Beach Girls (35 page)

Christy had packed up his daughter and, with the heaviest heart imaginable, gone home to Canada. There was a hearing scheduled for March, but Officer Collins spoke to the ADA in charge, telling him what had really happened. And with Danny nowhere to be found—in spite of Collins and other city cops looking for him—the charge against Christy had been thrown out. Where he should have been relieved, Christy was instead soul-sick; to the New York police and court system, his family had become just another statistic of domestic trouble, and his son had become just one more street kid.

Now, one year later, the pickup was packed and ready for him and his daughter to return to New York. They'd had just one postcard from Danny; of the Brooklyn Bridge, with not a clue in the message about where he was living or how he was really faring. Just the brash words: “I'm doing grand—don't worry about me.”

Not a word about missing Christy or Bridget or their thirty acres of fir trees on the edge of the world. The boy had come from magical northern land, inhabited by bald eagles, black bears, red and silver foxes, and great horned owls. He had left it for the urban caverns of New York, populated by players and hustlers. Christy hated the place with a passion, never wanted never to set foot in the city again.

But he knew he had to. Had to set up his trees on the same Chelsea corner, had to string up his lights so they'd set the salt crystals on the trees' needles gleaming and entice the customers, had to cock his smile and throw the charm, had to sell out his evergreens and put money in the bank. But most of all, had to be in the same place he always was, so Danny would know where to find him.

“Come on, Bridget,” he shouted up the stairs. She appeared at the top, dragging another huge suitcase behind her.

“What's that?” he asked.

“It's my things, Pa,” she said.

“Your things are in the truck, Bridget! We're only going for twenty-four days. What've you got in there?”

“Party clothes, Pa.” Her green eyes were shimmering.

Christy stared up at her. She was twelve now, a young lady. She'd curled her pretty brown hair by herself, tied it with a burgundy velvet ribbon she'd found somewhere. What the hell did she think she'd be needing with party clothes? Christy worked all day every day until his trees were sold.

“Bridget,” he started.

“Danny's coming back to us, and we're going to take him somewhere special to celebrate.”

“Leave the case here. Be a good girl, and let's get going.”

“I've seen it on TV, a program about New York City, Pa,” she said, the words spilling out as she started to bump the huge suitcase down the stairs. “Fancy places we've never gone to yet. Places Danny would love—palaces, Pa! All with crystal and gold, and with Christmas trees bigger than the oldest ones on our mountain, all covered with garlands and tiny lights. Like a fairyland, honest! Girls having tea with their fathers in places like that, and boys all dressed up with ties, everyone so happy and celebrating the holiday together, Pa.”

“That's not how you celebrate a holiday,” Christy said gruffly.

“But we have to do something wonderful, when Danny comes back to us!”

“Get in the truck now, Bridget,” he said, pointing with force at the front door. She scowled, limping past him under the weight of her case. Reluctantly he lifted it for her, into the compartment behind the seat. They climbed in and slammed the doors.

Christy had warmed up the cab for her, but he didn't suppose she noticed. That's okay, he told himself. One of the ways he measured that he'd been a good provider was that his kids never commented when they were warm enough, or when their stomachs weren't hurting from hunger; they took their comfort for granted, which was just what children should do. Christy wouldn't even try to force Danny come home—he swore it to himself.

He just had to make sure his boy wasn't hungry. And to hear if he'd gotten any closer to his “dream.” Looking down the farm's hillside toward the sea, he wondered how any dream could be better than this—this was all Danny's and Bridget's. If he could harness the wind, capture the sunlight, he would. And he would give it to his kids.

THE HOLIDAY SEASON STARTED earlier and earlier every year. Once it had been the day after Thanksgiving—the unofficial day that Manhattan would start to put up decorations. Now, Catherine Tierney thought, it seemed to happen in October—even as the greenmarkets were overflowing with pumpkins and grocery shelves were laden with Halloween candy. The city began to dress in its winter finery, weighting Catherine's soul a little more each day.

All through November Catherine had watched tiny, twinkling white lights appearing in midtown shop windows. Bell-ringing Santas would clang away, standing in front of Lord & Taylor and Macy's as passersby stuffed their cast iron kettles with dollar bills. Salvation Army bands would start playing “Silent Night” and “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen” outside Saks Fifth Avenue to the captive audience of people lined up to see the famous holiday windows. Squeezing past the crowd, Catherine kept her face stoic, so no one could what the carols were doing to her heart.

By the first of December, the city was in full holiday swing. Hotels were filled with shoppers and people in town to see City Ballet's
Nutcracker
, Radio City's Christmas show, Handel's
Messiah
, and, of course, the Rockefeller Center tree. The avenues crept with yellow cabs, and on her way to the subway, Catherine would be jostled by wall-to-wall people inching along in their thick coats.

Catherine Tierney worked as a librarian in a private
library owned by the Rheinbeck Corporation. The Rheinbecks had made their fortune in banking, and now real estate; they were philanthropists who supported education and the arts. The library occupied the fifty-fourth floor of the Rheinbeck Building at Fifth Avenue and Fifty-ninth Street, just across the Grand Army Plaza from Central Park.

The Rheinbeck Tower was fantastically gothic, with arched windows, pinnacles, flying buttresses, finials, and gargoyles, rising sixty stories to an ornate green cast stone point. The offices, and Catherine's library, had astonishing views of the park—the eight-hundred-and-forty-three-acre green haven in the city's midst.

The building's façade was lit year round, Paris style, with gold light. For the holidays, the illumination changed to red and green. The spectacular four-story barrel-vaulted lobby accommodated an enormous tree, covered with colored balls and lights. The Byzantine-style mosaics glistened like real gold, and evergreen roping garlanded the frescoed second-floor balconies.

Choirs sang carols in the lobby at lunchtime, a different city school group every day. That afternoon Catherine returned to work with her sandwich, and she paused to listen. The children's voices joined together, sweet and pure.

One little girl in the back row was off-key. Catherine watched her, head thrown back with brown braids hanging down, mouth open wide, singing her heart out. The choir director shot the girl an ice-cold look and a hand signal, and suddenly the girl stopped—her eyes wide with dismay as they flooded with tears. Catherine's stomach churned at the sight. She had to walk away, hurry upstairs, to keep from getting involved—telling the girl to keep singing, berating the director for squashing her spirit. That's what Brian would have done.

The look in that girl's eyes was with Catherine all day. From “Joy to the World” to the shock of being silenced. She felt the child's shame in her own heart, and for the rest of the day found it almost impossible to concentrate on her project—pulling up material from the archives on stone angels and gargoyles on buildings in Manhattan. She couldn't wait to get home and put this day behind her.

At five-thirty Catherine locked up and headed for the subway. She lived in Chelsea. Situated west of Sixth Avenue, roughly between Fourteenth and Twenty-third Streets, that part of town had its own personality. Eighth Avenue was playful, shop and restaurant windows decorated with wreaths of red peppers, Santa in a sleigh drawn by eight flamingos, candles shaped like the Grinch and Betty Lou Who.

The side streets had a nineteenth-century feel, with many Italianate and Greek Revival brownstones set back from the sidewalk, their yards enclosed by ornate wrought iron gates and lit by reproduction gas lamps.

Some residents decorated for the holidays as if Chelsea were still part of the estate of Clement Clark Moore—the author of “A Visit from St. Nicholas”—with English holly, laurel and evergreen roping, Della Robia wreaths, red ribbons, and gold and silver balls. It was so understated that if you didn't want to notice, you didn't have to.

The minute Catherine stepped off the E train at Twenty-third and Eighth, she breathed a sigh of relief. The buildings were low, and she could see the sky. The air was frigid, crystal clear, and so dry that it hurt to draw a breath. She wore stylish boots and a short black wool coat; her knees and toes were cold as she hurried across West Twenty-second Street, on her way home.

At Ninth Avenue she turned south. The Christmas tree man had arrived again—she stopped short when she saw him there; her pulse felt like galloping horses. For a second, she considered crossing the street to avoid having to look him in the eye.

She had witnessed the scene with his son last year—and she had doubted that he would come back. But here he was, just setting up his display of spruce and pine, making the sidewalk smell like a mountain forest. The trees stretched a quarter of the way down the block of small stores—an antiquarian book dealer, two avant-garde clothes designers, a new bakery, a florist, and Chez Liz.

In a brilliant fit of quirkiness possible only in Chelsea, Lizzie sold hats, which she made, along with hard-to-find poetry books and antique tea sets. When she was in the mood, she would set the mahogany table inside with her Spode and Wedgwood china and serve tea to whoever walked in. Catherine felt so nervous, seeing the man, she dove at Lizzie's door to duck inside. The shop was warmly lit by silk-shaded lamps, but the door was locked—Lizzie and Rose had already left.

“She closed early tonight—left with the little one,” the tree man said, leaning against the makeshift rack of raw pine boards, holding numerous wreathes, sprays, and garlands. “I asked her, beautiful as she looked in that black velvet hat with the one peacock feather sticking up, was she going to the theater or opera?”

“Hmm,” Catherine said, her palms damp inside her gloves, wanting to get away.

“She told me that she was going to ‘the banquet.'”

Catherine hid a smile. Lizzie would say that.

“What I think she'd say to you, if she was here,” he said, stamping his feet to keep them warm, his Irish brogue coming out in clouds, “is that you should buy a nice fresh Nova Scotia Christmas tree from me. And a wreath, for your front door. I see you walk by every day, and you look to me like someone who would fancy white spruce . . .”

The man was tall, with broad shoulders under a rugged canvas jacket. His hair was light brown, but even in the dark she could see it was grayer than it had been the year before. He had been warming his hands by a kerosene heater; he stepped closer to Catherine, and after what had happened last year, she leaned sharply back.

“I don't want a white spruce,” Catherine said.

“No? Then maybe a hardy blue—”

“Or any other tree,” she said. She had had a headache ever since the carol incident in the lobby, and she just wanted to get home.

“Just look at these needles,” he said, brushing a branch with one bare hand. “They're as fresh as they day the trees were cut—they'll never fall. And see how they glisten? That's the Cape Breton salt spray . . . you know, it's said that starlight gets caught in the branches, and . . .”

He paused in the midst of the sentence, trailing off as if he'd forgotten what he was saying or lost the heart for his spiel. Catherine had noticed his blue eyes sparkling during hard sells in the past, but tonight they were as dull as last week's snow. They held her gaze for a moment, then looked down at the ground. She felt her heart pounding as she kept her face neutral so he couldn't read her thoughts.

“Thank you anyway,” Catherine said, edging away.

As she walked home, she felt doubly uncomfortable. She was still upset about the little girl, and now she had to face the fact that the tree man would be in her neighborhood till Christmas Eve, and she'd probably have to change her route. She wondered whether his daughter had come with him this year. She hoped his son was somewhere warm. Her nose and fingertips stung with the cold. A December wind blew off the Hudson River, and when she turned right onto West Twentieth Street, she saw little clouds of vapor around the gaslights of Cushman Row.

In spite of the brutal chill, she paused to stare at the penumbra around one flickering lamp. The globe of light might have been due to moisture blowing off the river, forecasting a storm like a ring around the moon. It reminded Catherine of a ghost. It's a harbinger, she thought and hoped as she clenched her freezing hands and walked on.

Chelsea was haunted at Christmas. Or at least one room in one townhouse, in the very middle of Cushman Row. Like its neighbors—other brick Greek Revivals with tall brownstone steps, pocket-sized yards, and ornate cast-iron railings—the house where Catherine lived had been built in 1840 by Don Alonzo Cushman, a friend of Clement Clark Moore.

Catherine paused, holding onto the iron railing and gazing at the brick house, four stories up to the small attic windows. Leaded glass, encircled by plaster wreathes of laurel leaves, they were one of the house's prettiest, most charming features. The tiny panes of glass gave onto the sky. Strangers walking by often stopped to peer upward at those mysterious little windows.

People always made assumptions about other people's lives. Catherine thought of passing strangers imagining happiness inside. Perhaps they gazed at the pretty townhouse and pictured elegant dinner parties going on inside. They would probably assume it belonged to a loving couple with brilliant children—perhaps their playroom was up in the attic, behind those small wreathed windows.