by Maureen Lee
‘It’s your father, son. Wasn’t he flying as high as a kite last night, drinking whiskey as if it were water, shouting, and throwing stuff all over the place? It frightened the lads, it did. I was worried he’d murder us all in our beds. There’s no paraffin left for the lamps and we were stuck in the dark.’ Duneathly wasn’t connected either to gas or electricity. ‘If you’d like to go to his study, you’ll see the mess he’s made.’
Finn’s heart sank to his boots. It was as wrong as wrong could be for this fragile old woman to be left in the house with two small children and a crazy man, but what could he do about it? ‘Where is he now?’ he asked.
‘That I don’t know, Finn. He left the house early morning before the sun had risen, slamming the door behind him so hard that all the windows shook. I haven’t seen hide nor hair of him since.’ Since he’d arrived, Nanny was more her old self again.
‘Would you like something to drink, Nanny? A cup of tea perhaps - or would you prefer a glass of the hard stuff?’ She was partial to a glass of spirits now and again.
‘I wouldn’t say no to a nip of gin, lad, thanks all the same. It’s in the cupboard under the sink.’
They went into the kitchen. He found the bottle and poured half a glass. ‘Is there anything to go with it?’
‘I like it neat. I thought you’d’ve known that by now, Finn Kenny.’ Her rheumy eyes twinkled.
‘I don’t know how anybody can drink neat gin.’ He shoved the glass across the table and she seized it eagerly. ‘Is there a reason you can think of that sent the Doctor into such a state?’ he enquired.
She made a grotesque face and he remembered how Nanny’s faces used to terrify him when he was a child. ‘People are suspicious of him, son, and he knows it. He’s only seeing half the patients he saw before. He hasn’t had a receptionist since Mollie left, and he can’t get another soul to come and do the cleaning since Fran Kincaid walked out because she could stand the place no more.’ She nodded at the dishes in the sink, the dirty floor. ‘Everyone’s wondering why his girls disappeared the way they did, why you hardly ever come to the house, why Hazel never comes at all, not even to show him his first grandchild, why he didn’t go to your Mollie’s wedding.’ She put the glass down, having drunk half in a single mouthful and looking much the better for it. ‘How did the wedding go, by the way?’
‘Perfectly, Nanny.’ He wrinkled his nose. ‘I don’t think much of her new husband, he’s too big for his policeman’s boots by a mile, but Hazel and Aunt Maggie both liked him.’ He hadn’t realized his father had sunk so low in the eyes of Duneathly.
‘I wouldn’t mind seeing Maggie while she’s home.’
‘I’m sure she’d love to see you. Maybe you could meet one morning in the tea shop.’
Nanny’s eyes narrowed. ‘So, Maggie’s not prepared to come to this house, either. I have a good idea why, Finn, though I promise never to share it with a soul. Mind you, there’d be no need; most people have arrived at the same conclusion of their own accord.’
Finn sighed. It was all getting a bit too much for him. ‘What time will Thaddy and Aidan be home?’
‘Mrs Paterson said she’d bring them around seven. But Finn,’ she put a creased hand on his arm, ‘I don’t fancy another night like the last one. It’s not meself I’m worried about, but the lads. If you could’ve heard the way your father carried on last night, you’d know what I mean.’
‘I wonder where he is.’
‘Sleeping it off somewhere, I reckon. He must’ve had the devil of a hangover.’
Finn looked at his watch: nearly half past six. His brothers would be back soon. The cottage was much too small to take another three people: he’d just have to spend the night here. ‘I’ll stay, Nanny,’ he promised. ‘I’ll just go home and tell Hazel. I won’t be long. And I’ll bring some paraffin back with me for the lamps.’
Before leaving, he looked in the Doctor’s study and discovered a cracked and empty whiskey bottle on the floor, books strewn all over the place, a chair upturned, and a pool of vomit just inside the door. He tried very hard to feel some pity for his father, but found it impossible.
Nanny knew Finn had the ability to sleep through an earthquake. She’d said she’d wake him if the Doctor came home and started carrying on again, but when he opened his eyes in his old bed in his old room it was already morning and the sun shimmered around the familiar curtains. In the distance, a cock crowed. He went down to his father’s bedroom, but the bed hadn’t been slept in, and he wasn’t in the study or any other room in the house. He was beginning to wonder if the Doctor hadn’t taken it upon himself to run away, like his girls, when there was a knock on the front door.
It was Willy Keen from Old Mill Farm to say that Dr Kenny had been found floating face down in a pond on the farmer’s land.
‘No one knows how long he’s been there,’ he said respectfully, removing his cap and holding it tight to his chest. ‘There hasn’t been anyone round that way for a few days.’ He made the Sign of the Cross. ‘May your ould da rest in peace, Mr Kenny. He was a fine doctor, no matter what people might have said to the contrary.’
Levon wasn’t sure if it was fear he could see in her big, violet eyes or a wild impatience for the whole thing to be over, for the baby to be born, so that she would have no more to do with it. She hadn’t acknowledged the child in her womb, not once, in all the months since the doctor had announced she was pregnant. She rebuffed all Tamara’s attempts to talk about it, just turned away or left the room, her face set tight, her pretty mouth a straight line.
He’d engaged a trained midwife, Mrs Sarkadi, for when her time came, not wanting her to go into a hospital for two reasons: first, he was concerned that the strange surroundings and strange people would upset her: second, she was no more than a child herself and there was a chance that questions might be asked about the father, questions that only Anne could answer. The exact date of the child’s arrival was unknown, but the doctor had estimated it would be sometime in September.
That summer, Levon had passed the Bar exam and was now legally entitled to practise as a lawyer in the state of New York. He’d rented an office on the Lower East Side and had already acquired a few clients, but, once September came, he’d taken to coming home earlier and earlier, when he should have been staying later and later in order to find more clients to add to his list. He was anxious to be there when the baby came.
Tamara made fun of him. ‘You’re almost excited as when I was expecting Larisa,’ she said. ‘Nowadays, she could mention Larisa without dissolving into tears.
Anne’s baby arrived in the middle of the night. It was Levon who heard her loud, panicky cry and went to see if she was all right, to find her clutching her stomach, saying, ‘I have this awful pain, Lev. I feel as if I’m about to break in two.’
He’d woken Tamara, thrown on some clothes, and raced to fetch Mrs Sarkadi, a big Hungarian woman with a tough face and a kind smile, who lived in East 19th Street, two streets from his own. Her use of English was perfect, but her accent was so thick she was hard to understand.
Mrs Sarkadi had returned with him, examined the girl, who by then was in enormous pain, and said the baby wasn’t due just yet. Now she and Tamara were doing things in the kitchen, and Levon was in Anne’s room, stroking her brow, holding her hand, telling her everything was going to be fine, though what did he know about it? Did she realize what was happening? he wondered.
She was muttering something under her breath and he bent to listen. ‘I don’t want to go back,’ she was saying over and over. ‘I don’t want to go back.’
‘You’re not going anywhere, my angel,’ he told her. ‘You’re staying here - for ever, if that’s what you want.’
‘I don’t want to go back,’ she said again. His words had clearly not penetrated her fuzzy brain. Suddenly, she sat up and cried, ‘Where’s Mollie? I want Mollie.’
‘Mollie’s not here, darling.’ He held her shoulders, thinking how thin they were, an
d laid her down. ‘But I’m here. This is Lev, who loves you and will make sure you don’t come to any harm.’
She grabbed his hand and held it against her cheek. ‘Lev,’ she whispered. ‘Oh, Lev.’
Mrs Sarkadi came in with a bowl of steaming water, Tamara behind carrying an armful of old towels and sheets. ‘We’ll see to her now, Lev,’ Tamara said.
Levon spent the next hour attempting to read - later, he couldn’t remember a single word - drinking black coffee, looking out of the window at the lights of New York, going over the events that had led him to this strange and wonderful place, and listening to the cries and moans coming from Anne’s room that ate away at his heart.
Eventually, there came a different cry, not Anne, but from a baby. Levon positioned himself outside the door of her room so that he would be there when it opened and Tamara came out to tell him if it was a boy or a girl. The baby continued to cry and he stamped his feet impatiently. A boy would be called John, a girl Elizabeth, assuming that Anne herself didn’t suggest a name, which he felt was most unlikely. Tamara had wanted to give the child an Armenian name but Levon claimed that wouldn’t be fair. ‘Anne isn’t Armenian,’ he’d argued. ‘Her child should be given a name she might have chosen herself.’
The door opened and Tamara appeared with a tiny baby wrapped in the shawl she had knitted. ‘Lev, this is John,’ she said, her eyes like two bright stars in her excited face. ‘I always wanted us to have a boy.’
Levon looked down at the little, crumpled, bad-tempered face. ‘Why is he so red?’
‘Lots of babies are red when they’re first born.’
‘He’s awfully small.’
Tamara laughed. ‘What did you expect, Lev, an elephant? All babies are small. Mrs Sarkadi thinks he weighs about five pounds. It’s a good thing for Anne he’s no bigger, otherwise she’d have had an even worse time.’
‘How is she?’ He longed to go into the room and see for himself.
‘Exhausted. Mrs Sarkadi tried to give her the baby, but she turned away. I doubt she’ll want anything to do with him.’ Tamara didn’t seem upset about it. She was holding the child possessively, like a mother, as if it were hers.
‘I wonder who the father is?’ Levon mused. ‘Would he be interested to know he has a son?’
‘Do we really care, Lev?’ Tamara raised her fine eyebrows.
‘I suppose not, no.’
Mrs Sarkadi emerged to say in her rather charming way that Anne was a delicately built young lady, but very fit and strong, and should be left to sleep for as long as she wished. ‘I’ll come and zee ’er again tomorrow,’ she said.
Levon thanked and paid her, then asked if Anne was sleeping now.
‘Not yet, but any minute.’ She pronounced ‘minute’ as if it meant small.
Levon showed her out. Tamara was preparing a weak solution of the formula she’d bought, while John lay in a basket on the kitchen table. Levon bent over him, watching, fascinated, as the child yawned extravagantly and bunched his tiny fists into balls. He poked him gently in the stomach, but the child just yawned again. Tamara gave him a glowering look, so Levon left the kitchen and went to see Anne.
She lay on the bed, eyes closed, but somehow he could tell she wasn’t asleep. He sat on the edge of the bed and she said, ‘Is that you, Lev?’
‘Yes, darling, it’s me.’
‘I know what’s just happened, but I don’t want to know it. Do you understand what I mean?’
‘Yes, I do.’ At least, he thought he did.
‘I’m not quite as stupid as you think, Lev.’ She still hadn’t opened her eyes.
‘I’ve never thought you stupid, Anne darling, but you must admit you are a very strange young lady.’
‘I’ve always been strange, at least so people used to say.’ Her voice was a soft, feathery whisper. There was a long silence and he thought she had really gone to sleep. She spoke when he got up to leave. ‘I love New York, Lev.’
‘So do I, Anne.’
‘At first, I hated it when I saw it from the boat. I thought it was a dream, a really bad one, but now I never want to leave.’
‘Then you never will.’
‘Goodnight, Lev.’
Levon softly closed the door and looked at his watch. It was early morning, almost five o’clock, and New York was preparing itself for another day. He changed into what Tamara called his ‘lawyer suit’: dark-grey flannel with the latest narrow lapels, sloping pockets and narrow trousers. He found Tamara in the sitting room changing John’s diaper.
‘It didn’t really need changing. I just wanted to do it for the first time.’ She smiled at him. ‘Isn’t he beautiful, Lev?’
‘Beautiful.’ Levon nodded, though secretly he considered the child, with his screwed-up red face, rather ugly. He had massive balls and a tiny penis. His legs were stick-thin and very active.
‘He has blue eyes,’ Tamara noted.
‘They might change,’ Levon pointed out.
‘I know.’ She noticed what he was wearing. ‘Are you going to work this early?’
‘I thought I might. I need to get started on a few cases.’ He gestured at the baby. ‘I feel I can now that this is over.’
‘I’m relieved it’s over, too.’ She gave him a dazzling smile. ‘We’ve got a son, Lev. It was the last thing I expected when we came to America, to have a son. We’re so lucky. Once I used to think we were cursed, but now I realize how lucky we are.’
Chapter 6
Peggy Perlmann’s Academy of Drama, Dance and Song was situated on top of a baker’s shop on Hester Street, halfway between Little Italy and Chinatown. The studio comprised a large room that had once been two, with a ballet bar at one end and a mirror covering the entire wall at the other. The only furniture was a small, upright piano. It was tucked between the windows on which the academy’s name had been painted in black and gold.
When Levon and Anne arrived, it was early, barely nine o’clock, and half a dozen garishly dressed young people were sitting in a circle on the floor talking animatedly, accompanied by a great deal of dramatic waving of arms.
Peggy had been born in New York and had the accent to prove it. Half-Irish, half-Jewish, she was at least six feet tall and had danced in the chorus of every major theatre in the state. ‘Trouble was,’ she told Levon when she showed him and Anne into a small room that seemed to double as a kitchen and an office, ‘I started out at thirteen, but five years later I was taller than all the girls and most of the men. I tried pretending I was a man for a while, but it didn’t work.’
‘I’m not surprised,’ said Levon. Peggy had the lushest lips, the bluest eyes, and the longest, most shapely legs he’d ever seen. Nobody in his or her right mind would have taken her for a man. She was seated behind a table that held a typewriter, untidy heaps of paper, equally untidy heaps of photographs, and a collection of cracked cups. Her wonderful red hair was piled on top of her head and held in place with a series of colourful combs and slides. She was made up as if she were about to go on stage: black lines around the eyes, blue shadow on the lids, lashes stiff with mascara, and a mouth that reminded Levon of an over-ripe plum. She wore black tights, green shorts, and a knitted top covered in snags and darns. Her high-heeled shoes looked a size larger than his sensible black ones.
‘The hours are nine till four,’ she informed them. ‘Some evenings are involved: I’ll explain that later. You can take just one course, or all three. Some kids just take the dancing, the singing, or the drama. Most take the whole damn lot. At the end of each term, we give concerts for the parents - no friends allowed, ’cos we don’t have the room. We do two types of dancing: ballet and tap. As you can hear, today we’re doing tap.’
Since they’d arrived, someone had started to play the out-of-tune piano with enormous enthusiasm and the young people were pounding the floor so hard Levon half expected the building to collapse. ‘What would you like to do, Anne?’ he asked.
‘Everything,’ Anne said promptly. He saw
her feet were tapping in time to the music.
‘Just a minute, honey,’ Peggy said in her loud, raucous voice. ‘I don’t take just any old body in the academy. You have to audition first. There’s some kids who couldn’t dance to save their grannie from being eaten by the big, bad wolf, and others whose singing sounds like the whistle on a kettle. I have my reputation to consider. Producers come here all the time if they want a kid in one of their shows.’ She transferred her stern gaze to Levon. ‘Have you seen Murder on the Yukon, Mr Zarian?’ When Levon looked at her blankly, she went on, ‘It’s a movie. A young man called Billy Berry has a supporting role. Billy was one of my drama students the year I opened in nineteen fifteen.’
Levon confessed he’d never been to the movies. ‘My wife and I kept meaning to,’ he excused himself lamely.
‘The whole academy goes once a week, usually Tuesdays - it’s included in the fees - and we visit the theatre on the first of every month. It’s stimulating for the kids, gives them an idea of what to aspire to. Next week, we’re going to see The Ten Commandments directed by Cecil B. DeMille. It’s in Technicolor, the first of its kind.’
‘I’d love to see it, Lev,’ Anne said breathlessly.
‘First of all, honey, I suggest your pop goes downstairs and has a coffee in the baker’s - try their do’nuts while you’re at it, Mr Zarian, they’ll make your teeth melt - while I see how little Annie does on the dance floor. Then she can sing us a song. You can come back in half an hour.’
The do’nuts were delicious. Levon ate three before deciding enough was enough. He could easily have eaten more, but had been putting on weight since he’d exchanged driving a cab for sitting in an office. In the cab, he’d stopped for the occasional coffee. In the office, he ate at MacCready’s, a diner across the street that served the juiciest hamburgers imaginable, or at more salubrious places if he was taking a client to lunch - or the client was taking him.