The From-Aways (36 page)

I am sitting in the dinghy, in my black dress, knee length, sleeveless, my hair up in a bun, waiting for Henry to come get me so we can go to Rosie’s memorial. There’s something about the smell of the water that makes me feel like a real live human being. There’s bigness, here by the ocean. When you look at it, how those waves come rolling in, you think, There can’t really be another one coming, can there? And then there is.

“Ahoy,” Henry says.

“Ahoy,” I say.

He climbs into the boat. He is wearing a gray suit. He has trimmed his new beard. We sit there for a moment, rocking. I sit up taller and imagine a large oil portrait of us, the kind so big you have to step back to see it like in the galleries at MoMA.
New Yorker in Dinghy, with Husband
.

“You ready?” he says.

“I am,” I say. But I am not. I keep hearing myself, that night, when Quinn suggested we look for Rosie at Billy’s place.
Let her do her thing,
I said. So easy. We went to the bar instead.
Let her do her thing
.

The boat knocks against the planks. Henry pushes us off a little bit. I look down through the green water. Watch how the rope undulates in the murk.

“I’m going later this week,” Henry says. “I called my old guys. They have a couple of projects they could use me on. I won’t stay long. A week or two.”

“You’ll be working?” I say.

He nods. “It’ll be good to be working. I just need a break from all this. From Menamon.”

“And you’ll come back?” I say.

“Of course I’ll come back,” Henry says, and takes my hand. He seems so tired. So joyless. It’s not just me who has done this to him, but I did not help. I did not help at all.

“Wanna come?” Henry asks. “You can nose around the
Gazette
offices. We can see some friends.”

“Do you want me to come?”

Henry shrugs.

New York in springtime. Trees in concrete wells will be in bloom. New Yorkers will be sneezing. Allergies, they will say, allergies. The restaurants will be unfurling blue awnings; they will be bringing out their outdoor tables. Out-of-work actors will line up for interviews to wait tables in the extra sections. They will bring their head shots to the interviews. On the subway, fair-weather fans will resume wearing their Yankees championship gear. The men who have been wearing their 1986 satin Mets jackets since 1986 will dismiss them. Both of these kinds of people will start buying the
Post
more regularly to get game updates. At the
Gazette,
they will have exactly one meeting about how they could make their sports coverage compete with the
Post
’s without the use of puns. Nothing will come of this meeting. In the parks, runners will appear. Those first few weeks there will dozens of pale chubby-legged girls, flushing red in the face, getting ready for summer. My parents will start dreaming about their summer plans. Out loud they will say,
We are thinking of going to Paris
. To themselves they will be thinking, What if we just told everyone we were going to Paris and then stayed home and did nothing? There will be ads in the classifieds for rentals in the Hamptons, Fire Island, Nantucket. This is New York in spring.

And I do not want it.

I stand up too fast in the boat. It rocks but I have my sea legs now. I do not fall. I smooth my black skirt. “Let’s just go to the thing,” I tell Henry. “Let’s talk about this later.” We climb out of the boat and onto the dock. I pick up my patent-leather heels, hop off the planks, and walk in the sand, shoes clopping together as I grip them by the straps.

I think about June. How she was so perfectly a creature of this place, born of it and lost to it, but loved. I may have gotten a late start but it is not too late for me to belong to this place, I don’t think. I am not really a New Yorker in a dinghy anymore.

46

Quinn

W
e walk down the boardwalk to the dock. There are a lot of people there. Enough that I feel like running away immediately. I freeze but Charley grabs my wrist hard and keeps on marching me forward.

There’s a wet hair-mussing breeze coming off the ocean and people take turns holding down their skirts and running hands over their heads. They’re wearing nice dark clothes. Everyone in a town like this has a good mourning outfit ready and waiting to go.

Joseph stands in the center of the circle, his back to the sea, waiting. He’s wearing a blue, collared shirt and jeans. Billy’s not far off, wearing a collared shirt too. He looks smaller and paler than usual. He raises a hand when he sees me and holds it there. It’s not quite a wave. I nod at him.

Charley drags me down to where Leah and Henry are standing. Leah makes awkward shapes with her mouth but doesn’t say anything. Carter stands on my other side. Close, like he thinks I’m going to bolt.

Joseph looks at his watch, and then he clears his throat. “I want to thank all of you for coming today,” he says. “Father Martineau will be leading us in a requiem mass. Father Martineau, would you begin?”

An old Canuck emerges from the circle, all in black, with a collar on. His eyes are rheumy and he has a boom box and a cup of holy water, which he sprinkles about. Holy water, I think. With a whole fucking ocean behind him.

The father crosses himself, then stoops down. The boom box starts humming some ghostly Latin something. “The ‘Dies Irae,’ ” he says. “They are singing, ‘Day of wrath! O day of mourning! See fulfilled the prophets’ warning. Heaven and earth in ashes burning!’ ” He speaks too loud because he’s old, and because he’s competing with the wind. A few women make simpering noises. But what the fuck is this, anyway? Rosie hadn’t been to church since she was a kid at Easter, and even then she was only in it for the chocolate eggs.

Carter has his head down, staring at the ground, and Charley’s contorting her face so she doesn’t cry again. They’re upset, and respectful, and thinking their own thoughts.

So I just start walking.

“Quinn?” I hear Charley say. I stop at the top of the dock, on the hill, in the reeds. They’re all staring at me with their mourning faces on. Even the priest. Especially Leah.

“This has nothing to do with her,” I say. “If you knew the first thing about her, this isn’t what you’d do at all.”

I want to go back home, but if I see Rosie’s unwashed dishes in the sink, or her bobby pins scattered on the counter, I won’t make it another day. I start walking, and when I get to the intersection, I know where to go.

47

Leah

I
don’t blame Quinn for leaving. She shouldn’t have to listen to this Gregorian jukebox and think about Rosie’s soul.

The priest leans over laboriously and stops the cassette, then looks to Joseph. “Shall I continue?” he says.

Joseph makes a deep sighing noise. “I suppose so,” he says.

“Can I say something?” Henry says. Everyone turns to face us.

Henry’s forehead is creased and he is squinting, because the sun is bright, but also because he is thinking. As the faces turn to him, he musses his hair, his beard.

I think, No, whatever it is he is thinking about doing he cannot do it. It is too soon, and no one has as yet forgiven him his role in this mess. I can see it on the faces of the fishermen and fishwives, of the schoolteachers and the boys from the diner, of the Rebel Seven people miserably wringing their hands: the last thing they want to do today is listen to Henry.

“ ‘Fiddler’s Green,’ ” Henry says.

“Hank?” Joseph says.

Henry says again, “ ‘Fiddler’s Green.’ ”

Joseph’s face goes soft, but the rest of the people stare desperately at the priest. They are hoping he’ll start up his boom box again, shepherd them through some acceptable public grief for another thirty minutes, and then let them go home. But the old French Canadian priest seems relieved that something is happening. He is watching Henry too.

“If no one minds,” Henry says. He makes a coughing noise, clearing his throat. The mourners are silent, wondering whether Henry’s really going to do this. Henry doesn’t notice. He starts singing.

The song he begins is sad, but with a kind of lighthearted resignation to it. Henry’s voice rises and then falls dramatically; it twists itself around multiple syllables with an Irish quickness. There is a kind of maritime gallows humor in the tone he takes. He sings:

As I walked by the dockside one evening so fair

To view the salt water and take the sea air

I heard an old fisherman singing a song

Won’t you take me away boys me time is not long.

Wrap me up in me oilskin and jumper

No more on the docks I’ll be seen

Just tell me old shipmates, I’m taking a trip, mates

And I’ll see you someday in Fiddler’s Green.

Now Fiddler’s Green is a place I heard tell

Where the fishermen go if they don’t go to hell

Where skies are all clear and the dolphins do play

And the cold coast of Greenland is far, far away.

Wrap me up in me oilskin and jumper

No more on the docks I’ll be seen

Just tell me old shipmates, I’m taking a trip, mates

And I’ll see you someday in Fiddler’s Green.

When you get on the docks and the long trip is through

Ther’s pubs and ther’s clubs and ther’s lassies there too

When the girls are all pretty and the beer it is free

And ther’s bottles of rum growing from every tree.

Wrap me up in me oilskin and jumper

No more on the docks I’ll be seen

Just tell me old shipmates, I’m taking a trip, mates

And I’ll see you someday in Fiddler’s Green.

Now, I don’t want a harp nor a halo, not me

Just give me a breeze and a good rolling sea

I’ll play me old squeeze-box as we sail along

With the wind in the rigging to sing me a song.

Wrap me up in me oilskin and jumper

No more on the docks I’ll be seen

Just tell me old shipmates, I’m taking a trip, mates

And I’ll see you someday in Fiddler’s Green.

A name is a funny thing. You can see people thinking a name sometimes. The way the semicircle is looking at Henry right now, I know they are not thinking, That Henry Lynch. Instead they are thinking: Hank Jr
.

Joseph moves first. He goes over to Henry and gives him a good thumping hug. And then he does the same to me. And to Carter. One by one everyone lines up to do the same. With no body, and no kin, somehow Henry has ended the service gracefully and made the three of us the receiving line. Every person who showed up to that memorial gives a hug to Henry, and me, and Carter. I do not think I knew how sad I was, until each person did this. So many old-lady-perfume hugs. And cool-slippery-raincoat hugs. And warm-sweater-and-chewing-tobacco hugs. One by one they do this, and then they all file away from the docks, walking up the boardwalk and heading back home.

Charley and Carter go off to look for Quinn, which leaves just me and Henry. I put my arms around him. “Don’t go,” I say. “You don’t need a break. Everyone loves you here. I love you. Why would you ever leave a place like this?”

“They sang that for my father,” Henry says. “ ‘Fiddler’s Green.’ It’s for fishermen who go over.” He sighs. “So do you want to come with me?” he says. “To New York? We could go to Tom’s for breakfast. We could go to the park. See everyone at the bar.” He strokes my hair.

I love doing all those things, but how can I leave Menamon and hide in the city while this place is busy healing? I feel like I am seeing this town for the first time now that it is burned and grieving. Menamon is not the place I thought I was moving to at all. It is not the same place it was when Henry was small, or the place from his stories, and it is most certainly not the magical New England idyll I made up for myself.