Land of Dreams: A Novel (6 page)

Tom’s birth mother was a young woman whom we had taken into the homeless hostel in Yonkers when she was pregnant, but who had run away and left him in my care when he was less than a year old. A year after John died I realized that my greatest sadness had perhaps not been losing him alone, but the fact that we had been unable to have children. When this baby came into my life, he became my life. I had been rearing him as my own, on my own, before Charles found me again. The cruelty of Charles’s ex-wife in casting her son aside for the love of a man was so disgusting to me that I wasted no time whatsoever in establishing myself as Leo’s mother. The two boys locked in as siblings right away—Leo was so kind and patient with my lively baby and his gentle soul seemed to calm Tom in a way that my admonishments rarely did.

Not a day passed after I adopted both these children that I did not feel gratitude for the gift they were. I had been barren and desperate for a child until these two boys were sent to me. As our paths converged I gathered them both to me with a confidence that was so considerable it surprised me. I knew I had been a headstrong daughter and was a difficult and defiant wife, but I was a born mother. There was no doubt in my mind and my heart about that.

I was so proud of my prowess, my natural feeling for motherhood. Yet it was perhaps the undoing of my marriage.

I can trace the first souring of our relationship back to a small domestic incident.

Our apartment was a simple affair. We ate in the kitchen and, unless we brought food in or Bridie came to stay (as she did from time to time when “looking after” the Sweeneys got to be too much for her—and them!), I cooked. My food was as simple as the limited time I was prepared to give it; in the winter ground beef, gravy and potatoes; in the summer pasta with a salad. I could, and did, prepare sauce for a steak, or bake and ice a cake, but not every day, as I had done when I was living with John. My priorities were different. I had always managed to derive some small pleasure from domestic chores, and I was careful now to keep things as simple as possible so that I didn’t come to resent my own home.

Good manners were observed at my table—but I was not fanatical. I was reared in a tradition of priestly politeness that I loathed, so while there were linen napkins, even for the children, with every meal, they were often used twice in one day and seldom starched!

On that evening Charles was in an ill temper as we sat down to our evening meal. We had been making love earlier that day, a delicious illicit tryst while Tom was taking his afternoon nap. At a crucial moment Tom had woken and started screaming for me. I had left Charles where he was and gone to comfort the child, refusing to be lured back. Charles was a bit sharp with me, but I didn’t pay much heed. I didn’t blame him, for he was frustrated, and anyway sharp words were a feature of marriage from time to time. When you had children, I was quickly learning, there was not so much time for each other.

I put the food on the table—pork chops and potato—and we began eating. Tom was spooning the food as near to his face as he could approximate, with me helping him between my own mouthfuls. Charles, despite having been educated to act like a wealthy gentleman, made a point of eating with his sleeves rolled up like a shipyard laborer. However, his son, Leo, who had been reared by nannies and expensive schools, ate in the convoluted manner adopted by upper-class Americans. They cut their meat, then put the knife down, resting the tip of the blade on the side of the plate, transferred their fork to the right hand, took the food up using the fork alone, put it in their mouth, then placed the fork down on the plate until they had finished chewing and started the whole rigmarole of transferring cutlery from one hand to the other all over again. In Ireland even bishops gripped their cutlery—knife in right, fork in left—all the way through a meal, so I had always found this way of eating that Americans had faintly amusing. I found the way Leo ate endearing, although admittedly I should have preferred him to enjoy his food while it was still hot. Charles and I were all but finished, while Leo was still cutting and transferring his food to his fork in this meticulous way.

“Oh, for pity’s sake, boy—stop eating like a bloody priss!”

Charles shouted at him so loudly that Leo jumped in his seat, dropping his fork. I picked it up and went to fetch him another from the drawer.

“Let him eat with that one,” Charles said, and then, arguing with my silent glower, “What? It’s clean enough—that boy is too fussy, and your mollycoddling is making him worse.”

Leo’s lip quivered, his little hands placed neatly in his lap. Even Tom had ceased with his spoon-banging and was watching Charles and me with an eerily quiet curiosity. I was furious. Charles carried on eating.

“If you’re finished,” I said to Leo, “you go on into the other room, and I’ll bring you your pie in there.”

The poor child, blushing wildly, all but ran from the table.

“What the hell was that about?” I confronted Charles when Leo was out of earshot.

“Nothing,” he said, shoveling the last of his chop into his mouth. “I just don’t want him turning into a girl.”

He didn’t seem bothered that he had upset Leo—either he hadn’t even noticed the boy’s distress or he was careless about hurting his feelings.

“He looks up to you, Charles. You’re his father, he worships you.”

Charles finished his food, grabbed me around the waist and pulled me into him playfully.

“Aha, but do
you
worship me, Ellie Irvington?”

I played along, but I could feel my smile withering along the edges.

He had been careless with the feelings of his child and, for all that it was petty of me, the incident colored my view of him for the worse.

C
HAPTER
F
IVE

As we approached the bridge into the city I leaned forward in my seat and allowed the panic to set in. It was midmorning and the traffic was reasonably light, although when we came to the edge of the bridge it seemed that the road was becoming clogged with cars, and I was just seconds away from getting out of the taxi and running the rest of the way up to the apartment on 27th, before Chico started moving again.

Once we hit Manhattan, Chico showed his skills as a cabdriver, jerking the taxi swiftly between the avenues, darting up and down the side streets as if they were deserted conduits to aid our speed, rather than the busy city roads they were. As we hurtled past delivery trucks and milk vans, earning the abuse and fist-waving of pedestrians and fellow drivers, I didn’t know where he was going and a few times doubted his route, until the moment he confidently brought the taxi to a halt and pulled up outside the apartment.

I opened the cab window, but he shook his head, waving me away, refusing my money—still not speaking. As I was closing the door of the taxi, Chico leaned out the window and said in a voice so soft I could barely hear him, “I hope you find your son, lady.” Dan must have told him; I guessed that Chico was a family man and had felt the pain in my silence.

Hanging on the mirror in front of him was a picture of Our Lady of Guadalupe. My anxiety halted long enough for me to put my fingers to my lips, then reach in and touch her.

“Say a prayer, Chico,” I said, and he closed his eyes in assertion. Then I threw a wildly generous ten-dollar bill onto his lap and ignored his objections. I always paid my way—even in my prayers.

The moment I set foot in the building I knew that Leo had not been back there, but I ran into his room anyway and checked the wardrobe. His few clothes were still hanging neatly in the closet—his winter coat swung like a cadaver when I wrenched open the door. I immediately went into the bedroom and, unlike my last attempt, packed a large trunk of belongings with great efficiency. The panic was gone and in its place was an assured but nonetheless terrible anxiety that drove me to fold and pack piles of my own and Leo’s clothes with a speed and dexterity that was peculiarly disconcerting.

I phoned my friend Maureen and barely had the words out before she said, “Stay where you are, we’re on the way in . . .” And as I hung up I could hear her calling out to her husband, Patrick, “Warm up the truck. I’ll explain on the way.”

Like mine, Maureen’s instinct was to act first and ask questions later. Since we had met some eight years before, Maureen had been more than a sister or friend to me. We both understood what it was to be desperately poor, and we both knew what it was to lose a loved one. Maureen had become separated from her husband when he went in search of work during the Great Depression and she had ended up homeless with two children in New York. I had come upon her sitting on the steps of the Metropolitan Museum on Fifth Avenue, where she had been all night, in a state of such desperation that she had put aside her Irishwoman’s pride (we are no beggars) and accepted my offer to help her.

Together we had started a community to help rehabilitate and rehouse homeless families in Yonkers. Her warmth as a friend and fellow Irishwoman helped me recover my spirits after John’s death, so that when her own husband, Patrick, reappeared a year after we had met, I was delighted for her.

I had left the community in Yonkers quickly, and under false pretenses. In truth, I had no longer been running from my grief over John, but from the attentions of a man whom I had promised to marry. Matt was a part of the community, a good, kind person who would have made an excellent and attentive husband—but I had not been in love with him. I agreed to marry him because life looked easier with a man in it, and in the wake of losing John I had been grateful to slide into the easy companionship that he offered me. Matt made me feel safe, but deep in my heart I knew that the feelings he instilled in me were more to do with comfort than with real happiness. So, fearful that his love for me and my rawness over John would talk me into a passionless union, I put the infant Tom on my hip and headed off in search of adventure and a whole new life, leaving Matt, Maureen, Bridie and everyone else in the community with the most cursory of goodbyes.

With plenty of money in my pocket from the sale of my businesses in Ireland, and the whole of America unexplored in front of me, I only managed to make it as far as the apartment in Manhattan.

Within months of my grand exit I had realized that learning to be a mother to Tom was all the adventure I needed.

In any case, I found I could not stay away from Maureen and my beloved Bridie. I had relied heavily on John for his friendship as well as his love, but it had been my friends who had held me up after he died. Katherine, my right-hand woman in Ireland, had bought out several of my businesses and continued to manage my remaining affairs there without complaint or comment as to when, or if, I would ever return to claim them; Maureen, my soulmate in experience and age; Bridie, the old housekeeper who, for all her gruff complaining, had been more of a mother to me than my own ever had. How could I rear a child alone, when I had such wonderful people to share him with? Stepping away from them for a few months made me realize the wealth of love and warmth I had discarded alongside my fear of hurting Matt.

So I wrote to Maureen and she contacted me within days, informing me that Matt, brokenhearted, had left to go back to Ireland shortly after I took off.

He had written once to say that he had arrived safely, although to a great fuss, as the young wife he had left behind (whom I knew about) had told the entire town that he had died in America so that she could marry again. It seemed from his letter that he was rather enjoying the drama of being the maligned, returned emigrant—and I had no doubt that, with his fine figure and gentle demeanor, the other women of his village would be throwing themselves at him. Vindicated in my having done the right thing in not marrying him, I continued my close alliance with the Sweeney family and Bridie from my home in Manhattan.

So my journey back then was not by plane or train, as I had imagined it would be, but was the longer and more significant inner journey from mere businesswoman to “artist” and mother.

Fire Island had been as far as I had felt the need to travel away from New York for a number of years, but now I was being pulled away from my haven, my home.

C
HAPTER
S
IX

The headmaster arrived ten minutes after me and had Leo’s friend, Julian Knox, with him. We stood in the hallway of the apartment. I did not offer them a seat.

Mr. Cunningham seemed without his usual headmasterly puff—he had undoubtedly spent part of the hour since we had spoken consulting a lawyer: “First, can I just say how sorry . . .”

I ignored him and addressed the boy.

“Where is Leo?” I asked.

He looked at me with diffident, disinterested eyes. He was a good-looking boy, broad and square-jawed—a sportsman—dripping with the gloss of privilege. So different from my sensitive Leo; I could not imagine why they had chosen each other as friends.

“Well?” I went on.

“Julian,” the headmaster said firmly, “tell Mrs. Irvington what you told me.”

The use of my married surname immediately irked me, and I watched as Julian’s lip curled into a small smile.

“Leo met a man,” he said, looking me directly in the eye, full of bravado. I felt sick.

“And . . . ?” the headmaster said, missing the point.

Julian shrugged and looked away. “There was a man at a pool party at my parents’ house—he said he was an actor’s agent, and he offered Leo a screen test.”

He looked away again, bored. So help me God, but his insouciance made me want to lift my hand and strike him hard across the face.

“Julian . . . ,” Cunningham reprimanded him.

“Leo thought this was a big deal, and kept on and on at me to help him follow it up, but we didn’t go into the city for the rest of the summer, so . . .” He widened his eyes at me and said, “I think Leo’s gone back to Hollywood to make his fortune.”

“Who is this man—what’s his name?”

Julian shrugged again.

“Well then, I will need to speak to your mother,” I said, picking up the telephone.