Land of Dreams: A Novel (4 page)

Dan pointed. “There they are.” I looked back up the pier and could see the portly postmaster trying to persuade Tom to come back down from the second-floor decking of the closed hotel, where he was launching leaves through holes in the wood.

Dan waved at him, but Tom would only wave back.

“Ellie, you’re in a rush now. What say you leave him here—and we’ll take care of him till you get back?”

“It’s too much trouble. I’ll—”

“We love taking care of him, Ellie. Besides, you’ll be back in a day or two—with Leo.”

I was anxious to get going, and Tom was always a demanding distraction in the city. I would travel more quickly alone.

“If you’re sure, Dan.”

He waved my assent to his older, stouter lover and I climbed on board the boat.

As we pulled away from the dock I had a moment of panic as the land behind us grew smaller. Would I be back in a few days? Was this the start of another horrendous period of grief in my life? Would I have to endure all the pain and uncertainty of the past ten years, again? I felt a snap of anger at the child—selfish, selfish!—then quickly put Leo to the back of my mind. I had a journey into the city to make before I could do anything, and I needed to stay calm.

“Will Tom and Conor be all right, do you think, Dan?”

“If they’re not, sweetie, I’ll bring him right over to you. Yonkers—Manhattan—wherever, Ellie, you just call.”

Dan went over to the mainland and back all the time. He did sporadic work with a taxicab firm in the city throughout the winter and would make good on his promise to deliver Tom wherever I needed him to be. That, at least, was settled.

Dan pulled down the accelerator lever with his right hand, and the low thrum of the old fishing vessel engine turned to a screech as it started to make the short journey toward Sayville. I remembered the first time I had taken this journey, four—nearly five—years ago now.

I had been on my own that day. The boys were in the care of my surrogate Irish family in the rambling house in Yonkers that we had renovated together and run for a while as a homeless shelter at the tail end of the Great Depression. My own parents in Ireland were long since dead, and with them now were Maidy and Paud Hogan—the old couple who had all but reared me and whose son, John, I had married. Maidy had been the last to go, five years ago. She died three years after her son, John, my husband—and it had been my grief over his sudden death that had chased me back to New York. When I received news of Maidy’s death I did not return for her burial. Instead I enshrined her in my heart and left her living in the neat, rose-covered cottage where I remembered her. That was where my old beloveds were now: John, Maidy and Paud were tucked away in my heart, still living in that cottage in Kilmoy.

My parents had been products of Ireland’s two least attractive institutions—the Church and the privileged middle-class Irish who had survived the famine of 1879. They were not unkind people, but they were cold. Perhaps because of my craving for warmth and love as a child, I had become good at gathering people close to me.

My “family” now comprised the faithful friends I had made in America. Maureen and Patrick Sweeney and their two children now lived with Bridie—the fierce old housekeeper I had first encountered as a young woman in domestic service. They all lived in the house in Yonkers that I had bought for a song during the Depression and renovated from a homeless shelter into a family home over the years. In turn, these friends had become a true family to my adopted sons. Leo’s father was my second husband, Charles, and his mother was a vain, shallow socialite whose disinterest in Leo had led her to abandon him completely when she met her second husband. Tom’s mother was a poor unfortunate young girl who had presented herself, while pregnant with him, at the house in Yonkers that we had run as a homeless shelter during the worst of the Depression. His father was unknown. Both boys belonged to me now—the sons of a single woman artist. They were not mere products of their birth or background, but my cherished children, because they were fortunate enough to have been born in America: the land of reinvention. My own life had changed its course many times. I had worked as a housemaid, typist, farmer’s wife, businesswoman and now artist. My family—from the sons whom I had gratefully adopted, to the people I trusted to care for them and love them alongside me—were not of their (or my) birth, but of my own choosing.

The sea journey to my new oasis on that first occasion had taken less than twenty minutes. I had stood at the front of the Fire Island ferry on a bright spring day, facing out to what seemed like open sea. The horizon was blurred—any land made invisible by a gentle mist blending into the gray sky—and there was a moment when I felt as if I were at the stern of the boat that had brought me from Ireland to America as a young girl in 1920. For a moment, with the wind whipping my hair sideways across my face and no children tugging on me, I now allowed myself to remember how innocent and beautiful and brave I had been back then. My beloved husband had been injured in the Irish War of Independence, and I had stayed in New York just long enough to earn money for his operation. I returned to him and lived in blissful contentment until his death in 1934, when I came back to America in search of solace and, yes, reinvention. From the other side of the world it was easier to imagine that perhaps John was not dead, but still back home in Ireland waiting for me. Being apart from the one you love—separated by miles, or time—is close to death, in any case. John was alive in my heart as the first person who had taught me how to love. The man, and the memory of the man, had long since become one and the same, but John was no less precious to me for that. His death, and all the life that had happened to me since, had deepened the love I had always felt for him. Instead of gaining solace from my grief, the grief itself had become my solace.

That day I had lost myself in a reverie of sweet memories until Fire Island came into view. The low strip of land appeared to bubble into my eyeline from behind the mist, as if it were somehow emerging out of the water. Like some mysterious place in history, an illusion—the straight line of treetops growing taller as we got closer, as if they too were growing out of the water. I began to see a few white buildings emerge, a toy town, and above them gray clouds tinged with slight blue and a shy, hazy sun reaching down to the surface of the water—transforming it from gray to glittering sun. This was, I decided, a magical place. A new land, as America had once been to me; a place where the artist, the mother, the free spirit that I had become could thrive and belong. I was, that day, filled with the same feeling of adventure and excitement that I had felt when first arriving in America.

Fire Island had been all that I had ever hoped for; a place for me to settle and live out my days with my family, in solitude and creative fulfillment.

Now I was leaving and, although I hoped otherwise, I had a premonition that I would not be returning for some time.

C
HAPTER
T
HREE

Sayville was asleep today. In high season the port was buzzing with crowds of colorful city people getting on the ferry, piling large bags on the narrow benches and all around their feet, their personal belongings spilling over—groceries, clothes and beach towels. They also carried larger items such as lamps and chairs, decorating their island abodes bit by bit, because the lack of roads (and therefore of wheeled transport) on the island made it impossible to move everything in one go. I once helped a man up the ramp as he struggled with a life-sized glass flamingo. “It was my mother’s” was his only explanation or excuse. There was always something to amuse or entertain me on my journey to and from Fire Island.

However, today there was nothing but a single yellow taxicab waiting for me.

“Chico’s a man of few words,” Dan said, opening the door of the taxi and nodding to his friend, “so he won’t bother you with chitchat. I’ve given him the address of the apartment and told him to take you straight there.”

“Thanks, Dan,” I said climbing in, “I don’t know what I’d have done—”

“Go!” he said, “hurry!” Then he shut the door and slammed his hand on the roof to give Chico instructions.

The leather seating was cold underneath me, and my coat was too thin—I was still wearing the clothes I had chased out of the house in. I wished now that I had Tom with me. He could cuddle into me, and he was so full of energy that he was always as warm as an oven! He would offer me distraction too, and I suddenly craved an impossible question (“Mam, why do rabbits have such big ears?”) to ruminate over and pass the time.

I pulled my cuffs down over my hands and folded my arms. Outside, a slight spatter of rain on the car window interrupted my view of the disappearing sea.

Where had Charles, my second husband, been on that first day I took the trip to Fire Island? I couldn’t remember, but I remembered that he wasn’t there. Away somewhere chasing his political ideals—but not with me.

Our marriage had been a long time coming. Charles and I had first met when I was an innocent young housemaid and he the wealthy son of a shipbuilder. I was over in America earning money to send home to my first husband, John. Charles had fallen hard for me and, between his looks and his money and his noble ideals on behalf of the “ordinary workingman,” he came close to turning my head. However, I returned to Ireland, leaving him heartbroken. In my mid-thirties, after John died, I returned to America again and we met through a series of coincidences that can only be described as “fate.” Quite by chance, Charles came upon the charitable community that I was running in Yonkers with Bridie and Maureen Sweeney. Once again, he swept me away, but while we consummated our love, we only stayed together for a short while. I was demented with grief for John, and Charles had family problems, as this was the time when his ex-wife unexpectedly abandoned their son, Leo, into his care.

I left the community a few months after that and set up home in an apartment in Manhattan, along with baby Tom, who had been left in my care by his young mother. There had been another man in the community, Matt, who had wanted to marry me—but in a matter of a year after my husband’s death everything I thought I knew about love and passion had become so confused, so enmeshed with my grief over losing John, that I decided I needed some time on my own.

It was the right thing to do. Tom thrived under my exclusive parenting. I bought an apartment near Central Park, and every day we adventured in its fields: explored the broad bases of its large gnarled trees, listened to the shouts from its baseball courts, fed ducks in its ponds; through the eyes of my toddling son, I was reborn into a happy world of carousels and zoo animals. I had taken some lessons and started drawing. Tom slept in his baby carriage as I walked him through the city’s art galleries and drank in every last piece of work on public view. It was the first time in my life that I had done exactly as I pleased. There was nothing expected from me—from family or society. I still had some means from the businesses I had sold in Ireland, and had time to do completely as I pleased. From that place of freedom inside me, and with the passing of time, my terrible grief at losing John began to soften. I also began to imagine I had an artist’s eye and harbored an idea, which, with the confidence that age and motherhood gave me, grew into a belief that I could become an artist.

So, just over a year after I had left my life in Yonkers—two years after John died—I was happier and more settled than I had ever been. I had met an influential German artist, Hilla Rebay, who was mentoring me and had arranged a studio for me to work in. Hilla was also the curator of the renowned Solomon Guggenheim Foundation—and her confidence in my potential as an “important Irish Abstract artist” gave me such huge faith that I had found my path. Not as somebody’s daughter, lover or wife, not even as a businesswoman hell-bent on making money for fear of the poverty I had once known, but as an individual. I had found a way of expressing who I was and it felt important and true. I was excited about where this awakened passion for art would lead me, and was filled with the same spirit of adventure and excitement that I had experienced as a young woman in New York. I felt ready to launch myself into whatever came my way.

It just so happened that what came my way was Charles.

I had just put down the phone to Hilla, who had rung to tell me that my first painting had sold to an industrialist friend of Guggenheim. She was quite disgusted because this man seemed flummoxed by most of the work she showed him, so she assumed he was looking for something representative and traditional. Hilla found people with such uninformed tastes exhausting and was quickly walking him through the artists’ studios—wealthy art collectors liked to see the chaos where we artists worked—when in mine he spotted a large, vague, but entirely abstract landscape that I had done from memory, of the view from my cottage in Ireland. It stopped him in his tracks, Hilla told me.

“What did he say?” I had asked.

“ ‘Now that I like,’ she had said. ‘Now
that
I like’—that’s what he said.”

She sold him the work for a vastly inflated sum, then rang to tell me that I was now—officially—a professional artist.

When I put the phone down I was soaring with pleasure. I was longing to share my news with somebody, but Tom was asleep and the family out in Yonkers didn’t have a phone.

I was beaming with excitement and could only think of running down to the museum on East 54th Street and making Hilla tell me the whole story over and over again, until I grew tired of it. I would have gone immediately, had Tom not been asleep in his crib. If I had, I would have missed that ring on the door and Charles, standing there, clean-shaven and chiseled as a god. He was holding flowers.

I had not seen Charles since he left me in the house in Yonkers something over a year before, to attend to the family business of his wife and son. In my grief for John I had rejected him for the second time and had believed that I would never see him again. Only a fool would come back for more and, in all honesty, as caught up as I was with my art and being a good mother to Tom, I had barely given him a thought since. Enough time had passed perhaps for me to be pleased, if somewhat surprised, to see him.