The Seduction of Water (15 page)

“The whole summer!” I realize my surprise might sound ungracious. “I mean, how will you conduct your business while you’re up here?”

“Oh, the wonders of the Internet,” she says gesturing toward a thin silver laptop lying on one of the rocking chairs, “and FedEx. I’ll probably go down to the city for a few days every other week or so, but for the most part, you won’t be able to get rid of me.”

After my talk with Hedda, I walk up the main central stairs, even though it’s six flights up to my attic room. I am eager, I suppose, to put space between Hedda Wolfe and myself. I’ve never deliberately concealed anything from my aunt before and the fact that I am collaborating with a woman she hates makes it worse. As I climb the stairs, though, I feel better and not, I realize, because I am leaving Hedda Wolfe behind but because I feel as if I’m leaving myself behind—or at least that part of myself that would deceive my aunt for material gain. It’s what I have to do, I tell myself, feeling lighter with every flight as the view through the arched windows on each landing grows wider and higher. It’s like climbing into the clouds. The valley below recedes; the curving band of blue river unfurls into the distance. The thick carpets absorb the sound of my steps, and the stealthy glints of the chandeliers wink in the watery afternoon sunlight. Instead of feeling winded by the climb I feel as though I can really breathe for the first time in months. It’s just as my father always said: a good hotel allows its guests to become their best selves.

On the fifth floor the main staircase ends and I have to walk to the south end of the hall to a door leading to the narrow attic steps. I notice along the way that the hall carpets have been replaced—instead of the old threadbare flowered ones there are cream and purple runners bearing the Crown logo. The walls have been repainted a glossy cream with lavender trim. It’s a bit like being inside a candy box.

I peer into an open room that’s being cleaned by a maid and notice with relief that the renovations haven’t extended that far yet. My mother’s choice of color scheme—forest green and white—has faded but still looks good in the muted carpets and faded silk curtains. And when I head up the attic stairs I see that nothing has been changed up here at all.

Most of the rooms I pass haven’t been occupied since the new servants’ quarters were built in the early 1950s. Over the years the rooms have become a repository of broken furniture—too good to throw out, though, my aunt would insist—holiday decorations, and the things that guests have left behind. “You never know when they’ll realize they’re missing something and expect you to have it. And send it free of shipping charge, no doubt!”

When I was little I loved to go through the boxes of things—amazed that people could be so careless as to leave such treasure. Silk nightgowns and robes were the most commonly forgotten items because, my mother once explained, guests hung them on the bathroom hooks and forgot to check the back of the door when they were packing. But there were also shoes and books and tennis racquets and paint boxes and diaries and shawls and ropes and ropes of cheap paste pearls in every color imaginable, which sometimes my mother would wear. On her they always looked real.

It’s obvious that no one has bothered to go through the hoard in years. Boxes of long-discarded loot—the detritus of half a century of summer holidays—line the floors of each room. Until I get to the last room on the west side of the corridor, my old room.

Someone has gone to the trouble to clean and neaten my old room. The scarred and ringed surfaces of the night table and bureaus have been rubbed free of dust, and there’s fresh linen on the four-poster bed. I touch the carved sun and moon on the headboard and I can almost hear my mother’s voice beginning her story:
. . . In a land between the sun and the moon . . .
My luggage is neatly stacked on the trunk at the foot of my bed and a single red rose rests in a water glass on my night table. Aidan. I feel a rush of embarrassment to think of him entering this little room, its starkness saying more about me than I would like.

I go to the window and move the lace curtains aside to look out at the gardens. I can spot new arrivals from here—and possibly Aidan if he’s still working in the garden. The driveway is empty, but I do see Joseph sitting inside the archway of the summerhouse—Brier Rose—where Aidan and I stood a little earlier. It’s a sign of age, I think, to see Joseph sitting anywhere instead of trimming, or mulching, or digging—fussing over his garden in some way. Then I notice that he’s not alone. The person sitting on the opposite ledge is obscured by a spray of roses. I try for another angle, so curious am I to identify Joseph’s companion. It’s something about being under that
chuppa
together, I think, that suggests intimacy, which is no doubt why it annoyed Joseph to see me and Aidan standing under its arch. But maybe that’s who it is—Aidan, sitting while Joseph gives him his next instructions.

When I finally find the right angle, though, I see it’s not Aidan. I recognize her by her blue silk scarf. It’s Hedda Wolfe. While I watch she gets up to leave and Joseph stands, framed in the arch, to watch her go. I’m too far away to really tell, but when I watch Joseph pass his red bandanna across his eyes I have the distinct impression he’s brushing away tears.

Chapter Fifteen

THE BROKEN PEARL

It wasn’t long after I went to the Palace of the Stars that I saw the net of tears on that woman’s throat, the emerald tear hanging between her breasts.

It should not have made me angry. I was used to the carelessness of these women—the way they dropped their clothes where they stood, like a skin they had shed and had no more use for. Their jewels they left in heaps too, earrings placed on bedside tables where a careless hand in the night brushed them to the floor, diamond rings resting in soap dishes and pearls draping the mirror frames. Let them lose any one of these precious baubles, though, and they knew who to blame: the selkie women who cleaned their rooms.

The net of tears was just another glittering bauble to her—something to match a new green gown, to draw the men’s eyes to her breasts, and, at the end of the night, a handful of stones strewn across her dressing table among coins and soiled handkerchiefs. I could have gathered it up in my dustcloth and stuck it in my pocket—the diamonds and pearls so lightly woven they weighed hardly more than a handful of sand. I should have taken it then and run—gone to the river and thrown the stones in the deepest water—but instead I told Naoise what I had seen. And Naoise began to plan.

I checked the boxes in the attic, but I didn’t have much time in the next few weeks to look further for my mother’s manuscript. I had forgotten what it was like, running the hotel at the height of the summer season—or maybe it was just that we’d never had a season like this before. Harry Kron had outdone himself. In addition to the former guests whom he invited back, his name and reputation drew a wealthy and artistic clientele unlike anything the Hotel Equinox had ever seen. Oh, we’d always had artists, but in the recent past we had drawn the marginal, the struggling, the has-been. Now the registration book was full of names I recognized from the
Times
arts pages—musicians and theater people, architects and painters, writers whose work I admired and their editors and agents. It would have been a great way of making connections if I could ever have a conversation with one of them about something other than their hot-water pressure or the lack of TVs and mini bars in their rooms.

“The next one who asks me how to get to the indoor pool I’m going to send to the Holiday Inn in Kingston,” I tell Aidan on a hot, flawless day in June. I’m standing behind the registration desk checking the book for today’s arrivals. Aidan is sitting on a swivel chair midway between me and the back office where Janine is answering the phones. I notice that whenever the phones quiet for a moment Janine steals a look at Aidan and then turns nervously back to her phones to stab at the glowing buttons. I can only hope she doesn’t cut off anyone too important. The new phone system has been a challenge to her and I’ve had to plead her case to Harry Kron several times. “Look at this weather!” I say to Aidan, trying to draw him away from distracting Janine. “Why would anyone want an indoor pool on a day like this? What’s wrong with the lake?”

“Snakes,” Aidan says, “and mud. Not a very appealing combination. Have you not been down to the lake recently?”

“I’ve hardly made it out to the terrace,” I tell him. Between attending to guests’ needs and settling staff disputes I’ve hardly had a minute to myself since I arrived. I remember how effortless my father made the job look—he never seemed to be in a hurry. And my mother could soothe the most demanding guests. But then there were two of them and only one of me.

“We’ve never had a problem with snakes before and mud . . . well, what do they expect to be at the bottom of a lake—shag carpeting?”

“It’s the drought,” Aidan tells me. “The water level’s down so the shore’s muddy and the water is warmer and shallower—just the thing for snakes.”

“I’ll talk to Mr. Kron about bringing in sand to make a bathing beach—my mother always wanted to do that but we never had the money—but I don’t think there’s anything he can do about the lack of rain.”

“No? Are you sure?”

I make a face at Aidan. His attitude toward Harry Kron often borders on the insolent. I’ve seen him standing behind the new owner mimicking his instructions to the staff. He’s gotten two maids in trouble for giggling during staff meetings, including Mrs. Rivera who can ill afford to lose another job. I’ve seen Harry studying Aidan and I know that all he has to do is check his application file to see he’s on parole. I expect, daily, for Harry to call me in to ask why I’ve hired an ex-con, and each day Aidan’s demeanor makes it harder for me to think of an answer.

“Aidan, please,” I whisper, bending down toward him, “he’s the owner. Everything depends on his being happy with the way the hotel is run this summer. And think of your own position here.”

I look behind me to see if Janine is listening, but all the buttons on her console have lit up at once and she’s busy navigating the maze of flashing lights.

“You don’t want to do anything to risk your parole.”

Aidan tilts his head back and smiles up at me. I notice that a curl of dark hair clings damply to his collar, and it makes me aware of how hot and sticky I am in my panty hose (Sophie insists bare legs are unprofessional). Usually our altitude makes air-conditioning unnecessary but this summer is freakishly hot.

“Hey,” he says, as if reading my thoughts, “I’m on break in an hour. What about a swim?”

“I have way too much work to do . . .”

“I think it’s your managerial duty to personally check out the lake situation and set an example by swimming in it.”

“I don’t know—if there are really snakes . . .”

Aidan holds up his thumb and forefinger and pinches them together. “Ah, they’re wee snakes and they don’t like people. I will personally serve as your bodyguard and, St. Patrick–like, banish the snakes from Tirra Glynn.”

I smile. It’s my mother’s name for the grove of pine trees surrounding the lake that does it. That and the thought of cool water . . . but still, snakes . . .

“Or we could go to the swimming hole,” Aidan says. “That’s where the lowly staff members slink off to.”

“The pool at the base of the falls?”

“That’s the one. After dark it’s bathing suits optional, but my favorite time is just at dusk.”

I wonder whom Aidan has been going to the pool with.

“All right,” I say, looking at my watch and rechecking the registration book. “I’ll meet you on the path at five—by the first summerhouse.”

“The one called Evening Star?”

“Yes, that one.”

I’m late meeting Aidan because there’s a flurry of late-afternoon arrivals and a crisis in the kitchen involving a shipment of leeks spoiled by the heat and the new chef who refuses to substitute onion in the vichyssoise, which means all the menus for tonight’s dinner have to be reprinted. I’m afraid he’s gone on without me when I come around a curve and see the path in front of Evening Star deserted, but then I notice the tips of someone’s black Converse high-tops sticking up above the bench inside the summerhouse. Aidan is slouched down inside, smoking a cigarette, studying the view of the valley.

“Why do they call this one Evening Star?” he asks before I think he’s even heard me come up behind. I remember that day at the train station when he heard the train coming before me.

I sit on the bench opposite him and look up at the ceiling and Aidan looks up too. Most of the summerhouses have ceilings made of rough cedar shakes, but this one has a dome of smooth curved planks that Joseph has fitted together so skillfully you can’t make out the seams. The carvings have faded over time but I can just make out a man with a club, cloaked in some sort of skin, reaching into the mouth of a large serpent and pulling out a round orb that is already breaking up into a stream of stars, which spills past various sea creatures until it reaches a slender woman, kneeling by the shore, who scoops up the stars into a slender amphora.

“Joseph dreamed all this up?”

I shake my head. “My mother drew the pictures, Joseph carved them.”

“I didn’t know your mother was an artist as well as a writer.”

“She didn’t think much of her drawing. She just did it, she said, to help picture things in her book. This,” I say pointing to the roof of the summerhouse, “is what the ceiling looks like in the Palace of the Stars. That’s where Deirdre, her heroine, starts out in the first book. The painting on the ceiling is supposed to tell the story of how Connachar stole the pearl from the serpent, how it shattered and then a selkie gathered the pieces together to make the net of tears for her daughter.”

“And she got Joseph to make all these little houses to go along with places in her book.”

“It sounds silly, I know.”

“No, it’s better than Disneyland. C’mon.” Aidan springs to his feet and takes my hand. “I want the grand tour of the magic kingdom.”

I laugh; but really, he’s right. This was my mother’s magic kingdom—a world she invented out of her dreams—a feat of pure imagination that I’ve always envied and felt that my own earthbound prose could never approach. I would often come upon her in one of the gazebos, jotting notes on a piece of paper or just staring into space. Sometimes if I asked her what she was doing she would tell me a piece of the story she was trying to write, but as I grew older and the third book in her trilogy failed to appear, she would wave me away when I came upon her, telling me I should go back to the hotel and offer to help in the kitchen or the laundry room. That last summer I often came upon her like that, distracted and wanting to be alone.

I notice that Aidan is staring at me—and that he still has a hold of my hand.

“You’re thinking about your mother, aren’t you?”

“I was thinking how much I wanted to do what she did—to create my own world. It was like nothing could really touch her because she could always slip away into a world where she made all the rules and everything had to turn out the way she said. And then when she went away I thought for a long time that that’s where she’d gone. Like she never really belonged with us in this world and she’d gone back to where she really belonged. I started making up my own stories then.”

“Ah, so that’s how you became a writer. You made up stories about your mother coming back?”

“No,” I say, looking out over the valley. The sky above the eastern ridge has turned a deeper blue and one star has risen above the horizon—another reason for this summerhouse’s name. “I made up stories about a girl who lived in the woods with wild animals. As far as I remember there’s never any mention of a mother in them.”

I show Aidan Half Moon and Castle. Then the trail turns west, away from the ridge, and plunges downhill into a forest of white pine and mountain laurel that is just beginning to bloom. Their scent reminds me of the lilacs Jack brought me more than a month ago and I wonder if there’s mountain laurel where he is and whether it reminds him of that night. Jack calls every weekend, but there’s no phone in his cabin at the artists’ retreat so I can’t call him and I’ve begun to think of him as beyond my reach. The rules of the artists’ colony (no talking between the hours of nine and four, no phone calls, no Internet hookup) are like some harsh and arbitrary spell he’s been placed under. He might as well be on the moon.

The stream follows the path here, past the summerhouses called Floating Mountain and Sunset, down into the Clove, where it turns into the falls. One path breaks off and goes to the lake; the other, narrower, more overgrown, circles down to the pool at the foot of the falls. We stop here and look toward the lake, which I can just make out as a slightly more yellowish smudge of green beyond the darker pines. I hear voices, some children splashing in the shallows, and spy a couple stretched out on the rocks by the shore—a newspaper reporter and his wife, whom I suspect are writing a feature for the travel section. Guests. Although the staff is allowed to swim in the lake, Aidan and I both hesitate with that instinctive avoidance of encountering paying guests in our time off. Who knows what complaint or request for service they might make? To our right I can hear the steady murmur of falling water and turn toward that.

The woods are so thick here that you can’t see the pool until you’re almost upon it. The color of the water too, is the same black-green as the moss-covered rocks, so dark the pool has always seemed to me to be underground, like the underground lake in the story of the twelve dancing princesses. When I was little I always imagined that if you dived down deep enough you might find an underground cavern as sparkling and magical as the island pavilion where the princesses danced their shoes to shreds every night, but whenever I dived into the pool I would be too frightened to open my eyes under the water.

Aidan’s already stripped down to his swimming trunks. He’s so slim and white he might be a birch sapling in these dark woods. I kick my sneakers off and pull my T-shirt dress over my head. The shade here is so deep that even today’s heat (a record, Joseph told me earlier) hasn’t penetrated and I shiver when the air hits my sweat-damp skin. Aidan is gingerly toeing the water at the edge of the pool, but I know better than that. I scramble up the highest rock and stand at the farthest edge, pausing only a moment to stare into that bottomless green before diving straight down into the pool.

The cold water is like a blade neatly paring off my hot, tired flesh like an apple peel. This is how my mother taught me to enter the pool. Any other way, she said, was just slow torture. I often used to wonder, though, if slow torture was really any worse than quick torture. Today, when I break the surface of the water, gasping for air, and meet Aidan’s admiring gaze—he’s still on the edge of the pool—I’m glad my mother taught me to be brave.

“Well, what are you waiting for?” I ask, trying to keep my chattering teeth from giving me away. “The water’s fine.”

After our swim I show Aidan the last of the summerhouses, the double-decker gazebo called Two Moons. It’s right below the falls, on the edge of the forest, but because it’s completely covered by a rapacious wisteria vine very few people know it’s there. It looks like an overgrown bush or a shaggy mammoth downed in the last ice age. The rock it stands on—all of the summerhouses are staked into rock with iron rods—is smooth and highly polished, engraved with small crescent moons—chatter marks left by a glacier some fourteen thousand years ago. I find the steps and hold back a curtain of vines, gesturing with my hand for Aidan to go ahead.