As It Is in Heaven Read Free Page A

together for years.
     Once Philip had been the Master; he had first learned the game as a boy with the Christian Brothers in Westland Row. Later,
     he played against the newspaper, opening a pocket set in the tailoring room and playing against the puzzle between stitches,
     looking at the solution only before he pulled on his jacket and walked across the emptied ground-floor lobby to go home. He
     had taught his son when Stephen was fifteen, and beaten him consistently until a June evening five years later, when the matchless
     audacity of Stephen’s moves told his father that he had finished rearing him. From then on, the fluctuations of his form reflected
     his spirit so keenly that within five moves of beginning a game, Philip Griffin could already tell the depth of Stephen’s
     grief, anger, or frustration.
    So it was. They did not speak, they played chess in the dark. They played without a clock, making the moves the way other
     men beat a ball with a racket or a club, releasing the demons that lay in the low places of their spirits, and seeing arise
     in the ever more complex patterns of the board the perfect reflection of their lives.
    “We’ll play again?”
    Stephen had lost for the fourth time and was already resetting the pieces when he asked his father. It was past midnight.
     Three times the tape of Puccini’s
La Bohème
had replayed itself, and Philip Griffin had lowered his head until his chin was propped just above the board on the knuckles
     of his joined hands. He cannot play himself out of it, he thought. No number of games will free him from thinking of her.
     He looked down at the white king’s knight, which had already begun the new game by jumping forward. What could he tell Stephen?
     How could he instruct him in caution, in restricting the wild movements of his pieces that so clearly told the story of his
     heart? He could not. He looked at the backs of his hands and felt the papery skin at the top of his cheeks. He felt an enormous
     tiredness opening itself like a great cloak within him. He wanted to go to bed, but he played again, and again after that.
     Time ran away; no cars moved down the empty suburban road outside. Dublin was asleep beneath its streetlights, the autumn
     night foggy with dreams, while son and father played on. They did not look up from the board, nor did Philip remark when the
     scent of the lilies arose and filled the room. He breathed their perfume and kept his gaze fixed on the queen, recalling how
     Anne, too, had smelled of those flowers, and realizing there and then that life repeats itself over and over, and that, though
     the game might change, its patterns were the same, his son’s loving was his own, and it would be morning before Stephen exhausted
     himself telling of it and fell across the chessboard asleep.

4
      While Stephen slept, his father watched him. The king’s knight’s pawn was in his son’s hand, but his body had slumped backward
     into the armchair. Whatever move he had intended to make was frozen in his hand and the game lay suspended, its communication
     broken, like a missing page in an old love letter.
    Philip Griffin watched him. He had watched him for thirty years, watched him more carefully than any father watched his son.
     He loved Stephen as a wall loves a garden. He knew his son’s life was lacking in excitement or joy, but believed that it needed
     to be fiercely protected from the treachery of dreams.
    He watched over his son. The visions that rode Stephen in sleep gave his face the look of fearful anticipation; his eyebrows
     were knotted, the lids of his eyes shut tight. His father did not think to move him. He had waited almost half an hour for
     Stephen to make a move, not looking at him in the half-light, keeping his eyes fixed on the board and continuing to read the
     fable of his son’s loving. In that half an hour he had realized that the love was not returned at all yet, and that the desperation
     of the position that