The Pig Goes to Hog Heaven (20 page)

Unmoving, Kitty continued to regard the far wall. She let her breaths come and go, one after the other, neither shallow nor deep. Just the ordinary breaths that sustained her ordinary living. She got up and went to her side of the bed. She drew back the sheet and the blankets and plumped first Kieran's pillow, then her own. She reached out her hand. With a small, sad smile, she said, “Isn't it our time of morning? Or have you forgotten?”

Contrary to what could be common surmise, Kitty had come to the old familial ground not to wallow in sentimental communion with her forebears about her coming contribution to the future of the family line. Nor had she come to see Declan, who was known to visit the scene where—as Kitty now knew—he could try to either indulge or assuage his grief. If they should meet, she'd say but a few words if any, then do what she'd come to do and leave him to his solitary needs.

She had come to the cliff's edge, the copy of Mrs. Wharton's
The House of Mirth
in hand. When Declan had brought it to her, a remnant of her sunken house tossed onto the shore, she took it as a sign, an omen that it wanted her correction. She had, after all, kept it with that as a possibility, and its peculiar arrival could suggest that she accept the assignment. She had come to realize, however, as Teresa of Avila might once have said, “Sometimes a coincidence is just a coincidence.” Or, at least, that was Kitty's chosen interpretation, which now spared her the admission that she was not up to the task. It would be with reluctant resignation, not wrathful vengeance, that as soon as the tide came to the foot of the cliff, she would toss the copy back into the waters from whence it came.

She could, of course, keep the book. It
had
been part of her lost library. But she feared she would see it, there in the tower landing where she fashioned her wonders, as a rebuke, a reminder that Lily Bart, the novel's ill-fated heroine, had successfully resisted her efforts at rescue, despite Kitty's having changed her name to Fenimore Blythe and the title of the book to
The House of Fenimore Blythe
.

The difficulty was that Lily/Fenimore was not as cooperative as Kitty had expected her to be. Given the woman's release from the coincidences that had thwarted her landing a man of sufficient wealth and pedigree to guarantee lifelong happiness, she remained, as in Mrs. Wharton's version, more than a little fussy about whom she would accept as consort.

Also, Kitty realized that the coincidences imposed by Madam Wharton, aka Pussy Jones, while distinctly unlikely, were not exactly impossible. Kitty's accusation that Lily was destroyed because it suited Mrs. Wharton's agenda that she should be destroyed still held. But it had to be admitted that the temper of the times in which she, Lily/Fenimore, had lived were equally responsible for her fate.

Kitty had tried making her a Wall Street whiz, a woman taking command of her diminishing stock portfolio and transforming it into a bulging bundle that not only shamed the men of her acquaintance but brought them stampeding to her door, newly aware of her charms. Who except an American or a Frenchman would want to write a novel about a stockbroker, though? Not Kitty McCloud.

Our author then granted Lily/Fenimore the advantage enjoyed by both herself and Mrs. Wharton: She would be artistically gifted. Not a writer, but, acting upon the original author's choice of a possible profession for her heroine, a milliner—with the difference that now Lily/Fenimore had a near magical propensity for creating hats that caused a sensation, with the women of her set now the ones clamoring at her threshold, pleading not only for her hand in marriage to their dreary sons, but for one of her rather vulgar creations, one suitable for next week at the opera.

Still, Kitty wasn't satisfied. A small voice was telling her something she had hoped to ignore, but couldn't: Edith Wharton, had been telling truths that needed to be told; Kitty McCloud was not only obscuring but dismissing those truths. Lily's fate
had
been preordained. Also, if Mrs. Wharton had been overgenerous with her coincidences, Kitty was no less guilty with her own manipulations. She should be ashamed. And she was.

In one last effort to find a truth beyond what her predecessor had uncovered, Kitty could come up with only one inevitable but unacceptable ending. From the beginning she had rightly scorned Edith's closing scene: Lily's fantasy, in the last moments before her ambiguously induced death, of cradling a friend's baby in her arms. The yearning for a child had never been an important issue for Lily, and it was disgustingly sentimental to bring it into play in Lily's most vulnerable moment.

So what would Kitty do? Kitty came up with only one answer, the one that prompted her to shut down her computer and leave her desk. For her Fenimore there was but one honest ending. Kitty would give her the only job available to a woman in her situation—at the Triangle Shirtwaist factory in New York in the year
1911
—then let the absence of workable fire codes do the rest. Like all those other young women at the factory who had failed to find a rich and pedigreed man, she would meet her ordained doom, at first being trapped, then jumping to her death from the tenth floor to escape the flames.

A container ship had appeared and a single cloud had come from the north, bringing with it an even more intensified smell of clover. Gulls had joined the cormorants out over the sea, and behind her Kitty could hear ring plovers distressing the high grass. Below her she saw that the tide was coming in, the water still licking and lapping the foot of the cliff. She'd wait for the waves to rise higher before returning Edith's book, neither omen nor sign, to the element from which coincidence had sent it. More aggressive waves would be needed for the undertow to bear Lily back to the drowned house and the deeply mourned bones.

She heard a car stop on the road. She turned, assuming it was a longtime acquaintance who had stopped to give her a quick greeting and exchange gossip about the tumbled house. But it was Lolly she saw, cutting off her motor. Lolly glanced over and looked at Kitty looking at her. She immediately switched the ignition back on, ready to drive off. After a light push on the accelerator, she lifted her foot. The motor slowed, then stopped. She turned off the ignition a second time, waited, then got out and came toward her best friend, Kitty.

“You're here,” she called out, even though she wasn't that far away.

“So it would seem.” Kitty considered getting up from the cliff's edge, but didn't feel like accommodating the intrusion. What Lolly's purpose might be she had no ready idea, unless—and this was a thought she'd prefer not to entertain—it was the hope or expectation of meeting Declan. If so, Kitty preferred to hear that news sitting down.

Lolly, in a more conversational tone, said, “You've come to look for Declan?” From the sound of her voice, Kitty could tell she was more than a few paces behind her.

“Why would I come here to see Declan? I see him most days, doing the thatching.”

Oh. Well. Of course. But … is he here?”

“I've not the least notion. So it's he you've come to find?”

“Well, yes. But he's not here, I guess. I've something to tell him, but maybe it's not that important.” That Lolly had some reason to be either reticent or apologetic about being there was apparent from the way she was speaking.

“Did you try the castle? He could be there by now.”

“I thought I'd come here first. It's said in the village he comes here often—early in the morning or late in the day. The men working on the road, they see him often.”

“They don't think it strange?”

“Well, it
is
strange. To them.”

“But not to us?”

“To us nothing Declan does is strange. Or, rather, all of it is. We're used to it.”

“And that's the end of it?”

“If he wants anyone to know his reasons, he'll tell them, is how I see it. Otherwise, nothing.”

“Well, come to think of it, don't try the castle till later. He may be down at the bog cutting sedge so it'll dry by the time he ridges the thatch.”

“Oh. Thanks. I can always find him another time.” Kitty waited to hear more. It finally came. “And you,” Lolly said, “are you looking to see if the old house is going to show itself or what?”

“No. I've let it go. It can show itself or not show itself. I have a better home by far. And what is it that's maybe not important if I may be so bold as to ask?”

“Oh, nothing. Not really.”

“Now it's beginning to sound important after all.”

“All right, then. I'll tell you and you can decide for yourself.” Lolly sat next to Kitty on the cliff's edge. With the heel of her shoe she gave a light touch to the cliff-side below, a lifelong reflex to make sure something was there to support her.

Kitty could see she was wearing a dress, hardly her usual daytime attire, her bright blue one at that, linen, and newly ironed by the smell of it, the one whose blue deepened the color of her eyes—which, by common consent, heightened her allure. Whatever that might be.

“There's a thatcher wanted in the north past Connemara, putting up holiday houses. Aaron came across it on the Internet and I made a printout to give Declan. They plan to make them cottages and the roofs thatched so those who come can feel themselves living like long ago. I don't see any work for him around here, now that the thatching you've given him to do is all but done.”

Kitty looked sideways. Lolly had cocked her head, waiting for Kitty to say something. Kitty felt no need to say anything. She was content to give her full regard to the blue dress and the intensified eyes.

Assuming an attitude of lofty indifference, Lolly, still looking directly at Kitty, said, “After all, I
am
an old friend of his. Surely, I'd do something that might help a man destroyed as he is these days.”

Kitty turned her face again to the sea. Her voice was quiet. “You are a good friend of Declan's, Lolly, that you worry about him having work to do. And I hope the man knows it.”

Less loftily, Lolly said, “Well, there's nothing here for him. Nothing to keep him. There'd be no purpose to it, him not going off the way he always does. Why would he want to be here? He'll find something worthwhile a distance away. As he always does. I have to laugh to think about it.” To reinforce her words, she let out a laugh that sounded reasonably like the real thing.

Kitty considered changing the subject, but Lolly went on. “How foolish we all were. But we were young then. Younger than young. And just the sight of him. The great dark hero come from another world.” Again the laugh, but less convincing. “Nothing on his mind it seemed but … well, you know what. And even our guardian angel's sheltering wings no protection we'd know. But it wasn't just ‘you know what' he was after, but the offering of himself as if he were the Eden apple itself, daring you to come to the feast. Oh the life of it … the …”

She stopped and brushed her hand across her forehead. Softly she said, “And we believed we'd known the last of him and him gone into the sea, never to come again. But the sea couldn't keep him. He's come up out of the waves, Kitty. How could waters wide as the world hold him forever? It could never be. Not for him. He's come again—”

“From the north, where he'd gone.”

“I know. I know. But isn't it allowed that sometimes the old madness comes over you—”

“Not over me. You, maybe. But not me.”

“Ah, of course. Not you.” Again a small laugh, this one unforced, but not without its sorrows. “And not over me, either. It's not permitted. It must never come, the madness. And we must make sure it never does.”

The full tide had come in, the waves now battering away as if enraged by the cliff's earlier indifference to its lapping and licking. Kitty shifted Mrs. Wharton's book from her left hand to her right. The moment was near. She must toss it, not merely drop it as if it were a thing to be rid of. She must cast it out as far as she could, in tribute to her sister writer for whose flaws she had nothing but respect.

Again Lolly interrupted. “You were reading. I didn't realize. You probably never noticed, but I can be thoughtless at times.”

“No, I never noticed.” Without previous consultation, they giggled together. Lolly began to draw her right leg up from the cliff's edge, but stopped, then lowered it again. After an interval sufficient to let Kitty know she had more to say, Lolly smoothed the bright blue dress covering her lap and began what seemed a soliloquy, even though the words were obviously meant for Kitty as well.

“It's the bones of a boy out there beneath the waves. Declan told me and said how it happened. You know it all as well, he said, but according to him you needed no telling. He said all this to me when he was showing me the way up the secret stairs. Did you know he found them? They're still there, where the priests escaped and where we hid the skeleton when the gardaí, Tom and Jim, came looking for a man escaped.”

“I knew,” said Kitty, “but never went up them or down. They were a part of the house. They should have gone with it.”

“But they didn't. It was dark even with Declan's flashlight, but I wasn't afraid. Not with Declan there. Halfway up … Oh, but I guess I should tell you. I came looking for him after I'd made such a fool of myself telling him about my book, trying to convince him I wasn't the crazy lady he'd seen when Aaron and I went to Caherciveen to hear the
Messiah
. And he offered to show me the stairs. Halfway up he stopped on a landing, the damp stones all around and the smell still there from the years gone rotten so long ago. The flashlight he kept aimed toward the steps above and he spoke to me. About the boy's fall and the dying. And him buried in Declan's own coat because the ground was so cold, he said. And with the thatcher's tools and other things besides from Declan's life put into the old sack so the boy wouldn't be left without things he'd known in the world and that Declan had known, too. And then the search to the north and no one to claim the boy. Now the coming here, and it's all gone away, given by the wind and taken by the sea. And the grief was upon him, telling me all, and nothing to be done.” She paused, then added more quietly, “Well, almost nothing.” She paused again. “I'll say no more.”