Dance Lessons Page 14

  Thwack.

  Jo feels the fury rising. The fury and wailing grief become one.

  She watches his slow motion, the little hand, the eye on her as he takes a swing, then pelts another pebble. Thwap.

  She crosses the yard to him. Thwack. This time it’s the sound of her hand across his face. “Cursed little devil. When I say to stop, you’ll stop.” She slaps his face again. She watches his chin quiver, his frightened eyes. Then he wails. “Noooo!”

  His screeches make her more furious. Slap, slap, slap. She can’t stop herself. There is a high, cathartic joy to it, the sound of her own hand, the track of her hand there, on his freckled cheeks. “Ah, no, Mammy, noooo. Noo, noo.”

  Thwack. Thwack. “Do what you’re told. Do-what-you’re-told.”

  The boy keeps up the wailing, his face red and swollen, his little legs skirting the ground as she yanks him back into the house.

  26

  THEIR PASTA AND SALAD DINNERS FINISHED, the Fitzgerald children have grown fidgety. Eyes start to shift and elbows are straying across the patio table for brother-and-sister jabs.

  Riona and Lorcan Fitzgerald are hybrids of their mother and father, the doctor and his wife. Riona has Ruth’s blue eyes. Lorcan has his mother’s dark hair but his father’s pale, freckled complexion. Riona is thirteen. Lorcan is eleven.

  Across the candlelit table, Ruth Fitzgerald says, “You know our friend Ellen here is a teacher in America. She teaches French. Riona’s taking French this year, aren’t you, pet?”

  Ruth is obviously a little younger than her husband. Thirty-five, Ellen calculates, across their candlelit dinner table. Thirty-five, slim, and very pretty with her thick, dark hair clipped into a high, bobbing ponytail.

  Lorcan says, “I’m not going to like French. Not next year, when I move up to the community school on the hill. I mean, at the moment, I absolutely hate Irish, and like, that can’t be that much different, can it? All that grammar and stuff?”

  “Lorcan,” Tom scolds. “That’s not very polite.”

  “So what is your favorite?” Ellen asks Lorcan. “Your most favorite?”

  “Maths. I love maths. I’m the best in my class.”

  “Lorca-an,” Tom Fitzgerald pleads again. “It’s not nice to boast.”

  “Are you?” Ellen laughs. “You know, I bet you are. The very first day in my class, I can always tell which of my students will be good at things. Teachers can just tell.”

  Lorcan sets his chin in his upturned hand, fixes his gaze on his parents’ American dinner guest.

  Ellen knows this young boy’s dreamy look. At Coventry Academy, there’s always some young freshman, some sophomore boy who falls slightly in love with Mademoiselle Boisvert.

  Riona elbows her brother again. Ruth says, “All right, you two, upstairs. I rented you that DVD. You can have an hour before bed, then watch the rest tomorrow night.”

  The kids cross the slate patio to the French doors. Lorcan opens the door, then peers back out across the candlelit patio at Ellen.

  “Lorca-an! You’ll let the midges into the house!” Tom commands. The boy slaps the glassy door behind him, then thumps across the kitchen, giggling.

  Tom Fitzgerald shakes his head, crosses himself. “Jesus deliver us all from now on. The awkward age and all that. Sex ’n’ drugs ’n’ rock ’n’ roll.”

  It’s a Sunday evening. Two days ago, Friday, Tom came up the hill to Knockduff on his usual check. In Jo’s kitchen, he insisted that Ellen come for some dinner, wine, some company besides the nurse and Ned and Jo. He wanted her to meet his family.

  Now, with the kids gone, Tom’s and Ruth’s and Ellen’s forks and pasta spoons clink too loudly; the candles and the table and wine are too cozy, too pent up and intimate.

  Ruth says, “Well, speaking of drugs, we might as well finish this bottle. Ellen?” She offers the bottle of California cabernet.

  Earlier, when the per-diem nurse arrived at the house in Knockduff, Ellen drove down the avenue, following Tom’s directions to turn left on the Gowna road, then past the old dance hall and on toward the village, watching for the Fitzgeralds’ stone pillars and their sloping blacktop driveway to this newish, peach-colored house with its attached, one-story building with the sign on the door, “Doctor’s Surgery.”

  Now, twirling a nest of spaghetti around and around, Ellen wonders if she shouldn’t have made some excuse, politely refused his invitation. Because there’s definitely something edgy about the Fitzgeralds. In the kitchen there was all this staged business with food, wine glasses, appetizers. Around the patio dinner table there has been all this deliberate prompting of their son and daughter toward more and more kid-speak, more precocious questions about America and Boston; more exchanges about the kids’ school and music lessons and summer vacations.

  But now it’s just the three of them—Tom at Ellen’s left; Ruth sitting opposite Ellen, her back to the house. The patio smells of freshly mown grass, of the sloping fields all around the house, stretching from here to the village.

  A shaft of sudden light from the children’s upstairs window falls across the patio. Ruth’s pretty face is half in and half out of this light.

  “Ruth, did you say that you grew up here, too? In Gowna?”

  “Hmm? Oh, yeah. Yes. Well, outside. We were—are—ha, ha, ha. Well, my folks are still alive, and thriving, actually. Fit as fiddles. My Dad’s still farming away, but just a small place, thirty acres. You’ve driven past it out on the Galway road.”

  “So you knew Fintan, too? I mean, at school, around town?”

  Tom Fitzgerald stops eating, his knife and fork suddenly silent. Ruth keeps a determined smile. “I was actually two classes behind him at school. And I was one class behind this fella.” She nods playfully at her red-haired husband.

  In her mind’s eye, Ellen thinks of that school photo of Fintan’s, the rows of girls and boys outside an old school. The girls in their white kneesocks and severely cut bangs and pigtails. Ruth Fitzgerald was one of them.

  And Tom was probably at that university dance, the dance where Fintan and Carmel Cawley had their picture taken.

  “Of course she knew him,” Tom interrupts gustily. “Ellen, as you’ve probably gathered by now, everyone knows nearly everyone around here, except for the odd new blow-in. And much more so back then than now.”

  “Right.” Ellen starts on her cold spaghetti again. Round and around.

  Then tell me why a man like that lies about his parents. And tell me about that girl, the girl named Carmel Cawley who very obviously adored him. What happened? Who ditched whom?

  Tom leans backward, rocks on the chair’s back legs. It’s his most maddening habit. Ruth’s smile has grown hesitant.

  Tom says, “Oh, Fintan Dowd was the brains of the school. But then, my father, God rest him, used to say that she, Jo, was, too. By far the brightest girl in her class. Though of course, in her day, it didn’t matter whether a girl was brainy or not. ’Twas all the same. Nothing for them but to marry into a farm of land or emigrate to England to train as nurses or work as office cleaners. But look, I’m sure I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know, that Fintan didn’t tell you.”

  “Yes. He told me lots. And he was bright,” Ellen says. “Did you know he graduated first in his MBA class in Boston; studied for his degree while he worked full-time, got two job promotions in the process?”

  Tom clanks the chair down. When the conversation turns to the near present, he’s visibly more relaxed. “No. But I’m not surprised. The teachers above at the school loved him; apple of their eye. Needed no teaching, Fintan Dowd. In primary school, he even got to skip a class—common in those days, for the brainy ones, just push them onward. He was actually two years younger than me, but he got put ahead, and that’s how we ended up only a class apart. Of course, fellas like Fintan and myself were only counting the hours until we’d finish school and get out of here. I mean, except for th’oul Gowna Dance Hall on a Saturday night, there was abs
olutely nothing to do.”

  And who was he dancing with there? With that girl, Carmel, with the dark eyes?

  “Tom, you said you knew him in college, too. In Dublin?”

  Here’s another husband-and-wife glance across the table. Ruth reaches for the water pitcher, gestures it toward Ellen. Ellen shakes her head. “No, thanks.”

  “Yeah. I used to see him around campus. Of course, he was in comm, or business, and I was in premed. Though Fintan didn’t really come to many of the college parties—mad parties, out in these packed student flats in Ranelagh or Rathmines. Jeez, when I think of them. We wouldn’t put Ginger our cat in one of them now.”

  “Fintan didn’t? Live on campus?”

  “No. He was in digs, a rented room, someplace way out across the city, on the north side. I never went there. Sometimes my father’d be in Dublin on business and Dad’d give us both a lift home to Gowna. But we always collected Fintan in Bellfield, on campus. Fintan’d be there with his bags packed and ready.” He turns to Ellen. “We probably saw more of each other in Dublin than if we’d stayed here in Gowna.”

  Ellen cocks her head in a question.

  Ruth sets down her water glass. “As one of the local peasants myself, let me fill you in. Our Tom here was the village doctor’s son. The Dowds were—are—certainly one of the bigger farmers around. But they were still from Knockduff, out the country, outside the village itself, metropolis that it is. So the Dowds would’ve looked up to the Fitzgeralds. And, being from a small farm myself, we looked up to the Dowds and their huge, thriving place out there on the hill.” Ruth sits back, spreads her hands. “That was small Irish villages for you. And it still is, despite whatever ‘we’re all so egalitarian and modern’ Celtic-Tiger bullshit you might have heard.” Ruth shoots her husband an impish look.

  Tom pulls a mock-contrite look. Then he leans, rocks, back on his chair again. “We-ell, so I got told. But still, some of us came home to roost, didn’t we? Ha, ha, ha. Sowed the wild oats but then came home an’ took over the father’s practice and got the house and the cat”—he slaps his forehead—“Oh, and the wife ’n’ kids, too. Right. I nearly forgot.”

  Ruth swats her napkin toward him, then starts to stack their dinner-stained plates. “Coffee? Or tea?”

  “Hmm . . . Coffee, Ruth. Thanks. Here, let me help you with—”

  “—No, no. You sit. Sit. Rest yourself.”

  Is Ruth Fitzgerald happy, too happy, to escape?

  Tom and Ellen watch Ruth’s silhouette inside the lit-up kitchen as Ruth moves back and forth between the dishwasher and the fridge. Somewhere, out there in the gathering darkness, a cow bellows. A sliver of a pale yellowy sunset lingers at the edge of the fields. Ellen swats at a swarm of midges—these tiny invisible bugs that come out at twilight.

  “And there was this dog of his?” she says, not turning toward Tom.

  “Rosie!” Tom says. “God, Rosie. Jesus. Yeah! I’d forgotten about that. God, he loved that dog. Entered her for every sheepdog trial for miles around. Here in the secondary school, we’d all have some class of devilment or dancing lined up for the weekend, but if Fintan had a sheepdog trial, you wouldn’t see sight of him. Home in the fields training Rosie. God, that dog was his life.”

  Tom seems more relaxed with his wife not here. He seems released from the choreography, the collusion of whatever it is they’re hiding. Could it be the ring that Ellen thinks she’s seen in that photograph, the ring on Carmel Cawley’s left finger? Carmel Cawley who has two children, a girl and a boy, and is separated or divorced from that angry, menacing man who she met down at the lake, the man she met coming out of the Cawleys’ house on the lane?

  “And he had a girlfriend?” Ellen prompts. Yes. Yes. No mistaking it. Tom’s congenial, raconteur’s grin has frozen. He’s annoyed. Ellen twirls one hand, mimics trying to remember a name “Carmel? Carmel . . . ?”

  “Yes, he . . . um . . . used to go out with a girl, a girl from down in the village. Carmel. Did he tell you that?” He shoots an impatient glance at the house.

  Ellen scrapes her chair around, to face him straight on. “It’s okay, Tom. I mean, we all come to marriage with some sort of romantic past, right?”

  A lie. Big lie. When Ellen met Fintan Dowd, an Irish bartender in that college-hangout pub in Boston, Ellen Boisvert’s greatest love affair had been with her schoolbooks. Here, on this backyard patio in Ireland, she glimpses herself back there, when she landed in Boston—timid and self-conscious, convinced she was wearing all the wrong clothes when she crossed from her college dorm to the classrooms and refectory at Saint Bonaventure College. She was afraid to venture past the corner drugstore. Until just after that first, freshman Thanksgiving, she and a few more shy girls finally ventured out, prowling the city and all its smells and noise and the delicious prospect of parties and boys. But outside of some drunken, late-night fumblings at someone’s house party, Ellen Boisvert had never been with anyone until Fintan.

  Ruth is coming back with a tray and clinking cups, a steaming coffee pot. Tom stands, too quickly, sets their candles jiggling as he rushes toward the open French door. “Here, I’ll get that for you, love.”

  “Tom and I were just chatting about Carmel Cawley, Fintan’s old girlfriend,” Ellen announces across the table, smiling over her coffee cup.

  This time, Ruth doesn’t check with her husband. But the voice comes high, forced-casual. “Oh, yeah, right. Carmel.”

  “She’s still living in Gowna? Or close by?”

  Tom says, “Ach, no. Actually, she moved to England, a long time ago. I’m not sure where she’s actually living over there. Whether it’s London or . . . where?” He laughs.

  “Doesn’t she still have family here? In Gowna?”

  Again, Ellen sees that man, the man who came walking out of the little house at Number 10, The Lane.

  Ruth draws her lips together. “Actually, we saw her last year. Below in the hotel one night. There was a band, you know. And we were out for a Saturday night meal.”

  Tom takes the baton. “She was having a drink at the bar. With her brother. Tony. He’s still here, around these parts. Moved back in with his mother after his divorce. Then, she saw us, came over to our table. She’d had a few too many, the same night. But you know, to tell you the truth, Ellen, neither of us recognized her first. Did we, love? Of course, once she introduced herself, we knew her straight away. But the accent. It’s funny, but even after all that time, you’re still shocked to hear such a different accent.”

  “She sounded English?” Ellen asks, her head swiveling between the two, feeling silly, like a tennis spectator.

  Ruth: “Yeah. Very. ’Twas gas, really.”

  “But she seemed to be doing great, all settled in over there. Well, you would be after . . .” Tom’s voice trails off.

  “After how long?”

  Tom shuffles, then bumps the underside of the glass table with his knee.

  Ruth intercedes. “Gosh, I forget now. Sure, everyone was off someplace back then. There was almost nothing here in this country, and what there was, like jobwise, was already spoken for. But sure, Fintan’d have told you all that.”

  Ellen studies the biggest of their dinner candles, where it sits there in the middle of the table, next to the coffee tray. It’s as big as a canning jar. She watches the candle gutter in the night breeze.

  But then the breeze dies and the candle flickers bright again.

  1985. The year Fintan came to Boston. And the year Carmel Cawley left Gowna for England. Ellen is sure of it.

  When Ellen looks up again, she catches Tom and Ruth Fitzgerald eyebrowing each other across the table. She is an object of pity. The stranger among them; the woman who must be protected, kid-gloved from the truth.

  “Was she alone? Carmel Cawley? Visiting Gowna on her own?”

  “Yes,” Ruth answers.

  “No,” says Tom.

  Right, Ellen thinks. So I’ve got my answer.

  “Don’t be a stranger
,” Ruth says, leaning against the front doorjamb. “Or listen, if you’re in town, Ballinkeady, ask anyone for Lambert and Wells’ solicitors’ office. It’s where I work, part-time, a legal secretary. Hours are perfect, what with the kids and everything. We’ll have a bit of lunch. Or if you want to go into Galway some Saturday for a bit of shoppin’.”

  Ellen glimpses young Lorcan’s head dipping over the stair banister, hanging upside down, staring at her standing here in the front door. Ellen calls into the house, “’Bye, you guys. Good to meet you.”

  “Thanks again.”

  “And . . . Ellen?” Ruth steps further out onto the front step. The doctor’s wife sets her hand on Ellen’s arm. “I’m really, really sorry, you know. About Fintan.” She gestures her head back into the house. “I mean, that fella in there, well, there’s days when I might be ready to choke him. But still, I can’t imagine losing your one true love.”

  27

  ON HIS FIRST THANKSGIVING in America, Fintan Dowd said he loved her. He said it on the highway, Route 93 south, from Patterson Falls to Boston.

  Two months earlier, September, Ellen had answered an advertisement looking for a roommate in a shared apartment in Brookline, just west of the city. She had started her first, post-college position as an editorial assistant at Rheinhardt Publishers, specialists in foreign-language textbooks for middle and high school students, grades 7 to 9. Dressed in her prim skirts and ironed blouses, Ellen spent her days indexing and photocopying and trafficking text between the authors—foreign-language high school teachers—and Rheinhardt’s editorial team.

  Early on Thanksgiving morning, she took the T to the triple-decker apartment house in Dorchester, where everything was still in darkness, the curtains drawn. When she tiptoed up the stairs, Fintan was drinking tea in the freezing kitchen, the latest illegal arrival from Ireland sleeping face down and fully dressed on the living room couch.