Her Name Is Rose Page 8

  At the airport there was no phone service. Here, too, her old phone said “no service,” but yet her battery was half-full. She walked around the room with it held out as if to catch signals. Then suddenly, like a pulsing in her heart, she thought of Rose in London. Was it wrong she hadn’t told her? Of course it was. But I’ll be back in a couple of days. But I still should have told her something. And ruin her practicing for her master class? No. No. This was right. This is what a mother does. Get it done. And get back. Carry on. Make no fuss. You don’t want to ruin everything. Rose would be in her own world practicing like mad anyway. She had an important master class next week. She wouldn’t be in touch. She was like that. She needed her own space and she’d be coming home soon for a short holiday anyway. Best to say nothing. Just get it done. I’ll buy a phone card, she thought, and phone Tess and the clinic.

  There was a knock at the door and Iris opened it to see Grace—now in a cream muumuu with a thick leather belt girdling her waist. On her wrist was a square, gold bangle. “Toasted chicken sandwich with lettuce. Potato chips. A pot of tea. And a half bottle of red. How’s that? Nice, right?” She laid the tray down on the desk.

  “Very nice.” There was no sign of lemonade.

  “And just what the doctor ordered,” Grace said, stepping backward to the door and lingering there. She straightened her belt and looked at Iris a moment. Iris wasn’t sure if she was expected to taste the famous chicken sandwich right then and there. Grace didn’t stir.

  “Will you join me in a glass?” Iris said at last. She didn’t really know why she’d said it; she was tired and hungry and needed to gather herself for the morning’s mission of tracking down Hilary. But then it seemed inviting Grace in was the right thing to do, and Iris liked to do things that were right. Because here was a woman like herself, although a decade older. Widows in arms. A sort of ally, Iris thought.

  “Well, yes, that might be fun!” Grace’s eyes broadened. “Yes! I’ll be right back,” she said and scooted down the stairs. Moments later, with a second glass and a full bottle in her hands, Grace reappeared. “Here we go.” She unscrewed the top and poured the glasses. “You save this one for later.” She placed the unopened half bottle on the bureau, then pulled the chair around from the desk and settled, somewhat ungracefully, down onto it. She sat only a moment. “Grace Hale, where are your manners?” She popped up. “You sit here. You have your supper at the desk … and…” She hesitated. “I’ll sit there.” She indicated the leather armchair and thumped down again, dislodging a cushion embroidered with a tennis ball and racket.

  Iris angled the chair at the desk and sat facing Grace. She began to eat the sandwich, but thinking now—what unusual accommodation Kerry the redhead from the information kiosk had booked her.

  “This was Bob’s chair.” Grace said quietly, and she picked up the cushion that had fallen, hugged it for a moment, then tucked it back behind her. “Five years and I’m still getting used to his not being here.” She looked at Iris. “Do you know what I mean?” But before Iris could answer that yes, she did know, she did understand, that her Luke was gone, too, Grace went on. “Bob was in investments. What I don’t know about derivatives and hedge funds, and options and futures!” She laughed and patted her knee with her free hand in a manly way as if Bob’s gestures came with inhabiting his chair. In between quick swallows of wine she told Iris how Bob would come home in the evenings and spill out all the office politics and whatnot and how she listened to him like it was the most important thing in the world. How on weekends they played tennis together in the park and, having no children themselves, they had traveled to see their nieces and nephews. Before he died they’d taken a cruise to Alaska and seen the bear and the salmon.

  “Bob was my world,” she said, and turned toward the open door, and Iris got the feeling Grace expected Bob would somehow appear. When Iris had finished her sandwich and emptied her glass, Grace sprung up and refilled it.

  “I’ll take this away,” she said and removed the tray to the hallway. “The tea’s cold, I’m afraid. Would you like another?”

  “No. That’s fine. Wine’s good.” Iris felt a slight lift, as if she were delicately floating.

  “I’m afraid I’ve drunk more than my share,” Grace said, sitting down. “Ever since Bob died I’ve had trouble sleeping, although I don’t know why. He was such a snorer! Now I find a few small glasses help me sleep.” She paused, sinking further into Bob’s chair. “Sometimes he slept in this room, when he had to get up early. So as not to wake me.”

  The memory of it took her away into a quietness that Iris welcomed. She calculated what time it must be in Ireland. After midnight. She looked over the travel brochures on the desk and fingered Kerry’s map of the South End. She glanced at Grace, who seemed like she might fall asleep at any moment. Then Billy appeared, and seeing that Grace looked about to doze, knocked sharply on the open door.

  “You’re wanted downstairs, Mrs. Hale.” He looked at Iris with a knowing smile.

  “What? What?” Grace stirred.

  “Downstairs. Hector.”

  “Right,” she said, rising quickly. “I’ll be there in a minute.” She straightened up, looked in the mirror, then turned to Iris and said, “Well, that was perfectly lovely.” At the door she paused. “How lovely to meet you.”

  * * *

  The sun through the thin curtains woke Iris at nine. It was later than she’d intended, but she’d slept poorly in the early part of the morning and dozed off and on all night. Her eyes opened on the map of the South End that lay on the desk beside the bed. St. Botolph Street was marked in blue ink. She was dying for a cup of tea. She looked around the room again. Not like Ireland, she thought. No kettle in sight. She might ask Billy for one. She showered quickly and dressed in the only “nice” outfit she’d packed, a periwinkle blue linen sleeveless that Tess had bought with her one day.

  “Get something Rose would be surprised to see you in,” Tess had said. “Instead of those ratty blue jeans and Luke’s old shirt.” They’d chosen the linen dress because it was the kind of thing she could dress up or down, with heels or sandals. She chose the black sandals. She hadn’t worn a dress in so long, she felt uncomfortable in it. She’d folded it carefully between tissue paper but that hadn’t prevented it wrinkling. Oh, hell. She tugged at it as best she could. Looking at herself in the mirror now as she was ready to go downstairs, she felt acutely like an imposter. (What does one wear when meeting the woman who birthed your child?) She sat down on the edge of the bed and took off the sandals and put on the heels. She wanted to look smart meeting Hilary Barrett. She wanted to look like she’d measured up to the mother Hilary had probably hoped for when she gave her baby over to the adoption agency all those years ago. She tried to think about what she was wearing that day, but she couldn’t remember.

  Would Hilary remember her?

  In the breakfast room another guest was already sitting, a tanned man in a Hawaiian-like shirt, who sat in the corner by himself. He looked to be in his mid-forties. Iris sat down near the window at the only other table for two. She’d prepared a friendly smile to offer as she passed, but he didn’t look up. His straight back was leaned forward, his head fixed over the table. His unfinished plate had been pushed aside. He was writing something. He mustn’t have heard her, she thought. Then a sound, like a low humming, haphazard in rhythm, reached her and she looked over. It was coming from him. A low music somewhere inside him was humming and he was moving his head to its rhythm.

  “Good morning, Mrs. Bowen.” Billy had startled her and she looked up. He’d come in without her noticing. “Mrs. Hale says she hopes you slept well.”

  “You can tell her, thank you, yes,” she said in a quiet voice. She kept her eyes on the man in the blue and green and white shirt.

  The humming continued.

  “Coffee. Or … would you like tea?” Billy asked, taking no notice of the guest in the corner. “Mrs. Hale says you might prefer tea.”

 
“Tea would be lovely. Yes,” she almost whispered.

  “Coming right up.” He turned. “Morning, Hector,” Billy breezed past him, but the man made no acknowledgment except a slight nod of his head.

  Letting the fall of her hair curtain her face, Iris glanced at the humming man, who was now making small circles in the air with his long-fingered hands, like butterfly wings fluttering. His lips were moving bap bap bap bap. He looked up and stared at her blankly, then returned his attention to his writing.

  “Where are you off to today?” Billy was back with the tea and toast.

  “I haven’t quite decided,” she replied quickly.

  “If I may suggest?”

  “Yes?”

  “If you haven’t seen the Mapparium, then you should go. Just around the corner, across Huntington.”

  “Mapparium?” She pretended to be interested.

  “Yeah, it’s awesome. It’s like … it’s hard to explain actually. It’s a giant walk-through globe with a map of the world painted on glass. Inside out, like. Like you’re in the middle of the earth looking out. Really cool. The acoustics are unreal, and—”

  From butterfly hands came a groan. “Hey, Billy, pipe down, can you? I need to finish this.” The man hadn’t looked up.

  “Yeah, sure, Hector. Sorry, man.” Billy moved so he was masking the tall man from Iris’s view. He raised his eyebrows and shrugged and lowered his voice a notch. “Anyway. It’s three stories high and there’s over six hundred glass panels held together and they’re individually lit from behind. And there’s a glass bridge, midway though the earth, that takes you across from one side to the other and—”

  “It’s the world as it was in 1934,” said Hector. He stood up then and strode from the room in a kind of whoosh, but not before first looking directly at Iris, then back to Billy. “And don’t forget to say it’s a whispering gallery.” Whoosh. He was out the front room. Bang. He was passing in the street below the window, striding away, his fair hair like wings beating behind his ears.

  “Was it something we said?” Iris said, trying to make light of what was feeling to her like an awkward situation.

  “Don’t worry about it. Sometimes he’s like that, Professor Sherr. He’s a real good friend of Mrs. Hale’s. He’s Californian. He stays here a few times a year. He can be really nice, when he’s not composing.”

  “A musician?”

  “Yeah. He’s playing tonight at the park.” Billy pointed through the room and out the window. “Jazz.”

  Iris felt her face blush for no reason at all. Billy kept chatting and he told her he was helping Grace out while she took in a few guests over the summer. He told her he was a sophomore at Boston University, hoping to major in computers. “I’m a bit of a computer geek,” he said.

  “So, you’re about my daughter’s age, then?”

  “Twenty in September. Twenty-ninth.”

  “My daughter’s going to be nineteen at the end of the month.”

  * * *

  Iris didn’t wait for Billy to return with the brochure on the Mapparium that he’d proposed to get. Instead she went up to her room to change her shoes again and brush her hair. She looked at herself one long moment. Will she remember me? A few minutes later, map in hand, she left the guesthouse and walked in the direction of St. Botolph Street. The day was already hot. Iris passed alongside a long expanse of iron railings that enclosed a park. Children’s voices rang in the near distance. Redbrick townhouses, like Mrs. Hale’s, with double wooden doors and bowed windows with lead glass lined the other side of the street.

  Would Rose have come from a house like this?

  Would she have played in this park?

  Would she have loved growing up here?

  Anxiety, which had been briefly diverted by the Hawaiian-shirted man, returned. Her breath quickened and her chest hurt. What was she was going to say to Hilary Barrett when she found her? She’d been operating on gut instinct and her usual impulsiveness, but had she really thought it through? No. Of course not. Of course you didn’t, Iris. For a moment she wished she could beam herself home and wake up, relieved, as if from a bad dream. But there was too much at stake; she’d come too far to turn back now. At the end of the park, an almost paralytic terror gripped her.

  I am keeping my promise, Luke.

  At the intersection of West Newton and St. Botolph, a three-story building spanned the corner, curving with it. It was unlike the other buildings on the street. This one was a bit more elegant, with a kind of turret at its corner capped with lead. Iris walked across the street, closer to it and looked up at its doors, which stood at the top of a set of brick steps.

  99 St. Botolph Street.

  These numbers were etched in a glass panel above its black frame. If this is the place, nothing about it said it could be the home of Rose’s birth mother. It might have—once upon a time—housed apartments, maybe, but what Iris now saw as she stood fixed to the sidewalk was not someone’s “home.”

  Iris climbed the steps to the door and knocked.

  Nothing.

  She knocked again.

  Nothing again. No one came to answer the door.

  She turned around and half slumped her back against the door. A surge of heat rushed to her chest and face. She tugged on the neckline of her dress and felt perspiration gathering in the folds of her skin. How could 99 St. Botolph Street be the home of Hilary Barrett?

  It was a restaurant.

  After a few moments she went down the steps and crossed the street. She walked dazed, an ache in her heart, a kind of numbness buffering the pain of her thoughts. She turned abruptly and came back. There was a fruit and vegetable stand outside a small shop called Megaira’s Market. Botolph’s was across the way. She stepped into the market and, feeling conspicuous, took up a Boston Globe from the stack of newspapers just inside the front door. She looked back toward the restaurant, peering through stacked shelves of cans of tomatoes and lentils and jars of stuffed cabbage leaves and boxes of rice. A stoic-looking lady with small dark eyes and gray hair, standing inside behind the counter, snapped at her.

  “You want that paper?”

  “Sorry?”

  “Globe’s two dollars. You want it?”

  Iris crossed to the counter and stood for a moment in the whir of a fan.

  “They’re not open,” the woman said, opening the till.

  Iris looked at her questioningly.

  “Botolph’s, not open until lunchtime.”

  Iris smiled weakly. “Oh.”

  “Where you from?”

  “Ireland. I’m Irish.”

  “Ireland? Never been. I always wanted to visit places where foreign languages were spoken.”

  Iris didn’t know what to say to that, although she could have said, The world feels like it’s speaking a foreign language today and I don’t understand.

  From her post at the checkout the woman eyed Iris but as Iris met her gaze directly, something in the old woman lightened.

  “You looking maybe for a place to eat?”

  “No, thanks.” Iris put her things down and opened her purse.

  “Looking for a job? Maybe you got an interview or something. You meeting someone?”

  “No.”

  “None of my business, then,” the woman said, this time sounding cross.

  Iris was about to pay when she spotted some postcards of an urban garden. “I’ll take these, too, please.”

  “Titus Sparrow Park.”

  “How much are they?”

  “Six for five.”

  “Unusual name,” Iris said.

  “It’s Greek,” the woman said and shuffled along behind the counter and made a noise that sounded like spitting.

  “No, sorry. I meant … I meant Titus Sparrow.”

  A noise behind Iris got her attention. And then a voice. “Don’t pay any attention to Mrs. Kostas … often cranky midweek.” An elderly man in a red baseball cap had come just inside the door, half inside, half out. “Isn
’t that right, Megaira?”

  “Ah, áfisé her ísihi!” She took a ten-dollar bill from Iris and placed the postcards on top of the newspaper.

  “You got that right, though, ma’am.” The man smiled. “It’s an unusual name, but a nice name.” He glanced at Megaira. “And TSP’s got a nice long history, too. Titus wasn’t a bird, a sparrow, you know. He was a great man. And once upon a time, before the park was named after him—in honor of his teaching tennis to poor kids—Salvation Army had a home for unwed mothers and—”

  “Hey, Amos, old man … you want something?” Megaira interrupted.

  “Just the Globe today, Megaira. Read about my Sox beating Baltimore.”

  “Two dollars, then. And go away.” Despite herself, Megaira Kostas had softened in response to the Red Sox fan, and her downturned mouth evened out. Iris was reminded of home, of standing in the post office listening to Tommy Ryan when he’d be collecting the post from Josephine and she’d be giving out to him because he was five minutes late. And Tommy would laugh and say something that made Josephine bark even louder. The world is small, Iris thought. And, maybe, not always, so foreign.

  Amos smiled and did a neat pirouette. “As I was just saying,” he said, lowering his cap and looking sideways from beneath it at Megaira, “we’ve got community gardens and of course tennis courts and—”

  “And as I was just saying, Amos, you want something? Else?”

  “No. You know, I guess I don’t.” He winked at Iris. As he began to saunter away he turned, “And if you’re interested, it being a summer Friday, there’ll be jazz tonight in Titus’s park.”

  “Amos! Scat!”

  Amos tilted his head and was gone. From outside, Iris heard him sing, “Nothing but bluebirds … be dee and doo da bah…”