The Stars Are Fire

by Anita Shreve

  “I am,” he says, looking up from his book. He greets Grace when she enters by half standing.

  “Do you speak Gaelic?”

  “I used to.”

  “You haven’t got a brogue.”

  “I lost it.”

  Grace opens her book at the bookmark. “Why?”

  “Irish Need Not Apply.”

  “Still?”

  “Still.”

  “Is Berne an Irish name?”

  “It can be. It can also be French.” Aidan speaks a French sentence with Berne in it. The e in the name sounds halfway twisted around. “Or German.” He says a long harsh sentence in a German accent, and Grace can’t even tell where the Berne is. “Or even Danish.” He spouts Danish and she hears the Berne, with barely a second syllable, like an afterthought.

  Grace, in the sitting room, studies him. “You made that all up, didn’t you?”

  He smiles. “Maybe.”

  —

  After she has left the sitting room and gone up to her bedroom, Grace checks that the children are asleep and then stands facing the window. She stares at her feet. As she tries a few steps, the rhythm and the dance begin to come back to her. She straightens her back, puts her arms to her sides, and starts to execute the most rudimentary of steps. She wishes she had taps on her shoes. It was the clicking of the metal toes that was so satisfying.

  With no one to watch her, Grace stares straight ahead (“never look at your feet”) and moves sideways in a linear fashion across the room, then forward and back as best she can remember. After school twice a week, Grace accompanied Patty Rooney to her Irish step-dancing classes. Grace didn’t dance, merely watched, but occasionally after the class Patty would teach her a few steps. At a dance recital that Patty took her to, Grace remembers sitting in the audience with Mrs. Rooney, loving the precision that kept the top of the body immobile while the footwork dazzled.

  Grace dances until she is breathless. She wipes her forehead and forearms with a handkerchief. She knows a little Irish.

  —

  Marjorie outfits Claire and Tom with dark green sweaters she knit for them.

  “Where did you find the wool?” Grace asks at breakfast.

  “In a drawer full of sweaters. They must have been Gene’s. I unraveled one, washed the yarn, and reknit it to make these.”

  “You have amazing talents,” Grace tells her mother.

  “In my generation, nearly all women were taught to sew and knit.”

  “I took home economics, too.”

  “It’s different when you learn at home. Different when it’s a necessity.”

  “I lived through the thirties.”

  “Yes, but you weren’t the one who had to provide.”

  Grace blows across the top of her cup of coffee. “You’ve been such a help.”

  “You’re my life now. Just as Claire and Tom are yours.”

  It sounds like a true statement, but it isn’t quite. Grace’s life is also Gene and Merle’s house and the need to find a job, the necessity to have transportation, the desperation for money, and a desire, buried as it is, for something more.

  —

  “I’m thinking of taking the children next door,” Marjorie says. “I met the neighbor, Maureen. She seems nice, invited me over. I told her I might have the children with me.”

  “I’m thinking of applying for a job.”

  “Are you?”

  “If I got a job, would you be able to manage?” She means taking care of the children, cooking the meals, cleaning the house.

  “I think so. I’d get Aidan to help with the marketing and any heavy work. How will you get to work?”

  “By bus. Walk if I have to.”

  “Well, it’s only temporary, isn’t it? Until Gene gets back.”

  “Right,” says Grace.

  “Whatever are you going to do for clothes?”

  “I’m going to do to Merle’s closet what you just did to Gene’s drawer.”

  —

  When Marjorie and the children come home from the visit to Maureen, who turns out to be the cook and not the mistress of the house—“such delicious soda bread; we won’t need lunch”—they put Claire and Tom down for a nap. Grace, not willing to open Merle’s closet without her mother, makes a flourish of it when her mother is beside her.

  “Oh my Lord,” Marjorie says, “it’s enormous.”

  Together they enter the massive closet and stare at the racks and racks of clothes.

  “She must have had quite a social life.” Marjorie gestures. “Look at all these silks and furs. And this is no mouton coat, I can tell you that!” she adds as she holds the arm of a fur.

  “I don’t know where to start,” Grace says.

  “You explore while I decide what to have for dinner. Pick out a few things, and I’ll see if I can alter them to fit you. You’re about the same height, though I’d say Merle had a good fifteen pounds on you.”

  —

  Grace enters the parlor, where Aidan is sitting at the piano. She drops a pile of dresses onto a chair. “My mother wants to alter these so that I have something to wear when I look for work.”

  “Where are they from?”

  “Merle’s closet.”

  Aidan’s sleeves are rolled to his elbows. He hasn’t shaved yet.

  “You think I shouldn’t be doing this,” Grace says.

  He turns around on the bench. “No, I think you have to.”

  “The rules have changed, haven’t they?”

  “They do in a disaster.”

  “Is this stealing?” she asks.

  “No, not now.”

  “So what do you think of this one?” Grace holds the dress by its shoulders against her body. Her mother liked the jade green silk with gold trim at the sleeves and gold buttons. She thought it suited Grace’s coloring.

  “Where are you going in that?” Aidan asks, crossing his arms.

  “You don’t like it.”

  “It’s a little…I don’t know…fancy?”

  Grace whips the dress around and studies the front. She tosses it onto another chair. “What about this one?”

  Aidan tilts his head. “It’s red.”

  “Yes?”

  “And it has polka dots.”

  “So?”

  “Maybe you should choose something a little more conservative?”

  “You’re a bore.”

  “Not usually.”

  She smiles. She rummages through the heap of dresses and reaches for a navy blue with a white collar. She holds it up.

  “Is your mother good enough to put a waist in it?” Aidan asks.

  “You think it should have a waist?”

  “You have a very nice waist.”

  “Thank you, but this has short sleeves. Too cold for winter.”

  Again Grace separates out the dresses. She spots a light gray dress with a slim skirt and a little jacket to cover her arms. It’s wool, and it will keep her warm.

  Aidan nods and points.

  “This is it?” she asks.

  “That’s what you should wear. Are you nervous?”

  “A little,” she says, laying the gray dress on top of the others. She sits on another chair. “Do you have a cigarette?”

  “You are nervous.”

  She pulls a cigarette from his pack and leans his way while he lights it for her. She inhales and rests against the upholstery. “Do you get nervous before a concert?”

  “Sometimes I start to sweat. When it’s really bad, I get the hiccups.”

  “You can’t go onstage with the hiccups. How do you get rid of them?”

  “I find a knife and stick it in a glass of water, put the blunt end of the knife to my forehead and take ten slow gulps.”

  “And that works?”

  “Always.”

  “Did you just make that up?”

  “No.”

  —

  Grace stubs out her cigarette and slides out the green and gold dress—the dress deemed
too fancy—from the bottom of the pile on the chair and begins to dance with it in a free-form movement she makes up as she goes along. Aidan, catching the game, plays waltz music. Grace swoons herself into the dance as if she were wearing the fabric that swirls with her. She waltzes around the parlor, encircling Aidan and the piano. When he switches to the Charleston, Grace holds the dress to her bodice and swings one sleeve back and forth as she executes the footwork of the dance of her mother’s generation. Aidan’s segue to jazz is Grace’s cue to occupy in a languid manner an empty chair, the dress still clinging to her. She pantomimes leaning forward to have her cigarette, in its holder, lit for her. Relaxing into a louche pose, she crosses her legs.

  Aidan laughs, rolls his sleeves, and draws her into a slow jazz piece she thinks he must have learned at a Harlem nightclub.

  —

  “Merle’s closet is enormous. She has dozens of dresses and fur coats,” Grace says as she sits with the fancy dress folded over her lap.

  “Someone should wear those clothes,” Aidan says.

  “There have been pleas for clothing since the fire. Maybe I can get someone to pick them up.”

  “And when your husband comes back? Won’t he mind that you’ve given away his mother’s clothing without consulting him?”

  “Yes. For a minute. But then he’d see the necessity. If we’d moved in here, which he wanted to do, I suppose I’d have been given the contents of Merle’s closet.”

  “Do you see yourself in furs?”

  Grace laughs. “No. Can you imagine? Where on earth would I go?”

  “You could come to one of my concerts. You’d be beautiful in a fur.”

  A blush climbs the sides of her neck. “I hated the house when I first came here,” she remarks, glancing away.

  “Why?”

  “My mother-in-law wasn’t fond of me. She thought I’d ruined her son.”

  “And did you?”

  “Seen from her point of view, I suppose I did. He was meant to go places. Marry up.”

  —

  In her bedroom, Grace finds a hassock and climbs onto it. She strips down to her slip. In the triple mirror over the dressing table, she can see her reflection. She can’t see her head, only the body and the slip. Her skin is pale, and the slip hangs from her shoulders, not as fitted as it used to be. Common sense tells Grace that it’s her body in the mirrors, but she moves her arm just to make sure. She dips her head down to make double sure. How insubstantial she has become.

  “I’ve got everything I need,” her mother announces as she enters the room. “You can get down from there. I have to do the fitting before I can hem anything. Which one did you pick out?”

  —

  Sometimes, as Grace walks the rooms of the large house, she thinks she’s won a prize. She thinks she’s stolen a prize.

  In the large kitchen, when she and her mother first entered it, they discovered a wringer washer and a gas clothes dryer. At first Grace didn’t recognize the appliance. It was three feet high, two feet across, and low to the ground. When she opened the enameled hopper, she learned that there was a metal drum inside. The appliance had only one switch—on or off—and she and her mother concluded after several tries that it took only fifteen to twenty-five minutes to dry a load of wash. Towels and flannels didn’t need ironing. She and her mother were amazed. When Grace thought of the time needed to dry sheets in the wet spring, she could only shake her head.

  Grace is certain that Merle never used the machine. Laundry would have been Clodagh’s province.

  —

  “They’re building tin houses for the homeless,” Aidan says that evening as he and Grace are reading in the sitting room.

  “How do you know this?”

  “I heard it at the post office.”

  “Is that where you go when the kids are napping?”

  “Either there or the market. The houses are temporary until the new ones can be built.”

  Grace remembers the aluminum clinic. “Won’t they be awfully cold?”

  “They must have some kind of insulation. They can’t be comfortable, but people are desperate to get them.”

  Grace is silent. “We should be taking in refugees here.”

  “You already did,” he says.

  —

  “What do you and Aidan talk about at night?” Marjorie asks Grace the next morning while they are eating oatmeal.

  Grace stares at her mother. Why this question now? “We don’t talk a lot. We’re polite, but mostly we’re just reading.”

  “Reading?”

  “Yes,” Grace says, avoiding her mother’s gaze.

  She rises to rinse out her tea mug and sees Aidan giving the children a ride on a sled he must have found in the barn out back. Because the barn is farther up the hill than the house, he’s able to work up some speed as he sleds down. The children squeal and beg for more. In order to get Tom back up the hill, Aidan puts Claire on the sled and tells her to hold on tight to her brother. Grace watches as Aidan digs in his boots to fit the foot-size ledges in the snow he’s made earlier. It produces the illusion of him climbing a flight of stairs.

  Grace snatches her wool coat off a hook and steps outside at the front of the house, and for a few minutes, she is free. She slides down the slippery hill of the driveway, crosses the coast road, stumbles through the brush, and arrives at the beach. In her haste, she forgot her gloves and hat. Her ears sting. She puts her hands into her coat pockets, where she finds a quarter. Where did that come from?

  The sea has a chop to it that produces a deep blue-green. Living on the water is like watching a movie in color. She happens upon a large rock and sits on it and covers her ears until her hands are too cold.

  She’s not sure she’s ever been this happy—with her children and her mother safely in a large house; with Aidan to help and to talk to. She remembers sitting at her kitchen table at Hunts Beach, smoking a cigarette, and staring at the sink. How lonely and grim that seems now.

  “You forgot your hat and gloves.”

  Aidan settles the hat on her head and hands her the gloves, and she realizes she wished him here.

  “Thanks,” she says, glancing up at him. “My ears were stinging.”

  “It’s pretty cold out,” he says, drawing his black wool coat tighter. He claps his gloved hands together. He wears a black watch cap.

  “The children are in?” she asks.

  “Tom got a snootful of snow and started to cry. I had to take them to your mother.”

  “It looked like fun.”

  “They’re wonderful.”

  Grace smiles. “I agree.”

  He stands beside her, staring out to sea. Perhaps he’s as mesmerized by the chop as she is. It makes the ocean seem alive.

  “I’m always amazed that we’re not looking at England, but at Portugal,” she says. “And it’s warmer in London than it is here.”

  “The Gulf Stream,” they say simultaneously.

  “Do you ever wish you could go back to Ireland?” she asks.

  “In the war, I went to every Allied country on the European front, which didn’t include Ireland or Switzerland because of their neutrality. Yes, I’d like to go back there sometime. I still have brothers there.”

  “Do you?” Grace asks, surprised.

  “Two of them. They were older than I and more settled when we left.”

  “It must have been painful for your mother to leave them.”

  “My parents planned to save money for their passage, but the oldest refused to leave and the other followed suit.”

  “I can’t imagine growing up in a large family. I was an only child.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Twenty-four,” Grace answers. “You?”

  “Twenty-nine last September.”

  “So you just travel from place to place whenever they need a pianist?”

  “I’ve done it all,” he says. “Taught music in school, soloed with orchestras, tried to put some bands togeth
er.”

  “You don’t mind not having a place to call home?”

  “I didn’t used to.”

  “It’s wonderful to have such dedication,” Grace says.

  “It’s a gift. I won’t deny that. But I admire you.”

  “What for?” she asks, squinting up at him.

  “Finding a safe place for your family, keeping life sane when you must be worried sick about your husband.”

  —

  After dinner, Grace meanders into the sitting room with her book and is glad to see Aidan there.

  “I’ll go out tomorrow and start looking for a job,” she announces. “There’s a bus I can take.”

  “Where will you start?”

  She tilts her head. “I’ll tell you when I get one.”

  “I’m breathless with anticipation.”

  She reaches a leg out and kicks his boot. “How is your search going?” she asks.

  “I’ve half a dozen queries out. We’ll see what comes of them.”

  “Where are you looking?” she asks. She notes his knitted vest of brown wool. Hand knit. A mother? A lover? A sister? A wife?

  “Boston, New York, Chicago, Baltimore.”

  “So far away?”

  He sits up straight and clears his throat. “I’ve got to go where there are orchestras.”

  “What are you reading?” she asks.

  “It’s a biography of Antonin Dvořák.”

  She doesn’t know who Antonin Dvořák is.

  “He was a Czech composer. Brahms was his mentor. What are you reading?”

  “The plays of Eugene O’Neill. I found the volume in the bookcase beside you. Right now I’m reading something called The Iceman Cometh.”

  He nods.

  “You know it?”

  “Yes.”

  “I try to picture the play as I read it,” she says. “O’Neill was Irish American.”

  “Are you enjoying them?”

  “He’s very dark and full of pain.”

  “Our national heritage.”

  “Are you dark and full of pain?” She means it as a joke.

  “Sometimes.”

  —

  Grace’s evening conversations with Aidan often end abruptly. She wants to tell—ask him—so much more, but like in her exchanges with Gene, they talk in bits; unlike her exchanges with Gene, the bits fascinate her.

  —

  Grace removes a pile of papers from a drawer in Merle’s bedroom and sets them on the bed next to her as she sits up, her back to the headboard, to find out how the house is run and what the bills might be. The date, 1947, is affixed to the first page by a paper clip, and after that the papers have no obvious organization. She locates an invoice for shoe repair under an account for electricity, but there’s no indication as to whether either of these has been settled. No dunning notices, no checkbook. Did Merle pay only in cash, sending it through the mail? Grace unearths a breathtaking statement for a bracelet containing ten one-carat diamonds in gold. She hasn’t come across a bracelet of that description and imagines that Merle squirreled her best jewelry in a hiding place. Perhaps a safety-deposit box.