s dad was always immaculately dressed–his slim body adorned in dark suits or bright cotton jumpers and polo shirts in primary colors. He was from Dublin, the last faded remnant of a collapsed landowning family whose fortunes had dwindled down till only the haughtiness and superciliousness of his class remained. It was something he carried in his blood and it was an attitude that won her dad few friends in the west Ireland fishing village in which he settled.
“An aged man is but a paltry thing,” her sister continued. She could barely get the words out amidst the tears. Anybody could see that tears were unnatural for this woman. Mary wanted to go up and hold her, to put her arms around her and to read the poem with her, but she couldn’t. Anne would just shake her off, or scream at her, or simply stop and stare at her coldly until she returned to her seat. So instead, Mary just watched her sister cry from her seat at the front of the hall. At first, she was surprised that Anne remembered this. She could only have been one or possibly two when her father would return from his nocturnal peregrinations and begin his recitation. But then, she supposes, her father probably continued to read Yeats in the many more years the two of them spent together without her.
When they were children, Mary would wait up for her father. Or rather, she would be forced to wait. Her mother would lift her up onto her bony lap in the living room rocking chair and the two would sit together in the dark. The grandfather clock in the corner would tick away, low and cautious, and the chair would moan beneath her. Mary would try not to breathe so as not to pierce the stilted silence. The radio would remain cold and lifeless and the books remain unopened on the shelf. It was as if she wanted those nights to be as joyless as possible. If Mary threatened to drift off to sleep then she received a pinch on her arm and was yanked back into wakefulness. Mary’s mother had her black hair cut into a bob and the powerful, prominent jawline of a captain in a Conrad novel. She was strong then, though she was not later.
“O sages standing in god’s holy fire.” Her sister survived the rare paroxysm of sadness and Mary breathed again. Her sister released the lectern from her chokehold and gazed out at the gathered mourners, though her eyes pointedly never alighted on Anne.
As soon as her mother would hear the rattle of the key in the lock, sometimes accompanied by the whistle of a tune or the snippet of a song, she would leap to her feet and begin to yell. She would ask him where he was, how he could stay out all night when he knows that Mary can’t sleep without him in the house. The sound would awaken Anne and the baby’s shrieks would barrel down from above like a warped echo of her mother’s rage. Their father was unconcerned. He would glide past his wife like he was dancing in a ballroom, wink at Mary and then sink into the red polyester chair on the other side of the room. From there, he would lift a cigarette from his silver case and light a match that briefly sparked his features into life. When he came back from these mysterious nights, the match would reveal a peace in his eyes, a peace that no amount of recrimination could diminish. It may last the night, it may last a few days more, but eventually that peace would drain from his clear, proud eyes until he became a harrowed, somber man and it was time for him to vanish again.
“Once out of nature I shall never take,” her sister continued. Her voice was quiet now and she looked only at their father, laid out a few meters from the pulpit. She spoke only for him.
Once he had taken a few long drags of his cigarette, he would invariably begin to recite Yeats to drown out the sound of his wife’s curses. He looked only at his daughter and bellowed the opening lines until the imprecations died away. Then, when the room was finally quiet, his voice grew low and he held his open palm in the air like an actor playing Hamlet. Mary couldn’t resist the smile that spread across her face as he delivered his performance, though she knew on some confused subterranean level that this was a betrayal of her mother, that how much she admired her father was a betrayal of her mother. It was worth staying up all night just to hear his voice soar across the room, to see his face contort into exaggerated expressions of woe and longing, to see the peace in his eyes. She wished he were always like this. When he had finished, he would kiss Mary on the forehead and tiptoe up to bed, leaving a stunned and red-faced wife spluttering in the living room and an adoring child gazing up after him.
“Of what is past, or passing, or to come.”
Anne finished her recital. She turned to the coffin and simply said, “Goodbye, Dad” before returning to her seat. Those words were painful for Mary to hear, for they are the words that she never had a chance to say. The silence that fell upon the church hall with the finish of the reading was the same silence that lasted the whole night in that forlorn living room some half century before. That night, her mother’s knee revealed all of her tormented feelings. It leapt up and down, it twisted and turned in her seat and her hand beat a nervous rhythm upon it as they waited for her father to return. When the curtain edges grew light and bird song filtered in through the window, her knee turned to stone. After another hour, as if waking from a dream, Mary’s mother carefully lifted her off of the treacherous knee, kissed her on the forehead with a frozen smile, and told her to run upstairs and get some sleep.
For weeks after that, with no sign of his return, her mother returned to the living room night after night and waited in vain. From her bedroom, Mary could hear the lonely creak of the wood as she rocked herself back and forth in her chair.
“Walk with me,” Mary told her sister firmly. After a moment’s hesitation, and an awkward smile towards the guests whose commiserations Mary had interrupted, Anne begrudgingly accepted the invitation. The two sisters strode out into the soft afternoon drizzle. Anne trailed Mary through the overgrown grass and marble gravestones, gravel crunching beneath their feet.
“We should be there for each other,” Mary said. “We’re the only ones left.”
“Like you were for Dad?” Anne replied.
They walked on a little further underneath the dismal sky. Dublin stretched out in front of them. It looked immense and labyrinthian and lonely. An alder tree in the corner of the graveyard offered a respite from the rain and the two sisters sought shelter beneath it.
“You were younger,” Mary eventually replied.
“What’s that got to do with anything?”
“It means that you don’t really remember him leaving.”
The rumors reached them only after their father was already gone, light arriving from a distant star. The townsfolk took a particular relish in tearing down the Dubliner with the fine suits and sophisticated air who always found ways to avoid paying out on the insurance he sold them. Mary never saw the photos, though it seemed like everybody else in town had, or at least claimed to. The photos of her dad in a dress and high heels taken from a police raid on a reported house of ill repute. Behavior that was decried from the pulpit of Virgos Fidelis. The wild-eyed and sweaty parish priest called out the offenders by name, her father chief among them, and assured the gathered worshippers of the inherent, Satan-abetting evil of a men who loved one another. A fiery rhetoric that sent the eyes of every man and woman gathered there that day to the back of the room, where Mary and her mother sat there trying to hold back tears. As the priest worked himself up into a frenzy, Mary’s mother grabbed her by the forearm, hoisted Anne against her chest, and dragged them towards the exit, her heels clipping on the stone. The priest’s words stalked them all the way home, they battered on the door and knocked on the window and ensured that her mother would never leave the house again. Not even when the priest was in the ground, not even when the common memories of her husband had faded away into nothingness, not even when the attitudes of people had changed. Those words remained the warden at the gate right up until the day she died.
“You can’t hate him for who he was,” Anne replied, when she had finished listening. The rain released an earthy scent into the air. Mary looked at the simple church and then at the hall beside it and thought: “They’re incinerating him now.” But perhaps that’s not true. Perhaps they transport the coffin somewhere else. She hadn’t even had the chance to ask Anne where she will spread the ashes, or if she will be permitted to attend.
“I never hated him,” Mary replied firmly. She fixed Anne with a hard gaze. “I never hated him. How could you even think that?”
“You never spoke to him, never let your kids speak to him. He had to die knowing that you never forgave him.”
“Listen to me. I know how hard it must have been on him. I know he was afraid of being hounded out of town or beaten up or worse. But he still left me there. Left me waiting for him. And you can’t just abandon your daughter, you just can’t. You say I never forgave him but he never even asked for forgiveness. Not once. And now I’ll never get a chance to tell him that I understand. That I understand why he left but that I can’t forgive him for it. Because now it’s all too late and it will always be like this.”
Some beetles and worms, disturbed either by the rain or by their presence, wriggled over the wet bark at their feet. In the branches above, the sound of a squirrel struggling over slick leaves cascaded down. Mary took a few deep breaths and looked back up at her sister.
“I never hated him. He was my hero Anne,” she said. “He was my hero and he left me.”
The rain beat down around them as they huddled beneath the alder tree. The grey sky seemed to stretch on forever, to stretch out around the earth and reach them from the other side. It is hard, in moments like these, to believe that there could ever be sunlight again. “Come on,” Anne said eventually. “The rain is dying down a little.”
The two strode out quickly across the graveyard, side by side, down the gravel trail and away from the eternal echo of their mother’s heels across the stone. Anne’s children glanced up hopefully when they saw them enter the candle-lit pub together. Mary took a seat beside her husband and her children and the two families drank and offered up memories of the dead. One of her father’s friends had traveled over and he twiddled with his moustache as he recounted stories that made it plain to all that they had lived a Peter Pan existence out there on the Spanish coast.
“He died with a tan,” her nephew said finally. “We should all be so lucky.”
When dark night had devoured the grey day and the stories had all dried up, the two sisters walked to the bar to settle up. They waited for a long time outside the pub for their families to come and join them. A thin crescent of light from an overhead streetlamp divided them, plunged Anne into shadow. Finally, the two families emerged, drunk and happy. Without a word, Anne stepped into the light and hugged her sister, at first lightly but then with a sudden vicious passion. They disengaged, nodded at one another, and walked off in separate directions into the night. As Mary walked down the dimly lit street the drunken laughter of her family receded and her father’s voice rang out clear and true as he recited Yeats with a cigarette in hand like a conductor’s baton. She wondered what the poem meant to him, or if it meant anything at all. If it was simply a bombastic means of distracting his family from where he had been or if he really did yearn to set sail for somewhere before it was all too late. If he did, then she hoped that he was able to find some peace there, that he was able to live inside that peace she would occasionally glimpse in his eyes when he struck a match from the other side of the room and launched into his woeful recitation.
Patrick Dawson
Even as she approaches sixty years of age, Mary still hears the frightened clip of her mother’s heels whenever she sees the stone façade of a church. It was unavoidable then, that this was the sound that greeted her as she shuffled down between the mahogany pews and took her seat near the front of the church hall. The soft yellow light glanced off her blue eyes like summer sunlight hitting shallow water and as she waited for the priest to begin she traced the veins on her forearms incessantly. People often say that she is beautiful but that it is a fragile beauty, the fragile beauty of a small, shivering bird in falling snow.
Laments and condolences bubbled up around her and became trapped in the congealed atmosphere of the funeral but she focused only on the slideshow projected on a loop behind the pulpit. It repeated the same, familiar story. In the first five photos, when her father was young and dashing and her mother was handsome and striking, her father stands with a slight dip in his left leg and his right arm gently draped over his wife. A young Mary does her best to hold the baby Anne in front of them. The weight is clearly difficult to bear and one can see her struggling with the squirming infant. There are five black and white photos that each show some small variation on this basic template, perhaps there is some change in the background or in the number of clouds in the sky, but always Mary is holding Anne and always their dad has his left leg bent as if he had just reached the end of a Parisian runway. Then, color comes flooding in and Mary and her mother are ripped from the photos. In these color photographs, her dad’s shoe-polish hair has turned silver, his arrogant patrician features have become softer and less domineering. He had never looked like a father but he had aged into a grandfatherly rectitude with the passing of the years. This impression is bolstered by the photos that display him surrounded by Anne’s children, smiling broadly and wearing an old woolen cardigan that he wouldn’t have been caught dead in when he was thirty.
Mary’s nephew, large and relaxed and already accustomed to speaking at funerals, approached the front of the church hall in a modest black suit. With a rueful smile he told the story of a summer spent on his grandad’s boat. One was barely out of the hinterlands of youth, the other was pushing eighty, yet they spent the sun-drenched months together drinking on the docks. One night, his grandad stumbled off the pier and into the Mediterranean Sea. He said he would never forget the sudden panic that gripped him, nor the relief when he heard him laughing and splashing down below his feet like some drunken Irish sea lion. Mary stole a furtive glance at her two sons beside her, both lithe and long-haired and English. She wondered how much they resent her for depriving them of such memories, of that connection to their ancestral homeland. They looked ahead, laughing solemnly and respectfully, the way one does when hearing stories of the recently dead, and she turned back to watch the cyclical disappearing act.
Her nephew finished his story. There was a faint rustle of paper amidst the thick silence, the sound of a bench creaking, and then Anne approached the pulpit. Her black dress revealed her thick, muscular biceps and powerful shoulders, the product of rowing the River Corrib each morning after the death of her husband. Her head is rather square and she tends to stare out at the world with the pugnacious air of a boxer. Only in their blue, almond-shaped eyes and thin, bloodless lips do the two sisters resemble one another.
Anne gripped the lectern on both sides until her knuckles turned white. She glared down at the single A4 sheet of paper she had carried up with her and, with a slight clearing of the throat, the first lines of “Sailing to Byzantium” stuttered out into the air.
“That is no country for old men,” her father would murmur from the other side of the room, a lit cigarette dancing in the dark in front of him like a firefly. Mary’s dad was always immaculately dressed–his slim body adorned in dark suits or bright cotton jumpers and polo shirts in primary colors. He was from Dublin, the last faded remnant of a collapsed landowning family whose fortunes had dwindled down till only the haughtiness and superciliousness of his class remained. It was something he carried in his blood and it was an attitude that won her dad few friends in the west Ireland fishing village in which he settled.
“An aged man is but a paltry thing,” her sister continued. She could barely get the words out amidst the tears. Anybody could see that tears were unnatural for this woman. Mary wanted to go up and hold her, to put her arms around her and to read the poem with her, but she couldn’t. Anne would just shake her off, or scream at her, or simply stop and stare at her coldly until she returned to her seat. So instead, Mary just watched her sister cry from her seat at the front of the hall. At first, she was surprised that Anne remembered this. She could only have been one or possibly two when her father would return from his nocturnal peregrinations and begin his recitation. But then, she supposes, her father probably continued to read Yeats in the many more years the two of them spent together without her.
When they were children, Mary would wait up for her father. Or rather, she would be forced to wait. Her mother would lift her up onto her bony lap in the living room rocking chair and the two would sit together in the dark. The grandfather clock in the corner would tick away, low and cautious, and the chair would moan beneath her. Mary would try not to breathe so as not to pierce the stilted silence. The radio would remain cold and lifeless and the books remain unopened on the shelf. It was as if she wanted those nights to be as joyless as possible. If Mary threatened to drift off to sleep then she received a pinch on her arm and was yanked back into wakefulness. Mary’s mother had her black hair cut into a bob and the powerful, prominent jawline of a captain in a Conrad novel. She was strong then, though she was not later.
“O sages standing in god’s holy fire.” Her sister survived the rare paroxysm of sadness and Mary breathed again. Her sister released the lectern from her chokehold and gazed out at the gathered mourners, though her eyes pointedly never alighted on Anne.
As soon as her mother would hear the rattle of the key in the lock, sometimes accompanied by the whistle of a tune or the snippet of a song, she would leap to her feet and begin to yell. She would ask him where he was, how he could stay out all night when he knows that Mary can’t sleep without him in the house. The sound would awaken Anne and the baby’s shrieks would barrel down from above like a warped echo of her mother’s rage. Their father was unconcerned. He would glide past his wife like he was dancing in a ballroom, wink at Mary and then sink into the red polyester chair on the other side of the room. From there, he would lift a cigarette from his silver case and light a match that briefly sparked his features into life. When he came back from these mysterious nights, the match would reveal a peace in his eyes, a peace that no amount of recrimination could diminish. It may last the night, it may last a few days more, but eventually that peace would drain from his clear, proud eyes until he became a harrowed, somber man and it was time for him to vanish again.
“Once out of nature I shall never take,” her sister continued. Her voice was quiet now and she looked only at their father, laid out a few meters from the pulpit. She spoke only for him.
Once he had taken a few long drags of his cigarette, he would invariably begin to recite Yeats to drown out the sound of his wife’s curses. He looked only at his daughter and bellowed the opening lines until the imprecations died away. Then, when the room was finally quiet, his voice grew low and he held his open palm in the air like an actor playing Hamlet. Mary couldn’t resist the smile that spread across her face as he delivered his performance, though she knew on some confused subterranean level that this was a betrayal of her mother, that how much she admired her father was a betrayal of her mother. It was worth staying up all night just to hear his voice soar across the room, to see his face contort into exaggerated expressions of woe and longing, to see the peace in his eyes. She wished he were always like this. When he had finished, he would kiss Mary on the forehead and tiptoe up to bed, leaving a stunned and red-faced wife spluttering in the living room and an adoring child gazing up after him.
“Of what is past, or passing, or to come.”
Anne finished her recital. She turned to the coffin and simply said, “Goodbye, Dad” before returning to her seat. Those words were painful for Mary to hear, for they are the words that she never had a chance to say. The silence that fell upon the church hall with the finish of the reading was the same silence that lasted the whole night in that forlorn living room some half century before. That night, her mother’s knee revealed all of her tormented feelings. It leapt up and down, it twisted and turned in her seat and her hand beat a nervous rhythm upon it as they waited for her father to return. When the curtain edges grew light and bird song filtered in through the window, her knee turned to stone. After another hour, as if waking from a dream, Mary’s mother carefully lifted her off of the treacherous knee, kissed her on the forehead with a frozen smile, and told her to run upstairs and get some sleep.
For weeks after that, with no sign of his return, her mother returned to the living room night after night and waited in vain. From her bedroom, Mary could hear the lonely creak of the wood as she rocked herself back and forth in her chair.
“Walk with me,” Mary told her sister firmly. After a moment’s hesitation, and an awkward smile towards the guests whose commiserations Mary had interrupted, Anne begrudgingly accepted the invitation. The two sisters strode out into the soft afternoon drizzle. Anne trailed Mary through the overgrown grass and marble gravestones, gravel crunching beneath their feet.
“We should be there for each other,” Mary said. “We’re the only ones left.”
“Like you were for Dad?” Anne replied.
They walked on a little further underneath the dismal sky. Dublin stretched out in front of them. It looked immense and labyrinthian and lonely. An alder tree in the corner of the graveyard offered a respite from the rain and the two sisters sought shelter beneath it.
“You were younger,” Mary eventually replied.
“What’s that got to do with anything?”
“It means that you don’t really remember him leaving.”
The rumors reached them only after their father was already gone, light arriving from a distant star. The townsfolk took a particular relish in tearing down the Dubliner with the fine suits and sophisticated air who always found ways to avoid paying out on the insurance he sold them. Mary never saw the photos, though it seemed like everybody else in town had, or at least claimed to. The photos of her dad in a dress and high heels taken from a police raid on a reported house of ill repute. Behavior that was decried from the pulpit of Virgos Fidelis. The wild-eyed and sweaty parish priest called out the offenders by name, her father chief among them, and assured the gathered worshippers of the inherent, Satan-abetting evil of a men who loved one another. A fiery rhetoric that sent the eyes of every man and woman gathered there that day to the back of the room, where Mary and her mother sat there trying to hold back tears. As the priest worked himself up into a frenzy, Mary’s mother grabbed her by the forearm, hoisted Anne against her chest, and dragged them towards the exit, her heels clipping on the stone. The priest’s words stalked them all the way home, they battered on the door and knocked on the window and ensured that her mother would never leave the house again. Not even when the priest was in the ground, not even when the common memories of her husband had faded away into nothingness, not even when the attitudes of people had changed. Those words remained the warden at the gate right up until the day she died.
“You can’t hate him for who he was,” Anne replied, when she had finished listening. The rain released an earthy scent into the air. Mary looked at the simple church and then at the hall beside it and thought: “They’re incinerating him now.” But perhaps that’s not true. Perhaps they transport the coffin somewhere else. She hadn’t even had the chance to ask Anne where she will spread the ashes, or if she will be permitted to attend.
“I never hated him,” Mary replied firmly. She fixed Anne with a hard gaze. “I never hated him. How could you even think that?”
“You never spoke to him, never let your kids speak to him. He had to die knowing that you never forgave him.”
“Listen to me. I know how hard it must have been on him. I know he was afraid of being hounded out of town or beaten up or worse. But he still left me there. Left me waiting for him. And you can’t just abandon your daughter, you just can’t. You say I never forgave him but he never even asked for forgiveness. Not once. And now I’ll never get a chance to tell him that I understand. That I understand why he left but that I can’t forgive him for it. Because now it’s all too late and it will always be like this.”
Some beetles and worms, disturbed either by the rain or by their presence, wriggled over the wet bark at their feet. In the branches above, the sound of a squirrel struggling over slick leaves cascaded down. Mary took a few deep breaths and looked back up at her sister.
“I never hated him. He was my hero Anne,” she said. “He was my hero and he left me.”
The rain beat down around them as they huddled beneath the alder tree. The grey sky seemed to stretch on forever, to stretch out around the earth and reach them from the other side. It is hard, in moments like these, to believe that there could ever be sunlight again. “Come on,” Anne said eventually. “The rain is dying down a little.”
The two strode out quickly across the graveyard, side by side, down the gravel trail and away from the eternal echo of their mother’s heels across the stone. Anne’s children glanced up hopefully when they saw them enter the candle-lit pub together. Mary took a seat beside her husband and her children and the two families drank and offered up memories of the dead. One of her father’s friends had traveled over and he twiddled with his moustache as he recounted stories that made it plain to all that they had lived a Peter Pan existence out there on the Spanish coast.
“He died with a tan,” her nephew said finally. “We should all be so lucky.”
When dark night had devoured the grey day and the stories had all dried up, the two sisters walked to the bar to settle up. They waited for a long time outside the pub for their families to come and join them. A thin crescent of light from an overhead streetlamp divided them, plunged Anne into shadow. Finally, the two families emerged, drunk and happy. Without a word, Anne stepped into the light and hugged her sister, at first lightly but then with a sudden vicious passion. They disengaged, nodded at one another, and walked off in separate directions into the night. As Mary walked down the dimly lit street the drunken laughter of her family receded and her father’s voice rang out clear and true as he recited Yeats with a cigarette in hand like a conductor’s baton. She wondered what the poem meant to him, or if it meant anything at all. If it was simply a bombastic means of distracting his family from where he had been or if he really did yearn to set sail for somewhere before it was all too late. If he did, then she hoped that he was able to find some peace there, that he was able to live inside that peace she would occasionally glimpse in his eyes when he struck a match from the other side of the room and launched into his woeful recitation.
Photo by Mark de Jong