Her Name Is Rose Page 13

  “May I?” he asks once inside the kitchen, and takes out the violin before she can answer. He tunes it, takes the bow up, and begins to play an Irish reel. He ornaments it like a seasoned player with slides and rolls and triple notes.

  “You never said.”

  “What?” He stops.

  “You’re a good fiddler.”

  “There’s lots about me you don’t know.” Blue eyes dart from his bow hand to her face, then he continues playing. Music fills the room. It feels like the old walls resonate and release stored memories of bodhráns and spoons and ancient sounds of céilis and seisiúns that happened in the old cottage long before Rose came.

  “A gift that can’t be taught,” she says quietly.

  “What?”

  “Nothing.”

  Conor hands her the violin. “Why did you leave it on the tube?”

  She stares beyond him and out the window to the blue-flowered vine climbing on the cabin door. She remembers when she and her father painted that door. “To see if it would come back to me.”

  “Why?”

  Rose’s voice quivers when she says, “I was thinking of giving up.”

  He takes this in but doesn’t say anything. The evening is gathering into night outside.

  “I’m tired.”

  “Sure,” Conor says. “I’ll get going, then.” He rises.

  “I didn’t mean that. I mean. Oh. How come life can be so messy all of a sudden?” Her face is flushed and she pushes back her dark hair with both hands. Today it has a bit of a curl to it. She flops down into a chair.

  “Tell me,” he says.

  She looks at him, she looks at the blue eyes that seem full of understanding then, and so she does. She explains it all to him. The master class. Roger. Her mother gone missing. The letter. “Tess thinks that she’s gone visiting a garden somewhere and doesn’t have her phone with her. I don’t know. I thought she’d have rung me by now. It’s just not like her.”

  “I’m sure it’ll be all right,” he says.

  Rose rises quickly. “Why does everybody say that? How do you know? How does anyone know?” She paces. “And where’s Tess! She said she’d be right back!” She crosses to the counter and sees for the first time shriveled petals of red poppies and the naked stems with their bulbous seed pods. She bursts like a rain cloud and cries.

  Conor goes to her, holds her, and she drops her head against his heart.

  * * *

  A little later Tess does arrive. Rose is standing, playing her violin, and Conor is beside her. A swath of light from the window catches them. Tess looks at Conor, who rises and introduces himself.

  “Any news?” Rose asks. The anxiety makes her eyes look frightened.

  “Actually, yes,” Tess says, still looking at Conor, trying to work out who the stranger is. “Your mum’s in Boston.”

  “What?”

  “I know. Crazy Iris.”

  “A long way to go to visit a garden,” Conor says. He takes a sudden in-breath and turns to Rose. “Her phone mightn’t work there.”

  “Right. I told her you were home and—” Tess says.

  “Is she okay?”

  “Oh yes, Rose. Sorry. She’s fine! Absolutely fine.” Tess takes her hand. “She’s going to ring you now. On the home phone from her hotel. When I told her you were home she was quite worried. Something about a big master class you are due to have next week?”

  Rose nods. “Yeah, it was Tuesday. It got moved up and I didn’t tell her. But what did she say about the letter? And the appointment?”

  “She didn’t and I didn’t—” Tess is cut short because just then the phone rings.

  All three look to it.

  Ten

  The next time Hector saw Iris it was the morning after the concert and she was sitting on a bench in the community gardens of Titus Sparrow Park. Sunlight was hitting her hair. Hector noted that she looked sad, but he was so wrapped up in figuring how best to present himself that he didn’t quite register the white in her hand was a tissue. He wasn’t ready to officially introduce himself and so crossed the street and kept walking. His pace quickened. When he reached the end of the block, he veered right toward the river.

  The words to “Down to the River to Pray” were running in his head. After about ten minutes he arrived on the banks of the Charles. He stopped, faced the river, sank back into his heels in a sort of Standing Tree meditation, and closed his eyes, needing grounding and inspiration and awaiting it like some thirsty, rooted thing. A breeze blew hard.

  He thought about his vision the night of the concert of returning the fallen envelope like some knight in shining armor and how it had not in fact materialized. In meditation, more visions of himself, winged and angelic, appeared. And why not? he suddenly thought. Why couldn’t he have the angel’s part? Calm down, Hector. Breathe.

  It was like the start of a new composition where he had a musical phrase, a cluster of notes, but no idea how to continue or in which key to begin, although he knew it was a minor, maybe D or G. Finally, he broke his pose and jogged along the esplanade. Sailboats on the black ripple water circled every which way, their white triangles flapping like swans’ wings. The heat of another scorcher sucked up into itself the cool greenness of the grass and in the sky bunches of clouds, staccatolike, shielded the sun periodically. He jogged for about a mile but when he couldn’t discharge his restlessness, he decided to return to the South End to discuss it all with Grace.

  Grace, dressed in her tennis gear, met him at the front door. She spoke first. “Hector, Hector, we’ve got a problem.”

  “Tell me about it!”

  “No, really. It’s Mrs. Bowen … Iris.”

  “Yeah, I know. I saw her in the gardens sitting—”

  “No, she’s back. She’s in the kitchen now. Her cell phone isn’t working so I told her to use my landline. I’ve just heard her speaking with someone. Someone named Tess. When she hung up she was pacing around the kitchen. I’m afraid whatever this Tess said has upset her.” Grace looked at him with those nut brown eyes and whispered, “I think she’s crying, Hector.”

  Grace led him into her office where there was a second door into the kitchen. Iris was on the phone again and they could hear her clearly.

  “Hello, honey.”

  There was a long pause.

  Then they heard a kitchen chair scrape against the floor. “Oh, Rosie … honey … I’m so sorry. I thought your master class was next week. Why didn’t you tell me it was changed? Honey? How awful. I would have come. I wanted to come. Rose…” Several long silences followed, punctuated by Iris’s sighs. “Tell me what happened.”

  “She’s speaking with someone named Rosie,” whispered Grace.

  Under the circumstances it wasn’t right and Hector knew that, but to relieve his own tension he chuckled, “You’re a supersleuth, Grace.”

  She shushed him. “Who is Rosie?”

  “Sounds like … her daughter?”

  Grace’s face lit up in a brief register of understanding but suffused quickly into a frown. Grace and Hector sat side-by-side, listening and half hearing; they were like an old, childless couple, strangers to the language of parental discourse.

  From snippets of conversation over the next ten minutes, they pieced together that Iris hadn’t told her daughter she had come to Boston. And that Rose had some kind of master class that seemingly didn’t go well.

  “What’s a master class?” Grace whispered.

  “Shh.”

  “Doesn’t sound good, though, right?”

  Hector remembered how Iris had looked the night before, like she was bathed in a quiet sadness, and now whatever was going on was only adding to it. He stood, peeked in through the crack in the door. Sitting, her hand like a vise gripping her forehead, shielding her eyes, with her elbow on the table as a fulcrum, Iris rocked from side to side. She was explaining in that soft Irish cadence—music to his ears—that she was in Boston on a gardening gig. She’d got hired last-minute on
an assignment for a UK newspaper, so she said, and she’d tried to ring yesterday but her cell phone wasn’t connected to a network. “As soon as I realized I rang you from here where I’m staying, but it didn’t connect. Yes. That’s right, honey. That’s why I rang Tess at home.”

  “Gardening assignment? Hector…?”

  “I know. I’m thinking, Grace.” A musician friend of Hector’s once told him that it’s the silence in between where the real stuff is going on.

  “Oh … you opened it?”

  There was silence.

  Then Iris said, “I didn’t tell you because I didn’t want to worry you. Honey?… Don’t cry. Please … Rose? I’m sure it’s nothing. Absolutely. Really, I’ll be fine. I will, I promise. Dr. O’Reilly said I shouldn’t be worried. Honestly. Please don’t worry. Rose?” Pause. Sighs. Iris’s voice dropped lower. “I know. I know it was yesterday. I’ll reschedule as soon as I get home. No. It’s the weekend, I can’t ring now. Okay. Okay. I will. I’ll be home in just a few days. I promise.”

  Grace’s mouth dropped open, but she covered the startled sound it made with her hand. She whispered, “Oh dear, this—”

  “This is no ordinary conversation between mother and daughter,” Hector said.

  “I love you, sweetheart.” Another scrape of the chair sounded against the floor, then a clunk of the phone receiver being replaced. Iris passed by the office on her way upstairs, as if she was trying to be invisible. The sound of her footsteps disappeared and a door closed.

  “I should go to her, right?” Grace said.

  “And say what? ‘I was being nosy and listened to your conversation’? I don’t think so. No. No, Grace. Here’s what we do. I’ll knock on her door under the pretense of returning the envelope. And see how she is.”

  After a few moments Hector went upstairs, but just short of reaching the top step he stopped when he heard weeping. It took him by surprise. It was thoughtless of him, perhaps. He was acting from a cavalier notion that he could rescue Iris. But her crying made it suddenly real. He stood a few moments in the hallway outside her door, the green walls, like a forest, closing in on him. He was lost. Way out of his comfort zone.

  He tiptoed on by Iris’s door and went to his own room down the hall. He got a blank piece of staff paper from his sheet music and wrote:

  Dear Iris,

  He crossed that out and wrote:

  Hello Iris,

  Crossed that out and wrote:

  Dear Mrs. Bowen,

  Unsure how to put his feelings into words, he put down the pen. He was a musician, for cripes sake, not a man of letters. Like a tourist in lovelorn territory, he was finding his way alone. He got a fresh piece and started again.

  Mrs. Bowen,

  Hope you enjoyed the concert last night. Thanks for coming. I was happy to see you there.

  Here’s the envelope you dropped in the Mapparium. It fell from your bag. I was just arriving as you were leaving yesterday. I saw it. I saw you.

  I hope I’ll see you later …

  ☺

  Hector Sherr

  Room 12

  P.S. I hope everything’s all right …

  He folded the letter around the envelope and held it to his chest. He wanted to kiss it and for a moment he was eleven years old on Valentine’s Day in Woodside Elementary School in California, where he grew up.

  Outside Iris’s door Hector stood, listening to the quiet on the other side. He brought his fist to within an inch of the door several times, but in the end lost his courage. Finally, he slid the letter under her door and went downstairs, quickly, blushing like a schoolboy, and flew out onto the street.

  Had he been too blunt? P.S. I hope everything’s all right? Would she know they had overheard her? Oh. Now he wished he hadn’t added the P.S. Did he always have to go one step too far?

  He crossed the plaza. The splash fountain was turned off but a small crowd sat on the gray lip of the reflecting pool and cooled their feet. Thinking about Iris, about Sparrow in Summer, and listening to the summered voices mixing with the midmorning traffic, he stopped and closed his eyes. There was a kind of odd harmony to it all, rainbow-colored even.

  “Mr. Sherr?”

  A voice, breathless, was calling from behind him. At first he thought he’d imagined it.

  “Mr. Sherr?” He turned. His heart, as if separating from springs, leapt from its held place and zipped toward her. Iris. She was holding his letter.

  “Thank you. For your note.”

  “Anytime.”

  She looked at him with surprise.

  “I mean—”

  “And for…’ She stopped. Iris smiled weakly and what followed was a long pause when neither of them seemed to know what to do. It was the first time Hector was close to her. Her eyes were very clear, with tiny lines that stretched from the corners to her temples. The crying had only just left them. She had a pale patch of freckles across the bridge of her nose. Her hair had been quickly tied up, but strands fell in twirls about her face and neck and she tried to fix them behind her ears. She was in a white cotton blouse and blue jeans. She was gorgeous, he thought. As he looked down he saw she was barefoot.

  She turned to go but he caught her arm and blurted, “Stay. Let’s walk. Get a coffee. See the river.” His hands flung to the sides of his head as he stuttered.

  Iris didn’t seem to notice his gawkiness, or if she had, it didn’t matter. She looked down to her feet and Hector put his hand on her back and, to his great surprise, she let herself be guided back to Grace’s. While Iris went in to get shoes, Hector waited outside, not wanting to dilute the spell he felt cast under. When she reappeared she was wearing sandals. Sunglasses nestled on top of her head. They walked north and cut through the Prudential Center Plaza, and continued on a few short blocks. Neither of them spoke. They passed onto Gloucester with its ornate streetlamps and old Victorian brownstones with their ancient lead-glass windows and black window frames. Crossing over Comm Ave., the street widened into two-way traffic and was divided down the middle by a tree-lined pedestrian walk. Iris looked into the shaded tunnel carved by the trees.

  “Can we sit?”

  “Great idea.” Hector swung around, looked for an empty spot, and strode to the nearest bench, landing with a thud as if in being able to claim it for her so solidly he was gallant. And just like that there she was, Iris of the blue dress sitting right there beside him. Her hands were folded in her lap. She looked up and down the tree-lined mall and across the avenue at the redbrick buildings.

  “Magnolias,” he said.

  “What?”

  “Those trees you’re looking at. They’re saucer magnolias. This place is famous for them. In early May the streets are lit up like little pink and white balloons.” He was chuffed with himself and hoped he’d impressed her. If truth were told, everyone in Boston knew that about the magnolias in spring along Comm Ave. He didn’t know a thing about trees.

  After a few moments she said, “I enjoyed the concert last night. Hearing you play—”

  “Thank you,” he said. “That was a great audience.” He relaxed his tall frame, unfurling like a fern, fanning out across the bench, his arms abreast along the top rung.

  “We don’t have too many outdoor concerts like that but we—”

  “Ireland? Right?” He’d cut her off with his enthusiasm and immediately felt sorry.

  “We do have a music festival every summer.”

  “Yeah, of course you do. Everybody’s heard of the Cork Jazz Festival. I mean, anyone in the jazz world.”

  “Actually we have one near where I live. Doonbeg.”

  Hector raised his eyebrows with a look that said, Wow. But before he could ask her more about it she added, “My daughter’s a musician, too.”

  “I’m sorry,” he blurted (thinking back to the morning’s phone conversation). “I mean, what does she play?”

  Iris looked at him quizzically but continued. “The violin. Classical violin.”

  “Double
wow.” Suddenly it was impossible for him to know what more to say because he felt guilty and thought it must be written on his face. Next she would tell him her name.

  “Her name is Rose.”

  He wanted to say something. But what? Say something supportive. “I like the way you wear your hair.”

  Iris looked at him and then couldn’t help herself, she laughed. Really laughed. It was as if a river rippled from her and spilled onto the path and climbed up the trees, a sort of tintinnabulation. And Hector felt it, too, and laughed with her. Didn’t hold back.

  Hector jumped up and held out his hand. She took it briefly, then let go. Then, as if feeling less cautious, she walked forward. After a few blocks, they’d crossed onto the footbridge over Storrow Drive, then down to the Charles, where they walked along the esplanade. Hector felt surprisingly jaunty and began humming. Iris’s footfalls were soft and she picked a long blade of grass and swung it around in the air. It was one of those near perfect days of summer, blue sky even though hot. And for a moment, Hector imagined they were just two second-chance lovers sauntering on a midsummer’s morning along one of the finest promenades on the eastern coast of America.

  “Hector?” Iris said at last, her voice a different tempo and thinner. “Can you show me where the public library is?”

  “The library? Sure. Yeah. It’s not too far, but we have to cross back over.”

  She stopped. “I need to find someone.”

  “In the … library?”

  “Billy said I could use the Internet there. Isn’t that right?”

  “Oh, right. But you don’t need the library. I have my laptop with me back at Grace’s. We can go there if you like and you can use mine.”

  Iris considered. “All right,” she said at last, and they turned back. She told him then that her daughter, Rose, was studying at the Royal Academy of Music in London.

  “Well, now I’m impressed.” Hector said most Americans probably wouldn’t have heard of it, but he had because he taught music composition at Berklee. “I mean, we have Juilliard, and Oberlin, too, and right here … well … over there”—he pointed as they crossed back over Huntington—“is the New England Conservatory. But the RAM? Wow. She must be really good.” They kept walking, but Iris had picked up the pace.