Dance Lessons Page 4

  Cars pass, each one going clank-clank over a manhole. A delivery van stops outside Gowna Foodmart, and a man in a blue nylon coat hops out and walks around the side to a set of sliding doors.

  Two farm tractors rattle past. Then another car, this one with a bad muffler.

  The voices startle her, carrying up from the sidewalk. There’s a whiff of cigarettes. She leans to see three teenage girls and two boys, almost directly underneath her windowsill. They’re dressed in maroon sweaters and grey pants, striped school ties. Funny, it’s the exact same uniform as Coventry Academy. It’s as if the two places, the two countries are suddenly transposed.

  One girl wears fishnet stockings and high-heeled, winklepicker shoes. One boy’s trouser seams are ripped all the way to his knees; they flap-flap as he walks along.

  Ellen is about to close the window, to draw the curtains and snuggle into bed, when the girl in the winklepicker shoes looks up, sees the woman leaning out and gawking from the hotel window. The girl nudges the others, points, then shouts up: “Hey! What the fuck are you looking at?”

  6

  BEHIND THE LINE of yew trees, a lawnmower drones, the sound growing closer, then fading again. Now there are just the crows cawing in the trees behind the church.

  Ellen stands there in the pebbled churchyard to take in St. John’s Church, Gowna—the stone Gothic steeple against the fading, evening sky. This is the church where someone took that snapshot of first communion Fintan with his mother and father.

  An hour ago, she woke up in her little hotel room, hungry, shocked at the red numbers on her bedside clock: 5:10. Her first day in Ireland and she’s slept all afternoon.

  After a shower, she walked out into the hotel landing, up and down past the other room doors. She listened for sounds of other guests—a radio playing, someone on a phone, a bed creaking. But the hotel’s upstairs was silent.

  She went downstairs and past the bar door, where she could hear a television turned up extra loud. She thought to go in there but kept walking instead, craving a stroll and some fresh air.

  In the church vestibule, the heavy wooden doors are fastened back to reveal a modern church with a central aisle and rows of pews in blond wood.

  She has not been inside a church for years. Unless you count the hospital chapel where they held Fintan’s memorial service.

  In Boston, neither she nor Fintan belonged or attended, so Fintan’s colleagues in the fund-raising department at Boston Central Hospital suggested the chapel for his service. She was grateful and relieved. In those days after his death, she wanted to be told where and when to show up, when to kneel, stand, when to shake hands, and when to eat an egg salad sandwich.

  She dips her hand into one of the stone holy water fonts and crosses herself, “Nom du père et du fils et du Saint Esprit.” The words, the remembered entreaties of her childhood.

  The light is stained-glass bright over the pews. At the top, just beneath the altar, two older women kneel, heads bent, their whispery prayers echoing through the empty sanctuary. Someone has lit four candles. Along the side walls, the stations of the cross are little sculptures of polished brown wood. Jesus falls the first time.

  Ellen Boisvert genuflects at a pew just inside the door. One of the women glances around at her, frowns, then goes back to her prayers.

  Ellen bows her head, smells the soapy whiff from Flanagan’s bathroom hand soap. Pray, she tells herself. God knows you need some prayers.

  Kneeling here, her face buried in her joined hands, she could just as easily be back in St. Jean Baptiste in Patterson Falls, New Hampshire, amid that smell of damp Sunday coats and old women’s perfume. She remembers that old man who always played the organ to accompany their school choir: Sánctus, sánctus, dominus déus . . .

  At one end of Patterson Falls stood the French church. At the other end, the Immaculate Conception, the Irish church. When the archdiocese closed the French church down, crying insufficient funds, Thomas Boisvert and all his fellow mill workers took up a special collection to support their French church as their fathers had before them. They wrote, petitioned, opposed the Irish bishop. They lost. So for Ellen’s last years in high school, the Boisverts and the other Franco-American families grudgingly attended the Immaculate Conception whose Irish American parishioners they found too blustery-loud, too pretentious, too damn smug.

  She can’t pray. So she buries her face deeper in her cupped palms and strikes a bargain with the gods or with universal karma or the kindness of the universe. For what? Deliverance. Délivre-nous du mal. Deliver us from evil.

  She grabs onto the word. Yes, Délivre. Let me drive out there, out to that house in the country and meet a woman who weeps on my shoulder, makes me some tea, and then we both deliver up eulogy pieces of a son and a husband. And then, let her tell me something simple, as innocuous as a falling out in which a mother and son kept a transatlantic stalemate because each was too stubborn to make the first gesture.

  Outside, the crows have grown louder in the yew trees. The lawnmower is silenced. At the end of the churchyard path, Ellen turns onto the village sidewalk and collides with a man wheeling a racing bicycle, the spokes going tick-tick-tick.

  “Sorry. I didn’t see you there.”

  “No. My fault.” He’s red-faced, fortyish, with an old-fashioned hair part to the side, a T-shirt over his black Lycra biking shorts. A whiff of sweat. She remembers that day, the day she saw Fintan—or conjured him—outside the Risen Planet Café. The day she found out that her mother-in-law was still alive.

  He brushes his hands on his T-shirt. “Sorry again.”

  “I’m okay. Honest.”

  He flashes her a smile. “You’re American.”

  “Yeah. Just arrived this morning. Nice village. Pretty church.”

  “Oh, thanks. Thanks. We do our best.”

  “Well, I must be . . .”

  “Ah, are you staying around or just passing through?”

  “No, I’m staying at the hotel.”

  “Aw, lovely. Yeah, sure, Gerry and Phyllis are grand people. They’ll look after you all right.”

  “Well good-b—”

  “So how long are you here for?” She catches it, his quick glance toward her ringless left hand, her marriage-ring finger.

  “A week.”

  “Grand time of year for a holiday.”

  She looks beyond him to the little newsagent’s shop with an ice cream and an Irish Times advertisement in the window. In the evening sun, Gowna looks pretty, colorful, like someplace from which you might send a postcard.

  “What part?”

  “Hmmm?”

  “What part of the States are you in?”

  “Boston. Well, no. I live there part time, I’m actually moving to the North Shore.”

  “Oh, lovely. I was living over there myself for three years. I was in Washington, actually. Catholic University, did you ever hear tell?”

  The penny drops with her. Catholic University. So this is the pastor, the village’s priest in his bicycle shorts and a sweat-stained T-shirt. “Yes, of course. I was supposed to go to college there—I mean in Washington—myself.” She waves a hand. “But . . . that was years ago.”

  “Really? Where?”

  “Georgetown. I had an academic scholarship.” Does she sound boastful? She hadn’t planned on blurting it out like this, to a stranger, but she can tell he’s impressed.

  As he should be.

  The scholarship letter came to their house in Patterson Falls her senior year in high school. It brought the same tight-lipped silence as Louise’s absconding to Florida to join her high school boyfriend at a motel job.

  One night, when she was studying in their sisters’ bedroom—no Louise now, just Ellen—Thomas Boisvert made a rare visit to his seventeen-year-old daughter’s room. He sat on the very end of her bed. He wouldn’t meet her eyes. “You’re not going. Not to a place like that. There are colleges up here, in Manchester, Plymouth, even in Boston. Catholic colleges, for
girls and families like—”

  “—Like us?” Ellen finished for him, appalled at the surge of pure, white hatred for the small man perched on the end of her bed. Hatred for all that they were: factories, mills, years upon years of silent resentments.

  But her parents wouldn’t budge. She mailed back her refusal to Georgetown. By then, she had convinced herself that her parents were right. That September, she took the bus south two hours to Saint Bonaventure College outside Boston, where good Catholic girls got a good education.

  The Gowna priest cuts across her thoughts. “So why didn’t you go—to Georgetown, I mean?”

  She shakes her head. “It’s a long story. So you’re the pastor here.”

  “Head bottle-washer. ‘Jack of all trades and master of none’ as they say.” He sets the bicycle on its kickstand, then extends a handshake. “Noel Bradley.”

  “Oh, hi, Father. Ellen Boisvert.”

  He has the wide-open, hopeful smile of a lonely man. “So, is this your first time to Ireland?”

  “Yes. Yes it is.”

  Another glance at her left hand. “So you’re traveling with friends or . . .”

  “No, no. I’m all alone. Just me.” Then, before she can dither, she hears herself say it. “Actually, I was hoping to visit some relatives. The Dowds. You know them?”

  He purses his lips. “Dowd. Dowd. Dowd. I’m only here two years myself.” He clicks his fingers. “Oh, not Mrs. Dowd. Old Mrs. Dowd? Jo? Above in Knockduff?”

  Her breath quickens. “Yeah, that’s her. Well, I’ve never met her. Yet. Kind of a long-lost cousin and all that.” She presses on. “Actually, I knew her . . . son. In Boston. Fintan, did you know him?”

  Another furrow appears between the eyes. “Her son? No. No. I knew she was a widow, of course, but I never heard tell she had a son in America.”

  “So she’d be your parishioner then?”

  Caution passes across his features. There’s something he can’t tell. Sanctity of the confessional? “Well, yes, Knockduff is part of Gowna Parish.”

  “Does she come to church on Sunday?”

  He gives a purposeful laugh. It’s an avoidance tactic. “Well, no. No. At least, not since I’ve been here, anyways. But, well, the elderly often don’t, you know, especially traveling that distance. And, of course, she doesn’t drive. She has no car up there.”

  Ellen remembers old Ann Cote, the neighbor who her mother said has finally gone into St. Francis’s nursing home in Patterson Falls. Years ago, regular as the clock, the pastor from St. Jean Baptiste came on Fridays to bring her communion. It’s part of a priest’s weekly roster to visit the elderly, the shut-ins.

  “But don’t you go out there? For house calls?”

  He gives her a pained look. “Look, I’d rather not say.”

  She flashes a tight smile. “It’s okay, Father. I guess I shouldn’t’ve asked.”

  He smiles back. Relieved. “Ach, no bother. So you’re going out there yourself, are you, up to visit her?”

  “Yes.”

  “So she’s better? I heard she wasn’t that well, a while back, there. The end of last summer. I only just heard it. This is a small place. But she was in the hospital anyways, I know that.”

  Ellen recalls that phlegmy, breathy voice down the phone. Two weeks ago now, the night she met Sheila McCormack. “She’s ill?”

  He shrugs. “Well, that’s the funny thing. She came out of the hospital, then I made a few inquiries, you know. Well, the main thing is that I heard she’s doing a lot better now. In fact, someone said they saw her one evening, out for a bit of walk for herself. So whatever it was, she must be grand now.”

  “Good. I’ll give her your regards.” She watches his guarded expression.

  “Do. Yeah, do that. Give her my regards.”

  She begins to walk away at last, though she knows that he’s still standing there and still watching her. “Oh, and . . . ah . . . Ellen?”

  She turns. “Yes.”

  He seems to know something, read something in her features. “Look, if you need anything. Or maybe you’d like to come and sit in the back garden some evening and we’d have a beer.” He shrugs. “I just thought you might need a bit of company, that’s all. A bit of a chat.”

  Then he wheels his bicycle toward the church.

  7

  THE FIRST STONE plops through. She picks up another. This one plops, too.

  No, this way, Ell. See, it’s all in that flick of the wrist.

  When he came to visit her at her Cape Cod summer job, or, later, when they drove to a lake in New Hampshire, Fintan always skipped stones over the water. He could stand there for hours just watching the stone skip, the plash-plash sound. He said that it reminded him of his youth. So once, he must have stood here on this pebbly lakeside beach, on the shores of Lough Gowna, doing what she’s trying to do now.

  She can hear music across the water. It’s coming from someplace beyond those trees, the other side of a narrow, overgrown headland. It must be someone in a boat or a car.

  He told her of a drowning here, out on this lake—a group of men from the opposite side in County Galway, out for a Sunday afternoon’s fishing. Nobody ever figured out what happened, why a group of local men, experienced boaters, suddenly went down.

  Ellen narrows her eyes to make out the town on the opposite side, the town where families, neighbors, lovers prepared Sunday supper, or woke from an afternoon doze and wondered why their husbands weren’t home.

  Just like she did.

  When he drowned, he was attending a colleague’s wedding on Martha’s Vineyard—a girl named Abigail who worked with him in the fund-raiser and development department at the hospital.

  The day before that Vineyard wedding, Ellen had driven north to the Academy for a late-summer, pre-semester faculty meeting.

  The night before that, she and Fintan had fought. So they weren’t speaking. Again. This time, it was all over a newspaper she’d thrown out in the recycle box, assuming that he’d read it, when he actually wanted an article in there. Or he said he did.

  A newspaper. A forgotten pint of milk. His perpetual TV watching.

  That summer, their last summer, it didn’t take much to set either of them off.

  That morning, she was gathering up her things and car keys for the drive north, when she saw that he’d left a sticky note on her briefcase: “Six o’clock. Joshua’s Bistro.”

  The reminder nettled her. Of course she damn well remembered that a whole gang of his colleagues were meeting for pre-wedding drinks at a fancy bar in the South End.

  She hated when he did that—in the midst of a huffy fight, he assumed that she could and would just put on an act, appear in a nice dress at whatever glittery fund-raiser he was attending for work or for one of his many Irish American organizations around Boston. She hated that she was supposed to pretend that they hadn’t spent the evening before shouting at each other, dredging up their verbal ammunition.

  As she drove north along Route 1, her fury seemed to stoke itself. Jesus, she had to do something. Something. Just tell him she was moving into the Coventry apartment. A temporary separation. Just for a while. She needed to get some real space, just to clear her damn head. And then, the doubts crept in: had she really caused this latest fight? Was she really as inconsiderate, forgetful, stupid as he told her she was?

  Yes, she had to officially leave him. At least for a while. And she had to tell him. Now. This evening.

  She stayed for the entire faculty meeting, telling herself that she had to, that it had nothing to do with her rage, her wanting to teach him a lesson. Then she got caught in evening commuter traffic on Storrow Drive.

  When she got to Joshua’s Bistro, their cocktail table was full of empty glasses, and Fintan and his friends had already paid the check. They were exchanging tipsy good-byes.

  Across the table, she caught his tight-lipped fury.

  Later, back in their Beacon Hill living room, he exploded. You promised, fucking pr
omised.

  Their words spat back and forth, back and forth under the ceiling fan in their living room. She accused him of sucking up, that all he damn-well cared about were outward appearances. Not her. Not them. Then, she stamped to their bedroom where she wanted to get out of her hot, sweaty work clothes. At the door, she turned with her final shot: “And I’m not going to that wedding tomorrow. You can tell your asshole friends whatever you goddamn want.” Then she slammed the door.

  Later, she watched him from the bedroom window, four floors down, in jogging shorts and sneakers, jogging up Beacon Hill. Even full of beer, even on a muggy August night, he never missed his evening run. While he was gone, she carried his pillow and one blanket to the living room couch.

  Next morning, Saturday, she pretended to be asleep as he tiptoed in, took his pressed shirt and his summer suit from the closet. For that wedding on the Vineyard, a grand, outdoor extravaganza on the bride’s parents’ oceanfront estate, she’d spent more than she should have on a blue cocktail dress and silver strappy sandals. Now she wondered if the store would take them both back. Refund her money? Lying there listening to her husband getting ready in their bathroom, the picture of herself standing there pleading with a blank-faced store clerk made her cry. She’d bought the dress on sale anyway; marked down and then marked down again. But the loss of the dress, the sapphire blue dress that she’d never wear now, made her weep into her pillow.

  Tomorrow night, she thought. When he drives home from that ferry. I’m going to tell him.

  She listened for his car starting up in the street, then she got up and walked out to their living room, hoping, stupidly, for an apology, a note begging her to take a later ferry to Vineyard Haven, to come to the wedding after all.

  She looked on the fridge, the TV screen, her briefcase, the usual spots where he left notes. Nothing. Nothing but that pillow and the indentation of his body from where he’d slept on the couch.