The Pilot's Wife (23 page)

The baby in the woman’s arms was a boy. A boy with blue eyes. The hues were slightly different, though the difference was not as pronounced as it had been in his father’s eyes.

The envelope of time ripped open, and Kathryn dropped in. She struggled not to have to lean against the door with the shock of the woman, of the boy’s face.

“Come in.”

The invitation broke the long note of silence that had passed between the two women. Although it was not an invitation at all, not in the way such offers are normally made, with a smile or a step backward into a hallway to allow entry. It was, rather, a statement, simple and without inflection, as though the woman had said instead: Neither of us has a choice now.

And the instinct was, of course, to enter the house, to get in out of the wet. To sit down.

Kathryn lowered the umbrella and collapsed it as she stepped over the doorsill. The woman inside the house held the door with one hand, the baby with the other arm. The baby, perhaps having noted the silence, looked at the stranger with intense curiosity. A child in the hallway had stopped her playing to pay attention.

Kathryn allowed the umbrella to drip onto the polished parquet. In the several seconds the two women stood in the entry-way, Kathryn noticed the way the woman’s hair swayed along her chin line. Expertly cut, as Kathryn’s was not. She touched her own hair and regretted doing so.

It was hot in the hallway, excessively hot and airless. Kathryn could feel the perspiration trickling inside her blouse, which was under her suit coat, which was under her wool coat.

“You’re Muire Boland,” Kathryn said.

The baby in Muire Boland’s arms, despite the different sex, despite the slightly darker hair color, was precisely the baby that Mattie had been at that age — five months old, Kathryn guessed. The realization created dissonance, a screeching in her ears, as though this woman she had never met were holding Kathryn’s child.

Jack had had a son.

The dark-haired woman turned and left the hallway for a sitting room, leaving Kathryn to follow. The child in the hallway, a beautiful girl with enlarged pupils and a cupid mouth, picked up a handful of construction blocks, pressed them to her chest, and, eyeing Kathryn the entire time, edged along the wall and entered the sitting room, moving closer to her mother’s legs. The girl looked like her mother, whereas the boy, the son, resembled the father.

Kathryn put down the umbrella in a corner and walked from the entryway to the sitting room. Muire Boland stood with her back to the fireplace, waiting for her, although there had been no invitation to sit down, wouldn’t be.

The room had high ceilings and had been painted a lemon yellow. Ornately carved moldings were shiny with glossy white paint. At the front, the curved windows had long gauzy curtains on French rods. Several low chairs of wrought iron, cushioned with oversized white pillows, had been placed around a carved wooden cocktail table, reminding Kathryn of Arab rooms. Over the mantle, behind the woman’s head, was a massive gold mirror, which reflected Kathryn’s image in the doorway, so that, in essence, Kathryn and Muire Boland stood in the same frame. On the mantle was a photograph in marquetry, a pinkish-gold glass vase, a bronze figure. On either side of the bow window were tall bookcases. A carpet of muted grays and greens lay underfoot. The effect was of light and air, despite the grand architecture of the house, despite the dark of the weather.

Kathryn had to sit. She put a hand on a wooden chair just inside the doorway. She sat heavily, as though her legs had suddenly given out.

She felt old, older than the woman in front of her, who was nearly her own age. It was the baby, Kathryn thought, that somehow testified to the newness of love, certainly to the relative proximity of sex. Or the jeans in contrast to Kathryn’s dark suit. Or the way Kathryn found herself sitting, her pocketbook primly in her lap.

Beneath her coat, her right leg spasmed, as though she had just climbed a mountain.

The baby began to fret, uttering small impatient cries. Muire Boland bent to pick up a rubber pacifier from the cocktail table, put the nipple end in her own mouth, sucked it several times, and then put it into the baby’s mouth. The boy wore navy corduroy overalls and a striped T-shirt. The dark-haired woman had full, even lips and wore no lipstick.

Moving her eyes away from the woman with the baby, Kathryn caught sight of the photograph on the mantle. When the picture came into focus, she started, nearly rose from her seat. The photograph was of Jack, she could see that even across the room. Unmistakable now from where she sat. Cradling an infant, a newborn. His other hand ruffling the deep curls of another child, the girl who was in the room with them. In the picture, the girl had a solemn face. The trio appeared to be on a beach. Jack was smiling broadly.

Visceral evidence of another life. Although Kathryn had needed no proof.

“You’re wearing a ring,” Kathryn said almost involuntarily. Muire fingered the gold band with her thumb.

“You’re married?” Kathryn asked, disbelieving.

“I was.”

Kathryn was confused for a moment, until she understood the meaning of the past tense.

Muire shifted the baby to her other hip.

“When?” Kathryn asked.

“Four and a half years ago.”

The woman hardly moved her mouth when she spoke. The consonants and vowels rolled from her tongue with a distinctive melodic lilt. Irish, then.

“We were married in the Catholic Church,” Muire volunteered. Kathryn felt herself backing away from this information, as if from a blow.

“And you knew … ?” she asked.

“About you? Yes, of course.”

As though that were understood. That the dark-haired woman had known everything. Whereas Kathryn had not.

Kathryn put down her pocketbook, shook her arms free of her coat. The flat was overheated, and Kathryn was sweating profusely. She could feel the perspiration under her hair, at the back of her neck.

“What’s his name?” Kathryn asked, meaning the baby. She was astonished at her own politeness even as she asked the question.

“Dermot,” Muire said. “For my brother.”

The woman bent her head suddenly, kissed the baby’s pate. “How old is he?” Kathryn asked.

“Five months. Today.”

And Kathryn thought at once, as who would not, that Jack might have been there, in that flat, to share the small milestone.

The baby, pacified, appeared now to be falling asleep. Despite the revelations of the last several minutes, despite the unnatural relationship between herself and the baby (despite the very fact of the child’s existence at all), Kathryn felt an urge, akin to sexual, to hold the infant to her breast, to that hollow space that wants always to embrace a small child. The resemblance to Mattie at five months was uncanny. It might actually be Mattie. Kathryn closed her eyes.

“Are you all right?” Muire asked from across the room. Kathryn opened her eyes, wiped her forehead with the sleeve of her jacket.

“I have thought … ,” Muire began. “I have wondered if you would come. When you called, I was sure that you knew. I was sure when he died it would come out.”

“I didn’t know,” Kathryn said. “Not really. Not until I saw the baby. Just now.”

Or had she known? she wondered. Had she known from the moment she’d heard that transatlantic silence?

There were shallow wrinkles about the eyes of the dark-haired woman, the suggestion of parentheses that would one day form at either side of her mouth. The baby woke suddenly and began to wail in an uninhibited, lusty way that had once been familiar to Kathryn. Muire tried to comfort the child, bringing him to her shoulder, patting his back. But nothing seemed to work.

“Let me put him down,” Muire said over the cries.

When she left the room, the girl trailed after her, not willing to be left alone with the stranger.

Jack had been married in a Catholic church. The dark-haired woman had known that he was already married.

Kathryn tried to stand, then felt she could not. She crossed her legs in an effort to look not quite so shaken. Not quite so flattened. Slowly, she swiveled her head, trying to take in the entire room. The brass sconces with the electric candles on the walls. The magazines on the cocktail table, an oil painting of a working-class city street. She wondered why it was that she could not feel rage. It was as though she had been cut, the knife having gone so deep that the wound was not yet painful; it produced merely shock. And the shock seemed to be producing civility.

Muire had known, had imagined this day. Kathryn had not. Along one wall was a cabinet that Kathryn guessed would contain a television and a sound system. She thought suddenly of Pink Panther movies, the ones she and Jack and Mattie had rented, movies guaranteed to reduce Jack and Mattie to helpless giggles. They had prided themselves on being able to quote long passages of dialogue.

Kathryn turned her head at a sound. Muire Boland stood in the doorway, watching her from the side. She stepped into the room, crossed to one of the white chairs, and sat down. Immediately, she opened a wooden box on the cocktail table and took out a cigarette, which she lit with a plastic lighter next to the box.

Jack couldn’t tolerate being in the same room with a smoker, he had said.

“You want to know how it happened,” Muire said.

Though she was angular, she might be described as voluptuous. It was the baby, Kathryn thought. The nursing. Perhaps there was just the slightest suggestion of a belly, which would also be the baby.

Kathryn had another unexpected memory then, a picture, really, that Jack had taken. Kathryn was sleeping facedown in a quilted bathrobe on an unmade bed, her arms tucked under her. Jack, who’d been holding the five-month-old Mattie, had placed the sleeping baby, also facedown, on the hump made by Kathryn’s butt and the dip of the lower back. Kathryn and Mattie had together taken a nap, and Jack, moved by the sight of the mother and her papoose, had snapped the photograph.

Muire leaned back against a cushion, draped one arm along its back. She crossed her legs. Kathryn thought she might be six feet tall, nearly as tall as Jack. Kathryn tried to imagine what her body looked like unclothed, how she and Jack might look together.

But her mind protested and rebelled, and the pictures refused to form. Just as the image of Jack’s body as it may have lain in the ocean had at first refused to form. The pictures would come later, Kathryn knew, when she least wanted them.

“Yes,” Kathryn said.

Muire took a pull on her cigarette, leaned forward, and flicked an ash. “I flew with him five and a half years ago. I was a flight attendant with Vision.”

“I know.”

“We fell in love,” the woman said simply. “I won’t go into all the details. I could say that we were both swept off our feet. We were together for a month that first time. We had…” The woman hesitated, perhaps from delicacy, perhaps trying to find better words. “We had an affair,” she said finally. “Jack was torn. He said he wouldn’t leave Mattie. He could never do that to his daughter.”

The name
Mattie
produced a frisson in the air, a tension that quivered between the two women. Muire Boland had spoken the name too easily, as if she’d known the girl.

Kathryn thought: He wouldn’t leave his daughter, but he could betray his wife.

“When was this exactly?” Kathryn asked. “The affair.”

“June 1991.”

“Oh.”

What had she herself been doing in June of 1991? Kathryn wondered.

The woman had delicate white skin, an almost flawless complexion. The complexion of someone who spent little time outdoors. Though she might have been a runner.

“You knew about me,” Kathryn repeated. Her voice didn’t seem her own. It was too slow and tentative, as if she had been drugged.

“I knew about you from the very beginning,” Muire said. “Jack and I did not have secrets.”

The greater intimacy, then, Kathryn thought. An intentional knife wound.

The rain slid along the bowed windows, the clouds giving a false sense of early evening. From an upstairs room, Kathryn heard the distant squawk of a cartoon character on a television. Still perspiring, she shed her jacket and stood up, realizing as she did so that her blouse had become untucked. She made an effort to push it back into her skirt. Aware of the intense scrutiny of the woman across from her, a woman who may very well have known Jack better than she did, Kathryn prayed her legs would not betray her. She walked across the room to the mantle.

She took down the picture in its marquetry frame. Jack had on a shirt Kathryn had never seen before, a faded black polo shirt. He cradled the tiny newborn. The girl, the one Kathryn had just seen playing with the construction blocks, had Jack’s curls and brow, though not his eyes.

“What’s her name?” Kathryn asked.

“Dierdre.”

Jack’s fingers were deep in the girl’s hair. Had Jack been the same with Dierdre as he had been with Mattie?

Kathryn briefly closed her eyes. The hurt to herself, she thought, was nearly intolerable. But the hurt to Mattie was obscene. One could see — how could anyone fail to observe? — that the girl in the photograph was extraordinarily beautiful. A beguiling face, with dark eyes and long lashes, red lips. A veritable Snow White. Had memories that Mattie held sacred been repeated, relived, with another child?

“How could you?” Kathryn cried, spinning, and she might have been speaking to Jack as well.

Her fingers, slippery from perspiration, lost hold of the frame. It slid out of her hands, crashed against an end table. She hadn’t meant for that to happen, and she felt the small breakage as an exposure. The woman in the chair flinched slightly, though she did not turn her head to look at the damage. It was an unanswerable question. Though the woman wanted to answer it.

“I loved him,” Muire said. “We were in love.”

As if that were enough.

Kathryn watched as Muire put out her cigarette. How cool she was, thought Kathryn. Even cold.

“There are things I can’t talk about,” Muire said.

You bitch, Kathryn thought, a bubble of anger popping to the surface. She tried to calm herself down. It was hard to imagine the woman in the chair a flight attendant in a uniform with little wings on the lapel. Smiling at passengers as they entered a plane.