Free As It Is in Heaven by Niall Williams Page A

horizon of the nighttime, Stephen would wonder back to that moment and smile at the strange and unknowable conspiracies of
     the world, how the notion of the concert had become a resolve and how the night had almost blown him off its edge before the
     woman pulled over. He would read it for its meaning, and glimpse in that evening the shape of the world, a puzzle so intricate
     that not even the millionth part of the outer edge of its frayed pieces is discernible until so much later. Then it would
     make sense to him, and he would understand that the journey to the concert was the beginning of the most important journey
     of his life, and that the moment he insisted on going to the concert, he was acting out of a blind foreknowledge that told
     him it was the right thing to do, supposing that rightness was something that existed for every moment of every life and that
     the possibilities of humankind were so myriad and tortuous that knowing the right thing to do and then choosing it were the
     longest odds in man’s history. But just then in the car Stephen had chosen; and later, to that moment, like an old explorer
     fingering the route he had taken across the unknown, he would trace all his happiness.)
    They drove past the hospital to the hotel. Moira talked. She told him about Moses Mooney; she told him she wasn’t sure why
     or how she had become involved in the concert; Stephen had probably heard of her in the school, she said, she was too stupid
     for them to teach her anything, so it was the last thing she expected to be doing, running a concert of Italian music in Ennis;
     she had two children for goodness’ sake, and Tom is back in Miltown Malbay now, sitting on a high stool and telling jokes
     about how his missus is off having a bit of culture. “Agri or horti, that’s his joke,” she said. “That’s what he says, because
     I’m thick. He thinks that’s a great joke. They get you to do it because they don’t want to do anything themselves, Tom says.
     Why are you running it? he says.
    “And I can’t answer him. Especially when you see a night like this and you think you’re mad. You’re just mad, Moira. There’ll
     be nobody there and you’ll be walking in like this in a state with your eighteen-pound hairdo looking like a wet monkey’s
     backside, and four Italian musicians looking at you wondering why in the name of … I’m talking too much, I’m sorry, Mr. Griffin,
     I always talk too much when I’m nervous.”
    “Stephen.”
    “Stephen. Sorry, Stephen. Would you open that? See is there lipstick in it?”
    The carpark was full. Moira bumped the car onto the footpath outside and then apologized to Stephen for forgetting he had
     just had an accident. When they got out of the car the rain was not falling. The ivy on the front of the old hotel was lit
     with hidden lamps, puddles glistened with reflection, and the slick black of the tarmac might have been the low waters of
     a canal in Venice. Or so Moira imagined. She raised her head as Stephen lowered his, and they strode forward with the brief
     invulnerability of the rescued.
    At the front door they heard the buzz of people and the strains of the strings playing. For an instant, they imagined the
     same thing: that their watches had stopped and time had moved on without them, the concert was about to end. But by the time
     they had reached the doorway at the top of the red stairs, it was clear that the musicians were only warming up their instruments,
     and Moira Fitzgibbon blinked tears of gratitude, seeing the throng of people waiting in the rows of high-backed dining chairs
     and realizing that there was something fine and good and true in their being there, and that the bringing of the music and
     the people together that was the dreaming of old Mooney was worth the price of her hairdo, the ruining of her new suit, and
     the enduring of fatigue, hardship, and mockery.
    In the delay, Councillor O’Rourke had seen his opportunity and