Just then Liam swaggered into the water, clothes and all, and shouted to the world: “‘In a cool pond he stood, lapped round by water…’” For a moment he paused and his face trembled as though he couldn’t go on and I thought, What? Will he break down in tears? He went on,
“Clear to the chin and being athirst he burned
to slake his dry weasand with drink,
though drink
he would not ever again.”
Well. Johnny pushed his cap back on his head. He looked at that fish for a while, almost done, and he looked at his hands.
He unhooked the fish with one swift movement, turned the netting inside out and let that old fish loose. Tantalos left like a bat out of hell.
“At’s the easy way out, all right,” Temple called from the other side.
“What did you say?” Johnny strode in slow-motion across the deep water. They faced each other. Johnny put up his dukes.
Temple gave him a pitying look and kicked him dead in the face.
I screamed, they all told me later, and threw myself on top of Johnny. I was throwing myself on top of his teeth was what I thought. All those months of driving into the city in traffic to Dr. Zwick’s.
Just then the ambulance arrived so they took Jenny Rose and Johnny together and I stayed there with Seamus. Someone had to stay with him. He was so upset. He thought, first things first, Bridey ought to sew up Morocco with her crewelwork needles. They brought Mrs. Wooly over and everyone thought she would have a stroke from all the excitement but instead she was enjoying it all, you could tell. She was looking for a stiff nip, was what she said. “And the dance to begin.”
Willy followed the ambulance with Dierdre in Bernadette’s car. I felt sorry for her, for Dierdre. She looked all done in.
Bernadette, her arms crossed in front of her, came over to me. “Well,” she said, “a dream come true. Two blokes fighting over you at last.”
“You can have my dream,” I sobbed. “I’ve got a real life.”
She looked at me blankly.
“A real man.” I sniffed and sat back down on the ground. Everything hurt.
“I don’t want Temple,” she sneered. “It’s Tobias I’m in love with.”
“Tobias?” I asked blankly, some vague bell ringing far-off somewhere. “Who’s Tobias?”
“The cameraman.”
“The cameraman?”
Mrs. Driver came hurrying over. “Claire! There’s an urgent telephone call for you,” she said, “from the States.”
I hurried with her back to her place. All I could think was my mother was dead. The receiver was off its hook on the mahogany bar. “Hello?” I shouted. “Hello?”
“Ma?”
“Anthony?”
“Yeah.”
“What’s wrong?” I shrieked.
“Ma, where are my wrist guards?”
“What?”
“My wrist guards. Where are they?”
“But what about Grandma?!”
“She’s shopping at Key Food.”
I sat on the bar stool. “They’re in your closet, where they always are.”
“No they ain’t.”
“No they aren’t. Yes, they are.”
“Ma. Take a chill pill. Don’t you think I looked? I wouldn’t call you all the way across the Atlantic if they were where they were supposed to be.”
I mulled for a moment. I wanted him to be well without me, while a part still yearned for his dependence. “Try downstairs in the cellar in the cardboard box under the stairs.”
I could hear him skimming across the floor on his Roller-blades. I thought, How could I have imagined I could move them to the West Coast when I couldn’t even get them to tidy their things? There was a stunningly expensive wait.
Someone had come in. I looked across the dark pub. Temple was leaning against the beer barrel delivery. He was dressed to move on. His face was determined and beautiful from the light coming in the little stained glass window. Then I heard Anthony again on the other end. “Mom,” he said, “you’re the best.”
“Is everyone all right?” I said.
Temple nodded.
Anthony said, “Yeah, how ’bout you? Dad still there?” There was a moment where we both hesitated, hearing each other’s silences. He, listening for any changes, betrayals. It was only a moment but it was long.
“Yes,” I said.
“That’s great,” he said, in a hurry now. “Thanks, Mom. Oh, yeah, Aunt Carmela came to dinner last night and boy did she tie one on! Listen, the guys are all standing here waiting.”
“In their skates? On my kitchen floor?”
“Gotta go.” He blew me a kiss.
I hung up the phone.
“You’re not coming with me,” Temple said.
“No,” I said.
“What made up your mind?” He walked toward me. “All this with Molly?” He took hold of my big hand. “Or the fish thing?”
“I suppose my mind was made up years ago, I just refused to admit to myself I’d grown up. I loved thinking I still had a choice.” We stood there. “I loved thinking you were my choice.” I looked in his beautiful eyes. “You still have the moon through the trees,” I said softly.
“Go ahead then.” He dropped my hand. “Serve your false gods. You’ve dug your own grave.” Then, for effect, he added, “buried in Queens.”
“Oh, I doubt that,” I said, and right then I was glad he had said it because if he hadn’t I would always have missed him.
He turned and he started to go.
What the hell. “Temple,” I said, “will you be in New York?”
“Just for three days.”
“Would you look up my sister? Carmela?”
“Ah,” he remembered, “the beauty.”
Thank you, I thought, but let it pass. “Would you?”
“All right.” He sighed.
He picked up his duffel bag. His velvety calfskin appointment book looked for all the world just like hers. One cooler than the other. Those two would be made for each other.
I wrote in her number. Right under someone named Concita, with an asterisk.
I handed him the book and he packed it away. We looked at each other.
“Well then,” he said. “Cheerio.”
I walked him to the door. That Concita would have given me trouble sooner or later anyway. Cheerio? Sometimes you had to laugh.
Chapter Thirteen
So the next day, Uncle Ned and Liam brought Jenny Rose’s overturned doors down from the studio and put some extra saw horses underneath. They made a great long table out in front of Bally Cashin, under the grapevine, where, by the way, you could see little chartreuse beads in tight clusters that would one day be, with any luck, grapes.
Bridey swung back and forth on the door. “I mean, I could almost understand if she’d done it for the money. But to do it for the meanness of it.” She shivered. “And to make us suspect Jenny Rose!”
“She shmucked us up,” Johnny said, his left eye black and blue. “You have to give it to her. She was one shrewd cookie.” He unfurled the kite string gently. Brownie raced through his feet in a frenzy of expectation.
“What I don’t understand”—Uncle Ned scratched his nose—“is why did Molly kill Peg?”
Jenny Rose put down her pencil. “She didn’t intend to kill Peg but when she found out she had, she hardly missed a beat. She just switched her plans. She knew I’d get the money.”
“But how did she know that?”
“Because Peg told her if she didn’t leave Dierdre alone,” Jenny Rose said, “she’d go to Dublin and have the notary draw up a new will, leaving everything to me. Peg thought Molly just wanted money. And that’s just what she did do. At Pentecost. Expecting it to put Molly off.”
Dierdre put her arms around Jenny Rose. “Poor Peg didn’t realize how determined Molly was.”
“You mean demented,” Jenny Rose said with power.
Dierdre folded napkins carefully under e
very pewter plate. I noticed her fingers trembled.
“Moving the money around didn’t scare Molly, though,” Jenny Rose said.
“It did however give her an idea,” I said.
“And I thought she loved me,” Dierdre admitted. “What a bloody fool I was.”
Jenny Rose said, “Molly could never afford to have anyone see my pictures on the wall. Because I’d painted her with Dierdre, hadn’t I?”
“Peg knew it when I fell in love with Molly,” Dierdre muttered. “She knew it all along.”
“Peg was used to you. You were always falling in love with someone.” Jenny Rose laughed unhappily.
Johnny shook his head. “Molly had us all coralled.”
Jenny Rose put her face in her hands. “I never imagined it to be Molly. I mean, if she’d wanted to kill me, she had the chance to do it so many times. But she pretended to help me. She let me know that she’d saved my paintings. I guess she thought no one would suspect her if she’d already saved my work. But she just reckoned she’d wait until Willy left for London and then she’d make it look like I’d committed suicide. Everyone would know how heartbroken I would have been. She figured it would look as though I’d jumped off the cliff on top of Morocco. You know the way he’s always threatening to jump off. But then Morocco wouldn’t cooperate. So she pushed him. Poor old donkey. I pitched and plunged me down to stop her. That’s when she hit me on the head.
“I don’t know how I wound up on his back, I was unconscious when she tied us up. He kept struggling, poor Morocco. He couldn’t get up. He couldn’t get out of the water. I can’t tell you how horrible it was. It was like she was there but she wasn’t. She kept telling us ‘Cry out loud if it hurts too much.’ That was the part she enjoyed the most. That was when she told me about Brenden Murphy. Poor Brenden Murphy defied her, told her he loved his wife and she should leave him alone. She kept telling me how I’d end up like him. She was just spinning with enchantment. And it wasn’t like she didn’t know what she was up to. She had her plans. We’d both be dead and she’d be left with the rich, besotted Dierdre.”
Uncle Ned said, “And then what would she have thought up to do to her?”
We all looked, frightened, at Dierdre.
“Oh, I’m a bloody fool,” she cried.
“Now, now, not a bloody fool. At least not that,” Bridey said, taking charge. “Enough of that talk. This is a happy occasion.”
“Well, we can’t not talk about it. It’s changed all our lives,” Bernadette explained.
“Hello.” Liam poked his head out the door. “What’s that smells so good?” He hadn’t had a drink yet.
Sensing our thoughts, Aunt Bridey said, “That’s because I put the holy water all over him.” She’d made an entire lamb and stuffed it with rosemary and the dry sausage from my pork store on 101st Avenue. Your mouth would water every time the wind blew by. Absentmindedly, she tipped her shoulder a certain way and you could tell she was pleased. But so many people had telephoned the radio station wanting to know about Liam’s song, “The Number Seven Bus,” and that might have had something to do with his not drinking. A not too obscure group from Dublin wanted to know if they might record it for their next album.
“You want a cigarette?” Bernadette asked me, holding out the pack.
“Na.”
She looked me up and down. “No four-leaf clover, eh?”
“As a matter of fact I did find one.”
“That right?”
“Yes. Only I left it there. I didn’t pick it.”
She sucked on the cigarette. “Come again?”
“It just seemed like the more magnificent thing to do, I mean, I couldn’t bear to think of it withering on its little stem when all its little clover friends were still out there taking in the mist.”
She gave me a pitying look.
Tobias had come down in his Jeep. Bernadette went in the house when she saw it up on the road and when she came out again she was wearing her lipstick. He was leaving the film business, he announced. You could see Bernadette’s face fall. He had “connections in the music world, though,” he said, and thought he “might give it a shot.” He was thinking maybe he could “sell the rest of Liam’s lyrics. If Liam didn’t have other plans for them,” he added.
Bernadette blushed pink.
Dierdre looked at the white inside of her arm and rattled her charm bracelets. “What will happen to Molly’s house, do you think? Will Fiona want it?”
“No one would want to live in that house,” Bridey said.
“Oh, don’t say that,” Dierdre said, eyes glittering. “It would have to be blessed.”
“Och, that reminds me, Father Early’s comin’. Go get the Madeira.”
Bernadette bustled in and out. She and Dierdre had laid white sheets over the makeshift tables and set up jugs of wildflowers on top so they wouldn’t blow away. They’d hung the sheets width-wise, though, and they were long over the sides, so they waved in the breeze, like wings on geese. Then she had Seamus bring out the ironing board and lay it across two milk crates, because there weren’t enough benches.
“What on earth is that?” one of the kids said.
“It’s called a phonograph. Isn’t it great? It’s Mrs. Wooly’s. It works, too. Listen.” Jenny Rose put the old 78 on the chrome cylinder and watched it drop. It sputtered for a few moments, then a scratchy melody eeked out, “Long ago and far away … I dreamed a dream one day…”
Uncle Ned had a gift wrapped up for Johnny and he’d leaned it against the house. It looked suspiciously like a fishing pole. “No,” he said, “it’s what you call a guarantee. He’ll come back, like.”
Mrs. Whitetree-Murphy came in her car with the trailer attached to the back. Almost apologetically, she said she “didn’t think it would be right to leave Morocco alone, so soon after”—she nudged her head meaningfully, as though the donkey would know what she was talking about. Then, with as sweet a temper as you’ve ever seen, that donkey walked right up to Audrey and nuzzled her with his nose, stuck his head under her arm, knocking off the New York Yankees cap Johnny’d given him. “There’s really nothing quite as amusing as a donkey,” she remarked. If you didn’t know better, you’d have thought he understood every word that woman said. You had to admit he was a pretty donkey.
“Should I put him in the shed, Audrey?” Liam took hold of his rope. “I mean because of your lungs?”
We’d put her beside Seamus and Mrs. Wooly. “It’s awfully strange,” she said. “Yesterday Dr. Carpenter suggested I take what Mrs. Wooly took, the American prescription drug, and within the half hour, no more wheezing, no more headache!”
“Yeah?”
“I simply can’t get over it!”
“I thought you only took rare herbs and natural remedies?” Bernadette asked Mrs. Wooly suspiciously.
“I do, dear.” Mrs. Wooly lit her pipe. “But when you’ve got real pain you’ve got to go with the Americans.”
“You’re not going to America!” Seamus cried.
“Shut up! What do you think, I’d leave you here?”
Jenny Rose winked at Willy Murphy. “You’re a real hero, Seamus.” She put her slender arms around his heavy neck. “I’m that proud of you!”
Audrey Whitetree-Murphy watched them across the rippling table. In her pocket twinkled her long-gone mother’s pink sapphire ring. She touched her hair, happy and sad. Last night she’d stood behind Willy and wept sentimental tears as he’d retrieved it from the safe. Well, well. She patted the silky lump. It was there. He’d want it for later, after the fine dessert he’d spent the morning preparing. Blackberry Tango, he called it. She didn’t know why.
Bob the cat, who’d been a quiet circle in Brownie’s bed, jumped up and onto Jenny Rose. “Get off!” she cried and handed across the sketch she’d been working on.
Johnny, his eyesight fine but his arms not long enough, held it out to get a good look. “It’s the Taj Mahal!” he said. “And me and Claire on a bench in f
ront.”
“Yeah,” she said, passing the cat to Willy. “And it’s that fucking hard not to make it look sentimental.”
He darted a look at her and me with swimmy eyes.
I suppose I cleared my throat. “All right,” I announced, “everybody hold still. Time to catch life passing us by.”
“Don’t forget to say: ‘Don’t nobody say cheese,’” Johnny instructed.
I aimed my fine old Contex. “Don’t anybody say cheese,” I said.
The crane flew off and over their heads at that moment and I took, I could feel it, a perfect Zen photograph.
“So you see,” Mrs. Audrey Whitetree-Murphy surmised, “all’s well that ends well!” She patted Mrs. Wooly sitting there. “Imagine Molly pretending to nurse you and all the while doping you up! The cheek!”
“I’d feel a lot better”—Mrs. Wooly looked up from her tea—“if they’d found Molly in her sweater and not just her sweater and her not in it.”
“She’ll turn up,” Liam prophesized. “One a these nights she’ll come floatin’ up the beach and her head’ll be big as a spongy white squash.
“And it’ll serve her well right,” he added.
“Please,” Bridey said.
“I only can’t figure.” Bernadette ran her fingers through her hair. “If she was dead, how could she have slipped her arms out from that sweater?”
“Curious ways them currents have,” Uncle Ned explained.
“Could be the fish did eat her up,” Dierdre suggested.
“There’s a thought,” said Bridey.
Seamus looked over his shoulder. “You know what I’m scared of? Sure, what if she comes down the lane? Or through the dark? Half nibbled up.”
“Now, that would make a great story,” Jenny Rose said.
Liam leaned one arm across Seamus’s shoulders and held the other up to the briney moor. “It was a dark,” he said and winked at me, “and stormy night…”
Also by
Mary Anne Kelly
Keeper of the Mill
Foxglove
Park Lane South, Queens
THOMAS DUNNE BOOKS.
An imprint of St. Martin’s Press.
JENNY ROSE. Copyright © 1999 by Mary Anne Kelly. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin’s Press, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. 10010.
Jenny Rose Page 29