Chapter Two

First thing in the morning, I went to the bank, dropped Johnny’s usual load off at the dry cleaners on Jamaica Avenue and picked up my mother’s for her. So there I am, happy as a tick, on my way to meet Zinnie at my mom’s, thinking how nice it’s going to be to have Michaelean in the house, driving up 110th Street, a street I particularly love because of the run of intact Queen Annes along both sides but that I rarely take because if you’re in a hurry, which I always am, you get stuck at the stop sign on Myrtle Avenue waiting for the traffic that meanders past Forest Park. Anyway, today I was in that kind of mood or maybe, as my mom always says, when the angel on your shoulder nudges, you’ll do well to pick up your head. So I’m cruising up the block with my windows open and thinking too bad Portia McTavish lives on this otherwise perfect block. She happens to be stunning and an actress and there are not that many of those in our neck of the ’burbs. To be honest, I would have liked her for a friend until I realized she would go a little gushy whenever my husband was around. What was worse, he liked it. Don’t get me wrong. I wasn’t malfunctioningly in love with my husband or anything, but when you have a kid with someone, you get territorial. And not only was Portia McTavish strikingly beautiful, she was single. She and her sister Juliette (another undulating actress) lived together on the second floor of one of those great houses, where they, one presumed, fed each other lines and breakfast on the upstairs screened-in back porch and entertained theater-arts professors and Daily News columnists in the evening. Never mind, I always thought, I had my chocolate from the children’s lunch boxes and my library books and my listener-sponsored radio shows. I had my extravagant Alaskan drinking water. So it was with all unhurried guilelessness I turned my eyes up Portia’s drive and saw my husband face-to-face with the accused, leaning endearingly over and into her, holding with one wedding-ringed hand the nape of Portia’s pretty neck. She had her fingers on the front of the shirt I had ironed earlier. His cheeks, I could see, were splotchy with ardor. Even as I write this, the pain I felt from that comes back and whacks me like a shovel in the gut. Funny. I don’t feel like finishing this right now. I think I’ll drive over to Macy’s and charge something if nobody minds. I’ll write again tomorrow.

*   *   *

Another day, another Dalai Lama, I always say. Now, you would think finding my husband in the arms of another woman, I would forge right in there, elbows out, headlights on, and confront them where they stood, but that’s not what I did.

I waited long enough to let them get a look at my car, but not long enough for them to know if I’d seen them or not. My car kept on going and I was so shocked, I guess, I kept on going, too. I went, I’m embarrassed to say, to my mother’s. Well, I did have her dry cleaning, too, and I had the money from the bank I was lending Zinnie. I parked the car, let myself into her house and sat down at the kitchen table. There was an open can of peach halves and a basket of spring cheese. Funny how certain things just stick in your mind.

Mary laughed when she saw me. “Claire,” she said. “When will you ever stop wearing that hat? You wear it all the time. You’re in the house, dear. Oh. I’ve got the schedule for Zinnie for the wake.”

All I could think of was what they were thinking now, Portia and my Johnny. I hardly even heard Mary’s comfy chatter as I sat there, reeling with humiliation and fury. I figured she, Portia, was all right, very likely even pleased. As the affairee, she would want things to come to a head. She probably thought he was going to marry her. Although why she should want to be married to him was beyond me. Things were better for her as they were. Otherwise, if they were married, she’d have to do her share of watching the kids and laundry and the rest. No, I couldn’t see her wanting to marry Johnny. She’d want things to stay just the way they were, she and him, off sneaky on the velvet carpet. There must be a part of her that was pleased at my finding out, though, glorying in my jealousy. She was minx enough for that.

My one happiness was the uncertainty Johnny was going through. Then it occurred to me that maybe he did want me to see him. Or someone who would tell me. At least a part of him must desire discovery to let him be so blatant. All right, he wasn’t being blatant, but he wasn’t being careful, and it was that part of his state of mind to which I responded. For even a small part of his dissatisfaction to be made conscious, after all the silent sacrifices I’d whittled away at; for those perfect, absolutely faultless raspberry crêpes concocted from scratch, starting with my wee-hour expeditions to the backyard in my nightshirt; for those years and years of fabric softener on the sheets when he knew I preferred them plain; for my tucking the sheets in nice and snug underneath the mattress when he knew I loved to stick a foot out; and yes, for those long, concentrated moments of outright discomfort I’d suffered, apparently to no avail, imagining his bliss. It was for all those things not to have been enough for him upon which I declared war.

The phone must have rung because Mary was on it. She sounded upset. She came back in, her face worried and with the crumpled hanky in her hands. I forgot my own troubles for a second because she looked frightened.

“Ma! What is it? Sit down! What happened?”

“It’s Zinnie,” she cried, and then, seeing my stunned face, like anyone’s gets when they’ve got family on the job, she rushed to say, “No, she’s all right, it’s just she made a collar and it turned out to be some hit man they’ve been looking for. She can’t go anywhere, she says, it’s too important. She’s got to stay, now.”

“Well, why the hell did she arrest him?” I shrieked. “She knew she had to leave at six!”

“I know. I said the same thing. She didn’t want to arrest anybody but she took the subway to the Passport Plus office and he was having it out with his wife on the platform. Smacking her about. She had no choice. Now what will happen? There’ll be no one to represent our family!” Mary dropped her head and the tears made blurs on the News on the table.

There was no question of my going. I was headed for the pleasure of confronting my dallying husband. Wasn’t I? On the other hand, what was wrong with me going? I could up and leave and never even have to look in those lying eyes. But no, of course I couldn’t go. There was Anthony. Still very young was Anthony. Eager and trusting and loving us both. I would do anything for Anthony. But would I get on a plane pretending not to have seen my husband in the arms of another woman? Just for the sake of the dream every child is entitled to? I would. I could. I could get on the plane. Because I doubted if I could spend more than ten seconds in the same room with my husband without belting him or, worse, weeping. And, it hurt me to think, for I was now beginning to think, Johnny might well be living with me, acting out with me, for the very same reason: for Anthony; not for any love of me at all.

“Claire?” My mother scuffed me on the head. “What are you thinking?”

I looked around the kitchen at my mother’s accumulation of things: her coupon box overflowing with holy pictures; the plastic flower arrangement in a plastic pot my father had presented to her three birthdays ago that she still professes to love and defies you to say she doesn’t just by its very presence; the row of cereal boxes that is always there because just when you want to put them away, she’ll say, along will come someone who wants a bowl so you might as well leave them out. And I thought I could never tell her.

“You all try to spare me, you girls do,” she said with uncanny perception. “And then, a week or two later I find out what it is anyway, only now it carries the burden of the insult of not being in on it, of having yet another upsetment”—here she pounded the breadbox with her fist—“kept hidden away from me. And that makes it all the worse.”

She sat there looking at me with her hair in a net, her eyes all concerned and motherly and wanting to help.

“Ma,” I said. “I wanna go to Ireland. I’ll go.”

“Don’t be silly.”

So I told her. And what did she do? She yelled at me. Well sort of not at me, just yelled in general. She does that when she’s rattled.

“Look, Ma,” I reasoned, “it’s either stay here and confront Johnny and break up, or go.”

“And then what?”

“I don’t know. But I don’t think I can look at him right now.”

“Your passport’s still good?” she asked suspiciously. My calculating nature comes from somewhere, after all.

“Yeah. It’s fine.” Just in case, I went to the phone and called Aer Lingus and made sure I could get on the flight before I got all het up about it. It was still weeks before the summer rush. “I got a seat with no trouble at all,” I announced.

Mom roamed the kitchen, her big feet pummeling across the linoleum, her little eyes searching for where to begin. She slackened onto the chair. “But then I’ll have to tell you,” she whimpered. Up until then I hadn’t really been listening to anything she’d said because it was all the sort of rubbish nonsense we throw at each other when we’re both upset. All I could think of was where was my suitcase and did I have any film left in my camera bag because I sure as hell didn’t have lots of money to lay out to buy any.

“Tell me what? What is it?” I said as we both settled down and blew our noses.

“A long time ago,” she began, in that this-is-going-to-be-a-long-one Irish way she has.

“Mom, I’ve got a lot of things to do if I’m going—”

“Never mind.” She leaned forward. “You’ll listen to this. Just promise me you’ll have faith.”

“Okay.”

“Look in my eyes and promise.”

“By all means. I promise.”

She looked at me suspiciously. “Promise what?”

I lowered my register. “I promise I’ll have faith.”

“Do you remember years ago when I went back to Ireland to visit my sisters?”

“Sure.” Sure was an understatement. It had been the single most lonely time in my life. “Only now is not the time—”

“And remember I had to go because my sister Brigid was ailing and all?”

“Yeah. She had chicken pox and you had to go help her.”

“Well, it wasn’t true. I mean Brigid hadn’t really had the chicken pox y’see.”

“So what was it then?”

“She wasn’t even sick. And it wasn’t even Brigid.”

Now I was frightened. Something in her tone alerted me and I thought maybe she’d had cancer and had to go back to recover, like the time the Moores’ daughter was born weighing four pounds and they said she had to go back to Ireland for the air and the milk and the good health, poor thing, or she wouldn’t live and then sure enough they sent her back and not only did she live, she wound up five-eleven and living a long, happy life out in Oakdale. I got up out of my chair and moved around the table and held my mother’s shoulders in my hands and said, “Mom, whatever happened to you you can tell me.” I thought for a bad second, maybe she’d done something terrible and had to go back and go to jail, after all she’d been gone those three months, when, she said, “It wasn’t me, it was Carmela.”

Uh-oh. “Carmela?”

“Carmela had—” She gulped and couldn’t go on.

“Carmela had what? Cancer?”

“No, dear. I just hate to tell you like this but there’s so little time now with you off. It’s … Carmela had a baby.”

“A baby?”

“Yes, dear.”

I was so impressed I was speechless. My sister Carmela, who couldn’t have children. Barren Carmela for whom I’d always felt such pity! It couldn’t be. It wasn’t possible. But, no, it was true or my mother wouldn’t be telling me this now, on this of all days. But then the doorbell rang. It was Mrs. Slipper with Mom’s mass cards she’d ordered and of course would we mind if she stayed for a piece of the bereavement cake she’d bought at Gebhard’s? We stood there and looked at her, our mouths open, I think, both of us thinking of what was just said. “Special crumb,” Mrs. Slipper chatted on. “Still good, never mind the owner moved to Glen Cove and sold to a very nice Turk. Better than ever, really,” she said hopefully, holding up the bag. “And a bag of crullers for the kids.”

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 almost 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.”