Land of Dreams: A Novel (11 page)

He did not ask how far I was going and, as far as he knew, my journey ended in Chicago.

“Thank you,” and I stood up and shook his hand. “You have made the evening pass very pleasantly.”

His hand was cold and he held mine to kiss it, barely touching it with his lips.

Then he reached into the pocket of his jacket and produced a crumpled card with his name and address printed on it.

“If you ever find yourself in Los Angeles,” he said, “for any reason—any reason at all—you can contact me at this address.” I took the card and he added, “Any time, Eileen. I won’t forget you.”

It was a strange declaration, perhaps made from this old man’s confidence in his own memory or intellect, certainly not with any romantic sentiment attached. But something about his words reminded me of my first husband, John; never forgotten. The feeling of having been so deeply in love as a young girl had faded with time, but the smell of carbolic soap or lavender or freshly chopped mint would bring me back to the fields that I grew up in and to the strong, beautiful boy that I married. John never kissed my hand like a gentleman; he held me around the waist and drew down on me like a departing soldier. I was tired and, with all that had happened that day, my emotions began to rise.

“Thank you—nor I you,” I said. It was a polite lie. Stan had been a distraction, and a generous host, but I had much more important things on my mind and would surely have forgotten him by the morning. I put his card in my purse, then went back to my small cabin, where I slept until dawn.

C
HAPTER
T
EN

As soon as I stepped off the train in Chicago anxiety hit me again like a blast of cold air. I was less than halfway on my journey to find Leo, and yet when I was trapped on the moving train I knew I was powerless. Somehow, having my feet on solid ground made me feel as if I should be doing something. Modern conveniences being what they were, a part of me was itching simply to telephone the Chateau Marmont hotel and speak to Leo directly and check that he was still all right, but my greater instinct told me it would be a bad idea to notify him that I was on my way. It was best for me to wait until I got to Los Angeles, so that I could deal with it all in person. I wanted to see him and was afraid he might take flight again. In the meantime I would have to bide my time and occupy myself as best I could on this interminable journey.

Maureen’s cousin-in-law, Anne, was holding a chalkboard with the LaSalle Street Station logo on it, and EILEEN HOGAN emblazoned across it in the confident hand of a schoolteacher, which I knew her to be.

I was, of course, Eileen Irvington now, but Patrick’s schoolteacher cousin might not have known that; in any case, the Yonkers gang had never really registered the change. To them, I would always have the name they first knew me under, the name of my first husband. I also painted under the name Eileen Hogan; the only time I used Irvington was as a mother to my sons. Charles had hated me using the name Hogan, and even though he had always disliked his own family name, he referred to me as “Mrs. Irvington.”

Anne was a tall and substantial woman in her early fifties, wearing a red blazer, her jet-black hair arranged about her face in severe waves and with just that little bit too much makeup, especially a shade of deep-red lipstick that was smeared somewhat haphazardly across her wide mouth. Just from looking at her, I could easily see how my understated friend Maureen might find her a frightful houseguest. A spinster with a big salary and long teachers’ holidays, Anne would come and stay with them in New York at least once a year (although the Sweeneys had never been back to Chicago) and Maureen always dreaded her visits.

“She’s so bossy . . .” My friend’s complaints about her cousin-in-law came flooding back to me—too late, or I would have objected more heartily to her being contacted.

“I am so pleased to meet you.” Anne grabbed my hand and shook it vigorously, crunching my fingers with her many rings. “Maureen has told me so much about you!”

“It’s very kind of you to meet me like this,” I said.

“Nonsense,” she said, picking up my suitcase as if it were no bigger than an evening purse.

“Had we better put that into the baggage room for the day?” I suggested.

“No need,” she said. “I checked and there is a terrible line—I’ll put it straight in my car, it’s just outside.” And she marched ahead, indicating with an assertive nod for me to follow. From that first instance I knew I was to be taken hostage, and I was right.

She immediately reminded me of the nuns who had educated me at the Jesus and Mary Convent in Ireland. Well meaning but bossy. As we walked through the busy station concourse she parted the sea of men in gray suits and hats going to work, with her surefooted stride, and I followed behind her, like an obedient schoolgirl.

Anne had our day all mapped out with military precision and she was determined to give me a guided tour of Chicago. Breakfast (which I had already eaten on the train) was at Lou Mitchell’s, a very nice family bakery on Jackson. The owner flirted a little with Anne—or rather she construed that he was flirting, becoming somewhat girlish and coy as he took our order: coffee for me and flapjacks for my hostess.

I was relieved to see that Anne’s desire to impress me with her life in Chicago usurped any interest she might have had in asking about my life. She asked me no questions about myself, as if she had already garnered all the information she needed from Maureen. She knew I was an artist, twice widowed and was traveling to Los Angeles—Maureen, God bless her, had obviously not revealed why, and perhaps it was the misguided belief that I was a tourist that had led to Anne’s sightseeing schedule. When we were finished at Lou’s she intended to take me on a tour of the city, including a trip to the Art Institute of Chicago, followed by lunch at her house, tea with a neighbor of hers, an early dinner in town, before she dropped me back to the train in time for its 10:15 p.m. departure.

However, for all her frightening bustle, I noticed that my hostess was considerably more groomed than I was. I had bathed on the train, but had not washed my hair, and was badly in need of a trip to the hair salon. Working on Fire Island for the past few months, I had let my hair grow long and never bothered with makeup. Now that I was back in the “civilized world” I was self-consciously aware that I needed to smarten myself up, especially if I was going to have to deal with people I didn’t know in Los Angeles. I needed to prepare myself.

“That all sounds wonderful,” I said, “but I wonder if it might be possible to fit in a trip to the hair salon?”

She looked at me, incredulous at my cheek in interfering with her plans.

“Only I didn’t have the chance to go before I left New York, and now—well, I feel so unkempt next to you, Anne.”

She patted her waves proudly and pursed her lips.

“I could take you to my hairdresser,” she said. “Her salon is near my house, but it might mean
not
meeting Mrs. Podmore for tea—which would be a terrible, terrible shame, particularly as she is an artist like you.”

“Oh?” I said, vaguely curious.

“Not for
money
, of course—oh no,
no
—she is
married
to a
doctor.
” Anne paused to let me take in the magnitude of this achievement, then continued. “She works in watercolors mostly—wonderful
wonder-ful
detailed pictures of her garden and her cats, like photographs really.”

“Oh—she sounds very impressive,” I said, imagining just the sort of folksy, flowery fripperies that counted for nothing in the art circles in which I moved. “Perhaps I could meet Mrs. Podmore another time? As you can see, my hair is in need of urgent attention—it’s a real mess.”

She nodded sagely in agreement and I felt a snap of anger, quite disproportionate to the veiled insult.

Anne Sweeney, I decided, was the epitome of what could happen to women when they had never known the love of a man. People pitied women like Anne, and because eyes were on them for never having married, sometimes it could turn them into overbearing spinsters who had to pretend to know everything, because they in fact knew nothing about life, or love, or anything else—including, and
especially
, art!

Maureen was a saint to put up with this obnoxious woman in her house every summer. No wonder she had kept the two of us away from each other previously. I would happily have escaped through the bathroom window in the restaurant, if she hadn’t had my suitcase locked in the trunk of her car!

For the next hour we drove around Chicago while Anne pointed out this building and that, giving me the history of “this great city,” how the Great Chicago Fire in 1871 had destroyed it and how it was rebuilt into the Second City. As she showed me each building—“That was the first skyscraper in America: ten storys high!”—she would repeat salient points of history that she had already described (“1871? The Great Fire? You remember?”), in her bossy schoolteacher manner. I could tell she was longing to ask me to repeat the facts myself to show her that I was paying attention. As a result, I made a point of barely listening. Instead I gazed out at the towering skyline of downtown Chicago and thought how similar it was to New York—hundreds of thousands of people all packed into tall buildings—and I wondered how I could have traveled for such a long time and be in a place that was so similar to the place I had come from.

Walking around the Art Institute was even more of an ordeal because, actually, Anne Sweeney was very knowledgeable—far more so than me—on the subject of Impressionist and post-Impressionist painting. Had I been in better form and had not decided she was so loathsome, I might have found what she was saying fascinating. Instead my own prejudices meant I found her informed manner so insufferably irritating that it ruined for me some of the most inspiring works by Monet and van Gogh.

By the time Anne drove me out to her house for lunch I was paying as little attention to her as possible and, mercifully, she followed my lead and we drove the last part of the journey in silence.

The house was in a quiet neighborhood on the edges of the city, a small two-story row house in red brick with steps up to the front door. Inside it was as tidy and ordered as one would expect from a woman of her type. Anne had prepared us a lunch of cold meats and salads, which was already on the plate and covered in wax paper on a table set with a pretty lace tablecloth, good bone china and napkins. She bustled about, putting the kettle on and fetching milk for the table.

“Do you take sugar?” she asked. “With your lovely slim frame, I doubt that you do!”

She seemed softer, more self-conscious, now that we were in her home, perhaps believing—correctly—that I would judge her by the environs in which she lived.

When we had eaten, Anne showed me around her neat, overtly feminine home. A pink bedroom with a candlewick bedspread and lacy cushions, neatly stocked with cosmetics and decorative bottles of tinctures, and some of Mrs. Podmore’s watercolors along the narrow hallway, which were not as terrible as I had imagined. Although every surface was polished to shining, the house was peculiarly still—as if nothing were ever moved around: a spinster’s mausoleum. Her home was not nearly as large or as well furnished as the Sweeneys’ home in Yonkers, and I made a note to tell Maureen not to be so intimidated by this woman’s puff. I thought of Anne coming from this somewhat atrophied environment into the bustling warmth of the Sweeneys’ family home and could not help but feel slightly sorry for her.

She dropped me at the hair salon, where I spent the rest of the afternoon being gloriously pampered, having my hair washed, trimmed and set, as I read copies of
Vanity Fair
and
Vogue
. It was a welcome escape from everyone and everything that was troubling me.

Anne collected me, utterly refreshed, in time for supper in a small Italian restaurant near the station, where we had an excellent meal. I was so caught up with my new hair and gleaming nails that Anne’s “expert” blathering about her knowledge of Italy specifically, and Europe in general, hardly bothered me.

She drove me back to the train station, and as we were getting my case out of the trunk she suddenly turned to me and said, “I hope everything works out in Los Angeles, Ellie. Maureen told me about your son. You must be so worried.” I was completely taken aback, but before I could respond she added, “I lost a child once. It was a long time ago. I had to give him away. A mistake, you understand? I’m sure—I think—I know something of how you are feeling.”

Her gaudy face was shadowed with pain, and I understood in that moment that she knew something of what I was going through.

“I hope I was able to offer you some . . . distraction from your trouble today.”

I did not know what to say to the woman, so I grabbed both her hands in mine and said, “Thank you, Anne” as warmly and sincerely as I could, although as I walked away from her I knew it wasn’t nearly enough.

How harshly I had judged her, and how wrong I had been.

As I boarded the train I thought how true it was that you could never know a person, and I felt guilty for my own petty judgments and for having let the opportunity for warmth and friendship pass me by when, perhaps, I needed it most.

C
HAPTER
E
LEVEN

I arrived in Los Angeles at five in the afternoon two days later.

It was warmer than New York or Chicago, but not markedly so. Although Union Station was busy, nobody seemed in any particular rush. A porter sauntered over to me and helped lift my case onto a cart, but seemed happy for me to wheel it myself through the concourse. The main entrance to the station was reminiscent of a cathedral, with ornate wooden ceiling panels and a polished tile floor. On either side of its broad walkway were banks of seating, which, given the churchlike decor, looked immediately like pews, but on closer inspection were revealed as large, rather comfortable and expensive leather chairs, with people sitting in them reading and chatting as if this were one large living room. I thought the whole setup very strange.