“But Emma’s never been a kid. She doesn’t play like Cathy and Mark did. She just sits staring at things, with that vague look on her face. Games don’t interest her, toys don’t interest her. She doesn’t seem to know what they’re for, however much you show and explain them to her.”
“How soon did you notice that something was wrong with Emma?”
“Don’t say wrong,” said Archie. “Say different.”
“Okay, when did you know she was different?”
“Lynn says she knew at the hospital, because Emma didn’t cry or move very much. She thought once we got Emma home to Michigan everything would be all right. She was willing to take a chance. It took me longer to see Emma’s problems, maybe because I didn’t want to see them. You’d talk and she’d seem to look at your face and hear you, but she didn’t respond.
“The pediatrician said she didn’t seem to be deaf, but that she could be mildly retarded. That was a blow. But we were still optimistic. As the second year passed Emma learned to walk and to eat by herself. She could understand directions. She didn’t seem developmentally disabled except for her speech. We couldn’t get her to stop sucking her thumb and rocking in her bed at night, but during the day she seemed happy enough in her own little world. Sometimes when I read to her she would start rocking back and forth or beating her hand on the floor.
“And then Cathy noticed how Emma seemed to pay attention to music on the radio and enjoy it. We got her a xylophone and then one of those little Casio keyboards with a recorded tape that you can play along with. It amazed all of us, how Emma picked it up.
“It was Lynn who thought of giving her violin lessons. We started her in Ann Arbor and now she has a teacher in Munich. It’s phenomenal how she’s taken to it. I can’t understand it—how Emma can hear music and imitate it just fine, but how she can’t somehow get the idea that speech is the same thing. One child psychologist told us that what seems to be either missing or delayed is the sense of language as communication.”
“You said that Cathy and Mark loved to learn,” I said. “But it sounds to me that Emma has them both beat. For a four-year-old to play Mozart is quite astonishing, don’t you think?”
Archie didn’t say anything for a minute, then, in a lower tone of voice, he said, “I know I’m no genius. I’ve always felt it was my role in life to help people who were smarter than I was. Lynn is the brain of the family and Mark and Cathy take after her. Don’t get me wrong, I’m proud of all of them. I gave the kids the childhood I never had. But sometimes, I guess I hoped that Emma would be more … average.” He paused, and became the journalist again. “Tell me about your family, Cass.”
To my surprise, I found myself talking. Perhaps Archie’s confidences had disarmed me, or perhaps he was a better interviewer than I gave him credit for.
“My mother more or less raised us, but my dad was the fun one. He liked to listen to the radio with us and read to us from the newspaper,” I said. “He collected people and their stories. He was what my mother called ‘a real card.’ Of course he drank too, but he was one of the happy ones. He sang a lot. He could tell a story to make you fall down laughing. There was a lot of goodwill in him, a lot of the dreamer, and not much judgment. My mother always said I took after him—shiftless but lively. She went to church and prayed for him. There were eight of us kids. We didn’t have much money. After my dad died, things kind of went to hell. I ended up leaving home right after high school. I’d run away a couple of times before that.”
“So you’ve come up from nothing too,” said Archie. “It’s optimism, isn’t it? It’s looking on the bright side of things. I’ve always been an optimist. I got out of the house by getting two paper routes, by playing baseball, working my way through high school and college. I always believed that I could change my life, and I did. I made sure that my kids would have a different life.” He paused and stared at the lake. “I don’t drink much. My father wasn’t like yours.”
He didn’t say what had happened to him, why he had to get out of the house, but I didn’t need to ask. I wondered how bad it had been, and what his memories were.
These are some of my memories: I see my older sister Maureen braiding my frizzy hair and buttoning my dress; I see myself feeding one of the babies a bottle, holding it close and smelling its soft sweet breath. I see my father balancing me on his knee, telling me nonsense, singing me songs, a glass always on the table next to us. I also see myself screaming at my older brother Kevin to stop teasing me, or for Maureen or Eileen to leave me the hell alone. I see myself in church fidgeting, see myself not coming home for dinner, staying out half the night. I see my mother’s closed face, and her open hand swinging. I was never an optimist, but I knew that I was going to have a different life than that of my family.
I grew up fighting to get a word in. No one sat around waiting to hear me speak, no one took care of my needs without my asking. Words may have been a great source of pleasure, but they were also a necessary means of protection, the only means, besides your fists and fingernails, of getting what you needed.
Maybe Archie hovered too much, maybe Emma had never had to ask for what she needed. Maybe she was just waiting to speak until the time was right.
“So you’ll help me with Zsoska?” asked Archie again.
“All right,” I agreed. “I’ll see what I can find out. No promises though. Can I borrow your dictionary?”
Archie pumped my hand a few times and then left me to return to the dining hall, where Zsoska was half-heartedly polishing glasses.
To my surprise she gave me a friendly smile. “Yes. You wanting?”
“I’m wondering,” I said in English, “if you are free tomorrow? I would like to see more of the countryside, and I don’t have a car.”
“Yes?”
I repeated this in Romanian, with a few gestures.
This time she understood me, but she stuck to English. “Where you wanting going?”
“Oh, anywhere, just to see the mountains and farms.”
“Yes. I having car. We going.”
“I’ll pay you.”
“Just you, yes, no others? No Snapps?”
“Just me.”
When I went back out to the square nobody was around, so I decided to take a walk before dark. I followed the path leading to the lake and strolled around its shore. Firs hid cuckoo nests; the birds sang their two notes in rounds. A kind of squirrel I’d never seen before lived in these woods: it had long pointed ears like a rabbit. The sun had dropped behind the mountains in the distance and the air was cooler now; the flowery scent of backyard orchards was gone, like a woman who’d passed by.
After I’d rounded the lake, instead of going back to my room, I made my way along a road, paved with small flat stones, that wound up behind the hotels, and in a few moments I had left behind the world of mass tourism and was back in an earlier era. Large villas were set back from the road, surrounded by trees and orchards. There were benches set about in overgrown, but not unkempt, lawns of bluebells, daisies and yellow buttercups. Had they once belonged to Magyar families who spent their summers here, in the coolness of Arcata’s woods and lakes? Painted in soft browns and forest greens, the villas were gabled and spired, embellished with scrolls and other carvings around the window and door lintels. Many had fanciful turrets, shingled and conical, and romantic little dormer windows under eaves decorated with filigreed fretwork.
There were evergreens here, but also many birches, white calligraphed with black, their new leaves only a breath, not yet a canopy, of green. Wild abundance was in wait; in July and August these gardens and orchards would explode with flowers and fruit and the heavy, intoxicating scents of summer. But for now, in the twilight of a spring evening, all was tentative, a little ethereal.
Up near the top of the hill were two wooden gates, facing each other across the stone road. They had plump, hollow roofs of scalloped shingles, wide at the bottom, rising pagoda-like to needle spires. Perched on the carved wood
en gateposts these roofs were like oversized hats, fanciful and strange. The two gates were carved and painted with stylized blue pots of red tulips and green leaves, which curled in vines all around the posts.
One gateway was much larger and more elaborate; it formed part of a picket fence, broken at intervals by wooden posts turned on a lathe, and all painted that same soft shade of brown. The door of the gateway stood open and I walked through, up a path of tiny river pebbles to an enormous house. It was a creamy chocolate color with window lintels of bright blue. The lower part of the structure seemed to be constructed of logs, while the second story was paneled in an openwork pattern of tulips in pots. The house had two turrets, one a tall peaked tower that looked like a witch’s hat, and the other a spire with a weathervane. The doorway was painted dark brown and the door composed of four long panes of glass; the whole was surmounted by a carved lintel and further embellished by a profusion of carved, painted and gold-leafed flowers. There were words, also in gold, running up and down the doorway and the windows close to the door. I saw the names György and Erzsébet Lazsló, 1864–1934.
I looked in the big front window and saw empty rooms. This magical house was uninhabited. Oh, if only I could live here! I sat on the stone front porch and surveyed my new territory. Tall firs surrounded the house, but there had been beds of flowers once, and could be again. Across the road I saw the other, smaller gate, with a blur of wild-flowers visible through its opening. Where did it lead? Was there a house somewhere farther back in the trees? Was it even more fairy tale-like than this one?
I was back suddenly in Kalamazoo, on South Street, where the rich had built their beautiful gingerbread Victorians at the turn of the century. I supposed that nowadays some of the houses were offices or antique shops, but in my childhood they had belonged, or so I imagined, to fabulously wealthy families called Arbuthnot and Churchill. Sometimes on a Saturday, babysitting my younger brothers and sisters, I would drag them from where we lived behind St. Augustine’s for a walk down South Street, and together we’d admire the ornaments, the decorations, and especially, the size and orderliness of these houses. The house where we Reillys lived was not small, but there were ten of us before my father died, and I never had a room of my own. I shared an attic dormer room, stuffed with crucifixes and holy cards of female saints, with my two older sisters, Maureen and Eileen. Maureen wanted to be a nun, until she had to get married at seventeen; Eileen held out for a church wedding after high-school graduation. Both of them had little or no interest in school, in books, in art. Nor had I, then; I only knew that there was something else, and that something didn’t live in our home, only in houses like those on South Street.
There was one house that had been my special favorite when I was about ten. I called it the fairy-tale house. It had a turret room upstairs and downstairs a big picture window draped with lace, through which a piano was visible. A woman as blond and refined as Grace Kelly lived there, and a stout, prosperous man who always seemed to have on a suit and tie, even on weekends. They had a maid who wore an apron and cap, a large black poodle, and two children, a girl about my age, with a feathery cap of blond hair, and a boy a little younger. I imagined that the girl lived in the tower room, that she was lonely for a friend, and that one day, when I was just walking by, she’d invite me in. I’d say I was an orphan, and the family would adopt me. The girl would become my sister, they’d give me piano lessons, I’d say to the maid, Hilda, bring me my breakfast in bed. I’d have French toast and fresh orange juice every morning.
The girl noticed me, all right. One day as I was walking by with the two youngest in my family, she opened up the door to the fairy-tale house, ran out to the porch and screamed, “Go away! I see you all the time, looking at our house. I’m sick of seeing you out here on the sidewalk. Go away!”
I stared at her only a few seconds before hurrying my little brother and sister away. I saw us all as the blond girl must have seen us, poor Irish, badly dressed in hand-me-downs and St. Vincent de Paul specials, our wild curly hair in our eyes, forbidden longing on our faces.
I didn’t walk down South Street again for a long time.
But I could live here! Here in this beautiful house in Arcata. It couldn’t cost that much in Romanian lei. This could be my South Street, my fairy-tale house.
The stone porch was getting cold and darkness was falling. I got up and walked down the pebbled path and through the gate. But where did the second gate lead? A high, trimmed hedge rather than a fence separated the yard from the street, but there was no path once you opened the gate, only a meadow of wildflowers—buttercups, daisies and Queen Anne’s Lace. There was something still and peaceful here, here where there was no house, but only overgrown grass and flowers. Had it been a park once? There were two wooden benches with curved, slatted backs. I sat down on one of them, and let the mood of the place enter my spirit. I felt in the presence of something lost and long ago. In the presence of loss, but also of enchantment.
I had first run away from Kalamazoo the summer I was seventeen, following Dede Paulsen, who had not exactly said she loved me back, much less that she wanted me to come with her to her new home in Los Angeles. I had a little money that took me on the Greyhound down to Wichita. From there I hitchhiked across Kansas and Colorado, down through New Mexico and Arizona. I was picked up by the state patrol outside of Tucson and held in jail three days there for possessing no identification and for refusing to give my name. Finally I broke down, and my mother, who had never been farther from home than Grand Rapids, flew down to free me and bring me back.
Neither of us had ever flown before. She had had to borrow money from relatives to manage it.
I had been gone over a month when she saw me. She burst out crying and hugged me; then she gave me a good wallop on the butt, though I was taller than she was. After I’d left home one of my sisters had spilled the beans about my infatuation with Miss Paulsen. My mother couldn’t decide which was worse: being in love with a woman or running away.
“If anything like this ever happens again,” she threatened, “I won’t be coming to collect you. You’ll be on your own with your sinful ways. I won’t be following you down the highway to hell.”
Needless to say, it did happen again, and again, and the last time I left home, just after my high-school graduation, was the last time I saw my mother.
Women and the road thus became irrevocably merged in my mind. I never told my mother this, or any of my girlfriends back at school—because I wanted them to think me a hopeless romantic who’d do anything for love—but somewhere down about Santa Fe I had forgotten about Dede Paulsen. I had fallen in love with travel itself, with movement and change, and I didn’t care if I ever reached my destination.
It was completely dark by the time I came back down the cobbled road to the hotel. I stood outside looking up at the building. Most of the windows were dark; only a few glimmered with lamplight. In one of the lit windows, two women stood embracing. The shadow of the smaller one seemed to dwarf the taller, who leaned back to be kissed on the neck.
In another window a small figure held a violin up to her chin. The strains of a simple Bach melody floated out into the Arcadian night.
I remembered once complaining to my bassoonist friend Nicola that, however much I loved classical music, I could never understand it.
“What don’t you understand?”
“When I listen to classical music, I often have feelings, but I don’t know what the feelings are. It’s not like listening to a ballad or the blues.”
“Yes. And?”
“I mean, I can’t describe the feelings, I can’t really say if they’re happy or sad or whatever.”
“Yes. And?”
“I mean, Nicola, that no words come to me to describe the feelings.”
“Words,” she said. “Why on earth would you want words when you can have music?”
But I never heard music without words when I was growing up, and it was the words that gave the m
usic its meaning.
My father had a beautiful tenor and he often sang around the house. He loved jigs and reels, but more he loved sad ballads like “Kathleen Mavourneen.”
The refrain that Jack had yesterday forbidden me to sing came back to me now.
Oh hast thou forgotten how soon we must sever?
Oh hast thou forgotten this day we must part?
It may be for years and it may be forever,
Oh why art thou silent, thou voice of my heart?
It may be for years and it may be forever,
Then why art thou silent, Kathleen Mavourneen?
Chapter Eleven
I SAW JACK AT breakfast the next morning. Bundled in a Nepalese sweater over a sarong, tights and hiking boots, she was alone at a table eating bread and butter. Her skin was paler than usual, with soft violet shadows under her gray eyes, and she had an unusually languid air about her.
“Are you all right?”
“I’m bleeding.”
“What?”
She looked at me in surprise. “I mean, I’m having my period. And—I didn’t get much sleep last night.”
“Jack, she’s far too young for you. She’s hardly twenty. What would Gladys say?”
“Actually, Gladys did say something. She said she was glad we’d turned up, because she’d been worried about Bree getting bored with just Cathy to talk to.”
“If you were just talking, it would be fine.”
“I don’t believe in being ageist,” she said. “It’s nice, it makes me feel young too.”
“Well, you don’t look young. You look awful.”
“You had your chance, Widow Reilly. Is it my fault you prefer to suffer over the charming Eva? Or are you still suffering?”
“Eva would adore me if I were a car mechanic. Anyway, you were the one who had dinner with her last night, you tell me.”
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