Dance Lessons Page 17

  Ma’am never waves back. Instead, she hurries across the grass toward the hazel rock and its dark, mossy crevices. In her left hand is what looks like a white bag of rubbish.

  31

  FATHER NOEL BRADLEY’S front door is set open to a tiled hallway. From a room at the end, what looks like a kitchen, comes music from a radio, a radio program playing Bach.

  “Hello?” She steps in out of the afternoon thundershower, calls down the hallway. “Hello? Father Bradley?”

  He appears from a bedroom door, wiping his hair with a green towel. He’s dressed in the same black spandex bicycle-racing shorts and yellow T-shirt. He’s obviously been bicycling in the rain.

  From under the towel he gives her a twisted smile. “Oh, hello. Ellen! Were you knocking long? Come in! Or you’ll get drenched.”

  She follows him down the hallway toward a kitchen with white cupboards, a long window that looks onto the garden. “Coffee?” he asks, his voice muffled by the towel.

  Inside the doorway Ellen stops. She swallows. Between the priest’s shoulder blades, his shirt has a giant sweat stain that she can smell from here. Fintan. Fintan always returned from jogging looking and smelling just like this.

  Now, in this kitchen in Ireland, she can smell him—her dead husband, coming pounding up the stairs and into their living room, filling their apartment with a man’s sweat smell. She shuts her eyes. But there’s only the smell. She cannot conjure the rest of him. Even Fintan’s voice is gone. Like a snatch of a radio song that was there, but then faded, gone.

  Father Noel drapes the towel over his shoulders, then he stands there with his hair spiked wet. Now he’s just a man in a faded yellow T-shirt, the name and date of some road race on the front. He’s waiting for something. Oh, yes. He’s waiting for her to accept or decline his offer of coffee. “Yes, Father. Actually, I’d love a cup.”

  “Noel, please.”

  “Noel.”

  He crosses to the sink where he reaches to turn down the radio volume. Then he fills the kettle and sets it on a small electric stove. She sits on a wooden stool at the kitchen counter. He stays standing.

  He turns from the stove, gives her that hapless grin. “How are you surviving up there? I was up that way last week, and I was going to call in on you but . . . Well, Tom didn’t think that Jo Dowd would want me, though I hear she’s failing.”

  “She’s holding her own. Her breathing is getting worse. But she’s comfortable at least.”

  He takes Ellen in. “And how are you doing?”

  “I’m all right. It’s not so bad up there. Quiet, peaceful.” She forces a laugh. “People pay big bucks for summer vacations on a genuine Irish farm!”

  “Still . . .” He reaches into a cupboard for a cafetière, calls over his shoulder at her. “Oh, d’you take sugar?”

  The coffee is strong and scalding hot. The priest sits at the corner of the counter, the stool looking impossibly small under his long, thin frame. He’s hung the green towel on the back of the door. “Noel, this isn’t totally a social visit. I’ve come for advice and parish information.”

  “Yeah?” He raises his eyebrows.

  “Jo Dowd had a sister. Kitty. Jo is obviously dreaming about her, their youth. In her sleep, or half awake, she also keeps asking me about a little girl, a child, some child she keeps dreaming about, mumbling to.” She raises her eyebrows in a question. Who?

  The priest shrugs. “This sister, is she still alive?”

  “I don’t know. Kitty lived in Dublin. I know Fintan liked her, kind of looked up to her. But Kitty and Jo had a falling out.”

  “Well, Jo fell out with a lot of . . .” Then he makes that zipping-the-mouth shut sign. “Sorry, shouldn’t talk ill of the sick, but I’m not telling you anything you don’t already know.” Across the counter, Noel’s look tells her that Tom Fitzgerald has been talking, confiding in his friend the young priest. The story of the estranged American son, a son who never came home—not even to his mother’s hospital bedside. It’s not exactly medical-privacy information.

  Ellen says, “I’m going to try and find her. Even if they’re estranged. A sister should know, at least be given the chance to come and say good-bye. It can’t be that hard to find her, can it?”

  Father Noel sets his coffee mug down. “You know, I can probably help you there. I can take a rummage through our own church records; send out an e-mail to some of the bigger city parishes in Dublin. Was she married, do you know?”

  “Yes. Fintan, my late husband, said she was. So she’d have had a different last name, too.”

  “Yeah, but if she married in a Dublin parish, she’d have had to get”—he makes quote signs in the air—“‘a letter of freedom’ from her home parish of Gowna. It’s bound to be in the records here. Somewhere. That, and I’ll just send out a general interdiocesan e-mail. Her general age, originally from Mayo, the parish of Gowna. But a good place to start would be just our own records. Oh, you have Jo’s maiden name?”

  “Burke.”

  “So Kitty—Kathleen—Burke.” The priest calculates numbers, years—“Probably married somewhere in the mid- to late sixties, early nineteen-seventies. Right?”

  “You’re the boss, Father.”

  “Noel.”

  They both laugh—a tension-release laugh. He seems glad, eager for her company. He leans closer toward her. “Of course, she could’ve moved to another place, changed her church, gone to a nursing home or a retirement place. And a lot of priests go away on holidays this time of year; then the rest of us are left driving around between parishes, delivering the instant dial-a-Mass.”

  Sitting there with Bach still playing softly from the radio, Noel Bradley’s voice and face are full of real concern. If she let it, this voice could make her stop and feel the entire weight of it—to step outside the routine of visits to Jo’s room and the daily roster of medications and treatments. And the yawning emptiness of her future, a future where she has to fly back to Boston, go hunting for a place to live in Coventry-by-the-Sea.

  She has a sudden urge to tell him, to confide in this man in the yellow T-shirt—to tell him about this past year, the months since Fintan died. Yes, and the years before that, how they fought and seethed and, sometimes, kissed and made up and made love. That she’s not the do-gooder daughter-in-law that he seems to thinks she is.

  “Ellen?” He softens his voice, almost to a whisper. Has he been reading her thoughts? “That day . . . that day you came here, a month back, when we first met. You didn’t know, did you? I mean, you’d never met Jo Dowd before?”

  She meets his gaze. “No. In fact, I’d been told . . .” Her voice cracks. She feels tears threatening. “Actually, my husband said his mother was long dead. They hadn’t spoken since he’d left here. And I don’t . . . I don’t know why.”

  He reaches to touch her upper arm, leaving his hand there. Through her cotton shirt, his hand feels good. His hand or his voice have the power to undo her, to make her run out of this house weeping—to run back out into the street to her car and drive away. Forever.

  “For whatever reason, no matter what happened between you and him, or him and her, you’re doing the right thing now. Staying. It’d have been a shame to just shift her to a nursing home. She wouldn’t have lasted the fortnight in a place like that. At least at home she’s getting the chance to have all these dreams, fantasies, to have the long good-bye. I wish more of us had your courage.”

  “I’m not so sure about that, Noel.”

  He raises one eyebrow, gives her a sad, twisted smile. “Oh, I am.”

  The rain has stopped. The churchyard smells of rain and wet yew hedges. They stand in his doorway. “I’ll give a look through the parish books tomorrow. Anything I find, I’ll give you a ring up at the house.”

  She suddenly hugs him. The priest’s eyes widen in embarrassed surprise. Then he hugs her back—tightly.

  “’Bye. And thanks.” She turns to walk back to the village street, leaving him standing there i
n the doorway. Walking through the churchyard, Ellen feels suddenly lighter, as if she has relieved herself of something, as if something long dead within her might have trembled awake, as if it might have a new possibility.

  32

  “BUT YOU CAN’T BEAT THE TRAVEL,” a woman is saying to Jo. Here, in her bedroom, the sick room off the parlor. First, the woman and her jaunty little voice are the dream, but then suddenly, the woman is right there, standing at the end of Jo’s bed. It’s that silly little woman in the red winter coat. Then suddenly, Jo and this woman are both standing in a supermarket, trolleys head to head. Maxwell House and Nescafé and Lyons and Barry’s along a shelf. Little Red Riding Hood. “. . . I do be always saying to my Mattie above at the house; ‘Mattie,’ I do say, ‘you’ll never beat the bit of travel to broaden the mind.’ Ach no, I think it’s great, I really do. And they’re making a blinkin’ fortune over there in America, in Boston, the pair of them, your Fintan and my Sheila. Sheila rings every week, Saturday evenings, just before I wash me hair. Of course, she’s only just up outta the bed at that time, the five hours’ time difference. ‘Reverse the charges, darling,’ I do say to her. ‘Reverse the charges because it’s worth all the money in Ireland just to hear your voice across the sea.’ And she tells me your Fintan’s raking it in, too, working in a pub for himself. Of course, Sheila’s at the waitressing, too. And the bit of babysitting and she’s working for a lovely couple now; they let her drive their car and everything, a spare car they never use. Imagine! But loads of work. Not like here. Lord, Mrs. Dowd, did you hear about the place, the factory below in Castlebar? They’re saying that’s next. Everyone cut back to half-time already, and some of them already got their lump sum and their ‘Cheerio now and thanks for nothing.’ Our Sheila says it’s nothing to make a hundred dollars in a night’s waitressing. Not like here. Ha, ha, ha, God, a week’d be nearer the mark. Well, I’m delighted Mrs. Dowd now, that I met you at long last. ’Cos my Sheila does be saying on the phone, ‘Oh, I met this grand lad over here, a lad from out Gowna way. Sure you must know the family, Mammy.’ ‘Well I don’t, darling,’ says I. ‘I’d love to tell you I do, but I don’t.’ And tell us, had ye a great time over at the wedding? Was that your first time over, in America, I mean? God, ye must’ve had a great time altogether. Sure they do everything big over there. And a Yank, Sheila told me. Married a Yank for himself an’ all.”

  In her room off the parlor, Jo is trying to open her mouth. Her lips are stuck together. They’re dry as sand. And the breath won’t come. Puff, puff, puff. Stuck. Then at last it all creaks open, like a vault. The voice is not hers anymore. The voice becomes the man out there in the kitchen on the television advertisement, except someone has slowed the television down, a record caught in the gramophone.

  “Oh, yes,” Jo is saying across their grocery trolleys. “Oh, yes. ’Twas a lovely wedding.”

  “But listen, Mrs. Dowd, I’ll be telling her now, so I will; she’s due to ring again this Saturday coming, just before I go up to wash me hair, the few words with her daddy first, oh, the apple of her father’s eye that one, and then we’ll be having the chat and I’ll be telling her how I met you at long last. Ah, isn’t it grand for them though, out there in a strange country? Nearly neighbors’ children, you might say. Or neighboring parishes anyways. And your fella after getting married for himself. I’m sure she’s a nice girl.

  “What? Yeah, what’s the name of that pub he’s in? Funny names on the pubs over there. Not like here. What? Yeah, oh, Janey now I can’t remember it either, though Sheila did mention . . . oh, wait now . . . no, it’s on the tip of me tongue . . .”

  The television down in the kitchen is clicking, the screen rolling, skipping. Click, click, click. Telly on the blink. Telly on the blink. Then, Mrs. McCormack, the little woman in the little red coat in the supermarket, is clicking her fingers. Click, click, click. “Oh, d’ya know I have it now,” she says. “Yeah. Jeez I knew ’twas christened after some man. Yeah, that’s a funny one all right. Sure, leave it to the Yanks. ‘The Paul Revere Tavern,’ whoever he is when he’s at home.”

  The Paul Revere Tavern.

  “What’ll you have there?” the boy is saying, leaning in over Jo’s sick bed. “What’ll you have, Mam?” He’s so tall, almost six foot to the ceiling. A white towel over his shoulder, a barman’s shirt and tie. “What’ll you have, Mammy? Tea? Coffee? Sherry?”

  The place is loud with bar voices. The shame. The cursed, deadening shame. My brilliant son serving drinks in America, wiping up tables after drunkards and wastrels.

  Nighttime. No telly. Extra flavor, extra quality. Above Jo’s bed there are the usual noises: footsteps across the landing, water rushing in the pipes. Yes. The American girl. Ellen. The girl he got married to. The girl from the American wedding.

  Jo shuts her eyes and there’s the boy and this American bride, both of them suddenly here, driving up the avenue toward the house. There’s a line of cars—big American cars with strange wings and silver things on the bonnet. The cars stop. The doors bang, and here’s her boy and the Yank girl holding hands and walking up toward the house, stepping along in the ice and sliding. They get up again, walk up the hill and fall again, all their wedding guests behind them holding hands, too. The American wedding party trudging and falling up the hill at Knockduff.

  33

  “A DREAM, ELL,” Fintan said over his shoulder from the mirror above the bookshelves in their tiny Brookline apartment. He was fastening his tie—the tie he was wearing with his new suit to his first professional job in Boston.

  Two days earlier, he had been appointed project manager at Mahoney Brothers Construction in Quincy.

  They have lived together for over six months now in this apartment that they found and moved into after that night, after that Thanksgiving night on Route 93 from New Hampshire. Their bedroom closet was stuffed with his clothes and hers. On Saturday mornings, she climbed down four flights of stairs to the basement laundry, carrying a laundry basket full of his jogging gear and his barman’s shirts from the Paul Revere Tavern and her blouses and underwear.

  “Back in Ireland,” he said, turning back to the mirror and grinning at himself in his white shirt and tie, “back home you’d dream about a job or a chance like this.”

  Every evening as she walked home from the T station and her editorial assistant’s job at Rheinhardt’s Publishing, Ellen had a constant feeling that she would turn her key in the apartment door to silence, emptiness, to a live-in boyfriend who had just run away.

  Somehow, she could not shake this feeling that they were just playing house, that someday soon it would end. Badly.

  His tie knotted, he crossed to the kitchen for his new suit jacket. There was a spring in his step, a joy, a lightness that she hadn’t seen before. Last night over their celebratory lasagna dinner, he thumped the kitchen table and said he was finally moving on—no more grubbing for a barman’s tips or apologizing for someone’s overdone hamburger.

  She went to the kitchen door. Stood there watching as he slugged down the last of his morning coffee. Here it was again—her feeling of impending doom. She said, “They do know you’re illegal, these guys, right? They realize you have no green card?”

  Fintan’s dream job offer had come three days ago. The two Mahoney brothers, Bob and Mike, who usually ate lunch at the Paul Revere, waited for the lunchtime crowd to dissipate and then told Fintan to grab himself a coffee from behind the bar and come and join them. They had a proposition for him, their Irish buddy. They wanted Fintan Dowd to join their company as a new project manager. They weren’t going to mess with job advertisements and interviews and all that malarkey. They’d just landed two big contracts, and they’d just moved their company into one of their own office buildings in Quincy. Yeah, they had a secretary and all that, but while they were out on the sites, they needed a guy with an education and a gift of the gab. And hey, that brogue of his wouldn’t hurt, either.

  “But what about your green card?”
Ellen asked again from the kitchen doorway. “I mean, these guys do know you’re illegal?”

  “Oh, would you stop?” Fintan laughed at her worry. “Look, it’s a known fact that if no American can fill your job, then the company will sponsor you for a green card. No problem. And look, Mike and Bob are more friends than customers. Honest. You hear about it all the time; a pretend-advertisement placed in the paper: ‘must speak Gaelic,’ ‘must bake soda bread,’ ‘must have experience as a thatcher.’ So when nobody—no Yank—applies, then you’re home free. Bingo. Apply for work papers. Easy.”

  Standing there, Ellen Boisvert, the daughter and granddaughter of paper-mill workers, felt a pinch of skepticism. Then she felt envious of her live-in boyfriend and his immigrant’s belief that America could still deliver you from illegal alien to corporate prodigy.

  After he kissed her and left for his new job, their coffee table was still strewn with the business management textbooks that he’d brought home from the public library. It was the happiest she’d ever seen him. For three nights, instead of watching TV he sat here studying and scribbling notes in the margins, and she thought that it must have been this state of being an educated, well-qualified man who poured beer for a living that had made him so moody and unsettled.

  After work she stopped at a corner store to pick up a bottle of white wine to have with their special dinner—baked chicken breasts in white wine sauce with a green salad. She climbed the stairs and turned the key in their apartment, crossed to their tiny kitchen with her grocery bags. The trousers of his new suit were draped across the living room armchair. The suit jacket. Where was it? And why was he home so early?

  In the bedroom, his running shoes were gone from the closet. His new dress shoes were all wet and rimed with street grit. She smiled to herself. He’d just gone for a quick run before dinner.