Текст книги "Her Name Is Rose: A Novel"

Автор книги: Christine Breen

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Текущая страница: 11 (всего у книги 17 страниц)

Iris sat facing the water, her back leaning against the hard edge of the table.

The man at the water’s edge dove in loudly after the girl and when his head surfaced he shouted. “Fuck! It’s cold!” He swam wild, jerky strokes with his head out of the water, not a match for the woman he was chasing, who had reached a floating platform a short distance out and emerged up the ladder like some water nymph. It was a summer’s scene worthy of an American movie, but it only made Iris feel worse.

Hector emptied the basket and came around to face her, offering a sandwich. “Has Grace told you yet she makes the best chicken sandwiches?”

Not looking at him, she unwrapped the sandwich and left it open on her lap. She wasn’t sure what to say. They sat in their silence together while the untroubled voices of the two swimmers echoed across the pond.

“Tell me what you know about her,” Hector said at last.

“About who? The real mother?”

Stunned, he looked at the ground, shifted his weight, and his shoulders rose to his ears. “It was all that dumb talk. What a jerk I am. I’m sorry.”

“It’s not your fault.” Iris put her uneaten sandwich on the table and stood up abruptly. “What am I doing here?” She turned around as if ready to go. It was as if her feelings had finally caught up with her thoughts. “I don’t even know you.” She smoothed the linen dress, which was wrinkled in lines across her thighs. “I’m in the middle of nowhere with a man I’ve only just met on my way to talk to a woman who might be the mother of my child. How unreal is that?”

Hector just looked at her, eyes of a wounded child who’d just been scolded.

“I’ve got to calm down before I lose the run of myself.” She sat again and started to take off her sandals. She had it in her mind to cool down by standing in the water, but changed her mind midway and restrapped them. She turned to Hector and said, “Can we go, please? I don’t want to be here.”

“Yeah, sure, Iris. Sorry. My fault. I thought it would be nice to come here. But it was wrong. I’m sorry. I—”

“Hector! Stop saying that. It’s not your fault. It’s mine. I let myself be persuaded this was a good idea, to go looking for Hilary Barrett … with you. You’re just trying to help me.” She sat down again and, looking to the two swimmers in the pond, she said, “I did meet her once, okay? But I can’t tell you anything about her except what she was wearing. And that she was quiet. And very pretty. Young, in her early twenties. She seemed really nice, but it was extremely awkward. You get one chance at a thing like that. You hope for the best. You hope everyone is doing the right thing. The right thing for … for … for Rose. That’s what we all felt. And now, now. Oh! I don’t know what I’m doing!”

“Let’s go back to Boston.” Hector had jumped up and was already packing up.

“No.” She looked out to the swimmers on the float. “Take me to Becket.”

“What?”

“Take me to Becket.”

“Are you sure?” He stood his full height and came toward her. He put his hands on her shoulders.

She looked up to him and nodded. “At least I can feel that I’ve tried. I know it’s a long shot. Part of me feels now that I’m just going through the motions. On a quest that I already know will end without an answer.”

She felt it again. That buzz in her center, but she eased herself away from his gathering embrace. Now Hector seemed very unsure of himself. “Lily Pond was a bad idea,” he said.

“I felt trapped.”

“Sorry.”

“Stop apologizing. Please.”

His phone rang. He looked at the number. “I’d better take this,” he said, and while Iris put the basket and blanket in the car he walked back to the water’s edge with his phone. The call lasted only moments, but when Hector came back up and got into the car he seemed distant. He drove in silence. Lily Pond vanished behind them and the road flowed away ahead. Now as he drove, one hand on the wheel, he fussed with his hair with his free hand. The man who’d earlier been joyfully engaged in explaining the difference between Real Books and Fakebooks had become subdued. They were another ten miles farther on before he said, “Iris, we should talk about … Hilary.”

“There’s nothing more to say until I meet her. If … I meet her.”

“She…” He hesitated. With his right hand he pulled on the cords of his throat. He pressed his lips together, released them. “She mightn’t be there,” he said.

“I know.”

Approaching Becket, they came through a forested landscape: firs, birch, and beech, oaks and chestnuts. These were more trees than she’d seen in her lifetime. Quieted by the greenness of it all, the manicured, tree-shaded lawns rolling under sugar maples, and charmed, too, by the wood-shuttered windows, she said, “Everything’s so pretty. Anyone would want to live here.”

“Why exactly do you want to meet her?” His question stung and she knew he felt it, too. “Forget it, Iris. I’m sorry, it’s none of my business.”

Had she not told him about her breast cancer scare? No, she hadn’t. All she’d told him was about her promise to Luke, but not why he had asked it. It had all happened so fast and now here they were.

Well, anyway, he was right, it was none of his business.

“What are you going to say to her?” he asked.

“I don’t know.” She reached into her bag for a hairbrush. “I haven’t thought about that. I mean, I have. A hundred times. But not really, as in, what I would really say if I met her face-to-face. I know it’s right that no one thinks about how the adoptive mother feels, but I have thought about her, I mean, Hilary, a lot. Down through the years. Mostly, I wished I could tell her how well Rose was doing.”

The truth was that in the last few days she had thought about nothing else—what she would actually say when she found her.

“Thank you,” Iris said very quietly. “Thank you, that’s what I’ve always wanted to say, Thank you, for Rose.”

Hector slowed down and eased the Jag alongside a footpath in front of number 43 and parked. “This is the street. Valley View Terrace.”

She glanced quickly at him and then up toward the small, gray-shingled house with a white porch. A row of trimmed, ball-shaped boxwood lined the path and house front like green rosary beads.

“Should I come in with you?”

“No. Thank you. I have to do this by myself.”

Iris got out of the car. She shook her dress and smoothed her hair and walked toward the house. At the front door she looked back. Then she stepped up under the small porch and pressed the doorbell.

After a few moments, a tall woman, early forties with very short dark hair, opened the door.

“May I help you?”

Iris could barely breathe. “Are you Hilary Barrett?”

“Yes.”

Iris’s hand went out to steady herself against the nearest support, the upright of the little porch, which was just behind her. She nearly fell off the short step. The woman looked guardedly at her. “I wonder if I might speak with you.”

“If it’s about my yoga class, I’m not teaching from home anymore. Did the hotel send you? I’ve told them I’m not doing privates anymore.”

She doesn’t recognize me. But I don’t recognize her, either.

In a strange way, Iris was relieved that she could say she didn’t want a private class. “The hotel didn’t send me.”

“Oh. What then?”

“I wonder if I can come in.”

The woman had been standing behind a screen door so her face was visible only through a mesh, but Iris could see she was dressed in workout clothes, black, like her hair.

“It won’t take long.”

“You’re not a Jehovah’s Witness?”

“No. I’m not. I’m from Ireland and—”

“Are you looking for a place to stay? Is that what the hotel said? They’re always sending people here if they’re full. I used to do rooms during the Tanglewood concerts, but not anymore, I’m sorry. I’ve got to talk to them—”

“I’m sorry … Ms. Barrett, I don’t want a room, either. I just want to talk with you … to ask you … I want to tell you…” Iris faltered. This was hard. This was impossible. “May I please come in?”

Hilary Barrett opened the screen door then and came out and stood beside Iris. She’d closed her front door behind her. There was barely enough space under the small porch for the two women to stand. Iris could see the color of her eyes. They were brown like Rose’s but not quite the same almond shape. The woman squinted into the sun and put a hand up to shield her eyes. Her fingers were long like Rose’s but, unlike her daughter, she wore several silver rings. Was this the same woman she’d met in Dublin over twenty years ago? Iris couldn’t decide.

“What’s this about? You’re scaring me.”

“I really am sorry to disturb you,” said Iris and she looked quickly back to the car where Hector was no longer sitting. Where was he? She hadn’t heard the car door open or close. She felt dizzy. “This is awkward,” Iris said. “I’m not sure how to put this.”

“You’re Irish, you said?”

Iris pulled down on her shoulder bag for support and crossed one leg behind the other.

“I’ve always wanted to go to Ireland.”

“What?” Iris said quickly.

“I hear it’s really nice. The people are supposed to be real friendly.”

“You’ve … never been?” she stammered.

“No…” the woman replied with her head cocked slightly. “I’ve been to Europe. You know, Eurailing, college days. But…”

Iris shook her head. What was she saying? She’d never been to Ireland.

The woman waited for Iris to explain herself. She even smiled and looked around as if maybe this was a joke and someone was going to pop out from behind the car and shout something surprising.

Finally Iris said, “You’re not the real Hilary Barrett, then.”

“Excuse me?”

“I mean … you’re not the person I’m looking for.”

The woman said nothing.

“You never lived on St. Botolph Street in Boston?”

“Now look, this is getting weird. Either you tell me what you want, or—”

Iris made no sound, but her eyes teared and she looked helplessly around her.

“Iris?” Hector’s voice sounded from the sidewalk. He was standing on the driver’s side of the car.

“Is that your husband?” the woman asked.

Iris shook her head. “Sorry” was all she managed, then she turned and stumbled down toward the car.

Hilary Barrett peered after her, bewildered, and took a stance with her hands on her hips as if ready to adopt a Warriorlike yoga pose, then she started down the path toward the Jag, but Hector held out his hands like he was stopping traffic and motioned for her to stay. He went around to the passenger side and opened the door for Iris. When she sat in she collapsed forward. He came around to the driver’s side and sat in, too. Hilary Barrett stood where she was, midway down the path.

“She’s not … the Hilary Barrett I’m looking for,” Iris said, her breath choking on words between sobs.

“I know,” Hector said.

“What?” Iris turned to him.

“The one you’re looking for is dead.”

Twelve

Rowan lay on the night grass of the seventeenth green, his shoes off, his tie loose. Several hours after the mourners had departed the memorial service, Pierce had found him, the blue-flowered urn with Burdy’s ashes lying beside him. Above them, a crescent moon formed a triangle with Venus and Jupiter.

For a few moments, neither of them spoke. The bentgrass cushioned Pierce’s shoes as he rocked back and forth on the flawless green. “I thought I’d find you here. Burdy’s Last Stand, hey?” Pierce wasn’t the sort to lower his tall frame onto the now damp grass. Not usually. It was too awkward, but eventually, seeing that his brother showed no signs of getting up or even acknowledging his presence, he sat down beside Rowan.

After a few moments, Pierce indicated the urn. “Is he still there?”

“All there,” Rowan said.

With one arm resting on his bent knee, Pierce peered into the darkness, gauging his brother’s state of mind. Finally. “Come on, Ro. Get up.” His bother nudged him. “Time to go home. It’s nearly over.”

Rowan shifted his weight and turned to look at him. “Is it? Or just beginning?”

“Ah, brother,” said Pierce, “School of Life rulebook? Very deep.” He laughed lightly. “Come on now. Enough’s enough.” Pierce stood. He bent toward his brother with an outstretched arm. Rowan hesitated but Pierce kept his arm extended until his brother grabbed it and helped himself up. Rowan picked up the urn. The night air thrummed with crickets. Pierce stood for a moment on the green and pretended an air swing.

Rowan started walking away, and then, because there was no other way to shed the thing that was weighing him down, he turned back, and said, “She had a baby.”

Pierce stalled midswing. “What? Who?”

“Hilary.” Rowan stopped. “Hilary Barrett.” There were no lights along the fairway. They could barely see each other.

“What are you talking about?” Pierce seized hold of his brother’s arm. “Hilary?”

“Burdy’s old secretary told me.”

“That’s who that was? Peggy Dillon? I thought I recognized her. What did she say? Exactly?”

“She said she saw Hilary in Dublin. Pregnant.”

“God! When?”

“St. Patrick’s Day.”

“No, I mean what year?”

“The only year she was in Ireland. The year before she died. Do the math!”

Rowan walked away carrying the urn. The grass cooled his feet but his head was hot. Pierce went after him. “I don’t want to say this, but what makes you think it’s…?”

“It was six months after I broke off with her is why.”

“Still … it mightn’t—”

“Still. Nothing.” He put down the urn, swept his hands along the grass, then ran his wet fingers through his hair. Pierce waited and then they linked forward in the direction of Louise’s house, as if following an invisible ball. The moon had moved and was hidden by the trees bordering the fairway. The course was patterned in light and dark, white metal signs indicated the directions to tees and gleamed low in the grass.

All the lights were on when they reached the condo. Rowan hesitated. Pierce placed a hand on his brother’s shoulder. “You go in, Ro. I’ll walk back to the clubhouse and settle up.”

“I’ll come with you.”

“No,” he said firmly. “You need to go in to Mother.”

Rowan looked at him. “What have I done?” he said quietly.

The kitchen table was set for three, ready for morning. Louise, in a pink cotton bathrobe, the top of her hair in rollers and the remnants of five cigarette butts in the glass ashtray in front of her, gauged her son’s intoxication as he laid down the urn.

“Sorry, Mother. Something came up.”

“Is that all you can say? Then please … explain why you weren’t there to say good-bye to the guests.”

“Sit down, Mother.”

“I don’t want to sit down. I’ve been sitting down since ten waiting for you to come home. I sent Pierce to find you. I thought … I thought—”

Rowan interrupted her sharply. “Stop.” He held out his hands toward her. “Please. There’s something I need to tell you.” Rowan sat and took the glass in his hand. “I think I’m going to need your help.”

It was the thing she was most hoping to hear. She sat down beside him and took hold of his hands. “There’s a meeting every other night in the community center.”

“No.”

“Rowan, dear, come on. It’s the only way. One day at a time.”

He paused. “It’s not what you think.” He withdrew his hands.

“Don’t be dismissive. That’s the thing I hated most about your father!”

Rowan looked at her. That hurt. He rocked his head side to side in sadness. His eyes watered, and he gulped to stop himself from crying. It seemed they sat a long time, neither of them speaking, Louise opening and closing her mouth forming words she didn’t speak. Louise got up from the table and walked to the sink. To the refrigerator. Back to the table and sat. Rowan didn’t see Pierce, but he’d heard the screen door open and knew his brother stood in the hallway, waiting.

Finally Louise said, “Tell me! What’s happened?”

The look on Rowan’s face startled her. “Oh God,” she said. “What have you done?”

“Mother—”

“Tell me!”

“Calm down, please.”

Pierce came up behind Rowan and put a hand on his shoulder and shook him gently. “Hey, buddy. It’s going to be all right.” He left his hand there and, after waiting a few moments, in case Rowan would explain to their mother, Pierce turned to Louise. “You might be a grandmother after all.”

Louise’s eyes quivered. Stunned, mouth fully agape, she looked first to Pierce, then to Rowan. Fluorescent light showed the full weariness of her face. “I don’t understand.”

“It’s late. It’s been a full-on day,” said Pierce.

“Hilary?” she said softly, her voice waning like light rain falling.

Pierce went to his mother and bent to kiss the side of her face, which was turned to Rowan with tears in her eyes. “And enough’s been said for the time being, I think. Rowan will tell us all about it in the morning.” Pierce’s commanding voice quieted them and in a way gave them permission to be silent. No more talking was necessary, his look told his mother. “You need to sleep. And so does Rowan. Nothing can be achieved tonight.”

It was as if all at once in the silence of the bright kitchen all three received, individually, a kind of blessing from Burdy. The urn with his ashes, bathed in a kind of blue aura, seemed to radiate. It was like a key turning the plot of a life, Rowan thought. He went to his mother then to assist her to stand. Despite the occasion and the enormity of the disclosure, Rowan somehow now managed a smile, albeit weak. His wasn’t a tortured face any longer, just drained and tired. With his help Louise stood and she took hold of him, and for the first time in a long time Rowan let himself be held.

*   *   *

In the morning Louise went out early and came back with a box of pastries, and over coffee in the kitchen her sons puzzled together the scant information they had. “If Hilary really had a child,” she said, “her parents would know.”

“Maybe. Maybe not,” Pierce said.

“But if they knew, why wouldn’t they have told me?” Rowan fidgeted with his coffee spoon.

Pierce said he remembered attending her funeral. “What? Twenty years ago?”

“Seventeen. She died on February 15, 1992.”

It had been a cold February day when a snowstorm threatened to disable the service. Louise remembered Hilary’s grief-stricken father, Jack, and the seething anger that was clearly directed at her son. Rowan had been forced to consider that Mr. Barrett’s anger was in some way justified. He’d broken the engagement rather unchivalrously. He’d been too young. They’d both been too young. In the years since there had been no further contact, but every February 15, in that place inside him where he had left his love for her and where once the world had been full of the possibility of marriage and children and happy ever after, Rowan thought of her. And as the years went on, he knew he had made a mistake.

He’d met Hilary at a house party of a mutual friend, Scott, somewhere off Harvard Square. Scott played electric guitar and Rowan played tenor sax in a jazz ensemble. Scott and Hilary were in their senior year at college in Boston and Rowan was completing his MLA nearby in Cambridge.

She was tall with shoulder-length brown hair. She wore a sheepskin jacket that cold night, and a blue-jean skirt with frayed edges she’d fashioned herself, and lace-up boots with black tights. She’d come to the party on her own because Scott told her there was this guy he really wanted her to meet. She moved on the edge of the party with a kind of confidence that showed she was comfortable in herself, and even proud, and she spoke with Scott without needing to look around the room for the person he’d proposed for her to meet. When Scott finally brought them together he’d said, “You two have a destiny. I can feel it.”

Rowan had found out much about Hilary that first night. She came from the same part of New York State. It was this that got them talking so easily. They talked about places they visited in Westchester and found they had a mutual partiality for the old Bedford Village Playhouse and an Italian restaurant called Nino’s. They agreed right then and there that the next time they were both “home” they’d catch a film and dinner. Maybe Scott was right. Maybe they had a destiny.

Hilary lived in Brighton in a studio apartment. She cycled everywhere, she’d said. And she loved Bonnie Raitt and Bruce Springsteen and an Irish singer called Elvis Costello. Half a dozen silver bracelets on her arm made a kind of music, like cymbals proclaiming the arrival of royalty, Rowan had mused, every time she moved. He liked that she wore mismatched earrings, and liked the color green, and Irish poetry, and that she hoped to do a master’s degree in Ireland at Trinity College in September. Rowan told her about Burdy and his own Irish connection.

He remembered that in the dark, crowded room of the kitchen when someone had dimmed the lights he’d kissed her suddenly and said he wanted to take her back to his place. If Rowan closed his eyes, even now, there she was, waving good-bye to him as she went down into the station at Harvard Square to catch the T back to Brighton. She hadn’t accepted his invitation to spend that first night together.

*   *   *

Now, twenty years later, midmorning, Rowan was driving down the Saw Mill River Parkway. Louise had checked the phonebook—the Barretts still lived at 57 Cedar Lane—twenty minutes away. Mother and brother had wanted to go with him.

“Moral support, brother?”

“Pierce, thanks,” said Rowan. “I need to do this on my own, though.”

A heat wave was folding in over the whole of the northeastern coast, from the Jersey Shore to Boston, but Rowan turned off the air-conditioning and drove with the windows down. He needed a bit of reality. It was Sunday morning and traffic was light. He’d spent many hours up and down this highway traveling by car from the city to visit Burdy and his mother. Or he’d take the train that snaked along the river, a tributary of the Hudson that Burdy had once told him was known by the Native Americans as Nepperhan, meaning “rapid little stream.” He sometimes felt he belonged more to the landscape than to anything, to the richness of its place names and its flora and fauna.

Hilary had felt the same, and during one of their times together they’d taken a drive on the Taconic State Parkway up through the Hudson Valley to Chatham to spend the night in a country inn. He remembered telling her that the Taconic was as perfect an example of what was meant by a parkway as you could hope to find. A magnificent blend of highway engineering and landscape architecture. She’d let him ramble on about the designer, whom Rowan had studied at Harvard. “That’s the guy that designed the Unisphere,” he’d said. “You know the thing … the giant globe? You pass it on the way into Queens if you’re going to Long Island?”

“I know it. It’s pretty—”

“Over seven hundred thousand pounds of pure steel. Biggest world on earth.”

Rowan cringed now, recalling how he’d just been trying to boast and hear himself talk. He remembered the weekend because it was the end of September, the autumn leaves were turning. Hilary was leaving for Ireland.

He got off the parkway at Exit 32 and onto Route 120 and drove down into Chappaqua. From memory he knew the house was somewhere near, but made two wrong turns before he found Cedar Lane. He parked the car alongside the curb in front of the mailbox of number 57. A decal of ducks flew across the aluminum box. It was then that Rowan recalled Jack Barrett had been editor-in-chief of Field & Stream. An American flag the size of a large beach towel angled out under a black porch of the white, shingled house. On the seat beside him lay the music for his tribute to Burdy.

And grace will lead me home.

He blew a sigh and got out of the car.

The Barrett house was a Colonial Revival with black shutters sitting on a well-manicured front lawn with a two-car garage on an acre of land. To the left, an old red maple rose from the center of a bed of pachysandra. To the right, an old-fashioned rose bed. Simple and elegant and impressive. The front inner door was open and he could see into a foyer through a screen door. A mound of shoes—a pair each of loafers, boots, and running shoes—were piled inside to the left at the base of a stairway.

Rowan knocked on the wooden frame and waited.

A man accompanied by a black Labrador came to the door. He was wearing a Yankees baseball cap and khaki shorts and a black T-shirt. “Who have we here, Bullet?” the man said, looking down to the dog and scratching its head. “Hey, fella?” He turned back to Rowan. “Friend or foe?” He didn’t open the screen door.

“Hello, Mr. Barrett.”

As Mr. Barrett studied the stranger standing at his front door, his face transitioned from friendly curiosity to vexation. It only took a few seconds. “What do you want?” Bullet’s back stiffened and his tail heightened as he responded to the tone of his owner’s voice.

“It’s been a long time—” Rowan said.

“Seventeen years and a few months. And not long enough.”

“I have to speak with you … please.”

“Whatever it is, I’m not interested.” Bullet’s mouth curled and he growled. Jack Barrett was about the same age as Rowan’s father, late sixties. He stood squarely in the doorway.

“It’s important.”

“Jack? Jack? What is it?” A tall woman with graying hair tied up in an elegant bun appeared behind Jack. Marjorie Barrett was carrying small pruning scissors and wore one gardening glove.

“Please, Mrs. Barrett, Jack … I have to know if.… Did Hilary…?”

“Blake!” Jack Barrett raised his voice. “You—”

“Jack,” Mrs. Barrett said gently, putting her hand on his arm. “Don’t. Please.” She stepped in front of him. “I’m sorry, Rowan. It’s been a long time.” Mrs. Barrett went to open the screen door. “I know why you’re here.”

“Is it true? Did Hilary? Did she? Did she have a baby?” The words lurched up from Rowan’s gut.

Mr. Barrett stayed his wife’s hand on the door handle and stared at Rowan a moment, his lips quivering, and then he stomped off, leaving his wife with her head down, staring at the floor, then she, too, turned and walked deep into her home.

If there had been a chair or bench Rowan would have collapsed onto it. Instead his head sunk and he clasped his hands over his head. His shoulders heaved up and down and he sobbed. The energy rising in him, like a tornado, was so intense he had to move so as not to fall. He went around in a small circle on the graveled path to regain his balance.

Inside the house Bullet was barking.

Because he had to do something, because his world was spinning out of control, Rowan grabbed a fistful of gravel and threw it across the lawn. Pathetic. He bent over with his hands on his knees, trying to catch his breath, looking down at the circle of pachysandra around the red maple. He wanted to yank it out.

Then the front door of the house opened. Mrs. Barrett came toward Rowan with slow steps. In her brown eyes he saw Hilary. He backed away as she advanced.

“I’m sorry,” he said and let go of the last of the sharp gravel in his hand.

She extended her hand to him. “I hoped one day you would come. I didn’t know how or why or when. But I’d hoped you would because I wanted you to know. The birth of a child is a miracle. No matter what. It’s a sign that the world goes on, with or without us, it goes on. And you are a part of that.” She put her hand on the side of his face and left it there a moment.

Rowan pulled awkwardly on the flagged path. “Why didn’t she tell me? Why didn’t you tell me?”

“It was too late. There was nothing you, or we, could have done by the time we learned about the baby. It’s the way Hilary wanted it. I’m so sorry. It was a mistake … not to tell you.” Marjorie’s eyes teared as she watched him take this in, watched as his thoughts crisscrossed his face, reconstructing the past as if he were adding and subtracting all the permutations and reconciling the past with the present.

“No. I’m sorry. The mistake was mine. I should never have broken it off. Fact is, Mrs. Barrett, there hasn’t been anyone like Hilary in my life … since.”

“Here,” she said. “We found this after … after … here…” The words choked her throat. She handed Rowan a neatly folded piece of notepaper. It was inside a sealed plastic bag. “Hilary meant for you to have this. It tells you everything.”