Dance Lessons Page 15

  Everyone in the apartment was working the holiday—picking up restaurant and security and catering shifts for their American colleagues.

  From the apartment, they walked to a Rent-a-Wreck place two streets away. Then they set off north on Route 93 in a grey Chevy Impala that reeked of air freshener.

  On the phone to her mother the night before, Ellen had agreed to get off the highway just outside Patterson Falls to pick up Aunt Lilly, who lived in a state-funded apartment building for the developmentally disabled and the elderly.

  For as long as Ellen could remember, Aunt Lilly had been a fixture at every Christmas, Easter, and Thanksgiving table. Though in fact, Lilly was not a real aunt but her father’s first cousin who had never been “quite right.”

  From Aunt Lilly’s building, they drove the back roads to Patterson Falls while Aunt Lilly sat in the huge back seat, folding and refolding her collection of foil candy wrappers. She jabbed a fat little finger at Fintan in his driver’s seat, then leaned over and around the passenger’s seat to ask Ellen, “Who’s that, Ellie? Who’s that?”

  The Boisvert house smelled of roasting turkey. Donna Boisvert had never been a hugger. In the kitchen, Ellen made introductions above the whine of Thomas Boisvert’s woodworking saw from the basement. Donna asked them how the roads were, how busy, how jam-packed. She scolded her daughter for the extravagant gift basket of chutney and cheeses from a Boston delicatessen. Standing there in the kitchen, they all ran out of conversation.

  Thomas Boisvert came up the basement steps in his sawdust-flecked workpants and undershirt. Ellen made the introductions again, then watched her father flinch at the Irish accent. He shook Fintan’s hand but he didn’t meet his daughter’s eyes.

  Nodding toward the kitchen window and the driveway outside, her father asked Ellen where she’d gotten the Impala, how many highway miles she got on that thing? If gas was still more expensive down there over the border in Massachusetts? Fintan, seizing on this chance for a man-to-man, went to answer. But Thomas went on talking to his daughter, as if the tall, curly-haired stranger weren’t standing in their kitchen.

  The turkey was carved, then they took their seats around the table under the kitchen window. The living room TV and the Macy’s parade twittered across their awkward, perfunctory chatter about who would sit where and if Donna had put out milk glasses for everyone.

  Ellen saw it all—this family meal with the Tupperware serving bowls and the easy-wipe table cloth—through Fintan’s non-American eyes.

  As they passed the turkey platter, Donna Boisvert compensated for her husband’s sour silences by relaying the latest headlines from the neighborhood—the fact that the Theriaults, their neighbor’s daughter, had had another baby, that ShopFast, the town’s chain supermarket, was rumored to be changing hands again.

  They are not pernicious people, thought Ellen. Surely Fintan can and will see that?

  For years and years and years, the Boisverts had survived these high holidays by talking about cars and grocery coupons and the neighbors’ new garden fence. All of them making noise—words to while away the hours until everyone retreated back to his or her own world.

  Fintan asked Ellen’s father, “Mr. Boisvert, what do you drive yourself these days? I didn’t actually see your car out there in the driveway.”

  Again Ellen watched her father flinch at the Irish accent, at this dinner-table voice that evoked too many memories of the town’s Irish American mill workers who, according to Thomas and his friends at the Richelieu Franco-American club, had too much lace-curtain cockiness. The Irish who got to keep their own church and pastor while Patterson Falls’ French church was closed.

  The Boisverts possessed all the pride and prejudices of some postwar, first-generation immigrants to America. Above all, they believed in their own decency. And decency meant paying your taxes and mowing your lawn and keeping your car serviced. Over that Thanksgiving dinner table, there was something too high-minded, too unapologetic about this fresh-off-the-boat Mick with his thick brogue.

  “So you an American citizen?” Thomas asked Fintan through a mouthful of mashed potatoes.

  “No. No, I’m not. You have to live here for . . . well, longer than I have, Mr. Boisvert.”

  Spite glittered in Thomas’s eyes. “But you got yourself a green card, right?”

  Ellen set her knife and fork down. Her mouth had gone dry.

  Aunt Lilly fidgeted and blinked around the table, sensing some new, funny game. She jabbed a gravy-smeared finger at Fintan, then asked, with a crackly laugh, “Who’s that, Ellie? Who’s that?”

  Ellen said, “Da-ad. Pl—”

  But Fintan beat her to it, a calm and acid voice above Lilly’s cackle and the living room TV. “Mr. Boisvert, with all due respect, I’m not sure my immigration status is really any of your business.”

  Thomas scraped back his chair. He left his turkey and broccoli casserole and potato half eaten. He crossed to the cellar steps again.

  Donna Boisvert began to gather plates and to ask who wanted pumpkin or blueberry pie?

  Afterward, the four of them ate their dessert and Cool Whip to the whine of Thomas Boisvert’s electric wood saw through the kitchen floor.

  Ellen and Fintan were washing up when the phone rang. Louise. Calling from an all-day party around her apartment complex pool patio, her voice slurry from margaritas.

  Donna took the phone and delivered the same neighborhood news to her Florida daughter as she had, earlier, to Ellen. Watching her mother laughing into the phone and asking Louise for the exact temperature down there in St. Pete, Ellen felt a familiar stab of resentment. This was and always would be Louise—calling or breezing home for a quick visit, and always after the storm had passed.

  Fintan and Ellen left for Boston just before the six o’clock news.

  Driving back through town to Lilly’s apartment and afterward on Route 93 South, Fintan was silent.

  Ellen wanted to cry—not just for her father’s rudeness or Fintan’s silence. But she wanted to weep for the entire ruination of what a Thanksgiving Day was supposed to be. Now she knew that she had wanted Fintan to like it all—to admire her mother’s stuffing, to watch the Macy’s parade and eat his pie. And above all, she had wanted her own family to live up to her own concoctions of them, to her own storied version of small-town parents—traditional, God fearing, and New England wholesome.

  In that drive south, she admitted to herself that, for four years of college it had been this way—the terrible disappointment when you walked in that kitchen and remembered the mismatch between how they were and how she had beheld them from a distance.

  The Impala still reeked of cheap air freshener. Now Route 93 was a necklace of headlights all heading south—carfuls of people all harboring their own disappointments or delusions of an American holiday. Fintan drove in that hunch-shouldered way that told Ellen he was lost in thought, needling away at something inside him.

  After the last exit for Manchester, he set his hand back on her knee.

  “You all right?”

  “Yeah. Fine. You? . . . I’m sorry about Dad. He’s just—”

  Fintan shrugged. In the slithery highway lights, Fintan trapped the huge steering wheel with his knee while he reached over to caress her left cheek. She willed herself not to really cry, not to let the tears come. “Look, Ell, I’ve been thinking . . .”

  Months, years later, Ellen would enter a roadside public bathroom where the air-freshener smell would remind her of the Thanksgiving night when a man—when anyone—first said he loved her.

  “. . . I’ve been thinking that we should get a place, move in together.”

  Her heart skipped, thrilled.

  He took his eyes off the highway to smile across at her. “What do you think?”

  She leaned across to hug him. “Yes. Yes.” Then, “I love you.”

  “Me too.”

  28

  THE GIRL TIPTOES from the room and shuts the door. Jo listens to her footst
eps in the parlor, then up the stairs. Then the water rushes through the pipes. One of these days, that girl will wash her own flesh off. Her skin and hair will go floating through the house and out to the septic beyond the orchard.

  Tonight the Yank girl told her stories again—sitting here next to the bed, the words soft and slow, like someone reciting a prayer. The Yank girl tells her stories of the boy in Boston—how they met in that pub he worked in, how he studied for some sort of American degree, how they once went on their holidays to Mexico or Florida or someplace where it was roasting hot.

  The girl has managed to coax Ned back into the house. Coaxed him like a stray cat. But still he never steps past the parlor door. Still he stands there between the china cabinet and the couch, the cap scrunched in his fist as he delivers news of the stock and the fields. Yes, ma’am, and no, ma’am. That’s true all right, ma’am. This week, he’s having the usual men in to cut and bale the summer hay.

  After the girl leaves the bedroom, Jo listens for her bedtime rituals, the footsteps across the upstairs landing. These sudden sounds in the house, this sudden presence of another person. In the beginning, after the girl moved in, they used to frighten her, jolt her awake. But now they’re a strange comfort, a set of noises and rituals before sleep.

  Jo doesn’t believe the half of her stories, happy little yarns about a young couple in Boston. But what matter now, truth or lies? Swap the truth for the lie, and it’s often the same story anyway.

  Jo shuts her eyes and there he is again—her boy out there in those streets, serving in a pub, working in that office where the girl says he got a posh job and got promoted twice. Tonight he’s in a place with too many cars and buses with their horns blowing and all those exhaust fumes on the freezing winter air. He’s walking down the footpath, his back to her in a swanky winter overcoat, a scarf wrapped around his neck and his breath fogging on the icy air. He’s holding a little girl by the hand—a blond little girl in a little grey coat with a red scarf and matching red mittens. She’s a child from a storybook, a child that has come to Jo in dreams before. In the dream, they’re retreating into the distance, disappearing among the crowds of winter people on a city footpath. Just in time they stop and turn, the man and the little girl laughing as they wave at her, the red mittens waving madly. “Say ‘hello,’” the man says. “Wave and say ‘hello’ to your gran.” There they are laughing and waving, cocking their heads like people on a television.

  “Did you hear we got a telly?” Jo asks Kitty. “We got a telly within in the town.”

  Kitty has teased her hair into a beehive. Across the parlor table, her pointed bosoms press against her polka-dot blouse, which is tucked into white bell-bottom trousers. Next to Kitty sits her new husband, Brian.

  Earlier this afternoon, Brian and Kitty drove through the yard gate in a red Volkswagen car. Kitty sprang from the passenger seat in her polka dots and white bell-bottoms, looking ridiculous in the farmyard mud at Knockduff. In her high heels, Kitty picked her way across the yard to the boy standing there in the back doorway. Kitty tousled the boy’s curls and said, “Fintan, say hello to your new uncle.”

  “Brian,” she said, turning to the pale, smiling man in his immaculate holiday clothes, “Brian, this is Fintan, the best little boy in Ireland. And he just had a birthday, didn’t you, Fintan? He just turned eight.”

  Now across their white-cloth table, the table set with Jo’s own wedding china, they eat a supper of pink ham and sliced-up tomatoes and shop bread, not their usual caiscín. Jo has cycled down to the village to buy all this, all this convenience food because she presumes this is the kind of thing they all eat in Dublin City—shop bread and paper-thin ham. Mother, in her black widow’s cardigan, has stayed in her fireside armchair, where the sisters have brought her a supper tray.

  “It’s below in the kitchen,” says Jo about the new black-and-white television. “John put up a special shelf for it.”

  “Oh, isn’t that grand!” says Kitty. Brian, seizing on this conversation, turns toward the boy. “And tell me, Fintan, what’s your favorite telly program?”

  The boy flinches from this man’s cooing Dublin voice, the obvious shock of being asked a question, a direct question just for a child. He is never addressed by name.

  Across the table Jo watches her son sitting there, his young hands callused from farm work. Under his knitted geansaí, the boy’s arms and neck are marked with bruises where she has lashed out at him, given him the back of her own hand for when he won’t leave the cursed telly to go out and do his own share of the milking before dark. Or sometimes, Jo slaps her child simply because he’s there—just there between her and the rest of the world.

  “Tell Uncle Brian,” Jo prompts, in the strange, fluting voice she uses for visitors.

  The boy’s voice comes as a whisper. “Wanderly Wagon,” he says, red-faced with shyness and staring down at his food. “I love Wanderly Wagon.”

  Brian jabs a fork toward the little boy and winks at him. “Oh now, didn’t I think that’d be your favorite, for sure. Now don’t tell your Auntie Kitty this, but I do have the odd watch of Wanderly Wagon myself. On the sly! Sure, it’s great fun!”

  Then the cutlery becomes loud again. They have run out of things to say. Mother has dozed over her tea tray. The boy swings his Wellington legs under the table—thuck, thuck, thuck. Jo eyes him. Stop. Stop or I’ll kill you.

  Two weeks ago, Kitty announced her marriage by letter. A small affair, she wrote. In a north Dublin church with just a few friends and Brian’s mother and sisters.

  Ever since the postman brought that letter, the house has been full of wailing and hand-wringing. Night after night Jo has heard it, Mother’s words spitting from beside the kitchen range. Kitty, Kitty, Kitty. Kitty this and Kitty that. “What kind of daughter?” Mother wailed. “What kind of girl? And sure, we don’t know who he is, who his people are, what breeding, what stock.”

  And yet today, here’s all this fuss for Kitty and all of them sitting here like actors around a table, stagestruck and petrified in their own house.

  Brian reaches for Kitty’s hand and holds it, right there on the tablecloth in plain view. Jo stares at his little hand, not a man’s hands at all, but the flesh soft and powdered. The nails are clean and pink. He intertwines his fingers with Kitty’s. Embarrassed, Jo looks away. In her mind’s eye, she’s putting the hot saucepan from the range on there, the hot sizzling pot, right on Brian’s little office-boy’s fingers. She hears the sizzle of flesh, like branding a bullock.

  Then Jo watches her own John, sitting here next to her and munching his ham and bread, his neck scrawny and jiggly with age.

  In her letter, Kitty said that Brian was a bank clerk, and that every day, he leaves their new, semidetached house to take the bus to his job in a bank in College Green in the city center.

  “Would you believe it, but this is actually my first time in Mayo?” Brian tries again, his voice trumpeting across the parlor. “Been down the country before but never this far down!” He smiles around the table, this jaunty little Dublin man, hoping for some responding chatter. That fixed smile, sitting there in a white, short-sleeve shirt and in his beige holiday slacks. Brian Walsh is as different from John Dowd as it’s possible for two men, two human species to be.

  “That was a gorgeous meal, Jo,” says Kitty, setting down her knife and fork. She lowers her voice, glances at their sleeping mother. “Now, any chance of a drink? I’d love a drink; wouldn’t you, Brian? We’ll all have a drink to bless the nuptials!”

  Jo pours them whiskeys, a bottle of stout for John. At Kitty’s persuasion, they switch on the new transistor radio on the sideboard. Then, the happy couple coaxes Jo to pour a sherry for herself. “Go, on, it’ll just do you good. Pep you up.”

  They clink their glasses and, with the sherry, Jo feels the air in the parlor lighten. She feels as if they’ve been released from something.

  “Tell me,” says Brian in his indulgent child’s voice. “Tell me, Fi
ntan, what d’ya think of that oul’ dog on there, the dog on Wanderly Wagon, what’s his name . . . ?’”

  “Judge!” shouts the boy. “His name is Judge.” A smile flickers across his young features. He looks straight at his new uncle. He thucks his feet against the table leg again. “Judge is only a pretend. But I got a dog—a real dog! She’s a pup!”

  “Ooooh! Really?” Kitty sets down her whiskey glass. She claps her hands, her red nail lacquer flashing. “Aren’t you the lucky boy?”

  “Would you show me your new puppy?” Brian coaxes.

  The boy leads his new uncle through the house and up through the yard where Brian, in his suede shoes, detours around the puddles of cac bó. The child stands in the stable doorway, waiting for Brian to catch up. Out of the house, away from his mother’s dour and punishing gaze, this is a different child, a child who stands there rocking on his heels and giggling.

  He points to a black squirmy pup in the manger, lying there in the straw. “Uncle Brian!” he screeches. “Look at her! Look at my Rosie!”

  29

  TODAY THE MAN IN THE HAY-BALING MACHINE is working in one of the lower meadows. Ack-ack-ack goes the engine. It grows louder, more raucous through the open bedroom window.

  Ellen crosses to the bedside, scoops more crushed ice from a bedside bowl, holds her palm to Jo’s lips. Jo tilts the chin to obey. It’s like giving a dog a drink of water.

  Each ice piece slithers between the toothless gums. They have taken away her dentures. Nurse Ryan said there was too much risk of infection.

  Jo sighs loudly. Ellen goes back to the window again, to draw the drapes against the afternoon sun.

  “You had no right! None at all,” Jo shouts from the bed. “Jesus, Kitty, he’s my own son. And you my only sister. The least you could have done was to tell me.”

  Ellen shivers. For the past few mornings, Ellen has opened the door to this litany of disconnected sentences, words, past events. I am an eavesdropper, thinks Ellen. A stranger eavesdropping on the mismatched pieces of an old woman’s life.