Bells of Avalon (16 page)

Chapter 15

New York City, New York

1966

He’d heard that Washington Square Park used to be a graveyard. He couldn’t remember who’d told him that. He thought about what the sandstone markers would look like now, lying under stratums of modern concrete. The hard and fast rules of urban development had a way of cleaning up the past. Then there was hangman’s elm at the park’s northwest corner. He could barely see it from where he sat, but there it stood—as it had for the past hundred or so years, indifferent and far-reaching with its branches. During the Revolutionary War, it had been a popular spot to hang a guy. Pete had told him that…at least he thought he had. It turned out to be a bunk story, though. One Sunday afternoon he’d read through history books and about a hundred years worth of microfilm. In a blurry print from the 1860s
Times
, he found a crude caption about an arsonist slave hanged from the tree sometime before.
Rose Butler sat upon a bench—down drop't the trap, and hanged that wench.
Apart from that, there was nothing. But history books also had a way of cleaning up the past…so in the end, who really knew? If ever the park felt like a graveyard, it did today as the desolating cold settled all around.

This was his habit. He sat on the bench almost every day, watching the joggers and dog-walkers—the strummers playing guitar behind open cases. He’d tried out all the parks, but somehow always made his way back here. It suited him best. He liked the row of red brick houses that lined the north side of the park, liked to watch the frayed NYU kids milling through. The land that covered this park had likely seen any number of horrible things happen. But mostly, it had all shaken-out ok in the end.

Hell, in a city as old as New York, horrible things were liable to have happened everywhere. You just couldn’t tell unless you went looking for it.  Sometimes he sat on the same bench all day without realizing, in rough winter clothes, burned out match piths in his pocket. He shivered as the temperature dropped. He’d toughened to the cold in spite of his Californian breeding, but he hadn’t been to California since his mother died. They buried her a few paces from a Juniper tree, and he thought she would have liked that; she’d been fanciful for trees. He didn’t think about her much, but he did think of her sometimes. Mostly late at night when sleep didn’t come. Sometimes he rewrote the past in his head. He’d been doing that for so long it was hard to tell the real memories from the ones he’d conjured. But he thought that the good ones were real. His favorite was the one in his mother’s kitchen. In his mind, the screen door was open while filament rays lit the room. Her telephone had been mounted above the table back then, which he had always found strange. He could see it so clearly: the glossy black nobility of it hanging on custard-colored wall paper. He felt the feeling of his young body; the lightness of his joints before they’d become sore and broken-down.  He held his child’s hand in front of his face—saw the unblemished skin that stretched up his arm.

"Daniel?” It was his grandmother’s voice. 

"Daniel?” He heard it again. He closed his eyes, letting the lucidity of the memory drown out the sound of car horns and urban chatter.

She pulled him onto her lap, and he smiled with candy-shaped white teeth. Her papery hands intertwined with his and her skin was cool and soft. 

She placed the necklace in his tiny hand.

“MorMor?” he asked looking up to her old face.

"Gaa til din Mor," she whispered. He hesitated for a moment before sliding off her knee. He saw his mother then, standing tall by the stove top in a velvet tea gown. He pulled at the hem of her dress.

"Mama."

She looked down and smiled, her nose dotted with freckles under the moons of large eyes. Her shiny hair looked afire with the setting sun caught behind. But there was nothing beyond that. Childhood memories were often stories that dropped off into nothing. He felt a startling warmness as the memory faded to an autumn color, then to a muddled blue, before his head jerked awake…and he was in the city again. 

The evening sky held onto a blue pallor, but it would soon be black. He looked at the outline of trees against the setting night sky.  His mother had been so fanciful for trees. God’s truth, she would have lived in one. Now, that was a strange thought.
Would she have?
His eyebrows pressed together as he tried to scale his mind back. It was painful at first, but then something came: a flash of memory. She hadn’t really liked trees—had she? He supposed she had, but no more than any other person. Why had he thought she’d been fanciful for them?

  His mother, Princess Mary, lost to her homeland in the Californian sun. Marinel Gallagher. He always thought her name sounded fake—made-up…just like Katie’s. He saw his mother’s face again, her large eyes against her wild brown hair. Her mouth was his, along with the weakly hazel eyes she’d given him.  The rest of his features were spirited-away by his father’s Irish blood.
Princess Mary, she lived in a tree, and sailed across the seven seas. Captain Jack sank and so will you, if you don’t take a ricka bamboo
. Was that how it had gone? Or was his mind misgiving again? If those weren’t the words, they should have been.  He thought again of hangman’s elm, of the ancient graves below. He stood from the bench and began to walk, the notion of being in a graveyard suddenly sitting ill with him. Now he wanted nothing more but to be warm and amongst the living.

“It was some kind of jewel? A moonstone maybe?
No.
An opal. It was an opal,” he whispered.
Yes
. The certainty of it swift like a blow to the chin.
Opal
.  He thought of Katie’s demure finger touching the teardrop stone in a setting of gold leaves. She’d never seen a black one before. A memory, perhaps unreliable, whispered to him that he’d gone back for it after she died.  To the best of what was left of his mind, he thought that was right. But that could have been a dream as well. Something he'd meant to do but never had, like most things left undone in his life.  He heard the child’s version of his voice again,
Mama?
He shuddered, the sounds of the child’s words so clear that it frightened him. He made quick strides across the park, shuffling off the dead and things that should have long been forgotten. 

He shouldn’t have called her. That had been stupid. It was why, now, he risked freezing to death while his mind played useless memories.
God
, why had he done something so stupid? It wasn’t his style at all. But then again, he’d been soused. Even sober, he’d done a thousand stupid things where Katie was concerned. She could make him lose his damn mind. He should have just left it alone…but he couldn’t resist.  It didn’t seem right to never talk to her again—never see her again. That wasn’t the way it was supposed to end. He always thought they would run into one another. They always did somehow. New York City was a much smaller place than most people realized. But he’d known that all along. It was why he’d ended up here. Yet he’d lived in the city for years and they’d never crossed paths. All said and done, it wasn’t as if they ran in the same circles any longer. He was running out of time. When Pete got him drunk as a rat last night, the booze had seemed like a good way to grease the wheels.

He turned left on MacDougal Street rather than going westwards home. When he got to the basement bar where he’d spent the night before, Pete hadn’t yet took the small kerosene-lit stage. He plunged his hand into his pocket and pulled out a crumpled, blue-edged pack of cigarettes. He lit one and watched a red-haired kid play out a cover of a Joe Hunter song.  Pete was at the bar talking to the same Latvian barmaid from last night. He waited until she was called away by a string of new customers.

“Make a friend?” Danny asked and took the barstool next to his friend.

Pete smiled, patting him on the shoulder.

“I knew she’d come around. You want a Brewski?”

“Not just yet, thanks. You play tonight?”

“No man, too slow. Not worth it. I was about to call it a night and boogaloo home…but Celia’s got family in town.

“Still?” Danny asked. He watched the Latvian waitress wipe down the bar as Pete jawed on about the bevy of women held up at his place.  The
women folk
, as he couldn’t really call them in-laws.

“Yeah, you know. They don’t light out until tomorrow. She’s got me climbing the walls over this trip. What the hell am I supposed to do up there for the next six months, run a cross-saw?”

“I think they run more to fly fishing up there.”

“Even worse.  I’m from Rahway. What the hell do I know about fishing?” He swallowed the rest of his beer and motioned to the Latvian beauty for another. “She hasn’t been working on you about it has she?”

He shook his head              

“It’s really dead tonight,” Danny said, looking around the bar.

“As a herring.” Pete looked at him, “hey, you feelin ok?”

“I’m clear—unless you heard otherwise?”

Pete leaned in, his dark hair falling around his face in a sort of spaghetti western look.

“It seems I have, friend.” 

“Oh yeah?”

“Yeah. There was someone in here asking about you.”

“Me?”

“Yeah, some East Egg-Clyde. Gave everyone in here the fear…then left.”

“You for real?” Danny asked. 

“I told him I didn’t know you. Then he launched into a lot of hop-head talk about you being dead.”

“Dead, huh?”

Pete nodded, “as a herring.”

“That’s the breaks,” Danny said and leaned back on his barstool.

“Yeah, well I thought it was something you might want to know…if you cop to that sort of thing.”

“Not really.”

“Hey, this place is the dregs. Let’s get some dumplings at Nom Wah. You think you can keep it down?”

“I think so,” Danny replied.

Chapter Sixteen

Los Angeles, California

1959

She tried not to think of the last time they’d been at a restaurant like this. They had bad luck in fancy restaurants. Dim, brown liquor swirled to flattened peaks against the sides of his rocks glass. He lifted his eyes when their waiter asked if they’d like more to drink. He looked at her then to her empty wine glass. 

“Another Latour for her. Nothing for me, thanks.”

The second glass of wine hadn’t done much to dull her pain. She didn’t mind that he’d ordered her a third. Maybe so long as she stayed drunk, she wouldn’t have to send her mind walking. But from the moment she’d seen him walk through the doors at La Scala, dressed in a black suit, sadness fusing to his face in an oddly handsome way, she’d wanted to send her mind as far away as she could. He stared at her now, the son of the woman who’d taught her to appliqué cloth and boil fish dumplings. She took a deep breath, resisting the undercurrent of her emotions. When her mind was as still as she could manage, she looked at him. Just as she feared, his eyes looked far too similar to his mother’s. She should have expected it from the boy with many faces. The sing-songy voice broke through the stillness of her mind. She lost her grip. She knew what would come next. She could no longer quiet her mind, nor send it walking. It showed her a horrible thing: the woman who was now in the ground, a bony framework of the beauty she’d once been. There was no color, no stir. She didn’t know if she could survive the knowledge of having seen her that way. As she sat in the dark funeral parlor, she’d thought she would turn to complete madness. She had all the makings to have gone crazy years before, but somehow managed to walk the thin edge of sanity. This day, and all its trappings, would be what undid her.

“Thank you for meeting me,” he said.

“You’re welcome. How have you been?”

“Fine,” he said.

“I heard you were working on Cameo Theater.”

“Just an episode, nothing to get nuts about.”

“It’s good though,” she said.

“It’s nothing.”

Their waiter appeared to exchange her empty stemware for a fresh glass of wine. Hooking an index finger around the stem of the glass, her eyes fell on the raised slash of scar tissue stretching out from her wrist.
Hadn’t she meant to cover it that morning?
She could have sworn she’d pulled the bracelet from her jewelry box while she’d paced the bedroom in stocking feet and a black corselet. She could see it now so clearly: four cameo ladies encased in thick Lucite. The bracelet had been so shiny…
black
Lucite buttons
,
oh God…
like pooled oil from a derrick, but not even so special as—she swallowed hard and felt her chest burning. 

“Wishing you hadn’t met me?” he asked.

“Daniel—”she started impatiently. She closed her mouth and irritably looked around the restaurant, trying to think of anything else to say. “I just got back from England, you know.”

There was a hint of a smile on him.

“Good to see the motherland?”

“I wouldn’t call it that. I saw my sister when I was there.”

“
Sister?
You never told me you had a sister?”

“Well I’m telling you now, aren’t I?” she said. Daniel sighed and leaned back in his chair.

“That’s not what I meant,” he said.

“I don’t really even know her. Her name is Florence. She’s years older than me. I hadn’t seen her since father and I left when I was very small.”

“Well, what happened?”

“It wasn’t any good. She hates me.”

“
Hates you?
Why on earth would she hate you, Katie?”

“I don’t know. I can only imagine she holds me for some blame.”

“Blame? What for?”

“For taking father away. He’d have never left England if it hadn’t been for me. It was all for me—and she’s crazy, you see,” she said flatly.

“What?” He laughed until he saw the steely anger in her eyes.

“She’s crazy. I saw her go crazy once when I was young. An ambulance went by our flat. She heard it and tried to hurt herself. Father had to drag her out of the room so I wouldn’t see. It was the same night we went underground.”

“What the hell are you talking about, Katie?”

“She went crazy before we went to the tunnel. It was dirty and hot. I couldn’t sleep because people kept stepping on me.”

Danny gave her a spooked look, his glassy eyes clearing. “Katie, are you talking about the war?”

“What do you mean?”

“The war
—the blitz,”
he said. “Hitler and all of that, you know?”

She looked at him blankly.

“I don’t know what it was; father never told me.”

“Well, yes—but, Katie…you do know what the war was?” he asked but she shrugged and looked away.

“C’mon Katie—London was bombed. Your sister didn’t go crazy. She was probably just scared when the air raid sirens went off. That’s why you were underground. You were in the subway tunnels under the city.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about. You always do this,” she snapped. His eyes widened.

“Do what?”

“Try to make me feel stupid for what I don’t know. You try to make me feel stupid because you know you’re smarter than me.”

“Jesus, Katie. That’s the last thing in the world I would want to do to you. I just thought you knew.”

“She
did
go crazy, just as I will.”

“You’re not
crazy
, Katie.”

“Not yet. I never told anyone about her because I was scared I’d be sent to her when father died. That’s why I lived with you and your mother for those months because I told them there was no one else. I didn’t think they’d believe me, but they did.”

“Katie—”

“I didn’t try to see her. She found me out somehow while I was in London, showed up unannounced at my hotel. I was afraid but I let her come to my room. She looked just like father; the same black hair, the same stony eyes. We didn’t look a thing alike except for father’s nose. She was kind—at first.”

“At first?”

“We spoke for a while and then she became very cold, said she’d come to ask for the ring.”

“A ring?”

“My mother’s wedding ring. My grandmother sent it with father when we left. It was to be passed down, you see—to go to Florence being the oldest and all, but she gave it to me. I remember exactly what she’d said, ‘Give it to Florie, I amn’t. You’ve got nothin’ of my Sarah, not even a memory while Florie has a bushel of them. It wouldn’t be right for her to have this as well,’ and then she gave me the ring. I still remember her saying those exact words, isn’t that strange, Daniel?”

He looked down at his drink but didn’t answer. 

“In any case, I never understood what Nan meant. I suppose I did in a small way, but not completely.  It wasn’t until that moment, watching Florence look at me with those stony eyes after she’d asked for my mother’s wedding ring.  It wasn’t until then that I understood why Nan hadn’t wanted her to have it. None of it even matters now, though. The ring is long gone.” She lifted her eyes up in a peculiar way and looked him. “You remember the ring, Daniel, don’t you?” she said. He kept his eyes on his drink.

“I didn’t tell her that it was gone. I just plainly told her she couldn’t have it. Then Nan’s words came to me again, not all at once but quick enough and I repeated them to her just as Nan had told them to me.”

“Katie, why are you telling me this?”

“Why? Isn’t that what we’re doing? Isn’t that why you asked me here—to talk? To tell you things? Go on, ask me more. I’ll tell you anything, anything about proper little existence. I’m wildly successful you know. I’ve more money than I know what do with, but I’m sure you know that.”

“Katie, please.”

“No, go on and ask—anything you want to know.”

“Katie—”

“Oh, but I’m being rude. Let’s talk about you. You were getting married last I heard. Having a baby too—was it?”

Bunching his hand into a fist, he lowered his head and sighed.

“It barely lasted six months after she lost the baby.”

“Oh, well I’m very sorry for it.”

“Don’t do this, Katie.”

A ringing in her ears blocked out the random noise of the restaurant. She reached for her wine and looked again at the scar. This time she didn’t look away as she thought of the Lucite bracelet, still sitting on her vanity at the Fiske Street house. 

“Have you spoken to Albert?”

“You know I haven’t, he won’t talk to me since—I don’t want to talk about Albert.”

“Max moved east for good with Albert—some kind of night place,” she said and scratched at her scar.

“Katie, don’t.”

“They have illusions of making it into the next Stork Club or something.”

She continued scratching until the smooth flesh around the scar turned pink.

“Katie,
stop
it.” 

“Can you believe Max asked me to sing there?”

“Dammit, Katie,
stop
!” His hand slapped the table with a clank of china against the force. His voice rose over the soft dinnertime murmurings that surrounded them. He yanked her wrists up from the table. His hands squeezed down on her until she felt his nails in her wrist. An elderly couple dressed in his and hers plaid suits cast wary eyes on them.

“Oh, God, I’m sorry,” he said releasing her hands. She gave the couple a wilted smile that seemed to appease them for the moment. 

“God, Katie, I’m so sorry—I didn’t mean to—” he trailed off, his voice anxious. Katie dropped her head into her hands. 

“Katie, look at me.”

“No,” she mumbled from her fingers.

“Look at me.”

“I can’t do this.”

“Katie,
look
at me,
please
.”

“I can’t.”

Her voice was soft as she rose from the table and skirted out of the restaurant. He followed after her, fumbling first for his wallet and raining a flurry of bills over the table.  The elderly man from before stood up with an indignant whirl as Daniel dashed past.

“Katie
stop
!” he yelled behind her.

She ran through the cold air, each breath needling at her lungs. She was fast, but she heard him close behind. When he caught her, he pulled her from behind and then against him. His body suffocated her with its choking alcohol scent. She struggled against him, her palms burning as she slapped against his chest and arms while he held her firmly.

“She was you mother, Daniel. Your
mother
!”

“I tried to go to the church, Katie. God help me, I tried. I couldn’t do it.” His voice trembled and dipped into an unfamiliar tone.

“It was your
mother
!”

“I’m sorry, Katie.
Christ
, I swear I am. I went to the cemetery after everyone had gone. I swear!”

“I don’t believe you,” she hissed, pulling away but his hands were again at her wrists.

“I swear,” he said, and his desperate eyes looked over her face, “I watched them lower her down after everyone was gone. I swear I did.”

“I don’t believe you, I don’t, I don’t,” she sobbed, pulling harder and harder to break free from him.

“I did!
Damn you, Katie
—listen to me!” 

He shook her as his voice broke.

“I saw—I saw the flowers you left.”

She looked up at him, breathing hard.

“I saw those damned…those stupid white flowers you used to grow when we were kids.”

He let her go roughly. She stumbled back several steps before she caught her balance again. She wiped the streaming tears from her face.  He turned his back to her, his hand shaking as he raked through his thickly-gelled hair.

“Damn you, Katie.” His voice lowered, and he began to weep as well. “Damn you for making me see that.”

She stared at the broad line of his shoulders beneath his black jacket. She came behind him and touched his arm. He pivoted sharply at her touch—but she didn’t pull away. He looked over her with a touched sort of marvel, surprised perhaps that she was still there. The lights from a passing car beamed over his greenish eyes, until she saw the sad weight of them as they looked into her own. She wrapped her arms around him, and his weight fell against her.

“Katie,” he said against her ear. “Katie.”

  He shifted his face so he could look at her. His fingers danced over the sides of her face before his lips reached for hers. She gave him her mouth and he kissed her fiercely. Against her will, she melted into him, knowing now that she’d never stood a chance against him.

The bedroom in the Fiske Street house was now adorned with Art Deco sconces and a prism chandelier. The brass bed was long gone, replaced by a four-poster Mahogany with tufted curtains. He carried her to the bed, as he’d done years before, now placing her on 1000 thread-count sheets rather than scratchy green ones. He pulled his shirt over his head. Over his naked shoulder, she saw the forgotten Lucite bracelet in a crystal dish on the bureau. The image was blotted out as he kissed her mouth.  He crushed her close, and she arched to meet him as he took her again and again…until the horrors of that day—were gone.