Dance Lessons Read online

  “Oh. Right.” Jo is letting the words, the facts sink in.

  “You wanted to know.”

  “Yes. I’m sorry.”

  “Don’t be. It’s a reasonable enough question.”

  “No. I mean I’m sorry you didn’t . . . don’t.”

  Now Jo stops watching the TV to meet her daughter-in-law’s gaze. “Like, if that’s what you wanted.”

  No, Ellen says silently to the old face across the kitchen. No, I didn’t want your son’s children.

  She thinks this, says it aloud in her mind. Then, Ellen Boisvert knows that this has always been true.

  19

  SHE’S GOING TO SLEEP in Jo’s old upstairs room, where she can hear the old woman knocking through the parlor ceiling. When Ellen got back from the village, Jo was asleep in her bed again, still in her clothes, snoring lightly.

  Now Ellen sets her overnight bag against the upstairs landing wall. The door at the back of the house on the left of the landing beckons her. It was his room. She knows this.

  The ceiling light is yellow-dull inside its green tasseled shade. The bedroom smells of old wood and dust. The small window onto the backyard is rimed with dirt and weather. Behind the door is a twin bed with a brown headboard, a blue candlewick bedspread pulled up over the pillows. Taped to the wall above the bed is a child’s collage of blue and red satin ribbons. They’re the prize ribbons you win at a horse or agricultural show.

  Ellen yanks back the bedspread to a bare mattress, a faded striped print, two uncovered pillows with a mildew smell. She kneels on the bed to read the prize ribbons’ white satin centers, the gold lettering: “Rosie Dowd, Second Prize, Cloonmount Sheepdog Trials, 1978.” “Rosie Dowd. Two-year-olds. Best of Show.” “Mayo Regional Sheepdog Trials.”

  Elsewhere along the bedroom walls, the green paint is stippled white from where someone once hung posters.

  In the closet, two long-sleeved, checked shirts hang from the wire hangers. There’s a pair of corduroy jeans, worn at the knees. She leans into this old, wooden armoire to bury her face and sniff his clothes. She searches in each pocket. In one, she finds a torn-off ticket like you get for readmission to a movie theater or a concert.

  The bottom of the armoire is stacked with piles of hardcover books. They’re business management and accounting textbooks. In each flyleaf is Fintan’s erect, pointed handwriting: “Fintan J. Dowd, 23 Oak Grove Avenue, Whitehall, Dublin. If found lost, return to 01-564899.”

  She turns the books around to read the margin notes in faded pencil. Inserted between the pages are torn-off sheets from a spiral notebook with numbered lists, diagrams.

  Shoved between the last two heavy volumes are some newspapers: The Connaught People, The Western Farmer’s Journal. The newssheet has turned brittle and yellow. The photos are grainy. April 19, 1977. June 12, 1975. September 25, 1972.

  Ellen carries the news pages across to the bed, where she sits and spreads the papers out across the blue bedspread.

  “Fintan Dowd of Gowna, and his dog, Rosie, who won ‘best-of-show’ at the Annual Kiltubber Agricultural Show.” “Fintan Dowd, Gowna, and his sheepdog, Rosie, who took first prize at the Rathloe Sheepdog Trials.” “Mr. Vincent Thornton, manager and sponsor, Bank of Ireland, Ballinkeady, presents a savings bond for twenty pounds to young Fintan Dowd of Gowna, whose dog, Rosie, won first overall prize at last Sunday’s sheepdog trials.”

  More clippings: a gallery of his young life: at age thirteen, fifteen. A halo of curls, those huge, framed spectacles, a triumphant, beaming grin. In one, he is on his hunkers, his arm around Rosie, just like in the Polaroid photo he brought to America. In another, he’s wearing a Bay City Roller T-shirt, freckled arms; he’s wearing the corduroy trousers in the wardrobe. A paisley-pattern shirt, a huge, butterfly collar, more bellbottom trousers. And here, in the last one, he’s sporting an upper lip fuzz, the shadow of a schoolboy moustache.

  She looks up from the news clippings, looks cautiously around his old room. The house and the night outside the window are silent, dead silent.

  She carries the news clippings back to the wardrobe, replaces them where she found them, then piles the other textbooks on top.

  A yellow envelope drops from a book. It’s addressed to him, that same Dublin address from the books’ flyleaves. She tilts the envelope into the light to read the return address: Miss Carmel Cawley, 10, The Lane, Gowna, County Mayo. There’s a greeting card inside, yellow roses in a vase. “Thinking of You.” Folded into the card is another small news clipping.

  “F, Aren’t we just gorgeous??? Love always, C.”

  On the card’s left, inside flap: “P.S.: Don’t worry. I might have something sorted already. Surprise!!! More at the weekend. C.”

  She studies this news photo. It’s a close-up of Fintan in a tuxedo and bow tie. The girl comes to just above his chest, she’s slightly turned toward him, her chin pitched toward the camera. Her dark hair is in a chignon, her bony shoulders under a gown with spaghetti straps. Just at the photo’s bottom edge, they’re holding hands.

  Ellen crosses the room to bring the photo and its caption under the ceiling light. “Fintan Dowd, B.Comm, First-class hons., and Carmel Cawley, attending the University College Dublin Annual Ball at the Burlington Hotel, Dublin.”

  A university dance. And he took along this girl, a girl called Carmel Cawley who lives—or lived—in Gowna.

  She’s very pretty. With her dark eyes, she looks more Spanish than Irish. And she’s older than Fintan. There’s something world-worn, almost cynical in her features. Ellen brings the picture closer. A typesetter’s smudge? No. On Carmel Cawley’s left hand, her marriage finger, is a sparkly little ring.

  Next morning Jo’s eyes are bright and fierce as she sits there, propped against her pillows. She flutters a hand toward the chair next to the dressing table. “Sit.”

  Ellen obeys.

  Jo’s eyes are fixed straight ahead at the open parlor doorway. She has been preparing something, a speech. “I’m going to die soon.” The voice is flat and expressionless.

  “Mrs. Dowd, you don’t actually know that.”

  “—So I’ve thought about it like I said I would, like I told that fella. No. No hospital for me. Once is enough. Enough of those bloody lies that nobody believes—not even the doctors themselves, except they make a few euro off it all. Sure don’t I know I’m finished? So I’m staying. In my own house.”

  “But you’ll—”

  “It’s not easy what I’m going to ask you. But you can’t spend your life working with stock like I have, without knowing exactly the length that’s left. So I know it won’t be long. Young Fitzgerald below says I have to have someone. My husband has three grand-nephews. Thick as double-ditches all three of them. I wouldn’t have one of them past that threshold.” Jo raises her right hand, rubs her thumb and forefinger together—the international sign for money. “They’d be here for the one reason only. You can bet your life on that. Watching the land, what they can get. So I’d rather pay someone fair and square, a stranger.” At last, Jo turns her gaze from the parlor door. She fixes her hollow eyes on Ellen. “You.”

  “I’m not exactly a stranger.”

  “It’ll be two months. No longer. You said you’re a teacher, so you’re on holidays anyways.”

  Two months. Sitting here, Ellen and Fintan’s lives come rushing through her head like a vintage comedy where everyone keeps rushing about, doors opening and closing, each looking for but just missing the other—while, all along, the audience knows and laughs. New jobs, a new apartment, night school, promotions, both of them studying for their master’s degrees. Doors banging, yesterday’s clothes in the laundry hamper, a succession of notes left on the fridge, on the kitchen table: Back at eight. Gone for a run. Chicken in fridge. Gone to library. Married for thirteen years, but it could just as easily have been thirteen weeks, or thirteen days.

  Or a few hours or days can be longer than forever. Like those days on Martha’s Vineyard, the days w
hen Ellen waited and slept in a stranger’s house until they found his body. She can still feel the heft of that time, hour by long, endless hour.

  Jo’s grey hair is splayed against the discolored pillow. Fintan’s eyes. Fintan after they had pulled him from the sea off Martha’s Vineyard—swollen, blue-faced, his hair in a salty starfish.

  Last night, when Ellen dozed upstairs in Jo’s old bed, she saw that drowned face in her dreams. This morning she woke up from her fitful sleep. She felt a terrible, wailing sorrow.

  “All right,” Ellen says. “Yes. I’ll stay. And no, no pay.”

  20

  “WE’LL PAY FOR THIS YET,” the woman from Gowna Foodmart says, hands on hips and looking up at the pink evening sky over Flanagan’s Hotel. The woman has followed Ellen out onto the sidewalk to take her sandwich-board sign—“Fresh sandwiches. Take-away Coffee & Tea”—in for the night. “We’ll get rain sometime. Bound to.”

  “Goodnight,” Ellen calls over her shoulder, hitching the cardboard box of groceries higher into her arms.

  “Right,” the woman calls, carrying in her sign.

  Ellen’s little black Fiat is parked just up past the hotel’s parking lot, and her one suitcase is packed up and sitting on the back seat, ready to move into Jo Dowd’s house.

  Her steps are loud going up the sidewalk. There’s Gerry Flanagan’s domed head watching her over the café curtain in the hotel’s lounge window.

  Earlier, when she checked out of the hotel a day earlier than scheduled, she stood at the hotel desk, pan-faced at his sly little questions: You going off touring around someplace else for yourself? Or back to the States? The husband couldn’t survive without you?

  In the hotel parking lot, four cars and two farm tractors are parked carelessly, at angles to the high, cement wall. Four men sit around the wooden picnic table, pints of beer under the Heineken umbrella. There’s one extra big tractor parked against the wall, the machinery hitched up high behind it like a set of giant brown teeth. The men eye her as she walks past.

  She sets her box of groceries on the car’s passenger seat. She locks the car again to walk up past the houses with their front windows set open to the summer evening, a radio or TV warbling from a curtained living room. The window boxes are bright with pink and red geraniums. Someone is barbecuing in a backyard.

  She studies the sidewalk, the cracks in the cement, the green, scummy triangles where a drain pipe has spit out onto the sidewalk.

  Ellen turns down Church Street, past the churchyard with its yew trees and the cooing pigeons. It would actually be nice to bump into Father Noel Bradley again. It would be nice to sit in his garden and have that beer he promised. And ask him, please, to open up the church records and check . . . what? Marriage records? Fintan Dowd and this girl called Carmel Cawley? A young marriage? Married in that era of no Irish divorces?

  No. Stop. She shushes her racing thoughts. But in her mind’s eye is that newspaper photo in Fintan’s old room. An engagement ring. Or it could just as easily have been a dressy cocktail ring, a family heirloom, something to match her sparkly earrings and evening gown.

  After the church and the newsagents, she turns down another street and then, here she is at the top of the lane that circles around the back of the village. There is no signpost. But this is it: the lane where Carmel Cawley once lived. Perhaps she still lives here.

  Some of the one-story cottages are tourist-pretty with their tiny windows and natural stone walls. Others sag onto the sidewalk, their paintwork flaking. The neighbors on opposite sides could probably shake hands across the lane with each other, door to door.

  In one house, through an open window, someone is sanding wood. In another, a baby is crying.

  Number 10 stands halfway down; its dark grey paint is faded and flaked. The house’s white trim has turned green with rain. Even in this warm evening, the front windows and doors are shut tight.

  What if this Carmel girl really lives here? One of those women who never left town?

  In Patterson Falls, New Hampshire, Ellen sees those girls in the supermarket or wheeling children along one of the town’s side streets. Or once, on a summer weekend home, when Ellen’s parents took her along to the potluck supper in the backyard of the town’s firehouse, she met over half of her old classmates there—each of them fussing over dishes covered with tinfoil. Across the picnic tables, these girls she once knew introduced their husbands, screamed at their kids, then asked her about life in Boston. All of it tinged with resentful sarcasm, an assumption that she, Ellen condescended to or pitied them.

  Have Carmel and her family already heard about me? Has someone in Gowna already said something about the American woman way out there on the farm in Knockduff? And now Carmel Cawley is watching me from a secret window.

  The Cawleys’ door opens. A man steps out, pulling a sweatshirt down over his head, over a stained T-shirt. From the sidewalk, he turns back into the doorway, calls something to someone just inside the house. Then he turns back to the lane and sees Ellen, his puzzlement giving way to recognition.

  It’s the man she saw at the lake, at Lough Gowna, the man with the little girl, the one who was fixing his rowboat.

  “How’ya! I didn’t expect to see you still around these parts!” He tilts his head toward the back gardens and fences behind him, and the backs of the Main Street houses. “Still staying below at Flanagan’s?”

  “No. Yes. Hi.” Why has she lied to him?

  He closes the distance between them on the sidewalk. “I left my tractor parked down there—in the car park. Listen, would you fancy a pint? Or a gin or something?”

  She forces a smile. “No. Thanks, but I have to be somewhere. See someone.”

  He arches his eyebrows at her. He doesn’t believe her. He shoves his hands in his jeans pockets. “So when are you off back to the States?”

  “Not for a while yet.”

  “Right. Sure, maybe another time. He gets in a band on Saturday nights. And the fishermen should be down at the weekend—the mayfly lads. We could have the chat, the pair of us, maybe an oul’ dance, too. I’ll ask for you below at the hotel.”

  Then the man saunters past her on down the lane, turns into the street.

  Something wet and cold brushes Ellen’s leg. It’s a small dog, black face with a white smudge between the eyes. She can smell its filthy coat, its bad breath. It sniffs her feet.

  “Go home.” Ellen tells the dog—and herself. The smelly dog obeys and trots on down the lane. Then it stops to lift its leg against a drain pipe.

  Is this Carmel Cawley’s husband? If so, why is he asking her for drinks? Yes. She remembers his little girl, the little girl said that she and her brother lived part time with her mummy, then sometimes with her granny.

  Cat

  21

  TERRENCE RESTS HIS ELBOW on the ledge of the open car window. He taps on the steering wheel as they wait for a group of tourists to cross at the traffic light, all dawdley and slow, the leader guy glancing up from his London A-Z street map, pointing up the street. Japanese, all of them, with their backpacks and cameras and tight jeans. They’re looking for Willington Market. Tourists always are.

  From the passenger’s seat, Cat Cawley sneaks a look at Terrence, who is her mother Carmel’s latest boyfriend. They’ve moved into his flat, her and Mum, and now Cat Cawley has her own bedroom in the basement that smells a little bit. But still, it’s a nice big room with lots of drawers and a full built-in wardrobe for her stuff.

  Terrence always wears the same thing—these stupid dress shirts with the wide collars, white or pink or bright blue, and those really awful jeans, and a pinkie ring. He looks like he’s going off to play piano in an old people’s pub or a nursing home.

  The traffic light turns green, and Terrence puts the car in gear again. But now an old woman in a green coat toddles across, pulling her wheelie plaid shopping bag behind her.

  Usually Cat takes the tube. But this morning when she got up, there was Terrence sitti
ng at the kitchen table smoking a fag and reading his Daily Mail and offering to drive Cat to her weekly dance lesson at Miss Jarkowski’s Dance Studio in Kentish Town. Of course, when Terrence is being nice to his girlfriend’s sixteen-year-old daughter, that only means one thing. It means they’ve had another fight last night, him and Mum, another fight as they staggered up the hill from the Rose and Crown. And now, Saturday morning, and Terrence is giving her a lift to dance class ’cos he’s sucking up.

  They’re driving again—past the shops with silver security shutters locked over the front windows, past an Internet café, a pub, an Indian takeaway, a bus stop, a corner shop with bright pink signs for special offers on Bacardi. There are spindly trees in a small town park, a children’s playground outside a row of council flats. In the car, Terrence always plays a really bad radio station, and sometimes he even sings along—stupid songs that nobody’s ever heard of except him.

  When he changes gears he brushes her leg. Always. Always does that. Pervey sod.

  He turns and smiles at her. “All right then, Catherine?” he asks.

  Cat. Stupid wanker. She’s told him ten million times that’s what she wants to be called. “Yeah. Fine.” She starts picking some black nail varnish off the nails on her left hand.

  Just what’s Mum see in him anyway? Not her type, Terrence, and he’s totally not like her other boyfriends, who actually were kind of fun. Like that bloke—what was his name?—Fawad or Fur—something? Cat quite liked him, actually. Except that Fawad didn’t have a nice big flat where they could live for free, her and Mum, and this huge big car that still smells all new inside.

  They turn down a side street, then another, a shortcut that Terrence always takes to avoid the Saturday market crowds—the vendors with their vans and shopping trolleys, the tourists just walking and gawking.

  In her basement bedroom, Cat always goes to sleep with her earphones on, falls asleep to one of her new CDs, ’cos anything’s better than listening to him and Mum through the ceiling above her bed, usually screeching at each other like two cats. Or sometimes, she listens to them shagging, and their bed going creak-creak-creak.