“In other words . . .”
“In other words, we have the best season we’ve had in twenty years or he’ll tear it down and write it off as a tax loss.”
“Well, that should make for a relaxing summer.”
“Relaxing is for the guests,” my aunt tells me, something she’s said to me all my life. “Of course, it doesn’t help that I’m surrounded by geriatric staff. What we could use up here is a little fresh blood . . .”
“I’ll come up,” I say. I could drag it out, I realize; she obviously needs my help more than ever, but I have an image of my aunt in the deep pine woods, peering anxiously into the shadows for rabid wildlife ready to spring out at her. “I want to work there this summer . . .” What I’m about to say is that I want to work on the memoir I’ve just contracted to write, but when she cuts me off—obviously misinterpreting what I mean—it occurs to me that maybe I shouldn’t tell her about the memoir yet. Why get her hopes up? Why expose my new good luck to her withering scrutiny?
“Excuse me,” she says, “I must have a bad connection. Miss I-have-to-be-in-New-York-City-to-write wants to work in the hotel this summer?”
“Very funny. I’ve even got a maid and a night clerk for you. Two students who need work. If you want them.”
“Are they under ninety?”
“Yes, only I should tell you that the man . . .”
“Any experience in the hotel business?”
“Yes, Mrs. Rivera worked at a resort in Cancún; Aidan was a bellhop at a hotel in the city, but you should also know . . .”
“I’ll hire them. No. You’ll hire them. That’s part of your new job as manager. See if you can find a good carpenter while you’re at it. All these Hoo-Has need to be resanded; I’ve gotten half a dozen splinters in my tuckis while we’ve been talking.”
“Don’t you have to okay hiring me with the new owner?”
“Nah. He already asked for you. I told him you’d always refused to work at the hotel but he said he thought you’d feel differently this summer.”
“It’s Harry Kron, isn’t it?” I feel so stupid I could smack myself. Not only for not guessing the identity of the new owner—of course that’s where he was heading on the train today—but for buying into my aunt’s whole “poor me, you probably won’t take the job” shtick. She’d known all along I’d say yes.
“That’s right. We’re the newest jewel in the crown. So when can you get up here?”
I manage to give my aunt a rough picture of my finals and paper-grading schedule and by the time we’ve settled on an end-of-May arrival date the connection really is breaking up.
“Be careful walking back,” I shout into a rush of white noise that might be cellular static or my aunt tumbling into the falls. It’s only when I hang up that I realize I never got around to telling her about Aidan’s questionable credentials.
Mrs. Rivera bursts into tears when I tell her she has a job. Aidan is less demonstrative, but on the back of his final paper he scrawls the message, “You’ve saved my life. I promise, you won’t be sorry.” In the face of their gratitude I feel expansive and generous. I feel, I suppose, like a hotelier.
Jack is delighted that the plans for the book are running so smoothly. We spend a happy afternoon at the Met looking at his favorite paintings. He talks of wanting to paint in the open air, of larger canvases, of limitless skies. He tells me he’s “almost a hundred percent sure” he’ll be able to spend the summer with me at the hotel.
I finish grading my papers in record time and a record percentage of my Grace students—including Aidan, Amelie, and Mrs. Rivera—are passed by the grading committee. I make an appointment with my thesis adviser (who is, understandably, surprised to hear from me after a silence of two years) and launch a proposal to substitute my forthcoming memoir about my mother for my dissertation. She’s skeptical at first, but when I tell her I’ve signed a contract with the agent Hedda Wolfe I see a little light go on in her eyes.
“Have you thought of someone to do an introduction? An impartial scholar in the field of women’s studies to assess K. R. LaFleur’s place in twentieth-century feminist dialectics?”
“I was hoping you would do it,” I say.
Within minutes we’ve settled on a schedule of deadlines and submissions.
Phoebe Nix calls and congratulates me on signing with Hedda Wolfe and asks if I would consider publishing a series of excerpts from the memoir in Caffeine. I tell her I’ll have to talk it over with Hedda, but that I like the idea.
“Don’t let Hedda boss you around,” she says. “She’s been know to bully her writers.”
“Don’t worry about me, “ I say, and then, to change the subject, I tell her how grateful I am that her uncle Harry decided to buy the Hotel Equinox.
“Yes, Harry’s quite the knight in shining armor. You won’t recognize your little hotel when he gets done with it. He’s got the Midas touch, Harry does.”
I get off the phone unsettled by that last image. I’ve always hated that story—the little girl running into her father’s arms and turning into hard and lifeless gold. Alchemy gone wrong. I decide that Phoebe Nix can be a bit spiteful—think of that wedding ring engraved with barbed wire! Harry Kron is a godsend. Not only has he rescued the Hotel Equinox but, I learn at my last class at The Art School, he’s also hiring art students to restore the summerhouses at the hotel and sponsoring a competition to design a series of new summerhouses. The contest is called “Follies in the Garden, Whimsies in the Woods.” I spend the last class describing some of my favorite Hoo-Has—Half Moon, Evening Star, Sunset, Two Moons, Brier Rose—and telling the Hoo-Ha/chuppa story. I notice that both Gretchen Lu and Natalie Baehr take copious notes and are already sketching ideas as I talk.
I’m inspired after the class to write a note to Harry Kron, telling him about my students’ enthusiasm for his contest and, of course, how glad I am that the Hotel Equinox will be in such good hands. It gives me a chance, as well, to take care of another loose end. I mention in the note that I haven’t told my aunt about my memoir project or the contract I’ve signed with Hedda Wolfe. “I don’t want to get her hopes up prematurely,” I write. Would he mind not mentioning the matter to her?
Sending the note eases my mind for a day but then, like the uninvited fairy at Sleeping Beauty’s christening, Phoebe Nix’s warnings about Hedda Wolfe and her prediction of the hotel’s imminent transformation under her uncle’s aegis begin to cast a pall on my leave-taking. As I tick off each chore that lies between me and my departure date—books crated and UPSed upstate, Times delivery canceled, mail forwarded—a feeling of unease settles over me, a malaise that not even the end of the rainy season and a run of flawless spring days can dispel. The cool efficiency with which I dispatch all these errands begins to feel like the settling of affairs of a condemned man. It’s like I’m preparing for death instead of a summer in the country.
“Maybe you’re just not cut out for happiness,” Jack says to me one heartbreakingly beautiful May morning when I call him up to confess my second thoughts about the summer. Although I know he doesn’t mean to be unkind, the remark hurts me. It’s what I’ve always suspected my mother suffered from—an inability to be happy. Even when she was laughing with guests or flirting with my father there was always a shadow of unhappiness I’d see whenever she thought no one was looking. Some lingering sorrow that drove her each winter to that feverish typing that sounded to me as a child like an animal trying to tap its way out of a shell.
“You’re right,” I say. “It’s going to be a great summer. After all, you’re going to be there.”
In the pause that follows I guess everything Jack is about to say. I don’t really need to hear the details about the residency he’s just been awarded at an artists’ colony in New Hampshire. An eight-week residency.
“But of course, I can come over to the hotel for a few weekends. It’s not far. But you know how much this means to me . . .”
“Of course I do,” I tell h
im. “I’m really happy for you, things are working out for both of us. But you know, I’d better go, there’s some research I wanted to get done at the library before I go upstate.”
“I didn’t mean to tell you over the phone,” Jack says, “I was going to tell you tonight. I just found out about it yesterday.”
“It’s okay,” I tell him. “Really. I’ll see you tonight.”
I get off the phone and stare at the flawless blue sky over New Jersey, the little whitecaps on the Hudson. I’d made up that part about needing to go to the library, but suddenly it seems like a good idea. Anything to get out of the apartment right now.
I grab a notebook and pen and walk uptown fast, giving myself ten blocks to cry and ten blocks to be angry. By the time I’m in the twenties, though, I can see Jack’s side of it. After all, if I had been awarded a residency at Yaddo or MacDowell I’d certainly want to go. I know that if the situation were reversed Jack would be nothing but supportive. It’s why, after all, we’ve stayed unmarried and childless all these years—so we can take advantage of opportunities like this.
By the time I’m crossing through Bryant Park I feel almost happy. The white-limbed London plane trees, which were just beginning to bud that night I walked here with Aidan, are leafed out now, their greenery filling in the tangle of branches. The back of the library is gleaming in the sun. I’m not like my mother, I think, walking around to the front and mounting the steps past the two marble lions, I am capable of happiness. Why wasn’t she? Standing in the marble foyer of the library I try to think of something I could find out about my mother here. Some piece I can take up to the hotel with me. After all, this is where she started out from. Somewhere in the city. Did she feel the same mixture of hope and apprehension about leaving that I do?
Her first book begins with a mysterious creature—half woman, half seal—journeying up a river—the drowned river, it’s called—fleeing an unnamed pursuer. The journey literally transforms the creature. “Where the river turns to salt the selkie sheds her skin and becomes a woman.” Was she talking about her own journey up the Hudson and how it transformed her?
I’ll write about the day she arrived at the hotel, I decide. I’ll compare her train trip up the river to the journey she describes in her first book. Just as the selkie of her story sheds its skin halfway up the river, my mother shed her past and was reborn on the day she arrived at the Hotel Equinox. June 21, 1949.
I know the date because it’s also my parents’ wedding anniversary. They were married on the one-year anniversary of her arrival. “She came on the first day of summer,” my father always said. “Trailing clouds of glory . . .” The old lady guests loved that part and as corny as it was you could tell my father really meant it. Her arrival at the hotel had been the beginning of his life—but what had it been to my mother—a beginning or an end?
I turn left and go down the wide hall to Room 100, the microfilm division of the Periodicals Department. Of all the rooms to work in at the library it’s my least favorite. It doesn’t have the beautiful publishing-row murals of the Periodicals Reading Room across the hall or the blue-sky ceilings of the Rose Reading Room on the third floor, but it does have the roll of microfilm containing the New York Times for 1949, June through December. I find a free microfilm viewer, buy a copying card, and, after a few misfeeds, scroll the film to the front page of Tuesday, June 21, 1949. There’s a picture of four men shaking hands, with the caption “As the Big Four Conference Ended in Paris,” a story about Pope Pius’s excommunication of Czechoslovakian leaders, and a small article about a peace treaty in Austria. Postwar stuff, nothing all that exciting, but I make a copy of the first two pages to read later because I find it hard to read directly from the screen. I scroll through the rest of the paper, stopping to notice—and copy—a story about the weather: “Summer arrives with no relief from worst drought in 41 years.” Dry summers were always big news up at the hotel because of the acres of pine forest surrounding it and the ever-present threat of forest fires. I’ll have to ask my aunt whether there were any fires that summer.
I make copies of the entertainment pages for the movie listings. This is what my mother could have gone to see in the weeks before she left the city: Joan Crawford in Flamingo Road, Vivien Leigh in Anna Karenina, Anna Magnani in The Bandit. Also, at the 50th St. Beverly Theater, “your last chance to see,” Gone With the Wind. I’ve used up most of the credit on my copying card when I decide I ought to look at June 22 as well. After all, anything that actually happened on the day my mother arrived at the hotel wouldn’t show up in the paper until the next day. Again, there’s nothing too exciting in the first pages so I scroll through quickly, the whir of the film making me sleepy in the stuffy room. My eyes are half closed when a familiar name flashes by.
I stop the film and scroll backward. It’s a small story, and the name doesn’t appear in the headline—“Brooklyn Woman Killed in Train Accident”—but in the next line, “Death of Rose McGlynn Called Possible Suicide.” When I notice that the dateline is Rip Van Winkle, New York, my hand slips on the knob and the film jumps forward several frames. By the time I manage to scroll back and find the story I’m nearly hyperventilating in the stifling low-ceilinged room. I decide to copy the article and take it upstairs to read.
I walk up the three flights of stairs to the Rose Reading Room, clutching the Xeroxed newsprint in my now sweaty hands. It’s not just that I need more air, but that I have this inkling that what I’m about to read is going to be important. I don’t want to have that kind of revelation in Room 100. The Rose Reading Room, with its gilt-coffered ceilings and gleaming wood tables, is where the real writers work. This is where famous biographers toil away on decades-long projects. When I look back on this day, I want to remember that this is where I started to tell my mother’s story. I find a seat at the south end of the north gallery and read my article.
Tragedy struck at the Rip Van Winkle train station yesterday when Rose McGlynn, of Mermaid Avenue, Coney Island, fell beneath the northbound train. She was killed instantly.
Onlookers disagreed as to why the young woman fell, but at least one witness reported that Miss McGlynn appeared to wait for the approach of the train and then “she kind of leaned forward and fell onto the tracks.”
No family members could be found to comment on this possibility. Miss McGlynn’s mother died in 1941, when Rose was seventeen, at which time her three younger brothers were remanded into the care of the state. Her father, John McGlynn, died four years later. Neighbors said that she had recently lost her job. A young woman traveling with Miss McGlynn, who asked that her name be withheld, said that they were both traveling north to the Catskills to look for work in the hotels. “She wanted to start a new life, but now she’ll never get the chance.”
I sit back and stare up at the clouds and blue sky in the painted ceiling above me. Tirra Glynn is what my mother called her imaginary world in her fantasy books. She and her unknown companion were registered under the names Mr. and Mrs. McGlynn the night she died in the fire at the Dreamland Hotel. On the day my mother arrived at the Hotel Equinox, Rose McGlynn—an Irish girl who came from Brooklyn, just like my mother—killed herself. I’m instantly sure that the unnamed traveling companion must have been my mother, which means she saw her friend throw herself under the train. Two girls, very much alike, trying to change their lives, only one is killed in the process: the events mirror the story line of her fantasy world in which the selkies shed their skins to live new lives—only some of them die in the attempt.
I gather up the copies I’ve made and leave. I’ve been sitting under clear blue skies inside so it’s a surprise when I get outside to see that the sky has turned to violet and the street lamps are on in Bryant Park. This story of tragic death should, I suppose, have deepened my unease about my summer plans, but instead my fingertips are nearly tingling with excitement, with the urge to get home and start writing. It’s a feeling I’ve been waiting for all my life: I have a story to tell.
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PART II
The Net of Tears
Chapter Thirteen
THE BROKEN PEARL
Once there was a great serpent who lay at the bottom of the ocean in the land of Tirra Glynn and in his mouth he held a pearl that was the soul of the world. But the king Connachar desired the pearl for himself and he dived under the sea and stole it from the serpent. Before he could swim to the shore, though, the pearl shattered into a million pieces. All around him the water glowed white with the shards of the pearl and when he dragged himself onto the sand and looked back at the ocean he saw the glowing slivers in a path that led to the moon. He dipped his hands in the surf’s foam and tried to scoop up the glittering sand but the pieces of the pearl slid through his fingers.
From that time on the selkies were banished from Tirra Glynn and cursed. We can never return to the sea. Our only means of escape is the drowned river that twice a year flows backward from the sea. But even if we can catch the current and shed our skins where the salt water becomes fresh, we’re still trapped in a skin not our own. We can shed a million skins and still not be ourselves.
As for Connachar the shattered pearl had soaked into his skin and formed a carapace around his heart, because that’s what happens when you long for one thing, and one thing only, and then you lose it.
To go to the Hotel Equinox I take the same train I take every Thursday to teach at Rip Van Winkle. It’s the same train my mother would have taken in 1949. This is how my mother described her first trip to the Hotel Equinox: “It was the farthest I’d ever gone from home,” she would say. “I’d only ever taken the train into Manhattan for work. Even the Bronx seemed far. Another world. If you went to a dance and met a boy from the Bronx you’d say—even if you liked each other—too bad. But I’d heard about the job from a friend and that summer . . . 1949 . . . it was so hot working in the city. I had to get out. So a friend told me they were still hiring at one of the hotels in the Catskills and I wrote and someone—well, of course, it turned out to be your aunt Sophie—wrote back and said my references sounded fine and even though they’d already hired for the season they could use another girl. The hotel was having a good year. You see, all the men were home from the war now and people had, well, a little more money, at least more than anybody’d had for a while.