Dance Lessons Read online

  dance lessons

  Copyright © 2011 by Áine Greaney

  Syracuse University Press, Syracuse, New York 13244-5290

  All Rights Reserved

  First Edition 2011

  111213141565432

  The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

  For a listing of books published and distributed by Syracuse University Press, visit our Web site at SyracuseUniversityPress.syr.edu.

  ISBN: 978-0-8156-0984-1

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Greaney, Áine.

  Dance lessons: a novel / Áine Greaney. — 1st ed.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-0-8156-0984-1 (cloth: alk. paper)

  1. Widows—Fiction. 2. Irish Americans—Fiction. 3. Americans—Ireland—Fiction. 4. Family secrets—Fiction. 5. Domestic fiction. 6. Psychological fiction. I. Title.

  PS3607.R4283D36 2011

  813'.6—dc22

  2011001692

  Manufactured in the United States of America

  Áine Greaney, born and brought up on a remote farm in the west of Ireland, now lives and writes on Boston’s North Shore. Her literary works have been published in Ireland, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Previous book-length publications include a novel, The Big House, and a short-story collection, The Sheep Breeders Dance.

  Contents

  Prologue

  Ellen

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Jo

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Jo and Ellen

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Cat

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Jo and Ellen

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  Chapter 31

  Chapter 32

  Chapter 33

  Chapter 34

  Chapter 35

  Chapter 36

  Chapter 37

  Chapter 38

  Chapter 39

  Chapter 40

  Ellen

  Chapter 41

  Chapter 42

  Chapter 43

  Chapter 44

  Epilogue

  dance lessons

  Prologue

  August 1986

  THE KITCHEN PHONE is ringing again. This time, everyone ignores it until a young man named Liam from County Offally pushes through the party crowd to pick it up. His voice is husky from sleep. He is not long awake and up after sleeping off his night shift in a Back Bay hotel. He stands there shouting above the music and the voices, pale, skinny legs under his boxer shorts. He gives directions to their triple-decker apartment house on Springvale Avenue, Dorchester.

  “Yeah, we’re going barbecuing out on the balcony,” he says. “I heard there’s a new fella arrived. He’s here somewhere. I know he brought us rakes of Galtee sausages and we’re doing burgers, too.” He’s about to hang up the wall phone when he remembers something. “Hey!” he says. “Bring crisps. And beer.”

  Earlier, while Liam was still asleep, someone new arrived on the Sunday flight from Shannon, Ireland. Now, the newcomer’s luggage sits in a corner of the living room, abandoned while he’s drinking ice-cold American beer and being introduced around to the apartment roommates—always a changing lineup of young Irish tenants and subletters and their assorted guests.

  Almost a year ago, Fintan Dowd from County Mayo was the latest new arrival, another young immigrant full of bravado stories and how he told his lies and kept his cool at the airport immigration. He was the latest new squatter sleeping on the couch and wandering the city looking for tidings of an under-the-table job. Now Fintan works in a bar, the Paul Revere Tavern, where his weekly tips are more than anything he ever earned as a bachelor of commerce graduate, first class honors, from University College, Dublin.

  For the past five months, Fintan has been dating Ellen Boisvert, a girl from New Hampshire who has just graduated from Saint Bonaventure College.

  This summer, Ellen is working her usual summer gig at a seafood restaurant on Cape Cod, where she has asked for Sundays and Mondays off so she can take the Hyannis bus north to stay with her new boyfriend in this apartment of six, eight, or ten tenants.

  In the living room of shag-pile carpet and garage-sale couches, someone has set an old, rusted fan on the windowsill. It seems to make the room hotter. In the distance, the John Hancock building is a blurry-grey daub on the Boston skyline.

  Each new party guest comes walking up the hill from the T station with six-packs in hand, junk food in a brown paper bag. There are screechy exchanges from the balcony to the sidewalk.

  Fintan and Liam from County Offally share a bedroom. On their Sunday nights together, Ellen and Fintan have this bedroom to themselves until 8 A.M. while Liam works his night porter job. In the hot Boston mornings, the lovers huddle closer as they listen to Liam climbing out of his hotel uniform and creaking into bed.

  Now Ellen Boisvert is pushing through the loud, hot rooms where the Irish accents compete with the music from a boom box. Someone has just collided with her in the living room, and her T-shirt stinks of spilled beer.

  The music follows her down the hallway to the shadowy bedroom that smells of men’s socks and fusty bed sheets. Liam’s bed sits unmade, the covers just rolled back. The window blinds are drawn against the heat.

  She’s standing there in her bra when she hears three girls who are queuing for the one bathroom at the other end of the hallway.

  “Jesus, if I don’t go soon I’ll piss me knickers,” one of them says. “Are they having a shaggin’ baby in there or what? Who the feck is it anyways?”

  Another girl answers, “I think it’s yer woman. What’s her name? Eileen is it, or Ellen? The Yank.”

  In the bedroom, Ellen knows that she should pull on a clean T-shirt, then go stand in the doorway and announce herself.

  Now there’s a different girl’s voice. It’s a girl that Ellen has just been introduced to out in the living room. Her name is Sheila McCormack. “Oh, yeah. Right. I was just actually talking to her. That little dwarfy one? A bit of a drip, isn’t she? Fintan’s Yank girlfriend? His green card.”

  The toilet flushes. The bathroom door opens, then shuts again, and the Irish girls’ voices go on—gossiping about who else is here and who left with whom from a different party the night before.

  Standing there, Ellen curses her own cowardice.

  Another flush. Then there are footsteps down the landing and past the bedroom door. Then silence.

  At last, Ellen pulls on her T-shirt and leaves the bedroom. She pushes back through the hot, screechy partiers to find Fintan. There he is, standing inside a window in that packed living room, drinking a can of beer. As usual, he is standing half in and half out of a giggly, drunken conversation.

  He beckons her over.

  In the Irish pubs, she’s heard the term before—more than once. It’s their term for when someone is dating an American, not one of their own.

  “Hey,” he starts to say, taking her arm, flashing his collusive boyfriend smile.

>   She takes him aside. Fintan’s green card. “Your insult,” she says. “Your people.” Then she nods toward the huddle of girls who have started to dance around the boom box. One, a brunette with a 1980s poodle-style hairstyle, is Sheila McCormack.

  There is something about this girl called Sheila, her raised arms, her jiggling bottom, that startles him. He looks petrified. “Look, the girls are just jealous, mad jealous, that’s all. Let’s go for a walk out to Carson Beach until this madness dies down.”

  Fintan Dowd takes her hand. His grip tightens as he leads her through the sweaty people, through the blaring music and down the two flights of stairs where he says, “Sorry,” “Excuse us,” “Yeah, see you later.”

  Outside on the sidewalk, he stops to kiss her while the boys on the upstairs balcony whoop and screech, “Yoo-hoo! Yee-ha! Dowd, you boy ya!”

  His arm around her waist, they walk down the hill to the sound of the boys laughing and banging their beer bottles against the balcony railing.

  In this hot, August afternoon, Ellen Boisvert looks up and smiles at her Irish boyfriend. “I really love him,” she thinks.

  Ellen

  1

  May 2002

  ELLEN BOISVERT is munching on a lobster salad and scanning the real estate ads in the Coventry Daily Gazette when she feels someone watching her. The Risen Planet Café is packed with the usual business crowd—the gallery owners and bankers and real estate agents that comprise Coventry-by-the-Sea’s year-round commerce. Earlier, when she walked around town, some Friday tourists were strolling among the shops and galleries. And there was the usual dribble of bicyclists with their maps and helmets and spandex.

  Ellen looks up from the Gazette to see a woman in a pink T-shirt and blond highlighted hair giving her that puzzled, do-I-know-you look. At the table inside the window, the woman sits there with her three kids—a blond girl of about six, a baby in a stroller, a toddler on one of those wooden high chairs, swinging his fat legs and absently eating something from his tray top. The woman flashes her a tentative grin. Ellen manages a push-button smile. She feels strangely annoyed, embarrassed by this woman’s hopeful, pretty face.

  Today the Gazette’s real estate pages are packed with grainy pictures and jazzy headlines for houses and condos: water view, single-family, move-in condition. Wait! Here’s a downtown penthouse with a chef’s kitchen and a rooftop balcony.

  The woman is probably somebody’s parent. It’s a family who’s driven from elsewhere in New England, or even halfway across country for yesterday’s school graduation ceremonies at Coventry Academy, where Ellen Boisvert teaches French to grades 9 through 12. Or they’re here to pick up their kid—he or she can’t be more than a freshman or sophomore—for summer vacation. And now, the woman recognizes Ellen as one of her kid’s teachers.

  Yesterday, Academy graduation day, Ellen must have met a hundred parents, aunts, uncles, alumni of the quintessential New England prep school. As vice chair of the school’s graduation committee, she exchanged a hundred handshakes and pleasantries. She knew that something about this petite, thirty-nine-year-old American disappoints them; they have been expecting somebody taller, more chic. But still they asked, “Now where in France are you from?”

  “I’m not. I’m American. My parents were—are—French Canadian.”

  Most prep-school parents are too well schooled to show their disappointment. Or to say aloud that, for $42,000 per year, their kid should get a native-born language teacher.

  Her lobster salad tastes bitter. Her hangover is settling in. Last night, she had too much red wine at the headmaster’s end-of-year party where the faculty stood around nibbling on canapés and inquiring about each other’s summer plans.

  This school vacation, Ellen has only one plan: to find a new place to live, to move permanently up here from Boston to Coventry-by-the-Sea.

  After her husband Fintan’s death last year, she immediately sold their marital condominium in Boston. She knew from the realtor’s doubtful look that it was priced too low, that Ellen had grabbed a premature and first offer.

  In those weeks between the funeral service and her return for the school semester, she found some strange solace in packing up boxes. She wanted something in her life to feel controlled, achievable, complete.

  The academy’s faculty apartments were intended for the new-arrival teachers—gratis accommodation while they find their feet, adjust to a new school and this town along the Massachusetts seacoast. Now, as a second-year teacher, Ellen knows that her extended stay is the headmaster’s concession to her state of young and sudden widowhood.

  She looks up. Across these loud, chattery lunch tables, over the voices and the clatter of plates and the whoosh of the cappuccino machine, that woman is still watching.

  Ellen takes a long drink of her sparkling water and returns to the Gazette.

  The penthouse’s bedroom has exposed beams and skylights for nighttime stargazing.

  All this semester, when the snow piled up on the rickety wooden deck outside her faculty apartment, Ellen woke from a repeating dream of Fintan walking up the hill from work, just an ordinary day in which he expects to turn the key and loosen his tie and kick off his shoes, open their fridge for a drink of water or some dinner. In the dream he gets there and it’s all gone—his couch, his bed, his suits and dress shirts in the bedroom closet. She’s sold out and moved and forgotten to tell him.

  Thwap-thwap-thwap! Something hard and plastic bangs against a table. Around the café tables, conversations stop, heads turning toward the racket. The blond woman’s toddler squirms in his seat, screeching. “No, Mommy. I don’t wan’ it. Mommy, noooo.”

  “Fiachra, d’you want to go home to Daddy? Is that what you want? Home again on the train, no walkies on the beach?”

  Ellen knows that accent: Irish with inflections of Massachusetts.

  This was Fintan’s accent—a voice dithering between two countries.

  She watches the woman shushing her son, then refilling her son’s sippy cup from her own juice glass. They lock gazes. This time, the woman’s look deepens, lingers.

  Then here she is weaving among the Risen Planet tables, saying “excuse me” to the bicycling couple at the next table.

  Her sense of dread deepens, clutches at Ellen’s insides. Irish. Who? Who is this damn woman?

  “Ellen? It is, isn’t it?”

  “Yes? Yes, I’m Ellen Boisvert.”

  “I knew it. I’m Sheila. Sheila McCormack. Well, was.” The woman waggles her left hand to show engagement and wedding rings. She gives a nervous laugh. “I’m Sheila Caputo now . . . I mean, since the old days in Dorchester, in that apartment.”

  Ellen’s mind whips back over the years, more than fifteen years, back to those early days when she and Fintan were dating in Boston. It was the 1980s and there were Irish nannies, waitresses, builders, housepainters. A waitress? Yes, this girl must have worked with him in that ratty little bar, the Paul Revere Tavern, where Fintan was bartending when she first met him.

  Now Sheila rolls her eyes at the memory of that single, party life. “You know, I was over there; we’re just having a bit of lunch before going out to the beach, and I just knew you looked familiar.”

  Ellen sees that huge, triple-decker house with faded green siding—Springvale Avenue, Dorchester, where Fintan once shared a three-bedroom apartment with a bunch of other Irish guys—sometimes up to ten illegal tenants in that place. Someone was always crashing on the living room couch. It was a permanent party of beer and bravado stories about visas and bamboozling the airport immigration. To Ellen, a studious, twenty-year-old student at Catholic Saint Bonaventure College, it all seemed so unfettered, so cavalier and daring.

  “. . . So I said, ‘aw to hell with it,’ I’m going to go over and ask anyways,’ and Jesus, Ellen, it really is you!”

  “Yes, yes,” Ellen says with that stiff smile. Why does she feel such instant distrust for this woman? “I’m Fintan’s wife.”

  Sheila McC
ormack glances down at the open real estate page, gives a knowing and sympathetic nod. “I was sorry, really sorry to hear about Fintan’s . . .” She shakes her head. “Jeez, I mean . . . to just drown . . . a sailing accident. It must’ve been a terrible shock. Of course, all the Boston-Irish papers, all that praise and the obituaries. Actually, they could’ve written more about him, and it’d still have been true.”

  No it wouldn’t, thinks Ellen, remembering those hyperbolic articles, the photos of her husband from assorted Irish fund-raisers around the city.

  “Thank you. Yes. It was a shock.” Ellen hears the widow-sad timbre in her own voice. After nine months, it has all become words, just blank words that have somehow lost their relationship to the actual event, to a man drowning on a stupid sailing trip that he should never have gone on in the first place.

  But then, what is the poor-me-widow response after your husband dies when you had decided, finally, to leave him?

  Lately, except in her night-dreams, she finds it impossible to picture Fintan—all of him, the entire assemblage. Instead, and at the oddest times, she conjures one feature at a time—his sharp nose, the pitch of his chin, his long jogger’s legs.

  Sheila says, “Katie—that’s my baby—well, she’s just nodded off in her stroller there; she’d sleep through a bomb, that one. So, ah, listen, we’re here for a while.” Ellen follows Sheila’s gaze to the window table where Fiachra the toddler is staring over at his mother, obviously working up to another shrieking session. “So I was just going to get myself a coffee. Would you like to join us?”

  Years later, in her replay of this day, this would be Ellen’s crossroads of possibilities. She could have told Sheila McCormack’s smiling, waiting face that she would absolutely love to have a coffee, but gee, she had to get back to campus. Or she had to meet a real estate person.

  But the next half hour finds her sitting with the Caputo family inside the window, her newspaper stuffed into her shoulder bag. In that kiddie-loud voice, Sheila McCormack introduces her around the table: Fiachra, the toddler, Róisín, the six-year old girl studiously crayoning in the café’s kiddie place mat, and Katie the baby asleep in her stroller.