The Seduction of Water (28 page)

Operating the microfiche viewer doesn’t help my headache. Scanning through the old newsprint, the words blur into a gray slurry as the film unfurls. It reminds me of the story of Little Sambo—before Little Sambo got p.c.’d out of print—when the tigers race around and around in a circle and turn into butter. I skim through the earliest articles about the robbery and trial because they don’t tell me anything new. It’s only when I get to the appeal that I stop to read more closely. Once Vera Nix’s testimony was discredited, there were several unflattering articles about her. There’s a column on the society page of the
Tribune
criticizing Vera Nix for wearing the Kron family pearls to a coffeehouse in Greenwich Village and a particularly cruel cartoon of her in evening dress, dripping with jewels, reading a copy of
The Daily Worker
with her feet, in fur-tufted mules, resting on the back of a crouching, uniformed maid. I can see why Phoebe is bitter about how her mother was portrayed by the press, but honestly, what surprises me is that there isn’t more. The last article that mentions Vera Nix pointedly denies the rumor that she had been accused in court of setting up the robbery. After that her name disappears from accounts of the trial.

The last article I look up is headlined “Sister Pleads for Leniency in Brother’s Sentencing.” I’d been hoping for a picture of Rose McGlynn, but instead there’s a picture of John McGlynn in a uniform and peaked cap, leaning against a drum emblazoned with the words
ST. CHRISTOPHER’S HOME BAND.
I remember that Elspeth McCrory had mentioned in her article that Rose McGlynn’s younger brothers had been handed over to the Catholic orphanage and surmise that Rose’s plea for leniency featured this sad episode in her brother’s history. I start to read it, but by now I’m so lightheaded I feel as if my brain, like Sambo’s tigers, is turning into butter. I decide to copy this one and take it with me to the Greek diner across the street.

Passing back through the lobby, I find myself pausing over the black-and-white photographs of generations of young Irish police officers in the display case, perhaps because they remind me of that last picture of John McGlynn. It’s funny, I think, how the Irish seem to be cropping up everywhere in my life just now. I’ve never thought much of my mother’s Irish heritage—except for the selkie story she told me, she never made much of it herself. She didn’t raise me as a Catholic (except for that one trip to Brooklyn to have me baptized), or speak of her relatives. Once she was gone it was easy, especially with a name like
Greenfeder
, to forget I had any Irish in me at all.

At the diner I order a BLT and iced tea and take out Rose McGlynn’s plea for her brother, which the
Times
had transcribed verbatim.

“Our mother died when John was just fourteen,” she told the court:

and as bad as it was for me, at least I was old enough to take care of myself. John and my two younger brothers, Allen and Arden, still needed a mother. My father was not able to care for them. He was that broke up about my mother’s death that though he’d never taken a drop before the day she died he soon took to drinking. There’d been hard feelings between my mother’s family and him so none of them would take on three young boys to raise. My father’s sisters said they would have me, but not the younger ones. I wish now I’d thought of some way to keep them with me, but I could barely take care of myself. Still, I blame myself. It’s a pitiful thing to have a family separated like we were.

I’ll never forget the day we took them to St. Christopher’s. Mind you, the Dominican sisters were kind and the monsignor himself came to speak to my father and me in the chapel. He said many a family had left their sons to St. Christopher’s during the hard times when they could not care for them themselves. He said it was nothing to feel ashamed of, but when we left the boys there, in that great cold building without a soul who knew them, I felt as if we’d dropped them off the edge of a pier—like they do to kittens. My father would never look me in the eye from that day on and my brothers, well, I visited with them every Sunday. They looked well enough—they were probably eating better than they had at home—but there was always something missing in their eyes. And when it was time to leave, the younger ones, Allen and Arden, would cry and hang on to my legs. Not John, though. You could tell he tried to keep a brave face for the sake of the younger ones and it’s that would break my heart even more. He was so young, but he’d grown into an old man in that place. He’d even developed a curve in his back, which the nuns said came from poor nutrition as a baby.

Then Arden died. He’d had polio as a baby and had never been strong and they said he died of pneumonia. I could tell John blamed himself for that. Now, I’m not saying St. Christopher’s didn’t do all they could for him, but when John got out it was like there was a piece of him missing. I tried to do what I could. I got him a job at the hotel—Mr. Kron, the owner, was very kind about hiring him—but now I wish I’d never gotten him the job. He’d had nothing for so long, he shouldn’t have been around people who had so much. I don’t know if he took Mrs. Nix’s jewelry or not, but I know he’d never hurt anyone. Maybe the safe was left open and he couldn’t help himself. Maybe Mrs. Nix said something to him about his selling the jewelry for her and he misunderstood. I don’t know. But I do know that my brother’s a good man, that he’s been a good brother to me and to our two younger brothers, and that he’s never had much luck. So I’m here to ask you respectfully to go easy on him, to remember he’s a boy who lost his mother young and who deserves better than what this world’s had to offer him so far.

Rose McGlynn made her appeal in May 1949 at her brother’s retrial. The judge said in his sentencing that he’d considered the defendant’s unfortunate family history, but that he didn’t regard it as an excuse for criminal behavior. “Miss McGlynn herself is an argument against such excuses. She lost her mother at a tender age and had to leave her high school at St. Mary Star of the Sea before graduating, and yet she has, through perseverance and keeping to the straight and narrow, lifted herself out of poverty to a position of responsibility and trust at the Crown Hotel. If she could do it, why couldn’t her brother?”

I imagine how bitter the judge’s verdict must have been to Rose McGlynn. To have her success held up as proof of her brother’s culpability must have been galling. No wonder she decided to leave the city. Then I remember too Harry’s suggestion that Rose gave her brother the combination to the safe. If that were really true, her guilt must have been unbearable. No wonder she ended up throwing herself in front of a train after seeing her brother in prison that last time.

I read back over the newspaper story until I get to the judge’s verdict—the spot where he talks about Rose McGlynn dropping out of her high school, St. Mary Star of the Sea. It’s the same name as the church where I was baptized. My mother told me that she took me there because it was where she was baptized, but she’d never mentioned that it was also the name of a Catholic girls’ school; it must be where she went to school, though, along with Rose McGlynn. Rose McGlynn and my mother must have been friends since they were children, which meant that my mother had known John McGlynn all those years as well. She must have watched the McGlynn family fall apart, the boys put in an orphanage, their sister vainly trying to keep them from sinking into a life of crime. The story is not only pitiable, it’s familiar. I recognize it from my mother’s fantasy world, which she called Tirra Glynn, and the story of Naoise who stole the net of tears from the evil king Connachar and was banished to a fortress on the banks of the drowned river. When Deirdre visits Naoise at the prison and she sees the other selkies shedding their skins in the river some of them are ripped apart by the current, just as Rose McGlynn’s body was crushed by an oncoming train.

My mother must have felt like she was the sole survivor of some awful tempest. In the book Deirdre makes her way to the Palace of the Two Moons, clad in a green dress woven of the pollen that falls on her in the forest. My mother too made her way to the Hotel Equinox carrying her secrets . . . and what else?

I tap my finger on the name of the school. St. Mary Star of the Sea. The net of tears. I remember Gordon’s slide lecture, the fifteenth-century portrait of the Virgin Mary, seated on a rock by the sea, crowned with a diamond-and-pearl wreath that looked just like the necklace described in my mother’s books. What if the necklace—what had Gordon called it? A
ferronière
?—what if it had survived the war and somehow ended up in Vera Nix’s possession? I think back to Gordon’s lecture and remember him mentioning the possibility that the
ferronière
had been hidden by a descendant of the della Rosas. I also remember that according to Harry, Peter Kron had hidden out in an Italian villa after escaping from a POW camp. If he stole the
ferronière
and let Vera wear it, it could have been one of the pieces John McGlynn stole. It must not have been with the recovered jewels—Gordon would know if it had been recovered—but maybe John McGlynn, knowing this piece was both especially valuable and that it wouldn’t be listed in the police report, hid it someplace special. And then he told his sister, when she visited him in prison, where it was. Could she have told my mother before throwing herself under the train at Rip Van Winkle?

Those tigers in my brain are slowing down, showing their stripes now, like a carousel on its last revolution. I desperately want to call the number Aidan gave me to tell him what I’ve learned but I know it’s not enough yet. Something’s still missing. And the only place I can think of looking for it is in Brooklyn.

Chapter Twenty-seven

On my way to the subway I buy a five-boroughs map of New York City. Fortunately, it lists churches and I’m able to find St. Mary Star of the Sea on Court Street between Nelson and Luquer in the Carroll Gardens section of Brooklyn. I’m not all that familiar with Brooklyn, mostly because I hate taking subways. I usually tell people that I’m claustrophobic, but the truth is I hate going underground. I’ve even had trouble using some libraries—like the Beinecke at Yale—where the stacks are below ground.

Today, though, my phobia is happily placated by the whir of thoughts revolving inside my brain. Instead of tigers, now, I see Vera Nix in her siren’s green dress, John McGlynn in his St. Christopher’s band uniform, my mother and Peter Kron, and hovering outside this inner circle, Harry Kron. The one face that remains blurry is Rose McGlynn. I take out her plea to the court and reread the part in Rose McGlynn’s story when she visited her brothers at St. Christopher’s.
They looked well enough—they were probably eating better than they had at home—but there was always something missing in their eyes.
And then a little later, she’d said of John,
He was so young, but he’d grown into an old man in that place. He’d even developed a curve in his back, which the nuns said came from poor nutrition as a baby.

Concentrating on the small faded print in the swaying train has made me nauseous. I close my eyes and find that a new figure has joined the carousel in my mind: a grotesque half man/half swan with cold black eyes. It’s a creature from my mother’s books, one of the men who turn into winged creatures. The transformation from man to beast, as my mother described it, is painful. Their emerging wings break their backs, and their eyes grow cold. I remember a single line from my mother’s second book.
But when Naoise turned to me I saw in his eyes that the animal growing inside him had already taken over.

I shiver despite the suffocating heat in the train. If my mother had known John and Rose McGlynn when they were growing up she would have seen this transformation. She not only saw John turn into a hardened criminal, she also saw his sister kill herself, saw her step off the platform, her worn suitcase left behind like a used skin, to be crushed by the oncoming train. Decapitated, Harry had said. No wonder my mother got on the northbound train and continued on her journey upstate, to the hotel where she and Rose had planned to look for work. There was nothing left for her back in the city but bad memories. The Hotel Equinox, and my father, must have seemed like an oasis of peace after the horror she had witnessed. But then something had happened, twenty-four years later in the summer of 1973, to reawaken those horrors.

I’m so deep in thought that I almost don’t notice that the train has reached the Carroll Street station. I get out just before the door shuts and then take the stairs two at a time, breathless to get back up into the air. And back into the present. All morning I’ve felt the past tugging at my heels, a tide dragging me out to sea, and now I’ve washed up at the feet of St. Mary Star of the Sea, patron saint of seagoing sailors and shipwrecked castaways. The first thing I notice is that the church is nowhere near the sea. I check my five-boroughs map and see that the closest waterfront is the Red Hook docks. The second thing I notice is that the black iron gates in front of the church are chained and locked.

I look up and down a Court Street becalmed by the late-afternoon sun and then walk up to the corner. West on Luquer, deep shaded yards and plaster devotional statues guard the placid brownstones. The neighborhood feels quiet and private and, like the church, unwilling to give up its secrets. East on Luquer I find the church’s rectory and a bell to ring. A small plaque below the bell reads,
RING ONCE AND THEN PLEASE WAIT PATIENTLY
. I ring once and wait, patiently at first but decreasingly so, for ten minutes. I pace back up to Court Street and notice a coffee shop called Le Trianon directly opposite the church. There are benches outside, shaded by a linden tree, where a couple in neoprene cycling gear sip iced tea while their giant rottweiler laps up water from a bowl chained to the bench. I head there.

Entering the café I feel like I’ve actually found the church, mostly because Michelangelo’s God and Adam are lounging on a bed of clouds and blue sky painted on the ceiling. Everything else about Le Trianon is pretty—the hand-blown light fixtures, crafted to look like tightly furled lilies, the marble tables, and the selection of teas and pastries. Even the man behind the counter, short but muscular and bearing more than a passing resemblance to the painting of Adam on the ceiling, is handsome. I order an iced green tea and cinnamon scone and ask him if the church across the street is always locked up.

“Yeah, since some silver candlesticks were stolen from the altar a few years back. They’re open for Mass at the crack of dawn and once again in the evening at eight-thirty.”

“Damn,” I say, “I came a ways to see it.”

“Did you try ringing at the rectory door?”

“I rang once and waited patiently.”

He laughs. “Those old ladies who work in the office are probably there but they don’t like getting off their fannies. You could try again.”

“Thanks,” I say, taking my iced tea and scone. “By the way, why’s it called St. Mary Star of the Sea? We don’t seem to be anywhere near the sea.”

He points toward the rear of the café to indicate, I gather, the neighborhood to the south and west of us. “A lot of this land was built up over the years. When the church was built a hundred fifty years ago the water came closer and there weren’t so many buildings to block the view.”

“Really? I didn’t realize the church was that old. And has the neighborhood always been Italian?”

“My grandparents moved here just after the war,” he says, “but they said there were still a lot of Irish then. Now we’ve got lawyers and stockbrokers willing to pay a couple thou a month for a studio apartment. You looking to move into the neighborhood?”

“Sounds like I couldn’t afford it. Actually, I think my mother may have gone to school at St. Mary’s. I was baptized at the church.”

“No kidding. Well, look, considering you’re from the old neighborhood, forget trying to raise those old bats in the rectory. Go over to the school and ask for Gloria. Tell her that her nephew Danny sent you and she’ll get someone to show you the church. Plus, she’s got all the records for the school going back to Moses.”

“Thanks, that’s really helpful. Oh, and by the way, I love the ceiling.”

Danny rolls his eyes up to the painted heaven not eight feet above his head. “My brother Vincent, the artist. I’m just the baker. It’s okay if you don’t mind God hanging over your head all day.”

I sit on the bench outside (the cyclers and rottweiler have gone) and watch dismissal from the school while sipping my tea and eating my scone (which is so light and flaky that I wonder who is really the artist in the family—Danny or Vincent?). Children file out the front door in orderly rows that split to the right or the left to mini buses waiting on Nelson and Luquer Streets. I watch mothers in clogs and long Indian skirts and mothers in suits and high heels and some fathers too in paint-splattered overalls or rumpled Brooks Brothers shirts—ties stuffed in shirt pockets—emerging hand in hand with their children. I don’t know what I’d expected of my mother’s old neighborhood, but it wasn’t this pretty suburb, which seems too renovated and gentrified to still hold my mother’s secrets. This is a neighborhood Jack and I could have moved to, I think. He could have found some studio space in the new, burgeoning artists’ neighborhood, DUMBO (for Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass), and we could have renovated a brownstone before the rents skyrocketed.

When the traffic out of the doors slows to a trickle I cross the street and go inside. The secretaries are still in the office, comforting a little boy whose mother is late for pickup while packing up their purses to go. I pick out the oldest-looking woman—who also bears more than a passing resemblance to Danny from Le Trianon Café—and ask if she’s Gloria.

“I was talking to your nephew Danny across the street and he said you might be able to help me look up my mother’s records. I think she went here in the late thirties, early forties. Also, I was kind of hoping to see the church . . .”

Gloria and one of the younger secretaries exchange a look. “Did you try the rectory?” the younger girl asks me.

“I rang once.”

“Is Anthony still here, Tonisha?” Gloria asks. Tonisha nods, already hitting an intercom button on her phone.

“We’ll get you into the church. If you want to look at the records you’ll have to come down to the basement with me and find what you’re looking for yourself. My back can’t take stooping over those files.” In fact when Gloria gets up I see she has a pronounced hump in her back and that she needs a cane to walk.

“If it’s a real inconvenience . . .”

“Nah, do me good to get off my fanny. But it is cold down there . . .” She eyes my thin T-shirt and cotton skirt. “Here, take one of my sweaters.” There are several sweaters hanging from a lopsided coatrack in the corner. The one she picks for me is a hideous shade of acid green trimmed in a muddy pink. When I pull it on the synthetic wool itches and smells vaguely of some kind of lotion. Calamine, I think as I follow Gloria down the basement stairs; the muddy pink trim is the exact color of calamine lotion and the green is the green of poison ivy. Still, I’m grateful for the sweater’s warmth as we descend into the basement. If I thought the neighborhood at street level seemed too antiseptic to hold any traces of the past I should be comforted by the church basement, which looks, and smells, as old as the catacombs. The walls are hewn out of bedrock. The floor appears to be dirt.

Gloria pulls a string suspended from the ceiling and a naked bulb dimly illuminates the cavernous space.

“Wow, it’s huge,” I say, straining my eyes to see into the shadowy corners. I’m startled by what look like ghostly shapes in one recessed apse.

“It goes all the way under the church,” Gloria tells me, and then, pointing to the ghostly throng in the shadows and crossing herself, says, “Those are the ousted saints. You know, the ones the Vatican decided weren’t saints anymore. The church put their statues down here.”

“How does a saint get ousted?” I ask, looking away from the hollow eyes of the marble and bronze figures, which seem to look out with all the piteous eloquence of dogs at the pound.

Gloria shrugs and pulls a wobbly office chair with torn upholstery and one missing caster over to a bank of file cabinets just opposite the niche of deposed saints. “The church decides they weren’t real, like St. Christopher”—she fingers a medal at her throat, which I guess honors the defrocked saint—“or that their miracles weren’t real, like Santa Catalina. What year did you say your mother went here?”

“Well, she was born in 1924 so she would have graduated around 1942.”

Gloria pulls out a drawer and waves me to it. She rolls her chair back, takes a skein of wool out of her cardigan pocket, and begins to knit. I notice it’s the same calamine pink as the trim of the one I’m wearing.

I crouch in front of the metal cabinet, wincing at the pain in my battered knees, and try to read the names that have been handwritten on white labels affixed to dark brown file folders. The folders are so tightly packed—without the benefit of hanging dividers—that every time I move one folder forward the sharp edge of the next folder slices into my cuticles. The spidery handwriting—I imagine a long-dead nun as ghostly and hollow-eyed as the statues whose gazes I feel boring into my bent and aching back—is almost impossible to read. Nor does this particular nun seem to have considered strict alphabetical order, like cleanliness, next to godliness.

“Do the Mc’s come before or after the rest of the M’s?” I ask, lifting my head up from the drawer.

Gloria looks up from her knitting needles which keep moving in her hands, “I have no idea, but if you want to see the church too you’ll have to hurry up. Anthony takes his dinner break at four-thirty.”

I go through all the M’s but don’t find Morrissey or McGlynn.

“What if she dropped out?” I ask. I realize that my mother never actually mentioned graduating, and I know that Rose McGlynn dropped out.

Gloria sighs and, letting the bundle of pink wool sag into her lap, touches her medal. I imagine she’s asking St. Christopher to carry her out of the presence of fools and I also bet that Danny will get an earful tonight. She points a knitting needle in the direction of the deposed saints. “There are some boxes over there for the dropouts,” she says. “I think they’re grouped by decades.”

It makes a sort of perverse sense that the dropouts would get to share eternity with the unpopular saints. I picture an afterlife with cliques like in high school, with women like my mother and Rose McGlynn floating in limbo—only I believe that the Catholic Church has also gotten rid of limbo—with the ex-saints. I kneel at the feet of a pasty-white saint and start thumbing through the 1940s for my mother and her friend.

I find them both, their files rubber banded together, a note folded and paper clipped to the top file. I unfasten the note, which retains a rusty impression of the paper clip, and read it first. “Dear Monsignor Ryan,” she-of-the-spidery-handwriting has written,

Enclosed you will find the files of the two girls accused of stealing from the collection plate during last Sunday’s Mass. As you will recall, we suspected Rose McGlynn immediately because of the recent disruption in her family and when questioned she did not deny her culpability. Later that afternoon, though, another student, Katherine Morrissey, came to my office and said that she was responsible for the theft. I noticed that both girls were wearing identical saints medals that I hadn’t seen before. When I asked them, separately of course, where they got the medals they both became flustered and couldn’t come up with a satisfactory explanation. (Both girls come from very poor families and the medals are gold and quite valuable.) I concluded that the girls stole the money and purchased the medals. I confess that I felt moved to pardon them when I realized that the money had been used to purchase a religious item, but then I noticed that the medals are of Santa Catalina, a local folk heroine whose beatification was recently revoked by the church. (I’m embarrassed to tell you that girls in this neighborhood pray to this so-called saint to find them husbands.) I was further disillusioned in the girls’ characters when I was shown a picture of the girls (herein enclosed) cavorting at a local amusement park with a young man. You’ll notice, if you look carefully and perhaps employ a magnifying glass, that the girls are wearing the medals in the picture. I assume they were purchased as part of their escapade. In light of their both confessing to the theft and this evidence of slatternly behavior, I must recommend expulsion from St. Mary Star of the Sea.