Dance Lessons Page 16

  “My child. He was still my child!” Jo mutters. She is hallucinating, dreaming out loud. This is the most agitated that Ellen has seen her. “Kitty?” Ellen whispers to the sleeping face.

  “You should have told me, rang me down here at the house.” Jo says, the lips moving. In. Out. In. Out. Jo makes a little blowhole between her lips. The chest rising, falling rhythmically. The eyes have stopped fluttering.

  Ellen tiptoes closer to the bed. “Would you like Kitty to come here? Would you like us to find your sister?”

  The lips have stopped moving. Jo is fast asleep.

  Ellen checks her watch. She wishes Nurse Ryan would come early today. Should she ring the nurse’s mobile phone?

  Nurse Ryan eats the last of her pink marshmallow cookie, then she takes another sip of tea. Outside the hay baler has moved up the hill, to the far end of the meadow. So the kitchen at Knockduff is silent.

  “She’s been talking a lot about her younger and only sister. Kitty. Did you know her?” Ellen asks.

  Elaine Ryan has short, blond hair. She puzzles her small, pointed features. “Kitty? Sorry. No. I actually thought Jo’s all alone with no family left.” She shrugs. “I’m not actually from around here, myself.” She holds up her left hand, flashes a wedding band. “I was nursing and living in Dublin when I met my husband. He’s from Galway, so we moved down here. I retrained for community nursing. Except for the school parents’ committee at the kids’ school, I don’t actually know many local families. But I could certainly ask, ask around for you. Or Tom. Fitzgerald. He’d definitely know.”

  “I think we should try and find her, the sister. My late husband said she used to live in Dublin.” Ellen adds, “Look, I don’t want to be alarmist, but judging by Jo’s condition the past two days, it might be time.”

  “Yeah. She’s not doing that great, Ellen. Very soon she’s going to need more help breathing. A nebulizer to start, at least for short periods, then possibly oxygen.” Nurse Ryan surveys Ellen. “We can ask Tom, of course, but, well, that can be quite tough to handle. I mean, I’m not sure how long she can really go on like this.” Over her tea cup the nurse widens her eyes. “Or you.”

  “You look tired,” says Tom Fitzgerald, standing there in the scullery doorway.

  “I’m fine.”

  “Oh, your boyfriend, our Lorcan. He’s been asking when you’re coming for dinner again.” Tom flashes a wide smile. “I told him soon. I hope that’s true. Ruth loved meeting you. Get an agency nurse up here a few nights. This time we’ll go down to the hotel for a bite to eat. You need to get out and about. Come down the hill more often and sample our mad, Gowna nightlife.” He laughs at his own joke.

  Ever since that visit, that dinner in the doctor’s house, there’s been something extra contrite, effusive about Tom Fitzgerald.

  Ellen gives him a wintry smile. “Sounds good. I’ll call the agency.”

  He heads for the back door.

  “Oh, Tom? She was mumbling about her sister today, Kitty. Fintan’s Aunt Kitty. I think if she’s still alive, shouldn’t we contact her, find her? Let her come and say her good-byes?”

  Tom shrugs. “Last August, when I first came out here, when we were arranging for her admission to Galway Hospital, I asked Jo that. If she wanted me to contact anybody—her son. A sister, even one of the nephew-in-laws. ‘No,’ says she. ‘Nobody that’d give a tinker’s curse whether I’m alive or dead. Alive or six feet under the clay.’”

  “So did you know her—Kitty?”

  “Kitty? No. I didn’t. But my dad, God rest him, he knew them both—Jo and her sister—in his young days. He used to say that they were like night and day, the two Burke sisters—Little and Large, Pretty and . . . well, Jo was never any beauty. And my dad always said it was a kind of made match—between your in-laws, between Jo and her husband. Common enough in them days, the 1950s, especially where a farm of land was involved. The woman had to have a dowry—or a fortune they called it back then. And the man either had land or, if there were too many brothers, he had to marry into a farm. That or emigrate. Simple as that.” He shakes his head. “They were different times.”

  “Do you think she’s still alive?”

  “Even if she is, she’s no one our Jo wanted at her bedside.” Tom shrugs. “Unless she’s had a change of heart—which I doubt, to be honest.”

  Outside, the summer evening has grown chilly. Tomorrow the baling machine is scheduled to do the lower meadows, the fields between the house and the lower gate.

  After the doctor leaves, Ellen lingers in the back doorway, listening to the tractor tracking down the upper fields, heading down the slope for the house and the yard.

  30

  JO WATCHES THE BOY as he strides along the field’s newly ploughed ridges—his twelve-year-old’s gangly physique as he follows in the tractor’s noise and wake.

  There’s something birdlike about his long, stooping back. With the bucket of seed potatoes, he stoops and stands, stoops and stands. She plants the neighboring ridge, but a hundred yards behind him. Their Wellingtons thuck-thuck in the newly turned earth. Mother and son follow each other’s rhythm, their movements synchronized so that one is setting the potato seed while the other is walking, the plastic bucket of seed potatoes over the arm, pacing to the next planting spot. Stoop and stand. Stoop and stand.

  The crows are black specks in the grey sky. They compete with the tractor engine noise: curr-curr-curr. The birds seem to mock her woman’s stupidity, mock this ridiculous turn of events in the Dowd household.

  How will she tell her son, how will she bridge the staid silence between them to actually say the words? “You’re going to have a brother or sister.”

  Since she found out, since Dr. Fitzgerald did his test, she has come to think of the child inside her as a silly little thing, a rowdy, bumbling creature. Jo can’t sleep now. At night when she lies awake she wants to whisper to it, to give it fair warning.

  John is down in the house, in bed with a spring cold. Nowadays Jo thinks of her husband and her mother in the same breath: each complaining of drafts under the door, grumbling about the wheezes in their chests.

  She stops again. She straightens to arch her back. She turns to look back down at their house. From here it’s a top-down view of the slate roof, the smoke out of the chimneys, the upstairs windows. Don’t, she says silently to the child inside her. Don’t bother.

  In the house, Jo has turned from their new gas cooker or from the Formica table under the kitchen window to see her mother watching her. She has seen Mother’s knowing smirk—a smirk that vexes Jo, makes her rebellious, determined to somehow change things this time, to reverse the order of their universe.

  Next year, Jo Dowd will be forty years of age. Her sickly husband will soon be eligible for the old age pension. Before long, her pregnancy will be obvious to everyone. It’ll be a holy show before the whole parish when she travels down the hill to the shop in Gowna, or when they all get the hackney down to Mass of a Sunday. Everyone in the church will see the bulge under her coat. They’ll think that it’s either pitiful or obscene.

  For months, the village has been all talk about the renovations and reopening of the Gowna dance hall. There have been announcements off the Sunday pulpit, collection envelopes and bake sales and raffles to raise funds.

  These days, when he’s sent out for the evening milking, the boy brings the transistor from the parlor with him to hang from a nail on the stable wall. Down the upper yard in Knockduff come these mad, newfangled songs, “Tie a Yellow Ribbon Round the Old Oak Tree.” Or there’s a man called Gary Glitter who tells the Dowds’ cows that they’re his only true love.

  There’s a business man from the town who’s going to bring country music bands and disco outfits to the Gowna Hall again—every Saturday night. The rest of the week, the village hall will be available for parish events, concerts, and fund-raisers.

  “I’m going,” Jo announces one Sunday evening, after they have all come up the hill from
the Easter devotions, where the priest announced the hall’s grand-opening night, April 10.

  John looks mournfully from his fireside chair. “Ach, no,” he says. “It wouldn’t be right.” In your condition. It’s what he wants to say, but he, like their son, has grown afraid of Jo. He avoids her long, poisonous silences, he knows to slope and duck from the sudden typhoons of her temper.

  There’s a polyester trouser suit hanging in an upstairs wardrobe. It’s a suit that Kitty left behind last summer. She and Brian were on a flying visit, on their way to their summer holidays in County Kerry. The suit is a daft-looking thing: a turquoise jacket with patch pockets and three huge white buttons down the front, a white plastic belt in fake patent. There are matching turquoise slacks.

  That Sunday evening, Jo goes upstairs to try it on, then marches across the landing to the boy’s room and the full-length mirror on his wardrobe. The turquoise trousers are too short, and they sag slightly on her still-flat stomach. She turns and twists before the mirror, sucks in her cheeks and squints her eyes like those women on the telly, the women in the American comedy programs. In the mirror she reminds herself of someone’s oversized doll, a doll that someone dressed in the wrong clothes. She crosses and recrosses the boy’s bedroom, kicking her feet, twirling like a model and listening to the polyester slacks swishing. She almost laughs out loud. Slacks. They’d cover the tracks of her Wellingtons on her calves. Surely they’d be great fun on the bicycle? She smoothes her hand down over her stomach again, takes one more turn before the wardrobe mirror. No. You’d never guess. Never know that Jo and John Dowd are expecting a child.

  Every night that week, she sits in the kitchen with her sewing box, taking in the pants waist, letting down the hems and adding on a piece of matching white material to make the pants legs longer.

  Look at the height of her. Once, almost fifteen years ago, the woman in the bridal dress shop in Galway said that about Jo. That was a strange, other life. When she was twenty-five years old and about to be married. She must have a great appetite.

  Pedaling along the lake road, Jo sees the new lit-up sign flashing into the April twilight like an ambulance. Inside, the hall smells of new timber and concrete. In her blue trouser suit, she crosses to the ladies’ where the mirrors are all new and shiny, topped with new ceramic tiles and a line of domed lights. In the mirror she checks her new hair color—a deep brown rinse that covers the grey.

  The turnout for the grand opening is twice what anyone expected. On stage, a local band plays button accordion and fiddle and a man with a florid face and a crooning voice sings, “There was a wild Colonial boy. Jack Duggan was his name.”

  Jo sits in her old spot on the bench along the wall. She makes small talk with the other women as she crosses and uncrosses her legs, half terrified and half delighted by this new version of herself.

  One by one, the couples take to the floor—the men in pink, shiny faces, their starched shirts and their Sunday shoes. Some of the younger wives are dressed in polyester trouser suits or A-line miniskirts with zipped up, knee-length boots.

  Father Monroe asks Jo out to dance, for a stack of barley in which they kick and prance and twirl. But then, the priest is summoned to the tea room because someone has questions about the raffle.

  After that, another man asks her to make up a Siege of Ennis. Tonight, it’s as if Jo is watching herself there out on the floor, her new shoes clacking, this strange, frenetic version of herself. On the dance floor, she can forget the household she has just pedaled from. And except for this mad energy inside her, she could forget that, eight months from now, she will be delivering another child. As she dances she feels each man’s hand on her lower back. It sends ripples of longing through her.

  As part of the dance, she’s cast into the arms of a waiting man, a man in a pin-stripe suit with his tie loosened. When he twirls her around, his hands are big and strong; he marks the end of each dance movement with a loud, boisterous step.

  “D’you not remember me?” the man asks, his eyes glittery with drink. “You were a few classes ahead of me down at the school,” he says, through a gust of whiskey breath. “I’m Brendan. Brendan Quinn.”

  “Of course,” she assures him. Of course, she remembers him now, though in fact, she cannot quite distinguish which of the Quinn lads this is.

  After the Siege of Ennis is over, Brendan Quinn and Jo stay on the floor. His shirttail has escaped the waist of his trousers. He has a well-shaven, rakish face. They dance the next set, an old-time waltz, for which he makes exaggerated, sweeping steps so that several times, they bump into the older sedate couples.

  Brendan Quinn is home on holidays from London. He tells her that London is not what anyone around Gowna would think. That they probably think that London is lonely for men like him, but where he lives, there’s a mighty Irish social scene—dances and ceilis and pubs. There are nights, he says, when the craic is so good you’d swear you’d never left home at all.

  They dance set after set, and Brendan Quinn has the emigrant’s over-the-top gusto for old songs and old nostalgic chat. Between their dances, he inquires for other old school classmates who, in Jo’s memory, were not friends at all—just half-remembered names from among those grim rows of school desks.

  When the dance is nearly over, Jo weaves through the dancers to go to the ladies’ cloakroom. There’s nobody there, nobody collecting the tickets inside the hatch. When she turns, she almost collides with Brendan Quinn again, standing there just behind her.

  “Jo,” he says. “Give us an oul’ kiss. Just for oul’ times. Sure, there’s no harm in an oul’ kiss.”

  She lets him follow her across the ladies’ toilet, then into the ladies’ cloakroom, the farthest corner, where he backs her against the cold wall and jams his thigh between her legs, his tongue into her mouth. While he’s kissing her, she thinks of them up at home. Mother is in bed by now. The boy is sitting there gawking up at the telly as usual, the dog asleep at his feet. And John is dozing in his chair by the range, a scarf over his geansaí to keep out the chill. She sees them there as she pulls Brendan Quinn back toward her, draws him close for another kiss. She could devour him.

  She shows him a back entrance off the cloakroom, where they step out into the pebbled car park, under the dance hall’s flashing lights.

  As they walk down along the lake road, her mind is a blank of greed, seething greed.

  Brendan Quinn opens a farmer’s gate and they walk into a marshy, lakeside field.

  Behind a copse of furze bushes, he spreads his suit jacket on the ground for her. Then he tugs at her new blue pants as she listens to him unzipping himself in the dark.

  When he pushes himself into her, she feels the size of him, a proper size for a grown man, not like John. And there’s no harm to be done, no harm, not with the baby already there. She can’t get in trouble.

  Afterward they cross the wet grass and clank the field gate shut behind them. Her disappointment turns to desperation, a terrible desperation that she has been waiting all her life for something that just went, disappeared, before she had time to really feel, to hold onto it. “When will you be home again?” she asks, watching the whites of his eyes, the collar of his white shirt in the dark.

  He says that, with the new ganger he has beyond now, you just never know when you get holidays. Then, as if he can feel her growing panic he says, “Christmas, sure. Maybe Christmas. With the help of God.”

  Then Brendan leaves quickly, turning down the road for the village. Into the darkness, he calls good-bye and good luck. Alone, Jo walks back up the lake road to the hall where she’s just in time to stand with everyone else as the band plays the closing national anthem, Seo dhaoibh a Cháirde.

  With two other women, she walks back out into the April night, where she rolls up her trouser legs so she can cycle back up the hill home. The women retrieve their bicycles from the side of the hall and wheel them among the last cars left in the new tarmac car park. When they pedal away, the fla
shing marquee bulbs are finally switched off for the night.

  “Goodnight, Mrs. Dowd! Goodnight to you!” the women call to Jo as she turns up the Knockduff road for the hill and home.

  On the hill, she doesn’t get off to walk the bicycle but pedals madly, her backside jutting from side to side. Her coat flutters behind her, her cheeks burn, even in this dewy April night.

  Later, the pain wakens her. Gone. Soon gone, she tells herself. Just stomach gas. Or the size of Brendan Quinn. But the pain travels around her back, bends her in two. Then the bedsheet beneath her is cold, thick. It smells like a disemboweled rabbit.

  She tiptoes across the landing to the upstairs toilet while John snores on. The child. The unborn child has leaked from her. It has dislodged itself.

  John stands there, teetering sleepily into the light as she bundles the bloody sheets, a white stork’s bundle. She stuffs it in a corner until tomorrow and the daylight. Tiptoes back across the landing to the high cupboard for fresh sheets. There’s the boy in his bedroom door, wakened by the commotion. In his bare feet and pajamas, he blinks sleepily at his mother. She hears the dog flopping down off his single bed, the nails ticking across the linoleum. The bloody dog, Rosie. He’s sneaked her upstairs again.

  “Get back in bed,” she calls to the boy, a hoarse whisper, her fist raised to threaten a good clout.

  Back in their bedroom, John stands there in his long johns, that helpless look, the eyes wondering, asking, blaming. As she tucks and smoothes the clean sheets, she sees that look of his. Blame. Suspicion. What has he read in her face? They say a man knows. Smells another man. So it’s her fault. Dancing all night and pedaling the bicycle against the hill, lying with a man who thrilled and filled her. Her fault.

  Next afternoon, Jo walks down the avenue to the bottom field. She is heading toward the hazel rock when she sees Ned, young teenage Ned, the farmhand who comes to help on the land. His scythe rasps through the spring day as he cuts thistles in the front paddock. He stops and sets the scythe handle over his young shoulder to wave at her, obediently. Wave to his boss’s wife.