Land of Dreams: A Novel (30 page)

As soon as Tom was dressed, I put him into the front seat of the truck.

“Keep an eye out now for Bridie,” I said.

“Is she lost?” he asked.

“Yes,” I said. “A little lost.”

I realized that was exactly how I felt myself—a little lost. I wished to hell that Freddie and Leo were here to help me, or Stan (although as soon as his name entered my head I pushed it away). Searching for Bridie with a seven-year-old child was not exactly ideal. I made a quick decision to turn left, toward Los Feliz village—that would be Bridie’s first instinct. As I reached the turn for the shops I stopped to let a streetcar past. A streetcar! It was as if I had never seen one before. Bridie could have hopped on a trolley and been on the other side of the city by now. She could have gone to Union Station looking for her dead husband. On the other hand, she could have got on
any
streetcar, believing it was going to Union Station, and ended up anywhere.

A bus pulled up beside me and the driver signaled wildly for me to make up my mind which way I was turning. I was signaling right, but what was the point now? I turned left and the traffic beeped loudly. As I turned, all I could see were street turnings off the main road, and down them more street turnings, and dozens more leading off them. Street after street, buses and trolleys; I imagined going up and down each and every one. This city was a lot more complex than I had realized, and Bridie was infinitely more lost than I had first thought. I could sense my whole body swell with panic. What was I going to do? Who was going to find her, if not me? Even the police wouldn’t have the first idea where to look. People got lost and died on the streets in cities like this. Why had I not seen this coming? How could I have been so . . .

“Hey, Mrs. Hogan! Look who I just found wandering up St. George Street!”

It was Freddie. Sitting next to him in his car was Bridie, her face pure stone beneath her good Sunday hat, her two hands gripped around the handles of her handbag, which sat firmly on her lap.

“I was not wandering, I was shopping,” she said. “This vagabond wrestled me into his car against my will. Let me out at once.”

“Of course,” Freddie said. As he helped her into the truck, Tom hopped down and Freddie lifted him into the back. I got out for a moment on the pretense of helping him.

“I was showing a house,” Freddie said, once he was out of Bridie’s earshot, “and I’m out on the front lawn showing the prospective buyers the front aspect, when I see Bridie coming up on my left—walking down the middle of the road! Three cars veered around her just while I was looking. She was lucky she didn’t get killed, or get somebody else killed. She gave me an awful time getting her into the car. Oh, and even though I told the buyers she was my dear old grandma, I lost the sale. Actually, I think that was
why
I lost the sale. I’ll tell ya—for an old lady, Bridie sure has got some fruity language. Coupla things I never heard before—and I’ve been around.”

I was so relieved to have Bridie back that I didn’t question him further.

We traveled the few hundred yards or so back to the house in silence, went inside and Bridie took her coat off and set about making Tom the cake she had promised him earlier.

There was no mention of Mr. Flannery or birthdays or Union Station. I did not question or chide her, but pretended everything was as it had always been. She was in the devil of a mood for the rest of that afternoon until she realized that I was going to go along with her.

There was no sense in humiliating her with questions or proclamations that she was sick. I knew what was happening to my old friend, and I could see by the defensive stance she was taking that she knew it too.

All the time I had known her, Bridie and I had been brutally honest with each other in our daily dealings, but the most important truths were always left unspoken. That was our way. Bridie would criticize my cooking and my choice of lovers. She never made a secret of her dislike of Charles, or the bad decision I made in marrying him. Often, she was right. Then there were the things we had never spoken of: my depression after the death of my first husband; the way we were both barren and childless; the state of poverty that I had rescued her from after her own husband died. These were the unmentionable truths, the sorrows and shame too deep for words.

If the woman who was the closest thing I had to a mother was losing her mind, well then, she deserved to be protected from that fact. I would shield her from the truth and make her life as comfortable as I could. It was my duty now to look after her. Did I relish the thought? No. I was not a saint. I was an ordinary woman who had struggled with authority in my life, but never with my conscience. Sometimes my conscience steered me in the wrong direction, as it had done with Suri, but in this instance I knew I was right. I would look after Bridie now for the rest of her life, whatever it took; she was as much my responsibility as my sons were. I would have to manage my own life and the children’s lives around her. We might have to stay in Los Angeles instead of returning to New York, as I still wished. I would have to make some sacrifices. This might go on for as long a time as I could imagine—Bridie could even outlive me.

This relatively harmless domestic incident, which had taken place over less than an hour of my life one afternoon, had nonetheless signaled a change in my life that was so huge I could barely contemplate it.

That morning I had made love to a man for the first time since my husband died. That had seemed important, and yet—Stan had been right. Lovemaking was unimportant; it is what we are prepared to give of our time and our heart and our mind that is important. That afternoon, as I praised Bridie’s cake and wrote “SALT” on the jar next to the stove, I pledged to give all of that to her.

Late that night Tom crawled into the bed next to me. He curled his legs across mine and snuggled into me, by way of letting me know that all was forgiven for shouting at him earlier. “Mr. Flannery’s dead, isn’t he?” Tom said.

“Yes, love,” I replied, “he is, but Bridie forgets that sometimes and thinks he’s alive. That’s what happens when you love people.”

“My daddy’s dead and I don’t think he’s alive. Not even in heaven.”

He said it really quietly, like he didn’t want me to hear it. What could I say to him? Tom was a child who believed that heaven was here on Earth. He was visceral, pragmatic. He got an impossible joy from flowers and animals, and the miraculous boundings of his own small body and the adventures it took him on. I talked about God and angels and heaven, but he had always struggled with the concept. I had always believed in God, but I had come to see my faith, such as it was, less as a conviction that He existed, and more as a piece of good luck that I had been born more guileless than my poor grieving son.

“I know, my love,” I said. I held him close and stroked his forehead, as I had done since he was an infant, and soothed him.

When he was asleep I looked down at him. I loved my sons more than anything in the world, and I remembered what Stan had said: “All I want is to be allowed to love you.” For a moment I allowed myself the idea that it might be wonderful to have somebody love me as much as I loved them. Then I realized that I had to get up and lock the front door, so that Bridie could not escape in the night, and the thought was gone.

C
HAPTER
T
WENTY
-N
INE

Our family fell into a routine over the coming months. Tom went to school, Leo carried on going to the studio (despite waiting for his contract to be renewed, his tutors were happy for him to continue attending general classes) and I started painting again.

Things carried on much as normal, except that Bridie became increasingly absent-minded and, sometimes, confused. Her lapses could be as small as putting a saucepan of water on to boil when none was needed, or as heartbreaking as pouring an extra cup of tea and saying it was for her mother. Bridie had left Ireland when she was sixteen and had never returned. Over the years I had known her, she had rarely talked about her childhood, but now she seemed eager to share stories from her past with me.

My favorite was the story of the bold donkey, and she told it to Tom and me over and over again.

“My aunt, my mother’s sister, lived next door to us and she made the best butter in Cork. She supplied half the county, and had a big butter churn . . .”

“How big was it?” Tom asked.

“Huge,” she’d say.

“Bigger than a big bucket?”

“A bucket? Whisht, child—as big as this room it was!”

“How did she churn it?”

“Ah, now then, here it is,” Bridie would say. Tom knew what was coming and he’d shrug his shoulders and settle into the corner of the chair, thrilled to be hearing it again. “With a donkey!”

“A donkey?” Tom would say, and would sometimes wink at me. He thought this was all a game; and sometimes, I’m sure, Bridie knew she had told the story a dozen times already, and sometimes I could tell that she thought she was telling it for the first time. Either way, it didn’t matter—it was a wonderful story.

“The churn was so big that the donkey would be yoked up to it and would walk around and around and turn the handle. If he stopped, my aunt would whack him on his rump with a big stick.”

“On his
what
?”

“Tom! Stop that!”

(My son was trying to lure Bridie into saying “arse,” which she had done once before when telling the story. Bridie’s language was slipping south, and while my sons found it amusing and would try and goad her into using bad language, I found it impossibly sad, given the sort of respectable woman she was. However, occasionally, when I saw the joy she got from making Tom laugh, I wondered if the childlike, fun-loving figure that was increasingly emerging from my fierce old friend wasn’t as much Bridie as the old harridan I had come to love.)

“That donkey hated churning that churn, and when he was done he would run straight down to the bottom field, as far away as he could from the farm buildings, where he could stand and chew on grass and brambles for as long as he liked. Until a few days later, when he’d have to turn the churn again.”

That was the difficulty of living with Bridie in those first few months after her disappearance: not knowing which way she would go. I did not want to get a doctor in to see her. I did not want to frighten her. In those early stages I did not even want her to know there was anything wrong. There was no need. This was old age, and Bridie’s mind was giving up on her before her body. I don’t know what trade-off she would have chosen to make; we never discussed such things. I only knew that I would have sacrificed every physical facility I had, if I could go to the grave with a sharp brain.

Leaving Bridie alone in the house after that incident was not an option, and there was a great deal of juggling between Freddie and me (he was the only other “adult” in the house I could confide in), with regard to keeping things running smoothly. Bridie cooked, and hung wash, and went about as many of her chores as she normally did—but she needed a constant eye kept on her. The occasional hanging up of wet wash in the wardrobe, or forgetting to put the heat on under a pot of spuds, was easily managed; but if she were to wander out onto the road again, or scald herself by pouring boiling water on the floor instead of down the sink, that would be on my head.

Before I realized that the lock on the side gate was not fully secured, the doorbell rang unexpectedly and I answered it to find a neighbor, Susan, from a few doors down, standing there with her arm firmly hooked through Bridie’s.

“I think Mrs. Flannery forgot her key,” she said.

Susan was a trained nurse who had given up work to stay at home and look after her mother-in-law, who had recently passed away.

“You’d think I’d be glad she was gone,” she confided in me over coffee, “she gave us an awful time in the end—but I miss her. Miss the work, to be honest with you. I’d go back to the hospital, but Dan’s old-fashioned like that. Doesn’t like me working outside the home.”

“Would he let you come here for a few hours? I could use a hand, and I’ll pay you well,” I said.

“Pay me anything and I’d be happy, Ellie. I’d love that,” she said. “And him? He won’t mind—as long as he doesn’t know I’m earning money outside the home, and as long as he thinks I’m suffering looking after other folks, he’s happy!”

So Susan came around whenever I needed her. It was easy to make the excuse to Bridie that Susan was simply calling in to keep her company while I ran an errand.

At other times I would ask her to sit with Bridie so that I could lose myself in my painting for a few hours, without worrying if there was anything going on in the other room. Susan came those days on the pretense that she wanted Bridie to help her improve her knitting, although she was already competent. As a result, Bridie took up the pins herself and showed a remarkable level of concentration—knitting for hours on end; although she rarely produced anything more complex than a long scarf, it was a relief for her to find a pastime that involved mostly sitting down in the one place, where she was at no risk of any harm.

My painting had started to take off again. Perhaps it was the concentration of being in the house most of the time, and the lack of anything else to do, but I just stopped worrying about what I was producing, if it was any good and whether my muse had left me, and started simply putting paint on canvas. It was not my best work and there was certainly nothing I felt happy about sending to Hilla (if she hadn’t written me off entirely by now), but I experimented with some ideas around my views of the desert, and even tried to capture some images of Ireland from memory. On a whim I painted a small canvas with a traditional scene of Ireland: rolling green hills, separated by stone walls, and a small white cottage. It was a close depiction of the house I had shared with my first husband, John; his family homestead. It was the very type of representative picture that I normally despised, but I indulged myself nonetheless and gave it as a gift to Bridie, who was thrilled and declared that, at last, I was producing some “proper” art that she could appreciate. She got Freddie to hang it in a prominent position above the mantelpiece and showed it to everyone who came into the house, to “prove” what a great artist I was.