The Seduction of Water (21 page)

The Volvo feels as if it’s soaked up all the heat of the summer and the upholstery is as cracked as the dirt path leading down to the parking lot, but still I feel like a teenager in her dad’s convertible. I roll down the windows to breathe in the piney air. Instead I smell hot tar and dust. The pines on the edge of the road have a seared look, their needles glinting copper in the relentless sun. Something else bothers me as I drive down the mountain, but I can’t put my finger on it until I get to the bottom. I stop the car at the new sign for the hotel, switch off the engine and listen. All I hear is the rustle of dry pine needles, a sound like brooms sweeping a wooden floor. I can’t hear the creek.

I start up the car again and head toward the river. There’s a pay phone at the Agway but now that I’m driving away from the hotel the motion feels too good to stop. The river is widening in my windshield, growing from the thin pencil line I see from the hotel into a wide expanse of thirst-quenching blue. The bridge and the hills on the other side—a view I’ve stared at all summer long—bulk and take on substance. It’s like I’ve been living in a two-dimensional drawing all these weeks and now I’ve stepped off the page into real life.

Ascending the arc of the bridge I have a sudden urge to follow the river all the way back to the city. No wonder I’ve always avoided working at the hotel. My suspicions that it was a trap have been borne out.

Across the bridge, I turn south on Route 9, not really thinking through how far I plan to go—just enjoying the sensation of traveling. I wonder if this is how my mother felt that night Joseph drove her across the river to take the train to the city, that she was finally casting off the burden of the hotel—of me and my father—to start a new life.

I think of the scene in her book when the selkies shed their skins at the place in the river where the water turns from salt to fresh. The Hudson is tidal up until Rip Van Winkle, which is where you used to have to change trains to continue north and where my mother saw that woman throw herself under a train. I’ve always thought that the selkie story meant for her the transformation that occurred to her when she left the city and came to the hotel, but when the selkie sheds her skin the thing she becomes isn’t her true self either. She always longs to return to the sea, to slip into her old skin. The selkies in my mother’s book can’t go back because of some lost necklace—the net of tears. What if, for my mother, the net of tears wasn’t a lost thing, but a lost person without whose love she was not her true self?

What if running away with Peter Kron meant returning to her true self?

I’ve been driving so lost in thought I haven’t kept track of where I am. I notice that the river has widened and when I see a sign for the Rip Van Winkle Correctional Facility I can hardly believe how far I’ve come. I remember the reason for my trip: to call Jack and find out why he’s coming, but I still don’t know what to tell him about Aidan. I wonder how my mother could have been so sure when she left us that she was leaving for the right person.

I see a diner on the right—a vintage chrome Airstream that looks just the place from which to call Jack—and pull over. True to my expectations, it’s got a real phone booth with a worn wooden seat and a door that closes and switches on an overhead light. I dial the number, charging the call to my credit card, and prepare to do battle with the Cerberus of the colony—the receptionist.

“Yes, I know the hours between nine and four are reserved for ‘creative output,’ ” I tell her, “but this is an emergency.”

“Well, then, I’ll send someone to his studio,” she replies in a clipped voice that clearly says
philistine
and
enemy of the arts
. I think of all the writing I’ve failed to do this summer and wonder if I’d work better in such guarded isolation. I’d probably end up crocheting a doily for my laptop and watching squirrels all day long.

I wait for fifteen minutes. I imagine Jack wrenched away from a moment of creative inspiration, wiping his paint-smeared hands on his jeans, and trudging through the woods to find out what emergency has befallen me. How am I supposed to tell him that the emergency is that I’m sleeping with a younger man but I’m still racked with jealousy at the idea that he may also be having an affair?

When I hear his voice come on the line all I can think of is how much I’ve missed him.

“What’s happened, Iris? Are you all right?”

“I saw your registration form for the Arts Festival and I didn’t know what to make of it. Why didn’t you tell me you were coming?”

He lets out an exasperated sigh and I think he’s going to yell at me for pulling him away from his work.

“I asked that man at the desk if you’d see it and he said he didn’t think so because there was a new special-events coordinator, so I spoke with him and specifically asked him not to let you see it. I wanted it to be a surprise.”

“You spoke with Aidan?” What had Aidan said?
I was wondering when you would get around to letting me know.
But he’d known all along that Jack meant to surprise me.

“Was that his name? I thought he understood that I wanted to surprise you.”

“But why? Did you have something important to tell me?”

“Oh, Iris, I don’t know. I’ve just been feeling bad about how this summer has worked out.”

“I thought the painting was going well.”

“It’s not that. I’ve missed you and I’ve realized how grudging I’ve been with my time. I thought if I surprised you by coming to the hotel for a whole week it would make up a little for how I’ve neglected you. To tell you the truth, I’ve been a little worried.”

“Worried about what?” I ask, trying not to sound as guilty and nervous as I feel.

“That I’ve lost you. That you won’t come back to the city in the fall.”

“Why wouldn’t I come back?”

“Because you’ll want to stay on at the hotel. I know how much it’s always meant to you, so I wanted to tell you—damn, Iris, this isn’t how I meant to tell you—that if you want to stay at the hotel I’d come too.”

“You mean you’d consider living up here?”

“Why not? I think I’ve had enough of the city. We could find a little house near the hotel, maybe with a barn I could use as a studio. You’ve said often enough that real estate is cheap up there.”

“Jack, I don’t know what to say. This is all so sudden.”

“Don’t say anything right now. I’ve got to go anyway—the receptionist is glaring at me from the other office. We’ll talk about it when I’m up there. It’s still okay, isn’t it? I mean, you don’t mind me coming?”

What can I say? Jack and I have been together for ten years. I owe him more than a summary dismissal from a diner pay phone. And if he’s really ready for us to live together, am I ready to say good-bye?

“Of course I don’t mind you coming. I think there’s a lot we have to talk about.” That’s the best I can do, the only hint I give him that everything’s not right. It leaves a bad taste in my mouth that the diner’s stale coffee and greasy eggs and homefries only make worse. Still, I stay for an extra cup of coffee, dreading the return trip and facing Aidan. At the cashier I dawdle over the postcards and souvenir mugs—thick, cream-colored ones with a blue drawing of the Acropolis—and even buy a postcard because it’s occurred to me that this might be the diner where Ramon used to work. Just south of Peekskill on Route 9, he always said. Besides, now I’ll have something to show for this long, fruitless trip. Then, finally, because I can’t put it off any longer, I leave and head north.

I make one more stop before going back to the hotel. Thinking about the section in my mother’s book when the selkies shed their skins has reminded me of the woman my mother saw die at the Rip Van Winkle station. I haven’t had a chance to follow up on it since I’ve been up here. It didn’t seem as important when I’d hoped I would find my mother’s lost manuscript, but now that the summer is almost over I have to face the possibility I’ll never find it—or even that Hedda was wrong and there was no third book. In that case, I’ll need another approach if I still plan to write a book about my mother. Aside from the unsubstantiated possibility that my mother was having an affair, the only solid piece of information I’ve gleaned all summer is that my mother saw a girl named Rose McGlynn die on the train tracks the day she left the city. Maybe if I can find out more about Rose McGlynn I can figure out why she was important enough that my mother named her fantasy world after her.

I don’t really think the
Poughkeepsie Journal
will tell me much more than the
New York Times
, but there’s always a chance that the story would have drawn more local attention up here. The receptionist at the newspaper office directs me to the microfiche room where back issues of the paper are stored. I take out the loop for 1949 and scroll toward June 22, operating the machine much more confidently than back in May. When I find the story I see that it’s much longer than the
Times
version. I copy it and then, because there is no Rose Reading Room to repair to, read it under the flickering fluorescent lights.

“Tragedy at Rip Van Winkle—Woman Visiting Inmate at Prison Killed in Train Accident,” the headline reads. I blink at the small, blurred type. The
Times
article hadn’t said anything about the girl visiting an inmate at the prison. According to the unnamed “friend” in that article (whom I suspect is my mother), Rose McGlynn had been traveling north from the city to look for hotel work.

“The last person to see Rose McGlynn of Brooklyn, NY, was her brother John McGlynn, an inmate of Rip Van Winkle Prison. Just minutes after visiting her brother, who is serving a twenty-year sentence for grand theft, Rose McGlynn threw herself beneath the wheels of the train that would have taken her home, leaving behind on the platform a worn carpet bag and a multitude of unanswered questions. Perhaps she couldn’t face the trip home alone.”

If the story wasn’t so sad I would laugh at the florid prose. Plus the
Times
said she was killed by the northbound train, not the southbound one. Who knows how much else this reporter—Elspeth McCrory, I see by the byline—got wrong. Still, she couldn’t have completely made up the part about the brother in prison.

“The demise of this wild Irish Rose—” Oh, come on, Elspeth! “—was the culmination of a life full of tragedy, much of which was revealed during her brother’s trial when Rose McGlynn herself related the sad story of their childhood in a special plea for leniency in her brother’s behalf.” Elspeth McCrory went on to summarize the details of that “life full of tragedy.” The McGlynn children lost their mother when Rose was seventeen and John was fourteen, the eldest of three brothers. Their father, unable to care for the younger children, gave the boys over into state care—to St. Christopher’s Home for Boys in downtown Brooklyn. One of the boys had died there; the other two had, one after another, fallen into a life of petty crime. Rose McGlynn, who had gone to live with relatives in Coney Island, was a familiar sight in the Brooklyn courthouses where she’d plead for leniency on behalf of one brother or another. (How, I wondered, had Elspeth McCrory gotten all this background story just one day after the train accident?) She was particularly attached to John, and so one could imagine her grief when he was caught and convicted for robbing the hotel safe where Rose worked.

I read this last part over again. According to Hedda, my mother had worked at the Crown Hotel. It made sense that the friend she traveled north with had worked at the same hotel. And as it turns out, she did.

Elspeth McCrory had gone on to breathlessly describe the “Crown Jewel Heist” of over two million dollars’ worth of precious gems kept in the Crown Hotel safe as well as several costly items stolen from guest rooms. Some of the most valuable items belonged to the famous poet—and sister-in-law of the hotel’s owner—Vera Nix. Vera Nix’s testimony in the trial had been instrumental in convicting Mr. McGlynn.

And then I realize how Elspeth McCrory got all the inside dope on Rose McGlynn so quickly. The story of the hotel robbery must have been covered in all the papers. She just stole the background info and stuck it into her story. Pretty crafty, Elspeth, but how much of it was true?

I’d give anything right now for an hour in a library—or a computer with access to LexisNexis—but looking at my watch I see it’s after five. The microfiche librarian is loudly packing up her purse and glaring at me resentfully. I’m not sure how late the Poughkeepsie library stays open, but I am sure that if I don’t get back to the hotel by dinner my absence will be noted. Besides, why go to the library when I have a firsthand source? Harry should be able to tell me all I want to know about the Crown jewel heist.

Chapter Twenty-one

THE NET OF TEARS

Where the river turns from salt to fresh the selkie sheds her skin. It is here that the conqueror has his prison. Our men are here—fathers, sons, brothers, sweethearts—behind the high walls. The river runs beneath the stone walls and it’s possible to slip between the bars and swim to the pool of tears where the men come to see one last glimpse of their women. It’s dangerous, though, because the salt tide from the sea comes and goes here and if a selkie is caught inside the prison when the tide flows back she will drown.

I took the chance, though, to see Naoise one last time.

He was waiting by the pool, bent over the water, so that when I surfaced I came through his reflection. For a moment he must have thought he was still looking at himself, then he smiled, and then he frowned.

“You shouldn’t have come here, Deirdre, it’s not
safe
.”

“When did you ever care about safe,” I said, laughing at him, but then, seeing how his back was bowed over as if by some unbearable weight I relented and held his hand. “You didn’t think about safe when you stole Connachar’s jewels.”

“Shh.” He touched a finger to his lips and looked behind him into the shadows. When he turned I saw the scars between his shoulder blades where the knife had severed his wings.

“I did it for us—to release us from this prison—besides, they weren’t his to begin with. He stole them from others.”

I sighed and was frightened to hear the sound echo off the walls of the dungeon. It multiplied, as if the walls had absorbed all the sadness they had ever seen and were sighing back. But then I saw the other forms in the water—my sisters—come to see their men one last time, and I realized the sighs came from them.

“A lot of good it did. He has his jewels again and you are here.”

He bent all the way down to the water then, as if to press his lips to the river and drink, but instead he whispered in my ear.

“Not all. I saved the best. The net of tears—the net that must be broken to free us. I hid it . . .”

But as he spoke I felt a tug at my legs and a chill, like ice, moving through the water. The tide was retreating. If I didn’t leave now I would be trapped here. Perhaps it wouldn’t be so bad, to stay here with Naoise, better than living on dry land without him. I felt the river coaxing me to stay . . . to drown.

“Go,” Naoise said, “you must go,” and he leaned forward and pushed me away, whispering one last word in my ear. I could see through the water his back turned to me. I could see the long scars where his wings had been and, frightened, I kicked off from the slimy rock and dived deep. My tears drowned in the river, their salt flowing back to the sea. I didn’t care then if I ever found the grate and made it out into the light and onto the land. I went deeper and deeper until my hands scraped something hard—the bars—and then other hands were pulling me through.

I opened my eyes and what I saw, there beneath the river, frightened me. My sisters, the selkies, were struggling in the ebb tide; long blue tentacles of salt water pulling at them, flaying their skin. I watched as the skin of one selkie was shredded into long strips and something white and raw kicked free and swam upstream. But another one was ripped in half by the struggle and her poor mutilated body sank to the bottom of the river.

I didn’t have the leisure, though, to pity my sisters, because soon I was caught in the same struggle. No one had told me it would feel like this—to shed one’s skin. And worse than the sharp salt fingers digging into my skin was the awful cold of the freshwater river waiting to claim me. A cold born of the glaciers to the north. It would be better, I thought, to die here and be eaten by fish, than to live in that cold. And as I saw others around me sink to the bottom I knew they had given in to that wish.

But then I remembered what Naoise had told me at the end. He had told me where to find the net of tears. How could I take that knowledge to the bottom of the river?

So I struggled against the tide and kicked free into the ice-cold water and blinding sunlight. I barely had strength left to crawl up onto the riverbank. Naked. Alone. My sisters—the few who had survived—had come up on the opposite riverbank. I was alone in a world of mud and ice and for a long time I lay there wishing I had died beneath the river.

When I get back to the hotel from Poughkeepsie I learn that Harry’s gone down to the city to arrange for several paintings to be sent up on loan for the Arts Festival. I’m disappointed that I’m not able to ask about the Crown jewel theft, but truthfully, I’m so busy with preparations for the festival that I’d have little time to talk to him. I barely have time to talk to Aidan and then I notice he’s avoiding me anyway, which puts me in an awkward position since he’s the events coordinator. So when, on the morning before the first day of the festival, Ramon tells me that Mr. Kron has returned and left several Hudson River School landscapes behind the desk to be stored in the safe—which, Ramon tells me, is too small—I turn to Joseph to help me figure out where to store them.

It’s early enough that his coterie of art students hasn’t joined him yet. He’s sitting at a window in his suite, his injured foot propped up on a footstool, surrounded by the faded mural of Ichabod Crane’s flight from the specter of the Headless Horseman. Like the mural in the Half Moon Suite, this one also incorporates the view of the Catskill Mountains into the narrative. The bridge that Ichabod Crane must cross to safety seems to span the distant mountains, and its arch is echoed by a small ornamental bridge in the rose garden. Joseph, seated on the far side of the bridge, appears to be right in the path of the fiery missile of the horseman’s head.

I sit on the edge of the footstool and, because I still can’t get used to having a conversation face-to-face with him instead of working side by side in the flower bed, I find myself looking out the window as we talk. It’s an appealing view—not as spectacular as the east side of the hotel with its panoramic sweep of the Hudson Valley, but beautiful in a quieter way. The sun hasn’t reached this side of the ridge yet. Scraps of mist still cling to the ground; the grass is glazed with a light dew that will burn off soon enough. The garden is full of the quick darting shapes of birds hunting for food. The only guests I see are the Eden sisters sitting quietly in Brier Rose. Minerva has a pair of binoculars, but Alice is sitting with her eyes closed, as if meditating.

“The garden looks beautiful,” I tell Joseph.

He shakes his head. “The ground is bone dry. I’ve asked Clarissa and Ian to stop watering the annuals and concentrate on the roses and other perennials. It won’t look as pretty in a few weeks, but the season is almost over and at least the roses will survive to next year.”

There’s something melancholy in the way he says
at least the roses will survive
. As if he didn’t expect to be around to see them. I wonder if this forced leisure has made him feel expendable and he has already mentally removed himself from the scene, just as he’s apportioning water to the longer-living plants and pruning back the deadwood.

I can’t think of any better way to tell him how much I still need him than to do what I’ve come to do anyway: ask for his advice. I tell him that the paintings that have just arrived won’t fit in the hotel safe.

“The safe wouldn’t be the best place for them at any rate; too many people have access to it. I can’t tell you how many hotel safe robberies I’ve heard of over the years . . .”

“Do you remember the Crown Hotel robbery back in the forties?” I ask, remembering the article I read in Poughkeepsie.

Joseph turns abruptly away from the window and stares at me. “Who told you about that? Was it Mr. Kron?”

It would be easy to nod my head, but I can’t lie to Joseph. “I looked up the newspaper for the day my mother first came here. A woman named Rose McGlynn died at the Rip Van Winkle train station. She was visiting her brother who’d been sent to prison for robbing the Crown Hotel.”

Joseph’s face looks suddenly chalky, washed of color. I lean forward and touch his hand, which rests on the arm of his chair. His fingers feel cold as earth.

“Is that how you heard about the robbery,” I ask him. “Did my mother tell you about Rose McGlynn? Was my mother somehow involved in the robbery?”

Joseph pulls his hand away as if my touch had stung him. “Can you really imagine that your mother would involve herself in something like that, Iris?”

“Well, I think it’s likely she knew Rose McGlynn. They were traveling together on the same train, they’d both worked at the Crown, and they both came from Brooklyn. If it was really Rose McGlynn’s brother who committed the robbery . . .” I stop because Joseph looks stricken, but also because of what has occurred to me. “Rose McGlynn’s brother was named John. That’s how my mother was registered at the Dreamland Hotel. Mr. and Mrs. John McGlynn. John McGlynn could have been the lost lover whom she ran away with.”

“No,” Joseph says, “John McGlynn wasn’t your mother’s lover. Your mother would never betray your father like that.” Joseph swings his injured foot off the footstool so abruptly that the heavy plaster cast smacks into my thigh. I cry out, less from the physical pain—which is considerable—than from the sting of Joseph’s anger. But then I’m angry too.

“I’m tired of everyone telling me my mother was a saint. She died in a hotel room registered as another man’s wife. She was leaving my father and she was leaving me. If it had anything to do with that robbery I want to know.”

Joseph has struggled to his feet and is reaching for his crutches, which lean against the wall behind me. I grab his arm to steady him—and stop him long enough to answer my questions.

“Does it occur to you, Iris, that these might be dangerous questions to ask? That someone might get hurt.” He lays his large hand over mine—I think to remove it from his arm, but instead he draws my hand closer to him and holds it against his chest. Through the worn cloth of his shirt I can hear the faint pulse of his heart. “I promise you that your mother wasn’t having an affair with John McGlynn. She never meant to leave you or your father.” He squeezes my hand a little harder.
“Shayna maidela,”
he says, “I drove your mother across the river that night and I know she meant to come back. She went to settle something . . . to see someone . . . but I can’t tell you who. Not now. It’s not my secret to tell. Can you trust me enough to wait just a little?”

I look into Joseph’s brown eyes, eyes so scored with wrinkles it’s like looking into two wells sunk deep in parched ground. There’s never been anyone I’ve trusted more. Besides, I have an inkling suddenly of what he knows and why he can’t tell me. I remember the argument he had with Phoebe the night she went out onto the ledge and I feel sure it was something to do with my mother and Peter Kron.

“Do you promise you’ll tell me when you can?”

“If you promise me you’ll be careful.”

I nod, meekly, like when I was little and he made me promise not to trample over his flower beds.

“Good,” he says, releasing my hand and reaching behind me for his crutches. “Now let me show you where to keep those paintings.”

We don’t have to go far. There are two closets in the Sleepy Hollow Suite, one in the hall that joins the living area to the bedroom (which is the one Phoebe complained had loose floorboards) and one on the other side of the living area—which, I notice for the first time, has a double lock and a deadbolt on its metal door. Joseph takes out a heavy ring of keys from his pocket and unlocks it.

“Every once in a while we’d have a guest who wanted a secure storage area for valuables, so your father had three suites outfitted with locked closets and made sure he kept the keys. We don’t usually open them for guests unless they specifically request it. It’s perfect for storing those paintings.”

“But we’ll have to go in and out of your suite every time we need a painting. They’re for different lectures so we’ll be bothering you all week. Maybe we can use one of the other suites that has a locked closet.”

“The other ones are taken—unless you want to use the one in Mr. Kron’s suite, but I don’t fancy you traipsing in and out of his room.” Joseph looks up from his keys and holds my gaze for a moment before looking away. I wonder if he shares Phoebe’s idea that I’m romantically involved with Harry. “Use this one, Iris. You’ve got the key to the outside door, so you don’t need to bother me to get in. I can close the connecting door between the bedroom and the living area and there’s an outside door from the bedroom I can use. I’ll make sure no one goes in there who’s not supposed to. At least I’ll be doing something.”

When I get back downstairs Aidan is in the office looking at the paintings.

“They’re beautiful, aren’t they?” I ask him. “Did you see the one of the hotel?”

“This one here? It looks more like a Greek temple. And it makes these hummocky little hills around here look like the Swiss Alps. I’d say these river school painters were prone to a bit of exaggeration.”

“It was the whole romantic notion of the sublime,” I say, happy that Aidan’s even talking to me. “They were exalting the American landscape.”

“Well,” Aidan says, leaning the painting back against the wall, “of course I’m not an art expert like your fellow Jack, but even I know these are worth too much to be lying around the front office.”

I decide to ignore the reference to Jack. “There’s a locked closet in Joseph’s suite we can use for them and any other valuable artifacts that won’t fit in the safe. I was going to bring them up now . . .”

“Why didn’t you ask me? Do you not trust me with them?”

“Honestly, I was afraid you’d think the job was too menial for you . . .” I say before I can help myself. At least it’s the truth—I have been squeamish of asking him to do anything this last week—but I didn’t mean it to sound as if he’d been shirking his share of the work.