The Seduction of Water (10 page)

“Truthfully, she didn’t want the first one published either. Didn’t your father ever tell you?”

I shake my head. After my mother left I tried not to bring her up in my father’s presence; it was too painful to see the look in his eyes at the mention of her name.

“He’s the one who showed me her first book. I stayed at the hotel every summer with my grandmother and then in my twenties—when I had my first job at a literary agency—I’d still come up on weekends. Your mother always fascinated me. She was . . . so beautiful, even when she was still a maid, you’d come into your room and find her making your bed and you felt like you were the intruder. And when she married your father . . . well, even the guests—the regular ones who’d been coming for years—attended the ceremony in the rose garden. It was like a fairy tale, you knew she was someone special, and when I heard she spent the winters writing I just had to see what she wrote. I asked your father and he showed me the draft of her first book.”

“Without telling her?”

“Yes. I’m afraid I talked him into it. I told him she was probably just afraid it wasn’t any good and that no one would want to publish it. But that wasn’t it at all.”

“But she had to agree to let it be published . . .”

“Of course, but by the time she knew I’d gotten ahold of it I’d secured an offer from a publisher for what seemed like a lot of money back then. How could she turn it down? They needed the money . . .”

“For me? Because she was going to have a baby?”

Hedda Wolfe lifts one of her crumpled hands to her brow to shade her eyes from the sun and stares at me. “Darling, that was years before you were born. But yes, because she thought she was having a baby. That was the first miscarriage, I believe . . .”

My mouth is suddenly dry. This is the first time I’ve ever heard of a miscarriage, but then, who would have told me?

“The first?” I ask.

“Didn’t you know? She had two before she had you. You have no idea how thrilled she was when you were born. We were all so happy for her.”

“You mean you didn’t disapprove . . .”

Hedda laughs, the first time I’ve heard her laugh, and the sound takes me by surprise, it’s so unexpectedly light. “Why in the world would I disapprove? I was thrilled for her and, frankly, from a selfish perspective, I thought it would keep her from flying off. You always had the feeling with Kay that she could be gone any second, like some shy woodland creature that was ready to bolt. I wanted her to stay put and write her books, which she did . . . at least for a while.”

“But she wasn’t able to finish the third book.”

“No? But she was still writing, wasn’t she?”

I look out the window behind her desk where sycamore branches scrape the glass. That first tender green of spring is turning darker on the branches; a sparrow forages in the leaves for seeds. I remember the dream I had of my mother as a large bird tearing her own feathers out to feed into the cagelike typewriter, the tapping sound that followed me down the halls.

“Yes, she still wrote in the guest rooms on the hotel stationery . . .” I notice that Hedda smiles at this, as if it’s an endearing trait she remembered. “. . . and I remember hearing her typing . . . but years went by and no book appeared.”

“That doesn’t mean she didn’t write it. I have reason to think that she did finish the third book.”

“But how would you know? I thought you and she had argued . . .” I hadn’t meant to bring up their argument, but I’m past thinking I can direct the course of this conversation. Clearly, Hedda Wolfe has held the reins all along.

“Ben told me. We still talked. He was worried about her . . . she’d disappeared several times and seemed distracted. He said that she had finished the third book, but that she didn’t want to publish it. Of course she’d said that before and relented and she’d seemed more peaceful after each book came out. Ben thought that if I could convince her to publish the last book she might attain some sort of closure on whatever she was afraid of. He was able to convince Kay to speak with me on the phone. She told me I might not like the third book but she agreed that I could see it when she was done. She was going to bring it with her into the city when she went to that conference, only she never made it there.”

“If she had it with her it would have burned in the fire. We’ll never know . . .”

Hedda Wolfe shakes her head impatiently. “She always made a carbon copy. Ben said he couldn’t find it; I think she hid it before she left for the city.”

“And you think it’s somewhere at the hotel.” I can’t hide the disappointment in my voice. This is what the great Hedda Wolfe wants with me: a finder for my mother’s lost manuscript. I should be excited, I suppose, over the idea that such a manuscript exists. Haven’t I spent my whole life poring over my mother’s two novels, trying to decipher from her mythic fantasy tale some message for me? And always I’d felt right on the brink, as if the winged men and half-aquatic women would suddenly spring off the page and tell me why my mother left me when I was ten years old to meet a strange man in a hotel and die there. But if the first two books have failed to answer this question, why should I believe that a third would?

“I thought you might have already found it,” Hedda says. “That’s why the title of your essay struck me so forcibly. It’s what your mother was calling the last book in her trilogy:
The Selkie’s Daughter.
”

Chapter Ten

I am too preoccupied thinking about all I learned in Hedda Wolfe’s office to teach that night, so I tell my Grace students to write a five-paragraph essay on “What the New Millennium Means to Me.” I know that later, when I have to add twenty new essays to my stack of ungraded papers, I’ll regret giving the assignment, but at least it buys me time to stare out the window at the stream of traffic inching toward the Lincoln Tunnel while I try to sort out what I’m feeling.

I should be overjoyed. Not only have I signed my first contract with an agent—a renowned agent, no less—I’ve learned two pieces of information about my mother that should relieve at least some of the burden I’ve been laboring under all these years. The first bit of knowledge is that my mother was happy to have a child. I’d always imagined that she’d avoided having a child for as long as she did (how many women of her generation waited until they were thirty-eight to have their first child?) because she thought motherhood would interfere with her writing. But if what Hedda Wolfe told me is true and my mother had two miscarriages before giving birth to me, then she must have wanted a child all along.

The second piece of information seems even more important: my mother finished the third book in the Tirra Glynn trilogy. I’ve always believed that my mother wasn’t able to finish her third book because of me. All those times I followed her down the hall, picking up the stray pages she would drop, and later, listening for the sound of typing so I could trace it to its source . . . I couldn’t leave her alone. I tracked her down wherever she was—no wonder she wrote in so many different rooms!—to demand a game, a story, her time, her attention. She would look up from the page or the typewriter and for a moment—just a moment—her eyes would be blank. As if she’d forgotten who I was. The next moment she would look sorry and give in to my demands—especially the ones for a story. She must have felt guilty for that initial lack of recognition—how could a mother forget her own child!—and I learned to take advantage of that guilt even though no amount of attention—and all the stories in the world—could ever completely make up for that moment when I didn’t exist in her eyes.

I shiver and Mr. Nagamora offers to close the window. I look out at my class and notice that most of them have finished. Only Mrs. Rivera is still frantically scribbling into a spiral notebook.

“You can go if you’re done,” I tell the class. “Don’t forget to finish Rodriguez’s
The Hunger of Memory
for next week.”

I turn my back on the class to wrestle the window shut. I’m trying to discourage stragglers. I just don’t feel up to conversation tonight, the excuses for late papers from the poor students, the small talk and questions from the good ones. When I turn around, though, Mrs. Rivera is still there and when she looks up from her notebook I can see from her swollen and red-rimmed eyes that she’s been crying.

“Mrs. Rivera,” I say, “what is it? What’s wrong.”

Mrs. Rivera takes out a flowered handkerchief and blows her nose. “I’m sorry, Professor, I don’t mean to bring my troubles to you.”

I come around my desk and sit in the chair next to Mrs. Rivera’s. I try to sit sideways so I can face her, but the attached desktop makes that impossible. I swivel the whole desk and chair around, feeling clumsy and loud, while Mrs. Rivera takes large gulps of air, struggling to control the tears.

“It’s okay.” I fold her hand between mine. Although she’s about the same age as I am her hands feel leathery. I can feel the calluses and the roughness—the maids who worked in the laundry always had hands like this and I remember Mrs. Rivera saying she used to work in a hotel.

“Is it the class, Mrs. Rivera? You’re doing fine, you know. Your last paper—the one on ‘Rapunzel’—showed a big improvement. Only two sentence fragments and one run-on. I’m sure you’ll pass the final.” I’m really not sure at all but I’m desperate to halt her tears before they get to me. Already I can feel a sympathetic tightening at the back of my throat.

“No, it’s not the class, Professor Greenfeder”—she pronounces my name
fedder
so that it sounds like what it means in German: green feather—“your class is the only thing going right for me now. It’s all my fault. I was having such a good time last week at the art show you took us all to—you know you’re the only teacher here who does those kind of things for us and really cares about us . . .”

I wince, thinking of my own selfish motives for taking the class to the gallery last week.

“. . . so it’s not your fault at all.”

“What’s not my fault?”

“Getting fired from my job. The Rosenbergs have let me go.”

“Just for getting back late? That’s awful! Look, can I write them a note, or call them . . .”

Mrs. Rivera shakes her head. “They said they smelled liquor on my breath—I only had one glass of wine, Professor, I swear it to you, I don’t even like to drink. They’ve already gotten a replacement and told the children. They won’t change their minds after they’ve told the children. They never go back on their word once they’ve told the children.”

Every time she says the word
children
Mrs. Rivera’s chin wobbles and yet she seems to purposely repeat the word as if to inure herself to the memory of her former wards. She’s lost not only a job but her connection to children she’s taken care of for several years now. And at least partly because of me.

“Let me at least try to talk to them—I mean, just because they’ve told the children one thing doesn’t mean they can’t change their minds.”

“Oh no, they say going back on a decision would destroy their . . . how do you say . . .
creer
?”

“Credibility?” I ask. She nods.

I can just imagine the Rosenbergs of Great Neck. Principled people who pay their nanny’s insurance (just in case they decide to run for public office) and restrict their children’s sweets and TV.

I pat Mrs. Rivera’s work-roughened hand. “Maybe I can get you another job,” I tell her.

I try my aunt Sophie once more before leaving for Rip Van Winkle on Thursday. I’ve been trying her all week. Ever since I had the idea of getting Mrs. Rivera a job at the hotel I’ve felt better about the whole memoir thing. Not that it makes that much sense, but the idea that my plans to spend the summer at the hotel—quizzing my aunt and older staff members and regular hotel guests who knew my mother and ransacking the premises for a lost manuscript—might also enable me to keep Mrs. Rivera from being deported back to Mexico makes the whole thing seem a little less mercenary. Still, it all depends on Aunt Sophie’s go-ahead and suddenly, just when I finally want to take her up on the job she’s been pushing on me for years, she’s unavailable. Janine, the hotel operator, sounded embarrassed the last time I called and I’m beginning to wonder if my aunt is avoiding my call.

“She was just here a minute ago,” Ramon tells me Thursday morning. “She has been like a whirling dervish all week but will not say why. We all suspect an important dignitary is due at the hotel . . . should I have her call you back?”

I tell Ramon that I’ll be gone most of the day, but that she should call me tonight. All the way up to Grand Central I wonder if what Ramon said was just idle gossip. An important dignitary? At the Hotel Equinox? Maybe a hundred years ago. Presidents have stayed at the hotel, movie stars, baseball players, a Mafia don—whom my father pointed out to me strolling in the rose garden—and once, my aunt claims, a Russian princess. But those days are long gone. The hotel’s dwindling clientele, these last twenty years, has been a motley assembly of émigrés, musicians, watercolorists, bird-watchers, and, mostly, the now elderly grandchildren of families who used to summer at the hotel and still retain a nostalgia for those halcyon days.

The only person my aunt could be taking so much trouble for would be a prospective buyer.

The idea makes me pause in the middle of Grand Central Station so abruptly that commuters flooding up the platform ramps and heading for the street bump into me. I move into the shelter of the information kiosk and stare up at the blue-green barrel vault far above me as if trying to read my future in the constellations painted there. My future. The hotel’s future. Of course a buyer would be a good thing. But what if the buyer wants to tear the hotel down and start all over again? It could take years to rebuild—years that the hotel would be closed. No job for me or Mrs. Rivera—not to mention my aunt and Joseph or Janine, who must be well into her seventies by now.

I look at my watch and see I’m still early for my train to Rip Van Winkle. I usually take a bus to Grand Central (subways make me feel claustrophobic) but this morning I’d felt expansive—still floating on the promise of my meeting with Hedda Wolfe—and splurged on a cab.

“I think I could sell your memoir whether you find your mother’s third book or not,” she said, “but if we could bring out your mother’s third book at the same time I think I could get you a very nice advance indeed.”

A very nice advance indeed. I didn’t have an exact monetary value to attach to Hedda Wolfe’s idea of a nice advance but I had a feeling it was more than I had ever dared hope for. Not that the money was the most important thing. For years I’ve sent my stories out to little magazines, attended workshops and writing groups, gone to readings and seminars, revolving in the margins of New York’s literary life like so many others. And still the idea of being a published author has remained as distant as one of the tiny glittering lightbulbs dotting the painted ceiling above me. If I can’t spend the summer at the hotel, if I can’t find the manuscript of my mother’s third book, that’s what my dreams will remain, a faint and distant dream.

I step out of the shade of the kiosk smack into a sheet of sunlight streaming through the three massive arched windows on the east wall of the terminal. It’s like taking a bath in light. As I make my way through the crowds I can’t make out the faces of the strangers heading toward me because their backs are to the sun. The light is so strong it acts almost like a fog, blurring the edges of the figures approaching me. I tilt my chin down, shading my eyes with my hand, and head toward my train, but I’m stopped by a dark figure blocking my way. I can’t make out his face, but I can see he’s a large man in a dark suit that gleams richly in the strong sunlight, like an animal’s fur. Cashmere, I think, or alpaca. The fabric makes you want to stroke it. The way the man stares at me—I assume he’s staring at me from the tilt of his head—is unsettling and I try to keep walking but when I try to move around him he lays two fingers on my elbow and turns to keep up with me. As soon as he’s facing the light I recognize him. It’s Harry Kron.

“Ah, Miss Greenfeder,” he says, “I’ve been thinking about you.” He hardly seems surprised to run into me here in the middle of Grand Central Station. “What train are you taking?”

“The eight fifty-three Metro-North,” I tell him.

“Hm. Wait a moment.”

We’ve reached the platform gate where my train is posted. He looks up at the listing of stops and nods his head.

“I was going to take an express, but this will do . . .”

“But I wouldn’t want to delay you . . .” I’m amazed that Phoebe Nix’s rich uncle would even take the train. Shouldn’t he be in a limousine behind tinted windows?

“I love trains,” he says, as if reading my mind. “And the Hudson Line is one of my favorite routes. I can’t think of a better way of spending a spring morning than a train ride along the Hudson with a lovely, talented writer for company. Unless, of course, you have something else to occupy you for the trip.”

I think of the ungraded essays in my book bag but it would be like telling a little boy you couldn’t take him to the circus because you had work to do.

“I would love the company,” I say.

“Ah, then, shall we?” Harry Kron waves a hand toward the sloping ramp as if escorting me onto a dance floor. He switches his briefcase to his right hand and tucks my hand under his left elbow and we descend into the bowels of Grand Central where the eight fifty-three is waiting for us. The train, running against the commute, is almost empty and we quickly find two seats facing each other, next to the window on the river side. He gives me the forward-facing seat and sits across from me. He’s so tall our knees nearly touch.

“So,” he says when the train begins to move, “where are you heading this lovely spring morning?”

I tell him about my job at the prison and he furrows his brow with concern.

“But is that safe?”

“There’s a guard in the hall at all times and all my students are from the medium-security prison.”

“Well, then, small-time thieves and drug dealers. I can’t imagine it’s a productive outlet for your talents. I very much enjoyed, by the way, your essay in my niece’s magazine—which is more than I can say for most of the nonsense she publishes.”

We’ve come out of the tunnel and emerged into sight of the river so I’m able to look modestly out toward the view while I thank him for the compliment.

“You ought to be spending your time writing instead of wasting your talent on illiterate criminals.”

I’m torn between indignation on behalf of my students—I think of Aidan and his beautiful rendition of Tam Lin—and gratitude for being considered talented. I settle for honesty.

“I need the money,” I tell him.

He scowls at the window and looks slightly embarrassed, as if I had just mentioned some shameful bodily function.

“You must get a contract for this memoir of yours. Do you have an agent?”

I tell him I do. “Hedda Wolfe,” I say.

His eyes widen. “Really. Hedda.”

“You know her?”

“Oh, yes,” he answers. “We serve on many of the same boards. Surely she can secure you an advance so that you can work on your book in peace.”

“Well, she says I need more than the first chapter and it would help if I could find my mother’s third book.”

“She wrote a third book? I thought she only wrote the two.” Harry Kron snaps open his briefcase and, amazingly, extracts a paperback copy of my mother’s two novels—a one-volume edition reissued in the 1970s during the Tolkien craze. I remember that the cover illustration of a sexy redheaded mermaid enraged my father. “There are no mermaids in her books,” he’d ranted for days. “Did those people even bother to read her books?”