Dance Lessons Page 2

  Róisín sticks her pink little face beneath Ellen’s. “Are you my mommy’s friend?”

  Sheila smoothes back her daughter’s blond hair and says, “Yes, pet. This is Mommy’s friend from a long, long time ago.”

  Ellen was right. Sheila McCormack-Caputo was one of those Irish girls who had turned up at those late-night Dorchester parties. “Jesus,” Sheila says, “Weren’t we daft back then, pure daft?”

  Sheila says that she’s living out in Westwood now, a development of reproduction Colonial houses with lots of room for the kids to play with their neighbors. They have a very active mother and toddlers’ club. Oh! And every third Thursday of the month is dads’ night babysitting and girls’ night out, a potluck dinner and lashings of wine.

  “Look, why don’t you come some Thursday?” Sheila asks, delighted at her own ingenuity—at having something to offer the bereaved. “Or are you living up here now? I mean, since Fintan . . . ?”

  “No. Well, yeah, sorta. I have a small faculty apartment where I teach . . .” Ellen inclines her head. “Coventry Academy. It’s just a ways out of town, you’ll pass it on the way to the beach . . . I’ve been there two years now.”

  “Oh, yeah. That’s a prep school, right? Róisín here is starting kindergarten in September. Of course, we’re sending her to a private Catholic school, not . . .”

  Oh yes, Ellen remembers this about Fintan and his compatriots. When they met each other around Boston, the immediate questions and comparisons: what suburb, what job, what they had or had not achieved while living in America.

  “So you came up here two years ago?” Sheila’s voice is deliberately casual.

  “Yes. Came up and interviewed in the summer, then started that September. September 2000.”

  “So you’d moved?” A tight, embarrassed laugh. “Of course, I’d lost touch really. Jesus, must’ve been a fair oul’ commute for Fint—”

  Why am I enjoying this? Why am I relishing the suspicions rippling across this Irish girl’s pretty features? “No, Sheila. Not ‘we.’ Just me. I moved up here part time. I went back home to Boston on weekends, on all the school holidays.”

  Ellen’s red-wine headache is a vise grip on her temples. Outside, she watches a man and woman wheeling their bicycles down the sidewalk, bump, bump, bump over the red-brick sidewalk, then stopping to read the menu in the café window. Bed pans, she thinks, studying their black bicycle helmets, the straps under their chins. The bike helmets are like inverted bed pans. Why have I never thought of this before?

  “Listen, how did the mother, poor oul’ Mrs. Dowd, take it all?”

  Ellen draws her attention back to the Risen Planet Café and its empty tables littered with crumpled napkins, sandwich baskets, dribbled coffee cups. In the kitchen, someone has turned up the radio. Sheila’s question is a mistake, of course. There is no “poor oul’ Mrs. Dowd.”

  In 1985, when Ellen met Fintan, he said one of the reasons he came to America was to put his mother’s recent death behind him. His father had died when Fintan was a child.

  “Hmmm?”

  “His mother. Fintan’s. Back home. I mean, it must’ve been an awful shock.”

  Things are skidding, piling up inside Ellen’s head. No, no. Mistaken identities. Sheila is misremembering some other old woman from back home.

  “Fintan’s—mother—was—dead,” Ellen says, in the patient, steady voice she uses with her French students. You must hand that paper in by Wednesday. “When I met him. She had just died a few months before.”

  Sheila reaches across the table, sets one hand on Ellen’s forearm. “Ellen, look . . . oh, this is bloody awful . . . oh, Christ. Look, Mrs. Dowd is not . . . Sure, doesn’t my mother know her back home? I mean, they’re not friends or anything, well, we’re from the town, Ballinkeady, and the Dowds are . . . well, you know . . .”

  “From out in the country. The village of Gowna, named for Lough Gowna, its nearby lake. And they once owned a hilltop farm, the house and land that Fintan had to sell after she died.” Ellen stares at Sheila, waiting for verification. Oh, hang on, I have the wrong Dowds. But Sheila presses harder on Ellen’s arm. That whispery, sympathy voice. “Look, maybe she died lately, in the last few weeks. Mam did mention that she hasn’t seen her in town lately, in the shops.”

  In town. In the shops. But she was still alive when Fintan and I met, when we married, when we shared an apartment and later, our condo on Beacon Hill—the condo I cleared out and sold.

  “Are you sure?” Ellen’s voice comes high and pleading.

  Sheila purses her lips and nods. “Yeah. Josephine Dowd. Jo, they call her. The husband is dead all right. Dead for years; he was a lot, lot older than her. Or that’s what I used to hear Mam saying. But Jo, the mother? No. Mam and her used to have their little chats whenever they met in the supermarket”—Sheila makes quotation signs in the air—“the two mothers commiserating over their long-lost, emigrant kids and all that.”

  The kitchen radio is turned up louder. The tables are cleared, wiped down, though Ellen cannot remember the last lunch customers leaving, the two waitresses coming to clear the tables.

  Katie, the baby, wakes up, stares at Ellen, a stranger’s face, then starts to howl. Fiachra wakes, competes with his sister. Sheila lifts her baby from the stroller, sniffs at her lacy bottom. “Sorry, Ellen,” Sheila shouts over her children’s wails. “D’you know if they have a baby-changing table in the bathroom here?”

  “Yes. It’s . . . over there, down the hall to the left.”

  Sheila stands there, her baby bag over her shoulder. She’s considering a good-bye hug, but decides on a handshake instead. She shouts over her children’s screaming. “It was great to see you. And I never realized. I’m sorry. So sorry.” She glances toward the bathroom door.

  Ellen leaves, too quickly, taking her shoulder bag from the back of a chair. She leaves her newspaper behind on the table. The air stopped, trapped in her chest. She must get outside.

  On the sidewalk, there’s Fintan jogging down the street. It’s the first time in weeks, months, when she’s conjured all of him—his sweat-spiked hair, the patches of sweat up the back of his T-shirt, his long, pale legs flashing in the late-afternoon sun.

  2

  THE COVENTRY ACADEMY campus sits in that sudden, after-semester quiet. The white school vans sit parked outside the long, one-story janitor’s shed. From the lawns behind the library, a lawnmower buzzes, grows louder, then fades again.

  She takes the pedestrian shortcut between the Science and Humanities buildings, then crosses the trampled, foot-worn path across the lawn to the pine-needle parking lot and the faculty apartments. The apartments are six small studios in a converted carriage house, three upstairs, and three down.

  Ellen thumps up the outside wooden stairs, then across the second-floor verandah, past her neighbor Viktor’s front door. The blinds are drawn in his front window. Yesterday, just after graduation, he left for Manhattan and a gig teaching teenagers in a summer theater camp.

  Her room is chilly. Even on the hottest day, the trees keep the place cool and smelling of dead pine needles. She snaps up her window blind; it thwacks against the upper window frame.

  The clock tower chimes the hour. Three o’clock.

  Her bed under the eaves is still unmade from this morning—when she woke late and decided to walk up to town for the newspaper and an early lunch. In the corner next to the bed is a tower of storage boxes, stacked on top of each other, labeled with black marker.

  When she sold their condo, she had the movers deliver her furniture to her parents’ basement in Patterson Falls, New Hampshire. But she stuffed her and Fintan’s personal stuff into these boxes—his sports memorabilia, books, ornaments from their old living room, the birth and marriage certs and passports. Last September, she closed the door on their Boston condo for the last time and drove the last of their shared lives here, to this room.

  Her leather school satchel sits abandoned on the faded red armchair. Behind
her, the fridge clicks and hums.

  At Coventry Academy, Ellen Boisvert’s grades are turned in on time or early. At faculty meetings, she is attentive and silent unless she has something of substance to say. For those who don’t bother to look any closer, colleagues assume a quiet, nerdy timidity. The more flamboyant teachers tease her for her adherence to set curricula, for her quiet, unassuming orderliness. They would never admit this—not even to themselves—but they assume and dismiss all this nerdy timidity as a by-product of Ellen’s small-town, New Hampshire upbringing, the working-class kid’s adherence to the established rules.

  For the past two-and-a-half years, she has remained outside the staff lounge’s avant-garde cynicism, the lunchtime exchanges on art or politics or pedagogy, the faculty friendships that are underpinned by a fierce and watchful rivalry.

  If she has made any friends here, it has only been with Viktor Ortiz, her neighbor. There is an unspoken assumption that, as kids of tough, public-school families, they somehow belong together.

  Her first overnight here was on a Monday at the end of September, two-and-a-half years ago. It was her first week on dorm duty. Climbing the wooden stairs, she felt a sudden release, a sudden lightness. She thought, When I open my rickety little door there will be nobody there, waiting, nobody sitting watching the TV, the air charged with some unnamed disapproval. She could drop her satchel where she wanted, place the milk on the wrong shelf in the fridge, walk away and leave a teabag stain on the trash can’s swing-top cover.

  All that week, she spent her evenings here reading in this red armchair, looking up from her book to savor this new thing, this new silence.

  From her parents’ TV-loud house in Patterson Falls, New Hampshire, to her college dorm rooms to her and Fintan’s first shared apartment, she had never been truly alone. All that week, it was as if she could breathe all the air in the room.

  On Friday, she drove impatiently south, over the Tobin Bridge and west along Congress Street, waiting at the traffic light to turn up their own narrow street on the most western edge of Beacon Hill. After a week away, she was ready to be home, to be a wife again. She envisioned a sweet home-coming. He might have dinner ready—a surprise. Or maybe they’d go out, somewhere warm and romantic in the North End.

  Oh yes, she thought. Every marriage needed this—a little separation, then a sweet, sweet reunion.

  “I’m ho-ome!” she sang, opening in the door to their tiny, 800-square foot condo.

  Fintan was in the kitchen.

  “Hey!” She tried again, walking down the short hallway.

  The kitchen floor was covered in wet newspapers.

  His backside jutted out from underneath the kitchen sink. She felt a familiar pinch of dread. He ducked back out, hitting his head. “Fu-uck, fuck, fuck!”

  “What?” She started toward him.

  “I got home and the shaggin’ place was half-flooded!” You should have been here. That’s what his poison look said.

  He shook his head, narrowed his eyes at her, and went back to his task. She stood there with her joy deflated, the weekend suddenly gone sour. Fintan was good at that.

  Later, it would be the same for a breakdown on the highway, a lost door key, his missed job promotion. They were all somehow her fault and, therefore, hers to fix or soothe.

  After that, that first winter, it was easy to concoct reasons to stay overnight here, in this room at the academy where she could breathe all her own air.

  Above the bookshelves, between the two front windows, she has hung three unframed posters—freebies from the foreign language textbook suppliers who send her samples of teachers’ books and guides. There are two Paris street scenes in black and white. The third is of Rue Cartier in Québec City. Though Roland Boisvert, her paternal grandfather, had never left their Quebecois farm, never set foot in a city or town until he traveled south over the border to Patterson Falls, New Hampshire. Just as, except for her college graduation, her wedding, and Fintan’s funeral services, her parents, Donna and Thomas Boisvert, have rarely left their raised ranch in Patterson Falls.

  For almost thirty years, Ellen’s sister Louise, five years older than Ellen, has lived in St. Petersburg, Florida, with the leathery tan to show for it.

  Now Ellen pours herself some ice water from the pitcher in her fridge, takes some Tylenol from the narrow kitchen cabinet. She takes the water out onto her second-floor verandah. Today, there’s no music drifting from Viktor’s apartment. Downstairs, Kierstin, the academy’s new creative writing teacher’s, car is parked under the trees. But there’s no sign of Kierstin.

  Ellen sits on a creaky rocking chair, sets her water on the ground. Go away, she chases the Irish voices in her head—Sheila’s then Fintan’s.

  And what, just what do I care? What’s it got to do with me? So I married a man who lied, who wished his own mother dead. Lying is the smallest of crimes. God knows he was guilty of plenty others. And she. Guilty, too. So stop. Go back in, take a nap to sleep off this headache. Or go get some boxes to start dismantling this room, get ready to live somewhere else.

  Once, a year after their wedding, when his final green card came through, Ellen suggested a visit to Ireland. She wanted to see where he’d grown up. Wanted to visit the aunt he talked about so much, his Auntie Kitty.

  His voice always softened when he spoke of her. Aunt Kitty used to come and visit from Dublin. As a boy, she brought him nice things. A bit of a wild woman, me Aunt Kitty.

  But now that he was legal to live and work in America, Fintan had just started night college, a fast-track MBA. Money was tight. Always tight.

  Ellen takes a sip of water, downs the two Tylenol.

  The campus silence is unnerving. Ellen doesn’t like Kierstin the writing teacher with the pale face and the long, sweeping hair. But now, she wills Kierstin to come walking across that lawn, to appear from between the pine trees.

  One Monday afternoon, two weeks after the funeral, Ellen came back from class to a bunch of white roses and a bottle of wine on her coffee table. Viktor. Later, as the fall evening grew dark and chilly, they sat on this verandah with a bottle of cabernet. He listened to her grief-induced, disjointed ramblings, her unfinished thoughts, sentences that turned into out-loud questions to herself.

  Relatives? Irish relatives. Shit. She hadn’t thought of that. Until now. Yes, Fintan was an orphan, but surely there were cousins, uncles, aunts, great-aunts back there, back in County Mayo? How or when was she supposed to let them know?

  “Simple,” Viktor said. All over his town in Guatemala, you saw it all the time. An advertisement appeared in the local paper: “The family of . . . please contact.” It was always an American phone number, a U.S. police department, a town where a hotel housekeeper, a landscaping worker or office cleaner had been found dead in a motel or a crowded apartment. False papers. No papers. A Spanish name long anglicized, simplified. So they put an advertisement in the local paper. “Por Favor, Ponerse en contacto.”

  Then, everybody in that town or village comes to visit and cry. Poor family. But they are the lucky ones. The ones who know. Because in that same town or village, there are mothers, fathers, families who spend years wondering, waiting.

  “Ellenita,” Viktor said. “I will look it up for you, find that newspaper and we will put an advertisement, in that small village, in that county in Ireland. This is something I can do for my sad little Ellenita.”

  Later, when Ellen woke up to her darkened bedroom, she recalled the photos that Fintan had once shown her, the snapshots he’d brought with him from Ireland. Lying there and staring at the early-winter sky through her bedroom skylight, she saw those black-and-white snapshots of a younger Fintan, of the Dowd family. There was one outside a church, at Fintan’s first communion. The father looked as if he should be the boy’s grandfather. His mother was dressed in winter clothes and frowning at the camera.

  No. Those dour faces told her. No newspaper advertisements. Not here, not in this chill, damp place.


  For weeks she put it off. Then one afternoon, just before the Thanksgiving break, she forced herself to sit and write a short, one-page note on campus stationary, “To the family of Fintan Dowd, Gowna, County Mayo, Ireland.” Inside: “I regret to inform you that your relative, Fintan John, passed away on August 22 last. Please contact me at above address or telephone if you require further information.”

  All last winter, she expected to see an Irish postage stamp among her office mail. Or sometimes, when the light was blinking on office voice mail, she fancied that she would hear an Irish voice, an Uncle John or an Aunt Brigid, or the Aunt Kitty from Dublin.

  But there was nothing.

  Through the trees the Academy clock tower chimes the half-hour: 4:30.

  In her verandah rocking chair, Ellen tries to remember which storage box holds his family photos.

  From the snapshots scattered across her coffee table, the young Fintan stares back at her from a black-and-white photo. Short trousers and knobby knees, hunkered down, his arm around a black-and-white collie dog. “Rosie,” Ellen says aloud in her silent room. Yes, that was his dog’s name.

  She remembers herself and Fintan, all those years ago, sitting on his narrow bed in that bedroom in Dorchester, their legs stretched out in front of them, he setting out each snapshot along the cheap bedspread, like he was dealing playing cards.

  I must’ve been only about eight in this one. That was my little Rosie. The voice softened, wavered as he spoke of his pet. Rosie who died of . . . And when? Had he ever said?

  Here are official school portraits—a double row of children outside an old stone building. Little girls with severely cut bangs. Boys in cardigans and V-neck sweaters. Four teachers are seated front-row center. That’s Mrs. Galligan; “The Gallows Galligan,” we used to call her. Oul’ bitch. Get the back of that one’s hand and you felt it for a week after. And that was the headmaster, Mr. McGrath. “The greyhound,” we used to call him. Used to nod off asleep in his teacher’s chair and then we’d all kick up holy hell . . .