Of Sanctity and Whiskey

As Luke Regan drove down to Saint Killian's for the first sitting, he kept shifting around the fading cards of his memories of the place and wishing the press had never got onto this thing. It was a pleasant idea, of course, and he could understand the columnists' playing it up--but the stupid things they wrote about it! "Former pupil returns 40 years later to his old school to paint his old teacher.... This portrait of a distinguished headmaster by a distinguished academician is certain to reflect two sensibilities in perfect rapport with each other...." "This new portrait by Mr. Luke Regan, R.H.A., of Brother Hilary Harty, the retired head of Saint Killian's College, should record two journeys from youth to maturity...." He had already confided to his boozing friends that he found the whole bloody thing extremely embarrassing, not least because he could see that they thought he was just boasting about it. He had been in that school for only three years, between the ages of 12 and 15. It was 40 years ago. He had not the slightest recollection of this Brother Hilary Harty and he felt sure that the old man could not possibly remember him.

Hilary Harty? He hoped he was not that old snob they used to call Dikey, a fellow with a face like a coffin and eyes like a dead hen. Could he be Flossy, who used to collect jokes in a notebook as fat as a Bible: a head and a face like a turnip; purple, orange and green--that would be a nice palette to have to work with! Without affection, he remembered Popeyes, always blinking at you like the flicker of a motorcar that the driver had forgotten to turn off. But his name was Hurley. Now, little Regis would be a marvelous subject--a pink-and-white angel face with a fierce furrow between the eyebrows. That would be a challenging puss--if you were lucky enough and had time enough to get him talking about himself. But Hilary? The name rang no chime, sweet, cracked or otherwise. "Two sensibilities in perfect rapport with each other." Had none of these fellows ever been to school themselves? Didn't they know well that no boy ever knows anything human at all about his teachers? Men dressed in black soutanes and bony collars, with names like ships or stars or horses--Hyperion, Aquarius, Berengaria or Arkel--floating into your classroom every morning, saying, "Irregular verbs today!" or, "Did we polish off Queen Anne yet?" and, if you didn't know your stuff, giving you three on each hand with the leather strap stuck into their black belts like a policeman's truncheon. All any boy ever wants from any teacher is that he give you a bit of a chance now and again; understand or guess that the real reason you did not know your history or your math was not because you lost the book or had a headache or broke your pen but because you saw Molly Ryan yesterday with high leather boots halfway up her fat legs and you simply had to dodge out that night to be gassing with her under the gas lamp by the back gate, watching her swinging her pigtails and admiring her toes just to provoke you. Little Regis would have understood; he was the only one of them who understood anything. He would give you a good clout on the ear, look at you hard and say, "I'll give you this one chance, Master Regan, but if you ever do it again, I'll have the hide off you." And you loved him for it. But the rest of them? Human? The shock he got the day he saw Popeyes talking and laughing with a woman in the main street! (Jesus! I must have been a right little prig in those days!) Not to mention the evening he saw Monsieur Joffre, their French teacher, coming out of a pub wiping the froth off his Clemenceau mustaches. And, by the same token, not a drop must pass his lips while he was doing this portrait. Not with 200 quid from the Past Pupils' Union depending on it. Anyway, he had been off the booze for four months now. "Drop it, Luke!"--his doctor's last words. "Or it will drop you into a nice, deep, oblong hole up in Glasnevin. Ninety percent of your blood stream is pure alcohol, and you know where that finally lodges?"--and he had tapped his forehead. "D.t.s. Epilepsy. Neuritis. Insanity. God knows what!" The memory of it frightened him so much that when he was passing through Kilcrea, he halted for one last, one absolutely last quick one before he arrived. And, just for precaution's sake, he packed a bottle of Paddy Flaherty in his holdall, in case he got a cold or needed a little nightcap to send him to sleep after a day's revving up at the easel.

• • •

The only change he could see, guess, presume or infer in Coonlahan was the rows of cars parked on each side of the main street. Surely, in his time, there were only a few horse-drawn carts or donkey butts? Chromium everywhere now and neon strips. The street's surface, asphalted, recalled mud and cow dung on market days. With relief, he saw a neat-looking hotel called The Shamrock and booked himself in there.

"How long, Mr. Regan?" the fresh-faced young woman said with a welcoming smile.

"How did you know my name?"

"Ah, sure, the whole town knows about the painting."

He winced.

"Four nights, please."

"Only four?"

He winced again. In the academy, his colleagues called him Luca fa Presto, after a certain Neapolitan painter who could finish any picture in 24 hours.

"It's a small portrait. Head and shoulders."

Did she think he was going to live in the monastery? All the same, he felt a bit ashamed that he was not. There were painters who would have done it, toiling to reveal the habits of a lifetime in a face. Degas must have done it before he began his Uncle and Niece. Manet must have known every damned thing about those three people he imprisoned behind the green railing of The Balcony. Courbet had put a whole countryside into those three men in Bonjour, Monsieur Courbet. Still, when he had driven out of the town and came to the big iron gateway, with Saint Killian's College half-mooned across it in gilded lettering, and saw the half mile of avenue leading straight as a ruler up to the barracks-bare front of the college, grim as a tombstone against the sinking sun, he wondered whether Degas or Manet or Courbet or Rembrandt or Holbein or any of them would have wanted to soak himself in so dreary a joint as this, in the name of either literal truth or ideal beauty. Wishing that he had had another drink in The Shamrock before facing this Brother Hilary Harty, he rang the bell.

A cheerful little lay brother, spry and bright as a monkey, showed him into the front parlor, where, with painful clarity, he remembered the evening his mother had handed him over there to a matron named Miss Wall and with a face like one. The literal truth of the room leaped to the eye: linoleum on the floor, horsehair chairs, a round table glistering with a mock walnut veneer, a gas fire unlit. As for ideal beauty: pictures in monochrome, The Agony in the Garden, the ghostly face of Christ on the pious fraud called The Veil of Veronica, somebody's Annunciation, and was that Brueghel's Tower of Babel lifting the clouds? The Past Pupils' Union was going to make him earn every penny of that 200 quid. The door was hurled open, a powerful-bodied old brother strode in, jolly-faced and beaming, and on the spot, the setting sun hit his face and everything became joyous and splendid and OK.

"Luke Regan!" he all but shouted. "After all these years!"

And the two of them were laughing and shaking each other's hand with all the effusiveness proper to a reunion between two men who had long since forgotten each other. But what a head! Ripe for marble! For marble and porphyry! Nose rubicund, eyes blue as gentians and an astonishingly protruding lower lip, the sure sign of a born talker. Hair white, thin on top but curling like the last of the harpers around his neck. Manet be blowed! Poor old Rembrandt! It was going to be the portrait of his life. Green curtain behind, ocher streaks of sunlight, buckets of carmine, lumps of it laid on with bold hard brush strokes--half-inch brushes, at that. Energy, strength, tenderness, humor! No more of that blasted pink tooth-paste enamel that he had been floating all over the gobs of endless company directors for the past ten years. Not, to be fair, to flatter them but to flatter their stupid wives. "Oh, Mr. Regan, I think Eddie is much younger than you are making him out to be!" Or, "D'ye think, Mr. Regan, you could make the tie a bit smoother, like? The way you have it makes him look old and careless, like." Meaning, "My God, man, do you want people to think I'm that old?"

"Brother Hilary, when do you think we can begin?"

• • •

He was so excited that when he got back to The Shamrock, he had to go into the bar for a large one to calm his nerves. In its gold pool, he saw the title on the catalog of the academy, where the portrait would be shown publicly for the first time. The Old Dominie. By Luke Regan, R. H. A. Not for sale. Or, what about The Good Shepherd? Or, maybe, Ex Cathedra? Or Post Multos Annos? With a neat gold tab at the bottom of the frame, saying, Gladly Wolde he lerne and Gladly Teche. Tactile values? His fingers involuntarily began to mold the face. The man sitting beside him said, "Hello, Mr. Regan." He sighed and did not deny it.

"My name is Halligan. Harry Halligan. We all knew you were coming. All Ireland knows about the painting. You have a great character there in old Leatherlip."

"Leatherlip?"

Far away, a bell claimed harshly, curtains parting, a small red light at the end of a mile-long corridor.

"Don't you remember? Or didn't ye call him that in your day?"

"How extraordinary! We did call one fellow that. But, surely, not this man?"

"Tempus fugit. It's twenty-five years since I was at Saint Killian's. He was slim then, bushy black hair, eyes like a razor blade. You knew him in his thirties. And you really can't remember him?"

"He will come back to me. I'll quarry him out. That's how a painter works, working in and in, burrowing, excavating. It's like archaeology; you don't know what you are looking for until you find it. Sooner or later, the face speaks."

Halligan half turned to the woman on his left: a bosomy, high-colored little blonde. Horsy type.

"Let me introduce you to my wife. Valerie, this is Luke Regan, the famous painter."

She gave a cool hand and a cooler "How-d'ye-do?" in a loud Anglo-Irish voice. No smile. Regan could feel the antagonism in her and wondered at it. They had two more quick ones together before Mrs. Halligan abruptly hauled her husband off with her. Regan took a last one by himself, for the road to sleep.

• • •

Because of the light, he decided to use the front parlor for a studio. It had three tall windows facing north. He could come and go without bother. By two o'clock, when his man was free and the light would be good for two hours or so, he had managed to get a throne fixed up, a green curtain hung for background, his easel and worktable ready and the lay figure that he always traveled with (one of his neatest Fa Presto tricks) draped with a black soutane that he could be working on in the mornings.

"I can't believe, Brother Hilary," he laughed as his charcoal lightly and rapidly sketched in the outline, "that you are really seventy-five. You look about fifty."

He always talked while he worked, to keep his subject from stiffening or sagging.

"Aha!" the old boy laughed triumphantly. "Mixing with youth all my life, that's what does it. That," finger magisterially aloft, "and the regular life. A dull life, I suppose, not like you, out in the world, traveling, meeting interesting people, doing interesting things. But I have had my compensations. No worries, no regrets, no tensions. The rut, Luke. The beaten path. The ascetic discipline, Good country air. Constant exercise. No (continued on page 280)Sanctity and Whiskey(continued from page 110) excesses of any kind. Simple food. You wouldn't grow fat on our kind of life, my boy. But it's what turns every monk into a man."

When he came to the mouth, he stared long and hard at the protruding lower lip. Again that far-off bell. Leatherlip? The eyes were curiously small, but they gave out sparks when he talked. Regan would have given anything for an early photograph of the softer eyes of the boy buried behind those sharp orbs. He saw that the nose was red because it was veined all over. If this were a company director, he would have said at once, "Chronic alcoholic." He knew rosacea when he saw it. Chiefly in elderly women. The wages of virtue. Chronic tea drinker. Gastritis. Monastery food. Probably an ulcer. Teeth browning from age and pipe smoking. There would be black centers on the tip of every one of them. He frowned again at the big lip. A hard mouth in a jolly face. Now, what in hell did that portend? Silence. A good subject--he held the pose patiently.

"The rut?" he murmured, looking up, looking down. "The beaten path? 'The path of the just is as the shining light, that shineth more and more unto the perfect day.' "

"I'm glad to see that you read your Bible, Luke."

"Now and again, Brother. A little to the left, Brother. Thank you, Brother."

The light on the lip threw an interesting shadow. The nose became gory.

"Ah, yes!" concentrating on the jutting lip. "Now and again.... 'Return, return, O Shulamite.... Thy belly is like a heap of wheat set about with lilies.... Thy neck is as a tower of ivory.... Many waters cannot quench love, neither can the floods drown it.' "

He glanced up. The eyes were blazing, the whole expression of the face had changed, the brows gathered down fiercely, the cheeks as scarlet as the nose. His charcoal flew, dragging down the eyebrows. That revealing wet light on the lip, thrust out a whole inch--that, above all, that he must keep.

"I think, Mr. Regan ... I think, Luke, it might have been better if you had concentrated on the New Testament."

By a 40-year-old reflex, he glanced at the black belt around the belly, to see if he still carried the strap. No time for that now. Now! Memory was now!

"Now, Brother, I begin painting."

As he mixed his colors, he cooled. A sign that he was in tiptop form. He knew they called him Luca fa Presto. Bloody fools! You boil at the inspiration. You go cold as ice in the execution.

"You're dead right, Brother," he said soapily. "The New Covenant. There is the true wisdom. I learned that here in Saint Killy's." (Funny how the old slang name came back to him. It was all creeping back to him.) "I often think, Brother, of those wonderful words of Saint Matthew. 'Behold the fowls of the air; for they sow not, neither do they reap.... Consider the lilies of the field.... Even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these.' "

To his relief, the mollified voice quoted back to him.

" 'Behold, a greater than Solomon is here.' "

He looked up at the veined nose. The tuning fork for a study in rouge et noir. He touched the canvas with carmine.

"Oh, a beautiful saying, Brother! A darlint saying, Brother! And so wise, Brother! So very wise."

Not too red, now, for Christ's sake. No wife, but the Past Pupils' Union would have to be pleased. And, after all, 200 Johnnyogoblins in this job! A long silence.

"And there's another fine phrase--'Muscular Christianity.' A Jew invented that. Disraeli. A great man in lots of ways."

"A Jew?" said the voice coldly.

"By the way, Brother," he said hurriedly. "Talking of muscle. When I was here in Twenty-six, Brother, the Gaelic football team was going great guns. How is it doing these happy days?"

The old man beamed and told him. The rest of the sitting went as smooth as milk. The only other little lurch came when Regan looked out at the sky, threw down his brushes and said that the light was going.

"Can I see what you have done so far, Luke?"

He handled it with expert joviality.

"We never do, Brother, not until we've polished off the victim."

They parted in laughter and with warm handshakes. He took the key of the parlor with him; he would be working on the lay figure in the morning.

• • •

Halligan was waiting for him in the bar, alone this time. Seeing that his glass was at low tide, Regan invited him to freshen it up.

"I won't say no. How's the masterpiece doing?"

A stocky man. Heavy hands, but they could be a craftsman's. A fawn waistcoat with brass buttons. Ruddy cheeks. A gentleman farmer? A fisherman? Not a doctor--no doctor would dare drink at a public bar in a small town like this. The wife had had the smell of money.

"He's coming back to me slowly. Another sitting and I'll have him smoked out."

"What," eagerly, "are you finding?"

Regan eye-cornered him. This fellow might be a member of the Past Pupils' Union.

"A splendid character. I was just wondering, did he ever teach me history?"

"Were you a senior?"

"I was only what we used to call a gyb. A Good Young Boy. I came here when I was twelve. Straight from the nuns. Our Ladies of the Holy Bower. You wouldn't think it now to look at me, but I used to be their little angel. Curly hair. They used to make me sing solo at benediction. In a lacy surplice, purple soutane, red tie. They spoiled me. It was only by the blessing of God I didn't turn into a queer. I may tell you the change from there to here was pretty tough. I stayed only three years."

"No, you wouldn't have had him. And," surveying him humorously, "you may have been a little angel, Mr. Regan, but you've put on a bit of weight since then. Thirteen and a half stone? He taught only the seniors; and after he became headmaster, he had no fixed classes at all. Anyway, his particular obsession was English grammar. He was dotty about it. He was a bit of a megalomaniac, really. Couldn't give it up. Even after he became head, he used to rove around the school from class to class, leathering it into us. Of course, he's retired now, but I'm told he still does it. Did he never come into your classroom to wallop 'I seen' out of you and 'I saw' into you?"

Halligan laughed, as if in happy memory of the walloping; and, on the spot, Regan had his man whole and entire. The terror of his very first day at Saint Killy's, often repeated, seeing the lean black ghost come floating in. Like a starved wolf. One hand waving the leather strap behind his back like a black tail. The rasping voice. "What is a relative clause? What is an adverbial clause? Decline the verb see in the past tense. No, it is not! Hold out your hand. Take that. And that. And that." And, always, the one thing all boys loathe in teachers, as sarcastic as acid. Oh, a proper bastard!

"Do I take it, Mr. Halligan, that you didn't particularly like it at Saint Killy's?"

"I got on there all right. I was good at games. And Leatherlip was mad on games. 'The Irish,' he was always telling us, 'are famous all over the world as sportsmen. Strong men.' It was he started boxing at Saint Killy's. He used to knock the hell out of me in the ring. I got so mad at him one day that I deliberately gave him one right under the belt. And I could hit hard at that time. When he got his wind back, he nearly murdered me. He was the only fly in the ointment." He leaned over and whispered. "I often thought afterward that he was the only wasp in the ointment." He glanced quickly around the bar and said, in a loud voice, "Mind you, Brother Hilary is a great organizer. He built up a great school here. We are all very proud of Saint Killian's in this town."

Fuck you! Regan thought.

"And most justifiably so, Mr. Halligan. By the way, are you a member of the Past Pupils' Union?"

Halligan smiled crookedly. His voice fell.

"I didn't tell you I'm the local vet. I look after the Jersey herd up there." He beckoned to the barmaid. "The same again, Miss Noble."

"Family?" Regan asked.

"Three boys."

"They at school here?"

Halligan shuffled his glass a bit.

"Not exactly. You see.... Well, the fact is, Valerie is a Protestant. We met at the hunt. Actually, she's a niece of Lord Boyne's." (A good connection for a vet, Regan thought.) "Before I married her, I knew I'd have to do something to smooth the way for her. For myself, of course, I didn't give a damn. To hell with them. But for poor little Valerie.... You live up in Dublin, you can do what you like there, you don't understand what it's like in small places like this." He winked. "But there's always ways and means. Two months before I got married, do you know what I did?" He nudged and winked again. "I joined the local Knights of Columbanus. And, by God, it worked. Though I'll never forget the first time I went to the club after the wedding. The Grand Knight got up and he says, 'Since our last meeting, I suppose you all know that one of our brothers got married.' Christ Almighty, I thought, here it comes! He's going to give me hell for marrying a Protestant. I'm going to be ruined for life in this place. Far from it! He complimented me most warmly. I drove home that night singing like a bird. I knew I'd done one of the smartest things in my life. After a year, I dropped them. But when it came to where we'd send the boys to school, Valerie and myself had one hell of a fight. I said we simply had to send them to Saint Killy's. We started with the oldest boy. The very first day, he came home from school with his two hands red as pulp from Leatherlip's strap. After that, Valerie put her foot down. We came to a sensible compromise. We sent them all to school in England. Downside. One of the finest Catholic schools in the world. Nobody could object to that."

"Very shrewd. Very wise move. And, after that, no opposition? Miss Noble, fill 'em up again."

"Not half! The day I shipped Tommy out of school, Leatherlip wrote me a stinker. He went all around town, saying I was a snob and a la-di-da and an Anglicized Irishman and a toady and God knows what else. Just to show you--it wasn't until he retired that I got the job looking alter the college herd."

Regan laughed. "Elephants never forget."

"It's no joke," Halligan whispered solemnly. "Don't delude yourself. That man never forgets anything. Or anybody."

"I wonder," Regan said uncomfortably.

Just then, Valerie Halligan came in. Regan noted that after one quick one, she hauled her husband away. From her manner, it was plain that she did not approve of his latest drinking companion. This time, Regan did not wonder why.

Not that he had ever been much leathered by anybody at Killy's, and never once by Leatherlip. On the contrary, he had often wished he would leather him after the day he called him out of the class and sat him on his knee and said to the rest of them, after he had leathered them all, "Look at this clever little boy. He knows what a dependent clause is. And he's only twelve, and straight from the nuns, as small and fresh and rosy as a cherry. Why don't you slobs know it as well as he does?" His nickname became Cherry. They called him Leatherlip's lap dog or Leatherlip's pet. They used to corner him and say things like, "Cherry, if he comes in today for more frigging grammar, your job is to suck up to him. Get him into a good humor or he'll leather us, and we'll puck the hell outa you." He used to try, but it was always the same: "See this bright little boy!" And, after school, they would shove him and taunt him and puck him. Once, he deliberately tried to get leathered by failing to write out six sentences the night before on shall and will. The strap was swished, the brows came down, gray spittle appeared at each corner of the big lip. Terror shook his bones.

" 'I will go there tomorrow.' Is that correct?"

"No, Brother. Plain future statements in the first person must always have shall."

" 'We would not win a single match with a team like that.' Is that correct?"

"No, Brother. Plain conditional statements in the first person must have should."

"Come here to me, boy. Now, listen to that bright little boy, straight from the nuns...."

For three years, he had suffered hell from the benign approbation of that bloody old fathead.

"Miss Noble, the same again. No, make it a double this time."

He went to bed plastered.

• • •

"Well, Brother Hilary, I hear nothing all over the town but people singing your praises. You've made a great job of this college. The doyen of Saint Killian's."

The old monk beamed softly.

"Ah, well, Luke, I've done my humble best. But, mind you," rather less softly, "I had to fight all the way." Far from softly: "Opposition. I had to keep my hand on my dagger every moment of the day."

"Aha, but you fought well, Brother. You fought the good fight, Brother. 'To give and not to count the cost; to fight and not to heed the wounds.' "

"Who said that?"--suspiciously.

The lip out again, with the lovely wet light on it. Porcine. Sensual. Lickerish. Loose. Deboshed by pride and righteousness. Daringly, he slapped on a fleck of viridian. And, by God, it was just right! He kept him waiting for the answer.

"Saint Ignatius Loyola said that. A great body of men, the Jesuits."

The two eyes cold. Turquoise? No! Pine-needle blue? Hell's bells, snow and ice are the things no Irish painter can ever get right. Nor the British. Nor the Italians. You have to live with the stuff like the Dutch and the Scans. The gore of the cheeks would have to bring it out. Cherry? Damn you, I'll give you cherry. No ablation here. Warts and all. Malae of an anthropomorph. Ears of a bat. That time he had to sit on his lap in class! The hair stuck out of his ears.

"Have you ever had any Protestants in Saint Killy's, Brother?"

The little finger dug into a hairy ear and wagged there 20 times.

"I don't approve of mixed marriages and I don't approve of mixed schooling. Protestants haven't our morality, Luke. The morality of every Protestant I ever met was written into his checkbook. They are completely devoid of our mystical sense of the other world. Not like you and me. I don't like Protestants. You mentioned some Jew yesterday. I'll be frank with you, Luke. I don't like Jews either."

"Oh, you're on to something there, Brother. A cunning bloody race. Very able, though. I was talking about Disraeli." He seized his palette knife for the coarse, oily skin of the cheeks. "Do you remember what he said the time Dan O'Connell taunted him with being a Jew? 'Yes, I am a Jew; and when the right honorable gentleman's ancestors were brutal savages in an unknown land, mine were priests in the temple of Solomon.' "

The old war horse out on grass. Teeth bared. Sepia? Burnt sienna?

"For heaven's sake, Luke! I do wish you'd stop talking about Solomon!"

"All the same, Jesus was a Jew."

"One of the mysteries of the world!"

"And he chose the Jews." Laughing delightedly at the furious face on his canvas, he quoted: " 'How odd / That God / Should choose / The Jews.' "

In laughter, the ritual answer pealed from the throne.

" 'Oh, no, / Not odd. / They hoped / To God / Someday / He'd pay.' "

They both cackled.

"Ah, Brother, you understand it all!"

"We understand each other, Luke. Two comrades in Christ!"

He worked on. From the distant playing fields, young voices cheered. A long silence. When he looked up, he saw a profile. The old man was gazing at the moony face on Christ looming through The Veil of Veronica.

"Do you know Greek, Luke? A pity! There is a wonderful Greek word. Acheiropoieto. It is the perfect word for that image of Christ. Painted by no human hand. Painted by the angels. The day I became headmaster, I bought three dozen copies of that angelic image. I put one in every classroom. I gave one to every brother to hang over his bed."

He sighed. Regan looked at the fraud. Then he looked at his portrait. Never had he felt such a sense of power, energy, truth to life. The light was fading.

"Tomorrow is Sunday. I might do a little work on the background. Then, on Monday, we'll have the last sitting."

"And then," as eagerly as a boy, "I can see it?"

A laggard nod. As they parted, the old man put his arm around his shoulder.

"My dear friend!" He sighed affectionately. "Take care of yourself, Luke," who gave one backward glance at his easel; the face was virtually finished, the body half finished, the soul naked. Areas of bare canvas at the edges surrounded it all like a ragged veil.

• • •

That evening, the Halligans came together, had one quick one and left, promising to call on Sunday afternoon and go out to the college for a secret look at the unfinished masterpiece. Regan stayed on alone. The Saturday-night crowd was dense. He felt he was drinking with half the town. He was the last to leave the bar, pushed out, blind drunk, by the barman and old Noble. He took a bottle of whiskey to bed with him. He awoke late. The Angelas was slowly tolling and under his window, hollow feet echoing along the pavement to last Mass. He drank some more and slept some more. He was awakened by the maid knocking at his door to ask him if he wanted to eat something. He ordered her to bring him up a bottle of whiskey. When she returned, she stamped the bottle distastefully on his chest of drawers and banged the door after her. Halligan came up at four, refused to drink with him, said that Valerie was waiting outside in the station wagon, helped him dress and all but carried him downstairs. He was tolerantly amused by his stumblings and fumblings as he tried to get into the car, but Mrs. Halligan was not. "Oh, for Christ's sake!" she growled at her husband. "He needs to be pumped!"

When they had pushed open the hall door of the college and crept cautiously across the empty hall to the parlor, she had to take the key from his helpless hand to open the door They entered twilight. Regan dragged back the window curtains, bade Halligan switch on the light and, with one forensic arm, presented them to the easel. For one minute's silence, he watched Halligan's mouth fall open and his eyelids soar. Her eyelashes peered.

"God Almighty!" Halligan whispered. "You have him to a tee."

"T for truth!" he cried triumphantly.

Halligan turned to his wife.

"What d'ye think, Valerie?"

She looked at him, she looked at Regan, she looked at the portrait. Then she edged Halligan aside, stood before the portrait and, one hand on her hip, extended her silence to two minutes.

"Isn't it stu-pen-dous, Valerie?"

She walked away to the window, did a tiny drum roll with her nails on the glass, turned to them and spoke, quietly, coldly and brassily:

"Don't be a damn fool, Halligan. Mr. Regan! I know nothing about painting, but I know one thing, for certain, about that painting. Nobody will buy it. Not here, anyway. Are you, Halligan, going to get up in the committee of the Past Pupils' Union and say that portrait is stupendous? Vote for it? Pay for it? And hang it? Where? There's only one place in this town where you could hang that picture--in the bar of The Shamrock, where everybody would laugh their heads off at it and then go out and say it is a public disgrace. And do you think even old Noble would dare hang it? You can vote for that picture, Halligan, over my dead body--we've had trouble enough in this town and I don't want any more of it. And I'll tell you one other little thing about that picture, Mr. Regan. If you show it anywhere in this country, you might just as well go out and hang yourself, because it would be the last portrait you'd be asked to paint as long as you live."

Regan laughed at her. "To hell with their money. I'll show it at the academy. I'll sell it for twice the price. It'll be reproduced in every paper in Dublin! In every art magazine in the world!"

Halligan looked at him with funky eyes.

"Luke!" (And if Regan had been sober, he would have known at once by that use of his first name how grave the issue was.) "Valerie is right. Listen! Would you do one thing for me, and for yourself and for God's sake? There must be a second key to this room. Anyone might come in here at any moment." He cocked a frightened ear. "Any second, that door might open. Would you take it back to the hotel for the night and, tomorrow morning, look at it calmly and coldly and make up your own mind what you're going to do about it? You know," he wheedled, "they might even start pawing it!"

"Pawing it? Wise man. Shrewd man. Monkey, monkey! Hear all, see all, say nothing. Let's take it out of here."

They restored the twilight; the hallway was as empty as before; they drove fast, back to the empty, Sunday-afternoon main street. Outside The Shamrock, she put her head out through the window of the wagon to say, "I'll give you one minute, Halligan, no more." They were lucky. They met nobody on the way to the bedroom. They stood the portrait on the mantelpiece. They sat side by side on the bed and looked at the scarlet, scowling, wet-lipped face of their old master staring down at them. Halligan accepted one slug from the neck of the bottle, slapped his companion on the back and ran for it. Regan lay back on his pillow, emptying the bottle gulp by gulp, rejoicing strabismally at the face on the mantelpiece that, like a wavering of fire, slowly faded into the veils of the gathering dusk.

"Acheiropoieto!" he wheezed joyfully as he drained the bottle on its head, let it fall with a crash onto the floor and sank into a stupor.

It was dark when he awoke. He had no sense of time, of date or day or night. He thought he heard noises downstairs. He groped for the bell, found it and kept pressing it until the door opened and, against the light, he saw the burly figure of old Noble.

"Mishtr Noble, shend me up a bottle of whishkey, if you please."

Silence. Then:

"I will do no such a thing, Mr. Regan. If I was to do anything, I'd send for a doctor. Sleep it off."

The door closed and he was in darkness again.

"The bitch!" he growled, knowing that she had tipped off the old man. Must have a drink! If only--- Suddenly, he remembered. That bottle he had bought on the way down from Dublin. Had he drunk that, too? He rolled out of bed, crawled on all fours to the light switch, at last found his holdall, and there was his golden salvation. The colors of the little map of Ireland on the label swam--purple and red and yellow and green. He tore off the thin metal covering on the cork with his teeth, wrested out the cork, twisting its serrated edge, lifted the bottle to his mouth, engorged the sweet liquor as if it were water and sank to the floor in a coma. The maid found him there in the morning and ran from him down the stairs, screeching.

He recovered his senses only for the few minutes during which he was being put to bed in the monastery. Hilary had him brought there immediately he was informed of his sorry condition, first by old Noble, then by the community's doctor, who had driven him at once to the college door, wrapped in blankets, still in a stupor, his breath coming in gasps, his forehead glistening with cold dots of sweat. It took three brothers to lift him from the car and carry him upstairs to Hilary's bedroom. Harry and Valerie Halligan, also alerted by Noble, came after them, carrying his few belongings Stuffed into his suitcase and his holdall. As they packed them, her eye, roving about the room, saw the portrait on the mantelpiece.

"Halligan," she ordered. "Take that thing down and burn it."

He looked at her, looked at the closed door, told her to lock it, took out his clasp knife and cut the canvas from its frame. But when he approached the empty grate, his nerve failed him.

"I can't do it, Valerie. It's like murder."

She snatched it from him, tore some paper linings from the chest of drawers, crumpled the canvas on top of them in the grate, put her cigarette lighter to the paper and they watched everything burn to ashes. They drove to the college, laid his two cases inside the door and drove rapidly down the drive for home and a couple of stiff ones. In the middle of her drink, and her abuse of him, she looked at him and laughed, remembering from her school days.

" 'To be thus is nothing; but to be safely thus' " jumped up to ring old Noble and warn him never to mention their names to anybody in the college about this affair.

"Rely on me," the old voice replied. "We're all in it together," from which she knew that he, too, had seen the portrait.

• • •

Hilary sat by his bed during his few limp moments of consciousness.

"My poor Luke," tenderly fondling his icy palm. "What on earth happened to you at all, at all?"

"Brother," he said faintly, "can I have one last little drink?"

The old man shook his head, sadly but not negatively.

"Of course you can, Luke. I'll leave you a glass of the best here beside your bed for the night. Tomorrow, we'll cut it down to half a glass. Then, bit by bit, between us, with God's help," glancing up piously at the veiled face over the bed, "we'll wean you back to your old self."

• • •

In the morning, a young lay brother stole into the room with a nice hot cup of tea for the patient. He found the glass dry and the body an empty cell. Touched, it was like stuffed leather.

The obituaries were invariably kind. They all stressed the burned portrait, "The symbol of every artist's indefatigable pursuit of unattainable perfection." They slyly recalled his convivial nature, his great thirst for friendship, the speed with which he could limn a character in a few lines, the unfailing polish of his work. But, as always, it was some wag in a pub who spoke his epitaph.

"Well, so poor old Lukey fa Presto is gone from us? My God, he was a bad painter. And the poor bugger had no luck. But what a beautiful way to die! In the odor," his glass lifted, "of sanctity and whiskey. Bona Mors, boys!"

All their glasses rose as they drank to it, solemnly and compassionately, silenced by a great envy.