Stony River Read online

  “Mother Alfreda will send me to librarian school if I enter the convent,” she says.

  “Why would you want to be a librarian?”

  Doris’s puzzled look is surprising. Miranda is sure she natters on about the library to the point of tedium. “Did I not tell you I’m in charge of story hour for the kindergartners?” In charge is a bit of a boast. Sister Theodore insists on approving the books Miranda reads aloud to the children. Her dark eyebrows reach their greatest height when she dismisses as lewd or anti-Christian some tales Miranda enjoyed as a child and asks to bring into the library. “Sister Theodore says I have the talent and dedication necessary to succeed.”

  Doris lets out a shuddering sigh. “Of course you do. But what happens to Cian if you enter the convent?”

  Miranda has considered that. It would be good for Cian to have a man in his life, but according to Mother Alfreda, she can never be married in a state of grace, for the “foul stain” of incest has forever derailed the possibility of raising Cian in a true Catholic family. No point trying to explain that, since Danú and Dagda were not blood relatives, it couldn’t have been incest.

  “Father Shandley says Cian can live with him and his housekeeper,” she tells Doris. “I can see him whenever I want.”

  Doris’s face acquires sudden color and her eyes grow alarmingly large. She stands and takes a few steps back on the footpath, frightening a wobbling pigeon. She flails her arms. “That’s a horrible idea. I won’t have you losing Cian again.” The pigeon flaps and climbs until it’s wheeling high atop St. Bernadette’s.

  Miranda recalls the pink-and-green striped towels stacked in Doris’s bathroom and a shell-shaped dish holding little round soaps, a big window in the front room to let in the sun. Doris’s house has a television. Cian would be able to kiss the screen and say “Snap, Crackle, Pop” as he does in the nursery.

  “Could I attend librarian school?”

  “I don’t see why not. There must be night classes.”

  If Miranda joins the convent she’ll become a bride of Christ and wear a plain silver band. Nuns, like pigeons, mate for life. Mother Alfreda says Miranda’s destiny is in the convent. Sister Celine says it’s in a world without walls. Their competing visions of her future remind her of James’s tale of two swineherds who quarreled over whose power was greater, turning themselves into birds, dragons, sea creatures, worms and ghosts to get the better of each other.

  “I need to think on it,” she says at last. It won’t hurt Doris to wait for a change.

  FOURTEEN

  MAY 12, 1957. Mother’s Day. Linda woke to the clatter of pans, slipped into her robe and opened her door at the same time as her father, in pajamas, opened the one across the hall.

  “Your mother must have escaped while I was sleeping,” he said with a smile Miss Firkser would have described as “wry.”

  They stumbled down the stairs to the kitchen. Mother was at the stove slapping bacon into a pan. An apron cinched her pink bathrobe, giving the impression of a giant strawberry cream bon-bon.

  “I was going to serve you breakfast in bed,” Linda said. Toast and half a grapefruit with a maraschino cherry in the middle. She’d fixed the grapefruit the night before, surgically detaching fruit from membrane, dusting it with sugar.

  “Don’t bother,” Mother said. She hadn’t put on makeup and her hair was flat in the back, suggesting she’d been in a hurry to get downstairs and cheat them out of doing something nice for her. She wouldn’t be going to church, that was obvious. She was already in a state. Before they knew it she’d need to lie down.

  She’d ruin everything.

  Every year Linda’s parents bought pink carnations for dead Grandmother Wise and the still living Grandma Keynes to appear on the altar with the other tribute carnations. Linda was eager to watch Mother’s face as she scanned the church bulletin: For Betty Wise from her loving daughter. (Linda had deliberated for some time over whether to say devoted or loving.) She’d arranged for it secretly with Reverend Judge, paying for it with her allowance. She wanted Daddy to be surprised, too, show him the effort she was making to please Mother and not cause her to be sicker than she already was.

  Daddy’s voice was husky with puzzlement. “Betty? What gives?”

  “What does it look like? I’m cooking bacon. You like bacon, right? And Linda needs her strength if she’s going to spend the afternoon with someone else’s mother.”

  She spanked a burner with another pan, dropped Crisco into it.

  “Oh, so that’s it.” Daddy put a hand on Mother’s shoulder. She shrugged it off. “Be reasonable, dear. It’s not the whole afternoon. Only an hour or so. You knew about this.”

  The Crisco was spitting. Mother cracked three eggs into the pan.

  “Don’t treat me like an idiot. Of course I knew about the sale. It was me who rummaged through closets and drawers looking for things to contribute. But until last night I had no idea they’d deliver the money today, of all days.” She turned to Linda. “You didn’t have the decency to tell me yourself. Your father had to before we went to sleep.”

  Linda thought she might throw up. The youth choir had held a white elephant sale to raise money for Officer Nolan’s widow and kids. They’d taken in two hundred and fifty-six dollars and decided Mother’s Day would be the perfect occasion to give it to Mrs. Nolan. Mother had been enthusiastic about the sale, as touched as everyone else in town by the young widow and her small children. She’d gone with Linda and Daddy to stand on a curb with hundreds to watch the funeral procession. For over a week, Linda had anticipated Mrs. Nolan’s grateful smile. Linda would tell her she’d met her husband and, if it didn’t feel rude, ask if the police had found the gun that killed him.

  “I didn’t think it would be such a big deal,” Linda said, swallowing past the ache in her throat. “I wasn’t planning to go till after Valentino’s.” Every Mother’s Day, Daddy and Linda took Mother to Valentino’s where dark-suited waiters would fawn over her, hold out her chair and spread a starched napkin over her lap.

  “No, you didn’t think, did you? You never think when it comes to me.”

  Linda wanted Mother to drop dead right on the spot.

  Daddy said, “I don’t think that’s fair, Betty.”

  “That’s right. Take her side. You always do.” Mother turned the eggs over, breaking the yolks. Linda detested broken yolks.

  “I won’t go, Mother. The others can give her the money without me.”

  “Don’t do me any favors. And would it kill you to call me Mom? Mothers are dead people or old ladies who get taken to Valentino’s.” She slapped one egg and a bacon strip on a plate and handed it to Linda. Slapped two eggs and three bacon strips on another plate and handed it to Daddy. “You can fix your own toast.”

  “Where’s your plate?” Daddy asked.

  “The hired help doesn’t eat with the family.”

  “Oh, that’s rich.” Daddy’s voice came out hoarse and unsteady. “It may have escaped your notice but Linda and I do most of whatever gets done around here.”

  Mother’s cheeks flushed deep red as though she’d been slapped. She grabbed the three-pronged fork she’d used to turn the bacon and hurled it to the linoleum floor where it stuck on one of the pattern’s hideous thick black zigzags that looked like lightning bolts. It quivered there like an arrow. She took off her apron and climbed the stairs, her footsteps slow at first then quicker and quicker. Linda heard a door slam.

  Daddy sat at the kitchen table, a little too straight, staring at his plate. “I’m not hungry. You want mine?”

  Linda shook her head. “I hate limp bacon.”

  She didn’t think what she’d said was funny but Daddy laughed and laughed. Finally he wiped his eyes with a napkin, blew his nose and said, “Without you I might end it all, you know.” He stood and extracted the fork from the linoleum. “I’ll go up and get dressed for church if she hasn’t barricaded the door.”

  Linda scooped the bacon and eggs into the
garbage and washed the dishes.

  She and Daddy had bought Mother a new robe and a mushy, expensive card with lace on it. Before leaving for church, Linda put the gift box and card on the floor outside her parents’ room. She crossed out Mother on the envelope and wrote Mom.

  Daddy canceled the reservation at Valentino’s and spent the afternoon behind the closed door with Mother. Mom. Linda sat on the porch eating Fig Newtons, wishing she’d gone to Mrs. Nolan’s and thinking about that gun. If it turned out to be the one she’d held as Gilda Daring, it would be wrong not to tell the police. But that would be ratting on Richie. (“You rat on me, I swear I’ll kill you,” Tereza had said the night she ran away.) She couldn’t see Richie shooting anyone, still couldn’t believe he was gone. She’d checked with Vinnie, Paul and Vlad for weeks after he left but they hadn’t heard from him either. The high-school secretary told Vinnie that Richie’s parents had taken him out of school for health reasons. They’d left town a week after Richie and had put their house up for sale.

  Over deli sandwiches that night, Daddy said, “Your mother and I have decided I’ll rent a room from Mrs. Ernst for a while.” Mrs. Ernst sang in the choir and ran a boarding house. “It’s really something to learn that, in nineteen years, your wife has never had a happy day.”

  Linda swallowed hard. “She doesn’t mean that.” She’d never heard her parents do more than bicker, never heard them shout at each other. Shouldn’t you shout at least once before you decide to separate?

  “Possibly not, but she thinks she does and that’s what’s important.”

  Linda couldn’t keep the tears out of her words. “Why do you have to leave? Why can’t she go to Kansas and stay with Grandma?”

  Daddy closed his eyes and sighed. “Her doctor’s here. You’re here. She wants to have more time with you. This might bring you closer.”

  “I don’t want to be close to her. I hate her.”

  He stood and crossed to where she sat, knelt beside her and looked up with a pained face. “No, no, no. You mustn’t.”

  She looked past him at the wallpaper teakettles, at a panel where they didn’t match. “When will I see you?”

  “I’ll come by every night if possible. You can call me at work anytime. I have no intention of divorcing your mother, if that’s what you’re thinking. The three of us will always be a family. I’m just giving her the time she says she needs to get better.”

  “Does it matter what I want?”

  “Not right now.”

  A drop of sweat crept out of Linda’s armpit and ran down her ribs. She could already feel the emptiness of the house without Daddy, the absence of his big voice, her mother’s silence behind that loathsome closed door.

  JUNE 7, 1957. The room smells of talcum and rubber-faced dolls. The antique desk is open, the scarred surface of its drop-down table exposed. James’s scratched ladder-back chair waits before the desk. So loud is the pulse in Miranda’s ears, she barely registers the gust of words from Doris explaining how she rescued the desk when the house was sold. It stands now between Carolyn’s bed and the one Miranda slept on for twelve years, transformed with new sheets and a pink-and-yellow striped bedspread matching Carolyn’s.

  Doris wants to know if it’s a good surprise: the desk, the chair and her old bed. When Miranda left St. Bernadette’s with Cian this morning, she carried only her journal, a high-school diploma, James’s red shoes and his billfold.

  Doris natters on. She and Bill had no place for the other furnishings. But they saved all the books. Bill had to bring in a ladder to reach the top shelves, something Doris finds heroic, judging from her tone. Miranda wouldn’t believe how many books were infested with silverfish. They brought them back, spread them out on the basement floor and set the fan on them before putting them back in the boxes. The records bowled Doris over. She didn’t know Miranda’s father, of course, but even so she wouldn’t have expected him to be a fan of old bands and that baby-voiced flapper. By the way, they found a shotgun in a closet. Bill turned it in at the station.

  Doris points out the desk’s sprung lock, which Bill suspected was a runaway’s doing. The one Doris had brought her the newspaper article about. Would Miranda be able to tell if anything had been taken? Miranda shakes her head. Fortunately, Doris says, the deed to the house was there along with a property tax record; apparently James was paying the taxes in cash once a year. Does Miranda know where he might have gotten that cash? She doesn’t; the girls at St. Bernadette’s ridiculed the belief in a money tree right out of her.

  Doris points out a compartment with sealed envelopes she didn’t feel right opening. And what was Miranda’s father doing with the creams and dried leaves in the lower drawers? For years James has been Miranda’s private property. Even confronted with items so intimately connected to him, she can’t begin to explain him and doesn’t want to. When Doris says they also lugged over boxes from the basement, Miranda’s tongue goes dry. She waits. No mention of the altar or what was on it. Doris says the boxes are in the basement below their feet.

  Moments later Miranda perches on a book carton next to the washing machine, under the glare of a naked bulb. Doris has gone to “ride herd” over the three little ones whose wee hooves gallop overhead. Heavy black ink marks boxes of BOOKS, RECORDS, MISCELLANEOUS. In the damp basement air, Miranda’s bone-white legs miss their novitiate tights. Doris brought her home in a yellow flowered sundress, brown loafers and white socks folded down into cuffs. She suggested Miranda begin “working on a tan” and shaving her legs.

  On the floor to Miranda’s right, the oak phonograph winks in the light. She shoves boxes aside to get to it. She squats, opens the lid and fingers the green felt turntable. Spare needles are still in the cup and the crank is stored in the lid. Her eyes fill as she recalls the fire rising and falling on the wall while James announced clarinet, trombone, piano, violin and guitar as each entered a song.

  You can discern a culture’s traits by observing its deities and music, James told her. He’d reflect on the transportability of both from one culture to another. With a concertina, he said, Miranda’s favorite record, “I’m an Old Cowhand,” would be indistinguishable in sentiment from a Gaelic piece about a wandering laborer. She didn’t have James’s knowledge of anthropology. She simply treasured the communion with him that the crackling music offered. She closes her eyes, remembering the feel of his rough trousers against her face and his hand absentmindedly stroking her hair. She’s someone’s daughter again, touched with love.

  The sisters were wrong. She wasn’t violated. She was chosen. Danú confirmed that.

  She feels a flush of warm air like an oven door opening: the Voice of James urging her to not fear what’s in the boxes.

  She opens a carton and unleashes a stale smell.

  Paradise Regained. The History of Rome. On the Motion of the Head and Blood in Animals. She lifts out each volume cautiously lest it crumble in her fingers. L’âge de raison. Great Expectations. Parallel Lives. De occulta philosophia. A few are swollen with damp. The Prince. Apology. The Elements. Time has darkened the pages of others around the edges.

  Gargantua. The Aeneid. Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy. Cuchulain of Muirthemne. She sets each book on the floor. Beyond Good and Evil. Candide. The Nibelungenlied. Irish Witchcraft and Demonology. James’s penciled notes in the margins of some volumes catch at her heart. Sex and Repression in Savage Society. Argonauts of the Western Pacific. Sons and Lovers. Critique of Pure Reason.

  Memories like fingers and hands grip her belly and chest.

  Such joyous pain.

  Heroic Romances of Ireland. The Death-Tales of the Ulster Heroes. The Golden Bough. Brave NewWorld. Tarzan of the Apes.Witchcraft, Oracles and Magic Among the Azande. These would likely be on Sister Theodore’s prohibited list. Miranda wants to read them all the more if they are, wants to savor words and ideas so powerful they must be banned.

  Quickly now she unpacks the remaining volumes, setting them end to end,
alphabetically by author, forming a serpent of books across the floor, her hands agile with purpose. Ah, here are those whose worlds she naively once believed existed outside their pages. Don Quixote de la Mancha. Ivanhoe. Gulliver’s Travels. And others that befriended her all those lonely years. Oliver Twist. Emma. Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea. The Hunchback of Notre Dame. For Cian, Carolyn and Mickey she sets aside Winnie-the-Pooh, The Wind in the Willows, Through the Looking-Glass, The Jungle Book and children’s versions of the Iliad and the Odyssey.

  James said that if words could be held and tasted and smelled they might be enough to live on. He ferried most of these volumes from Ireland and purchased others later so that she could hear the literary voices of her birth country: Gone with the Wind, Moby-Dick, The Last of the Mohicans, Of Mice and Men, A Tree Grows in Brooklyn—she so wanted Francie to be her sister! She knows not how James paid for those books unless by card tricks in pubs. Her favorite was when he changed the colors of the aces.

  Over here, the Voice calls. The cartons from our basement.

  Under rags she finds the altar cloth, chalice, James’s cord of knots, the bells, drinking horn, wand and the candle, now soft and misshapen. The candle symbolized awareness, James said. She’d nearly forgotten. She pulls it out and sniffs the soapy smell of the wax.

  She wrenches open another box. Hidden beneath a telephone that never rang and lamps that were never lit are the black drapes and the map James drew of their spiritual homeland. Here are the forests and plains, coastline and isles he traversed during meditations and trances, a landscape he said would open up to her in good time.