Scarlet Night (20 page)

Don’t understand too much, old lady, O’Grady thought. You’ll kill the plant before it’s borne a seed. The girl was removing the dog’s leash. With any luck the creature would bury himself for the duration under the bed.

It might have been a fine seating arrangement, their supper table, if he’d been a horse wearing blinkers. The card table was hard against the doorframe with Julie sitting on the foot of the bed, Mrs. Ryan on the inside free to fetch and take, and O’Grady astride a folding chair, elbows in the room, his head fading in and fading out and his arse in the hallway. But they laughed a great deal and got along fine and there was no traffic to speak of at that end of the hall. They finished the whiskey among them, even Julie taking a thimbleful to respond to O’Grady’s toast to a united Ireland.

“Do you consider violence the only way, Johnny?” She had finally broken down and used his first name.

He smiled with the pleasure of that and then said, “If you’ll show me the country otherwise free, I’ll give it consideration.”

“Canada,” Julie suggested.

“They’d have been better off having to fight. They’d have wound up knowing who they were at least. And when they’ve sorted out the Frenchies from among them, maybe that’ll do it. But whether that’s going to come about peaceable…” He shook his head doubtfully.

Julie, as she had several times through the evening, thought of Jeff. The only way she could see him at this table was if it were in a remote part of the world, sort of a native compound.

“Are you partial to the French, Julie?” O’Grady asked, for she had said nothing.

“I do like France, and Jeff’s there a lot.” Having no intention of saying his name, she’d said it.

Mrs. Ryan had that funny little pinched look that generally appeared at the mention of Jeff. She said: “I must get the dessert before it runs down the sink.”

“I’d be willing to help if you hadn’t exiled me out here,” O’Grady said.

Julie said, “We should have used paper plates, Mrs. Ryan.”

“It never tastes the same.”

“It was delicious.”

“You don’t have much of an appetite, do you?” O’Grady said.

“I’m rather unconventional in what I like.”

“You’re an uncommon person altogether.”

Julie looked at him.

“Well, damn it, you are,” he said and averted his eyes.

Julie laughed.

Mrs. Ryan came with three saucers of ice cream. “It’ll be soup if we don’t eat it.”

“Soup, beautiful soup,” Julie said.

“Where have you gone to, Sean O’Grady?” Mrs. Ryan said, seeing him stare into space. “It isn’t fair not to take us along with you.” To Julie: “He’s been all over the world.”

“And none of it home,” he said with a sigh.

“I feel that way too sometimes,” Julie said.

Their eyes did meet then, but his real show of sensitivity was in his mouth.

Mrs. Ryan said, her hand on Julie’s: “If only you’d known your father, it would have made all the difference.” She was back on that tack again.

“I knew mine,” O’Grady said, “and if I’d had the strength I’d have killed him.”

Silence. Except for the gnawing under the bed of Fritzie on the steak bone.

Mrs. Ryan said: “I should never have given him that bone. He won’t have a tooth left in his head by the time he’s done with it.”

O’Grady said: “I shouldn’t drink whiskey. It depresses the hell out of me. I apologize to you both.”

“You’re not reneging on that drive to the Tappan Zee?” Julie said.

“I’ve never reneged on a promise in my life…though I’ve failed to keep one or two.”

He was serious. Julie didn’t laugh. She pushed back from the table and pulled her knees up to swing her legs off the bed. “Let’s do the dishes and go.”

“We’ll leave the dishes,” Mrs. Ryan said. “I won’t be taking a bath until tomorrow.”

Mrs. Ryan and Fritzie rode in the back of the Volkswagen, Julie beside O’Grady. As they drove up the West Side Highway, Mrs. Ryan leaned forward and said of the George Washington Bridge in the distance: “Will you look at the lights the way they’re strung out like a rosary.” O’Grady asked Julie: “Do you drive a car?”

“I’ve driven,” she said, and then laughed at herself. “In a case of extreme emergency. But I can sail a boat.” Which really was wicked of her: she could sail a boat about as well as she could drive a car, and no one would consider himself lucky to be her passenger in either.

“Ah, there’s something I’d love to be able to do,” O’Grady said. “You’d think being an able seaman, I’d know the water like the palm of my hand, and all manner of boats, but it’s not like that at all. There’s times I might as well be working in the subway. You do what you’re told to do and live for the time you’re landside. And when you go ashore, the first thing you want is a drink, and maybe it’s the last thing. It’s a terrible life when you come down to it, seven months out of the year employment and you long since broke with nothing left but pious resolutions.”

“I know,” Julie said. “I’ve read Eugene O’Neill.”

“Aye. It hasn’t changed much.”

“And you’re not married?”

“I’m not. I’ve not been especially blessed in the women I’d have chosen. The blessing, I suppose is, they wouldn’t have me.”

As they crossed the river on the George Washington Bridge, O’Grady said, over his shoulder: “Look back now, Mary Ryan. There’s your city in all its glory. There’s no sight like it in the world, a fairyland of glittering towers, a passion of lights.”

“Holy Mother of God,” Mrs. Ryan said reverently.

They stopped at Rockefeller Lookout on the Palisades Parkway and got out of the car. A fat oval moon splashed a long reflection across the river. A few miles ahead lay Maiden’s End.

“Could we go down to the river’s edge at Maiden’s End?” Julie asked.

“If you know the way.”

“I do.” With luck. All that she really knew was that the river was there at the end of a winding road. Say a prayer, Julie. The nonpraying member of the caravan.

“We’ll go off the next exit,” O’Grady said. “We must be getting near Maiden’s End.”

“I’m not the greatest navigator you ever sailed with,” Julie said.

“If we get lost, does it matter? Aren’t there people?”

She nodded.

At the exit they turned toward Nyack and when after a few miles they passed the Geological Observatory, Julie knew they were almost there. She remembered the traffic light and the sign that pointed toward the community church. There was also a sign that said the road had no outlet. The white church with its steep, graceful roof stood in a flood of light.

There was not a car to be seen as they started down the winding road Washington was said to have followed with his men on the way to rendezvous with Lafayette. “There are some great houses,” Julie said, “some of them from before the Revolution. I wish we could see them.”

“We’ll come back in the daylight,” O’Grady said.

He drove very slowly, and the closer they came to the river the nearer to the road were some of the houses. Lamps shone within them, and their shutters and gingerbread trim were visible in the moonlight.

“Some have names,” Julie said. “Like there’s a Captain Somebody’s House and a Bell House and a Ferry House. Some pretty famous people have lived here.” She named a few of the theater stars who had at one time or another lived at Maiden’s End.

“Oh, is that where we are?” Mrs. Ryan said with awe. “Now I remember the name.”

She’d have been almost as impressed, Julie thought, to hear the name of the television correspondent she and Jeff had visited.

The river lay dead ahead with only a railing between it and the end of the road. “Now what do we do?” O’Grady wanted to know.

“There’s enough room to turn around,” Julie said. “Park for a minute and turn off the motor.”

Julie rolled her window all the way down. The only sound was the rhythmic splash of the water against the sea wall.

O’Grady said softly: “‘I will arise and go now, for always night and day/I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore…’”

“I can’t hear,” Mrs. Ryan wailed, having heard just enough to know she was missing something. She pulled herself forward, hanging onto the back of Julie’s seat.

O’Grady raised his voice: “‘While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements gray…’”

Julie joined her voice to his on the last line, for she knew it well: “‘I hear it in the deep heart’s core.’”

Mrs. Ryan sighed and sat back when O’Grady started the motor. They drove slowly up the hill. After a moment she said, as though surprised: “The houses are not all that grand.”

“There isn’t a one I wouldn’t settle for,” O’Grady said.

“You know what I mean, Johnny.”

Julie turned, as though to speak particularly to Mrs. Ryan; she wanted to watch O’Grady without his knowing. “There’s one place I suppose you’d really call an estate: it belongs to a man named Campbell.”

There was not a quiver in O’Grady’s face. She would swear the name meant nothing to him.

“He sponsors a sailboat regatta in the summer and he’s supposed to have a great art collection.” Just a little twitch to O’Grady’s nose and a slight lift of the shaggy brows, but a response.

For O’Grady it was a moment of surprise, hearing her speak of an art collection. He felt as though something had been slipped in on him. Ginni was great at such tricks, committing him to something before he even knew what she was talking about.

“Do you know whose place it used to be?” Julie said, and named an actress whose fame was only remotely known to O’Grady.

But Mary Ryan was beside herself. “She was one of the nicest human beings ever stepped on the stage. Could we drive past the place, Johnny?”

“Could we, well?” he said, looking at Julie. He put his suspicions down to his imagination. Who with money didn’t have an art collection of some sort?

“We can go up to the gate anyway,” Julie said, “but Mrs. Ryan won’t see much.”

“She’ll feel, never mind. She’s a great one for feeling.”

You couldn’t go far astray in Maiden’s End: there were not many roads and the only way out was the road you had come in on. At Julie’s suggestion they drove between two stone pillars marked Private. She had once walked this way. Within a quarter mile they came to the wrought-iron gate. Julie bade him stop a few feet before it, the snout of the VW just short of the post with the electronic eye and the intercom through which, presumably, a watchman would speak.

“We’re as far as we can go,” Julie said, “except for a lovely walk that skirts the fence and goes on through the woods into the park system.”

“It’d be a grand night to explore it,” O’Grady said.

“We can’t leave the car here. There’s a park entrance on the highway. The time I was here before we came out that way.”

“Shall we go find it?” He swung the car around and drove back between the stone pillars.

Julie turned in her seat. “Are you all right, Mrs. Ryan?”

“I’ve been sitting here thinking about
The Barretts of Wimpole Street.
There’s nothing at all like it on the stage today. I cried every night. I was an usher in those days. An usherette.”

On the highway, they soon came to a driving range. It was doing a thriving business. Julie remembered the park entrance was opposite. A barricade closed the path to vehicular traffic. “It’s a fair walk.”

Mrs. Ryan was leaning forward. “Why don’t you park the car where Fritzie and I can sit and watch the golfers while you two go on? The night air’s a little sharp for my chest.”

“S
HE’S A DEVIL, THAT
old lady is, sending us off into the woods alone.”

“She’ll count every minute we’re gone,” Julie said. They crossed the highway and went around the park barrier—a single pole locked between two posts. “What’s crazy is that she’s the one that wanted to see the place.”

“I have a certain amount of curiosity myself,” O’Grady said.

“Oh?”

“I don’t like fences. I suppose I’m a poacher at heart. Do you know what that means?”

“Taking illegal fish or game.”

“Well, it depends on how you define legal—or more to the point, who makes the laws. I’ve never had salmon in Ireland that wasn’t poached. They were in litigation for years over whether the rights to fish in the Carib River belonged to an Englishman living in France or to the Irish people. How can you have any respect for a government that would take that long to consolidate their national resources?”

“And yet you want a united Ireland.”

“Yes, but I’d want a few other changes as well. For example, there’s got to be something done outside the Church to civilize the Protestants of the North.”

Julie laughed.

“You’ve always heard it the other way round, is it? The Catholic savages?”

Julie made a noise of assent.

“British propaganda.”

She thought about Romano’s story of the painting stolen from the National Gallery. Not quite a non sequitur, but not much of a sequitur either. The sound of the cars on the road behind them gradually faded into the distance so that the hum and wheeze of insects became audible.

O’Grady took an occasional slap at a mosquito. “I’d forgot about them, well.”

Their footfalls made a soft, plopping noise in the damp mixture of last year’s leaves and this year’s grass. “What are the silvery trees?” Julie wondered aloud.

“You’re asking a foreigner. Would they be ash?”

“They’re like ghosts among the others. Why do you live in the city, Johnny?”

“It’s where I was born and bred.”

“You don’t sound like it.”

“That’s from my mother. She was a country woman, County Mayo. I wish I’d been born over there. I have a notion I might have been a poet or such in Ireland.”

“Then why don’t you go and live there?”

“I might find out for sure that I wasn’t.”

They walked in silence for a moment. Then Julie said “Shall we go on until we catch sight of the river and then turn back?”

“Don’t you want to see the fence?”

“All right.” It was odd that he was the one to say it, when she had led them to Maiden’s End for the very purpose of scouting the estate. It had to be well after ten o’clock. The moon was almost directly over where she supposed the Campbell property was. When they reached a fork in the path they turned toward the Campbell estate and crossed a stream by way of a viaduct.