The Seduction of Water (35 page)

“About what?” I ask Mr. Nagamora. “I’ve told the police everything I know.”

Mr. Nagamora nods eagerly. “Yes,” he says, “you had no way of knowing about this. Not your fault! Good thing, though, you bring the dress to me.”

“What dress?” I ask, but then I notice it, hanging in its sheath of sheer plastic on the door behind Mr. Nagamora. “Don’t tell me Phoebe Nix has been here trying to get her mother’s dress back.”

“I have a theory about that dress.” Sophie, carrying a tray loaded with teapot, teacups, and a plate of rugelach, comes in from the kitchen. “Your mother had it with her when she came to the hotel—I saw it hanging in her closet and . . . well, you know me, I asked her where she came by such an expensive number. I could tell she was embarrassed. She said it belonged to a girlfriend. She said a man gave it to her, but she had to get rid of it because the man’s wife had seen it on her and been furious because he had given the same dress to her. Imagine! Well, at the time I thought there wasn’t a friend —that she was the one who’d been given the dress. But now I think that Peter Kron gave it to Katherine Morrissey—the real Katherine Morrissey—and your mother had it because she had her suitcase. I never saw your mother wear it. She must have thought it had brought her friend bad luck. But then I got to thinking about how she kept it all that time even though she never wore it and . . . well, show her what we found, Isao, I can’t wait to see the expression on her face.”

Mr. Nagamora unlocks a metal filing cabinet and takes out a small lacquered box decorated with a pattern of dancing cranes. He opens it and holds it out to me with both hands, his face creased into a thousand lines of delight. The silk weaver presenting his finest sail to the ship’s captain. The box is full of jewels. Pearls, diamonds, and one emerald cut in the shape of a teardrop.

“Where? . . .” But of course I’ve already guessed. The weights that held down the swag on the green dress. My mother had sewn the net of tears into the green dress.

Two days later I take the subway to Coney Island.

“You have to go,” Aidan tells me. “It must have been Allen who was in trouble with Peter Kron, because John McGlynn was already dead. Your mother went back to Brooklyn because Peter had something on him. We’ll never know if you don’t go see him—the old guy could die of a heart attack any day.”

“I don’t need to know any more,” I say, half truthfully. “Look what’s come of running after my mother’s story.”

Aidan takes my hand. “We’ve come of it,” he says. “Besides, I want to know how it ends.”

So I go. Back down into the subways, all the way to the end of the line. I follow the directions to Bel Mar—Gracious Living for Seniors by the Sea, which turns out to be a high-rise facing the boardwalk. Allen McGlynn meets me in the Buena Vista Social Room. I don’t know what I’m expecting, but not this tiny bald man in a yellowish fisherman’s cardigan and kelly-green golf shirt. Someone must have told him once that green brought out his eyes. It’s the only bit of him where I can see my mother, but I fasten my eyes over his shoulder, at the strip of blue Atlantic just visible above the boardwalk outside the windows. I don’t want to be swayed by family resemblance right now—at least not until I know what role he played in my mother’s death.

“Sister D’Aulnoy says you might be able to shed some light on what happened to my mother in 1973,” I say to a spot over his shoulder. An orderly in a white uniform opens the sliding glass doors, letting in the smell of the ocean. It brings me back to the treatment room at the burn unit—where Aidan probably is right now. “Did you see her that year?”

Allen runs a withered hand over his shiny pink scalp. “I learned from John that she was still alive just before he died. I think he felt bad leaving me all alone and I’d been telling him how I missed her sometimes worse than I missed our mother. I remembered her better . . .”

“So you went up to see her at the hotel?”

He nods and looks nervously around the room, smiling briefly at someone who waves at him and then squelching it. This isn’t shaping up to be the family reunion he was expecting.

“I saw you too, from across the garden. Rose pointed you out to me. You probably think I went to ask her for money, but you’d be wrong. Not that I didn’t need money. I had a sickness for gambling back then, along with a sickness for drink, which I’ve put behind me now by putting myself in the hands of a higher power—” I fidget just enough to let him know I’m not entirely comfortable with the twelve-step philosophy. It was one thing hearing about God from Sister D’Aulnoy, another thing hearing it from the man who may have lured my mother to her death. “—and I owed some money to half the loan sharks in Brooklyn. I never said a word to her about that though. I was just glad to see her. When I was little she told all us boys stories—the stories our mother told us before she died—”

“How’d she find out about the money you owed?”

“Mr. Peter Kron told her. He must’ve seen us together at the hotel and he tracked me down. He offered to buy up my chits—otherwise, he told her, some fellows from Red Hook were planning to break both my legs.” He looks around the Buena Vista Social Room and lowers his voice. “Would you mind if we continued this conversation out on the boardwalk?”

I imagine that he’d rather not have his canasta buddies learn about his past, and it’s on the tip of my tongue to say something like this, but then I look at him. This is my mother’s brother, I remind myself, whom she loved enough to risk her own life. “Sure,” I say, “I’d like to take a look at the ocean.”

Out on the boardwalk the sun and ocean breeze nearly take my breath away. We walk a little way and stop at a sheltered bench facing the ocean. It’s easier to listen to the rest of the story with both of us looking toward the sea.

“Rosie told me that Peter Kron wanted something she had—a piece of jewelry. I guessed it was part of the haul John had gotten from the Crown. She said she didn’t care about giving it to him only she was afraid once he had it he might kill us both. I couldn’t figure why he would, but she said it had something to do with where the necklace came from and Peter being scared his brother might find out he had it. She told me she would meet Peter at the Dreamland Hotel and make arrangements to give him the necklace, but that I should wait for her on the boardwalk instead of coming to the hotel in case something went wrong. I guess something did.”

“Peter’s wife followed him to the hotel and shot her,” I tell him. “She thought they were having an affair.”

He nods and stands up, turning his back to the sea. “I was here that night, waiting for her, when I saw the Dreamland Hotel on fire.” He points to a space between two tall buildings. “That’s where it was, between those two buildings.”

I look at the place on earth where my mother died. I guess that’s important—people plant crosses by the side of the road to mark where the car crashed; in Italy they lay flowers in the alley where the latest mob victim’s body is found—but I don’t feel anything of my mother’s spirit residing in that sliver of air between the two buildings. I do feel it, though, in the man standing next to me, his face wet with tears now, his hand trembling as he passes it over his pale green eyes.

“I left the city then. Got on a train and took it clear across the country to Oregon. Spent the next twenty years traveling from town to town until I finally found my way back here to where I started. I should’ve come and told you, but I thought maybe it was better I stay away from you—that if Peter Kron’s brother was still looking for the necklace I might draw his attention to you if I got in touch.”

“Weren’t you interested in knowing what happened to the necklace?”

He shakes his head and looks at me for the first time since we left the building. “No,” he says. I know he’s telling the truth. It’s not the truth I was looking for, but as Sister D’Aulnoy says, you don’t always get to choose your truth.

I wonder what he’d think of the plans being made for the necklace now. Gordon del Sarto, going on a tip from Joseph, had indeed located the Countess Oriana Val d’Este, and it’s turned out that she has at least as much claim to the
ferronière
as the Catholic Church. The case could be in court for years. As an alternative, Hedda Wolfe and Sister D’Aulnoy have petitioned the church and the countess to allow the necklace to be auctioned off, the proceeds to benefit St. Christopher’s. There’s talk of a college scholarship and a dormitory—on the top floors of the old orphanage—for boys who have aged out of the system. I imagine Allen McGlynn would like the idea, but I decide not to mention it now. It will be months before the fate of the necklace is decided—time enough to tell him when it’s certain.

“St. Christopher’s had a kind of summer camp for the orphans here at the beach,” Allen is telling me now. He sits back down on the bench and I notice how tired he looks. “Rose would come and take me and John out for the day. We’d eat ice cream and sit by the water and Rose told us all the old stories our mother used to tell us. She said that was our best way of remembering her. But then Rose stopped coming and I forgot the way the stories went.”

He rubs the cuff of his shirtsleeve across his face and starts to get up, “Well, I guess that’s all I can tell you. I hope it helps . . .”

I tug his shirtsleeve to make him sit back down.

“I can tell you one of her stories,” I say, “if you want me to.”

He looks so eager it embarrasses me. I look away, fixing my eyes on the blue horizon. “In a time before the rivers were drowned by the sea,” I begin, “in a land between the sun and the moon . . .”

About the Author

C
AROL
G
OODMAN
is the author of
The Lake of Dead Languages
. Her work has appeared in such journals as
The Greensboro Review
,
Literal Latté
,
The Midwest Quarterly
, and
Other Voices
. After graduating from Vassar College, where she majored in Latin, she taught Latin for several years in Austin, Texas. She then received an M.F.A. in fiction from the New School University. Goodman currently teaches writing and works as a writer-in-residence for Teachers & Writers. She lives on Long Island.

BY CAROL GOODMAN

The Lake of Dead Languages

A Ballantine Book

Published by The Ballantine Publishing Group

Copyright © 2003 by Carol Goodman

All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by The Ballantine Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto.

Ballantine and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

www.ballantinebooks.com

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Goodman, Carol.

The seduction of water / Carol Goodman.

p. cm.

1. Women teachers—Fiction. 2. Catskill Mountains Region (N.Y.)—Fiction. 3. Fantasy fiction—Authorship—Fiction. 4. Mothers and daughters—Fiction. 5. Maternal deprivation—Fiction. 6. Biographers—Fiction. 7. Hotels—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3607.O566 S4 2003

813′.6—dc21 2002034463

eISBN: 978-0-345-46350-0

v3.0