Illyria (15 page)

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Christmas lights. A bar was hosting a karaoke Kwanzaa contest. "Madeline wasn't that long ago. And you were onstage. With your bands, I mean. That's performing."

"Not to her it wasn't." He laughed, a faint edge of bitterness to his voice, and tossed his cigarette out the window. "Your TV stuff, that wasn't, either.
Rumpole of the Bailey
or whatever the hell it was. None of that stuff counted. Only the stage. Only the
theater?

He pronounced it as our great-grandmother might have,
thee-ah-tuh.
"That was the only thing that mattered to Aunt Fate."

We pulled into Arden Terrace. I sat beside him, my heart beating too fast, fear and anticipation and jet lag all crowded into that small car. "How long did you live with her?"

"Two years. Two and a half. I didn't actually live with her, not in her house. She had Luisa and Jadeis for that. They're the health-care professionals." He gave another sharp laugh. "I live at Fairview. I'm, like, the caretaker--Michael and the rest of them, they pay me to stay there and keep it from falling into the ground. Which is a losing fucking proposition, I can tell you. But it's great for me; I can work on my music or whatever, no one hassles me. I never even have to fucking see them. Here we are--"

He slowed in front of the house where I'd grown up. "They shingled it about ten years ago," he said, peering out the side window. "It looked good. Now it looks like it needs some paint. But that's nothing compared to my house. Which looks like the Munsters live there."

The car turned down the long drive to Fairview.

"No kidding," I said.

It didn't look completely derelict, just neglected and sad. Shingles

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were missing, leaving long gaps like rows of rotted teeth. Plywood covered one of the upper windows, and mats of dead wisteria hung like wet carpet from the porch railings. A few lights glimmered downstairs.

"Aunt Kate's place is in better shape," said Rogan as he parked. "She put a lot of money into it."

I stepped out, shivering, and got my bag from the backseat. "What's going to happen to it now?"

Rogan locked the car and waited for me before heading for the front door. "Actually," he said, sounding embarrassed, "she left it to me."

"Really?" I felt a momentary spike of jealousy, then laughed. "But that's great! Her stuff, too? All those things of Madeline's and, well, everything?"

"Yeah. We went through most of it before she died. She wanted to give it to a museum, or a college--I must've called every school in New York. No one was interested. SUNY Purchase took a few things. I gave some of it to the girls who took care of her--nothing you'd want, just some furniture, blankets, and stuff like that. The rest I packed up. I figured you'd want to look at it and maybe take some of it back to England with you."

"Maybe," I said. "I don't have a lot of room. And, you know, I'm not a citizen. Which these days makes it hard. And it's getting expensive. I don't know how long I can really afford to stay there."

We stepped inside. Rogan switched on a light as I rubbed my arms. "Jesus, it's as cold here as outside."

"Yeah, sorry. Here, I'll put the heat on."

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He went into the hall, returning a minute later. "I can't really afford to live here, either." He laughed. "But hey, as long as Michael keeps writing the checks, I'll keep it warm. You hungry?"

I followed him into the kitchen. It was like walking through a haunted house of my own life. Most of the furniture was gone, as well as the worn Turkish carpets and mirrors and ancient theatrical memorabilia.

But enough remained that it was still, recognizably, Rogan's home. Most of the damage seemed to be limited to the house's exterior; the structure was still sound. Rogan showed me where he'd made repairs to the interior walls, replaced some of the old windows with triple-insulated glass, and done a serviceable job of patching a crack in the plaster in the kitchen. There was even a bedraggled Christmas tree in the living room, strung with a few strands of those big, old, multicolored bulbs that are no longer fashionable, and hung with glass ornaments.

"I saved those," he said as we stood and admired the tree. He turned back to the kitchen and began to make coffee and sandwiches from leftover turkey. "After my father went crazy that time and trashed everything. I think that's when my mother finally decided she'd had enough. Not when he was pounding the shit out of me. When he broke all the Christmas decorations."

"Jesus, Rogan."

I sat at the table, still in my coat. He handed me a mug of coffee, turned down the dimmer on the overhead light, and lit a candle in a blue glass holder.

"Hey. I remember that," I said softly. "That was under the porch..."

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He seemed not to hear me. "Forget it. It's history. You want a sweater? It'll warm up soon. Last winter I put in a new furnace. Aunt Fate paid for it; Michael was too cheap. I told him when the pipes burst and he had to put in a new foundation he'd wish he'd popped for a furnace, but he said if that happened he'd just tear the whole fucking place down. He would, too. No one cares about this place but me."

He turned and looked at me. He'd removed his coat and, despite the chill, pushed up the sleeves of his shirt, so that I could see how the hairs on his arms glowed in the candlelight. I reached out and touched his wrist, like mine only bigger, took his hand, and laid mine beside it.

"We could have been twins," I said. "I wonder if it would have been different. If there had been a girl in your family."

"They were wrong about that, too." He stared at our hands, then linked his fingers with mine. "All that stuff about us. All that boatload of guilt. People marry their cousins; it's not even illegal. I know a guy in Bay Ridge, he's married to his cousin. Not that he tells anyone," he added and smiled ruefully. "You want a drink?"

He opened a bottle of wine. We ate our turkey sandwiches, and then Rogan handed me a CD.

"Check this out."

The cover was a black-and-white photo of an empty city street, a figure silhouetted beneath a lamppost.
Rogan Tierney: Sad Songs.
I looked at him. "This is you?" He grinned. "Hey, write what you know."

I turned it over and read the back. "Jesus--Nicky Cox produced

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this? How'd you get him?" I scanned the rest of the names in disbelief. "How'd you get all these guys?"

"You meet a lot of people at NA meetings in New York. I'll play it for you later. I have a whole little studio upstairs. It's pretty cool."

We finished the wine.

"Is it okay that you do this?" I asked as he set the empty bottle in the sink. "If you're doing that whole Narcotics Anonymous thing?"

"I'm straight, not necessarily sober. But I don't do it much." He shrugged, poured us each a tumbler of Irish Mist, then gazed at the bottle. "This was my father's."

He took his drink and walked to a window overlooking the carriage house, the long sweep of darkness to the Hudson. "He used to drink this stuff after dinner every night. After the cocktails, I mean. I found a stockpile of it after I moved in. I'm working my way through it. Not at his rate, though."

I walked over to stand beside him. Outside the night was so clear and black it looked brittle, as though, like ice, it would shatter if you touched it. Stars seemed to stir in the wind. The ridge of trees that bordered the lawn had become so dense and overgrown you could no longer see the lights of the houses below.

Only in the uppermost window of Aunt Kate's carriage house did a single light glow, pale yellow, and cast a bright lozenge onto the ground.

"You kept it on." I began to cry. "After everything, you were the one--"

"Maddy." He turned and put his arms around me and drew me close. "Don't cry, baby, please don't cry..."

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He kissed me. He smelled as he always had, of smoke and sweat, his mouth bitter with nicotine. I could feel the wind through the cracks in the walls, and then a slow shifting, as though the entire house moved around us. Behind my closed eyes it all began to take shape again, the carpets in their muted colors unfurling across the wooden floors, white lace curtains at the windows, wisteria blooming on the porch outside, and the echo of footsteps on the stairs above.

"Maddy."

I blinked. There were no curtains at the window, and only worn linoleum underfoot. The kitchen smelled of fuel oil and cigarette smoke.

But Rogan's head rested against mine, and Rogan's voice whispered as he grabbed my hand and stepped away from me.

"Come here," he said. "Upstairs. I want to show you something."

He picked up the candle in its blue glass and walked out of the kitchen, through the hall and into the foyer, and up the curving stairway. I held his hand and hurried after him. On the second-floor landing I peered into a room where a computer blinked on a long trestle table, surrounded by speakers and coils of wire.

"That's the studio," said Rogan. He started up the steps to the third floor. "But that's still not it."

I said nothing, just shivered and followed him. The unsteady candlelight made the dark space seem even colder than the rest of the house. When we reached the third floor, Rogan stopped.

"Close your eyes."

I rubbed my arms. "Do I have to? I can't see anything."

"Yeah. You do. Wait right there."

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I flinched as he let go of my hand and stepped away, then shut my eyes. I didn't feel like I had downstairs, when the entire house seemed to knit itself around me. Just cold and a growing unease that was close to dread. I thought of when I had last stood here; of Rogan crouched against the wall and his father shouting at me.

Get out of here, you get out of here...

"Come here." I started as Rogan took me by the shoulders. "Keep your eyes closed. It's okay, I won't let you fall. Come here, but don't look until I tell you."

I took tiny baby steps as he led me across the landing, past the door to Michael's bedroom, and into his own.

"Can I open them?" I knew I sounded anxious and drunk, but I didn't care. "Rogan?"

"Hang on, just a sec--"

He stepped away. For a moment I stood alone, fighting the urge to open my eyes, to bolt. Then Rogan was beside me. His arm settled around my shoulders.

"Okay," he said. "You can look."

I opened my eyes and blinked, staring first at the ceiling, then the floor as I tried to get my bearings.

The room was empty. No books, no bed, no rugs, no drapes; no furniture save a makeshift table made of a sheet of plywood on top of a small desk. At its edge glowed a half circle of candles in colored glasses, cobalt and red and green.

"I know it's late," said Rogan. "But Merry Christmas."

I blinked, unsure what I was looking at.

And then I saw.

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It was the toy theater, the fairy stage and proscenium we had shared thirty-odd years before. Only it was no longer a thing of light and shadow but a real theater, torn cardboard and paper carefully reassembled, the broken struts and floor repaired, clumsily in spots, with tape and glue and what looked like dirty plaster. The proscenium arch had been so badly damaged that only a small part of it remained, a fragile gilt arc within a crumpled span of tinfoil etched painstakingly with ballpoint ink in the same design that had been on the original. Crepe paper and a ragged fringe of orange silk replaced the curtains. The topiary trees and snow-capped mountains were a pastiche of torn paper and pictures cut from magazines. The scrim was a piece of mosquito netting, painted with a glowing silver moon and the spidery prongs of a broken mast.

"Rogan." It hurt to speak. I stepped toward the table and knelt. "It's--there are people."

And there were. Dozens of figures, each no bigger than my finger, their heads clipped from old photographs and mounted onto stiff paper and cardboard. There were my parents, heads affixed to the gowns of a king and queen; there was Uncle Richard, incongruously smiling above a hunchback's torso, and Aunt Pat in her wedding gown but with a donkey's long muzzle. There was smiling Mr. Sullivan from the St. Brendan's yearbook, his hands raised like a football referee's. There were my sisters, garbed like princesses or stepsisters or shopgirls; and Rogan's brothers, with monkey's tails or Grecian robes. There were all our friends from
Twelfth Night:
dizzy Sir Toby and dopey Duncan Moss; Maria and Fabian and Malvolio; Orsino and Olivia and Sir Andrew Aguecheek.

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And there was Aunt Kate, suspended above the stage by a piece of fishing line, with two sets of wings, a swan's and a bat's. And there was me.

I stood beneath Aunt Kate in my yearbook snapshot, costumed as Viola. But my head had been replaced, so carefully that only I would know that the little figure brandishing her wooden sword didn't bear my fifteen-year-old face, but the delicately made-up features I bore in my
Playbill
photo for
The Good Person of Szechuan;
the adult Viola I had never played.

"Rogan," I whispered.

I stretched out my hand to touch his image. It stood center stage, slightly in front of mine; a Polaroid retouched with ink. He wore the Pierrot's costume from
Twelfth Night,
his head thrown back and eyes closed with the same rapturous expression he had then.

But this photo was new--it might have been taken that day--and when I touched it, I could feel that it was still slightly damp, as though the glue had not yet dried.

Rogan lowered his head to kiss me.