Land of Dreams: A Novel (36 page)

Bridie would not have seen it that way, and I could almost hear her huffing and puffing after me, as her ornate mahogany coffin was loaded onto the train at Union Station: “All this fuss and expense—burn me and pour the ashes down the sink with the tea leaves; sure, I’m dead now, so what difference does it make?”

“You’ll get the full bell, book and candle Catholic High Service, Bridie Flannery, like it or not,” I replied in my head, “for all the Masses you made me go to over the years. I’ll not bury you a pagan and have the curse of you on my head forever!”

Bridie’s voice was so ingrained in me that I knew she would be talking to me, and I to her, for the rest of my life. Her overpowering personality, her practical goodness and her sense of right and wrong were her legacy. In that sense, Bridie could never die. Perhaps that is where people truly go when they die: into the hearts of the people who love them.

Where Bridie truly belonged was back in Ireland, buried with her people. However, she had never been back there—not once, in all the years I had known her. In fact, not since she had come to America as a young girl of sixteen. I had offered to pay her passage, more than once offered to take her home myself, but she always declined.

Bridie’s life was in America—Ireland was her fantasy, her Hollywood dream. Had she returned, she once told me, she would have found her family home empty and derelict, her parents dead and their graves overgrown.

“Sometimes it’s best just to leave things as you remember them,” she said.

I had packed up a lot of the house before I came east, but I had left Leo behind. It hurt to leave him there—for both of us—but we had decided that he did not need to attend Bridie’s funeral. He had loved her, and now she was gone. It was enough that he had lost his father and barely grieved for him before his nan died. His life in Hollywood would keep him distracted and busy, and keep the grief at bay.

I arranged for Freddie to move back into my house in Los Feliz to look after Leo. The house was paid for until the end of the summer and, as Freddie was still pursuing his idea of being an actor’s agent, it suited him to free up some cash to continue paying his debts and save for a new office. In any case, Leo had already begun rehearsals for another movie, to start shooting in a few weeks’ time—another reason for him not coming to New York, and another reason to support Freddie in his endeavors. Bridie was old and, while all death is shocking, sometimes it is more expected than others. She would have wanted Leo to be in the movie, more than to have him weeping at her graveside. For all that Bridie spoke her mind, she lived her life in the shadow of other people. Her joy was in accommodating their success. It would have killed her all over again to think that her death had stood in the way of Leo’s career.

I was not entirely happy that Crystal was part of the package, but then you can’t have everything, and Freddie was trustworthy enough to counteract her craziness. Leaving Leo behind was hard, but I had to let him go. Perhaps Bridie moving on at the time she did had helped me to see that. People are temporary gifts, not permanent structures. Even—especially—your children.

I stood at the door of the house and held his face in my hands and told him I loved him.

His beautiful eyes filled with tears and I said, “Don’t cry, Leo.”

I don’t know why I said it. I always encouraged my sons’ tears. Perhaps I was afraid that I would not be strong enough to leave him.

He smiled and swallowed, and held me for a long time as we hugged. He was a young man now, but he was still as slim and delicate as he had been as a boy.

“Go in,” I said. “I don’t want you waving at the door.”

As our car drove off I didn’t look back, but pulled Tom into my side and clutched tightly at my purse. I had not booked return tickets because I was uncertain when, or indeed, whether we would return to Los Angeles.

We had a full service out in Yonkers. The church was packed. Maureen and her family and Tom and I occupied the front pews, and every shopkeeper and supplier in the area came. Even Hilla showed her face, and Conor and Dan came in from Fire Island.

Afterward we went back to the house, where Maureen and all our local friends from the women’s cooperative had laid out a fantastic spread. The place was packed, with people milling in and out of each room, old friends and new. There was a warm party atmosphere: a home where Bridie had lived could not have been any other way. She might have been there at the stove, scalding the pot for more tea, rolling pastry as she talked, refusing to sit down and be attended to, even at her own funeral.

The table in the dining room was groaning with food like you might see at a Tudor banquet. Everyone coming in the door had an offering: brown bread, lasagne, corned beef, honey-roasted ham, a smoked salmon—the final feast for a woman who had put so much food in our bellies over the years.

“When are you coming back to us on Fire Island?” Conor and Dan asked. “We assume you’re in New York for good now?”

Hilla was hovering nearby and her ears pricked up.

“I’m not sure,” I said, only realizing then that I wasn’t certain if I truly wanted to come back. My friends were here, but my eldest son was in Los Angeles. For the first time since I had come to New York, and had fallen instantly and madly in love with the city, it did not feel entirely like home. Nowhere did anymore. Bridie, it seemed, was my home.

I left early with Tom and went back to the apartment. I was less in a mood for reveling than I had thought I would be. It had been a long week since Bridie had passed, and I was exhausted from all the emotion and the traveling.

Tom fell dramatically and instantly asleep as soon as his head hit the pillow. I crawled in beside him and lay down for a while, but I could not sleep; I had a chill and couldn’t get warm.

So I got up and went out to the kitchen and put the kettle on to fill a hot-water bottle.

While I was in the kitchen there was a gentle tap on the door. One of the neighbors come to sympathize over my loss, perhaps. I did not feel I could endure another minute of sympathy, but nonetheless something compelled me to open it.

Standing in front of me was the last person I expected to see.

“Would this—by any chance—be the ends of the Earth?” Stan said, smiling.

E
PILOGUE

The year is 1950—and I am fifty years of age. I have lived through two world wars and the death of two husbands, and I am happy to have survived both.

I have realized that it is better not to simply dream of a good life, but to live life as if it were the one you had always hoped for. I never thought I would end up living in Hollywood—the land of other people’s dreams—yet here I am, existing contentedly in circumstances I had neither decided upon nor dreamed of. I am living with a man who is too old to marry, on the opposite side of the world to where I came from, and the other side of the continent to New York, the place I had believed I would never tire of.

We live in Stan’s house in the hills, and we winter in New Mexico, where we built a cabin so that I could work, and live sometimes, in the company of other artists. In the desert, which I have come to love as much as I once loved the sea.

I am here because of the three men in my life.

Stan did not leave my side after that day he turned up at my apartment in Manhattan seven years ago. We fought many times after that, and we still do—but never again over his loyalty or his love for me. Those two things are beyond issue now, for both of us. As soon as I saw him standing in my doorway like that, something in me was able to let go. I threw my petals to the wind, then I fell back and he caught me. Stan does what no man has ever truly done for me: not John and not Charles. Stan holds me up.

Tom is nearly the age that Leo was when he ran away to become a movie actor. He is so different from his sensitive older brother, still a ball of powerful physical energy—I am assured that he will get a sports scholarship to compensate for his lack of interest in academia or art. Tom is a complete mystery to me; his sporting prowess is an exoticism beyond my comprehension, but I adore him all the more for it.

Leo is directing, which is a relief. The acting never really took off, but he didn’t let go of his love for films, and his time at the studio gave him a good grounding to find himself another career in the movies. He has not married, and has shown no signs of doing so yet. I don’t know what that means, and I have no intention of asking. Some things are best left unsaid. He knows I judge nobody, and will always love him, and the gift of his confidence is his alone to give.

Parenting is a pleasure surely, but it seems that every ounce of joy it gave me was offset by the pain I felt on watching my sons grow away from me. I discovered, late, that there was no magic trick to keeping them close. The harder I held them, the more they bucked to escape me.

Each day, as I have watched my boys grow from small children into strong, confident boys and then into handsome young men, I wonder why God gave me such luck by bringing them into my life as He did. I still believe God is a cruel trickster, but I no longer worry what He has in store for me. I realize that I am utterly in His command now—or, rather, in the command of whatever force He empowers, if “He” in fact exists at all. Stan says he is my Irish Catholic fantasy—it is one of the things we fight about. Sometimes I think I might have lost my faith entirely, if I were not living with an atheist and wanted to annoy him. Instead I pray every day (and I try to keep the tone of warning out of my voice as I ask Him to keep my sons safe) because life—all it has given me, and all it has taken away, its gifts and thefts—has finally humbled me.

Stan chooses to write film scores for big movies, rather than the teaching and the more academic composing that I know are his passion. When I confront him on the matter he merely tells me again that his passions have changed; that his art has taken second place to loving me—“an artist who has enough integrity for us both. In any case, what use would a woman like you have for a penniless professor?”

However plainly I dress, however simple my cooking or small my daily desires for a piece of nice chocolate or a smile from one of my sons, Stan will always see me as the glamorous goddess of his dreams. Perhaps that is what Hollywood does to you after all—you live out your dreams, or life itself becomes a dream.

Stan showers me with love, with gifts and compliments that I have no need or desire for. In my younger years such overt vulnerability in a man, such a desire to please, such frantic proclamations of love would have irritated me. While they frightened me at first, now I relish them, possibly because I have no need of them anymore. I am learning to receive love with grace, and have found it to be a harder thing—tenfold harder—than giving love.

Manzanar closed in 1945 when the war ended, and Suri returned to her life with Jackson. Her parents-in-law moved to Florida and never returned, but Suri did not regret the three years she spent with them in the camp. When she got home she was moved to see the painting that I had done of her given pride of place; she approached me and we resumed our friendship, which turned out to be all the richer for my recklessness in trying to rescue her, and her passionate rebuff. As time passed, we came to understand, I think, that we were both simply women who cared.

Freddie is an actor’s agent, a very successful one—things worked out exactly as he predicted they would. The studio system fell apart in the mid-1940s and he was there to swoop up the stars. Who would have thought it, but Freddie is now one of the most powerful men in Hollywood. It was he who found Stan and sent him to me after Bridie died, but he was less lucky in love. Crystal fell in with another bad man, found solace in drugs and drink, and nobody knows where she has ended up. Freddie spends his one-week vacation every year searching for her in the bars and whorehouses in downtown LA. I am certain she is dead, but Freddie still goes out there and looks for her. He has had a string of girlfriends, and is sure to marry one of them soon enough. But Crystal was his first love.

As John was mine, and as I am Stan’s—and true love never lets you go. It grips you and carries you to the ends of the Earth—and back again if you’re lucky, as Stan has been with me, and as I was with John Hogan, all those years ago.

A
CKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank the following people for their contribution to the researching and writing of this novel.

In Los Angeles, musicians Songa Lee and Jeff Babko, old friend and fellow writer Sophie Ulliano and artist Charlene Gawa. In New York, the fantastic team at HarperCollins U.S. and Irish-American authors Peter Quinn and Honor Molloy for their endless help and literary cheerleading. Also a big thanks to good friends Jimmy Kelly and Lisa Ferguson and their sons Silus and Marcus for putting me up
and
putting up with me in their beautiful Yonkers home.

Garry King and Gunnar Senum for their invaluable introduction to Fire Island and my trusty intern and research assistant Lily Stoicheff for her great work.

Fellow writer Helen Falconer for her generous and invaluable first-draft notes, Martin Smith for his fact-checking and being my “film-buff nerd” and my intern Danielle Kerins for proofreading and last-minute line edits.

Special thanks to my editor at HarperCollins, Trish Daly, for believing in me and allowing me to complete Ellie’s American journey to the place where it belongs. To Caroline Perny and Alaina Waagner for marketing and publicity and to talented Emin Mancheril for designing the beautiful cover. I feel very fortunate to have such a dynamic young team at my back—your charm, efficiency and enthusiasm for your work is truly inspiring.

Agents Marianne Gunn O’Connor, Pat Lynch and Vicki Satlow for managing me and keeping the faith and the money flowing.

To my husband, Niall Kerrigan, for letting me go to the U.S. on those extended trips and my mother-in-law Renee Kerrigan for looking after my three boys when I was gone.

My beautiful sons Leo and Tom for their constant inspiration (and temporary use of their names).