Illyria (14 page)

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Desdemona, Lady Macbeth, Noël Coward's Gilda, and yes, Viola.

In the mid-1980s I went to Washington, D.C., for several months, after being cast in a supporting role in
The Good Person of Szechuan
at Arena Stage. I saw Rogan then, for the first time since leaving Yonkers. I'd kept up with his whereabouts through my parents and my sister Brigid. I'd learned not to ask Aunt Kate for news, after she made a brief trip to visit me several years earlier.

"Your cousin Rogan's not doing well, Maddy." She shook her head and stared down at the rhododendrons glistening silvery green in a late November rain. "You know he's a heroin addict, right?"

I turned so she wouldn't see my face.

"No," I said. "I knew he was in a band. I thought they were doing pretty well; Brigid said they had a record deal."

"I saw him at Pat's house and he looked awful. Jaundiced." Aunt Kate's mouth tightened. "Someone should help him. One of his brothers."

I slid a headshot into an envelope and said nothing.

Now, at last, I would see him. I took the train to New York and met him for lunch, all the time I could steal from work. I had suggested Rosoff's.

"Nah. There's a good Szechuan place near Penn Station. In honor of your play." He laughed and gave me the address. Through the telephone I heard the familiar
phhtt
of a match being struck, an indrawn breath. "Go there. I'll meet you at one thirty."

He sat at a table near the front of the restaurant, a narrow steam-filled place where there was more food on the shag carpeting than the tables. "Hey, Maddy."

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I could feel him flinch as I put my arms around him.

"Rogan." I pulled back to look at him. "Hi, Rogan, hi..."

Someone had set fire to him and burned away all his youth. The nimbus of golden hair had faded to dull russet, close-cropped and already receding. He was gaunt, his skin so thin I could see the capillaries beneath, a faint blue fretwork starred here and there with red where the vessels had burst. There were already lines across his brow and deep grooves beside his mouth.

And yet he remained beautiful. Not only to me: I saw the waitress stare at him after she'd taken our drink orders and returned to the bar, and the bartender as well, watching us as we ate. His pallor only accentuated his eyes, their aquamarine now darkened to a cold teal blue, and the delicate line of his jaw and cheekbones.

"You look good," I said.

He gave me a twisted smile. "You, too."

I stared at his beat-up leather jacket and T-shirt, scuffed engineer's boots, and filthy jeans. In D.C. the weather had been sultry; I wore a white linen shirtdress and espadrilles, clothes that had seemed elegant, even sexy, when I got on the train at Union Station.

Now I felt dowdy and middle-aged, far older than twenty-six. Beside Rogan I looked ancient.

We made desultory conversation while we ate. I downplayed my modest success, which wasn't hard. I hadn't had a leading role since drama school, and the TV shows I'd appeared in weren't yet broadcast in the United States. Rogan told me about his band's recent gigs in the city and Philadelphia and Boston. I'd imagined this reunion for years, and for the last few weeks had been almost sick with anticipation and

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yearning--how could a few hours on a Monday afternoon even begin to be enough time to knit our lives back together?

The lunch was excruciating. Rogan wouldn't meet my eyes. I asked after his family and he shrugged.

"I don't see them. You're the first one I've talked to in, I dunno, seven years."

When I mentioned Aunt Kate in passing, he grimaced.

"Aunt Fate." His face contorted into a mask of loathing. "Fucking bitch. I don't want to hear about her."

We finished eating. I picked up the check. Only after we were back outside did he touch me, pulling me to him and resting his head lightly on my shoulder.

"Maddy. Thanks for coming up to see me." His tone grew slightly mocking. "It's been a really long time. We're both so busy."

He drew away and reached into the pocket of his leather jacket. "You have a tape player?"

I nodded. "Yeah, a Walkman."

"Here." He handed me an audiocassette. "This is a demo we're putting together. It's really rough, but it'll give you an idea anyway. Sounds a lot better live. You should come hear us sometime."

"I will. You should come see the play."

His eyes grew distant. "Yeah, maybe." He lit a cigarette and looked in the direction of Penn Station. "You better go or you'll miss your train. I'd walk you over but I have to meet someone."

My mouth was dry as I leaned in to kiss him. He gave me a small half smile, turning his head so my lips brushed his cheek.

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"See you," he said softly, and walked away.

On the Metroliner back to D.C, I sat beside the window and listened to his tape. A mix of original songs and covers, "Helter Skelter" and "Turn Blue" and "Panic in the World." I had expected his voice to be raw or smoke-coarsened.

But then I punched the Play button and felt my skin grow cold as that same pure, high tenor rang out, so wild and true and utterly unchanged it was like being thrust back onstage with him. I shut my eyes and played the tape over and over, until the train at last pulled into Union Station. I gathered my things, a sheaf of unread scripts and magazines, shoved them into my bag with my Walkman, and made my way to my sublet apartment on Capitol Hill.

***

I HAD ALWAYS IMAGINED MY CAREER WOULD BE
like a series of rehearsals leading up to opening night, followed by a long run and longer semiretirement, with turns as Lady Bracknell and Juliet's Nurse to buttress solid employment in a critically acclaimed television series or maybe even a movie.

Instead it was an endless audition; a few nice parts in regional theaters before I turned thirty and, almost overnight, the leading roles disappeared. I became trapped in the career immurement that awaits a character actor, shuttling between London and New York,

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theater and bit parts in TV. Usually I was better than the shows I was in; always I imagined someone else on the stage with me, Rogan's flickering image like the static on a dead television channel, his voice in my head long after the tape he'd given me wore out from being played and replayed for so many years.

When my work was reviewed, critics marveled how I inevitably triumphed over bad material, especially if I shared the stage with weak leading men; how it seemed as if my own presence animated the air between us, as if someone else, something else, moved there unseen.

Even in this feeble attempt at a post-Stoppard black comedy of manners, the redoubtable Madeline Armin walks the stage like a woman possessed.

But I would never be a star. Maybe there's only a certain amount of talent that can go around, especially in a family like ours; maybe after hundreds of years, the Tierney gifts had finally died out. Whatever acting talent I possessed, it wasn't enough. I channeled all my energy into my work. I had a few halfhearted relationships, and a drawn-out affair with a married woman, an actress I continued to work with, off and on, until her career outstripped mine. I still read about her occasionally, small items in
Time Out
or
Vanity Fair.
In love, as in theater, I had never had any magic.

True, I never flamed out. And I never shone, not even for a moment, the way my cousin had.

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***

DECADES PASSED. MY PARENTS RETIRED AND MOVED
from New York to Arizona. When Rogan's mother died, I sent him a note of condolence from London, carefully scripted and written on thick Crane stationery. I never received a reply. A few years later, my father told me that Uncle Richard had cancer. Within several months he, too, was dead. This time I didn't write.

The houses on Arden Terrace had long since been sold, all save Fairview and Aunt Kate's carriage house. Two of the bigger heaps were torn down and McMansions built in their stead, but most of the others were restored and carefully maintained by doctors and lawyers and stockbrokers, the same sorts of people who had first colonized Arden Terrace at the beginning of the last century. Aunt Kate remained in her home, attended by a series of loyal and well-paid home health aides who read to her when her vision deteriorated and made certain there was a good supply of audiobooks and cognac when they left at night to their own homes in the Bronx or White Plains.

I visited her whenever I was in New York, but that wasn't often now. I had no work in the city; not much in London, either. I did a series of audiobooks, adaptations of a successful children's series about a brave ant, and that made me enough money to live on.

When I did visit my aunt, the relative prosperity of her home, and the rest of Arden Terrace, made Fairview's gradual decay seem even worse. After Uncle Richard's death, the mansion had been inherited by his sons.

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But no one wanted to live in it. Despite a few prosperous neighborhoods, like Arden Terrace, Yonkers had become a ghost city. Gentrification was still a ways off. My cousins were comfortably ensconced in Westchester or Putnam County with their families.

All save Rogan.

Over the years, news of him had filtered to me through family members. Like me, he never married. For twenty years he lived in the city, singing in various incarnations of his original band. He drifted from apartment to apartment downtown and, when he was finally priced out of the East Village, into Brooklyn. In the early 1990s he almost died. I learned about this only a few years afterward, and it was never clear to me what had happened. AIDS, I thought, and felt that same chill as when I'd first heard him sing.

But it wasn't AIDS.

"He's in the hospital," Aunt Kate told me over the phone. Her voice was so frail I didn't ask her to repeat herself. I was afraid she'd lose the strength to talk at all.

As a result, during the next year I received only fractured accounts of my cousin. Rehab. Another hospitalization, a second stint at rehab. Then, surprisingly, a performance at a Tom Waits tribute, or maybe Tom Waits had sung at a benefit for Rogan?

Aunt Kate herself seemed uncertain. She sounded more drifty these days, which was to be expected. I asked her, more than once, how old she was.

She never answered. She had always seemed ageless to me, younger than my own parents. Still, no matter how I did the math, I figured she had to be well into her nineties, if not over a hundred.

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After 9/11 she grew even more remote: one of my in-laws had been trapped in the towers, and the husband of Aunt Kate's favorite caregiver. I spoke to her less frequently, on her birthday and at Christmas. Finally, six years later, I received a phone call from my father saying she had died.

It was the end of December, the middle of a harsh winter in the Northeast. My parents were too frail to make the trip from Sedona, my sisters too caught up with the aftermath of Christmas and their own children and grandchildren. The rest of the Tierneys were scattered and long out of touch.

So I told my father I'd fly over from London to represent the family at the funeral Mass at St. Brendan's. It was only after I hung up that I realized I'd forgotten to ask what time the funeral was; also, where I could stay?

I rang my father back.

"Your cousin Rogan's made all the arrangements," he said. "He stayed with her, you know. He was there in the hospital when she died. Your mother e-mailed and told him you're coming. Have a safe trip, dear."

My plane was late. It was a cloudless blue day. Flying above the Canadian Maritimes and New England, I saw snow thirty thousand feet below, a wrinkled white expanse of woodland dulling into gray urban sprawl, pocked with frozen lakes and reservoirs. In the minutes I stood outside at Kennedy before locating my hired car, my lungs ached from the cold.

"Fucking freezing," the driver told me as we headed toward the city. "Too cold to snow, even. Where's our global warming?"

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The car took me directly to St. Brendan's. There had been no wake, and only a few people were inside the church when I arrived. The two middle-aged women I assumed were Aunt Kate's health aides, and the ancient couple I remembered from my own tenure at St. Brendan's.

And Rogan.

"Maddy." He stood in the first pew and waved me toward him. "Jesus, Maddy, I can't believe you came all this way, in this weather."

He was thin, though not gaunt as he'd been twenty years before. He wore a black woolen overcoat over faded corduroys, and a gray henley shirt. His thin russet hair had burned to ash; his eyes were a pale washed turquoise, slightly bloodshot; his face was heavily lined. He looked ravaged; still beautiful, still wrecked.

But his arms around me were strong, and when he drew me to sit in the pew beside him his hand held mine, tightly, until the priest made the final benediction.

Afterward I rode with Rogan to Valhalla for the burial, a ceremony that lasted a fraction as long as the drive there, then back to Yonkers, braving the frigid cold with my window open while Rogan chain-smoked.

"She talked about you all the time," he said on the way home. We hadn't spoken much till then, but it wasn't an uncomfortable silence; more a sort of intermission, while we looked at each other and grew accustomed to once again breathing the same air. "She was really proud of you. The first Tierney in a hundred years to be onstage again."

"Not a hundred years." I gazed out the window. We were on North Broadway, passing houses and storefronts strung with