As It Is in Heaven Read Online Free Page A

ghost of the mother was already standing,
     Philip and Stephen carried the burden of their survival in exactly the same manner. They did not speak of it but took the
     puzzle of their days everywhere with them, growing an identical jagged wrinkle across the middle of their foreheads and talking
     fitfully in the brief periods of their night sleep.
    Now, fifteen years later, Philip Griffin saw that his son had not entirely escaped the habits of those years. For at once,
     instants after the blanket had been put across him in the armchair, Stephen began talking in his sleep. His words were unintelligible
     at first, and even though his father got from his chair and knelt down beside him like a priest, he could make nothing of
     them. He touched the sweat on his son’s forehead, where it glistened in the low light. He was startled at how cold it was.
     It was as chill as seawater. He was thinking to get another blanket, or wake Stephen and move him to the bed, when he finally
     realized that the words his son was speaking were Italian.

5
      Stephen Griffin had first seen Gabriella Castoldi playing violin in a concert in the thick-curtained upstairs room of the
     Old Ground Hotel in Ennis in County Clare. He had not intended to be there and marvelled often afterwards how one moment leads
     to the next, until the pattern of our lives seems inevitable. He worked as a history teacher in a grey school by the sea at
     Spanish Point twenty miles away and lived in a house with no curtains, where the Atlantic sprayed his windows and whispered
     like a mystery in every room. He had lived there for three years since taking the job. The day he came for the interview he
     drove west until he met the coastline and knew at once not that he wanted the position but that he wanted to be there in the
     west, for that sense of arrival in reaching the edge of the country. He had searched for the house for the same reason, finding
     a place that was small and damp but, unlike so many of the other old cottages, turned outward to the sea. Its front-room window
     looked out over a small slope of burnt grass that fell away in a sharp cliff into the alarming pounding of the tide. When
     he sat in the front room and looked westward into the slow movement of the swollen waters, he did not know it but he was the
     mirror of his father sitting in Dublin.
    “History is disappearing,” the principal, Mrs. Waters, told him at the interview. “Nobody wants to do history anymore. It’s
     a terrible shame.” The students preferred computers, she said with a tone of derision. “History is long and difficult, Mr.
     Griffin; there’s a lot of reading in it,” said Mrs. Waters. “That’s the reason. They don’t like reading. They’re too lazy.
     Your classes will be small. But maybe you’ll be able to change all that.” It was a little threat. Mrs. Waters was a big woman
     with a small mouth; she seemed to know that the smallness of her mouth betrayed some lack of feeling and had overpainted her
     lips, which she pursed constantly to reassure herself. She sat across the table from Stephen and wondered would he do. It
     wasn’t everybody who could stick it out, the west was bleak in the winter, and between the broken Atlantic skies and the rough
     sea, few souls not born to it endured. So Mrs. Waters imagined, sitting in the neatness of her principal’s office and priding
     herself on the rigid indestructibility of her own person.
    “You think you might like it here?” she asked Stephen.
    “I can’t tell you,” he said.
    “I’m sorry?”
    “The future has no history. We can’t know anything of tomorrow, can we?”
    Mrs. Waters stared at him; it was an outlandish remark, and she had to pause a moment to decide if she was being insulted.
    “I think I will, that’s why I’m here. But I don’t know.” Stephen looked directly at her. “I’d like the chance to work here,
     I know that.”
    It was not exactly what Mrs. Waters wanted to hear.