The Seduction of Water (8 page)

Mr. Nagamora lowers the papers. Suddenly he looks as tired and worn out as the dying crane. Gone is the youthful man who danced a moment ago; now he looks old and bewildered, looking out at this little group of strangers. I get up from my perch on the edge of one of the student’s desks to relieve him of the spotlight, but he holds up his paper and waves me away.

“When I was a boy I thought this a very sad story,” he says. Several of the students nod. “But now when I tell it what I remember most is my father dancing. And I’m glad I have this story to remember him by.”

Mr. Nagamora gives a little bow and the class begins to applaud—I think it’s Aidan who starts it—as he walks back to his desk.

I haven’t a clue how to follow up his performance—no pithy, teacherly comment to bring closure to the lesson. And so I suggest we adjourn to The Art School to see what my other students have done with this assignment I’ve given—an assignment that seems to have taken on a queer life of its own.

We walk across town in a straggling clump. I notice that Amelie and Mrs. Rivera walk protectively on either side of Mr. Nagamora as if he were one of the young children they nanny for their livelihoods. I’m glad to see him in good hands. Aidan Barry gravitates to my side and tells me about his work-release job at the printing press. He doesn’t really like it, he says, and he’s afraid he’s not learning the trade fast enough. If he loses the job, he tells me, it won’t look good to the parole board.

“What did you do before . . .” Before I’m forced to say
before prison
he answers, “I worked at a hotel in Midtown. First as a doorman, then a desk clerk. I liked it. Hotels are classy. If my family had a hotel like yours I’d definitely work there, learn the business, maybe run it someday.”

“My family doesn’t own the Hotel Equinox,” I remind him. “My father was the manager, but he died last year, and my aunt Sophie’s just the bookkeeper—although she tends to put her hand in everywhere. Besides, it’s up for sale and if no one buys it it’ll probably get torn down.”

“That’s a shame,” he says. “Maybe you could find someone to buy it.”

I laugh. “I don’t know anyone that rich, and even if I did, who’d want it? It would cost millions to renovate and even though the setting is really spectacular it’s not exactly in a prime tourist location. No one goes to the Catskills anymore.”

Aidan shakes his head. “You shouldn’t give up so easily on the family business.”

“It’s not the family business . . .” I begin, but he doesn’t hear me. We’ve come to The Art School’s student gallery and he springs ahead of me to open the door, a gesture that amuses the crowd of slouching smokers lounging on the front steps. Unfortunately I prolong the embarrassment by freezing at the entrance.

The student gallery is a long stretch of glass-fronted, stark white space facing Fifth Avenue. It’s a venue that can make even the most mild-mannered of student efforts striking. The tableau mounted at its center tonight doesn’t need any help. My first reaction is that Mr. Nagamora’s story has come eerily to life, at least that last part when the crane flies away leaving a trail of bloody feathers. There’s a lot of feathers and a lot of blood. Well, red paint, no doubt, but still . . . it looks as if there’s been a lethal pillow fight—the My Lai of pillow fights. Giant white birds are suspended from the ceiling, white feathers drifting from their ruptured bellies like candy from piñatas. The feathers drift steadily—how Gretchen has engineered this part is a mystery—onto a scene of bizarre carnage. Eleven—I know it’s eleven without having to count—baby dolls sit in a circle around a pyre of wood. In the center of the pyre a mannequin in a torn Disney princess nightgown sits cross-legged, knitting. Even from out here on the sidewalk I can see the bloodied bandages on her hands. She’s knitting a shirt made up of prickly green leaves—the nettles, no doubt—and, more disturbingly, barbed wire. Ten of the eleven dolls wear shirts made of this strange fiber. The eleventh doll is standing reaching its one chubby baby fist up toward the girl on the pyre. Its other arm has been ripped off. Feathers and blood pour out of the little gaping hole.

The fact that attractively dressed people—mostly in black—are standing around this scene, gesturing toward it with their plastic tumblers of wine, only makes the whole thing more unsettling.

My little crew of Grace students have come up beside me. We’ve lost a few in transit—but here are Mrs. Rivera and Amelie and Mr. Nagamora. What in the world will they make of this?

I would like to flee the scene, but how would I possibly explain that to my students? Besides, as I stand here, foolishly keeping Aidan holding the door, Gretchen Lu spies me from inside and comes running out to get me.

“Oh, Professor Greenfeder, thank God you’re here. It’s turned into a real circus. The board of trustees was invited, and there are some reporters, and everyone’s asking me what my inspiration was? So now that you’re here you can explain everything, right?”

Chapter Eight

Gretchen Lu takes me by the hand—even if I wanted to resist, the blunted shape of her bandaged hand, soft as a kitten’s paw, totally disarms me—and leads me to a small group standing next to her project. I recognize a few of the teachers—full-timers for the most part—and the head of the English Department, Gene Delbert. Gene, in black jeans and leather jacket, is nervously swirling red wine in his tumbler while talking to a small group of older men and women whom I guess to be trustees. I notice there’s a feather sticking out of Gene’s hair and resist the temptation to pluck it loose. Several of the men and women standing around have feathers in their hair or clinging to their clothing. As a result their serious expressions seem feigned, like children who’ve been surprised in a pillow fight, pretending innocence.

“Oh good,” Gene says when he sees Gretchen leading me forward. “Here’s the instructor who gave the assignment. I’m sure she can make clear her intent.”

Gene says
intent
the way a lawyer might use the word in phrases like
with harmful intent
. I also notice that he’s called me an instructor, not professor, making clear, I’m sure, to the college trustees that I am an expendable part-timer. There’ll be no sticky tenure issues to cope with when they fire me for inspiring this scene of feathery carnage.

I take a deep breath and, dropping Gretchen’s hand, gesture toward Elisa on her pyre. I notice, now that I’m closer, that the mannequin’s mouth is sealed with silver electrical tape. I open my mouth to speak but the voice that I hear isn’t my own.

“ ‘The Wild Swans’ is yet another allegory of the silencing of women’s creativity,” the voice explains much more eloquently than I could have hoped to. “While Elisa works she is sworn to silence, just as the woman artist is forced to give up her true voice in order to produce in a man’s marketplace.”

I turn around and find Phoebe Nix behind me, one hand on my shoulder, the other gesturing toward the tableau. I’m so relieved to have her explaining the piece that I forget for a moment to wonder what she’s doing here.

“But what does the woman artist produce without artistic freedom?”

Phoebe pauses while we all consider this question and Gretchen’s work. I notice that the little shirts worn by the baby dolls are not just knitted in stocking stitch, but in alternating cables of nettles and barbed wire. If I’m not mistaken, Gretchen has even managed to work in a blackberry stitch within the cables. What attention to detail! Even if she’s gotten me fired, I’ll have to give Gretchen an A+.

“Bad clothes?” I hear Mark Silverstein mutter his answer to Phoebe’s question somewhere behind me. I try, out of the corner of my eye, to see Mark’s piece on “The Emperor’s New Clothes” but his unprepossessing assemblage of naked mannequins has been crowded into a corner like uninvited guests. No wonder he’s pissed off at Gretchen.

Phoebe ignores Mark’s comment and answers her own question. “She creates a prison for her offspring, crafting a garb of barbed wire for her daughters out of the old myths and collusion of silence.”

I’m tempted to correct Phoebe’s version of the fairy tale. The baby dolls in their barbed wire and nettle shirts aren’t Elisa’s daughters, they’re her brothers. But then I notice that several of the older trustees and most of the full-time professors are nodding eagerly. Only one man—a much older man in a beautiful charcoal gray suit—is not nodding along with the others. Instead he is staring at me as if challenging me to unmask Phoebe’s mistake. But there’s no way I’m going to turn back the tide of acceptance and approval that sweeps over the crowd. I can feel the tension in the room dissipating. Conversation resumes, the crowd breaks into groups of twos and threes, again happily swirling the wine in their tumblers and picking feathers out of their hair like friendly chimps picking out each other’s nits. I notice Aidan Barry chumming up to Natalie Baehr and smile and then think
Oh my God, should I tell Natalie he’s an ex-con?
and then, once again, I catch the old man in the gray suit staring at me.

I turn away from him and find Phoebe at my elbow.

“Thanks for that speech,” I tell her. “I’m lucky you turned up here.”

Phoebe doesn’t shrug or smile or even lift an eyebrow. She is one of the most gesture-free people I’ve ever met.

“I came with my uncle Harry; he’s on the board. I thought it would be a good venue to give away some copies of the journal. If you had told me you were involved in the show I would’ve planned a tie-in with this month’s issue.”

“You mean it’s out?”

“Yes, we got to press a little early. There’s a stack by the door.” I turn toward the entrance and suddenly notice that several of the people in the gallery are leafing through a pale lavender magazine. The thought that some of them might be already reading my piece makes me feel strangely queasy.

Misreading my wave of nausea as excitement—I suppose a person who doesn’t use facial expressions can be excused for misreading them—Phoebe says, “I’ve got some copies for you in my bag, but first I want you to meet my uncle. He’s an imperialistic fossil, but he’s rich as Croesus and a great patron of the arts, so you might as well know him.”

Phoebe takes me by the hand, her grip surprisingly firm, and pulls me over to the man in the gray suit who is facing away from us.

“Uncle Harry, I want you to meet Iris Greenfeder, one of the writers in this month’s issue of
Caffeine
.”

The man turns toward us, his blue eyes vague but not unkind. I can see him assembling his features into an expression of polite interest. For a moment I feel sorry for him. He’s older than I thought at first, my father’s age at least—or the age my father would be if he were still alive. I remember how, as my father got older, his feet would bother him if he had to stand still for any length of time and how he hated being in a crowded room with lots of people talking; he said he found it hard to hear what people were saying. I imagine the effort it takes for this man to feign interest in his niece’s half-baked writers. To his credit, though, I see his vague over-the-shoulder look resolve into something unexpected—perhaps to him as much as to me: genuine interest.

“I’m afraid I didn’t catch your name,” he says.

I tell him—trying to pitch my voice loud enough for him to hear but not so loud as to seem to be shouting—and he repeats it, taking a sip of red wine from his tumbler and wincing. He is, no doubt, used to a better vintage.

“Iris is writing a memoir about her mother who was a fantasy writer,” Phoebe says.

I am?

“Well, I’ve just gotten started.”

“Who was your mother?” he asks me so avidly that I’m a little taken back.

“She wrote under the name K. R. LaFleur,” I tell him. “You probably wouldn’t have heard of her.”

“LaFleur.” Phoebe’s uncle swishes his cheeks back and forth as if he’s at a wine tasting. I half expect him to spit. “The flower. Perhaps her first name was a flower name?”

“No, her name was Katherine, but everyone called her Kay. I don’t know why she chose LaFleur . . .”
One more thing I don’t know about my mother,
I think. Perhaps sensing my confusion Harry Kron comes to my rescue.

“I’m sure she had her own reasons. My name for instance,
Kron,
means ‘crown’ in German and so that is what I named my first hotel.”

He pauses—a little pause like an orator who’s penciled in the spaces for applause or laughter—and I realize that I’m supposed to recognize the name. The name
Harry Kron
doesn’t register at first, but then the words
crown
and
hotel
do.

“The Crown Hotel,” I say, “near Grand Central? My father always said it was the best-run hotel in New York. He admired the whole chain. He modeled our hotel’s management on the Crown Hotels.”

I notice Harry Kron grimace at the word
chain
and realize I’ve blundered. Holiday Inn is a chain, Hilton even, but the Crown Hotels, a dozen gemlike establishments known for their luxury and exclusivity, are more like a line, as in a line of purebred racehorses or the descendants of royalty. “Jewels in the Crown,” they’re called, all listed in the blue Michelin guides my father kept on the shelf above his desk in the front office. I feel an ache in my throat. The sight of old men sometimes does this to me. This is what my father would have looked like if he were still alive. (Curiously, the sight of old women never has this effect on me; I can never picture my mother as old.) But this man has not only attained an age my father never will, he is everything my father always wanted to be—the quintessential hotelier.

“Ah, your father ran a hotel and your mother wrote . . . what an intriguing combination. Perhaps I knew your parents . . .”

“Oh no, I doubt it. It’s a small hotel upstate—the Hotel Equinox. My father was the manager for almost fifty years. He died last year.”

“I’m so sorry. And your mother?”

“My mother died in 1973, when I was ten.”

“Ah, like my sister-in-law, perhaps, Phoebe’s poor mother, too sensitive to live in this world.”

“She died in a hotel fire—not ours—I mean she was staying at another hotel. The Dreamland in Coney Island.”

Something like distaste passes over Harry Kron’s face and I’m not sure if it’s the mention of such a déclassé hotel or the idea of a hotel fire—every hotelier’s worst nightmare.

“Yes,” he says, “I remember the incident. So tragic. Fire is a hotel’s greatest danger and fire regulations were once quite lax. Even now not all managers are as scrupulous as they ought to be in fire prevention. The Crown Hotels have been leaders in fire prevention in the field. We installed emergency exits and sprinkler systems long before we were required to.”

“Yes, I know,” I say excitedly, “my father told me that. He installed pumps to draw water from the lake and trained the waiters in fire-fighting procedures. My mother was especially terrified of the idea of a fire . . .”

I stop, interrupted by an image of my mother, a picture of her I didn’t know I possessed, walking the hotel halls with her hands on the walls, like a blind person, feeling for electrical fires in the wiring.

Seeing the emotion on my face, Harry Kron gallantly rescues me. “How doubly tragic, then, for her to die in one. What was your mother’s maiden name?”

“Morrissey,” I say. “Katherine Morrissey.”

“Ah,” Harry says, “I thought I saw a touch of Irish in you. You must look like your mother.”

I smile. I’d like to think I look like my mother because she was beautiful. It’s true I have my mother’s dark hair and pale green eyes, but I’m built more solidly than she, more like my father’s sturdy eastern European stock, and I’ve got a touch of his sallowness in my skin.

“Morrissey,” he repeats. “Interesting.”

“Well, you’ll have to read Iris’s piece in
Caffeine
, Uncle Harry.” I’ve almost forgotten that Phoebe is still standing there.

“Oh, I will, I will.” I can tell it’s more than a polite lie and I’m ridiculously flattered by the idea of this urbane man reading my piece. “A writer living in a hotel. I think that’s most interesting. Where in the hotel did your mother write? Was she like Jane Austen, writing in the parlor and then hiding her work in a drawer when people came in?”

“Oh no, she wrote—” I’m interrupted by Aidan Barry who’s come up with Natalie Baehr in tow.

“Professor Greenfeder, you’ve really got to see what Natalie’s done—it’s small so I’m afraid you’ll miss it.”

I hold up a finger to signal to Aidan I’ll be right with him, but Harry Kron smiles magnanimously and stretches his arms out as if to embrace me and Aidan and Natalie. “I’ve monopolized you far too long, Miss Greenfeder. Please, let’s see your student’s work.”

I’m pleased, both for me and Natalie. After all, Phoebe said her uncle was a patron of the arts. Maybe he could do something for Natalie.

We walk over to a glass case in the corner of the room. Aidan’s right. Natalie’s display is so small and tucked away that I would have missed it. And I wouldn’t want to miss this. Suspended on wires within the case—so that it seems to float—is a circlet of crystal and pearls so fine it seems spun out of dew. The piece could be worn as a necklace or headpiece, but floating as it does it seems to be something more than just a piece of jewelry, something elemental. In fact it seems to partake of all the elements: water frozen, shaped by wind, sparkling like fire, tethered to the earth by a single green teardrop. Natalie has crafted the wreath described in my mother’s version of “The Selkie.”

“Natalie, you made my mother’s necklace,” I say, so touched I barely trust myself to speak.

Harry Kron, who has taken out a pair of reading glasses to read the index card on which Natalie has typed the part of my story that describes the Selkie’s necklace, turns to stare at me, his eyes disturbingly magnified by the lenses of his glasses. “Your mother had a necklace like this?”

“Oh no,” I say, laughing, “my mother hardly wore jewelry at all—just some fake pearls.” Just as before I’d had an image of my mother touching the hotel walls now I almost hear the sound my mother’s pearls made when she leaned over me in bed to kiss me good night. “She described it in her books—the net of tears, she called it, but I think she got the idea from the selkie legend . . .”

I falter. Did she? Actually, now that I think of it, I’ve never seen a version of “The Selkie” that mentions any necklace at all.

“Or she added it to the fairy tale when she was writing her books,” I say. “She did that. She took fairy tales and then changed them and created a whole fantasy world based on these altered fairy tales. I’ve always thought that the places where she changed the fairy tales might be where she’s talking about herself, about something that happened to her . . .” I trail off. This had been the thesis of my dissertation and I’ve never been comfortable articulating it. Which is probably why I’m ABD.

“You’ll have to explore that in your memoir,” Phoebe says, “the intersection of your mother’s life with her art.”

Harry Kron nods, looking back at Natalie’s necklace. “Yes. I’d very much like to know the real-life inspiration for this.”