Bells of Avalon (7 page)

“Well hello, Irene,” she said, the sweetness of her greeting at odds with Irene’s fussy façade.

“Hey, Ma.” Danny said and ducked past her into the house. Katie hesitated for a moment before greeting Mrs. Gallagher and following behind. Katie stopped for moment at the foot of the stairs. There, she heard enough of the conversation to know that she didn’t want to hear any more. The last bit she caught was Mrs. Kittredge’s shrill voice saying
his
name. It hadn’t been his
real
name, of course. They’d both been given better names, names that fell across the tongue in just the right way. He’d been fond of talking to her afterwards. He sometimes wept strange, boyish tears and told her secrets—a lot of them she didn’t understand. Mostly she didn’t listen to them. Mostly she stared while his hand clung to his flat cap, his head bent in shame. But once he’d told her his real name. It was strange-sounding, clunky in its Irishness—just as her own had been

She put on her pajamas. Irene and Mrs. Gallagher were still talking downstairs, but the sound was barely audible. Then there was silence. Headlights blazed through her room then fell away with the sound of the Kittredge’s car pulling from the drive. As she brushed her hair, the swingy sounds of Danny’s jazz records played from down the hallway.

“Katie, doodah, come down for a moment,” Mrs. Gallagher called from below.  Katie clamped her eyes shut at the sound of the kind, but firm voice. She put down her hairbrush and sadly descended the staircase. Mrs. Gallagher sat with her tangled ladybug pattern in hand, her slender fingers working at untangling the threaded mess.

“There you are. Did you have a nice time this evening?”

“Yes,” she answered, a little too quickly.

“This is good work. You won’t finish it?”

“I don’t know. I’m stuck in the middle. It only irritates me to move forward.”

“I see. Do you not like the work?”

Katie thought about it. It was the kind of question she’d never really been asked before.

“I guess I don’t like it. It’s like when I dance. The rules for what to do next just pile on top of each other and I get confused. I know what I need to do, but I can’t make myself do it.”

“Yes, I suppose it is the same as this,” she said holding up the ladybug, “you must know how to weave each thread together to make a shape. It is a hard dance to learn.”

“But you’re so good at it. You’re so good at everything. You’d never know what it is to be bad at something,” Katie replied, and quickly grew ashamed of the sulky comment.

“But you are wrong, Katie Webb. When I was young, as you are now, all of the girls I knew loved to dance. Yes, I loved to move and play and make my own dances. But my friends said that was not real dancing. They made a big bag of rules of it all: rules for when to move and when to not, when to be silent. When to be still. I thought that dancing was something that came without rules. My friends teased me for that. It made me sad. Until one day I thought, if that is what it means to be a dancer, I’d rather just drift and bend like the trees—and I was happy then. And you know what happened to all the little girls who were dancers?” She smiled with a wicked tilt to her lips.

“What?” Katie asked.

“They ended up bow-legged and cross-eyed for all their silly rules—and all before any boy could invite them to dance along.” Katie giggled as Mrs. Gallagher crossed her eyes into her smallish nose.

“That can’t be true.” Katie laughed, and Mrs. Gallagher’s dopey expression settled back into the still beauty of before.

“Well maybe not for all. But if it was true, then would it not be better to dance and bend like the trees?”

“Yes, I suppose.”

Mrs. Gallagher crossed her eyes again and puffed out her cheeks. Katie giggled again, but soon found herself laughing loudly from her belly while Mrs. Gallagher ran through a series of sillier and sillier faces. Over their laughter, she hadn’t noticed Daniel’s clomping down the stairs until he walked past them into the kitchen.

“Well, hello Daniel—I thought you’d gone to bed?” Mrs. Gallagher said.

“I’d like to know who could sleep with you two making so much racket.”

Danny opened the refrigerator door to scour the contents inside.

“There’s nothing to eat in this house.”

“Hardly, Daniel. It is only food you have to work to prepare.”

“That’s worse than having nothing,” he said. He shut the door and joined them in the living room.  He plopped down in a heap next to his mother. Mrs. Gallagher smiled warily at the companionable display of affection so unlike him.

“Make us something, won’t you Ma?”

“You like my cooking again, do you?”

“Not just for me. Katie’s hungry too, right?”

“Don’t bring Katie into your trickery.” She smiled. “It’s almost midnight—if you eat this late you’ll have nightmares.”

“I’ll risk it.”

“Well, I will make something—but it’s not because you pulled me in with your swindling.  I’ll likely forget after tonight. When Katie leaves, I’ll have no one left to cook for.”

Katie looked at Danny, his body in a lazy crumble, hand resting on his cheekbone, pressing the skin of his face into childish folds.

“So what have you two been squawking about down here anyway?”

Mrs. Gallagher rolled her eyes at her son’s teenage bluntness.

“Dancing, if you must know,” Mrs. Gallagher answered.

“Dancing? Why? Katie hates dancing…couldn’t dance her way out of a paper bag.”

“Danny!” Katie shouted.

“Well you
can’t
.”

“Well you can’t either, Daniel.” Mrs. Gallagher said over the sound of sizzling meat on the stove range. “When you were small, they tried to teach you tap dancing and oh how you would cry and bellow.  He threw a tantrum when he had to take a lesson.”               

“What boy ever wanted to tap anyways?” 

“True enough,” she replied. “But they had told us it would broaden you.”

“Broaden me?” he groaned, “broaden me into a goon like—”

It didn’t register at first that he’d said the name. Actually said it out loud. Not the secret name the Dancer had shared with her again and again, but the one the whole world knew him for. Mrs. Gallagher gave a short-lived, but amused laugh, “Well, I think Mrs. Kittredge would disagree with you.”

“Big deal,” Danny yawned.

“Well, she was quite crazy with seeing him tonight.”

“What? Where? At the club?” he asked, turning in his seat.  

“Yes. You didn’t see him?”

Danny didn’t answer. Katie felt his eyes on her, but she could only stare at the ground. The blood rushed to her ears and she wrapped her arms around her waist.

“Irene said he was cut by some cheap crystal when a waiter dropped a tray. You didn’t see?” she asked, but her voice was flat as though she already knew the answer.

“No,” Daniel said.

Mrs. Gallagher sighed. “Oh, Irene is a nice woman, but she talks a lot about things that don’t matter. I would say he drank too much champagne and fell into the poor boy. Such things happen at parties. Nothing to hang on the Christmas tree. She must be over the moon for him to care so much.”

The heat in Katie’s ears cooled, and she looked up.  Mrs. Gallagher’s dramatic eyes were on her as she’d expected they would be.

“Cross-eyed and bow-legged, didn’t I say Katie?  Such people fall into trays,” she said.  Katie gave her a sad smile. Mrs. Gallagher began to hum her strange music and put plates onto the kitchen table. Katie followed in to help—a task she did now without much thought.

“Thank you, Katie.” Mrs. Gallagher stroked the back of her head before placing the last of the food on the table. Danny joined them at the table, but seemed to have little more to say.

“Velbekommen, Daniel.”  Mrs. Gallagher said. Danny looked up at his mother oddly, but accepted when she passed him a serving dish.

“Velbekommen, Mama.” he replied softly.

And so began their strange, late-night meal. A mostly silent meal that seemed to roll out and put away everything horrible that had happened.

Chapter Eight

Pacific Palisades, California

1949

The men in grey suits came ten days later. Things were not so different that final week. She worked in the garden with Mrs. Gallagher and helped with the chores. The only thing that changed was Danny had stopped disappearing. Apart from the Saturday he went to Wrigley Field to watch the Angels play, he spent every day in the backyard building a trellis for his mother’s grapevine plant or playing jazz records in his room. In the afternoons, she watched him work from the porch swing and stitched at the ladybug she was bound to finish. She’d come to like the swing more than the upstairs window seat. The window seat had sheltered her while she needed sheltering—but she found she no longer wanted to hide.

She pushed herself with a dirty bare foot—back and forth, back and forth—every movement followed by a short swinging creak. She stole glances at him between needle strokes, his back bowed over while he hammered away as though they were working toward the same fixed deadline. Soon she would go back to crinoline petticoats and Spoolie curlers—back to cold lot classrooms and hot can lights.  The old Katie Webb was unmarred and pale—even under the peach-colored stage lights. She was taller now, her skin tanned and knees rough. She looked down at the chain of healing scabs on her shin bone, then up again at Danny. The telephone rang from inside. His hammering hand stopped mid-air, and then followed through to tamp another nail into place. It was a sound she’d feared only a short time before. Yet now she only glanced toward the kitchen—then turned her chin down toward her needlework. Her mind had gone blank with the sunset by the time she heard the screen door slap behind her. She didn’t need to look up at Mrs. Gallagher’s face to know what the call had meant. They had found her father’s holographic will, of course. Written in longhand, her father had left her to Tilda and Ornan Meltsner. The aging couple who came to all the parties on Nestle Avenue.

Sometimes she wondered if she should have thought of her father more.  The tears at the funeral were for press standing along the cemetery’s shrubbery lines. The same way she cried again and again for the camera until her tears read the way the director wanted. Crying at night while Mrs. Gallagher held onto her—she supposed that those tears had been real, but they hadn’t been for her father—not really. They were just confused, scared tears. She hadn’t known where she would end up or what would become of her. Now she knew the Meltsners would take her. There was some peace in that. They weren’t so scary. They were film people—like her. They would understand. People who didn’t understand what she was…were the ones who tried to hurt her. She looked up at Mrs. Gallagher and smiled.

“Oh, doodah,” she sighed.

The ladybug pattern fell from Katie’s lap to the ground as she stood in one quick motion and wrapped her arms around Mrs. Gallagher’s waist. She clenched her eyes shut, and if she’d thought that her tears still meant anything—she would have cried them for Daniel’s mother. Mrs. Gallagher kissed the top of her head. Katie smiled, feeling the fringe of Mrs. Gallagher’s wild, dark hair over the top of her arms and bare shoulders. She breathed in, inhaling her cotton-vanilla essence until she heard Daniel’s boots scraping across the porch.

“Oh
god
, what is it now?” He grimaced.

“Tys, Daniel,” Mrs Gallagher scolded.

“
What?
” he asked defensively, “you two look like a pair of hounds.”

“Katie is leaving us, Daniel. We only now heard the news.”

“Huh, that’s the breaks.”

“Daniel, is that all you have to say? She’s leaving tomorrow.”

“
What?
” he asked again with the same comic defense in his voice. “It’s not like she’s dying—I’m going to see her again next week when we record our air trailers. Nothing to snap your cap over.” He walked past them into the house, the screen door bawling behind him.

“Pis og papir.” Mrs. Gallagher exclaimed, uncharacteristically aggravated. Katie smiled up at her.  They both looked toward his window and caught a glimpse of Danny’s grimy hand closing the drapes.

“Four daughters, huh?” Katie asked. Mrs. Gallagher looked down at first with a perplexed tilt of her head then laughed. She draped her long arm over Katie’s shoulders as they went inside to start dinner.

Katie stood across from them, carrying two suitcases. The one in her right hand was the one she’d come with. The other was a small red case that Mrs. Gallagher had bought on yet another trip to Desmonds. Mrs. Gallagher spoke to the men, not so differently from the day they’d told her that her father was gone. But Danny was missing from this version of the scene. He’d left early that morning, making a thin promise to return that afternoon—but she’d know then that he wouldn’t.

Only tonight if there is no one else—but
there
was
someone else: a woman—although, she was little more than a memory to Katie. As a child, she’d thought she was rather tall and a little bit mean. A woman who didn’t look much like her, although she should have. The last time Katie saw her was at the tiny house near Bushey Heath. She’d always thought of the house as belonging to her and her father. As if it had always been just theirs. But Katie somehow knew that the tall woman had also once lived there. The same way she knew her mother had been there as well. Maybe that was why she’d been angry that day—angry because it was no longer her home. She never spoke to Katie. The words were only for her father. That day when the sirens came, her words turned to shrieks. Katie watched, helpless and young, thinking even then that it didn’t seem right for a woman to shriek like that. She remembered crying when the girl tore at her long dark hair. Her father finally pulled the woman up in his arms and flung her, still flailing, over his shoulder. In one last move of resistance, the woman’s hand flattened and slapped a vase to the floor. The glass exploded while the door slammed behind them. Then the shrieking was gone. She realized sometime later that the shrieking girl had been her sister, although no one had told her as much. When her father died, she was scared they would find her. Maybe it had been one of the reasons she’d cried so much during the night. But it seemed they hadn’t found her.

“Do you have everything, doodah?” Mrs. Gallagher asked as she swept a strand of hair from her shoulder.

“I think so.”

“Did you check everywhere?”

“Yes, it’s all here,” Katie smiled and looked down at her cases.

“I’m sorry my Danny isn’t here to say goodbye.” She placed both hands on Katie’s small shoulders.

“It’s alright.We’ll see each other soon enough.”

“He doesn’t mean to be cruel. It is just his way. You surely know that by now.” Mrs. Gallagher said. Katie shrugged her shoulders.

“I don’t think we really know each other at all. People think we do, but we don’t.”

“I’m sorry Katie. Do you hate me for bringing you here with us?”

“Oh
no
, Mrs. Gallagher.  It’s not what I meant.”  Katie struggled to catch her words then hung her head low.  “I’m sorry. It’s not what I meant,” she repeated and closed her eyes.  She managed to say the next few words—but they were hard words. “I was happy here.”

She felt Mrs. Gallagher’s finger lightly touch her chin before she guided Katie’s face back up to meet her own. 

“You’re welcome here anytime, Katie Webb.”

“Thank you,” Katie said, wanting to say so much more.

“I’ll tell you something about my son that you do not know. He doesn’t mean to be hurtful.  It is only that he hates to say goodbye.  The morning his father left to fight in the war, he disappeared. No one knew where he’d gone. He came home after the sun had set and his father was gone and said not a word to anyone. My mother still lived with us then, you see, but that’s not important I suppose,” she finished. “When his father was brought home to be buried—he did the same of course.”

Katie looked up, overran by the brief glimpse into Danny’s mind.

“He gives what he can. We have to be grateful for what he does give. He was born to be stubborn, and I learned that long ago. It is just his way, and he doesn’t mean to be hurtful.” She smiled and brushed another strand of hair from Katie’s shoulder.

“Goodbye, Mrs. Gallagher,” Katie smiled.

“Goodbye, for now, Katie,” she answered.

Katie didn’t look back, even as she heard Mrs. Gallagher’s footsteps follow them out to the front porch and stop as she reached the edge of it. The younger of the two men opened the backseat door to her and she climbed inside.  He shut it behind without looking at her and took his seat in the front. In the corner of her eye, she saw the fuzzy, faraway image of Mrs. Gallagher’s white housedress as she remained standing on the front porch. Her body stood cruelly still…like the promise of something that could never be.  Katie struggled to breathe though the air thick with aftershave and new upholstery. For a moment she thought her tears would come—the real ones this time. But just before they did, she turned and saw that Mrs. Gallagher had finally gone inside. The ignition turned and she closed her eyes. The car engine hummed while the men spoke short, clipped words to each other.

“
Drive, please drive, drive
,” she whispered the desperate litany over and over again. Yet they continued to sit and talk in that horribly detached way. She thought she would die if they didn’t leave. She thought if Mrs. Gallagher reemerged in her thin, flowing dress, and gave her a last wave she couldn’t resist, it would kill her.

The car began to roll, but she kept her eyes down until they stopped for a long red light at the intersection of San Vicente and 26
th
. That was when she saw him.  For one frantic, unconscious moment, she put her hand to the door’s crank lever.  It was
him
…Danny in jeans and a dark t-shirt—waiting for the light to cross with a cigarette in his hand. Looking at the ribbons of smoke, she began to cry—real tears. He might as well have been a stranger on the sidewalk, some drugstore cowboy with a foul mouth and too much time on his hands.  She leaned back in her seat, still watching through blurred tears. The light turned green, and they began to move again.  The car drifted parallel to Daniel for an instant, and he looked at her.  It was a quick glance over his shoulder as he hustled across the street—but he saw her.  His dark eyebrows lifted in surprise when their eyes made contact. After that—he was was gone, growing smaller and smaller as the car gathered speed and left him behind.