The Seduction of Water (27 page)

Aidan touches the side of my face and it’s only then I realize how hot my skin is. I feel like I’m burning up. As if the fire that had consumed my mother is consuming me. “Are you saying you think Vera Nix murdered my mother?” It comes out as a whisper, as if I’m afraid the words might ignite in the open air.

“I’m saying it’s a possibility that Phoebe Nix thinks she did. And she thought Joseph knew where your mother was going that night and who she was going to see . . . what’s wrong?”

Now instead of feeling hot, I feel cold, as if I had jumped into icy water to douse the fire under my skin. “That day she came into the suite—remember, when you were moving the sky painting? Well, after you went out she asked me if Joseph had told me who my mother was going to see the night she died. I didn’t tell her he had, but I let her think that he would tell me if I really wanted to know. And then at the lecture that night I practically dared her to find the manuscript. If she did kill Joseph, it’s my fault, Aidan, it wasn’t just that he was standing between her and the manuscript—I made her see him as a threat.”

“We still don’t know that’s what happened, and even if it did, you couldn’t have known that she was crazy enough about her mother’s reputation to kill to preserve it.” He still has his hand against my face. I bow my head so that my forehead rests in the palm of his hand, his flesh cool against my brow. He slides his arm around my shoulders and pulls me closer to him on the couch.

“I should have known,” I murmur into his neck. “I, of all people, know what it means to be obsessed by a mother who died young. I’m as bad as she is—pursuing my mother’s story until the pursuit got Joseph killed and you wanted for murder—but I can’t stop now. I have to figure out exactly what happened at the Crown in 1949 that could have made someone kill my mother at the Dreamland Hotel in 1973. I think, then, we’ll know who killed Joseph.”

“It sounds like a lot of work,” he says, stroking the hair away from my face. “Do you want me to go now?”

I look into his eyes and see that restless look I’ve seen there before, the sense that he’s ready to flee. I move closer and wrap my arms around him, running my hands down his shoulder blades, feeling a vibration under the skin that makes me want to hold him tighter to keep him from flying out of my grasp. It takes me a few minutes to realize that the trembling I felt beneath his skin is coming from me.

Chapter Twenty-six

Aidan leaves before dawn. He doesn’t tell me where he’s going, but he gives me a phone number where I can leave a message for him and directions to a spot in Inwood Park where he’ll meet me at noon the day after I call.

“It’s like Tam Lin in the story—telling Margaret to meet him at the well. I should bring some holy water and dirt from Joseph’s garden . . .” My voice trails off, Joseph’s name falling like a shadow between us. He gets up to get dressed, looking out the window where the light is gathering above the river. Then he sits down beside me on the bed and runs his hand in one fluid stroke down the length of my body, from forehead to toes. “If you haven’t made that call in one week I’ll not expect to hear from you and I’ll understand. No hard feelings, Iris.”

“I’ll make the call, Aidan, as soon as I’ve found out something.”

After he’s gone I stay in bed waiting until it’s late enough to call the librarian at John Jay College. When I taught there last year I brought my class to the library for a tour of its criminology archives and I’d had a long chat with the librarian about Scandinavian fairy tales.

“Sure,” Charles Baum tells me, “always happy to help ex-faculty in their research. I’ll leave a pass for you at the desk. If you need any help finding the right case just give a holler.”

On my way up to John Jay I stop at the dry cleaner and tailor’s on Eighth Avenue where Mr. Nagamora works. He’s not at his sewing machine by the window and I panic for a moment at the thought that something has happened to him over the summer. After all, he’s not a young man. When I ask the girl at the counter, though, she disappears into the racks of hanging garment bags and a few seconds later the thin plastic bags rustle and Mr. Nagamora surfaces from behind them. His face, the moment before he recognizes me, is as smooth as a stone, but then he smiles, revealing a thousand small wrinkles.

“Professor Greenfeder,” he says, bowing ceremoniously, “my family will want to meet you.” The counter girl reappears, as well as an older woman and a small boy, all disgorged by the rippling plastic bags like bobbins popping up on a still lake, all bowing when introduced to me. The old woman, whom I took at first to be his wife, is his sister, the young woman and boy his niece and grandnephew. Mr. Nagamora takes something out of the pocket of his cardigan—even in the subtropical humidity of the dry cleaner’s he wears the same woolen cardigan—and begins to unfold it. I’m reminded of Joseph unfolding his handkerchief to wipe the sweat off his brow, but it turns out to be several sheets of white paper, which he unfolds and holds up to display the large A on top. It’s Mr. Nagamora’s retelling of “The Crane Wife.” I remember how I hesitated over that A and for once in my life I’m glad of something I did impulsively.

Finally, when our audience has slipped back into the recesses of the shop I take out the bundle of green silk from my canvas book bag and lay it on the counter between us.

“Ah,” he says, stroking the fabric gently, reminding me, of all things, of how Aidan touched me before he left this morning. “Beautiful silk.” He folds back the waistband and looks at the label, nodding at the designer’s name. Then he runs his fingers along the seams, as if the stitches were Braille. “Very fine work,” he says. “This belonged to your mother?”

“Yes,” I agree, because it’s easier than going into the dubious history of the dress, “but I wore it and it got torn.” He’s come to the rip in the swag and the cuts made by the glass when I knelt beside Joseph. He rolls something between his fingertips and then holds up a tiny splinter of glass balanced between the tips of his fingernails.

“There was an accident,” I say, embarrassed to hear my voice quiver over the last word. Mr. Nagamora holds up his hand to stop me from going on. It’s the same imperious gesture he used when I tried to interrupt his story, which I’d guessed at the time was an echo of his father—his father, the silk weaver. I notice then what has struck me about Mr. Nagamora since I came in. He carries himself differently than he used to in class. All the slump has gone out of him. I feel sure it’s not the A I gave him, though; it’s telling his father’s story. He’s still telling it.

“I can fix,” he tells me, and for a moment I forget we’re talking about the dress.

I nod. “Thank you, Mr. Nagamora.”

He pats the silk cloth, but I feel as if he’s patting my hand. Then he writes up a ticket and tells me my mother’s dress will be ready Thursday next.

For the rest of my walk up to John Jay I think about Mr. Nagamora’s altered demeanor—the way telling his father’s story has transformed him. I think too of my other students whose lives have changed since the spring: Mrs. Rivera, who has stayed up at the hotel with Ramon to help in the renovations, Gretchen Lu, who told me she planned to use the prize money from the Folly contest to travel for a year visiting textile mills in different countries (Mark said he planned to use the money as a down payment for a co-op in Hoboken), and Natalie Baehr who’s sold her jewelry to Barney’s. Even Aidan seems to be living out some version of the story he told last spring—caught in a limbo where my belief in him, my ability to see past the guises of enchantment, can save him or not. So many changes to come out of one little writing assignment! And what about my life? What chain of events did I set off when I sent my mother’s selkie story to Phoebe Nix?

By the time I’ve arrived at the entrance to John Jay I feel like I’ve been walking one of those labyrinths set up in cloisters for meditation—that I’m following a path set out by unseen hands. There’s nothing calming in following this path, though; I feel dizzy.

Charles Baum has left a pass for me at the security desk as he promised. Of all the colleges I’ve taught at—except for the prison, of course—John Jay maintains the highest level of security. I suppose it’s inherent in the culture of an institution that’s the leading criminal justice college in the country—most of the New York City police officers who go to college go here. It also has one of the best criminology libraries in the city, which is why I’m here today.

I take the escalators down to the lobby, past a row of flags that makes me feel like I’m entering the UN, and glass cases featuring a display on
The Irish in New York City Police History
, to the security desk at the entrance to the library. Then I go back up to the first floor (the library is self-contained within the building and can only be entered from the lobby) to find a free computer with access to LexisNexis.

When I took my class to the library Charles Baum had explained how to use LexisNexis to look up a specific court case. Unfortunately, I spent more time monitoring my students’ attention level than paying attention myself. I flail about for a bit and then notice a printed flyer that describes in detail how to look up case law in LexisNexis. I click on Legal Research, then State Case Law, and then program a search for “John McGlynn” and “Crown Hotel” and then hold my breath. I vaguely recall that the case will only appear if it had been appealed and I don’t remember Elspeth McCrory of the
Poughkeepsie Journal
saying anything about an appeal.

As it turns out, John McGlynn had a fairly compelling reason to appeal. Through the maze of legal terms in the Disposition and Headnotes, I glean that his appeal was based on the premise that the testimony of one of the main witnesses at his trial was considered tainted because she had previously proven incapable of identifying the accused in a lineup and she had changed her testimony several times during the course of the trial.

I scroll through the Syllabus, which summarizes the main points of the appeal, to the Opinion that elaborates on the circumstances of the trial. On the night of August 21, 1948, the night clerk at the Crown Hotel was asked to open the safe so that Vera Nix, who occupied the penthouse suite and was the sister-in-law of the hotel’s owner, could retrieve a diamond necklace that she had placed in the safe earlier that evening. At that time the clerk discovered that the safe was completely empty. Miss Nix told the police that when she had put the necklace in the safe at eight-thirty that evening—“just before going out to a party at the Plaza”—the defendant, John McGlynn, had been “hanging around the front desk flirting with one of the maids.”

“I’d seen him before, you couldn’t miss him because he’s a very handsome young man—in a wild Heathcliff-on-the-moors sort of way—and quite popular with the young Irish girls who worked at the hotel. I believe his sister worked at the hotel. Well, I noticed that when I passed him to go into the office to put my necklace in the safe he was looking at my necklace.”

Based on this flimsy evidence, the police had gone in search of John McGlynn at his residence in Coney Island but were told by his landlady that he had vacated his rooms that morning—“even though he was paid up for the next week”—and left town without giving a forwarding address. This was enough, apparently, to convince the police that they had their thief. A week later John McGlynn was found at a motel near Saratoga Springs, New York. He’d been spotted placing a bet at the nearby racetrack. The police followed him back to his motel room where they found the jewelry that had been stolen from the Crown safe.

The fact that John McGlynn had been caught with stolen property in his possession had been enough to convict him. His appeal was based on additional evidence that came to light after his conviction. Apparently, six months before the safe robbery Vera Nix had reported some jewelry missing from her room. At that time she had told the police that she had surprised a maid “entertaining a young man” in the living room of her suite and she suspected that the maid had worked in collusion with the young man to steal her jewelry. She’d said that she thought that the man was the brother of the hotel’s assistant manager and that the maid, “according to that little tag they all wear,” was Katherine Morrissey.

I’ve been scrolling through the lines quickly, but when I see my mother’s name I pause the cursor and lean back in my chair. I try to picture my mother, in a maid’s uniform, caught with a young man in a guest’s room. When I try to picture John McGlynn—handsome in a “wild Heathcliff-on-the-moors sort of way”—I see Aidan. The black hair and dark-lashed blue-green eyes, the pale skin that tinges pink in the open air. But I can’t see my mother. I just can’t imagine her caught in a compromising position, jumping to her feet and straightening her uniform—I can’t imagine her in a uniform at all—and blushing and curtseying in front of the grand lady, Vera Nix. Maybe it’s just because no one likes to think of their mother in a sexual context, but I think it has more to do with my mother’s dignity, the way she held herself.

What I do remember, though, is that whenever a maid was accused of stealing something by a guest my mother would insist that my father keep the guest in his office while she went up to the guest’s room to conduct her own search. Often she would discover the “stolen item” in the carpet or caught in the blankets, or lying carelessly beneath a book on the night table. Once, when a society dowager from Boston named Caroline Minton had the audacity to suggest that the maid must have given her garnet brooch back to my mother so that she could place it back in the room, my mother had silently left the office and ordered the bellhop to have Mrs. Minton’s luggage removed from her suite and have her car brought up from the parking lot and packed. The hotel bill had been discharged and Mrs. Minton had been asked to seek other accommodations should she ever find herself in the region again. I can’t imagine the woman who coolly ousted Mrs. Minton from the Hotel Equinox cowering in front of Vera Nix. Maybe I just don’t want to. I have to admit that if my mother had been falsely accused by Vera Nix of stealing, it might explain why she was so vigilant in defending her own employees against similar fraudulent charges.

I go back to the screen to see what had come of this earlier accusation and feel vindicated by the outcome. When Vera Nix had been asked to identify the maid she’d caught in flagrante delicto in a police lineup she’d picked the wrong woman. She was given three opportunities to pick Katherine Morrissey from a lineup and failed every time. The charges had been dropped. When this incident came to light after John McGlynn’s conviction it was considered sufficient cause to bring Mrs. Nix’s testimony at his trial into question. Apparently, Vera Nix had a poor memory for faces—or at least the faces of the many maids, bellhops, valets, hairdressers, manicurists, secretaries, and waiters who attended to her regularly at the Crown Hotel. Although she claimed that John McGlynn’s good looks made him memorable, she was unable to correctly pick him out from recent photographs. The picture she identified as John McGlynn turned out to be of the screen star Laurence Olivier, who had played Heathcliff in 1939.

So maybe it wasn’t my mother caught with her boyfriend in the Nix’s suite. Maybe it was some other unfortunate Irish girl—or maybe Vera Nix made up the whole thing. But why? She named my mother. She might not have known what my mother looked like, but she knew her name. She must have wanted to get her in trouble.

I stare at the blinking cursor on the screen in front of me until I notice that a vein above my right eye is pulsing to the same rhythm. The only thing that occurs to me is that if Vera Nix had been told by someone that her husband was having an affair with a maid by the name of Katherine Morrissey she might fabricate the whole episode to get the girl fired. And why not throw in a boyfriend at the same time to show her husband that he wasn’t the only light in his girlfriend’s life?

The remainder of the case file doesn’t tell me much. Although Vera Nix’s testimony was dismissed there was still sufficient evidence—possession of stolen property, fleeing the crime scene, prior history of small thefts—to uphold John McGlynn’s conviction. I print out the case file and head back into the periodical stacks to look up the newspaper coverage of the trial.

Under “Crown Hotel Robbery” I find seven references in the
New York Times
, four in the
Herald Tribune
, and twelve in the
Daily News
. I also find that I’m getting hungry. I check my watch and see that it’s after noon. I didn’t have any breakfast—not having the heart to scramble eggs again after the uneaten eggs that I’d made for Aidan and myself the night before—and I’d been too anxious to get to the library to stop on the way. I don’t want to stop now either. Beyond the dull, buzzing pain in my right eye and the haze of fatigue and hunger, a picture is beginning to slowly take shape in my mind. It’s just too much of a coincidence that it was Vera Nix whose testimony first directed the police to John McGlynn and that she had tried to implicate him and my mother in a theft even before the safe robbery. Clearly, Vera Nix had some vendetta against my mother—whether justifiably or not, she must have believed that my mother was having an affair with her husband.