Land of Dreams: A Novel (5 page)

“Hello, stranger,” he said. I smiled, but it went so wide that it turned into a small laugh. I knew he thought my shining from the inside out was because of him, so I blurted out, “I’ve just sold a painting!”

“Well, congratulations—these are for you,” he said, handing me the flowers.

We celebrated my achievement with a walk in the park with Tom, a glass of champagne at The Plaza, taking the baby carriage into the Oak Bar, which was such a gloriously decadent act that even the staff were not sure how to react. By the time they decided children were not appropriate customers, Tom had started crying and we had agreed to move on.

Charles came back to the apartment and didn’t leave.

That first night we made love as easily and as freely as if the intervening years separating us had never happened. There seemed no reason to question what was happening. Charles loved me still and had come in search of me. (I had not been hard to find—one call to the house in Yonkers and he had my address.) His life was as settled as it would ever be; his ex-wife was remarried, and his son Leo was living with him as much as his erratic life as a union activist (and communist agitator!) allowed—but most of the time Leo resided with Charles’s brother and his family upstate. The terrible grief and confusion I had felt after my husband’s death had gone and had been replaced by the maturity and certainty of motherhood.

After we made love I lay with my head on Charles’s chest and wondered how my life—my simple life as an unmarried mother and professional artist—would accommodate him. Was this a good idea, allowing Charles back into my life? This force of nature of a man? Would he take over? However, thinking of such things seemed humdrum after the great celebration we had enjoyed that day.

He kissed the top of my head, gently cupped his hands around my naked breasts and said, “So, selling paintings to the great industrialist elite, eh? What would my union buddies think of that, eh?”—and I turned to him willingly.

After all, what was the sense in thinking things through, when living in the moment felt so good?

Charles had wanted to get married, but I was uncertain. First because I had already been married. John had been dead for only two years and I still felt as though he was my husband. As a seventeen-year-old girl I had been desperate to marry John, to consummate our love. We had eloped to Dublin on the train and breakfasted at Bewley’s afterward on coffee and sweet cake. That was my wedding day. I had no need or desire for another. Charles and I had consummated our passions already. What was the point of entering into a legal formality, especially for two people—communist and artist—who had little truck with conventional society?

In my heart perhaps, deep in my heart (with hindsight), I had not wanted to tie myself to him in that way. I might never have done so if I had not met Leo.

Charles brought him to tea at the apartment.

Leo was tall for his age, coming up to my shoulder. A slim, elegantly formed child—but no scrawny waif—and as beautiful as a girl from an Irish ballad, with full lips as “red as a rose” and blue eyes rimmed with lashes “as black as coal.” He shook my hand and his eyes looked downward. He sat, only at his father’s instruction, on the low settee in my living room. His back was straight and his small, smooth hands were folded tightly on his lap, and his cheeks pinked as I spoke to him.

“Would you like some cake, Leo?”

He looked at his father, uncertain how to answer me, unclear who this strange woman was and what this invitation to tea meant.

Although I had never met the child before that afternoon, Leo’s history and mine ran parallel.

I had first met his father in New York when I was a young woman and, despite the fact that I was already married to John, he had turned my head. A few months after my return to Ireland I read that Charles had married a rich socialite, a woman found for him by his parents—he had been weakened by losing “his Irish colleen” and had married her, I knew, to get back at me.

She had borne him a son, and shortly afterward the marriage had broken down and they had divorced. Leo was raised by a series of nannies until the age of seven, when his mother had remarried and finally abandoned him altogether, placing him entirely, and legally, into Charles’s care. A man could not raise a child alone, especially not a man with such an erratic and adventurous working life as Charles, so Leo passed from nannies to schools, spending his holidays with grandparents and uncles and—only when it suited his father—with Charles himself.

Those first ten years of Leo’s life were the years when John and I had tried, and failed, to start a family. I lost three babies—the first at seven full months. A boy: he had been taken away and buried while I lay howling on the bed. The cure for my grief was to lose another, and another after that, until I knew that God Himself was against me and we gave up trying. I always remembered the first—the day I bore and lost my first son was etched forever into my mind: May 15th, 1927.

It was, by coincidence, that same date ten years later when Charles brought Leo to meet me for the first time. Perhaps that had played a part in the softness in my heart that I felt for him. His perfectly shaped eyebrows were furrowed, as if the worries of the world were on his shoulders. I felt such an urge to mother him. I wanted to lie him down on the cushions and run the back of my hands gently down his cheeks, until his eyes closed and I soothed him off to sleep. In an instinct as immediate and as strong as falling in love, I knew that what I wanted—more than anything—was to be this child’s mother.

Charles and I got married shortly after that, at City Hall, on June 20th, 1937. Leo attended, with Patrick and Maureen Sweeney as witnesses. Bridie walked Tom around the broad blocks outside the large, formal building. She didn’t like Charles and was openly disgusted that I was marrying him. “You know, and I know, you’re marrying him simply to give that child a mother, Ellie.”

“That’s not true, Bridie, not entirely . . .”

“Pff,” she interrupted, waving her bony hands across her substantial bosom. “He won’t thank you for taking on his son! Men are selfish, Ellie—they want all the love for themselves.”

“That’s a terrible thing to say, Bridie. Look at Patrick—he’s a wonderful father.”

“Patrick is an exception,” she said, giving me a glowering look that left me in no doubt what she was thinking.

Yet Charles seemed to be the very definition of an exceptional man. He had turned his back on his parents’ money to work alongside his father’s shipyard laborers; he had eschewed the wealth of his birthright and had worked his way through the Great Depression, negotiating for workers’ rights and setting up unions.

Most people—Bridie being a notable exception—loved him. Men admired him, and women coveted his admiration. He was a good catch.

“You’ll see,” Bridie had said, quite openly in front of Charles, when we emerged from the short legal service. “You mark my words, you’ll see.”

Charles had put his arms around the old lady’s waist and had given her a squeeze. He loved to tease and charm her—and never took her criticisms of him too seriously.

I had always thought it very good-humored and generous of Charles not to take Bridie’s dislike of him to heart. However, that day, on the steps of City Hall, I felt a snap of irritation for the way he was patronizing my old friend with his unwanted affection, as if being old and Irish made her a figure of ridicule and absented her from a valid opinion. I pushed the thought aside, but part of me must have been wondering if Bridie was right.

C
HAPTER
F
OUR

Chico was silent and efficient, as Dan had promised; the back of his head was as impervious and unfriendly as the cold, utilitarian interior of the yellow taxi he was driving. I wished there was a paper or magazine in its spotless empty interior, something to distract my thoughts from Leo. Although I knew from the concentrated stillness of Chico’s posture that he was making as much haste as he could, my heart was pushing itself up into my mouth, urging me to call out at him to go faster—faster! It seemed as if I had entirely lost track of time.

How much time passed after I heard the news before I got on the boat? How long had the boat journey been? I looked at my watch—pointlessly, as it was no more than a piece of plain jewelry to me. It read eight. It might have stopped days, weeks, months ago, and I would not have noticed anyway. The easy pace of life on Fire Island, and my obsession with work, consumed all concept of time for me. We ate when we were hungry, slept when we were tired—in between we worked and read and wandered. I gazed out of the cab window, willing myself away from worrying about Leo. The autumn trees were in full fall color: blazing reds, auburns and golds. These huge displays were undoubtedly New York’s most extraordinary landscape feature, and yet I had never felt drawn to painting them. They were striking and yet—like a woman in church at a wedding wearing an extraordinary feathered hat that draws attention away from the bride—they screamed, “Look at me! Paint me!” and so I decided they were too gaudy and obvious for me to capture on canvas. I was contrary like that. I wouldn’t let anybody tell me what to do. Not even nature.

Sayville, Bohemia, Bay Shore, Babylon, Baldwin—Long Island towns with pretty names and organized, tidy streets bridged the gap between the wild solitude of Fire Island and the frenetic crowding of New York City. All the smart wooden houses were set in manicured gardens, and the shop fronts were pristine and painted—goods piled in neat displays on gingham-covered tables outside the grocery stores, polished apples, jars of homemade pickles piled up into symmetrical towers, brooms and brushes lined up, inviting people to be even tidier, to wipe up every last leaf from the ground. Even the residents themselves, springing along the sidewalks, seemed universally cheerful, apparently delighted to be living in this friendly nirvana, to have hit upon the perfect note between smug mediocrity and ideal happiness. Surely there were weeds and unwashed windows and grubby affairs going on behind the main streets, but we were traveling the road where they put their best face forward.

For all their efforts, these small towns—neither suburb, nor wilderness, nor city—seemed like no-man’s-lands to me, where the inhabitants surely led such unadventurous lives that they had the time to polish apples. They were too similar to the small Irish town where I had grown up. I had never fitted in there; my mother was a snob and my father a failed priest. The only thing I had ever achieved, in the eyes of the townspeople, was marrying their hero, John Hogan. When I returned from America as a young married woman I set up businesses that transformed the town: a typing school, a hair salon, a grocery shop and, latterly, a drapery (the profits from the sale of which I was still enjoying). But I was still, when all was said and done, John Hogan’s wife. I was at best respected and at worst tolerated, because of the man I was married to.

Nobody in that small, ordinary town could possibly come close to understanding the voracious, consuming adoration that I had for my husband. We were childhood sweethearts, but more than that, the very foundation of who I was—any compassion or sweetness I had in me—was fashioned by John’s kind heart, and I knew that. However, my desire for adventure was my own; and for all that I loved him, I defied him. He would have stayed a cripple all his life rather than lose me for one short year to America to earn the money to save him. In the end I stayed in New York for four years—out of sheer pigheadedness, because he refused to join me there and start a new, better life. I returned to Kilmoy eventually and stayed, for John. We lived, happily enough, until his death from a sudden heart attack parted us in 1934, when I returned to my New York.

I had run away in despair after John’s death. It wasn’t poverty that chased me out of Ireland that second time—in fact, I found more poverty during the Great Depression in New York than I had ever experienced at home. It was the small-minded, keeping-up-appearances, pious Catholic neighbors who had chased me away with their judgments on my “airs and graces” and with their snide remarks and cynicism. Although I had been back in America for eight years now, the memory of them had hardened with time. Perhaps, beneath it all, there was that longing for home, yet what protected me from all that I had lost was a shallow disdain for small-town life. That and the snobbery of the freethinking artists and radicals, because, for all our liberal ideals, in our own way we were as snobbish about the bourgeoisie as they were about us.

“Most men lead lives of quiet desperation . . .” was a quote by the philosopher Henry David Thoreau that Charles had used to separate “us and them.”

“Nothing wrong with that,” Bridie had said, the first time I had used it. “Nothing wrong with keeping your mouth shut and getting on with it.”

“. . . and go to the grave with the song still in them” was the second half of the quote. I was determined to sing my song, and for my life to have meaning—to be the best I could be; and now, with my painting, I had found a way to do that.

After Charles and I got married I was as happy as I had ever been in my life, even with John. We lived in the apartment on West 27th and 10th, near Chelsea Park. The neighborhood was rich with a mixture of artists and the colorful New York society of hookers and drinkers that Charles, with his working-class aspirations, loved to hang around with.

It seemed that everything had fallen into place in my life; this was my time—I was sure of it. My second chance, after the pain of John’s death; my reward for enduring the disappointment of not being able to have children.

Charles was so happy, and that made me happy. He was so in love with me that loving him back was easy.

“Do you remember our first kiss?” he asked me on our wedding night.

“Of course I do,” I said. It had been in the crisp dawn chill of a spring morning in 1924, after a glamorous party on his brother’s upstate estate. The air had been laden with the smell of lilac and our bodies heavy with the desire of an illicit, unrequited passion. He had asked me to marry him that night, and a few hours later, before I had the chance to answer him, I was called home to Ireland and to my marriage. That had been fifteen years ago. The intervening years had seen us both married, divorced and widowed—and although we had been lovers for a year, when he kissed me on our wedding night I could see that Charles was carried back to those heady days when we first met. In the sanctity of our married bedroom, with the children asleep in the room next door, he cupped my chin in his hands and said, “You are the most beautiful girl in the world,” as if we were two young lovers again; as if I looked the same to him now as I did then. Every time he kissed me I could feel that it held the same resonance for him as that first kiss. Charles was a good man, and he was deeply in love with me. I did not imagine anything could ever go wrong between us. Added to this, the marriage had undoubtedly been the right thing to do for the boys.