Dance Lessons Read online

  In their tiny galley kitchen, Ellen made coffee, all of her movements leaden, weighed down as the day grew hot outside. The ceiling fan went thup-thup-thup.

  Sitting at their kitchen counter, she egged herself on. Run some errands. Clean this place. Fold up his blanket off the couch.

  She pictured that ferry and its freight of stylish and educated thirty-somethings standing up on deck—the girls in their high-heeled sandals and dresses; the men in linen suits and bright, billowing ties.

  Last year, Ellen and Fintan had been invited there for a Labor Day cookout, to that old stone house over the sea, the sloping hydrangea gardens with their guest cottages and perennial beds. The porches with the solid old rockers, worn and shiny from a hundred family summers and croquet games on the lawn.

  It was all a million miles, a universe away from those guzzling, boozy parties in Fintan’s old apartment in Dorchester. And Fintan loved, courted, craved all that Brahmin, old-money style.

  A man named Grant, cousin of the bride, befriended Fintan in one of the wedding tents set up on the lawn. After a long and boozy conversation, Fintan’s newfound friend suggested a night sail, just up and around the headland and back. It was a chance to see the house and the family compound from a completely different and even more beautiful vantage point.

  After the boat capsized, Grant made it to shore with a fractured elbow and bruised ribs. A doctor, also a wedding guest, made a call to have him medivac’d to a Boston hospital.

  That night, Ellen woke to the bedside phone ringing. Fintan. Drunk, feeling contrite; calling to see how she was. Apology? No. He never apologized, but a call. Yes, she’d settle for that.

  It was the Vineyard Haven police.

  She rushed, half-dressed, through her darkened living room, past the couch where her husband had slept. At Woods Hole, she took the first ferry out.

  The search took three days—three days in which the bride’s family insisted she stay in that house over the sea. She dozed in a strange, oceanfront bedroom. She dreamed that Fintan was scrambling up the rocks under her window. She woke in the dark, certain she’d heard him calling her name.

  A nude swimmer found a white dress shirt floating from a rock off Gay Head Beach. An hour later, they brought back the body of a young male. The police brought her to identify him—a blue, swollen face. His hair was set in a crazy, salt-spritzed frieze.

  Every night for the ten months since, that face keeps appearing in her dreams.

  She walks along the beach at Lough Gowna, the lake water lapping, knocking the pebbled stones together. The rhododendrons seem to be growing wild here, the blooms lush and purple, the leaves thick and waxy. In the spots where the rhododendrons block the path, she pulls the branches back to walk along the lakeshore. Of course, the lake and the houses on the hillside above are different, less vivid and exotic than the Bórd Fáilte pictures from the web sites she looked up before coming here.

  I’m glad, she thinks—glad that it’s not like those cutesy little photos. Except for the tinny sound of someone’s radio, the sounds of Kenny Rogers singing, “Ruby, don’t take your love to town.”

  She walks out into a clearing, onto another pebbled beach and a public boat launch. A black station wagon is parked up on the sloping path from the main road, its back to the lake, the front hood pitched upward. The two front doors are open so that someone can hear the car radio all the way down on the lake where there’s a lone rowboat tied against a wooden dock.

  “The shadow on the wall / Tells me the sun is going down,” screams the song on the radio.

  The man in the rowboat is bent over with his back to her, the crack of his ass showing above his pants as he yanks on an outboard motor. Even from here, even over the music, there is something unwieldy and enraged about his movements.

  “Hello!” The voice startles her. Turning, there’s a little girl, about seven years old, standing there in a pink sweatshirt and hot pink leggings. She has come from around the front of the black car.

  “Hi,” Ellen says. “Is that your car?”

  The girl rocks on her heels. “My dad’s. It’s my dad’s car.” Then she points, “An’ that’s our boat.”

  “It’s a very nice boat. That must be your dad.” This little girl doesn’t seem to have been warned not to talk to strangers—especially strangers who appear out of nowhere, at a lonely lakefront boat launch. Or perhaps she has, and that man is going to come now, yank his daughter away.

  The girl sucks the end of the string on her sweatshirt hood. “My brother’s here, too. We’re sleeping at our granny’s house. Mammy drove us here yesterday. Mammy has a different house. That’s where we live. But then other times, we live at Granny’s house, ’cos Daddy lives there, too.”

  “Right,” Ellen says, glancing up toward the path behind them. Somehow, she feels she should leave. “It’s great to have two houses.”

  “Deirdre,” the man calls from his boat. “Deirdre, come over here!”

  The little girl stares at Ellen. She senses she’s in trouble. Then, she takes Ellen’s hand and starts to walk down the slope to the water’s edge.

  “Howr’ya,” the man says, straightening up and standing with his feet set apart in his boat. He has jet-black hair that falls over his forehead in greasy bangs. His hands and shirt are smeared with engine oil. “She’s a bit of a chatterbox. Talk the hind leg off an ass if you let her.”

  “She’s fine,” Ellen says, feeling the little girl’s hand in hers. “She was just telling me about your boat.”

  “You’re here from America?” He nods past her shoulder, up past the main road and the matching white rental houses that dot the hillside above the lake. “Staying above in one of the holiday homes?”

  “No, down at the hotel.”

  He wrinkles his nose. “Better off. I heard they’re a pure rip-off. You’d nearly build a house for what that bastard’s renting them for. Sure, he threw them up there one summer. Got the land for a song. JCB machinery there one day; houses the next. I heard some of the roofs are leaking already. Sure he sees them comin’—the poor tourists. Though Gerry Flanagan below gives nothing away either.”

  A bitter man, thinks Ellen. A man with something acerbic to say about everything and everyone. He pushes the black hair out his eyes, balancing effortlessly in his boat.

  “Sure, enjoy yourself anyways,” he says with a sardonic, twisted smile. “You staying long?” he shouts above the twangy song on the car radio.

  “A week.”

  “That’s long enough. Deirdre, let the nice lady go now. She has things for doin’. Here, come into the boat and help Daddy. We’ll go for a spin later, the pair of us. Where’s your brother anyways?”

  “’Bye,” Ellen says to the little girl, who’s back sucking on her sweatshirt string. “It was very nice to meet you.”

  The man reaches a hand to tempt the little girl away across the pebbles, to help his daughter climb into the boat. Over his daughter’s head, he says to Ellen, “Listen, we might see you down in Flanagan’s some night if you’re having a pint.” Then he dips his head and winks at her.

  8

  WHEN THE SHOP DOOR pings open, the women stop their early morning chatter to stare at the woman in the bright yellow rain slicker. There are five of them gathered around the checkout counter at Gowna Foodmart. One is drinking tea from a paper cup. Ellen has the feeling that she’s intruded on some private morning ritual.

  The woman in a blue nylon shop coat leans past her friends. “Can I help you there?”

  “I’m just looking,” Ellen says, then ducks down one of the supermarket’s aisles. Behind her, they start chatting again. One woman laughs, a loud, screechy laugh. Young, Ellen thinks. All of those women are too young to be Jo Dowd.

  There’s a morning radio show playing, the pop music loud and tinny through the store’s intercom. Canned vegetables. Cleaning stuffs, toiletries, coffee, tea. As she turns each corner, she imagines an old woman there, an old woman hunched over her shoppi
ng cart who would look instantly familiar. But except for a young man stacking bottles of dish soap, the aisles are empty. This is ridiculous, she tells herself as she turns into another fluorescent-lit aisle.

  Ellen finds what she came for—a roll-on deodorant, a bottle of apricot shower gel to replace Gerry Flanagan’s little hotel soap bars.

  At the checkout, the women part to let her through.

  “Keeping showery,” says the shop woman, nodding toward the village street and the hotel.

  “Yes,” Ellen says, puzzled. “I haven’t used this brand before, but it looks really nice.”

  One of the women titters. It’s the one with the paper cup of tea.

  “The day,” says the shop woman. “We’re supposed to get showers nearly all day—heavy enough, too, they said there on the radio earlier.”

  “Oh!” Ellen says, feeling stupid. It’s only her second morning here, and already, there’s something about these Gowna people that can do that—make you feel foolish, an innocent. Not in the know.

  The young Latvian girl with the long, dark hair is standing in the hotel dining room, polishing juice glasses. “Coffee today?” the girl asks, taking the pot and leading Ellen to the table inside the net-curtain window—the same table as yesterday.

  The window gives onto the back of the hotel with its line of beer kegs against the kitchen wall. There’s a wooden picnic table and benches. Today, the Heineken picnic umbrella drips with morning rain.

  Yesterday, after her visit to Lough Gowna, Ellen drove back along the road that hugged the lake. The landscape was green and fresh and vivid. Lough Gowna and its islands glittered between the trees. Ireland of the postcards and the glossy coffee table books. But it was all tinged by her memory of that man in the boat—how he looked at her. She could still see his twisted, bitter smile, that lewd wink.

  A week, she told herself. I’m just here a week—just long enough to visit my mother-in-law, to meet my husband’s ghost. To put that ghost to rest.

  Back in Gowna, she ate an early hotel supper and took another stroll up the main street, back up to the churchyard where, this time, there was no sign of the bicycle-racing priest, Father Bradley. She felt strangely disappointed. She wanted a friendly face, a glass of wine and the comforting oblivion of small talk, that stranger-on-the-plane conversation.

  But the church doors were shut tight. The pigeons hoo-hoo’d at her from the trees behind St. John’s.

  Now the Latvian girl places a big plate of bacon, eggs, sausage, black blood pudding, fried mushrooms, and grilled tomatoes in front of her. It’s enough for two people. “Enjoy your breakfast,” says the girl, in her stilted English.

  “Would you know where Knockduff is?” Ellen asks.

  “It’s a man?” asks the girl.

  “No, a place.”

  The girl frowns at her. “I’m here. I live in Ireland, work for Mr. Flanagan”—she holds up three fingers—“three, three months.” And then, “Martha. Martha knows.”

  Martha the cook is older, a hard-bitten little woman who stands there in a hairnet and a white chef’s jacket. “There’s nothing up in Knockduff,” Martha says. “Only the one family.”

  “The Dowds?” Ellen says, watching the woman’s interest pique.

  “Yeah, and she’d be a fair age now, that one. But it’s only about two-and-a-half miles, really. You go down through the village here, all the way along the lake. After the lake, start watching for an ould dance hall, nearly fallen in now. Once you pass that hall, watch for the turn, up to the right. Just turn up that road and keep going, up the hill, up into the sky!”

  “Thank you.”

  “Are you looking at property up there?” Martha the cook asks.

  “No.”

  Martha seems disappointed, as if Ellen is supposed to say, tell more.

  “Is your breakfast all right for you?” The cook nods at the plate, gives a little sniff.

  “Delicious,” Ellen says. Then she spears a fried mushroom just to prove it.

  Her wipers thwack-thwack against the rain. The same morning discussion program is on the car radio, the woman’s smooth radio voice. “But Justin, surely that’s exactly the point here! I mean, if a local housing authority is actually being asked to . . .”

  A man interrupts: “Ah, yes, but Marian, it’s crucial that we don’t skew the two issues here.”

  Today, Lough Gowna sits down there as a mass of pewter grey. The road narrows, dips, and turns. She slows for three bicyclists, their rain capes floating behind them, their crumpled, drenched faces in her rearview mirror.

  After the hillside vacation cottages, the chalets that the man said were a rip-off, she starts to watch for that dance hall, watching for a roadside honky-tonk sign.

  There’s a sudden clearing in the roadside trees. She turns in an overgrown parking lot where the weeds catch on the underside of her car. The dance hall is a long, low building with boarded-up windows. “Keep Out!” says the painted sign nailed to the padlocked double doors with flaking purple paint. Over the tops of the double doors and the boarded windows is a white plastic marquee sign with a huge slice of plastic missing to show the bare lightbulb sockets inside.

  She leans over the steering wheel and angles her head to see it all—Gowna Dance Hall.

  In Boston, a certain song on the radio would remind him of this place. Once, in that first apartment that they shared in Brookline, the first place where they lived as a couple, he suddenly jumped up from the breakfast table and took her hand and twirled her around that tiny kitchen in a sort of jitterbug two-step. We loved this song. We couldn’t wait for Saturday nights. Fancied ourselves as real John Travoltas.

  Now she thinks, Wait till I tell him that the dance hall is almost ready to fall in.

  God. Shit. Her mind slipped again. No, Ellen, you won’t tell him—about this or any part of Gowna.

  She tries to picture this place thrumming with music, the twang of electric guitars. She pictures smoochy young couples sneaking out through that door, out into the marquee lights and around the back to those swampy fields.

  She used to feel jealous of this place, of that entire secret life that he had before her, before America.

  When did she stop feeling jealous? At least two, even three years before his death. In fact, she never felt jealous at a Boston party anymore, or at some Irish American fund-raiser dinner, where some businessman’s wife cornered him at the open bar and cooed over his Irish brogue. Strange, Ellen thinks now. Funny how a derelict old dance hall can become only that, divested of its mystery, a borrowed memory. It’s just an old place in the rain, as silent as the grave.

  The chassis creaks, she shifts to second gear for Knockduff Hill. It feels like she’s driving to the top of the world. She eases the car up into the ditch, sets the handbrake against the hill. She zips up her yellow raincoat, pulls up the hood. The stone pillars, the wide gate give onto an avenue that leads up between the paddocks to a two-story house in the distance, perched at the top of the hill. She could drive all way up there, but this is better, the quiet, stealth approach.

  She reads the handwritten sign attached, wire-strung to the stone pillar: “No hill-walkers. No shooting.”

  She fiddles with the gate latch, holds the gate against the hill’s gravity, then latches it shut behind her. In the rain, Jo Dowd’s house stands grey and stolid against the leaden sky. In the distance, there’s that second gate, the farmyard gate where Fintan posed for a photograph with his collie dog.

  The sound stops her. What? She crosses the wet grass, steps around the pools of fresh cow dung to follow the coughing sound to an island of overgrown bushes and trees—a single outcropping in the middle of this otherwise pristine grazing.

  Several sets of eyes peer at her from under the dripping trees. Of course, cattle. They’re sheltering here, amidst that smell of rain and moss and wet rock.

  A hazel rock. I used to play in the hazel rock. Pluck and eat the hazelnuts, crack them with me teeth even though Mam sai
d it’d crack every tooth in my head.

  As she steps closer to the house, the smell of a turf fire grows stronger. This was the first smell she got that day two days ago when she landed in Gowna village.

  Just before the farmyard gate, Ellen stops on the avenue. She pushes back her rain hood to stare up at the house, watching for a face inside a window.

  Jo

  9

  May 2002

  JO DOWD reaches for her winter coat and a bobble knit hat from the back of the kitchen door. It’s late May, summertime, but she’s perished to the bone.

  She buttons up the coat, pulls on the cap, and pulls the back door shut behind her. Then off with her, the walking cane tap-tapping across the lower farmyard to the orchard wall where her farmhand Ned’s car sits parked, the car’s roof dotted with white apple blossoms from the trees.

  Go, go, go. She commands herself. Down as far as the hazel rock and back again.

  She opens the yard gate and sets off down the avenue.

  Every day she sets herself these tests of strength. Though for the past week, it’s been harder. Yesterday, she made it a quarter of the way down when the hammering started in her chest. But she pushed herself onward. Jo Dowd was never a peata, a woman for mollycoddling.

  Tap-tap-tap. Down the avenue between the stone walls, the fields where her cattle—best breeds of Fresian and Charolais—graze peacefully.

  The pain is back. The summer air brought it back. And the pain means that the lump in her lung is back, too. Bad zest to all of it.

  It comes at night, that dagger-pain in the lower back. It jolts her awake, then circles, snakes up to her shoulders. You can bear anything, she tells herself, then tries to go back to sleep. She reminds herself of all the pain, years and years of it, she has borne and borne well, without troubling a soul. Giving birth. And there were bee stings as a child. Or once, years ago, in one of the upper meadows, a hay fork went straight through her foot. The doctor—it was the older Fitzgerald then—came rushing up from the village in his old Morris Oxford car. He put her in the back seat and carted her away down the hill to a hospital in Castlebar, where the nurses said they couldn’t fathom why the little girl wasn’t screeching, howling with agony.