Spider Dance (34 page)

“Irish, was she?”

Irene’s glance to me was rueful. Eliza Gilbert was Irish, all right (not that accident of birth is any recommendation to me), later claimed to have Spanish blood and even later became a Bavarian countess.

“That she was,” Irene said at once. “Limerick born, although some say Sligo. Either way, she didn’t stay long. I’m told she died in this building.”

“Not recently.” The landlady looked affronted at the very idea, although death must visit Seventeenth Street as often as it did any address in Manhattan.

“No,” Irene admitted, “it will be thirty years ago next January.”

“Thirty years?” The woman brushed her palms on her apron. “Why didn’t you say so at the first? As it happens you are not the first to inquire about this lady.”

“We aren’t?” I asked, speaking for the first time.

“No, ma’am,” she answered me, looking from one to the other of us. “Why, what a coincidence. The good father was here inquirin’ not a week or two ago.”

“‘The good father’?” Irene’s facile voice held a controlled note of excitement, or perhaps anxiety.

“Yes. Of course I told him all I could, which was little, but he interviewed all the current boarders in one evening. So
very tiring for a man his age. In fact he took a little whiskey before he left. I couldn’t let him leave without something to restore his strength.”

“Was his search successful?” Irene wondered.

“I don’t know. He said it was church business, very important church business.”

“Indeed it is,” Irene said, assuming a tone I could only describe as suddenly sanctimonious. “Miss Huxleigh and I are here on church business as well. I have approached the bishop wishing to make a substantial donation in the name of my late mother. He directed me to the good father, who has apparently been . . . led into another place by his mission, and is not available, alas, to consult with us right now.

“What is this about?”

Irene edged closer. “I’m not at liberty to say, but the bishop mentioned the process of evidence-gathering. For sainthood.”

“Holy Mither o’ God! The good father mentioned the lady in question had been most devoted to her prayers, but nothing of this. A saint in the building? No wonder he was searchin’ for the room she occupied, died in. A shrine. I have a shrine in me house.”

“Quite likely, but you must say nothing to anyone until it becomes a fact.”

“And this lady was your mother?”

“It’s possible. We were separated at my birth. The Troubles, you know.”

“Indeed, and a brutal time it was back in the ’40s and ’50s when the people of Ireland were reduced to eating the furze in the ditches like sheep, thanks to the murderous English. ’Tis no wonder a saint would come out of that heinous time.”

I was suddenly glad I had only spoken once, and too briefly for my accent to register. Besides, this entire spurious discussion of the late Lola Montez as a candidate for sainthood was so outrageous I was too furious to speak anyway. Irene was exploiting this poor woman’s superstitions as heartlessly as a confidence man.

“Do you know,” Irene was asking now, “which chamber
was so blessed? Whether the good father found what he sought?”

“I believe it is the ground floor room at the right rear. There have been some alterations to the ground floor rooms throughout the years. The dining room was expanded and we added gaslights.”

“May we see this chamber? I have been searching for my mother my whole life.”

“Why, of course, madam. And what would be the name of this holy lady?”

Irene stood flummoxed for a moment, then resorted to the string of Spanish names Eliza had tacked onto her birth name. “Maria. Dolores.”

Mrs. Kelly shut her eyes in awe. “Maria. Dolores. The Holy Virgin Mary, Our Lady of Sorrows. She was well named.”

“By herself,” I almost snapped, but of course I could not reveal my kinship to the “bloody English.”

“I’ll take you to the room. The current resident is a traveling button salesman, but now that I know the import of the chamber’s long-previous resident, I will move him to another room at once, and keep this one vacant. How soon will the Church know its decision on Maria Dolores?”

“These things take much time and testimony,” Irene answered gently. “Meanwhile, if we may?—

“Of course. Of course.” She wiped, then wrung her hands in her apron. “The room has not been tidied as it should be, I didn’t know, God have mercy. . . .”

We followed her out through the dining room into the hallway and then back in the dimness to some doors tucked behind the stairway.

The landlady’s keys chimed with our steps, and she darted ahead to unlock the door on the right.

“Mr. Burnside is an old bachelor, don’t you know? Not the tidiest soul perhaps, but good-natured and prompt with his rent. I can’t speak to the condition of the premises.”

I was struck first by the bareness, and saw only the wide-planked wooden floor, the roughly-plastered walls whose
pale paint had weathered with time and dust into the color of cardboard. An odor of old tobacco was the only incense to be found in this so-called sainted room.

Furniture was spare: a narrow cot, an old oaken armchair upholstered in worn carpet tapestry, a wooden chair, a table with a basin, towel, and small round mirror above it. A battered bureau whose drawers did not quite close, and a wardrobe that sagged against one wall.

One window looked out on . . . I had wandered over to see the view, and regretted it. I saw an alleyway lined with trash buckets facing rows of back stoops and not an inch of sod anywhere, or a flower, only the effluvia of city life, papers. Above us were strung not the ugly electric and telephone wires that plagued even Fifth Avenue but lines of laundry flapping in the contained winds of the inner courtyard.

“It’s gaslit,” Mrs. Fenster noted with pride, going to one wall and holding her hand up to the level of a crude metal fixture.

“Wonderful,” Irene said. “But we don’t need it now. If we may spend some time alone in this chamber.” She bowed her head. At least she was not enough of a hypocrite to say what her posture implied: that we would be praying.

“Of course, my dear lady. The place is yours for as long as you like, as it was for your dear, sainted mither. Me own mither was God’s own emissary, but she died in the Famine.”

I bit my lip. I’d heard of the Famine, of course, but it seemed some dry fact of ancient history having to do with that unruly island to the west of the “sceptered isle” I and William Shakespeare had been fortunate to call home in vastly different eras. To see an Irishwoman standing before me whose mother had been lost to hunger and hunger alone in these modern times made my soul shrivel. Perhaps the French were not completely wrong to disdain the English on some issues.

In fact, the moment the poor woman had left us alone, I rounded on Irene, perhaps because I could not turn on myself.

“How could you deceive that poor, unlettered woman,
Irene, and mouth churchy sentiments you don’t believe a jot of?” I whispered.

But Irene hardly heard me. She was standing by the big, bare window coated in dried raindrops of dust, staring at the grim, monotone scene beyond, and the ragamuffin children playing under the dingy laundry lines above.

Their childish cries came faintly through the glass and brick that separated us, and they sounded as happy as children in Hyde Park, though they looked nothing like them at all.

Irene stretched out first one arm, then the other, to the filthy walls of the room, unaware how her figure made the shape of a cross against the bright white light of daylight beyond.

She turned slowly, studying this bare, naked, empty room in utter silence. She paced its length, then width, touching each wall with the same slow wonder.

Irene almost resembled a ballet dancer, in her grace, her aloofness, her silence.

She trailed a hand along each wall as she made a circuit of the room, stepping back when she encountered the interruption of furniture pieces as if they were clumsy dance partners she avoided rather than embraced.

At one particularly dingy spot on the wall, she stopped and pressed close to examine the variations in texture and color with her fingers as well as her eyes. I was reminded of a blind person, attempting to read what was unseen with fingertips alone.

This room was indeed a shrine for Irene, far more than it ever could be for me, and I was ashamed that I had doubted her.

What had stuck me as facile was, I saw, genuine. The worldly cynicism I both deplored and envied actually was no more than a key to Irene. Her feelings ran far deeper than she allowed anyone to suspect.

“Some say she had become a fanatic,” Irene said, rather dreamily. She touched the wall again. “She pasted religious
sayings all around the room. She read the Bible over and over, particularly the New Testament story of Mary Magdalene. What had she come to, this rebel, this revolutionary, this intense lover and hater, this spider dancer? In this room. Was she mad? Was she saved? Was she pathetic? Or triumphant?”

“I think . . . she was sincere.”

“Sincere.” Irene turned to smile at me. “I knew you would find the perfect word, Nell. If we can all end at least sincere, then we have accomplished something, and the rest doesn’t matter, does it?”

“Well . . .” I was not quite ready to say that penitence erases all, although parts of the Scriptures might. I was not quite ready to be as magnanimous as the Scriptures.

“Father Hawks described her as at peace. She died with her hand on the Bible and him at her side. She rejected the Catholic faith she was born to. She called upon an Episcopal priest and bishop at the end. If she is a saint, Nell, she is an Anglican one.”

I opened my mouth, speechless, when I saw in Irene’s eyes that fond twinkle with which she liked to tweak my deepest sensibilities.

“This particular sainthood has only one advocate, and he is dead.”

“Yes.” She made a circuit of the room again, this time at a brisk, businesslike pace. “One wonders if that is
why
he is dead.”

“Martyred,” I couldn’t help saying with a shudder.

“Martyred. He was indeed.” Irene had grown grim again. “Eliza Gilbert, or Maria Dolores, or Lola Montez may or may not have merited sainthood, but that old man, that old priest, did not deserve to die as he did in any world I would care to claim.” She surprised me by shuddering herself. “That was an evil worse than Jack the Ripper’s, because it was done not out of madness but in the cold-blooded service of an ignoble goal.”

“You know the reason?”

“No. Only that nothing on earth, or in heaven, can justify it. Now. We don’t have forever.”

“No one does, but what do you mean?”

“We must search the room.”

“Why? Nothing of Lola remains.”

“Ah, I do believe that spirits leave their impressions on places, or vice versa. I sense her in this room. I understand nothing about her earlier life yet. The facts and the contradictory reports leave that all a mysterious swirl, like the spider dancer’s petticoats. But here, I find her. Sure of herself at last. I do not much like the word and concept ‘humble.’”

“That is obvious,” I said, but she ignored my interjection.

“It strikes me as an insincere stance, like Dickens’s awful ‘umble’ Uriah Heap. But I think Lola Montez had found her humble self here in this room, and it was not defeat but triumph. And to that extent I think that Father Hawks was not wrong. I think he died to protect that belief, in her and in himself.”

“How awful, if true!”

“How remarkable. He may have converted her, in the conventional sense, but she also converted him.” Irene sighed. “I almost feel regret for what we must do next.”

“Which is?”

“We must search this room, Nell, from stem to stern and back again.”

“There is nothing here!”

“There is everything here, only we have not found it yet. I doubt Father Hawks did either. At least that is my humble hope.”

“Another man lives here now. We would violate his occupancy.”

“In a good cause, Nell.”

And so I joined her in the rough work of turning a simple room upside down. We moved the cot and searched under the supportive struts. We pummeled the mattress. We pushed the wardrobe away from the wall, and explored its every corner, filled mostly with mouse-eaten crumbles of wood and dustballs.

We looked under and behind the bureau drawers, on the chance that it had been there when Lola was in residence. We turned the chairs upside down.

Finally, there was no piece of furniture left to manhandle. We stood in the middle of the room, sneezing from the dust, perspiring like farm laborers, red-eyed and worn.

Irene eyed the blocked up fireplace behind the wardrobe, for a small stove now sat near the window for winter uses.

“Oh, Irene, no!”

For answer she went to the stove and found a coal shovel beside it.

“Lola was in this place from fall through Christmas and into January. I would venture to say the fireplace was unblocked and useful then.”

She rammed the shovel lip into the dry mortar between two bricks. It crumbled.

We took turns banging away at the bricks. Finally one consented to being pushed and pried and levered loose.

Then another.

“How will we ever restore this? What will we tell the landlady?” I wailed, surveying the mess that was beyond concealing.

“Looking for relics of the sainted Maria Dolores, which is the absolute truth.”

“What relics?” I cried.

“This.” Irene sat back on her heels, withdrawing yet another brick from the ghastly hole we had gouged out of the wall.

A brick of oilcloth covering.

My heart began to pound with the possibility of discovery.

Irene delicately pulled back the filthy, aged-stiffened cloth. It was the color of diseased dirt, and I myself would be hard put to touch it, even with gloves on.

Irene, however, regarded it with the silent awe reserved for holy relics.

“Nell. I think . . . I think it is her last diary.”

I stared at the much-folded lump of thick papers. Could it be?

Irene was ruffling up her skirt and baring her petticoat pocket. The filthy burden, oilcloth and all, was slipped inside. Her petticoat would do well not to sag and split with such an uncomely burden.