The Seduction of Water (17 page)

On the third floor the door to the linen closet swings open and a hand reaches out and pulls me inside.

“Aidan,” I say when he moves his mouth away from my lips to my neck, “I don’t think this is a good place. What if one of the maids comes in?”

“Not to worry,” he says, “they’ve just stocked this closet with new linen and all the rooms are already made up.”

It’s true that the stack of folded sheets he’s backed me up against are warm and smell of starch, fresh from the laundry. Aidan’s skin, on the other hand, is cool and tastes of moss and mineral water.

“You went swimming in the pool,” I say as Aidan lifts me onto the wide-planked shelf. I hear the wood creak but I used to climb on these shelves when I was little so I know they’re sturdy.

“I was fair heartbroken to go alone. What were you doing with those two old birds anyway?”

“Fulfilling my role of gracious hotelier,” I say, stroking his face, trying to guess in the closet’s darkness what his expression is. There’s an edge to his voice, as if he was really hurt I missed our swim. “Which is what I’m supposed to be doing now downstairs in the Sunset Lounge.” The conviction in my voice fades as Aidan’s hands travel up my leg, pushing the tight skirt of my mother’s cocktail dress up higher.

“Ah, Sir Harry’s Art Recovery party? They were still setting up when I passed by. You have time. Besides, are you really in such a hurry to join a bunch of lawyers and curators arguing about some paintings stolen in World War Two?”

I’m impressed, fleetingly, with Aidan’s knowledge of the event—more than I’ve remembered certainly, but then Aidan presses himself between my legs. It’s delicious, the sensation of being wedged between the hot soft linens and his cool, hard chest, like being suspended between land and water.

“Aidan,” I say, trying one last time to sound responsible, even as he slides my leg up the length of his chest and bends to kiss the hollow behind my knee. “Mr. Kron is expecting me to be there . . .” but Aidan’s discovered that I’m not wearing panties and suddenly my whole professional facade doesn’t seem all that credible.

The party is just getting under way when I get downstairs. The guests have spilled out from the Sunset Lounge onto the flagged walkway and into the rose garden where little cast-iron tables and chairs have been set up and Japanese lanterns have been strung in the trellises. Harry is standing in front of Brier Rose talking to some people seated inside the gazebo so I work my way through the guests in the lounge first, hoping he’ll assume, by the time he sees me, that I’ve been here longer. I stop and introduce myself to the conference attendees—scanning their name tags for the people Harry told me I should pay special attention to. There’s the curator of a small museum in Pittsburgh who’s made provenance issues his specialty, an associate curator from the Met in charge of a new provenance research project, and several lawyers who have made their reputations representing clients in restitution claims. I notice as I make my way from group to group that there’s a similar thread to the conversations. The lawyers and art dealers affiliated with Art Recovery aggressively assert the culpability of museums and their negligence in establishing the provenance of their holdings, while the museum curators apologetically defend their museums’ good-faith attempts to track the previous owners of all their works as best they can.

“There are always going to be gaps in the provenance of some works of art, but a gap isn’t necessarily a piece of incriminating evidence,” the associate curator from the Met explains to an appraiser of Judaica who works with Jewish clients to recover lost family artifacts. “If due diligence is done and the purchase is made in good faith . . .”

“Good faith?” The appraiser, a petite redhead in a St. John knit suit and Prada pumps that are sinking into the soft loam of a dahlia bed, cries, “Is that any reason not to return what’s been stolen?”

I notice that Joseph, who is wandering on the outskirts of the party relighting the citronella torches, looks over at the redheaded appraiser. He’s probably worried that she’s impaling his dahlia bulbs with those heels. I think I’ll take a moment off from mingling to tell him I’ll keep an eye on the flower beds, but Harry spots me and calls me over.

“Ah, Iris,” he says. “How lovely you look tonight. That dress reminds me of something my sister-in-law wore to the opening of the Cavalieri Hilton in Rome. Conrad Hilton couldn’t take his eyes off her all night.”

I smile at Harry. I imagine my mother—instead of his sister-in-law—dancing at the Cavalieri Hilton. In another world, it’s the life she could have had, maybe if she’d had the success with her writing before she married my father and had me. She would have been free to travel.

“My mother wrote in one of her journals that she thought the Cavalieri Hilton was the ugliest hotel she’d ever seen in her life.
A mastectomy of the many-breasted city,
she wrote in one of her unpublished poems.”

The voice, coming from inside the gazebo, startles me out of my reverie of my mother in Rome. I look inside and see Phoebe Nix, looking cool and tranquil in a shapeless, colorless linen shift, sitting with a slim man in a pin-striped suit and a yellow bow tie who is softly concurring with Phoebe’s mother’s assessment of the Cavalieri. “A travesty of Cold War architecture,” he murmurs, “with its ugly American’s insistence on air-conditioning and ice water piped into every room.”

“Ah, but what a lovely view from the rooftop restaurant,” Harry says to no one in particular, taking a sip of his martini and looking wistful.

“Phoebe,” I say, “I didn’t know you were here. I would have arranged for a special room for you . . .” I falter, remembering that she is, after all, the owner’s niece. Surely Harry has made arrangements for her.

“Alas, my darling niece refuses our hospitality. Quite insulting, don’t you think, Miss Greenfeder?”

“Gordon and I have been staying at my place in Chatham,” Phoebe says, stretching her bare legs out along the gazebo’s bench. “We were on our way back to the city.”

Gordon blushes to the roots of his close-cropped curly brown hair. His ears, which look far too big for his small head, also turn a bright shade of pink. Men with large ears, I think to myself, should never wear bow ties.

“But your hotel is lovely, Miss Greenfeder,” he says rising to his feet and putting down his drink to shake my hand. “Gordon del Sarto.” I shake his hand, surprised by his courtesy and his Italian surname. “We’ll certainly stay another time.” He smiles so graciously I’m immediately sorry for my uncharitable thoughts about his ears.

“Oh, enough already,” Phoebe says as if we’d all been haranguing her to stay. “We don’t have to be back until Monday, do we, Gordon? I know you’re just dying to listen to all this Nazi art stuff.”

“Are you interested in World War Two art recovery?” I ask Gordon. I’m intrigued now not just by his politeness and Italian surname but by how this odd, diminutive man seems to get a rise out of the cool magazine editor.

“Well, it’s a bit outside my field—I just finished doing my thesis on Renaissance goldwork—but I’m doing an internship this summer at Sotheby’s in the Jewelry Department and we’ve had some difficulty establishing the pedigree of several recent acquisitions.”

“Pedigree?”

“Old Money talk for provenance,” Phoebe says, rising to her feet and beating the wrinkles out of her shift as if a swarm of bees had invaded the fabric. “Which is art world talk for previous ownership. If we’re going to stay I’d better make sure of what sort of room you put us in. It has to be near a fire exit, but not too close to the elevators because they’ll keep me awake. Can you show me what you’ve got?”

I look to Harry to see if it’s all right to abandon the cocktail party. He pats my arm, as if sorry to leave me prey to his niece’s demands. “Yes, I suppose you’d better get Phoebe settled. Gordon and I can discuss those recent acquisitions of his,” he says and then, when Phoebe turns away to pick up her purse—a canvas book bag really—Harry leans closer and whispers in my ear, “High maintenance—just like her mother.” I try to repress the smile that comes to my lips, but when Phoebe straightens up she glares at me suspiciously and I have a feeling she’s overheard what her uncle said and knows what I’m smiling at.

“Come on,” I say, trying to adopt a cheery managerial tone to cover my embarrassment. “I think I know just the room for you two.”

“Rooms,” Phoebe says when we’re just out of earshot. “Gordon’s not my lover. He just goes with me to these art things so Uncle Harry will get off my back about getting married. I’ve known him since Bennington and he’s the only one of my male friends Harry can stand. Harry loves quizzing him on Italian art because it gives him a chance to relive his bohemian days as an art student in Rome before the war and the glory days of rescuing Italian paintings from the Nazis.”

“Well, Gordon seems very nice,” I say. We’ve crossed the lawn and come to the flagstone walk, but Phoebe abruptly veers off course toward the long arbor where a night-blooming moonflower vine is just opening up its pale trumpet blooms. They seem to glow under the Japanese lanterns. Phoebe dips her slender neck to one of the blossoms and inhales.

“You’re not his type,” she says, “so don’t bother.”

It’s such a rude remark I have no idea what to say, so I say nothing. Although I found her a bit abrupt on our few previous meetings, she’s never actually been rude to me before. Maybe she’s just angry with her uncle . . . or maybe she’s found out something that has changed her mind about me.

Phoebe looks up from the white flower. “Not that you look like you’re hard up. You have that satisfied glow. I thought that painter boyfriend of yours was in Vermont.”

“New Hampshire,” I correct her and look away. I notice Joseph a little way down under the arbor, staking a droopy-headed peony.

“Then it’s someone new. I hope he’s not distracting you from your research. Aren’t you supposed to be up here researching the book about your mother?”

She makes the remark casually while pulling one of the moonflowers down by its thick vine toward her face, but, glancing at her mother’s wedding ring on her thumb, I suddenly have an idea of why she’s changed her attitude toward me.

“How about your research?” I ask. “Weren’t you going to look at your mother’s journals while you were at your house in Chatham? Did you find out if our mothers knew each other?”

Phoebe lets loose the vine and a little puff of yellow pollen spills from the flower’s quivering throat.

“Yes, they did know each other . . . but only slightly. My mother and father stayed here in the summer of 1973—just before I was born. I’m afraid my mother didn’t think much of your mother’s writing, but she thought it was a shame she had stopped . . .” Phoebe’s voice drifts off and she turns to go into the hotel. I follow quickly at her heels, cravenly anxious to hear whatever little tidbit Phoebe has discovered about my mother.

I catch up to her on the flagstone walk, a few yards from the hotel, where she has stopped to look up at the building.

“I’d like to stay in the suite my parents had,” she says. “I think it was named after some Washington Irving story.”

“All the center suites, which are the nicest ones, are named after something from Washington Irving . . . a bit hokey, I know, but people still associate this area with him.” I point to the central spine of the hotel where each floor has a three-sided bay window and starting with the fifth floor count down the names of the center suites. “There’s Knickerbocker, Rip Van Winkle, Half Moon, Sleepy Hollow, and Sunnyside.”

“How quaint,” Phoebe says dryly. “I think they stayed in Sleepy Hollow.”

“You’re in luck, it’s vacant. I’ll have it made up for you right away . . . but look,” I add as she starts to move away from me, “did your mother write why she thought my mother had stopped writing?”

“She wrote,
Kay spends altogether too much time with the guests.
”

“That’s it? She thought my mother stopped writing because the guests kept her too busy?”

“Oh, I left out a word. What she actually wrote was:
Kay spends altogether too much time with the
married
guests.
”

Chapter Seventeen

THE NET OF TEARS

By the time I decided to help Naoise steal the net of tears it was back in the hands of Connachar.

“But how can we get it from Connachar?” I asked Naoise. “He’s not as careless as the woman.”

“He’s careless in different ways,” Naoise told me. “He’s careless in how he looks at you.”

Naoise turned away from me as he said this, pretending to check the corridor for listeners, but I knew it was because he was ashamed to look at me. I tried to harden my heart against him, but with his back to me I could see the wings forming under his shoulder blades, the skin straining over the new bone, the bone pushing to break free. Naoise would turn into one of the winged creatures soon and then there’d be no saving him.

“And that’s how you want me to get the net of tears from him?” I asked him, giving him one more chance to take it back. But when Naoise turned to me I saw in his eyes that the animal growing inside him had already taken over. He touched his finger to my breastbone, his nail digging like a talon at my skin. Beneath the bone I felt the flutter of gills, the animal I had been calling to, the animal he would become.

“He won’t be able to resist seeing you wear it,” he said. “It’s you it’s made for.”

The morning after the cocktail party I ask Ramon where the old registration books are kept.

“We used to store them in the attic,” he tells me, “but Mr. Kron asked for all of them at the beginning of the summer so he could compile a list of old regulars to invite back. He probably still has them. Why?”

Stupidly I haven’t come up with a lie. The truth is I want to look at the book for the summer of 1973 to see if somewhere among the registered guests would be a married man who might have been my mother’s lover. How I’m going to recognize his name, I have no idea, but I’m hoping that something will jar my memory. My mother used versions of real people’s names in her books—Glynn, for instance, which I know now comes from the girl who died at the train station the day my mother traveled here to the hotel. Maybe one of the names in the registration book will remind me of something from her books.

I decide to be truthful with Ramon—or at least halfway truthful. “I’m writing something about my mother,” I whisper. Fortunately, it’s still early enough in the morning that the lobby is deserted. “And I think there might have been a man staying here that summer who . . . well, who might have been her lover.”

Ramon makes a soft clucking sound and shakes his head. “Not your mother. Your mother—”

“—was a saint. Yes, so everyone tells me. Ramon, you only started here midway through the summer of 1973. You hardly knew my mother.”

“I know I’d still be up to my elbows in grease if not for her.”

“Okay, look, maybe she wasn’t having an affair. Maybe someone she used to know came up here and threatened her or asked for help.” I remember Alice’s theory. I don’t quite buy it, but maybe Ramon will. “Maybe that’s how she ended up in that hotel room in Coney Island.”

“And what good would it do you to know that?”

“Well . . .” I look around the lobby as if searching for an answer. I notice we’re not completely alone. A man is kneeling behind one of the couches, tape measure in hand. He’s the upholsterer Harry has hired to redo the lobby furniture. The color scheme my mother chose will vanish, replaced by the Crown Hotel’s signature violet and cream. “Then I’ll know she wasn’t planning to leave us,” I say.

Ramon looks theatrically left and right—what an awful actor he must have been, I think, how fortunate my mother saved him—and then leans over the desk. “Mr. Kron has them in his suite, in the armoire, the key to which is in his night table.”

I gape at him, amazed at this detailed knowledge of the owner’s suite. He smiles. “Paloma—the new maid—she mentioned as much to me. She thought it was funny he went to so much trouble locking away a bunch of dusty old books.”

“Paloma?” I say. It takes me a second to realize he’s talking about Mrs. Rivera.

Ramon grins. “Don’t tell your aunt,” he says. “You know how she feels about staff romances.”

Although I have a master key to all the rooms I’m not about to let myself into Harry Kron’s suite and lift the registration book from a locked armoire. I’m sure the idea would never have even entered my mind if not for Ramon’s detailed blueprint of the book’s location. There’s no reason not to simply ask Harry if I can see the registration book for 1973. After all, he is one of the few people who knows I’m working on a book about my mother.

The only problem is getting him alone for a few minutes. I can hardly ask him during the daily staff meeting with my aunt Sophie sitting across from me on his left-hand side taking minutes. I try him in the dining room at brunch, but although he usually dines alone, this Saturday he’s got Phoebe Nix and Gordon del Sarto at his table. When he sees me hovering by the omelet chef he waves me over and insists I join them.

Phoebe is in the middle of giving the waiter precise instructions on how to boil her egg. I turn to Gordon and ask him if he found his room comfortable, but Phoebe, done with her injunctions to her waiter that her toast be very, very dry, answers instead. “Two of the drawers in my bureau are broken, and I tore my foot on a loose nail in the closet.”

I assure Phoebe that I’ll send Joseph—our unofficial carpenter—to have a look at the defective items even as I’m wondering why, since her luggage had consisted of a canvas book bag, she had needed two drawers and the closet.

“Well, my room was heavenly,” Gordon interjects. “Literally. I awoke this morning to the sun rising outside my window. It was like floating in the middle of a Tiepolo ceiling.”

“I thought your period was Renaissance, not High Baroque,” Phoebe says to Gordon.

Gordon blushes to the tips of his large ears as if Phoebe has made an indelicate sexual reference instead of an artistic one.

“I gave you the room most popular with the sunrise school of painters who used to stay here,” I tell Gordon. “If you look under the rug by the window you’ll find paint splatters.”

We discuss, then, the Hudson River School painters who stayed at the hotel and some more recent regional painters. I’m impressed that Gordon not only knows of these minor artists but doesn’t seem to consider them beneath his notice. Harry too has an encyclopedic knowledge of local folk artists.

“I have an idea,” Harry says. “Come stay—as our guest of course—the last week of August for our Arts Festival. Art Recovery has agreed to come back—” Here Harry winks at me, letting me know that the group has been well enough satisfied with their accommodations to rebook. “—and we’re going to judge the ‘Follies in the Garden, Whimsies in the Woods’ contest. Perhaps you could put together a little program on ‘The Arts at Hotel Equinox.’ ”

Gordon sets down his coffee cup and smiles at Harry. “It would be an honor, Mr. Kron—”

“Oh, Gordon,” Phoebe interrupts, “say what you mean. You’d much rather give a talk on fifteenth-century Florentine jewelry and not some local Grandma Moses. Uncle Harry, he’s got the slides in the car. Couldn’t Art Recovery fit him in this weekend?”

Harry puts his toast down and gives his niece his full attention. I remember what he said last night. High maintenance, just like her mother. And then I remember what became of Phoebe’s mother, Vera Nix, award-winning poet, dead at forty-four when she drove her car off a bridge. Harry must remember too because he speaks softly and gently, as if coaxing an excitable racehorse.

“Of course I would be delighted to hear Gordon speak on the subject of his expertise, and I would have asked already, only the emphasis this weekend is on works of art lost during the war . . .”

Gordon clears his throat as if to interrupt, then lapses into a coughing fit. While I signal the waiter to refill his water glass, Phoebe places a hand on Gordon’s bony shoulder and takes up the gauntlet for him. I have to admit I’m touched. For all her sharp edges, it’s obvious that Phoebe has a strong sense of loyalty to those she cares about. It also occurs to me their arrival here last night was not by chance—perhaps Phoebe had planned all along to get Gordon included in the weekend’s program.

“He’s got a painting of a lost necklace,” Phoebe says. “A fifteenth-century pearl necklace that belonged to some Venetian saint and disappeared during the war.”

“Ferronière,”
Gordon rasps out between sips of water. “It’s a
ferronière
.”

“What’s that?” I ask.

“A sort of fifteenth-century headband,” Phoebe answers impatiently.

“Well, that’s fascinating,” Harry says, “but one slide of a missing headband does not a lecture make.”

Gordon holds up a finger, takes another sip of water, and clears his throat. “Actually, sir, I have assembled a rather interesting slide presentation surrounding the lost della Rosa
ferronière
. I’ve got portraits of the della Rosa family and several other examples of
ferronières
in Lippi and Botticelli . . .”

“Well, it sounds like quite a thorough program. I’d love to see it. Why don’t we schedule your talk for tonight before cocktails? Have you got enough to fill forty-five minutes?”

“Oh, yes, Mr. Kron, I could do a good solid hour,” Gordon says, beaming. I’m so pleased for Gordon’s success that it takes me a moment to realize that I’ve missed my opportunity to ask Harry for the registration books. It’s too late now. Harry is touching a napkin to his lips and sliding his chair back and Gordon is already on his feet to shake his hand.

“Thank you, sir, I’m sure you won’t be sorry. And of course I’d love to do the program on local artists as well.”

“Excellent. Come to my room after dinner tonight and I’ll give you all the old registration books. You can comb through them for the names of artists who stayed here.”

For the rest of the afternoon I kick myself for not asking for the books. I could have done it in front of Phoebe. After all, she knows about the memoir and it was she who gave me the idea that my mother might have been having an affair with a guest. In the end, though, I realize that’s exactly why I didn’t ask for the books in front of Phoebe. I didn’t want her to know I took her suggestion seriously—or how much the idea bothers me.

I don’t know why it should make such a difference if the man my mother left my father for was married and a guest at the hotel. I have, after all, come to admit that she probably was having an affair—despite all the protestations of my mother’s sainthood. Maybe it’s because since hearing Hedda’s suggestion that it was someone she knew before coming here I’ve gotten a certain picture in my head. All I know about my mother’s life before she showed up here is that she grew up in an Irish neighborhood in Brooklyn, attended an all-girl Catholic school, and was christened at St. Mary Star of the Sea in Brooklyn, the same church where she took me—belatedly, at my soul’s great risk—when I was three to be christened. And so what I pictured when Hedda spoke of a childhood sweetheart was a young Irish boy, poor like herself, a boy who looks, in my imagination, a lot like Aidan Barry.

Only he wouldn’t have been a boy in 1973. No matter how I might like to fool myself I can’t tell the story that way. There’s no reason to think that my mother, in her early forties in 1973, was having an affair with a man in his twenties. There’s no precedent for my affair with Aidan. No excuse.

And so, after chastising one of the maids for understocking the third-floor linen closet (and remembering halfway through my lecture that Aidan and I had stuffed the soiled sheets in an unused dumbwaiter), I decide to take the matter into my own hands and retrieve the 1973 registration book from Harry’s suite. Just to set the record straight. I’ll wait for Gordon’s lecture on fifteenth-century jewelry—a good solid hour, he said, and which Harry will of course attend—and let myself in with the master key.

I’m busy most of the afternoon setting up slide projectors and checking microphones for the evening’s lectures. It’s not an easy job. We’re using the library and two parlors on the north side of the courtyard, across from the bar, and the rooms were meant for reading the newspaper and tête-à-têtes on a rainy day, not multimedia conferences. If Harry’s vision of the hotel as an international conference site comes true the rooms will have to be completely remodeled and rewired. In the meantime, Aidan comes to my rescue with an armful of extension cords, claiming a high school AV club in his past. I don’t see him as AV club material, though, and suspect it’s yet another skill he’s acquired in prison. Where he acquired the skill to charm the lawyers and museum curators is another question. By the end of the day the redheaded Judaica appraiser has him toting her slide carousels and setting up a display of nineteenth-century Kiddush cups along a sideboard in the Gold Parlor. I am in the library, just outside the French doors leading into the parlor, rearranging chairs, when Harry Kron comes to stand beside me. I notice that he too is paying close attention to Aidan. This would be the time—while Aidan handles the jeweled, engraved goblets—for Harry to mention any concern about Aidan’s background.

“Mr. Barry seems quite an asset with the corporate clients,” he says. “You did well to hire him. Perhaps we should release him from his thralldom to Joseph and give him a position of more responsibility. Say, special-events coordinator? What do you think?”

“I think he’d be very good at it,” I say, relieved that the only attention Aidan has drawn from Harry Kron is positive. “And I think it would be a wonderful opportunity for him.” I lay stress on the last part and hold Harry’s gaze for a moment longer than necessary. If he knows about Aidan’s prison record this would be the moment to bring it up.

Harry looks away from me to Aidan and then back to me. “Part of being a good manager is knowing when to take risks, how to recognize promise in unlikely places—a diamond in the rough, so to speak.” I smile, relieved. He must know about Aidan. “Have I told you lately what a good job you’re doing?” he goes on. “You have that rare talent, invaluable in a true hotelier, of bringing out the best in people.”