Ironweed - William Kennedy [53]
What brought her to this uncertainty is the accumulation of her sins, and if you must call them sins, then there is certainly quite an accumulation. But Helen prefers to call them decisions, which is why she has no compulsion to confess them. On the other hand, Helen wonders whether anyone is aware of how really good a life she lived. She never betrayed anybody, and that, in the end, is what counts most with her. She admits she is leaving Francis, but no one could call that a betrayal. One might, perhaps, call it an abdication, the way the King of England abdicated for the woman he loved. Helen is abdicating for the man she used to love so he can be as free as Helen wants him to be, as free as she always was in her own way, as free as the two of them were even when they were most perfectly locked together. Didn’t Francis beg on the street for Helen when she was sick in ‘33? Why, he never begged even for himself before that. If Francis could become a beggar out of love, why can’t Helen abdicate for the same reason?
Of course the relationships Helen had with Arthur and Francis were sinful in the eyes of some. And she admits that certain other liberties she has taken with the commandments of God and the Church might also loom large against her when the time of judgment comes (brass and clock, brass and clock). But even so, there will be no priests coming to see her, and she is surely not going out to see them. She is not going to declare to anyone for any reason that loving Francis was sinful when it was very probably—no, very certainly—the greatest thing in her life, greater, finally, than loving Arthur, for Arthur failed of honor.
And so when crippled Donovan knocks again at eleven o’clock and asks if Helen needs anything, she says no, no thank you, old cripple, I don’t need anything or anybody anymore. And old Donovan says: The night man’s just comin’ on, and so I’m headin’ home. I’ll be here in the mornin’. And Helen says: Thank you, Donovan, thank you ever so much for your concern, and for saying good night to me. And after he goes away from the door she lets go of the brass and thinks of Beethoven, Ode to Joy,
And hears the joyous multitudes advancing,
Dah dah-dah,
Dah dah-de-dah-dah,
And feels her legs turning to feathers and sees that her head is floating down to meet them as her body bends under the weight of so much joy,
Sees it floating ever so slowly
As the white bird glides over the water until it comes to rest on the Japanese kimono
That has fallen so quietly,
So softly,
Onto the grass where the moonlight grows.
VI
First came the fire in a lower Broadway warehouse, near the old Fitzgibbon downtown ironworks. It rose in its own sphere, in an uprush into fire’s own perfection, and great flames violated the sky. Then, as Francis and Rosskam halted behind trucks and cars, Rosskam’s horse snorty and balky with elemental fear, the fire touched some store of thunder and the side of the warehouse blew out in a great rising cannon blossom of black smoke, which the wind carried toward them. Motorists rolled up their windows, but the vulnerable lights of Francis, Rosskam, and the horse smarted with evil fumes.
Ahead of them a policeman routed traffic into a U-turn and sent it back north. Rosskam cursed in a foreign language Francis didn’t recognize. But that Rosskam was cursing was unmistakable. As they turned toward Madison Avenue, both men’s faces were astream with stinging tears.
They were now pulling an empty wagon, fresh from dumping the day’s first load of junk back at Rosskam’s yard. Francis had lunched at the yard on an apple Rosskam gave him, and had changed into his new white-on-white shirt, throwing his old blue relic onto Rosskam’s rag mountain. They had then set out on the day’s second run, heading for the deep South End of the city, until the fire turned them around at three o’clock.
Rosskam turned up Pearl Street and the wagon rolled along into North Albany, the smoke still rising into the heavens below and behind them. Rosskam called out his double-noted ragman’s dirge and caught the attention of a few cluttered housewives. From the backyard of an old house near Emmett Street, Francis hauled out a wheelless wheelbarrow with a rust hole through its bottom. As he heaved it upward into the wagon, the odor of fire still in his nostrils, he confronted Fiddler Quain, sitting on an upended metal chamber pot that had been shot full of holes by some backyard marksman.