The Seduction of Water (13 page)

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.

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.

“So I took the subway into Grand Central and I missed the train I’d meant to take. I had to wait another hour. I was too nervous to sit. I walked back and forth looking up at the ceiling, at those drawings of the constellations. You know what I thought? I thought I might as well be going there, to the Milky Way, to where all those stars were, to another planet as to someplace in upstate New York. I almost took the subway back to Coney Island.”

My mother must not have known how unbearable this part of her story was to me. She was trying to show, I suppose, all the obstacles fate threw up between her and her eventual destination, but for me it was unimaginable. How could she not get on the train that took her to the Hotel Equinox? To my father. To me.

“But I didn’t, of course; I took the train upstate. Oh, I almost changed my mind again when we had to change trains at Rip Van Winkle. Such a funny name, like a fairy tale, I thought, but not funny because it was also the name of a prison. The northbound train was delayed and when I saw the southbound train pulling in I almost crossed the tracks and took it back to the city.” Again she would pause. Tauntingly, I thought as a child, drawing out my panic. Later I would think it was funny that this stop was the one I got out at every week to teach at the prison. There were days when, after I’d taught my class, I’d come back to the station and feel an overwhelming urge to cross the narrow bridge spanning the tracks and wait on the other side for the northbound train. It seemed such heresy to leave this station southbound; as if by doing so I was rewriting my mother’s decision and so writing myself out of existence.

Today, when we stop in Rip Van Winkle, I think of the woman who died on these tracks on June 21, 1949, and wonder if that’s why my mother always paused when she told me this story. Was she editing out the memory of that horrible death? Had she seen it? Did she know Rose McGlynn? As the train starts again, the thing that strikes me the most is that my mother might have witnessed that death and she still got on the northbound train—when the tracks had been cleared of Rose McGlynn’s body—and continued on her journey. I stare out the window at the river and the low blue mountains on the other side, straining for a glimpse of the hotel, but there’s a light haze today rising from the mountains and I miss it and before I’m quite expecting it the conductor calls my stop.

When I get off the train I recognize the old caramel-colored Volvo station wagon that Joseph has driven and nursed along for so many years. I almost expect Joseph to get out of it and come limping across the parking lot (one of his legs was broken in the concentration camp and it didn’t set right) to wrest my luggage away from me, but I’m sure my aunt said that Joseph had gotten too old to drive. Still, I would be less surprised by the sight of ancient Joseph hopping spryly from the car than by the figure I do see walking around the car, heading toward me with a wide, mischievous grin.

“What’s the matter, Prof, did you think the management would leave you stranded?” Aidan says, releasing my suitcases from my grip. He swings the smaller bag under one arm and carries the large bag in the same hand, leaving his right hand free to tip an imaginary cap at me.

“I’m just surprised to see you doing car service—I thought you were bellhopping.” What I’m really surprised at is Joseph letting him drive the beloved and ancient Volvo.

“That’s what I thought, but your aunt took one look at me and said I’d better help Joseph. Seems most of your bellboys are over sixty and arthritic or skinny college kids who’ve never worked with their hands a day in their lives. So I’ve been given the heavy lifting jobs, carting shrubbery back and forth until Joseph decides where he wants them, hauling wood for the new summerhouses, shoveling gravel for the garden paths . . . not that I’m complaining . . . Want the full chauffeured experience, mum?” he says opening the back door for me and presenting the Volvo’s cracked leather rear seat with a flourish of his gloved hands. “I’ve got a nice champagne chilling in the mini fridge and CNN on the porto-telly.”

“No, thanks,” I say, opening the front passenger’s door for myself. “Champagne and TV make me carsick. I’ll ride in front. I am staff, you know.”

“Management, Professor,” he says, getting into the driver’s seat. “And don’t you forget it.”

“Barely. I’ll be lucky if my aunt doesn’t have me hauling gravel. Look, you might as well drop the
Professor Greenfeder
bit too. No one at the hotel has called me anything but Iris since I was two.”

“Not Miss Iris?”

I shake my head. “My father didn’t want me turning into a hotel brat like Eloise at the Plaza.” Aidan cocks his head at me before starting the car. “Okay,” I admit, “it didn’t work. I still ended up a bit of a hotel brat.”

Aidan grins. “Joseph calls you Miss Iris. To me at least. I think he’s making it clear you’re above my station.”

“Oh please. Joseph’s just old-fashioned and . . . well, he sort of looked out for me after my mother died. He must think well of you to let you drive his Volvo.”

“No choice. I’m the only one about who knows his way around a stick shift. No, I’m afraid your Joseph isn’t crazy about me. I think he’s trying to load me down with enough heavy work so I’ll quit or have a heart attack.”

“I’m sorry, Aidan, I didn’t mean to get you such a miserable job.” What really bothers me is the idea that Joseph and Aidan don’t get along. Although he never spoke much, I’d always found it soothing just to be around Joseph, and after my mother was gone he’d let me help in the garden. We’d work the flower beds together in companionable silence and overhear all sorts of things the guests said among themselves without noticing us. Joseph never commented on these overheard conversations, but I’d know by a wink or a nod or a grimace what he thought of the guest and I came to trust his judgment about people. “Do you want me to speak to him?”

“Nah, don’t bother, I think that would make it worse. I’m used to this kind of thing—I’ve had guards who had it out for me who could do me a lot more harm than an old, lame gardener can dish out.”

I look over at Aidan—we’re crossing the Kaatskill Bridge and he’s looking straight ahead, concentrating on the narrow causeway—and see that flicker of shame that crosses his eyes whenever he talks about prison. Is this maybe what Joseph has picked up? It’s something I imagine that Joseph—after his experience in the concentration camps—might sense.

“So is the place all aflutter at the new owner’s imminent arrival,” I say, trying to change the subject. “When’s he supposed to get here?”

“Oh, you mean Sir Harry?”

“Sir Harry?”

“Didn’t you know? He was knighted by the queen for his war efforts. He saved some famous paintings from the Nazis and restored them to their rightful owners after the war.”

“Really? I knew he was a Monuments officer in the war, but I didn’t know he’d been knighted.” What had Phoebe called him? A knight in shining armor? “He doesn’t really expect us to call him Sir Harry?” We’ve come to the crest of the bridge and I can see the blue hills of the Catskills receding before us like ripples in water, a narrow band of cloud separating the mountains from the river so they appear to be floating. Whenever I see them like this I remember that Washington Irving called them a “dismembered branch of the great Appalachian mountains.” They seem somehow transplanted from someplace else, exiled mountains floating in a foreign land. It’s what my mother called the mountains in her fantasy world: the Floating Mountains. And there, rising from a blue fold, are the white columns of the Hotel Equinox, like a Greek temple in Arcadia.

“Nah, Mr. Kron. But down in the under cellars we serfs refer to him as Sir Harry. Gives the enterprise a touch of class, don’t you think?”

We’re past the glimpse of Arcadia from the bridge and driving through the town of Kaatskill. I’d heard that some restaurants and antiques dealers had moved to downtown, but there are still more abandoned storefronts than occupied ones and most of the stores are the same sad and dusty gun shops and taxidermists that I remember from my childhood. Hunting and fishing are still the region’s most profitable tourist draws. On the outskirts of town faded and peeling signs advertise hotels and resorts long out of business. We pass the Agway advertising deer feed and kerosene for home stoves. I’m looking for the little green-and-white sign, with its fringe of pine trees carved years ago by Joseph and painted by my mother, that is the Hotel Equinox’s only advertisement. But instead, as we turn off the county route onto the long private drive that climbs the mountain to the hotel, I see a new sign, cream with glossy purple lettering.
THE NEWEST JEWEL IN THE CROWN
. . . the sign reads,
THE CROWN EQUINOX
.

“The Crown Equinox? He renamed it? My aunt didn’t tell me.”

“He renames everything that’s his,” Aidan says taking a curve a bit too fast, “like God.”

I take a deep breath and the smell of pine instantly calms me down. Of course the hotel would be renamed. What does it matter? What matters is that the hotel is still here. I roll down the window all the way to inhale more of the warm resiny smell. Through the dense stands of trees I catch the flash of water, the stream coming down from the falls. We’re the only car on the road and except for the sound of the Volvo’s engine and the flowing water there’s silence—a quiet I remember as peculiar to these woods as if the dark dense stand of pines absorbed all sounds.

“The pines look dry,” I say, anxious to divert the conversation from Harry Kron’s alterations—after all, he can’t change the woods, or the mountain, or the falls. “We had such a rainy spring.”

“That’s what I thought when I got up here, but apparently we got all the rain in the city and they didn’t. Joseph says it’s to do with the rain shadow . . .”

“The mountain draws down the clouds but it rains on the other side of the mountain. The east side. I never quite got that.”

Aidan shakes his head and grins. “Me neither, but I learned pretty quick you might as well question a statue as ask Joseph what he means by something.”

“And Joseph thinks it’s going to be a dry summer?”

“Worst drought in fifty-one years, he predicts. But at least the lack of rain should be good for business. No one wants to spend money for a hotel room way up in the country and then sit inside and watch it rain.”

I nod, even though Aidan is concentrating too hard on the twisting, steep road to see me. It’s true, I think, guests hate the rain. It’s not their problem if the water level in the cisterns is low or the pine needles in the forest are dry as tinder. All they care about is good hiking weather and dry tennis courts, clear sunrises to paint and sunsets to decorate the windows of the lounge while they sip their aperitifs. It’s only when we’re on the final approach to the hotel that I take in fully what Aidan said. The worst drought in fifty-one years. It’s exactly what I read in the paper at the library, about the summer my mother arrived here, only then it had been forty-one years since the last drought. It makes me anxious to arrive at the hotel, to make sure it really is still standing, and that it hasn’t been destroyed by a fire while Aidan and I have made our way up the mountain.

Of course it hasn’t. As we round the last curve in the road the hotel appears, cool and white on its ridge above the Hudson Valley, its slender Corinthian columns echoing the encircling white pines. No wonder. The wood for the hotel was hewn right on this spot and carved into these columns by local craftsmen. It’s almost as if the northern white pines had sprouted a crown of tropical foliage. “If you look closely,” Joseph once told me, hoisting me up on his shoulders and pointing to the carved capitals, “you can see they mixed acorns and pines boughs in among the Greek frippery. And here, at the base”—he swung me down to the ground and lowered himself slowly to his knees—“if you feel under the paint . . .” He held his large, rough hand over my small one until I could feel the pattern carved in the wood.