The Journey Westward

A song at the end of a party in Joyce's Dublin, and a wife who cannot say why it stopped her on the stairs. In the second of two episodes on The Dead, the story that closes James Joyce's Dubliners, John Banville follows the Conroys from the party to the Gresham Hotel, where the night Gabriel planned comes apart. Someone else has come back to the hotel with them, and he has been dead since Gretta was a girl. Banville stays for the last paragraph, the snow, and the sentence that sends a Dublin husband west; then he imagines the morning after, which Joyce never wrote. Come and hear what he finds there.