As It Is in Heaven Read Free

world.
    There is no way he can tell me, thought Philip. No way he can begin to say, I have fallen in love. And that this is already
     different from anything else, that already he knows that there is a greater magnitude of feeling in his heart than he had
     possibly imagined before. There is no way he can tell me, even as I cannot tell him I am dying.
    “That’s nice tea,” said Philip, and looked down at his hands. He waited some time and said, “Will we get to evening Mass?”
    They left the house and pulled the door shut and went into Dublin. Philip drove the car and Stephen sat beside him. The night
     had fallen. There were no stars or moon. While they drove, Stephen said nothing. His knees were crooked up in front of him.
     His breath steamed the window excessively; the warmth of his thoughts about the woman he had met rose against the glass until
     at last his father asked him to open the window. When he did, Gabriella Castoldi flew out on the night air 160 miles from
     where she was in the city of Galway. Stephen rolled up the window, but it was quickly fogged with her again, the car air smelling
     increasingly of white lilies and clouding the view ahead so utterly that neither of the two men could bring themselves to
     mention it but instead drove on, peering outward through the fogged windscreen of hopeless love.
    The journey was fifteen minutes. Philip parked the car in NO PARKING before the gate of an office building. He saw the sign but paid it no attention, getting out of the car with his hat on his
     head and telling Stephen not to bother to lock it: when the plot of your life is written, there is no need to worry about
     trivialities. The two men stepped onto the path; they smelled the lilies escaping with them and noticed an elderly woman waiting
     for the 46 bus raise her nose and catch the scent as it passed down the street. But they said nothing about it. Silence was
     the family code.
    Philip touched the brim of his hat slightly. He stepped into the street without looking.
    But nothing was coming; it never was. That was the monotony of being spared: God was always there before him. The Dublin evening
     pressed like a damp cloth across the backs of their necks, and the two men hurried across to the door of the Church of the
     Blessed Sacrament. When they opened it, Mass began. Philip Griffin took off his hat. He knelt into the pew farthest from the
     altar, closed his eyes, and told his wife there might be a delay, but he hoped he would be there before too long.

3
      That evening they played chess in the dark. Not that it was entirely dark, but the only light came from the low table lamp
     in the hallway and cast elongated shadows across the board, making the pieces larger and giving the impression to anyone passing
     outside that the men were playing with giants. Over the years of Stephen’s visits it had become routine to play after Mass.
     The language of chess was much like the secret language of men’s clothes, only it took longer to discover. Now Philip knew
     that there existed in the movement of the pieces a communication infinitely more true than anything he and Stephen might have
     said to each other.
    So, as one game followed the next, the movement of the chess pieces was the ancient vocabulary through which Stephen began
     to tell his father that he was daring to believe in love. All his moves signalled it; his knights flew into the midst of the
     board, his bishops ventured crisscross along diagonals that bespoke the innocence of a beginner or the blind invulnerability
     of dreams. Stephen moved his queen constantly, taking the piece in his fingers and holding it a moment suspended above the
     game before once again releasing it to the danger of the board.
    Stephen lost the first game, and then the second; by the time they had begun the third, his father had already understood
     the turbulence of his son’s heart and wondered at how he was managing to play at all. They had played