Her Name Is Rose Read online

  “Someday that man might buy more than the Globe,” Megaira said.

  Movement from the dark windows across the street caught Iris’s attention. She hurried out.

  “Hey, lady? Your Globe!” Iris heard the woman yell after her, but she didn’t turn back.

  She crossed the street, climbed the steps, and this time she absolutely hammered the door knocker. The door was opened sharply by a man of about sixty, nearly bald, in a white shirt. His trousers, shoes, and belt were black. “We’re closed, lady,” he said point-blank and more than a little annoyed. But Iris was fired up now. Something about the baseball fan had sparked her courage. She walked past the bald man into the restaurant and didn’t look back until she was well inside.

  “When do you open, then?”

  “Didn’t you read the sign? We’re open for lunch on Saturdays and for Sunday brunch,” he said. “Today is? Friday. You can come back for dinner. Open at six.” He turned his eyes to the door.

  She’d missed the sign. Iris reached for the top of the nearest chair. Suddenly she thought she was going to faint. Her courage hadn’t lasted but a minute. She tried to steady herself but her eyes were dizzy, taking in the tables covered in white linen, each with a tall vase of single flowers, cosmos maybe or daisies. Suddenly she couldn’t remember what they were called even though she knew well their name. The tables were swimming and Iris’s legs were feeling limp. “I think I … could I sit down?”

  The man moved toward her. “Hey. Hey! Okay, Look, here,” he said. He pulled a chair away from the table and Iris slid into it. When Iris was seated he rushed through a swinging door. A pulse thumped along the side of her neck. Her head felt light. A mixture of humiliation and panic seized her. If Hilary Barrett was here, was Iris going to collapse at her feet?

  The man reappeared with a glass of water. “Now. Here, drink this. Slowly.”

  Iris sipped. “I’m sorry, I’ll be all right in a minute.” She steadied her hands on the table. He looked down at her. “No, really. I’ll be fine.”

  “Okay. Take your time.” He stepped away, straightened a few tables, turning his head now and again to look at her. His shoulders were hunched as if too used to bending, like a gardener, Iris thought. With the sleeves of his shirt rolled up just past his wrists, he lifted a napkin from a willow basket and folded it into a fan.

  Iris breathed in slowly and imagined white light from the tablecloths filling her chest. She breathed out and imagined it turning gray and smoky and dissolving into the dark walls of the restaurant. Somewhat composed, she said, “The lady in the little shop across the way said you opened for lunch.”

  “Megaira? She doesn’t know anything. We open for lunch, like I said, like the sign says, but not on weekdays. If you’re looking for a nice place there’s one over—”

  “No, I’m not actually.”

  The waiter crossed to a tall cabinet and pulled some napkins from a drawer.

  “I’m looking for someone.”

  He didn’t respond. He kept his head down and brought some of the fanned napkins to the table beside her. She wasn’t sure he’d heard her.

  “I don’t want lunch. I’m not hungry.”

  He stopped folding and moved nearer.

  “I’m actually looking for someone.”

  “Aren’t we all, lady?” A kind of impatience was gathering and she felt ready to burst.

  “I’m looking for Hilary Barrett,” she blurted.

  Having said it—the name out loud—was like some deep secret was finally revealed. But with the revelation something had to happen, either the world would stop spinning and one of its doors would spring open and maybe she wouldn’t have to look any further and she could keep her promise and everything would be just the way Luke wanted it. Or …

  “Hilary Barrett,” she said again.

  The man thought for a moment. (Or so Iris thought.) He looked at her with narrowed eyes, then over her right shoulder, as if he was remembering something or was he looking where Hilary was about to enter. Iris couldn’t breathe.

  “I knew a Hil—”

  She gasped.

  He came and placed his hand on the table. When he’d leaned in, Iris saw the hearing aid behind his left ear. “You sure you’re all right.”

  “Yes. I’m fine. I’m fine.” Instinctively she placed her hand on her breast. “You said you know a Hil—”

  He straightened up and took one step back. “Well … I … what do you want her for?”

  “It’s … personal.” Iris stood up. Face-to-face then with the person who might be one degree of separation from her daughter’s birth mother, she suddenly could think of nothing more to say. Her mind went blank. So she extended her hand as if presenting herself. “I’m Iris. Iris Bowen. From Ireland.”

  It took a moment for the man to smile. But he did. Wrinkles creased in his tanned face. “Thornton Pletz. Polish. Shortened on the boat from ‘Plezinski,’ a generation back.” He took her hand. “You’re a long way from home.”

  She looked out the window just as a bird swooped from a rooftop. “I am.” Iris paused a moment. “About Hil…” She half stumbled on the name. “Hilary … where do you think I might find her?”

  “Ah. You see…” Thornton Pletz said. “I don’t, is the answer.”

  “Is … is she the owner?”

  “Owner? Of Botolph’s? No, ma’am. She’s not. I’ve been here since the restaurant opened. Let me think. Fifteen or so years ago.” His brows lowered.

  “But she used to live here … at 99 St. Botolph Street!” Iris reached into her purse for the envelope. She showed it to him. “This is her handwriting. See…? See the return address?”

  Thornton fingered the worn envelope carefully, as if it were a thin piece of cracked porcelain that had been glued back together. His brows lifted. “Barrett? It says…”

  “Barrett, yes, Hilary Barrett, that’s right.”

  “Sorry. Barnett, Barnett. I thought you said Barnett.” He pointed to his ears. “Sorry, ma’am, I’m a little hard of hearing. I once knew a Hilda Barnett. I thought it odd you asking me that. About Hill. She’s in Pittsburgh now.”

  Iris stared blankly back at him.

  Mr. Pletz from Poland checked his watch, adjusted his hearing aid, which was suddenly buzzing, and waited for Iris to speak, his whole face holding an expectant pose.

  “The flowers … they’re cosmos,” Iris said finally.

  “Huh?”

  “I remember now. The name of those flowers.”

  “Right,” Thornton said and looked at them, too. “Cosmos. What do you know?”

  Iris tidied her chair into the table and when Thornton walked toward the doors she followed. He held the door open. She had that vacant feeling in her legs, again. They felt hollow and yet she was trembling.

  At the top of the steps, Iris hesitated. It was hot and cloudless outside. She sensed Thornton Pletz’s eyes upon her. “You know,” he said, touching her arm as he held the door, “there’s a nice place to sit not far from here, across Huntington.” He pointed through the building. She imagined he had more to say to her but for some reason hadn’t. So she looked at his eyes to check. They were gray. But no, he wasn’t saying anything more. She went down the steps to the sidewalk and didn’t look back. The door closed behind her.

  Around the corner, at Huntington, a woman about her age with three small girls in dresses was stopped at the traffic light beside her. The girls each had a balloon tied on their wrists, and when the light turned Iris watched the balloons bob up and down as they crossed the busy street. She stood still. She let the light go red and waited until it was green again before crossing to the other side.

  She turned left and walked in the direction of a great, domed, churchlike building that rose at the far end of a plaza. Bordered on one side was a complex of sand-colored buildings, and a long avenue of linden trees lined the other. Groups of people crossed the plaza. Some tourists. Some shoppers. Some stood watching a group of children chasing e
ach other beneath jets from a circular water fountain that shot up from a flat surface of concrete. Beyond the fountain, running nearly the full length of the plaza, was a shallow infinity pool.

  Iris could go no farther. She sat on the curved, hard edge of the pool. An elderly woman in a blue suit and white shoes walked by, holding something that Iris thought looked like a Bible.

  Iris was still holding the envelope. She folded it and put it back into her handbag. (She’d seen that handwriting before. A few months after the official order to adopt had been made, a letter from Rose’s birth mother had come from the Adoption Board. Iris knew what it said by heart: Always remember you are doubly loved. By me, forever, and by your parents.)

  Iris sat on the curved, hard edge of the infinity pool and dipped in her hands. Then she saw the sign, NO WADING. Reading it made her want to do just that, to lift her dress knee-high and walk the full length of the pool and out the other side. As she stared into the water the glint of copper pennies on the tarred bottom caught her eye. She took off her heels and a moment later stepped into the pool. She toed the pennies with her foot and, for one long moment, stood in the cold, shallow water holding her dress just above her knees. She wished she were standing far away from there, at the edge of the sea at Doughmore with Rose. Standing with their feet in the freezing sea and giggling as they watched Luke dive into the waves and reappear, howling from the cold. She wished the world wasn’t so hard. She wished she didn’t have a sense of failing Luke and failing Rose. She wished she didn’t have the dread of the callback at the Breast Clinic, that she didn’t have this question mark stamped on her chest, nor the feeling that everything resisted her. She drew a line with her foot under the water, moving the pennies, and wishing that this time things would work out.

  Out of the corner of her eye, a man in a uniform at the other end of the plaza was motioning to her, but Iris didn’t move. He started toward her then with a purposeful stride and just as she was stepping out she heard an accent familiar to her.

  “Mother of God, I hope it’s cool in there, Francis. I’m roasting!”

  A pink-faced foursome, sweltering mother and father with two boys in green-and-white soccer jerseys, was passing. Iris stepped out of the water and into her shoes and followed them, tagging along, her legs itching as the water evaporated. The family was heading toward the front of what Iris soon understood was the granite dome of the mother church of Christian Scientists, and the complex, which she later learned housed not only the church but a library and conference rooms. The world headquarters. And over there was the Mapparium, a sign said. Iris followed behind the family like she was one of them.

  She needed a still moment in her spinning-out-of-control world. Entering the magnificent building, into which the whole of her village back in the west of Ireland could fit, there was silence. Cool and deep.

  The door to the Mapparium was modest, and yet what it opened into was anything but, as if she, along with the Irish family, had landed somewhere over the rainbow, arriving into the middle of a stained-glass world, a giant, three-dimensional Technicolor ball of the globe. The world had swallowed her whole.

  Billy from Grace Hale’s was right. It was awesome: There was no other word for it. A floating bridge of glass swam across eye level with the equator. France was green. Spain was orange. Alaska was yellow. Africa was huge across its northern half and tapering down to the Cape of Good Hope. And surrounding everything was the blue-blue air-water of the Earth.

  “Hey, Colin, look!” whispered the smaller boy of the family, “the North Po—” He stopped suddenly, startled by the sound of his own voice booming across the world to the other end of the bridge, where his parents were observing the bluey glass of the Atlantic Ocean.

  “Yeah! Brilliant! Can ye hear me?” The taller boy’s voice boomed, too.

  “Shh … Robert!” the father said. His whisper traveled around behind and flipped back at him, loud and clear. The mother’s laughter broke, burst like glass bubbles.

  As Iris stood looking up at Ireland, blood-red and tiny against the sea, she invited their laughter into her heart. The man named Hector said it was a whispering gallery. She smiled at them as tears wet her cheeks. When she reached into her bag to grab a tissue, the thing that often happened to Iris happened then. All sorts of paraphernalia—boarding pass, lipstick, her Irish passport, the T receipt, the scribbled note from Hi-I’m-Kerry-Welcome-to-Boston’s pad, Hilary’s envelope, and her map—spilled out. She quickly bent to retrieve the contents that had made a map of their own on the floor of the glass bridge.

  “Here, love. Let me help.”

  In the middle of the world, it was the pink mother speaking to her. She’d bent, too, and patted Iris’s arm, handing back the map.

  “Thank you.”

  The bizarre synchronicity of two Irishwomen in the heart of this crystal-like world briefly comforted Iris. The pink mother smiled. She picked up the Welcome-to-Boston note, but as she did she knocked the envelope with Hilary’s address off the edge of the bridge. Iris let out a small cry, an aching sigh reeling from her throat. It echoed around them as the envelope, floating and winging its way, like a pale yellow butterfly—passing San Francisco and Mexico and the Bernardo O’Higgins Region of central Chile—finally landed in the glass ocean somewhere near the bottom of the world.

  Seven

  Hector Sherr had first seen Iris Bowen when she came in for breakfast that morning, in the second week of June and the start of a heat wave. Unusual, so early in the summer. He was deep into his composition and didn’t acknowledge her, but later he would remember a scent of apples in the air. Even though he was engrossed in his work, he sensed something about her. That something was troubling her. It was in the way her dove gray eyes darted about the room. Like a wary bird, he thought. He saw her from the corner of his eye. She didn’t know he was looking at her. And, even though he liked to think he was the kind of person who could walk up to a total stranger and say, “Hey, can I help?” this wasn’t that day.

  Anyway, Billy was doing the talking, chatting away like some overenthusiastic tourist-academy graduate about the Mapparium over on Mass Ave. Mrs. Bowen, as Billy called her, was listening politely. Hector put his head down and tried to get back to work, but two minutes later he got up and left. Truth was, he was a bit rude in his departure and regretted it the minute he’d left. He wasn’t really that kind of guy.

  He was a last-minute kind. That night he would be performing one of his own compositions in a concert at Titus Sparrow Park and he still hadn’t completed the final riff, and he was already late for his students over at Berklee College of Music. (For the past ten summers he’d been teaching a class there and staying with his friend Grace whenever he came from his home in California.)

  Grace and Hector went back to the days when he was a college music student at Berklee two and half decades ago. She’d been his landlady then. Grace had inherited her grandparents’ home on West Newton. He’d met her by answering a “room for rent” ad, and ever since then her redbrick town house had been his home away from home. He was so sorry for her when Bob died. In fact, it was he who’d convinced her to open her house to the occasional paying guest. He was pleased she’d gone with his suggestion and was now considering going into the hospitality business full-time. (“Good God, Grace. What a great idea,” he’d said when she starting planning, forgetting he himself had planted the seed.)

  The piece unfinished and the students waiting, Hector left Grace’s and crossed Huntington. Something has happened, he thought. Something. Out of nowhere there was a new rhythm shaping in his head and the image of the lady in the blue dress was spread out against the sky. But it was the last thing he needed today. He needed to finish his piece. He needed to get to his waiting class. He stood at the intersection of Mass Ave. and he tried to concentrate on hearing Sparrow in Summer in his head. But there she was. She was like some walking bass line. A blue note. A blue flower. Suddenly, in the middle of his piece, the Bowen lady was
an improv all her own.

  What was it about her? Her hair—that was like, like what?

  Cinnamon.

  He raced up the stairs ten minutes late. The students were all there. They were used to seeing him a bit tangled, and used to him going into the wrong classroom, getting their names mixed up, calling them “Clarinet One” and “Sax Two.” It didn’t diminish their respect. He was Hector Sherr.

  “Okay,” he said, and pushed his hands along his thighs. “So. You know I’ve played the park before, right? In ’99 and ’04, both times as part of a trio: sax, bass, and me on piano. And it was cool both times. But this is the first time I’ve decided to invite two students to join me on stage.” He watched a little flicker of nervousness run through them.

  “But it’s improv, guys. So don’t sweat it.” He relaxed now, getting into his role as the offbeat professor. “The way I see it, there are three groups of people in the world. Those who rein in their creativity because they’re afraid to express themselves, those who just express themselves without thought or form, and those who follow their creativity and listen to it, without restricting it, allowing it … personal feeling. And that, that’s jazz, baby. That’s what I’m looking for. Can you guys deliver?”

  He broke his students into groups, gave instructions, the major chords and key signature, and sent them to work on their improvs in practice rooms. Alone in the studio then, he sat down at the piano, a Boston upright, and worked on the final chord progression for Sparrow in Summer. (Turned out allowing personal feeling wasn’t so easy.) He worked until one, taking breaks to check on the students, and coming back with a kind of punchy electric urgency. Just before lunch he cracked the tune.

  “Got it! That’s it,” he said under his breath. “Yes yes yes,” and he played the piece again to secure it. “Thank you. Mrs. Bowen!”

  After a quick lunch of an apple and a yogurt he’d taken from Grace’s refrigerator, he went to audition the students. He had an extra bounce in him now. The students could see it. They knew his piece must have come together. He chose Casey and Belletti for the concert that evening, told them they’d be sensational and told the others he wished they could all be on stage, that he was that proud of them all.