The Seduction of Water (22 page)

Aidan glares at me for a moment, but then drops his head and rubs the back of his neck. “This ain’t going to work, love,” he says so softly I have to move closer to hear him. Over his shoulder I see Ramon at the desk, but he’s busy checking in a guest. “Maybe I should just leave.”

I touch the tips of my fingers to his elbow. “But this job is too good an opportunity for you to waste.”

“Is that the only reason you want me to stay?” When Aidan looks up at me I’m alarmed at the expression in his eyes—he looks like a trapped animal. Maybe he really does want to leave.

“You know it isn’t . . . it’s just everything is so complicated right now. Can you trust me enough to wait just a little?”

The words sound familiar as I say them and then it occurs to me that I’ve repeated what Joseph asked of me not more than half an hour ago. At the desk the guest who is checking in drums his fingers while waiting for Ramon to run his credit card. Beyond him the lobby is empty and quiet in the bright sunlight streaming in from the terrace. A faint breeze stirs the sheer curtains at the French windows and the hems of the newly upholstered couches. I have a sense of the whole hotel perched on the ridge waiting, like a ship at anchor before it launches into the sea. Aidan beside me seems equally poised for flight.

Aidan touches the back of his hand to my face. “I’ll wait for you, Iris,” he says, “for as long as I can.”

When I’ve made sure the paintings are safely stored I go into the breakfast room to find Harry. He’s talking into a cell phone, but he motions me to sit and signals to a waiter to fill my coffee cup, all the while conducting a conversation mostly composed of large figures and obscure code.

“Offer long, above, fifty thousand shares BONZ, Bob Oscar Nancy Zebra nine spot sixty-nine. For the day.”

After a minute I realize he’s placing a stock order.

As soon as he folds the phone shut he turns his whole attention to me. “You’re looking lovely this morning, Iris. That outfit reminds me of Coco Chanel.”

I laugh and feel lighter than I have all morning. Of the two men I’ve spoken to so far, Harry is the first to notice what I’m wearing today—a boxy green linen suit and several long ropes of fake pearls—and the first to make me laugh.

“It belonged to my mother, but it’s hardly Chanel. She had a knack for copying whatever was in vogue and as for these”—I twirl the fake pearls around my finger—“guests were always leaving their costume jewelry behind. There are boxes of this stuff up in the attic.”

Harry lifts an eyebrow and reaches across the coffee cups to finger one of the pearls. “Yes,” he says, “fake. But are you sure all of it is? Maybe I should have a look at those boxes.”

“Well, if any of it was real surely the owners would have come looking for it a long time ago.”

“You’d be amazed at how careless some people can be, but then I always thought jewelry belongs on those best suited for it. You, for instance, ought to have the real thing.”

“Oh,” I say, feeling the heat rise to my face, “I’d just worry about it getting stolen—which brings me to what I wanted to talk to you about . . .”

“There hasn’t been anything stolen?” he asks, his expression instantly growing serious.

“Oh, no, of course not. I only wanted to talk to you about the security for the Arts Festival—for the paintings you brought up this morning.”

“The Hudson River School landscapes? I thought I left instructions for them to go into the safe.”

“Yes, but they were too large,” I say, surprised he wouldn’t have thought of this. Certainly he’s seen the safe. “Joseph suggested we use the locked closet in his suite.”

“An excellent idea. Have they been moved there?”

“Aidan Barry has seen to it already.”

I think I see a shadow pass over his face and once again I wonder how much Harry knows about Aidan’s background.

“Well, I’m glad they’ll be close to Joseph. I’m sure he won’t let anything happen to them. Nothing can damage a hotel’s reputation more quickly than a robbery.”

“We’ve never had anything worse than the odd missing piece of jewelry, which usually turned up after the guest blamed the poor maid. It would be awful to have a real robbery. Have any of your hotels ever been robbed?” The question is out before I remember my promise to Joseph. I wasn’t even thinking of the Crown jewel theft—but of course now I am.

“One or two over the years, it’s to be expected . . .” Harry’s gaze has grown abstracted and drifts over the dining room, surveying the scene, no doubt to make sure everything is running smoothly. I should let the subject drop and keep my promise to Joseph, but then I’m fairly sure it’s not Harry that Joseph’s worried about, but Phoebe.

“Wasn’t the Crown Hotel safe burglarized in the late forties? And some valuable jewelry stolen?”

Harry smiles, purses his lips, then smiles again, like a man at a wine tasting swishing some Cabernet around in his mouth.

“Yes, that’s so. It was in 1949. Most of the jewels that were stolen belonged to my family estate. My brother, Peter, and his wife, Vera, were staying in the hotel and Vera liked to wear the family jewelry. There were pieces dating back to the Habsburgs—ancestors of ours. I strongly urged my brother to keep the jewels in a bank vault, but Peter was reckless and my sister-in-law was extremely stubborn—not unlike her daughter—and she insisted on wearing them in the most inappropriate of settings. Bohemian gatherings in the Village and jazz clubs in Harlem. She’d even brag about how much they were worth. It was almost as if she were begging someone to take them from her.”

I recall Phoebe mentioning that all her mother’s jewelry had gone back to the family estate after her death.
All that ancestral crap,
she called it. It didn’t sound as if her mother was so disdainful of it—or maybe she was and that’s why she wore it so carelessly.

“And then they were taken,” I say, because Harry seems to have lost the thread of his story. “Were they ever recovered?”

“Yes. The thief was apprehended a few months later—the jewels were in his motel room. We were most fortunate.”

“You don’t make it sound like a fortunate occurrence.”

Harry nods his head and touches his forefinger just below his right eye, tugging at the loose skin there. “You see much, Iris. No. The jewels were returned, but the damage was done. Something came unhinged in Peter and Vera after that. Maybe it was how Peter treated her. My brother was not perhaps suited for married life. He was never very stable after the war. Maybe it was the experience of being in a POW camp; he could never bear to be confined after that and he seemed to feel that the world owed him some sort of recompense for what he suffered. He repaid the Countess Oriana Val d’Este, who hid him in her villa at great personal risk to herself, by emptying her wine cellar and stealing some of her jewelry—he claimed later that she’d given him the jewelry to aid him in fleeing the country, but she told me otherwise when I met her a few years later at the Hotel Charlotte in Nice. Perhaps the Crown robbery brought up those unpleasant memories—or perhaps he blamed Vera for her carelessness with the jewels. Their marriage became a shambles after that—he had affairs; she became a morphine addict. She and Peter lived another twenty years but I’ve often thought she would have done them both a favor by driving their car off a cliff sooner. Their life together must have been a living hell.”

It’s a harsh assessment, but is it really any worse than Phoebe’s depiction of her parents’ marriage and the wedding band that she personally engraved with barbed wire and thorns?

“That’s the thing about theft—it’s a violation with repercussions beyond the loss of material goods.”

There’s an anger behind Harry’s words I’ve rarely heard before from him. I notice the waiter at the next table look up from pouring coffee; even the omelet chef has turned, saucepan in hand, alert to the possibility of an angry boss.

“The thief must have served a long prison sentence,” I say in an almost placating tone, as if I’d been the one to anger him.

Harry shrugs. “Twenty years. Yes, I made sure of that. But he wasn’t the one who really hurt me. It was his sister who worked for me—a young woman I’d taken under my wing and hoped to advance. She started out working the information desk, but she’d been promoted to assistant manager. Quite an accomplishment for a woman in those days. I’ve always considered myself ahead of the times when it came to advancing women. It was her brother who robbed the safe. Of course, there was only one logical conclusion to draw.”

“You think she gave him the combination?”

Harry widens his eyes and looks out the window. I’m startled to realize he’s close to tears. After a minute he looks back at me, his composure regained, his voice cool. “I believed so, but I told the police that she didn’t know the combination.”

“But why not . . . if you thought she betrayed you . . .”

The right side of his mouth curls up in a sad little smile and he sighs.

“Oh,” I say, guessing what he might be embarrassed about, “you were involved with her.”

“I’m afraid so. Always a mistake becoming romantically entangled with an employee. I’m sure you’ll be wiser than me in that respect, Iris. I couldn’t bear the embarrassment of what would come out at the trial if she were implicated along with her brother. But then, the guilt must have been too much for her. Oh, I don’t say because of what she did to me, but for how her brother ended up. The poor girl killed herself in the most awful way. She was decapitated by a train.”

I don’t have to feign shock at Harry’s words because even though I know that Rose McGlynn died under a train at the Rip Van Winkle station, no one said anything about decapitation. I know I must look shaken. What I imagined—as soon as Harry said the words—was how horrible it must have been for my mother to witness that death. I think of all the people whom that tragedy struck—John McGlynn, Harry, his brother Peter, Vera Nix—and of how my mother’s life became inevitably entangled in their lives. Had one of them—John McGlynn or Peter Kron—come back into her life all those years later?

“Iris, did you hear my question?”

“I’m sorry, Harry, I was thinking about that poor girl. What a horrible way to die. What did you ask?”

“I asked how you came to hear about the jewel theft. I wasn’t aware that it was common knowledge.”

In a newspaper article I looked up in Poughkeepsie while I was supposed to be at the printers,
are the words that run through my head. The words that come out, though, are, “Joseph told me about it. We were talking about hotel security and he mentioned it as a case where the hotel safe wasn’t the most secure location.”

Harry smiles. I’m relieved to see the sadness his story has brought lift. “He’s quite on the ball, our Joseph. I believe his talents have been wasted on gardening all these years. We really must make better use of him.”

Chapter Twenty-two

THE NET OF TEARS

I lay in the mud a long time, staring up at the cliffs rising above. When I’d come up the river a mist had lain on the water but now that mist had risen and traveled up into the mountains. The hills closest to me were green and covered with dense forest. The next layer of mountains was blue but I knew they too were covered with the never-ending trees that stood like sentinels guarding the river. Above the blue was a layer of pearl, like a silk slip dropped over a rumpled bed. Something white glinted in its folds—like a diamond earring caught on the cloth—and that’s what finally drew me to my feet—to see what it was.

My legs felt like two knives thrust into my hip sockets; the mud sucked at my feet. I had shed my skin but still felt trapped in a body not my own. But I stood there trying to read the horizon until the colors began to change in the distance. What I thought at first were clouds were more mountains. They went on forever! How many steps would I have to take on this dry land before the river would take me back? What I thought at first was a diamond earring—and then a mirage—was a white palace, its columns rising from the sea of trees like a ship cresting the waves. That’s where I had to go. The Palace of Two Moons. That’s where Naoise had hidden the net of tears.

“Rising above the grand river, enfolded in the misty hills of legend, the hotel that stands behind you has been more than a gathering spot for artists and art lovers for over a century and a half—it has been the inspiration for art, the cradle of romantic genius.”

The guests, arranged in a semicircle of chairs, shade their eyes with their festival programs while Harry gives the opening talk of the Arts Festival. He stands in the middle of the Half Moon gazebo, which has been festooned with purple and cream crepe-paper streamers. Behind him the sky is clear all the way to New Hampshire—a radiant backdrop. The only problem is that because his back is to the strong morning sun his expression is unclear—he’s little more than a dark silhouette against the breathtaking view.

“We all know that this region gave rise to the first American school of landscape painting. The river you see below us lent its name to that movement—the Hudson River School of painting—examples of which you will see and hear discussed during this week. What you might not know is the role the hotel behind you played in the genesis of our first homegrown artistic movement.”

Some of the guests crane their heads around to peer back at the hotel. Since I’m standing under the colonnade—perched between lobby and terrace to watch for late arrivals—I’m caught in their gaze. I feel I should flourish my hands to present the hotel to them, but I can see it’s not necessary. I can’t see what they see since I’m under the colonnade, but I know what the hotel looks like on a clear morning with the eastern sun bathing its white facade, striking the Corinthian columns into pillars of flame.

Harry is explaining that what American scenery lacked to make it a fitting subject for landscape painting was romantic association. I lose a little of what he says every time I lean into the shadowy cool of the lobby to check the front entrance. Most of the conference attendees have arrived except for the one I’m waiting for—Jack, who should have been here an hour ago.

“. . . what today might be exalted as unspoiled wilderness was considered woefully lacking in the vestiges of antiquity, which is why this building, with its classical columns, became such a popular subject for nineteenth-century painting . . .”

I notice that a woman in the back row is glaring at me and realize it’s because I’m picking the peeling paint off the column I’m leaning against. Defiling this vestige of antiquity. I push myself off the column and take a turn around the lobby. Harry’s speech, which should make me feel proud of the hotel, is depressing me. I don’t want to think of the Hotel Equinox as a vestige of antiquity or a picturesque subject for landscape painting. It’s my home. It’s where I grew up. When I peer into the dark recesses of the Sunset Lounge, deserted at this hour, I can catch for just the briefest of moments a glimpse of my mother leaning against the bar, the curve of her hip against the padded leather banquette, a reflection of her dark hair and pale face in the silvered mirror above the liquor bottles. The smoky shadows still hold the faintest whiff of her perfume and my father’s cigars.

Out there on the terrace Harry is appropriating the hotel for a larger role in a history less personal. Staking its claim for art. It makes me feel petulant—the way I felt when my mother was busy writing and I wasn’t supposed to bother her.

I walk out the front entrance and stand on the flagstone walk, following with my eyes the line of the circular drive until it disappears into the trees. Jack could be driving up through the woods already and I wouldn’t know it. The view on this side of the hotel is closed off by the thick forest of pine and oak, so dense it cuts off sound as well. I stare at the trees where the drive disappears from view as if willing them to disgorge Jack from their hold and notice that the oaks have started to change color already. Flares of red and orange, like sparks of flame, tremble in the early-morning breeze. The melancholy that has been licking at my heels all morning washes over me. Summer is almost over and I haven’t gotten anywhere with my book. I’m no closer to understanding my mother than I was at the beginning of the season—if anything she seems to have taken a step deeper into the shadows. The one thing that seemed truly good about this summer is gone. Aidan hasn’t talked to me all week and now Jack—the reason for our quarrel—hasn’t shown up.

Even this sadness is wearily familiar—the same end-of-season malaise I felt every year when the summer, which had seemed to stretch out into infinity, was suddenly over. All the things that I meant to do with the long vacation left undone. Time catching me unaware as if the turning of the earth came as a big surprise.

I notice that Joseph’s cane is leaning against the arch of Brier Rose. I take a step forward and see that he’s sitting on the bench inside staring at the edge of the woods just as I was. I wonder if he’s feeling the same end-of-summer melancholy that I am and if it’s worse when you’re as old as Joseph, or maybe that sense of time catching up with you is with you all the time because coming to the end of your life is like coming to the end of summer: all your plans and dreams left undone.

I start walking toward the gazebo, but then I see Joseph’s not alone. At first I think he must be with Clarissa, the new gardener, but then the woman sitting across from him leans forward and I see it’s Phoebe Nix. I’m so taken aback that I stop on the path. Perhaps I should interrupt them, though, in case Phoebe is grilling Joseph about what he knows about her father and my mother’s involvement, but then I hear an odd, unfamiliar sound coming from the gazebo. Joseph laughing. I think I’ve only heard him laugh once or twice in my whole life. It makes me feel like the intruder—the stranger here.

A rush of wind, gathering itself up from the slope of the mountain through acres of trees, sweeps through the garden bringing that first edge of autumn coolness. I head back through the lobby, shivering, out onto the sun-warmed terrace where Harry is finishing up.

“The Hotel Equinox is well named,” he says, bringing a hand up to his darkened face to wipe the sweat away. Out here on the terrace it is, thank God, still summer. “Because it is here that the ideals of the romantic period meet in balance. Sublimity in the expanse of the view—” Harry lifts his right arm to indicate the valley and the wide sky behind him. “—picturesqueness in its classical lines and romantic associations.” He raises his left arm—not as high, I notice—to take in the hotel. He pauses for a moment, holding both arms out so that he looks like a giant blackbird perched on the edge of the ridge. “It is the ideal setting for a coming together of artistic ideas—for the airing of conflicts no matter how at odds some of those ideas might seem to be. My hope for this Arts Festival is that forces of opposition will join hands here.” Harry sweeps his arms together and interlaces his fingers. “And I hope that at least a few of you will go away with some romantic associations of your own.”

The audience applauds. It’s my signal to head for the dining room to make sure the waiters are ready with pitchers of orange juice and that the trays of baked goods are uncovered. As I head along the colonnade, though, I bump into Aidan coming out of the dining room.

“I’ve got it,” he says, tilting his chin inside where I can see a flurry of white jackets moving back and forth across the room and smell the freshly brewed coffee. “I could tell Harry was winding down when he started flapping his arms around. A bloke his age can’t keep those gymnastics up for long.”

I laugh, mostly because it’s the longest sentence Aidan’s spoken to me since we discussed where the paintings should be stored. “I want to thank you for taking on so much this week,” I say, moving into the shade of one of the columns. “I never would have pulled all this together without you.”

“Well, if not for you I’d still be sweating it out in that printing shop on Varick Street instead of here basking in the cradle of romantic genius.”

“Pretty silly, huh?”

“Oh, I don’t know.” Aidan leans against the wall and I do too. “A lot of what he said made sense to me, especially that part about romantic associations.” He turns his head to look at me and his hand, which is lying against the wall, grazes my arm. “It’s not just us—although, yeah, that’s a big piece of it—but it’s also this place. It has a special feel to it, like it’s standing outside time like . . . what’s the name of that little Scottish town in the movie? You know the one that comes and goes every hundred years?”

“Brigadoon?”

“Yeah. Maybe it’s because of all the people who’ve come and gone here. You can still sort of feel them moving in and out of the rooms, all the parties and the families. I can see why you’ve never truly settled down after growing up here. Every other place must seem a disappointment to you.”

“No, that’s not it . . .” I start to say, but Aidan’s gaze has lifted from mine and strayed over my shoulder. The sun has reached this sheltered piece of the terrace and it strikes Aidan’s face like the flat side of a blade.

“Well, maybe that will change for you now, Iris. Someone seems pretty happy to see you.”

I turn to look and there’s Jack striding through the stripes of sun and shade cast by the columns. I turn back to Aidan, but he’s already gone, which is just as well because Jack practically lifts me off my feet embracing me.

“You’re late,” I say when he puts me down. “You missed Mr. Kron’s speech.”

“Frankly I’ve heard enough gibberish about art this summer to last a lifetime. Wait until you hear what I found on the way over here . . . is that coffee I smell?”

The guests are filing into the dining room now and queuing up at the coffee urns. Harry is waving me over to a group of curators but I pretend not to see him. I’m not ready to introduce Jack around yet.

“We’ll slip into the kitchen and nab a thermos,” I say, steering Jack inside. “We can take it up to your room.”

“My room? Aren’t I staying in your room?”

“Well, when you registered for the conference without telling me, you were assigned a room. Besides, don’t you remember how hot it is up in the attic?” I’m able to say this without looking at him because I’m rooting in the shelves for a thermos. I find one that’s missing its top and fill it from the coffeemaker. I pour some milk into a pitcher and hand it to Jack, running smack into the confused look on his face. “Is that all your luggage,” I say, pointing at the duffel bag hanging from his shoulder.

“The rest is in the car. What’s up, Iris? Are you really that mad because I was late? I saw a
FOR SALE
sign just off Route Thirty-two and I had to check it out. It would be perfect for us. A two-hundred-year-old farmhouse with a barn I could paint in . . .”

Jack must see the wild terror in my eyes because he stops. A two-hundred-year-old farmhouse for us to share. Six months ago it would have sounded like a dream come true, but now it seems like one of those abandoned projects of summer—an idea whose time is past.

“Let’s go upstairs and get you settled,” I say, handing Jack a basket of rolls. “And we’ll talk.”

We’re heading to the elevator when I see that Hedda is in it.

“Do you mind taking the stairs?” I ask.

Jake shakes his head and he starts toward the main stairs. “No, let’s take the back staircase,” I tell him, “if I run into any of these conference people I’ll get stuck running a million errands for them.”

“What about that new guy, your special-events coordinator?”

“What about him?”

“Isn’t he supposed to do all that?”

“Yes, but you can’t tell a guest that.” The enclosed stairway is hot and airless. The open thermos I’m carrying sloshes hot coffee on my wrist. We stop talking after the second floor and concentrate on conserving our breath.

“I put you on the fifth floor so you’d be close to my room,” I say when we reach the top.

“Well, that’s a relief, Iris. From the way you’re acting I suppose I should be glad you didn’t put me in the basement.”

I wait until we’re in the room to answer him. “What do you expect, Jack? I barely hear from you all summer and then you make plans to come here without even telling me. For the last ten years I haven’t even been allowed to talk about living together and now you’ve got a house all picked out for us. How fast am I supposed to switch gears?”

Jack shrugs his duffel bag off his shoulder and lifts his hands up, palms out. “I thought the way we were suited you. Are you saying it’s too late?”

I turn away from him because I don’t have an answer, but also because the room is stifling. I wrench open a window and look out, my hands flat against the window ledge. I couldn’t get Jack a valley view so he’s facing the garden and the woods. The trees seems to stretch out endlessly and I can see, in among the burnt umber of the pines, flashes of red and yellow. Once again, the sight of the changing leaves makes me feel that I’ve run out of time, but more than that, those acres of pines remind me of the time I’ve spent with Aidan under their boughs. That fleeting panic I’d felt before is not only for time slipping away but for Aidan.