"And if I had two pounds, why, I could eat on the way."

I uncrumpled two bills.

"And three pounds would bring the wife, not leave her here alone."

I unleafed a third.

"Ah, h.e.l.l!" cried the man. "Five, just five poor pounds, would find us a hotel in that brutal city, and let me get to the job, for sure!"

What a dancing fighter he was, light on his toes, in and out, weaving, tapping with his hands, flicking with his eyes, smiling with his mouth, jabbing with his tongue.

"Lord thank you, bless you, sir!"

He ran, my five pounds with him.

I was half in the hotel before I realized that, for all his vows, he had not recorded my name.

"Gah!" I cried then.

"Gah!" I cried now, my wife behind me, at the window.

For there, pa.s.sing below, was the very fellow who should have been in Belfast two nights ago.

"Oh, I know him," said my wife. "He stopped me this noon. Wanted train fare to Galway."

"Did you give it to him?"

"No," said my wife simply.

Then the worst thing happened. The demon far down on the sidewalk glanced up, saw us and d.a.m.n if he didn"t wave!

I had to stop myself from waving back. A sickly grin played on my lips.

"It"s got so I hate to leave the hotel," I said.

"It"s cold out, all right." My wife was putting on her coat.

"No," I said. "Not the cold. Them."

And we looked again from the window.

There was the cobbled Dublin street with the night wind blowing in a fine soot along one way to Trinity College, another to St. Stephen"s Green. Across by the sweetshop two men stood mummified in the shadows. On the corner a single man, hands deep in his pockets, felt for his entombed bones, a muzzle of ice for a beard. Farther up, in a doorway, was a bundle of old newspapers that would stir like a pack of mice and wish you the time of evening if you walked by. Below, by the hotel entrance, stood a feverish hothouse rose of a woman with a mysterious bundle.

"Oh, the beggars," said my wife.

"No, not just "oh, the beggars,"" I said, "but oh, the people in the streets, who somehow became beggars."

"It looks like a motion picture. All of them waiting down there in the dark for the hero to come out."

"The hero," I said. "That"s me, d.a.m.n it."

My wife peered at me. "You"re not afraid of them?"

"Yes, no. h.e.l.l. It"s that woman with the bundle who"s worst. She"s a force of nature, she is. a.s.saults you with her poverty. As for the others-well, it"s a big chess game for me now. We"ve been in Dublin what, eight weeks? Eight weeks I"ve sat up here with my typewriter, studying their off hours and on. When they take a coffee break I take one, run for the sweet-shop, the bookstore, the Olympia Theatre. If I time it right, there"s no handout, no my wanting to trot them into the barbershop or the kitchen. I know every secret exit in the hotel."

"Lord," said my wife, "you sound driven."

"I am. But most of all by that beggar on O"Connell Bridge!"

"Which one?"

"Which one indeed. He"s a wonder, a terror. I hate him, I love him. To see is to disbelieve him. Come on."

The elevator, which had haunted its untidy shaft for a hundred years, came wafting skyward, dragging its unG.o.dly chains and dread intestines after. The door exhaled open. The lift groaned as if we had trod its stomach. In a great protestation of ennui, the ghost sank back toward earth, us in it.

On the way my wife said, "If you held your face right, the beggars wouldn"t bother you."

"My face," I explained patiently, "is my face. It"s from Apple Dumpling, Wisconsin, Sarsaparilla, Maine. "Kind to Dogs" is writ on my brow for all to read. Let the street be empty, then let me step out and there"s a strikers" march of freeloaders leaping out of manholes for miles around."

"If," my wife went on, "you could just learn to look over, around or through those people, stare them down." She mused. "Shall I show you how to handle them?"

"All right, show me! We"re here!"

I flung the elevator door wide and we advanced through the Royal Hibernian Hotel lobby to squint out at the sooty night.

"Jesus come and get me," I murmured. "There they are, their heads up, their eyes on fire. They smell apple pie already."

"Meet me down by the bookstore in two minutes," said my wife. "Watch."

"Wait!" I cried.

But she was out the door, down the steps and on the sidewalk.

I watched, nose pressed to the gla.s.s pane.

The beggars on one corner, the other, across from, in front of, the hotel, leaned toward my wife. Their eyes glowed.

My wife looked calmly at them all for a long moment.

The beggars hesitated, creaking, I was sure, in their shoes. Then their bones settled. Their mouths collapsed. Their eyes snuffed out. Their heads sank down.

The wind blew.

With a tat-tat like a small drum, my wife"s shoes went briskly away, fading.

From below, in the b.u.t.tery, I heard music and laughter. I"ll run down, I thought, and slug in a quick one. Then, bravery resurgent . . .

h.e.l.l, I thought, and swung the door wide.

The effect was much as if someone had struck a great Mongolian bronze gong once.

I thought I heard a tremendous insuck of breath.

Then I heard shoe leather flinting the cobbles in sparks. The men came running, fireflies sprinkling the bricks under their hobnailed shoes. I saw hands waving. Mouths opened on smiles like old pianos.

Far down the street, at the bookshop, my wife waited, her back turned. But that third eye in the back of her head must have caught the scene: Columbus greeted by Indians, Saint Francis amidst his squirrel friends with a bag of nuts. For a terrific moment I felt like a pope on St. Peter"s balcony with a tumult, or at the very least the Timultys, below.

I was not half down the steps when the woman charged up, thrusting the unwrapped bundle at me.

"Ah, see the poor child!" she wailed.

I stared at the baby.

The baby stared back.

G.o.d in heaven, did or did not the shrewd thing wink at me?

I"ve gone mad, I thought; the babe"s eyes are shut. She"s filled it with beer to keep it warm and on display.

My hands, my coins, blurred among them.

"Praise be!"

"The child thanks you, sir!"

"Ah, sure. There"s only a few of us left!"

I broke through them and beyond, still running. Defeated, I could have scuffed slowly the rest of the way, my resolve so much putty in my mouth, but no, on I rushed, thinking, The baby is real, isn"t it? Not a prop? No. I had heard it cry, often. Blast her, I thought, she pinches it when she sees Okeemogo, Iowa, coming. Cynic, I cried silently, and answered, No-coward.

My wife, without turning, saw my reflection in the bookshop window and nodded.

I stood getting my breath, brooding at my own image: the summer eyes, the ebullient and defenseless mouth.

"All right, say it." I sighed. "It"s the way I hold my face."

"I love the way you hold your face." She took my arm. "I wish I could do it, too."

I looked back as one of the beggars strolled off in the blowing dark with my shillings.

""There"s only a few of us left,"" I said aloud. "What did he mean, saying that?"

""There"s only a few of us left."" My wife stared into the shadows. "Is that what he said?"

"It"s something to think about. A few of what? Left where?"

The street was empty now. It was starting to rain.

"Well," I said at last, "let me show you the even bigger mystery, the man who provokes me to strange wild rages, then calms me to delight. Solve him and you solve all the beggars that ever were."

"On O"Connell Bridge?" asked my wife.

"On O"Connell Bridge," I said.

And we walked on down in the gently misting rain.

Halfway to the bridge, as we were examining some fine Irish crystal in a window, a woman with a shawl over her head plucked at my elbow.

"Destroyed!" The woman sobbed. "My poor sister. Cancer, the doctor said, her dead in a month! And me with mouths to feed! Ah, G.o.d, if you had just a penny!"

I felt my wife"s arm tighten to mine.

I looked at the woman, split as always, one half saying, "A penny is all she asks!," the other half doubting: "Clever woman, she knows that by her underasking you"ll overpay!," and hating myself for the battle of halves.

I gasped. "You"re . . ."

"I"m what, sir?"

Why, I thought, you"re the woman who was just back by the hotel with the bundled baby!

"I"m sick!" She hid in shadow. "Sick with crying for the half dead!"

You"ve stashed the baby somewhere, I thought, and put on a green instead of a gray shawl and run the long way around to cut us off here.

"Cancer . . ." One bell in her tower, and she knew how to toll it. "Cancer . . ."

My wife cut across it. "Beg pardon, but aren"t you the same woman we just met at our hotel?"

The woman and I were both shocked at this rank insubordination. It wasn"t done!

The woman"s face crumpled. I peered close. And yes, by G.o.d, it was a different face. I could not but admire her. She knew, sensed, had learned what actors know, sense, learn: that by thrusting, yelling, all fiery-lipped arrogance one moment, you are one character; and by sinking, giving way, crumpling the mouth and eyes, in pitiful collapse, you are another. The same woman, yes, but the same face and role? Quite obviously no.

She gave me a last blow beneath the belt. "Cancer."

I flinched.

It was a brief tussle then, a kind of disengagement from one woman and an engagement with the other. The wife lost my arm and the woman found my cash. As if she were on roller skates, she whisked around the corner, sobbing happily.

"Lord!" In awe, I watched her go. "She"s studied Stanislavsky. In one book he says that squinting one eye and twitching one lip to the side will disguise you. I wonder if she has nerve enough to be at the hotel when we go back?"

"I wonder," said my wife, "when my husband will stop admiring and start criticizing such Abbey Theatre acting as that."

"But what if it were true? Everything she said? And she"s lived with it so long she can"t cry anymore, and so has to play-act in order to survive? What if?"

"It can"t be true," said my wife slowly. "I just won"t believe it."

But that single bell was still tolling somewhere in the chimney-smoking dark.

"Now," said my wife, "here"s where we turn for O"Connell Bridge, isn"t it?"