Dance Lessons

by Aine Greaney

  “Vinnie and I were standing out on the dance floor. We both lit a cigarette. We’d shared a flat and med classes, hospital rounds and pubs and parties in Dublin. But now, there we were standing in that oul’ hall with the smell of stale cigarettes and Jeyes Fluid from the toilets and the floor still sticky and filthy from the dance the night before. We were like an old couple that were supposed to dance or talk or make a move, but neither of us had a word to say to each other. So we went back to the cloakroom to go and play doctor.

  “Carmel was lying there in her hospital gown, just staring at the smoky ceiling, just staring straight up as if she just wanted it to be all over and let her know when to look down at herself, at the rest of the world again.

  “When we heard the car we thought it was just Tony, deciding to drive away for a while, to kill the time by taking a drive out along Lough Gowna. But then we listened to the car parking. A door banged shut, but the engine was still running.

  “Fintan. He’d found out. He ran across the room and then stopped, stood there as if he’d collided with something. He just stood there staring down at her under those cheap lamplights. Then he started screeching, terrible screeching.

  “First we thought it was just temper, or shock, or both, but then, we saw that he was actually crying. Crying and fell to his knees and sobbed and cursed us all to hell.”

  A telephone rings somewhere in the Fitzgeralds’ house. It rings six times, then an answering machine picks it up. Through the sitting room door, Ellen listens to Ruth’s recorded voice from the hallway. “Hello! You’ve reached Tom, Ruth, Lorcan, and Riona. We’re not here at the moment. But leave us a message!”

  “So Carmel never got Jo’s money?”

  “I don’t know. But I doubt it. Jo was to arrive on her bike when it was all done. She was supposed to pay us all then.”

  “Where . . .” Ellen starts to ask, but the words falter. She sees that vision of her husband again, sitting there at their kitchen counter, eating his breakfast and reading the American headlines before he rushed off to his Boston job.

  Tom replaces the cushion and reaches past the arm of the couch to switch on a lamp on an end table. The light is soft and buttery in the big, comfortable room. “See, unlike the rest of us, Fintan was the only one without a plan, a trick up his sleeve, a financial gain. He’d actually convinced himself that he could make it all work—marriage, a kid, living on his parents’ land. Carmel was supposed to tell him she miscarried. But then, she was suddenly just gone. Of course, we all assumed that it was to get a legal abortion, to finish what we were supposed to do. And then, last summer, here’s Carmel back in town with a teenage girl in tow.” He shakes his head, gives a dry little laugh. “It was terrible that night last summer. When we met her in the hotel. I thought she’d avoid us, pretend not to know or see, but she seemed to actually enjoy introducing her daughter while watching the expression on our faces.”

  “So Ruth didn’t know? About you?”

  He shakes his head.

  “So Jo doesn’t know she has a grandchild?”

  Tom shrugs. “I don’t know that. But I doubt it.”

  “But Tom, even if Fintan believed that his girlfriend was going to lie about a miscarriage, why did he take off to the States, in the opposite direction?”

  The doctor shrugs. “You tell me. You were his wife.”

  Should she tell this doctor, this relative stranger, why she abandoned her life in Coventry-by-the-Sea to come here?

  She thinks of it now, that day in the Risen Planet Café, the day after the end of school term. It would have been easy, so easy to have missed this: if Ellen had eaten lunch someplace else, if she had decided to clear out her faculty room instead of walking up to town, if Sheila McCormack hadn’t recognized her across those lunch tables. Any of these and Ellen Boisvert would not be sitting here now. She would never have known Jo Dowd. She would have let her husband die in peace. Then, a strident voice rises inside Ellen’s head. “The dead have their own peace. But what about us, the living. What about me? Shouldn’t I have some peace, too?”

  Suddenly, she tells Tom Fitzgerald the story, how she believed—was told—that her husband was an orphan. How, on an otherwise ordinary day, through a chance meeting, she’d discovered Jo’s existence. She says, “When I met him, I was even younger and even stupider than you were. I was attracted to that idea, the idea of someone so far from home, so adventurous, so untethered to a family or tradition or expectations. I wanted him to be an orphan.” She tells it all in a quiet, even voice, while watching the soft lamplight fall across the Fitzgeralds’ polished-wood floor. She tells how she was just about to go away, to fly back to Boston when Jo called her in the middle of the night ranting about grandchildren in America.

  Tom gets up from the couch to stand before the unlit fireplace. He takes a framed photo from the mantel. It’s a photo of him and Ruth and the kids somewhere on vacation. Ruth is in a blue sundress. The kids are each in shorts. Riona wears denim cut-offs and a red, strapless bikini top. There are palm trees and white lounge chairs in the photo’s background. In the snapshot, Tom, in sunglasses and a pale, bare chest, stands behind his daughter, his right hand set protectively on her bare shoulder.

  He stares at the framed photo so long that Ellen wonders if she should tiptoe away, up the hallway and out the front door. He doesn’t turn toward her when he speaks. “We fight like blazes, you know. Me and Riona. It’s a constant battle between us. She’s one of the most headstrong kids I’ve ever met. Or maybe I expect more—more gratitude than I get. We’re just constantly at loggerheads lately, especially in the last six months. If I suggest she take piano, she wants to take violin. If I suggest Spain for a holiday, she suddenly wants Italy. It’s her age. And we’re too alike, the pair of us.”

  He faces Ellen, looking down at her in her armchair. His expression is stripped of his usual congenial-doctor persona. He looks as if he might cry. “Even in a small place like this, I’ve seen terrible things in my practice—negligent, abusive parents, men who torture their partners or wives. You know, Ellen, I thought when my own parents died that I’d never get over it.” He jabs the framed photo toward her, as if he’s showing it to her for the first time. “But the thing I’d never, ever get over would be if one of these guys just cut me off, denied my very existence. If they ever told the rest of the world that they’d no father.”

  He places the framed photo back on the mantel. “What would I have to do to make them do that? What terrible, awful thing? I hope I never find out—but in a way, I have. I . . .” His voice catches. “I know. You just . . . Christ! You just told me. And I was actually part of it.”

  “She wrote, she said. Wrote him letters and he never wrote back. She said there was a falling out; she assumed that I, his wife, was part of that estrangement.” Ellen gives a wry laugh.

  They are standing in the doctor’s front hallway, between the hall table and the blond-wood staircase. The phone’s red message light is blinking—the person who called an hour ago. Tom’s face is lighter. His voice is almost recovered, almost returned to that bustling, I’m-the-nice-doctor voice. He nods toward their kitchen door. “I never even offered you anything—a drink, a cup of tea. Don’t tell Ruth. She a devil for them kind of things—strict on hospitality, protocols.”

  “I’m fine. It wasn’t a social visit. But thanks—for everything.”

  “Ach, for nothing. I’m just sorry it couldn’t be an easier, nicer story—something that made us all look a bit less savage or greedy. But they were different times back then. An’ people forget now, how limited, constricted everything really was. Everyone scrabbling for the same few shillings, for the few jobs there were. That’s not an excuse, just a—”

  “—That photo,” Ellen interrupts. She suddenly remembers it. “The photo that you said Carmel’s daughter sent. You still got it?”

  “Prob-ably. I know Riona tried to use it as a sort of bribe to get us to let her drop ballet and change her classes for some
mad hip-hop thing.”

  “Can I take a look?”

  He passes his hand over his chin again. “D’you think that’s a good idea?”

  “No. But I’d still like to just see her. I’d like to see Fintan’s kid. Please.”

  Over the polished-wood stair banister, Tom hands her the printout of a digital photo. He glances toward the front door, nervous of his family’s return. “’Twas easy enough to find—clipped to Riona’s dressing-table mirror.”

  Ellen studies the photo of eight girls in a dance studio, four in front; four in the back. Some are willowy and sophisticated; others are plump and still childlike in their dance tights and leotards and strappy tops. The girls in back are standing with their palms up, in a parody of theatrical fright. The four girls in front are kneeling on a polished-wood floor, their eyes wide and ferocious; their arms and hands crooked in an attacking-bear pose.

  Back row, center. There’s Fintan’s girl. She stands an inch or more above the others. Her black bangs are cut at a crazy angle. She’s wearing a puzzled frown for the camera. Fintan’s frown.

  Above the girls’ heads is a white banner draped across a wall, “Jarkowski Dance Studio.”

  “Catherine.” Ellen says the name aloud in the doctor’s house. She studies the eyes, the bony little shoulders inside the strappy dance top.

  40

  “LIE DOWN,” the little girl says to her. “Lie down in the grass and we’ll tickle you.”

  So Jo, laughing, kneels and then flops down in the overgrown summer meadow in front of the house. She stretches out, her hands above her head. There is a smell, a musky smell. It’s wild honeysuckle—the wild honeysuckle that grows all over the hazel rock.

  “No peeping,” says the little girl. “No, no peeping.” The girl giggles. Her brother joins in, screeching, laughing at the sight of their mother lying there in the long grass. Through her summer skirt, the grass is prickly. She hears them plucking the buttercups, the wild barley they’ll use to tickle her. She listens to their whispery voices. The boy, always, the more cautious of the two, watching out for his sister, pointing out what she shouldn’t pick—what might prick or sting her. “No. Not that,” the boy says. “Here, you just do the buttercups.”

  Jo opens her eyes. Through the long, wild grasses, there are her children hunkered in the meadow, the boy in his summer short pants; the girl in a pink floral dress. The boy’s curly hair is silhouetted against the summer sky, the midday sun. The girl is blond, an angel-blond. Above her the sky is a pure summer blue. From Jo’s spot in the field, the whole world has shifted. The trees are monstrous. They’re the trees in a fairy tale. The house is way up there on the hill, just a blob on the horizon, a dark spot on the sun.

  The children’s voices grow louder as they cross the distance between them and her. And just before she shuts her eyes again, she sees that they are holding hands. To oblige them, to play along in their game, she shuts her eyes and lies still, lies here in the summer smell of wild honeysuckle as the kids come again, kneel in the grass over their mother.

  Ellen opens in the bedroom door slowly. The agency nurse startles awake from where she’s nodded off in the bedside chair. A swatch of lemon yellow knitting flops from the nurse’s lap onto the bedroom floor. Both women watch Jo’s sleeping face. The old woman is muttering and giggling.

  “She’s been laughing,” whispers the agency nurse. “Off and on all night. She’s been giggling like this to herself.”

  Ellen bends to pick up the nurse’s piece of knitting. She follows the trail of yellow yarn across the white bedspread to the big ball of fuzzy yellow yarn clutched in Jo’s hand.

  “She seems to like it,” the nurse whispers. “Once I put it in her hand at all, she wouldn’t let go. She just kept laughing and kneading my ball of baby wool.” Then the nurse glances down at herself, pats the rise of her pregnant tummy. “We’re not bothering to find out if we’re havin’ a girl or a boy, so I stuck with yellow—safer.” She flashes a smile at Ellen, then checks her watch. “I’m supposed to be on till 12, if you want to get a bit of a rest for yourself.”

  “No. No, that’s okay.”

  Jo keeps giggling and kneading the ball of yellow yarn.

  “I can just start another ball,” the nurse says, gently breaking off the yarn from the piece of finished knitting. “I’ve plenty more at home. I bought too much anyways.”

  They walk to the kitchen together, where Ellen switches on the light to read the chart in its folder, the nurse’s initials opposite the dosages and temperature and blood pressure.

  “Her temperature is up a bit,” the nurse says from behind Ellen as she zips up a jacket over her scrubs. “But that could really be anything. I mean, at this stage. I changed her nightie and bathed her as best I could.”

  “She seems comfortable,” Ellen says. “I’ll sit a while with her and take it from there.”

  The nurse jingles her car keys, takes her purse and knitting bag and crosses to the scullery. “I left my mobile number there,” she says to Ellen. “Just in case.”

  When Ellen returns to the bedroom, Jo is no longer giggling. Her small, shriveled face is turned sideways on the pillow, the toothless mouth set slightly open. Now she’s clutching and stroking the big ball of yellow yarn in both hands. For one split second, Ellen thinks it looks like she’s going to throw it, toss it like someone playing a game.

  Ellen sits on the bedside chair, studying the sideways face against the pillow. This is the woman who rode her bicycle down the hill, parked her bicycle behind the Gowna dance hall to check on the young Tom Fitzgerald’s work, to pay him for a job done. No. Ellen shakes the thought away. Not tonight. Tonight, there is only this sick old woman. The face is slightly pinker than usual. Jo’s forehead is glistening with sweat.

  From the nightstand, Ellen tears off a piece of cotton wool, dips it in a glass of water, and leans in to dab at Jo’s forehead, then down the bridge of her nose to her cheeks. The lightest touch, light enough not to wake or frighten.

  Jo parts her lips and sighs. Then she mewls like a cat and giggles aloud.

  “This one!” says the boy. “How d’ya like this one, Mam?” He’s trailing a sheaf of wild barley over her forehead, down the bridge of her nose, over her cheeks. “Is it tickly? Tickly?”

  “Yes! Oh, yes!” She giggles. “But it’s lovely and feathery! Lovely.”

  The girl squeals. “Me next! Me next!”

  The girl has something softer. It’s a strand of bog cotton. The girl trails it down Jo’s cheeks, down along her neck. The bog cotton is damp and dewy.

  This time his room seems sadder. Ellen stands there under the harsh, unshaded lightbulb, looks again at the arc of prize-winning ribbons over his bed. She opens the wardrobe again, touches his plaid shirt, the corduroys still hanging from the wire hanger. The detritus of his young life, the last shreds of innocence—of belief.

  She bends to pick up the yellow envelope from where it peeps from the pages of the textbook. She takes out that photo of Fintan and Carmel at that university dance. This time, Carmel looks even prettier to Ellen. Both of them are the picture of young romance. Both of them are the picture of blissful naïveté.

  Then Ellen conjures that printed photo of their daughter in her dancer’s pose. Standing here in his old room, Ellen inserts the girl here between her parents, superimposes the tall, pouting girl into the photo. Catherine right there between them. They all fit, all three of them, the way that Ellen never did. Their marriage might have been happy then unhappy, difficult and then suddenly easier. But it would have survived, been fed and renewed by this aged and deep conviction that they were meant to be.

  In Boston or in Patterson Falls, when Ellen Boisvert saw other people’s children, when she went to a friend or colleague’s baby shower, she never dreamed up a child for her and Fintan. She sees it now, how their marriage was one of playing house, counting time until something happened, something got resolved, fixed, moved on. But it never would have. Never. Even i
f he’d stayed alive.

  She crosses the room to sit on his bed. For the first time since her husband’s death, Ellen Boisvert weeps—great, body-heaving sobs. She takes his uncovered pillow and hugs it to her left cheek. She weeps until the pillow is wet and warm. On this summer night, Ellen’s weeping is the only sound in the Dowds’ silent house.

  She wakes freezing. Her eyes are dry and tight. Daylight streams through the small bedroom window.

  She fell asleep on the narrow single bed, on Fintan’s old, teenage bed. She fell asleep holding, hugging the still-damp pillow.

  Rain ticks against the window pane. Ellen gets up, fully dressed still, and stiff with cold from the bed.

  Ned’s car is parked along the orchard wall. When Ellen plugs in the kettle, the electric clock on the wall over the scullery sink says nine o’clock. Ellen has overslept.

  In Jo’s bedroom, a damp breeze sends the curtains ballooning over the windowsill. The curtains’ damp edges suction and then lift from the painted wood. The sound overlays the hiss of the oxygen machine. Slap-slap-slap.

  Ellen crosses to pull the window shut.

  The ball of yellow yarn has rolled down Jo’s bed, lodged there on the white bedspread, somewhere between the twin ridges of Jo’s legs. No. No. Ellen stands and watches for the breath, the rise and fall. Then she crosses to the bed, feels for a pulse.

  Nothing.

  Jo’s dead eyes stare at the open window. Her lips are set together in a smile.

  “Ach, she’s gone, the creature.” Ellen jumps at the man’s voice from the parlor doorway. Ned. The shoulders of his checked sports coat are wet from the rain. He stands there with his tweed cap scrunched in his hand.

  “Ned. You knew?” Ellen whispers.

  For the first time, Ned McHugh almost meets the American woman’s eyes. “I was above in one of the top sheds. The calves turned awful giddy in themselves. I knew ’twas time, then.”

  “How long?” Ellen asks, panicked, picturing herself up there, asleep in the wrong bed, asleep and out of earshot from Jo’s downstairs room. Had the poor woman called out? Screamed? Needed her?