The Seduction of Water (16 page)

“It’s like going inside a cave,” he says, ducking his head. “A cave under water.”

I nod, but it’s so dark when I’ve dropped the vines back that I doubt he notices.

“In my mother’s second book the hero Naoise comes back to find Deirdre and they meet in an underwater cave when both moons are half full . . .”

“Both moons?”

“There are two moons in Tirra Glynn—which makes for very high tides—and one waxes while the other wanes. Look.” I point to a curving line that bisects the circular floor. “That’s one half moon. The other’s on the floor above us.”

I start climbing the steep curving stairs that go up to the second level, but I’ve forgotten how narrow the steps are and slip on the third one. Aidan, who’s right behind me, catches me before I can fall down.

“It’s a good thing this place is so hard to find or you’d have guests breaking their necks in it. I’m surprised Sir Harry hasn’t ordered it torn down yet.”

“Oh, he wouldn’t. He couldn’t.” I continue up the stairs, turning my feet sideways to fit onto the narrow steps and holding on to the smooth wooden railing.

“Well, it might not be a bad idea to redo the stairs at least.”

“Look at this railing,” I say. “Who are you going to get to carve something like this? I don’t think even Joseph would be able to do it now.”

Aidan looks down at the grooved wood of the railing under his hand and sees what most people miss at first. It’s carved to look like a serpent. When we get to the second level the serpent wraps around the center post and then, just below the peak of the roof, its jaws gape open around a large, smooth orb.

We sit on the narrow bench that follows the curve of the circle and look up. Sunlight, tinted green by the entangling vine, slips through the cracks of the roof. We’re so close to the falls that drops of water cling to the leaves, sparkling in the sun like a web of diamonds. Even with the drought, the falls fill the green space with the sound of water. Aidan—he’s put on his jeans and an unbuttoned white shirt over his bathing suit—wraps his arms around himself as if he’s cold even though it’s warm in here under all the foliage. “I feel like that snake’s looking at me,” he says. “I swear it’s got Joseph’s eyes.”

I laugh and shake out my damp hair. “Maybe. The serpent’s a kind of guardian—the pearl in its mouth is supposed to be the soul of the world. When it’s stolen it breaks apart into a web of pearls and diamonds—the net of tears, my mother called it—and the world falls out of alignment. When it’s returned the world will right itself and everything will be in balance—good and evil, day and night, perpetual equinox.”

“Now that’s a fantasy.”

“
Tikkun olam,
is what Joseph calls it. Hebrew for ‘healing the world.’ He said that’s what my mother’s books were about, but I always thought that’s what Joseph was doing, building these little houses after all the destruction he must have seen in the war . . .” I notice Aidan is looking away and think I must be boring him, but then he puts his hands to my lips and makes a shushing sound.

“Do you hear that?”

I listen, but hear nothing above the whisper of the falls and the sound of my own heart, which Aidan’s touch has set racing. His hand has drifted down from my lips and come to rest on my hand. He’s looking away from me, concentrating on those sounds only he seems able to hear, so I can concentrate on him, his pale skin, cool as marble, the fine black hairs that curl at the nape of his neck. I remind myself—as I’ve done many times these last few weeks—of our age difference, but in this place it no longer seems to matter. A drop of water falls from the leaves above us and lands on his cheekbone. Without thinking I raise my hand to brush it away but then I hear the voices and stop, my hand in midair.

“. . . she came here then to meet the man?” The voice, slightly hoarse, belongs to a woman. I lean forward to make out her companion’s answer but only catch a low-pitched rumble, a few short words given grudgingly that fall into the rush of the falls like pebbles into a lake.

“I know there was someone,” the woman continues, “everyone knew, except Ben of course.”

The low rumble sounds angrier, like thunder on a summer day, but no more decipherable.

“Yes, I know she loved Ben. Who wouldn’t? He worshiped the ground she walked on and took care of her like she was a princess. But I know there was someone before him—someone she wouldn’t talk about—what if he came back? Her first love returned to her? How could she resist?”

There’s no answering rumble and I’m so disappointed I almost call out myself.
She would never have done that to my father,
I want to cry, but Aidan, still turned from me, squeezes my hand. I hear Joseph and Hedda Wolfe’s retreating footsteps but I let them go. I search my own memory for some evidence that Hedda is wrong—surely if my mother was meeting someone down here I would have seen them together—but then I remember that I wasn’t allowed to come down to the pool by myself. My mother said she was afraid I might slip into the pool and drown. What I do remember is my mother returning to the hotel in the late afternoons, her hair damp, her pale skin cool to the touch on the hottest days. I can’t swear that she wasn’t meeting someone down here. Besides, who am I to defend my mother while I myself cower hidden in the shadows with a young man—who’s also an ex-convict, I remind myself, as I watch a drop of water splash on his white shirt, which is already soaked through in two long stripes where the wet skin on his shoulder blades touch the cloth—two long stripes that are as waxy and opaque as new skin. I lift my hand to brush away a drop of water from his neck but he turns toward me and my hand falls on his damp chest instead. A water droplet from the leaves above us lands on my cheekbone and he leans forward and presses his mouth against the spot where it fell, while I trace with my fingers the slide of water over his throat. It starts like that; the drips of water guiding our hands and mouths to the rivulets they make on our skin. We move slowly, at first, keeping pace with the soft and steady downpour, but when he lays me down on the bench and I reach up to taste the water falling over his ribs our motion lets loose a cascade that we can’t possibly keep up with, that we can only give in to.

Chapter Sixteen

THE NET OF TEARS

I owed it to Naoise to help him steal the net of tears. It was my fault he’d been changed into what he was. I could have stopped it. When a man is cast under the enchantment a selkie can save him. All she has to do is shed her skin and throw it over him. But once she’s done this she can never make the trip up the drowned river, never escape her own imprisonment. These are the rules the enchantment holds us to. These are our choices: to be one thing or another. When Naoise and his brothers started to change I could have helped them. One by one I watched as they were transformed into speechless beasts—lost to me forever—and did nothing. I chose my freedom over theirs. Now Naoise was the last. I saw the signs, the stoop in his back where the wings had begun to grow, the hard black glitter in his eyes replacing what was once human. He believed the net of tears would save us all. How could I say no?

Before I began my affair with Aidan I never realized how many secret places there were in and around the Hotel Equinox—especially during a dry, hot summer like this one. There are the summerhouses, of course, Two Moons offering the most seclusion, but many of the others affording a brief screen from prying eyes, room enough for a furtive touch, a desirous gaze, a chance to let drop the mask of indifference. Then there are the woods—acres of pine forest floor covered in soft, dry pine needles. I find, later, embedded in the creases of my skin, the pale reddish gold dust the needles make when they’ve been crushed. I see Aidan brushing the gold dust off the back of his neck and imagine the hot prickly ground scouring my back, the cool smoothness of his chest moving over me like water. I have to stop whatever I am doing while an ache passes through my body.

My aunt thinks I’ve developed stomach trouble.

I wonder if this is how my mother felt that last summer—as if she were spending her days in someone else’s skin—living for the brief moments when a touch would release her? No wonder she wrote about selkies, I think, who shed their true skins and are forced to live in a false shape. But then I remember that she had written about the selkies years before that summer. Had she always felt like an impostor? Had her entire life with my father and me been a false one—a hundred-years spell she had endured only until her true prince could return and cast off her enchantment?

I wish now that I had never thought of writing a book about my mother. I’m not sure I want the answers to these questions. For the first time in my life I wonder if it’s all that important for me to be a writer—something I’ve been struggling for all my life. Why not stay here and run the hotel—with Aidan. Why shouldn’t that be enough?

But I know that even if I don’t ask the questions, others will. I see Hedda Wolfe every day walking through the gardens with Joseph and know she’s not just quizzing him on rose fertilizers. When I talk to Joseph, though, I’m pretty sure she’s not learning much from him.

“I couldn’t say,” he tells me when I ask him, point-blank, if he thought my mother was having an affair the summer before she left. “Your mother was always going off by herself—I understood that to be part of being a writer.” There’s a touch of reproach in his voice, but whether because I suspect my mother of infidelity or because I, a writer myself, should understand her need for solitude, I’m not sure.

“But did she ever talk about someone from before she came here—an old sweetheart?”

Joseph looks up from the hosta bed he’s weeding and gives me that sad, disappointed look that would hurt me more if it weren’t his habitual expression. “We both took it for granted we’d lost people,” he tells me. “We didn’t have to talk about it.”

I confront Hedda one afternoon when I find her sitting alone in Brier Rose. She has a thick manuscript in her lap, but she’s not reading it. I suspect that she’s waiting for a chance to ambush Joseph.

“I think my mother may have been having an affair her last summer here. Do you know anything about that?”

Hedda removes the wide-brimmed straw hat that she always wears when she’s in the garden and waves it in front of her face. I notice that her grip on the brim of the hat looks steadier and guess that the heat and dryness have helped her arthritis. “Why? Do you remember seeing her with anyone that summer?” she asks so avidly I’m startled.

“No,” I tell her. “I mean she was always talking to some guest, but no one stands out in my mind. She did seem abstracted—even more than usual, I mean—and I remember her coming back to the hotel in the afternoons with her hair wet, as if she’d been swimming . . .”

“At the pool below the falls?” Hedda asks. “Where there’s that hidden gazebo?”

I nod.

Hedda lays the hat in her lap and weaves a loose straw back into the brim. Her fingers seem almost nimble. “Your mother would never have left your father for someone new—but she had great loyalty, Kay did, and if there’d been someone she loved before she met your father, a childhood sweetheart perhaps . . .”

“But then why did she leave this other man in the first place?”

Hedda shrugs and settles the hat back on her head. “Remember, Kay grew up in the Depression and then there was the war. Maybe he was poor and went off somewhere to seek his fortune . . . maybe they lost track of each other in the war. I don’t know, Iris, that’s your job to find out. I think that might be the crux of Kay’s story—a long-lost lover who returned to her. Have you asked Joseph?”

“He won’t tell me anything.”

Hedda smiles and I can tell she’s glad that I haven’t gotten anything more out of Joseph than she has. It strikes me as odd suddenly because wouldn’t she want me to learn as much as possible to write the book? Maybe it’s just her way of spurring me on—the kind of tough-love editorial style she’s famous for.

“Have you tried the other employees who were here that summer?”

“Um . . . yes, I’m planning to . . . it’s been a bit busy.” I blush, thinking of the hours I’ve spent with Aidan when I might have been working on my book.

Hedda tilts her chin toward the path where two elderly women have stopped to admire a border of hollyhocks and dahlias. “They were here that summer. Maybe they saw something.”

“The Eden sisters? I don’t think they’d notice someone having an affair if they tripped over the naked bodies.”

Hedda leans toward me as if to whisper something in my ear, but it’s only to brush something off my shirt collar. Her soft fingers bat against my neck like a moth. Then she brushes the red-gold powder off her fingertips and smiles. “Don’t assume everyone is as blind as they seem. You’d be surprised what people notice.”

After I leave Hedda in the gazebo I catch up to the Eden sisters and walk with them around to the front terrace. I can’t imagine that they really know anything, but at least it will look to Hedda like I’m trying. I offer to walk them to Sunset Rock when they tell me they’ve been afraid to venture there on their own.

“We don’t remember things as well as we used to,” the younger sister, Minerva, confides in a stage whisper. By “we” I take it she means her older sister, Alice. Alice glares at her sister and waves her cane at a daylily. “Speak for yourself, Minnie, I remember these paths like the back of my hand. There was a boy I used to meet at Sunset Rock each evening—it was a standing date.”

“I bet there were a lot of secret assignations going on around here,” I say, steering the sisters down the path, past Evening Star. I notice the tips of Aidan’s high-tops sticking out over the wall of the summerhouse and feel a palpable ache in my stomach, but I can hardly abandon the sisters now.

“Oh, my dear,” Minerva says, “I can assure you Alice’s assignations were entirely innocent—if not entirely imaginary.”

“Oh, I don’t know,” I say quickly to forestall Alice’s response. “My mother always said it was a wonder you two never married what with all the admirers you both had. She said it must have been for love of your music that you stayed single.”

It is true, actually, that my mother once said that Alice had real talent as a pianist, but that she’d refused to leave her younger sister when she was given an opportunity to tour. The two sisters performed “dinner music” in the big hotels for many years and when those hotels closed they’d lived for several years at our hotel—at a reduced rate in the attic rooms—until they’d gotten jobs teaching music at a girls’ boarding school somewhere north of Saratoga.

“Your mother was a saint,” Alice and Minerva both say in unison, like a song they’ve sung many times together.

It’s not the best opening—and I feel a pang of guilt at undermining the sisters’ loyalty to my mother—but I force myself. “No,” I say, “hardly a saint, I’m afraid. After all, she died at a hotel registered as someone else’s wife.”

“We would never believe that,” Alice says. “Kay would never have done that to Ben. She adored that man.”

“But then why would she be registered . . .”

“Your father told us that the police didn’t find any other remains in the room where . . . where she died. So maybe she just registered as a married woman as a safety precaution, you know, so no one would bother her. By 1973, Coney Island wasn’t exactly a good neighborhood. I have always thought she went back to her old neighborhood to help someone—an old friend perhaps.”

“But whom would she have been helping?” We’ve come to the bend where the path starts going downhill. Sunset, a tall narrow gazebo built on a large boulder, rises above us. If you climb to the top of it you can look west and see the sun set over the Catskill Mountains. I’m afraid, though, that now that we’ve gotten here the two sisters won’t be able to make the climb up. Alice’s breathing is labored and ragged.

“Minnie, go on up there and tell me if it’s worth making the climb,” Alice says. “I’m going to sit here on this bench with Miss Greenfeder until I catch my breath.”

Minnie looks doubtful and I wonder if it’s wise to let her climb the steep and narrow steps herself—but then she nimbly ascends into the summerhouse, disappearing from our view.

Alice’s fingers dig into the palm of my hand so hard I’m afraid the old woman must be having a heart attack, but when I look at her I see she’s positively beaming. “I didn’t want to say anything in front of Minnie—she’s still a child in many ways.” I almost laugh to think of anyone calling Minerva—who must be in her midseventies—a child, but then I see, beneath her excitement, how serious Alice is.

“Of course she worshiped your mother. You know it was your mother who found us our teaching jobs. The headmistress used to vacation here and that summer your mother wouldn’t leave the poor woman alone until she agreed to hire Minnie and me.” Alice leans in closer and lowers her voice. “It was almost like she knew she was going away and wanted to see us settled.”

“So you think she was planning to go away? Then she must have been having an affair.”

Alice leans back away from me. She looks at me for a moment and then she looks up toward the top of the summerhouse where Minerva appears, waving a scarf at us like a departing passenger on a cruise ship. “Oh, Alice,” Minerva calls, “it’s just as I remember it. You can see for miles.”

Alice looks back at me, her face momentarily softened by her sister’s excitement, and then a tremor passes over her face and her eyes fill with tears. “She didn’t act like a woman getting ready to go away with a sweetheart,” Alice says to me. “She acted like a woman getting ready to die.”

By the time I get the two sisters safely back to the hotel the sun is low in the sky and Evening Star is empty. I suspect Aidan has gone down to the pool and is waiting for me in Two Moons, but I remember that I’m supposed to put in an appearance at a cocktail party Harry Kron is giving in the Sunset Lounge for an arts organization whose name, at the moment, I can’t remember. The group has reserved the hotel for the weekend but, Harry has told me, if they like how they’re treated they might come back in August for a weeklong seminar. It amazes me how Harry, who must be rich as Croesus, worries over each and every booking like this, but maybe that’s how he got to be so rich. What’s clear is that he expects me to pay special attention to this group and I’ve got less than twenty minutes to change.

Unfortunately, both elevators are busy taking guests up to their rooms to change for dinner. I take the stairs, running up the first three flights, then slowing, out of breath, for the last two. By the time I’ve made it to the attic I’m drenched. There’s no shower up here and I don’t have time to draw a bath, so I make do with washing my face and splashing myself with cold water. I fill an old ceramic pitcher with cold water and, standing naked in the old claw-footed bathtub, pour it over my neck and shoulders. Then I comb my damp hair up into a haphazard French twist and go stand in front of my closet. None of the cotton sundresses or preppy shirtdresses look right for a cocktail party. I flip through the dresses impatiently and come, at the back of the closet, to a row of linen dress bags. I unzipper one and take out a black sleeveless cocktail dress from the 1950s. I hold it to my face and inhale, trying to catch the faded scent of White Shoulders, but all I smell is cedar from the little sachet of wood chips Sophie puts in the closets to discourage moths. I slip the dress over my head and, after only a minor wrestle with the zipper, discover it fits. I’m surprised. Although I’ve never been heavy I’ve always thought of myself as more substantial than my mother. “You’ve got the Greenfeder build,” Aunt Sophie always tells me, “eastern European peasants—sturdy stock.”

When I look in the mirror I see that the dress is shorter on me than it would have been on my mother, and it clings a little closer, but still it looks good. Except for a wisp of sheer chiffon at the shoulders and neckline the dress is plain—simple but well cut. I turn and crane my head over my shoulder for a view of my rear and see that the only thing that looks bad are the lines from my panties so I slip those off. Panty hose would probably make my stomach look flatter, but I’m damned if I’m going to wrestle myself back into those hot, sweaty things. I slip on a pair of black sandals, spritz my wrists and neck with perfume to disguise the smell of cedar, and head downstairs.