The Walking People (34 page)

"Like her mother." And then, "Sorry."

"No sorries. You are her mother."

"She calls you Mama."

"Or Mom, or Mommy, depending on what she hears in the park."

"She sounds happy."

"She is happy. And so are we."

"Good," Johanna said. "That's good." And then, after a pause, "Strange to talk on the telephone, isn't it?"

"At first, a bit."

"Same distance you to me and you to Ireland, but I bet you don't get the same feeling like you have to rush."

That was true, Greta thought.

"Because it's over land," Johanna pointed out. "And it's the same country."

"And not nearly as dear."

Silence. Greta wrapped the curly cord around her index finger like one of those Chinese finger traps they sell on the street downtown.

"She doesn't know," Johanna said.

"She's too young to understand anyway."

"Well, we'll have to decide soon what to tell her."

Greta chewed her lip as she watched Michael approach the dog walker with Julia in tow.

"Did you hear me, Greta?"

"Yes, I heard you."

"I'd love to see her. I have vacation time coming and I—"

Julia crouched down to skim a chubby hand down the back of a black Labrador. The other dogs yipped around her, and she kept snatching her hand away and running to the shelter of Michael's legs. Again and again he led her back to the dog, showed her how to pet nicely. "Gently," he said, his voice faint through the glass. He ran his hand from the top of the dog's head all the way down its back, and then Julia did the same.

"No, Johanna," Greta said, surprised at her own firmness. "Let's talk about something else. You said in your last that you bought a bicycle?"

"When, then?" Johanna asked, the tentative voice dropping away. "I've asked a dozen different ways in my letters, and you never mention a thing about it when you write back."

"You said it's up to me and Michael."

"Well, it is, but Christ, Greta. I'm the child's mother."

Greta could see her sister's face, three years older, a fringe over her forehead now—she'd mentioned a dramatic new cut in her last letter. These were the things they wrote about: haircuts, new shoes, cars, gained weight, lost weight, noisy neighbors, weather, and home.
Home most of all. Have you talked to home? I heard from home last week. And in Johanna's letters, at the very end, a P.S. about Julia. The more they avoided talking about it, the more Greta felt it rise up between them. It was a dumb show, letters back and forth across the country, comments, questions, gestures without meaning. She's careful of me now, Greta thought as she listened to her sister breathe into the connection. She's the one in the wrong. Now she'll backpedal and make nice.

"Sorry, Greta. I didn't mean to snap at you."

"No bother."

"But I do want to see her. Not take her, Greta, if that's what you're afraid of. I wouldn't just take her. And I won't ever forget how much you've done for me. For Julia and me."

There she goes, Greta thought, putting herself and Julia on one side and me on the other. She heard the echo of her own labored breathing somewhere deep inside the phone, miles down the line. And what about Michael, who belongs on both sides? Ask, she urged herself. Ask her if she's thought for one second about Michael over the last three years. She closed her eyes and saw without effort Johanna standing on the flagstone path outside the front door of the cottage, hands on her hips, wanting something and not wanting to ask for it. Johanna went out in the evenings, Greta knew. Dinners with friends she'd met out there in California. She sipped wine in restaurants just as she'd always dreamed. She went on dates. One time she wrote of being out on a boat with two other girls and getting a sunburn. Greta hadn't been swimming since Ballyroan.

The tug from Ireland was equally strong, and the letters that came from Lily had none of the careful coolness of Johanna's. Time enough now to be coming home, Lily wrote. That child belongs here, in an Irish school, and wouldn't it be lovely for us here to have a child around? Tom will paint your old bedroom, and Julia can take Johanna's old place in the bed. We could make it nice for her, just as it was nice for you, Greta. You've gotten on so far, Lily wrote, but what next? You are not even twenty years old. Greta, you goose, bring the child here to me.

On the rare occasions where their letters arrived on the same day, Greta felt exactly as if her mother had taken her left hand, Johanna her right, and at the same moment decided to walk in opposite directions without letting go. Once, on the Galway Road, two tinkers, men, had pulled a child's arms out of her sockets doing that. Both claimed the child for his own as the mother stood by hiding her face in her apron.

Greta watched through the gritty window of the stationery store as the dog walker gathered his leashes tight around his fist and moved on down the street. Michael plucked Julia up and over his head to his shoulders.

"No, Johanna. Not yet," Greta said, and without saying goodbye, she hung up the phone.

 

With Julia across the street at the Cookes' apartment and Michael and Eavan asleep, Greta stretched out on the couch and folded her arms behind her head. It was the perfect time to read the letter from Ireland, but she couldn't quite get up the energy. What was Johanna doing in Ballyroan? She hadn't been home in fourteen years, and to not have mentioned it seemed odd. The letters came and went. Sometimes they wrote as often as once a month, and sometimes four or five months would go by. They'd spoken on the phone a handful of times since that morning in 1967—Christmases, birthdays—but Julia quickly got too old to talk on the phone to someone she didn't know without asking a hundred questions later. By the time she could talk properly, she was like a sponge for all that was spoken or even felt inside the apartment. She's like a willow witch, Michael said once, except instead of searching for water, she watches us with those big eyes to figure out what's going on. Johanna had eventually stopped asking to see Julia, but Greta felt that she could get the notion in her head again at any moment. Once, out of the blue, when Julia was five, they received a letter from a lawyer who'd been hired by Johanna to pursue joint custody. Littered throughout the letter were the terms custodial, noncustodial, visitation, and something called a parenting plan. Every night for two weeks, after Julia went to bed, Michael and Greta pored over the letter to try to figure out what it meant.

"They mean to confuse a person," Michael had said. "That's part of it."

"Well then, they're doing their job," Greta said, looking again at the glossy navy blue lettering at the top of the page, the address in San Francisco.

"What do we do?" Greta asked, wishing that Johanna had brought the letter herself so Greta could take her by the shoulders and give her a shake. She had a good mind to write and tell Johanna that even from the other side of the iron gate of the kindergarten playground, she could tell what Julia was feeling by the way she held her shoulders, the way she held her arms at her sides. Every afternoon, Greta stood waiting for her, watching the child's back as she reached with the others for the highest rung of the monkey bars.

"Ignore it," Michael said, folding the letter into quarters and passing it to Greta. "She'll come to her senses."

And he was right. Two weeks later they got another letter from Johanna, apologizing for the lawyer, explaining that she'd been through a rough patch recently, a failed romance, a raise in rent, a job she described as more boring than being cook at poor Mr. Breen's.

"I got talking to this lawyer who came in to the restaurant for a drink, and he turned my head a bit about the whole thing," she wrote. "I would be a good mother now, but I'll never hire a lawyer again, Greta. Never. That was wrong and I'm sorry. I've always said it's up to you, and it is. And it would be a shock to her now, I suppose. Getting to know another mother."

"Damn right it would be a shock," Michael had said when Greta showed him the letter. "That one must be out of her mind."

And as usual, Greta moved to defend her sister. She was young when it happened. She was so full of ideas. She was terribly confused. Michael didn't know what a turn it must have been to her.

And you? Michael always asked. Were you not young? Were you not full of ideas? Wasn't I?

It was different for me, Greta said. She said it the night they got the apology letter from Johanna, and she'd said it on a hundred other occasions.

Ah, Greta, Michael always came back, that's what I'm trying to tell you.

 

Soon after the lawyer incident had passed, they decided it was time to come to some kind of decision.

"Come as an aunt," Greta said to Johanna over the phone. "Come as Aunt Johanna and it won't confuse her, and let's take it from there. Can't we do that?" Lately Greta had been dreaming of speeding trains. Sometimes, to stop the train, she hung from the side and put her foot along the ground to slow it with friction. She'd seen that on Julia's Saturday morning cartoons. Sometimes the trains plunged off cliffs into the ocean, the tracks never turning away. Sometimes her train just sat in the station, empty, while all the other trains pulled out. Julia was talking in full sentences and smart as a whip. It was now or never. Michael felt it too. The air inside the apartment had changed. Greta could see the decision pressing down on his features in the quiet way he came in from work and opened a newspaper or stared off into space when he said he was sleeping. Calling Johanna "Aunt" was the solution she and Michael had discussed and agreed on. Johanna was within her rights when she said she wanted to see the child, but still, having her back in the apartment she'd left so abruptly—returned from a milk errand that had lasted so many years—made both Michael and Greta nervous. Boundaries would have to be erased and drawn all over again.

"You mean not tell her who I really am? That I'm her mother?" Johanna asked when Greta told her the plan.

"Yes, Johanna. Say you're her aunt, and she'll understand that that's why she doesn't see you."

"Well, how long then until we tell her the truth?"

Greta felt the same white heat travel through her body that she'd felt that night so many years earlier, hiding on the road while Johanna spied on the traveller camp.

"That's what I'm telling you. That will be the truth. That's it. She's starting to notice the trips we take to talk on the phone, and even the letters. It's time we told her something, and this is what we decided."

"What do you mean will be the truth? It's either the truth or it isn't."

Greta stayed silent, waited.

"Well, I don't know if I can do that," Johanna said.

"Then we'll have to wait until you can."

 

Greta dozed off on the couch, and when she woke, Eavan and Michael were still asleep. She turned to look at the clock. They'd gotten a telephone installed in 1973, the year Julia started fourth grade, and in a few minutes Julia would call from the Cookes' and ask if she could eat over. Greta would say no, she could not eat over, Julia would ask why, and Greta would say because I said so. That's not a reason, Julia would say. Well, it's my reason, Greta would say, and then she'd think of Lily saying no to the dances in Oughterard because it was no good for girls to be on the road like horse's shite. It happened like this almost every Saturday.

Once, Julia arrived home after a Saturday afternoon at the Cookes' and announced that she'd already eaten. "It's not a big deal," she'd added, flipping her hair and skipping off to her room before Greta could say a word.

"Yes it is a big deal," Greta said, following her in.

"Why?" Julia asked. "Why is it a big deal?"

But Greta didn't have a reason. It just was. She couldn't say why except that it gave her a feeling like the time she realized she was the one who'd left the gate open for the new calf to escape. Warm in her bed with Johanna grinding her teeth next to her, she had heard the calf bawling into the dark as Big Tom and the boys searched for her. Lately Julia was demanding explanations for everything, and when those moments arrived, Greta felt more than ever that she was playing a pretend game and that Julia would announce at any moment that the game was up. Lily would have given the girl a belt, Greta knew. Two or three smart slaps to the back of the legs, and that would be the end of it. Greta had smacked Julia a few times when she was little, always on occasions when Julia scared her so much she didn't know what else to do. Don't run out into the street. Don't open the door to strangers. Each time, the child's shock was plain on her face, her mouth a round and soundless O until she caught her breath and the wailing started. Good for you, the older women in the building said. And if she starts with the curse words, give her a smack on the mouth.

At five o'clock the phone rang, just as Greta knew it would. Imagine! Only twenty-five steps across the street and using the telephone to ask. And knowing full well Eavan and Michael were probably asleep! Greta jumped up from the couch and ran to the kitchen to catch it before the second ring.

"Hello," she said, a statement. No question of who was calling.

"That you, Greta?" It was not Julia.

"Yes?" the line crackled.

"It's me. Did you get my letter?" A dog barked in the background. Greta could make out the thin clink of teacup returned to saucer at the other end of the connection. She quickly added the hours ahead and wondered where Johanna could be calling from. Norton's closed at four o'clock in the winter.

"Johanna? Is that you?" Greta said. "No, I didn't see any letter." Too much to explain, getting it but not wanting to open it yet. She wondered if Johanna ever had to work up the energy to face things, or if she just plunged right in. "Is something the matter?"

"It's Mammy. She's sick, Greta. She's had a stroke. She can't talk yet, and the doctor still can't tell how much she'll recover. Are you there?"

"I'm here. Where is she now?"

"Galway. I'm there now at a B and B. She'll be here at least another week."

"Another week?"