Dance Lessons

by Aine Greaney

  Ned steps into the room, closer to the bed. “Ah, not long, ma’am. An hour at the very most. Less, I’d say. God go with her.”

  Ellen

  41

  THERE’S A LIGHT out there on the lake, appearing and disappearing in the dark and through the trees along the headland. Then Ellen hears voices—a woman’s first, then a man’s, both amplified by the waters of Lough Gowna. They sound so close that they could be standing right next to her, standing here on the pier. Smack-smack-smack. The boat is anchored out there, rising and slapping against the lake’s dark, lacquered surface. The woman laughs. Then Ellen hears some jazzy music from the motor boat.

  The night sky is dark and starless.

  Since Jo’s death, a week ago now, she has moved back down to Flanagan’s hotel, where Gerry Flanagan and other assorted strangers have stopped her along Gowna’s main street to sympathize, to offer their condolences. Every day she has driven out to the house at Knockduff, parking her car in the old spot, then wandering through the silent, ghostly rooms.

  The people from the health department came and took away the invalid bed, the bedpans, the assortment of stainless steel trays and medical accoutrements. The undertakers and Dr. Fitzgerald said they’d take care of the rest, of the cremation and the death certificate. And for Tony Cawley’s lawyer, the required swab of the cheek for the DNA sample that he and his sister need to prove paternity, to get their money for his daughter.

  She spent an afternoon clearing out Fintan’s old room—the clothes in the closet, the greeting card and photo of him and Carmel Cawley at that dance.

  She stacked his old textbooks and the newspaper clippings together, put them in a cardboard box to carry down to the village and the hotel’s dumpster.

  She was almost done carting his things to her car when, with a surge of hope, she reread the address that Fintan had listed in his textbooks’ flyleaf pages. 23 Oak Grove Avenue, Whitehall, Dublin. She went back into the house and called directory assistance for a number for that address.

  “Um . . . I’m looking for a woman named Kitty,” she said to the man who answered the Dublin phone number. He had picked up on the first ring; he sounded young. A son? Ellen wondered—hoped. Auntie Kitty’s son?

  “Kitty? Look, is this some kinda joke? Who is this?”

  “She . . . lived there. I think. Once. A woman named Kitty.”

  “Aw, for fuck’s sake!” the young man said. Then he hung up.

  After the phone call, there was nothing for Ellen to do but to tiptoe back up through the house, up through the scullery, past the line of old coats and Wellington boots. She closed the scullery door behind her. Ned’s car was still there, parked in its usual spot along the orchard wall.

  Since Jo’s death, he had come faithfully to work in the fields or the sheds. But since that morning, he’d never come back into the house. Ellen drove out through the yard gates and down the sloping avenue. Halfway down the hill, she got out to unlatch and then latch the second gate, standing there to take one last look at the stone grey house. It looked shuttered. A house alone on a hill.

  Then she drove away toward the Gowna road; left it all for Jo’s and the Cawleys’ lawyers to handle, to battle it out with letters and legal fees and probates.

  Now Ellen watches the white motorboat light nudge out from behind the trees along the point. The man and woman’s tittery voices compete with the sudden purr of the engine. She can smell the boat’s diesel exhaust. The strains of jazzy violin music have grown louder.

  She takes the small paper bag from her jacket pocket. One by one, she takes out satiny prize ribbons, each with its white satin center, the faded gold embroidery. First prize. Fintan & Rosie Dowd.

  Today when she cleared out his childhood room, she took them down from the wall, the display above his single bed.

  The ribbons tail on the night breeze. She watches them, the reds and the blues, one by one, as they drift away on the dark lake.

  42

  “NOW. THE ROAST LAMB. Which of ye has the lamb?” A waitress is standing at the top of their dinner table, two steaming dinner plates in her hand.

  “Oh, yeah,” says Father Bradley, pushing back his chair slightly. “That’s me. I’m the lamb!”

  “The lamb o’ God,” quips Tom Fitzgerald. Ruth shoots him a shushing look as the doctor chortles at his own joke.

  “And the cod?” asks the waitress again, holding forth the second plate. “Someone ordered codfish.”

  “Here,” Ellen says. “I had cod.”

  Behind this older waitress stands the younger Latvian girl who usually serves at breakfast time. The younger girl passes the remaining plates to the older, florid-faced waitress. Beef, roast chicken, poached salmon. And a large green salad for Riona Fitzgerald who has announced that, now that she’s back from her summer holidays in Portugal, she’s going to turn vegetarian for the rest of the year.

  The two waitresses lean past and over their heads again to place large platters of steamed broccoli, a bowl of carrots, huge bowls of French fries and boiled new potatoes at intervals down their table.

  It’s a Friday night and the Fitzgeralds and Father Bradley have taken Ellen to dinner at Flanagan’s hotel. It’s her good-bye dinner—last meal in Gowna.

  Upstairs in her small, second-floor hotel room, her suitcase sits unzipped and open on the bedroom floor, waiting for the last few items, waiting to be packed up for tomorrow’s flight to Boston.

  There are four other occupied tables. Two tables have local-looking couples—faces that Ellen recognizes from her visit to the supermarket or from walking around the village. At one table sit three French tourists, their hair drenched, their rain slickers draped across the backs of their chairs.

  Earlier, just after the waitress brought their appetizers, Gerry Flanagan came bustling across the dining room followed by six American tourists who he seated around a large, round table near the door. They’re a group of men and women in V-neck sweaters and pressed jeans who made a great, theatrical fuss about who would sit where, and where they might hang their wet raincoats.

  Now, as Ellen half listens to more reports from the Fitzgerald family’s summer holiday in the Algarve, she watches the American women’s faces at the other table. A woman with highlighted hair and a lipstick smile is listening with feigned interest as her husband tells a loud story about an argument with the airport personnel in Shannon.

  They seem so foreign, their voices and demeanors so overblown for this country hotel. For this village of Gowna. It’s as if they’re playing their parts in some stage play where they assume there’s a listening audience.

  “But sure, that’s the thing, isn’t it?” Ruth Fitzgerald says, her voice vying with the American man’s hooting laugh. Ruth is sitting opposite Ellen. She’s leaning toward Ellen now, her pretty face tanned and smiling.

  “Hmmm?” Ellen starts from her thoughts. What thing? What part of the Portugal conversation has Ellen missed?

  Ruth nods to the rainy evening outside the dining room windows. “If you could even get a few decent weeks of weather here, you wouldn’t need to go abroad.”

  Ellen says, “You got a really great tan.”

  “Ach,” says Ruth, stretching out her bronzed forearm. “And that’s with a factor 25 on every day!” She dips her head toward her husband and children. “This shower went running around the place—every day a full timetable of snorkeling and swimming and the devil knows what. Not me. I got a chair at the pool and didn’t stir from there until I was called for meals. Getting rid of them for a week was my holiday!”

  Father Bradley sits next to Ellen. He’s wearing worn Levi’s jeans and a faded dress shirt with the sleeves rolled up. Earlier, when they all met in the hotel bar for pre-dinner drinks, there was something extra solemn about him. He says, “Ellen, I’m sure you’re off back to great sunshine out there in Boston. Saw on the news there that ye’re getting a real roaster of a summer.”

  “Supposed to hit 90 by the middle of th
e week,” Ellen says. “At least, that’s what my mom said on the phone last night. My sister won’t be happy. She lives in Florida and she’s flying up to New Hampshire the end of next week—her annual trip home to escape the Florida heat.”

  Lorcan and Riona Fitzgerald are seated between their parents. Lorcan gazes across the table at Ellen, a fork of roast chicken held in midair. His hair is blonder; his pert little nose is sunburned pink. Riona, like her mother, has turned a deep tan under her low-necked T-shirt. She’s abandoned her salad to fidget with her cell phone, playing some game that makes a chirping sound. Riona who hit it off and exchanged dance photos with Fintan’s daughter.

  Jarkowski. Ellen suddenly remembers the name, the large printed letters on the banner that hung above Catherine Cawley’s dance troupe. Jarkowski Dance Studio.

  “We went snorkeling, me and Dad. Did you ever try snorkeling, Ellen?” Lorcan asks, mustering a grown-up voice.

  “Lorcan,” Tom says. “Ellen was actually talking to Father Bradley. What’ve I said about interrupting?”

  “Dad, I was just ask—”

  “Chirp-chirp!” It’s Riona’s cell phone.

  Cat? Ellen wonders. Does she still text her little friend in London?

  Ruth says, “Riona, I’ve asked you three times now . . .”

  “Both of you,” says Tom. “Both of you agreed that if you were brought out for this meal that you wouldn’t carry on. That’s what we talked about and what you agreed. Remember?”

  Father Bradley sets his fork down and crooks his body away from their table and the squabbling Fitzgerald family. He drops his voice. “Tom said it went all right in the end. With Jo. The undertakers, the cremation and everything? I still felt like I should’ve been there, but . . .” He shrugs.

  “It was fine. Everything . . . everything was the way she wanted.”

  “Did anyone turn up in the end, a niece or a nephew or that sister of hers?”

  Ellen shakes her head. No. “Oh, Noel. I forgot. I actually made a call. An address I found in one of Fintan’s old textbooks. A house in Dublin. Thought it might’ve been the sister, Kitty’s.”

  “And?”

  “Just some guy who seemed really pissed off at me for asking for a woman named Kitty.”

  “I’ve had no luck with the interparish search,” Father Bradley says. “At least not yet. You’d never think the country’s that big. You’d never think there’d be that many young girls or women left the parish of Gowna for Dublin—and Dublin when it was small and nearly as parochial as Ballinkeady anyways.”

  “Maybe she remarried,” Ellen says. “I mean, after the first husband died or whatever.” She nods toward his plate and the slices of pink, succulent roast lamb. “You should eat your dinner before it gets cold. It looks great!”

  “Want a bit? A taste?” He cuts a piece of meat and holds his fork out for her, like someone feeding a child. When she leans closer to eat it, the intimacy of the act makes her blush a deep pink. She swallows the meat and glances guiltily across the table to see Tom Fitzgerald studying both of them. “Gerry Flanagan buys it local,” the priest says, his words rushed and flustered. “He’s actually known for his good lamb.”

  Father Bradley leans across the table for some more potatoes, his profile turned from her. Tom says, “So what happens with everything now, Ellen—I mean, the entire house and land and everything up there?” He lowers his voice. “She always told me she’d it taken care of with her solicitor. But of course, that’s all she’d tell me.”

  Since that day at his house, the days he confessed his own, youthful part in the end of Fintan and Carmel Cawley’s romance, the doctor has been softer around the edges, less of the staged, congenial small-town doctor.

  Ellen says, “It’s between her solicitor and the Cawleys’. Probate. I guess. Too soon to hear yet.”

  Tom gives her a wincing look, and then shakes his head. “I dunno. It’s a pity. With all Jo’s faults—and God knows she had plenty—she did work hard. She and Ned kept that place immaculate. I’d hate to see it all just get divided up or sold to the lowest bidder for some cheap, slapped up housing estate. Or sold over the telephone and fax from a London firm of solicitors to some cowboy developer.”

  In her mind’s eye, Ellen glimpses a development of cookie-cutter houses on Knockduff Hill—the sort of housing estates she’s seen outside Galway and Ballinkeedy and all the way up here from Shannon Airport. Jo’s perfect orchard is erased, as are the front paddocks and the hazel rock, the sloping avenue and the double set of farm gates—all of it replaced with white, look-alike houses with their bright-colored front doors and tiny gardens.

  “Then buy it!” Ellen says, raising her voice above the clatter and chatter of the hotel dining room. “You could fit in some farming along with your practice.”

  Tom rolls his eyes. “Oh, yeah, in my spare time.”

  She turns to Father Bradley. “Or you, Noel. Isn’t there room around here for a spiritual retreat place? Hilltop views? Peace and quiet? Surely the church has the cash?”

  The doctor and the priest look across the table at each other and laugh. Father Bradley says, “Right, we could invite everyone and have them pay admission and they’d all drive all the way down here to Gowna, all delighted to be getting in touch with their inner spiritual selves. Until, of course, they ran smack into Jo’s ghost, shaking her stick at them and cursing them out of it for bringing any kind of religion onto her land!” This time, Ruth laughs with them. Then they all stop abruptly, embarrassed. It hasn’t even been two weeks since her death, since that morning when Ellen walked into her room and saw that face on the pillow.

  “Excuse me,” says Ellen, setting down her linen napkin. “If the waitress comes back while I’m gone, order me some tea and the apple crumble.” She pushes back her chair and walks across the dining room toward the hotel lobby and the ladies’ room.

  The Americans have just gotten their dinners, and the two waitresses are setting the bowls of vegetables and potatoes down along the table. “Spuds!” proclaims that same man again—obviously the jokester of their group. “Gotta have them spuds when we’re in Ireland!”

  In the lobby, there’s a man coming up the back hallway from the parking lot, laden down with two huge black vinyl bags—obviously a set of drums. He nods to the bar door. “You wouldn’t get the door for us?” he asks her. She opens in the bar door to a gust of voices and clinking glasses and background music from the bar stereo. “Thanks a million,” the man says as he edges through. In the corner, on the side of the bar near the village street, another band member is testing the sound equipment.

  Ellen starts back down the narrow hallway past the stairs. Tony Cawley is coming out of the gents’ toilet, zipping up his fly. He looks up to see her there in the darkened hallway that smells of antiseptic cleaner from the bathrooms. “I thought you’d be gone off back by now.” He’s wearing a stained grey sweatshirt over his loose, oil-stained jeans. The usual lock of dark hair falls across his forehead. “Why don’t you feckin’ stay around? You’d have no problem with a job. I heard Gerry’s looking for a bouncer here. A heavy to work the door, go beating the shite outta people! You’d be dead suited.”

  “It’s my last night,” she says. “I’m having some dinner.”

  “Must be nice.”

  “Yes. I recommend the lamb.”

  He sneers at her. His voice is petulant. “You get anything yet? From the solicitor?”

  “Nothing I know of. It could be waiting for me back home—back in Boston. That’s my legal address.”

  “Testing!” calls an amplified voice from the bar. “Testing, one-two-three.”

  They wait until the noise has stopped. Tony says, “I suppose I’m meant to be thanking you.”

  “For . . . ?”

  “Well, for not making it any more difficult than it has to be. With the undertaker, the DNA sample. You know all that costs money—more money if you have to get a court order to do it. So . . . ah . . . thanks.”
He shrugs.

  Again, Ellen thinks of Tom Fitzgerald standing in his hallway, waiting while she, Ellen, studied that photograph of Fintan’s daughter—the photo of the teenage girls at a dance studio. She sees the tall, pouting girl who, unless there’s been some strange happenstance of genetics, is definitely Fintan’s daughter.

  Tony nods toward the front of the hotel, the lobby and the glass doors to the dining room. “I presume you’re with Fitzgerald and the wife?”

  The electric guitar starts up a song. The drums thump along. Then the music stops. The band is still setting up and doing sound check.

  “Yes. Tom and Ruth and their kids. Father Bradley, too.”

  “And I presume Fitzgerald’s filled you in on things?”

  “That’s none of your business.”

  Tony shrugs again. “Fine.”

  There’s a gust of voices as someone opens the bar door and walks out toward the front of the hotel.

  Tony salutes her. “Well, have a nice life as the Yanks say.”

  She turns toward the ladies’ bathroom.

  “Oh, and hey!” he calls after her. “I never asked you,” says Tony. “Have you kids yourself? I mean, over there? In Boston.”

  “No. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I need to . . .” She’s already reached the ladies’ room door. From the hallway he eyes her tummy. “I don’t know why you haven’t any kids. We know Fintan had no problems in that department. But don’t think you can ever go acting the little long-lost stepmother with our Catherine.” He narrows his eyes at her.

  She pushes open the toilet door. She lets it slap shut on his face and beery breath.

  He opens in the door with the beveled glass and shouts into the cold, tiled interior. “If you ever make contact with my niece, my sister and me’ll have a barring order on you so fast you’ll wish you were never born.”