I’ve got half an hour before the next southbound train so I walk to the north end of the platform and lean on the chain-link fence separating the train yard from the river. The river is wide here, a fjord really, which, when I once looked it up, I found meant that it was a river that had been drowned by the sea—just like the river in my mother’s books. In a time before the rivers were drowned by the sea . . . she would start her story each night. Which I suppose is just another way of saying once upon a time.
As the sun sinks toward the Catskills on the west bank the river turns a cold slaty blue—tinted, I imagine, by an infusion of Atlantic water sweeping up from the sea. The low mountains on the other side fold the light into jeweled bands: emerald, sapphire, pearl, and amethyst. It’s hard to tell where the mountains end and the clouds, purpling as the sun sets, begin. It’s as if the mountains were pulling the water-dense swaths of pink and violet clouds to them, like a woman drawing a cloak over her shoulders. No wonder the early Dutch settlers thought the mountains were the home of storm gods and ghosts. It looks as if they are drawing a storm down right now. I close my eyes to feel the last warmth of the sun before the rain reaches down here. I’ve still got my eyes closed when I feel a hand touch my shoulder.
I turn around to find Aidan Barry, shading his eyes from the sun, squinting at me.
“Professor Greenfeder? I thought that was you.”
“God, Aidan, don’t creep up on me like that. Especially so close to the train tracks.” It’s an absurd comment—we’re a good eight feet from the edge of the platform, but I’m trying to cover my embarrassment with teacherly admonishment. Lately I’ve found with Aidan that I have to keep reminding myself that I am his teacher and that I’m a good seven years older than he is.
“Och, I wouldn’t let you fall on the tracks like poor Anna Karenina. At least not till I get the letter of recommendation I’m after asking you for.” Aidan winks at me to accompany his suddenly exaggerated brogue—or maybe it’s just the sun in his eyes. I turn to walk back down the platform so he won’t have to look into the sun to talk to me (not, I tell myself, because I’m nervous being alone with him at this deserted end of the platform) and he falls into step beside me.
“What letter is that?”
“My parole officer just now—” He jerks his chin in the general direction of the prison. “—says I should get a letter from one of my teachers saying what a good citizen I’ve become, a reformed man, you know. I thought you could write it for me. None of my other teachers has so much as bothered to learn my name.”
“Oh, I bet that isn’t true.” I can’t imagine having Aidan in a class and not knowing exactly who he is. Sneaking a sideways look at him I notice that since he’s gotten out of prison he’s filled out a bit and gotten some color in that pale skin of his. He’s let his hair grow and it curls just a bit over his ears and at the nape of his neck.
“I’m happy to write you a letter, Aidan; you’ve been a fine student. If there’s anything else I can do . . .”
“Well, there is one thing . . . but let me tell you on the train.” He cocks his thumb over his shoulder and I look behind him. Far down the tracks, barely visible, I make out the silver glint of the southbound train.
“How’d you know the train was here?”
Aidan grins and rocks back on his heels. “Old Indian trick. The tracks run right through Van Wink. I got used to feeling the vibrations before it came. I guess that’s something you don’t forget.” That momentary glint of pride fades, replaced by something else, sadness or shame, or some mixture of the two. I try not to think of what else he’s learned in prison and wonder if he’ll always live under that shadow.
We board the train and find two seats next to each other. He takes the window seat, which means I can look at him and still see the river. I can’t help but compare the southbound trip with the northbound. The sunlit trip north, the gathering clouds heading south. My two gentleman admirers! One old enough to be my father, the other young enough to be . . . what? A younger brother, I suppose . . .
I’m so caught up figuring out what our age difference adds up to that I miss something Aidan is asking me.
“. . . so do you think there’s any chance you could look into it for me, I mean, I know, no one wants to hire an ex-con.” That look of shame passes over his clear blue-green eyes, like the rain shadow I watched pass over the mountains before, and it pains me to see it.
“I would personally vouch for you to any potential employer,” I say, gratified to see that shadow lift from his eyes. We’ve reached the outskirts of the city, the Bronx a dark silhouette against a moist purple sky. The heavy clouds I saw massing over the Catskills have followed us south. I see the lights of the skyline over Aidan’s shoulder and then a curtain of rain extinguishes them.
“Brilliant,” Aidan says, flashing me a smile so expansive I feel something let go inside my chest just as the clouds have released their rain. “I know hotel work’s the line for me. You won’t be sorry.”
I am sorry, though, for the rest of the train ride but I can’t think of any way to explain to Aidan that I misheard him—that I wasn’t paying attention because I’d been too busy rationalizing a relationship I don’t plan to have. He, innocently unaware of my remorse, is filling me in on his varieties of hotel experiences. He comes from a long line of hotel workers, he tells me. Even back in Ireland, the men in his family would go over to London to work in the big hotels—the Connaught, the Savoy, the Ritz, the May Fair—and send money back home. “That’s how my mom met my dad—she was working as a maid and he was the night clerk. They came over here because they had a cousin who’d promised them work in a New York hotel, but by the time they got over the hotel had closed down. That’s when my dad started drinking—like he’d decided the world had no good in store for him anymore. Anyway, I’ve always felt the business was in my blood. You understand, coming from a hotel family yourself.”
I could explain that I’ve spent most of my life trying to avoid working at the hotel. It would be a good preamble to telling him I can’t really get him a job at the Hotel Equinox—but knowing, as I do, that I’m planning to ask my aunt for a job myself, I can’t. As the train pulls into the station I tell myself that in a few days I’ll just tell Aidan that I asked my aunt Sophie for a place for him at the hotel and that there wasn’t one. I shoulder my book bag and button up my raincoat with that resolve in mind. We both walk briskly up the platform toward the main terminal, both of us resuming a city pace until we hit a wave of commuters heading down to the trains, the great tide flooding back out of the city. Aidan takes my arm and steers me though the crowd. The vaulted space above us is dark now, the lightbulbs in the constellations twinkling a little brighter in the gloom.
Would it really hurt, I wonder, just to ask? Chances are there won’t be a job for me, or Mrs. Rivera, let alone Aidan. The hotel might not be open this summer. I’ll ask and then I can tell Aidan the truth and it’ll just be one more disappointment to him, but it won’t be my fault.
I feel better, then, turning to say good-bye to him at the Vanderbilt exit. I tell him I’m going to take a bus home because of the rain. But instead of shaking the hand I hold out to him he holds both his hands up, wrists bent, palms up, so that he looks like some ancient figure representing justice or balance. It’s a full thirty seconds before I get the purpose of his pantomime. It’s not raining. The thundershower that rolled off the western mountains and bowled its way down the alley of the Hudson was an isolated salvo. The rain has glazed the streets, freshened the air, and moved on.
“It’s a beautiful night,” he says, “let me walk you home.”
And since I can’t dispute the truth of the first part of his statement, I see no reason not to assent to the second part.
We walk west on 42nd Street and cut across Bryant Park just because the trees are so beautiful there. The leaves are still that new spring green, not full enough yet to hide the elegant bone structure of their limbs. The street lamps
make spiderwebs out of the slick wet branches. Aidan tells me more about his family, about growing up in Inwood and how even though his dad wasn’t much on the scene he’d had his grandmother, aunts and uncles, and scores of cousins to take up the slack.
We weave through the streets of the garment district and end up on Ninth Avenue and 38th Street, the southern edge of Hell’s Kitchen.
“Does your family still live in Inwood?” I ask Aidan as we turn south on Ninth.
“My mother’s still there—my dad died a couple of years ago. Most of my cousins live in Woodlawn.”
“That’s nice you’re so close to your family,” I say.
Aidan makes a face. “Oh, it’s a bit clannish for me. That’s how you find work, though, by staying in touch with all the boys, only . . .”
Aidan pauses and I can tell, looking over at him as we pass under a street lamp, that he’s not so much at a loss for words as trying to edit something out for my benefit. I wonder what it could be.
“Only sometimes the work’s not to my liking.”
Aidan looks over at me and I nod. In other words, sometimes the work’s not legal. That’s what he’s trying to tell me. That if I don’t find him work at the hotel he’ll end up in the same old crowd. I remember what he said in his paper, about watching the ex-cons fall back in with their old ways because no one was willing to take a chance on them and give them a fresh start. Unless there was someone like the girl in the fairy tale who held on even when the boy she embraced turned into a snake, and then a lion, and then a pillar of flames.
Was it too much to ask to look beyond what he appeared to be now, to what he could become if only someone gave him a chance?
Although I assure Aidan that I don’t need him to walk me all the way home he says he’s glad to. That he’s enjoying the air and the company. When we pass a bar in Chelsea, though, I see his eyes flick sideways and the young men standing around outside smoking cigarettes call his name.
“Friends of yours?” I ask as we approach the bar—which, I notice, is called the Red Branch.
“Aye, like I said, I know half the Irish population on the isle of Manhattan.”
“Well, don’t let me stop you if you want to go in. I’m more than halfway home.”
Aidan smiles, I think because I’ve released him, but then he puts his arm around my shoulders and pulls me close enough so he can whisper in my ear.
“Would you mind coming in for a drink?” he asks. “It’ll mean a lot to these lads that I’m seen with such a classy lady.”
I can’t help smiling at that any more than I can help that flutter I feel in my chest every time Aidan looks at me. It’s not a night Jack comes over, so why not? Haven’t I earned a little time off after all the grading I’ve done today? The pub looks bright and inviting, not one those derelict Irish bars near the train station. I can see through the door a mix of young and old people and I can hear live music wafting out onto Ninth Avenue. There are tables with candles flickering in stained-glass holders and a beautiful stained-glass window set into the fanlight above the door, which depicts three men struggling through a raging sea, a woman in a red cloak perched on the shoulders of one of the men.
“You see that window?” I ask Aidan, buying myself time while I decide if I should take him up on his offer or not. “It’s from a story called ‘The Sorrows of Deirdre.’ Have you ever heard of it?”
“Wasn’t it Deirdre who got her husband and his two brothers slaughtered?” Aidan asks, looking up at the window. “I always wondered why it was called ‘The Sorrows of Deirdre’ when it was she who caused all the sorrows.”
“Just like a man,” I say. “Always blaming the woman. It wasn’t her fault that Naoise fell in love with her.”
“Naoise?” It’s one of those names that sounds—NEE-sheh—nothing like it’s spelled, but Aidan pronounces the name just as my mother did.
“That’s the fellow whose shoulders she’s on. He falls in love with her and they run away, along with his brothers Allen and Arden, because she was supposed to marry the king, Connachar Mac Ness. They all live happily in Scotland for a while, but then they’re tricked into coming back and Mac Ness tries to take Deirdre back. When they try to escape again, Connachar orders his druid to conjure up an ocean to stop them. That’s them trying to get across it.”
“Do they make it?”
“No. Mac Ness orders them to be beheaded. Deirdre throws herself into their burial pit and dies in Naoise’s arms. That’s why it’s called ‘The Sorrows of Deirdre.’ Her sorrows are over having caused so much death. My mother named the main character in her books Deirdre and there’s an evil king named Connachar and a hero called Naoise, but she doesn’t really follow the story. I think, though, that she used the names to allude to the danger of love—what might happen if you followed your heart.”
Aidan is still looking up at the window. The light, coming through the stained glass, casts jeweled shadows on his face—emerald, ruby, and sapphire. When he turns back to me I notice that his eyes are the same sapphire as the glass in the window.
“It seems to me there’s more sorrow in not following your heart,” he says. “So are you coming in?”
I shake my head.
“Then would you like me to take you home?” I notice he says take you home not walk you home, but I choose to answer as if he said the latter.
“No, Aidan I’ll be fine, it’s a lovely night and I’m almost home.” He shrugs and turns his shoulder so I think he’s heading back inside but instead he leans in and kisses me lightly on the cheek, saying something I don’t quite hear. Then he’s gone. I turn and walk south. I’ve gone two blocks before I realize what he said. “Well, maybe another time then.”
Chapter Twelve
At home there’s a message on my answering machine that sounds like running water. When I turn up the volume a notch it sounds like running water with a Brooklyn accent. Only when I’ve turned the volume as high as it goes do I make out my aunt’s message.
“I’m calling from a cell-yu-lar phone,” she says, drawing out each word as if to make up in slowness what she lacks in volume. “I have some news to discuss with you that I cannot relate over the switchboard. I’ll be in the Hoo-Ha by Sunset Rock precisely at ten o’clock P.M. I’m assuming you’ll be home by then. The number is . . .”
I have to replay the message six times to transcribe the number of my aunt’s new cellular phone. By the time I’ve got it, it’s ten minutes before ten.
The Hoo-Ha my aunt is referring to is a little wooden structure with a bench and a cedar shake roof, one of the dozen little buildings built by Joseph over the years. Our guests usually refer to them as the gazebos or summerhouses, which is what they’re called by another hotel to the south of us. Joseph, though, always called them chuppas, like the rudimentary shelters used in Jewish wedding ceremonies. My aunt thought our gentile guests would be put off by this designation so whenever she heard Joseph use the word chuppa she would pretend to correct his pronunciation and say, “He means Hoo-Ha—that’s what the English call them.” By the time I learned that the British designation for this kind of garden folly is a “Ha-Ha” it was too late to break her of the habit.
This particular Hoo-Ha, the one by Sunset Rock, is on a trail in the woods about a quarter mile from the hotel. I can’t imagine my aunt making this journey in the daytime let alone in the dark. The path she has to take goes across a bridge over a waterfall and along a ledge with a forty-foot drop on the other side. What in the world does she have to tell me that would require this level of subterfuge?
I dial the number and my aunt picks up on the eighth or ninth ring as if she were in a large mansion instead of a three-by-five-foot lean-to. “Hello, Mata Hari,” I say, “this is your niece, code name Hoo-Ha.”
“What? Is that you, Iris?” my aunt yells into the phone as if she’s calling down a deep well. “I don’t think this thing works too well.”
“I can hear you fine, Aunt Sophie.”
&n
bsp; “Ah, that’s better. I didn’t want to hold this thing too close to my ear in case it gives you brain cancer, not that at my age a tumor would matter much—”
“Aunt Sophie,” I interrupt, “why are you out in the middle of the woods? What’s up?”
“I didn’t want Janine to hear. You know Janine—a bigger yenta you never met.”
Actually I’ve always thought that Janine, the hotel operator for over forty years, has the discretion of a priest in the confessional. Especially considering all she must have heard over the years. She showed me when I was only ten how to listen in on calls without “the party” catching on, but the only time she divulged the information she had overhead was when, as she put it, she was “privy to information of a dire or life-threatening nachure.” When Mrs. Crosby in Room 206 told her estranged husband she was planning to swallow a bottle of sleeping pills, for instance, or when she overheard the “millionaire” occupying the Sunnyside Suite for the whole summer discussing his imminent bankruptcy with his lawyer, Janine alerted my father. “For the good of the hotel or the good of the guest,” Janine liked to say. “Otherwise: zip,” and she would draw her lacquered red fingernails across her matching shade of lipstick in a pantomime of confidentiality. But surely my aunt has not braved wildlife and brain cancer to discuss Janine’s character.
“So what do you have to tell me?” I ask.
“Well!” I can tell from the explosion of breath that my aunt would like to draw out this piece of news but either her dislike of being outdoors or consciousness of how much this call must cost compels her to be brief. “The hotel has been sold. A big-shot hotel man from the city has bought the place, lock, stock, and barrel.”
“A hotel man,” I say. “Then it won’t be torn down? The hotel will be open this summer?”
“Open and running at full capacity. Mr. Big-Shot Hotel Man says he wants extra staff put on, everything spruced up, advertisements in all the papers. He wants to see what the hotel can do and then he’ll ‘determine the direction of the Hotel Equinox’s future’ at the end of the season.”