The Seduction of Water (32 page)

I stagger out onto the platform just before the train heads back south and look for a bench to sit on, but they’re all taken up by disgruntled commuters who are dividing their time by looking down at their watches and then looking southward along the tracks. I find a wall to slump against and stare resentfully at the river and the sun setting over the hills in the west. The view is familiar to me and after a minute I recognize the stop as Rip Van Winkle. Although I think the man with onion breath said
equipment failure
I have an eerie sense of déjà vu waiting at this stop for a replacement train. This is where my mother stood waiting for the tracks to be cleared of Rose McGlynn’s body so she could continue on her way to the Hotel Equinox. I remember that when I was little she told me a version of the story—saying she waited at this stop to change trains (no mention of a friend’s suicide) and thought about going back to the city. The possibility that she could have turned away from her destiny of meeting my father and having me always scared me, but now I find myself wondering how she could have possibly continued on her way after what happened here. I find myself considering crossing the bridge over the tracks and taking a southbound train back to the city—Aidan was probably right that I should get Jack to go with me—when I see the woman standing in front of me set down her suitcase and step toward the tracks. Without thinking I step forward, coming up alongside her discarded bag, and reach for her. Startled, she turns. I can’t see her face because the setting sun’s behind her back.

“Yes?” she says, puzzled. “Do I know you?”

I shake my head and step away from her suitcase. “I’m sorry. I thought you were someone else.”

She smiles nervously and then points down the tracks. “Look,” she says, “here’s the replacement.”

Chapter Thirty-one

There’s no one to pick me up at the station—no Joseph, no Aidan—so I engage a cab to drive me across the river to the hotel.

“I thought the old Equinox had finally closed down,” the cabdriver remarks as we cross the bridge.

“Only temporarily. For repairs.”

“The word in town is it’s closed for good.”

“It will open again in the spring,” I assure my driver.

But when we pull up to the front entrance, I’m not so sure myself. The hotel is completely dark. Even the outside lights are off.

“Doesn’t look like anyone’s home,” the cabdriver observes laconically while taking my money.

“The desk clerk and one of the maids have been hired to stay the winter. The construction crew must have left for the night and switched off the electricity because of some repair—or maybe they cut a line accidentally . . .”

The cabdriver, uninterested in my speculations and seemingly unconcerned about leaving me alone here, shifts the taxi into drive.

“I may need a cab in the morning,” I tell him.

He pauses long enough to hand me a card with the taxi company number on it and drives back around the circular drive, his taillights disappearing at the dark edge of the woods. When that light is gone I’m left in almost total darkness. I’d noticed that the moon, to my back as we crossed the river, is full, but it hasn’t risen far enough to light this side of the hotel yet. Even without light, though, I can sense the desolation of the garden. The annual borders have withered into humpbacked clumps against the shaggy, untrimmed hedges; the rosebushes, thrusting out leggy shoots topped with dead blooms, sprawl against the trellises. Clearly the gardeners, Ian and Clarissa, have been let go even though I’d thought Harry planned to keep them on a few more weeks. A wind from the north sweeps through the garden, shaking loose a few leaves and making a dry sound as it moves through the withered vegetation. I shiver, wishing I’d thought to bring a sweater—it’s so easy to forget it’s colder up here—and go inside.

In the lobby, moonlight streams through the French doors from the east side of the hotel, pooling on the white dropcloths that cover the furniture and carpet. Two stepladders stand in the middle of the room. Large paint cans line the top of the front desk, which has also been draped in white cloth. The cans, on closer inspection, contain not only paint but various stains and cleaning fluids and a vast amount of polyurethane—about thirty six-gallon cans. A stack of receipts is weighted down by one of the cans, along with an inventory, in Ramon’s handwriting, listing each item and what it’s for. Another sheet of paper has fallen to the floor and when I stoop to pick it up a breeze steals into the room, rippling the sheets like a current moving over stones. I straighten up and walk over to the French doors where I find the one that’s ajar—wedged open with another can of polyurethane. The painters must have done it for ventilation, but it was careless to leave it open with no one here. I close and lock it and then read the paper in my hands. It’s a fax addressed to Ramon from Harry giving him the address of a plumbing supply store in Syracuse that carries the fixtures that are to be used for the new guest bathrooms. The fax is dated today and it instructs Ramon to make sure the fixtures are available for the plumbing contractors who are due to start work tomorrow. No wonder Ramon’s not here—it’s a good five-hour drive to Syracuse and the time on the fax reads three-ten
P.M
. He could never make the supply store before it closed. He and Paloma must have decided to drive there tonight, pick up the fixtures in the morning, and then come back. If I know Ramon he’ll take the back roads through the Catskills and give Paloma a tour of all the old hotels where he appeared onstage, even the ones where his only performance involved singing with a tray of kreplach balanced on his shoulder.

I let myself into the office and check to see if the phones are still working—they are—and take a flashlight out of the supply closet. I consider for a moment calling the cab company and coming back in the morning, but I’m too anxious to see if I’m right about my mother’s hiding place. Besides, I’ve been in the hotel many times during power failures; I imagine I could find my way up to the attic blindfolded.

The main staircase is amply lit by the windows on each landing. In fact, having the lights off allows for a view of the Hudson Valley and river under the moonlight unimpeded by ambient light. Walking up the stairs is like rising in a column of light pouring up from the river, and I feel as if I’m floating above the miniature world of the valley. Once, when I was four or five, my mother woke me in the middle of the night, wrapped me in her coat, and led me through the darkened halls to the fifth-floor landing. An ice storm had knocked out the power and glazed the valley in a crystal sheath. “Look,” my mother said, “it’s like being inside a snow globe.”

When I get to the fifth floor now I stop at the window and look out at the valley, remembering the smoothness of my mother’s hand on mine, the softness of the fur collar against my face. I had felt then that my mother created the spectacle for me with as little effort as it would take to tip a real snow globe over and set the miniature snow to falling. As I grew older I never doubted that she had the power to hold a world in the palm of her hand, the world she invented of fabulous creatures from a land under the sea, of women who could shed their skins and men who could fly. Now I wonder how much control she had over that other world. Maybe she had hoped to gain control by turning the demons of her youth into fantasy creatures, but instead the world she created welled up and flooded into the life she had made for herself here with me and my father.

When I turn into the fifth-floor hallway there is no light anymore from the windows. I switch my flashlight on and trail my fingers along the walls to guide my way to the attic stairs and up to my room. After a few steps I notice that my shoes are sticking to the floor; each step I take makes a faint sucking sound. I stop and take a deep breath, almost choking on the fumes. No wonder the workers left the French doors open downstairs—the floors have already been refinished with their first coat of polyurethane—the whole hotel reeks of it. Really they should have left more windows open for ventilation and I promise myself I’ll do it before I leave. For now, though, there’s nothing I can do about the damage my footprints do—I’ll tell Ramon in the morning that this hallway will have to be redone. At least when I get to the attic stairs I find they haven’t been refinished.

At my door I have to put the flashlight down to look through my bag for my room key. At first, when I can’t find it, I curse to myself—I’ll have to go all the way down to the desk again for a master key—but then I remember that I slipped it into a jewelry pouch in my toiletries case. I open the door, leaving the key in the lock, and set the flashlight on the top of my bureau, its beam directed toward my bed where it hits the chipped yellow paint of the sun finial. I’ll try the sun first, I decide, but after I’ve lit a candle for more light.

Unscrewing the finial is harder than I thought it would be—Joseph must have glued it—and I’m beginning to think that if it’s this hard it’s unlikely my mother hid anything here when it comes loose. I shine the flashlight down into the hollow post. There’s nothing there. When I lean over to put back the sun finial, which I’d left on the night table, I drop the flashlight behind the bed.

The flashlight is wedged between the headboard and the wall and I have to pull the bed forward—which sends the flashlight crashing to the floor. I’m reminded of my last clandestine effort—taking the 1973 registration book from Harry Kron’s suite. At least now there’s no one in the hotel to hear the racket I’m making.

I suppose it’s thinking about the registration book that makes me do what I do next. When I’ve retrieved the flashlight from the floor I shine it on the back of the headboard and notice that the unfinished plywood on this side is crudely stapled to the sides of the headboard and one side is loose. I slide my hand in under the loose flap of wood and immediately feel the smooth leather edge of a bound book, which I manage to slide out from under the loose board. It’s a registration book, but when I shine the flashlight on its spine there’s no date. I open it and find that the pages have been cut out. In their place is a stack of typed manuscript pages held together by a rubber band. On the first page are printed the words:
The Selkie’s Daughter: Memory of a Brooklyn Childhood.

Sitting on the edge of the bed I remove the rubber band, turn to the first page, and read the first line, “In a time before the rivers were drowned by the sea, in a land between the sun and the moon . . .” and feel a wave of disappointment wash over me. It’s only an early draft of the first Tirra Glynn book after all. Perhaps my mother hid it up here when she was still a maid . . . but then I read on and see that this is not a fantasy novel. After a few lines of the selkie story, which I notice now are enclosed in quotation marks, the narrator breaks in. “This was my favorite story when I was a child. My mother told it to me, as her mother told it to her, a long line of mothers going back to the little island where her family came from, Cloch Inis, Stone Island, which lies between Grian Inis, Sun Island, and Gealach Inis, Moon Island.”

The land between the sun and the moon. I tear myself away from the book. There will be time to read later. It’s hard to believe that after trying so long to tease my mother’s secrets out of the web of her fantasy world the answers were here all the time—above my head as I lay sleeping—not coded in fairy tales or fantasy, but laid out in plain memoir.

I’m only the tiniest bit disappointed to realize that the existence of this book makes the one I’d planned to write unnecessary. My mother wrote her own story. She doesn’t need me to do it for her.

I move the book aside and go to work on the moon finial, which pops off in my hand easily. Without bothering with the flashlight I stick my fingers down the hole and graze something soft as velvet. Dead mouse, I think with a shudder, but when I force myself to retrieve the little bundle I see it is velvet. A velvet jewelry pouch. I pour its contents into the palm of my hand, which I cup under the beam of the flashlight. It takes me a moment to realize what I’ve got and what it means and in the next moment I hear an odd sound coming from the floor below me—a sound like someone ripping heavy tape off a package—the sound footsteps make on wet polyurethane. I look back at what I have in my hands and know who it is that’s coming and what I’ve got to do.

By the time Harry shows up at my door I’m sitting on the edge of the bed, which I’ve pushed back against the wall.

“My dear,” Harry says, his hand on the doorknob, “I knew you would find it! I knew my faith in you would not go unrewarded.” He slips the key out of the lock, pockets it, and removes a gun from the same pocket. Then he closes the door and approaches the bed.

“The
ferronière
and the manuscript. Well done! You won’t mind if I have a look at the jewelry first—you see, I’m not such a big fan of science fiction.”

I hand over the pouch, my eyes fastened on the gun in Harry’s hand. “It’s not a fantasy book,” I say, “it’s a memoir. My mother’s life.” Harry spills the contents of the pouch out into his hand and holds the string of jewels up in the beam of the flashlight. They glisten like a spill of water in the dark room.

“Lovely, isn’t it? No one crafted gold like the quattrocento Italian goldsmiths. And it’s not just the crude value of the stones—which is, I assure you, in the millions—but the history of the piece, the stories . . . why, your mother may have added value to it by including it in her novels. I’ll consider it interest on a long loan.”

“I suppose your brother Peter took it,” I say, “and when you found out it was too late to give it back to the countess.”

Harry laughs. “Peter? I’m afraid when I found him at the Countess Val d’Este’s villa he was in such a stupor of fear and alcohol he wouldn’t have been capable of distinguishing a fifteenth-century heirloom from a dime-store bauble. But the countess did mention to me that she believed the
ferronière
was still hidden in the church of Santa Maria Stella Maris. When my battalion entered the town—just hours after it had been retaken by the Allies—I went straight to the church. It had been hidden by the abbot but when I told him I was a Monuments officer and we needed to move all national artistic treasures to a safe location he showed me where he had hidden it. Unfortunately the abbot was struck by enemy fire—the town was crawling with snipers—and later, the church was bombed. So you see, if I hadn’t taken it, it would have been lost forever.”

I nod as if this explanation excused him of killing an abbot or any of the other crimes he’s committed since to keep his theft a secret, but he’s too enraptured by his recovered treasure to pay much attention. He doesn’t care, I realize, what I think. If he did, he’d have gone along with my suggestion that Peter stole the jewels in the first place. He doesn’t care because he doesn’t intend to let me leave here. Knowing this is like taking the cold plunge into the pool below the falls—painful, but a relief of sorts after wading on the edge.

“You must have been very angry when John McGlynn stole it from you—after you went to so much trouble to get it.”

“On the contrary, I hired John McGlynn to steal it for me. Peter—idiot that he was—had let Vera get a hold of it. My fault, I suppose, because I’d shown it to her. I might have gotten it back from her, but I wanted to get the rest of the Kron family jewels out of her hands as well. The stupid woman would have lost most of them eventually—so I figured why not kill two birds with one stone. The only problem was that when John left the jewels at the locale we had decided upon he neglected to leave the
ferronière
. He thought he could get away with keeping it . . .”

“Because he knew where it came from. Rose told him. She knew the story from St. Mary Star of the Sea. He thought that since you stole it, you wouldn’t chase after him.”

“Stupid boy. I had to have some friends with the police apprehend him—with the jewels he’d given back to me hidden in his hotel room—but by then he’d hidden the
ferronière
.”