The O'Briens (7 page)

Ferme ta gueule, tu, putain de cochon!

They had sounded like people losing their minds, and she used to wonder if her father made a practice of hiring crazy people. Or did tending power looms cause people to lose their minds? It was Patrick Dubois, not her parents, who told her of a famous battle between Irish mechanics and foremen and French-Canadian factory hands on the bridge over the falls: one man thrown into the river, another kicked to death in the road. She'd wanted to ask her father what he remembered, but her curiosity would only have annoyed him.

The spry little river was the reason her great-grand-father had come up to New Hampshire in the
1820
s, and in the early days the mill machinery was geared directly to the speed of the wild stream. Her grandfather had tamed and scheduled the river, first by damming it, then by installing steam turbines. A business doesn't like wild things.

At the precinct house on
35
th Street, Iseult and Mother Power prayed decades of the rosary with kneeling policemen, then visited the lock-up. The cells were relatively quiet on Saturday afternoon, awaiting the weekly bacchanal between Times Square and the river, although anything like real silence could not exist in such place, with drunks and morphine addicts snoring and whimpering, someone muttering crazy nonsense, someone else weeping. Iseult helped Mother Power hand prayer beads, missals, and holy pictures between the bars, and the cutting, violent stink of bodies was almost overpowering.

Iseult knelt beside the nun as she led the inmates in a novena, then stayed close, watching her comfort a German prostitute named Flossie, who had stabbed a man the night before. Clinging to the iron bars, Flossie was pretty in a demolished way. She might have been eighteen or thirty. Her yellow dress was torn at the shoulder, and whatever happened to her, she didn't want her mother finding out.

“In Brooklyn my mother lives. I shall write a letter, say I go to Germany, home.”

All her life Iseult had been handled like a carefully wrapped package. When the nun touched Flossie's hands, knuckled around the bars, and the girl began sobbing, Iseult, absorbing Flossie's noise and scent and the plainness of her despair, felt an almost sickening awareness of her own privilege.

Prostitutes. Raw rivers. Secrets, drunks. Broken glass, bodily violence, dirt, and various forms of hunger. It was curiosity that drew her to the Kitchen, not religious feeling. She had never been able to feel that God was close. Her notion of having found her vocation had been a delusion, a conceit, a fantasy.

Flossie let go the bars and started coughing and wheezing. Mother Power sent the female jailer for a jug of cold water and tried to get Flossie to drink, but it didn't do much good — cold water never did, in Iseult's experience. She could still hear the girl coughing as they left the precinct house.

She would never be a nun like Mother Power, but she would try seeing herself in others, others in herself. She went to the Kitchen with Mother Power every Saturday for the rest of the term. Mother Superior must have known but for some reason never again tried to stop her from going. Mother Superior made fun of Mother Power behind her back but, like everyone else, she was also scared of her.

The first Saturday in June was graduation day at the Convent of the Sacred Heart. Iseult and her classmates, all in white and carrying nosegays, entered the chapel where their parents were already seated. Cardinal Farley celebrated the High Mass and afterwards there was a strawberry tea. It was a warm, emotional afternoon. Girls who over three years had barely spoken to Iseult hugged and kissed her.

Mother Power attended High Mass with the other nuns, but sometime during the strawberry tea she disappeared before Iseult had a chance to say goodbye to her. It was a Saturday, after all.

That evening Iseult's parents took her to dinner at Delmonico's, where she drank her first glass of champagne. The next morning they boarded a Pullman and travelled up to Maine, where her father had taken a big, breezy cottage at Kennebunkport for the summer. With her mother she joined a ladies' art club and spent many afternoons trying to paint seascapes that were no worse and no better than anyone else's. That fall she started at Smith, but a wicked bout of asthma weakened her and her parents would not allow her to return to college after Christmas; she was confined to bed for most of the winter. The next year her father died, and a few months later she and her mother left New Hampshire for good and moved to Pasadena.

Iseult never saw Mother Power again but often thought of her. Bold, awkward, lit up by something inside herself, the nun was the first woman Iseult had met who possessed a powerful vision of herself operating in the world.

~

She felt the California sun hot on her bare neck. She was wearing one of her day dresses, cotton poplin in crisp blue and white stripes. Her New England relations would have been annoyed that she wasn't in mourning.

No one she knew would ever have thought of settling in Venice, California. The Boston relations somehow had the idea that now her mother was dead she would go back and live with them in their narrow, dark Back Bay houses. She wasn't going to, not in a million years.

Colonnades — surely a Venetian touch — shaded the sidewalks along Windward Avenue, though the columns were plaster, not Italian stone, and sounded hollow when she tapped them. There were half a dozen raucous saloons. In Pasadena and L.A., saloons and pretty much everything else had to close on Sundays, but Venice had its own laws.

She found the real estate office a block back from the beach, in a storefront between a seafood restaurant and a shop that sold Indian moccasins, ships in glass bottles, and striped beach towels. Peering into the office through the plate-glass window, she saw empty desks and a potted plant of gigantic proportions. She wondered if the office was closed, then noticed a man with his feet up on a desk in the back of the room, reading a newspaper. A bell jingled as she opened the door. The man lowered his newspaper. Seeing her, he took his feet off the desk and stood up.

“May I help you?”

“I'd like to see some properties.”

“Oh. Well. I can certainly help you with that.”

He was maybe a year or two younger than she was. His skin was tanned, eyes blue, and teeth very white.

“Perhaps you'd like to finish your lunch first.” There was half a chicken sandwich on his desk.

“Oh, no. Wasn't all that good anyhow.” He came forward, picking up his hat. “I'd be happy to show you what's on the market. Not a lot of houses, but there are some choice lots. I'm Grattan O'Brien.”

Some men seized Iseult's hand and squeezed as if it were a bird they wanted to crush before it could escape. Her mother had disapproved of men and women shaking hands, considering it a vulgar Americanism. Grattan's handshake was firm and quick, but she felt something intimate in his touch. As though he had rubbed some bone of herself. She felt her cheeks flushing with thoughts that weren't words, just burrs of feelings, inchoate, startling.

But one could ignore feelings; one didn't need to let them show.

~

On Windward Avenue, in the shadows of the colonnade, voices were keyed up and the air smelled of fried food. People spooned ice cream from paper cups. A man in front of a store had watch chains draped over his arm. “Real gold!” he called. “Come along, gents, don't put a fine watch on a cheap chain! Real gold watch chains, only one dollar!”

As they walked, Grattan O'Brien told her that Mr. Abbot Kinney planned to make Venice the most extraordinary residential community in America, a garden city with shining waterways instead of dusty streets. She was doing her best to pay attention while constantly feeling death, the presence of death behind everything.

“We'll go by the Lagoon and see if we might catch a gondola. There are only a couple of houses to see. The lots have been selling, but the fact is not many people have built yet.”

I am an orphan
, Iseult thought to herself.
An orphan led westward, windward, by a young man whose wrists and hands are brown and glossy smooth as the branches of a manzanita tree
.

The Lagoon was a stagnant green pond flanked by what he called the Amphitheatre.

“They held swimming races here this morning. The Amphitheatre seats
2
,
500
. This was all wasteland when Mr. Kinney first saw it. Nothing but mud and birds.”

White plaster columns, plaster statues everywhere, and banks of rickety seats: she thought it looked a bit like a Roman ruin and a bit like the Dartmouth College swim tank. On the far side of the Lagoon, three black Venetian gondolas were tied up at a float where the boatmen, in striped jerseys, were smoking and playing cards. Mist was blowing inland, giving some texture to plain, brutal sunshine. She could feel surf thumping on the beach.

“Luigi,
per piacere
, let's take the
signora
down to the Linnie.”

The gondoliers looked up from their card game. One of them shrugged, tossed down his cards, and stood up. “Sure thing, Mr. Grattan.”

“How's business?” Grattan asked.

“Ah, not so good.”

The man stepped into one of the gondolas, then held out his hand for Iseult as she stepped down. It was pleasant to be on the water, to sense something soft beneath the hull, liquid depth, a mystery. Grattan sat down next to her and the gondolier slipped his line and pushed off.

With its toothed stern rising like a wicked tail, the gondola resembled a dragon. It had something of a canoe's narrowness and fragility. The gondolier hummed a tune as he worked the scull.

“It's a nice way to go, don't you think?” Grattan said.

It was wonderful: the scent of tarry wood and the black hull sliding noiselessly across the Lagoon, headed for the Grand Canal. A flock of ducks paddled in the sluggish water.

“What's the difference between a canal and a ditch?”

He smiled. “Good question. You dig a ditch to drain a swamp or to bring water to crops. The canals are so people can enjoy living by water. That was Abbot's idea, anyway. In summer it's often fifteen degrees cooler out here than in Los Angeles. You can sleep under a blanket all summer. You're from back east?”

“Yes.”

“I'm out of Canada myself. Don't let me get started on the ocean air out here, or you'll think I'm huckstering you.”

They glided along. To the north she could see the olive green Santa Monica Mountains, and the purple San Gabriels to the east, beyond Pasadena. Something dreamy, sleepy, about moving on water. Her mother would have called this day a whim. Was that what it was? How weightless and unencumbered she felt.

The gondola slipped beneath a couple of footbridges. There were only a few people strolling along the canals. She saw survey sticks and sand piles but few houses.

“We haven't actually sold that many lots, to tell you the truth. People don't appreciate the canals; they want real streets so they can park automobiles in front of their houses. They might not own an automobile yet, but they hope to.”

“You're not being a very good salesman. You shouldn't be giving me reasons not to buy.”

“Well, we do have the electric cars. It's only fifty-two minutes to Los Angeles. I want to give you the whole picture. Venice hasn't worked the way Mr. Kinney had in mind. I shouldn't say so, but I believe he's tired of the whole thing. People just aren't interested in beauty — not his idea of beauty, anyway — so he has to give them fun parks and crazy rides and the Pier. A person like you might be happier living in Ocean Park or Santa Monica.”

“A person like me? What sort of person is that?”

“Well, Santa Monica's more civilized, that's all I mean. There's not a lot going on at the office — you may have noticed. All the other salesmen have quit, and I'm thinking about it. Nothing to do all day gets kind of lonely.”

“How can you be lonely with the biggest dancehall in world?” she teased. “And a roller-skating rink!”

“You ought to meet my wife,” he said. “She could tell you what it's like out here.”

Iseult turned away, let her fingers dabble in the water. Her throat felt tight and dry.

“You'll hear coyotes at night,” he was saying.

Wild sun, hard blue sky, the slip of the hull through green water. Not a very sensible place to live.

The gondolier was humming and every now and then burst out with a stanza in Italian. Was he singing for her, she wondered, was it part of his job? Did it matter? No. Shutting her eyes, she let the music float by as the sun stroked her face.

What she was most conscious of was animal will: a jump of desire. Grattan, slender and crisp. She longed to bite him, taste his skin.

~

He showed her through a pair of bungalows on the Howland Canal, then one on the Linnie, all three built to the same pattern. Inside they smelled of raw wood, sawdust, grout, and stale new paint. Squirrels or raccoons had gotten inside one of the Howlands and made a nest of rags, dry grass, and twigs on the kitchen floor.

Big white New England houses could be iron chains around the necks of their inhabitants, and she had watched her father being dragged to his death by the gloom and weight of such a house, until he had climbed up to the attic one Sunday afternoon and blown out his brains with a Colt Navy pistol his own father had carried through the Civil War.

She liked the Linnie Canal cottage best. Maybe it was just the name.
Linnie
sounded like a pretty girl,
Howland
bleak and masculine. It was strange to stand in an empty house alone with a young man, a stranger. She felt vulnerable and open, without edges.

Grattan said, “I guess I don't understand why people are so keen for houses in the first place.”

“Everyone needs a home, Mr. O'Brien.”

“Do they? I think I carry my home inside my head.”