Her Name Is Rose Page 14

  * * *

  Hector at last orchestrated his thoughts about Hilary Barrett of 99 St. Botolph Street and now Iris’s promise about rescheduling some appointment. A further thought struck him. A discordant note. How had he not heard it before? Because he was a selfish so-and-so.

  He looked quickly to her hand.

  “You and … um … Mr. Bowen must be truly proud of her.”

  “Yes. Very. Very proud of her.”

  “I mean, sure—”

  She stopped. Hector thought he’d insulted her. She looked away. “Luke, her father, died two years ago.” Then she walked on.

  It’s a terrible thing in a man when half his heart is going one way, feeling sad, but in the other half, the strings of joy are playing full on. What could he say? “I’m sorry.”

  They walked the remaining few minutes in silence, then once back at Grace’s went upstairs to their rooms, having agreed to meet in Grace’s old parlor in half an hour. Hector wasted no time, changed his shirt quickly for another of his Hawaiians, the olive green one with blue flowers, got his laptop, and raced back down.

  Billy appeared from the kitchen. “Hey, Hector?”

  “Billy.” Hector had arranged two armchairs around the coffee table. “Is Grace around?”

  “No. Playing tennis with the seniors.”

  “Good! I mean, good for Grace. Mrs. Hale. Her enthusiasm is a lesson for us all, hey? Listen, kid, me and Mrs. Bowen will be working in here.”

  “Oh?”

  “Mrs. Bowen needs to send some e-mails. I’m letting her use my laptop.”

  Billy gave Hector a knowing look.

  “I’m hooked. What can I say? But that’s between you and me.”

  When Iris eventually appeared she’d changed clothes, too, and had washed her hair. It was still wet, the ends curving into scrolls, and dampening patches on her cotton blouse. Billy reappeared and she asked him for a pot of tea.

  Hector turned the open laptop toward Iris. “Here you go.” The cursor beat in the search bar.

  “I’ve never done this before.”

  “What?” He pulled his chair closer to hers. She was still cool from showering and her hair smelled like apples.

  “I’ve never ‘searched’ for a person before.”

  Iris typed in “Hilary Barrett.” Hector didn’t say a word.

  A 0.16-second search yielded nearly six million entries. She turned to him startled. “There can’t be that many people with the same name! I’ll never find her.”

  “Try ‘Boston phone book,’” Hector said.

  Her face reddened. “What? Why Boston?”

  Hector stammered. “It … it was on the envelope … 99 St. Botolph Street. Right? I’m sorry. That’s around the corner?”

  She thought about this for a second. “Right. The envelope. Of course.” Those gray eyes closed for a second.

  “I’m sorry. It’s none of my business.” Hector looked at her, but she was looking out the window toward the park. After a long pause, she said, “It’s complicated. And … she wasn’t there. I went yesterday. It’s a restaurant, you know?” Back at the screen she typed “Boston phone book.” Her eyes scanned the first page of results. Top was White Pages.com.

  Just then Grace opened the door carrying a tray. She was still in her tennis shorts. A gold chain was half hidden beneath her polo shirt.

  “Iris! How are you? Billy said you’d like some tea. Here you go.” As she laid down the tray, her face obscured from Iris, she looked at Hector, thin eyebrows raised.

  “Hector—”

  “Gracie, Gracie, Gracie. Good match?”

  “Wonderful … So you’ve finally met our Hector? Is he behaving himself? He’s a bit of wild card. Isn’t that right, Hector?”

  Grace edged closer and squinted to see what was on the screen, but couldn’t. As she turned away, her red lips quivered, twitching to say something.

  “I’m trying to locate an old friend,” Iris said at last. “Someone I met a long time ago in Dublin. She used to live in Boston.”

  “Oh?”

  “A Hilary Barrett.”

  “Hil—”

  “We’re searching the White Pages on the ’Net,” Hector interrupted, his tone suddenly harsh, cocked, and aimed at Grace. Iris seemed to sense there was a subplot, or so Hector feared, so he smiled at Grace then.

  “Right. Yes. Of course,” Grace said. “Good idea. The White Pages. Well, you never know. Right? Always a good place to start, with the telephone book.” Grace walked toward the door but turned before leaving. Iris couldn’t see that she held her hands open as if ready to catch something. Like an answer. Eyes so wide that if they had been speaking they’d have been saying, Hector, what have you found out? Hector shushed her away with a small wave of his hand.

  In all, there were thirteen search results for Hilary Barrett in the White Pages for Massachusetts. But only one in the age bracket that matched Iris’s guesstimation: Becket, MA.

  “It’s probably not her.” She thought a moment. “Where is Becket? Maybe she moved there?” She fell silent again. She shook her head. “Anyway. I just can’t ring her up—”

  “Sure. Sure you can. She’ll remember you. I mean … yours is not a voice one easily forgets.” Hector, Hector, Hector. What are you saying?

  Iris paused. She stared at the screen. Her face flushed as she took this in. “No, I mean. I don’t even know her. She’s not an old friend,” she said at last. She bit her lower lip hard. Looked around the room and at the closed door. “She’s my daughter’s birth mother.”

  Hector sat back and inclined his head forward and his mouth formed an “oh.” He looked surprised because he was. The missing piece had fallen into place, but it wasn’t what he’d expected.

  “Rose is my adopted daughter.” Iris closed the laptop. Her hands lay on her lap and she made small fists with them. And then she explained: the promise she’d made to her husband before he died but had never carried out; how she’d “stolen” the envelope just a few days earlier from the Adoption Board and got the name and address; and that yesterday when she visited 99 St. Botolph Street, the man there had never heard of a woman named Hilary Barrett.

  She explained it all except for the now missed appointment and the reason for it.

  “So you see, I can’t just ring her up, even if this Hilary Barrett in Becket is the woman I’m looking for.”

  She was elegant in her distress. She held it together. There was strength in this woman; Hector wondered if she knew she had it. Her story was breaking his heart, but his heart had a mind of its own and, to paraphrase the great Irish singer/songwriter, his heart was doing his thinking and it was leading him into a danger zone. He needed more time. More time to get to wherever this was going and to figure out some way to help her, and so in a flush of feeling he found himself saying, “Why don’t I drive you there?”

  “What?”

  “Sure. Why not? Plan B. You could get out of the city heat and see some country.”

  “Is it far?”

  “Becket? Not really. About two hours. West across the state. Into the Berkshires. Part of the Appalachian mountain range and really—”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I’ll ask Grace if we can borrow the car.”

  “Please! Please don’t tell her—”

  “No. No. Of course not.”

  “Why,” she continued, “it’s probably nothing. I’ve been pretty unlucky so far.”

  Hector laid his hand on hers. “Sure. I understand. Your secret’s—” Iris looked at him. She pulled her hand away like it’d been stung by a bee.

  “Sorry, I’m not good with words. What I meant was—”

  “It’s okay. I think I know what you meant.”

  “I just want to … you know … help.” He reached for her hand and held it firmly for a second, then let go. “I meant to tell you last night before the concert, but you weren’t around. I want to help you because … you helped me.”

  “What?”
Her eyes widened.

  “Yeah. Yesterday morning. I finished my piece because of you … you were my inspiration.”

  A group of young teenagers cycled past the window, their voices loud and happy. He watched her watching them until they cycled out of sight. Iris stood and went to the window. After a few moments, she walked toward Hector, put her hand briefly on his shoulder, and said, “Okay,” and then went out the front door and crossed the street to the park.

  * * *

  Hector found Grace and Billy in the office and when he told Grace that he wanted to borrow her car to take Iris to the Berkshires, she gave him that mother of all looks.

  “What have you found out? What’s the appointment? And who is she looking for? Is it the name on the envelope? Have you found her?”

  “Nothing about the appointment, and not exactly.”

  “Hector! Tell me.”

  “It’s a needle in a haystack, Grace. We found one Hilary Barrett in Becket, Massachusetts. What are the chances? Right, Billy?”

  “Hilary Barrett. Hilary Barrett.” Grace mused and screwed her round, dolphinlike eyes closed. “I know that name.” Billy and Hector waited. Waiting for Grace to clarify, but she kept shaking her head and closing her eyes. “I can’t remember. Oh…”

  “I might be able to help,” Billy said at last. Grace and Hector looked to him. “I mean. I am in computers. What do we know?”

  “Of course. Billy. Computers! Now.” Grace spoke excitedly, her voice rising.

  “We only know that she is Mrs. Bowen’s daughter’s birth mother,” said Hector.

  Billy raised his eyebrows. “That’s a mouthful.”

  “And, that this Hilary Barrett once lived at 99 St. Botolph Street. That’s about it. Right?” Hector looked to Grace. “She’d be around … I don’t know. What do you think? How old is Iris?”

  “Oh my. She’s so pretty. Um? Early forties?”

  “Yeah, that’s what I’m thinking. So her daughter is … like … twenty?”

  “No. Nearly nineteen,” Billy said and Grace and Hector looked to him. “Yeah, she told me yesterday morning when we were talking at breakfast and—”

  “Right. Okay.” Hector was nodding his head up and down in a kind of staccatolike beat in double-time. “That makes this Hilary anywhere from forty to forty-five. Ish. Yeah?” Hector was bouncing on his toes now. Rocking back and forth. “Okay. See if you can find anything out, kiddo.”

  “Will do.”

  Then, as if in silent consent, they left in separate directions. Grace to the kitchen to plan that evening’s dinner, Billy to his laptop to see what he could find out. And Hector to his room, where he lay down and waited for the sound of Iris’s footsteps returning.

  Eleven

  The thing about Iris Bowen was she liked to talk to people, even strangers. Like a few days earlier with Thornton Pletz, the Polish-American waiter at Botolph’s. If it hadn’t been for the dead-ended conversation about Hilary, she would have gone on and asked him about his family in Europe. Had he any relatives still there? Did he have children? Or, with Kerry at the airport the day she arrived, if she hadn’t been so overwhelmed with the sense of arrival and her mission, Iris would have asked in what village in County Kerry her granny was born.

  At home in Clare, she struck up conversations with the people behind shop counters, too. With the man who sold her flowers on a Wednesday afternoon at the street market in Ennis, with the fair-haired fishmonger from Slovakia, who had developed a habit of asking each time he met her, “When is Rose due back?” To which Iris usually replied, “In a few weeks.” Her answer, too, had become a habit. Their frequent exchanges (Iris always bought a piece of halibut from him on a Friday) had turned to repartee, which made the Slovakian and other customers in the fish shop smile.

  A few things like that, little anchors, helped her cope with loss.

  And, it made her feel less lonely.

  Before flowers and fish, Iris would often meet Tess for lunch in Ennis. In winter they sat in old feather-stuffed chairs beside the fire, just inside the front door of the Old Ground Hotel. In the summer they sat in garden chairs under the ancient beech tree on the moss-lined patio. They became regulars among regulars and the owner, an art lover named Allen, got to know their names. He never failed to ask how Rose was getting on. He’d known Luke because Luke often lunched there on his noncourt days and they’d become friends. When Luke was in hospital, Allen would send meals from the hotel’s kitchen. One day he had driven all the way out to Ashwood to deliver a bread-and-butter pudding, which was Luke’s favorite.

  All of this Iris thought about the following morning as she stood at the bedroom window upstairs in Grace Hale’s house, wondering if she should phone Tess again. She was sure Grace wouldn’t mind if she used her phone. She listened to the unfamiliar sounds of Boston’s early morning traffic, of buses and cars and garbage trucks. American cities woke so early. She was used to birds and tractors and, at this time of year, the disappearing song of the cuckoo.

  Her hands were restless and she kept fussing with her hair. Twice since rising, Iris had changed her clothes. Nothing looked right. Sitting on the bed fastening her sandals she recalled the dream she’d had early that morning. Luke was in it. He was walking out of the sea holding a box. He walked toward her but the tide kept coming with him and he made no progress to the shore. He wasn’t struggling, just walking in his suit, ankle deep in the tide pools. He smiled. She couldn’t see what was in the box he carried from the sea.

  She missed her garden—her own garden—where things had a way of working themselves out. A knock on the door made Iris jump. She opened it to find Hector, who had a tray that held a teapot and some toast and a daisy in a water glass.

  “I thought maybe we could get a head start on breakfast and hit the road when you’re ready,” he said and he put the tray down on her made-up bed. He stood back as if somehow proud of himself. “You still want to go, don’t you?”

  She nodded. “I’ll be down”—she hesitated—“in a bit. Five minutes.”

  “Great.” He clapped his hands together. “I’ll get the car ready.”

  Iris looked at the daisy. Some of its petals were missing. As if someone had plucked them.

  * * *

  Grace had agreed to lend Hector her old Jaguar so he could drive into the Berkshire Mountains to show Iris some of America. Or at least that’s what Grace had thought the previous night when they met for meat loaf and salad in her kitchen.

  “To see some of my great state of Massachusetts, right?”

  The table was laid with bone china and linen napkins and an assortment of lit candles. “I asked Billy to tidy up the car for your little road trip tomorrow,” Grace had said, pulling her muumuu that had gathered tight beneath her gold belt. She’d looked at Hector, whose teeth slightly eclipsed his bottom lip. His eyes seemed charged with some meaning Iris didn’t understand. Grace returned his scrutiny, then turned to Iris and went on. “Bob loved that car. You’ll like it. Drives like a dream. I couldn’t give it up when he died. I know it’s old—”

  “Gracie, you’re a visionary,” Hector had said promptly, and pulled the chair for her to sit. He’d poured her wine and given her a look, which Iris found puzzling. Grace drank half the glass in one long sip.

  “You’d better watch him, Iris, he’s a charmer.” Her voice had a curious undertone, Iris thought, as she watched her cut the meat loaf into slices.

  During the supper, Iris succeeded in not having to talk about herself. Grateful the subject of the phone calls to Ireland was not referred to, she had instead asked questions. She’d learned about the renovation of the South End, which had been Grace’s passion for twenty years. Learned how Hector had answered an ad for a spare room and how he ended up living with Bob and Grace when he was a student at Berklee, and how long ago the neighborhood around St. Botolph had been populated by jazz musicians.

  “Hector wore his hair in a ponytail those days,” Grace said distractedly.
/>   Hector glanced sideways at Iris.

  Grace continued, “You know, Botolph is the patron saint of Boston. It was named after him when the Pilgrims came here in the early 1600s. Right, Hector?”

  “Something like that, Gracie.”

  With a twinge of regret that here she was sitting, listening to something she knew Luke would have been more interested in than she was, Iris recalled when he’d told Rosie that a Bowen ancestor had been a passenger on the Mayflower, survived the journey, and landed at Plymouth Rock. Rose was doing a genealogy chart in primary school. Iris remembered because Rose was distressed about it. “Are they my ancestors, too?” she’d asked.

  “Of course! What’s mine is yours, ma petite chou,” Luke had said.

  And with that Rose was happy. If she ever struggled about her biological connections, she hid it well. Maybe she’d locked it away in a box. Iris could never be sure.

  “Yes, I remember now,” Grace said. “Something about a stone and a monastery and a Benedictine abbot named Botwulf in England. English Pilgrims landed here and called it Boston. I can’t quite remember the connection. I have it written down somewhere.” She paused. “If you’re interested I can find it. You know—” Grace stopped suddenly and looked directly at Iris. “You know, I never asked you what brought you to Boston.”

  “Grace! None of our business, I think.”

  “I’m doing a gardening piece on Boston city gardens,” Iris said. She said it quickly, and she didn’t look at Hector.

  “Oh?” Grace turned the wine in her glass. “That’s nice.”

  They ate in silence for a little while.

  “Enough for me,” Hector said, his hand covering his glass when Grace attempted to fill it from a third bottle. She looked to Iris, who shook her head gently.

  “But thank you. It’s been a lovely evening.”

  “Pleasure, I’m sure,” Grace replied with a just little too much emphasis on her Ss. “Sorry it was only meat loaf. Not much of a cook since Bob…” She paused and spoke pointedly to Iris. “It’s never the same. But we manage. We get on with it.” She rose and stood for a moment and looked toward the door. Hector got up then and put his arm around her, kissed her cheek, and led her out the door, his hasty movement making the candles flicker. For a moment then, light mottled the room and Iris had sat alone, feeling guilty that she had lied and wondering what she was going to say to Hilary Barrett in Becket, Massachusetts, the next day.