Dance Lessons Read online

  Pick me out there, Ellie, aw, go on, find me if you can. Ellen doesn’t have to search for her husband. Second row, fourth from the left. He stands taller than his classmates.

  Here’s a faded Polaroid of eight first communion children outside a church. Three girls stand in front, their freckled, pious faces under white fluttery veils. Five boys, including Fintan, stand behind them, all dressed up in miniature suits and ties.

  And then, here it is: that family photo. Fintan is flanked by his parents—his father stoop-shouldered, wearing the quintessential Irish tweed cap. The mother is taller than her husband, dressed in a mannish gabardine coat and stout winter shoes. Her lips are drawn together in sufferance.

  Ellen says her name aloud, “Josephine. Jo.” Jo Dowd who, if Sheila McCormack is right, lives in the house behind that farmyard gate where Fintan was hunkered down with his dog.

  Ellen checks the red numbers on the digital bedside clock. Five hours’ time difference. So it’s almost ten o’clock at night over there. Yes, she should have done this earlier, but she was terrified, working up the nerve. Or she was hoping to find something in these snapshots to tell her that Sheila was just plain wrong.

  3

  “COULD YOU SPELL THAT, PLEASE?” says the man at international directory assistance. He types in the address as Ellen reads it off Fintan’s birth certificate.

  “K-n-o-c-k-d-u-f-f, G-o-w-n-a.”

  Breezily, as casually as if Ellen were calling for an Interflora florist, he says, “A listing for that name: Dowd, Mrs. J. Hold on for the number please.” Then, the electronic voice: “The number you requested is . . . country code 353, 094 . . .”

  For the second time today, Ellen feels the air trap in her chest. She hears Sheila McCormack’s voice: Look, maybe she died lately.

  Across the ocean, there’s a double-barrel ring. Brrr-brrr. Brrr-brrr. Five rings. Six.

  Good, nobody there. It’s a telephone number that nobody bothered to disconnect. The man in International Directories made a mistake, too. There are two J. Dowds in Knockduff.

  “Hello?” A woman’s voice at last, very out of breath. “Hello?”

  Ellen forgets how to speak. Then she forces out the words. “Mrs. Dowd?”

  “Who is this?” Jo Dowd is still breathless. She has come to the phone from someplace far away.

  Ellen stares at the first communion photo in her left hand. The aged voice, the Irish accent dubbed over this face, the unsmiling face above the gabardine coat. Now it’s a voice down Ellen’s phone, in her studio apartment.

  “This is . . .”

  The breaths come harder, raspier. Jo Dowd coughs into the phone. Then, “I know who you are. You’re that Y—American. My son’s . . . You’re that girl, his wife? The one that sent the letter? Ellen B—something or other.”

  “Yes.”

  Silence again. And that awful, labored breathing.

  “What d’you want?”

  “Pardon? Mrs. Dowd, I . . . I don’t want anything.”

  “Your letter came. Is that what you’re ringing for? Look, I don’t know what ye do over there in America, but in this country, we tell a person about . . . about a death the right way, not making a public show.”

  Hack, hack, hack. Jo coughs again, then sets the phone down with a clunk. But Ellen can still hear her. Hack, hack, hack.

  Christ. Christ.

  Then Jo picks up again, the voice phlegmy. “There’s nothing here for you, you know. If you think you can get anything, a red farthing out of me or this place, you’ve another bloody think coming.”

  With the phone, Ellen crosses to her front window. She watches the grey stone buildings beyond the pine trees, the swatch of summer sky above the campus rooftops. She’d like to scream back at this voice in her ear, this woman 3,000 miles away. When I got up this morning, I never even knew you existed. Your son wished you, told you dead. So take that. And that.

  “Mrs. Dowd. I don’t want anything. I just . . . I just wanted to make sure you really knew, that the letter made it to you. I’m sorry to have disturbed you. Good night.”

  She waits, expecting the old woman to apologize, to beg her for information on her dead son.

  Loudly Jo Dowd hangs up.

  In the house in Patterson Falls, New Hampshire, Ellen can hear the TV warbling from the living room. Her father, Thomas Boisvert, is watching Wheel of Fortune.

  “I’m thinking of going to Ireland,” Ellen says, the words just there, announced to her mother down the telephone before it’s fully informed or decided inside her head.

  Why has she called home? Why is she telling her mother this? She’s thirty-nine years old, and they live almost a hundred miles apart. And, married or widowed, her parents knew or know little of her Boston life. Yet it has always been like this: Ellen sitting on a phone or visiting for summer or Thanksgiving and narrating, presenting her life to them. So here she is now: sitting in her studio apartment, with the detritus and snapshots of her husband’s Irish life spread out on the coffee table while her mother-in-law’s voice floats and echoes around this shadowy room, under the eaves, behind and under the bed.

  Now, she’d like to say it again, as if repeating her intended trip might force her mother’s permission or approval.

  “Your father thinks he has a job at that new gas station out on Route 4. Early mornings, four days a week. Won’t affect his social security. They said they’ll let him know tomorrow.”

  “Mom, there are some things that Fintan left . . . unfinished.” She hears the hollowness of her own words. She knows that Donna Boisvert has no truck with such vagaries, the lexicon of wellness magazines and new-age hogwash.

  Dutifully, the Boisverts traveled south to Boston for a wedding and a funeral service. But during or after either event, Donna has made no comment, no commiseration to her widowed daughter. In Donna’s mind, the drive south to a city said what it needed to say.

  The wife of a laid-off paper mill worker, Donna Boisvert believes that keeping busy is the best approach to life’s surprises or heartaches.

  Now Donna says, “Your father’s gonna be upset when he hears this, that you’re flying over there after those terrorists last year, the plane and all those people and those buildings in New York.”

  Outside Ellen’s window, the evening sun glitters, a golden-pink reflection off the west-facing windows of the Academy’s dormitories. A Friday night. By now, Sheila McCormack is at home and tucking her kids in. Kissing them goodnight in fluffy, lamp-lit bedrooms, promising them that Mummy’s always here. Or she’s sitting in a living room telling her husband, “You’ll never guess who I met today!”

  Donna says, “Oh, did I tell you they put poor Ann Cote in a nursing home? Yeah, just two weeks ago. So there’s another place with a sign outside it now; though beats me who’ll buy a place like that. They done nothing with it since poor Jean passed.”

  “No,” Ellen says. “No, you didn’t tell me that.” And then, “Look, I’ll call you when I make a final decision. I mean about going to Ireland.”

  Silence. Silence is Donna’s disapproval. “Mom? Tell Dad good luck with the job.”

  4

  THE ENGINE GROWS LOUDER, a revved-up growl, then the fields disappear from underneath the Aer Lingus jet.

  The plane bumps twice. The head flight attendant announces, “Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Ireland. We ask you to remain seated until the plane comes to a complete stop. For those of you traveling on with us to Dublin . . .” Then she repeats the message in Irish. A Cháirde, Failte rom-haimh go hÉireann.

  I’m in Ireland, Ellen announces to herself, staring out the window at the approaching concrete, the low, grey clouds.

  Just yesterday evening she took a bus to Boston’s Logan Airport. In the departure lounge, she watched the sunlight deepening over the marshes and the town of Nahant across the harbor. While she was dozing in this tiny cramped seat, the world has fast-forwarded to daylight, to morning, morning in Fintan’s country, where people are already s
tanding out of their seats, the overhead luggage compartments snapping open.

  On the car radio, the drive-time DJ is sending special birthday greetings out to Aisling McIlroy out there in Stillorgan, who, he’s told, from a very reliable little birdie-source, is celebrating the big one today. “Twenty-one today! Wow, Aisling! An’ listen girls, behave yourselves at that party tonight!”

  Ellen turns the car heater up again. The headlights flash on. Shit. It’s her second time doing that. A car coming in the opposite direction flashes back at her. Damn. She tries another car switch.

  The night flight has left her feeling chilled and dry-eyed.

  On the opposite side of the highway, the morning commuter traffic passes in a steady stream. In the cloudy May morning, there’s something amusement-park silly about all of it: the cars, the roadside trees, the houses and passing fields. She’s exhausted.

  Then the highway gives way to a one-lane road and the woman on the car radio is inviting listeners out there to call in after the commercial break. Call with their opinions. About what? Ellen wonders as she speeds along, watching for the green road signs for Galway.

  By Galway City she has been driving with the window rolled down all the way. She’s still freezing, but she’s got to stay awake. Everything stands at this strange, televised distance. Even the ocean, a sudden swatch of grey water sitting beyond a housing development. It seems unreal. She drives, shifts gears on automatic pilot. A man on the radio has called in to say yes, their family, his child was a victim of playground bullying. “Absolutely,” the man is saying. “Nearly every day of the week, my son came home telling us about more name-calling, more playground insults.”

  “But surely you complained about all this to the principal or the board of management?” the radio-woman asks in an inflected, radio-empathy voice.

  “Well, Marian, my wife and I did set up a meeting with the principal. And she basically told us . . .”

  Today? Ellen wonders. Should I check into my Gowna hotel, the place I booked via phone two nights ago, just wash up, wake up, and then go find that farm in Knockduff? Find Jo Dowd’s house?

  “. . . Marian, we found the best and only approach for the parents of the bullied child, really, in this situation . . .”

  No. I’ll explore around the village first, get the lay of the land. Play tourist. Will Jo Dowd drive me away? Take a shotgun? A broom?

  Suddenly, Ellen remembers Viktor’s story. Nine months ago now, and there they were, Viktor and her sitting there on their verandah drinking wine on a warm, fall afternoon. She thinks of those parents and families in desiccated little towns and villages in Guatemala, left with nothing else to do but to beg, to concoct, fill in the blanks of their immigrant children’s lives.

  So will Jo fall weeping and contrite at my feet, begging for life details of a dead son?

  So what, just what, will she tell Jo Dowd? Or what parts should she tell or leave out? Their fights, their silences, her own poisonous thoughts toward her husband?

  She’s stopped at a traffic circle. A roundabout. Here’s Fintan’s voice in her head, telling some story about his days at college in Dublin. So there I was, on me bike coming up to the Stillorgan roundabout.

  She tries to read the green road signs at the Galway roundabout. An Lár, City Center. Bothar na Trá. Salthill. A car behind her toots the horn.

  N-84. Yes, that’s what she needs. The N-84 to County Mayo and Gowna.

  Jo’s voice: There’s nothing here for you, you know.

  Here’s a Holiday Inn hotel, some housing developments, then a huge shopping mall. Another traffic circle. A roundabout.

  The radio woman’s voice: “Now, we’ll be back after the break.”

  The road runs through a wide marsh. Bog. It’s a bog. Across the brown scrubland, the wind buffets her tiny black Fiat.

  Then the road suddenly narrows, the landscape turns green again—a checkerboard of tiny fields and stone walls. Now there’s a hole in the sky, where a shaft of sunlight waits to break through.

  On the car radio, a man is delivering a mid-morning news bulletin: A rail workers’ strike is still looming, talks continuing. A Dublin raid on a house of illegal asylum seekers.

  The road gets narrower still. There are ranch houses and gateways and a barking dog. Huge, black rolls appear in these fields. They remind her of gigantic pieces of licorice candy. It’s hay. She’s seen it in the States someplace, in the farms of New Hampshire.

  She reaches a village with a Y junction and a stone church. The left road has a luminous green sign: “Gowna.” An Gabhna. Five kilometers.

  On the Gowna Road, she slows behind a farm tractor, the man’s torso jiggling, keeping rhythm with the vehicle’s motion. She downshifts to second gear. Now here’s the sun at last, a pale clear light leaching across the meadows, turning everything to Technicolor green.

  At a straight stretch of road, the tractor man looks behind at her, and waves her on and past him.

  Overtaking him, she waves her “thanks,” then catches his eye, studies the ruddy face. The man is about fifty. A Dowd cousin? A neighbor who’s known the Dowds all his life? Then she pulls around and in front of him, just in the nick of time for an approaching car. Ridiculous. Sleeplessness has set her thoughts tumbling, racing.

  The open fields give way to trim front gardens, a footpath where a woman in a white sweatshirt walks briskly with her black Labrador puppy.

  Suddenly, Ellen wishes the road would go on and on. Or that she could turn around and drive back to Galway.

  The sun has grown hot through the windshield. She rolls down the window to that smoky air. Turf. A turf fire.

  We used to save turf in the bog; stripped to our waists and footing turf in the sun.

  She takes this last curve in the road. Then there’s Gowna: a street with its double row of houses, the sky tunneled between the slate roofs.

  5

  SHE’S BEEN STANDING in the carpeted lobby of Flanagan’s Hotel for over ten minutes, studying the patchwork of yellow sticky notes along the flocked wallpaper above the reception desk, last year’s wall calendar with its sepia photograph of one of the shops she’s just driven past. “Season’s Greetings from Gowna Meats.”

  At last a man, fiftyish, potbelly inside a red V-neck sweater, comes through the door marked “Bar.” He’s on his cell phone. “Right, right, well, sure, that’s the six-marker, isn’t it? Ha, ha, ha.” Then he looks up and sees Ellen there, waiting.

  “Look, I’ll ring you back, Vinnie? Hah? Yeah. Five minutes. Right.” He stuffs the phone in his jeans pocket.

  “Oh. Hello! Sorry, are you . . . ? Are you there long?”

  “I booked two nights ago. Boisvert?”

  “Oh. Right.” He looks around him, as if he’s forgotten something, then takes his place behind the antique wooden desk and an open ledger book.

  “Ah, you’re Miss B—sorry, you’ll have to give us a hand here with the name, I’m afraid . . .” He grins up at her. Except for the double chin, he looks like a hapless schoolboy.

  “Boisvert.”

  “Right. French? But . . . aren’t you the girl that rang and booked from America?”

  “Massachusetts. My grandparents were French Canadian.” The man gives her an impassive smile. He’s obviously heard it a million times: American tourists rattling off their hyphenated heritages.

  “Gerry.” He reaches over the desk for a hurried handshake. “Gerry Flanagan.”

  So this is actually the hotel owner. Flanagan’s hotel.

  Gerry Flanagan pushes the Visa slip across at her, then opens a wide drawer to produce a room key. “Now. I put you down at this end, number 12, in the back. Most people want the back. No noise.”

  “Look, do you have anything in the front? I’d prefer the front.”

  Gerry frowns. “But . . . most people—”

  “The front’s fine, honest.”

  I want to watch for her. If she’s out and about, buying milk and bread in that village store acros
s the street, walking up to Sunday church.

  He reopens the drawer to produce a new key, a new smile. He leans out over the desk. “Now. Just give us your lugg—”

  He frowns at her carry-on suitcase with the Aer Lingus tags. “Ah, the rest of your bags, Miss Boisvert? In the car are they? I’ll go out the back here and get them.”

  “No, this is it.”

  Then Gerry Flanagan takes her in, head to toe, not bothering to conceal his obvious sizing her up: this petite American woman in jeans, a white cotton shirt, shoulder-length curly hair clipped back each side. And just a carry-on bag for a week’s stay.

  “Right. You’re third along the landing on the right.” He tilts his head toward the beveled-glass door he’s just come through. “We’ve finished breakfast a good while ago. But I could probably get the girls to do you up something. Bit of hot toast or a bowl of porridge. Or a coffee? You must be fuc—well, a bit on the tired side after the flight and the drive and everything.” He’s still eyeing her, that puzzled look, obviously failing to place her among his annual gallery of American hotel guests. “We’d a busy enough oul’ weekend in the bar. Though the fishermen aren’t in yet. Next week maybe, at the earliest. Great fly-fishing around these parts, you know. You’re not after a bit of fishing, are you?”

  A yawn escapes, making her eyes water. “Hmm? Oh, no. No fishing.”

  In room 13, the sheer curtains balloon in over her double bed with its white bedspread and starched pillows. The sun has made it all the way through, but it sits behind the slate roofs, leaving the village street in shadow. She sits on the edge of the bed, looking at someone’s upstairs living room across the street. On the ground floor, under the window, the village store, “Gowna Foodmart.”

  Flanagan’s room has a cheerful red carpet, two matching wall lamps and a wall phone with phone cord dangling above the headboard. On the opposite wall is a mirror with a long, white shelf underneath—her dressing table. She has already brushed her teeth, combed her hair, set her small brown barrettes on the sink in the small, white bathroom with the towels in mismatched shades of pink.