Jenny Rose Read online

  Mary gaped at the folded yellow paper. All the way from County Cork. Dierdre. Her big sister. Who used to take her wheeling in the shopping trolley over the cobbles on Bridge Street and let her suck red-hot pennies, soft and gummy, all the way home. She could feel it now. She could see her sister’s game head tossing and hear her tarty laugh. Mary dropped her gray head into her big arms and sobbed and sobbed.

  “Ma”—Carmela nudged her—“c’mon, think of your blood pressure, Ma.”

  “Let her cry,” Zinnie advised. “She has to cry.”

  I put my palm on Zinnie’s back. “Don’t worry about Michaelean. I really will look after him. It’s not as though he’s a baby.”

  “That’s what worries me.” She snorted. “You’ll see. Yours aren’t babies anymore, either.”

  “Oh, but they are.” I sighed. “Anthony doesn’t even know where to find his uniform in the morning. He’s standing right next to it and he says, ‘Ma-aa! Where’s my tie?’ I have to lay it out for him.”

  “Then it’s high time he learned,” Carmela said.

  How cold she is, I thought. I felt like smacking her. What stopped me was the mean expression I felt my own face freeze into. I wasn’t going to let Carmela make me as hard as she was. She was just jealous, as usual. I remembered my own jealousy when our mother had taken Carmela with her the last time she’d gone to Ireland. I hadn’t been allowed for fear I’d catch the dreaded chicken pox Aunt Brigid had. We hadn’t had enough money for us all to go, anyway. I still remembered the misery of being without the two of them for what had seemed like forever. My father’s horrid Polish sister from Greenpoint had come to help with the rest of us. She must have cleaned every day. The woman had no sense of humor. And the one time I’d gone with her to Woolworth’s on Jamaica Avenue she wouldn’t let me try on any lipstick. It hadn’t been an easy time for me.

  Zinnie controlled her voice. “Carmela. If you want to go, I’ll happily relinquish the honor. Or we could both go.”

  “I’ve already been, thanks. You’ll never get me back to that dump of a town.”

  “Well,” Zinnie said. “That’s that, then. Claire?” She looked at me with happy eyes. “You have any money?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Loan me some cash ’til next month?”

  “Sure,” I said, heaping my toast with the Masters Choice blackberry lemon.

  Mary reached up and took Carmela’s hand. “She loved you, Carmela. Dierdre did.”

  Carmela stood very still. She didn’t say anything, though. She just stood and let her hand be held.

  “I’d better go find Johnny.” I gnawed on my thumbnail. “He’s so hard to track down with this undercover business. Let him know Michaelean will be sleeping on the sofa.”

  “Just so he doesn’t come in in the middle of the night and shoot him,” Zinnie said, referring to Johnny’s drinking.

  “And”—I acted like everything was okay—“I’ll have to go to the bank in the morning if I want to loan you that cash.”

  “Ma,” Zinnie said. “Which one was Dierdre? I always mix them up.”

  “Well, sure, you never knew them.”

  “She was the single one, right?” I said.

  Mary had always said “single” as though it were something forbidden, exotic.

  “She was bonny, was Dierdre, when she was a girl. Got a bit thick, later on, poor thing.” She said this from some sheltered distance as though she herself had not. “Loved to play cards. And had a way with words, Dierdre did. Loved a good game of Scrabble, too. She always won. And if it looked like she might not, she’d throw the whole board up in the air. Letters everywhere!”

  Stan came in the back door. That’s our dad. He looked at us over the top of his glasses, his pipe in his mouth, and he went to wash his hands. He hadn’t lit the pipe in a year and a half but he still had to have the thing. “What’s up?” he said.

  “It’s Mommy’s sister Dierdre, Dad. She died.”

  “No kiddin’! Oh. That’s too bad. I thought it was one of the kids. The way you were all sitting here, I did.” He went over and rubbed Mary on the arm. “You okay?”

  Mary sniffed and nodded.

  “Zinnie’s going to Ireland for the funeral,” I announced.

  “Is she now?”

  “Yeah.”

  Stan leaned against the sink. “Remember, you said someone would die. Always, when there’s a mouse.”

  “That’s right, I did.” Mary clapped her hands shut.

  “What mouse?” Carmela asked.

  “I suppose you’ll have to stay for the reading of the will, too,” Stan said.

  “Will?” I said.

  “Sure. The house. Dierdre’s house.”

  “That’s right.” Mary bit her lip. “That was our parents’ house, really. I mean Dierdre lived there all her life but the house was all of ours. It’s a fine, snug house, too.”

  I have to say we all perked up.

  “So, you mean, we might inherit the house?” I asked. “That one with the straw roof, on the cliff, across from the slate-roof house you always told us about?”

  “Aye, that’s Bally Cashin.”

  “Well, at least part of it,” Stan said. “Your sister will be waiting in the wings, you can be sure.”

  “And why shouldn’t she be?” Mary reared her loyal head. “It would be hers as much as it would be mine.”

  “Hmm,” we all said, each with her own set of plans.

  “They’ll be laying her out in the bedroom,” Mary murmured.

  “Yikes,” Zinnie said.

  “Don’t we have any more Sweet’n Low?” Carmela complained.

  Mary sniffed.

  She’d never liked her sister much, I’d always suspected. “You didn’t like her too much, though, Mom, did you?” I risked asking.

  “Oh, I liked her enough. She never approved of my emigrating, is all.” She closed her mouth and smiled, raising her eyebrows and furrowing her forehead in good-natured resignation. “I wonder how she died,” she said. “I guess it was her heart. Our family always goes from the heart. She was way too big for her frame. They didn’t say, on the phone, Claire?”

  I shrugged my shoulders and hoped she wouldn’t notice my uneasy sudden recall. The long-winded woman on the phone, before she’d come to the part about Aunt Dierdre being dead at all, had mentioned something about “disastrous circumstances.” I must have shoved that unhappy phrase right to the back of my mind, you know the way you will when it’s inconvenient. Carmela let out a bloodcurdling and, I must say, opportune scream.

  “Hurrah.” Stan rubbed his mitts together. “She’s found our little mouse.”

  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 thos
e 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.”