I had to go. I was floating with so much upsetment; it was as if I had to hold myself down to the ground by gritting my teeth. Still, I picked Anthony up at Holy Child and took him down to Angelo’s on Jamaica Avenue for a slice of pizza and a huddle. I told him I was going to Ireland this afternoon because Aunt Zinnie’d made an auspicious collar and who knew what she’d be promoted to, so I was going in her place, wasn’t it great and I was leaving this evening, that way I’d get back sooner and Aunt Zinnie, his godmother, had called the airport and fixed it for me, which wasn’t true (it’s a wonder I knew what I was saying, at that point). Anyway, this way he’d be impressed and go for it, his aunt Zinnie is the moon to him, being a detective and all, and anything to do with her is fine with him. He was okay with my going, which made me proud and, I have to admit, sad, but he’s such a wonderful kid, our Anthony, that really, if you knew him you wouldn’t expect any less. It was going to be a little rough for him to get out in the morning without me to hurry him up but, hey, you know what, maybe it would do him good. At least he wasn’t acting stressed out. He was more concerned about an impending basketball game against Our Lady of Perpetual Help, so I thought all would be well and he hooked my neck with one arm as we walked out under the El and he told me I’d better not go do anything more stupid than usual like cutting my hair. That’s how he talks to me (God forbid I should try to do anything sexy or up-to-date), so I knew he was all right with me in general. He could stay at Aunt Zinnie’s the whole time, he said. He worships his cousin Michaelean, who goes to Molloy. I was relieved and dropped him off at the monument in Forest Park, where they were having a game. He has this heartbreakingly beautiful, elegant, loping walk and I watched him leave the car and walk off toward his friends with this enormous pride and love. Whatever Johnny had done to me, I had this great kid.
Then I went home to wait for Dharma. She’d be getting off the bus. She was a different type altogether, Dharma. Not easy. But then, she interests me for that reason. I made her her kukicha tea. She’s an artist. She has, at the moment, rose-red hair with brown roots, she wears all black except for her uniform and even that is now a struggle. I promised her if she stays in Catholic school until the end of her junior year I’ll let her go to Richmond Hill for her senior year (hoping she’ll change her mind when she sinks her teeth into that advanced art course they’ve got going over there at Christ the King). She hides her uniform with a black Buddhist prayer apron and carries a bedpost top on a sparkled piece of rawhide on her pocketbook; anyway, you get the idea. Not your queen-of-the-prom kind of kid but I like her.
I picked up the phone and dialed Carmela’s number. She was probably monitering her machine. My fingers drummed the hateful wall. No wonder she’d been so quiet when she’d heard Aunt Dierdre died. No wonder. I didn’t say anything. I imagined she knew the call was from me. We met each other’s silences. I hung up and rifled through the phone book. I called the National Audubon Society and reported an eagle sighting in Queens. “So that is the first time you ever heard someone report an eagle sighting in Queens, right?” I barked a laugh.
“Nuh-uh,” he replied, writing this down, unimpressed. “You’re about the fourth in two weeks.” And then it occurred to me, I hadn’t even asked who the father was. Who could it have been? I thought of all the high school boys, one more pimply than the next, who’d gazed, heartsick, at our old house. There’d been so many.
So, of course I had to call Carmela right back. The machine picked up, as I knew it would. “You know I’m leaving any minute now for Ireland,” I said. “Zinnie can’t go so I’m going. Mommy and me just had a little heart-to-heart.” I waited a moment, to give her a chance to pick up. “No,” I said, “if you had nothing to say all these years, I don’t suppose you will now. But just so you know, there really was an eagle. Is an eagle. The Audubon Society supports my claim.” I managed not to add the intoxicating, “So there,” but inserted the receiver to its cradle with a nonetheless assertive silver clunk. Then I went downstairs to wait for Dharma. As I’d figured, she wasn’t as easygoing about my leaving. As a matter of fact, she thought she’d just take off school and come along and she was downright sullen at my refusal to let her. Then she was angry that she’d have to stay at Grandma’s. Why, Grandma was just getting over a heart attack and she was a teenager and we all knew what a strain teenagers were so why couldn’t she just stay at our house with Daddy and he’d have no one to look after him and, oh, I could see where this was going: long, sumptuous dinners of takeout from the Homestead Deli, charged to my credit card and I could spend the rest of the year paying it off. No, I explained, she couldn’t stay with Johnny because he was working on something that was really taking all the juice out of him—I had to wonder at my own cynical cool—but in the end we compromised and I agreed that if it was all right with Zinnie, she could stay there too, if she promised to help with the laundry and the dishes, which was really no deal at all because Zinnie runs a tight ship and, for example, if you don’t take your dish to the sink she’ll leave it there and the next time you sit down, there it will be and there it will stay until you decide to do something about it. At least they both would be safe with Zinnie.
I went upstairs and did a concentrated meditation before I packed my bag so that I wouldn’t take too much. I have this natural tendency to take my whole world with me—not being one to detach—so I really have to bring myself mentally to a stripped and essential state, then follow up with an imaginary projection to my destination, allow for weather, realize I’m not going to lose eleven pounds on the plane, nor am I going to turn magically into a businesswoman who wears suits when I get there and then I put in what I probably would have worn at home for the next week or so, anyway. The whole time Dharma was arguing with me, I’d been thinking and planning. I wasn’t going to bring my whole camera bag and all the rigamarole that goes with it. I took my small German Contex, a gem of a camera. That was the only thirty-five millimeter I’d take. I have this purple and green velvet Nepali shoulder bag with silk buttons I like to keep it in. It looks more like a hippy drug bag than a valuable camera bag, and it’s padded with plush cotton quilting, so it’s safe as a bug in a rug underneath my jacket.
I had a bad moment as I made the bed. The faint remains of garlic and Old Spice. I’m afraid I was halfway through when I turned around and pulled the tucked-in sheets out and left them that way. Then I got one more grudging hug from Dharma and sent her on her way, made sure I had my passport, credit card and cash. I packed some paperbacks I’d just gotten from the library, a V. S. Pritchett and my trusty Jean Rhys. Then I lugged my squishy big bag down the stairs and drove over to my mom’s with the dog. Floozie was pleased as punch to go to Mary’s. First, the other dogs were there and second, where else would you start the day with French toast and end with Reddi Whip on pudding? I don’t know how her dogs live into their late teens but they do.
My mother was excited and upbeat. She always is when there’s a lot going on. She didn’t look at all sick. Well, she’d got a lot off her chest. “Where’s Carmela?” I sniffed around.
“Sure, where should she be? Here? Waiting for you to accuse her of whatever it is you’re so sure to accuse her of?”
I stood there, guilty as charged, and decided not to take the row of Vienna Fingers the ripped-open cellophane would have allowed me to slip into my bag without a sound.
“She’s home in the city,” Mary said eventually. “In her loft.” She said loft like you would say palace. Pretty different from the way she’d said the word when she’d first heard Carmela would be living in what was then, if I remember her words right, a “filthy, abandoned rattletrap sweatshop with a self-operated, take-your-life-in-your-hands bloody excuse for a lift.” But she was right. What would I have said that would have been any use?
“Does she know you told me?” I checked my purse again for passport, credit card and cash.
“Oh, no.” Her mouth compressed to a tight white dash and rattled to and fro. She’d alm
ost died a week ago, I reminded myself, and took her in my arms. “We’ll get through this,” I assured her.
A little voice came up through her hair. “There’s something else.”
“What else?” I pulled back and searched her face.
“Bridey, your aunt Brigid, called this morning.”
“She did?” I checked that I had my moon phase watch on. “She will have someone there to meet me at the airport, won’t she?”
“No. You’re to drive yourself down in a rental. I’ve written it all out. You know how Dierdre died?”
“How?”
“In a fire.”
“What, really?”
“Yes.” Her eyes filled up and she mopped them with her ever handy brassiere-rumpled Kleenex. “An explosion, really. The house. Our beautiful house! All up in flames. You know how they’ve got these treacherous kerosene heaters. A wretched death.” She sniffed. She caught my eye. “Leave it to Brigid to fill me in on the gory details!”
I waited. I knew I too would be recipient of those details. I didn’t have to wait too long.
“They didn’t even have to break her finger to get her ring,” Mary said, twisting her own thin band of gold. “That was our mother’s own ring! Bridey said they pulled it off and her finger crumbled. Turned to ashes! Oh, what a cruel and wretched way to die!”
“Jesus!” I concurred.
“There’ll be no wee house, now, to leave to you girls!”
My heart, I admit, sank a little. “Ah,” I said, “the hell with the house. We never would have gone over to be in it. It would have just wound up bringing in money and, hey, you know our family—what would we do with money?”
I got my laugh. She walked me to the door with last-minute necessities she’d made ready for Zinnie and now insisted I bring: a dry sausage from the pork store on 101st Avenue, Daddy’s Irish sweater she’d bought him all those years ago and I couldn’t “believe me!” do without, a collapsed hot water bottle for the nights (also grand as a flight cushion for the neck, she assured me), a paperback of rudimentary Gaelic so her family wouldn’t find me totally ignorant (what was I supposed to do, memorize it on the plane?), a Whitman’s Sampler for the lady at the rectory who’d called, and a bottle of witch hazel. I already had three mass cards and a vestment for the priest neatly folded on the bottom of my suitcase. She made me take money for duty-free whiskey. “Get the bourbon”—she pushed me toward the door—“the good one with the turkey on the label. You never know.”
I squashed everything into my bag. My mother hesitated. She brushed the lint from my shoulder and searched my face.
“What?” I said.
“I’ve never been sorry I came to live here, Claire. I’ve never regretted leaving Bally Cashin.”
“I know, Mom.”
“God be with you.” She pushed me out the door, not letting the tears fall till she clicked it shut behind me.
My dad was waiting in front of the house, too polite to honk but I could feel him wanting to get going. We took Lefferts, to avoid the Van Wyck.
He wanted to talk about Debussy, who was on the radio, but all I wanted to talk about was how all those years went by and nobody, not one person in the whole family, mentioned that Carmela had had a baby. You have to understand my father. His mother’s family were Adlige, aristocratic German Poles, and he is that way, tall and reserved and soft-spoken. A gentleman. So you tend to overlook a lot. Or we do, following my mother’s lead. She’s practical. He lives in a tower of symphonic appreciation. If you see my mother’s face when she deals with him, her mouth softening into a campaign to amuse a privileged, favorite child, you get a better idea of how things are with us.
But I wasn’t in the mood to protect or pamper anyone. I was outraged and I was righteous. On and on I went. “Did Zinnie know?”
“No.”
At least that.
“Claire,” he said, “don’t let it get to you when your mother’s family acts kind of suspicious.”
“Why? How, suspicious?”
“Well, you see, these people are from the country. They have country ways.”
“And?”
“Just that they might look at you as though you’re there to take something from them. Like your share of their land. That’s the way they think.”
“I don’t give a flying how they think. Nobody cares what I think.”
“I don’t know why you’re so indignant,” my father finally said. “It was Carmela’s heartache, after all.”
“What do you mean?!” I’m ashamed to say I screamed. “I’m not involved? That heartache has nothing to do with me? Couldn’t I have helped, or … or been there for her?!”
“Claire, you were a young girl. So, for that matter, was she. This whole thing never should have happened.”
We joggled along. Dad’s car has worn-out springs. I looked out at the supermarket and Don Peppe’s restaurant. The mouthwatering scent of southern Italian cooking came in through the vents of the Buick. “But it did happen, Dad. What if that child still lives in the village, there? What if it lives in Skibbereen and I run into it and don’t know?”
Dad tipped an ear to me. “Then it’s God’s will,” he said.
“Oh, come on, Dad.”
He gave me a worried look. “No, come on you, Claire. What’s this, you believe in God on Sunday but not in real life? And I don’t want to hear one word against Carmela. Another girl would never have even told her parents, just would have gotten rid of it. It took a lot of courage to do what Carmela did.”
He had me there. Still, I had a lot of issues when a man (even my father) talked about God’s will when it came to a woman’s body. It just riles me. Like that time in the Himalayas when a Westerner of no obvious monetary worth was about to give birth and this handy Tibetan doctor refused to assist because, he patiently explained, if she lived she lived and if she died she died. That was her karma. I won’t go on and on about that now but you get the gist.
“It’s just that nobody told me,” I muttered, feeling not only the nettle of my husband’s betrayal but now what felt like my family’s as well. “I just can’t understand how nobody would care enough to try and find it. I mean you’d think, after all these years. Nowadays and all—”
“Claire,” my father said gently, “open the window. You’re fuming.”
I managed a smile. My father is too kind to say, “this is not about you.” We both studied the giant can’t miss ’em signs along the airport road for our airline, missed it, had to turn around and creep cautiously back onto the airport road, found it at last and pulled up in front with little time to spare. We edged to the curb.
“So, this is it.” He came around the car and held me in a bear clutch while the traffic cop was whistle-blowing and not far away. My dad is not to be intimidated. And he wears Zinnie’s mini gold shield on his license.
“No, but really.” I pulled my bag from his pre—oil crisis, huge American car trunk. “Maybe I can find it. I mean, as long as I’m there.”
“Can’t stay here, Pop.” The security cop lumbered over.
“Give our best to everyone, now,” my dad said. “And try not to get into trouble.” His brow wrinkled up in that way it had when he was trying not to think of my bright, checkered past.
“Don’t worry, Dad.” I kissed him. “I’ll be fine. Just keep an eye on the kids. Johnny”—I think I would have told him then, in the trusting upheaval of farewell, but a Carey bus was on our tail—“Johnny will be busy and all,” I said in a small voice, realizing as I did that Johnny wasn’t going to be dismayed at all when he found I’d gone and hadn’t even left a message. He was going to be delighted.
“Don’t you worry.” Dad climbed into the car, leaned across the seat and rolled down the passenger window. “Oh and ‘it’ is a girl.”
I almost dropped my bag. “It is?” I leaned into the car. “You know it’s a girl? And you let me keep calling her ‘it’?”
“Honey, she’s not a baby. She’s
a grown-up girl.”
“I can’t believe this!” I stood there.
“And her name”—Dad pulled off, as if he thought I was going to jump in the car and grab hold of his ears—“her name’s Jenny Rose.”
Chapter Three
The first thing I did, when I was satisfied the plane was indeed not about to explode, was order one of those nice mini bottles of French red wine. I couldn’t think of sleep. At best I hoped to knock myself out for a couple of hours. I just sat there stewing in the juice of Johnny’s betrayal, though. And then I would see the glamorous flight attendant and I’d remember Carmela. That would keep me busy ’til the picture of Johnny salivating over Portia McTavish would again appear. But it’s funny how things move along. As the plane crept over the mysterious Atlantic ocean, I felt my own fortune falling into place. It was almost as though I were waiting for this very thing to happen; like my whole life had been on hold while I raised the kids and now, here I was again. Me. Claire Breslinski, on my own, the way I’d known and loved me best.
When we were landing, the plane tipped cavalierly to one side. I held my breath but dared to peek from my squeezed-shut eyes and saw the dawn on the cockeyed little land squares. The notorious forty shades of green. I wasn’t prepared for a green that would reach inside me and make me soft. It tugged at my heart.
Jenny Rose Page 3