Stony River (33 page)

A crackling voice, full of regret, pulls him back to the radio: “… I have to tell you now that no such undertaking has been received, and that consequently this country is at war with Germany.”

The other man, dark-suited and cherry-faced, says, “You're not likely to forget this wedding anniversary.”

The woman in white notices Miranda and starts. “This changes everything,” she says. Her voice is nasal, harsh.

“Sure and doesn't it,” James says. He opens his arms to Miranda in a wide embrace.

The woman glares at him and presses her stomach with both hands. Miranda plunges into a dark, warm pool where the only sound is a steady
lub dub, lub dub
. Her lungs drink a berry-sweet liquid with a bitter aftertaste that suffuses her veins with revelation: the woman wants to flush Miranda from her womb.

“Go back,” James says, his voice simultaneously muffled and clear.

Next, the sound of a barking dog. Nicholas?

Miranda opens her eyes, alone once more in the room she shares with Carolyn. She steps to the window: a neighbor's dog, a collie, not a shepherd. She returns to the desk and slides the photograph into its envelope. Kneels beside her bed and whispers, “I cannot do this, Sister.”

EVERY DAY BRINGS MUCH
to distract her from James's letters: story time with the wee ones; the nightly news from Chet Huntley's sonorous voice; the library she's set up in the living room; the detective who brings her objects to enter; Doris's prodigious Task List.

So many distractions. Yet, here she sits abed with a flashlight casting a pool on the pages in her lap. She has chosen more letters at random and has prayed to Mary and Danú for protection. She keeps a wary eye on Carolyn a few feet away, asleep with her arms flung
out, not even a sheet covering her this sweltering night. The child's bubble-bath scent permeates the humid air. Miranda is atop her own sheets, wearing whimsically named shorty pajamas patterned in pink rosebuds on white cotton.

Eileen's shorty pajamas would be silk. Miranda pictures her reclining on a chaise longue in a sanatorium in the Swiss Alps, sipping a tall lemonade laced with mint, each swallow a cruel reminder of her bittersweet exile, necessary to shield her daughter from the pernicious consumption from which she suffers. Despite the mountain height, nary a breeze finds its way through the open window. Eileen fans herself with her dear, brave husband's letters before reading the one written on the seventh birthday of the daughter she sorely misses.

You might rather I'd returned to Ireland with the lass when the university censored my lectures and sent me packing. In my mind I've argued myself dry with you over this. But I would not have been able to keep the Catholics from her no more than my dear mother could keep them from me
.
I like to think I'm keeping her safe whilst adding to the understanding of how cultural and social forces shape the nascent personality. The contribution we'll make to anthropological knowledge! I was never told the truth as a lad. Think on this: what Miranda will know of what is proper and good, holy and unholy, natural and unnatural will be uncontaminated by the Church or any other institution. Is it wrong to lock her away from a society that sees women as a lower order of being? Wrong to shield her as long as possible from a culture in which goods are the measure of personal achievement? What's wrong with learning for its own sake or simply being?

Eileen leans back in the chaise, closes her eyes and gently shakes her head with a smile. My husband, she thinks: ever the professor, the lecturer. Or perhaps she frowns at the thought of her husband turning their daughter into an academic study. Of his deciding only he knows the truth. It's so hot! Eileen arises from the chaise and paces as Miranda opens another letter, written when she was four, the year after they moved into the house she strains to picture now.

It's been one year, four months and five days since that awful day I stood o'er your corpse and said, “Aye, there was a lass.” Wondering who'd stand o'er mine and say,“There was a lad.”

Her heart plunges off the Alps. She didn't honestly believe she had a guardian-angel mother languishing in a magic sanatorium kingdom—James would have
sent
the letters—but she wanted to indulge herself awhile longer. The psychiatrist Doris took her to claimed Miranda engages in infantile magical thinking. He suggested she take up painting or writing to channel her fantastical imaginings. He also said she's so anesthetized from a traumatic past she is unable to grasp how “adult–child relations” are viewed in the real world. She told him she did not have a traumatic past.

She forces herself to read on.

Only through Morrígan's intercession have I not been called up here. My volunteer work is all that keeps the widows and gold star mothers from having me drawn and quartered. It terrifies me to leave her alone the nights I must go house to house in white helmet and armband, checking to see the blinds are tightly drawn. I've gotten a guard dog. You'd approve of him, my love. I contemplated naming him Cerberus but settled on Nicholas, after the first, the one with a kind heart who nonetheless brooked no challenge to his authority.

Miranda catches her breath at the dear creature's name. Once she confessed to Father Shandley that she grieved more for Nicholas than she did for James. “Grief is grief ” was all he said, assigning her not a single Hail Mary. And grief must have been what James felt for Eileen as he shouldered the weight of Miranda's welfare and, later, Cian's.

She chances a few more letters
.The abilities to charm and heal are passed through the blood,
James wrote on her eighth birthday,
but they must be drawn out else lie fallow
.
I want her to continue the traditions of her grandmother and great-grandmother before her, to walk the same path, although (no need to point it out, dearest) I'm well aware I'm circumscribing that path
. He wrote of anointing her with cinnamon oil that day and
dedicating her to a life of healing. On her thirteenth birthday— Cian would have been no bigger than a pencil lead inside her—he lamented she had little passion for healing
. Books are what inspire her. She's her mother's child in that. She's read every English language novel and translation I've allowed her. The small village library has a patriotic fervor for American novelists. I've overcome my scorn for them for the lass's sake. Pity she shows little aptitude for French or German
.

Miranda recalls James attempting to interest her in the plants he grew or scavenged and dried in the basement. She took his knowledge of their healing properties for granted and paid scant attention to whether it was one pinch or two of this or that. She knew only that clove set your mouth on fire, mullein was bitter and chamomile smelled like apples.

I miss the perilous beauty of Ireland's winter, the trees in their topcoats of fog. It's hard not to think what I'm doing is completely mad. I need you to say something handsome to me.

I have some French, now, she whispers.
Ça ne fait rien.

Latin, too.
Filia est pars patris
.

Carolyn coughs.

Miranda douses the light.

SEVENTEEN

AUGUST 16, 1957
. From the day she moved into Buddy's room nearly two months ago, Tereza swore she could hear Miranda's money rustling around in the basement. Yesterday, as if they'd been in a dream together, she woke with the feeling of Miranda's hand on her cheek, the weight of it like guilt.

According to Buddy's schedule, Tereza was supposed to work on grammar this morning. As an A&P wife she needed to stop saying stuff like “ain't” and “I seen.” Speak more like Natalie Wood than Sal Mineo, har-dee-har-har. But instead of “conjugating” with a bunch of words Buddy'd give/gave/given her, she'd put on a Popsicle-green circle skirt and a sleeveless white blouse Natalie might wear and snuck out at ten while he and Dearie were still asleep.

The bus ride to Stony River was slow and hot. Already her hair had exploded into frizz and the V between her tits felt wet. She arrived around noon at the stop under the shadowy railway trestle where taxis idled, pigeons crapped and a Crazy Haggerty type on a gray bench drank from a paper bag. The town felt smaller, the trestle not as high as she remembered. Had it really been two years since she and the guys ran around under that trestle shouting
When I'm calling you-oo-oo-oo
into the echo? Stony River felt even stranger to her knowing Richie had been gone for months. He'd left without so
much as a goodbye, something that must've pained Buddy awful bad because he never wanted to talk about it.

She'd had breakfast ready as usual this morning when he got home after the midnight to eight-thirty shift he'd been working since they got married. It was nice, just the two of them in the kitchen, arms on the table, leaning into each other to keep their voices low on account of Dearie still sleeping. The sun always rose behind the house and snuck into the kitchen through the back porch. The new light and Buddy's private voice kept her looking for that magic moment when marriage would change them into something cooler than they were alone and make Buddy want to screw her. So far all that had happened was he'd gotten an A&P haircut that looked like a mowed lawn and Tereza had learned to cook oatmeal the way he liked.

Over breakfast, Buddy would beef about how boring it was stocking shelves, making sure every can, jar and box was stamped with a price, scrubbing the floor with a machine that weighed a ton and lugging returned bottles to the basement. He was determined to learn every job because no chore was too lowly for an A&P manager. He had being a bagger down cold. Eventually he'd be a cashier, stock clerk, produce supervisor and so on. He was sure the work would get more interesting and was already dropping words like
merchandise, marketing, inventory
and
stock
on her.

Tereza was just as fired up about becoming an actress, but Buddy wanted her to take over more and more shifts at Herman's so that Dearie could stay home whenever she wanted without “the family” losing income.

Thinking of them as family felt like cheating on Ma.

The Stony River “cop shop,” as Vinnie used to call it, was five blocks from the bus stop. Tereza's black flats scuffed the sidewalk as she hustled along. By now Dearie would have found the “went to store” note she'd left by the coffee pot. Tereza would pick up Midol and Kotex before she went back and cook up a story about why it
took her so long. Buddy'd never know she was gone; he didn't get up until after she and Dearie left for Herman's.

He slept days when he was on night shift. After breakfast, he'd shower before getting into bed. Tereza would crawl in with him in case he wanted to make out. He never did. But he'd stretch out beside her and hold her for a while, his Lifebuoy smell pinching her nose, before turning onto his stomach and lying frog-kneed like a Dearie miniature. Tereza would get up once his body started sleep-twitching and have a go at whatever he'd put on her schedule.

Not today.

She wanted to find Miranda before Buddy found the money. Every time he carried the vacuum up from the basement for Dearie, Tereza's stomach flipped. If she'd told him right after the wedding, it might've been okay. The longer she kept it to herself, the harder it would be to explain. Not that he'd hurt her if he found out. He wasn't like Jimmy. It was just that he went all funny sometimes, making her swell up with a fear she couldn't name.

The sun was like a hot and heavy hand on her back but Tereza kept her head up and her shoulders back, almost hoping somebody'd recognize her and say what's up so she could say nothing-much-gotmarried-in-June and see in their eyes she wasn't a loser anymore. She couldn't be sent back to school now. She had a birth certificate that said she was sixteen. Nobody had to know her husband didn't “sexually respond” to her, as the book had put it. Lately she'd been thinking a girlfriend would be a good idea. Not Linda. Somebody who knew something useful. Talking to Dearie about certain stuff would be like ratting on Buddy. Same for the women who worked at Herman's. Miranda was the only teenager Tereza knew of who'd had sex, even if it had been with her geezer father. One guy Tereza picked up at Tony's had wanted her to hum “The Star Spangled Banner” while she blew him. Buddy didn't want her to do anything except look scared while he came on her leg or stomach. Maybe Miranda would
say, “Oh, that's normal,” or “That's nothing compared to what I had to put up with.”