Fiona

by Gemma Whelan

  “Blue moon, you leave me standing alone . . . ” She stared at the screen. “Without a dream in my heart . . . ” Her own reflected image looked back at her. Despondent.

  She went to her favorite Jazz and Blues club that night in an effort to relax and unwind, and hoped that by visiting the closest thing she had to a “haunt,” she could get her life and her writing back on track. She was in a tizzy about the New Yorker assignment. This could be a breakthrough, and she badly wanted to make it work. The Blue Angel was a small low-light space in Greenwich Village where the wooden fixtures and the small circular tables, each with a single lit candle, lent it the air of a Parisian bistro in the shadow of Montmartre. As Fiona ordered a glass of Pinot Noir at the bar from the reed thin woman in the black dress who she knew by sight, she glanced around at the posters of Blues singers that graced the walls. Billie Holiday, Marlene Dietrich, Duke Ellington, Edith Piaf. Marlene was blonde and glimmering against a black frame, with her pursed lips and white feather boa. Billie was smiling sadly, dressed in black, embracing a tiny white dog. Ellington, with bemused, upturned eyes, sported a tiny mustache and dapper bowler hat. Piaf looked sorrowful, her right hand reaching over to touch her left cheek, her other hand supporting her right wrist. Piaf, with her sad and soulful melodies, was her favorite.

  The bartender could have passed for a very young Piaf; she wore a perpetually pained expression, and she hardly ever spoke. This suited Fiona fine and was one of the reasons she liked this spot. It was the antithesis of an Irish bar—and New York was awash with Irish bars. They were loud and boisterous, and the bartenders were always gregarious, full of quick talk and witty conversations and bursts of songs and jokes and heated discussions on politics and literature and sports and religion and everything under the sun. Fiona wondered if she missed out on that Irish gene. The bar gene. She much preferred this soft, dimly lit, relatively smoke-free hideaway.

  She headed for her favorite spot, a secluded corner table in the shadow of Piaf. The place was quiet as it was mid week, but she recognized one or two of the regulars she knew by sight. She spotted Anton, wearing his signature leather jacket, sitting at a table with a man she didn’t recognize. She nodded hello and escaped to her table. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see Anton making his way over.

  “Hiya. Did you come to hear Sonya?”

  “I just came to sit and relax, really. Is she the new vocalist?”

  Anton nodded. “She’s really good. I’ve heard her a few times. My brother-in-law,” and he indicated the man at his table, “is overnighting on business, so showing him my hang-outs!”

  “Is he from New Orleans, too?”

  “Yep. So far I’m the only deserter! After six months in New York, I’m now the official tour guide.”

  Fiona liked his slight southern lilt and wry humor. She knew what was coming next.

  “Care to join us?”

  “Thanks, Anton, but, I need a bit of quiet time tonight.”

  “Sure.” He started to leave and then turned back and leveled his earnest green eyes at her. “Any point in me asking again? Dinner, movie, concert?”

  Fiona smiled. “You’re nothing if not persistent, Anton. I’m sorry, but thanks.”

  He nodded, disappointed. Then he resumed his jovial manner. “Catch you later!” and was gone.

  The band was setting up after a break, and Fiona recognized the bass and drum players but not the piano player. The violinist, Ernie, was the same one who had taken over for Phil when he moved on eighteen months ago.

  Fiona had been cradling a glass of Merlot in this very bar over three years before when she first set eyes on Philip. She had heard his music first, the clear melodic strains that struck her as plaintive and personal. As she looked up to see from whence they emanated, she saw the tousled sandy fringe thrown forward with the intensity of his playing, eyes shut, concentrated, completely wrapped up in the emotion. He was pale, slight build. His face was lively and expressive and allowed the ebb and flow of the notes to play over it, to register, to animate. At the same time, she intuited a shy streak about him, and this she found attractive.

  It was her third weekend coming in and exchanging small talk during the breaks when Philip asked if she’d like to meet for coffee. Two days later, they sat in the corner of a bustling coffee shop, sipping lattes, surrounded by the buzz of late morning comings and goings, looking out at the early autumn city.

  “Reminds me a little bit of Dublin.” Fiona mused, as she watched the people in their mufflers and boots and scarves, keeping warm in the face of the bite in the air.

  “Did you go to coffee shops a lot there?” Phil asked.

  “The flats I was in were always so poky that I needed to get out. So I’d escape with a book, or notebook. You could sit in Bewley’s for hours, fire blazing, nursing a cup of coffee.”

  Philip laughed. He had a gentle musical laugh, like an extension of his playing.

  “Is it a big café?”

  “Yes, they’re a Dublin institution. Bewley’s Oriental Cafés. All the décor is Eastern, lots of red plush, beautiful fireplaces in some of the rooms. I loved sitting by the fire in the cold weather. Watching people. They’d come with their Irish Times and cups of tea or coffee or soup, alone or with friends. You could spend the whole day there, if you wanted to.”

  Philip nodded. “Reminds me of San Francisco. It’s a great café town. You can ensconce yourself with your book and grab a coffee, and you don’t have to budge until you’re ready to leave.”

  They talked easily. About their work, their lives in San Francisco and Dublin. Music. Books. Their hopes and dreams. Until it was time for Phil to go and teach.

  Over the next few months, the two spent a great deal of time together and gradually became lovers. They went to movies and concerts and clubs and sat in cafes and talked. They hung out at Fiona’s apartment and at Philip’s. They got Indian or Chinese take-out and a bottle of wine, and she read poetry to him, and he played the violin for her. Seamus Heaney, Brendan Kennelly, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill; Beethoven, Sibelius, Stephane Grappelli. She hoped that eventually she would get better at killing that old sexual anxiety. Her lover was patience personified, but it was Fiona who judged herself harshly. She wished she could relax and let go of what she assumed were religion-induced irrational fears. Ingrained shame. In spite of this, she and Philip grew closer.

  Phil invited her to visit his family at Christmas, and she got on famously with them. The trip solidified their relationship, and, back in New York, they spent more and more time together. Fiona was slow to talk about her family, but little by little, in tiny increments, she revealed pieces of her past. Philip seemed to have infinite patience and never rushed her or tried to pry. He was fascinated by her dolls. There was one of Orla, of Aunt Rita, of her school friend Sinead, of President Kennedy. There was one of her grandfather on her mother’s side whom she had never met but had made from a photograph at her mother’s request.

  “It’s like a gallery, but instead of photos there are dolls.” Philip remarked one night they were spending at Fiona’s apartment.

  “I suppose. Maybe they’re my photo substitutes.”

  Philip was impressed. “I’m sure you’ve been told these are good enough to sell. Not these particular ones, of course, as they’re yours, but the work.”

  Fiona nodded. “I’ve often thought that I’d be better off trying to parlay this into a little side business than washing other people’s toilets! And I actually enjoy the work. The physical part of working with my hands, choosing the colors, designing the shapes, the challenge of getting the likeness right. All that.”

  “So? Why not? You’d be good at designing your advertising copy. I’m sure there’s a market for handmade dolls. They wouldn’t have to be of real people but that too maybe. A lot of folks would get a kick out of a doll made in the likeness of people they know.”

  Fiona was quiet. She picked up a piece of fabric and fingered it. She pulled out another shape that she ha
d begun. A blank model, like a blueprint. Without any identity yet.

  “I’d be afraid,” she almost whispered. “I’d be afraid to make one of someone living, unless it’s someone I’m a hundred percent sure I won’t see again.” Philip waited. He let her continue. “I’d be afraid I’d jinx them.”

  “You mean like a hex?”

  “It’s just that the dolls I’ve made are almost all of people who are dead or absent in some way.”

  “But you made them after they died. And anyway, even if you hadn’t . . . ”

  “I know it’s not rational. I’m just afraid to chance it. I’m too embroiled in it all, Philip.”

  “In what?”

  “Death. Compared to most people I know, I’ve had an inordinate number of deaths in my family. Three people very close to me within a few months when I was nine years old. And my mother’s going away was like a death at the time.”

  Philip encircled her with his arm and hugged her close. “You were unlucky, Fiona. That was a lot of suffering to bear. But it’s not your fault. None of it is your fault.”

  She wasn’t so sure.

  The very next morning there was a phone call from Fiona’s father to say that her mother had a heart attack. Fiona was still in her dressing-gown (the word “robe” was another she couldn’t get used to) and starting to brew the coffee when the phone rang. She nearly dropped the receiver when she heard her father’s voice. He had never rung her before, not even when she lived in Dublin.

  “She asked for you and Declan, Fiona. She’s very poorly.”

  Fiona was aware of Philip stirring in the bed in the loft. He had heard the phone and was beginning to emerge. She couldn’t speak.

  “Fiona?” her Dad’s troubled voice pierced through her grief.

  It felt like a century passed before she could drudge up a small voice. “Dad. Oh God! I’ll see what flights I can get.”

  “Good girl.” He sounded bereft, like a lost child. He hung up.

  Philip was behind her. As she turned towards him, her face was set, closing. She was going on automatic. Her voice when she spoke was monotonal. “I need to get the first flight out to Ireland. My mother . . . ”

  “Is she . . . ?”

  “No. But it sounds bad. Heart attack.” She dragged out the telephone directory and called the travel agent.

  “I’ll come to the airport with you.”

  “No, you don’t need to.”

  “I’d like to.”

  “Phil, I have so much to do. I need to pack and call Pam and arrange about work . . . ”

  “Will you let me do some of those things for you? I could call and get a substitute.”

  “No. I don’t want you disrupting your life. It’s my mother. I need to handle it”

  “Fiona. This IS part of my life. YOU are part of my life.”

  “But I’m fine. I need space, and I’m used to . . . used to . . . ”

  “If it was my mother, wouldn’t you want to help?”

  “Of course. But that’s completely different. Your mother brought you up; she loved you.”

  “And yours didn’t? Fiona. It wasn’t her fault she was ill, that her daughter died and she was lost in grief.”

  “But did they have to cut off their living children?” Fiona was angry. “Myself and Declan? We were still alive. Why didn’t they protect us, protect me? Why?”

  “Protect you from what? I can see the neglect part. What do you mean about protection?”

  Fiona stared at him. She had never told Phil, or anyone, about her uncle’s sexual abuse. “I didn’t feel safe. Maybe it’s the same as not feeling loved. But I felt betrayed.” Fiona looked into Philip’s trusting eyes. “Phil. My mother is dying, and I never knew her. She’s sixty-one. Maybe I thought I had time. That at some point we’d work it out. That I could feel something. It’s unnatural not to love your mother.”

  “I’m sure you do love her, Fiona. Otherwise you wouldn’t be suffering like this.”

  Fiona sat in her big armchair and curled up.

  “I saw her once in the sanitarium. We weren’t allowed to visit her in her room as T.B. was contagious, so they let us stand outside and look up at her window. We stood in the knee-high grass. It was damp, and I could feel my socks getting wet. Declan was behind me, and I was holding Orla in my arms. Three children in the middle of a field, staring up at this huge, gray, brick building, trying to find the right window. Then we saw her, far away, a frail figure who was a shadow of our mother, a nurse holding up her arm so she could wave at us. I don’t think we believed it was really her. I thought that Dad was making it up to keep us hoping. That she was already dead but he couldn’t bring himself to tell us the truth. At that moment I decided she was dead so I wouldn’t have to face it again. Better to get it over with. That’s what I decided at the age of seven.”

  “But she wasn’t dead. She recovered.”

  Fiona nodded. “She came back. But I’m not sure I accepted her back. I thought I had done a good job of being a mother to Orla. And Orla’s illness and all the deaths—they all came in quick succession. All the same year she came back. She brought death back with her.”

  Fiona retreated into herself. This had happened before with Phil, but most of the time she slowly came back around and started to open up again. This time her armor was tightly sealed up.

  “Fiona. Please.”

  She looked at him as if seeing him from a great distance. Her heart was breaking, and she had to protect herself. She realized in this moment how much she loved this man, and at the same time she felt she did not deserve him, that she couldn’t love in the way someone like Philip deserved to be loved. She had an image of her mother dying, and knew she would not be alive when she arrived in Ireland. Her gallery of death was increasing.

  When Fiona returned from her mother’s funeral two weeks later, she had grown another protective coat. The ritual from house to graveyard, the gaping hole, the earth swallowing up the coffin. It had all happened already. She kept Phil at a distance and made their eventual breakup an inevitability. Fiona knew that they might well have made it if it wasn’t for her. She knew deep down that she wasn’t prepared to meet him or anyone else face to face on a deep emotional level, that if anyone had been able to get through to her, surely it would have been this talented, lovely, man who made magic on the violin. When he played to her it seared her soul. It was so intermingled with old pain and pleasure that she wasn’t able to accept the gift, to take it in. So she let it go.

  Yet another death, that of her father, had widened the chasm between Fiona and the possibility of intimacy. She didn’t believe in fate, but she did believe that our futures are formed out of our past. “Time present and time past, Are both perhaps present in time future.” She sipped the dry oaky wine. It was over two years since she and Phil broke up, and she hadn’t been out with anyone since, despite repeated offers from both Saul and, more recently, from Anton. As the opening notes of “Unforgettable” on the violin soared through the air, Fiona felt the need to escape before she unleashed her pent up tears.

  The strains of the song were still dancing in her head as she climbed the stairs to her studio. “Unforgettable, that’s just what you are.” The vocalist had delivered her songs in the jazzy, soulful style of Aretha Franklin. “You’re unforgettable, near to me or far . . .” She tried to get the song out of her head. “You’re unforgettable, in every way. And forever more, that’s how you’ll stay.” She tried to push back the loneliness, to dispel the yearning. “That’s why, darling, it’s so incredible, that someone so unforgettable, thinks that I’m unforgettable, too.”

  EYE OF THE STORM

  Excerpt from a novel by Fiona Clarke

  The summer flew by in a flash. Picnics, walks, films, dances. Before I knew it, I was beside Peter in his car and on my way to meet his parents for the first time. I was a nervous wreck. I was wearing my favorite summer frock, light blue with tiny lemon flowers, I had my hair swept back and tied with a blue sati
n ribbon, and if I say so myself, I thought I looked really nice.

  Peter looked smashing as usual, and the turquoise shirt made his blond curls look even brighter. He squeezed my hand. “Don’t worry. You’ll like them; they’re not so bad.”

  “It’s not me liking them I’m worried about, Peter!”

  “What? They’ll be crazy about you. How could they not?”

  We approached the Rawlings’ property up a long tree-lined entranceway—massive, and impressive despite some subtle signs of disrepair. As we stepped into the drawing room, Peter’s parents, Josephine and Clayton, came forward, and he did the honors. Josephine was about forty-two or -three, robust and healthy with strongly etched features and a fashionably short hairstyle. Clayton, around the same age, had a slight build and a strong sensitive face. I thought that they managed to be both thoroughly modern and yet retain a whiff of late Edwardian grandeur.

  “Peter tells me that you’re a talented writer, Sheila,” Mrs. Rawlings proclaimed in her strong sure voice.

  I blushed, though not as furiously as I was wont to do in the past.

  “He exaggerates!” I started to protest, but Peter jumped in.

  “She’s already won some of the most prestigious prizes for her age group,” he told his parents.

  “Are you intending to go to University, Sheila?” Mr. Rawlings asked.

  “Yes. I’m going to apply to all of them,” I said. “But I really hope I get in to Trinity.”

  “Clayton and I are both Trinity graduates,” Mrs. Rawlings boomed.

  I knew already because Peter had told me, and it had always been the Protestant university.

  “In fact, we met at a Law Society party,” Mrs. Rawlings added.

  “I believe it was at a Society Debate, my dear,” Mr. Rawlings interjected. “We were on opposing teams.”

  “No, no, Clayton,” Mrs. Rawlings insisted. “I distinctly remember—in fact, I . . . ” and she was poised to continue, but at that moment Moira entered the room, dressed in a proper maid’s black and white starched uniform.