Land of Dreams: A Novel (10 page)

Bridie recommended the funeral director who had buried her husband of forty years. I was astonished when she produced his business card from a pocket in her purse the day the Sweeneys came to console me, as if she had been carrying it about with her all those years, to use on just such an occasion.

“He was a good friend of Mr. Flannery, and he’ll be sure to look after Charles. Everybody deserves a good funeral,” she said, “and Lord knows your wedding was scant enough.”

It was her way of apologizing for her harsh judgment of Charles for much of his life.

The night before his funeral I arranged for Charles’s body to be brought down to a public house on the docks that he used to frequent, to be properly waked. I left him in the care of his first union cell, the men who had worked for his father in the shipyard—his oldest, closest friends. They drank and sang around him all night and he would have loved it. His old workmates and friends, the laboring men, released his spirit across the bleak gray buildings and warehouses and loading bays that he loved so much, and out to sea—to freedom. Charles was always striving to be somebody else, somebody that the privilege of his birth would never allow him to be. That was my gift to him: the wake of a workingman, a tribute to the life he always wanted to have.

The funeral itself was a much more muted affair. I loved Leo too much to cause a ruinous relationship with Charles’s family, so I gave Minnie Irvington her Protestant service and he was buried alongside all the great political activists and abolitionists in Green-Wood Cemetery, which appeased his CPUSA associates somewhat.

The boys and I followed the coffin. I put my hands firmly on both their shoulders as they cried while walking down the long aisle—Tom in confusion, Leo in shocked disbelief that his father was in the black box with the brass handles. I did not cry. I kept myself strong for them although, in all honesty, I could not cry with so many strangers’ eyes on me. I had been there before, when John died. The sea of mourners, their solemn clothes, the expectant pity on their faces; quiet speculations and judgments silently shuddering through them like whispers of warm wind.

I held on to my boys and focused on keeping them safe; moving them through the strangeness of the day as if we were one beast. At the graveside I looked across and saw Minnie for the first time that day, although I assumed she had been sitting behind me in the church, as she would not have shared a pew with me. She had a small, delicate physique and was, as always, immaculately turned out, but her face did not look like the grieving face of a woman who had lost a son. She wore an expression of stoic defensiveness, but for one moment she looked across and held my eye and I saw a look of profound disappointment, deeper and more terrible than any sadness, and one that I recognized in myself.

Charles had let us both down. He had been the measure of our dreams: her for a golden son to carry on the family empire, me for a good man to complete my family idyll.

One way or another we had lost our dreams, and probably not through Charles’s misdoing, but through our own expectations of how things should be.

After a few seconds Minnie arched an eyebrow at me and pointedly pulled the black veil of her broad hat down over her face.

We had wrestled for control of this day, yet neither of us felt the pang of victory.

C
HAPTER
N
INE

My sleeping compartment or “roomette” on the train was very comfortable, with a broad window and a cozy divan seat that doubled as a full-length bed. Nonetheless it became claustrophobic after the light outside faded and the rural landscape disappeared into blackness. On such a long journey it was important to relax into the time ahead and enjoy the luxuries on offer. However, I could not settle and the first hour passed like a lifetime. I looked out of the window and ruminated on my past, watching ten minutes turn to fifteen. Leo was on his own. Or rather not on his own, but in the company of some stranger—my mind began to wander down dark alleys, and I drew myself back, knowing I would lose my mind if I let myself wonder what was happening to him. My son was outside of my care and this damned train wasn’t going to get me there any quicker because of it.

One way or another I had to occupy myself for the next fifteen hours or so. I checked myself in the vanity unit next to the bed—I looked unkempt and worn. I had not brushed my teeth or eaten since dawn. It seemed longer than a day since I had left Fire Island—what a distance I had traveled since then!

I straightened my hair and applied a little lipstick and rouge, and was pleased to note that I felt hungry. A meal would pass the time and perhaps, with food in my stomach, maybe even a half bottle of wine, I might sleep.

I walked down the corridor toward the dining car. When I presented myself to the maître d’ at the desk, he informed me that the dining car was full and there were reservations for the next hour at least. By this time I was famished with hunger and desperate to eat. His manner implied incredulity that I expected to get a meal on a train without prior reservation, and I could see behind him that every seat was taken, so there was no sense in arguing or pleading with him.

He took my name and told me he would do his very best to accommodate me, if I would like to wait in the lounge car.

I made a beeline for the one free seat left in the lounge. Next to it was a small table with a bowl of nuts and a folded newspaper on it. I picked up the paper and opened it, grateful for the distraction, and began hungrily popping the nuts into my mouth.

“Ahem.”

I looked up from the paper and there was an elegant, older man standing in front of me. He looked foreign, with olive skin and a distinguished silvery beard that stood out against it, and he was wearing a casually cut linen suit that seemed expensive.

“Do you mind?” he asked.

I thought, there being no seats left, that he intended to perch himself on the table in front of me. The cheek!

“Yes, actually, I do,” I said. It was clearly dog-eat-dog, getting seats and meals on trains these days, and it was his hard luck for not coming down sooner.

Before he could object any further, a steward came over and addressed him: “Mr. Lilius, your table in the dining car is ready.”

I looked at him haughtily—mad that he was getting his dinner and I wasn’t—then moved the paper up over my face again. As I did so, the bearded gentleman asked, “Would you mind if I take my paper? You see, I do hate eating alone.”

Oh God, I was in the poor man’s seat! I jumped up, mortified.

“Unless, of course, you’d care to join me?”

Stanislaw (“Stan”) Lilius was a successful composer in his native Poland, and he had come here at the beginning of the war three years ago.

“I knew Hitler would get around to us,” he said, “and I didn’t want to be there when he did.”

As far as I could gather, Stan had no family back in Poland and had come to America out of a mixture of curiosity and greed. “Why does anyone come here from Europe?”

“For a new start?” I said.

“Is that why you came?” he asked. “From Ireland, yes?”

He obviously didn’t want to talk about what was happening in Poland. European refugees, and even ordinary immigrants who had come to America before Hitler’s reign, were sensitive about the war. I understood that—the guilt of leaving people you loved and would never see again, of walking away from your history. It was easier to focus on “the land of opportunity” than face what you had left behind.

“Is my accent that obvious?” I asked.

“I am a musician—I listen to voices, sounds. And Ellie is Eileen, yes? What were you running away from? War as well, perhaps? I know the Irish love to fight with the English . . .”

“And with each other,” I said, “when we’ve taken a few drinks.”

He laughed and I felt ridiculously pleased with myself for having made a joke.

I smiled and then, despite myself, raised my eyebrows at him playfully and took another mouthful of steak to indicate that I didn’t intend to answer any more questions about myself. I didn’t feel like talking, just listening.

“A mystery . . . okay . . . okay.”

Stan didn’t push me, but just talked about himself while I ate. He was traveling back to his home in Hollywood after a one-month teaching stint at the prestigious Manhattan School of Music. He lived alone in a house in the hills above Hollywood—and he lived well, as far as I could gather.

“The movie industry has been very good to me,” he said.

“Would I have seen any of the movies you have written scores for?” I asked.

“Almost certainly you have,” he said, “but they are all rubbish, and my scores for them are contrived—ridiculous! The directors say, ‘This woman is falling in love—I want it to sound as if she is being “kissed by butterflies”’—did you ever hear of anything so stupid? So I write them some simple melody, a nonsense for six strings, and they think I am a genius. They don’t know what genius is, these people. They have no intellect. They have no soul . . .” He was getting quite heated, then remembered himself.

“But I expect you love the movies. Everybody loves the movies. Women love to be taken to the pictures, yes?”

I smiled and shrugged.

“I don’t go so often anymore.”

“Who knows,” he joked, “what this mysterious woman does, or does not, like.”

This interlude was nothing if not distracting. My steak was delicious and very welcome, and as long as I was able to sit here being enigmatic, flirting vaguely with this foreign stranger, I was free of worry, and time was passing quickly and pleasantly.

“Every few months I must travel to New York to teach, because I like to do something normal, something worthwhile. In New York I am taken seriously as a great composer—and yet I keep coming back to Hollywood,” he said, raising his hands dramatically. “There is too much money in movies,” he said. “We artists are like prostitutes: the Hollywood moguls open their purses and we poor immigrant musicians come running!” And he laughed.

I liked this man. He was entertaining, easy company—and his story was interesting enough to take me completely out of myself.

“What about your family?” I asked. “Are they still in Poland?”

“My parents died in the last war,” he said. “I was an only child. My professors at the Kraków Conservatory were my family.”

“Wife?” I asked.

He had a nice smile and was handsome—for his age, which was perhaps sixty.

“So, maybe this mysterious Irishwoman is not so cold after all?”

I found myself blushing, which was annoying.

“I only meant . . .”

“No, no, I am joking,” he said. “I have never had the honor of being married—although I have been in love many times. To tell you the truth, the women in Los Angeles who work in the movies are full of artifice. They dye their hair and wear too much rouge—or wigs—and they have straight white teeth that they take out at night and put in a glass!”

I let out a loud laugh. Really, this was wrong. I was supposed to be full of anxiety and misery, but here I was, with this strange man making me laugh out loud!

“I am too old to get married now. My work is the great love of my life. Passion, romance—it interferes with my creativity, I don’t expect you to understand but . . .”

“I’m an artist,” I said suddenly, “I do understand.”

Although I was not sure that I did, I wanted to let him know that I was not just an ordinary person.

“Ah,” he said and he nodded, as if he had seen something in me all along.

We ordered a second bottle of wine and talked about art. He knew something about Impressionism, but very little about Non-Objective Painting, and although he had seen some of the Guggenheim Collection, he was fascinated to hear more about the movement itself and the new gallery that Hilla was working on with Frank Lloyd Wright, designed specifically to best display the collection that she had worked on for Guggenheim himself. He was very impressed that I knew Hilla Rebay.

“Is she a Jew?” he asked.

“No,” I said. It was a common misconception that all Germans in America were here to escape the Nazis. “She came here well before the war.”

“Like me,” he said.

Then he became suddenly melancholy, his expression hardening.

“The Germans have Poland now—they have won. They call it
Intelligenzaktion
,” and he cracked his hands together as if he were snapping a stick. “This is what they called the murder of our intellectual elite; this is the way they break us: by destroying our music, our art—everything. There is nothing left for me—nothing.”

It was a shocking outburst, and Stan seemed grateful when I picked up the dessert menu and changed the subject. The world was altering, and those of us who had escaped the drudgery and dangers of our old countries for a new life in America had to avoid going back, in our own minds. Falling into sentiment about the places we had come from was unwise and dangerous. It could cause the kind of pointless pain that led to deep and abiding unhappiness. It was important to look forward, to stay grateful for the wealth and security to be found in our new lives. It was important to remember that we were, first and foremost, Americans.

I ordered apple pie and ice cream, and when it arrived I ate hungrily as if my steak had never existed.

“I like a woman with a good appetite,” Stan said, and I blushed at my obvious greed, before reprimanding his impertinence.

“I’ve been traveling since early this morning, and have not eaten all day.”

“So sensitive,” he said, “clearly you have the temperament of a true artist!”

I smiled—I really did like this incorrigible old flirt.

“I should like to see your work sometime,” he said.

Suddenly I felt really, really tired. On top of the wine and the steak, the dessert had finished me off, and I just wanted to lie down and go to sleep. It had been a long day and my tiredness reminded me of why I was here.

I looked up—I am afraid quite rudely—and signaled to the waiter.

“You’re tired,” Stan said, and he smiled and studied my face queryingly, but didn’t pry. “I can see you need to retire. Let me pay for dinner, please.”