Her Name Is Rose Read online

  Iris quickly crossed to the table and picked up the folder that Sonia had left on her chair.

  I’ll be right back. A few minutes.

  She stood with her back to the door and leaned against it, her shoes anchored on the floor. I’ll only be a few minutes.

  She opened the folder.

  Inside, was the consent form to adopt, application order, and the notice of legal order from the Adoption Board. Nothing there she didn’t already know. Stapled to the inside-front cover was a photocopy of the legal birth certificate for adoptive children naming Iris and Luke as Rose’s parents. But there was also a copy of the original birth certificate, stapled underneath. She held her breath. Here it was. It named a Hilary Barrett as the mother. Barrett! Was there more? She flipped from the front of the file to the end. Paper-clipped to the back-inside cover of the folder, as if in afterthought, was a handwritten-addressed envelope. It said: Adoption Board, Merrion Square, Dublin, Ireland.

  “Iris?”

  Iris froze.

  “Would you get the door, please?”

  Iris quickly returned the folder. The paper clip fell to the ground and she brushed it away with her foot and went to get the door.

  Sonia carried in a small tray with two mugs and settled the tray on the side table. She looked at Iris, her eyes pausing on the chair a moment before picking up the folder and sitting down with it securely in her lap.

  “I hope you’ve had a few minutes to recognize, Mrs. Bowen that the Adoption Board can do nothing more for you as the adoptive mother.” She passed Iris a tea mug. “I am so sorry. It’s just the way it is. And has been for many years. And until the laws change—”

  “I understand.” Iris paused a few moments and, still standing, took a single sip of the tea and then said, “Actually, I have to go. I have to catch the five-twenty train back to Limerick.” She put her mug down. “I have a long way to go from here.” She waited for Sonia to say something but Sonia only looked at her own mug. Then she, too, stood and the two women faced each other.

  An instant of silent understanding passed. Nothing was explained nor questioned. But there was a moment—definitely, and a powerful connection—and for that fleeting moment Iris and Sonia were co-conspirators against the chaotic universe.

  A moment that could possibly change a life forever.

  “Thank you for your help,” Iris said.

  Sonia smiled weakly and weariness showed in the circles under her eyes, as if each day she prepared to face the world but it was wearing her out. She walked Iris down the wide Georgian hallway to the front door. A partial ellipse of light shone from the fanlight above the door onto the marble floor.

  “Good-bye then, Iris,” Sonia said, and she held Iris’s hand very firmly. “Good luck … with everything.”

  Stepping across the street and onto the footpath, Iris reached out to hold on to the black railing enclosing the small park. She turned back to see the blue door of the Adoption Board close, the city street now a blur of noise and traffic passing. She took from her pocket the envelope she had torn from the folder. She had folded it small, but now gently opened and pressed it flat. She’d got what she’d come for. In the top, left-hand corner, inked in faded blue writing, was an address.

  “Luke,” Iris whispered. “Hilary … Hilary Barrett. 99 St. Botolph Street. Boston, Massachusetts.”

  Five

  There is no difference between the fiddle and the violin—Rose had learned that by heart and said it in response to neighbors and friends in Clare who often asked why she played the violin instead of the fiddle. The fiddle was traditional, it was what a child was expected to learn in the west. “Sure it’s who we are,” Tommy Ryan had said one day hearing her play. But Rose was a girl who wanted to form her own identity. They’re not really different, she would say, just played differently. When she played a jig she’d say she was playing the fiddle, but when she played a sonata or a concerto she was playing the violin. “Same instrument. Just played differently. Traditional and classical. I’m both.”

  When, as an eight-year-old, she’d showed an interest in learning an instrument Luke and Iris took her to a music school in Ennis, where she sat in on several classes, including fiddle. It was Andreas the violin teacher, an Austrian from Salzburg who’d moved to Ireland, who’d captured her imagination. A stocky man with a head of thick, gray hair. On her first lesson, he’d said, “Mein Roslein, the music’s in you and you’re in the music. Keep practicing and one day you’ll find each other, and then you’ll be famous. I know this.” And with his help, year by year, she’d come though the exams and then won a gold medal for her performance of Beethoven’s Spring sonata. She was accepted to the Royal Academy of Music in London in the summer of ’08.

  When she was sixteen Andreas had advised it was time for her to get a really good violin. He’d suggested an Irish violin maker called Conor Flynn who’d studied to be a luthier in Cremona, Italy. Andreas explained that Conor’s mother was Italian and a musician herself and now played with the Irish Chamber Orchestra. Conor had learned to play the fiddle when he was young, Andreas said, but when he visited his grandparents’ home in Verona at a young age he got it into his head that he wanted to make his own violin. Andreas laughs when he tells the story. “Imagine, mein Roslein, a five-year-old boy wanting to make a violin instead of an airplane or a tractor of some other wooden toy! And now he is one of the best young violin makers in Ireland.”

  * * *

  Incense burned and two ginger cats were asleep in an open violin case on the window seat of Conor Flynn’s workshop inside an old Irish farmhouse in North Clare on the day Rose and her parents walked in. It was early January. Wood shavings were scattered across the floor. Hanging on the walls were silver molds and templates, and on a blue nylon line hanging, like strange washing, were several unfinished violins. Against the wall was a long, thick table with several ceramic jars holding tools and a docking station with an iPod playing. Rose recognized the end of a Haydn concerto, but the next piece was a surprise. It was “The Lonesome Touch” by Martin Hayes, the Irish fiddler from East Clare.

  “It is all about the wood. Baltic spruce and Bosnian maple. The great Cremonese violin makers got their maple from the Acer pseudoplatanus,” the blue-eyed luthier said. He was young, not even thirty. He was wearing a wooly cap with ear flaps, and from him came the scent of the sea and his sandy-colored hair was long and tied back. Rose watched wood dust drift from his fingers when he lifted his hand to point to the samples on the plastered wall. She looked to her mother, expecting a response, her mother knowing about plants and trees and such things, but Iris only nodded, eyes down, smiling faintly.

  “The higher up the trees grow, the better; generally, the air is purer,” Conor continued, a little nervous, Rose thought. “Wood is highly absorbent.”

  “Is it?” Rose said. She knew it was, but she’d felt Conor’s eyes on her cheek and she needed to say something to break his stare. She turned to look around the studio and then out toward the sea. A dozen white heads of snowdrops bowed in their terra-cotta pots on the windowsill outside.

  “Yeah, it is. Things penetrate the wood. Acid rain, things, you know.… Like when it dries out, toxins may remain”—Rose turned back to him—“in the wood, I mean. But it gives it … character.” His eyes held hers. “You know?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  For a moment it had seemed as if there was only Rose and Conor and the violins in the room until Luke smiled and said, “Character is important.”

  Iris straightened the stencils on the worktable.

  “Used to be that natural materials used in violin making were unpolluted,” Conor said. “They did stuff like cutting the trees down with the waning moon to make the best tonewood. So”—he waved his hand toward the display—“if you pick the cuts here, then I’ll adjust them (and here he looked at Luke) to the character of whatever wood you choose.” He bowed theatrically to Rose. She couldn’t stop herself smiling. Something inside her stirre
d.

  Iris, who’d watched the exchange unfurling between them, turned to Luke. “Maybe … we should just buy a really good used violin?” Her thoughts might have well been audible: waning moons, blue eyes, blond hair in a ponytail, and he makes violins?

  “Up to you.” The violin maker turned back to his worktable. The tune had finished on the player. “It makes a difference, of course, if the wood was grown in sunshine or in shadow.”

  * * *

  Two months later the violin with a bright, rich sound was hand delivered by Conor on a radiant early March morning when Rose was studying. She wasn’t expecting him. He hadn’t let the Bowens know he was finished.

  “I read about you in The Banner County News. Congratulations,” he’d said when she’d opened the glass door and he breezed in. “Not many Irish get accepted at the RAM, I mean. That’s really cool. RAM. Good for you.” He was wearing the same yellow wooly cap with the ear flaps.

  “I guess.” Rose didn’t know what to say because his arrival as well as his enthusiasm had caught her unawares. “I have to pass my Leaving Cert, though.” She motioned to the French grammar book and practice tests open on the table.

  “Sure, of course. But no bother. It’s a couple months away, right?” He opened the violin case as if presenting an offering. “Will you play it, ma chérie?”

  She shot him a look. Funny guy. “I don’t know…” She didn’t pick it up, and after a bit he put the open case down on the table beside her books.

  He gazed at her one long moment, gauging the possibilities, working out the chances, and when at last it looked like he’d made up his mind, he blurted, “You’re really beautiful.”

  Rose glanced away and fingered the open face of the violin, tracing the inside of the f holes ending in a swirl. Then she looked to him and said, “No, I’m not,” and turned away.

  Iris and Luke weren’t home, they’d told Rose they had business in Limerick that afternoon. Rose didn’t know if she wanted Conor Flynn to stay around. He was intense, or something. She wasn’t sure what was happening. Her face reddened. He kept looking at her but she’d decided not to play for him. She walked toward the door.

  “So, maybe you’d let me know how my violin stands up to the rigors of that academy, once you get there, I mean. Tell them there’s an Irish fiddler by the name of Flynn you can recommend. That is, if you like the sound.” He laughed at himself but continued speaking and followed Rose to the door and stood close beside her. “You’ll be my first true professional customer. I slipped a few of my cards in with a gift for you—some rosin. It’s a secret recipe a guy in Belgium makes.” From him came the scent of the sea and wood dust. He said he hoped maybe she’d invite him around during the summer just so he might hear how the violin sounded, in case it needed any tweaking, but he’d been playing it for a month and was happy.

  “All right, so, I’m off. Taking Gerty to Doughmore Beach.”

  Rose cast her eyes downward.

  “Gerty’s my van,” he said quickly.

  “Oh.” She smiled and laughed. “I thought you had—”

  “A dog in the van? No, the cats wouldn’t like that.” He paused. “I’m a surfer.” He put his hands in his pockets and waited in case Rose had changed her mind and wanted him to stay, but she only looked away out the window down across the garden.

  They’d exchanged numbers and he’d wished her luck on her exams and in doing so placed his hand gently on her back. He moved closer so that his body was against hers. It was just a moment. And as quick as the flick of a downward bow he bent and kissed her.

  “For good luck!” he said. Then he was out the door, through the gap in the hedge in her mother’s garden.

  Rose followed after a moment but it was a moment too late. She saw the back of an old red van heading toward the sea.

  When he’d gone, she looked at his cards: Conor Flynn, Master Violin Maker, Kinvara, Co. Galway. She tucked them back into the small velvet box under the scroll. He’d explained her violin’s sound would deepen, that it would travel through the layers of varnish like air through puff pastry. Rose would eventually think back on this as the thing that had opened the door and left an imprint on her heart. That he’d thought this and said it. It wasn’t what she expected and she liked that. That night after dinner Rose played “O Mio Babbino Caro” on the new violin and her mother cried. (Her parents hadn’t yet told her that Luke had been at the doctor’s office that day.)

  * * *

  Until now the music had never let Rose down. Sometimes she’d had doubts and wondered if she was chasing the feeling instead of flowing with it. But at her best, at the very height of her rising skill, she could disappear into the sound like a surfer riding through the tunnel of a long wave. And for that she had lived.

  Now, as Rose Bowen exits Camden Town tube station after the crushing master class and turns at Camden High Street, wandering along Parkway, that all seems a long time ago in another world. In that world she might have answered Conor Flynn’s texts that first summer. Returned his kiss even. In that world her father would still be living and they would be laughing and he’d be telling her this very minute that the Kiwi dude was a “proper bollocks.” And all would be okay. And he would say something philosophical, like even though the teaching is external the learning comes from inside, and not to doubt herself. But it’s not that world, and it’s not all right. Conor’s texts had stopped and her father was not living.

  Now she is just a girl moving through the night of the dark city, alone.

  She passes the Jazz Cafe where a late-night crowd is queuing for Imelda May, the Irish rockabilly star. She keeps walking. It’s getting darker. The tables on the sidewalk outside of Dublin Castle are crowded with young people drinking beer and smoking. The girls wear short summer skirts and string tops and briefly fill the air with their tangled perfume. The guys are skinny with hair that hides their faces.

  A lightness on Rose’s back where her violin should be makes her shoulders feel bare. It’s as though she’d had wings, but hadn’t realized it until now—now there’s a vacancy. Her feet slap the pavement as she crosses Gloucester Road. In the falling coolness she walks through the iron gates of Primrose Hill Park where the lights along the path make white patches in the grass that look like snow. Rose climbs the hill. Wind through the fingered leaves of horse chestnut trees makes a noise like rain, and hanging in the sky just above the tree line to her left is a half moon. A runner jogs with a golden retriever. A couple pushes a baby stroller. At the top of the hill, Rose sits down on a wooden bench and lowers her head to her knees, dark hair sliding along her legs touching the pavement, where it curls across the top of her shoes. A text beeps on her phone.

  Rose, please ring me. Need to talk to you. ASAP. x Roger.

  Red and purple lights of the BT Tower pulse in the distance. The light on the screen of her phone fades and leaves her face in darkness. As the late night folds around her she vows to sit still there above the city until she knows what to do. She ignores Roger’s text. She wants to call Iris but she can’t do it. She can’t confess to her mother just yet the madness that has happened. She wouldn’t be able to explain what she has just done or why she has done it until she can explain it to herself. It seemed that in the moment it was what she had to do. It was as though something prompted her to abandon the violin, as though she had no option but to bring the whole business of London and the academy and Roger to completion. Was she really any good? Who was she? She sat and stared down at the lights of the city.

  Iris would understand, wouldn’t she? Yes. But. But she’d be heartbroken for her. So how could Rose tell her?

  If Rose could have asked God for a mother, she would have asked for Iris. Good old Iris. Strong, yet able to bend like a flower in the wind. She’d have asked for a proud mother, a brave one, an understanding one, a fierce one who could be pigheaded, impulsive, determined, yet delicate, too, who wanted the best for her daughter in everything and would move whatever she had to just to
make that happen, a mother who always had just the right amount of humor.

  Stars pixelate in the night sky and remind Rose of the day before she left Ashwood for London at the end of August the previous year. She and her mother had lain out on beach chairs in the garden past midnight. They’d watched a meteor shower and counted twenty-four shooting stars. They’d held hands and agreed they’d come through an entire year and second summer without Luke. Somehow they had managed it. It was a miracle in a way and Rose had pressed her head against Iris’s apple-scented hair.

  There are times she wonders about her birth parents (she’d be lying if she said she hadn’t thought about them, ever), but only in a matter-of-fact kind of way because Rose knows she’s lucky to have been adopted. She knows how much she was wanted and that in a way, she was chosen. That has always made her feel special. Life as Rose knows it—has only ever known it—has been as the treasured child of Iris and Luke Bowen, the mother and father who raised her, nurtured her, encouraged her, took care of her—like that time with the chicken pox when all she wanted to do was scratch her face to pieces and her mother kept bathing her in calendula oil. Or, when she fell from her bike, broke her collarbone and her mother had to do everything for her. Everything. Or the time she failed French in her Junior Certificate exam and was gutted. Then, her mother’s cups of tea and homemade scones were like some magic recipe to which only Iris knew the secret.

  That’s what she needs right now, as she sits on the park bench in the fettered dark—magic. But there is nothing and no one. She’s on her own. A boisterous group arrives at the top of the hill and looks at the lights of the city. They don’t speak English. They are laughing and pushing and hanging off each other. Rose doesn’t understand them. But one of them has an iPod playing through headphones and something about the thin music escaping jolts her like a bolt of electricity.

  Oh my God.

  Oh my God, what have I done?

  She jumps up, pushes past the group, and races down the hill and out through the gates. She tears down the High Street, past the pet shop, the greengrocers, the Primrose Hill Bookshop, past the now-closed pubs and chic restaurants and cafes, the street empty except for black plastic bags of rubbish and stacks of folded cardboard. Across the railway bridge she races down into Chalk Farm tube station. On the platform the tunnel wind blows her hair. The lights glare into her eyes and she feels disgusting, she feels like some insect wanting to run for cover. She walks quickly toward the red light so she can step into the first car as soon as the train comes and when it does, she pushes in through disembarking passengers when the doors open.